They're usually true believers who "just know" that this kind of thing will work and once the trolls are "outed", they'll do a completely 180 and become born again good citizens. I mean, all it takes is someone who knows what's best for them telling them the "truth" to straighten them out...
I've noticed this about a strong contingent of liberals; they seem to have an irrational notion that people just need to be exposed to their liberal values and have "the truth" explained to them by someone who knows what's best for them, and they'll magically convert to their way of thinking. It's the same on the conservative side too, and you especially see it with religious people. I got it just a couple days ago here in some discussion about religion; some religious people who "know what's best" telling me that the "truth" is obvious and my mind is simply "closed" to it, or that contraception is evil and I just need to read some Latin text from the Vatican and I'll understand everything.
There's really a complete lack of scientific reasoning from most humans, whether they're religious nuts, or into some social cause (which seems to be another religion of sorts). People believe things without any actual evidence at all, or based on some "evidence" which can't be cross-checked or validated in any way.
Wrong again. There's gravity everywhere, including GEO. There's no effective gravity in any orbit because the gravitational force is counteracted by your motion caused by inertia: you're in constant freefall when you're in a stable orbit, so it appears to be zero-g in your reference frame, even though it really isn't.
But there is gravity in GEO, and theoretically to the ends of the universe, all caused by Earth's mass: just look at the gravitational equation, there's no distance limits on it. Of course, the effect of gravity diminishes with distance and it competes with the gravity caused by other bodies so past a certain point it becomes negligible. But for a practical example, the Moon exerts significant gravitational force on the Earth, which is what causes our tides, and the Moon is much farther away than GEO.
Short answer? We're still nowhere even remotely close to being even capable of making a space elevator. Space elevators face such numerous problems anyway (really don't want to have to go into them all) that they're really not a fruitful avenue of pursuit.
For the Earth, sure. What about for the Moon, where gravity is only 1/6g and there's no atmosphere?
Ok, maybe, but still, you're talking about two groups of people who are very closely related genetically. It's impossible for them not to be: they originate from the same part of the world. They even look mostly the same. It's like comparing a German to a Frenchman. They're not very far apart. It's not like the genetic difference between a German and a Japanese person, or even more, the difference between a subsaharan African and just about anyone else. Humans as a species are extremely inbred, especially the non-African ones. We might think we look really different from ethnic group to ethnic group, but we really aren't.
If someone killed my wife and children... I would not be above genocide utilizing a bioweapon, and I would be capable of building such a thing, targeted to a specific set of tribes or genomes
Good luck with that one. The problem here is that the two ethnic groups are almost the same: they're both Semitic people, and are extremely closely related genetically. Any bio-weapon targeting Jewish genetics is also going to affect Arabs, and vice-versa.
Something like that might work if, for instance, the Nigerians were really pissed at the Chinese. But with most cases where some ethnic group really hates some other ethnic group, the two groups are more similar to each other than to anyone else. It's kinda like all those cases you see where there's a family-run restaurant, but two brothers in the family have a big fight and suddenly there's two restaurants, the original one, and then a new one across the street with the exact same menu and almost same name.
The length is relevant because all of that dust, seen straight on, blocks a lot of light
Right, I see. I was thinking you meant that the huge length, seen lengthwise, would block a lot of light just because of the sheer length, but this makes more sense since lengthwise it wouldn't be that dense.
How about the other poster's brown dwarf idea? Could this be caused by a brown dwarf in orbit around the star? Those things can get really big. Effectively, it'd be a multi-star system. Or do brown dwarves emit enough light (probably in IR) to still be seen? And why is my stupid spell-checker telling me that "dwarves" is misspelled?
That's not a bad idea actually. I think I read that Jupiter is just a bit too small to be a brown dwarf, but there's probably a good size range there, so maybe there's a large brown dwarf there.
Yeah, but isn't the length of the tail irrelevant, because the tail would be pointed directly towards Earth (since it's blown by the stellar wind from the star, and the presumed comet is directly between that star and Earth)? I thought comet tails always pointed directly away from their star.
No, not really. They didn't pay for any software at all; that's the whole problem. They paid for a service. If they paid for some software, they could just stick with what they have instead of pissing off users by divulging their identities when the users had never agreed to that before, at least until they could get the software made so that old comments used the pseudonyms while newer comments switched to the new policy.
Instead, they bought a service which apparently doesn't offer this ability. I don't know if there's a legal case to be made here, but it seems to me that their website had a policy before where people could make posts anonymously (or pseudonymously), and now they're changing to a real-name policy. That would be OK, except they're making it retroactive, which is certainly wrong ethically, and quite possibly legally, depending on the wording of their prior user agreement policy. You can't just go change agreements like that retroactively. And the fact that the SaaS vendor doesn't support this is no excuse. Either they need to switch to a new vendor, get the vendor to change, or eliminate the service (and comment section) altogether.
Well again, given that a gas giant can only block 1-2%, this would have to be a really friggin' huge comet, right? A comet bigger than Jupiter? That doesn't sound likely. Sure, the tail might help, but still comet tails don't block light the way a planet does, they're just a collection of dust.
Now you're talking about absurd and unaffordable amounts of money. Can you imagine how much money you'd need to pay Microsoft to make a custom version of Windows 10 for you without Metro? It's just not something they want to do. They might not even do it for any amount of money, unless you buy out the company outright, because it goes directly against their corporate vision.
With FOSS, this isn't a problem; there's always someone willing to do the work for you. And you don't have to buy out the original company to get what you want.
The thing I don't get is how comets could possibly block 20% of the star's output. From what I remember, some astronomer said that if there were a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting the star, that would only block 1% of the star's output. If a Jupiter-sized planet would only block 1%, how the heck would some comets block 20 times more?
Not necessarily. If they've outsourced their website to some other company, they're at the vendor's mercy. So "impossible" is a codeword for "we were too shortsighted to have our own website built, and contracted with some shitty cloud provider, and we just do whatever they want."
If it's possible to do with "free" (open) software, it's possible to do with proprietary.
Absolutely wrong.
If it's proprietary, and you ask the vendor to make a change, and they say "no", then you're out of luck. They have total control over the software, so if they refuse, even with you waving money in front of their noses, there's nothing you can do. Proprietary companies frequently refuse to do custom work or listen to customer feedback, because they're selling to lots of people and don't want to deviate from their corporate direction or invest the resources necessary to please a single customer.
With open-source/Free software, you don't have this problem. You have access to the source code, so worst case, you can hire someone to make custom changes for you. It probably won't be that cheap to get a freelancer or some small software house to do it for you, since they're working with unfamiliar code, but it's better than nothing.
Real estate prices are ridiculous everywhere these days, unless you live in some backwater where there's no employment. Cheap real estate isn't of much use if you're unemployed, unless you're retired.
As for rain, you sound like you've never been to northern California. How do you think all those forests grow? The pictures I've seen of Florida only show palm trees, same as southern California.
Having a preset price is not how taxi regulations work.
So what? Ubers aren't taxis, that's why they're not subject to taxi regulations. They're limousines, so they operate under those laws. Limos have preset prices.
So they have to have technology in the cab to charge a credit card.
Sure, and then they refuse to use it.
Uber does not have to have equipment in the cab because they charge the card at the home base.
Right, but you still haven't explained how the taxis are "more advanced". They're clearly not. Charging a pre-set price is a superior method, and it's simpler, faster, and easier to do the transaction through a smartphone app rather than on a card reader in some car. This is a pretty good example of KISS. Uber has no need to pollute cars with unnecessary and extremely expensive payment terminals because they've come up with a superior alternative.
(Actually, if any city tried to do THAT, I'd imagine the discussion here would be the opposite and it'd end up in "Your Rights Online" -- "How DARE they force us into a cashless economy! Today it's forcing businesses to accept credit, tomorrow it's no cash allowed! My right to anonymous transactions must be upheld!!!")
I'm sorry, this is BS.
Cabs accepting credit cards doesn't mean that cash-payers are stuck having to use a card. They can still pay cash. No one is proposing to change this. Uber doesn't take cash, but for the YRO people, that's not a problem because it's well-known up front. You just can't even use Uber without getting cashless payment set up through them. It's not like an Uber car is going to show up and drive you somewhere and then you need to figure out how to pay with a card.
The problem with these stupid cabs is that they'll say they take cards, but then when you try to actually pay with a card they tell you the card reader is "broken". It's a case of simple lying, and bait-and-switch. I can't image how any anti-cashless-economy or YRO people would be in defense of this; the libertarian crowd is all about people and businesses having maximum freedom within the law, not for them to lie and advertise one thing and do something else, which sounds a lot like fraud to me. I've never heard of any true libertarians being in favor of fraud.
If the cab companies want to advertise that they accept cards, then they need to do so, plain and simple. This is what people are complaining about: a cab shows up, it may or may not accept cards, they just don't know. You don't have that problem with Uber: you know up front how you have to pay, and you already have it set up to automatically charge you. Uber also gives you a close estimate how much it'll cost up front, whereas with a cab you have little idea, especially if the cabbie drives you in circles or some circuitous route to get a higher fare. In short, Uber's singlehandedly fixed everything wrong with the cab industry.
Well, a couple of points here: 1) Slashdot does not represent software engineers as a whole in the US. Many SW engineers I've met don't seem to be Slashdot users or care about it. 2) Slashdot seems to have an older crowd, since it started back in the 90s. A lot of SW engineers these days are younger, in the Millenial generation. They're not on Slashdot, they're on Reddit or something else I don't know about. 3) Even on Slashdot, there's a bunch of liberals. Remember the Brendan Eich incident? There were people on both sides of that one here. I do think the extreme right + libertarians outnumber them though. 4) Slashdot is not confined to SW engineers; there's a lot of other engineers here too, and in my experience they're frequently even worse than SW engineers.
I do think you're onto something with the libertarian angle; from what I can tell, it seems that the SW engineers tend to be more libertarian and not as religious, whereas the other engineers tend to be more old-school and religious conservative. However even the religious conservatives these days are worshiping the "free market"; the churches here have all bought into that stuff plus Prosperity Doctrine ("God loves rich people more than poor people, and if you're rich, it's because God has blessed you.").
WTF? If you think Cox is worse than Comcast, you're a fucking moron. And if you think that bitching and complaining is going to improve the state of ISPs in this country, you're also a fucking moron. You sound like a naive idealist who complains if everything isn't up to some lofty, unrealistic standard. Maybe after you get past the age of 18 you'll see the real world isn't like that.
The thing is, you're not going to mine 500 lbs of platinum, it's quite possible you're going to mine millions of pounds of it, along with other valuable metals. Yes, you wouldn't be able to dump that on the market too fast, but you would put all the existing platinum mines out of business quickly. And with lower prices for platinum, more uses would be found for it, increasing the demand. More people would want it for jewelry and aesthetics probably, but also it's quite likely new industrial uses would be found for it which were previously unexplored due to its extremely high cost. You have to think more long-term about these things, which it doesn't look like you're doing with your analysis. An endeavor like this isn't going to be something small, it's going to be absolutely huge, and mining a single asteroid will span for decades most likely.
Finally, look at the environmental aspect: mining is terrible ecologically. Wouldn't it be better to do as much mining in space as we can, so we aren't digging giant holes in the ground, polluting groundwater and rivers, shearing the tops off mountains, etc.? We just had a bad incident with river pollution in one of the western states (CO I think), and mining always has problems with environmental opposition in advanced nations (and in backwards nations causes all kinds of problems, like fueling conflicts as with coltan). Environmentalists won't care if you break up asteroids for mineral resources.
Last I heard, they found a lot of water at one of the poles.
And all those other things, while not extremely rare here, are still valuable for building stuff on the Moon. Iron, aluminum, and titanium are very useful for making things. Plus there's tons of sunlight there to provide solar power, without any clouds or atmosphere in the way.
So with all this, you should be able to build a Moon base which you can use for refining captured asteroids (which have far more valuable ores) and doing low-g manufacturing.
As for the gravity well, it's half the gravity of Mars, and it's very close to Earth. These sound like big pluses to me. I guess if you really need extremely low gravity or zero gravity, you could just build a big space station at the L1 Lagrangian point. And again, all that material on the Moon you think is "boring" would come in handy there, because it'd be far cheaper to lift all that mass from the 1/6g Moon than from the 1g Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
They're usually true believers who "just know" that this kind of thing will work and once the trolls are "outed", they'll do a completely 180 and become born again good citizens. I mean, all it takes is someone who knows what's best for them telling them the "truth" to straighten them out...
I've noticed this about a strong contingent of liberals; they seem to have an irrational notion that people just need to be exposed to their liberal values and have "the truth" explained to them by someone who knows what's best for them, and they'll magically convert to their way of thinking. It's the same on the conservative side too, and you especially see it with religious people. I got it just a couple days ago here in some discussion about religion; some religious people who "know what's best" telling me that the "truth" is obvious and my mind is simply "closed" to it, or that contraception is evil and I just need to read some Latin text from the Vatican and I'll understand everything.
There's really a complete lack of scientific reasoning from most humans, whether they're religious nuts, or into some social cause (which seems to be another religion of sorts). People believe things without any actual evidence at all, or based on some "evidence" which can't be cross-checked or validated in any way.
Wrong again. There's gravity everywhere, including GEO. There's no effective gravity in any orbit because the gravitational force is counteracted by your motion caused by inertia: you're in constant freefall when you're in a stable orbit, so it appears to be zero-g in your reference frame, even though it really isn't.
But there is gravity in GEO, and theoretically to the ends of the universe, all caused by Earth's mass: just look at the gravitational equation, there's no distance limits on it. Of course, the effect of gravity diminishes with distance and it competes with the gravity caused by other bodies so past a certain point it becomes negligible. But for a practical example, the Moon exerts significant gravitational force on the Earth, which is what causes our tides, and the Moon is much farther away than GEO.
Short answer? We're still nowhere even remotely close to being even capable of making a space elevator.
Space elevators face such numerous problems anyway (really don't want to have to go into them all) that they're really not a fruitful avenue of pursuit.
For the Earth, sure. What about for the Moon, where gravity is only 1/6g and there's no atmosphere?
Ok, maybe, but still, you're talking about two groups of people who are very closely related genetically. It's impossible for them not to be: they originate from the same part of the world. They even look mostly the same. It's like comparing a German to a Frenchman. They're not very far apart. It's not like the genetic difference between a German and a Japanese person, or even more, the difference between a subsaharan African and just about anyone else. Humans as a species are extremely inbred, especially the non-African ones. We might think we look really different from ethnic group to ethnic group, but we really aren't.
If someone killed my wife and children... I would not be above genocide utilizing a bioweapon, and I would be capable of building such a thing, targeted to a specific set of tribes or genomes
Good luck with that one. The problem here is that the two ethnic groups are almost the same: they're both Semitic people, and are extremely closely related genetically. Any bio-weapon targeting Jewish genetics is also going to affect Arabs, and vice-versa.
Something like that might work if, for instance, the Nigerians were really pissed at the Chinese. But with most cases where some ethnic group really hates some other ethnic group, the two groups are more similar to each other than to anyone else. It's kinda like all those cases you see where there's a family-run restaurant, but two brothers in the family have a big fight and suddenly there's two restaurants, the original one, and then a new one across the street with the exact same menu and almost same name.
The length is relevant because all of that dust, seen straight on, blocks a lot of light
Right, I see. I was thinking you meant that the huge length, seen lengthwise, would block a lot of light just because of the sheer length, but this makes more sense since lengthwise it wouldn't be that dense.
How about the other poster's brown dwarf idea? Could this be caused by a brown dwarf in orbit around the star? Those things can get really big. Effectively, it'd be a multi-star system. Or do brown dwarves emit enough light (probably in IR) to still be seen? And why is my stupid spell-checker telling me that "dwarves" is misspelled?
That's not a bad idea actually. I think I read that Jupiter is just a bit too small to be a brown dwarf, but there's probably a good size range there, so maybe there's a large brown dwarf there.
Yeah, but isn't the length of the tail irrelevant, because the tail would be pointed directly towards Earth (since it's blown by the stellar wind from the star, and the presumed comet is directly between that star and Earth)? I thought comet tails always pointed directly away from their star.
No, not really. They didn't pay for any software at all; that's the whole problem. They paid for a service. If they paid for some software, they could just stick with what they have instead of pissing off users by divulging their identities when the users had never agreed to that before, at least until they could get the software made so that old comments used the pseudonyms while newer comments switched to the new policy.
Instead, they bought a service which apparently doesn't offer this ability. I don't know if there's a legal case to be made here, but it seems to me that their website had a policy before where people could make posts anonymously (or pseudonymously), and now they're changing to a real-name policy. That would be OK, except they're making it retroactive, which is certainly wrong ethically, and quite possibly legally, depending on the wording of their prior user agreement policy. You can't just go change agreements like that retroactively. And the fact that the SaaS vendor doesn't support this is no excuse. Either they need to switch to a new vendor, get the vendor to change, or eliminate the service (and comment section) altogether.
Well again, given that a gas giant can only block 1-2%, this would have to be a really friggin' huge comet, right? A comet bigger than Jupiter? That doesn't sound likely. Sure, the tail might help, but still comet tails don't block light the way a planet does, they're just a collection of dust.
Now you're talking about absurd and unaffordable amounts of money. Can you imagine how much money you'd need to pay Microsoft to make a custom version of Windows 10 for you without Metro? It's just not something they want to do. They might not even do it for any amount of money, unless you buy out the company outright, because it goes directly against their corporate vision.
With FOSS, this isn't a problem; there's always someone willing to do the work for you. And you don't have to buy out the original company to get what you want.
The thing I don't get is how comets could possibly block 20% of the star's output. From what I remember, some astronomer said that if there were a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting the star, that would only block 1% of the star's output. If a Jupiter-sized planet would only block 1%, how the heck would some comets block 20 times more?
Not necessarily. If they've outsourced their website to some other company, they're at the vendor's mercy. So "impossible" is a codeword for "we were too shortsighted to have our own website built, and contracted with some shitty cloud provider, and we just do whatever they want."
If it's possible to do with "free" (open) software, it's possible to do with proprietary.
Absolutely wrong.
If it's proprietary, and you ask the vendor to make a change, and they say "no", then you're out of luck. They have total control over the software, so if they refuse, even with you waving money in front of their noses, there's nothing you can do. Proprietary companies frequently refuse to do custom work or listen to customer feedback, because they're selling to lots of people and don't want to deviate from their corporate direction or invest the resources necessary to please a single customer.
With open-source/Free software, you don't have this problem. You have access to the source code, so worst case, you can hire someone to make custom changes for you. It probably won't be that cheap to get a freelancer or some small software house to do it for you, since they're working with unfamiliar code, but it's better than nothing.
Real estate prices are ridiculous everywhere these days, unless you live in some backwater where there's no employment. Cheap real estate isn't of much use if you're unemployed, unless you're retired.
As for rain, you sound like you've never been to northern California. How do you think all those forests grow? The pictures I've seen of Florida only show palm trees, same as southern California.
Having a preset price is not how taxi regulations work.
So what? Ubers aren't taxis, that's why they're not subject to taxi regulations. They're limousines, so they operate under those laws. Limos have preset prices.
So they have to have technology in the cab to charge a credit card.
Sure, and then they refuse to use it.
Uber does not have to have equipment in the cab because they charge the card at the home base.
Right, but you still haven't explained how the taxis are "more advanced". They're clearly not. Charging a pre-set price is a superior method, and it's simpler, faster, and easier to do the transaction through a smartphone app rather than on a card reader in some car. This is a pretty good example of KISS. Uber has no need to pollute cars with unnecessary and extremely expensive payment terminals because they've come up with a superior alternative.
A good solution to that problem is to simply not live in Florida. FloridaMan is constantly in the news about something.
(Actually, if any city tried to do THAT, I'd imagine the discussion here would be the opposite and it'd end up in "Your Rights Online" -- "How DARE they force us into a cashless economy! Today it's forcing businesses to accept credit, tomorrow it's no cash allowed! My right to anonymous transactions must be upheld!!!")
I'm sorry, this is BS.
Cabs accepting credit cards doesn't mean that cash-payers are stuck having to use a card. They can still pay cash. No one is proposing to change this. Uber doesn't take cash, but for the YRO people, that's not a problem because it's well-known up front. You just can't even use Uber without getting cashless payment set up through them. It's not like an Uber car is going to show up and drive you somewhere and then you need to figure out how to pay with a card.
The problem with these stupid cabs is that they'll say they take cards, but then when you try to actually pay with a card they tell you the card reader is "broken". It's a case of simple lying, and bait-and-switch. I can't image how any anti-cashless-economy or YRO people would be in defense of this; the libertarian crowd is all about people and businesses having maximum freedom within the law, not for them to lie and advertise one thing and do something else, which sounds a lot like fraud to me. I've never heard of any true libertarians being in favor of fraud.
If the cab companies want to advertise that they accept cards, then they need to do so, plain and simple. This is what people are complaining about: a cab shows up, it may or may not accept cards, they just don't know. You don't have that problem with Uber: you know up front how you have to pay, and you already have it set up to automatically charge you. Uber also gives you a close estimate how much it'll cost up front, whereas with a cab you have little idea, especially if the cabbie drives you in circles or some circuitous route to get a higher fare. In short, Uber's singlehandedly fixed everything wrong with the cab industry.
Right, and that's a problem why?
Having a pre-set price is *better*.
Yes. Are you just being argumentative or something?
Well, a couple of points here:
1) Slashdot does not represent software engineers as a whole in the US. Many SW engineers I've met don't seem to be Slashdot users or care about it.
2) Slashdot seems to have an older crowd, since it started back in the 90s. A lot of SW engineers these days are younger, in the Millenial generation. They're not on Slashdot, they're on Reddit or something else I don't know about.
3) Even on Slashdot, there's a bunch of liberals. Remember the Brendan Eich incident? There were people on both sides of that one here. I do think the extreme right + libertarians outnumber them though.
4) Slashdot is not confined to SW engineers; there's a lot of other engineers here too, and in my experience they're frequently even worse than SW engineers.
I do think you're onto something with the libertarian angle; from what I can tell, it seems that the SW engineers tend to be more libertarian and not as religious, whereas the other engineers tend to be more old-school and religious conservative. However even the religious conservatives these days are worshiping the "free market"; the churches here have all bought into that stuff plus Prosperity Doctrine ("God loves rich people more than poor people, and if you're rich, it's because God has blessed you.").
Fine, you go ahead and elect strongly anti-gun politicians, and then when Republicans win all the races you can congratulate yourself.
WTF? If you think Cox is worse than Comcast, you're a fucking moron. And if you think that bitching and complaining is going to improve the state of ISPs in this country, you're also a fucking moron. You sound like a naive idealist who complains if everything isn't up to some lofty, unrealistic standard. Maybe after you get past the age of 18 you'll see the real world isn't like that.
The thing is, you're not going to mine 500 lbs of platinum, it's quite possible you're going to mine millions of pounds of it, along with other valuable metals. Yes, you wouldn't be able to dump that on the market too fast, but you would put all the existing platinum mines out of business quickly. And with lower prices for platinum, more uses would be found for it, increasing the demand. More people would want it for jewelry and aesthetics probably, but also it's quite likely new industrial uses would be found for it which were previously unexplored due to its extremely high cost. You have to think more long-term about these things, which it doesn't look like you're doing with your analysis. An endeavor like this isn't going to be something small, it's going to be absolutely huge, and mining a single asteroid will span for decades most likely.
Finally, look at the environmental aspect: mining is terrible ecologically. Wouldn't it be better to do as much mining in space as we can, so we aren't digging giant holes in the ground, polluting groundwater and rivers, shearing the tops off mountains, etc.? We just had a bad incident with river pollution in one of the western states (CO I think), and mining always has problems with environmental opposition in advanced nations (and in backwards nations causes all kinds of problems, like fueling conflicts as with coltan). Environmentalists won't care if you break up asteroids for mineral resources.
Last I heard, they found a lot of water at one of the poles.
And all those other things, while not extremely rare here, are still valuable for building stuff on the Moon. Iron, aluminum, and titanium are very useful for making things. Plus there's tons of sunlight there to provide solar power, without any clouds or atmosphere in the way.
So with all this, you should be able to build a Moon base which you can use for refining captured asteroids (which have far more valuable ores) and doing low-g manufacturing.
As for the gravity well, it's half the gravity of Mars, and it's very close to Earth. These sound like big pluses to me. I guess if you really need extremely low gravity or zero gravity, you could just build a big space station at the L1 Lagrangian point. And again, all that material on the Moon you think is "boring" would come in handy there, because it'd be far cheaper to lift all that mass from the 1/6g Moon than from the 1g Earth.