Geez, you'd think the Air Force would be hip to the fact that muscular men are usually classified as "overweight" by the BMI standards set for yer average couch potato...glad they had the alternate measurement for you. What I'd really like to be able to do for my 45th birthday, rapidly coming up, is be able to qualify for Ranger school. Difficult.
they probably should budget an hour or two for exercise in your daily schedule.
This can't be emphasized enough, even if one is within normal weight and percentage of fat range. Once you get past 40 stuff starts aging and falling apart faster than I'd have ever believed, and so far as I can tell only regular exercise slows the decline. I wasn't totally inactive in my 30s, but I sure wish I'd been as active as I was in my 20s, to get a head start on staving off the decline of middle age. But, well, it's tough when you've got young kids et cetera.
Sad to whom, bucko? Speaking as a taxpayer and a citizen, I have no problem forking over big wads of my cash to the Pentagon to make the fiercest and scariest war machine on the planet, so that all my enemies are scared shitless and pay attention when my diplomats speak softly.
Far better use of my tax money then throwing it down some rathole trying to reverse the judgments of Fate and Luck, subsidizing people rebuilding their beloved family homes on a flood plain, below sea level, in the path of the last 42 forest fires, et cetera.
Actually, they do. The military has no problem hiring the very best if they want to. Half the best physicists and electrical engineers I knew at MIT -- and the better half, typically -- went either directly into the military (via ROTC) or worked for defense contractors. Why not? It's where the really interesting physics and engineering was being done, the pay and benefits were great, and you weren't hassled by dumbass marketing suits wanting you to make your product cute or cheap.
The military wants their tech to work and be way cooler and better than anyone else's stuff, cost to them is no object, and they don't give a fuck what it looks like or whether it "appeals" to the critical 18-25 Facebook demographic. It's going to be painted olive drab anyway, and soldiers will be told to use it, not begged. Fairly ideal working conditions for a really smart technical person, I'd say. The only drawback is the various amounts of bureaucratic bullshit you have to cope with, which tops the level in a good private firm.
Anyway, I've never heard of a good technical job in the military or one of its prime contractors, or one of the defense-associated national labs, not drawing a huge raft of top-notch applicants. It's agencies like the EPA which pay terribly, have hideous civil-service and union rules weighing them down, and which, frankly, involve boring and outdated technology, which end up desperate to hire even third-rate people.
Get out and get your exercise, man. You'll be glad you did when you're my age, and if you already are, you'll feel 10 years younger in a few months, really truly.
Some of the recent work I have been involved with tends to have some anomalies that are not easily sorted out concerning Light speeds and velocities in these areas.
Good Golly, like what?
If the speed of light is not constant, then physical law (e.g. Maxwell's equations) is not the same everywhere, and energy is not conserved, there is no Second Law of thermodynamics, and basically all hell breaks loose. The speed of light isn't just the speed at which light travels. It's a fundamental constant that appears in all kinds of basic physical laws.
I think you're using the term incorrectly. I wasn't criticizing anybody, I was just explaining to someone why the square brackets appeared. Surely it isn't being a Nazi to answer questions, even merely implied questions?
What does a machine have to do with whether you use single or double quotes?
I was responding to the AC who said I need to work on my coding. I assume he meant "coding" as in "programming," and was referring to the well-known fact that if you nest the same type of quotes in a shell command, which is tempting when writing complex commands, the shell can't tell the difference between the next level of open quote and a close quote, so you will typically get something quite different from what you intended.
Although you appear to be conflating "journalism" and "stuff posted on Slashdot"
The point is is it a good idea in the first place- given the potential overall long term pluses and minuses?
No, that's a topic for theologians, monks, and college sophomores to debate, because only God Himself is wise enough to evaluate whether anything is "beneficial to society as a whole." Any mere mortal who claims he can do so is a fool, shyster or crook. This is why it's proven utterly impossible to set up the One True Social System that automatically evaluates each and every technological advance and encourages those that are Good and suppresses those that are Bad.
And so we have such morally ambiguous tools as atomic bombs, ICBMs, guns, and anonymous Internet identities. We've found that in actual practise (as opposed to a meaningless discussion forum) you can't evaluate whether a whole technology is Good or Bad. No ten people can even agree on the definition of "good" and "bad." You can only, at best, say that this or that particular use of the technology is good or bad. So we don't, unless we're naive idiots, evaluate technology all by itself. We evaluate the actions of people and judge those, instead. Shooting schoolchildren to make a political point is bad. Shooting people who are in the process of shooting schoolchildren is good. Shooting people who merely say schoolchildren should be shot to make political points is a closer call, but probably bad. And so on. But we don't even try to decide whether guns, or even "shooting people" is, in itself, on balance, good or bad.
Come on now. You might as well argue that locking your front door is pointless because there are many ways to pick a lock, if you are talented and persistent and resourceful enough, and in the end you can just hire a Mission : Impossible team for $10,000,000 to silently dig a tunnel under the house and break in through the basement.
The point isn't to make theft impossible in the sense that it would violate the laws of physics. The idea is just to make it more expensive, so that, ideally, it's cheaper to pay for the work in an honest way than to steal it.
In any event, there is obviously a correlation between how expensive and difficult it is to steal and make it pay, and how much stealing goes on. Anything that makes stealing even slightly more expensive is going to reduce the amount of it (more or less driving the cheap criminals out of the "market"). If it costs less than the amount of theft prevented, it's worth it.
What, they can completely change the meaning of the article with their stupid spin, but they've got enough standards to use brackets for a case-sensitive journalistic convention?
Oh, you know. Major crooks are always careful to obey the speed limit and file their tax returns on time. The biggest con-men always shine their shoes, wear a tie, and speak politely. Some sort of law o' nature.
Fortunately, in (most of) this world, you are not paid according to what you "deserve," but according to what you can negotiate freely with the people who want your services or product.
Forcing your moral and ethical standards on others -- e.g. stating what other people do and do not "deserve" -- is something I find reprehensibly arrogant.
Not to mention that if it dies from your neglect, you can be charged with murder, or at least animal abuse, and your neighbors start leaving dogshit on your doorstep after your face is on the evening news...next to the sad, shriveled corpse of the laptop...a bright promising life, cut cruelly short by a cranky abusive bastard...
Given how far away it is, and the speed of light, you can calculate how long it took the light to get here. You know it existed that long ago. Subtract from the age of the Universe. That gives you the maximum age of the galaxy, and that's what they're quoting. It could be younger, of course.
This is something Canon would tout as a feature of their camera, for which artists would pay a premium, so that they could more easily prove that a particular photo belongs to them.
Keep in mind these are people who (1) earn their daily bread by taking amazing photos, and (2) often have to endure years and years of dry spells before one particular photo hits the big time and generates widespread interest. They have a very strong interest in controlling the reproduction and use of their photos, so they can get paid for their years of effort. A feature like this, sort of an automatic unfakeable "signature" embedded in each frame, would make it much easier for them to prove that a given photo is their property.
You might not like that of course, but that just means you're not a photographer. Presumably when it comes to whatever you do creatively, that takes years of discipline and effort to do, and which puts the food on your table, is not something you'd like people to just be able to duplicate and distribute randomly and broadly without even asking you first.
Think of it as the equivalent of your engraving your SSN on your very expensive tools, so that if they're ripped off you can prove they're yours.
When you quote a piece, you're supposed to put anything you add that isn't in the original quote in square brackets. What you add is supposed to be harmless, of course, not changing the original meaning, but keeping it grammatically and typographically correct.
In this case, the full quote would be:
"In an achievement some see as the "holy grail" of nanoscience, researchers..."
The summary dropped the introductory phrase, which makes the quote:
"researchers..."
But if the quote is used where it is, the first letter should be capitalized to make it grammatically correct. Hence, the capital is added, but it's put in square brackets to put you on notice that this is not precisely a direct quote.
Another common use of the convention is when you quote something that contains a pronoun, and you need to put the proper nouns in to make sense of it:
"Joe Slashdot couldn't care less. He hated journalists anyway."
To quote only the second sentence, you'd write:
"[Joe] hated journalists anyway."
Because if you leave it as "he" your audience wouldn't know who the heck "he" is.
Go look up Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Liebniz.
Or, if your point is that the historical record has been massively fudged by some evil patriarchal European conspiracy, then you can go fuck yourself as a clueless post-modernist nutjob.
Well...thank you for the comments. This is certainly not something that can easily be settled, as the comments section in many an alt.space blog will tell you. The debate about how and why LEO access remains so fabulously expensive, despite all expectations 50 years ago, seems endless, although we might hope that sooner or later some development will put a stop to it by demonstrating the right way to go.
Does the right way involve social changes, as you suggest? Is it like trans-Atlantic travel in the 1600s, where it's really just a question of the home countries getting rich enough to be able to afford the cost routinely instead of only on special occasion? Sure, could be.
Or is it like personal computing, which was utterly impossible in the days of discrete components, because the labor cost involved in building (and maintaining) a computer built out of tubes or discrete transistors would ensure that the price of a computer would never come within reach of the average individual? In that case, a breakthrough technology -- the integrated circuit -- changed the whole dynamics of the situation by making it possible to robotically build incredibly complex circuits incredibly cheaply at the margin, and poof, we have personal computers that cost less than what teenagers spend on their senior prom, and the revolution that has wrought.
Perhaps that is what will finally bring the cost of space access into the same category as the price of overnight package delivery, and revolutionize society. That would, indeed, be an engineering advance of some kind. Of what kind, I can't imagine, or else I'd be keeping my mouth shut and filing patent applications and raising seed money. But it's a possible resolution of the problem, assuming any resolution is possible.
First, life as we know it is essentially a precarious delicate balance of chemical reactions that can go either way. For example, we need to break down the proteins we eat so that we can build up or own proteins. We need to create energy-rich substances (like fat) to store energy, so that later we can consume them to provide energy. We assemble DNA into chromosomes and then pack it away for safe storage, but then we need to partially disassemble it to use it. And so on.
All this has to take place in essentially an isothermal environment. We can't change the temperature of a cell by several hundred degrees to get different reactions to go in different ways, or forward and back. We can't compartmentalize the cell and have different temperatures in different parts so that different reactions are favored.
To get a set of chemical reactions that can be delicately balanced so that very small changes -- e.g. the addition or withholding of an enzyme (catalyst) -- can tip the balance this way and that, nothing is as useful as the hydrogen bond, which is a somewhat like a chemical bond in that it involves sharing a small charged particle between atoms, but in this case the particle is a proton instead of an electron. Since the proton is much larger than the electron, the bond is far weaker, typically. Helpfully, it can easily be broken and made at temperatures where water is a liquid by very small changes in the conditions. Indeed, they're made and broken in liquid water all the time.
You might easily say that life is fundamentally based around the existence of the hydrogen bond, and its ability to be formed and broken easily at certain temperatures. There really isn't anything else like it in chemistry. You couldn't imagine ordinary chemical bonds playing this role at, say, a much higher temperature, because the problem is that all chemical bonds become flexible and easy to make and break at about the same temperature (5000-10000 K). You couldn't have some bonds flexible and some others sturdy. It would be like trying to pour and shape steel with iron tools close to the melting point of iron.
Fortunately for us, because of the peculiar stability of the oxygen nucleus, there is a great deal of oxygen in the universe. Since there is also, naturally, a very large amount of hydrogen, it turns out that water (H2O) is probably the most common heteronuclear neutral molecule in the universe. There's a huge amount of it out there. And water is an ideal basic substrate on which to be building your life based on hydrogen bonds, because of course water is one of the best hydrogen-bonding substances there is. Think of it as the "silicon" in life "microelectronics," the substance that you can dope with other molecules and get all kinds of useful behavior.
It might well be the case that there is some other model for life, one not based on ordinary chemistry -- for example you could have Robert L. Forward's life based on nuclear chemistry, living on neutron stars, with a natural time-scale a billion or more times faster than ours. But no one outside of fantasy has ever proposed a plausible model for it.
27 years is a long time to project computer technology, yes. But for most technology? Not so much. Certainly a new 2008 Toyota Corolla, for example, is a much better car than a new 1981 Corolla, but much of the basic technology is fairly similar and reasonably forseeable from 1981, if you were in tune with the latest thinking in automotive technology. There's a few things you might not have anticipated -- built-in MP3 players, GPS navigation -- but you would be pretty much spot on if you predicted that you'd be using EFI, aluminum heads, fuel injection, et cetera, all the stuff the 1981 engineers thought would be in the future.
For that matter, I would be greatly surprised if Toyota wasn't thinking about their 2008 Corollas in 1981. You need to plan stuff out that long if you want to do things like acquire land for new factories, build the factories, install robots, hire and train workers, and put together a complicated assembly process. That stuff can't be done in six months (unless you're the government with infinite amounts of other peoples' money to spend).
Even if you're the government, when you build something really complicated that pushes the envelope, you still need a lot of time to go from sketches on a napkin to actual hardware. The F-22 fighter jet, for example, which is just coming into service now, began planning in 1981 (coincidentally, just about 27 years ago).
Even for computer technology, a more precise statement would be that 27 years turns out to have been too long a time to predict what would happen over the past 50 years. In the decades before the semiconductor revolution, advances in computing technology -- slide rules, adding machines, etc. -- were slow and fairly predictable. Furthermore, we do not know how much longer the revolution will continue generating amazing new stuff.
Most revolutionary technologies release a burst of innovation, but after the initial discovery is mined out, progress slows again. When efficient, cheap internal combustion engines were introduced in the 1880s, they revolutionized many aspects of society. Canals were abandoned and railroads exploded. Horses disappeared and cars and highways and traffic accidents appeared. The heavier-than-air airplane appeared and it became possible to cross the country in hours instead of days. Similar massive changes followed the introduction of AC electricity mains around the same period. Someone could be forgiven for predicting that the revolution would never stop, and there would be wild and amazing discoveries and inventions in electricity and engines right on through the 1950s. Indeed, Jules Verne's Nautilus is something like that. But of course, this is not what happened. The initial wave of discovery with respect to internal combustion engines and electricity in wires faded, and progress now is back to being slow and evolutionary. Much the same thing is probably bound to happen in computing, but we don't know when. There will come a time when it will be as easy to predict what computers will be like in 20 years as it is now to predict what an internal combustion engine or electric motor will look like in 20 years.
Even ignoring all that, it's still 1970s technology.
Yeesh, this canard again. Look, when we really think about it, don't you think it's only an occasionally useful rule of thumb that the age of a technology has some correlation to its quality and cleverness? Why should it? Is it really reasonable to assume that every technological problem has an infinite number of solutions, which will always be discovered in ascending order of cleverness?
I mean, do we argue that astronauts shouldn't use ball-point pens in orbit because that's 1960s technology, and surely there must be something better now? That they shouldn't use handkerchiefs to blow their nose because that's 16th century technology? NASA shouldn't use wheels on the design of a moon rover because wheels were invented 5000 years ago? They should use something other than calculus to calculate orbits because it was invented in the 1620s and hasn't changed a bit since? Sometimes the best solution to a problem is an old and well-known one. Newer isn't automatically better.
It seems to me that the Space Shuttle was designed at the end of the golden age of rocketry: in the 50s and 60s clever youngsters went into aerospace the way they went into computers and the Internet in the 80s and 90s. It was exciting, it was way out on the frontier, and it paid decently. NASA and their contractors collected most of the best, and they did pretty impressive engineering work. Yes, they didn't have some of the fancy electronics parts their descendants have now, but avionics is only part of the spacecraft -- and when you're talking about a spacecraft that has to survive two very high-energy events (launch and re-entry) -- the quality and coolness of the avionics is probably not the key criterion for design success. Something like airframe design, system robustness, and a canny use of materials is probably way more important.
Since the 1980s, however, aerospace engineering talent in the US has aged and shrunk, and far fewer of the best and brightest go into the field. Furthermore, the excitement and potential glory of a real frontier-type mission is missing. Designing reliable electric bus connectors for solar-power panels on the ISS isn't quite the same as trying to squeeze an extra 5 ounces out of the weight of the first manned Mars lander. It doesn't attract the very best young talent.
So it may very well be that the "1970s technology" design of the SS is as good or better than what could be done today, avionics aside. Certainly the difficulty which private aerospace has had recently in trying to duplicate, essentially, the circa 1965 Saturn 1B medium-lift launch vehicle should make one pause thoughtfully before concluding that it's just a piece of cake to design a combination heavy-lift vehicle and re-usable manned spaceplane seating 10 that leaves the SS in the dust. I mean, if it were easy to do better -- wouldn't someone have done so, already? It's not like there isn't a fortune to be made by the first organization that can get 50 tons of cargo and a crew of 10 to LEO for 10% of the price of a SS launch.
I'm sorry, but this seems like a whole bunch of arrogant cluelessness rolled into one.
First of all, it certainly used to be easy to be an ISP, and there used to be a whole slew of mom 'n' pop ISP operations. The fact that a lot of those closed up shop has much more to do with the fact that they just couldn't compete with the cutthroat pricing the telcos (and to a much more limited extent) the cable companies were rolling out to acquire market share. If you're living in an area with only one or two ISP choices, it's very likely to be the fault of you and your peers in ranking low price above every other possible consideration. When customers do that, they drive everyone out of the business except the largest and most diversified company, which alone can turn a reliable profit by multiplying teensy-weensy margins on each account by zillions of accounts, or can even take a loss on providing network service because they make it up on portal ad revenue, selling add-on services, whatever.
If you think a market exists for ISP service with fixed IPv6 addresses, nothing's stopping you from opening up shop, hiring the necessary network engineers, and trying to cover their salaries, medical benefits, and 401k's with your subscription fees. And if you aren't willing to give that a spin, 'cause you lack expertise to even know WTF you're talking about, or you do actually realize that people generally won't pay for that kind of service, then you're being cynical and dishonest in complaining that other people won't go into the business and lose their life's savings trying to shovel back the tide for your temporary benefit.
Secondly, the reason ISPs charge more for fixed IP addresses is just because it makes some of their network administration more complicated. My ISP (Cox cable) used to give out fixed IP addresses ten years ago, but switched over to DHCP and variable addresses as their customer base grew, and presumably the complexity of administering fixed addresses when customers might add the service and then drop it a week later, and then add it again in three months (and demand their old address back) became incompatible with charging a price not too far above what Pacific Bell charged for DSL.
Finally, your complaint where it isn't uninformed seems to boil down to the complaint that people in the business of selling Internet access want to charge as much as possible for doing so. Uh...and so? Did you just fall of the turnip truck yesterday? Is it an outrageous surprise to you that people everywhere want to maximize the price they get for their labor? Don't you want to get the highest salary you can for the work you do? What makes the people who work for ISPs, or who start them, any different?
Uh...it's not that they really think the Chinese, for example, are stupid or lack resources. But they're not really trying to hide from the Chinese. (Or more precisely, what they're trying to hide from the Chinese they really try to hide, which means they don't even talk about it in public.)
What they're trying to hide it from is some cheapass Taliban group in the hinterlands of Pakistan, who may, as someone else pointed out, have access to the Internet and be able, once given a satellite's orbit, be able to know when it's over their neck of the woods, and plan operations accordingly.
And it's not that they fear amateurs will compromise black satellites. That can only happen, at best, temporarily. It's that if amateurs start compromising satellites, then they need to build and launch much more expensive black satellites that defy amateur attempts at compromise. Which costs you, the taxpayer, beaucoup additional dollars.
I don't mind people trying to spot black satellites. Fun 'n' games, to be sure. But a certain amount of discretion would be grown-up and helpful. I mean, I happen to know, because of my professional background, how to synthesize meth and other interesting substances. But I wouldn't post the steps on/. Not because they should be secret per se, but just because one doesn't leave loaded guns lying around where children can get to them.
If NASA is looking for "people" people to be astronauts, it's probably more just a sign that the real cutting-edge stuff, for which you do need wildly talented and somewhat abnormal folks, is about over. If machines and the ground crew are now doing all the real hairy work, and the important thing about the people on orbit is just that they don't embarass the agency in front of the TV cameras, well then, sure, being a well-adjusted normform is clearly the way to go.
There's a somewhat apt quote from Fleet Admiral Ernest King, who was Chief of Naval Operations during the Second World War, a famously crabby non "people" person (described by FDR as "a man who shaves with a blowtorch"), to the effect that in wartime they send for the sons of bitches, because only they can get the job done. Point being, if NASA is looking for more "people" skills over aerospatial genius or nerves of brass, then they're probably no longer working on the true frontier.
Yes, I know you don't want a crew that will kill each other because they've the social skills of retarded bonobos. But if you have a crew that has time and energy to spare for social interactions beyond hand me that fucking wrench really quick and O2 is nominal again thank Christ then your missions aren't at the very leading edge.
Slashdot Mirror
Geez, you'd think the Air Force would be hip to the fact that muscular men are usually classified as "overweight" by the BMI standards set for yer average couch potato...glad they had the alternate measurement for you. What I'd really like to be able to do for my 45th birthday, rapidly coming up, is be able to qualify for Ranger school. Difficult.
they probably should budget an hour or two for exercise in your daily schedule.
This can't be emphasized enough, even if one is within normal weight and percentage of fat range. Once you get past 40 stuff starts aging and falling apart faster than I'd have ever believed, and so far as I can tell only regular exercise slows the decline. I wasn't totally inactive in my 30s, but I sure wish I'd been as active as I was in my 20s, to get a head start on staving off the decline of middle age. But, well, it's tough when you've got young kids et cetera.
Sad to whom, bucko? Speaking as a taxpayer and a citizen, I have no problem forking over big wads of my cash to the Pentagon to make the fiercest and scariest war machine on the planet, so that all my enemies are scared shitless and pay attention when my diplomats speak softly.
Far better use of my tax money then throwing it down some rathole trying to reverse the judgments of Fate and Luck, subsidizing people rebuilding their beloved family homes on a flood plain, below sea level, in the path of the last 42 forest fires, et cetera.
Actually, they do. The military has no problem hiring the very best if they want to. Half the best physicists and electrical engineers I knew at MIT -- and the better half, typically -- went either directly into the military (via ROTC) or worked for defense contractors. Why not? It's where the really interesting physics and engineering was being done, the pay and benefits were great, and you weren't hassled by dumbass marketing suits wanting you to make your product cute or cheap.
The military wants their tech to work and be way cooler and better than anyone else's stuff, cost to them is no object, and they don't give a fuck what it looks like or whether it "appeals" to the critical 18-25 Facebook demographic. It's going to be painted olive drab anyway, and soldiers will be told to use it, not begged. Fairly ideal working conditions for a really smart technical person, I'd say. The only drawback is the various amounts of bureaucratic bullshit you have to cope with, which tops the level in a good private firm.
Anyway, I've never heard of a good technical job in the military or one of its prime contractors, or one of the defense-associated national labs, not drawing a huge raft of top-notch applicants. It's agencies like the EPA which pay terribly, have hideous civil-service and union rules weighing them down, and which, frankly, involve boring and outdated technology, which end up desperate to hire even third-rate people.
Been driving a desk a lot, lately?
I can meet them easily, and I turn 45 next week.
Get out and get your exercise, man. You'll be glad you did when you're my age, and if you already are, you'll feel 10 years younger in a few months, really truly.
Some of the recent work I have been involved with tends to have some anomalies that are not easily sorted out concerning Light speeds and velocities in these areas.
Good Golly, like what?
If the speed of light is not constant, then physical law (e.g. Maxwell's equations) is not the same everywhere, and energy is not conserved, there is no Second Law of thermodynamics, and basically all hell breaks loose. The speed of light isn't just the speed at which light travels. It's a fundamental constant that appears in all kinds of basic physical laws.
(subject says it all)
I think you're using the term incorrectly. I wasn't criticizing anybody, I was just explaining to someone why the square brackets appeared. Surely it isn't being a Nazi to answer questions, even merely implied questions?
What does a machine have to do with whether you use single or double quotes?
I was responding to the AC who said I need to work on my coding. I assume he meant "coding" as in "programming," and was referring to the well-known fact that if you nest the same type of quotes in a shell command, which is tempting when writing complex commands, the shell can't tell the difference between the next level of open quote and a close quote, so you will typically get something quite different from what you intended.
Although you appear to be conflating "journalism" and "stuff posted on Slashdot"
God forbid. Probably insulting to both.
The point is is it a good idea in the first place- given the potential overall long term pluses and minuses?
No, that's a topic for theologians, monks, and college sophomores to debate, because only God Himself is wise enough to evaluate whether anything is "beneficial to society as a whole." Any mere mortal who claims he can do so is a fool, shyster or crook. This is why it's proven utterly impossible to set up the One True Social System that automatically evaluates each and every technological advance and encourages those that are Good and suppresses those that are Bad.
And so we have such morally ambiguous tools as atomic bombs, ICBMs, guns, and anonymous Internet identities. We've found that in actual practise (as opposed to a meaningless discussion forum) you can't evaluate whether a whole technology is Good or Bad. No ten people can even agree on the definition of "good" and "bad." You can only, at best, say that this or that particular use of the technology is good or bad. So we don't, unless we're naive idiots, evaluate technology all by itself. We evaluate the actions of people and judge those, instead. Shooting schoolchildren to make a political point is bad. Shooting people who are in the process of shooting schoolchildren is good. Shooting people who merely say schoolchildren should be shot to make political points is a closer call, but probably bad. And so on. But we don't even try to decide whether guns, or even "shooting people" is, in itself, on balance, good or bad.
Boy, what do they teach in schools these days?
Come on now. You might as well argue that locking your front door is pointless because there are many ways to pick a lock, if you are talented and persistent and resourceful enough, and in the end you can just hire a Mission : Impossible team for $10,000,000 to silently dig a tunnel under the house and break in through the basement.
The point isn't to make theft impossible in the sense that it would violate the laws of physics. The idea is just to make it more expensive, so that, ideally, it's cheaper to pay for the work in an honest way than to steal it.
In any event, there is obviously a correlation between how expensive and difficult it is to steal and make it pay, and how much stealing goes on. Anything that makes stealing even slightly more expensive is going to reduce the amount of it (more or less driving the cheap criminals out of the "market"). If it costs less than the amount of theft prevented, it's worth it.
What, they can completely change the meaning of the article with their stupid spin, but they've got enough standards to use brackets for a case-sensitive journalistic convention?
Oh, you know. Major crooks are always careful to obey the speed limit and file their tax returns on time. The biggest con-men always shine their shoes, wear a tie, and speak politely. Some sort of law o' nature.
Fortunately, in (most of) this world, you are not paid according to what you "deserve," but according to what you can negotiate freely with the people who want your services or product.
Forcing your moral and ethical standards on others -- e.g. stating what other people do and do not "deserve" -- is something I find reprehensibly arrogant.
Not to mention that if it dies from your neglect, you can be charged with murder, or at least animal abuse, and your neighbors start leaving dogshit on your doorstep after your face is on the evening news...next to the sad, shriveled corpse of the laptop...a bright promising life, cut cruelly short by a cranky abusive bastard...
Given how far away it is, and the speed of light, you can calculate how long it took the light to get here. You know it existed that long ago. Subtract from the age of the Universe. That gives you the maximum age of the galaxy, and that's what they're quoting. It could be younger, of course.
Phooey. I need a better shell, which can determine from context whether, when it encounters a quote, it's a closing quote or a new opening quote.
The machines work for me, not vice versa.
Or don't buy the camera?
This is something Canon would tout as a feature of their camera, for which artists would pay a premium, so that they could more easily prove that a particular photo belongs to them.
Keep in mind these are people who (1) earn their daily bread by taking amazing photos, and (2) often have to endure years and years of dry spells before one particular photo hits the big time and generates widespread interest. They have a very strong interest in controlling the reproduction and use of their photos, so they can get paid for their years of effort. A feature like this, sort of an automatic unfakeable "signature" embedded in each frame, would make it much easier for them to prove that a given photo is their property.
You might not like that of course, but that just means you're not a photographer. Presumably when it comes to whatever you do creatively, that takes years of discipline and effort to do, and which puts the food on your table, is not something you'd like people to just be able to duplicate and distribute randomly and broadly without even asking you first.
Think of it as the equivalent of your engraving your SSN on your very expensive tools, so that if they're ripped off you can prove they're yours.
When you quote a piece, you're supposed to put anything you add that isn't in the original quote in square brackets. What you add is supposed to be harmless, of course, not changing the original meaning, but keeping it grammatically and typographically correct.
In this case, the full quote would be:
"In an achievement some see as the "holy grail" of nanoscience, researchers..."
The summary dropped the introductory phrase, which makes the quote:
"researchers..."
But if the quote is used where it is, the first letter should be capitalized to make it grammatically correct. Hence, the capital is added, but it's put in square brackets to put you on notice that this is not precisely a direct quote.
Another common use of the convention is when you quote something that contains a pronoun, and you need to put the proper nouns in to make sense of it:
"Joe Slashdot couldn't care less. He hated journalists anyway."
To quote only the second sentence, you'd write:
"[Joe] hated journalists anyway."
Because if you leave it as "he" your audience wouldn't know who the heck "he" is.
Go look up Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Liebniz.
Or, if your point is that the historical record has been massively fudged by some evil patriarchal European conspiracy, then you can go fuck yourself as a clueless post-modernist nutjob.
Well...thank you for the comments. This is certainly not something that can easily be settled, as the comments section in many an alt.space blog will tell you. The debate about how and why LEO access remains so fabulously expensive, despite all expectations 50 years ago, seems endless, although we might hope that sooner or later some development will put a stop to it by demonstrating the right way to go.
Does the right way involve social changes, as you suggest? Is it like trans-Atlantic travel in the 1600s, where it's really just a question of the home countries getting rich enough to be able to afford the cost routinely instead of only on special occasion? Sure, could be.
Or is it like personal computing, which was utterly impossible in the days of discrete components, because the labor cost involved in building (and maintaining) a computer built out of tubes or discrete transistors would ensure that the price of a computer would never come within reach of the average individual? In that case, a breakthrough technology -- the integrated circuit -- changed the whole dynamics of the situation by making it possible to robotically build incredibly complex circuits incredibly cheaply at the margin, and poof, we have personal computers that cost less than what teenagers spend on their senior prom, and the revolution that has wrought.
Perhaps that is what will finally bring the cost of space access into the same category as the price of overnight package delivery, and revolutionize society. That would, indeed, be an engineering advance of some kind. Of what kind, I can't imagine, or else I'd be keeping my mouth shut and filing patent applications and raising seed money. But it's a possible resolution of the problem, assuming any resolution is possible.
First, life as we know it is essentially a precarious delicate balance of chemical reactions that can go either way. For example, we need to break down the proteins we eat so that we can build up or own proteins. We need to create energy-rich substances (like fat) to store energy, so that later we can consume them to provide energy. We assemble DNA into chromosomes and then pack it away for safe storage, but then we need to partially disassemble it to use it. And so on.
All this has to take place in essentially an isothermal environment. We can't change the temperature of a cell by several hundred degrees to get different reactions to go in different ways, or forward and back. We can't compartmentalize the cell and have different temperatures in different parts so that different reactions are favored.
To get a set of chemical reactions that can be delicately balanced so that very small changes -- e.g. the addition or withholding of an enzyme (catalyst) -- can tip the balance this way and that, nothing is as useful as the hydrogen bond, which is a somewhat like a chemical bond in that it involves sharing a small charged particle between atoms, but in this case the particle is a proton instead of an electron. Since the proton is much larger than the electron, the bond is far weaker, typically. Helpfully, it can easily be broken and made at temperatures where water is a liquid by very small changes in the conditions. Indeed, they're made and broken in liquid water all the time.
You might easily say that life is fundamentally based around the existence of the hydrogen bond, and its ability to be formed and broken easily at certain temperatures. There really isn't anything else like it in chemistry. You couldn't imagine ordinary chemical bonds playing this role at, say, a much higher temperature, because the problem is that all chemical bonds become flexible and easy to make and break at about the same temperature (5000-10000 K). You couldn't have some bonds flexible and some others sturdy. It would be like trying to pour and shape steel with iron tools close to the melting point of iron.
Fortunately for us, because of the peculiar stability of the oxygen nucleus, there is a great deal of oxygen in the universe. Since there is also, naturally, a very large amount of hydrogen, it turns out that water (H2O) is probably the most common heteronuclear neutral molecule in the universe. There's a huge amount of it out there. And water is an ideal basic substrate on which to be building your life based on hydrogen bonds, because of course water is one of the best hydrogen-bonding substances there is. Think of it as the "silicon" in life "microelectronics," the substance that you can dope with other molecules and get all kinds of useful behavior.
It might well be the case that there is some other model for life, one not based on ordinary chemistry -- for example you could have Robert L. Forward's life based on nuclear chemistry, living on neutron stars, with a natural time-scale a billion or more times faster than ours. But no one outside of fantasy has ever proposed a plausible model for it.
27 years is a long time to project computer technology, yes. But for most technology? Not so much. Certainly a new 2008 Toyota Corolla, for example, is a much better car than a new 1981 Corolla, but much of the basic technology is fairly similar and reasonably forseeable from 1981, if you were in tune with the latest thinking in automotive technology. There's a few things you might not have anticipated -- built-in MP3 players, GPS navigation -- but you would be pretty much spot on if you predicted that you'd be using EFI, aluminum heads, fuel injection, et cetera, all the stuff the 1981 engineers thought would be in the future.
For that matter, I would be greatly surprised if Toyota wasn't thinking about their 2008 Corollas in 1981. You need to plan stuff out that long if you want to do things like acquire land for new factories, build the factories, install robots, hire and train workers, and put together a complicated assembly process. That stuff can't be done in six months (unless you're the government with infinite amounts of other peoples' money to spend).
Even if you're the government, when you build something really complicated that pushes the envelope, you still need a lot of time to go from sketches on a napkin to actual hardware. The F-22 fighter jet, for example, which is just coming into service now, began planning in 1981 (coincidentally, just about 27 years ago).
Even for computer technology, a more precise statement would be that 27 years turns out to have been too long a time to predict what would happen over the past 50 years. In the decades before the semiconductor revolution, advances in computing technology -- slide rules, adding machines, etc. -- were slow and fairly predictable. Furthermore, we do not know how much longer the revolution will continue generating amazing new stuff.
Most revolutionary technologies release a burst of innovation, but after the initial discovery is mined out, progress slows again. When efficient, cheap internal combustion engines were introduced in the 1880s, they revolutionized many aspects of society. Canals were abandoned and railroads exploded. Horses disappeared and cars and highways and traffic accidents appeared. The heavier-than-air airplane appeared and it became possible to cross the country in hours instead of days. Similar massive changes followed the introduction of AC electricity mains around the same period. Someone could be forgiven for predicting that the revolution would never stop, and there would be wild and amazing discoveries and inventions in electricity and engines right on through the 1950s. Indeed, Jules Verne's Nautilus is something like that. But of course, this is not what happened. The initial wave of discovery with respect to internal combustion engines and electricity in wires faded, and progress now is back to being slow and evolutionary. Much the same thing is probably bound to happen in computing, but we don't know when. There will come a time when it will be as easy to predict what computers will be like in 20 years as it is now to predict what an internal combustion engine or electric motor will look like in 20 years.
Even ignoring all that, it's still 1970s technology.
Yeesh, this canard again. Look, when we really think about it, don't you think it's only an occasionally useful rule of thumb that the age of a technology has some correlation to its quality and cleverness? Why should it? Is it really reasonable to assume that every technological problem has an infinite number of solutions, which will always be discovered in ascending order of cleverness?
I mean, do we argue that astronauts shouldn't use ball-point pens in orbit because that's 1960s technology, and surely there must be something better now? That they shouldn't use handkerchiefs to blow their nose because that's 16th century technology? NASA shouldn't use wheels on the design of a moon rover because wheels were invented 5000 years ago? They should use something other than calculus to calculate orbits because it was invented in the 1620s and hasn't changed a bit since? Sometimes the best solution to a problem is an old and well-known one. Newer isn't automatically better.
It seems to me that the Space Shuttle was designed at the end of the golden age of rocketry: in the 50s and 60s clever youngsters went into aerospace the way they went into computers and the Internet in the 80s and 90s. It was exciting, it was way out on the frontier, and it paid decently. NASA and their contractors collected most of the best, and they did pretty impressive engineering work. Yes, they didn't have some of the fancy electronics parts their descendants have now, but avionics is only part of the spacecraft -- and when you're talking about a spacecraft that has to survive two very high-energy events (launch and re-entry) -- the quality and coolness of the avionics is probably not the key criterion for design success. Something like airframe design, system robustness, and a canny use of materials is probably way more important.
Since the 1980s, however, aerospace engineering talent in the US has aged and shrunk, and far fewer of the best and brightest go into the field. Furthermore, the excitement and potential glory of a real frontier-type mission is missing. Designing reliable electric bus connectors for solar-power panels on the ISS isn't quite the same as trying to squeeze an extra 5 ounces out of the weight of the first manned Mars lander. It doesn't attract the very best young talent.
So it may very well be that the "1970s technology" design of the SS is as good or better than what could be done today, avionics aside. Certainly the difficulty which private aerospace has had recently in trying to duplicate, essentially, the circa 1965 Saturn 1B medium-lift launch vehicle should make one pause thoughtfully before concluding that it's just a piece of cake to design a combination heavy-lift vehicle and re-usable manned spaceplane seating 10 that leaves the SS in the dust. I mean, if it were easy to do better -- wouldn't someone have done so, already? It's not like there isn't a fortune to be made by the first organization that can get 50 tons of cargo and a crew of 10 to LEO for 10% of the price of a SS launch.
I'm sorry, but this seems like a whole bunch of arrogant cluelessness rolled into one.
First of all, it certainly used to be easy to be an ISP, and there used to be a whole slew of mom 'n' pop ISP operations. The fact that a lot of those closed up shop has much more to do with the fact that they just couldn't compete with the cutthroat pricing the telcos (and to a much more limited extent) the cable companies were rolling out to acquire market share. If you're living in an area with only one or two ISP choices, it's very likely to be the fault of you and your peers in ranking low price above every other possible consideration. When customers do that, they drive everyone out of the business except the largest and most diversified company, which alone can turn a reliable profit by multiplying teensy-weensy margins on each account by zillions of accounts, or can even take a loss on providing network service because they make it up on portal ad revenue, selling add-on services, whatever.
If you think a market exists for ISP service with fixed IPv6 addresses, nothing's stopping you from opening up shop, hiring the necessary network engineers, and trying to cover their salaries, medical benefits, and 401k's with your subscription fees. And if you aren't willing to give that a spin, 'cause you lack expertise to even know WTF you're talking about, or you do actually realize that people generally won't pay for that kind of service, then you're being cynical and dishonest in complaining that other people won't go into the business and lose their life's savings trying to shovel back the tide for your temporary benefit.
Secondly, the reason ISPs charge more for fixed IP addresses is just because it makes some of their network administration more complicated. My ISP (Cox cable) used to give out fixed IP addresses ten years ago, but switched over to DHCP and variable addresses as their customer base grew, and presumably the complexity of administering fixed addresses when customers might add the service and then drop it a week later, and then add it again in three months (and demand their old address back) became incompatible with charging a price not too far above what Pacific Bell charged for DSL.
Finally, your complaint where it isn't uninformed seems to boil down to the complaint that people in the business of selling Internet access want to charge as much as possible for doing so. Uh...and so? Did you just fall of the turnip truck yesterday? Is it an outrageous surprise to you that people everywhere want to maximize the price they get for their labor? Don't you want to get the highest salary you can for the work you do? What makes the people who work for ISPs, or who start them, any different?
Uh...it's not that they really think the Chinese, for example, are stupid or lack resources. But they're not really trying to hide from the Chinese. (Or more precisely, what they're trying to hide from the Chinese they really try to hide, which means they don't even talk about it in public.)
/. Not because they should be secret per se, but just because one doesn't leave loaded guns lying around where children can get to them.
What they're trying to hide it from is some cheapass Taliban group in the hinterlands of Pakistan, who may, as someone else pointed out, have access to the Internet and be able, once given a satellite's orbit, be able to know when it's over their neck of the woods, and plan operations accordingly.
And it's not that they fear amateurs will compromise black satellites. That can only happen, at best, temporarily. It's that if amateurs start compromising satellites, then they need to build and launch much more expensive black satellites that defy amateur attempts at compromise. Which costs you, the taxpayer, beaucoup additional dollars.
I don't mind people trying to spot black satellites. Fun 'n' games, to be sure. But a certain amount of discretion would be grown-up and helpful. I mean, I happen to know, because of my professional background, how to synthesize meth and other interesting substances. But I wouldn't post the steps on
If NASA is looking for "people" people to be astronauts, it's probably more just a sign that the real cutting-edge stuff, for which you do need wildly talented and somewhat abnormal folks, is about over. If machines and the ground crew are now doing all the real hairy work, and the important thing about the people on orbit is just that they don't embarass the agency in front of the TV cameras, well then, sure, being a well-adjusted normform is clearly the way to go.
There's a somewhat apt quote from Fleet Admiral Ernest King, who was Chief of Naval Operations during the Second World War, a famously crabby non "people" person (described by FDR as "a man who shaves with a blowtorch"), to the effect that in wartime they send for the sons of bitches, because only they can get the job done. Point being, if NASA is looking for more "people" skills over aerospatial genius or nerves of brass, then they're probably no longer working on the true frontier.
Yes, I know you don't want a crew that will kill each other because they've the social skills of retarded bonobos. But if you have a crew that has time and energy to spare for social interactions beyond hand me that fucking wrench really quick and O2 is nominal again thank Christ then your missions aren't at the very leading edge.