Exactly precise angles is one of the benefits of modern flight computers, which they didn't have for Apollo. I'd certainly expect them to put the crew in a pretty small circle in the ocean if they wanted to, today. Hell, I wouldn't be *that* surprised if they could land them in a big lake... or better yet a harbor or bay. the space shuttle manages to hit a runway, after all. Sure, it has wings and whatnot, but this is 20 years later, and a lake, bay, or harbor could be quite a bit larger.
As someone already pointed out involving the ISS would be a waste.
More to the point though... there are already 3 parts being assembled in space IIRC. The Orion capsule goes up alone, where it attaches to the "earth departure stage," the rocket it needs to leave earth orbit, and the new lunar lander (Altair, named yesterday). But taking airbags up separately.... wouldn't be easy. It would mean a (or an additional?) zero-g EVA to insure each bag attached properly. Not to mention it costs quite a bit of money to take stuff into orbit even separately.
No, the correct answer to this question is to either decide landing by sea is fine (and roll out the NASA naval branch again...) or to build a bigger rocket. Or, hell, use the ares IV or V instead of the ares I. They use the bigger once to launch the earth departure stage, and they could handle a bigger Orion.
Disclaimer: all I know of the Orion system and the return to the moon I learned from wikipedia and the NASA website.
Probably a better idea to permanent-marker the *incorrect* area (or both). Because there's a chance they don't even look at the mirror of where they plan to operate.
1.) When cloning a sheep to give birth to itself, by putting a complete strand of its own DNA in its own egg cells in its own womb, we would have a one in several hundred chance of success. We don't know why, but the rest would be miscarriages, still births, or otherwise non-viable. The cloned animal would die early of old age, nobody knows why.
2.) The Human Genome Project to sequence *ONE* complete set of DNA for a single human took us 13 years and 3 billion dollars. That's comparable to the Apollo project, to sequence *ONE* example of a complex being's DNA.
3.) DNA is relatively unstable. I doesn't survive completely intact for 65 million years no matter how you preserve it.
Mosquitoes trapped in amber wouldn't be great sources of DNA - it would have still decomposed over time. Not in the "something ate it" sense of the word, but in the "radioactive particles" sense of the word. So the DNA would be there, but fragmented. Analyzing one strand of complete, non-fragmented strand of DNA was an Epic undertaking. Doing it with hundreds of strands that were chopped into pieces is probably beyond our capabilities. We could also get this DNA from red blood cells found in a T-rex fossil recently, or just from grinding up the core of bones for *really* tiny bits.
Next, you can't just patch DNA in a dinosaur with DNA from a reptile. It just doesn't work that way, and birds are closer relatives anyway if it *did* work that way.
And then you'd have to somehow put together a DNA molecule. We can't do that yet. I'm totally serious, we can't. We can manipulate pieces maybe 10 or so genes long in existing DNA, but I don't think we could piece billions of genes long strands together from a blueprint even given all the time in the world.
Finally, you'd need a viable dinosaur egg. You can't just pick someone else's egg and stick dino DNA in it, eggs are highly specialized. You might get away with something as similar as elephant-mammoth but there just isn't anything *like* a dinosaur, nothing *near* close enough for a viable egg.
If by some miracle you managed to find full dino DNA, sequence the DNA, assemble the DNA, and put them in an artificial egg that worked... you'd have to do a thousand trials before you could say with any certainty you'd messed something up to make it fail instead of just having bad luck. So don't worry about Jurassic Park happening anytime soon.
A dialog pops up asking "do you want to use a secure connection or not" on your internet stock-buying site.
I would assume that any reasonably secure computer user would.... say yes? I mean, I suppose this approach would work if you assumed *everyone* either always said yes or always said no... but what about people who pay attention to what URL they are at (yes, this is *really* the site I want to buy stocks from) and *read* the prompt (yes, I would like to use a secure connection). You've just root-kitted (well, tried to rook-kit(heh, root-kit as a verb)) your most secure and computer-savy users. They aren't going to like it.
If my trusted e-commerce site decided to give me a root-kit or take control of my keyboard/mouse... well they wouldn't be *my* trusted e-commerce site anymore. Now, if you have a security dialog that anyone actually reading *wouldn't* agree to this approach might work, as the *only* ones who agreed would be the ones who automatically say "yes."
So yes, instead of taking a little loss on people who got tricked into buying someone else a stock you should *obviously* try to trick and "0wn" your clients for agreeing to a reasonable proposition ("would you like to use a secure connection with your trusted e-commerce site"). That is *clearly* the best approach.
'It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it.'
That's because there is no way to stop it. If I can look at a string of numbers, I can write them down somewhere else. If my computer looks at a string of numbers, *it* can write them down really, really fast somewhere else. And so it isn't possible to stop anyone from making a copy of a digital "work."
You can shut down places where transfers occur, you can *try* to scare people into not copying... but you can't *stop* me from writing down all the 1's and 0's that make up your program or data except to stop me from reading it in the first place. And if you don't let anyone read it, it might as well not exist.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence? Worth it. Funding isn't binary (it isn't a choice between SETI and curing cancer, we can fund several things in differing amounts), obviously we will spread funding with some thought to how much funding each thing is worth. And finding extraterrestrial intelligence deserves a bit of money.
Now, pointing a radio telescope at the sky and listening is pretty much pointless. I can't imagine any advanced civilization continuing to broadcast radio waves in a strength we are capable of reading from the nearest star. Due to the inverse square law any really long distance communication will be directed to a pretty narrow angle. Any short distance communication wouldn't waste the power to transmit strongly enough for us to pick it up from across the galaxy. The chance of short-distance extraterrestrial communication happening within a lightyear or two of earth *or* a long-distance communication passing through earth's telescopes while we're listening... is frankly tiny.
So how to look, then? Well that's not my job. Look for stellar scale engineering or something, or wait for *them* to find *us.* And hope that any civilization advanced enough for starflight doesn't care for wars of aggression?
No it isn't. We still have one really major step to take (that we can see from here/now). Molecular level construction. I don't mean nano-tolerance specs for things this could print, but by building things at the molecular level you finally get the ability to do self-replication. Right now the problem is that you need a scale - if you have a stick you use to measure things by, you add to the error of *every* measurement with each generation... which prevents self-replication. If you use a molecule (or some universal constant) as your stick, though, you lose this problem... stack a certain number of molecules into a stick of a useful size, or use the speed of light (in some medium) to measure distance for your "unit length" as part of the replication process and you'll have the same error in every generation. We already do this for manual manufacture... just, because we don't try to make self-replicating fabricators, we only have to measure (using the standard of the speed of light in a vacuum) once every few years to replace the "standard" used in manufacturing rulers.
Molecular level construction could also be useful for, obviously, building really small things. Or for building really big things semi-automatically.
Once you can spec the atomic placement in manufacture.... *then* there will be no need for brains in manufacturing. That we can understand today. Who knows, maybe there is something useful beyond that level that we just don't understand yet. But for now this is the one major step left in the ability to manufacture things.
"Paul Boutin finds Google's online presentation tool Preso more like a PowerPoint commercial [CC] -- a half-baked app"
You mean... one of google's beta applications feels... like it should still be in beta! That's astounding. If you think google isn't going to fix retardedly obvious things like "you can't work on documents without an active broadband connection" then you need to see a doctor about your apple fanboy-itis.
Once again... google's month-old beta application doesn't "kill" a commercial product that microsoft has been perfecting for 20 years? How is this at all a surprise, or *at all* indicative of what the field will look like in even one year?
I'm not a evolution denier, but it bothers the hell out of me when I see people trying to debate the flat earthers by taking a position that a theory is considered a law, when it is not.
I don't see where I said it was a law. That's where the qualifier "as far as we can tell" comes in. There is no such thing as a scientific law. But as far as theories go evolution is among the most well supported. Maybe you weren't aware that there are no scientific "laws" anymore. You can have a hypothesis, or a theory (a hypothesis that's been around a while, hasn't been falsified, and is supported by evidence). For example, the theory of universal gravitation. Or the theory of evolution. Of the two, we can explain how one might happen. The other we can only observe and measure the results, but have to make guesses as to the "how." Both have mountains of evidence, and are supported by pretty much everything we see (the other things don't support the theory, but because they aren't relevant to it, not because they contradict the theory).
Guess which is which? Hint: we haven't ever seen the carrier particle for gravity. We also make wild-ass guesses as to why galaxies rotate faster then gravity predicts they should. Basically either we totally misunderstand gravity in large systems or we misunderstand the structure of galaxies by about 90%. And so, while scientists are leaning toward "90% of matter and energy is invisible" over "we don't understand gravity" (and there *is* some evidence for dark matter, just not hard evidence) evolution is the better supported of the two theories.
Just shut up already. You ain't helping.
Your lack of "preview" doesn't help either, if we're throwing random insults around.
He said those things are true... because they are, as far as we can tell. Nobody is going to debate "is water wet?" or "does gravity tend to cause things to fall?" because these are as close to scientific facts as we can get. Evolution is arguably *more* well supported then gravity. Global warming is trivially verified by a "thermometer." (Ok, technically thousands of weather stations across the world for years, but you get the point. It is a fact that the earth is on average warmer then it was when we started measuring).
What is there to debate? How about the things that actually matter in a presidential candidate as related to science. Like... "what do you plan to *do* about global warming" or "what are you going to do about the dropping number of native college graduates in math and science?" or "do you plan on increasing scientific funding?"
I think it would also be interesting to see the answer to "Is the earth about 10 thousand years old, or is it several billion years old?" over the field of candidates. But I'm not sure that would fit into a scientific debate, being one of those "already settled" questions. Still, it might be nice to see who has 2 brain cells to rub together.
Interesting theory, just so long as you realize that this still leaves *you* in deep shit, since you don't have the "gills" mutation you theorize some people might get. At *best* your kids are the first to develop it. If they're even allergic.
And for the record I'm allergic to penicillin as well. And it sucks.
You're right. "I don't believe there is a god in the universe" isn't the same as "there is no god." One is a statement of opinion, the other is a universal fact with no qualifications.
But try this: close your eyes and say "I am in the year 2006." You didn't say "I think I'm in 2006," this is something completely different. Now, check your computer's clock. Is it 2006? No, it isn't. Because just saying something is true doesn't make it true. So what would it mean if someone walked up to you and said "this is the year 2006?" It would mean that this one particular person *thought* it was 2006. Not that they weren't sure, they were pretty sure. You should probably direct them to a calendar, or some other proof of the date. But it didn't make it true. Now someone walks up to you and says "there is no god." Obviously this statement of fact doesn't change the universe. Either there is a god or there isn't, one guy saying there isn't doesn't change that.
So what *does* "there is no god" mean, then, when someone says it? Why, it means they're pretty fucking sure there is no god. Or, in other words, "There is no solid evidence there is a god, thus by applying the commonly accepted scientific methodologies, we can say there is no god until proven otherwise."
The two statements are technically different, but functionally the same. I am not an agnostic, I don't wonder if there is a god or not. I've considered the question and come to the conclusion that there is no god. I am an atheist. I am, as a scientifically minded person, willing to change my working hypothesis to reflect new evidence, if such evidence surfaces, but it never has and it never will. Do I know that as a universal truth? Can I ever really be certain? Of course not. But just as I'm sure there is no flying spaggetti monster, and no invisible pink unicorn, and that zeus doesn't rule the gods from mount olympus, and that there is no Santa, and no loch ness monster, I'm sure there is no god. I know this as much as a thing can be known.
I'm afraid it might take a bit more then that. Feasibility speaking landing a probe on europa isn't *that* difficult. Nothing to scoff at, but certainly within our limits. Automated drilling through the ice, though? And this is more then a few meters to find liquid water. How exactly do we *do* that? Then the sub. How do you power it? Not solar. Nuclear would make a big stink with environmentalists (bringing nuclear waste on your search for life!?) if you could even *get* a nuclear powered up that far (reactors aren't small...). No air, so that pretty much leaves batteries. How long can we have a sub explore with batteries? A day or two at most?
No, there are problems that need to be solved before we can explore europa for life. And one of those problems is solved by landing on it and just looking at the surface a bit. Is it stable? Could something sit on its surface for a few months without trouble? How hard is it?
But the search for life on europa isn't something to plan for "this decade."
For Science! No, but really. The moon is a great place for a few things - like a telescope. You can make a huge one that is always hidden from earth's interference. Also, if you have a place to stay anyway, long-term low gravity experiments. We know you get screwed up in microgravity, we know you do fine in full gravity. But what about a little gravity? We don't really know.
Also, geology. Study the moon itself. In preparation, perhaps, for later mining.
Lets be perfectly honest, the problem isn't our technology. The problem is budget and risks. The first time we went to the moon we were in a race... there are people who claim that russia killed itself trying to keep up, and that without the race we might still be in the cold war. This time, we don't have nearly the same budget, and a 1-2% risk is *far* too much. Last time we wanted to land on the surface and come back, at any cost. This time we want to not only land there but the next morning start building a long-term habitable base, and we want to do it at minimal material and zero human cost. This time we don't *have* old V-2 rockets to start from and much more importantly we don't have any place designed to *make* V-2 rockets that we can easily convert to making boosters for a moon-bound manned mission.
We're trying to do it bigger, better, safer, cheaper, all that and we want to do more once we're there then take some pictures and pick up some rocks. This time we want to start building, and make sure we're in a good place to eventually start mining helium.
Now, if someone donated a billion dollars NASA could pull out old blueprints, buy an hundred acres in texas, hire a few thousand immigrants and build the facilities to build a single moon-capable replica of the Apollo shuttle in the next year or two. But that isn't what we want, and we'd have a few percent chance of a failure worse then Apollo 13.
Obviously he didn't mean that Dawkins has made any actual progress... how could he have made all the progress in the last 1000 years? Dawkins is, however, indicative of the fact that we *have* made progress - he would have been dead a hundred times over even 100 years ago, for all he's said. The fact that he isn't is proof that logic may finally be getting a foothold on baseless faith - an important prerequisite for progress.
That's great and all but probably not worth spending much time on. I mean, how often do you use your computer without an internet connection these days? When you're on a plane, maybe? Maybe I'm just terribly different, living on a college campus, but I never take out my laptop in a place where there isn't a wireless connection. I mean, if you're stuck in an area without broadband obviously you aren't connected 24/7 but we're supposed to be making it so that nobody is stuck in that situation.
I'm just saying that the return on technology that is only a benefit if you use the program while offline is only going to drop in the future, until everyone is always connected when using a computer.
It's an issue because it took me two hours on google and various forums to find out how to disable the touchpad - which I had to do because it was so sensitive that I couldn't type anything without accidentally selecting it all and the deleting it next time I hit a key. "Disable touchpad while typing" would have been easier to find, but that isn't what I wanted. Hopefully with the graphical interface for X in Gutsy I can find a way to disable the touchpad much easier.
To be perfectly honest the main thing I need to kick windows is to get ventrilo working either on a native linux client ("in development" since forever) or through wine (binds don't work when ventrilo isn't the active window, and I can't use mouse buttons 4-5 as a bind even if I remap it to a keyboard key). But I might have given up for another year or two if I hadn't figured out how to turn off the touchpad within a few more minutes.
Homeopathy is the thought that the more diluted a substance is in water, the more effective it is. That's why a homeopathic "doctor" will give you a bottle of pure distilled water. At some point in the past, the water in that bottle was part of a *much* larger batch of distilled water, and a single molecule of medicine was added. (Actually, most homeopathic medicine claims an impossible level of dilution... a level that would take every molecule in the universe and more to dilute a single molecule of medicine).
Now, you've claimed that this may be true science that "real science" missed for one reason or another and is now ignoring. So it is your time to shine, produce the repeatable experiment to prove or disprove homeopathy. Here's what we do... we test two substances at ridiculous extremes of dilution. Get some 10 molar hydrochloric acid. Put 500 mL in a beaker. Now fill a bathtub with water, and put a single drop of.01 molar hydrochloric acid in it. CAREFULLY get 500 mL of it into another beaker. Now, stick your hand in the very dilute beaker (the one you filled from a tub). You'll probably feel a slight tingling sensation. Now, stick your hand in the other beaker. If homeopathy is true, it should be *far* less strong and not even leave a tingling. If homeopathy is bullshit, then your hand will melt off. Now, once you get back from the hospital and can come back to this discussion, let's analyze the results.
Well, your hand burned off in the strong acid, but not in the dilute. Hopefully you didn't actually do that, as the 10 molar bottle was probably covered in warnings. I doubt even a homeopathic doctor would try that experiment, even after seeing that the really dilute solution didn't do anything to *my* hand. Now, *real* scientists have diluted pretty much everything at some point for hundreds of years. This includes medicines. They would have noticed if diluting something had the opposite of the expected result.
Now, if you actually did the experiment... you may wonder about the tingling you probably felt when you touched the.000001 molar solution. You knew there was acid in there, and perhaps you even halfway believed that this dilution made it stronger. What you felt was the placebo effect that homeopathy thrives on.
(BTW, it would be seriously awesome if someone brought some 10 molar and.000000001 molar acid and dared a homeopathic "doctor" to put his money where his mouth is. Be sure to record the results.)
Homeopathy is 100% BULLSHIT as every controlled double-blind study with a significant sample-size shows time and time again. The fact that some countries (I'm looking at you, UK!) publicly fund homeopathic hospitals is one of the worse crimes being perpetrated today. I certainly hope those responsible are criminally persecuted when someone dies because their homeopathic cure doesn't work.
So basically "moon colony" "mars colony" "manned exploration of titan" "space elevators" "many private space stations" and soon "robot -> another solar system."
A moon "colony" of 2000 scientists is probably the most likely prediction. I mean, we're supposed to start building a permanent moon base in 2020 and I could certainly see an antartica type multinational presence on that scale within 50 years. It'll be useful for telescope maintenance and probably other things. Maybe we'll have H-3 mining on the moon by then as well, though that is somewhat less predictable.
A mars colony I don't see happening in 50 years. I can see us re-building the moon base on mars, but not having it manned constantly. There just isn't a good reason to be there every day unless a terraforming process is underway. And since we haven't even been able to do a bio-dome on earth, yet, I'm a little bit iffy about having started preparations (even) for the complete teraforming of mars, within 50 years.
Manned exploration of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn could happen in the next 50 years, easily. But then... well certain people thought it would happen by 2001...
Space elevators. A most interesting concept. We seem to be relatively close to the material strength we'd need. Other challenges I can't see lasting 20 years if people are seriously interested. All the same, I give us a 50/50 chance of *ever* building a space elevator. (A sky hook seems a near certainty, even if just for the novelty, but not a space elevator for primary lifting). I'd say there's an even chance of finding a better way to lift sensitive cargo off the earth, and certainly a big slingshot makes more sense for cargo that can take the acceleration.
The vision of privately operated space stations drifting around the earth is nice. I can see a really expensive hotel happening in space in the next 50 years. Perhaps even with artificial gravity (via spinning, not some sci-fi magic) on part of it. I can also see a cluster of private science space stations. I don't really see more then a few private space stations for anything other then private science, though, in the foreseeable future.
As for sending a robot to another solar system in 50 years.... Well, hopefully we'll be *able* to. The problem is speed. Even with optimistic speeds it would probably take another hundred years to get any data back from the mission, even just to know if it worked. And then in the next hundred years someone could find a way to go faster then light and the entire mission would be pointless. (And yes, it is technically possible. Acceleration from less then light speed to greater then light speed takes infinite energy, but if you find a way to skip that acceleration you're good to go. I wouldn't go so far as to say it can't happen in the next 150 years.)
Fine, you have god creating the universe. So now god is your uncaused cause. What's that you say? Your god exists outside space and time so that question is meaningless? Fine then - my single infinitely dense point exists outside space and time. Now, which should I (given no evidence) believe exists outside space and time? A single point or an entire all-powerful being? That my friend is what happens when you have double standards... you forget that if I can't break a rule you can't either. And don't go claiming "god is special" or something because that's the same as claiming the laws of physics change as you go backward.
Conscious? Well, what happens to a species that goes around destroying all other examples of itself? Why, it loses diversity mister AC! And then what happens if something goes wrong? Why, that species goes and dies out, doesn't it! And so, for long term protection of similar genes, we tend to protect things that are similar to ourselves. As we have advanced as a species we have come to identify non-human animals as close to ourself, and instantly began to emphasize with them as per the above trend. And now we find ourselves aware that destroying things (even if we see them as competition) will end in a bad way... so we have more environmental awareness.
"So what is this thing? I say, it's God. Now I fervently dispute that acknowledging a God should stop scientific discovery. I feel, like many early scientists, that scientific exploration is a form of pulling back the curtain of the mind of God and should absolutely be encouraged."
Oh, so we should keep looking into the cause of the universe when we know god caused it? That seems kinda contradictory. Either he didn't cause it or we should stop looking. Now take that back a few tens of hundreds of years... the sun rises every day. God did it, no need to study it. Hense the dark ages.
Now grow some balls and question your religious mythos, and that goes for everyone.
While running it doesn't do much... but how much power does your car use while it sits in the parking lot outside your office building for 8 hours a day? I could see you getting enough power to go a few miles without gas, maybe double your MPG on the way home.
So you aren't going to get a solar cell powered car any time soon, but it might be decent for a commute at this point. As long as you can get past the startup cost, of course.
So higher education and private schools don't count? Because I'm pretty sure that the level of enlightenment you're talking about requires higher education. If you aren't counting higher education, then divide by the number of people in k-12 instead of the full population since you're not counting educational spending on anyone else. Also, there are over 300 million people in the US last time I checked. Though I don't know when that budget is from and don't care to read the PDF.
In the end I pretty much agree that people (in general, not just US) aren't quite smart enough to elect the best candidate by a long shot... they elect either on party lines (80% of people who vote) or based on who has the most money (on advertising.. the 20% or so "swing" vote). The problem I have with this idea is that you propose that the current system is better then letting people directly elect their officials.
It isn't. It might be if they really were doing the entire point of the electoral college... electing the people who cast the *real* votes. But these people long ago entered pacts to all vote for the candidate who "won" the most districts in their state... complete with gerrymandering by whoever won the *last* election. Instead of "the uneducated masses elect their leader" you get "the uneducated masses in 3 counties in ohio elect the country's leader" as an end result. Simply put, the current system is *more* retarded then democracy.
My point is that there isn't any reason why you can't increase educational spending and in the mean time fix the election system to actually be fair, and eliminate the need for contrived "vote swapping" schemes. Which is why I support a popular vote/Instant Run-off on a national holiday. As an added bonus you can even cast a vote for a third party candidate without throwing away your vote!
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Exactly precise angles is one of the benefits of modern flight computers, which they didn't have for Apollo. I'd certainly expect them to put the crew in a pretty small circle in the ocean if they wanted to, today. Hell, I wouldn't be *that* surprised if they could land them in a big lake... or better yet a harbor or bay. the space shuttle manages to hit a runway, after all. Sure, it has wings and whatnot, but this is 20 years later, and a lake, bay, or harbor could be quite a bit larger.
As someone already pointed out involving the ISS would be a waste.
More to the point though... there are already 3 parts being assembled in space IIRC. The Orion capsule goes up alone, where it attaches to the "earth departure stage," the rocket it needs to leave earth orbit, and the new lunar lander (Altair, named yesterday). But taking airbags up separately.... wouldn't be easy. It would mean a (or an additional?) zero-g EVA to insure each bag attached properly. Not to mention it costs quite a bit of money to take stuff into orbit even separately.
No, the correct answer to this question is to either decide landing by sea is fine (and roll out the NASA naval branch again...) or to build a bigger rocket. Or, hell, use the ares IV or V instead of the ares I. They use the bigger once to launch the earth departure stage, and they could handle a bigger Orion.
Disclaimer: all I know of the Orion system and the return to the moon I learned from wikipedia and the NASA website.
Probably a better idea to permanent-marker the *incorrect* area (or both). Because there's a chance they don't even look at the mirror of where they plan to operate.
Some facts for you:
1.) When cloning a sheep to give birth to itself, by putting a complete strand of its own DNA in its own egg cells in its own womb, we would have a one in several hundred chance of success. We don't know why, but the rest would be miscarriages, still births, or otherwise non-viable. The cloned animal would die early of old age, nobody knows why.
2.) The Human Genome Project to sequence *ONE* complete set of DNA for a single human took us 13 years and 3 billion dollars. That's comparable to the Apollo project, to sequence *ONE* example of a complex being's DNA.
3.) DNA is relatively unstable. I doesn't survive completely intact for 65 million years no matter how you preserve it.
Mosquitoes trapped in amber wouldn't be great sources of DNA - it would have still decomposed over time. Not in the "something ate it" sense of the word, but in the "radioactive particles" sense of the word. So the DNA would be there, but fragmented. Analyzing one strand of complete, non-fragmented strand of DNA was an Epic undertaking. Doing it with hundreds of strands that were chopped into pieces is probably beyond our capabilities. We could also get this DNA from red blood cells found in a T-rex fossil recently, or just from grinding up the core of bones for *really* tiny bits.
Next, you can't just patch DNA in a dinosaur with DNA from a reptile. It just doesn't work that way, and birds are closer relatives anyway if it *did* work that way.
And then you'd have to somehow put together a DNA molecule. We can't do that yet. I'm totally serious, we can't. We can manipulate pieces maybe 10 or so genes long in existing DNA, but I don't think we could piece billions of genes long strands together from a blueprint even given all the time in the world.
Finally, you'd need a viable dinosaur egg. You can't just pick someone else's egg and stick dino DNA in it, eggs are highly specialized. You might get away with something as similar as elephant-mammoth but there just isn't anything *like* a dinosaur, nothing *near* close enough for a viable egg.
If by some miracle you managed to find full dino DNA, sequence the DNA, assemble the DNA, and put them in an artificial egg that worked... you'd have to do a thousand trials before you could say with any certainty you'd messed something up to make it fail instead of just having bad luck. So don't worry about Jurassic Park happening anytime soon.
A dialog pops up asking "do you want to use a secure connection or not" on your internet stock-buying site.
I would assume that any reasonably secure computer user would.... say yes? I mean, I suppose this approach would work if you assumed *everyone* either always said yes or always said no... but what about people who pay attention to what URL they are at (yes, this is *really* the site I want to buy stocks from) and *read* the prompt (yes, I would like to use a secure connection). You've just root-kitted (well, tried to rook-kit(heh, root-kit as a verb)) your most secure and computer-savy users. They aren't going to like it.
If my trusted e-commerce site decided to give me a root-kit or take control of my keyboard/mouse... well they wouldn't be *my* trusted e-commerce site anymore. Now, if you have a security dialog that anyone actually reading *wouldn't* agree to this approach might work, as the *only* ones who agreed would be the ones who automatically say "yes."
So yes, instead of taking a little loss on people who got tricked into buying someone else a stock you should *obviously* try to trick and "0wn" your clients for agreeing to a reasonable proposition ("would you like to use a secure connection with your trusted e-commerce site"). That is *clearly* the best approach.
'It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it.'
That's because there is no way to stop it. If I can look at a string of numbers, I can write them down somewhere else. If my computer looks at a string of numbers, *it* can write them down really, really fast somewhere else. And so it isn't possible to stop anyone from making a copy of a digital "work."
You can shut down places where transfers occur, you can *try* to scare people into not copying... but you can't *stop* me from writing down all the 1's and 0's that make up your program or data except to stop me from reading it in the first place. And if you don't let anyone read it, it might as well not exist.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence? Worth it. Funding isn't binary (it isn't a choice between SETI and curing cancer, we can fund several things in differing amounts), obviously we will spread funding with some thought to how much funding each thing is worth. And finding extraterrestrial intelligence deserves a bit of money.
Now, pointing a radio telescope at the sky and listening is pretty much pointless. I can't imagine any advanced civilization continuing to broadcast radio waves in a strength we are capable of reading from the nearest star. Due to the inverse square law any really long distance communication will be directed to a pretty narrow angle. Any short distance communication wouldn't waste the power to transmit strongly enough for us to pick it up from across the galaxy. The chance of short-distance extraterrestrial communication happening within a lightyear or two of earth *or* a long-distance communication passing through earth's telescopes while we're listening... is frankly tiny.
So how to look, then? Well that's not my job. Look for stellar scale engineering or something, or wait for *them* to find *us.* And hope that any civilization advanced enough for starflight doesn't care for wars of aggression?
They'll send data to communications satellites which will use radio to send it back to earth?
No it isn't. We still have one really major step to take (that we can see from here/now). Molecular level construction. I don't mean nano-tolerance specs for things this could print, but by building things at the molecular level you finally get the ability to do self-replication. Right now the problem is that you need a scale - if you have a stick you use to measure things by, you add to the error of *every* measurement with each generation... which prevents self-replication. If you use a molecule (or some universal constant) as your stick, though, you lose this problem... stack a certain number of molecules into a stick of a useful size, or use the speed of light (in some medium) to measure distance for your "unit length" as part of the replication process and you'll have the same error in every generation. We already do this for manual manufacture... just, because we don't try to make self-replicating fabricators, we only have to measure (using the standard of the speed of light in a vacuum) once every few years to replace the "standard" used in manufacturing rulers.
Molecular level construction could also be useful for, obviously, building really small things. Or for building really big things semi-automatically.
Once you can spec the atomic placement in manufacture.... *then* there will be no need for brains in manufacturing. That we can understand today. Who knows, maybe there is something useful beyond that level that we just don't understand yet. But for now this is the one major step left in the ability to manufacture things.
"Paul Boutin finds Google's online presentation tool Preso more like a PowerPoint commercial [CC] -- a half-baked app"
You mean... one of google's beta applications feels... like it should still be in beta! That's astounding. If you think google isn't going to fix retardedly obvious things like "you can't work on documents without an active broadband connection" then you need to see a doctor about your apple fanboy-itis.
Once again... google's month-old beta application doesn't "kill" a commercial product that microsoft has been perfecting for 20 years? How is this at all a surprise, or *at all* indicative of what the field will look like in even one year?
Guess which is which? Hint: we haven't ever seen the carrier particle for gravity. We also make wild-ass guesses as to why galaxies rotate faster then gravity predicts they should. Basically either we totally misunderstand gravity in large systems or we misunderstand the structure of galaxies by about 90%. And so, while scientists are leaning toward "90% of matter and energy is invisible" over "we don't understand gravity" (and there *is* some evidence for dark matter, just not hard evidence) evolution is the better supported of the two theories.
Your lack of "preview" doesn't help either, if we're throwing random insults around.
He said those things are true... because they are, as far as we can tell. Nobody is going to debate "is water wet?" or "does gravity tend to cause things to fall?" because these are as close to scientific facts as we can get. Evolution is arguably *more* well supported then gravity. Global warming is trivially verified by a "thermometer." (Ok, technically thousands of weather stations across the world for years, but you get the point. It is a fact that the earth is on average warmer then it was when we started measuring).
What is there to debate? How about the things that actually matter in a presidential candidate as related to science. Like... "what do you plan to *do* about global warming" or "what are you going to do about the dropping number of native college graduates in math and science?" or "do you plan on increasing scientific funding?"
I think it would also be interesting to see the answer to "Is the earth about 10 thousand years old, or is it several billion years old?" over the field of candidates. But I'm not sure that would fit into a scientific debate, being one of those "already settled" questions. Still, it might be nice to see who has 2 brain cells to rub together.
Interesting theory, just so long as you realize that this still leaves *you* in deep shit, since you don't have the "gills" mutation you theorize some people might get. At *best* your kids are the first to develop it. If they're even allergic.
And for the record I'm allergic to penicillin as well. And it sucks.
You're right. "I don't believe there is a god in the universe" isn't the same as "there is no god." One is a statement of opinion, the other is a universal fact with no qualifications.
But try this: close your eyes and say "I am in the year 2006." You didn't say "I think I'm in 2006," this is something completely different. Now, check your computer's clock. Is it 2006? No, it isn't. Because just saying something is true doesn't make it true. So what would it mean if someone walked up to you and said "this is the year 2006?" It would mean that this one particular person *thought* it was 2006. Not that they weren't sure, they were pretty sure. You should probably direct them to a calendar, or some other proof of the date. But it didn't make it true. Now someone walks up to you and says "there is no god." Obviously this statement of fact doesn't change the universe. Either there is a god or there isn't, one guy saying there isn't doesn't change that.
So what *does* "there is no god" mean, then, when someone says it? Why, it means they're pretty fucking sure there is no god. Or, in other words, "There is no solid evidence there is a god, thus by applying the commonly accepted scientific methodologies, we can say there is no god until proven otherwise."
The two statements are technically different, but functionally the same. I am not an agnostic, I don't wonder if there is a god or not. I've considered the question and come to the conclusion that there is no god. I am an atheist. I am, as a scientifically minded person, willing to change my working hypothesis to reflect new evidence, if such evidence surfaces, but it never has and it never will. Do I know that as a universal truth? Can I ever really be certain? Of course not. But just as I'm sure there is no flying spaggetti monster, and no invisible pink unicorn, and that zeus doesn't rule the gods from mount olympus, and that there is no Santa, and no loch ness monster, I'm sure there is no god. I know this as much as a thing can be known.
I'm afraid it might take a bit more then that. Feasibility speaking landing a probe on europa isn't *that* difficult. Nothing to scoff at, but certainly within our limits. Automated drilling through the ice, though? And this is more then a few meters to find liquid water. How exactly do we *do* that? Then the sub. How do you power it? Not solar. Nuclear would make a big stink with environmentalists (bringing nuclear waste on your search for life!?) if you could even *get* a nuclear powered up that far (reactors aren't small...). No air, so that pretty much leaves batteries. How long can we have a sub explore with batteries? A day or two at most?
No, there are problems that need to be solved before we can explore europa for life. And one of those problems is solved by landing on it and just looking at the surface a bit. Is it stable? Could something sit on its surface for a few months without trouble? How hard is it?
But the search for life on europa isn't something to plan for "this decade."
For Science! No, but really. The moon is a great place for a few things - like a telescope. You can make a huge one that is always hidden from earth's interference. Also, if you have a place to stay anyway, long-term low gravity experiments. We know you get screwed up in microgravity, we know you do fine in full gravity. But what about a little gravity? We don't really know.
Also, geology. Study the moon itself. In preparation, perhaps, for later mining.
Also, so that you/your country wins.
Lets be perfectly honest, the problem isn't our technology. The problem is budget and risks. The first time we went to the moon we were in a race... there are people who claim that russia killed itself trying to keep up, and that without the race we might still be in the cold war. This time, we don't have nearly the same budget, and a 1-2% risk is *far* too much. Last time we wanted to land on the surface and come back, at any cost. This time we want to not only land there but the next morning start building a long-term habitable base, and we want to do it at minimal material and zero human cost. This time we don't *have* old V-2 rockets to start from and much more importantly we don't have any place designed to *make* V-2 rockets that we can easily convert to making boosters for a moon-bound manned mission.
We're trying to do it bigger, better, safer, cheaper, all that and we want to do more once we're there then take some pictures and pick up some rocks. This time we want to start building, and make sure we're in a good place to eventually start mining helium.
Now, if someone donated a billion dollars NASA could pull out old blueprints, buy an hundred acres in texas, hire a few thousand immigrants and build the facilities to build a single moon-capable replica of the Apollo shuttle in the next year or two. But that isn't what we want, and we'd have a few percent chance of a failure worse then Apollo 13.
Obviously he didn't mean that Dawkins has made any actual progress... how could he have made all the progress in the last 1000 years? Dawkins is, however, indicative of the fact that we *have* made progress - he would have been dead a hundred times over even 100 years ago, for all he's said. The fact that he isn't is proof that logic may finally be getting a foothold on baseless faith - an important prerequisite for progress.
That's great and all but probably not worth spending much time on. I mean, how often do you use your computer without an internet connection these days? When you're on a plane, maybe? Maybe I'm just terribly different, living on a college campus, but I never take out my laptop in a place where there isn't a wireless connection. I mean, if you're stuck in an area without broadband obviously you aren't connected 24/7 but we're supposed to be making it so that nobody is stuck in that situation.
I'm just saying that the return on technology that is only a benefit if you use the program while offline is only going to drop in the future, until everyone is always connected when using a computer.
It's an issue because it took me two hours on google and various forums to find out how to disable the touchpad - which I had to do because it was so sensitive that I couldn't type anything without accidentally selecting it all and the deleting it next time I hit a key. "Disable touchpad while typing" would have been easier to find, but that isn't what I wanted. Hopefully with the graphical interface for X in Gutsy I can find a way to disable the touchpad much easier.
To be perfectly honest the main thing I need to kick windows is to get ventrilo working either on a native linux client ("in development" since forever) or through wine (binds don't work when ventrilo isn't the active window, and I can't use mouse buttons 4-5 as a bind even if I remap it to a keyboard key). But I might have given up for another year or two if I hadn't figured out how to turn off the touchpad within a few more minutes.
Homeopathy is the thought that the more diluted a substance is in water, the more effective it is. That's why a homeopathic "doctor" will give you a bottle of pure distilled water. At some point in the past, the water in that bottle was part of a *much* larger batch of distilled water, and a single molecule of medicine was added. (Actually, most homeopathic medicine claims an impossible level of dilution... a level that would take every molecule in the universe and more to dilute a single molecule of medicine).
.01 molar hydrochloric acid in it. CAREFULLY get 500 mL of it into another beaker. Now, stick your hand in the very dilute beaker (the one you filled from a tub). You'll probably feel a slight tingling sensation. Now, stick your hand in the other beaker. If homeopathy is true, it should be *far* less strong and not even leave a tingling. If homeopathy is bullshit, then your hand will melt off. Now, once you get back from the hospital and can come back to this discussion, let's analyze the results.
.000001 molar solution. You knew there was acid in there, and perhaps you even halfway believed that this dilution made it stronger. What you felt was the placebo effect that homeopathy thrives on.
.000000001 molar acid and dared a homeopathic "doctor" to put his money where his mouth is. Be sure to record the results.)
Now, you've claimed that this may be true science that "real science" missed for one reason or another and is now ignoring. So it is your time to shine, produce the repeatable experiment to prove or disprove homeopathy. Here's what we do... we test two substances at ridiculous extremes of dilution. Get some 10 molar hydrochloric acid. Put 500 mL in a beaker. Now fill a bathtub with water, and put a single drop of
Well, your hand burned off in the strong acid, but not in the dilute. Hopefully you didn't actually do that, as the 10 molar bottle was probably covered in warnings. I doubt even a homeopathic doctor would try that experiment, even after seeing that the really dilute solution didn't do anything to *my* hand. Now, *real* scientists have diluted pretty much everything at some point for hundreds of years. This includes medicines. They would have noticed if diluting something had the opposite of the expected result.
Now, if you actually did the experiment... you may wonder about the tingling you probably felt when you touched the
(BTW, it would be seriously awesome if someone brought some 10 molar and
Homeopathy is 100% BULLSHIT as every controlled double-blind study with a significant sample-size shows time and time again. The fact that some countries (I'm looking at you, UK!) publicly fund homeopathic hospitals is one of the worse crimes being perpetrated today. I certainly hope those responsible are criminally persecuted when someone dies because their homeopathic cure doesn't work.
So basically "moon colony" "mars colony" "manned exploration of titan" "space elevators" "many private space stations" and soon "robot -> another solar system."
A moon "colony" of 2000 scientists is probably the most likely prediction. I mean, we're supposed to start building a permanent moon base in 2020 and I could certainly see an antartica type multinational presence on that scale within 50 years. It'll be useful for telescope maintenance and probably other things. Maybe we'll have H-3 mining on the moon by then as well, though that is somewhat less predictable.
A mars colony I don't see happening in 50 years. I can see us re-building the moon base on mars, but not having it manned constantly. There just isn't a good reason to be there every day unless a terraforming process is underway. And since we haven't even been able to do a bio-dome on earth, yet, I'm a little bit iffy about having started preparations (even) for the complete teraforming of mars, within 50 years.
Manned exploration of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn could happen in the next 50 years, easily. But then... well certain people thought it would happen by 2001...
Space elevators. A most interesting concept. We seem to be relatively close to the material strength we'd need. Other challenges I can't see lasting 20 years if people are seriously interested. All the same, I give us a 50/50 chance of *ever* building a space elevator. (A sky hook seems a near certainty, even if just for the novelty, but not a space elevator for primary lifting). I'd say there's an even chance of finding a better way to lift sensitive cargo off the earth, and certainly a big slingshot makes more sense for cargo that can take the acceleration.
The vision of privately operated space stations drifting around the earth is nice. I can see a really expensive hotel happening in space in the next 50 years. Perhaps even with artificial gravity (via spinning, not some sci-fi magic) on part of it. I can also see a cluster of private science space stations. I don't really see more then a few private space stations for anything other then private science, though, in the foreseeable future.
As for sending a robot to another solar system in 50 years.... Well, hopefully we'll be *able* to. The problem is speed. Even with optimistic speeds it would probably take another hundred years to get any data back from the mission, even just to know if it worked. And then in the next hundred years someone could find a way to go faster then light and the entire mission would be pointless. (And yes, it is technically possible. Acceleration from less then light speed to greater then light speed takes infinite energy, but if you find a way to skip that acceleration you're good to go. I wouldn't go so far as to say it can't happen in the next 150 years.)
Fine, you have god creating the universe. So now god is your uncaused cause. What's that you say? Your god exists outside space and time so that question is meaningless? Fine then - my single infinitely dense point exists outside space and time. Now, which should I (given no evidence) believe exists outside space and time? A single point or an entire all-powerful being? That my friend is what happens when you have double standards... you forget that if I can't break a rule you can't either. And don't go claiming "god is special" or something because that's the same as claiming the laws of physics change as you go backward.
Conscious? Well, what happens to a species that goes around destroying all other examples of itself? Why, it loses diversity mister AC! And then what happens if something goes wrong? Why, that species goes and dies out, doesn't it! And so, for long term protection of similar genes, we tend to protect things that are similar to ourselves. As we have advanced as a species we have come to identify non-human animals as close to ourself, and instantly began to emphasize with them as per the above trend. And now we find ourselves aware that destroying things (even if we see them as competition) will end in a bad way... so we have more environmental awareness.
"So what is this thing? I say, it's God. Now I fervently dispute that acknowledging a God should stop scientific discovery. I feel, like many early scientists, that scientific exploration is a form of pulling back the curtain of the mind of God and should absolutely be encouraged."
Oh, so we should keep looking into the cause of the universe when we know god caused it? That seems kinda contradictory. Either he didn't cause it or we should stop looking. Now take that back a few tens of hundreds of years... the sun rises every day. God did it, no need to study it. Hense the dark ages.
Now grow some balls and question your religious mythos, and that goes for everyone.
While running it doesn't do much... but how much power does your car use while it sits in the parking lot outside your office building for 8 hours a day? I could see you getting enough power to go a few miles without gas, maybe double your MPG on the way home.
So you aren't going to get a solar cell powered car any time soon, but it might be decent for a commute at this point. As long as you can get past the startup cost, of course.
So higher education and private schools don't count? Because I'm pretty sure that the level of enlightenment you're talking about requires higher education. If you aren't counting higher education, then divide by the number of people in k-12 instead of the full population since you're not counting educational spending on anyone else. Also, there are over 300 million people in the US last time I checked. Though I don't know when that budget is from and don't care to read the PDF.
In the end I pretty much agree that people (in general, not just US) aren't quite smart enough to elect the best candidate by a long shot... they elect either on party lines (80% of people who vote) or based on who has the most money (on advertising.. the 20% or so "swing" vote). The problem I have with this idea is that you propose that the current system is better then letting people directly elect their officials.
It isn't. It might be if they really were doing the entire point of the electoral college... electing the people who cast the *real* votes. But these people long ago entered pacts to all vote for the candidate who "won" the most districts in their state... complete with gerrymandering by whoever won the *last* election. Instead of "the uneducated masses elect their leader" you get "the uneducated masses in 3 counties in ohio elect the country's leader" as an end result. Simply put, the current system is *more* retarded then democracy.
My point is that there isn't any reason why you can't increase educational spending and in the mean time fix the election system to actually be fair, and eliminate the need for contrived "vote swapping" schemes. Which is why I support a popular vote/Instant Run-off on a national holiday. As an added bonus you can even cast a vote for a third party candidate without throwing away your vote!