I thought it was pretty much settled? Thin atmosphere, solar radiation disassociated water into hydrogen and oxygen, the hydrogen left, the oxygen combined with various minerals. At least, that's what I had learned...
For our lifetime, or our kids lifetimes, absolutely... 500 years from now... I'm placing no bets.
The atmosphere that is a hundredth of Earth's, where surface gasses evaporate?
Anyone hoping to terraform a planet overnight would be disappointed. An atmosphere would have to be established before the water to prevent it all being stripped away in the first place. If you want water to stay put on the surface, you need an atmosphere first.
This is a ridiculous idea. There is no way to transfer water to Mars from comets or asteroids that don't involve a massive transfer of kinetic energy at the same time as the comets arrive at the bottom of the Mars gravity well. It was a viable avenue to get water to the planet very early on in the planets history, but for terraforming purposes it's just not a solution. You'd be further ahead to send people down there with a thermos of coffee and a six pack of lager to piss all over everything.
You wouldn't have to crash them into the planet. Position them into close orbit and allow them to "burn up" in the atmosphere.
So, this would imply that we could never terraform Mars because it cannot maintain surface water.
We couldn't with today's technology, nor tomorrow's. Long term? Who knows. There is lots of water out in space. Many comets and asteroids contain bunches of it. If you could harvest them and send them to Mars- you could probably create temporary surface water... over the millennia it will sink into the planet again- you'd need to keep "topping it off". Losing water to space is a big problem too... you'd need to try and keep an atmosphere- again, you could probably create one, but need to keep "topping it off" over the millennia by pumping more gas out.
You can terraform Mars but it will revert back to it's current dead-state if you don't keep maintaining it. A bit like a field. You can plough a field and harvest wheat one year... the next it might self seed and have some coming back that you can harvest, the next a little less, the next a little less... eventually you're going to need to replough the field, rotate the crops, replant, etc, if you want that field to feed you.
Somehow young people have young people jobs and older people have older people jobs. I wonder what might it be that makes the difference?
Over half the people I have worked with during my career have been over 40. I've always been "the young guy" at every place I've been (until my current job) - here I'm average age... and not too far off 40 myself. To be honest, I'm not sure why there is so much age discrimination against older IT staff. Younger staff know how to do things; older staff know how AND WHY to do things. Your 50 year old may make twice as much as your 25 year old IT worker- but they'll make far less than half the mistakes and cause far fewer project delays.
If they advertised on Fox News, they'd reach only older white males who think President Hillary's to blame for their sharply rising health insurance cost.
But, a young black female who loves Hillary isn't specifically excluded. You can advertise on Fox, and although you hit a different demographic than if you advertised on say "Buzzfeed", you're not specifically excluding them. There is nothing wrong with advertising on Fox News because they don't categorically exclude people. Heck, I bet they'd love nothing more than to have liberals watching so that they could have a chance to convert them. They'd love nothing more than to get young black females voting for Trump in 2020.
Also, Facebook isn't a 3rd party in this process, since their selection criteria for placing the ad allows their clients to select quite a large range of demographic markets for any and every ad that they place: age, nationality, race, gender, location (to more specific than zip code), education, favorite _____, etc. Also, they've already been charged with this type of discrimination before, so if they're still doing it, maybe we should see what happens when you imprison a corporation.
Not on facebook, but back when monster.com used to be a thing and people looked for jobs there- I remember lots of companies would have written down something along the lines of "must be born in the US to apply". This directly goes against the amendment that states that you can't discriminate against based on nation of origin.
I'd usually send them an email pointing this out, after which they would apologise and invite me to apply. Naturally, I wouldn't. I knew I wouldn't stand a chance after complaining about that... and wouldn't want to work for such a company anyway.
What does "modified to the near infrared spectrum" mean?
My printer can't print "near infrared" or radio waves. It can't even print gamma rays.
Infrared ink could come in handy in cold climates. I think Newspapers should start printing papers in infrared ink to help the homeless people keep warm.
I am not objecting to 10Mbps, I am objecting to calling it "high speed".
It's all relative I guess. When 10Mbps first came out, it was high speed. The name high speed originally meant faster than dial-up. A bit like "High Definition" TVs. A few more TV generations and HD will be laughably low def.
The key thing is that the ISPs aren't forced to provide rural Internet service—they can choose not to provide Internet service at all. And some of them will. Which makes matters worse for every non-rural Internet consumer.
This is Britain, and specifically BT. They have no such option available to them. If this were the US and a similar measure made, I don't think Charter, or TWC, or Comcast would drop completely out of a market just because they were told they had to give everyone access. If they would, another monopolistic cable company would gladly step in.
Absolutely, it's lost investment opportunity elsewhere, or they would have done it themselves. If it were the MOST profitable option to make money, they would have done it themselves. They're only being forced to do this because it is not something they would do voluntarily.
That said, they will make their money back from this. It's a forced investment, but one that will ultimately yield them a profit. I don't feel sorry for the ISP.
It kept me from ever considering Windows Phone; and it made me seriously consider switching to Mac or Linux when I got my last computer... I stuck with Windows, but if they ever expand the Windows Marketplace too far so that I have to start using it I might jump ship.
I recently upgraded to 1Gbps (symmetric) and I would say that is "high speed". But 10Mbps seems decidedly on the average-to-slow side. Is this some politically-motivated lie to make people believe the 2rd rate speed they will be getting in 2020 is "great"?
You can stream a movie (just not in high def) at 10mbps or 1000mbps and not be able to tell the difference. Most web pages won't perceptibly load slower. (slow ones obviously will). You can have a phone call over 10mbps and not notice a difference to 1000mbps.
Yeah, you can't download HD. Large files take much much longer to download, and there are some complex web pages that will be slower. 10mbps is really the absolute minimum you would want in a modern society. Ideally, you would definitely want much faster, but as a baseline speed, for "nobody slower than this", it is fine.
I fail to see on a philosophical level how anything can be a right if it requires someone else to provide it for you.
I think we can all agree that one of the main purposes of a modern government is to protect it's citizens. We expect the right to safety from lawbreakers. That's something you don't provide yourself (not completely anyway), it's "given" to us out of the money we pay in taxes.
We expect the right to pursue happiness and a pleasurable life. The laws and social institutions we have help protect us from others violating those pursuits. That's "provided" by the government. We expect the right to have access to basic healthcare. States have healthcare programs of different levels, be it a full health system or medicare/Medicaid in the US.
Most "rights" are provided for us by others in part by others. Society functions as a whole to try to protect other people's rights (as defined by the people). Without a society, in a system of total anarchy, there would be no security, access to healthcare for many, etc.
I know what you want people to answer... "The government, it's a free hand-out, socialist state", etc.
And whereas, initially that is true, in the end, the person using that connection will pay for it. It will just take longer for the IPS to get their money back from installing the cable for a rural route not already served, than it would in a densely populated urban cluster. If it takes a company 10 years to recoup an investment they will be less willing to invest than if it takes 5. Sometimes they don't want to invest, or take risks in a longer term investments. The government is forcing their hand here.
Some of the really rural, out of the way, places, they may never make their money back. They will most places eventually though. Most of the UK is fairly densely populated. Even rural areas in the UK aren't usually too far from an urban hub. It's not like the US Midwest where you can sometimes drive an hour without hitting a major population centre.
Don't feel bad... I have 16 at home and it works just fine considering what I use it for (browsing, VPN, the occasional tv stream, etc.)
Funny thing - When I lived in-town, I had a 50mbps connection, and comparing my experiences now with what I had then, I don't see any real difference (okay, it was a 50mbps Comcast connection, but...)
All said, I suspect that unless you routinely suck down multi-GB files all day long, or use it to watch like three 4k Netflix/Hulu/whatever streams all at the same time? Even 30mbps is kind of overkill. I won't turn it down, but at the same time I don't really use it, and the vast majority of people out there won't either (at least not for now, and this may change as cable-cutting becomes more prevalent and screen rez goes up.)
Since I recently switched to a faster plan, I've noticed the internet goes offline far more often than when I was at 15mbps. It's usually only for a minute or two- but it's several times a day. Internet never went offline when it was slower.
10 Mbps, is not super fast by the standards of a lot of Slashdot users, but it is serviceable.
In fact as a cheap bastard I only just recently upgraded from a 10 Mbps to a 30 Mbps connection myself.
I paid for 15mbps (and got 10) as recently as a month ago. Only just switched to 100mbps (really only getting 85mbps). 10 is definitely usable, although, obviously a lot slower than ideal. 95% of uses though you don't realize how slow it is.
Apple's map database is downright horrendous. It's almost like they intentionally want to mislead drivers as a practical joke.
Reminds of the comparison of Google to Bing yesterday. Google may have the best search engine and the best maps at the moment, but I sure am glad that they have competition to keep them on their toes. I'd hate to think how things would be today if they had NO real competition.
On the otherhand, if you shrink the crew count too much on a multi-generational ship you are potentially going to have issues with genetic diversity and susceptibility to diseases - assuming either of those is relevant to our hypothetical aliens, of course.
That is certainly true of humans, and definitely for any terrestrial complex life we know. However, with technology though (and who knows how advanced such a species could be)- you could artificially provide for genetic diversity. Even in humans, if an embryo's DNA was initially printed by a computer somehow (rather than relying on mating for genetic selection), you could have certain genes appear in the population with a predictable occurrence.
If we, as a species, ever had a generational ship; I think, at least for the journey whilst the population were low, we would be unwise to leave procreation purely to mating individuals. I'd trust a computer to get a better balance of population genetics that cupid's dart. Have a computer "print" off the chromosomes for individuals and add that material to the eggs. Put the men on birthcontrol, and let the computer get the women pregnant with computer-designed eggs. We're not able to do that yet; but we're also not able to create a reliable generation ship- I suspect, true designer babies will be technically feasible before a generation ship is.
If the computer contained a huge database of human DNA, once we got where we were going, you could print off a huge variation of new individuals- and have that 1st generation go about getting pregnant the old-fashioned way.
(93834871) What interest do the "DeusMachinians", who are actively trying to meet with and elevate other species, have in us? Plenty! (93834872) What interest do the "Sumbitchians", who believe that no dish is as delicate and subtle as that born of genocide, have in us? Plenty!
Intelligent species will probably have some aggressive tendencies. After all, which species on earth seem to evolve more intelligence? Hunters/Omnivores that have to strategise how to catch food- or Omnivores that need to run or hide.
By necessity, aggressive species also develop intelligence. So, probably most intelligent species to evolve would not be gentle.
Then there comes to pure strategy. Any alien species given enough time could become more advanced than you. Any species more advanced than you, could overpower you. Given enough time and changes in morals/leadership, you will eventually get a leader of that other species that WILL want to kill you.
In the end, there can be only one dominant species. Logic states, if you can wipe out any other intelligent species, you should.
it not only seems awfully small for a multi-generational ship (assuming a reasonable minimum size for any lifeforms that might crew it)
How does one determine a reasonable size?
A cockroach has the same mental capacity as a rodent, its "brain" is miniscule but highly efficient and advanced for such a small creature. Spiders have similarly complex "brains" and can learn, remember, understand cause and effect be taught tricks... etc.
If you took a brain with the sheer efficiency and complexity of a spider/cockroach and scaled it up to a cat sized organism you could potentially have an organism far more intelligent than us.
Then there is the matter of how much space do they need? If the species is advanced enough, do they need to actually physically move around? Can they be "wired-in" to a central computer and have the perception of a lot of space? Not as glamorous as the roomy ships of the Star Trek federation and other sci-fi, but much more efficient and probably more likely for interstellar travel than roomy space ships would be.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought it was pretty much settled? Thin atmosphere, solar radiation disassociated water into hydrogen and oxygen, the hydrogen left, the oxygen combined with various minerals. At least, that's what I had learned...
For our lifetime, or our kids lifetimes, absolutely... 500 years from now... I'm placing no bets.
The atmosphere that is a hundredth of Earth's, where surface gasses evaporate?
Anyone hoping to terraform a planet overnight would be disappointed. An atmosphere would have to be established before the water to prevent it all being stripped away in the first place. If you want water to stay put on the surface, you need an atmosphere first.
This is a ridiculous idea. There is no way to transfer water to Mars from comets or asteroids that don't involve a massive transfer of kinetic energy at the same time as the comets arrive at the bottom of the Mars gravity well. It was a viable avenue to get water to the planet very early on in the planets history, but for terraforming purposes it's just not a solution. You'd be further ahead to send people down there with a thermos of coffee and a six pack of lager to piss all over everything.
You wouldn't have to crash them into the planet. Position them into close orbit and allow them to "burn up" in the atmosphere.
So, this would imply that we could never terraform Mars because it cannot maintain surface water.
We couldn't with today's technology, nor tomorrow's. Long term? Who knows. There is lots of water out in space. Many comets and asteroids contain bunches of it. If you could harvest them and send them to Mars- you could probably create temporary surface water... over the millennia it will sink into the planet again- you'd need to keep "topping it off". Losing water to space is a big problem too... you'd need to try and keep an atmosphere- again, you could probably create one, but need to keep "topping it off" over the millennia by pumping more gas out.
You can terraform Mars but it will revert back to it's current dead-state if you don't keep maintaining it. A bit like a field. You can plough a field and harvest wheat one year... the next it might self seed and have some coming back that you can harvest, the next a little less, the next a little less... eventually you're going to need to replough the field, rotate the crops, replant, etc, if you want that field to feed you.
Somehow young people have young people jobs and older people have older people jobs. I wonder what might it be that makes the difference?
Over half the people I have worked with during my career have been over 40. I've always been "the young guy" at every place I've been (until my current job) - here I'm average age... and not too far off 40 myself. To be honest, I'm not sure why there is so much age discrimination against older IT staff. Younger staff know how to do things; older staff know how AND WHY to do things. Your 50 year old may make twice as much as your 25 year old IT worker- but they'll make far less than half the mistakes and cause far fewer project delays.
If they advertised on Fox News, they'd reach only older white males who think President Hillary's to blame for their sharply rising health insurance cost.
But, a young black female who loves Hillary isn't specifically excluded. You can advertise on Fox, and although you hit a different demographic than if you advertised on say "Buzzfeed", you're not specifically excluding them. There is nothing wrong with advertising on Fox News because they don't categorically exclude people. Heck, I bet they'd love nothing more than to have liberals watching so that they could have a chance to convert them. They'd love nothing more than to get young black females voting for Trump in 2020.
That doesn't matter.
Also, Facebook isn't a 3rd party in this process, since their selection criteria for placing the ad allows their clients to select quite a large range of demographic markets for any and every ad that they place: age, nationality, race, gender, location (to more specific than zip code), education, favorite _____, etc. Also, they've already been charged with this type of discrimination before, so if they're still doing it, maybe we should see what happens when you imprison a corporation.
Not on facebook, but back when monster.com used to be a thing and people looked for jobs there- I remember lots of companies would have written down something along the lines of "must be born in the US to apply". This directly goes against the amendment that states that you can't discriminate against based on nation of origin.
I'd usually send them an email pointing this out, after which they would apologise and invite me to apply. Naturally, I wouldn't. I knew I wouldn't stand a chance after complaining about that... and wouldn't want to work for such a company anyway.
These aren't job offers, they're ads. Usually for shit positions at the bottom of the food chain.
Still wrong ethically, morally, and legally.
OK. How about instead we target IT jobs to people who read comic books? - Your friendly neighborhood HR department
Do you really want people that still read comic books as an adult working for you?
What does "modified to the near infrared spectrum" mean?
My printer can't print "near infrared" or radio waves. It can't even print gamma rays.
Infrared ink could come in handy in cold climates. I think Newspapers should start printing papers in infrared ink to help the homeless people keep warm.
I am not objecting to 10Mbps, I am objecting to calling it "high speed".
It's all relative I guess. When 10Mbps first came out, it was high speed. The name high speed originally meant faster than dial-up. A bit like "High Definition" TVs. A few more TV generations and HD will be laughably low def.
The key thing is that the ISPs aren't forced to provide rural Internet service—they can choose not to provide Internet service at all. And some of them will. Which makes matters worse for every non-rural Internet consumer.
This is Britain, and specifically BT. They have no such option available to them. If this were the US and a similar measure made, I don't think Charter, or TWC, or Comcast would drop completely out of a market just because they were told they had to give everyone access. If they would, another monopolistic cable company would gladly step in.
Absolutely, it's lost investment opportunity elsewhere, or they would have done it themselves. If it were the MOST profitable option to make money, they would have done it themselves. They're only being forced to do this because it is not something they would do voluntarily.
That said, they will make their money back from this. It's a forced investment, but one that will ultimately yield them a profit. I don't feel sorry for the ISP.
So how has this worked out for Windows so far?
It kept me from ever considering Windows Phone; and it made me seriously consider switching to Mac or Linux when I got my last computer... I stuck with Windows, but if they ever expand the Windows Marketplace too far so that I have to start using it I might jump ship.
I recently upgraded to 1Gbps (symmetric) and I would say that is "high speed". But 10Mbps seems decidedly on the average-to-slow side. Is this some politically-motivated lie to make people believe the 2rd rate speed they will be getting in 2020 is "great"?
You can stream a movie (just not in high def) at 10mbps or 1000mbps and not be able to tell the difference. Most web pages won't perceptibly load slower. (slow ones obviously will). You can have a phone call over 10mbps and not notice a difference to 1000mbps.
Yeah, you can't download HD. Large files take much much longer to download, and there are some complex web pages that will be slower. 10mbps is really the absolute minimum you would want in a modern society. Ideally, you would definitely want much faster, but as a baseline speed, for "nobody slower than this", it is fine.
I fail to see on a philosophical level how anything can be a right if it requires someone else to provide it for you.
I think we can all agree that one of the main purposes of a modern government is to protect it's citizens. We expect the right to safety from lawbreakers. That's something you don't provide yourself (not completely anyway), it's "given" to us out of the money we pay in taxes.
We expect the right to pursue happiness and a pleasurable life. The laws and social institutions we have help protect us from others violating those pursuits. That's "provided" by the government. We expect the right to have access to basic healthcare. States have healthcare programs of different levels, be it a full health system or medicare/Medicaid in the US.
Most "rights" are provided for us by others in part by others. Society functions as a whole to try to protect other people's rights (as defined by the people). Without a society, in a system of total anarchy, there would be no security, access to healthcare for many, etc.
Who is going to pay for the infrastructure?
I know what you want people to answer... "The government, it's a free hand-out, socialist state", etc.
And whereas, initially that is true, in the end, the person using that connection will pay for it. It will just take longer for the IPS to get their money back from installing the cable for a rural route not already served, than it would in a densely populated urban cluster. If it takes a company 10 years to recoup an investment they will be less willing to invest than if it takes 5. Sometimes they don't want to invest, or take risks in a longer term investments. The government is forcing their hand here.
Some of the really rural, out of the way, places, they may never make their money back. They will most places eventually though. Most of the UK is fairly densely populated. Even rural areas in the UK aren't usually too far from an urban hub. It's not like the US Midwest where you can sometimes drive an hour without hitting a major population centre.
Don't feel bad... I have 16 at home and it works just fine considering what I use it for (browsing, VPN, the occasional tv stream, etc.)
Funny thing - When I lived in-town, I had a 50mbps connection, and comparing my experiences now with what I had then, I don't see any real difference (okay, it was a 50mbps Comcast connection, but...)
All said, I suspect that unless you routinely suck down multi-GB files all day long, or use it to watch like three 4k Netflix/Hulu/whatever streams all at the same time? Even 30mbps is kind of overkill. I won't turn it down, but at the same time I don't really use it, and the vast majority of people out there won't either (at least not for now, and this may change as cable-cutting becomes more prevalent and screen rez goes up.)
Since I recently switched to a faster plan, I've noticed the internet goes offline far more often than when I was at 15mbps. It's usually only for a minute or two- but it's several times a day. Internet never went offline when it was slower.
10 Mbps, is not super fast by the standards of a lot of Slashdot users, but it is serviceable.
In fact as a cheap bastard I only just recently upgraded from a 10 Mbps to a 30 Mbps connection myself.
I paid for 15mbps (and got 10) as recently as a month ago. Only just switched to 100mbps (really only getting 85mbps). 10 is definitely usable, although, obviously a lot slower than ideal. 95% of uses though you don't realize how slow it is.
Apple's map database is downright horrendous. It's almost like they intentionally want to mislead drivers as a practical joke.
Reminds of the comparison of Google to Bing yesterday. Google may have the best search engine and the best maps at the moment, but I sure am glad that they have competition to keep them on their toes. I'd hate to think how things would be today if they had NO real competition.
On the otherhand, if you shrink the crew count too much on a multi-generational ship you are potentially going to have issues with genetic diversity and susceptibility to diseases - assuming either of those is relevant to our hypothetical aliens, of course.
That is certainly true of humans, and definitely for any terrestrial complex life we know. However, with technology though (and who knows how advanced such a species could be)- you could artificially provide for genetic diversity. Even in humans, if an embryo's DNA was initially printed by a computer somehow (rather than relying on mating for genetic selection), you could have certain genes appear in the population with a predictable occurrence.
If we, as a species, ever had a generational ship; I think, at least for the journey whilst the population were low, we would be unwise to leave procreation purely to mating individuals. I'd trust a computer to get a better balance of population genetics that cupid's dart. Have a computer "print" off the chromosomes for individuals and add that material to the eggs. Put the men on birthcontrol, and let the computer get the women pregnant with computer-designed eggs. We're not able to do that yet; but we're also not able to create a reliable generation ship- I suspect, true designer babies will be technically feasible before a generation ship is.
If the computer contained a huge database of human DNA, once we got where we were going, you could print off a huge variation of new individuals- and have that 1st generation go about getting pregnant the old-fashioned way.
And 7 billion people say 'duh' (or whatever 'duh' is in their respective languages - please educate me what duh is in your language).
I think the whole world knew they were a transport company not a digital company. They've just been trying to use loopholes to avoid being regulated.
"Omnivores that need to run or hide."
Obviously, I intended to say herbivores.
(93834871) What interest do the "DeusMachinians", who are actively trying to meet with and elevate other species, have in us? Plenty!
(93834872) What interest do the "Sumbitchians", who believe that no dish is as delicate and subtle as that born of genocide, have in us? Plenty!
Intelligent species will probably have some aggressive tendencies. After all, which species on earth seem to evolve more intelligence? Hunters/Omnivores that have to strategise how to catch food- or Omnivores that need to run or hide.
By necessity, aggressive species also develop intelligence. So, probably most intelligent species to evolve would not be gentle.
Then there comes to pure strategy. Any alien species given enough time could become more advanced than you. Any species more advanced than you, could overpower you. Given enough time and changes in morals/leadership, you will eventually get a leader of that other species that WILL want to kill you.
In the end, there can be only one dominant species. Logic states, if you can wipe out any other intelligent species, you should.
it not only seems awfully small for a multi-generational ship (assuming a reasonable minimum size for any lifeforms that might crew it)
How does one determine a reasonable size?
A cockroach has the same mental capacity as a rodent, its "brain" is miniscule but highly efficient and advanced for such a small creature. Spiders have similarly complex "brains" and can learn, remember, understand cause and effect be taught tricks... etc.
If you took a brain with the sheer efficiency and complexity of a spider/cockroach and scaled it up to a cat sized organism you could potentially have an organism far more intelligent than us.
Then there is the matter of how much space do they need? If the species is advanced enough, do they need to actually physically move around? Can they be "wired-in" to a central computer and have the perception of a lot of space? Not as glamorous as the roomy ships of the Star Trek federation and other sci-fi, but much more efficient and probably more likely for interstellar travel than roomy space ships would be.