Mandatory? Who exactly is forcing anyone to use Office 2007+? You never had to move away from 2003. Microsoft even released a compatibility pack for Office XP and 2003 to open and save files in the new format. Or you can still use menus and toolbars in Libre Office or Open Office. That right there is your option to avoid the ribbon. So where's the problem?
I've used the compatibility pack. It does two things: takes forever to load large documents (as in, 3-5 minutes) and breaks formatting in subtle ways. After exchanging a document with a colleague a few times I realized that no matter what I was going to have to upgrade because new laptops and work computers were using Office 2007 and making sure I wasn't smashing up other people's documents (and could see them correctly) was more important.
Of course life being what it is, naturally the boss gets an iPad and starts using format converters which ruin all advanced formatting for iPad display anyway...
It does this at the cost of being able to keep multiple features on screen at once - with Ribbon I can't have styling and fonts, drawing, and reviewing all on screen at the same time
No you can. If you were using them, you would have popped out the dialogs in question.
Poor workman blames his tools.
Dialogs overlap the work area and don't let me define the space. Toolbars sit neatly around the space I'm working in - they don't ever overlap it, they don't ever conceal the active cursor. I have resorted to popping out dialogs, and it is an ugly compromise on what used to be neatly arranged toolbars around my workspace which stuck with the window they were associated with.
And since you mentioned space, the ribbon is easily hidden if you feel it's taking up too much room. It can be retrieved with a single click. How do you hide all your toolbars and retrieve them in a single click?
Why would I ever hide all my toolbars? They're toolbars - filled with tools I expect to use frequently. I will literally never need to take them away on any specific computer.
There might be other reasons to hide all the tools - I don't know. I can't imagine them. But if I'm working on something, I will never ever want to hide all my toolbars. That would be silly since I'm in the middle of using them.
This should headline my opinion on your other comments: I don't want the user interface deciding what is and isn't important to me in such a broad feature set. That's my decision. I want things grouped intelligently to start with - but not arbitrarily changed based on pre-conceived importance. It didn't work with "personalized menus" and it doesn't work with the ribbon (even if not so aggressive). And again - in the space used by the ribbon, about 3-5 times as many commands can be fitted with the Office 2003 layout scheme. I know this, because again, in 2003 I easily fit styling, file, drawing and reviewing toolbars into the same space occupied by "the Ribbon" which only managed to fit a mangled subset of styling and file management.
Ribbon takes a layout which can fit a wide range of tools, and shrinks the total usable space, in the interest of - for some mysterious reason - drawing attention to the most common set of features which everyone uses, despite the fact that everyone already used them.
It does this at the cost of being able to keep multiple features on screen at once - with Ribbon I can't have styling and fonts, drawing, and reviewing all on screen at the same time whereas in Office 2003 I could and it worked perfectly well.
Instead with Ribbon I have to click between multiple tabs to reach the same features, all for the benefit of making - again - features I already knew existed and could easily access, bigger and more prominent.
This is a user-interface revamp so big you can make money selling products that give the old functionality back.
How does data showing the rates of use for various features winds up with the conclusion that you should less commonly used features even harder to access I will never know. Why not just delete them from your damn product if you think they're that unimportant? What they managed to do instead was sit down and say "I think our business users are not the core demographic which does productive work".
Thanks for clarifying. Did a little bit of digging and it looks like UCPOP is very thoroughly superceded.
I trend innately skeptical of these types of generalizations, since they tend to focus on one specific example someone has encountered, and if it lies just a little bit outside of their field then they're quick to assign the property to everyone who matches whatever pattern they can see (and in the case of "X's job is easy" usually are ridiculous in principle anyway).
The problem I very much have is that the one underperformer can be found in almost any field someone cares to think about. And may not even be an underperformer in aggregate if you only encounter one sector of their work (though plenty of people - equally - tend to meet expectations disappointingly).
This. "Fake" meat requires fundamental science. That is, getting closer to the real muscle than any butcher has ever done. They will learn to create muscle tissue that is indistinguishable from tissue that spent its life on ancient forests.
"Fake" meat will be more real than almost all "real" meat.
Actually it's likely that once we get "close enough" that it'll turn out people like divergent varieties of meat which can only be produced through tissue engineering and definitely bear no resemblance to real tissue.
And yet, apparently, despite all your work, you still have time to post on the internet accusing people of not working hard enough because they post on the internet.
Also don't think that all professors work hard on the classes they teach. Many phone it in extremely badly. They don't update their curriculum, ever, they have their grad students do all the grading, they don't write good tests, etc. We've got one guy who we are struggling to get software last updated in 1995 working on our new Linux server because he is unwilling to update his course to something newer.
Which software? Is it custom software? What does it do? In what field does he work?
Do you know for a fact there's anything better, or are you just assuming there must be? Do you know how much the newer version might cost? Because there's an awful lot of newer scientific software, and plenty of it is utterly useless for teaching because its proprietary and too automagic to explain basic concepts with - or which doesn't do specific analysis properly. There isn't exactly a broad range of competition for a lot of software in academia seeing as how the market might be no more then a few thousand people who aren't able to afford to update it expensively every year.
But don't let any of these specific, important questions preclude you from passing judgement on someone, or an entire class of people.
a site that leans libertarian and as such is *heavily* anti-intellectual.
Not sure where you get "anti-intellectual" from. After all, libertarianism's primary opponents are strongly anti-intellectual, believing in such things as the free lunch, throwing money at problems can fix them, or acting on impulses of envy. And how anti-intellectual are such ideas as actually following the rules you make or empowering people by making them responsible for their own actions?
For libertarianism to be taken seriously, you have to ignore the entire established base of modern economic theory and 20th century history, as well as any recent attempts to implement it's concepts. Any evidence that it's ideas are flawed will be corrected when it's implemented "properly", which apparently should only ever be attempted in the successful first world country of one's origin which has a long history of successes traceable to socialist policies of various natures.
Anyone who supports communism as described in the manifesto is equally anti-intellectual these days, for precisely the same reasons.
Yes, absolutely! We've collectively had it with this damaging stereotype slowly infiltrating all the media. To be successful in present-day academia, you have to live for your work. Many successful professors never had the time to raise children. Those that do (and a lot of those that don't) have marital problems, because every evening, every weekend, every vacation, you'll be taking work with you. Otherwise, well I guess you could find a teaching-only job in a backwater community college and not even try to compete in your field. Or leave science altogether.
But making time to rant is more valuable than making time for family? You reserve no right to complain about losing family, due to lack of time, when you can "make" time just to complain about losing family. Sounds like many professors wanted prestige at any cost, and have gotten it. If the costs are too high, than fight that, but even you said it yourself;
Apparently your super-hard super-demanding private sector job still leaves you time to rant about lazy professors?
Energy is in no way the scarcest resource at the moment. You'll know when it is.
Energy - in the form of unrewable, surprisingly inflexible supplies - is a resource for which we are starting to correctly see the future problems that loom - but they're in no way here today.
Thats why the republicans only got 1% of the vote too, idiot.
Perhaps the REST of us has realized that the democrats are anti-middle class. Our taxes went up, especially if you undergo extensive medical treatments. They are attempting to outlaw the ability for us to protect ourselves while increasing the number of their amred guards. Hell, this week alone the middle class got a 2% tax increase while Obama took a $20 million dollar vacation to Hawaii.
Republicans lost the election and lost the popular vote for President.
And Democrats in the House won the popular vote, just not the majority of districts.
It is actually staggeringly hard to deorbit an asteroid into a planet. Things don't just "fall' towards gravity wells - they orbit them. To actually hit something, you need to remove all the lateral motion relative to the body - which involves a lot of applied delta-V in the right direction of the orbit - for it to actually fall towards the target (+ - whatever you can get away with if you want to just skim the atmosphere).
Without intentionally trying to, we're likely to have hundreds of years warning if an asteroid relocation was going to hit us.
I can't speak for any other idiot, but I only believe it's easier, cheaper, and faster to subjugate a disarmed populace than an armed one. In that time, many things may happen. Morale will certainly fall, for one. It's one thing to go bomb some people who don't look like you, it's another thing to be asked to kill your neighbor.
Which again, the latter part, is exactly what happens in dictatorships. The US doesn't subjugate them, they subjugate each other. A well-armed populace doesn't prevent it, and as should be apparently from Egypt, civil wars don't produce functional democracy overnight.
While Venus has some advantages, it is not an initial target for terraforming as it is a living hell. While some people have discussed cloud settlements in Venus's atmosphere at about the 1 atmosphere pressure level, the planet itself is a nightmare. On Mars, we drive around rovers and take all sorts of measurements. On Venus, the USSR sent reinforced probes to the planet that, without moving or doing anything other than sitting there, died in an hour or less of touching down. Besides the pressure and the acidic atmosphere, the average surface temperatures are hot enough to liquify lead.
Radiation is a daunting task to overcome, but I think it would be easier to deal with than the very daunting situation with Venus. Low gravity has many more advantages than disadvantages at least for initial conditions for settlement.
Of course, the very extreme conditions on Venus might make it a more practical test target for more extreme terraforming methods that could work faster than the more careful terraforming we might consider on Mars, so I won't say that the situation would persist forever, but Venus is far from Earth's twin in regard to habitability, despite many similarities.
Venus is actually very similar to Earth in most physical regards, and is tectonically stable. It's single biggest problem is that crushing, super-dense atmosphere (and the suspended acids in it which corrode probes). So it's hard to explore - but it's not hard to terraform - that atmosphere means we know it can already hold onto an atmosphere.
If you were going to terraform a planet, you'd terraform Venus, because pretty much all it's issues are associated with a lack of water and that's something we can find elsewhere in the solar system (asteroids, comets). Crash one or several of those into it, and you'd accomplish the dual goals of blowing some of the atmosphere off into space, and adding sufficient water to react the acids out of the atmosphere and start getting that CO2 immobilized into carbonate rocks or dissolved in the resultant oceans.
Given that we have asteroids in the solar system with more water ice then all of Earth's oceans combined, this is not such an unreasonable long term goal.
Any idiot who thinks a well-armed populace easily resists the government should try actually learning something about all those middle eastern dictatorships they keep voting to bomb. Pro-tip: AK-47's are literally cheaper then cigarettes there.
I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.
I've heard that argument before, yet the main problem with it is that you can't just go and live in the Gobi Desert because it's surrounded by nations full of people. We're in plenty of inhospitable places because there's things there, or you can do something there that you can't do anywhere else. There are tons of deserts we're very concerned with the precise owner-occupiers and behavior thereof.
The benefit of say, another planet, is largely that you can do pretty much whatever you want there because there'll be effectively no one around for a very long time. Sure, we're probably not going to colonize Mars in the near future...but that isn't to say we're not going to want to try things. Like the first steps of terraforming (though I prefer Venus as the target for that - thicker atmosphere, sunnier, more gravity).
Because rahrah he's pretty sure he'll never get sick, old or have any kind of misfortune.
Because he doesn't think "government" jobs are "real" jobs. There are apparently hundreds of thousands of people employed doing nothing. You heard it. Processing tax forms? Not valuable. Issuing driver's licenses? Not valuable. Updating signage, repairing roads, manning 911 call centres? Not valuable.
Queue long-winded post about how beurocrats don't "create value" that ignores the existence of necessary beurocracy in every enterprise, public or private.
They're poor because their government insists on keeping them that way. If we undid the economic blockade, the "party members" would be rich, and everyone else would still be poor.
NK could do any number of things to end the economic blockade, because no one cares about ruling that country, they've only ever worried about a possibly batshit crazy leader with nuclear weapons. The cold war is long over and communism is dead.
Do you have anything at all, other than words ot US propaganda workers, as the base for all those bold statements? Have you even seen any kind of Communist in your whole life, leave alone, a North Korean official? Studied economy of the region collecting information from actual sources? Did any comparisons between North Korean and Chinese leaders' actions over recent half a century of their history? And if not, please shut up and never talk about those things again.
Wow. Your deeply reasoned post sighting even a shred of real-world evidence has swayed me!
Do you similarly have any facts to back up your grandiose claims that this is "all the US's fault"? No? Then shut up and never talk about the issue again.
North Korea's problems are North Korea's to solve. Their people have invented a de facto capitalist society, and the only one suppressing it is their own government. The only reason they have sanctions is because their own government repeatedly acts to threaten surrounding nations, and there's no reason to think that any kind of free trade wouldn't have the immediate consequence of the attempted importation of weapons and weapons technology for said government, and of course the attendant wealth-boosting of the few upper-members of the government.
Yes it might all work out in the long run, but it's not going to matter if Seoul has to deal with an actual practical North Korean nuclear weapon and not a hypothetical one (seeing as how it's unclear whether the one they built actually works at all). North Korea could easily obtain huge amounts of food and farming aid for it's citizens, since most of the world wants to give that to them - but of course, guess why they never take it.
They're poor because their government insists on keeping them that way. If we undid the economic blockade, the "party members" would be rich, and everyone else would still be poor.
NK could do any number of things to end the economic blockade, because no one cares about ruling that country, they've only ever worried about a possibly batshit crazy leader with nuclear weapons. The cold war is long over and communism is dead.
Every recession in the last 80 years or so has been marked by the US top marginal tax rate falling to a low, right before the attendant stock market crash.
The GFC was preceded by US top marginal tax rates being the lowest they've been at any point in history.
Isn't that the same as using a large aperture when they could get away with a small one? Focus is frequently used in 2D movies - I don't see why it would be different in stereoscopic movies. Citizen Kane is famously in-focus, and it might well be the best movie ever, but many good movies make use of focus (Hitchcock, anyone?).
It should be different, because unlike in 2D where I just resolve the blur, in 3D my eyes actively fight to try and bring something into focus in the space the stereoscopy is telling me it should be. This is an actively painful sensation.
2. You get fooled by the 3d and try to watch some detail in the background that you're no supposed to watch and your eyes try to bring it into focus until your head almost bursts. Do that for a couple of minutes and you'll be sick as a dog or have a nice headache.
Do you not see how this is kind of a huge problem with 3D as it stands?
In an ordinary 2D film, this literally cannot happen. I can look anywhere on the screen I want and feel fine. In a 3D film, if I get interested in something that's not made the focal centre of the scene, then suddenly I'm in for a world of pain when my eyes try to track it. Even employing a time honored film tradition like adjusting the depth of field to focus on another object (which Avatar did a few times, and shouldn't have) creates a problem because unless I'm on the ball my eyes aren't going to properly track the object (real life doesn't normally start changing focus on my arbitarily).
Since the 1950s there has been 3D after 3D after 3D but all anyone wants is the hologram of Princess Leia from the movie.
There are lots of problems with stereoscopic "3D". Your eyes (actually your brain)determine distance both by rangefinding and focus. When the two don't match (and they seldom will in a stereoscopic movie), many people get headaches.
Then there's the stupid glasses you have to wear.
Then there's the fact that 3D isn't really necessary.
But if you like 3D, never fear, it'll be back. It always is. As soon as a new crop of kids come around who think "3D" is new it will ressurect, just as it's done for over sixty years now.
I think you hit it with focus part. I always thought the reason I liked the 3D in Avatar was that it was environmental, it wasn't the focus of your attention as much as just there. They might have better luck with it if they kept the 3D to the edges instead of trying to jump your primary focus out of the screen, or at least reduce my headaches. I know I am altering the literal sense of the word focus from your intent, but I still think it applies.
Disagree. I hated the 3D in Avatar because of this. Because it was environmental, a lot of the time you simply can't look at the rest of the scene and see what's going on in it - which makes no sense for a movie which was advertised and sold on the idea of being set in this amazing differenty world.
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Mandatory? Who exactly is forcing anyone to use Office 2007+? You never had to move away from 2003. Microsoft even released a compatibility pack for Office XP and 2003 to open and save files in the new format. Or you can still use menus and toolbars in Libre Office or Open Office. That right there is your option to avoid the ribbon. So where's the problem?
I've used the compatibility pack. It does two things: takes forever to load large documents (as in, 3-5 minutes) and breaks formatting in subtle ways. After exchanging a document with a colleague a few times I realized that no matter what I was going to have to upgrade because new laptops and work computers were using Office 2007 and making sure I wasn't smashing up other people's documents (and could see them correctly) was more important.
Of course life being what it is, naturally the boss gets an iPad and starts using format converters which ruin all advanced formatting for iPad display anyway...
It does this at the cost of being able to keep multiple features on screen at once - with Ribbon I can't have styling and fonts, drawing, and reviewing all on screen at the same time
No you can. If you were using them, you would have popped out the dialogs in question.
Poor workman blames his tools.
Dialogs overlap the work area and don't let me define the space. Toolbars sit neatly around the space I'm working in - they don't ever overlap it, they don't ever conceal the active cursor. I have resorted to popping out dialogs, and it is an ugly compromise on what used to be neatly arranged toolbars around my workspace which stuck with the window they were associated with.
And since you mentioned space, the ribbon is easily hidden if you feel it's taking up too much room. It can be retrieved with a single click. How do you hide all your toolbars and retrieve them in a single click?
Why would I ever hide all my toolbars? They're toolbars - filled with tools I expect to use frequently. I will literally never need to take them away on any specific computer.
There might be other reasons to hide all the tools - I don't know. I can't imagine them. But if I'm working on something, I will never ever want to hide all my toolbars. That would be silly since I'm in the middle of using them.
This should headline my opinion on your other comments: I don't want the user interface deciding what is and isn't important to me in such a broad feature set. That's my decision. I want things grouped intelligently to start with - but not arbitrarily changed based on pre-conceived importance. It didn't work with "personalized menus" and it doesn't work with the ribbon (even if not so aggressive). And again - in the space used by the ribbon, about 3-5 times as many commands can be fitted with the Office 2003 layout scheme. I know this, because again, in 2003 I easily fit styling, file, drawing and reviewing toolbars into the same space occupied by "the Ribbon" which only managed to fit a mangled subset of styling and file management.
No you can't.
Ribbon takes a layout which can fit a wide range of tools, and shrinks the total usable space, in the interest of - for some mysterious reason - drawing attention to the most common set of features which everyone uses, despite the fact that everyone already used them.
It does this at the cost of being able to keep multiple features on screen at once - with Ribbon I can't have styling and fonts, drawing, and reviewing all on screen at the same time whereas in Office 2003 I could and it worked perfectly well.
Instead with Ribbon I have to click between multiple tabs to reach the same features, all for the benefit of making - again - features I already knew existed and could easily access, bigger and more prominent.
This is a user-interface revamp so big you can make money selling products that give the old functionality back.
How does data showing the rates of use for various features winds up with the conclusion that you should less commonly used features even harder to access I will never know. Why not just delete them from your damn product if you think they're that unimportant? What they managed to do instead was sit down and say "I think our business users are not the core demographic which does productive work".
Thanks for clarifying. Did a little bit of digging and it looks like UCPOP is very thoroughly superceded.
I trend innately skeptical of these types of generalizations, since they tend to focus on one specific example someone has encountered, and if it lies just a little bit outside of their field then they're quick to assign the property to everyone who matches whatever pattern they can see (and in the case of "X's job is easy" usually are ridiculous in principle anyway).
The problem I very much have is that the one underperformer can be found in almost any field someone cares to think about. And may not even be an underperformer in aggregate if you only encounter one sector of their work (though plenty of people - equally - tend to meet expectations disappointingly).
This. "Fake" meat requires fundamental science. That is, getting closer to the real muscle than any butcher has ever done. They will learn to create muscle tissue that is indistinguishable from tissue that spent its life on ancient forests.
"Fake" meat will be more real than almost all "real" meat.
Actually it's likely that once we get "close enough" that it'll turn out people like divergent varieties of meat which can only be produced through tissue engineering and definitely bear no resemblance to real tissue.
And yet, apparently, despite all your work, you still have time to post on the internet accusing people of not working hard enough because they post on the internet.
Also don't think that all professors work hard on the classes they teach. Many phone it in extremely badly. They don't update their curriculum, ever, they have their grad students do all the grading, they don't write good tests, etc. We've got one guy who we are struggling to get software last updated in 1995 working on our new Linux server because he is unwilling to update his course to something newer.
Which software? Is it custom software? What does it do? In what field does he work?
Do you know for a fact there's anything better, or are you just assuming there must be? Do you know how much the newer version might cost? Because there's an awful lot of newer scientific software, and plenty of it is utterly useless for teaching because its proprietary and too automagic to explain basic concepts with - or which doesn't do specific analysis properly. There isn't exactly a broad range of competition for a lot of software in academia seeing as how the market might be no more then a few thousand people who aren't able to afford to update it expensively every year.
But don't let any of these specific, important questions preclude you from passing judgement on someone, or an entire class of people.
a site that leans libertarian and as such is *heavily* anti-intellectual.
Not sure where you get "anti-intellectual" from. After all, libertarianism's primary opponents are strongly anti-intellectual, believing in such things as the free lunch, throwing money at problems can fix them, or acting on impulses of envy. And how anti-intellectual are such ideas as actually following the rules you make or empowering people by making them responsible for their own actions?
For libertarianism to be taken seriously, you have to ignore the entire established base of modern economic theory and 20th century history, as well as any recent attempts to implement it's concepts. Any evidence that it's ideas are flawed will be corrected when it's implemented "properly", which apparently should only ever be attempted in the successful first world country of one's origin which has a long history of successes traceable to socialist policies of various natures.
Anyone who supports communism as described in the manifesto is equally anti-intellectual these days, for precisely the same reasons.
Yes, absolutely! We've collectively had it with this damaging stereotype slowly infiltrating all the media. To be successful in present-day academia, you have to live for your work. Many successful professors never had the time to raise children. Those that do (and a lot of those that don't) have marital problems, because every evening, every weekend, every vacation, you'll be taking work with you. Otherwise, well I guess you could find a teaching-only job in a backwater community college and not even try to compete in your field. Or leave science altogether.
But making time to rant is more valuable than making time for family? You reserve no right to complain about losing family, due to lack of time, when you can "make" time just to complain about losing family. Sounds like many professors wanted prestige at any cost, and have gotten it. If the costs are too high, than fight that, but even you said it yourself;
Apparently your super-hard super-demanding private sector job still leaves you time to rant about lazy professors?
Energy is in no way the scarcest resource at the moment. You'll know when it is.
Energy - in the form of unrewable, surprisingly inflexible supplies - is a resource for which we are starting to correctly see the future problems that loom - but they're in no way here today.
Thats why the republicans only got 1% of the vote too, idiot.
Perhaps the REST of us has realized that the democrats are anti-middle class. Our taxes went up, especially if you undergo extensive medical treatments. They are attempting to outlaw the ability for us to protect ourselves while increasing the number of their amred guards. Hell, this week alone the middle class got a 2% tax increase while Obama took a $20 million dollar vacation to Hawaii.
Republicans lost the election and lost the popular vote for President.
And Democrats in the House won the popular vote, just not the majority of districts.
They don't fall in the colloquial understanding of it though. Orbit, by and large, isn't some delicate state which will collapse at a moments notice.
It is actually staggeringly hard to deorbit an asteroid into a planet. Things don't just "fall' towards gravity wells - they orbit them. To actually hit something, you need to remove all the lateral motion relative to the body - which involves a lot of applied delta-V in the right direction of the orbit - for it to actually fall towards the target (+ - whatever you can get away with if you want to just skim the atmosphere).
Without intentionally trying to, we're likely to have hundreds of years warning if an asteroid relocation was going to hit us.
I can't speak for any other idiot, but I only believe it's easier, cheaper, and faster to subjugate a disarmed populace than an armed one. In that time, many things may happen. Morale will certainly fall, for one. It's one thing to go bomb some people who don't look like you, it's another thing to be asked to kill your neighbor.
Which again, the latter part, is exactly what happens in dictatorships. The US doesn't subjugate them, they subjugate each other. A well-armed populace doesn't prevent it, and as should be apparently from Egypt, civil wars don't produce functional democracy overnight.
While Venus has some advantages, it is not an initial target for terraforming as it is a living hell. While some people have discussed cloud settlements in Venus's atmosphere at about the 1 atmosphere pressure level, the planet itself is a nightmare. On Mars, we drive around rovers and take all sorts of measurements. On Venus, the USSR sent reinforced probes to the planet that, without moving or doing anything other than sitting there, died in an hour or less of touching down. Besides the pressure and the acidic atmosphere, the average surface temperatures are hot enough to liquify lead.
Radiation is a daunting task to overcome, but I think it would be easier to deal with than the very daunting situation with Venus. Low gravity has many more advantages than disadvantages at least for initial conditions for settlement.
Of course, the very extreme conditions on Venus might make it a more practical test target for more extreme terraforming methods that could work faster than the more careful terraforming we might consider on Mars, so I won't say that the situation would persist forever, but Venus is far from Earth's twin in regard to habitability, despite many similarities.
Venus is actually very similar to Earth in most physical regards, and is tectonically stable. It's single biggest problem is that crushing, super-dense atmosphere (and the suspended acids in it which corrode probes). So it's hard to explore - but it's not hard to terraform - that atmosphere means we know it can already hold onto an atmosphere.
If you were going to terraform a planet, you'd terraform Venus, because pretty much all it's issues are associated with a lack of water and that's something we can find elsewhere in the solar system (asteroids, comets). Crash one or several of those into it, and you'd accomplish the dual goals of blowing some of the atmosphere off into space, and adding sufficient water to react the acids out of the atmosphere and start getting that CO2 immobilized into carbonate rocks or dissolved in the resultant oceans.
Given that we have asteroids in the solar system with more water ice then all of Earth's oceans combined, this is not such an unreasonable long term goal.
Any idiot who thinks a well-armed populace easily resists the government should try actually learning something about all those middle eastern dictatorships they keep voting to bomb. Pro-tip: AK-47's are literally cheaper then cigarettes there.
There is no escape. Dream all you want--write stories about it, make movies about it. But we ain't leaving.
I've been less optimistic about concepts of colonizing Mars, particularly after reading this retro future website, http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/macguffinite.php
I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.
I've heard that argument before, yet the main problem with it is that you can't just go and live in the Gobi Desert because it's surrounded by nations full of people. We're in plenty of inhospitable places because there's things there, or you can do something there that you can't do anywhere else. There are tons of deserts we're very concerned with the precise owner-occupiers and behavior thereof.
The benefit of say, another planet, is largely that you can do pretty much whatever you want there because there'll be effectively no one around for a very long time. Sure, we're probably not going to colonize Mars in the near future...but that isn't to say we're not going to want to try things. Like the first steps of terraforming (though I prefer Venus as the target for that - thicker atmosphere, sunnier, more gravity).
Because rahrah he's pretty sure he'll never get sick, old or have any kind of misfortune.
Because he doesn't think "government" jobs are "real" jobs. There are apparently hundreds of thousands of people employed doing nothing. You heard it. Processing tax forms? Not valuable. Issuing driver's licenses? Not valuable. Updating signage, repairing roads, manning 911 call centres? Not valuable.
Queue long-winded post about how beurocrats don't "create value" that ignores the existence of necessary beurocracy in every enterprise, public or private.
BS.
They're poor because their government insists on keeping them that way. If we undid the economic blockade, the "party members" would be rich, and everyone else would still be poor.
NK could do any number of things to end the economic blockade, because no one cares about ruling that country, they've only ever worried about a possibly batshit crazy leader with nuclear weapons. The cold war is long over and communism is dead.
Do you have anything at all, other than words ot US propaganda workers, as the base for all those bold statements? Have you even seen any kind of Communist in your whole life, leave alone, a North Korean official? Studied economy of the region collecting information from actual sources? Did any comparisons between North Korean and Chinese leaders' actions over recent half a century of their history? And if not, please shut up and never talk about those things again.
Wow. Your deeply reasoned post sighting even a shred of real-world evidence has swayed me!
Do you similarly have any facts to back up your grandiose claims that this is "all the US's fault"? No? Then shut up and never talk about the issue again.
North Korea's problems are North Korea's to solve. Their people have invented a de facto capitalist society, and the only one suppressing it is their own government. The only reason they have sanctions is because their own government repeatedly acts to threaten surrounding nations, and there's no reason to think that any kind of free trade wouldn't have the immediate consequence of the attempted importation of weapons and weapons technology for said government, and of course the attendant wealth-boosting of the few upper-members of the government.
Yes it might all work out in the long run, but it's not going to matter if Seoul has to deal with an actual practical North Korean nuclear weapon and not a hypothetical one (seeing as how it's unclear whether the one they built actually works at all). North Korea could easily obtain huge amounts of food and farming aid for it's citizens, since most of the world wants to give that to them - but of course, guess why they never take it.
BS.
They're poor because their government insists on keeping them that way. If we undid the economic blockade, the "party members" would be rich, and everyone else would still be poor.
NK could do any number of things to end the economic blockade, because no one cares about ruling that country, they've only ever worried about a possibly batshit crazy leader with nuclear weapons. The cold war is long over and communism is dead.
Every recession in the last 80 years or so has been marked by the US top marginal tax rate falling to a low, right before the attendant stock market crash.
The GFC was preceded by US top marginal tax rates being the lowest they've been at any point in history.
Isn't that the same as using a large aperture when they could get away with a small one? Focus is frequently used in 2D movies - I don't see why it would be different in stereoscopic movies. Citizen Kane is famously in-focus, and it might well be the best movie ever, but many good movies make use of focus (Hitchcock, anyone?).
It should be different, because unlike in 2D where I just resolve the blur, in 3D my eyes actively fight to try and bring something into focus in the space the stereoscopy is telling me it should be. This is an actively painful sensation.
2. You get fooled by the 3d and try to watch some detail in the background that you're no supposed to watch and your eyes try to bring it into focus until your head almost bursts. Do that for a couple of minutes and you'll be sick as a dog or have a nice headache.
Do you not see how this is kind of a huge problem with 3D as it stands?
In an ordinary 2D film, this literally cannot happen. I can look anywhere on the screen I want and feel fine. In a 3D film, if I get interested in something that's not made the focal centre of the scene, then suddenly I'm in for a world of pain when my eyes try to track it. Even employing a time honored film tradition like adjusting the depth of field to focus on another object (which Avatar did a few times, and shouldn't have) creates a problem because unless I'm on the ball my eyes aren't going to properly track the object (real life doesn't normally start changing focus on my arbitarily).
Since the 1950s there has been 3D after 3D after 3D but all anyone wants is the hologram of Princess Leia from the movie.
There are lots of problems with stereoscopic "3D". Your eyes (actually your brain)determine distance both by rangefinding and focus. When the two don't match (and they seldom will in a stereoscopic movie), many people get headaches.
Then there's the stupid glasses you have to wear.
Then there's the fact that 3D isn't really necessary.
But if you like 3D, never fear, it'll be back. It always is. As soon as a new crop of kids come around who think "3D" is new it will ressurect, just as it's done for over sixty years now.
I think you hit it with focus part. I always thought the reason I liked the 3D in Avatar was that it was environmental, it wasn't the focus of your attention as much as just there. They might have better luck with it if they kept the 3D to the edges instead of trying to jump your primary focus out of the screen, or at least reduce my headaches. I know I am altering the literal sense of the word focus from your intent, but I still think it applies.
Disagree. I hated the 3D in Avatar because of this. Because it was environmental, a lot of the time you simply can't look at the rest of the scene and see what's going on in it - which makes no sense for a movie which was advertised and sold on the idea of being set in this amazing differenty world.