As much as I would love to see such a debate, it simply not going to happen. In order to participate in a debate, or any other campaign function, the candidate has to see a significant upside that outweighs the potential pitfalls. In other words, the campaign needs to have a sense that they can win votes and avoid losing votes. Let us examine that calculus for the two leading contenders:
Obama:
Pros - Gets to look like an informed policy maker. Gets to highlight his record (real or perceived) as president: green energy, funding for innovation, R&D corporate tax credits, higher mileage standards, network neutrality, access to education. Gets to try to make Romney look like an ignorant fool touting flat-earth nonsense that panders to an ignorant base.
Cons - The people who are going to vote for him anyway already know this. The people who are undecided probably won't be swayed by his performance. His record thus far hasn't really satisfied environmentalists. Could come off as an egg-headed wonk rather than a substantive leader. Solyndra! Killing jobs in coal country! Higher energy costs! Loss of manufacturing!
Romney:
Pros - Gets to pound Obama on his record (real or perceived). Gets to pound Obama about job-killing regulations from the EPA, FCC, FDA, etc. Drill, baby, drill! Innovators are harmed, not helped, by government.
Cons - Doesn't have a coherent platform of his own to promote, other than the magic mystery of the markets and ending (unspecified) regulations. Will either have to 1) pander unscientific nonsense that accords with his base, 2) speak intelligently on science and technology and alienate his base, or 3) speak in platitudes (innovation good! climate change? I dunno. Government bad!) that won't win over anyone. The people who are going to vote for him anyway won't be any more committed to him any route he chooses. He might end up losing votes. He isn't likely to get many undecideds from his performance.
In short, there really aren't a whole lot of votes to be won from such a debate. There are votes to be lost. Nobody wants to appear uninformed on camera. Despite its indisputable importance, science and technology policy just doesn't deliver votes.
Climate change is a stupid question to bring up, regardless on where you fall on the issue. America has already lowered carbon emissions a great deal, if you're that worried about it talk to the rest of the world.
The lowering of U.S. emissions is largely due to slowdowns in the economy and a gradual shift from coal to natural gas. Neither of those trends are sufficient in the long term, and we still emit roughly twice the emissions per capita and per GDP compared to Europe. Are you suggesting that there is no further room for improvement in America's emissions? Or that American policy could not be more geared towards changing global emissions?
The opposite of legitimate rape isn't "illegitimate rape", it's consensual sex. What Akin meant was that if you got pregnant from a rape, it wasn't rape. You enjoyed it, you slut.
Well, gosh, if he'd just come out and said that, everything would be OK! That's definitely the kind of person we want making critical decisions on public health and obstetrics.
Raise you hand if you, too, are tired of politicians - mostly old white men - spouting forth pretending to be obstetricians! Why bother advocating for certain policies from an informed and intelligent position, when ideology and wishful thinking will suffice!
What we need are politicians who aren't afraid to confront the real threat to society: that dastardly man in the red jacket that makes a career or breaking into people's homes, that twisted anti-thief terrorist, Santa Claus!
The Hubble mirror was the most precisely and uniformly shaped mirror ever made up to that time. They just happened to make it precisely to an incorrect shape.
On the rover are color calibration targets (here is the one for the rover's arm's instruments). We know exactly what the colors of those targets are supposed to look like, when imaged by the cameras on the rover, under normal Earth-like lighting conditions. By looking at how those targets appear in the images we get back under Mars lighting conditions, we can do two things:
1) Learn a lot about the lighting conditions on Mars.
2) Correct the appearance of images we get back to correct for that Mars lighting.
And the X-15 was a rocket, not an air-breather. Sure, if you can carry your fuel and oxidizer with you, you can get to really insane speeds. This program isn't seeking a speed record; it is trying to develop a new class of propulsion.
Perhaps, but when the incoming microwave signal is measured in nanowatts or picowatts, a gain of 100 million is pretty damned awesome. Bulk electrical power is easy to come by; a stronger incoming signal is very hard to come by. Depending on the application, who cares if the efficiency of the equipment is lousy.
A better way to look at "efficiency" is to consider how much energy is required to transmit some unit of information across a certain distance. 1.5 kW electrical power is not actually all that much power for microwave transmission applications, especially if it means that the transmitter power can be turned down by, say, a factor of 10.
Clean in comparison to hydrazine and hypergolic fuels, yes. Also, it's a lot easier to manufacture (off-planet) and store compared to hydrogen. You can't get kerosine off-planet, and alcohols require distillation (tough in zero-g). So, yes, methane is an excellent fuel to investigate for future use.
A "Failure" means loss of the mission. This is an unsuccessful test....
The "spacecraft" has been totally destroyed. It seems to me calling it an "unsuccessful test" is a bit of an understatement. I agree with the rest of your sentiment about testing and learning, but calling this a "failure" is entirely appropriate in this case.
In some cases, the software loaded on the device is not suited to the task the engineers want it to do. TFA mentions that the software on the device now is geared towards interplanetary cruise, EDL, and some very basic on-the-surface tasks. If they actually want the rover to do what they've sent it there to do, they need to perform the upgrade. Why not have the entire suite of mission software on the rover when it launches? Perhaps they hadn't gotten around to coding/testing the on-the-surface software yet. Probably the limiting factor is the program storage space on the rover. According to this JPL website:
The computer contains special memory to tolerate the extreme radiation environment from space and to safeguard against power-off cycles so the programs and data will remain and will not accidentally erase when the rover shuts down at night.
On-board memory includes 256MB of DRAM and 2 GB of Flash Memory both with error detection and correction and 256kB of EEPROM
Think you'd be able to code everything the rover is ever meant to do, in a single unchanging program image, into just a few hundred kB?
In other cases, upgraded software provides new capabilities that weren't envisioned during the original design. Spirit and Opportunity, for instance, were given lots of new capabilities over their mission life: like the ability to autonomously navigate based on Simultaneous Locating And Mapping (SLAM) using the various cameras. These are capabilities that were just in development in academia when the rovers were originally programmed, but became proven during the MER mission. As a result of having that autonomous navigation capability, Spirit and Opportunity were able to travel much further distances than they would have if every single wheel revolution needed to be commanded from Earth.
In order to change the trajectory, you need reaction mass. In case of a surface blast, all the reaction mass you'd get would be shrapnel from the bomb itself
In the case of a nuclear weapon detonation, there is practically no shrapnel left. There is a shockwave of vaporized bomb material that acts in a similar way. Most of the output of a nuclear weapon, however, is a whole freaking lot of electromagnetic radiation across the whole spectrum. (On earth it is this energy release that produces most of the building-crushing shockwave. Indiana Jones is immune.) This radiation would vaporize some amount of the asteroid's surface, and that expelled material is what would provide the impulse. A secondary effect would be to heat large swaths of the surface (less than it would take to vaporize) really quickly, which would cause the surface to fracture, leaving the main asteroid body with less mass, which may or may not be significant later on. Finally, all the remaining hot surface emits infrared radiation as it cools, which would provide a small but continuous thrust like a radiometer.
All that still probably wouldn't be enough to deflect an asteroid of lethal size.
As one of the articles explains, HFT algorithms trade almost exclusively based on other trades. Guess what behavior is almost guaranteed to cause a bubble?
Human behavior.
Well, yes, that too. But positive feedback loops are a real bitch. In a real, physical system, positive feedback can be mitigated through damping, time delays, etc. In the worst case, you are still limited by the strength of your actuators - you'll saturate the system, or become slew-rate limited. Sticking a microphone next to a loudspeaker may make an unpleasantly loud sound, but it doesn't immediately become infinitely loud. HFT has the potential to blow up, almost without bound, almost immediately. Would the liquidity and purity of the market really suffer that much if the minimum hold time was, say, one second? At the very least, it would slow the ridiculous arms race of who can clear the most trades per second. I'd be pleased it we could free up the brainpower of some of those very smart people to solve more important, though less immediately profitable, problems. When a billion-dollar investment to shave a millisecond off latency times becomes worthwhile, it is time to change the game to straighten out our priorities.
On a related note: I understand the value of the TIFF format, but why the hell does it have to be so hard to find a decent viewer for them? Why isn't TIFF support baked into every OS and browser, the way it is with jpeg, gif, png, bmp, etc?
Because behavioral economics demands that the price end in.99, otherwise people will think they are being ripped off. If the price jumped to $20, there would be no buyers.
On the other hand, $19.99 is just the sticker price. Once you throw in the extended warranty, Geek Squad on-site setup, and ten accessories you don't actually need, it'll be $237.54.
So YES it is job creation, it's the possibility of long term jobs vs. the reality (that you acknowledge) that without a buyer there is will be no Best Buy at some point.
Well, technically, it isn't job creation unless, ya know, more jobs are created in the process. At the moment it looks a lot more like job status quo - staunch the bleeding. Granted, that's better from a macroeconomic standpoint than letting the company drown in its own incompetence, but unless Best Buy actually starts expanding its workforce, at best it'll be job neutral. As often happens in private takeovers, a lot of jobs get eliminated (failing stores get closed, useless middle management gets axed, etc.), so in the near term it is likely to end up costing jobs.
I am sure that you could fully emulate the Apple//e in software on an Apple TV as a tiny software application. Makes me wonder if some apple employee hasn't considered doing that as an easter egg.
Just becasue there are issues that it can be used to make a bomb, should not stop countries such as the US developing it for its nuclear power plants. I would agree that the facilities to process it should be licenced and monitored and we should keep it out of the hands of rogue states such as Iran
Gosh, with platitudes like that, you should run for office! It is very easy for politicians, who don't actually live in the same reality as the rest of us, to make such simplistic statements without offering any concrete or realistic suggestion as to how they would accomplish those ends.
Gov. Romney: If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon. And if we elect Mitt Romney, they will not have a nuclear weapon. [Nov 12, 2011, GOP Debate in Spartanburg, S.C.]
Inquiring Media, fellow candidates, anyone with half a brain: How will you accomplish that, exactly?
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I would love to see such a debate, it simply not going to happen. In order to participate in a debate, or any other campaign function, the candidate has to see a significant upside that outweighs the potential pitfalls. In other words, the campaign needs to have a sense that they can win votes and avoid losing votes. Let us examine that calculus for the two leading contenders:
Obama:
Pros - Gets to look like an informed policy maker. Gets to highlight his record (real or perceived) as president: green energy, funding for innovation, R&D corporate tax credits, higher mileage standards, network neutrality, access to education. Gets to try to make Romney look like an ignorant fool touting flat-earth nonsense that panders to an ignorant base.
Cons - The people who are going to vote for him anyway already know this. The people who are undecided probably won't be swayed by his performance. His record thus far hasn't really satisfied environmentalists. Could come off as an egg-headed wonk rather than a substantive leader. Solyndra! Killing jobs in coal country! Higher energy costs! Loss of manufacturing!
Romney:
Pros - Gets to pound Obama on his record (real or perceived). Gets to pound Obama about job-killing regulations from the EPA, FCC, FDA, etc. Drill, baby, drill! Innovators are harmed, not helped, by government.
Cons - Doesn't have a coherent platform of his own to promote, other than the magic mystery of the markets and ending (unspecified) regulations. Will either have to 1) pander unscientific nonsense that accords with his base, 2) speak intelligently on science and technology and alienate his base, or 3) speak in platitudes (innovation good! climate change? I dunno. Government bad!) that won't win over anyone. The people who are going to vote for him anyway won't be any more committed to him any route he chooses. He might end up losing votes. He isn't likely to get many undecideds from his performance.
In short, there really aren't a whole lot of votes to be won from such a debate. There are votes to be lost. Nobody wants to appear uninformed on camera. Despite its indisputable importance, science and technology policy just doesn't deliver votes.
The lowering of U.S. emissions is largely due to slowdowns in the economy and a gradual shift from coal to natural gas. Neither of those trends are sufficient in the long term, and we still emit roughly twice the emissions per capita and per GDP compared to Europe. Are you suggesting that there is no further room for improvement in America's emissions? Or that American policy could not be more geared towards changing global emissions?
Well, gosh, if he'd just come out and said that, everything would be OK! That's definitely the kind of person we want making critical decisions on public health and obstetrics.
Yes, and I definitely want an uninformed idiot representing me in the Senate!
Raise you hand if you, too, are tired of politicians - mostly old white men - spouting forth pretending to be obstetricians! Why bother advocating for certain policies from an informed and intelligent position, when ideology and wishful thinking will suffice!
What we need are politicians who aren't afraid to confront the real threat to society: that dastardly man in the red jacket that makes a career or breaking into people's homes, that twisted anti-thief terrorist, Santa Claus!
The Hubble mirror was the most precisely and uniformly shaped mirror ever made up to that time. They just happened to make it precisely to an incorrect shape.
On the rover are color calibration targets (here is the one for the rover's arm's instruments). We know exactly what the colors of those targets are supposed to look like, when imaged by the cameras on the rover, under normal Earth-like lighting conditions. By looking at how those targets appear in the images we get back under Mars lighting conditions, we can do two things:
1) Learn a lot about the lighting conditions on Mars.
2) Correct the appearance of images we get back to correct for that Mars lighting.
And the X-15 was a rocket, not an air-breather. Sure, if you can carry your fuel and oxidizer with you, you can get to really insane speeds. This program isn't seeking a speed record; it is trying to develop a new class of propulsion.
Perhaps, but when the incoming microwave signal is measured in nanowatts or picowatts, a gain of 100 million is pretty damned awesome. Bulk electrical power is easy to come by; a stronger incoming signal is very hard to come by. Depending on the application, who cares if the efficiency of the equipment is lousy.
A better way to look at "efficiency" is to consider how much energy is required to transmit some unit of information across a certain distance. 1.5 kW electrical power is not actually all that much power for microwave transmission applications, especially if it means that the transmitter power can be turned down by, say, a factor of 10.
Clean in comparison to hydrazine and hypergolic fuels, yes. Also, it's a lot easier to manufacture (off-planet) and store compared to hydrogen. You can't get kerosine off-planet, and alcohols require distillation (tough in zero-g). So, yes, methane is an excellent fuel to investigate for future use.
If failing a unit test also meant that the computer bursts into flames, then yes, it would be a lot of failure, and you would be right to call it so.
The "spacecraft" has been totally destroyed. It seems to me calling it an "unsuccessful test" is a bit of an understatement. I agree with the rest of your sentiment about testing and learning, but calling this a "failure" is entirely appropriate in this case.
Think you'd be able to code everything the rover is ever meant to do, in a single unchanging program image, into just a few hundred kB?
In other cases, upgraded software provides new capabilities that weren't envisioned during the original design. Spirit and Opportunity, for instance, were given lots of new capabilities over their mission life: like the ability to autonomously navigate based on Simultaneous Locating And Mapping (SLAM) using the various cameras. These are capabilities that were just in development in academia when the rovers were originally programmed, but became proven during the MER mission. As a result of having that autonomous navigation capability, Spirit and Opportunity were able to travel much further distances than they would have if every single wheel revolution needed to be commanded from Earth.
Bruce Willis may not have a shot, but we still have Chuck Norris.
In the case of a nuclear weapon detonation, there is practically no shrapnel left. There is a shockwave of vaporized bomb material that acts in a similar way. Most of the output of a nuclear weapon, however, is a whole freaking lot of electromagnetic radiation across the whole spectrum. (On earth it is this energy release that produces most of the building-crushing shockwave. Indiana Jones is immune.) This radiation would vaporize some amount of the asteroid's surface, and that expelled material is what would provide the impulse. A secondary effect would be to heat large swaths of the surface (less than it would take to vaporize) really quickly, which would cause the surface to fracture, leaving the main asteroid body with less mass, which may or may not be significant later on. Finally, all the remaining hot surface emits infrared radiation as it cools, which would provide a small but continuous thrust like a radiometer.
All that still probably wouldn't be enough to deflect an asteroid of lethal size.
And yet, Kang and Kodos haven't received much treatment...yet.
Of course they are. Isn't that why they dumped all that tea into boston harbor?
Well, yes, that too. But positive feedback loops are a real bitch. In a real, physical system, positive feedback can be mitigated through damping, time delays, etc. In the worst case, you are still limited by the strength of your actuators - you'll saturate the system, or become slew-rate limited. Sticking a microphone next to a loudspeaker may make an unpleasantly loud sound, but it doesn't immediately become infinitely loud. HFT has the potential to blow up, almost without bound, almost immediately. Would the liquidity and purity of the market really suffer that much if the minimum hold time was, say, one second? At the very least, it would slow the ridiculous arms race of who can clear the most trades per second. I'd be pleased it we could free up the brainpower of some of those very smart people to solve more important, though less immediately profitable, problems. When a billion-dollar investment to shave a millisecond off latency times becomes worthwhile, it is time to change the game to straighten out our priorities.
On a related note: I understand the value of the TIFF format, but why the hell does it have to be so hard to find a decent viewer for them? Why isn't TIFF support baked into every OS and browser, the way it is with jpeg, gif, png, bmp, etc?
Because behavioral economics demands that the price end in .99, otherwise people will think they are being ripped off. If the price jumped to $20, there would be no buyers.
On the other hand, $19.99 is just the sticker price. Once you throw in the extended warranty, Geek Squad on-site setup, and ten accessories you don't actually need, it'll be $237.54.
Well, technically, it isn't job creation unless, ya know, more jobs are created in the process. At the moment it looks a lot more like job status quo - staunch the bleeding. Granted, that's better from a macroeconomic standpoint than letting the company drown in its own incompetence, but unless Best Buy actually starts expanding its workforce, at best it'll be job neutral. As often happens in private takeovers, a lot of jobs get eliminated (failing stores get closed, useless middle management gets axed, etc.), so in the near term it is likely to end up costing jobs.
I am sure that you could fully emulate the Apple //e in software on an Apple TV as a tiny software application. Makes me wonder if some apple employee hasn't considered doing that as an easter egg.
Nah, we'd just get Superman to tweak it.
Naaar! They'd have been knocked over by the whalers!
Gosh, with platitudes like that, you should run for office! It is very easy for politicians, who don't actually live in the same reality as the rest of us, to make such simplistic statements without offering any concrete or realistic suggestion as to how they would accomplish those ends.
Gov. Romney: If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon. And if we elect Mitt Romney, they will not have a nuclear weapon. [Nov 12, 2011, GOP Debate in Spartanburg, S.C.]
Inquiring Media, fellow candidates, anyone with half a brain: How will you accomplish that, exactly?
Gov. Romney: [crickets]