It's a fair argument in some ways, the modern (OK, near future, hopefully) equivalent would be the choice between building a thousand really big and really efficient fusion reactors worldwide or 500 per country. Yes, we all know the big ones are more efficient, but what the world needs right now (according to the politicians and media, who I suspect may only be of my average intelligence) are jobs, and lots of them. The Apollo project was nowhere near the most high-tech and efficient of operations, even for the time, it was basic, cobbled together and I'd even go so far as to say "soviet" in the approach and methods. The needs of the many...
I don't want the best, or the cheapest, or the shiniest, I just want it to happen.
I was re-reading the Slashdot fusion power Q&A recently. The figure quoted to get the first generation of (barely) economically viable fusion reactors online was $80bn. The yearly spend by the US military is currently in the region of $650bn.
I suspect that if we want starships all we have to do is find a way of not putting enormous amounts of money into fighting and making money and just use it to develop the required technologies. I suspect that if the worldwide military budget and manpower were devoted to the human species for just one year the we'd see similar leaps in technology as the 1940-1970 period. Engineering is easy, people are difficult.
It's not a bad idea in principle, I have a client which has lots of outlets and each uses around 10 different login for various services, I supply them with a printout each month and they keep it locked in a safe at head office. There's also a little encryption on it to stop casual usage (the passwords aren't the real passwords, they've been altered using an algorithm that only two company directors know).
Of course, a filing cabinet isn't the best option, Feynman proved this by breaking into many of them at Los Alamos and leaving little notes. Instead of changing the security systems the military put out a memo saying that Prof Feynman was not to be left alone with a filing cabinet.
So if you could somehow generate entangled matter ahead of time and move it en masse, say a gramme on the ground and a gramme in the satellite, would that allow FTL information transfer? I'm guessing it can't for obvious reasons, but I can't work out why not.
The point is they're getting far more than they need. Imagine we're talking about a library with, say, 15 public terminals and a few office computers. If each computer is just browsing low-bandwidth sites like a webmail service then a really cheap ($50) router could just about handle it. Step up to everybody watching YouTube vids and you might need to spend a few hundred dollars to keep things reliable. The systems they got were suitable for a university or large office building, what they needed was "adequate internet cafe" systems.
And cue an entire slashdot discussion about base(60)less conspiracy theories. Please, any chance of talking about the archaeology here without descending into numerology? No? Oh well...
One example - you don't hit them. Get in close, disarm them if necessary, then pin them down. I've actually done this with a guy who attacked me using a large shard of glass, I waited for him to swing, blocked and locked the arm, forced the weapon out of his hand and then pinned him to the ground. He suffered a sore wrist and some minor grazes.
Obviously I'm not going to recommend this technique for somebody who isn't trained, and a person who doesn't feel confident trying that is much more likely to strike them with a fist/hand/chair, and that's more likely to cause injury.
Any good martial arts training will emphasise the "RLF Technique", or "running like fuck". This is the primary form of self defence, I only took the guy on because he was swinging a large shard of glass around in a crowded street and putting other people in danger. If you want a legal defence for taking physical actio the first thing you'll have to explain is your reason for not running away.
You're allowed to use the minimal force needed to protect yourself. If they pull a knife and you knock them unconscious then you're not allowed to keep going until they're dead, however tempting it might be.
It's appalling grammar, but it's roughly right. The UK has two main charges for killing a person, murder and manslaughter. The difference is pre-meditation. If I get into a fight with somebody and kill them in the process it's manslaughter. If I go out looking for them and intentionally start the fight hoping to kill them then it's murder. If the killing happens then whether it's been planned or not is an absolutely vital element.
Lethal force is acceptable if it's the minimum force you can reasonably use and killing isn't your primary intention. If somebody started stabbing people in a pub then I could quite probably get away with hitting him over the head with a chair. If he died then that's just unfortunate. If, however, I pinned him down and intentionally strangled him to death then it's not reasonable, the threat is over when he's pinned down and holding on to his throat when he's unconscious is manslaughter (equivalent to a lesser degree of murder, not pre-planned but intentional or avoidable)
The irony is that good martial arts training makes you less likely to cause somebody serious injury, the level of force you need to defend yourself actually drops. I could (and have) defend myself against somebody bigger than myself, if I hadn't had training then I might be tempted to punch them in the face, which can kill much more easily than people think.
No you don't, you're over-simplifying. I can walk up to somebody in the street and talk to them. If I do this often enough to make the person uncomfortable then they can apply for a restraining order, and if it's granted then approaching them again will make me liable to prosecution, not for approaching the person but for breaching a court order. Everybody is entitled to approach somebody in the street, nobody is allowed to breach a court order.
Absolutely. Sure, if you want to follow a random selection of users then you're just going to get lots of updates on what people are having for lunch, but the trick is to follow people you find interesting. I mostly follow people involved in physics, maths, science writing and a few other topics I'm interested in. It's essentially a news feed if you get it right, I first heard about CERN's "super-luminal neutrinos" through Twitter.
Yes, there's a lot of noise (just try reading the "raw" feed if you want to feel depressed about humanity), but the whole point of the thing is to find your own signal, and Twitter makes it very easy to get a good signal/noise ratio.
If you want something "useful to the species", people have set up programs which scan Twitter for "earthquake" and a place name or geolocation tag and can then give early warning before the waves hit (internet traffic is faster than seismic waves).
The standard defense for this is that "everything exists" is a simpler solution than "some things, but not all of them, exist". As an analogy, "the set of integers" is much more easy to define than "the set of all prime numbers which end in a 3 and have a prime number of digits". This is one of the strengths of the MWI, it solves the fine tuning problem etc.
The argument used to be whether the wave function was "real" or whether it was a mathematical artifact, in other words is a particle actually smeared out or does it exist at one point and we're just limited in our observations of it (aka a "hidden variable"). These days the argument is whether the (Copenhagen interpretation) wave function actually exists or whether it's a mathematical artifact of a different theory, such as Everett's "Many Worlds" interpretation. Personally I go with Everett, but for philosophical/anthropic arguments rather than anything testable at the moment.
It's a lawful order, it breaks no laws (unless the US health and safety exemptions are very different from the UK), this is just a case of the military showing some common sense.
"Fly that plane."
"I have serious reservations."
"OK, you might have a point there..."
"That's mine! That too! All that's mine, that's mine, but not that bit. It's been a good morning, I've eaten three times, slept six times and made a lot of things mine...next I'm going to see if I can't have sex with something!"
(That line is the one which got Red Dwarf commissioned in the first place.)
Right-wingers tend to exhibit much stronger religious fervour than moderates or left wingers. And as "doing gods work" trumps national laws they're more likely to break them. It's much the same situation as pre-reformation Europe, national leaders are treating the laws of their country as secondary to whatever they think god is telling them to do. Which means we're due another reformation, like it or not, and a whole bunch more religion based violence and suppression. Woop-de-doo.
Slashdot Mirror
People who have a vested interest in spreading FUD about what virii do. So this is clearly the work of a Linux/Apple/McAfee global conspiracy. ;)
So why post anonymously? I never heard a better post for justifying a link to your shop.
Second time today I saw a post that needed a +1 Sad.
It's a fair argument in some ways, the modern (OK, near future, hopefully) equivalent would be the choice between building a thousand really big and really efficient fusion reactors worldwide or 500 per country. Yes, we all know the big ones are more efficient, but what the world needs right now (according to the politicians and media, who I suspect may only be of my average intelligence) are jobs, and lots of them. The Apollo project was nowhere near the most high-tech and efficient of operations, even for the time, it was basic, cobbled together and I'd even go so far as to say "soviet" in the approach and methods. The needs of the many...
I don't want the best, or the cheapest, or the shiniest, I just want it to happen.
I was re-reading the Slashdot fusion power Q&A recently. The figure quoted to get the first generation of (barely) economically viable fusion reactors online was $80bn. The yearly spend by the US military is currently in the region of $650bn.
I suspect that if we want starships all we have to do is find a way of not putting enormous amounts of money into fighting and making money and just use it to develop the required technologies. I suspect that if the worldwide military budget and manpower were devoted to the human species for just one year the we'd see similar leaps in technology as the 1940-1970 period. Engineering is easy, people are difficult.
It's not a bad idea in principle, I have a client which has lots of outlets and each uses around 10 different login for various services, I supply them with a printout each month and they keep it locked in a safe at head office. There's also a little encryption on it to stop casual usage (the passwords aren't the real passwords, they've been altered using an algorithm that only two company directors know).
Of course, a filing cabinet isn't the best option, Feynman proved this by breaking into many of them at Los Alamos and leaving little notes. Instead of changing the security systems the military put out a memo saying that Prof Feynman was not to be left alone with a filing cabinet.
So it's only good for key exchange, with a boob analogy. Brilliant :)
One good way to find yourself up against multiple opponents is to use excessive force against a single one.
So if you could somehow generate entangled matter ahead of time and move it en masse, say a gramme on the ground and a gramme in the satellite, would that allow FTL information transfer? I'm guessing it can't for obvious reasons, but I can't work out why not.
The point is they're getting far more than they need. Imagine we're talking about a library with, say, 15 public terminals and a few office computers. If each computer is just browsing low-bandwidth sites like a webmail service then a really cheap ($50) router could just about handle it. Step up to everybody watching YouTube vids and you might need to spend a few hundred dollars to keep things reliable. The systems they got were suitable for a university or large office building, what they needed was "adequate internet cafe" systems.
Thank you, that's snapped me out of it somewhat. Platonism != Numerology, I'm off to re-read some Anathem.
And cue an entire slashdot discussion about base(60)less conspiracy theories. Please, any chance of talking about the archaeology here without descending into numerology? No? Oh well...
One example - you don't hit them. Get in close, disarm them if necessary, then pin them down. I've actually done this with a guy who attacked me using a large shard of glass, I waited for him to swing, blocked and locked the arm, forced the weapon out of his hand and then pinned him to the ground. He suffered a sore wrist and some minor grazes.
Obviously I'm not going to recommend this technique for somebody who isn't trained, and a person who doesn't feel confident trying that is much more likely to strike them with a fist/hand/chair, and that's more likely to cause injury.
Any good martial arts training will emphasise the "RLF Technique", or "running like fuck". This is the primary form of self defence, I only took the guy on because he was swinging a large shard of glass around in a crowded street and putting other people in danger. If you want a legal defence for taking physical actio the first thing you'll have to explain is your reason for not running away.
You're allowed to use the minimal force needed to protect yourself. If they pull a knife and you knock them unconscious then you're not allowed to keep going until they're dead, however tempting it might be.
It's appalling grammar, but it's roughly right. The UK has two main charges for killing a person, murder and manslaughter. The difference is pre-meditation. If I get into a fight with somebody and kill them in the process it's manslaughter. If I go out looking for them and intentionally start the fight hoping to kill them then it's murder. If the killing happens then whether it's been planned or not is an absolutely vital element.
Lethal force is acceptable if it's the minimum force you can reasonably use and killing isn't your primary intention. If somebody started stabbing people in a pub then I could quite probably get away with hitting him over the head with a chair. If he died then that's just unfortunate. If, however, I pinned him down and intentionally strangled him to death then it's not reasonable, the threat is over when he's pinned down and holding on to his throat when he's unconscious is manslaughter (equivalent to a lesser degree of murder, not pre-planned but intentional or avoidable)
The irony is that good martial arts training makes you less likely to cause somebody serious injury, the level of force you need to defend yourself actually drops. I could (and have) defend myself against somebody bigger than myself, if I hadn't had training then I might be tempted to punch them in the face, which can kill much more easily than people think.
No you don't, you're over-simplifying. I can walk up to somebody in the street and talk to them. If I do this often enough to make the person uncomfortable then they can apply for a restraining order, and if it's granted then approaching them again will make me liable to prosecution, not for approaching the person but for breaching a court order. Everybody is entitled to approach somebody in the street, nobody is allowed to breach a court order.
Absolutely. Sure, if you want to follow a random selection of users then you're just going to get lots of updates on what people are having for lunch, but the trick is to follow people you find interesting. I mostly follow people involved in physics, maths, science writing and a few other topics I'm interested in. It's essentially a news feed if you get it right, I first heard about CERN's "super-luminal neutrinos" through Twitter.
Yes, there's a lot of noise (just try reading the "raw" feed if you want to feel depressed about humanity), but the whole point of the thing is to find your own signal, and Twitter makes it very easy to get a good signal/noise ratio.
If you want something "useful to the species", people have set up programs which scan Twitter for "earthquake" and a place name or geolocation tag and can then give early warning before the waves hit (internet traffic is faster than seismic waves).
The standard defense for this is that "everything exists" is a simpler solution than "some things, but not all of them, exist". As an analogy, "the set of integers" is much more easy to define than "the set of all prime numbers which end in a 3 and have a prime number of digits". This is one of the strengths of the MWI, it solves the fine tuning problem etc.
The argument used to be whether the wave function was "real" or whether it was a mathematical artifact, in other words is a particle actually smeared out or does it exist at one point and we're just limited in our observations of it (aka a "hidden variable"). These days the argument is whether the (Copenhagen interpretation) wave function actually exists or whether it's a mathematical artifact of a different theory, such as Everett's "Many Worlds" interpretation. Personally I go with Everett, but for philosophical/anthropic arguments rather than anything testable at the moment.
Not far off quoting from a 20 year old memory though! Life's too short to Google everything.
It's a lawful order, it breaks no laws (unless the US health and safety exemptions are very different from the UK), this is just a case of the military showing some common sense.
"Fly that plane."
"I have serious reservations."
"OK, you might have a point there..."
"That's mine! That too! All that's mine, that's mine, but not that bit. It's been a good morning, I've eaten three times, slept six times and made a lot of things mine...next I'm going to see if I can't have sex with something!"
(That line is the one which got Red Dwarf commissioned in the first place.)
Agreed, but which is more scary?
"I'm doing this because god told me to"
"I'm doing this because I feel like it, but if I say god told me to do it you're all cool with that?"
Right-wingers tend to exhibit much stronger religious fervour than moderates or left wingers. And as "doing gods work" trumps national laws they're more likely to break them. It's much the same situation as pre-reformation Europe, national leaders are treating the laws of their country as secondary to whatever they think god is telling them to do. Which means we're due another reformation, like it or not, and a whole bunch more religion based violence and suppression. Woop-de-doo.