Lots of parts of the earth have liquid water, and a lot of them have no life
Do tell. Name one.
need air: Brilliant. In a vacuum the water would boil-freeze and you'd have no more liquid water.
light: Brilliant. Without light the water would freeze and you'd have no more liquid water.
plants: What, do plants not qualify as life? Hell man, for a few billion years photosynthesizing bacteria were the only things you'd find here!
a suitably low gravity: We have absolutely no idea whether life could develop in gravities different from our own. How are you so sure?
no major regular earthquakes: What does this have to do with anything? Are you telling me primitive flora and fauna can't handle the occasional tremor?
What is the likelyhood of all these things being right on another planet: Look, if there is liquid water in any great quantities at all, a number of requirements have already been met. There is an atmosphere. There is sufficient light. The gravity is within reasonable boundaries, else the air pressure would be too wierd to allow for liquid water. Considering the kind of sick places here on Earth that life is perfectly willing to put up with, it seems very likely that even barely habitable worlds would develop some form of life.
It depends. If all you have to do is dig down a mile and start scooping up the ice, then it's not much of a problem at all. If you've got to sift through tons of moon rock to get a few pounds of ice, then it may indeed be easier to go to Jupiter, or just go a little further to Saturn and bring back an ice rock from the rings. Or nab a passing comet.
It's possible that Jovian-sized planets generate so much heat by themselves that the seasonal effects are negligible. The point is moot though, since these planets don't even have a surface. But they might have earth-sized moons capable of supporting life.
Hell, I'm just waiting for the gamma and X-ray lithography machines! With their wavelength, they're could write on mediums far smaller than atoms. I'm not too sure what the chip would be made of in that event, but hey...
They can still come up with better ways to use all those transistors. They need not be transistors, either. Whatever process they use to make these things in quantity could certainly be useful for making, to pick a technology at random, molecule sized LCD's. Imagine a monitor with 10 billion dpi!
Sorry, but having a transistor's atoms split would be nuclear fission. It takes a bloody large amount of heat to reach temperatures capable of such a reaction
Yes it does, but that doesn't mean it can't happen on the scale of one or two atoms. Consider: water only converts to a gas at 100 Celcius, yet it evaporates. How? The water at the surface attains a kinetic energy sufficient to transform it into a gas. Similarly, freak quantum interactions will cause the occasional atom to convert to a different element. It doesn't take that much energy, since we're not talking about all that much mass here.
Statistically, a lump of lead could undergo spontaneous fission, but the odds of it happening are on par with the chances of every molecule of air in the room suddenly evacuating itself, leaving you gasping for breath. On a long enough time scale, everything in the universe does this; eventually it all turns into iron (and then neutronium, and then black holes, and then evaporates, but let's not quibble).
I love this! And the product is utterly indistinguishable from a real EULA.
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Re:Another interpretation
on
EULA In Games
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· Score: 1
without bond, other security, or proof of damages
with respect to threatened or actual breaches
That sounds like something straight out of the UCITA. "We the software developers are not required to provide actual proof of any wrongdoing and can sue your sorry ass into oblivion if we feel so inclined."
The up side is that even with the UCITA, any lawyer worth his salt could probably make hash of the lack of evidence on a 'threatened breach of contract'.
It would be legally binding, but I'd love to see anything like that hold up in court. The company would have to explain how that little clause got into the EULA.
About the only way you could get away with that would like the recent M$ forcing a bill of $130k. Try and trick a medium sized company that would rather just pay the bill than take you to court. But there you have to deal with the fact that they might actually read the EULA and catch your little scam.
What, you mean this opinion?
"Is big science destroying human esteem?"
"Scientists are obsessed with reducing our status."
"They should be striving to show the opposite, just how important we are"
These are all direct quotes from you.
I don't see how I'm distorting your opinion at all.
But I do apologize for suggesting that everything you say is dumb. There are some highly insightful posts in your user info.
That would probably do some good, but throw in dynamically generated web pages, of which there are an awful lot, and the computational power necessary to do voice recognition on 60 million people's phone calls, and the DB is still friggin huge. They'd definitely want to keep an eye on what people get off of ftp's, so you may have to add that in as well.
I know not everyone is connected, but those of us who are (especially on DSL/cable) more than make up for it.
Hell, just storing the visits to/. would take a couple of gigs per day by itself.
Probably. But even that low-end estimate is mind-boggling. If they do the easy thing and store all packets to and from a given person, the rest of us will easily make that number go through the roof. For instance, between me and my 3 roommates, we've sent or received 6 million packets in the past 4 days. I figure that's at least 30MB per person per day. That number is offset by the non-connected people, but between phone calls and the increase in used bandwidth over the next few years, 30MB is probably a better estimate. That makes for a little over 4.5 million terrabytes. That's just not gonna happen, folks, especially not on a budget of a few million pounds.
As I recall, 4,500,000 TB is on par with what it would take to store the solution to the Towers of Hanoi with all 64 discs.
Snooping by government may be a violation of privacy and a violation of personal rights but in no streach of imagionation is this a violation of democracy.
Sure it is. If the cast majority of the populace is against it (and they will be!) but their representatives go ahead and do it anyway, then that is most definitely not democracy in action.
As long as it is made known which members of the House of Commons voted for it, I don't think this will last, since those reps will be out on their asses next election. Obviously you can't do the same with the House of Lords, but that's ok, since they can't do much anyway.
I'm just curious about the space this would take up. Ideas?
Every telephone call made and received by a member of the public, all emails sent and received and every web page looked at would be recorded.
Does that mean every time I (that is, if I were in Britain) check/. it makes a copy of the page at that point in time? And are they going to be recording the phone calls? How about faxes? Attachments to emails?
60 million people * 365 * 7 years = 153 billion people-days of info. Lets be conservative and say it only takes 100K to store every phone call, web page visit, and email made by the average (not everyone is a/. junkie) person in a day, with compression.
an astronomer at McDonald observatory in Texas went nuts about 20 years ago and fired a 45 caliber handgun several times into one of the big scopes there
I'm sorry, but I just think that's funny as hell. Any idea what made him 'go astral'?
I am, however, quite relieved to hear that these phenomenally expensive telescopes can take a little beating and keep on ticking.
If it could be easily mined then those commodity price would fall quickly
True, but it's not as if an entire asteroid's worth of metals is going to be dumped onto the market overnight. It'll take a while to get price levels down to ridiculous levels (ie, gold and platinum for the same price as tin), during which the demand for these materials will go even higher.
Also if the metals could be recovered and transported cheaply enough you could look to see even more mining companies going bust
Why does everyone see new technologies putting old industries out of work as a Bad Thing? When automobiles first became popular, did the horse-raising industry cry out to the government "No, you can't allow this! We'll go out of business!" How about commuter airplanes vs airships? The Pony express vs telegrams? Telegrams vs telephones? Telephones vs voice over IP? The RIAA and MPAA vs the Internet? Well on the last two, yes, but why should the they be allowed to do things the inefficient Old way at the expense of the much better New? I say, fuck em. If they can't adapt, they deserve to go under.
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Re:Asteroid mining is just sweeping it under the r
on
On Asteroid Mining
·
· Score: 1
So, we should all just find a nice cave to live in and spend our lives singing campfire songs and skinning local wildlife for clothes while admiring Ayla's slinging abilities?
You want no pollution or garbage? Geez, mankind has been polluting its environment since before we became sentient, just like every single other organism on the planet for its entire history. This atmosphere you hold so dear to your heart is largely pollution from photosynthesis and various other chemical reactions. Should we do something about our excesses? Yes, but certainly not by killing off all our industries.
You want no shortages? You're not going to get that by slapping an upper limit on the amount of resources we can have in circulation at any given time. You'll notice that money fits this pattern fairly well. Now think carefully before you answer this: are there people who have a shortage of money? I'll give you a hint: the correct answer begins with a 'Y'.
Look, utopias where everyone's desires are fulfilled through the happy interaction of happy people with happy intentions working happily towards happy goals using only happy technology while living out happy lives with their happy families on a happy planet are all well and good. But for the love of god don't waste space on/. servers by asking why they aren't already here.
I hate that treaty. It's such a blatant attempt at "Let's do something really stupid to make us all feel good about ourselves". Now any nation that wants to get into space is going to have to deal with the fact that for all the work they did, they can't claim anything. Stupid, stupid, stupid...
You said that any vehicle from earth still belongs to the country. Does that cover vehicles made in space? If I build a moon rover out of lunar materials, is it still "the province of all mankind"?
Personally, if I were in charge of a nation with a space program that actually did anything in space, I sure as hell wouldn't turn over authority of space to the UN.
Hello, extraction costs? Hello distance? Hello concentration? Yeah right, 'making rocket fuel from icy asteroids' in orbit at 3 AU
Hello, you're an idiot? There are plenty of asteroids that aren't in the Belt. Some of them cross earth's orbit all the time. Move one into orbit and your distance problem all but goes away. 3 AU's? Try 3000 km, with gravity doing all the work of getting it down here. Who the hell moderated this moron up?
What's naive is assuming that you are right and everyone else is wrong. Don't you think that people with significantly more intelligence than you have been thinking about problems like these for some time now? Try actually reading up on the subject before you declare yourself an expert.
First of all, it doesn't cost anywhere near as much to throw something down a gravity well. Second, why can't you do the manufacturing in orbit? I'll bet there's a lot of cool stuff industry could do with zero-g and vacuum and perpetual sunshine.
However, the required delta-v is a good point, but easily solved: move the asteroid into orbit. Then just extract the stuff and kick it down to earth. But then you have problems with all the stupid people who have seen Armagaeddon and will think that it's the end of the world when that second moon (cool!) shows up.
Slashdot Mirror
Do tell. Name one.
need air: Brilliant. In a vacuum the water would boil-freeze and you'd have no more liquid water.
light: Brilliant. Without light the water would freeze and you'd have no more liquid water.
plants: What, do plants not qualify as life? Hell man, for a few billion years photosynthesizing bacteria were the only things you'd find here!
a suitably low gravity: We have absolutely no idea whether life could develop in gravities different from our own. How are you so sure?
no major regular earthquakes: What does this have to do with anything? Are you telling me primitive flora and fauna can't handle the occasional tremor?
What is the likelyhood of all these things being right on another planet: Look, if there is liquid water in any great quantities at all, a number of requirements have already been met. There is an atmosphere. There is sufficient light. The gravity is within reasonable boundaries, else the air pressure would be too wierd to allow for liquid water. Considering the kind of sick places here on Earth that life is perfectly willing to put up with, it seems very likely that even barely habitable worlds would develop some form of life.
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It depends. If all you have to do is dig down a mile and start scooping up the ice, then it's not much of a problem at all. If you've got to sift through tons of moon rock to get a few pounds of ice, then it may indeed be easier to go to Jupiter, or just go a little further to Saturn and bring back an ice rock from the rings. Or nab a passing comet.
--
It's possible that Jovian-sized planets generate so much heat by themselves that the seasonal effects are negligible. The point is moot though, since these planets don't even have a surface. But they might have earth-sized moons capable of supporting life.
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Hell, I'm just waiting for the gamma and X-ray lithography machines! With their wavelength, they're could write on mediums far smaller than atoms. I'm not too sure what the chip would be made of in that event, but hey...
--
They can still come up with better ways to use all those transistors. They need not be transistors, either. Whatever process they use to make these things in quantity could certainly be useful for making, to pick a technology at random, molecule sized LCD's. Imagine a monitor with 10 billion dpi!
--
Yes it does, but that doesn't mean it can't happen on the scale of one or two atoms. Consider: water only converts to a gas at 100 Celcius, yet it evaporates. How? The water at the surface attains a kinetic energy sufficient to transform it into a gas. Similarly, freak quantum interactions will cause the occasional atom to convert to a different element. It doesn't take that much energy, since we're not talking about all that much mass here.
Statistically, a lump of lead could undergo spontaneous fission, but the odds of it happening are on par with the chances of every molecule of air in the room suddenly evacuating itself, leaving you gasping for breath. On a long enough time scale, everything in the universe does this; eventually it all turns into iron (and then neutronium, and then black holes, and then evaporates, but let's not quibble).
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I love this! And the product is utterly indistinguishable from a real EULA.
--
with respect to threatened or actual breaches
That sounds like something straight out of the UCITA. "We the software developers are not required to provide actual proof of any wrongdoing and can sue your sorry ass into oblivion if we feel so inclined."
The up side is that even with the UCITA, any lawyer worth his salt could probably make hash of the lack of evidence on a 'threatened breach of contract'.
--
About the only way you could get away with that would like the recent M$ forcing a bill of $130k. Try and trick a medium sized company that would rather just pay the bill than take you to court. But there you have to deal with the fact that they might actually read the EULA and catch your little scam.
--
"Is big science destroying human esteem?"
"Scientists are obsessed with reducing our status."
"They should be striving to show the opposite, just how important we are"
These are all direct quotes from you.
I don't see how I'm distorting your opinion at all.
But I do apologize for suggesting that everything you say is dumb. There are some highly insightful posts in your user info.
--
I know not everyone is connected, but those of us who are (especially on DSL/cable) more than make up for it.
Hell, just storing the visits to /. would take a couple of gigs per day by itself.
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Of course, it would make trying to get one of the discs in the middle rather fun :)
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Who uses jewel cases for mass disc storage? A spindle 441km long would do it just fine.
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C'mon, someone mod this up as Funny!
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As I recall, 4,500,000 TB is on par with what it would take to store the solution to the Towers of Hanoi with all 64 discs.
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So you're saying that Harry Browne should run for office in GB?
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Sure it is. If the cast majority of the populace is against it (and they will be!) but their representatives go ahead and do it anyway, then that is most definitely not democracy in action.
As long as it is made known which members of the House of Commons voted for it, I don't think this will last, since those reps will be out on their asses next election. Obviously you can't do the same with the House of Lords, but that's ok, since they can't do much anyway.
--
Every telephone call made and received by a member of the public, all emails sent and received and every web page looked at would be recorded.
Does that mean every time I (that is, if I were in Britain) check /. it makes a copy of the page at that point in time? And are they going to be recording the phone calls? How about faxes? Attachments to emails?
60 million people * 365 * 7 years = 153 billion people-days of info. Lets be conservative and say it only takes 100K to store every phone call, web page visit, and email made by the average (not everyone is a /. junkie) person in a day, with compression.
100K * 153B = 15,300 Terrabytes.
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I'm sorry, but I just think that's funny as hell. Any idea what made him 'go astral'?
I am, however, quite relieved to hear that these phenomenally expensive telescopes can take a little beating and keep on ticking.
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Its posts would probably just get modded down as trolls and we'd never hear about it.
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True, but it's not as if an entire asteroid's worth of metals is going to be dumped onto the market overnight. It'll take a while to get price levels down to ridiculous levels (ie, gold and platinum for the same price as tin), during which the demand for these materials will go even higher.
Also if the metals could be recovered and transported cheaply enough you could look to see even more mining companies going bust
Why does everyone see new technologies putting old industries out of work as a Bad Thing? When automobiles first became popular, did the horse-raising industry cry out to the government "No, you can't allow this! We'll go out of business!" How about commuter airplanes vs airships? The Pony express vs telegrams? Telegrams vs telephones? Telephones vs voice over IP? The RIAA and MPAA vs the Internet? Well on the last two, yes, but why should the they be allowed to do things the inefficient Old way at the expense of the much better New? I say, fuck em. If they can't adapt, they deserve to go under.
--
You want no pollution or garbage? Geez, mankind has been polluting its environment since before we became sentient, just like every single other organism on the planet for its entire history. This atmosphere you hold so dear to your heart is largely pollution from photosynthesis and various other chemical reactions. Should we do something about our excesses? Yes, but certainly not by killing off all our industries.
You want no shortages? You're not going to get that by slapping an upper limit on the amount of resources we can have in circulation at any given time. You'll notice that money fits this pattern fairly well. Now think carefully before you answer this: are there people who have a shortage of money? I'll give you a hint: the correct answer begins with a 'Y'.
Look, utopias where everyone's desires are fulfilled through the happy interaction of happy people with happy intentions working happily towards happy goals using only happy technology while living out happy lives with their happy families on a happy planet are all well and good. But for the love of god don't waste space on /. servers by asking why they aren't already here.
--
You said that any vehicle from earth still belongs to the country. Does that cover vehicles made in space? If I build a moon rover out of lunar materials, is it still "the province of all mankind"?
Personally, if I were in charge of a nation with a space program that actually did anything in space, I sure as hell wouldn't turn over authority of space to the UN.
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Hello, you're an idiot? There are plenty of asteroids that aren't in the Belt. Some of them cross earth's orbit all the time. Move one into orbit and your distance problem all but goes away. 3 AU's? Try 3000 km, with gravity doing all the work of getting it down here. Who the hell moderated this moron up?
What's naive is assuming that you are right and everyone else is wrong. Don't you think that people with significantly more intelligence than you have been thinking about problems like these for some time now? Try actually reading up on the subject before you declare yourself an expert.
--
However, the required delta-v is a good point, but easily solved: move the asteroid into orbit. Then just extract the stuff and kick it down to earth. But then you have problems with all the stupid people who have seen Armagaeddon and will think that it's the end of the world when that second moon (cool!) shows up.
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