That assumes you're not busy clearing Amazon rain forest, turning US farmland into housing projects and parking lots, etc.
The same mentality that doesn't believe global warming is real and anthropogenic is likely to believe that anthropogenic influences on global O2/CO2/H2O are also negligible.
How much oxygen do we have, and how does that compare to the supposed quantity of fossil fuels?
The Earth originally had a reducing atmosphere, and the fact that we now have an oxidizing atmosphere is because it has been "bioformed". Biological activity yanked the CO2 and other stuff out of the atmosphere, locked it away in some other form, and released O2, leaving us with the combination of nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, and other traces that we consider - pleasant and essential.
By burning fossil fuels we're essentially reversing that process. It's worth noting that those biological processes are still ongoing and to some extent auto-compensating. But one could make the case that by going after every last scrap of fossil fuel we would at the same time be going after every last scrap of O2 as well.
It's a rather simplistic argument, I'll agree. But we make far too many policies based on unrecognized externalities and the assumption of an abundant and inexhaustible biosphere. Most likely "using up all of the O2 with fossil fuels" is absurd, but perhaps "doing something to measurably reduce worldwide O2" isn't, and I would suspect that high-altitude nations would be as upset by this as sea-level nations are by current global warming issues.
I don't know if this was meant as snark or not, but that's one of the very real possibilities.
I once heard that you couldn't have life like us until you were around a third-generation star like ours, because the environment would be to metal-poor. Wait long enough for our sun, then wait long enough for planets, the wait a while for life, and here we are.
According to that assertion, we're reasonably early on the scene, given what we know about stellar evolution. But even "reasonably early" may be a highly variable thing, leaving lots of room for slop. Maybe a few of them would even be uploads of Ray Kurzweil.
Give us a thousand years and we could easily have robot probes scouring the galaxy, building a few more at each suitable spot. They could cover the galaxy in a few million years.
A few million years sounds like a lot to us, but against a galactic timescale it's a drop in the bucket. The same applies to someone a few million years ahead of us. Compared to stellar evolution, planetary formation, and evolution it's a drop in the bucket.
1 - Curiosity - Maybe they can predict us, but what are untested predictions worth. Think Doc Smith's Arisians and their "Visualization of the Cosmic All." They still needed Samms' lens on-site to test their prediction. 2 - Charity - Arguably we could certainly use some assistance. 3 - Boredom - When you've solved that many problems, and when you've run out of "Gilligan's Isolated Stellar Cluster" reruns, you need something to do.
Really, we have no idea how rare the Earth is - or isn't, and that would affect the likelihood of being investigated by a more advanced type of life. We've been finding planets in the Goldilocks belt, and some of those are nearly Earth-sized. But at the same time we're learning more about how critical Jupiter and the Moon are to our development, so OUR requirements were actually quite complex, not that that needs to be universal.
But the rarer the circumstances for intelligent life to develop, the more likely it gets that we will be investigated. That assumes that that puts us in the bucket of "interesting things", and that that bucket is smaller than it would be if the galaxy were teeming with life.
I do have to agree with the article's assertion and reasons that there won't be an invasion force. If there were to be any hostile actions by aliens, it would almost have to be xenophobic fear - get us before we get the technology to get them. If that were the case, we'd never see an invasion force - comets and asteroids are much simpler, easier, cheaper, less risky, and at least as effective.
If you were a real person instead of AC, I would be tempted to consider that you have a point about the debt. I will certainly concede that the portion of taxes used to service the debt is taken out of the economy.
But even as I say that I'd ask what you think of my assertion that corporate matterss-stuffing of profits removes money from the economy, too.
Have fun with your front-row seat watching the next asteroid impact on Earth. You're right in that there is no short or medium term justification for manned space exploration. In the long term, simply having some of our eggs in a second basket is sufficient justification.
Another long-term justification for a space program is protecting the one basket of eggs we've got now better. If that can be done with robots, fine. If it requires men, let's do it.
Thank you for recognizing that central planning can exist at the "corporate level" as well as the "government level". Too many so-called free-market capitalists only recognize the latter and fail to see the former.
IMHO the best feature of the free market is that it harnesses the sheer chaos of many players working in an un-coordinated fashion. A better (not necessarily the best, at least not right away) solution is likely to emerge from somewhere in that mess.
I'll see your heresy and raise you one... Profit is not a feature of free-market capitalistic economy, it's a necessary evil.
If you look at a market economy as transferring goods from producers to consumers efficiently, profit is an inefficiency. It's a necessary inefficiency, because it gives people the incentive to facilitate that transfer, (and to produce, for that matter) but it's still an inefficiency.
Today's "record corporate profits" are really a danger sign. One aspect of the free market is that whenever there are high profits, there should ALWAYS be an opportunity for another player to enter the market, willing to accept lower profits, improving the flow of goods from producer to consumer. That we have sustained high profits indicates that there are barriers to entry that are not being overcome. Sometimes the barriers are "natural", such as the cost of a semiconductor fabricator, and sometimes they're not, such as market effects or IP law.
Even more heretical...
People talk about government spending being a sap on the economy, but when you look at it, the government is spending all of that money, so it's really almost all going back into the economy - it's not being taken away. When corporate profits are used to invest in growth, production, etc, that is also not removing money from the economy. But today's record corporate profits aren't being reinvested, they're being stuffed in the mattresses - frequently offshore. In that respect, corporate profits are worse for the economy than taxes, because they really are removing money from the economy. (not just spending the money on something the taxee doesn't like)
Funny thing is, the tech support lady didn't even mention going direct to my Kobo. She basically did the "reboot Windows method of tech support," then gave up. I never set up my Kobo on my wireless, largely out of laziness because of my 63-character (max length, as far as I could tell) pseudo-random wireless password. If I can cut/paste, fine - but I've never bothered to type it.
I've found the ADE 1.7.2 version, and if I can download it, I'll at least have a permanent copy.
I see you're running 1.7.2 - the one WineHQ rates as "gold". The current 2.0 is rated as "garbage". I've found and downloaded 1.7.2 from Tucows, but I think I'll try it on my public library before trying to buy another book from Kobo - and even then I'll buy cheapy first.
A week or two back, after seeing the Iain Banks announcement on Slashdot, I decided it was time to buy "The Hydrogen Sonata" and went to the Kobo store to get it. I don't have Windows or Mac in the house, and use Calibre to talk to my Kobo.
I knew it would have DRM, but figured that Linux didn't have to understand it, as long as the Kobo could. But the Kobo store wouldn't even permit me to download any sort of file at all - it would ONLY work through an Adobe Digital Editions plug-in. Looking on WineHQ the current version of A.D.E. doesn't run on WINE.
Happily Kobo refunded my money, though it took a little doing. I'd rather they sell me a file that can be read on my Kobo, even if not on Linux. It would have seemed to me that the Kobo would generally appeal to the same type of people who prefer the politics of Linux - but they've cut me out of their store.
In the discussions I've seen, there are Wayland fanbois and there are Wayland developers, and there's a big difference between the two camps.
The Wayland fanbois disparage network transparency and consider those who need it to be dinosaurs.
The Wayland developers, on the other hand, seem to overlap considerably with X11 developers, and well understand the need for network transparency. Apparently they're too busy working to be very vocal, so most impressions of Wayland are being put out there by the fanbois.
My impression is that a large part of X11 is really deprecated, left there because it's legacy, might be used, and can't go away. Another way of looking at Wayland is to first strip X11 down to the "real and recent use model," (ie qt/gtk toolkits, etc) look at what you've got left and make some optimizations, strip the obviously defunct parts out of the protocol, make some more optimizations, etc. X11 today isn't even really what X11 was a decade or more ago, it just has backward support for the old X11.
There is a company doing archival documentation work, and their solution is to etch small characters onto a metallic wafer. To read, you need a microscope - and know how to read the language it was written in.
But could an F-1 even lift its own weight? After all the venerable D was at least a D-13, and even the C series was typically a C-6. At that scaling I would have expected the F to be something like an F-50.
Perhaps the solution is that we're using a "new engine scale", kind of like ST:TNG moved to the new Warp scale instead of the old W**3 of ST:TOS. And of course since it's a first-stage booster, it would be an F-1-0. (I wonder what the ejection charge delay would be for a single/upper-stage version.)
Your definition of "defeat" may be erroneous in your referenced context. Keep in mind that in the "corporate era" the goal of corporations becomes that which has so far been assigned to nation-states and governments - to perpetuate. (Profit being secondary to perpetuation.) From the perpetuation point of view, "new fundamental science" is really a big hassle, because it opens to door to disruptive technologies, and disruptive technologies tend to unseat comfortable incumbent corporations.
That padding was something like an arms race. Basically the players hit each other to some sort of tolerable pain level. Add better padding, to hopefully reduce injuries, and as a side-effect that reduces the pain from a given hit force. Since the pain was reduced, it's obviously a call to increase the hit force.
In essence, the improved padding simply increased the violence level, by making the increased violence physically tolerable. Nanofoam padding for football simply ups the ante. The flip side of this is when coverage is uneven, and the new higher levels of hit force are accidentally applied to less-covered body parts.
This is all fine humor and all. But I remember reading a science fiction story about a person who resembled a well-known movie star. That person was sent a "cease and desist", in essence told to get plastic surgery to quit looking the way he was born to. That's the first paragraph or two, the meat of the story was his response. Since I read the story decades ago, I've forgotten the rest, and only remembered the premise.
So my, my this here Anakin guy May be Vader some day later Now he's just a small fry He left his toys, kissed his mommy goodbye Saying soon I'm gonna be a Jedi Soon I'm gonna be a Jedi
Obviously not enough Slashdotters have had children...
This is the song that never ends, It just goes on and on my friend. Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was, And they'll continue singing it forever just because... (repeat)
It might not be appropriate to consider aerogels "solid" in the "3D solid" sense. It might be better to consider aerogels to be a real and physical example of a "factal solid," and I wouldn't care to attempt to assign the fractional dimensionality to such a thing. But aerogels seem to have the essential characteristics of the "space-filling" shapes described in fractal literature.
Slashdot Mirror
That assumes you're not busy clearing Amazon rain forest, turning US farmland into housing projects and parking lots, etc.
The same mentality that doesn't believe global warming is real and anthropogenic is likely to believe that anthropogenic influences on global O2/CO2/H2O are also negligible.
I thought of that too, and was hoping the boy would feed his girlfriend to the atom at the end. Would it have gobbled her up like a black hole?
I agree. I thought about bringing that up, but felt it would dilute my main point.
How much oxygen do we have, and how does that compare to the supposed quantity of fossil fuels?
The Earth originally had a reducing atmosphere, and the fact that we now have an oxidizing atmosphere is because it has been "bioformed". Biological activity yanked the CO2 and other stuff out of the atmosphere, locked it away in some other form, and released O2, leaving us with the combination of nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, and other traces that we consider - pleasant and essential.
By burning fossil fuels we're essentially reversing that process. It's worth noting that those biological processes are still ongoing and to some extent auto-compensating. But one could make the case that by going after every last scrap of fossil fuel we would at the same time be going after every last scrap of O2 as well.
It's a rather simplistic argument, I'll agree. But we make far too many policies based on unrecognized externalities and the assumption of an abundant and inexhaustible biosphere. Most likely "using up all of the O2 with fossil fuels" is absurd, but perhaps "doing something to measurably reduce worldwide O2" isn't, and I would suspect that high-altitude nations would be as upset by this as sea-level nations are by current global warming issues.
I don't know if this was meant as snark or not, but that's one of the very real possibilities.
I once heard that you couldn't have life like us until you were around a third-generation star like ours, because the environment would be to metal-poor. Wait long enough for our sun, then wait long enough for planets, the wait a while for life, and here we are.
According to that assertion, we're reasonably early on the scene, given what we know about stellar evolution. But even "reasonably early" may be a highly variable thing, leaving lots of room for slop. Maybe a few of them would even be uploads of Ray Kurzweil.
Give us a thousand years and we could easily have robot probes scouring the galaxy, building a few more at each suitable spot. They could cover the galaxy in a few million years.
A few million years sounds like a lot to us, but against a galactic timescale it's a drop in the bucket. The same applies to someone a few million years ahead of us. Compared to stellar evolution, planetary formation, and evolution it's a drop in the bucket.
1 - Curiosity - Maybe they can predict us, but what are untested predictions worth. Think Doc Smith's Arisians and their "Visualization of the Cosmic All." They still needed Samms' lens on-site to test their prediction.
2 - Charity - Arguably we could certainly use some assistance.
3 - Boredom - When you've solved that many problems, and when you've run out of "Gilligan's Isolated Stellar Cluster" reruns, you need something to do.
Really, we have no idea how rare the Earth is - or isn't, and that would affect the likelihood of being investigated by a more advanced type of life. We've been finding planets in the Goldilocks belt, and some of those are nearly Earth-sized. But at the same time we're learning more about how critical Jupiter and the Moon are to our development, so OUR requirements were actually quite complex, not that that needs to be universal.
But the rarer the circumstances for intelligent life to develop, the more likely it gets that we will be investigated. That assumes that that puts us in the bucket of "interesting things", and that that bucket is smaller than it would be if the galaxy were teeming with life.
I do have to agree with the article's assertion and reasons that there won't be an invasion force. If there were to be any hostile actions by aliens, it would almost have to be xenophobic fear - get us before we get the technology to get them. If that were the case, we'd never see an invasion force - comets and asteroids are much simpler, easier, cheaper, less risky, and at least as effective.
If you were a real person instead of AC, I would be tempted to consider that you have a point about the debt. I will certainly concede that the portion of taxes used to service the debt is taken out of the economy.
But even as I say that I'd ask what you think of my assertion that corporate matterss-stuffing of profits removes money from the economy, too.
Have fun with your front-row seat watching the next asteroid impact on Earth. You're right in that there is no short or medium term justification for manned space exploration. In the long term, simply having some of our eggs in a second basket is sufficient justification.
Another long-term justification for a space program is protecting the one basket of eggs we've got now better. If that can be done with robots, fine. If it requires men, let's do it.
Thank you for recognizing that central planning can exist at the "corporate level" as well as the "government level". Too many so-called free-market capitalists only recognize the latter and fail to see the former.
IMHO the best feature of the free market is that it harnesses the sheer chaos of many players working in an un-coordinated fashion. A better (not necessarily the best, at least not right away) solution is likely to emerge from somewhere in that mess.
I'll see your heresy and raise you one... Profit is not a feature of free-market capitalistic economy, it's a necessary evil.
If you look at a market economy as transferring goods from producers to consumers efficiently, profit is an inefficiency. It's a necessary inefficiency, because it gives people the incentive to facilitate that transfer, (and to produce, for that matter) but it's still an inefficiency.
Today's "record corporate profits" are really a danger sign. One aspect of the free market is that whenever there are high profits, there should ALWAYS be an opportunity for another player to enter the market, willing to accept lower profits, improving the flow of goods from producer to consumer. That we have sustained high profits indicates that there are barriers to entry that are not being overcome. Sometimes the barriers are "natural", such as the cost of a semiconductor fabricator, and sometimes they're not, such as market effects or IP law.
Even more heretical...
People talk about government spending being a sap on the economy, but when you look at it, the government is spending all of that money, so it's really almost all going back into the economy - it's not being taken away. When corporate profits are used to invest in growth, production, etc, that is also not removing money from the economy. But today's record corporate profits aren't being reinvested, they're being stuffed in the mattresses - frequently offshore. In that respect, corporate profits are worse for the economy than taxes, because they really are removing money from the economy. (not just spending the money on something the taxee doesn't like)
A.C. is right, but for the snide /. value, as a matter of fact I run Gentoo Linux, and I ALWAYS compile my WINE from source.
Funny thing is, the tech support lady didn't even mention going direct to my Kobo. She basically did the "reboot Windows method of tech support," then gave up. I never set up my Kobo on my wireless, largely out of laziness because of my 63-character (max length, as far as I could tell) pseudo-random wireless password. If I can cut/paste, fine - but I've never bothered to type it.
I've found the ADE 1.7.2 version, and if I can download it, I'll at least have a permanent copy.
I see you're running 1.7.2 - the one WineHQ rates as "gold". The current 2.0 is rated as "garbage". I've found and downloaded 1.7.2 from Tucows, but I think I'll try it on my public library before trying to buy another book from Kobo - and even then I'll buy cheapy first.
Forget the android app, how about Linux access?
A week or two back, after seeing the Iain Banks announcement on Slashdot, I decided it was time to buy "The Hydrogen Sonata" and went to the Kobo store to get it. I don't have Windows or Mac in the house, and use Calibre to talk to my Kobo.
I knew it would have DRM, but figured that Linux didn't have to understand it, as long as the Kobo could. But the Kobo store wouldn't even permit me to download any sort of file at all - it would ONLY work through an Adobe Digital Editions plug-in. Looking on WineHQ the current version of A.D.E. doesn't run on WINE.
Happily Kobo refunded my money, though it took a little doing. I'd rather they sell me a file that can be read on my Kobo, even if not on Linux. It would have seemed to me that the Kobo would generally appeal to the same type of people who prefer the politics of Linux - but they've cut me out of their store.
In the discussions I've seen, there are Wayland fanbois and there are Wayland developers, and there's a big difference between the two camps.
The Wayland fanbois disparage network transparency and consider those who need it to be dinosaurs.
The Wayland developers, on the other hand, seem to overlap considerably with X11 developers, and well understand the need for network transparency. Apparently they're too busy working to be very vocal, so most impressions of Wayland are being put out there by the fanbois.
My impression is that a large part of X11 is really deprecated, left there because it's legacy, might be used, and can't go away. Another way of looking at Wayland is to first strip X11 down to the "real and recent use model," (ie qt/gtk toolkits, etc) look at what you've got left and make some optimizations, strip the obviously defunct parts out of the protocol, make some more optimizations, etc. X11 today isn't even really what X11 was a decade or more ago, it just has backward support for the old X11.
There is a company doing archival documentation work, and their solution is to etch small characters onto a metallic wafer. To read, you need a microscope - and know how to read the language it was written in.
But could an F-1 even lift its own weight? After all the venerable D was at least a D-13, and even the C series was typically a C-6. At that scaling I would have expected the F to be something like an F-50.
Perhaps the solution is that we're using a "new engine scale", kind of like ST:TNG moved to the new Warp scale instead of the old W**3 of ST:TOS. And of course since it's a first-stage booster, it would be an F-1-0. (I wonder what the ejection charge delay would be for a single/upper-stage version.)
Your definition of "defeat" may be erroneous in your referenced context. Keep in mind that in the "corporate era" the goal of corporations becomes that which has so far been assigned to nation-states and governments - to perpetuate. (Profit being secondary to perpetuation.) From the perpetuation point of view, "new fundamental science" is really a big hassle, because it opens to door to disruptive technologies, and disruptive technologies tend to unseat comfortable incumbent corporations.
That padding was something like an arms race. Basically the players hit each other to some sort of tolerable pain level. Add better padding, to hopefully reduce injuries, and as a side-effect that reduces the pain from a given hit force. Since the pain was reduced, it's obviously a call to increase the hit force.
In essence, the improved padding simply increased the violence level, by making the increased violence physically tolerable. Nanofoam padding for football simply ups the ante. The flip side of this is when coverage is uneven, and the new higher levels of hit force are accidentally applied to less-covered body parts.
This is all fine humor and all. But I remember reading a science fiction story about a person who resembled a well-known movie star. That person was sent a "cease and desist", in essence told to get plastic surgery to quit looking the way he was born to. That's the first paragraph or two, the meat of the story was his response. Since I read the story decades ago, I've forgotten the rest, and only remembered the premise.
Let me get this straight.... If this patent is upheld, it will become illegal to pass along BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes to offspring.
We've found it - the cure to cancer!
Gravest of apologies needed here. I forgot to credit Weird Al Yankovic, for "The Saga Begins"...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEcjgJSqSRU
There was another round of direct-to-disk back in the 70's, and who knows how many others, before and after that.
I bought a Sheffield disk of Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" back in the mid 70's, and there were other disks in their lineup. Here is someone else's on ebay now - http://www.ebay.com/itm/Prokofiev-Romeo-Juliet-Excerpts-LP-Sheffield-Lab-Direct-Disc-Leinsdorf-LAPO-/380457368606
So my, my this here Anakin guy
May be Vader some day later
Now he's just a small fry
He left his toys, kissed his mommy goodbye
Saying soon I'm gonna be a Jedi
Soon I'm gonna be a Jedi
Obviously not enough Slashdotters have had children...
This is the song that never ends,
It just goes on and on my friend.
Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was,
And they'll continue singing it forever just because...
(repeat)
Credits to the late, great Sherri Lewis
Which makes me think...
It might not be appropriate to consider aerogels "solid" in the "3D solid" sense. It might be better to consider aerogels to be a real and physical example of a "factal solid," and I wouldn't care to attempt to assign the fractional dimensionality to such a thing. But aerogels seem to have the essential characteristics of the "space-filling" shapes described in fractal literature.