We've all seen stories of how primitive tribes get sugar, or whiskey, or drugs, or other trappings of modern society and proceed to ruin themselves even more than we do because they're not accustomed to those things.
Submitted for your consideration, that this time the tribe is us, and we have done it to ourselves.
Imagine if Mars had a slightly more advanced civilization than Earth, and they contacted us in 1950. Let's say they had no interest in hostility, but gave us the technology they had been using for a few hundred years.
Reports in the Martian media would be full of our foibles--of how accidents went up due to texting, of the spying, of the fake news, of the conspiracy mongering. They would be wondering if it had been a good idea to give us their tech.
I don't think the Chinese will cut corners on this one. It's one thing to make a piece of military equipment cheaper and accept higher casualties. It's a different ball game in space. You can just throw more soldiers into a battle. You can't just throw more astronauts at the Moon. They're worth too much. It's not *just* a human life on the line. It's the cost to their international prestige and the value of contracting services to other nations. We don't use Soyuz rockets just to save money. They're also one of the most (the most?) reliable man-rated boosters. I'm sure the Chinese would love to have a business like that.
Every break I ever got came from doing an end-run around HR. Picture HR as a bunch of 300 lb. tackles in the middle of the field, each and every one of which has had way too many concussions; but they can still fuck you up. Your first job is to get the ball and run fast and wide, hoping to squeak by the sideline without stepping out of bounds, and get into the end zone. The actual job is usually so much easier. Think of it as kicking the extra point; but you get 1000 points instead of 1.
Expressed in what form? As random remarks over a cup of coffee
Sure. Just install it on Amazon Echo and leave it in the office. A few pallets of Beanie Babies might show up once in a while for no good reason, but you'll get the job done./sarc
I don't define achievement as the exertion of power over others.
The Patriots won. It was an achievement. I may not like it; but I'm not oppressed because of that.
Perhaps that's a bad example because they had to exert power over a tiny percentage of the population in order to win. How about a math test? It's not explicitly a competition--getting 100% is an achievement, even if the other students don't know you got it. Many others will not get a perfect score. You did better than them--and it's funny that I have to point this out: there's nothing wrong with that.
Absolute equality is probably just as bad as extreme concentration. I don't think anybody is seriously proposing that we target perfect equality, except Marxist ideologues.
The problem with absolute equality is the enforcement mechanism and the way it tends to crush the spirit of anybody who desires to achieve.
The problem with wealth concentration in the upper tiers is that it leads to *power* concentration in the upper tiers--government by the wealthy, ie, oligarchy.
I think it's often the case that the optimal position is somewhere in the middle. When wealth is concentrated in the upper tiers, a move towards absolute equality seems appealing, but only in the way that moving towards a fire seems appealing when it's freezing.
I love the Apollo 8 patch. That's a logo designer's dream. It practically designed itself. I almost wonder if they made sure it wasn't 7 or 9 just so they could do that.
Anyway, that mission made sense as a stepping stone to landing on the Moon. Doing it again *sort of* makes sense just to dip our toes back into something other than LEO operations... but if Mars is the next target maybe other missions are more logical steps...
Hopefully not. I wish him the best of luck; but if he ends up as an unkempt recluse I won't be surprised. With a little luck, maybe I can figure out where he will be hitch-hiking... or maybe not.
Last night on the news there was also a story about some Arby's being picketed because they hadn't paid their employees. Are these guys asleep at the switch or something?
It doesn't look like it has anything like Super Charger capability. That, IMHO, is what makes the Tesla technology a real breakout--the ability to charge while you have lunch on a road trip. Less likely to affect most people's decision is the fact that you're giving money to the company that took back the EV-1s and crushed them. All else equal, people who know about things like that may feel better giving money to Tesla.
I don't want to see any "innovative" paper products until my grocery receipt is dollar-sized and printed on paper with out Bisphenol or some other such toxic nonsense on it. How many times have you bought just a couple things, and they hand you your receipt with the cash and the receipt is 3 times longer than a dollar and a lot wider too? What's up with that?
In true Star Trek form though, the original Enterprise is actually a Constitution class star ship. I'm too lazy to see if any of the later Enterprises defined their class.
It depends on the language. In Lisp dialects, it's practically required and IIRC compliant Scheme requires tail-call optimization so that it doesn't cause performance issues. My experience in C is that people prefer iteration. One time I did it in assembly and the professor marked me down, but I think it had to do more with combining self-modifying code *and* recursion. Dang, it was compact code though. You might even say it was elegant; but I get the lesson he was teaching and I would never do that now.
While basic essentials like food, water, etc. don't need to be advertised, other things do. How did I find out about the C-64? A commercial. Was it a need? At the time we didn't think so; but looking back, it was. I don't know where I'd be if we didn't have one. Dead? No; but with much fewer interesting things in life. Now in the modern era, kids are playing with things like Rasberry Pi boards and stuff. How do they find out about it? Sites like this? And when some start-up pitches a product like that on this site, what do people say? "Slashvertisement". A product placement or startup interview isn't an "ad" in the traditional sense; but it serves the same purpose.
As much as we might hate to admit it, some level of advertisement is necessary.
Impossible for me to not hear Two Minutes to Midnight when ever this is mentioned. This is from the 80s when the threat was real. Today's announcement is just a bunch of domestic politics. Also, get off my lawn.
One of these things is not like the other, namely Applied Music. I'm guessing the price has less to do with earning potential, and more to do with the limited supply of teachers who are actually good.
They're not stupid. They're just smug. Liberals in general got full of smug somehow. Gone are the days of men from working class backgrounds rising to power. Smug weenies rule the left in the USA. Their strategy in the face of the current distress seems to be, "We weren't smug enough. We need to pile on more smug".
Not until we solve the mystery of how the first insertion is wrong 90% of the time when in theory it should be 50%. A working theory of this could lead to free energy, faster-than-light travel, or gas station sushi that won't make you sick.
HSR safety document. AFAIK, true grade separation isn't fully funded. The quad gates described in the PDF are said to reduce "collisions" 98%, but I'm inferring that as vehicle collisions. They don't look like they would do much for pedestrians.
You improperly inferred that I was saying CA HSR won't match the eastern corridor for speed. In fact, it will exceed it. I was only making a statement regarding the expense of building out HSR in populated areas of the US, and why it's a problem; namely the fact that it's a retrofit. This is why they're doing the Central Valley first--it's more like a clean slate, and they're counting on the sunk cost mentality to keep the project going once it starts.
You improperly inferred that I was suggesting we build Hyperloop. I simply stated that if it proved out, HSR would be an obsolete technology when complete.
Finally, you opined that electrified and self-driving cars are in irrational idea. The self-driving tech is already out there, and open-road convoys are one of the easiest things for self-driving tech to do. OTOH, pulling electricity from the grid in a personal vehicle isn't tested and in retrospect something I didn't need to thrown in to the vision because battery tech is pretty good now, and some people will still want to run ICE or other technology in their cars. Dedicated self-driving lanes are the main idea, and that's very doable, don't you think?
Slashdot Mirror
We have met the primitive tribe, and they are us.
We've all seen stories of how primitive tribes get sugar, or whiskey, or drugs, or other trappings of modern society and proceed to ruin themselves even more than we do because they're not accustomed to those things.
Submitted for your consideration, that this time the tribe is us, and we have done it to ourselves.
Imagine if Mars had a slightly more advanced civilization than Earth, and they contacted us in 1950. Let's say they had no interest in hostility, but gave us the technology they had been using for a few hundred years.
Reports in the Martian media would be full of our foibles--of how accidents went up due to texting, of the spying, of the fake news, of the conspiracy mongering. They would be wondering if it had been a good idea to give us their tech.
'tis the Martian's burden, I suppose.
The NASDAQ bottomed on March 9, 2009. Inertia much? Talk to me next year.
I don't think the Chinese will cut corners on this one. It's one thing to make a piece of military equipment cheaper and accept higher casualties. It's a different ball game in space. You can just throw more soldiers into a battle. You can't just throw more astronauts at the Moon. They're worth too much. It's not *just* a human life on the line. It's the cost to their international prestige and the value of contracting services to other nations. We don't use Soyuz rockets just to save money. They're also one of the most (the most?) reliable man-rated boosters. I'm sure the Chinese would love to have a business like that.
Every break I ever got came from doing an end-run around HR. Picture HR as a bunch of 300 lb. tackles in the middle of the field, each and every one of which has had way too many concussions; but they can still fuck you up. Your first job is to get the ball and run fast and wide, hoping to squeak by the sideline without stepping out of bounds, and get into the end zone. The actual job is usually so much easier. Think of it as kicking the extra point; but you get 1000 points instead of 1.
Sure. Just install it on Amazon Echo and leave it in the office. A few pallets of Beanie Babies might show up once in a while for no good reason, but you'll get the job done. /sarc
Apparently, they're conducting studies now.
I don't define achievement as the exertion of power over others.
The Patriots won. It was an achievement. I may not like it; but I'm not oppressed because of that.
Perhaps that's a bad example because they had to exert power over a tiny percentage of the population in order to win. How about a math test? It's not explicitly a competition--getting 100% is an achievement, even if the other students don't know you got it. Many others will not get a perfect score. You did better than them--and it's funny that I have to point this out: there's nothing wrong with that.
Absolute equality is probably just as bad as extreme concentration. I don't think anybody is seriously proposing that we target perfect equality, except Marxist ideologues.
The problem with absolute equality is the enforcement mechanism and the way it tends to crush the spirit of anybody who desires to achieve.
The problem with wealth concentration in the upper tiers is that it leads to *power* concentration in the upper tiers--government by the wealthy, ie, oligarchy.
I think it's often the case that the optimal position is somewhere in the middle. When wealth is concentrated in the upper tiers, a move towards absolute equality seems appealing, but only in the way that moving towards a fire seems appealing when it's freezing.
I love the Apollo 8 patch. That's a logo designer's dream. It practically designed itself. I almost wonder if they made sure it wasn't 7 or 9 just so they could do that.
Anyway, that mission made sense as a stepping stone to landing on the Moon. Doing it again *sort of* makes sense just to dip our toes back into something other than LEO operations... but if Mars is the next target maybe other missions are more logical steps...
Hopefully not. I wish him the best of luck; but if he ends up as an unkempt recluse I won't be surprised. With a little luck, maybe I can figure out where he will be hitch-hiking... or maybe not.
If it will make you feel any better, just imagine that beavers did it.
Last night on the news there was also a story about some Arby's being picketed because they hadn't paid their employees. Are these guys asleep at the switch or something?
It doesn't look like it has anything like Super Charger capability. That, IMHO, is what makes the Tesla technology a real breakout--the ability to charge while you have lunch on a road trip. Less likely to affect most people's decision is the fact that you're giving money to the company that took back the EV-1s and crushed them. All else equal, people who know about things like that may feel better giving money to Tesla.
The rules say you have to use all 4 4s. You can't just use 2 4s. That's why you have to effectively add zero to get one.
I don't want to see any "innovative" paper products until my grocery receipt is dollar-sized and printed on paper with out Bisphenol or some other such toxic nonsense on it. How many times have you bought just a couple things, and they hand you your receipt with the cash and the receipt is 3 times longer than a dollar and a lot wider too? What's up with that?
In true Star Trek form though, the original Enterprise is actually a Constitution class star ship. I'm too lazy to see if any of the later Enterprises defined their class.
It depends on the language. In Lisp dialects, it's practically required and IIRC compliant Scheme requires tail-call optimization so that it doesn't cause performance issues. My experience in C is that people prefer iteration. One time I did it in assembly and the professor marked me down, but I think it had to do more with combining self-modifying code *and* recursion. Dang, it was compact code though. You might even say it was elegant; but I get the lesson he was teaching and I would never do that now.
While basic essentials like food, water, etc. don't need to be advertised, other things do. How did I find out about the C-64? A commercial. Was it a need? At the time we didn't think so; but looking back, it was. I don't know where I'd be if we didn't have one. Dead? No; but with much fewer interesting things in life. Now in the modern era, kids are playing with things like Rasberry Pi boards and stuff. How do they find out about it? Sites like this? And when some start-up pitches a product like that on this site, what do people say? "Slashvertisement". A product placement or startup interview isn't an "ad" in the traditional sense; but it serves the same purpose.
As much as we might hate to admit it, some level of advertisement is necessary.
Impossible for me to not hear Two Minutes to Midnight when ever this is mentioned. This is from the 80s when the threat was real. Today's announcement is just a bunch of domestic politics. Also, get off my lawn.
One of these things is not like the other, namely Applied Music. I'm guessing the price has less to do with earning potential, and more to do with the limited supply of teachers who are actually good.
No web page should do anything when you're not looking at it. Full stop. Pun intended.
They're not stupid. They're just smug. Liberals in general got full of smug somehow. Gone are the days of men from working class backgrounds rising to power. Smug weenies rule the left in the USA. Their strategy in the face of the current distress seems to be, "We weren't smug enough. We need to pile on more smug".
They're late. Moller has been at it for 50 years. I'm really late, but why not? I promise to release my flying car prototype next year too. I plan to take a different approach.
Not until we solve the mystery of how the first insertion is wrong 90% of the time when in theory it should be 50%. A working theory of this could lead to free energy, faster-than-light travel, or gas station sushi that won't make you sick.
HSR safety document. AFAIK, true grade separation isn't fully funded. The quad gates described in the PDF are said to reduce "collisions" 98%, but I'm inferring that as vehicle collisions. They don't look like they would do much for pedestrians.
You improperly inferred that I was saying CA HSR won't match the eastern corridor for speed. In fact, it will exceed it. I was only making a statement regarding the expense of building out HSR in populated areas of the US, and why it's a problem; namely the fact that it's a retrofit. This is why they're doing the Central Valley first--it's more like a clean slate, and they're counting on the sunk cost mentality to keep the project going once it starts.
You improperly inferred that I was suggesting we build Hyperloop. I simply stated that if it proved out, HSR would be an obsolete technology when complete.
Finally, you opined that electrified and self-driving cars are in irrational idea. The self-driving tech is already out there, and open-road convoys are one of the easiest things for self-driving tech to do. OTOH, pulling electricity from the grid in a personal vehicle isn't tested and in retrospect something I didn't need to thrown in to the vision because battery tech is pretty good now, and some people will still want to run ICE or other technology in their cars. Dedicated self-driving lanes are the main idea, and that's very doable, don't you think?