Because a booster is not a passive antenna. It includes an amplifier and transmitter.
A booster is trivially easy to turn into a jammer. Even unintentionally... if they are poorly made or badly installed, they pump out noise which reduces signal quality for everyone nearby. As a ham radio operator, I know first hand how careful you have to be to put out a clean signal. Water in your coax dielectric? Ground loop somewhere? Connectors loose? It shows in your transmitted signal.
There's a reason that devices which transmit on cell phone frequency bands are regulated and have to be approved, and in some cases require a license just to own. It's not just you who would have their cell phone service damaged.
Can propellers do that? Yes. The XF88B could maintain 0.8 Mach.
That's in Earth atmosphere, though. Doesn't the efficiency of propellers directly depend on the density of air?
It does, yes. Remember though that the density of the atmosphere is much lower than surface at the altitude at which those tests were performed (100mb or less). There's no question that the props won't be of the same efficiency... it's only if they're "good enough".
There's the additional issue of prop blade speed. While it's very hard to make a conventional prop work well at supersonic speed from the point of view of "how fast is the prop moving forwards", there is also the issue of "how fast are the prop blades moving rotationally". When you take into account the forward motion and the rotary motion, the path a blade takes through the air is a helix. And depending upon how fast the blade is rotating and how far away from the central axis you are, part of the blades may be supersonic near the tips while near the root they're subsonic, and you have a sonic transition sliding back and forth along the blade. This is nothing new; World War II era craft had this as an issue. Brute strength solved in then, exotic materials and geometry will solve it this time.
You also can adjust the pitch of a propeller, i.e. the angle at which the blades are tilted, in response to airspeed and density. You can pitch for climb rate, or for speed, and you can do so in flight. This is extremely common even in ordinary single-engine aircraft, and is well-understood.
In all, as long as the true airspeed of the Mars flyer is subsonic, if there's enough atmosphere for lift there will be enough atmosphere for propeller-based thrust. Propellers are just rotating wings, and they have to solve the same problem.
Typical Mars surface air pressure varies between 6 and 10 millibars, depending upon season and land altitude. Assuming relatively low altitude flights, it's quite possible to build aircraft that can fly in that density (particularly given that Mars' surface gravity is only about 40% of Earth's). What are the constraints?
1. Velocity. At 6 millibars, you're looking at a near-supersonic speed to stay aloft. Sure, that's not a big deal from a drag perspective when the air is that thin, but your propulsion system has to be able to maintain that. Can propellers do that? Yes. The XF88B could maintain 0.8 Mach.
2. Flutter. Unlike drag, which is heavily dependent upon the product of air density, velocity and drag coefficient, flutter is only really dependent upon airspeed. Think of it as a kind of resonance. As the air flows over the wing, the wing vibrates like a guitar string. Aircraft have literally shaken themselves apart when they hit a critical airspeed; this remains an issue today (example: builders of the Van's Aircraft RV10 are warned about relying upon airspeed indicators if they have a turbocharged or supercharged motor, as at the service ceiling of 18000 feet the absolute airspeed max of around 250 knots will only be shown as 160 knots on most mechanical airspeed indicators... and at 250 knots, you're int he danger zone for flutter). This can be engineered around, though at the airspeeds necessary it won't be easy.
3. Energy. So how do you propel this thing? Unless it's going to be a short mission, chemical propellants are right out (especially given that you need to carry both the fuel AND the oxidizer, as there's no "free" oxygen to be found. Solar-electric is being discussed, and may actually be viable; the plane would probably have to "race the sunset" to stay in sunlight constantly. This is very doable, though. At the equator, Mars has a curcumference of about 13,000 miles. At that size, with a 24.5 hour day, an aircraft would have to maintain a bit over 500mph to stay in sunlight. However, as this is likely to be near the speed necessary just to stay aloft anyway, it's a nonfactor. If you're powered enough to fly, you can stay in sunlight.
Yep. There are problems. But none of it is insurmountable. How much tax increase are you willing to endure (and convince others to endure) to accomplish this? If that number's high enough... yes. It CAN be done, with propellers and lift from wings (as opposed to vectored thrust). The challenges are the power system and overcoming flutter, but these are solvable.
The IAU, not Walmart-denizes with a microphone shoved into their face, nor IT workers who read something on Wikipedia once. There is no "wobbly ground", and the IAU doesn't answer to the general public.
Besides. If Pluto fits the definition of "dwarf planet", how does the size, existence, density, or any other property of Eris change whether Pluto fits the definition?
There are downsides to changing your passwords frequently, which should at least be considered along with the upsides. Specifically:
You are more likely to forget your passwords, and if you do so on a critical service you might cause yourself a lot of inconvenience/financial loss (example: a stock you hold is in free-fall, you want to sell, you try to sell when it's at 20 but forgot your brokerage password, and by the time you recover the password it's at 15).
More frequent password loss means more password recovery events, each of which is its own security risk (i.e. sending recovered or new passwords in cleartext, or personalized recovery URLs in cleartext)
More visits to password-change pages, which means more windows of opportunity for keyloggers. While this is only a small incremental exposure (compared to actually using the password-protected accounts as you go about your daily business), password recovery pages often involve challenge/response steps which could be recorded, meaning the bad guy could then change your password using your "secret question" answers at their leisure a few months later. (Recovery "secret question" answers are almost as good as the passwords themselves in usefulness for compromising an account... when you change your passwords, do you also change your recovery question/answers? And can you remember them?)
All that being said... yeah, passwords do have a shelf-life. I'd just warn against going overboard on frequency. Using password keychains mitigates a lot of that, but ties you to the keyring. Like so many issues in security, there's no perfect answer.
Where do you have greater freedom of speech and presumption of innocence: Britain or Saudi Arabia? Where are you more likely to be harassed by police for trivialities: Britain or Saudi Arabia?
Every day the two look more alike.
And now I will commit a crime in the eyes of England: Will someone please put a bullet into the head of the police officer who made the arrest?
Who says that there's an American trade imbalance with China? Here we have excellent proof that China is importing and embracing the leading American industry: entitlements.
Suppose that this "error" that happens every time nonetheless yields the same original DNA sequence?
dna half-strand ACTG ----> rna TATTCGAGATATAC ---> dna half-strand ACTG
It's been a very, very long time since I took my college biology, so be kind if I'm wrong. My point is that these might not be "errors" at all, just alternate intermediate steps that generate the same ultimate results. The assumption to date seems to be "one, and ONLY one, amino acid on RNA yields one, and ONLY one, corresponding amino acid on DNA". Is that necessarily the case, every time? I'm quite sure about ohhhh, a billion molecular biologists have already thought about this. I just don't know the answer.
Major ISPs/backbone providers (forced to partition bandwidth on their private networks)? No, they don't. YOU do. These are for-profit companies, and when their expenses go up, your costs go up. If a percentage of their networks are, in effect, nationalized, they will certainly raise their rates to compensate for the losses associated with this seizure.
Major ISP/backbone providers (forced to build the "open" internet in parallel)? No, they don't. YOU do. Again, these companies aren't charity and aren't public property. Being forced to build something that is their own competition means they raise their rates to compensate, and again, this is a form of property seizure.
A new not-for-profit national company? YOU do. Through regulatory fees, etc... assuming it passes Constitutional muster. It might not. In any event, just how many tens or hundreds of billions of dollars would it cost to duplicate the current Internet infrastructure's capacity, then maintain and grow it? This isn't chump-change. This is hundreds to thousands of dollars per person.
The government? No, they don't. YOU do. Through taxes and tarriffs and fees and other bad words (see above for the scale involved). Plus, if the government owns it, you bloody well know they will content-filter it (no porn, access to ammunition-sellers, or websites of uncontrolled news media, grassroots voter-activism sites, etc.), record everything you do and give it to the DHS, have regulatory requirements for "security software" (meaning scour-your-disks-and-record-your-keystrokes software( installed on any machine accessing this "public resource", and turn it off at times of national emergency (cyber-attacks, terrorist incidents, presidential and senatorial electorial victory for third-party candidates).
Idealism is great until you realize that someone has to pay for it, and that someone is always, without exception, YOU. And there's that annoying Fourth Amendment, and case law that would get in the way. Remember, if the government can muster the power to seize a major industry over ideological reasons, what defense would smaller companies (including yours, for all values of "you") have with the takeover of the commercial Internet as precedent? Ideologies come and go, but powers of regulation and seizure only linger and grow.
Don't feed the regulation-monster. Don't feed the confiscation-monster. It only makes them stronger.
There are problems that have to be solved, but there are no functional answers which don't involve imposing expenses on other people or allowing the government far, far more powers over Internet content and monitoring than it already has. It's quite possible that, warts and problems and all, what we have right now may be the least of evils. Please keep an open mind to that possibility.
The approach comes dangerously close to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Exactly. You think that's not intentional? This is 100% identical to the Westboro people inciting violence against gays and claiming that they are justified in doing so because "gays are violent". They then picket funerals and say the most hateful things in the hope they will be attacked and thus get everything they want.
The TSA is just hoping someone will put the smackdown on one of their expendable minimum-wage immune-to-prosecution "law enforcement officials" as an excuse to create internal passports a la Apartheid-era South Africa. You just know they're drooling over that prospect.
My own answer is to fly myself. It's a bit more expensive and slower, but no TSA jackboot can tell me I can't do it. The FAA issued my pilot's license, and ONLY the FAA can revoke it. The TSA can go pound sand; I'll just walk to the other side of the airport and go general aviation. Yeah, this isn't a solution open to everyone, but there's no single solution short of the disbandment of the TSA that will be universal. Fly yourself, drive, take a train (until the TSA claims they own trains too), don't travel, sue, vote Libertarian, do SOMETHING to lawfully resist. And let the airlines know. Airlines have more ability to resist the conversion of the TSA into the KGB than an individual, but individuals have power over the airline's most precious resource: income.
The ring, to avoid problems with the aforementioned Coriolis force, would have to be hundreds of feet in diameter. The expense would be extreme.
The ring, to avoid problems induced by the mass of the astronauts moving from place to place, would have to either be very massive or have a series of weights that always move by themselves to the opposite side of the ring from where a given astronaut is located. Consider what this would do to the bearings of the interface of the nonrotating section if even a slight wobble were introduced. Think of what happens when one of your car's wheels throws a balance-weight. This counterbalance system would be a complex maintenance-hog with a really nasty failure mode
If the station is built without a nonrotating section (a la 2001:A Space Odyssey , docking becomes orders of magnitude more difficult and dangerous. We've already had incidents of damage to the ISS caused by bad docking attempts... now we want to add spin?
In an emergency, you're dealing with an object that has a lot of rotational inertia. How do you take the spin off? Will the ring tear itself apart if a critical structural member is micrometeored, hit with space junk, or suffers a material failure?
How would EVAs to do inspections and repairs work? Sounds like a very high possibility of an astronaut getting slung off into the great black void.
It's a good idea for the health of the astronauts, but the cost is prohibitive. Science fiction authors don't have to deal with the budgetary process...
As far as I know (this was about 6 months before my time at That Company, and was the subject of hallway lore, which is how I learned of it), it was never proven that buggy code was being deliberately checked in. What WAS certainly going on was that people who were in a position to know about bugs but were bounty-ineligible were sharing that knowledge with people who were bounty-eligible. The bugs were found and fixed, the product wasn't hurt, but the bounty system was thoroughly gamed by people who were excluded and heavily-worked.
A Former Employer Who Shall Not Be Named had a product about to go golden-master, and wanted every employee in the company to participate in the final round of testing. Then the pointy-haired bosses got an idea! During the last round of testing, they put up a bounty of twenty dollars for each P3, fifty dollars for each P2, and a hundred dollars for each P1 bug found. However, the pointy-hairs decreed QA and Dev were excluded, and in the same breath decreed that QA and Dev would be working overtime.
An underground economy of bugs immediately sprang up. QA guys would find bugs and quietly share them with tech support/sales engineers/etc. Devs would notice (and it was whispered, though never proven, create) bugs and quietly share them with IT. And the proceeds would be split between the ineligible employees and the eligible.
Over fifty thousand in bounties were paid. Then the pointy-hairs got wind of what was going on.
And that was the end of that.
Irrelevant to the story at hand, though, I'm quite sure...
It's a side-port two-stroke. This is where much of the savings in weight and complexity occur, as there is no valve train (and associated mechanical losses) to deal with. It also means you get twice as many power impulses per revolution (one-for-one instead of one-for-two), so you need a much smaller engine for the same horsepower output. The reason we don't use two-stroke engines (except in less-than-50cc motors which aren't emissions-controlled in the US) is that traditional two-strokes have serious emissions issues.
The turbo is electrically controlled to manage backpressure. The main purpose of a turbo is to recover some of the otherwise-wasted energy of high speed exhaust gasses, using that energy to drive a compressor which packs more air-fuel mixture into the cylinders. Since you only get a finite, specific amount of energy per gram of fuel, if you can pack more fuel into the cylinders by pushing it through a compressor, you can get the same horsepower (burn the same amount of fuel) in a smaller engine, which means fewer mechanical losses plus making use of some of that otherwise-wasted energy. A turbo has a "waste gate" which meters how much of the exhaust goes into the turbo's turbine and how much bypasses it (as at low exhaust velocities the turbo loses efficiency, and can actually be worse than no turbo at all). The tech described sounds like it's using that mechanism to control the pressure in the exhaust pipe from the exhaust port on the side of the cylinder (2-stroke, remember?) , thus regulating when the exhaust is allowed to leave the cylinder (i.e. not until it's fully burned. This is why there are emissions problems with older two-strokes; the exhaust port opens while unburned hydrocarbons are still present, and those unburned hydrocarbons get blown out the exhaust.)
The design has two opposing pistons, mechanically linked, instead of one piston, per cylinder. I'm not 100% sure about whether this represents a real efficiency gain or not. One of the ways you can increase engine efficiency is to reduce the mass that is rotating/reciprocating (pistons, crankshaft, connecting rods), and this design is much more complex. It does, however, have the potential to have a much much lower vibration, which might let you have lighter components in the piston/connecting rod/crankshaft chain. I don't have the math or background to say, though.
The design shown is actually a multiple-engine design, in which you have the complex central clutch to bring additional cylinders online when you need them and idle them otherwise. Unlike current "8-6-4" designs which simply shut off fuel flow to unneeded cylinders, with this design when the idle cylinders are idle they are not a parasitic loss. Current 8-6-4 designs still have the unused cylinders active, i.e. their pistons are rotating and acting as a nonproductive drag on the active cylinders. With this design there is no parasitic loss. You're paying for it with complexity, though. Nothing's free.
Overall, this looks promising, but it's important to remember that the energy used to power a vehicle is only part of its overall energy footprint. Something more complex to manufacture and maintain means more energy consumption at that part of the vehicle's life, though that energy could (potentially) be non-hydrocarbon based. It also must not be more expensive than its conventional counterpart, and this engine looks like it would be quite expensive to manufacture and maintain (the central multi-clutch would be essentially a whole additional transmission to maintain, and the number of rotating/reciprocating parts is much larger than a conventional Otto 4-stroke). It's a serious hurdle. But then, we have the Telsa, which is just as exotic. Let's see one of these in a Lotus Elise frame and go head-to-head:)
There are still so many problems with 3D movies that for me it's not worth paying for.
I have never found a 3D tech that is headache-free. I've never made it past about 5 minutes without serious pain. I wear glasses and have an astigmatism. Sucks to be me.
I have never seen a 3D movie in which the 3D was anything other than a "LOOKIE! LOOKIE WE'VE GOT THREE DEES ALL AT THE SAME TIME!" gimmick. Just like the first few years of stereo, engineers had no clue how to use it well, so they did wild over-the-top sweeps and pans. "Twist the dials back and forth, otherwise how will anyone know it's in stereo?" Someday editors and directors will have the self-discipline to tone it down, but that day is not today. Until then, we get explosions with busses and zombies flying toward the audience.
3D still only has the prepackaged depth-of-field, meaning the focal plane is what the cameras were focused upon. If I want to glance at a background object for a moment, in the real world the objects that had been the subject of focus go blurry while the object of interest comes into focus. You can't do that in 3D with the current technologies.. You either can only focus upon what the director decided, for the duration of the scene, or everything is in the same focal plane, which is unnatural and calls attention to itself.
Not ready yet... neither the technology nor the people using it.
Liberal/conservative = Democrats buying votes with Republican money seized at police gunpoint (taxes)
Conservative/liberal = Republicans attempting to repeal the First Amendment to be replaced by Leviticus 18
Me/you = idiot
You/me = idiot
Moderation/slashdot = Insightful if I agree, flamebait if I don't
Slashdot/moderation = Selection bias case study
You really should learn what "devil's advocate" means. It signifies examining the basis for the beliefs of your opponent and attempting to leave your own biases and prejudgments behind. It does not mean you necessarily agree with the position being examined.
I never said I had even the slightest trust in the US Government, or Feinstein. As a matter of record, I distrust them greatly, Feinstein in particular. I know her track record. I remember her days as mayor of San Francisco. I have observed her senatorial career and voting record continuously (do you do the same for your senators? You should.)
Feinstein is a police-statist. She likes power over ordinary citizen's day-to-day lives, and she likes it a lot. What is even more frightening is that she is a very, very skilled politician. I worried for a long time that she would make a presidential bid; I think she could have won it. And the prospect of her as president is more frightening to me than the prospect of bin Laden with a nuke, as the damage she would do in the long run is in my opinion greater than radioactive glass.
What I said is that I do not have a factual basis to decide upon whether the 80 billion is yielding results.
And you don't, either. Trust or not, the people making those decisions are not something I can control, and given that I don't have the facts, I don't think I should control. Intel isn't a game for amateur-hour. The only difference is that I admit it. Like it or not, she has the position, the power, the knowledge, and the control. Until I get at least one of those, my opinion doesn't count for much.
If you've got a better idea aside from impotent protest-sign-waving, I'd love to hear it, but it had better be grounded in fact not emotion.
And... kindly do not put words in my mouth. I am capable of articulating my own position without your help or guesswork.
We haven't had a major terrorist incident in the US for a while. Why?
A: There hasn't been any credible ability to do so by the bad guys
B: Nobody wants to harm the US any more
C: The counterterrorism efforts have prevented such an attack
For ANY of the above choices, how do you know? I mean, REALLY know, not just guessing or trying to shout louder than the guy next to you whose opinion is different than yours?
And for future budgets, how do you decide? Reduce the budget until a major attack happens, then go slightly higher next year? Reduce the budget then just absorb major attacks when they happen? Keep it where it's at on the assumption that the spending levels are the reason there's been nothing big happening? Again, upon what do you base your decision?
In all of Slashdot's membership, there are probably a few who have the real, first-hand primary-source knowledge (or are themselves a primary source) to make these decisions based upon fact and clear, rational thought. The rest of us, myself included, are talking out of our asses because we don't know shit. I loathe and despise Feinstein (she's never met a government-power-increasing law she didn't like), but she's in a position to have at least some factual knowledge. Have we overspent? Probably. But I don't want to be the one to decide how much to cut, and what to keep, and I'm not going to pretend I'm qualified to tell the intel community how to do their jobs. (Intel(tm)? That's another matter...)
We leave it to the judgment of history whether Feinstein is qualified to do so. Myself? I DON'T KNOW.
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Because a booster is not a passive antenna. It includes an amplifier and transmitter.
A booster is trivially easy to turn into a jammer. Even unintentionally... if they are poorly made or badly installed, they pump out noise which reduces signal quality for everyone nearby. As a ham radio operator, I know first hand how careful you have to be to put out a clean signal. Water in your coax dielectric? Ground loop somewhere? Connectors loose? It shows in your transmitted signal.
There's a reason that devices which transmit on cell phone frequency bands are regulated and have to be approved, and in some cases require a license just to own. It's not just you who would have their cell phone service damaged.
Spock was a naughty Vulcan.
And a top.
It seems that "dark matter" is by far the most common type of matter in the universe; what we call "normal matter" is very much in the minority.
You realize what this means?
WE are the "Goatee Universe".
CmdrTaco... your agonizer, please.
Can propellers do that? Yes. The XF88B could maintain 0.8 Mach.
That's in Earth atmosphere, though. Doesn't the efficiency of propellers directly depend on the density of air?
It does, yes. Remember though that the density of the atmosphere is much lower than surface at the altitude at which those tests were performed (100mb or less). There's no question that the props won't be of the same efficiency... it's only if they're "good enough".
There's the additional issue of prop blade speed. While it's very hard to make a conventional prop work well at supersonic speed from the point of view of "how fast is the prop moving forwards", there is also the issue of "how fast are the prop blades moving rotationally". When you take into account the forward motion and the rotary motion, the path a blade takes through the air is a helix. And depending upon how fast the blade is rotating and how far away from the central axis you are, part of the blades may be supersonic near the tips while near the root they're subsonic, and you have a sonic transition sliding back and forth along the blade. This is nothing new; World War II era craft had this as an issue. Brute strength solved in then, exotic materials and geometry will solve it this time.
You also can adjust the pitch of a propeller, i.e. the angle at which the blades are tilted, in response to airspeed and density. You can pitch for climb rate, or for speed, and you can do so in flight. This is extremely common even in ordinary single-engine aircraft, and is well-understood.
In all, as long as the true airspeed of the Mars flyer is subsonic, if there's enough atmosphere for lift there will be enough atmosphere for propeller-based thrust. Propellers are just rotating wings, and they have to solve the same problem.
Typical Mars surface air pressure varies between 6 and 10 millibars, depending upon season and land altitude. Assuming relatively low altitude flights, it's quite possible to build aircraft that can fly in that density (particularly given that Mars' surface gravity is only about 40% of Earth's). What are the constraints?
1. Velocity. At 6 millibars, you're looking at a near-supersonic speed to stay aloft. Sure, that's not a big deal from a drag perspective when the air is that thin, but your propulsion system has to be able to maintain that. Can propellers do that? Yes. The XF88B could maintain 0.8 Mach.
2. Flutter. Unlike drag, which is heavily dependent upon the product of air density, velocity and drag coefficient, flutter is only really dependent upon airspeed. Think of it as a kind of resonance. As the air flows over the wing, the wing vibrates like a guitar string. Aircraft have literally shaken themselves apart when they hit a critical airspeed; this remains an issue today (example: builders of the Van's Aircraft RV10 are warned about relying upon airspeed indicators if they have a turbocharged or supercharged motor, as at the service ceiling of 18000 feet the absolute airspeed max of around 250 knots will only be shown as 160 knots on most mechanical airspeed indicators... and at 250 knots, you're int he danger zone for flutter). This can be engineered around, though at the airspeeds necessary it won't be easy.
3. Energy. So how do you propel this thing? Unless it's going to be a short mission, chemical propellants are right out (especially given that you need to carry both the fuel AND the oxidizer, as there's no "free" oxygen to be found. Solar-electric is being discussed, and may actually be viable; the plane would probably have to "race the sunset" to stay in sunlight constantly. This is very doable, though. At the equator, Mars has a curcumference of about 13,000 miles. At that size, with a 24.5 hour day, an aircraft would have to maintain a bit over 500mph to stay in sunlight. However, as this is likely to be near the speed necessary just to stay aloft anyway, it's a nonfactor. If you're powered enough to fly, you can stay in sunlight.
Yep. There are problems. But none of it is insurmountable. How much tax increase are you willing to endure (and convince others to endure) to accomplish this? If that number's high enough... yes. It CAN be done, with propellers and lift from wings (as opposed to vectored thrust). The challenges are the power system and overcoming flutter, but these are solvable.
Who decides what the definition of "planet" is?
The IAU, not Walmart-denizes with a microphone shoved into their face, nor IT workers who read something on Wikipedia once. There is no "wobbly ground", and the IAU doesn't answer to the general public.
Besides. If Pluto fits the definition of "dwarf planet", how does the size, existence, density, or any other property of Eris change whether Pluto fits the definition?
"YOU! Stop reading Slashdot and get back to work!" BOOT TO THE HEAD
Now I owe Microsoft a buck.
There are downsides to changing your passwords frequently, which should at least be considered along with the upsides. Specifically:
All that being said... yeah, passwords do have a shelf-life. I'd just warn against going overboard on frequency. Using password keychains mitigates a lot of that, but ties you to the keyring. Like so many issues in security, there's no perfect answer.
These are serious questions.
Where do you have greater freedom of speech and presumption of innocence: Britain or Saudi Arabia? Where are you more likely to be harassed by police for trivialities: Britain or Saudi Arabia?
Every day the two look more alike.
And now I will commit a crime in the eyes of England: Will someone please put a bullet into the head of the police officer who made the arrest?
Who says that there's an American trade imbalance with China? Here we have excellent proof that China is importing and embracing the leading American industry: entitlements.
YAY! Preview-porn is best-porn!
So here's a question.
Suppose that this "error" that happens every time nonetheless yields the same original DNA sequence?
dna half-strand ACTG ----> rna TATTCGAGATATAC ---> dna half-strand ACTG
It's been a very, very long time since I took my college biology, so be kind if I'm wrong. My point is that these might not be "errors" at all, just alternate intermediate steps that generate the same ultimate results. The assumption to date seems to be "one, and ONLY one, amino acid on RNA yields one, and ONLY one, corresponding amino acid on DNA". Is that necessarily the case, every time? I'm quite sure about ohhhh, a billion molecular biologists have already thought about this. I just don't know the answer.
Who pays for a separate "open" Internet?
Idealism is great until you realize that someone has to pay for it, and that someone is always, without exception, YOU. And there's that annoying Fourth Amendment, and case law that would get in the way. Remember, if the government can muster the power to seize a major industry over ideological reasons, what defense would smaller companies (including yours, for all values of "you") have with the takeover of the commercial Internet as precedent? Ideologies come and go, but powers of regulation and seizure only linger and grow.
Don't feed the regulation-monster. Don't feed the confiscation-monster. It only makes them stronger.
There are problems that have to be solved, but there are no functional answers which don't involve imposing expenses on other people or allowing the government far, far more powers over Internet content and monitoring than it already has. It's quite possible that, warts and problems and all, what we have right now may be the least of evils. Please keep an open mind to that possibility.
The approach comes dangerously close to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Exactly. You think that's not intentional? This is 100% identical to the Westboro people inciting violence against gays and claiming that they are justified in doing so because "gays are violent". They then picket funerals and say the most hateful things in the hope they will be attacked and thus get everything they want.
The TSA is just hoping someone will put the smackdown on one of their expendable minimum-wage immune-to-prosecution "law enforcement officials" as an excuse to create internal passports a la Apartheid-era South Africa. You just know they're drooling over that prospect.
My own answer is to fly myself. It's a bit more expensive and slower, but no TSA jackboot can tell me I can't do it. The FAA issued my pilot's license, and ONLY the FAA can revoke it. The TSA can go pound sand; I'll just walk to the other side of the airport and go general aviation. Yeah, this isn't a solution open to everyone, but there's no single solution short of the disbandment of the TSA that will be universal. Fly yourself, drive, take a train (until the TSA claims they own trains too), don't travel, sue, vote Libertarian, do SOMETHING to lawfully resist. And let the airlines know. Airlines have more ability to resist the conversion of the TSA into the KGB than an individual, but individuals have power over the airline's most precious resource: income.
Civet Coffee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_Luwak
OK, OK, civets aren't cats...
Yes, but this is overclocking AND overvolting.
It's a good idea for the health of the astronauts, but the cost is prohibitive. Science fiction authors don't have to deal with the budgetary process...
I always wondered why 7of9 had to run around in this tight leotards. Finally, a scientific explanation!
The Borg assimilated spandex early on.
Resistance is futile. You will be asshumiliated. Wait, did I pronounce that correctly...?
As far as I know (this was about 6 months before my time at That Company, and was the subject of hallway lore, which is how I learned of it), it was never proven that buggy code was being deliberately checked in. What WAS certainly going on was that people who were in a position to know about bugs but were bounty-ineligible were sharing that knowledge with people who were bounty-eligible. The bugs were found and fixed, the product wasn't hurt, but the bounty system was thoroughly gamed by people who were excluded and heavily-worked.
Time period: 1993.
A story from the past...
A Former Employer Who Shall Not Be Named had a product about to go golden-master, and wanted every employee in the company to participate in the final round of testing. Then the pointy-haired bosses got an idea! During the last round of testing, they put up a bounty of twenty dollars for each P3, fifty dollars for each P2, and a hundred dollars for each P1 bug found. However, the pointy-hairs decreed QA and Dev were excluded, and in the same breath decreed that QA and Dev would be working overtime.
An underground economy of bugs immediately sprang up. QA guys would find bugs and quietly share them with tech support/sales engineers/etc. Devs would notice (and it was whispered, though never proven, create) bugs and quietly share them with IT. And the proceeds would be split between the ineligible employees and the eligible.
Over fifty thousand in bounties were paid. Then the pointy-hairs got wind of what was going on.
And that was the end of that.
Irrelevant to the story at hand, though, I'm quite sure...
A quick summary of the tech:
Overall, this looks promising, but it's important to remember that the energy used to power a vehicle is only part of its overall energy footprint. Something more complex to manufacture and maintain means more energy consumption at that part of the vehicle's life, though that energy could (potentially) be non-hydrocarbon based. It also must not be more expensive than its conventional counterpart, and this engine looks like it would be quite expensive to manufacture and maintain (the central multi-clutch would be essentially a whole additional transmission to maintain, and the number of rotating/reciprocating parts is much larger than a conventional Otto 4-stroke). It's a serious hurdle. But then, we have the Telsa, which is just as exotic. Let's see one of these in a Lotus Elise frame and go head-to-head :)
It's certainly worth investigating.
There are still so many problems with 3D movies that for me it's not worth paying for.
Not ready yet... neither the technology nor the people using it.
Liberal /conservative = Democrats buying votes with Republican money seized at police gunpoint (taxes)
/liberal = Republicans attempting to repeal the First Amendment to be replaced by Leviticus 18
Conservative
Me /you = idiot
/me = idiot
You
Moderation /slashdot = Insightful if I agree, flamebait if I don't
/moderation = Selection bias case study
Slashdot
Darok /Jalad = Tanagra
You really should learn what "devil's advocate" means. It signifies examining the basis for the beliefs of your opponent and attempting to leave your own biases and prejudgments behind. It does not mean you necessarily agree with the position being examined.
I never said I had even the slightest trust in the US Government, or Feinstein. As a matter of record, I distrust them greatly, Feinstein in particular. I know her track record. I remember her days as mayor of San Francisco. I have observed her senatorial career and voting record continuously (do you do the same for your senators? You should.)
Feinstein is a police-statist. She likes power over ordinary citizen's day-to-day lives, and she likes it a lot. What is even more frightening is that she is a very, very skilled politician. I worried for a long time that she would make a presidential bid; I think she could have won it. And the prospect of her as president is more frightening to me than the prospect of bin Laden with a nuke, as the damage she would do in the long run is in my opinion greater than radioactive glass.
What I said is that I do not have a factual basis to decide upon whether the 80 billion is yielding results.
And you don't, either. Trust or not, the people making those decisions are not something I can control, and given that I don't have the facts, I don't think I should control. Intel isn't a game for amateur-hour. The only difference is that I admit it. Like it or not, she has the position, the power, the knowledge, and the control. Until I get at least one of those, my opinion doesn't count for much.
If you've got a better idea aside from impotent protest-sign-waving, I'd love to hear it, but it had better be grounded in fact not emotion.
And... kindly do not put words in my mouth. I am capable of articulating my own position without your help or guesswork.
Playing devil's advocate here...
We haven't had a major terrorist incident in the US for a while. Why?
B: Nobody wants to harm the US any more
C: The counterterrorism efforts have prevented such an attack
For ANY of the above choices, how do you know? I mean, REALLY know, not just guessing or trying to shout louder than the guy next to you whose opinion is different than yours?
And for future budgets, how do you decide? Reduce the budget until a major attack happens, then go slightly higher next year? Reduce the budget then just absorb major attacks when they happen? Keep it where it's at on the assumption that the spending levels are the reason there's been nothing big happening? Again, upon what do you base your decision?
In all of Slashdot's membership, there are probably a few who have the real, first-hand primary-source knowledge (or are themselves a primary source) to make these decisions based upon fact and clear, rational thought. The rest of us, myself included, are talking out of our asses because we don't know shit. I loathe and despise Feinstein (she's never met a government-power-increasing law she didn't like), but she's in a position to have at least some factual knowledge. Have we overspent? Probably. But I don't want to be the one to decide how much to cut, and what to keep, and I'm not going to pretend I'm qualified to tell the intel community how to do their jobs. (Intel(tm)? That's another matter...)
We leave it to the judgment of history whether Feinstein is qualified to do so. Myself? I DON'T KNOW.