How long does it take to learn to develop SAP or Oracle business applications, for example? How much does such a job pay? Maybe 'relatively complex' environments have something going for them after all?
If that something going for them is purely developer lock-in due to complexity and steep learning curve, then that's not a very compelling argument if you're wanting to find a good tool rather than a secret handshake.
I suppose it's possible that a complex tool is also a good tool, but complexity is not in general, in itself, good. Some of the most powerful ideas in the history of knowledge have been the simplest, and the simpler a tool, generally the less likely it is to cause unexpected failures.
Spend hundreds of dollars at least to get a gaming PC
Aww! How cute! You guys in the USA complain about spending hundreds of dollars.
Cheap PCs generally cost upwards of $1000 here (NZ). A little cheaper now that netbooks have come out, but last year I saw a full gaming rig going for around $7000. Yeah, I thought it was stupidly expensive too.
Yet it failed in exactly the way they said it wouldn't.
Thank goodness that out of all the sectors of our highly complex modern society, it's only the IT industry which makes grandiose promises about the total impossibility of failure and then fails to properly manage disaster recovery. I for one am glad that, for example, the people who run nuclear reactors in Japan never make that...... ooops.
Actually, the waste is a pretty much solved problem if the political process will kindly step aside and let us recover the 95% valuable fuel from the "waste"./quote>
Where "recover" and "solved" mean "stick it in a very hot fast reactor which requires cooling with exotic substances like liquid sodium, which when it melts down is even worse to try to fix than light water".
But reactors never melt down so that's not a problem.
Imagine if anti-gasoline nuts had blocked the implimentation of fuel injection, unleaded gas, and catalytic converters because their goal was the complete elimination of gasoline as a fuel.
But what if those entities are really intelligent, and are not making such bombs to begin with?
Fricken' dolphins, we're not talking to them again. It's all "fish, fish, fish" and squaring the sides of a triangle and how to redistribute goods and services equitably among equal yet separate citizens in a just economy
Why do you say we will never get beyond this solar system? With no advances whatsoever in technology, we already have the technology to leave, albeit incredibly slowly.
To be more precise, we have the ability to put some people in a sealed can, wish them luck, and push that can out of Sol orbit.
We don't, as far as I'm aware, have anything near the biosphere technology to reasonably expect those people to stay alive more than a couple of years - let alone procreate successfully.
A nuclear war still isn't going to make the planet less habitable than the radiation count on Mars or (eek!) Jupiter's radiation belts - goodbye any hope of moving to Europa.
There might be some long-lived isotopes. But they'll be confined to the surface as dust. Earth will still have oceans of water, an atmosphere full of oxygen, and a functioning magnetosphere. Worst of worst cases, you could just tunnel into mineshafts and you'll be no worse off than in space.
There's no way space starts to look more attractive than Earth unless the entire planet got exploded, and then you'd need space-grade life-support but you could still live on the asteroid fragments of Earth (would be cheaper than moving all the way out to beyond Mars orbit).
Seriously, the only thing that could drive us out of Earth would be something going wrong with the sun - red giant or nova.
We are destroying the environment we absolutely need to survive.
Perhaps, but these two statements can't both be simultaneously true:
1. "Earth's ecosystem is so delicate that our entire planet could become unliveable without 100% of the current web of species so we'll have to move into space!" 2. "Earth's ecosystem is so robust that we can put a tiny sample of it into a sealed metal can out in space with no gravity and cosmic radiation and everything inside will be perfectly fine, and that's the future of mankind!"
An environmental crisis could never force us to leave Earth. If it could, we'd be even deader in space than staying here, because space environments are far less Earthlike.
a rock on a collision course with the earth. It may or may not be large enough to "destroy the earth" - but it doesn't need to be that big to "end life as we know it" on earth.
And yet, even after surviving an asteroid impact sufficient to destroy "life as we know it" or a full-on nuclear war, what remains of Earth will still be a million times more habitable than Mars.
We simply don't need colonies in space to ensure the continuance of the human race. If going all survivalist is what lights your fire, just build a sealed bio-dome in a mineshaft in Texas. It will be orders of magnitude cheaper, you'll get free oxygen and dirt to start with, and as a bonus, you'll get to find out whether it's even possible to build a self-sustaining colony. And if that answer turns out to be "no" (as it did for Biosphere 2), you can jump out the escape hatch without needing a working billion dollar rocket and a nine-month wait.
Space is not magic fairy dust which will make unworkable science or uneconomic technology spring into life. If sealed colonies in a can are possible, they're possible right here on Earth, for cheaper.
Bring a gold-heavy asteroid back to earth in secret and start selling.
Great idea! Once you let the Texas-sized crater cool a bit, and the global mega-tsunami has calmed down, you can carve up that baby and flood the gold market!
Oh, or you could bring it down the quiet way, in spaceships, which will cost you more per ounce in freight than what that gold's worth...
Because if man is to survive as a species, we must leave this planet... the sun will eventually incinerate the earth.
I'm not sure you've thought this through.
Sure, on a timescale of millions of years, the sun will burn out - and the only solution will not be just to leave the planet, but the entire solar system, which would require either some form of faster-than-light physics breakthrough, or a generation ship. Living on which would require developing ecological sustainability skills because it will have very limited resources. Those pesky Greenies! They've infiltrated even our shiny Space Future!
Meanwhile, on the same timescale, lots of other main sequence stars of the same age will be having similar problems, which means you can't just necessarily go to any old star, but would have to pick specifically young ones.
In the near to plausible mid future, you achieve absolutely nothing for the survival of the human race by going off-planet to the local solar system - and you're going to find very expensive, dangerous, exhausting and degrading work trying to scratch out a living on your average Sol system planetoid - a chunk of frozen metal, gas or ice without even functional dirt, and on a strictly bring-your-own oxygen basis.
tldr: If you want to imagine a future in space, go right ahead. Imagination's free. But in reality, we're all going to be living on Earth for a long, long time, so why not start treating it like the spaceship it is, and not just a giant strip mine / scrapheap?
no fish in the Pacific ocean will be safe for human consumption.
Does that mean that they will be safe from human consumption? Good news for the fish, then.
Or they will come for you now.
When they came for the giant mutated irradiated octopi, I did not speak out because I was not an octopus. Or a giant mutant. Or radioactive. When they came for the giant mutated irradiated sharks, it was too late because the giant mutated irradated octopi had respawned.
The total amount of radiation released is roughly equivalent, but the contamination is nowhere near the degree of Chernobyl.
Interesting claim. In what form does "radiation" get released from a leaking fission power reactor that is not "contamination"? Like, bursts of pure gamma rays or something?
Everything I've read suggests that what has been released from Fukushima, and is still being released, is radioactive isotopes that can't help but be contamination. The land area over which the contamination is spread is smaller than Chernobyl owing to there being no graphite fire - but on the other hand, contaminated water is also leaking into the sea, with all that that implies for the fishing industry, which wasn't an issue for Chernobyl.
I know how much it cost to build: $9 billion. At an average cost of $140K per physicist (including benefits) this is enough to hire 1,800 physics PhDs.
$9 billion for pure science? Wow, that's a lot of money!
Now, of course, the US has trouble exporting to a world where nobody has Imperial-sized tools or fasteners.
Not to mention your weird "Letter" size which is inexplicably the default in all your word processing programs when all the rest of the world uses A4.
I don't think I've ever seen Letter paper in my life, but I just installed LibreOffice and whoops, Letter, and measurements in inches. Grrr.
Don't worry, we don't think the less of you all in the States for it. Well, that's not actually true, we think it's kinda cute and sweet that you have your precious little antique measurement systems - aww, how retro! - but we figure eventually you'll grow out of it and become a proper country.
Then we think about all the nuclear reactors and rockets you built using feet and inches and get night sweats.
Why are you people still reading the comments to this article?
Because the existence of Blu-Ray in the first place is one of the great modern mysteries of the world to me. I'm poring through the comments trying to get a clue to how it ever made sense in the first place.
Also I like laughing at all the people with TV screens bigger than mine.
Slashdot Mirror
Spelling Nazi?
N-A-T-S-I. Wait, that's not right, is it. Do I get do-overs? Okay. N-A-U-G-H-T-S-Y... um.
*bzzt*
How long does it take to learn to develop SAP or Oracle business applications, for example? How much does such a job pay? Maybe 'relatively complex' environments have something going for them after all?
If that something going for them is purely developer lock-in due to complexity and steep learning curve, then that's not a very compelling argument if you're wanting to find a good tool rather than a secret handshake.
I suppose it's possible that a complex tool is also a good tool, but complexity is not in general, in itself, good. Some of the most powerful ideas in the history of knowledge have been the simplest, and the simpler a tool, generally the less likely it is to cause unexpected failures.
Spend hundreds of dollars at least to get a gaming PC
Aww! How cute! You guys in the USA complain about spending hundreds of dollars.
Cheap PCs generally cost upwards of $1000 here (NZ). A little cheaper now that netbooks have come out, but last year I saw a full gaming rig going for around $7000. Yeah, I thought it was stupidly expensive too.
Cloudrus: I has a uptime!
Nooo they be stealin mah uptime!
Yet it failed in exactly the way they said it wouldn't.
Thank goodness that out of all the sectors of our highly complex modern society, it's only the IT industry which makes grandiose promises about the total impossibility of failure and then fails to properly manage disaster recovery. I for one am glad that, for example, the people who run nuclear reactors in Japan never make that... ... ooops.
We're screwed, aren't we?
A contractual uptime, however, is something you can be sure about, and you can sue if you're not happy.
Sure you can sue, after you claw your way out from bankruptcy with no records and no business left.
Or you could take precautions before the fact, and decide that just because something's in a contract doesn't mean you need to be 'sure' about it.
Actually, the waste is a pretty much solved problem if the political process will kindly step aside and let us recover the 95% valuable fuel from the "waste"./quote>
Where "recover" and "solved" mean "stick it in a very hot fast reactor which requires cooling with exotic substances like liquid sodium, which when it melts down is even worse to try to fix than light water".
But reactors never melt down so that's not a problem.
Imagine if anti-gasoline nuts had blocked the implimentation of fuel injection, unleaded gas, and catalytic converters because their goal was the complete elimination of gasoline as a fuel.
If one gasoline power plant malfunction had caused 740,000 cases of premature aging, 100,000-200,000 abortions and 30,000-207,000 genetically damaged children (with 300,000-2 million expected over multiple generations) then they might not actually be 'nuts'.
Oh yeah? I'm fairly certain my high IQ score is the cause of my intelligence.
That's why cheating on IQ tests is frowned on.
We don't want our schools to accidentally fill up with ultra-bright kids. They're scary enough as it is.
But what if those entities are really intelligent, and are not making such bombs to begin with?
Fricken' dolphins, we're not talking to them again. It's all "fish, fish, fish" and squaring the sides of a triangle and how to redistribute goods and services equitably among equal yet separate citizens in a just economy
Dolphins. They're just not worth it.
They have made quite a bit, where do you think things like the microwave came from?
At a first guess, I'd think that microwave ovens came from Raytheon's 1945 experiments with magnetrons for military radar, and nothing to do with the still-yet-to-be-imagined NASA.
How surprised I am to find that I'm wrong! Thank you for educating me!
Ya, but try getting rid of money, and watch how many people die as the economy collapses
Try getting rid of water, oxygen and glucose and holding on to money and watch how many people the invisible hand of the market magically keeps alive.
Why do you say we will never get beyond this solar system? With no advances whatsoever in technology, we already have the technology to leave, albeit incredibly slowly.
To be more precise, we have the ability to put some people in a sealed can, wish them luck, and push that can out of Sol orbit.
We don't, as far as I'm aware, have anything near the biosphere technology to reasonably expect those people to stay alive more than a couple of years - let alone procreate successfully.
No, I'd bet on a nuclear war.
A nuclear war still isn't going to make the planet less habitable than the radiation count on Mars or (eek!) Jupiter's radiation belts - goodbye any hope of moving to Europa.
There might be some long-lived isotopes. But they'll be confined to the surface as dust. Earth will still have oceans of water, an atmosphere full of oxygen, and a functioning magnetosphere. Worst of worst cases, you could just tunnel into mineshafts and you'll be no worse off than in space.
There's no way space starts to look more attractive than Earth unless the entire planet got exploded, and then you'd need space-grade life-support but you could still live on the asteroid fragments of Earth (would be cheaper than moving all the way out to beyond Mars orbit).
Seriously, the only thing that could drive us out of Earth would be something going wrong with the sun - red giant or nova.
We are destroying the environment we absolutely need to survive.
Perhaps, but these two statements can't both be simultaneously true:
1. "Earth's ecosystem is so delicate that our entire planet could become unliveable without 100% of the current web of species so we'll have to move into space!"
2. "Earth's ecosystem is so robust that we can put a tiny sample of it into a sealed metal can out in space with no gravity and cosmic radiation and everything inside will be perfectly fine, and that's the future of mankind!"
An environmental crisis could never force us to leave Earth. If it could, we'd be even deader in space than staying here, because space environments are far less Earthlike.
But, people do learn from their mistakes when their very survival is at stake.
There's nothing in physics which guarantees that. It's entirely possible they'll just die.
a rock on a collision course with the earth. It may or may not be large enough to "destroy the earth" - but it doesn't need to be that big to "end life as we know it" on earth.
And yet, even after surviving an asteroid impact sufficient to destroy "life as we know it" or a full-on nuclear war, what remains of Earth will still be a million times more habitable than Mars.
We simply don't need colonies in space to ensure the continuance of the human race. If going all survivalist is what lights your fire, just build a sealed bio-dome in a mineshaft in Texas. It will be orders of magnitude cheaper, you'll get free oxygen and dirt to start with, and as a bonus, you'll get to find out whether it's even possible to build a self-sustaining colony. And if that answer turns out to be "no" (as it did for Biosphere 2), you can jump out the escape hatch without needing a working billion dollar rocket and a nine-month wait.
Space is not magic fairy dust which will make unworkable science or uneconomic technology spring into life. If sealed colonies in a can are possible, they're possible right here on Earth, for cheaper.
Bring a gold-heavy asteroid back to earth in secret and start selling.
Great idea! Once you let the Texas-sized crater cool a bit, and the global mega-tsunami has calmed down, you can carve up that baby and flood the gold market!
Oh, or you could bring it down the quiet way, in spaceships, which will cost you more per ounce in freight than what that gold's worth...
Then we are not, realistically, going anywhere.
That's been a fact ever since Einstein declared that the universal speed limit was C.
There's nothing in this solar system to go to, and it takes forever to get anywhere there might be livable alternate Earths.
Has it really taken this long for the reality to sink in?
Because if man is to survive as a species, we must leave this planet... the sun will eventually incinerate the earth.
I'm not sure you've thought this through.
Sure, on a timescale of millions of years, the sun will burn out - and the only solution will not be just to leave the planet, but the entire solar system, which would require either some form of faster-than-light physics breakthrough, or a generation ship. Living on which would require developing ecological sustainability skills because it will have very limited resources. Those pesky Greenies! They've infiltrated even our shiny Space Future!
Meanwhile, on the same timescale, lots of other main sequence stars of the same age will be having similar problems, which means you can't just necessarily go to any old star, but would have to pick specifically young ones.
In the near to plausible mid future, you achieve absolutely nothing for the survival of the human race by going off-planet to the local solar system - and you're going to find very expensive, dangerous, exhausting and degrading work trying to scratch out a living on your average Sol system planetoid - a chunk of frozen metal, gas or ice without even functional dirt, and on a strictly bring-your-own oxygen basis.
tldr: If you want to imagine a future in space, go right ahead. Imagination's free. But in reality, we're all going to be living on Earth for a long, long time, so why not start treating it like the spaceship it is, and not just a giant strip mine / scrapheap?
no fish in the Pacific ocean will be safe for human consumption.
Does that mean that they will be safe from human consumption? Good news for the fish, then.
Or they will come for you now.
When they came for the giant mutated irradiated octopi, I did not speak out because I was not an octopus. Or a giant mutant. Or radioactive.
When they came for the giant mutated irradiated sharks, it was too late because the giant mutated irradated octopi had respawned.
The total amount of radiation released is roughly equivalent, but the contamination is nowhere near the degree of Chernobyl.
Interesting claim. In what form does "radiation" get released from a leaking fission power reactor that is not "contamination"? Like, bursts of pure gamma rays or something?
Everything I've read suggests that what has been released from Fukushima, and is still being released, is radioactive isotopes that can't help but be contamination. The land area over which the contamination is spread is smaller than Chernobyl owing to there being no graphite fire - but on the other hand, contaminated water is also leaking into the sea, with all that that implies for the fishing industry, which wasn't an issue for Chernobyl.
I know how much it cost to build: $9 billion. At an average cost of $140K per physicist (including benefits) this is enough to hire 1,800 physics PhDs.
$9 billion for pure science? Wow, that's a lot of money!
That would be - well - almost enough to clean up one commercial nuclear power plant accident.
Not that anyone's counting or anything.
Now, of course, the US has trouble exporting to a world where nobody has Imperial-sized tools or fasteners.
Not to mention your weird "Letter" size which is inexplicably the default in all your word processing programs when all the rest of the world uses A4.
I don't think I've ever seen Letter paper in my life, but I just installed LibreOffice and whoops, Letter, and measurements in inches. Grrr.
Don't worry, we don't think the less of you all in the States for it. Well, that's not actually true, we think it's kinda cute and sweet that you have your precious little antique measurement systems - aww, how retro! - but we figure eventually you'll grow out of it and become a proper country.
Then we think about all the nuclear reactors and rockets you built using feet and inches and get night sweats.
Why are you people still reading the comments to this article?
Because the existence of Blu-Ray in the first place is one of the great modern mysteries of the world to me. I'm poring through the comments trying to get a clue to how it ever made sense in the first place.
Also I like laughing at all the people with TV screens bigger than mine.