You say it has nothing to do with truth, and everything do to with trust. But how do we decide whom to trust? Putting your trust in people without any rational justification is as good a definition of stupidity as any.
Science is always funded by organizations with an agenda. Scientists themselves have agendas. But science is, at its heart, a way to find truth despite our agendas. The controlled experiment, the testable hypothesis, the double-blind study, are all techniques to prevent our biases from determining the answer.
If you refuse to accept scientific results because they *might* be biased, you're either choosing to believe ideas that are *definitely* biased, or you don't believe anything at all. Neither is good for you.
Yes. With a caveat: that doesn't mean we should stand aside entirely. We should use our wealth to help implement their decisions, but we can't decide for them.
Every place on Earth with the capacity to hold more people is already up to its ass in people who really don't want new neighbors. US immigration law is a pretty good example of this.
And even if you could knock down barriers to immigration, it's not enough to move someone from point A to point B: they need a home when they get there. If you build 'em something cheap on land nobody's using, you get a refugee camp or ghetto society. If you integrate them into the culture of the new place, you gotta pay for prime real estate. The cost will be many $trillion.
"Just move" works for individuals, but it doesn't scale up to billions very easily.
This whole thread is up to its ass in imperialist, racist white privilege. You are not some great white savior, who with his superior intellect knows what's best for all the poor dark races of the world. (And if you're one of the 2% of Slashdot readers who's not a white male, my point still holds.)
No matter how much you've read about Africa, you don't have the expertise to decide for them that one form of fertilizer is better than another. You don't get to decide whether they'd be better off being "exploited" by big business or left to fend for themselves. You don't get to decide whether food security is more or less urgent than contraception.
That's not to say that you should do nothing, though. Your wealth grants you educational advantages: you can provide information. Tell folks in Africa what their options are, brainstorm new ideas (like this one). Your wealth grants you logistical advantages: you can help to implement the solutions they decide they like.
If Blackboard took some of the money they spend buying up open-source competitors and used it to make a product that didn't suck, they wouldn't be gasping for air.
The college I teach at switched from Blackboard to Moodle a few years ago, and it's been glorious. Better for students, better for professors, better for administrators, better for the budget. We administer it ourselves, and switching from "supported" to "do-it-yourself" software actually *reduced* the time our techs spend with administrative tasks.
The wind pushes *much* harder on a turbine than on the oil rig -- getting pushed on by the wind is what a turbine is designed to do. You can anchor one in deep water, but it's not cheap. Wind turbines cost a few $million, while a deepwater oil platform is worth about half a $billion:
So you're trying to solve a more difficult engineering problem with a tiny fraction of the budget. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it ain't trivial.
"Hey, why pay for news when there's perfectly good free news?"
So long as good news is available for free, nobody recognizes its value, so nobody will pay for it. But good news does cost money. A lot of money. Right now, that cost is being bankrolled by investors and the gradually-depleting capital held by news companies.
But a day will come when there will be no good free news. There will only be shitty free news -- glorified advertising that only says what it's being paid to say. I predict that for a long while, nobody will notice. But eventually, when your city council starts selling eminent domain power to the highest bidder, when your kid comes home from school and his only textbook is a Bible, when your federal taxes triple to pay for a war you never even heard about, you will be willing to pay for your news.
Let's just hope journalism is still legal when that happens.
I'm from southeast Massachusetts, and I agree with the authors: the east coast is the best location. Here's why: 10 miles offshore from Cape Cod, the water is 25 feet deep. 10 miles offshore of Los Angeles, the water is 2000 feet deep.
The water in this particular spot is 20 feet deep. If you go 12 miles offshore from Cape Cod, it's around 80 feet deep in most places. You can build wind turbines in deep water, but it's much more difficult and expensive.
The base load problem is a myth. It's an artifact of the fact that today, renewables are a small fraction of the total power stream. If you have a diverse enough set of large enough, widely-spaced enough power sources, you can ensure that at least a few are producing enough power to run the country. Any minor gaps can be filled in by voluntary demand reduction and intermittent / pumped hydro.
Internet pirates keep thinking of extranational territory as some sort of promised land of milk and honey: if they can just get their data outside national boundaries, they'll be golden. They are wrong. A series of international treaties ensures that your vehicle always falls under the jurisdiction of one state or another. The Law of the Sea says that ships fall under the jurisdiction of the nation whose flag they fly, and failing to fly a flag is a domestic crime. The Outer Space Treaty says that spacecraft fall under the jurisdiction of the nation that launched them. And the Tokyo Convention says that crimes aboard aircraft fall under the jurisdiction of the nation they're registered in. (And failure to register an aircraft is typically a domestic crime.) Not sure the Tokyo Convention applies specifically to copyright violations or to unmanned aircraft, but at this point it's a universal international relations principle: your citizens' vehicle, your nation's problem.
Give up your dreams of escaping state control by leaving state borders. Your only hope is to fight within the state, rather than trying to run from it.
You can't count the life of a project from the date someone first thought of it. By that measure, the Apollo moon landing project took at least 100 years. You should start counting from the date significant funding began, which in this case is 2010. Not bad, compared to, say, Boston's Big Dig.
Ugh, terrible journalism, they've buried the lede. You have to read to the very last sentence to figure out that it's a heavy commuter rail corridor, not a subway, bus, or car tunnel. Maybe this is obvious to British readers, but I found it confusing as hell.
I thought of that before posting. Since this is the only thing I've ever said or done that would put me on said list, I think I've got solid grounds for a civil rights lawsuit, and I'm ready and willing to pursue one. And if I do lose, Slashdot's going down too: how's it going to look if a site devoted to online rights rats out one of its users?
Global Entry *and* Precheck? This is a fantastic 2-for-1 deal! Now, when I'm flying into the US to bomb a domestic flight, I don't have to wait in line at customs, I can just hail a cab and I'm off to Home Depot for box cutters and fertilizer. America sure is the land of convenience!
For those playing at home: network tracking and identification isn't enough to even grant a search warrant for theft of physical property, but it's enough evidence to convict in a case of "theft" of intellectual property.
I worked it out: the magnetic fields in the vicinity of the spacecraft are in the ballpark of 0.2 Tesla. This is a bit less than your average MRI machine. If you try to carry *anything* ferromagnetic in your launch vehicle, or build it out of ferrous metals, it will run your whole day.
Yep. In layman's terms, imagine a row of many dish antennas sending data to an identical row of dish receivers. You can send a lot more data than just one dish, right? But think about the problems: as you try to make the dishes smaller, the signal beams spread out and overlap multiple antennas, causing interference and crosstalk. Same happens if the dishes aren't aligned exactly right, or the signals bounce off walls on the way.
Wrap the whole thing around in a circle and apply a little math hocus pocus, and you've got the "Twisted wave" antenna. Same advantage, same problems.
Yes. It's easy to get lost in the weeds when talking about rotational systems, especially when light is involved. Here's an analogue for what I think is going on:
Suppose I had a rectangular grid of directional transmitting antennas, and a rectangular grid of directional receivers. If I point one antenna array at the other, I can send data between each pair. With enough antennas and receivers, I can send arbitrarily large amounts of data using a fixed bandwidth. But there are problems: if I don't have really good directional antennas (which must be large), signals from one Tx-Rx pair will bleed onto nearby channels. If I mis-align the antennas, or have stray reflections, same problem. And eventually, I can't afford that many antennas.
This "twisted wave" thing is exactly the same concept, wrapped round in a spiral. It too will require large, expensive antennas with many components to distinguish each beam pattern. It too will have potential crosstalk problems if the antennas aren't large enough. It too will have to deal with crosstalk when the antennas are misaligned, or signals are reflected en route.
If you're after bulk metal, you don't care about travel time, you care about trip *energy*. The asteroid belt is energetically "closer" to Earth orbit than the surface of the moon. Plus, some asteroids have iron in metallic form that doesn't need smelting -- saving you even more energy.
In the U.S., cattle emit about 5.5 million metric tons of methane per year into the atmosphere, accounting for 20% of U.S. methane emissions.
Because of their biology, cattle are the predominant source: landfills, wastewater treatment, etc. add up to a roughly equal amount, so let's say 12 million metric tons of methane from all biological sources total.
All the farts in the nation add up to just 3% of the amount of natural gas we burn. In fact, in the US cows release less methane than the amount that accidentally leaks from natural gas pipes!
Slashdot Mirror
You say it has nothing to do with truth, and everything do to with trust. But how do we decide whom to trust? Putting your trust in people without any rational justification is as good a definition of stupidity as any.
Science is always funded by organizations with an agenda. Scientists themselves have agendas. But science is, at its heart, a way to find truth despite our agendas. The controlled experiment, the testable hypothesis, the double-blind study, are all techniques to prevent our biases from determining the answer.
If you refuse to accept scientific results because they *might* be biased, you're either choosing to believe ideas that are *definitely* biased, or you don't believe anything at all. Neither is good for you.
Yes. With a caveat: that doesn't mean we should stand aside entirely. We should use our wealth to help implement their decisions, but we can't decide for them.
Every place on Earth with the capacity to hold more people is already up to its ass in people who really don't want new neighbors. US immigration law is a pretty good example of this.
And even if you could knock down barriers to immigration, it's not enough to move someone from point A to point B: they need a home when they get there. If you build 'em something cheap on land nobody's using, you get a refugee camp or ghetto society. If you integrate them into the culture of the new place, you gotta pay for prime real estate. The cost will be many $trillion.
"Just move" works for individuals, but it doesn't scale up to billions very easily.
This whole thread is up to its ass in imperialist, racist white privilege. You are not some great white savior, who with his superior intellect knows what's best for all the poor dark races of the world. (And if you're one of the 2% of Slashdot readers who's not a white male, my point still holds.)
No matter how much you've read about Africa, you don't have the expertise to decide for them that one form of fertilizer is better than another. You don't get to decide whether they'd be better off being "exploited" by big business or left to fend for themselves. You don't get to decide whether food security is more or less urgent than contraception.
That's not to say that you should do nothing, though. Your wealth grants you educational advantages: you can provide information. Tell folks in Africa what their options are, brainstorm new ideas (like this one). Your wealth grants you logistical advantages: you can help to implement the solutions they decide they like.
But they decide, not you.
If Blackboard took some of the money they spend buying up open-source competitors and used it to make a product that didn't suck, they wouldn't be gasping for air.
The college I teach at switched from Blackboard to Moodle a few years ago, and it's been glorious. Better for students, better for professors, better for administrators, better for the budget. We administer it ourselves, and switching from "supported" to "do-it-yourself" software actually *reduced* the time our techs spend with administrative tasks.
The wind pushes *much* harder on a turbine than on the oil rig -- getting pushed on by the wind is what a turbine is designed to do. You can anchor one in deep water, but it's not cheap. Wind turbines cost a few $million, while a deepwater oil platform is worth about half a $billion:
So you're trying to solve a more difficult engineering problem with a tiny fraction of the budget. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it ain't trivial.
Not my pitch. Mine ends with the punchline: "and we would do it today, if only fossil fuel weren't so cheap."
We can argue all day about "political will", but I can say with absolute certainty that fossil fuel won't always be this cheap.
"Hey, why pay for news when there's perfectly good free news?"
So long as good news is available for free, nobody recognizes its value, so nobody will pay for it. But good news does cost money. A lot of money. Right now, that cost is being bankrolled by investors and the gradually-depleting capital held by news companies.
But a day will come when there will be no good free news. There will only be shitty free news -- glorified advertising that only says what it's being paid to say. I predict that for a long while, nobody will notice. But eventually, when your city council starts selling eminent domain power to the highest bidder, when your kid comes home from school and his only textbook is a Bible, when your federal taxes triple to pay for a war you never even heard about, you will be willing to pay for your news.
Let's just hope journalism is still legal when that happens.
I'm from southeast Massachusetts, and I agree with the authors: the east coast is the best location. Here's why: 10 miles offshore from Cape Cod, the water is 25 feet deep. 10 miles offshore of Los Angeles, the water is 2000 feet deep.
The water in this particular spot is 20 feet deep. If you go 12 miles offshore from Cape Cod, it's around 80 feet deep in most places. You can build wind turbines in deep water, but it's much more difficult and expensive.
The base load problem is a myth. It's an artifact of the fact that today, renewables are a small fraction of the total power stream. If you have a diverse enough set of large enough, widely-spaced enough power sources, you can ensure that at least a few are producing enough power to run the country. Any minor gaps can be filled in by voluntary demand reduction and intermittent / pumped hydro.
Internet pirates keep thinking of extranational territory as some sort of promised land of milk and honey: if they can just get their data outside national boundaries, they'll be golden. They are wrong. A series of international treaties ensures that your vehicle always falls under the jurisdiction of one state or another. The Law of the Sea says that ships fall under the jurisdiction of the nation whose flag they fly, and failing to fly a flag is a domestic crime. The Outer Space Treaty says that spacecraft fall under the jurisdiction of the nation that launched them. And the Tokyo Convention says that crimes aboard aircraft fall under the jurisdiction of the nation they're registered in. (And failure to register an aircraft is typically a domestic crime.) Not sure the Tokyo Convention applies specifically to copyright violations or to unmanned aircraft, but at this point it's a universal international relations principle: your citizens' vehicle, your nation's problem.
Give up your dreams of escaping state control by leaving state borders. Your only hope is to fight within the state, rather than trying to run from it.
You can't count the life of a project from the date someone first thought of it. By that measure, the Apollo moon landing project took at least 100 years. You should start counting from the date significant funding began, which in this case is 2010. Not bad, compared to, say, Boston's Big Dig.
Ugh, terrible journalism, they've buried the lede. You have to read to the very last sentence to figure out that it's a heavy commuter rail corridor, not a subway, bus, or car tunnel. Maybe this is obvious to British readers, but I found it confusing as hell.
I thought of that before posting. Since this is the only thing I've ever said or done that would put me on said list, I think I've got solid grounds for a civil rights lawsuit, and I'm ready and willing to pursue one. And if I do lose, Slashdot's going down too: how's it going to look if a site devoted to online rights rats out one of its users?
Global Entry *and* Precheck? This is a fantastic 2-for-1 deal! Now, when I'm flying into the US to bomb a domestic flight, I don't have to wait in line at customs, I can just hail a cab and I'm off to Home Depot for box cutters and fertilizer. America sure is the land of convenience!
Nope, they prosecute IP violations based on network traffic in the Netherlands too. (Any Dutch readers, feel free to shoot me down here.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay#Netherlands
For those playing at home: network tracking and identification isn't enough to even grant a search warrant for theft of physical property, but it's enough evidence to convict in a case of "theft" of intellectual property.
Double standards much?
I worked it out: the magnetic fields in the vicinity of the spacecraft are in the ballpark of 0.2 Tesla. This is a bit less than your average MRI machine. If you try to carry *anything* ferromagnetic in your launch vehicle, or build it out of ferrous metals, it will run your whole day.
In summary: after 500 posts, Winston Churchill wins the thread.
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2707959&cid=39249145
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2707959&cid=39249167
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2707959&cid=39247993
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2707959&cid=39249515
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2707959&cid=39247601
Yep. In layman's terms, imagine a row of many dish antennas sending data to an identical row of dish receivers. You can send a lot more data than just one dish, right? But think about the problems: as you try to make the dishes smaller, the signal beams spread out and overlap multiple antennas, causing interference and crosstalk. Same happens if the dishes aren't aligned exactly right, or the signals bounce off walls on the way.
Wrap the whole thing around in a circle and apply a little math hocus pocus, and you've got the "Twisted wave" antenna. Same advantage, same problems.
Yes. It's easy to get lost in the weeds when talking about rotational systems, especially when light is involved. Here's an analogue for what I think is going on:
Suppose I had a rectangular grid of directional transmitting antennas, and a rectangular grid of directional receivers. If I point one antenna array at the other, I can send data between each pair. With enough antennas and receivers, I can send arbitrarily large amounts of data using a fixed bandwidth. But there are problems: if I don't have really good directional antennas (which must be large), signals from one Tx-Rx pair will bleed onto nearby channels. If I mis-align the antennas, or have stray reflections, same problem. And eventually, I can't afford that many antennas.
This "twisted wave" thing is exactly the same concept, wrapped round in a spiral. It too will require large, expensive antennas with many components to distinguish each beam pattern. It too will have potential crosstalk problems if the antennas aren't large enough. It too will have to deal with crosstalk when the antennas are misaligned, or signals are reflected en route.
If you're after bulk metal, you don't care about travel time, you care about trip *energy*. The asteroid belt is energetically "closer" to Earth orbit than the surface of the moon. Plus, some asteroids have iron in metallic form that doesn't need smelting -- saving you even more energy.
No. Not even remotely endless.
Because of their biology, cattle are the predominant source: landfills, wastewater treatment, etc. add up to a roughly equal amount, so let's say 12 million metric tons of methane from all biological sources total.
In contrast, the US consumes about 23 trillion cubic feet of natural gas a year, which works out to473 million metric tons/year.
All the farts in the nation add up to just 3% of the amount of natural gas we burn. In fact, in the US cows release less methane than the amount that accidentally leaks from natural gas pipes!