If you want to be confused a bit more, look up "weak measurement"
Isn't this basically what Linus Torvalds did with Linux? If it can be done with an OS couldn't you do it with a compiler or an interpreter? I'm not a programmer, so the likeliness of this story being true is beyond my ability to judge.
Both general GNU and Linux developers were very careful to avoid infringing copyrights and a lot of work started after the original Unix patents expired.
I have a Kindle, you insensitive clod!
So you read Farenheit 451 instead ?
I'm not sure how serious you are, but I'll point out the problem at the risk of killing the joke. The issue is in step 2. Photons travel at the speed of light (by definition). Because we cannot send information faster than the speed of light, the photons arrive at Victor strictly before any message from Alice and Bob.
Just use a fiber optic cable to make them wait longer. Or bounce between mirrors in a zigzag - this way light trajectory can be long, but the spatial distance can be short.
It hit in daylight over Reno-Tahoe.
Imagine if it had hit just a bit further west at night with clear weather. That would have resulted in a very bright flash at night and the aforementioned "rumbling and shaking" over the San Francisco Bay Area.
Now imagine that the orbital dynamics were such that this happened in 1982 instead of 2012. Then you get a bright flash and a rumble over a major metro area during the Cold War.
No worries - that meteorites show up on radar (strongly) was well-known since World War 2.
Why? It's not like we can do anything. Personally, I would not like to know that a meteor is about to slam into the earth and end life as we know it.
We can tell people to move..
If you now assume that you need only a nanosecond to tell whether there is an asteroid in a given 1 meter cube or not (which would correspond to spending a few CPU/FPGA cycles on processing) then you need to be able to process 80000 different positions simultaneously.
This is doable with modern technology, but rather expensive - think military size budget, not NASA size budget.
It only takes a little bit of alloying metals to make most different kinds of high-grade steel. Some of those are available from asteroids or the moon quite easily. Shipping a little of some of the rarer alloying elements like chromium up is still a lot less mass than boosting everything. Nickel is the other major element of nickel-iron asteroids and it is great both on its own and in alloys. High performance steels and nickel superalloys are truly high-tech stuff - often the best materials at any price, not just on the basis of cost.
The problem is process control - you need to add the elements in just the right proportion and then have a proper temperature cycle, etc, which greatly increases complexity. With titanium it could probably be as simple as an electron beam gun heating up raw rutile with oxygen escaping and leaving pure titanium. One thing you have in space is plenty of low-quality vacuum !
There are also large quantities of platinum-group metals in some asteroids that have many, many technological uses but are just in too short supply on earth to use as much as engineers and chemists would like.
I agree.
Well, you know what they say in real estate: Location, location, LOCATION. I'm thinking they don't want to bring 'Mineral X' down to Earth unless it's in ton lots. What they want is, the materials right where they are, in space, where they will provide materials to work with in space. Yes, it could take $2.6 billion to bring a random 500 ton asteroid to lunar orbit. It would cost over 10 billion to launch that 500 tons into orbit at the current guestimated going rate of $10,000 per pound. What can you do with 500 tons of materials in orbit? Lots of things. 500 tons of very high grade iron ore, the purity of which we haven't seen on Earth in almost a millenium, would make the basis for the frame of a decent sized space station. For comparison, the ISS at full buildout is about 37 billion plus overruns and weighs in approximately 450 tons plus about 13 billion so far in supplies etc to date. Grabbing a carbonaceous asteroid could offset some of that 13 billion on the 'next-gen' space stations, when we learn to 'convert' that carbon into foodstuffs in space. Sure, we'd need to put a smelter assembly in orbit to refine the metals & scavange the carbon/etc from any asteroid, but add a machine shop as well, adn we can duplicate the factory complex and build out from there, at ZERO boost from Earth costs. Again, why would we want to send asteroidal material to Earth when we need it so badly in space?
I doubt that pure iron is a good choice for space station material - it is heavy and has low strength unless alloyed. What you want are some low-Z materials like aluminum or lithium. Or, you could try titanium. In fact, titanium would likely be as easy to process in vacuum as iron and titanium is one of few elements with good strength characteristics when unalloyed. It will likely be oxidized, so as a byproduct you get oxygen for fuel (and breathing).
And gold is not the most expensive metal, Rhodium is 4x more expensive.
I think if Romney were elected the unaccountable spying and intrusion would get worse. However, if Obama were re-elected, the unaccountable spying and intrusion would get worse. I suppose you're right that the partisan thing is a mere distraction. The problem is that Congress -- whether of the same or different party of the president in power -- absolutely refuses to reign in the White House. Are they lazy? Do they see the trend as a good thing? Do they not care? Has someone got the dirt on them all?
There is another possibility - this is a systemic issue and our society has run into a scalability problem. Most aspects of modern society are very technologically sophisticated - computers, cars, medicine, finance. It stands to reason that running the government is technologically sophisticated as well.
In such situation it is very difficult to make long-term decisions. We are well-familiar with the quarter to quarter mentality in the corporations - well, the same thing is true for the government, it is run but a lot of young people who are overworked and only see a few months ahead.
In such situation, the society evolves like a physical system and it is very hard to change its course. So whoever is in charge pretty much just runs around doing damage control. Hence the desire for more information and shorter response time.
Maybe the Thinkpad R61 was a unique model then... It has a CPU socket like a desktop, you can upgrade the processor yourself as well (the socket itself is quite different from a Desktop socket, but it has one, and replacing the CPU is a relatively trivial process)
Dell's are like that as well. In fact it makes perfect sense - it would be a lot harder to offer different CPU grades if you had to swap logic boards.
"The identical is equal to itself, since it is different." -- Franco Spisani
