I think you're referring not to drywall, but to the spray-on fireproofing that protected the steel columns. The alternative would be fireproofing tiles, used in older buildings, which are expensive and heavy. Without the spray-on material, the twin towers probably would never have been built.
Bacteria would be likely to survive the journey -- samples from the unmanned Surveyor lander, returned to Earth by Apollo astronauts, showed terrestrial bacteria had survived years of vacuum and radiation on the Moon.
It's extremely unlikely that an organism attuned to room temperature and pressure, and an oxygen environment, could thrive in a sulfurous ocean at just above freezing under hundreds of atmospheres of pressure. We would want to disinfect the probes, not so much out of a worry that they would destroy the Europan ecosystem, but to ensure that any life signs that we found would not be false positives from terrestrial organisms.
Actually after serving as Ontario's finance minister, Ernie Eves took a couple of years off from politics to work as a bank executive, so he's probably stinkin' rich.
In the novel 2001, the joke about HAL was that H, A, L are one letter before I, B, M, so HAL was one step ahead of IBM. (There was also an expansion of the acronym: Heuristic ALgorithmetric, I think.) Applying the same logic, are we saying that WNT is one step behind VMS?
The doomed satelite launches made in response to Sputnik (Vanguard) were on not-ready-for-prime-time civilian launch vehicles, not military rockets.
The Soviets suffered their own failures, but managed to keep them secret - the successful Sputnik launch was preceeded by at least two failed launches, while the Americans had to do everything under the glare of the world's media. Also, the Vanguard was not civillian, it was a Navy launcher, while von Braun's Jupiter was an Army project. Anyway, von Braun was instrumental to the Saturn project.
Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun. - Tom Lehrer
Stephen Hill (D.A. Adam Schiff) was by far the best actor on Law & Order. He never said much, but when he did it was always a pithy, wise one-liner that brought the entire episode together.
I'm old enough to remember when some books and magazines included analog records printed on sheets of plastic... particularly music instruction books, and things of that nature. I'm looking forward to the days when you can tear a CD out of your favourite music magazine and listen to it...
Indeed. The advantage of DNA computing is massive parallelism, but consider the 3-Satisfiability problem (the classic NP-complete problem) with n predicates. Regardless of the number of parallel processors (be they silicon or DNA), the only known algorithm has complexity O(2^n), which means:
For n=10, a few thousand operations are required.
For n=30, a few billion operations are required.
For n=250, somewhere around 1e+80 operations are required, which is roughly the same number as the number of atoms in the universe.
So imagine a DNA computer consisting of every atom in the universe -- even for this computer, a solution to 3-Satisfiability for n>250 would be basically hopeless.
Most alternative OS'es support every filesystem that they ever released, including fat16 and fat32. If they break NTFS, the bitter irony is that people will be forced to use Linux to access their files. However, surely they're not that dense?
Well, it always pays to cover your ass.
In the 1920s, the Canadian government prepared a secret plan for invading the United States, should the need ever arise. Canadian army officers posing as tourists scouted out several cities for possible attack; the plan called for quick occupation of large cities close to the border, such as Seattle and Detroit, in the hope that they could be fortified before reinforcements arrived.
Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom - both young and old - surrounded the house. They called to Lot, `Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.' (Genesis 19:4-5)
However, some scholars point to the following passage as the real reason why Sodom was destroyed:
Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. (Ezekiel 16:49)
There are only a few software packages that most students would ever contemplate using... say, the OS, an office suite, and a few specific analysis packages tailored specifically for courses. Since most software companies make most of their money off industrial users, it makes sense to tailor cheap licenses for student software users. Modern packages also tend to be large, in the hundreds of megabytes -- even with university bandwidth that's not trivial, especially if your rez has capacity limits.
By contrast, there are hundreds of songs that the average student would be interested in downloading, and students are one of the more lucrative demographics for music companies. Most songs are a few megabytes at most, making them incredibly easy to download and share. The "creative solutions" proposed for software probably won't translate well into music piracy...
it was at best bad science... to get funds or to serve some industry's interests.
Then you say:
top-class scientists around the world would have been trying to build Tokamaks at the cost of billions of dollars
How much grant money is in building a Tokamak? Billions, according to you. How much in sonoluminescence? Easily two or three orders of magnitude less. If I were to pull a big, evil corporate scam, I'd be in the Tokamak business, not the shady science business.
This/.er certainly does. I prefer Scientific American for general science stuff, and IEEE Spectrum for EE stuff. Both give the straight goods without talking down to the audience or engaging in sensationalism.
Capacitors are used for energy storage in industrial applications, but normally for situations requiring high output current and high peak power, since their internal resistance is usually much lower than batteries. I'm under the impression that capacitors are not as stable as chemical batteries... besides, have you ever seen a 1-farad capacitor? It's about the size of a pint glass.
Although I agree that the Drake equation is flaky science, I can't agree with most of what else you've said. For example:
Even in a time when new terrestrial life forms are being found in places where these educated scientists said no life could ever exist (undersea thermal vents, etc), the science community tends to want to look like life like us (not human, DNA/carbon based life).
Yes, the scientists found organisms that exist in places where they were previously unexpected. However, these forms of life were easily recognizable as such, because they act much like already known life forms -- they exploit chemical energy sources, grow, and (most importantly) reproduce.
I'm citing an extreme example, but my point is this: If there was life so extreme, how would we ever notice them?
We probably wouldn't. But we also have no reason to expect that earthbound life is so terribly unusual, either. There might exist bizarre forms of life, but based on the single data point available concerning life in the universe (ourselves), it's not necessarily ridiculous to start looking for life "as we know it".
How would we ever contact them? With radio signals embedded with decodable messages? You could broadcast a voice talking over FM radio into space, and when it reaches an alien race, they never notice it because either they've moved so far past that technology or never had the need to use radio-type waves for communication purposes.
We might never be able to contact them in any meaningful way. However, that doesn't mean that we can have no knowledge that they exist. Even a highly advanced race would realise that RF technology is simple and robust for many applications, in much the same way that we on Earth still use lighthouses even though GPS is far superior and far more advanced.
IMHO, the only point in looking for "inhabitable" planets is for future colonization. All else is simply pointless.
I don't accept that it's "pointless" to do something simply because it's more complicated that we might first assume -- that's frankly a defeatist attitude. We have to start somewhere, and if life is not unusual, then our form of life is probably not unusual, so it makes perfect sense to look for what we understand as life. Furthermore, the importance of extraterrestrial life is such that finding it would probably have world-changing implications.
Then we could start looking for the bizarre forms of life.
"The Internet regards censorship as a hardware failure and just works around it."
That would be true if the topology of the Internet was much more mesh-like. As it is, comparatively few backbones carry most of the Internet's traffic, so censorship can be implemented by controlling only relatively few routers. This is particularly true of national governments regulating Internet content -- a typical nation is served by only a handful of incoming backbone links.
Posted by $EVIL_EDITOR on $DATE from the $LAME_BYLINE dept.
$KARMA_GRUBBING_USER sent in a story claiming that $FREE_OS will Succeed on the $OS_APP_TYPE, and not just the $OTHER_OS_APP_TYPE where it has already had much success. I think that the latest version of $WINDOW_SYSTEM has demonstrated that it can compete, but with the increasing dependance on $PROPRIETARY_STANDARD that have no support on $FREE_OS, it's going to be awfully difficult. That said, $FREE_OS has been on my $OS_APP_TYPE for $LENGTH_OF_TIME, and I don't plan on changing it. (Maybe if $ALTERNATIVE_COMPUTER_MANUFACTURER released $COMPUTER_TYPE with $FEATURE I'd at least have an option;)
The mass of an antihydrogen atom is roughly 1e-27 kilograms, the same as a hydrogen atom. Using Einstein's famous formula, with the speed of light given as 3e+8 meters/second, the annihilation of one anti-hydrogen atom and one hydrogen atom would produce 2*(1e-27)*(3e+8)^2 = 1.8e-10 joules. The specific heat capacity of water is 4.2 J/(g*K), so 1.8e-10 joules would raise a 300g cup of coffee by 1.4e-13 degrees Kelvin. (I haven't had my coffee yet... does that sound right? Anyone?)
The point is, one hydrogen atom makes little difference, but annihilating kilogram's worth of hydrogen atoms would liberate 9,000 terajoules of energy. Compare that to a kilogram of coal, wood, or oil...
Re:The Net is not a way to promote free expression
on
Disinformation.com
·
· Score: 2
Well, I don't see that it necessarily follows that media empires are owned mostly to influence public opinion. I think AOL, MS et al. see that computers are ready to become entertainment devices, and entertainment requires content, so it's a natural move for them to own the content. Even if the bias argument is accepted, MS and AOL are competitors, and would therefore balance each other's bias out, at least in theory.
While I believe that people don't like to be exposed to opposing viewpoints, I also believe that people can think critically, even when reading views that support their own. I have faith that the average person would read with skepticism a pro-MS article on MSNBC, the same way that Slashdotters make critical points in posts to otherwise pro-free-software articles. Maybe I'm just a hopeless optimist...
The Net is not a way to promote free expression
on
Disinformation.com
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The net has never succeeded in promoting free expression of ideas. Instead it has founded enclaves of like-thinking people, who need to have their own point of view reinforced by others. Take Slashdot for example -- a community of people who have similar views about free software and intellectual property law. When was the last time a justification of Microsoft's tactics was posted to the front page, without an immediate rebuttal? Or a repudiation of the GPL? The readership here wouldn't stand for it, because that's not what they are here for... not free expression, but validation.
Really, we shouldn't be surprised that the "mainstream" media is boring -- most people don't like to hear views that strongly conflict with their own. This is a consequence of the popularization of the internet, and Slashdot is an example of that in microcosm.
"Alternative media" sites like disinformation.com are no different. They have their own axioms (the media is lying; the police are out to get you; corporations will enslave the world), their own jargon, and their own orthodoxy. Read an "alternative paper" for a while and you'll see what I mean.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're referring not to drywall, but to the spray-on fireproofing that protected the steel columns. The alternative would be fireproofing tiles, used in older buildings, which are expensive and heavy. Without the spray-on material, the twin towers probably would never have been built.
Bacteria would be likely to survive the journey -- samples from the unmanned Surveyor lander, returned to Earth by Apollo astronauts, showed terrestrial bacteria had survived years of vacuum and radiation on the Moon.
It's extremely unlikely that an organism attuned to room temperature and pressure, and an oxygen environment, could thrive in a sulfurous ocean at just above freezing under hundreds of atmospheres of pressure. We would want to disinfect the probes, not so much out of a worry that they would destroy the Europan ecosystem, but to ensure that any life signs that we found would not be false positives from terrestrial organisms.
Actually after serving as Ontario's finance minister, Ernie Eves took a couple of years off from politics to work as a bank executive, so he's probably stinkin' rich.
In the novel 2001, the joke about HAL was that H, A, L are one letter before I, B, M, so HAL was one step ahead of IBM. (There was also an expansion of the acronym: Heuristic ALgorithmetric, I think.) Applying the same logic, are we saying that WNT is one step behind VMS?
I send you this subpoena in order to have your advice.
See you later. Thanks.
The doomed satelite launches made in response to Sputnik (Vanguard) were on not-ready-for-prime-time civilian launch vehicles, not military rockets.
The Soviets suffered their own failures, but managed to keep them secret - the successful Sputnik launch was preceeded by at least two failed launches, while the Americans had to do everything under the glare of the world's media. Also, the Vanguard was not civillian, it was a Navy launcher, while von Braun's Jupiter was an Army project. Anyway, von Braun was instrumental to the Saturn project.
Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
- Tom Lehrer
Stephen Hill (D.A. Adam Schiff) was by far the best actor on Law & Order. He never said much, but when he did it was always a pithy, wise one-liner that brought the entire episode together.
I'm old enough to remember when some books and magazines included analog records printed on sheets of plastic ... particularly music instruction books, and things of that nature. I'm looking forward to the days when you can tear a CD out of your favourite music magazine and listen to it ...
Indeed. The advantage of DNA computing is massive parallelism, but consider the 3-Satisfiability problem (the classic NP-complete problem) with n predicates. Regardless of the number of parallel processors (be they silicon or DNA), the only known algorithm has complexity O(2^n), which means:
So imagine a DNA computer consisting of every atom in the universe -- even for this computer, a solution to 3-Satisfiability for n>250 would be basically hopeless.
Most alternative OS'es support every filesystem that they ever released, including fat16 and fat32. If they break NTFS, the bitter irony is that people will be forced to use Linux to access their files. However, surely they're not that dense?
Contigency nuke plans for Canada?!?
Well, it always pays to cover your ass. In the 1920s, the Canadian government prepared a secret plan for invading the United States, should the need ever arise. Canadian army officers posing as tourists scouted out several cities for possible attack; the plan called for quick occupation of large cities close to the border, such as Seattle and Detroit, in the hope that they could be fortified before reinforcements arrived.
It's Sodom and Gomorrah, as in:
Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom - both young and old - surrounded the house. They called to Lot, `Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.' (Genesis 19:4-5)
However, some scholars point to the following passage as the real reason why Sodom was destroyed:
Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. (Ezekiel 16:49)
There are only a few software packages that most students would ever contemplate using ... say, the OS, an office suite, and a few specific analysis packages tailored specifically for courses. Since most software companies make most of their money off industrial users, it makes sense to tailor cheap licenses for student software users. Modern packages also tend to be large, in the hundreds of megabytes -- even with university bandwidth that's not trivial, especially if your rez has capacity limits.
By contrast, there are hundreds of songs that the average student would be interested in downloading, and students are one of the more lucrative demographics for music companies. Most songs are a few megabytes at most, making them incredibly easy to download and share. The "creative solutions" proposed for software probably won't translate well into music piracy ...
You say first:
it was at best bad science ... to get funds or to serve some industry's interests.
Then you say:
top-class scientists around the world would have been trying to build Tokamaks at the cost of billions of dollars
How much grant money is in building a Tokamak? Billions, according to you. How much in sonoluminescence? Easily two or three orders of magnitude less. If I were to pull a big, evil corporate scam, I'd be in the Tokamak business, not the shady science business.
This /.er certainly does. I prefer Scientific American for general science stuff, and IEEE Spectrum for EE stuff. Both give the straight goods without talking down to the audience or engaging in sensationalism.
Capacitors are used for energy storage in industrial applications, but normally for situations requiring high output current and high peak power, since their internal resistance is usually much lower than batteries. I'm under the impression that capacitors are not as stable as chemical batteries ... besides, have you ever seen a 1-farad capacitor? It's about the size of a pint glass.
if it were this picture, that would put the fear of God into me, I'm sure.
Although I agree that the Drake equation is flaky science, I can't agree with most of what else you've said. For example:
Even in a time when new terrestrial life forms are being found in places where these educated scientists said no life could ever exist (undersea thermal vents, etc), the science community tends to want to look like life like us (not human, DNA/carbon based life).
Yes, the scientists found organisms that exist in places where they were previously unexpected. However, these forms of life were easily recognizable as such, because they act much like already known life forms -- they exploit chemical energy sources, grow, and (most importantly) reproduce.
I'm citing an extreme example, but my point is this: If there was life so extreme, how would we ever notice them?
We probably wouldn't. But we also have no reason to expect that earthbound life is so terribly unusual, either. There might exist bizarre forms of life, but based on the single data point available concerning life in the universe (ourselves), it's not necessarily ridiculous to start looking for life "as we know it".
How would we ever contact them? With radio signals embedded with decodable messages? You could broadcast a voice talking over FM radio into space, and when it reaches an alien race, they never notice it because either they've moved so far past that technology or never had the need to use radio-type waves for communication purposes.
We might never be able to contact them in any meaningful way. However, that doesn't mean that we can have no knowledge that they exist. Even a highly advanced race would realise that RF technology is simple and robust for many applications, in much the same way that we on Earth still use lighthouses even though GPS is far superior and far more advanced.
IMHO, the only point in looking for "inhabitable" planets is for future colonization. All else is simply pointless.
I don't accept that it's "pointless" to do something simply because it's more complicated that we might first assume -- that's frankly a defeatist attitude. We have to start somewhere, and if life is not unusual, then our form of life is probably not unusual, so it makes perfect sense to look for what we understand as life. Furthermore, the importance of extraterrestrial life is such that finding it would probably have world-changing implications. Then we could start looking for the bizarre forms of life.
"The Internet regards censorship as a hardware failure and just works around it."
That would be true if the topology of the Internet was much more mesh-like. As it is, comparatively few backbones carry most of the Internet's traffic, so censorship can be implemented by controlling only relatively few routers. This is particularly true of national governments regulating Internet content -- a typical nation is served by only a handful of incoming backbone links.
Here, write your own script.
;)
$FREE_OS *Won't* Fail on the $OS_APP_TYPE ?
Posted by $EVIL_EDITOR on $DATE
from the $LAME_BYLINE dept.
$KARMA_GRUBBING_USER sent in a story claiming that $FREE_OS will Succeed on the $OS_APP_TYPE, and not just the $OTHER_OS_APP_TYPE where it has already had much success. I think that the latest version of $WINDOW_SYSTEM has demonstrated that it can compete, but with the increasing dependance on $PROPRIETARY_STANDARD that have no support on $FREE_OS, it's going to be awfully difficult. That said, $FREE_OS has been on my $OS_APP_TYPE for $LENGTH_OF_TIME, and I don't plan on changing it. (Maybe if $ALTERNATIVE_COMPUTER_MANUFACTURER released $COMPUTER_TYPE with $FEATURE I'd at least have an option
The mass of an antihydrogen atom is roughly 1e-27 kilograms, the same as a hydrogen atom. Using Einstein's famous formula, with the speed of light given as 3e+8 meters/second, the annihilation of one anti-hydrogen atom and one hydrogen atom would produce 2*(1e-27)*(3e+8)^2 = 1.8e-10 joules. The specific heat capacity of water is 4.2 J/(g*K), so 1.8e-10 joules would raise a 300g cup of coffee by 1.4e-13 degrees Kelvin. (I haven't had my coffee yet ... does that sound right? Anyone?)
The point is, one hydrogen atom makes little difference, but annihilating kilogram's worth of hydrogen atoms would liberate 9,000 terajoules of energy. Compare that to a kilogram of coal, wood, or oil ...
Well, I don't see that it necessarily follows that media empires are owned mostly to influence public opinion. I think AOL, MS et al. see that computers are ready to become entertainment devices, and entertainment requires content, so it's a natural move for them to own the content. Even if the bias argument is accepted, MS and AOL are competitors, and would therefore balance each other's bias out, at least in theory.
While I believe that people don't like to be exposed to opposing viewpoints, I also believe that people can think critically, even when reading views that support their own. I have faith that the average person would read with skepticism a pro-MS article on MSNBC, the same way that Slashdotters make critical points in posts to otherwise pro-free-software articles. Maybe I'm just a hopeless optimist ...
The net has never succeeded in promoting free expression of ideas. Instead it has founded enclaves of like-thinking people, who need to have their own point of view reinforced by others. Take Slashdot for example -- a community of people who have similar views about free software and intellectual property law. When was the last time a justification of Microsoft's tactics was posted to the front page, without an immediate rebuttal? Or a repudiation of the GPL? The readership here wouldn't stand for it, because that's not what they are here for ... not free expression, but validation.
Really, we shouldn't be surprised that the "mainstream" media is boring -- most people don't like to hear views that strongly conflict with their own. This is a consequence of the popularization of the internet, and Slashdot is an example of that in microcosm.
"Alternative media" sites like disinformation.com are no different. They have their own axioms (the media is lying; the police are out to get you; corporations will enslave the world), their own jargon, and their own orthodoxy. Read an "alternative paper" for a while and you'll see what I mean.
You send me this orgasm? See you later. Thanks.