Personally, I believe that the TSA having to look at my near-naked scan is probably punishment enough for whatever they've done to me that trip. I'd call it even.
Curiously, I'd *literally* (and mostly by accident) just read the first book when I happened to see it on cable or in a hotel somewhere, I was actually rather quite impressed with their fidelity to the story.
It wasn't perfect, of course, but it was pretty good by Hollywood standards (and a quintillion times better than the Hobbit standard).
"It might seem odd for a company or country to spend billions of dollars to get to Mars, only to relinquish any control over what happens on the planet. But itâ(TM)s not inconceivable, says Haqq-Misra."
Yes, yes it is. Despite the speculations of an ivory-tower academic, countries and corporations are not charities. They do not dump billions (and perhaps trillions) of dollars into projects that will not return them (expected) benefits. They simply don't.
I'm curious; considering that we aren't really anywhere near close to putting humans on Mars (I'd submit that a serious program to do so would be at least 10 years in the works, and to my knowledge no such program has started beyond mere speculation), where precisely does "space researcher" end and "science fiction author" begin?
Because wild speculation about who is responsible to whom in a situation fraught with complexities that may well be a century away sounds pretty much like science fiction to me. Oh, it's interesting on a sort of 'coffee discussion' level, but utterly meaningless on a substantive level.
Didn't he write most of The Martian as a web-collaboration, where he'd write a chapter or two, let people savage it on the web for a while, then rewrite based on their criticisms?
Of course, that answer could be applied to so many things: gasoline, clothing, cars, computers, food....
What I think a more comprehensive understanding of economics would offer is that without the incentive of competition to reduce pricing (and particularly to innovate as a way to reduce costs), state monopolies on anything (even if genuinely well-intentioned) quickly become bloated, inefficient monstrosities.
I understand that the point of the article is really just to spread FUD, but even the terrified masses must understand that "warming" sea level rise is expected to measure a double handful of inches over the next century. Normal daily wave variation is more than that; if your nuclear plant designers aren't planning for bigger variation you have much more serious problems than what's going to happen a 100 yrs from now (and which of these plants is expected to run a century anyway)?
In short, just because SOME of the people in the community are in fact bumpkins, doesn't mean that those people drove the discussion, as entertaining as their quotes were.
In fact, the community had some very good reasons to decline a THIRD solar farm (for now).
Hard to imagine internet wankers jumping to patronizing (wrong) conclusions, isn't it?
I'm pretty sure that the United States founders would agree that "genuinely dangerous ideas" (let's remember that not so long ago, things like homosexuality, transgenderism, interracial marriage would have all been on that list - hell my parents were married in 1955 and his parents didn't go to the wedding because my mom was LUTHERAN) should very much BE discussed in the marketplace of ideas. The only way stupid ideas die is when they're revealed to be stupid.
Of course, part and parcel of their worldview was that if you were deemed enough of a threat to society, they just killed you and didn't wring their hands over the injustice of it either.
That might be wonderful in concept, but Pollyannaish to believe it could be enforceable.
Is that Tom Hanks' face? By whose standard? If we move the nose 4 pixels to the left and one eye down by 2 pixels, is it still Tom Hanks? What if we pay a Tom Hanks lookalike $100 to shoot HIS face, instead of paying Tom $1 million (or whatever)? What if we just use Tom Hanks, but just put a small mole on his left cheek?
I'm aware of both the lunar inclination to the ecliptic and the lunar orbit inclination, and the resulting libration, etc. Coverage doesn't have to be vertical - instead of building a half-mile tower, one could build laterally and get the same result (or more likely, a combination of height and lateral distance).
Second: no, it's obviously not as simple as if the earth/moon/ecliptic were all just rolling around each other as on a billiard table; personally I didn't feel a slashdot post was really the context for a deep analysis of lunar orbital perturbations. Suffice to assert that they're STILL the "best" possible places in terms of line-of-sight to the earth/moon system generally if one wanted, say, general surveillance coverage of the local system or even the solar system, for example.
Further, let's not forget that the water resources assumed to exist in the permadark craters are ALSO largely at or near the poles. That matters.
As far as South Pole ownership: no, nobody OWNS the south pole (mainly due to the 1959 Antarctic treaty - note that doesn't stop many countries from CLAIMING parts of the continent...), but last time I checked, Amundson-Scott station is pretty damn permanent. Thus my point of 'de facto' ownership (as opposed to de jure).
Back in the day, when Lucas was just a filmmaker, Star Wars was conceived literally as "a cowboy western in space".
It was SUPPOSED to be action-packed and a little cheesy, with hammy 2d archetypes for characters...
The way that this subsequently has ended up hallowed in some peoples' minds (including Lucas, who never has apparently missed a step on his own hagiography) does a disservice to what it was really intended to be.
Before anyone acts surprised, understand that the light bulb manufacturers were one of the most comprehensive, archetypal cartels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It's a perfect, comprehensive example of such behavior: controlled pricing, customers, regions, planned obsolescence (and agreed-upon 'freeze' on tech development) and even penalty payments for violation of the agreement.
Nothing really changes. The moment they sense they can get away with something, they will.
Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution, includes the Treaty Clause, which empowers the President of the United States to propose and chiefly negotiate agreements, between the United States and other countries, which become treaties between the United States and other countries (only) after the advice and consent of a supermajority of the United States Senate.
In short, if it's an actual, binding treaty, the President must have the Senate approve it. This is a clear and deliberate constraint on Presidential power imposed by the US Constitution. If it's in any way binding in international law, it's a treaty.
Ergo: it's either meaningless or a dead-letter, no matter what the suits say.
There is a tangible benefit as substantial as having a coaling station on the coast of Africa was in the 19th century, or having an unsinkable aircraft carrier called Hawaii or Diego Garcia today: the poles.
There are precisely 2 points on the moon that have (basically) uninterrupted line-of-sight to earth AND line of sight to the sun (ie power). Whoever gets there, and plants at least a basic base there, has a de-facto ownership based on occupancy.
Short of ejecting them by violence, that's forever. That's pretty important.
If the premise of the study is to highlight the risks of near stellar neighbors and cluttered neighborhoods, of COURSE the conclusion will be that remote systems are 'safer'.
This is like asking a cancer doctor where it's safest to live, and getting the answer "in a sealed lead-lined vault"....yes, disregarding the need for air, water, and food, and only focusing on the cancer risk, that's probably great.
While we simply don't KNOW the primary drivers of life generation (or the Drake equation would be a lot less hand-waving), and while yes, there's a danger of nearby stellar events, one might also consider: - our solar system didn't just appear ex nihilo: the heavier elements present suggest that our system formed from nova or supernova remnants. A more cluttered stellar neighborhood is going to have more of such events. While these events would be indeed dangerous (likely exterminatory) for nearby life, life might regrow with such staggering frequency that the stellar scales are outmatched - radiation: dangerous, sure, but we exist because of mutations. LIFE is based on mutation. (And hell, there's persuasive evidence here on earth that living with higher level of background radioactivity actually increases life span; then again, that could also be a raised average due to selective weeding by same.) A higher-radiation environment is not necessarily inherently bad for life, and may actually accelerate the mutative processes.
These are just a couple of reasons that inner regions might be better. A lot of it is simply guesswork at this point.
I've always wondered why, for the bomb-truck application, it wasn't easier to modify civilian jets that are already supremely optimized for fuel consumption, flyability, modern systems, etc.
It's not like the B52 is a wonder of modern engineering, it's literally just a high-flying pickup truck.
Sounds interesting. Would be great if they said: - how it worked - did it work? - what speeds did they achieve - driver's opinions - surprises? - how did they cope with in-race obstacles? Could they just drive over them? - same with the other car, a HUGE part of racing is positioning...in this could they just drive through the other car?
Seriously, it's his money. He can donate it, bury it, burn it, or turn it into little paper pterodactyls.
For the people insisting he should have more tax liability, that's ridiculous. His wealth came largely from the internet which yes, was a government-built thing. But a) everyone pays already for their internet connection b) Facebook has by now probably paid hundreds of millions of $ for their internet connection The internet is PAID-FOR already.
To assert that he should pay more is comparable to you and I betting privately on a football game, but saying that the winner should give some of the wager to the football team.
It was a nicely done piece of data-generation, with an overwordy, wandering, and foggy summation.
Pretty classic sort of thing you'd see from a data-driven techy: +1 for great data, clever collection, and -5 for shitty presentation.
What you call a short attention span, I'd call being respectful of people's time; not everyone has time to churn through reams of raw data and "look at how clever I was" backstage details. Some people just would like to see the results. And yes, some were summarized, but I felt I could do it better.
And it's not like I was routing his clicks to my website or some crap. I fucking posted that link to his study to EN world, D&D 5e reddit, and a number of other smaller gaming website - again, heedless of the clicks, but because his study was INTERESTING.
Some of us don't give a flying shit who gets the clicks.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I believe that the TSA having to look at my near-naked scan is probably punishment enough for whatever they've done to me that trip. I'd call it even.
Curiously, I'd *literally* (and mostly by accident) just read the first book when I happened to see it on cable or in a hotel somewhere, I was actually rather quite impressed with their fidelity to the story.
It wasn't perfect, of course, but it was pretty good by Hollywood standards (and a quintillion times better than the Hobbit standard).
"It might seem odd for a company or country to spend billions of dollars to get to Mars, only to relinquish any control over what happens on the planet. But itâ(TM)s not inconceivable, says Haqq-Misra."
Yes, yes it is.
Despite the speculations of an ivory-tower academic, countries and corporations are not charities. They do not dump billions (and perhaps trillions) of dollars into projects that will not return them (expected) benefits.
They simply don't.
I'm curious; considering that we aren't really anywhere near close to putting humans on Mars (I'd submit that a serious program to do so would be at least 10 years in the works, and to my knowledge no such program has started beyond mere speculation), where precisely does "space researcher" end and "science fiction author" begin?
Because wild speculation about who is responsible to whom in a situation fraught with complexities that may well be a century away sounds pretty much like science fiction to me. Oh, it's interesting on a sort of 'coffee discussion' level, but utterly meaningless on a substantive level.
Didn't he write most of The Martian as a web-collaboration, where he'd write a chapter or two, let people savage it on the web for a while, then rewrite based on their criticisms?
Let's not forget that same fMRI technology successfully identified brain function in a DEAD SALMON.
http://blogs.scientificamerica...
Of course, that answer could be applied to so many things: gasoline, clothing, cars, computers, food....
What I think a more comprehensive understanding of economics would offer is that without the incentive of competition to reduce pricing (and particularly to innovate as a way to reduce costs), state monopolies on anything (even if genuinely well-intentioned) quickly become bloated, inefficient monstrosities.
I understand that the point of the article is really just to spread FUD, but even the terrified masses must understand that "warming" sea level rise is expected to measure a double handful of inches over the next century. Normal daily wave variation is more than that; if your nuclear plant designers aren't planning for bigger variation you have much more serious problems than what's going to happen a 100 yrs from now (and which of these plants is expected to run a century anyway)?
In short, just because SOME of the people in the community are in fact bumpkins, doesn't mean that those people drove the discussion, as entertaining as their quotes were.
In fact, the community had some very good reasons to decline a THIRD solar farm (for now).
Hard to imagine internet wankers jumping to patronizing (wrong) conclusions, isn't it?
I'm pretty sure that the United States founders would agree that "genuinely dangerous ideas" (let's remember that not so long ago, things like homosexuality, transgenderism, interracial marriage would have all been on that list - hell my parents were married in 1955 and his parents didn't go to the wedding because my mom was LUTHERAN) should very much BE discussed in the marketplace of ideas. The only way stupid ideas die is when they're revealed to be stupid.
Of course, part and parcel of their worldview was that if you were deemed enough of a threat to society, they just killed you and didn't wring their hands over the injustice of it either.
That might be wonderful in concept, but Pollyannaish to believe it could be enforceable.
Is that Tom Hanks' face? By whose standard? If we move the nose 4 pixels to the left and one eye down by 2 pixels, is it still Tom Hanks? What if we pay a Tom Hanks lookalike $100 to shoot HIS face, instead of paying Tom $1 million (or whatever)? What if we just use Tom Hanks, but just put a small mole on his left cheek?
I'm aware of both the lunar inclination to the ecliptic and the lunar orbit inclination, and the resulting libration, etc.
Coverage doesn't have to be vertical - instead of building a half-mile tower, one could build laterally and get the same result (or more likely, a combination of height and lateral distance).
Second: no, it's obviously not as simple as if the earth/moon/ecliptic were all just rolling around each other as on a billiard table; personally I didn't feel a slashdot post was really the context for a deep analysis of lunar orbital perturbations. Suffice to assert that they're STILL the "best" possible places in terms of line-of-sight to the earth/moon system generally if one wanted, say, general surveillance coverage of the local system or even the solar system, for example.
Further, let's not forget that the water resources assumed to exist in the permadark craters are ALSO largely at or near the poles. That matters.
As far as South Pole ownership: no, nobody OWNS the south pole (mainly due to the 1959 Antarctic treaty - note that doesn't stop many countries from CLAIMING parts of the continent...), but last time I checked, Amundson-Scott station is pretty damn permanent. Thus my point of 'de facto' ownership (as opposed to de jure).
If you're a fan, why would you want to dumb-down My Little Pony?
Back in the day, when Lucas was just a filmmaker, Star Wars was conceived literally as "a cowboy western in space".
It was SUPPOSED to be action-packed and a little cheesy, with hammy 2d archetypes for characters...
The way that this subsequently has ended up hallowed in some peoples' minds (including Lucas, who never has apparently missed a step on his own hagiography) does a disservice to what it was really intended to be.
Before anyone acts surprised, understand that the light bulb manufacturers were one of the most comprehensive, archetypal cartels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's a perfect, comprehensive example of such behavior: controlled pricing, customers, regions, planned obsolescence (and agreed-upon 'freeze' on tech development) and even penalty payments for violation of the agreement.
Nothing really changes. The moment they sense they can get away with something, they will.
Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution, includes the Treaty Clause, which empowers the President of the United States to propose and chiefly negotiate agreements, between the United States and other countries, which become treaties between the United States and other countries (only) after the advice and consent of a supermajority of the United States Senate.
In short, if it's an actual, binding treaty, the President must have the Senate approve it. This is a clear and deliberate constraint on Presidential power imposed by the US Constitution.
If it's in any way binding in international law, it's a treaty.
Ergo: it's either meaningless or a dead-letter, no matter what the suits say.
I'd actually disagree.
There is a tangible benefit as substantial as having a coaling station on the coast of Africa was in the 19th century, or having an unsinkable aircraft carrier called Hawaii or Diego Garcia today: the poles.
There are precisely 2 points on the moon that have (basically) uninterrupted line-of-sight to earth AND line of sight to the sun (ie power). Whoever gets there, and plants at least a basic base there, has a de-facto ownership based on occupancy.
Short of ejecting them by violence, that's forever. That's pretty important.
That sound you just heard was the Screen Actors' Guild shitting their pants.
Expect soon to see lobbyists' tame legislators writing laws prohibiting this.
If the premise of the study is to highlight the risks of near stellar neighbors and cluttered neighborhoods, of COURSE the conclusion will be that remote systems are 'safer'.
This is like asking a cancer doctor where it's safest to live, and getting the answer "in a sealed lead-lined vault"....yes, disregarding the need for air, water, and food, and only focusing on the cancer risk, that's probably great.
While we simply don't KNOW the primary drivers of life generation (or the Drake equation would be a lot less hand-waving), and while yes, there's a danger of nearby stellar events, one might also consider:
- our solar system didn't just appear ex nihilo: the heavier elements present suggest that our system formed from nova or supernova remnants. A more cluttered stellar neighborhood is going to have more of such events. While these events would be indeed dangerous (likely exterminatory) for nearby life, life might regrow with such staggering frequency that the stellar scales are outmatched
- radiation: dangerous, sure, but we exist because of mutations. LIFE is based on mutation. (And hell, there's persuasive evidence here on earth that living with higher level of background radioactivity actually increases life span; then again, that could also be a raised average due to selective weeding by same.) A higher-radiation environment is not necessarily inherently bad for life, and may actually accelerate the mutative processes.
These are just a couple of reasons that inner regions might be better. A lot of it is simply guesswork at this point.
...installing this comprehensive necessary patch DOES actually also install Win10 automatically.
Sorry.*
-MS
*not really.
I've always wondered why, for the bomb-truck application, it wasn't easier to modify civilian jets that are already supremely optimized for fuel consumption, flyability, modern systems, etc.
It's not like the B52 is a wonder of modern engineering, it's literally just a high-flying pickup truck.
The Mars Rovers certainly qualify.
Sounds interesting.
Would be great if they said:
- how it worked
- did it work?
- what speeds did they achieve
- driver's opinions
- surprises?
- how did they cope with in-race obstacles? Could they just drive over them?
- same with the other car, a HUGE part of racing is positioning...in this could they just drive through the other car?
BUT THEY DON'T
Worthless fucking promo video.
Seriously, it's his money. He can donate it, bury it, burn it, or turn it into little paper pterodactyls.
For the people insisting he should have more tax liability, that's ridiculous. His wealth came largely from the internet which yes, was a government-built thing. But
a) everyone pays already for their internet connection
b) Facebook has by now probably paid hundreds of millions of $ for their internet connection
The internet is PAID-FOR already.
To assert that he should pay more is comparable to you and I betting privately on a football game, but saying that the winner should give some of the wager to the football team.
LOL Rage much?
I never asserted it was clickbait.
It was a nicely done piece of data-generation, with an overwordy, wandering, and foggy summation.
Pretty classic sort of thing you'd see from a data-driven techy: +1 for great data, clever collection, and -5 for shitty presentation.
What you call a short attention span, I'd call being respectful of people's time; not everyone has time to churn through reams of raw data and "look at how clever I was" backstage details. Some people just would like to see the results. And yes, some were summarized, but I felt I could do it better.
And it's not like I was routing his clicks to my website or some crap. I fucking posted that link to his study to EN world, D&D 5e reddit, and a number of other smaller gaming website - again, heedless of the clicks, but because his study was INTERESTING.
Some of us don't give a flying shit who gets the clicks.