Maybe 3 million years from now we'll go to some other planet and evolve in a way we haven't evolved yet and we'll consider our present day species as proto-whatever-we-call-ourselves.
Yeah I know what you mean. In about 3 million years, when we're all Snozzmongers on the planet Boubosnort, we'll all look back on this and laugh.
Guess Zonk just felt like fanning a religious flame war this morning.
Naw, he just noticed that the comment database was getting empty. Haven't you noticed that these "evolution vs creationism" stories always get 1000+ comments, even if they have no substance?
it's been my experience that those who get their morality
from a book are a lot more likely to commit amoral or immoral acts than those who act morally because it is
innate to them.
It so happens that I agree, but I also think it's just about impossible to teach this kind of innate morality (certainly not to those over the age of 10, anyway). That's the powerful discovery that religion constitutes: a way to get the vast majority of a population to behave morally most of the time.
(-1, cynical)
I've found the most honest site on the issue to consistently be evowiki. The intelligent design and creationism pages are always worth a read if you've never done so. They actually go into which sorts of statements used by those arguing the issue are logical falacies and how you can tell.
I'd say that the shuttle design is overly fragile in the sense that it's just too complicated for you to expect the whole system to work every time. The shuttle has a lot of pieces, and there are a lot of combinations of failures that would result in the whole thing falling apart. Sure, a lot of the systems have redundancies, but some things (the protective tiles, for instance) just cannot have redundant backups.
For very complex systems, simply reducing the complexity has value in improved safety.
Honestly, when they designed the shuttle there were just too many design compromises. They wanted to have it liquid fueled so that they would have (a) reusable engines and (b) the ability to throttle the engines better than you can do with solid fuels. The problem was that there just wasn't enough power for the liquid fueled main engines, so they had to strap on those solid boosters we all know and love. (I think this had something to do with a military requirement, but I really can't remember clearly.)
They wanted it to be a manned vessel, so it had to be really safe. They also wanted it to have large cargo capacity, so it had to big. The trouble is that this means that this means that _all_ of the shuttle components, not just the part the crew are using, have to be extra-triple-safe. This is part of what makes the shuttle so blamed expensive.
On the subject of reusability, there were too many compromises too. The ability to reuse all of the components ten times between replacements would be great, it would reduce costs by a lot, but it just wasn't going to happen. The odds are simply too great of damage cropping up during in multiple launches to reuse most things when launching humans. The end result is that there are such thorough inspections between launches that it would probably be cheaper to just build new single-use rockets every time (see TFA).
Hey, with any luck, maybe they'll come up with something better this time. With NASA's budget, once they eventually manage to switch away from shuttles, they ought to be able to launch a LOT of stuff/people into orbit each year.
Then again, there are also programs developed by closed-source companies that would never have been made as open source. Compare the quality of open-source versus proprietary games, for example. While open source games may work, they generally a few orders of magnitude more shallow than the proprietary equivalent. Opensourceefforts similar to commercial video games always start with big plans, and then slowly end up going nowhere.
On the other hand, more fundamental software like operating systems, web browsers, graphics libraries, etc. seem to work better if they're made by open source efforts. I'd say that there's not only a place for both open source and proprietary development models, but both are required for current software supply to continue for the future.
Besides that, it's assumed that when you buy a computer with windows pre-installed that part of the price you paid was the purchase price of the software. If that's not true, then they essentially stole that part of the price from you.
'You can build it, design it, and it will work great. The trouble begins when you want to add things to it...(due to) the brittle nature of the platform, when you do that, other things break.'
The trouble begins when you try to add things to Windows too. That's when they sue you.
Okay, this guy just doesn't know what he's talking about. He needs to go to a web site and read the definitions of the words he's saying. Quoth TFA:
I have begged critics of the system, such as The Register's Andrew Orlowski, to explain to me how Creative Commons works or what it's supposed to do that current copyright law doesn't do. He says, "It does nothing."
Of course it does nothing outside of existing copyright law. Creative Commons is a licensing scheme that works within exisiting copyright law.
This means that others have certain rights to reuse the material under a variety of provisos, mostly as long as the reuse is not for commercial purposes. Why not commercial purposes?
The answer, of course, is that Creative Commons licenses allow creators to specify which things are allowed. If you want to allow commercial use, allow it. If you don't want to allow commercial use, then don't. It's not that difficult.
This is nonsense. Before Creative Commons I could always ask to reuse or mirror something. And that has not changed. And I could always use excerpts for commercial or noncommercial purposes. It's called fair use. I can still do that, but Creative Commons seems to hint that with its license means that I cannot. At least not if I'm a commercial site and the noncommercial proviso is in effect. This is a bogus suggestion, because Creative Commons does not supersede the copyright laws.(emphasis added)
You mean fair use like me quoting segments of your article, John? Anyway, the relevant issue there is that word, "ask". Having to ask permission to do something is certainly no the same as having the right to do something. Creative Commons licenses give end-users rights to do certain things. Yeah, the courts usually allow people to get away with certain kinds of use that violate the letter of copyright law, which fall under the domain of "fair use", but fair use is not really written into most countries' copyright laws. Most publishers, etc. won't allow their content creators to use "fair use" works, as the "fair" part can be challenged in court, which is expensive. The nice thing with Creative Commons licenses is that the rights users have are formulated clearly and it's basically impossible to get very far with suing somebody for use that complies with the license.
I'd keep going, there are more problems with the article, but this post is too long already.
I believe what you're trying to say is that "The mainsream media sucks." Well, that sure is a gutsy thing for you to say here on an alternative media outlet (slashdot).
I'm referring to other measures of body fat content, not BMI. BMI is bunk.
I agree with you on this. BMI, or Body Mass Index, is usually measured as mass/(height ^2), with mass usually in kilograms and height usually in meters. The wikipedia article I linked to lists anything under 20 BMI as "underweight", 20-25 as "ideal", 25-30 as "overweight" and over 30 as "obese".
Note that this is based only on body weight and height, nothing else. The BMI of a 400-pound, 6 foot tall bodybuilder is 54, which is listed as severely obese (when in fact the person might have 1 or 2% body fat). The BMI of someone of average wight and tall, but who gets no exercise would look like an ideal range. So while the BMI has some value when applied to large populations, it isn't really very relevant when applied to just one person. The lesson is that it would be appropriate to deal with broader indices of health rather than just BMI.
The losses involved in ripping apart water or synthesizing ethanol are going to be huge,
True, but you've got to remember that in manufacturing hydrogen, you're converting a non-mobile energy source into a mobile one. That has value too. It's kind of irrelevant exactly how much energy is lost in the conversion process if the end product (hydrogen) is worth more than the input (over-capacity electricity; ie cheap). Exactly how much the hydrogen will be worth remains to be seen, but the necessity of putting the plants on different power grids makes it necessary that they be somewhat widely separated, which would be good for hydrogen filling/distribution station, if such things ever turn out to be buildable and economical.
As far as I can tell, hydrogen really only makes sense when it is stripped off of some other molecule or stripped off of oxygen(electrolysis) in the context of nuclear power.
Of course I'm talking about electrolysis to make hydrogen. What, do you think I mean proton/antiproton pair production?
So what you're saying that after the "breeders" are through for the night, they're all "thorium"?
Anyway, there's more info on Thorium as a nuclear fuel here and here. Overall, it looks like the thorium fuel cycle has lots of potential (there's three times as much thorium in the ground as there is uranium), but the work to make a functional commercial reactor based on thorium has never been done.
I wrote up my thoughts on this a while ago. Algae can grow so incredibly fast that it really puts any vascular plant to shame. One important (but not insurmountable) difficulty is extracting the oil from the finished algae. A nice thing is that the oil produced is suitable for biodiesel use. Alternatively, you could try to use it as a stock for thermal depolymerization, which would make it a lot easier to recycle the various minerals (phosphorus, sulphur, all kinds of trace elements...) you have to put into the algae to get them to grow.
All told, I think it's a topic worthy of a lot deeper inspection.
More specifically, we're trying to coserve "controlled" energy sources. If we had solar power panels out there in the field, with the corn plants blocking them, then yes the whole process of producing ethanol would be a net energy loss (ie entropy increases, as it always does). Since solar panels are expensive, however, the corn plants (or whatever) are put out there instead of directly tapping the sunlight. The % energy gain is actually a (incredibly inaccurate) way of describing how efficient the plants are at producing human-controlled energy (not in terms of sunlight used, but in terms of other controlled energy sources used).
Oddly enough, producing a storable fuel from solar/wind energy would be quite a good thing. One of the big problems introduced by technologies like solar and wind power is that they tend to produce a lot of variation in the level of power being supplied (as solar only works during daylight, and wind only works when the wind is blowing). The big mainline power production technologies (especially coal-burning plants) can easily produce all the time, but it can take days to change their output level very much. This means that technologies that change their power level a couple of times a day put a lot of stress on the system.
I would think that adding industries to the electrical power grid that draw power only during certain times (and coordinating them so that they only draw power when there's extra available) would be helpful for evening out the load. I once heard mention of the idea of hydroelectric power plants pumping water to the uphill side of the dam during these kinds of time (gravity is a conservative force, so the only losses are from mechanical inefficiencies, ie friction). Manufacturing hydrogen or ethanol via electric power during these times could be a good use for the extra capacity, but would necessarily involve turning these expensive machines off when there is not extra capacity. Whether it's actually a good idea depends on the cost of the hydrogen/ethanol production facilities and the marginal profit on the fuel they're making.
While you're ranting about the "Hydrogen Economy", science fiction authors always seem to get this wrong about antimatter too. Last I checked, astronomers are pretty sure there's no (or at least no substantial amount of) antimatter in this galaxy, so antimatter should only be used as an energy storage technology, not an outright power source. I read a book once that involved large-scale antimatter production based on solar power panels on the moon, with the antimatter being used to fuel interstellar slower-than-light spacecraft, but I can't remember the name. Any help anybody?
The other reason is that sometimes, if a mod doesn't get the joke, an honest effort at a joke can get modded troll or offtopic, leading to bad karma. Modding good jokes insightful, etc. once in a while tends to offset this effect.
That depends entirely on what you mean by "fruit juice". The kinds that are cheapest in the store, and are labeled something like "apple drink" (ie, they don't actually say juice on the label) aren't any better for you than pop. Those kind of things mostly contain a few percent juice, a lot of High Fructose Corn Syrup, and some acids (I've seen maltic or citric or ascorbic, or more than one of the above) so that they taste kind of like juice. These things are, indeed, not very healthy for you.
Real fruit juice, on the other hand, doesn't contain nearly as much fructose, so it's not as bad (by volume, at least) and it also has vitamins, since it comes from fruit. Having too much of anything, however, tends to be pretty unhealthy.
Oddly enough, it appears from the above link that fructose's glycemic index being lower than that of ordinary table sugar, sucrose, would make it healthier for you. A lot of the diet books make a big thing about low glycemic indices being important. I guess the glycemic index is irrelevant if you're drinking 2-3000 calories worth of soda pop a day.
The beauty of capitalism is that bad ideas usually die.
I agree in general, the trouble is that in the case of a market dominated by a monopoly this isn't always true. There are well-known techniques for a monopoly to kill off products/companies that it doesn't like. A powerful monopolist can introduce a product that is clearly subpar, but then kill off all of the competition for the product. As long as they make sure that their cruddy product is still the best one that's widely available (and there's a market for the category of product in the first place), then it will probably be successful.
Slashdot Mirror
The real question is: Would this still be news if they hadn't come up with such a catchy name (spear phishing)?
Maybe 3 million years from now we'll go to some other planet and evolve in a way we haven't evolved yet and we'll consider our present day species as proto-whatever-we-call-ourselves.
Yeah I know what you mean. In about 3 million years, when we're all Snozzmongers on the planet Boubosnort, we'll all look back on this and laugh.
Guess Zonk just felt like fanning a religious flame war this morning.
Naw, he just noticed that the comment database was getting empty. Haven't you noticed that these "evolution vs creationism" stories always get 1000+ comments, even if they have no substance?
it's been my experience that those who get their morality from a book are a lot more likely to commit amoral or immoral acts than those who act morally because it is innate to them.
It so happens that I agree, but I also think it's just about impossible to teach this kind of innate morality (certainly not to those over the age of 10, anyway). That's the powerful discovery that religion constitutes: a way to get the vast majority of a population to behave morally most of the time.
(-1, cynical)
I've found the most honest site on the issue to consistently be evowiki. The intelligent design and creationism pages are always worth a read if you've never done so. They actually go into which sorts of statements used by those arguing the issue are logical falacies and how you can tell.
I'd say that the shuttle design is overly fragile in the sense that it's just too complicated for you to expect the whole system to work every time. The shuttle has a lot of pieces, and there are a lot of combinations of failures that would result in the whole thing falling apart. Sure, a lot of the systems have redundancies, but some things (the protective tiles, for instance) just cannot have redundant backups.
For very complex systems, simply reducing the complexity has value in improved safety.
Honestly, when they designed the shuttle there were just too many design compromises. They wanted to have it liquid fueled so that they would have (a) reusable engines and (b) the ability to throttle the engines better than you can do with solid fuels. The problem was that there just wasn't enough power for the liquid fueled main engines, so they had to strap on those solid boosters we all know and love. (I think this had something to do with a military requirement, but I really can't remember clearly.)
They wanted it to be a manned vessel, so it had to be really safe. They also wanted it to have large cargo capacity, so it had to big. The trouble is that this means that this means that _all_ of the shuttle components, not just the part the crew are using, have to be extra-triple-safe. This is part of what makes the shuttle so blamed expensive.
On the subject of reusability, there were too many compromises too. The ability to reuse all of the components ten times between replacements would be great, it would reduce costs by a lot, but it just wasn't going to happen. The odds are simply too great of damage cropping up during in multiple launches to reuse most things when launching humans. The end result is that there are such thorough inspections between launches that it would probably be cheaper to just build new single-use rockets every time (see TFA).
Hey, with any luck, maybe they'll come up with something better this time. With NASA's budget, once they eventually manage to switch away from shuttles, they ought to be able to launch a LOT of stuff/people into orbit each year.
I agree, but remember: this is slashdot. We regularly mod the microsoft/DRM-lovers into oblivion just for kicks.
Then again, there are also programs developed by closed-source companies that would never have been made as open source. Compare the quality of open-source versus proprietary games, for example. While open source games may work, they generally a few orders of magnitude more shallow than the proprietary equivalent. Open source efforts similar to commercial video games always start with big plans, and then slowly end up going nowhere.
On the other hand, more fundamental software like operating systems, web browsers, graphics libraries, etc. seem to work better if they're made by open source efforts. I'd say that there's not only a place for both open source and proprietary development models, but both are required for current software supply to continue for the future.
I'm probably not the first to say it but...
Dangit, not again!
Besides that, it's assumed that when you buy a computer with windows pre-installed that part of the price you paid was the purchase price of the software. If that's not true, then they essentially stole that part of the price from you.
Ya' know, I was going to get VOIP, but then I realized that with my dialup internet connection, it might be kind of redundant.
'You can build it, design it, and it will work great. The trouble begins when you want to add things to it...(due to) the brittle nature of the platform, when you do that, other things break.'
The trouble begins when you try to add things to Windows too. That's when they sue you.
Next up, Dvorak interviews Steve Ballmer on the benefits of Linux...
Dangit, stop giving him ideas!
Okay, this guy just doesn't know what he's talking about. He needs to go to a web site and read the definitions of the words he's saying. Quoth TFA:
I have begged critics of the system, such as The Register's Andrew Orlowski, to explain to me how Creative Commons works or what it's supposed to do that current copyright law doesn't do. He says, "It does nothing."
Of course it does nothing outside of existing copyright law. Creative Commons is a licensing scheme that works within exisiting copyright law.
This means that others have certain rights to reuse the material under a variety of provisos, mostly as long as the reuse is not for commercial purposes. Why not commercial purposes?
The answer, of course, is that Creative Commons licenses allow creators to specify which things are allowed. If you want to allow commercial use, allow it. If you don't want to allow commercial use, then don't. It's not that difficult.
This is nonsense. Before Creative Commons I could always ask to reuse or mirror something. And that has not changed. And I could always use excerpts for commercial or noncommercial purposes. It's called fair use. I can still do that, but Creative Commons seems to hint that with its license means that I cannot. At least not if I'm a commercial site and the noncommercial proviso is in effect. This is a bogus suggestion, because Creative Commons does not supersede the copyright laws.(emphasis added)
You mean fair use like me quoting segments of your article, John? Anyway, the relevant issue there is that word, "ask". Having to ask permission to do something is certainly no the same as having the right to do something. Creative Commons licenses give end-users rights to do certain things. Yeah, the courts usually allow people to get away with certain kinds of use that violate the letter of copyright law, which fall under the domain of "fair use", but fair use is not really written into most countries' copyright laws. Most publishers, etc. won't allow their content creators to use "fair use" works, as the "fair" part can be challenged in court, which is expensive. The nice thing with Creative Commons licenses is that the rights users have are formulated clearly and it's basically impossible to get very far with suing somebody for use that complies with the license.
I'd keep going, there are more problems with the article, but this post is too long already.
I believe what you're trying to say is that "The mainsream media sucks." Well, that sure is a gutsy thing for you to say here on an alternative media outlet (slashdot).
I'm referring to other measures of body fat content, not BMI. BMI is bunk.
I agree with you on this. BMI, or Body Mass Index, is usually measured as mass/(height ^2), with mass usually in kilograms and height usually in meters. The wikipedia article I linked to lists anything under 20 BMI as "underweight", 20-25 as "ideal", 25-30 as "overweight" and over 30 as "obese".
Note that this is based only on body weight and height, nothing else. The BMI of a 400-pound, 6 foot tall bodybuilder is 54, which is listed as severely obese (when in fact the person might have 1 or 2% body fat). The BMI of someone of average wight and tall, but who gets no exercise would look like an ideal range. So while the BMI has some value when applied to large populations, it isn't really very relevant when applied to just one person. The lesson is that it would be appropriate to deal with broader indices of health rather than just BMI.
The losses involved in ripping apart water or synthesizing ethanol are going to be huge,
True, but you've got to remember that in manufacturing hydrogen, you're converting a non-mobile energy source into a mobile one. That has value too. It's kind of irrelevant exactly how much energy is lost in the conversion process if the end product (hydrogen) is worth more than the input (over-capacity electricity; ie cheap). Exactly how much the hydrogen will be worth remains to be seen, but the necessity of putting the plants on different power grids makes it necessary that they be somewhat widely separated, which would be good for hydrogen filling/distribution station, if such things ever turn out to be buildable and economical.
As far as I can tell, hydrogen really only makes sense when it is stripped off of some other molecule or stripped off of oxygen(electrolysis) in the context of nuclear power. Of course I'm talking about electrolysis to make hydrogen. What, do you think I mean proton/antiproton pair production?
Two words: "thorium", and "breeders"
So what you're saying that after the "breeders" are through for the night, they're all "thorium"?
Anyway, there's more info on Thorium as a nuclear fuel here and here. Overall, it looks like the thorium fuel cycle has lots of potential (there's three times as much thorium in the ground as there is uranium), but the work to make a functional commercial reactor based on thorium has never been done.
I wrote up my thoughts on this a while ago. Algae can grow so incredibly fast that it really puts any vascular plant to shame. One important (but not insurmountable) difficulty is extracting the oil from the finished algae. A nice thing is that the oil produced is suitable for biodiesel use. Alternatively, you could try to use it as a stock for thermal depolymerization, which would make it a lot easier to recycle the various minerals (phosphorus, sulphur, all kinds of trace elements...) you have to put into the algae to get them to grow.
All told, I think it's a topic worthy of a lot deeper inspection.
More specifically, we're trying to coserve "controlled" energy sources. If we had solar power panels out there in the field, with the corn plants blocking them, then yes the whole process of producing ethanol would be a net energy loss (ie entropy increases, as it always does). Since solar panels are expensive, however, the corn plants (or whatever) are put out there instead of directly tapping the sunlight. The % energy gain is actually a (incredibly inaccurate) way of describing how efficient the plants are at producing human-controlled energy (not in terms of sunlight used, but in terms of other controlled energy sources used).
Oddly enough, producing a storable fuel from solar/wind energy would be quite a good thing. One of the big problems introduced by technologies like solar and wind power is that they tend to produce a lot of variation in the level of power being supplied (as solar only works during daylight, and wind only works when the wind is blowing). The big mainline power production technologies (especially coal-burning plants) can easily produce all the time, but it can take days to change their output level very much. This means that technologies that change their power level a couple of times a day put a lot of stress on the system.
I would think that adding industries to the electrical power grid that draw power only during certain times (and coordinating them so that they only draw power when there's extra available) would be helpful for evening out the load. I once heard mention of the idea of hydroelectric power plants pumping water to the uphill side of the dam during these kinds of time (gravity is a conservative force, so the only losses are from mechanical inefficiencies, ie friction). Manufacturing hydrogen or ethanol via electric power during these times could be a good use for the extra capacity, but would necessarily involve turning these expensive machines off when there is not extra capacity. Whether it's actually a good idea depends on the cost of the hydrogen/ethanol production facilities and the marginal profit on the fuel they're making.
While you're ranting about the "Hydrogen Economy", science fiction authors always seem to get this wrong about antimatter too. Last I checked, astronomers are pretty sure there's no (or at least no substantial amount of) antimatter in this galaxy, so antimatter should only be used as an energy storage technology, not an outright power source. I read a book once that involved large-scale antimatter production based on solar power panels on the moon, with the antimatter being used to fuel interstellar slower-than-light spacecraft, but I can't remember the name. Any help anybody?
The other reason is that sometimes, if a mod doesn't get the joke, an honest effort at a joke can get modded troll or offtopic, leading to bad karma. Modding good jokes insightful, etc. once in a while tends to offset this effect.
That depends entirely on what you mean by "fruit juice". The kinds that are cheapest in the store, and are labeled something like "apple drink" (ie, they don't actually say juice on the label) aren't any better for you than pop. Those kind of things mostly contain a few percent juice, a lot of High Fructose Corn Syrup, and some acids (I've seen maltic or citric or ascorbic, or more than one of the above) so that they taste kind of like juice. These things are, indeed, not very healthy for you.
Real fruit juice, on the other hand, doesn't contain nearly as much fructose, so it's not as bad (by volume, at least) and it also has vitamins, since it comes from fruit. Having too much of anything, however, tends to be pretty unhealthy.
Oddly enough, it appears from the above link that fructose's glycemic index being lower than that of ordinary table sugar, sucrose, would make it healthier for you. A lot of the diet books make a big thing about low glycemic indices being important. I guess the glycemic index is irrelevant if you're drinking 2-3000 calories worth of soda pop a day.
The beauty of capitalism is that bad ideas usually die.
I agree in general, the trouble is that in the case of a market dominated by a monopoly this isn't always true. There are well-known techniques for a monopoly to kill off products/companies that it doesn't like. A powerful monopolist can introduce a product that is clearly subpar, but then kill off all of the competition for the product. As long as they make sure that their cruddy product is still the best one that's widely available (and there's a market for the category of product in the first place), then it will probably be successful.