CNES is much more than just an educational institution, they build satelites and interplanetary probes and run telescopes (and, yes, there is a lot of educational work there since there is a lot of pure academic research done there) beside their educational activities. The points NASA does and not CNES are launchers (handled by Ariane Espace) and experimental aircrafts (mostly handled by EADS). Of course, on any of these activities, it is 10 to 100 times smaller than NASA.
I would even say creativity needs a reason, since idea usually not come out of nothing. Wether you on networks, scientific theory, poetry or whatever, you only have a limited capacity of work, set of skills, knowledge and you usually have some needs that require you to sell a large proportion of those capacities.
The Miss America contest is probably the only place you could hear so many people saying they want to cure cancer and put an end to war and starvation. Why don't everyone spend all their energy actually acheiving these goal? Simply because for so many people, having a job we like and that pays reasonably well is already a luxury. I do benefit from that luxury, but after 40h/w of creativity on other people's problem, I don't have anymore willpower to even imagine something I would wish to work on during my free time.
Of course it requires great minds to innovate, but it is rare that these people really work on their own without constraints. Some of them do however, and the.com bubble gave some of them a good opportunity (a lot of available cash and everything to create from the void), but in the large majority, innovation comes from constraints, something that drives you nuts and give you a reason to concentrate your efforts on that particular scope (and/or pay people from the second category to work on it with/for you), as I read somewhere, "happy people enjoy the world, unhappy people make it a better place to live".
BTW, I personally believe I fall in the second category. I once in a while tried to start my own mini-projects but never could find something that could interest me for more than a few weeks and they all ended being only occasions to learn new languages or skills, but every day I get paid reasonably well to find innovative solutions to other peoples's problems, I won't probably never change the world or be famous but I have a motivation (money and reputation), and it really makes a big difference in the quality of my work.
But before we had it right, we had to get rid of a couple weeks at the end of the middle age to resync on the sun. The Gregorian2.0 is OK, but despite its near obsolecence problem and the lack of developemnt effort, the Mayan1.0 was right long before.
The funny thing about your post is that, if there really is a big solar storm, one of its first consequences will be a reduction of the quality of the weather forecasts because the satelites will suffer from increased noise in their sensors and communication devices and (in case of a realy nasty solar storm) temporary electronic failures. But don't worry, odds that this activity peak would cause the end of the world as we know it is basically the same as the one of 1958 (0.0000000000000000%).
1-Apparently, this movie, being THE release of the week, sells more in its BR version than all the other high def disks combined, at least today. 2-This movie seems to be available only in DVD, BR and UMD, so imagine "300" or another very big hit is released only in DVD and HD-DVD because it comes from an anti-Sony studio (I don't know for "300", and I don't care, it is simply for the example), will we see the same kind of article the other way around in a couple of mounthes?
That's exactly the point, more capabilities (HW, language, libraries) means many more things to do, not "nothing anymore" as the morron from the article said.
You're kidding, right? They'll just say that computers are so powerfull that they don't need coders anymore. Why, because it's been 40 years that those people say that CS or IT will be dead jobs within a couple of years because that is what the C*O want to hear and they will probably be wrong at least for the next couple of centuries.
And, as a bonus, there can always be an accident where 5000 tons of iron are accidentally dropped on Teheran at mach 30 after a failure in the atmospheric reentry system.
For the tinfoil community, simply create a circuit to short-cut the battery (or any other low-power incendiary device) in case of wrong password and use a Sony laptop to be able to claim bad luck when the FBI ask you to enter your PW.
I read an article long ago (sorry, can't remember the source, probably an all audience science magazine) that concluded that if you add UFO sightings to religious/mystical apparitions and divide by local population, the rate is globally constant all over the world since centuries, but at the start of the cold war, religous apparitions dropped in western contries in favor of UFOs, folowwed in the next few decades by the rest of the world. The conclusion (and I tend to agree with it) was that a certain proportion of people will see things they don't understand (wether because they are likely to or just by random is another question) and their cultural background, hopes and fears will try to rationalize that, and it dosen't really matter if it is Jesus, Elvis, secret government agency or little grey ones.
Well, technically, even that broad term is regulary wrong. A large proportion of UFO sightings are simply funny shapped clouds and/or sunlight reflection/refraction in the atmosphere, so the O and F parts can be wrong. I personnaly propose (U)nidentified (A)thmospheric (P)henomenon instead.
Probably not that much. Unfortunately yes. Not a lot, but far more than what they had invested to simply fine tune a generic search engine. I don't think so since I don't see news about gays or pink ponnies here today.
Yes, antimatter is unstable and hard to stock, so that's the big problem with that technique, treated people will have to go to a particule accelerator to be treated instead of a normal hospital.
Yes, antimatter can kill any kind of cell, but there are funny things about that kind of physics that basically says that if you throw the antimatter with the right energy, it will require x cm of flesh to slow it down enough before it can react with regular matter. So if you configure the system correctly, the great majority of the antimatter will explode at a very localized point and generate radiations that will be almost totally absorbed by a small volume of flesh (inj the order of cubic millimeters), so there is a very good spacial selectivity with that kind of technique.
And to be honest, I'm not very worried about a terrorist group trying to steal or smuggle a particule accelerator wheighting millions of tons and putting GW in it to get picograms of antimatter.
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CNES is much more than just an educational institution, they build satelites and interplanetary probes and run telescopes (and, yes, there is a lot of educational work there since there is a lot of pure academic research done there) beside their educational activities. The points NASA does and not CNES are launchers (handled by Ariane Espace) and experimental aircrafts (mostly handled by EADS).
Of course, on any of these activities, it is 10 to 100 times smaller than NASA.
Me, I was expecting 100 4MB movies files that you would have to play concurrently.
I would even say creativity needs a reason, since idea usually not come out of nothing. Wether you on networks, scientific theory, poetry or whatever, you only have a limited capacity of work, set of skills, knowledge and you usually have some needs that require you to sell a large proportion of those capacities.
The Miss America contest is probably the only place you could hear so many people saying they want to cure cancer and put an end to war and starvation. Why don't everyone spend all their energy actually acheiving these goal? Simply because for so many people, having a job we like and that pays reasonably well is already a luxury. I do benefit from that luxury, but after 40h/w of creativity on other people's problem, I don't have anymore willpower to even imagine something I would wish to work on during my free time.
I'd like to live in your alternative reality...
.com bubble gave some of them a good opportunity (a lot of available cash and everything to create from the void), but in the large majority, innovation comes from constraints, something that drives you nuts and give you a reason to concentrate your efforts on that particular scope (and/or pay people from the second category to work on it with/for you), as I read somewhere, "happy people enjoy the world, unhappy people make it a better place to live".
Of course it requires great minds to innovate, but it is rare that these people really work on their own without constraints. Some of them do however, and the
BTW, I personally believe I fall in the second category. I once in a while tried to start my own mini-projects but never could find something that could interest me for more than a few weeks and they all ended being only occasions to learn new languages or skills, but every day I get paid reasonably well to find innovative solutions to other peoples's problems, I won't probably never change the world or be famous but I have a motivation (money and reputation), and it really makes a big difference in the quality of my work.
But before we had it right, we had to get rid of a couple weeks at the end of the middle age to resync on the sun. The Gregorian2.0 is OK, but despite its near obsolecence problem and the lack of developemnt effort, the Mayan1.0 was right long before.
The funny thing about your post is that, if there really is a big solar storm, one of its first consequences will be a reduction of the quality of the weather forecasts because the satelites will suffer from increased noise in their sensors and communication devices and (in case of a realy nasty solar storm) temporary electronic failures.
But don't worry, odds that this activity peak would cause the end of the world as we know it is basically the same as the one of 1958 (0.0000000000000000%).
Maybe Rocket science is like computer science. You can have your payload on orbit, still working or for cheap, choose at most 2.
By the way, how could we prove Viacom didn't uploaded some of the youTube infrigements, a la WMD?
Then, they can also claim that Viacom's claim was an attempt to use a bogus legal action to hurt a direct competitor and ask for damages.
There also are decent emulators running on PC.
Because they start with the conclusion that their sponsor chosed and then try to build a study around it?
So the kids who torture real small animals for fun will suddenly gain a conscience when faced with simulated ones?
1-Apparently, this movie, being THE release of the week, sells more in its BR version than all the other high def disks combined, at least today.
2-This movie seems to be available only in DVD, BR and UMD, so imagine "300" or another very big hit is released only in DVD and HD-DVD because it comes from an anti-Sony studio (I don't know for "300", and I don't care, it is simply for the example), will we see the same kind of article the other way around in a couple of mounthes?
Considering that, at this moment, the Amazon DVD top 100 is composed of 99 DVD (still including Firefly at #81, BTW) and 1 BR.
That's exactly the point, more capabilities (HW, language, libraries) means many more things to do, not "nothing anymore" as the morron from the article said.
You're kidding, right? They'll just say that computers are so powerfull that they don't need coders anymore. Why, because it's been 40 years that those people say that CS or IT will be dead jobs within a couple of years because that is what the C*O want to hear and they will probably be wrong at least for the next couple of centuries.
And, as a bonus, there can always be an accident where 5000 tons of iron are accidentally dropped on Teheran at mach 30 after a failure in the atmospheric reentry system.
For the tinfoil community, simply create a circuit to short-cut the battery (or any other low-power incendiary device) in case of wrong password and use a Sony laptop to be able to claim bad luck when the FBI ask you to enter your PW.
Personally, I do that nearly every friday and never had to complain about it.
I read an article long ago (sorry, can't remember the source, probably an all audience science magazine) that concluded that if you add UFO sightings to religious/mystical apparitions and divide by local population, the rate is globally constant all over the world since centuries, but at the start of the cold war, religous apparitions dropped in western contries in favor of UFOs, folowwed in the next few decades by the rest of the world.
The conclusion (and I tend to agree with it) was that a certain proportion of people will see things they don't understand (wether because they are likely to or just by random is another question) and their cultural background, hopes and fears will try to rationalize that, and it dosen't really matter if it is Jesus, Elvis, secret government agency or little grey ones.
Well, technically, even that broad term is regulary wrong. A large proportion of UFO sightings are simply funny shapped clouds and/or sunlight reflection/refraction in the atmosphere, so the O and F parts can be wrong. I personnaly propose (U)nidentified (A)thmospheric (P)henomenon instead.
Probably not that much.
Unfortunately yes. Not a lot, but far more than what they had invested to simply fine tune a generic search engine.
I don't think so since I don't see news about gays or pink ponnies here today.
Don't worry, every new technology will also be applied to mass murder civilians, err fight terrorism. Sleep well little child.
Yes, antimatter is unstable and hard to stock, so that's the big problem with that technique, treated people will have to go to a particule accelerator to be treated instead of a normal hospital.
Yes, antimatter can kill any kind of cell, but there are funny things about that kind of physics that basically says that if you throw the antimatter with the right energy, it will require x cm of flesh to slow it down enough before it can react with regular matter. So if you configure the system correctly, the great majority of the antimatter will explode at a very localized point and generate radiations that will be almost totally absorbed by a small volume of flesh (inj the order of cubic millimeters), so there is a very good spacial selectivity with that kind of technique.
And to be honest, I'm not very worried about a terrorist group trying to steal or smuggle a particule accelerator wheighting millions of tons and putting GW in it to get picograms of antimatter.
They can ask a few advices from McAfee.