Hands totally off the Middle East? Fair enough, so long as western societies have the right to kick out any person who has any form of affiliation with any religion that has been weaponized into a death cult. This is not so much of a problem in the US as in Europe, which has imported large numbers of angry young radicals under preferential immigration laws from their former colonies.
I don't know whether this is the location you're talking about, butthe same thing happened recently in Anthem, AZ. The result was a cutoff of fiber to the entire northern half of the state for days. Even the ATMs stopped working.
Meaning that cops have literally gotten away with murder in places ranging from the poorest neighborhoods (the Garner case) to the wealthiest (the Olin case). Bystander photography, mostly using "incidental" devices like cellphones, has been key in exposing this problem.
Happens that I visited that mountaintop, in the summer of 1968 when the only sign of human presence was the graded road and the foundation for the very first telescope. There was absolutely no life up there: A Marscape of volcanic cinder. Not a single tree, mamane or otherwise. I can bet that the only sewage that's up there now is the stuff you're spouting.
NIMBY is not a factor here, because it's not near anyone's "backyard" and it's not on reservation land, so it does not belong to the natives. In fact, it's in an area already populated with large telescopes.
Some of the scopes on this mountain had originally been planned for the summit of Mt Graham in southeastern Arizona. Like Mauna Kea, it's not reservation land, nobody lives there and no species is threatened by this particular kind of construction. But the identical controversy erupted when Greens protested on the basis that astronomy represented an intrusion into the sacredness of nature. Some Indian group popped up out of nowhere to claim that the mountaintop was sacred to them, though it's not their land and this claim has never been heard before. Some scopes did get built on Mt Graham, but most of the construction was moved to Mauna Kea because it "wouldn't be controversial there."
There is a standard question that Greens always use when we propose building something new: "Who are you working for?" When something like this happens, we need to start throwing it right back in their faces. Where is their money coming from? Who are they working for?
Half an hour becomes a significant amount of time if you have to make a number of chained decisions, in which you have to wait for the results of decision A to come back before making decision B, with each cycle taking the full latency round trip..
This is how we will approach a task like assaying asteroids for exploitable mineral content. But although actually mining them would be far more robot-intensive than any terrestrial equivalent, we are still going to need some people in the loop.
The real problem is latency. From Earth, we could control teleoperators on the Moon, but no farther. If a robot on Mars reports that it sees something interesting and Mission Control decides to go drill that rock over there, at least a half hour has to elapse.
The more leisure time technology gives us, the more we spend it on 'hobbies' in the broadest sense of the term. This started in Victorian times when the first wave of industrial wealth made it possible for the Downton Abbey class to fund voyages of exploration to every unexplored part of the planet, thereby initiating a golden age of observational science.
Today, ventures like SpaceX are part of the same process. If we did achieve a ten-hour workweek, space nutters would be waving at Luddites from the Oort Cloud.
Russia's declaration of war was the other trigger for our use of the bomb.Imagine Russia swooping down into the less-defended half of the country and creating the dismal dump of "North Japan." Even after the collapse of Russian communism, it could have been a threat to peace unto this day.
Not to mention the creepy way that Werner Heisenberg would intone "Let's cook!" as he gave the order to assemble each new bomb. Heisenberg's increasingly erratic behavior caused the OSS to ease him out of the project and erase any record that he had ever been involved in it. After the war, he retired to open the first carwash in Albuquerque.
No nerd bucket list should be without the Nevada Test Site, which today is like a museum of the Cold War. It has control rooms with the largest CRT monitors ever made, whole test towns with houses, buildings, bridges, railroads and arrays of Fifties cars, all bent and blackened and melted by the earlist nuclear tests. You can see the ant-lion pits left by the era of underground testing. You can see the last blast hole drilled before the test ban treaty was signed, with the test array still dangling from the hoist cable that would have lowered it thousands of feet down to the blast point (A test array consisted of a warhead topped by up to 350' of test instrumentation, with an optical cable to send results to the surface. When the warhead detonated, the array sent back data in the microseconds before the instrumentation all vaporized.)
Your best chance to get a tour is to sign up with a group which has made a reservation.
That dinosaur story was a revenge fantasy about being bullied. Since we're all geeks in here and have mostly been bullied at some time in our lives, and spect a significant percentage of our childhoods dreaming up revenge fantasies about our tormentors, whether such a story would be a "self-righteous pile of PC crap" or not is dependent on what particular kind of bullying you underwent.
Would you feel the same about the story if instead of a gay guy in a pool hall the protagonist had been a Linux fan being mocked in his high school gym?
Bleakness in itself is not the problem, it's the attitude toward science/tech as a solution to human problems. Contrasting two of the ancient classics taught in our schools illustrates the difference: In 1984 the villain is clearly a dictatorship exploiting technology for its own purposes. Brave New World on the other hand, takes the stand that evil has triumphed because, in Huxley's exact words, "science has replaced Nature."
"Dystopic, post-apocalyptic vision, one after the other. I am damn sick and tired of story after story about our future being a world where the only technology advances are to inflict pain and death on other human beings"
But a reformation seems to be in the works. That's what really underlies this controversy.
Of course I bring out the big Olympus when I'm hiking and need to zoom through landscapes or to macro in on tiny flowers, or to do anything that only a lot of pixels can handle. But an 8MP cell camera works just fine for street shooting because it's "invisible" socially. In situations where a big camera stands between me and the subject, people tend to freeze up and can even get suspicious of a photographer. Phones are so ubiquitous that nobody needs to be aware you are using one.
If Henri Cartier-Bresson were alive today, he would be shooting on an iPhone.
Although the Girard-Perregaux Complication Bombastique Impériale was a marvel of its time, the complex geartrains required to write and mail letters, answer telephone calls and listen to the wearer's heartbeat was impossible to keep repaired and lubricated in the field, besides resulting in a device too heavy for any real-world wrist to carry. Though the concept watch was a hit at the Basel trade fair that year, the very idea of having to use a tiny set of platinum screwdrivers to connect the device to a cash register to use the payment feature was a major impediment to sales.
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But how soon will we see claims that windfields affect the weather? Remember, any usage of energy by man is evil somehow.
Hands totally off the Middle East? Fair enough, so long as western societies have the right to kick out any person who has any form of affiliation with any religion that has been weaponized into a death cult. This is not so much of a problem in the US as in Europe, which has imported large numbers of angry young radicals under preferential immigration laws from their former colonies.
But why would this preferentially affect this one country?
I don't know whether this is the location you're talking about, butthe same thing happened recently in Anthem, AZ. The result was a cutoff of fiber to the entire northern half of the state for days. Even the ATMs stopped working.
Meaning that cops have literally gotten away with murder in places ranging from the poorest neighborhoods (the Garner case) to the wealthiest (the Olin case). Bystander photography, mostly using "incidental" devices like cellphones, has been key in exposing this problem.
Happens that I visited that mountaintop, in the summer of 1968 when the only sign of human presence was the graded road and the foundation for the very first telescope. There was absolutely no life up there: A Marscape of volcanic cinder. Not a single tree, mamane or otherwise. I can bet that the only sewage that's up there now is the stuff you're spouting.
Another Arizonan here: It's not the tribes who are anti-technology, anti-business, and anti-modern world. It's our imported California hippies.
NIMBY is not a factor here, because it's not near anyone's "backyard" and it's not on reservation land, so it does not belong to the natives. In fact, it's in an area already populated with large telescopes.
Some of the scopes on this mountain had originally been planned for the summit of Mt Graham in southeastern Arizona. Like Mauna Kea, it's not reservation land, nobody lives there and no species is threatened by this particular kind of construction. But the identical controversy erupted when Greens protested on the basis that astronomy represented an intrusion into the sacredness of nature. Some Indian group popped up out of nowhere to claim that the mountaintop was sacred to them, though it's not their land and this claim has never been heard before. Some scopes did get built on Mt Graham, but most of the construction was moved to Mauna Kea because it "wouldn't be controversial there."
There is a standard question that Greens always use when we propose building something new: "Who are you working for?" When something like this happens, we need to start throwing it right back in their faces. Where is their money coming from? Who are they working for?
Half an hour becomes a significant amount of time if you have to make a number of chained decisions, in which you have to wait for the results of decision A to come back before making decision B, with each cycle taking the full latency round trip..
" Ted Danson may have, but who the fuck does he speak for?"
He was considered chief environmental scientist for all the same Enlightened Ones who got their energy policy from Peter, Paul and Mary.
This is how we will approach a task like assaying asteroids for exploitable mineral content. But although actually mining them would be far more robot-intensive than any terrestrial equivalent, we are still going to need some people in the loop.
The real problem is latency. From Earth, we could control teleoperators on the Moon, but no farther. If a robot on Mars reports that it sees something interesting and Mission Control decides to go drill that rock over there, at least a half hour has to elapse.
The more leisure time technology gives us, the more we spend it on 'hobbies' in the broadest sense of the term. This started in Victorian times when the first wave of industrial wealth made it possible for the Downton Abbey class to fund voyages of exploration to every unexplored part of the planet, thereby initiating a golden age of observational science.
Today, ventures like SpaceX are part of the same process. If we did achieve a ten-hour workweek, space nutters would be waving at Luddites from the Oort Cloud.
The failed projects are the ones we hear about.
Been hitting the colloidal silver again, have we?
Russia's declaration of war was the other trigger for our use of the bomb.Imagine Russia swooping down into the less-defended half of the country and creating the dismal dump of "North Japan." Even after the collapse of Russian communism, it could have been a threat to peace unto this day.
Not to mention the creepy way that Werner Heisenberg would intone "Let's cook!" as he gave the order to assemble each new bomb. Heisenberg's increasingly erratic behavior caused the OSS to ease him out of the project and erase any record that he had ever been involved in it. After the war, he retired to open the first carwash in Albuquerque.
It is thought that Truman's use of the bomb was decided by the massive losses on Okinawa, which totaled almost a quarter of a million on both sides.
No nerd bucket list should be without the Nevada Test Site, which today is like a museum of the Cold War. It has control rooms with the largest CRT monitors ever made, whole test towns with houses, buildings, bridges, railroads and arrays of Fifties cars, all bent and blackened and melted by the earlist nuclear tests. You can see the ant-lion pits left by the era of underground testing. You can see the last blast hole drilled before the test ban treaty was signed, with the test array still dangling from the hoist cable that would have lowered it thousands of feet down to the blast point (A test array consisted of a warhead topped by up to 350' of test instrumentation, with an optical cable to send results to the surface. When the warhead detonated, the array sent back data in the microseconds before the instrumentation all vaporized.)
Your best chance to get a tour is to sign up with a group which has made a reservation.
That dinosaur story was a revenge fantasy about being bullied. Since we're all geeks in here and have mostly been bullied at some time in our lives, and spect a significant percentage of our childhoods dreaming up revenge fantasies about our tormentors, whether such a story would be a "self-righteous pile of PC crap" or not is dependent on what particular kind of bullying you underwent.
Would you feel the same about the story if instead of a gay guy in a pool hall the protagonist had been a Linux fan being mocked in his high school gym?
Bleakness in itself is not the problem, it's the attitude toward science/tech as a solution to human problems. Contrasting two of the ancient classics taught in our schools illustrates the difference: In 1984 the villain is clearly a dictatorship exploiting technology for its own purposes. Brave New World on the other hand, takes the stand that evil has triumphed because, in Huxley's exact words, "science has replaced Nature."
"Dystopic, post-apocalyptic vision, one after the other. I am damn sick and tired of story after story about our future being a world where the only technology advances are to inflict pain and death on other human beings"
But a reformation seems to be in the works. That's what really underlies this controversy.
Yeah, but how many of those books were comics about cats?
Of course I bring out the big Olympus when I'm hiking and need to zoom through landscapes or to macro in on tiny flowers, or to do anything that only a lot of pixels can handle. But an 8MP cell camera works just fine for street shooting because it's "invisible" socially. In situations where a big camera stands between me and the subject, people tend to freeze up and can even get suspicious of a photographer. Phones are so ubiquitous that nobody needs to be aware you are using one.
If Henri Cartier-Bresson were alive today, he would be shooting on an iPhone.
Although the Girard-Perregaux Complication Bombastique Impériale was a marvel of its time, the complex geartrains required to write and mail letters, answer telephone calls and listen to the wearer's heartbeat was impossible to keep repaired and lubricated in the field, besides resulting in a device too heavy for any real-world wrist to carry. Though the concept watch was a hit at the Basel trade fair that year, the very idea of having to use a tiny set of platinum screwdrivers to connect the device to a cash register to use the payment feature was a major impediment to sales.