The moon challenge is cool-- and it's great to see students compete (this is something we really need)-- but what I really love is the lunar lander challenge (also previously featured on/.). Seeing videos like this one just thrill me. The real problem with spaceflight has been that some time back in the '50s it moved the ability of individuals and small groups to participate in, and I just love that idea that real experimental rocketry is coming back.
I have to say that the only time I was set aside to be in the special search category, everybody else in the group was from the middle-East or India. It was quite clearly obvious that they were profiling based on ethnic origin.
(*In my case, the "profile" was that I'd bought a one-way ticket only one hour before the flight. Apparently the profile of terrorists is that they buy tickets at the last moment. True? Probably not.)
The laws of thermodynamics state that regenerative breaking can only capture *some* of the energy lost in slowing down.
This part is true...
One will never get as much range in city driving than in highway driving.
but this part isn't. A significant part of the loss is aerodynamic drag, which increases as velocity squared. So highway (high speed) driving can, in fact, get worse mileage (and hence worse range) than city driving at lower speeds, if you are moderately efficient at recapturing the energy from stop and go.
Mainly because in this house, Lisa, we obey the laws of thermodynamics.
The second law of thermodynamics: not just a good idea. It's the law.
I'll have to agree with the parent here-- they don't seem to have "developed" anything. Reading the article, they seem to be proposing a nuclear rocket, which they will do a paper study of that will be done in 2012.
They actually developed a nuclear thermal engine some years back. They could dust that off, put it on top some Angara stages and build a rocket.
My apologies. I was talking about the subject discussed in the article; I wasn't talking about work done in the past.
I'll have to agree with the parent here-- they don't seem to have "developed" anything. Reading the article, they seem to be proposing a nuclear rocket, which they will do a paper study of that will be done in 2012.
Good idea, by the way-- but I don't see any hint of any those "17 billion rubles" that they say they'll need.
Christ on a pogo stick, are you being dense on purpose?
Some risks are STUPID IN FORESIGHT.
Yeah. And, in hindsight, it's really easy to tell which ones they are.
Like, for example, if NASA engineers are telling their bosses, "Hey, this is is bad, this could result in disaster in this very specific way, but we have some ideas on how to fix it"
Yes... you're buying into the story that the Thiokol engineers told, in retrospect, trying to make them look good.... or at least, not look bad.
Do keep in mind that these are the exact same engineers who, when they were told "do we launch? Yes or no? Give us an answer," said, "yes, go for launch."
Now, afterwards, they said "we felt pressured. It's not our fault we said "go for launch," because we were pressured by our management to tell NASA what they wanted to hear."
But, if they seriously believed-- as you say-- "this could result in disaster in this very specific way," can you credibly think that, even under pressure, they would say "go ahead and launch?" Sure. "Go ahead and launch. We do know that will kill seven people, destroy a billion dollars of equipment, and result in billions of dollars of loss to the company, but at least it will reduce the management pressure on us right now, and that's all that's important. And, hey, maybe people will forgive us later-- we'll just tell them we were under pressure, they'll understand."
What they actually thought was, here's an anomaly, we don't entirely understand it, and, by not entirely understanding it, we don't know if it's safe.
...If there's someone around to say "I told you so, but you wouldn't listen", chances are you fucked up not listening to them.
OK. Velikovski told NASA "don't land astronauts on the moon, my crashing worlds theory says that the moon is dangerously radioactive, and they'll die in an hour."
They should have listened to him, right?
Fact is, the world is filled with doomsayers. There is absolutely nothing you can do, ever, anywhere, without somebody somewhere saying it's the wrong thing.
There are still a lot of things to worry about with electronic voting-- but this goes a long way toward making the process transparent, and transparency (of the vote counting method) is absolutely essential to confidence in the results.
Though I have always adored the thought and reality of space travel--this is just a luxury we cannot afford now. There is no pressing problem that would cause this need to travel to the Moon or Mars to occur.
No, actually, space exploration is essentailly done on the bubble-gum budget of the US. Deleting NASA or doubling NASA would have no noticible effect on the US budget-- the funding level is down in the noise compared to the main budget items.
If "it's complicated enough that others won't be able to easily copy the idea and compete," then you don't need a patent-- you can use a trade secret.
The original idea of patents was that the inventor gets a period of exclusivity in exchange for writing out a complete description that allows anybody skilled in the relevant art to replicate the invention. Patents and trade secrets are, in a sense, opposites.
(However, there's very little that can't be reverse engineered these days. I'm not sure that there's anything that can't be copied for a few million dollars worth of analytical work.)
"The BBC reports that researchers at the University of Edinburgh have found that Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) somehow makes trees grow faster.
That conclusion is so distant from the data as to be completely misleading.
What they really found was that tree growth rate in one particular site in Scotland seems to show an eleven-year cycle over the last fifty-three years (i.e., not quite five periods). The eleven year cycle was then connected with sunspots via this reasoning: "Hey, sunspots have an eleven-year cycle, too!". And then the mechanism was suggested: "Hey, galactic cosmic rays vary with the number of sunspots!"
The purported connection from tree-rings at a single spot in Britain, to sunspots, to cosmic rays is very, very tenuous.
If you patent, it'll be expensive.
If you don't patent, but end up making it, someone else will patent it and sue you, that will be more expensive.
No to the second part-- if you publish before they file the patent, their patent filing won't help them, the patent is invalidated by prior art (=your publication).
In fact, if you keep good enough notes (signed and witnessed) to show your date of invention, and to show that you were diligent in working to bring the invention to workability (i.e., that you didn't just have the idea and abandon it), then they can't succeed in suing you, either, because you can prove you invented it first.
(However, if you had the idea, and didn't diligently work on reducing it to practive, you're out of luck. No cookies from the patent office to ideas that are abandoned and not reduced to practice.)
The sad fact is that nine out of ten patents don't make any money. I don't mean, "don't make enough money to pay back the expenses of patenting"-- I mean, don't make any money.
Don't expect that you'll make money if you patent an idea-- the patent is only the first step in the process of commercializing the invention, and unless you are active and get your invention out in the world, it won't happen-- it's not true that there are people sitting there and reading every patent as it comes out, saying "oh, there's one I can invest in! I'll pay that guy buckets of money!" You have to do the work (and only ten percent of that work is technical. The majority is networking, social, legal, business, economic, and sales related.)
So: are you ready to do the entrepreneur thing? Long days of working on selling your invention to people with investment money, concatenated with long nights of working to make your invention work better, cheaper, and more reliably?
On the other hand, patenting needn't be terribly expensive if you do most of the grunt work yourself. The patent office has low fees for "small entities," which includes individual inventors.
If you publish, you won't profit directly (although if it's a nobel-prize winning invention, you will), but you will (in principle) prevent somebody else from patenting it. In practice, actually, the patent office is not very good at finding prior art in the literature (to be fair, they have roughly one day per invention to do both the literature search and also the write-up), so what you'll actually accomplish by publishing is to give other parties a piece of evidence that they can use to challenge the validity of the patent. (And, of course, the other parties who have the same idea will probably not have exactly the same idea, and the details of their patent will probably be slightly different, so not the entire patent will be invalidated.)
Scientologists have had this device for years, of course. They call it an "E-meter."
... and, as far as I can tell, they have no actual data suggesting that this would actually make for better trades. (But then, neither do the scientologists).
Hate this "immediately moderate when you select an option" feature. meant to mod funny... slip of the mouse goes to overrated... there should be a go/ok button next to the list imho.
I agree; I hate that too. A couple of times I've had the stupid mouse slide down and discovered I clicked the next moderation setting down, which sometimes is exactly opposite of what I'd meant to rate, so I've had to comment in the discussion thread to delete that moderation (in the process deleting other moderation which wasn't wrong). It would be nice if the moderation button didn't disappear the instant you release the mouse buttons, so you could change a moderation you just made...
(What? You're moderating this post off-topic?? No, it's not at all off topic-- just another example of bad user interfaces that give results opposite of what was intended).
"Will we ever learn enough to make these errors truly uncommittable?""
Well, actually, sure we can... just as soon as we stop adding new technologies.
New technologies mean new procedures, which mean that the old safeguards are no longer good. Once you stop changing the technologies, you can go down the learning curve, and redesign the interfaces (and the training check lists) to avoid those error types.
But, of course, that means stopping progress as well. Your choice.
Slashdot Mirror
The moon challenge is cool-- and it's great to see students compete (this is something we really need)-- but what I really love is the lunar lander challenge (also previously featured on /.). Seeing videos like this one just thrill me. The real problem with spaceflight has been that some time back in the '50s it moved the ability of individuals and small groups to participate in, and I just love that idea that real experimental rocketry is coming back.
Rocket Ship Galileo, let's do it!
(*In my case, the "profile" was that I'd bought a one-way ticket only one hour before the flight. Apparently the profile of terrorists is that they buy tickets at the last moment. True? Probably not.)
The laws of thermodynamics state that regenerative breaking can only capture *some* of the energy lost in slowing down.
This part is true...
One will never get as much range in city driving than in highway driving.
but this part isn't. A significant part of the loss is aerodynamic drag, which increases as velocity squared. So highway (high speed) driving can, in fact, get worse mileage (and hence worse range) than city driving at lower speeds, if you are moderately efficient at recapturing the energy from stop and go.
Mainly because in this house, Lisa, we obey the laws of thermodynamics.
The second law of thermodynamics: not just a good idea. It's the law.
they arrived within 9/10th of a second of each other
which indicates the opposite of the story's summary
Notice the key word here, "within".
One second in 9.3 billion years is a pretty good measurement. It indicates a difference in speed of no more than 0.0000000000000003 percent.
I'll have to agree with the parent here-- they don't seem to have "developed" anything. Reading the article, they seem to be proposing a nuclear rocket, which they will do a paper study of that will be done in 2012.
They actually developed a nuclear thermal engine some years back. They could dust that off, put it on top some Angara stages and build a rocket.
My apologies. I was talking about the subject discussed in the article; I wasn't talking about work done in the past.
Good idea, by the way-- but I don't see any hint of any those "17 billion rubles" that they say they'll need.
Christ on a pogo stick, are you being dense on purpose?
Some risks are STUPID IN FORESIGHT.
Yeah. And, in hindsight, it's really easy to tell which ones they are.
Like, for example, if NASA engineers are telling their bosses, "Hey, this is is bad, this could result in disaster in this very specific way, but we have some ideas on how to fix it"
Yes... you're buying into the story that the Thiokol engineers told, in retrospect, trying to make them look good.... or at least, not look bad.
Do keep in mind that these are the exact same engineers who, when they were told "do we launch? Yes or no? Give us an answer," said, "yes, go for launch."
Now, afterwards, they said "we felt pressured. It's not our fault we said "go for launch," because we were pressured by our management to tell NASA what they wanted to hear."
But, if they seriously believed-- as you say-- "this could result in disaster in this very specific way," can you credibly think that, even under pressure, they would say "go ahead and launch?" Sure. "Go ahead and launch. We do know that will kill seven people, destroy a billion dollars of equipment, and result in billions of dollars of loss to the company, but at least it will reduce the management pressure on us right now, and that's all that's important. And, hey, maybe people will forgive us later-- we'll just tell them we were under pressure, they'll understand."
What they actually thought was, here's an anomaly, we don't entirely understand it, and, by not entirely understanding it, we don't know if it's safe.
...If there's someone around to say "I told you so, but you wouldn't listen", chances are you fucked up not listening to them.
OK. Velikovski told NASA "don't land astronauts on the moon, my crashing worlds theory says that the moon is dangerously radioactive, and they'll die in an hour."
They should have listened to him, right?
Fact is, the world is filled with doomsayers. There is absolutely nothing you can do, ever, anywhere, without somebody somewhere saying it's the wrong thing.
Wow-- horray for them!
There are still a lot of things to worry about with electronic voting-- but this goes a long way toward making the process transparent, and transparency (of the vote counting method) is absolutely essential to confidence in the results.
Great news!
You are now saying that space exploration is "wrong."
That's a different argument. You are entitled to your opinion.
Though I have always adored the thought and reality of space travel--this is just a luxury we cannot afford now. There is no pressing problem that would cause this need to travel to the Moon or Mars to occur.
No, actually, space exploration is essentailly done on the bubble-gum budget of the US. Deleting NASA or doubling NASA would have no noticible effect on the US budget-- the funding level is down in the noise compared to the main budget items.
What is going to happen with the Ares V? I heard rumors about it being scrapped. I hope they were wrong?
No decisions as yet. Stay tuned.
Huh? That makes no sense,
If "it's complicated enough that others won't be able to easily copy the idea and compete," then you don't need a patent-- you can use a trade secret.
The original idea of patents was that the inventor gets a period of exclusivity in exchange for writing out a complete description that allows anybody skilled in the relevant art to replicate the invention. Patents and trade secrets are, in a sense, opposites.
(However, there's very little that can't be reverse engineered these days. I'm not sure that there's anything that can't be copied for a few million dollars worth of analytical work.)
H1N1 may indeed be pandemic in NYS, but it's still not as prevalent as corruption.
If somebody could come out with a vaccine against corruption, I'd definitely favor making that mandatory.
"Taking an aspirin a day will keep you headache-free"
No, actually it won't.
we're damn tired of seeing that lose/loose error, in particular
Just spell it "luse", and everybody wins.
Locate the server farm in Antarctica!
"The BBC reports that researchers at the University of Edinburgh have found that Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) somehow makes trees grow faster.
That conclusion is so distant from the data as to be completely misleading.
What they really found was that tree growth rate in one particular site in Scotland seems to show an eleven-year cycle over the last fifty-three years (i.e., not quite five periods). The eleven year cycle was then connected with sunspots via this reasoning: "Hey, sunspots have an eleven-year cycle, too!". And then the mechanism was suggested: "Hey, galactic cosmic rays vary with the number of sunspots!"
The purported connection from tree-rings at a single spot in Britain, to sunspots, to cosmic rays is very, very tenuous.
Once a patent is granted in the US, I believe that you have to find prior art that predates the filing submission date by 1 year.
Nope.
But you do have to show a publication that shows the prior art that predates their invention, not just their filing date.
If you patent, it'll be expensive. If you don't patent, but end up making it, someone else will patent it and sue you, that will be more expensive.
No to the second part-- if you publish before they file the patent, their patent filing won't help them, the patent is invalidated by prior art (=your publication).
In fact, if you keep good enough notes (signed and witnessed) to show your date of invention, and to show that you were diligent in working to bring the invention to workability (i.e., that you didn't just have the idea and abandon it), then they can't succeed in suing you, either, because you can prove you invented it first.
(However, if you had the idea, and didn't diligently work on reducing it to practive, you're out of luck. No cookies from the patent office to ideas that are abandoned and not reduced to practice.)
Disclaimer: IANAL
Don't expect that you'll make money if you patent an idea-- the patent is only the first step in the process of commercializing the invention, and unless you are active and get your invention out in the world, it won't happen-- it's not true that there are people sitting there and reading every patent as it comes out, saying "oh, there's one I can invest in! I'll pay that guy buckets of money!" You have to do the work (and only ten percent of that work is technical. The majority is networking, social, legal, business, economic, and sales related.)
So: are you ready to do the entrepreneur thing? Long days of working on selling your invention to people with investment money, concatenated with long nights of working to make your invention work better, cheaper, and more reliably?
On the other hand, patenting needn't be terribly expensive if you do most of the grunt work yourself. The patent office has low fees for "small entities," which includes individual inventors.
If you publish, you won't profit directly (although if it's a nobel-prize winning invention, you will), but you will (in principle) prevent somebody else from patenting it. In practice, actually, the patent office is not very good at finding prior art in the literature (to be fair, they have roughly one day per invention to do both the literature search and also the write-up), so what you'll actually accomplish by publishing is to give other parties a piece of evidence that they can use to challenge the validity of the patent. (And, of course, the other parties who have the same idea will probably not have exactly the same idea, and the details of their patent will probably be slightly different, so not the entire patent will be invalidated.)
Disclaimer: IANAL (but, on the other hand, you can google Patent Claim Drafting... :)
Scientologists have had this device for years, of course. They call it an "E-meter."
... and, as far as I can tell, they have no actual data suggesting that this would actually make for better trades. (But then, neither do the scientologists).
The machine's software should not be capable of triggering the release of that much radiation
That sentence, essentially, just said "The machine did something bad. It should have been designed so it isn't allowed to do that."
That's what qualifies as "insightful" these days????
Hate this "immediately moderate when you select an option" feature. meant to mod funny... slip of the mouse goes to overrated... there should be a go/ok button next to the list imho.
I agree; I hate that too. A couple of times I've had the stupid mouse slide down and discovered I clicked the next moderation setting down, which sometimes is exactly opposite of what I'd meant to rate, so I've had to comment in the discussion thread to delete that moderation (in the process deleting other moderation which wasn't wrong). It would be nice if the moderation button didn't disappear the instant you release the mouse buttons, so you could change a moderation you just made...
(What? You're moderating this post off-topic?? No, it's not at all off topic-- just another example of bad user interfaces that give results opposite of what was intended).
"Will we ever learn enough to make these errors truly uncommittable?""
Well, actually, sure we can... just as soon as we stop adding new technologies.
New technologies mean new procedures, which mean that the old safeguards are no longer good. Once you stop changing the technologies, you can go down the learning curve, and redesign the interfaces (and the training check lists) to avoid those error types.
But, of course, that means stopping progress as well. Your choice.
Exactly.