If you're going do a nerd joke on April 1st, know your material even a little bit better. I read Dune over 30 years ago in college, and I can remember that the capitol of Arrakis is Arrakeen. Even 54 comments later that little factiod hasn't made it anywhere onto the page.
Does this mean that the follies of your youth become held against you for your entire life? Even if we were somehow shielded until we're 18, youthful mistakes don't stop then. There has been quite a bit of study now that important developments in the brain continue into the mid 20's. Heck, since we often accept anecdotal fiction as evidence around/., think of Scrooge. He had a life-changing event relatively late in life.
At one extreme, we freeze everyone into the patterns of their youth. At the other, "I've changed, I've learned since then," becomes a mantra that absolves all responsibility. The difference here is that in the real world, people know you, your speech and actions, and how they all change with time, so they're at least equipped to make a decent judgement, even if that doesn't always happen. In non-meat-space those things aren't necessarily true, especially as so much incoming information is filtered to confirm one's current world-view.
At what point does it become unethical to consider and treat these as lab animals. How much brain complexity is enough? This probably isn't it, and our A.I. isn't good enough yet. But some year we're going to cross the line, and I'm sure that as a society we're going to be completely unaware and in denial when we do.
Wish I had mod points. This has been one of my problems with the whole NSA scandal - it has taken eyes off of the bigger problem. Even as people think of protecting themselves from the various Three Letter Agencies, they forget about the ones that end in ".com".
The brand that doesn't lock farmers out will get more business, presuming that there is such a brand, and it makes decent equipment.
Otherwise used equipment will start commanding a better price. Plus new business will emerge in buying too-broken-to-repair farm equipment, and managing to rebuild it with better facilities and spare parts.
One of my more-fun tasks on the farm was going into the weeds to get three dead green-choppers and scabbing the parts to make one that worked.
The fun is that in 2001, the bright side of Iapetus was sculpted, with the monolith in the middle. In reality the dark side is sculpted from passage through the dust ring.
There's a bit more to it than that. My tops would be two points. First, we're memetically infectuous. Plant a new idea here, and someone will run with it, most likely in some direction you never wished for. Many of our memetic infections are downright dangerous, lethal, destructive, etc. Contact might well be considered irresponsible, no matter how well intended. Second, there's the thing I mentioned about our reverse-engineering technology. They might accidentally give us more capability than they wanted to. Not that we'd be any threat to them, but we've been sitting here for however long with the Doomsday Clock close to midnight. Give us something new that can be weaponized, (We've been able to turn just about everything into a weapon, perhaps the most resistant invention was the "death ray", the laser - it's had so darned many peaceful uses and has been very hard to make into aweapon.) and we will do so. Perhaps that weapon might be what tips the scale, ticks the clock, or whatever metaphor you like.
First, it doesn't explain Fermi's Paradox, it merely adds another term to it. In all of those various probabilities, apparently there is something like a 10% chance of not getting taken out by a gamma burst in half-a-billion years. I would also expect the odds to get better as a given galaxy "settles down", generating fewer big, hot stars and more smaller, calmer ones. Some neighborhoods are probably rougher too. I wouldn't wait around to settle Trantor, near the center of our galaxy.
Second, I wouldn't consider intergalactic contact in any serious way - the distances are bad enough for interstellar, do we really want to add a few more orders of magnitude?
Third, our presence establishes our galaxy as one of the more benign ones. There is at least one neighborhood that has been sufficiently peaceful for the last half-billion hears. Last I knew, there were no supernova candidates close enough to cause that kind of trouble any time soon, either.
Fourth, I'll focus on your word "silliness", which I think you meant as an understatement. There is conceivably a chance that we are under observation, and rank as "too silly" for any contact. The Earth has had an oxygen atmosphere for the last half-billion years, and we're on the verge of being able to detect other such atmospheres on other worlds such as Kepler has found. It's not a bad assumption that any civilization capable of interstellar travel is also better at planetary surveys than us. If they're there and within a few thousand light-years, they know something worth seeing is probably here.
At this point in physics we're stuck at the Standard Model. We have many theories that move beyond, but no facts to select among them, and many of the experiments would be incredibly expensive. But let's say one day we saw a "warp signature", it's quite possible that we could immediately discard half of those theories. (By "warp signature" I really mean physical evidence of truly advanced technology.) IF there were here watching us, and seeing our "silliness" as well as the scientific acumen of some, they would be especially careful that we see no such evidence.
Hmmmm.... I wonder how far The Culture is from Roddenberry's ideals? In some ways, The Culture seems to me to be a far more realistic post-Singularity type of civilization than the Federation. The trappings are far more fantastic, (GSVs, anyone?) but TOS tended to underestimate many things. As one example, the communicators were basically phones, and other than communicating with an orbiting starship instead of a local tower, they only do a fraction of what today's smartphones do.
Plus even The Culture gets to have explosions. I'm currently re-reading "Surface States". The first time I read it, I particularly liked one Ship giving a fairly complex blow-by-blow account of a space battle that was only something like 15 microseconds long.
I was rather amused by the titles of the Tanya Harding / Nancy Kerrigan newsgroups, though to be honest I don't remember the titles any more and never read them. I just remember ".whack.whack.whack" being the tail end of one.
I actually did follow and post to technical newsgroups.
However in Europe you've been warned. In the US we walked (or sat?) way too far down this path before discovering how bad it is. Now that we all know better, you can change your path before getting where we are.
OTOH, my wife are generally stupified looking at twenty-somethings smoking. Our parents didn't know better, and in fact during WWII the Army included cigarettes with meal rations. During our generation (I'm a later Boomer.) we sort-of knew better, but the cigarette companies didn't actually admit they were lying until well into my adulthood. For this generation there's no doubt about how bad cigarettes are, but if anything smoking seems to be on the rise.
I wonder if Hari Seldon would have said that masses of people are stupid, as well as predictable.
I wonder how much a standing desk would really help. Absent the standing desk, I would suspect that normally standing implies some other measure of activity besides just not-sitting. I would suspect just-standing as you would at a standing desk is better than sitting, if only because of micro-movements involved in remaing standing. But I'm guessing that simply moving to standing desks won't fully erase the bad effects of too much sitting, it'll lessen them to the bad effects of too much just-standing.
Movement is a spectrum, the question here is where is just-standing on that spectrum between sitting and the known-good brisk walk. Also, how do you fit onto that spectrum the known-good and known-bad thresholds?
The three distros in the Subject line do not use systemd, though Gentoo does offer it. They may well be the dig-in-the-heels distros that will stay that way, driven by people like you. Moving to one of those distros is a smaller/easier move for you, and doesn't preclude moving to a BSD in the future.
Years back I thought about moving my server to OpenBSD, based on reputation. However after some thinking I realized that potentially the safest server is the one you know best how to administer. I was probably better off knowing how to administer Linux well across my home cluster than to divide my efforts. I know OpenBSD is supposed to be "secure by default", but don't know how I might accidentally mess that up by mis-applying Linux knowledge to it.
I remember when the 8086 came out, Intel also brought out the 8087 FPU and the 8089 I/O Processor. The former got bundled into the CPU a few generations later. I don't rememeber details of the 8089, but it seems to have withered away. Nor does Wikipedia say much about it, once you differentiate it from the Hoth Wampa Cave Lego set.
I liked David Brin's "Tank Farm Dynamo", which featured a space station made from used external tanks. Part of the premise was that ETs were deliberately discarded the way they were, so that they'd burn on reentry and not become space debris. For negligible cost they could be brought the rest of the way to orbit, available for use there.
Every first stage ever made and flown has been simply thrown away after one use. FIrst stages are quite a bit different from whatever is on the top of the stack.
For that matter, "lander on legs" is a different thing on Earth than it is on the moon or Mars.
I will agree that there is a decided anti-NASA attitude around here, though.
Ever read "The House in November", by Keith Laumer? Kind of the same thing, but more story to it. "All You Zombies" was short, sweet, and to the point.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone on this topic need to mention, "Timecube." There, I've fulfilled my duty.
Anyone for a one-way ticket to Mars, now?
oversized salt-shakers shrieking, "Exterminate!"
If you're going do a nerd joke on April 1st, know your material even a little bit better. I read Dune over 30 years ago in college, and I can remember that the capitol of Arrakis is Arrakeen. Even 54 comments later that little factiod hasn't made it anywhere onto the page.
One man's abuse is another man's necessity.
Deciding who is right is the problem.
Does this mean that the follies of your youth become held against you for your entire life? Even if we were somehow shielded until we're 18, youthful mistakes don't stop then. There has been quite a bit of study now that important developments in the brain continue into the mid 20's. Heck, since we often accept anecdotal fiction as evidence around /., think of Scrooge. He had a life-changing event relatively late in life.
At one extreme, we freeze everyone into the patterns of their youth. At the other, "I've changed, I've learned since then," becomes a mantra that absolves all responsibility. The difference here is that in the real world, people know you, your speech and actions, and how they all change with time, so they're at least equipped to make a decent judgement, even if that doesn't always happen. In non-meat-space those things aren't necessarily true, especially as so much incoming information is filtered to confirm one's current world-view.
If that unit has been willing to work for the Good Magician Humphrey for a year to get the answer to that question, there can be only one answer.
At what point does it become unethical to consider and treat these as lab animals. How much brain complexity is enough? This probably isn't it, and our A.I. isn't good enough yet. But some year we're going to cross the line, and I'm sure that as a society we're going to be completely unaware and in denial when we do.
Wish I had mod points. This has been one of my problems with the whole NSA scandal - it has taken eyes off of the bigger problem. Even as people think of protecting themselves from the various Three Letter Agencies, they forget about the ones that end in ".com".
The brand that doesn't lock farmers out will get more business, presuming that there is such a brand, and it makes decent equipment.
Otherwise used equipment will start commanding a better price. Plus new business will emerge in buying too-broken-to-repair farm equipment, and managing to rebuild it with better facilities and spare parts.
One of my more-fun tasks on the farm was going into the weeds to get three dead green-choppers and scabbing the parts to make one that worked.
The fun is that in 2001, the bright side of Iapetus was sculpted, with the monolith in the middle. In reality the dark side is sculpted from passage through the dust ring.
There's a bit more to it than that. My tops would be two points.
First, we're memetically infectuous. Plant a new idea here, and someone will run with it, most likely in some direction you never wished for. Many of our memetic infections are downright dangerous, lethal, destructive, etc. Contact might well be considered irresponsible, no matter how well intended.
Second, there's the thing I mentioned about our reverse-engineering technology. They might accidentally give us more capability than they wanted to. Not that we'd be any threat to them, but we've been sitting here for however long with the Doomsday Clock close to midnight. Give us something new that can be weaponized, (We've been able to turn just about everything into a weapon, perhaps the most resistant invention was the "death ray", the laser - it's had so darned many peaceful uses and has been very hard to make into aweapon.) and we will do so. Perhaps that weapon might be what tips the scale, ticks the clock, or whatever metaphor you like.
First, it doesn't explain Fermi's Paradox, it merely adds another term to it. In all of those various probabilities, apparently there is something like a 10% chance of not getting taken out by a gamma burst in half-a-billion years. I would also expect the odds to get better as a given galaxy "settles down", generating fewer big, hot stars and more smaller, calmer ones. Some neighborhoods are probably rougher too. I wouldn't wait around to settle Trantor, near the center of our galaxy.
Second, I wouldn't consider intergalactic contact in any serious way - the distances are bad enough for interstellar, do we really want to add a few more orders of magnitude?
Third, our presence establishes our galaxy as one of the more benign ones. There is at least one neighborhood that has been sufficiently peaceful for the last half-billion hears. Last I knew, there were no supernova candidates close enough to cause that kind of trouble any time soon, either.
Fourth, I'll focus on your word "silliness", which I think you meant as an understatement. There is conceivably a chance that we are under observation, and rank as "too silly" for any contact. The Earth has had an oxygen atmosphere for the last half-billion years, and we're on the verge of being able to detect other such atmospheres on other worlds such as Kepler has found. It's not a bad assumption that any civilization capable of interstellar travel is also better at planetary surveys than us. If they're there and within a few thousand light-years, they know something worth seeing is probably here.
At this point in physics we're stuck at the Standard Model. We have many theories that move beyond, but no facts to select among them, and many of the experiments would be incredibly expensive. But let's say one day we saw a "warp signature", it's quite possible that we could immediately discard half of those theories. (By "warp signature" I really mean physical evidence of truly advanced technology.) IF there were here watching us, and seeing our "silliness" as well as the scientific acumen of some, they would be especially careful that we see no such evidence.
Cars made of memory metals will spoil that one, too. Heat the wreckage to the right temperature, and have it spring back into a car.
Hmmmm.... I wonder how far The Culture is from Roddenberry's ideals? In some ways, The Culture seems to me to be a far more realistic post-Singularity type of civilization than the Federation. The trappings are far more fantastic, (GSVs, anyone?) but TOS tended to underestimate many things. As one example, the communicators were basically phones, and other than communicating with an orbiting starship instead of a local tower, they only do a fraction of what today's smartphones do.
Plus even The Culture gets to have explosions. I'm currently re-reading "Surface States". The first time I read it, I particularly liked one Ship giving a fairly complex blow-by-blow account of a space battle that was only something like 15 microseconds long.
I was rather amused by the titles of the Tanya Harding / Nancy Kerrigan newsgroups, though to be honest I don't remember the titles any more and never read them. I just remember ".whack.whack.whack" being the tail end of one.
I actually did follow and post to technical newsgroups.
So is your desk a standing-only desk, or one of those that moves up and down? My wife has been looking at one of the latter.
However in Europe you've been warned. In the US we walked (or sat?) way too far down this path before discovering how bad it is. Now that we all know better, you can change your path before getting where we are.
OTOH, my wife are generally stupified looking at twenty-somethings smoking. Our parents didn't know better, and in fact during WWII the Army included cigarettes with meal rations. During our generation (I'm a later Boomer.) we sort-of knew better, but the cigarette companies didn't actually admit they were lying until well into my adulthood. For this generation there's no doubt about how bad cigarettes are, but if anything smoking seems to be on the rise.
I wonder if Hari Seldon would have said that masses of people are stupid, as well as predictable.
I wonder how much a standing desk would really help. Absent the standing desk, I would suspect that normally standing implies some other measure of activity besides just not-sitting. I would suspect just-standing as you would at a standing desk is better than sitting, if only because of micro-movements involved in remaing standing. But I'm guessing that simply moving to standing desks won't fully erase the bad effects of too much sitting, it'll lessen them to the bad effects of too much just-standing.
Movement is a spectrum, the question here is where is just-standing on that spectrum between sitting and the known-good brisk walk. Also, how do you fit onto that spectrum the known-good and known-bad thresholds?
The three distros in the Subject line do not use systemd, though Gentoo does offer it. They may well be the dig-in-the-heels distros that will stay that way, driven by people like you. Moving to one of those distros is a smaller/easier move for you, and doesn't preclude moving to a BSD in the future.
Years back I thought about moving my server to OpenBSD, based on reputation. However after some thinking I realized that potentially the safest server is the one you know best how to administer. I was probably better off knowing how to administer Linux well across my home cluster than to divide my efforts. I know OpenBSD is supposed to be "secure by default", but don't know how I might accidentally mess that up by mis-applying Linux knowledge to it.
I remember when the 8086 came out, Intel also brought out the 8087 FPU and the 8089 I/O Processor. The former got bundled into the CPU a few generations later. I don't rememeber details of the 8089, but it seems to have withered away. Nor does Wikipedia say much about it, once you differentiate it from the Hoth Wampa Cave Lego set.
I liked David Brin's "Tank Farm Dynamo", which featured a space station made from used external tanks. Part of the premise was that ETs were deliberately discarded the way they were, so that they'd burn on reentry and not become space debris. For negligible cost they could be brought the rest of the way to orbit, available for use there.
Every first stage ever made and flown has been simply thrown away after one use. FIrst stages are quite a bit different from whatever is on the top of the stack.
For that matter, "lander on legs" is a different thing on Earth than it is on the moon or Mars.
I will agree that there is a decided anti-NASA attitude around here, though.
Right up there with seeing a perfectly healthy person with two free hands hit the handicapped door opener button, rather than open the door by hand.
Ever read "The House in November", by Keith Laumer? Kind of the same thing, but more story to it. "All You Zombies" was short, sweet, and to the point.