That doesn't answer why on earth anyone would want to live there. You might as well build a generation ship and travel to Alpha Centauri if you're going to rely on an entirely artificial habitat with its own energy source. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of natural resources in the Oort Cloud anyway (and what there is is so widely dispersed it wouldn't exactly be easy to fly around and capture it).
Considering that we have almost no idea if a deflector type device is even possible for this application, I decided to leave the science fiction out of the equation.
Well Arthur C. Clarke wrote a sci-fi book about a ship using a shield for this problem; I think the book was "Songs of Distant Earth". The shield was just a giant block of ice. Do you think that's beyond our technology? The ice tray in my freezer says no.
Unfortunately the presumption that it is incorrect in the sort of good way that you seem to be hoping is even more laughable. Physics rarely works to make things easier for us Just the opposite. It almost seems to have a grudge against whatever it is we want to do. If our theories prove to be wrong it is more plausible imo that it will make things more difficult for us to do cool stuff. Not less.
Huh? We're constantly discovering weird and potentially useful new properties of materials when we do things at an atomic scale; they're called "metamaterials". There's lots of weird quantum effects we're only now discovering. A good amount of our present technology absolutely relies on quantum physics now. The LED is a really good example of that, as is the laser.
Due to relativistic effects, our ability to accelerate to and then to maintain safe flight (such as your ship not being annihilated by hitting small particles of matter) at the higher velocities is very challenging,
That's why you have to put a deflector array on the front of your ship.
Or, you could make a big ablative shield out of ice.
Doubtful. English has barely changed at all in the last 100 years, even though the world has changed immensely since WWI. Any literate English speaker can pick up an English-language book from the early 1900s and read it with very little difficulty. In that time, we've gone from the British Empire never having the sun set on it, to going through two world wars, a cold war, the British Empire completely falling apart, the USA turning from a mostly agrarian nation into the world's largest superpower and a huge industrial and technological economy. Despite all that change in the two major English-speaking nations, the language hasn't changed much at all.
Remember, we're talking about what languages we'll speak in 100 years, not 500 or 1000.
Exactly. And it's not just programmers, it's other laborers too. I have a small business and I really need to hire some competent employees. I'm willing to pay them $0.50 per hour. Why can't I find anyone willing to work for that???? We need to eliminate these minimum-wage laws and let me import workers willing to work for that!
Why would anyone marry a poor man when a wealthy one is worth more money?
Women marry poor men because they can't snag a rich one if they don't have enough to offer: not pretty enough, not smart enough, too crazy, etc. If a woman has a lot to offer, she doesn't marry a poor man. So poor men get whatever's left over: women with no education, women missing teeth, women with 5 kids by 5 different fathers who are 29 years old and look like they're 49, etc. If you see a poor man with a gorgeous woman, unless there's some other factors at play, most likely what happened is that she's such a psycho nutcase that other men wouldn't have anything to do with her so she got desperate and had to marry whoever she could get.
The problem with STEM vs. MBA is that dumb people can't get STEM degrees (from any decent institution at least), and can't perform in a serious STEM job. It's not like the smartest people can go get MBAs and the dumb people can go into STEM and work for them; such companies won't survive. You can't just go get a bunch of average people and get any kind of quality STEM work out of them.
Also in practice, the less-than-1% of the US in Alaska/HI can be ignored, leaving us with 4 time zones with more than 99% of the population.
You're correct, but only for a while. The people of Massachusetts are thinking of switching to the Atlantic time zone, so the US might span 5 time zones pretty soon.
Someone else defined then pretty well earlier in this conversation: left-wing is for the people, right-wing is for the aristocracy (which this days means the corporations and other rich people).
Just calling them "democrats" doesn't say anything about who they want to help, and there's a common misperception that they're left-wing (and in favor of helping common people), which simply isn't true at all.
However, it really sounds like this whole thing is a recipe for a big headache, unless you're able to train your brain to accept visual input in this new way (and to use your eye and neck muscles accordingly). At least with reading glasses, it's simple: if I'm looking at something far away, I just take them off. Having different focus zones for different eyes sounds like hell (the one where you're putting distance-center in one eye and near-center in the other).
I had a ton of trouble sticking my finger in my as well -- so I quit after two months.
I used to wear contacts more frequently, back in college (I needed them to read the blackboard). I only started in college too, and it took a little while to get used to them. It does not come naturally. It was an extremely uncomfortable and unnatural feeling putting my finger in my eye and not reflexively closing it. I think it took me an hour to put it in (I only use one contact lens, in the right eye) the first time I did it.
Now, 20 years later, even though I rarely wear it, when I do, sticking my finger in my eye comes naturally, just like riding a bike. I can put in my lens in seconds now even if I haven't worn it in a month.
I completely disagree. We need to retain the terms, but we need to use them correctly, which means we need to call both the Democrats and the Republicans "right wing". Otherwise, we're going to continue to falsely believe that somehow they're different, rather than the truth which is (as you say) they both have fascist tendencies and favor elitist and corporatist interests over citizens' individual rights.
If we start calling the Democrats "left wing", then we'll just continue to be fooled, and we'll never get to a state where the well-being of the People is given any weight in politics.
The Democrat party isn't left-wing, it's right-wing. It's just a different flavor of right-wing than the Republican party. The Republicans' good buddies are the oil and gas industries, the military contracting industries, and the gun industry. The Democrats' good buddies are the media companies/copyright industry and the big banks.
I'm largely the same: I'm a bit near-sighted, but more so in one eye than the other (annoyingly, it's the dominant eye that's more near-sighted). I just don't bother with my contacts most of the time, unless I'm on a road trip or something where I really want the extra acuity. For computers, I have no problems at all uncorrected. However, I also do a lot of close-up work, and I've passed 40, so I'm starting to have some problems there where if I don't use reading glasses and do close-up work for too long, my eyes will get "stuck" and it'll take a while to be able to see distant things properly. So I keep a set of $1 reading glasses handy and use those, which seems to work OK. I am worried about how much worse this will get though.
Yeah, but contact lenses won't work for close-up stuff. Contacts are for when your eyes are the wrong shape; the reason older people can't read well is because their intraocular lenses are no longer flexible and they can't focus on close-up things. Contacts won't help with that; if you put contacts in to correct that, you won't be able to see anything farther than arms' reach. And unlike bifocals/progressive-lens glasses, you can't really orient contacts so that a region with different correction is at the bottom.
Headphones don't do anything to stop visual distractions. I can't concentrate when I have people walking right by my low-walled "cubicle" (if you can even call it that) in a constant stream. And I've never been in an open-plan (or low-walled or anything resembling that) office where they actually seated me next to people I needed to ever talk to. Instead, they just randomly throw people in there into whatever position is conveniently open, so I have to listen to conversations about all kinds of things that have nothing to do with me, and when I do need to talk to someone, I need to get up and go to a different aisle.
The one time I was actually seated next to someone I had to talk to a lot (which happened somewhat by accident, but they did keep that larger workgroup together), I had a full-height, full-size, 9x9 cubicle. It was wonderful. I even had a sign (provided by the company) that said "do not disturb" which I could hang across the entrance to keep people out. And if I needed to talk to my neighbor on our 2-person project, I just stood up and poked my head over the wall (it helps being tall).
I never said it was a good idea. I don't think it would actually work. The NK government isn't the brightest bunch of people around, but I don't think they're quite that stupid for this to work out.
Perhaps that's the answer to the North Korea problem, grizzly as it may be: get as many civilians there killed as possible (by their own government), for petty things. Eventually, they won't be able to sustain their economy and government as there won't be enough people left to actually do any real work. After that collapses, everyone will starve; give it ten years or so, and there won't be any population left except a few feral people. Then the DMZ can be taken down and the land repopulated by others.
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't answer why on earth anyone would want to live there. You might as well build a generation ship and travel to Alpha Centauri if you're going to rely on an entirely artificial habitat with its own energy source. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of natural resources in the Oort Cloud anyway (and what there is is so widely dispersed it wouldn't exactly be easy to fly around and capture it).
Even just to match Voyager unassisted we need an entirely different kind of unproven technology like fission,
So we'll just need to invent nuclear fission then. Oh wait, we've been doing that for 75 years now....
Considering that we have almost no idea if a deflector type device is even possible for this application, I decided to leave the science fiction out of the equation.
Well Arthur C. Clarke wrote a sci-fi book about a ship using a shield for this problem; I think the book was "Songs of Distant Earth". The shield was just a giant block of ice. Do you think that's beyond our technology? The ice tray in my freezer says no.
Unfortunately the presumption that it is incorrect in the sort of good way that you seem to be hoping is even more laughable. Physics rarely works to make things easier for us Just the opposite. It almost seems to have a grudge against whatever it is we want to do. If our theories prove to be wrong it is more plausible imo that it will make things more difficult for us to do cool stuff. Not less.
Huh? We're constantly discovering weird and potentially useful new properties of materials when we do things at an atomic scale; they're called "metamaterials". There's lots of weird quantum effects we're only now discovering. A good amount of our present technology absolutely relies on quantum physics now. The LED is a really good example of that, as is the laser.
You can also use cryonic means to extend the crews' lifespans.
Due to relativistic effects, our ability to accelerate to and then to maintain safe flight (such as your ship not being annihilated by hitting small particles of matter) at the higher velocities is very challenging,
That's why you have to put a deflector array on the front of your ship.
Or, you could make a big ablative shield out of ice.
Yep, English is the Borg of languages. You will be assimilated. It actually works quite effectively.
Doubtful. English has barely changed at all in the last 100 years, even though the world has changed immensely since WWI. Any literate English speaker can pick up an English-language book from the early 1900s and read it with very little difficulty. In that time, we've gone from the British Empire never having the sun set on it, to going through two world wars, a cold war, the British Empire completely falling apart, the USA turning from a mostly agrarian nation into the world's largest superpower and a huge industrial and technological economy. Despite all that change in the two major English-speaking nations, the language hasn't changed much at all.
Remember, we're talking about what languages we'll speak in 100 years, not 500 or 1000.
Exactly. And it's not just programmers, it's other laborers too. I have a small business and I really need to hire some competent employees. I'm willing to pay them $0.50 per hour. Why can't I find anyone willing to work for that???? We need to eliminate these minimum-wage laws and let me import workers willing to work for that!
Why would anyone marry a poor man when a wealthy one is worth more money?
Women marry poor men because they can't snag a rich one if they don't have enough to offer: not pretty enough, not smart enough, too crazy, etc. If a woman has a lot to offer, she doesn't marry a poor man. So poor men get whatever's left over: women with no education, women missing teeth, women with 5 kids by 5 different fathers who are 29 years old and look like they're 49, etc. If you see a poor man with a gorgeous woman, unless there's some other factors at play, most likely what happened is that she's such a psycho nutcase that other men wouldn't have anything to do with her so she got desperate and had to marry whoever she could get.
The problem with STEM vs. MBA is that dumb people can't get STEM degrees (from any decent institution at least), and can't perform in a serious STEM job. It's not like the smartest people can go get MBAs and the dumb people can go into STEM and work for them; such companies won't survive. You can't just go get a bunch of average people and get any kind of quality STEM work out of them.
Also in practice, the less-than-1% of the US in Alaska/HI can be ignored, leaving us with 4 time zones with more than 99% of the population.
You're correct, but only for a while. The people of Massachusetts are thinking of switching to the Atlantic time zone, so the US might span 5 time zones pretty soon.
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/...
http://www.bostonglobe.com/ide...
Someone else defined then pretty well earlier in this conversation: left-wing is for the people, right-wing is for the aristocracy (which this days means the corporations and other rich people).
Just calling them "democrats" doesn't say anything about who they want to help, and there's a common misperception that they're left-wing (and in favor of helping common people), which simply isn't true at all.
Wow, thanks for the info.
However, it really sounds like this whole thing is a recipe for a big headache, unless you're able to train your brain to accept visual input in this new way (and to use your eye and neck muscles accordingly). At least with reading glasses, it's simple: if I'm looking at something far away, I just take them off. Having different focus zones for different eyes sounds like hell (the one where you're putting distance-center in one eye and near-center in the other).
I had a ton of trouble sticking my finger in my as well -- so I quit after two months.
I used to wear contacts more frequently, back in college (I needed them to read the blackboard). I only started in college too, and it took a little while to get used to them. It does not come naturally. It was an extremely uncomfortable and unnatural feeling putting my finger in my eye and not reflexively closing it. I think it took me an hour to put it in (I only use one contact lens, in the right eye) the first time I did it.
Now, 20 years later, even though I rarely wear it, when I do, sticking my finger in my eye comes naturally, just like riding a bike. I can put in my lens in seconds now even if I haven't worn it in a month.
I completely disagree. We need to retain the terms, but we need to use them correctly, which means we need to call both the Democrats and the Republicans "right wing". Otherwise, we're going to continue to falsely believe that somehow they're different, rather than the truth which is (as you say) they both have fascist tendencies and favor elitist and corporatist interests over citizens' individual rights.
If we start calling the Democrats "left wing", then we'll just continue to be fooled, and we'll never get to a state where the well-being of the People is given any weight in politics.
The Democrat party isn't left-wing, it's right-wing. It's just a different flavor of right-wing than the Republican party. The Republicans' good buddies are the oil and gas industries, the military contracting industries, and the gun industry. The Democrats' good buddies are the media companies/copyright industry and the big banks.
I'm largely the same: I'm a bit near-sighted, but more so in one eye than the other (annoyingly, it's the dominant eye that's more near-sighted). I just don't bother with my contacts most of the time, unless I'm on a road trip or something where I really want the extra acuity. For computers, I have no problems at all uncorrected. However, I also do a lot of close-up work, and I've passed 40, so I'm starting to have some problems there where if I don't use reading glasses and do close-up work for too long, my eyes will get "stuck" and it'll take a while to be able to see distant things properly. So I keep a set of $1 reading glasses handy and use those, which seems to work OK. I am worried about how much worse this will get though.
So you have to manually orient them, and hope they stay that way throughout the day? That sounds like a PITA.
Wow, weird. I would have thought, being circular, that contacts couldn't have an orientation.
do you have any idea how arrogant it is for you to tell other people how they should live their lives ?
This is Slashdot, and that mentality is common here. It shouldn't surprise you.
Yeah, but contact lenses won't work for close-up stuff. Contacts are for when your eyes are the wrong shape; the reason older people can't read well is because their intraocular lenses are no longer flexible and they can't focus on close-up things. Contacts won't help with that; if you put contacts in to correct that, you won't be able to see anything farther than arms' reach. And unlike bifocals/progressive-lens glasses, you can't really orient contacts so that a region with different correction is at the bottom.
Headphones don't do anything to stop visual distractions. I can't concentrate when I have people walking right by my low-walled "cubicle" (if you can even call it that) in a constant stream. And I've never been in an open-plan (or low-walled or anything resembling that) office where they actually seated me next to people I needed to ever talk to. Instead, they just randomly throw people in there into whatever position is conveniently open, so I have to listen to conversations about all kinds of things that have nothing to do with me, and when I do need to talk to someone, I need to get up and go to a different aisle.
The one time I was actually seated next to someone I had to talk to a lot (which happened somewhat by accident, but they did keep that larger workgroup together), I had a full-height, full-size, 9x9 cubicle. It was wonderful. I even had a sign (provided by the company) that said "do not disturb" which I could hang across the entrance to keep people out. And if I needed to talk to my neighbor on our 2-person project, I just stood up and poked my head over the wall (it helps being tall).
I never said it was a good idea. I don't think it would actually work. The NK government isn't the brightest bunch of people around, but I don't think they're quite that stupid for this to work out.
Perhaps that's the answer to the North Korea problem, grizzly as it may be: get as many civilians there killed as possible (by their own government), for petty things. Eventually, they won't be able to sustain their economy and government as there won't be enough people left to actually do any real work. After that collapses, everyone will starve; give it ten years or so, and there won't be any population left except a few feral people. Then the DMZ can be taken down and the land repopulated by others.
Now they just need to cut off access to websites where people ask coding questions, like StackOverflow.