The BBC article actually said that 250 Myear-old bacteria meant that it could be theoretically possible that bacteria from extraterrestrial (or even extra-solar/galactic) sources to survive the trip to earth, not that anybody thought that these bacilli were extraterrestrial. This would lend support to eople that life originated off-Earth and 'migrated' here.
Certainly JFK benefittd from being a Kennedy, but it's probably much less than than Bush2 has. JFK's dad was a senator and ambassador to Britain who didn't think we should get involved with WW2 (at first anyway), while Bush1 was Prez during a nice little TV war. What do you think is better to the average Joe?
Also, don't forget Bush2 used his family political connections to get an Air National Guard commision during a war his daddy supported, JFK used his to get a Navy combat command and nearly died because of it.
Do you think that GW ('There ought to be limits on freedom') Bush would be for or against record-labelling? The only reason Bush mentioned the 'Net and not music is because nobody has made much of a stink over music lately, except for gays and womans-rights groups, neither of whom GWB gives a rat's ass about.
And about the 'less government' line, listen up: No politician wants less government, they just want more government in different areas. Some pols think the government shouldn't bother with making sure corps don't dump poison into drinking water but should be able to seize your property without a trial, read your mail, tap your phones and execute retarded kids. Some pols think the goverment should break up monopolies, punish polluters, and make sure your workplace is safe, but not hold individuals responsible for their actions until they've screwed up a few times. You might prefer one over the other, but don't spew that 'X wants less government' crap, because it just shows you're not paying attention.
How about this - In order to own a gun, or even just an 'assualt weapon' of whatever defintion, you have to join the militia. You'd get the weekends and the the summer 'vacation' training, a check from Uncle Sam and the joy of filling sandbags the next time there's a flood (or whatever natural/man-made disaster strikes your area). The training would probably reduce the number of accidental deaths significantly, as well as take away some of the 'Look at mah new toy Billy Joe' factor, turning guns into things you need for work, not symbols of manhood. The militia requirement would also make it easier to guns away from people who were too stupid and/or immature to be trusted with them. ('What's that, too hungover to show up for drill? No problem, the rest of the platoon will swing by and pick up your H&K MP5 and the L1A1, you can keep the squirrel rifle.') The militia/Guard seems like they have problems with getting and retaining people and this would help with that, especially in getting people who have obscure technical skills that can get much better $$ without marching, etc.
Genetic testing can determine whether or not a gene is present, however, the difference between two copies of a recessive gene being present (victim of a disease) and one copy (asymptomatic carrier) is likely to be lost in the data, particularly using the kinds of rapid assays that are common in the large commercial testing labs, versus smaller academic labs where volume/speed isn't such a concern. Basically, the little well will change color/floresce(sp)/whatever if the test is positive, or not if it's negative. Think of an over-the-counter pregnancy test and you'll not be too far off.
You're correct in saying that these diseases affect only a small part of the population, but the whole point of insurance is to spread the costs of risks over as many people as possible. Let's say it costs $100,000 per year to treat someone with genetic disease X, and 10,000 people in the US have it. That's $1,000,000,000 per year in costs for those people. Insurance companies have, let's say 100,000,000 policyholders in the US. That works out to $10 per year per policyholder, versus $100,000 per year per victim. Of course I've ignored tons of factors here, such as insurance companies only covering y% of the cost of anything, caps for how much they'll pay out per procedure (try to find a doctor/dentist that charges what your insurance company considers 'reasonable and customary'), per year and per lifetime, which would cut the amount covered, so we're probably down to $5 or so.
It's also important to remember that there is absolutely no way to not get one of these diseases if it's locked into your genome. Should these people be punished for something they have no control over? Now think about the things that the vast majority of health insurance payouts are for and how controllable they are. How much does the total of health costs for heart attacks by people who are sedentary and/or overeat and/or smoke, all of which are much more controllable than Huntingdon's Chorea, cost policyholders? Now add in people who get cancer from smoking, liver disease from drinking, broken necks from driving stupid and how does that $5 per year compare? Funny though, you never hear about people who are 30 lbs. overwieght smokers getting rejected for coverage. Why? Because there's be a generalized revolt by voters against this sort of heavy-handed activity by insurance companies. But hey, who cares about it if a disease is rare enough that Joe Bagodonuts doesn't know anyone with it, right?
Back in the early 90's my Amiga got stolen (along with my clothes, bed and cat)
I realize another poster has said this but... Someone stole your cat, clothes and bed? The old people are right - things are going to hell in a handbasket. I imagine you were moving and they snagged the truck w/ the cat et al. inside, or they were the greatest theif ever ('I stole the bed right out from under the victim! The clothes right off their back! The cat right out of the sunbeam! Well, okay, the last was no big deal...'). Sorry about your Amiga, cat, bed and clothes.
By the age of 18, they had also taught me how to launch tactical nuclear missiles...Yet I still couldn't legally drink. Now is that a bone-head idea or what?
Maybe they were concerned that the drinking would affect your aim?
ObHeinleinParaphrase: Strong drink can make you launch tactical nuclear weapons at tax collectors. And miss.
I guess I wasn't too clear, but 'good enough not to get in the way of the ideas', is just about exactly what I was looking for. I also agree with about cutting Niven/Clarke/Asimov/Brin/Bear/etc. some slack because of their 'Real Big Wow'-factor. And I also really appreciate not having to cut Stephenson/Sterling/Gibson/Ellison (especially Ellison!!) any slack for anything.
This book sounds interesting, can anyone give a 2nd opinion on the writing? A book that starts off 'indifferent', probably wont get finished with my stack of 'To Be Read Soon' books as high as it is. Are there any good anthologies, since I can go through a short story collection in less time than a novel.
At the company I work for the problem is predominantly communication-related. I've got about 200 users, lots of whom are independent contractors and their assistants. The contractors go through assistants with astonishing speed (Note: If you've had 4 people for one position in 6 weeks, you may want to examine their working conditions.), but don't feel bound by any company policies regarding notifying anybody about changes. Usually, I find out there's somebody new when they call and complain about voice(or e)-mail problems. However, the worst problem I've had was when I got a call from the manager at a remote site called and said Employee A was let go and took it pretty hard, so could I please change her passwords etc. Sure, no problem. The next week the boss calls again and says they are having lots or problems with lost database info. I restore most of it from the backup tapes, but not all. About a month later I'm over in that office to replace a bad NIC and ask for Employee B (who did most of the work in the database), to commiserate about the database problems. I find out she got let go at the same time that Employee A did, but no one thought it was an issue since she didn't leave in a huff, so why should they tell me? They just left her logged in all the time, so they could learn how to use the DB. None of them could understand why I was so cranky at them.
Windows machines with so much stuff loaded in memory are even more unstable. The first thing I do when they come screaming for help is get rid of all this junk.
I love users who load their machines with crap downlaoded from the 'Net. When their machine crashes/hangs/turns to molasses, I can fix it by saying 'Well, you're working now, but I'm pretty sure it was caused by the cute little kitty and the cute teddy bear fighting for resources, so if it happens again, I'll just go ahead and uninstall them.' I never have to reboot their machines again.
That might be pretty hard to do. IIRC, DNA needs a handful of enzymes and water for replication, which would make it difficult to do and still have a useful conductor. Of course it would be pretty easy to have a box that makes new wire sitting on your desktop - 'Hey, we need another 20 feet of cable', 'No prob, let me replicate another 47 kajillion base pair and we're good to go.'
What would really be interesting would be to see a Batman movie filmed in black and white.
Old-school B&W (not 'Film it in color and develop it in grayscale like Pleasantville was)would be the perfect way to go, especially considering the noirish 'Year One' story. It'll never happen though, WB wouldn't pay big bucks for a movie that x% of people wouldn't see just 'cuz it wasn't in color.
What TPTB should do is have many directors work on many short Batfilms and show them all on HBO. Give them lots of freedom, but not much budget and see what happens. I'd get HBO just for 'Martin Scorsese's Batman', or a 'Blair Witch'-style Batman from the POV of a street criminal.
I don't think that microgravity would make any difference, since the mass of the disk would be the same even if the weight was less. Hmmm, that would imply that the spin times would be the same on Jupiter as well, so I could be way off base on that. The astronauts always seem to be struggling with the larger pieces of equipment, but they are able to move them.
Anybody who remembers more of Physics I than I do have an answer?
I don't know about affecting the Earth's orbit, but ISTR reading something in Discover about the Earth's rotation slowing a very small amount because of dams (and the pools of water they are associated with) near the equator. Apparently, the dams have shifted the Earth's mass around a little, moving more near the equator, causing the rotation to slow, similar to how a spinning ice skater slows when they extend their arms.
Of course, I can't find a reference to this at Discover.com, but that just means that the conspiracy to make me think I'm going senile is back at work.
A computer is just a calculating device, ultimately, so the day the abacus was invented, that problem had already been solved. Everything else was a mere matter of scalability.
How is going from an abacus to a computer just a question of 'scalability', while going from existing cable designs/materials to much-improved futuristic ones an impossibility? If 'workable theories' are all that is needed to get credit for a series of inventions (as you imply for the Ancient Greeks - 'on Robotics, Hydrodynamics, Steam & Rocket propulsion, etc.'), then I think we already should get the credit for
a space elevator.
Lastly, it's illegal. If the elevator or cable travel within 10 miles of any other national border, that nation is entitled to claim trespass on their national territory, up to and including shooting down the offending object.
Aside from the detail that the '10 miles from the border' rule applies only over bodies of water and cannot affect another country's border, the base unit, cable, elevator and asteroid 'anchor' will be in a line perpendicular to the surface of the Earth. It won't be swinging back and forth over the base country's borders and into its neighbors airspace. So it would not be illegal.
It's impossible. The tether will have to be flexible, or it'll snap. (Remember, s = d/t, and the circumference of low-orbit is quite a bit greater than that on the surface.) Even then, the stress will be fantastic.
Hey, Thanks! This explains why when I was a kid the wheels on my trike would always come apart! I'd get pedalling so fast that the outer edge of the wheel would explode away from the axle. Little did I realize that it was because the circumference at the outer edge of the wheel was so much greater than at the axle, therefore the outer edge had to spin much faster than the axle it was attached to. Now I see that those rigid metal spokes should be replaced with something more flexible like Twizzlers. Fresh ones, though, not the ones that have been in that open bag in my glove box for a couple months. Likewise, we should be ready for the Earth to break up from the stresses caused by the equator rotating so much faster than the poles. Bye-bye Scandinavia!
If you don't think the materials science people are capable of creating materials strong enough to work, that's certainly a valid point, but there's nothing inherently impossible about different parts of the same object rotating at different speeds - in fact, it's basically required for anything of any respectable size, be a planet, Frisbee, or trike wheel.
I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure Friday came out when I was in high school, which would be in the mid-80's. A quick check at alibris shows an unread, signed, first printing edition for the low, low price of $492. Friday is probably my favorite late-era RAH novel, but he was using other people's ideas for some of the BG.
IIRC, the axial tilt of the Earth doesn't flip-flop with the seasons. If the Earth is tilted to the 'Left' in June with the sun to the 'Left', it's still tilted 'Left' in December, but the sun is now on the 'Right'.
Slashdot Mirror
The BBC article actually said that 250 Myear-old bacteria meant that it could be theoretically possible that bacteria from extraterrestrial (or even extra-solar/galactic) sources to survive the trip to earth, not that anybody thought that these bacilli were extraterrestrial. This would lend support to eople that life originated off-Earth and 'migrated' here.
Certainly JFK benefittd from being a Kennedy, but it's probably much less than than Bush2 has. JFK's dad was a senator and ambassador to Britain who didn't think we should get involved with WW2 (at first anyway), while Bush1 was Prez during a nice little TV war. What do you think is better to the average Joe?
Also, don't forget Bush2 used his family political connections to get an Air National Guard commision during a war his daddy supported, JFK used his to get a Navy combat command and nearly died because of it.
Do you think that GW ('There ought to be limits on freedom') Bush would be for or against record-labelling? The only reason Bush mentioned the 'Net and not music is because nobody has made much of a stink over music lately, except for gays and womans-rights groups, neither of whom GWB gives a rat's ass about.
And about the 'less government' line, listen up: No politician wants less government, they just want more government in different areas. Some pols think the government shouldn't bother with making sure corps don't dump poison into drinking water but should be able to seize your property without a trial, read your mail, tap your phones and execute retarded kids. Some pols think the goverment should break up monopolies, punish polluters, and make sure your workplace is safe, but not hold individuals responsible for their actions until they've screwed up a few times. You might prefer one over the other, but don't spew that 'X wants less government' crap, because it just shows you're not paying attention.
How about this - In order to own a gun, or even just an 'assualt weapon' of whatever defintion, you have to join the militia. You'd get the weekends and the the summer 'vacation' training, a check from Uncle Sam and the joy of filling sandbags the next time there's a flood (or whatever natural/man-made disaster strikes your area). The training would probably reduce the number of accidental deaths significantly, as well as take away some of the 'Look at mah new toy Billy Joe' factor, turning guns into things you need for work, not symbols of manhood. The militia requirement would also make it easier to guns away from people who were too stupid and/or immature to be trusted with them. ('What's that, too hungover to show up for drill? No problem, the rest of the platoon will swing by and pick up your H&K MP5 and the L1A1, you can keep the squirrel rifle.')
The militia/Guard seems like they have problems with getting and retaining people and this would help with that, especially in getting people who have obscure technical skills that can get much better $$ without marching, etc.
Genetic testing can determine whether or not a gene is present, however, the difference between two copies of a recessive gene being present (victim of a disease) and one copy (asymptomatic carrier) is likely to be lost in the data, particularly using the kinds of rapid assays that are common in the large commercial testing labs, versus smaller academic labs where volume/speed isn't such a concern. Basically, the little well will change color/floresce(sp)/whatever if the test is positive, or not if it's negative. Think of an over-the-counter pregnancy test and you'll not be too far off.
You're correct in saying that these diseases affect only a small part of the population, but the whole point of insurance is to spread the costs of risks over as many people as possible. Let's say it costs $100,000 per year to treat someone with genetic disease X, and 10,000 people in the US have it. That's $1,000,000,000 per year in costs for those people. Insurance companies have, let's say 100,000,000 policyholders in the US. That works out to $10 per year per policyholder, versus $100,000 per year per victim. Of course I've ignored tons of factors here, such as insurance companies only covering y% of the cost of anything, caps for how much they'll pay out per procedure (try to find a doctor/dentist that charges what your insurance company considers 'reasonable and customary'), per year and per lifetime, which would cut the amount covered, so we're probably down to $5 or so.
It's also important to remember that there is absolutely no way to not get one of these diseases if it's locked into your genome. Should these people be punished for something they have no control over? Now think about the things that the vast majority of health insurance payouts are for and how controllable they are. How much does the total of health costs for heart attacks by people who are sedentary and/or overeat and/or smoke, all of which are much more controllable than Huntingdon's Chorea, cost policyholders? Now add in people who get cancer from smoking, liver disease from drinking, broken necks from driving stupid and how does that $5 per year compare? Funny though, you never hear about people who are 30 lbs. overwieght smokers getting rejected for coverage. Why? Because there's be a generalized revolt by voters against this sort of heavy-handed activity by insurance companies. But hey, who cares about it if a disease is rare enough that Joe Bagodonuts doesn't know anyone with it, right?
Back in the early 90's my Amiga got stolen (along with my clothes, bed and cat)
I realize another poster has said this but... Someone stole your cat, clothes and bed? The old people are right - things are going to hell in a handbasket. I imagine you were moving and they snagged the truck w/ the cat et al. inside, or they were the greatest theif ever ('I stole the bed right out from under the victim! The clothes right off their back! The cat right out of the sunbeam! Well, okay, the last was no big deal...'). Sorry about your Amiga, cat, bed and clothes.
They looked deep inside my soul and assigned me a number based on the order the I joined in.
By the age of 18, they had also taught me how to launch tactical nuclear missiles...Yet I still couldn't legally drink. Now is that a bone-head idea or what?
Maybe they were concerned that the drinking would affect your aim?
ObHeinleinParaphrase: Strong drink can make you launch tactical nuclear weapons at tax collectors. And miss.
It's a fast, fun GOOD read.
Gotta love those short reviews. Thanks, I'll be checking it out soon.
I guess I wasn't too clear, but 'good enough not to get in the way of the ideas', is just about exactly what I was looking for. I also agree with about cutting Niven/Clarke/Asimov/Brin/Bear/etc. some slack because of their 'Real Big Wow'-factor. And I also really appreciate not having to cut Stephenson/Sterling/Gibson/Ellison (especially Ellison!!) any slack for anything.
This book sounds interesting, can anyone give a 2nd opinion on the writing? A book that starts off 'indifferent', probably wont get finished with my stack of 'To Be Read Soon' books as high as it is. Are there any good anthologies, since I can go through a short story collection in less time than a novel.
(OT: A possible 1P?)
At the company I work for the problem is predominantly communication-related. I've got about 200 users, lots of whom are independent contractors and their assistants. The contractors go through assistants with astonishing speed (Note: If you've had 4 people for one position in 6 weeks, you may want to examine their working conditions.), but don't feel bound by any company policies regarding notifying anybody about changes. Usually, I find out there's somebody new when they call and complain about voice(or e)-mail problems.
However, the worst problem I've had was when I got a call from the manager at a remote site called and said Employee A was let go and took it pretty hard, so could I please change her passwords etc. Sure, no problem. The next week the boss calls again and says they are having lots or problems with lost database info. I restore most of it from the backup tapes, but not all. About a month later I'm over in that office to replace a bad NIC and ask for Employee B (who did most of the work in the database), to commiserate about the database problems. I find out she got let go at the same time that Employee A did, but no one thought it was an issue since she didn't leave in a huff, so why should they tell me? They just left her logged in all the time, so they could learn how to use the DB. None of them could understand why I was so cranky at them.
Windows machines with so much stuff loaded in memory are even more unstable. The first thing I do when they come screaming for help is get rid of all this junk.
I love users who load their machines with crap downlaoded from the 'Net. When their machine crashes/hangs/turns to molasses, I can fix it by saying 'Well, you're working now, but I'm pretty sure it was caused by the cute little kitty and the cute teddy bear fighting for resources, so if it happens again, I'll just go ahead and uninstall them.' I never have to reboot their machines again.
That might be pretty hard to do. IIRC, DNA needs a handful of enzymes and water for replication, which would make it difficult to do and still have a useful conductor. Of course it would be pretty easy to have a box that makes new wire sitting on your desktop - 'Hey, we need another 20 feet of cable', 'No prob, let me replicate another 47 kajillion base pair and we're good to go.'
What would really be interesting would be to see a Batman movie filmed in black and white.
Old-school B&W (not 'Film it in color and develop it in grayscale like Pleasantville was)would be the perfect way to go, especially considering the noirish 'Year One' story. It'll never happen though, WB wouldn't pay big bucks for a movie that x% of people wouldn't see just 'cuz it wasn't in color.
What TPTB should do is have many directors work on many short Batfilms and show them all on HBO. Give them lots of freedom, but not much budget and see what happens. I'd get HBO just for 'Martin Scorsese's Batman', or a 'Blair Witch'-style Batman from the POV of a street criminal.
Damn, I wish I would have caught that one! :D
I don't think that microgravity would make any difference, since the mass of the disk would be the same even if the weight was less. Hmmm, that would imply that the spin times would be the same on Jupiter as well, so I could be way off base on that. The astronauts always seem to be struggling with the larger pieces of equipment, but they are able to move them.
Anybody who remembers more of Physics I than I do have an answer?
Hmmm, maybe he doing some research for some of his time-travel stories?
I don't know about affecting the Earth's orbit, but ISTR reading something in Discover about the Earth's rotation slowing a very small amount because of dams (and the pools of water they are associated with) near the equator. Apparently, the dams have shifted the Earth's mass around a little, moving more near the equator, causing the rotation to slow, similar to how a spinning ice skater slows when they extend their arms.
Of course, I can't find a reference to this at Discover.com, but that just means that the conspiracy to make me think I'm going senile is back at work.
A computer is just a calculating device, ultimately, so the day the abacus was invented, that problem had already been solved. Everything else was a mere matter of scalability.
How is going from an abacus to a computer just a question of 'scalability', while going from existing cable designs/materials to much-improved futuristic ones an impossibility? If 'workable theories' are all that is needed to get credit for a series of inventions (as you imply for the Ancient Greeks - 'on Robotics, Hydrodynamics, Steam & Rocket propulsion, etc.'), then I think we already should get the credit for a space elevator.
Lastly, it's illegal. If the elevator or cable travel within 10 miles of any other national border, that nation is entitled to claim trespass on their national territory, up to and including shooting down the offending object.
Aside from the detail that the '10 miles from the border' rule applies only over bodies of water and cannot affect another country's border, the base unit, cable, elevator and asteroid 'anchor' will be in a line perpendicular to the surface of the Earth. It won't be swinging back and forth over the base country's borders and into its neighbors airspace. So it would not be illegal.
It's impossible. The tether will have to be flexible, or it'll snap. (Remember, s = d/t, and the circumference of low-orbit is quite a bit greater than that on the surface.) Even then, the stress will be fantastic.
Hey, Thanks! This explains why when I was a kid the wheels on my trike would always come apart! I'd get pedalling so fast that the outer edge of the wheel would explode away from the axle. Little did I realize that it was because the circumference at the outer edge of the wheel was so much greater than at the axle, therefore the outer edge had to spin much faster than the axle it was attached to. Now I see that those rigid metal spokes should be replaced with something more flexible like Twizzlers. Fresh ones, though, not the ones that have been in that open bag in my glove box for a couple months. Likewise, we should be ready for the Earth to break up from the stresses caused by the equator rotating so much faster than the poles. Bye-bye Scandinavia!
If you don't think the materials science people are capable of creating materials strong enough to work, that's certainly a valid point, but there's nothing inherently impossible about different parts of the same object rotating at different speeds - in fact, it's basically required for anything of any respectable size, be a planet, Frisbee, or trike wheel.
I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure Friday came out when I was in high school, which would be in the mid-80's. A quick check at alibris shows an unread, signed, first printing edition for the low, low price of $492. Friday is probably my favorite late-era RAH novel, but he was using other people's ideas for some of the BG.
Hmm, I wonder how long it would take for the Mile High Club to find the elevator.
They'll probably have to start some new, um, 'qualifications' - LEO, GEO, etc. Everybody likes TLAs, you know.
IIRC, the axial tilt of the Earth doesn't flip-flop with the seasons. If the Earth is tilted to the 'Left' in June with the sun to the 'Left', it's still tilted 'Left' in December, but the sun is now on the 'Right'.