You do know that healthcare in the US costs about twice as much as say the UK where everybody is covered by the government including unemployed fatties?
The actual outcomes are pretty similar but in the UK you just don't worry about your 'cover' at all. It rarely merits a thought. In the US as I understand it, lack of health cover is a real impediment to starting your own business or changing a job. Particularly if you have an existing chronic condition.
I'm not saying you don't have a point about who makes the rules, but ultimatley the rules in the UK are made by a government that has to be re-elected, how much say do you have over your rules?
"Why do I have to go to bed Daddy, Mohammed's Dad lets him stay up past nine? Your so mean"
"Your criticism of my parental oversight is lacking consideration of cultural congruence. Mohammed's parent have a different ethnic tradition and come from a lower socio economic class, as a result their risk perception of the dangers of staying up late disagree with mine".
'Spelled' sounds terrible to my English ear, we say 'Spelt'.
Generally agree with you that bad spelling makes me less interested in a comment although I am aware that for a lot of slashdot contributors, English is not their first language.
I agree that it's not sensible to try to read too much into our sample of one. That said if intelligent life had occurred 5% of the way through the lifespan of the planet rather than 50% of the way in I'd be a lot more optimistic about it happening elsewhere.
You seem to be conflating two issues, the difficulty of physically travelling to a star and the much less difficult task of communicating with another star system.
So what if we are never likely to get out of our solar system, it has no bearing on whether we could detect an extraterrestrial signal.
At the very least SETI is showing us that there are no nearby signals of the kind they are looking for. That is a thing worth knowing and the costs of establishing it were relatively modest.
The difficulties of actually travelling anywhere are a good reason to ignore those that claim that SETI may be putting us at risk by opening up the possibility of dangerous communications with malevolent aliens.
I personally am pretty pessimistic about there being intelligent life out there, partly because of SETI, partly because of how long it took intelligent life to occur on the only place we know it has occurred. After all our planet only has a lifespan of about 8 billion years or so and it took 4.5 billion for it to happen. If it was somehow inevitable you'd have thought it would have happened a lot sooner.
Still if we survive this century as a civilisation I can't help thinking that we'd begin to broadcast some kind of pulse that could be seen throughout the galaxy, and by that logic you'd think if there was a similar civilisation in our galaxy at this point they might be doing the same. Surely it's worth spending a few million now to check?
Actually China owns about 10% of the USA's debt. Same amount as Japan.
From Wikipedia about 47% of the debt is owned by foreign investors, the top 7 being...
China, Japan, Brazil, Taiwan, Switzerland, Russia, and the United Kingdom holding respectively approximately $1.16 trillion, $1.08 trillion, $230 billion, $178 billion, $145 billion, $143 billion, and $142 billion as of January 2012.
How do you know we haven't had a supernova in the last 4 billion years and why do you say we are in a 1% by 1% by 1% portion of the milky way? Aren't we also in a 0.01% by 0.01% by 0.01% portion of the milky way?
As I understand it, and I'm no expert, this 'lack of supernovae' argumnet is used by creationists and has been thoroughly debunked by astronomers.
I'm English and most of my fellow countrymen are quite happy for Scotland to be independent. Think it would do both countries a lot of good to be honest.
I worked in Glasgow for a while and found everyone perfectly pleasant, whenever a Scot works in England though they seem to get all chippy and resentful for some reason.
Think maybe you're confusing the English with the much smaller bunch of Londoners who dominate our media and other elites. Speaking as a Northerner who's worked in London I can guarantee that they are just as patronising to us as they probably are to you Scots.
I never really bought into the idea that the flaw in Zeno's paradox was that he didn't realise you could split time infinitely, or that using calculus you can sum infinitesimals. I reckon it is a pretty good argument if you accept its premises.
Personally I think you have to look to quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle to find a satisfactory way around it. You can't actually say what precise speed either runner is running at or exactly where they are. Once you factor this in, the assumption that you can split the difference between them into infinitely small steps is just wrong so the paradox disappears.
The article is about using solar power to generate electricity to generate hydrogen, and it says the zinc is reusable in the cycle so you won't have to keep mining it.
I agree we can't expect alien life to use DNA but don't discount the possibility that DNA represents some kind of optimal design for evolutionary purposes.
It might be the equivalent of using a power based place holder system to represent numbers as we do, which is just better than using a symbolic system like the Romans had.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the Taiping Rebellion was led by a Christian visionary called Hong Xiuquan and almost certainly killed more people than any of those three.
It doesn't feature much in Western history so it gets overlooked.
You do know that healthcare in the US costs about twice as much as say the UK where everybody is covered by the government including unemployed fatties?
The actual outcomes are pretty similar but in the UK you just don't worry about your 'cover' at all. It rarely merits a thought. In the US as I understand it, lack of health cover is a real impediment to starting your own business or changing a job. Particularly if you have an existing chronic condition.
I'm not saying you don't have a point about who makes the rules, but ultimatley the rules in the UK are made by a government that has to be re-elected, how much say do you have over your rules?
"Why do I have to go to bed Daddy, Mohammed's Dad lets him stay up past nine? Your so mean"
"Your criticism of my parental oversight is lacking consideration of cultural congruence. Mohammed's parent have a different ethnic tradition and come from a lower socio economic class, as a result their risk perception of the dangers of staying up late disagree with mine".
Who's to say that the world didn't pop into existence 10 minutes ago containing you and your 'memories'.
That's no more or less stupid than it popping into existence 6,000 years ago.
'Spelled' sounds terrible to my English ear, we say 'Spelt'.
Generally agree with you that bad spelling makes me less interested in a comment although I am aware that for a lot of slashdot contributors, English is not their first language.
In my view a government has NO right to keep things secret from its citizens.
So you think we should be told where all of the nuclear subs are?
Or what leads the police are following in every crime?
The addresses and photos of all the undercover agents?
Err, so how do you go from that to 'as big a threat to world peace as nuclear weapons?'
Have you seem a modern port? You think you could do all that from some smugglers beach?
Really? What's your reasoning? Increased smuggling?
I agree that it's not sensible to try to read too much into our sample of one. That said if intelligent life had occurred 5% of the way through the lifespan of the planet rather than 50% of the way in I'd be a lot more optimistic about it happening elsewhere.
You seem to be conflating two issues, the difficulty of physically travelling to a star and the much less difficult task of communicating with another star system.
So what if we are never likely to get out of our solar system, it has no bearing on whether we could detect an extraterrestrial signal.
At the very least SETI is showing us that there are no nearby signals of the kind they are looking for. That is a thing worth knowing and the costs of establishing it were relatively modest.
The difficulties of actually travelling anywhere are a good reason to ignore those that claim that SETI may be putting us at risk by opening up the possibility of dangerous communications with malevolent aliens.
I personally am pretty pessimistic about there being intelligent life out there, partly because of SETI, partly because of how long it took intelligent life to occur on the only place we know it has occurred. After all our planet only has a lifespan of about 8 billion years or so and it took 4.5 billion for it to happen. If it was somehow inevitable you'd have thought it would have happened a lot sooner.
Still if we survive this century as a civilisation I can't help thinking that we'd begin to broadcast some kind of pulse that could be seen throughout the galaxy, and by that logic you'd think if there was a similar civilisation in our galaxy at this point they might be doing the same. Surely it's worth spending a few million now to check?
Doh, got the gallon conversion the wrong way round which puts me out be 10^6.
That sounds a lot more reasonable
I get surface area of oceans is 3.5x10 ^ 14 m2 so a .77mm increase would be 2.31x10 ^ 11 m3
in gallons I make that 8.75 x 10 ^ 8
If a supertanker holds 8.4 x 10^7 gallons then that makes 10 supertankers which still sounds surprisingly low to me.
Where did I go wrong?
Actually China owns about 10% of the USA's debt. Same amount as Japan.
...
From Wikipedia about 47% of the debt is owned by foreign investors, the top 7 being
China, Japan, Brazil, Taiwan, Switzerland, Russia, and the United Kingdom holding respectively approximately $1.16 trillion, $1.08 trillion, $230 billion, $178 billion, $145 billion, $143 billion, and $142 billion as of January 2012.
Give me a word, any word, and I show you that the root of that word is Greek.
Bollocks
How do you know we haven't had a supernova in the last 4 billion years and why do you say we are in a 1% by 1% by 1% portion of the milky way? Aren't we also in a 0.01% by 0.01% by 0.01% portion of the milky way?
As I understand it, and I'm no expert, this 'lack of supernovae' argumnet is used by creationists and has been thoroughly debunked by astronomers.
I'm English and most of my fellow countrymen are quite happy for Scotland to be independent. Think it would do both countries a lot of good to be honest.
I worked in Glasgow for a while and found everyone perfectly pleasant, whenever a Scot works in England though they seem to get all chippy and resentful for some reason.
Think maybe you're confusing the English with the much smaller bunch of Londoners who dominate our media and other elites. Speaking as a Northerner who's worked in London I can guarantee that they are just as patronising to us as they probably are to you Scots.
The article says 'offshore shale gas' though. I know about the stuff in Lancashire, was wondering about where this was.
Anyone know whether this would belong to Scotland or England should the UK break up?
I never really bought into the idea that the flaw in Zeno's paradox was that he didn't realise you could split time infinitely, or that using calculus you can sum infinitesimals. I reckon it is a pretty good argument if you accept its premises.
Personally I think you have to look to quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle to find a satisfactory way around it. You can't actually say what precise speed either runner is running at or exactly where they are. Once you factor this in, the assumption that you can split the difference between them into infinitely small steps is just wrong so the paradox disappears.
Will you please use preview and than insert a backslash when you close an em tag
Am I the only one who gets annoyed when scientific articles use archaic scales like suns?
The article is about using solar power to generate electricity to generate hydrogen, and it says the zinc is reusable in the cycle so you won't have to keep mining it.
What do you consider dubious about 'The Selfish Gene'? I consider it a modern classic myself.
You really think Dawkins is a 'useless moron' do you. How do you justify this?
I don't understand posts like this, what point are you making that should be of interest to anyone else?
And what would that achieve exactly?
I agree we can't expect alien life to use DNA but don't discount the possibility that DNA represents some kind of optimal design for evolutionary purposes.
It might be the equivalent of using a power based place holder system to represent numbers as we do, which is just better than using a symbolic system like the Romans had.