Or we could go back to the old days when Usenet was a true "store and forward" application, with people forwarding posts instead of everyone acting like leaf nodes. Just use NNTP or some new protocol instead of UUCP.
It's actually an idea that's been around since at least the 60's, I even remember a science fiction movie made about an astronaut who was sent to the Moon and got off course, and had to make his way to the supply ship that landed first, so he could wait for rescue by the "full-blown" mission.
It's sort of like the plan Robert Zubrin has for a Mars mission, send things up there to store and/or make supplies needed for the humans, and which don't need to be brought back. Since it's one-way, you don't need nearly as much complication in the systems, it's not going to take back off again and return, you don't need a LM type platform, and you don't need return fuel, so all that weight and systems could be used by supplies and storage support.
Shoot, you could send food up, keep it in the shade and exposed it to space, and you freeze-dry it on the way. Once it passes through the radiation belt, it cooks most of the bacteria out of it, and so you really don't need special packaging. Just bring enough water along with the people to reconstitute the food.
German and Latin are good languages, both are a lot easier than English. I don't know much about Russian, but I've heard that it's not anywhere near as bad as a lot of people think. If I understand things correctly, it's quite regular.
The nice things about Russian that I remember are that the Cyrillic characters only have one pronunciation each, and that even though there's gender, there are no articles like "the" or "a" that require gender.
Gut really, anybody who can handle a programming language and math should have no problem with foreign languages. The only thing at all challenging there is vocab, and that can be picked up if you've got a pretty good understanding of grammar.
Well, picking up the rules of grammar are quite a bit harder in a human language, and from what I can remember I had a harder time getting grammar down in German and Russian, but I've had a much harder time getting vocabulary down in Japanese. That may be age-related though. Speaking of age-related difficulty, I'm also trying to keep my brain exercised by learning new things, since my father and grandfather both had Alzheimer's or at least senile dementia, and I'm doing all I can to avoid it.
Plus, trying to read manga in Japanese is a lot more fun than crossword puzzles...
I have to agree with this, that learning another language helps you with your own. That said, it also makes a difference in how it is taught. When I learned Latin in high school, the teacher made it a point to learn this method called "parsing" a sentence. I remember we had to draw lines and label the "verb", the "subject" etc. It wasn't until I got into computer programming that I learned that I really wasn't a "parser".
You mean the ones that don't see the SI Swimsuit issue (I was going to type "Sears Catalog" but I don't think many readers would know what that was)...
When I was a wee lad of 16 summers or so, I took 2 years of Latin in high school. Then when I got to the big kids school, the university, I took a year of German and a year of Russian, while also learning Pascal, Fortran, PL/1, Cobol, Basic, and VAX Assembler. Now, nearing the half-century mark (and on that long slope down) I've taken up Japanese, studying it for the past 3 years (and took a trip to Japan for a month, too. Worldcon 2007 FTW.)
On a bad morning, I can get confused enough to sound like I know Klingon...
Don't look for the mote in the other's eye when you have a beam in your own. Especially one of those beams. You wouldn't be able to see anything, much less a mote.
Hollywood is like a marketing department at an engineering firm. A unicorn is what's left of the engineer's rhinoceros after marketing gets done with it.
I always thought it was the other way around...
Oh wait, that's after upper management gets done with it.
Go back to the first season of Saturday Night Live, when they have a fake commercial for the new "Triple Track". Loved the tag line: "Because, you'll believe anything."
You blew right past that "legal" adjective the parent used. "Legal gun owners" aren't the ones robbing stores, the ones who are robbers usually "possess" guns, not necessarily "own" them, much less "legally".
That's basically the "scruffy" approach to AI, as opposed the "neat" approach, which was to define all the supposed rules that people supposedly follow. There was always a competition between the "scruffies", who thought that neural nets, genetic algorithms, and bayesian nets would enable us to "grow brains in a box" that would eventually be complex enough to think like we do, and the "neats" who could never define all the rules, because they relied on question-answer sessions with the "thinkers" who often thought they were following rules, but often turned out to be using instincts and assumptions that they never consciously thought about.
I was working in an AI research company back in the late 80's, and I remember the fun and "fun" we had back then. I tend to fall more in the "scruffy" category, but I'm coming from an implementation rather than research background, and I saw all the problems with the rule-based approaches. Even getting good probabilities from "experts" concerning their decisions and evaluations, to feed into Bayesian probability nets, was nearly impossible.
Nowadays I think we'll have better luck just following biology augmented with microelectronics. I want my cyberbrain, dammit!
I've been thinking along those lines, except in addition to using nuclear, why not use solar and wind and all the other "clean" electric sources to generate methanol in situ and store it. Then the methanol (or whatever hydrocarbon you prefer) can be transported or used locally. Seems like a good way of storing the intermittent energy from things like solar which work well in the summer but not so well in the winter, or wind that's great in the spring and fall. The big problems with the "renewable" resources is that you can't depend on them when they're available, and they're not always available when you need them. "Storing" their output in a different form seems like it would smooth out the unreliability.
It's ignored because it's an "inconvenient truth" and would interfere with the attempted criminalization of the ongoing policy disputes in the US Government. Anything to "get Bush" is fair game, and anything that might possibly put a roadblock on that attempt must be suppressed.
Slashdot Mirror
How ingenious...
but so disingenuous...
his lack of genius...
he must be an ingenue...
Burma Shave
Or we could go back to the old days when Usenet was a true "store and forward" application, with people forwarding posts instead of everyone acting like leaf nodes. Just use NNTP or some new protocol instead of UUCP.
It's actually an idea that's been around since at least the 60's, I even remember a science fiction movie made about an astronaut who was sent to the Moon and got off course, and had to make his way to the supply ship that landed first, so he could wait for rescue by the "full-blown" mission.
It's sort of like the plan Robert Zubrin has for a Mars mission, send things up there to store and/or make supplies needed for the humans, and which don't need to be brought back. Since it's one-way, you don't need nearly as much complication in the systems, it's not going to take back off again and return, you don't need a LM type platform, and you don't need return fuel, so all that weight and systems could be used by supplies and storage support.
Shoot, you could send food up, keep it in the shade and exposed it to space, and you freeze-dry it on the way. Once it passes through the radiation belt, it cooks most of the bacteria out of it, and so you really don't need special packaging. Just bring enough water along with the people to reconstitute the food.
That's Goofy.
All we have to fear, is the fear of the fear of the fear of terror itself.
German and Latin are good languages, both are a lot easier than English. I don't know much about Russian, but I've heard that it's not anywhere near as bad as a lot of people think. If I understand things correctly, it's quite regular.
The nice things about Russian that I remember are that the Cyrillic characters only have one pronunciation each, and that even though there's gender, there are no articles like "the" or "a" that require gender.
Gut really, anybody who can handle a programming language and math should have no problem with foreign languages. The only thing at all challenging there is vocab, and that can be picked up if you've got a pretty good understanding of grammar.
Well, picking up the rules of grammar are quite a bit harder in a human language, and from what I can remember I had a harder time getting grammar down in German and Russian, but I've had a much harder time getting vocabulary down in Japanese. That may be age-related though. Speaking of age-related difficulty, I'm also trying to keep my brain exercised by learning new things, since my father and grandfather both had Alzheimer's or at least senile dementia, and I'm doing all I can to avoid it.
Plus, trying to read manga in Japanese is a lot more fun than crossword puzzles...
I have to agree with this, that learning another language helps you with your own. That said, it also makes a difference in how it is taught. When I learned Latin in high school, the teacher made it a point to learn this method called "parsing" a sentence. I remember we had to draw lines and label the "verb", the "subject" etc. It wasn't until I got into computer programming that I learned that I really wasn't a "parser".
Well, maybe a lazy one...
But it can help you read a Chinese menu, sorta.
You mean the ones that don't see the SI Swimsuit issue (I was going to type "Sears Catalog" but I don't think many readers would know what that was)...
And romanji is evil incarnate unless all you want to do is speak, or you're limited to an ASCII only interface...
Gesundheit!
When I was a wee lad of 16 summers or so, I took 2 years of Latin in high school. Then when I got to the big kids school, the university, I took a year of German and a year of Russian, while also learning Pascal, Fortran, PL/1, Cobol, Basic, and VAX Assembler. Now, nearing the half-century mark (and on that long slope down) I've taken up Japanese, studying it for the past 3 years (and took a trip to Japan for a month, too. Worldcon 2007 FTW.)
On a bad morning, I can get confused enough to sound like I know Klingon...
Don't look for the mote in the other's eye when you have a beam in your own. Especially one of those beams. You wouldn't be able to see anything, much less a mote.
Hollywood is like a marketing department at an engineering firm.
A unicorn is what's left of the engineer's rhinoceros after marketing gets done with it.
I always thought it was the other way around...
Oh wait, that's after upper management gets done with it.
Go back to the first season of Saturday Night Live, when they have a fake commercial for the new "Triple Track". Loved the tag line: "Because, you'll believe anything."
You blew right past that "legal" adjective the parent used. "Legal gun owners" aren't the ones robbing stores, the ones who are robbers usually "possess" guns, not necessarily "own" them, much less "legally".
I'm an immoderate metamoderator, you insensitive clod!
I'm cold insensitive, you insensitive clod!
That's basically the "scruffy" approach to AI, as opposed the "neat" approach, which was to define all the supposed rules that people supposedly follow. There was always a competition between the "scruffies", who thought that neural nets, genetic algorithms, and bayesian nets would enable us to "grow brains in a box" that would eventually be complex enough to think like we do, and the "neats" who could never define all the rules, because they relied on question-answer sessions with the "thinkers" who often thought they were following rules, but often turned out to be using instincts and assumptions that they never consciously thought about.
I was working in an AI research company back in the late 80's, and I remember the fun and "fun" we had back then. I tend to fall more in the "scruffy" category, but I'm coming from an implementation rather than research background, and I saw all the problems with the rule-based approaches. Even getting good probabilities from "experts" concerning their decisions and evaluations, to feed into Bayesian probability nets, was nearly impossible.
Nowadays I think we'll have better luck just following biology augmented with microelectronics. I want my cyberbrain, dammit!
I've been thinking along those lines, except in addition to using nuclear, why not use solar and wind and all the other "clean" electric sources to generate methanol in situ and store it. Then the methanol (or whatever hydrocarbon you prefer) can be transported or used locally. Seems like a good way of storing the intermittent energy from things like solar which work well in the summer but not so well in the winter, or wind that's great in the spring and fall. The big problems with the "renewable" resources is that you can't depend on them when they're available, and they're not always available when you need them. "Storing" their output in a different form seems like it would smooth out the unreliability.
But what do I know, I'm just a computer geek...
It's ignored because it's an "inconvenient truth" and would interfere with the attempted criminalization of the ongoing policy disputes in the US Government. Anything to "get Bush" is fair game, and anything that might possibly put a roadblock on that attempt must be suppressed.
Apparently 5 out of 9 Supreme Court Justices disagree with you...
He was probably mis-Led...
Or for those of us a bit older, "Up and at 'em, Atom Ant!"