That isn't a legitimate reason to not use RTG for Philae. The lander only uses 32 watts of power. The MMRTG used in Curiosity provides 125 watts of power initially, and 100 watts after 14 years. The mass of that specific RTG (the MMRTG) would be too great for use in Philae, but then it also produces 3 times more energy than needed (even after 14 years). RTGs have been made in many sizes for many different applications, so it would simply have been a matter of designing an RTG that produces 40-45 watts of power after 10 years.

However, one of the main uses of the 32 watts of power required by Philae is just to keep the batteries warm so they don't fail. RTGs produce more "waste" heat than they do electricity. For example, the MMRTG used in the Curiosity rover produces 2 kW of heat, of which 125 W is converted to electricity. The extra heat is used to keep the various temperature-sensitive parts of the rover nice and warm so they don't fail. With Philae, a good portion of the 32 watts of the solar power it requires is just to keep the battery warm. So if an RTG were used, it wouldn't even need to produce 32 watts of electricity since it can keep the lander warm directly.

Looking at the mass and wattage produced, the RTGs ("SNAP-19") in the Pioneer probes would have been just about perfect for Philae. They produce 40 watts of power and weigh 13.6 kg. Philae's current electrical system weighs 12.2 kg, so that's at least in the ballpark. The RTGs on the surface of the moon, as manually placed by Apollo astronauts's would have been a bit heavy at 20 kg. One of those RTGs was still producing 90% of its power after 10 years.

Regardless, the fact that the Philae mission would last more than 10 years is not a reason to not have used RTG. Other issues (obtaining the radioactive material, environmentalists throwing a fit, inexperience of the ESA with that kind of power source, delays in production, etc) certainly dictated that an RTG wasn't used, but it was most certainly not due to any technical limitation.

This is probably good news. Obama makes a public statement urging the FCC to step in and enforce net neutrality, and the FCC suddenly delays a decision they were about to make. That means the decision had already been made and it was that the FCC was not going to intervene. Now they are reconsidering and thus they want more time to figure out what all Obama's request entails.

And enough to hire you to do some Perl programming.

Yeah, just like how everyone now communicates via "video phone" (aka Facetime (TM), etc, etc) instead of just talking on the phone. Oh wait, we don't even use the phone any more, we use mostly written text. How many prognosticators of future technology utterly failed on that one too? Video is not the logical culmination of still images. It is something totally different. Nor was the music video the logical culmination of merely listening to music. He's looking too closely at things like technology and infrastructure and ignoring the higher level constructs and why people prefer one over the other.

This doesn't make much sense to me. First off, the test subject knows something else is behind them touching their back. They know there IS a "ghost" there (IE something external from themselves) that is touching their back. The test subject knows from experience that even though they are moving their hand, that motion on their back can't be because their hand is actually back there.

When the touches are synchronized, and the motion they make with their finger results in the robot touching their back at the same time, the brain coordinates the events and automatically realizes "I just triggered this touch on my back by doing something" and they don't have that sense that something external is behind them.

When the touch is delayed, the brain does not automatically correlate their action with the sensation on their back, and thus the robot's motions are interpreted as something external (ie a "ghost").

What doesn't make sense to me is the synchronized motion part is really the trick here - that our brain will automatically figure out we're causing a sensation, even though the mechanics don't make sense or it's something we haven't experienced before. The fact that that or subconscious does not automatically assimilate those motions that are no longer synchronized is to be expected. There IS a ghost behind the person touching them, in the form of a robot, and if the actions are not synchronized, then our mind may not correlate those delayed motions as a result of something we did.

As soon as those motions are no longer synchronized it gets silly to make the test subject guess how many people are behind them or whatever. Something is poking them in the back, and they don't notice that it's a delayed result of their own motions - it's quite obvious that a robot or person or something is responsible for that sensation. And so different people will make different guesses about what kind of trickery is going on behind their back based on their mental state or perception or whatever.

Or maybe something about this experiment went WOOSH right over my head.

Summary: Some languages give you more control over the hardware on which the software runs. Those languages require more skill, experience and discipline to use, thus software written in those languages will have more defects.

This is a very indirect way to measure and thus predict flu outbreaks. There are many things that could prompt people to search for and otherwise discuss the flu, beyond a person or their family actually having the flu. All it would take is a few major news sources to make mention of the flu, and there's a good chance there would be a surge in people searching for terms related to the flu. Further, other illnesses could be going around that have some flu-like symptoms which would also increase search results for the flu. Can't we just get this information from healthcare providers or insurance companies directly? (although the latter is probably charging an arm and leg for that information)

FTA:

The sun is around 330,000 times more massive than the Earth. Thus those 100,000 other Earths out there have a mass of 1/3 our sun. But, there are of course several other planets in our solar system. So the mass of all those rogue planets (100,000 : 1 ratio of rogue planets to planets in the solar system) would be several times greater than the sun. Not exactly a trivial amount of mass there. That could explain a big part of dark matter, but of course people a lot smarter than me have already considered and dismissed that already for whatever reason. Maybe they've already accounted for that much extra mass and there's still the "dark matter" that's missing.

Yes, exactly. I visited them all looking for some new insight into the factual state of what's going on with Ebola, and ended up just wasting my time. One of the sites has predictions that are over two weeks old. Useless. Another is tracking the social media discussion of Ebola by region (which regions are tweeting the most about Ebola). Useless. Another is a page regarding some statistical software package. Useless. The only real data is a paper modeling what impact flight restrictions might have, expressed in the number of extra weeks of delay before Ebola is transmitted. The entire thing was a waste of time.

He obviously must see and be directly involved in some aspects of AI that are causing him to be concerned. Telsa is working on self driving cars. Part of that AI must involve the computer making a decision about who may live or die in certain accident scenarios. For example, a child walks out in front of the vehicle. Does the AI direct the car into inanimate objects (with the assumption that the car will protect the occupants) or does it try to stop as fast as possible even if the AI knows it cannot stop in time and will hit the child? If the car is travelling at high rate of speed and has 5 occupants, does the AI then decide that multiple people may die from driving into a telephone pole at a high speed, so it decides to hit the child?

It might be those kinds of things that are making Musk think about what kinds of control we're already starting to turn over to AI.

Unlike Samsung and Apple's watches, which are meant as an accessory / extension for their existing flagship mobile devices, I would think MS would tend to make something a little more stand-alone and not so intimately tied to a specific device or OS. That, IMO, would be a good thing.

Here's a much better article, that not only can differentiate between fission and fusion, but also has purty pictures too.

http://aviationweek.com/techno...

This stuff isn't my strong suit at all, but I'm having a hard time grasping how sound waves can behave like subatomic particles in this way.

Sound is a wave through some medium, so how can they pop into existence in a vacuum? Are particles of some kind (and what are they? Hydrogen atoms? Helium?) popping into existence long enough for them to physically interact with one another so a physical wave can propagate from one particle to another before they pop back out of existence, and thus "sound waves" are appearing?

All this is pretty amazing to me, but the amount of complexity involved (using dual event horizons to reflect the waves back and forth to amplify the audio signal because its so weak, etc) sure would leave a lot of room to screw something up along the way. Seems the signal to noise ratio would be pretty bad.

I just finished watching it. It has quite a few really funny clips, and a few that are somewhat disturbing LOL. The great thing is seeing the amount of creativity and artistic styles people can come up with. Definitely worth watching. Now I'm watching Star Ward Uncut, since I hadn't heard about it until now.

Writing fail. Don't use the term "distance" to discuss intervals in time, especially when the topic specifically involves covering a specific distance as fast as possible. At first I thought they meant that the distance the runners have to race has been reduced in order to be able to run it in two hours.