You know the moral difference between your saying that the U.S.A. kicks ass and someone else says Deutschland Uber Alles? It's because anybody, regardless of their religion, color, family background or whatever can come here and become an American.
America is not so much a country as a set of ideas. If foreigners abroad can't understand why Americans get so worked up about their country, it's because we love these ideas so much (my handle? I was being ironical).
Britain and Australia kick severe ass as well. Don't bother flaming me, I won't be reading the responses.
Given the constraints under which the program has to operate. Propulsion is about liberating energy from an energy store. We hit upon the storage limits of chemical bonds in the last century, there simply is no way to (safely) cram any more energy into fuels that also can be stored safely, are not incredibly toxic to the environment and can be produced anywhere within budgetary reason.
The sad truth is we are the very limits of chemical rocketry. Fast forward 1000 years from now, and if you ask those folks to build you a chemical rocket, chances are it will be a multi-stage vehicle like the Saturn V and what we're seeing now.
The next stop is a higher density energy store, like nuclear materials, but we are prevented from proceeding to that for reasons more political than anything else. Nuclear rockets could be made far safer than current rockets, but the consequences of a failure are far greater. But even those consequences could be greatly ameliorated with choice of launch and landing sites.
Having said all of this, I'm sure that the new designs will be light years ahead of the Apollo era designs in safety and science capability because of advances in materials and computer sciences since then.
Not as difficult as you might think. This is what an equatorial mount on a telescope does, in conjunction with a worm drive. It will keep the same spot in the sky in the same place.
Good grief! YES IT IS! Get this: hot coffee is not safe to spill on your groin! Twas always thus, and always it will be!
There's a principle called assumption of risk. If you do something so unwise as placing a hot cup of coffee between your legs...well?
Consider that even now, placing a cup of McDonalds coffee between your legs and spilling it will cause injury. This isn't nerf-world, and we shouldn't want it to be.
One of the problems with these devices is that they tend to end up classified as medical devices due to the tight integration with the retina.
This stuff is cool, but I don't see it becoming available in the U.S. any time soon. I would worry about a bad capacitor or something that suddenly released an hour's worth of exposure in a microsecond and fried my retina. Somebody with more engineering knowledge of these systems may know whether that's impossible or not, but it will always represent a consumer concern, I imagine.
Alright, I'll write as a disinterested (i.e., no holdings in either oil or nuclear power companies) party.
What does this have to do with Republicans? I thought that the Republicans were aligned with oil interests, who LOVE the fact that nuclear power can't get anywhere in this country, unlike France which supplies 77% of their power from nukes.
Face it, buddy: you've been lied to, and you drank the Kool-Aid and asked for seconds. Seriously, check out the DETAILS of why Chernobyl failed (no containment tower because they wanted to be able to crane nuclear material for weapons, positive nuclear reactive co-efficient). And even so, find out FOR YOURSELF how many people died. Now compare that the number of people that die in coal mining accidents, and add the number of people who die of respiratory ailments aggravated by fumes, add in the danger of global warming...
Preach it brother! When I start talking to enviro-fundamentalists about this, at some point in the argument, I wave my hands and grind it to a stop and say:
"Let's be totally clear. You realize we're talking about zero emissions here. ZERO...FRICKING...EMISSIONS? As in no CO2 or CO, no more ozone alerts, no more FRICKING SMOG? Let's just be totally clear about this. Starting with the fact that, again, we're talking about ZERO FRICKING EMISSIONS how many waste and storage problems can we budget for? Given the fact that the global warming problem is FRICKING SOLVED, how do we proceed in this argument?"
This usually stops the fundies in their tracks. Of course, I realize that most of the pollution actually comes from automobiles, but that's where the hydrogen car becomes useful, rather than just a political football to be bounced around.
Bio DieselD is the best alternative fuel right now but then you have the moral issue of is it right to use that land for fuel instead of feeding people?
I don't see this as a moral dilemna...consider that as demand for Biodiesel rose, the price of food would rise. This would mean that land for which it was formerly unprofitable (or less profitable than some alternative use, say, building a condo on it) would be marshaled for this purpose. So the upshot is a slight increase in the cost of agricultural products...maybe. I think when you weigh this against the benefits (independence from Islamofascist oil, increased fuel efficiency) it's a no-brainer.
Frankly the first car company that makes a car that does not use fossil fuel but works as well as gas car they will make a mint.
I agree, but I don't expect to see it anytime soon unless we crack the problem of fusion or triggered isomer release. Otherwise, fossil fuels will be in the chain somewhere...
The ideal arrangment that we could have now (or soon, at least) would be a car powered by hydrogen that was manufactured by the power from a fission nuclear plant. But the envirofundamentalists won't allow this, so we'll continue to choke on fossil fumes until someone can figure out that problem.
This, though way cool, is actually a totally different kind of fusion.
Research continues on this to this day, mostly by amateur researchers (here's a good link). The general understanding is that you can absolutely produce fusion, you just can't break even in terms of energy.
Apparently, RPOWs are a way of throttling down incoming requests by forcing them to solve a time-consuming puzzle. You would want to do this to mitigate DOS attacks.
Here's the question for those who know more, i.e., anyone who knows anything about this. Won't this necessarily and dramatically increase request time? It should impose no (significant) additional load on the server, but won't this mean that requests take x*response time to begin?
I'm not sure what Cortez has to do with this, aside from a cry of righteous indignation. At any rate, I didn't say that that indigenous peoples had no history. I said they had no historical continuum that was anywhere near the historical awareness of the West. The simple reason for this is that there was only one writing system available (in Mexico), and it was used only for bookkeeping. Without writing, there's no history, aside from oral tradition. In short, there were no archives, that you're talking about.
In fact, I'm very interested in the history of Ancient America. I think that these peoples accomplished astonishing things (particularly in terms of astronomy), but to understand these things we have to evaluate them dispassionately. And a dispassionate analysis leads to the conclusion that these people were around 3500 years behind the Europeans that came to conquer them. There are geographic reasons for this that are complicated, but boil down to three main reasons:
the Americas were oriented north to south, which prevented domesticated crops from transferring between populations readily (crops tend to be highly tuned to latitude)
the Americas lacked a Mediterranean basin from which numerous domesticable crops could arise (and spread East and West, see #1) and
the peoples lacked access to the writing systems that arose in the ancient Middle East.
History and truth have different break rooms. If you mean History and Fact, then history represents our best effort to reconstruct facts of the past. Of course we fail, of course we are biased, but we simply don't have any better tool with which to understand our past.
And finally, Eurocentrism may not continue to dominate the world, but it will still be accurate in the future to say that Columbus discovered America. At the time of discovery, Columbus was a representative of the most advanced society in the world.
I highly recommend Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel for more on this stuff. It's a fantastic book.
Eurocentrism was / is not unreasonable because indigenous peoples did not have a recorded history. Europe and Asia represented a continuum of communication, commerce and historical awareness that had nothing like any sort of parallel in the Americas. Furthermore, our modern society is the extension of that continuum with subtle accents from the indigenous peoples at best. It is, therefore, entirely appropriate when we say that Columbus discovered America.
You're confusing existence with awareness. No one implies that radioactivity didn't exist before Curie, or buoyancy before Archimedes. But here, I've corrected a very fine point. I do think that it's likely that there are quite many planets like Earth in the universe.
I will say this, however. While the laws of physics are universal, it is unclear how probable the origin of life is, so we may find "Earth-like" planets in the sense that they resemeble primordial, un-biologically altered Earth.
This is a good point. If these firms became large and commonplace enough, perhaps they would influence the design of the components, i.e., components would be specifically designed so that they could be easily and cheaply fabricated in this manner. This has some really interesting implications.
For example, imagine buying a DVD player that a local fabber "printed" off for you. You purchased it online at a site that functions essentially as a services broker for local suppliers, i.e., enter your zipcode and search a catalog of products that is determined by a database of the capabilities of fabber companies within a certain delivery zone of your house.
If fabber scientists are really clever, they'll design the components so that they can be easily disassembled as well, so that components can be endlessly recycled. When this happens, the hardware business model becomes much more like the software model, with users turning in their DVD players each year for a newer model.
Upon a moment's consideration, there are not that many products that couldn't be produced in this manner. Where the business model allows it is another question of course, but in ticking off the last few non-grocery items I've purchased (DVD, charcoal grill, game controller) there's no structural reason why they couldn't all have been produced by a local (if speculative) fabber shop, with an interplay of some design changes and an increase in price.
Interesting enough, this same sort of force led to the idea of primogeniture, i.e., all lands and wealth going to the eldest son. The idea was that rather than splitting up a wealth creating system (e.g., an agricultural estate, or cobbler's shop, or whatever), it would remain intact and go to the eldest son.
This led to younger brothers who, having no fortune to speak of, were forced to go out and make their own. They became knight errants (wandering knights), which laid the foundations for chivalry, gentlemanliness, and codes of male conduct up until the 60's, when we all became crass bastards again.
One last thing: before anyone begins to salivate about a big inheritance tax: any sufficiently well-educated wealthy person would simply channel his assets into a Charitable Remainder Trust rather than let it go the government.
I'm totally onboard for NERVA, but keep in mind that NERVA wasn't done, per se, when the program folded. There were some significant problems relating to hydrogen eroding the graphite engine cores that still remained to be solved.
I think what would be great would be a (relatively) protest-proof method of transporting nuclear materials into space. There are always going to be leftists who oppose it on religious grounds, but if we can satisfy the reasonable people with objections, then the road to space will stretch out in front of us.
I kind of got the impression from the book that there had been one kind of supra genius who laid foundations for AI that no one else could duplicate or truly understand. And whoever that was chose to put in the rules, hence.
Somebody who's read the book more recently correct me if I'm wrong, but if that's the case, you can write robots, but they all have to implement...IRobot! And there's only one provider that has successfully implemented the interface.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, they made $29.6 billion in profits. Of course, that constitutes only a 10% profit margin.
For all of everybody's bitching about oil companies, here are some net profit rates for a couple of oil companies:
Exxon-Mobil: 10% net profit
Chevron: 8% net profit
BP: 5% net profit
Of course, as a consumer, I'd prefer that they make zero profit and lower the price, but these rates of profit don't seem outrageous to me.
Hell yeah...God bless the U.S.A.
You know the moral difference between your saying that the U.S.A. kicks ass and someone else says Deutschland Uber Alles? It's because anybody, regardless of their religion, color, family background or whatever can come here and become an American.
America is not so much a country as a set of ideas. If foreigners abroad can't understand why Americans get so worked up about their country, it's because we love these ideas so much (my handle? I was being ironical).
Britain and Australia kick severe ass as well. Don't bother flaming me, I won't be reading the responses.
Given the constraints under which the program has to operate. Propulsion is about liberating energy from an energy store. We hit upon the storage limits of chemical bonds in the last century, there simply is no way to (safely) cram any more energy into fuels that also can be stored safely, are not incredibly toxic to the environment and can be produced anywhere within budgetary reason.
The sad truth is we are the very limits of chemical rocketry. Fast forward 1000 years from now, and if you ask those folks to build you a chemical rocket, chances are it will be a multi-stage vehicle like the Saturn V and what we're seeing now.
The next stop is a higher density energy store, like nuclear materials, but we are prevented from proceeding to that for reasons more political than anything else. Nuclear rockets could be made far safer than current rockets, but the consequences of a failure are far greater. But even those consequences could be greatly ameliorated with choice of launch and landing sites.
Having said all of this, I'm sure that the new designs will be light years ahead of the Apollo era designs in safety and science capability because of advances in materials and computer sciences since then.
Not as difficult as you might think. This is what an equatorial mount on a telescope does, in conjunction with a worm drive. It will keep the same spot in the sky in the same place.
Here's a link.
Good grief! YES IT IS! Get this: hot coffee is not safe to spill on your groin! Twas always thus, and always it will be!
There's a principle called assumption of risk. If you do something so unwise as placing a hot cup of coffee between your legs...well?
Consider that even now, placing a cup of McDonalds coffee between your legs and spilling it will cause injury. This isn't nerf-world, and we shouldn't want it to be.
I had some problems with my XBox and a cleaning disc really helped. I had no idea that such a thing even existed for DVD players.
Having said that, XBox won't play a lot of the Netflix discs, presumably because of their wear and tear.
One of the problems with these devices is that they tend to end up classified as medical devices due to the tight integration with the retina.
This stuff is cool, but I don't see it becoming available in the U.S. any time soon. I would worry about a bad capacitor or something that suddenly released an hour's worth of exposure in a microsecond and fried my retina. Somebody with more engineering knowledge of these systems may know whether that's impossible or not, but it will always represent a consumer concern, I imagine.
Alright, I'll write as a disinterested (i.e., no holdings in either oil or nuclear power companies) party.
What does this have to do with Republicans? I thought that the Republicans were aligned with oil interests, who LOVE the fact that nuclear power can't get anywhere in this country, unlike France which supplies 77% of their power from nukes.
Face it, buddy: you've been lied to, and you drank the Kool-Aid and asked for seconds. Seriously, check out the DETAILS of why Chernobyl failed (no containment tower because they wanted to be able to crane nuclear material for weapons, positive nuclear reactive co-efficient). And even so, find out FOR YOURSELF how many people died. Now compare that the number of people that die in coal mining accidents, and add the number of people who die of respiratory ailments aggravated by fumes, add in the danger of global warming...
You're the oil companies' best little buddy.
Preach it brother! When I start talking to enviro-fundamentalists about this, at some point in the argument, I wave my hands and grind it to a stop and say:
"Let's be totally clear. You realize we're talking about zero emissions here. ZERO...FRICKING...EMISSIONS? As in no CO2 or CO, no more ozone alerts, no more FRICKING SMOG? Let's just be totally clear about this. Starting with the fact that, again, we're talking about ZERO FRICKING EMISSIONS how many waste and storage problems can we budget for? Given the fact that the global warming problem is FRICKING SOLVED, how do we proceed in this argument?"
This usually stops the fundies in their tracks. Of course, I realize that most of the pollution actually comes from automobiles, but that's where the hydrogen car becomes useful, rather than just a political football to be bounced around.
A four wheeled vehicle designed for conveying people around? There's no way that this will catch on.
I suspect that they'll eventually shorten the name CentAuR to CAR.
And yet this is precisely what the American Left thinks that they should do.
Then you're a fool. America isn't perfect, but as they say, the sins of the West are the sins of the world.
Bio DieselD is the best alternative fuel right now but then you have the moral issue of is it right to use that land for fuel instead of feeding people?
I don't see this as a moral dilemna...consider that as demand for Biodiesel rose, the price of food would rise. This would mean that land for which it was formerly unprofitable (or less profitable than some alternative use, say, building a condo on it) would be marshaled for this purpose. So the upshot is a slight increase in the cost of agricultural products...maybe. I think when you weigh this against the benefits (independence from Islamofascist oil, increased fuel efficiency) it's a no-brainer.
Frankly the first car company that makes a car that does not use fossil fuel but works as well as gas car they will make a mint.
I agree, but I don't expect to see it anytime soon unless we crack the problem of fusion or triggered isomer release. Otherwise, fossil fuels will be in the chain somewhere...
The ideal arrangment that we could have now (or soon, at least) would be a car powered by hydrogen that was manufactured by the power from a fission nuclear plant. But the envirofundamentalists won't allow this, so we'll continue to choke on fossil fumes until someone can figure out that problem.
Moons are made of cheese
Wensleydale, specifically.
This, though way cool, is actually a totally different kind of fusion.
Research continues on this to this day, mostly by amateur researchers (here's a good link). The general understanding is that you can absolutely produce fusion, you just can't break even in terms of energy.
Ah...that makes a lot more sense. I WAS thinking in terms of a web server. Cool.
Apparently, RPOWs are a way of throttling down incoming requests by forcing them to solve a time-consuming puzzle. You would want to do this to mitigate DOS attacks.
Here's the question for those who know more, i.e., anyone who knows anything about this. Won't this necessarily and dramatically increase request time? It should impose no (significant) additional load on the server, but won't this mean that requests take x*response time to begin?
Sounds like a great platform for a portable version of Wikipedia.
In fact, I'm very interested in the history of Ancient America. I think that these peoples accomplished astonishing things (particularly in terms of astronomy), but to understand these things we have to evaluate them dispassionately. And a dispassionate analysis leads to the conclusion that these people were around 3500 years behind the Europeans that came to conquer them. There are geographic reasons for this that are complicated, but boil down to three main reasons:
History and truth have different break rooms. If you mean History and Fact, then history represents our best effort to reconstruct facts of the past. Of course we fail, of course we are biased, but we simply don't have any better tool with which to understand our past.
And finally, Eurocentrism may not continue to dominate the world, but it will still be accurate in the future to say that Columbus discovered America. At the time of discovery, Columbus was a representative of the most advanced society in the world.
I highly recommend Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel for more on this stuff. It's a fantastic book.
Eurocentrism was / is not unreasonable because indigenous peoples did not have a recorded history. Europe and Asia represented a continuum of communication, commerce and historical awareness that had nothing like any sort of parallel in the Americas. Furthermore, our modern society is the extension of that continuum with subtle accents from the indigenous peoples at best. It is, therefore, entirely appropriate when we say that Columbus discovered America.
You're confusing existence with awareness. No one implies that radioactivity didn't exist before Curie, or buoyancy before Archimedes. But here, I've corrected a very fine point. I do think that it's likely that there are quite many planets like Earth in the universe.
I will say this, however. While the laws of physics are universal, it is unclear how probable the origin of life is, so we may find "Earth-like" planets in the sense that they resemeble primordial, un-biologically altered Earth.
Absolutely the worst article to ever appear on Slashdot. This piece is transcendingly, gravity-bendingly horrible. Highlander 2 bad.
I suggest the government form a multi-billion dollar bi-partisan panel on how this article could have been prevented.
This article is so bad that Auntie Entity could run Barter Town off of it.
If this article were an 80's band, it would have been a collaboration band between Poison, Warrant and Bon Jovi.
This article is Ewoks, Jar-Jar, Kes, and Haley Joel Osment getting stabbed at the end all rolled together.
Okay, that's about all I've got.
This is a good point. If these firms became large and commonplace enough, perhaps they would influence the design of the components, i.e., components would be specifically designed so that they could be easily and cheaply fabricated in this manner. This has some really interesting implications.
For example, imagine buying a DVD player that a local fabber "printed" off for you. You purchased it online at a site that functions essentially as a services broker for local suppliers, i.e., enter your zipcode and search a catalog of products that is determined by a database of the capabilities of fabber companies within a certain delivery zone of your house.
If fabber scientists are really clever, they'll design the components so that they can be easily disassembled as well, so that components can be endlessly recycled. When this happens, the hardware business model becomes much more like the software model, with users turning in their DVD players each year for a newer model.
Upon a moment's consideration, there are not that many products that couldn't be produced in this manner. Where the business model allows it is another question of course, but in ticking off the last few non-grocery items I've purchased (DVD, charcoal grill, game controller) there's no structural reason why they couldn't all have been produced by a local (if speculative) fabber shop, with an interplay of some design changes and an increase in price.
Interesting enough, this same sort of force led to the idea of primogeniture, i.e., all lands and wealth going to the eldest son. The idea was that rather than splitting up a wealth creating system (e.g., an agricultural estate, or cobbler's shop, or whatever), it would remain intact and go to the eldest son.
This led to younger brothers who, having no fortune to speak of, were forced to go out and make their own. They became knight errants (wandering knights), which laid the foundations for chivalry, gentlemanliness, and codes of male conduct up until the 60's, when we all became crass bastards again.
For a (much) more complete history, check out The Compleat Gentleman by Brad Miner.
One last thing: before anyone begins to salivate about a big inheritance tax: any sufficiently well-educated wealthy person would simply channel his assets into a Charitable Remainder Trust rather than let it go the government.
I'm totally onboard for NERVA, but keep in mind that NERVA wasn't done, per se, when the program folded. There were some significant problems relating to hydrogen eroding the graphite engine cores that still remained to be solved.
I think what would be great would be a (relatively) protest-proof method of transporting nuclear materials into space. There are always going to be leftists who oppose it on religious grounds, but if we can satisfy the reasonable people with objections, then the road to space will stretch out in front of us.
I kind of got the impression from the book that there had been one kind of supra genius who laid foundations for AI that no one else could duplicate or truly understand. And whoever that was chose to put in the rules, hence.
Somebody who's read the book more recently correct me if I'm wrong, but if that's the case, you can write robots, but they all have to implement...IRobot! And there's only one provider that has successfully implemented the interface.