There seems to be a basic human assumption that power plants must reside within the habitable portions of a craft. In reality, the powerplant(s) might be very distantly attached by spars. A mile long spar will introduce some interesting engineering challenges (depending on the materials used to make the spars) but it will most certainly remove most of the radiation hazard.
And, this is where someone asks, "Why in hell would you want mile long spars? How big do you want this craft to be?" Well - thinking in interstellar terms, we don't have the technology to exceed the speed of light. Interstellar colonization will be done with generation ships. They'll have to be BIG, to carry a large DNA pool, plus ship's crew, plus the support personnel that will be needed by the colonists. Unless we get FTL, ships will have to be freaking HUGE! So, putting any hazardous power plants at the far end of a mile long spar just makes sense!
Citation needed. Note that none of the astronauts have died due to the lack of gravity. I can't say definitely whether any cosmonauts have died due to lack of gravity, but it seems that we would have heard about it. Sinonauts? (What DOES China call their space explorers? Sinonaut sounds like a nasal problem!) How about European astronauts?
I SUSPECT that you are alluding to health and development problems that are expected to occur in a population without gravity. And, I SUSPECT that said population will adapt. Individuals might die, but the population will adapt. Some recessive traits might become dominant, congenital deformities might become meaningless, while other traits that make us strong in gravity might slowly disappear.
BUT, that's pretty much inconsequential, no matter that I'm right or wrong. Few people seriously propose that we build 0-G environments. We want habitats on the moon, Mars, the moons of the gas giants. You know - places that have gravity, even if it's microgravity. As for space habitats, we can always induce artificial gravity by means of rotating the place.
Nope. You didn't. You're dismissing the importance of culture, and heritage. "We ain't got it, so it doesn't matter very much." That's the attitude I read from your, and the above comments. A few other peoples have an unbroken history going back thousands of years - the Jews for instance. Europeans? Nope.
Let us say that the United States is the offspring of a mostly European culture, that emerged from the dark ages about a thousand years ago. And, China has a culture that has been ongoing for more than 5000 years. Not GOVERNMENT, but culture. What with the worship of ancestors, I'll bet that a lot of Chinese can trace their ancestry back thousands of years. (I actually tried to test that idea once, but since I can't read Chinese, I couldn't tell if I found lineage pages, or Great Firewall warnings that meant "Achtung, foreign white devil, trespass here is verboten!")
Find me some Americans who can trace their ancestry back past the renaissance, and I'll think about conceding the point.
The wonderful thing about an education higher than the sixth grade is, many of us can conceive of things like time measured in nanoseconds, and particles smaller than electrons.
It's ironic to listen to an inbred hillbilly * mocking the mouth breathing basement dwellers. Unlike yourself, most of them made it to 8th grade, before dropping out!
Basically, you're running a FAT12 file system in your heads. Easily corrupted, with no maintenance, no metadata, nothing. The files are still there, but you can't access them. What they are saying is, people should upgrade to a modern file system. Ext4, Reiser4, LTFS, or maybe HAMMER.
Significant, or otherwise, it's revenue. And, it's definitely significant to the victims! 180 day's interest on a thousand dollars is indeed a drop in the bucket for Paypal, but for many people, having their thousand dollars frozen for six months can be disastrous!
Obviously, you're one of those people who are confused by simple differences between items. A car, for one thing, is a part of the real, physical world, with a concrete presence. So concrete, in fact, that multitudes of idiots have managed to use cars to kill themselves. A piece of software, on the other hand, is nothing more than an idea that works based on mathematical laws. You, Sir, sound like an open sore on the face of society . . .
Alright, I exaggerate. I'm not quite rolling on the floor, but I am laughing. The less happy people get with Microsoft, the less my investments depend on Microsoft, the happier I'll be. My investments don't rise or fall on the fate of any one company. If Microsoft were to completely fail tomorrow, I might lose a few dollars. Hundreds, maybe thousands. Certainly not tens of thousands. My 401 sends me itemized statements from time to time, to inform me of which lottery games - errrr - investment strategies they are using. Microsoft ranks very low among my investments. I couldn't quite blacklist them with the options available, but I came close!
Oh - wait. Doesn't your 401 give you options to choose where your money is invested? Do you know where your money is invested?
What Marcos said. Android is not "open source". It's "kinda sorta open to downstream proprietors, but not to end users", which is not open source at all.
I'm one who likes a lot of what Google does, but I'm no blind fanboi. Google dropped the ball when they permitted downstream customers to close their source. And, that's why I'm using a "dumb phone"*, with no plans to upgrade. I'm not about to pay the phone company hundreds of dollars, PLUS an exorbitant contract fee, so that they can spy on me.
* It should be noted that even old "dumb phones" are pretty easy to spy on, albeit to a lesser extent than is exposed in this and other recent articles.
I'm glad that you're amused, and not outraged. I'm also amused. People that I generally agree with have pointed out that the mod system is broken. People that I disagree with have pointed it out, as well. People that I don't know a damned thing about have done so as well. It's almost a consensus, isn't it?
Meanwhile, I'm spending my current crop of mod points on the dude with the signature "Sudo, mod me up!" I know, I really should demand his password first, but it's the holiday season!
I'm on Firefox 11. Guess what? There's a "Refresh" icon right there! It's on the right side of the address bar. Not to the right of the address bar, it's ON the address bar, on the right side.
And, seeing that I'm on FF 11 - WTF took you so long to download and install FF7? Is your internet THAT FUCKING SLOW?!?!?! Maybe you don't really need a browser, but a higher antenna for your television.
Well - to be fair, when I hear the word "patent" in any discussion remotely related to software, I have that rabid dog reaction. It's only natural for a relatively sane person to do so.
I sort of grew into WP5.1 - it was the first office software I ever installed. I got used to it, I like it. In fact, I'd probably invest in a copy, but I don't think they support Linux at all. And, there are almost certainly interoperability issues between WP and MS office apps.
We're kind of stuck here, between the devil, and the deep blue sea, aren't we?
LOL - that office suite. After having bought out and/or squashed a lot of good competition, you'd think that Microsoft would have a superb office suite. And, given all the years that they've had to perfect it, it should be better than merely superb.
Maybe if they hadn't wasted all that time trying to embrace, extend, and extinguish all competing document formats, while advancing their own proprietary crap formats, they could actually have created office tools that always work, on any platform, any time and anywhere.
If that were the case, they could probably sell licenses for that suite for around ten dollars, and make a nice profit.
The shame is, I'll be fooling around with MS Office in the next couple days. I need to create a couple of documents, which are real easy to create in Open Office or LibreOffice. Unfortunately, the computers on which the documents will be used have had problems with documents that I've created in the past. The XP machines can't read ODF, and something gets lost in translation when I tell Open Office to save documents in other formats.
So - one more time, I'll be installing a pirated version of MS Office into a virtual machine, just to create a couple of simple documents. Then, I'll just revert the VM back to a snapshot taken before installation.
Life could be so much simpler, if MS actually cooperated with the rest of the world on standards.
Agreed. Ingenuity - American, or any other variety, does NOT depend on huge amounts of cash from the government.
Fact is, the federal government doesn't belong in education. The more money shoveled into education, the stupider people get. First - all that money is used to make textbooks and curriculum uniform around the nation. So, you get millions of lemmings who have all been taught the same lessons almost verbatim. They get together, and instead of actually churning different - even opposing - views and opinions around, all they can do is recite the same old formula to each other. Innovation? Bullshit.
Second - the people most worried about the lack of funding for education are almost certainly dullards who have never had an original thought of their own. Those individuals know nothing more than what their schools have taught them. And, they can't understand that really bright people have learned a hundred things outside of school, for every thing they ever learned IN school.
A student never stops learning. At age 55, I'm still learning. I give credit to my elementary and high school teachers who instilled a desire to learn into me. But, the actual lessons? More often than not, the lessons were inane, and boring, and sometimes even wrong.
If and when Washington and all the various school boards around the nation figure out that schools shouldn't be used for teaching facts and figures, our schools will improve dramatically. Schools SHOULD be used to teach children to enjoy learning. Schools SHOULD be teaching people where, and how, to find facts and figures, and they SHOULD be teaching people to think about those facts and figures.
NCLB has proven that you can actually teach morons to recite multiplication tables - but you cannot force a moron to manage his finances.
A little secret about those GPS tractors that you didn't hit on:
They work out the most efficient plowing, planting, and harvesting routes, as well. If you or I climbed on a tractor, we would just drive from end to end of the field, only varying our course for a tree or something. The GPS guided tractor maps out every single pass, before it ever starts. The result is a modest increase in crop yield. I emphasize "modest" - but if a farmer realizes a 3% increase in crop yield, with the very same investment, he has more money to spend on - uhhh - more robots?
I always seem to have mod points - but not today. Benjamin certainly deserves some mod points. Unfortunately - some fool or another will probably mod him (and me) down, because they believe us to be xenophobic, and/or prejudiced. Phhht.
The average person, world wide, does little more than consume food and pursue sexual relations. Some take another route, consuming food and pursuing drug induced highs. Humanity isn't going to do anything more valuable with their time than they are already doing. In fact, picking produce would be a step up for a large number of Americans. Take a tour of your nearest housing project. I don't much care whether you live in a large city with ghettos, or if you live out here in Outback, Nowhere. Our county jail is overpopulated with good for nothings who haven't earned enough honest money in their lifetimes to pay for their incarceration.
I think that you err, in your assumptions about the job market. The automotive industry managed to replace tens of thousands of workers with dumb-bots, decades ago. And, these bots don't sound especially "smart". Face it - it doesn't take much processing power to evaluate a cucumber's readiness for harvest, or the myriad of other tasks involved in agriculture.
The sensors, software, and hardware are so cheap today, that even a pretty poor person can construct a bot to perform such simple tasks. Once the industry matures a little bit, the bots can probably be left running 24/7/365. The bots can even be programmed to return to a charging station when they run out of power. Self diagnostics can inform the bot when it's worn or damaged, at which time it would (attempt to) return to a repair station. While they may not be competitive with cheap labor today, I expect that at some time in the near future, they can and will be. The margin is obviously close enough today, that some people are willing to experiment with them.
Slashdot Mirror
There seems to be a basic human assumption that power plants must reside within the habitable portions of a craft. In reality, the powerplant(s) might be very distantly attached by spars. A mile long spar will introduce some interesting engineering challenges (depending on the materials used to make the spars) but it will most certainly remove most of the radiation hazard.
And, this is where someone asks, "Why in hell would you want mile long spars? How big do you want this craft to be?" Well - thinking in interstellar terms, we don't have the technology to exceed the speed of light. Interstellar colonization will be done with generation ships. They'll have to be BIG, to carry a large DNA pool, plus ship's crew, plus the support personnel that will be needed by the colonists. Unless we get FTL, ships will have to be freaking HUGE! So, putting any hazardous power plants at the far end of a mile long spar just makes sense!
"Without gravity, we'd die."
Citation needed. Note that none of the astronauts have died due to the lack of gravity. I can't say definitely whether any cosmonauts have died due to lack of gravity, but it seems that we would have heard about it. Sinonauts? (What DOES China call their space explorers? Sinonaut sounds like a nasal problem!) How about European astronauts?
I SUSPECT that you are alluding to health and development problems that are expected to occur in a population without gravity. And, I SUSPECT that said population will adapt. Individuals might die, but the population will adapt. Some recessive traits might become dominant, congenital deformities might become meaningless, while other traits that make us strong in gravity might slowly disappear.
BUT, that's pretty much inconsequential, no matter that I'm right or wrong. Few people seriously propose that we build 0-G environments. We want habitats on the moon, Mars, the moons of the gas giants. You know - places that have gravity, even if it's microgravity. As for space habitats, we can always induce artificial gravity by means of rotating the place.
Nope. You didn't. You're dismissing the importance of culture, and heritage. "We ain't got it, so it doesn't matter very much." That's the attitude I read from your, and the above comments. A few other peoples have an unbroken history going back thousands of years - the Jews for instance. Europeans? Nope.
Or ladyboys. CmdrPony likes ladyboys.
FTFY
That is a rather narrow minded view of things.
Let us say that the United States is the offspring of a mostly European culture, that emerged from the dark ages about a thousand years ago. And, China has a culture that has been ongoing for more than 5000 years. Not GOVERNMENT, but culture. What with the worship of ancestors, I'll bet that a lot of Chinese can trace their ancestry back thousands of years. (I actually tried to test that idea once, but since I can't read Chinese, I couldn't tell if I found lineage pages, or Great Firewall warnings that meant "Achtung, foreign white devil, trespass here is verboten!")
Find me some Americans who can trace their ancestry back past the renaissance, and I'll think about conceding the point.
The wonderful thing about an education higher than the sixth grade is, many of us can conceive of things like time measured in nanoseconds, and particles smaller than electrons.
It's ironic to listen to an inbred hillbilly * mocking the mouth breathing basement dwellers. Unlike yourself, most of them made it to 8th grade, before dropping out!
* Just sit down in that rocking chair, and show us what you got boy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tqxzWdKKu8
No, that would be ferronic, wouldn't it?
Basically, you're running a FAT12 file system in your heads. Easily corrupted, with no maintenance, no metadata, nothing. The files are still there, but you can't access them. What they are saying is, people should upgrade to a modern file system. Ext4, Reiser4, LTFS, or maybe HAMMER.
Significant, or otherwise, it's revenue. And, it's definitely significant to the victims! 180 day's interest on a thousand dollars is indeed a drop in the bucket for Paypal, but for many people, having their thousand dollars frozen for six months can be disastrous!
Obviously, you're one of those people who are confused by simple differences between items. A car, for one thing, is a part of the real, physical world, with a concrete presence. So concrete, in fact, that multitudes of idiots have managed to use cars to kill themselves. A piece of software, on the other hand, is nothing more than an idea that works based on mathematical laws. You, Sir, sound like an open sore on the face of society . . .
Either I forgot to put an * and a disclaimer in my post - or you failed to read it.
ROFLMAO
Alright, I exaggerate. I'm not quite rolling on the floor, but I am laughing. The less happy people get with Microsoft, the less my investments depend on Microsoft, the happier I'll be. My investments don't rise or fall on the fate of any one company. If Microsoft were to completely fail tomorrow, I might lose a few dollars. Hundreds, maybe thousands. Certainly not tens of thousands. My 401 sends me itemized statements from time to time, to inform me of which lottery games - errrr - investment strategies they are using. Microsoft ranks very low among my investments. I couldn't quite blacklist them with the options available, but I came close!
Oh - wait. Doesn't your 401 give you options to choose where your money is invested? Do you know where your money is invested?
What Marcos said. Android is not "open source". It's "kinda sorta open to downstream proprietors, but not to end users", which is not open source at all.
I'm one who likes a lot of what Google does, but I'm no blind fanboi. Google dropped the ball when they permitted downstream customers to close their source. And, that's why I'm using a "dumb phone"*, with no plans to upgrade. I'm not about to pay the phone company hundreds of dollars, PLUS an exorbitant contract fee, so that they can spy on me.
* It should be noted that even old "dumb phones" are pretty easy to spy on, albeit to a lesser extent than is exposed in this and other recent articles.
I'm glad that you're amused, and not outraged. I'm also amused. People that I generally agree with have pointed out that the mod system is broken. People that I disagree with have pointed it out, as well. People that I don't know a damned thing about have done so as well. It's almost a consensus, isn't it?
Meanwhile, I'm spending my current crop of mod points on the dude with the signature "Sudo, mod me up!" I know, I really should demand his password first, but it's the holiday season!
I'm on Firefox 11. Guess what? There's a "Refresh" icon right there! It's on the right side of the address bar. Not to the right of the address bar, it's ON the address bar, on the right side.
And, seeing that I'm on FF 11 - WTF took you so long to download and install FF7? Is your internet THAT FUCKING SLOW?!?!?! Maybe you don't really need a browser, but a higher antenna for your television.
The advertisers can't "lose" money by respecting a do-not-track policy. They can only "not make" money by doing so.
Well - to be fair, when I hear the word "patent" in any discussion remotely related to software, I have that rabid dog reaction. It's only natural for a relatively sane person to do so.
I sort of grew into WP5.1 - it was the first office software I ever installed. I got used to it, I like it. In fact, I'd probably invest in a copy, but I don't think they support Linux at all. And, there are almost certainly interoperability issues between WP and MS office apps.
We're kind of stuck here, between the devil, and the deep blue sea, aren't we?
LOL - that office suite. After having bought out and/or squashed a lot of good competition, you'd think that Microsoft would have a superb office suite. And, given all the years that they've had to perfect it, it should be better than merely superb.
Maybe if they hadn't wasted all that time trying to embrace, extend, and extinguish all competing document formats, while advancing their own proprietary crap formats, they could actually have created office tools that always work, on any platform, any time and anywhere.
If that were the case, they could probably sell licenses for that suite for around ten dollars, and make a nice profit.
The shame is, I'll be fooling around with MS Office in the next couple days. I need to create a couple of documents, which are real easy to create in Open Office or LibreOffice. Unfortunately, the computers on which the documents will be used have had problems with documents that I've created in the past. The XP machines can't read ODF, and something gets lost in translation when I tell Open Office to save documents in other formats.
So - one more time, I'll be installing a pirated version of MS Office into a virtual machine, just to create a couple of simple documents. Then, I'll just revert the VM back to a snapshot taken before installation.
Life could be so much simpler, if MS actually cooperated with the rest of the world on standards.
Anything that makes Microsoft or Microsoft shareholders unhappy is a good thing, IMHO.
Agreed. Ingenuity - American, or any other variety, does NOT depend on huge amounts of cash from the government.
Fact is, the federal government doesn't belong in education. The more money shoveled into education, the stupider people get. First - all that money is used to make textbooks and curriculum uniform around the nation. So, you get millions of lemmings who have all been taught the same lessons almost verbatim. They get together, and instead of actually churning different - even opposing - views and opinions around, all they can do is recite the same old formula to each other. Innovation? Bullshit.
Second - the people most worried about the lack of funding for education are almost certainly dullards who have never had an original thought of their own. Those individuals know nothing more than what their schools have taught them. And, they can't understand that really bright people have learned a hundred things outside of school, for every thing they ever learned IN school.
A student never stops learning. At age 55, I'm still learning. I give credit to my elementary and high school teachers who instilled a desire to learn into me. But, the actual lessons? More often than not, the lessons were inane, and boring, and sometimes even wrong.
If and when Washington and all the various school boards around the nation figure out that schools shouldn't be used for teaching facts and figures, our schools will improve dramatically. Schools SHOULD be used to teach children to enjoy learning. Schools SHOULD be teaching people where, and how, to find facts and figures, and they SHOULD be teaching people to think about those facts and figures.
NCLB has proven that you can actually teach morons to recite multiplication tables - but you cannot force a moron to manage his finances.
A little secret about those GPS tractors that you didn't hit on:
They work out the most efficient plowing, planting, and harvesting routes, as well. If you or I climbed on a tractor, we would just drive from end to end of the field, only varying our course for a tree or something. The GPS guided tractor maps out every single pass, before it ever starts. The result is a modest increase in crop yield. I emphasize "modest" - but if a farmer realizes a 3% increase in crop yield, with the very same investment, he has more money to spend on - uhhh - more robots?
I always seem to have mod points - but not today. Benjamin certainly deserves some mod points. Unfortunately - some fool or another will probably mod him (and me) down, because they believe us to be xenophobic, and/or prejudiced. Phhht.
The average person, world wide, does little more than consume food and pursue sexual relations. Some take another route, consuming food and pursuing drug induced highs. Humanity isn't going to do anything more valuable with their time than they are already doing. In fact, picking produce would be a step up for a large number of Americans. Take a tour of your nearest housing project. I don't much care whether you live in a large city with ghettos, or if you live out here in Outback, Nowhere. Our county jail is overpopulated with good for nothings who haven't earned enough honest money in their lifetimes to pay for their incarceration.
I think that you err, in your assumptions about the job market. The automotive industry managed to replace tens of thousands of workers with dumb-bots, decades ago. And, these bots don't sound especially "smart". Face it - it doesn't take much processing power to evaluate a cucumber's readiness for harvest, or the myriad of other tasks involved in agriculture.
The sensors, software, and hardware are so cheap today, that even a pretty poor person can construct a bot to perform such simple tasks. Once the industry matures a little bit, the bots can probably be left running 24/7/365. The bots can even be programmed to return to a charging station when they run out of power. Self diagnostics can inform the bot when it's worn or damaged, at which time it would (attempt to) return to a repair station. While they may not be competitive with cheap labor today, I expect that at some time in the near future, they can and will be. The margin is obviously close enough today, that some people are willing to experiment with them.