"There are some things that Windows does pretty well," Zemlin said. Microsoft for instance has excelled in marketing the operating system, and has a good track record in fending off competition. "Yes, and also I now decree that all FOSS developers must now call themselves 'freetards' the the request of Mr. Ballmer."
"Oh, and by 'marketing', I mean lying, cheating, and illegally 'knifing the baby', to use MS' own words, as they did to Gary Kildall to even start the company. That will be all."
I can appreciate what you are saying, but ignition will be a problem, until it isn't. If you know what I mean.
It can actually be kind of hard to light diesel fuel on fire with a lighter. But once it goes... So what I am saying is that its very definition, when we have a self-sustaining fusion reactor it is not "just going out" by itself, any more than all working nuclear fission reactor designs "just go out" (some do go out when you pull the plug, some melt down when you pull the plug). But whatever, we won't know until the designs are finalized and built --in like, 25 years. Maybe the method of magnetic containment will be radically different. Maybe NIF will win out and we'll be using lasers... who knows what 'race' conditions different designs that actually work may be prone to.
But they'd better dang well have passive safety features. You think we've learned our lessons by now.
Well, I am sort of with you but if you read this thread it is perfectly clear that all he did was allow everybody justification to retreat further into their existing points of view and yell louder.
I think this is because he places himself in the center of each 'controversy' to prove a point. Except that we've learned enough that there ISN'T necessarily a valid center to each climate change controversy, so he fudged it a bit. I can be all for "not allowing your beliefs to run too far ahead of your facts" but he has unfortunately just dismissed some pretty well done research with a wave of his hand. That's probably not helpful here, or in his larger point of the value of heretical thinking (that is dead on).
There are half of the people on this board actually saying, "What idiots, you have to have competent ethical research -- and you have none! There is nothing there!" Except, mysteriously, there is a lot of research out there but no one points to WHICH research is bad and WHY. This is exactly the lapse of careful rationality that Dyson was trying to get across.
Similarly, most of the other half is saying, "You can't just deny climate change!" Well sure they can, and should until there are decent studies that they can't knock down with a stick. But where are the links to these studies?
Heck, it took me 0.001 seconds on Google. I'm not a scientist, so you tell me, are these people lying, incompetent, or bought?
Whether we understand the entire global climate model for the last 100 million years or not, if there is truth in the above line of research on the smaller scale, we had better pay attention and pick apart the details. We all obviously agree that the world does not need more hot air.;)
warfare is much better for contractors than space. Oh, I don't know about that... Lockheed Martin calculated that they'd make more money as maintenance providers for the old shuttles than to sell NASA a more easily maintained, safer new model.
Hell, they make $33 million every launch just from that huge orange External tank alone. They sell NASA a brand new one every launch. Don't even look at the price tag for all those damn tiles...
I know that's not as much as Lockheed Martin makes from aircraft sales or maintenance, or Lockheed Martin makes on missile systems for war... hey, I'm noticing a pattern here. At least when there were hundreds of defense contractors, they would fight each other for the chance to rip-off tax payers and sometimes we'd come out ahead accidentally.
From TFA:
It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. Says the physicist from this air-conditioned building about computer models. Oh the irony. Why such hate for the other fields? I don't see Dian Fossey poking him in the eye about "cold fusion"... Anyway...
point isn't "is the world getting warmer" it is "are we causing it" and maybe "can we fix it or should we" I agree with you and him completely.
cause is unknown, and really unknowable But I don't agree with him there, do you really? We don't have a perfect Grand Unified Theory, but we seem to do OK just understanding bits and pieces -- different unrelated models here and there. We 'know' enough cause and effect to act on specific mechanisms in our interest, without completely understanding the whole.
I totally hate all the "sky is falling" FUD being throw out there. But even though his heresy is fun, it seems to advocate doing nothing because there is no point. I'm sure that won't hurt his physics budget, but maybe we DO need to improve funding for climatology. In the past they were so underfunded, they couldn't even maintain basic temperature data, as you point out! I think we can understand rising sea levels, and ocean currents. And I think we should try to do just that.
I guess I'm more disappointed in Dyson's little essay than you are, as I expected much better slicing and dicing of all the crap put out there by the media from his gigantic intellect. This seems to be more fluff than insight and analysis, don't you think?
I have to say that his description of Greenland and Antarctica getting so much snow that it offsets their loss really interesting. I'd never heard that before. He's right that there is far too much hype, and not enough scrutiny of all of these claims flying around, no doubt!
But when he says Wallace Broecker first argued the influx of fresh water melt reversing the warm Atlantic current to Britain in 1997, I have to wonder. I think I read about it from in a book from that anthropology/neurology guy William H. Calvin long before that. Maybe William and Wallace spoke to each other during the research, who knows.
He is a much smarter and informed man than I. But doesn't he err here, regarding this mechanism for prompting sudden climate shift to an Ice Age (salinity model):
Since we are confronted with two plausible arguments leading to opposite conclusions, the only rational response is to admit our ignorance. Until the causes of ice-ages are understood, we cannot know whether the increase of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing or decreasing the danger. That is not true. He is ignoring the variable he freely admits in the paragraphs above, that increasing carbon dioxide levels probably do correspond to small increases in temperature. And, of course, increase in temperature leeds to more freshwater melt (although he implies that we don't know where this water comes from... really?). We can observe the increase in sea levels today, as he also admits. The opposite argument here that CO2 levels are low during Ice Ages 'proves' that CO2 may be saving off an Ice Age strikes me as disingenuous with the current data we have on the ocean current theory. There is no reason that slow warming, causing a reversal of that warm Gulf current would NOT cause an ice age for the north. CO2 levels can then do whatever they like;)
We don't have to understand the whole global climate system in detail to understand that if this ocean current changes, it will really suck to be British (meaning, "permanent house-guests of the French").
Stay heretical, though, you crazy old man! I think it's cool!
MHO, this is a nearly inevitable side effect of the idiotic design of the shuttle, putting the astronauts next to the fuel and not above it. That makes me wonder if either of the now cancelled replacements wouldn't have been better? How would the Venture Star or Delta Clipper designs fair with his type of danger? Someone on Slashdot must know...
In any case, I think we screwed up by canceling them, even if the were over budget or whatever. I'm sure they know the risks, but loosing as many astronauts as we have is a hard price to pace for progress -- loosing them needlessly to save a few bucks is criminal... I'm sure that maintaining the 1970s era shuttles is lucrative, I hope that hasn't played a factor in the delay of a replacement.
PS. NASA, if you're listening... next time build the launch facility in a freaking low humidity desert please. I hear MASA rents for cheap!
Actually, I think that the majority of Americans will agree with you that fusion is probably safer than fission. Especially with a good ad campaign, like they had for fission in the 1950s.
But my point is, seriously how long do you think it will take to replace all American fission and coal reactors with fusion reactors? 10 years? 20? 50? I guess 100. But nobody knows, because we don't even HAVE a single fusion reactor. Meanwhile, we refuse to upgrade our old crappy 1970 design water reactors. We sure as hell won't tear them down and rebuild a new generation instead.
Also, as people should take away from the article, fusion is really hard to keep going. If things get out of hand, it will just go out. No melted cores. We don't know that. I think you will probably end up being right, but there aren't any fusion reactors, so how do we know it will "just go out"?
We DO know that fission reactor designs with so called "passive safety features" do just go out because we have tested them decades ago. But will we update any of our designs? No. Did we share our technology with the Russians and help them update (or at least make more manageable) their terribly designed reactors? No. So Chernobyl happens. Easily preventable, yet look at all those that suffered. It is all well and good to say "radiation is bad" but that does not instantly replace all those reactors. We can't even shut them down without replacements because we need the electricity.
And the whole process of refining reactor fuel does not create mega-tons of radioactive mine tailings, tons and tons of radioactive waste, and it doesn't have to be guarded because you cannot make a bomb out it I understand you here, and used to think the same way a looong time ago. But things change. We don't even need to mine fuel for a quite a while with new reactor designs. Where is plutonium safer? All of it being burned up in a passive safe reactor for energy? Or in hundreds of thousands of nuclear warheads spread all over the world? In reality, fission reactors ARE THE ONLY WAY TO GET RID OF REFINED PLUTONIUM. That is very important. Why should we not render it safe and get energy at the same time? With new refining techniques and reactors, uranium and weapons grade plutonium go into the reactor. Only LOW-LEVEL radioactive waste comes out. It can't be used for fission (it is "used up") or even effective "dirty" bombs. This is a huge leap forward. Additionally, the refining is ONLY done inside the reactor. So the really dangerous stuff that is all around us on the open market goes in, relatively safe stuff (far, far less of it because most of the fuel is re-refined and used as fuel again -- if it is still hot, it stays in to make electricity!). This is also FAR less dangerous than the by products of all of these coal reactors spread around the world. They don't even try to contain ANY of their pollutants (where as these new fission reactors retain and properly deal with them all) they just spit them out for someone else to deal with. These pollutants ironically include naturally occurring radioactive materials in coal that WILL harm you if you suck them into your lungs. Thanks for putting that in the air, power industry.
I do take exception to one small detail though. Current uranium mining does not "create" radioactive mine tailings any more than it "creates" uranium. There is no reason that the tailings do not go right back where they came from in todays world, other than lack of enforcement by the EPA. It is no more dangerous than it was before.
I know this probably reads like I'm a fan-boy for fission; I guess maybe I am. But so very many otherwise intelligent people just hear the word "fission" and stick their fingers in their ears: "lalalalalalala... caan't hear you... no I don't use nuclear power...lalala"
Well, sorry, if you are American, you do. All of the information about IFR, new research, etc. was gone from the internet not too long ago. Thankfully, there seems to be some resurgence of at least intellectual curiosity about it. But we should at least have an open mind, and treat this rationally, not emotionally.
Doesn't the Z machine require vast amounts of electricity just to "fire" once? They only fire it once or twice a day at MOST and it fires for only billionths of a second. It's not a continually running thing. It also produces a shockwave something like a mini-earthquake when it fires. Yes. Perhaps you missed it, but that is why I posted the link to wikipedia for Pulsed Power. This means a power cycle, much like the combustion engine in your car, where there is compression, explosion, and expansion. It is this process that eventually translates into power, by turning your car axle. This process is a little different on a large scale, but basically the same. It doesn't really matter it takes a while to charge up the capacitors for the initial fire. The only question is: 'do we capture much more power from the compression/fusion that we put into the charge?' In this case the answer is a resounding YES! We are all fortunate. I understand that you can hear it fire, again like your car engine. Is this a problem? FWIW, steam turbine generators are VERY loud, although more constant.
"Stockpile stewardship" is not about solving our energy problems... Well, at least not peacefully... It's all about ensuring that the aging nukes will perform as expected on demand. A large part of Sandia is dedicated to this mission. Yes... I'm not sure I follow you here. It sounds like you are saying that because Sandia was originally commissioned to do testing so that the US would not have to explode live nuclear bombs on the earth's surface to see how radiation effects aging nuclear warheads, that they then are NOT allow to take use of discoveries that could use fusion to safely and peaceably generate power. Right here, right now. Sadly, this is a misunderstanding that the US government also shared, thereby canceling the new X-1 fusion power test reactor without any reason. This is a very strange and arbitrary viewpoint. Incidentally, this benefitted the existing petroleum industry that was lobbying against this reactor. I think we see how that has turned out, but I'll leave it to you to decide how much "tinfoil" is in that line of reasoning.
I believe all sorts of radiation is released when they vaporize things in the Z machine... THAT's why its useful for stockpile stewardship. Yes... again I am confused. The only way we traditionally generate power on a large scale is harnessing SOME type of radiation, right? "Radiation" is neither BAD nor GOOD. It is like metal. It is all around us, and can be used for good or bad. It can even poison us, just like heavy metals. But really, "radiation" is just another word for power. I don't know about "all sorts" of radiation for the Z machine, but its primary purpose is to generate X-Rays, like the doctors office. Only at a much, much higher temperature. This radiation does not travel outside the building, nor is it "contagious". You don't want to sunbathe in 3 million degrees C, however.
At one time, I was stupid enough to think that The Department of Energy was concerned with producing/supplying energy for the nation. Despite appearances, they seem more concerned with finding new ways of quickly releasing energy upon other nations. Hurray! We agree completely (see tinfoil above). This is in part why we don't want ANYBODY to build, or re-build, old dangerous FISSION reactors. If the US requires the rest of the world to only use FUSION, and we are the only country that makes FUSION reactors... well, there we are. Incidentally, if fusion ever does become practical in the US, I think all those pushing for coal, oil, and gas will suddenly sing a different tune, and wag their fingers at China, Africa, etc. "But here," they say, "I have just the thing to sell you to help you out..."
Ah, my fellow Americans... always anxious to corner the market (before there is even a market).
In a way, I think you restate my point, IMHO. You probably say it in a better way...
I'm not a nuclear engineer but the only info I find on Calvert Cliffs 3 is that it is still based on pre-1975 designs. That is not smart. I know Gen IV is not immediately available, but there is NO reason that we cannot start building reactors with passive fail safe technology that has been running in test IFRs for decatdes. There is a reason everyone is moving away from light-water designs.
Why would people build in a swamp or low shoreline? No idea, I agree it sounds stupid. Although, why not run the reactor as smaller 30 year sealed design units if this HAS to be the scenario? Those, too, have existed for years. Just pull them up, service, reseal every 30 years. Nothing is simple about nuclear power, but it is not like we are not using it (or going to use it in the future). I think we should be smarter about it and use the work of the engineers from the past several decades to make better, more informed decisions -- as in site planning as you so rightly point out.
The only thing I really disagree with is:
Chernobyl disasters made clear what a problem nuclear power is No. Chernobyl and 3Mile made clear what a problem poor design, and refusal to improve upon that design means. That is exactly where we are now, and it is why I am concerned. By sticking our heads in the sand, we are assuring that we will have a problem sooner, rather than later. Additionally, if a similarly carelessly designed and operated fusion reactor was near... say Chicago and things got out of hand there would be far more casualties, even including the lingering radioactive problems of the Ukraine.
We aren't shutting down all the nuclear reactors in the US. Period. Ain't going to happen. So why on earth aren't we doing everything we can to make them safe, or failing that rebuild them with new safer technologies ASAP? Self destructive politics. I do not think fusion will ever be a panacea for this problem.
From TFA:
Record sales are down every year Plenty of other links in TFA, but none there. Is this true? Proof? It's got to be somewhere...
Unfortunately, http://www.riaa.org/ is stale and busted (imagine that) so their "piracy statistics" links just go nowhere. Wow, I wish I could rampage through the courts, extorting money from old ladies and children without any proof! I wanna be a media lawyer when I grow up!
I know you think you are being clever. But you're not.
Not all slaves were black. Good for you, you pass. Look through this thread, nobody said all slaves were black. That would be your assumption. The quote was:
it sure sounds like you just equated (here in the USA, for example) people with black skin as animals This is correct. In the United States of America, as I point out, there was a long, very culturally significant period of time in which people born with black skin were forced into slavery. The phrase "for example" means I am providing you with a subset of data, so that you may better understand WTF I am talking about, and why it would be considered offensive. If you say what you said in America, it will be interpreted as above. This is due to the culture of America, correct. However, you don't have any clue who I am, or what my personal cultural beliefs or biases might be, only those of America at large by my statement.
When someone is talking about mice, and YOU state as you did above:
"they would realize that if we were not testing on these mice the mice would never even have been born." Wouldn't this same justification for mistreatment apply to people born into slavery thanks to forced breeding? You are equating the feelings and treatment of mice with slaves. I performed a cultural translation for you so that you might understand why this would be offensive if you were in America. If you or your countrymen aren't American, and have wronged humans with a different color skin, perform your own cultural translation, I shouldn't have to do it for you. Saying this in the guise of "Devil's Advocate" doesn't make it somehow more appropriate.
PETA members equate all humans and animals So what? What does that justify? That doesn't even make any sense, as you seem to despise PETA's true motives and actions as much as I do. Yet you are willing to use THEIR moral compass to justify YOUR actions?
Just use a different fucking analogy. Get it? If you have to use a human slavery comparison, compare the abuse of slaves to the ill-gotten privileges of "free" humans. Not animals. The irony is that if you had just said, "What I meant was 'using the current existence of deformed or diseased mice does not justify purposefully breeding them in the first place'" I would whole-heartedly agree.
Slavery is still occurring all over the world Yes. I believe that is wrong. WTF does that have to do with mice?
The reason people casually dismiss animals as non-thinking is so they can live with the idea of eating meat and using animal products for commerce. A close-up analysis of how their brains work would tell you that they aren't all that different from humans. People need to realize this. I don't casually dismiss animals as non-thinking, and I don't disregard that they are very similar to humans (go mammals!). I agree with you, however, that more humans -- especially here in the US -- need to understand their responsibility as stewards of the entire planet, its plants and animals.
Death happens. Every time we step, we alter the ground beneath us in some fundamental way, for some species of life (a sprout, a spore, a gnat, a bacteria). To think that we even get the choice to not participate in the system is just foolish. To eliminate all human impact on the environment is to eliminate all humans. Even this may be very short-sighted, as I can certainly see a plausible "Noah's Arc" scenario when the next ice age finally hits. Just by existing, you are choosing who lives and dies, where crops are planted (excluding non-human-edible life -- entire ecosystems, really) which will then only support certain forms of higher life. You can live in a cave and exist by sucking on lichen... it doesn't matter. Your presence, consumption and waste, will encourage one set of molds, mites, parasites, and mice over the default state favoring others.
Everyone decides what animals live or die every day whether you eat them or not. So let us make wise choices in light of that fact; leading us to...
Am I saying end all research now? No. But they definitely need to start growing organs independently of animals and move to a direction where there isn't some being that's processing information like we do on the end of research and experimentation. Unless there exist highly funded medical research facilities out there that pay scientists $80,000/year solely to needlessly torture mice, what is to change about the current system? They are human, and they can't possibly all be sadists. Individuals may be unethical, but the popular notion that the field as a unit are unethical is overly broad and incorrect.
The technical problem with this statement is that a slab of meat is not an organism. It is a slab of meat. Culturing tissues is nifty, if what you are doing is culturing tissues. If you want to see how some factor changes an organism, you have to experiment on the whole organism.
My whole point of view is that we all have blood on our hands, just as will (hopefully) our children. We grow and we kill, re-introduce and experiment on all life around us, we should do it responsibly. But we cannot avoid doing it, any more that your consciousness can prevent the all deaths of all the cells of your body. But it can sculpt them, and put them to a purpose that it believes to be right. If that means destroying perfectly good tissue to save other, more vital, living cells then that is what you will have to do to live. I think that this is no more complicated than the decisions doctors face every day, and I like to think that most of them do not just wantonly destroy cells just to watch them die.
If society won't even accept safe fission designs, what makes you think we will ever get far more powerful fusion reactors built? I think the largest problem now is the culture of misinformation and fear, not the problem of technology.
Unless I'm wrong, the production of non-military nuclear reactor designs in the US for the last 30 years have been... zero. Unless you count the Galileo, Ulysses, and Cassini space probes. Call me when we upgrade all of our reactors from 1973 designs to a much safer and cleaner Gen IV design -- like this bad boy (now with free hydrogen!) instead of taking high-level radioactives --potential fuel-- driving them recklessly around the country in truck, and shoving it into a salt mine, or some similar brilliant idea.
Besides, though I lust for the sheer coolness of magnetically confined plasma as much as any proper geek, the the simple fact is we have had the technology to use fusion for power for quite some time now(press release from 1998, although building the X-1 was promptly cancelled without reason) with Z-pinch inertial confinement on the insanely cool Z machine at Sandia.
Yawn. Wake me went the politics of our time aren't ruled by Luddites with pitchforks and torches...
Wow, that has been Standard Operating Procedure in the US since the PC revolution in the 90s... (as in supposed Political Correctness) We don't even talk about it anymore, society just accepts it.
My idea? Tell the students, "All of you-- ALL of you... will fail at least one class during your time in this school body." And then actually do just that. None of us know our limits until we fail; it is how the freaking universe works. This "stigma" of failure is repulsive and contrary to the entire notions of "education", "science", or even "industry".
The idea that children who fail will never try something again could only have been perpetuated by damned moron, that has never had a 3 year old and cookies in their house at the same time.
To this day I have absolutely no idea what a quadratic equation is beyond a vague "something to do with parabolas". I still remember the formula thanks to a silly mneumonic, and if forced I could probably still crunch through one. But that was ten years ago, and that is all I can do today. You took many years of math courses, yet you seem positive they didn't influence you at all. How can you be sure? If you were younger, and the way you think --the way you organize your ideas before you put them to paper was still being formed -- how can you say constant exposure to the structure of math was pointless? Maybe you don't remember quadratics, or how to calculate the flow through a pipe. Maybe it doesn't matter, as mathematics is more than just memorizing the times table. Math isn't a chart, it is a language.
Even then, being exposed to it every single day, I didn't understand it. I had no idea what it was used for, and I had no idea whatsoever how it worked. At all. And I still don't. Then maybe I've been too harsh. You obviously had "teachers" that sucked. Because just from 2 posts of yours, you are obviously smart enough to appreciate the function of math in your development and society. The failure of your teachers that turned your potential to bitterness is criminal, in my mind.
We certainly need more good teachers. That is always true. Perhaps we can compromise and say, we need better math instruction.
But in this whole discussion, the perspective is that education only happens from ages 5-26. Insane. I think it is perfectly clear that that is simply not the way it works any more, that everybody is expected to be a life-long student. We don't all graduate and go to work for "The Company" for 50 years, then retire with a nice fat pension (if that was ever true, it sure as hell ain't now). Technology changes roles in the workplace at an ever increasing pace, so we pretty much have to keep up with re-training.
Or just give up, and commit 99.9% of the population working at McJobs while the infrastructure and capabilites of "Western Culture" melts away. But I don't think that is really necessary.
It's easy for us to knee-jerk and say this is bad, but why? Most people don't need mathematics beyond basic arithmetic and fractions. Outside of a classroom, the concepts taught in algebra and above are rarely, if ever, encountered by the day to day people.
"Most people" don't really use more that a set vocabulary of less than 1,000 words. Me think you true say -- why need us later days think of?!
A normal student in public schools in America will take at least two to three years of algebra, sometimes more, plus a year of trig or geometry. The ones who are interested in such things will take more advanced stuff yet...
You are completely missing the point. Why would you discourage students from taking anything in high school? And whole point of public education is to expose students to everything, not just what they would have found on their own! I took trig in 9th grade. Should that be my only exposure to math? Well, that'd be great if we all still worked back on the farm. Actually, not even that, as Agriculture programs have requirements for calculus at least.
So we're looking at three to four years of mandatory math classes. For someone not strong in math, isn't that enough?
What the hell is the point of education? If you are not strong in math, perhaps more classes are required. If it isn't required, you aren't really "exposing" the student to it. Last time I checked, there was no prediction of huge demand for Master Basket Weavers in the future. I really don't understand why everyone seems to think that it is noble and good to train for requirements 25 years in the past instead of the future. That is certainly the direction of my old school district. Things were great when I was there. They expected each student to perform to their abilities. No more, no less. The heavy yoke of NCLB standardized testing, and officials looking the other way when high schools flush poorly performing students out before 12th grade to improve their graduate statistics has certainly ruined that. And, by the way, not having a diploma is really awesome for those students, let me tell you. The students that remain in school are taught to a banal national test. Period. Who cares what their individual capabilities are?
I am not saying that exposing the students to the classes is a bad idea. But by high school age, it is usually fairly apparent whether or not the student has an aptitude for math or not. If he doesn't, there is no point in making endure a forced march through a bunch of crap he'll never internalize, fully understand, or find any use for.
It sure sounded like that is what you said. In 9th grade, I had no idea what I wanted to do in the future. Well, actually I know what I wanted to do but things turned out completely differently (to date, no one has paid my to play video games on my lear jet while flying to my NBA finals box party). The student might have some idea of their interests, but they will probably have no realistic idea of the future, or what might possibly be required of them later in life. That is what the schools are for! I sure as hell needed better math skills than my father, why this trend be different for my son? Time happens.
I, for example, am hopeless when it comes to math, but was always strong in English and decent at visual arts. I'd have been ecstatic had an administrator said to me, "Your scores are consistently low in math but high in these areas. Would you like to shift your credit focus to reflect the subjects in which you excel?"
Did you really need permission? It doesn't sound like you were forced to do anything. Maybe your administrator had a Masters in Comparative Literature and did replica oil painting on side... maybe they realized that maxing out at $22,000/yr and unhappy as a high school counselor with these skills was something you might want to avoid.
It's all about the inhibition threshold. It sounds scary what you got to do to use torrents. Install it, configure it, you need to know at least a hint about TCP/IP, you have to configure your router... I don't know about that. I just saw an idiot kid download an album after 2 clicks. One to download Transmission to his macbook, one to open a torrent link on a web page. I suppose he must have googled the band name before that. But it's hardly difficult even now; punched through the airport firewall just fine, apparently. No different than the original Napster, really.
I'm willing to give them this train of thought instead of some megalomanic overlord plot of world domination through the control of music. Sure, that is their goal. But it's not attainable, and I think they noticed that. Are you sure about that? "Pay us money for the crap potential future students are gonna steal from us in the future, or we'll sick our lawyers on you!" Sure sounds like extortion to me, not like backing off. "408 pre-litigation settlement letters" yikes. They flex muchly.
I am willing to think that they noticed that DRM reduces the value of their goods, and that this is why they offer it DRM-free. Really? Then why don't they just say, "we are now offering all Universal artists' music as unrestricted mp3s through all of our digital distribution outlets from here on out"? Why this ruse of a "trial period" and excepting iTunes? What do these moves get them?
Many of these questions could be resolved if we could look at their very own "Annual Piracy Report" but that link is somehow ALWAYS dead when I go there. Huh. Here is the referring page.
Yeah, if I were one of those crippled mice I'd be terribly proud. I know that as a member of the species responsible for engineering these Jem'Hadar-like mice dependent upon this ketracel-white-like NTBC, I'm also terribly proud. Would that be more or less proud than a mouse that was run over on the highway unnoticed? Is that considered a more honorable death in mouse culture (sorry, I am not familiar with the social conventions and religious beliefs of mice)? Or does it really not matter?
If YOU had and inherited liver disease... wait, did you say Jem'Hadar? You mean... they are fearsome warriors armed with intergalactic travel and energy weapons?! Well, why didn't you say so -- that's completely different!
I, for one, would like to welcome our new mouse overlords!
Holy crap! It's a good thing your playing Devil's Advocate because it sure sounds like you just equated (here in the USA, for example) people with black skin as animals.
I think you may want to avoid doing that in the future, as most human beings I know find it offensive to be thought of as an animal. In fact, if you were to say that out loud, many places in the US, I really don't think you'd like the outcome. And I'm not sure I'd help you out.
So, no, whatever your position is on mice, it is unrelated, and does not justify, the mistreatment to people born into slavery and subject to forced breeding.
I know that's not what your trying to say (Devil's Advocate and all), so I thought I'd point that out for you.
If PETA want to rally against Michael Vick, or against testing on animals for research into, say, cosmetics - I'll be the first to join them. But I hope they don't have a problem with research of this sort. Sorry to disappoint you. Absolutists are... well, absolute. Here is a nifty link to their FUD page that explains their wonderful world-view.
Slashdot Mirror
"Oh, and by 'marketing', I mean lying, cheating, and illegally 'knifing the baby', to use MS' own words, as they did to Gary Kildall to even start the company. That will be all."
I can appreciate what you are saying, but ignition will be a problem, until it isn't. If you know what I mean.
It can actually be kind of hard to light diesel fuel on fire with a lighter. But once it goes... So what I am saying is that its very definition, when we have a self-sustaining fusion reactor it is not "just going out" by itself, any more than all working nuclear fission reactor designs "just go out" (some do go out when you pull the plug, some melt down when you pull the plug). But whatever, we won't know until the designs are finalized and built --in like, 25 years. Maybe the method of magnetic containment will be radically different. Maybe NIF will win out and we'll be using lasers... who knows what 'race' conditions different designs that actually work may be prone to.
But they'd better dang well have passive safety features. You think we've learned our lessons by now.
Phbbbtt!! Whatever. Screw DirectX and OpenGL. Where is my real-time ray-tracing graphics card?
The Nvidia Renderman 9000 FTW.
Well, I am sort of with you but if you read this thread it is perfectly clear that all he did was allow everybody justification to retreat further into their existing points of view and yell louder.
= 17906
;)
I think this is because he places himself in the center of each 'controversy' to prove a point. Except that we've learned enough that there ISN'T necessarily a valid center to each climate change controversy, so he fudged it a bit. I can be all for "not allowing your beliefs to run too far ahead of your facts" but he has unfortunately just dismissed some pretty well done research with a wave of his hand. That's probably not helpful here, or in his larger point of the value of heretical thinking (that is dead on).
There are half of the people on this board actually saying, "What idiots, you have to have competent ethical research -- and you have none! There is nothing there!" Except, mysteriously, there is a lot of research out there but no one points to WHICH research is bad and WHY. This is exactly the lapse of careful rationality that Dyson was trying to get across.
Similarly, most of the other half is saying, "You can't just deny climate change!" Well sure they can, and should until there are decent studies that they can't knock down with a stick. But where are the links to these studies?
Heck, it took me 0.001 seconds on Google. I'm not a scientist, so you tell me, are these people lying, incompetent, or bought?
http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=12455&tid=282&cid
Whether we understand the entire global climate model for the last 100 million years or not, if there is truth in the above line of research on the smaller scale, we had better pay attention and pick apart the details. We all obviously agree that the world does not need more hot air.
Hell, they make $33 million every launch just from that huge orange External tank alone. They sell NASA a brand new one every launch. Don't even look at the price tag for all those damn tiles...
I know that's not as much as Lockheed Martin makes from aircraft sales or maintenance, or Lockheed Martin makes on missile systems for war... hey, I'm noticing a pattern here. At least when there were hundreds of defense contractors, they would fight each other for the chance to rip-off tax payers and sometimes we'd come out ahead accidentally.
Good times...
Sir! I think that a flabbergastingly preposterous accusation! I have seen these resplendently detailed plans with my very own eyes!
I will be most delighted to share them with you: Behold!
PS. Please address checks to "My Kool Space Howse", P.O Box...
Er... it was a joke. You know, how Bigelow's habs are sort of tough, inflatable fabric as opposed to the traditional "tin can" style.
;) I'm apparently the least funny mofo on the damned planet. :(
You know what ELSE some weirdos could 'enter' that is inflatable...
Sigh. I am so depressed now.
Yes, but who's going to pay to enter an inflatable when he could get inside the real thing for the same price?
I totally hate all the "sky is falling" FUD being throw out there. But even though his heresy is fun, it seems to advocate doing nothing because there is no point. I'm sure that won't hurt his physics budget, but maybe we DO need to improve funding for climatology. In the past they were so underfunded, they couldn't even maintain basic temperature data, as you point out! I think we can understand rising sea levels, and ocean currents. And I think we should try to do just that.
I guess I'm more disappointed in Dyson's little essay than you are, as I expected much better slicing and dicing of all the crap put out there by the media from his gigantic intellect. This seems to be more fluff than insight and analysis, don't you think?
But when he says Wallace Broecker first argued the influx of fresh water melt reversing the warm Atlantic current to Britain in 1997, I have to wonder. I think I read about it from in a book from that anthropology/neurology guy William H. Calvin long before that. Maybe William and Wallace spoke to each other during the research, who knows.
He is a much smarter and informed man than I. But doesn't he err here, regarding this mechanism for prompting sudden climate shift to an Ice Age (salinity model): Since we are confronted with two plausible arguments leading to opposite conclusions, the only rational response is to admit our ignorance. Until the causes of ice-ages are understood, we cannot know whether the increase of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing or decreasing the danger. That is not true. He is ignoring the variable he freely admits in the paragraphs above, that increasing carbon dioxide levels probably do correspond to small increases in temperature. And, of course, increase in temperature leeds to more freshwater melt (although he implies that we don't know where this water comes from... really?). We can observe the increase in sea levels today, as he also admits. The opposite argument here that CO2 levels are low during Ice Ages 'proves' that CO2 may be saving off an Ice Age strikes me as disingenuous with the current data we have on the ocean current theory. There is no reason that slow warming, causing a reversal of that warm Gulf current would NOT cause an ice age for the north. CO2 levels can then do whatever they like
We don't have to understand the whole global climate system in detail to understand that if this ocean current changes, it will really suck to be British (meaning, "permanent house-guests of the French").
Stay heretical, though, you crazy old man! I think it's cool!
In any case, I think we screwed up by canceling them, even if the were over budget or whatever. I'm sure they know the risks, but loosing as many astronauts as we have is a hard price to pace for progress -- loosing them needlessly to save a few bucks is criminal... I'm sure that maintaining the 1970s era shuttles is lucrative, I hope that hasn't played a factor in the delay of a replacement.
PS. NASA, if you're listening... next time build the launch facility in a freaking low humidity desert please. I hear MASA rents for cheap!
But my point is, seriously how long do you think it will take to replace all American fission and coal reactors with fusion reactors? 10 years? 20? 50? I guess 100. But nobody knows, because we don't even HAVE a single fusion reactor. Meanwhile, we refuse to upgrade our old crappy 1970 design water reactors. We sure as hell won't tear them down and rebuild a new generation instead. Also, as people should take away from the article, fusion is really hard to keep going. If things get out of hand, it will just go out. No melted cores. We don't know that. I think you will probably end up being right, but there aren't any fusion reactors, so how do we know it will "just go out"?
We DO know that fission reactor designs with so called "passive safety features" do just go out because we have tested them decades ago. But will we update any of our designs? No. Did we share our technology with the Russians and help them update (or at least make more manageable) their terribly designed reactors? No. So Chernobyl happens. Easily preventable, yet look at all those that suffered. It is all well and good to say "radiation is bad" but that does not instantly replace all those reactors. We can't even shut them down without replacements because we need the electricity. And the whole process of refining reactor fuel does not create mega-tons of radioactive mine tailings, tons and tons of radioactive waste, and it doesn't have to be guarded because you cannot make a bomb out it I understand you here, and used to think the same way a looong time ago. But things change. We don't even need to mine fuel for a quite a while with new reactor designs. Where is plutonium safer? All of it being burned up in a passive safe reactor for energy? Or in hundreds of thousands of nuclear warheads spread all over the world? In reality, fission reactors ARE THE ONLY WAY TO GET RID OF REFINED PLUTONIUM. That is very important. Why should we not render it safe and get energy at the same time? With new refining techniques and reactors, uranium and weapons grade plutonium go into the reactor. Only LOW-LEVEL radioactive waste comes out. It can't be used for fission (it is "used up") or even effective "dirty" bombs. This is a huge leap forward. Additionally, the refining is ONLY done inside the reactor. So the really dangerous stuff that is all around us on the open market goes in, relatively safe stuff (far, far less of it because most of the fuel is re-refined and used as fuel again -- if it is still hot, it stays in to make electricity!). This is also FAR less dangerous than the by products of all of these coal reactors spread around the world. They don't even try to contain ANY of their pollutants (where as these new fission reactors retain and properly deal with them all) they just spit them out for someone else to deal with. These pollutants ironically include naturally occurring radioactive materials in coal that WILL harm you if you suck them into your lungs. Thanks for putting that in the air, power industry.
I do take exception to one small detail though. Current uranium mining does not "create" radioactive mine tailings any more than it "creates" uranium. There is no reason that the tailings do not go right back where they came from in todays world, other than lack of enforcement by the EPA. It is no more dangerous than it was before.
I know this probably reads like I'm a fan-boy for fission; I guess maybe I am. But so very many otherwise intelligent people just hear the word "fission" and stick their fingers in their ears: "lalalalalalala... caan't hear you... no I don't use nuclear power...lalala"
Well, sorry, if you are American, you do. All of the information about IFR, new research, etc. was gone from the internet not too long ago. Thankfully, there seems to be some resurgence of at least intellectual curiosity about it. But we should at least have an open mind, and treat this rationally, not emotionally.
Ah, my fellow Americans... always anxious to corner the market (before there is even a market).
I'm not a nuclear engineer but the only info I find on Calvert Cliffs 3 is that it is still based on pre-1975 designs. That is not smart. I know Gen IV is not immediately available, but there is NO reason that we cannot start building reactors with passive fail safe technology that has been running in test IFRs for decatdes. There is a reason everyone is moving away from light-water designs.
Why would people build in a swamp or low shoreline? No idea, I agree it sounds stupid. Although, why not run the reactor as smaller 30 year sealed design units if this HAS to be the scenario? Those, too, have existed for years. Just pull them up, service, reseal every 30 years. Nothing is simple about nuclear power, but it is not like we are not using it (or going to use it in the future). I think we should be smarter about it and use the work of the engineers from the past several decades to make better, more informed decisions -- as in site planning as you so rightly point out.
The only thing I really disagree with is: Chernobyl disasters made clear what a problem nuclear power is No. Chernobyl and 3Mile made clear what a problem poor design, and refusal to improve upon that design means. That is exactly where we are now, and it is why I am concerned. By sticking our heads in the sand, we are assuring that we will have a problem sooner, rather than later. Additionally, if a similarly carelessly designed and operated fusion reactor was near... say Chicago and things got out of hand there would be far more casualties, even including the lingering radioactive problems of the Ukraine.
We aren't shutting down all the nuclear reactors in the US. Period. Ain't going to happen. So why on earth aren't we doing everything we can to make them safe, or failing that rebuild them with new safer technologies ASAP? Self destructive politics. I do not think fusion will ever be a panacea for this problem.
Unfortunately, http://www.riaa.org/ is stale and busted (imagine that) so their "piracy statistics" links just go nowhere. Wow, I wish I could rampage through the courts, extorting money from old ladies and children without any proof! I wanna be a media lawyer when I grow up!
When someone is talking about mice, and YOU state as you did above: "they would realize that if we were not testing on these mice the mice would never even have been born."
Wouldn't this same justification for mistreatment apply to people born into slavery thanks to forced breeding? You are equating the feelings and treatment of mice with slaves. I performed a cultural translation for you so that you might understand why this would be offensive if you were in America. If you or your countrymen aren't American, and have wronged humans with a different color skin, perform your own cultural translation, I shouldn't have to do it for you. Saying this in the guise of "Devil's Advocate" doesn't make it somehow more appropriate. PETA members equate all humans and animals So what? What does that justify? That doesn't even make any sense, as you seem to despise PETA's true motives and actions as much as I do. Yet you are willing to use THEIR moral compass to justify YOUR actions?
Just use a different fucking analogy. Get it? If you have to use a human slavery comparison, compare the abuse of slaves to the ill-gotten privileges of "free" humans. Not animals. The irony is that if you had just said, "What I meant was 'using the current existence of deformed or diseased mice does not justify purposefully breeding them in the first place'" I would whole-heartedly agree. Slavery is still occurring all over the world Yes. I believe that is wrong. WTF does that have to do with mice?
Death happens. Every time we step, we alter the ground beneath us in some fundamental way, for some species of life (a sprout, a spore, a gnat, a bacteria). To think that we even get the choice to not participate in the system is just foolish. To eliminate all human impact on the environment is to eliminate all humans. Even this may be very short-sighted, as I can certainly see a plausible "Noah's Arc" scenario when the next ice age finally hits. Just by existing, you are choosing who lives and dies, where crops are planted (excluding non-human-edible life -- entire ecosystems, really) which will then only support certain forms of higher life. You can live in a cave and exist by sucking on lichen... it doesn't matter. Your presence, consumption and waste, will encourage one set of molds, mites, parasites, and mice over the default state favoring others.
Everyone decides what animals live or die every day whether you eat them or not. So let us make wise choices in light of that fact; leading us to... Am I saying end all research now? No. But they definitely need to start growing organs independently of animals and move to a direction where there isn't some being that's processing information like we do on the end of research and experimentation. Unless there exist highly funded medical research facilities out there that pay scientists $80,000/year solely to needlessly torture mice, what is to change about the current system? They are human, and they can't possibly all be sadists. Individuals may be unethical, but the popular notion that the field as a unit are unethical is overly broad and incorrect.
The technical problem with this statement is that a slab of meat is not an organism. It is a slab of meat. Culturing tissues is nifty, if what you are doing is culturing tissues. If you want to see how some factor changes an organism, you have to experiment on the whole organism.
My whole point of view is that we all have blood on our hands, just as will (hopefully) our children. We grow and we kill, re-introduce and experiment on all life around us, we should do it responsibly. But we cannot avoid doing it, any more that your consciousness can prevent the all deaths of all the cells of your body. But it can sculpt them, and put them to a purpose that it believes to be right. If that means destroying perfectly good tissue to save other, more vital, living cells then that is what you will have to do to live. I think that this is no more complicated than the decisions doctors face every day, and I like to think that most of them do not just wantonly destroy cells just to watch them die.
If society won't even accept safe fission designs, what makes you think we will ever get far more powerful fusion reactors built? I think the largest problem now is the culture of misinformation and fear, not the problem of technology.
Unless I'm wrong, the production of non-military nuclear reactor designs in the US for the last 30 years have been... zero. Unless you count the Galileo, Ulysses, and Cassini space probes. Call me when we upgrade all of our reactors from 1973 designs to a much safer and cleaner Gen IV design -- like this bad boy (now with free hydrogen!) instead of taking high-level radioactives --potential fuel-- driving them recklessly around the country in truck, and shoving it into a salt mine, or some similar brilliant idea.
Besides, though I lust for the sheer coolness of magnetically confined plasma as much as any proper geek, the the simple fact is we have had the technology to use fusion for power for quite some time now(press release from 1998, although building the X-1 was promptly cancelled without reason) with Z-pinch inertial confinement on the insanely cool Z machine at Sandia.
Yawn. Wake me went the politics of our time aren't ruled by Luddites with pitchforks and torches...
Wow, that has been Standard Operating Procedure in the US since the PC revolution in the 90s... (as in supposed Political Correctness) We don't even talk about it anymore, society just accepts it.
My idea? Tell the students, "All of you-- ALL of you... will fail at least one class during your time in this school body." And then actually do just that. None of us know our limits until we fail; it is how the freaking universe works. This "stigma" of failure is repulsive and contrary to the entire notions of "education", "science", or even "industry".
The idea that children who fail will never try something again could only have been perpetuated by damned moron, that has never had a 3 year old and cookies in their house at the same time.
We certainly need more good teachers. That is always true. Perhaps we can compromise and say, we need better math instruction.
But in this whole discussion, the perspective is that education only happens from ages 5-26. Insane. I think it is perfectly clear that that is simply not the way it works any more, that everybody is expected to be a life-long student. We don't all graduate and go to work for "The Company" for 50 years, then retire with a nice fat pension (if that was ever true, it sure as hell ain't now). Technology changes roles in the workplace at an ever increasing pace, so we pretty much have to keep up with re-training.
Or just give up, and commit 99.9% of the population working at McJobs while the infrastructure and capabilites of "Western Culture" melts away. But I don't think that is really necessary.
It's easy for us to knee-jerk and say this is bad, but why? Most people don't need mathematics beyond basic arithmetic and fractions. Outside of a classroom, the concepts taught in algebra and above are rarely, if ever, encountered by the day to day people.
"Most people" don't really use more that a set vocabulary of less than 1,000 words. Me think you true say -- why need us later days think of?!
A normal student in public schools in America will take at least two to three years of algebra, sometimes more, plus a year of trig or geometry. The ones who are interested in such things will take more advanced stuff yet...
You are completely missing the point. Why would you discourage students from taking anything in high school? And whole point of public education is to expose students to everything, not just what they would have found on their own! I took trig in 9th grade. Should that be my only exposure to math? Well, that'd be great if we all still worked back on the farm. Actually, not even that, as Agriculture programs have requirements for calculus at least.
So we're looking at three to four years of mandatory math classes. For someone not strong in math, isn't that enough?
What the hell is the point of education? If you are not strong in math, perhaps more classes are required. If it isn't required, you aren't really "exposing" the student to it. Last time I checked, there was no prediction of huge demand for Master Basket Weavers in the future. I really don't understand why everyone seems to think that it is noble and good to train for requirements 25 years in the past instead of the future. That is certainly the direction of my old school district. Things were great when I was there. They expected each student to perform to their abilities. No more, no less. The heavy yoke of NCLB standardized testing, and officials looking the other way when high schools flush poorly performing students out before 12th grade to improve their graduate statistics has certainly ruined that. And, by the way, not having a diploma is really awesome for those students, let me tell you. The students that remain in school are taught to a banal national test. Period. Who cares what their individual capabilities are?
I am not saying that exposing the students to the classes is a bad idea. But by high school age, it is usually fairly apparent whether or not the student has an aptitude for math or not. If he doesn't, there is no point in making endure a forced march through a bunch of crap he'll never internalize, fully understand, or find any use for.
It sure sounded like that is what you said. In 9th grade, I had no idea what I wanted to do in the future. Well, actually I know what I wanted to do but things turned out completely differently (to date, no one has paid my to play video games on my lear jet while flying to my NBA finals box party). The student might have some idea of their interests, but they will probably have no realistic idea of the future, or what might possibly be required of them later in life. That is what the schools are for! I sure as hell needed better math skills than my father, why this trend be different for my son? Time happens.
I, for example, am hopeless when it comes to math, but was always strong in English and decent at visual arts. I'd have been ecstatic had an administrator said to me, "Your scores are consistently low in math but high in these areas. Would you like to shift your credit focus to reflect the subjects in which you excel?"
Did you really need permission? It doesn't sound like you were forced to do anything. Maybe your administrator had a Masters in Comparative Literature and did replica oil painting on side... maybe they realized that maxing out at $22,000/yr and unhappy as a high school counselor with these skills was something you might want to avoid.
I'm sorry you resent the math you had to lear
Many of these questions could be resolved if we could look at their very own "Annual Piracy Report" but that link is somehow ALWAYS dead when I go there. Huh. Here is the referring page.
If YOU had and inherited liver disease... wait, did you say Jem'Hadar? You mean... they are fearsome warriors armed with intergalactic travel and energy weapons?! Well, why didn't you say so -- that's completely different!
I, for one, would like to welcome our new mouse overlords!
Holy crap! It's a good thing your playing Devil's Advocate because it sure sounds like you just equated (here in the USA, for example) people with black skin as animals.
I think you may want to avoid doing that in the future, as most human beings I know find it offensive to be thought of as an animal. In fact, if you were to say that out loud, many places in the US, I really don't think you'd like the outcome. And I'm not sure I'd help you out.
So, no, whatever your position is on mice, it is unrelated, and does not justify, the mistreatment to people born into slavery and subject to forced breeding.
I know that's not what your trying to say (Devil's Advocate and all), so I thought I'd point that out for you.