Comment Re:Shedding some light (Score 2) 76
*Whoosh* - The sound of a metaphor going over your head.
*Whoosh* - The sound of a metaphor going over your head.
Because no member of the EU can punish someone by death.
Sure but they weren't making a TV show. They have the telemetry (from what I can tell), its just the video that is so poor. Getting high bandwidth data from below the horizon of a fast moving object is hardly easy.
They will have nice enough videos when they bring the first stage back to land
They will shortly, there was a planned launch last month but it has been pushed back for various reasons. http://www.space.com/25822-spa...
The fact they have this thing vertical at well below terminal velocity and apparently not spinning means the rest is just details. Controlling it down from supersonic is the hard part. They have made many successful landings with grasshopper from a vertical, low speed non spinning state.
I guess its just a marketing problem, they need drugs that make the person not move so no one feels bad. And at the end the person looks like they died naturally.
500g of c4 on someone's head would do the job and be completely painless, and cost almost nothing.
I'm guessing that its hard to get drugs that don't cause convulsions or toxic side effects Or at least they only are made by companies who dont want to be known for killing people. Because getting drugs to kill someone doesn't seem so hard.
Disclaimer: Im against the death penalty.
But I don't understand why its so hard to kill someone. Making someone unconscious for major surgery seems to be a solved problem. Once someone is unconscious, and paralysed, how hard is it to kill them?
If you are unconscious, no oxygen will kill you in a few minutes without pain. Even if you are concious, from what I understand its CO2 in the lungs that causes pain.. just filling a room with helium should probably kill you without you feeling much pain in a few minutes.
Why these injections are taking 20+ minutes to kill people who are in pain, I don't understand.
I doubt it. While there is many things we will learn the basic reaction of gravity ~ heat + hydrogen to helium is well understood by quantum mechanics. We have billions of examples of stars to cross check this. Comparing mentality of stars against their evolution.
On the bright side, even if we only have 1 million years left, if we haven't left earth by then its only because we have already killed ourselves.
I think the point they were making was not to stop doing science, or publishing. Instead its the problem with the reporting of science. Everything has to have drama and conflict.
The news makes it seem like every new paper is a paradigm changing event. Where as from the point of view of people who are doing this work its another piece of information to help improve our understanding.
The biggest problems is when popular news makes people think science is just stories, it seems to change every other week from one extreme to the other, so with overwhelming scientific facts like evolution and climate change people think its just some "theory" that is just as likely to be proven wrong tomorrow.
Its a difficult balance to find the best match between the public's hunger for science news and the sensational nature of reporting.
The company that will do it is most likely spacex. If they manage to make their rockets reusable, there might be no other launch companies left.
Its a fair point I guess. But there is no self regulation in the software industry. There is no standard qualifications.
The internet isn't regulated. There is no malpractice laws for code. These companies used this software as-is without warranty.
You could create laws to make people liable for the free code the provide. But they don't exist now. Im not sure how you could make it work.
We live in a new time now where the technology we use is so homogeneous, interconnected and fast that mistakes can cripple a large percent of the people on earth in a very short period of time. Even an incompetent doctor can only kill one patient at a time.
At some point laws will regulate things as important as ssl, but for now its still the wild west.
Programming is just breaking down a real world task into smaller and smaller parts until you can write code to achieve it.
So all bugs seem trival in reflection because code is simple (single threaded anyhow
To be fair though, this was part of the rfc, and is the sort of thing you write unit tests to catch. These sort of well defined algorithims are extremely unit testable. This is the way you test functionality and stop regression bugs.
Sure you could still miss it, its just most of our bugs don't cause such a huge pain in the ass for the internet.
Well, I would phrase it that, maths is internally consistent logical numeric operations.
Correct maths is always correct, does it reflect nature? Sure only experiment can tell.
This gets to the philosophy of maths, is maths "real". I think the best way I can think of it is.. if the universe worked by non internally consistant means it would not be stable, if the forces between particles didnt follow consistent logic, I cant see how they could exist. So it parallels math in having that constraint.
Particles are excitations of fields. There are many fields that permeate the universe. Fields have a quantized state at every point, everywhere.
Due to the uncertainty principle we cannot know the precise value of say the momentum of that point in space (if we want to define no momentum as nothing). Therefore there is no "nothing". This has all come from rigorous theory confirmed by experiment.
Are these fields real? Do they exist everywhere? Does this hold outside our "universe" whatever that means, who knows, its just philosophy. All we know is what we can see by experiment.
There are already liable and slander laws.
If you want to start to fine and jail people who say things you don't like, you have ended free speech and democracy.
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.
