The interview process he describes is pretty much exactly what everyone goes through to work at some large development shops. I know for certain that Valve does extensive interviews for any potential candidate. If the interview process is mediocre, so is the company.
Exactly how much productivity do you think is possible to get out of an interview candidate? In the world of interns and off shore labor, if you think a company is going to get a positive net gain in work done by 'stealing' work from interview candidates, you're retarded.
Bullshit. If you want the job, you do whatever the employer asks to prove you have the qualifications. Unless you work is universally known, like John Carmack, or Linus Torvalds, you're never too good to take an entrance exam.
The SBSP concept is attractive because space has several major advantages over the Earth's surface for the collection of solar power. There is no air in space, so the collecting surfaces would receive much more intense sunlight, unaffected by weather. In geostationary orbit, an SPS would be illuminated over 99% of the time. The SPS would be in Earth's shadow on only a few days at the spring and fall equinoxes; and even then for a maximum of 75 minutes late at night[38] when power demands are at their lowest. This characteristic of SBSP avoids the expense of storage facilities (dams, oil storage tanks, coal dumps) necessary in many Earth-based power generation systems. Additionally, SBSP would have fewer or none of the ecological (or political) consequences of fossil fuel systems.
SBSP would also be applicable on a global scale. Nuclear power especially is something many governments are reluctant to sell to developing nations, where political pressures might lead to proliferation of nuclear weapons technology. SBSP poses no known potential threat.
On getting the collected power to earth:
Wireless power transmission was early proposed to transfer energy from collection to the Earth's surface. The power could be transmitted as either microwave or laser radiation at a variety of frequencies depending on system design. Whichever choice is made, the transmitting radiation would have to be non-ionizing to avoid potential disturbances either ecologically or biologically.
Nah, it shows that while C# and Java developers are using Stack Overflow on the job, Ruby and Python developers find it hard to ask questions while asking 'you want fries with that?'
Drop a book in the tub and you have a wet book. The letters on each page are still there and you can read it after it's dry.
That's a for instance, and there are lots of things that can happen to a book to render it useless for reading.
There's a fundamental difference in robustness between old and modern media.
That doesn't mean there's a fundamental right to get more rights with a piece of modern media than with a piece of old media.
You can make copies of pages of books for personal use;
Because books aren't protected by DRM, not because they're books.
if they prevent you from legally copying a DVD for backup, they are denying you your right to make a backup.
They're denying you access to a given tool to make a backup. It just so happens that any tool to make a backup is illegal. The law isn't required to be sensible or fair, just consistent.
No one expects a book publisher to replace their copy of 1984 if they accidentally drop it in the bathtub. Why do you expect such a greater level of service from DVD manufacturers? Don't confuse what you think is fair with what a company should be actually obligated to do.
Such as what? You mean the ancient cultures like the Aztecs who have dinosaurs on their garments and pottery and jewelry despite being thousands of years older then our current understanding of dinosaurs or what they look like.
That's retarded. The only reference to anything like this that I can find is this page which makes the argument that a certain piece of aztec art bears a resemblance to a tyrannosaurus skull. So yeah... hardly pervasive and hardly convincing to anyone who doesn't already desperately want to believe.
Anyways, we have seen with flash flooding and dam bursting that much of the geological formations like the Grand Cannon, the dead sea, and the badlands can be caused over extremely short periods of time in like days and weeks.
No we haven't. The young earth grand canyon meme is debunked nicely here. It also doesn't stand up to some basic critical thinking skills, like if flash flooding carved the grand canyon, how come it left relatively fragile islands of rock standing up in the middle of the canyon in places?
You should really look into it. It's not exactly going to say the earth is 6000 years old, but it will force you to keep an open mind on the millions being claimed.
In order to believe young earth creationism, or ANY kind of age for the earth that's not in the millions or billions of years, you essentially have to throw away a ton of accepted knowledge, like how radioactive isotopes work, how sedimentation happens, plate tectonics, and so on. This includes things that are not only accepted but practically acted upon.
Basically science and technology are like a giant pyramid with the coolest crap on top. You can't accept the stuff on top, like say the GPS in your car or a radioisotope powered pacemaker, without implicitly allowing for the fact that all or most of the stuff beneath it is true, like the age of the earth.
Such a projectile might leave the top of the structure with enough velocity to put the apogee of its trajectory in low-earth-orbit altitudes.
No. LEO orbital velocity is about 5 miles per SECOND, and even then it has to be lateral. The nice part of a space elevator is that it goes all the way up to geosync orbit heights, the point at which you can let go and you're already in orbit. This is 25,000 miles above us. The highest this kind of thing could reach is probably no more than 50 miles, 1/500th the useful height.
Even if what you suggest is true, that progress is derived from military applications more readily than from exploration, I'd rather see the money spent on putting a man on mars than trying to kill people.
You likely could have said the same thing about building a general purpose computer 50 years ago. Plus, the more mission specific a robot is, the more of them you have to buy to do N tasks offsetting any savings from making them built task specific.
The cost of developing a robot with human qualities is high, but its always going down, and the cost is spread over an unbounded amount of time. That is, the design of robots will always get better and never get worse and the design of a general purpose robot (one that can be instructed to do anything a human would) is likely to converge on the only known existing design, that of a human.
The original Cylons were even better. What's the best way to pilot a raider? Strap in three robots, give them manual controls! And how do they communicate? By vibrating air molecules inside the ship! Wait, why was it pressurized again? So I take it if Cylons were in a ship that lost atmo, they'd have to communicate with sign language?
If you can make a humanoid robot that has the dexterity of a human and can communicate using natural language, you get to use the same equipment for them that you already bought for your prior human army, and can transition slowly from all human to all robot. Why don't people get this?
Spoken like a true malcontent, who wouldn't be happy with ANY rule - unless of course, he is the ruler.
That does not follow. My point in my original post was on the impracticality of the 'government as toy' model that was being espoused. How you get from there to me being a power hungry despot, I cannot fathom.
Tell me - do these Christians torture you to make you see their way? Is your home burnt down, regularly? Are you forbidden to build a temple of your choosing? Assuming that you are an American, Canadian, Australian, or European, you have the freedom to worship as you wish, or not. What more can you ask for?
Thus making my point about government being responsible for preventing tyranny of the majority.
Given a choice, I'd go with the tyranny of the majority, rather than the tyranny of the minority.
Spoken like a true member of the majority, who doesn't know what its like to be surrounded by people who will discriminate againt you at any chance.
The minority has almost always ruled, historically. The concept of royalty, and the hocus pocus of religion were both designed for the purpose of enforcing minority rule.
I'm a non-christian living where there's a church on virtually every block. Don't talk to me about 'religion' and 'minority rule'
Instead of having a dedicated, small group of individuals in charge of everything (leading to ridiculous situations like this, where they posture for the electorate), why not have anyone be as involved in government as they wish?
Because part of a government's responsibility is to protect those who can't protect themselves, and to prevent a tyranny of the majority.
The corollary to this is that once windows gets hosed, its often impossible to fix without a wipe / clean install. I run XP on my main laptop, Vista on my wife's laptop, and Linux on just about every other computer I have access to (work desktop, home desktop, media server PC) and while the Linux boxes can sometimes be a hassle to set up, and the Windows boxes easy, once my laptop has decided its been through enough power cycles it will do something like eat its network configuration beyond the point of repair. Last time it did this I spent a week fighting with its slowly reducing functionality till I had to reinstall. And the reinstall did take only a few hours, but do you know why? Because I've done several dozen times. I know exactly where to go for all my primary apps / drivers now, I know the order to install them in and I know exactly what I can install before I need to reboot to proceed further. Its NOT because windows is intrinsically easier to set up that its so fast. Its cause we're all so good at it because the windows mantra is 'reinstall when all else fails'.
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The interview process he describes is pretty much exactly what everyone goes through to work at some large development shops. I know for certain that Valve does extensive interviews for any potential candidate. If the interview process is mediocre, so is the company.
That's my point. 15 years of experience doesn't mean shit if it doesn't mean you have the skills we need.
Exactly how much productivity do you think is possible to get out of an interview candidate? In the world of interns and off shore labor, if you think a company is going to get a positive net gain in work done by 'stealing' work from interview candidates, you're retarded.
I know devs with more than 15 years experience who couldn't write a class to save their life.
Bullshit. If you want the job, you do whatever the employer asks to prove you have the qualifications. Unless you work is universally known, like John Carmack, or Linus Torvalds, you're never too good to take an entrance exam.
Advantages:
On getting the collected power to earth:
Wait, the Marvel Comics Mephisto is supposed to be a dude?
Nah, it shows that while C# and Java developers are using Stack Overflow on the job, Ruby and Python developers find it hard to ask questions while asking 'you want fries with that?'
Biological viruses don't act with intent. An exploit will, in the sense that it was designed and would typically have a motivation to conceal itself.
which he is not legally obligated to provide.
That's a for instance, and there are lots of things that can happen to a book to render it useless for reading.
That doesn't mean there's a fundamental right to get more rights with a piece of modern media than with a piece of old media.
Because books aren't protected by DRM, not because they're books.
No one expects a book publisher to replace their copy of 1984 if they accidentally drop it in the bathtub. Why do you expect such a greater level of service from DVD manufacturers? Don't confuse what you think is fair with what a company should be actually obligated to do.
That's retarded. The only reference to anything like this that I can find is this page which makes the argument that a certain piece of aztec art bears a resemblance to a tyrannosaurus skull. So yeah... hardly pervasive and hardly convincing to anyone who doesn't already desperately want to believe.
No we haven't. The young earth grand canyon meme is debunked nicely here. It also doesn't stand up to some basic critical thinking skills, like if flash flooding carved the grand canyon, how come it left relatively fragile islands of rock standing up in the middle of the canyon in places?
In order to believe young earth creationism, or ANY kind of age for the earth that's not in the millions or billions of years, you essentially have to throw away a ton of accepted knowledge, like how radioactive isotopes work, how sedimentation happens, plate tectonics, and so on. This includes things that are not only accepted but practically acted upon.
Basically science and technology are like a giant pyramid with the coolest crap on top. You can't accept the stuff on top, like say the GPS in your car or a radioisotope powered pacemaker, without implicitly allowing for the fact that all or most of the stuff beneath it is true, like the age of the earth.
Not to mention that a structure designed to take that differential in a zero gravity environment might not respond the same way to it under 1 gravity.
No. LEO orbital velocity is about 5 miles per SECOND, and even then it has to be lateral. The nice part of a space elevator is that it goes all the way up to geosync orbit heights, the point at which you can let go and you're already in orbit. This is 25,000 miles above us. The highest this kind of thing could reach is probably no more than 50 miles, 1/500th the useful height.
Even if what you suggest is true, that progress is derived from military applications more readily than from exploration, I'd rather see the money spent on putting a man on mars than trying to kill people.
Better the enemy you know than the one who is batshit insane.
You likely could have said the same thing about building a general purpose computer 50 years ago. Plus, the more mission specific a robot is, the more of them you have to buy to do N tasks offsetting any savings from making them built task specific. The cost of developing a robot with human qualities is high, but its always going down, and the cost is spread over an unbounded amount of time. That is, the design of robots will always get better and never get worse and the design of a general purpose robot (one that can be instructed to do anything a human would) is likely to converge on the only known existing design, that of a human.
If you can make a humanoid robot that has the dexterity of a human and can communicate using natural language, you get to use the same equipment for them that you already bought for your prior human army, and can transition slowly from all human to all robot. Why don't people get this?
That does not follow. My point in my original post was on the impracticality of the 'government as toy' model that was being espoused. How you get from there to me being a power hungry despot, I cannot fathom.
Thus making my point about government being responsible for preventing tyranny of the majority.
Spoken like a true member of the majority, who doesn't know what its like to be surrounded by people who will discriminate againt you at any chance.
I'm a non-christian living where there's a church on virtually every block. Don't talk to me about 'religion' and 'minority rule'
Because part of a government's responsibility is to protect those who can't protect themselves, and to prevent a tyranny of the majority.
Thanks for saving me from having to write all that.
The corollary to this is that once windows gets hosed, its often impossible to fix without a wipe / clean install. I run XP on my main laptop, Vista on my wife's laptop, and Linux on just about every other computer I have access to (work desktop, home desktop, media server PC) and while the Linux boxes can sometimes be a hassle to set up, and the Windows boxes easy, once my laptop has decided its been through enough power cycles it will do something like eat its network configuration beyond the point of repair. Last time it did this I spent a week fighting with its slowly reducing functionality till I had to reinstall. And the reinstall did take only a few hours, but do you know why? Because I've done several dozen times. I know exactly where to go for all my primary apps / drivers now, I know the order to install them in and I know exactly what I can install before I need to reboot to proceed further. Its NOT because windows is intrinsically easier to set up that its so fast. Its cause we're all so good at it because the windows mantra is 'reinstall when all else fails'.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0988045/