Comment Re:Not resigning from Debian (Score 1) 550
It's Sunday. The usual read-slashdot-at-work crowd is offline.
It's Sunday. The usual read-slashdot-at-work crowd is offline.
Hi Chuck, long time no see.
Mars does not have a geomagnetic sphere to protect it from solar outbursts. People will die if they are on the surface when one of those things happens
People will die if they're out on the surface of Earth unprotected, for large parts of Earth (deserts, arctic, oceans, etc). We manage
. It is going to take a good bit of learning, though.
Of course it's going to take a good bit of learning. Fortunately that's something we humans tend to be good at (with a few obvious exceptions). We conquered the deserts, the arctic and the oceans with pretty much neolithic technology, after all.
I'm not sure whether it's the coward that's speaking -- you're afraid of space and think everyone else should be, so you'll feel better about yourself -- or that as a Canadian you recognize that you'll probably never have a chance to go to space yourself and it's all just sour grapes.
I'm leaning towards the former, since that's how you sign yourself.
But sure, keep telling yourself that it's everybody else that's crazy, if that's what comforts you.
Why? What do you think is within the reach of human beings in space that is not available on Earth? A reply containing the words "wonder", "exploration" or "adventure" are not acceptable.
Unacceptable to you, perhaps. What a miserable existence you must suffer.
It does, however, explain your failure of imagination.
Its far more likely that we will send people that die early.
Yep. Being a pioneer is all about finding new and interesting ways to die
See for example the first few hundred years (counting from the Vikings) of European colonization attempts of North America. (Probably the same holds true of Asian attempts, but they're a lot further back in the prehistorical record.)
Or more recently, the roughly 10% that died along the Oregon Trail.
As a plaque on some old Conestoga wagon puts it: "The cowards never started. The weak died along the way. Only the strong survived."
That said, only the stupid set out on a trek like that without preparation, and they don't even last as long as the weak. If Mars One has being doing preparation, they haven't been talking about it.
And everyone who has played Counter-Strike knows that the AWP (http://counterstrike.wikia.com/wiki/AWP) is a great Arctic weapon.
No, they know that the game designers thought it was a great Arctic weapon.
Any relationship between what game designers think (or at least, put in their games -- ditto for authors) and the real world is entirely coincidental.
You keep asserting failure to reproduce the results. I can understand that, you're from Caltech.
However, that turns out not to be the case.
I would recommend to you and to everyone here Charles Beuadette's thoroughly researched and easy to read study of the field, including the mistakes, including the shameful errors of scientific protocol, on both sides. (Basically, the hot-fusionistas ignored the excess heat claims and put their hands over their ears chanting "la la la where are the neutrons?"; P&F erred by claiming a mechanism instead of just presenting their excess heat measurements and saying "this is weird, we're highly experienced electrochemists but can't come up with a chemical explanation for this. Any ideas?")
Anyway, the book is Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed by Charles G. Beaudette. It's not up on the latest work (copyright 2002 unless there's a later edition) but it's a very worthwhile read -- a lot of the questions raised by various slashdotters are answered here -- and documents well the first few months and years of both the controversy and various lab results.
You cannot over come the columb barrier without sufficient energy. Fusion is an inherently thermal process.
Tell it to the muons.
How many attempts did it take to first clone a mammal? How many more attempts did it take before some other lab repeated the process?
Clearly they didn't do good science.
Repeating 19th century experiments with 21st century equipment is pretty easy. Doing 21st century experiments (or, okay, very late 20th century) is hard.
And even at that, back in high school physics when we were replicating Millikan's oil drop experiment (only with latex microspheres rather than oil drops) some people came up with a charge only 1/3 that of what's accepted for the electron. Were all those people who claim you can't have an isolated quark wrong, or is it just a trickier experiment than it sounds from a written description?
Siegel makes the arrogant mistake that all he needs is "the proper equipment" to replicate an experiment. If it's not in a field he has a few thouand hours of experience in -- say, electrochemistry or calorimetry for a high-energy physicist -- he needs more than the proper equipment, he needs somebody skilled in the particular field in question. Put another way, how long would it take a physicist to clone a mammal?
Unfortunately since about 1989 or 1990, the US Patent Office has refused to consider anything dealing with cold fusion, probably because the high energy physics mafia convinced them it was akin to perpetual motion.
Rather surprising, considering some of the things the USPTO has issued patents for.
Nuclear physics doesn't work this way.
High energy nuclear physics, no. All that extra energy to overcome the Coulomb barrier has to go somewhere, and moving nuclei at that speed gives them precious little interaction time.
Why is it so inconceivable that some other reaction mechanism, which keeps the nuclei in close proximity at lower energies for longer times, has different preferences for reaction pathways?
Muon-catalyzed fusion, for example, if fusion in condensed matter is so heretical. (Of course, muon-catalyzed fusion turns out to be an interesting curiousity rather than a useful power source unless and until we come up with a way of easily making muons. Fusion in condensed matter may turn out the same -- a great way to produce low grade excess heat, but not much else.)
Why assume neutrons or gammas if you don't understand what's going on? Because hot fusion tells you so? They're not talking about hot fusion, so your assumptions are bad science. Superconductivity is bad science too if you go by what happens at room temperature.
We already had a SSTO it was called the Saturn V.
Uh, no. You're confusing HLLV (heavy lift launch vehicle) with SSTO (single stage to orbit). Saturn V dropped two stages on the way to orbit.
The original Atlas was the closest we've come to an actual flying SSTO, it only dropped the two outboard engines, the tankage and sustainer engine made it the rest of the way.
Now, as a thought experiment you could take the Saturn V second stage and replace its five J2 engines with a Shuttle SSME (and move a bulkhead to allow for the different LH2/LOX burn ratio) and it would make orbit as a single stage. Ditto with the Shuttle External Tank and six SSMEs. But none of those would have reentry and landing capability, and if it's not reusable there's not much point to SSTO.
As for not seeing the point, it must be sad to live in a mind with such limited imagination. My condolences.
Isolated event, and the guy was brought down. There'll always be a risk as long as their are fanatics or loonies who don't give any though to their own personal safety, but there comes a point of diminishing returns.
Suppose they hired 10 times as many Secret Service agents? That just increases the odds of one of them going bad and offing the President himself. (Not a likely event, but having 10x as many agents also means more chances of confusion in a crisis, etc, etc.)
Security is never perfect (wasn't there an incident some years back where an intruder wandered into the Queen's living quarters at Buckingham Palace?) That's one reason we have a line of succession -- it's not like the government collapses in the case of an untimely death.
Mind, given the choices of VP over the past few presidencies, that line of succession might actually be helping lower the odds of someone trying to assassinate the Prez.
The designs were revived in the 1980s by Gary Hudson and Pacific-American Launch Systems (Phoenix) and later by General Dynamics (Millennium Express --disclaimer, I helped name it) as their proposal for the DC-X competition.
Yes, New Shepherd was clearly influenced by all that (as have several others, including a Japanese suborbital test vehicle). The design makes sense for a number of reasons:
Of course there are downsides to the design too, particularly in terms of integrating the design so that it's light enough for SSTO, and starting and controlling the large number of thrust chambers (usually at least 16, some designs with 24 or 32).
It still met the pre-mission criteria for life. That the other experiments gave confusing results was a contributing factor to wondering if those criteria were correct.
There's some indication that those other experiments weren't sensitive enough to detect life signs even in Earth soil samples from places like the Atacama desert in Chile.
In 2003, a team of researchers published a report in the journal Science in which they duplicated the tests used by the Viking 1 and Viking 2 Mars landers to detect life, and were unable to detect any signs in Atacama Desert soil.[21] The region may be unique on Earth in this regard and is being used by NASA to test instruments for future Mars missions. The team duplicated the Viking tests in Mars-like Earth environments and found that they missed present signs of life in soil samples from Antarctic dry valleys, the Atacama Desert of Chile and Peru, and other locales.
In 2008, the Phoenix Mars Lander detected perchlorates on the surface of Mars at the same site where water was first discovered.[23] Perchlorates are also found in the Atacama and associated nitrate deposits have contained organics, leading to speculation that signs of life on Mars are not incompatible with perchlorates.
(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...)
And speaking of perchlorates and the Viking biology experiments:
On 2006, scientist Rafael Navarro demonstrated that the Viking biological experiments likely lacked sensitivity to detect trace amounts of organic compounds.[36] On a paper published in December 2010,[25] the scientists suggest that if organics were present, they would not have been detected because when the soil is heated to check for organics, perchlorate destroys them rapidly producing chloromethane and dichloromethane, which is what the Viking landers found.
Crazee Edeee, his prices are INSANE!!!
