Holy cow, my respect for the guy has shot back up again.
I'm still not a big fan of his later work, but it's nice to see a science fiction author try to combat the misperceptions that the genre (and even this author) is responsible for. I don't fault them per se for writing what they do, but it's time that such authors notice the harm they are doing.
By far, the biggest offenders are Hollywood movies, mostly because of their graphic nature, and Hollywood "science fiction" movies have only barely progressed since the days of the Giant Ants, and I could make a case they've regressed (Star Trek has gone a long way towards creating a psuedo-science that spreads far beyond merely Star Trek and into damn near every sci-fi show on the planet; even my beloved Stargate has imported "subspace"). But Crighton is involved with that mess, too.
mutates from the differing radiation levels/climate/etc.
Mutation isn't the magic it is protrayed as in 50's monster movies. It happens all the time, every day, uncountably often. Any mutation that might occur in space can, and probably has, occured already on Earth.
Moreover, it isn't "free" from the organism's point of view, either. Adapting to a high radiation environment, or radically different temperature or pressures, will be maladaptations for the original environment, since for the most part most organisms like bacteria hover pretty close to the local optima for their niche. Study the proliferation of life forms in evolutionary simulations, for things like bacteria the slightest advantage rapidly takes over the population.
Sure, it might happen. Is it worth being concerned about? Well, I don't know what the perfectly rational level of concern is, but I am quite confident that on the "reasons to sterilize your spacecraft" list it rates well below "don't want to contaminate the scientific results".
Oh, and we've already brought back bacteria from space; we do every time a vehicle returns from space with people in it. I don't think "things from Mars" are going to magically be worse... that's 50s horror movie thinking again, not thinking informed by science.
There is nothing really shocking in prohibiting the use of packet sniffers
The "shocking" thing is that they think the clause does anything.
If I wanted to sniff Gator packets, well, I sure as hell wouldn't install it on my machine anyhow. I'd get one of my friends to install it and use it on the local network, and I'd stiff those packets.
I am not bound by the license and as it would be my network I can do whatever sniffing I want. Legally I couldn't "do whatever the hell I wanted" with the data since copyright could still apply, but the interesting data that I might want to share with the public about what Gator sends couldn't be copyrighted as it would be the output of their program, and would also merely be factual data. (So even if they tried to include a copyrighted signiture or something in their packet, they couldn't stop me from stripping that out and still talking about what I saw.)
Pointless provision, and there's not a damned thing they can do about it either. (Force the user to agree not to let anybody else packet sniff? Yeah, I'd like to be able to prevent other parties from packet sniffing, but I seem to lack that power.)
If the cold fusion guys don't come up with something substantial at some point, in 40 or 50 years the "hot-fusion crowd" will still be calling the shots, just a different crowd; we definately know hot-fusion is possible.
I say this as someone with an open mind about the whole thing who just wants to see good science done and let the chips fall where they may; I'm not impressed with how the media set the scientific agenda during the "craze". But the burden of proof remains on those claiming anomalies, and so far, nobody seems to have produced a solid proof. Sadly.
I'm a little unclear on why "He's the biggest dork to ever appear on Jeopardy" somehow cancels out the assertion "he's a nerd hero".
Sounds like support to me, but maybe that's just me. Since I'm 15.238494698823255... times nerdier than you by the most convenient local standard, I think I'll stick with my opinion.
But I'd hold some hope out for the DS, if it does well and the PSP does not. While my impression is that the DS is not a playstation (more like an N64), I think if you chop out the CGI, chop out the voices (if any, I haven't played it yet), downsample the textures and models for a smaller screen, and wait for the cart size to grow, you might just be able to jam VII onto the DS. It'll be close, though, and I think it might not happen until 2006-ish; even cut down I'd guestimate at least ~200-300 MB at a minimum, and we're about two doublings away from that, from what I can see. (I may be overestimating the CGI count; it is possible it might fit on a modern cart, I'm just being pessimistic.)
(Either that, or maybe something that uses both the DS cart and a GBA cart, if the hardware can do that... and I would hope Nintendo would see the bennies of that and didn't make it impossible in the hardware. (Come to think of it, the Sega offering can scan the GBA port to see if you stuck a Sega GBA game in there, so it must be able to.) In which case the technical possiblity comes even sooner, but it'd be more expensive than average.)
I'm mostly spouting off based on what I know about relative sizes of things; after all, boil any FF down to the basics and almost anything can handle the basic mechanics, it's the media that sucks the megabytes up. Of course this is probably pointless, if it goes anywhere it'll probably be the PSP, whether or not it does well.
Not paranoid enough. Which corporations would get what? Too complicated. And why bother with a middleman? The government will simple claim the copyrights for itself.
(I suppose there's a slim chance it'd go public domain, but since that seems to be Undemocratic or something...)
Or has python strayed from it's original philosophy of 'one best way to do it'?
To a degree, yes. Largely to the extent it has it is a result of backwards-compatibility; while the Python designers do not make the mistake of enshrining reverse compatibility above all else, they do try to avoid gratuitously compromising it.
As a result, as better ways to do things have emerged, sometime the old ways hang around and muss things up. However, for any given version there is always a "core" that you can stick to that is very close to "one best way to do it"... and despite what a first reading tells you, you really don't throw much of the language away.
For instance, while in modern Python you can say either
a = [] for i in range(5):
a.append(i*2)
or
a = [i*2 for i in range(5)]
the latter is the "one right way to do it". Few, if any, new additions truly leave you with two equally good choices.
(One of Guido's examples is the "lambda" statement, but a lot of people, including me, rather like not needing to replace
but hey, that's life. (While that isn't code for any GUI toolkit in particular that is a pattern common to all of them.))
By and large, none of these things have affected the difficulty of learning Python from scratch and using its libraries. It has affected the difficulty of reading other people's code, but I find the alternative, "keeping the language stagnant indefinately", completely unacceptable, and frankly, reading code is hard anyhow. (I was writing code for others long before I was reading other's code.)
In fact, given as that is the alternative, "keeping the language stagnant indefinately", while I concede it is somewhat sad that we can't jump to an optimal language immediately so that nobody ever has to learn anything past their first impression (not sarcastic, that would be the ideal), that doesn't seem to be working for folks. You might try LISP, though, I gather that hasn't changed syntax, much. (Though I also gather mature programs in that language tend to start looking like their own languages themselves, so that just may move the pain...)
A swing and a miss. During preview I noticed the phrase "astronaut's consent" needed an apostrophe, but I hit the wrong instance of "astronauts". Oops. I should know better than to post at 2:30am local time.
NASA's administration hasn't put forth a compelling reason why they should be much more risk adverse than they were before.
It's not really the administration. I'm sure they care about the astronaut's, but if the money, the approval, and the astronauts informed consent are there I'm sure most of them would happily send them up.
It's the American People, and our reaction to losing people (no matter whether they wanted to be there or not) that is the source of the fear. If NASA screws up again soon and anybody dies, they probably fear they will be dissolved. Don't know if that's a real problem... I consider it more likely they would simple be emasculated such that they were still a huge money sink, but too underfunded to actually do anything, a sort of "worst of both worlds" scenario.
The perceived value of a single human famous enough to show up on television continues to rise. This has obvious implications in other domains I won't spell out. It is also instructive to compare how our rapidly our society is increasing the valuation of people who can get on the evening news, vs. those who can not. Food for thought; I wish I could just feed you unquestionable conclusions on these subjects but I'm no more capable than anyone else.
(Sarcasm: The solution is obvious. Astronauts who die show up on TV and cause too much negative publicity. Therefore, staff the space shuttle with, oh, say battered husbands or some other group of people that just gets largely ignored. Then, even if the Space Shuttle kills everyone aboard, it'll be just a blip on the CNN scroll bar, if that...)
I think you're vastly underestimating the difficulty in homogenously distributing waste over that large an area.
Yes and no. Compared to the difficulty of guaranteeing that someone, somewhere, over the course of the next ten thousand years won't be even the slightest bit adversely affected to the 100% level that people seem to be demanding, it might not be so bad. People have already demonstrated they are willing to spread the risk; each and every one of us, even as we read, are breathing in a little radioactive material that used to live in coal, after all.
If we could drop that 100% down to something more reasonable I'd totally agree with you. But perfection is damned expensive.
(It's usually infinitely expensive, but in this case there are perfect alternatives that aren't infinitely expensive. One that may be cost effective is waiting until we have a space elevator and flinging it all into the sun. IIRC the far end exceeds the escape velocity for the solar system so literally flinging things into the sun is feasible. Anything else, of course, won't do... just flinging it out of the solar system will have people worried that the radioactivity boogieman will magically fly back and crash into them.
Oh, who am I kidding? Such a plan would be blocked by a new coalition of SOS (Save Our Sun!), a misguided group of environmentalists who want to preserve the pristine purity of the Sun (What if there is life on the Sun, after all?), and a bunch of brave environmentalist types whose science education is straight out of the 80s... the 1880s... who are afraid the Sun would suddenly start shooting dangerous radiation out. Yes, start shooting it out, because of course the hellfire nuclear fusion inferno that converts tons of matter to energy per second was otherwise, up to the point we meddling humans got involved, as fuzzy and cute and natural as a puppy, or cobra venom.
Pardon my bitterness here; even in this supposed bastion of intelligence that is Slashdot (and I'm not being terribly sarcastic here, I would expect the average Slashdotter to have an above average understanding of space issues) I can count on one hand the commenters that have a clue about big numbers.)
The radioactive material we put in reactors is toxic and radioactive BEFORE we put it in the reactor, it's just in your backyard instead of a holding tank or mountain.
Honest to god, sometimes I wonder about the feasibility of just liquidating the waste and spraying it, very dilutely, over, say, half of Utah. And I mean it, really spread it out, hundreds of square miles.
Because, as you get at, it already is really spread out. The danger comes when we concentrate it.
Yeah, I know it seems kooky at first, but seriously, think about it a bit. It probably isn't as crazy as it sounds. It may still be crazy, but not as crazy as it sounds.
(The only real counter I have is that by having it all on the surface it might wash away and collect somewhere. But what if we buried a diluted pound of it six feet underground, spread across thousands of square miles?)
Consider it a thought experiment. I am not seriously proposing this. But it is worth considering.
(Remember, there's nothing magically bad about radioactivity...)
No, I don't like that solution. Whatever we ultimately end up with to sort through our information overload, I don't think it will be an online nude anime gallery... though I suppose it will probably be easy to turn it into one, I kind of hope it has some more functionality built into it.
I wish there was someone I could vote for that was both serious about the war on terror (lowercase) and the longterm need to increase security as more and more tech comes into the hands of the common man, but actually understood security, like Bruce Schneier.
(This trend is just beginning; can you imagine what a paranoid schizophrenic could do with a nanotech desktop assembler? Schizophrenia often leaves intelligence untouched, or can even focus it...)
This message is not political; note that while one party wants draconian measures and the other may not, the reason the other doesn't want them isn't that they won't work, it is other things... I daresay mostly that it isn't their party in power is one of the big ones, but expense factors in too. But it is the fact that they don't work that is the real reason to not like them, and the fact that there are other easy things we could be doing to enhance security without trading liberty that we don't do because the model of security used by government officials is basically a totalitarian, centralized one.
No political party anywhere has even the slightest fucking clue about security. Well into the unskilled and unaware zone.
If you think my past comments about the Democrates[sic] were trollish, you are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Mere disagreement is not trolling. Calling for increased honesty by both sides isn't trolling. Saying Bush was the marginally better candidate but I don't completely agree with him isn't trolling.
Apparently, you live in the black and white world that is the real target of my ire, where anything other than full support is active emnity and any one "wrong" opinion somehow discredits the entire person, regardless of the rest of the full person.
I neither want nor expect your respect at this point; this is merely a defense against your unwarranted attack. I'd ask you to think about the previous paragraph, but in my honest experience, you won't even understand what I'm trying to say, because you've already decided I'm wrong because I had a Wrong Opinion (TM).
One can only be a True Programmer if you have the right political opinions? This is why you are part of the problem, not part of the solution, it is that very kind of pigeonholing and prejudice that is tearing our country apart, not the actual disagreements, which we have always had and always will have.
but one of the innovations of the Java language design was that it was the
first mainstream programming language to incorporate a cross-platform threading model
Have fun in C++ land though!
The fact you think the only possible alternative I could mean is C++ discredits you.
POSIX threads; not only cross-platform and essentially built into C (remembering that while C itself eschews the One True Library approach, there are certain libraries so pervasive they might as well be part of the language, and POSIX libraries would be on the top of that list), but also cross-language as many other languages built on C have inherited that model.
Java is great... I guess, personally I think it's the worst thing to happen to systems programming since C++, but since popularity and power seem to be inversely related, Java is great, I guess, or people will shoot me... but to date, it has not done one original thing, or done it first. It shouldn't, that's not its thing. If you ever think Java did something first, odds are, it's your ignorance showing.
You misunderstand. Something with less tensile strength can build an elevator. I've seen proposals to build it out of steel. But because of the problems I mentioned, the elevator, while theoretically possible, ballons to hundreds of yards around at the top, just to support itself.
The problem is a differential equation type one, and like many diffy-Q problems, there is a rather sharp transition. As the tensile strength of the material increases, the need to have more of it to hold up the rest of the elevator decreases, until suddenly it is gone. Carbon nanotubes are the only thing we know that can theoretically cross that transition point. (Or at least it gets close enough that we need not worry about it.)
Thus, a strong elevator can be made that doesn't pull itself apart and doesn't end up having to be made larger and larger, like a steel one would.
If you think the only force on the entire elevator is the mass on the end, you need to review your basic physics.
I suppose the space elevator doesn't have the rocket's exponentially growing weight problem ?
The elevator has a similar problem, but I don't recall if it's exponential or geometric. (Despite common confusion there is a difference.) Each given segment of the elevator must support the segment below itself, plus itself. Thus, as you go "up" the elevator (which IIRC actually means "towards the middle" in this case), the elevator has to get thicker and thicker... at least if "normal" materials are used.
That's why "carbon nanotubes" are necessary; they get "over the hump" and the elevator can be built such that it can actually lift things and not just hold itself up. Theoretically, a space elevator can be built with more mundane things, but while you end up with a thread at the bottom, the middle can rapidly ballon out into miles in width, or to even more implausible dimensions. Perhaps it might be more accurate to say such an elevator could exist if it were already built; I'm not sure such a thing could actually be built.
Someone else may fill in the details but that's the basics.
As a final note, launching things works much better on the Moon, since there is no atmosphere. The reason to build a space elevator on the Moon is practice; there are probably better alternatives on the Moon.
Actually, the scientists are typically right in these situations.
That's only true for established science.
In the field of particle physics, for instance, the vast majority of people proposing Theories of Everything are wrong. In fact it is quite likely all of them are wrong.
What you can be reasonably assured of is that if such a theory is possible, science will eventually come up with it. However, in a situation like this, on the "cutting egde" of this particular domain, with no consensus built and no history, scientists are just guys with slightly more math scribbled out than the next guy, and these particular scientists are to be accorded no special respect, but their ideas are to be examined strictly on their merits.
To sum up, in the situation as discussed in this article, scientists are typically as wrong as everybody else and your statement is false. Science may eventually arrive at the right answer, but not because of any special rightness possessed by any given scientist.
You can't build a house in a week no matter how many men you throw on it. After a point, your returns diminish.
Have you seen that makeover show, I think it's on ABC, that has done just that? One house in particular actually had to have foundation work done on it. (I don't watch it routinely, just caught it a couple times.)
I actually don't say this to disagree with you. One of the reasons neither my wife nor I can really stand to watch that show regularly is we both know you can't build a house from the foundation in a week... but you can build a television set from the foundation in a week. We have a rather strong suspicion that as neat as these houses look on TV, and as cool as they look on the surface (eliciting the cries of joy from the new owners), that these people are really just getting television sets. And those are no fun to live in.
I don't know, I'd love to be wrong, but the suspicion that these make-over-ees are getting boned wrecks the show for us. If 20/20 or equivalent show from another network followed up on one of these homes after a year or two, and everything was peachy within reason, maybe I wouldn't feel this way. But I suspect "peachy" wouldn't be the right word.
I posted this before but it seems relevant again: (I've been karma capped since the day karma caps were created so don't worry about that...)
The levelling treadmill is a fundamental result of trying to apply the levelling system to MMORPGs. Anything that tries to apply the idea of levelling runs into two fundamentally conflicting forces:
10% of your customer base accounts for 90% of the logged in time, and
90% of your customer base (and by extension, income) doesn't do that.
You need to make the game fun for both groups, because the first one is loud (and will impact whether anyone buys the game at all disproportionately), and because the second one accounts for the majority of your cash flow.
Any system that rewards the player for spending time in the game, or, equivalently, requires significant time in the game to advance in skills, will always have the same flaws modern "levelling treadmills" do. Until you do away with the level idea as the central organization of the game, MMORPGs will not advance significantly over what they are now. (I'm not saying they have to go away completely, but they can't be the central number used in every RNG computation.)
It's not something that can be designed around, it's fundamental to the genre and the technique. Fortunatley, all hope is not lost. I know of at least two systems that eschew the levelling treadmill: Puzzle Pirates, which uses head-to-head puzzle competition as its combat technique, and Planetside, which I've heard is more FPS then level-based. (Could be wrong. I haven't played either.) Until these alternate techniques go mainstream, MMORPGs are going to be stuck in the same rut they've been stuck in since Ultima Online.
(PS: Half a year after I posted this and I still see no reason to believe this is wrong. The D&D mechanics are still too strong in modern MMO games, and they do not work. It is a testament to the power of MMORPG's draw that people are playing them in spite of this flaw.)
Yeah, I was going to post a sarcastic message somehow tying this in to Halliburton and something the Nazi party once did, but I was afraid I'd be modded "Informative".
People are 100% good or evil, right? If I dislike someone, that means I have to dislike everything they do, right? Black and white, right?
(That, by the way, was sarcasm. I feel the need to label it as such because too many people have been blinkered into simply shutting off their forebrains when the topic of Bush comes up. Ironically, many of these same people believe that this inability to hold a nuanced view is a sign of their intelligence...)
Slashdot Mirror
Holy cow, my respect for the guy has shot back up again.
I'm still not a big fan of his later work, but it's nice to see a science fiction author try to combat the misperceptions that the genre (and even this author) is responsible for. I don't fault them per se for writing what they do, but it's time that such authors notice the harm they are doing.
By far, the biggest offenders are Hollywood movies, mostly because of their graphic nature, and Hollywood "science fiction" movies have only barely progressed since the days of the Giant Ants, and I could make a case they've regressed (Star Trek has gone a long way towards creating a psuedo-science that spreads far beyond merely Star Trek and into damn near every sci-fi show on the planet; even my beloved Stargate has imported "subspace"). But Crighton is involved with that mess, too.
mutates from the differing radiation levels/climate/etc.
Mutation isn't the magic it is protrayed as in 50's monster movies. It happens all the time, every day, uncountably often. Any mutation that might occur in space can, and probably has, occured already on Earth.
Moreover, it isn't "free" from the organism's point of view, either. Adapting to a high radiation environment, or radically different temperature or pressures, will be maladaptations for the original environment, since for the most part most organisms like bacteria hover pretty close to the local optima for their niche. Study the proliferation of life forms in evolutionary simulations, for things like bacteria the slightest advantage rapidly takes over the population.
Sure, it might happen. Is it worth being concerned about? Well, I don't know what the perfectly rational level of concern is, but I am quite confident that on the "reasons to sterilize your spacecraft" list it rates well below "don't want to contaminate the scientific results".
Oh, and we've already brought back bacteria from space; we do every time a vehicle returns from space with people in it. I don't think "things from Mars" are going to magically be worse... that's 50s horror movie thinking again, not thinking informed by science.
Expect line feeds to go next.
On the positive side, that should drag the page count of the license down a bit... heh heh.
There is nothing really shocking in prohibiting the use of packet sniffers
The "shocking" thing is that they think the clause does anything.
If I wanted to sniff Gator packets, well, I sure as hell wouldn't install it on my machine anyhow. I'd get one of my friends to install it and use it on the local network, and I'd stiff those packets.
I am not bound by the license and as it would be my network I can do whatever sniffing I want. Legally I couldn't "do whatever the hell I wanted" with the data since copyright could still apply, but the interesting data that I might want to share with the public about what Gator sends couldn't be copyrighted as it would be the output of their program, and would also merely be factual data. (So even if they tried to include a copyrighted signiture or something in their packet, they couldn't stop me from stripping that out and still talking about what I saw.)
Pointless provision, and there's not a damned thing they can do about it either. (Force the user to agree not to let anybody else packet sniff? Yeah, I'd like to be able to prevent other parties from packet sniffing, but I seem to lack that power.)
If the cold fusion guys don't come up with something substantial at some point, in 40 or 50 years the "hot-fusion crowd" will still be calling the shots, just a different crowd; we definately know hot-fusion is possible.
I say this as someone with an open mind about the whole thing who just wants to see good science done and let the chips fall where they may; I'm not impressed with how the media set the scientific agenda during the "craze". But the burden of proof remains on those claiming anomalies, and so far, nobody seems to have produced a solid proof. Sadly.
I'm a little unclear on why "He's the biggest dork to ever appear on Jeopardy" somehow cancels out the assertion "he's a nerd hero".
Sounds like support to me, but maybe that's just me. Since I'm 15.238494698823255... times nerdier than you by the most convenient local standard, I think I'll stick with my opinion.
(Smileys for everyone.)
On the GBA? Never.
But I'd hold some hope out for the DS, if it does well and the PSP does not. While my impression is that the DS is not a playstation (more like an N64), I think if you chop out the CGI, chop out the voices (if any, I haven't played it yet), downsample the textures and models for a smaller screen, and wait for the cart size to grow, you might just be able to jam VII onto the DS. It'll be close, though, and I think it might not happen until 2006-ish; even cut down I'd guestimate at least ~200-300 MB at a minimum, and we're about two doublings away from that, from what I can see. (I may be overestimating the CGI count; it is possible it might fit on a modern cart, I'm just being pessimistic.)
(Either that, or maybe something that uses both the DS cart and a GBA cart, if the hardware can do that... and I would hope Nintendo would see the bennies of that and didn't make it impossible in the hardware. (Come to think of it, the Sega offering can scan the GBA port to see if you stuck a Sega GBA game in there, so it must be able to.) In which case the technical possiblity comes even sooner, but it'd be more expensive than average.)
I'm mostly spouting off based on what I know about relative sizes of things; after all, boil any FF down to the basics and almost anything can handle the basic mechanics, it's the media that sucks the megabytes up. Of course this is probably pointless, if it goes anywhere it'll probably be the PSP, whether or not it does well.
Not paranoid enough. Which corporations would get what? Too complicated. And why bother with a middleman? The government will simple claim the copyrights for itself.
(I suppose there's a slim chance it'd go public domain, but since that seems to be Undemocratic or something...)
To a degree, yes. Largely to the extent it has it is a result of backwards-compatibility; while the Python designers do not make the mistake of enshrining reverse compatibility above all else, they do try to avoid gratuitously compromising it.
As a result, as better ways to do things have emerged, sometime the old ways hang around and muss things up. However, for any given version there is always a "core" that you can stick to that is very close to "one best way to do it"... and despite what a first reading tells you, you really don't throw much of the language away.
For instance, while in modern Python you can say eitherorthe latter is the "one right way to do it". Few, if any, new additions truly leave you with two equally good choices.
(One of Guido's examples is the "lambda" statement, but a lot of people, including me, rather like not needing to replacewithbut hey, that's life. (While that isn't code for any GUI toolkit in particular that is a pattern common to all of them.))
By and large, none of these things have affected the difficulty of learning Python from scratch and using its libraries. It has affected the difficulty of reading other people's code, but I find the alternative, "keeping the language stagnant indefinately", completely unacceptable, and frankly, reading code is hard anyhow. (I was writing code for others long before I was reading other's code.)
In fact, given as that is the alternative, "keeping the language stagnant indefinately", while I concede it is somewhat sad that we can't jump to an optimal language immediately so that nobody ever has to learn anything past their first impression (not sarcastic, that would be the ideal), that doesn't seem to be working for folks. You might try LISP, though, I gather that hasn't changed syntax, much. (Though I also gather mature programs in that language tend to start looking like their own languages themselves, so that just may move the pain...)
Star in your own Murder mystery:...
Watch the hilarity ensue
How?
A swing and a miss. During preview I noticed the phrase "astronaut's consent" needed an apostrophe, but I hit the wrong instance of "astronauts". Oops. I should know better than to post at 2:30am local time.
NASA's administration hasn't put forth a compelling reason why they should be much more risk adverse than they were before.
It's not really the administration. I'm sure they care about the astronaut's, but if the money, the approval, and the astronauts informed consent are there I'm sure most of them would happily send them up.
It's the American People, and our reaction to losing people (no matter whether they wanted to be there or not) that is the source of the fear. If NASA screws up again soon and anybody dies, they probably fear they will be dissolved. Don't know if that's a real problem... I consider it more likely they would simple be emasculated such that they were still a huge money sink, but too underfunded to actually do anything, a sort of "worst of both worlds" scenario.
The perceived value of a single human famous enough to show up on television continues to rise. This has obvious implications in other domains I won't spell out. It is also instructive to compare how our rapidly our society is increasing the valuation of people who can get on the evening news, vs. those who can not. Food for thought; I wish I could just feed you unquestionable conclusions on these subjects but I'm no more capable than anyone else.
(Sarcasm: The solution is obvious. Astronauts who die show up on TV and cause too much negative publicity. Therefore, staff the space shuttle with, oh, say battered husbands or some other group of people that just gets largely ignored. Then, even if the Space Shuttle kills everyone aboard, it'll be just a blip on the CNN scroll bar, if that...)
I think you're vastly underestimating the difficulty in homogenously distributing waste over that large an area.
Yes and no. Compared to the difficulty of guaranteeing that someone, somewhere, over the course of the next ten thousand years won't be even the slightest bit adversely affected to the 100% level that people seem to be demanding, it might not be so bad. People have already demonstrated they are willing to spread the risk; each and every one of us, even as we read, are breathing in a little radioactive material that used to live in coal, after all.
If we could drop that 100% down to something more reasonable I'd totally agree with you. But perfection is damned expensive.
(It's usually infinitely expensive, but in this case there are perfect alternatives that aren't infinitely expensive. One that may be cost effective is waiting until we have a space elevator and flinging it all into the sun. IIRC the far end exceeds the escape velocity for the solar system so literally flinging things into the sun is feasible. Anything else, of course, won't do... just flinging it out of the solar system will have people worried that the radioactivity boogieman will magically fly back and crash into them.
Oh, who am I kidding? Such a plan would be blocked by a new coalition of SOS (Save Our Sun!), a misguided group of environmentalists who want to preserve the pristine purity of the Sun (What if there is life on the Sun, after all?), and a bunch of brave environmentalist types whose science education is straight out of the 80s... the 1880s... who are afraid the Sun would suddenly start shooting dangerous radiation out. Yes, start shooting it out, because of course the hellfire nuclear fusion inferno that converts tons of matter to energy per second was otherwise, up to the point we meddling humans got involved, as fuzzy and cute and natural as a puppy, or cobra venom.
Pardon my bitterness here; even in this supposed bastion of intelligence that is Slashdot (and I'm not being terribly sarcastic here, I would expect the average Slashdotter to have an above average understanding of space issues) I can count on one hand the commenters that have a clue about big numbers.)
The radioactive material we put in reactors is toxic and radioactive BEFORE we put it in the reactor, it's just in your backyard instead of a holding tank or mountain.
Honest to god, sometimes I wonder about the feasibility of just liquidating the waste and spraying it, very dilutely, over, say, half of Utah. And I mean it, really spread it out, hundreds of square miles.
Because, as you get at, it already is really spread out. The danger comes when we concentrate it.
Yeah, I know it seems kooky at first, but seriously, think about it a bit. It probably isn't as crazy as it sounds. It may still be crazy, but not as crazy as it sounds.
(The only real counter I have is that by having it all on the surface it might wash away and collect somewhere. But what if we buried a diluted pound of it six feet underground, spread across thousands of square miles?)
Consider it a thought experiment. I am not seriously proposing this. But it is worth considering.
(Remember, there's nothing magically bad about radioactivity...)
How will one in the end sort it out?
The nets biggest online nude anime gallery's
No, I don't like that solution. Whatever we ultimately end up with to sort through our information overload, I don't think it will be an online nude anime gallery... though I suppose it will probably be easy to turn it into one, I kind of hope it has some more functionality built into it.
I wish there was someone I could vote for that was both serious about the war on terror (lowercase) and the longterm need to increase security as more and more tech comes into the hands of the common man, but actually understood security, like Bruce Schneier.
(This trend is just beginning; can you imagine what a paranoid schizophrenic could do with a nanotech desktop assembler? Schizophrenia often leaves intelligence untouched, or can even focus it...)
This message is not political; note that while one party wants draconian measures and the other may not, the reason the other doesn't want them isn't that they won't work, it is other things... I daresay mostly that it isn't their party in power is one of the big ones, but expense factors in too. But it is the fact that they don't work that is the real reason to not like them, and the fact that there are other easy things we could be doing to enhance security without trading liberty that we don't do because the model of security used by government officials is basically a totalitarian, centralized one.
No political party anywhere has even the slightest fucking clue about security. Well into the unskilled and unaware zone.
If you think my past comments about the Democrates[sic] were trollish, you are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Mere disagreement is not trolling. Calling for increased honesty by both sides isn't trolling. Saying Bush was the marginally better candidate but I don't completely agree with him isn't trolling.
Apparently, you live in the black and white world that is the real target of my ire, where anything other than full support is active emnity and any one "wrong" opinion somehow discredits the entire person, regardless of the rest of the full person.
I neither want nor expect your respect at this point; this is merely a defense against your unwarranted attack. I'd ask you to think about the previous paragraph, but in my honest experience, you won't even understand what I'm trying to say, because you've already decided I'm wrong because I had a Wrong Opinion (TM).
One can only be a True Programmer if you have the right political opinions? This is why you are part of the problem, not part of the solution, it is that very kind of pigeonholing and prejudice that is tearing our country apart, not the actual disagreements, which we have always had and always will have.
From the story submission: Have fun in C++ land though!
The fact you think the only possible alternative I could mean is C++ discredits you.
POSIX threads; not only cross-platform and essentially built into C (remembering that while C itself eschews the One True Library approach, there are certain libraries so pervasive they might as well be part of the language, and POSIX libraries would be on the top of that list), but also cross-language as many other languages built on C have inherited that model.
Java is great... I guess, personally I think it's the worst thing to happen to systems programming since C++, but since popularity and power seem to be inversely related, Java is great, I guess, or people will shoot me... but to date, it has not done one original thing, or done it first. It shouldn't, that's not its thing. If you ever think Java did something first, odds are, it's your ignorance showing.
You misunderstand. Something with less tensile strength can build an elevator. I've seen proposals to build it out of steel. But because of the problems I mentioned, the elevator, while theoretically possible, ballons to hundreds of yards around at the top, just to support itself.
The problem is a differential equation type one, and like many diffy-Q problems, there is a rather sharp transition. As the tensile strength of the material increases, the need to have more of it to hold up the rest of the elevator decreases, until suddenly it is gone. Carbon nanotubes are the only thing we know that can theoretically cross that transition point. (Or at least it gets close enough that we need not worry about it.)
Thus, a strong elevator can be made that doesn't pull itself apart and doesn't end up having to be made larger and larger, like a steel one would.
If you think the only force on the entire elevator is the mass on the end, you need to review your basic physics.
I suppose the space elevator doesn't have the rocket's exponentially growing weight problem ?
The elevator has a similar problem, but I don't recall if it's exponential or geometric. (Despite common confusion there is a difference.) Each given segment of the elevator must support the segment below itself, plus itself. Thus, as you go "up" the elevator (which IIRC actually means "towards the middle" in this case), the elevator has to get thicker and thicker... at least if "normal" materials are used.
That's why "carbon nanotubes" are necessary; they get "over the hump" and the elevator can be built such that it can actually lift things and not just hold itself up. Theoretically, a space elevator can be built with more mundane things, but while you end up with a thread at the bottom, the middle can rapidly ballon out into miles in width, or to even more implausible dimensions. Perhaps it might be more accurate to say such an elevator could exist if it were already built; I'm not sure such a thing could actually be built.
Someone else may fill in the details but that's the basics.
As a final note, launching things works much better on the Moon, since there is no atmosphere. The reason to build a space elevator on the Moon is practice; there are probably better alternatives on the Moon.
Actually, the scientists are typically right in these situations.
That's only true for established science.
In the field of particle physics, for instance, the vast majority of people proposing Theories of Everything are wrong. In fact it is quite likely all of them are wrong.
What you can be reasonably assured of is that if such a theory is possible, science will eventually come up with it. However, in a situation like this, on the "cutting egde" of this particular domain, with no consensus built and no history, scientists are just guys with slightly more math scribbled out than the next guy, and these particular scientists are to be accorded no special respect, but their ideas are to be examined strictly on their merits.
To sum up, in the situation as discussed in this article, scientists are typically as wrong as everybody else and your statement is false. Science may eventually arrive at the right answer, but not because of any special rightness possessed by any given scientist.
You can't build a house in a week no matter how many men you throw on it. After a point, your returns diminish.
Have you seen that makeover show, I think it's on ABC, that has done just that? One house in particular actually had to have foundation work done on it. (I don't watch it routinely, just caught it a couple times.)
I actually don't say this to disagree with you. One of the reasons neither my wife nor I can really stand to watch that show regularly is we both know you can't build a house from the foundation in a week... but you can build a television set from the foundation in a week. We have a rather strong suspicion that as neat as these houses look on TV, and as cool as they look on the surface (eliciting the cries of joy from the new owners), that these people are really just getting television sets. And those are no fun to live in.
I don't know, I'd love to be wrong, but the suspicion that these make-over-ees are getting boned wrecks the show for us. If 20/20 or equivalent show from another network followed up on one of these homes after a year or two, and everything was peachy within reason, maybe I wouldn't feel this way. But I suspect "peachy" wouldn't be the right word.
The levelling treadmill is a fundamental result of trying to apply the levelling system to MMORPGs. Anything that tries to apply the idea of levelling runs into two fundamentally conflicting forces:
- 10% of your customer base accounts for 90% of the logged in time, and
- 90% of your customer base (and by extension, income) doesn't do that.
You need to make the game fun for both groups, because the first one is loud (and will impact whether anyone buys the game at all disproportionately), and because the second one accounts for the majority of your cash flow.Any system that rewards the player for spending time in the game, or, equivalently, requires significant time in the game to advance in skills, will always have the same flaws modern "levelling treadmills" do. Until you do away with the level idea as the central organization of the game, MMORPGs will not advance significantly over what they are now. (I'm not saying they have to go away completely, but they can't be the central number used in every RNG computation.)
It's not something that can be designed around, it's fundamental to the genre and the technique. Fortunatley, all hope is not lost. I know of at least two systems that eschew the levelling treadmill: Puzzle Pirates, which uses head-to-head puzzle competition as its combat technique, and Planetside, which I've heard is more FPS then level-based. (Could be wrong. I haven't played either.) Until these alternate techniques go mainstream, MMORPGs are going to be stuck in the same rut they've been stuck in since Ultima Online.
(PS: Half a year after I posted this and I still see no reason to believe this is wrong. The D&D mechanics are still too strong in modern MMO games, and they do not work. It is a testament to the power of MMORPG's draw that people are playing them in spite of this flaw.)
Yeah, I was going to post a sarcastic message somehow tying this in to Halliburton and something the Nazi party once did, but I was afraid I'd be modded "Informative".
People are 100% good or evil, right? If I dislike someone, that means I have to dislike everything they do, right? Black and white, right?
(That, by the way, was sarcasm. I feel the need to label it as such because too many people have been blinkered into simply shutting off their forebrains when the topic of Bush comes up. Ironically, many of these same people believe that this inability to hold a nuanced view is a sign of their intelligence...)