They are charging and fining anyone who submits to examination and then backs out. This is to keep terrorists from exploring the limits of the system by bringing contraband to the examination and then backing away at the last minute so they're not caught. It is an extremely ham-fisted way of preventing a social engineering attack, but it should suffice.
In the US, once you enter in an agreement with any corporation you lose some rights. What the TSA is doing now is no worse than what many software companies do with their EULAs, it's just more obvious because it's physical.
I'm just waiting for a website to collect body scan pictures and post them with the travellers' names. Is the domain tsa-leaks.com taken? Aunt Mildred might put up with having one official in the airport look through her blouse, but put those pictures up on the internet and there will be fury.
All the responses to my post are missing the point. If you want to find a place on Earth for people to settle that's better than Mars, you need to find:
A) A place without any sociopolitical constraints. We don't colonize Canada because the Canadians would get upset, not because it's unlivable. (It's not; I live in the Dakotas.)
B) A place disconnected from the environmental feedback systems of the Earth. No matter where we colonize on Earth, our industries would still be stinking up the atmosphere and we'd still be contributing to climate change and the destruction of the ozone layer. A planet is a life support system. Earth's is near capacity.
C) A place secure against the possible destruction or collapse of our civilization. Extraplanetary colonies are a hedge against disaster here. The Sahara, or even Antarctica, would not be. Even the ocean floor would not be a safe refuge if our end comes from a meteorite impact or a nuclear war.
Mars is a living space that meets all those requirements. Yes, it's a huge technical challenge. But all of these qualities form economically exploitable investments that you cannot find on Earth.
What really causes website outage is when your stupid comment gets posted to LiveJournal, Usenet, Facebook, Reddit, Digg, BoingBoing, MakingLight, and Slashdot all in the span of a few hours. Which is what happened here.
I'd hate to be their hosting company. They're probably breathing smoke in the server room just about now.
Does this imply that there are two levels of internet access in China -- full access for those rich enough to afford high-tech gadgets, but severely restricted access for the poor?
Am I the only one more worried about freedom-damaging corporate power than the government?
I want a big government to protect me from the corporations, who are bigger, less accountable, and more malevolent than any government. (I'm including religions in this as just another type of corporation.)
I guess that makes me a liberal. I don't even mind paying taxes, as long as I get good services back for my money -- and, amazingly, I almost always do. I can't build a road or a school or an army, but if I pool my money with others the government will do it for me. Governments are wonderful things when they work. But corporations have a vested interest in making the government misfunction, and lately they are getting their wish. In my view that means we need more liberalism, not less.
Surprisingly, no. If the holographic theory is proven, it will mean that our universe contains a minimum of two dimensions. (The maximum remains up in the air, as string theory adds a lot of dimensions that we can't touch.)
When they say 'holographic universe', what they are saying is that while we think we live in three dimensions, we're really only living in two. The universe stores information that the rules of physics turn into the illusion of a third dimension.
You *could* extrapolate that to mean that our universe is, when you get down to its bare essence, only data. And you *could* extrapolate that to mean we are data in a simulation somewhere. But that's two leaps of logic past what the science is actually saying.
1. The current globalization scenario of unfettered trade outward from America but with limited imports into other countries. The whole world gets rich, but America gets less so, and eventually Americans are equalized down to the world standards of lower income, fewer workers' rights and less safety.
2. Measured isolationism, with tariffs in line with how other countries treat our goods. The whole world gets less rich than it could, but Americans retain their standards of living and records for worker safety and environmental protection.
To me, this seems like a no-brainer.
Globalization is a force that in time will equalize every country. That makes it 'good for the world', but bad for America, since we currently enjoy the top position. We should try to the third world to our standards; it is dangerous and unethical to give up our standards and adopt theirs in the name of a bit more marginal profit.
Of course you can compete, by levying tariffs on the guy who is using destructive business practices.
We could restart all of America's manufacturing facilities if our trade policies were just a little more isolationist -- which would be in line with how foreign countries treat our goods.
Count me in the 'scared shitless' category. I was alarmed by the biotech trend years ago, so much that I wrote fiction about it. That fiction story has now turned into my webcomic, Genocide Man.
Everyone who says we shouldn't worry because bioengineered germs aren't very virulent is missing the point. Virulence is an editable trait. They experimented with calicivirus in 1995 to make it more infectious to rabbits, to help cull the Australian feral rabbit population. They came up with a bug that was 99% lethal even when the animals were vaccinated beforehand and treated after they got sick. As soon as some Open Source nutcase figures out how to do that to E. Coli we will have a serious problem.
And once the first home brew plague hits the news, the authorities are going to crack down on this hobby harder than anything you've ever seen.
But don't mind me. I'm just the dance band on the Titanic. You all go ahead and keep partying.
So what's wrong with volunteer fire departments? I live in a rural area served by a volunteer fire department. They are funded by the state as a miniscule item in the budget, and they put out fires without asking people to pay them protection money first.
Tax-funded volunteer fire departments are a fine solution. They would have saved this guy's home.
This isn't rocket science. Lots of communities charge a tax in order to provide fire services to everyone. This one place in rural Tennessee chose low taxes instead of basic safety. Sucks to be them, but this is what they chose.
But in the interest of public good, a fire that's allowed to burn out-of-control at one home could spread to another home, or to a forest, extending the initial threat from a single private residence to the general welfare of the public. If I were this man's neighbor, and the fire that the fire department let burn suddenly engulfed my house as well, I would be quite the irate citizen.
Read the article. When the fire threatened the neighbor's house the firemen responded, because that neighbor had paid their fee.
This is what happens when you starve governments and run the country on capitalism. The only more raw capitalism would be if firefighting were privatized out to for-profit corporations -- which is another dream of the right wing. The 21st century would look a lot like the 19th, if certain people had their way.
Ah, but the price of a human life can be measured, and it often amounts to a small dollar value. How much more productivity are you going to get out of an old woman with osteoporosis? Measured by cold economic equations her life is worth mere thousands.
But electronic crimes have no set measure. Nobody can put an accurate dollar value on annoyance, or loss of security. Lawyers will make up a figure, then multiply it by the millions of people that were involved, and so the costs can be astronomical...if complete fiction.
The lesson here is to only commit crimes that net you a countable amount of dollars, and don't be afraid to kill if it's cost-effective. Bureaucrats everywhere, take notice.
Dave Goldberg, coauthor of A User's Guide to the Universe, took a more optimistic approach. In a blog post, he assumed an average travel speed of 92 percent of the speed of light
That is one HELL of an assumption.
No, it is not.
The base of his calculation was that we want to fly at an acceleration of 1 Earth Gravity, for comfort. To do that we'd accelerate smoothly for 3 years, turn around, then decelerate smoothly for the last 3 years.
If you accelerate for 3 years at 1G, you end up traveling very, very close to the speed of light.
Now, there's a good argument that we have no technology capable of sustained acceleration for that length of time. But we certainly have the ability to accelerate for 1G for short periods of time. The limitation is fuel. But it's not outrageous to assume that one problem has been solved for a best-case estimate of this trip.
Yay -- WoW has finally caught up with the 6-year-old City of Heroes.:)
Seriously, is there any feature WoW has that other, more creative games (CoH chief among them, in my opinion) hasn't already done? As far as I can tell people play WoW because of either Blizzard's good reputation or because so many other people are already playing it. By measure of the actual gameplay, it's one of the worst MMOGs you can find.
The mixed upper- and lowercase rule was adopted in 2003, but municipalities were given until 2018 to comply completely, Hecox said....The additional cost to the city, if any, will be "marginal" because it receives a steady stream of state funding for routine sign repairs and replacement, DOT spokesman Seth Solomonow said. The life of a typical sign is about a decade, so most of the city's signs would be replaced in the next few years anyway, Solomonow said.
So the signs are going to be replaced on a schedule where they would be replaced anyway, almost all of the funding comes from the routine sign replacement budget, and the whole deal was arranged back in 2003.
This is a non-story that some political jerks want to blow up into unreasonable proportions.
I am much impressed. Now, whether the iron was truly meteoric - that's a tougher question. Mind you, one could argue that it hardly matters. A home-made sword is a home-made sword.
He didn't make the sword himself. According to the root news article (which appears to be here) he smelted iron ore from near his house into bars. Then he purchased a meteorite -- hopefully one with a certificate of authenticity or something -- added the meteorite to the pile of iron and gave it to a skilled blacksmith. That means the sword was made with some skill, which means it should be a fine weapon.
This sword is destined to become a legend, whether or not the meteoric iron in it gives it any mystical properties. I've already been seeing it referenced as the Sword of Sir Pterry and as the Pratchettblade. The coolness factor is off the charts.
Just this week, I was asked to peer review a paper in which I was mentioned in the Acknowledgments. The request was sent out automatically -- the journal has records of all their authors, and the keywords for this paper matched the keywords in my profile, so I was picked to review it.
I recused myself, but really I should never have been asked. If they're going to handle the peer review process automatically, the artificial intelligence that makes the decisions needs to be improved.
A geek can cover 99% of their bases scanning boingboing, slashdot, digg, fark and google news in about 15 minutes,
If you're only scanning five news sites, you don't need an RSS aggregator. RSS readers are for power users who monitor dozens or hundreds of websites. You'd go mad trying to stay on top of that many sites yourself.
RSS readers are also very useful for getting news through firewalls. I can't read Fark or Digg from work, and I'm surprised they still allow Boingboing. Google reader allows me to get information that otherwise would be blocked off.
I used to have Bloglines, but for a while their site was broken and I couldn't stand it. Switched to Google last year, and I'm very comfortable.
We don't need new strategies for getting objects down from space. We know how to get them down. When a satellite has outlived its usefulness, you reserve enough fuel so that it can deorbit itself.
The problem is that satellites are expensive and rare still, so we don't want to give them up. So we keep the missions up there for years past their expected lifetime, with the result that they don't have deorbiting fuel left over when they finally break down enough that they're no good to us anymore.
An example: I work with Landsat 5. It was launched in 1982 with a 5 year mission plan. It's still up there, 28 years later, and still a vital piece of the US remote sensing strategy. The next similar satellite won't be launched until 2012. Although it had a deorbiting plan that would have sunk it into the atmosphere a few years after it was decommissioned, that plan was waived. The current plan is to put it into an orbit that will leave it as space debris for 1000 years before it gets low enough to burn in.
If we had funded the satellite program enough, there would have been several follow-on missions and L5 would not still be essential. We would have been able to deorbit it without complaint if there were others that could have taken its role.
Fund space and you won't have space problems. Don't fund it and it'll become a graveyard. Simple as that.
Slashdot Mirror
They are charging and fining anyone who submits to examination and then backs out. This is to keep terrorists from exploring the limits of the system by bringing contraband to the examination and then backing away at the last minute so they're not caught. It is an extremely ham-fisted way of preventing a social engineering attack, but it should suffice.
In the US, once you enter in an agreement with any corporation you lose some rights. What the TSA is doing now is no worse than what many software companies do with their EULAs, it's just more obvious because it's physical.
I'm just waiting for a website to collect body scan pictures and post them with the travellers' names. Is the domain tsa-leaks.com taken? Aunt Mildred might put up with having one official in the airport look through her blouse, but put those pictures up on the internet and there will be fury.
All the responses to my post are missing the point. If you want to find a place on Earth for people to settle that's better than Mars, you need to find:
A) A place without any sociopolitical constraints. We don't colonize Canada because the Canadians would get upset, not because it's unlivable. (It's not; I live in the Dakotas.)
B) A place disconnected from the environmental feedback systems of the Earth. No matter where we colonize on Earth, our industries would still be stinking up the atmosphere and we'd still be contributing to climate change and the destruction of the ozone layer. A planet is a life support system. Earth's is near capacity.
C) A place secure against the possible destruction or collapse of our civilization. Extraplanetary colonies are a hedge against disaster here. The Sahara, or even Antarctica, would not be. Even the ocean floor would not be a safe refuge if our end comes from a meteorite impact or a nuclear war.
Mars is a living space that meets all those requirements. Yes, it's a huge technical challenge. But all of these qualities form economically exploitable investments that you cannot find on Earth.
... nor are there any economically exploitable resources.
Living space is an economically exploitable resource. Earth is running out of it.
What really causes website outage is when your stupid comment gets posted to LiveJournal, Usenet, Facebook, Reddit, Digg, BoingBoing, MakingLight, and Slashdot all in the span of a few hours. Which is what happened here.
I'd hate to be their hosting company. They're probably breathing smoke in the server room just about now.
Does this imply that there are two levels of internet access in China -- full access for those rich enough to afford high-tech gadgets, but severely restricted access for the poor?
o The scanners must be provably safe.
I don't care if anyone sees me naked. Hell, I'll strip and walk through the metal detector if they want. But there are serious questions about whether these new scanners cause skin cancer. Until that's resolved, or until some new, safer technology appears, I am not getting in one.
Am I the only one more worried about freedom-damaging corporate power than the government?
I want a big government to protect me from the corporations, who are bigger, less accountable, and more malevolent than any government. (I'm including religions in this as just another type of corporation.)
I guess that makes me a liberal. I don't even mind paying taxes, as long as I get good services back for my money -- and, amazingly, I almost always do. I can't build a road or a school or an army, but if I pool my money with others the government will do it for me. Governments are wonderful things when they work. But corporations have a vested interest in making the government misfunction, and lately they are getting their wish. In my view that means we need more liberalism, not less.
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence..."
That's just what the openly malicious want you to think.
Surprisingly, no. If the holographic theory is proven, it will mean that our universe contains a minimum of two dimensions. (The maximum remains up in the air, as string theory adds a lot of dimensions that we can't touch.)
When they say 'holographic universe', what they are saying is that while we think we live in three dimensions, we're really only living in two. The universe stores information that the rules of physics turn into the illusion of a third dimension.
You *could* extrapolate that to mean that our universe is, when you get down to its bare essence, only data. And you *could* extrapolate that to mean we are data in a simulation somewhere. But that's two leaps of logic past what the science is actually saying.
Here are your choices:
1. The current globalization scenario of unfettered trade outward from America but with limited imports into other countries. The whole world gets rich, but America gets less so, and eventually Americans are equalized down to the world standards of lower income, fewer workers' rights and less safety.
2. Measured isolationism, with tariffs in line with how other countries treat our goods. The whole world gets less rich than it could, but Americans retain their standards of living and records for worker safety and environmental protection.
To me, this seems like a no-brainer.
Globalization is a force that in time will equalize every country. That makes it 'good for the world', but bad for America, since we currently enjoy the top position. We should try to the third world to our standards; it is dangerous and unethical to give up our standards and adopt theirs in the name of a bit more marginal profit.
Of course you can compete, by levying tariffs on the guy who is using destructive business practices.
We could restart all of America's manufacturing facilities if our trade policies were just a little more isolationist -- which would be in line with how foreign countries treat our goods.
It's not the evil geniuses you need to worry about. It's the insane geniuses that are a problem.
Count me in the 'scared shitless' category. I was alarmed by the biotech trend years ago, so much that I wrote fiction about it. That fiction story has now turned into my webcomic, Genocide Man.
Everyone who says we shouldn't worry because bioengineered germs aren't very virulent is missing the point. Virulence is an editable trait. They experimented with calicivirus in 1995 to make it more infectious to rabbits, to help cull the Australian feral rabbit population. They came up with a bug that was 99% lethal even when the animals were vaccinated beforehand and treated after they got sick. As soon as some Open Source nutcase figures out how to do that to E. Coli we will have a serious problem.
And once the first home brew plague hits the news, the authorities are going to crack down on this hobby harder than anything you've ever seen.
But don't mind me. I'm just the dance band on the Titanic. You all go ahead and keep partying.
So what's wrong with volunteer fire departments? I live in a rural area served by a volunteer fire department. They are funded by the state as a miniscule item in the budget, and they put out fires without asking people to pay them protection money first.
Tax-funded volunteer fire departments are a fine solution. They would have saved this guy's home.
Everyone in the county or state, then.
This isn't rocket science. Lots of communities charge a tax in order to provide fire services to everyone. This one place in rural Tennessee chose low taxes instead of basic safety. Sucks to be them, but this is what they chose.
But in the interest of public good, a fire that's allowed to burn out-of-control at one home could spread to another home, or to a forest, extending the initial threat from a single private residence to the general welfare of the public. If I were this man's neighbor, and the fire that the fire department let burn suddenly engulfed my house as well, I would be quite the irate citizen.
Read the article. When the fire threatened the neighbor's house the firemen responded, because that neighbor had paid their fee.
This is what happens when you starve governments and run the country on capitalism. The only more raw capitalism would be if firefighting were privatized out to for-profit corporations -- which is another dream of the right wing. The 21st century would look a lot like the 19th, if certain people had their way.
Ah, but the price of a human life can be measured, and it often amounts to a small dollar value. How much more productivity are you going to get out of an old woman with osteoporosis? Measured by cold economic equations her life is worth mere thousands.
But electronic crimes have no set measure. Nobody can put an accurate dollar value on annoyance, or loss of security. Lawyers will make up a figure, then multiply it by the millions of people that were involved, and so the costs can be astronomical...if complete fiction.
The lesson here is to only commit crimes that net you a countable amount of dollars, and don't be afraid to kill if it's cost-effective. Bureaucrats everywhere, take notice.
That is one HELL of an assumption.
No, it is not.
The base of his calculation was that we want to fly at an acceleration of 1 Earth Gravity, for comfort. To do that we'd accelerate smoothly for 3 years, turn around, then decelerate smoothly for the last 3 years.
If you accelerate for 3 years at 1G, you end up traveling very, very close to the speed of light.
Now, there's a good argument that we have no technology capable of sustained acceleration for that length of time. But we certainly have the ability to accelerate for 1G for short periods of time. The limitation is fuel. But it's not outrageous to assume that one problem has been solved for a best-case estimate of this trip.
Yay -- WoW has finally caught up with the 6-year-old City of Heroes. :)
Seriously, is there any feature WoW has that other, more creative games (CoH chief among them, in my opinion) hasn't already done? As far as I can tell people play WoW because of either Blizzard's good reputation or because so many other people are already playing it. By measure of the actual gameplay, it's one of the worst MMOGs you can find.
Hold on! That UPI article is deceptive, and does not tell the whole story. Check out the original article in the NY Daily News, which I found via MotherJones:
So the signs are going to be replaced on a schedule where they would be replaced anyway, almost all of the funding comes from the routine sign replacement budget, and the whole deal was arranged back in 2003.
This is a non-story that some political jerks want to blow up into unreasonable proportions.
I am much impressed. Now, whether the iron was truly meteoric - that's a tougher question. Mind you, one could argue that it hardly matters. A home-made sword is a home-made sword.
He didn't make the sword himself. According to the root news article (which appears to be here) he smelted iron ore from near his house into bars. Then he purchased a meteorite -- hopefully one with a certificate of authenticity or something -- added the meteorite to the pile of iron and gave it to a skilled blacksmith. That means the sword was made with some skill, which means it should be a fine weapon.
This sword is destined to become a legend, whether or not the meteoric iron in it gives it any mystical properties. I've already been seeing it referenced as the Sword of Sir Pterry and as the Pratchettblade. The coolness factor is off the charts.
Just this week, I was asked to peer review a paper in which I was mentioned in the Acknowledgments. The request was sent out automatically -- the journal has records of all their authors, and the keywords for this paper matched the keywords in my profile, so I was picked to review it.
I recused myself, but really I should never have been asked. If they're going to handle the peer review process automatically, the artificial intelligence that makes the decisions needs to be improved.
A geek can cover 99% of their bases scanning boingboing, slashdot, digg, fark and google news in about 15 minutes,
If you're only scanning five news sites, you don't need an RSS aggregator. RSS readers are for power users who monitor dozens or hundreds of websites. You'd go mad trying to stay on top of that many sites yourself.
RSS readers are also very useful for getting news through firewalls. I can't read Fark or Digg from work, and I'm surprised they still allow Boingboing. Google reader allows me to get information that otherwise would be blocked off.
I used to have Bloglines, but for a while their site was broken and I couldn't stand it. Switched to Google last year, and I'm very comfortable.
We don't need new strategies for getting objects down from space. We know how to get them down. When a satellite has outlived its usefulness, you reserve enough fuel so that it can deorbit itself.
The problem is that satellites are expensive and rare still, so we don't want to give them up. So we keep the missions up there for years past their expected lifetime, with the result that they don't have deorbiting fuel left over when they finally break down enough that they're no good to us anymore.
An example: I work with Landsat 5. It was launched in 1982 with a 5 year mission plan. It's still up there, 28 years later, and still a vital piece of the US remote sensing strategy. The next similar satellite won't be launched until 2012. Although it had a deorbiting plan that would have sunk it into the atmosphere a few years after it was decommissioned, that plan was waived. The current plan is to put it into an orbit that will leave it as space debris for 1000 years before it gets low enough to burn in.
If we had funded the satellite program enough, there would have been several follow-on missions and L5 would not still be essential. We would have been able to deorbit it without complaint if there were others that could have taken its role.
Fund space and you won't have space problems. Don't fund it and it'll become a graveyard. Simple as that.