...and I've actually dealt with industrial partnerships with universities. If you think most businesses will fund anything that takes more than three years to pay off (and a lot of research takes a lot longer than that do so so), you're kidding yourself.
Libertarianism and Marxism are like peas in a pod. Great, until reality intrudes.
In response to your specific comment, most breakthroughs in applied technological research come from breakthroughs in basic research that preceded it, often by some decades.
Have a look at this, for instance. Or this. Or this. Or, for that matter, this. Do I have to go on?
No one will refuse tenure, but when asked to choose most people will take a high salary over tenure. Since when is not being able to fire someone who is not doing a good job a reasonable way to run an organization? Its crazy.
You'd be surprised. A full professor is pretty well paid at the moment anyway. A lot of them have explicitly chosen to stay in academia because they prefer the assurance of being essentially unsackable rather than a huge pay packet. If tenure was removed, you'd have to radically increase professor's salaries. Yes, tenure sometimes means unproductive dead wood is kept around, but it also means that academics can't get sacked purely because their research discovers conclusions that the university finds unpalatable.
If you want to remove politics from science then we should eliminate government funding for science. science should be about producing useful research not about whatever the current administration feels like funding this week.
And you think business is capable of funding that kind of thing? For most businesses, if it's not going to produce a marketable product within five years, maybe even three, they're not interested. Business doesn't fund basic research. The few farsighted ones that do are essentially doing so for two reasons - as a bribe to get good researchers to work for them and also do some applied research that will make them money, and philanthropy. Few businesses have ever gotten to directly exploit their basic research (Xerox and AT&T being classic examples of research labs that have made other companies a lot of money). Then there is private philanthropy, but that makes up a miniscule part of research funding and is disproportionately skewed to medical research.
The same goes for schools. Schools should be about what parents want for their kids. Not whatever the current administration wants. That means vouchers and more private schools.
To a certain extent. What if those parents want to teach their kids that their religion demands holy war against infidels?
I can't believe somebody modded this "interesting"...
For those three of you who don't know the Princess Bride, and its genesis, back to front, the Wikipedia explains all. S. Morgenstern was an invention of Goldman.
I agree that on the surface it sounds like a good idea, but I think the problem is that you need a certain radius of the rotation or the rotation rate will be so high as to make the mice permanently seasick from the Coriolis forces. That tends to rule out conducting it within the interior of the ISS.
From the abstract (the full paper doesn't seem to be online) he's assuming the bone loss on Mars will be the same as it is in zero-G. There is, however, AFAIK currently zero experimental data to support that assumption. There are any number of possible models for bone loss on partial gravity. It might be that there's no accelerated bone loss at all once gravity is above some minimum value. It might be a linear relationship. Or something more complex again.
The MarsGravity biosatellite will hopefully provide some answers on this point, assuming it's ever launched. But at the moment you're taking a very glass-half-empty point of view.
Your GNP measurement is exceedingly silly. As other people have pointed out, the GDP of Bangladesh is ten times that of Luxembourg. Having been to Luxembourg and with friends who've lived in Bangladesh, I know which one I'd count as rich...
But back to the point. China is still a poor country. While the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese people have improved greatly over the last couple of decades, there are still large parts of China which are very poor. Nearly one-third of all children in some provinces are malnourished, for instance.
Despite all that, I don't really object to China's space program. It's still a very small part of the government's budget, and it's a hell of a lot more benign way of boosting national pride than invading other countries, the traditional way governments stoke nationalism.
"Hacked up"? Unless they were using Wine as a porting tool, a port of an application like Office is something you can't hack together lightly.
The big problem is that neither of the widget sets Office currently uses are available on Linux; like I said, either you use Wine or you have to rewrite your entire GUI.
I used to think that fair use was the way to go, but Australian IP law academic Kim Weatherall, who is generally one of the good guys on IP law, thinks that a better approach is to explicitly enumerate rights like personal copying in legislation rather than relying on a constitutional device like fair use. You can go digging through her archives, but her view, IIRC, is that fair use is so vaguely defined it makes it very difficult to decide what's legal and what's not.
Of course, fair use would be better than what we have now, when there's hardly an Australian who doesn't violate the law by loading songs into their iPod. Heck, I wonder how many members of Parliament have one...
REALLY cool would be a gun that shoots lead slugs (like safety slugs, lightly jacketed powered lead) and could take bullets out of the air, Patriot Missile style. That's probably more than a few years out though.
Assuming they're using a supersonic round (and as I understand it most snipers do except maybe the Russian VSS Vintorez), you couldn't use sound to detect the bullet like this system is doing because the bullet hits you before the sound does.
I'm not an architecture expert, but it would seem obvious that all the requisite mechanisms to ensure that computations only occur when the inputs are available are a lot more complex in a dataflow machine. Having a central clock to ensure your timing steps are discrete makes ensuring this much easier (trivial with a non-pipelined chip, non-trivial but much easier with a pipelined CPU). It was probably simpler to just crank up the CPU clock, add extra execution units, and add cache.
As chip fabrication processes have changed, presumably these equations have changed. The number of transistors available to manage all this data flow control has radically incrased ; at the same time, clock speeds have increased to the point where the time it takes for the clock signal to propagate across the chip is probably a limiting factor - at 4 GHz, light travels only 7.5 centimetres in the time it takes to complete a clock cycle. Therefore, to make things go faster, we eliminate the bottleneck of the centralised clock and take advantage of the fact we've got all these extra transistors available to sort the data flow constraints out on an as-needed basis.
Hopefully somebody who actually knows what they're talking about can clarify my guess.
While ethanol manufactured from sugar cane is clearly a greenhouse/oil supply win, the potential supply of it from that source is quite limited. Heck, I did some calculations that say that Australia, which exports quite a lot of sugar, could only produce about 5-10% of its transport fuel requirements even if it diverted its entire cane crop to ethanol production. The US, of course, shouldn't be growing sugar at all at current prices; in a rational world its sugar industry would disappear and be replaced by imports from Brazil.
The other trouble with sugar cane is it's a very dirty crop; it requires a lot of pesticide and fertilizer to grow well. In Australia (sorry for the Oz-centric examples but it's what I'm most familiar with) the fertilizer runoff from the cane farms is seriously damaging the Great Barrier Reef.
The reason why only one scientist, Harrison Schmitt, went up on Apollo is simple. The program got killed by Congress (for a saving of only $50 million dollars or so, chickenfeed in the context of the US federal budget even then), stopping the flights that were supposed to have the bloody scientists on them! It's on top of the many other things you can blame Nixon (along with morons in Congress like William Proxmire) for.
From an exploration/scientific perspective, having humans on Mars makes a great deal more difference than having them on the Moon. On the moon, you have near real-time communication with any remotely controlled robot; on Mars you have to wait half an hour for the results to get back. That's the real reason why the Mars rover have to work so slowly; if you even had a team of people in orbit around Mars it would make a huge difference. If you have people actually on the surface, properly equipped with a science lab, the speed and flexibility of having humans on the spot would do more science than a hundred rovers.
As for the scientific aspect, one point that manned Mars exploration advocates have made is that military test-piloting skills will, at most, only be needed for a few minutes, while scientific skills will be needed every day. Therefore, it makes a lot more sense to select scientists and engineers and pick ones who show a reasonable level of piloting skills, rather than pick the hottest flyboy they can find and try to teach him to become top research scientist. But, as I understand it, NASA's already figured that out. The whole insistance on having a crew made up entirely of test pilots ended with Apollo.
As the years pass after they stop tranmitting in 2020 or so, I would imagine that they will fairly rapidly become impossible to locate precisely enough to retrieve. Sure, the trajectory Is known pretty precisely, but over time the confidence intervals for the prediction would become wider and wider to the point where it would be almost impossible to find the thing amongst all the other random bits of Kuiper belt. Given that it's unlikely a recovery mission could be mounted until at least, say, 2050 or so, I wouldn't hold my breath.
Personally, I think Voyager's fate of an eternal (unless it gets too close to the gravitational field of a sun) wander through the galaxy is an entirely fitting one - though let's hope we continue to listen until we can no longer hear them!
One thing that I've wondered about LiftPort is that if material strong enough for a space elevator ever becomes available, billions of dollars will pretty much instantly appear for the development of the rest of the other ancilliary technologies. So what's the point of struggling with low-budget experiments now?
But then, a pretty plausible answer has occurred to me. If you've already been working on this problem for some time, you stand a better chance of sending some of those billions of dollars your way when the stampede happens.
Yes, amongst other things, nanotubes would likely lead to much better body armor. It might also lead to huge weight reductions in aircraft and missile design.
I am one to pooh-pooh ideas when it comes to preventing terrorism, because most of the ideas that get advanced are bad ones that will either be ineffective, have a simple countermeasure, or are worse than the risk of terrorism itself (which should rate right up there with, say, farm machinery accidents, in the scale of concern given the actual risk it poses).
But, back to the point. Doesn't anybody remember the Moscow Theatre hostage crisis, when the Russian government ended up killing 120-odd hostages with their "sleeping gas"? And, guess who would be most likely to die? You guessed it - children and babies. It's likely in your scenario that that baby would die before its neck started to bend.
There's reports that the US government is quietly working on less lethal varieties of knockout gas, but I'd be surprised if they managed to develop something that was effective and safe over a broad enough dosage range to be deployable.
Then plan is that you locate these a few hundred miles offshore on a big floating base. Given the cost of the project, a security garrison including everything up to a wing of STOL Joint Strike Fighters is a relatively minor additional expense.
Oh, and yes, China would probably want one too, and they would get one sooner or later. Given that China already has enough ICBM's to make a mess of America's biggest cities (perhaps a dozen, which is more than enough), them having a space elevator represents no additional military threat. So we may as well sell it to them.
One thing that people haven't quite grasped, however, is what the availability of nanotubes is going to do to mechanical devices *other* than the elevator. A whole generation of military equipment is going to be rendered obsolete instantly...
Your analysis is incorrect. If oil prices remain high, the "alternative fuel" technogies that are known to be capable of producing substantial amounts of fuel (as distinct from biodiesel and ethanol, which can only provide a very, very small fraction of humanity's transportation fuel requirements) are the direct burning of natural gas, the conversion of natural gas to liquid fuel, extracting oil from shale or tar sands, and converting coal into oil. The last two, in particular, will emit far more greenhouse gas in extraction, refining, and processing than petroleum-sourced fuels do.
However, the broader point is that transport fuels are not where we should be looking to make cuts in emissions in the short term. this graph of US emissions shows that CO2 emissions from the transport sector are smaller than the emissions from coal in electricity generation. And the nice thing is that there are some feasible technologies (nuclear power and in the slightly longer term geosequestration) that could actually substitute for coal, whereas hydrogen-powered vehicles (and, more to the point, the infrastructure for supplying the hydrogen at a realistic cost) are a long, long way off.
You tar whole classes of people here. Some of the best scientists/smartest people I know DO IT FOR THE MONEY. They like being RICH.
If it was money they wanted, there's any number of easier ways to get rich (medicine, law, Wall Street - at least one of which the typical top scientist would have the talents for). So even in your case I would argue that there is more going on than just the desire for money.
Personally I always thought scientists did it for the free cocaine and abundant groupies;)
I've heard these stories before, and I remain unconvinced. There's always the suspicion in exercises, particularly ones involving the US, that the participants are deliberately handicapping themselves. For instance, when India and the USAF ran some exercises against each other recently, the USAF F-15's got their backsides kicked. However, there were reports that amongst other restrictions, the simulated AAMRAAMs the US were "using" were artificially restricted to a range of 32 kilometres, when in actual fact the range of real AAMRAAMs is far longer.
It *might* be the case that carrier battle groups are sitting ducks for diesel subs, but I don't think we can say that with any confidence based on generalist media reports on military exercises.
Slashdot Mirror
...and I've actually dealt with industrial partnerships with universities. If you think most businesses will fund anything that takes more than three years to pay off (and a lot of research takes a lot longer than that do so so), you're kidding yourself.
In response to your specific comment, most breakthroughs in applied technological research come from breakthroughs in basic research that preceded it, often by some decades.
Have a look at this, for instance. Or this. Or this. Or, for that matter, this. Do I have to go on?
You'd be surprised. A full professor is pretty well paid at the moment anyway. A lot of them have explicitly chosen to stay in academia because they prefer the assurance of being essentially unsackable rather than a huge pay packet. If tenure was removed, you'd have to radically increase professor's salaries. Yes, tenure sometimes means unproductive dead wood is kept around, but it also means that academics can't get sacked purely because their research discovers conclusions that the university finds unpalatable.
And you think business is capable of funding that kind of thing? For most businesses, if it's not going to produce a marketable product within five years, maybe even three, they're not interested. Business doesn't fund basic research. The few farsighted ones that do are essentially doing so for two reasons - as a bribe to get good researchers to work for them and also do some applied research that will make them money, and philanthropy. Few businesses have ever gotten to directly exploit their basic research (Xerox and AT&T being classic examples of research labs that have made other companies a lot of money). Then there is private philanthropy, but that makes up a miniscule part of research funding and is disproportionately skewed to medical research.
To a certain extent. What if those parents want to teach their kids that their religion demands holy war against infidels?
For those three of you who don't know the Princess Bride, and its genesis, back to front, the Wikipedia explains all. S. Morgenstern was an invention of Goldman.
Well, actually, he only *abridged* the book. The original, unabridged story was by Morgenstern. Didn't you read the forward? ;)
I agree that on the surface it sounds like a good idea, but I think the problem is that you need a certain radius of the rotation or the rotation rate will be so high as to make the mice permanently seasick from the Coriolis forces. That tends to rule out conducting it within the interior of the ISS.
There are any number of possible models for bone loss on partial gravity. It might be that there's no accelerated bone loss at all once gravity is above some minimum value. It might be a linear relationship. Or something more complex again.
The MarsGravity biosatellite will hopefully provide some answers on this point, assuming it's ever launched. But at the moment you're taking a very glass-half-empty point of view.
But back to the point. China is still a poor country. While the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese people have improved greatly over the last couple of decades, there are still large parts of China which are very poor. Nearly one-third of all children in some provinces are malnourished, for instance.
Despite all that, I don't really object to China's space program. It's still a very small part of the government's budget, and it's a hell of a lot more benign way of boosting national pride than invading other countries, the traditional way governments stoke nationalism.
And let them work on exactly what they want, and let them release software when they feel like it instead of when the customer demands it.
Yes, I am aware of that...
The big problem is that neither of the widget sets Office currently uses are available on Linux; like I said, either you use Wine or you have to rewrite your entire GUI.
Of course, fair use would be better than what we have now, when there's hardly an Australian who doesn't violate the law by loading songs into their iPod. Heck, I wonder how many members of Parliament have one...
As chip fabrication processes have changed, presumably these equations have changed. The number of transistors available to manage all this data flow control has radically incrased ; at the same time, clock speeds have increased to the point where the time it takes for the clock signal to propagate across the chip is probably a limiting factor - at 4 GHz, light travels only 7.5 centimetres in the time it takes to complete a clock cycle. Therefore, to make things go faster, we eliminate the bottleneck of the centralised clock and take advantage of the fact we've got all these extra transistors available to sort the data flow constraints out on an as-needed basis.
Hopefully somebody who actually knows what they're talking about can clarify my guess.
The other trouble with sugar cane is it's a very dirty crop; it requires a lot of pesticide and fertilizer to grow well. In Australia (sorry for the Oz-centric examples but it's what I'm most familiar with) the fertilizer runoff from the cane farms is seriously damaging the Great Barrier Reef.
You obviously haven't come across Telstra then.
As for the scientific aspect, one point that manned Mars exploration advocates have made is that military test-piloting skills will, at most, only be needed for a few minutes, while scientific skills will be needed every day. Therefore, it makes a lot more sense to select scientists and engineers and pick ones who show a reasonable level of piloting skills, rather than pick the hottest flyboy they can find and try to teach him to become top research scientist. But, as I understand it, NASA's already figured that out. The whole insistance on having a crew made up entirely of test pilots ended with Apollo.
Personally, I think Voyager's fate of an eternal (unless it gets too close to the gravitational field of a sun) wander through the galaxy is an entirely fitting one - though let's hope we continue to listen until we can no longer hear them!
But then, a pretty plausible answer has occurred to me. If you've already been working on this problem for some time, you stand a better chance of sending some of those billions of dollars your way when the stampede happens.
Yes, amongst other things, nanotubes would likely lead to much better body armor. It might also lead to huge weight reductions in aircraft and missile design.
But, back to the point. Doesn't anybody remember the Moscow Theatre hostage crisis, when the Russian government ended up killing 120-odd hostages with their "sleeping gas"? And, guess who would be most likely to die? You guessed it - children and babies. It's likely in your scenario that that baby would die before its neck started to bend. There's reports that the US government is quietly working on less lethal varieties of knockout gas, but I'd be surprised if they managed to develop something that was effective and safe over a broad enough dosage range to be deployable.
Oh, and yes, China would probably want one too, and they would get one sooner or later. Given that China already has enough ICBM's to make a mess of America's biggest cities (perhaps a dozen, which is more than enough), them having a space elevator represents no additional military threat. So we may as well sell it to them. One thing that people haven't quite grasped, however, is what the availability of nanotubes is going to do to mechanical devices *other* than the elevator. A whole generation of military equipment is going to be rendered obsolete instantly...
However, the broader point is that transport fuels are not where we should be looking to make cuts in emissions in the short term. this graph of US emissions shows that CO2 emissions from the transport sector are smaller than the emissions from coal in electricity generation. And the nice thing is that there are some feasible technologies (nuclear power and in the slightly longer term geosequestration) that could actually substitute for coal, whereas hydrogen-powered vehicles (and, more to the point, the infrastructure for supplying the hydrogen at a realistic cost) are a long, long way off.
If it was money they wanted, there's any number of easier ways to get rich (medicine, law, Wall Street - at least one of which the typical top scientist would have the talents for). So even in your case I would argue that there is more going on than just the desire for money.
Personally I always thought scientists did it for the free cocaine and abundant groupies ;)
It *might* be the case that carrier battle groups are sitting ducks for diesel subs, but I don't think we can say that with any confidence based on generalist media reports on military exercises.