I think putting poor politicians on the moon would improve things a lot more;).
In the USA you could have one of those reality TV type shows that you all are so fond of - "Vote Them Off The Planet!". With one-way and two-way options. And even if it's all for laughs and not for real - the interviews with/calls to the winners and "winners" would be worth the cost of a vote. Might get enough to send people for real -it's about USD20-30 million per go (for various reasons you'd still let the one-ways come back if they choose to go).
I'm sure in India you could get more than a few rupees.
The problem with many electronic voting systems is they are weak at an important requirement for voting systems: Convincing the losers they've lost. If you cannot convince the losers they've lost and they start a civil war, the election is just a waste of time, money and resources.
With hand counted paper ballots, it doesn't take a genius to know you've lost if you (or your party's representatives) watch the votes being taken out of the ballot boxes and counted one by one, and the majority of the votes are for "The Other Party".
Yes you can still cheat, but it's a lot harder to do it and not make it obvious. The cheating is usually in the postal/zombie votes and gerrymandering, and in isolated/remote areas. The electronic system is just as weak in those areas.
With the electronic voting system - how are you going to convince enough people that no cheating is happening?
I'm willing to wait for https, but it's still noticeably slower. You can try it yourself. Find high(er) latency sites (different country/continent) that support both http and https and serve up the same content.
Then use Google Chrome. Type ctrl-shift-I. Click on "Network". Load the http page. Repeat the same thing for https. Repeat a few times. Ensure that about the same content is being loaded. Compare the load times and latency of the various items.
Nowadays many sites will also put stuff in different domains for various reasons. For each of these the browser will have to make a separate TCP and TLS connection. And this typically can only happen AFTER the main page has loaded partially (browser won't know the URL till then).
If the RTT link latency goes up to 400ms (does happen), HTTP would be 600 and HTTPS would be 1200.
Human average reflexes are about 200ms. So it will be distinguishable - a http website will feel "snappier", assuming "light" pages.
Of course if by decent webmaster you mean someone who will load pages up with flash, ads from doubleclick etc, huge images, huge javascript, css hosted on overloaded servers then yeah it will be indistinguishable... It'll just be slow either way.
There's also another problem, how do you build a ship that can survive hitting even specks of dust traveling at significant fractions of the speed of light?
Will a 4 light year long path with the diameter of your ship be empty enough?
How big is the bruise? Does it stretch across the entire torso? If it doesn't then the armor isn't stiff enough as per my argument. And it is deforming and not spreading the impact enough.
The ideal armor of course would be very stiff but have padding between the armor and the person - then it would spread the impact across the entire padded area, rather than just a small area. The problem is lots of stiff stuff tends to shatter on impact.
Yes but the bullet is not a sledgehammer. It has a different mass and speed.
Conservation of momentum means that the amount of momentum the bullet has on leaving the muzzle is going to be the same as the amount of momentum the rifle has moving backwards.
Similarly after the bullet hits the armor, the momentum gained by the armor will not be greater than what the rifle got. Otherwise it would break the laws of physics.
If the contact area of the armor is larger than the area of the rifle butt, and the armor is about the same mass as the rifle then the armor is going to cause less hurt than the rifle butt. Assuming both butt and armor are stiff and do not deform.
There's no reason to have folks doing the exact same repetitive task day in day out for years, ruining them.We need to make more stuff in the USA.
Sure, but they'll be made by robots and factory automation. Doing the same task day in and out is what robots are good at.
And when the robots get cheap, efficient and flexible enough, they'll replace even the Chinese workers. Foxconn are already replacing some jobs with robots - since the cost of their Chinese workers have been increasing.
So where will the jobs be? I doubt 100% of those people losing their jobs will get similar paying jobs because: 1) The whole idea is to cut costs and save money. 2) We're supposed to be eco friendly and not rip out so much resources/wealth per second from the planet. 3) In an ultra capitalist society the increased productivity (by robots etc) can't be consumed by people with no jobs and no money. Initially the people without jobs could still consume the cheaper goods, but they will run out of cash and credit after a while.
So unless you have make work or a guaranteed minimum income, there's going to be a big bunch of poor people with miserable lives once the rich own almost everything and don't need the poor people.
Or maybe people could make virtual goods to sell. There's plenty of virtual goods you can make... And that might be why the USA is pushing for strong IP everywhere- doesn't look like they will go the guaranteed minimum income way.
That said people may not have money, but they might still have the vote (assuming a democracy), not sure what they can do with it though;).
If the body armor is that stiff and strong and spreads the impact completely across my torso I wouldn't mind - it would definitely be less painful than the rifle's recoil on the person firing the bullet at me. Laws of physics and all that.
Well the story is "Why does the world exist?" But all of us who make conscious observations obeserve it. We know it exists. We can reason from that without knowing why.
So why does this Slashdot story and the book exist?
Can't do it in reverse. Need to build the first few stations near the earth. For testing (we haven't even got a space station with artificial gravity yet! Think about how much time and resources we've been wasting) and also the first few mining and manufacturing ones. Chicken and egg and all that.
Once things are going, then sure most will be built near/on the asteroids. That's what the space colony thing is all about anyway.
I'm saying staying in "open space" + asteroids will be better than trying to stay on Mars, the Moon and the other places where you can't have near Earth gravity, and even ignoring that are about as problematic as staying in "open space" - you still have to build your habitats and everything - except the Moon and Mars are further away than a space station that you can more conveniently build near the earth, and then move to where you want in the solar system (e.g. to an asteroid).
I don't see the point of spending lots of resources leaving a somewhat hospitable gravity well just to get stuck in an inhospitable one. You are still going to need most of the tech you need in a space station to survive on Mars or the Moon. You can't step outside and live for long on both places. And I doubt the winds and dust storms on Mars will be that helpful. Vast expanses of low productivity[1] inhospitable land isn't what I call a benefit. Even worse if you need idiocy like LED lights for the plants for all that land.
In contrast there are plenty of asteroids in open space. Plenty of resources (including water) that aren't stuck at the bottom of a gravity well. You can also get finished products back to Earth (think Trade) without having to fight a gravity well AND most importantly you can easily maintain earth-level "gravity" for humans, livestock etc, while mining those asteroids. You can even have other levels of "gravity" for recreational purposes (flying, fitness training). You can't do that easily on the Moon nor Mars.
So tell me again what's the benefit of Moon/Mars vs having a space colony amongst the asteroids? Once you've got people in space colonies then you can talk seriously about long term projects like terra-forming (because you can actually live nearby and wait for the bacteria, fungi etc to do their jobs, monitor and tweak stuff if necessary). But till then it's a waste of time and resources.
[1] It's not proven that the Moon's/Mars soil is OK for plants. I haven't seen tests on actual moon soil. But even the tests on mock moon soil aren't that encouraging - seems you need to add bacteria to the soil.
To me the real early steps to progress would not involve the Moon or Mars, but space stations with artificial gravity and radiation shielding.
Then you can actually have people, animals, plants etc living AND reproducing in space as opposed to trying not to degenerate so fast.
Trying to settle on the Moon and Mars without such stuff is like trying to jump before even being able to stand.
So from my perspective NASA etc nowadays are mainly a waste of resources. They're not really working on the necessary steps for the long term survival of the species in space. They're just sending expensive toys to mars and other places.
p.s. fish would probably do ok in low gravity, and some live on algae which doesn't need very much. You're going to want to have tons of water around anyway, so might as well put fish in at least some of it and filter the water when you want to use it for other stuff.
You're moving the goal posts. And thus what you post is a poor rebuttal to his claim.
A proper rebuttal would be to state that a private teacher could be taking advantage of a student's stupidity and yet not be an asshole. The thing is "taking advantage" tends to have a negative connotation in many contexts.
A better way to tell is is there really classical Trade going on - e.g. are both parties better off after the trade?
Example: if you're stupid and have money, after a proper Trade you might have less money, but received a reasonable amount of service/goods for it. Might not be the most you could get, but still reasonable.
Whereas after being Swindled you would be worse off by most accounts. And the person you dealt with would likely be an asshole.
That's skipping a big question there: "Why is there even this weird phenomena we call Consciousness?"
We're skipping the very first observation (Consciousness) that every scientist and person makes, and moving on to the second observation "The world exists".
Based on our current knowledge of physics, stuff can exist without this consciousness phenomena- we can do all the information processing without it[1]. If it weren't for our own personal observation of consciousness Occam's Razor would have cut it out long ago;).
People who keep saying things are simple (both creationists and non-creationists) are ignoring a universe that keeps telling us that things get stranger the more we know. Not saying that simple = wrong, but to ASSUME the universe is so simple given so much evidence to the contrary (go ask the physicists- they keep coming up with more and more theories the more they figure things out), seems to be silly. Yes explanations should generally not be more complicated than they have to be, but being so sure "it must be random/chance" at this point seems wrong to me.
[1] Unless someone is claiming that the information processing (or certain forms) somehow _necessarily_ results in actual consciousness. Not sure how one would prove/disprove that.
Slashdot Mirror
I think putting poor politicians on the moon would improve things a lot more ;).
In the USA you could have one of those reality TV type shows that you all are so fond of - "Vote Them Off The Planet!". With one-way and two-way options. And even if it's all for laughs and not for real - the interviews with/calls to the winners and "winners" would be worth the cost of a vote. Might get enough to send people for real -it's about USD20-30 million per go (for various reasons you'd still let the one-ways come back if they choose to go).
I'm sure in India you could get more than a few rupees.
The Chinese are good at preserving wildlife - they dry shark fins.
The problem with many electronic voting systems is they are weak at an important requirement for voting systems: Convincing the losers they've lost. If you cannot convince the losers they've lost and they start a civil war, the election is just a waste of time, money and resources.
With hand counted paper ballots, it doesn't take a genius to know you've lost if you (or your party's representatives) watch the votes being taken out of the ballot boxes and counted one by one, and the majority of the votes are for "The Other Party".
Yes you can still cheat, but it's a lot harder to do it and not make it obvious. The cheating is usually in the postal/zombie votes and gerrymandering, and in isolated/remote areas. The electronic system is just as weak in those areas.
With the electronic voting system - how are you going to convince enough people that no cheating is happening?
Yeah, I noticed they didn't use revision control yet. Did your team do without it as well?
Also obviously, ID "theft" isn't really theft, because you aren't (fully) denying that person their own identity.
ID theft is called ID theft because back when it was fraud it was the Bank's problem. Whereas now that it's "ID theft" it's the Customer's problem.
See the difference? OK so I'm being a bit too cynical...
I'm willing to wait for https, but it's still noticeably slower. You can try it yourself. Find high(er) latency sites (different country/continent) that support both http and https and serve up the same content.
Then use Google Chrome. Type ctrl-shift-I. Click on "Network". Load the http page. Repeat the same thing for https. Repeat a few times. Ensure that about the same content is being loaded. Compare the load times and latency of the various items.
Nowadays many sites will also put stuff in different domains for various reasons. For each of these the browser will have to make a separate TCP and TLS connection. And this typically can only happen AFTER the main page has loaded partially (browser won't know the URL till then).
OK assuming 200ms round trip latency from Asia Pacific to USA (which is currently close to the actual figure under good conditions). So 100ms one way.
TCP 3 way handshake= 300ms. HTTP =-300ms.
TCP + SSL handshake = 300ms + 300ms. HTTPS = 600ms.
If the RTT link latency goes up to 400ms (does happen), HTTP would be 600 and HTTPS would be 1200.
Human average reflexes are about 200ms. So it will be distinguishable - a http website will feel "snappier", assuming "light" pages.
Of course if by decent webmaster you mean someone who will load pages up with flash, ads from doubleclick etc, huge images, huge javascript, css hosted on overloaded servers then yeah it will be indistinguishable... It'll just be slow either way.
Latency.
We take them down by complaining about them and not buying their products.
Not by going "everyone does that, oh no, what can we do about it".
There's also another problem, how do you build a ship that can survive hitting even specks of dust traveling at significant fractions of the speed of light?
Will a 4 light year long path with the diameter of your ship be empty enough?
I haven't seen manned missions to Mars yet.
Are you making a valid comparison? Or are you from a different time.
IKEA? Oops that's Dutch already... ;)
Ok erm Assa Abloy and Atlas Copco?
How big is the bruise? Does it stretch across the entire torso? If it doesn't then the armor isn't stiff enough as per my argument. And it is deforming and not spreading the impact enough.
The ideal armor of course would be very stiff but have padding between the armor and the person - then it would spread the impact across the entire padded area, rather than just a small area. The problem is lots of stiff stuff tends to shatter on impact.
Yes but the bullet is not a sledgehammer. It has a different mass and speed.
Conservation of momentum means that the amount of momentum the bullet has on leaving the muzzle is going to be the same as the amount of momentum the rifle has moving backwards.
Similarly after the bullet hits the armor, the momentum gained by the armor will not be greater than what the rifle got. Otherwise it would break the laws of physics.
If the contact area of the armor is larger than the area of the rifle butt, and the armor is about the same mass as the rifle then the armor is going to cause less hurt than the rifle butt. Assuming both butt and armor are stiff and do not deform.
Because the robots aren't good enough slaves and serfs yet.
And some may prefer human worshippers and slaves. Traditions and all that.
There's no reason to have folks doing the exact same repetitive task day in day out for years, ruining them.We need to make more stuff in the USA.
Sure, but they'll be made by robots and factory automation. Doing the same task day in and out is what robots are good at.
And when the robots get cheap, efficient and flexible enough, they'll replace even the Chinese workers. Foxconn are already replacing some jobs with robots - since the cost of their Chinese workers have been increasing.
So where will the jobs be? I doubt 100% of those people losing their jobs will get similar paying jobs because:
1) The whole idea is to cut costs and save money.
2) We're supposed to be eco friendly and not rip out so much resources/wealth per second from the planet.
3) In an ultra capitalist society the increased productivity (by robots etc) can't be consumed by people with no jobs and no money. Initially the people without jobs could still consume the cheaper goods, but they will run out of cash and credit after a while.
So unless you have make work or a guaranteed minimum income, there's going to be a big bunch of poor people with miserable lives once the rich own almost everything and don't need the poor people.
Or maybe people could make virtual goods to sell. There's plenty of virtual goods you can make... And that might be why the USA is pushing for strong IP everywhere- doesn't look like they will go the guaranteed minimum income way.
That said people may not have money, but they might still have the vote (assuming a democracy), not sure what they can do with it though ;).
If the body armor is that stiff and strong and spreads the impact completely across my torso I wouldn't mind - it would definitely be less painful than the rifle's recoil on the person firing the bullet at me. Laws of physics and all that.
It's a bullet not a cannonball.
Well the story is "Why does the world exist?" But all of us who make conscious observations obeserve it. We know it exists. We can reason from that without knowing why.
;).
So why does this Slashdot story and the book exist?
Go figure
Can't do it in reverse. Need to build the first few stations near the earth. For testing (we haven't even got a space station with artificial gravity yet! Think about how much time and resources we've been wasting) and also the first few mining and manufacturing ones. Chicken and egg and all that.
Once things are going, then sure most will be built near/on the asteroids. That's what the space colony thing is all about anyway.
You miss my point completely.
I'm saying staying in "open space" + asteroids will be better than trying to stay on Mars, the Moon and the other places where you can't have near Earth gravity, and even ignoring that are about as problematic as staying in "open space" - you still have to build your habitats and everything - except the Moon and Mars are further away than a space station that you can more conveniently build near the earth, and then move to where you want in the solar system (e.g. to an asteroid).
And it will remain a better for many decades.
I don't see the point of spending lots of resources leaving a somewhat hospitable gravity well just to get stuck in an inhospitable one. You are still going to need most of the tech you need in a space station to survive on Mars or the Moon. You can't step outside and live for long on both places. And I doubt the winds and dust storms on Mars will be that helpful. Vast expanses of low productivity[1] inhospitable land isn't what I call a benefit. Even worse if you need idiocy like LED lights for the plants for all that land.
In contrast there are plenty of asteroids in open space. Plenty of resources (including water) that aren't stuck at the bottom of a gravity well. You can also get finished products back to Earth (think Trade) without having to fight a gravity well AND most importantly you can easily maintain earth-level "gravity" for humans, livestock etc, while mining those asteroids. You can even have other levels of "gravity" for recreational purposes (flying, fitness training). You can't do that easily on the Moon nor Mars.
So tell me again what's the benefit of Moon/Mars vs having a space colony amongst the asteroids? Once you've got people in space colonies then you can talk seriously about long term projects like terra-forming (because you can actually live nearby and wait for the bacteria, fungi etc to do their jobs, monitor and tweak stuff if necessary). But till then it's a waste of time and resources.
[1] It's not proven that the Moon's/Mars soil is OK for plants. I haven't seen tests on actual moon soil. But even the tests on mock moon soil aren't that encouraging - seems you need to add bacteria to the soil.
To me the real early steps to progress would not involve the Moon or Mars, but space stations with artificial gravity and radiation shielding.
Then you can actually have people, animals, plants etc living AND reproducing in space as opposed to trying not to degenerate so fast.
Trying to settle on the Moon and Mars without such stuff is like trying to jump before even being able to stand.
So from my perspective NASA etc nowadays are mainly a waste of resources. They're not really working on the necessary steps for the long term survival of the species in space. They're just sending expensive toys to mars and other places.
p.s. fish would probably do ok in low gravity, and some live on algae which doesn't need very much. You're going to want to have tons of water around anyway, so might as well put fish in at least some of it and filter the water when you want to use it for other stuff.
You're moving the goal posts. And thus what you post is a poor rebuttal to his claim.
A proper rebuttal would be to state that a private teacher could be taking advantage of a student's stupidity and yet not be an asshole. The thing is "taking advantage" tends to have a negative connotation in many contexts.
A better way to tell is is there really classical Trade going on - e.g. are both parties better off after the trade?
Example: if you're stupid and have money, after a proper Trade you might have less money, but received a reasonable amount of service/goods for it. Might not be the most you could get, but still reasonable.
Whereas after being Swindled you would be worse off by most accounts. And the person you dealt with would likely be an asshole.
It's even worse than that.
From the review:
We exist as something so we know that
That's skipping a big question there: "Why is there even this weird phenomena we call Consciousness?"
We're skipping the very first observation (Consciousness) that every scientist and person makes, and moving on to the second observation "The world exists".
Based on our current knowledge of physics, stuff can exist without this consciousness phenomena- we can do all the information processing without it[1]. If it weren't for our own personal observation of consciousness Occam's Razor would have cut it out long ago ;).
People who keep saying things are simple (both creationists and non-creationists) are ignoring a universe that keeps telling us that things get stranger the more we know. Not saying that simple = wrong, but to ASSUME the universe is so simple given so much evidence to the contrary (go ask the physicists- they keep coming up with more and more theories the more they figure things out), seems to be silly. Yes explanations should generally not be more complicated than they have to be, but being so sure "it must be random/chance" at this point seems wrong to me.
[1] Unless someone is claiming that the information processing (or certain forms) somehow _necessarily_ results in actual consciousness. Not sure how one would prove/disprove that.
"No award" when stuff is too crap is actually a good policy.
I'm not saying that nothing is good enough- I haven't really been keeping up with stuff, so I'm not qualified to judge.