dstorrs

1) The article writer completely missed Feynman's point. Feynman is talking about the nature of reality, not about society and its actions. If I say "bricks are nutritious" and the government forces everyone to eat nothing but powdered bricks, that doesn't change the fact that bricks are not nutritious.

2) There is a slight caveat to Feynman's point -- if a theory disagrees with experiment, it's possible that the theory is correct but the experiment / data interpretation / etc was flawed.

> The people who do ask for it are obviously criminals.

You're being sarcastic, but we're moving in the direction of "police need unlimited power to investigate, so let's make it illegal to ask for privacy". And yes, we're a long way off from that scenario (at least in the USA) but I can see it on the horizon.

The thing that really scares me is the UK system -- CCTV cameras on every corner explicitly built for surveillance. We have a lot of cameras in the US (traffic, ATM, etc) but they generally belong to different entities and there is no comprehensive framework for getting (near)real-time footage from all of them.

Jebus. Ok, I need to look into disk encryption (and maybe TrueCrypt) for my phone. AFAIK, there is nothing incriminating on it, but the cops can always find something if they really want to.

Solar is a better bet for energy in near earth space as opposed to batteries. That changes as you go out to the Belt and Mars, but even then a radio thermal generator (RTG) is probably better.

If you want to ship energy to Earth surface you want solar again. Generate electricity from panels, convert to microwave, beam to receivers on Earth, convert back to electricity, problem solved. And no, the beam density would not high enough to cook anyone.

Google "space based solar power" for more.

Ten or fifteen years ago, they actually built a scale model of the Solar System up in up in northern Maine. As you drive north on Rt 1A, there's a particular rest stop with a shadowbox on the wall. Inside is a very small small sphere (size of a large marble). The label says "Pluto", with no further details. Keep driving until you get to Caribou or Limestone (I forget which) and you'll pass all the other planets. Some are inside (where there is a convenient building at the right distance), some are on purpose-built display poles by the roadside. When you get to the end, you can find the Sun painted on a wall -- or, at least, the very small arc of it that fits on a wall that size.

The planets are all carefully painted to look as accurate as possible and quite attractive. There's no explanation anywhere, you just have to be "in the know". It's an awesome treasure hunt to find them all.

Yep. It would also astound me if they didn't have at least some cyber-competent people in their organization.

Yes, but the data on the server may still be valuable (e.g. to an identity thief).

They may well be doing that in many cases, but we only hear about the occasional dramatic seizures. And the dramatic seizures may be prompted by internal politics -- some manager needs to show that his team is doing something in order to justify his budget, so he makes a visible move and gets some publicity.

It would be interesting to correlation frequency of these stories with FBI budget cycles.

The problem with this view is that if you look at the energy demand curve for the human race, there are only two long-term sources that can even potentially satisfy the demand: nuclear and space-based solar. Wind, geothermal, ground-based solar, tidal...there just isn't enough energy there to satisfy the demands, especially once you factor in the inefficiencies of power transmission.

The reason it's a problem, of course, is because the both methods are politically difficult and require significant engineering (if not research) and capital investment to make them practical.

You think "space" and "everything you listed" are mutually exclusive? Not so. Products and technologies from space development end up benefiting us right here on Earth.

Medicine? The software that was developed to do image-sharpening on the Hubble pictures turned out to make MRI machines significantly more useful without requiring a change to the hardware.

Social net? NASA has produced a crazy amount of research that would be useful to disaster victims, people in shelters , and assisted living. A couple of examples from the top of my head: safe, stable, long-term storage for high-nutrition meals; long-term emotional impact of environmental factors (colors, scents, etc).

Police: Most forms of wireless communication (including police radios) use SOMETHING that was developed by NASA -- extended-life batteries, transmission protocols, etc.

Even leaving aside the benefits to be head, "$10 billion for NASA" is NOT real money. It's an unnoticeable fraction of the waste in our budgets.

Why is this being downvoted? It's not the popular view in these parts but it's a legitimate one and did not strike me as trolling.

Galileo's argument is actually quite slipshod and is based on the ambiguity of language and the narrowness of what-we-commonly-experience as a slice of all-that-really-is.

If Aristotle were right then the rocks would EITHER fall slower or faster together. There is no "knowing" if they are one object or two.

But Aristotle is wrong. Which means Galileo's thought experiment is irrelevant to reality and should be ignored. The picture is very simple: gravity pulls down, air resistance pushes up. Gravity is constant but air resistance is higher for faster moving objects. That's all you need.

Several things:

1) They last a VERY long time as measured in "Internet time"

2) It's very hard to find examples of GOOD software patents. They tend to either cover too much (one click shopping), or they are really just math expressed in code (encryption and compression algorithms).

3) They are easy to abuse, since it takes so little time to produce them and the people who grant them don't really understand them.

SpaceX is launching things to LEO for about $5,500 / KG (which is $2,500 / lb) on the Falcon9, so it's getting better.

Source: http://www.spacex.com/falcon9.php

1) Building out sufficient solar power collectors to solve the Earth's energy problems forever.

2) Manufacturing medicines, alloys, and materials that can only be produced in micro-gravity.

3) Protecting humanity against social breakdown and/or extinction in case of massive asteroid strike / global pandemic / etc.

4) Because every dollar that has been spent on space development in the US has put $7 back into the economy by way of spinoffs, technical advances, etc.

Good point, but I would have said the big win with Tarsnap is the zero-effort encryption. It means that everything you send is safe, so you don't have to worry about whether there is sensitive data in some particular DB / directory / logfile / whatever.

Most clients (e.g. Irssi / MacIrssi) will handle logging. And you can have a bot do the logging for you.

I'm impressed by the skill that goes into this but it doesn't seem like an even-handed technology -- it empowers governments, major corporations, and other large organizations more than it does private individuals.

As a specific example, people writing political blogs in China could be seriously harmed by this technique even at the levels that it's at now.

I applaud you for including the link to "manually changing your writing style will defeat these attacks" but that's a link to an academic paper. Could you please also write some good, layperson-oriented docs on "how to beat this"? For that matter, I'll do the writing grunt work if you'll provide the expertise. If you're interested, use the GMail address in my profile.

Fixed fee saves you from some issues and throws you square into the middle of others.

Specifically, it means you now need a far more detailed requirements doc BEFORE you can start working (safely, anyway), and you need to manage changes much more carefully because they are coming directly out of your pocket.

Plus, as an hourly guy, I never cared when the customer wasted my time, e.g. with over-attended phone meetings that take unnecessarily long because everyone needs to have their say. It didn't matter, because I was paid for it.

Check out _The Mythical Man-Month_ for a refutation of this.

Quoting from memory:

- Nine women cannot have a baby in one month.

- Adding more developers to a late project makes it later.

The problem is that in order for throwing a thousand engineers at the problem to be time-effective, each one must communicate what he has learned to all of the others. That takes time and adds friction.

Mongo is specifically designed for horizontal scaling, so it makes it easy to establish replica sets and shards, and it includes an auto-balancer that will distribute your data between the shards. Pg (the database, not the guy!) can do much of this, but it's not quite as built-in.

Which isn't to say there aren't things that Pg is better for. Full text search comes to mind.

>A poor tenant with a voucher is preferable, because the >government always pays the rent.) So we incentivize single- >parent households, which are more likely to remain in >poverty.

Yes, there's an incentive here, but it seems unlikely to me that this is going to be enough to make people get divorced or probably even fail to get married if they meet the right person. More likely they would just fail to mention it to the government.

I definitely agree on the rest of what you're saying, though.

BART: comfortable, fast, limited locations in the city but reasonably good coverage of East Bay and it will get you to the airports (SFO and Oakland). Price varies based on number of stops but roughly $4 to $8 is a reasonable set of bounds.

Light rail: comfortable, fast, moderately good coverage of the city. Price is fixed ($2 / ride)

Bus: Uncomfortable, slow, but excellent coverage of the city. Price is fixed ($2 / ride)

A) Because every dollar invested in the US space program since inception has created about $7 of economic benefit to the consumer economy.

B) (Related to A but worth mentioning separately:) Because the space program has led to major advances in medicine that have improved length and quality of life on Earth. [1]

C) To gain access to essentially limitless energy resources via space-based solar.

D) To gain access to material resources (e.g. minerals) that are scare or absent on Earth. [2]

E) To create an off-Earth breeding population of humans so that one asteroid / plague / nuclear war / whatever cannot wipe out the entire species.

[1] Here's a simple example: When the Hubble telescope was initially launched, it had a small lens defect that blurred the pictures slightly (the pictures were still better than any Earth-based 'scope, though). Image processing software was developed to clean up the pictures until a replacement lens could be deployed. That software then migrated over to MRI machines where it is now used to detect tumors much earlier than used to be possible.

[2] These resources are better accessed from the asteroids than Mars, but going to the latter gives you access to the former.

I really want this to work, but it seems too good to be true, which bring my Dubious Dave side to the front:

Sources: Avita Medical, Wikipedia, New South Wales Dept. of Health

Image credits: Avita Medical

If it's actually been successful at treating "thousands of patients in Canada, the UK, France, Germany, and Australia (among many other countries)", why is New South Wales the only potentially medically-reliable / non-conflicted source? Why do all of the source links go to top level pages instead of specific data?

I really hope that it's real and that they get the approvals, though.

Here's a much simpler explanation:

Because the cables cost $30 and revenue is good.

For the love of god..."make nuclear power safe"?

There have been...what, three nuclear plant failures EVER? Ignoring Chernobyl (which was caused by political pressure on the operators of one of the earliest plants ever built) there have been a few hundred deaths attributable to nuclear energy. Compare that on a GW / fatality basis to coal mines, hydro plants, etc, and nuclear power is clearly the safest option around.

As to Fukushima...the fifth most powerful earthquake ever recorded went off a few dozen miles away with a total energy release of something like 600 million Hiroshima bombs. This caused tidal waves up to 30 feet high that rolled almost halfway around the world. Despite all that, the total effect was a thermal explosion and some radioactive steam was vented. Yes, it's bad, but it's hardly a good reason to give up the best and safest form of energy known.

I've done this. I set up a survey on SurveyMonkey and then created a series of tasks on MT to send people to it.

I paid about USD$0.05 per survey and spent something like $30 or $40 (I don't recall exactly). I got thousands of people taking the survey, they were from all over the world, all different demographics, and the information was solid -- i.e., people didn't just type "jfalksdfjkjhgkj" to try to steal the money.

One thing to be aware of: since this will be an international audience, their English reading skills will be at various levels. Make sure your directions / questions are very clear and simple.

> I also fail to see how dumping our waste on generations to come for our own selfish desires is less bad.

You're assuming that just because we consider it waste, they will too. Personally, I'm expecting that at some point some use will be found for the 'waste' -- maybe highly efficient reprocessing or materials for low-radiation (think 'easily traced') medical nanobots -- at which point future generations will thank us profusely for generating such convenient stockpiles of the stuff.

Could someone with Mongo experience help me gut-check this?

I want my data store to be durable and unsurprising -- barring a hardware failure or such, if I submit data it should either tell me that it failed to commit or it should be stored durably and without surprises (e.g., it should not truncate a long string to fit).

I've read some of the Mongo docco, and it's pretty exciting, but the lack of ACID -- primarily the Durability -- has kept me from really using it.

With a WAL journal, it sounds like maybe the durability issue is fixed. Is it? Could I use Mongo with relatively out-of-the-box settings plus --journal and count on a level of durability equivalent to a traditional RDBMS?