The technology exists to toot around the solar system and collect materials from asteroid today. Also note that if we're considering terraforming, it will be far cheaper to stay in space once there. As for habitat, see these drawings from the 1970s: Stanford Torus. With materials collection and processing from space, instead of by launching it at immense expense, will allow us to build huge habitats with all the soaring vistas you can imagine.
And if you're worried about stray charged particles from the solar stream, we'll just cover the outside of the rotating cylinder in ice to block those cosmic rays. Then we'll drink the water. -M
No. The resources we care about are in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter (metals), the rings of Saturn (water), and the Kupier belt (probably lots of water, but who the hell knows?).
Mars has marginal amounts of metals and water in comparison to the asteroid belt and Saturn's rings. The expense of landing and launching (even with an elevator) is just not worth it compared to mining asteroids and comets already in a solar orbit.
OK, if a He3 reactor comes online - fine, let's mine the moon. But we sure as hell can't live there, it has 1/6th the gravity of earth. Human beings are not adapted to 1/6G, we are adapted to 1G. If there is material on the moon worth mining, then people won't do it - machines will. We can make machines that would work in 1/6G far easier than we could adapt ourselves to live in 1/6G.
The moon is a canard. As is living on Mars.
I predict that within 500 years humanity will have spread throughout the solar system. But we won't live on a single planet or planetoid. Nor will we "teraform" any planets or moons in our solar system. We will instead *build* our habitats and live within them in orbit around various planets and moons which have materials we happen to need.
I could imagine a large rotating space station in orbit around Titan, dropping a nanotube straw to the methane atmosphere and/or oceans for energy. Or we might live in orbit around Earth, Venus, or Mercury in order to extract abundant sunlight for energy conversion.
Once we get off of Earth's gravity well, why in God's name would we build another society within another gravity well? Space is where we should live. And in space, we should build habitats suitable to our evolutionary history. And once we can do that, the notion that we waste our time looking for "habitable planets" becomes a canard. Our only interest is to look for stars and planets with enough energy to support our biological needs.
I'm annoyed about the topic because some online assholes - many years back - took it upon themselves to contact me personally at work and threaten me with contacting my superiors over posts here and at another web site. I've not made my employer public since that time.
Sorry I got pissed at you though, you had nothing to do with that. I'm just a little over-sensitive.
Would an SSD take the hit of a drop better than spinning media? I betcha it would. Also, these are apples to oranges comparisons here - when was the last time you saw a MacBook Air equipped with a 3.5" 7200rpm Barracuda drive?
IMO: I'm already recommending the purchase of SSDs in laptops for all of our top professionals where I work. And the reason is not performance, it is for reliability.
Basically the value of the money that you save by using open source is more or less equal to the time that you have to spend researching and learning all the things that the code's writing group assume that you already know. I agreed with you right up until this point. Many make this claim, yet I've seen no numbers to back it up. I'd like to see an economic study on this published in a peer reviewed journal. It may be true, but from my anecdotal experience it certainly isn't.
Hi! Do you enjoy paying taxes? Probably not. Especially if you happen to think most of the money confiscated for taxation goes to wasteful spending. It doesn't matter if you would happen to prefer cutting military spending over entitlement spending, or entitlement spending over military spending: one thing is for sure, most every citizen doesn't want to waste taxpayer money. And most every government appears hell-bent on extracting taxes for worthless purposes.
So why are we listening to these private companies whine about not collecting enough revenue from their product lines? Isn't it the same thing? That is: does it really advantage all economic players to pay more for a product than one must? Isn't that just throwing money away on worthless consumption as well?
Or is this yet more of that 'have your cake and eat ours too' bullshit that seemingly pervades the whole nexus of business / government interests? Because one thing is for sure, if individuals can't set the price of their own products and creations - even if that price is zero - then the one thing we don't have is a "free market". -M
What piece of shit software are you using that can not handle simple English text and insists on inserting (TM) trademark symbols where I assume you meant single quote mark?
Unicode differences between Widows and the Mac, I presume. Using Firefox on OS X 10.5, and all I did was cut and paste the text in. Didn't notice the problem in preview or I would have hand edited out the errors.
The new gig is not about me blogging, itâ(TM)s about helping bloggers do what they do best â" shape opinion through the sharing of information â" hand in hand with helping companies understand the role they can play in that conversation.
Mmmmm, the lovely taste of vomit. I never knew 'shaping opionion' by 'sharing information' was what 'bloggers do best'. That statement is even more ironic considering only a few paragraphs earlier he said:
Listen to your readers â" theyâ(TM)re the reason you get a paycheck. Case in point[blah blah blah](
I won't argue with whether Vista is good or bad, because what galls me about this interview is not the debate over Vista but the man's presumptions about his audience and the supposed purpose of marketing being to '[change] the prevailing âoewisdomâ around [the product], one user at a time[...]'. And one does this by 'to explain things in terms that didnâ(TM)t sound like spin but rather presented the facts without being leading, and in a manner that respected our readersâ(TM) intelligence.'
Because, 'I learned that companies ignore or attempt to manipulate public opinion around their products and services at their peril.' And we know Microsoft (or any other corporate "blogger" (I'm sorry, let's call him what he is: Shill) would never do such a thing - right? I mean, Lord help the company that tries to 'manipulate public opinion' with lies - whoops, I mean market-speak.
That thing is freak'n indestructible. I've had one for almost seven years, use it daily - sometimes left on all day - and the damn thing just won't break. I wonder if I'll have it for the rest of my life because it shows no signs of impending failure.
I bought the PS3 last April for Blu-Ray on my digital projector. At the time, AVS Forum recommended the unit as the best available Blu-ray player. Had I bought any other unit, I wouldn't have the option to upgrade to the most recent Blu-Ray spec. IMO: it was a good decision. Also, it came with the hardware PS2 back compatibility and I have plenty of old PS2 games to play. However, I must admit, for HD gaming I have an xbox 360.
Re:This gives reddit a bad name
on
RIAA Website Hacked
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
> If I post a bug report on a vulnerability in some piece of software, am I doing something wrong?
How about if you use that bug by submitting a link to the exploit, and in the submission title promote the use of that hack? How about if then a large segment of that community joins in? And by that action they collectively takes down a privately owned server and cause damages? Who is responsible then? Nobody?
Re:This gives reddit a bad name
on
RIAA Website Hacked
·
· Score: 4, Informative
But the community joined in on the hack with gusto. The comments are worth a read too.
This gives reddit a bad name
on
RIAA Website Hacked
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I like the site a bunch, so I say this with a twinge of reluctance. And I certainly don't like the RIAA. But that kind of behavior is plain criminal. Doesn't matter who owns the computer, it is private property and deserves respect as such.
The fraud is just too obvious. How many times can we experience 'statistical improbabilities' in our election results before we finally just give up and recognize that it's not the exit polls, but the voting system that is rigged? I mean, come on! It's been like this since 2000 at least. And while many were convinced that it was the GOP responsible for all the fraud, clearly the Democratic party insiders are in on it too. This is not about a corrupt Republican party. It's about both party power bases abusing power to retain power, at the expense of the citizenry. BOTH party power centers are using vote fraud to limit choice and debate, yet political parties were *never* ensconced in the constitution.
The only way out of this mess is for liberals and conservatives to drop their petty bickering and join forces to overthrow the whole political party system. Toss the Republican and Democratic parties out just like the Whigs. The parties have forgotten their place and collude to their own advantage at the expense of the entire nation. This is NOT what our founding fathers had in mind. Though they certainly did warn that it might happen.
I expect we'll be migrating ~150 or so Linux desktops to OS X over the next several years. Linux is nice and will remain in production for our back-end servers and for computational clustering, but it's more expensive to support than OS X and supports commercial software the user community wants. This is at a technical university on the east coast.
It's true that X11 won the UNIX display server market. MIT gave it away, the vendors took it. But the modern DPDF display engine has a history just as long, going back to STeP in the late eighties and some aspects of Sun's NEWS before that. I used to hope for real Display Postscript in Linux, but I've given up. Netinfo is seriously obnoxious, but other than that OS X is just as much unixy as linux. With lots and lots of free software ported.
Yes, I was factually incorrect on a number of points. It still doesn't do what I want, so I'm not going to buy it. However, I'm glad the unit works for you.
Slashdot Mirror
It needn't be fast, just effective.
electrostatic Xenon ion propulsion
The technology exists to toot around the solar system and collect materials from asteroid today. Also note that if we're considering terraforming, it will be far cheaper to stay in space once there. As for habitat, see these drawings from the 1970s: Stanford Torus. With materials collection and processing from space, instead of by launching it at immense expense, will allow us to build huge habitats with all the soaring vistas you can imagine.
And if you're worried about stray charged particles from the solar stream, we'll just cover the outside of the rotating cylinder in ice to block those cosmic rays. Then we'll drink the water. -M
No. The resources we care about are in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter (metals), the rings of Saturn (water), and the Kupier belt (probably lots of water, but who the hell knows?).
Mars has marginal amounts of metals and water in comparison to the asteroid belt and Saturn's rings. The expense of landing and launching (even with an elevator) is just not worth it compared to mining asteroids and comets already in a solar orbit.
A rotating space station would offer artificial gravity support, in this case set to 1G for the inhabitants.
Think of the rotating space station in 2001. That really does work.
OK, if a He3 reactor comes online - fine, let's mine the moon. But we sure as hell can't live there, it has 1/6th the gravity of earth. Human beings are not adapted to 1/6G, we are adapted to 1G. If there is material on the moon worth mining, then people won't do it - machines will. We can make machines that would work in 1/6G far easier than we could adapt ourselves to live in 1/6G.
The moon is a canard. As is living on Mars.
I predict that within 500 years humanity will have spread throughout the solar system. But we won't live on a single planet or planetoid. Nor will we "teraform" any planets or moons in our solar system. We will instead *build* our habitats and live within them in orbit around various planets and moons which have materials we happen to need.
I could imagine a large rotating space station in orbit around Titan, dropping a nanotube straw to the methane atmosphere and/or oceans for energy. Or we might live in orbit around Earth, Venus, or Mercury in order to extract abundant sunlight for energy conversion.
Once we get off of Earth's gravity well, why in God's name would we build another society within another gravity well? Space is where we should live. And in space, we should build habitats suitable to our evolutionary history. And once we can do that, the notion that we waste our time looking for "habitable planets" becomes a canard. Our only interest is to look for stars and planets with enough energy to support our biological needs.
I'm annoyed about the topic because some online assholes - many years back - took it upon themselves to contact me personally at work and threaten me with contacting my superiors over posts here and at another web site. I've not made my employer public since that time.
Sorry I got pissed at you though, you had nothing to do with that. I'm just a little over-sensitive.
Not.
I don't make who I work for public any longer.
Would an SSD take the hit of a drop better than spinning media? I betcha it would. Also, these are apples to oranges comparisons here - when was the last time you saw a MacBook Air equipped with a 3.5" 7200rpm Barracuda drive?
IMO: I'm already recommending the purchase of SSDs in laptops for all of our top professionals where I work. And the reason is not performance, it is for reliability.
Hi! Do you enjoy paying taxes? Probably not. Especially if you happen to think most of the money confiscated for taxation goes to wasteful spending. It doesn't matter if you would happen to prefer cutting military spending over entitlement spending, or entitlement spending over military spending: one thing is for sure, most every citizen doesn't want to waste taxpayer money. And most every government appears hell-bent on extracting taxes for worthless purposes.
So why are we listening to these private companies whine about not collecting enough revenue from their product lines? Isn't it the same thing? That is: does it really advantage all economic players to pay more for a product than one must? Isn't that just throwing money away on worthless consumption as well?
Or is this yet more of that 'have your cake and eat ours too' bullshit that seemingly pervades the whole nexus of business / government interests? Because one thing is for sure, if individuals can't set the price of their own products and creations - even if that price is zero - then the one thing we don't have is a "free market". -M
Unicode differences between Widows and the Mac, I presume. Using Firefox on OS X 10.5, and all I did was cut and paste the text in. Didn't notice the problem in preview or I would have hand edited out the errors.
Mmmmm, the lovely taste of vomit. I never knew 'shaping opionion' by 'sharing information' was what 'bloggers do best'. That statement is even more ironic considering only a few paragraphs earlier he said:
I won't argue with whether Vista is good or bad, because what galls me about this interview is not the debate over Vista but the man's presumptions about his audience and the supposed purpose of marketing being to '[change] the prevailing âoewisdomâ around [the product], one user at a time[...]'. And one does this by 'to explain things in terms that didnâ(TM)t sound like spin but rather presented the facts without being leading, and in a manner that respected our readersâ(TM) intelligence.'
Because, 'I learned that companies ignore or attempt to manipulate public opinion around their products and services at their peril.' And we know Microsoft (or any other corporate "blogger" (I'm sorry, let's call him what he is: Shill) would never do such a thing - right? I mean, Lord help the company that tries to 'manipulate public opinion' with lies - whoops, I mean market-speak.
Asshole.
http://coffeegeek.com/reviews/consumer/rancilio_silvia
That thing is freak'n indestructible. I've had one for almost seven years, use it daily - sometimes left on all day - and the damn thing just won't break. I wonder if I'll have it for the rest of my life because it shows no signs of impending failure.
I bought the PS3 last April for Blu-Ray on my digital projector. At the time, AVS Forum recommended the unit as the best available Blu-ray player. Had I bought any other unit, I wouldn't have the option to upgrade to the most recent Blu-Ray spec. IMO: it was a good decision. Also, it came with the hardware PS2 back compatibility and I have plenty of old PS2 games to play. However, I must admit, for HD gaming I have an xbox 360.
no text here
> If I post a bug report on a vulnerability in some piece of software, am I doing something wrong?
How about if you use that bug by submitting a link to the exploit, and in the submission title promote the use of that hack? How about if then a large segment of that community joins in? And by that action they collectively takes down a privately owned server and cause damages? Who is responsible then? Nobody?
But the community joined in on the hack with gusto. The comments are worth a read too.
I like the site a bunch, so I say this with a twinge of reluctance. And I certainly don't like the RIAA. But that kind of behavior is plain criminal. Doesn't matter who owns the computer, it is private property and deserves respect as such.
Hmmmph. I can't even buy myself a decent UNIX workstation for that.
The fraud is just too obvious. How many times can we experience 'statistical improbabilities' in our election results before we finally just give up and recognize that it's not the exit polls, but the voting system that is rigged? I mean, come on! It's been like this since 2000 at least. And while many were convinced that it was the GOP responsible for all the fraud, clearly the Democratic party insiders are in on it too. This is not about a corrupt Republican party. It's about both party power bases abusing power to retain power, at the expense of the citizenry. BOTH party power centers are using vote fraud to limit choice and debate, yet political parties were *never* ensconced in the constitution.
The only way out of this mess is for liberals and conservatives to drop their petty bickering and join forces to overthrow the whole political party system. Toss the Republican and Democratic parties out just like the Whigs. The parties have forgotten their place and collude to their own advantage at the expense of the entire nation. This is NOT what our founding fathers had in mind. Though they certainly did warn that it might happen.
I expect we'll be migrating ~150 or so Linux desktops to OS X over the next several years. Linux is nice and will remain in production for our back-end servers and for computational clustering, but it's more expensive to support than OS X and supports commercial software the user community wants. This is at a technical university on the east coast.
It's true that X11 won the UNIX display server market. MIT gave it away, the vendors took it. But the modern DPDF display engine has a history just as long, going back to STeP in the late eighties and some aspects of Sun's NEWS before that. I used to hope for real Display Postscript in Linux, but I've given up. Netinfo is seriously obnoxious, but other than that OS X is just as much unixy as linux. With lots and lots of free software ported.
Yes, I was factually incorrect on a number of points. It still doesn't do what I want, so I'm not going to buy it. However, I'm glad the unit works for you.
It doesn't do what I want and it's too damn expensive. No sale.