What's amazing isn't that the planet is orbiting it's parent star, it's the technology to take a picture of the planet and be able to see it moving over time. Most extrasolar planets aren't detected this way, they usually use either Doppler shift or reduction in brightness to detect the existence of a planet and extrapolate from there. There's only a handful of examples of optically sighted extrasolar planets, and this is the first I've heard of having two pictures of the same system, both with the planet visible.
Not only is that 'cool' but it allows us to start cataloging planets that orbit their stars on a plane perpendicular to the direction we are viewing them. Previously, a planet had to conveniently be orbiting such that we were looking into the system edge on. The real excitement will come when we can view terrestrial planets this way with enough resolution to perform spectrographic analysis on the atmosphere and search for, among other things, sings of life.
So because open WiFi doesn't work in the most extreme situations, everyone should be legally obligated not to use it? Really? That is your argument? Open WiFi works just fine at my house (with a separate 'guest' SSID that doesn't grant network access obviously), and my place of business, and the college I attended, and the park downtown, and any number of other situations. There's absolutely no reason to ban operating an open WiFi connection except to make copyright content owners happy.
The sole purpose of Google's search site is to serve as a portal to their ad engine. For the obligatory car analogy: That's like complaining about not being able to order a Chevy pickup from the factory with a Honda engine. Whereas what Apple is trying to do would be like Chevy saying only their approved manufacturers get to make after market parts, which just happens exclude their biggest competitor.
Wasn't too long ago that Project Oxcart was declassified, that was pretty juicy for me. Served as the precursor to one of the coolest, most impressive planes ever built.
Haha, yeah, I'm sure MS if gloating about how Google copied them. On the other hand, the response to the 'Bing' flavored Google was overwhelmingly negative, which can't make them feel too good. Especially since a lot of the comments that I saw were along the lines of "If I wanted this crap I would go use Bing".
No, something survives and a new ecosystem eventually evolves. In the meantime (read: several million years) the survivors are in complete disarray as population numbers fluctuate wildly without the normal predator/prey relationships in effect, something which would not bode well for human civilization. Diversity is good, it is the damping that makes an otherwise unstable system become stable.
Honestly, 3D gaming actually sounds appealing in a way that 3D movies simply don't to me. Only problem? Everyone not playing will either have to leave the room or put up with the very, very annoying flickering coming from the TV. I don't see my wife being real thrilled about that, and I don't see any realistic way to remedy the situation.
Pilots are also a good final safety net though. I'm not saying that computers can't be trusted with flying a plane, obviously they can be and probably safer than a human pilot as well. But I find it unlikely that pilots will be out of the cockpit anytime soon, you just can't program a computer to handle every possible emergency. Would an autopilot have been able to control and land the Gimli Glider? Even assuming that designs were changed to ensure continuous power in that situation, I doubt the autopilot could have coped.
Today, we have the pilot's abilities being enhanced by the computers' abilities. The computer handles the boring stretches of the flight where human attention will waver. It alerts the pilot to things that need attention that they might otherwise miss. Synthetic vision systems are helping pilots see in situations of low visibilities. Computers can even (with the proper equipment on the ground) land a plane in conditions that would be suicide for a human pilot. Soon enough, we'll have a situation with the pilot being on hand to cover only the most unusual situations; but I doubt you'll see the pilot removed from the equation any time soon.
Even all that ignores the fact that the livelihood of every single person involved in fixing the situation is on the line. And I do mean everyone; having this leak be as bad as it is will hurt the entire oil industry for years to come. BP's stock is down 40% in the past 2 months, there's a moratorium on offshore drilling permits, and public relations for all the oil companies are in the toilet. You don't think that everyone at BP, from the engineers, to the drillers, to the CEO isn't worried about their job right now?
I wouldn't want to be one of their engineers right now, getting blamed for a problem you didn't create (the people in charge of the operation were the ones cutting corners), being told by every Joe Shmoe on the street that fixing the problem is so easy, all the while working 80+ hour weeks in an effort to save not only your job but quite possibly your entire company. But heh, no pressure right?
Any solution that does not prevent future blow outs from happening in the first place is far too expensive to justify
Huh? I was under the impression that many jurisdictions have rules stating that relief wells must be drilled in advance. Granted, you'd still have a blow out, and it would probably take a few days to get the necessary equipment and supplies in place to perform the bottom kill, but the leak would be pretty short lived compared to what we are seeing today. Also, Shell is, as I write this, building containment domes over many of their wells that would significantly reduce the problem as well. So it seems to me that there are economical ways to reduce the impact such an event would have. Oh, and that's even ignoring the fact that the spill was caused because BP was breaking the rules that are already in place and cutting corners to save money.
Sorry, I still feel it makes more sense for the city government to decide how big the police force should be, rather than have the police force decide their budget and then fund it by fining people for things that 99.9% of the population are guilty of, including the officers writing the tickets (including when they're on duty). What you're basically saying is that the police department is payed for by a tax on the stupid, that might make a large number of people feel warm and fuzzy, but in my opinion it's a horrible and unfair way to run a government office.
No, the real solution is to put the money generated by fines out of the hands of the police department that writes them; you'll see really quick what laws are important to the PD if they aren't seeing money coming in from writing traffic tickets. The only department that should be self funded is maybe the parking ticket guys, since there would be zero incentive to enforce those laws without it (and even that is ripe for abuse). Instead of pulling over people doing 5 mph over the speed limit you'd get them focused on pulling over people driving in ways that are actually dangerous, and of course you'd free up a lot of officers to patrol bad neighborhoods, respond to non-emergency calls (usually took about 90 minutes in Milwaukee at least), and do all the other things that the police should actually care about.
"A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
Sometimes Pratchet and authors like him are so busying trying to make a joke that they don't even realize that they've stumbled onto an essential truth of our society.
Yep, another hell-hole almost definitely. But, is that really a bad thing? It seems to me that outsourcing menial labor is the one international aid package that has a long term history of success. There's a lot of countries that are prosperous, developed nations today that were poor, developing nations when we started sending jobs there.
I'm betting that the next manufacturing center will be Africa, maybe even Somalia (no taxes! (Only joking obviously)). Guess what, anywhere that people can work for pennies on the dollar compared to the competition is going to be a tempting target for industry. And generally anywhere that people are willing for so little is by definition a place where very little is better than what they have now. Eventually, after enough money gets dropped into their economy pennies isn't enough anymore and we move on, but the factories, businesses, and trained workers remain and their economy is much better for it.
I'd love to see manufacturing jobs return to the US, but that isn't going to happen until automation is cheaper than developing nation manual labor. And when that does happen it's going to put the brakes on every developing country who relies on rich countries outsources to them for cheap labor.
Considering I could pull better than 51k with my 1x connection 5 years ago, I'm going to go with Clear was totally messed up. I'm on 3g now and while it's certainly not as fast as my wired connection at home, it is most definitely faster than a 56k modem.
The most infamous of the Red Flag Laws was enacted in Pennsylvania circa 1896, when Quaker legislators unanimously passed a bill through both houses of the state legislature, which would require all motorists piloting their "horseless carriages", upon chance encounters with cattle or livestock to (1) immediately stop the vehicle, (2) "immediately and as rapidly as possible... disassemble the automobile," and (3) "conceal the various components out of sight, behind nearby bushes" until equestrian or livestock is sufficiently pacified.
Wait... what did they think was going to happen? The horses were going to freak out upon seeing a carriage with no horse in front of it?
"You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they'll have no privacy... We're going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we'll have all the power and they'll have none."
Those are the directions given to the 'guards' the day before the experiment. Dehumanizing? Yes that is true. But it pales in comparison to the behavior that followed. Not allowing access to the bathroom facilities, blasting prisoners with fire extinguishers, confining prisoners to closets, denying the prisoners bedding... all well and above what they were instructed to do. In fact, even the person who gave the directions, who had no one above him giving him inhuman orders became oblivious to the behavior of the guards and the experiment was only ended when his girlfriend reminded him of how appalling it all was.
Also important" "Experimenters said that approximately one-third of the guards exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies. Most of the guards were upset when the experiment concluded early." "The experiment's result has been argued to demonstrate the impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing ideology and social and institutional support. It is also used to illustrate cognitive dissonance theory and the power of authority."
People wouldn't get it, if they would they'd already be pissed off just watching plain old regular COPS. It happened to be on when I turned on the TV one day and I left it on while I cooked supper. Well, for the first 10 minutes anyway, after that I turned it off in disgust. They followed some pedestrian for 3 blocks until he crossed the street int he middle of a block (not even jaywalking by most definitions) then demanded to see ID (which he didn't have), threatened to arrest him for not having ID, then did arrest him when he tried to walk away, and nearly arrested his mother when she came out to see what was going on. I haven't been that mad at my TV since my sister watched three straight episodes of "My Super Sweet 16" when I was visiting her.
Until then, it's one more example of the way in which cops are increasingly generally subpar people, recruited from the less educated and less successful demographics of society, eager to hold a gun, and drawn to the profession precisely because they feel powerless in other areas of their life as a result of their general lack of merit, and thus need to abuse citizens in order to compensate for this lack.
Perhaps this is true, but I doubt it. For my personal anecdote, the (admittedly few) police officers I've known personally have been intelligent and friendly people with no obvious mental or emotional issues.
The real problem can be summed up most effectively with three words: Stanford Prison Experiment. Put people in a position of physical and legal authority over others and they will abuse it. It doesn't matter who they are or where the authority is derived from, it appears to be built into basic human nature. See also the Rosenhal Experiment for a possible explanation as to why people in that kind of authority act that way, they see what they expect to see in their prisoners/patients/criminals.
Future devices could work just the opposite, where an outside electrical current could power the pump and alter how quickly ions are pumped into or out of a cell.
That has potentially far reaching effects assuming they can eventually find a way to install these things throughout the body (or even better just on targeted cells). You could install one of these devices on each cancer cell, for example, and power a pump that forced chemo drugs into the cells. That means that cancer cells would receive a much higher dose than non-cancer cells meaning less side effects and/or more effective treatments. Of course, there's a million problems to be solved before such a treatment could become reality, but the possibilities are endless.
We have the technology today, we could start designing, building, and testing a manned mars mission tomorrow. The risks would be high, the costs would be huge, and the time frame makes it politically difficult but we have the technology needed to start and by the time the start is done we'll have the technology to finish.
Because the risks are high, we will almost certainly set out to identify and quantify them before putting too much money into the program. One of the risks that we know very little about are the psychological problems of being trapped in a small, enclosed space with a handful of other individuals for a few years. Especially with such limited contact with the outside world and what is almost undoubtedly an boring, repetitive diet (you'd be surprised at how much something like that will drive people crazy after a while).
You're not alone. I was expecting software that allowed you to place lego bricks in 3d space and then hit print and have the object you designed built for you. Not that this isn't neat, just not nearly as neat as what I first imagined.
Well... "Two organisms that cannot produce fertile offspring are separate species" would probably be more accurate. Otherwise you would be lumping tigers and lions into the same species. And the reverse is not true, just because two species can produce fertile offspring doesn't mean they are the same species. For example, polar bears are able to breed with brown bears, false killer whales can create fertile offspring with bottle nosed dolphins; not to mention the countless plant hybrids that are possible.
Haha, religious people are fools for believing ridiculous creation myths. And if they instead distill the key messages out of their religion while eliminating the mythology they are cultists. Look at it this way, I highly doubt there was ever a boy killed and eaten by a wolf because the townspeople had learned to ignore his wolf cries. But that doesn't equate to the story being meaningless drivel, the story can still have meaning.
But the article states that this is basic human nature. In other words, this isn't anything new or unique to our culture. There's probably been people like you looking around and thinking "No one thinks anymore and it's only getting worse" for the past 20,000 years. If you need evidence, look at all the people who have been persecuted over the years for telling others that they're wrong about something. Hell, even Jesus was killed basically for challenging people's beliefs.
Slashdot Mirror
What's amazing isn't that the planet is orbiting it's parent star, it's the technology to take a picture of the planet and be able to see it moving over time. Most extrasolar planets aren't detected this way, they usually use either Doppler shift or reduction in brightness to detect the existence of a planet and extrapolate from there. There's only a handful of examples of optically sighted extrasolar planets, and this is the first I've heard of having two pictures of the same system, both with the planet visible.
Not only is that 'cool' but it allows us to start cataloging planets that orbit their stars on a plane perpendicular to the direction we are viewing them. Previously, a planet had to conveniently be orbiting such that we were looking into the system edge on. The real excitement will come when we can view terrestrial planets this way with enough resolution to perform spectrographic analysis on the atmosphere and search for, among other things, sings of life.
So because open WiFi doesn't work in the most extreme situations, everyone should be legally obligated not to use it? Really? That is your argument? Open WiFi works just fine at my house (with a separate 'guest' SSID that doesn't grant network access obviously), and my place of business, and the college I attended, and the park downtown, and any number of other situations. There's absolutely no reason to ban operating an open WiFi connection except to make copyright content owners happy.
The sole purpose of Google's search site is to serve as a portal to their ad engine. For the obligatory car analogy: That's like complaining about not being able to order a Chevy pickup from the factory with a Honda engine. Whereas what Apple is trying to do would be like Chevy saying only their approved manufacturers get to make after market parts, which just happens exclude their biggest competitor.
Wasn't too long ago that Project Oxcart was declassified, that was pretty juicy for me. Served as the precursor to one of the coolest, most impressive planes ever built.
Haha, yeah, I'm sure MS if gloating about how Google copied them. On the other hand, the response to the 'Bing' flavored Google was overwhelmingly negative, which can't make them feel too good. Especially since a lot of the comments that I saw were along the lines of "If I wanted this crap I would go use Bing".
No, something survives and a new ecosystem eventually evolves. In the meantime (read: several million years) the survivors are in complete disarray as population numbers fluctuate wildly without the normal predator/prey relationships in effect, something which would not bode well for human civilization. Diversity is good, it is the damping that makes an otherwise unstable system become stable.
Honestly, 3D gaming actually sounds appealing in a way that 3D movies simply don't to me. Only problem? Everyone not playing will either have to leave the room or put up with the very, very annoying flickering coming from the TV. I don't see my wife being real thrilled about that, and I don't see any realistic way to remedy the situation.
Pilots are also a good final safety net though. I'm not saying that computers can't be trusted with flying a plane, obviously they can be and probably safer than a human pilot as well. But I find it unlikely that pilots will be out of the cockpit anytime soon, you just can't program a computer to handle every possible emergency. Would an autopilot have been able to control and land the Gimli Glider? Even assuming that designs were changed to ensure continuous power in that situation, I doubt the autopilot could have coped.
Today, we have the pilot's abilities being enhanced by the computers' abilities. The computer handles the boring stretches of the flight where human attention will waver. It alerts the pilot to things that need attention that they might otherwise miss. Synthetic vision systems are helping pilots see in situations of low visibilities. Computers can even (with the proper equipment on the ground) land a plane in conditions that would be suicide for a human pilot. Soon enough, we'll have a situation with the pilot being on hand to cover only the most unusual situations; but I doubt you'll see the pilot removed from the equation any time soon.
Even all that ignores the fact that the livelihood of every single person involved in fixing the situation is on the line. And I do mean everyone; having this leak be as bad as it is will hurt the entire oil industry for years to come. BP's stock is down 40% in the past 2 months, there's a moratorium on offshore drilling permits, and public relations for all the oil companies are in the toilet. You don't think that everyone at BP, from the engineers, to the drillers, to the CEO isn't worried about their job right now?
I wouldn't want to be one of their engineers right now, getting blamed for a problem you didn't create (the people in charge of the operation were the ones cutting corners), being told by every Joe Shmoe on the street that fixing the problem is so easy, all the while working 80+ hour weeks in an effort to save not only your job but quite possibly your entire company. But heh, no pressure right?
Any solution that does not prevent future blow outs from happening in the first place is far too expensive to justify
Huh? I was under the impression that many jurisdictions have rules stating that relief wells must be drilled in advance. Granted, you'd still have a blow out, and it would probably take a few days to get the necessary equipment and supplies in place to perform the bottom kill, but the leak would be pretty short lived compared to what we are seeing today. Also, Shell is, as I write this, building containment domes over many of their wells that would significantly reduce the problem as well. So it seems to me that there are economical ways to reduce the impact such an event would have. Oh, and that's even ignoring the fact that the spill was caused because BP was breaking the rules that are already in place and cutting corners to save money.
Sorry, I still feel it makes more sense for the city government to decide how big the police force should be, rather than have the police force decide their budget and then fund it by fining people for things that 99.9% of the population are guilty of, including the officers writing the tickets (including when they're on duty). What you're basically saying is that the police department is payed for by a tax on the stupid, that might make a large number of people feel warm and fuzzy, but in my opinion it's a horrible and unfair way to run a government office.
No, the real solution is to put the money generated by fines out of the hands of the police department that writes them; you'll see really quick what laws are important to the PD if they aren't seeing money coming in from writing traffic tickets. The only department that should be self funded is maybe the parking ticket guys, since there would be zero incentive to enforce those laws without it (and even that is ripe for abuse). Instead of pulling over people doing 5 mph over the speed limit you'd get them focused on pulling over people driving in ways that are actually dangerous, and of course you'd free up a lot of officers to patrol bad neighborhoods, respond to non-emergency calls (usually took about 90 minutes in Milwaukee at least), and do all the other things that the police should actually care about.
Sam Vimes' Boot Theory of Economic Inequality:
"A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
Sometimes Pratchet and authors like him are so busying trying to make a joke that they don't even realize that they've stumbled onto an essential truth of our society.
Yep, another hell-hole almost definitely. But, is that really a bad thing? It seems to me that outsourcing menial labor is the one international aid package that has a long term history of success. There's a lot of countries that are prosperous, developed nations today that were poor, developing nations when we started sending jobs there.
I'm betting that the next manufacturing center will be Africa, maybe even Somalia (no taxes! (Only joking obviously)). Guess what, anywhere that people can work for pennies on the dollar compared to the competition is going to be a tempting target for industry. And generally anywhere that people are willing for so little is by definition a place where very little is better than what they have now. Eventually, after enough money gets dropped into their economy pennies isn't enough anymore and we move on, but the factories, businesses, and trained workers remain and their economy is much better for it.
I'd love to see manufacturing jobs return to the US, but that isn't going to happen until automation is cheaper than developing nation manual labor. And when that does happen it's going to put the brakes on every developing country who relies on rich countries outsources to them for cheap labor.
Considering I could pull better than 51k with my 1x connection 5 years ago, I'm going to go with Clear was totally messed up. I'm on 3g now and while it's certainly not as fast as my wired connection at home, it is most definitely faster than a 56k modem.
Choice quote:
The most infamous of the Red Flag Laws was enacted in Pennsylvania circa 1896, when Quaker legislators unanimously passed a bill through both houses of the state legislature, which would require all motorists piloting their "horseless carriages", upon chance encounters with cattle or livestock to (1) immediately stop the vehicle, (2) "immediately and as rapidly as possible... disassemble the automobile," and (3) "conceal the various components out of sight, behind nearby bushes" until equestrian or livestock is sufficiently pacified.
Wait... what did they think was going to happen? The horses were going to freak out upon seeing a carriage with no horse in front of it?
"You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they'll have no privacy... We're going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we'll have all the power and they'll have none."
Those are the directions given to the 'guards' the day before the experiment. Dehumanizing? Yes that is true. But it pales in comparison to the behavior that followed. Not allowing access to the bathroom facilities, blasting prisoners with fire extinguishers, confining prisoners to closets, denying the prisoners bedding... all well and above what they were instructed to do. In fact, even the person who gave the directions, who had no one above him giving him inhuman orders became oblivious to the behavior of the guards and the experiment was only ended when his girlfriend reminded him of how appalling it all was.
Also important" "Experimenters said that approximately one-third of the guards exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies. Most of the guards were upset when the experiment concluded early." "The experiment's result has been argued to demonstrate the impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing ideology and social and institutional support. It is also used to illustrate cognitive dissonance theory and the power of authority."
People wouldn't get it, if they would they'd already be pissed off just watching plain old regular COPS. It happened to be on when I turned on the TV one day and I left it on while I cooked supper. Well, for the first 10 minutes anyway, after that I turned it off in disgust. They followed some pedestrian for 3 blocks until he crossed the street int he middle of a block (not even jaywalking by most definitions) then demanded to see ID (which he didn't have), threatened to arrest him for not having ID, then did arrest him when he tried to walk away, and nearly arrested his mother when she came out to see what was going on. I haven't been that mad at my TV since my sister watched three straight episodes of "My Super Sweet 16" when I was visiting her.
Until then, it's one more example of the way in which cops are increasingly generally subpar people, recruited from the less educated and less successful demographics of society, eager to hold a gun, and drawn to the profession precisely because they feel powerless in other areas of their life as a result of their general lack of merit, and thus need to abuse citizens in order to compensate for this lack.
Perhaps this is true, but I doubt it. For my personal anecdote, the (admittedly few) police officers I've known personally have been intelligent and friendly people with no obvious mental or emotional issues.
The real problem can be summed up most effectively with three words: Stanford Prison Experiment. Put people in a position of physical and legal authority over others and they will abuse it. It doesn't matter who they are or where the authority is derived from, it appears to be built into basic human nature. See also the Rosenhal Experiment for a possible explanation as to why people in that kind of authority act that way, they see what they expect to see in their prisoners/patients/criminals.
Future devices could work just the opposite, where an outside electrical current could power the pump and alter how quickly ions are pumped into or out of a cell.
That has potentially far reaching effects assuming they can eventually find a way to install these things throughout the body (or even better just on targeted cells). You could install one of these devices on each cancer cell, for example, and power a pump that forced chemo drugs into the cells. That means that cancer cells would receive a much higher dose than non-cancer cells meaning less side effects and/or more effective treatments. Of course, there's a million problems to be solved before such a treatment could become reality, but the possibilities are endless.
We have the technology today, we could start designing, building, and testing a manned mars mission tomorrow. The risks would be high, the costs would be huge, and the time frame makes it politically difficult but we have the technology needed to start and by the time the start is done we'll have the technology to finish.
Because the risks are high, we will almost certainly set out to identify and quantify them before putting too much money into the program. One of the risks that we know very little about are the psychological problems of being trapped in a small, enclosed space with a handful of other individuals for a few years. Especially with such limited contact with the outside world and what is almost undoubtedly an boring, repetitive diet (you'd be surprised at how much something like that will drive people crazy after a while).
You're not alone. I was expecting software that allowed you to place lego bricks in 3d space and then hit print and have the object you designed built for you. Not that this isn't neat, just not nearly as neat as what I first imagined.
Well... "Two organisms that cannot produce fertile offspring are separate species" would probably be more accurate. Otherwise you would be lumping tigers and lions into the same species. And the reverse is not true, just because two species can produce fertile offspring doesn't mean they are the same species. For example, polar bears are able to breed with brown bears, false killer whales can create fertile offspring with bottle nosed dolphins; not to mention the countless plant hybrids that are possible.
Haha, religious people are fools for believing ridiculous creation myths. And if they instead distill the key messages out of their religion while eliminating the mythology they are cultists. Look at it this way, I highly doubt there was ever a boy killed and eaten by a wolf because the townspeople had learned to ignore his wolf cries. But that doesn't equate to the story being meaningless drivel, the story can still have meaning.
But the article states that this is basic human nature. In other words, this isn't anything new or unique to our culture. There's probably been people like you looking around and thinking "No one thinks anymore and it's only getting worse" for the past 20,000 years. If you need evidence, look at all the people who have been persecuted over the years for telling others that they're wrong about something. Hell, even Jesus was killed basically for challenging people's beliefs.