And, yes, it's utterly pointless. Just like football, the opera, TV, movies,. poetry, 99.99% of the content of the internet, music...
I think that you can learn more lessons from trying to keep a rocket on its wheels than from football or most TV shows... which makes it (imho) much less pointless. In fact, I think that if that rocket car thing wouldn't be launched in a frickin' desert, it would attract more people than football too!
Interestingly, going at a fast trot/gallop on a horse still feels frighteningly fast although it's only about 30mph, which in a car feels like you're barely moving.
Try to do that in a Lada or a Trabant, and you will definitely get the horse-like experience at 30 already.
I'm sorry, but if you're trying to garner sympathy for workers being displaced by technology, you're going to have to do better than lawyers.
Lawyers are just overhead costs: they don't produce anything, but you need a few around to keep everything running... But if you can safely reduce the costs of overhead, that's supposed to be a good thing.
The day that engineers can be replaced by computers we shall talk again. Until then, I just advise law-students to choose a new study while they can.
Should just DHL it to the Iranian embassy or even overseas to China or something.
Good idea: confirm to the FBI what they already suspected. LOL
The guy was being monitored... in the FBI's computers, they had his name attached to that gadget. Sending it anywhere other than the police or the FBI would only increase the suspicion, even if he is innocent.
Here's a little advice: if you live in a police-state, don't mess with the police, unless you intend to completely overthrow the system.
The FBI wouldn't be tracking him if he was actually "a 20 year old community college student who has never done anything [wrong]", as the article says. Maybe he's Ahmadinejad's nephew or something. Can we have some actual reporting?
The most important thing is that you NEVER question the agencies, the government or the police. Not only is it unthinkable that their complete policy is wrong, even small mistakes are impossible.
How much of a pollution footprint do these generate *during production*?
Whenever something green comes out, everybody is ready to fire their critical questions. Whenever something made of oil and animal skin, looking identical, everybody goes: "Oh well, we know it pollutes, but we don't really care how much it pollutes. We know it's made in poor countries by kids, but I don't really care how bad their situation is".
But when it's claimed to be made green and sustainable - oh boy, then it'd better be perfect, otherwise we'll bury it under hypocritical comments!
Not to mention all the historical plays, such as Anthony and Cleopatra, which are obviously copied from ancient Roman/Greek/Egyptian descriptions.
But I guess that's still acceptable - as we can see in The King's Speech. But as soon as one of the big industry become the owner of a story, it's theirs to keep;)
Laptop manufacturers (yes, all of them) want to make disposable machines. Not only is it cheaper to make them that way, it encourages users to buy new rather than upgrade.
In the past, computer makers had to cater to the geek market, and the geeks wanted to be able to tinker. Although the Slashdot crowd refuses to accept it, the geek market is tiny relative to the mass market.
You must mistake the laptop market with the Apple market, and users by Apple-customers.
Almost all laptop users understand that they at some point would want a bigger harddrive, but don't necessarily need a new screen. And that would actually convince people to upgrade some hardware while they would never buy a new laptop (not yet), which means some people will see a business-model in this idea.
How is this informative if we do not know if we need to be worried or not? Please let us know if we need to start worrying or not, just like in this post earlier on slashdot.
I agree. But according to all the media, there are so many things to worry about that I propose that from now on, we only get the Factor of Cumulative Worries (FCW). The news should simply give us a level of worriedness - it can be in 5 simple colors so that infants also understand it - ranging from green to red. "Today it's level Red! We're gonna die! Tomorrow, we expect a mild level Yellow. It will be green over the weekend, but don't cheer because on Monday we expect another Red!"
Back to your question: It's government policy that it's probably safer to worry. So, yes, you should be worried. Just in case.
The whole point of the death ray is to be able to adjust the focus point. The Mythbusters tried to set a boat on fire... which was assumed to be an enemy boat passing along the coast. You can't reasonably expect the enemy boats to sail exactly at the focus point of your death ray... or to either come closer or go further away in case they are not at the focus point of your death ray.
This 19-year-old hasn't made the focus point adjustable... so you can't set a moving target at a variable distance on fire with it. Any dish shaped thing with mirrors has a focus point - especially satellite dishes - so this isn't exactly rocket science.
How are we going to rid the world of ISLAM? These peopel make me despair, they won't be happy until they convert or kill us all. There isn't a country in the world that hasn't suffered from this religion of hate
You make me despair. How are we going to get rid of the STUPID people who, without blinking, generalize about a billion people? There isn't a country in the world that hasn't suffered from this racist stupidity.
No... science is being *questioned* and that's a Good Thing. Now, what we need is people who can answer the questions with supporting evidence, and an explanation that helps people see that Science.NE. Religion, and neither poses a threat to the other. Science doesn't answer religious questions, and religion doesn't answer science questions. Period. It's only when we "cross the streams", and try to make one discipline answer the other's problems that we get into trouble.
You're wrong in your assumption that smart people with convincing evidence can convert religious people into accepting science as a good method to describe the world. You're also wrong in your assumption that there is not yet enough supporting evidence. There are many people who just don't listen, and it's hard to convince anyone who just doesn't listen.
For any argument, you must first search for the basic, most fundamental assumption on which your argument is based. In the discussion between science and religion, that most fundamental assumption differs... so ultimately, the discussion will fail... always.
Therefore, I completely agree that Science is not equal to Religion... and I believe that in school, we must prepare children for Science, not Religion. Therefore, it should be straightforward that no religious argument can change a school program.
It's ridiculous, but science is being bullied in our Western democracies...
There are fights about the greenhouse gas, about evolution, and several other topics... and if teachers say something about that, they are said to choose a side and teachers should be politically neutral.
That, of course, is ridiculous. If teachers can no longer teach science, because some theories (which have a lot of evidence) might undermine the political course set by our Great Leaders or because they might upset certain religious people (science always does that), then we might as well close our schools.
I would recommend to see how all components scale down. If you make everything smaller by the same factor, does performance suffer?
Or, in other words, for which components is a certain size essential? And how big is that?
Reduce the mass by half, reduce the fuel by half... and find which components cannot be made any smaller, or which do not scale linearly with the fuel needs or performance... Push the limits of some components to make them smaller (and invest heavily in those miniturization bottlenecks, because they might pay themselves back easily if the whole project becomes smaller).
So, you're saying that you should never start any projects with a steep learning curve, but instead just wait (and wait, and wait) until someone else starts, and then be the 2nd to step in.
Bah. I disagree. There's always a chance that the 1st project is actually the good one... and that it's considered good enough.
Oddly enough, I was reading up on possible interstellar probes just a few days ago.
Anyway, getting to another star system is just simply such a huge task. Take for example Daedalus' design -- the economics of building such a vehicle today are such that even if we had the political willpower to do so, it would just cost so much that it would soak up our global economic output for a very long time, possibly centuries.
If we were to just wait 100 years or so, I'd put money on new physics being discovered which would allow an interstellar mission to be constructed for a tiny fraction of the cost of Daedalus (or Icarus), be completed in a fraction of the time, and have enormously increased capabilities (e.g. stopping at the target star, making a return journey, or even carrying Astronauts).
It's an interesting study, but totally impractical today. We need a better understanding of the universe before we should even give serious thought to attempting this -- it doesn't pass the back-of-the-envelope test.
It's not completely absurd. The projects that mankind undertakes today are enormous (in fact, there are multiple things that are way more expensive or complicated than this Daedalus spaceship). Take for example the entire road system of the world, including all rural roads, cities, traffic lights, cars, trucks, and whatnot. It's been an enormous undertaking - yet we don't mind rebuilding it entirely every decade because we don't like bumpy old asphalt or old cars.
The ISS, with a weight of nearly 400 tons, and measuring 50x100 meters shows how much is possible for a relatively small-scale human project. All our civil achievements show how much is possible for the large-scale human projects. We don't mind changing the entire surface of our planet.
We humans look at cost/benefit estimates. If the costs are high, we don't mind, as long as the benefits are there.
The problem therefore with the Daedalus is not that it's not possible. It is that it just does not have enough benefits for mankind to invest the time, effort and resources in it.
...how to down these things with something other than a bullet? If they start using them for anything other than special occasions, I want to see them drop out of the skies like those birds from a couple weeks ago..
Hack them.
It's just a flying government computer.
And that's in fact what scares me the most... they're just flying government computers... so any fool can probably hack into a flying weapon system.
(All the EMP stuff is fun, but not very practical).
On the 8th day God created teh Internet. And He saw that it was good and fair, and neutral. And his minions supported it. Then twisted the original idea. Then wrote many books about it. Which were translated. And edited. And then it was not so good anymore. But nobody dared to admit that.
-- Call me an offtopic flaming troll - I just had to get this out of my system:-)
Real-time strategy games have lots of irreversible consequences. It's the fact that you take them all the time which makes it easy. The clock is running, and your enemy is building an army too. No choice is also a choice. To construct that new base means you take a risk. Not to build it is also a risk. Those are all make-or-break moments.
The only difference is perhaps that a single game doesn't last all that long, and therefore a failure is not too bad. Also, it's often possible to hit pause and save the game before making an important decision in a big game against AI.
Hey, Godwin. What took you so long? The article was submitted a whole NINE minutes ago!
The topic is about the right wing politics, and in some fields, racism isn't far off. A remark about WWII is very valid in that case. If we cannot refer to the lessons learned in that terrible period, then we are just stupid. Of course we have to learn from our history, and therefore it is necessary to repeat what happened in that time.
The "Godwin" argument was about any random internet discussion... not about specific political racism, where it is actually near-mandatory to repeat WWII facts so that we never ever forget.
As far as I'm concerned, it's near-impossible not to Godwin. We should never forget WWII, or what caused it.
To kill an argument which correctly mentions anything about WWII just by calling it a Godwin is a Godwin in itself.
In this case, the comparison is valid. It is one of the few well-known cases in history that compares to this move by the Democrats.
Slashdot Mirror
And, yes, it's utterly pointless. Just like football, the opera, TV, movies,. poetry, 99.99% of the content of the internet, music...
I think that you can learn more lessons from trying to keep a rocket on its wheels than from football or most TV shows... which makes it (imho) much less pointless.
In fact, I think that if that rocket car thing wouldn't be launched in a frickin' desert, it would attract more people than football too!
Interestingly, going at a fast trot/gallop on a horse still feels frighteningly fast although it's only about 30mph, which in a car feels like you're barely moving.
Try to do that in a Lada or a Trabant, and you will definitely get the horse-like experience at 30 already.
I'm sorry, but if you're trying to garner sympathy for workers being displaced by technology, you're going to have to do better than lawyers.
Lawyers are just overhead costs: they don't produce anything, but you need a few around to keep everything running... But if you can safely reduce the costs of overhead, that's supposed to be a good thing.
The day that engineers can be replaced by computers we shall talk again. Until then, I just advise law-students to choose a new study while they can.
Should just DHL it to the Iranian embassy or even overseas to China or something.
Good idea: confirm to the FBI what they already suspected. LOL
The guy was being monitored... in the FBI's computers, they had his name attached to that gadget. Sending it anywhere other than the police or the FBI would only increase the suspicion, even if he is innocent.
Here's a little advice: if you live in a police-state, don't mess with the police, unless you intend to completely overthrow the system.
The FBI wouldn't be tracking him if he was actually "a 20 year old community college student who has never done anything [wrong]", as the article says. Maybe he's Ahmadinejad's nephew or something. Can we have some actual reporting?
The most important thing is that you NEVER question the agencies, the government or the police. Not only is it unthinkable that their complete policy is wrong, even small mistakes are impossible.
How much of a pollution footprint do these generate *during production*?
Whenever something green comes out, everybody is ready to fire their critical questions.
Whenever something made of oil and animal skin, looking identical, everybody goes: "Oh well, we know it pollutes, but we don't really care how much it pollutes. We know it's made in poor countries by kids, but I don't really care how bad their situation is".
But when it's claimed to be made green and sustainable - oh boy, then it'd better be perfect, otherwise we'll bury it under hypocritical comments!
Yeah... suck baby suck.
(Sorry)
Not to mention all the historical plays, such as Anthony and Cleopatra, which are obviously copied from ancient Roman/Greek/Egyptian descriptions.
But I guess that's still acceptable - as we can see in The King's Speech. But as soon as one of the big industry become the owner of a story, it's theirs to keep ;)
Good luck with that.
Laptop manufacturers (yes, all of them) want to make disposable machines. Not only is it cheaper to make them that way, it encourages users to buy new rather than upgrade.
In the past, computer makers had to cater to the geek market, and the geeks wanted to be able to tinker. Although the Slashdot crowd refuses to accept it, the geek market is tiny relative to the mass market.
You must mistake the laptop market with the Apple market, and users by Apple-customers.
Almost all laptop users understand that they at some point would want a bigger harddrive, but don't necessarily need a new screen. And that would actually convince people to upgrade some hardware while they would never buy a new laptop (not yet), which means some people will see a business-model in this idea.
How is this informative if we do not know if we need to be worried or not? Please let us know if we need to start worrying or not, just like in this post earlier on slashdot.
I agree.
But according to all the media, there are so many things to worry about that I propose that from now on, we only get the Factor of Cumulative Worries (FCW).
The news should simply give us a level of worriedness - it can be in 5 simple colors so that infants also understand it - ranging from green to red.
"Today it's level Red! We're gonna die! Tomorrow, we expect a mild level Yellow. It will be green over the weekend, but don't cheer because on Monday we expect another Red!"
Back to your question: It's government policy that it's probably safer to worry. So, yes, you should be worried. Just in case.
The whole point of the death ray is to be able to adjust the focus point.
The Mythbusters tried to set a boat on fire... which was assumed to be an enemy boat passing along the coast.
You can't reasonably expect the enemy boats to sail exactly at the focus point of your death ray... or to either come closer or go further away in case they are not at the focus point of your death ray.
This 19-year-old hasn't made the focus point adjustable... so you can't set a moving target at a variable distance on fire with it.
Any dish shaped thing with mirrors has a focus point - especially satellite dishes - so this isn't exactly rocket science.
Maybe the peer reviewers wore magnets and temporarily deactivated parts of their brain - while suffering from a placebo effect?
I knew it! They can deactivate my brain with magnets and stuff!
*proudly wears tin foil hat*
How are we going to rid the world of ISLAM? These peopel make me despair, they won't be happy until they convert or kill us all. There isn't a country in the world that hasn't suffered from this religion of hate
You make me despair. How are we going to get rid of the STUPID people who, without blinking, generalize about a billion people? There isn't a country in the world that hasn't suffered from this racist stupidity.
No... science is being *questioned* and that's a Good Thing. Now, what we need is people who can answer the questions with supporting evidence, and an explanation that helps people see that Science .NE. Religion, and neither poses a threat to the other. Science doesn't answer religious questions, and religion doesn't answer science questions. Period. It's only when we "cross the streams", and try to make one discipline answer the other's problems that we get into trouble.
You're wrong in your assumption that smart people with convincing evidence can convert religious people into accepting science as a good method to describe the world. You're also wrong in your assumption that there is not yet enough supporting evidence. There are many people who just don't listen, and it's hard to convince anyone who just doesn't listen.
For any argument, you must first search for the basic, most fundamental assumption on which your argument is based. In the discussion between science and religion, that most fundamental assumption differs... so ultimately, the discussion will fail... always.
Therefore, I completely agree that Science is not equal to Religion... and I believe that in school, we must prepare children for Science, not Religion. Therefore, it should be straightforward that no religious argument can change a school program.
It's ridiculous, but science is being bullied in our Western democracies...
There are fights about the greenhouse gas, about evolution, and several other topics... and if teachers say something about that, they are said to choose a side and teachers should be politically neutral.
That, of course, is ridiculous. If teachers can no longer teach science, because some theories (which have a lot of evidence) might undermine the political course set by our Great Leaders or because they might upset certain religious people (science always does that), then we might as well close our schools.
I would recommend to see how all components scale down. If you make everything smaller by the same factor, does performance suffer?
Or, in other words, for which components is a certain size essential? And how big is that?
Reduce the mass by half, reduce the fuel by half... and find which components cannot be made any smaller, or which do not scale linearly with the fuel needs or performance... Push the limits of some components to make them smaller (and invest heavily in those miniturization bottlenecks, because they might pay themselves back easily if the whole project becomes smaller).
So, you're saying that you should never start any projects with a steep learning curve, but instead just wait (and wait, and wait) until someone else starts, and then be the 2nd to step in.
Bah. I disagree. There's always a chance that the 1st project is actually the good one... and that it's considered good enough.
Oddly enough, I was reading up on possible interstellar probes just a few days ago.
Anyway, getting to another star system is just simply such a huge task. Take for example Daedalus' design -- the economics of building such a vehicle today are such that even if we had the political willpower to do so, it would just cost so much that it would soak up our global economic output for a very long time, possibly centuries.
If we were to just wait 100 years or so, I'd put money on new physics being discovered which would allow an interstellar mission to be constructed for a tiny fraction of the cost of Daedalus (or Icarus), be completed in a fraction of the time, and have enormously increased capabilities (e.g. stopping at the target star, making a return journey, or even carrying Astronauts).
It's an interesting study, but totally impractical today. We need a better understanding of the universe before we should even give serious thought to attempting this -- it doesn't pass the back-of-the-envelope test.
It's not completely absurd. The projects that mankind undertakes today are enormous (in fact, there are multiple things that are way more expensive or complicated than this Daedalus spaceship). Take for example the entire road system of the world, including all rural roads, cities, traffic lights, cars, trucks, and whatnot. It's been an enormous undertaking - yet we don't mind rebuilding it entirely every decade because we don't like bumpy old asphalt or old cars.
The ISS, with a weight of nearly 400 tons, and measuring 50x100 meters shows how much is possible for a relatively small-scale human project. All our civil achievements show how much is possible for the large-scale human projects. We don't mind changing the entire surface of our planet.
We humans look at cost/benefit estimates. If the costs are high, we don't mind, as long as the benefits are there.
The problem therefore with the Daedalus is not that it's not possible. It is that it just does not have enough benefits for mankind to invest the time, effort and resources in it.
...how to down these things with something other than a bullet? If they start using them for anything other than special occasions, I want to see them drop out of the skies like those birds from a couple weeks ago..
Hack them.
It's just a flying government computer.
And that's in fact what scares me the most... they're just flying government computers... so any fool can probably hack into a flying weapon system.
(All the EMP stuff is fun, but not very practical).
On the 8th day God created teh Internet.
And He saw that it was good and fair, and neutral. And his minions supported it. Then twisted the original idea. Then wrote many books about it. Which were translated. And edited. And then it was not so good anymore. But nobody dared to admit that.
-- Call me an offtopic flaming troll - I just had to get this out of my system :-)
Real-time strategy games have lots of irreversible consequences. It's the fact that you take them all the time which makes it easy. The clock is running, and your enemy is building an army too. No choice is also a choice. To construct that new base means you take a risk. Not to build it is also a risk. Those are all make-or-break moments.
The only difference is perhaps that a single game doesn't last all that long, and therefore a failure is not too bad. Also, it's often possible to hit pause and save the game before making an important decision in a big game against AI.
Would this have been visible without Night Vision?
The meteor would have been visible, but the presentor wouldn't.
Hey, Godwin. What took you so long? The article was submitted a whole NINE minutes ago!
The topic is about the right wing politics, and in some fields, racism isn't far off. A remark about WWII is very valid in that case.
If we cannot refer to the lessons learned in that terrible period, then we are just stupid. Of course we have to learn from our history, and therefore it is necessary to repeat what happened in that time.
The "Godwin" argument was about any random internet discussion... not about specific political racism, where it is actually near-mandatory to repeat WWII facts so that we never ever forget.
As far as I'm concerned, it's near-impossible not to Godwin. We should never forget WWII, or what caused it.
To kill an argument which correctly mentions anything about WWII just by calling it a Godwin is a Godwin in itself.
In this case, the comparison is valid. It is one of the few well-known cases in history that compares to this move by the Democrats.
I think it's fair to compare a new SUV to a new small city car.
For a large part, there are also parking issues involved here... and SUV's look pretty bad in that picture.