Possible. I think unlikely, but certainly possible. By your comment I take you to mean that designing such a payload is difficult if not impossible regardless of your technology level. I would counter-argue that life itself shows how such a system is at least theoretically possible. All that it's really missing is a much more effective error detection and elimination system. Otherwise life obviously self replicates, is extremely hardy, and can store/move a vast amount of information, more than enough to build itself and several subsequent generations of more advanced machines plus the instructions needed to drive it all.
One of the great scientific minds of the modern era can say it far better than me.
"John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
We're talking hyper advanced self-replicating probes. The actual payload getting transferred could be on the order of grams. With a little ingenuity, we could launch a few grams to.05c right now if we really wanted to, it just wouldn't do any good because we don't have any way of making a useful payload that small.
Hi there. This is wrong. Just... incredibly wrong.
People had known the earth was round for hundreds if not thousands of years before Columbus. They had even done the math and experiments to figure out it's size (and gotten pretty close to being right about it). You can't actually navigate long distances on Earth without that knowledge. So what made Columbus special? He did the math wrong and thought the earth was 1/3 the size it actually is. That's also why he thought he was in the Indies in spite of having traveled a fraction the distance it actually would take.
The reason no one had ever tried to make the trip before wasn't that they thought they would fall off, it was that they thought they would run out of supplies and die. Which is exactly what would have happened to Columbus if there hadn't been a massive continent for him to run into.
mainly because the airship is a pretty damn big single point of failure
How so? I assume the envelope would be divided into separate cells and the pressures and temperatures involved mean that the actual pressure difference between inside and outside the envelope is basically nill. In other words, if something springs a leak you'll have quit a bit of time to get it repaired, your lifting gas will escape at the rate of diffusion.
they'll effectively be cooped up inside of the craft the same as if they're traversing open space.
Except the craft can be much, much more capable because the environment is much friendlier to human life than open space. Given enough power, you could even work towards pulling breathing (and lifting for that matter) gasses and water out of the atmosphere, not directly but by processing the CO2 and acids.
Is it though? Sanitation workers, farmers, and roofers have a death rates 2x higher than police officers in the US and we don't consider them to be particularly dangerous jobs.
Rogue is too random. It's at least theoretically possible to win any random game of Nethack (assuming default options of course... never could bring myself to write "elbereth" everywhere), many (most?) games of Rogue are unwinnable, there simply aren't enough decisions to be made to overcome the random number gods.
I still remember a GOP debate during the primaries. The moderator asked for a show of hands, who would approve torture to save american lives. The camera slowly pans past all the candidates with their hands up. And then there's John McCain on the end with what can only be described as a horrified expression. I felt sorry for the guy that day, there in front of him were some of his closest colleagues and presumably a few friends saying that the torture the Vietcong did to him was not only justifiable but in fact justified from the perpetrators point of view.
Not sure why it's funny, Hawking might be a brilliant theoretical physicist but that doesn't make him a brilliant artificial intelligence researcher any more than my competence at creating code makes me a classical painter.
The amount of development that has occurred in Africa over the last 50 years is staggering. Ignoring it to make a point is dishonest and smacks of prejudice at the very least.
Oh god I hate weighing in on the wrong side of this argument but I can't let this one lie. (For the record, I'm assuming based on what you are responding to that you're being sarcastic, if you're not... well, so it goes). Yes, natural selection can work in about 100 years. Natural selection can work in about 100s if the environment changed the right way. Do note, natural selection is only a single part of evolution, and for lasting, long term changes to occur requires, among other things, mutations. Those kinds of changes take dozens of generations. Simply changing the rate of expression of a gene in the gene pool is as simple as removing the genes you don't like, which can happen very, very rapidly.
In some states you can request the evidence. In WI for instance you can ask to see the radar gun (with read speed still displayed) as well as the certification information for said gun. Generally this is a bad idea, since it will take you from "maybe get out of this with a warning" into "they will throw everything they can at you even if they can't get you for speeding".
1) People who lose tools by accident 2) People who steal tools on purpose 3) People who don't lose or steal tools
You might prevent or reduce losses from category 1. You will create a minor inconvenience for people in category 2. And you will piss off everyone in category 3 who will feel like they're no longer trusted.
You can't just ramp up and down a nuclear power plant when the sun goes behind a cloud (exaggeration for affect). It takes a long time for a reactor to heat up and an even longer time for it to cool down. They are very poor when it comes to the use you are advocating.
Alternatively, what they're saying is that it's going to be really really hard and we should take every opportunity possible. Just because small changes aren't enough by themselves doesn't mean small changes don't have a positive impact.
Central to what they are saying is that it isn't enough to be cheaper than coal, you have to be so much cheaper than coal that power companies shutter their coal plants ahead of schedule. We are still building coal plants today, not all that many of them but a few. They will be in operation for 40-50 years according to the plans laid down when they were built.
Anything that touches your skin is disposed of or sterilized. The total service would include 2 minutes to your place, 15 minutes to get you loaded up (I've seen this take up to an hour when my neighbor was unconscious for unclear reasons), 2 minutes back, half hour of wiping down every surface you touched or might have touched, half hour of taking stock of what was used and restocking it, and a half hour of documenting all of that for the insurance costs. I don't think 2 hours is an unrealistic estimate.
And like I said, most days those guys are probably sitting around, getting 1 or two calls per day. Your bill covers that waiting around time also. If it didn't, they wouldn't be waiting around. And if they weren't waiting around, you wouldn't get treatment for half an hour or more when you need it.
Today: "There's no reason for such firms to be willing to cooperate with state agencies over child abuse but not over combating terrorism"
Tomorrow: "There's no reason for such firms to be willing to cooperate with state agencies over terrorism but not over combating organized crime"
[etc]
Soon enough: "There's no reason for such firms to be willing to cooperate with state agencies over petty theft but not over combating traffic violations"
$485 actually... just doesn't seem that bonkers to me, sorry. Two medical professionals, probably 2 hours when all is said and done. Any equipment they used on you must be either disposed of and replaced or sterilized. And you're not just paying for those 2 hours, you're paying for them to be sitting around waiting for you to need them. Now arguably that's an externality that perhaps shouldn't be shoveled onto each individual's bill, but changing that would require a very significant overhaul of the system.
Lots of men do, more of them probably should. Lots of women don't. Lot's more are done with that part of their lives. Also, in the US, the law requires only 6 weeks of leave, which doesn't have to be paid, and you aren't guaranteed the same position when you return. And men have the same rights to the same leave when their kids are born.
Slashdot Mirror
Possible. I think unlikely, but certainly possible. By your comment I take you to mean that designing such a payload is difficult if not impossible regardless of your technology level. I would counter-argue that life itself shows how such a system is at least theoretically possible. All that it's really missing is a much more effective error detection and elimination system. Otherwise life obviously self replicates, is extremely hardy, and can store/move a vast amount of information, more than enough to build itself and several subsequent generations of more advanced machines plus the instructions needed to drive it all.
This doesn't actually work unless your ok with all the worlds poor continuing to be poor.
One of the great scientific minds of the modern era can say it far better than me.
"John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
Isaac Asimov - The Relativity of Wrong
Damn straight! I'm sure none of those marmy smarmy researchers thought about nighttime!
We're talking hyper advanced self-replicating probes. The actual payload getting transferred could be on the order of grams. With a little ingenuity, we could launch a few grams to .05c right now if we really wanted to, it just wouldn't do any good because we don't have any way of making a useful payload that small.
Hi there. This is wrong. Just... incredibly wrong.
People had known the earth was round for hundreds if not thousands of years before Columbus. They had even done the math and experiments to figure out it's size (and gotten pretty close to being right about it). You can't actually navigate long distances on Earth without that knowledge. So what made Columbus special? He did the math wrong and thought the earth was 1/3 the size it actually is. That's also why he thought he was in the Indies in spite of having traveled a fraction the distance it actually would take.
The reason no one had ever tried to make the trip before wasn't that they thought they would fall off, it was that they thought they would run out of supplies and die. Which is exactly what would have happened to Columbus if there hadn't been a massive continent for him to run into.
mainly because the airship is a pretty damn big single point of failure
How so? I assume the envelope would be divided into separate cells and the pressures and temperatures involved mean that the actual pressure difference between inside and outside the envelope is basically nill. In other words, if something springs a leak you'll have quit a bit of time to get it repaired, your lifting gas will escape at the rate of diffusion.
they'll effectively be cooped up inside of the craft the same as if they're traversing open space.
Except the craft can be much, much more capable because the environment is much friendlier to human life than open space. Given enough power, you could even work towards pulling breathing (and lifting for that matter) gasses and water out of the atmosphere, not directly but by processing the CO2 and acids.
they do a dangerous job
Is it though? Sanitation workers, farmers, and roofers have a death rates 2x higher than police officers in the US and we don't consider them to be particularly dangerous jobs.
Rogue is too random. It's at least theoretically possible to win any random game of Nethack (assuming default options of course... never could bring myself to write "elbereth" everywhere), many (most?) games of Rogue are unwinnable, there simply aren't enough decisions to be made to overcome the random number gods.
I still remember a GOP debate during the primaries. The moderator asked for a show of hands, who would approve torture to save american lives. The camera slowly pans past all the candidates with their hands up. And then there's John McCain on the end with what can only be described as a horrified expression. I felt sorry for the guy that day, there in front of him were some of his closest colleagues and presumably a few friends saying that the torture the Vietcong did to him was not only justifiable but in fact justified from the perpetrators point of view.
So... Hawking is a Skroderider?
Not sure why it's funny, Hawking might be a brilliant theoretical physicist but that doesn't make him a brilliant artificial intelligence researcher any more than my competence at creating code makes me a classical painter.
The amount of development that has occurred in Africa over the last 50 years is staggering. Ignoring it to make a point is dishonest and smacks of prejudice at the very least.
Oh god I hate weighing in on the wrong side of this argument but I can't let this one lie. (For the record, I'm assuming based on what you are responding to that you're being sarcastic, if you're not... well, so it goes). Yes, natural selection can work in about 100 years. Natural selection can work in about 100s if the environment changed the right way. Do note, natural selection is only a single part of evolution, and for lasting, long term changes to occur requires, among other things, mutations. Those kinds of changes take dozens of generations. Simply changing the rate of expression of a gene in the gene pool is as simple as removing the genes you don't like, which can happen very, very rapidly.
In some states you can request the evidence. In WI for instance you can ask to see the radar gun (with read speed still displayed) as well as the certification information for said gun. Generally this is a bad idea, since it will take you from "maybe get out of this with a warning" into "they will throw everything they can at you even if they can't get you for speeding".
In theory yes, in practice it's unlikely to ever come up. Wear leveling does wonders, over provisioning does more on top.
If SSDs had come first you'd be saying the same thing about HDDs: Don't HDDs have fragile mechanical parts that fail randomly?
There's 3 types of people:
1) People who lose tools by accident
2) People who steal tools on purpose
3) People who don't lose or steal tools
You might prevent or reduce losses from category 1. You will create a minor inconvenience for people in category 2. And you will piss off everyone in category 3 who will feel like they're no longer trusted.
You can't just ramp up and down a nuclear power plant when the sun goes behind a cloud (exaggeration for affect). It takes a long time for a reactor to heat up and an even longer time for it to cool down. They are very poor when it comes to the use you are advocating.
Alternatively, what they're saying is that it's going to be really really hard and we should take every opportunity possible. Just because small changes aren't enough by themselves doesn't mean small changes don't have a positive impact.
Central to what they are saying is that it isn't enough to be cheaper than coal, you have to be so much cheaper than coal that power companies shutter their coal plants ahead of schedule. We are still building coal plants today, not all that many of them but a few. They will be in operation for 40-50 years according to the plans laid down when they were built.
Anything that touches your skin is disposed of or sterilized. The total service would include 2 minutes to your place, 15 minutes to get you loaded up (I've seen this take up to an hour when my neighbor was unconscious for unclear reasons), 2 minutes back, half hour of wiping down every surface you touched or might have touched, half hour of taking stock of what was used and restocking it, and a half hour of documenting all of that for the insurance costs. I don't think 2 hours is an unrealistic estimate.
And like I said, most days those guys are probably sitting around, getting 1 or two calls per day. Your bill covers that waiting around time also. If it didn't, they wouldn't be waiting around. And if they weren't waiting around, you wouldn't get treatment for half an hour or more when you need it.
Today:
"There's no reason for such firms to be willing to cooperate with state agencies over child abuse but not over combating terrorism"
Tomorrow:
"There's no reason for such firms to be willing to cooperate with state agencies over terrorism but not over combating organized crime"
[etc]
Soon enough:
"There's no reason for such firms to be willing to cooperate with state agencies over petty theft but not over combating traffic violations"
$485 actually... just doesn't seem that bonkers to me, sorry. Two medical professionals, probably 2 hours when all is said and done. Any equipment they used on you must be either disposed of and replaced or sterilized. And you're not just paying for those 2 hours, you're paying for them to be sitting around waiting for you to need them. Now arguably that's an externality that perhaps shouldn't be shoveled onto each individual's bill, but changing that would require a very significant overhaul of the system.
What need of a comet? Species are already dying off at rates not seen in hundreds of millions of years.
Lots of men do, more of them probably should. Lots of women don't. Lot's more are done with that part of their lives. Also, in the US, the law requires only 6 weeks of leave, which doesn't have to be paid, and you aren't guaranteed the same position when you return. And men have the same rights to the same leave when their kids are born.