Oh don't get me wrong, the electives I took I really enjoyed. I loved Jazz history. My values and technology class influenced my world perspective heavily. My singing and dancing classes just added one more feather in my cap for impressing the women with. My world politics class taught me a lot about the values of underprivileged people from places like Africa and the Middle East. I loved just about every class that I took in college. If I had more time and money, I would have stayed at my university for an extra couple of years.
I was just trying to illustrate a different perspective than the, "OMG cheating! It's always a bad thing!" theme put forth by TFA. Hell, on top of being an engineer, I am also a writer, an explorer, a hacker, an athlete, a performer, and a certified man-slut according to my family. So please don't make the mistake of thinking I didn't enjoy a diverse education. I very much did. But many people I went to school with did not.
I should probably make it clear that I never actually cheated myself, in either my core classes or my GE classes. I very much enjoyed most of my liberal arts classes. As one other respondent noted, they had more cute girls in them. Furthermore, I really did appreciate having a broad and diverse education. However, I don't think that a broad and diverse education is something that a lot of technically minded individuals are interested in. As such, I can see exactly how and why they would feel justified in cheating in what some would consider to be worthless classes. Combine that with my bad habit of taking extreme pleasure in encouraging morally ambiguous behavior in my peers, and you end up with the post I slapped up above.
When it comes right down to it, I am very glad I took the classes that I took in school. I am also very grateful for the opportunities I was afforded in learning about such a broad range of subjects. But many of my peers didn't share that perspective, and I can understand where they were coming from. So I guess I just appreciate that different folk have different habits and values, and I am not particularly troubled by such an observation.
I agree it certainly sets up a moral dilemma to be presented with the type of education I discussed above. When it came right down to it, I actually really enjoyed all of my liberal arts and GE classes. Learning about modern politics is interesting and gave me some insight as to why my own industry is stagnated the way it is. My Jazz history class taught me a lot about music that I never appreciated before. I've always loved literary analysis, but that's because I love character studies and such.
For some people, the "pains" of a diversified education can actually be the mediating salve to the constant burns one suffers under a tough technical course load. However, I know that many of my peers absolutely detested having to take a lot of those classes. They were techie geeks through and through and were appalled that they had to spend any time at all learning about the nuance of human character in a psych 101 course. That's the kind of person I would wager partakes in this form of cheating heavily. For the record, many of those folks I went to school with have higher paying engineering jobs than I do, but they certainly fail to live a full life. So there is definitely a value trade that goes on in those types of decisions.
Personally, I like working with folks with a diverse education because it adds liveliness to a discussion about a particular problem. And I get really tired of having to clean up crap writing by my fellow engineers. Nonetheless, the folks that I do work with that are one track minded are damn near brilliant, and I can see the value in that too. So I guess when it comes down to it, that old addage that, "It takes all types..." isn't that far off the mark.
TFA does a cheater percentage breakdown by field. They show fields like engineering and tech and computer sciences as having a higher percentage of cheating students in them than other fields. I want to know what types of classes the students are cheating in. TFA mainly discusses using online "paper mills" to print out reports that the student themselves didn't write. As a recent engineering graduate, I rarely had to write a report for any of my classes that actually mattered for my education (math, sciences, engineering applications, etc.) All of the work was done primarily as projects and problem solving. The only reports we did have to write were discussions of our own projects, something that couldn't be plagiarized or downloaded from online.
The classes that did involve report writing were things like Jazz history, Literary Analysis, Political Studies, etc. In other words, us techie majors had to write extensive reports on matters that we just didn't give a fuck about, for classes that added absolutely nothing to the skill set we would need for our careers. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if the engineering and and compy sci. students that were cheating, were cheating in their GE and liberal arts classes because they just don't give a shit about those topics. Furthermore, they are probably overworked and under-rested when it comes to studying for the classes they do care about. So, rather than waste their valuable time writing a report about The Scarlet Letter (something that should have been done in HS), they say fuck it and download one. Honestly, I can't blame them for that. It's good time management and it shows they know how to budget their energy for things that matter.
I would rather see a breakdown by class type that involved cheating for each one of those field breakdowns. If my guess is correct, I say go forth and cheat my young engineers. Spend your time actually learning calculus, mathematical analysis, and designing something. That's what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life so you might as well learn it now.
I don't know if it's just a buggy implementation of flash on Linux or what, but I've been having issues with the Grooveshark website for about two months now. Quite specifically, the login feature seems to fail to register button clicks at all for me. I hope I can get it figured out soon, I really did love that site (and just before it bugged out, I has spent a good 5 hours perfecting a nerd-rock playlist).
Or we'll just wait for some other small startup company to come along and broadcast free radio over the net again. We'll switch to that until they get big and start charging, and then it's on to the next service. Welcome to the web. Things move fast here Sweetheart.;)
One of my pal's dads used to be a corrections officer. He liked to tell us that the only difference between a prisoner and a guard was which person was holding a billy-club. For those of you that are heard pressed on understanding, he was trying to communicate the idea that his fellow co-workers were often a bunch of morally corrupt, brutish thugs with little sense of justice, good, bad, or anything else relevant to the matter. Apparently, that kind of living wears on a person pretty hard, pretty quickly.
I've seen you post this stuff about a post scarcity society on every damn story on Slashdot from ones dealing with space exploration to ones dealing with corporate drama in the computer world. I get that you read a book, or went to a lecture or something that pimped the benefits of, "transitioning our society to one of abundance." I get that, whatever your source for these ideas was, it inspired you to tell anyone who would listen about it. I understand that you are trying to fight a cause for the betterment of our world and such.
But honestly, do you have to post the same 3 - 4 ideas and sentences to every damn story posted to slashdot? We've heard it already. We know there is an alternate society structure out there being thought about. We don't need every single freakin' science story hijacked to become some sociology discussion. This story is about the benefits vs. the risks of documenting, cataloging, and preserving all known microbial agents in the world. Can you please post on-topic for once and add something interesting to the discussion? Or, alternatively, if you don't have anything interesting or insightful to say about the matter at hand, can you please just not click the, "Post Comment," button?
So we are living in a post-scarcity society. Thanks for that. But stop evangelizing your position on how to fix everything at every opportunity. Believe it or not, there is not a single social pill that will fix all the problems that humans face nowadays. Stop pretending your idea is one. This is getting to the point where you sound like one of the wide-eyed religious freaks who answer, "God and Jesus," every time any topic is mentioned around them. Any topic. It's annoying. Please take it down a notch.
The point of the article is that alternative launch methods may be beyond today's technology, but developing the technology of tomorrow would be a more worthwhile use of the resources that would otherwise go towards milking that last couple tenths of a percent of efficiency out of the technology of yesterday.
See the funny part is that we are developing the technology of tomorrow. NASA is throwing money into contests designed to lay the groundwork for building a space elevator. The Air Force is currently testing hypersonic propulsion methods that could one day be utilized on an alternative launch platform. NASA and the Navy are both dumping money into tech like rail guns and mass accelerator cannons to see what can and cannot be achieved with them. Virgin, SpaceDev, and half a dozen other companies are looking into building space planes, eventually.
Anyone who says that we aren't attempting to develop alternative space access methods currently is not looking hard enough. We are working, across the globe, to lower the cost of access to space by whatever means necessary. The problem is, getting out of our gravity well is hard. So developing this technology takes time, decades even, like rockets. Do we have space elevators, space planes, and orbital cannons? No. Are we working to get there one day? Yes. So I really don't understand what the complaint is, other than impatience.
That's definitely a possible method to achieve orbit. However, you need to realize that the big hurdle in getting to orbit is not altitude, it's velocity. Yes, you can hoist a big ass rocket up to 100,000 feet and launch it from the back of a hypersonic plane. It turns out, however, that you still need a really big ass rocket (I know, lot's of technical details there) to achieve orbital velocity no matter how high you launch from. That said, it tends to be a lot cheaper and easier to launch a big ass rocket from a stationary, land based platform, than it is to launch it from a flying, attitude-subject-to-weather-conditions plane.
So is it possible? Yes. Are we trying it? Yes, some companies/organizations are. Will it be the final answer to space access? Well, maybe, but it will probably prove to be just as complicated and expensive as rocket launches. Then again, maybe not. We'll find out in another couple decades when the technology comes to fruition.
The Delta and Atlas rockets used today pretty much only share the name of their predecessors. I am not sure there is a single piece of technology on either of the current vehicles that was employed by their original programs, or, hell, even their predecessors two generations removed.
I like how one of the things Stephenson blames in his article for the rocket lock-in is, "engineering culture," that is resistant to change. I often find that nontechnical folk (and no, sci-fi writing does not count as a technical pursuit) use terms like, "engineering culture," or "scientific elitism," to describe phenomena brought about by actual technical details. In other words, that engineering culture doesn't develop simply because we engineers are resistant to change. It develops because we engineers crunch the numbers and have to deal with reality.
Anyone who thinks that engineers working in the space launch industry are resistant to change just for the shits is pretty misinformed. When it comes right down to it, we're the ones who would love to find a new Pandora's box technology that could get us into space faster, cheaper, and safer. Hell, we have devoted our lives to pursuing the development of the space industry. If anyone wants to see men and women living on Mars, manufacturing in orbit, and fucking onboard inter-galactic colony ships, it's us. Unfortunately, we don't have the luxury that sci-fi authors have of writing about some great new idea and just assuming it will work. We have to test material strengths. We have to plot thermal loads. We have to damp harmonic oscillations. We have to produce enough energy to overcome gravity. Those aren't trivial tasks. And we don't get to defy the laws of thermodynamics and gravity with some hand-wavy bullshit about, "couldn't this idea totally work in theory?!"
So yeah, there are lots of proposed theories and ideas on how to get to orbit. Great, congratulations Mr. Stephenson, you have an imagination. And, awesome, you can see sunnier hilltops across the valley that reach higher than the one we are standing on now. That's a great fantasy land. I hope you enjoy living in it. But while you draft up clever metaphors based on cherry-picked "facts" and unrealistic assumptions, those of us working in the industry, you know, the ones doing the math, actually have to look at the numbers. And those distant, high hilltops you see, well they might not be as high as you think. And all those, "innovations," on how to get to space, well they might not be as Earth-shatteringly ingenious as you think.
I'm not saying there's not room for improvement, there definitely is. But until someone shows me some numbers that prove a space-elevator, a launch loop, or a space fountain can be built, today, without unobtainium (in the form of some material, or some epic power source), I am going to delegate those ideas strictly to fantasy-land for now. And as for things like space planes, hypersonics, multi-propulsion-type vehicles, and so on, we are trying them, to an extent. And, believe it or not, just like rockets, they are still fucking difficult to get right. That's why it takes a long time to develop them. In the end, chucking something out of our gravity well is no easy task, no matter what method you take. And it is expensive, in both time and energy, no matter what technology you utilize. So stop lamenting about how poor off we are compared to where we could be. We're doing everything we can with what we've got. If that's not good enough for you, vote to give us more money or design a small, portable power-plant that can produce a proper metric fuckton of thrust.
In the end, engineering culture is just a term being used to say, "technical shit that I don't understand well enough so I'lll use it as a scapegoat to justify my preconceived notions"
We are not alone. There is no proof to dispute this statement. Theories, hopes and dreams do not equal proof. The universe does not exist for the sole purpose to serve as a backdrop for humanity.
Quantum physics shows us that the universe behaves differently when it is observed by others than when it is not. This phenomenon appears to suggest that their physical universe exists solely for their benefit so that their limited minds can perceive and comprehend reality in a coherent and predictable manner. Therefore, we don't see them, and they don't see us.
There is no proof to dispute that statement either.
It would appear that the article linked to in TFS is actually a mashup of the press release you linked to and this one. Most of the numbers quoted in the article from TFS can be found in the press release at that link,
And for all you religious types out there: I am sure there are plenty of natives and alien heathens for you to convert to praise whatever god you wish. But to do so, you gotta help us get there first. Now, who wants to be the first Christian/Muslim/Jewish/Buddhist/Hindu missionary to another solar system?
I'm pretty sure that most folk's standard for cool is how much drama something solicits. That said, trying to make respect and accomplishment cool is probably an exercise in futility.
I've been following the robotics telepresence scene ever since I stumbled upon Anybots whilst paroozing YouTube. I really think telepresence is a market that can fund more research and development into humanoid robots (at the very least, it draws less eyebrow raises as the sexbot industry). We have a lot of companies making money off specialized, robotic floor cleaners and lawn mowers, but if we really want to develop an all-purpose robot that can handle a lot of the work that we humans can, we need to put R&D into things like dynamically balancing on two legs, controlling limbs with dozens of actuators, and mapping motion commands in those limbs to sensor readings.
I know there are a lot of companies working on these problems already, but in order for them to remain, they have to get funded somehow. I honestly think telepresence robtos may be one of the best ways for companies to generate revenue while working on more advanced stuff. I hope to see more in the coming years!
Think of it kind of like the old guy that has the hot young girlfriend. It's a symbiotic relationship. The old guy gets to use the hot young girlfriend to appear relevant, hip, and still worth noticing. The hot young girlfriend uses the old guy for money to fund her shiny toy collection.
Pay no attention to the fact that both parties are fucking other significant others perpetually. Pay no attention to the fact that neither have any love for one another. Please ignore the fact that there is no way in hell the old guy could get a blow job from the young without hottie her being written in his soon-to-be-invoked will. Nope, it's a real relationship. We promise.
Now excuse me while I go scrub my brain of some of the images that metaphor caused to blossom in my mind's eye.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh don't get me wrong, the electives I took I really enjoyed. I loved Jazz history. My values and technology class influenced my world perspective heavily. My singing and dancing classes just added one more feather in my cap for impressing the women with. My world politics class taught me a lot about the values of underprivileged people from places like Africa and the Middle East. I loved just about every class that I took in college. If I had more time and money, I would have stayed at my university for an extra couple of years.
I was just trying to illustrate a different perspective than the, "OMG cheating! It's always a bad thing!" theme put forth by TFA. Hell, on top of being an engineer, I am also a writer, an explorer, a hacker, an athlete, a performer, and a certified man-slut according to my family. So please don't make the mistake of thinking I didn't enjoy a diverse education. I very much did. But many people I went to school with did not.
I should probably make it clear that I never actually cheated myself, in either my core classes or my GE classes. I very much enjoyed most of my liberal arts classes. As one other respondent noted, they had more cute girls in them. Furthermore, I really did appreciate having a broad and diverse education. However, I don't think that a broad and diverse education is something that a lot of technically minded individuals are interested in. As such, I can see exactly how and why they would feel justified in cheating in what some would consider to be worthless classes. Combine that with my bad habit of taking extreme pleasure in encouraging morally ambiguous behavior in my peers, and you end up with the post I slapped up above.
When it comes right down to it, I am very glad I took the classes that I took in school. I am also very grateful for the opportunities I was afforded in learning about such a broad range of subjects. But many of my peers didn't share that perspective, and I can understand where they were coming from. So I guess I just appreciate that different folk have different habits and values, and I am not particularly troubled by such an observation.
I agree it certainly sets up a moral dilemma to be presented with the type of education I discussed above. When it came right down to it, I actually really enjoyed all of my liberal arts and GE classes. Learning about modern politics is interesting and gave me some insight as to why my own industry is stagnated the way it is. My Jazz history class taught me a lot about music that I never appreciated before. I've always loved literary analysis, but that's because I love character studies and such.
For some people, the "pains" of a diversified education can actually be the mediating salve to the constant burns one suffers under a tough technical course load. However, I know that many of my peers absolutely detested having to take a lot of those classes. They were techie geeks through and through and were appalled that they had to spend any time at all learning about the nuance of human character in a psych 101 course. That's the kind of person I would wager partakes in this form of cheating heavily. For the record, many of those folks I went to school with have higher paying engineering jobs than I do, but they certainly fail to live a full life. So there is definitely a value trade that goes on in those types of decisions.
Personally, I like working with folks with a diverse education because it adds liveliness to a discussion about a particular problem. And I get really tired of having to clean up crap writing by my fellow engineers. Nonetheless, the folks that I do work with that are one track minded are damn near brilliant, and I can see the value in that too. So I guess when it comes down to it, that old addage that, "It takes all types..." isn't that far off the mark.
TFA does a cheater percentage breakdown by field. They show fields like engineering and tech and computer sciences as having a higher percentage of cheating students in them than other fields. I want to know what types of classes the students are cheating in. TFA mainly discusses using online "paper mills" to print out reports that the student themselves didn't write. As a recent engineering graduate, I rarely had to write a report for any of my classes that actually mattered for my education (math, sciences, engineering applications, etc.) All of the work was done primarily as projects and problem solving. The only reports we did have to write were discussions of our own projects, something that couldn't be plagiarized or downloaded from online.
The classes that did involve report writing were things like Jazz history, Literary Analysis, Political Studies, etc. In other words, us techie majors had to write extensive reports on matters that we just didn't give a fuck about, for classes that added absolutely nothing to the skill set we would need for our careers. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if the engineering and and compy sci. students that were cheating, were cheating in their GE and liberal arts classes because they just don't give a shit about those topics. Furthermore, they are probably overworked and under-rested when it comes to studying for the classes they do care about. So, rather than waste their valuable time writing a report about The Scarlet Letter (something that should have been done in HS), they say fuck it and download one. Honestly, I can't blame them for that. It's good time management and it shows they know how to budget their energy for things that matter.
I would rather see a breakdown by class type that involved cheating for each one of those field breakdowns. If my guess is correct, I say go forth and cheat my young engineers. Spend your time actually learning calculus, mathematical analysis, and designing something. That's what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life so you might as well learn it now.
I don't know if it's just a buggy implementation of flash on Linux or what, but I've been having issues with the Grooveshark website for about two months now. Quite specifically, the login feature seems to fail to register button clicks at all for me. I hope I can get it figured out soon, I really did love that site (and just before it bugged out, I has spent a good 5 hours perfecting a nerd-rock playlist).
Or we'll just wait for some other small startup company to come along and broadcast free radio over the net again. We'll switch to that until they get big and start charging, and then it's on to the next service. Welcome to the web. Things move fast here Sweetheart. ;)
Posting to undo bad mod.
A lot of folk lose their sense of humor when Death is hanging out in the room.
One of my pal's dads used to be a corrections officer. He liked to tell us that the only difference between a prisoner and a guard was which person was holding a billy-club. For those of you that are heard pressed on understanding, he was trying to communicate the idea that his fellow co-workers were often a bunch of morally corrupt, brutish thugs with little sense of justice, good, bad, or anything else relevant to the matter. Apparently, that kind of living wears on a person pretty hard, pretty quickly.
I've seen you post this stuff about a post scarcity society on every damn story on Slashdot from ones dealing with space exploration to ones dealing with corporate drama in the computer world. I get that you read a book, or went to a lecture or something that pimped the benefits of, "transitioning our society to one of abundance." I get that, whatever your source for these ideas was, it inspired you to tell anyone who would listen about it. I understand that you are trying to fight a cause for the betterment of our world and such.
But honestly, do you have to post the same 3 - 4 ideas and sentences to every damn story posted to slashdot? We've heard it already. We know there is an alternate society structure out there being thought about. We don't need every single freakin' science story hijacked to become some sociology discussion. This story is about the benefits vs. the risks of documenting, cataloging, and preserving all known microbial agents in the world. Can you please post on-topic for once and add something interesting to the discussion? Or, alternatively, if you don't have anything interesting or insightful to say about the matter at hand, can you please just not click the, "Post Comment," button?
So we are living in a post-scarcity society. Thanks for that. But stop evangelizing your position on how to fix everything at every opportunity. Believe it or not, there is not a single social pill that will fix all the problems that humans face nowadays. Stop pretending your idea is one. This is getting to the point where you sound like one of the wide-eyed religious freaks who answer, "God and Jesus," every time any topic is mentioned around them. Any topic. It's annoying. Please take it down a notch.
The point of the article is that alternative launch methods may be beyond today's technology, but developing the technology of tomorrow would be a more worthwhile use of the resources that would otherwise go towards milking that last couple tenths of a percent of efficiency out of the technology of yesterday.
See the funny part is that we are developing the technology of tomorrow. NASA is throwing money into contests designed to lay the groundwork for building a space elevator. The Air Force is currently testing hypersonic propulsion methods that could one day be utilized on an alternative launch platform. NASA and the Navy are both dumping money into tech like rail guns and mass accelerator cannons to see what can and cannot be achieved with them. Virgin, SpaceDev, and half a dozen other companies are looking into building space planes, eventually.
Anyone who says that we aren't attempting to develop alternative space access methods currently is not looking hard enough. We are working, across the globe, to lower the cost of access to space by whatever means necessary. The problem is, getting out of our gravity well is hard. So developing this technology takes time, decades even, like rockets. Do we have space elevators, space planes, and orbital cannons? No. Are we working to get there one day? Yes. So I really don't understand what the complaint is, other than impatience.
That's definitely a possible method to achieve orbit. However, you need to realize that the big hurdle in getting to orbit is not altitude, it's velocity. Yes, you can hoist a big ass rocket up to 100,000 feet and launch it from the back of a hypersonic plane. It turns out, however, that you still need a really big ass rocket (I know, lot's of technical details there) to achieve orbital velocity no matter how high you launch from. That said, it tends to be a lot cheaper and easier to launch a big ass rocket from a stationary, land based platform, than it is to launch it from a flying, attitude-subject-to-weather-conditions plane.
So is it possible? Yes. Are we trying it? Yes, some companies/organizations are. Will it be the final answer to space access? Well, maybe, but it will probably prove to be just as complicated and expensive as rocket launches. Then again, maybe not. We'll find out in another couple decades when the technology comes to fruition.
The Delta and Atlas rockets used today pretty much only share the name of their predecessors. I am not sure there is a single piece of technology on either of the current vehicles that was employed by their original programs, or, hell, even their predecessors two generations removed.
I like how one of the things Stephenson blames in his article for the rocket lock-in is, "engineering culture," that is resistant to change. I often find that nontechnical folk (and no, sci-fi writing does not count as a technical pursuit) use terms like, "engineering culture," or "scientific elitism," to describe phenomena brought about by actual technical details. In other words, that engineering culture doesn't develop simply because we engineers are resistant to change. It develops because we engineers crunch the numbers and have to deal with reality.
Anyone who thinks that engineers working in the space launch industry are resistant to change just for the shits is pretty misinformed. When it comes right down to it, we're the ones who would love to find a new Pandora's box technology that could get us into space faster, cheaper, and safer. Hell, we have devoted our lives to pursuing the development of the space industry. If anyone wants to see men and women living on Mars, manufacturing in orbit, and fucking onboard inter-galactic colony ships, it's us. Unfortunately, we don't have the luxury that sci-fi authors have of writing about some great new idea and just assuming it will work. We have to test material strengths. We have to plot thermal loads. We have to damp harmonic oscillations. We have to produce enough energy to overcome gravity. Those aren't trivial tasks. And we don't get to defy the laws of thermodynamics and gravity with some hand-wavy bullshit about, "couldn't this idea totally work in theory?!"
So yeah, there are lots of proposed theories and ideas on how to get to orbit. Great, congratulations Mr. Stephenson, you have an imagination. And, awesome, you can see sunnier hilltops across the valley that reach higher than the one we are standing on now. That's a great fantasy land. I hope you enjoy living in it. But while you draft up clever metaphors based on cherry-picked "facts" and unrealistic assumptions, those of us working in the industry, you know, the ones doing the math, actually have to look at the numbers. And those distant, high hilltops you see, well they might not be as high as you think. And all those, "innovations," on how to get to space, well they might not be as Earth-shatteringly ingenious as you think.
I'm not saying there's not room for improvement, there definitely is. But until someone shows me some numbers that prove a space-elevator, a launch loop, or a space fountain can be built, today, without unobtainium (in the form of some material, or some epic power source), I am going to delegate those ideas strictly to fantasy-land for now. And as for things like space planes, hypersonics, multi-propulsion-type vehicles, and so on, we are trying them, to an extent. And, believe it or not, just like rockets, they are still fucking difficult to get right. That's why it takes a long time to develop them. In the end, chucking something out of our gravity well is no easy task, no matter what method you take. And it is expensive, in both time and energy, no matter what technology you utilize. So stop lamenting about how poor off we are compared to where we could be. We're doing everything we can with what we've got. If that's not good enough for you, vote to give us more money or design a small, portable power-plant that can produce a proper metric fuckton of thrust.
In the end, engineering culture is just a term being used to say, "technical shit that I don't understand well enough so I'lll use it as a scapegoat to justify my preconceived notions"
Add an entry to the Codex!
We are not alone. There is no proof to dispute this statement. Theories, hopes and dreams do not equal proof. The universe does not exist for the sole purpose to serve as a backdrop for humanity.
Quantum physics shows us that the universe behaves differently when it is observed by others than when it is not. This phenomenon appears to suggest that their physical universe exists solely for their benefit so that their limited minds can perceive and comprehend reality in a coherent and predictable manner. Therefore, we don't see them, and they don't see us.
There is no proof to dispute that statement either.
Screw the stamps, I want to see a, "Women of Science," swimsuit calendar. My two nominees are Felicia Wolfe-Simon and Hanny van Arkel.
It would appear that the article linked to in TFS is actually a mashup of the press release you linked to and this one. Most of the numbers quoted in the article from TFS can be found in the press release at that link,
And for all you religious types out there: I am sure there are plenty of natives and alien heathens for you to convert to praise whatever god you wish. But to do so, you gotta help us get there first. Now, who wants to be the first Christian/Muslim/Jewish/Buddhist/Hindu missionary to another solar system?
I'm pretty sure that most folk's standard for cool is how much drama something solicits. That said, trying to make respect and accomplishment cool is probably an exercise in futility.
You need to update your sig, we're now on Slashdot 3.0.
Thanks for the tip.
Good point. Sounds like the Vgo makers need to come up with a "safe for high school" model that includes a taser and smoke bombs.
I've been following the robotics telepresence scene ever since I stumbled upon Anybots whilst paroozing YouTube. I really think telepresence is a market that can fund more research and development into humanoid robots (at the very least, it draws less eyebrow raises as the sexbot industry). We have a lot of companies making money off specialized, robotic floor cleaners and lawn mowers, but if we really want to develop an all-purpose robot that can handle a lot of the work that we humans can, we need to put R&D into things like dynamically balancing on two legs, controlling limbs with dozens of actuators, and mapping motion commands in those limbs to sensor readings.
I know there are a lot of companies working on these problems already, but in order for them to remain, they have to get funded somehow. I honestly think telepresence robtos may be one of the best ways for companies to generate revenue while working on more advanced stuff. I hope to see more in the coming years!
Think of it kind of like the old guy that has the hot young girlfriend. It's a symbiotic relationship. The old guy gets to use the hot young girlfriend to appear relevant, hip, and still worth noticing. The hot young girlfriend uses the old guy for money to fund her shiny toy collection.
Pay no attention to the fact that both parties are fucking other significant others perpetually. Pay no attention to the fact that neither have any love for one another. Please ignore the fact that there is no way in hell the old guy could get a blow job from the young without hottie her being written in his soon-to-be-invoked will. Nope, it's a real relationship. We promise.
Now excuse me while I go scrub my brain of some of the images that metaphor caused to blossom in my mind's eye.