Hey, if they could concentrate it enough, I'd get my caffine fix from a shot glass:-P
Why do you need all that boiling water and bitter bean based colouring anyway? The important stuff is the caffine, or as I like to think of it, the "wake up kick to the head".
Touch could tell you that the egg is ovoid, has a certain texture, and a specific weight range. Comparing that to stored information about various objects could tell you that the object you're holding is an egg, rather than, say, a golf ball. This is essentially what human memory already accomplishes.
All you need to do is either A) Give the robot learning capability and let it make mistakes (which is hard, but leads to more versatile behaviour), or B) Code for every object it is likely to come in contact to (the easier brute force method). The latter approach works just fine if the bot is only going to come into contact with a limited number of forseeable objects. Put simply, a robot designed for something like mechanical work only needs to know in-depth information about a few types of material - it doesn't need to know what an egg is if it isn't going to handle them.
Being able to tell things like surface texture and shape is what the technology in TFA does - and in our "egg" scenario, that is useful information. You'd need other sensors for things like weight, but being able to determine that object X has Y properties, and then comparing Y to a database of shape/size/surface data, does give the robot an advantage when dealing with the environment it's operating in.
You'd also need the techology to tie the prosthetic limb into your nervous system. That might actually be the harder part.
OTOH, if you could tie into your peripheral nervous system, you'd have a prosthetic that not only had a sense of touch, but that could be controlled like a limb as well. The parts of your brain are already there to move it, so as long as you were born with the limb in question, you could probably train a prosthetic easily enough.
I'd be more interested in the autonomous robotics
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Robotic Sense of Touch
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I get why this would be useful for telesurgery. But does anyone else thing this would be damn useful for robots more generally?
AI is the single largest problem with making robots that act autonomously, but there are other issues as well, and sensory data is one of them. Humans, and other animals, depend on a variety of senses to interact with our environment - ranging from sonar to sight to smell (depending on species). An individual is severly limited with one of their senses lost/reduced.
We could build a robot with sight easily - camera technology is getting better and better. Ditto sound recording, and even interpretation (voice recognition for example has come a long way). Gyroscopes can be used to give a sense of balance. It wouldn't be that difficult to add sonar or radar to that list, and smell we can probably skip for most applications. But touch is too useful not to have. For any device that moves independantly, being able to feel where it's putting its various body parts is potentially vital.
How important is our sense of touch? Hands are useless without feedback as to where we're putting them. Imagine the advantages for a robot that can feel different surfaces (and determine what they're made of, how sturdy they are, etc). I suspect a fair number of problems with pathfinding could be solved by giving the robot instructions as to what surfaces will and won't support it's weight. Telling a vehicle sized robot to stick to the asphalt would be helpful, especially when you consider the alternatives. It'd be nice to be able to tell a bot meant for cleaning not to throw away money, or to differentiate between recycleable materials and regular garbage, or to avoid scrubbing the carpet with tile cleaner...
Of course I'm probably getting ahead of the technology here - this sort of application won't exist for a long time yet. But hey, a geek can dream.
It's fission. The only place in the solar system where you get naturally occuring fusion is the sun, and even then it only happens at the very core. If fusion were easy, we wouldn't have such a hard time getting fusion reactors to work.
I think that last part that would screw you up. How large, or how spherical, would a random orbiting body have to be to fit the defninition of "minor planet"? You're gonna need an arbitrary cutoff no matter what you do.
Plus, how do brown dwarf stars fit into that definition? A brown dwarf can't fuse hydrogen, and in many regards is similar to a planet; however it can fuse deuterium, so it does undergo fusion during it's initial collapse. Wouldn't a brown dwarf fit your definition of a major planet, since it is not undergoing fusion? Or would it have to be orbiting a star (as is the case in a binary system) first?
What about rogue planets? They don't fit the "orbiting a star" half of the planet definition you give. What does that make them, their own category, or just interstellar rocks? And if they do have their own category, do the aformentioned brown dwarfs fall under it?
I've always thought that looking for intelligent life on other planets is premature, since we haven't conclusively found intelligent life on this one yet:-P
But seriously, what difference does life make? Any planet could support life if you put it in a habitat of some sort. Even gas giants could support life if said habitats floated (and yes, that hs been proposed - human breathable air is a lifting gas when the outside pressure is high enough). If you mean indigenous life, that's another story - we're very likely alone here in our solar system, so seeking to define a livable planet when we have exactly one example is a bit premature.
If you want to find examples of life outside our solar system, good luck. The best we can do currently is look for either signs of intelligence (which is SETI's business), or else look for a planet that shows signs of an oxygen atmospherem, since that would imply biological processes. We're already doing this IIRC.
And even then we'd be unable to show that a rocky body of the right temperature didn't have life - anaeorbic (sp?) life gets along just fine and dandy without toxic oxygen fouling up their enviroment. That doesn't even get into the possibility of life forms existing with completely different chemical composition, which we can't even make an educated guess about.
We couldn't even show that there isn't intelligent life somewhere, since there is no guarantee that they'd use the same methods of communicating as we do - all we can do is hope they're trying to contant us.
"Allerca announced their plans three years ago, and started collecting deposits from allergic cat fans, but have now decided that their plans to use RNA interference were taking a back seat to a more traditional breeding approach, albeit one that uses genetic testing to select individuals that express low levels of FEL D1. Although no reason is given for the change of approach, it is possible the RNAi approach simply wasn't working, and if you can just find individual breeding animals where mother nature has done all the hard work, then it makes sense to take advantage of that fact"
Turns out they are using selective breeding. Bring on the inbred supercats!
Though the text doesn't specify that they aren't using genetic alteration - it just says it's "Taking a back seat", which could mean they're using both.
We could probably breed them to be hypoallergenic the old fashioned way. Instead of enviromentalists crying doom, we'd get PETA screaming about unethical treatment. Breeding animals for specific purposes does them no favours.
Do you know how inbred most purebred domestic animals are? What do you think purebred means anyway? For an animal to be purely of one breed, you have to mate it with it's not-so-distant relatives. Consequently they suffer from aliments ranging from hip dysplasia, to mental retardation, to compromised immune systems.
This would probably count as animal cruelty, particularly since hypoalergenic cats would be very hard to breed, and might require many generations of inbred test animals to get it right, some of which would need to be put down. This too is playing god, and not in a merciful or benevolent way.
Altering them in a lab is doing them a favour by comparison. You can argue that we shouldn't be playing god to begin with, but since we've been doing it for several thousand years already with every single form of domesticated life, it's a bit late to protest.
And worrying about them escaping into the wild is just moronic - domestic cats DIE in the wild. "Wild" houscats are called strays or ferals by another name, and typically only exist near human habitation. Trust me - every time some suburban moron drives their cat out to the country and lets it out, with the idiotic idea that it can fend for itself, it either dies or winds up living in somebodies garage. There is no "natural" habitat to spoil. And there are plenty of natural habitats spoiled by (unmodified) housepets already - ask an Austrailian or New Zealander.
Perhaps you're mistaking entry mass for landing mass?
A meteorite's surface vapourizes from reentry heat when it enters the atmosphere. If the meteorite is small enough, the entire object will be plasma long before it hits the ground; it takes a large or dense object to survive reentry, and even then much of it's mass is lost.
That doesn't however mean that it disperses. There is at least one theory that a meteorite could hit the ground as a ball of plasma with a solid core, due to the surrounding air pressure preventing the superheated surface from dispersing even after it vapourizes. I seem to recall seeing this put forward for the Tunguska blast in Siberia. IANA Astrophysicist, so I don't know how fast the object would need to be moving, or how large it would have to be initially, to produce this effect.
If that did happen, what would you use for your calculations? The mass of the meteorite wouldn't all be solid when it hit, and whatever material wasn't vapourized by descent or on impact would only make up a fraction of the mass present during the impact. The core might be 90kg, or 300kg, or whatever, but using that figure to calculated the speed the object on impact would be incorrect. You'd need to mass of the meteorite on reentry, minus whatever mass bled off during descent.
However, I would agree that comparing the impact to an atomic bomb blast is silly. It's like comparing a firecracker explosion to a bullet impact - yes, you can say that one has X amount of energy and the other has Y (and you could probably calculate this by measuring the gunpowder present in each, and determining how much energy you get from burning it), but that comparison doesn't actually tell you anything useful, since the energy is applied in a very different fashion. It's comparing apples to oranges.
You build something that will almost certainly last 6 months. After 6 months, it will probably last another 8 months. After those 8 have passed, it might last another year if you're lucky. After that year is up, it's anybody's guess.
It's not like they built it to self destruct after it's projected mission time expired. They built it to not FAIL in it's mission time, and anthing beyond that is just fine and dandy.
I've seen electronics that were 50 years old (like old fashioned radios) that still worked. Is that because they were built to last 50 years? Nope. They were built to last maybe ten, and the ones I saw were the lucky few that still worked and hadn't been tossed. Nowdays the equivalents are built to last a year, and might last five if treated well - but the fact they still work after they're projected lifespan still holds.
Yeah, that sort of thing been proposed. There are actually dozens, if not hundreds, of useful commecial applications of space travel that would work if even low orbit were easily accessible.
Off the top of my head, there are materials that can be made easily in space like Aerogel, which is incredibly valuable here in earth. Google it or look it up in Wiki to see what I mean - this stuff has amazingly useful properties, and weighs next to nothing. Mass producing it would mostly be a matter of getting a facility into orbit at a reasonable cost.
There are abundant and accessable metal resources in the belt, due in no small part to the lack of differentiation in asteroids - heavy metals on earth mostly sunk into the core during the planet's formation, whereas in a floating rock the different materials are more evenly distributed. Getting at those materials would require either extensive automation or much better life support technology - the belt is slightly further away than Mars, and we haven't even gotten that far yet. We'd also need to be able to get heavy equiptment into orbit, and we'd need long range in-system propulsion, such as an ion drive. Putting a waystation in orbit around Mars, or on one of the Martian moons, would make this easier - call it a steeping stone.
If we don't want to go that far, the moon also makes a good choice, and it has oxygen already present as well. That solves the range problem, but adds another trip out of a gravity well going the other way. Another stepping stone possibility is the Lagrange points in between the earth and the moon. Additionally, if we are ever able to use He3-D fusion power, the moon is our nearest fuel source.
Apart from that, there's the prospect of putting solar plants and more conventional factories in orbit. Solar power in space suffers none of the drawbacks of solar power on the ground, and we can build the power plant as large as we like. If the lauch costs were low enough, we could easily move our polluting industries away from any and all ecosystems, perhaps using the belt for raw materials and shipping only finished products back to earth. The aforementioned Lagrange points in the earth-moon system would be a good place to put them. Given that those industries would never have to worry about the cost of complying with the EPA again, they might well volunteer for a chance to move away. A whole new type of outsourcing would begin:-P
All of these have the common problem of being too expensive yet, which means in practice that we need to go about the R&D in the meantime using tax dollars. In the long run, I suspect there will always be a NASA equivalent, if only for the pure science side of things, but it'll take a strong incentive and a cheaper launch vehicle to put private industry up there in numbers. Had we never done all the space research of the 60's and 70's, we wouldn't have the satelite industry of today.
Airlines are a bad point of comparison. They're generally seen as profitable (and by and large they have been, though many have hit trouble more recently), they use existing, well understood technology, and they replaced much older methods of long range travel that predated them.
Space travel isn't profitable yet. People aren't going from point A to point B and crossing outer space in the process - to profit from space, you must go from the ground to orbit, and bring something back that's worth the trip. Space is mostly empty, and gravity is a strong barrier to entry.
Space travel technology isn't both cheap an reliable yet. Cheap rockets make the satelite business possible, but reliable, reusable craft capable of attaining orbit with a signifigant payload are incredibly expensive (the X-prize craft didn't meet those qualifications, though they were cheap and reusable). Airplanes existed for years before the formation of airlines, and jet propulsion existed for a long time before jetliners were brought into widespread service. It was largely factors like military R&D that made modern airlines possible - jets were weapons before they were anything else.
Lastly, we were traveling from Europe to North America (to give two examples) for centuries before planes were invented. The pathway was already there, and already profitable and useful. Airlines slowly but surely superceded ships as the means to travel long distances. Centuries from now we might have an equivalent in space - if we start with ion drives and later develop fusion propulsion, that would be similar - but right now we're at the stage where intercontinental travel was in the medieval period.
The private sector needs an incentive to go to space. All they have now is the satelite business. Why should they feel the need to go any further than that? There isn't anything to be had up there yet, at least not at the prices they're willing to pay. A billion dollar airliner fleet isn't that expensive if it makes 100 billion in airfare after all. What incentive is there to drop a few billion dollars on space craft when it will take another decade of R&D before they can turn a profit?
Oh, I'm not denying NASA's political woes and faults. Nor am I denying that in some cases private industry gets things done effeciently. But the conditions that the private sector needs in order to operate are fairly limiting.
In the future, assuming we don't die out or go back to the dark ages, I have no doubt that there will be private exploitation of offworld resources. There will come a time in the next few decades where building factories in orbit to take advantage of abundant energy, vacuum and free-fall will be profitable, and where space based power plants are a reality. In the long run the belt and the moon will be open for commercial mining.
But in the meantime the costs are too high, so the only private enterprise in space is the satelite business. To expand beyond that requires cheap reusable lauch vehicles, or a space elevator, plus a thousand other minor technical problems that must be solved to make space accessible. And to really get the most out of a private space program we'd probably need other related advancements in fields like robotics. These advances won't come from the private sector, because the time it would take for an investment to pay off is measured in decades, and investors aren't that patient.
Because private industry is motivated by short term profit, and the benefits of a space program are all long term (or non-profitable - "pure" science like astronomy is of no commercial value).
Let's say you want to build a solar power plant in space, or a mining operation on the moon or in the belt, or an orbital facility for producing materials that require vacuum and/or free fall. The startup costs are immense, and it'll be decades before you see a profit. Why invest the money in it now when you could put it somewhere else that'll turn a profit sooner and more reliably? That's how the free market works after all, money takes the path of least resistance, and that's why private industry fairs poorly at anything long term. Government agencies can be short sighted too, but they aren't required to make a profit, and so while they are often ineffecient, they can do things no industry has the patience for.
Half the benefit to space travel is to the whole of mankind; a chance to spread beyond our home world, and a pathway to greater understanding about the universe. These things aren't appealing to the private sector. The other reasons for going to space - valuable resources such as those in the belt, abundant solar energy, technological offshoots that come from developing better craft, etc - those aren't easy enough to turn a quick buck on.
When space technology progresses to the point where low earth orbit is easily accessable, then and only then will the private sector step up and start seriously considering offworld activities such as the ones mentioned above. Remember that it was government agencies, not the private sector, that made satelites possible, and yet now that putting satelites in orbit is easy you have plenty of commercial applications springing up. The public sector paved the way for satelites, and the communications companies took advantage of that when it became cheap enough. And even the X-prize craft were following what had already been done by NASA, they were just finding new ways of doing it.
That doesn't hold up for much of history. The Triassic era didn't have large dinosaurs, but the following eras (Jurrasic and Cretaceous) did. The dinosaurs got bigger as time went on, not smaller - Tyranosaurs were the last and largest of their line. There are plenty of examples of the reverse happening (large dinosaurs getting smaller, see Utah Raptors shrinking down to Deinonocus (Sp?) and Trodon), but there isn't a strong trend in that direction. It was the mass extinction at the end that got all the large animals out of the picture, which is to be expected in a global die off.
Trilobites aren't the best example either - they are not just large bugs, they're a whole different group. There are examples of massive insects from earlier eras (massive meaning much bigger than today, though still not large when compared to a mammal), but those were probably dead ends - insects have a maximum size due to their exoskeletons, and being larger is a disadvantage for them. And if you want examples of big invertebrates today, squids and octopuses come to mind, as do crustaceans like crabs and lobsters.
As for the ice age mammals (mastodons, saber tooth cats and the like), there's a very good reason they got bigger when it got colder. Larger animals have a greater volume relative to their surface area, since surface area increases by the sqaure, and volume by the cube (^2 vs. ^3). Surface area to volume determines the rate of heat loss to the surrounding environment - larger animals retain heat better than small ones. They grew to mammoth size when the ice age made heat retention vital, and they died off or shrunk when the ice age ended.
True, but the person I was replying to was reffering to efforts to educate the public about the ESRB in general. His point was that educating them won't help sway the puritans (who are by and large complete idiots to begin with); my point was that it isn't the puritans who need to be swayed, it's the moderates (who often do not know of the ESRB). The comics are a part of a whole. The ESRB knows that it needs to make more people aware of what it does, and it's good to see them doing something about it.
Actually, if it were me, I'd be more worried about my (hypothetical) kids putting stuff on there that they shouldn't. It'd be really unfortunate if the guy who posted the article was scrupulous about avoiding copyrighted materials himself, and one of his kids went and put all his pirated MP3s on the server. And the OP, while flamebait, is right about one thing - a central server would draw more attention than a p2p network does.
Either make sure there are no potentially infringing materials at all on the server, or make sure that any such materials can't be found.
Actually, didn't something like that happen a while back? I seem to recall a/. story about somebody who was hosting video files that they themselves held copyright to, and was sent repeated takedown notices because the MPAA was SURE the files were theirs. They followed up with legal threats when the material wasn't removed, despite repeated requests that the lawyers examine the materials that they were told were MPAA owned.
Not sure if it's exactly relevant here, or if the story was a hoax, but it's certainly plausible enough, what with the companies using webcrawler bots and heavy handed legal tactics.
I don't think it's the Jackass Thompsons of the world that this is aimed at.
Look at it this way - parents understand what rated "R" means, because they themselves watch movies. They often don't understand what rated "M" means, because they've never played games. There are obviously exceptions (and I'm sure someone will post in a minute that they're a parent and also play games), but of course the people who play the games aren't the ones who support fucktards like Thompson.
I've seen plenty of examples of parents buying games for their kids without checking the labels on them. At a guess those parents are the ones who simply aren't aware of the ESRB, and will go on to complain loudly to anyone who will listen that nobody told them that Gorefest 2K wasn't appropriate for a five year old. THESE are the people who need ad campaigns and efforts to raise their awareness of the ESRB labels. They are part of the problem, but unlike the puritans, they're a problem that can be solved.
The puritans, the ones who want to ban anything that they don't like, can go fuck themselves. They can't dictate what other people play, read or watch without running up against the first amendment (or other free speach provisions in other democratic countries). They're a hopeless lot, so we might as well just try and ignore their shrill wailing.
It's the people who are only interested in their own children, the ones who are rational, who need this kind of education. And if they take responsibility for screening their kids games, then the idiots like Jack Thompson will lose their only credible support base.
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Because the last time I did that, I got some very strage looks from the other people in the washroom.
Hey, if they could concentrate it enough, I'd get my caffine fix from a shot glass :-P
Why do you need all that boiling water and bitter bean based colouring anyway? The important stuff is the caffine, or as I like to think of it, the "wake up kick to the head".
Touch could tell you that the egg is ovoid, has a certain texture, and a specific weight range. Comparing that to stored information about various objects could tell you that the object you're holding is an egg, rather than, say, a golf ball. This is essentially what human memory already accomplishes.
All you need to do is either A) Give the robot learning capability and let it make mistakes (which is hard, but leads to more versatile behaviour), or B) Code for every object it is likely to come in contact to (the easier brute force method). The latter approach works just fine if the bot is only going to come into contact with a limited number of forseeable objects. Put simply, a robot designed for something like mechanical work only needs to know in-depth information about a few types of material - it doesn't need to know what an egg is if it isn't going to handle them.
Being able to tell things like surface texture and shape is what the technology in TFA does - and in our "egg" scenario, that is useful information. You'd need other sensors for things like weight, but being able to determine that object X has Y properties, and then comparing Y to a database of shape/size/surface data, does give the robot an advantage when dealing with the environment it's operating in.
You'd also need the techology to tie the prosthetic limb into your nervous system. That might actually be the harder part.
OTOH, if you could tie into your peripheral nervous system, you'd have a prosthetic that not only had a sense of touch, but that could be controlled like a limb as well. The parts of your brain are already there to move it, so as long as you were born with the limb in question, you could probably train a prosthetic easily enough.
I get why this would be useful for telesurgery. But does anyone else thing this would be damn useful for robots more generally?
AI is the single largest problem with making robots that act autonomously, but there are other issues as well, and sensory data is one of them. Humans, and other animals, depend on a variety of senses to interact with our environment - ranging from sonar to sight to smell (depending on species). An individual is severly limited with one of their senses lost/reduced.
We could build a robot with sight easily - camera technology is getting better and better. Ditto sound recording, and even interpretation (voice recognition for example has come a long way). Gyroscopes can be used to give a sense of balance. It wouldn't be that difficult to add sonar or radar to that list, and smell we can probably skip for most applications. But touch is too useful not to have. For any device that moves independantly, being able to feel where it's putting its various body parts is potentially vital.
How important is our sense of touch? Hands are useless without feedback as to where we're putting them. Imagine the advantages for a robot that can feel different surfaces (and determine what they're made of, how sturdy they are, etc). I suspect a fair number of problems with pathfinding could be solved by giving the robot instructions as to what surfaces will and won't support it's weight. Telling a vehicle sized robot to stick to the asphalt would be helpful, especially when you consider the alternatives. It'd be nice to be able to tell a bot meant for cleaning not to throw away money, or to differentiate between recycleable materials and regular garbage, or to avoid scrubbing the carpet with tile cleaner...
Of course I'm probably getting ahead of the technology here - this sort of application won't exist for a long time yet. But hey, a geek can dream.
It's fission. The only place in the solar system where you get naturally occuring fusion is the sun, and even then it only happens at the very core. If fusion were easy, we wouldn't have such a hard time getting fusion reactors to work.
"I hope Pluto finally gets excluded from planet definition. It's too small"
Well, sir, I hope that you are similarly excluded from the human definition. What have I ever done to you to deserve this?
-Pluto
(PS that was a really low blow, commenting on my size. I could make a crack about you and satisfying your wife, but that wouldn't be "big" of me.)
I think that last part that would screw you up. How large, or how spherical, would a random orbiting body have to be to fit the defninition of "minor planet"? You're gonna need an arbitrary cutoff no matter what you do.
Plus, how do brown dwarf stars fit into that definition? A brown dwarf can't fuse hydrogen, and in many regards is similar to a planet; however it can fuse deuterium, so it does undergo fusion during it's initial collapse. Wouldn't a brown dwarf fit your definition of a major planet, since it is not undergoing fusion? Or would it have to be orbiting a star (as is the case in a binary system) first?
What about rogue planets? They don't fit the "orbiting a star" half of the planet definition you give. What does that make them, their own category, or just interstellar rocks? And if they do have their own category, do the aformentioned brown dwarfs fall under it?
I've always thought that looking for intelligent life on other planets is premature, since we haven't conclusively found intelligent life on this one yet :-P
But seriously, what difference does life make? Any planet could support life if you put it in a habitat of some sort. Even gas giants could support life if said habitats floated (and yes, that hs been proposed - human breathable air is a lifting gas when the outside pressure is high enough). If you mean indigenous life, that's another story - we're very likely alone here in our solar system, so seeking to define a livable planet when we have exactly one example is a bit premature.
If you want to find examples of life outside our solar system, good luck. The best we can do currently is look for either signs of intelligence (which is SETI's business), or else look for a planet that shows signs of an oxygen atmospherem, since that would imply biological processes. We're already doing this IIRC.
And even then we'd be unable to show that a rocky body of the right temperature didn't have life - anaeorbic (sp?) life gets along just fine and dandy without toxic oxygen fouling up their enviroment. That doesn't even get into the possibility of life forms existing with completely different chemical composition, which we can't even make an educated guess about.
We couldn't even show that there isn't intelligent life somewhere, since there is no guarantee that they'd use the same methods of communicating as we do - all we can do is hope they're trying to contant us.
My bad. From TFA:
"Allerca announced their plans three years ago, and started collecting deposits from allergic cat fans, but have now decided that their plans to use RNA interference were taking a back seat to a more traditional breeding approach, albeit one that uses genetic testing to select individuals that express low levels of FEL D1. Although no reason is given for the change of approach, it is possible the RNAi approach simply wasn't working, and if you can just find individual breeding animals where mother nature has done all the hard work, then it makes sense to take advantage of that fact"
Turns out they are using selective breeding. Bring on the inbred supercats!
Though the text doesn't specify that they aren't using genetic alteration - it just says it's "Taking a back seat", which could mean they're using both.
We could probably breed them to be hypoallergenic the old fashioned way. Instead of enviromentalists crying doom, we'd get PETA screaming about unethical treatment. Breeding animals for specific purposes does them no favours.
Do you know how inbred most purebred domestic animals are? What do you think purebred means anyway? For an animal to be purely of one breed, you have to mate it with it's not-so-distant relatives. Consequently they suffer from aliments ranging from hip dysplasia, to mental retardation, to compromised immune systems.
This would probably count as animal cruelty, particularly since hypoalergenic cats would be very hard to breed, and might require many generations of inbred test animals to get it right, some of which would need to be put down. This too is playing god, and not in a merciful or benevolent way.
Altering them in a lab is doing them a favour by comparison. You can argue that we shouldn't be playing god to begin with, but since we've been doing it for several thousand years already with every single form of domesticated life, it's a bit late to protest.
And worrying about them escaping into the wild is just moronic - domestic cats DIE in the wild. "Wild" houscats are called strays or ferals by another name, and typically only exist near human habitation. Trust me - every time some suburban moron drives their cat out to the country and lets it out, with the idiotic idea that it can fend for itself, it either dies or winds up living in somebodies garage. There is no "natural" habitat to spoil. And there are plenty of natural habitats spoiled by (unmodified) housepets already - ask an Austrailian or New Zealander.
Perhaps you're mistaking entry mass for landing mass?
A meteorite's surface vapourizes from reentry heat when it enters the atmosphere. If the meteorite is small enough, the entire object will be plasma long before it hits the ground; it takes a large or dense object to survive reentry, and even then much of it's mass is lost.
That doesn't however mean that it disperses. There is at least one theory that a meteorite could hit the ground as a ball of plasma with a solid core, due to the surrounding air pressure preventing the superheated surface from dispersing even after it vapourizes. I seem to recall seeing this put forward for the Tunguska blast in Siberia. IANA Astrophysicist, so I don't know how fast the object would need to be moving, or how large it would have to be initially, to produce this effect.
If that did happen, what would you use for your calculations? The mass of the meteorite wouldn't all be solid when it hit, and whatever material wasn't vapourized by descent or on impact would only make up a fraction of the mass present during the impact. The core might be 90kg, or 300kg, or whatever, but using that figure to calculated the speed the object on impact would be incorrect. You'd need to mass of the meteorite on reentry, minus whatever mass bled off during descent.
However, I would agree that comparing the impact to an atomic bomb blast is silly. It's like comparing a firecracker explosion to a bullet impact - yes, you can say that one has X amount of energy and the other has Y (and you could probably calculate this by measuring the gunpowder present in each, and determining how much energy you get from burning it), but that comparison doesn't actually tell you anything useful, since the energy is applied in a very different fashion. It's comparing apples to oranges.
Nah, it's just a question of probability.
You build something that will almost certainly last 6 months. After 6 months, it will probably last another 8 months. After those 8 have passed, it might last another year if you're lucky. After that year is up, it's anybody's guess.
It's not like they built it to self destruct after it's projected mission time expired. They built it to not FAIL in it's mission time, and anthing beyond that is just fine and dandy.
I've seen electronics that were 50 years old (like old fashioned radios) that still worked. Is that because they were built to last 50 years? Nope. They were built to last maybe ten, and the ones I saw were the lucky few that still worked and hadn't been tossed. Nowdays the equivalents are built to last a year, and might last five if treated well - but the fact they still work after they're projected lifespan still holds.
Yeah, that sort of thing been proposed. There are actually dozens, if not hundreds, of useful commecial applications of space travel that would work if even low orbit were easily accessible.
:-P
Off the top of my head, there are materials that can be made easily in space like Aerogel, which is incredibly valuable here in earth. Google it or look it up in Wiki to see what I mean - this stuff has amazingly useful properties, and weighs next to nothing. Mass producing it would mostly be a matter of getting a facility into orbit at a reasonable cost.
There are abundant and accessable metal resources in the belt, due in no small part to the lack of differentiation in asteroids - heavy metals on earth mostly sunk into the core during the planet's formation, whereas in a floating rock the different materials are more evenly distributed. Getting at those materials would require either extensive automation or much better life support technology - the belt is slightly further away than Mars, and we haven't even gotten that far yet. We'd also need to be able to get heavy equiptment into orbit, and we'd need long range in-system propulsion, such as an ion drive. Putting a waystation in orbit around Mars, or on one of the Martian moons, would make this easier - call it a steeping stone.
If we don't want to go that far, the moon also makes a good choice, and it has oxygen already present as well. That solves the range problem, but adds another trip out of a gravity well going the other way. Another stepping stone possibility is the Lagrange points in between the earth and the moon. Additionally, if we are ever able to use He3-D fusion power, the moon is our nearest fuel source.
Apart from that, there's the prospect of putting solar plants and more conventional factories in orbit. Solar power in space suffers none of the drawbacks of solar power on the ground, and we can build the power plant as large as we like. If the lauch costs were low enough, we could easily move our polluting industries away from any and all ecosystems, perhaps using the belt for raw materials and shipping only finished products back to earth. The aforementioned Lagrange points in the earth-moon system would be a good place to put them. Given that those industries would never have to worry about the cost of complying with the EPA again, they might well volunteer for a chance to move away. A whole new type of outsourcing would begin
All of these have the common problem of being too expensive yet, which means in practice that we need to go about the R&D in the meantime using tax dollars. In the long run, I suspect there will always be a NASA equivalent, if only for the pure science side of things, but it'll take a strong incentive and a cheaper launch vehicle to put private industry up there in numbers. Had we never done all the space research of the 60's and 70's, we wouldn't have the satelite industry of today.
Airlines are a bad point of comparison. They're generally seen as profitable (and by and large they have been, though many have hit trouble more recently), they use existing, well understood technology, and they replaced much older methods of long range travel that predated them.
Space travel isn't profitable yet. People aren't going from point A to point B and crossing outer space in the process - to profit from space, you must go from the ground to orbit, and bring something back that's worth the trip. Space is mostly empty, and gravity is a strong barrier to entry.
Space travel technology isn't both cheap an reliable yet. Cheap rockets make the satelite business possible, but reliable, reusable craft capable of attaining orbit with a signifigant payload are incredibly expensive (the X-prize craft didn't meet those qualifications, though they were cheap and reusable). Airplanes existed for years before the formation of airlines, and jet propulsion existed for a long time before jetliners were brought into widespread service. It was largely factors like military R&D that made modern airlines possible - jets were weapons before they were anything else.
Lastly, we were traveling from Europe to North America (to give two examples) for centuries before planes were invented. The pathway was already there, and already profitable and useful. Airlines slowly but surely superceded ships as the means to travel long distances. Centuries from now we might have an equivalent in space - if we start with ion drives and later develop fusion propulsion, that would be similar - but right now we're at the stage where intercontinental travel was in the medieval period.
The private sector needs an incentive to go to space. All they have now is the satelite business. Why should they feel the need to go any further than that? There isn't anything to be had up there yet, at least not at the prices they're willing to pay. A billion dollar airliner fleet isn't that expensive if it makes 100 billion in airfare after all. What incentive is there to drop a few billion dollars on space craft when it will take another decade of R&D before they can turn a profit?
Oh, I'm not denying NASA's political woes and faults. Nor am I denying that in some cases private industry gets things done effeciently. But the conditions that the private sector needs in order to operate are fairly limiting.
In the future, assuming we don't die out or go back to the dark ages, I have no doubt that there will be private exploitation of offworld resources. There will come a time in the next few decades where building factories in orbit to take advantage of abundant energy, vacuum and free-fall will be profitable, and where space based power plants are a reality. In the long run the belt and the moon will be open for commercial mining.
But in the meantime the costs are too high, so the only private enterprise in space is the satelite business. To expand beyond that requires cheap reusable lauch vehicles, or a space elevator, plus a thousand other minor technical problems that must be solved to make space accessible. And to really get the most out of a private space program we'd probably need other related advancements in fields like robotics. These advances won't come from the private sector, because the time it would take for an investment to pay off is measured in decades, and investors aren't that patient.
Because private industry is motivated by short term profit, and the benefits of a space program are all long term (or non-profitable - "pure" science like astronomy is of no commercial value).
Let's say you want to build a solar power plant in space, or a mining operation on the moon or in the belt, or an orbital facility for producing materials that require vacuum and/or free fall. The startup costs are immense, and it'll be decades before you see a profit. Why invest the money in it now when you could put it somewhere else that'll turn a profit sooner and more reliably? That's how the free market works after all, money takes the path of least resistance, and that's why private industry fairs poorly at anything long term. Government agencies can be short sighted too, but they aren't required to make a profit, and so while they are often ineffecient, they can do things no industry has the patience for.
Half the benefit to space travel is to the whole of mankind; a chance to spread beyond our home world, and a pathway to greater understanding about the universe. These things aren't appealing to the private sector. The other reasons for going to space - valuable resources such as those in the belt, abundant solar energy, technological offshoots that come from developing better craft, etc - those aren't easy enough to turn a quick buck on.
When space technology progresses to the point where low earth orbit is easily accessable, then and only then will the private sector step up and start seriously considering offworld activities such as the ones mentioned above. Remember that it was government agencies, not the private sector, that made satelites possible, and yet now that putting satelites in orbit is easy you have plenty of commercial applications springing up. The public sector paved the way for satelites, and the communications companies took advantage of that when it became cheap enough. And even the X-prize craft were following what had already been done by NASA, they were just finding new ways of doing it.
That doesn't hold up for much of history. The Triassic era didn't have large dinosaurs, but the following eras (Jurrasic and Cretaceous) did. The dinosaurs got bigger as time went on, not smaller - Tyranosaurs were the last and largest of their line. There are plenty of examples of the reverse happening (large dinosaurs getting smaller, see Utah Raptors shrinking down to Deinonocus (Sp?) and Trodon), but there isn't a strong trend in that direction. It was the mass extinction at the end that got all the large animals out of the picture, which is to be expected in a global die off.
Trilobites aren't the best example either - they are not just large bugs, they're a whole different group. There are examples of massive insects from earlier eras (massive meaning much bigger than today, though still not large when compared to a mammal), but those were probably dead ends - insects have a maximum size due to their exoskeletons, and being larger is a disadvantage for them. And if you want examples of big invertebrates today, squids and octopuses come to mind, as do crustaceans like crabs and lobsters.
As for the ice age mammals (mastodons, saber tooth cats and the like), there's a very good reason they got bigger when it got colder. Larger animals have a greater volume relative to their surface area, since surface area increases by the sqaure, and volume by the cube (^2 vs. ^3). Surface area to volume determines the rate of heat loss to the surrounding environment - larger animals retain heat better than small ones. They grew to mammoth size when the ice age made heat retention vital, and they died off or shrunk when the ice age ended.
True, but the person I was replying to was reffering to efforts to educate the public about the ESRB in general. His point was that educating them won't help sway the puritans (who are by and large complete idiots to begin with); my point was that it isn't the puritans who need to be swayed, it's the moderates (who often do not know of the ESRB). The comics are a part of a whole. The ESRB knows that it needs to make more people aware of what it does, and it's good to see them doing something about it.
Jury "The verdict is Rock your honour"
:-P
Judge "Very well. Death by stoning."
I shudder to think what they'd do for paper. Death by bureaucracy?
Yeah, except that I suspect that lawyers could find a way to argue over the interpretation of the rules.
Actually, if it were me, I'd be more worried about my (hypothetical) kids putting stuff on there that they shouldn't. It'd be really unfortunate if the guy who posted the article was scrupulous about avoiding copyrighted materials himself, and one of his kids went and put all his pirated MP3s on the server. And the OP, while flamebait, is right about one thing - a central server would draw more attention than a p2p network does.
Either make sure there are no potentially infringing materials at all on the server, or make sure that any such materials can't be found.
Actually, didn't something like that happen a while back? I seem to recall a /. story about somebody who was hosting video files that they themselves held copyright to, and was sent repeated takedown notices because the MPAA was SURE the files were theirs. They followed up with legal threats when the material wasn't removed, despite repeated requests that the lawyers examine the materials that they were told were MPAA owned.
Not sure if it's exactly relevant here, or if the story was a hoax, but it's certainly plausible enough, what with the companies using webcrawler bots and heavy handed legal tactics.
I don't think it's the Jackass Thompsons of the world that this is aimed at.
Look at it this way - parents understand what rated "R" means, because they themselves watch movies. They often don't understand what rated "M" means, because they've never played games. There are obviously exceptions (and I'm sure someone will post in a minute that they're a parent and also play games), but of course the people who play the games aren't the ones who support fucktards like Thompson.
I've seen plenty of examples of parents buying games for their kids without checking the labels on them. At a guess those parents are the ones who simply aren't aware of the ESRB, and will go on to complain loudly to anyone who will listen that nobody told them that Gorefest 2K wasn't appropriate for a five year old. THESE are the people who need ad campaigns and efforts to raise their awareness of the ESRB labels. They are part of the problem, but unlike the puritans, they're a problem that can be solved.
The puritans, the ones who want to ban anything that they don't like, can go fuck themselves. They can't dictate what other people play, read or watch without running up against the first amendment (or other free speach provisions in other democratic countries). They're a hopeless lot, so we might as well just try and ignore their shrill wailing.
It's the people who are only interested in their own children, the ones who are rational, who need this kind of education. And if they take responsibility for screening their kids games, then the idiots like Jack Thompson will lose their only credible support base.
"Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of law!"
The mental image that conjures is of a dog in a suit and tie howling "SUUUUEEEEEEEEE" at the moon....