Rest assured that the same Church that teaches the African people the moral dangers of using condoms..
The "moral dangers" you speak of are your moral dangers; they are not my moral dangers and they are certainly not the moral dangers of the African people. You have the "benefit" of having been raised in an environment where sex is considered to be dirty and condoms are evil, though this is not part of the African culture. You have an arbitrary set of restrictions that you choose to impose upon yourself, you expect an entire continent to do the same, and when they fail to do so, you wring your hands in despair and pronounce that the people of this continent are getting what they deserve.
Pardon me for not considering this to be a particularly useful attitude. Condoms are extraordinarily effective in reducing rates of HIV transmission, and no amount of Catholic dogma can change that fact.
they know why their people are dying, and they know how they can stop it, the same way it is in the US.
The "same way it is in the US?" Are you seriously suggesting that sex in the US is rare outside of marriage, and that condoms are never used here? You are shooting yourself in the foot -- badly.
Notably, Article 2 forbids "national appropriation," but does not ban appropriation by some super-national body - such as the United Nations. Surely the settlers of Mars would gain little from being placed under the thumb of an infamously corrupt and self-serving collection of dictatorships none of which (Russia excepted) have contributed anything to the exploration of space.
The fact that the National Review publishes the ranting of an anti-UN nationalist is not particularly surprising. It is curious that he refers to the UN as an "infamously corrupt and self-serving collection of dictatorships"; the last time I checked, the United States and the rest of the Western democracies were members of the UN as well.
Perhaps this is an example of wishful thinking on his part?
My software team develops and maintains a very complex system that generates user products from Level 0 data obtained from a certain Earth-orbiting spacecraft. Part of this spacecraft's main instrument is an ADC that converts reflected radiances in several spectral bands to digital values that are then either transmitted back to Earth-based receiving stations via X-band or satellite relay systems, or stored in a solid state recorder for later retrieval.
If Mr. Valenti believes that the ETM+ instrument's ADC needs watermark detection capabilities, then I suggest that we send him into low Earth orbit to do the installation personally. (Preferably, this would be a one-way ticket, of course.)
Just curious because when that article originally surfaced in '97 it was quite apparent from the problem description to anybody knowledgeable that the problem was caused by the third party software running on top of the OS, and not the OS itself.
Irrelevant, unless you're claiming that it's perfectly fine and dandy to allow an application divide-by-zero error take down the entire operating system. Windows has matured a lot since then, but let's not pretend that it wasn't at fault in that situation.
For the record, this review was written by zikzak and posted to Adequacy.org several days ago. It has been reproduced here without permission or attribution (and mention of Adequacy was actually removed from the introduction.) We're glad you enjoyed the review, but the least you could have done is explain where it came from.
Dennis Tito and "the NSync guy" paid (or will pay) their way into space using $20 million of their own money through the Russian Space Agency. NASA is not involved. They did not ride the space shuttle. The Russian plan to put tourists in space is problematic, but attempting to blame NASA for it is asinine. NASA has nothing to do with it, and they have expressed their displeasure with it at every possible opportunity.
The fact that it may be possible to have an enormous potential supply of stem cells from this source makes the conservative stand against using embryonic stem cells (which is admittedly creepy) look much more reasonable.
FWIW, nobody is saying that embryos are the only source of stem cells; many of these same conservatives have long been calling for the use of adult stem cells in research. What the research community is saying is that embryonic stem cells are more scientifically valuable and hold more promise than their adult counterparts. None of that has been changed by this discovery. IANAMD, but you can bet the farm that many will use this as an excuse to claim that embryonic stem cell research is no longer needed, but that is not the case, and we should not let such claims go unchallenged.
Historically speaking, the difference between "bin" and "sbin" has had nothing to do with the intended users of the software (superuser versus "mortal.") The "s" stands for "static", and has always typically been the home for statically linked binaries that are available for cases where the C runtime library is (for whatever reason) unavailable (maybe the filesystem it resides on is unmounted, maybe some idiot admin deleted it, etc.) Now, it just so happens that most of these programs are really only useful to root, but it was never the original intention of UNIX vendors to store "root-only" programs in "sbin".
(This is not to say that it's a bad idea or that things haven't been migrating that way in recent years and in recent distributions.)
Not so much `withstood' as `denied and papered over the wounds from'.
Ah, yes! The evil, black-helicoptered Scientific Orthodoxy! An army of jack-booted, blue-helmeted thugs, commanded by Persian-catted evil overlords in their concrete fortresses on the far side of the moon. They are coming for us. They are coming for us all.
Punishing everybody
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 2, Flamebait
You know, how hard would it be for the MPAA to make an example out of somebody who really is offering pirated copies of the latest movies? How difficult would it be to get on Morpheus or Gnutella, look up something like "The Fast and the Furious (DivX)", and trace the offender through his or her IP address? Has anybody heard of the MPAA actually doing anything like this? Aren't these the people that the MPAA should really go after? How many questions can I squeeze into one paragraph?
With legislation like the SSSCA, the movie and music industries are seeking to impose draconian (some might say dictatorial) on everybody as a result of the actions of a small percentage of the users. If these people had any interest in protecting their profits, they would actually go after the pirates who are swapping ripped movies on the Internet and selling bootleg copies on street corners. The fact that they are (apparently) unwilling to do so speaks volumes about their true intentions.
Brave men have died to protect the fundamental freedoms that the MPAA/RIAA and their corporate thugs are now bribing Congress to take away. What's most sad is that (apparently) nobody in Congress recognizes or cares about this, as long as their "charitable funds" are being properly supplied by the movie industry. Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao, and Jack Valenti. In future history books, all of these names will appear in the same paragraph.
...instead of being constantly inside trying to figure out how to get to world 8-1 of mario brothers, i was outside playing sports, riding my bike, building tree forts...
If kids don't know how to get to World 8-1 of Super Mario Brothers, then IMHO they need to spend more time playing video games because they are clearly out of practice. Really, all one needs to do is go to the hidden warp zone at the end of World 1-2, warp to World 4, then use the first warp zone in World 4-2 to warp directly to World 8. (Note: Do not confuse this with the warp zone at the end of World 4-2, which will only take you to World 5 and is virtually useless; you're looking for the vine hidden in the blocks near the first elevator.)
It is a bit silly to cry "censorship" about that whole debacle. After all, it is their (by which I mean OSDN's) Web site, and if they want to moderate down a bunch of comments that they don't like, then that is their call. However, it was still a Very Bad Thing (TM) to do, for the following reasons:
The editors have always claimed that Slashdot is a user-moderated site. After all, in the moderation story, they describe how they could no longer handle the sheer number of comments and moved from an edited site to a system where users would periodically get a small number of moderation points. The collective actions of those users would result a community consensus.
The thread in question got a large number of "Offtopic" points from the user moderators, but by and large it got more positive moderations. This is because the afore-mentioned community consensus was that the thread was worth viewing. What the editors essentially did was reverse the "user-moderated" policy, nullify the community consensus, and robomod hundreds of posts to -1 with an unlimited supply of points. This is diametrically opposed to any claims of user moderation.
Moderating (and meta-moderating) Slashdot is not that enjoyable of a job, you know. It takes time and effort to find quality comments to knock up a point or two. When the editors completely disregard the will of the moderators (who are essentially unpaid employees) and start "fixing" things with an unlimited supply of points, they're basically saying "Thanks for the effort, but go screw yourself just the same." It is for this reason that I'm no longer willing to moderate (see sig.)
As a result of the modflood, lots of legitimate users took karma hits for no reason other than that they happened to post a reply in a thread that the editors didn't like. This would likely not have happened if all of the moderations had come from users.
Additionally, I presume the main reason that everybody was moderated down was to hide the comments from default anonymous readers and prevent the comments from becoming part of the static page. To accomplish this, it would have been sufficient to mark those posts at zero. However, everybody got hit with -1's, and you can argue that this is just vindictive and disrespectful of a large number of users who really did nothing wrong.
The funny thing is that if the editors had just let that thread die, it would have quickly faded into memory and nobody would be talking about it today, months after the fact. As a result of what they did, it has become infamous. Lots of people who missed it the first time around read it after the uproar started. There was even a front-page story on Kuro5hin linking to the story. I would imagine that the whole nested thread has been archived in a thousand different places on the Web. The mass-moderation accomplished nothing that it was intended to (quite the contrary!)
Now, are a couple of karma points and a mass-modded threat worth whining about? Probably not. But there are legitimate reasons that a lot of people were bothered by what the editors did to that thread. I suspect that we probably won't see anything like it again anytime soon; after the resulting PR fiasco, one would think that the lesson had been learned. At any rate, it isn't much worth losing sleep over.
But if I were to start a cult in Waco Texas and keep to my own private property I should obviously expect the government to storm in guns a blazing...
If you were in violation of Lord knows how many firearms ordinances and if you had taken shots at federal law enforcement officers, you bet. The sad thing about Waco is that it took the law as long as it did to end that "siege"; they should have gone in right away. The innocents who died at Waco would be alive today if Koresh and his cult had followed the law instead of provoking an armed conflict with the government.
Do you blame the United States for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who have died as a result of the sanctions on that country, or do you blame Saddam Hussein, who could end the sanctions at any time (but is unwilling to?) If you blame Hussein for those deaths, it is extremely hypocritical to place the blame for Waco on anybody but Mr. Koresh.
I must admit the possibility that our activities are having absolutely no effect on the environment..
Demonstrably false. Check out the skylines of Los Angeles and Houston. The smog that hangs over these cities and causes the National Weather Service to issue routine air quality alerts are most definitely not caused by small, natural oscillations in our system. Now, granted, this does not immediately extrapolate into evidence that human activities are affecting the climate on a global scale, but at the very least, it shows that those who claim that human activities do nothing to affect the environment are clearly out to lunch.
Maybe God created a World that looks like the result of billions of years of evolution.
Or maybe God created a world that is the result of billions of years of evolution. I'm not particularly religious, but it has always amazed me that so many people apparently believe that a very old Earth/Universe and biological evolution somehow preclude the existence of a higher power. The last time I checked, biology (and the natural sciences in general) was in the business of answering the "how" questions. It makes no attempts to answer the "who" or "why" questions.
Certainly, if a person believes in an all-powerful God, then said person must (by definition) believe that said God would be capable of creating life by employing evolutionary processes. If you were an engineer charged with populating a planet, would you design a species, wipe the drawing board clean, and start from scratch to design another species that is 99% similar to the one you just got done with? I know I wouldn't, and I'm just a lowly code monkey.
I'm an apathetic agnostic, but as far as I can tell, this whole "evolution versus creation" debate is the biggest non-issue in recent history since, by and large, they are the same thing. Oh, I'm aware that there are problems with evolution if you are one of these Biblical literalists who believe that every last word of the Bible is 100% true and that the Universe is 6,000 years old. But I've always been under the impression that these folks constitute a small (but vocal) minority of American evangelicals. Certainly, the Christians that I talk to consider these folks to be a bit of an embarassment.
The "rift" between science and religion (to the extent that there is one) is largely a creation of militant fundamentalists and militant atheists taking pot-shots at each other from opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence. To the rest of us, there is a large middle ground that has more than enough room to hold us comfortably.
I find this clandestine mass-robomoderation to be thoroughly distasteful. I'm not going to yell "censorship", as so many others have; after all, it is your site and you are free to do what you like. However, it is entirely hypocritical to claim that/. is an open, free and user-moderated forum out of one side of your mouth, while instantly nuking entire threads to get rid of discussions that you (apparently) don't like. The parent post may be off-topic, but the last time I checked, user moderators have an "Offtopic" option and could have marked it as such if they desired. (Many, in fact, did so; many did not.)
If you're going to be doing this type of thing, the least you could do is have the cajones to come clean about it. Explain that editors may, on occasion, wipe out threads that they find undesirable; explain that this nullifies the expressed wishes of the existing moderators, and explain that people should attempt to preserve their karma by avoiding discussions that could potentially invoke the ire of a/. editor. This is beginning to happen with some regularity; your credibility would be helped if you would at least come clean. None of this namby-pampy fiddly-fuck "um, we don't do that sort of thing."
I've been reading/. for a long time; I liked it, and in general I still do like it. But IMHO the editors would do well to let the moderators do their jobs. Moderating and meta-moderating is not exactly the easiest or most enjoyable task in the world, you know. It takes time and effort to find insightful comments to moderate up. It takes time and effort to pour through people's moderations and judge them on their merits. And frankly, it does piss me off a little that these efforts are being overshadowed by skriptz that will handily dispose of all "subversive" comments in a manner that is not subject to metamoderation.
There's my $0.02. I could check the "No Score +1 Bonus", but I won't. I think three karma points is worth it, when there is a point to be made. I hope I've made one.
Nevertheless, I think SETI would be in favor of a message in a bottle being sent out to sea versus having Columbus kill himself once he's found land. OK, I admit it. I'm a dreamer.
This is actually a neat idea, though as you say, it's a long shot at best.:-) The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft actually had plaques on board that contained, among other things, drawings of human beings and a description of the Solar System. There's a picture of the plaques here (there may be a better link, but this was the first one that I found in Google.)
Early RTGs (radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which are used to power Galileo) were designed to do exactly what you are claiming; that is, they were designed to burn up in the atmosphere in the case of failure. Modern RTGs are not designed to do this. Instead, the focus is on survival of re-entry and containment of the plutonium (primarily because they carry more of it than their earlier cousins.)
Besides, what in the world does our atmosphere have to do with anything? We're talking about an impact on Europa, not on Earth. Europa doesn't have an atmosphere (at least, not one that is even comparable to Earth's.)
Galileo isn't nuclear powered in the sense that "nuclear powered" means to most people.
I never claimed that the spacecraft was powered by a nuclear reactor. I'm aware that the RTGs are designed to minimize the possibility of introducing plutonium into the environment, particularly as a result of an accident. However..
Even if Galileo crashed on Europa, all it would do is sink as far as it could sink and give off a nice bit of warmth there in the dark.
.. would you really want to take this chance?:-) As you noted, the RTGs performed correctly during the Apollo 13 mission, but there was no hard impact there -- just a non-nominal earth re-entry.
That's the point - it would keep orbitting *sending back images* until it crashed.
This is why I love Slashdot; everybody's an expert, I guess.
You realize that the same propellant that is used to power the spacecraft's engine is also used to keep the antenna pointed at Earth, don't you? This is the same propellant supply that is all but exhausted. Without this, the spacecraft and its payload are scientifically useless. The reason for intentionally crashing it is to prevent a scenario, however slim, where Galileo may intercept Europa at some time in the distant future. Despite what another poster has claimed, it is not at all trivial (or even possible) to put the spacecraft into a perpetually stable orbit in a system as complex as the Jovian one.
It's done its job. It's in its end-of-life phase, after which it will have no further scientific value to us. NASA's completely right on this one; let's end it.
..we want to be sure it is native to Europa, not imported from earth by accident in a previous space mission. This is simply good science, nothing else, and is completely orthogonal to how well, or how poorly, we are acting as stewards of the Earth.
Certainly, the major reason for going out of our way to avoid Europa is as you say (to avoid potentially introducing life where it did not exist before.) However, I would submit that it is also "good science" to ensure that a nuclear-powered spacecraft does not crash on and contaminate a terrestrial body suspected of harboring life. This is not "save the whales environmentalism"; it is common sense. Certainly you would not call a person who was opposed to detonating a nuclear device in the atmosphere on Earth to be a "save the whales" environmentalist?
Slashdot Mirror
.. I should start charging royalties each time this thing gets reposted. :)
Rest assured that the same Church that teaches the African people the moral dangers of using condoms ..
The "moral dangers" you speak of are your moral dangers; they are not my moral dangers and they are certainly not the moral dangers of the African people. You have the "benefit" of having been raised in an environment where sex is considered to be dirty and condoms are evil, though this is not part of the African culture. You have an arbitrary set of restrictions that you choose to impose upon yourself, you expect an entire continent to do the same, and when they fail to do so, you wring your hands in despair and pronounce that the people of this continent are getting what they deserve.
Pardon me for not considering this to be a particularly useful attitude. Condoms are extraordinarily effective in reducing rates of HIV transmission, and no amount of Catholic dogma can change that fact.
they know why their people are dying, and they know how they can stop it, the same way it is in the US.
The "same way it is in the US?" Are you seriously suggesting that sex in the US is rare outside of marriage, and that condoms are never used here? You are shooting yourself in the foot -- badly.
Notably, Article 2 forbids "national appropriation," but does not ban appropriation by some super-national body - such as the United Nations. Surely the settlers of Mars would gain little from being placed under the thumb of an infamously corrupt and self-serving collection of dictatorships none of which (Russia excepted) have contributed anything to the exploration of space.
The fact that the National Review publishes the ranting of an anti-UN nationalist is not particularly surprising. It is curious that he refers to the UN as an "infamously corrupt and self-serving collection of dictatorships"; the last time I checked, the United States and the rest of the Western democracies were members of the UN as well.
Perhaps this is an example of wishful thinking on his part?
My software team develops and maintains a very complex system that generates user products from Level 0 data obtained from a certain Earth-orbiting spacecraft. Part of this spacecraft's main instrument is an ADC that converts reflected radiances in several spectral bands to digital values that are then either transmitted back to Earth-based receiving stations via X-band or satellite relay systems, or stored in a solid state recorder for later retrieval.
If Mr. Valenti believes that the ETM+ instrument's ADC needs watermark detection capabilities, then I suggest that we send him into low Earth orbit to do the installation personally. (Preferably, this would be a one-way ticket, of course.)
Just curious because when that article originally surfaced in '97 it was quite apparent from the problem description to anybody knowledgeable that the problem was caused by the third party software running on top of the OS, and not the OS itself.
Irrelevant, unless you're claiming that it's perfectly fine and dandy to allow an application divide-by-zero error take down the entire operating system. Windows has matured a lot since then, but let's not pretend that it wasn't at fault in that situation.
For the record, this review was written by zikzak and posted to Adequacy.org several days ago. It has been reproduced here without permission or attribution (and mention of Adequacy was actually removed from the introduction.) We're glad you enjoyed the review, but the least you could have done is explain where it came from.
Yeah, that O'Reilly is definitely full of himself.
Dennis Tito and "the NSync guy" paid (or will pay) their way into space using $20 million of their own money through the Russian Space Agency. NASA is not involved. They did not ride the space shuttle. The Russian plan to put tourists in space is problematic, but attempting to blame NASA for it is asinine. NASA has nothing to do with it, and they have expressed their displeasure with it at every possible opportunity.
The fact that it may be possible to have an enormous potential supply of stem cells from this source makes the conservative stand against using embryonic stem cells (which is admittedly creepy) look much more reasonable.
FWIW, nobody is saying that embryos are the only source of stem cells; many of these same conservatives have long been calling for the use of adult stem cells in research. What the research community is saying is that embryonic stem cells are more scientifically valuable and hold more promise than their adult counterparts. None of that has been changed by this discovery. IANAMD, but you can bet the farm that many will use this as an excuse to claim that embryonic stem cell research is no longer needed, but that is not the case, and we should not let such claims go unchallenged.
Historically speaking, the difference between "bin" and "sbin" has had nothing to do with the intended users of the software (superuser versus "mortal.") The "s" stands for "static", and has always typically been the home for statically linked binaries that are available for cases where the C runtime library is (for whatever reason) unavailable (maybe the filesystem it resides on is unmounted, maybe some idiot admin deleted it, etc.) Now, it just so happens that most of these programs are really only useful to root, but it was never the original intention of UNIX vendors to store "root-only" programs in "sbin".
(This is not to say that it's a bad idea or that things haven't been migrating that way in recent years and in recent distributions.)
You might be surprised how many Slashdotters are in South Dakota.
Yeah, and so are drug dealers and kiddie porn peddlers.
Not so much `withstood' as `denied and papered over the wounds from'.
Ah, yes! The evil, black-helicoptered Scientific Orthodoxy! An army of jack-booted, blue-helmeted thugs, commanded by Persian-catted evil overlords in their concrete fortresses on the far side of the moon. They are coming for us. They are coming for us all.
You know, how hard would it be for the MPAA to make an example out of somebody who really is offering pirated copies of the latest movies? How difficult would it be to get on Morpheus or Gnutella, look up something like "The Fast and the Furious (DivX)", and trace the offender through his or her IP address? Has anybody heard of the MPAA actually doing anything like this? Aren't these the people that the MPAA should really go after? How many questions can I squeeze into one paragraph?
With legislation like the SSSCA, the movie and music industries are seeking to impose draconian (some might say dictatorial) on everybody as a result of the actions of a small percentage of the users. If these people had any interest in protecting their profits, they would actually go after the pirates who are swapping ripped movies on the Internet and selling bootleg copies on street corners. The fact that they are (apparently) unwilling to do so speaks volumes about their true intentions.
Brave men have died to protect the fundamental freedoms that the MPAA/RIAA and their corporate thugs are now bribing Congress to take away. What's most sad is that (apparently) nobody in Congress recognizes or cares about this, as long as their "charitable funds" are being properly supplied by the movie industry. Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao, and Jack Valenti. In future history books, all of these names will appear in the same paragraph.
...instead of being constantly inside trying to figure out how to get to world 8-1 of mario brothers, i was outside playing sports, riding my bike, building tree forts...
If kids don't know how to get to World 8-1 of Super Mario Brothers, then IMHO they need to spend more time playing video games because they are clearly out of practice. Really, all one needs to do is go to the hidden warp zone at the end of World 1-2, warp to World 4, then use the first warp zone in World 4-2 to warp directly to World 8. (Note: Do not confuse this with the warp zone at the end of World 4-2, which will only take you to World 5 and is virtually useless; you're looking for the vine hidden in the blocks near the first elevator.)
- The editors have always claimed that Slashdot is a user-moderated site. After all, in the moderation story, they describe how they could no longer handle the sheer number of comments and moved from an edited site to a system where users would periodically get a small number of moderation points. The collective actions of those users would result a community consensus.
- As a result of the modflood, lots of legitimate users took karma hits for no reason other than that they happened to post a reply in a thread that the editors didn't like. This would likely not have happened if all of the moderations had come from users.
The funny thing is that if the editors had just let that thread die, it would have quickly faded into memory and nobody would be talking about it today, months after the fact. As a result of what they did, it has become infamous. Lots of people who missed it the first time around read it after the uproar started. There was even a front-page story on Kuro5hin linking to the story. I would imagine that the whole nested thread has been archived in a thousand different places on the Web. The mass-moderation accomplished nothing that it was intended to (quite the contrary!)The thread in question got a large number of "Offtopic" points from the user moderators, but by and large it got more positive moderations. This is because the afore-mentioned community consensus was that the thread was worth viewing. What the editors essentially did was reverse the "user-moderated" policy, nullify the community consensus, and robomod hundreds of posts to -1 with an unlimited supply of points. This is diametrically opposed to any claims of user moderation.
Moderating (and meta-moderating) Slashdot is not that enjoyable of a job, you know. It takes time and effort to find quality comments to knock up a point or two. When the editors completely disregard the will of the moderators (who are essentially unpaid employees) and start "fixing" things with an unlimited supply of points, they're basically saying "Thanks for the effort, but go screw yourself just the same." It is for this reason that I'm no longer willing to moderate (see sig.)
Additionally, I presume the main reason that everybody was moderated down was to hide the comments from default anonymous readers and prevent the comments from becoming part of the static page. To accomplish this, it would have been sufficient to mark those posts at zero. However, everybody got hit with -1's, and you can argue that this is just vindictive and disrespectful of a large number of users who really did nothing wrong.
Now, are a couple of karma points and a mass-modded threat worth whining about? Probably not. But there are legitimate reasons that a lot of people were bothered by what the editors did to that thread. I suspect that we probably won't see anything like it again anytime soon; after the resulting PR fiasco, one would think that the lesson had been learned. At any rate, it isn't much worth losing sleep over.
But if I were to start a cult in Waco Texas and keep to my own private property I should obviously expect the government to storm in guns a blazing...
If you were in violation of Lord knows how many firearms ordinances and if you had taken shots at federal law enforcement officers, you bet. The sad thing about Waco is that it took the law as long as it did to end that "siege"; they should have gone in right away. The innocents who died at Waco would be alive today if Koresh and his cult had followed the law instead of provoking an armed conflict with the government.
Do you blame the United States for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who have died as a result of the sanctions on that country, or do you blame Saddam Hussein, who could end the sanctions at any time (but is unwilling to?) If you blame Hussein for those deaths, it is extremely hypocritical to place the blame for Waco on anybody but Mr. Koresh.
I must admit the possibility that our activities are having absolutely no effect on the environment ..
Demonstrably false. Check out the skylines of Los Angeles and Houston. The smog that hangs over these cities and causes the National Weather Service to issue routine air quality alerts are most definitely not caused by small, natural oscillations in our system. Now, granted, this does not immediately extrapolate into evidence that human activities are affecting the climate on a global scale, but at the very least, it shows that those who claim that human activities do nothing to affect the environment are clearly out to lunch.
Maybe God created a World that looks like the result of billions of years of evolution.
Or maybe God created a world that is the result of billions of years of evolution. I'm not particularly religious, but it has always amazed me that so many people apparently believe that a very old Earth/Universe and biological evolution somehow preclude the existence of a higher power. The last time I checked, biology (and the natural sciences in general) was in the business of answering the "how" questions. It makes no attempts to answer the "who" or "why" questions.
Certainly, if a person believes in an all-powerful God, then said person must (by definition) believe that said God would be capable of creating life by employing evolutionary processes. If you were an engineer charged with populating a planet, would you design a species, wipe the drawing board clean, and start from scratch to design another species that is 99% similar to the one you just got done with? I know I wouldn't, and I'm just a lowly code monkey.
I'm an apathetic agnostic, but as far as I can tell, this whole "evolution versus creation" debate is the biggest non-issue in recent history since, by and large, they are the same thing. Oh, I'm aware that there are problems with evolution if you are one of these Biblical literalists who believe that every last word of the Bible is 100% true and that the Universe is 6,000 years old. But I've always been under the impression that these folks constitute a small (but vocal) minority of American evangelicals. Certainly, the Christians that I talk to consider these folks to be a bit of an embarassment.
The "rift" between science and religion (to the extent that there is one) is largely a creation of militant fundamentalists and militant atheists taking pot-shots at each other from opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence. To the rest of us, there is a large middle ground that has more than enough room to hold us comfortably.
Count me in.
/. is an open, free and user-moderated forum out of one side of your mouth, while instantly nuking entire threads to get rid of discussions that you (apparently) don't like. The parent post may be off-topic, but the last time I checked, user moderators have an "Offtopic" option and could have marked it as such if they desired. (Many, in fact, did so; many did not.)
/. editor. This is beginning to happen with some regularity; your credibility would be helped if you would at least come clean. None of this namby-pampy fiddly-fuck "um, we don't do that sort of thing."
/. for a long time; I liked it, and in general I still do like it. But IMHO the editors would do well to let the moderators do their jobs. Moderating and meta-moderating is not exactly the easiest or most enjoyable task in the world, you know. It takes time and effort to find insightful comments to moderate up. It takes time and effort to pour through people's moderations and judge them on their merits. And frankly, it does piss me off a little that these efforts are being overshadowed by skriptz that will handily dispose of all "subversive" comments in a manner that is not subject to metamoderation.
I find this clandestine mass-robomoderation to be thoroughly distasteful. I'm not going to yell "censorship", as so many others have; after all, it is your site and you are free to do what you like. However, it is entirely hypocritical to claim that
If you're going to be doing this type of thing, the least you could do is have the cajones to come clean about it. Explain that editors may, on occasion, wipe out threads that they find undesirable; explain that this nullifies the expressed wishes of the existing moderators, and explain that people should attempt to preserve their karma by avoiding discussions that could potentially invoke the ire of a
I've been reading
There's my $0.02. I could check the "No Score +1 Bonus", but I won't. I think three karma points is worth it, when there is a point to be made. I hope I've made one.
Nevertheless, I think SETI would be in favor of a message in a bottle being sent out to sea versus having Columbus kill himself once he's found land. OK, I admit it. I'm a dreamer.
:-) The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft actually had plaques on board that contained, among other things, drawings of human beings and a description of the Solar System. There's a picture of the plaques here (there may be a better link, but this was the first one that I found in Google.)
This is actually a neat idea, though as you say, it's a long shot at best.
Early RTGs (radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which are used to power Galileo) were designed to do exactly what you are claiming; that is, they were designed to burn up in the atmosphere in the case of failure. Modern RTGs are not designed to do this. Instead, the focus is on survival of re-entry and containment of the plutonium (primarily because they carry more of it than their earlier cousins.)
Besides, what in the world does our atmosphere have to do with anything? We're talking about an impact on Europa, not on Earth. Europa doesn't have an atmosphere (at least, not one that is even comparable to Earth's.)
Galileo isn't nuclear powered in the sense that "nuclear powered" means to most people.
..
:-) As you noted, the RTGs performed correctly during the Apollo 13 mission, but there was no hard impact there -- just a non-nominal earth re-entry.
I never claimed that the spacecraft was powered by a nuclear reactor. I'm aware that the RTGs are designed to minimize the possibility of introducing plutonium into the environment, particularly as a result of an accident. However
Even if Galileo crashed on Europa, all it would do is sink as far as it could sink and give off a nice bit of warmth there in the dark.
.. would you really want to take this chance?
That's the point - it would keep orbitting *sending back images* until it crashed.
This is why I love Slashdot; everybody's an expert, I guess.
You realize that the same propellant that is used to power the spacecraft's engine is also used to keep the antenna pointed at Earth, don't you? This is the same propellant supply that is all but exhausted. Without this, the spacecraft and its payload are scientifically useless. The reason for intentionally crashing it is to prevent a scenario, however slim, where Galileo may intercept Europa at some time in the distant future. Despite what another poster has claimed, it is not at all trivial (or even possible) to put the spacecraft into a perpetually stable orbit in a system as complex as the Jovian one.
It's done its job. It's in its end-of-life phase, after which it will have no further scientific value to us. NASA's completely right on this one; let's end it.
..we want to be sure it is native to Europa, not imported from earth by accident in a previous space mission. This is simply good science, nothing else, and is completely orthogonal to how well, or how poorly, we are acting as stewards of the Earth.
Certainly, the major reason for going out of our way to avoid Europa is as you say (to avoid potentially introducing life where it did not exist before.) However, I would submit that it is also "good science" to ensure that a nuclear-powered spacecraft does not crash on and contaminate a terrestrial body suspected of harboring life. This is not "save the whales environmentalism"; it is common sense. Certainly you would not call a person who was opposed to detonating a nuclear device in the atmosphere on Earth to be a "save the whales" environmentalist?