I registered for an absentee ballot in Wisconsin, because I actually will be out of the country. However, they never asked for my reason and certainly never made me swear on penalty of perjury.
As a member of society, I have every right to complain when people are being stupid and try to get them to change. This attitude that you should just ignore when people are being idiots because they have a right to do it is pure ignorance, libertarian-wannabe masturbation. If I think somebody's registration system is stupid, it is my perogative to conclude that their barriers don't make sense and make myself heard, even if it's just venting on slashdot.
I think you both got my point completely wrong. I had two points. The first point was that the cost was wildly overestimated. The second point is that somebody has the right to do whatever he wants with his own money, even if it is a billion dollars.
And for some reason beyond my comprehension, both you and the post you're replying to think I'm making some reference to US governmental charity. I never mentioned the US government in my post, I was not talking about the US government, and neither was the article. Why do you bozos have to turn everything into an anti-US/pro-US flamefest? I'm really tired of everybody saying "fuck the US" or "fuck the world". It's so incredibly stupid.
Get real. The money doesn't evaporate. It just goes to feed Russian rocket scientists instead of African AIDS victims.
Also, your estimate is way off. Trips to the space station are $20 million. This trip will require two or three launches. Since those are the expensive part, we can naively multiply by two or three and arrive at a decent estimate of about $40-60 million per trip.
Even if it were a couple of billion, people spend something like $600 billion a year on tourism just in the US. It would be a drop in the bucket, both compared to the amount of money "wasted" on tourism and the amount of money needed to bring about real change in the situation of the poor.
This won't solve anything. This won't make anything better for anyone.
I agree. Faster, cheaper travel never benefitted mankind in any way. Only fat, rich, white men could possibly want to travel the world in a timely, affordable manner.
Yes, exactly. Some evolution is easily and logically understood as natural adaptation to changes in environment, or taking advantage of an ecological niche. I find the development of the flagellum - a freakish modification which led to greater survivability several million generations later - too outlandish to fit into either of those categories. To believe in such "natural" development requires a "faith" in the improbable that elevates science to a religion. A creator is much simpler, and much easier to believe.
Did you read the posted article? It describes how the flagellum could have come about without needing to be a freakish modification with no short-term survivability benefits.
Let's talk about evidence for the moment. Evolution happens, there's no doubt about that. Just ask anybody who's been infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The question is whether evolution can explain everything, or whether it's only responsible for simple things. Extending the known working theory of evolution to cover more complicated changes, when taken in the context of billions of years of life, is a much simpler explanation than handwaving in some higher power.
The two more commonly accepted "creators" are:
1) The Creator (God, or, in your language, the all-knowing all-seeing imaginary friend)
2) An extra-terrestrial intelligent being (hacker?) who "seeded" life on this planet billions of years ago.
In theory, the two are very different. In practice, the two may be indistinguishable by us in our lifetimes, if either in fact exists.
I think that they are more or less the same, in that there is no evidence of either one and they are both basically imaginary friends and fairy tales.
I'd hazard a guess that those who don't believe in a Creator God are the most likely candidates to believe that there exist ET intelligence somewhere in the universe. Isn't the eye or the flagellum strong evidence that such intelligence exists, and has shown its hand here on Earth?
No, it is not strong evidence at all. The eye is a crappy design; in fact, our bodies show an incredible mix of haphazardness and finesse. The way our bodies are put together looks a lot like the way evolved programs look to me.
Don't let your reluctance to believe in "God" get in the way of scientific evidence.
Don't let your reluctance to believe in evolution get in the way of scientific evidence, either. Have you actually calculated the probability of a flagellum evolving and found that probability wanting, or are you just handwaving "it's too improbable!" to make yourself feel better? People generally lack the ability to understand very large and very small numbers, and this is a place where the numbers are very large (billions of years, trillions of generations, an incomprehensibly large number of bacteria) and very small (probability of a beneficial mutation appearing in a new generation). You can't analyze them with your gut.
You find the possibility of quintillions of bacteria living for billions of years happening onto something that is improbable to be less plausible than the existence all-knowing all-seeing imaginary friend who has never revealed his presence in any way?
Maybe you have a different mechanism for "created in place", but I haven't heard of one.
Re:Nature's solution is best in at least a few way
on
Living Without a Pulse
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· Score: 1
Given that the people who are getting these implants are on their deathbeds and are not expected to live out the year, I think the matter of their being unable to run is not so important at the moment.
Indeed, I got your point. I didn't respond to the rest of your post because it all seemed rather sensible and I didn't have anything to comment on.
I made a similar mistake when talking about Microsoft's Xbox finances. I wanted to state that Microsoft would have lost less money by paying a bunch of guys to shovel $100 bills into a furnace all day long than they have by operating their Xbox division. In fact, I had to drop it down to one guy working a normal 40-hour week shoveling $10 bills (or something like that) before my numbers came out to match reality. Those things are worth more than you'd think!
One reason you can't define price as being cost of materials + cost of labor + reasonable profit is because it's a circular definition. How do you decide on the price of the materials or the price of the labor in that case? They will end up depending on the prices of other things, and you never get to the point where you can put a number on anything. In the end, it all has to boil down to supply and demand.
Even if they use 100 dollar bills for fuel on the flights, they'll still end up an order of magnitude cheaper than Scaled.
Minor nit: $20 million in $100 bills would only be about 200kg, and I doubt if they're going suborbital with that little fuel. They'd be ok if they were using $1 bills as fuel, though.
Aside from the standard POSIX calls, which don't include lots of things that a modern program that goes beyond the command line must do, Mac OS X and Linux are as different as can be. Although Mac OS X has an optional X11 server that can be used to porn X11 programs over, there is one other critical area where they are completely different: sound! Linux sound IO and Mac sound IO are completely different.
Not to mention that when somebody says "Linux", they usually mean "Linux on x86", so you have completely different processor architectures to deal with too.
Yes, Linux and Mac OS X share various underpinnings, but that does not make a port of a program between them, in either direction, to be necessarily easy.
If you can't see the difference between a police raid that comes without warning and takes away all of your stuff, and a court action in which the accused is allowed to face his accuser and put up a defense, then you deserve whatever you get. Being taken to court is not a kiss of death.
Oh no, fifty ten-pound model aircraft flying around over our nation's capital! What shall we do?! Somebody might get hurt, if they were really really unlucky!
I give evidence, you give anecdotes. Here's an anecdote for you: in 12 years of working with Macs and supporting Mac users, you are the first person I've ever heard of who actually had to deal with a Mac virus. I never got a Mac virus, nobody I knew ever got one, and I never even heard of one third-hand or fourth-hand until now.
If you want to convince me, you'll have to do better than that; find a list somewhere. Of course, if you don't want to convince me, that's just fine too.
The free program was called Disinfectant, and it was available starting in 1989. The fact that it existed didn't stop people from buying the commercial stuff, of course.
You're right, my background is in Windows and not OS X, but you don't have to be insulting about it. Calling people ignorant doesn't get you anywhere.
You're criticizing a platform when you don't know very much about it. You're doing a poor job supporting that same platform because you don't know enough about it to do a good job. If that isn't "ignorant", then what is it, exactly?
The "one trillion dollars" figure comes from NASA, and cannot be trusted. They used Bush Sr.'s inquiry about a possible Mars mission as a prompt to start going nuts to try to get funding for everything and the kitchen sink. They got promptly shot down. I freely admit that $20-40 billion would just cover startup studies at NASA. However, an organization that is not primarily concerned with covering its own ass and increasing its own funding (and doing a bad job at it, at that) could most likely do it at around the cost I quoted. Look up the plans for Mars Direct, which both ESA and NASA have studied and agreed that it could be done for less than $40 billion.
You misspelled "billion". IIRC, the total cost for the rovers was around $800 million.
A realistic (i.e. not done by the incredibly bloated NASA bureaucracy) plan to put people on Mars would cost something like $20-40 billion. So for 20 to 50 times as much, you can put actual people there, and probably get at least 100 times as much done, if not more. That's a better return for your dollars. The only trouble is that it's a much higher initial investment, and NASA is completely incapable of thinking about putting people on Mars for less than a trillion dollars.
Slashdot Mirror
I registered for an absentee ballot in Wisconsin, because I actually will be out of the country. However, they never asked for my reason and certainly never made me swear on penalty of perjury.
As a member of society, I have every right to complain when people are being stupid and try to get them to change. This attitude that you should just ignore when people are being idiots because they have a right to do it is pure ignorance, libertarian-wannabe masturbation. If I think somebody's registration system is stupid, it is my perogative to conclude that their barriers don't make sense and make myself heard, even if it's just venting on slashdot.
Yeah, I hate it when that happens with my por... I mean, with my game screenshots.
I think you both got my point completely wrong. I had two points. The first point was that the cost was wildly overestimated. The second point is that somebody has the right to do whatever he wants with his own money, even if it is a billion dollars.
And for some reason beyond my comprehension, both you and the post you're replying to think I'm making some reference to US governmental charity. I never mentioned the US government in my post, I was not talking about the US government, and neither was the article. Why do you bozos have to turn everything into an anti-US/pro-US flamefest? I'm really tired of everybody saying "fuck the US" or "fuck the world". It's so incredibly stupid.
Get real. The money doesn't evaporate. It just goes to feed Russian rocket scientists instead of African AIDS victims.
Also, your estimate is way off. Trips to the space station are $20 million. This trip will require two or three launches. Since those are the expensive part, we can naively multiply by two or three and arrive at a decent estimate of about $40-60 million per trip.
Even if it were a couple of billion, people spend something like $600 billion a year on tourism just in the US. It would be a drop in the bucket, both compared to the amount of money "wasted" on tourism and the amount of money needed to bring about real change in the situation of the poor.
Searching for ivan+the+terrible+doesn't+know+how+to+use+google gets 2,010 hits.
It's a worthless measure.
This won't solve anything. This won't make anything better for anyone.
I agree. Faster, cheaper travel never benefitted mankind in any way. Only fat, rich, white men could possibly want to travel the world in a timely, affordable manner.
Yes, exactly. Some evolution is easily and logically understood as natural adaptation to changes in environment, or taking advantage of an ecological niche. I find the development of the flagellum - a freakish modification which led to greater survivability several million generations later - too outlandish to fit into either of those categories. To believe in such "natural" development requires a "faith" in the improbable that elevates science to a religion. A creator is much simpler, and much easier to believe.
Did you read the posted article? It describes how the flagellum could have come about without needing to be a freakish modification with no short-term survivability benefits.
Let's talk about evidence for the moment. Evolution happens, there's no doubt about that. Just ask anybody who's been infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The question is whether evolution can explain everything, or whether it's only responsible for simple things. Extending the known working theory of evolution to cover more complicated changes, when taken in the context of billions of years of life, is a much simpler explanation than handwaving in some higher power.
The two more commonly accepted "creators" are:
1) The Creator (God, or, in your language, the all-knowing all-seeing imaginary friend)
2) An extra-terrestrial intelligent being (hacker?) who "seeded" life on this planet billions of years ago.
In theory, the two are very different. In practice, the two may be indistinguishable by us in our lifetimes, if either in fact exists.
I think that they are more or less the same, in that there is no evidence of either one and they are both basically imaginary friends and fairy tales.
I'd hazard a guess that those who don't believe in a Creator God are the most likely candidates to believe that there exist ET intelligence somewhere in the universe. Isn't the eye or the flagellum strong evidence that such intelligence exists, and has shown its hand here on Earth?
No, it is not strong evidence at all. The eye is a crappy design; in fact, our bodies show an incredible mix of haphazardness and finesse. The way our bodies are put together looks a lot like the way evolved programs look to me.
Don't let your reluctance to believe in "God" get in the way of scientific evidence.
Don't let your reluctance to believe in evolution get in the way of scientific evidence, either. Have you actually calculated the probability of a flagellum evolving and found that probability wanting, or are you just handwaving "it's too improbable!" to make yourself feel better? People generally lack the ability to understand very large and very small numbers, and this is a place where the numbers are very large (billions of years, trillions of generations, an incomprehensibly large number of bacteria) and very small (probability of a beneficial mutation appearing in a new generation). You can't analyze them with your gut.
You find the possibility of quintillions of bacteria living for billions of years happening onto something that is improbable to be less plausible than the existence all-knowing all-seeing imaginary friend who has never revealed his presence in any way?
Maybe you have a different mechanism for "created in place", but I haven't heard of one.
Given that the people who are getting these implants are on their deathbeds and are not expected to live out the year, I think the matter of their being unable to run is not so important at the moment.
Indeed, I got your point. I didn't respond to the rest of your post because it all seemed rather sensible and I didn't have anything to comment on.
I made a similar mistake when talking about Microsoft's Xbox finances. I wanted to state that Microsoft would have lost less money by paying a bunch of guys to shovel $100 bills into a furnace all day long than they have by operating their Xbox division. In fact, I had to drop it down to one guy working a normal 40-hour week shoveling $10 bills (or something like that) before my numbers came out to match reality. Those things are worth more than you'd think!
One reason you can't define price as being cost of materials + cost of labor + reasonable profit is because it's a circular definition. How do you decide on the price of the materials or the price of the labor in that case? They will end up depending on the prices of other things, and you never get to the point where you can put a number on anything. In the end, it all has to boil down to supply and demand.
Even if they use 100 dollar bills for fuel on the flights, they'll still end up an order of magnitude cheaper than Scaled.
Minor nit: $20 million in $100 bills would only be about 200kg, and I doubt if they're going suborbital with that little fuel. They'd be ok if they were using $1 bills as fuel, though.
Nice catch! However, I must disappoint you; I use Dvorak, where N and T are, sadly, adjacent.
I doubt if it's a freudian slip, because I always look at porn using native Aqua programs....
This meme must die!!!!
Aside from the standard POSIX calls, which don't include lots of things that a modern program that goes beyond the command line must do, Mac OS X and Linux are as different as can be. Although Mac OS X has an optional X11 server that can be used to porn X11 programs over, there is one other critical area where they are completely different: sound! Linux sound IO and Mac sound IO are completely different.
Not to mention that when somebody says "Linux", they usually mean "Linux on x86", so you have completely different processor architectures to deal with too.
Yes, Linux and Mac OS X share various underpinnings, but that does not make a port of a program between them, in either direction, to be necessarily easy.
If you can't see the difference between a police raid that comes without warning and takes away all of your stuff, and a court action in which the accused is allowed to face his accuser and put up a defense, then you deserve whatever you get. Being taken to court is not a kiss of death.
Oh no, fifty ten-pound model aircraft flying around over our nation's capital! What shall we do?! Somebody might get hurt, if they were really really unlucky!
I give evidence, you give anecdotes. Here's an anecdote for you: in 12 years of working with Macs and supporting Mac users, you are the first person I've ever heard of who actually had to deal with a Mac virus. I never got a Mac virus, nobody I knew ever got one, and I never even heard of one third-hand or fourth-hand until now.
If you want to convince me, you'll have to do better than that; find a list somewhere. Of course, if you don't want to convince me, that's just fine too.
Cut his head off.
You're right, there were way more than ten. There were, assuming I counted correctly, twenty-two, which I got from this list: http://www.icsalabs.com/html/communities/antivirus /macintosh/archives/macvirus/reference/viruses.htm l.
The free program was called Disinfectant, and it was available starting in 1989. The fact that it existed didn't stop people from buying the commercial stuff, of course.
You're right, my background is in Windows and not OS X, but you don't have to be insulting about it. Calling people ignorant doesn't get you anywhere.
You're criticizing a platform when you don't know very much about it. You're doing a poor job supporting that same platform because you don't know enough about it to do a good job. If that isn't "ignorant", then what is it, exactly?
Fond memories of the WDEF and other joyful Mac viruses.
What, like all ten of them? There were never a significant number of Mac viruses, and there was a free scanner that caught them all.
You're right, it doesn't. Windows is shitty, broken, and hard to use on expensive PCs too.
The "one trillion dollars" figure comes from NASA, and cannot be trusted. They used Bush Sr.'s inquiry about a possible Mars mission as a prompt to start going nuts to try to get funding for everything and the kitchen sink. They got promptly shot down. I freely admit that $20-40 billion would just cover startup studies at NASA. However, an organization that is not primarily concerned with covering its own ass and increasing its own funding (and doing a bad job at it, at that) could most likely do it at around the cost I quoted. Look up the plans for Mars Direct, which both ESA and NASA have studied and agreed that it could be done for less than $40 billion.
You misspelled "billion". IIRC, the total cost for the rovers was around $800 million.
A realistic (i.e. not done by the incredibly bloated NASA bureaucracy) plan to put people on Mars would cost something like $20-40 billion. So for 20 to 50 times as much, you can put actual people there, and probably get at least 100 times as much done, if not more. That's a better return for your dollars. The only trouble is that it's a much higher initial investment, and NASA is completely incapable of thinking about putting people on Mars for less than a trillion dollars.