You're not taking the analogy to a sufficient extreme. For somebody to ask me to fix their Windows computer is like if somebody said they bought a CD player, and now it doesn't work. Since you work with semiconductors, you can fix it, right? You might be able to, but the knowledge used in fixing it is only vaguely related to your actual specialty.
And what if a lunar space elevator is simultaneously a prerequisite for long term stays, colonies, mining, etc.? You have to do one of them first, why not the elevator?
My family has interesting misconceptions about my capabilities, and I assume this is true of a lot of people here. I have a degree in CS, I make my living programming computers, but I don't know jack about troubleshooting Windows. I run a Mac at home because it's simple to fix when it breaks. The skillsets of a good programmer and a good technician don't overlap nearly as much as people think. Yet, everybody thinks I should know how to fix all of their Windows problems.
So, I tell them that I'm like an engineer. I do the computer equivalent of building bridges, designing cars, etc. What they're asking me to do is the computer equivalent of repairing their car after the engine compartment started smoking. They wouldn't expect a bridge designer to be able to fix their car engine, and so they shouldn't expect a programmer to be able to fix their computer. Once they get the idea that I might be able to do something, but it's really not the kind of thing I'm good at, everybody is a lot happier.
Look at Apollo. JFK challenged the nation to go to the Moon before 1970, and we did it. It was incredibly quick. Yet, it still took eight years to do. If you were setting there in 1965, looking at all of the cool stuff promised for Apollo, would you feel the same way? Would you feel the same way in 1993, looking at all the things promised for the internet? In 1903, looking at the promises for the airplane?
The turkey-guts -> oil plants are new. The concept was just introduced in the past year or two. Do you really expect them to take over instantaneously? Here's news for you: there is less inertia in human affairs now than ever before. Things appear to have moved fast in the past because they already happened, and you don't have to wait for them to finish.
Re:What has our fascist consumer state done since?
on
Apollo 12 at 35
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
No progress? What about the incredible amount of technology and infrastructure that's been developed over the last thirty years that culminated in your being able to make your post to slashdot? Aerospace is not the only measure of the progress of mankind.
Think about it this way: a dozen people walked on the moon, but only six stayed overhead in the command module. It's an even more exclusive club.
Re:They had bugs...
on
Apollo 12 at 35
·
· Score: 3, Informative
To say that the lightning strike spooked the astronauts is a bit of an understatement. The strike scrambled one of the navigation systems, killed telemetry to the ground, and generally wreaked havoc with everything electrical on board. Fortunately there was enough redundancy in the systems, and nothing was actually destroyed, that the mission was not harmed.
Details are here. It must have been an awfully exciting few seconds.
With a resolution of 5cm (2 inches) or 10cm (4 inches), the spy satellites can certainly track people. Source: Resolution of a Spy Satellite.
Note that a satellite does not have to be able to recognize your face to track you (it is hard to see it from the sky anyway). You can be identified by many other details.
What are these other details? At one pixel per 25cm^2, a human as seen from above is going to be a blob of just a couple of hundred pixels. How can you automatically track a couple of hundred pixels covering the top of the head and the shoulders when you can't even reliably track somebody by their face?
That makes no difference. Imagine a group of people in 1972 planning a fusion reactor that would be built today. It would all be total bullshit. The science has changed, the techniques have changed, the politics have changed.
Name one thing in the fifty years that was successfully planned over thirty years in advance and then executed. It's simply not possible. Things change far too fast.
Probably 2036 is the time when the first feasible fusion reactor could have started working, that was the plan a year ago.
That's more than thirty years in the future, and therefore total bullshit. A scientist is lucky if he can predict advances in his field for the next three years. To say "fusion by 2036" is just to make a wild guess.
A force whose leaders have deserted it is easier to defeat, and will be defeated with fewer casualties on both sides, than the same force with its leaders in full control.
I'm not sure how microwaving it will help. I don't think a half-burned passport will get me through any borders, and if I don't care about that then I can simply not renew my passport at all.
First, if you're at a university, then your students are adults. They are responsible for their own attendance. It is not your responsibility, nor the responsibility of the university, to make them come.
Second, the system in question is not at a university, it's being used for little children who have no choice about it. That is a huge difference.
Tracking truant students is, theoretically, one of the jobs of the police. However, I get the feeling this information will be piped directly to/dev/null, or at the very least nobody is ever going to look at it.
There is a huge difference between a marathon and a school.
The participants in a marathon are all consenting adults. They are able to refuse to participate. The students in a school are children who have no choice about attending.
RFID is different from all previous forms of identification because it's the only one which can be reliably read from a distance without your consent. Remember that the short range of these devices is simply due to the power and sensitivity of the detector. Bluetooth isn't supposed to work from the next room down, but people have made it work over more than a kilometer away. Forcing people (not to mention children!) to carry identifying information that can be read involuntarily from a distance is evil. I'm not normally a tin-foil hatter, but I'm already thinking about countermeasures to use when my passport expires in seven years and I get a shiny new one with an RFID tag in it.
We also have to make sure that Susie who takes one day to learn plate tectonics doesn't get too far ahead of Johnny who takes 4 days.
This bizarre belief that every student should advance in their knowledge at exactly the same rate is the primary reason I hated all of my schooling until I got to college. Why shouldn't Susie get too far ahead of Johnny? Why shouldn't she be able to spend those three extra days learning the subject in more depth, or painting, or playing in the sandbox?
From the beginning of elementary school to the end of high school, I suffered from this. I pick things up quickly and don't need a lot of repetition. As a result, I was forced to do a great deal of homework that I didn't need, attend classes that weren't interesting, and I generally hated the experience. (Not everything was this way, but close.) Once I got to college, where homework is more of a check than a forced study aid, where classes are dense, and where people are expected to do more on their own if they need practice, things got a lot better.
I realize the situation is different at the lower levels, and I don't have a proposed solution, but I still believe that this idea that all children must learn at approximately the same rate, and they must stay in a group of other children with exactly the same age, is one of the more poisonous ones in our educational system.
As for replayability being your major factor for buying games. What a weird choice. Do you only watch movies wich you can watch over and over again?
He probably only buys movies that he can watch over and over again, like most people I know. Normally when somebody wants to watch a once-only movie, they rent it or watch it in a theater. These are not generally options for games.
Using copyrighted material as part of a parody is only considered to be free use if the subject of the parody is the copyrighted material in question. In the case of the PA comic, they used material owned by American Greetings to parody American McGee. This was not fair use because it's parodying something unrelated. In order to distribute it, PA would need permission from American Greetings, which they have obviously not granted.
And to take the opposite example, repeat your experiment with a Mac. Wait as long as you like. Notice how it's still as friendly and usable as the day you got it, while remaining highly secure.
Do you really think that five guys armed with box cutters are going to be able to kill a plane full of people with nothing to lose? Or two guys armed with guns?
Unfortunately, the answer is clearly yes: guy points gun at side of plane and fires, cabin decompresses explosively, plane crashes, and everybody dies. No magic or cunning planning required.
You are incorrect. Explosive decompression will not kill everybody on board. Look at the case of Aloha Airlines flight 243. A structural failure resulted in an enormous hole being blown in the sides and roof of the aircraft while it was at an altitude of 24,000 feet. The only fatality was somebody who got sucked out through the hole. If ripping an entire section off the roof of the airplane only killed one person, then I'll have a very hard time believing that a few bullet holes will do better.
Even if we ignore the impossibility of taking down an airliner with guns, that assessment ignores some important things. Why are terrorists killing everybody on board? If their end goal is to destroy an airliner, they won't be doing it with guns. A bomb is easier, less risky, and more likely to succeed. Are they trying to take over the airliner in a 9/11-style attack? Anything which kills themselves is right out, then.
Destroying an airliner is still (and probably always will be) possible. Taking it over, either by brute force or intimidation, is no longer possible.
That's an interesting question. I would consider product placement to be something of a gray area. However, they are basically embedding ads in somebody else's products, which you then choose to receive of your own free will. The fact that you don't always know when there's going to be product placement makes this a little iffy. At the very least, product placement only fails one test: it's not clearly marked as advertisement. It makes no effort to hide what it's advertising or who it's advertising for.
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You're not taking the analogy to a sufficient extreme. For somebody to ask me to fix their Windows computer is like if somebody said they bought a CD player, and now it doesn't work. Since you work with semiconductors, you can fix it, right? You might be able to, but the knowledge used in fixing it is only vaguely related to your actual specialty.
And what if a lunar space elevator is simultaneously a prerequisite for long term stays, colonies, mining, etc.? You have to do one of them first, why not the elevator?
My family has interesting misconceptions about my capabilities, and I assume this is true of a lot of people here. I have a degree in CS, I make my living programming computers, but I don't know jack about troubleshooting Windows. I run a Mac at home because it's simple to fix when it breaks. The skillsets of a good programmer and a good technician don't overlap nearly as much as people think. Yet, everybody thinks I should know how to fix all of their Windows problems.
So, I tell them that I'm like an engineer. I do the computer equivalent of building bridges, designing cars, etc. What they're asking me to do is the computer equivalent of repairing their car after the engine compartment started smoking. They wouldn't expect a bridge designer to be able to fix their car engine, and so they shouldn't expect a programmer to be able to fix their computer. Once they get the idea that I might be able to do something, but it's really not the kind of thing I'm good at, everybody is a lot happier.
If that's the state of the art in 1930's nuclear technology, then we should have guys building fission warheads in their basements around 2015.
Also, it would be a handy terrorist tool. Just put the bomb in and set the car to go to the target.
Everything is a handy terrorist tool, to the extent that this is not a useful argument against anything.
Time works in funny ways.
Look at Apollo. JFK challenged the nation to go to the Moon before 1970, and we did it. It was incredibly quick. Yet, it still took eight years to do. If you were setting there in 1965, looking at all of the cool stuff promised for Apollo, would you feel the same way? Would you feel the same way in 1993, looking at all the things promised for the internet? In 1903, looking at the promises for the airplane?
The turkey-guts -> oil plants are new. The concept was just introduced in the past year or two. Do you really expect them to take over instantaneously? Here's news for you: there is less inertia in human affairs now than ever before. Things appear to have moved fast in the past because they already happened, and you don't have to wait for them to finish.
No progress? What about the incredible amount of technology and infrastructure that's been developed over the last thirty years that culminated in your being able to make your post to slashdot? Aerospace is not the only measure of the progress of mankind.
Think about it this way: a dozen people walked on the moon, but only six stayed overhead in the command module. It's an even more exclusive club.
To say that the lightning strike spooked the astronauts is a bit of an understatement. The strike scrambled one of the navigation systems, killed telemetry to the ground, and generally wreaked havoc with everything electrical on board. Fortunately there was enough redundancy in the systems, and nothing was actually destroyed, that the mission was not harmed.
Details are here. It must have been an awfully exciting few seconds.
With a resolution of 5cm (2 inches) or 10cm (4 inches), the spy satellites can certainly track people. Source: Resolution of a Spy Satellite.
Note that a satellite does not have to be able to recognize your face to track you (it is hard to see it from the sky anyway). You can be identified by many other details.
What are these other details? At one pixel per 25cm^2, a human as seen from above is going to be a blob of just a couple of hundred pixels. How can you automatically track a couple of hundred pixels covering the top of the head and the shoulders when you can't even reliably track somebody by their face?
That makes no difference. Imagine a group of people in 1972 planning a fusion reactor that would be built today. It would all be total bullshit. The science has changed, the techniques have changed, the politics have changed.
Name one thing in the fifty years that was successfully planned over thirty years in advance and then executed. It's simply not possible. Things change far too fast.
Probably 2036 is the time when the first feasible fusion reactor could have started working, that was the plan a year ago.
That's more than thirty years in the future, and therefore total bullshit. A scientist is lucky if he can predict advances in his field for the next three years. To say "fusion by 2036" is just to make a wild guess.
A force whose leaders have deserted it is easier to defeat, and will be defeated with fewer casualties on both sides, than the same force with its leaders in full control.
Visual identification can be read from a distance without your consent, but it's not reliable in any way, either with human observers or computers.
I'm not sure how microwaving it will help. I don't think a half-burned passport will get me through any borders, and if I don't care about that then I can simply not renew my passport at all.
There are two things you've missed.
First, if you're at a university, then your students are adults. They are responsible for their own attendance. It is not your responsibility, nor the responsibility of the university, to make them come.
Second, the system in question is not at a university, it's being used for little children who have no choice about it. That is a huge difference.
Tracking truant students is, theoretically, one of the jobs of the police. However, I get the feeling this information will be piped directly to /dev/null, or at the very least nobody is ever going to look at it.
There is a huge difference between a marathon and a school.
The participants in a marathon are all consenting adults. They are able to refuse to participate. The students in a school are children who have no choice about attending.
RFID is different from all previous forms of identification because it's the only one which can be reliably read from a distance without your consent. Remember that the short range of these devices is simply due to the power and sensitivity of the detector. Bluetooth isn't supposed to work from the next room down, but people have made it work over more than a kilometer away. Forcing people (not to mention children!) to carry identifying information that can be read involuntarily from a distance is evil. I'm not normally a tin-foil hatter, but I'm already thinking about countermeasures to use when my passport expires in seven years and I get a shiny new one with an RFID tag in it.
We also have to make sure that Susie who takes one day to learn plate tectonics doesn't get too far ahead of Johnny who takes 4 days.
This bizarre belief that every student should advance in their knowledge at exactly the same rate is the primary reason I hated all of my schooling until I got to college. Why shouldn't Susie get too far ahead of Johnny? Why shouldn't she be able to spend those three extra days learning the subject in more depth, or painting, or playing in the sandbox?
From the beginning of elementary school to the end of high school, I suffered from this. I pick things up quickly and don't need a lot of repetition. As a result, I was forced to do a great deal of homework that I didn't need, attend classes that weren't interesting, and I generally hated the experience. (Not everything was this way, but close.) Once I got to college, where homework is more of a check than a forced study aid, where classes are dense, and where people are expected to do more on their own if they need practice, things got a lot better.
I realize the situation is different at the lower levels, and I don't have a proposed solution, but I still believe that this idea that all children must learn at approximately the same rate, and they must stay in a group of other children with exactly the same age, is one of the more poisonous ones in our educational system.
As for replayability being your major factor for buying games. What a weird choice. Do you only watch movies wich you can watch over and over again?
He probably only buys movies that he can watch over and over again, like most people I know. Normally when somebody wants to watch a once-only movie, they rent it or watch it in a theater. These are not generally options for games.
Using copyrighted material as part of a parody is only considered to be free use if the subject of the parody is the copyrighted material in question. In the case of the PA comic, they used material owned by American Greetings to parody American McGee. This was not fair use because it's parodying something unrelated. In order to distribute it, PA would need permission from American Greetings, which they have obviously not granted.
And to take the opposite example, repeat your experiment with a Mac. Wait as long as you like. Notice how it's still as friendly and usable as the day you got it, while remaining highly secure.
You are incorrect. Explosive decompression will not kill everybody on board. Look at the case of Aloha Airlines flight 243. A structural failure resulted in an enormous hole being blown in the sides and roof of the aircraft while it was at an altitude of 24,000 feet. The only fatality was somebody who got sucked out through the hole. If ripping an entire section off the roof of the airplane only killed one person, then I'll have a very hard time believing that a few bullet holes will do better.
Even if we ignore the impossibility of taking down an airliner with guns, that assessment ignores some important things. Why are terrorists killing everybody on board? If their end goal is to destroy an airliner, they won't be doing it with guns. A bomb is easier, less risky, and more likely to succeed. Are they trying to take over the airliner in a 9/11-style attack? Anything which kills themselves is right out, then.
Destroying an airliner is still (and probably always will be) possible. Taking it over, either by brute force or intimidation, is no longer possible.
That's an interesting question. I would consider product placement to be something of a gray area. However, they are basically embedding ads in somebody else's products, which you then choose to receive of your own free will. The fact that you don't always know when there's going to be product placement makes this a little iffy. At the very least, product placement only fails one test: it's not clearly marked as advertisement. It makes no effort to hide what it's advertising or who it's advertising for.
That is a nonsensical argument. If it were conducted via normal paper-based mail, the volume wouldn't be anywhere near as high.