Yeah, if I had the money I'd probably get one of these Samsungs and run Stellarium on it. It must be pretty good seeing as how Apple feels the need to sue about it.
Can the condescending attitude please. Threading doesn't matter if 90% of it all is off topic politics and pushes the on topic talk into an unmoderated corner.
Why is India in such a bad state when there are so many smart Indians?
High difficulty level. I live in Finland which has been called "the least failed state in the world". This is nice and all but anyone trying to improve India is dealing with something like 250 times the population, a thousand languages and cultures (probably an understatement) and a warm climate which will give you a great variety of diseases whenever it feels like it. There's also the whole mutual hate thing with Pakistan.
Given the circumstances India seems like a surprising success to me. I hope they can keep it up.
Like the other poster said, you're wrong in your last point.
Finland almost equals Iceland when it comes to being a go-to country for genetic research on homogenous populations.
Now of course all present European peoples have many peoples behind them. But to say that Hungarians and Finns have mixed with others equally much is just wrong.
Others already pointed out that there are naked eye visible nebulas. However, I'll add a slightly different point: if you didn't know this, make sure you get to see the night sky properly sometime! Light pollution is everywhere these days, I've had astronomy as a hobby for a couple of years and still haven't had the chance to see a proper sky.
But a better sky is good enough! Grab Stellarium (.org) for free and check what's out there.
The EU can't keep pouring money into a leaky barrel. Eurobonds would have to go hand in hand with relieving a country of its sovereign control if it wants federal money.
I dont really care about the specific approach. The point is someone should show some leadership in the EU and do something, anything else than pushing austerity.
And don't even think about threatening Germany with the notion that exports will crash if export markets will leave the Eurozone or the EU, making Germany's currency more valuable and exports more expensive.
It's not a threat, since after all it's not like I have the power to make it happen. Currently austerity seems to be on this path: 1. Greek finances are ever more strained and closer to collapse 2. Confidence in Spain and Italy weakens as a result (60+ billion capital flight from Spain in March reported today)
If Spain falls further it will affect confidence in Italy and either country will strain France which is a big lender. If France, Italy and Spain get into serious economic trouble Germany will take a hit that will dwarf any amount of money the Greek elite could waste. It's not a threat, but rather a serious risk of the dominoes falling.
Greece borrows a fuckton of money, pisses it up the wall and then throws a massive sulk when asked to pay it back. Meanwhile Germany makes stuff that people want to buy.
The past Greek governments have done a terrible job and now the country suffers for it - this is undoubtedly true. It is also true that the German economy has been much better.
However, Germany has benefited enormously from sharing a currency with them. Being one of the world's largest exporters, they benefit from a relatively weak currency. If they had their own currency now they would be like Switzerland - a safe haven in the crisis, with a very strong currency and problems with exports.
But currently the problems in the other countries devalue the euro, meaning Germany gets to export at great prices. Meanwhile the crisis-hit euro countries have an over-valued currency, and they can't do anything about it. Basically, Germany gets a huge boost for free and pretends it's all due to working hard.
Germany is resisting money-printing and collective eurobonds which would give the crisis-hit countries an opportunity to grow again. They want the others to sort their own things out - but if the others run out of options and crash, Germany might end up wishing they had done something.
FWIW I'm in one of the rich and balanced euro countries. Doesn't matter, I still think we need something else than "tough love" to solve this.
Haven't spam and spam countermeasures already made the effort of running your own mailserver unreasonable? At least I've heard that you'll be basically blocked either by default or after a while.
Add to that malware which just loves the idea of a spare mailserver whose owner works elsewhere most of the time and the fact that it's hard to even get ONE static IP these days and suddenly the current system is already the domain of large organizations (and a few super-nerds who are there mostly through inertia.)
I don't think anyone is lobbying against v6. But even if they were v4 will run out soon, we'll have a small crisis and at that point v6 adoption will explode no matter what anyone says or thinks. After that we won't be able to remember IPs but everything else will be better.
Of course then there is the fact that nuclear disarmament would probably make large scale war MORE likely. With nukes you do not need a large standing army for national defense. (For national OFFENSE, what the US is doing today, you do.) Without them you have to expend vast resources maintaining a conventional military for purely defensive purposes. Seriously, why DIDN'T the Soviet Union just steamroll until they got to Gibraltar? They could have done so with conventional forces largely at any time during the Cold War. Because they knew full well that such an action would result in nuclear retaliation.
The little bit of political science I've read contradicts this, although I admit it's so little that I can't dig up any sources on short notice.
But the basic thing is this: if you have a lot of nukes you tend to build up a huge army precisely so that you'll never have to use them. You know nukes probably mean mutually assured destruction, so you never go "oh no problem, I'll just lean on the nukes".
Now, even though I live in Western Europe I think it's not that important: the Soviet Union was the only superpower to defend its home turf in Europe. It had a huge army. The US also had a huge army, but it didn't have its capital in Europe. The fact remains that both nuclear armed to the teeth superpowers also had strong conventional arms.
Also a quick check with unreliable sources gives 350,000 US troops in Europe in 1980. Add different national armies to this and the fact that the defender tends to be in a better position and the certain Soviet victory starts looking a lot less certain. Not to mention that 350 000 troops mostly standing guard far away from home hardly sounds like defence is cheap.
At Chernobyl - wildlife have been reported to have lower survival and reproduction rates, with clear pathological effects to sperm. This data point may be valid (it's a complex problem),
Not a bad point, and Chernobyl should figure in most radiation data comparisons due to its nature. However, radiation levels vary wildly in the area: the animals could have eaten their food from a hotspot even if the background would have been tolerable (which we don't really know either.)
but you have to wonder when the sponsor (DOE) reason to want this outcome.
No we don't. But, I'll say this much: the DOE is involved with coal power. The DOE is involved with nuclear power. Clearly, they're simultaneously plotting to replace coal with nuclear and nuclear with coal.
Also this was funded by both MIT and the DOE. This is just basic research, so cool it with the conspiracy theories.
Progressivism because (1) flag burning and riots and meeting with the North Vietnamese in Cuba tends to transmit to everyone else, no matter what your pious words are, that you hate your country, thus breaking societal cohesion and (2) TV and movies -- of which all/majority of the writer were Progressive -- starting in the 1970s coarsening the culture with ever increasing amounts of foul language in movies and TV while eliminating cultural norms like good manners: children saying Please, Thank You, Sir & Ma'am, thus destroying the social lubricant
I think you have cause and effect reversed. If there was such great social cohesion, then where did these society-destroying people come from? Where did the riots come from?
Social change had already happened. The societal cohesion you talk about was already gone, and had perhaps been a faÃade in the first place - Middletown pressured everyone into behaving 'properly', but that everyone really was like that doesn't necessarily follow.
You can't have perfect social cohesion and riots at the same time. Some liked the old order and some didn't, and both groups were citizens. Both groups were also equally led by leaders and ideologies - there wasn't one group which "followed its heart" and another that was brainwashed by media.
Of course, if you're going by compositional similarity, then putting Mercury and Jupiter in the same category is also silly. Which is why my preferred solution is to make "planet" a super-category that includes 1) gas giants, 2) round rocky objects, and 3) round comet-like objects. I wouldn't bother to mention orbits at all. Orbital characteristics should be part of a separate classification system, IMO.
I agree completely about the super-category part.
I wouldn't change the orbit definition, mostly because another huge can of worms would be opened then. : )
I'd rather see a definition of planet that includes Ceres and excludes Pluto than the reverse.
I don't see what would put Ceres and Pluto in different categories under any system. Neither has cleared its orbit (I too think this is a silly criterion.) Both have the hydrostatic equilibrium thing going. Both orbit the sun directly.
Well, there *is* one peculiarity about Pluto: the barycenter of the Pluto-Charon system is outside both. While I dislike the clear the neighbourhood criterion I think this system is actually the strongest proof of the current planet definition being temporary: Pluto-Charon is a binary (dwarf) planet, yet no one has bothered to even mention Charon. Instead one of our current dwarf planets orbits an empty piece of space.
Apart from it being a shame system there are also other problems.
This is a form of measurement system, and sociological studies have shown that those are growing increasingly common in schools. The problems is the same as with most such systems: the thing being measured isn't necessarily anywhere close to what is thought.
In the case of a list of who completed things first, the probability is high that it measures who took the most shortcuts and did the least amount of work possible relative to their own capabilities.
Instead of focusing on measurement and rivalry studies have shown that focusing on equality and everyone in class doing a good job lifts the entire group. I do not know if this carries over to work environments, but I'm sceptical about using rivalry when there could be co-operation instead.
(Further reading: sociologists who have written about the culture of measurement in schools include David Hargreaves and Risto Rinne.)
There was already a longterm study release a few weeks ago that confirmed that dental x-rays and such are a source of common brain tumors....how long until those stories get taken down is anyone's guess....now move along citizen...
What the fuck are you on about?
That story is *all over* the net. NBC, ABC, Washington Post, Fox, Reuters, and numerous smaller sites. The paper itself is to be published (if it wasn't already published) in Cancer, which is the journal of the American Cancer Society.
If you actually honestly think that story or this Russian story will somehow disappear you're most likely paranoid, and not in the colloquial sense either.
And who was stupid enough to moderate the quoted comment up? It's just paranoid rambling with little connection to the story above.
Your problem is, human nature. Those who beat their swords into plowshares will till the soil for those who have not.
It's not human nature, it's your civilization and its institutions.
Not every culture has had organized violence, humans are perfectly capable of keeping murder a purely personal affair.
War is not easy to do away with in the situation we're in, but don't let yourself be fooled into thinking that we are doing the only thing possible. Apart from comparisons with other cultures I'll also throw this in here: wars with conscripts involved require strong measures against desertion. Often the death penalty is necessary to keep everyone in line.
You don't need a death threat to attack someone you're angry at. But in war it's suddenly needed. It's really the societal institution of war perpetuating itself, since human nature alone is completely incapable of carrying it. Violence is human nature, war is not.
The yield is lower, but was energy input taken into account?
If fewer resources are required organic could still win out.
Although I suspect it will still be like the summary says: both will have their place. It's a small miracle we're feeding about seven billion people, and it was achieved through hard work and using all the tools available.
Add some more billions and we'll likely have organics, conventional agriculture and GM crops side by side, since we'll have no choice but to use all tools again.
Once upon a time, Lloyd Biggle Jr. accurately said, as best I can recall, "Given a bunch of people in a sewer, mainstream literature will lovingly describe those who are content to stay there. Science fiction will write about those trying to get out." That's at best less true than it was.
I'm confused, what does this make Futurological Congress?
The people who think about becoming scientists are actually smart enough to discern at a relatively young age between sci-fi and reality. Survey how many smart kids who saw "Blade Runner" found that movie disenfranchised them about the future, or whether they just thought it was really cool.
A lot of people parse stories as trying to discuss reality and humanity. This is what serious stories like the ones discussed here are mostly written as too. If you think "smart kids" on average just take a shallow view and see the surface of a story then you should brush up on your reading skills. Children gradually learn to separate stories and reality, whereas adults often learn how to join them together again.
Stephenson apparently answered a more general question about the attitude of science fiction. I think he was correct. While there are many factors in play, the general attitude towards the future is a result of a myriad discussions in society which create a certain climate of attitudes. Science fiction stories specifically consider the future and are therefore a disproportionally large fraction of those discussions. Stephenson's contribution is a small part of just of a part of the influences on society, but his contribution is not zero.
O yeah and i just noticed you put up a link from the NIDA. -because the US government is such a trustable source of facts about drugs... LOL
Well, no one will probably read this since this is many days after the story was posted, but: That's precisely the point. I wouldn't trust a US government source too much about drug negatives.
But this is about LSD not being addictive. It's a good thing about an illegal drug. If the organization felt it could say LSD will turn you into a junkie for life it certainly would. But it cannot, because no research says so. If that's still not enough you can do the scientific thing and check the sources which are conveniently listed at the end.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, if I had the money I'd probably get one of these Samsungs and run Stellarium on it. It must be pretty good seeing as how Apple feels the need to sue about it.
Can the condescending attitude please. Threading doesn't matter if 90% of it all is off topic politics and pushes the on topic talk into an unmoderated corner.
Why is India in such a bad state when there are so many smart Indians?
High difficulty level. I live in Finland which has been called "the least failed state in the world". This is nice and all but anyone trying to improve India is dealing with something like 250 times the population, a thousand languages and cultures (probably an understatement) and a warm climate which will give you a great variety of diseases whenever it feels like it. There's also the whole mutual hate thing with Pakistan.
Given the circumstances India seems like a surprising success to me. I hope they can keep it up.
Actually we use much more expensive headphones so that we can have noise-cancellation for the rustling of the beard. Do not under-estimate us.
Like the other poster said, you're wrong in your last point.
Finland almost equals Iceland when it comes to being a go-to country for genetic research on homogenous populations.
Now of course all present European peoples have many peoples behind them. But to say that Hungarians and Finns have mixed with others equally much is just wrong.
So Abian was right all along?
Plus points for old school. I only just managed to read this on my WebTV.
Others already pointed out that there are naked eye visible nebulas. However, I'll add a slightly different point: if you didn't know this, make sure you get to see the night sky properly sometime! Light pollution is everywhere these days, I've had astronomy as a hobby for a couple of years and still haven't had the chance to see a proper sky.
But a better sky is good enough! Grab Stellarium (.org) for free and check what's out there.
The EU can't keep pouring money into a leaky barrel. Eurobonds would have to go hand in hand with relieving a country of its sovereign control if it wants federal money.
I dont really care about the specific approach. The point is someone should show some leadership in the EU and do something, anything else than pushing austerity.
And don't even think about threatening Germany with the notion that exports will crash if export markets will leave the Eurozone or the EU, making Germany's currency more valuable and exports more expensive.
It's not a threat, since after all it's not like I have the power to make it happen. Currently austerity seems to be on this path:
1. Greek finances are ever more strained and closer to collapse
2. Confidence in Spain and Italy weakens as a result (60+ billion capital flight from Spain in March reported today)
If Spain falls further it will affect confidence in Italy and either country will strain France which is a big lender. If France, Italy and Spain get into serious economic trouble Germany will take a hit that will dwarf any amount of money the Greek elite could waste. It's not a threat, but rather a serious risk of the dominoes falling.
Greece borrows a fuckton of money, pisses it up the wall and then throws a massive sulk when asked to pay it back. Meanwhile Germany makes stuff that people want to buy.
The past Greek governments have done a terrible job and now the country suffers for it - this is undoubtedly true. It is also true that the German economy has been much better.
However, Germany has benefited enormously from sharing a currency with them. Being one of the world's largest exporters, they benefit from a relatively weak currency. If they had their own currency now they would be like Switzerland - a safe haven in the crisis, with a very strong currency and problems with exports.
But currently the problems in the other countries devalue the euro, meaning Germany gets to export at great prices. Meanwhile the crisis-hit euro countries have an over-valued currency, and they can't do anything about it. Basically, Germany gets a huge boost for free and pretends it's all due to working hard.
Germany is resisting money-printing and collective eurobonds which would give the crisis-hit countries an opportunity to grow again. They want the others to sort their own things out - but if the others run out of options and crash, Germany might end up wishing they had done something.
FWIW I'm in one of the rich and balanced euro countries. Doesn't matter, I still think we need something else than "tough love" to solve this.
Haven't spam and spam countermeasures already made the effort of running your own mailserver unreasonable? At least I've heard that you'll be basically blocked either by default or after a while.
Add to that malware which just loves the idea of a spare mailserver whose owner works elsewhere most of the time and the fact that it's hard to even get ONE static IP these days and suddenly the current system is already the domain of large organizations (and a few super-nerds who are there mostly through inertia.)
I don't think anyone is lobbying against v6. But even if they were v4 will run out soon, we'll have a small crisis and at that point v6 adoption will explode no matter what anyone says or thinks. After that we won't be able to remember IPs but everything else will be better.
Of course then there is the fact that nuclear disarmament would probably make large scale war MORE likely. With nukes you do not need a large standing army for national defense. (For national OFFENSE, what the US is doing today, you do.) Without them you have to expend vast resources maintaining a conventional military for purely defensive purposes. Seriously, why DIDN'T the Soviet Union just steamroll until they got to Gibraltar? They could have done so with conventional forces largely at any time during the Cold War. Because they knew full well that such an action would result in nuclear retaliation.
The little bit of political science I've read contradicts this, although I admit it's so little that I can't dig up any sources on short notice.
But the basic thing is this: if you have a lot of nukes you tend to build up a huge army precisely so that you'll never have to use them. You know nukes probably mean mutually assured destruction, so you never go "oh no problem, I'll just lean on the nukes".
Now, even though I live in Western Europe I think it's not that important: the Soviet Union was the only superpower to defend its home turf in Europe. It had a huge army. The US also had a huge army, but it didn't have its capital in Europe. The fact remains that both nuclear armed to the teeth superpowers also had strong conventional arms.
Also a quick check with unreliable sources gives
350,000 US troops in Europe in 1980. Add different national armies to this and the fact that the defender tends to be in a better position and the certain Soviet victory starts looking a lot less certain. Not to mention that 350 000 troops mostly standing guard far away from home hardly sounds like defence is cheap.
At Chernobyl - wildlife have been reported to have lower survival and reproduction rates, with clear pathological effects to sperm.
This data point may be valid (it's a complex problem),
Not a bad point, and Chernobyl should figure in most radiation data comparisons due to its nature. However, radiation levels vary wildly in the area: the animals could have eaten their food from a hotspot even if the background would have been tolerable (which we don't really know either.)
but you have to wonder when the sponsor (DOE) reason to want this outcome.
No we don't. But, I'll say this much: the DOE is involved with coal power. The DOE is involved with nuclear power. Clearly, they're simultaneously plotting to replace coal with nuclear and nuclear with coal.
Also this was funded by both MIT and the DOE. This is just basic research, so cool it with the conspiracy theories.
I think you have cause and effect reversed. If there was such great social cohesion, then where did these society-destroying people come from? Where did the riots come from?
Social change had already happened. The societal cohesion you talk about was already gone, and had perhaps been a faÃade in the first place - Middletown pressured everyone into behaving 'properly', but that everyone really was like that doesn't necessarily follow.
You can't have perfect social cohesion and riots at the same time. Some liked the old order and some didn't, and both groups were citizens. Both groups were also equally led by leaders and ideologies - there wasn't one group which "followed its heart" and another that was brainwashed by media.
Of course, if you're going by compositional similarity, then putting Mercury and Jupiter in the same category is also silly. Which is why my preferred solution is to make "planet" a super-category that includes 1) gas giants, 2) round rocky objects, and 3) round comet-like objects. I wouldn't bother to mention orbits at all. Orbital characteristics should be part of a separate classification system, IMO.
I agree completely about the super-category part.
I wouldn't change the orbit definition, mostly because another huge can of worms would be opened then. : )
I'd rather see a definition of planet that includes Ceres and excludes Pluto than the reverse.
I don't see what would put Ceres and Pluto in different categories under any system. Neither has cleared its orbit (I too think this is a silly criterion.) Both have the hydrostatic equilibrium thing going. Both orbit the sun directly.
Well, there *is* one peculiarity about Pluto: the barycenter of the Pluto-Charon system is outside both. While I dislike the clear the neighbourhood criterion I think this system is actually the strongest proof of the current planet definition being temporary: Pluto-Charon is a binary (dwarf) planet, yet no one has bothered to even mention Charon. Instead one of our current dwarf planets orbits an empty piece of space.
Apart from it being a shame system there are also other problems.
This is a form of measurement system, and sociological studies have shown that those are growing increasingly common in schools. The problems is the same as with most such systems: the thing being measured isn't necessarily anywhere close to what is thought.
In the case of a list of who completed things first, the probability is high that it measures who took the most shortcuts and did the least amount of work possible relative to their own capabilities.
Instead of focusing on measurement and rivalry studies have shown that focusing on equality and everyone in class doing a good job lifts the entire group. I do not know if this carries over to work environments, but I'm sceptical about using rivalry when there could be co-operation instead.
(Further reading: sociologists who have written about the culture of measurement in schools include David Hargreaves and Risto Rinne.)
There was already a longterm study release a few weeks ago that confirmed that dental x-rays and such are a source of common brain tumors....how long until those stories get taken down is anyone's guess....now move along citizen...
What the fuck are you on about?
That story is *all over* the net. NBC, ABC, Washington Post, Fox, Reuters, and numerous smaller sites. The paper itself is to be published (if it wasn't already published) in Cancer, which is the journal of the American Cancer Society.
If you actually honestly think that story or this Russian story will somehow disappear you're most likely paranoid, and not in the colloquial sense either.
And who was stupid enough to moderate the quoted comment up? It's just paranoid rambling with little connection to the story above.
Your problem is, human nature. Those who beat their swords into plowshares will till the soil for those who have not.
It's not human nature, it's your civilization and its institutions.
Not every culture has had organized violence, humans are perfectly capable of keeping murder a purely personal affair.
War is not easy to do away with in the situation we're in, but don't let yourself be fooled into thinking that we are doing the only thing possible. Apart from comparisons with other cultures I'll also throw this in here: wars with conscripts involved require strong measures against desertion. Often the death penalty is necessary to keep everyone in line.
You don't need a death threat to attack someone you're angry at. But in war it's suddenly needed. It's really the societal institution of war perpetuating itself, since human nature alone is completely incapable of carrying it. Violence is human nature, war is not.
Man, it's been too long since last time I saw a proper old school Slashdot troll. It even uses homosexuality as the point of interest! Refreshing.
Now I just want some hot grits.
The yield is lower, but was energy input taken into account?
If fewer resources are required organic could still win out.
Although I suspect it will still be like the summary says: both will have their place. It's a small miracle we're feeding about seven billion people, and it was achieved through hard work and using all the tools available.
Add some more billions and we'll likely have organics, conventional agriculture and GM crops side by side, since we'll have no choice but to use all tools again.
Once upon a time, Lloyd Biggle Jr. accurately said, as best I can recall, "Given a bunch of people in a sewer, mainstream literature will lovingly describe those who are content to stay there. Science fiction will write about those trying to get out." That's at best less true than it was.
I'm confused, what does this make Futurological Congress?
The people who think about becoming scientists are actually smart enough to discern at a relatively young age between sci-fi and reality. Survey how many smart kids who saw "Blade Runner" found that movie disenfranchised them about the future, or whether they just thought it was really cool.
A lot of people parse stories as trying to discuss reality and humanity. This is what serious stories like the ones discussed here are mostly written as too. If you think "smart kids" on average just take a shallow view and see the surface of a story then you should brush up on your reading skills. Children gradually learn to separate stories and reality, whereas adults often learn how to join them together again.
Stephenson apparently answered a more general question about the attitude of science fiction. I think he was correct. While there are many factors in play, the general attitude towards the future is a result of a myriad discussions in society which create a certain climate of attitudes. Science fiction stories specifically consider the future and are therefore a disproportionally large fraction of those discussions. Stephenson's contribution is a small part of just of a part of the influences on society, but his contribution is not zero.
O yeah and i just noticed you put up a link from the NIDA. -because the US government is such a trustable source of facts about drugs...
LOL
Well, no one will probably read this since this is many days after the story was posted, but:
That's precisely the point. I wouldn't trust a US government source too much about drug negatives.
But this is about LSD not being addictive. It's a good thing about an illegal drug. If the organization felt it could say LSD will turn you into a junkie for life it certainly would. But it cannot, because no research says so. If that's still not enough you can do the scientific thing and check the sources which are conveniently listed at the end.
They usually look like this:
http://www.philips.co.uk/c/-/softone-20-w-86-w-normal-cap-warm-white-871150066268290/prd/
I don't know about US branding/product line. Try a normal store?