Re:Wake me when they have something in production.
on
New Nano-Laser Created
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Thanks. And yeah, I was thinking that when I made the original post.
There does seem to be a contingent on Slashdot that sees science as kind of irrelevant. Scientists are ivory-tower eggheads with their heads in the clouds who waste their time on airy-fairy ideas, engineers are tough gritty workin' men with dirt under their fingernails who really make things happen... that kind of thing. It's bullshit, of course, but it's very appealing bullshit to people who don't actually know that much about how science or engineering actually works, but think they do.
Re:Wake me when they have something in production.
on
New Nano-Laser Created
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· Score: 3, Insightful
And without the "R," the "D" has nothing to do.
The kind of thing TFA is talking about is a lot more than "just a nice thought." The researchers have done some very difficult, impressive work. Will it ultimately become a usable product? We have no way of knowing. But they've contributed to the sum of human knowledge in a meaningful way. This is pretty much how the relationship between science and technology works.
Re:Wake me when they have something in production.
on
New Nano-Laser Created
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· Score: 1
Well, believe it or not, there are some people who are interested in the "R" part of R&D as well as the "D" part.
It's because they're smoking hashish, not leaf cannabis. You get a lot more THC for a given volume of hashish (thus making it easier to transport) and shaving slices off a block of it into tobacco, then rolling the mix into a cigarette, gives you about the same strength as a joint.
Okay, that's promising, and I didn't realize Bigelow was so far along. That being said, there's a key paragraph in the article you link to:
In an exclusive interview this week, Las Vegas billionaire Robert Bigelow confirmed that his company has been talking about the concept with NASA - and that the first earthly tests of the techniques involved would take place later this year. The scenario he sketched out would essentially make Bigelow a general contractor for the final frontier.
IOW, Bigelow isn't planning to fund the entire Moon mission. NASA is still expected to foot most of the bill. This is very different from a private company, or a consortium of private companies, planning, funding, and carrying out the entire mission on their own.
Maybe you didn't read past the first sentence of my post?
As of 2008, the revenue of the Virgin Group was around $17 billion. That's the entire company, of which Virgin Galactic is a tiny, tiny part. They have the money to set up a "spaceline" to take a few well-heeled passengers on suborbital hops. If they took every single penny the entire VG made and put it all into space travel, they might be able to do an Apollo-style there-and-back to the moon, but that's about it... and I really doubt they're going to do that.
Look, I am 100% in favor of space mining and manufacturing, and I have no doubt that one of these days it will be profitable. Carrying passengers along for the ride will be a bonus! But it is just silly to compare today's private manned space efforts, which are only now getting to the stage which government (Soviet and US) space programs did half a century ago, to the scale of effort that will be required to create meaningful industrial infrastructure in orbit, on the Moon, and beyond.
The "get off this rock" crowd is a magical-religious cult, not a serious proponent of realistic, feasible, affordable, desirable, or even specific projects.
Except that space advocates have been for decades proposing projects which are entirely realistic, feasible, and specific. Whether they're affordable is of course an open question, and whether they're desirable is a matter of opinion, but there is nothing like the ambiguity you claim.
Manned colonization of the cosmos is, at the present time and likely for centuries to come, no different from a belief in an afterlife filled with saints, virgins, and angelic personages.
By saying "cosmos," you're conflating science-fantasy ideas about warp drives and such with well-understood science and engineering problems involved in colonizing the Solar System. I suspect you're doing this deliberately to make it all look equally silly. In case you're really so ignorant that you don't understand the difference:
Cosmos -- not going to happen without fundamental changes in our understanding of physical laws. Too bad.
Solar System -- easily doable with technology that exists right now, using little more than a Newtonian understanding of the world.
It is not real.
Human footprints on the Moon are real. Many of the people who put them there are still alive. That's as real as it gets.
If you want inspiration, stick to anime.
How about being inspired by the actual record of what people did? Are you actually more inspired by fiction than by real life?
Look around. Do you see private companies lining up to fund Moon travel?
Believe me, if Boeing or General Electric or United Airlines (those seem like the most obvious candidates off the top of my head; I'm sure there are many others) thought there was a profit in it, they'd be lobbying like mad for whatever regulatory changes would be necessary, and simultaneously developing well-publicized plans. Instead we have the absurdly misnamed "Virgin Galactic" planning suborbital hops at some point in the unspecified future -- and as much money as the Branson empire represents, the truth is that when it comes to projects of this scale, Virgin Everything is a bit player.
Yes, eventually the technology will improve to the point that corporate investors will see a short-term profit potential, and at that point the dollars will start flowing in. But it is going to take massive government investment to get us there. As long as the US is dragging its feet, we'd better hope that the EU or Russia or China can step up, because otherwise we are just not going to see people on the Moon again in our lifetimes.
I have a lot of friends who work for Microsoft in various divisions and I can say without a doubt that the rank and file of Microsoft considers Windows Mobile to be an embarrassment.
I don't doubt that this is true, but surely it's just as true of many other Microsoft products including most releases of Windows for the desktop. Releasing crappy products has never, AFAIK, kept Microsoft out of a market they really want to be in -- and I guarantee they want to be in this one, given that the smartphone market is going to keep growing rapidly for some time to come. They keep releasing versions and either eventually get it kind-of right (Office, Xbox) or just count on the "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" mentality to generate enough sales to keep it profitable (SQL Server, Windows again). Yet they do, in fact, employ a lot of very smart people who are capable of judging the quality of these products... but who presumably, especially in the current economy, consider a steady paycheck to be worth the embarrassment of telling other people who they work for.
many cell phones now have screens like 800x350 or 800x480
Yep. That's more pixels than my first laptop, and I wrote novels on that thing. GPP's idea that they're somehow inherently unusable for large document creation strikes me as very odd.
Yeah, I know, I know, tablet PCs (or whatever the latest buzzword for them is) have been the Next Big Thing for twenty years now. But sooner or later we will have handheld phones/computers (whatever buzzword they're calling them at that point) which will be able to translate regular handwriting into text as reliably as typing the same text on a keyboard. Faster than dictation, and a hell of a lot more private. Doing this on a device the size of most of the common smartphones would be quite comfortable, I think.
As a bulldog owner, I felt the urge to defend my breed too.;) But stating that one breed is generally more intelligent than others doesn't mean your dogs, individually, are stupid. The breed ranking was based on surveys of obedience trainers, who probably have a pretty good feel for how different breeds act in general. Specifically, if they're rating intelligence by how well dogs respond to commands -- well, that's one particular type of intelligence, and it's worth evaluating, but there's a lot more to the way dogs think than that.
You're comparing a fully-mature animal to one in its infancy.
Profoundly retarded humans, such as adults who operate on a two-year-old level, still have what we recognize as human-type intelligence. They don't have as much of it as most people do, obviously, but they still think like humans as opposed to cattle, or hawks, or trout. So if dogs think similarly enough to us to score at all on human-type intelligence tests, then it's silly to say that their intelligence is "not even remotely human."
According to TFA, wolves score lower than domestic dogs on the intelligence tests used. I suspect this may be an artifact of the test, since wolves are pretty damned smart in their wild behaviors. But unsurprisingly, domestic dogs have a kind of intelligence that responds better to tests designed by the same species that's been breeding and training them for the last several thousand years.
Wow, sumdumass, you're really living up (or down) to your username today.
You will be saying "Oh noes" when the best job you can get is flipping burgers at some drive through joint.
The point, which you're clearly missing (or dodging, I suspect) is that a hell of a lot of Americans can't get any job better than burger-flipping -- or even that -- because of the supposed expertise of these executives of giant corporations who supposedly possess some expertise in running businesses. All this "top talent" rhetoric has been clearly exposed as the bullshit it is. The C*O's don't have any more idea than the rest of us how to fix this mess, and they bear the responsibility for getting us into it in the first place. We owe them no consideration whatsoever going forward.
As to your second point, the government can sue like anyone else. I'm not suggesting criminal prosecutions or suspensions of the Bill of Rights. Just go after these bastards in the one place they really care about. Once you go into bankruptcy, you make yourself pretty vulnerable, you know.
What is obvious? Does the name offend you? Does it make you uncomfortable? If so, then why?
What's obvious is what I said in my original post. The name "Barack Hussein Obama" doesn't make me uncomfortable at all. Its constant use does makes me uncomfortable, because of the wacko xenophobia it reveals in so many of my fellow Americans.
Does "John Sidney McCain III" offend you, or make you uncomfortable? If so, then why? And if not, then why didn't we hear it being thrown around doing the 2008 campaign as often as "Barack Hussein Obama?"
Right-wingers seem constitutionally unable to answer these simple questions.
George W. Bush was called that to distinguish him from his father, a la John Quincy Adams.
I've rarely heard Eisenhower called Dwight D. Eisenhower or Dwight David Eisenhower. Same for Clinton and Nixon. Generally you only hear Presidents' full names given on ceremonial occasions (e.g., "I, Firstname Middlename Lastname, do solemnly swear..." or "I present to you the nth President of the United States of America,...")
George Herbert Walker Bush was only called that, IIRC, during the 1992 campaign when Clinton was trying to make a point about him being out-of-touch with ordinary Americans by using his full, aristocratic-sounding name. It was childish when anti-Bush people did it then, and it's childish when anti-Obama people do it now.
I'll say it again: how many times last year did you hear "John Sidney McCain III?" compared to "Barack Hussein Obama?" And why do you think that was?
[sigh] Is John Sidney McCain III ashamed of his full name? If not, why didn't he use it in his campaign literature?
This wide-eyed, fake-innocent "but it's just his name" bullshit is really childish. You know perfectly well that the only reason to say "Barack Hussein Obama" in a regular political conversation is to make him sound more foreign, more menacing, more eeevil. Look, you don't like the guy, you don't like his policies, fine. There's plenty to criticize on that basis. But the Birther / Secret Muslim / Not One Of Us rhetoric accomplishes nothing except reveal much of the opposition to Obama as racist, religionist, xenophobic craziness.
The alternative is that GM goes completely out of business and is no longer a going concern, and then the liability of cleanup still falls on government, if it ever got done at all.
$530 million is a lot of money, but what's the total salary and benefits of GM's BoD and C*O-level executives? I'll bet it's in the billions. Make them pay for it -- by garnishment of wages if they stay on, or if they quit, make the IRS responsible for collecting the money. I guarantee you, we (as in We, The People) will get the money back. They might, I don't know, have to sell off a few private jets or something. Boo hoo.
Oh wait, that would be socialist and if it became standard practice we might scare off the top talent who have the unique skills needed to run American business! Oh noes!
I assume you're talking about the hockey puck mouse, rather than the ADB Mouse II that's pictured on the top of the page. The former was a disaster, of course; the latter was actually quite a good mouse and very pleasant to use.
[sigh] "Intelligence has no track record of X" is always true until the first time intelligence (specifically, in our experience, human intelligence) actually does X. We've done quite a bit of this over our history... which is one reason that you can sit here on/. typing illogical blather, I can point out the glaring flaws in your argument, and you can respond with more blather plus a side of misplaced condescension.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks. And yeah, I was thinking that when I made the original post.
There does seem to be a contingent on Slashdot that sees science as kind of irrelevant. Scientists are ivory-tower eggheads with their heads in the clouds who waste their time on airy-fairy ideas, engineers are tough gritty workin' men with dirt under their fingernails who really make things happen ... that kind of thing. It's bullshit, of course, but it's very appealing bullshit to people who don't actually know that much about how science or engineering actually works, but think they do.
And without the "R," the "D" has nothing to do.
The kind of thing TFA is talking about is a lot more than "just a nice thought." The researchers have done some very difficult, impressive work. Will it ultimately become a usable product? We have no way of knowing. But they've contributed to the sum of human knowledge in a meaningful way. This is pretty much how the relationship between science and technology works.
Well, believe it or not, there are some people who are interested in the "R" part of R&D as well as the "D" part.
It's because they're smoking hashish, not leaf cannabis. You get a lot more THC for a given volume of hashish (thus making it easier to transport) and shaving slices off a block of it into tobacco, then rolling the mix into a cigarette, gives you about the same strength as a joint.
Okay, that's promising, and I didn't realize Bigelow was so far along. That being said, there's a key paragraph in the article you link to:
In an exclusive interview this week, Las Vegas billionaire Robert Bigelow confirmed that his company has been talking about the concept with NASA - and that the first earthly tests of the techniques involved would take place later this year. The scenario he sketched out would essentially make Bigelow a general contractor for the final frontier.
IOW, Bigelow isn't planning to fund the entire Moon mission. NASA is still expected to foot most of the bill. This is very different from a private company, or a consortium of private companies, planning, funding, and carrying out the entire mission on their own.
Maybe you didn't read past the first sentence of my post?
As of 2008, the revenue of the Virgin Group was around $17 billion. That's the entire company, of which Virgin Galactic is a tiny, tiny part. They have the money to set up a "spaceline" to take a few well-heeled passengers on suborbital hops. If they took every single penny the entire VG made and put it all into space travel, they might be able to do an Apollo-style there-and-back to the moon, but that's about it ... and I really doubt they're going to do that.
Look, I am 100% in favor of space mining and manufacturing, and I have no doubt that one of these days it will be profitable. Carrying passengers along for the ride will be a bonus! But it is just silly to compare today's private manned space efforts, which are only now getting to the stage which government (Soviet and US) space programs did half a century ago, to the scale of effort that will be required to create meaningful industrial infrastructure in orbit, on the Moon, and beyond.
The "get off this rock" crowd is a magical-religious cult, not a serious proponent of realistic, feasible, affordable, desirable, or even specific projects.
Except that space advocates have been for decades proposing projects which are entirely realistic, feasible, and specific. Whether they're affordable is of course an open question, and whether they're desirable is a matter of opinion, but there is nothing like the ambiguity you claim.
Manned colonization of the cosmos is, at the present time and likely for centuries to come, no different from a belief in an afterlife filled with saints, virgins, and angelic personages.
By saying "cosmos," you're conflating science-fantasy ideas about warp drives and such with well-understood science and engineering problems involved in colonizing the Solar System. I suspect you're doing this deliberately to make it all look equally silly. In case you're really so ignorant that you don't understand the difference:
Cosmos -- not going to happen without fundamental changes in our understanding of physical laws. Too bad.
Solar System -- easily doable with technology that exists right now, using little more than a Newtonian understanding of the world.
It is not real.
Human footprints on the Moon are real. Many of the people who put them there are still alive. That's as real as it gets.
If you want inspiration, stick to anime.
How about being inspired by the actual record of what people did? Are you actually more inspired by fiction than by real life?
Look around. Do you see private companies lining up to fund Moon travel?
Believe me, if Boeing or General Electric or United Airlines (those seem like the most obvious candidates off the top of my head; I'm sure there are many others) thought there was a profit in it, they'd be lobbying like mad for whatever regulatory changes would be necessary, and simultaneously developing well-publicized plans. Instead we have the absurdly misnamed "Virgin Galactic" planning suborbital hops at some point in the unspecified future -- and as much money as the Branson empire represents, the truth is that when it comes to projects of this scale, Virgin Everything is a bit player.
Yes, eventually the technology will improve to the point that corporate investors will see a short-term profit potential, and at that point the dollars will start flowing in. But it is going to take massive government investment to get us there. As long as the US is dragging its feet, we'd better hope that the EU or Russia or China can step up, because otherwise we are just not going to see people on the Moon again in our lifetimes.
I have a lot of friends who work for Microsoft in various divisions and I can say without a doubt that the rank and file of Microsoft considers Windows Mobile to be an embarrassment.
I don't doubt that this is true, but surely it's just as true of many other Microsoft products including most releases of Windows for the desktop. Releasing crappy products has never, AFAIK, kept Microsoft out of a market they really want to be in -- and I guarantee they want to be in this one, given that the smartphone market is going to keep growing rapidly for some time to come. They keep releasing versions and either eventually get it kind-of right (Office, Xbox) or just count on the "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" mentality to generate enough sales to keep it profitable (SQL Server, Windows again). Yet they do, in fact, employ a lot of very smart people who are capable of judging the quality of these products ... but who presumably, especially in the current economy, consider a steady paycheck to be worth the embarrassment of telling other people who they work for.
many cell phones now have screens like 800x350 or 800x480
Yep. That's more pixels than my first laptop, and I wrote novels on that thing. GPP's idea that they're somehow inherently unusable for large document creation strikes me as very odd.
If voice recognition worked...
Or handwriting recognition.
Yeah, I know, I know, tablet PCs (or whatever the latest buzzword for them is) have been the Next Big Thing for twenty years now. But sooner or later we will have handheld phones/computers (whatever buzzword they're calling them at that point) which will be able to translate regular handwriting into text as reliably as typing the same text on a keyboard. Faster than dictation, and a hell of a lot more private. Doing this on a device the size of most of the common smartphones would be quite comfortable, I think.
Interesting. I'd never seen that particular Get Fuzzy before.
I think it's just a pretty obvious observation.
As a bulldog owner, I felt the urge to defend my breed too. ;) But stating that one breed is generally more intelligent than others doesn't mean your dogs, individually, are stupid. The breed ranking was based on surveys of obedience trainers, who probably have a pretty good feel for how different breeds act in general. Specifically, if they're rating intelligence by how well dogs respond to commands -- well, that's one particular type of intelligence, and it's worth evaluating, but there's a lot more to the way dogs think than that.
You're comparing a fully-mature animal to one in its infancy.
Profoundly retarded humans, such as adults who operate on a two-year-old level, still have what we recognize as human-type intelligence. They don't have as much of it as most people do, obviously, but they still think like humans as opposed to cattle, or hawks, or trout. So if dogs think similarly enough to us to score at all on human-type intelligence tests, then it's silly to say that their intelligence is "not even remotely human."
According to TFA, wolves score lower than domestic dogs on the intelligence tests used. I suspect this may be an artifact of the test, since wolves are pretty damned smart in their wild behaviors. But unsurprisingly, domestic dogs have a kind of intelligence that responds better to tests designed by the same species that's been breeding and training them for the last several thousand years.
That would probably be a mistake; I'd expect most dogs to vote Democratic.
Cats, on the other hand, would be overwhelmingly Republican.
Wow, sumdumass, you're really living up (or down) to your username today.
You will be saying "Oh noes" when the best job you can get is flipping burgers at some drive through joint.
The point, which you're clearly missing (or dodging, I suspect) is that a hell of a lot of Americans can't get any job better than burger-flipping -- or even that -- because of the supposed expertise of these executives of giant corporations who supposedly possess some expertise in running businesses. All this "top talent" rhetoric has been clearly exposed as the bullshit it is. The C*O's don't have any more idea than the rest of us how to fix this mess, and they bear the responsibility for getting us into it in the first place. We owe them no consideration whatsoever going forward.
As to your second point, the government can sue like anyone else. I'm not suggesting criminal prosecutions or suspensions of the Bill of Rights. Just go after these bastards in the one place they really care about. Once you go into bankruptcy, you make yourself pretty vulnerable, you know.
What is obvious? Does the name offend you? Does it make you uncomfortable? If so, then why?
What's obvious is what I said in my original post. The name "Barack Hussein Obama" doesn't make me uncomfortable at all. Its constant use does makes me uncomfortable, because of the wacko xenophobia it reveals in so many of my fellow Americans.
Does "John Sidney McCain III" offend you, or make you uncomfortable? If so, then why? And if not, then why didn't we hear it being thrown around doing the 2008 campaign as often as "Barack Hussein Obama?"
Right-wingers seem constitutionally unable to answer these simple questions.
George W. Bush was called that to distinguish him from his father, a la John Quincy Adams.
I've rarely heard Eisenhower called Dwight D. Eisenhower or Dwight David Eisenhower. Same for Clinton and Nixon. Generally you only hear Presidents' full names given on ceremonial occasions (e.g., "I, Firstname Middlename Lastname, do solemnly swear ..." or "I present to you the nth President of the United States of America, ...")
George Herbert Walker Bush was only called that, IIRC, during the 1992 campaign when Clinton was trying to make a point about him being out-of-touch with ordinary Americans by using his full, aristocratic-sounding name. It was childish when anti-Bush people did it then, and it's childish when anti-Obama people do it now.
I'll say it again: how many times last year did you hear "John Sidney McCain III?" compared to "Barack Hussein Obama?" And why do you think that was?
so is he ashamed of his name again?
[sigh] Is John Sidney McCain III ashamed of his full name? If not, why didn't he use it in his campaign literature?
This wide-eyed, fake-innocent "but it's just his name" bullshit is really childish. You know perfectly well that the only reason to say "Barack Hussein Obama" in a regular political conversation is to make him sound more foreign, more menacing, more eeevil. Look, you don't like the guy, you don't like his policies, fine. There's plenty to criticize on that basis. But the Birther / Secret Muslim / Not One Of Us rhetoric accomplishes nothing except reveal much of the opposition to Obama as racist, religionist, xenophobic craziness.
Barack Hussein
Thanks for letting me know when I could stop reading your post.
Presumably GPP thinks John Sidney McCain III would have done better. ;)
The alternative is that GM goes completely out of business and is no longer a going concern, and then the liability of cleanup still falls on government, if it ever got done at all.
$530 million is a lot of money, but what's the total salary and benefits of GM's BoD and C*O-level executives? I'll bet it's in the billions. Make them pay for it -- by garnishment of wages if they stay on, or if they quit, make the IRS responsible for collecting the money. I guarantee you, we (as in We, The People) will get the money back. They might, I don't know, have to sell off a few private jets or something. Boo hoo.
Oh wait, that would be socialist and if it became standard practice we might scare off the top talent who have the unique skills needed to run American business! Oh noes!
Unfortunately, Microsoft just got a patent on it.
I assume you're talking about the hockey puck mouse, rather than the ADB Mouse II that's pictured on the top of the page. The former was a disaster, of course; the latter was actually quite a good mouse and very pleasant to use.
[sigh] "Intelligence has no track record of X" is always true until the first time intelligence (specifically, in our experience, human intelligence) actually does X. We've done quite a bit of this over our history ... which is one reason that you can sit here on /. typing illogical blather, I can point out the glaring flaws in your argument, and you can respond with more blather plus a side of misplaced condescension.