I think it's worth pointing out that while an advanced degree in some random field is certainly not the same thing as real-world technical writing expertise... an advanced degree in technical writing should include a great deal of attention to technical writing, and is of substantial value.
It's rare to find a technical writer who has a master's in technical writing itself, of course, but they do exist. Still, your typical tech writer has a degree in something like communications or English, and should be judged more on their writing experience and the quality of their portfolio. (And a technical writer without a portfolio isn't worth hiring at all.)
One of the primary capabilities that a good technical writer brings to a writing project, is the ability to assess the technical savvy of a particular audience, and tailor the language to best fit their needs.
A single catch-all rule about how detailed or specific a given document should be is foolish. Audiences differ; writing needs to be adapted to suit the need.
It is really no different than designing a user interface; something you'd design for a children's counting game is very different than a console intended for system administrators to review the performance of enterprise software deployments. And both are different than the UI intended for an ATM or an airport check-in kiosk.
A technical writer who is worth his or her salt, begins not with the material but with the audience; their needs, their level of technical sophistication, their primary languages, the organizational schemas they are likely to be familiar with, and so on.
The second step of course is to understand the material; and the third, is to act as a translator, converting the material into the language of the audience.
I came in here specifically to say what this poster just said. You can hire a technical writer on a contract basis to handle just this particular issue... or, take a look and see where else a good technical writer could make a contribution and consider hiring a staff writer.
That's not to say subby shouldn't attempt to document his own procedures. Just, that a technical writer can take what is produced and convert it into something that is accurate, complete, written in the language that the audience finds most accessible, and can recommend organizational schemas that are maximally effective for your particular audience.
An organism, particularly a mammal, is far more than its own DNA. Humans have 10 times as many bacterial cells in our bodies as human cells. Dolphins are no different. A baby dolphin no doubt gets cultures of all sorts of bacteria from its mother's milk. Unique symbiotic organisms live on the skin, in the gut, even in the blood in some animals.
Further, the species is adapted to a particular ecological niche - in this case, the Yangtse River.
Further, particularly in mammals, there are learned behaviors that are not genetically-based, which can include food-finding/gathering/hunting techniques, predator-avoiding techniques, mating behavior, child-rearing behavior, and so forth.
If you want to recover a species from its DNA, it is necessary to reproduce all of the co-dependent species on which it relies. You could maybe get a different species of dolphin to act as a surrogate mother (freshwater dolphin would be necessary, I'd think), but it would have the wrong stomach flora, the wrong hormones in its uterus and breastmilk, the wrong rearing behaviors.
What you'd get as a result wouldn't be the species you were trying to save. Not quite, anyway.
We could probably maybe recover an extinct bacterial strain from its DNA today. Recovering something as complicated as a dolphin is, I'd guess, a century or more out, if it is possible at all: and it may not be possible at all.
Actually, what bugs me the most about parent's sociopathic behavior is just how needlessly complex it is.
If you want to anonymously piss off people for the sheer enjoyment of it, surely there are ways to do it that are less time-consuming and expensive than creating an aimbot. Can't you just key cars in parking lots, put superglue in ATM cardslots, go mailbox-bashing, or otherwise engage in petty destruction and random vandalism? Or is it a particular thrill to you, to fuck up other people's life experience at random, if you do it in a really nerdy way?
And before you go claiming that there's a difference between vandalizing a mailbox and cheating in online Halo games... recognize that others have paid money to play Xbox online. You are actively ruining an entertainment experience which others have paid for. It'd be no different if you decided to go kick over people's sattelite dishes during the superbowl, or if you built a cell phone jammer and randomly turned it on in crowded public areas.
Actually, it is worse, because you aren't just fucking up other people's gaming directly... you've built software to enable others to do the same. You are no different from someone who writes a harmful computer virus for kicks.
Fuck you.
-Lep
As geeks, we're most concerned with the top-of-the-line desktop chips. But it's a mistake to think that's the most important factor in the market. Companies like Dell don't make the majority of their profits from highly-informed, single-PC-buying gamers and linux nerds. Their bread-and-butter is the business desktop and server market, followed in second place by the fairly uninformed home PC buying family.
For businesses, decisions about what to buy are made on a large scale, based more on budgetary and standardization factors than on which chip has the absolute top performance in its price class this week. My company picks a standard model and sticks to it for months at a time, sometimes more than a year. It might buy thousands of desktops and laptops during that time, as well as dozens or a few hundred servers.
Dell is just trying to grab market share. AMD owns 20% of the desktop market now. That Intel's Core Duo is the price/performance winner this month is a blip on the screen - the larger trend is all that matters to Dell. They need to get at that 20% of the market they're missing, because it represents money left on the table in their primary sector. No business can stay in business if it is in the habit of leaving its customers' money on the table.
What has been holding Dell back historically is twofold - sure, there's whatever exclusive deal they had with Intel, and that is significant. But there's also the (historical) inability of AMD to ship large quantities of a given part on release. Dell does not want to be in the position of turning down or delaying shipment of large orders by its most important (corporate) customers, for lack of parts. AMD has only recently (in the last two or three years maybe) been able to show reliable ability to ship the kinds of quantities that Dell requires. So, now that it can, it becomes a Dell vendor.
So, it doesn't matter all that much to Dell if Intel's Core Duo is in the lead currently. That's a short-term question, of what to package on its current models next quarter maybe. Right now it is concerned with meeting the demands of existing customers, and those existing customers are working from certified models and budget numberes that were determined on paper months ago. I doubt any major company is purchasing Core Duo machines for its employees this week - very few are that proactive and quick with purchasing decisions.
As for next quarter, and the quarter after that - well, Dell will use whatever part makes the most sense, for each model in each product line at each price point and discount level. For some, that probably will mean a core duo platform - but assuradly, now that they have signed the agreement, they will have some Athlon models - and they'll sell some. I'd expect AMD single-chip (dual and single core) desktops to make up something like 5% to 10% of next quarter's shipped desktop units, and maybe a good 15% of next quarter's shipped server units.
Dell's home market will be mostly mid to low-end dell desktops, using whatever chip is at the $50 to $80-each (in 1000-tray quanitites) price point that month. Leaving AMD out of that equation would be a mistake, again irrespective of Core Duo vs. Athlon 64 x2 price/performance points. The cheapest Athlon 64 X2 is still well above $100 each in quantity - and Core 2 Duo is around $200 minimum. They are only a small portion of even the home desktop market at this point, so which of the two is fastest isn't really that relevant to Dell.
Hi, I'd like a hotdog. Two bucks? Great! Hey, listen, do you have ketchup and mustard and relish and stuff? Over there? Cool. How much does it cost?
Oh, it's included in the price? Right on! Thanks!
Ok, so, but that ketchup and stuff, it must cost you something, right? I buy ketchup at Safeway and the smallest bottle they sell is a buck.
Right, yeah, cool.
Ok, so, can I have a plain hotdog, for a dollar? See, I have my own sauce, I brought it from home. It's home-made, see. I downloaded the recipe from the internet. You want some of my sauce? You can have it for free, I bet tons of your customers would love this stuff, it's great.
No? Ok, well anyway: How about that dollar-off, plain hotdog?
What? But, see, I'm not gonna use any of your ketchup. I'm leaving it in the bottle. If you give it to me anyway, I'll have to scrape it off, see... you might as well just keep it. And since ketchup costs a buck, I'll have my hotdog for a dollar off.
No. Seriously man, here's the two bucks for the hotdog. If you won't give me a buck back for not using the ketchup, would you at least figure out how much that ketchup costs per-hotdog, and then take THAT off the price? Even if it's only ten cents per hotdog, I should still get the refund 'cause I'm not using the ketchup.
Ok, yeah, I could take some ketchup and then re-sell it on ebay, but really, why would someone buy my used ten-cents worth of ketchup... it might be dirty. Plus you can't really sell open ketchup like that. I'm sure there's a regulation. Who knows what I'm selling? It might not be real ketchup. It could be filthy, full of viruses. I'm sure Heinz would not like me representing it as their product.
So, c'mon, one hotdog for a buck, or, show me your balance sheet and then we'll just take off what the ketchup really costs. At least.
Huh? OK, fine, screw you! I'm going home and making my own damn hotdog! Dammit!
There's some cool artifacts on the map.
Look, I found a jet contrail:
somewhere in canada complete with shadow. It really gives you a sense of how high up your perspective is. Well, it would do so better with a scale, but there ya go.
-Lep
Re:horrible aerodynamic drag on paddle-wheel tires
on
Reinventing the Wheel
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Gee, do you think maybe these engineers aren't total idiots?
I mean, seriously.
Not to be mean. It's a thought. I'm sure it took them all of 12 seconds to decide not to expose a bunch of radial fins on the side of the tire. Maybe another 4 to decide not to make the tire out of chalk, too. I bet they spent another 9 rejecting granite sidewalls as an option.
He didn't say exctinction. He said "civilization-ending". Totally different concept, one which far too many slashdotters seem to have glossed over. Yes, the broader converstaion was about extinction, but the statistic he cited was not.
Human 'civilization' depending on how you define it is around 10,000 years old, or so, give or take, and fits nicely into his cited figure.
Ah, but you didn't read carefully. He never said 'wipe out the human species'. He said 'civilization-ending'.
By most accounts, human civilization is no more than about 10,000 years old, depending on what you consider to be civilization.
And of course, if we assume one civ-ending event every 45,000 years on average, then sometimes we'll get a long run of 'tails' on the cosmic coin-flip and it'll be two, three, four, or more times that.
For corroboration on the risks, look up info on the last major eruptions of various supervolcanoes (Yellowstone, Long Valley CA, etc), and the major asteroid impacts. Go ahead and throw in ice ages if you like.
-Lep
Yeah, see, what we really need is, One P2P network/client to Rule them All
One P2P network/client to Find them
One p2p network to bring them all
And in the darnkess bind them.
That's an excellent point, and well taken. Maybe the RIAA/MPAA will at some point realize that they cannot attack every P2P application... and will resort to legislative action (outlawing P2P entirely). Obviously they've already tried that, and mostly failed (DMCA notwithstanding) but ultimately I think that will be their only realistic option.
There are just so many different P2P products these days. Doesn't each new one subdivide the market more? If half of the torrent folks use the new thing, and half stick with bittorrent, don't both of them become less useful?
I'm not sure what can be done about that, and I'm not saying there shouldn't be progress. But I miss the days when there was only Napster, and you never came up blank on your search terms.
-Lep
It seems to me that the answer to this problem is to not give you a flashlight, instead of giving you a stupid and implausible flashlight.
Give the guy a little candle. That makes more sense. No, really, he finds some emergency candles in a box somewhere and you can light the thing, but you can't carry it and your gun at the same time, and it tends to blow out a lot.
Or, maybe he's got a kid's party glowstick. Low light source, lasts for a little while, gradually fades, and fades, and fades... until it's basically useless.
Or, maybe he is using a cigarette lighter. Or matches.
It seems to me there are lots of solutions to the problem (you want darkness to build suspense and give the mean beasties something to leap out of) that aren't incredibly stupid. All it takes is a tiny amount of creativity.
If rope + towed ship =.01% of rock's mass, then you can get away with a few hundred lifts before you have a problem with the rock's orbit.
Even better, maybe your rock is also its own fuel? Sacrafice small amounts of the rock's mass to create thrust to correct orbit, and you have a system that will work for at least centuries.
I think your real obstacles are, in order of difficulty
1) moving the rock into position in the first place 2) a strong enough rope 3) building in redundancy and safety precautions, such as, what if the ship lets go of the rope halfway up, what if the rope breaks, what if the system playing out more rope suddenly stops doing so (jams) or starts doing so too fast (brake breaks), etc. 4) Loads of things we haven't thought of yet
I still like this idea much more than the classic space elevator, which presents a continuous single-point-of-failure with massively catastrophic consequences of such.
As long as you are diversified and in it for the long term (and we are talking about over 30 years here), there is zero evidence that you will lose or be outgained by any other investment strategy (simply pull up 15 year DJIA charts for any period, even include the last 15 years, and you will see fine returns).
Generally I agree with your assessment of Nader's response. However:
you have to recognize that a retirement account must be liquidated, to some degree, at retirment. In other words, there may be a set year at which a given person needs to begin withdrawing cash from their retirement. As we saw in 2000-2001, if your invested-account happens to, say, lose 50% of its value in the last year, because, say, the stock market plunges, or bond funds shrivel, or a given 'safe' mutual fund fails, you are really screwed. Many people have private retirement accounts, and we heard lots of stories of newly-destitute retirees, and 65-year-olds who were having to put off retirement for a few years, because of the downturn.
That's why social security is there for everyone, regardless of their income or wealth. That's why it's important to have some safety-net that is NOT locked to ANY public (risky) investment. It would be one thing if the proposal were to allow people to invest some portion of their social security in, say, US Treasury Bonds, which are at least as secure as actual currency.
Now, that doesn't mean I am completely against the idea anyway. Something must be done to rescue social security. But I think despite its alarmist tone and inaccuracy, Nader's argument has some merit.
-Lep
Plot summary, not a book report
on
Ringworld's Children
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This review is a serious pain in the ass. It's not really a review: it's a plot summary, loaded with spoilers. We get the general drift that the reader enjoyed the book, but that's it.
My third grade teacher used to grade very poorly for book reports that were nothing but plot summaries, and so should Slashdot.
All of the oil produced worldwide is part of a big pool of available oil. It's a commodity. The US uses X barrels of oil, irrespective of who exactly produced it. Which country supplies the actual oil is dependent far more on the economics of shipping the oil to us than anything else.
If oil production were reduced by any producing country, all the oil globally goes up in price. If oil demand by the US went down, global oil prices would drop, not just those of the countries directly shipping oil to us.
So the idea of making any kind of energy policy solution based on which countries actually ship oil to the US is kind of broken.
And why the hell am I commenting on a post that is over a week old, anyway?
Your analysis is quite interesting and generally I'd support it, but it should be noted that mitochondria do indeed have DNA. Mitochondrial DNA drift is the 'mutation rate' to which you referred.
So it is still required that the aliens create mitochondrial organisms that 'just happen' to use the terran model of DNA helix molecules.
Paranoia ME would be a better parallel... millenium edition makes sense in both ways, and of course. Windows ME is almost psychopathically broken, which is appropriate too...
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's worth pointing out that while an advanced degree in some random field is certainly not the same thing as real-world technical writing expertise... an advanced degree in technical writing should include a great deal of attention to technical writing, and is of substantial value.
It's rare to find a technical writer who has a master's in technical writing itself, of course, but they do exist. Still, your typical tech writer has a degree in something like communications or English, and should be judged more on their writing experience and the quality of their portfolio. (And a technical writer without a portfolio isn't worth hiring at all.)
One of the primary capabilities that a good technical writer brings to a writing project, is the ability to assess the technical savvy of a particular audience, and tailor the language to best fit their needs.
A single catch-all rule about how detailed or specific a given document should be is foolish. Audiences differ; writing needs to be adapted to suit the need.
It is really no different than designing a user interface; something you'd design for a children's counting game is very different than a console intended for system administrators to review the performance of enterprise software deployments. And both are different than the UI intended for an ATM or an airport check-in kiosk.
A technical writer who is worth his or her salt, begins not with the material but with the audience; their needs, their level of technical sophistication, their primary languages, the organizational schemas they are likely to be familiar with, and so on.
The second step of course is to understand the material; and the third, is to act as a translator, converting the material into the language of the audience.
I came in here specifically to say what this poster just said. You can hire a technical writer on a contract basis to handle just this particular issue... or, take a look and see where else a good technical writer could make a contribution and consider hiring a staff writer.
That's not to say subby shouldn't attempt to document his own procedures. Just, that a technical writer can take what is produced and convert it into something that is accurate, complete, written in the language that the audience finds most accessible, and can recommend organizational schemas that are maximally effective for your particular audience.
An organism, particularly a mammal, is far more than its own DNA. Humans have 10 times as many bacterial cells in our bodies as human cells. Dolphins are no different. A baby dolphin no doubt gets cultures of all sorts of bacteria from its mother's milk. Unique symbiotic organisms live on the skin, in the gut, even in the blood in some animals.
Further, the species is adapted to a particular ecological niche - in this case, the Yangtse River.
Further, particularly in mammals, there are learned behaviors that are not genetically-based, which can include food-finding/gathering/hunting techniques, predator-avoiding techniques, mating behavior, child-rearing behavior, and so forth.
If you want to recover a species from its DNA, it is necessary to reproduce all of the co-dependent species on which it relies. You could maybe get a different species of dolphin to act as a surrogate mother (freshwater dolphin would be necessary, I'd think), but it would have the wrong stomach flora, the wrong hormones in its uterus and breastmilk, the wrong rearing behaviors.
What you'd get as a result wouldn't be the species you were trying to save. Not quite, anyway.
We could probably maybe recover an extinct bacterial strain from its DNA today. Recovering something as complicated as a dolphin is, I'd guess, a century or more out, if it is possible at all: and it may not be possible at all.
Actually, what bugs me the most about parent's sociopathic behavior is just how needlessly complex it is. If you want to anonymously piss off people for the sheer enjoyment of it, surely there are ways to do it that are less time-consuming and expensive than creating an aimbot. Can't you just key cars in parking lots, put superglue in ATM cardslots, go mailbox-bashing, or otherwise engage in petty destruction and random vandalism? Or is it a particular thrill to you, to fuck up other people's life experience at random, if you do it in a really nerdy way? And before you go claiming that there's a difference between vandalizing a mailbox and cheating in online Halo games... recognize that others have paid money to play Xbox online. You are actively ruining an entertainment experience which others have paid for. It'd be no different if you decided to go kick over people's sattelite dishes during the superbowl, or if you built a cell phone jammer and randomly turned it on in crowded public areas. Actually, it is worse, because you aren't just fucking up other people's gaming directly... you've built software to enable others to do the same. You are no different from someone who writes a harmful computer virus for kicks. Fuck you. -Lep
As geeks, we're most concerned with the top-of-the-line desktop chips. But it's a mistake to think that's the most important factor in the market. Companies like Dell don't make the majority of their profits from highly-informed, single-PC-buying gamers and linux nerds. Their bread-and-butter is the business desktop and server market, followed in second place by the fairly uninformed home PC buying family.
For businesses, decisions about what to buy are made on a large scale, based more on budgetary and standardization factors than on which chip has the absolute top performance in its price class this week. My company picks a standard model and sticks to it for months at a time, sometimes more than a year. It might buy thousands of desktops and laptops during that time, as well as dozens or a few hundred servers.
Dell is just trying to grab market share. AMD owns 20% of the desktop market now. That Intel's Core Duo is the price/performance winner this month is a blip on the screen - the larger trend is all that matters to Dell. They need to get at that 20% of the market they're missing, because it represents money left on the table in their primary sector. No business can stay in business if it is in the habit of leaving its customers' money on the table.
What has been holding Dell back historically is twofold - sure, there's whatever exclusive deal they had with Intel, and that is significant. But there's also the (historical) inability of AMD to ship large quantities of a given part on release. Dell does not want to be in the position of turning down or delaying shipment of large orders by its most important (corporate) customers, for lack of parts. AMD has only recently (in the last two or three years maybe) been able to show reliable ability to ship the kinds of quantities that Dell requires. So, now that it can, it becomes a Dell vendor.
So, it doesn't matter all that much to Dell if Intel's Core Duo is in the lead currently. That's a short-term question, of what to package on its current models next quarter maybe. Right now it is concerned with meeting the demands of existing customers, and those existing customers are working from certified models and budget numberes that were determined on paper months ago. I doubt any major company is purchasing Core Duo machines for its employees this week - very few are that proactive and quick with purchasing decisions.
As for next quarter, and the quarter after that - well, Dell will use whatever part makes the most sense, for each model in each product line at each price point and discount level. For some, that probably will mean a core duo platform - but assuradly, now that they have signed the agreement, they will have some Athlon models - and they'll sell some. I'd expect AMD single-chip (dual and single core) desktops to make up something like 5% to 10% of next quarter's shipped desktop units, and maybe a good 15% of next quarter's shipped server units.
Dell's home market will be mostly mid to low-end dell desktops, using whatever chip is at the $50 to $80-each (in 1000-tray quanitites) price point that month. Leaving AMD out of that equation would be a mistake, again irrespective of Core Duo vs. Athlon 64 x2 price/performance points. The cheapest Athlon 64 X2 is still well above $100 each in quantity - and Core 2 Duo is around $200 minimum. They are only a small portion of even the home desktop market at this point, so which of the two is fastest isn't really that relevant to Dell.
-Lep
Hi, I'd like a hotdog. Two bucks? Great! Hey, listen, do you have ketchup and mustard and relish and stuff? Over there? Cool. How much does it cost?
Oh, it's included in the price? Right on! Thanks!
Ok, so, but that ketchup and stuff, it must cost you something, right? I buy ketchup at Safeway and the smallest bottle they sell is a buck.
Right, yeah, cool.
Ok, so, can I have a plain hotdog, for a dollar? See, I have my own sauce, I brought it from home. It's home-made, see. I downloaded the recipe from the internet. You want some of my sauce? You can have it for free, I bet tons of your customers would love this stuff, it's great.
No? Ok, well anyway: How about that dollar-off, plain hotdog?
What? But, see, I'm not gonna use any of your ketchup. I'm leaving it in the bottle. If you give it to me anyway, I'll have to scrape it off, see... you might as well just keep it. And since ketchup costs a buck, I'll have my hotdog for a dollar off.
No. Seriously man, here's the two bucks for the hotdog. If you won't give me a buck back for not using the ketchup, would you at least figure out how much that ketchup costs per-hotdog, and then take THAT off the price? Even if it's only ten cents per hotdog, I should still get the refund 'cause I'm not using the ketchup.
Ok, yeah, I could take some ketchup and then re-sell it on ebay, but really, why would someone buy my used ten-cents worth of ketchup... it might be dirty. Plus you can't really sell open ketchup like that. I'm sure there's a regulation. Who knows what I'm selling? It might not be real ketchup. It could be filthy, full of viruses. I'm sure Heinz would not like me representing it as their product.
So, c'mon, one hotdog for a buck, or, show me your balance sheet and then we'll just take off what the ketchup really costs. At least.
Huh? OK, fine, screw you! I'm going home and making my own damn hotdog! Dammit!
Here's active eruption from Hawaii Volcanoes Nat'l Park on the Big Island in Hawaii. -Lep
There's some cool artifacts on the map. Look, I found a jet contrail: somewhere in canada complete with shadow. It really gives you a sense of how high up your perspective is. Well, it would do so better with a scale, but there ya go. -Lep
Gee, do you think maybe these engineers aren't total idiots?
I mean, seriously.
Not to be mean. It's a thought. I'm sure it took them all of 12 seconds to decide not to expose a bunch of radial fins on the side of the tire. Maybe another 4 to decide not to make the tire out of chalk, too. I bet they spent another 9 rejecting granite sidewalls as an option.
-Lep
He didn't say exctinction. He said "civilization-ending". Totally different concept, one which far too many slashdotters seem to have glossed over. Yes, the broader converstaion was about extinction, but the statistic he cited was not.
Human 'civilization' depending on how you define it is around 10,000 years old, or so, give or take, and fits nicely into his cited figure.
-Lep
Ah, but you didn't read carefully. He never said 'wipe out the human species'. He said 'civilization-ending'. By most accounts, human civilization is no more than about 10,000 years old, depending on what you consider to be civilization. And of course, if we assume one civ-ending event every 45,000 years on average, then sometimes we'll get a long run of 'tails' on the cosmic coin-flip and it'll be two, three, four, or more times that. For corroboration on the risks, look up info on the last major eruptions of various supervolcanoes (Yellowstone, Long Valley CA, etc), and the major asteroid impacts. Go ahead and throw in ice ages if you like. -Lep
No no no. Just a RAID array. And not striped, obviously.
After all, we're talking about storage, right?
-Lep
Yeah, see, what we really need is, One P2P network/client to Rule them All One P2P network/client to Find them One p2p network to bring them all And in the darnkess bind them.
That's an excellent point, and well taken. Maybe the RIAA/MPAA will at some point realize that they cannot attack every P2P application... and will resort to legislative action (outlawing P2P entirely). Obviously they've already tried that, and mostly failed (DMCA notwithstanding) but ultimately I think that will be their only realistic option.
-Lep
There are just so many different P2P products these days. Doesn't each new one subdivide the market more? If half of the torrent folks use the new thing, and half stick with bittorrent, don't both of them become less useful? I'm not sure what can be done about that, and I'm not saying there shouldn't be progress. But I miss the days when there was only Napster, and you never came up blank on your search terms. -Lep
It seems to me that the answer to this problem is to not give you a flashlight, instead of giving you a stupid and implausible flashlight.
Give the guy a little candle. That makes more sense. No, really, he finds some emergency candles in a box somewhere and you can light the thing, but you can't carry it and your gun at the same time, and it tends to blow out a lot.
Or, maybe he's got a kid's party glowstick. Low light source, lasts for a little while, gradually fades, and fades, and fades... until it's basically useless.
Or, maybe he is using a cigarette lighter. Or matches.
It seems to me there are lots of solutions to the problem (you want darkness to build suspense and give the mean beasties something to leap out of) that aren't incredibly stupid. All it takes is a tiny amount of creativity.
-Lep
I love it.
But, correct me if I'm wrong here:
In an elliptical orbit, the orbiting object is travelling fastest at perigee, and slowest at apogee, not the other way around. Right?
Which is why solar-orbit comets whip past the sun in a few days, and then spend years in their outer apogees?
-Lep
I think you just need a big enough rock.
.01% of rock's mass, then you can get away with a few hundred lifts before you have a problem with the rock's orbit.
If rope + towed ship =
Even better, maybe your rock is also its own fuel? Sacrafice small amounts of the rock's mass to create thrust to correct orbit, and you have a system that will work for at least centuries.
I think your real obstacles are, in order of difficulty
1) moving the rock into position in the first place
2) a strong enough rope
3) building in redundancy and safety precautions, such as, what if the ship lets go of the rope halfway up, what if the rope breaks, what if the system playing out more rope suddenly stops doing so (jams) or starts doing so too fast (brake breaks), etc.
4) Loads of things we haven't thought of yet
I still like this idea much more than the classic space elevator, which presents a continuous single-point-of-failure with massively catastrophic consequences of such.
-Lep
Generally I agree with your assessment of Nader's response. However:
you have to recognize that a retirement account must be liquidated, to some degree, at retirment. In other words, there may be a set year at which a given person needs to begin withdrawing cash from their retirement. As we saw in 2000-2001, if your invested-account happens to, say, lose 50% of its value in the last year, because, say, the stock market plunges, or bond funds shrivel, or a given 'safe' mutual fund fails, you are really screwed. Many people have private retirement accounts, and we heard lots of stories of newly-destitute retirees, and 65-year-olds who were having to put off retirement for a few years, because of the downturn.
That's why social security is there for everyone, regardless of their income or wealth. That's why it's important to have some safety-net that is NOT locked to ANY public (risky) investment. It would be one thing if the proposal were to allow people to invest some portion of their social security in, say, US Treasury Bonds, which are at least as secure as actual currency.
Now, that doesn't mean I am completely against the idea anyway. Something must be done to rescue social security. But I think despite its alarmist tone and inaccuracy, Nader's argument has some merit.
-Lep
This review is a serious pain in the ass. It's not really a review: it's a plot summary, loaded with spoilers. We get the general drift that the reader enjoyed the book, but that's it.
My third grade teacher used to grade very poorly for book reports that were nothing but plot summaries, and so should Slashdot.
-Lep
All of the oil produced worldwide is part of a big pool of available oil. It's a commodity. The US uses X barrels of oil, irrespective of who exactly produced it. Which country supplies the actual oil is dependent far more on the economics of shipping the oil to us than anything else.
If oil production were reduced by any producing country, all the oil globally goes up in price. If oil demand by the US went down, global oil prices would drop, not just those of the countries directly shipping oil to us.
So the idea of making any kind of energy policy solution based on which countries actually ship oil to the US is kind of broken.
And why the hell am I commenting on a post that is over a week old, anyway?
-Lep
> ... mitochondria are not DNA-based
Your analysis is quite interesting and generally I'd support it, but it should be noted that mitochondria do indeed have DNA. Mitochondrial DNA drift is the 'mutation rate' to which you referred.
So it is still required that the aliens create mitochondrial organisms that 'just happen' to use the terran model of DNA helix molecules.
-Lep
I have a TDK dvd-burner running under WinXP and had the same issues, until I updated the firmware. Just FYI.
-Lep
Paranoia ME would be a better parallel... millenium edition makes sense in both ways, and of course. Windows ME is almost psychopathically broken, which is appropriate too...
-Lep