No, merely more concerned with other things. Elsewhere in this thread I brought up another issue that would also worry more than hearing my own heartbeat - load responsiveness. When we exercise our hearts beat harder to support the load.
Do artificial hearts respond to load? Can artificial heart recipients still run, swim, jump, etc, or are they forever restrained to some sort of moderate pace? Along that line, assuming the worst, if they tried to run would they pass out, from inadequate blood/oxygen supply?
This is related, because in my experience, I hear my heart beat right after slowing down from a major exertion. During the exertion I'm generally too busy and noisy to notice, but after stopping the heart doesn't slow immediately, and that's when it's noticable.
In a hierarchy of needs of this thought experiment, I haven't gotten that far yet, to wonder about hearing my resting heart.
One can almost always choose a life-ending event. After such an even is "completed", rescinding it isn't generally possible. (I'm using "completed" to weasel around near-death events, resuscitation, etc. This is/., land of the nitpick, after all.)
Without the implant, she won't feel anything again. There's no way to put this other than that it's a life-changing event. Many things after this will be different from the way they were before. But generally a life-changing event is to be preferred over a life-ending event.
Then again, contrast Peter Cook as the prince of darkness, and compare that to him as a priest in "The Princess Bride." He was looking a little worse for the wear in the latter.
Think of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. And certainly not Brendan Fraser and what's-her-name that Hugh Grant was attached to when he got caught. (in Vegas? in a taxi cab?)
I know it's not much of a security measure, and it wasn't designed as one. But if you can keep root privileges away, it does constitute one more layer of security.
My problem with SELinux is that as good as it is, it bills itself as THE security measure, THE silver bullet. As part of that, it's sufficiently finicky that it may not play well with other security measures, other than staying up to date and properly configured, which are a necessary part of any secure system. But when you find that really rare circumstance like last month's kernel hole, relying only on SELinux leaves you up the creek.
Feudalism didn't last continually for 1000 years. The overall system was in place, but it periodically and bloodily switched from one feudal power group to another. Until you look a little closer, the historical view was "continuous", but it was full of those little "speed bumps."
I would further predict that with a world now filled to overflowing, feudalism will be even less stable. Many parts of the world are habitually on the edge of disaster these days. Even without some sort of disruption - like a change to feudalism - some sort of massive die-off is not that unlikely. There are some that believe that the real Renaissance was caused by the plagues, and the fact that the lives of the survivors, as pay rates rose because of a tighter labor market.
"Capitalism" is worshipped far too much around this place.
It's a tool, not an end. Greed is a tool, not an end. Both make terrible masters. Better yet, the way we're practicing it, capitalism is unstable, as Karl Marx predicted. As you say, it takes checks and balances to stabilize it. Today's problem is that those who have want more, and have advanced the art of buying politicians and legislators to advance their cause - removing those checks and balances.
Where it goes from here - fewer and fewer having more and more, more and more having less and less. Fuedalism. But that's not stable, either. The have-nots periodically die from plagues and such, raising the competition for labor, raising wages, creating a middle class, etc.
Or consider it to be recycling or crop-rotation, at the national level. As consumer demand picks up in India and China, the multinationals can jettison the US completely, workers and consumers both. The US becomes so badly depressed that in another generation they become the next workforce to be exploited, when the Indians and Chinese start to become too expensive. The crop rotation scheme is probably more complex than this, but it wouldn't surprise me to hear that some people are actually thinking this way.
One fly in the ointment... At some point businesses will start to home-grow in India and China, and decide that those overpaid (formerly US) multinational executives are an unnecessary expense - and jettison them.
One other fly... All things really aren't fungible. Sometimes it takes time and humility to know what is and isn't.
Even this doesn't handle the other side of the scenario...
Buy your box of drives and put them in a RAID-6. Chances are you just bought all of the drives at the same time, from the same vendor, and they're probably all the same model of the same brand. Chances are also very good that they're from the same manufacturing lot. You've got N "identical" drives. Install them all into your drive enclosure, power the whole thing up, build your RAID-6, put it into service.
Now all of your "identical" drives are running off of the same power supply, getting the same voltage. There's likely to be some temperature gradient inside the box, but overall they're all at similar temperatures. They have the same number of POH, the same number of read requests, same number of write requests. In essence, they remain very nearly "identical" through their service life.
Next, let one drive fail. What are your chances of having a second drive failure, especially when you power the RAID down to replace the first failing drive?
That's what I've heard some anecdotal evidence from, from those who manage this type of thing where I work. RAIDs tend not to have single-drive failures, or at least tend to have "time clustered" drive failures. Plan for it.
They do what they can with a 2D projection of a 3D+time situation. But even at that it's an overly simplistic picture, with "a highway" zipping a loop through the planets, and the planets aren't even in any sort of solar-centric positions, even if they did choose to exaggerate sizes for the case of illustration. For that matter, it would be fascinating to get a better idea of the shape of these corridors. Are they simple spokes, radial from the Sun through each planet? Do they have a curve? Why? etc, etc.
As others have said, not news. In my deskPix directory, from which I randomly pick a background each login, I have "Interplanetary_Superhighway.jpg" dated Sept 8, 2005 which is as far as I can tell, exactly the same picture used in the article. Doesn't beat the 2003 Slashdot date, but the illustration matches.
Last I knew, you could do a clean install with an upgrade CD, as long as you had "proof of purchase" of the product being upgraded from. Of course that gets a bit harder these days when they no longer ship recovery or install CDs...
The pre-Air-Force designs were also winged, but the wings were much smaller and the overall balance of the craft was completely different. The big thing about the wings wasn't the weight, but the ability to come down at Vandenberg, remembering that it flies something like a brick - the steepest glide-path of any glider.
The Russians built and flew their own shuttle - the Buran. Last I saw of one was a picture of it as a visual accessory at some random park over there - not maintained, just degrading. It's noteworthy that Buran had jet engines to improve its landing capability. It flew at least once - unmanned, computer-piloted.
As for the capsules, I suspect the Soviets/Russians lost interest in space even faster than we did after Apollo. At that point they likely made do with what they had, and did as much as they could with it. Capsules were sufficient for what they needed to do. I suspect it was by necessity, not by plan or design.
You forgot the War on Drugs - not only are we not winning it, it's destabilizing governments all over the world, and making criminals better financed than their governments.
> > until we've mastered being human without killing each other, the air, the seas, and the land upon which we walk. > > You're going to be waiting a very, very long time. Odds are that humanity ending would be a precondition
You'd better hope we can do better than that. Becoming a truly spacefaring society is incredibly energy-intensive, even if we do it the best possible way. Just the potential and kinetic energy of a human mass in orbit is pretty decent. Being truly spacefaring, where getting to orbit or beyond is rougly equivalent to getting on an airplane today is in some ways like giving every man, woman, and child on Earth a small nuclear bomb. There's that much power involved, if we really have that degree of access.
Given that much available power, if we're inclined to blow each other up, we'll do it. We simply must lose the inclination.
Sidetrack...
I have a pet belief that any interstellar-travelling life will be innately peaceful, for just the above reason. The powers involved are just too great, the base attitude needs to change. If you were to count on political and legal controls, which is essentially how we keep the cork on nuclear armageddon today, the possiblities for a slip-up are just too great. Even the cork we have on nukes today is rather leaky.
Others have asserted "alien psychology", like a hive mind, making it possible to make it into space with a deep case of xenophobia. Recent experiences my daughter has told me about make me skeptical of that. For work-study she has been reuniting ant colonies, where the queen and a few workers were separated as part of the experiment. Reuniting those colonies has been really tough, and only works first-pass in a minority of times. Most times the colont attacks the queen and her workers. There's a second-pass effort with some gradual acclimation efforts, but I guess even that isn't foolproof, and she hasn't yet had time to evaluate that. This is one example of how with colonial creatures it's pretty easy to become "other." From science fiction Peter Hamilton's "Pandora's Star" books had a similar circumstance of part of a hive-mind becoming "other" because of (interstellar) separation. The more xenophobic, the more likely this scenario, in my opinion.
Time to learn to be human, or maybe post-human, as some have put it.
I doubt those "hubble clones" would have worked well for space science. After all, they were designed to look 100-200 miles down instead of out into infinty.
I suggest that the US does have one of the more oppressive regimes, but you're looking in the wrong place to see it. Our government isn't the source of the oppression, it's our commercial sector. Somewhere back in the 80's, acquisition of money became the single highest goal in the US. Fast forward to today, when anything that gets in the way of acquisition of money has become "socialist", and for that matter, just about any national goal whatsoever has become "socialist." It appears that the only reason for the State is to make a safe place for people to make money.
Unfortunately that is short-sighted thinking.
Think through some ramifications to "no government impediments to making money"...
The Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act both impede making money, and in the last administration there were serious efforts to "streamline" them. Long term... look at what's happening in China. Their air and water are in such bad shape there there are pockets of people dying. They had to have an incredible commerce and transportation shutdown in order to make hosting the Olympics a non-disgrace. Interestingly, they're starting to move on their environmental issues, even as some in the US are trying to undo ours.
Employer relations - obviously companies could be more profitable it they cut benefits, moved jobs overseas, paid less, etc. All of these things have been happening, too. It's a little surprising that nobody has tied this into the current financial mess we're in. I know that personally, my income stagnated starting with the dot-com bust, and the situation never really improved. Even today though I may get raises, they almost meet inflation. Now take a nation that is accustomed to an improving standard of living, stagnate their pay, and make credit far too easily available, and you get a debt mess - kind of like the debt mess we're in. Because nothing that has been done that really improves the situation for regular Americans, it's really hard to climb out of this mess, too.
Socialist??? No, not me. Nor am I a "Capitalist," because I recognize that there are things that are more important than money. Greed and Capitalism can be good, in that they can serve as powerful motivators - but they're very poor masters, and that's where we are today.
I'm surprised that nobody has commented on perhaps the single greatest cause of Shuttle design bastardization - the US Air Force.
From what I've heard, design requirements were settling around something reasonably sane that looked very little like today's shuttle. Then the Air Force weighed in with 2 killer requirements - operations from Vandenberg and polar orbit capability. Adding those requirements drove the compromises that gave us the shuttle design we've had for almost 3 decades.
What's worse, after driving the design into what has proven to be a black hole, the Air Force decided they didn't want it, anyway. The shuttle has never flown to or from Vandenberg, and never flown a polar orbit. (Though the ISS orbit does have a pretty high inclination, I guess, and for the same reasons we were interested in a polar orbit - Soviet/Russian access.)
The CAD that I do is 2D, not 3D, though putting a million vertices on the screen can stress things, mainly because nobody has optimized those paths.
However at home I play some OpenGL games and play video. Yes, the framerates are adequate, even on my non-leading-edge hardware. (Except for Flash fullscreen)
I thought about white pigment a few minutes after posting.
As for China, I said "locking up", because they're investing heavily in Africa, for instance. The stuff they want may not be on their territory, but they're very present in places where those things are.
Now that I actually take a look, Titanium is 22 and Iron is 26, and the contentious Lanthanoids are 57-71. (No doubt higher stuff will be scarcer.)
How much titanium is there, laying around, if the demand would suddenly start to rise?
How much of that titanium is locked up by China, who has seen for some time that strategic metals will become a growth limiter in the not-so-distant future?
You neglected to mention the improvements in near-ultraviolet and near-infrared with the new kernel that kick in about 5 or 6 hours after the thrird boot. Nor did you say anything about the clear bass extension that happens right away on the first boot.
> I don't mind X, but what applications did people run on those computers?
Well for one thing, I personally ran CAD tools to create chips that go into computers, from way back then to today. (Still doing it, too.) For that matter, before running CAD tools on X Windows I ran CAD tools on mainframes with dedicated graphics terminals.
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No, merely more concerned with other things. Elsewhere in this thread I brought up another issue that would also worry more than hearing my own heartbeat - load responsiveness. When we exercise our hearts beat harder to support the load.
Do artificial hearts respond to load?
Can artificial heart recipients still run, swim, jump, etc, or are they forever restrained to some sort of moderate pace?
Along that line, assuming the worst, if they tried to run would they pass out, from inadequate blood/oxygen supply?
This is related, because in my experience, I hear my heart beat right after slowing down from a major exertion. During the exertion I'm generally too busy and noisy to notice, but after stopping the heart doesn't slow immediately, and that's when it's noticable.
In a hierarchy of needs of this thought experiment, I haven't gotten that far yet, to wonder about hearing my resting heart.
And quite happily so.
One can almost always choose a life-ending event. After such an even is "completed", rescinding it isn't generally possible. /., land of the nitpick, after all.)
(I'm using "completed" to weasel around near-death events, resuscitation, etc. This is
Without the implant, she won't feel anything again. There's no way to put this other than that it's a life-changing event. Many things after this will be different from the way they were before. But generally a life-changing event is to be preferred over a life-ending event.
Then again, contrast Peter Cook as the prince of darkness, and compare that to him as a priest in "The Princess Bride." He was looking a little worse for the wear in the latter.
Can't argue with the point about E.H. though.
No, no...
Think of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. And certainly not Brendan Fraser and what's-her-name that Hugh Grant was attached to when he got caught. (in Vegas? in a taxi cab?)
I know it's not much of a security measure, and it wasn't designed as one. But if you can keep root privileges away, it does constitute one more layer of security.
My problem with SELinux is that as good as it is, it bills itself as THE security measure, THE silver bullet. As part of that, it's sufficiently finicky that it may not play well with other security measures, other than staying up to date and properly configured, which are a necessary part of any secure system. But when you find that really rare circumstance like last month's kernel hole, relying only on SELinux leaves you up the creek.
Feudalism didn't last continually for 1000 years. The overall system was in place, but it periodically and bloodily switched from one feudal power group to another. Until you look a little closer, the historical view was "continuous", but it was full of those little "speed bumps."
I would further predict that with a world now filled to overflowing, feudalism will be even less stable. Many parts of the world are habitually on the edge of disaster these days. Even without some sort of disruption - like a change to feudalism - some sort of massive die-off is not that unlikely. There are some that believe that the real Renaissance was caused by the plagues, and the fact that the lives of the survivors, as pay rates rose because of a tighter labor market.
"Capitalism" is worshipped far too much around this place.
It's a tool, not an end. Greed is a tool, not an end. Both make terrible masters. Better yet, the way we're practicing it, capitalism is unstable, as Karl Marx predicted. As you say, it takes checks and balances to stabilize it. Today's problem is that those who have want more, and have advanced the art of buying politicians and legislators to advance their cause - removing those checks and balances.
Where it goes from here - fewer and fewer having more and more, more and more having less and less. Fuedalism. But that's not stable, either. The have-nots periodically die from plagues and such, raising the competition for labor, raising wages, creating a middle class, etc.
Oh well.
Or consider it to be recycling or crop-rotation, at the national level. As consumer demand picks up in India and China, the multinationals can jettison the US completely, workers and consumers both. The US becomes so badly depressed that in another generation they become the next workforce to be exploited, when the Indians and Chinese start to become too expensive. The crop rotation scheme is probably more complex than this, but it wouldn't surprise me to hear that some people are actually thinking this way.
One fly in the ointment... At some point businesses will start to home-grow in India and China, and decide that those overpaid (formerly US) multinational executives are an unnecessary expense - and jettison them.
One other fly... All things really aren't fungible. Sometimes it takes time and humility to know what is and isn't.
Even this doesn't handle the other side of the scenario...
Buy your box of drives and put them in a RAID-6. Chances are you just bought all of the drives at the same time, from the same vendor, and they're probably all the same model of the same brand. Chances are also very good that they're from the same manufacturing lot. You've got N "identical" drives. Install them all into your drive enclosure, power the whole thing up, build your RAID-6, put it into service.
Now all of your "identical" drives are running off of the same power supply, getting the same voltage. There's likely to be some temperature gradient inside the box, but overall they're all at similar temperatures. They have the same number of POH, the same number of read requests, same number of write requests. In essence, they remain very nearly "identical" through their service life.
Next, let one drive fail. What are your chances of having a second drive failure, especially when you power the RAID down to replace the first failing drive?
That's what I've heard some anecdotal evidence from, from those who manage this type of thing where I work. RAIDs tend not to have single-drive failures, or at least tend to have "time clustered" drive failures. Plan for it.
They do what they can with a 2D projection of a 3D+time situation. But even at that it's an overly simplistic picture, with "a highway" zipping a loop through the planets, and the planets aren't even in any sort of solar-centric positions, even if they did choose to exaggerate sizes for the case of illustration. For that matter, it would be fascinating to get a better idea of the shape of these corridors. Are they simple spokes, radial from the Sun through each planet? Do they have a curve? Why? etc, etc.
As others have said, not news. In my deskPix directory, from which I randomly pick a background each login, I have "Interplanetary_Superhighway.jpg" dated Sept 8, 2005 which is as far as I can tell, exactly the same picture used in the article. Doesn't beat the 2003 Slashdot date, but the illustration matches.
Last I knew, you could do a clean install with an upgrade CD, as long as you had "proof of purchase" of the product being upgraded from. Of course that gets a bit harder these days when they no longer ship recovery or install CDs...
The pre-Air-Force designs were also winged, but the wings were much smaller and the overall balance of the craft was completely different. The big thing about the wings wasn't the weight, but the ability to come down at Vandenberg, remembering that it flies something like a brick - the steepest glide-path of any glider.
The Russians built and flew their own shuttle - the Buran. Last I saw of one was a picture of it as a visual accessory at some random park over there - not maintained, just degrading. It's noteworthy that Buran had jet engines to improve its landing capability. It flew at least once - unmanned, computer-piloted.
As for the capsules, I suspect the Soviets/Russians lost interest in space even faster than we did after Apollo. At that point they likely made do with what they had, and did as much as they could with it. Capsules were sufficient for what they needed to do. I suspect it was by necessity, not by plan or design.
You forgot the War on Drugs - not only are we not winning it, it's destabilizing governments all over the world, and making criminals better financed than their governments.
> > until we've mastered being human without killing each other, the air, the seas, and the land upon which we walk.
>
> You're going to be waiting a very, very long time. Odds are that humanity ending would be a precondition
You'd better hope we can do better than that. Becoming a truly spacefaring society is incredibly energy-intensive, even if we do it the best possible way. Just the potential and kinetic energy of a human mass in orbit is pretty decent. Being truly spacefaring, where getting to orbit or beyond is rougly equivalent to getting on an airplane today is in some ways like giving every man, woman, and child on Earth a small nuclear bomb. There's that much power involved, if we really have that degree of access.
Given that much available power, if we're inclined to blow each other up, we'll do it. We simply must lose the inclination.
Sidetrack...
I have a pet belief that any interstellar-travelling life will be innately peaceful, for just the above reason. The powers involved are just too great, the base attitude needs to change. If you were to count on political and legal controls, which is essentially how we keep the cork on nuclear armageddon today, the possiblities for a slip-up are just too great. Even the cork we have on nukes today is rather leaky.
Others have asserted "alien psychology", like a hive mind, making it possible to make it into space with a deep case of xenophobia. Recent experiences my daughter has told me about make me skeptical of that. For work-study she has been reuniting ant colonies, where the queen and a few workers were separated as part of the experiment. Reuniting those colonies has been really tough, and only works first-pass in a minority of times. Most times the colont attacks the queen and her workers. There's a second-pass effort with some gradual acclimation efforts, but I guess even that isn't foolproof, and she hasn't yet had time to evaluate that. This is one example of how with colonial creatures it's pretty easy to become "other." From science fiction Peter Hamilton's "Pandora's Star" books had a similar circumstance of part of a hive-mind becoming "other" because of (interstellar) separation. The more xenophobic, the more likely this scenario, in my opinion.
Time to learn to be human, or maybe post-human, as some have put it.
I doubt those "hubble clones" would have worked well for space science. After all, they were designed to look 100-200 miles down instead of out into infinty.
Go read about the earliest Christian church...
Rough paraphrase - "They sold all that they had and lived in common."
I suggest that the US does have one of the more oppressive regimes, but you're looking in the wrong place to see it. Our government isn't the source of the oppression, it's our commercial sector. Somewhere back in the 80's, acquisition of money became the single highest goal in the US. Fast forward to today, when anything that gets in the way of acquisition of money has become "socialist", and for that matter, just about any national goal whatsoever has become "socialist." It appears that the only reason for the State is to make a safe place for people to make money.
Unfortunately that is short-sighted thinking.
Think through some ramifications to "no government impediments to making money" ...
The Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act both impede making money, and in the last administration there were serious efforts to "streamline" them. Long term... look at what's happening in China. Their air and water are in such bad shape there there are pockets of people dying. They had to have an incredible commerce and transportation shutdown in order to make hosting the Olympics a non-disgrace. Interestingly, they're starting to move on their environmental issues, even as some in the US are trying to undo ours.
Employer relations - obviously companies could be more profitable it they cut benefits, moved jobs overseas, paid less, etc. All of these things have been happening, too. It's a little surprising that nobody has tied this into the current financial mess we're in. I know that personally, my income stagnated starting with the dot-com bust, and the situation never really improved. Even today though I may get raises, they almost meet inflation. Now take a nation that is accustomed to an improving standard of living, stagnate their pay, and make credit far too easily available, and you get a debt mess - kind of like the debt mess we're in. Because nothing that has been done that really improves the situation for regular Americans, it's really hard to climb out of this mess, too.
Socialist??? No, not me. Nor am I a "Capitalist," because I recognize that there are things that are more important than money. Greed and Capitalism can be good, in that they can serve as powerful motivators - but they're very poor masters, and that's where we are today.
I'm surprised that nobody has commented on perhaps the single greatest cause of Shuttle design bastardization - the US Air Force.
From what I've heard, design requirements were settling around something reasonably sane that looked very little like today's shuttle. Then the Air Force weighed in with 2 killer requirements - operations from Vandenberg and polar orbit capability. Adding those requirements drove the compromises that gave us the shuttle design we've had for almost 3 decades.
What's worse, after driving the design into what has proven to be a black hole, the Air Force decided they didn't want it, anyway. The shuttle has never flown to or from Vandenberg, and never flown a polar orbit. (Though the ISS orbit does have a pretty high inclination, I guess, and for the same reasons we were interested in a polar orbit - Soviet/Russian access.)
You got grey hairs, too?
Any grandkids, yet?
My kids are still in college, so I've got a few years.
Oops, the is Slashdot. I can't possibly have a life, wife, kids, or grey hairs.
The CAD that I do is 2D, not 3D, though putting a million vertices on the screen can stress things, mainly because nobody has optimized those paths.
However at home I play some OpenGL games and play video.
Yes, the framerates are adequate, even on my non-leading-edge hardware. (Except for Flash fullscreen)
I thought about white pigment a few minutes after posting.
As for China, I said "locking up", because they're investing heavily in Africa, for instance. The stuff they want may not be on their territory, but they're very present in places where those things are.
Now that I actually take a look, Titanium is 22 and Iron is 26, and the contentious Lanthanoids are 57-71. (No doubt higher stuff will be scarcer.)
How much titanium is there, laying around, if the demand would suddenly start to rise?
How much of that titanium is locked up by China, who has seen for some time that strategic metals will become a growth limiter in the not-so-distant future?
You neglected to mention the improvements in near-ultraviolet and near-infrared with the new kernel that kick in about 5 or 6 hours after the thrird boot. Nor did you say anything about the clear bass extension that happens right away on the first boot.
> I don't mind X, but what applications did people run on those computers?
Well for one thing, I personally ran CAD tools to create chips that go into computers, from way back then to today. (Still doing it, too.) For that matter, before running CAD tools on X Windows I ran CAD tools on mainframes with dedicated graphics terminals.