I do hope you're not directly equating the use of paper ballots with being a "less-developed country".
I'm not.
[T]here is no reason why a modern democracy cannot do perfectly well with paper ballots.
Oh I agree. But maybe we can do better by moving beyond them. We can move about perfectly well by foot, after all. Did so for centuries. But cars and airplanes and spacecraft are awfully nice, allow us to do so much more. Similarly, we can exchange political views by all gathering in the town square and yelling at each other. But discussion groups on the Web are very nice.
The United Kingdom....still use[s] paper ballots of the sort where you indicate your vote by marking an X in a little box. The consequences of this antiquated system? [Nice things about UK elections]
Er, but how do you know these nice things are the direct consequences of the English paper ballot system, as opposed to, say, the consequences of centuries-old English political and social traditions?
I want an auditor to be able to come in and verify the count.
This is essential, absolutely, I agree. But...is a printed paper trail the only way to do it? Surely the geek community can be more creative than that. What about chains of digital signatures? I'm not saying I know how to design such a process, 'cause I'm not a digital security guru. But such people exist. Don't they have more interesting ideas than, gee, er, let's just print a paper copy of everything?
Well, congratulations. Back when the US had 30 million citizens (1850 or so), we did it by hand, too. But no one's saying it's impossible to count votes by hand. The argument is merely that it is unnecessarily expensive and limiting. That by using technology appropriately (and I emphasize appropriately here) you might be able to improve the process greatly.
For example, I'd love to be able to vote from home, from my computer, if I could trust the process. I'd like to be able to vote while on vacation somewhere. Or a little ahead of time, if I was going to be traveling, or had already made up my mind and was just tired of thinking about the whole thing. I'd like it if there was a lightweight method of putting certain questions to the electorate, instead of having to go through this heavyweight process of getting an initiative on a ballot. I'd enjoy being able to give a quick vote of no-confidence to the legislature if they were screwing around instead of doing their job.
I think you are right that the complexity of US ballots greatly complicates things. The basic electoral unit in the US is the county, meaning in principle every county in the US (and there are thousands) can have a different ballot if it chooses. Sometimes they do vary, if there are local measures and local elections on the ballot. Then you've got jurisdictions that allow ballot measures and jurisdictions that don't, and for national elections you've got candidates that qualify for the ballot in some states, but not others, and so on, ad nauseum.
But I wouldn't argue against this diversity. To the contrary, I'd say modern technology should be put to use to enable it. The US has a long tradition of allowing significant variations across the nation in how things are done. The "50 experiments in democracy" idea. Or think of it as the equivalent of the "cathedral versus the bazaar" method of social software development. In principle, successes and failures in one region can serve as powerful lessons for the remainder of the country. This is a good thing. I would not want Canadian-style uniformity, for the same reason I'd want genetic diversity in animal species, or competitive diversity in software applications. Makes the entire system more robust.
...both of those systems have manual overrides and people in the loop in case the computers fail.
If they fail utterly, maybe. If the radar screen goes completely blank, then, sure, there are emergency procedures that might allow the ATC operators to guide planes in under VFR, God and weather willing.
But what if the technology just goes a little wiggy? What if the distances the radar screen reports are all 10% too small? There's nothing in the system that can catch that until Something Bad happens.
Same thing with missile control. Sure, a human gives the launch order. But then you trust the guidance computer to deliver the warhead to Soviet Russia instead of, say, downtown Chicago, because of some little bug or other in the onboard software.
Heck, you trust the mechanisms in your car all the time. You drive down the road at speeds and at distances relative to other cars that if your brakes suddenly stopped working as designed, you'd be dead. There's no way for you to "override" the machine and do the braking yourself, Fred Flinstone style. Some newer cars have cruise-control that can take over braking and accelerating at all speeds -- do drivers really have the reflexes to take over in time if this mechanism flips out? Slams the accelerator to the floor suddenly when the car in front brakes sharply? I'm guessing not.
Or take the flight-control system in a 767. If the hydraulic assist goes out, can the pilot still move the control surfaces by brute strength and wires? Are there even any wires anymore?
Or take your basic heart-lung machine used in open-heart surgery. Sure, if the machine gives up the ghost in the middle of the operation, while your heart is lying outside your chest half taken apart, there's a human heart surgeon standing by. To pick up the phone and call for a priest, maybe.
Basically, we increasingly rely on machines to work as they are designed, and our command options are increasingly limited to whether or not we push the "start" button. The "go to manual override" option is becoming about as useful to 21st century life as it was on the bridge of the Enterprise. But why fret about this? Humans have always trusted their lives and fortunes to their tools.
Computers have only one good mechanism for storing ballots in a failure-resistant, tamper-resistant fashion, and that's printer ink on paper.
I don't think this is correct. There's nothing inherently tamper-resistant about paper. That's why check-forging is a problem, and even counterfeiting. That's why ballot fraud was widespread in the 19th century and still is in less-developed countries that use paper ballots.
I don't think the exact medium of storage is at all the issue. I don't think it matters whether you store the votes on paper, in NVRAM, on a disk drive, or as stacks of pebbles in labeled buckets. What is important, I suggest, is being able to guarantee the chain of custody from the original voter. It's like preserving evidence in a trial: you've got to be able to prove to anyone that the vote you cite as part of a winning candidate's tally can be rigorously traced back to the hand of someone who meant to cast that vote, even if you can't (or won't) name the voter. In other words, you need a completely reliable audit trail.
I agree this is something that commodity and consumer computing hasn't thought twice about, and using commodity and consumer computing technology would be a little alarming. But I would suspect that perhaps in certain niche computing markets there has been good attention paid to forging ironclad audit trails. Maybe in the military? Keeping track of nuclear weapon activation codes?
Er, because there are 120 million of those little bubble thingies to read and score? And people want the final results in a few hours, tops? And two elections ago it was necessary to make fewer than 500 mistakes while scoring those 120 million votes (an error rate of 0.0004%)? And, finally, because taxpayers are not willing to pay the salary of a half-million-man army of vote counters, vote-counter supervisors, and vote-counter inspectors and auditors?
If we're willing to trust air-traffic control and nuclear ballistic missile command-and-control to computers, I'm not quite sure why voting is such an intrinsically scary proposition.
Quite right. Which is why professors of all political stripe don't want it to happen.
I think the unfortunate fact is that a university education, barring clear skills-related stuff like how to program well, thermodynamics, foreign languages, economics, and the like isn't at all worth what it costs. And it costs not just the obvious tuition and room-and-board, but also the salary you could have made during those four years, and the practical experience in some profession you're not getting, and we have to add in the hidden massive subsidies university education gets from the taxpayers.
Say the upfront costs are $80,000 for a bachelor's degree. We might as well add 3x this, because tuition rarely covers more than 1/3 of a university budget, so the subsidy from taxpayers is about 3x what the students pay. So we're talking over a quarter million dollars. If you acquire some hairy amazing tech skills for this, I can see it. But for just sitting around in class and spouting teenage sophomorisms about the Meaning Of Life? Is this really worth it? Color me doubtful.
The university degree is, I think, for many non-techie people just a socioeconomic class merit badge of some kind. It's like throwing a hugely expensive bar mitzvah or quinceanero. It says you and your family have the money and other resources to delay starting a job until your mid-20s. That makes it an entry ticket into jobs where people are snobbish about hiring the "right" people, people with polish and class. From that point, as an entry ticket, it's worth it. But the value is entirely a perception. The degree is worth something only because people think it's worth something. There's no underlying real value to it. Start to ask hard questions about what exactly you're getting for your money, and the whole castle of cards might come down. And that is something all professors don't want to see. (For that matter, neither do recent college graduates -- it sucks to realize you've been snookered into throwing away tons of money and time for little more than a fancy piece of paper.)
I think your analogy is not quite right. For one thing, a conversation I have with my boss is private by definition. But a lecture given in a giant public lecture hall by someone whose salary is paid by my taxes is quite another thing.
Look at this way: do you think it equally troubling that newsmen and members of the general public might tape record the speeches of other public employees, like your Congressman or the Governor? Even if those speeches are later posted to blogs and used to criticize the guy?
Part of the bottom line here is that when your salary for speaking is paid by the citizens, you give up most of your rights to keep that speech private. I think professors at a public university have almost no reasonable expectations of privacy during their lectures. If they really don't like that, the solution is simple: give back the nice money to the citizens, and go work for a private organization supported by private money.
I believe you are right, that McCarthy's targets were not, even in light of later evidence, Soviet spies. The problem, however, is that what we know now, not only from Venona but from the brief access the West enjoyed to the Soviet archives in the early 90s, is that there were as many Soviet spies as McCarthy shrieked about high in American policy-making circles, and the the CPUSA was run by the KGB, and not just a domestic political party, and there was just as much reason to be concerned as McCarthy hysterically claimed.
The guy was an alcoholic paranoid nutcase, personally loathesome, and he fingered the wrong people. But on the general point, that the US was far too complacent about Soviet infiltration and subversion, he was, alas, dead right. Just because the messenger is a fruitcake doesn't mean the message is wrong.
Hey my SO is a nurse in the pediatric intensive care unit, and she sees kids die of multiple-drug-resistant infections all the time. I think your optimism is not justified.
Antibiotics haven't been around a long time, biologically speaking. So we have no way to know if the biosphere is stable to their "sudden" (over the last 50 years) introduction.
The point is that dumping antibiotics into the biosphere, as we have been doing for 50 years, not just by treating infection but in animal feed, antibacterial soaps, et cetera, may be having just as large-scale and important effects as dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We don't know how fast the bugs are going to evolve resistance to them, or how it will spread (as another responder noted, bacteria exchange genes with each other, so the fact that a given species doesn't infect humans itself doesn't mean it won't acquire the genes, mutate them, and pass them on).
We don't know how we are changing the heretofore stable relationship between bacteria and the rest of the animal kingdom. Hopefull, we are doing nothing much, or at least nothing we can't deal with. But time will tell.
You're right. Plus, I'm at a complete loss to see how this is a nerd issue at all -- you know, something about hardware, software, games, mods, science, rocketships, Star {Trek|Wars}, the net, overclocking CPUs or undermining DRMs. It seems purely political. And I thought nerds weren't into politics, figured wide-ranging sociopolitical discussion the kind of silly waste of time you got out of your system somewhere between your sophomore year in college and your first 60-hours-a-week summer co-op job.
Hmm, this criticism reminds me somewhat of the common newsgroup "argument" which pounces on someone's spelling or grammar failures, and concludes from the existence of same that the poster's entire point, whatever it is, must be equally bogus. In short, the "argument" goes, if you can't spell you must ipso facto be wrong.
Whether or not this group is "sloppy" or shrill or gets their information in an unsavory, ungentlemanly way, or fails to state their case in the polite polysyllabic language of the academy has very little relevance to whether or not they're right.
As an amusing side note, I've noticed that professors on both sides of the political spectrum have solidly lined up against these folks. Apparently one thing all professors can agree on is that students and alumni should be a lot more respectful to professors than this group is being.
Saw this after I posted. Hmmm...so Eisner is stepping down this year, and two Disney board members including Roy have already openly said they want Jobs as CEO...
Is it not the case, however, that Disney has been looking for a good CEO for a while, what with the wretched Eisner mess? Maybe Jobs figures that when Eisner finally exits, stage right, the company will be looking for someone just as strong-willed but a tad less, er, stupid, not to put too fine a point on it, and if Jobs is sitting right there on the board, having previously made one or two very sensible suggestions in a quiet voice, and otherwise demonstrated a nice team-player spirit to re-assure the more conservative spirits on the board -- maybe he's sitting pretty? And it helps that's friends with Roy and can bring the maverick back home? If the board doesn't make the offer in 2006-07, or they don't make an offer he finds acceptable, he can always bail out...
To enter orbit around a planet you need to be going slowly when you get there, at no more than the orbital speed for the planet. New Horizons will be going at 11 km/s when it flashes by Pluto, snapping pictures like mad, whereas the orbital velocity for Pluto is just over 3 km/s. NH is moving at least 3 times too fast to go into orbit.
If you wanted to go into orbit, you'd have two choices. The first, and most economical, is to launch the spacecraft on an elliptical trajectory that just barely reaches out to Pluto. That gets the spacecraft there with the lowest possible speed relative to Pluto. You still have some braking to do, but it's the least possible. Problem is, the length of such a trajectory is about half the period of Pluto's orbit, i.e. 125 years. Ugh.
If you speed things up by taking a faster trajectory, then you end up with much more braking to do. Then the problem becomes: how do you lose all that speed? If the planet had an atmosphere, and you have good heat shielding, you can do a little aerobraking, which is what's done with Mars. But with an airless world you're stuck with bringing along enough fuel to do almost as much braking as you did accelerating from Earth orbit. So far, that has been very difficult without a very large spacecraft. One plausible hope for improvement is to bring along a real nuclear reactor (instead of just an RTG) which can provide lots of electric power, and then use a high-efficiency ion drive to slow yourself down.
C'mon, this is not the True Geek(TM) response. If you have highly capable -- and heavily armed! -- robots wandering the streets, the right thing to do is infect them with viruses that subvert their brains (which will probably run Windows ZZ.2060, har har) so that they do your bidding instead of the City Council's. Bwahahahaha.
Maybe when you add stuff to a submission, just put the original submission (or the cleaned-up trimmed original submission) first, after the "so-and-so writes...." and then put "...; CmdrTaco adds...." second. That way what you said is clearly separated from what the original guy said, and, of course, clearly separated from TFA itself. I suspect if any reasoning homonids are criticizing you for inserting your opinion, it's only because your opinion isn't clearly marked off as such, and adding those two words ("CmdrTaco adds...") will shut them up. It won't shut up unreasonable critics, of course, but nothing will.
Good luck, man. I wouldn't have your job at any pay.
They are. Moreover, I think the press-release aspect of this report is a little overexcited. We already know you can produce coherent light by any number of stimulating mechanisms, from flashlamps to microwaves to electricity. What's new here seems only to be that a physical shock can also be the "stimulation" in the acronym ("LASER = "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation"). Now, given that we already knew that a physical shock can stimulate incoherent light emission -- hence the phenomenon of triboluminescence, otherwise known as the crunching wintergreen LifeSavers makes sparks effect -- it doesn't seem real surprising that physical shock can stimulate coherent light emission under the right circumstances.
I can believe the simulations establish the possibility of shock-stimulated coherent light emission, but I am very doubty of the amplitude. There's no way they could do the simulation in as much detail and long enough to account for all the side-channels and decay mechanisms in a real crystal. There's a lot of experimental work ahead before this proves to be a solid discovery. But it's a neat little story, nonetheless.
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I do hope you're not directly equating the use of paper ballots with being a "less-developed country".
I'm not.
[T]here is no reason why a modern democracy cannot do perfectly well with paper ballots.
Oh I agree. But maybe we can do better by moving beyond them. We can move about perfectly well by foot, after all. Did so for centuries. But cars and airplanes and spacecraft are awfully nice, allow us to do so much more. Similarly, we can exchange political views by all gathering in the town square and yelling at each other. But discussion groups on the Web are very nice.
The United Kingdom....still use[s] paper ballots of the sort where you indicate your vote by marking an X in a little box. The consequences of this antiquated system? [Nice things about UK elections]
Er, but how do you know these nice things are the direct consequences of the English paper ballot system, as opposed to, say, the consequences of centuries-old English political and social traditions?
I want an auditor to be able to come in and verify the count.
This is essential, absolutely, I agree. But...is a printed paper trail the only way to do it? Surely the geek community can be more creative than that. What about chains of digital signatures? I'm not saying I know how to design such a process, 'cause I'm not a digital security guru. But such people exist. Don't they have more interesting ideas than, gee, er, let's just print a paper copy of everything?
Well, congratulations. Back when the US had 30 million citizens (1850 or so), we did it by hand, too. But no one's saying it's impossible to count votes by hand. The argument is merely that it is unnecessarily expensive and limiting. That by using technology appropriately (and I emphasize appropriately here) you might be able to improve the process greatly.
For example, I'd love to be able to vote from home, from my computer, if I could trust the process. I'd like to be able to vote while on vacation somewhere. Or a little ahead of time, if I was going to be traveling, or had already made up my mind and was just tired of thinking about the whole thing. I'd like it if there was a lightweight method of putting certain questions to the electorate, instead of having to go through this heavyweight process of getting an initiative on a ballot. I'd enjoy being able to give a quick vote of no-confidence to the legislature if they were screwing around instead of doing their job.
I think you are right that the complexity of US ballots greatly complicates things. The basic electoral unit in the US is the county, meaning in principle every county in the US (and there are thousands) can have a different ballot if it chooses. Sometimes they do vary, if there are local measures and local elections on the ballot. Then you've got jurisdictions that allow ballot measures and jurisdictions that don't, and for national elections you've got candidates that qualify for the ballot in some states, but not others, and so on, ad nauseum.
But I wouldn't argue against this diversity. To the contrary, I'd say modern technology should be put to use to enable it. The US has a long tradition of allowing significant variations across the nation in how things are done. The "50 experiments in democracy" idea. Or think of it as the equivalent of the "cathedral versus the bazaar" method of social software development. In principle, successes and failures in one region can serve as powerful lessons for the remainder of the country. This is a good thing. I would not want Canadian-style uniformity, for the same reason I'd want genetic diversity in animal species, or competitive diversity in software applications. Makes the entire system more robust.
...both of those systems have manual overrides and people in the loop in case the computers fail.
If they fail utterly, maybe. If the radar screen goes completely blank, then, sure, there are emergency procedures that might allow the ATC operators to guide planes in under VFR, God and weather willing.
But what if the technology just goes a little wiggy? What if the distances the radar screen reports are all 10% too small? There's nothing in the system that can catch that until Something Bad happens.
Same thing with missile control. Sure, a human gives the launch order. But then you trust the guidance computer to deliver the warhead to Soviet Russia instead of, say, downtown Chicago, because of some little bug or other in the onboard software.
Heck, you trust the mechanisms in your car all the time. You drive down the road at speeds and at distances relative to other cars that if your brakes suddenly stopped working as designed, you'd be dead. There's no way for you to "override" the machine and do the braking yourself, Fred Flinstone style. Some newer cars have cruise-control that can take over braking and accelerating at all speeds -- do drivers really have the reflexes to take over in time if this mechanism flips out? Slams the accelerator to the floor suddenly when the car in front brakes sharply? I'm guessing not.
Or take the flight-control system in a 767. If the hydraulic assist goes out, can the pilot still move the control surfaces by brute strength and wires? Are there even any wires anymore?
Or take your basic heart-lung machine used in open-heart surgery. Sure, if the machine gives up the ghost in the middle of the operation, while your heart is lying outside your chest half taken apart, there's a human heart surgeon standing by. To pick up the phone and call for a priest, maybe.
Basically, we increasingly rely on machines to work as they are designed, and our command options are increasingly limited to whether or not we push the "start" button. The "go to manual override" option is becoming about as useful to 21st century life as it was on the bridge of the Enterprise. But why fret about this? Humans have always trusted their lives and fortunes to their tools.
Computers have only one good mechanism for storing ballots in a failure-resistant, tamper-resistant fashion, and that's printer ink on paper.
I don't think this is correct. There's nothing inherently tamper-resistant about paper. That's why check-forging is a problem, and even counterfeiting. That's why ballot fraud was widespread in the 19th century and still is in less-developed countries that use paper ballots.
I don't think the exact medium of storage is at all the issue. I don't think it matters whether you store the votes on paper, in NVRAM, on a disk drive, or as stacks of pebbles in labeled buckets. What is important, I suggest, is being able to guarantee the chain of custody from the original voter. It's like preserving evidence in a trial: you've got to be able to prove to anyone that the vote you cite as part of a winning candidate's tally can be rigorously traced back to the hand of someone who meant to cast that vote, even if you can't (or won't) name the voter. In other words, you need a completely reliable audit trail.
I agree this is something that commodity and consumer computing hasn't thought twice about, and using commodity and consumer computing technology would be a little alarming. But I would suspect that perhaps in certain niche computing markets there has been good attention paid to forging ironclad audit trails. Maybe in the military? Keeping track of nuclear weapon activation codes?
Er, because there are 120 million of those little bubble thingies to read and score? And people want the final results in a few hours, tops? And two elections ago it was necessary to make fewer than 500 mistakes while scoring those 120 million votes (an error rate of 0.0004%)? And, finally, because taxpayers are not willing to pay the salary of a half-million-man army of vote counters, vote-counter supervisors, and vote-counter inspectors and auditors?
If we're willing to trust air-traffic control and nuclear ballistic missile command-and-control to computers, I'm not quite sure why voting is such an intrinsically scary proposition.
Things got frozen into the ice up there during the last Ice Age. They're remarkably lifelike when defrosted.
I would say very roughly between 10% and 20% of all the deaths in the PICU. "All the time" has its usual meaning of "regularly and noticeably."
Quite right. Which is why professors of all political stripe don't want it to happen.
I think the unfortunate fact is that a university education, barring clear skills-related stuff like how to program well, thermodynamics, foreign languages, economics, and the like isn't at all worth what it costs. And it costs not just the obvious tuition and room-and-board, but also the salary you could have made during those four years, and the practical experience in some profession you're not getting, and we have to add in the hidden massive subsidies university education gets from the taxpayers.
Say the upfront costs are $80,000 for a bachelor's degree. We might as well add 3x this, because tuition rarely covers more than 1/3 of a university budget, so the subsidy from taxpayers is about 3x what the students pay. So we're talking over a quarter million dollars. If you acquire some hairy amazing tech skills for this, I can see it. But for just sitting around in class and spouting teenage sophomorisms about the Meaning Of Life? Is this really worth it? Color me doubtful.
The university degree is, I think, for many non-techie people just a socioeconomic class merit badge of some kind. It's like throwing a hugely expensive bar mitzvah or quinceanero. It says you and your family have the money and other resources to delay starting a job until your mid-20s. That makes it an entry ticket into jobs where people are snobbish about hiring the "right" people, people with polish and class. From that point, as an entry ticket, it's worth it. But the value is entirely a perception. The degree is worth something only because people think it's worth something. There's no underlying real value to it. Start to ask hard questions about what exactly you're getting for your money, and the whole castle of cards might come down. And that is something all professors don't want to see. (For that matter, neither do recent college graduates -- it sucks to realize you've been snookered into throwing away tons of money and time for little more than a fancy piece of paper.)
I think your analogy is not quite right. For one thing, a conversation I have with my boss is private by definition. But a lecture given in a giant public lecture hall by someone whose salary is paid by my taxes is quite another thing.
Look at this way: do you think it equally troubling that newsmen and members of the general public might tape record the speeches of other public employees, like your Congressman or the Governor? Even if those speeches are later posted to blogs and used to criticize the guy?
Part of the bottom line here is that when your salary for speaking is paid by the citizens, you give up most of your rights to keep that speech private. I think professors at a public university have almost no reasonable expectations of privacy during their lectures. If they really don't like that, the solution is simple: give back the nice money to the citizens, and go work for a private organization supported by private money.
I believe you are right, that McCarthy's targets were not, even in light of later evidence, Soviet spies. The problem, however, is that what we know now, not only from Venona but from the brief access the West enjoyed to the Soviet archives in the early 90s, is that there were as many Soviet spies as McCarthy shrieked about high in American policy-making circles, and the the CPUSA was run by the KGB, and not just a domestic political party, and there was just as much reason to be concerned as McCarthy hysterically claimed.
The guy was an alcoholic paranoid nutcase, personally loathesome, and he fingered the wrong people. But on the general point, that the US was far too complacent about Soviet infiltration and subversion, he was, alas, dead right. Just because the messenger is a fruitcake doesn't mean the message is wrong.
Hey my SO is a nurse in the pediatric intensive care unit, and she sees kids die of multiple-drug-resistant infections all the time. I think your optimism is not justified.
Antibiotics haven't been around a long time, biologically speaking. So we have no way to know if the biosphere is stable to their "sudden" (over the last 50 years) introduction.
The point is that dumping antibiotics into the biosphere, as we have been doing for 50 years, not just by treating infection but in animal feed, antibacterial soaps, et cetera, may be having just as large-scale and important effects as dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We don't know how fast the bugs are going to evolve resistance to them, or how it will spread (as another responder noted, bacteria exchange genes with each other, so the fact that a given species doesn't infect humans itself doesn't mean it won't acquire the genes, mutate them, and pass them on).
We don't know how we are changing the heretofore stable relationship between bacteria and the rest of the animal kingdom. Hopefull, we are doing nothing much, or at least nothing we can't deal with. But time will tell.
You're right. Plus, I'm at a complete loss to see how this is a nerd issue at all -- you know, something about hardware, software, games, mods, science, rocketships, Star {Trek|Wars}, the net, overclocking CPUs or undermining DRMs. It seems purely political. And I thought nerds weren't into politics, figured wide-ranging sociopolitical discussion the kind of silly waste of time you got out of your system somewhere between your sophomore year in college and your first 60-hours-a-week summer co-op job.
I must be getting old.
Hmm, this criticism reminds me somewhat of the common newsgroup "argument" which pounces on someone's spelling or grammar failures, and concludes from the existence of same that the poster's entire point, whatever it is, must be equally bogus. In short, the "argument" goes, if you can't spell you must ipso facto be wrong.
Whether or not this group is "sloppy" or shrill or gets their information in an unsavory, ungentlemanly way, or fails to state their case in the polite polysyllabic language of the academy has very little relevance to whether or not they're right.
As an amusing side note, I've noticed that professors on both sides of the political spectrum have solidly lined up against these folks. Apparently one thing all professors can agree on is that students and alumni should be a lot more respectful to professors than this group is being.
Well, color me clueless blue...
Thanks for the correction!
Saw this after I posted. Hmmm...so Eisner is stepping down this year, and two Disney board members including Roy have already openly said they want Jobs as CEO...
Is it not the case, however, that Disney has been looking for a good CEO for a while, what with the wretched Eisner mess? Maybe Jobs figures that when Eisner finally exits, stage right, the company will be looking for someone just as strong-willed but a tad less, er, stupid, not to put too fine a point on it, and if Jobs is sitting right there on the board, having previously made one or two very sensible suggestions in a quiet voice, and otherwise demonstrated a nice team-player spirit to re-assure the more conservative spirits on the board -- maybe he's sitting pretty? And it helps that's friends with Roy and can bring the maverick back home? If the board doesn't make the offer in 2006-07, or they don't make an offer he finds acceptable, he can always bail out...
Thanks for the correction!
To enter orbit around a planet you need to be going slowly when you get there, at no more than the orbital speed for the planet. New Horizons will be going at 11 km/s when it flashes by Pluto, snapping pictures like mad, whereas the orbital velocity for Pluto is just over 3 km/s. NH is moving at least 3 times too fast to go into orbit.
If you wanted to go into orbit, you'd have two choices. The first, and most economical, is to launch the spacecraft on an elliptical trajectory that just barely reaches out to Pluto. That gets the spacecraft there with the lowest possible speed relative to Pluto. You still have some braking to do, but it's the least possible. Problem is, the length of such a trajectory is about half the period of Pluto's orbit, i.e. 125 years. Ugh.
If you speed things up by taking a faster trajectory, then you end up with much more braking to do. Then the problem becomes: how do you lose all that speed? If the planet had an atmosphere, and you have good heat shielding, you can do a little aerobraking, which is what's done with Mars. But with an airless world you're stuck with bringing along enough fuel to do almost as much braking as you did accelerating from Earth orbit. So far, that has been very difficult without a very large spacecraft. One plausible hope for improvement is to bring along a real nuclear reactor (instead of just an RTG) which can provide lots of electric power, and then use a high-efficiency ion drive to slow yourself down.
Well, to be fair, Apollo had to slow down so it could stop at the Moon...
Here's to New Horizons, indeed!
[Drains glass, turns over on top of bar...]
One wonders if NH might contribute some data to finally solve the Pioneer anomaly.
C'mon, this is not the True Geek(TM) response. If you have highly capable -- and heavily armed! -- robots wandering the streets, the right thing to do is infect them with viruses that subvert their brains (which will probably run Windows ZZ.2060, har har) so that they do your bidding instead of the City Council's. Bwahahahaha.
Maybe when you add stuff to a submission, just put the original submission (or the cleaned-up trimmed original submission) first, after the "so-and-so writes...." and then put "...; CmdrTaco adds...." second. That way what you said is clearly separated from what the original guy said, and, of course, clearly separated from TFA itself. I suspect if any reasoning homonids are criticizing you for inserting your opinion, it's only because your opinion isn't clearly marked off as such, and adding those two words ("CmdrTaco adds...") will shut them up. It won't shut up unreasonable critics, of course, but nothing will.
Good luck, man. I wouldn't have your job at any pay.
They are. Moreover, I think the press-release aspect of this report is a little overexcited. We already know you can produce coherent light by any number of stimulating mechanisms, from flashlamps to microwaves to electricity. What's new here seems only to be that a physical shock can also be the "stimulation" in the acronym ("LASER = "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation"). Now, given that we already knew that a physical shock can stimulate incoherent light emission -- hence the phenomenon of triboluminescence, otherwise known as the crunching wintergreen LifeSavers makes sparks effect -- it doesn't seem real surprising that physical shock can stimulate coherent light emission under the right circumstances.
I can believe the simulations establish the possibility of shock-stimulated coherent light emission, but I am very doubty of the amplitude. There's no way they could do the simulation in as much detail and long enough to account for all the side-channels and decay mechanisms in a real crystal. There's a lot of experimental work ahead before this proves to be a solid discovery. But it's a neat little story, nonetheless.