I thought I read that they tested it against cultured human cells in a petri dish, without bad side-effects. That's not whole-animal testing, but it's better than no human testing at all.
First question... Is such a dust cloud inconsistent with a sun-like star somewhere inside the boundaries? Second question... If a sun-like star can exist there, is such a dust cloud inconsistent with that star having a planetary system like ours? Third question... Assuming the first two questions pass, and that there could be an Earth-like planet there with life that could look up into the sky and wonder, what would they see?
In other words, is that dust really still a hard vacuum, just seen from a different perspective, or is it really something denser that would alter the view from within?
But the Earth had an oxygen (potentially biosculpted) atmosphere some 500 million years ago. So if someone there has been able to observe Earth and know something about its atmosphere, they'd know that there might be life here. We would count as "interesting".
I've read more recently that there may be other ways to have significant amounts of free oxygen in a planetary atmosphere besides biological processes. I have no idea how probable those ways are compared to life, how stable they are, how "interesting" they are compared to life, etc.
But for the remote sensing schemes we've used on exoplanets, as well as foreseeable improvements to those schemes, Earth would definitely count as "interesting".
Not irrelevant. The parent poster was concerned about protecting his system, then proceeded to discuss protecting from the US without considering other threats.
Plus don't forget, the NSA simply must be the only agency in the world trying to do this sort of thing. I'm sure that no other nation has any interest whatsoever in gathering this type or depth of information, for any reason at all.
Maxwell and Newton were one-in-a-million. (if not more) Do we really want to only harness that small a portion of the human race's mind-power? Yes there will always be some who will have found their motivation in the natural world, and don't need any artifice. But is there really a problem with providing inspiring artifice? Does that make contributions those people make worthless? They may well be second-rate compared to Maxwell or Newton, but that also takes in the vast majority of mankind. To do better seems good.
Which highlights what I'd really like to see added to the ISS - a farm module. Test a farm module on the ISS, getting the concept ready for a Mars mission. Do we really plan to send something on the order of 2 years of consumables on a Mars mission, recycling only the water? We need much more complete recycling, and we'll need it for any permanent presence anywhere beyond Earth. For that matter the only reason we don't need it on Earth is because we've got this giant biosphere that has handled the details pretty well for us, up until the past several decades.
I rather like the idea of such a farm module even on Earth. No doubt it would be designed for compactness, efficiency, and minimal hand-holding. Sounds good to me - put one of those in the back yard and cut the grocery bills. (I realize that the initial outlay is likely prohibitive, but the idea is neat.) There are also likely places on Earth where such a thing would be worthwhile, say Antarctica or other inhospitable locations.
(Note that I didn't say that a farm module would use sunlight - that might not work for Mars, and probably not beyond.)
Bear spray is quite nasty stuff. It's meant to stop something big and mean, or at least pursuade it to look toward less-equipped hikers.
Would you have had the "is... a weapon?" response had it been tear gas instead of bear spray?
The last hike of the vacation was the Grinnel Glacier Trail, and at the end I gave my can to someone headed up that didn't have one. Wasn't going to do me any good, didn't need it at home even if I could get it on the plane, and they weren't properly equipped to hike in Glacier N.P. without it.
Not really. Certainly NASA has been buying boosters for a long time, but from what I understand those have continued to be on a cost-plus basis, or as some would say, sucking from the government teat. Again, from what I understand, SpaceX is new in that it is delivering fixed-cost launches.
>NASA did all the really hard work (the basic design of space rockets). You know, the Basic Science that costs billions and >doesn't pay off for decades. You see, private companies are too focused on short term profit generation to basic science. >That's why it's done on the public dime.
I won't disagree with you. But I also believe that NASA should be allowing basic launch stuff to go to companies like SpaceX, which reap the rewards of all of that public domain knowledge - the fruits of publicly funded NASA research. It's past time for basic Earth orbit access (and somewhat beyond) to be business as usual.
NASA should be moving on to bigger, tougher jobs, targets that are still beyond the horizon of ordinary business, just like space travel was 50 years ago.
Or just read "The Year When Stardust Fell" or "In the Days of the Comet" for other examples. Many would say more interesting ideas, because they're not simple monster movies.
I never tried to mold my daughter, but I also made sure that opportunities for science and technology were there for her. There were numerous signs along the way that she was headed in the direction of the sciences. She's always been interested in critters - We used to go to the Maine seashore, and one of our big activies there was exploring tide-pools. She "adopted" woolie bears in our front yard one fall, building villages for them. When she was in 5th grade, I read "The Hot Zone" with her. For years after she kept a picture of the ebola virus on the wall of her room, and we still trade ebola news over a decade later.
She got her bachelor's and master's degree in biological sciences, and started her PhD. About a year in, she discovered that she really didn't like the life sacrifices of the PhD lifestyle required, especially of a woman. She also realized that she likes the outreach side of science more - bringing science to students and others. She's managed to find a job in that field, while her husband continues to work on his PhD.
Earth has been advertising itself for more like a half-billion years. An atmosphere with free oxygen is rare, at least we haven't found one yet out of the explanets we've discovered. To be sure, we haven't studied the atmosphere on very many, but at the very least we know how to do so, at least for some.
There has been some suggestion of merely chemical processes that can give rise to free oxygen in the atmosphere, but I don't know how likely (or un) those processes are, and whether they cause the levels the Earth has, especially with traces of methane present at the same time.
We know our atmosphere has been biosculpted, and that would be something others could have seen for half a billion years.
One must assume that any alien civilization capable of interstellar travel would know at least as much as we do about the relevant technologies. That would include something Keplar-like, only better. You don't want to take your first interstellar steps to a place with no relevant planets.
More value was returned to the shareholders. After all, what are they there for, to provide a solution where the free market acts to optimize the situation for both provider and customer, or to use a de-facto monopoly to maximize shareholder value?
We keep launching stuff into space, and launch cost is always a concern. This isn't new business, this is existing business. Even if only structural components could be space-source, and not the electronics or optics, it can still be a financial win.
That depends on the destination for the final product. If you're building something for use off-Earth, using space-based resources from construction allows you to eliminate launch costs for the weight of that thing.
This of course presumes that the launch cost of your asteroid harvester is less than the launch cost of what you're building with the materials. Then again, if one Earth-launched asteroid harvester can get enough raw materials for more than one space-built asteroid harvester, you're on your way. Or to put it in a more Slashdot-memetic way: 1 - Launch asteroid harvester. 2 - Use harvested materials to build more asteroid harvesters, plus other neat space-based stuff. Repeat. 3 - Profit!!
I'm guessing that the problem here is that there can either be executive salaries for chocolate (and coffee) companies in the US, or there can be adequate revenue for sustainable chocolate (and coffee) agriculture outside the US.
Say that their business class service is not sufficiently functional and it's a Comcast problem. This problem will presumably be shared by other Comcast customers, if it's IP address based. It renders their service less valuable, and can be a reason for business class customers to choose another option. They may be losing business today because of this problem.
Perhaps good for people who read, "The Virtue of Selfishness."
To be fair I'm taking that title at exactly its face meaning and coming to the same conclusion as you. However I remember some E.E. Doc Smith books had the "Principle of Enlightened Self Interest" that I could potentially buy into, so I'm still leaving the door just a squeak open for Ayn Rand on this. But only a squeak.
I don't believe Philae has thrusters, much less thrusters that can be fired gently. I get the impression that there is one single-use thruster that was meant to counter the reaction of firing the harpoons, and neither went off as planned. I would guess that at some point they will attempt to manually fire both. But if something goes wrong with that attempt it's very possible that Philae will get launched off of the comet, so they probably want to get as much science done as possible before they even try it.
The bigger problem is the lack of sunlight on the solar cells.
I suspect that some would think that externalizing all possible costs is a legitimate path to higher profitability, and therefore a Good Thing under Capitalism as practices in the US. However I also suspect they'd be very careful who they would actually say that to.
Utter side point, and I'll probably get flamed for this, but since you've said "conservative enough", even as an AC...
It bothers me that I've never heard a Republican utter the phrase, "too conservative." It seems almost past their lexicon, which leaves me thinking that if someone spent the time coming up with conservative-to-the-absurd ideas and threw them out there, there would be Republicans lining up behind them. I would feel much better, like there might even be real political discourse, if some Republican could say that some idea or other is, "too conservative," without being immediately dismissed as being a RINO.
Since this is Slashdot, I'll say that that is another disturbing thing about systemd. From what I can tell by its advocates, there is absolutely nothing wrong with systemd. Any problems at all that show up are because of some piece of software that just isn't working well with systemd, or because of stupid obsolete Unix thought modes that haven't been purged from the rest of the system.
Incidentally, "too liberal" is in my lexicon, as is "too conservative," and I think that there are problems with SysVInit and OpenRC, as well.
Might this have bad implications for those who can keep their appetites and activity levels in decent proportion?
I'm thinking about the fact that airbags can be harmful to kids, because they're tuned for adults. What happens when we start tuning our restraint systems for the obese? Will they continue to function properly for trim people, will they work less effectively, or might they actually become harmful, like airbags for kids? (I would expect that they might become too stiff for old-normal body proportions, for instance.)
Slashdot Mirror
I thought I read that they tested it against cultured human cells in a petri dish, without bad side-effects. That's not whole-animal testing, but it's better than no human testing at all.
First question... Is such a dust cloud inconsistent with a sun-like star somewhere inside the boundaries?
Second question... If a sun-like star can exist there, is such a dust cloud inconsistent with that star having a planetary system like ours?
Third question... Assuming the first two questions pass, and that there could be an Earth-like planet there with life that could look up into the sky and wonder, what would they see?
In other words, is that dust really still a hard vacuum, just seen from a different perspective, or is it really something denser that would alter the view from within?
But the Earth had an oxygen (potentially biosculpted) atmosphere some 500 million years ago. So if someone there has been able to observe Earth and know something about its atmosphere, they'd know that there might be life here. We would count as "interesting".
I've read more recently that there may be other ways to have significant amounts of free oxygen in a planetary atmosphere besides biological processes. I have no idea how probable those ways are compared to life, how stable they are, how "interesting" they are compared to life, etc.
But for the remote sensing schemes we've used on exoplanets, as well as foreseeable improvements to those schemes, Earth would definitely count as "interesting".
Not irrelevant. The parent poster was concerned about protecting his system, then proceeded to discuss protecting from the US without considering other threats.
Plus don't forget, the NSA simply must be the only agency in the world trying to do this sort of thing. I'm sure that no other nation has any interest whatsoever in gathering this type or depth of information, for any reason at all.
Maxwell and Newton were one-in-a-million. (if not more) Do we really want to only harness that small a portion of the human race's mind-power? Yes there will always be some who will have found their motivation in the natural world, and don't need any artifice. But is there really a problem with providing inspiring artifice? Does that make contributions those people make worthless? They may well be second-rate compared to Maxwell or Newton, but that also takes in the vast majority of mankind. To do better seems good.
Which highlights what I'd really like to see added to the ISS - a farm module. Test a farm module on the ISS, getting the concept ready for a Mars mission. Do we really plan to send something on the order of 2 years of consumables on a Mars mission, recycling only the water? We need much more complete recycling, and we'll need it for any permanent presence anywhere beyond Earth. For that matter the only reason we don't need it on Earth is because we've got this giant biosphere that has handled the details pretty well for us, up until the past several decades.
I rather like the idea of such a farm module even on Earth. No doubt it would be designed for compactness, efficiency, and minimal hand-holding. Sounds good to me - put one of those in the back yard and cut the grocery bills. (I realize that the initial outlay is likely prohibitive, but the idea is neat.) There are also likely places on Earth where such a thing would be worthwhile, say Antarctica or other inhospitable locations.
(Note that I didn't say that a farm module would use sunlight - that might not work for Mars, and probably not beyond.)
Bear spray is quite nasty stuff. It's meant to stop something big and mean, or at least pursuade it to look toward less-equipped hikers.
Would you have had the "is ... a weapon?" response had it been tear gas instead of bear spray?
The last hike of the vacation was the Grinnel Glacier Trail, and at the end I gave my can to someone headed up that didn't have one. Wasn't going to do me any good, didn't need it at home even if I could get it on the plane, and they weren't properly equipped to hike in Glacier N.P. without it.
Not really. Certainly NASA has been buying boosters for a long time, but from what I understand those have continued to be on a cost-plus basis, or as some would say, sucking from the government teat. Again, from what I understand, SpaceX is new in that it is delivering fixed-cost launches.
>NASA did all the really hard work (the basic design of space rockets). You know, the Basic Science that costs billions and
>doesn't pay off for decades. You see, private companies are too focused on short term profit generation to basic science.
>That's why it's done on the public dime.
I won't disagree with you. But I also believe that NASA should be allowing basic launch stuff to go to companies like SpaceX, which reap the rewards of all of that public domain knowledge - the fruits of publicly funded NASA research. It's past time for basic Earth orbit access (and somewhat beyond) to be business as usual.
NASA should be moving on to bigger, tougher jobs, targets that are still beyond the horizon of ordinary business, just like space travel was 50 years ago.
Or just read "The Year When Stardust Fell" or "In the Days of the Comet" for other examples. Many would say more interesting ideas, because they're not simple monster movies.
I never tried to mold my daughter, but I also made sure that opportunities for science and technology were there for her. There were numerous signs along the way that she was headed in the direction of the sciences. She's always been interested in critters - We used to go to the Maine seashore, and one of our big activies there was exploring tide-pools. She "adopted" woolie bears in our front yard one fall, building villages for them. When she was in 5th grade, I read "The Hot Zone" with her. For years after she kept a picture of the ebola virus on the wall of her room, and we still trade ebola news over a decade later.
She got her bachelor's and master's degree in biological sciences, and started her PhD. About a year in, she discovered that she really didn't like the life sacrifices of the PhD lifestyle required, especially of a woman. She also realized that she likes the outreach side of science more - bringing science to students and others. She's managed to find a job in that field, while her husband continues to work on his PhD.
She's one terriffic daughter and person.
You forgot to mention that Peter F. Hamilton weaponized some of his tattoos. I presume that's at least part of the reason for your "awesome".
Earth has been advertising itself for more like a half-billion years. An atmosphere with free oxygen is rare, at least we haven't found one yet out of the explanets we've discovered. To be sure, we haven't studied the atmosphere on very many, but at the very least we know how to do so, at least for some.
There has been some suggestion of merely chemical processes that can give rise to free oxygen in the atmosphere, but I don't know how likely (or un) those processes are, and whether they cause the levels the Earth has, especially with traces of methane present at the same time.
We know our atmosphere has been biosculpted, and that would be something others could have seen for half a billion years.
One must assume that any alien civilization capable of interstellar travel would know at least as much as we do about the relevant technologies. That would include something Keplar-like, only better. You don't want to take your first interstellar steps to a place with no relevant planets.
More value was returned to the shareholders. After all, what are they there for, to provide a solution where the free market acts to optimize the situation for both provider and customer, or to use a de-facto monopoly to maximize shareholder value?
We keep launching stuff into space, and launch cost is always a concern. This isn't new business, this is existing business. Even if only structural components could be space-source, and not the electronics or optics, it can still be a financial win.
That depends on the destination for the final product. If you're building something for use off-Earth, using space-based resources from construction allows you to eliminate launch costs for the weight of that thing.
This of course presumes that the launch cost of your asteroid harvester is less than the launch cost of what you're building with the materials. Then again, if one Earth-launched asteroid harvester can get enough raw materials for more than one space-built asteroid harvester, you're on your way. Or to put it in a more Slashdot-memetic way:
1 - Launch asteroid harvester.
2 - Use harvested materials to build more asteroid harvesters, plus other neat space-based stuff. Repeat.
3 - Profit!!
I'm guessing that the problem here is that there can either be executive salaries for chocolate (and coffee) companies in the US, or there can be adequate revenue for sustainable chocolate (and coffee) agriculture outside the US.
Of course we know which is more important.
Say that their business class service is not sufficiently functional and it's a Comcast problem. This problem will presumably be shared by other Comcast customers, if it's IP address based. It renders their service less valuable, and can be a reason for business class customers to choose another option. They may be losing business today because of this problem.
Perhaps good for people who read, "The Virtue of Selfishness."
To be fair I'm taking that title at exactly its face meaning and coming to the same conclusion as you. However I remember some E.E. Doc Smith books had the "Principle of Enlightened Self Interest" that I could potentially buy into, so I'm still leaving the door just a squeak open for Ayn Rand on this. But only a squeak.
I don't believe Philae has thrusters, much less thrusters that can be fired gently. I get the impression that there is one single-use thruster that was meant to counter the reaction of firing the harpoons, and neither went off as planned. I would guess that at some point they will attempt to manually fire both. But if something goes wrong with that attempt it's very possible that Philae will get launched off of the comet, so they probably want to get as much science done as possible before they even try it.
The bigger problem is the lack of sunlight on the solar cells.
I suspect that some would think that externalizing all possible costs is a legitimate path to higher profitability, and therefore a Good Thing under Capitalism as practices in the US. However I also suspect they'd be very careful who they would actually say that to.
Utter side point, and I'll probably get flamed for this, but since you've said "conservative enough", even as an AC...
It bothers me that I've never heard a Republican utter the phrase, "too conservative." It seems almost past their lexicon, which leaves me thinking that if someone spent the time coming up with conservative-to-the-absurd ideas and threw them out there, there would be Republicans lining up behind them. I would feel much better, like there might even be real political discourse, if some Republican could say that some idea or other is, "too conservative," without being immediately dismissed as being a RINO.
Since this is Slashdot, I'll say that that is another disturbing thing about systemd. From what I can tell by its advocates, there is absolutely nothing wrong with systemd. Any problems at all that show up are because of some piece of software that just isn't working well with systemd, or because of stupid obsolete Unix thought modes that haven't been purged from the rest of the system.
Incidentally, "too liberal" is in my lexicon, as is "too conservative," and I think that there are problems with SysVInit and OpenRC, as well.
Unused. I'm a bit amused to hear them refer to their examples as "strongly typed" languages.
Might this have bad implications for those who can keep their appetites and activity levels in decent proportion?
I'm thinking about the fact that airbags can be harmful to kids, because they're tuned for adults. What happens when we start tuning our restraint systems for the obese? Will they continue to function properly for trim people, will they work less effectively, or might they actually become harmful, like airbags for kids? (I would expect that they might become too stiff for old-normal body proportions, for instance.)