However, Verizon's business is not built around selling phones. It's built around selling you minutes and special premium features. Id doesn't make any less money if you download Doom or Quake mods, but that's not necessarily the case here.
The problem is that Verizon is figuring that the gain in minutes-usage by releasing a more open phone is going to result in less money than requiring people to use the premium services. And unless there's evidence to prove otherwise, that's where things will stay. Or, alternatively, the number of people who actually take advantage of being able to get around the Verizon premium services will be so small that it's not worth worying about.
There is hope. When Cingular and AT&T merge and manage to move things properly so that there's UMTS in the 800 MHz band, they will be able to give Verizon some great competition. But that's going to be 2-3 years at the earliest.
Actually, the problem was a little less malicious than that.
By the time that they realized that the shuttle wouldn't be able to meet it's promises, the Air Force was alredy involved, all non-shuttle forms of launch were declared obselete, a load of money had been spent, etc. So it was blinders time because if they hadn't kept charging ignorantly forward, it might have lead to even worse consequences. Like, declaring most of the shuttle-related crew obselete after having a launch vehicle that really *does* fill the role the Shuttle was supposed to fill.
The problem is, had we gone for some of the earlier, smaller, and simpler shuttles, it might have worked. The problem is that they would either be too small for some satelites, useless for the Air Force, or wouldn't be able to fill a variety of missions that the shuttle was supposed to be able to do but nobody ever tried to do (like launching from Vanderberg AFB, grabbing a Russian spy satelite on the first orbit, and then landing at Vanderberg AFB again)
See, the problem is that we are merely at the potential cusp for where things get damn interesting. Putting blind faith in Rutan being able to make an orbital launch vehicle like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat is no more prudent than believing that the government will solve all of the problems of space travel. SpaceShipOne is a great expendature of a mere few tens of millions, but it's not a replacement for the shuttle.
The shuttles are "self insured", like the rest of the space program.
That means that if it blows up, is destroyed, etc. the government is left with the tab and Congress will have to pay for a new manned space program. Or just decide to cancel it so that we can spend more money on other things.
No, the big dumb booster is only *one* way of getting to space. The point of a big dumb booster is to lower fabrication costs by several orders of magnitude, leaving only material and fuel costs (plus launch range fees)
The point, however, is that a good reusable booster designed properly will cost fuel costs and maintenence, plus launch range fees. As long as maintenence is less than material costs, it's even better.
The big reason why building a good reusable booster is so hard is that currently, people aren't willing to accept the comprimizes required to make it work. All of the shuttle-replacement reusable launch vehicles have been hamstrung by trying to be everything that the Shuttle was. If you accept that you are going to have 5000 kg payload instead of 27000 kg, everything becomes much much easier.
And 5000 kg is a nice number. The Gemini was under 5000 kg. An empty logistics module is under 5000 kg. A Soyuz 7k-L1, a.k.a. Zond, is a smidge over (but it was able to go to the moon). A full small logistics module could be under 5000 kg.
If it was cheap enough, we could (and should) build a complete space station, a complete lunar mission, and a complete mars mission, using only components large enough to be launched on a 5000 kg-class booster.
The one thing to remember about Mars is that it's highly likely that any manned mission will contaminate the planet with *our* bacteria and prevent us from getting a full and proper answer to the question of life on the planet. So, while I'm all for a mars mission, I also figure that the best first mars mission may involve a manned orbiter and a series of robotic landers.
I think, no matter how you dice it, the social reprecussions will be *awesome*.
I mean awesome in the dictionary, not surfer meaning. It could be positive, it could be very negative. Will we decide that violence, wars, etc. are really stupid. We could have holy wars with nuclear weapons.
How it's presented is important. A gradually increasing level of certainty will buffer the load, as compared to a sudden announcement. It's also dependent on what we find. Microbes on mars, floaters on Jupiter, fish in Europa, etc. are one thing. Other life forms that are intelligent like us, but differently, are something completely different.
And when we actually are able to talk to space aliens, will they have a similar thought process to us, or will what they consider to be logical be completely nonsensical? Will the logical assumptions that we've often made about them, that they will be peaceful because any civilization advanced enough for space travel would have to be, or will they begin attacking us for one reason or another that makes perfect logical sense to them?
I'm looking forward to it, if for no other reason than to know if everything I learned about the complex system that is mathematics after 4 years of college is a load of crap, based on how space aliens do mathematics.
Or you could always use a (makes quotation marks with fingers) laser or other very directional method of communication.
No, there's a lot of assumptions with SETI, and, even if we do read what is undeniably a signal, it probably won't be anywhere nearby. *And* it is designed to only pick up intentional beacons, not general radio communication noises because our antennas are noisy enough.
I mean, it's a big question mark. Sure, sending out a beacon with a proper easy-to-find signal at a particular wavelength makes sense to us, but we're the only intelligent species we've ever met, so it's *all* guesswork.
But it's the best avenue we've got right now. We can build a massive telescope in space that the Hubble Space Telecope would only be suitable as the viewfinder for and directly image planets. We can build a massive radio antenna array on the "dark" side of the moon and, in the radio silence that only a massive chunk of rock will provide, do some really good interference-free viewing of other planets. We could even try launching exploration missions to other systems. But none of these are particularly possible right now, so we go with what we've got.
Ahh, but only because Russia found that it wasn't worth seperating the tug and the module it's transporting. Pretty much, launching autonomous modules that dock together in space is the only way that Russia has to get stuff up.
Which is fine for a service module or a functional cargo block, but isn't exactly optimal for each and every module of a station, especially given that most reboost operations are done with pidly little engines on a Progres cargo craft.
Pretty much the design of the ISS is all built around decisions made in the 1970s, with generally bad information and an incorrect assumption of how things would be, with limited room to change them over time.
The ISS is modular because all other launch vehicles were to be discontinued in favor of the shuttle. Sure you could have planned to launch it on a Titan 3 or the like, but those were going away and would be much too expensive because the shuttle was going to be cheap, remember?
They started talking about doing things other ways, post Challenger. One of the proposals not picked for the ISS was to build a new core and tack three SSMEs on the back and make it shaped close enough to the shuttle that it could be launched using an ET and two SRBs. Except we already had the US-side ISS modules (russians weren't involved yet) designed and partially built, so it wouldn't save that much money, and had some signifigant disadvantages.
And, the other thing is that without an ISS, the shuttle wouldn't have much of a mission, post Challenger. The Columbia's mission was the second-to-last non-ISS shuttle mission planned. Sure, it might have resulted in a shuttle-replacement, but it could also have ended the US manned space presence.
So, to say that we should have launched the ISS in a few Saturn Vs is really to say that the way the Shuttle program turned out was a bad idea. Which, yeah, it is. But then, it's mostly the fault of NASA leadership, the presidents over the years, and Congress, none of which are particularly known for good mid-term and often long-term thinking.
This is a move to another family of incredibly expensive boosters. All it signals is that Boeing realized one thing: Given how #%#! expensive their boosters are, it doesn't really matter how much fuel's in there, it has no real point in optimizing that, nor is it even worth worying about how much metal they are using to make the booster. It simply doesn't matter because the big cost is fabricating the vehicle and spending months getting each and every booster ready for launch. And building it over and over again because there's not a reusable bolt in there. And they aren't even doing that entirely; they've got heavy lift versions of their boosters that cost at least 3 times as much to actually get something large up there.
If you want to talk about revolution, it's got nothing to do with the latest Atlas or Delta boosters, other than a pretty damn near miniscule cost decrease per pound. Sure we could have launched the ISS in a few Saturn Vs. But that's not the best way if a small reusable spaceplane brought it up in several times the number of flights where each flight was a mere few million to fly.
The problem is that nobody's too interested in that much improvement. The shuttle takes an army of people to maintain because there was already an army of Saturn V engineers to use. If the Atlas 5 was enough of a revolutionary improvement to do a number on launch costs, it *might* spark a resurgance of space industry, or it might just cut down on Boeing's bottom line because it's too cheap and you are still launching just as many boosters, but are making less money.
Remember, the vast amounts of dark fiber all over the world and the failure of the Iridium system did quite the number on the space industry the last time everybody had big plans (Rotary Rockets, anyone?).
Now, there's hope for progress, yes. But a big booster is not required for space exploration, and nor is any hope for progress represented here.
Actually, you'd be surprised at what you can make Word do for physics.
Pretty much, I set up a bunch of AutoComplete "macros" to replace text. So \eps would become epsilon, \int became the integral symbol, etc. So that gets you all of the symbols commonly used. Lucida Sans Unicode is your friend.
Then, pretty much the rest of it was done by writing it out in psuedocode-notation and fixing it later if necessary. So a matrix would be [[x1 x2 x3][y1 y2 y3][z1 z2 z3]], fractions would be seperated by a slash, superscripts used a ^, subscrips used a [], etc.
In the end, I slowed down a smidge with equations, but given that most folks can type faster than they can write, it was entirely workable.
Except she left the CS program after a while. But she did let me borrow her laptop when my 5+ year old Epson laptop (yes, Epson made laptops at one point. It had a 640x480 screen and a 486 processor) finally breathed its last. And she even agreed to marry me.
emacs or full MS Word isn't going to fit on a PDA. There's a lot that can be done with either of those packages to take proper notes with equations and stuff that won't fit on a PDA.
The best solution for taking notes (other than perhaps a tablet PC) is a cheap laptop. Not valuable enough to get stolen, not a replacement for a real machine (so you still have a real machine to back up onto and stuff in the very likely event that your laptop is damaged/broken/stolen), but very very useful.
With some creative Word customization, I was able to keep up with most classes. So my notes were much better, especially given that my handwriting sucks.
1) Primary computer too big to be easily stolen 2) Laptop too crappy to be attractive for stealing 3) Roomate who had similarly expensive computer gear, hence there being a shared interest in protecting one's stuff. 4) Not letting my personal portable gear out of my sight. 5) Leaving unnecessary yet expensive crap at home.
No locks, tripwires, security cameras, security alarms, etc. were involved.
The real stuff that tends to disapear isn't your hardware, it's somebody nicking a CD or two, clothes that dissapear, etc. At this point in life, I probably would have left the CDs at home and stored them on my hard drive.
In fact, the main thing that walked off when I was in college was a leather jacket that dissapeared somewhere around move-out.
Also not that your posessions may be, either currently or optionally, covered by your parent's homeowner's insurance.
Oh yeah, and engraving your name on the really fancy expensive posessions.
I, personally, would rather use a pseudo-WYSIWYG style-sheet based system for all word processing tasks.
But the problem, and I've learned this the hard way, is that your average person does not understand style-sheet based formatting, nor do they grasp what happens when two styles cascade, they have no desire to learn, and they aren't likely to see any benefit from changing how they do work.
I wrote some styling code at work that had cascading styles. Turned out that not a single user other than myself could grasp the concept of a cascade. So I ended up removing functionality because doing things the *right* way was causing more problems than forcing the user to do more work.
Similarly, people don't care about having the computer know what the address your letter is sent to, the person you are writing it to, etc. all present as metainformation. They will type the person's name and address several times, or perhaps cut-and-paste it, and spend far longer messing with formatting than they should.
See, Microsoft has *tried* to make your word processing experience more TeX-like. Remember, Microsoft was one of the first folks on the market with style sheets. The problem is that even Microsoft hasn't been able to jam this one down people's throats. People didn't use the styles the way they were defined, so they had Clippy suggest styles, which people didn't like. People didn't use the document templates provided that would provide a road into a style sheet. And if they did use a template, they'd override all of the formatting and end up even worse off than if they had just formatted it themselves. And automatically "guessing" what you want to do also drives people up the wall.
In fact, one can force Word to act the way you want it to, assuming a reasonably controlled environment (i.e. not mixing versions) and a desire to actually learn to use Word. Although the "whole table of contents/figures/authorities" feature, the "index" feature, and a few other pidly features still suck. But if you set up your style sheets properly, you can have an auto-generated index frame on the side of the screen to dance through a document.
So the problem is not that Word Processors are actually stupid and inefficent, it's that the users simply don't care, and even Microsoft hasn't been able to force people to care.
Don't worry. Sometime in the next ten thousand years Chernobyl will be safe to walk near. Then everything will be just back to normal.
Faster than that.
The more radioactive an atom, the less the half-life is.
The whole civil defense crap from the fifties was built around that. Reduce the immediate fallout several orders of magnitude from packed earth. Stay there for a few weeks until most of the really really nasty stuff is gone.
In 500 years, it's less radioactive than the ore it came from, because you are accelerating nuclear decay. Remember, making something not at all radioactive is an impossible goal, but making it safe is entirely attainable. Banannas are amazingly radioactive, but we still eat them, no?
Of course, you are left with a *lot* of depleated uranium, which is a mildly toxic heavy metal on it's own merits. But it's no more toxic than lead.
Radioactive waste is very much a problem that is less troublesome the longer you wait.
The big thing is that right now, we don't *need* reprocessing. It is possible to seperate out the stuff that you want -- u238 a.k.a. depleated uranium, u235, Pu239 and Pu240 (where the more Pu240 the less likely the Plutonium is going to be useful for making bombs), and folks have been talking about a variety of other non-radioactive decay components as being potentially economically feasable to get out of the reprocessed ore. But lately, folks have found all kinds of nice Uranium ores, so other than storage space, it's not economically necessary to reprocess it right now.
And if it's really really critical that you have waste that's safe *now* you just bombard it with neutrons until it's safe. They have it worked out, and, because it'll put off a lot of heat that can be used, it may not be that expensive as far as energy goes.
First, people don't *care* if somebody dies in a coal power plant. It makes the local news, the family mourns, etc. If somebody dies from something similarly bad at a nuclear plant, even if it's in an area of the plant that is exactly the same between a coal and a nuclear plant it makes world news.
I mean, what about all of the coal miners who died early of lung-related ailments on years gone by from coal dust?
Second, the same way that smoking does. A certain percentage of people will live shorter lives because of lung damage, etc. You can quantify this statistically.
I'm betting that he thinks that thinking robots are in the near future and he'll be able to figure out some way to point out that they violate his ethical code that he patented.
In which case, I say "Dude, that's what they thought in the seventies." Where is the AI labs at Stanford and MIT now?;)
Or, he's just figuring that people will think he's intelligent or something and that he's an AI pundit instead of a family counseler.
Slashdot Mirror
Possible.
However, Verizon's business is not built around selling phones. It's built around selling you minutes and special premium features. Id doesn't make any less money if you download Doom or Quake mods, but that's not necessarily the case here.
The problem is that Verizon is figuring that the gain in minutes-usage by releasing a more open phone is going to result in less money than requiring people to use the premium services. And unless there's evidence to prove otherwise, that's where things will stay. Or, alternatively, the number of people who actually take advantage of being able to get around the Verizon premium services will be so small that it's not worth worying about.
There is hope. When Cingular and AT&T merge and manage to move things properly so that there's UMTS in the 800 MHz band, they will be able to give Verizon some great competition. But that's going to be 2-3 years at the earliest.
Actually, the problem was a little less malicious than that.
By the time that they realized that the shuttle wouldn't be able to meet it's promises, the Air Force was alredy involved, all non-shuttle forms of launch were declared obselete, a load of money had been spent, etc. So it was blinders time because if they hadn't kept charging ignorantly forward, it might have lead to even worse consequences. Like, declaring most of the shuttle-related crew obselete after having a launch vehicle that really *does* fill the role the Shuttle was supposed to fill.
The problem is, had we gone for some of the earlier, smaller, and simpler shuttles, it might have worked. The problem is that they would either be too small for some satelites, useless for the Air Force, or wouldn't be able to fill a variety of missions that the shuttle was supposed to be able to do but nobody ever tried to do (like launching from Vanderberg AFB, grabbing a Russian spy satelite on the first orbit, and then landing at Vanderberg AFB again)
See, the problem is that we are merely at the potential cusp for where things get damn interesting. Putting blind faith in Rutan being able to make an orbital launch vehicle like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat is no more prudent than believing that the government will solve all of the problems of space travel. SpaceShipOne is a great expendature of a mere few tens of millions, but it's not a replacement for the shuttle.
The shuttles are "self insured", like the rest of the space program.
That means that if it blows up, is destroyed, etc. the government is left with the tab and Congress will have to pay for a new manned space program. Or just decide to cancel it so that we can spend more money on other things.
Ahh, but at least with the Delta IV Heavy, you can take three more CBCs off of the assembly line and try another launch.
No, the big dumb booster is only *one* way of getting to space. The point of a big dumb booster is to lower fabrication costs by several orders of magnitude, leaving only material and fuel costs (plus launch range fees)
The point, however, is that a good reusable booster designed properly will cost fuel costs and maintenence, plus launch range fees. As long as maintenence is less than material costs, it's even better.
The big reason why building a good reusable booster is so hard is that currently, people aren't willing to accept the comprimizes required to make it work. All of the shuttle-replacement reusable launch vehicles have been hamstrung by trying to be everything that the Shuttle was. If you accept that you are going to have 5000 kg payload instead of 27000 kg, everything becomes much much easier.
And 5000 kg is a nice number. The Gemini was under 5000 kg. An empty logistics module is under 5000 kg. A Soyuz 7k-L1, a.k.a. Zond, is a smidge over (but it was able to go to the moon). A full small logistics module could be under 5000 kg.
If it was cheap enough, we could (and should) build a complete space station, a complete lunar mission, and a complete mars mission, using only components large enough to be launched on a 5000 kg-class booster.
The one thing to remember about Mars is that it's highly likely that any manned mission will contaminate the planet with *our* bacteria and prevent us from getting a full and proper answer to the question of life on the planet. So, while I'm all for a mars mission, I also figure that the best first mars mission may involve a manned orbiter and a series of robotic landers.
I think, no matter how you dice it, the social reprecussions will be *awesome*.
I mean awesome in the dictionary, not surfer meaning. It could be positive, it could be very negative. Will we decide that violence, wars, etc. are really stupid. We could have holy wars with nuclear weapons.
How it's presented is important. A gradually increasing level of certainty will buffer the load, as compared to a sudden announcement. It's also dependent on what we find. Microbes on mars, floaters on Jupiter, fish in Europa, etc. are one thing. Other life forms that are intelligent like us, but differently, are something completely different.
And when we actually are able to talk to space aliens, will they have a similar thought process to us, or will what they consider to be logical be completely nonsensical? Will the logical assumptions that we've often made about them, that they will be peaceful because any civilization advanced enough for space travel would have to be, or will they begin attacking us for one reason or another that makes perfect logical sense to them?
I'm looking forward to it, if for no other reason than to know if everything I learned about the complex system that is mathematics after 4 years of college is a load of crap, based on how space aliens do mathematics.
Or you could always use a (makes quotation marks with fingers) laser or other very directional method of communication.
No, there's a lot of assumptions with SETI, and, even if we do read what is undeniably a signal, it probably won't be anywhere nearby. *And* it is designed to only pick up intentional beacons, not general radio communication noises because our antennas are noisy enough.
I mean, it's a big question mark. Sure, sending out a beacon with a proper easy-to-find signal at a particular wavelength makes sense to us, but we're the only intelligent species we've ever met, so it's *all* guesswork.
But it's the best avenue we've got right now. We can build a massive telescope in space that the Hubble Space Telecope would only be suitable as the viewfinder for and directly image planets. We can build a massive radio antenna array on the "dark" side of the moon and, in the radio silence that only a massive chunk of rock will provide, do some really good interference-free viewing of other planets. We could even try launching exploration missions to other systems. But none of these are particularly possible right now, so we go with what we've got.
Ahh, but only because Russia found that it wasn't worth seperating the tug and the module it's transporting. Pretty much, launching autonomous modules that dock together in space is the only way that Russia has to get stuff up.
Which is fine for a service module or a functional cargo block, but isn't exactly optimal for each and every module of a station, especially given that most reboost operations are done with pidly little engines on a Progres cargo craft.
Pretty much the design of the ISS is all built around decisions made in the 1970s, with generally bad information and an incorrect assumption of how things would be, with limited room to change them over time.
The ISS is modular because all other launch vehicles were to be discontinued in favor of the shuttle. Sure you could have planned to launch it on a Titan 3 or the like, but those were going away and would be much too expensive because the shuttle was going to be cheap, remember?
They started talking about doing things other ways, post Challenger. One of the proposals not picked for the ISS was to build a new core and tack three SSMEs on the back and make it shaped close enough to the shuttle that it could be launched using an ET and two SRBs. Except we already had the US-side ISS modules (russians weren't involved yet) designed and partially built, so it wouldn't save that much money, and had some signifigant disadvantages.
And, the other thing is that without an ISS, the shuttle wouldn't have much of a mission, post Challenger. The Columbia's mission was the second-to-last non-ISS shuttle mission planned. Sure, it might have resulted in a shuttle-replacement, but it could also have ended the US manned space presence.
So, to say that we should have launched the ISS in a few Saturn Vs is really to say that the way the Shuttle program turned out was a bad idea. Which, yeah, it is. But then, it's mostly the fault of NASA leadership, the presidents over the years, and Congress, none of which are particularly known for good mid-term and often long-term thinking.
Huh?
Your conclusions do not follow from your facts.
This is a move to another family of incredibly expensive boosters. All it signals is that Boeing realized one thing: Given how #%#! expensive their boosters are, it doesn't really matter how much fuel's in there, it has no real point in optimizing that, nor is it even worth worying about how much metal they are using to make the booster. It simply doesn't matter because the big cost is fabricating the vehicle and spending months getting each and every booster ready for launch. And building it over and over again because there's not a reusable bolt in there. And they aren't even doing that entirely; they've got heavy lift versions of their boosters that cost at least 3 times as much to actually get something large up there.
If you want to talk about revolution, it's got nothing to do with the latest Atlas or Delta boosters, other than a pretty damn near miniscule cost decrease per pound. Sure we could have launched the ISS in a few Saturn Vs. But that's not the best way if a small reusable spaceplane brought it up in several times the number of flights where each flight was a mere few million to fly.
The problem is that nobody's too interested in that much improvement. The shuttle takes an army of people to maintain because there was already an army of Saturn V engineers to use. If the Atlas 5 was enough of a revolutionary improvement to do a number on launch costs, it *might* spark a resurgance of space industry, or it might just cut down on Boeing's bottom line because it's too cheap and you are still launching just as many boosters, but are making less money.
Remember, the vast amounts of dark fiber all over the world and the failure of the Iridium system did quite the number on the space industry the last time everybody had big plans (Rotary Rockets, anyone?).
Now, there's hope for progress, yes. But a big booster is not required for space exploration, and nor is any hope for progress represented here.
Actually, you'd be surprised at what you can make Word do for physics.
Pretty much, I set up a bunch of AutoComplete "macros" to replace text. So \eps would become epsilon, \int became the integral symbol, etc. So that gets you all of the symbols commonly used. Lucida Sans Unicode is your friend.
Then, pretty much the rest of it was done by writing it out in psuedocode-notation and fixing it later if necessary. So a matrix would be [[x1 x2 x3][y1 y2 y3][z1 z2 z3]], fractions would be seperated by a slash, superscripts used a ^, subscrips used a [], etc.
In the end, I slowed down a smidge with equations, but given that most folks can type faster than they can write, it was entirely workable.
You'd be surprized what can be done with Word (or probably emacs) for everything *but* diagrams.
It ended up that I was able to keep up with most classes where everything wasn't entirely drawings.
See, that doesn't solve the primary problem that my handwriting is illegable.
However, conveniently enough, the single pass of typing out the notes was good enough.
Oddly enough, been there done that.
;)
Except she left the CS program after a while. But she did let me borrow her laptop when my 5+ year old Epson laptop (yes, Epson made laptops at one point. It had a 640x480 screen and a 486 processor) finally breathed its last. And she even agreed to marry me.
Ahh. Young romance in the computer labs.
Here's the thing.
emacs or full MS Word isn't going to fit on a PDA. There's a lot that can be done with either of those packages to take proper notes with equations and stuff that won't fit on a PDA.
Plus, the screen size is awfully small.
Bah.
The best solution for taking notes (other than perhaps a tablet PC) is a cheap laptop. Not valuable enough to get stolen, not a replacement for a real machine (so you still have a real machine to back up onto and stuff in the very likely event that your laptop is damaged/broken/stolen), but very very useful.
With some creative Word customization, I was able to keep up with most classes. So my notes were much better, especially given that my handwriting sucks.
PDAs are wretched for taking notes on.
Other benefit for backpack with notebook slot: You can bike with a laptop.
1) Primary computer too big to be easily stolen
2) Laptop too crappy to be attractive for stealing
3) Roomate who had similarly expensive computer gear, hence there being a shared interest in protecting one's stuff.
4) Not letting my personal portable gear out of my sight.
5) Leaving unnecessary yet expensive crap at home.
No locks, tripwires, security cameras, security alarms, etc. were involved.
The real stuff that tends to disapear isn't your hardware, it's somebody nicking a CD or two, clothes that dissapear, etc. At this point in life, I probably would have left the CDs at home and stored them on my hard drive.
In fact, the main thing that walked off when I was in college was a leather jacket that dissapeared somewhere around move-out.
Also not that your posessions may be, either currently or optionally, covered by your parent's homeowner's insurance.
Oh yeah, and engraving your name on the really fancy expensive posessions.
Bah.
I, personally, would rather use a pseudo-WYSIWYG style-sheet based system for all word processing tasks.
But the problem, and I've learned this the hard way, is that your average person does not understand style-sheet based formatting, nor do they grasp what happens when two styles cascade, they have no desire to learn, and they aren't likely to see any benefit from changing how they do work.
I wrote some styling code at work that had cascading styles. Turned out that not a single user other than myself could grasp the concept of a cascade. So I ended up removing functionality because doing things the *right* way was causing more problems than forcing the user to do more work.
Similarly, people don't care about having the computer know what the address your letter is sent to, the person you are writing it to, etc. all present as metainformation. They will type the person's name and address several times, or perhaps cut-and-paste it, and spend far longer messing with formatting than they should.
See, Microsoft has *tried* to make your word processing experience more TeX-like. Remember, Microsoft was one of the first folks on the market with style sheets. The problem is that even Microsoft hasn't been able to jam this one down people's throats. People didn't use the styles the way they were defined, so they had Clippy suggest styles, which people didn't like. People didn't use the document templates provided that would provide a road into a style sheet. And if they did use a template, they'd override all of the formatting and end up even worse off than if they had just formatted it themselves. And automatically "guessing" what you want to do also drives people up the wall.
In fact, one can force Word to act the way you want it to, assuming a reasonably controlled environment (i.e. not mixing versions) and a desire to actually learn to use Word. Although the "whole table of contents/figures/authorities" feature, the "index" feature, and a few other pidly features still suck. But if you set up your style sheets properly, you can have an auto-generated index frame on the side of the screen to dance through a document.
So the problem is not that Word Processors are actually stupid and inefficent, it's that the users simply don't care, and even Microsoft hasn't been able to force people to care.
Don't worry. Sometime in the next ten thousand years Chernobyl will be safe to walk near. Then everything will be just back to normal.
Faster than that.
The more radioactive an atom, the less the half-life is.
The whole civil defense crap from the fifties was built around that. Reduce the immediate fallout several orders of magnitude from packed earth. Stay there for a few weeks until most of the really really nasty stuff is gone.
So it'll be a few hundered years, tops.
It's actually even better.
In 500 years, it's less radioactive than the ore it came from, because you are accelerating nuclear decay. Remember, making something not at all radioactive is an impossible goal, but making it safe is entirely attainable. Banannas are amazingly radioactive, but we still eat them, no?
Of course, you are left with a *lot* of depleated uranium, which is a mildly toxic heavy metal on it's own merits. But it's no more toxic than lead.
Radioactive waste is very much a problem that is less troublesome the longer you wait.
The big thing is that right now, we don't *need* reprocessing. It is possible to seperate out the stuff that you want -- u238 a.k.a. depleated uranium, u235, Pu239 and Pu240 (where the more Pu240 the less likely the Plutonium is going to be useful for making bombs), and folks have been talking about a variety of other non-radioactive decay components as being potentially economically feasable to get out of the reprocessed ore. But lately, folks have found all kinds of nice Uranium ores, so other than storage space, it's not economically necessary to reprocess it right now.
And if it's really really critical that you have waste that's safe *now* you just bombard it with neutrons until it's safe. They have it worked out, and, because it'll put off a lot of heat that can be used, it may not be that expensive as far as energy goes.
Two ways....
First, people don't *care* if somebody dies in a coal power plant. It makes the local news, the family mourns, etc. If somebody dies from something similarly bad at a nuclear plant, even if it's in an area of the plant that is exactly the same between a coal and a nuclear plant it makes world news.
I mean, what about all of the coal miners who died early of lung-related ailments on years gone by from coal dust?
Second, the same way that smoking does. A certain percentage of people will live shorter lives because of lung damage, etc. You can quantify this statistically.
Dude, there's prior art a'plenty from bad 60s science fiction. ;)
Ummm..
;)
Robots obey those who own them.
Politicians also obey those who own them. We do not own our politicians, large corporations do.
I'm betting that he thinks that thinking robots are in the near future and he'll be able to figure out some way to point out that they violate his ethical code that he patented.
;)
In which case, I say "Dude, that's what they thought in the seventies." Where is the AI labs at Stanford and MIT now?
Or, he's just figuring that people will think he's intelligent or something and that he's an AI pundit instead of a family counseler.
Indeed. I'm going out and creating a killing robot right now. I'll claim that it's a killing robot because I couldn't afford to license his patent. ;)