I know the iPhone is the shiznit and all but will its camera withstand cosmic rays, van allen belts, vibration and hot-cold temperature cycles of 200 degrees C, with a probability of failure of less than 1% over a year?
"The intent of the Founders was pretty clear - any man should be able to carry the same sort of weapons a soldier carries (long arms effective in battle), not so much cannon."
Cannon were very effective to decisive in 18th and 19th century battle.
The knowledge and certainty level about nuclear georeactors is quite low (understatement), and it is a minority opinion that it exists. If it does we certainly don't know enough about its prehistory either and what the consequences to climate would have been, so the climatological record isn't remotely conclusive on this.
Incoming solar radiation is 173 petawatts, 44 to 47 terawatts from "stored heat and radioactive decay" (probably not from fission), which is 0.025%. So a variation of 4 terawatts is about 0.002% of solar insolation. Now the climate can be sensitive but I doubt it's that sensitive. It probably wouldn't be possible to pick up a fluctuation in a 4 terawatt core georeactor in climate data.
The core georeactor should be actually reasonably easy to detect if you can analyze neutrino scattering data and get initial angle and energy distribution of the incoming particles. That fact that I haven't heard of such a signal (the neutrino experimentalists would have found an unusual pesky background that they couldn't get rid of when trying to measure solar neutrinos) leads me to believe far more directly and without reference to climate that it's unlikely there's any signifcant core georeactor. Maybe it's possible it was just missed, and was in the data.
Atmospheric physics and dynamics is much, much better understood since we've had experiments and theory for 50 years or so.
"If you want to think like a scientist, try thinking about what might DISPROVE the global warming hypothesis. That's right - you'll find that NOTHING is accepted as disproof."
That's false. What would disprove it?
*) Measuring infrared fluxes in the atmosphere and finding that they aren't changing as predicted by our chemistry and current knowledge of infrared scattering. This experiment has been done and the results match predicted theory.
*) space probes finding Venus to be just a bit warmer than Earth instead of the hell hole that it is.
"Really, 95% of the software development employees out there are just using these rigorous methodologies to try to emulate hacker-ness, because they can't otherwise muster it naturally."
Huh? Never seen this before.
The usual difference is that 'engineering' is about understanding and dealing with the realities of other humans: your colleagues, your bosses, and your clients, and yourself, and not just your code and your problem and your shiny toy.
The most important difference between 'hacking' and engineering is understanding time, and understanding humans (epsecially yourself).
In a nutshell:
0) learn the difference between 'clever' and 'smart', and then 'smart' and 'wise'.
1) code is to your employer as mass is to an aircraft engineer: less is better.
2) understand how and when to say "no" to your management, or more realistically "how long" and "what it takes" and don't overestimate your total productivity in delivering product as opposed to a caffeine-fueled hacking.
Why isn't all high-value email being run with an outlook client in a locked virtual machine? Say centralized, with a VNC connection and all the anti-malware scrubbing everything and resetting its configuration?
"they've not done anything that a more sanely-led country in their position wouldn't have done, which is to try to use any resources at their disposal to ensure that they don't get their asses kicked."
Why is Qatar/Kuwait/Jordan not getting its ass kicked?
Maybe they haven't recently threatened to exterminate a whole bunch of people for ideological reasons and build the infrastructure for producing nuclear weapons.
Aerospace has much better QA procedures than heart surgeons. Many surgeons don't even use basic checklists despite being proven successful at reducing errors, because they are the well-paid masters and don't what any peon correcting them.
"And how accurate would a high-precision scale be after a few weeks of aircraft mechanics dropping heavy toolboxes on it at the beginning and end of every shift?"
You don't need absolute accuracy, just enough repeatability over one shift.
Blaming everything on the CRA is 99% right wing propaganda and a lie.
Banks don't give out enormous bonuses to brokers for loans that they "have to give out". If that were the case, they would make it an arduous bureaucratic process which the customers have to navigate and push themselves. Banks give out enormous bonuses for loans which make them tons of money, this quarter. And that's what they did.
And the CRA doesn't in any case force subprime loans, and the worst subprime offenders were not even subject to CRA. And there was a huge bubble in commercial property lending which is not part of CRA either. And there is clear evidence 'redlining' of minority borrowers to bad (==profitable to the bank) loan terms when the borrowers could have qualified for better, conventional loans (which were less profitable).
The CRA was around for twenty/thirty years and never caused any huge systematic effect.
"When Microsoft used their Windows monopoly revenues to fund development of Internet Explorer and release it for free to try to dominate the web market, everyone here cried "antitrust!""
It was the bundling it with Windows and concomitant development of proprietary MS only extensions that were the real problems.
Google (so far) isn't doing the rough equivalents: they aren't restricting use of Google search to Chrome, and they aren't pushing a plethora of obviously Google-only APIs to make websites work on Chrome-only. If they did, then they'd be like Microsoft 1998.
They're making Chrome so that they can make and sell Google Apps and be sure that there will be a way to run Google Apps which doesn't suck too much.
Of course, Google is mini-evil to meso-evil (on the scale where Facebook is full-on-evil) on privacy and creepy data collection.
The Federal Reserve is already highly regulated, sufficiently so that the President appoints its board of directors, who have to report to Congress, and whose essential laws and operations are governed by acts of Congress.
What specific positions and policies does Mr Paul believe in which act for the purpose of "preventing monopolies, encouraging market diversity/competition" against the self-interest of incumbent providers of goods and services who freely and willingly attempt to assert monopolies and discourage market diversity & competition?"
Any which are NOT 'stopping government regulation'?
"But, I digress. Until we make the housing business more like the PC business (cheaper and better every year and yet the companies still prosper) we will continue to have this problem."
When you put it that way, the problem's simple. We need only shrink people in half every 18 months. Obviously it's only government intervention, like Fannie & Freddie, which is stopping our housing productivity from being as high as the deregulated semiconductor industry.
But the actual Space Race was integrated ICBM weapon system & communication. DARPA is there to fund stuff to make stuff go boom, not go "look at me mom".
And when the spacecraft's orbit took it out of range?
Really. The problem can be explained simply: the people involved did not have any recent experience building scientific spacecraft, and they started with an ambitious and complicated design.
The USA has been sending some smaller and simpler science spacecraft fairly regularly for about 15-20 years and so when they want to design an expensive & complex mission they have some better capabilities and won't overlook the odd failure modes (in rocket science there are zillions of low-probability possibilities, which is why it's hard). And even still, there have been failures.
Yes they did, at least a little. Foreigners were offered quite a bit of money/stuff to part with theirs. Burning them was *not* their subsequent use, btw.
"Chances are reasonable, intentional or otherwise, one of these stations may have unduly influenced the operation of their rocket."
Actually that's insane. What is the (a) physics of doing so? (Heating the atmosphere over a wide patch is what they do to study ionosphere) What's the cross section of power applied directly on the satellite? Notice that when you want to aim something precisely (and hitting a satellite in orbit requires LOTS of precision) you need to use short wavelengths, like say an optical laser, and then you have to precisely compensate for atmospheric aberrations. The radio research facilities instead use wavelengths of a number of meters long, which of course diffracts and spreads out just a wee bit more.
And then what is (b) the motivation for doing so? In detail. Screwing with a scientific probe going to Mars? Dr Strangelove types aren't particularly impressed or care about some nerd spacecraft. What's in it for The Conspirators?
c) "there are powerful interests in the US who absolutely do not want to rely on Russia for space access" -- but are apparently insufficiently powerful to get the USA to spend the money to fund ongoing operations and develop the next generation simultaneously. Well, since in your conspiracy theory the US *is* in fact dependent on Russia, then why sabotage Russian rockets? Why not sabotage Russian rockets only after the US gets its space access back?
And besides, the US is is not dependent on Russia for space access overall: the military and intelligence communities happily continue to buy launches on expensive Boeing/Lockheed ULA rockets, it's just that NASA can't afford (isn't given funding for) these ones and will have to hitch rides on bargain basement SpaceX hardware in a few years.
Slashdot Mirror
I know the iPhone is the shiznit and all but will its camera withstand cosmic rays, van allen belts, vibration and hot-cold temperature cycles of 200 degrees C, with a probability of failure of less than 1% over a year?
"The intent of the Founders was pretty clear - any man should be able to carry the same sort of weapons a soldier carries (long arms effective in battle), not so much cannon."
Cannon were very effective to decisive in 18th and 19th century battle.
Huh?
The knowledge and certainty level about nuclear georeactors is quite low (understatement), and it is a minority opinion that it exists. If it does we certainly don't know enough about its prehistory either and what the consequences to climate would have been, so the climatological record isn't remotely conclusive on this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_energy_budget#Incoming_energy
Incoming solar radiation is 173 petawatts, 44 to 47 terawatts from "stored heat and radioactive decay" (probably not from fission), which is 0.025%.
So a variation of 4 terawatts is about 0.002% of solar insolation. Now the climate can be sensitive but I doubt it's that sensitive. It probably wouldn't be possible to pick up a fluctuation in a 4 terawatt core georeactor in climate data.
The core georeactor should be actually reasonably easy to detect if you can analyze neutrino scattering data and get initial angle and energy distribution of the incoming particles. That fact that I haven't heard of such a signal (the neutrino experimentalists would have found an unusual pesky background that they couldn't get rid of when trying to measure solar neutrinos) leads me to believe far more directly and without reference to climate that it's unlikely there's any signifcant core georeactor. Maybe it's possible it was just missed, and was in the data.
Atmospheric physics and dynamics is much, much better understood since we've had experiments and theory for 50 years or so.
"If you want to think like a scientist, try thinking about what might DISPROVE the global warming hypothesis. That's right - you'll find that NOTHING is accepted as disproof."
That's false. What would disprove it?
*) Measuring infrared fluxes in the atmosphere and finding that they aren't changing as predicted by our chemistry and current knowledge of infrared scattering. This experiment has been done and the results match predicted theory.
*) space probes finding Venus to be just a bit warmer than Earth instead of the hell hole that it is.
*) clear global cooling trends
"Really, 95% of the software development employees out there are just using these rigorous methodologies to try to emulate hacker-ness, because they can't otherwise muster it naturally."
Huh? Never seen this before.
The usual difference is that 'engineering' is about understanding and dealing with the realities of other humans: your colleagues, your bosses, and your clients, and yourself, and not just your code and your problem and your shiny toy.
An engineer also tries very hard to mitigate (and document/CHA) the problems when faced with the inevitable WGNTGSD *now* projects.
The most important difference between 'hacking' and engineering is understanding time, and understanding humans (epsecially yourself).
In a nutshell:
0) learn the difference between 'clever' and 'smart', and then 'smart' and 'wise'.
1) code is to your employer as mass is to an aircraft engineer: less is better.
2) understand how and when to say "no" to your management, or more realistically "how long" and "what it takes" and don't overestimate your total productivity in delivering product as opposed to a caffeine-fueled hacking.
"Oh, so saying bad stuff with the enemy is an act of war and not free speech?"
Usually, yes, if this saying bad stuff is combined with active organizing and support of armed aggression.
"or not a simple police-level crime?"
If it's inside jurisdiction you can pursue it as a crime.
Why isn't all high-value email being run with an outlook client in a locked virtual machine? Say centralized, with a VNC connection and all the anti-malware scrubbing everything and resetting its configuration?
"they've not done anything that a more sanely-led country in their position wouldn't have done, which is to try to use any resources at their disposal to ensure that they don't get their asses kicked."
Why is Qatar/Kuwait/Jordan not getting its ass kicked?
Maybe they haven't recently threatened to exterminate a whole bunch of people for ideological reasons and build the infrastructure for producing nuclear weapons.
Aerospace has much better QA procedures than heart surgeons. Many surgeons don't even use basic checklists despite being proven successful at reducing errors, because they are the well-paid masters and don't what any peon correcting them.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/14/us-surgical-checklists-idUSTRE70D33920110114
When the malpractice insurers start enforcing this with detective-techniques and legal subpoenas it will change.
"And how accurate would a high-precision scale be after a few weeks of aircraft mechanics dropping heavy toolboxes on it at the beginning and end of every shift?"
You don't need absolute accuracy, just enough repeatability over one shift.
Blaming everything on the CRA is 99% right wing propaganda and a lie.
Banks don't give out enormous bonuses to brokers for loans that they "have to give out". If that were the case, they would make it an arduous bureaucratic process which the customers have to navigate and push themselves. Banks give out enormous bonuses for loans which make them tons of money, this quarter. And that's what they did.
And the CRA doesn't in any case force subprime loans, and the worst subprime offenders were not even subject to CRA. And there was a huge bubble in commercial property lending which is not part of CRA either. And there is clear evidence 'redlining' of minority borrowers to bad (==profitable to the bank) loan terms when the borrowers could have qualified for better, conventional loans (which were less profitable).
The CRA was around for twenty/thirty years and never caused any huge systematic effect.
"When Microsoft used their Windows monopoly revenues to fund development of Internet Explorer and release it for free to try to dominate the web market, everyone here cried "antitrust!""
It was the bundling it with Windows and concomitant development of proprietary MS only extensions that were the real problems.
Google (so far) isn't doing the rough equivalents: they aren't restricting use of Google search to Chrome, and they aren't pushing a plethora of obviously Google-only APIs to make websites work on Chrome-only. If they did, then they'd be like Microsoft 1998.
They're making Chrome so that they can make and sell Google Apps and be sure that there will be a way to run Google Apps which doesn't suck too much.
Of course, Google is mini-evil to meso-evil (on the scale where Facebook is full-on-evil) on privacy and creepy data collection.
The Federal Reserve is already highly regulated, sufficiently so that the President appoints its board of directors, who have to report to Congress, and whose essential laws and operations are governed by acts of Congress.
What specific positions and policies does Mr Paul believe in which act for the purpose of "preventing monopolies, encouraging market diversity/competition" against the self-interest of incumbent providers of goods and services who freely and willingly attempt to assert monopolies and discourage market diversity & competition?"
Any which are NOT 'stopping government regulation'?
ArcherDanielsMidland, and Senators from Kansas, Nebraska, Illinois, Dakotas and Minnesota
Larry: I hold up my pinky, and it tells me the number. Like a fucking oracle, it is.
"But, I digress. Until we make the housing business more like the PC business (cheaper and better every year and yet the companies still prosper) we will continue to have this problem."
When you put it that way, the problem's simple. We need only shrink people in half every 18 months. Obviously it's only government intervention, like Fannie & Freddie, which is stopping our housing productivity from being as high as the deregulated semiconductor industry.
In other words, yet another medical bankruptcy & destitution, which is almost uniquely American in developed nations.
"Can you be 100% sure this probe wasn't ALSO carrying some spy equipment?"
No, but it would only be useful for spying on Martians.
"Can you be 100% sure the US doesn't want to discredit Russia's space program for its own ends?"
When it needs the Russians more than before? It's insane.
No, they were critical to the Space Race.
But the actual Space Race was integrated ICBM weapon system & communication. DARPA is there to fund stuff to make stuff go boom, not go "look at me mom".
And when the spacecraft's orbit took it out of range?
Really. The problem can be explained simply: the people involved did not have any recent experience building scientific spacecraft, and they started with an ambitious and complicated design.
The USA has been sending some smaller and simpler science spacecraft fairly regularly for about 15-20 years and so when they want to design an expensive & complex mission they have some better capabilities and won't overlook the odd failure modes (in rocket science there are zillions of low-probability possibilities, which is why it's hard). And even still, there have been failures.
"Russians never had access to Levis"
Yes they did, at least a little. Foreigners were offered quite a bit of money/stuff to part with theirs. Burning them was *not* their subsequent use, btw.
"Chances are reasonable, intentional or otherwise, one of these stations may have unduly influenced the operation of their rocket."
Actually that's insane. What is the (a) physics of doing so? (Heating the atmosphere over a wide patch is what they do to study ionosphere) What's the cross section of power applied directly on the satellite? Notice that when you want to aim something precisely (and hitting a satellite in orbit requires LOTS of precision) you need to use short wavelengths, like say an optical laser, and then you have to precisely compensate for atmospheric aberrations. The radio research facilities instead use wavelengths of a number of meters long, which of course diffracts and spreads out just a wee bit more.
And then what is (b) the motivation for doing so? In detail. Screwing with a scientific probe going to Mars? Dr Strangelove types aren't particularly impressed or care about some nerd spacecraft. What's in it for The Conspirators?
c) "there are powerful interests in the US who absolutely do not want to rely on Russia for space access" -- but are apparently insufficiently powerful to get the USA to spend the money to fund ongoing operations and develop the next generation simultaneously. Well, since in your conspiracy theory the US *is* in fact dependent on Russia, then why sabotage Russian rockets? Why not sabotage Russian rockets only after the US gets its space access back?
And besides, the US is is not dependent on Russia for space access overall: the military and intelligence communities happily continue to buy launches on expensive Boeing/Lockheed ULA rockets, it's just that NASA can't afford (isn't given funding for) these ones and will have to hitch rides on bargain basement SpaceX hardware in a few years.