I wasn't seriously claiming that this mission is going to turn a profit. Even aside from the many problems you hint at, making a profit is not really NASA's (or indeed any government agency's) deal.
But this is meant to be a exploration mission. It's meant to teach us lessons that we can use to make the next mission easier and more efficient. We can always save a bunch of money by not exploring, sure. Or we can wait until the technology is better, and the mission is cheaper. But at what price point does exploration suddenly become a good idea? Would you wait forever? After all, we can always spend that money feed one more starving baby in the Third World. And pretty much nobody is in favor of baby-starving, right? Does it stand to reason, then, that 100% of our budget should be dedicated to baby-feeding?
The only way I can figure out that 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the universe is never going to have any economic impact on humanity is if humanity goes extinct on Earth before it makes out into the larger universe. And if such a thing did happen, it would actually be a pretty good argument that we should have worked all the harder at getting out there while we had the chance, no?
Every time I hear about some wacky boat voyage to the New World, I think "why"? Surely the costs far outweigh the returns. Anything remotely valuable enough to consider doing it for, like gold, would realistically require lots of mercury (and gravity) to separate, and it would hardly be viable to bring all the dirt back here to refine. This is pie in the sky stuff (figuratively!).
The article quotes Haldeman as saying (emphasis mine):
"You can’t have absolute freedom with absolute danger. We live in an unstable and dangerous environment, and we like it. We don’t want to change it. I don’t know what we do about that. I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable taking away that freedom, and I don’t even have guns.
Those statements don't seem to jibe to me. Does it sound to anyone else here like what he really said/meant to say instead was "without" and "comfortable"? Or am I just projecting incredibly hard right now?
Gotta love the passive voice. Always a favorite of PR firms and politicians.
Also, scientists.
What active-voice alternative do you recommend for "momentum is conserved"? Because the best one I can think of is: "The Flying Spaghetti Monster conserves momentum".
Sure, though according to that article the mass we get back ("dust", maybe silicon dioxide or carbon?) is different from the mass we're losing (hydrogen and other light elements), so over time we might still eventually run out of hydrogen. My question is whether a leaky hydrogen economy would accelerate that process in any meaningful way.
"I want everyone to hate what I hate as much as I hate it, so here's some extremely shaky logic that attempts to conflate what I hate to something that most people already hate, because what I hate most of all is coming up with real, cogent arguments. Hate!"
I doubt good (and, yes, there are a lot of good ones out there, if you actually look) doctors are handing out SSRI's like candy to kids.
I'm not sure about that. I think there's a indeed a lot of that sort of thing going on. One of my relatives went in to get a checkup, was asked whether they were happy, answered honestly that life was just okay, and so they recommended low-dose antidepressants. Another acquaintance went in for a checkup, was told that they were slightly overweight, and had antidepressants prescribed more-or-less as an appetite suppressant. I swear I'm not making any of that up.
I gather that a large percentage of patients nowadays only go to the doctor as a necessary step toward getting specific drugs that they believe they need. They are almost universally obliged, or they find another doctor. Modern doctors, perhaps as a consequence of this, seldom seem hesitant to recommend medication to alleviate the symptoms of the human condition. Supply and demand. You've got to give the people what they want, or go out of business.
Conservation of mass, sure. But I do sometimes worry, if we ever convert to a hydrogen economy, that two hundred years of leaky hydrogen tanks, plus hydrogen's relative ease in escaping from Earth's atmosphere, might lead to a significant loss of hydrogen, and therefore water, from Earth. But I'm not a physicist, so I don't know how significant those effects might be.
Anyway, I guess if humanity is still a going concern by then we'll be able to ship it in from Jupiter or something.
So the only reason any organization ever does anything is because they'd suffer negative consequences if they don't do it. If a company doesn't do anything, they go out of business. A government agency can embarrass the elected officials in charge, so that the higher-ups get fired and replaced.
None of that is likely to happen to NASA. No administration since Nixon has given half a squat about our space program. Half of the taxpayers are so short-sighted that they don't see any good reason to ever bother exploring the other 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the universe when we could instead use that money to increase their Social Security benefits by 0.001%.
The date will slip again, and keep slipping, until some future administration axes the program, or until some bookkeeping snafu accidentally allows some team of engineers to be left alone long enough to actually engineer something.
The only reason that they didn't push the "deadline" back to 2050 in this announcement is that they're trying to boil a frog. The frog, in this example, is us.
The predictably named Move to iOS will appeal to anyone who was persuaded to switch allegiances by the release of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, or indeed iOS 9
I know money can be a powerful motivator, but how many people could that be, really? I feel like everyone has pretty much picked their side at this point. I'm genuinely curious... though that doesn't mean I'm not being snarky.
You might also try giving the object of your affection two very weak compliments whose implied assumptions about their ignorance actually add up to an insult. I call this "twos complimenting".
Researcher Trying To Teach Computer What Women He's Attracted To
Well, at least he's trying something new. The usual, and completely wrongheaded, approach a computer nerd uses when trying to get laid is to try to teach women he's attracted to about computers.
Yes, I agree with many on the site that, in a just world, these teachers and police should suffer some consequences for their stupidity. But punishment only has value if it demonstrates to their peers that this particular kind of stupidity is to be avoided. Human nature being what it is, a severe punishment will only harden the attitudes of all the other like-minded, well-meaning dimwits out there.
A better solution would be to make their continued employment contingent on making them deliver a formal, public apology for this debacle, stating that they now understand that what they did was wrong, and listing all the reasons why it's wrong. That would probably have the most positive effects of any course of action available.
Oh, also, Ahmad wins the science fair this year. Sorry, baking-soda-volcano kid.
Speaking of science fairs, now I wonder if this whole ugly incident could have been avoided by just attaching a potato to the clock somehow.
I don't think any settings are too esoteric for audiences to enjoy a good story set within them. In the final equation, people are people, even if they're modrons. Audiences will enjoy seeing, and pay to see, the heroes relating to each other, their enemies, and the funky environment they have to navigate, as long as the story excites them and the characters ring true.
Which, of course, they won't. A good story requires good writing, and most movie executives place pretty damn close to zero value on storytelling. They seem to just pick a screenwriter at random. Even that might be okay, if they let that writer work without interference. But they won't.
Even putting the plot and characters aside, when a movie executive gets their hands on a particular "property" to make a movie out of, they're completely, willfully, and perhaps actually proudly out-of-touch with and uninterested in whatever special sauce it is that makes that property so great to begin with. To put it in D&D terms, it's like going on a seventeen-year quest to find Vecna's hand and eye and then eating them as jerky. The original source material is invariable drowned under a veritable garbage chute of "notes", as these executives attempt to put their own egotistical stamp on the finished project, though if they had more sense they might instead take their names off of it completely before release.
So, yes, any Forgotten Realms movie that actually got produced would somehow be about the 18th Century Polish monarchy. The Dark Sun movie would end up being set on Waterworld. The Planescape movie would take place in a single, featureless locked room. The Spelljammer movie... well, the Spelljammer movie might potentially be so awful that it would eventually become a cult favorite, though it would bomb all the harder at the box office for that.
Every day, another 'how horrible I am for killing all my neighbors' story. Look, I'm the pinnacle of this neighborhood's long slog towards producing intelligence and of course I'm going to modify my environment if I can. Any neighbor that has the ability to alter its environment does it to make it less crowded. Is this a bad thing? I say no. Do you want me to live with neighbors? Not murder them in their sleep? Keep to a nice, uncomfortable suburban existence? Yup, I murder neighbors. Yup, there are fewer of them. Big fucking deal. Neighbors are a renewable resource, and they can replenish themselves quickly. Frankly I think most of the people writing these stories have absolutely nothing useful to do with their time. The neighborhood is changing. Deal with it. Or not, I don't care. Just shut the fuck up.
And "the administration", in turn, is used as a shorthand to mean "the executive branch", or more precisely "the elected or appointed leadership of the executive branch". When most people say "the administration", they mean the people who have actual power of some kind, which generally doesn't include junior-level park rangers, or even junior-level FBI agents.
After Gnome 3, it's completely understandable that the developers would want to switch to code names. Using their real names probably made it too easy for disgruntled users to track them down.
The organization is a moderate sized (~3000 employees), publicly traded company with a nearly $1 billion market value.
I'm not going to do the research myself, but I bet you could figure out exactly who he works for from this data. Glad he's not being made the Customer Privacy Czar.
That's the pertinent question, all right. I know it's not the researchers' fault, but I can't help wishing that they'd tried injecting this into a few of those born-with-cancer lab rats before telling us about it, so we don't get all excited about it if it turns out to kill the patient in addition to the cancer. How much time and money would that have cost them, really?
I know, I know, that's not how science works. But we already know about a lot of things that can kill cancer cells if they're already in a Petri dish. Just off the top of my head: an oven; bleach; a hammer.
Economics 101. Supply and Demand: If Demand stays constant and supply goes up, cost for services go down.
This, a thousand times this. I want to stand on top of a water tower and scream this about a hundred times whenever anybody starts talking about H1Bs. But I guess if there were no H1Bs all those programmer jobs would probably just go to India directly, at least for the first round of development.
And I guess it's too much to ask that the news media understand basic economics when they usually can't be bothered to learn basic science, or in some cases basic arithmetic.
Most designers will tell you, if you are interested in being a board game designer, do not attempt to publish your game. The amount of work involved is all-consuming as publishers do far more than simple distribution.
Interesting. Can you elaborate? What kind of tasks are involved? What makes them so difficult?
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't seriously claiming that this mission is going to turn a profit. Even aside from the many problems you hint at, making a profit is not really NASA's (or indeed any government agency's) deal.
But this is meant to be a exploration mission. It's meant to teach us lessons that we can use to make the next mission easier and more efficient. We can always save a bunch of money by not exploring, sure. Or we can wait until the technology is better, and the mission is cheaper. But at what price point does exploration suddenly become a good idea? Would you wait forever? After all, we can always spend that money feed one more starving baby in the Third World. And pretty much nobody is in favor of baby-starving, right? Does it stand to reason, then, that 100% of our budget should be dedicated to baby-feeding?
The only way I can figure out that 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the universe is never going to have any economic impact on humanity is if humanity goes extinct on Earth before it makes out into the larger universe. And if such a thing did happen, it would actually be a pretty good argument that we should have worked all the harder at getting out there while we had the chance, no?
Every time I hear about some wacky boat voyage to the New World, I think "why"? Surely the costs far outweigh the returns. Anything remotely valuable enough to consider doing it for, like gold, would realistically require lots of mercury (and gravity) to separate, and it would hardly be viable to bring all the dirt back here to refine. This is pie in the sky stuff (figuratively!).
The article quotes Haldeman as saying (emphasis mine):
"You can’t have absolute freedom with absolute danger. We live in an unstable and dangerous environment, and we like it. We don’t want to change it. I don’t know what we do about that. I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable taking away that freedom, and I don’t even have guns.
Those statements don't seem to jibe to me. Does it sound to anyone else here like what he really said/meant to say instead was "without" and "comfortable"? Or am I just projecting incredibly hard right now?
Gotta love the passive voice. Always a favorite of PR firms and politicians.
Also, scientists.
What active-voice alternative do you recommend for "momentum is conserved"? Because the best one I can think of is: "The Flying Spaghetti Monster conserves momentum".
The passive voice could be left out of this.
A: You can't just tape two mousetraps together and patent it!
B: Oh, I beg to differ. [Holds up approved patent.]
A: [Tapes three mousetraps together.]
Sure, though according to that article the mass we get back ("dust", maybe silicon dioxide or carbon?) is different from the mass we're losing (hydrogen and other light elements), so over time we might still eventually run out of hydrogen. My question is whether a leaky hydrogen economy would accelerate that process in any meaningful way.
"I want everyone to hate what I hate as much as I hate it, so here's some extremely shaky logic that attempts to conflate what I hate to something that most people already hate, because what I hate most of all is coming up with real, cogent arguments. Hate!"
I doubt good (and, yes, there are a lot of good ones out there, if you actually look) doctors are handing out SSRI's like candy to kids.
I'm not sure about that. I think there's a indeed a lot of that sort of thing going on. One of my relatives went in to get a checkup, was asked whether they were happy, answered honestly that life was just okay, and so they recommended low-dose antidepressants. Another acquaintance went in for a checkup, was told that they were slightly overweight, and had antidepressants prescribed more-or-less as an appetite suppressant. I swear I'm not making any of that up.
I gather that a large percentage of patients nowadays only go to the doctor as a necessary step toward getting specific drugs that they believe they need. They are almost universally obliged, or they find another doctor. Modern doctors, perhaps as a consequence of this, seldom seem hesitant to recommend medication to alleviate the symptoms of the human condition. Supply and demand. You've got to give the people what they want, or go out of business.
Conservation of mass, sure. But I do sometimes worry, if we ever convert to a hydrogen economy, that two hundred years of leaky hydrogen tanks, plus hydrogen's relative ease in escaping from Earth's atmosphere, might lead to a significant loss of hydrogen, and therefore water, from Earth. But I'm not a physicist, so I don't know how significant those effects might be.
Anyway, I guess if humanity is still a going concern by then we'll be able to ship it in from Jupiter or something.
So the only reason any organization ever does anything is because they'd suffer negative consequences if they don't do it. If a company doesn't do anything, they go out of business. A government agency can embarrass the elected officials in charge, so that the higher-ups get fired and replaced.
None of that is likely to happen to NASA. No administration since Nixon has given half a squat about our space program. Half of the taxpayers are so short-sighted that they don't see any good reason to ever bother exploring the other 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the universe when we could instead use that money to increase their Social Security benefits by 0.001%.
The date will slip again, and keep slipping, until some future administration axes the program, or until some bookkeeping snafu accidentally allows some team of engineers to be left alone long enough to actually engineer something.
The only reason that they didn't push the "deadline" back to 2050 in this announcement is that they're trying to boil a frog. The frog, in this example, is us.
The predictably named Move to iOS will appeal to anyone who was persuaded to switch allegiances by the release of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, or indeed iOS 9
I know money can be a powerful motivator, but how many people could that be, really? I feel like everyone has pretty much picked their side at this point. I'm genuinely curious... though that doesn't mean I'm not being snarky.
Negging, eh?
You might also try giving the object of your affection two very weak compliments whose implied assumptions about their ignorance actually add up to an insult. I call this "twos complimenting".
[ducks]
Researcher Trying To Teach Computer What Women He's Attracted To
Well, at least he's trying something new. The usual, and completely wrongheaded, approach a computer nerd uses when trying to get laid is to try to teach women he's attracted to about computers.
Moss: I never know what to say to people at funerals.
Roy: Me too. I'm terrible.
Jen: Just say you're sorry and move on. [To Denholm's wife] He'll be in our prayers.
Roy: [to Denholm's wife] I'm sorry for your loss. Move on.
-from The IT Crowd
Yes, I agree with many on the site that, in a just world, these teachers and police should suffer some consequences for their stupidity. But punishment only has value if it demonstrates to their peers that this particular kind of stupidity is to be avoided. Human nature being what it is, a severe punishment will only harden the attitudes of all the other like-minded, well-meaning dimwits out there.
A better solution would be to make their continued employment contingent on making them deliver a formal, public apology for this debacle, stating that they now understand that what they did was wrong, and listing all the reasons why it's wrong. That would probably have the most positive effects of any course of action available.
Oh, also, Ahmad wins the science fair this year. Sorry, baking-soda-volcano kid.
Speaking of science fairs, now I wonder if this whole ugly incident could have been avoided by just attaching a potato to the clock somehow.
I don't think any settings are too esoteric for audiences to enjoy a good story set within them. In the final equation, people are people, even if they're modrons. Audiences will enjoy seeing, and pay to see, the heroes relating to each other, their enemies, and the funky environment they have to navigate, as long as the story excites them and the characters ring true.
Which, of course, they won't. A good story requires good writing, and most movie executives place pretty damn close to zero value on storytelling. They seem to just pick a screenwriter at random. Even that might be okay, if they let that writer work without interference. But they won't.
Even putting the plot and characters aside, when a movie executive gets their hands on a particular "property" to make a movie out of, they're completely, willfully, and perhaps actually proudly out-of-touch with and uninterested in whatever special sauce it is that makes that property so great to begin with. To put it in D&D terms, it's like going on a seventeen-year quest to find Vecna's hand and eye and then eating them as jerky. The original source material is invariable drowned under a veritable garbage chute of "notes", as these executives attempt to put their own egotistical stamp on the finished project, though if they had more sense they might instead take their names off of it completely before release.
So, yes, any Forgotten Realms movie that actually got produced would somehow be about the 18th Century Polish monarchy. The Dark Sun movie would end up being set on Waterworld. The Planescape movie would take place in a single, featureless locked room. The Spelljammer movie... well, the Spelljammer movie might potentially be so awful that it would eventually become a cult favorite, though it would bomb all the harder at the box office for that.
hackers: this is going to be awesome and we are going to revolutionize 3d immersive gaming and computing with your kickstarter help
Zuckerberg: I will literally choke you with a dick made of cash until you sell this to me.
hackers: We are going to buy a mansion in mansion land now. your funding has helped us build a solid gold toilet in this mansion. so, thanks.
Zuckerberg: Now tell all your supporters that this is really the best thing for the technology.
hackers: Everyone, selling out to Facebook is really the best possible thing for the technology!
Zuckerberg: Now tell your children that you never loved them and you're selling them into slavery.
hackers:Pack your bags, kids! You're joining the circus!
Zuckerberg: Now set your grandmother on fire.
hackers: Hey, grandma, catch this Molotov cocktail!
Zuckerberg: Now dance sexy for me. Real slow.
hackers: [gyrate awkwardly]
Every day, another 'how horrible I am for killing all my neighbors' story. Look, I'm the pinnacle of this neighborhood's long slog towards producing intelligence and of course I'm going to modify my environment if I can. Any neighbor that has the ability to alter its environment does it to make it less crowded. Is this a bad thing? I say no. Do you want me to live with neighbors? Not murder them in their sleep? Keep to a nice, uncomfortable suburban existence? Yup, I murder neighbors. Yup, there are fewer of them. Big fucking deal. Neighbors are a renewable resource, and they can replenish themselves quickly. Frankly I think most of the people writing these stories have absolutely nothing useful to do with their time. The neighborhood is changing. Deal with it. Or not, I don't care. Just shut the fuck up.
And "the administration", in turn, is used as a shorthand to mean "the executive branch", or more precisely "the elected or appointed leadership of the executive branch". When most people say "the administration", they mean the people who have actual power of some kind, which generally doesn't include junior-level park rangers, or even junior-level FBI agents.
After Gnome 3, it's completely understandable that the developers would want to switch to code names. Using their real names probably made it too easy for disgruntled users to track them down.
The organization is a moderate sized (~3000 employees), publicly traded company with a nearly $1 billion market value.
I'm not going to do the research myself, but I bet you could figure out exactly who he works for from this data. Glad he's not being made the Customer Privacy Czar.
>yum install w3c-richtext-editing-support
Error: Package: w3c-richtext-editing-support-2015.8.27-1234.x86_64
Requires: a-degree-of-good-faith-consensus-that-doesnt-exist-plus-a-nonglacial-speed-of-development
What happens when you do this to healthy cells?
That's the pertinent question, all right. I know it's not the researchers' fault, but I can't help wishing that they'd tried injecting this into a few of those born-with-cancer lab rats before telling us about it, so we don't get all excited about it if it turns out to kill the patient in addition to the cancer. How much time and money would that have cost them, really?
I know, I know, that's not how science works. But we already know about a lot of things that can kill cancer cells if they're already in a Petri dish. Just off the top of my head: an oven; bleach; a hammer.
Economics 101. Supply and Demand: If Demand stays constant and supply goes up, cost for services go down.
This, a thousand times this. I want to stand on top of a water tower and scream this about a hundred times whenever anybody starts talking about H1Bs. But I guess if there were no H1Bs all those programmer jobs would probably just go to India directly, at least for the first round of development.
And I guess it's too much to ask that the news media understand basic economics when they usually can't be bothered to learn basic science, or in some cases basic arithmetic.
Most designers will tell you, if you are interested in being a board game designer, do not attempt to publish your game. The amount of work involved is all-consuming as publishers do far more than simple distribution.
Interesting. Can you elaborate? What kind of tasks are involved? What makes them so difficult?