No, assert(0) is correct: the total energy of a quake varies as the 3/2 power of the seismic moment. Both the Richter and Moment magnitude scales are based around the base-10 logarithm of the seismic moment, but that isn't the same as the total released energy of the quake.
By the way, I noticed that this fact is mentioned in the second paragraph of the very link that you cited. Did you perhaps stop reading after the first?;-)
You are misinformed. Jose Padilla, born in New York, raised in Chicago, is an enemy combatant. Yaser Hamdi, born in Louisiana, is an enemy combatant. Both were being detained in Guantanamo Bay last I heard.
Actually, I don't believe either of them were ever at Guantanamo. Hamdi surrendered his US citizenship as a condition of his release, and was deported to Saudi Arabia, IIRC. Padilla is still being held in a naval brig in South Carolina (or possibly Virginia, I forget which).
That's quite the oversimplification. After taking all the trouble to homeschool a child, how easy will it be for a one-income family to then afford to send these kids to University? Christ, even in a two-income household, it can be rough to have more than one kid in college at a time.
Homeschooling works. If the public schools were eliminated, along with the associated massive government expenditures, maybe taxpayers could actually survive on one income.
Now the trick is convincing one parent (and guess which one) to give up a career and a paycheck, and devote the next twelve years to being a schoolteacher. I really don't see a lot of people jumping on this particular bandwagon here in the 21st century. This also presumes that the parent is qualified to act as a teacher; one unfortunate aspect of homeschooling is that the pupil gets exactly one teacher for the duration of his basic education. I can see how a student could prosper under a knowledgeable parent, but what about the parent with a poor education, and/or no talent in pedagogy? I suppose one could hire a tutor, as you mention, but then there is the issue of expense (and then you're not really homeschooling anymore, either). So, I can see where homeschooling could work in a number of situations, but it's not at all obvious to me that this is a superior alternative in the general case.
Don't tell me this would be worse than our current system. It's not possible to be worse.
That's rubbish. I don't dispute the numerous problems facing schools currently, but we still develop countless scientists, artists, lawyers, doctors, &cet. I don't see the sky falling, in other words.
Ah, you must have read a book about cognitive psychology once. Does cognitive psychology also explain why some people feel the need to be condescending, pretentious twats? That could be some fruitful research.
Because the human being has evolved to talk face to face. Take away the subtle cues of facial expression, body language and conversation requires a great deal more mental effort.
So, should there be a law against my speaking to people in the back seat? After all, if I look into the rear-view mirror to see them, I'm not paying attention to the road. If I *don't* look at them, obviously my brain simply isn't equipped to both imagine what kind of faces they're making at me, *and* drive the car. If one of them should accidentally make a joke, for example, my mind could easily become locked in a fatal rigor sardonicus: "was he trying to be funny? is he laughing at me? I don't know, god damn it, I CAN'T SEE HIS FACE!". And then I would probably drive into a concrete pylon or something.
Of course, I *have* chatted with folks in the back seat without my car exploding, so perhaps these cognitive psychologists are full of shite.
By the way, I disagree with your assertion that driving is not merely a physical activity. In my own experience, I find that eyes and reflexes comprise the bulk of my driving experience. This is especially true in urgent situations, where excessive use of higher brain functions would probably get me killed:-)
this is it. this is the most important statement in the whole freakin big deal. if this is true, then there is a case. if it is not, then it's all bogus.
Have a look at Tanenbaum's web site, where he discusses this. He believes that the ideas came from MINIX (which is almost certainly true), but is quite convinced that none of the code was stolen (which is the issue at hand).
What's out there that we do completely understand? By your rationale, humans should never have migrated out of the mideast, because we wouldn't want to bring our diseases to the virgin forests of Europe.
I think we understand forests pretty well. And the "virgin forests of Europe" were hardly at risk for contracting smallpox, if that's what you mean.
Environmental consciousness is a wonderful thing, but bringing human progress to a screeching halt pending "complete understanding" of anything is ridiculous. Risks have to be taken. When risks are taken, sometimes they go the wrong way, which is what makes them risks. Advocating a "no risk" policy is the best possible way to prevent anything from ever being done.
Well, of course I never said that risks should never be taken, and I'll thank you not to put words in my mouth. But any risk must be balanced against the potential negative consequences should things go awry, and compared against the benefits if everything works out. Game theory, in other words. If it is the word "complete" that bothers you, my point still stands if you leave it out:-)
You are right to say that risks must be taken, but you are mistaken if you believe that you alone can judge what risks are worth balancing against a nebulous "human progress". This must of necessity be determined by as great a consensus of humanity as possible. Advocacy and debate---and a great deal of time.
One last thing---while I don't dispute the benefits likely to accrue from a mission to Mars, it is worth asking whether such benefits couldn't be gained in any other way. For example, would it perhaps be a better use of resources to further explore the depths of our terrestrial oceans, which might as well be another planet in terms of what we know about the darkest depths. Can you give a reasoned argument as to why the funding should be put into space, rather than oceanography? (I say this, by the way, as one who is very excited about the possibility of manned exploration of Mars---but I think it is important that the question be asked).
number four... who gives a sh**, our destiny is to colinate and grow as a succesfull species, at the expense of dead, and/or near-dead planets. Our expansiona and colonization, and security by not putting all our eggs in one basket (earth).. is far more important than any stinking microbes on mars...
That sounds fine, until a colony ship of some advanced civilisation shows up on our doorstep, ready to "terra"form our planet. Just need to get rid of 6 billion microbes first...
And while you may be content sacrificing an entire (putative) ecology in exchange for neater rocket ships, others would say that possible life on another world is a far greater treasure, however advanced. Nevertheless, while the issue of biological contamination should be paramount (in both directions), that should hardly prevent manned exploration, provided reasonable precautions are taken.
But immediate terraforming of Mars, even disregarding the technical problems, is clearly ridiculous. It is rarely a good idea to destroy something before we completely understand it. While concerns about making humanity a harder target for mass extinction are surely valid, we can almost certainly start colonies on the Moon or at L5 with much less work than Mars.
Let's look at some Dept of Labor statistics, shall we? You can find them just like I did (given 5 minutes and an annoying Liberal cry-baby to spank).
Here's a hint, look under Employment Situation:
Jan 94: 121,971,000 employed. 65,286,000 not in workforce.
Jan 04: 138,566,000 employed. 75,298,000 not in workforce.
"Liberal cry-baby" ad hominem aside, it is of course the ratio of these numbers that we are interested in, not the absolute figures. By your measure, China and India have the strongest employment figures, because they have hundreds of millions more people working! The drop between the '94 and '04 figures you quote is a few tenths of a percent. No impending doom, to be sure, but hardly cause for celebration, or triumphalist chest-beating, come to that.
While there are significantly more people not in the workforce, I submit to you that most of those are retired! (baby boomers getting older, that sort of thing)
While that's partly true, most of the uptake in the "not in workforce" category is due to the increasing number of folks who are unemployed and have given up looking for work. Actually, this is discussed explicitly in the text of the report whose numbers you cite, so I presume you have read it. Anyone who had not actively looked for employment in the four weeks preceding the survey were counted as out of the workforce, but no longer considered technically unemployed either...
This is a concept the young liberalcrat, left wing, econ-morons need to deal with, or they'll get left behind
Yeah, if only we had some sort of spy satellite that was capable of tracking ground targets as big as a freight truck...
Also, if you truly believe that the entire infrastructure necessary for the development and production of chemical or biological weapons can be fit into an 18-wheeler, you've been reading too many Tom Clancy novels.
And calling me an idiot, while no doubt satisfying to your spinal column, does short-change your prefrontal lobe a bit. Either come up with a more cogent argument, or a more clever put-down.
What UN Inspection thing? You mean a dozen guys driving a jeep on a spot surprise insepction and suddenly getting caught in a roadblock until they told the Iraqi thug where their surprise inspection was going to be? Then another 45 minutes while they waited for the roadblock to "clear?"
Because, of course, any serious attempt at constructing these weapons could easily be hidden in under an hour, leaving no trace of their existence. Now we know where Santa's elves spend the off season.
It's fools like you who think with about three brain cells that get fooled by meaningless, symbolic gestures. It's a damn shame you can vote, too because then some intelligent, thinking person has to waste their ballot to counter your idiot vote.
The Kuwaiti Oil Fires / Nuclear Winter thing was Carl Sagan. Pretty much the entire nuclear winter thing has been discredited as pop / junk science at this point.
I've seen no credible refutation of the Nuclear Winter hypothesis, and would be interested to see any references you may have on this point. Conflating this with the Kuwaiti Oil Fires merely clouds the issue, if you'll forgive the expression. Junk science? I think that remains to be seen (hopefully not anytime soon...)
Sagan was a MASTER science popularizer and spokesman, in the end, he wasn't a very good scientist.
He was a highly-regarded planetary scientist, though it is true that he was more of a bureaucrat for the latter part of his career. Most of his work was done in large collaborations, but that can hardly be held against him.
I remember ages ago reading an EXTREMELY unflattering interview with ACC where the reviewer came away hinting (broadly) that he was a self-obsessed has-been. Looking at the onion article and seeing some of the stuff he does (name-dropping Kubrick, deciding the most important recent invention was something he predicted (satellite)
Given his close and productive relationship with Kubrick, I think one could hardly call this name-dropping (they were known to be close personal friends). Also, he didn't "predict" the communications satellite, but did in fact invent it; hardly misplaced pride in this case.
I've lost a lot of the vast respect I used to have for ACC (and that's not even mentioning the - unproven - allegations about the young boys surrounding him)
I hadn't heard that; but given that the allegations are unproven, perhaps the man has earned the benefit of the doubt.
Interesting, I missed that. Allow me to withdraw my previous comment with apologies, even if the parent felt the need to express themselves with maximum smugness. At least he isn't wrong.
We pretty much have break-even fusion today, the problems are basically engineering at this point.
The problem has always been engineering, really. We've had "break-even" fusion for many years. At the risk of sounding cynical, I'll believe it when I see it.
The moon is a giant rock that happens to be covered in a consistent layer of Helium 3. Harvesting that could, combined with the advent of Fusion power, provide us enough power to light the entire planet for thousands of years.
Since we haven't yet figured out how to produce useful energy from hydrogen fusion (hydrogen bombs don't count, presumably...), talking about exploiting the Moon's atmosphere for helium fusion is just nonsense. Even assuming we could produce the vastly higher temperatures and pressures required, at around 1000 atoms per cubic centimeter, there's not a whole hell of a lot there as it is.
Plus, what we don't find a direct commmercial use for we can always drop down the gravity well on terrorists at really nice velocities.
Re:What about other software?
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Mplayer Revisited
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· Score: 2, Insightful
In other words, spread all resources as thin as possible instead of making one big kick-ass killer app. All in the name of idealist "diversity."
You assume that adding more people to this project will automatically make it a bigger, better "killer app". That is not at all obvious, given what we know about human nature.
All that matters is net output. That's it.
All that matters to *you* is net output. You can hardly fault the developers for not seeing it that way. They are happy to contribute their efforts to improving media playback on linux, and have made enormous progress in that regard. Beyond that, they really don't owe anything to you or the rest of the community. But you speak as though they were salaried employees!
How worried should I really be about this? And what steps should I be taking (or ask dad to take)? Since I gather Lindows is similar to Debian, should I just look for a Debian tutorial?
If you don't log on to your computer from another machine at school or wherever, then the safest thing would be to ensure that the ssh daemon is disabled. You can test this by just trying a "ssh localhost" at a command prompt. If you get a "Connection Refused" message, you're probably fine. To make sure, try executing "/etc/init.d/ssh stop" as root (might also be/etc/init.d/sshd, not sure about Lindows). It will come back on after a reboot though, so you'll want a more permanent solution, which involves moving one of the startup scripts in a/etc/init.d/ subdirectory. If you have trouble, reply and we'll get you sorted out.
Why not have the distance between the mirrors as (1/(n^2) + 2w) where w is the wavelength of the beam of light?
Because the required energy of the particle should then approach infinity as the mirror distance approached zero.
Thank you for the link, though I found it to be especially glib and facile when making this connection. I'm sorry to say that it did little to clarify the situation, beyond throwing in a handwaiving assertion about how special relativity
answers Zeno's concern over the lack of an instantaneous difference between a moving and a non-moving arrow by positing a fundamental re-structuring the basic way in which space and time fit together, such that there really is an instantaneous difference between a moving and a non-moving object, insofar as it makes sense to speak of "an instant" of a physical system with mutually moving elements.
While it is true that the special theory redefined the interaction between space and time from the classical notion of the absolute, the argument here involves simultaneity in a very weak way. When discussing the work of Rindler and Heath, the author shows a few diagrams, and then basically equates Zeno's notion of time to that of Einstein's, without sullying himself with a proof. Also, I cannot seem to find any attribution for this passage you refer to---I gather it is an article in "Reflections on Relativity", but I cannot seem to find an author anywhere. Did I miss it somewhere?
Perhaps you could recast the argument in your own words? I may simply be missing something in this passage.
While an inventive thought experiment, you neglected to mention that the reflecting beam of light possesses a wavelength. When the separation between the two mirrors drops below this wavelength, your assumption about beam reflection from a surface breaks down.
In fact, 'poor Zeno' was well ahead of his time, not only arguing against infinitely divisible, but also touching on Relativity! His 'stadium' paradox of two bodies of objects passing each other essencially begs the solution of Special Relatively.
Right on the first point, but the last point is not at all clear to me. Special relativity shows that simple-minded Galilean transforms cause electrodynamics to break, but that a Lorentz transform preserves these relationships. Could you elaborate on why you think special relativity is involved here?
How do 12 aircraft carriers stop box cutter wielding fanatics hijack a plane and crash it into the White House?
They don't need to. Half a dozen brave passengers were all that was needed. I doubt you will ever again see a successful hijacking in this country, or probably anywhere else for that matter.
Agreed. This was a ruse that could only ever work once. Standard response to a hijacking was ruthlessly exploited.
the USA seems to be armed to the teeth with OFFENSIVE weapons...
Yup. and you ain't seen nuthin' yet. When we perfect directed energy weapons and anti-missile defenses, we'll dictate peace to everyone in the world, or destroy their military capability with impunity. Get used to it.
This kind of talk may assuage the ego, and get the testosterone going, but ultimately it's a little short on forward thinking. If this is your technique for obtaining firm erections, kindly ignore my post and go enjoy yourself. Otherwise...
I would say that all of this misses the point, which is that single actors, or small groups, have a power far out of proportion to their size given modern technology. Your thinking may have been appropriate, or at least understandable, fifty or a hundred years ago, when the damage a group of combatants could do was limited by the ammunition and explosives they could carry. This is no longer the case. The ongoing tide of scientific progress ensures that it is now possible for small groups of people to kill far more people than they could with submachine guns and a few kilos of C4, "directed energy weapons and anti-missile defenses" notwithstanding.
Interestingly, a previous poster brought up the connection between exaggerated defense spending in the late Soviet Union, and the ensuing economic collapse in the late 1980s. This in the context of Reagan and his "evil empire" rhetoric, and the corresponding ramp-up in domestic defense spending. It would be strange indeed if a similar fate befell us. We may possess technological supremacy unmatched in history, but we cannot possibly take on the entire planet, testosterone injections or no.
I must confess I find these proclamations of a Pax Americana from my fellow countrymen more than a little troubling. We quickly forgot George Washington's appeal as he left the presidency (and Eisenhower's dire warnings as well, if you'll remember).
You friggin' Euro-weenies are going to accuse us of imperialism no matter what we do, so in my opinion we may as well go Roman and bend the rest of the world to our will by force.
Leaving aside the ad hominem nonsense, it's worthwhile to note that, given how the Romans ended up, your statement isn't as convincing as you may have hoped.
We have nothing worthwhile to learn from moldering European welfare states or Third World pest holes. We'll remake the world in our image, and ten thousand years from now, your descendants will thank God we did.
When we refuse to learn from anyone else, we become prone to repeating some pretty awful mistakes. There's a reason why Europeans tend to find military action so horrific---they've all lost their share of bloody conflicts. We really haven't had that terrible, hard-won experience, and as a consequence we have a kind of blind triumphalism which will have us stepping on land mines if we're not careful. Staying on this course of constant attack and constant supremacy not only threatens to savage our powerful economy, but the underpinnings of our democracy also. In the event, it is likely that the only "descendants" we would leave would be intelligent cockroaches.
Continuing to fly the shuttle,l and explore space is definitely the best memorial they could ever give to the people on Columbia.
Not to sound unsympathetic, but we've explored low-earth orbit pretty well by now. Truth be told, the shuttle program has been a solution in search of a problem for many years now. Little to no publishable research has come out of the scientific experiments undertaken on the shuttle flights. The scientific experiments on the last Columbia flight were essentially meaningless. This is common knowledge to most folks in the industry, and is approaching the level of an inside joke.
I'm beginning to think that NASA is stuck in a rut regarding the space shuttle. Shuttle launches are still extremely expensive (which was the whole reason that they were developed in the first place), and have a miserable rate of return, irrespective of whether your metric is scientific of economic. The best reason for keeping the shuttle around now is to support the ISS. Given the anemic state of the ISS (to put it kindly), this raison d'etre is starting to evaporate.
I'm a huge supporter of NASA, and the concept of manned space exploration, but I'm starting to see the shuttle program as an enormous leech, diverting resources that could be used to further the R&D and space exploration at the heart of NASA's mandate. They keep launching shuttles though, accomplishing precisely bugger all, and no one in this organisation seems to be thinking about where to go from here (this is not true, of course, but one could be forgiven for thinking so). I wish it were otherwise, and I wish that NASA could reclaim the vision that gave us the Apollo program, and the Viking, Voyager, Mariner and Pioneer-series probes. Galileo and Cassini are steps in the right direction, but ultimately I think NASA must either terminate the shuttle program, or apply it towards a real program of research and exploration. Zero-g nematode growth just isn't worth the lives of seven humans.
Slashdot Mirror
No, assert(0) is correct: the total energy of a quake varies as the 3/2 power of the seismic moment. Both the Richter and Moment magnitude scales are based around the base-10 logarithm of the seismic moment, but that isn't the same as the total released energy of the quake.
By the way, I noticed that this fact is mentioned in the second paragraph of the very link that you cited. Did you perhaps stop reading after the first? ;-)
Spreading rumours about Archimede's marvelous machines must have been a pretty good deterrent to invasion.
:-)
Sadly, it didn't work out that way. Archimedes was killed by a Roman legionnaire when the general Marcellus sacked Syracuse in the 3rd century BCE.
Or maybe the Romans took Archimedes devices as a challenge
Cheers,
Mouser
You are wrong about Hamdi, according to this page:
Yeah, could be. My mistake. But he's certainly not there anymore, which I guess was the main point.
Mouser
You are misinformed. Jose Padilla, born in New York, raised in Chicago, is an enemy combatant. Yaser Hamdi, born in Louisiana, is an enemy combatant. Both were being detained in Guantanamo Bay last I heard.
Actually, I don't believe either of them were ever at Guantanamo. Hamdi surrendered his US citizenship as a condition of his release, and was deported to Saudi Arabia, IIRC. Padilla is still being held in a naval brig in South Carolina (or possibly Virginia, I forget which).
Mouser
The volvo is more important then the kids.
That's quite the oversimplification. After taking all the trouble to homeschool a child, how easy will it be for a one-income family to then afford to send these kids to University? Christ, even in a two-income household, it can be rough to have more than one kid in college at a time.
Mouser
Homeschooling works. If the public schools were eliminated, along with the associated massive government expenditures, maybe taxpayers could actually survive on one income.
Now the trick is convincing one parent (and guess which one) to give up a career and a paycheck, and devote the next twelve years to being a schoolteacher. I really don't see a lot of people jumping on this particular bandwagon here in the 21st century. This also presumes that the parent is qualified to act as a teacher; one unfortunate aspect of homeschooling is that the pupil gets exactly one teacher for the duration of his basic education. I can see how a student could prosper under a knowledgeable parent, but what about the parent with a poor education, and/or no talent in pedagogy? I suppose one could hire a tutor, as you mention, but then there is the issue of expense (and then you're not really homeschooling anymore, either). So, I can see where homeschooling could work in a number of situations, but it's not at all obvious to me that this is a superior alternative in the general case.
Don't tell me this would be worse than our current system. It's not possible to be worse.
That's rubbish. I don't dispute the numerous problems facing schools currently, but we still develop countless scientists, artists, lawyers, doctors, &cet. I don't see the sky falling, in other words.
Cheers,
Mouser
Learn something about cognitive psychology.
Ah, you must have read a book about cognitive psychology once. Does cognitive psychology also explain why some people feel the need to be condescending, pretentious twats? That could be some fruitful research.
Because the human being has evolved to talk face to face. Take away the subtle cues of facial expression, body language and conversation requires a great deal more mental effort.
So, should there be a law against my speaking to people in the back seat? After all, if I look into the rear-view mirror to see them, I'm not paying attention to the road. If I *don't* look at them, obviously my brain simply isn't equipped to both imagine what kind of faces they're making at me, *and* drive the car. If one of them should accidentally make a joke, for example, my mind could easily become locked in a fatal rigor sardonicus: "was he trying to be funny? is he laughing at me? I don't know, god damn it, I CAN'T SEE HIS FACE!". And then I would probably drive into a concrete pylon or something.
Of course, I *have* chatted with folks in the back seat without my car exploding, so perhaps these cognitive psychologists are full of shite.
By the way, I disagree with your assertion that driving is not merely a physical activity. In my own experience, I find that eyes and reflexes comprise the bulk of my driving experience. This is especially true in urgent situations, where excessive use of higher brain functions would probably get me killed
Cheers,
M.
Have a look at Tanenbaum's web site, where he discusses this. He believes that the ideas came from MINIX (which is almost certainly true), but is quite convinced that none of the code was stolen (which is the issue at hand).
Cheers,
Mouser
Glad to see I'm not the only one who gets high before reading Slashdot...
What's out there that we do completely understand? By your rationale, humans should never have migrated out of the mideast, because we wouldn't want to bring our diseases to the virgin forests of Europe.
I think we understand forests pretty well. And the "virgin forests of Europe" were hardly at risk for contracting smallpox, if that's what you mean.
Environmental consciousness is a wonderful thing, but bringing human progress to a screeching halt pending "complete understanding" of anything is ridiculous. Risks have to be taken. When risks are taken, sometimes they go the wrong way, which is what makes them risks. Advocating a "no risk" policy is the best possible way to prevent anything from ever being done.
Well, of course I never said that risks should never be taken, and I'll thank you not to put words in my mouth. But any risk must be balanced against the potential negative consequences should things go awry, and compared against the benefits if everything works out. Game theory, in other words. If it is the word "complete" that bothers you, my point still stands if you leave it out
You are right to say that risks must be taken, but you are mistaken if you believe that you alone can judge what risks are worth balancing against a nebulous "human progress". This must of necessity be determined by as great a consensus of humanity as possible. Advocacy and debate---and a great deal of time.
One last thing---while I don't dispute the benefits likely to accrue from a mission to Mars, it is worth asking whether such benefits couldn't be gained in any other way. For example, would it perhaps be a better use of resources to further explore the depths of our terrestrial oceans, which might as well be another planet in terms of what we know about the darkest depths. Can you give a reasoned argument as to why the funding should be put into space, rather than oceanography? (I say this, by the way, as one who is very excited about the possibility of manned exploration of Mars---but I think it is important that the question be asked).
Mouser
number four... who gives a sh**, our destiny is to colinate and grow as a succesfull species, at the expense of dead, and/or near-dead planets. Our expansiona and colonization, and security by not putting all our eggs in one basket (earth).. is far more important than any stinking microbes on mars...
That sounds fine, until a colony ship of some advanced civilisation shows up on our doorstep, ready to "terra"form our planet. Just need to get rid of 6 billion microbes first...
And while you may be content sacrificing an entire (putative) ecology in exchange for neater rocket ships, others would say that possible life on another world is a far greater treasure, however advanced. Nevertheless, while the issue of biological contamination should be paramount (in both directions), that should hardly prevent manned exploration, provided reasonable precautions are taken.
But immediate terraforming of Mars, even disregarding the technical problems, is clearly ridiculous. It is rarely a good idea to destroy something before we completely understand it. While concerns about making humanity a harder target for mass extinction are surely valid, we can almost certainly start colonies on the Moon or at L5 with much less work than Mars.
Cheers,
Mouser
Here's a hint, look under Employment Situation:
Jan 94: 121,971,000 employed. 65,286,000 not in workforce.
Jan 04: 138,566,000 employed. 75,298,000 not in workforce.
"Liberal cry-baby" ad hominem aside, it is of course the ratio of these numbers that we are interested in, not the absolute figures. By your measure, China and India have the strongest employment figures, because they have hundreds of millions more people working! The drop between the '94 and '04 figures you quote is a few tenths of a percent. No impending doom, to be sure, but hardly cause for celebration, or triumphalist chest-beating, come to that.
While there are significantly more people not in the workforce, I submit to you that most of those are retired! (baby boomers getting older, that sort of thing)
While that's partly true, most of the uptake in the "not in workforce" category is due to the increasing number of folks who are unemployed and have given up looking for work. Actually, this is discussed explicitly in the text of the report whose numbers you cite, so I presume you have read it. Anyone who had not actively looked for employment in the four weeks preceding the survey were counted as out of the workforce, but no longer considered technically unemployed either...
This is a concept the young liberalcrat, left wing, econ-morons need to deal with, or they'll get left behind
That's not much of an argument.
Mouser
It only takes a Freight truck, you idiot.
Yeah, if only we had some sort of spy satellite that was capable of tracking ground targets as big as a freight truck...
Also, if you truly believe that the entire infrastructure necessary for the development and production of chemical or biological weapons can be fit into an 18-wheeler, you've been reading too many Tom Clancy novels.
And calling me an idiot, while no doubt satisfying to your spinal column, does short-change your prefrontal lobe a bit. Either come up with a more cogent argument, or a more clever put-down.
Mouser
What UN Inspection thing? You mean a dozen guys driving a jeep on a spot surprise insepction and suddenly getting caught in a roadblock until they told the Iraqi thug where their surprise inspection was going to be? Then another 45 minutes while they waited for the roadblock to "clear?"
Because, of course, any serious attempt at constructing these weapons could easily be hidden in under an hour, leaving no trace of their existence. Now we know where Santa's elves spend the off season.
It's fools like you who think with about three brain cells that get fooled by meaningless, symbolic gestures. It's a damn shame you can vote, too because then some intelligent, thinking person has to waste their ballot to counter your idiot vote.
Funny, I was just thinking that.
Mouser
The Kuwaiti Oil Fires / Nuclear Winter thing was Carl Sagan. Pretty much the entire nuclear winter thing has been discredited as pop / junk science at this point.
I've seen no credible refutation of the Nuclear Winter hypothesis, and would be interested to see any references you may have on this point. Conflating this with the Kuwaiti Oil Fires merely clouds the issue, if you'll forgive the expression. Junk science? I think that remains to be seen (hopefully not anytime soon...)
Sagan was a MASTER science popularizer and spokesman, in the end, he wasn't a very good scientist.
He was a highly-regarded planetary scientist, though it is true that he was more of a bureaucrat for the latter part of his career. Most of his work was done in large collaborations, but that can hardly be held against him.
Cheers,
Mouser
I remember ages ago reading an EXTREMELY unflattering interview with ACC where the reviewer came away hinting (broadly) that he was a self-obsessed has-been. Looking at the onion article and seeing some of the stuff he does (name-dropping Kubrick, deciding the most important recent invention was something he predicted (satellite)
Given his close and productive relationship with Kubrick, I think one could hardly call this name-dropping (they were known to be close personal friends). Also, he didn't "predict" the communications satellite, but did in fact invent it; hardly misplaced pride in this case.
I've lost a lot of the vast respect I used to have for ACC (and that's not even mentioning the - unproven - allegations about the young boys surrounding him)
I hadn't heard that; but given that the allegations are unproven, perhaps the man has earned the benefit of the doubt.
Mouser
Interesting, I missed that. Allow me to withdraw my previous comment with apologies, even if the parent felt the need to express themselves with maximum smugness. At least he isn't wrong.
We pretty much have break-even fusion today, the problems are basically engineering at this point.
The problem has always been engineering, really. We've had "break-even" fusion for many years. At the risk of sounding cynical, I'll believe it when I see it.
Cheers,
Mouser
Since we haven't yet figured out how to produce useful energy from hydrogen fusion (hydrogen bombs don't count, presumably...), talking about exploiting the Moon's atmosphere for helium fusion is just nonsense. Even assuming we could produce the vastly higher temperatures and pressures required, at around 1000 atoms per cubic centimeter, there's not a whole hell of a lot there as it is.
Plus, what we don't find a direct commmercial use for we can always drop down the gravity well on terrorists at really nice velocities.
What's good for the goose...
Mouser
And you know this how?
In other words, spread all resources as thin as possible instead of making one big kick-ass killer app. All in the name of idealist "diversity."
You assume that adding more people to this project will automatically make it a bigger, better "killer app". That is not at all obvious, given what we know about human nature.
All that matters is net output. That's it.
All that matters to *you* is net output. You can hardly fault the developers for not seeing it that way. They are happy to contribute their efforts to improving media playback on linux, and have made enormous progress in that regard. Beyond that, they really don't owe anything to you or the rest of the community. But you speak as though they were salaried employees!
Cheers,
Mouser
How worried should I really be about this? And what steps should I be taking (or ask dad to take)? Since I gather Lindows is similar to Debian, should I just look for a Debian tutorial?
/etc/init.d/sshd, not sure about Lindows). It will come back on after a reboot though, so you'll want a more permanent solution, which involves moving one of the startup scripts in a /etc/init.d/ subdirectory. If you have trouble, reply and we'll get you sorted out.
If you don't log on to your computer from another machine at school or wherever, then the safest thing would be to ensure that the ssh daemon is disabled. You can test this by just trying a "ssh localhost" at a command prompt. If you get a "Connection Refused" message, you're probably fine. To make sure, try executing "/etc/init.d/ssh stop" as root (might also be
Cheers,
Mouser
Because the required energy of the particle should then approach infinity as the mirror distance approached zero.
Thank you for the link, though I found it to be especially glib and facile when making this connection. I'm sorry to say that it did little to clarify the situation, beyond throwing in a handwaiving assertion about how special relativity
While it is true that the special theory redefined the interaction between space and time from the classical notion of the absolute, the argument here involves simultaneity in a very weak way. When discussing the work of Rindler and Heath, the author shows a few diagrams, and then basically equates Zeno's notion of time to that of Einstein's, without sullying himself with a proof. Also, I cannot seem to find any attribution for this passage you refer to---I gather it is an article in "Reflections on Relativity", but I cannot seem to find an author anywhere. Did I miss it somewhere?Perhaps you could recast the argument in your own words? I may simply be missing something in this passage.
Cheers,
Mouser
While an inventive thought experiment, you neglected to mention that the reflecting beam of light possesses a wavelength. When the separation between the two mirrors drops below this wavelength, your assumption about beam reflection from a surface breaks down.
In fact, 'poor Zeno' was well ahead of his time, not only arguing against infinitely divisible, but also touching on Relativity! His 'stadium' paradox of two bodies of objects passing each other essencially begs the solution of Special Relatively.
Right on the first point, but the last point is not at all clear to me. Special relativity shows that simple-minded Galilean transforms cause electrodynamics to break, but that a Lorentz transform preserves these relationships. Could you elaborate on why you think special relativity is involved here?
Mouser
How do 12 aircraft carriers stop box cutter wielding fanatics hijack a plane and crash it into the White House?
They don't need to. Half a dozen brave passengers were all that was needed. I doubt you will ever again see a successful hijacking in this country, or probably anywhere else for that matter.
Agreed. This was a ruse that could only ever work once. Standard response to a hijacking was ruthlessly exploited.
the USA seems to be armed to the teeth with OFFENSIVE weapons...
Yup. and you ain't seen nuthin' yet. When we perfect directed energy weapons and anti-missile defenses, we'll dictate peace to everyone in the world, or destroy their military capability with impunity. Get used to it.
This kind of talk may assuage the ego, and get the testosterone going, but ultimately it's a little short on forward thinking. If this is your technique for obtaining firm erections, kindly ignore my post and go enjoy yourself. Otherwise...
I would say that all of this misses the point, which is that single actors, or small groups, have a power far out of proportion to their size given modern technology. Your thinking may have been appropriate, or at least understandable, fifty or a hundred years ago, when the damage a group of combatants could do was limited by the ammunition and explosives they could carry. This is no longer the case. The ongoing tide of scientific progress ensures that it is now possible for small groups of people to kill far more people than they could with submachine guns and a few kilos of C4, "directed energy weapons and anti-missile defenses" notwithstanding.
Interestingly, a previous poster brought up the connection between exaggerated defense spending in the late Soviet Union, and the ensuing economic collapse in the late 1980s. This in the context of Reagan and his "evil empire" rhetoric, and the corresponding ramp-up in domestic defense spending. It would be strange indeed if a similar fate befell us. We may possess technological supremacy unmatched in history, but we cannot possibly take on the entire planet, testosterone injections or no.
I must confess I find these proclamations of a Pax Americana from my fellow countrymen more than a little troubling. We quickly forgot George Washington's appeal as he left the presidency (and Eisenhower's dire warnings as well, if you'll remember).
You friggin' Euro-weenies are going to accuse us of imperialism no matter what we do, so in my opinion we may as well go Roman and bend the rest of the world to our will by force.
Leaving aside the ad hominem nonsense, it's worthwhile to note that, given how the Romans ended up, your statement isn't as convincing as you may have hoped.
We have nothing worthwhile to learn from moldering European welfare states or Third World pest holes. We'll remake the world in our image, and ten thousand years from now, your descendants will thank God we did.
When we refuse to learn from anyone else, we become prone to repeating some pretty awful mistakes. There's a reason why Europeans tend to find military action so horrific---they've all lost their share of bloody conflicts. We really haven't had that terrible, hard-won experience, and as a consequence we have a kind of blind triumphalism which will have us stepping on land mines if we're not careful. Staying on this course of constant attack and constant supremacy not only threatens to savage our powerful economy, but the underpinnings of our democracy also. In the event, it is likely that the only "descendants" we would leave would be intelligent cockroaches.
Cheers (hah!),
Mouser
Continuing to fly the shuttle,l and explore space is definitely the best memorial they could ever give to the people on Columbia.
Not to sound unsympathetic, but we've explored low-earth orbit pretty well by now. Truth be told, the shuttle program has been a solution in search of a problem for many years now. Little to no publishable research has come out of the scientific experiments undertaken on the shuttle flights. The scientific experiments on the last Columbia flight were essentially meaningless. This is common knowledge to most folks in the industry, and is approaching the level of an inside joke.
I'm beginning to think that NASA is stuck in a rut regarding the space shuttle. Shuttle launches are still extremely expensive (which was the whole reason that they were developed in the first place), and have a miserable rate of return, irrespective of whether your metric is scientific of economic. The best reason for keeping the shuttle around now is to support the ISS. Given the anemic state of the ISS (to put it kindly), this raison d'etre is starting to evaporate.
I'm a huge supporter of NASA, and the concept of manned space exploration, but I'm starting to see the shuttle program as an enormous leech, diverting resources that could be used to further the R&D and space exploration at the heart of NASA's mandate. They keep launching shuttles though, accomplishing precisely bugger all, and no one in this organisation seems to be thinking about where to go from here (this is not true, of course, but one could be forgiven for thinking so). I wish it were otherwise, and I wish that NASA could reclaim the vision that gave us the Apollo program, and the Viking, Voyager, Mariner
and Pioneer-series probes. Galileo and Cassini are steps in the right direction, but ultimately I think NASA must either terminate the shuttle program, or apply it towards a real program of research and exploration. Zero-g nematode growth just isn't worth the lives of seven humans.
Cheers,
Mouser