Yeah, it's odd that the slashdot crowd missed that.
To be fair, though, in Night's Dawn, there's better power available. For example, antimatter is banned for nonproliferation reasons, but is easy enough to manufacture that the equivalent of today's drug runners are carrying hundreds of grams of it around the galaxy. The reason everyone depends on He3 is that the monopoly is setting reasonable prices, and is intrinsically trustworthy.
One also gets the impression that the characters know how to run fusion without He3, but there's a greater radiation risk that way, so nobody does.
I'm frankly amazed Night's Dawn isn't mentioned - you'd think the entire slashdot crowd would have read it for the sex scenes alone...
Actually there's about 4-5 year-round scientific stations, and several more stations that are occupied only during the summer. McMurdo station alone has hundreds of people during the winter, and thousands in the summer.
The south pole station, which is totally isolated during the winter (the much-publicized medevacs were done at significant risk to the aircraft crews), has 35-50 people then, and hundreds in the summer.
Nobody is supporting having people die there.
on
One-Way Ticket to Mars?
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· Score: 2, Informative
In contrast to a lot of the comments along the lines of "Let's send Bush/Gates/whomever" nobody is supporting sending astronauts to die after a few days when their air runs out.
Sending the equipment to manufacture their own air, and grow some of their own food, as well as a couple of nuclear reactors, is cheaper then sending the fuel to go home, and also means the astronauts don't have to be confined for months twice.
People have lived in the past with little or no contact with civilization - a few dozen scientists and support folks at the South Pole are gearing up to do so now. They won't be able to come home, except in *really* extreme emergency, between February and November because the temperature is cold enough to congeal the fuel of any jet that tried to land.
Granted, they aren't stuck there for life, but they have far less equipment than a Mars expedition would, and they seem to be quite happy - they even develop their own culture over the winter. This is in a place where the average daily temperatures make CO2 a solid, and where it's possible to get severe frostbite just by touching the ground without gloves.
The journal of a recent "winterover" is available here. Read it.
Does Karina seem like she's someone to give up on life? Or merely like someone who was willing to put up with total isolation, being largely trapped in a small station for most of a year, in order to do basic science, and really enjoyed herself in the process?
Nobody is proposing having them die there. It's far, far cheaper to send 30 years of canned food, and the equipment to manufacture oxygen from soil (just a matter of heating it until the Fe3O2 separates) than it is to send the fuel needed to get someone back to Earth, against Mars' surface gravity. Most of the weight on takeoff of any spacecraft is fuel, and a return trip needs that much more fuel - especially if you need a quick takeoff to get through an atmosphere.
I'm highly tempted to go to a few "hacking" groups on EFnet and suggesting just that.
Make the district webpage an HTTP redirect to some "interesting" sites, to start with, then add some "interesting" screensavers to the teacher machines... I don't do that sort of thing, but I know there's folks out there who have read this article and would love to.
As for the easy to jam issue - any sattelite network will be easy to jam for any ground-based station that's able to run off the power grid. Using a single frequency, or narrow frequency range, may make it easier for the EE major with stuff he bought at radio shack to jam you, but it won't help vs. medium to large national governments.
Why the US would WANT to jam Galileo globally, given the diplomatic repurcussions, especially once ships start running aground, is another issue.
You want a secure checksum like SHA-1 rather than a CRC. It might be possible for a 32-bit CRC to, given a ballot with that CRC that was signed, to generate a fake ballot with the same CRC and paste on the signature.
Well the whole advantage of going with the mob (or doing other illegal jobs, like selling weed) is that there are no taxes. You sell the weed for cash, you use the cash to buy groceries etc, and I'm guessing you somehow get enough money in non-cash form to pay rent and bills.
In fact, it's fairly good evidence that humans *can't* solve those problems on large boards. There's a lot of problems humans can't readily solve that computers can solve easily (multiplying multiple-million-digit numbers without error, to start with).
Well a lot of them are/were to some extent mentally/neurologically less than healthy. But if Kasparov has such problems (which I've never heard stated) that does not reflect on humans in general; nor would it prevent him from working in another field.
Gates and Einstein are both believed to have Aspergers. And I'm diagnosed with it, so I would appreciate you not making those kinds of blanket remarks.
Well, the thing is a chess computer can ONLY play chess - a human with the same degree of intelligence can do many other things. Kasparov could have become a doctor, a lawyer, a programmer, or a Go player. Or he could have developed a different aspect of his intelligence and been a poet.
I think computers need true intelligence before they're equal to humans, no matter how well they play one classic board game.
I've heard great things about it... though I've never been any good at it... I'm not even sure what my rating should be, I think I made 25 Kyo (sp?) on one server.
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How do they drive the rovers across that kind of huge time lag anyhow?
Who's Kathleen Fent anyhow? I see her referred to alot on this site.
Damn...
microsoft is going to put those Nigerian money launderers clear out of business!
Yeah, it's odd that the slashdot crowd missed that.
To be fair, though, in Night's Dawn, there's better power available. For example, antimatter is banned for nonproliferation reasons, but is easy enough to manufacture that the equivalent of today's drug runners are carrying hundreds of grams of it around the galaxy. The reason everyone depends on He3 is that the monopoly is setting reasonable prices, and is intrinsically trustworthy.
One also gets the impression that the characters know how to run fusion without He3, but there's a greater radiation risk that way, so nobody does.
I'm frankly amazed Night's Dawn isn't mentioned - you'd think the entire slashdot crowd would have read it for the sex scenes alone...
Agreed. Read my other comments on this article. Have you ever read Red Mars or its sequels?
Actually there's about 4-5 year-round scientific stations, and several more stations that are occupied only during the summer. McMurdo station alone has hundreds of people during the winter, and thousands in the summer.
The south pole station, which is totally isolated during the winter (the much-publicized medevacs were done at significant risk to the aircraft crews), has 35-50 people then, and hundreds in the summer.
In contrast to a lot of the comments along the lines of "Let's send Bush/Gates/whomever" nobody is supporting sending astronauts to die after a few days when their air runs out.
Sending the equipment to manufacture their own air, and grow some of their own food, as well as a couple of nuclear reactors, is cheaper then sending the fuel to go home, and also means the astronauts don't have to be confined for months twice.
People have lived in the past with little or no contact with civilization - a few dozen scientists and support folks at the South Pole are gearing up to do so now. They won't be able to come home, except in *really* extreme emergency, between February and November because the temperature is cold enough to congeal the fuel of any jet that tried to land.
Granted, they aren't stuck there for life, but they have far less equipment than a Mars expedition would, and they seem to be quite happy - they even develop their own culture over the winter. This is in a place where the average daily temperatures make CO2 a solid, and where it's possible to get severe frostbite just by touching the ground without gloves.
The journal of a recent "winterover" is available here. Read it.
Does Karina seem like she's someone to give up on life? Or merely like someone who was willing to put up with total isolation, being largely trapped in a small station for most of a year, in order to do basic science, and really enjoyed herself in the process?
Nobody is proposing having them die there. It's far, far cheaper to send 30 years of canned food, and the equipment to manufacture oxygen from soil (just a matter of heating it until the Fe3O2 separates) than it is to send the fuel needed to get someone back to Earth, against Mars' surface gravity. Most of the weight on takeoff of any spacecraft is fuel, and a return trip needs that much more fuel - especially if you need a quick takeoff to get through an atmosphere.
But it's not possible to actually land on the sun! So how can we be sure he got there OK?
Granted it's quite possible to attempt to land on the sun - is that what you're suggesting?
HHGttG reference right? Where the entire world population is descended from the "Useless" segments of an alien society?
It's quite true.
No, no... Finland is Lunix... Canada is OpenBSD, idiot.
I wonder if you can run OpenBSD on a cellphone. the antenna would probably be off by default though...
I'm highly tempted to go to a few "hacking" groups on EFnet and suggesting just that.
Make the district webpage an HTTP redirect to some "interesting" sites, to start with, then add some "interesting" screensavers to the teacher machines... I don't do that sort of thing, but I know there's folks out there who have read this article and would love to.
Re the seminar... you were charitable. I would have done
$DISPLAY=foo && mozilla http://goatse.cx
maybe with that whole thing inside an infinite loop with a sleep statement so he *thought* he closed mozilla, then in 30 seconds...
As for the easy to jam issue - any sattelite network will be easy to jam for any ground-based station that's able to run off the power grid. Using a single frequency, or narrow frequency range, may make it easier for the EE major with stuff he bought at radio shack to jam you, but it won't help vs. medium to large national governments.
Why the US would WANT to jam Galileo globally, given the diplomatic repurcussions, especially once ships start running aground, is another issue.
Most of that US deficit is against non-EU nations, specifically Japan and the big oil exporters.
I don't know what the situation between the US and the EU alone is, but let's compare apples to apples.
You want a secure checksum like SHA-1 rather than a CRC. It might be possible for a 32-bit CRC to, given a ballot with that CRC that was signed, to generate a fake ballot with the same CRC and paste on the signature.
Isn't that why we have tobacco companies? And industry groups like the MPAA and the RIAA and the GNAA and... wait, never mind.
Well the whole advantage of going with the mob (or doing other illegal jobs, like selling weed) is that there are no taxes. You sell the weed for cash, you use the cash to buy groceries etc, and I'm guessing you somehow get enough money in non-cash form to pay rent and bills.
Not japan, to my knowledge. It's a civilized democracy, and has been for quite some time.
Well yeah, that goes without saying.
In fact, it's fairly good evidence that humans *can't* solve those problems on large boards. There's a lot of problems humans can't readily solve that computers can solve easily (multiplying multiple-million-digit numbers without error, to start with).
Well a lot of them are/were to some extent mentally/neurologically less than healthy. But if Kasparov has such problems (which I've never heard stated) that does not reflect on humans in general; nor would it prevent him from working in another field.
Gates and Einstein are both believed to have Aspergers. And I'm diagnosed with it, so I would appreciate you not making those kinds of blanket remarks.
So basically it's unlikely to be solved anytime soon, for high values of unlikely.
Thanks
Well, the thing is a chess computer can ONLY play chess - a human with the same degree of intelligence can do many other things. Kasparov could have become a doctor, a lawyer, a programmer, or a Go player. Or he could have developed a different aspect of his intelligence and been a poet.
I think computers need true intelligence before they're equal to humans, no matter how well they play one classic board game.
I've heard great things about it... though I've never been any good at it... I'm not even sure what my rating should be, I think I made 25 Kyo (sp?) on one server.
Do you have any suggestions for where to learn?