Thanks to the magic of calculus, as long as you have less than two children (on average) per couple, the population will stabilize eventually. Many first-world nations have already reached that point (and are experiencing negative population growth as a result).
A one-child policy seems a reasonable price to pay for immortality - hell, even if sterilization was mandatory a lot of people would still jump at the chance. And why shouldn't they? There's plenty of interesting people in the world to get to know. If we didn't spend our entire lives concerned only with our immediate relatives we might become a better species.
Besides, even without old age plenty of people will still die from yet-uncured diseases, accidents, wars, murders, suicides, etc. Death isn't going away any time soon.
The big question is how it would affect us psychologically: If death was no longer inevitable, would we give life more value? Would men still march to war? Would terrorism become a far more compelling tool? Would we spend eternity cowering inside private fortresses, fearing the slightest risks to our fragile immortality?
500 years from now, just think how out of touch the elderly will be! I can't wait to shake a cane and tell the youth that in my day we had Atari 2600s, not AI-merged universal consciousness!
In a related martian breakthrough, apparently an asteroid hit Mars with an energy of "1029 joules, which is equivalent to 100 billion gigatons of TNT."
I assume they meant 10^29 J. But still, the inability of most scientific journalist's to even check the plausibility of their figures is astounding.
The original text was probably a word/rtf/odf document with the "29" in superscript, but the superscripting got stripped out during conversion. Happens all the time.
Sorry, I actually was replying to Khyber's post, not yours.
Unfortunately, the current Slashdot discussion system seems to have been written by Hebrew genealogists; when posts in the middle of threads are hidden, grandchild posts are listed as if they were direct children of their grandparent posts. It's confusing as all get out.
I'd take a geek's erratic printing over a cursive scrawl any day. Most of the cursive writers I know draw shorthand versions of characters and forget the proper D'nealian transitions, turning entire pages into seas of identical vertical squiggles. Even the authors can't read their own writing, yet that never stops them from touting the superiority of their script over any crude printing.
Princeton's WordNet defines language as "a systematic means of communicating by the use of sounds or conventional symbols". If that's true, the CS majors I associate with understand language better than the English majors.
As someone who's spent plenty of time looking at power consumption/efficiency numbers (silentpcreview.com is a great site, btw), I can say that very few PSUs bother to be noticeably *more* than 80% efficient. A small fraction of 80-plus units peak at 85% efficiency, but only under a fairly heavy load. You can count on your fingers the number of ATX PSUs that achieve 85% over their full range.
Of course, the issue is rhetorical. The parent poster referred to a theoretical 200 watt, 80% efficient PSU using 250 watts in normal operation. I corrected him, using his example to demonstrate that PSUs only draw power based on the current system load. The fact that some PSUs might actually be 83% efficient wasn't salient to the discussion.
So, if you have a 200 watt power supply, making 200 the 80%, you would be drawing around 250 watts of power.
A very common fallacy is that a PSU always draws as many watts as it's rated for; in other words, a 500-watt PSU constantly draws 500 watts or more. This is incorrect; your PSU only supplies (and draws) as many watts as your computer currently needs.
"80-plus certified" means the PSU was tested to be 80% efficient at 25%, 50%, and 100% load. Assuming you have a fairly low-end system, your 200-watt PSU may never supply more than 100 watts, and therefore (being 80% efficient) never draw more than 125 watts. If you added a component to your system that consumed an extra 20 watts, your PSU would supply an additional 20 watts, and draw an additional 25 watts (again, 80% efficiency). Simple as that.
I never said "implosion device". It was just a humorous take on the fact that a nuclear reactor *is* a figurative bomb waiting to go off, if the right freak combination of events occur. Moreover, a device that can detonate (via steam explosion), kill thousands of people (radiation poisoning), and render thousands of square miles uninhabitable (fallout) meets my admittedly liberal definition of the word "bomb".
But I agree with everything you said in your post. Nuclear energy has become cleaner and safer over the decades, and even the occasional Chernobyl pales in comparison to the very real, constant, global environmental destruction from strip mining and coal/oil burning.
What's your point? No method of generation is safe.
That WAS my point. A GP in the thread said that nuclear power was "safe...PERIOD!" I was pointing out that nuclear energy, while far cleaner and safer for the world at large than coal, still has definite risks. We should work hard to make power generation safer, but not delude ourselves (or others) into thinking it's "safe".
(To be fair, though, no great photovoltaic catastrophes spring to mind...)
We know how to design a reactor which can fail safely and deactivates without constant and precise supervision. We also know how to safely handle coolant leaks. I agree that the major problem is in the wetware but we could potentially minimize it's job to the design and the hitting the off button. Once we have the design the off button should be a no-brainier.
We also know how to make buildings that don't collapse, planes which don't crash, and ships which don't sink. But a few still do.
No matter how many known contingencies we may plan for, we're constantly finding new ways to screw things up. A piece of inferior material here combined with a bad decision there and throw in a broken sensor or a software glitch and you've discovered a new recipe for disaster. Crazy combinations of events happen every day; statistics is a bitch.
Of course, any technology becomes safer with time and experience, but we've yet to produce anything with a 0% failure rate.
My previous comment was meant as a joke, but a nuclear reactor is indeed an enormous dirty bomb waiting to go off. Thankfully we've only once had a large-scale release, but there have been several other smaller incidents and some averted catastrophes that can only be described as miraculous.
While there have been and will continue to be great improvements in reactor safety, there will always be mistakes and failures. It is impossible to call nuclear energy "safe...PERIOD!" It just happens to be "safer" than burning billions of tons of fossil fuels every year.
The average American will whine endlessly about the dangers of nuclear power and cower under the nearest rock at first mention of "radioactive". Never mind the far worse environmental contamination caused by coal and oil power plants; nuclear is the boogeyman and white-bread Americans won't go near it.
That is, unless it saves them money.
Coal and oil prices skyrocketed during the 1970s, which brought lots of attention to nuclear energy and caused the average American to decide that maybe he/she had simply got off on the wrong foot with that whole nuclear scare, and that these reactor thingies that were popping up left and right just might be the miracle technology that would save us from the evil oil barons. The love affair didn't last long, however; fossil fuel prices dropped again in the early 1980s and nuclear development came to a crashing halt. There was no longer a big economic incentive, and anything 'nuclear' became the boogeyman again overnight.
The reason nothing has improved (in the US) since your books were written in 1985 is because no new plants have been built since then; even those plants under construction in the 1980s ended up being scrapped. The US is still using primitive 30 or 40 year old reactors while countries not in a cheap-fossil-fuel-induced stupor have been developing newer, safer, lower waste designs.
But once again, fossil fuels are expensive. And once again, Americans are seeing nuclear as the miracle solution. Until it stops saving them money.
If they're creating a new design, they can copyright it.
If they're adding to or changing someone else's design such that it becomes a new creative work, they can copyright it.
If they're simply digitizing someone else's design, they can't copyright it.
Seems like the most logical solution to me. I just wish more manufacturers released the digital models for their products; it would save everybody a lot of trouble.
to see so many otherwise individualistic geeks yelling "conform" at the top of their lungs!
By the logic employed by many here, surely even more than adopting a common temperature scale, the world would benefit from people throwing away their native tongues and all adopting English as a first language instead. I don't see anyone arguing for that though.
I agree. Slashdot should adopt a common temperature scale when it adopts a common language.
Well, we could just build a bigger catapult on Mars, if only it had some sort of giant fucking mountain, we could build the mass driver along the side of it.
I'll refrain from making a reference to the relative spatial positions of you and the joke.;)
But escape velocity isn't really a velocity, as your trajectory is irrelevant. (Assuming it's, you know, above the horizon...) As long as you're traveling above a given speed, you'll escape the gravity well whether you're pointed straight up or towards the horizon.
The reason we launch rockets vertically is to minimize the time spent in dense atmosphere. You get a lot of drag at low altitudes here on Earth, so it's better to climb quickly and get to where the air is thin as soon as possible.
Mars is another story: Air pressure at the top of Olympus Mons is only ~0.003 that of Earth sea level. Launching a payload at a shallow angle through that would be no huge waste of energy.
On the moon (or anywhere that lacks an atmosphere), you could lay the mass driver right down on the surface and it wouldn't make any difference.
FWIW, "Limbo of the Lost" is a 1990s-era point-and-click adventure game with static backdrops, and those backdrops just happen to be screenshots of other games.
Even if they hadn't plagiarized other games, I can't see anyone buying the piece of crap. Everything about it - plot, graphics, audio, game engine - reeks of amateurism.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks to the magic of calculus, as long as you have less than two children (on average) per couple, the population will stabilize eventually. Many first-world nations have already reached that point (and are experiencing negative population growth as a result).
A one-child policy seems a reasonable price to pay for immortality - hell, even if sterilization was mandatory a lot of people would still jump at the chance. And why shouldn't they? There's plenty of interesting people in the world to get to know. If we didn't spend our entire lives concerned only with our immediate relatives we might become a better species.
Besides, even without old age plenty of people will still die from yet-uncured diseases, accidents, wars, murders, suicides, etc. Death isn't going away any time soon.
The big question is how it would affect us psychologically: If death was no longer inevitable, would we give life more value? Would men still march to war? Would terrorism become a far more compelling tool? Would we spend eternity cowering inside private fortresses, fearing the slightest risks to our fragile immortality?
500 years from now, just think how out of touch the elderly will be! I can't wait to shake a cane and tell the youth that in my day we had Atari 2600s, not AI-merged universal consciousness!
W-T-F? I used to dream of having W-T-F! When I got a car they gave me S-P-F-C-C-M-T, and I was grateful!
In a related martian breakthrough, apparently an asteroid hit Mars with an energy of "1029 joules, which is equivalent to 100 billion gigatons of TNT."
I assume they meant 10^29 J. But still, the inability of most scientific journalist's to even check the plausibility of their figures is astounding.
The original text was probably a word/rtf/odf document with the "29" in superscript, but the superscripting got stripped out during conversion. Happens all the time.Sorry, I actually was replying to Khyber's post, not yours.
Unfortunately, the current Slashdot discussion system seems to have been written by Hebrew genealogists; when posts in the middle of threads are hidden, grandchild posts are listed as if they were direct children of their grandparent posts. It's confusing as all get out.
I'd take a geek's erratic printing over a cursive scrawl any day. Most of the cursive writers I know draw shorthand versions of characters and forget the proper D'nealian transitions, turning entire pages into seas of identical vertical squiggles. Even the authors can't read their own writing, yet that never stops them from touting the superiority of their script over any crude printing.
Princeton's WordNet defines language as "a systematic means of communicating by the use of sounds or conventional symbols". If that's true, the CS majors I associate with understand language better than the English majors.
As someone who's spent plenty of time looking at power consumption/efficiency numbers (silentpcreview.com is a great site, btw), I can say that very few PSUs bother to be noticeably *more* than 80% efficient. A small fraction of 80-plus units peak at 85% efficiency, but only under a fairly heavy load. You can count on your fingers the number of ATX PSUs that achieve 85% over their full range.
Of course, the issue is rhetorical. The parent poster referred to a theoretical 200 watt, 80% efficient PSU using 250 watts in normal operation. I corrected him, using his example to demonstrate that PSUs only draw power based on the current system load. The fact that some PSUs might actually be 83% efficient wasn't salient to the discussion.
So, if you have a 200 watt power supply, making 200 the 80%, you would be drawing around 250 watts of power.
A very common fallacy is that a PSU always draws as many watts as it's rated for; in other words, a 500-watt PSU constantly draws 500 watts or more. This is incorrect; your PSU only supplies (and draws) as many watts as your computer currently needs.
"80-plus certified" means the PSU was tested to be 80% efficient at 25%, 50%, and 100% load. Assuming you have a fairly low-end system, your 200-watt PSU may never supply more than 100 watts, and therefore (being 80% efficient) never draw more than 125 watts. If you added a component to your system that consumed an extra 20 watts, your PSU would supply an additional 20 watts, and draw an additional 25 watts (again, 80% efficiency). Simple as that.
I never said "implosion device". It was just a humorous take on the fact that a nuclear reactor *is* a figurative bomb waiting to go off, if the right freak combination of events occur. Moreover, a device that can detonate (via steam explosion), kill thousands of people (radiation poisoning), and render thousands of square miles uninhabitable (fallout) meets my admittedly liberal definition of the word "bomb".
But I agree with everything you said in your post. Nuclear energy has become cleaner and safer over the decades, and even the occasional Chernobyl pales in comparison to the very real, constant, global environmental destruction from strip mining and coal/oil burning.
That WAS my point. A GP in the thread said that nuclear power was "safe...PERIOD!" I was pointing out that nuclear energy, while far cleaner and safer for the world at large than coal, still has definite risks. We should work hard to make power generation safer, but not delude ourselves (or others) into thinking it's "safe".
(To be fair, though, no great photovoltaic catastrophes spring to mind...)
We also know how to make buildings that don't collapse, planes which don't crash, and ships which don't sink. But a few still do.
No matter how many known contingencies we may plan for, we're constantly finding new ways to screw things up. A piece of inferior material here combined with a bad decision there and throw in a broken sensor or a software glitch and you've discovered a new recipe for disaster. Crazy combinations of events happen every day; statistics is a bitch.
Of course, any technology becomes safer with time and experience, but we've yet to produce anything with a 0% failure rate.
My previous comment was meant as a joke, but a nuclear reactor is indeed an enormous dirty bomb waiting to go off. Thankfully we've only once had a large-scale release, but there have been several other smaller incidents and some averted catastrophes that can only be described as miraculous.
While there have been and will continue to be great improvements in reactor safety, there will always be mistakes and failures.
It is impossible to call nuclear energy "safe...PERIOD!" It just happens to be "safer" than burning billions of tons of fossil fuels every year.
The average American will whine endlessly about the dangers of nuclear power and cower under the nearest rock at first mention of "radioactive". Never mind the far worse environmental contamination caused by coal and oil power plants; nuclear is the boogeyman and white-bread Americans won't go near it.
That is, unless it saves them money.
Coal and oil prices skyrocketed during the 1970s, which brought lots of attention to nuclear energy and caused the average American to decide that maybe he/she had simply got off on the wrong foot with that whole nuclear scare, and that these reactor thingies that were popping up left and right just might be the miracle technology that would save us from the evil oil barons. The love affair didn't last long, however; fossil fuel prices dropped again in the early 1980s and nuclear development came to a crashing halt. There was no longer a big economic incentive, and anything 'nuclear' became the boogeyman again overnight.
The reason nothing has improved (in the US) since your books were written in 1985 is because no new plants have been built since then; even those plants under construction in the 1980s ended up being scrapped. The US is still using primitive 30 or 40 year old reactors while countries not in a cheap-fossil-fuel-induced stupor have been developing newer, safer, lower waste designs.
But once again, fossil fuels are expensive. And once again, Americans are seeing nuclear as the miracle solution. Until it stops saving them money.
+1 obscure Calvin & Hobbes reference.
I think Christopher Columbus would be a more apt comparison.
If they're creating a new design, they can copyright it. If they're adding to or changing someone else's design such that it becomes a new creative work, they can copyright it. If they're simply digitizing someone else's design, they can't copyright it. Seems like the most logical solution to me. I just wish more manufacturers released the digital models for their products; it would save everybody a lot of trouble.
to see so many otherwise individualistic geeks yelling "conform" at the top of their lungs!
By the logic employed by many here, surely even more than adopting a common temperature scale, the world would benefit from people throwing away their native tongues and all adopting English as a first language instead. I don't see anyone arguing for that though.
I agree. Slashdot should adopt a common temperature scale when it adopts a common language.Noticed a typo in my post: For what it's worth, the air pressure at the top of Olympus Mons is 0.0003 atmospheres, not 0.003.
Like this one?
You probably want something steeper, though.
I'll refrain from making a reference to the relative spatial positions of you and the joke. ;)
But escape velocity isn't really a velocity, as your trajectory is irrelevant. (Assuming it's, you know, above the horizon...) As long as you're traveling above a given speed, you'll escape the gravity well whether you're pointed straight up or towards the horizon.
The reason we launch rockets vertically is to minimize the time spent in dense atmosphere. You get a lot of drag at low altitudes here on Earth, so it's better to climb quickly and get to where the air is thin as soon as possible.
Mars is another story: Air pressure at the top of Olympus Mons is only ~0.003 that of Earth sea level. Launching a payload at a shallow angle through that would be no huge waste of energy.
On the moon (or anywhere that lacks an atmosphere), you could lay the mass driver right down on the surface and it wouldn't make any difference.
Okay, I'm trying to figure this out. This is Reverse Sweden, right? Not the regular Sweden?
FWIW, "Limbo of the Lost" is a 1990s-era point-and-click adventure game with static backdrops, and those backdrops just happen to be screenshots of other games.
Even if they hadn't plagiarized other games, I can't see anyone buying the piece of crap. Everything about it - plot, graphics, audio, game engine - reeks of amateurism.
Even if that were true, which it isn't, one would expect *cooling* during this half of the cycle.
No, it's all the rest of them.
Sounds like you just described the XO-1.