the people of America by a majority voted for a different candidate
To be totally pedantic...
There are some 320 million people in the united states (or were, in 2016). In 2016, some 136 million votes were cast for president. So the majority of people in the United States didn't vote at all!
But I hear what you are saying: "I meant a majority of eligible voters".
One could look up the stats in a bunch of places, but according to this particular source, about 59% of eligible voters participated in the 2016 presidential election. Of those that did vote, Trump got about 46% and Clinton about 48%. So, yes, I guess a majority of voters chose a different candidate than Trump.
But in terms of eligible voters, Trump got about 27%, Clinton about 28%,.... and not even bothering to vote got 41%. So, literally, it looks like "nobody" wins!
this was something I was curious about: how large is this setup presently, and small do they think they can make it. The article mentions they had the excited cesium in a vapor cell. Vapor cells are lab-grade blown glassware, one-to-several cm in diameter and at least several cm long. That isn't going to replace the antennae in my smartphone anytime soon.
On the other hand, this is an experimental setup, probably spanning a large tabletop (an optical table at that!). But they gave no hint about how small they might be able to make this. I think "grain of rice" isn't likely anytime soon. But it could be, eventually. The first transistor was a rather chunky thing, too. Now a trillion of them fit on a fingernail. It may be possible for them to construct a vapor cell using lithographic techniques, similar to how MEMs technology put a 6-axis IMU chip in every smartphone.
While I agree that the sleeper cab is a bit of a weird addition to this vehicle, the fact that its range is only about 300 mi does not make it worthless.
As the article stated, this truck's intended purpose is short-haul, drayage work at the port. That is: getting containers from boats at the dock to distribution centers at some distance away. That kind of work is a lot of start-stop moving around the port, idling in queues, waiting at stoplights. Diesel semis are terrible at that, from the standpoint of efficiency and emissions. The rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases in the communities around the ports of Long Beach and Oakland are very high. The start-stop is very hard on the vehicles, too, leading to accelerated wear of the powertrain.
This is why electric semis (a fuel-cell vehicle is an electric vehicle) will be so useful in this niche, long before using them cross-country becomes practical.
I'm no moon landing conspiracy theorist but the combination of losing the Saturn blue prints and not having a viable ship to get to the moon and not having space suits that can allow a person to survive on the moon a pretty strong factors to consider.
I don't usually respond to ACs, especially when they're spouting easily and repeatedly debunked conspiracy theories. But, in the interests of correcting the internet:
YouTuber Curious Droid, who creates videos about lots of rocket and aeronautic history, just recently put out a video about recreating the F-1 engine. Short answer: the blueprints aren't lost, but they do not contain all the necessary information about how to make the engine. A lot of that information about assembly technique was not well documented. Each engine, although more or less the same, was practically hand-made by skilled technicians.
NASA does have suits that went to the Moon. For instance, the Smithsonian has been carefully restoring and documenting Armstrong's lunar EVA suit for permanent display. I am a backer of that successful kickstarter effort, and have been getting regular updates as they prepare for its debut next year (50th anniversary).
It would be so much simpler if the earth rotated the sun in exactly 256 days, divided into exactly eight 32 day months.
Ya know, with enough planets and moons of the right masses and orbits, you probably could generate a system that was locked into that kind of orbital resonance. Maintaining stability in such a system, where small perturbations accumulate, would probably be difficult to guarantee, though.
Bloody hell, Qbertino. In the time it took you to post this toss-off question to Slashdot, you could have just used the powers of the internet to find out the answer yourself.
But what do you do with the cards after you get the data off of them and blackmail the owners?
Load them with malware, then sell them back on eBay! Or sprinkle them at various political gatherings to see who's gullible enough to pick them up and plug them in.
My secret past-time is buying up old memory cards, finding the goodies, and then blackmailing the former owners, committing industrial espionage, and generally being amused. Now you all have gone and ruined it by warning everyone!
Oh, wait, people are still lazy? Don't care about security? Wouldn't know how to wipe a card even if they did care? Well, then, I guess I'm all set.
Here is a recent YouTube video from space enthusiast and Kerbal guru Scott Manley. It attempts to explain the differences in capturing images of distant objects using spacecraft compared to, say, taking pictures with a smartphone. The most important aspect to keep in mind that is these images are taken from really far away, and so the objects being resolved are really tiny (i.e., subtend a tiny angle in the field of view).
Let's throw some math at this. The target asteroid is roughly 0.9 km across, and was imaged from 320 to 240 km away. Even at the closest of four images, the asteroid was only 0.2 degrees (13 arcmin) across - less than half the apparent size of the full moon from here on Earth. Now, if Hayabusa2 was not going to get much closer, the designers of the spacecraft could have spec'ed a camera system with a narrower field of view, i.e., a greater magnification, so that it could resolve the asteroid better from that distance. But this spacecraft is going to get very, very close to the asteroid (probably land on it), and a camera with a narrow field of view would be a hindrance to good science when the spacecraft gets close up. Put differently: you wouldn't want to use a telescope to take a portrait of your friend.
The designers had to make tradeoffs. The main camera has a field of view of about 6 degrees. On the bright side, things only get better from here as the spacecraft gets closer. It will spend the majority of its mission just 20 km away.
I agree that the decay of the RTG's capacity is limiting the voyager probe. But, it has been 40 years, and well past even the "extended" mission out to Neptune. My broader point with Curiosity was this: what is more likely to give out and end the mission, the RTG or some other component? My bet is that it won't be the RTG; something else will fail first.
Not that Curiosity, their bigger nuclear-powered older bother, isn't doing well for itself either. It touched down in August 2012 and it's too still going despite an originally planned two year mission length. I'm interested to see if it'll last even longer or if the decay of it's Pu238-dioxide power source will be what keeps it from extending it's mission beyond the original goal by as much as Opportunity has.
The decay of Pu-238 will not be what limits the Curiosity mission. It has a half-life of 87.7 years. The RTG that uses that decay to produce electricity (and, perhaps more importantly at the moment, heat to keep the electronics happy) decays more quickly than that. But the Voyager probes still have enough electricity to communicate with earth forty years after launch.
The limiting factor for Curiosity will probably be its moving parts. Specifically, its drive motors and wheels. The wheels have taken quite a beating, and may eventually be so damaged that they can no longer provide adequate traction. The JPL guys are really clever, and can probably drive Curiosity even with the complete loss of one wheel.
But even if Curiosity stopped moving tomorrow, it would almost certainly still be useful for stationary science. It can continue to gather weather data (including measuring atmospheric methane, which hit the news recently), take pictures, shoot lasers, and sample rocks, probably for years. One of the Viking landers lasted 6 years on the surface, and that mission ended only after a bad software update.
Well, the man has so conflated (in his own mind, anyway) that he and the country are one and the same thing. Personal loyalty to him is equated with patriotism. Attacks on him are equated with treason. A skeptical media is the enemy of the people.
It used to be that one could maintain a mental distinction between the office and the person holding it. This president behaves as though that distinction no longer exists. So, yes, it's no longer "the White House" - a short hand for the Office of the President - but rather "the Trump White House" - the twisted amalgam of power and personality.
Or, expressed differently: start sailing in a particular direction, and do not deviate left or right from that (locally) straightline path until you hit land again.
It would be insane _not_ to require a shrinking service to fund its retirement obligations.
Can we hold coal companies to the same standard, or allow them to chew up their employees, spit them out when they're too broken down to work, and then welch on their pension obligations?
Try again, it's right now well below the 0.2% mark (~$20Bn out of $1.3Tn)
I don't know where you get your numbers from, Oh Anonymous Coward, but the federal budget hasn't been $1.3 trillion for decades. The latest budget (well, what passes for a budget in these ridiculous ad hoc, continuing-resolution times) is about $4 trillion. Perhaps the $1.3 trillion was meant to indicate non-defense, discretionary spending?
If you're going to spend just... all the money... on something, and that something can't be things like education or infrastructure, then it might as well be on something cool like putting people on the moon.
During the Apollo program, NASA was something like 3-5% of the entire federal budget. These days, it's more like 0.5%. NASA has spent about as much on the Ares/Constellation pork boondogle as the JWST, and that just might someday go to the Moon.
For comparison: Department of Education is around 2% of the federal budget. Highway spending is about 1%. Defense spending, depending on the year and what gets counted, is 15-20%.
So when you are talking about "all the money", just what are you pointing to other than your own ignorance?
The "rest of the 'financial community'" understands that the "FUCK UP" here was a traceable use of the Internet and text messages.
Indeed. The rest of the financial community is probably shaking their heads at this guy's fuck up, which amounts to 1) getting caught and 2) selling his stock instead of just waiting for his golden parachute.
Insider trading on his own incompetence and negligence is criminal, but incompetence and negligence itself is not punished in any way.
Considering that, ten years out, none of the Wall Street folks that caused the financial crisis have been convicted, let alone indicted, I will consider this Equifax development as a tiny sliver of progress.
And after two years, has anything in the debate changed on Slashdot? Perhaps a hardening of positions, but I doubt that anyone's mind here has been changed. Can anyone chime in: has your position on this been modified? What persuaded you?
for those of you wondering: just how hard is it to light a rocket engine, when it is spewing tons of highly combustible fuel and oxider per second, Scott Manley provides a handy video on rocket ignition technology.
SpaceX's eventual plans to go to Mars utilize a different rocket engine - the Raptor. Among other differences from the Merlin enigne (used by the Falcon 9), the Raptor will have spark ignition: no need for these highly combustible lighter fluids.
Redundancy has costs--both to pay for the redundant equipment, and to accommodate it
To a certain extent, SpaceX's architectural approach of many engines has arguably reduced costs. By making more copies of single engine design, the cost per engine has dropped significantly.. The manufacturing reliability is better, too. (What would the failure rate of a Model T have been if Ford was only building one per week? Building lots of something continuously brings you up the learning curve faster, reduces mistakes, and forces you to invest in tooling and fixturing that ensures each step is successful and repeatable.)
In this case, I think it is likely that the cost/kg and the reliability of a 9-engine rocket is better than a rocket that had a single engine of comparable power.
As you say - there are limits to this approach. (I'd call it modularity, rather than redundancy.) The efficiency of rocket engines doesn't scale down well and, as you point out, requires a build up of all the ancillary equipment.
Slashdot Mirror
To be totally pedantic...
.... and not even bothering to vote got 41%. So, literally, it looks like "nobody" wins!
There are some 320 million people in the united states (or were, in 2016). In 2016, some 136 million votes were cast for president. So the majority of people in the United States didn't vote at all!
But I hear what you are saying: "I meant a majority of eligible voters".
One could look up the stats in a bunch of places, but according to this particular source, about 59% of eligible voters participated in the 2016 presidential election. Of those that did vote, Trump got about 46% and Clinton about 48%. So, yes, I guess a majority of voters chose a different candidate than Trump.
But in terms of eligible voters, Trump got about 27%, Clinton about 28%,
this was something I was curious about: how large is this setup presently, and small do they think they can make it. The article mentions they had the excited cesium in a vapor cell. Vapor cells are lab-grade blown glassware, one-to-several cm in diameter and at least several cm long. That isn't going to replace the antennae in my smartphone anytime soon.
On the other hand, this is an experimental setup, probably spanning a large tabletop (an optical table at that!). But they gave no hint about how small they might be able to make this. I think "grain of rice" isn't likely anytime soon. But it could be, eventually. The first transistor was a rather chunky thing, too. Now a trillion of them fit on a fingernail. It may be possible for them to construct a vapor cell using lithographic techniques, similar to how MEMs technology put a 6-axis IMU chip in every smartphone.
While I agree that the sleeper cab is a bit of a weird addition to this vehicle, the fact that its range is only about 300 mi does not make it worthless.
As the article stated, this truck's intended purpose is short-haul, drayage work at the port. That is: getting containers from boats at the dock to distribution centers at some distance away. That kind of work is a lot of start-stop moving around the port, idling in queues, waiting at stoplights. Diesel semis are terrible at that, from the standpoint of efficiency and emissions. The rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases in the communities around the ports of Long Beach and Oakland are very high. The start-stop is very hard on the vehicles, too, leading to accelerated wear of the powertrain. This is why electric semis (a fuel-cell vehicle is an electric vehicle) will be so useful in this niche, long before using them cross-country becomes practical.
I don't usually respond to ACs, especially when they're spouting easily and repeatedly debunked conspiracy theories. But, in the interests of correcting the internet:
YouTuber Curious Droid, who creates videos about lots of rocket and aeronautic history, just recently put out a video about recreating the F-1 engine. Short answer: the blueprints aren't lost, but they do not contain all the necessary information about how to make the engine. A lot of that information about assembly technique was not well documented. Each engine, although more or less the same, was practically hand-made by skilled technicians.
NASA does have suits that went to the Moon. For instance, the Smithsonian has been carefully restoring and documenting Armstrong's lunar EVA suit for permanent display. I am a backer of that successful kickstarter effort, and have been getting regular updates as they prepare for its debut next year (50th anniversary).
Ya know, with enough planets and moons of the right masses and orbits, you probably could generate a system that was locked into that kind of orbital resonance. Maintaining stability in such a system, where small perturbations accumulate, would probably be difficult to guarantee, though.
Bloody hell, Qbertino. In the time it took you to post this toss-off question to Slashdot, you could have just used the powers of the internet to find out the answer yourself.
This could get you started, anyway.
Load them with malware, then sell them back on eBay! Or sprinkle them at various political gatherings to see who's gullible enough to pick them up and plug them in.
My secret past-time is buying up old memory cards, finding the goodies, and then blackmailing the former owners, committing industrial espionage, and generally being amused. Now you all have gone and ruined it by warning everyone!
Oh, wait, people are still lazy? Don't care about security? Wouldn't know how to wipe a card even if they did care? Well, then, I guess I'm all set.
disclaimer: this post is in jest
Here is a recent YouTube video from space enthusiast and Kerbal guru Scott Manley. It attempts to explain the differences in capturing images of distant objects using spacecraft compared to, say, taking pictures with a smartphone. The most important aspect to keep in mind that is these images are taken from really far away, and so the objects being resolved are really tiny (i.e., subtend a tiny angle in the field of view).
Let's throw some math at this. The target asteroid is roughly 0.9 km across, and was imaged from 320 to 240 km away. Even at the closest of four images, the asteroid was only 0.2 degrees (13 arcmin) across - less than half the apparent size of the full moon from here on Earth. Now, if Hayabusa2 was not going to get much closer, the designers of the spacecraft could have spec'ed a camera system with a narrower field of view, i.e., a greater magnification, so that it could resolve the asteroid better from that distance. But this spacecraft is going to get very, very close to the asteroid (probably land on it), and a camera with a narrow field of view would be a hindrance to good science when the spacecraft gets close up. Put differently: you wouldn't want to use a telescope to take a portrait of your friend.
The designers had to make tradeoffs. The main camera has a field of view of about 6 degrees. On the bright side, things only get better from here as the spacecraft gets closer. It will spend the majority of its mission just 20 km away.
I agree that the decay of the RTG's capacity is limiting the voyager probe. But, it has been 40 years, and well past even the "extended" mission out to Neptune. My broader point with Curiosity was this: what is more likely to give out and end the mission, the RTG or some other component? My bet is that it won't be the RTG; something else will fail first.
The decay of Pu-238 will not be what limits the Curiosity mission. It has a half-life of 87.7 years. The RTG that uses that decay to produce electricity (and, perhaps more importantly at the moment, heat to keep the electronics happy) decays more quickly than that. But the Voyager probes still have enough electricity to communicate with earth forty years after launch.
The limiting factor for Curiosity will probably be its moving parts. Specifically, its drive motors and wheels. The wheels have taken quite a beating, and may eventually be so damaged that they can no longer provide adequate traction. The JPL guys are really clever, and can probably drive Curiosity even with the complete loss of one wheel.
But even if Curiosity stopped moving tomorrow, it would almost certainly still be useful for stationary science. It can continue to gather weather data (including measuring atmospheric methane, which hit the news recently), take pictures, shoot lasers, and sample rocks, probably for years. One of the Viking landers lasted 6 years on the surface, and that mission ended only after a bad software update.
I hear "Yalie", as spoken by Ned Gerblansky
bummer. no mod points today. Well played, sir.
Well, the man has so conflated (in his own mind, anyway) that he and the country are one and the same thing. Personal loyalty to him is equated with patriotism. Attacks on him are equated with treason. A skeptical media is the enemy of the people.
It used to be that one could maintain a mental distinction between the office and the person holding it. This president behaves as though that distinction no longer exists. So, yes, it's no longer "the White House" - a short hand for the Office of the President - but rather "the Trump White House" - the twisted amalgam of power and personality.
Damn, I knew I was forgetting something! Thank you, Anonymous Coward, for pointing out this glaring design flaw to me. --Elon
As straight as you can get on a sphere, anyway.
Or, expressed differently: start sailing in a particular direction, and do not deviate left or right from that (locally) straightline path until you hit land again.
Can we hold coal companies to the same standard, or allow them to chew up their employees, spit them out when they're too broken down to work, and then welch on their pension obligations?
I don't know where you get your numbers from, Oh Anonymous Coward, but the federal budget hasn't been $1.3 trillion for decades. The latest budget (well, what passes for a budget in these ridiculous ad hoc, continuing-resolution times) is about $4 trillion. Perhaps the $1.3 trillion was meant to indicate non-defense, discretionary spending?
During the Apollo program, NASA was something like 3-5% of the entire federal budget. These days, it's more like 0.5%. NASA has spent about as much on the Ares/Constellation pork boondogle as the JWST, and that just might someday go to the Moon.
For comparison: Department of Education is around 2% of the federal budget. Highway spending is about 1%. Defense spending, depending on the year and what gets counted, is 15-20%.
So when you are talking about "all the money", just what are you pointing to other than your own ignorance?
Indeed. The rest of the financial community is probably shaking their heads at this guy's fuck up, which amounts to 1) getting caught and 2) selling his stock instead of just waiting for his golden parachute.
Considering that, ten years out, none of the Wall Street folks that caused the financial crisis have been convicted, let alone indicted, I will consider this Equifax development as a tiny sliver of progress.
And after two years, has anything in the debate changed on Slashdot? Perhaps a hardening of positions, but I doubt that anyone's mind here has been changed. Can anyone chime in: has your position on this been modified? What persuaded you?
for those of you wondering: just how hard is it to light a rocket engine, when it is spewing tons of highly combustible fuel and oxider per second, Scott Manley provides a handy video on rocket ignition technology.
SpaceX's eventual plans to go to Mars utilize a different rocket engine - the Raptor. Among other differences from the Merlin enigne (used by the Falcon 9), the Raptor will have spark ignition: no need for these highly combustible lighter fluids.
To a certain extent, SpaceX's architectural approach of many engines has arguably reduced costs. By making more copies of single engine design, the cost per engine has dropped significantly.. The manufacturing reliability is better, too. (What would the failure rate of a Model T have been if Ford was only building one per week? Building lots of something continuously brings you up the learning curve faster, reduces mistakes, and forces you to invest in tooling and fixturing that ensures each step is successful and repeatable.)
In this case, I think it is likely that the cost/kg and the reliability of a 9-engine rocket is better than a rocket that had a single engine of comparable power.
As you say - there are limits to this approach. (I'd call it modularity, rather than redundancy.) The efficiency of rocket engines doesn't scale down well and, as you point out, requires a build up of all the ancillary equipment.