Home Theater: You don't have to spend $9.50 on a ticket to watch 20 minutes of TV ads and commercials.
No shit. I can live with high ticket prices, or I can live with commercials before the movies, but the combination really has been enough to discourage me from going to theater lately. And I used to be a movie junkie.
Manufacturing- it costs thousands of dollars per kg to loft materials.
Not if you mine and refine the materials on the Moon. You do know that the Moon is basically a chunk of Earth's crust, right?
Medicine? We already spend 3x more than any other country per-person on health-care and have some of the worse quality-of-life indexes around; everyone else seems to be doing the whole "health care thing" on planet earth just fine.
Those are short-term inefficiencies. I'm thinking long-term. I have no advice on whether Lunar medicine is public, private, or a combination thereof.
And don't tell me anyone is doing "just fine." I worked in patient care for almost ten years, and have been on the research side of things for about seven years; I know as well as anyone how many people die of or are disabled by diseases and injuries whose causes we understand, but which we just can't cure with our current technology. I'm not saying low-g would be a panacea by any means, but for large numbers of cardiac, pulmonary, and orthopedic problems, it would offer huge benefits.
Astronomy- we have no way to build these "huge delicate structures", and compound arrays have proven far easier to construct, operate, and repair (look at how much trouble we had with lofting Hubble- two tries. You want to put a Hubble on the MOON?).
Right, and no engineering problem has ever been solved by the development of new technology. *snort*
Way station for future voyages. We're doing a fine job of assembling vehicles here on earth and lobbing them to the furthest reaches of our solar system just fine.
Long term. Long term. Long term. You're thinking in terms of sending unmanned probes out on one-way voyages. I'm thinking in terms of moving people and goods back and forth.
I see a huge number of problems with moon assembly (the dust, for starters) of sensitive mechanisms.
Maintain a pressurized environment (with oxygen and other gases mined on the Moon, of course) with a slight, steady bleed-out into vacuum. People work in the pressurized areas. The dust gets steadily blown outside.
You're missing my point. Right now all of the things I'm talking about would be absurdly expensive next to Earth-bound alternatives. But we have to start somewhere, and the Moon is the logical place. It's not cyclical; it's linear, even if you don't see it.
IIRC, with the exception of the early conquistador expeditions -- which were basically the 16th-c. equivalent of Apollo, go there and grab some neat stuff and come home -- none of the European colonization efforts in the New World were profitable for the first fifty years or so of their existence. But people persisted, because they knew it would pay off in the long run.
The sales people and other b-school types who open unknown attachments, regardless of the subject line of the e-mail, are... how to put this delicately... morons. They need to be taught, harshly, the error of their ways.
I don't care if they don't understand the technological issues, or if they don't care about them, or regard the sysadmins as greasy long-haired hippie geeks who speak incomprehensible blather. It doesn't matter. Condition them appropriately, and they'll learn. It's the only way.
There are some serious answers, but they're all long-term. Pretty much everyone can see the benefit in having a solar-system-wide civilization, I think, but we have to do things one step at a time.
Off the top of my head...
- Manufacturing and heavy industry should really be moved off Earth; low-g doesn't offer quite the same cool possibilities that zero-g (okay, microgravity) does, but it's still possible to build things cheaper (locally) the less they weigh; more generally, pollution is less of a concern because, you know, the Moon has no air, no water, and no life. You can dump stuff in an empty crater and it either sits there if it's heavy, or sublimes off into space if it's light. And, of course, there's plentiful solar power.
- Various types of medicine and surgery, again, would benefit tremendously from low-g. Of course, for this to work, you have to find a way to move sick people off Earth that doesn't involve the crushing g-forces of current space flight... Eventually, I can see the Moon becoming a giant retirement colony, a kind of mega-Florida for old people who want to live out their days in comfort.
- Astronomy: the far side is just about the best possible place to build telescopes. Yes, better than L-5, because (again) the gravity is light enough to allow huge delicate structures, but it's still a planet, and building a long-term support base with local materials is a lot easier than hauling everything off into the middle of nowhere.
- Way station for future voyages. Other posters have mentioned the relative ease of building and launching interplanetary spacecraft on the Moon as opposed to Earth. Here's another benefit: the Moon has the lowest gravity of any place people are likely to live, which means that not only could visitors from Earth go there and be comfortable, so could those from Mars, the Jovian and Saturnian moons, etc. I can easily see the Moon becoming the Solar System's busiest hub for trade, diplomacy, and tourism.
Creationists call their nonsense a "theory" as well. But at least they don't expect us to destroy the world economy over their beliefs.
Indirectly, they do; whether they realize it or not, the propagation of their beliefs is fundamentally inimical to scientific progress, and thus to all the benefits (economic and otherwise) which rely on this progress.
Are all scientists "interested only in the welfare of the human race and whose motives and actions are always pure and above reproach?" Of course not. But I think you will find that a much greater proportion of scientists approach this ideal than do Luddite wackos of either the religious fundamentalist or radical environmentalist stripe.
1. Philosophy. An indivisible, impenetrable unit of substance viewed as the basic constituent element of physical reality in the metaphysics of Leibnitz.
So it's a real word, and I can kinda sorta see why they chose it. I agree that it's unfortunate, though, and I think "MSH" (pronounced the obvious way) is a perfectly reasonable name.
I understand Stan Lee was thinking of issues of race and prejudice when he came up with idea of the X-men as being mutants persecuted for being who and what they were born as.
>> A man is capable of having children with multiple women. For a woman to do the opposite is not as advantageous. Because of this, the strategies are different.
> I just have to say, this probably doesn't apply to you, but the men I know who subscribe most strongly to this hypothesis are those who have the least experience with women.
I'd go further and say that the men who subscribe most strongly to this hypothesis are always those who have the least experience with women, understanding that "experience" in this concept doesn't just mean "number of sex partners." The stereotypical sexually frustrated geek certainly lacks experience, but in a very real way, so does the stereotypical playboy jock who sees women as disposable masturbation aids -- and members of both groups really love this idea, because it provides excuses for their frustration on the one hand, and callous behavior on the other.
Being both a) a straight guy with a healthy sex life, and b) a modern, sensitive kind of guy with many female friends and who hears lots of "girl talk," I think it's bullshit of the purest ray serene.
You what? The "FUD" that Microsoft had been saying about Linux in terms of cost turned out to be true? Who'd have guessed it?! It turns out that in real world, it does cost money to move over to new systems, train people and get support!
Oh, please. No one with a brain ever claimed that there were no ancillary costs involved in using Linux. The FUD that Microsoft spreads, and that people like you seem determined to help them spread, goes like this: the ancillary costs associated with Linux are higher than those associated with Windows; higher enough, in fact, that Windows is cheaper overall. Which, now that I think of it, doesn't even deserve a fancy name like "FUD" -- the simple, old-fashioned word "bullshit" is quite sufficient.
The thing is, anything that helps us fight infectious disease in general may also help with "combating bioterrorism." And a good simulation of the response of bacterial populations, which often show emergent behavior, respond to biochemical stimuli may very well be helpful in coming up with new methods of diagnosis and treatment. (For an understanding of why this is so, check out work on swarming behavior, and the research interests page of Leah Edelstein-Keshet, one of the leading researchers in the field.) I'm not any happier than you are about how the bioterrorism card is played in every grant application, but it really is one of many valid applications here.
Citing one bad statistic (and I don't think this is a bad statistic, actually) to say "all statistics are worthless" is like citing one buggy computer to say "all computers are worthless."
>> The only thing that pisses me off than bad statistical analyses is people like this troll who discount the entire field because of their ignorance.
> Not as bad as your pissy rant.
Oh, fuck off. GP poster wasn't being "prissy" -- he was making an important point, and doing so in the most restrained possible way. (In your world, apparently, restraint and well-thought-out language constitute prissiness, so I'm taking the gloves off.) It's a constant source of frustration that the fact that statistics can be misused leads so many people to assume that they always are misused. An enormous amount of what we know about our world comes from the proper use of statistics, even if people like you don't understand that. (This usually goes hand-in-hand with a misunderstanding of statistics as a field of study in an of itself.) So here's an idea: why don't you go your merry way in ignorance, enjoying the fruits of the labor of people who actually know how to think, and keep your mouth shut in the presence of your betters.
If everyone abided by this idea, about 95 percent of all the Windows-Macintosh diatribes would evaporate overnight. But here it is: If you haven't tried something, then you really have no basis to comment.
That 95% -- probably more like 99% -- of Windows fanboys have never tried a Mac, I can well believe. But the reverse? Uh-uh.
Windows is everywhere, and unavoidable. Anyone who uses a Mac, or Linux, or any other OS that's not Windows, almost certainly has made an informed decision to do so based on harsh experience with Microsoft's crap.
Oh, for God's sake. I remember hearing "Needs Another Seven Astronauts" jokes within a day or so of the Challenger explosion, and rumor has it that the line started in Mission Control hours after the event. People make jokes about horrible things because it's very often the best way to deal with it.
Funny, I've never understood why people will pay $x000 for a tricked-out gaming PC when they can get the same performance from a $x00 console.
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs?
on
McVoy Strikes Back
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· Score: 1
Oh, believe me, I know I'm lucky. My hope is that F/OSS will continue to gain mainstream acceptance so that other programmers will be as lucky as I was.
Re:Well, let's have a look
on
McVoy Strikes Back
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· Score: 3, Informative
PHP? Yet another clone of MS's ASP. Yes, MS did invent that kind of server-side inline scripting. (Yes, I know they're supposed to never have invented anything. Sorry 'bout letting reality get in the way of that.)
Reality: the original PHP (PHP/FI) was developed in 1994, released in 1995; ASP was released in 1996. Sorry to shatter your precious illusions.
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs?
on
McVoy Strikes Back
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· Score: 4, Insightful
This point can't be emphasized enough. Most programmers do not make their living working at software companies. Instead, the bulk of software is written in-house, for applications specific to companies that make and sell other products. One of the greatest moments of my career was when I convinced my boss to let me go with a F/OSS solution for our in-house IT, at a time when I was the company's only DBA -- which has scaled with our growth from a tiny company barely getting by to a good-sized one making a healthy profit, and which saved us enough money to hire a considerably larger in-house development staff than we could have otherwise. Tell me this doesn't spur innovation.
The problem is that most IT managers are techies who get promoted to management instead of good managers who got into tech, so they don't have the management skills and knowledge to realize that giving someone to a week to figure out the ins-and-outs of your particular software choice and it's config files is a lot easier then spending weeks or months looking for that "perfect" candidate.
Are you kidding? You really believe that PHB's are more likely to understand how techies work than techies are? Bullshit. It's people with "management education" who write these absurd "candidate must know how to do task A, B, and C in application X, Y, and Z" job requirements, and HR drones with a slightly lower level (if there is such a thing) of "business education" who pass people over for jobs because they don't have the right buzzwords on their resumes. Every techie I know understands that a competent programmer or sysadmin can figure out the company's way of doing things within a couple of weeks of being hired.
I would bet good money that not 10% of people who buy Macs have ANY idea what kind of processor is in the system -- in fact, the majority of them probably think it has "Intel Inside", since "that's what computers use, right?".
I think you're wrong about this, simply because buying a Mac these days is a deliberate decision. People who just want "a computer" go to Wal-Mart or Best Buy or Office Depot and get a box with Microsoft(r)(tm)(c) Windows(r)(tm)(c) and Intel(r)(tm)(c) Inside(r)(tm)(c), because "that's what computers use, right?". (Windows no less than Intel.) Using a Mac is like installing Linux on your x86 PC, in that there's usually a fair amount of thought and research that's gone into the choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Home Theater: You don't have to spend $9.50 on a ticket to watch 20 minutes of TV ads and commercials.
No shit. I can live with high ticket prices, or I can live with commercials before the movies, but the combination really has been enough to discourage me from going to theater lately. And I used to be a movie junkie.
Manufacturing- it costs thousands of dollars per kg to loft materials.
Not if you mine and refine the materials on the Moon. You do know that the Moon is basically a chunk of Earth's crust, right?
Medicine? We already spend 3x more than any other country per-person on health-care and have some of the worse quality-of-life indexes around; everyone else seems to be doing the whole "health care thing" on planet earth just fine.
Those are short-term inefficiencies. I'm thinking long-term. I have no advice on whether Lunar medicine is public, private, or a combination thereof.
And don't tell me anyone is doing "just fine." I worked in patient care for almost ten years, and have been on the research side of things for about seven years; I know as well as anyone how many people die of or are disabled by diseases and injuries whose causes we understand, but which we just can't cure with our current technology. I'm not saying low-g would be a panacea by any means, but for large numbers of cardiac, pulmonary, and orthopedic problems, it would offer huge benefits.
Astronomy- we have no way to build these "huge delicate structures", and compound arrays have proven far easier to construct, operate, and repair (look at how much trouble we had with lofting Hubble- two tries. You want to put a Hubble on the MOON?).
Right, and no engineering problem has ever been solved by the development of new technology. *snort*
Way station for future voyages. We're doing a fine job of assembling vehicles here on earth and lobbing them to the furthest reaches of our solar system just fine.
Long term. Long term. Long term. You're thinking in terms of sending unmanned probes out on one-way voyages. I'm thinking in terms of moving people and goods back and forth.
I see a huge number of problems with moon assembly (the dust, for starters) of sensitive mechanisms.
Maintain a pressurized environment (with oxygen and other gases mined on the Moon, of course) with a slight, steady bleed-out into vacuum. People work in the pressurized areas. The dust gets steadily blown outside.
You're missing my point. Right now all of the things I'm talking about would be absurdly expensive next to Earth-bound alternatives. But we have to start somewhere, and the Moon is the logical place. It's not cyclical; it's linear, even if you don't see it.
IIRC, with the exception of the early conquistador expeditions -- which were basically the 16th-c. equivalent of Apollo, go there and grab some neat stuff and come home -- none of the European colonization efforts in the New World were profitable for the first fifty years or so of their existence. But people persisted, because they knew it would pay off in the long run.
Then you need to learn how to identify malicious attachments, and how to set up your e-mail client so it won't automatically execute anything. Period.
No.
... how to put this delicately ... morons. They need to be taught, harshly, the error of their ways.
The sales people and other b-school types who open unknown attachments, regardless of the subject line of the e-mail, are
I don't care if they don't understand the technological issues, or if they don't care about them, or regard the sysadmins as greasy long-haired hippie geeks who speak incomprehensible blather. It doesn't matter. Condition them appropriately, and they'll learn. It's the only way.
There are some serious answers, but they're all long-term. Pretty much everyone can see the benefit in having a solar-system-wide civilization, I think, but we have to do things one step at a time.
...
... Eventually, I can see the Moon becoming a giant retirement colony, a kind of mega-Florida for old people who want to live out their days in comfort.
Off the top of my head
- Manufacturing and heavy industry should really be moved off Earth; low-g doesn't offer quite the same cool possibilities that zero-g (okay, microgravity) does, but it's still possible to build things cheaper (locally) the less they weigh; more generally, pollution is less of a concern because, you know, the Moon has no air, no water, and no life. You can dump stuff in an empty crater and it either sits there if it's heavy, or sublimes off into space if it's light. And, of course, there's plentiful solar power.
- Various types of medicine and surgery, again, would benefit tremendously from low-g. Of course, for this to work, you have to find a way to move sick people off Earth that doesn't involve the crushing g-forces of current space flight
- Astronomy: the far side is just about the best possible place to build telescopes. Yes, better than L-5, because (again) the gravity is light enough to allow huge delicate structures, but it's still a planet, and building a long-term support base with local materials is a lot easier than hauling everything off into the middle of nowhere.
- Way station for future voyages. Other posters have mentioned the relative ease of building and launching interplanetary spacecraft on the Moon as opposed to Earth. Here's another benefit: the Moon has the lowest gravity of any place people are likely to live, which means that not only could visitors from Earth go there and be comfortable, so could those from Mars, the Jovian and Saturnian moons, etc. I can easily see the Moon becoming the Solar System's busiest hub for trade, diplomacy, and tourism.
It's Frank Poole.
Creationists call their nonsense a "theory" as well. But at least they don't expect us to destroy the world economy over their beliefs.
Indirectly, they do; whether they realize it or not, the propagation of their beliefs is fundamentally inimical to scientific progress, and thus to all the benefits (economic and otherwise) which rely on this progress.
Are all scientists "interested only in the welfare of the human race and whose motives and actions are always pure and above reproach?" Of course not. But I think you will find that a much greater proportion of scientists approach this ideal than do Luddite wackos of either the religious fundamentalist or radical environmentalist stripe.
From dictionary.com:
mo-nad n.
1. Philosophy. An indivisible, impenetrable unit of substance viewed as the basic constituent element of physical reality in the metaphysics of Leibnitz.
So it's a real word, and I can kinda sorta see why they chose it. I agree that it's unfortunate, though, and I think "MSH" (pronounced the obvious way) is a perfectly reasonable name.
I understand Stan Lee was thinking of issues of race and prejudice when he came up with idea of the X-men as being mutants persecuted for being who and what they were born as.
;)
I think he was mostly thinking of Slan.
>> A man is capable of having children with multiple women. For a woman to do the opposite is not as advantageous. Because of this, the strategies are different.
> I just have to say, this probably doesn't apply to you, but the men I know who subscribe most strongly to this hypothesis are those who have the least experience with women.
I'd go further and say that the men who subscribe most strongly to this hypothesis are always those who have the least experience with women, understanding that "experience" in this concept doesn't just mean "number of sex partners." The stereotypical sexually frustrated geek certainly lacks experience, but in a very real way, so does the stereotypical playboy jock who sees women as disposable masturbation aids -- and members of both groups really love this idea, because it provides excuses for their frustration on the one hand, and callous behavior on the other.
Being both a) a straight guy with a healthy sex life, and b) a modern, sensitive kind of guy with many female friends and who hears lots of "girl talk," I think it's bullshit of the purest ray serene.
You what? The "FUD" that Microsoft had been saying about Linux in terms of cost turned out to be true? Who'd have guessed it?! It turns out that in real world, it does cost money to move over to new systems, train people and get support!
Oh, please. No one with a brain ever claimed that there were no ancillary costs involved in using Linux. The FUD that Microsoft spreads, and that people like you seem determined to help them spread, goes like this: the ancillary costs associated with Linux are higher than those associated with Windows; higher enough, in fact, that Windows is cheaper overall. Which, now that I think of it, doesn't even deserve a fancy name like "FUD" -- the simple, old-fashioned word "bullshit" is quite sufficient.
The thing is, anything that helps us fight infectious disease in general may also help with "combating bioterrorism." And a good simulation of the response of bacterial populations, which often show emergent behavior, respond to biochemical stimuli may very well be helpful in coming up with new methods of diagnosis and treatment. (For an understanding of why this is so, check out work on swarming behavior, and the research interests page of Leah Edelstein-Keshet, one of the leading researchers in the field.) I'm not any happier than you are about how the bioterrorism card is played in every grant application, but it really is one of many valid applications here.
Once again statistics proven worthless.
Citing one bad statistic (and I don't think this is a bad statistic, actually) to say "all statistics are worthless" is like citing one buggy computer to say "all computers are worthless."
>> The only thing that pisses me off than bad statistical analyses is people like this troll who discount the entire field because of their ignorance.
> Not as bad as your pissy rant.
Oh, fuck off. GP poster wasn't being "prissy" -- he was making an important point, and doing so in the most restrained possible way. (In your world, apparently, restraint and well-thought-out language constitute prissiness, so I'm taking the gloves off.) It's a constant source of frustration that the fact that statistics can be misused leads so many people to assume that they always are misused. An enormous amount of what we know about our world comes from the proper use of statistics, even if people like you don't understand that. (This usually goes hand-in-hand with a misunderstanding of statistics as a field of study in an of itself.) So here's an idea: why don't you go your merry way in ignorance, enjoying the fruits of the labor of people who actually know how to think, and keep your mouth shut in the presence of your betters.
You can pry my SUV from my cold dead fingers
With pleasure.
If everyone abided by this idea, about 95 percent of all the Windows-Macintosh diatribes would evaporate overnight. But here it is: If you haven't tried something, then you really have no basis to comment.
That 95% -- probably more like 99% -- of Windows fanboys have never tried a Mac, I can well believe. But the reverse? Uh-uh.
Windows is everywhere, and unavoidable. Anyone who uses a Mac, or Linux, or any other OS that's not Windows, almost certainly has made an informed decision to do so based on harsh experience with Microsoft's crap.
Oh, for God's sake. I remember hearing "Needs Another Seven Astronauts" jokes within a day or so of the Challenger explosion, and rumor has it that the line started in Mission Control hours after the event. People make jokes about horrible things because it's very often the best way to deal with it.
Funny, I've never understood why people will pay $x000 for a tricked-out gaming PC when they can get the same performance from a $x00 console.
Oh, believe me, I know I'm lucky. My hope is that F/OSS will continue to gain mainstream acceptance so that other programmers will be as lucky as I was.
PHP? Yet another clone of MS's ASP. Yes, MS did invent that kind of server-side inline scripting. (Yes, I know they're supposed to never have invented anything. Sorry 'bout letting reality get in the way of that.)
Reality: the original PHP (PHP/FI) was developed in 1994, released in 1995; ASP was released in 1996. Sorry to shatter your precious illusions.
This point can't be emphasized enough. Most programmers do not make their living working at software companies. Instead, the bulk of software is written in-house, for applications specific to companies that make and sell other products. One of the greatest moments of my career was when I convinced my boss to let me go with a F/OSS solution for our in-house IT, at a time when I was the company's only DBA -- which has scaled with our growth from a tiny company barely getting by to a good-sized one making a healthy profit, and which saved us enough money to hire a considerably larger in-house development staff than we could have otherwise. Tell me this doesn't spur innovation.
The problem is that most IT managers are techies who get promoted to management instead of good managers who got into tech, so they don't have the management skills and knowledge to realize that giving someone to a week to figure out the ins-and-outs of your particular software choice and it's config files is a lot easier then spending weeks or months looking for that "perfect" candidate.
Are you kidding? You really believe that PHB's are more likely to understand how techies work than techies are? Bullshit. It's people with "management education" who write these absurd "candidate must know how to do task A, B, and C in application X, Y, and Z" job requirements, and HR drones with a slightly lower level (if there is such a thing) of "business education" who pass people over for jobs because they don't have the right buzzwords on their resumes. Every techie I know understands that a competent programmer or sysadmin can figure out the company's way of doing things within a couple of weeks of being hired.
I would bet good money that not 10% of people who buy Macs have ANY idea what kind of processor is in the system -- in fact, the majority of them probably think it has "Intel Inside", since "that's what computers use, right?".
I think you're wrong about this, simply because buying a Mac these days is a deliberate decision. People who just want "a computer" go to Wal-Mart or Best Buy or Office Depot and get a box with Microsoft(r)(tm)(c) Windows(r)(tm)(c) and Intel(r)(tm)(c) Inside(r)(tm)(c), because "that's what computers use, right?". (Windows no less than Intel.) Using a Mac is like installing Linux on your x86 PC, in that there's usually a fair amount of thought and research that's gone into the choice.