Ah The Power of the Celebrity
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Bringing Up Bill
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I always think its funny when I hear or read interest pieces on a Celebrity's life. Bill Gates, according to the article synopsis, was a fiercely independent child, possibly even a brat, that was at odds with his parents. How many people in the world are there like this? And yet, its Bill that we write and read and care about because Celebrity drives and organizes social patterns....In the words of Robert M. Pirsig:
"Celebrity is the Dynamic Quality that primitive social patterns once used to organize themselves. That gives celebrity a new importance.
None of this celebrity has any meaning in a subject-object universe. But in a value-structured universe, celebrity comes roaring to the front of reality as a huge fundamental parameter. It becomes an organizing force of the whole social level of evolution. Without this celebrity force, advanced complex human societies might be impossible. Even simple ones.
...
It was crazy. People going over Niagara Falls in a barrel and killing themselves just for the celebrity of it. Assassins murdering for it. Maybe the real reason nations declared war was to increase their celebrity status. You could organize an anthropology around it.
...
Even a policeman's uniform is a kind of celebrity device so that you will do what he says without questioning him. Without celebrity nobody would take orders from anybody and there would be no way you could get society to work.
...
Money and celebrity are fame and fortune, traditionally paired as twin forces in the Dynamic generation of social value. Both fame and fortune are huge Dynamic parameters that give society its shape and meaning. We have whole departments of universities, in fact, whole colleges, devoted to the study of economics, that is fortune, but what do we have that is similarly devoted to the study of fame? What exactly is the mechanism by which the cultures controls the shapes of the mirrors that produce all these different images of celebrity? Would analysis of that mirror-changing force enable the resolution of ethnic conflicts? Phaedrus didn't know..." - Lila, Chapter 20, Robert M. Pirsig.
... And so Bill Gates is a big enough celebrity to have his personal life dug into by the media. His social patterns and examples will be passed on from generation to generation. Funny, I would rather have Larry Wall be in a role that big instead....
Hahaha, "Sustainable environmental practices." And here exists another poor fool who has not been taught the ways of the Second Law of Thermodynamics which states simply: The entropy of an isolated system will tend to increase over time until equilibrium is achieved. Just in case you don't know, the measure of entropy of the system is the measure of disorder, chaos, or generally 'unusuable' energy in a system. This being said, the fundamental philosophy behind sustainable environments is flawed. You see, consuming anything as humans will cause a net decrease in the amount of useful natural resources due to energy being wasted as heat and light and such and such etc. Of course, we can increase the efficiency of a given consumption process to slow this decrease in resources, we can even use some of the wasted energy to reform or recreate some natural resources, thus increasing the efficiency of the system. However, since no process can be 100% efficient (entropy will get you every time) there will always be a steady rate of decline no matter. All we are doing with our silly attempts at sustainable practices is slowing the inevitable. Even if we manage to stretch the lifespace of this little planet and our little species to the limits, at some point, the Universe itself will either cool down, or crunch back in, probably. Either way, it will die, as will our species, and all of our sustainable practices will have been for naught.
Sustainable practices? Ha! I say to thee. Those of us who have been enlightened with the Second Law know that the entropy of all systems will increase indefinitely until the death of the universe. Even without mankind, eventually, the world would burn itself out due to wasted energy alone. Welcome to physics.
Don't forget, you also find an unending amount of pictures of "Cool fans that got our logo tattooed on their [ass,arm,leg,ankle,back,forehead,penis,tooth,armpit,nipple,kidney,hair-plugs] which makes them so unique!"
I don't think there will be a 'Google' in ten years, I am more thinking there will be a 'Google-Starbucks-Boeing-WalMart-America-China' super entity that reigns over the known universe and controls everything via an AI named 'GORT-Hal-Skynet.'
Luckily for us, I think we will still have the real Arnold Schwarzenegger for defense, and if not, we will always have digitized CGI models of him to wage binary wars on the new GooMartBucksWangCletusPlane superstructure....
Don't get me wrong, NASA has done an absolute wonderful job in helping move mankind into the stars thus far. From their original moon landing missions to the continued effort to probe space via advanced optics platforms and missions to other planets, it has been a wonderful help in getting mankind past the boundaries of its own planet.
Nonetheless, keeping a space program under the thumb of the U.S. federal government is doing little more than holding back the field at this point. When space programs (and technology) were just starting to blossom, it was important to monitor them due to their potential military uses as well as the safety issues involved in working with such experimental technology.
Nowadays, however, companies such as SpaceX, Bigelow Aerospace, Blue Origin, and a plethora of others are showing that space exploration is capable as a commercial entity (granted, none of these organizations are sending probes past Earth orbit yet, but the potential is there). That being said, there is very little reason to continue to spend federal money on an entire space program. NASA employs some of the most intelligent and capable people in this industry. They have a plethora legacy and in-house knowledge that could benefit the public sector endlessly. It seems that, at this point, the NASA entity should be closed entirely while a private sector entity is set up to absorb most of, if not all of, its employees. If NASA were to break free of the federal government (and all of the political staging and pressures and general BS) it could perform unimaginably well in the private sector.
It seems to me that it is time for the government funded (and unfortunately, controlled) entity of NASA might as well be dissolved and a private equivalent PASA (Public American Space Agency or some other such acronym) could thrive better in its place. Of course, I am not a business major so I can't say I know much about a potential business model, but from a science and engineering standpoint, it would behoove progress greatly if NASA could get free of the government.
Keeping NASA under government control would be like keeping a booming computer company like Microsoft under government control during the early years of the computing industry, it would have just hampered progress and the dissemination of computer technology. Similarly, federal control of one of the most (if not THE most) advanced space exploration entities is just hampering the progress of mankind's expansion into the stars.
I wonder how many people tend to notice the coincidental timing of things like this. What was it, yesterday or the day before that there was a front-page post in every major newspaper about the JSF plans getting siphoned? Then, just coincidentally, a few days later plans to beef up 'cyber' operations at a federal level are put forth publicly (despite the fact that making decisions for any new programs at a federal level take days, if not weeks to make).
It seems to me that the average layman probably hears things like 'cyberwarfare' and 'fighter plane plans stolen via hacking' and 'we need a new, federally controlled cyberwarfare program' and probably doesn't think about the difference between 'offensive' and 'defensive' type network operations since the average layman says, "Computers and Hackers and Cyberspies! Oh My! Save us!" Thus, convincing the public that a new, expensive, powerful (and probably not well-regulated) federal cyber-department will keep them safe. Besides, our very own military networks were just hacked maliciously to download the plans for our newest jet fighter, didn't you hear?
I guess what I am trying to say is:
Increase public knowledge of cyberthreats + Offer federal solution to the new cyberthreat problem = Immediate public approval new program that increases federal spending and power.
Well some of us whippersnappers in the U.S. tried to institute a shift in ideals during the last election with Ron Paul. Unfortunately our hopes were squelched effectively when the mainstream media made a point to shoot Ron Paul's election bid in the face before it had a chance to be recognized. It's hard to inspire motivation in a generation of U.S. citizens that has been consistently reminded that no matter how hard we kick and scream or what kind of political ruckus we make, there is always and over-aggressive government and ignorant/biased media to put us back in 'our place.'
Couple this with the fact that all of us youngin's found a newfound breathe of fresh air and freedom in the internet, but now the government and media are also going through consistently more aggressive means to regulate and control this frontier and what we have is a general feeling of bleak hoplessness conquering us all. Yay!
If I had spent 2-3 years creating a novel, I certainly don't want somebody taking my labor without pay...
Excuse me, I cannot speak for anyone but I would like to throw an alternative perspective out there. I DID spend a year and a half writing a novel. It was one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. An idea came to me and I just started typing. I wrote when I had free time. I wrote instead of watching T.V. I wrote to my favorite music, while trolling my favorite internet forums. The reason I tell you all this is because for me, writing a novel was an extremely enjoyable experience, one I would have done whether or not anyone ever did or did not read it. I never published my book (though I still may), but I did pdf and release it on one of my school's FTP serves for anyone to flip through. There are 6 binder bound copies floating around in the local community that I printed so friends could read. I don't really know what happened to them.
I never made a dime of a single print.
I am not bitter about this. Writing something like a book, or developing any art, imho should be a labor of love, something you enjoy doing. Now, I write perl programs as a hobby, because like writing the novel was,it is fun to me.
It seems that at some point, someone decided that doing things just for the sake of enjoying them wasn't enough. I say that's wrong. I figure most of what we do should be done for the sake of doing it, not making a profit. In fact, once profits do come into the picture, things like deadlines occur and then, all of the sudden, the quality of the work can go down drastically.
My point to posting all this is that there seems to be a very money-oriented mindset instilled in culture these days that says if you do anything you should damn well be payed for it. Nonsense. If you do anything it should bring you peace of mind.
Granted, altruistic creations are often approached with suspicion these days, but this is a problem, imho. I am tired of hearing everyone bitch about how they should be paid for everything. If you are going to do something, do it for the peace it brings you, not the bling.
Famous last words. Now in the eyes of the government/media you are an extremist, paranoid, potential terrorist, and you have something to hide. Funny how those last words used to be a rallying cry for freedom.
Any 'exceptions' you have discovered to ZMM's wisdom, I would bet, were derived based on contrivances of your making induced by the filtration your natural human senses have processed your experience with. That being said, if you understood the core of what ZMM was addressing, the general scheme it was introducing, you would realize that it is this filtration, and the inevitable contrivances thus developed by the human experience, that limit the perception of the true power of what was being discussed. That is, of quality. Please reread the book and start looking at the universe, at reality in general, from the top-down theme that it introduces, and you may find that so many of your so-called exceptions are entirely irrelevant, not to mention as I stated above, contrived based on your personal experience.
...why is it worded in such a way as to imply the different bacteria is the reason that one is obese and the other isn't, instead of the type of bacteria changed because being obese (and the eating that goes along with it) favor one type over the other.
I would imagine it has something to do with the fact that the mass majority of your body's microbes (including the type majorities in your systems) are acquired at or shortly after birth ( Discussed in Detail Here), rather than changing significantly over the course of your life.
"The repair procedure will deprive you of your overpriced gaming console for more than two weeks which, though you legally paid for and own, you are not allowed to unscrew and open in order to clean out the excessive amount of obfuscated legal BS that came with the interior of your purchase. Have a nice day...."
It's a meaningless analogy that only serves to make your field sound like pseudoscience BS.
The miracle of pseudoscience has brought us fields and theories such as reflexology, chiropractic, magnet theory, global warming, scientology(ish), psychobabble, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor> radioactive medicinces , or the movement to close down the Large Hadron Collider.
Without psuedoscience, what would all the people in the world do if they wanted to get their neck cracked, their feet massaged, and their brain demagnetized while enjoying a nice UV cooking session and methodically fluffing L. Ron Hubbard's ego while enjoying a passive prostate warming and impeding scientific progress?
I mean sheesh, you have to give pseudoscience some credit...
And yet it can't be completed with people actually working on it.
Sure it can, just like the oversight and regulation of the bailout money being doled out to various social entities has been completed without anyone working on it....
...to the thinkgeek items that say, "No, I will not fix your computer."
From the original article:
Some of the supposedly suspicious activities listed in support of the search warrant application include: the student being seen with "unknown laptop computers," which he "says" he was fixing for other students; the student uses multiple names to log on to his computer...."
I particularly like the fact that having multiple log in accounts and multiple laptops is suspicious behavior. Damn those greedy capitalist pig-dog students who aren't content with one computer and one user Id.....
Ummmmm, no? I am not sure what proposal you read in the 1970's and maybe I am just lacking inventiveness, but this seems entirely unintuitive to me. Geosynch orbits, by definition, cross the same footprint on the earth at the same time every day. To get less than 2% shadow exposure you need to have a near sun-syncronous orbit (highly inclined) that rides along the day-night divider line. While you can design these sun-synch orbits to have a constant RAAN in terms of local time on Earth, (meaning that it always ascends towards the north pole at say, 11:30 Am, and descends towards the south pole at 11:30 PM), they do not, if I recall, end up crossing the same point over Earth at the same time. That is, since the Earth rotates under them (because they are orbiting at a near 90 degree inclination to the equator), each time they cross a given lattitude, it is a different point on the Earth.
While you can design geosynch and geostationary orbits to cross or hover over one particular footprint area at one particular time, these are, by definition, low inclination orbits. Which seems to imply to me that you are going to spend quite a bit of time in both the Earth's umbra and penumbra (shadow) regions. Of course, you can do some high eccentricity tricks like the Molniya orbits to make the orbital speeds crazy intense when in the shadow so that you swing in and out of it quickly, but then you are faced with two problems:
A) You are are swinging in and out of the Van Allen radiation belts and melting your shiny solar arrays which are your mission critical payload and
B) You are now at an altitude beyond GEO (~22,000 mi) for part of your orbit, which makes beaming anything, especially energy, back to Earth in an accurate manner entirely difficult, nigh impossible.
Again, I might just not be thinking outside the box here, but designing an effective, low-shadow Geosynch orbit seems....unlikely. It's not impossible, nothing is impossible, it's just unlikely, and it seems like a real pain in the a** to me.
200 sq. meters of solar arrays is not that unreasonable these days. The Direct TV satellites have something like 60 sq. meters or solar arrays if I remember correctly. I recall doing research on a Japanese satellite that trailed a single solar array that was larger than that. 200 sq. meters of solar arrays has never been done before, granted, but neither had 5 sq. meters at some point in history. The trick with something this big is controlling it, I have not looked at the design for their orbital power plant, but it seems to me that constraining solar arrays in a grid pattern, anchored at separate orbiting bodies might allow that kind of control. Otherwise we are going to need to redesign the CMGs for the ISS to control something that big. It's doable, it just hasn't been done yet.
Honestly though, I think having multiple interconnecting panels might be the better way to approach that kind of problem....hmmmm...
Hmmm, I am not sure exactly where you got your numbers but 2-4 times more efficient seems a bit fishy to me, especially since it depends highly on what kind of solar cells you are using and what materials are layered within it. I've known space cell efficiencies to range from 10% to 33% so 2-4 times as a multiplier seems, odd...
But that aside, it is also important to note that space based solar cells degrade much quicker due to higher radiation levels. I think the idea of generating power in space and sending it back to earth is an extreme foresight on humanity's part. Granted, we do not have the technology right now to make it economically viable or cost-effective. Nonetheless, some one hundred years or more in the future, as humanity's population expands and our farmlands die off and so on and so on, we might find that terrestrial assets become rare. That is, taking up acres and acres of land for solar power generation or wind generation may prove to be just as bad a decision in the future as abusing fossil fuels and wasting water has proven to be today. Thus, if we start testing space based power generation now, we may provide ourselves some solution to future problems. This kind of idea shows me that humanity is at least attempting to change the carpe diem mindset a bit. Doesn't seem like a terrible investment to me...
It's hard to generate genuine public interest in a space program or any other program when the public as a whole would rather wallow in trendy fads and pseudo science. Those who think NASA is doing nothing interesting are quite wrong. Take for instance the Cassini-Huygens probe that NASA launched to study Saturn and her moons. Here was a great example of a bold, recent mission by NASA. It involved a lander, an attempt to search for traces of life, and studying one of the most known items in our solar system, Saturn's rings. Yet, despite the awe that such an undertaking would impose upon most people, this mission became mired in public criticism over the fact that it used plutonium as a power source. The simply fact of the matter is, once you push beyond the asteroid belt, things like solar panels become terribly inefficient for power generation so something like nuclear material needs to be used. Nonetheless, this fact didn't stop high profile physicists from complaining about nuclear matter being used on board a spacecraft that would be operating in an environment that is already crawling with radiation (you didn't think all of those charged particles belched out by our sun just fizzled did you)?
So NASA stands in an incredibly precarious situation. Every move they want to make to the 'final frontier' will involve increasingly complex, risky, and costly developments. Yet, they still must push forward because, well, that's the whole point of the organization. Then, even when they do something right (Cassini was and still is a great success), their programs are still stained in criticism and filth because it is so easy to rally the ignorant public into a critical frenzy by dropping phrases like, "environmentally unfriendly," "a danger to public health," or "a waste of tax-payers money."
This isn't the only place we see this kind of thing happen. Worldwide, nuclear physicists are under criticism for trying to develop and streamline nuclear power production terrestrially. Robotics and AI fields get attacked for developing "dangerous, possibly threatening" near sentient autonomous weapons (paranoid much?) And even the medical field gets it when they investigate something like stem-cell research or human growth factor and the whole ordeal becomes a blasphemous religious issue.
It seems that the general population is too stupid to think for themselves so they let themselves be rallied by the loudest (and often very biased) sources, by tactics like fear-mongering or mercy pleas. The only reason this wasn't allowed to occur during the Cold War days was because Joe public was more worried about the 'evil commies' than he was about 'cooking the dolphins with plutonium.' Now there are no evil commies to fear so we fear the unknown instead.
The last great revolution in society was the digital revolution supposedly. Some experts think the information and robotics revolutions are next. It seems to me that we are more likely to see a "naive complacency revolution" instead...
Just one problem with your idea, if someone mentions the words "nuclear powered..." anything, somewhere, someone throws a political hissy fit over the possible environmental and public health issues these nuclear powered anythings 'could possible create...' Rather than recognize the fact that research and understanding of both fission and fusion reactions has advanced and evolved since their original implementations to result in safer, better controlled power plants and applications, some ignoramuses would much rather pull on their sheep costumes and declare proudly to their pseudo-scientific overlords that "nuclear powered" anythings are the purest evil mankind has ever wrought.
See at this point in time, applying any of our most modern technologies is considered a moral blasphemy because, well, technology is unnatural, not understood and dangerous. Fissile materials and nuclear power production are no exception to this rule. The general populace seems entirely convinced that if an element has an atomic weight somewhere above the number 100, the element is a magical compound that will result in Armageddon and the deaths of all children (WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?).
So no, my friend, we cannot use decommissioned nukes to progress the human species in any form because frankly, it is entirely impossible to implement such technology without killing every living thing on the planet...or at least that's what we are supposed to think.
It is interesting to me that stories like this are getting posted more and more to slashdot. I recall reading on here something about Obama's DOJ appointees being extremely biased in the filesharing controversies. I remember reading stuff on here about acts putting cyber security for both federal and private networks in the hands of the presidency. I remember reading quite a few of these types of stories here on slashdot, but have seen none of them published in newspapers, or discussed on news talk shows (comedy or serious) or anything else. In fact, it seems that these kinds of rights-suppressing stories are increasingly being pushed to the fringe news networks while the main stream media continues to bitch about an economy that we all know is cluster f***ed royally, an increasing rate of violent crimes, and occasional news about the middle east. Forgive me if I am being paranoid but it seems like there is a large effort being conducted to keep the news about us, American Citizens, and our rights off the air, while the airwaves are being increasingly polluted with the same depressing, mind-numbing dribble for the masses to feed upon.
Something seems very wrong with this country these days, and the world in general....
Forgive the doomsday tone, but I don't like the fact that the mass majority of people are completely unaware that their privacy and defense-against-the-government rights are being hacked and slashed like no tomorrow. At least when the Patriot Act was pushed through, we saw throngs of people bitching about it in the streets and media. Why the sudden happy complacency now?
Slashdot Mirror
I always think its funny when I hear or read interest pieces on a Celebrity's life. Bill Gates, according to the article synopsis, was a fiercely independent child, possibly even a brat, that was at odds with his parents. How many people in the world are there like this? And yet, its Bill that we write and read and care about because Celebrity drives and organizes social patterns....In the words of Robert M. Pirsig:
...
...
...
... And so Bill Gates is a big enough celebrity to have his personal life dug into by the media. His social patterns and examples will be passed on from generation to generation. Funny, I would rather have Larry Wall be in a role that big instead....
"Celebrity is the Dynamic Quality that primitive social patterns once used to organize themselves. That gives celebrity a new importance.
None of this celebrity has any meaning in a subject-object universe. But in a value-structured universe, celebrity comes roaring to the front of reality as a huge fundamental parameter. It becomes an organizing force of the whole social level of evolution. Without this celebrity force, advanced complex human societies might be impossible. Even simple ones.
It was crazy. People going over Niagara Falls in a barrel and killing themselves just for the celebrity of it. Assassins murdering for it. Maybe the real reason nations declared war was to increase their celebrity status. You could organize an anthropology around it.
Even a policeman's uniform is a kind of celebrity device so that you will do what he says without questioning him. Without celebrity nobody would take orders from anybody and there would be no way you could get society to work.
Money and celebrity are fame and fortune, traditionally paired as twin forces in the Dynamic generation of social value. Both fame and fortune are huge Dynamic parameters that give society its shape and meaning. We have whole departments of universities, in fact, whole colleges, devoted to the study of economics, that is fortune, but what do we have that is similarly devoted to the study of fame? What exactly is the mechanism by which the cultures controls the shapes of the mirrors that produce all these different images of celebrity? Would analysis of that mirror-changing force enable the resolution of ethnic conflicts? Phaedrus didn't know..." - Lila, Chapter 20, Robert M. Pirsig.
Hahaha, "Sustainable environmental practices." And here exists another poor fool who has not been taught the ways of the Second Law of Thermodynamics which states simply: The entropy of an isolated system will tend to increase over time until equilibrium is achieved. Just in case you don't know, the measure of entropy of the system is the measure of disorder, chaos, or generally 'unusuable' energy in a system. This being said, the fundamental philosophy behind sustainable environments is flawed. You see, consuming anything as humans will cause a net decrease in the amount of useful natural resources due to energy being wasted as heat and light and such and such etc. Of course, we can increase the efficiency of a given consumption process to slow this decrease in resources, we can even use some of the wasted energy to reform or recreate some natural resources, thus increasing the efficiency of the system. However, since no process can be 100% efficient (entropy will get you every time) there will always be a steady rate of decline no matter. All we are doing with our silly attempts at sustainable practices is slowing the inevitable. Even if we manage to stretch the lifespace of this little planet and our little species to the limits, at some point, the Universe itself will either cool down, or crunch back in, probably. Either way, it will die, as will our species, and all of our sustainable practices will have been for naught.
Sustainable practices? Ha! I say to thee. Those of us who have been enlightened with the Second Law know that the entropy of all systems will increase indefinitely until the death of the universe. Even without mankind, eventually, the world would burn itself out due to wasted energy alone. Welcome to physics.
From the article:
"do you want to drive the community yourself, or do you want to interact in an environment that's been created for you?"
But the author forgets one very important thing: In Soviet Russia, community drives you!
Don't forget, you also find an unending amount of pictures of "Cool fans that got our logo tattooed on their [ass,arm,leg,ankle,back,forehead,penis,tooth,armpit,nipple,kidney,hair-plugs] which makes them so unique!"
I don't think there will be a 'Google' in ten years, I am more thinking there will be a 'Google-Starbucks-Boeing-WalMart-America-China' super entity that reigns over the known universe and controls everything via an AI named 'GORT-Hal-Skynet.'
Luckily for us, I think we will still have the real Arnold Schwarzenegger for defense, and if not, we will always have digitized CGI models of him to wage binary wars on the new GooMartBucksWangCletusPlane superstructure....
Don't get me wrong, NASA has done an absolute wonderful job in helping move mankind into the stars thus far. From their original moon landing missions to the continued effort to probe space via advanced optics platforms and missions to other planets, it has been a wonderful help in getting mankind past the boundaries of its own planet.
Nonetheless, keeping a space program under the thumb of the U.S. federal government is doing little more than holding back the field at this point. When space programs (and technology) were just starting to blossom, it was important to monitor them due to their potential military uses as well as the safety issues involved in working with such experimental technology.
Nowadays, however, companies such as SpaceX, Bigelow Aerospace, Blue Origin, and a plethora of others are showing that space exploration is capable as a commercial entity (granted, none of these organizations are sending probes past Earth orbit yet, but the potential is there). That being said, there is very little reason to continue to spend federal money on an entire space program. NASA employs some of the most intelligent and capable people in this industry. They have a plethora legacy and in-house knowledge that could benefit the public sector endlessly. It seems that, at this point, the NASA entity should be closed entirely while a private sector entity is set up to absorb most of, if not all of, its employees. If NASA were to break free of the federal government (and all of the political staging and pressures and general BS) it could perform unimaginably well in the private sector.
It seems to me that it is time for the government funded (and unfortunately, controlled) entity of NASA might as well be dissolved and a private equivalent PASA (Public American Space Agency or some other such acronym) could thrive better in its place. Of course, I am not a business major so I can't say I know much about a potential business model, but from a science and engineering standpoint, it would behoove progress greatly if NASA could get free of the government.
Keeping NASA under government control would be like keeping a booming computer company like Microsoft under government control during the early years of the computing industry, it would have just hampered progress and the dissemination of computer technology. Similarly, federal control of one of the most (if not THE most) advanced space exploration entities is just hampering the progress of mankind's expansion into the stars.
I wonder how many people tend to notice the coincidental timing of things like this. What was it, yesterday or the day before that there was a front-page post in every major newspaper about the JSF plans getting siphoned? Then, just coincidentally, a few days later plans to beef up 'cyber' operations at a federal level are put forth publicly (despite the fact that making decisions for any new programs at a federal level take days, if not weeks to make).
It seems to me that the average layman probably hears things like 'cyberwarfare' and 'fighter plane plans stolen via hacking' and 'we need a new, federally controlled cyberwarfare program' and probably doesn't think about the difference between 'offensive' and 'defensive' type network operations since the average layman says, "Computers and Hackers and Cyberspies! Oh My! Save us!" Thus, convincing the public that a new, expensive, powerful (and probably not well-regulated) federal cyber-department will keep them safe. Besides, our very own military networks were just hacked maliciously to download the plans for our newest jet fighter, didn't you hear?
I guess what I am trying to say is:
Increase public knowledge of cyberthreats + Offer federal solution to the new cyberthreat problem = Immediate public approval new program that increases federal spending and power.
Yay!
No, to track them down we're going to need more power....or better yet...
...we could use a Beowulf Cluster of these!
Well some of us whippersnappers in the U.S. tried to institute a shift in ideals during the last election with Ron Paul. Unfortunately our hopes were squelched effectively when the mainstream media made a point to shoot Ron Paul's election bid in the face before it had a chance to be recognized. It's hard to inspire motivation in a generation of U.S. citizens that has been consistently reminded that no matter how hard we kick and scream or what kind of political ruckus we make, there is always and over-aggressive government and ignorant/biased media to put us back in 'our place.'
Couple this with the fact that all of us youngin's found a newfound breathe of fresh air and freedom in the internet, but now the government and media are also going through consistently more aggressive means to regulate and control this frontier and what we have is a general feeling of bleak hoplessness conquering us all. Yay!
If I had spent 2-3 years creating a novel, I certainly don't want somebody taking my labor without pay...
Excuse me, I cannot speak for anyone but I would like to throw an alternative perspective out there. I DID spend a year and a half writing a novel. It was one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. An idea came to me and I just started typing. I wrote when I had free time. I wrote instead of watching T.V. I wrote to my favorite music, while trolling my favorite internet forums. The reason I tell you all this is because for me, writing a novel was an extremely enjoyable experience, one I would have done whether or not anyone ever did or did not read it. I never published my book (though I still may), but I did pdf and release it on one of my school's FTP serves for anyone to flip through. There are 6 binder bound copies floating around in the local community that I printed so friends could read. I don't really know what happened to them.
I never made a dime of a single print.
I am not bitter about this. Writing something like a book, or developing any art, imho should be a labor of love, something you enjoy doing. Now, I write perl programs as a hobby, because like writing the novel was,it is fun to me.
It seems that at some point, someone decided that doing things just for the sake of enjoying them wasn't enough. I say that's wrong. I figure most of what we do should be done for the sake of doing it, not making a profit. In fact, once profits do come into the picture, things like deadlines occur and then, all of the sudden, the quality of the work can go down drastically.
My point to posting all this is that there seems to be a very money-oriented mindset instilled in culture these days that says if you do anything you should damn well be payed for it. Nonsense. If you do anything it should bring you peace of mind.
Granted, altruistic creations are often approached with suspicion these days, but this is a problem, imho. I am tired of hearing everyone bitch about how they should be paid for everything. If you are going to do something, do it for the peace it brings you, not the bling.
Cheers.
I have a right.....
Famous last words. Now in the eyes of the government/media you are an extremist, paranoid, potential terrorist, and you have something to hide. Funny how those last words used to be a rallying cry for freedom.
Any 'exceptions' you have discovered to ZMM's wisdom, I would bet, were derived based on contrivances of your making induced by the filtration your natural human senses have processed your experience with. That being said, if you understood the core of what ZMM was addressing, the general scheme it was introducing, you would realize that it is this filtration, and the inevitable contrivances thus developed by the human experience, that limit the perception of the true power of what was being discussed. That is, of quality. Please reread the book and start looking at the universe, at reality in general, from the top-down theme that it introduces, and you may find that so many of your so-called exceptions are entirely irrelevant, not to mention as I stated above, contrived based on your personal experience.
...why is it worded in such a way as to imply the different bacteria is the reason that one is obese and the other isn't, instead of the type of bacteria changed because being obese (and the eating that goes along with it) favor one type over the other.
I would imagine it has something to do with the fact that the mass majority of your body's microbes (including the type majorities in your systems) are acquired at or shortly after birth ( Discussed in Detail Here), rather than changing significantly over the course of your life.
"The repair procedure will deprive you of your overpriced gaming console for more than two weeks which, though you legally paid for and own, you are not allowed to unscrew and open in order to clean out the excessive amount of obfuscated legal BS that came with the interior of your purchase. Have a nice day...."
It's a meaningless analogy that only serves to make your field sound like pseudoscience BS.
The miracle of pseudoscience has brought us fields and theories such as reflexology, chiropractic, magnet theory, global warming, scientology(ish), psychobabble, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor> radioactive medicinces , or the movement to close down the Large Hadron Collider.
Without psuedoscience, what would all the people in the world do if they wanted to get their neck cracked, their feet massaged, and their brain demagnetized while enjoying a nice UV cooking session and methodically fluffing L. Ron Hubbard's ego while enjoying a passive prostate warming and impeding scientific progress?
I mean sheesh, you have to give pseudoscience some credit...
And yet it can't be completed with people actually working on it.
Sure it can, just like the oversight and regulation of the bailout money being doled out to various social entities has been completed without anyone working on it....
...Oh Wait...
From the original article:
Some of the supposedly suspicious activities listed in support of the search warrant application include: the student being seen with "unknown laptop computers," which he "says" he was fixing for other students; the student uses multiple names to log on to his computer...."
I particularly like the fact that having multiple log in accounts and multiple laptops is suspicious behavior. Damn those greedy capitalist pig-dog students who aren't content with one computer and one user Id.....
...anything more would be a violation of basic constitutional rights
Ha! What makes you think any of us have those anymore? What do you think this is, America?....
Oh, wait....
Ummmmm, no? I am not sure what proposal you read in the 1970's and maybe I am just lacking inventiveness, but this seems entirely unintuitive to me. Geosynch orbits, by definition, cross the same footprint on the earth at the same time every day. To get less than 2% shadow exposure you need to have a near sun-syncronous orbit (highly inclined) that rides along the day-night divider line. While you can design these sun-synch orbits to have a constant RAAN in terms of local time on Earth, (meaning that it always ascends towards the north pole at say, 11:30 Am, and descends towards the south pole at 11:30 PM), they do not, if I recall, end up crossing the same point over Earth at the same time. That is, since the Earth rotates under them (because they are orbiting at a near 90 degree inclination to the equator), each time they cross a given lattitude, it is a different point on the Earth.
While you can design geosynch and geostationary orbits to cross or hover over one particular footprint area at one particular time, these are, by definition, low inclination orbits. Which seems to imply to me that you are going to spend quite a bit of time in both the Earth's umbra and penumbra (shadow) regions. Of course, you can do some high eccentricity tricks like the Molniya orbits to make the orbital speeds crazy intense when in the shadow so that you swing in and out of it quickly, but then you are faced with two problems:
A) You are are swinging in and out of the Van Allen radiation belts and melting your shiny solar arrays which are your mission critical payload and
B) You are now at an altitude beyond GEO (~22,000 mi) for part of your orbit, which makes beaming anything, especially energy, back to Earth in an accurate manner entirely difficult, nigh impossible.
Again, I might just not be thinking outside the box here, but designing an effective, low-shadow Geosynch orbit seems....unlikely. It's not impossible, nothing is impossible, it's just unlikely, and it seems like a real pain in the a** to me.
Cheers.
200 sq. meters of solar arrays is not that unreasonable these days. The Direct TV satellites have something like 60 sq. meters or solar arrays if I remember correctly. I recall doing research on a Japanese satellite that trailed a single solar array that was larger than that. 200 sq. meters of solar arrays has never been done before, granted, but neither had 5 sq. meters at some point in history. The trick with something this big is controlling it, I have not looked at the design for their orbital power plant, but it seems to me that constraining solar arrays in a grid pattern, anchored at separate orbiting bodies might allow that kind of control. Otherwise we are going to need to redesign the CMGs for the ISS to control something that big. It's doable, it just hasn't been done yet.
Honestly though, I think having multiple interconnecting panels might be the better way to approach that kind of problem....hmmmm...
Hmmm, I am not sure exactly where you got your numbers but 2-4 times more efficient seems a bit fishy to me, especially since it depends highly on what kind of solar cells you are using and what materials are layered within it. I've known space cell efficiencies to range from 10% to 33% so 2-4 times as a multiplier seems, odd...
But that aside, it is also important to note that space based solar cells degrade much quicker due to higher radiation levels. I think the idea of generating power in space and sending it back to earth is an extreme foresight on humanity's part. Granted, we do not have the technology right now to make it economically viable or cost-effective. Nonetheless, some one hundred years or more in the future, as humanity's population expands and our farmlands die off and so on and so on, we might find that terrestrial assets become rare. That is, taking up acres and acres of land for solar power generation or wind generation may prove to be just as bad a decision in the future as abusing fossil fuels and wasting water has proven to be today. Thus, if we start testing space based power generation now, we may provide ourselves some solution to future problems. This kind of idea shows me that humanity is at least attempting to change the carpe diem mindset a bit. Doesn't seem like a terrible investment to me...
Cheers.
It's hard to generate genuine public interest in a space program or any other program when the public as a whole would rather wallow in trendy fads and pseudo science. Those who think NASA is doing nothing interesting are quite wrong. Take for instance the Cassini-Huygens probe that NASA launched to study Saturn and her moons. Here was a great example of a bold, recent mission by NASA. It involved a lander, an attempt to search for traces of life, and studying one of the most known items in our solar system, Saturn's rings. Yet, despite the awe that such an undertaking would impose upon most people, this mission became mired in public criticism over the fact that it used plutonium as a power source. The simply fact of the matter is, once you push beyond the asteroid belt, things like solar panels become terribly inefficient for power generation so something like nuclear material needs to be used. Nonetheless, this fact didn't stop high profile physicists from complaining about nuclear matter being used on board a spacecraft that would be operating in an environment that is already crawling with radiation (you didn't think all of those charged particles belched out by our sun just fizzled did you)?
So NASA stands in an incredibly precarious situation. Every move they want to make to the 'final frontier' will involve increasingly complex, risky, and costly developments. Yet, they still must push forward because, well, that's the whole point of the organization. Then, even when they do something right (Cassini was and still is a great success), their programs are still stained in criticism and filth because it is so easy to rally the ignorant public into a critical frenzy by dropping phrases like, "environmentally unfriendly," "a danger to public health," or "a waste of tax-payers money."
This isn't the only place we see this kind of thing happen. Worldwide, nuclear physicists are under criticism for trying to develop and streamline nuclear power production terrestrially. Robotics and AI fields get attacked for developing "dangerous, possibly threatening" near sentient autonomous weapons (paranoid much?) And even the medical field gets it when they investigate something like stem-cell research or human growth factor and the whole ordeal becomes a blasphemous religious issue.
It seems that the general population is too stupid to think for themselves so they let themselves be rallied by the loudest (and often very biased) sources, by tactics like fear-mongering or mercy pleas. The only reason this wasn't allowed to occur during the Cold War days was because Joe public was more worried about the 'evil commies' than he was about 'cooking the dolphins with plutonium.' Now there are no evil commies to fear so we fear the unknown instead.
The last great revolution in society was the digital revolution supposedly. Some experts think the information and robotics revolutions are next. It seems to me that we are more likely to see a "naive complacency revolution" instead...
Cheers.
Just one problem with your idea, if someone mentions the words "nuclear powered..." anything, somewhere, someone throws a political hissy fit over the possible environmental and public health issues these nuclear powered anythings 'could possible create...' Rather than recognize the fact that research and understanding of both fission and fusion reactions has advanced and evolved since their original implementations to result in safer, better controlled power plants and applications, some ignoramuses would much rather pull on their sheep costumes and declare proudly to their pseudo-scientific overlords that "nuclear powered" anythings are the purest evil mankind has ever wrought.
See at this point in time, applying any of our most modern technologies is considered a moral blasphemy because, well, technology is unnatural, not understood and dangerous. Fissile materials and nuclear power production are no exception to this rule. The general populace seems entirely convinced that if an element has an atomic weight somewhere above the number 100, the element is a magical compound that will result in Armageddon and the deaths of all children (WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?).
So no, my friend, we cannot use decommissioned nukes to progress the human species in any form because frankly, it is entirely impossible to implement such technology without killing every living thing on the planet...or at least that's what we are supposed to think.
Cheers.
use File::Find;
find(\&beat_with stick,"Dead_But_Funny_Horse");
It is interesting to me that stories like this are getting posted more and more to slashdot. I recall reading on here something about Obama's DOJ appointees being extremely biased in the filesharing controversies. I remember reading stuff on here about acts putting cyber security for both federal and private networks in the hands of the presidency. I remember reading quite a few of these types of stories here on slashdot, but have seen none of them published in newspapers, or discussed on news talk shows (comedy or serious) or anything else. In fact, it seems that these kinds of rights-suppressing stories are increasingly being pushed to the fringe news networks while the main stream media continues to bitch about an economy that we all know is cluster f***ed royally, an increasing rate of violent crimes, and occasional news about the middle east. Forgive me if I am being paranoid but it seems like there is a large effort being conducted to keep the news about us, American Citizens, and our rights off the air, while the airwaves are being increasingly polluted with the same depressing, mind-numbing dribble for the masses to feed upon.
Something seems very wrong with this country these days, and the world in general....
Forgive the doomsday tone, but I don't like the fact that the mass majority of people are completely unaware that their privacy and defense-against-the-government rights are being hacked and slashed like no tomorrow. At least when the Patriot Act was pushed through, we saw throngs of people bitching about it in the streets and media. Why the sudden happy complacency now?