Taking a hammer to them is too much effort. A single pass of "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd" will utterly destroy all the data beyond any hope of recovery.
This does not cover the case though of the hard drive being taken out of service due to flaky behavior developing with age. In that case you cannot assume that the drive ill erase itself properly (or at all if is fails out right). Now such a drive is not likely to be ever resold or reused, and it might require a malefactor to actually fix the drive in some way before recovering data from it, but the platter is still readable and a security risk.
Besides whacking with a hammer is fun. Get a big hammer! (But wear eye protection.)
The title is completely wrong. Nothing about this work suggests extraterrestrial life isn't plausible, nor that there's anything whimsical about it. Here is what they actually said.
We know that life appeared on earth very soon after the surface became cool enough to be habitable. People therefore assume the same would be true on other planets. But having only one data point doesn't give us enough evidence to actually conclude that with any confidence. In particular:
1. It took a few billion years after that for life to evolve to the point where it could wonder about the possibility of life on other planets.
2. If it had taken a few billion years for life to appear in the first place, we might never have reached this point.
3. Therefore this might just be an anthropic effect. Intelligent life forms will always find themselves on planets where life appeared quickly, but that doesn't tell you how often life actually does appear quickly.
Good summary. And it clearly shows the weakness of their argument. It might be an anthropic effect true, but the interesting thing about the evidence of the emergence of life on Earth is that we know it occurred quickly, in fact so quickly that the evidence is consistent with it being instantaneous. That is - we can push the evidence essentially back to the earliest remaining material in which we could hope to find such evidence. We see a trend of earlier material, when found, giving ever earlier evidence shrinking the gap between that life and the last sterilizing bombardment.
This is direct evidence of a very rapid life emergence rate parameter (lambda in the PNAS article). While the late emergence of intelligence on Earth makes it likely that human-style intelligence is rare (unlikely on average to occur at all) there is little evidence to support their proposed model where a special rapid lambda is being observationally selected for in order for our intelligence to emerge.
Nah. Crookes radiometer is not due to thermal radiation pressure in a vacuum. It is a ballistic effect of air molecules in a very thin atmosphere bouncing off a hot surface with more velocity than they had when the collided with.
100% certainty exists only in a fictional version of science.
They showed that the residual 20% is not statistically significant. This is a showing that there is no additional anomaly to be accounted for. This is what is called "solving a problem" in real science.
Re:This was already solved by a portuguese in 2009
on
Pioneer Anomaly Solved
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Not exactly.
Numerous investigators have been strengthening the case for thermal radiation as the cause for nearly a decade. The work of Bertolami, Francisco, et al in Portugal in 2008-2009 accounted for 67% of the acceleration, a then-new high point in this reckoning. This was a notable result, but they didn't "figure it out" or "solve" it, they strengthened the case that was by then widely believed to be correct. For an account of the whole story up through 2010 see: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1001.3686v2.pdf.
The new study raises the level of confirmation to 80%, using data that they newly recovered, and further shows that the remaining 20% is not statistically significant. It is this study that deserves to be regarded as having "solved" the problem: accounting essentially for the full anomalous acceleration, and leaving no residual anomaly.
Indeed. Another problem with drawing broad conclusions with the study is look at the years they are comparing - 2008, when gas first broke the $4 a gallon barrier (remember?), but before the economic collapse look hold, and 2011 when gas prices where still down sharply, and after a punishing two years of recession/depression. Paying more up front when the economy is bad, for the promise of future savings when gas prices are down, is not a consuming behavior many people will exhibit.
Okay "Sokolization" is not a recognized word (yet) - it refers to Sokal Affair, wherein physicist Alan Sokal successfully published a hoax article of gibberish in Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies (Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies ("Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", published in the Social Text Spring/Summer 1996).
As long as certain structural requirements are met (grammar, composition and style) this program will grade it well even if it is complete nonsense.
I suggest this might be a good tool if the teachers still read the best essays for content (logic, factual correctness, etc.)
According to TFA, they did do the final test, and it showed problems. Unfortunately, they came to the conclusion that the test was bad, not the mirror. They assumed that since the mirror was no longer on it's 'bed of nails', it was sagging under gravity, and that was causing the test error.
Given the thickness error in the mirror was less than the thickness of a piece of paper, that is a reasonable explanation. It was really small error given the size and weight of the mirror and gravity unfortunately does have a huge effect in slightly deforming such heavy optics. And yes, the optics were carved with gravity deformation in mind as well.
And the other bad thing is, well, the further something is away from you, the tighter the tolerances needed in order to resolve that object, so an error as tiny as it is makes for very blurry images.
To anyone who works with telescope mirrors (even ones costing 0.001% the cost the Hubble mirror) knows all about gravity sagging, it is every present and even my 13.1" mirror requires carefully designed supports. The degree of sag with the 3-point support should have been (and probably was) a calculated, pre-known quantity, and that it was sagging far more than expected should have led to an investigation as to why that was if the cultural environment had supported proper review. So no, it was not a reasonable explanation.
Is NASA really so underfunded they cannot afford a 50k dollar test to make sure their 1.5 billion dollar telescope?
Read the article (I know, this is Slashdot...). The problem was not that they didn't do obvious tests that would have revealed a major flaw - THEY DID! But they didn't believe the results since the far more sensitive null corrector should/could not possibly have made an error of this magnitude (it should have been accurate to 1/65 wave, but was off by 1/2 wave). They assumed that the test set-up they were using was flawed -- and the environment they were working in (schedule and budget overruns, prestige and jobs on the line putting pressure to get the mirror out the door) discouraged taking pains to understand fully what was happening.
Mod up! I was going to make this exact same comment. A old-fashioned copy machine maker - instead of a modern multi-function network device - would be out of business.
No, that's very naive. Its not because people want shiny that RIM is in the dumpster. Its because "business phones" really needed to be able to do everything that the "non business phones" do too.....
Amen. That Blackberry is automatically competing against everyone's personal cellphone. A job I had several years ago they provided their tech staff with Blackberries, but I refused to use/carry it. Why? I already had a cell phone, which I still needed to carry since the rest of the world uses it to call me, and it was smaller (the Blackberry had a permanent keyboard making too big to fit in the pocket), and did more. So I changed my contact info to my personal cell phone.
When a product is sufficiently uncompelling that you don't want to use it even when they give it to you free, that product has a long term problem.
You might reflect for a moment that your predisposition to dismiss data you don't like without any investigation may have a bearing on whether it is apt to characterize conservatives as being "anti-science".
Actually the Japanese were trying desperately to negotiate a surrender even before the FIRST use of WMD against them. The idea that WMD somehow prevented deaths or suffering is total bullshit. It was a matter of the US asserting itself as the dominant military power, and Japan was a soft enough target to cop 2 WMD attacks. Interesting how the victors frame their attrocities.
Sorry, the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War (SCDW, or the "Big Six") who actually ran the country were not only NOT involved in any way with attempts to negotiate surrender. The official policy, and the only one they ever discussed, was Ketsu-Go, a final apocalyptic battle where (the Army claimed) they would inflict such heavy casualties on the Americans that they Americans would grant Japan favorable terms (no occupation, and continuation of the present government). It was impossible (due to Army opposition) to even bring up the subject of ending the war in any other way.
The few feelers of negotiation came from low level functionaries in Europe who acted without the support or knowledge of their own government. The U.S. recognized that these were worthless. The discussion between the closest thing to a true "peace representative" on the SCDW, Foreign Minister Togo, and Ambassador Sato in Moscow (monitored by the U.S.) shows Togo denying any possibility of negotiating surrender, despite Sato's repeated insistence that that was the only option available.
Rules of MAD don't apply to Islamic regimes the same way that they did to Communists. Sure, the Communists (Soviets & Chinese) were evil, but they were at least rational about it - while they undoubtedly wanted to wipe out their enemies, they themselves wanted to survive. Which is why deterence worked during the Cold War. During that time, there were a lot of espionage & terrorist acts pulled off by the NKVD/KGB, but how many suicide bombings does anybody remember that the Soviets did?
...
How short the memories.
During the Cold War the hysteria-mongers routinely argued that the Communists could not be deterred because they cared nothing for human life - arguments trotted out for this view were the tens of millions of deaths in the Stalinist and Maoist purges and engineered famines, the way life was literally thrown away in Gulags, and in WWII how millions of Soviet soldiers were carelessly sacrificed for negligible battlefield effect (and the same with Chinese and North Korean soldiers a few years later, and North Vietnamese and Cambodian soldiers decades after that). Various quotes by Lenin were commonly repeated (some of them fictitious*) to show the utter ruthlessness, and that their messianic belief in the inevitable victory of Communism made them indifferent to the possibility of nuclear war since Communism would survive.**
And most of the statements about Communist behavior were true. But a big difference is it was never the leadership, the state itself that was put at risk. Nuclear weapons change that completely. That alone makes the whole claim completely invalid.
*The favored fake quote, often repeated was this one: "What does it matter if three-fourths of the world perish, if the remaining one fourth are good communists?" attributed to Lenin.
**Counter-evidence, like Stalin's decision not to seize West Berlin, Khruschev's hasty back-down in Cuba, and the striking intolerance to taking casualties in the 1980s after the Afghanistan invasion were ignored.
This "Islamists are insane and are not afraid of nuclear war" is just a retread of the same Cold War tripe.
I agree, and what's more, the Best Animated Feature category should not have been created. Unlike what the general public might have heard, it was created as a ghetto with the intention that animated movies would no longer be eligible for Best Picture (Beauty and the Beast's nominations sent shockwaves of anger through the acting branch, the largest voting block of the academy). Over a decade later and Toy Story 3 was nominated, but the talk was that it could "settle" for Best Animated Film.
If ever there was a Sci-Fi category, it would doom the chances of a science fiction film ever being considered for Best Picture.
...
Disagree. So... despite the existence of the ghetto that ensures no animated movie will be eligible for Best Picture, one was nominated (for the second time ever) anyway? Logical disconnect.
And what you are saying is that it would be better than no animated movie ever win an Oscar -- since only two have ever been nominated at all, and the Academy's well-known biases guarantee that however good it might be, it can't win.
Animated movies are sufficiently different in fundamental ways from live action (i.e. in a way that any live action genre movie - like SF - is not) that a separate category is not only deserved, but needed to allow their qualities to be appreciated, and to allow the whole discipline of animation to get its due recognition.
This is similar to the existence of best foreign language category, the nominees in some years are all better than any on the English best picture list, but have never one an Academy Award for Best Picture.
He, Brainstorm was actually a pretty good movie....
Two-thirds of it were a pretty good movie. It was in fact an unusually close model of a classic approach to hard SF - postulate a technological innovation, and follow the consequences as its impact is felt. The movie was crippled by the death of Natalie Wood and led to a very unsatisfactory mish-mash of an ending that let them patch together the footage they had of her.
...If China is willing to sell goods for cheaper than it costs to produce, then that's good for us. The rare earth metals will remain in our country while we bleed China dry....
Brilliant! Let's do that! Lets buy all those rare earths at below cost, and bleed China dry!
Wait. Didn't China stop selling rare earths at below cost and now charges punitive rates? Isn't it a problem not getting them to sell to you at all? Why isn't that good deal still available? Come on China let us bleed you dry!
This could be shaped into a line for Weird Al's "Dare to be Stupid" ("It's like I said, you gotta buy one if you wanna get one free.").
It's like the right-wing reverse-image version of Communism.
I've often thought that. It is a distinctly 19th Century Utopian notion (though the product of the mid-20th Century). It was clearly a counter-reaction to and inspired by Communism (which Ayn Rand's family fled in 1917) dreamed up at the height of the "Red Menace" years from the 1930s to the 1950s. Like Communism it was dreamed up by an academic mind without basing it on any evidence of feasibility in the real world. Like Communism, to adherents the failure of the theory to describe the real world reveal a defect in reality (not the theory) or is simply the result of the theoretical scheme not being comprehensively and universally implemented. You must surrender to it utterly to experience its wonderful benefits.
Until the day the new plant comes on line, and China slashes prices again. They are already did this to obtain the monopoly - why would you think they wouldn't repeat what they have already done?
So if we make the mine operational and then China starts providing us with cheap metal, I don't see the problem. Keep the mine maintained, and ready for use, and let China load us up with cheap minerals. Oh, of course making this situation of allowing many hundreds of businesses and hundreds of millions of consumers to thrive in an atmosphere of reduced costs would depend on the government buying out or subsidizing one...
Naturally, this will have conservatives crawling out of the woodwork to declare that capitalism is being subverted and to let the market decide....
China's practice of using its ability to undersell by mis-pricing externalities to destroy competition and create a monopoly of course is the anti-thesis of free markets, as its subsequent abuse of this monopoly to charge exorbitant prices to its competition, or worse cut off supplies altogether. This is economic warfare not free trade, and defensive measures by government are perfectly in order. A Republican President could make this argument and conservatives would eat it up. There is well established model for this too - having the government support the business with long-term contracts to build up a strategic reserve, and conservatives love the strategic oil reserve (GW Bush was eager to start filling it up again, buying at the peak of the market when supplies were tight the last time gas hit $4 a gallon).
But if Obama were to suggest this it would be Marxism and a plot to destroy freedom.
There is a non-governmental approach though: all the industries and companies that consume rare earths forming a trade association to buy rare earths on long-term contracts at agreed fixed prices for part of their supply no matter how cheaply China sells rare earths. Even then it is likely the government will need facilitate the arrangement.
It is as I thought. All this means that YOU can't make use of your web history, Google still has it and can do with it as it pleases. Same as with Facebook account "deletions".
Next thursday is March 1, not tomorrow. New policy goes into effect NEXT thursday, not tomorrow.
Not according to the definitions in any dictionary I have at hand. E.g.: Dictionary.com:
adjective: 1. immediately following in time, order, importance, etc.: the next day; the next person in line.
Tomorrow is the Thursday immediately following in time. I cannot find any dictionary carrying the definition you are using.
Nonetheless - I am familiar with the idiom, based on the usage I have heard I suspect it is endemic to the American South - and its illogicality annoys the heck out of me. Is the house next door the one you reach after a passing the house immediately adjacent to yours?
I did the math. Sufficiently slow acceleration of 3Gs would require a distance of several miles (going from memory here) to achieve 17,000 miles per hour. As much as it sucks, it's still better to put the propulsion system on the vehicle.
Regards,
Jason C. Wells
It is not possible to put something into orbit using a ground launcher alone. An on-board motor is essential at the very least to circularize the trajectory so that the "orbit" does not intersect the surface of the Earth before completing one revolution. And you lost way to much energy in the lower atmosphere (and create incredible heat loads) trying to ram through it at super-orbital speeds (in fact the G-loading from this deceleration alone will probably be prohibitive for humans).
For Earth-surface launches it could provide a replacement for the first stage - get you above 95%-99% of the atmosphere where rocket engines are most efficient and no longer have to fight lower atmosphere air resistance. This might make a single (rocket) stage to orbit system practical.
Slashdot Mirror
Taking a hammer to them is too much effort. A single pass of "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd" will utterly destroy all the data beyond any hope of recovery.
This does not cover the case though of the hard drive being taken out of service due to flaky behavior developing with age. In that case you cannot assume that the drive ill erase itself properly (or at all if is fails out right). Now such a drive is not likely to be ever resold or reused, and it might require a malefactor to actually fix the drive in some way before recovering data from it, but the platter is still readable and a security risk.
Besides whacking with a hammer is fun. Get a big hammer! (But wear eye protection.)
The title is completely wrong. Nothing about this work suggests extraterrestrial life isn't plausible, nor that there's anything whimsical about it. Here is what they actually said.
We know that life appeared on earth very soon after the surface became cool enough to be habitable. People therefore assume the same would be true on other planets. But having only one data point doesn't give us enough evidence to actually conclude that with any confidence. In particular:
1. It took a few billion years after that for life to evolve to the point where it could wonder about the possibility of life on other planets. 2. If it had taken a few billion years for life to appear in the first place, we might never have reached this point. 3. Therefore this might just be an anthropic effect. Intelligent life forms will always find themselves on planets where life appeared quickly, but that doesn't tell you how often life actually does appear quickly.
Good summary. And it clearly shows the weakness of their argument. It might be an anthropic effect true, but the interesting thing about the evidence of the emergence of life on Earth is that we know it occurred quickly, in fact so quickly that the evidence is consistent with it being instantaneous. That is - we can push the evidence essentially back to the earliest remaining material in which we could hope to find such evidence. We see a trend of earlier material, when found, giving ever earlier evidence shrinking the gap between that life and the last sterilizing bombardment.
This is direct evidence of a very rapid life emergence rate parameter (lambda in the PNAS article). While the late emergence of intelligence on Earth makes it likely that human-style intelligence is rare (unlikely on average to occur at all) there is little evidence to support their proposed model where a special rapid lambda is being observationally selected for in order for our intelligence to emerge.
Nah. Crookes radiometer is not due to thermal radiation pressure in a vacuum. It is a ballistic effect of air molecules in a very thin atmosphere bouncing off a hot surface with more velocity than they had when the collided with.
100% certainty exists only in a fictional version of science.
They showed that the residual 20% is not statistically significant. This is a showing that there is no additional anomaly to be accounted for. This is what is called "solving a problem" in real science.
Not exactly.
Numerous investigators have been strengthening the case for thermal radiation as the cause for nearly a decade. The work of Bertolami, Francisco, et al in Portugal in 2008-2009 accounted for 67% of the acceleration, a then-new high point in this reckoning. This was a notable result, but they didn't "figure it out" or "solve" it, they strengthened the case that was by then widely believed to be correct. For an account of the whole story up through 2010 see: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1001.3686v2.pdf .
The new study raises the level of confirmation to 80%, using data that they newly recovered, and further shows that the remaining 20% is not statistically significant. It is this study that deserves to be regarded as having "solved" the problem: accounting essentially for the full anomalous acceleration, and leaving no residual anomaly.
Indeed. Another problem with drawing broad conclusions with the study is look at the years they are comparing - 2008, when gas first broke the $4 a gallon barrier (remember?), but before the economic collapse look hold, and 2011 when gas prices where still down sharply, and after a punishing two years of recession/depression. Paying more up front when the economy is bad, for the promise of future savings when gas prices are down, is not a consuming behavior many people will exhibit.
Okay "Sokolization" is not a recognized word (yet) - it refers to Sokal Affair, wherein physicist Alan Sokal successfully published a hoax article of gibberish in Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies (Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies ("Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", published in the Social Text Spring/Summer 1996).
As long as certain structural requirements are met (grammar, composition and style) this program will grade it well even if it is complete nonsense.
I suggest this might be a good tool if the teachers still read the best essays for content (logic, factual correctness, etc.)
Given the thickness error in the mirror was less than the thickness of a piece of paper, that is a reasonable explanation. It was really small error given the size and weight of the mirror and gravity unfortunately does have a huge effect in slightly deforming such heavy optics. And yes, the optics were carved with gravity deformation in mind as well.
And the other bad thing is, well, the further something is away from you, the tighter the tolerances needed in order to resolve that object, so an error as tiny as it is makes for very blurry images.
To anyone who works with telescope mirrors (even ones costing 0.001% the cost the Hubble mirror) knows all about gravity sagging, it is every present and even my 13.1" mirror requires carefully designed supports. The degree of sag with the 3-point support should have been (and probably was) a calculated, pre-known quantity, and that it was sagging far more than expected should have led to an investigation as to why that was if the cultural environment had supported proper review. So no, it was not a reasonable explanation.
Is NASA really so underfunded they cannot afford a 50k dollar test to make sure their 1.5 billion dollar telescope?
Read the article (I know, this is Slashdot...). The problem was not that they didn't do obvious tests that would have revealed a major flaw - THEY DID! But they didn't believe the results since the far more sensitive null corrector should/could not possibly have made an error of this magnitude (it should have been accurate to 1/65 wave, but was off by 1/2 wave). They assumed that the test set-up they were using was flawed -- and the environment they were working in (schedule and budget overruns, prestige and jobs on the line putting pressure to get the mirror out the door) discouraged taking pains to understand fully what was happening.
Anne_Nonymous was making a joke.
Mod up! I was going to make this exact same comment. A old-fashioned copy machine maker - instead of a modern multi-function network device - would be out of business.
No, that's very naive. Its not because people want shiny that RIM is in the dumpster. Its because "business phones" really needed to be able to do everything that the "non business phones" do too.....
Amen. That Blackberry is automatically competing against everyone's personal cellphone. A job I had several years ago they provided their tech staff with Blackberries, but I refused to use/carry it. Why? I already had a cell phone, which I still needed to carry since the rest of the world uses it to call me, and it was smaller (the Blackberry had a permanent keyboard making too big to fit in the pocket), and did more. So I changed my contact info to my personal cell phone.
When a product is sufficiently uncompelling that you don't want to use it even when they give it to you free, that product has a long term problem.
And scienceblog is more willing to use a study that it doesnt link to to validate its positions.
Seriously WTF. No important details, no actual numbers, no study, but lets ridicule conservatives for being anti-science. You sure showed them.
Well, you could use a search engine to find the link: http://www.asanet.org/images/journals/docs/pdf/asr/Apr12ASRFeature.pdf
Whew, that took me almost 15 seconds!
You might reflect for a moment that your predisposition to dismiss data you don't like without any investigation may have a bearing on whether it is apt to characterize conservatives as being "anti-science".
Actually the Japanese were trying desperately to negotiate a surrender even before the FIRST use of WMD against them. The idea that WMD somehow prevented deaths or suffering is total bullshit. It was a matter of the US asserting itself as the dominant military power, and Japan was a soft enough target to cop 2 WMD attacks. Interesting how the victors frame their attrocities.
Sorry, the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War (SCDW, or the "Big Six") who actually ran the country were not only NOT involved in any way with attempts to negotiate surrender. The official policy, and the only one they ever discussed, was Ketsu-Go, a final apocalyptic battle where (the Army claimed) they would inflict such heavy casualties on the Americans that they Americans would grant Japan favorable terms (no occupation, and continuation of the present government). It was impossible (due to Army opposition) to even bring up the subject of ending the war in any other way.
The few feelers of negotiation came from low level functionaries in Europe who acted without the support or knowledge of their own government. The U.S. recognized that these were worthless. The discussion between the closest thing to a true "peace representative" on the SCDW, Foreign Minister Togo, and Ambassador Sato in Moscow (monitored by the U.S.) shows Togo denying any possibility of negotiating surrender, despite Sato's repeated insistence that that was the only option available.
You are repeating a myth with no basis in fact.
Rules of MAD don't apply to Islamic regimes the same way that they did to Communists. Sure, the Communists (Soviets & Chinese) were evil, but they were at least rational about it - while they undoubtedly wanted to wipe out their enemies, they themselves wanted to survive. Which is why deterence worked during the Cold War. During that time, there were a lot of espionage & terrorist acts pulled off by the NKVD/KGB, but how many suicide bombings does anybody remember that the Soviets did?
...
How short the memories.
During the Cold War the hysteria-mongers routinely argued that the Communists could not be deterred because they cared nothing for human life - arguments trotted out for this view were the tens of millions of deaths in the Stalinist and Maoist purges and engineered famines, the way life was literally thrown away in Gulags, and in WWII how millions of Soviet soldiers were carelessly sacrificed for negligible battlefield effect (and the same with Chinese and North Korean soldiers a few years later, and North Vietnamese and Cambodian soldiers decades after that). Various quotes by Lenin were commonly repeated (some of them fictitious*) to show the utter ruthlessness, and that their messianic belief in the inevitable victory of Communism made them indifferent to the possibility of nuclear war since Communism would survive.**
And most of the statements about Communist behavior were true. But a big difference is it was never the leadership, the state itself that was put at risk. Nuclear weapons change that completely. That alone makes the whole claim completely invalid.
*The favored fake quote, often repeated was this one: "What does it matter if three-fourths of the world perish, if the remaining one fourth are good communists?" attributed to Lenin.
**Counter-evidence, like Stalin's decision not to seize West Berlin, Khruschev's hasty back-down in Cuba, and the striking intolerance to taking casualties in the 1980s after the Afghanistan invasion were ignored.
This "Islamists are insane and are not afraid of nuclear war" is just a retread of the same Cold War tripe.
...
I agree, and what's more, the Best Animated Feature category should not have been created. Unlike what the general public might have heard, it was created as a ghetto with the intention that animated movies would no longer be eligible for Best Picture (Beauty and the Beast's nominations sent shockwaves of anger through the acting branch, the largest voting block of the academy). Over a decade later and Toy Story 3 was nominated, but the talk was that it could "settle" for Best Animated Film.
If ever there was a Sci-Fi category, it would doom the chances of a science fiction film ever being considered for Best Picture.
...
Disagree. So... despite the existence of the ghetto that ensures no animated movie will be eligible for Best Picture, one was nominated (for the second time ever) anyway? Logical disconnect.
And what you are saying is that it would be better than no animated movie ever win an Oscar -- since only two have ever been nominated at all, and the Academy's well-known biases guarantee that however good it might be, it can't win.
Animated movies are sufficiently different in fundamental ways from live action (i.e. in a way that any live action genre movie - like SF - is not) that a separate category is not only deserved, but needed to allow their qualities to be appreciated, and to allow the whole discipline of animation to get its due recognition.
This is similar to the existence of best foreign language category, the nominees in some years are all better than any on the English best picture list, but have never one an Academy Award for Best Picture.
He, Brainstorm was actually a pretty good movie....
Two-thirds of it were a pretty good movie. It was in fact an unusually close model of a classic approach to hard SF - postulate a technological innovation, and follow the consequences as its impact is felt. The movie was crippled by the death of Natalie Wood and led to a very unsatisfactory mish-mash of an ending that let them patch together the footage they had of her.
... If you want to speak to a Libertarian you should be prepared not just for a political discussion, but for a philosophical one as well. ....
Done that many, many times. The problem is that philosophy is used as a counter to any consideration of reality.
...If China is willing to sell goods for cheaper than it costs to produce, then that's good for us. The rare earth metals will remain in our country while we bleed China dry....
Brilliant! Let's do that! Lets buy all those rare earths at below cost, and bleed China dry!
Wait. Didn't China stop selling rare earths at below cost and now charges punitive rates? Isn't it a problem not getting them to sell to you at all? Why isn't that good deal still available? Come on China let us bleed you dry!
This could be shaped into a line for Weird Al's "Dare to be Stupid" ("It's like I said, you gotta buy one if you wanna get one free.").
It's like the right-wing reverse-image version of Communism.
I've often thought that. It is a distinctly 19th Century Utopian notion (though the product of the mid-20th Century). It was clearly a counter-reaction to and inspired by Communism (which Ayn Rand's family fled in 1917) dreamed up at the height of the "Red Menace" years from the 1930s to the 1950s. Like Communism it was dreamed up by an academic mind without basing it on any evidence of feasibility in the real world. Like Communism, to adherents the failure of the theory to describe the real world reveal a defect in reality (not the theory) or is simply the result of the theoretical scheme not being comprehensively and universally implemented. You must surrender to it utterly to experience its wonderful benefits.
Until the day the new plant comes on line, and China slashes prices again. They are already did this to obtain the monopoly - why would you think they wouldn't repeat what they have already done?
So if we make the mine operational and then China starts providing us with cheap metal, I don't see the problem. Keep the mine maintained, and ready for use, and let China load us up with cheap minerals. Oh, of course making this situation of allowing many hundreds of businesses and hundreds of millions of consumers to thrive in an atmosphere of reduced costs would depend on the government buying out or subsidizing one... Naturally, this will have conservatives crawling out of the woodwork to declare that capitalism is being subverted and to let the market decide....
China's practice of using its ability to undersell by mis-pricing externalities to destroy competition and create a monopoly of course is the anti-thesis of free markets, as its subsequent abuse of this monopoly to charge exorbitant prices to its competition, or worse cut off supplies altogether. This is economic warfare not free trade, and defensive measures by government are perfectly in order. A Republican President could make this argument and conservatives would eat it up. There is well established model for this too - having the government support the business with long-term contracts to build up a strategic reserve, and conservatives love the strategic oil reserve (GW Bush was eager to start filling it up again, buying at the peak of the market when supplies were tight the last time gas hit $4 a gallon). But if Obama were to suggest this it would be Marxism and a plot to destroy freedom. There is a non-governmental approach though: all the industries and companies that consume rare earths forming a trade association to buy rare earths on long-term contracts at agreed fixed prices for part of their supply no matter how cheaply China sells rare earths. Even then it is likely the government will need facilitate the arrangement.
It is as I thought. All this means that YOU can't make use of your web history, Google still has it and can do with it as it pleases. Same as with Facebook account "deletions".
Next thursday is March 1, not tomorrow. New policy goes into effect NEXT thursday, not tomorrow.
Not according to the definitions in any dictionary I have at hand. E.g.: Dictionary.com:
adjective: 1. immediately following in time, order, importance, etc.: the next day; the next person in line.
Tomorrow is the Thursday immediately following in time. I cannot find any dictionary carrying the definition you are using.
Nonetheless - I am familiar with the idiom, based on the usage I have heard I suspect it is endemic to the American South - and its illogicality annoys the heck out of me. Is the house next door the one you reach after a passing the house immediately adjacent to yours?
I did the math. Sufficiently slow acceleration of 3Gs would require a distance of several miles (going from memory here) to achieve 17,000 miles per hour. As much as it sucks, it's still better to put the propulsion system on the vehicle.
Regards, Jason C. Wells
It is not possible to put something into orbit using a ground launcher alone. An on-board motor is essential at the very least to circularize the trajectory so that the "orbit" does not intersect the surface of the Earth before completing one revolution. And you lost way to much energy in the lower atmosphere (and create incredible heat loads) trying to ram through it at super-orbital speeds (in fact the G-loading from this deceleration alone will probably be prohibitive for humans).
For Earth-surface launches it could provide a replacement for the first stage - get you above 95%-99% of the atmosphere where rocket engines are most efficient and no longer have to fight lower atmosphere air resistance. This might make a single (rocket) stage to orbit system practical.