Re: Nice one

A lot of the US military also works in metric. IIRC, NASA has been resisting change because they have a lot of tooling and schematics in English units. I don't know how legitimate a reason that is, but it does boil down to cost and they are a bit overloaded.

Re: one-child

In God we trust. All others, bring data.

People don't actually have that many children once countries modernize. People like to imagine that our growth goes up expotentially but if you look at the data, it always slacks off. Even the poorest countries have much lower birth rates than pre-historic rates.

This demonstrates a key point; not having children is absolutely in the human behavioural toolkit. All human societies today reproduce below their capacity, with modern once producing well below the amount they can actually feed.

Societies with the most social freedom and medical technology do so the very least.

For some people the idea that "you know, we should control people cause like, you can't just have people doing whatever you want" is very -resonant-. And sometimes these people go on to attack freedoms and technology as the enemy here. But the reality is quite the opposite.

The Sun

The Sun's very expensive to reach. Once in orbit you need about 29 km/s delta-v to get down there. Could be easy with Solar-electric or -sail, though.

If private companies count, you should now we have -several- spacecraft projects going, one having recently orbited and another (small spaceplane) in orbit now along with two inflatable station prototypes in orbit right now and (FWIW) a few suborbitals.

Skylon? Is not funded.

Good luck.

Nay

They almost always mean mass.

FWIW

Kepler discoveries planets using the transit method and if I understand it right, they can observe its atmosphere with follow-up studies (by other 'scopes).

So if they keep searching and find one with a good chunk of oxygen and conditions for plant life, than, that's interesting and we don't have to say "sample size of one" anymore.

As for the press, at least they stopped declaring "new Earth" with every star-hugging hellhole with a 6-day "year".

Grunt

I had the impression that the last paragraph was a reminder at how many points of failure there still are between here and Mars for ours.

Starbucks Poland

I live in Poland and the Starbucks here has free wifi with no login or anything.

Right

Cause we can safely assume that aliens, by virtue of being alien, have no disease, religion or economy.

@Peter Ford

There are some very, very small and light fighter jets including the Gripen and Freedom Fighter. A lot of the reason for the size of the jet has to due with the mass fraction. They often want a better than 1:1 thrust:weight ratio for executing combat maneuvers, and it needs to offer this <em>while carrying a large payload</em> which is dramatically larger than a human and life support. Depending on class and mission this can include very large internal fuel stores, additional external fuel and multiple types of air-to-air and air-to-ground weapons for different scenarios.

Indeed, many UAVs are a lot <em>bigger</em> than some manned fighters, such as the Global Hawk next to an F-5.

But <em>by a mile</em> the most important concern is usage considerations.

Current UAVs are designed for and deployed against enemies who have no relevant defense technology, no ability to jam signals and no real competitiveness against the UAVs. They're designed assuming a state of air supremacy.

Fighter jets necessarily must be designed assuming a technologically competitive enemy who can both jam your drone's communication, find fault in its artificial intelligence and possibly blind it or otherwise subvert its senses.

If the machine has to operate without communications it must also make life-or-death decisions about what and when to shoot and even humans can screw this one up. There are friendly fire incidents all the time. <em>Key point; our observational technology hasn't always been adequate to differentiate a 747 and F-14, or a Brit on the ground from an Iraqi</em>. Can an autonomous, unintelligent machine judge context better and make mistakes less? <em>Could its inability, coupled with jamming or other manipulation, be subverted for propaganda purposes</em>?

All things considered, I don't see the cost-risk-benefit analysis weighing against the total elimination of a genuinely intelligent, well-trained, on-sight decision-maker. Humans are imperfect and a little heavy, but so are military-grade computers and sensors and not only are humans dramatically smarter at this point in time, but something can't be both intelligence and flawless anyway.

Novelty

Time for some novelty!

Have James Earl Jones doing a reading of Son of Strolka (Youtube it).

@how much brain use

"Isn't this about as much of our own brains that we actually use??"

Only if you've been struck in the head too many times; the "you only use 10% of your brain" line is a myth founded on a misunderstanding of how the brain works. Not only do you use all your neurons but there's also this whole chemical "volume transfer" of information and hormones and mroe.

10% is myth

Don't try to rationalize it or understand it; it's mentally void.

Java GC

@trstooge

I've ran into this before. I had some media playback code that would load frames and display them, and there was a visible lurch due to garbage collection, so I wound up recycling image classes manually to circumvent the create-and-collect approach. It worked splendidly after that.

no title

This kind of jump is normal when you optimize things. I once had some code that did some processing to a text file in Java that needed about 3 to 5 minutes to run on some systems and it was getting annoying.

I rewrote it by tossing the regex and replacing it with a bespoke function and it shrunk it to 10 to 15 seconds. Roughly a 20x improvement.

It had nothing to do with anything except comparing some code I pulled from my rear to code that was carefully crafted according to the specifications.

Old is good

I loved old systems, I kept my dual Pentium III (with ECC!) around til about 2009 when I zapped it on accident. Windows 2000, Word 97, it was beautiful. Begrudginly updated...

Not that I don't love my new Macbook and iPad.

I will say this though; I can see why Apple would focus on the new. Obviously you can't sell to someone who isn't buying, right? If one wants to use old software, Apple isn't forcing anyone to upgrade anything.

And if you really want to go hardcore, you can just fire up Qemu for Mac and install Windows 3.11 like I have :)

no title

There is no "orbital velocity" here; the more similar the orbits are, the lower the collision velocity. In principle it could only be a few hundred mph, or dozen, or a few. Conversely, something in a retrograde orbit would hit at around 15 km/s. Or much more.

So anything from a slight bump to blowing a large chunk of it to pieces, depending on the impact velocity and mass of impactor.

In short; get in the lifeboat, be ready to bail and find out what happens.

It would not

The ISS orbits in the upper atmosphere, so the headwind quickly slows down and de-orbits all debris. This makes it a sort of "safe zone" (relatively).

The ISS itself will sink and deorbit within only half a year if abandoned, while smaller objects may come down faster due to having proportionally lower mass compared to their cross section... I think... Or am I thinking of surface area? Whichever.

No title

No; this low altitude orbit was chosen partially because there's enough atmospheric wind drag to deorbit debris within a very short period, under half a year.

The flip side is that if the ISS is abandoned, it will come down in that timeframe.

Depending on the state of ISS after collision, it may be possible to remotely instruct it to accelerate, raising it above the debris field and should buy enough time (before it falls) to schedule more boost missions while a repair plan is conjured up.

It would be a problem for the upcoming final shuttle mission, though.

Well...

A ballistic missile can deliver a nuke with some reprogramming, though its impact would be limited without much reaction mass. If you carried some propellant with it though... A nuke with a tank of some liquid (water? hydrogen? kitty litter?) next to it, detonated so the reaction mass tank is between the nuke and the target.

It would give a trajectory altering bump.

You might do this if you know in advance that it would likely hit the Earth on the _next_ pass, but not the current one.

But of course our ability to predict these things is not good enough to tell that the nuke won't _cause_ it to hit on the next pass.

Right now, though, just being able to see these things is good enough. If one were to hit, I dunno, Pakistan, and you already knew it was coming, you'd know it wasn't an Indian nuke (or whatever) and if it were to hit anywhere, you would have a head start on getting disaster relief ready to go.

Or something.

I wonder if a larger rock could honestly be mistaken for a nuke? I'm gonna go ask uncle google.

Soviet Russia

The fact that the union fell is in fact why the standard line features the word "Soviet"; originally, it wasn't necessary to specify because Russia actually was still Soviet.

Plus it's even bigger than an internet meme, and older, too...

Stargate

They did this in a Stargate SG-1 episode.

Anubis was firing a laser beam through the gate to destroy Stargate Command. The USAF had a metal plate covering the gate that was supposed to protect against gunfire and light weapons, but the beam was melting it. They spent a good part of the episode hosing it down with liquid nitrogen, but the alien's technology was well enough to sustain the beam indefinitely. In the end they had to have the gate lifted out of the base and flung into space.

Shoot the lawyers

The shooters, then, had no legal defense and were sentences to death.

Un-good

When y'all build a scramjet and it bones itself, you can describe it with any words you like, pardner.

n/t

That's such a dumb statement on so many levels. Aside from the fact that this game is shaping up to be a flop, demonstrating the weakness of such a product on today's market, that's like saying Porky's or Revenge of the Nerds casts a bad light on all film.

Built yourself

You mined your own silicon?

Why stop there?

Just spend $2 on a marker so you can take a cardboard box and draw some fake knobs and Colonel Young on it. Instant sci-fi TV.

Pretending is just as good as the real thing, no?

no title

@John Smith

Yessir, but the atmosphere is about 1/100th the density.

The difference is large enough to require substantially different aerodynamics. A vehicle designed for flight on Earth, for example, can't get sufficient lift, and the drag (relevant here) is substantially lower than 1/3.

@hayseed

You might be right.

Short it

Don't take this as financial advice, but there is a device for betting on the loss of a stock; short sales. Basically you sell the stock at the current price on borrowed money then buy it later at the lower price. Backwards stock trading. Or something.

But it does actually have to go down. Don't be bedazzled by the terms. If you wouldn't buy a regular stock, don't bother.

Holodecks

Less rockets; let's get holodecks so we can play Doom and pretend we're going to Mars. Good plan! Very ambitious!

Nonsense

How do you plan to get in the sky's pants with something that isn't built for pleasure?

And regardless of how they look, they all do the same thing; thrust for ten minutes or so before releasing their payload.

@Jonathon

Yes I see that now. Very close, though the Gnome\KDE\IceWM\etc. system shows a row of icons with mini-preview, here I just have some numbers, and I can't rename them.

Little detail? Yes. But it measurably adds to the pain in the rear factor. I have to click a drop-down menu, I see some numbers that give no hint of what's on what, then I click and then it has to do this slide animation.

The other way, I can instantly recognize which desktop I want to go to and have one-click access.

Furthermore, Apple's MO is that they're supposed to care about little details like this, and that's why they're worth these extra money.

And I do love my Mac, but basically they're doing some ridiculous over-engineering to avoid a very simple, easy solution and why?

NIH syndrome.

I wouldn't criticize Linux if it had some silliness like this (and I remember lots of silliness) but this and that stupid Expose thing make it kind of a pain in the rear to use a Mac if any program you're running opens two or more windows.

Though that's not so bad anymore since almost everything's tabbed.

Luckily...

The waste from oil and gas just magically vanishes into the air!