And what will Science say about the universe when the next 10 years of observational data are gathered? Will the Universe be foamy? Or shaped like a doughnut? Or perhaps a big toilet?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
One thing's for sure, all of those retail clerks and stockboys are going to have to retrain as delivery drivers for Fed Ex.
I think it would be kind of neat to see some malls (like Fox Valley in Aurora, IL), converted from retail space to apartments. Think of the interior spaces being converted to year-round indoor leisure parks for tenants. . . You could prolly keep half the stores and restaurants too.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I think that this issue follows from the allegations by French Airbus, that Echelon was used to pass confidential corporate information to Boeing, which was used to gain a very important contract over Airbus.
Things like this could affect the entire economy of the EU - depending on whether this is true, and also what's the extent of such practices. But if that's the case, the EU has a responsibility to protect the privacy, and therefore competitiveness of it's commerce and businesses.
I'm sure that there are some nice nationalistic sentiments that can be spewed here as to why the EU economy is in the shitter compared to the US. But isn't it possible that this is one reason?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
"I think sitting in front of the screen all day has distorted your version of reality and completely fucked up your brain. You would still be using punch cards if it weren't for the development of military technology and space technology during the cold war and the space race. The instinct to SURVIVE drives technology and science forward. Why don't you go farm instead."
You may be right. But I wasn't saying that it was all BAD. I was just saying that it's silly and unrealistic to believe that lofty goals of the "advancement of science" were the main force at work in the space race/cold war. When you dig down to it, yes, it WAS the instinct to SURVIVE, but when you take that to extremes, you start to think thinks like, gee it'd be nice if I ruled the world. Then I could truly optimize this survival thing.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Perhaps NSA knows that a conservative congress will pry open the secrets, and make it all public, and the NSA just wants to protect what it can before the end.
HAW! HAW! HAW!!!
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Like write and GPL a cross-platform, high performance, highly abstracted high-level, 3d API (like QD3D was supposed to be).
Then invent a mind-control ray, and use it on all game developers in the world to force them to abandon DirectX, and switch to the superior technology he wrote (because the fact that it IS superior, means that nobody will use it).
Then people will start writing games in the same way Id did Quake3, simultaneous cross-platform development. The way it should be. The way they do it in Heaven.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Actually I reported that a French team made some 20 nanometers transistors a month ago but of course it didn't make it on Slashdot, as of course only the US can make innovations, and anything else doesn't exist
"But when you look at the French 20 nanometer transistor closely, it looks A LOT like the old Russian design. In fact, they basically bought the design from the Russians, who stole it from US back in the 50's.", he deadpanned.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I DO think a pen makes for an awful pointing device. I DID buy a Wacom, and tried to use it instead of a mouse. It just wasn't as comfortable. The pen is great for sensitive applications, where you need fine control and pressure sensitivity, but for pushing windows and widgets, the mouse is the way to go.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
The $64,000 question is though, as Science used to be of the opinion that OUR solar system was what you could characterize as a "normal" one - small, life-bearing rocky inner planets, big, radioactive, cold, dead gas giants, farther out; which type of solar system is "normal", and how does the distribution of such "normal" solar systems affect the chances of finding intelligent life?
Now, pretty much every extrasolar planetary system we've observed is NOT structured in that way (the way ours is). Granted, because of the methods we're using for observation, (star-wobble, spectrographic filtering), observing a solar system built like ours is probably beyond our current technology, and maybe that's why we haven't observed any yet. Not only can we not detect larger gas-giant planets that orbit relatively far out (like our own solar system), but I also believe that we can't yet detect smaller planets like Earth in other solar systems, wether they're in close-in or far-out orbits. But I also think it's safe to say that a solar system like the ones we've observed other than ours, would not be as likely to bear intelligent life. The presence of such a large mass, in the "goldilocks-zone" of the inner planets, would be very disruptive. Smaller objects would tend to get swept away by the larger objects' periodic influence. The scale of distances among inner planets is much smmaller than among the outer planets, Mercury is many many times closer to Earth than Jupiter. I don't think Science even today has a good model for how these "inner gas giant" systems form. It contradicts the model they came up with to explain OUR solar system. But to say that they don't exist would contradict current observations, so it's the model that has to go. And with it, a lot of suppositions on the distribution of "life-friendly" solar systems in the Universe. At least until we have the technology to detect solar systems that are formed more like ours - and from that we can come to more of a conclusion as to whether there is intelligent life out there. Because if there is, I think it's not likely to be found in solar systems such as those we've observed to date.
So if OUR solar system is "normal", then we can say it's pretty likely that there is a lot of intelligent life out there. If our solar system is *not*, then I'd say it's pretty unlikely that we'll find a LOT of intelligent life out there, but not necessarily NO intelligent life out there. Though our solar system may be an oddball model, it can't be unique.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Well, this planet is also very near the star, (3.3 day orbital period - Mercury is 66 days), and very large (4x Jupiter Mass). I'm betting that it's not anything close to spherical, and I'm also betting that it has no moons, and I'm also betting that it's far LESS hospitable to life than our Jupiter is, and I'm less certain, but I also think it's not likely that there are any intelligent or advanced life-bearing worlds in this solar system.
But I haven't been there, so what do I know?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
that "we're explorers" line is a load of crap. We're capitalists. If it can be proven that we can make buttloads of money (without any scary, risky, large up-front costs), humans will do it.
Why did we go to the moon? As I mentioned in the Chinese space program discussion; cold-war posturing. But I left out the all important (and highly profitable) pork-barrel spending, where large corporations maneuver their own politicians (as in, they 0WN them), into taxing the bejeezus out of the middle class, to buy nice big rockets to scare the bejeezus out of the Ruskies (now the Chinese), the fact that we got to send people to the moon was kind of neat, but beside the main point of: "Capitalism kicks ass, and you sorry Russians couldn't land a man on the moon because you're all lazy slobs wanting a handout".
We don't HAVE to go to Mars. Because there are only two imperitives in life, Death and Taxes. And unless we "go" to Mars in the afterlife, Mars doesn't look to be in the plan.
So until it's cheap enough to go there, or unless some economic incentive can be found to justify the cost, it isn't going to happen, no matter how many little boys (and girls, sorry for being so sexist!) stand outside in their backyards with thier dads (or moms), pointing at a small, twinkling red dot in the sky, and dreaming.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Ford did this. Most recently, with the Mustang, it's advertised at about 310 HP, but people who have bought them, and hooked them up to Dynos (after losing drag races), found out that most 99 Mustangs are putting out somewhere in the 270-285 HP range.
Ford is doing nothing about it, because it's an engine defect, and replacing the engine is about a $8000/car proposition.
Glad I bought German!
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I'm sure the Chinese were all unhappy about nukes being dropped on Japan at the end of world war II. That was a time famous for it's Japanese/Chinese peace and brotherhood.
I'm sure that it was much more vindicating for the Chinese than even for the US smarting from Pearl Harbor. Or haven't you seen "The Last Emporer"?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
"I welcome China to the small club of nations capably of contributing to space research."
Man, do YOU have a distorted view of things. Sputnik, and the things that followed were all about the cold war. Posturing, demonstrating to the world that you could put a nuke in their front yard any day of the week. Further space developments were more of the same; "I can beat you up, but I'll show you that I can also spend 8 hours a day in the gym shooting up steroids and pumping iron until I'm an overdeveloped mutant! Just to drive the point home." Or do you have an alternate explanation as to why we went to the moon, and haven't been back in 25 years, and why we built thousands of nukes in the 80's when we really only need a few hundred to completely fuck over all life on this planet? This is what the entire space program is for.
While it's nice that Science got a free ride for a lot of research, (thanks for the heavy lifters guys, oh, sure, you can use a few, don't forget the press releases, wouldn't want to light one of these bad boys off without the less fortunate nations knowing we got 'em!" it was not done in the name of science, it was done in the name of cold war posturing. Now, China wants in on the game. Well, I don't say welcome, and thanks for reinventing the wheel. I say, SUCKERS! boy, you sure fell for that ABM stuff, hook, line and sinker. I guess we'll be digging you guys out of your economic rubble in another 10 years, just like the former USSR, that is if you don't launch on us. ..
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Re:The humans rights violations are irksome
on
China Enters Space
·
· Score: 1
dream on
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I'm not sure posts get moderated down just because they say they're going to - in most cases. I think that people SAY that in their posts, because they feel like they're going out on a limb, or have low self esteem or something like that, and in reality, they ARE going out on a limb, and it's limbworthy thought that earns good moderation points.
That's the optimist's view, though.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Slashdot Mirror
And what will Science say about the universe when the next 10 years of observational data are gathered? Will the Universe be foamy? Or shaped like a doughnut? Or perhaps a big toilet?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
One thing's for sure, all of those retail clerks and stockboys are going to have to retrain as delivery drivers for Fed Ex.
I think it would be kind of neat to see some malls (like Fox Valley in Aurora, IL), converted from retail space to apartments. Think of the interior spaces being converted to year-round indoor leisure parks for tenants. . . You could prolly keep half the stores and restaurants too.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Just as I've always said.
The best place to hide a tree, is in a forest.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
As far as I'm concerned, SGI bowed out of the workstation market when they began offering intel CPU's running Windows. Like Packard Bell.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I think that this issue follows from the allegations by French Airbus, that Echelon was used to pass confidential corporate information to Boeing, which was used to gain a very important contract over Airbus.
Things like this could affect the entire economy of the EU - depending on whether this is true, and also what's the extent of such practices. But if that's the case, the EU has a responsibility to protect the privacy, and therefore competitiveness of it's commerce and businesses.
I'm sure that there are some nice nationalistic sentiments that can be spewed here as to why the EU economy is in the shitter compared to the US. But isn't it possible that this is one reason?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Why do you think the DOJ got out of it's antitrust trial with a slap on the wrists?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Sounds like a Mindcraft thing to me. . .
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
"I think sitting in front of the screen all day has distorted your version of reality and completely fucked up
your brain. You would still be using punch cards if it weren't for the development of military technology and
space technology during the cold war and the space race. The instinct to SURVIVE drives technology and
science forward. Why don't you go farm instead."
You may be right.
But I wasn't saying that it was all BAD. I was just saying that it's silly and unrealistic to believe that lofty goals of the "advancement of science" were the main force at work in the space race/cold war. When you dig down to it, yes, it WAS the instinct to SURVIVE, but when you take that to extremes, you start to think thinks like, gee it'd be nice if I ruled the world. Then I could truly optimize this survival thing.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
very wishful thinking:
Perhaps NSA knows that a conservative congress will pry open the secrets, and make it all public, and the NSA just wants to protect what it can before the end.
HAW! HAW! HAW!!!
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
So, this Echelon scanning system, it relies on boldface text to trigger?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
He should do something USEFUL.
Like write and GPL a cross-platform, high performance, highly abstracted high-level, 3d API (like QD3D was supposed to be).
Then invent a mind-control ray, and use it on all game developers in the world to force them to abandon DirectX, and switch to the superior technology he wrote (because the fact that it IS superior, means that nobody will use it).
Then people will start writing games in the same way Id did Quake3, simultaneous cross-platform development. The way it should be. The way they do it in Heaven.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
"SPOOOOON!" -the tick.
"there is no spoon" -Neo
"there simultaneously IS and IS NOT a spoon." -Schoedinger.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Actually I reported that a French team made some 20 nanometers transistors a month ago but of course it
didn't make it on Slashdot, as of course only the US can make innovations, and anything else doesn't exist
"But when you look at the French 20 nanometer transistor closely, it looks A LOT like the old Russian design. In fact, they basically bought the design from the Russians, who stole it from US back in the 50's.", he deadpanned.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I DO think a pen makes for an awful pointing device. I DID buy a Wacom, and tried to use it instead of a mouse. It just wasn't as comfortable. The pen is great for sensitive applications, where you need fine control and pressure sensitivity, but for pushing windows and widgets, the mouse is the way to go.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
The $64,000 question is though, as Science used to be of the opinion that OUR solar system was what you could characterize as a "normal" one - small, life-bearing rocky inner planets, big, radioactive, cold, dead gas giants, farther out; which type of solar system is "normal", and how does the distribution of such "normal" solar systems affect the chances of finding intelligent life?
Now, pretty much every extrasolar planetary system we've observed is NOT structured in that way (the way ours is). Granted, because of the methods we're using for observation, (star-wobble, spectrographic filtering), observing a solar system built like ours is probably beyond our current technology, and maybe that's why we haven't observed any yet. Not only can we not detect larger gas-giant planets that orbit relatively far out (like our own solar system), but I also believe that we can't yet detect smaller planets like Earth in other solar systems, wether they're in close-in or far-out orbits. But I also think it's safe to say that a solar system like the ones we've observed other than ours, would not be as likely to bear intelligent life. The presence of such a large mass, in the "goldilocks-zone" of the inner planets, would be very disruptive. Smaller objects would tend to get swept away by the larger objects' periodic influence. The scale of distances among inner planets is much smmaller than among the outer planets, Mercury is many many times closer to Earth than Jupiter.
I don't think Science even today has a good model for how these "inner gas giant" systems form. It contradicts the model they came up with to explain OUR solar system. But to say that they don't exist would contradict current observations, so it's the model that has to go. And with it, a lot of suppositions on the distribution of "life-friendly" solar systems in the Universe. At least until we have the technology to detect solar systems that are formed more like ours - and from that we can come to more of a conclusion as to whether there is intelligent life out there. Because if there is, I think it's not likely to be found in solar systems such as those we've observed to date.
So if OUR solar system is "normal", then we can say it's pretty likely that there is a lot of intelligent life out there. If our solar system is *not*, then I'd say it's pretty unlikely that we'll find a LOT of intelligent life out there, but not necessarily NO intelligent life out there. Though our solar system may be an oddball model, it can't be unique.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Well, this planet is also very near the star, (3.3 day orbital period - Mercury is 66 days), and very large (4x Jupiter Mass). I'm betting that it's not anything close to spherical, and I'm also betting that it has no moons, and I'm also betting that it's far LESS hospitable to life than our Jupiter is, and I'm less certain, but I also think it's not likely that there are any intelligent or advanced life-bearing worlds in this solar system.
But I haven't been there, so what do I know?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
that "we're explorers" line is a load of crap. We're capitalists. If it can be proven that we can make buttloads of money (without any scary, risky, large up-front costs), humans will do it.
Why did we go to the moon?
As I mentioned in the Chinese space program discussion; cold-war posturing. But I left out the all important (and highly profitable) pork-barrel spending, where large corporations maneuver their own politicians (as in, they 0WN them), into taxing the bejeezus out of the middle class, to buy nice big rockets to scare the bejeezus out of the Ruskies (now the Chinese), the fact that we got to send people to the moon was kind of neat, but beside the main point of: "Capitalism kicks ass, and you sorry Russians couldn't land a man on the moon because you're all lazy slobs wanting a handout".
We don't HAVE to go to Mars. Because there are only two imperitives in life, Death and Taxes. And unless we "go" to Mars in the afterlife, Mars doesn't look to be in the plan.
So until it's cheap enough to go there, or unless some economic incentive can be found to justify the cost, it isn't going to happen, no matter how many little boys (and girls, sorry for being so sexist!) stand outside in their backyards with thier dads (or moms), pointing at a small, twinkling red dot in the sky, and dreaming.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Oxygen w/o carbon will get you nowhere, in terms of "Life as we know it".
Carbon is FAR MORE important than oxygen, in that regard.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Ford did this.
Most recently, with the Mustang, it's advertised at about 310 HP, but people who have bought them, and hooked them up to Dynos (after losing drag races), found out that most 99 Mustangs are putting out somewhere in the 270-285 HP range.
Ford is doing nothing about it, because it's an engine defect, and replacing the engine is about a $8000/car proposition.
Glad I bought German!
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Maybe that's what we should do with Microsoft!
Split them into four divisions, hand one over to Sun, one to IBM, one to Apple, and one to Oracle.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I'm sure the Chinese were all unhappy about nukes being dropped on Japan at the end of world war II.
That was a time famous for it's Japanese/Chinese peace and brotherhood.
I'm sure that it was much more vindicating for the Chinese than even for the US smarting from Pearl Harbor. Or haven't you seen "The Last Emporer"?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
"I welcome China to the small club of nations capably of contributing to space research."
.
Man, do YOU have a distorted view of things. Sputnik, and the things that followed were all about the cold war. Posturing, demonstrating to the world that you could put a nuke in their front yard any day of the week.
Further space developments were more of the same; "I can beat you up, but I'll show you that I can also spend 8 hours a day in the gym shooting up steroids and pumping iron until I'm an overdeveloped mutant! Just to drive the point home."
Or do you have an alternate explanation as to why we went to the moon, and haven't been back in 25 years, and why we built thousands of nukes in the 80's when we really only need a few hundred to completely fuck over all life on this planet?
This is what the entire space program is for.
While it's nice that Science got a free ride for a lot of research, (thanks for the heavy lifters guys, oh, sure, you can use a few, don't forget the press releases, wouldn't want to light one of these bad boys off without the less fortunate nations knowing we got 'em!" it was not done in the name of science, it was done in the name of cold war posturing.
Now, China wants in on the game. Well, I don't say welcome, and thanks for reinventing the wheel. I say, SUCKERS! boy, you sure fell for that ABM stuff, hook, line and sinker.
I guess we'll be digging you guys out of your economic rubble in another 10 years, just like the former USSR, that is if you don't launch on us. .
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
dream on
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
It is now "the yellow planet".
No wait, we claim Mars in the name of Communism, so now it's REALLY "the red planet". Well, more accurately, "the people's red planet".
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I'm not sure posts get moderated down just because they say they're going to - in most cases.
I think that people SAY that in their posts, because they feel like they're going out on a limb, or have low self esteem or something like that, and in reality, they ARE going out on a limb, and it's limbworthy thought that earns good moderation points.
That's the optimist's view, though.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".