hostility. In every pre-historic rich environ i have ever visited, I was struck by how much effort was spent in defensive works, or selection of defensively advantageous valley's hilltops. Of particular impression to me were English prehistoric hilltop earthworks. As someone with high tech tools who has struggled moving an azalea bush, I absolutely shudder at how bad things must have been to get someone to pile up hundreds of tons of dirt by hand. What drove the panspermia? The club, the spear and the arrow. A continent without people must have seemed like heaven. I think our appreciation of what a mean bunch of SOB's our ancestors were is a very underappreciated factor in our prehistory.
the other thing we need to get over is the idea that one population came in and spread to all the Americas. (consciously or unconsciously trying to mirror the out of Africa theory). Localized populations may have been established several times in several places, but then failed or were wiped out by or assimilated with later arrivals leaving confusing or no genetic traces, but artifacts that taunt whatever the current time-line theory is. Archeology and geneticists have still not worked out their interface in a coherent manner.
I have never been comfortable with classical archeology's reconstruction of prehistory from the highly filtered artifact sets that we have. Cultures, religions, histories and daily life practices extrapolated from essentially a few flakes of stone and a few fire pits...
seen it. but the biggest advance has been in robotics and AI. vision systems etc.
the geologist can do in 30 seconds what it takes a day, but the 30 seconds does not produce anything but impressions that are not stored anywhere but in that geologist's brain. combine with that the incredible effort involved in getting that geologist there and back, and you begin to see why i support robots. I love seeing people in space, but think that the unequal advances in technology warrant a change in priorities.
once you admit that we have come a significant distance in robotics, where as we have not come a similarly significant distance in human space travel, then you have to concede that we should at least shift resources proportions.
finally, i would not trust anything said by anyone working in NASA or associated with it to state their honest opinion about manned space travel. the focus there is clear, and those that do not tow the line will not be employed long.
Interesting parallels with biological parasites. Early computer virus/worms did damage, intentionally or unintentionally, which drew attention to themselves, causing them to be removed. In microbiology this is the bad parasite, that kills the host or provokes an immune response. Botnets have moved up to the commensal parasite level, living as undetectably as possible, leaving their hosts unharmed for the most part, even patching and preventing other botnet infections.
One wonders if the world PC population will adapt as have humans to live with and benefit from parasites (probably not!)
I emphatically agree. Though I love human space travel, the biggest advances in the last 10 years have been in robotics, and the largest setbacks have been in human space travel. We have ignored the shift in the equation....
Mars Rovers and for that matter Roomba's make it clear that things have changed...
and yet another slashdot article wonders why IT folks consider users stupid.
The very first scumware i ever cleared off a users pc was rapidblaster, which did this exact thing.
One hopes and expects that the appeals court will reverse it, but this shows exactly how crappy is the interface between IT and regular users and the professional environ and the legal system.
the brake car analogy misses a point that is the key to understanding this problem. The problems of drivers (users) getting confused between the brake and gas pedals did actually occur on BMW's. The result was instructive in the context of this article. Drivers sued BMW, swearing that the car accelerated while they pressed the brake. Even though it became painfully obvious that these drivers had confused the pedals, BMW was forced by lawsuits to address the issue. (the tech fix made it clear that they were addressing not spontaneous acceleration as the plaintiffs claimed, but pedal confusion, and the fix worked, 'nuff said) In a like manner, doctors are sued as often for their patient's misperceptions and emotional grief as they are for their mistakes (since they often bury their mistakes, it evens out imo)
In the software industry, EULA's shield programmers from the effects of their mistakes, (and the effects of their customer's mistakes) This has created the culture described in this article. The customers have no big stick to beat programmers over the head with, so, like kids who know the adult has no power to punish us, we (in another comment i admitted I was guilty) act like arrogant brats.
I would argue that what tempers doctors and other professionals is not their code of ethics, but the legal power their customers have. Grant my users the right to sue me for a confusing interface, and suddenly I would not roll my eyes, but focus squarely on making it idiot proof. I also would start looking for another job.
I confess I have fallen into this mindset, sometimes getting myself into trouble. The problem for me is that the answers being sought sometimes seem so obvious, and in fact some other users see them as obvious, those that don't, well I often hope that the jolt of being teased will get them to look at things a little more carefully rather than just assuming they cannot do it. I try to do it with a smile, but that does not always come accross, and in fact I have had to apologized more than once, sometimes through gritted teeth.
there really is no argument to this statement that i know of, and even if i did know of one, i would not state it, because, as noted, i too want manned space travel. However, that said, i an era of limited funding, where there is substantial interplanetary research left undone, the advances in robotic mission capability still makes a strong argument for a temporary shifting of resources towards robotic missions.
no. if you found that mars had water and conditions favorable to life for x number of years,but there was never life, that would extend our understanding of some of the drake equation parts. it would trim some of the edges off the variables upper or lower limits, because right now all we have is one example where life did form. I have heard people work on the assumption that anytime conditions are right, life forms. this may not be true. it may be an exceptional set of conditions, and it may be even then to be a rare chance occurance.
it is good that the liqid question is answered, as liquid methane is somthing that some view as possible environ of life, just as those who believe water on Mars means likely life. The issue though is whether conditions were ever favorable enough, long enough for life to develope. If we establish Titan's parameters, and Mar's parameters, we might come up with some of the values in drakes equation
http://www.activemind.com/Mysterious/Topics/SETI/d rake_equation.html
the answeres might not be what we want, however
I agree, this would require some specifics to be believable. However, it does get to a truth: drugs can be very very expensive. There are multiple reasons, some of them not obvious. First and foremost, disease populations (ie the drug's customer base) are being split by the more accurate subclassification genomics is affording medicine. This means that a cure for any newly more specific disease is for fewer and fewer people. When you take the higher and higher costs of developement and testing, add in the overhead produced by failed research efforts (the majority), and less time left on the patent (because it takes so long to get it to approval) you have to run the price up even further. There are no brakes on this whole process because right now, even with HMO's, we still pay whatever it takes.
so much to do, so little time. So much easier to dash off some code, patch the bugs, jury rig the gaps, and append new features.... then clean up the more screamingly ridiculous messes in service pack x+1
I too am a fan of manned space missions, but I think we need to recognize the very uneven advances in manned versus unmanned space travel. Right now, with advances in computing, AI and robotics, unmanned is advancing leaps and bounds, whereas manned space travel has, with the exception of the X prize, advance hardly a notch. The shuttles are seventies technology, the soviets use 60's spacecraft and the new Orion design is the sixties all over again.
Given this, we should reprioritize, shifting to robots till there are sufficient advances in manned spaceflight to warrant the many times greater expense.
This could become a small but interesting example of a sociological/technological interface quirk pivoting on an event and eventually taking on greater weight historically or sociologically. (Such as the oft cited connection between horses behinds and the space shuttle design http://www.aqua.co.za/assa_jhb/Canopus/c99aSpec.ht m) As web 2.0 takes on greater weight, monolithic ISP's poorly managed centralized systems etc, may have their flaws highlighted, and in order to keep up, will have to mend their ways. So it is entirely possible that years from now, someone might cite this as an example of how spam helped end authoritarian rule in the 21st century....well, we can hope!
This is another milestone in what may turn out to be the most successful space mission ever. After they pulled off two landings, and perhaps right after they they revived one of the rovers from a perpetual reboot error (the ultimate remote bios fix) and before the dust devils cleaned their solar panels, before they unstuck one from a sand dune, and even before the 3 month mission went 3 YEARS, these rovers are showing everyone who is paying attention that the information age driven robotic exploration, moving forward at moores law speed, is the obvious choice over still stuck in the 60's manned space exploration.
I am optimistic about oil prices: that is to say,I believe they will stay high (above 50$ a barrel). Because of this, serious attention will be paid to conservation and the development of alternative energy sources, and most importantly, alternatives to the internal combustion automobile.
I believe this to be the case because past oil shocks were largely driven by political issues (boycotts) or intentional manipulation by oil producers. The current high prices are driven by booming economies in China, India and other countries that are creating demand increases faster than supply increases can handle. In other words, it is the first distant echo of that assumed to be horizon event, the end of the oil supply.
as someone who left more than half the races blank, I would suggest that, particularly amongst embarrassed Republicans, this was the year to leave a lot of lines blank on the ballot, producing lots of undervoting. While I agree that paper-trail-less voting is a mistake, so is seeing conspiracy around every bush.
OK, it is easy to imagine this being done in the past, before TOR and irc.... but there are so many more, less trackable methods, and the hobbyists make me wonder if this is now mostly fake, like crop circles.
Slashdot Mirror
well, i for one am not shovelling tons of dirt into walls to keep roving bands of raiders at bay. heck, i don't even lock my door most days...
Just as some of these populations wiped out earlier populations. there is nothing new under the sun... even genocide
hostility. In every pre-historic rich environ i have ever visited, I was struck by how much effort was spent in defensive works, or selection of defensively advantageous valley's hilltops. Of particular impression to me were English prehistoric hilltop earthworks. As someone with high tech tools who has struggled moving an azalea bush, I absolutely shudder at how bad things must have been to get someone to pile up hundreds of tons of dirt by hand. What drove the panspermia? The club, the spear and the arrow. A continent without people must have seemed like heaven. I think our appreciation of what a mean bunch of SOB's our ancestors were is a very underappreciated factor in our prehistory.
the other thing we need to get over is the idea that one population came in and spread to all the Americas. (consciously or unconsciously trying to mirror the out of Africa theory). Localized populations may have been established several times in several places, but then failed or were wiped out by or assimilated with later arrivals leaving confusing or no genetic traces, but artifacts that taunt whatever the current time-line theory is. Archeology and geneticists have still not worked out their interface in a coherent manner. I have never been comfortable with classical archeology's reconstruction of prehistory from the highly filtered artifact sets that we have. Cultures, religions, histories and daily life practices extrapolated from essentially a few flakes of stone and a few fire pits...
seen it. but the biggest advance has been in robotics and AI. vision systems etc. the geologist can do in 30 seconds what it takes a day, but the 30 seconds does not produce anything but impressions that are not stored anywhere but in that geologist's brain. combine with that the incredible effort involved in getting that geologist there and back, and you begin to see why i support robots. I love seeing people in space, but think that the unequal advances in technology warrant a change in priorities. once you admit that we have come a significant distance in robotics, where as we have not come a similarly significant distance in human space travel, then you have to concede that we should at least shift resources proportions. finally, i would not trust anything said by anyone working in NASA or associated with it to state their honest opinion about manned space travel. the focus there is clear, and those that do not tow the line will not be employed long.
Interesting parallels with biological parasites. Early computer virus/worms did damage, intentionally or unintentionally, which drew attention to themselves, causing them to be removed. In microbiology this is the bad parasite, that kills the host or provokes an immune response. Botnets have moved up to the commensal parasite level, living as undetectably as possible, leaving their hosts unharmed for the most part, even patching and preventing other botnet infections. One wonders if the world PC population will adapt as have humans to live with and benefit from parasites (probably not!)
I emphatically agree. Though I love human space travel, the biggest advances in the last 10 years have been in robotics, and the largest setbacks have been in human space travel. We have ignored the shift in the equation.... Mars Rovers and for that matter Roomba's make it clear that things have changed...
if this pixelation is intended to hide the complex it does a pretty poor job...
and yet another slashdot article wonders why IT folks consider users stupid. The very first scumware i ever cleared off a users pc was rapidblaster, which did this exact thing. One hopes and expects that the appeals court will reverse it, but this shows exactly how crappy is the interface between IT and regular users and the professional environ and the legal system.
the brake car analogy misses a point that is the key to understanding this problem. The problems of drivers (users) getting confused between the brake and gas pedals did actually occur on BMW's. The result was instructive in the context of this article. Drivers sued BMW, swearing that the car accelerated while they pressed the brake. Even though it became painfully obvious that these drivers had confused the pedals, BMW was forced by lawsuits to address the issue. (the tech fix made it clear that they were addressing not spontaneous acceleration as the plaintiffs claimed, but pedal confusion, and the fix worked, 'nuff said) In a like manner, doctors are sued as often for their patient's misperceptions and emotional grief as they are for their mistakes (since they often bury their mistakes, it evens out imo) In the software industry, EULA's shield programmers from the effects of their mistakes, (and the effects of their customer's mistakes) This has created the culture described in this article. The customers have no big stick to beat programmers over the head with, so, like kids who know the adult has no power to punish us, we (in another comment i admitted I was guilty) act like arrogant brats. I would argue that what tempers doctors and other professionals is not their code of ethics, but the legal power their customers have. Grant my users the right to sue me for a confusing interface, and suddenly I would not roll my eyes, but focus squarely on making it idiot proof. I also would start looking for another job.
I confess I have fallen into this mindset, sometimes getting myself into trouble. The problem for me is that the answers being sought sometimes seem so obvious, and in fact some other users see them as obvious, those that don't, well I often hope that the jolt of being teased will get them to look at things a little more carefully rather than just assuming they cannot do it. I try to do it with a smile, but that does not always come accross, and in fact I have had to apologized more than once, sometimes through gritted teeth.
there really is no argument to this statement that i know of, and even if i did know of one, i would not state it, because, as noted, i too want manned space travel. However, that said, i an era of limited funding, where there is substantial interplanetary research left undone, the advances in robotic mission capability still makes a strong argument for a temporary shifting of resources towards robotic missions.
no. if you found that mars had water and conditions favorable to life for x number of years,but there was never life, that would extend our understanding of some of the drake equation parts. it would trim some of the edges off the variables upper or lower limits, because right now all we have is one example where life did form. I have heard people work on the assumption that anytime conditions are right, life forms. this may not be true. it may be an exceptional set of conditions, and it may be even then to be a rare chance occurance.
it is good that the liqid question is answered, as liquid methane is somthing that some view as possible environ of life, just as those who believe water on Mars means likely life. The issue though is whether conditions were ever favorable enough, long enough for life to develope. If we establish Titan's parameters, and Mar's parameters, we might come up with some of the values in drakes equation http://www.activemind.com/Mysterious/Topics/SETI/d rake_equation.html
the answeres might not be what we want, however
I agree, this would require some specifics to be believable. However, it does get to a truth: drugs can be very very expensive. There are multiple reasons, some of them not obvious. First and foremost, disease populations (ie the drug's customer base) are being split by the more accurate subclassification genomics is affording medicine. This means that a cure for any newly more specific disease is for fewer and fewer people. When you take the higher and higher costs of developement and testing, add in the overhead produced by failed research efforts (the majority), and less time left on the patent (because it takes so long to get it to approval) you have to run the price up even further. There are no brakes on this whole process because right now, even with HMO's, we still pay whatever it takes.
so much to do, so little time. So much easier to dash off some code, patch the bugs, jury rig the gaps, and append new features.... then clean up the more screamingly ridiculous messes in service pack x+1
I too am a fan of manned space missions, but I think we need to recognize the very uneven advances in manned versus unmanned space travel. Right now, with advances in computing, AI and robotics, unmanned is advancing leaps and bounds, whereas manned space travel has, with the exception of the X prize, advance hardly a notch. The shuttles are seventies technology, the soviets use 60's spacecraft and the new Orion design is the sixties all over again. Given this, we should reprioritize, shifting to robots till there are sufficient advances in manned spaceflight to warrant the many times greater expense.
This could become a small but interesting example of a sociological/technological interface quirk pivoting on an event and eventually taking on greater weight historically or sociologically. (Such as the oft cited connection between horses behinds and the space shuttle design http://www.aqua.co.za/assa_jhb/Canopus/c99aSpec.ht m) As web 2.0 takes on greater weight, monolithic ISP's poorly managed centralized systems etc, may have their flaws highlighted, and in order to keep up, will have to mend their ways. So it is entirely possible that years from now, someone might cite this as an example of how spam helped end authoritarian rule in the 21st century....well, we can hope!
This is another milestone in what may turn out to be the most successful space mission ever. After they pulled off two landings, and perhaps right after they they revived one of the rovers from a perpetual reboot error (the ultimate remote bios fix) and before the dust devils cleaned their solar panels, before they unstuck one from a sand dune, and even before the 3 month mission went 3 YEARS, these rovers are showing everyone who is paying attention that the information age driven robotic exploration, moving forward at moores law speed, is the obvious choice over still stuck in the 60's manned space exploration.
I am optimistic about oil prices: that is to say,I believe they will stay high (above 50$ a barrel). Because of this, serious attention will be paid to conservation and the development of alternative energy sources, and most importantly, alternatives to the internal combustion automobile. I believe this to be the case because past oil shocks were largely driven by political issues (boycotts) or intentional manipulation by oil producers. The current high prices are driven by booming economies in China, India and other countries that are creating demand increases faster than supply increases can handle. In other words, it is the first distant echo of that assumed to be horizon event, the end of the oil supply.
as someone who left more than half the races blank, I would suggest that, particularly amongst embarrassed Republicans, this was the year to leave a lot of lines blank on the ballot, producing lots of undervoting. While I agree that paper-trail-less voting is a mistake, so is seeing conspiracy around every bush.
DNA does not "grow". It is amplified, chemically.
OK, it is easy to imagine this being done in the past, before TOR and irc.... but there are so many more, less trackable methods, and the hobbyists make me wonder if this is now mostly fake, like crop circles.