I suppose that leads down a long (and no-doubt unresolved) theological rabbit hole about free will, God's grace, omnipotence and omniscience*, and the final criteria for judgement.
Just remember, nothing about any of it makes good, rational sense to me.
I guess they would say you must be able to actively defy God as a function of free will, even if that free will is a gift, namely by rejecting the sacrifice as your one-and-only path to salvation, and further illustrated in your consequent behavior. After all, not all human behavior is consistent with the will of a just and loving God. I can appreciate how this conflicts with notions of an all powerful God... and more specifically, God's plan.
But yeah, I'm the wrong guy to ask. Maybe someone gave me a more formidable answer in a previous life and I've forgotten it. But either way, I don't have any answers about this that would satisfy me, much less someone that takes it all quite seriously.
* A fun little Sunday school paradox for the kids.
As a distantly former, semi-active "turbo-religious type" (Baptist), from a major metropolitan area that's not in Alabama, I'll second his observations.
There was nothing terribly rare (and certainly not insignificant) about viewing cutting-edge medical science as a meddling denial of God's will. The talking points would probably be a bit more... flowery... and go something along the lines of them being, "desperate attempts to cheat your mortality, to foolishly tell ourselves that we're our own masters, to deny our place as God's children, and that only Jesus' sacrifice can truly save us from suffering." You'd have to talk to a professional preacher to get the exact form of wackiness... I'm a little rusty.
So in this case, if I revisited my old religious groups today I wouldn't be at-all surprised if growing new organs for transplant, however they're presently derived, is considered the fruit of an evil science pioneered in infanticide.
We need to be honest about the underlying issue here... there's no real regard for reason in an institution that depends entirely on a lack thereof. Pretending otherwise (when you're out in public, anyway) is little more than a PR strategy.
He doesn't do much else? Like him or not, I can't think of many people that have done more than he has. And it's not like he sets small goals.
SolarCity, which apparently is the largest provider of solar systems in the US. That would be enough for any person to feel like they achieved something.
Co-founded Tesla Motors, who brought the electric car back from the dead, and last I'd heard, is actually profitable. Also provides powertrain tech to other auto companies. Company is worth over a billion now, the Model S starts production this year and the Model X starts in 2014. I believe they already maxed out preproduction reservations.
SpaceX. Started with $100m of his own money. Has $1.6 billion (minimum) to $3.x billion (max) in contracts for resupply flights to the ISS. Just made history as the first commercial company to complete one of those missions... and it was a nearly flawless one. Equipment to make the Dragon capsule safe for manned flight is in the works (as linked above).
Of course there's Paypal (formerly his X.com). I imagine he did alright on that deal... which was no small feat.
Sure he talks big, but the dude is only 40 and has already done a lot.
And I would not consider research that much, as most companies would most likely not benefit from a trip to Mars, other than prestige. And that would be a quite expensive PR stunt.
Did you think the same about docking with the ISS? There's not cash at the ISS. But that's going to be profitable for SpaceX, as is moving people to-and-from. They were testing the SuperDraco escape rocket engines a couple days ago for manned flights with the Dragon capsule... https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/214831794103664640
Meanwhile, Elon Musk has been talking quite a bit about manned trips to mars and eventual colonization. Last I heard he was estimating 10-15 years if things go well, at an eventual cost of about half a million per head.
There are lots of people that make silly estimates. He has a knack for coming through, with a certain margin for error, on big-ass goals.
I was, at least, interested in the bit about why they use Page Views instead of Unique Visitors. My initial reaction would have been to side with Microsoft with the Unique Visitors metric, but StatCounter makes a great case...
- Person opens IE on a machine (for whatever reason) and uses a site that's part of their network. Let's call it five pageviews.
- Then they close IE and use Chrome or Firefox for 500 more pageviews, to every other site, for the rest of the day.
Now using Uniques, you'd show that person as an IE user. Or at maybe you'd 50/50 it. Both methods poorly represent that person's browser usage than the total pageviews by browser. It's not perfect, but it does make sense.
Their youtube video makes it quite clear, and it's good that they did this.
If Microsoft does not port the.NET runtime to Windows 8 on ARM, allowing apps compiled from C#/VB/C++ to CIL to execute on either supported hardware platform [...]
You probably already know this but in case you haven't, I read that Indiegogo.com is good for that sort of thing. I imagine KS has a bigger audience though.
I'm neither a successful VC or a gajillionaire start-up guy, but I hope I'd think of it like this...
If someone points out a problem with my idea and I immediately get defensive, it's probably a very serious problem.
If it's something I've heard more than once, I'm probably really screwed.
If they made a judgement based on my pitch and I think it's because they just don't understand, then I'm probably not good at communicating ideas and I'll probably fail at communicating the idea to the masses, too. That's a big weakness, just of a different variety.
If I think I've explained it well, in a way everyone would understand, their concerns are not problems, and it's a very workable idea... I'd ask myself how someone that evaluates these ideas for a (successful) living could be that, "stupid". More likely than not, an amateur like me is wrong, not the other guy. Work from there...
Agreed. And even without asking for funding from an outside party, I wish I'd gotten some honest advice before pursuing some of my past ideas.
I suspect most would say this though... right up until they hear why their idea sucks. Then that person is, "just a cranky old hater trying to ruin my dreams".
Right? You'd think it's about time for a slashcode update to ban any message containing that word, or even k-line any IP posting a link to that bullshit.
Since the donor vessel was stripped down to nothing but a protien structure is there any reason a non-human vein couldn't be donated?
I know they use animal tissues as scaffolds for some treatments. I was recently reading about the use of stripped extracellular matrix from pigs bladders for treatment on both horses and people.
That's cool and at $1,000 that's much cheaper than the other ones. Though by the look of it, it seems you get what you pay for.;)
I know some amateurs have done cubesats and tubesats, it's just that those pricetags are all still in the pretty-serious tinkerer range. I'm going to cling, desperately, to that 1/100th number. Because at $80 or $100, I have a list of projects I'd love to cram into one of those and send up.
And I figure Elon Musk has got a pretty impressive track record, so there's hope.
I know this is a problem, and I imagine smart people are trying to figure something out.
That said, I can't help but marvel at the shrinking cost-to-LEO. Just a year ago I was talking to someone at a company that does tubeSat launches for $8,000. That's the launch and the satellite. And I heard that SpaceX does CubeSat launches on their Falcon 9 rockets.
Now I don't know if the cost reductions would translate directly to that kind of mission, but if they can get the cost down to anywhere near 1/100, putting a satellite up will be easily within reach for an individual tinkerer. To me, that's just amazing... that you can put your own little satellite in space (for a short time), and not even be crushed if something goes wrong.
Many good hearing aids involve the work of an audiologist, impression taking, having those impressions shipped to the hearing aid company that puts the devices in new, cured products made from those impressions, cleaned up, checked and shipped back for your audiologist to (again) show you how to use, tune them, etc.
So it's not like they just make a trillion generic devices and ship them to Best Buy.
Also, the audiologist makes a lot on hearing aids. There's good margin in the process for everyone involved.
No. People do all that, and pretty much always have. It just turns out that we're big on tools and keep making them better.
Maybe the headline should've been something more like, "material interdependence and frequent interaction with different people makes them less alien, and the more you do each, you're proportionately disinclined to murder members of their tribe."
Yes. I read the article. It says it's from seals in the assembly and they seem confident they can work around it.
I think they're probably the best qualified people to decide if they should halt a gajillion dollar project or if they think they can work around the problem.
It sounds like the teflon is from rings higher up in the assembly. It's not like they covered the bit in teflon and later did a full-on Picard facepalm.
They seem optimistic that they'll be able to work around it. I guess these lessons come with the territory when operating hugely complex projects to other friggin planets.
I've never had a big problem with that for the (very few) services we do outsource.
"Salesforce is really slow!" * "Hold... I've checked everything on our end, from your workstation out, and we're 100%. It's Salesforce." "Those fuckers."
The real trick is in keeping an eye on how often you're actually hearing things like that and how often it's the outside provider's fault. Because, believe me, your coworkers would be doing the same for your internally hosted solution.
* Random example I get pretty rarely. We haven't had SF go down outside of scheduled maintenance in the last four years.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha! Thanks. ...and here everyone told me I'd never contribute anything of value. :)
I suppose that leads down a long (and no-doubt unresolved) theological rabbit hole about free will, God's grace, omnipotence and omniscience*, and the final criteria for judgement.
Just remember, nothing about any of it makes good, rational sense to me.
I guess they would say you must be able to actively defy God as a function of free will, even if that free will is a gift, namely by rejecting the sacrifice as your one-and-only path to salvation, and further illustrated in your consequent behavior. After all, not all human behavior is consistent with the will of a just and loving God. I can appreciate how this conflicts with notions of an all powerful God... and more specifically, God's plan.
But yeah, I'm the wrong guy to ask. Maybe someone gave me a more formidable answer in a previous life and I've forgotten it. But either way, I don't have any answers about this that would satisfy me, much less someone that takes it all quite seriously.
* A fun little Sunday school paradox for the kids.
As a distantly former, semi-active "turbo-religious type" (Baptist), from a major metropolitan area that's not in Alabama, I'll second his observations.
There was nothing terribly rare (and certainly not insignificant) about viewing cutting-edge medical science as a meddling denial of God's will. The talking points would probably be a bit more... flowery... and go something along the lines of them being, "desperate attempts to cheat your mortality, to foolishly tell ourselves that we're our own masters, to deny our place as God's children, and that only Jesus' sacrifice can truly save us from suffering." You'd have to talk to a professional preacher to get the exact form of wackiness... I'm a little rusty.
So in this case, if I revisited my old religious groups today I wouldn't be at-all surprised if growing new organs for transplant, however they're presently derived, is considered the fruit of an evil science pioneered in infanticide.
We need to be honest about the underlying issue here... there's no real regard for reason in an institution that depends entirely on a lack thereof. Pretending otherwise (when you're out in public, anyway) is little more than a PR strategy.
I don't recall him (or anyone else) saying that they planned to use the Dragon capsule for manned missions to Mars.
He doesn't do much else? Like him or not, I can't think of many people that have done more than he has. And it's not like he sets small goals.
SolarCity, which apparently is the largest provider of solar systems in the US. That would be enough for any person to feel like they achieved something.
Co-founded Tesla Motors, who brought the electric car back from the dead, and last I'd heard, is actually profitable. Also provides powertrain tech to other auto companies. Company is worth over a billion now, the Model S starts production this year and the Model X starts in 2014. I believe they already maxed out preproduction reservations.
SpaceX. Started with $100m of his own money. Has $1.6 billion (minimum) to $3.x billion (max) in contracts for resupply flights to the ISS. Just made history as the first commercial company to complete one of those missions... and it was a nearly flawless one. Equipment to make the Dragon capsule safe for manned flight is in the works (as linked above).
Of course there's Paypal (formerly his X.com). I imagine he did alright on that deal... which was no small feat.
Sure he talks big, but the dude is only 40 and has already done a lot.
And I would not consider research that much, as most companies would most likely not benefit from a trip to Mars, other than prestige. And that would be a quite expensive PR stunt.
Did you think the same about docking with the ISS? There's not cash at the ISS. But that's going to be profitable for SpaceX, as is moving people to-and-from. They were testing the SuperDraco escape rocket engines a couple days ago for manned flights with the Dragon capsule... https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/214831794103664640
Lo and behold... the same profit model exists for Mars:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#.22Red_Dragon.22_Mars_mission_concept
Meanwhile, Elon Musk has been talking quite a bit about manned trips to mars and eventual colonization. Last I heard he was estimating 10-15 years if things go well, at an eventual cost of about half a million per head.
There are lots of people that make silly estimates. He has a knack for coming through, with a certain margin for error, on big-ass goals.
I was, at least, interested in the bit about why they use Page Views instead of Unique Visitors. My initial reaction would have been to side with Microsoft with the Unique Visitors metric, but StatCounter makes a great case...
- Person opens IE on a machine (for whatever reason) and uses a site that's part of their network. Let's call it five pageviews.
- Then they close IE and use Chrome or Firefox for 500 more pageviews, to every other site, for the rest of the day.
Now using Uniques, you'd show that person as an IE user. Or at maybe you'd 50/50 it. Both methods poorly represent that person's browser usage than the total pageviews by browser. It's not perfect, but it does make sense.
Their youtube video makes it quite clear, and it's good that they did this.
If Microsoft does not port the .NET runtime to Windows 8 on ARM, allowing apps compiled from C#/VB/C++ to CIL to execute on either supported hardware platform [...]
Sounds like he was.
You probably already know this but in case you haven't, I read that Indiegogo.com is good for that sort of thing. I imagine KS has a bigger audience though.
I'm neither a successful VC or a gajillionaire start-up guy, but I hope I'd think of it like this...
If someone points out a problem with my idea and I immediately get defensive, it's probably a very serious problem.
If it's something I've heard more than once, I'm probably really screwed.
If they made a judgement based on my pitch and I think it's because they just don't understand, then I'm probably not good at communicating ideas and I'll probably fail at communicating the idea to the masses, too. That's a big weakness, just of a different variety.
If I think I've explained it well, in a way everyone would understand, their concerns are not problems, and it's a very workable idea... I'd ask myself how someone that evaluates these ideas for a (successful) living could be that, "stupid". More likely than not, an amateur like me is wrong, not the other guy. Work from there...
I should've added, it reminds me very much of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6gZ4vk_Tw4
Which is a conversation I've had more than once with only minor variation.
Agreed. And even without asking for funding from an outside party, I wish I'd gotten some honest advice before pursuing some of my past ideas.
I suspect most would say this though... right up until they hear why their idea sucks. Then that person is, "just a cranky old hater trying to ruin my dreams".
Right? You'd think it's about time for a slashcode update to ban any message containing that word, or even k-line any IP posting a link to that bullshit.
Yes! Built like a Klingon.
Only, instead of battle wounds I'll need the redundancy for my future arteriosclerosis.
Interesting. I called them last year (just inquiring) and they were telling me they had launches scheduled for a couple months ahead of when I called.
It's a little disappointing to see that IOS specifically hasn't managed it yet, but I know others have and my overall excitement stands! :)
Since the donor vessel was stripped down to nothing but a protien structure is there any reason a non-human vein couldn't be donated?
I know they use animal tissues as scaffolds for some treatments. I was recently reading about the use of stripped extracellular matrix from pigs bladders for treatment on both horses and people.
http://www.acell.com/acell-products.html
That's cool and at $1,000 that's much cheaper than the other ones. Though by the look of it, it seems you get what you pay for. ;)
I know some amateurs have done cubesats and tubesats, it's just that those pricetags are all still in the pretty-serious tinkerer range. I'm going to cling, desperately, to that 1/100th number. Because at $80 or $100, I have a list of projects I'd love to cram into one of those and send up.
And I figure Elon Musk has got a pretty impressive track record, so there's hope.
I know this is a problem, and I imagine smart people are trying to figure something out.
That said, I can't help but marvel at the shrinking cost-to-LEO. Just a year ago I was talking to someone at a company that does tubeSat launches for $8,000. That's the launch and the satellite. And I heard that SpaceX does CubeSat launches on their Falcon 9 rockets.
Now I don't know if the cost reductions would translate directly to that kind of mission, but if they can get the cost down to anywhere near 1/100, putting a satellite up will be easily within reach for an individual tinkerer. To me, that's just amazing... that you can put your own little satellite in space (for a short time), and not even be crushed if something goes wrong.
Found the $8k one...
http://interorbital.com/TubeSat_1.htm
Windows 7?! If that IE icon was the Windows Start Button
This is my horrified face.
Seriously though, nothing about dropping Aero seems radical. I haven't played with win8 yet so I'll reserve judgement on the underlying functionality.
But in the meantime, I'm not jumping off any bridges.
Eh, it looks to me like win7 with less transparency. I'd say it's more on the order of "minor theme adjustment" than anything.
I just can't make myself get worked up about it one way or another like it's a huge deal.
Many good hearing aids involve the work of an audiologist, impression taking, having those impressions shipped to the hearing aid company that puts the devices in new, cured products made from those impressions, cleaned up, checked and shipped back for your audiologist to (again) show you how to use, tune them, etc.
So it's not like they just make a trillion generic devices and ship them to Best Buy.
Also, the audiologist makes a lot on hearing aids. There's good margin in the process for everyone involved.
No. People do all that, and pretty much always have. It just turns out that we're big on tools and keep making them better.
Maybe the headline should've been something more like, "material interdependence and frequent interaction with different people makes them less alien, and the more you do each, you're proportionately disinclined to murder members of their tribe."
Or something like that... I am not a sociologist.
Yes. I read the article. It says it's from seals in the assembly and they seem confident they can work around it.
I think they're probably the best qualified people to decide if they should halt a gajillion dollar project or if they think they can work around the problem.
It sounds like the teflon is from rings higher up in the assembly. It's not like they covered the bit in teflon and later did a full-on Picard facepalm.
They seem optimistic that they'll be able to work around it. I guess these lessons come with the territory when operating hugely complex projects to other friggin planets.
I've never had a big problem with that for the (very few) services we do outsource.
"Salesforce is really slow!" *
"Hold... I've checked everything on our end, from your workstation out, and we're 100%. It's Salesforce."
"Those fuckers."
The real trick is in keeping an eye on how often you're actually hearing things like that and how often it's the outside provider's fault. Because, believe me, your coworkers would be doing the same for your internally hosted solution.
* Random example I get pretty rarely. We haven't had SF go down outside of scheduled maintenance in the last four years.