> Consider the differences in atmosphere and insolation (temperature) just for starters. No > backup is needed - just a few moments thinking about the two enviroments.
The pressure difference will be larger on the Moon than on Mars, so with that regard a suit designed for the Moon. The temperature span is also larger on the moon, and the lack of atmosphere makes cooling more of a challenge. All in all, a Moon suit should do just fine on Mars, while the opposite might not be the case.
That doesn't mean a Moon suit would be optimal for Mars, on Mars you would probably prefer something lighter. On the Moon, you basically need a full space suit, on Mars something less will do.
You can survive in a Moon suit on Earth as well, it is just not very convenient. It won't be on Mars either.
> There is NO WAY that the money spent on lunar exploration justifies its opportunity cost. > ANYTHING upon which you spend the same amount of public funds will bring more benefit to > society than spending it on lunar exploration.
> I'm sure paper ballots work great when your country has less than half the population of Los Angeles.....
The logic behind that kind of statements escape me. If we have the half the population of LA, we also have the same population as half of LA. So have a paper ballot in one half of LA, and another paper ballot in the other half of LA, and add the results.
What you describe is "direct democracy". They had that in Athen. It has all kind of fun effects, like first executing the homecoming officers for leaving their dead beind after a lost battle, then, after realizing that was a bad idea, executing the people who ordered the executions. Or executing one of the worlds greatest philosophers (Socrates) for being a stubborn pain in the ass.
The idea behind representative democracy is to avoid the "heat of the movement" decisions. In fact, the major problem with representative democracy these days, is that with the constant polling and professional politicians who adjust their views to follow the vims of the (voting part of) the population, we are getting closer to direct democracy. Representative democracy works best when politicians actually stand for something.
Can't you vote blank in the US? They always count the blank votes in Danish elections. Of course, they are always paper ballots. Paper ballots works fine, nobody even discuss the option of using anything else.
Many (most?) of the district heating systems in Denmark are community owned. I witnessed it once, someone took initiative to a local heat/power plants, and got a sufficiently large fraction of the community to sign up for it.
For US, it sounds like a perfect fit for the "designed" communities.
I know two boys, one autistic and one with Asperger, and there is no comparison. Judging by those two, the step from "nerd" to Asperger is insignificant compared to the step from Asperger to classic autism.
The whining in this thread seems to be just a case of the US favorite sport of victim-status territorial fights. [ When I lived in US a couple of years, I learned to my surprise that being Scandinavian didn't make me belong to a minority despite there being very few of us around, but that women were a minority, despite also being majority. Weird system. It is probably my autism that prevents me from understanding it. ]
The best metric for the success of the project on the host side will probably be how many host organizations reapply next year.
It is worth remembering that the student isn't the only one who learns from a student/mentor relationship. The mentor will know a lot more about how the problem can (or cannot) be solved after the project, this way the student implementation would act as a prototype.
If a company release some useful free software, it is extremely useful if they also accept the leadership role for the further development that come naturally with being the initial developer. Without such a natural leader, the project development may splinter into competing projects, duplicating each others efforts, and maybe eventually wither away.
If the company accept the leadership role, their success will largely depend on adopting some of the values of the free software community.
And if a clever hacker manage to break into your computer system and transfer all your belonging to himself, that is both morally and legally completely all right. It is, after all, your own damn fault for not keeping your systems in order.
Not making each and every software bug (as the Amazon case was) legally binding would render all contract law void, and reduce civilization to men hitting each other on the head with clubs.
I have never heard it before. The universities use a different system (with a lot of titles, culminating in full professor), and the non-university research centers we collaborate with have a simple two tier system ("researcher" and "senior researcher").
A better method might be the D'Hondt method (a.k.a. Jeffeson's method), I know it is used for committee seats in Denmark. It is hard to understand, rather messy, but rarely questioned, as the results are basically fair.
Science is based on consensus as well. A person might make wonderful discoveries in the lab, but it won't be science unless he can convince other scientists abut their noteworthiness.
What matters isn't where it is based on consensus or not, it always is, but how consensus is achieved. In a democracy, it is about voting. In science, it is about independently unverifiable predictions. In Wikipedia, it is about authoritative references.
Each of these are also based on an underlying consensus about how to achieve the consensus on particular issues.
Any Wikipedia article should ideally be edited by a number of independent people, to ensure that it doesn't just reflect the opinions of a single person. And a number of people should watch over it, to guard it from vandalism.
This is far from the case today for all articles, but the notability criteria should only let articles through for which it is likely to become true one day.
The only people who tend to take any notice of a high-school are located in a very small area surrounding the school. Unless someone gets killed in it.
Star Wars, Star Trek and Pokemon, on the other hand, are all integrated into our culture, and we are likely to see references to them everywhere. References we might want to look up. That is noteworthy, and that is what an encyclopedia is for.
Of your three examples, the E-Wing probably shouldn't be included, it is from "the expanded universe", which has a much lower impact. The Treaty is borderline, the Romulans is an important race, but not one everybody knows. Pikachu should obviously be there, it is the most recognizable figure from the Pokemon universe.
The main reason Google was so much better than AltaVista was that it sorted the results according to a "popularity contest" based on how many other pages referred to it. This was way more useful than sorting according to how often your search term occur in it.
Don't dismiss popularity contests, the popular choice will, almost by definition, usually be the most interesting choice for most people. You may not feel you belong to "most people", most people don't, but if you leave your feeling of elitism and/or alienation aside for a moment, chances are that the popular choice are often also the right one for you in most areas.
Of course, a general search engine that would return the most popular hits "by people with similar tastes as me", would be even better. Such personalized answers results is already done in some book or movie recommendation systems.
This doesn't preclude the need for a good baseline though, something that would put roses higher than dog poo in a "things that smell great" list.
Is that nasty? I'd call it a semi-coherent/. rant containing no personal information, at least none I could decipher in the first third of the message, where I gave up.
Actually, Global *cooling* was a concern thirty years ago.
That's what the GP article said, and that what I repeated in my comment had you read it to the end. One concern doesn't preclude the other. Here is a 30 year old article from the same source about a Warming Earth?
What have happened in the intermediate 30 years is that climate and climate changes has been an increasingly active field of research, and we know a hell of a lot more today than then. Yes, there is also still even more we don't know, but at least now we have a basic agreement on the direction of the curve.
It is perfectly possible that Linus all along just want access to the derived software, and don't care about the ability to use said software on the hardware it was originally bundled with.
Slashdot Mirror
> Consider the differences in atmosphere and insolation (temperature) just for starters. No
> backup is needed - just a few moments thinking about the two enviroments.
The pressure difference will be larger on the Moon than on Mars, so with that regard a suit designed for the Moon. The temperature span is also larger on the moon, and the lack of atmosphere makes cooling more of a challenge. All in all, a Moon suit should do just fine on Mars, while the opposite might not be the case.
That doesn't mean a Moon suit would be optimal for Mars, on Mars you would probably prefer something lighter. On the Moon, you basically need a full space suit, on Mars something less will do.
You can survive in a Moon suit on Earth as well, it is just not very convenient. It won't be on Mars either.
> There is NO WAY that the money spent on lunar exploration justifies its opportunity cost.
> ANYTHING upon which you spend the same amount of public funds will bring more benefit to
> society than spending it on lunar exploration.
Including waging war on foreign nations?
Don't try to mess around with us /. readers, none of us have any sense of humor. Just look at what gets moderated Funny here.
> I'm sure paper ballots work great when your country has less than half the population of Los Angeles.....
The logic behind that kind of statements escape me. If we have the half the population of LA, we also have the same population as half of LA. So have a paper ballot in one half of LA, and another paper ballot in the other half of LA, and add the results.
Hvor svært kan det være?
What you describe is "direct democracy". They had that in Athen. It has all kind of fun effects, like first executing the homecoming officers for leaving their dead beind after a lost battle, then, after realizing that was a bad idea, executing the people who ordered the executions. Or executing one of the worlds greatest philosophers (Socrates) for being a stubborn pain in the ass.
The idea behind representative democracy is to avoid the "heat of the movement" decisions. In fact, the major problem with representative democracy these days, is that with the constant polling and professional politicians who adjust their views to follow the vims of the (voting part of) the population, we are getting closer to direct democracy. Representative democracy works best when politicians actually stand for something.
Can't you vote blank in the US? They always count the blank votes in Danish elections. Of course, they are always paper ballots. Paper ballots works fine, nobody even discuss the option of using anything else.
Many (most?) of the district heating systems in Denmark are community owned. I witnessed it once, someone took initiative to a local heat/power plants, and got a sufficiently large fraction of the community to sign up for it.
For US, it sounds like a perfect fit for the "designed" communities.
I know two boys, one autistic and one with Asperger, and there is no comparison. Judging by those two, the step from "nerd" to Asperger is insignificant compared to the step from Asperger to classic autism.
The whining in this thread seems to be just a case of the US favorite sport of victim-status territorial fights. [ When I lived in US a couple of years, I learned to my surprise that being Scandinavian didn't make me belong to a minority despite there being very few of us around, but that women were a minority, despite also being majority. Weird system. It is probably my autism that prevents me from understanding it. ]
> Many people will be able to put a cap on their resource consumption and just live happily arguing about vi vs. emacs.
Not so. Unless they choose Emacs, they won't be truly happy.
The best metric for the success of the project on the host side will probably be how many host organizations reapply next year.
It is worth remembering that the student isn't the only one who learns from a student/mentor relationship. The mentor will know a lot more about how the problem can (or cannot) be solved after the project, this way the student implementation would act as a prototype.
If a company release some useful free software, it is extremely useful if they also accept the leadership role for the further development that come naturally with being the initial developer. Without such a natural leader, the project development may splinter into competing projects, duplicating each others efforts, and maybe eventually wither away.
If the company accept the leadership role, their success will largely depend on adopting some of the values of the free software community.
And if a clever hacker manage to break into your computer system and transfer all your belonging to himself, that is both morally and legally completely all right. It is, after all, your own damn fault for not keeping your systems in order.
Not making each and every software bug (as the Amazon case was) legally binding would render all contract law void, and reduce civilization to men hitting each other on the head with clubs.
For P = 0 or N = 1.
I have never heard it before. The universities use a different system (with a lot of titles, culminating in full professor), and the non-university research centers we collaborate with have a simple two tier system ("researcher" and "senior researcher").
A better method might be the D'Hondt method (a.k.a. Jeffeson's method), I know it is used for committee seats in Denmark. It is hard to understand, rather messy, but rarely questioned, as the results are basically fair.
Science is based on consensus as well. A person might make wonderful discoveries in the lab, but it won't be science unless he can convince other scientists abut their noteworthiness.
What matters isn't where it is based on consensus or not, it always is, but how consensus is achieved. In a democracy, it is about voting. In science, it is about independently unverifiable predictions. In Wikipedia, it is about authoritative references.
Each of these are also based on an underlying consensus about how to achieve the consensus on particular issues.
Any Wikipedia article should ideally be edited by a number of independent people, to ensure that it doesn't just reflect the opinions of a single person. And a number of people should watch over it, to guard it from vandalism.
This is far from the case today for all articles, but the notability criteria should only let articles through for which it is likely to become true one day.
The only people who tend to take any notice of a high-school are located in a very small area surrounding the school. Unless someone gets killed in it.
Star Wars, Star Trek and Pokemon, on the other hand, are all integrated into our culture, and we are likely to see references to them everywhere. References we might want to look up. That is noteworthy, and that is what an encyclopedia is for.
Of your three examples, the E-Wing probably shouldn't be included, it is from "the expanded universe", which has a much lower impact. The Treaty is borderline, the Romulans is an important race, but not one everybody knows. Pikachu should obviously be there, it is the most recognizable figure from the Pokemon universe.
The main reason Google was so much better than AltaVista was that it sorted the results according to a "popularity contest" based on how many other pages referred to it. This was way more useful than sorting according to how often your search term occur in it.
Don't dismiss popularity contests, the popular choice will, almost by definition, usually be the most interesting choice for most people. You may not feel you belong to "most people", most people don't, but if you leave your feeling of elitism and/or alienation aside for a moment, chances are that the popular choice are often also the right one for you in most areas.
Of course, a general search engine that would return the most popular hits "by people with similar tastes as me", would be even better. Such personalized answers results is already done in some book or movie recommendation systems.
This doesn't preclude the need for a good baseline though, something that would put roses higher than dog poo in a "things that smell great" list.
> It's real easy to beat up on an amateur on Slashdot isn't it?
Yes, and fun too!
> And if I met her, shook her hand?
Then you obviously work for IBM.
That's basic conspiracy theory stuff. Anyone who successfully manage to discredit the conspiracy theory, are themselves a part of the conspiracy.
Is that nasty? I'd call it a semi-coherent /. rant containing no personal information, at least none I could decipher in the first third of the message, where I gave up.
> I don't know if I'd use the word "hardcore", but I have time for games again.
Yeah, but don't expect to go back to 4 hours of gaming a day.
That's what the GP article said, and that what I repeated in my comment had you read it to the end. One concern doesn't preclude the other. Here is a 30 year old article from the same source about a Warming Earth?
What have happened in the intermediate 30 years is that climate and climate changes has been an increasingly active field of research, and we know a hell of a lot more today than then. Yes, there is also still even more we don't know, but at least now we have a basic agreement on the direction of the curve.
It is perfectly possible that Linus all along just want access to the derived software, and don't care about the ability to use said software on the hardware it was originally bundled with.