Eh, frankly I wish that serious medical researchers in the 70's had been a bit more aggressive about countering the bogus results from tobacco industry shills. Yep, including the exclusion of publication of the results of reports commissioned by the tobacco industry that were significantly divergent from those of independent researchers without some darn good explanation for the divergence. There's a precedent for this kind of activity and these scientists don't want their scientific discipline tarnished by whores paid off by industry to muddy the waters. I don't think they initially had problems with genuine criticism. However there's the once, is an accident, twice a coincidence... when it comes to bogus papers, they're well into enemy action.
Yeah. On the bright side, if you do wind up getting Dust Bowl II for a decade or more, it would heavily affect the purchasing power of the agrobusiness lobby. Eventually, you might actually get a chance to get some reasonable legislation/trade treaties happening with respect to agricultural subsidies like those on corn. The idiocy of corn-based ethanol for transportation will get an overdue death. In addition, that Republican heartland might get a bit of an overdue insight into the applicability of social support policies (it worked in the 30s at least). Property values in California might go back up to 2006 levels in constant dollars and stay there (not so much for Florida if sea levels rise). Those are about the only silver linings I can see though (the last one is pretty debatable), and the rest is pretty bleak.
Unless there's convincing evidence to the contrary (not alarmist garbage like the CRU article that this slashdot story is based on) or serious carbon emission reduction regulation is implemented, we'll find out naturally. That's good enough for me.
Ah, the "Hopefully I'll be dead before we find out incontrovertibly that it's a critical problem" approach. AKA the Ostrich stance. I guess either you don't want/have kids, or you dislike the ones you have. Here's a hint: many articles about climate change are alarmist because, as simulation capability has improved and models improved in complexity and predictive accuracy, they've been predicting increasingly dire scenarios. Part of that increase in alarm has been due to an increase in the rate of fossil fuel consumption over time, as has the resulting amount of CO2 released, and the CO2 content in the atmosphere. We're not just ignoring the problems ahead, we're accelerating towards them. At this point we've got enough trend line data that you don't need a model to predict if the consequences are going to be bad if we keep along the same path, the modelling at this point just gives us better estimates of how bad it's going to get.
We're currently at a low in the "11 year" solar cycle. You can think of it as a small periodic wave fluctuation in the solar output. That can easily be superimposed on an increasing trend from other factors (like the greenhouse effect). You can have a number of the lows in the zig-zag pattern being lower than previous highs, but in the long run, the highs keep getting higher. The test will be if we get new record-high average temperatures in another couple of years when the solar sunspot activity increases again (just as highest solar exposure is at noon and temperatures max out in the mid-afternoon, there is a lag between longer period solar flux changes and average global temperature changes). Solar activity does play a factor in fluctuations, but it's extremely likely an underlying trend is pushed up by increased CO2 and other GHG.
The problem is that once you admit that solar activity cycles are a factor in global temperature fluctuations, you get the deniers claiming that solar activity therefore also must be the source of all global temperature changes and that none of it is anthropogenic. To me, that's like claiming that the WWI soldiers in the winter of 1918 shouldn't have worried about bullets killing them because the bad hygiene conditions in the trenches were likely to kill them naturally through infection with seasonal flu or pneumonia.
That said, yeah, I have to admit, green is a much better color scheme than brown. Too bad it was already taken.
If you change the background to something decent, the window title bars are the only things brown and it actually can be quite pleasant. I used the provided fractal explorer app to generate a subset of the julia set with solid colours on the left and right edges and mostly solid on the bottom (so my few desktop icons are clear and readable) and made it just the right size for my dual-head setup. I did two fractal bitmaps, one with a mainly white/green shade cycling palette for increasing function values, and another from the multi-colour cycling palette. I wound up preferring the multi-colour palette picture; it's got a warmer blend of colours, with some harmonizing nicely with the title bars and others providing visual relief from the default beige theme. The result looks terrific when I turn it on and the whole desktop is visible (I'm not the only one who thinks so), windows stand out nicely from the middle of the background, and yet the background isn't distracting or eyestrain inducing.
My work laptop uses an old space.com pic as a desktop background, featuring a shuttle and planet-backed spacewalk pic. However I haven't found anything like that at a high enough resolution to work well on my home screen combo.
Good point. I seem to remember that some of the earlier Bush-proposed legal frameworks for military tribunals (which were struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional) allowed evidence obtained after torture, but the current framework doesn't. Apparently, Australia is finding that overly restrictive, but in a way that's probably got some ex-Bush administration officials worried over their actions.
It's pretty simple. The military courts are appropriate for combatants captured on a foreign field of battle. By trying KSM and the others in civilian courts (because the 9/11 victims were civilians on US soil), the case establishes a couple of things that neo-cons don't want to happen:
a) since evidence obtained through torture is ineligible in civilian courts, the information used by the prosecution will be what was obtained before he was tortured. So when KSM gets convicted on the basis of all the incriminating information that was available prior to torture, it will be a strong indictment that the torture used on him was not necessary. The whole neo-con "we had to torture" argument is shown for the pack of lies it is. Since Cheney was the biggest proponent of torture, it's not surprising he's also the most opposed to this happening since a conviction changes his place in history from question mark to a sadistic torturer.
b) it re-establishes the primacy of the standard US criminal justice system for acts committed on U.S. soil.
Basically, if KSM and his buddies can be convicted and put in jail through the civilian courts, it means that the wholesale raping of the Geneva Convention, habeus corpus, and other civil rights by the (neo-con) Republicans was unnecessary. It also sets a strong counter-precedent in case the neo-cons (inevitably) try the whole "Permanent Emergency" gambit again.
So yeah, the neo-cons and their water bearers like Lieberman are seriously against this and using FUD to slam the effort. Big surprise.
Well, it depends on how sensitive the bacteria are. Over time, rain, sun, organic processes, etc., will probably wash away and break down the explosive residue you spread, whereas it would continue to evaporate/disseminate from the actual mine locations. That would mean that long term mine fields like those on the North Korea DMZ would effectively be vulnerable unless you were prepared to re-seed the fields regularly with explosive residue (an expensive proposition). In the end, this might remove the last holdouts (including the US - primarily because of NK) against a land mine ban treaty. Once it becomes moot of course.
They might try to seal the explosives in new mines against thermal dispersal (and then terrorists can get a hold of that technology to sneak explosives onto planes again) but that would increase the cost of land mines, for which the primary advantage currently is low cost.
Well, it's possible to look at them as a control experiment. On the one hand they are willingly foregoing use of most modern conveniences, and wasting a lot of energy unnecessarily doesn't seem like a terribly smart idea. On the other hand, if modern civilization ever collapses for some reason (and it is fairly precarious in some ways), they are the best equipped, in terms of skills and tools, to survive the aftermath (assuming they live far enough away from the roaming bands of armed and starving city folk).
Well, apparently the Nibiru myth has been widespread in a number of "non-fiction" books by psychics and other flim-flam salesmen. So maybe they did some "research" after the movie, found all the Internet links on the subject and decided "Holy crap, there's something to this after all!".The movie just put something on their radar that they were predisposed to believe. It's not like there isn't a precedent - just think of all the people who took for granted the Dan Brown books.
Perhaps the predisposition comes through a mistaken belief in psychics from a persuasive person that actually uses those beliefs to help people. That's the problem with "magic men" and shamans. Even if they have useful knowledge and do good and but just don't want to take the time to explain what they know, they create a predisposition that can be exploited by the less scrupulous. Unfortunately, with much of science becoming increasingly advanced, specialized, and inaccessible to the layman, and thus becoming indistinguishable from magic, it's not helping. Back when kid could pick up a wrench set or a soldering iron and play with an old engine or tube radio, science was less mystifying. Outlawing chemistry sets to "save the children" isn't helping any either.
Not really. Mad cow disease, when transmitted to humans, is called variant Creutzfeld-Jacob disease. The original Creutzfeld-Jacob disease occurs spontaneously, but can be transmitted by cannibalism and is suspected to have been more common among some tribes that practised cannibalism like those in New Guinea and elsewhere. But cows didn't get mad cow disease by eating people or even by eating cows; as with humans it probably started spontaneously. However, it did get much more widespread as a result of feeding unusable cow parts, like the nervous system, back to cows to cut feed costs. That said, the prions tend to be more in the nervous system, so you might be relatively safer eating the liver, if it weren't for the fact that the liver is the filter of the bloodstream and contains a lot more noxious junk (as well as some important vitamins) than the rest of the body as a result.
This also leads me to think that you'd need less of a 'net' and more of a 'sheet'. One would then wonder, depending on altitude and sheet size, when atmospheric drag becomes an issue.
I remember an SF story over a decade ago where the author (maybe Pournelle?) had a similar sweeper idea and they used aerogels to scrub Earth orbit. I say let's call it a trap instead of a net or a sheet, since that describes its function as opposed to its form. That said, I don't think the orbital mechanics would work the way Cringely thought it might. Higher orbits go slower, so the hanging sheet/net (moving at the speed of the orbit of the center of mass of the sheet/tug) is going to be accelerated by impacts from the space junk which will lead the whole thing into a more elliptical orbit, not a shallower circular one. That's not a good way to arrange a slow spiral down to clean up orbits gradually. And that doesn't even begin to consider the stuff in eccentric orbits. So Cringely's idea isn't original, and if he read the same story I did and is subconsciously re-iterating the idea, he's not even getting it right. Now, if you balanced your trap with a larger solar sail and used it to keep your orbit more circular, you might have something.
As for atmospheric drag, if it's an issue for the trap, it will be an issue for anything flying that low. The space junk flying low enough for atmospheric drag to be a factor is a self-correcting problem.
An industry that is known not to pay well will generally only attract people that love it and want to do it.
While money is a poor motivator, lack of it can be a very strong de-motivator. The converse to your argument is "Do the people who would make the best teachers decide to do something else instead? Are they not teachers because they are sufficiently flexible to do something else that is much better remunerated and are economically pressured to do so?"
Back before women's lib, many of the brightest women went into the teaching profession, to the benefit of society, but they now (thankfully for them) have many more opportunities. Smart people will do what motivates them, but don't underestimate the need to make enough money to raise and support a family. If you don't pay teachers enough compared to their alternatives, eventually even the ones who love it will be forced to do something else. It's pretty well required by the rational actor assumption in economics, and you don't really want heavily irrational people teaching your kids. 25 years ago in high school, I had a stats prof who loved teaching but once pointed out he could make a lot more in industry and was torn. This was at one of the best public schools in the province at the time.
Imagine an education system where the workers are there just for the money.
The flip side, one which some schools are rapidly approaching, is to imagine an educational system where teachers are paid so much less than other work with comparable educational investment that the only ones willing to teach are those who have failed/would fail at alternatives. "Those who can't, teach" made real. Clearly the answer is somewhere between the two extremes.
What the hell are you going to get out of the asteroids that you can't get (much, much, much) more cheaply on earth?
Everything, if you're planning on using it in space instead of bringing it down to Earth. Also if you look at a longer term horizon (no more than 200 years) and all the prime/rich mineral sites on Earth are mined out unless you go down a kilometer, the answer will probably simply be "Everything".
Consider that 1) the asteroids are made of iron, nickel, and silicates. So is the earth.
Delta-vee to get out of the earth's gravity well needs high specific impulse unless you've got a space elevator. Once you get your target asteroid out of the asteroid belt, automated solar sail tugs are a (relatively cheap) option. As are nuclear ion engines. Sure it may take a lot longer before you get your payload, but you spend a lot less money and the tug is reusable (send it back out after some minor sail repairs/refueling).
2) It's really, really expensive to get to the asteroids - remember, it costs over $10k/kg just to get to LOW EARTH ORBIT. You'd have to bring an entire factory up there, and there's no way that would be cost effective.
So on the one hand you talk about how everything is cheaper on Earth than bringing in asteroids, and then you go on about how getting things from sea level to LEO (let alone GEO) is so expensive. Remember that the gravity gradient is an inverse square so the costs drop the farther you get out and the biggest costs are near earth, however if you have to raise reaction mass for later legs up that first leg of the trip it's really expensive. But GEO to escape isn't that expensive if you didn't get to GEO with reaction mass and you're using solar sails or reaction mass engines that are energy efficient instead of optimized for Isp. Although, if you have a space elevator, you can get a good fraction of escape velocity from dropping off the end of it at the right time. The tricky part is getting the necessary increase in angular momentum as you move down the line.
Anyways, you would do basic refining closer in-system where the solar energy density is higher, in a lunar trojan or maybe in a trailing Earth or Mars trojan pt if you really wanted a lot of room. If you were to try to replicate a terran refining plant in space then yeah, it would be hellaciously expensive. But you can build a really big solar furnace with very little mass if you don't need to support it in a 1G field and you have a natural vacuum as an insulator.
3) The asteroids are spread out over quadrillions of cubic miles of space, and their orbits are pretty chaotic. Even if you were somehow to find something more valuable than earth's crustal rocks, how would you return to the same location later?
Why would you care about returning to the same location? It's not like you would find a part of the asteroid belt that's the motherload full of gold and you mine it for years. Billions of years should have randomized distribution of minerals across the belt. That said, there might be some type of emergent sorting happening due to orbital mechanics in the way that it does in Jupiter and Saturn's rings, although less so since the moons in those systems enforce orbital boundaries. Still, Jupiter's mass might have some interesting effects on the belt over billions of years and it would be useful to have a general mapping to see if there's any sorting effects. Those effects would have to be radially distributed because of the large difference in solar orbital velocity between the belt and Jupiter. What might be useful is to send out a probe just past the belt and do spectral analysis mapping of the belt over the next couple of decades, with some followups going through radially at any points of interest.
When it came to actual mining, you would send out a bunch of automated samplers that assay the rocks in a region using spectograph
They ought to start wondering why it is that many of us give fuck-all about their precocious shite hardware and realize it's the operating system people are after.
You still don't get it. They know that some people feel the way you do and don't care. They have a business model for making money. You play ball with them or they keep their ball. Seriously all business is like that. There's a value proposition offered by the vendor. If it works for you, you buy; if not, you don't. If you're a big enough customer, maybe you can negotiate if it's worth it to the vendor.
Starbucks isn't going to change their roast recipe because my wife finds their coffee too strong and, as long as they feel their model works at making them money, their renumeration and hiring practices also aren't likely to change significantly because somebody has a problem with it. That's the way business works. As long as Apple continues making a lot of money by successfully positioning themselves as a premium vendor, they're not going to change to accommodate you if it's going to cut into their healthy profit margins. While it's best to keep your customers happy, you are not part of Apple's targeted customer base. That's their decision to make. Deal with it.
The cochlea is just the sensor. AI is interested in how those electrical signals are translated into meaningful recognition in the brain.
Well sure, but that sensor implicitly does a sort of Fourier transform on the incoming waveform because the shape of the cochlea means that specific cilia are more sensitive to specific wavelengths of sound vibrations. The brain then does pattern matching on the resulting frequency/intensity value range to turn it into phonemes. What do you think most of the transistors in that DSP is used for? Fourier transforms maybe? OK, there's probably some filters for telltale relative frequency combinations and added circuitry to detect significant pattern transition boundaries and lengths and that stuff is probably performed by neural networks in the brain. The rest of the work, dictionary lookups and heuristics to determine appropriateness of homonyms (i.e. the rest of what the brain does) probably isn't handled in the DSP but in the driver software. I guess now they may have even most of the last part on chip as well, although you would either have to make it language specific or have the process driven by an external language-specific PROM.
At which point they could refuse to sell the update to anyone who hasn't registered their purchase of an Apple computer. Currently that's a hassle they prefer not to make their users go through, but if they had no other way to limit distribution to owners of Apple computers supported by that update, that would certainly be an option. At which point you wouldn't be able to legally run their software because you wouldn't be able to buy a copy except on eBay secondhand (and you know how well that would work).
The cost model for MacOS is the opposite of the one Microsoft, HP printer/cartridge, and razor vendors use: the fixed and variable costs are front-loaded on the initial purchase and minimized on the updates. Conversely, Microsoft practically gives away Windows licences via OEMs and nails you on the upgrades. I actually think it makes sense that the MacOS X incremental upgrades are cheaper and the up-front costs of the hardware are higher. I don't have a lot of sympathy for you trying to game the system/business model. Seriously, if you want to run MacOS X so much, buy a MacOS box sized for your needs. You can multi-boot or virtualize Linux, Windows or any other O/S you care for. I don't see why anyone would care whether your efforts at running MacOS on unsupported hardware are being stymied.
Now sure you can say: if you can't virtualize MacOS then you are concerned about its long term availability and your ability to access your applications and data in the future. Now that's a good point, one which I can appreciate since my wife's G4 iMac has been in the shop for the last month because of the lack of availability of replacement power supplies. However if that is an overriding concern for you, then run Linux on commodity hardware where that concern is addressed. But you can't always get everything you want and sometimes you have to make a decision on what's more important to you. Apple has basically made it clear they are only interested in doing business with those people willing to accept their business model. If that model's not acceptable to you, then too bad. Move on.
I've enjoyed a number of Wil McCarthy's books. Discovered Charles Stross at this year's Worldcon and so have only found time to read Singularity Sky. I'm looking forward to the rest of his SF books that are sitting on my shelf waiting for me to find time.
I did the same and ran into some problems. The main problem seems to have been the Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000 conflicting with my Logitech USB mouse. If I unplug and re-plug the mouse, it works OK, but it's frozen again after a reboot. Seems to be an issue with evdev mapping. I've now got it re-plugged in as a PS/2 mouse and don't seem to have the same problem. What's interesting is that they worked together fine upgrading from 8.10 to 9.04, which is when a lot of other people were having problems.
I also experienced some minor difficulties because I was running ATI's binary fglrx driver and have switched to the ati/radeon open source driver. However that was simpler to fix and only took time because of the keyboard/mouse problem. Reconfiguring the dual head from mirrored desktop (default after driver re-install) to contiguous is actually pretty easy with the new ati drivers and display preferences panel. I really like KMS and RandR support. Next challenge will be to get userland working with a server kernel for virtualization (at least the kernel boots now).
Except for the fact that phone calls are only protected because of wiretapping laws, with exemptions outlined in FISA and the "PATRIOT" Act for "national security" reasons (i.e. pretty well anything the FBI, CIA, or DOD want). That is, telephone communications are covered because of explicit laws, not because of the 4th amendment. Technically the judge is probably right and the real problem is that you've got useless or corrupt representatives who haven't plugged the obvious legislative holes.
Yep, the use of the Windows 7 math handwriting recognition in tablet mode integrated into Mathematica looks like it would be pretty useful. Has anybody used it and is able to comment on whether its performance is as good as the propaganda says?
Why? Having money available to pay for an expensive licence is not indicative of an ability to drive. If you want to make people be more careful about driving, increase fines for poor driving and apply suspensions (of increasing durations for repeat offenders) for even small but dangerous driving infractions, no exceptions. Making licences expensive beyond the cost of testing and issuance is a form of prior restraint for being poor. Now if your driving test is more rigorous, time consuming, and therefore has a higher cost, then pass on that cost. But raising the cost of a licence by itself won't improve the quality of driving. There were (are) lots of immigrants in Vancouver willing to pay more (i.e. bribes) to be assured of obtaining a licence.
My visit to HK in the late 90s gave me some insight into why more asian immigrants seem to have bad driving habits. Only the rich there could afford a vehicle and parking. Everybody else got out of their way because they were at a mass disadvantage (pedestrian/cycle) and the driver might be able to bribe their way out of consequences. I expect it's the same all over SE Asia. Now when somebody comes from that culture and gets a drivers licence in NA, they're likely to drive that way (ignoring the laws of physics and expecting everything mobile to get out of their way) even if they weren't rich in their home country, because they have the mental model that that is how driving is done. Increased availability of vehicles in China and SE Asia will force those attitudes to change over the next few decades through a brutal process of natural selection.
Are you kidding? I give you the following argument:
Homo sapiens will have sex with ANYTHING.
Homo sapiens is a significant step up in attractiveness from homo neanderthalensis (as evidenced by Discovery's impeccable reconstructions of homo neanderthalensis).
Things like to do things that are more attractive than they are.
By 2 and 3, homo neanderthalensis liked to do homo sapiens.
By 1 and 4, I give you a pair of beings that want to do one another.
I see no significant leap of faith necessary to conclude that sex was had.
There's a number of problems in your logic.
I think it would be more fair to say that "some specimens of homo sapiens..."
Homo sapiens sapiens is a significant step up in attractiveness from homo neanderthalensis... in the eyes of HSS. However while people find those with strong bilateral symmetry more attractive, individuals also tend to prefer people who look roughly like their parents. So for all we know, neanderthals might find strong superorbital ridges and weak chins attractive and might find the facial features on modern ideals of beauty (like Gisele Bundchen or even Isabella Rosellini) far too pronounced and angular.
It's actually quite unlikely neanderthals would find HSS physically attractive. We are generally taller and might have less muscle mass and, if so, they might think we look awkward and gawky, or even weak and sickly,
Unless a homo neanderthalensis specimen were outcast or had no social prospects in their own tribe, they probably found homo sapiens sapiens sexually unappealing.
That said there may have been a number of reasons why there might have been interbreeding.
The "exotic foreigner" attraction, which is probably due to hybrid vigor from past ancestors with the same tendency, that is also seen in other primates,
Arranged pairings across high ranking families in neighbouring tribes to establish peace treaties,
The same for trade relationships,
Raid/pillage on other tribes that didn't have 2) or 3)
several of the lead engineers from the ZFS project who fled the remnants of Sun in the Schwartz melt-down
Of course all heavy elements like lead developers are blown off during the supernova. Good thing too, because once Sun shrinks below the Schwarzchild radius, no developers will be able to escape.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh, frankly I wish that serious medical researchers in the 70's had been a bit more aggressive about countering the bogus results from tobacco industry shills. Yep, including the exclusion of publication of the results of reports commissioned by the tobacco industry that were significantly divergent from those of independent researchers without some darn good explanation for the divergence. There's a precedent for this kind of activity and these scientists don't want their scientific discipline tarnished by whores paid off by industry to muddy the waters. I don't think they initially had problems with genuine criticism. However there's the once, is an accident, twice a coincidence... when it comes to bogus papers, they're well into enemy action.
Yeah. On the bright side, if you do wind up getting Dust Bowl II for a decade or more, it would heavily affect the purchasing power of the agrobusiness lobby. Eventually, you might actually get a chance to get some reasonable legislation/trade treaties happening with respect to agricultural subsidies like those on corn. The idiocy of corn-based ethanol for transportation will get an overdue death. In addition, that Republican heartland might get a bit of an overdue insight into the applicability of social support policies (it worked in the 30s at least). Property values in California might go back up to 2006 levels in constant dollars and stay there (not so much for Florida if sea levels rise). Those are about the only silver linings I can see though (the last one is pretty debatable), and the rest is pretty bleak.
Ah, the "Hopefully I'll be dead before we find out incontrovertibly that it's a critical problem" approach. AKA the Ostrich stance. I guess either you don't want/have kids, or you dislike the ones you have. Here's a hint: many articles about climate change are alarmist because, as simulation capability has improved and models improved in complexity and predictive accuracy, they've been predicting increasingly dire scenarios. Part of that increase in alarm has been due to an increase in the rate of fossil fuel consumption over time, as has the resulting amount of CO2 released, and the CO2 content in the atmosphere. We're not just ignoring the problems ahead, we're accelerating towards them. At this point we've got enough trend line data that you don't need a model to predict if the consequences are going to be bad if we keep along the same path, the modelling at this point just gives us better estimates of how bad it's going to get.
We're currently at a low in the "11 year" solar cycle. You can think of it as a small periodic wave fluctuation in the solar output. That can easily be superimposed on an increasing trend from other factors (like the greenhouse effect). You can have a number of the lows in the zig-zag pattern being lower than previous highs, but in the long run, the highs keep getting higher. The test will be if we get new record-high average temperatures in another couple of years when the solar sunspot activity increases again (just as highest solar exposure is at noon and temperatures max out in the mid-afternoon, there is a lag between longer period solar flux changes and average global temperature changes). Solar activity does play a factor in fluctuations, but it's extremely likely an underlying trend is pushed up by increased CO2 and other GHG.
The problem is that once you admit that solar activity cycles are a factor in global temperature fluctuations, you get the deniers claiming that solar activity therefore also must be the source of all global temperature changes and that none of it is anthropogenic. To me, that's like claiming that the WWI soldiers in the winter of 1918 shouldn't have worried about bullets killing them because the bad hygiene conditions in the trenches were likely to kill them naturally through infection with seasonal flu or pneumonia.
If you change the background to something decent, the window title bars are the only things brown and it actually can be quite pleasant. I used the provided fractal explorer app to generate a subset of the julia set with solid colours on the left and right edges and mostly solid on the bottom (so my few desktop icons are clear and readable) and made it just the right size for my dual-head setup. I did two fractal bitmaps, one with a mainly white/green shade cycling palette for increasing function values, and another from the multi-colour cycling palette. I wound up preferring the multi-colour palette picture; it's got a warmer blend of colours, with some harmonizing nicely with the title bars and others providing visual relief from the default beige theme. The result looks terrific when I turn it on and the whole desktop is visible (I'm not the only one who thinks so), windows stand out nicely from the middle of the background, and yet the background isn't distracting or eyestrain inducing.
My work laptop uses an old space.com pic as a desktop background, featuring a shuttle and planet-backed spacewalk pic. However I haven't found anything like that at a high enough resolution to work well on my home screen combo.
Good point. I seem to remember that some of the earlier Bush-proposed legal frameworks for military tribunals (which were struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional) allowed evidence obtained after torture, but the current framework doesn't. Apparently, Australia is finding that overly restrictive, but in a way that's probably got some ex-Bush administration officials worried over their actions.
It's pretty simple. The military courts are appropriate for combatants captured on a foreign field of battle. By trying KSM and the others in civilian courts (because the 9/11 victims were civilians on US soil), the case establishes a couple of things that neo-cons don't want to happen:
a) since evidence obtained through torture is ineligible in civilian courts, the information used by the prosecution will be what was obtained before he was tortured. So when KSM gets convicted on the basis of all the incriminating information that was available prior to torture, it will be a strong indictment that the torture used on him was not necessary. The whole neo-con "we had to torture" argument is shown for the pack of lies it is. Since Cheney was the biggest proponent of torture, it's not surprising he's also the most opposed to this happening since a conviction changes his place in history from question mark to a sadistic torturer.
b) it re-establishes the primacy of the standard US criminal justice system for acts committed on U.S. soil.
Basically, if KSM and his buddies can be convicted and put in jail through the civilian courts, it means that the wholesale raping of the Geneva Convention, habeus corpus, and other civil rights by the (neo-con) Republicans was unnecessary. It also sets a strong counter-precedent in case the neo-cons (inevitably) try the whole "Permanent Emergency" gambit again.
So yeah, the neo-cons and their water bearers like Lieberman are seriously against this and using FUD to slam the effort. Big surprise.
Well, it depends on how sensitive the bacteria are. Over time, rain, sun, organic processes, etc., will probably wash away and break down the explosive residue you spread, whereas it would continue to evaporate/disseminate from the actual mine locations. That would mean that long term mine fields like those on the North Korea DMZ would effectively be vulnerable unless you were prepared to re-seed the fields regularly with explosive residue (an expensive proposition). In the end, this might remove the last holdouts (including the US - primarily because of NK) against a land mine ban treaty. Once it becomes moot of course.
They might try to seal the explosives in new mines against thermal dispersal (and then terrorists can get a hold of that technology to sneak explosives onto planes again) but that would increase the cost of land mines, for which the primary advantage currently is low cost.
Well, it's possible to look at them as a control experiment. On the one hand they are willingly foregoing use of most modern conveniences, and wasting a lot of energy unnecessarily doesn't seem like a terribly smart idea. On the other hand, if modern civilization ever collapses for some reason (and it is fairly precarious in some ways), they are the best equipped, in terms of skills and tools, to survive the aftermath (assuming they live far enough away from the roaming bands of armed and starving city folk).
Well, apparently the Nibiru myth has been widespread in a number of "non-fiction" books by psychics and other flim-flam salesmen. So maybe they did some "research" after the movie, found all the Internet links on the subject and decided "Holy crap, there's something to this after all!".The movie just put something on their radar that they were predisposed to believe. It's not like there isn't a precedent - just think of all the people who took for granted the Dan Brown books.
Perhaps the predisposition comes through a mistaken belief in psychics from a persuasive person that actually uses those beliefs to help people. That's the problem with "magic men" and shamans. Even if they have useful knowledge and do good and but just don't want to take the time to explain what they know, they create a predisposition that can be exploited by the less scrupulous. Unfortunately, with much of science becoming increasingly advanced, specialized, and inaccessible to the layman, and thus becoming indistinguishable from magic, it's not helping. Back when kid could pick up a wrench set or a soldering iron and play with an old engine or tube radio, science was less mystifying. Outlawing chemistry sets to "save the children" isn't helping any either.
Not really. Mad cow disease, when transmitted to humans, is called variant Creutzfeld-Jacob disease. The original Creutzfeld-Jacob disease occurs spontaneously, but can be transmitted by cannibalism and is suspected to have been more common among some tribes that practised cannibalism like those in New Guinea and elsewhere. But cows didn't get mad cow disease by eating people or even by eating cows; as with humans it probably started spontaneously. However, it did get much more widespread as a result of feeding unusable cow parts, like the nervous system, back to cows to cut feed costs. That said, the prions tend to be more in the nervous system, so you might be relatively safer eating the liver, if it weren't for the fact that the liver is the filter of the bloodstream and contains a lot more noxious junk (as well as some important vitamins) than the rest of the body as a result.
I remember an SF story over a decade ago where the author (maybe Pournelle?) had a similar sweeper idea and they used aerogels to scrub Earth orbit. I say let's call it a trap instead of a net or a sheet, since that describes its function as opposed to its form. That said, I don't think the orbital mechanics would work the way Cringely thought it might. Higher orbits go slower, so the hanging sheet/net (moving at the speed of the orbit of the center of mass of the sheet/tug) is going to be accelerated by impacts from the space junk which will lead the whole thing into a more elliptical orbit, not a shallower circular one. That's not a good way to arrange a slow spiral down to clean up orbits gradually. And that doesn't even begin to consider the stuff in eccentric orbits. So Cringely's idea isn't original, and if he read the same story I did and is subconsciously re-iterating the idea, he's not even getting it right. Now, if you balanced your trap with a larger solar sail and used it to keep your orbit more circular, you might have something.
As for atmospheric drag, if it's an issue for the trap, it will be an issue for anything flying that low. The space junk flying low enough for atmospheric drag to be a factor is a self-correcting problem.
While money is a poor motivator, lack of it can be a very strong de-motivator. The converse to your argument is "Do the people who would make the best teachers decide to do something else instead? Are they not teachers because they are sufficiently flexible to do something else that is much better remunerated and are economically pressured to do so?"
Back before women's lib, many of the brightest women went into the teaching profession, to the benefit of society, but they now (thankfully for them) have many more opportunities. Smart people will do what motivates them, but don't underestimate the need to make enough money to raise and support a family. If you don't pay teachers enough compared to their alternatives, eventually even the ones who love it will be forced to do something else. It's pretty well required by the rational actor assumption in economics, and you don't really want heavily irrational people teaching your kids. 25 years ago in high school, I had a stats prof who loved teaching but once pointed out he could make a lot more in industry and was torn. This was at one of the best public schools in the province at the time.
The flip side, one which some schools are rapidly approaching, is to imagine an educational system where teachers are paid so much less than other work with comparable educational investment that the only ones willing to teach are those who have failed/would fail at alternatives. "Those who can't, teach" made real. Clearly the answer is somewhere between the two extremes.
Everything, if you're planning on using it in space instead of bringing it down to Earth. Also if you look at a longer term horizon (no more than 200 years) and all the prime/rich mineral sites on Earth are mined out unless you go down a kilometer, the answer will probably simply be "Everything".
Delta-vee to get out of the earth's gravity well needs high specific impulse unless you've got a space elevator. Once you get your target asteroid out of the asteroid belt, automated solar sail tugs are a (relatively cheap) option. As are nuclear ion engines. Sure it may take a lot longer before you get your payload, but you spend a lot less money and the tug is reusable (send it back out after some minor sail repairs/refueling).
So on the one hand you talk about how everything is cheaper on Earth than bringing in asteroids, and then you go on about how getting things from sea level to LEO (let alone GEO) is so expensive. Remember that the gravity gradient is an inverse square so the costs drop the farther you get out and the biggest costs are near earth, however if you have to raise reaction mass for later legs up that first leg of the trip it's really expensive. But GEO to escape isn't that expensive if you didn't get to GEO with reaction mass and you're using solar sails or reaction mass engines that are energy efficient instead of optimized for Isp. Although, if you have a space elevator, you can get a good fraction of escape velocity from dropping off the end of it at the right time. The tricky part is getting the necessary increase in angular momentum as you move down the line.
Anyways, you would do basic refining closer in-system where the solar energy density is higher, in a lunar trojan or maybe in a trailing Earth or Mars trojan pt if you really wanted a lot of room. If you were to try to replicate a terran refining plant in space then yeah, it would be hellaciously expensive. But you can build a really big solar furnace with very little mass if you don't need to support it in a 1G field and you have a natural vacuum as an insulator.
Why would you care about returning to the same location? It's not like you would find a part of the asteroid belt that's the motherload full of gold and you mine it for years. Billions of years should have randomized distribution of minerals across the belt. That said, there might be some type of emergent sorting happening due to orbital mechanics in the way that it does in Jupiter and Saturn's rings, although less so since the moons in those systems enforce orbital boundaries. Still, Jupiter's mass might have some interesting effects on the belt over billions of years and it would be useful to have a general mapping to see if there's any sorting effects. Those effects would have to be radially distributed because of the large difference in solar orbital velocity between the belt and Jupiter. What might be useful is to send out a probe just past the belt and do spectral analysis mapping of the belt over the next couple of decades, with some followups going through radially at any points of interest.
When it came to actual mining, you would send out a bunch of automated samplers that assay the rocks in a region using spectograph
You still don't get it. They know that some people feel the way you do and don't care. They have a business model for making money. You play ball with them or they keep their ball. Seriously all business is like that. There's a value proposition offered by the vendor. If it works for you, you buy; if not, you don't. If you're a big enough customer, maybe you can negotiate if it's worth it to the vendor.
Starbucks isn't going to change their roast recipe because my wife finds their coffee too strong and, as long as they feel their model works at making them money, their renumeration and hiring practices also aren't likely to change significantly because somebody has a problem with it. That's the way business works. As long as Apple continues making a lot of money by successfully positioning themselves as a premium vendor, they're not going to change to accommodate you if it's going to cut into their healthy profit margins. While it's best to keep your customers happy, you are not part of Apple's targeted customer base. That's their decision to make. Deal with it.
Do you work in a hospital, firehouse, or as a paramedic?
Well sure, but that sensor implicitly does a sort of Fourier transform on the incoming waveform because the shape of the cochlea means that specific cilia are more sensitive to specific wavelengths of sound vibrations. The brain then does pattern matching on the resulting frequency/intensity value range to turn it into phonemes. What do you think most of the transistors in that DSP is used for? Fourier transforms maybe? OK, there's probably some filters for telltale relative frequency combinations and added circuitry to detect significant pattern transition boundaries and lengths and that stuff is probably performed by neural networks in the brain. The rest of the work, dictionary lookups and heuristics to determine appropriateness of homonyms (i.e. the rest of what the brain does) probably isn't handled in the DSP but in the driver software. I guess now they may have even most of the last part on chip as well, although you would either have to make it language specific or have the process driven by an external language-specific PROM.
At which point they could refuse to sell the update to anyone who hasn't registered their purchase of an Apple computer. Currently that's a hassle they prefer not to make their users go through, but if they had no other way to limit distribution to owners of Apple computers supported by that update, that would certainly be an option. At which point you wouldn't be able to legally run their software because you wouldn't be able to buy a copy except on eBay secondhand (and you know how well that would work).
The cost model for MacOS is the opposite of the one Microsoft, HP printer/cartridge, and razor vendors use: the fixed and variable costs are front-loaded on the initial purchase and minimized on the updates. Conversely, Microsoft practically gives away Windows licences via OEMs and nails you on the upgrades. I actually think it makes sense that the MacOS X incremental upgrades are cheaper and the up-front costs of the hardware are higher. I don't have a lot of sympathy for you trying to game the system/business model. Seriously, if you want to run MacOS X so much, buy a MacOS box sized for your needs. You can multi-boot or virtualize Linux, Windows or any other O/S you care for. I don't see why anyone would care whether your efforts at running MacOS on unsupported hardware are being stymied.
Now sure you can say: if you can't virtualize MacOS then you are concerned about its long term availability and your ability to access your applications and data in the future. Now that's a good point, one which I can appreciate since my wife's G4 iMac has been in the shop for the last month because of the lack of availability of replacement power supplies. However if that is an overriding concern for you, then run Linux on commodity hardware where that concern is addressed. But you can't always get everything you want and sometimes you have to make a decision on what's more important to you. Apple has basically made it clear they are only interested in doing business with those people willing to accept their business model. If that model's not acceptable to you, then too bad. Move on.
I've enjoyed a number of Wil McCarthy's books. Discovered Charles Stross at this year's Worldcon and so have only found time to read Singularity Sky. I'm looking forward to the rest of his SF books that are sitting on my shelf waiting for me to find time.
I did the same and ran into some problems. The main problem seems to have been the Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000 conflicting with my Logitech USB mouse. If I unplug and re-plug the mouse, it works OK, but it's frozen again after a reboot. Seems to be an issue with evdev mapping. I've now got it re-plugged in as a PS/2 mouse and don't seem to have the same problem. What's interesting is that they worked together fine upgrading from 8.10 to 9.04, which is when a lot of other people were having problems.
I also experienced some minor difficulties because I was running ATI's binary fglrx driver and have switched to the ati/radeon open source driver. However that was simpler to fix and only took time because of the keyboard/mouse problem. Reconfiguring the dual head from mirrored desktop (default after driver re-install) to contiguous is actually pretty easy with the new ati drivers and display preferences panel. I really like KMS and RandR support. Next challenge will be to get userland working with a server kernel for virtualization (at least the kernel boots now).
Except for the fact that phone calls are only protected because of wiretapping laws, with exemptions outlined in FISA and the "PATRIOT" Act for "national security" reasons (i.e. pretty well anything the FBI, CIA, or DOD want). That is, telephone communications are covered because of explicit laws, not because of the 4th amendment. Technically the judge is probably right and the real problem is that you've got useless or corrupt representatives who haven't plugged the obvious legislative holes.
Yep, the use of the Windows 7 math handwriting recognition in tablet mode integrated into Mathematica looks like it would be pretty useful. Has anybody used it and is able to comment on whether its performance is as good as the propaganda says?
Agreed.
Why? Having money available to pay for an expensive licence is not indicative of an ability to drive. If you want to make people be more careful about driving, increase fines for poor driving and apply suspensions (of increasing durations for repeat offenders) for even small but dangerous driving infractions, no exceptions. Making licences expensive beyond the cost of testing and issuance is a form of prior restraint for being poor. Now if your driving test is more rigorous, time consuming, and therefore has a higher cost, then pass on that cost. But raising the cost of a licence by itself won't improve the quality of driving. There were (are) lots of immigrants in Vancouver willing to pay more (i.e. bribes) to be assured of obtaining a licence.
My visit to HK in the late 90s gave me some insight into why more asian immigrants seem to have bad driving habits. Only the rich there could afford a vehicle and parking. Everybody else got out of their way because they were at a mass disadvantage (pedestrian/cycle) and the driver might be able to bribe their way out of consequences. I expect it's the same all over SE Asia. Now when somebody comes from that culture and gets a drivers licence in NA, they're likely to drive that way (ignoring the laws of physics and expecting everything mobile to get out of their way) even if they weren't rich in their home country, because they have the mental model that that is how driving is done. Increased availability of vehicles in China and SE Asia will force those attitudes to change over the next few decades through a brutal process of natural selection.
There's a number of problems in your logic.
That said there may have been a number of reasons why there might have been interbreeding.
Of course all heavy elements like lead developers are blown off during the supernova. Good thing too, because once Sun shrinks below the Schwarzchild radius, no developers will be able to escape.