> I think that computers can be a very useful tool
> in learning but kids can learn everything they
> need/want to know without them too.
Well, just to pick a nit, children have a very hard time learning about computers without exposure to one. The computer isn't only a tool in this case, but also a field of study to be mastered, and nothing beats hands-on experience. I would certainly argue that kids in this day and age need to know this stuff.
Holy COW! That's quite a vitriolic post. Firstly, not everyone on Slashdot places (or placed) personal copyright above betterment of society; I for one already gave my consent for any and all of my posts to be published in such a work, and I doubt that I'm alone. Second, there are a lot of people that think that even with permission to publish the posts, any book produced from this will need a lot of work before publication, as Mr. Katz has the annoying tendency not to cite any sources at all, much less Slashdot posts, so it's really easy to shoot down anything he says since there's no proof of his points other than his say-so.
Next time, take three deep breaths and a long think before you reach for that "submit" button, or you risk alienating even those who agree with you, as you have this time.
My thought is that it adds a disquieting level to what people define as "dangerous". To take an extreme but very real example, I have a friend who (because of her upbringing, and by her own admission with no real-world reason) is afraid to stand next to a black man in an elevator. I was there with her; this man was dressed in typical teen clothing but was not acting menacing in any way whatsoever, but she still felt unsafe. In another example, a friend's father was in the car with me as we were driving in our neighborhood. There was a group of teenage guys skateboarding in the street. As our car passed, they moved out of the street to let us pass, and one of them (whom I know) smiled and waved as we went by. Still, his comment was, "lock the doors, I don't like the look of them." Again, they weren't doing anything menacing at all, but because of their looks he felt threatened. It's not a long leap of logic to extend this to the teen who wears pancake makeup and black clothes.
The problem I sense with this whole thing is that since the reporting is anonymous, and the person accused often has no knowledge of the report, there's too much potential for abuse. The possibility that the system will come down on someone who hasn't done anything wrong is too great for it to be used as an effective tool. Perhaps it would help people in your situation, but to extend it to absurdity, handing out pistols at the door would also help protect you from this student's threats. That doesn't make it a good idea.
Virg
P.S. If there's written proof of threats of physical violence, report it to the police. It's their job to deal with such things, not your principal's. Forcing him/her to deal with it will just result in overkill solutions such as W.A.V.E.
Wow, what an ego you've built yourself there! I'm truly moved that you have a wonderful life and fascinating hobbies and all that. Well, some of those nerdy misfits who daydreamed and played games while you so industriously bettered yourself are doing just fine. Others are not. I spent a good portion of my youth dreaming about starships and playing D&D, and I didn't teach myself assembler on my computer (I don't know assembler even to this day), and I even got lousy grades in high school math. Now, I've got a wonderful life full of wonderful friends, athletics, a great job dreaming about and building starships (well, okay, satellites, but they _are_ spacecraft) and interesting/fascinating hobbies. Where are all of the doers who blew their youths being little grownups now, I can't help but wonder. Oh, that's right. That's you, isn't it?
Perhaps you should spend a little time boning up on your social skills. You apparently spent so much time being better than all of those nerdy types that you failed to notice that elitism is a social failing.
> If this CD45 can just help regulate immunity,
> won't there be another molecul that would prefer
> that we don't play with it ?
>
Molecules don't prefer anything. Preference implies sentience.
> I bet I'd prefer to keep my sane life instead
> of taking one more drug.
>
That's most likely because you're not dying from anything immuno-related. Would your preferences change if you had six very painful months left to live?
I'd truly like to know by what reasoning you think that diabetes (or multiple sclerosis) is a mostly human problem.
Cash in your two cents, sir (or madam). Calling Dr. Penninger a trophy hunter because of the number of published articles to his credit would be an insult if not for the lack of insight that caused you to make the statement. He himself is the one following through on these advances. He doesn't do this for the glory, or the money (just look at his publications if you need proof). He's prolific because he finds out a lot of stuff. To say that he's not the one doing the legwork on this is just plain incorrect. I'm not sure what you mean by stating "...he must regularly change band-wagons" but if by that you imply that he changes the nature of his research you're incorrect there too. You'll find upon research that "regular" scientists had already given up on finding out anything new about CD45, assuming they already knew it all. He went back for a closer look, because he had the thought that there was more to find.
You should be more careful before you assume he's a sloppy scientist just because he's prolific.
Well, just one, if you're talking about whopping people with it. Hoewever, since it takes (I would guess) about 3 minutes to whop someone to death with a spray can, and there are about 6 billion people in the world, you'd need about (3 X 3,000,000,000) minutes (17,123.28 years) to do it. A tough job, indeed.
Okay, in answer to your query, I'm going to throw my hat in with "smart", because as you age you tend to get less beautiful and more smart. Being smart to begin with, your opportunities for success (being created by you yourself) don't tend to disappear over time. Getting by on your looks will eventually burn you, unless you're smart enough to realize it isn't going to last forever.
I agree that some of the "cures" foisted off on the world have been (at best) snake oil and (at worst) patently hazardous. One needs look no farther than Thalidomide to see that. However, I think this points up an issue that you were perhaps trying to make in the first place. Blind faith in anything medical is likely to get you into trouble. Anything touted as "the new cure for fillintheblank" should be taken with a grain of salt. That is not to say, however, that it should be rejected. A great deal of caution is warranted when you're dealing with the public health, but it's the patient who is responsible for the choices in the end. And sometimes, it's a gamble. That doesn't excuse incaution.
Well, there's a flaw to your logic as well. You don't have to hire your own children, and frankly it's still cheaper to feed them than to pay someone else's.
Here we go 'round the mulberry bush. Every time I hear this argument I just shake my head in disbelief at the unscientific approach some take to science. "Let's solve all of our real problems before we go traipsing around in space," they say, again and again.
Well.
First, your starting assumption is faulty. We're never going to "solve all of our real problems" whether we go into space or not. Poverty has been around for thousands of years, and there'll be homeless people and those who get smashed down by circumstance on the first Mars base, or in New New York in the year 3001. Cure diseases instead of spending money on space exploration? How much money did we put into AIDS research in the 1960's? The answer is none, since AIDS didn't exist as a human disease then, and if we insist on spending every available dollar on disease research, that's all we'll ever spend our dollars on. You ask how many children could be fed by the cost of one space vehicle launch. I ask in reply, how many chidren could have been fed by the money poured into automotive development, or the cosmetics industry?
Second, your logical extension is faulty. What is it exactly that blinds you (and all of the others who like to make this argument) to the possibility that the cure for cancer is a chemical that synthesizes only in microgravity? Or that the next clean power supply can't be discovered by scientists trying to figure out how to make a sustainable Moon base? Science at its core is dicovery, and the farther we range from what we know, the more likely it is that we'll dicover something new. Some of the things we need to learn and do for space exploration could (and very often do) produce huge benefits for life here on Earth. Without space exploration, for example, there'd be no satellites. These wondrous little devices do everything from geological surveys and weather mapping to communications. Next time you say that we're wasting money on space travel, try telling that to the family who are still alive because of an accurate forcast for a hurricane path, or the person whose 911 call went through.
Pure science is not and cannot be forced. I agree that we shouldn't throw all of our money into space exploration, but then neither should we pull all of our money away from space exploration. The solution to the problems right next door may very well be "out there."
All well and good, but this approach has some down sides to it. The first and most obvious is that it's not going to reduce the amount of invasion into your spending habits, it'll just change the results. Tell them you make more than you do, and you'll get targeted for vacation homes and new cars. Tell them you make less, and you'll get targeted for secured credit cards and get-out-of-debt schemes. You actually run the risk of getting on more target databases since you'll fit a larger range of criteria.
The second down side is the one that should worry you, though. Suppose you apply for a large loan; perhaps you need a car loan or a mortgage. When the credit check is run, you run the very real possibility that the data found will be contradictory. This is a huge red flag for lenders, and most will reject you out of hand if they find it. After all, it's often the first hint of a fraud in progress, and if you're willing to lie to anyone, who's to say you aren't lying to them?
Next time your fiancee feels she needs to send in a warranty card, remind her of two things. First of all, you don't need to send the card until you actually need the warranty (if you wear it out or replace it without ever needing it fixed, no card needs get mailed) and you can leave marketing stuff like income blank on the card and still get your warranty coverage, no matter what the card says.
What an awesomely sweeping assumption you put forward! Your statement that "...the issue of online privacy is only really of interest to people who spent too much time online, and too little time in the real world" is insulting. Have you ever been turned down for a mortgage because of financial trouble you had fifteen years previous? Ever had an insurance company deny you life insurance, deeming you a "bad risk" based on the fact that you've gotten three speeding tickets? Opened your mailbox or your email recently and found that you can't find your real messages for all of the junk from targeted marketers?
Your comment about confidentiality in medical records shows you've put some thought into the issue. Your statements following that show that you should have put in a lot more.
Next time, consider asking why others consider a subject important, instead of assuming that because it's unimportant to you it's unimportant for all.
Let's not be daft. The point to take is "...treat the computer like a closed container such as a briefcase or file cabinet." It does not matter whether the computer is physically clear, unless you hid something illegal inside the machine's case, in which case you'd be an idiot fuly deserving of arrest. It means they can't legally access the data stored in the system unless they could also legally access the contents of your (opaque) filing cabinet (say, via a search warrant). Having a window in your case doesn't release law enforcement agents from the laws of legal search and seizure.
I've had that beaten for years. I have an old Diamond Multimedia (yes, for a while they made whole computers) EISA system that was a passive backplane, space for two system boards, and 14 EISA/ISA slots. It has two cooling fans in front for the drive bays, the cards loaded with the brackets to the top (vertical mount for cooling) three fans under the cards to cool them, and two exhaust fans out the back, plus the exhaust fan for the power supply. The lights dim when you switch this beast on. The best part is that it used a standard fit passive backplane, so when EISA went out of vogue three weeks after it came to market, we could replace the guts with a PCI-based three-motherboard-and-ten-PCI-slot system. The down side is that the system weighs nearly thirty pounds (I think), looks like a small refrigerator and sounds about as loud.
Um, "Wargames" was a movie. It's not reality. In this world, a Cessna and a missile have rather different radar signatures, as do a Cessna and a jet fighter. Also, a human operator is at hand when the system is working who can shut it down if need be. Lastly, the computer decides when and where to fire only for accuracy purposes. Whether to fire is determined by the rules of engagement, which is decided by humans. This is a targeting computer, not AI.
This is not really naive at all, although I agree it's a bit premature. As others have specified, logistics is a problem easily solved with time. The extraction costs and distance add to the one-time cost in some scenarios, but not all of them. For example, the "let's build our refinery right on the asteroid" camp has to get to the asteroid with enough non-local stuff to get the refinery underway, but then, assuming it's designed to be self-sufficient, it'll be able to churn out materials from then on. Properly thought out (and barring major disasters, the risk of which can be minimized through proper planning), the refinery will pay for itself over time. Since this is the same logic that applies to every coal mine on Earth (sink some costs to get started, then get it back plus profit over time), there's no reason it won't work eventually.
Virg
P.S. traveling to 3 AU takes much time, but not much energy. The Voyagers use no fuel at all for travel, only maneuvering.
The very point of this is that there are unethical humans out there who will hijack your signature for their own gain, so using something insecure for authentication makes it all too easy for said unethicals to rob you blind. Your analysis that your computer is trusted ignores one of the weaknesses of digisigs entirely. For an analogy, let's take a real world example, having nothing to do with coercion but instead with deceit. Let's say you sign a contract that says you'll pay me X dollars for a widget that I sell you. Let's say I then tear your signature off the bottom of that contract and tape it to the bottom of a bill of sale for your house (for ten bucks, no less). Let's say that a court then accepts your signature on this bill of sale (it _is_ your signature, after all) and tells you to grab your sawbuck and get the heck out of my house.
Not fun, eh?
Digital signatures have, among their weaknesses, no mechanism to prevent the changing of the signed work after the signature is attached. Until they do, they should by no means be used as a legal authentication for anything.
Virg
The major reason we're interested in Mars over Venus is that it's a lot easier to get there from here, figuratively speaking. Mars is very cold. Mars has no real atmosphere. Space suits work on Mars. Venus is very hot. Lead melts on Venus. People do, too, even in space suits. We haven't AFAIK even been able to land a vehicle on Venus because they tend to dissolve in the atmosphere due to the extreme temperature. Therefore, terraforming Mars may be impossible, but colonizing Mars is bunches easier than doing anything to Venus.
> Sorry, it pains me to say it, but Microsoft
> STILL have the better browser.
>
Although you do specify in your subject line that speed is the issue, faster is not always better. I find IE to be patently unstable and if I figure in having to restart IE or reboot my PC to keep browsing, the numbers shift strongly to Netscape. Netscape is slower when it runs, but then so was the tortoise.
Virg
You're not addressing Sherpajohn's original point by your response. For the first point, a BILLION people is less than 20% of the world, so it seems a bit out of line to discuss standards in that light. By your very argument we should all be following Bhuddism. But again, that's not his point at all. Also, you state:
> If you have respect for "others" you don't go
> and label them as the "most hypocritical social
> forces in the world".
Well, he didn't. His condemnation is of the Christian faith in comparison to other faiths, not the Christian people (if you're having trouble seeing the separation of a religion as an entity and its adherents individually, I would refer you to the philosophy section of your local library for many better arguments than I could hope to give here).
His point is that our slow erosion of respect for ourselves and others had led to the inability, even with the best intentions, to treat others with their own worldviews as respectable, because if you can't treat yourself with dignity you certainly can't treat others that way. His question is which approach to fixing the problem (find out why we degraded our self-respect and fix it, or seek a new way to learn self respect) will be the outcome of this realization. I also don't have the answer to that, but that's a different discussion.
Virg
> I urge you all to follow suit. Who is with
> me????
>
Iam! I think it's a great idea! I'll certainly never, um, respond to...um...er...
Oh, damn.
Virg
Slashdot Mirror
> I think that computers can be a very useful tool
> in learning but kids can learn everything they
> need/want to know without them too.
Well, just to pick a nit, children have a very hard time learning about computers without exposure to one. The computer isn't only a tool in this case, but also a field of study to be mastered, and nothing beats hands-on experience. I would certainly argue that kids in this day and age need to know this stuff.
Virg
Holy COW! That's quite a vitriolic post. Firstly, not everyone on Slashdot places (or placed) personal copyright above betterment of society; I for one already gave my consent for any and all of my posts to be published in such a work, and I doubt that I'm alone. Second, there are a lot of people that think that even with permission to publish the posts, any book produced from this will need a lot of work before publication, as Mr. Katz has the annoying tendency not to cite any sources at all, much less Slashdot posts, so it's really easy to shoot down anything he says since there's no proof of his points other than his say-so.
Next time, take three deep breaths and a long think before you reach for that "submit" button, or you risk alienating even those who agree with you, as you have this time.
Virg
My thought is that it adds a disquieting level to what people define as "dangerous". To take an extreme but very real example, I have a friend who (because of her upbringing, and by her own admission with no real-world reason) is afraid to stand next to a black man in an elevator. I was there with her; this man was dressed in typical teen clothing but was not acting menacing in any way whatsoever, but she still felt unsafe. In another example, a friend's father was in the car with me as we were driving in our neighborhood. There was a group of teenage guys skateboarding in the street. As our car passed, they moved out of the street to let us pass, and one of them (whom I know) smiled and waved as we went by. Still, his comment was, "lock the doors, I don't like the look of them." Again, they weren't doing anything menacing at all, but because of their looks he felt threatened. It's not a long leap of logic to extend this to the teen who wears pancake makeup and black clothes.
The problem I sense with this whole thing is that since the reporting is anonymous, and the person accused often has no knowledge of the report, there's too much potential for abuse. The possibility that the system will come down on someone who hasn't done anything wrong is too great for it to be used as an effective tool. Perhaps it would help people in your situation, but to extend it to absurdity, handing out pistols at the door would also help protect you from this student's threats. That doesn't make it a good idea.
Virg
P.S. If there's written proof of threats of physical violence, report it to the police. It's their job to deal with such things, not your principal's. Forcing him/her to deal with it will just result in overkill solutions such as W.A.V.E.
Wow, what an ego you've built yourself there! I'm truly moved that you have a wonderful life and fascinating hobbies and all that. Well, some of those nerdy misfits who daydreamed and played games while you so industriously bettered yourself are doing just fine. Others are not. I spent a good portion of my youth dreaming about starships and playing D&D, and I didn't teach myself assembler on my computer (I don't know assembler even to this day), and I even got lousy grades in high school math. Now, I've got a wonderful life full of wonderful friends, athletics, a great job dreaming about and building starships (well, okay, satellites, but they _are_ spacecraft) and interesting/fascinating hobbies. Where are all of the doers who blew their youths being little grownups now, I can't help but wonder. Oh, that's right. That's you, isn't it?
Perhaps you should spend a little time boning up on your social skills. You apparently spent so much time being better than all of those nerdy types that you failed to notice that elitism is a social failing.
Virg
In this case, I didn't mean (and didn't refer to) manned space exploration. A fine point, perhaps, but a point in my defense nonetheless :).
Virg
> If this CD45 can just help regulate immunity,
> won't there be another molecul that would prefer
> that we don't play with it ?
>
Molecules don't prefer anything. Preference implies sentience.
> I bet I'd prefer to keep my sane life instead
> of taking one more drug.
>
That's most likely because you're not dying from anything immuno-related. Would your preferences change if you had six very painful months left to live?
I'd truly like to know by what reasoning you think that diabetes (or multiple sclerosis) is a mostly human problem.
Virg
Cash in your two cents, sir (or madam). Calling Dr. Penninger a trophy hunter because of the number of published articles to his credit would be an insult if not for the lack of insight that caused you to make the statement. He himself is the one following through on these advances. He doesn't do this for the glory, or the money (just look at his publications if you need proof). He's prolific because he finds out a lot of stuff. To say that he's not the one doing the legwork on this is just plain incorrect. I'm not sure what you mean by stating "...he must regularly change band-wagons" but if by that you imply that he changes the nature of his research you're incorrect there too. You'll find upon research that "regular" scientists had already given up on finding out anything new about CD45, assuming they already knew it all. He went back for a closer look, because he had the thought that there was more to find.
You should be more careful before you assume he's a sloppy scientist just because he's prolific.
Virg
Well, just one, if you're talking about whopping people with it. Hoewever, since it takes (I would guess) about 3 minutes to whop someone to death with a spray can, and there are about 6 billion people in the world, you'd need about (3 X 3,000,000,000) minutes (17,123.28 years) to do it. A tough job, indeed.
Virg
Okay, in answer to your query, I'm going to throw my hat in with "smart", because as you age you tend to get less beautiful and more smart. Being smart to begin with, your opportunities for success (being created by you yourself) don't tend to disappear over time. Getting by on your looks will eventually burn you, unless you're smart enough to realize it isn't going to last forever.
Virg
I agree that some of the "cures" foisted off on the world have been (at best) snake oil and (at worst) patently hazardous. One needs look no farther than Thalidomide to see that. However, I think this points up an issue that you were perhaps trying to make in the first place. Blind faith in anything medical is likely to get you into trouble. Anything touted as "the new cure for fillintheblank" should be taken with a grain of salt. That is not to say, however, that it should be rejected. A great deal of caution is warranted when you're dealing with the public health, but it's the patient who is responsible for the choices in the end. And sometimes, it's a gamble. That doesn't excuse incaution.
Virg
Well, there's a flaw to your logic as well. You don't have to hire your own children, and frankly it's still cheaper to feed them than to pay someone else's.
Virg
Here we go 'round the mulberry bush. Every time I hear this argument I just shake my head in disbelief at the unscientific approach some take to science. "Let's solve all of our real problems before we go traipsing around in space," they say, again and again.
Well.
First, your starting assumption is faulty. We're never going to "solve all of our real problems" whether we go into space or not. Poverty has been around for thousands of years, and there'll be homeless people and those who get smashed down by circumstance on the first Mars base, or in New New York in the year 3001. Cure diseases instead of spending money on space exploration? How much money did we put into AIDS research in the 1960's? The answer is none, since AIDS didn't exist as a human disease then, and if we insist on spending every available dollar on disease research, that's all we'll ever spend our dollars on. You ask how many children could be fed by the cost of one space vehicle launch. I ask in reply, how many chidren could have been fed by the money poured into automotive development, or the cosmetics industry?
Second, your logical extension is faulty. What is it exactly that blinds you (and all of the others who like to make this argument) to the possibility that the cure for cancer is a chemical that synthesizes only in microgravity? Or that the next clean power supply can't be discovered by scientists trying to figure out how to make a sustainable Moon base? Science at its core is dicovery, and the farther we range from what we know, the more likely it is that we'll dicover something new. Some of the things we need to learn and do for space exploration could (and very often do) produce huge benefits for life here on Earth. Without space exploration, for example, there'd be no satellites. These wondrous little devices do everything from geological surveys and weather mapping to communications. Next time you say that we're wasting money on space travel, try telling that to the family who are still alive because of an accurate forcast for a hurricane path, or the person whose 911 call went through.
Pure science is not and cannot be forced. I agree that we shouldn't throw all of our money into space exploration, but then neither should we pull all of our money away from space exploration. The solution to the problems right next door may very well be "out there."
Virg
All well and good, but this approach has some down sides to it. The first and most obvious is that it's not going to reduce the amount of invasion into your spending habits, it'll just change the results. Tell them you make more than you do, and you'll get targeted for vacation homes and new cars. Tell them you make less, and you'll get targeted for secured credit cards and get-out-of-debt schemes. You actually run the risk of getting on more target databases since you'll fit a larger range of criteria.
The second down side is the one that should worry you, though. Suppose you apply for a large loan; perhaps you need a car loan or a mortgage. When the credit check is run, you run the very real possibility that the data found will be contradictory. This is a huge red flag for lenders, and most will reject you out of hand if they find it. After all, it's often the first hint of a fraud in progress, and if you're willing to lie to anyone, who's to say you aren't lying to them?
Next time your fiancee feels she needs to send in a warranty card, remind her of two things. First of all, you don't need to send the card until you actually need the warranty (if you wear it out or replace it without ever needing it fixed, no card needs get mailed) and you can leave marketing stuff like income blank on the card and still get your warranty coverage, no matter what the card says.
Virg
What an awesomely sweeping assumption you put forward! Your statement that "...the issue of online privacy is only really of interest to people who spent too much time online, and too little time in the real world" is insulting. Have you ever been turned down for a mortgage because of financial trouble you had fifteen years previous? Ever had an insurance company deny you life insurance, deeming you a "bad risk" based on the fact that you've gotten three speeding tickets? Opened your mailbox or your email recently and found that you can't find your real messages for all of the junk from targeted marketers?
Your comment about confidentiality in medical records shows you've put some thought into the issue. Your statements following that show that you should have put in a lot more.
Next time, consider asking why others consider a subject important, instead of assuming that because it's unimportant to you it's unimportant for all.
Virg
Let's not be daft. The point to take is "...treat the computer like a closed container such as a briefcase or file cabinet." It does not matter whether the computer is physically clear, unless you hid something illegal inside the machine's case, in which case you'd be an idiot fuly deserving of arrest. It means they can't legally access the data stored in the system unless they could also legally access the contents of your (opaque) filing cabinet (say, via a search warrant). Having a window in your case doesn't release law enforcement agents from the laws of legal search and seizure.
Virg
I've had that beaten for years. I have an old Diamond Multimedia (yes, for a while they made whole computers) EISA system that was a passive backplane, space for two system boards, and 14 EISA/ISA slots. It has two cooling fans in front for the drive bays, the cards loaded with the brackets to the top (vertical mount for cooling) three fans under the cards to cool them, and two exhaust fans out the back, plus the exhaust fan for the power supply. The lights dim when you switch this beast on. The best part is that it used a standard fit passive backplane, so when EISA went out of vogue three weeks after it came to market, we could replace the guts with a PCI-based three-motherboard-and-ten-PCI-slot system. The down side is that the system weighs nearly thirty pounds (I think), looks like a small refrigerator and sounds about as loud.
Virg
Of all of the complaints about your call phone, heavier?!? Does toting around the extra five ounces really get to you?
Virg
Um, "Wargames" was a movie. It's not reality. In this world, a Cessna and a missile have rather different radar signatures, as do a Cessna and a jet fighter. Also, a human operator is at hand when the system is working who can shut it down if need be. Lastly, the computer decides when and where to fire only for accuracy purposes. Whether to fire is determined by the rules of engagement, which is decided by humans. This is a targeting computer, not AI.
Virg
Because the primary shrubber is quite capable of doing his job alone, and they like being called "botanists", by the way. Virg
This is not really naive at all, although I agree it's a bit premature. As others have specified, logistics is a problem easily solved with time. The extraction costs and distance add to the one-time cost in some scenarios, but not all of them. For example, the "let's build our refinery right on the asteroid" camp has to get to the asteroid with enough non-local stuff to get the refinery underway, but then, assuming it's designed to be self-sufficient, it'll be able to churn out materials from then on. Properly thought out (and barring major disasters, the risk of which can be minimized through proper planning), the refinery will pay for itself over time. Since this is the same logic that applies to every coal mine on Earth (sink some costs to get started, then get it back plus profit over time), there's no reason it won't work eventually.
Virg
P.S. traveling to 3 AU takes much time, but not much energy. The Voyagers use no fuel at all for travel, only maneuvering.
The very point of this is that there are unethical humans out there who will hijack your signature for their own gain, so using something insecure for authentication makes it all too easy for said unethicals to rob you blind. Your analysis that your computer is trusted ignores one of the weaknesses of digisigs entirely. For an analogy, let's take a real world example, having nothing to do with coercion but instead with deceit. Let's say you sign a contract that says you'll pay me X dollars for a widget that I sell you. Let's say I then tear your signature off the bottom of that contract and tape it to the bottom of a bill of sale for your house (for ten bucks, no less). Let's say that a court then accepts your signature on this bill of sale (it _is_ your signature, after all) and tells you to grab your sawbuck and get the heck out of my house. Not fun, eh? Digital signatures have, among their weaknesses, no mechanism to prevent the changing of the signed work after the signature is attached. Until they do, they should by no means be used as a legal authentication for anything. Virg
The major reason we're interested in Mars over Venus is that it's a lot easier to get there from here, figuratively speaking. Mars is very cold. Mars has no real atmosphere. Space suits work on Mars. Venus is very hot. Lead melts on Venus. People do, too, even in space suits. We haven't AFAIK even been able to land a vehicle on Venus because they tend to dissolve in the atmosphere due to the extreme temperature. Therefore, terraforming Mars may be impossible, but colonizing Mars is bunches easier than doing anything to Venus.
> Sorry, it pains me to say it, but Microsoft > STILL have the better browser. > Although you do specify in your subject line that speed is the issue, faster is not always better. I find IE to be patently unstable and if I figure in having to restart IE or reboot my PC to keep browsing, the numbers shift strongly to Netscape. Netscape is slower when it runs, but then so was the tortoise. Virg
You're not addressing Sherpajohn's original point by your response. For the first point, a BILLION people is less than 20% of the world, so it seems a bit out of line to discuss standards in that light. By your very argument we should all be following Bhuddism. But again, that's not his point at all. Also, you state: > If you have respect for "others" you don't go > and label them as the "most hypocritical social > forces in the world". Well, he didn't. His condemnation is of the Christian faith in comparison to other faiths, not the Christian people (if you're having trouble seeing the separation of a religion as an entity and its adherents individually, I would refer you to the philosophy section of your local library for many better arguments than I could hope to give here). His point is that our slow erosion of respect for ourselves and others had led to the inability, even with the best intentions, to treat others with their own worldviews as respectable, because if you can't treat yourself with dignity you certainly can't treat others that way. His question is which approach to fixing the problem (find out why we degraded our self-respect and fix it, or seek a new way to learn self respect) will be the outcome of this realization. I also don't have the answer to that, but that's a different discussion. Virg
> I urge you all to follow suit. Who is with > me???? > Iam! I think it's a great idea! I'll certainly never, um, respond to...um...er... Oh, damn. Virg