The photo you linked to is the Columbia Hills Complex, named after the seven astronauts lost when the Columbia space shuttle was destroyed. In my opinion, such names are far better than "mystical sounding" names based on some dead mythology; instead, they honor those who gave their lives pursuing space exploration. If and when humans reach Mars... which names do you think they will find more meaningful?
The article you linked to is about funding for education, and a lot of it is about K-12 and not college. Either way, I agree that schools could use educational money better.
But the funding from DARPA and other agencies getting slashed has nothing to do with education. This is research money, allocated to scientists at universities which do basic research as well as educate. Those activities are almost exclusively funded by specific grants, with no connection to overall educational funding. Slashing this money won't encourage schools to become more efficient; all it'll do is hurt working researchers, and cause the US to fall further behind in science.
Both Stargate SG-1 and Star Trek (not Enterprise) do a pretty decent job of interesting kids in science, in that they put together drama and excitement with just enough real theory to get some of the audience to look further. Science fiction in general was a major motivator for many scientists and engineers, and I have a feeling that the decrease in science interest could at least be correlated to a decrease in SF quality.
Personally I prefer Stargate to Star Trek, though. A little more believable, a better story arc... plus Samantha Carter is a hell of a lot hotter than Scotty.
Microsoft agrees it murdered OS/2, and did lots of other nasty things. They also agreed to give IBM $850 million, but managed to talk IBM into taking a tiny chunk of it in Microsoft software.
This hurts Microsoft, no doubt about it; and some chunk of IBM's workforce which hasn't yet installed the latest MS Office (or Halo?) gets to do it for free...
It really depends on what you're looking for. Science fiction can be divided (very roughly) into "hard" and "soft" SF: the hard being that based only on current science or its closest extrapolations, and soft being more free-ranging, and less concerned with detailed explanation of the science involved. You might also divide it into the "probable" as opposed to the merely "possible."
So, it depends what kind of story you want to tell. Hard SF is often much more restrictive: no galaxy-spanning civilizations, ESP, or conveniently human-shaped aliens. However, it's a wonderful format for exploring in detail the manner in which changes in science and technology change our lives, and teaching the readers more about what our world actually is in a way less boring than a textbook. Soft SF, conversely, is often more focused on the characters than the science. It's not about how the flying car works and what effect it will have on society, but more about how an individual person will interact with their much cooler flying car, and what sorts of adventures they can have with it. Overall the difference is a matter of taste, or the mood of the moment: I personally enjoy both kinds of story immensely.
No matter what the style, however, science fiction always has the same purpose. It's about telling stories that re-introduce us to our world, and inspire a sense of wonder and a new interest in what's around us. Whether you do that by exploring the rise of a flying car industry, or what happens when George Jetson crashes into a tree, doesn't matter so much as the fact that at the end of the story, some kid is going to want to build that car.
The OO.o people had a decision to make about how to build in the new functionality they wanted, and they chose Java for purely technical reasons. You don't like it? Don't use it! Find something else, or make use of the fact that it is open source and fork it.
But stop complaining about it, or acting like they had some obligation to develop their software according to your philosophy. Their project may succeed, or it may fail because of its supporters leaving it--but be content to let it play out without screaming about it.
Unfortunately, a lot of companies see very little value in any sort of basic research; any R&D being done is with the specific goal of creating a new product. Which is fine for them, I suppose... except a lot of their applied research has to build on previous research done just for the hell of it. "Useless" research has a tendancy to become essential in ways not expected before.
AFAIK, the government is the only very large organization willing to spend money on research which has no immediate economic value. I'd be thrilled to see private organizations step up to the plate, and throw money at things which won't help their profits next quarter... but I wouldn't bet on it happening any time soon.
Can we please send more probes and people there first? Give the scientists fifty years or so, build a picture of the original Mars so we understand it all first.
Then go wild. Creating a new Earth would be a huge achievement, but it'd be a shame to destroy the place before we knew the first thing about it.
A year ago I lost my MS Office installation....
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OpenOffice.org Is 4 Today
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Last year I had a hard drive crash shortly after heading up to school for the year. I had to start over with a completely new system, reinstalling everything... and discovered that I had left my Office CDs at home, with a paper due the next week. So I installed OpenOffice as a stopgap measure, figuring that I'd write this paper with it and then retrieve my Office CDs when I went home for Thanksgiving.
It's been more than a year now, and still I've had no need to reinstall MS Office. OpenOffice does everything I need it to.
And your point is what? The people who got killed by police in Tiananmen, or East Germany, or the Soviet Union also violated the laws of their lands.
Your point really isn't valid here. Protesters in those countries were killed because of their actions, essentially making their relatively minor crimes into death-penalty offenses. In the US, however, pushing through a police barricade gets you arrested--a perfectly appropriate action, given that authorities decided to preserve the security of the event. They broke the law, they acted in a manner which compromised clear security boundaries, and so they were taken into custody.
Now, you can of course argue that a police barricade was not necessary or appropriate to a presidential debate, and I'd probably agree with you. But you can't compare two men, however prominent, being arrested when they crossed clear barricades, to the disproportionate use of force in massacres such as Tiananmen Square.
Food was grown by humankind for an awfully long time and rather successfully before the advent of pesticides and herbicides. We don't need that poison on our foods, on our soil or in our water supplies. And we don't need Frankenfood either.
How big was the population in the time before we had those chemicals? How well-fed were the people? How much of the food was spoiled or contaminated by natural agents, making it impossible or harmful to consume? What makes you think you can make those changes and maintain the current levels of production?
As for "Frankenfood"... please. Forget about name-calling and slogans, and bring in the science about why you think GM food is so dangerous. Fear-mongering is just pointless, not to mention pathetic.
What you're missing here is how big this sail would have to be. To get a meaningful acceleration, you'd probably have a big, flimsy sail several thousand square kilometers in area; and once you have that, who cares if you lose a few square kilometers now and then?
The other factor is that once you get outside the solar system, the matter density should go way down; not much dust, virtually no chance of large rocks. Sure, they're out there... but odds are that you'll never hit anything capable of taking out a major percentage of the sail.
Most of what you asked for is no where near being available. Implanted chips? Regrowing limbs on the fly? The ability to "eat anything"? Even conceding that it's possible (which I don't for all of them), all of this is decades in our technological future.
Sure, "a bunch of neato armor bits and some computer stuff" is the easy way out. But it's what we can have now (or relatively soon), and at least some of it looks useful. So stop griping; while this is nowhere what we need, it's potentially on the right track.
(I do agree, though, that good food would be a plus.)
It depends what you mean by "bulk".
on
Dell CEO Tells All
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· Score: 2, Interesting
When he said "The bulk of our employees are still in the U.S.", what he may have been trying to say is "We still employ more people in the U.S. than any other single country." A plurality, not a majority.
Quite shaky ground, I know. But it means he may not have been flat out, intentionally lying... just being very sneaky and misleading.
There's a University competition sponsored by Ford and the DOE to build environment-friendly, fuel-efficient vehicles called
FutureTruck. The catch? They have to modify Ford Explorers, not create go-cart sized vehicles, maintain existing performance, and remain fairly manufacturable. (In other words, Ford is using college teams for their R&D.)
There've been amazing results: the winning team, from University of Wisconsin Madison, built a hybrid Explorer that got somewhere over 40 mpg. (Different sources disagree as to the exact number.) For reference, stock Explorers are rated at merely 15/19 mpg for city and freeway driving. They also scored well in emissions and made a vehicle which could probably be manufactured and sold for about the same price as a stock vehicle.
So it's not 1700 mpg. It's still pretty darn impressive for an SUV!
Those searches worked for me, all fairly well. For the distros, all but Mandrake and Gentoo returned the main page first--and the first result for Gentoo is their store.
I thought what set Linux users apart was that they avoided using FUD?
It should. However, that necessarily mean you can set up a wireless network where a group of friends all shares a single connection to save money: most schools have a clause saying that only one person or computer may use a given connection. A group of twenty people tried that at my school: when the administration found out, they were all required to back pay for personal connections.
I wouldn't want to support a cancer victim support site with any advertisements! The examples you gave should not be accepting any ads, whereas Linux Today is a magazine! Magazines regularly take competitor's ads, and it makes no difference to the actual content.
I am guessing that the vast majority of people who use library PCs for internet access could reasonably get it (or, more accurately, already have it) in some other fashion at home, but prefer the coffeehouse / social aspect of being out of the house while doing their web surfing.
As someone who helped maintain the computers and network at a small public library, I can tell you that this is definitely not the case. There are certainly people who go to the library to be social, or just because of immediate convenience, but the majority are usually people who either can't afford a computer, or simply don't need Internet access often enough to justify the expense. But from time to time they do need to get online, to get information for which local sources can't provide enough depth, or is updated too often to keep up with books.
Attendance isn't the point, it's community access to information in any form. That's not just the books: it's the Internet, periodicals, and a place to coordinate with other people who have information you need. Example: our library had an "Ask A Lawyer" program and provided free access to a conference room for community groups to meet in. If the best way to get people information they need is the Internet, then a library needs that as much as they need books.
The problem is that the work that actually gets done, in materials or computing or other fields, isn't as "exciting" to the media as the fanciful ideas presented in Hollywood and science fiction. Why talk about a new kind of flat-panel display or the technology that will create your next computer, when you can shock the public into fearing tiny robots that will disassemble the world? I'm a big fan of science fiction, but I must admit that I'm incredibly disappointed in their portrayal of the field.
I'm a physics student myself, an undergrad doing some research which makes limited use of carbon nanotubes, and both of us probably got our real knowledge of nanotechnology from our classes and work in the field. With more applications in general use, the situation may improve, but the media definitely has to stop portraying fantasy as fact. Otherwise, real research could easily get a bad rep--there are already people calling for a ban on all nano research, including a lot of work which they don't understand is relatively harmless.
Nanotech does NOT mean just nanobots
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Nanotech or Nano-Not?
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· Score: 5, Informative
All the emphasis on the "potential dangers" of nanobots or "gray goo" just drives me nuts. Sure, the image of a nanobot doing manufacturing or curing cancer can be compelling, and also frightening. But not only are we no where near such technology, the fear of it stigmatizes genuine nanotech being done right now, which often has no relation to tiny robots.
Nanotechnology now means any process for determining structure or composition at a molecular scale. It means creating fuels or drugs with carefully selected chemical compositions. It means creating self-healing structure in which tears tend to seal simply because the material is made that way. It means making computer chips faster and smaller by growing very small features directly onto the chip, using molecular carbon or silicon.
These applications are much more real than self-replicating nanobots which can take over the world, and some of them could easily be on all our desks in five years. Do a Google search on Field
emission displays: new flat panel displays, as bright as a CRT display at a fraction of the power usage, with a better image and wider field of view than an LCD.
Could there be environmental dangers even in these applications? Sure, any new material has potential problems, and nanomaterials should be studied all the more closely because of our limited experience with them. But we're a long, long way from nanobots which can self-replicate and take over the world, and the nanotech industry as it stands now is no more dangerous than any other advanced materials.
Every time you try to use this on a different computer, you'll have to re-enter your preferences: with no login or registration, your preferences are no more than a cookie.
Not implying this is a huge problem, but it does have a downside.
Slashdot Mirror
The photo you linked to is the Columbia Hills Complex, named after the seven astronauts lost when the Columbia space shuttle was destroyed. In my opinion, such names are far better than "mystical sounding" names based on some dead mythology; instead, they honor those who gave their lives pursuing space exploration. If and when humans reach Mars... which names do you think they will find more meaningful?
The article you linked to is about funding for education, and a lot of it is about K-12 and not college. Either way, I agree that schools could use educational money better.
But the funding from DARPA and other agencies getting slashed has nothing to do with education. This is research money, allocated to scientists at universities which do basic research as well as educate. Those activities are almost exclusively funded by specific grants, with no connection to overall educational funding. Slashing this money won't encourage schools to become more efficient; all it'll do is hurt working researchers, and cause the US to fall further behind in science.
Both Stargate SG-1 and Star Trek (not Enterprise) do a pretty decent job of interesting kids in science, in that they put together drama and excitement with just enough real theory to get some of the audience to look further. Science fiction in general was a major motivator for many scientists and engineers, and I have a feeling that the decrease in science interest could at least be correlated to a decrease in SF quality.
Personally I prefer Stargate to Star Trek, though. A little more believable, a better story arc... plus Samantha Carter is a hell of a lot hotter than Scotty.
Microsoft agrees it murdered OS/2, and did lots of other nasty things. They also agreed to give IBM $850 million, but managed to talk IBM into taking a tiny chunk of it in Microsoft software.
This hurts Microsoft, no doubt about it; and some chunk of IBM's workforce which hasn't yet installed the latest MS Office (or Halo?) gets to do it for free...
Also, it's sort of a paraphrase of a quote from the series... :-)
It really depends on what you're looking for. Science fiction can be divided (very roughly) into "hard" and "soft" SF: the hard being that based only on current science or its closest extrapolations, and soft being more free-ranging, and less concerned with detailed explanation of the science involved. You might also divide it into the "probable" as opposed to the merely "possible."
So, it depends what kind of story you want to tell. Hard SF is often much more restrictive: no galaxy-spanning civilizations, ESP, or conveniently human-shaped aliens. However, it's a wonderful format for exploring in detail the manner in which changes in science and technology change our lives, and teaching the readers more about what our world actually is in a way less boring than a textbook. Soft SF, conversely, is often more focused on the characters than the science. It's not about how the flying car works and what effect it will have on society, but more about how an individual person will interact with their much cooler flying car, and what sorts of adventures they can have with it. Overall the difference is a matter of taste, or the mood of the moment: I personally enjoy both kinds of story immensely.
No matter what the style, however, science fiction always has the same purpose. It's about telling stories that re-introduce us to our world, and inspire a sense of wonder and a new interest in what's around us. Whether you do that by exploring the rise of a flying car industry, or what happens when George Jetson crashes into a tree, doesn't matter so much as the fact that at the end of the story, some kid is going to want to build that car.
The OO.o people had a decision to make about how to build in the new functionality they wanted, and they chose Java for purely technical reasons. You don't like it? Don't use it! Find something else, or make use of the fact that it is open source and fork it.
But stop complaining about it, or acting like they had some obligation to develop their software according to your philosophy. Their project may succeed, or it may fail because of its supporters leaving it--but be content to let it play out without screaming about it.
Unfortunately, a lot of companies see very little value in any sort of basic research; any R&D being done is with the specific goal of creating a new product. Which is fine for them, I suppose... except a lot of their applied research has to build on previous research done just for the hell of it. "Useless" research has a tendancy to become essential in ways not expected before.
AFAIK, the government is the only very large organization willing to spend money on research which has no immediate economic value. I'd be thrilled to see private organizations step up to the plate, and throw money at things which won't help their profits next quarter... but I wouldn't bet on it happening any time soon.
Can we please send more probes and people there first? Give the scientists fifty years or so, build a picture of the original Mars so we understand it all first.
Then go wild. Creating a new Earth would be a huge achievement, but it'd be a shame to destroy the place before we knew the first thing about it.
Last year I had a hard drive crash shortly after heading up to school for the year. I had to start over with a completely new system, reinstalling everything... and discovered that I had left my Office CDs at home, with a paper due the next week. So I installed OpenOffice as a stopgap measure, figuring that I'd write this paper with it and then retrieve my Office CDs when I went home for Thanksgiving.
It's been more than a year now, and still I've had no need to reinstall MS Office. OpenOffice does everything I need it to.
And your point is what? The people who got killed by police in Tiananmen, or East Germany, or the Soviet Union also violated the laws of their lands.
Your point really isn't valid here. Protesters in those countries were killed because of their actions, essentially making their relatively minor crimes into death-penalty offenses. In the US, however, pushing through a police barricade gets you arrested--a perfectly appropriate action, given that authorities decided to preserve the security of the event. They broke the law, they acted in a manner which compromised clear security boundaries, and so they were taken into custody.
Now, you can of course argue that a police barricade was not necessary or appropriate to a presidential debate, and I'd probably agree with you. But you can't compare two men, however prominent, being arrested when they crossed clear barricades, to the disproportionate use of force in massacres such as Tiananmen Square.
Food was grown by humankind for an awfully long time and rather successfully before the advent of pesticides and herbicides. We don't need that poison on our foods, on our soil or in our water supplies. And we don't need Frankenfood either.
How big was the population in the time before we had those chemicals? How well-fed were the people? How much of the food was spoiled or contaminated by natural agents, making it impossible or harmful to consume? What makes you think you can make those changes and maintain the current levels of production?
As for "Frankenfood"... please. Forget about name-calling and slogans, and bring in the science about why you think GM food is so dangerous. Fear-mongering is just pointless, not to mention pathetic.
The September issue of Physics Today also had a GLAT insert. I guess Google's trying for all sorts of backgrounds...
What you're missing here is how big this sail would have to be. To get a meaningful acceleration, you'd probably have a big, flimsy sail several thousand square kilometers in area; and once you have that, who cares if you lose a few square kilometers now and then?
The other factor is that once you get outside the solar system, the matter density should go way down; not much dust, virtually no chance of large rocks. Sure, they're out there... but odds are that you'll never hit anything capable of taking out a major percentage of the sail.
Most of what you asked for is no where near being available. Implanted chips? Regrowing limbs on the fly? The ability to "eat anything"? Even conceding that it's possible (which I don't for all of them), all of this is decades in our technological future.
Sure, "a bunch of neato armor bits and some computer stuff" is the easy way out. But it's what we can have now (or relatively soon), and at least some of it looks useful. So stop griping; while this is nowhere what we need, it's potentially on the right track.
(I do agree, though, that good food would be a plus.)
When he said "The bulk of our employees are still in the U.S.", what he may have been trying to say is "We still employ more people in the U.S. than any other single country." A plurality, not a majority.
Quite shaky ground, I know. But it means he may not have been flat out, intentionally lying... just being very sneaky and misleading.
There's a University competition sponsored by Ford and the DOE to build environment-friendly, fuel-efficient vehicles called FutureTruck. The catch? They have to modify Ford Explorers, not create go-cart sized vehicles, maintain existing performance, and remain fairly manufacturable. (In other words, Ford is using college teams for their R&D.)
There've been amazing results: the winning team, from University of Wisconsin Madison, built a hybrid Explorer that got somewhere over 40 mpg. (Different sources disagree as to the exact number.) For reference, stock Explorers are rated at merely 15/19 mpg for city and freeway driving. They also scored well in emissions and made a vehicle which could probably be manufactured and sold for about the same price as a stock vehicle.
So it's not 1700 mpg. It's still pretty darn impressive for an SUV!
Those searches worked for me, all fairly well. For the distros, all but Mandrake and Gentoo returned the main page first--and the first result for Gentoo is their store.
I thought what set Linux users apart was that they avoided using FUD?
It should. However, that necessarily mean you can set up a wireless network where a group of friends all shares a single connection to save money: most schools have a clause saying that only one person or computer may use a given connection. A group of twenty people tried that at my school: when the administration found out, they were all required to back pay for personal connections.
I wouldn't want to support a cancer victim support site with any advertisements! The examples you gave should not be accepting any ads, whereas Linux Today is a magazine! Magazines regularly take competitor's ads, and it makes no difference to the actual content.
I am guessing that the vast majority of people who use library PCs for internet access could reasonably get it (or, more accurately, already have it) in some other fashion at home, but prefer the coffeehouse / social aspect of being out of the house while doing their web surfing.
As someone who helped maintain the computers and network at a small public library, I can tell you that this is definitely not the case. There are certainly people who go to the library to be social, or just because of immediate convenience, but the majority are usually people who either can't afford a computer, or simply don't need Internet access often enough to justify the expense. But from time to time they do need to get online, to get information for which local sources can't provide enough depth, or is updated too often to keep up with books.
Attendance isn't the point, it's community access to information in any form. That's not just the books: it's the Internet, periodicals, and a place to coordinate with other people who have information you need. Example: our library had an "Ask A Lawyer" program and provided free access to a conference room for community groups to meet in. If the best way to get people information they need is the Internet, then a library needs that as much as they need books.
they had an airborne five-megawatt system at Pacific Tech, though all it was good for was making popcorn.
The problem is that the work that actually gets done, in materials or computing or other fields, isn't as "exciting" to the media as the fanciful ideas presented in Hollywood and science fiction. Why talk about a new kind of flat-panel display or the technology that will create your next computer, when you can shock the public into fearing tiny robots that will disassemble the world? I'm a big fan of science fiction, but I must admit that I'm incredibly disappointed in their portrayal of the field.
I'm a physics student myself, an undergrad doing some research which makes limited use of carbon nanotubes, and both of us probably got our real knowledge of nanotechnology from our classes and work in the field. With more applications in general use, the situation may improve, but the media definitely has to stop portraying fantasy as fact. Otherwise, real research could easily get a bad rep--there are already people calling for a ban on all nano research, including a lot of work which they don't understand is relatively harmless.
All the emphasis on the "potential dangers" of nanobots or "gray goo" just drives me nuts. Sure, the image of a nanobot doing manufacturing or curing cancer can be compelling, and also frightening. But not only are we no where near such technology, the fear of it stigmatizes genuine nanotech being done right now, which often has no relation to tiny robots.
Nanotechnology now means any process for determining structure or composition at a molecular scale. It means creating fuels or drugs with carefully selected chemical compositions. It means creating self-healing structure in which tears tend to seal simply because the material is made that way. It means making computer chips faster and smaller by growing very small features directly onto the chip, using molecular carbon or silicon.
These applications are much more real than self-replicating nanobots which can take over the world, and some of them could easily be on all our desks in five years. Do a Google search on Field emission displays: new flat panel displays, as bright as a CRT display at a fraction of the power usage, with a better image and wider field of view than an LCD.
Could there be environmental dangers even in these applications? Sure, any new material has potential problems, and nanomaterials should be studied all the more closely because of our limited experience with them. But we're a long, long way from nanobots which can self-replicate and take over the world, and the nanotech industry as it stands now is no more dangerous than any other advanced materials.
Every time you try to use this on a different computer, you'll have to re-enter your preferences: with no login or registration, your preferences are no more than a cookie.
Not implying this is a huge problem, but it does have a downside.