The dangers of secondhand smoke were deliberately misrepresented by experts of the day, who were anti-smoking zealots. Basically, anything with political consequences will be misrepresented to gain the desired outcome. Even if there's some underlying truth, the extent can be misrepresented to manufacture fear and thus political action.
The problem with anti-vaxxers is really that they will put 100 children at real risk in order to remove some tiny, imagined risk to their precious angel. That's a bigger problem than whether the risk is 0 or 1-in-a-million. I don't know how we break out of this cultural syndrome of overprotective parents, but it's gotten out of hand from every angle.
Oh bullshit. A private company squashing factually wrong information
"Factually wrong". It's like you know nothing of the history of Communism. Anything can be "factually wrong". In the worst days in Poland, "1 + 1 = 2" was used as a powerful protest sign - just the assertion that there are objective truths was risking government crackdown.
We have laws against fraud, because that's a restriction on business, not on speech per se. That's a very good place to draw the line.
The modern foil fencing saber is a bastardized form of the original saber,
The sport fencing technique has no relation at all to acual historical saber technique (YouTube is full of HEMA videos that explain this - there's a whole different martial art for historical accuracy). BTW, many cavalry sabers were straight, designed primarily for thrusting as one rode by one's target.
Light sabre fencing also has nothing to do with historical saber technique, but it wouldn't surprise me if they grow closer over time as the historical martial arts actually needed to be effective, and presumably will be used by those that do both.
. I don't know if you have ever worked a retail customer facing job but I bet you 100% of the time they do not "shut down" the store when the power/cash registers go out.
Most of the places I've lived, they not only shut down, they lock and barricade the doors to deter looters.
If there's ever a power outage of any significance your "economy" is fucked. Doesn't seem very sound to have such a point of failure.
If the power goes out, what are you going to buy with cash? The cash registers at the grocery stores won't work, and it's not like anyone knows how to make change these days. Can't buy gas, as the pumps won't work. Banks can't operate without power these days, so you're limited to cash on hand.
I'm glad people have stopped rattling on about OOP. I was getting tired of hearing about functional programming and immutable objects. At least a new fad will be a change, I guess.
Fads come and go, but you're still writing functions to do something, and most people can't do that well, for whatever reason.
"Google is spying on you" is hardly a conspiracy theory - it's the fundamental truth of the modern age. Whether they're recording this microphone is dubious, but you can hardy be shocked when it turns out the thing you bought from Google is harvesting your personal data, however it does it.
Space Nutters keep talking about mining asteroids, even though it makes zero sense. We have more than enough here on Earth.
Heavy industry isn't exactly environmentally friendly on Earth. It would be nice to do it elsewhere, if we could afford to. At the right price, the kind of people who own their own islands would no doubt love to own their own island-sized space stations, and it just makes more sense to build most of that in space (at least the heavy structure and water and such) rather than lifting it.
Shorter term, the ability to make fuel in space would be a godsend to science missions. There are hundreds more probes we could launch if we didn't have to launch their fuel. There are some nearby CHON asteroids - dragging a tiny one into orbit isn't that ridiculous.
I'd love to see us able to launch a solar probe that doesn't require 7 Venus flybys to get there (though it will be approaching 0.1% of the speed of light, which is amazing), or quickly send probes to the Pluto-like objects we've discovered. Just making interplanetary probes more than a once-a-decade affair would be a heck of a thing.
It will grow though, as launch costs continue falling. I don't know that it needs to be it's own branch, but it's not a crazy idea, any more than the Coast Guard.
How will this new force be funded? What will be their mission? Doesn't the airforce already have this covered?
Yes, space operations are currently part of the Air Force. They will be split off. I expect they'll be quite small at first, like our other small uniformed services (NOAA and USPHS). It will continue to grow over time, though.
Traditionally the air force has had this covered. Seems like we could have necessary defenses with a specialized unit without the overhead of an entire military branch.
Perhaps so, but amateurs almost always guess wrong about questions of military logistics, so I'll avoid guessing.
I would expect the Marines would be quite upset at the suggestion that the Navy is responsible for any sort of Marines. But I doubt it will come up this century.
"Socialism" is not the only alternative to anarchy, as you seem to suggest. Socialism is the extreme. A government building roads has nothing to do with socialism - it's just a government program. When everyone shoveling asphalt works for the government, and private roads are forbidden, that's a socialist program.
Did someone actually teach you that "socialism" is just another word for government? The mind boggles.
Well now that we have 20% reduction in launch costs
The cost to launch stuff on the space shuttle was around $16,000/kg to LEO IIRC (actual program cost was around 3x that). Launching on the Delta IV costs around $12,000/kg - that's progress, for a government contractor.
Falcon 9 has launch costs around $3000/kg to LEO. That's a bit better than 20%. Blue Origin is trying for commercial sub-orbital tourism this year with New Shepard (and their product demo launch makes that seem credible). The next generation (New Glenn and Starship) are promising much lower costs.
Building a rocket will never be cheap, but rocket fuel just isn't that expensive.
what is it that got you your precious Moon landing in 1969?
Mostly technology built by corporations. Just like interstate highways.
There was a time when going to space was so expensive, and the payback so distant, that it only made sense or the government to do it. It's a new century, and "space" is a competitive business now.
Even if rockets are free, what kind of things make sense to do in space?
Anything that's unpleasant to do on Earth. I expect the first major industry to move to space will be power generation. When a several trillion dollar industry gets cheaper to do in space, it will move, and that will be the end of our whining about fossil fuels. Very simple solar thermal plants are far more efficient, even with transmission losses, than ground0based solar. At $3000/kg to orbit, orbital power is practical, but still more expensive than fracking. At $300/kg to orbit, it will happen. Solar in LEO might not make sense for other reasons, and it may be another decade or two before we're talking about $300/kg for GEO, but that's just price.
Think about all the heavy industries that enviroweenies complain about. Most heavy industrial processes would be a lot less of a hassle in space, if we could just magically teleport millions of tons of equipment to orbit. We're a long way from asteroid mining and heavy industry moving to space, but launch costs are the sticking point, far more than robotics or redesigning a blast furnace to be a solar furnace.
The reason we haven't colonized the galaxy yet is because of launch costs.
Do you see anyone else around here spouting this hyperbole? You're the person you're complaining about!
And, yes, China is kicking ass. Their moon landing was awesome. And an Israeli moon lander will launch on a Falcon 9 in a few days, and ideally be the first to do a "hop" from one landing site to another. Exciting times.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a freedom of speech issue. Facebook is a privately-run platform, not a government-run platform.
Freedom of speech should apply to all public platforms, just like all public accommodations are prevented from racial discrimination.
The dangers of secondhand smoke were deliberately misrepresented by experts of the day, who were anti-smoking zealots. Basically, anything with political consequences will be misrepresented to gain the desired outcome. Even if there's some underlying truth, the extent can be misrepresented to manufacture fear and thus political action.
The problem with anti-vaxxers is really that they will put 100 children at real risk in order to remove some tiny, imagined risk to their precious angel. That's a bigger problem than whether the risk is 0 or 1-in-a-million. I don't know how we break out of this cultural syndrome of overprotective parents, but it's gotten out of hand from every angle.
Oh bullshit. A private company squashing factually wrong information
"Factually wrong". It's like you know nothing of the history of Communism. Anything can be "factually wrong". In the worst days in Poland, "1 + 1 = 2" was used as a powerful protest sign - just the assertion that there are objective truths was risking government crackdown.
We have laws against fraud, because that's a restriction on business, not on speech per se. That's a very good place to draw the line.
The modern foil fencing saber is a bastardized form of the original saber,
The sport fencing technique has no relation at all to acual historical saber technique (YouTube is full of HEMA videos that explain this - there's a whole different martial art for historical accuracy). BTW, many cavalry sabers were straight, designed primarily for thrusting as one rode by one's target.
Light sabre fencing also has nothing to do with historical saber technique, but it wouldn't surprise me if they grow closer over time as the historical martial arts actually needed to be effective, and presumably will be used by those that do both.
. I don't know if you have ever worked a retail customer facing job but I bet you 100% of the time they do not "shut down" the store when the power/cash registers go out.
Most of the places I've lived, they not only shut down, they lock and barricade the doors to deter looters.
If there's ever a power outage of any significance your "economy" is fucked. Doesn't seem very sound to have such a point of failure.
If the power goes out, what are you going to buy with cash? The cash registers at the grocery stores won't work, and it's not like anyone knows how to make change these days. Can't buy gas, as the pumps won't work. Banks can't operate without power these days, so you're limited to cash on hand.
Slashdot groupthink hates it when you point out the groupthink.
All we need is a story about Musk, Bitcoin, and global warming for the perfect storm of clickbait.
I'm glad people have stopped rattling on about OOP. I was getting tired of hearing about functional programming and immutable objects. At least a new fad will be a change, I guess.
Fads come and go, but you're still writing functions to do something, and most people can't do that well, for whatever reason.
"Google is spying on you" is hardly a conspiracy theory - it's the fundamental truth of the modern age. Whether they're recording this microphone is dubious, but you can hardy be shocked when it turns out the thing you bought from Google is harvesting your personal data, however it does it.
It's no more nerdy than foil fencing, just less old. It's also about as abstracted from reality as foil fencing.
Any exercise program that you actually do is a good one. If light sabers motivate people, more power to them.
Is "imperative" vs "declarative" the latest fad? You're good at problem solving, or you're not. You understand data structures, or you don't.
Java has the bitwise operators. Same as in C.
Java doesn't even have unsigned ints. And while shorts are in the language, just try working with them with no implicit casting.
The high-level programmer uses a library for these tasks - but someone has to write the libraries...
And writing them in Java is much like driving a nail with a screwdriver. Technically, it's possible.
Anyway, the point is your typical college graduate has no practical experience with bitwise operations these days.
Possible plunder preempted: potentious precedent prevents popular peeping.
The US Marines have a seat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But perhaps you're splitting hairs finer than I care to.
Space Nutters keep talking about mining asteroids, even though it makes zero sense. We have more than enough here on Earth.
Heavy industry isn't exactly environmentally friendly on Earth. It would be nice to do it elsewhere, if we could afford to. At the right price, the kind of people who own their own islands would no doubt love to own their own island-sized space stations, and it just makes more sense to build most of that in space (at least the heavy structure and water and such) rather than lifting it.
Shorter term, the ability to make fuel in space would be a godsend to science missions. There are hundreds more probes we could launch if we didn't have to launch their fuel. There are some nearby CHON asteroids - dragging a tiny one into orbit isn't that ridiculous.
I'd love to see us able to launch a solar probe that doesn't require 7 Venus flybys to get there (though it will be approaching 0.1% of the speed of light, which is amazing), or quickly send probes to the Pluto-like objects we've discovered. Just making interplanetary probes more than a once-a-decade affair would be a heck of a thing.
It will grow though, as launch costs continue falling. I don't know that it needs to be it's own branch, but it's not a crazy idea, any more than the Coast Guard.
How will this new force be funded? What will be their mission? Doesn't the airforce already have this covered?
Yes, space operations are currently part of the Air Force. They will be split off. I expect they'll be quite small at first, like our other small uniformed services (NOAA and USPHS). It will continue to grow over time, though.
Traditionally the air force has had this covered. Seems like we could have necessary defenses with a specialized unit without the overhead of an entire military branch.
Perhaps so, but amateurs almost always guess wrong about questions of military logistics, so I'll avoid guessing.
I would expect the Marines would be quite upset at the suggestion that the Navy is responsible for any sort of Marines. But I doubt it will come up this century.
"Socialism" is not the only alternative to anarchy, as you seem to suggest. Socialism is the extreme. A government building roads has nothing to do with socialism - it's just a government program. When everyone shoveling asphalt works for the government, and private roads are forbidden, that's a socialist program.
Did someone actually teach you that "socialism" is just another word for government? The mind boggles.
We don't have a space navy, nor will we any time soon. We do have a lot of military satellites.
/
Well now that we have 20% reduction in launch costs
The cost to launch stuff on the space shuttle was around $16,000/kg to LEO IIRC (actual program cost was around 3x that). Launching on the Delta IV costs around $12,000/kg - that's progress, for a government contractor.
Falcon 9 has launch costs around $3000/kg to LEO. That's a bit better than 20%. Blue Origin is trying for commercial sub-orbital tourism this year with New Shepard (and their product demo launch makes that seem credible). The next generation (New Glenn and Starship) are promising much lower costs.
Building a rocket will never be cheap, but rocket fuel just isn't that expensive.
what is it that got you your precious Moon landing in 1969?
Mostly technology built by corporations. Just like interstate highways.
There was a time when going to space was so expensive, and the payback so distant, that it only made sense or the government to do it. It's a new century, and "space" is a competitive business now.
Even if rockets are free, what kind of things make sense to do in space?
Anything that's unpleasant to do on Earth. I expect the first major industry to move to space will be power generation. When a several trillion dollar industry gets cheaper to do in space, it will move, and that will be the end of our whining about fossil fuels. Very simple solar thermal plants are far more efficient, even with transmission losses, than ground0based solar. At $3000/kg to orbit, orbital power is practical, but still more expensive than fracking. At $300/kg to orbit, it will happen. Solar in LEO might not make sense for other reasons, and it may be another decade or two before we're talking about $300/kg for GEO, but that's just price.
Think about all the heavy industries that enviroweenies complain about. Most heavy industrial processes would be a lot less of a hassle in space, if we could just magically teleport millions of tons of equipment to orbit. We're a long way from asteroid mining and heavy industry moving to space, but launch costs are the sticking point, far more than robotics or redesigning a blast furnace to be a solar furnace.
The reason we haven't colonized the galaxy yet is because of launch costs.
Do you see anyone else around here spouting this hyperbole? You're the person you're complaining about!
And, yes, China is kicking ass. Their moon landing was awesome. And an Israeli moon lander will launch on a Falcon 9 in a few days, and ideally be the first to do a "hop" from one landing site to another. Exciting times.
WTF are you on about? I can't even follow what you're trying to say. "Socialism == Military"? Wut?
Fuck me. Nothing but "Orage Man Bad" on Slashdot these days. Can't we fucking discuss the topic?