If you point was to say something about which political party has called yound men to die, yes, Bush the Younger is breaking the pattern.
No, I had no such point. I was merely saying that young men today are no more protected from a draft than they were in the Vietnam Era (actually less, the rules are more strict now, granting fewer exceptions for marriage or education). The only difference is that there's no war going on which needs that kind of manpower. I apologize for the Clinton/Carter mistake; I read the SS website back when I had to sign up, and I guess I'd just gotten those two C's mixed up in my head.
Oh, and selective service is NOT the same as the draft.
I realize that. But clearly there's not going to BE a draft unless we're engaged in a high casualty war. So to say that the military has improved because they're not currently drafting people is not true. If we start getting bogged down in Iraq, or wherever, I have no doubt the draft will pick right back up again.
Yeah, that's probably not a bad point. One minor issue though: the Selective Service was reinstated by Clinton. I had to register a few years ago. Hopefully they'll never actually call anyone up though.
IANAL, but copyright does protect you from someone making "derivative works" based on your copyright. A story about Kzinti seems pretty clearly derivative of his Known Space series, and therefore in violation of his copyright. If Elf had made up a new race that just happened to have the same name as Niven's, that would be a trademark matter, but if he copies the race exactly, that's a derivative work, and is protected by copyright.
Reforms have been successfully made to other institutions.
Other government institutions? Are you sure? Quite frankly, I can't think of any. From the Post Office to Social Security to the IRS to the Patent Office, every government institution I can think of just gets worse and more bloated year after year. I wish I could, but I honestly can't think of any governmental organization that has gotten better, aside from those which have been essentially totally dismembered (for example, the ICC).
That's really a depressing thought, actually. Please, someone give me a counter example.
They use extra strength bolts, and use them as sparingly as possible, spaced at least a foot apart. They also claim that the trees will adapt to the house, growing to support it rather than putting pressure on it. I'm not 100% sure if I believe that last bit, and clearly this is not what you want to build if you want a house you can pass on to your grandkids. Still, I think it's obvious that they know a hell of a lot more about building treehouses than you or I do.
Perhaps a tad more risky
on
Back to the Trees
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· Score: 4, Informative
But as long as you do regular inspections, you're probably safer than you would be in a house on the ground where you never check for damage. The linked sites explain that they only build on living trees, and mention a few of the things they do to keep the trees from rotting (like putting bolts at least 12 inches apart, so that the tree will isolate each bolt as a seperate wound, rather than just killing off the entire area).
As for weather, it sounds like they only build these in areas with mild weather. Although, I will grant you, even in San Francisco we will occasionally get a wind storm that will uproot a bunch of trees. Maybe the weight of the house makes the tree harder to uproot? I would think it would do the opposite by raising the center of gravity, but I'm not sure.
As long as people don't live forever, it's not such a big problem. An extension in lifespan will cause a one time population boost, but when those people do start dying, they'll die off just as fast as they would have with a shorter lifespan. What's really important for long term population growth is family size and age of parents at conception (a culture where people have kids at 16 will grow twice as fast as one where they start at 32). Since the former's been falling and the latter's been growing in every industrialized country, I think we'll be alright.
Certain features are considered universally attractive. In women, men prefer a high hip to waist ratio, small nose, and smooth skin. The first is a secondary female sex characteristic (same with breasts, but that was too obvious to bother mentioning), while the second two are signs of youth. Male attractiveness is more subject to individual differences, but muscules and broad shoulders seem to help.
So, you're never going to end up with someone who's perfect through genetic engineering, but most of us could be at least moderately improved in appearance, and since these are instinctive beauty cues, we would still find them attractive despite the fact that it's now the norm. We would also still look like individuals, because clearly the above features do not dictate a person's entire appearance.
Maybe I'm totally off base, but I would think you could make a laser powerful enough to kill instantly. I seem to recall having seen video footage of lasers boring through inches of steel in less than a second, and a human skull is much less durable.
As for supersonic bullets, almost all guns fire supersonic rounds, pistols included. That's why gunshots are so loud, because of the sonic boom. That's why a silencer fits in front of the barrel of a gun. The silencer has to slow the bullet down, to make it subsonic. Muffling the actual firing is only half the problem. I still think a laser would be more accurate than a bullet, because it wouldn't be affected by air or gravity, and would only be minimally refracted by a window.
You can see an old slashdot article about this from back in 2001. And the project was already old back then. I'm kind of starting to doubt that it will ever see the light of day.
Drifting ever so slightly offtopic, here's a question I've always had about lasers: why don't SWAT teams use them? I know we don't have laser rifles or anything like that just yet, so any laser would be rather cumbersome. Still, for long hostage standoffs and the like, when you have plenty of time to get massive equipment into place, wouldn't a weapon that fires at lightspeed be rather useful? It'd certainly be the most accurate sniper weapon ever.
Meh, Imperium Galactica 2 was kind of cool, but the graphics were really overdone. Everything was flashing randomly for no reason, just to make it look cool. I would have preferred a simpler layout, myself.
Microsoft has never required us to have our CDs in the drive while running Windows. If that had been their former behavior, I'm sure/.ers would be applauding Microsoft for moving in the right direction. We're perfectly consistent: we want people to move towards less onerous restrictions.
or perhaps they will do like they did with the dorm phone systems when the colleges got greedy, go elsewhere...
Hmm, this doesn't seem to be the case at Brown. Here our phone bills have been going steadily down. The year before I arrived it was $0.20 a minute ('98-'99), then when I was a freshman they cut it to $0.10 a minute. The next year, they'd give you a discount if you viewed your statement online, so that it would only be $0.08 per minute. A couple years later, they switched long distance companies, the new rates are $0.08 a minute regular (no restrictions about getting online statements), or $0.03 a minute with a $7 a month fee.
Note that there are NO other fees or taxes associated with this account. All together, that seems like a pretty good deal.
That's interesting, given that most military experts believe the PRC's military is not strong enough to allow them to invade Taiwan (in particular, the airforce/navy isn't strong enough to allow a landing).
Personally, I think China will fall from grace for the same reason as Japan: an inflexible, non merit based system. In fact, you can already see that government owned corporations in China are unable to compete; most of the growth in high tech products in the past 10 years has increased the marketshare of foreign owned companies. In absolute dollar terms, Chinese companies have more or less held steady, and in terms of percentage of the overall market, have fallen sharply.
I think the Athenians have prior art. You can have credit for the court system, with seperate judge, jury, and executioner, though. That, in my opinion, is as or more important.
And parlimentary democracy was instituted in the 13th Century with the signing of the Magna Carta.
Ha! I think not. The Magna Carta established that the King's power was not supreme, but he was still a hell of a lot more powerful than the parliament. The House of Lords was the only one that mattered, and members of parliament were not elected democratically anyway. The idea of the Magna Carta as the beginning of British democracy was a piece of propaganda spread centuries later (I believe it was done by the Whigs, though I can't remember for certain).
By the 17th Century we'd had a civil war during which the King was removed from power and only parliment ruled the country.
Again, untrue. Lord Oliver Cromwell set himself up as military dictator. He did TRY to make England into a democracy, of sorts, but he never liked the people who were elected, so he'd just send them all home and call for new elections. In reality, Cromwell had more power than the monarchs he'd replaced. The one useful thing that did come out of the whole situation was that the House of Commons started to equal or even dominate the House of Lords in power for the first time.
The evolution of democracy in Britain was a slow process, and I'm not sure one could really peg down a date and say "this was the effective end of the monachy's power." If I were to choose a period though, it certainly would not be before 1800.
There's another article which has been up for a while, over at Penny-Arcade. This would seem to confirm the point in the Chronicle's article that it's not all fun and games.
Hell, I remember being a beta tester for a game (Total Distortion), because my friend's cousin's husband was one of the lead designers. It was cool for a little while, but I was under no pressure to keep playing. If I'd had to put in 8 hours a day for a month trying to find bugs and the like, I'm sure I would have gone insane. The cute things like the "you are dead" song when you died would have gone from funny to annoying, and it ran pretty slowly on the machine I had back then. It really wasn't that great of a game (which is too bad, because his earlier game, Spaceship Warlock, ROCKED when it first came out).
Just about every one had a fairly rich pantheon of gods and a culture that, to my way of thinking at least, seemed to be brimming with imagination.
Which hunting and gathering tribes are you thinking of, here? The "rich pantheon[s] of gods" that I can think of all came from agricultural societies. Examples: the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and so forth.
I admit I haven't studied a lot of hunting and gathering tribes. All I really know came from reading "The Forest People," about the Bambuti pygmies. The extent of their religion was some nebulous notion of "the forest" as being some kind of benevolent entity.
There's much more reason to believe that agricultural societies would have more developed (as in more complex) religions, because they could support religious specialists. In hunting and gathering tribes, everyone had to do everything. Agricultural societies has some artisans, some priests, some administrators, etc.
Back to the original topic, one reason to expect that people in the Middle Ages wouldn't have thought much about the future is that there was no reason to expect things to change! Your father could no doubt tell you that things had been exactly the same when he was your age (okay, colored slightly by "back in the good old days" memory). Today, how many of our parents had computers when they were our age? How many had flown in an airplane? We went from Kitty Hawk to Apollo in less than 100 years! There are good reasons for us to expect the future to be different from the present. This was not true in the Middle Ages.
3%? Maybe that's where it should be, but that's hardly the long term trend. Have a look here. Especially have a look at the 70's and early 80's. I guess it depends when arcade games were first introduced at $0.25, whether or not current prices are above or below prevailing inflation rates. If you pick 1980 as the year, then arcades should now cost $0.55. If you pick 1975, then we're talking $0.85. I'm not sure which would be a better date, I'm not that old.
"Test pilot Bucky Bergstrom today orbited the earth farther than any human ever has!"
If that's the kind of announcement that you think will get people interested in space again, you are out of your mind. I like space, and even I don't give a good god damn that some guy orbited higher than anyone ever has before. That's just stupid.
As an aside, so long as NASA is a government program, it will always be ruled by the politicians. That's what a government program IS, a program run by politicians. You've got the same problem with public schools, look at the amount of time we spend arguing about whether the 10 commandments should be posted.
Depends what you consider innovation. I think you're probably right if you mean it will be thin on the plot. You're completely wrong if you mean it'll be a simple recycling of the Quake 3 engine. Licensing the engine is more important to ID than selling the game itself.
Others have commented on the scientific reasoning why this happens, so I won't go into it. Growing up in San Francisco, this is something they told us about when I was in 2nd grade. The last big earthquake San Francisco had experienced was in 1906 ('89 was still in the future), and as you can well imagine, in the days of horse and buggy transportation, the animal response in the minutes before the earthquake was intense. Horses all over the city were flipping out.
The developer, Boeing, will have every incentive to provide patches for commercialy applicable code back to the Linux development community. Otherwise, they have to maintain their own set of patches and independently apply them and test them every time they go to a new release.
This assumes that they want to keep current with new kernel releases. I don't think there's any reason to assume that. If they're mostly concerned with reliability, it might just make sense to grab one version of the kernel, add your extensions, test the hell out of it, and then just use that for 15 years, until the government offers someone another few tens of billions of dollars to update it.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I had no such point. I was merely saying that young men today are no more protected from a draft than they were in the Vietnam Era (actually less, the rules are more strict now, granting fewer exceptions for marriage or education). The only difference is that there's no war going on which needs that kind of manpower. I apologize for the Clinton/Carter mistake; I read the SS website back when I had to sign up, and I guess I'd just gotten those two C's mixed up in my head.
Oh, and selective service is NOT the same as the draft.
I realize that. But clearly there's not going to BE a draft unless we're engaged in a high casualty war. So to say that the military has improved because they're not currently drafting people is not true. If we start getting bogged down in Iraq, or wherever, I have no doubt the draft will pick right back up again.
Yeah, that's probably not a bad point. One minor issue though: the Selective Service was reinstated by Clinton. I had to register a few years ago. Hopefully they'll never actually call anyone up though.
IANAL, but copyright does protect you from someone making "derivative works" based on your copyright. A story about Kzinti seems pretty clearly derivative of his Known Space series, and therefore in violation of his copyright. If Elf had made up a new race that just happened to have the same name as Niven's, that would be a trademark matter, but if he copies the race exactly, that's a derivative work, and is protected by copyright.
Other government institutions? Are you sure? Quite frankly, I can't think of any. From the Post Office to Social Security to the IRS to the Patent Office, every government institution I can think of just gets worse and more bloated year after year. I wish I could, but I honestly can't think of any governmental organization that has gotten better, aside from those which have been essentially totally dismembered (for example, the ICC).
That's really a depressing thought, actually. Please, someone give me a counter example.
They use extra strength bolts, and use them as sparingly as possible, spaced at least a foot apart. They also claim that the trees will adapt to the house, growing to support it rather than putting pressure on it. I'm not 100% sure if I believe that last bit, and clearly this is not what you want to build if you want a house you can pass on to your grandkids. Still, I think it's obvious that they know a hell of a lot more about building treehouses than you or I do.
As for weather, it sounds like they only build these in areas with mild weather. Although, I will grant you, even in San Francisco we will occasionally get a wind storm that will uproot a bunch of trees. Maybe the weight of the house makes the tree harder to uproot? I would think it would do the opposite by raising the center of gravity, but I'm not sure.
Fellas, the argument's moot, the patent expires this June.
As long as people don't live forever, it's not such a big problem. An extension in lifespan will cause a one time population boost, but when those people do start dying, they'll die off just as fast as they would have with a shorter lifespan. What's really important for long term population growth is family size and age of parents at conception (a culture where people have kids at 16 will grow twice as fast as one where they start at 32). Since the former's been falling and the latter's been growing in every industrialized country, I think we'll be alright.
So, you're never going to end up with someone who's perfect through genetic engineering, but most of us could be at least moderately improved in appearance, and since these are instinctive beauty cues, we would still find them attractive despite the fact that it's now the norm. We would also still look like individuals, because clearly the above features do not dictate a person's entire appearance.
As for supersonic bullets, almost all guns fire supersonic rounds, pistols included. That's why gunshots are so loud, because of the sonic boom. That's why a silencer fits in front of the barrel of a gun. The silencer has to slow the bullet down, to make it subsonic. Muffling the actual firing is only half the problem. I still think a laser would be more accurate than a bullet, because it wouldn't be affected by air or gravity, and would only be minimally refracted by a window.
Drifting ever so slightly offtopic, here's a question I've always had about lasers: why don't SWAT teams use them? I know we don't have laser rifles or anything like that just yet, so any laser would be rather cumbersome. Still, for long hostage standoffs and the like, when you have plenty of time to get massive equipment into place, wouldn't a weapon that fires at lightspeed be rather useful? It'd certainly be the most accurate sniper weapon ever.
Meh, Imperium Galactica 2 was kind of cool, but the graphics were really overdone. Everything was flashing randomly for no reason, just to make it look cool. I would have preferred a simpler layout, myself.
Microsoft has never required us to have our CDs in the drive while running Windows. If that had been their former behavior, I'm sure /.ers would be applauding Microsoft for moving in the right direction. We're perfectly consistent: we want people to move towards less onerous restrictions.
Hmm, this doesn't seem to be the case at Brown. Here our phone bills have been going steadily down. The year before I arrived it was $0.20 a minute ('98-'99), then when I was a freshman they cut it to $0.10 a minute. The next year, they'd give you a discount if you viewed your statement online, so that it would only be $0.08 per minute. A couple years later, they switched long distance companies, the new rates are $0.08 a minute regular (no restrictions about getting online statements), or $0.03 a minute with a $7 a month fee.
Note that there are NO other fees or taxes associated with this account. All together, that seems like a pretty good deal.
That's interesting, given that most military experts believe the PRC's military is not strong enough to allow them to invade Taiwan (in particular, the airforce/navy isn't strong enough to allow a landing).
Personally, I think China will fall from grace for the same reason as Japan: an inflexible, non merit based system. In fact, you can already see that government owned corporations in China are unable to compete; most of the growth in high tech products in the past 10 years has increased the marketshare of foreign owned companies. In absolute dollar terms, Chinese companies have more or less held steady, and in terms of percentage of the overall market, have fallen sharply.
I think the Athenians have prior art. You can have credit for the court system, with seperate judge, jury, and executioner, though. That, in my opinion, is as or more important.
Ha! I think not. The Magna Carta established that the King's power was not supreme, but he was still a hell of a lot more powerful than the parliament. The House of Lords was the only one that mattered, and members of parliament were not elected democratically anyway. The idea of the Magna Carta as the beginning of British democracy was a piece of propaganda spread centuries later (I believe it was done by the Whigs, though I can't remember for certain).
By the 17th Century we'd had a civil war during which the King was removed from power and only parliment ruled the country.
Again, untrue. Lord Oliver Cromwell set himself up as military dictator. He did TRY to make England into a democracy, of sorts, but he never liked the people who were elected, so he'd just send them all home and call for new elections. In reality, Cromwell had more power than the monarchs he'd replaced. The one useful thing that did come out of the whole situation was that the House of Commons started to equal or even dominate the House of Lords in power for the first time.
The evolution of democracy in Britain was a slow process, and I'm not sure one could really peg down a date and say "this was the effective end of the monachy's power." If I were to choose a period though, it certainly would not be before 1800.
Hell, I remember being a beta tester for a game (Total Distortion), because my friend's cousin's husband was one of the lead designers. It was cool for a little while, but I was under no pressure to keep playing. If I'd had to put in 8 hours a day for a month trying to find bugs and the like, I'm sure I would have gone insane. The cute things like the "you are dead" song when you died would have gone from funny to annoying, and it ran pretty slowly on the machine I had back then. It really wasn't that great of a game (which is too bad, because his earlier game, Spaceship Warlock, ROCKED when it first came out).
Which hunting and gathering tribes are you thinking of, here? The "rich pantheon[s] of gods" that I can think of all came from agricultural societies. Examples: the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and so forth.
I admit I haven't studied a lot of hunting and gathering tribes. All I really know came from reading "The Forest People," about the Bambuti pygmies. The extent of their religion was some nebulous notion of "the forest" as being some kind of benevolent entity.
There's much more reason to believe that agricultural societies would have more developed (as in more complex) religions, because they could support religious specialists. In hunting and gathering tribes, everyone had to do everything. Agricultural societies has some artisans, some priests, some administrators, etc.
Back to the original topic, one reason to expect that people in the Middle Ages wouldn't have thought much about the future is that there was no reason to expect things to change! Your father could no doubt tell you that things had been exactly the same when he was your age (okay, colored slightly by "back in the good old days" memory). Today, how many of our parents had computers when they were our age? How many had flown in an airplane? We went from Kitty Hawk to Apollo in less than 100 years! There are good reasons for us to expect the future to be different from the present. This was not true in the Middle Ages.
3%? Maybe that's where it should be, but that's hardly the long term trend. Have a look here. Especially have a look at the 70's and early 80's. I guess it depends when arcade games were first introduced at $0.25, whether or not current prices are above or below prevailing inflation rates. If you pick 1980 as the year, then arcades should now cost $0.55. If you pick 1975, then we're talking $0.85. I'm not sure which would be a better date, I'm not that old.
If that's the kind of announcement that you think will get people interested in space again, you are out of your mind. I like space, and even I don't give a good god damn that some guy orbited higher than anyone ever has before. That's just stupid.
As an aside, so long as NASA is a government program, it will always be ruled by the politicians. That's what a government program IS, a program run by politicians. You've got the same problem with public schools, look at the amount of time we spend arguing about whether the 10 commandments should be posted.
Depends what you consider innovation. I think you're probably right if you mean it will be thin on the plot. You're completely wrong if you mean it'll be a simple recycling of the Quake 3 engine. Licensing the engine is more important to ID than selling the game itself.
Others have commented on the scientific reasoning why this happens, so I won't go into it. Growing up in San Francisco, this is something they told us about when I was in 2nd grade. The last big earthquake San Francisco had experienced was in 1906 ('89 was still in the future), and as you can well imagine, in the days of horse and buggy transportation, the animal response in the minutes before the earthquake was intense. Horses all over the city were flipping out.
This assumes that they want to keep current with new kernel releases. I don't think there's any reason to assume that. If they're mostly concerned with reliability, it might just make sense to grab one version of the kernel, add your extensions, test the hell out of it, and then just use that for 15 years, until the government offers someone another few tens of billions of dollars to update it.