We don't know for a fact it's infinite length, one of the points of continuing to calculate more and more digits is to attempt to find out. Most people have pretty much assumed by now that it's infinite, but if it really is infinite we will never know.
What?? That's absurd. I don't advocate turning away from growth and freedom. I think it's possible to build a world with a lower population through the willful participation of its members. I don't think people should be forced not to have children, but I think if we all work together we can reduce the population and keep it at stable, low levels.
And we don't "grow" by growing the population. We grow by advancing in other ways, ways that don't require huge amounts of resources and cause huge amounts of suffering.
Wrong. Mars has an abundance of water, in frozen form, in very large polar ice caps. There is also a suspected layer of permafrost, frozen water just beneath the surface. Most planets do have some amount of water in some form, although not usually liquid. Water/ice is floating everywhere in space. It is very, very common.
There are no lifeforms on Mars
We don't know this. There is no reason to think it, considering Mars is relatively Earth-like and life happens very easily.
There never were lifeforms on Mars
This is very, very unlikely. Where there is liquid water, there is usually life. Life is made up of the most common elements in the universe, and for life to exist all you really need is water and some basic primordial soup. The chances of Mars never having had even the lowest form of bacteria are incredibly slim.
Repeat 2-3 for each planet, save Earth
Yeah, and the universe orbits around the Earth, and out of a huge and infinite universe Earth is the only planet to have developed pond scum.
One thing that confuses me: The article states that the researchers claim the climate of Mars was never hot enough for running water; the researchers contend that fallen snow left deep gorges in the surface. However, in order for snow to fall in the first place, water vapour must be present in the air. I was under the impression that for water vapour to get into the air, liquid water must evaporate (solid water certainly does not transform directly into vapour!). So there must have been liquid water somewhere to form snow in the first place, right? Besides this, in order for the snow to melt, the planet had to be hot enough for this to happen. And what happened to the water that resulted from the melting snow?
When water evaporates, it just becomes water vapour, which will eventually become liquid again, etc. It doesn't generally have a chance of escaping a planet's gravity well.
Most likely: the water went through a chemical transformation due to changes in conditions (I am not a chemist) and became something else. Also a great deal of water is obviously frozen at the poles, which could have happened as a result of a slight movement away from the Sun. Remember also permafrost--there may have been a time when the permafrost was groundwater, fog, etc.
AFAIK none of the Earth's water leaves the planet. It is a closed system and water vapour even at the highest altitudes cannot escape the Earth's gravity well.
Unless, of course, you count the blobs of astro-urine that are now floating around somewhere in space thanks to dozens of space missions...
This is a very elitist viewpoint. First of all, poverty is usually caused by the lack of wealth (poverty IS the lack of wealth) and anyway, regardless of its causes it is a serious problem that we are ALL responsible for and to give up hope of fixing it is very elitist in deed.
We are living in a very different time to the time of Columbus. At that time, the money used to finance his expedition could not and would not have had a far-reaching effect. However, we spend HUGE amounts of money on space exploration because it is a very expensive thing. Those amounts of money could help a huge amount of people.
Put it this way: if YOU were starving in Africa, about to die, I think you'd rather have money spent on feeding you than on brand new solar panels for the ISS.
I would be concerned that it may have a dividing effect rather than a unifying one. Starving people in poor countries are probably going to wonder at the lavish Americans/Europeans who have so much abundance they can spend money on space stations and colonisation, and may even develop hatred beyond what they already have for us. Yes, it will help unify first world countries, but as far as the rest of the world, I imagine it makes a lot of people jealous and even angry (it's hard to imagine how many people could be fed by the money that has gone into the ISS)
Isn't this a little like saying "We should wage war, because we are human, that's what humans do!" or "We should be bigoted against each other, because that's what humans do!"
Humans do a lot of things they shouldn't necessarily do. No, space exploration is not something comparable to war and bigotry, but we have to consider the implications of space exploration, and what its benefits and drawbacks are. We are evolved enough not to use the general behaviour of our species as an excuse.
In my mind, space exploration would serve little practical benefit. There are still so many issues we have to resolve here on earth--starvation, disease, overpopulation, pollution, war, oppression, hatred, etc--that space exploration is negative, not just because of the money and effort that could be spent elsewhere but because many people view it as a way to "escape" our problems. Leaving earth is not a way to escape our problems; they will only come back to haunt us later.
As a software engineer, I have a natural drive to want to refine systems and make them clean and efficient. So I think the idea of an Earth with a constant population of, say, 4 billion, very little disease, very little violence, no pollution, and running on 100% sustainable resources, is very compelling. It's more compelling to me to perfect what we do here on earth than to spread our very problematic and messy behaviours elsewhere.
Yes, space travel is intriguing, because we do all have an instinct to explore and expand. But many people also have instincts to kill, maim, and rape--just because they are instincts doesn't mean they are good.
I assume by "we" he means the People (although in reality it's the Party). If it were the people, you can rest assured most people do _not_ like pollution, etc. I see nothing wrong with using tax as a way to fight this kind of thing.
It's a little disappointing that he didn't personally reply to all the questions. Also, with the three third party candidates having responded and still no response from the Democrats or Republicans, one wonders if they're ever going to respond. If they had any clue about Slashdot they'd be wise to do so, considering they can reach several hundred thousand voters at least!
Would it be possible/plausible to detect bad RAM on the fly, without needing a reboot? What about testing RAM allocated right before a program fails? How long does it take to check RAM, and could it be done at runtime?
Just make it Open Systems! If they made Java a completely Open System, designed by industry consensus and completely backward compatible with a publicly available spec, anyone could create a complete Java implementation, open source or not. This is far more important than availability of source, but then again Sun has been more against Open Systems than any of the UNIX vendors, historically.
ARGH!! 99% of MUDs are open source and always have been! Nearly every MUD in existence. This is completely bizarre, I have no idea what's wrong with these people...
Considering generally the first thing open source advocates tend to add to software is translucent windows and huge pictures of scantily clad women, I would suspect that open source medical tools would include translucent scalpels and medicine bottles with bikini-clad women on them. And they should make Matrix-like sounds every time you move them about.
Seriously, who is best equipped to design software that life depends on--someone with NASA-style mission critical development practices or some pimply teenager sitting in his bedroom at 3 AM hacking away and chugging coffee? I don't think I'd want to trust my life to the pimply teenager, but I might well trust my life to the NASA-like developers.
I'm tired of hearing about this stuff. X is excellent technology, and the reason it's been around since 1984 and is still working wonderfully (well X11 has been around since 89) is that it's EXTREMELY WELL DESIGNED. Despite peoples' griping about the X toolkit and protocol, the whole system is vastly well designed, and built to last. It lasts not because of the abundance of "legacy" applications (at one time there was a migration from X10 to X11--and that was very quick--and think of the migration from win3.1 to win95, etc), but because it's excellent, excellent technology.
A word about antialiasing. Most uses of X are in businesses, governments, and science. When you're controlling satellites, nuclear reactors, nuclear warheads, global databases, etc, does antialiasing do you ANY good whatsoever?
And as people have pointed out numerous times, today's screen resolutions are so huge that antialiasing is outdated--it was designed to compensate for huge jaggies that no longer exist.
Despite all its shortcomings, Mir is a remarkable piece of engineering to be able to last this long, and is also proof that alternative systems to capitalism can really produce high quality technology. It's far more impressive than Skylab ever was, and it's been home to the longest human space missions in history. To just let it crash into the ocean is a tragedy--you'd think enough people would be able to spare the money to save it. Incidentally, I wonder if it would have had a far better fate under the communist government.
UNIX is not an OS, it's an Open System
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Is UNIX An OS?
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UNIX is not an OS. UNIX is an Open System, and a set of standards maintained primarily by The Open Group. Several operating systems conform to the UNIX standard, but as an Open System UNIX is far more significant than any implementation of that standard (incidentally Linux is NOT UNIX). As an Open System, there is backwards compatibility, vendor-neutrality, vendor-independence, and the ability for anyone to create an implementation. Implementations compete based on individual quality, not differing and incompatible APIs. Open Systems are really a beautiful thing, and far more important than "open" source. UNIX is one of the great manifestations of the Open Systems concept, and it really works quite well. So don't belittle it by calling it just an "operating system".
That's just flat out not true. You're obviously very ignorant of what Motif can do. Motif is extremely flexible and can dynamically be made to look practically any way you want it to. All you have to do is set the right X resources the right way.
I hate to see people bash Motif like this. You can customise all this stuff using X resources if you don't like the way Motif handles numlock. (incidentally I've never noticed this...you sure you're not using some weird old version of Motif, or maybe Lesstif?)
I use NEdit all the time, and one of the things I like best about it is it is based on Motif. Rather than all the shitty "glitzy" toolkits like Gtk and Qt that take hours to load over the network and are not worth it anyway, NEdit uses the best toolkit around. Motif is still better than all the alternatives--it's faster, more efficient, more to-the-point, and more powerful. This is one of my main reasons for using NEdit in the first place.
Motif is highly customisable by resources (unlike some other toolkits). All you have to do is set the right X resources the same way CDE does--it's built into Motif.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't know for a fact it's infinite length, one of the points of continuing to calculate more and more digits is to attempt to find out. Most people have pretty much assumed by now that it's infinite, but if it really is infinite we will never know.
Electronics--err, computers--err, silicon can't hold titles just yet...
That was a good movie, but it was about Joshua Waitzkin, what does that have to do with this?
And we don't "grow" by growing the population. We grow by advancing in other ways, ways that don't require huge amounts of resources and cause huge amounts of suffering.
Wrong. Mars has an abundance of water, in frozen form, in very large polar ice caps. There is also a suspected layer of permafrost, frozen water just beneath the surface. Most planets do have some amount of water in some form, although not usually liquid. Water/ice is floating everywhere in space. It is very, very common.
There are no lifeforms on Mars
We don't know this. There is no reason to think it, considering Mars is relatively Earth-like and life happens very easily.
There never were lifeforms on Mars
This is very, very unlikely. Where there is liquid water, there is usually life. Life is made up of the most common elements in the universe, and for life to exist all you really need is water and some basic primordial soup. The chances of Mars never having had even the lowest form of bacteria are incredibly slim.
Repeat 2-3 for each planet, save Earth
Yeah, and the universe orbits around the Earth, and out of a huge and infinite universe Earth is the only planet to have developed pond scum.
I don't think so.
Can anyone explain this? Am I missing something?
Most likely: the water went through a chemical transformation due to changes in conditions (I am not a chemist) and became something else. Also a great deal of water is obviously frozen at the poles, which could have happened as a result of a slight movement away from the Sun. Remember also permafrost--there may have been a time when the permafrost was groundwater, fog, etc.
Unless, of course, you count the blobs of astro-urine that are now floating around somewhere in space thanks to dozens of space missions...
Space stations are not.
We are living in a very different time to the time of Columbus. At that time, the money used to finance his expedition could not and would not have had a far-reaching effect. However, we spend HUGE amounts of money on space exploration because it is a very expensive thing. Those amounts of money could help a huge amount of people.
Put it this way: if YOU were starving in Africa, about to die, I think you'd rather have money spent on feeding you than on brand new solar panels for the ISS.
I would be concerned that it may have a dividing effect rather than a unifying one. Starving people in poor countries are probably going to wonder at the lavish Americans/Europeans who have so much abundance they can spend money on space stations and colonisation, and may even develop hatred beyond what they already have for us. Yes, it will help unify first world countries, but as far as the rest of the world, I imagine it makes a lot of people jealous and even angry (it's hard to imagine how many people could be fed by the money that has gone into the ISS)
Humans do a lot of things they shouldn't necessarily do. No, space exploration is not something comparable to war and bigotry, but we have to consider the implications of space exploration, and what its benefits and drawbacks are. We are evolved enough not to use the general behaviour of our species as an excuse.
In my mind, space exploration would serve little practical benefit. There are still so many issues we have to resolve here on earth--starvation, disease, overpopulation, pollution, war, oppression, hatred, etc--that space exploration is negative, not just because of the money and effort that could be spent elsewhere but because many people view it as a way to "escape" our problems. Leaving earth is not a way to escape our problems; they will only come back to haunt us later.
As a software engineer, I have a natural drive to want to refine systems and make them clean and efficient. So I think the idea of an Earth with a constant population of, say, 4 billion, very little disease, very little violence, no pollution, and running on 100% sustainable resources, is very compelling. It's more compelling to me to perfect what we do here on earth than to spread our very problematic and messy behaviours elsewhere.
Yes, space travel is intriguing, because we do all have an instinct to explore and expand. But many people also have instincts to kill, maim, and rape--just because they are instincts doesn't mean they are good.
I assume by "we" he means the People (although in reality it's the Party). If it were the people, you can rest assured most people do _not_ like pollution, etc. I see nothing wrong with using tax as a way to fight this kind of thing.
It's a little disappointing that he didn't personally reply to all the questions. Also, with the three third party candidates having responded and still no response from the Democrats or Republicans, one wonders if they're ever going to respond. If they had any clue about Slashdot they'd be wise to do so, considering they can reach several hundred thousand voters at least!
Would it be possible/plausible to detect bad RAM on the fly, without needing a reboot? What about testing RAM allocated right before a program fails? How long does it take to check RAM, and could it be done at runtime?
Just make it Open Systems! If they made Java a completely Open System, designed by industry consensus and completely backward compatible with a publicly available spec, anyone could create a complete Java implementation, open source or not. This is far more important than availability of source, but then again Sun has been more against Open Systems than any of the UNIX vendors, historically.
ARGH!! 99% of MUDs are open source and always have been! Nearly every MUD in existence. This is completely bizarre, I have no idea what's wrong with these people...
Seriously, who is best equipped to design software that life depends on--someone with NASA-style mission critical development practices or some pimply teenager sitting in his bedroom at 3 AM hacking away and chugging coffee? I don't think I'd want to trust my life to the pimply teenager, but I might well trust my life to the NASA-like developers.
I'm tired of hearing about this stuff. X is excellent technology, and the reason it's been around since 1984 and is still working wonderfully (well X11 has been around since 89) is that it's EXTREMELY WELL DESIGNED. Despite peoples' griping about the X toolkit and protocol, the whole system is vastly well designed, and built to last. It lasts not because of the abundance of "legacy" applications (at one time there was a migration from X10 to X11--and that was very quick--and think of the migration from win3.1 to win95, etc), but because it's excellent, excellent technology.
A word about antialiasing. Most uses of X are in businesses, governments, and science. When you're controlling satellites, nuclear reactors, nuclear warheads, global databases, etc, does antialiasing do you ANY good whatsoever?
And as people have pointed out numerous times, today's screen resolutions are so huge that antialiasing is outdated--it was designed to compensate for huge jaggies that no longer exist.
Despite all its shortcomings, Mir is a remarkable piece of engineering to be able to last this long, and is also proof that alternative systems to capitalism can really produce high quality technology. It's far more impressive than Skylab ever was, and it's been home to the longest human space missions in history. To just let it crash into the ocean is a tragedy--you'd think enough people would be able to spare the money to save it. Incidentally, I wonder if it would have had a far better fate under the communist government.
UNIX is not an OS. UNIX is an Open System, and a set of standards maintained primarily by The Open Group. Several operating systems conform to the UNIX standard, but as an Open System UNIX is far more significant than any implementation of that standard (incidentally Linux is NOT UNIX). As an Open System, there is backwards compatibility, vendor-neutrality, vendor-independence, and the ability for anyone to create an implementation. Implementations compete based on individual quality, not differing and incompatible APIs. Open Systems are really a beautiful thing, and far more important than "open" source. UNIX is one of the great manifestations of the Open Systems concept, and it really works quite well. So don't belittle it by calling it just an "operating system".
That's just flat out not true. You're obviously very ignorant of what Motif can do. Motif is extremely flexible and can dynamically be made to look practically any way you want it to. All you have to do is set the right X resources the right way.
I use NEdit all the time, and one of the things I like best about it is it is based on Motif. Rather than all the shitty "glitzy" toolkits like Gtk and Qt that take hours to load over the network and are not worth it anyway, NEdit uses the best toolkit around. Motif is still better than all the alternatives--it's faster, more efficient, more to-the-point, and more powerful. This is one of my main reasons for using NEdit in the first place.
Motif is highly customisable by resources (unlike some other toolkits). All you have to do is set the right X resources the same way CDE does--it's built into Motif.