I'm not sure what you're getting at here, but I think it's definitely justifiable to stop a greater crime. If you had a gun in hand and were near the door when the Colorado movie shooter busted in and was about to start shooting people, would you seriously have not shot him to prevent a dozen dead and scores injured? How can that action not be OK?
However, what we saw in "Collateral Murder" was NOT self-defense in any way, and was even less so when they opened fire on people trying to rescue the injured.
Actually, I guess I should have articulated it better rather than write that out so hastily: Americans today make the German citizens living under the Nazis (and supporting their regime verbally) look not-so-bad. Now obviously, not all Americans are like this, there's still a small contingent that believes in things like gay rights, not engaging in useless wars, etc., but there's no shortage of American citizens who would be happy to round up all homosexuals and gas them. We've even had politicians say things to this effect. Or to invade Iran; lots of Americans are chomping at the bit to start yet another war. We're just lucky that our regime hasn't started taking these actions, yet (I fully expect to see an invasion of Iran within 2 years). Some of them they're prevented from doing so because of politics (the other "side" takes the other position to get votes from the more-moderate Americans who aren't quite as far-right-wing as the ones who want to murder gays, so it stalls this action, and there's significant parts of the country where people are more-moderate like this; if the people in the "heartland" states for instance had all the power, we'd already have concentration camps).
A circular phone would be infringing. After all, if you round the corners on a circle enough, it'll turn into a circle (i.e., a circle is a square with round corners). And a square is just a rectangle with equal-length sides. I think a trapezoid or rhomboid is out too; these are just rectangles with two sides angled.
I've never heard of it being OK to shoot wounded soldiers or people who are trying to take them away to get medical attention, and certainly not when there's children in their car (since they don't have the resources for proper ambulances and such).
It's really pretty sick just how evil Americans are now, and what kinds of crimes they will defend. Americans make Nazis look not-so-bad.
You sign away your rights and freedoms when you join the military. You, as a grunt, such as Manning, have signed their lives away willingly to do what the Army asks them to do. And to follow orders.
Exactly. And if the Army orders you to throw people into gas chambers, that's what you need to do. Great to see that everyday Americans are no different than the Nazis.
Getting out and voting doesn't make a difference here. In case you haven't been following things, the elections are highly controlled so that you end up with two really shitty choices for President (and the other elections aren't any better), thanks to our first-past-the-post voting system that hasn't changed since the 1700s, rather than the proportional election systems you Europeans use. There are some exceptions at the local level, where there's proportional systems, runoff systems, etc. used, and those are indeed better, but the chances of any of those ever being used in national elections is nil.
What's really sad is that this isn't some random general-population site on the internet, this is supposed to be the home of geeks and nerds, people who are supposedly smarter than the average. Even so, your words are true; this level of stupidity is normal here in 2012. The intelligence level here on Slashdot, like everywhere else in American society, has fallen greatly in the last 10 years or so.
Maybe that works for you. For someone who's poor, they don't have extra money for vaccinations for their kids. So, they're going to just skip them altogether if they're not free. So without making them free, you have no herd immunity, because tons of poor people (and people who simply didn't feel like spending the money) won't be vaccinated at all. You can't force people to spend money on vaccinations, especially if they don't have it.
Good point, I didn't think about that. I'm not sure what the solution for that would be. How about the poles (of Venus)? Maybe those would be good spots to build habitats?
Sounds like a lot more trouble than it's worth. We already know how to grow food with artificial lights, so it's not like we really need an earth-normal rotation for agriculture. Humans can live just fine in such conditions, as they already do in many northern areas like Alaska where it's daytime for 6 months and nighttime for the other 6 months. It's not ideal and will prevent Venus from being a human paradise world, but it's better than trying to redirect large asteroids for an impact and then waiting hundreds of millenia for the dust to settle.
What's the problem with a 240-earth day day on Venus? Yeah, it's not great, but it's basically what the people in the more northern parts of Alaska, and other far-north places (like northern Norway and Svalbard) have to live with: 6 months of daylight and 6 months of nighttime. I guess we won't be doing a whole lot of farming there, until we can figure out how to get around it (or just grow crops for half the year only in any one place).
Why on earth would you put your computer in your checked luggage to get thrown around by the luggage handlers? There's no weight limit for carry-on luggage. Doesn't everyone keep their computer in their carry-on luggage?
PS: I've never had trouble with the security at the court houses here in both Chandler & Mesa, Arizona, they were always professional and courteous, much more so than the TSA people at the airport here. Rather odd too, because this metro area is absolutely full of rude and incompetent assholes working in customer service jobs, compared to other places I've lived. What city do you live in where they apparently have some asshole doing the hiring at the court house?
Surely someone could come up with a new process that doesn't require much gravity; they just haven't done so because no one's needed to. Also, if we're mining it on the moon, maybe we'd just build the steel forges on the moon too; the moon has gravity, albeit only 1/6g. Would that not be enough for the current process to work? How about other metals, do they have the same problem?
I think you misunderstood; I'm asking what the travel times are in Earth's reference frame, not the spacecraft's. That is, if the ship travels there, and turns around and comes back, how much time has elapsed on Earth when it arrives home?
Suppose we've invented highly effective suspended animation, so you don't age at all during the trip. So you take a trip to Alpha Centauri A (either with 1g or 12g acceleration), spend a few years puttering around there exploring whatever planets there are, and get bored and decide to come home because there's nothing there to be terraformed; when you get home, how many years will have passed on Earth?
Exactly. Other tech companies (except maybe Samsung) will still be falling all over themselves to be suppliers to Apple if they can, since their volumes are so enormous. And much of the tech community adores them, as we see constantly on Slashdot these days.
Our best hope is that some of the other tech titans who compete with them will gang up on them, instead of constantly fighting each other. I don't have too much hope of that though; these companies seem to be run by people who think like buzzards.
Living on mars is crazy, try living in Antarctica and multiply that by 1000.
It's utterly shocking how ignorant of basic scientific principles Slashdotters are. Did you forget that Mars has almost no atmosphere? It's nothing like Antarctica. I guess you're going to try to tell me now that the high-speed "winds" on Mars are a serious problem too.
silly. even the very most hospitable regions of mars are like freezing airless hells compared to the most inhospitable regions of earth.
No, actually they aren't. Mars has something like 1/100 the atmospheric density of Earth. So it doesn't really matter how cold it gets, you're not going to get very cold because there isn't much convection cooling taking place. They also have 200+mph winds there, and the effect is minimal on humans or equipment, since 1/100atm of pressure just isn't very much.
Your statement like saying the Moon is too cold to live on. It's a vacuum there, so it doesn't matter how cold it is. Mars isn't a vacuum, but it's pretty close.
big bang for the buck science with unmanned probes.
You don't get much "back for the buck" when you send a rover every 10 years and have an 8kb/sec data stream to communicate with it. A human geologist with a shovel will get you more science in an hour than that probe will in a year.
It's very doable in a technological sense, but I do have a big reservation about the "heavily vetted software"; we haven't shown a lot of engineering discipline with our software development yet.
A physicist named Miguel Alcubierre disagrees with you. Are you a physicist? I think I'll trust the word of a real physicist over some random person on the internet with a fetish for anuses.
Yes, these sound like the numbers I had read somewhere before for such a hypothetical trip with a drive system that could provide that sort of acceleration (1g). What would be the travel times (in Earth's reference frame) of both the 1g human trip and the 12g robotic trip?
Assuming you could somehow build an engine to provide 12g acceleration for that long, I wonder if it'd be possible to send humans there at that speed, but using cryonics/suspended animation?
It also depends on what you want to do with it, and how much you need. There isn't actually that much iron on Earth. There's ridiculous amounts of iron in the Earth, but not on it, as geological processes over billions of years have forced most it it into the mantle and core; I believe most of the iron ore we use now is actually meteoric in origin.
Also, iron is heavy stuff, so if you want to use the iron for, say, building space stations or space craft or moon habitats or whatever, it's a lot less energy-intensive to just get the iron from an asteroid or on the Moon, rather than mining it here on the Earth and then lifting it out of our gravity well.
I have no idea what's abundant on Mars, however, and I'm curious about that as well. This might not even be well known yet.
Slashdot Mirror
So because some people shoot at red crosses, the US thinks it's OK to shoot at anyone trying to help injured people?
And no one in that video was acting like a combatant. Camera lenses are not guns, and don't even look like them.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here, but I think it's definitely justifiable to stop a greater crime. If you had a gun in hand and were near the door when the Colorado movie shooter busted in and was about to start shooting people, would you seriously have not shot him to prevent a dozen dead and scores injured? How can that action not be OK?
However, what we saw in "Collateral Murder" was NOT self-defense in any way, and was even less so when they opened fire on people trying to rescue the injured.
Actually, I guess I should have articulated it better rather than write that out so hastily: Americans today make the German citizens living under the Nazis (and supporting their regime verbally) look not-so-bad. Now obviously, not all Americans are like this, there's still a small contingent that believes in things like gay rights, not engaging in useless wars, etc., but there's no shortage of American citizens who would be happy to round up all homosexuals and gas them. We've even had politicians say things to this effect. Or to invade Iran; lots of Americans are chomping at the bit to start yet another war. We're just lucky that our regime hasn't started taking these actions, yet (I fully expect to see an invasion of Iran within 2 years). Some of them they're prevented from doing so because of politics (the other "side" takes the other position to get votes from the more-moderate Americans who aren't quite as far-right-wing as the ones who want to murder gays, so it stalls this action, and there's significant parts of the country where people are more-moderate like this; if the people in the "heartland" states for instance had all the power, we'd already have concentration camps).
A circular phone would be infringing. After all, if you round the corners on a circle enough, it'll turn into a circle (i.e., a circle is a square with round corners). And a square is just a rectangle with equal-length sides. I think a trapezoid or rhomboid is out too; these are just rectangles with two sides angled.
I've never heard of it being OK to shoot wounded soldiers or people who are trying to take them away to get medical attention, and certainly not when there's children in their car (since they don't have the resources for proper ambulances and such).
It's really pretty sick just how evil Americans are now, and what kinds of crimes they will defend. Americans make Nazis look not-so-bad.
You sign away your rights and freedoms when you join the military. You, as a grunt, such as Manning, have signed their lives away willingly to do what the Army asks them to do. And to follow orders.
Exactly. And if the Army orders you to throw people into gas chambers, that's what you need to do. Great to see that everyday Americans are no different than the Nazis.
Thank you, that needed to be pointed out. Remember, who's been President during this whole Wikileaks saga? A democrat.
Getting out and voting doesn't make a difference here. In case you haven't been following things, the elections are highly controlled so that you end up with two really shitty choices for President (and the other elections aren't any better), thanks to our first-past-the-post voting system that hasn't changed since the 1700s, rather than the proportional election systems you Europeans use. There are some exceptions at the local level, where there's proportional systems, runoff systems, etc. used, and those are indeed better, but the chances of any of those ever being used in national elections is nil.
What's really sad is that this isn't some random general-population site on the internet, this is supposed to be the home of geeks and nerds, people who are supposedly smarter than the average. Even so, your words are true; this level of stupidity is normal here in 2012. The intelligence level here on Slashdot, like everywhere else in American society, has fallen greatly in the last 10 years or so.
Maybe that works for you. For someone who's poor, they don't have extra money for vaccinations for their kids. So, they're going to just skip them altogether if they're not free. So without making them free, you have no herd immunity, because tons of poor people (and people who simply didn't feel like spending the money) won't be vaccinated at all. You can't force people to spend money on vaccinations, especially if they don't have it.
Good point, I didn't think about that. I'm not sure what the solution for that would be. How about the poles (of Venus)? Maybe those would be good spots to build habitats?
Sounds like a lot more trouble than it's worth. We already know how to grow food with artificial lights, so it's not like we really need an earth-normal rotation for agriculture. Humans can live just fine in such conditions, as they already do in many northern areas like Alaska where it's daytime for 6 months and nighttime for the other 6 months. It's not ideal and will prevent Venus from being a human paradise world, but it's better than trying to redirect large asteroids for an impact and then waiting hundreds of millenia for the dust to settle.
What's the problem with a 240-earth day day on Venus? Yeah, it's not great, but it's basically what the people in the more northern parts of Alaska, and other far-north places (like northern Norway and Svalbard) have to live with: 6 months of daylight and 6 months of nighttime. I guess we won't be doing a whole lot of farming there, until we can figure out how to get around it (or just grow crops for half the year only in any one place).
Why on earth would you put your computer in your checked luggage to get thrown around by the luggage handlers? There's no weight limit for carry-on luggage. Doesn't everyone keep their computer in their carry-on luggage?
PS: I've never had trouble with the security at the court houses here in both Chandler & Mesa, Arizona, they were always professional and courteous, much more so than the TSA people at the airport here. Rather odd too, because this metro area is absolutely full of rude and incompetent assholes working in customer service jobs, compared to other places I've lived. What city do you live in where they apparently have some asshole doing the hiring at the court house?
Surely someone could come up with a new process that doesn't require much gravity; they just haven't done so because no one's needed to. Also, if we're mining it on the moon, maybe we'd just build the steel forges on the moon too; the moon has gravity, albeit only 1/6g. Would that not be enough for the current process to work? How about other metals, do they have the same problem?
I think you misunderstood; I'm asking what the travel times are in Earth's reference frame, not the spacecraft's. That is, if the ship travels there, and turns around and comes back, how much time has elapsed on Earth when it arrives home?
Suppose we've invented highly effective suspended animation, so you don't age at all during the trip. So you take a trip to Alpha Centauri A (either with 1g or 12g acceleration), spend a few years puttering around there exploring whatever planets there are, and get bored and decide to come home because there's nothing there to be terraformed; when you get home, how many years will have passed on Earth?
Exactly. Other tech companies (except maybe Samsung) will still be falling all over themselves to be suppliers to Apple if they can, since their volumes are so enormous. And much of the tech community adores them, as we see constantly on Slashdot these days.
Our best hope is that some of the other tech titans who compete with them will gang up on them, instead of constantly fighting each other. I don't have too much hope of that though; these companies seem to be run by people who think like buzzards.
In my lifetime, however, I've seen advances in computing and robotics technology that are staggering.
Those computing advances largely were a result of the Apollo manned space program.
What would a human do on mars that the new car-sized rover cannot? What would be the point of sending a human be?
A human geologist on Mars with a shovel can do more science in an hour than a rover can in a year.
Living on mars is crazy, try living in Antarctica and multiply that by 1000.
It's utterly shocking how ignorant of basic scientific principles Slashdotters are. Did you forget that Mars has almost no atmosphere? It's nothing like Antarctica. I guess you're going to try to tell me now that the high-speed "winds" on Mars are a serious problem too.
silly. even the very most hospitable regions of mars are like freezing airless hells compared to the most inhospitable regions of earth.
No, actually they aren't. Mars has something like 1/100 the atmospheric density of Earth. So it doesn't really matter how cold it gets, you're not going to get very cold because there isn't much convection cooling taking place. They also have 200+mph winds there, and the effect is minimal on humans or equipment, since 1/100atm of pressure just isn't very much.
Your statement like saying the Moon is too cold to live on. It's a vacuum there, so it doesn't matter how cold it is. Mars isn't a vacuum, but it's pretty close.
big bang for the buck science with unmanned probes.
You don't get much "back for the buck" when you send a rover every 10 years and have an 8kb/sec data stream to communicate with it. A human geologist with a shovel will get you more science in an hour than that probe will in a year.
It's very doable in a technological sense, but I do have a big reservation about the "heavily vetted software"; we haven't shown a lot of engineering discipline with our software development yet.
A physicist named Miguel Alcubierre disagrees with you. Are you a physicist? I think I'll trust the word of a real physicist over some random person on the internet with a fetish for anuses.
Yes, these sound like the numbers I had read somewhere before for such a hypothetical trip with a drive system that could provide that sort of acceleration (1g). What would be the travel times (in Earth's reference frame) of both the 1g human trip and the 12g robotic trip?
Assuming you could somehow build an engine to provide 12g acceleration for that long, I wonder if it'd be possible to send humans there at that speed, but using cryonics/suspended animation?
Doesn't that depend on how fast your acceleration is?
It also depends on what you want to do with it, and how much you need. There isn't actually that much iron on Earth. There's ridiculous amounts of iron in the Earth, but not on it, as geological processes over billions of years have forced most it it into the mantle and core; I believe most of the iron ore we use now is actually meteoric in origin.
Also, iron is heavy stuff, so if you want to use the iron for, say, building space stations or space craft or moon habitats or whatever, it's a lot less energy-intensive to just get the iron from an asteroid or on the Moon, rather than mining it here on the Earth and then lifting it out of our gravity well.
I have no idea what's abundant on Mars, however, and I'm curious about that as well. This might not even be well known yet.