Not every satellite orbiting this or other planets was made by the US. Of course, lacking the original sources squabbling about what they might or might not have used is pretty much the definition of pointless.
And by the way, why would working together with NASA be any problem for determining who did what science? Last I heard, most European, Russian, Japanese and American space research is shared and more or less coordinated. For example, both the data from Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Express are used by NASA, JAXA, ESA and RKA. Just because the image and other data was gathered by a probe from made in a different country, that doesn't mean that only one country analyses the research. And if you're the first to analyse a particular set of data and publish your findings, why shouldn't you get credit for just that? It's the difference between data and information. An image alone is mostly data, a research paper derived from it (ideally) mostly information.
Most people have trouble reasonably choosing between rival electricity and gas providers.
Ok, you got me on this one.
Are you saying that in some city/cities in the world, you actually have a choice on who provides your utilities like power and gas???
I've never heard of such a thing...how would that work? Do multiple companies dig multiple trenches to bury multiple pipes in the ground for the gas? Do they all string wires for power along the same poles or different poles for each company (or buried underground if they do that in your area)?
What cities have this choice? How many do they have to choose from?
Pretty much all cities in Germany. All of them, really.
For example, imagine you want to switch your electricity provider. Here, you only have to call the new provider, tell them you want their offerings, tell them who your previous provider was and the rest is done by them. A few days later the "switch" will be made. Without any new cabling or whatever. You will still get exactly the same electricity.
How does this work, you might ask? Well, it works because all German (and European) Energy production facilities are cross-linked. Therefore, you will always get the electricity that's generated closest to you, but you actually pay for energy that was generated somewhere else.
Say you're getting electricity from company CA who owns power plant PA (which is closest to you) and want to switch to company CB who owns power plant PB. By switching you now pay the running cost of electricity generated at power plant PB, while still getting energy from PA. You can do that because PA and PB actually transmit their energy into a common pool. If PA has reserves while PB is fully loaded, company CB draws energy from the pool and vice versa. The companies (regulated by a common authority) will then figure out how much energy they have produced with their plants and how much of that was "used" by their own customers. If their customers used 100%, they pay nothing, if less they get compensated for the "surplus" they have offered other companies if more, they compensate the others for the draw they have caused on the other power plants. Thus, the companies deal with compensating each other for the fact that you draw from power-plants not owned by them.
With this system, even companies who don't actually own power plants can sell electricity to you and companies who own power plants don't necessarily need to sell energy to end users... or users in their own country.
The same system applies to gas, water, railroads and other utilities.
Most of the seeds of todays plants can't take staying completely submerged in water for even a very, very short amount of time. Even very small seeds can only stay airborne for a brief time. Most seeds do not germinate in completely waterlogged and/or eroded soil.
So, either you posit that a few thousand years ago seeds were much hardier (then why aren't they now, then?), or you need to explain how the current abundance of plants came into existence in such a short amount of time.
On top of that, you have mushrooms, most of which reproduce via airborne spores that would've been destroyed even easier by a flood.
Shoemaker–Levy 9 didn't look scattered all over the place, pretty much looked like a straight line.
And the 21 fragments whose impacts were visible from earth needed 6 days to hit the planet. 6 days at a speed of ~60 km/s equals ~ 31 million kilometers distance between the first and last impactor.
So the submitter is indeed right: "Claiming that a comet broke apart, yet managed to constrain its pieces to volume of space less than a few thousand kilometers across strains credulity."
Henry Ford did not invent the car, but he applied to it the industrial practices (which he did invent) that put it in a position to change the world.
If we're already on the topic of setting historical misconceptions right: As much as Henry Ford is to be admired, he did not invent the industrial practice -- or mass production -- or the assembly line.
He was at least predated by roughly 1800 years. To be precise, during the construction of the Colosseum in Rome (the Flavian Amphitheatre) beginning in 72AD, the Romans already used standardized mass production on an industrial scale in assembly lines all over Rome to produce bricks that were used en masse in the construction. The shops that created them were even called "fabrica", or where do you think the word came from?
So, to use a famous, if paraphrased, saying: History is not a tale of heroes and giants that saw farther than the dwarfs around them, or a tale of dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants to see farther. It is very much a tale of dwarfs standing shoulder to shoulder to allow the next generation of dwarfs above them to see farther.
And if your name is Linus Torvalds, you don't have to learn everything possible about Git, as you can just decree whatever you think is right as being right.
wow! Lol I had forgotten that's what they would advertise home computers for in the 80s. Man that takes me back... and to all of you not over 40, in the early and mid 80s most ads would show the main benefit of a $3,000 (closer to $6k in today's money) home computer is that it can balance the check book or (to get wives interested) store cooking recipes. Wow we have come a long way.
Actually, as far as storing recipes is concerned, Apple is still using exactly the same advertisement for the iPad. So much for coming a long way and that "nothing will ever be the same again"! (Or whatever slogan they use in the USA, as I'm hailing in from Germany and am currently too lazy to check.)
If I didn't have to go to work, I wouldn't do work. I'd be the best damn video game player in the world.)
But really, how long would you be able to do this? According to my experience, most people want to work after a certain time. Why do you think most millionaires don't spend all day doing nothing. Sure, they may have more leisure time than the average person, but most of them find a multitude of other things to do. For example running companies, especially if they've built it up themselves. And even those that only socialize all day do exactly that: They socialize, they strive to get in touch with other people, because at some point, even the biggest palace is empty.
And if you want to see what happens when you combine joblessness with poverty, just go into the nearest run-down pub you can find. Not being able to work sooner or later destroys you, both mentally as well as physically.
No matter what will happen in the future, no matter how much human work will become unnecessary, people will find ways to work, if only to entertain themselves and feel they're helping others. We're social animals, and will remain so for a long, long time.
Of course, that's how boss battles work, isn't it?
World War 2 ended when a prisoner escaping from some castle gunned down Cyborg-Hitler, after all.
That's only VE day. You forget about VJ day when a giant monkey the Americans stole from some jungle island killed a giant lizard/dinosaur thing.
But of course, it was a really sad day for the world when that lone Italian Plumber later shot the monkey. Of course, there are also some nutjobs that claim that another plumber helped from the mushroom knoll...
It is the driver behind the wheel which makes it dangerous.
And here's the problem with robotic drivers... They are all identical. Every one on a particular model will be byte for byte identical. Which means a fault in one is a fault in all.
Humans on the other hand are all different. Just because one causes an accident under certain circumstance doesn't mean another would.
Ahh, so if I code a virus for AmigaOS, it'll automatically affect Windows machines, too? Cool!
Do you really believe that the entire car industry would really just select one design? And then never change it? Hell, just look at the current state of car engineering: Even the SAME manufacturer uses a number of different hardware platforms, operating systems, field bus systems and software versions, sometimes even between two different iterations of the same car model.
Believe me, if one manufacturer ever added a full driving AI to its cars, you can bet that the other manufacturers would add a different and totally incompatible AI to their line of cars, just to ensure that the other manufacturer won't gain market dominance. And that's assuming that the first manufacturer hasn't patented the AI.
On top of that, do you really think that a 2-ton Pickup, an 800 kg supermini car and the future iteration of the Porsche 911 will handle exactly the same? Thus, what may be a bug in one car version, might not even be a minor issue in another car version.
And even if all you said were true, and each and every car is the same, you'd still have to convince us that that's in any way worse than the current situation where you have millions of reckless drivers, millions of half-blind drivers, millions of repeatedly drunk drivers and so on.
They don't 'see' the position, they have to do math to get it. Having said that, I do use the computer to practice and analyse my games.
And, pray tell, what do you think the brain does when it "sees" a position? There's no such thing as insight raining down from the heavens like manna. Even your brain needs to first realize how the board looks, then cross-reference that with that else it has seen in the times past and then choose an appropriate action it deems worthwhile.
The approach to steps 2 and 3 may be slightly different, as the human brain most likely uses more heuristics, but in the end, both computers and brains follow the same logic... and have to follow the same logic.
There is no such thing as a free thought, to abuse a popular saying.
I'm not the only one that feels that PC Gaming only has three genres: "Shooting", "Driving", "Micro Managing".
Huh? I just looked at my gaming collection, and your three genres make up maybe 10% of the games I own.
I mean, you conveniently forgot all Adventure Games (and no, that genre isn't dying out, just ask Telltale Games) and didn't include a lot of RPGs. Then there's a whole slew of Indie Games out there that don't fit your formula. Just looking at the "Humble Bundle" games you immediately find Aquaria, Gish, World of Goo, Osmos and Braid that don't fit into either of the three categories.
And even if you limit yourself to your three categories, isn't "Micro Managing" a bit overly broad? If you take the most inclusive sense of the word, you find management simulations, political simulations, war simulations (both turn-based and real-time strategy), life simulations (and no, not just The Sims), and so on. And in each of those, you find a wide and rich spectrum of very different games. Just compare the Civilization series with StarCraft.
And then there are these mixtures that don't fit into any single category. Games like Dwarf Fortress or The Settlers or Minecraft.
My point is, there are not only a lot more than three genres on the PC, even those three contain wildly diverse games. They might not sell multiple millions of copies and take the lime-light, but then again, how many people have bought such critically acclaimed, off-beat, console-only games like Flower?
You do know that energy consumption goes beyond just oil, right?
Sure. I merely tried to express in a parable, what I could've stated more bluntly as: Do the math again, and this time don't forget that consumption will not stay constant and may easily bridge the orders of magnitude that you described as insurmountable.
In a way, your comment only raises further hints and concerns in that respect: We consume some resources like there's no tomorrow. And as hungry as our society is for oil, it is even hungrier for energy.
The total world energy consumption from all sources in 2008 was estimated at 4.75*10^20 joules.
At that rate, cooling the interior of the earth by a single degree would power the entire world for 5,789,473 years.
And that's assuming the earth doesn't continue to generate heat from radioactive decay, tidal forces, friction etc.
But that's assuming human energy use will stay the same.
Let's see. In 1859, the United States of America (just taking one country for simplicity) produced ~2000 (270 t) barrel of crude oil per year. As of 2010 said country has reserves left of around ~21*10^9 billion barrel = 21*10^18 barrels. So given these figures, you could live with those reserves for ~ 1*10^16 years.
Just as a reminder, the age of the universe is estimated at 14 billion = 14*10^9 years. So, certainly the US-Americans are nowhere near close to using up their oil reserves. So it's an absolutely moot point to check Wikipedia for the number of years till the reserves are run dry. But just for the sake of completion:
WHAT? Just 8 years! How can this be? My numbers can absolutely not lie!
See what you just conveniently forgot there? Always be aware of all the possible consequences and then act accordingly. I'm all for using geothermal energy, but as with everything, one should use one's brain before, while and also still after doing something.
It also opens the provocative possibility of same-sex couples having their own genetic children, the researchers note.
As long as they're happy with only female children, or are males themselves.
You know, if they are able to get two arbitrary (male/female) sets of genetic code to combine, I imagine it's not so much of a stretch to assume that you can either:
1.) Introduce a Y chromosome from a third party or 2.) Convert the gene sequences from an X chromosome into a Y chromosome (or at least those parts that are compatible)
You know, that's the nearly unqiue property of genetic engineering, the most pressing issue is not whether something is possible at all, but whether it is morally acceptable.
None of the other non-gas giants has a moon anywhere near as big as our satellite. Asimov explored this in Foundation and Earth, where the Earth was fairly unique in the galaxy.
Also, tidal forces probably played a part in the development of life. I think it's more likely that if we find extraterrestrial life, we'll find it on the satellite of a gas giant, not in a rocky small planet.
I think you missed the point of the OP. Everything you described above is true for Earth, but not for Mercury, Venus and Mars.
In other words: It is true for 1/4 of the rocky planets in our solar system, and if you hold that our solar system will more likely be the average case, instead of an uncommon case[1], you can extrapolate that the above conditions will hold for ~25% of rocky planets in the universe.
Of course, that's vastly oversimplifying things, but still, the OP's point of "If our solar system is any guide, it happens to 1/4 of all rocky planets...." is a valid statement... it might prove out to be false, of course, but it is valid.
[1] - That is, if you assume a normal distribution for the properties of solar systems in the Universe, there are bound to be more "nearly average" solar systems, than outliers. Thus, it's more likely that we live on an average solar system.
How say this modded informative? I had to Google for WTF the post's talking about. Apparently it's from something called the Silmarillion.
Knowing the average Slashdotter, I would not be surprised if a poll found out that that there are actually more Slashdotters that have read the Silmarillion than those that have read the Bible.
Not that there's all too much difference between them, given Tolkien's own beliefs.;-)
On a more realistic note, if there was no such thing as free will, then science would never have developed anything. No thinking "outside the box" allowed;-) (philosophy has never been one of my strong subjects, because I think most of it is an illusion produced by people exercising free will...)
I'm not sure if that smiley should indicate that you're joking, but your statement is plainly absurd.
"Thinking outside the box" and "free will" have nothing to do with each other. The former describes that you think different than others on some particular topic. It is a matter of conformance. The second on the other hand, describes that you can freely choose what to think, which is a matter of determinism.
To make the difference even more clear, imagine a set of gears. If everyone of them has the same diameter and same number of teeth, they will behave exactly the same (as far as using them as gears is concerned), thus they conform to each other, and they will behave the same way every time. Now imagine that you cut away one of the teeth from one of the gears.
It will now behave different than the others; but does that mean that it won't do the same thing every time? No. While it does not conform to the others anymore, it's still fully deterministic.
Conformance and determinism are simply different concepts. You can still "think outside the box", even if your whole existence only goes through predetermined motions. It only means that your motion leads you to a different position, that's all.
I dont think the Nazis were trying to mask anything with the camps. It was about efficiency. What would they otherwise have done? Shot them all in the head in the streets ort in their houses. Thats a lot of ammunition and a lot of mess. They just wanted to dispose of the posulation quickly and cheaply.
Of course the camps were for efficiency, but that's not all they were for.
Afterall, why didn't they build extermination camps earlier? Like in 1933 when they rose into power, or in 1938, when they first tried their luck with the Reichskristallnacht?
The real killing only started with the onset of the war and even then, they didn't start with full scale genocide until 1942, because by that point, they were relatively sure that the populace had accepted the concentration camps in Germany and had actually conquered enough territory away from German soil to start turning the concentration camps there into extermination camps. There is a reason why those were in Poland, Russian and similar soil. The further away from Germany and the German populace, the better.
Yes, they wanted to get rid of the Jews, Communists and a lot of other targets as quickly as possible, but not at the cost of causing their own populace to rise.
After all, if the Kristallnacht had shown them one thing, it was that the German population barely accepted it. Instead of openly participating, as the Nazis had hoped, most people simply just didn't do anything against their troops. Yes, this is bad enough, especially given that I'm a German myself, but the important thing to note is that despite 5 years of constant propaganda on top of an already existing and wide-spread antisemitism, most people felt it was wrong what the Nazis did. Not wrong enough to rise up, but still...
After that, the Nazis wisened up and gave their terror in Germany a "legal" fascade, masked abductions even more as semi-legitimate police actions and clouded everything even more with a very unique wording in their propaganda, which not only borders on Orwell's Newspeak, but is pretty much one of the main inspirations for it.
No, if one thing is truly terrifying about the Nazi leaders is that they not only had the patience to plan the genocide, but that they also had the foresight to mask it in any way they could.
But still, word got out, and even if it was never a clear picture (just look at how aghast the liberating soldiers of those extermination camps were), it ultimately broke their necks.
If they hadn't started a war, sooner or later the pressure from inside and outside would've caused the whole thing to collapse (the war certainly helped to keep the German populace from rising up). After all, Ghandi himself needed decades. Satyagraha is not a fast way, but it is a way that ultimately works, especially if you can just reach enough people. The more terror you apply against it, the better it works.
There is a great short story about this, I think by Harry Turtledove. One of these alternate history concepts, where the Nazis end up ruling India instead of the British. When Gandhi tries his non-violent resistance the Germans arrest him. After a brief interview with the German commander, who is genuinely curious why Gandhi thinks his methods would have any effect on the German occupation, the German have him shot out of hand. End of story.
Probably? I'd say almost certainly! Before he had a significant amount of followers, Ghandi was a very easy target. But that's actually not a point against Ghandi's methods, it merely points out that people need to know about you, before you can raise them to do anything. But if no-one knows you, why would you need to be shot?
Of course, the Nazis had a much, much lower threshold of when you were a sufficiently dangerous subject that needed to be dealt with, but to say that unarmed resistance would not have worked is a strange argument. After all, if the Nazis were aware of one thing, it was always keeping the majority of the Germans in a state of mind where they might not like what the government does, but would not actually raise up against it. Hiding information was a big part of it.
But so was avoiding to exert too much openly visible violence against those who could not be easily demonized in the eyes of the populace.
For example, there is an incident, where several men (at least a dozen) were imprisoned by the SS -- I think they were suspected communists, but I might be mistaken about that. Anyway, their capture went quietly and their fate was almost sealed. But the SS hadn't expected that their wives would come to the prison and loudly demand their husbands to be released; openly visible by a lot of bystanders.
What do you think the SS did at this point? Given the short story, you'd expect them to have also imprisoned the wives and put the proverbial jackboot to the response of the populace.
But that's not what happened. Instead, they released the husbands and didn't touch them again. Why? Because they were well aware that if they exerted their terror too openly, it was just a matter of time till one dead dissident was joined by two of their relatives, which would necessarily mean more relatives and friends having to be dealt with, and so on. If the Nazis feared one thing after they assumed power, it was applying too much open terror against the majority.
You can see this even in how they dealt with the Jews. Only few of them were actually killed directly in the cities, towns and villages. Instead, they were imprisoned and carried away, first into Ghettos, then into concentration camps. So while the populace knew that something happened to the Jews, and everyone with half a working brain could imagine exactly what happened to them, they could deny it, because they did not witness it. So they only needed to push a few people to do immoral to atrocious acts, the rest could be calmed with propaganda, misinformation and building on the already latent anti-semitism (or generally racism). The fact that a war was around to keep the populace focused probably helped, too.
Now, knowing this, yes, the Nazis would've shot Ghandi -- but if they dallied only a bit till he had a somewhat visible following in the broad populace, they couldn't have stopped his ideas. Maybe his death would've meant that the people would've stopped the non-violence (afterall, it happened even with Ghandi present), but if it had reached the threshold were fighting it would've meant full genocide, they would've needed to mask it just as with the Jews -- and that only works with an insane amount of planning and very careful steps to make it acceptable to the majority.
But imagine doing this on a scope of 1 Billion people, instead of ~10 million. Possible? Yes, certainly. But see what reaction already the latter conjured up. And that's exactly what Ghandi was getting at. Even IF the
Slashdot Mirror
Note to self: When you get Mod Points, double-check all links before you use them.
- they used data gathered by an american satellite (the mars global surveyor, probably)
Actually, they might easily have used the Mars Express probe that was made and launched by ESA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Express
Not every satellite orbiting this or other planets was made by the US. Of course, lacking the original sources squabbling about what they might or might not have used is pretty much the definition of pointless.
And by the way, why would working together with NASA be any problem for determining who did what science? Last I heard, most European, Russian, Japanese and American space research is shared and more or less coordinated. For example, both the data from Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Express are used by NASA, JAXA, ESA and RKA. Just because the image and other data was gathered by a probe from made in a different country, that doesn't mean that only one country analyses the research. And if you're the first to analyse a particular set of data and publish your findings, why shouldn't you get credit for just that? It's the difference between data and information. An image alone is mostly data, a research paper derived from it (ideally) mostly information.
Ok, you got me on this one.
Are you saying that in some city/cities in the world, you actually have a choice on who provides your utilities like power and gas???
I've never heard of such a thing...how would that work? Do multiple companies dig multiple trenches to bury multiple pipes in the ground for the gas? Do they all string wires for power along the same poles or different poles for each company (or buried underground if they do that in your area)?
What cities have this choice? How many do they have to choose from?
Pretty much all cities in Germany. All of them, really.
For example, imagine you want to switch your electricity provider. Here, you only have to call the new provider, tell them you want their offerings, tell them who your previous provider was and the rest is done by them. A few days later the "switch" will be made. Without any new cabling or whatever. You will still get exactly the same electricity.
How does this work, you might ask? Well, it works because all German (and European) Energy production facilities are cross-linked. Therefore, you will always get the electricity that's generated closest to you, but you actually pay for energy that was generated somewhere else.
Say you're getting electricity from company CA who owns power plant PA (which is closest to you) and want to switch to company CB who owns power plant PB. By switching you now pay the running cost of electricity generated at power plant PB, while still getting energy from PA. You can do that because PA and PB actually transmit their energy into a common pool. If PA has reserves while PB is fully loaded, company CB draws energy from the pool and vice versa. The companies (regulated by a common authority) will then figure out how much energy they have produced with their plants and how much of that was "used" by their own customers. If their customers used 100%, they pay nothing, if less they get compensated for the "surplus" they have offered other companies if more, they compensate the others for the draw they have caused on the other power plants. Thus, the companies deal with compensating each other for the fact that you draw from power-plants not owned by them.
With this system, even companies who don't actually own power plants can sell electricity to you and companies who own power plants don't necessarily need to sell energy to end users ... or users in their own country.
The same system applies to gas, water, railroads and other utilities.
Most of the seeds of todays plants can't take staying completely submerged in water for even a very, very short amount of time. Even very small seeds can only stay airborne for a brief time. Most seeds do not germinate in completely waterlogged and/or eroded soil.
So, either you posit that a few thousand years ago seeds were much hardier (then why aren't they now, then?), or you need to explain how the current abundance of plants came into existence in such a short amount of time.
On top of that, you have mushrooms, most of which reproduce via airborne spores that would've been destroyed even easier by a flood.
Shoemaker–Levy 9 didn't look scattered all over the place, pretty much looked like a straight line.
And the 21 fragments whose impacts were visible from earth needed 6 days to hit the planet. 6 days at a speed of ~60 km/s equals ~ 31 million kilometers distance between the first and last impactor.
So the submitter is indeed right: "Claiming that a comet broke apart, yet managed to constrain its pieces to volume of space less than a few thousand kilometers across strains credulity."
Question. How were you disconnecting it? Did you just grab the cord and yoink, or did you grab the nice, solid plug and yoink/rock it off?
Counter-question: Does it matter if he treated both connectors the same way?
One works, the other fails. No matter how badly he mistreated them, from his personal view, one is better than the other.
The same applies to the original poster who thinks that the magnetic connector is better than the friction one.
Henry Ford did not invent the car, but he applied to it the industrial practices (which he did invent) that put it in a position to change the world.
If we're already on the topic of setting historical misconceptions right: As much as Henry Ford is to be admired, he did not invent the industrial practice -- or mass production -- or the assembly line.
He was at least predated by roughly 1800 years. To be precise, during the construction of the Colosseum in Rome (the Flavian Amphitheatre) beginning in 72AD, the Romans already used standardized mass production on an industrial scale in assembly lines all over Rome to produce bricks that were used en masse in the construction. The shops that created them were even called "fabrica", or where do you think the word came from?
So, to use a famous, if paraphrased, saying: History is not a tale of heroes and giants that saw farther than the dwarfs around them, or a tale of dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants to see farther. It is very much a tale of dwarfs standing shoulder to shoulder to allow the next generation of dwarfs above them to see farther.
And if your name is Linus Torvalds, you don't have to learn everything possible about Git, as you can just decree whatever you think is right as being right.
wow! Lol I had forgotten that's what they would advertise home computers for in the 80s. Man that takes me back... and to all of you not over 40, in the early and mid 80s most ads would show the main benefit of a $3,000 (closer to $6k in today's money) home computer is that it can balance the check book or (to get wives interested) store cooking recipes. Wow we have come a long way.
Actually, as far as storing recipes is concerned, Apple is still using exactly the same advertisement for the iPad. So much for coming a long way and that "nothing will ever be the same again"! (Or whatever slogan they use in the USA, as I'm hailing in from Germany and am currently too lazy to check.)
If I didn't have to go to work, I wouldn't do work. I'd be the best damn video game player in the world.)
But really, how long would you be able to do this? According to my experience, most people want to work after a certain time. Why do you think most millionaires don't spend all day doing nothing. Sure, they may have more leisure time than the average person, but most of them find a multitude of other things to do. For example running companies, especially if they've built it up themselves. And even those that only socialize all day do exactly that: They socialize, they strive to get in touch with other people, because at some point, even the biggest palace is empty.
And if you want to see what happens when you combine joblessness with poverty, just go into the nearest run-down pub you can find. Not being able to work sooner or later destroys you, both mentally as well as physically.
No matter what will happen in the future, no matter how much human work will become unnecessary, people will find ways to work, if only to entertain themselves and feel they're helping others. We're social animals, and will remain so for a long, long time.
Of course, that's how boss battles work, isn't it?
World War 2 ended when a prisoner escaping from some castle gunned down Cyborg-Hitler, after all.
That's only VE day. You forget about VJ day when a giant monkey the Americans stole from some jungle island killed a giant lizard/dinosaur thing.
But of course, it was a really sad day for the world when that lone Italian Plumber later shot the monkey. Of course, there are also some nutjobs that claim that another plumber helped from the mushroom knoll...
When are we going to get YouTube in 3d?
If I had to venture a guess, somewhere around April 1st next year.
It is the driver behind the wheel which makes it dangerous.
And here's the problem with robotic drivers... They are all identical. Every one on a particular model will be byte for byte identical. Which means a fault in one is a fault in all.
Humans on the other hand are all different. Just because one causes an accident under certain circumstance doesn't mean another would.
Ahh, so if I code a virus for AmigaOS, it'll automatically affect Windows machines, too? Cool!
Do you really believe that the entire car industry would really just select one design? And then never change it? Hell, just look at the current state of car engineering: Even the SAME manufacturer uses a number of different hardware platforms, operating systems, field bus systems and software versions, sometimes even between two different iterations of the same car model.
Believe me, if one manufacturer ever added a full driving AI to its cars, you can bet that the other manufacturers would add a different and totally incompatible AI to their line of cars, just to ensure that the other manufacturer won't gain market dominance. And that's assuming that the first manufacturer hasn't patented the AI.
On top of that, do you really think that a 2-ton Pickup, an 800 kg supermini car and the future iteration of the Porsche 911 will handle exactly the same? Thus, what may be a bug in one car version, might not even be a minor issue in another car version.
And even if all you said were true, and each and every car is the same, you'd still have to convince us that that's in any way worse than the current situation where you have millions of reckless drivers, millions of half-blind drivers, millions of repeatedly drunk drivers and so on.
They don't 'see' the position, they have to do math to get it. Having said that, I do use the computer to practice and analyse my games.
And, pray tell, what do you think the brain does when it "sees" a position? There's no such thing as insight raining down from the heavens like manna. Even your brain needs to first realize how the board looks, then cross-reference that with that else it has seen in the times past and then choose an appropriate action it deems worthwhile.
The approach to steps 2 and 3 may be slightly different, as the human brain most likely uses more heuristics, but in the end, both computers and brains follow the same logic ... and have to follow the same logic.
There is no such thing as a free thought, to abuse a popular saying.
I'm not the only one that feels that PC Gaming only has three genres: "Shooting", "Driving", "Micro Managing".
Huh? I just looked at my gaming collection, and your three genres make up maybe 10% of the games I own.
I mean, you conveniently forgot all Adventure Games (and no, that genre isn't dying out, just ask Telltale Games) and didn't include a lot of RPGs. Then there's a whole slew of Indie Games out there that don't fit your formula. Just looking at the "Humble Bundle" games you immediately find Aquaria, Gish, World of Goo, Osmos and Braid that don't fit into either of the three categories.
And even if you limit yourself to your three categories, isn't "Micro Managing" a bit overly broad? If you take the most inclusive sense of the word, you find management simulations, political simulations, war simulations (both turn-based and real-time strategy), life simulations (and no, not just The Sims), and so on. And in each of those, you find a wide and rich spectrum of very different games. Just compare the Civilization series with StarCraft.
And then there are these mixtures that don't fit into any single category. Games like Dwarf Fortress or The Settlers or Minecraft.
My point is, there are not only a lot more than three genres on the PC, even those three contain wildly diverse games. They might not sell multiple millions of copies and take the lime-light, but then again, how many people have bought such critically acclaimed, off-beat, console-only games like Flower?
You do know that energy consumption goes beyond just oil, right?
Sure. I merely tried to express in a parable, what I could've stated more bluntly as: Do the math again, and this time don't forget that consumption will not stay constant and may easily bridge the orders of magnitude that you described as insurmountable.
In a way, your comment only raises further hints and concerns in that respect: We consume some resources like there's no tomorrow. And as hungry as our society is for oil, it is even hungrier for energy.
The total world energy consumption from all sources in 2008 was estimated at 4.75*10^20 joules.
At that rate, cooling the interior of the earth by a single degree would power the entire world for 5,789,473 years.
And that's assuming the earth doesn't continue to generate heat from radioactive decay, tidal forces, friction etc.
But that's assuming human energy use will stay the same.
Let's see. In 1859, the United States of America (just taking one country for simplicity) produced ~2000 (270 t) barrel of crude oil per year. As of 2010 said country has reserves left of around ~21*10^9 billion barrel = 21*10^18 barrels. So given these figures, you could live with those reserves for ~ 1*10^16 years.
Just as a reminder, the age of the universe is estimated at 14 billion = 14*10^9 years. So, certainly the US-Americans are nowhere near close to using up their oil reserves. So it's an absolutely moot point to check Wikipedia for the number of years till the reserves are run dry. But just for the sake of completion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves#Estimated_reserves_by_country
WHAT? Just 8 years! How can this be? My numbers can absolutely not lie!
See what you just conveniently forgot there? Always be aware of all the possible consequences and then act accordingly. I'm all for using geothermal energy, but as with everything, one should use one's brain before, while and also still after doing something.
The things that annoy me is that it uses shift + ctrl to open a new tab instead of the defacto standard ctrl
Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Shortcuts -> (Keyboard Setup) Edit
Configure away! You can override ANY keyboard, mouse and voice command that way. Yes, you can even change the meaning of the mouse gestures.
and there is no way to have tabs you open from a link open next to the active tab
Tools -> Preferences -> Open New Tab Next To Active
Happy?
and have new blank tabs open at the end of the browser.
By default, there's a "+" tab at the end of the browser's tab list. Not good enough?
Also, no working adblock despite what hosts files trolls say.
Gone with Opera 11, since it now supports extensions. Now, you can have Adblock, Flashblock, whatever.
So, basically, you only miss features that are TRIVIALLY easy to enable now. So, why don't you switch again? ^_^
It also opens the provocative possibility of same-sex couples having their own genetic children, the researchers note.
As long as they're happy with only female children, or are males themselves.
You know, if they are able to get two arbitrary (male/female) sets of genetic code to combine, I imagine it's not so much of a stretch to assume that you can either:
1.) Introduce a Y chromosome from a third party or
2.) Convert the gene sequences from an X chromosome into a Y chromosome (or at least those parts that are compatible)
You know, that's the nearly unqiue property of genetic engineering, the most pressing issue is not whether something is possible at all, but whether it is morally acceptable.
None of the other non-gas giants has a moon anywhere near as big as our satellite. Asimov explored this in Foundation and Earth, where the Earth was fairly unique in the galaxy.
Also, tidal forces probably played a part in the development of life. I think it's more likely that if we find extraterrestrial life, we'll find it on the satellite of a gas giant, not in a rocky small planet.
The Forgosts think that too (of course, I made them up ;)
I think you missed the point of the OP. Everything you described above is true for Earth, but not for Mercury, Venus and Mars.
In other words: It is true for 1/4 of the rocky planets in our solar system, and if you hold that our solar system will more likely be the average case, instead of an uncommon case[1], you can extrapolate that the above conditions will hold for ~25% of rocky planets in the universe.
Of course, that's vastly oversimplifying things, but still, the OP's point of "If our solar system is any guide, it happens to 1/4 of all rocky planets...." is a valid statement ... it might prove out to be false, of course, but it is valid.
[1] - That is, if you assume a normal distribution for the properties of solar systems in the Universe, there are bound to be more "nearly average" solar systems, than outliers. Thus, it's more likely that we live on an average solar system.
Tolkien was a bit better of a poet, though.
That goes without saying.
For one, Tolkien was most likely just one person. ;)
How say this modded informative? I had to Google for WTF the post's talking about. Apparently it's from something called the Silmarillion.
Knowing the average Slashdotter, I would not be surprised if a poll found out that that there are actually more Slashdotters that have read the Silmarillion than those that have read the Bible.
Not that there's all too much difference between them, given Tolkien's own beliefs. ;-)
On a more realistic note, if there was no such thing as free will, then science would never have developed anything. No thinking "outside the box" allowed ;-) (philosophy has never been one of my strong subjects, because I think most of it is an illusion produced by people exercising free will...)
I'm not sure if that smiley should indicate that you're joking, but your statement is plainly absurd.
"Thinking outside the box" and "free will" have nothing to do with each other. The former describes that you think different than others on some particular topic. It is a matter of conformance. The second on the other hand, describes that you can freely choose what to think, which is a matter of determinism.
To make the difference even more clear, imagine a set of gears. If everyone of them has the same diameter and same number of teeth, they will behave exactly the same (as far as using them as gears is concerned), thus they conform to each other, and they will behave the same way every time. Now imagine that you cut away one of the teeth from one of the gears.
It will now behave different than the others; but does that mean that it won't do the same thing every time? No. While it does not conform to the others anymore, it's still fully deterministic.
Conformance and determinism are simply different concepts. You can still "think outside the box", even if your whole existence only goes through predetermined motions. It only means that your motion leads you to a different position, that's all.
I dont think the Nazis were trying to mask anything with the camps. It was about efficiency. What would they otherwise have done? Shot them all in the head in the streets ort in their houses. Thats a lot of ammunition and a lot of mess. They just wanted to dispose of the posulation quickly and cheaply.
Of course the camps were for efficiency, but that's not all they were for.
Afterall, why didn't they build extermination camps earlier? Like in 1933 when they rose into power, or in 1938, when they first tried their luck with the Reichskristallnacht?
The real killing only started with the onset of the war and even then, they didn't start with full scale genocide until 1942, because by that point, they were relatively sure that the populace had accepted the concentration camps in Germany and had actually conquered enough territory away from German soil to start turning the concentration camps there into extermination camps. There is a reason why those were in Poland, Russian and similar soil. The further away from Germany and the German populace, the better.
Yes, they wanted to get rid of the Jews, Communists and a lot of other targets as quickly as possible, but not at the cost of causing their own populace to rise.
After all, if the Kristallnacht had shown them one thing, it was that the German population barely accepted it. Instead of openly participating, as the Nazis had hoped, most people simply just didn't do anything against their troops. Yes, this is bad enough, especially given that I'm a German myself, but the important thing to note is that despite 5 years of constant propaganda on top of an already existing and wide-spread antisemitism, most people felt it was wrong what the Nazis did. Not wrong enough to rise up, but still...
After that, the Nazis wisened up and gave their terror in Germany a "legal" fascade, masked abductions even more as semi-legitimate police actions and clouded everything even more with a very unique wording in their propaganda, which not only borders on Orwell's Newspeak, but is pretty much one of the main inspirations for it.
No, if one thing is truly terrifying about the Nazi leaders is that they not only had the patience to plan the genocide, but that they also had the foresight to mask it in any way they could.
But still, word got out, and even if it was never a clear picture (just look at how aghast the liberating soldiers of those extermination camps were), it ultimately broke their necks.
If they hadn't started a war, sooner or later the pressure from inside and outside would've caused the whole thing to collapse (the war certainly helped to keep the German populace from rising up). After all, Ghandi himself needed decades. Satyagraha is not a fast way, but it is a way that ultimately works, especially if you can just reach enough people. The more terror you apply against it, the better it works.
There is a great short story about this, I think by Harry Turtledove. One of these alternate history concepts, where the Nazis end up ruling India instead of the British. When Gandhi tries his non-violent resistance the Germans arrest him. After a brief interview with the German commander, who is genuinely curious why Gandhi thinks his methods would have any effect on the German occupation, the German have him shot out of hand. End of story.
Probably? I'd say almost certainly! Before he had a significant amount of followers, Ghandi was a very easy target. But that's actually not a point against Ghandi's methods, it merely points out that people need to know about you, before you can raise them to do anything. But if no-one knows you, why would you need to be shot?
Of course, the Nazis had a much, much lower threshold of when you were a sufficiently dangerous subject that needed to be dealt with, but to say that unarmed resistance would not have worked is a strange argument. After all, if the Nazis were aware of one thing, it was always keeping the majority of the Germans in a state of mind where they might not like what the government does, but would not actually raise up against it. Hiding information was a big part of it.
But so was avoiding to exert too much openly visible violence against those who could not be easily demonized in the eyes of the populace.
For example, there is an incident, where several men (at least a dozen) were imprisoned by the SS -- I think they were suspected communists, but I might be mistaken about that. Anyway, their capture went quietly and their fate was almost sealed. But the SS hadn't expected that their wives would come to the prison and loudly demand their husbands to be released; openly visible by a lot of bystanders.
What do you think the SS did at this point? Given the short story, you'd expect them to have also imprisoned the wives and put the proverbial jackboot to the response of the populace.
But that's not what happened. Instead, they released the husbands and didn't touch them again. Why? Because they were well aware that if they exerted their terror too openly, it was just a matter of time till one dead dissident was joined by two of their relatives, which would necessarily mean more relatives and friends having to be dealt with, and so on. If the Nazis feared one thing after they assumed power, it was applying too much open terror against the majority.
You can see this even in how they dealt with the Jews. Only few of them were actually killed directly in the cities, towns and villages. Instead, they were imprisoned and carried away, first into Ghettos, then into concentration camps. So while the populace knew that something happened to the Jews, and everyone with half a working brain could imagine exactly what happened to them, they could deny it, because they did not witness it. So they only needed to push a few people to do immoral to atrocious acts, the rest could be calmed with propaganda, misinformation and building on the already latent anti-semitism (or generally racism). The fact that a war was around to keep the populace focused probably helped, too.
Now, knowing this, yes, the Nazis would've shot Ghandi -- but if they dallied only a bit till he had a somewhat visible following in the broad populace, they couldn't have stopped his ideas. Maybe his death would've meant that the people would've stopped the non-violence (afterall, it happened even with Ghandi present), but if it had reached the threshold were fighting it would've meant full genocide, they would've needed to mask it just as with the Jews -- and that only works with an insane amount of planning and very careful steps to make it acceptable to the majority.
But imagine doing this on a scope of 1 Billion people, instead of ~10 million. Possible? Yes, certainly. But see what reaction already the latter conjured up. And that's exactly what Ghandi was getting at. Even IF the