I agree - that those craft are still even alive is a wonder. Still, considering how old they are, how far away, and how run down their power sources are, does NASA still get anything from them? Are they actually still working in any appreciable way?
Curious to know (not just nit-picking semantics), I decided to go to the JPL mission page. Voyager 1 passed the 100 AU mark this summer, that's about 12 light-hours. Although it's signal is very weak, we can still talk to it a bit. According to this blurb, "Flight controllers believe both spacecraft will continue to operate and send back valuable data until at least the year 2020."
Looks like we're still on track for V-GER to become sentient and return to earth in a few centuries.
Leaving aside the horrible acting in Armaggedon, the portrayal of reality in that movie is atrocious! There are different levels of science fiction, requiring differing levels of suspended disbelief. It runs the gamut from Star Wars, where things like hyperdrive and lightsabers are somehow possible, to Star Trek, some of which could be possible in the 24th century, to 2001, which definitely could have taken place in 2001. This movie seems to exist somewhere inbetween - it wants to come off as being possible today, and yet requires a complete disposal of all scientific knowledge.
In college I took a course on science and communication - how we try, and often fail, to explain science and technology to the public. One homework assignment was to watch the movie Armaggedeon and describe the ways they get it wrong. The "it" here includes:
* physics (it actually takes days to go from earth to the moon - even then it took the Saturn V rocket to get the relatively small Apollo LM/CSM craft that far. Oh, and the old favorite, that there's lots of things to hear in space.),
* propulsion technology (the notion that a space station has a propulsion system capable of generating 1 g of continuous acceleration, or that the shuttle's engines can produce several g's of acceleration all on their own),
* engineering (that you could build a space station that wouldn't collapse under 1 g of acceleration),
* medicine (that space dementia is a likely condition, resulting in careless manslaughter behavior),
* probability (that out of the total surface of the earth, the only places that get struck are NYC, Paris, and Hong Kong (?)),
* astronomy (that, up close, asteroids seem to be made of very brittle stalagmites of rock, and spew radioactive-looking gas).
Science in general. This was a film seen by millions of people - it is probably the first thing most people think about when the subject of asteroids comes up. It's well for Carl Sagan that he was already deceased - the notion that such a movie existed would have killed him. Armaggedon's contemporary, Deep Impact, was more plausible and realistic, if you can get past Elija Wood being a teenager. Alas, it tanked.
I gave up after filling 10 pages with the first hour of the movie - it was too painful to continue.
I know that I would not want Microsoft fumbling around with the power saving settings on my Windows 2000/2003 Server (if I had one) computer just because they think they know what's best for consumers.
That may be true of servers and other critical infrastructure, but the vast, overwhelming majority of computers aren't. Think of the millions and millions of workstation PCs that need to be on for, at most, 8 hours a day, when someone is at the desk. The other 16 hours a day, and all weekend, most of those computers don't power down or throttle back, and users are too oblivious to be bothered to shut them off; they just keep churning through watts like there's no tomorrow.
Well, frankly, tomorrow is coming. Would it be such a hardship for the sysadmins to tweak their power settings back to where they want them, if it meant that everyone else would be saving phenominal amounts of energy? They spend enough time tweaking everything else. It doesn't even have to affect servers at all - the updates could be focused on XP only.
For more information about electronic medical records, and the efforts to create national medical databases, I would suggest an article that appeared in IEEE Spectrum's October issue entitled "Dying for Data." The article describes some of the monumental challenges in creating such a system, profiles the British effort, and highlights the success that the Mayo Clinic has had in moving to electronic records for all its patients.
[I can't link to the full text of the article, because that issue is not longer current. IEEE members can log in and view it, however.]
I've worked a lot with photovoltaics. They're really cool, but I recognize their limitations for utility-scale power generation. The primary limitation is that silicon-based photovoltaics currently convert only 10-23% or so of the incident solar power into useful electricity. Silicon solar cells cannot convert infrared light to electricity - the photons have too little energy. Higher energy photons (visible and UV light) are poorly utilized - a solar cell will get the same energy output from a red photon as a blue one, despite the fact that the blue photon has higher energy. Solar cells aren't very reflective (by design), so most of the remainder of the unconverted sunlight becomes heat in the cell.
You can get higher efficiencies by going to other chemistries, like GaAs, and by layering different chemistries on top of one another. These are not cost effective, and won't ever be able to get above, say, 50% efficiency.
But solar energy is not limited solely to photovoltaics. Probably the best way to use solar energy is solar thermal - capture all that 1000 W/m^2 of incident sunlight as heat. It can be used to heat a fluid up to fantastic temperatures, which can drive turbines, etc. This is the principle behind Solar One, Two, and Tres and the Nevada Solar One plants. These are, however, demonstration plants, not utility scale.
The other major kind of solar energy is biomass. Photosynthesis is a pretty good way to capture sunlight and make it do something useful. Plants have had a looong time to get good at making use of sunlight, which we use to our benefit in many ways. When cellulosic ethanol comes around, you'll probably make better use of sunlight by planting crops and building a solar power station.
Not to seem like I would defend Rumsfeld, but question 1 was not his place to answer.
I disagree. The Secretary of Defense isn't the one with final say, but he is a member of a small group that advises the President on making the decision. Qutie simply, if the President asks the Secretary of Defense "should we go to war?" it is the SecDef's primary and explicit job to answer - to advise the President. If a Secretary of Defense were to say to his President that the U.S. should or should not go to war, that weighs heavily in the final decision.
In the particular case of Rumsfeld and the Iraq war, he was a primary architect of that war - not just the fighting of it, but of the push to have a war in the first place. Considering how hard he pushed for it, to say that "question 1 was not his place to answer" is, frankly, bullshit. Rumsfeld had an answer to that particular question, and made sure the whole world knew about it, and advocated it to the President.
Now, asking rhetorically: If Rumsfeld had not pushed for going to war, would it have happened anyway?
There's more to holding a House majority than passing bills. The most important thing, especially in the House (rather than the Senate) is that the majority party gets to decide the rules of order. The Democrats will now have the chair of every House committee, Speaker Pelosi will have the power to decide what bills even make it to the floor. Having the chair of all the committees, the Democrats will be able to exert Congressional oversight that has been sorely lacking since Bush came to office. In short, Democrats in the House will be able to frustrate the President's agenda, and likely make his final two years very embarassing.
Dorky though it may sound, I actually spent election night 2004 watching a hand count. If you thought that actually doing a hand count was boring, try watching it sometime. It was a small community in New Hampshire, and they had a couple thousand ballots to go through. There were about 20 people there, and it still took them nearly two hours to go through those couple thousand ballots.
Why so long? Because the ballots didn't contain just a single binary choice (Bush vs. Kerry): there were about three dozen races on the ballot (senators and reps at various levels, local ballot measures, etc.). For transparency and redundancy, a stack of ballots would simultaneously be counted by two people tallying two separate score sheets, which were then compared. If there was a discrepancy in a particular race, then the stack was handed off to a second team of two for a recount. Note that this kind of simultaneous counting would only catch a parity error - both poll workers making two independent counting errors wouldn't necessarily be caught.
Your math is faulty by way of faulty premises. It does not take three seconds to record a single ballot. It may take three seconds to record a single vote for a single race from a single ballot, but there is a lot more to a hand count than just that.
That is not to say that hand counting can't work - it did just that in this New Hampshire community, and had for many years before that. It just takes more work than you might normally think.
I think the article is an interesting (and accurate) bit of analysis contrasting the Music and Movie stores and how Apple gets content for them. However, tossing out the BANTA graphs, and the accompanying banter [pun intended] gives the article a feel not unlike a couple of MBA students presenting a case study to their professor. They (BANTA graphs) are useful tools for comparative analysis, but I've hardly ever seen them outside of a business school classroom.
Revival or restoration... I think that a fully restored 1967 Hemi Barracuda is a very nice car!
The corollary is, of course, that a revival of the barracuda would be a bad idea. Look at the aweful spate of reintroduced (or "revived") american muscle cars: the mustang, the t-bird, the camero. Even if they are more advanced (and, sometimes, more powerful) vehicles, they pale in comparison to the original.
Despite the good cause, you can't expect people to fork $200 extra for a machine that they'd regard more as a toy than a tool.
Have you seen the idiotic toys that people are willing to spend $300 for? Most of them are probably worth about $20 but for some flashy packaging. The extra $280 they pay just goes to the corporation clever enough to swindle them. Here, at least, the $200 is going towards something useful.
Desktop-based applications are dying. Internet-based applications will gain more prominence. Convergence of everything, everywhere, all the time will be the new modality. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
Anyone have any new predictions - ones that haven't been bandied about already for 10 years?
FTFA: "If a recent patent filing is any indication, Apple Computer may abandon the iconic wheel that has become virtually synonymous with its popular iPod music players."
Need I remind the writers of the Mercury News that, just because a company has filed for a patent on something, does not mean that they intend to roll it out in their product line. Look at IBM, the most prolific filer of patents in the world. Of the thousands of patents they are granted each year, only a small handful (comparatively speaking) ever amount to anything. Most of the IP is captured solely "just in case" they find a use for it. Oftentimes, they use those filings as leverage or bargaining chips in negotations with other companies, or for attracting customers. Even if they themselves don't commercialize it, they can license it to another company to develop. It is a common thing in the world of business: a good idea from one of your employees is worth capturing, even if its present use is not apparent.
As the article points out, the real problem is that the border is a weird place, legally speaking. The area between the gate and when you clear customs is not technically speaking a part of the united states; U.S. law doesn't always apply. Particularly with regards to security, customs, immigration, etc., the law is essentially what the border guards claim it to be. If they want to hold you for hours or days because you refuse to unlock your computer - you may have no recourse against that, especially if you are not a U.S. citizen. If they want to confiscate your computer to let their own crackers and forsensics folks tear it apart, there likewise is very little you can do.
It's hardly equitable to compare the price of a refurb from one manufacturer to new hardware from another. That's like comparing the price of one company's car on the used lot to a different company's sold brand new.
My 8-year-old daughter, once a devoted PS2 platformer, now spends most of her gaming time online with friends in ToonTown, Disney's Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG or MMO,) This is despite the fact that ToonTown's game play and graphics are clearly inferior compared to, say, current generation Ratchet and Clank.
Did anyone else read this and think of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Let's hope that the kids never discover the secret of Dip!
Ironically enough, Peter Jackson didn't have a whole lot of directing experience, especially big budget experience, before doing Lord of the Rings. Check out his filmography. It was a bold move on the studios' part to entrust so much money to him, but now I doubt there's a studio around that wouldn't love to shower him with hundreds of millions.
It'd be a real bummer if this research proves true, because having water readily available on the moon would be a help in our (looong-term) future plans.
But, that doesn't mean that there can't be a whole lot of ice there someday. In the future, about the time when interplanetary travel becomes feasible and large quantities of water are needed, we will also have the technology to go out and capture water. One of the great motivations for interplanetary travel is mining asteroids for their abundant mineral wealth. Some consider capturing and towing an asteroid into Earth orbit for better availability. Why not capture and tow a water-rich comet, too? If there are grave concerns about it hitting the earth, just bring it very slowly towards the moon and orbit it there. It would be easily accessible there from the moon and from spacecraft, much higher in Earth's gravity well than LEO.
This is hardly a new idea - I think Arthur Clarke was a big proponent of it. I'm not advocating that we try it out in the next few years, either - I'm just saying that getting water to the moon, by the time we need lots of it, isn't that farfetched.
Right now he has a pick-ax handle with a nail in it. But he won't stop there. Soon he will make bigger handles with bigger nails until he makes a handle with a nail in it so big it will destroy us all!
from summary: "Is spyware acceptable to the public when it comes with a game, or has EA made a PR misstep?"
One may as well ask "Are rootkits acceptable to the public when it comes with music, or has Sony made a PR misstep?"
We all know how well that one worked out. At least it's well publicized before the release, so that the hew and cry can prevent it from happening in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
One two time Nobel Prize winner and another near Nobel Prize winner
I think it's fair to say that Franklin' was robbed of her Nobel Prize by Watson. Or, at least, she deserved it at least as much as he and Crick did.
I agree - that those craft are still even alive is a wonder. Still, considering how old they are, how far away, and how run down their power sources are, does NASA still get anything from them? Are they actually still working in any appreciable way?
Curious to know (not just nit-picking semantics), I decided to go to the JPL mission page. Voyager 1 passed the 100 AU mark this summer, that's about 12 light-hours. Although it's signal is very weak, we can still talk to it a bit. According to this blurb, "Flight controllers believe both spacecraft will continue to operate and send back valuable data until at least the year 2020."
Looks like we're still on track for V-GER to become sentient and return to earth in a few centuries.
Leaving aside the horrible acting in Armaggedon, the portrayal of reality in that movie is atrocious! There are different levels of science fiction, requiring differing levels of suspended disbelief. It runs the gamut from Star Wars, where things like hyperdrive and lightsabers are somehow possible, to Star Trek, some of which could be possible in the 24th century, to 2001, which definitely could have taken place in 2001. This movie seems to exist somewhere inbetween - it wants to come off as being possible today, and yet requires a complete disposal of all scientific knowledge.
In college I took a course on science and communication - how we try, and often fail, to explain science and technology to the public. One homework assignment was to watch the movie Armaggedeon and describe the ways they get it wrong. The "it" here includes:
* physics (it actually takes days to go from earth to the moon - even then it took the Saturn V rocket to get the relatively small Apollo LM/CSM craft that far. Oh, and the old favorite, that there's lots of things to hear in space.),
* propulsion technology (the notion that a space station has a propulsion system capable of generating 1 g of continuous acceleration, or that the shuttle's engines can produce several g's of acceleration all on their own),
* engineering (that you could build a space station that wouldn't collapse under 1 g of acceleration),
* medicine (that space dementia is a likely condition, resulting in careless manslaughter behavior),
* probability (that out of the total surface of the earth, the only places that get struck are NYC, Paris, and Hong Kong (?)),
* astronomy (that, up close, asteroids seem to be made of very brittle stalagmites of rock, and spew radioactive-looking gas).
Science in general. This was a film seen by millions of people - it is probably the first thing most people think about when the subject of asteroids comes up. It's well for Carl Sagan that he was already deceased - the notion that such a movie existed would have killed him. Armaggedon's contemporary, Deep Impact, was more plausible and realistic, if you can get past Elija Wood being a teenager. Alas, it tanked.
I gave up after filling 10 pages with the first hour of the movie - it was too painful to continue.
You just described every server on the market.
I know that I would not want Microsoft fumbling around with the power saving settings on my Windows 2000/2003 Server (if I had one) computer just because they think they know what's best for consumers.
That may be true of servers and other critical infrastructure, but the vast, overwhelming majority of computers aren't. Think of the millions and millions of workstation PCs that need to be on for, at most, 8 hours a day, when someone is at the desk. The other 16 hours a day, and all weekend, most of those computers don't power down or throttle back, and users are too oblivious to be bothered to shut them off; they just keep churning through watts like there's no tomorrow.
Well, frankly, tomorrow is coming. Would it be such a hardship for the sysadmins to tweak their power settings back to where they want them, if it meant that everyone else would be saving phenominal amounts of energy? They spend enough time tweaking everything else. It doesn't even have to affect servers at all - the updates could be focused on XP only.
For more information about electronic medical records, and the efforts to create national medical databases, I would suggest an article that appeared in IEEE Spectrum's October issue entitled "Dying for Data." The article describes some of the monumental challenges in creating such a system, profiles the British effort, and highlights the success that the Mayo Clinic has had in moving to electronic records for all its patients.
[I can't link to the full text of the article, because that issue is not longer current. IEEE members can log in and view it, however.]
I've worked a lot with photovoltaics. They're really cool, but I recognize their limitations for utility-scale power generation. The primary limitation is that silicon-based photovoltaics currently convert only 10-23% or so of the incident solar power into useful electricity. Silicon solar cells cannot convert infrared light to electricity - the photons have too little energy. Higher energy photons (visible and UV light) are poorly utilized - a solar cell will get the same energy output from a red photon as a blue one, despite the fact that the blue photon has higher energy. Solar cells aren't very reflective (by design), so most of the remainder of the unconverted sunlight becomes heat in the cell.
You can get higher efficiencies by going to other chemistries, like GaAs, and by layering different chemistries on top of one another. These are not cost effective, and won't ever be able to get above, say, 50% efficiency.
But solar energy is not limited solely to photovoltaics. Probably the best way to use solar energy is solar thermal - capture all that 1000 W/m^2 of incident sunlight as heat. It can be used to heat a fluid up to fantastic temperatures, which can drive turbines, etc. This is the principle behind Solar One, Two, and Tres and the Nevada Solar One plants. These are, however, demonstration plants, not utility scale.
The other major kind of solar energy is biomass. Photosynthesis is a pretty good way to capture sunlight and make it do something useful. Plants have had a looong time to get good at making use of sunlight, which we use to our benefit in many ways. When cellulosic ethanol comes around, you'll probably make better use of sunlight by planting crops and building a solar power station.
Not to seem like I would defend Rumsfeld, but question 1 was not his place to answer.
I disagree. The Secretary of Defense isn't the one with final say, but he is a member of a small group that advises the President on making the decision. Qutie simply, if the President asks the Secretary of Defense "should we go to war?" it is the SecDef's primary and explicit job to answer - to advise the President. If a Secretary of Defense were to say to his President that the U.S. should or should not go to war, that weighs heavily in the final decision.
In the particular case of Rumsfeld and the Iraq war, he was a primary architect of that war - not just the fighting of it, but of the push to have a war in the first place. Considering how hard he pushed for it, to say that "question 1 was not his place to answer" is, frankly, bullshit. Rumsfeld had an answer to that particular question, and made sure the whole world knew about it, and advocated it to the President.
Now, asking rhetorically: If Rumsfeld had not pushed for going to war, would it have happened anyway?
That's it? WTF? Why not just directly link to the patent office and skip the ad-ridden Boing Boing link in the first place?
There's more to holding a House majority than passing bills. The most important thing, especially in the House (rather than the Senate) is that the majority party gets to decide the rules of order. The Democrats will now have the chair of every House committee, Speaker Pelosi will have the power to decide what bills even make it to the floor. Having the chair of all the committees, the Democrats will be able to exert Congressional oversight that has been sorely lacking since Bush came to office. In short, Democrats in the House will be able to frustrate the President's agenda, and likely make his final two years very embarassing.
Dorky though it may sound, I actually spent election night 2004 watching a hand count. If you thought that actually doing a hand count was boring, try watching it sometime. It was a small community in New Hampshire, and they had a couple thousand ballots to go through. There were about 20 people there, and it still took them nearly two hours to go through those couple thousand ballots.
Why so long? Because the ballots didn't contain just a single binary choice (Bush vs. Kerry): there were about three dozen races on the ballot (senators and reps at various levels, local ballot measures, etc.). For transparency and redundancy, a stack of ballots would simultaneously be counted by two people tallying two separate score sheets, which were then compared. If there was a discrepancy in a particular race, then the stack was handed off to a second team of two for a recount. Note that this kind of simultaneous counting would only catch a parity error - both poll workers making two independent counting errors wouldn't necessarily be caught.
Your math is faulty by way of faulty premises. It does not take three seconds to record a single ballot. It may take three seconds to record a single vote for a single race from a single ballot, but there is a lot more to a hand count than just that.
That is not to say that hand counting can't work - it did just that in this New Hampshire community, and had for many years before that. It just takes more work than you might normally think.
Irregardless is not a fucking word
Irrespective and regardless are words.
You, sir, are trying to propulgate the notion that mash-ups ain't English.
Netflix - the answer for social recluses! If you can get past that whole fear-of-the-mailman part, that is.
I think the article is an interesting (and accurate) bit of analysis contrasting the Music and Movie stores and how Apple gets content for them. However, tossing out the BANTA graphs, and the accompanying banter [pun intended] gives the article a feel not unlike a couple of MBA students presenting a case study to their professor. They (BANTA graphs) are useful tools for comparative analysis, but I've hardly ever seen them outside of a business school classroom.
Have you seen the idiotic toys that people are willing to spend $300 for? Most of them are probably worth about $20 but for some flashy packaging. The extra $280 they pay just goes to the corporation clever enough to swindle them. Here, at least, the $200 is going towards something useful.
Desktop-based applications are dying. Internet-based applications will gain more prominence. Convergence of everything, everywhere, all the time will be the new modality. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
Anyone have any new predictions - ones that haven't been bandied about already for 10 years?
FTFA: "If a recent patent filing is any indication, Apple Computer may abandon the iconic wheel that has become virtually synonymous with its popular iPod music players."
Need I remind the writers of the Mercury News that, just because a company has filed for a patent on something, does not mean that they intend to roll it out in their product line. Look at IBM, the most prolific filer of patents in the world. Of the thousands of patents they are granted each year, only a small handful (comparatively speaking) ever amount to anything. Most of the IP is captured solely "just in case" they find a use for it. Oftentimes, they use those filings as leverage or bargaining chips in negotations with other companies, or for attracting customers. Even if they themselves don't commercialize it, they can license it to another company to develop. It is a common thing in the world of business: a good idea from one of your employees is worth capturing, even if its present use is not apparent.
As the article points out, the real problem is that the border is a weird place, legally speaking. The area between the gate and when you clear customs is not technically speaking a part of the united states; U.S. law doesn't always apply. Particularly with regards to security, customs, immigration, etc., the law is essentially what the border guards claim it to be. If they want to hold you for hours or days because you refuse to unlock your computer - you may have no recourse against that, especially if you are not a U.S. citizen. If they want to confiscate your computer to let their own crackers and forsensics folks tear it apart, there likewise is very little you can do.
It's hardly equitable to compare the price of a refurb from one manufacturer to new hardware from another. That's like comparing the price of one company's car on the used lot to a different company's sold brand new.
Did anyone else read this and think of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Let's hope that the kids never discover the secret of Dip!
Ironically enough, Peter Jackson didn't have a whole lot of directing experience, especially big budget experience, before doing Lord of the Rings. Check out his filmography. It was a bold move on the studios' part to entrust so much money to him, but now I doubt there's a studio around that wouldn't love to shower him with hundreds of millions.
It'd be a real bummer if this research proves true, because having water readily available on the moon would be a help in our (looong-term) future plans.
But, that doesn't mean that there can't be a whole lot of ice there someday. In the future, about the time when interplanetary travel becomes feasible and large quantities of water are needed, we will also have the technology to go out and capture water. One of the great motivations for interplanetary travel is mining asteroids for their abundant mineral wealth. Some consider capturing and towing an asteroid into Earth orbit for better availability. Why not capture and tow a water-rich comet, too? If there are grave concerns about it hitting the earth, just bring it very slowly towards the moon and orbit it there. It would be easily accessible there from the moon and from spacecraft, much higher in Earth's gravity well than LEO.
This is hardly a new idea - I think Arthur Clarke was a big proponent of it. I'm not advocating that we try it out in the next few years, either - I'm just saying that getting water to the moon, by the time we need lots of it, isn't that farfetched.
Right now he has a pick-ax handle with a nail in it. But he won't stop there. Soon he will make bigger handles with bigger nails until he makes a handle with a nail in it so big it will destroy us all!
Obscure reference?
from summary: "Is spyware acceptable to the public when it comes with a game, or has EA made a PR misstep?"
One may as well ask "Are rootkits acceptable to the public when it comes with music, or has Sony made a PR misstep?"
We all know how well that one worked out. At least it's well publicized before the release, so that the hew and cry can prevent it from happening in the first place.
Oh yes, I'd be so unhappy that google's stockprice has merely quadrupled in the 2+ years since its IPO. I think I'll go dump all mine right now!