The really big sticking point for me is the formation of fossil fuel deposits on Earth - so many things in both biochemical and geological evolution had to go just right that it might be exceedingly rare, and necessary for bootstrapping things like solar- and nuclear-derived energy.
Well, we don't know the probability of such deposits forming given that life is present. We have absolutely no idea whether it is likely or not, as we only know of one place with life and only have had the ability to properly look elsewhere for a very short time. The jury isn't out; the jury's not yet been sworn in.
So while lots of planets may harbor life, and some tiny percentage but substantial number may harbor bronze age-level civilizations, I think it's possible that we could be the only place in the Milky Way with a technological civilization. Sad, but how do you account for Fermi's Paradox?
Too many possibilities to say. To be fair, our current technology would be hard-pressed to look for Earth from a distance equivalent to Proxima Centauri, so it's not surprising that we've not seen any other civilizations yet. What we do know is that we've not seen much in the way of coherent photon beams (lasers, etc.) directed towards us. But then why would anyone bother to do that? (Or maybe they've decided not to.)
The only things we do know for sure are that it is a very large galaxy, that our detection methods are not yet good enough to spot most potential life-harboring planets at all, that we don't think there is any reason in principle why life has to be carbon-and-water based, and that it was a long time on Earth from when life appeared to when civilization turned up. The Drake Equation has many terms where we simply do not know what the value is; we've lots of speculation, but damn little data as yet.
I've just checked the timetable and the shortest Leeds to London journey today is 2 hours 12 minutes. Whilst most are around the 2 hours 20 mark.
Actually, the quickest was the 07:00 departure from Leeds which arrived in Kings Cross at 08:52, which is a journey time of 1:52. Most are longer (including all services in the reverse direction, from what I can see) because they make more stops. If we could just stop having to halt in one-horse towns like Grantham and Retford, service improvements would be seen all round.
Yeah advance tickets can be cheap if you are prepared to book a long way in advance and spend a lot of time waiting arround to ensure you don't miss your booked train.
So you're prepared to pay extra for convenience? 'Tis your call.
Metamoderation is good for eliminating trolls, but it suppresses minority opinions even more than a straight upvote/downvote system.
Virtually all the minority opinion that's getting suppressed (as opposed to just not voted up or down at all) is dumped on because it's badly written and incoherent. Seriously, the slashdot community tends to like comments that have some proper thought behind them and which are expressed in a way that can be understood the first time through. But you can't just assume that because you believe something, everyone else will agree. What's more, if you have a controversial basic assumption that is key to your argument and don't state it, your whole argument will come across as incomplete (because lots of other people will say "where the heck did he get that from?!") and will be inclined to get downvotes. Show that you've actually thought this through properly and upvotes are much more likely; bonus for showing either useful factual links or awareness of the limitations of your reasoning.
Any time someone's complaining about groupthink here, it's almost actually that they think that everyone else should take some divisive line on something without questioning it at all. But people round here are (usually) too smart for that trap. Show some actual intelligence for a change! Raise the bar for those of us who disagree with you.
Signals to / from Voyager are directional, and more than likely very high power.
Directional, yes, but the power of the signal from the Voyagers is very low as they don't have much energy to work with. (The nuclear battery just doesn't produce enough power for anything more than that, and that's the only power option anyway.) The signal going in the other direction could be high power but there isn't an awful lot to send that way in the first place now: we're essentially just grabbing as much data now as we can from around the heliopause and sending it back here. It's a tough area to study as it's very difficult to get instruments to.
[Longer] trains might involve moving all the signals.
Only if the train gets so long that it doesn't fit between two signals! That's pretty rare, and in the places where it does happen they cope just fine with having trains in two signal blocks at once. (In any case, goods trains with a full load of containers get much longer than any passenger train.) The real constraint on signal separation is the ability of trains to come to a stop safely, and the real constraint on train length is platform length and the fact that they'll have to move signals at the end of station platforms to accommodate longer trains (if there's a signal there; there isn't at all stations). But that's (usually) a much simpler problem to deal with as you don't need to do everything at once.
It seems to me that for the same or less than HS2 they could have longer platforms, double decker coaches (like in France) and get the cost down.
Longer platforms are coming, where possible and sensible, but double decker coaches aren't. The problem is that the standard size of space for a train (i.e., the size of tunnels and bridges) is enough smaller in the UK that there's not enough room to put a double decker coach through it. Moreover, the UK uses bridges very heavily by comparison with much of the world.
I would rather have a 2 hour service for about £30 that I could actually use than a 50 minute one for £200.
Yes, but if you go two weeks further out (and are willing to travel outside peak times) there's a fare on the same route for £22.60. (I'm not sure if that's a return or a single; the website's interface isn't quite as clear on that as I would want.) Booking at the last minute is costly, but booking well ahead is pretty cheap.
Though to be fair there are ecological concerns to be taken into account this time round seeing as we've got less countryside left.
The easiest way to fix that is to get some farmers in the area to take some land out of production and just leave it alone. Within a few decades, you'll have woodland there as that's the natural state for most of the UK anyway (that which isn't bare rock or open water). Sure it won't be undisturbed natural woodland but there's almost none of that anyway; too many hundreds of years of human interference have already been and gone.
None. The EU doesn't collect income taxes (though all its member states do). However, within the EU (insofar as you can say that) not all income is taxed; there's an allowance that is zero-rated. That means that the percentage figure quoted may seem high but real tax levels are lower than that. It's a little complex, but entirely possible to capture within a spreadsheet formula without much funky coding. Because of that, and the fact that different places have different mandatory items on pay-packets anyway, it makes much more sense to compare gross pay and net take-home pay after all deductions. After all, it's not too important whether the money is going to some government or a private organization (e.g., pension fund, healthcare insurer) when balanced against the fact that its not going to you directly. Oh, and remember to compare at different income levels too: proportions change.
Again, a common misconception of morons. Crawling painfully slow? Now, that just makes you look ignorant. SWT is actually quite good.
I've seen slow SWT apps too, but then the problem isn't really the GUI but rather the habit of the Java runtime to use lots of memory. Any machine is slow when forced to page (and when using Java on something with plenty of RAM, it flies). The other issue is that the boot time of the JVM is quite long, but that's actually quite dependent on what you're doing with it.
Neither of these issues is at all special to Java of course and things are not as bad as they used to be, but it is afflicted with them for sure.
However, calling [Ron Paul] "not viable" is defeatist given that his numbers are significantly strong.
What is his support like among non-aligned voters, nationwide? If he's repelling them, then no matter how much his base loves him, he still predictably won't win overall and is thus "not viable". Winning the nomination is not enough.
Knowing my vote will not make a real difference, I will instead vote solely to send the message that I'm fed-up with the establishment's shit.
Good luck with that, but I bet the establishment will do their level best to totally ignore your vote. Alas.
Both parties attract those who are power hungry to their elected ranks
Of course they do! That's true of any organization where people can gain real power, anywhere in the world. The problem is that some people — the power hungry, as you characterize them — will do anything at all to get power. The only things you can do about it are to try to structure things so that they do good by most people despite themselves, and to keep very vigilant for those who go too far.
Or come up with a magic way to change one of the possible configurations of human nature. Good luck with that...
The laws of physics work the same way there that they do here...
And your proof is... ?
You can't draw any conclusions at all without that assumption. It's nearly as fundamental as assuming that there's an objective observable universe at all...
You sure it wasn't taxes? You pay about a buck a liter in petrol taxes over there, plus VAT - roughly doubles the price. I don't know about electricity - but I do know that you pay some carbon tax on that.
FYI, for most fuel and electricity the only tax is VAT (20% at the moment). The Climate Change Levy (about 0.5p/kWh for electricity, quite a bit lower for natural gas) doesn't apply to domestic consumers at all (well, except indirectly through higher general prices). Vehicle fuel attracts much higher taxes.
$500M of a corporation's money, vs a person's right to fly on a plane without cracked wings. Tough indeed.
But the corporation isn't being evil in this case. You've got to assign a value to a human life otherwise there's just no way to work out how important safety features are, and there's no way to work out how much to pay for insurance, and so on. Typically, a life is worth a few million bucks ($2-5 million US, IIRC). That has to be used to work out whether it is worth doing some kind of safety-related action, with key factors being the number of lives at risk and the likelihood of a failure causing deaths. Now, an A380 carries over 500 people but the part in question isn't load-bearing so a failure is probably not very likely soon and probably won't cause the plane to crash. In other words, keep an eye via regular maintenance inspections on it but don't panic.
(I can't imagine any circumstance under which an aircraft manufacturer or airline would want one of their planes to crash, even if all the people on board survive. Crashes are bad for business. They're even bad for business in competitor manufacturers and airlines.)
Yes, it is the SR-71, which requires a generator or two to jump start, and a refueling in mid-air since it tends to lose a lot of fuel before getting off the ground.
IIRC (from talking to a guide at a museum), another technique used with the SR-71 was to position another jet engine in front of the engine air intake to heat and fuel-enrich the air to allow the Blackbird's engine to start more effectively. Amazing stuff right at the limit of what can be engineered (and made obsolete by spy-sats).
Maybe initial analysis could be done on site and data dumped to storage media to be couriered elsewhere every few days?
Anything with higher priority could be transmitted by satellite uplink, presuming the cost of such bandwidth is not prohibitive.
All travel in Antarctica is difficult, as it is at the whim of the local ferocious weather. What's more, with telescopes you typically store all the data collected because it's very hard to work out what's important, i.e., it takes significant image processing and you don't necessarily know yet what you're looking for (modern astronomy is less hypothesis-driven than particle physics during the data collection stage).
A webserver running in a user-account, installed without being root, with a stateful doing the transparent redirection to/from non-priviledged port, a shell for that user set to/bin/false, a sandbox, non-loadable kernel modules, etc. can bring you a system that is immune to patching for *years*.
Good advice. A step forward from that is to run the webserver on a machine that has no write access to any filestore at all. Thus you send logs off-host, mount the things being served read-only from a networked filesystem (AFS is better for this than NFS because you can arrange for none of the users to have write capability to the remote filestore), and use multiple separate databases (obviously not on the webserver machine) so a hole there won't hurt (also give the DB users the minimum access rights that they need). Like that, any attack has to be strictly limited to altering memory and it is extremely difficult to inject substantial new trouble (like a rootkit).
And if you can disable PHP, so much the better. (Sure, you can write secure code in PHP, but community practice tends to insecurity and that's just more trouble than can be ever justified. Other languages much more strongly encourage Doing It Right from the beginning.)
I don't know that much about UK Employment Law, but I'm on the receiving end of US Employment Law.
This is an area where there is substantial difference. The UK's rules are very much not "at will"; a dismissal that doesn't follow exactly the stated procedures for the company (which are constrained by law and have to be set out in writing ahead of time) will open up the way to an unfair dismissal claim (which is typically processed by tribunal in the UK, rather than normal courts). Would the claim be successful in this case? I've no idea at all, but UK companies don't dismiss without being very careful about it (unless the company's in Administration, the approximate equivalent of Chapter 11).
I know that in this area of CT the mulberry trees were destroyed by introduction of silkworms.
You are aware that mulberry trees are the natural habitat of silkworms? They're specialists and don't live on anything else. Moreover, it sounds like before that there was relatively little predation upon those trees, allowing them to get much larger and more common than would normally happen. Because of that, what you had there was a classic case of what happens when a predator species is introduced into a prey-rich environment. It happens.
Slashdot Mirror
The really big sticking point for me is the formation of fossil fuel deposits on Earth - so many things in both biochemical and geological evolution had to go just right that it might be exceedingly rare, and necessary for bootstrapping things like solar- and nuclear-derived energy.
Well, we don't know the probability of such deposits forming given that life is present. We have absolutely no idea whether it is likely or not, as we only know of one place with life and only have had the ability to properly look elsewhere for a very short time. The jury isn't out; the jury's not yet been sworn in.
So while lots of planets may harbor life, and some tiny percentage but substantial number may harbor bronze age-level civilizations, I think it's possible that we could be the only place in the Milky Way with a technological civilization. Sad, but how do you account for Fermi's Paradox?
Too many possibilities to say. To be fair, our current technology would be hard-pressed to look for Earth from a distance equivalent to Proxima Centauri, so it's not surprising that we've not seen any other civilizations yet. What we do know is that we've not seen much in the way of coherent photon beams (lasers, etc.) directed towards us. But then why would anyone bother to do that? (Or maybe they've decided not to.)
The only things we do know for sure are that it is a very large galaxy, that our detection methods are not yet good enough to spot most potential life-harboring planets at all, that we don't think there is any reason in principle why life has to be carbon-and-water based, and that it was a long time on Earth from when life appeared to when civilization turned up. The Drake Equation has many terms where we simply do not know what the value is; we've lots of speculation, but damn little data as yet.
The transcontinental that stretched 1,000 miles from Omaha to the west coast though the sierras took 6 years to build. By Hand.
The additional delay is from messing around trying to make very rich Tory voters less upset. Waste of time if you ask me.
Then one day, you're told that your view is going to be of a grey concrete wall, behind which there will be a train line.
So you think we should pay an "urban artist" or two to make it look more exciting and dynamic?
I've just checked the timetable and the shortest Leeds to London journey today is 2 hours 12 minutes. Whilst most are around the 2 hours 20 mark.
Actually, the quickest was the 07:00 departure from Leeds which arrived in Kings Cross at 08:52, which is a journey time of 1:52. Most are longer (including all services in the reverse direction, from what I can see) because they make more stops. If we could just stop having to halt in one-horse towns like Grantham and Retford, service improvements would be seen all round.
So they'll just jack up fares and when the numbers drop off they'll use the lack of passengers as the excuse to reduce the service.
They were doing that anyway even without HS2.
Yeah advance tickets can be cheap if you are prepared to book a long way in advance and spend a lot of time waiting arround to ensure you don't miss your booked train.
So you're prepared to pay extra for convenience? 'Tis your call.
Metamoderation is good for eliminating trolls, but it suppresses minority opinions even more than a straight upvote/downvote system.
Virtually all the minority opinion that's getting suppressed (as opposed to just not voted up or down at all) is dumped on because it's badly written and incoherent. Seriously, the slashdot community tends to like comments that have some proper thought behind them and which are expressed in a way that can be understood the first time through. But you can't just assume that because you believe something, everyone else will agree. What's more, if you have a controversial basic assumption that is key to your argument and don't state it, your whole argument will come across as incomplete (because lots of other people will say "where the heck did he get that from?!") and will be inclined to get downvotes. Show that you've actually thought this through properly and upvotes are much more likely; bonus for showing either useful factual links or awareness of the limitations of your reasoning.
Any time someone's complaining about groupthink here, it's almost actually that they think that everyone else should take some divisive line on something without questioning it at all. But people round here are (usually) too smart for that trap. Show some actual intelligence for a change! Raise the bar for those of us who disagree with you.
Signals to / from Voyager are directional, and more than likely very high power.
Directional, yes, but the power of the signal from the Voyagers is very low as they don't have much energy to work with. (The nuclear battery just doesn't produce enough power for anything more than that, and that's the only power option anyway.) The signal going in the other direction could be high power but there isn't an awful lot to send that way in the first place now: we're essentially just grabbing as much data now as we can from around the heliopause and sending it back here. It's a tough area to study as it's very difficult to get instruments to.
Southern England hasn't had any wilderness for hundreds of years, and it's to do with farming not houses.
It's got a moral and spiritual wilderness. Will that do?
yachts for the various Ministers
Not yachts. Duck islands.
[Longer] trains might involve moving all the signals.
Only if the train gets so long that it doesn't fit between two signals! That's pretty rare, and in the places where it does happen they cope just fine with having trains in two signal blocks at once. (In any case, goods trains with a full load of containers get much longer than any passenger train.) The real constraint on signal separation is the ability of trains to come to a stop safely, and the real constraint on train length is platform length and the fact that they'll have to move signals at the end of station platforms to accommodate longer trains (if there's a signal there; there isn't at all stations). But that's (usually) a much simpler problem to deal with as you don't need to do everything at once.
It seems to me that for the same or less than HS2 they could have longer platforms, double decker coaches (like in France) and get the cost down.
Longer platforms are coming, where possible and sensible, but double decker coaches aren't. The problem is that the standard size of space for a train (i.e., the size of tunnels and bridges) is enough smaller in the UK that there's not enough room to put a double decker coach through it. Moreover, the UK uses bridges very heavily by comparison with much of the world.
I would rather have a 2 hour service for about £30 that I could actually use than a 50 minute one for £200.
Yes, but if you go two weeks further out (and are willing to travel outside peak times) there's a fare on the same route for £22.60. (I'm not sure if that's a return or a single; the website's interface isn't quite as clear on that as I would want.) Booking at the last minute is costly, but booking well ahead is pretty cheap.
Though to be fair there are ecological concerns to be taken into account this time round seeing as we've got less countryside left.
The easiest way to fix that is to get some farmers in the area to take some land out of production and just leave it alone. Within a few decades, you'll have woodland there as that's the natural state for most of the UK anyway (that which isn't bare rock or open water). Sure it won't be undisturbed natural woodland but there's almost none of that anyway; too many hundreds of years of human interference have already been and gone.
Really? What is the EU income tax rate?
None. The EU doesn't collect income taxes (though all its member states do). However, within the EU (insofar as you can say that) not all income is taxed; there's an allowance that is zero-rated. That means that the percentage figure quoted may seem high but real tax levels are lower than that. It's a little complex, but entirely possible to capture within a spreadsheet formula without much funky coding. Because of that, and the fact that different places have different mandatory items on pay-packets anyway, it makes much more sense to compare gross pay and net take-home pay after all deductions. After all, it's not too important whether the money is going to some government or a private organization (e.g., pension fund, healthcare insurer) when balanced against the fact that its not going to you directly. Oh, and remember to compare at different income levels too: proportions change.
Again, a common misconception of morons. Crawling painfully slow? Now, that just makes you look ignorant. SWT is actually quite good.
I've seen slow SWT apps too, but then the problem isn't really the GUI but rather the habit of the Java runtime to use lots of memory. Any machine is slow when forced to page (and when using Java on something with plenty of RAM, it flies). The other issue is that the boot time of the JVM is quite long, but that's actually quite dependent on what you're doing with it.
Neither of these issues is at all special to Java of course and things are not as bad as they used to be, but it is afflicted with them for sure.
However, calling [Ron Paul] "not viable" is defeatist given that his numbers are significantly strong.
What is his support like among non-aligned voters, nationwide? If he's repelling them, then no matter how much his base loves him, he still predictably won't win overall and is thus "not viable". Winning the nomination is not enough.
Knowing my vote will not make a real difference, I will instead vote solely to send the message that I'm fed-up with the establishment's shit.
Good luck with that, but I bet the establishment will do their level best to totally ignore your vote. Alas.
Both parties attract those who are power hungry to their elected ranks
Of course they do! That's true of any organization where people can gain real power, anywhere in the world. The problem is that some people — the power hungry, as you characterize them — will do anything at all to get power. The only things you can do about it are to try to structure things so that they do good by most people despite themselves, and to keep very vigilant for those who go too far.
Or come up with a magic way to change one of the possible configurations of human nature. Good luck with that...
The laws of physics work the same way there that they do here...
And your proof is ... ?
You can't draw any conclusions at all without that assumption. It's nearly as fundamental as assuming that there's an objective observable universe at all...
You sure it wasn't taxes? You pay about a buck a liter in petrol taxes over there, plus VAT - roughly doubles the price. I don't know about electricity - but I do know that you pay some carbon tax on that.
FYI, for most fuel and electricity the only tax is VAT (20% at the moment). The Climate Change Levy (about 0.5p/kWh for electricity, quite a bit lower for natural gas) doesn't apply to domestic consumers at all (well, except indirectly through higher general prices). Vehicle fuel attracts much higher taxes.
$500M of a corporation's money, vs a person's right to fly on a plane without cracked wings. Tough indeed.
But the corporation isn't being evil in this case. You've got to assign a value to a human life otherwise there's just no way to work out how important safety features are, and there's no way to work out how much to pay for insurance, and so on. Typically, a life is worth a few million bucks ($2-5 million US, IIRC). That has to be used to work out whether it is worth doing some kind of safety-related action, with key factors being the number of lives at risk and the likelihood of a failure causing deaths. Now, an A380 carries over 500 people but the part in question isn't load-bearing so a failure is probably not very likely soon and probably won't cause the plane to crash. In other words, keep an eye via regular maintenance inspections on it but don't panic.
(I can't imagine any circumstance under which an aircraft manufacturer or airline would want one of their planes to crash, even if all the people on board survive. Crashes are bad for business. They're even bad for business in competitor manufacturers and airlines.)
Yes, it is the SR-71, which requires a generator or two to jump start, and a refueling in mid-air since it tends to lose a lot of fuel before getting off the ground.
IIRC (from talking to a guide at a museum), another technique used with the SR-71 was to position another jet engine in front of the engine air intake to heat and fuel-enrich the air to allow the Blackbird's engine to start more effectively. Amazing stuff right at the limit of what can be engineered (and made obsolete by spy-sats).
Maybe initial analysis could be done on site and data dumped to storage media to be couriered elsewhere every few days?
Anything with higher priority could be transmitted by satellite uplink, presuming the cost of such bandwidth is not prohibitive.
All travel in Antarctica is difficult, as it is at the whim of the local ferocious weather. What's more, with telescopes you typically store all the data collected because it's very hard to work out what's important, i.e., it takes significant image processing and you don't necessarily know yet what you're looking for (modern astronomy is less hypothesis-driven than particle physics during the data collection stage).
A webserver running in a user-account, installed without being root, with a stateful doing the transparent redirection to/from non-priviledged port, a shell for that user set to /bin/false, a sandbox, non-loadable kernel modules, etc. can bring you a system that is immune to patching for *years*.
Good advice. A step forward from that is to run the webserver on a machine that has no write access to any filestore at all. Thus you send logs off-host, mount the things being served read-only from a networked filesystem (AFS is better for this than NFS because you can arrange for none of the users to have write capability to the remote filestore), and use multiple separate databases (obviously not on the webserver machine) so a hole there won't hurt (also give the DB users the minimum access rights that they need). Like that, any attack has to be strictly limited to altering memory and it is extremely difficult to inject substantial new trouble (like a rootkit).
And if you can disable PHP, so much the better. (Sure, you can write secure code in PHP, but community practice tends to insecurity and that's just more trouble than can be ever justified. Other languages much more strongly encourage Doing It Right from the beginning.)
I don't know that much about UK Employment Law, but I'm on the receiving end of US Employment Law.
This is an area where there is substantial difference. The UK's rules are very much not "at will"; a dismissal that doesn't follow exactly the stated procedures for the company (which are constrained by law and have to be set out in writing ahead of time) will open up the way to an unfair dismissal claim (which is typically processed by tribunal in the UK, rather than normal courts). Would the claim be successful in this case? I've no idea at all, but UK companies don't dismiss without being very careful about it (unless the company's in Administration, the approximate equivalent of Chapter 11).
I know that in this area of CT the mulberry trees were destroyed by introduction of silkworms.
You are aware that mulberry trees are the natural habitat of silkworms? They're specialists and don't live on anything else. Moreover, it sounds like before that there was relatively little predation upon those trees, allowing them to get much larger and more common than would normally happen. Because of that, what you had there was a classic case of what happens when a predator species is introduced into a prey-rich environment. It happens.