What would be the point to doing this? There is no free lunch in physics- the amount of energy you spent getting the spacecraft to the bottom of the tube (whether by pumping water or pushing on the craft) would not be recouped by the savings at launch.
Electricity, rocket fuel, jet fuel... In the end, you will still need to spend a set amount of J per Kg to get payload into orbit.
I can't think of anything about OS X or linux that prevents any games from running on them.
I mentioned leaving games out of the equation because their distribution across OSes is based on the current monopoly state of the market, and it helps even the playing field between windows and the smaller players.
I think that in your example, the other devices would restrict which TVs they could run on.
>>Apple turns the computer into something more resembling a television.
What do you use your computers to do? How does Apple impair your ability to do those things? What can you not do in OS X that you can do in Windows or *nix?
Let's leave games/3rd-party software out of it. They are irrelevant to an OS's internal functioning and GUI.
I am genuinely curious, as I've heard this sort of thing here before.
I could see this working with most diseases, but HIV is different. You can contract polio and die from it at a young age (prior to puberty). HIV's primary route of infection is through sex, which essentially requires a person to be fertile (exempting edge cases).
Being fertile means that you might already have produced offspring, and those offspring would not benefit from any kind of selection. If you produced more offspring while you were infected, I would anticipate that those offspring would not live to childbearing age, and thus would play no part in evolutionary selection.
There are diseases, such as alzheimers, that will probably never be selected out of our genes because they affect people who are not bearing children. HIV/AIDS might be another disease like this, but on the other end of the lifespan.
I'd be interested to hear from anyone working in this field about these ideas.
"Mother Nature" didn't do anything. That is, of course, if you want to preserve at least the idea that we are free agents. 'Nature' does not care one war or the other whether walter can still get it up. Maybe Walter ate too much sugar, is diabetic, drank too much, etc. It's hard to see where Nature fits in to that. It's not like we're pine trees in a forest fire that need heat to open our seed pods. We are intelligent, vicious, clever primates who have developed from a threatened species to the lords of all existence. If nature has anything to do with us, then Nature must have been ok with the last 100,000 years, right?
Maybe nature wanted the crow outside my window to die of starvation, but hey! He found some food, which is unnatural, right? Maybe nature is sad that the care bears exterminated the flying ponies? Why do people even go down this line of reasoning?
"Mother" Nature gets "angry" when you anthropomorphize "her".
I know that other people have probably brought this up somewhere else, but part of the reason that murderers have such a low recidivism rate is that many of them spend the bulk of the rest of their lives in prison.
Another reason is that many murders are heat-of-the-moment affairs that could conceivably affect anyone (see the first scenes in minority report). I find it hard to believe that many sex offenses were heat-of-the-moment, one-time deals driven by extenuating circumstances. They are behavior-driven rather than circumstance driven, ie, the average person wouldn't be driven to seek sexual gratification from children under any circumstances, while the average person could kill. I'm in the military- It's not a stretch for me to say that a schoolteacher could become a killer under the right conditions.
Stories like this cause a tinge of nostalgia, perhaps, but to me they mean something more.
I am excited to think that someday while I am still alive, kids will see pay phones in old movies as we see hand-cranked automobiles or slide rules.
I am excited to guess what I will experience in thirty or forty years (technology-wise). I can't think of a more interesting century or two to be a part of than the ones I live in. I'm sure that the pace will only accelerate.
Tesla died penniless and alone because he had terrible social skills. He was a genius, but he was not someone who could look past his own social deficiencies in order to put his ideas into motion.
I milled my own tesla turbine a few years ago, and the lesson i took from all that research was: God damn it, I wish this guy could have just licensed the thing so that I wouldn't have to turn out 3 iterations of this supposedly 'perfect' invention before I found reasonable efficencies.
His ideas died with him, leaving us in the lurch. How selfish does a genius have to be before you get pissed off at him?
My best friend works 60 hours a week at a hospital. She makes something like $450 per paycheck. She has to pay $290 for medical insurance for herself and her son. Rent is $498/month (HRA apt, sliding scale based on income). She has a 3-year-old child. She has to pay for daycare and school.
Community service?
I paid her rent this month. You can take your community service and shove it.
Where do you put the 380,000 square miles of refrigerators when the entire surface of the planet (including, apparently, the oceans) is covered in miraculous 100%-efficiency solar panels?
I think that a laser would require LESS power, as the beam is collimated.
If, at 1.5 million miles, you need X broadcast energy for radio waves to reach your target (with your broadcast traveling as an expanding sphere), then with a laser you would need only enough energy to 'light up' a portion of the sky that represented your target.
So in order for Y energy to reach your target, it would look like this:
Radio- X energy Laser- X/z energy, where z is a large number
I'm really tired, otherwise I'd post the real math.
I think this is kind of funny coming from someone named Provigilman.
Anyways, many of the drugs you mentioned came to their respective markets AFTER being developed for other more serious issues; for example, I believe viagra was originally developed for heart conditions. Viagra is funding research into other diseases by being marketable. Hell, you don't even need to be sick to take the stuff! It's big pharma's wet dream.
I think that might have to do with people's changing perception/valuation of computers. They have gone from gee-whiz calculator-type devices to the very core of our daily existence.
This crime may be the same as the old-timey prank, but you're right- we no longer see it as 'just a prank'. Breaking into a computer nowadays would be like breaking into someone's home or office instead of their calculator. Right? If I break into your house to watch TV, I still broke into your house and I should be punished. And then sued by the MPAA.
Because depriving someone of their life is considered the worst offense to a victim- far worse than being raped or mugged- because it is irreversible and permanent. Even if the death is painless, the fact remains that you have deprived a person of _everything_. There are also effects on society as a whole after a murder.
Maybe the reason that recidivism is so low for murderers is because they spend most of their lives locked up after the initial act?
If we dealt out punishment in proportion to recidivism instead of damage done, then speeding tickets would land you in prison.
>>The difference between us and you is when we seen something that was wrong we DID something about it!
So, I guess you're saying that you all just stopped doing anything in 1982? Because, if I understand you correctly, my generation doesn't do anything. Your generation does everything. So by your logic, if nothing has happened since 1982, it's because your generation hasn't done anything. Right? Or have you just forgotten what you were doing when YOU were 20-25? I suppose that while I was missing college to be in Iraq during that period, you were inventing the transistor, the digital watch, and pet rocks? Right? Because Your Generation was just so inherently smooth like that. Must have been the radiation from Trinity that turned you all into super-mutant-fantastic-forty-somethings, right? With Dan Rather as your twitchy but lovably poster boy?
Or maybe you're the product of your time, just like I am.
>>We stopped the Vietnam War...
Really? You mean it stopped when you pulled out and the country was overrun by the north vietnamese? You mean when you sort of, you know, lost the war? Who *Started* the (american involvement in) the vietnam war? Grenada? Both Iraq wars? Surely not you. It must have been all those teenaged Gen-Xers and their Pepsi.
The paradox here is that, by your logic, the boomers did have at least one major foul-up: Me. If you were so great at everything you did, then why did you raise a generation of stupid slackers? Why did you invent video games in the first place? Why did you take advertising and consumerism to such morbid extremes? Why did you not invest in cleaner energy? Why did you resist so much when mandatory safety devices were introduced in cars? Why did some boomers shoot other boomers on college campuses?
Urghhh! Cognitive dissonance! It's like brain freeze, but more depressing and/or humbling!
I realize that I'm not involved with your original conflict with OP, but for crying out loud, I'm sick of being a whipping boy for boomers who won't admit that they spent their younger years getting high and trying to have sex all over the place.
We're either your fault or we're not. If you say we're not, then how can you take credit for anything else you claim to have done? I would say that you can't have it both ways, but I see that your politicians have done a great job of doing just that. Fantastic. Yeah, Gen-X sure does suck.
See, the problem I have with the approach to weighted numbers is that one player cannot really increase his odds of winning enough to break even. I mean, let's say that knowing the odds of weighted numbers could conceivably help you raise your odds from 1 in 1,270,984 to 1 in 1,270,971. You would still go broke waiting to win big. And if everyone played just the weighted numbers, there would still only be an infinitesimally small increase in winners (and they would earn slightly less as a result). This, too, does not favor the individual gambler.
I'm saying that even WITH the weighted numbers, the outcome is still random enough to make for terrible odds.
>>For the big jackpots the odds are typically in the ballpark of being hit by lightning 10 times.
Ok, I hear 'odds' like this thrown around all the time. I think it's time to question them.
Many people win big (to varying degrees) while playing the lottery. About once a week it seems that another working-class joe is on TV telling us what he's going to do with his money. Now, you're saying that this is as likely as being hit by lightning 10 times.
How many people have been hit by lightning 10 times? 9? 8?
Come on, people, this is slashdot.
Purported record holder for most lightning strikes: Roy C. Sullivan, a park ranger, at seven times.
National Center for Health Statistics on lightning fatalities in the United States from 1980 through 1995 show 1318 deaths attributed to lightning.
Being struck by lightning just once is common enough that there is an organization out there to support shock victim: http://www.lightning-strike.org/
I would say that a rough estimate would put the odds of being struck by lightning as about equal to winning it big in the lottery (by big, let's say more than a million dollars).
Someone out there with more patience should figure out the actual odds. But the odds are certainly much better than being struck by lightning ten times.
Ah, the thought police! welcome to our discussion. You'll find you job of punishing certain thoughts exceedingly easy here, as there are exceedingly few of them to start with.
Your idea re: contracts with the artists would be possible only in a perfect world, and if we lived in a perfect world we would not need this.
Also, this would infringe on privacy (something that some people still value).
Why not just be able to show the cd as proof after the fact of a legal notice? If the person bought the CD after the legal notice, what difference does that make? The artists still get their money.
And one more question (OT): Why would this mother get sued? If the video is used commercially, it is due to youtube making money from advertising. The mother makes nothing from it. So why don't the labels sue youtube for making money off of copyrighted content?
Slashdot Mirror
What would be the point to doing this? There is no free lunch in physics- the amount of energy you spent getting the spacecraft to the bottom of the tube (whether by pumping water or pushing on the craft) would not be recouped by the savings at launch.
Electricity, rocket fuel, jet fuel... In the end, you will still need to spend a set amount of J per Kg to get payload into orbit.
-b
I can't think of anything about OS X or linux that prevents any games from running on them.
I mentioned leaving games out of the equation because their distribution across OSes is based on the current monopoly state of the market, and it helps even the playing field between windows and the smaller players.
I think that in your example, the other devices would restrict which TVs they could run on.
-b
>>Apple turns the computer into something more resembling a television.
What do you use your computers to do? How does Apple impair your ability to do those things? What can you not do in OS X that you can do in Windows or *nix?
Let's leave games/3rd-party software out of it. They are irrelevant to an OS's internal functioning and GUI.
I am genuinely curious, as I've heard this sort of thing here before.
-b
I could see this working with most diseases, but HIV is different. You can contract polio and die from it at a young age (prior to puberty). HIV's primary route of infection is through sex, which essentially requires a person to be fertile (exempting edge cases).
Being fertile means that you might already have produced offspring, and those offspring would not benefit from any kind of selection. If you produced more offspring while you were infected, I would anticipate that those offspring would not live to childbearing age, and thus would play no part in evolutionary selection.
There are diseases, such as alzheimers, that will probably never be selected out of our genes because they affect people who are not bearing children. HIV/AIDS might be another disease like this, but on the other end of the lifespan.
I'd be interested to hear from anyone working in this field about these ideas.
-b
"Mother Nature" didn't do anything. That is, of course, if you want to preserve at least the idea that we are free agents. 'Nature' does not care one war or the other whether walter can still get it up. Maybe Walter ate too much sugar, is diabetic, drank too much, etc. It's hard to see where Nature fits in to that. It's not like we're pine trees in a forest fire that need heat to open our seed pods. We are intelligent, vicious, clever primates who have developed from a threatened species to the lords of all existence. If nature has anything to do with us, then Nature must have been ok with the last 100,000 years, right?
Maybe nature wanted the crow outside my window to die of starvation, but hey! He found some food, which is unnatural, right? Maybe nature is sad that the care bears exterminated the flying ponies? Why do people even go down this line of reasoning?
"Mother" Nature gets "angry" when you anthropomorphize "her".
-b
OK-
;)
Just make really THICK mirrors!
I know that other people have probably brought this up somewhere else, but part of the reason that murderers have such a low recidivism rate is that many of them spend the bulk of the rest of their lives in prison.
Another reason is that many murders are heat-of-the-moment affairs that could conceivably affect anyone (see the first scenes in minority report). I find it hard to believe that many sex offenses were heat-of-the-moment, one-time deals driven by extenuating circumstances. They are behavior-driven rather than circumstance driven, ie, the average person wouldn't be driven to seek sexual gratification from children under any circumstances, while the average person could kill. I'm in the military- It's not a stretch for me to say that a schoolteacher could become a killer under the right conditions.
-b
Stories like this cause a tinge of nostalgia, perhaps, but to me they mean something more.
I am excited to think that someday while I am still alive, kids will see pay phones in old movies as we see hand-cranked automobiles or slide rules.
I am excited to guess what I will experience in thirty or forty years (technology-wise).
I can't think of a more interesting century or two to be a part of than the ones I live in. I'm sure that the pace will only accelerate.
Forgive my geeky schmaltz.
-b
Tesla died penniless and alone because he had terrible social skills. He was a genius, but he was not someone who could look past his own social deficiencies in order to put his ideas into motion.
I milled my own tesla turbine a few years ago, and the lesson i took from all that research was: God damn it, I wish this guy could have just licensed the thing so that I wouldn't have to turn out 3 iterations of this supposedly 'perfect' invention before I found reasonable efficencies.
His ideas died with him, leaving us in the lurch. How selfish does a genius have to be before you get pissed off at him?
-b
My best friend works 60 hours a week at a hospital. She makes something like $450 per paycheck. She has to pay $290 for medical insurance for herself and her son. Rent is $498/month (HRA apt, sliding scale based on income). She has a 3-year-old child. She has to pay for daycare and school.
Community service?
I paid her rent this month. You can take your community service and shove it.
-b
Where do you put the 380,000 square miles of refrigerators when the entire surface of the planet (including, apparently, the oceans) is covered in miraculous 100%-efficiency solar panels?
-b
I think that a laser would require LESS power, as the beam is collimated.
If, at 1.5 million miles, you need X broadcast energy for radio waves to reach your target (with your broadcast traveling as an expanding sphere), then with a laser you would need only enough energy to 'light up' a portion of the sky that represented your target.
So in order for Y energy to reach your target, it would look like this:
Radio- X energy
Laser- X/z energy, where z is a large number
I'm really tired, otherwise I'd post the real math.
-b
I think this is kind of funny coming from someone named Provigilman.
Anyways, many of the drugs you mentioned came to their respective markets AFTER being developed for other more serious issues; for example, I believe viagra was originally developed for heart conditions. Viagra is funding research into other diseases by being marketable. Hell, you don't even need to be sick to take the stuff! It's big pharma's wet dream.
-b
I think that might have to do with people's changing perception/valuation of computers. They have gone from gee-whiz calculator-type devices to the very core of our daily existence.
This crime may be the same as the old-timey prank, but you're right- we no longer see it as 'just a prank'. Breaking into a computer nowadays would be like breaking into someone's home or office instead of their calculator. Right? If I break into your house to watch TV, I still broke into your house and I should be punished. And then sued by the MPAA.
-b
If most murderers are never caught, then how can you say that murder carries a low rate of recidivism? Wouldn't that be an unknown?
Because depriving someone of their life is considered the worst offense to a victim- far worse than being raped or mugged- because it is irreversible and permanent. Even if the death is painless, the fact remains that you have deprived a person of _everything_. There are also effects on society as a whole after a murder.
Maybe the reason that recidivism is so low for murderers is because they spend most of their lives locked up after the initial act?
If we dealt out punishment in proportion to recidivism instead of damage done, then speeding tickets would land you in prison.
-b
>>The difference between us and you is when we seen something that was wrong we DID something about it!
So, I guess you're saying that you all just stopped doing anything in 1982? Because, if I understand you correctly, my generation doesn't do anything. Your generation does everything. So by your logic, if nothing has happened since 1982, it's because your generation hasn't done anything. Right? Or have you just forgotten what you were doing when YOU were 20-25? I suppose that while I was missing college to be in Iraq during that period, you were inventing the transistor, the digital watch, and pet rocks? Right? Because Your Generation was just so inherently smooth like that. Must have been the radiation from Trinity that turned you all into super-mutant-fantastic-forty-somethings, right? With Dan Rather as your twitchy but lovably poster boy?
Or maybe you're the product of your time, just like I am.
>>We stopped the Vietnam War...
Really? You mean it stopped when you pulled out and the country was overrun by the north vietnamese? You mean when you sort of, you know, lost the war?
Who *Started* the (american involvement in) the vietnam war? Grenada? Both Iraq wars? Surely not you. It must have been all those teenaged Gen-Xers and their Pepsi.
The paradox here is that, by your logic, the boomers did have at least one major foul-up: Me. If you were so great at everything you did, then why did you raise a generation of stupid slackers?
Why did you invent video games in the first place?
Why did you take advertising and consumerism to such morbid extremes?
Why did you not invest in cleaner energy?
Why did you resist so much when mandatory safety devices were introduced in cars?
Why did some boomers shoot other boomers on college campuses?
Urghhh! Cognitive dissonance! It's like brain freeze, but more depressing and/or humbling!
I realize that I'm not involved with your original conflict with OP, but for crying out loud, I'm sick of being a whipping boy for boomers who won't admit that they spent their younger years getting high and trying to have sex all over the place.
We're either your fault or we're not. If you say we're not, then how can you take credit for anything else you claim to have done? I would say that you can't have it both ways, but I see that your politicians have done a great job of doing just that. Fantastic. Yeah, Gen-X sure does suck.
-b
Intended or not, that was the best play on words in this thread
-b
See, the problem I have with the approach to weighted numbers is that one player cannot really increase his odds of winning enough to break even. I mean, let's say that knowing the odds of weighted numbers could conceivably help you raise your odds from 1 in 1,270,984 to 1 in 1,270,971. You would still go broke waiting to win big. And if everyone played just the weighted numbers, there would still only be an infinitesimally small increase in winners (and they would earn slightly less as a result). This, too, does not favor the individual gambler.
I'm saying that even WITH the weighted numbers, the outcome is still random enough to make for terrible odds.
-b
>>For the big jackpots the odds are typically in the ballpark of being hit by lightning 10 times.
Ok, I hear 'odds' like this thrown around all the time. I think it's time to question them.
Many people win big (to varying degrees) while playing the lottery. About once a week it seems that another working-class joe is on TV telling us what he's going to do with his money. Now, you're saying that this is as likely as being hit by lightning 10 times.
How many people have been hit by lightning 10 times? 9? 8?
Come on, people, this is slashdot.
Purported record holder for most lightning strikes: Roy C. Sullivan, a park ranger, at seven times.
National Center for Health Statistics on lightning fatalities in the United States from 1980 through 1995 show 1318 deaths attributed to lightning.
Being struck by lightning just once is common enough that there is an organization out there to support shock victim: http://www.lightning-strike.org/
I would say that a rough estimate would put the odds of being struck by lightning as about equal to winning it big in the lottery (by big, let's say more than a million dollars).
Someone out there with more patience should figure out the actual odds. But the odds are certainly much better than being struck by lightning ten times.
-b
Tobacco mosaic virus is used experimentally because so much is known about it. Think of it as the white lab rat of virus research.
-b
Guardsman speaking here:
They weren't empty at my airport. They still aren't.
I can't walk 20 feet at work without seeing a "Use of deadly force authorized" placard. Those aren't empty words.
-b
...and LIDAR systems."It's a LIDAR. It's pretty much my favorite detection and ranging system. It's like a lion and a RADAR mixed... bred for its skills in magic."
-b
Ah, the thought police! welcome to our discussion. You'll find you job of punishing certain thoughts exceedingly easy here, as there are exceedingly few of them to start with.
-b
Your idea re: contracts with the artists would be possible only in a perfect world, and if we lived in a perfect world we would not need this.
Also, this would infringe on privacy (something that some people still value).
Why not just be able to show the cd as proof after the fact of a legal notice? If the person bought the CD after the legal notice, what difference does that make? The artists still get their money.
And one more question (OT): Why would this mother get sued? If the video is used commercially, it is due to youtube making money from advertising. The mother makes nothing from it. So why don't the labels sue youtube for making money off of copyrighted content?
-b