I would find it extremely annoying (if it were the case that I was living in Europe, which saddly enough it isn't), if I started to receive e-mail in several different languages all trying to opt me into some SPAM-list.
Achtung! Die spammingmessagezunzuzkriben is nicht fer yer fingerpokin! Clicken-zie to unsubzkriven spamhaus und wilkommen billiards und billiards of weightenlozen, Paenisenlonginment und CowboyNealen mail.
If you nothing to hide, than you have nothing to worry about. True, until someone decides that something you thought was legal is now suddenly made illegal (DeCSS, anyone?). So guess what? You should've kept that stuff hidden all this time.
On the other hand, that sounds just like something out of a nudist beach advertisement or from the Naked News website.
(If you don't, Microsoft will clear room for the spam by deleting the juicy old letters from ex-girlfriends you have in there.) Wow, and I thought I was the only one who kept those mails for years.
Who's jurisdiction does the moon fall under? That's easy. Finders keepers.
But seriously, I think the U.N. should settle this in advance. Something in the order of "you settle your human-inhabited base in any spot on the Moon, and then you own a good chunk around it". Say, 80 miles around your base.
Let's avoid splitting the moon like they've done with the Antartic, where the toughest nations decided to share it between themselves.
Part of the distance you get from a golf ball is from the action of the air on the dimples. Since we are talking about a vacuum, the effect is gone. On the other hand, there's no air resistance so the ball should fly farther anyway.
I think the dimple-ness of the ball helps it reduce the air drag, compared to a completely spherical ball... but since there's no atmosphere on the Moon, there's no drag. I think you chould hit a pyramid-shaped golf ball there and it would fly just as far as a spherical one.
Based on an estimated frequency of once every 100 years, a supernova should occur within 200 ly of Earth on average once every 30 million years.
Which almost happens to coincide with the biggest extintions of life here on Earth. If I remember correctly, they've been happening every 33 million years or so.
...life on Earth must be pretty resilient if we're here talking about it today. Unlike those puny, non-resilient dinosaurs of our past. Sucks to be them, I say.
This means, it's about as autonomous as your average TV set, which you can control with the remote. For now.
I think he's not talking about the current status of human-less warfare, but about the trend in reducing human interference with the objective of maximum damage with minimal effort.
First, soldiers had to _carry_ the explosives to the enemy. Then they learned to throw them for afar. Then they threw them from planes. Then they didn't even had to send planes, just Tomahawks. Give them a decade or so, and they're just gonna throw them from space.
Re:Never mind the animals... what about us!
on
Featherless Chickens
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· Score: 2
Just think of what the 6.4 billion of us and the 13 billion chickens could do together in the future - we could terraform planets and spread ourselves (and the chickens) across the stars... Dude, that's so NOT what we've always dreamed about when we talked about naked chicks from outer space.
Seems to me it would make a lot more sense for distributed computing efforts like SETI to be looking for such "extinction" objects, rather than the Little Green Men.
Sounds like a great idea, but I would think that finding patterns in the noise from space is "easier" than finding meteorites, mathematically speaking. What I mean is, I assume it's easier to convert those signals into a multitude of small chunks for the PCs to analyze, than it is to convert space images into something that a regular PC could analyze.
I could be wrong, of course, but I think this kind of research requires bigger and better equipment, not distributed calculations.
IIRC, there are whole NEWS GROUPS dedicated to the topic. Yeah, all of them clones from the Muppets' Swedish Chef. Bork bork bork!
But let's be honest, Wil (with one 'l'... gotta love The Weakest Link) was a good actor given a lousy character. Or, rather, a semi-decent character given too much attention in some parts of the season, left to obscurity in other parts, and not very well-written, either.
There *are* valid tests within the human context that provide credibility to the claims of Christ. There are no such claims or evidence to back the tooth fairy. What you say!!!
When I was a kid, I lost a tooth (I lost a whole bunch of them, actually, but let's use just one for this example). I put it under my pillow, and the next morning there was a big, shiny coin in its place. I asked my parents about it, and they told me that it was because of the Tooth Fairy.
When I was a kid, I lost my grandfather (I lost only one of them, and I'm pretty sure my other grandpa wouldn't want to be included as an example here). I asked my parents about his death, and they told me that it was the will of God.
So why is one more believable than the other? Just because of one Book?
I think that one of the things you get when you add to the pool, so to speak, is a certain amount of respect....and just like in real life, no one respects you when all you add to the pool is pee.
The commodity of the internet isn't money, it's access. It's connections. From what I've seen, this is true in almost every business. In the highest levels, money may be something to be considered, but political (or family, or social, or whatever) connections usually have more weight in the decision-making.
On another note, maybe from a geek's point of view, information wants to be free (as in speech) but your average Internet surfer wants information to be free (as in beer), so they dont have to "waste" their money getting it (as in cheap bastards).
Great rant, though. Too bad we can't moderate websites to give him a few (+1, Insightful) Karma points.
What strikes me is the sense of drama and tragedy if the on-ship culture panics or corrupts itself before it reaches the goal. Does anyone know of any stories that focus on that? Where generation eight of ten finds that they need to scrap the historic goal, due to some miscalculation or some unforeseen hardships, or merely a decadent generation five?
I can think of a few:
- Robert A. Heinlein's Universe short story.
- Michael Cassut's The Longer voyage (which, interestingly enough, deals with a spaceship voyage gone wrong even before it even sets out from orbit).
- Ian R. McLeod's "Starship Day".
- Robert Reed's "Chrysalis".
There's a lot more, but those are the ones I remember right now.
Heh. I wouldn't be very concerned about the boredom level of the colonists... I mean, if we were going to build such a big spaceship, it wouldn't be much of an extra cost to give them:
a) A digital collection of the complete works of art of Humanity (you know, something to read in the way), and
b) A laser-link or something similar to give them fresh news (inasmuch as 50 or 60 years old news can be considered "fresh").
What I would be concerned is to how to convince their descendants to continue the work started by their parents. No matter how sophisticated the ship's systems may be, there's always gonna be the need for knowledgeable people to keep them in shape, or as backups, or something.
"But I really want to be a... ballerina!",
"Shut up, John, you'll be a cooling system engineer just like your father was, and his father before him, and so on".
Of course, we could end up with something similar to Robert Heinlein's "Universe", where the descendants are so remote from the original colonists that they don't even know they're on a spaceship.
Lousy weather ruined it for me. We had several clear nights all week long... and then Friday comes along, and friday night it get's cloudy and starts to rain. Saturday came and went and it kept cloudy all day long. I even stayed up 'til 5 AM, hoping to catch at least a break in the cloud cover for a few minutes (and reading Slashdot all night long, to pass the time). Nada.
Back in... '98, I think, the weather was great, and me and several friends drove out to a ranch an hour away from Monterrey, and we saw a great show, too. Nothing like this one, I imagine, but still it was pretty cool. I think we saw about 100 meteors / hour, some with beautiful colorful trails that lasted for several seconds (including one with a green trail that lasted almost a full minute).
Well, I hope I'll be able to see it next time around, which'll be about... 2040 or somewhen close. Soudns like a great thing to do with any future grandchildren I may (or may not) have.
OK, quick. Name a stereotype that's not at least partially grounded in reality.
All aliens are grey-green, speak in metallic tones and always want to be taken to our leaders.
If i'm ever in an alien planet for the first time, i'll tell them to take me to their local version of Hooters, just to leave their scientist puzzled for a while about my race's intelligence. Hmm. Hooters girls. Now that's one stereotype fortunately grounded in reality.
Second: it's entertaining to think we can prove our intelligence to another species by sending them proof that we've cracked a prime... Yup. Very entertaining.
Until the alien lawyers arrive, waving around the Encyclopaedia Galactica version of the DMCA, and sending us all into oblivion with their phasers, torpedoes and subpoenas, for cracking part of the encryption to Life, the Universe and Everything.
Once upon a time, the Constitution was worth a whole lot more than just 6000 lives. Even though i'm not an american citizen (though I do have relatives there), I have to admit this sentence is more deep and makes more sense than everything Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft & Co. have said (combined) since the September 11 attacks.
Can you hear that? It must be the sound of 10,000 american militia ghost cheering from their graves.
Did no one else get it? Am I the only Pink floyd fan reading here? Or maybe no one had the moderator points to use. Anyway, to paraphrase a little bit closer to the original:
"There is no dark side of the universe, really. Matter of fact, it is all dark."
Indications are that 600,000 people were left homeless, with 348,000 houses destroyed and an additional 844,000 damaged.[...] Government estimates place direct economic losses at $1.3 billion. Other estimates indicate losses may be as high as $5 billion.
If you want to talk about perspective, we have whole areas of India struck by this earthquake, 348k houses damaged, and it costed them almost 5 billion.
Slashdot Mirror
I would find it extremely annoying (if it were the case that I was living in Europe, which saddly enough it isn't), if I started to receive e-mail in several different languages all trying to opt me into some SPAM-list.
Achtung! Die spammingmessagezunzuzkriben is nicht fer yer fingerpokin! Clicken-zie to unsubzkriven spamhaus und wilkommen billiards und billiards of weightenlozen, Paenisenlonginment und CowboyNealen mail.
Well, for what it's worth, I don't see people trying to work out a way to film "Titanic 2" (Attack of the underwater clones?).
Titanic was one of those "wow, lookithat" movies, with some sex mixed in. MIB was an action flik with aliens in it (and a bit with a dog).
The point is, he got it backwards.
Confusing both movies John Katz is, hmmmm? Strong in the Mind Force he is not.
The next generation unseated its elders [...]
Not on Star Trek they didn't. Captain Kirk is still the man!
If you nothing to hide, than you have nothing to worry about. True, until someone decides that something you thought was legal is now suddenly made illegal (DeCSS, anyone?). So guess what? You should've kept that stuff hidden all this time.
On the other hand, that sounds just like something out of a nudist beach advertisement or from the Naked News website.
(If you don't, Microsoft will clear room for the spam by deleting the juicy old letters from ex-girlfriends you have in there.) Wow, and I thought I was the only one who kept those mails for years.
Who's jurisdiction does the moon fall under? That's easy. Finders keepers.
But seriously, I think the U.N. should settle this in advance. Something in the order of "you settle your human-inhabited base in any spot on the Moon, and then you own a good chunk around it". Say, 80 miles around your base.
Let's avoid splitting the moon like they've done with the Antartic, where the toughest nations decided to share it between themselves.
Sweet! Any chances of playing golf there?
Part of the distance you get from a golf ball is from the action of the air on the dimples. Since we are talking about a vacuum, the effect is gone. On the other hand, there's no air resistance so the ball should fly farther anyway.
I think the dimple-ness of the ball helps it reduce the air drag, compared to a completely spherical ball... but since there's no atmosphere on the Moon, there's no drag. I think you chould hit a pyramid-shaped golf ball there and it would fly just as far as a spherical one.
Based on an estimated frequency of once every 100 years, a supernova should occur within 200 ly of Earth on average once every 30 million years.
...life on Earth must be pretty resilient if we're here talking about it today. Unlike those puny, non-resilient dinosaurs of our past. Sucks to be them, I say.
Which almost happens to coincide with the biggest extintions of life here on Earth. If I remember correctly, they've been happening every 33 million years or so.
This means, it's about as autonomous as your average TV set, which you can control with the remote. For now.
I think he's not talking about the current status of human-less warfare, but about the trend in reducing human interference with the objective of maximum damage with minimal effort.
First, soldiers had to _carry_ the explosives to the enemy. Then they learned to throw them for afar. Then they threw them from planes. Then they didn't even had to send planes, just Tomahawks. Give them a decade or so, and they're just gonna throw them from space.
Just think of what the 6.4 billion of us and the 13 billion chickens could do together in the future - we could terraform planets and spread ourselves (and the chickens) across the stars... Dude, that's so NOT what we've always dreamed about when we talked about naked chicks from outer space.
Seems to me it would make a lot more sense for distributed computing efforts like SETI to be looking for such "extinction" objects, rather than the Little Green Men.
Sounds like a great idea, but I would think that finding patterns in the noise from space is "easier" than finding meteorites, mathematically speaking. What I mean is, I assume it's easier to convert those signals into a multitude of small chunks for the PCs to analyze, than it is to convert space images into something that a regular PC could analyze.
I could be wrong, of course, but I think this kind of research requires bigger and better equipment, not distributed calculations.
IIRC, there are whole NEWS GROUPS dedicated to the topic. Yeah, all of them clones from the Muppets' Swedish Chef. Bork bork bork!
But let's be honest, Wil (with one 'l'... gotta love The Weakest Link) was a good actor given a lousy character. Or, rather, a semi-decent character given too much attention in some parts of the season, left to obscurity in other parts, and not very well-written, either.
Kirk was cooler than Piccard, anyway.
There *are* valid tests within the human context that provide credibility to the claims of Christ. There are no such claims or evidence to back the tooth fairy.
What you say!!!
When I was a kid, I lost a tooth (I lost a whole bunch of them, actually, but let's use just one for this example). I put it under my pillow, and the next morning there was a big, shiny coin in its place. I asked my parents about it, and they told me that it was because of the Tooth Fairy.
When I was a kid, I lost my grandfather (I lost only one of them, and I'm pretty sure my other grandpa wouldn't want to be included as an example here). I asked my parents about his death, and they told me that it was the will of God.
So why is one more believable than the other? Just because of one Book?
I think that one of the things you get when you add to the pool, so to speak, is a certain amount of respect. ...and just like in real life, no one respects you when all you add to the pool is pee.
The commodity of the internet isn't money, it's access. It's connections.
From what I've seen, this is true in almost every business. In the highest levels, money may be something to be considered, but political (or family, or social, or whatever) connections usually have more weight in the decision-making.
On another note, maybe from a geek's point of view, information wants to be free (as in speech) but your average Internet surfer wants information to be free (as in beer), so they dont have to "waste" their money getting it (as in cheap bastards).
Great rant, though. Too bad we can't moderate websites to give him a few (+1, Insightful) Karma points.
What strikes me is the sense of drama and tragedy if the on-ship culture panics or corrupts itself before it reaches the goal. Does anyone know of any stories that focus on that? Where generation eight of ten finds that they need to scrap the historic goal, due to some miscalculation or some unforeseen hardships, or merely a decadent generation five?
I can think of a few:
- Robert A. Heinlein's Universe short story.
- Michael Cassut's The Longer voyage (which, interestingly enough, deals with a spaceship voyage gone wrong even before it even sets out from orbit).
- Ian R. McLeod's "Starship Day".
- Robert Reed's "Chrysalis".
There's a lot more, but those are the ones I remember right now.
Heh. I wouldn't be very concerned about the boredom level of the colonists... I mean, if we were going to build such a big spaceship, it wouldn't be much of an extra cost to give them:
a) A digital collection of the complete works of art of Humanity (you know, something to read in the way), and
b) A laser-link or something similar to give them fresh news (inasmuch as 50 or 60 years old news can be considered "fresh").
What I would be concerned is to how to convince their descendants to continue the work started by their parents. No matter how sophisticated the ship's systems may be, there's always gonna be the need for knowledgeable people to keep them in shape, or as backups, or something.
"But I really want to be a... ballerina!",
"Shut up, John, you'll be a cooling system engineer just like your father was, and his father before him, and so on".
Of course, we could end up with something similar to Robert Heinlein's "Universe", where the descendants are so remote from the original colonists that they don't even know they're on a spaceship.
Lousy weather ruined it for me. We had several clear nights all week long... and then Friday comes along, and friday night it get's cloudy and starts to rain. Saturday came and went and it kept cloudy all day long. I even stayed up 'til 5 AM, hoping to catch at least a break in the cloud cover for a few minutes (and reading Slashdot all night long, to pass the time). Nada.
Back in... '98, I think, the weather was great, and me and several friends drove out to a ranch an hour away from Monterrey, and we saw a great show, too. Nothing like this one, I imagine, but still it was pretty cool. I think we saw about 100 meteors / hour, some with beautiful colorful trails that lasted for several seconds (including one with a green trail that lasted almost a full minute).
Well, I hope I'll be able to see it next time around, which'll be about... 2040 or somewhen close. Soudns like a great thing to do with any future grandchildren I may (or may not) have.
OK, quick. Name a stereotype that's not at least partially grounded in reality.
All aliens are grey-green, speak in metallic tones and always want to be taken to our leaders.
If i'm ever in an alien planet for the first time, i'll tell them to take me to their local version of Hooters, just to leave their scientist puzzled for a while about my race's intelligence. Hmm. Hooters girls. Now that's one stereotype fortunately grounded in reality.
Second: it's entertaining to think we can prove our intelligence to another species by sending them proof that we've cracked a prime...
Yup. Very entertaining.
Until the alien lawyers arrive, waving around the Encyclopaedia Galactica version of the DMCA, and sending us all into oblivion with their phasers, torpedoes and subpoenas, for cracking part of the encryption to Life, the Universe and Everything.
Once upon a time, the Constitution was worth a whole lot more than just 6000 lives.
Even though i'm not an american citizen (though I do have relatives there), I have to admit this sentence is more deep and makes more sense than everything Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft & Co. have said (combined) since the September 11 attacks.
Can you hear that? It must be the sound of 10,000 american militia ghost cheering from their graves.
Did no one else get it? Am I the only Pink floyd fan reading here? Or maybe no one had the moderator points to use. Anyway, to paraphrase a little bit closer to the original:
"There is no dark side of the universe, really.
Matter of fact, it is all dark."
(Kudos to nukebuddy for thinking about it first!)
Indications are that 600,000 people were left homeless, with 348,000 houses destroyed and an additional 844,000 damaged.[...] Government estimates place direct economic losses at $1.3 billion. Other estimates indicate losses may be as high as $5 billion.
If you want to talk about perspective, we have whole areas of India struck by this earthquake, 348k houses damaged, and it costed them almost 5 billion.
On New York, according to this story: "Attacks expected to cost New York at least £40bn", 2 buildings are destroyed and the cost rises at least eightfold.
Nothing to do with the Ig Noble Awards, I know, but it makes you think about the economical difference between both countries.