... damn, you should have gone to the symposium. These people were not nuts - they were capable engineers and sociologists and educators and authors and astronauts, who well understood the enormity of the challenge (which does in fact edge into astronomic scale).
There were reviews of existing technologies, reports on current research, proposals ranging from modest to blue-sky, discussion about the science that would have to be done. Social engineering was also prominent - any future colony would be a microcosm of human society after all.
Without the Dreamers, you wouldn't have the Planners. It was awe-inspiring to be among the Dreamers for a couple of days, and I begrudge not one dime of the money DARPA spent on it.
You're one of only a few people who have written positively about Gnome 3 (in the places I hang out, anyway). Would you add some detail about your experience?
It was 600 smart people all in one place: engineers, technical managers, educators, academics, NASA representatives from Ames and Glenn and MSFC, and everyman types like me, all of whom understood the magnitude of the challenge.
It was a gathering where you could dare to use the word "starship" in a sentence and nobody would crack a smile.
There were tracks on propulsion (light sails, nuclear thermal and hybrid nuclear technologies), habitat creation (bioengineering, microgravity challenges, plasma shields), education (there were lots of educators in the audience), organization, ethics. One university type - I forget his name - boldly asserted that there would be useful violations of the second law of thermodynamics in a couple of years. (I didn't quite believe that, so I did a little reading when I returned; it seems that the second "law" is more like a statistical assertion, so maybe he's got something. IANAPhysicist.)
There was a track on fringe technologies too, those FTL and warp drives you laugh about. I didn't attend that one; at the conference wrap-up the track moderator only said politely that there "was no concensus".
A double handful of SF authors were there and a couple of Hollywood types too, all conducting their own research.
Nobody came here expecting to be beamed up. Nobody was thinking Flash Gordon or Jean Luc Picard. Everyone fully appreciated the immensity of the project, the audacity of such a thing, the difficulty of the undertaking. It was inspiring to be in the company of people who had thought seriously about some of the issues, and who dared to dream big. All brainstorming is like this.
An underlying theme, mentioned several times during the conference, is that Earth "is a single point of failure".
Per the organizers: "The Journal of the British Interplanetary Society will be publishing a select number of papers in a special issue. Date of the special issue has not yet been announced."
If you gave me a pill that placed my life expectancy at 150, then the golden handcuffs are OFF.
Here I am today, a few years from retirement, madly saving acorns for my approaching decrepitude. Making good money in my established career... but it's boring as hell. I learned all the interesting stuff in my business years ago.
I follow the kids over at HN doing their entrepreneurial thing, some of them failing, some of them succeeding, most of them subsisting on ramen and hackerspace futons, and I think: how grand it must be to have that kind of flexibility to just chuck it all for the dream.
Well give me another 75 years and the whole picture changes. I could go do something else, something completely different. My kids are old enough to take care of themselves, so I could go join that latter-day-hippie commune. Or move to Novosibirsk and learn the language. Or learn a new trade. Write that novel. Develop some of those ideas I've gotten in the shower.
There are a million things I dare not do at this stage of my life. But give me my life back and there's nothing I can't try.
IBM? I sincerely doubt it. They would have never believed in personal computing, or that there could even be personal computing. Computers would still be AS400 mainframes to this day most likely.
You are unaware, then, of the IBM 5100 - introduced in 1975.
IBM was coming around to desktop computing, but was hampered by a strong corporate culture of eating their own dogfood - they rolled their own processors and circuit packages. That little 5100 was a sweet machine for its time, but terribly pricy.
Don Estridge convinced IBM to use off-the-shelf components in the mad drive to get the 5150 (IBM PC) out the door in Boca Raton, which made them competitive.
"the choice that seals Nokia's doom isn't the tie-up with Microsoft [...] It's the way Elop has failed to resolve Nokia's drift and lack of a strategic focus. Instead of addressing this problem, Elop plans to institutionalize it by splitting the company into two business units that will pursue different - and, in fact, mutually opposing - strategies."
Perhaps they feel, as I do, that the punishment is out of proportion with the crime.
Remember the "Disproportionate Response" episode of The West Wing?
Bartlet: But they know we are going to do that, they know we are going to do that. Those areas have been abandoned for days. We know that from the satellites. We have the intelligence. They did that, so we do this. It's the cost of doing business, it's been factored in, right? Am I right or am I missing something here?
Fitzwallace: No sir, you're right sir.
Bartlet: Then I ask again, what is the virtue of a proportional response?
Fitzwallace: It isn't virtuous Mr. President, it's all there is sir.
Bartlet: It is not all there is.
Fitzwallace: Pardon me, Mr. President, just what else is there?
Bartlet: A disproportionate response. Let the word ring forth from this time and this place, you kill an American, any American, we don't come back with a proportional response, we come back with total disaster!
Unnamed General: Are you suggesting we carpet bomb Damascus?
Bartlet: General, I am suggesting that you and Admiral Fitzwallace and Secretary Hutchinson and the rest of the national security team take the next sixty minutes and put together a U.S. response scenario that doesn't make me think we are just docking somebody's damn allowance.
It wasn't "House Republicans have already promised to oppose any solution", it was "Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans are preparing a letter to the agency expressing disapproval". (Why so shrill?)
I do some community theater work as a hobby - amateur stuff - and wonder if something like this could be used to track multiple actors on stage? Might be better than fitting them all with transmitters and lavaliers. Targeting would become the next problem, I guess.
... to synthesize and insert an entire genome. No "transferring" of anything. So go ahead and outlaw ALL genetic manipulation Ohio, because that's what it's gonna take.
... to act as a deterrent. The Mariposa perps face a maximum of six years under Spanish law. That's small enough to shrug off as the cost of doing business.
A few years ago I experimented with the Kinesis "Advantage" keyboard, trying to alleviate some wrist discomfort I had been experiencing. I never did warm up to that keyboard, but my fingers did travel less than with a standard layout. If you're trying to eke out that extra word or two per minute then it might be worth evaluating. Kinesis keyboards are expensive, but they have a generous 60 day eval policy.
If your workaday typing includes a fair amount of code, then I'd recommend you use a really capable editor - and I'm thinking emacs here. I've yet to master the art of emacs-fu, but I have watched those who have, and it's purely astonishing how much code can appear on a screen so quickly, with so few keystrokes, and no mouse movement. Unobvious and arcane keychords are the name of the game, bolstered by your personal arsenal of editor macros. After your fingers learn the landscape they become buzzsaws.
These kinds of questions are stupid: "I need to do XYZ for a project, how do I do XYZ?"
There's a technical forum that I frequent where it is rather common for someone to ask "How do I do XYZ", and also rather common for the people who don't know how to do XYZ to demand "what are you trying to accomplish" or "why do you want to do XYZ?"
If a responder doesn't know how to answer a question, then he should just move along -- not try to change the question to something he does know the answer to.
For every honor code violation by an individual, the entire class gets to enjoy an additional 5% increase in the value of the final exam.
That's simply wrong. Do they do prof evals at Stanford, tied to salaries and tenure? I suggest that when innocent students get screwed that those evals take the injustice into account. Sauce for the goose, Mr. Saavik.
... glossy, slick, intelligent in the right places, readable from cover to cover. Orson Scott Card's A Thousand Deaths was my first introduction to him, and that story still creeps me out.
When Omni's staff inexplicably began to promote those silly UFO and parapsychology pieces, I allowed my subscription to lapse.
"... with mommy and daddy having to work thirty percent more just to provide the same standard of living and real income as a single-breadwinner family in 1962"
As Larry Summers said a few years ago, I'm going to provoke you.
Isn't it possible that two-income families weren't needed until a sizable percentage of families went to two incomes, devaluing the work pool? Sexual politics aside, might we be better off today if each household had a designated breadwinner and a designated homemaker?
Frankly, I have no plans to see this movie -- I never had even the slightest interest in it.
That's fair enough; I wasn't looking forward to being beaten by the Pocahontas bludgeon again. But I've got to say that the film is a technological wonder - lots of moving parts, fractals, motion capture, other stuff. Cameron (and ILM, WETA and other folks) set this bar pretty high.
I gather you don't have a use for it. Great, don't buy one. But I ride my Segway an average of 200 miles each month, and wouldn't be without it. I live a sane distance from work, and commute back and forth without (a) getting sweaty and (b) adding quite so much to my carbon footprint as I did when I was using the Volvo. So yeah, Segways have their place. This Yike thing probably has a niche, too.
Slashdot Mirror
... damn, you should have gone to the symposium. These people were not nuts - they were capable engineers and sociologists and educators and authors and astronauts, who well understood the enormity of the challenge (which does in fact edge into astronomic scale).
There were reviews of existing technologies, reports on current research, proposals ranging from modest to blue-sky, discussion about the science that would have to be done. Social engineering was also prominent - any future colony would be a microcosm of human society after all.
Without the Dreamers, you wouldn't have the Planners. It was awe-inspiring to be among the Dreamers for a couple of days, and I begrudge not one dime of the money DARPA spent on it.
Right you are.
You're one of only a few people who have written positively about Gnome 3 (in the places I hang out, anyway). Would you add some detail about your experience?
It's pretty easy to set up dovecot and z-push, which gets you the activesync partner for your phone.
No.
It was 600 smart people all in one place: engineers, technical managers, educators, academics, NASA representatives from Ames and Glenn and MSFC, and everyman types like me, all of whom understood the magnitude of the challenge.
It was a gathering where you could dare to use the word "starship" in a sentence and nobody would crack a smile.
There were tracks on propulsion (light sails, nuclear thermal and hybrid nuclear technologies), habitat creation (bioengineering, microgravity challenges, plasma shields), education (there were lots of educators in the audience), organization, ethics. One university type - I forget his name - boldly asserted that there would be useful violations of the second law of thermodynamics in a couple of years. (I didn't quite believe that, so I did a little reading when I returned; it seems that the second "law" is more like a statistical assertion, so maybe he's got something. IANAPhysicist.)
There was a track on fringe technologies too, those FTL and warp drives you laugh about. I didn't attend that one; at the conference wrap-up the track moderator only said politely that there "was no concensus".
A double handful of SF authors were there and a couple of Hollywood types too, all conducting their own research.
Nobody came here expecting to be beamed up. Nobody was thinking Flash Gordon or Jean Luc Picard. Everyone fully appreciated the immensity of the project, the audacity of such a thing, the difficulty of the undertaking. It was inspiring to be in the company of people who had thought seriously about some of the issues, and who dared to dream big. All brainstorming is like this.
An underlying theme, mentioned several times during the conference, is that Earth "is a single point of failure".
Per the organizers: "The Journal of the British Interplanetary Society will be publishing a select number of papers in a special issue. Date of the special issue has not yet been announced."
Keep looking up!
If you gave me a pill that placed my life expectancy at 150, then the golden handcuffs are OFF.
Here I am today, a few years from retirement, madly saving acorns for my approaching decrepitude. Making good money in my established career... but it's boring as hell. I learned all the interesting stuff in my business years ago.
I follow the kids over at HN doing their entrepreneurial thing, some of them failing, some of them succeeding, most of them subsisting on ramen and hackerspace futons, and I think: how grand it must be to have that kind of flexibility to just chuck it all for the dream.
Well give me another 75 years and the whole picture changes. I could go do something else, something completely different. My kids are old enough to take care of themselves, so I could go join that latter-day-hippie commune. Or move to Novosibirsk and learn the language. Or learn a new trade. Write that novel. Develop some of those ideas I've gotten in the shower.
There are a million things I dare not do at this stage of my life. But give me my life back and there's nothing I can't try.
You are unaware, then, of the IBM 5100 - introduced in 1975.
IBM was coming around to desktop computing, but was hampered by a strong corporate culture of eating their own dogfood - they rolled their own processors and circuit packages. That little 5100 was a sweet machine for its time, but terribly pricy.
Don Estridge convinced IBM to use off-the-shelf components in the mad drive to get the 5150 (IBM PC) out the door in Boca Raton, which made them competitive.
Complete post is here.
Remember the "Disproportionate Response" episode of The West Wing?
(Dialogue lifted from http://intelcarpet.blogspot.com/2008/12/disproportionate-response.html)
Groklaw does a lot of good, too.
It wasn't "House Republicans have already promised to oppose any solution", it was "Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans are preparing a letter to the agency expressing disapproval". (Why so shrill?)
... but he is still the victim. Save your ire for the perp.
I do some community theater work as a hobby - amateur stuff - and wonder if something like this could be used to track multiple actors on stage? Might be better than fitting them all with transmitters and lavaliers. Targeting would become the next problem, I guess.
OT, but can you provide a citation for Bergstrom's Law? (I think it's clever, but a casual googling doesn't turn up a source. Is it yours?)
... to synthesize and insert an entire genome. No "transferring" of anything. So go ahead and outlaw ALL genetic manipulation Ohio, because that's what it's gonna take.
... to act as a deterrent. The Mariposa perps face a maximum of six years under Spanish law. That's small enough to shrug off as the cost of doing business.
A few years ago I experimented with the Kinesis "Advantage" keyboard, trying to alleviate some wrist discomfort I had been experiencing. I never did warm up to that keyboard, but my fingers did travel less than with a standard layout. If you're trying to eke out that extra word or two per minute then it might be worth evaluating. Kinesis keyboards are expensive, but they have a generous 60 day eval policy.
If your workaday typing includes a fair amount of code, then I'd recommend you use a really capable editor - and I'm thinking emacs here. I've yet to master the art of emacs-fu, but I have watched those who have, and it's purely astonishing how much code can appear on a screen so quickly, with so few keystrokes, and no mouse movement. Unobvious and arcane keychords are the name of the game, bolstered by your personal arsenal of editor macros. After your fingers learn the landscape they become buzzsaws.
There's a technical forum that I frequent where it is rather common for someone to ask "How do I do XYZ", and also rather common for the people who don't know how to do XYZ to demand "what are you trying to accomplish" or "why do you want to do XYZ?"
If a responder doesn't know how to answer a question, then he should just move along -- not try to change the question to something he does know the answer to.
For every honor code violation by an individual, the entire class gets to enjoy an additional 5% increase in the value of the final exam.
That's simply wrong. Do they do prof evals at Stanford, tied to salaries and tenure? I suggest that when innocent students get screwed that those evals take the injustice into account. Sauce for the goose, Mr. Saavik.
... glossy, slick, intelligent in the right places, readable from cover to cover. Orson Scott Card's A Thousand Deaths was my first introduction to him, and that story still creeps me out. When Omni's staff inexplicably began to promote those silly UFO and parapsychology pieces, I allowed my subscription to lapse.
As Larry Summers said a few years ago, I'm going to provoke you.
Isn't it possible that two-income families weren't needed until a sizable percentage of families went to two incomes, devaluing the work pool? Sexual politics aside, might we be better off today if each household had a designated breadwinner and a designated homemaker?
Yes, this sounds like a passive-aggressive fix employed by a gutless manager.
That's fair enough; I wasn't looking forward to being beaten by the Pocahontas bludgeon again. But I've got to say that the film is a technological wonder - lots of moving parts, fractals, motion capture, other stuff. Cameron (and ILM, WETA and other folks) set this bar pretty high.
... Microsoft security researcher confirms advantages of open source transparency
I gather you don't have a use for it. Great, don't buy one. But I ride my Segway an average of 200 miles each month, and wouldn't be without it. I live a sane distance from work, and commute back and forth without (a) getting sweaty and (b) adding quite so much to my carbon footprint as I did when I was using the Volvo. So yeah, Segways have their place. This Yike thing probably has a niche, too.