... No work on exotic particles (that is, anything other than the proton, neutron, electron and photon that we've known for a century) has ever produced any useful technology....
Neutron discovered in 1932. 2012-1932 = 80 years. Not a century yet. Positrons and pions are both important for medical use, muons and neutrinos are powerful tools for imaging the Earth. So you fail on a number of counts.
And X-ray telescopes in orbit (the Chandra X-Ray Observatory) and gamma ray telescopes in orbit (the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope) and on the ground (the MAGIC-I and II atmospheric imaging Cherenkov telescopes).
"ritualistically eat one of their gods." Catholicism there, it doesn't apply to protestant christianity.
Most Protestant churches practice communion also. Theological interpretations of the act differ, but it is still the ritualistic consumption of the body of Jesus in every case.
No, standard Christianity is every bit as weird as Mormonism. People have just grown up around it, so it gets a pass.
Which one is standard Christianity exactly?
The six Oriental Orthodox churches* have the best claim to being standard Christianity, in terms of not introducing new innovations not found in the early Christian church. The "ISO standard" of Christianity was formulated with the first three ecumenical councils in AD 325 (or 325 CE), 381, and 431. These three councils essentially define the universal core of Christianity. The Oriental Orthodox churches reject nearly all innovations since that time (including ones accepted by other Eastern Orthodox churches).
*The Coptic, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Syriac, Malankara Orthodox Syrian (India) and the Armenian Orthodox churches.
I agree, Capitalism is a horrible and awful economic system, but its still better than any other economic system we've ever devised.
As long as we are dealing in single word characterizations of a family of complex economic systems, I will grant that this claim is defensible. That is, as long as you acknowledge that socialism as practiced is in fact a type of capitalistic system, and that primitive capitalism or laissez faire have serious defects (the tendency for monopolies to destroy free markets, frequent severe cyclic economic crises, disastrous industrial pollution without regulation, etc.).
A better formulation is that forms of regulated capitalism are the best economic systems ever devised.
The article assumes more jobs are a good thing. That is a last century concept. How many people actually want to work all day? Most people do it to get the things they really want: food, a decent home, etc. The job itself is a necessary evil, and if they could get the things they wanted without it, they would. We should aim for productivity so insanely high that people don't *have* to work for a living, just like the rich do now. Then the people who actually enjoy doing whatever it takes can take care of the remaining work.
...
No matter how high productivity is, you will still a place to live - physical space isn't being minted by "new tech". And you still need to eat, and will be relying on someone to deliver to you food produced by someone else, again, agricultural automation has its limits. How will someone without a job pay for those two necessities of life? Is someone simply going to mail them a check for doing nothing?
Under current trends, the wealth from the enormous increase in productivity over the last 30 years has gone into the pockets of a small group of executives and the already-rich. It has not been distributed to the masses to make their lives easier - not even to the actual workers with jobs producing the wealth. We have very high un-(and under-)-employment which we are increasingly hearing described as the "new normal" and something that will no go away. These people aren't taking it easy, enjoying life - they are desperate and facing lives of abject poverty and shortened lifespans, while being scorned by a large part of society as "lazy".
Your projections assume we will evolve into a true communist model of society where wealth is not jealously withheld by those who can engineer control of it. How is this going to happen? What we see now is those with power and wealth and engineering new laws to that new sources of wealth, "intellectual property", are controlled by a tiny elite in perpetuity. What we are headed for is Dickensian London with the rich soaring overhead in flying cars.
NASA was never able to do better than 800 seconds with an NTR, which is less than double what you get with a conventional hydrogen/LOX engine, and far less current electric engines. It's definitely not suited to the pie in the sky interstellar probe in the article. Hell, at 800 seconds NTR isn't a good fit for a mars mission. In theory they could get one up to 1000 seconds. So... worth the time and effort? I don't see it, particularly when Ad Astra has already demonstrated an ISP of 4900 seconds in a full-scale test of a VASIMR engine.
...
All this assumes, of course, a NERVA style solid core engine, which is I think what they're proposing, though it's hard to tell from the article. And the numbers don't pass the laugh test. A liquid or gas core engine would be a real game-changer from the performance perspective and probably a whole lot safer if we could actually build one, but from what I can see we're no closer than we were when the idea was first proposed more than half a century ago. And even the holy grail gas core "nuclear light bulb" engine will only produce an ISP of between 1500 and 2000 seconds (according to the wiki page). Good for an SSTO assuming you weren't worried about spreading nuclear fuel everywhere if it crashed.
A key problem with nuclear thermal rockets is that when you consider all technologies on the table they have a fairly small mission space where they are the engines of choice. They have higher thrust than electric rockets, and higher ISPs than chemical rockets, but if high ISP is needed they are poor choices, and if high thrust is needed, ditto. This is one key reason why these systems have never flown - there is no mission requiring them yet identified. Most candidates in the past have been military missions, but none have been compelling.
Derek,
Sending up small amounts is now accepted. Sending up the amount needed for NERVA would drive the same group that objected to the IFR batty. ANd yes, they would protest....
A fission space propulsion system would be made using highly enriched uranium, and launched cold. By the methods used to measure radioactivity (decays per second), a HEU reactor core definitely qualifies as a "small amount" and in fact would be far, far less hazardous than the plutonium RTGs send up routinely today.
... However, I wonder if it may be possible to not bother with the hydrogen at all, and simply use the high-energy neutrons (or Alpha, or Beta, particles) as the reaction mass....
The mass of the these particles from fission and resulting decay processes are too low to provide much thrust - but you can do much, much better than that (in theory) by using the momentum of the fission fragments themselves. Those two massive atoms carry nearly all of the fission energy as kinetic energy on formation, if a significant fraction of those fission fragments can be used as reaction mass then a very high ISP engine would result - one of the few conceivable ones that really could power an interstellar probe. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket
My pet peeve is Google going the Microsoft route of discontinuing support for an application (Desktop Search) by shutting down the download server so you can't get a copy for a reinstall, instead of footing the negligible (actually zero incremental) cost of keeping the download available on a server, OR of making the discontinued app open source.
> *clip of cute toddler jamming out to some pop music plays*
Is this so hard to understand: the music was NOT HERS TO USE.
Let's try this again: If YOU didn't create it, DON'T USE IT.
Easy to see why this is a Anonymous Coward posting - the poster is a corporate shill.
Believe it or not - creative works that are copyrighted and sold belong to the public also - not just the copyright holder. It is an explicit contract written into the U.S. Constitution in extending the privilege of copyright protection, paid for by the taxpayer, to the creator and whosoever the creator sells the copyright to during its limited period.
The creative work thus becomes part of the culture/society/civilization and is available to all, subject to the term of copyright. This was originally for reasonably short time 28 years at most, and there is also the principle of fair use -- even within the copyright period non-commercial uses of copyrighted material is permissible. If said mom isn't selling "Dancing Toddler" DVDs or downloads, she should have nothing to worry about.
The real problem here is that immortal corporations have been buying up all the copyrights they can lays hands on, then have broken the original contract with the public by having copyrights extended for an effective 130 years or so after the fact and are trying to deny the existence of fair use -- thus stealing cultural property from the public.
The current staus quo is better than most of history, and better than it would be if we implemented most ideas that look good on paper.... New ideas are exicitng, appealing, and almost always wrong.
Since you are commenting on a sub-thread about metrification, are you asserting that this new-fangled metric thing is one of those unproven and thus most likely bad ideas? In this case the evidence that it really is a good idea seems overwhelming - it is in use by >95% of the world's population, and by science everywhere.
Everyone complains about the anti-evolution, anti-climate of the GOP. They fail to talk about the anti-chemistry/anti-rocketry views of the Democrats. Try to build a model rocket in a liberal state. Can't go to the store and get the rocket motors - they are illegal. Afraid of fireworks, etc.
...
Can you support this claim with a list of states that ban model rocket motors? In California I have no trouble buying a box of a dozen motors at my local Michael's arts and craft store. Hard core model building stores carry large selections.
If you can list which states ban them so that we can judge for ourselves the truth of the claim?
Lets try this analysis again, in a much shorter version.
The Spitfires cannot reach the F-22 bases at all due to their limited range. The F-22s can precision bomb the Spitfire bases with impunity since the Spitfires cannot touch them in altitude or speed.
The Spitfires get wiped out on the ground with zero F-22 losses from enemy action.
This isn't really an issue about extending reactor life - a perfectly reasonable process if the reactors were safe to begin with. These Water-cooled graphite reacotrs are inherently unstable and were dangerous the day they powered up. They should be shut down ASAP.
The internet is made up of other people's networks. One uses the internet through access provided, for profit, by other people. Making internet access an inalienable right would mean giving one group of people, those without internet access, a right to the property of other people, ISP owners...
Sorry, your reductionist approach in trying to make this a "property rights trump all" issue fails. Do you realize that ISPs run wire and fiber over other people's property left and right, due to easements granted by law without paying a penny? Those people are forced to accommodate the property of a private business, denying them unlimited use of that portion of their property. The ISPs are given special legal privileges in exchange for providing a service to the public, as well as the opportunity to make money.
Sure. And the simple and well-tested way of getting lower birthrates, is by upping living-standard.
...
But it isn't the only one. Witness Bangladesh. It is one of poorest countries on Earth, but has had a dramatic drop in birth rates. In fact it is projected to drop below the replacement rate, just like wealthy industrialized nations, in two years time. Due to the lag time for below-replacement-rate birth rates to work their way through the demographic structure Bangladesh's population will stabilize around 2075 and then begin a long-term decline.
Bangladesh is proof that third world countries can beat the "population bomb" without consuming huge amounts of the world's resources to do it. (Improvements in living standards is connected with the Bangladeshi birth rate drop, but they are improvements made within a third world economy).
While not all that original, at least it beast the pants off of Avatar, which can be perfectly summed up by cutting and pasting nouns from a summary of Pocahontas.
But the 19th century was also when literacy started to become really widespread.
You are at least 100 years too late for the countries that led the industrial revolution. The fact that literacy had become the norm (>50% literate) by the 1700s was one of the enabling factors for the industrial revolution, which kicked off circa 1780.
It all comes down to this: You don't own Star Wars, and George Lucas is not your bitch.
Like it or not, they're his movies. He can do whatever he wants with them.
Copyright is a gift given to artists by the public, via the law, for the public's benefit.* It was originally limited to 34 years maximum, and allowing an artist to make a living on his work, but the work would then become public domain - for benefit of everyone.
The retroactive extensions to copyright through bills written by corporate lawyers is a theft of property from the public. There is no inherent right for Lucas to still control Star Wars. His abuse of that control shows why copyright extension was a bad idea.
Slashdot Mirror
... No work on exotic particles (that is, anything other than the proton, neutron, electron and photon that we've known for a century) has ever produced any useful technology....
Neutron discovered in 1932. 2012-1932 = 80 years. Not a century yet. Positrons and pions are both important for medical use, muons and neutrinos are powerful tools for imaging the Earth. So you fail on a number of counts.
And X-ray telescopes in orbit (the Chandra X-Ray Observatory) and gamma ray telescopes in orbit (the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope) and on the ground (the MAGIC-I and II atmospheric imaging Cherenkov telescopes).
Only Catholics believe in transubstantiation (real blood, flesh). Everyone else believes it is symbolic.
But a symbolic act is still ritualistic consumption of the body of Jesus.
"ritualistically eat one of their gods." Catholicism there, it doesn't apply to protestant christianity.
Most Protestant churches practice communion also. Theological interpretations of the act differ, but it is still the ritualistic consumption of the body of Jesus in every case.
No, standard Christianity is every bit as weird as Mormonism. People have just grown up around it, so it gets a pass.
Which one is standard Christianity exactly?
The six Oriental Orthodox churches* have the best claim to being standard Christianity, in terms of not introducing new innovations not found in the early Christian church. The "ISO standard" of Christianity was formulated with the first three ecumenical councils in AD 325 (or 325 CE), 381, and 431. These three councils essentially define the universal core of Christianity. The Oriental Orthodox churches reject nearly all innovations since that time (including ones accepted by other Eastern Orthodox churches).
*The Coptic, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Syriac, Malankara Orthodox Syrian (India) and the Armenian Orthodox churches.
I agree, Capitalism is a horrible and awful economic system, but its still better than any other economic system we've ever devised.
As long as we are dealing in single word characterizations of a family of complex economic systems, I will grant that this claim is defensible. That is, as long as you acknowledge that socialism as practiced is in fact a type of capitalistic system, and that primitive capitalism or laissez faire have serious defects (the tendency for monopolies to destroy free markets, frequent severe cyclic economic crises, disastrous industrial pollution without regulation, etc.).
A better formulation is that forms of regulated capitalism are the best economic systems ever devised.
The article assumes more jobs are a good thing. That is a last century concept. How many people actually want to work all day? Most people do it to get the things they really want: food, a decent home, etc. The job itself is a necessary evil, and if they could get the things they wanted without it, they would. We should aim for productivity so insanely high that people don't *have* to work for a living, just like the rich do now. Then the people who actually enjoy doing whatever it takes can take care of the remaining work.
...
No matter how high productivity is, you will still a place to live - physical space isn't being minted by "new tech". And you still need to eat, and will be relying on someone to deliver to you food produced by someone else, again, agricultural automation has its limits. How will someone without a job pay for those two necessities of life? Is someone simply going to mail them a check for doing nothing?
Under current trends, the wealth from the enormous increase in productivity over the last 30 years has gone into the pockets of a small group of executives and the already-rich. It has not been distributed to the masses to make their lives easier - not even to the actual workers with jobs producing the wealth. We have very high un-(and under-)-employment which we are increasingly hearing described as the "new normal" and something that will no go away. These people aren't taking it easy, enjoying life - they are desperate and facing lives of abject poverty and shortened lifespans, while being scorned by a large part of society as "lazy".
Your projections assume we will evolve into a true communist model of society where wealth is not jealously withheld by those who can engineer control of it. How is this going to happen? What we see now is those with power and wealth and engineering new laws to that new sources of wealth, "intellectual property", are controlled by a tiny elite in perpetuity. What we are headed for is Dickensian London with the rich soaring overhead in flying cars.
...
NASA was never able to do better than 800 seconds with an NTR, which is less than double what you get with a conventional hydrogen/LOX engine, and far less current electric engines. It's definitely not suited to the pie in the sky interstellar probe in the article. Hell, at 800 seconds NTR isn't a good fit for a mars mission. In theory they could get one up to 1000 seconds. So... worth the time and effort? I don't see it, particularly when Ad Astra has already demonstrated an ISP of 4900 seconds in a full-scale test of a VASIMR engine.
All this assumes, of course, a NERVA style solid core engine, which is I think what they're proposing, though it's hard to tell from the article. And the numbers don't pass the laugh test. A liquid or gas core engine would be a real game-changer from the performance perspective and probably a whole lot safer if we could actually build one, but from what I can see we're no closer than we were when the idea was first proposed more than half a century ago. And even the holy grail gas core "nuclear light bulb" engine will only produce an ISP of between 1500 and 2000 seconds (according to the wiki page). Good for an SSTO assuming you weren't worried about spreading nuclear fuel everywhere if it crashed.
A key problem with nuclear thermal rockets is that when you consider all technologies on the table they have a fairly small mission space where they are the engines of choice. They have higher thrust than electric rockets, and higher ISPs than chemical rockets, but if high ISP is needed they are poor choices, and if high thrust is needed, ditto. This is one key reason why these systems have never flown - there is no mission requiring them yet identified. Most candidates in the past have been military missions, but none have been compelling.
Derek, Sending up small amounts is now accepted. Sending up the amount needed for NERVA would drive the same group that objected to the IFR batty. ANd yes, they would protest. ...
A fission space propulsion system would be made using highly enriched uranium, and launched cold. By the methods used to measure radioactivity (decays per second), a HEU reactor core definitely qualifies as a "small amount" and in fact would be far, far less hazardous than the plutonium RTGs send up routinely today.
... However, I wonder if it may be possible to not bother with the hydrogen at all, and simply use the high-energy neutrons (or Alpha, or Beta, particles) as the reaction mass....
The mass of the these particles from fission and resulting decay processes are too low to provide much thrust - but you can do much, much better than that (in theory) by using the momentum of the fission fragments themselves. Those two massive atoms carry nearly all of the fission energy as kinetic energy on formation, if a significant fraction of those fission fragments can be used as reaction mass then a very high ISP engine would result - one of the few conceivable ones that really could power an interstellar probe. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket
My pet peeve is Google going the Microsoft route of discontinuing support for an application (Desktop Search) by shutting down the download server so you can't get a copy for a reinstall, instead of footing the negligible (actually zero incremental) cost of keeping the download available on a server, OR of making the discontinued app open source.
Not if you're in chains and a cell, you can't.
And thus your claim about "voluntary slavery" collapses from the blow you yourself delivered.
> *clip of cute toddler jamming out to some pop music plays*
Is this so hard to understand: the music was NOT HERS TO USE.
Let's try this again: If YOU didn't create it, DON'T USE IT.
Easy to see why this is a Anonymous Coward posting - the poster is a corporate shill.
Believe it or not - creative works that are copyrighted and sold belong to the public also - not just the copyright holder. It is an explicit contract written into the U.S. Constitution in extending the privilege of copyright protection, paid for by the taxpayer, to the creator and whosoever the creator sells the copyright to during its limited period.
The creative work thus becomes part of the culture/society/civilization and is available to all, subject to the term of copyright. This was originally for reasonably short time 28 years at most, and there is also the principle of fair use -- even within the copyright period non-commercial uses of copyrighted material is permissible. If said mom isn't selling "Dancing Toddler" DVDs or downloads, she should have nothing to worry about.
The real problem here is that immortal corporations have been buying up all the copyrights they can lays hands on, then have broken the original contract with the public by having copyrights extended for an effective 130 years or so after the fact and are trying to deny the existence of fair use -- thus stealing cultural property from the public.
The current staus quo is better than most of history, and better than it would be if we implemented most ideas that look good on paper.... New ideas are exicitng, appealing, and almost always wrong.
Since you are commenting on a sub-thread about metrification, are you asserting that this new-fangled metric thing is one of those unproven and thus most likely bad ideas? In this case the evidence that it really is a good idea seems overwhelming - it is in use by >95% of the world's population, and by science everywhere.
...
Everyone complains about the anti-evolution, anti-climate of the GOP. They fail to talk about the anti-chemistry/anti-rocketry views of the Democrats. Try to build a model rocket in a liberal state. Can't go to the store and get the rocket motors - they are illegal. Afraid of fireworks, etc.
...
Can you support this claim with a list of states that ban model rocket motors? In California I have no trouble buying a box of a dozen motors at my local Michael's arts and craft store. Hard core model building stores carry large selections.
If you can list which states ban them so that we can judge for ourselves the truth of the claim?
Lets try this analysis again, in a much shorter version. The Spitfires cannot reach the F-22 bases at all due to their limited range. The F-22s can precision bomb the Spitfire bases with impunity since the Spitfires cannot touch them in altitude or speed. The Spitfires get wiped out on the ground with zero F-22 losses from enemy action.
This isn't really an issue about extending reactor life - a perfectly reasonable process if the reactors were safe to begin with. These Water-cooled graphite reacotrs are inherently unstable and were dangerous the day they powered up. They should be shut down ASAP.
The internet is made up of other people's networks. One uses the internet through access provided, for profit, by other people. Making internet access an inalienable right would mean giving one group of people, those without internet access, a right to the property of other people, ISP owners...
Sorry, your reductionist approach in trying to make this a "property rights trump all" issue fails. Do you realize that ISPs run wire and fiber over other people's property left and right, due to easements granted by law without paying a penny? Those people are forced to accommodate the property of a private business, denying them unlimited use of that portion of their property. The ISPs are given special legal privileges in exchange for providing a service to the public, as well as the opportunity to make money.
umm hello! USSR == Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
By that argument the DPRK == Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic.
Precisely. You don't mention it by name but Bangladesh is proof of this thesis. It is going below the replacement rate in 2013.
Sure. And the simple and well-tested way of getting lower birthrates, is by upping living-standard.
...
But it isn't the only one. Witness Bangladesh. It is one of poorest countries on Earth, but has had a dramatic drop in birth rates. In fact it is projected to drop below the replacement rate, just like wealthy industrialized nations, in two years time. Due to the lag time for below-replacement-rate birth rates to work their way through the demographic structure Bangladesh's population will stabilize around 2075 and then begin a long-term decline.
See: http://www.me-jaa.com/me-jaa15Feb08/Robust.htm
Bangladesh is proof that third world countries can beat the "population bomb" without consuming huge amounts of the world's resources to do it. (Improvements in living standards is connected with the Bangladeshi birth rate drop, but they are improvements made within a third world economy).
While not all that original, at least it beast the pants off of Avatar, which can be perfectly summed up by cutting and pasting nouns from a summary of Pocahontas.
And FernGully, and Dances with Wolves....
thatsthejoke.jpg
(also is Homer actually historic, or just a mythological source of mythology?)
Scholars are divided about whether the works of Homer were actually composed by Homer, or were composed instead by another man of the same name.
But the 19th century was also when literacy started to become really widespread.
You are at least 100 years too late for the countries that led the industrial revolution. The fact that literacy had become the norm (>50% literate) by the 1700s was one of the enabling factors for the industrial revolution, which kicked off circa 1780.
It all comes down to this: You don't own Star Wars, and George Lucas is not your bitch. Like it or not, they're his movies. He can do whatever he wants with them.
Copyright is a gift given to artists by the public, via the law, for the public's benefit.* It was originally limited to 34 years maximum, and allowing an artist to make a living on his work, but the work would then become public domain - for benefit of everyone.
The retroactive extensions to copyright through bills written by corporate lawyers is a theft of property from the public. There is no inherent right for Lucas to still control Star Wars. His abuse of that control shows why copyright extension was a bad idea.