The fallout would naturally degrade and become harmless long, long before anyone would be trotting around Mars without a pressure suit.
I'm not so sure about that. I've read that Hiroshima and Nagasaki still experience cancer rates well above normal levels, and it's been 60 years since the bombing. I don't know if that is due to the fallout or something else, but whatever it is, if the biggest deposits of water in Mars are polluted by it that might create problems for human activity in Mars for generations.
The point is that I don't think using nuclear explosives is needed, a device that uses nuclear power in a controlled way can evaporate the necessary amount of ice to create the atmosphere, with a much smaller danger of contaminating things with radiation.
Also, I think that dust does not create greenhouse effect; on the contrary, it tends to decrease the amount of insolation. Haven't you heard of nuclear winter?
I suppose you don't use nuclear power nor plan on using radiation to fight cancer either.
The OP was talking specifically about nukes (nuclear chain reactions) and so am I.
I'm sure nuclear power will be needed for any terraforming activity and it might well be the best option for melting the Martian poles as suggested by the OP. But what captured the imagination of the OP was not nuclear power, it was nukes, and that's what prompted my comment.
That would create a lot of radioactive dust (fallout) and I don't think that would help the spread of life (human or otherwise) on the planet.
By the way, am I the only eurotrash who is amazed at how easily nukes will be suggested by some Americans as a natural solution for a variety of problems? I would say here in Europe nukes are seen as a symbol of death, a sad reminder of how we humans can use our ingenuity to kill and mutilate ourselves in massive, horrible ways. Obviously nukes don't have the same associations in the American mind.
As you can see by the satellite photo, the rugged Guadalupe Mountains meet the barren, flat Llano Estacado.
"Llano" means flat in Spanish. So yes, it's not that surprising that Llano Estacado is flat. I'm also guessing the Guadalupe Mountains would be mountainous.
And yet you always seem to see the same opinions expressed and modded up to +4 or +5, time and time again. That takes not only the posters, but the moderators too.
Moderators for a story will be self-selected in much the same way as the posters.
It really does get hard to shake the feeling that while the readers of slashdot have a wide variety of opinions, the Slashdot Readership is pretty much agreed on most topics.
People usually get that feeling in most cases where you've got a vocal minority and a silent majority, and yet that feeling is often wrong.
And no, of course he wasn't serious about that last bit.
It seemed to go with the general tone of his post.
I care about the arguments that nearly everyone on Slashdot made at the time
I don't know why this is so hard to understand: Slashdot has around 800,000 registered users. A typical Slashdot story will have around 500 comments from perhaps 200 or 300 different registered users, i.e. around 0.03% of all.
Let this sink in: the set of people commenting on a story will be a highly selected sample of those who care about that particular subject, and it won't necessarily be representative of Slashdot readership.
At least you guys could discuss amongst yourselves and put out a consistent message at some point.
I'm not a fan of layoffs either but a company is there to make money, nothing else.
You might be surprised but many people believe that ethical behaviour should also be a priority for a company. Perhaps this opinion is more common in Europe.
You're saying that if you can't integrate a 6Mb diff, containing changes for many unrelated purposes, none of which are explained, and many of which you know you don't want to apply (e.g. because they're OSX-specific), you are suddenly a bad programmer?
Why is everybody missing this KHTML developer's point? It's right there in the short Slashdot summary. He acknowledges that Apple is fulfilling their legal obligations by providing the modified files. But they're not providing any help at all in making their changes useful to the KHTML team. So, there's no "collaboration" at all from Apple's side. That's all. He's not even flaming Apple. If anyone, he's flaming people who misunderstand this situation.
Or even read just the Slashdot summary. You will find this quote:
'All I'm asking for is that all the clueless people stop talking about the cooperation between Safari/Konqueror developers and how great it is. There's absolutely nothing great about it. In fact "it" doesn't exist.'
This KDE developer is frustrated because people misunderstand the contribution (or absence thereof) Apple is making to KHTML; he's not flaming Apple or suggesting Apple's duty is to be more helpful to the KHTML people.
What is interesting about compressed air though, the energy you get out of it is NOT what you have put into it. The energy comes from the ambient temperature of the air. This means that if a compression technique could be found that is efficient enough then you could have a potential self filling energy tank.
The mods who gave the parent 4, Insightful know nothing about the kernel development process.
For one thing, the lack of support for binary-only modules is not an "oversight". It has been done deliberately, for somewhat political reasons, and is a touchy subject with many kernel developers.
Before giving (or modding up) grandiloquent advice on what the kernel and Linus "need", one should have at least some understanding of how the kernel is developed and what is its current state.
Lai notes that if you split up the studies into publicly and industry funded studies, you see that 75% of publicly funded studies show a problem and 80% of industry funded studies show no problem.
So 20% of industry funded studies show a problem? Man, is industry getting ripped off...
That's just another parallel to the way things work in a "real" state. The state wouldn't have enough resources to prosecute all transgressors if a significant number of people started breaking the law, but the threat of punishment (e.g. jail time) is enough to deter most of those potential offenders.
Big corporations can use litigation threats the same way; if enough people are scared into not doing what the corporations want to prevent, the number of remaining targets might be sufficiently low so it's possible to sue enough of them to make the risks too high for everybody. The key here is that litigation is used as punishment; once a corporation has sued you, you've lost and you're already being punished. No need to say that's not what the legal system was designed for.
The problem is that this is not an isolated case. Do as the story submitter suggests and visit Chilling Effects to have a more complete picture of how the legal system is used as a social control weapon by big corporations.
Fix the DMCA, but stop giving them excuses to have laws like it passed.
Appeasement doesn't work with big corporations; it only shows them that their methods work. They already got copyright duration extended for fifty years, did that stop their lobbying efforts to get it extended again?
... that the cost of threatening legal action without any basis whatsoever is too low for these big corporations. The legal system has become a way for big corporations to push individuals and small companies around and basically create a parallel state were the punishment for any behavior big corporations doesn't like is litigation.
As usual in business culture, all credit for the company's work is given to executives. See for example this blurb about AMD CEO Héctor Ruiz: "Nevertheless, the soft-spoken executive has put AMD in the black for the first time since 2000. He's giving larger competitor Intel Corp. (INTC ) fits with AMD's hot-selling Opteron server and Athlon 64 desktop chips, and he has set the agenda for next-generation PC designs." It almost seems that he's the only employee in the company doing any work. No mention of the engineers who, you know, actually designed the products AMD is selling so successfully.
Even Freeciv, that is one of the usual examples of "bigger" FOSS games, is sorely lacking in the art department. There's barely any people with artistic skills contributing to FOSS games. If there was, though, it would be a different story, but the situation does not seem likely to change any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you're just got the American bashing hysteria mentality that much of the EU has.
Good to see you are above bashing-the-other-bloc hysteria yourself.
The fallout would naturally degrade and become harmless long, long before anyone would be trotting around Mars without a pressure suit.
I'm not so sure about that. I've read that Hiroshima and Nagasaki still experience cancer rates well above normal levels, and it's been 60 years since the bombing. I don't know if that is due to the fallout or something else, but whatever it is, if the biggest deposits of water in Mars are polluted by it that might create problems for human activity in Mars for generations.
The point is that I don't think using nuclear explosives is needed, a device that uses nuclear power in a controlled way can evaporate the necessary amount of ice to create the atmosphere, with a much smaller danger of contaminating things with radiation.
Also, I think that dust does not create greenhouse effect; on the contrary, it tends to decrease the amount of insolation. Haven't you heard of nuclear winter?
I suppose you don't use nuclear power nor plan on using radiation to fight cancer either.
The OP was talking specifically about nukes (nuclear chain reactions) and so am I.
I'm sure nuclear power will be needed for any terraforming activity and it might well be the best option for melting the Martian poles as suggested by the OP. But what captured the imagination of the OP was not nuclear power, it was nukes, and that's what prompted my comment.
That would create a lot of radioactive dust (fallout) and I don't think that would help the spread of life (human or otherwise) on the planet.
By the way, am I the only eurotrash who is amazed at how easily nukes will be suggested by some Americans as a natural solution for a variety of problems? I would say here in Europe nukes are seen as a symbol of death, a sad reminder of how we humans can use our ingenuity to kill and mutilate ourselves in massive, horrible ways. Obviously nukes don't have the same associations in the American mind.
As you can see by the satellite photo, the rugged Guadalupe Mountains meet the barren, flat Llano Estacado.
"Llano" means flat in Spanish. So yes, it's not that surprising that Llano Estacado is flat. I'm also guessing the Guadalupe Mountains would be mountainous.
Though marketed as a device to enable people to keep track of spouses [...]
What exactly are spouses up to in Japan?
And yet you always seem to see the same opinions expressed and modded up to +4 or +5, time and time again. That takes not only the posters, but the moderators too.
Moderators for a story will be self-selected in much the same way as the posters.
It really does get hard to shake the feeling that while the readers of slashdot have a wide variety of opinions, the Slashdot Readership is pretty much agreed on most topics.
People usually get that feeling in most cases where you've got a vocal minority and a silent majority, and yet that feeling is often wrong.
And no, of course he wasn't serious about that last bit.
It seemed to go with the general tone of his post.
I care about the arguments that nearly everyone on Slashdot made at the time
I don't know why this is so hard to understand: Slashdot has around 800,000 registered users. A typical Slashdot story will have around 500 comments from perhaps 200 or 300 different registered users, i.e. around 0.03% of all.
Let this sink in: the set of people commenting on a story will be a highly selected sample of those who care about that particular subject, and it won't necessarily be representative of Slashdot readership.
At least you guys could discuss amongst yourselves and put out a consistent message at some point.
Are you serious?
Device Drivers Filled with Flaws, Pose Risk
Another Slashdot typo: they obviously misspelt "SUV" as "Device".
... and this is why Linux is years from the corporate desktop.
I'm not a fan of layoffs either but a company is there to make money, nothing else.
You might be surprised but many people believe that ethical behaviour should also be a priority for a company. Perhaps this opinion is more common in Europe.
I thought this was supposed to be 'News for Nerds', not 'Speculation for Halfwits'...
This is NOT Speculation for Halfwits? And you tell me now??
You're saying that if you can't integrate a 6Mb diff, containing changes for many unrelated purposes, none of which are explained, and many of which you know you don't want to apply (e.g. because they're OSX-specific), you are suddenly a bad programmer?
Non-delusional you say?
Why is everybody missing this KHTML developer's point? It's right there in the short Slashdot summary. He acknowledges that Apple is fulfilling their legal obligations by providing the modified files. But they're not providing any help at all in making their changes useful to the KHTML team. So, there's no "collaboration" at all from Apple's side. That's all. He's not even flaming Apple. If anyone, he's flaming people who misunderstand this situation.
Or even read just the Slashdot summary. You will find this quote:
'All I'm asking for is that all the clueless people stop talking about the cooperation between Safari/Konqueror developers and how great it is. There's absolutely nothing great about it. In fact "it" doesn't exist.'
This KDE developer is frustrated because people misunderstand the contribution (or absence thereof) Apple is making to KHTML; he's not flaming Apple or suggesting Apple's duty is to be more helpful to the KHTML people.
What is interesting about compressed air though, the energy you get out of it is NOT what you have put into it. The energy comes from the ambient temperature of the air. This means that if a compression technique could be found that is efficient enough then you could have a potential self filling energy tank.
Have you heard about the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
The mods who gave the parent 4, Insightful know nothing about the kernel development process.
For one thing, the lack of support for binary-only modules is not an "oversight". It has been done deliberately, for somewhat political reasons, and is a touchy subject with many kernel developers.
Before giving (or modding up) grandiloquent advice on what the kernel and Linus "need", one should have at least some understanding of how the kernel is developed and what is its current state.
Lai notes that if you split up the studies into publicly and industry funded studies, you see that 75% of publicly funded studies show a problem and 80% of industry funded studies show no problem.
So 20% of industry funded studies show a problem? Man, is industry getting ripped off...
Big corporations can use litigation threats the same way; if enough people are scared into not doing what the corporations want to prevent, the number of remaining targets might be sufficiently low so it's possible to sue enough of them to make the risks too high for everybody. The key here is that litigation is used as punishment; once a corporation has sued you, you've lost and you're already being punished. No need to say that's not what the legal system was designed for.
I agree about the Seagate Barracudas, I love them.
Fix the DMCA, but stop giving them excuses to have laws like it passed.
Appeasement doesn't work with big corporations; it only shows them that their methods work. They already got copyright duration extended for fifty years, did that stop their lobbying efforts to get it extended again?
... that the cost of threatening legal action without any basis whatsoever is too low for these big corporations. The legal system has become a way for big corporations to push individuals and small companies around and basically create a parallel state were the punishment for any behavior big corporations doesn't like is litigation.
Carnivore is not spyware in the accepted meaning of the word. It's installed in the ISP's computers and not in the users' desktops.
As usual in business culture, all credit for the company's work is given to executives. See for example this blurb about AMD CEO Héctor Ruiz: "Nevertheless, the soft-spoken executive has put AMD in the black for the first time since 2000. He's giving larger competitor Intel Corp. (INTC ) fits with AMD's hot-selling Opteron server and Athlon 64 desktop chips, and he has set the agenda for next-generation PC designs." It almost seems that he's the only employee in the company doing any work. No mention of the engineers who, you know, actually designed the products AMD is selling so successfully.
Even Freeciv, that is one of the usual examples of "bigger" FOSS games, is sorely lacking in the art department. There's barely any people with artistic skills contributing to FOSS games. If there was, though, it would be a different story, but the situation does not seem likely to change any time soon.