Presumably though, the idea with this thing would be to fly where the sun is, so from the east to the west staying in the daylight as much as possible, then it wouldn't need batteries. I've not done the maths, I don't know how fast it would need to fly to do that, but that's what I'd assumed it would want to do.
Second sentence has the wrong number of negatives in it, I'm going to assume you meant "The *civilized behavior needs to start somewhere" or "The uncivilized behavior needs to end somewhere".
You're exactly right, apologies, don't know how that mistake slipped through.
You say I'm an asshole if I burn a Quran, or if I advocate doing so. I'm having a debate with you so I'll acknowledge your words and try to counter them. But you'll do little more than issue the same admonishment to Muslim countries for officially executing non-believers just for being non-believers.
If you burn a Quran, you're only a moderate asshole. Executing non-believers makes you an extreme asshole, and I denounce those behaviours much more strongly. Unfortunately, I'm in no position to do anything more.
So in a way you probably did not intend, you (and the many people who share your position) are essentially promoting violence over speech, by not properly disambiguating the two. Sensibilities and superstitions are never more valuable than Life, Liberty and reasonable levels of safety.
I'm not terribly sure what you mean by this statement. I'm in no way saying that superstitions are more valuable than life, etc, and on the whole, I completely agree with you. The Muslims who do things like that (and other radicals following whatever cause, for that matter) are complete assholes and they shouldn't do the things they do. My point is that burning Qurans to protest against that is at best useless, because it's not going to make them stop, and at worst offensive to the non-offending Muslims who still value their holy book. So while anyone who wants to burn holy books I suppose has a right to do it but why are they doing it in the first place? It's only going to cause more problems. A more civilised and more effective way of protesting should be found.
So I don't care about whether you live in the middle east, in indonesia, in australia, in the US, I just care how you behave. And if you behave as though the binding of my copy of your book is more valuable than my life or anyone's, then it is worth it for me to behave as a moderate asshole and troll you in order to out you (and your congregation and your community and your leaders, as the case may be) as militant douchbags and a danger to whatever "peaceful international cooperation" we're all trying to achieve.
Or just don't behave moderately assholeishly, and don't burn the book. Just leave the Muslims alone, then they'll leave you alone.
Don't misunderstand me, I'm not a Muslim, but all the flak that is directed at them ticks me off. I, for one, consider the fact that they take their faith so seriously a good thing.
I don't condone their demands about Zuckerberg, for example, or threatening Obama with death (although threatening to kill the American President is hardly a new thing), on the contrary, those things are unacceptable. But so is burning Qurans. If we want ultimately to be able to co-exist in a civil manner, then the civility needs to start with someone, the uncivilised behaviour needs to start somewhere. Moderate asshole trolls will just aggravate the problem.
In short, unless you are spewing bile and using the stunt to draw attention to your bile, the act of desecration or blasphemy itself is not an act of hate, only an act of sensational protest.
Protest against what? Why would you need to burn Qurans or Bibles to protest? You're throwing up a straw-man here, Islam isn't the problem, it's some of the people who profess to practise it. Look back in history, and you'll find that Christians were not so different a few hundred years ago from what the stereotypical Muslim is now.
Someone needs to stop the hate. Burning the holy book of a faith or group of people that you disagree with on some ground or other isn't likely to make them your friends, it's only likely to stoke whatever fire there was even more.
Burning the Quran? That evokes irrational reactions. Since no people are harmed, no property is stolen and nothing of real consequence is transpiring, then the reaction itself is uncalled for and more people will try it in order to protest the reaction itself. This is one of the core things people (including myself) do dislike about Islam: putting idolotry ahead of the quality of human life.
That is wrong. I don't care if it's wrong because some people don't think before they react, or if it's wrong because a religious culture trained you to behave that way. Whatever the reason, it is wrong and I value my right to protest against it. To highlight it and to illustrate it.
Muslims regard the Quran very differently to the way Christians regard the Bible. You're right, to us it is just a book (speaking as a Christian myself), and the burning thereof would likely offend most Christians, but it would be unlikely to drive us to a frenzy of whatever it is that drives some Muslims to do the things they do.
Your comments about Muslims are quite a generalization. The trait that you refer to tends to be more characteristic of Muslims originating in the Middle East. Muslims from elsewhere (I'm thinking specifically Indonesia, I have some Muslim friends from that part of the world) don't tend to be as militant. Nevertheless, I stand by what I said. If you're burning Qurans you know it will get up the Muslims' skins, you're aware that they're irrational about it. I'm not condoning whatever their reactions may be, but what I am saying is "you asked for it". Why did you do it in the first place?
So should the government put a tax on the motor industry because cars are usually used to facilitate bank robberies? Do they penalise the steel mines because knives that are used in violent crimes are made of steel? Do they make paper manufacturers pay a percentage of the costs of various fraudulent transactions that are no doubt carried out on their paper? That's more or less the same thing, as far as I can see. If you consider "copyright infringement" to be a crime, that is.
He's right in that "it's just a book.. get over it". However, I do hope he's not doing it with the purpose of taunting, because I would view that as malicious. If he wants to burn books because it makes him feel good, that's fine. It's doing it with the sole purpose of mocking others that creates an issue. I wouldn't do that to a Muslim's Koran, despite how much I disagree with them.
While I agree with you in principle, I think that the act of burning holy books is usually intended in a very religiously intolerant light, if not as an incitement to violence. Here in South Africa, a court interdict was issued recently against a Muslim cleric who was going to burn Bibles in response to the chap in the States a while ago, which I agree with, personally, no-one should make public displays about how much they hate someone else's religion (or race or whatever else for that matter).
Although the AC is right as to the connotations that the two words have developed over the years, you're right, strictly speaking they mean the same thing.
Thanks for that. I was struggling to make sense of that previous post, so making a response was difficult. You've done it for me though:-)
I don't claim to be any sort of guru, I'm a slightly more technical than usual user. I've tried to use more advanced distros, like Gentoo or Arch, and they were fun but on the whole I prefer Mint, which is the one I use now. My friends / relatives have no problem whatsoever with it, they all run it on desktops so wireless support isn't an issue, and all have been saying that it's actually really easy to use, and it's so nice not to have to put up with all the crap that Windows gives you on a day-to-day basis.
95% of the population will not install their own OS. Ever. If you had said preinstalls, that might have made sense.
I tend to agree with you there. I'm not so sure about 95%, but a large portion of computer users just want to switch their computers on and do their thing. IMHO, it's only really been in the last couple of years that Linux has developed the capability to let the user do that.
Here where I live, many people haven't heard of Linux. The only place I've ever seen it pre-installed on a PC is if a small business is selling a super-budget computer for students or other financially-deprived people, then they'll advertise the computer as having a "Linux OS". I don't think that those sorts of things sell very well though.
If a major vendor were to take the plunge and start pre-installing Linux on some of their machines I reckon the adoption would accelerate.
The challenge with that though, would be the rate at which Linux distros tend to update themselves... You've seen how long it's taken for Windows 7 to be adopted over Windows XP, now imagine Ubuntu with its 6-month release schedule? Maybe if they use the LTS or something, but that software is hardly bleeding edge...
Well, I know 3 other people that use Linux Mint (nearly the same as Ubuntu), and I know of a few others that use one form of Linux or another. As opposed to only 1 person I know who has a Mac. The people who use Mint that I know, love it, and recommend it to people who ask them:-)
Agreed. I'd prefer my significant other not to be with anyone else, though, call me old fashioned.
When I said "those around me" I had reference to those immediately around me (family members, close friends, etc.) not society at large. Perhaps just a bit of clarity there.
How pathetic the Slashdot crowd are - whatever the TV tells you, you believe it.
I think this statement by itself is reason enough not to pay any attention to what you're saying. The Slashdot crowd are among the most intelligent on the internet. They have other failings, but stupid, uneducated and gullible they're not.
I have no idea why you want to decieve yourself with this AIDS denialism unless you're actually Thabo Mbeki posting anonymously like that.
But can we not overcome the need for these long-standing safety rules with modern materials and a slight bit of fore thought?
I think one of the things being referred to here was more social than physical. Modern materials can prevent you from getting diseased, but they can't prevent your wife from leaving you when she finds out you've been with another woman.
Personally, I'm in favour of those thousand-year-old rules, I think they provide me with a lot of peace of mind when I know that both I and those around me are keeping them.
Don't talk crap. Do you even know who Stephen Hawking is? Perhaps the only person qualified to call Stephen Hawking a moron is Roger Penrose, but you may have noticed that he doesn't, he uses intelligent means of expressing disagreement.
Agreed, I've recommended Mint to several people who had had problems with Windows (Viruses, too expensive to upgrade, etc.). The ones who took the recommendation are very happy, one of them is actually my techno-phobe mother.
The advantage to Mint is that pretty much anything written (either software packages or documentation / howtos / etc) for Ubuntu will also work for Mint, and as you mention, things such as Flash and mp3 playback come standard so it isn't a huge hassle. It's the only reason I don't recommend Ubuntu to Linux newbies.
The only case I recommend that someone uses Windows is if they absolutely have to use a certain software package, and for most people, dual-booting is too much of a pain.
MATLAB is also an option. I'm not far along enough in the course to need it (only started last year), I've used a little bit of both though, and I enjoy Mathematica more, especially when it's just maths that I'm doing and not anything technical. It's more elegant.
I'm in university at the moment, for some subjects we can use pretty much anything in a test, even a notebook computer with Mathematica or something. Not all subjects though. I'm doing Electrical Engineering. Just FYI.
If I might just point out the situation in South Africa where I live, if you're lucky enough to HAVE broadband it's either 384k or 512k. And even then, if something happens to the undersea cables going to the US and Europe (which happens every few months or so), then our internet is basically cut off until it gets fixed.
Also... Isn't the US government something like millions and billions of dollars in debt? Why is it doing things like this? It's not as though broadband is a basic human need, and there are libraries and schools that provide access for those who might not have at home. Why does the government feel that it needs to step in and spend money that it doesn't have? Is the free market not good enough?
0.0002 lb is the number that TFA quotes. If you follow the link to the JAXA release, that number (1.12mN in SI units) seems to be for the entire sail, which is definitely not just catching one photon. Which seems a more reasonable number.
Isn't that a very very small force though? I'd imagine that doing any sort of acceleration with it would take a long, long time. The mass of the system is given by
the Wikipedia article is ~300kg, so this thing's acceleration should be about 3.7e-6 m/s^2. The typical speed needed by a rocket to get into orbit is about 17000 mph or roughly 7600 m/s. Realising that that's not necessarily comparing apples to apples, but that's the sort of speed we're used to from space-ships. Thus, if the light of the sun manages to accelerate this thing constantly it should take about 2e9 seconds or 64 and a half years by my rough calculations to get up to speed.
I'll admit though, it's an amazing proof-of-concept.
Slashdot Mirror
Presumably though, the idea with this thing would be to fly where the sun is, so from the east to the west staying in the daylight as much as possible, then it wouldn't need batteries. I've not done the maths, I don't know how fast it would need to fly to do that, but that's what I'd assumed it would want to do.
Second sentence has the wrong number of negatives in it, I'm going to assume you meant "The *civilized behavior needs to start somewhere" or "The uncivilized behavior needs to end somewhere".
You're exactly right, apologies, don't know how that mistake slipped through.
You say I'm an asshole if I burn a Quran, or if I advocate doing so. I'm having a debate with you so I'll acknowledge your words and try to counter them. But you'll do little more than issue the same admonishment to Muslim countries for officially executing non-believers just for being non-believers.
If you burn a Quran, you're only a moderate asshole. Executing non-believers makes you an extreme asshole, and I denounce those behaviours much more strongly. Unfortunately, I'm in no position to do anything more.
So in a way you probably did not intend, you (and the many people who share your position) are essentially promoting violence over speech, by not properly disambiguating the two. Sensibilities and superstitions are never more valuable than Life, Liberty and reasonable levels of safety.
I'm not terribly sure what you mean by this statement. I'm in no way saying that superstitions are more valuable than life, etc, and on the whole, I completely agree with you. The Muslims who do things like that (and other radicals following whatever cause, for that matter) are complete assholes and they shouldn't do the things they do. My point is that burning Qurans to protest against that is at best useless, because it's not going to make them stop, and at worst offensive to the non-offending Muslims who still value their holy book. So while anyone who wants to burn holy books I suppose has a right to do it but why are they doing it in the first place? It's only going to cause more problems. A more civilised and more effective way of protesting should be found.
So I don't care about whether you live in the middle east, in indonesia, in australia, in the US, I just care how you behave. And if you behave as though the binding of my copy of your book is more valuable than my life or anyone's, then it is worth it for me to behave as a moderate asshole and troll you in order to out you (and your congregation and your community and your leaders, as the case may be) as militant douchbags and a danger to whatever "peaceful international cooperation" we're all trying to achieve.
Or just don't behave moderately assholeishly, and don't burn the book. Just leave the Muslims alone, then they'll leave you alone.
Don't misunderstand me, I'm not a Muslim, but all the flak that is directed at them ticks me off. I, for one, consider the fact that they take their faith so seriously a good thing.
I don't condone their demands about Zuckerberg, for example, or threatening Obama with death (although threatening to kill the American President is hardly a new thing), on the contrary, those things are unacceptable. But so is burning Qurans. If we want ultimately to be able to co-exist in a civil manner, then the civility needs to start with someone, the uncivilised behaviour needs to start somewhere. Moderate asshole trolls will just aggravate the problem.
In short, unless you are spewing bile and using the stunt to draw attention to your bile, the act of desecration or blasphemy itself is not an act of hate, only an act of sensational protest.
Protest against what? Why would you need to burn Qurans or Bibles to protest? You're throwing up a straw-man here, Islam isn't the problem, it's some of the people who profess to practise it. Look back in history, and you'll find that Christians were not so different a few hundred years ago from what the stereotypical Muslim is now.
Someone needs to stop the hate. Burning the holy book of a faith or group of people that you disagree with on some ground or other isn't likely to make them your friends, it's only likely to stoke whatever fire there was even more.
Burning the Quran? That evokes irrational reactions. Since no people are harmed, no property is stolen and nothing of real consequence is transpiring, then the reaction itself is uncalled for and more people will try it in order to protest the reaction itself. This is one of the core things people (including myself) do dislike about Islam: putting idolotry ahead of the quality of human life.
That is wrong. I don't care if it's wrong because some people don't think before they react, or if it's wrong because a religious culture trained you to behave that way. Whatever the reason, it is wrong and I value my right to protest against it. To highlight it and to illustrate it.
Muslims regard the Quran very differently to the way Christians regard the Bible. You're right, to us it is just a book (speaking as a Christian myself), and the burning thereof would likely offend most Christians, but it would be unlikely to drive us to a frenzy of whatever it is that drives some Muslims to do the things they do.
Your comments about Muslims are quite a generalization. The trait that you refer to tends to be more characteristic of Muslims originating in the Middle East. Muslims from elsewhere (I'm thinking specifically Indonesia, I have some Muslim friends from that part of the world) don't tend to be as militant. Nevertheless, I stand by what I said. If you're burning Qurans you know it will get up the Muslims' skins, you're aware that they're irrational about it. I'm not condoning whatever their reactions may be, but what I am saying is "you asked for it". Why did you do it in the first place?
I re-iterate: The hate needs to stop somewhere.
So should the government put a tax on the motor industry because cars are usually used to facilitate bank robberies? Do they penalise the steel mines because knives that are used in violent crimes are made of steel? Do they make paper manufacturers pay a percentage of the costs of various fraudulent transactions that are no doubt carried out on their paper? That's more or less the same thing, as far as I can see. If you consider "copyright infringement" to be a crime, that is.
He's right in that "it's just a book.. get over it". However, I do hope he's not doing it with the purpose of taunting, because I would view that as malicious. If he wants to burn books because it makes him feel good, that's fine. It's doing it with the sole purpose of mocking others that creates an issue. I wouldn't do that to a Muslim's Koran, despite how much I disagree with them.
While I agree with you in principle, I think that the act of burning holy books is usually intended in a very religiously intolerant light, if not as an incitement to violence. Here in South Africa, a court interdict was issued recently against a Muslim cleric who was going to burn Bibles in response to the chap in the States a while ago, which I agree with, personally, no-one should make public displays about how much they hate someone else's religion (or race or whatever else for that matter).
TFA said they're rolling it out over the next several days to people with google accounts. I don't have it either, yet.
Although the AC is right as to the connotations that the two words have developed over the years, you're right, strictly speaking they mean the same thing.
It wouldn't be completely unavailable, nothing would stop them from ordering it online.
Thanks for that. I was struggling to make sense of that previous post, so making a response was difficult. You've done it for me though :-)
I don't claim to be any sort of guru, I'm a slightly more technical than usual user. I've tried to use more advanced distros, like Gentoo or Arch, and they were fun but on the whole I prefer Mint, which is the one I use now. My friends / relatives have no problem whatsoever with it, they all run it on desktops so wireless support isn't an issue, and all have been saying that it's actually really easy to use, and it's so nice not to have to put up with all the crap that Windows gives you on a day-to-day basis.
Just my 2c.
95% of the population will not install their own OS. Ever. If you had said preinstalls, that might have made sense.
I tend to agree with you there. I'm not so sure about 95%, but a large portion of computer users just want to switch their computers on and do their thing. IMHO, it's only really been in the last couple of years that Linux has developed the capability to let the user do that.
Here where I live, many people haven't heard of Linux. The only place I've ever seen it pre-installed on a PC is if a small business is selling a super-budget computer for students or other financially-deprived people, then they'll advertise the computer as having a "Linux OS". I don't think that those sorts of things sell very well though.
If a major vendor were to take the plunge and start pre-installing Linux on some of their machines I reckon the adoption would accelerate.
The challenge with that though, would be the rate at which Linux distros tend to update themselves... You've seen how long it's taken for Windows 7 to be adopted over Windows XP, now imagine Ubuntu with its 6-month release schedule? Maybe if they use the LTS or something, but that software is hardly bleeding edge...
Well, I know 3 other people that use Linux Mint (nearly the same as Ubuntu), and I know of a few others that use one form of Linux or another. As opposed to only 1 person I know who has a Mac. The people who use Mint that I know, love it, and recommend it to people who ask them :-)
Quite.
Agreed. I'd prefer my significant other not to be with anyone else, though, call me old fashioned.
When I said "those around me" I had reference to those immediately around me (family members, close friends, etc.) not society at large. Perhaps just a bit of clarity there.
How pathetic the Slashdot crowd are - whatever the TV tells you, you believe it.
I think this statement by itself is reason enough not to pay any attention to what you're saying. The Slashdot crowd are among the most intelligent on the internet. They have other failings, but stupid, uneducated and gullible they're not.
I have no idea why you want to decieve yourself with this AIDS denialism unless you're actually Thabo Mbeki posting anonymously like that.
But can we not overcome the need for these long-standing safety rules with modern materials and a slight bit of fore thought?
I think one of the things being referred to here was more social than physical. Modern materials can prevent you from getting diseased, but they can't prevent your wife from leaving you when she finds out you've been with another woman.
Personally, I'm in favour of those thousand-year-old rules, I think they provide me with a lot of peace of mind when I know that both I and those around me are keeping them.
Isn't Btrfs supposed to be similar to ZFS in its features and stuff?
I suspect you may have posted this reply on the wrong thread, mate.
Hawking's a moron.
Don't talk crap. Do you even know who Stephen Hawking is? Perhaps the only person qualified to call Stephen Hawking a moron is Roger Penrose, but you may have noticed that he doesn't, he uses intelligent means of expressing disagreement.
Agreed, I've recommended Mint to several people who had had problems with Windows (Viruses, too expensive to upgrade, etc.). The ones who took the recommendation are very happy, one of them is actually my techno-phobe mother.
The advantage to Mint is that pretty much anything written (either software packages or documentation / howtos / etc) for Ubuntu will also work for Mint, and as you mention, things such as Flash and mp3 playback come standard so it isn't a huge hassle. It's the only reason I don't recommend Ubuntu to Linux newbies.
The only case I recommend that someone uses Windows is if they absolutely have to use a certain software package, and for most people, dual-booting is too much of a pain.
MATLAB is also an option. I'm not far along enough in the course to need it (only started last year), I've used a little bit of both though, and I enjoy Mathematica more, especially when it's just maths that I'm doing and not anything technical. It's more elegant.
I'm in university at the moment, for some subjects we can use pretty much anything in a test, even a notebook computer with Mathematica or something. Not all subjects though. I'm doing Electrical Engineering. Just FYI.
If I might just point out the situation in South Africa where I live, if you're lucky enough to HAVE broadband it's either 384k or 512k. And even then, if something happens to the undersea cables going to the US and Europe (which happens every few months or so), then our internet is basically cut off until it gets fixed.
Also... Isn't the US government something like millions and billions of dollars in debt? Why is it doing things like this? It's not as though broadband is a basic human need, and there are libraries and schools that provide access for those who might not have at home. Why does the government feel that it needs to step in and spend money that it doesn't have? Is the free market not good enough?
I realised that they didn't use the solar sail to get there, they launched the thing with more conventional methods a little while ago.
My point was that any deep-space explorers are going to need some patience...
Now I'm thinking about it, how is this thing going to slow down once it gets to where it wants to go?
0.0002 lb is the number that TFA quotes. If you follow the link to the JAXA release, that number (1.12mN in SI units) seems to be for the entire sail, which is definitely not just catching one photon. Which seems a more reasonable number.
Isn't that a very very small force though? I'd imagine that doing any sort of acceleration with it would take a long, long time. The mass of the system is given by the Wikipedia article is ~300kg, so this thing's acceleration should be about 3.7e-6 m/s^2. The typical speed needed by a rocket to get into orbit is about 17000 mph or roughly 7600 m/s. Realising that that's not necessarily comparing apples to apples, but that's the sort of speed we're used to from space-ships. Thus, if the light of the sun manages to accelerate this thing constantly it should take about 2e9 seconds or 64 and a half years by my rough calculations to get up to speed.
I'll admit though, it's an amazing proof-of-concept.