Not sure what you are thinking or if you're confused about units, etc.
I'm pretty sure the poster was dividing 35.71 by 1000 to get KWh price and getting.3571 rather than.03571. Then they said "47 cents per KWh!? That's 3X our residential price!". Fairly simple, and easy, mistake to make when working with with one set that scales by 1000 (kilo, mega, giga, etc.) and another item that scales by 100 (dollars to cents).
No, he didn't. He criticized Obama for being suspicious of his generals. That's a different thing.
"I *expect* strict oversight of the men making the direct decisions about wars, especially the double-boondoggles of Iraq and Afghanistan that Obama was given."
After hundreds of years of experience with bureaucracies, we know micromanagement doesn't work. Obama's place is to make policy decisions, not to stuff his hands down their underwear to read the label.
Weird how all that stuff about military discipline, heirarchy, etc. goes out the window as you go higher up the chain of command. A lowly drill seargeant can expect a reply of "how high" when he demands that a private jump, but the commander in chief needs to tiptoe.
I think the lesson they're implying we should learn is that the paper is wrong because it's based on overly pessimistic assumptions. Erring on the side of caution is fine, but arguing about how long it will take to cross North America, in this day and age but based on the average daily speed of horses over rough terrain, is not.
With what energy? Short of fission or fusion, how exactly do you plan on smelting ore in space (let alone forge it)?! Perhaps fusion in zero-G might make it easier, but who knows at this point. It's not being done now.
Thinking outside the box a bit, if energy is a concern, mine the energy as well. Suck it right out of the asteroids, one way or another. Consider, for example 243 Ida, which is a binary asteroid system, consisting of Ida and its moon Dactyl. Ida rotates about once every 4.63 hours and Dactyl orbits Ida about once every 20 hours. Dactyl masses about 7 trillion kilograms. That represents an enourmous about of mechanical energy. Considering that it orbits only about 90 km from Ida, you could attach a tether to it and literally power your mining operation with string.
On most of the asteroids out there, you can use tricks of one kind or another to steal power from their rotation. Aside from that, you're there to _mine_. There will be exploitable chemical energy on these asteroids as well. Harder to use without an atmosphere full of free oxygen, but still usable.
Aside from that, is there actually any good reason you couldn't bring along a nuclear reactor? Or just a bunch of radiosotopes to run RTGs or just provide heat for smelting? It's not as if nuclear reactors haven't gone into space before, and it's not as if they require some futuristic technology.
The one I read had working Fusion reactors, cars that float above the ground, Cubic TVs, windowless underground houses, no electic cords, colonies on the moon and automatic cooking machines in every kitchen.
Which is weird because the article I read had an experimental fusion power plant or two. Strangley enough, we've had "working Fusion reactors" for decades, making what you claimed he said something that actually exists, whereas actual fusion power plants don't exist. We do have, for example, ITER, the NIF, etc. however, which are pretty close to qualifying. We have cars that float above the ground, though they're certainly not operating on the roads as he predicted. As for 3D cube TVs, there are various prototypes and commercial products out there along those lines and all he predicted is that they would be showing off prototypes. Windowless underground houses certainly exist, they just aren't as popular as he thought. The no electric cord thing was based on predictions of ubiquitous RTGs, which are feasible enough, but not very likely considering paranoia about radiation. As for colonies on the moon... Well, we should have colonies on the moon. When Asimov wrote that, landing on the moon was only 5 years away. With the optomism about the future of the time, who could have imagined that we would do all that, then just forget about it? As for automatic cooking machines, we certainly aren't there yet. Of course, most of the food we consume is pre-prepared anyway.
what is my incentive to maintain my business at all?
That's a good question. What _is_ your incentive to maintain your business at all? If you can't think of why you should maintain it in a hypothetical world with a basic income, why should you be able to think of a reason to maintain it in the world we currently live in? Why don't you just get a minimum wage job flipping burgers?
This is needed because Douglas Adams was a genius. From _Mostly Harmless_:
It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant --- a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.
Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all- purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.
I mean, what kind of sad, pathetic, ridiculous version of the future do we live in where drooling morons get to present us with the brilliant idea of a "Subscriber Identity Module": now permanantly embedded into the device for your convenience!
Huh????? Nixon was never impeached. The house never voted to impeach him. There was talk that he would be impeached but Nixon resigned before that happened.
The poster you're replying to never said that Nixon was impeached, they just vaguely said "the house passed articles". The US has a bicameral legislature. The House passing articles of impeachment isn't the same as impeachment because the Senate would need to vote as well. In any case the House Judiciary committee voted overwhelmingly in favor of the articles of impeachment against him, although the vote never went to the full House. So, technically part of the House voted on it, but not the full house, so you're technically correct in your second sentence. The part about "there was talk that he would be impeached" is a ridiculous understatement. The Judiciary committee vote happened _before_ the tapes were released. There was no way that Nixon was going to avoid being impeached if the vote had taken place. Naturally,as is the tradition, most of the people under Nixon who were involved in the break in and cover up got to throw themselves on their swords and go to prison while Nixon got off scott free.
Yes, primitive technology. Not like the advanced technology we have now with spell checkers and search engines and so forth anticipating what you want all the time. Why, it works so well it frequently leaves me wanting to scream and tear my hair out in delight.
O.K. - but who was playing his fiddle while Rome burned?
Considering that the fiddle wasn't developed for the greater part of a thousand years after he died, it probably wasn't Nero. He probably wasn't playing his lyre either, since the historical records that aren't crazy conspiracy theories place him out of time when it happened. It is fairly historically certain that he introduced building codes to help prevent that sort of thing from happening again after the fire, however.
You do have to wonder about those who are highly devout, but not particularly concerned about the specifics of what they're devoted to.
Reminds me of a bit from _Good Omens_ featuring the angel Aziraphale, psychic (and part time dominatrix) Madame Tracy and her next door neighbor Shadwell who leads the Witchfinder Army (which consists of himself, one new recruit, and a large number of fake log entries):
"You are, I trust, familiar with the Book of Revelation?" said Madame Tracy with Aziraphale's voice.
"Aye," said Shadwell, who wasn't. His biblical expertise began and ended with Exodus, chapter twentytwo, verse eighteen, which concerned Witches, the suffering to live of, and why you shouldn't. He had once glanced at verse nineteen, which was about putting to death people who lay down with beasts, but he had felt that this was rather outside his jurisdiction.
But if life caught and spread in that very early universe, there could have been life waiting in the wings to fill in areas that were sterilized later. Between areas too hot for life and too cold for life, you get areas where life can thrive, or, at least, cling on to existence by its fingernails, or even die but leave behind materials that are much more likely to become life again than random material. So, the idea here is that life develops and spreads in the early universe and then gets scattered across it as it ages.
As for the problem of interstellar distances, and working under the assumption that life can't be preserved frozen for millions of years, you have to realize that interstellar distances are a temporary problem. You imagine life travelling on rocks taking millions of years to cross the vast gulfs of space between stars. The thing is, those vast gulfs aren't always so vast. Consider Barnard's star. At present, it's moving towards our sun at.04% of the speed of light. That's pretty fast. In just 8000 years it will have moved about 2.2 light years closer to Earth and will be closer to Earth than Proxima Centauri is now. In 33,000 years, Ross 248 should be 1 light year closer to Earth than Proxima Centauri is now. It should be obvious from this that, over the course of billions of years, many stars make really close approaches to other stars. Galaxies are giant stellar blenders. When stars make really close approaches, the odds of life surviving a transfer becomes significantly greater.
I'm not personally a proponent of panspermia theories, based on the "space is frickin' big" principle.
Well, yes, but the whole point of this article is that, once upon a time, space was tiny compared to what it's like now, but still had just as much actual matter in it, with a staggeringly larger part of that existing in conditions that could foster the origin of life.
Well, there is the problem of forced heirship. In the US though, I think that only takes the form of some portion of the estate statutorily going to children, and then only in some states. In the case mentioned, a will would have been a really good idea, but many people don't have them. When they're a male/female couple and either married or otherwise recognized by the law, the will isn't needed. So, this is still an example of a lack of equal protection under the law.
The people I've known who self-identified as satanists have been very clear that they're not the same thing as "satan worshipers" and that they're really following more of a philoshophy of rebellion and individualism than actually worshiping supernatural entities. Most of them had read the LaVey Satanic bible (parts of it anyway) and liked some of the philosophy, but never bothered with the rituals (which are essentially self-actualization exercises anyway).
That's not to say that all satanists are the same any more than all christians are the same. There are true believers as well and, as you point out, they are, in terms of religious beliefs, sometimes exactly in line with christians (or jews or muslims, etc.) they just disagree on who to worship from the "pantheon" of the ostensibly monotheistic religions.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure what you are thinking or if you're confused about units, etc.
I'm pretty sure the poster was dividing 35.71 by 1000 to get KWh price and getting .3571 rather than .03571. Then they said "47 cents per KWh!? That's 3X our residential price!". Fairly simple, and easy, mistake to make when working with with one set that scales by 1000 (kilo, mega, giga, etc.) and another item that scales by 100 (dollars to cents).
Hmm, sorry. Somehow I got the meaning of your reply backwards.
No, he didn't. He criticized Obama for being suspicious of his generals. That's a different thing.
"I *expect* strict oversight of the men making the direct decisions about wars, especially the double-boondoggles of Iraq and Afghanistan that Obama was given."
After hundreds of years of experience with bureaucracies, we know micromanagement doesn't work. Obama's place is to make policy decisions, not to stuff his hands down their underwear to read the label.
Weird how all that stuff about military discipline, heirarchy, etc. goes out the window as you go higher up the chain of command. A lowly drill seargeant can expect a reply of "how high" when he demands that a private jump, but the commander in chief needs to tiptoe.
Try not to be such an idiot.
I think the lesson they're implying we should learn is that the paper is wrong because it's based on overly pessimistic assumptions. Erring on the side of caution is fine, but arguing about how long it will take to cross North America, in this day and age but based on the average daily speed of horses over rough terrain, is not.
You do know that the Earth is in space, right?
Sufficient shielding for even the crew and work areas for a reactor that can produce enough energy to smelt metals won't be light
Yes. What a pity that anyone using such a reactor won't be travelling somewhere with billions of tons of free shielding.
With what energy? Short of fission or fusion, how exactly do you plan on smelting ore in space (let alone forge it)?! Perhaps fusion in zero-G might make it easier, but who knows at this point. It's not being done now.
Thinking outside the box a bit, if energy is a concern, mine the energy as well. Suck it right out of the asteroids, one way or another. Consider, for example 243 Ida, which is a binary asteroid system, consisting of Ida and its moon Dactyl. Ida rotates about once every 4.63 hours and Dactyl orbits Ida about once every 20 hours. Dactyl masses about 7 trillion kilograms. That represents an enourmous about of mechanical energy. Considering that it orbits only about 90 km from Ida, you could attach a tether to it and literally power your mining operation with string.
On most of the asteroids out there, you can use tricks of one kind or another to steal power from their rotation. Aside from that, you're there to _mine_. There will be exploitable chemical energy on these asteroids as well. Harder to use without an atmosphere full of free oxygen, but still usable.
Aside from that, is there actually any good reason you couldn't bring along a nuclear reactor? Or just a bunch of radiosotopes to run RTGs or just provide heat for smelting? It's not as if nuclear reactors haven't gone into space before, and it's not as if they require some futuristic technology.
At least the poster you replied to had actually read the article we're discussing.
The one I read had working Fusion reactors, cars that float above the ground, Cubic TVs, windowless underground houses, no electic cords, colonies on the moon and automatic cooking machines in every kitchen.
Which is weird because the article I read had an experimental fusion power plant or two. Strangley enough, we've had "working Fusion reactors" for decades, making what you claimed he said something that actually exists, whereas actual fusion power plants don't exist. We do have, for example, ITER, the NIF, etc. however, which are pretty close to qualifying. We have cars that float above the ground, though they're certainly not operating on the roads as he predicted. As for 3D cube TVs, there are various prototypes and commercial products out there along those lines and all he predicted is that they would be showing off prototypes. Windowless underground houses certainly exist, they just aren't as popular as he thought. The no electric cord thing was based on predictions of ubiquitous RTGs, which are feasible enough, but not very likely considering paranoia about radiation. As for colonies on the moon... Well, we should have colonies on the moon. When Asimov wrote that, landing on the moon was only 5 years away. With the optomism about the future of the time, who could have imagined that we would do all that, then just forget about it? As for automatic cooking machines, we certainly aren't there yet. Of course, most of the food we consume is pre-prepared anyway.
what is my incentive to maintain my business at all?
That's a good question. What _is_ your incentive to maintain your business at all? If you can't think of why you should maintain it in a hypothetical world with a basic income, why should you be able to think of a reason to maintain it in the world we currently live in? Why don't you just get a minimum wage job flipping burgers?
Reading comprehension. Learn it.
This is needed because Douglas Adams was a genius. From _Mostly Harmless_:
It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant --- a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.
Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all- purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.
I mean, what kind of sad, pathetic, ridiculous version of the future do we live in where drooling morons get to present us with the brilliant idea of a "Subscriber Identity Module": now permanantly embedded into the device for your convenience!
Huh????? Nixon was never impeached. The house never voted to impeach him. There was talk that he would be impeached but Nixon resigned before that happened.
The poster you're replying to never said that Nixon was impeached, they just vaguely said "the house passed articles". The US has a bicameral legislature. The House passing articles of impeachment isn't the same as impeachment because the Senate would need to vote as well. In any case the House Judiciary committee voted overwhelmingly in favor of the articles of impeachment against him, although the vote never went to the full House. So, technically part of the House voted on it, but not the full house, so you're technically correct in your second sentence. The part about "there was talk that he would be impeached" is a ridiculous understatement. The Judiciary committee vote happened _before_ the tapes were released. There was no way that Nixon was going to avoid being impeached if the vote had taken place.
Naturally,as is the tradition, most of the people under Nixon who were involved in the break in and cover up got to throw themselves on their swords and go to prison while Nixon got off scott free.
Sure sign that Slashdot isn't running enough space stories. The space nutter troll is posting in other stories now due to loss of his natural habitat.
Voting in the United States is, indeed, heavily broken. You should still vote. Just don't vote for a Democrat or Republican.
Yes, primitive technology. Not like the advanced technology we have now with spell checkers and search engines and so forth anticipating what you want all the time. Why, it works so well it frequently leaves me wanting to scream and tear my hair out in delight.
O.K. - but who was playing his fiddle while Rome burned?
Considering that the fiddle wasn't developed for the greater part of a thousand years after he died, it probably wasn't Nero. He probably wasn't playing his lyre either, since the historical records that aren't crazy conspiracy theories place him out of time when it happened. It is fairly historically certain that he introduced building codes to help prevent that sort of thing from happening again after the fire, however.
You do have to wonder about those who are highly devout, but not particularly concerned about the specifics of what they're devoted to.
Reminds me of a bit from _Good Omens_ featuring the angel Aziraphale, psychic (and part time dominatrix) Madame Tracy and her next door neighbor Shadwell who leads the Witchfinder Army (which consists of himself, one new recruit, and a large number of fake log entries) :
"You are, I trust, familiar with the Book of Revelation?" said Madame Tracy with Aziraphale's voice.
"Aye," said Shadwell, who wasn't. His biblical expertise began and ended with Exodus, chapter twentytwo, verse eighteen, which concerned Witches, the suffering to live of, and why you shouldn't. He had once glanced at verse nineteen, which was about putting to death people who lay down with beasts, but he had felt that this was rather outside his jurisdiction.
the average density of space would have been a couple hundred atoms per cubic mete
"Average", yes. Are you suggesting that it was also uniform?
But if life caught and spread in that very early universe, there could have been life waiting in the wings to fill in areas that were sterilized later. Between areas too hot for life and too cold for life, you get areas where life can thrive, or, at least, cling on to existence by its fingernails, or even die but leave behind materials that are much more likely to become life again than random material. So, the idea here is that life develops and spreads in the early universe and then gets scattered across it as it ages.
As for the problem of interstellar distances, and working under the assumption that life can't be preserved frozen for millions of years, you have to realize that interstellar distances are a temporary problem. You imagine life travelling on rocks taking millions of years to cross the vast gulfs of space between stars. The thing is, those vast gulfs aren't always so vast. Consider Barnard's star. At present, it's moving towards our sun at .04% of the speed of light. That's pretty fast. In just 8000 years it will have moved about 2.2 light years closer to Earth and will be closer to Earth than Proxima Centauri is now. In 33,000 years, Ross 248 should be 1 light year closer to Earth than Proxima Centauri is now. It should be obvious from this that, over the course of billions of years, many stars make really close approaches to other stars. Galaxies are giant stellar blenders. When stars make really close approaches, the odds of life surviving a transfer becomes significantly greater.
I'm not personally a proponent of panspermia theories, based on the "space is frickin' big" principle.
Well, yes, but the whole point of this article is that, once upon a time, space was tiny compared to what it's like now, but still had just as much actual matter in it, with a staggeringly larger part of that existing in conditions that could foster the origin of life.
What have you got against Hortas? They're perfectly nice as long as you aren't butchering their children to make paperweights.
Well, there is the problem of forced heirship. In the US though, I think that only takes the form of some portion of the estate statutorily going to children, and then only in some states. In the case mentioned, a will would have been a really good idea, but many people don't have them. When they're a male/female couple and either married or otherwise recognized by the law, the will isn't needed. So, this is still an example of a lack of equal protection under the law.
The people I've known who self-identified as satanists have been very clear that they're not the same thing as "satan worshipers" and that they're really following more of a philoshophy of rebellion and individualism than actually worshiping supernatural entities. Most of them had read the LaVey Satanic bible (parts of it anyway) and liked some of the philosophy, but never bothered with the rituals (which are essentially self-actualization exercises anyway).
That's not to say that all satanists are the same any more than all christians are the same. There are true believers as well and, as you point out, they are, in terms of religious beliefs, sometimes exactly in line with christians (or jews or muslims, etc.) they just disagree on who to worship from the "pantheon" of the ostensibly monotheistic religions.