However, there are about 80 million pet cats in the US, and an estimated 50-60 million feral cats. Perfectly evolved hunters, largely immune to fluctuations in food availability, which the passenger pigeon didn't co-evolve with.
Wolves are an counter-example to your overreaction. They have been reintroduced to the US, and reintroducing a top predator is a hell of a lot more risky than reintroducing a pigeon. Broadly, reintroductions just don't cause the problems you claim and either dramatically improve things, or die out again. You are thinking of the problems of introduced foreign pest-species and projecting that onto the vastly safer re-introductions.
This is my biggest complaint at people who dislike Ubuntu and other distros that make Linux "easy."
People don't hate Ubuntu for making Linux "easy", they hate it for making Linux hard. By starting with Debian, which already twists SoP, then adding its own non-standard way of doing things, it actually makes things harder for the Linux ecosystem. Specifically, it "Window-ises" Linux, creates that two-level usage where doing something is either blindly stupidly easy or else buried in obscurity that requires special training. It removes the natural progression of difficulty that got those geeks into Linux in the first place. (And, as you say, without that new generation of explorers, there is no coding community.) Instead, the learning curve is a right angle. Hence the irony-quotes around "easy". It's a pretend easy. It's "easy" by burying the hard stuff, rather than making the hard stuff more natural.
[The solution, IMO, is to treat Ubuntu as being a OS/UI "based on Linux", not as a Linux distro. So it's not something you offer someone to "introduce them to Linux", it's a stand-alone free/free n00bs-friendly Windows replacement.]
If your FOSS project only has a handful of users, it's nice.
If your FOSS project has thousands of users, it's good.
If your FOSS project has millions of users, it's not as good as it used to be, the devs are idiots, and I've been using [abandoned fork] for two years.
Not quite. Thermal cycling of the top inch or two of regolith means that the footprints are likely to be lost in a century or three. Even 45 years is probably enough to soften the sharp outlines. The flag will be UV-bleached-white or radiation-black. The descent stage and other equipment will be peppered with micro-meteorite holes.
Frankly, this is another reason to preserve the sites. As experiments which provide 6 points of reference to calibrate the fine erosion rate for lunar features.
"If". That's the question. We don't know. And we can't find the answer if we slime up the test subject before we even run the test. It's about trying to avoid contaminating our samples with the very thing we're looking for. (Imagine if you were an oil surveyor looking for signs of oil, but you were randomly leaking oil everywhere you went.)
Once we know for sure that a body is lifeless, then yes, go nuts.
If the only life in the universe is found right here on earth,
"If" is an interesting question. And I'd like to see science be able to take steps towards an answer. Which is why it's stupid to spread Earthly bacteria until we can at least check if the obvious places in the solar system already have their own alien life. Mars, Europa, etc. If they are truly dead, go nuts.
If life does not exist anywhere else in the universe, the universe doesn't care.
It may be a waste of a good opportunity, but even "life" doesn't care. Except us, and maybe the dolphins.
So, as the only species capable of having an opinion, it might be a "crime" against humanity to... well, not do whatever we decide is the humane thing to do. If we decide not to pollute the universe with ourselves, then that decision is life's "natural will". If we decide to spread life far and wide in a hostile cosmos, then that too is the natural will of life.
Cool thing about being the only creatures in existence in existence with morality. We get to decide what is moral.
It's the places that might already have life that we are trying to preserve. So that if they do have alien life, we can detect that life and do science on it.
Demonstrably dead things we don't care about getting life all over them. You can splash as much bacteria as you like on the Moon, no one cares. Asteroids? Go nuts. Life away.
But Mars, Europa, Titan, and comets; we wait until we figure out how to definitively rule out native, alien life.
Thing is, it was the same Librarian of Congress making the two contradictory decisions. The same person. Why would you reverse your own decision if no one was pressuring you to? Especially at the very next consecutive review. You've solved the issue, you've given your decision, if no one was pressuring you, you wouldn't even consider the issue again. That's what makes it unusual, and suspicious.
I suspect that a lengthy legalistically-complex application was made by the cell-operators' lobby at the newest review, and the LoC basically said "Fuck it, why is this my problem?" and intentionally made the worst decision he could to try to force the issue back onto Congress. But, IMO, he didn't realise (or perhaps doesn't care) that Congress would be perfectly happy (or at least well funded) with the LoC's reversal, because there is no paid unlock-cellphones lobby.
Which is what makes the Whitehouse response to the petition particularly unusual.
Since we're being pedantic: Anyone who uses a mean to refer to the "average" person is generally lying to you (or they have been lied to or they are merely ignorant and you can safely ignore anything they are saying.)
The mean is about finding the average of the total value. It has nothing to do with the objects/people having those values. The median is about the average object/person. So mean is appropriate for total birthrate over time corrected for population size, but not for "average number of children per family" at a given time as a measure of the "average family". But good luck finding anyone who can give you the median number of children per family. (And yet, weirdly, judging by google, it's a standard maths homework problem.)
Hence I was, even when joking, referring to the average person, the median.
Even more pedantically, perfect bell curves for positive value ranges do not match mean/median. A perfect bell curve will only match mean/median when the median is at zero on the x-axis.
Think of a X-axis scale from 0-100, and a perfect curve with a median at 50 (Y-axis is the number of members.) The right side of the bell curve is from 50-100 and has exactly the same number of members as the left side, 0-50. For a perfect curve, the number of members at, say, 75, matches the number at 25. Clearly you are going to have a mean which is well to the right of the median. [If it's not clear, grab a piece of graph paper and draw a small bell-curve (say nine by nine) and actually count the value. Eventually it will "pop", the right side is "heavier" than the left, even though it has the same number of members.]
Now a production curve, where the Y-axis is the number of units of production, and the X-axis is time, you will generally want to know the mean (which is simply area under the curve divided by time. Note: that's the total Y-axis value divided by X-axis. The mean for the population-curve (bell-curve) is the X-axis area under the curve (total value) divided by the Y-axis area under the curve (total number of members). The opposite.)
There is, however, a large and well-funded anti-handset-unlocking lobby; which is why the LoC reversed their original decision allowing unlocking. So the President coming out in favour of a completely unfunded public group, against the will of the funded business lobby, is actually a much greater gesture than a "Cancer bad, m'kay."
A democracy can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. Paraphrased, Elmer T. Perterson, The Daily Oklahoman
Can you point to three examples where a democracy failed because the masses voted themselves largess? For every single example you give, I'll give three examples of a society failing because the aristocracy voted themselves largess from the public treasury.
If you can't point to three clear examples of democracy ending because "the voters discovered they can vote themselves largess", can you please just stop regurgitating this hateful bullshit fucking meme.
Frankly, most voters are vastly more decent and selfless than those at the top. Which is why political arguments about "belt tightening" and "sacrifice" resonate so much with them. And "fairness" and "family" and "American values". Even when you give them free stuff, you have to couch it in terms of caring for the poor, or creating a decent society, something larger than "hey look, free shit".
Now I'm not saying people are all that bright, hell half of them have below average; which is why they don't always see when politicians and lobbyists using terms like "fairness" and "values" are lying and stealing from them. But they are trying to vote for the right thing. And this constant war against the integrity of the masses (the "takers", the "47%", the "welfare mentality") is not only disgusting, it is the real cause of harm to your nation.
The problem is that working in space is hideously expensive. So that the cost of engineering out as much mass as possible to allow you to do everything in a single launch is, bizarrely, cheaper than launching a bunch of heavier-but-simpler-&-cheaper parts to assemble in orbit. For example, right now we can't even launch ship and fuel on separate rockets, which seems a pretty basic skill for a space-faring civilisation.
As we do more in orbit, particularly as private companies actually start operating human-space-flight (even if it's just to provide in-orbit services for NASA/DOD/ESA/JAXA/CSA/etc), we should see techniques developed to make operations in space cheaper. At some point we'll reach the cross over where assembly is always cheaper than single-launch. After that, someone will inevitably start building a "space-dock".
It's like reusable launchers. Logically, using a launch vehicle 100 times should be cheaper than using it once and throwing it away; look at aircraft, who would build a single-use plane? But so far we haven't been able to figure out how to make refurbishable craft cheaper than disposable ones.
Why not just choose a crew from the long list of regular volunteers you will have applying for every flight? Including, I suspect, every single currently trained astronaut and astronaut candidate in the world. And a hell of a lot of former ones. I don't know why this "Send criminals" meme keeps being passed around.
[They can still rescue the President if you want.]
SpaceX uses Monomethylhydrazine, which has a freezing point of -50C. So the Nitrogen Tetroxide would freeze first. (-10C). But that said, I don't know what a mono-prop mixture of MMH and N2O4 does to their gestalt properties. Similarly, releasing pressure on a cold, pressurised tank can cause the temp to drop sharply. And they might use a pressurant like Helium, so that's a possible factor too.
But even with all that, it still seems more likely it was just a bad batch of valves than icing. I guess we'll see when they get it home and pull it apart.
I was responding to mill3d's specific claim that he has difficulty focusing on something with only one eye, that he has to force it, strains his opposite eye, and instinctively tries to move his head back to the bring the target into focus. My own experiment showed no such effect. I now wonder if he mistakenly thought the Glass user had to focus on the display an inch in front of his eye.
I did something like that before I wrote my comment. I put my left hand between my eyes like a curtain, held up my right hand close enough that it wasn't visible to my left eye. And just now, a better example; holding up a small notepad page and reading what's written on it. I just don't have the problem you are describing (nor the "readjustment" that Mann is describing.) I focus just as easily as I can with one eye closed.
Obviously, if I put my hand/finger too close to my eye, I have trouble focusing. But again, no different than if I have one eye closed. And even that is only because I'm over 40 and my near-focus is starting to decay with age.
[I just realised something... it sounds like you are also placing your finger extremely close to your eye. Ie, as close as the Glass display in the images. Do you realise that the display has a lens that changes the apparent focal depth to the equivalent of a foot or two in front of you? You don't focus close to your eye, you focus through the display to see what it's projecting.]
Slashdot Mirror
However, there are about 80 million pet cats in the US, and an estimated 50-60 million feral cats. Perfectly evolved hunters, largely immune to fluctuations in food availability, which the passenger pigeon didn't co-evolve with.
Wolves are an counter-example to your overreaction. They have been reintroduced to the US, and reintroducing a top predator is a hell of a lot more risky than reintroducing a pigeon. Broadly, reintroductions just don't cause the problems you claim and either dramatically improve things, or die out again. You are thinking of the problems of introduced foreign pest-species and projecting that onto the vastly safer re-introductions.
(Also, wolves are pigeon predators? WTF?)
I think the label "freeloader" is a major part of the problem - it is only appropriate for talking about economies of scarcity.
The "scarce resource" is the developers. So users who try to monopolise dev-hours are perceived by those devs as freeloading.
This is my biggest complaint at people who dislike Ubuntu and other distros that make Linux "easy."
People don't hate Ubuntu for making Linux "easy", they hate it for making Linux hard. By starting with Debian, which already twists SoP, then adding its own non-standard way of doing things, it actually makes things harder for the Linux ecosystem. Specifically, it "Window-ises" Linux, creates that two-level usage where doing something is either blindly stupidly easy or else buried in obscurity that requires special training. It removes the natural progression of difficulty that got those geeks into Linux in the first place. (And, as you say, without that new generation of explorers, there is no coding community.) Instead, the learning curve is a right angle. Hence the irony-quotes around "easy". It's a pretend easy. It's "easy" by burying the hard stuff, rather than making the hard stuff more natural.
[The solution, IMO, is to treat Ubuntu as being a OS/UI "based on Linux", not as a Linux distro. So it's not something you offer someone to "introduce them to Linux", it's a stand-alone free/free n00bs-friendly Windows replacement.]
More like "If you want people to work in theatre, you need an audience".
If your FOSS project only has a handful of users, it's nice.
If your FOSS project has thousands of users, it's good.
If your FOSS project has millions of users, it's not as good as it used to be, the devs are idiots, and I've been using [abandoned fork] for two years.
FTFY
Methane Lite.
The spectrum you love, with half the calories.
This story is an obvious troll. There was no need to "tip off" the EU,
Even if Google complained to the EU that Microsoft wasn't complying with the browser ballot agreement, how is that a "tip off", let alone "snitching"?
Furthermore when did â500m before "nearly a billion dollars"?
Try "€".
Not quite. Thermal cycling of the top inch or two of regolith means that the footprints are likely to be lost in a century or three. Even 45 years is probably enough to soften the sharp outlines. The flag will be UV-bleached-white or radiation-black. The descent stage and other equipment will be peppered with micro-meteorite holes.
Frankly, this is another reason to preserve the sites. As experiments which provide 6 points of reference to calibrate the fine erosion rate for lunar features.
If there is no life there already,
"If". That's the question. We don't know. And we can't find the answer if we slime up the test subject before we even run the test. It's about trying to avoid contaminating our samples with the very thing we're looking for. (Imagine if you were an oil surveyor looking for signs of oil, but you were randomly leaking oil everywhere you went.)
Once we know for sure that a body is lifeless, then yes, go nuts.
If the only life in the universe is found right here on earth,
"If" is an interesting question. And I'd like to see science be able to take steps towards an answer. Which is why it's stupid to spread Earthly bacteria until we can at least check if the obvious places in the solar system already have their own alien life. Mars, Europa, etc. If they are truly dead, go nuts.
If life does not exist anywhere else in the universe, the universe doesn't care.
It may be a waste of a good opportunity, but even "life" doesn't care. Except us, and maybe the dolphins.
So, as the only species capable of having an opinion, it might be a "crime" against humanity to... well, not do whatever we decide is the humane thing to do. If we decide not to pollute the universe with ourselves, then that decision is life's "natural will". If we decide to spread life far and wide in a hostile cosmos, then that too is the natural will of life.
Cool thing about being the only creatures in existence in existence with morality. We get to decide what is moral.
It's the places that might already have life that we are trying to preserve. So that if they do have alien life, we can detect that life and do science on it.
Demonstrably dead things we don't care about getting life all over them. You can splash as much bacteria as you like on the Moon, no one cares. Asteroids? Go nuts. Life away.
But Mars, Europa, Titan, and comets; we wait until we figure out how to definitively rule out native, alien life.
Gentoo.
Thing is, it was the same Librarian of Congress making the two contradictory decisions. The same person. Why would you reverse your own decision if no one was pressuring you to? Especially at the very next consecutive review. You've solved the issue, you've given your decision, if no one was pressuring you, you wouldn't even consider the issue again. That's what makes it unusual, and suspicious.
I suspect that a lengthy legalistically-complex application was made by the cell-operators' lobby at the newest review, and the LoC basically said "Fuck it, why is this my problem?" and intentionally made the worst decision he could to try to force the issue back onto Congress. But, IMO, he didn't realise (or perhaps doesn't care) that Congress would be perfectly happy (or at least well funded) with the LoC's reversal, because there is no paid unlock-cellphones lobby.
Which is what makes the Whitehouse response to the petition particularly unusual.
Since we're being pedantic: Anyone who uses a mean to refer to the "average" person is generally lying to you (or they have been lied to or they are merely ignorant and you can safely ignore anything they are saying.)
The mean is about finding the average of the total value. It has nothing to do with the objects/people having those values. The median is about the average object/person. So mean is appropriate for total birthrate over time corrected for population size, but not for "average number of children per family" at a given time as a measure of the "average family". But good luck finding anyone who can give you the median number of children per family. (And yet, weirdly, judging by google, it's a standard maths homework problem.)
Hence I was, even when joking, referring to the average person, the median.
Even more pedantically, perfect bell curves for positive value ranges do not match mean/median. A perfect bell curve will only match mean/median when the median is at zero on the x-axis.
Think of a X-axis scale from 0-100, and a perfect curve with a median at 50 (Y-axis is the number of members.) The right side of the bell curve is from 50-100 and has exactly the same number of members as the left side, 0-50. For a perfect curve, the number of members at, say, 75, matches the number at 25. Clearly you are going to have a mean which is well to the right of the median. [If it's not clear, grab a piece of graph paper and draw a small bell-curve (say nine by nine) and actually count the value. Eventually it will "pop", the right side is "heavier" than the left, even though it has the same number of members.]
Now a production curve, where the Y-axis is the number of units of production, and the X-axis is time, you will generally want to know the mean (which is simply area under the curve divided by time. Note: that's the total Y-axis value divided by X-axis. The mean for the population-curve (bell-curve) is the X-axis area under the curve (total value) divided by the Y-axis area under the curve (total number of members). The opposite.)
tl;dr - I'm rubber, you're glue...
They also did the thing with getting (eventual) public access to publicly funded research.
The difference is there's no "pro-cancer" lobby.
There is, however, a large and well-funded anti-handset-unlocking lobby; which is why the LoC reversed their original decision allowing unlocking. So the President coming out in favour of a completely unfunded public group, against the will of the funded business lobby, is actually a much greater gesture than a "Cancer bad, m'kay."
A democracy can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury.
Paraphrased, Elmer T. Perterson, The Daily Oklahoman
Can you point to three examples where a democracy failed because the masses voted themselves largess? For every single example you give, I'll give three examples of a society failing because the aristocracy voted themselves largess from the public treasury.
If you can't point to three clear examples of democracy ending because "the voters discovered they can vote themselves largess", can you please just stop regurgitating this hateful bullshit fucking meme.
Frankly, most voters are vastly more decent and selfless than those at the top. Which is why political arguments about "belt tightening" and "sacrifice" resonate so much with them. And "fairness" and "family" and "American values". Even when you give them free stuff, you have to couch it in terms of caring for the poor, or creating a decent society, something larger than "hey look, free shit".
Now I'm not saying people are all that bright, hell half of them have below average; which is why they don't always see when politicians and lobbyists using terms like "fairness" and "values" are lying and stealing from them. But they are trying to vote for the right thing. And this constant war against the integrity of the masses (the "takers", the "47%", the "welfare mentality") is not only disgusting, it is the real cause of harm to your nation.
The problem is that working in space is hideously expensive. So that the cost of engineering out as much mass as possible to allow you to do everything in a single launch is, bizarrely, cheaper than launching a bunch of heavier-but-simpler-&-cheaper parts to assemble in orbit. For example, right now we can't even launch ship and fuel on separate rockets, which seems a pretty basic skill for a space-faring civilisation.
As we do more in orbit, particularly as private companies actually start operating human-space-flight (even if it's just to provide in-orbit services for NASA/DOD/ESA/JAXA/CSA/etc), we should see techniques developed to make operations in space cheaper. At some point we'll reach the cross over where assembly is always cheaper than single-launch. After that, someone will inevitably start building a "space-dock".
It's like reusable launchers. Logically, using a launch vehicle 100 times should be cheaper than using it once and throwing it away; look at aircraft, who would build a single-use plane? But so far we haven't been able to figure out how to make refurbishable craft cheaper than disposable ones.
To show that our ambition still exceeds our capability, that our "reach exceeds our grasp".
Why not just choose a crew from the long list of regular volunteers you will have applying for every flight? Including, I suspect, every single currently trained astronaut and astronaut candidate in the world. And a hell of a lot of former ones. I don't know why this "Send criminals" meme keeps being passed around.
[They can still rescue the President if you want.]
SpaceX uses Monomethylhydrazine, which has a freezing point of -50C. So the Nitrogen Tetroxide would freeze first. (-10C). But that said, I don't know what a mono-prop mixture of MMH and N2O4 does to their gestalt properties. Similarly, releasing pressure on a cold, pressurised tank can cause the temp to drop sharply. And they might use a pressurant like Helium, so that's a possible factor too.
But even with all that, it still seems more likely it was just a bad batch of valves than icing. I guess we'll see when they get it home and pull it apart.
I was responding to mill3d's specific claim that he has difficulty focusing on something with only one eye, that he has to force it, strains his opposite eye, and instinctively tries to move his head back to the bring the target into focus. My own experiment showed no such effect. I now wonder if he mistakenly thought the Glass user had to focus on the display an inch in front of his eye.
I did something like that before I wrote my comment. I put my left hand between my eyes like a curtain, held up my right hand close enough that it wasn't visible to my left eye. And just now, a better example; holding up a small notepad page and reading what's written on it. I just don't have the problem you are describing (nor the "readjustment" that Mann is describing.) I focus just as easily as I can with one eye closed.
Obviously, if I put my hand/finger too close to my eye, I have trouble focusing. But again, no different than if I have one eye closed. And even that is only because I'm over 40 and my near-focus is starting to decay with age.
[I just realised something... it sounds like you are also placing your finger extremely close to your eye. Ie, as close as the Glass display in the images. Do you realise that the display has a lens that changes the apparent focal depth to the equivalent of a foot or two in front of you? You don't focus close to your eye, you focus through the display to see what it's projecting.]
Dracos use hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide. No cryo.