Most vaccines aren't 100% effective. They reduce the number of people who can get the disease, but don't eliminate the risk. However, if enough of the population is immunised, every person on which the vaccine fails is surrounded by people who are immune.
Likewise, pre-immunised babies may be vulnerable. If almost all adults are immune, they are protected until they can be jabbed. Likewise, when you suffer a prolonged illness that weakens your immune system, you are more vulnerable. An immunised society protects you until you are healed.
And if we are really good, we can completely eliminate the disease from our entire population, so we can drop the vaccines (which have a cost). As we did with small-pox, and polio in most of the world.
however it remains to be seen whether they'll develop immunity.
Inevitable. Not being 100% universal even in dry areas, and nearly worthless in wet areas like sth Victoria, means that there will always be population reserves, and any bit of resistance is a huge selective advantage. Plus we've virtually stopped follow-up measures, just like we did in the '50s after Myxie.
Given that rabbits mate for life, now would be a good time to mass-release sterile vaccinated rabbits, in a nation-wide extinction program.
<flat affect>Apparently they did comparative studies that showed banners with JW received much higher click-throughs and donations than ones with other people.</flat affect>
It's not about being "nasty". It's the tone that is created when the speaker doesn't care about their tone and doesn't realise that anyone else cares, and/or is being teenage-nerd enthusiastic about their own opinion. People who aren't used to it feel like they're being attacked.
There are also small changes that would help even users who know the mark-up, not just teh n00bs. Being able to hide or minimise certain elements in the edit-box (or pseudo-render them, replacing a bunch of <ref>{{cites... with just their number [7]), but making those elements uneditable, would make it easier to see and edit the normal text within cumbersome sections. (And solve the GP's problem.)
That sort of thing can be built upon, to lower the learning curve for n00bs, simplify things for the rest of us (and to make it easier to build wysiwyg functions into the editor, because you're only hiding/minimising/rendering elements that are standardised and understood, the rest stays as raw mark-up.)
(Another example, Live Preview. A little window that displays the rendered form of just the text visible in the edit box, scrolling and updating as you move through and edit the edit-box text. So you can see what you're doing, as you do it. Next version lets you scroll in the Live Preview window directly, so you can find the part you want in the edit-box. Next version lets you edit plain-text directly in the Live Preview window, then adding simple wysiwyg functions like italics, bold, links, headers...)
If editors were let loose with a wysiwyg editor then Wikipedia entries would be a chaos of inconsistent layout and display and effectively unreadable, in very short order.
Yeah, I had that thought. The solution is to "version" the edits from the wysiwyg users. They already created a system for hiding new changes from the viewable page until they is verified by a higher ranked editor. Just turn that on for the wysiwyg editor.
"Thank you for contributing to Wikipedia. Your edit is awaiting moderation. Do you want to be notified when this edit is approved? [Y/N]"
The alternative is to simply exclude them. Given the choice between "careful introduction" and "snobbish exclusion", I'd prefer the former.
That scenario may be likely, but I seriously doubt it would occur in only one year
Viewer numbers dropped by Apollo 12. By Apollo 13, most networks didn't cover the live crosses after launch (until, you know...). By Apollo 17, they didn't cover any, it was a minor story on the nightly news. And that was with three channels, no cable, no internet. Today, we don't even watch the war.
To fund a continuing Mars mission, it would have to rate as well as the Olympics, month after month, year after year. And the more you try to monetise it, the more you drive people away.
More likely, you'd have to bring in frozen CO2 from asteroids, comets, and gas giants, which is a huge undertaking.
True. And in which case, why not biologically process it in-situ before exporting it to Mars. Ie, build a series of multi-100km wide bubble-habitat in free space, for the algae/lichen/plants to efficiently turn CO2 into O2, right next to where you're extracting the CO2. Unlike on Mars, you can better regulate pressure and temperature to optimise the process.
But, as I've said elsewhere, after you've got all that lovely O2... what's Mars for?
You don't put a major hub in a place that's hard to get to, unless there's some other overwhelming advantage. We build ports in deep water bays because it's easier to get large ships in close to shore, we build distribution centres near wharfs to be close to the transport hub. We build trading posts at cross-roads. We build agricultural centres near rivers, or at cross-roads. We likewise build power-plants near available water. We build manufacturing hubs near available power and transport.
Mars has no natural advantages, other than a vague sense of it being "a planet". But a gravity well is a crappy place to build anything unless you already live there. It's like building a transport hub at the top of a mountain, just because the mountain is sort of vaguely "central".
If you are able to mine the asteroid belt, why do you need Mars? Put your facilities where the resources are, or closer to your markets. (As we do on Earth.)
If you need acceleration (gravity), you can spin just the processing equipment for centripetal acceleration. Certainly for less than the cost of trying to land the raw material on Mars, process it, then relaunch it off again to reach the market. That 1/3 gravity affects launches too, remember. You virtually need the same launch infrastructure as you have on Earth (not quite, in energy it's closer to sub-orbital flight, but it's up there.)
Operating in space gives you the flexibility to optimise the acceleration for different processes. It's unlikely that Mars' 1/3 g will be just exactly enough. More likely, you're talking processes that need just a little bit. Even 1/100th of a g is enough for fluid settling.
Mars is closer to the asteroid belt
Ceres is in it.
Lots of water-ice. Little gravity, so it's easy to approach, land, launch. Lowish density, making it easy to dig down for shelter (as well as mining), protecting your miners/settlers from radiation. You can easily tunnel out rings several km across, to place centrifugally spun bases inside Ceres. (Earth-normal gravity and protection from radiation.)
Mars is a terrible planet. Too much and not enough, at the same time.
With two colonies on mars, won't that then become a ratings war as each tries to be more interesting to viewers and not be canceled[...]? How far would colonists be expected to go in order to maintain interest and viewership?
The IAU only meets every three years. The 28th meeting was 2009, the 29th will be in August this year. The fourth moon of Pluto was only discovered last year.
You can suggest Erebus for the 5th moon, to the Committee on Small Body Nomenclature. (Although it may be too late to have it considered for the 29th meeting, presumably they already have a name chosen for the 4th moon.)
You should also suggest your idea about having a prepared list of names for obvious future discoveries. Such as inevitable future moons of Pluto and the gas giants. Future TNO's above a certain size. Etc. It's a good idea. Try the CSBN's current secretary, Gareth Williams. gwilliams (at) cfa.harvard.edu or via the Minor Planet Centre (mpc (at) cfa.harvard.edu).
Oh yea, good luck finding a Kuiper belt object. At least we know the orbit of Pluto, we don't even know how to find a Kuiper belt object, let alone navigate to one.
"I type 'of' or 'if' each in place of the other about a dozen times a day. It makes me nuts."
Agreed, this is why I don't really like swype. (I like the idea, and it seems much faster until I hit three or four of those words in a row... of/if, out/it/or, to/top, you/toy...)
Hmmm, we're not going to replace qwerty, but I wonder if you could simply resize the keys in the qwerty layout, enlarge the areas of predictive-text's greatest confusion (such as TYUIOP), and reduce the size of groups it only needs a approximate hit (DFG/CVB)?
Experiments have shown that steering with your dominant hand is safer, reducing accidents. Since most people are right handed, the proper English RHD makes for safer drivers than the hateful French LHD that you use.
No. Sholes arranged the keys so the arms wouldn't jam in order to allow typists to type faster. Typewriter salesmen would show this feature off for managers by having a speed contest with groups of typists on rival brands with different layouts, and QWERTY would always win. Even if you could physically hit the keys faster on another layout, you'd have to slow down to keep it from jamming. It's why QWERTY became popular, then standard, it was faster. Faster layouts only became possible once the arm mechanism improved to eliminate jamming, but by then the QWERTY patent had ended and QWERTY was already standard. [No company was going to shut down their entire typing pool to wait six months for them to retrain on Dvorak, on the chance that maybe it was 10% faster.]
I wasn't making fun of your efforts. (On the contrary, I've seen people learn Dvorak, see the same 10% gain, and use that to insist on Dvorak from then on, damning to hell anyone who won't spend a year or two relearning to type. Your "meh" is wisdom itself.) Just saw the contrast between your experience and Blanc's and realised that the fine quality of the tool is probably more important than the gross design of the tool. Thus all our nerd-obsessing over keyboard layouts matters less than keyboard quality.
[Noting for irony that I still use the $40 Microsoft-branded dome-type qwerty that came with my 8 year old computer.]
Slashdot Mirror
Oh it's a toy! Never mind.
Seriously? They didn't think to run that past a single english speaker? Or South Park fan?
They work for the people who are vaccinated.
Most vaccines aren't 100% effective. They reduce the number of people who can get the disease, but don't eliminate the risk. However, if enough of the population is immunised, every person on which the vaccine fails is surrounded by people who are immune.
Likewise, pre-immunised babies may be vulnerable. If almost all adults are immune, they are protected until they can be jabbed. Likewise, when you suffer a prolonged illness that weakens your immune system, you are more vulnerable. An immunised society protects you until you are healed.
And if we are really good, we can completely eliminate the disease from our entire population, so we can drop the vaccines (which have a cost). As we did with small-pox, and polio in most of the world.
however it remains to be seen whether they'll develop immunity.
Inevitable. Not being 100% universal even in dry areas, and nearly worthless in wet areas like sth Victoria, means that there will always be population reserves, and any bit of resistance is a huge selective advantage. Plus we've virtually stopped follow-up measures, just like we did in the '50s after Myxie.
Given that rabbits mate for life, now would be a good time to mass-release sterile vaccinated rabbits, in a nation-wide extinction program.
Won't happen. No money, no interest.
<small voice>I was trying to be funny.</small voice>
<flat affect>Apparently they did comparative studies that showed banners with JW received much higher click-throughs and donations than ones with other people.</flat affect>
It's not about being "nasty". It's the tone that is created when the speaker doesn't care about their tone and doesn't realise that anyone else cares, and/or is being teenage-nerd enthusiastic about their own opinion. People who aren't used to it feel like they're being attacked.
You know, slashdot, if modding involved a text-box into which you had to type markup, we wouldn't keep making this mistake.
<user mod="off-topic" increment-1>
There are also small changes that would help even users who know the mark-up, not just teh n00bs. Being able to hide or minimise certain elements in the edit-box (or pseudo-render them, replacing a bunch of <ref>{{cites... with just their number [7]), but making those elements uneditable, would make it easier to see and edit the normal text within cumbersome sections. (And solve the GP's problem.)
That sort of thing can be built upon, to lower the learning curve for n00bs, simplify things for the rest of us (and to make it easier to build wysiwyg functions into the editor, because you're only hiding/minimising/rendering elements that are standardised and understood, the rest stays as raw mark-up.)
(Another example, Live Preview. A little window that displays the rendered form of just the text visible in the edit box, scrolling and updating as you move through and edit the edit-box text. So you can see what you're doing, as you do it. Next version lets you scroll in the Live Preview window directly, so you can find the part you want in the edit-box. Next version lets you edit plain-text directly in the Live Preview window, then adding simple wysiwyg functions like italics, bold, links, headers...)
If editors were let loose with a wysiwyg editor then Wikipedia entries would be a chaos of inconsistent layout and display and effectively unreadable, in very short order.
Yeah, I had that thought. The solution is to "version" the edits from the wysiwyg users. They already created a system for hiding new changes from the viewable page until they is verified by a higher ranked editor. Just turn that on for the wysiwyg editor.
"Thank you for contributing to Wikipedia. Your edit is awaiting moderation.
Do you want to be notified when this edit is approved? [Y/N]"
The alternative is to simply exclude them. Given the choice between "careful introduction" and "snobbish exclusion", I'd prefer the former.
That scenario may be likely, but I seriously doubt it would occur in only one year
Viewer numbers dropped by Apollo 12. By Apollo 13, most networks didn't cover the live crosses after launch (until, you know...). By Apollo 17, they didn't cover any, it was a minor story on the nightly news. And that was with three channels, no cable, no internet. Today, we don't even watch the war.
To fund a continuing Mars mission, it would have to rate as well as the Olympics, month after month, year after year. And the more you try to monetise it, the more you drive people away.
But who will open their jars? Who!
More likely, you'd have to bring in frozen CO2 from asteroids, comets, and gas giants, which is a huge undertaking.
True. And in which case, why not biologically process it in-situ before exporting it to Mars. Ie, build a series of multi-100km wide bubble-habitat in free space, for the algae/lichen/plants to efficiently turn CO2 into O2, right next to where you're extracting the CO2. Unlike on Mars, you can better regulate pressure and temperature to optimise the process.
But, as I've said elsewhere, after you've got all that lovely O2... what's Mars for?
You don't put a major hub in a place that's hard to get to, unless there's some other overwhelming advantage. We build ports in deep water bays because it's easier to get large ships in close to shore, we build distribution centres near wharfs to be close to the transport hub. We build trading posts at cross-roads. We build agricultural centres near rivers, or at cross-roads. We likewise build power-plants near available water. We build manufacturing hubs near available power and transport.
Mars has no natural advantages, other than a vague sense of it being "a planet". But a gravity well is a crappy place to build anything unless you already live there. It's like building a transport hub at the top of a mountain, just because the mountain is sort of vaguely "central".
If you are able to mine the asteroid belt, why do you need Mars? Put your facilities where the resources are, or closer to your markets. (As we do on Earth.)
If you need acceleration (gravity), you can spin just the processing equipment for centripetal acceleration. Certainly for less than the cost of trying to land the raw material on Mars, process it, then relaunch it off again to reach the market. That 1/3 gravity affects launches too, remember. You virtually need the same launch infrastructure as you have on Earth (not quite, in energy it's closer to sub-orbital flight, but it's up there.)
Operating in space gives you the flexibility to optimise the acceleration for different processes. It's unlikely that Mars' 1/3 g will be just exactly enough. More likely, you're talking processes that need just a little bit. Even 1/100th of a g is enough for fluid settling.
Mars is closer to the asteroid belt
Ceres is in it.
Lots of water-ice. Little gravity, so it's easy to approach, land, launch. Lowish density, making it easy to dig down for shelter (as well as mining), protecting your miners/settlers from radiation. You can easily tunnel out rings several km across, to place centrifugally spun bases inside Ceres. (Earth-normal gravity and protection from radiation.)
Mars is a terrible planet. Too much and not enough, at the same time.
With two colonies on mars, won't that then become a ratings war as each tries to be more interesting to viewers and not be canceled[...]? How far would colonists be expected to go in order to maintain interest and viewership?
Damn, now I do want to watch that show.
At which point, what is Mars for?
he could always send a terse email demanding a release of source to... um.
But every time the programmer has done that, we went and created a new religion... hey that is like Open Source!
The IAU only meets every three years. The 28th meeting was 2009, the 29th will be in August this year. The fourth moon of Pluto was only discovered last year.
You can suggest Erebus for the 5th moon, to the Committee on Small Body Nomenclature. (Although it may be too late to have it considered for the 29th meeting, presumably they already have a name chosen for the 4th moon.)
You should also suggest your idea about having a prepared list of names for obvious future discoveries. Such as inevitable future moons of Pluto and the gas giants. Future TNO's above a certain size. Etc. It's a good idea. Try the CSBN's current secretary, Gareth Williams. gwilliams (at) cfa.harvard.edu or via the Minor Planet Centre (mpc (at) cfa.harvard.edu).
Oh yea, good luck finding a Kuiper belt object. At least we know the orbit of Pluto, we don't even know how to find a Kuiper belt object, let alone navigate to one.
Do try to keep up.
List of trans-Neptunian objects
No, it's the opposite of what you said:
"QWERTY was introduced to slow them down."
Sholes was not trying to slow typists down to the speed of the mechanism, he spread the mechanism out so it can keep up with the speed of the typist.
"I type 'of' or 'if' each in place of the other about a dozen times a day. It makes me nuts."
Agreed, this is why I don't really like swype. (I like the idea, and it seems much faster until I hit three or four of those words in a row... of/if, out/it/or, to/top, you/toy...)
Hmmm, we're not going to replace qwerty, but I wonder if you could simply resize the keys in the qwerty layout, enlarge the areas of predictive-text's greatest confusion (such as TYUIOP), and reduce the size of groups it only needs a approximate hit (DFG/CVB)?
Experiments have shown that steering with your dominant hand is safer, reducing accidents. Since most people are right handed, the proper English RHD makes for safer drivers than the hateful French LHD that you use.
No. Sholes arranged the keys so the arms wouldn't jam in order to allow typists to type faster. Typewriter salesmen would show this feature off for managers by having a speed contest with groups of typists on rival brands with different layouts, and QWERTY would always win. Even if you could physically hit the keys faster on another layout, you'd have to slow down to keep it from jamming. It's why QWERTY became popular, then standard, it was faster. Faster layouts only became possible once the arm mechanism improved to eliminate jamming, but by then the QWERTY patent had ended and QWERTY was already standard. [No company was going to shut down their entire typing pool to wait six months for them to retrain on Dvorak, on the chance that maybe it was 10% faster.]
http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/whyqwert.html
I wasn't making fun of your efforts. (On the contrary, I've seen people learn Dvorak, see the same 10% gain, and use that to insist on Dvorak from then on, damning to hell anyone who won't spend a year or two relearning to type. Your "meh" is wisdom itself.) Just saw the contrast between your experience and Blanc's and realised that the fine quality of the tool is probably more important than the gross design of the tool. Thus all our nerd-obsessing over keyboard layouts matters less than keyboard quality.
[Noting for irony that I still use the $40 Microsoft-branded dome-type qwerty that came with my 8 year old computer.]