True enough! I had forgotten learning that on the discovery channel back in the day.
Even so, it would seem that at least one or two other dinos would evolve such a behavior pattern too, if the rodent-egg selection factor was as profound as to endanger all dinos.
It was a glaring omission that needed addressing though, and mainly, I'm just amused/horrified by the notion of a tree-croc leaping down on its unsuspecting prey.
Sunspot activity or lack thereof has absolutely nothing to do with human caused global warming. Bear with me for a second here.
It's been conclusively proven that increased carbon dioxide in a system prevents more incoming solar energy from escaping a system. This is demonstrable on a small scale with basic equipment, and is readily observable.
It is also simply a fact that humans have been dumping huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I doubt anyone on this website doubts this.
This known cause (carbon emission) has a known effect (warming), and humans have been performing this known cause for centuries with ever-increasing pervasiveness.
What is less clear cut is the end result and magnitude that this human-caused warming effect has. The earth is obviously a hugely complicated system. Innumerable factors, like the exact ability of each various sub-system to absorb carbon, are just now being explored. The amount of solar input of energy, clearly, has a --huge-- bearing on the end net temperature.
But please... don't make the logical fallacy of saying that since sunspots also affect temperature, therefore carbon doesn't matter, or that humans aren't having a climactic impact.
There's a more interesting question with Neanderthals this raises here too.
Humans have enough problems with race as it is. Can you imagine had the Neanderthals actually survived to the modern era, being an entirely genuinely separate species?
The cultural and social effects of that would be fascinating, especially if they really were in fact equally intelligent. They might approach problems in hugely different thought processes that we can't even really envision right now, since we all share the same wetware fundamentally.
Now presume something like a human liger, or mule... healthy, intelligent, strong offspring between a human and and a Neanderthal that is unable to breed? Would religions and cultures proclaim them abominations? What would their perspective bring to society?
The optimist in me is fascinated by what could have been. The cynic in me is horrified at what would have happened.
Ah, d'oh! You're right. I had just read fast and saw the "standard 3x3x3 size" line... where the unit is squares, not inches.
Two morals:
1) RTFA is a good thing
2) I shouldn't design Mars probes
That, sir, was a nit well picked. It should still (barely) fit though. It might have to be fudged a little bit, but the untrained eye would probably never be able to tell the difference. And it would be no less spiffy. ^.^
That'd be cool for far more than just airport security, I think that might just be the coolest casemod idea I've ever heard of.
Since a Rubik's cube is 3"x3"x3", you could literally fit a shell that looked just like a standard Rubik's over it, and have removable squares for the ports....
So, if China were to create offical documents certifying that none of their athletes were doping, IOC should accept that too?
Hogwash. The IOC has an obligation to enforce its own rules. It should conduct a thorough investigation into alleged rules violations, particularly high profile ones like this. These are not radical notions.
The whole argument of "Ah, but the scientist himself has determined actions!", while very appealingly Zen sounding, makes no sense.
If a particle's state is undeterminable before observation, it makes it impossible to predict with 100% accuracy.
How, then, exactly, is this thing we call a "scientist", who himself (or herself) is nothing more than the current product of these same particles interacting with some non-zero level of unpredictability over roughly 13.73 billion years, predictable??
If a particle is granted to have an un-predeterminable state, then some sort of effective free will is possible. If it isn't, then it isn't.
As a "devout" atheist, I often use terms such as "soul" (and devout, in case you didn't catch that irony there somehow). Part of it is cultural habit and syntax that is almost second nature.
The other part is that they are very useful abstractions. It's very much so easier to refer to one's "soul" as opposed to some terminological monstrosity such as "the sum total of my innate biological predispositions after everything it has experienced" or "my wetware operating system". Use "soul", and clarify your appropriation of the term at the outset. It makes life easier, and helps phrases discussions in terms others understand.
Yes, Boston has an excellent T system, and driving very often means taking well over twice as long to risk life, limb, and sanity driving before you sell a significant fraction of your soul to find a parking spot.
The problem lies in getting TO the T and getting out again. There's a commuter rail system, true, and I have in fact taken it many times. Despite the fact that the commuter rail has always traditionally operated at a loss, it's rather expensive. And you still have to coordinate your trip just right, because if you miss a train, very often you're going to be an hour and a half late somewhere, unless of course you plan against it by scheduling to arrive an hour and a half early.... Also, you have to get --to-- the commuter rail stop, which means?.... driving.
This is because, as far as the suburbs around Boston goes, you have two options of getting around:
1) Drive
2) Wish you had the option of 1) and instead stay exactly where you are.
There are no buses. There is no TAXI. People will not pick up a hitchiker. Distances in the sprawling suburbs are too prohibitive to walk practically, and even bicycling is difficult. Also, there are no bike lanes, the edges of the road are very uneven, and very often biking means taking your life into your hands.
One side-effect of this lack of transportation is that there are a vast number of elderly drivers, who know they're unsafe, and whose relatives know they are unsafe, and yet still drive (although usually only during the daylight hours, and only a few times a week).
The reason for this is they literally have no choice. An elderly person without a driving license, kind-hearted relatives or neighbors nearby, or a good knowledge of local social services faces a very, very real prospect of literally starving to death. I wish I was exaggerating.
So, yes, while Boston itself has an excellent subway system, and the immediate area is well served by busses, I would hardly hold Massachusetts as a whole up as a paragon of public transportation.
I'm sharing anecdotal knowledge regarding the one plant that I know, and clearing up an incredibly pervasive misconception about the waste stream of nuclear plants. I sourced the factual stuff, and labelled the rest as anecdotal.
My impression is that it's a much dirtier industry than its starry-eyed newfound fans want people to believe. There are very good reasons why people abruptly stopped building these things in the first place after the initial boom.
If you have countervailing evidence/experience, please feel free to share that; I'd love to hear it!
Anyone have any valid criticism that can't be boiled down to "I disagree, therefore Nazis?"
P.S.--Adding Imperial Japan to your logical fallacy doesn't make it any less fallacious. ^.^
Yes, let's take all these tons and tons of radioactive material, pack it on top of some of the most efficient chemical explosives known to mankind, and elevate it into the atmosphere's global air currents. Paging the what-could-possibly-go-wrong department....
Okay, even disregarding this point, you and most people in this thread seem to be operating under a very common misconception about what "nuclear waste" is and the nuclear power industry as a whole. Most people will think of spent nuclear fuel as nuclear waste, when in fact there are many more kinds. The most often overlooked, and by far the largest source of volume in nuclear waste, is so-called "low-level waste," and is a very important window of insight into what actually goes on in a nuclear plant in reality.
From wikipedia: "Low-level waste (LLW) is a term used to describe nuclear waste that does not fit into the categorical definitions for high-level waste (HLW), spent nuclear fuel (SNF), transuranic waste (TRU), or certain byproduct materials known as 11e(2) wastes, such as uranium mill tailings."
To put this into plain English, this usually consists of everything that has been exposed to radiation in the course of a nuclear plant's facilities. "Nuclear waste" isn't just spent fuel rods. It's hammers, it's protective suit coverings, it's old pipes that have had to be replaced. There is a --huge-- volume of things that get contaminated by radiation in a plant. More information than you could ever use on this subject is found here Just to launch the low level nuclear waste alone in the state of Ohio alone (generated by only two nuclear reactors mind you) in the year of 1987 alone would require launching a satellite holding 50,000 cubic feet of material into space.
The simple fact is that in a nuclear power plant, radiation is --everywhere-- and it, to some degree or another, infects --everything--.
On an anecdotal note, of my family's grandfathers worked in the Pilgrim Power plant in Massachusetts for decades. He doesn't talk about his time at the nuclear plant much, even though it comprises pretty much all if his adult life. As more and more of his friends started dying of cancer, he just stopped mentioning it at all. While this is melodramatic, it's true: it reminds me in an uncanny fashion of how several other family members do not talk about their time in Vietnam.
The few things he did say gave me an insight into the nuclear industry that is very different from anything that shows up in G.W.'s nuclear power proposals.
He told me about how whenever he was working, he had to wear what he called a "dosometer." It was shaped like a security badge, and it changed color as it was continuously exposed to radiation, which was always present in some level at the plant. After a certain threshhold of accumulated radiation deemed "dangerous" was reached, the employee was supposed to stop working. Sometimes due to fiscal and work pressures, they just got a new tag. I'm sure safety procedures might be somewhat better nowadays, but humans are humans, and corners will always be cut on some level, by both management and by the employees, especially as economic times get harder.
While he has lived to a ripe old age, literally every one of his friends from the plant died a horrible death due to every type of cancer imaginable. "Incidents" like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl grab the headlines, but the nuclear industry kills each and every day in a way that is incredibly hard to quantify.
So, please. This "magic uranium" stuff is wishful thinking at best. If nuclear power truly is the only solution until humanity hypothetically masters fusion, that is a truly depressing option.
Or, to put it another way, it would be a lot like trying to find a planet in the visually by trying to differentiate the tiny tiny light the planet reflects from the LIGHT the star emits.:)
Still, it could be useful; it's clearly impossible to tell from this article. More potential avenues of planet detection can only serve to increase detection odds.
I'm using this strategy now, and I'm happy to report it's working well!
Part of the unexpected fun of it is getting young people from my old WoW guild to play D2 with me and watch their brain 'splode when they can only run it in 800x600. It's strangely satisfying, try it!
Sorry, all the organic materials will not have decomposed. This is one of the many misconceptions about our waste stream. The compression of the trash generally results in an anaerobic environment, and it all mostly just.... stays there.
Here's a nice little summary about garbage myths that it looks like William Ruthje of the Tucson Garbage Project put together for high school students about misconeptions regarding trash. One of the particularly surprising and interesting things is the huge percentage of garbage that is actually just paper.
While the article seems to have been written in 1992 and I'm sure trash disposal streams have changed a bit, it gives the general idea and is quite an interesting read. The short of it is that there's a huge volume of stuff out there, and gallium, hafnium, and the like might very well turn out to still be small needles in a very large, stinky, toxic, and hazardous haystack for many years to come.
This is the key question for the whole thing. Are you having fun while you play the game? As objectively as you can be, is this fun that you're having really worth the sacrifices your making in your "real life" to have this fun?
Although I retreated into WoW heavily at one point when my life basically collapsed, when I resumed a more normal (but still very heavy) usage pattern, I had a good balance for a long time, and it was a very healthy thing for me. The raiding was very time intensive, but it really wasn't all that different in terms of time and commitment than being on a sports team, although of course it was missing the whole exercise bit....
Eventually, though, it just stopped being fun. I played for months just not enjoying it, and I know many people who have done this or are even still doing the exact same thing.
If it's not fun, stop! Perhaps the strangest thing about WoW is how people just get on the reward-for-difficult-achievent item hamsterwheel, and somehow fail to realize that they're not having fun anymore.
But seriously. There are analogues in space disasters, and there are analogues on earth, but none are quite perfect. All I'm saying is that we don't really know until the worst happens how people will react.
There are tons of taxpayer money at stake here, one government agency to blame, and an overlay of space mythology and media romanticism that is not at work in any other situation.
Public overreaction after a manned disaster is a real risk, and one that can't be dismissed out of hand.
Human psychology, particularly when dealing with nations of people, doesn't always work logically.
Each one of those three cases you mention, while tragic and horrible, don't really fall into the nightmare scenario of human space exploration.
It's not just the deaths we fear, it's the helplessness and impotence of an impending death we can do nothing about in the void of space, or the horror of unretreived bodies. A fiery death is something we as humans understand. There is tragedy, there is heroism and glory, we honor their sacrifice, and we can move forward.
There is a huge difference, emotionally speaking, between a shuttle reentering Earth's atmosphere and incinerating, and what could possibly happen on a manned mission to the Moon or Mars.
Imagine a scenario where, say, Apollo 17's boosters fail to fire after landing on the moon, dooming the landing crew to run out of oxygen and die on the moon. No amount of Apollo 13-style duct tape heroics can save them. They slowly die as a horrified public watches, and there is nothing that anyone can do to save them. Their bodies remain on the Moon, and every time someone looks up at the night sky, they see dead Americans in adddition to or in place of a crowning human achievement, until a future mission possibly retrieves their bodies.
Or imagine a manned Mars mission where a critical rocket malfuntions and the crew is doomed to hurtle out into the void of space, and there is NEVER realistically a possibility of retrieving the bodies once they finally die.
Now, I don't know if this would usher in a new dark age of space exploration, because it has never happened. I'm not advocating against human space exploration either. Clearly, for all of our costly fleshly limitations, humans are by far still the greatest possible conductors of science and exploration.
However, it is also important to acknowledge that we don't truly know how humanity as a whole would react to the worst that could possibly happen in human space exploration because, thanks to the brilliance of engineers and a good deal of luck, it hasn't happened yet.
I realize that this is an internet forum, slashdot or not, but I also fail to see why there is so much bile in your posts on this topic.
Unless there was more data provided in a hidden comment further up the tree that I missed, all that we know about the subject is that it would cost $10,000 to purportedly make the connection, and that there are "a lot of trees." From this, you infer that this person has made a lifestyle choice, and should either pay for their own installation or shut up about it.
Recently, a friend of mine moved to a very suburban part of southern New Hampshire. Even though the next door neighbors had broadband access, and you could literally hit the house with a baseball from the road, it was deemed "prohibitively expensive" (I believe the original, wildly overblown quote was $4,000) to hook up the house by the small, backwards ISP that was essentially the sole broadband provider in the area. It was only after a several week harassment of the company that the line was able to be installed. I sincerely doubt it took $4,000 when they did so.
Government encouragement through subsidies, and general pressure, could be invaluable in helping connect people to what is rapidly becoming more and more of a vital resource.
Other examples might be places like Native American reservations, or simply crushingly poor rural areas like some areas even in upstate New York, where remote, underprivileged folks can obtain online educations that would otherwise be unavailable to them. That sort of thing can change lives and consequently communities.
Government encouragement and (sensible) subsidies seem only positive. For an example of how slowly much vaunted "market forces" can work, Mink, Louisiana finally got access to landline phones in 2005-- arguably after they had already been rendered obsolete.
Certainly, luxury homes nestled deep in idyllic woodlands aren't top on anyone's list of taxpayer spending targets. As in all things, discretion must be used. But I hardly believe that such a situation constitutes the remaining 25% of homes lacking broadband access.
Slashdot Mirror
True enough! I had forgotten learning that on the discovery channel back in the day.
Even so, it would seem that at least one or two other dinos would evolve such a behavior pattern too, if the rodent-egg selection factor was as profound as to endanger all dinos.
It was a glaring omission that needed addressing though, and mainly, I'm just amused/horrified by the notion of a tree-croc leaping down on its unsuspecting prey.
And those durn tree-dwelling crocodiles!
Man, those things are scary. ^.^
But I like evolving from monkeys! It pisses off creationists very conveniently.
I reject your reality and substitute my own!
This would be a much more compelling argument if a "proto-mosquito the size of a turkey" actually existed.
I'm not saying it's not a good comment, but the modding should be "funny" not insightful.
Sunspot activity or lack thereof has absolutely nothing to do with human caused global warming. Bear with me for a second here.
It's been conclusively proven that increased carbon dioxide in a system prevents more incoming solar energy from escaping a system. This is demonstrable on a small scale with basic equipment, and is readily observable.
It is also simply a fact that humans have been dumping huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I doubt anyone on this website doubts this.
This known cause (carbon emission) has a known effect (warming), and humans have been performing this known cause for centuries with ever-increasing pervasiveness.
What is less clear cut is the end result and magnitude that this human-caused warming effect has. The earth is obviously a hugely complicated system. Innumerable factors, like the exact ability of each various sub-system to absorb carbon, are just now being explored. The amount of solar input of energy, clearly, has a --huge-- bearing on the end net temperature.
But please... don't make the logical fallacy of saying that since sunspots also affect temperature, therefore carbon doesn't matter, or that humans aren't having a climactic impact.
It does, and we are.
I take it this means I can't shoot missiles at the other cars?
Booooooring!
There's a more interesting question with Neanderthals this raises here too.
Humans have enough problems with race as it is. Can you imagine had the Neanderthals actually survived to the modern era, being an entirely genuinely separate species?
The cultural and social effects of that would be fascinating, especially if they really were in fact equally intelligent. They might approach problems in hugely different thought processes that we can't even really envision right now, since we all share the same wetware fundamentally.
Now presume something like a human liger, or mule... healthy, intelligent, strong offspring between a human and and a Neanderthal that is unable to breed? Would religions and cultures proclaim them abominations? What would their perspective bring to society?
The optimist in me is fascinated by what could have been. The cynic in me is horrified at what would have happened.
Ah, d'oh! You're right. I had just read fast and saw the "standard 3x3x3 size" line... where the unit is squares, not inches.
Two morals:
1) RTFA is a good thing
2) I shouldn't design Mars probes
That, sir, was a nit well picked. It should still (barely) fit though. It might have to be fudged a little bit, but the untrained eye would probably never be able to tell the difference. And it would be no less spiffy. ^.^
That'd be cool for far more than just airport security, I think that might just be the coolest casemod idea I've ever heard of.
Since a Rubik's cube is 3"x3"x3", you could literally fit a shell that looked just like a standard Rubik's over it, and have removable squares for the ports....
The mind boggles at the coolness of that!
So, if China were to create offical documents certifying that none of their athletes were doping, IOC should accept that too?
Hogwash. The IOC has an obligation to enforce its own rules. It should conduct a thorough investigation into alleged rules violations, particularly high profile ones like this. These are not radical notions.
The whole argument of "Ah, but the scientist himself has determined actions!", while very appealingly Zen sounding, makes no sense.
If a particle's state is undeterminable before observation, it makes it impossible to predict with 100% accuracy.
How, then, exactly, is this thing we call a "scientist", who himself (or herself) is nothing more than the current product of these same particles interacting with some non-zero level of unpredictability over roughly 13.73 billion years, predictable??
If a particle is granted to have an un-predeterminable state, then some sort of effective free will is possible. If it isn't, then it isn't.
As a "devout" atheist, I often use terms such as "soul" (and devout, in case you didn't catch that irony there somehow). Part of it is cultural habit and syntax that is almost second nature.
The other part is that they are very useful abstractions. It's very much so easier to refer to one's "soul" as opposed to some terminological monstrosity such as "the sum total of my innate biological predispositions after everything it has experienced" or "my wetware operating system". Use "soul", and clarify your appropriation of the term at the outset. It makes life easier, and helps phrases discussions in terms others understand.
What, you mean your country didn't get an invitation to compete in Major League Baseball's World Series?
Yes, Boston has an excellent T system, and driving very often means taking well over twice as long to risk life, limb, and sanity driving before you sell a significant fraction of your soul to find a parking spot.
The problem lies in getting TO the T and getting out again. There's a commuter rail system, true, and I have in fact taken it many times. Despite the fact that the commuter rail has always traditionally operated at a loss, it's rather expensive. And you still have to coordinate your trip just right, because if you miss a train, very often you're going to be an hour and a half late somewhere, unless of course you plan against it by scheduling to arrive an hour and a half early.... Also, you have to get --to-- the commuter rail stop, which means?.... driving.
This is because, as far as the suburbs around Boston goes, you have two options of getting around:
1) Drive
2) Wish you had the option of 1) and instead stay exactly where you are.
There are no buses. There is no TAXI. People will not pick up a hitchiker. Distances in the sprawling suburbs are too prohibitive to walk practically, and even bicycling is difficult. Also, there are no bike lanes, the edges of the road are very uneven, and very often biking means taking your life into your hands.
One side-effect of this lack of transportation is that there are a vast number of elderly drivers, who know they're unsafe, and whose relatives know they are unsafe, and yet still drive (although usually only during the daylight hours, and only a few times a week).
The reason for this is they literally have no choice. An elderly person without a driving license, kind-hearted relatives or neighbors nearby, or a good knowledge of local social services faces a very, very real prospect of literally starving to death. I wish I was exaggerating.
So, yes, while Boston itself has an excellent subway system, and the immediate area is well served by busses, I would hardly hold Massachusetts as a whole up as a paragon of public transportation.
I'm sharing anecdotal knowledge regarding the one plant that I know, and clearing up an incredibly pervasive misconception about the waste stream of nuclear plants. I sourced the factual stuff, and labelled the rest as anecdotal.
My impression is that it's a much dirtier industry than its starry-eyed newfound fans want people to believe. There are very good reasons why people abruptly stopped building these things in the first place after the initial boom.
If you have countervailing evidence/experience, please feel free to share that; I'd love to hear it!
Anyone have any valid criticism that can't be boiled down to "I disagree, therefore Nazis?"
P.S.--Adding Imperial Japan to your logical fallacy doesn't make it any less fallacious. ^.^
Nuclear waste blather? Launch it all at the sun??
Yes, let's take all these tons and tons of radioactive material, pack it on top of some of the most efficient chemical explosives known to mankind, and elevate it into the atmosphere's global air currents. Paging the what-could-possibly-go-wrong department....
Okay, even disregarding this point, you and most people in this thread seem to be operating under a very common misconception about what "nuclear waste" is and the nuclear power industry as a whole. Most people will think of spent nuclear fuel as nuclear waste, when in fact there are many more kinds. The most often overlooked, and by far the largest source of volume in nuclear waste, is so-called "low-level waste," and is a very important window of insight into what actually goes on in a nuclear plant in reality.
From wikipedia: "Low-level waste (LLW) is a term used to describe nuclear waste that does not fit into the categorical definitions for high-level waste (HLW), spent nuclear fuel (SNF), transuranic waste (TRU), or certain byproduct materials known as 11e(2) wastes, such as uranium mill tailings."
To put this into plain English, this usually consists of everything that has been exposed to radiation in the course of a nuclear plant's facilities. "Nuclear waste" isn't just spent fuel rods. It's hammers, it's protective suit coverings, it's old pipes that have had to be replaced. There is a --huge-- volume of things that get contaminated by radiation in a plant. More information than you could ever use on this subject is found here Just to launch the low level nuclear waste alone in the state of Ohio alone (generated by only two nuclear reactors mind you) in the year of 1987 alone would require launching a satellite holding 50,000 cubic feet of material into space.
The simple fact is that in a nuclear power plant, radiation is --everywhere-- and it, to some degree or another, infects --everything--.
On an anecdotal note, of my family's grandfathers worked in the Pilgrim Power plant in Massachusetts for decades. He doesn't talk about his time at the nuclear plant much, even though it comprises pretty much all if his adult life. As more and more of his friends started dying of cancer, he just stopped mentioning it at all. While this is melodramatic, it's true: it reminds me in an uncanny fashion of how several other family members do not talk about their time in Vietnam.
The few things he did say gave me an insight into the nuclear industry that is very different from anything that shows up in G.W.'s nuclear power proposals.
He told me about how whenever he was working, he had to wear what he called a "dosometer." It was shaped like a security badge, and it changed color as it was continuously exposed to radiation, which was always present in some level at the plant. After a certain threshhold of accumulated radiation deemed "dangerous" was reached, the employee was supposed to stop working. Sometimes due to fiscal and work pressures, they just got a new tag. I'm sure safety procedures might be somewhat better nowadays, but humans are humans, and corners will always be cut on some level, by both management and by the employees, especially as economic times get harder.
While he has lived to a ripe old age, literally every one of his friends from the plant died a horrible death due to every type of cancer imaginable. "Incidents" like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl grab the headlines, but the nuclear industry kills each and every day in a way that is incredibly hard to quantify.
So, please. This "magic uranium" stuff is wishful thinking at best. If nuclear power truly is the only solution until humanity hypothetically masters fusion, that is a truly depressing option.
Or, to put it another way, it would be a lot like trying to find a planet in the visually by trying to differentiate the tiny tiny light the planet reflects from the LIGHT the star emits. :)
Still, it could be useful; it's clearly impossible to tell from this article. More potential avenues of planet detection can only serve to increase detection odds.
I'm using this strategy now, and I'm happy to report it's working well!
Part of the unexpected fun of it is getting young people from my old WoW guild to play D2 with me and watch their brain 'splode when they can only run it in 800x600. It's strangely satisfying, try it!
Sorry, all the organic materials will not have decomposed. This is one of the many misconceptions about our waste stream. The compression of the trash generally results in an anaerobic environment, and it all mostly just.... stays there.
Here's a nice little summary about garbage myths that it looks like William Ruthje of the Tucson Garbage Project put together for high school students about misconeptions regarding trash. One of the particularly surprising and interesting things is the huge percentage of garbage that is actually just paper.
While the article seems to have been written in 1992 and I'm sure trash disposal streams have changed a bit, it gives the general idea and is quite an interesting read. The short of it is that there's a huge volume of stuff out there, and gallium, hafnium, and the like might very well turn out to still be small needles in a very large, stinky, toxic, and hazardous haystack for many years to come.
Yes, you said the magic word there, fun.
This is the key question for the whole thing. Are you having fun while you play the game? As objectively as you can be, is this fun that you're having really worth the sacrifices your making in your "real life" to have this fun?
Although I retreated into WoW heavily at one point when my life basically collapsed, when I resumed a more normal (but still very heavy) usage pattern, I had a good balance for a long time, and it was a very healthy thing for me. The raiding was very time intensive, but it really wasn't all that different in terms of time and commitment than being on a sports team, although of course it was missing the whole exercise bit....
Eventually, though, it just stopped being fun. I played for months just not enjoying it, and I know many people who have done this or are even still doing the exact same thing.
If it's not fun, stop! Perhaps the strangest thing about WoW is how people just get on the reward-for-difficult-achievent item hamsterwheel, and somehow fail to realize that they're not having fun anymore.
Or submarines!
But seriously. There are analogues in space disasters, and there are analogues on earth, but none are quite perfect. All I'm saying is that we don't really know until the worst happens how people will react.
There are tons of taxpayer money at stake here, one government agency to blame, and an overlay of space mythology and media romanticism that is not at work in any other situation.
Public overreaction after a manned disaster is a real risk, and one that can't be dismissed out of hand.
Human psychology, particularly when dealing with nations of people, doesn't always work logically.
Each one of those three cases you mention, while tragic and horrible, don't really fall into the nightmare scenario of human space exploration.
It's not just the deaths we fear, it's the helplessness and impotence of an impending death we can do nothing about in the void of space, or the horror of unretreived bodies. A fiery death is something we as humans understand. There is tragedy, there is heroism and glory, we honor their sacrifice, and we can move forward.
There is a huge difference, emotionally speaking, between a shuttle reentering Earth's atmosphere and incinerating, and what could possibly happen on a manned mission to the Moon or Mars.
Imagine a scenario where, say, Apollo 17's boosters fail to fire after landing on the moon, dooming the landing crew to run out of oxygen and die on the moon. No amount of Apollo 13-style duct tape heroics can save them. They slowly die as a horrified public watches, and there is nothing that anyone can do to save them. Their bodies remain on the Moon, and every time someone looks up at the night sky, they see dead Americans in adddition to or in place of a crowning human achievement, until a future mission possibly retrieves their bodies.
Or imagine a manned Mars mission where a critical rocket malfuntions and the crew is doomed to hurtle out into the void of space, and there is NEVER realistically a possibility of retrieving the bodies once they finally die.
Now, I don't know if this would usher in a new dark age of space exploration, because it has never happened. I'm not advocating against human space exploration either. Clearly, for all of our costly fleshly limitations, humans are by far still the greatest possible conductors of science and exploration.
However, it is also important to acknowledge that we don't truly know how humanity as a whole would react to the worst that could possibly happen in human space exploration because, thanks to the brilliance of engineers and a good deal of luck, it hasn't happened yet.Giving that aunt who mailed you the fruitcake one of these things would be the gift that kept on giving....
Your death can be reasonably symbolized by a red light flickering out in a velociraptor's eye.
Thanks for the magic.I realize that this is an internet forum, slashdot or not, but I also fail to see why there is so much bile in your posts on this topic.
Unless there was more data provided in a hidden comment further up the tree that I missed, all that we know about the subject is that it would cost $10,000 to purportedly make the connection, and that there are "a lot of trees." From this, you infer that this person has made a lifestyle choice, and should either pay for their own installation or shut up about it.
Recently, a friend of mine moved to a very suburban part of southern New Hampshire. Even though the next door neighbors had broadband access, and you could literally hit the house with a baseball from the road, it was deemed "prohibitively expensive" (I believe the original, wildly overblown quote was $4,000) to hook up the house by the small, backwards ISP that was essentially the sole broadband provider in the area. It was only after a several week harassment of the company that the line was able to be installed. I sincerely doubt it took $4,000 when they did so.
Government encouragement through subsidies, and general pressure, could be invaluable in helping connect people to what is rapidly becoming more and more of a vital resource.
Other examples might be places like Native American reservations, or simply crushingly poor rural areas like some areas even in upstate New York, where remote, underprivileged folks can obtain online educations that would otherwise be unavailable to them. That sort of thing can change lives and consequently communities.
Government encouragement and (sensible) subsidies seem only positive. For an example of how slowly much vaunted "market forces" can work, Mink, Louisiana finally got access to landline phones in 2005-- arguably after they had already been rendered obsolete.
Certainly, luxury homes nestled deep in idyllic woodlands aren't top on anyone's list of taxpayer spending targets. As in all things, discretion must be used. But I hardly believe that such a situation constitutes the remaining 25% of homes lacking broadband access.