I wondered about that myself.
Here's the math :
Neptune : 4.2 light hours from the sun
Earth : 8.3 light minutes
"She can get to Neptune in 6 minutes"
4 * 24 * 60 / 6 = 960
So 4 days is 960 times the distance from earth to neptune. Assuming the greatest distance (earth is diametrically opposed to Neptune in the solar system),
4.3 light hours * 960 = 4165 light hours =
0.475 light years.
Which stars are closest to the Sun? The closest is Proxima Centauri, one of three stars that orbit each other about 4 light-years away in the Alpha-Centauri system.
So, ideally this trip should have taken 4/(0.475 / 4) days (light years / (distance in four days / 4)) = 33.65 days to get to the closest star
So the Klingon homeworld should have been months and months away. Possibly years, according to the quote on their speed. From what I understand about warp (as much as one can understand something fictional), it's a lot harder to get from 8 to 9 than 7 to 8, and impossible to achieve warp 10. So I think that this series would have been better served starting at a higher warp - maybe 7. Otherwise these characters aren't even going to be able to have an adventure every few months, let alone every week - there's a lot of empty space out there.
Couldn't the years have neutered that word (man)? If everyone takes the sentence to mean "mankind (and takes "mankind" to mean "humanity":-), then there is gender neutrality.
For instance, we're looking at the later appearance of the Klingons
Aside from all the time-travel theories here, I think there's another reasonable explanation. It may be a self-inflicted thing. Klingon physiology is pretty different from our own, of course (see the NextGen episode where Worf devolved into some spitting-reptile thing?) Maybe there's some vitamin/drug/hormone that can have such drastic effects on Klingon appearances - or perhaps it's more like piecings or tattoos.
Anyway, that explains why now the Klingons aren't like that, and if it were considered an extreme social stigma or something like that later on, it explains why Worf didn't want to talk about it.
It was a completely different feel than the other series' I've liked (ie NextGen/DS9/Voyager). I thought on it, wondering what it was that made it so different than the others, and it came down to the exploration aspect. NextGen didn't really explore in the same way. They had the technology, they knew how to use it. There were few new concepts explored, only new ways of using the old concepts.
Enterprise seemed to me to be on a whole new level of exploration. Humans really haven't penetrated much of the galaxy. The best warp they can achieve is warp 4.5, transporters are for cargo only, phasers (phase pistols) are a new technology, no Universal Translater!. I could feel the sense of accomplishment they showed when talking about the "incredible" speeds the new ship could achieve. Everything's new.
My only disappointment was putting in a "temporal cold war" so early in the series. Time travel has been overused in the other series, and I had hoped that it would be used cautiously, if at all, in these archaic pre-Federation times. Ah well. All in all, I approve.
If it was a genuine argument, then I apologize for the "troll" label.
As for your own highway argument, I agree that something should be done. I just disagree that stricter laws would help that much. *Enforced* laws would help.
How many times do you go over the speed limit. Maybe you don't, but nearly everyone I drive with consistently drives over the speed limit. They're caught speeding maybe once a year, if that. It's because the laws aren't enforced. If you increased the penalty to 6 months in jail, but only one person in a thousand was charged, let alone convicted - of course people ignore the law.
If, on the other hand, one was charged every time their speedometer tipped over the speed limit, you'd see speeding drop to nearly zero.
The same goes for crackers. If there were more people enforcing computer-crime laws, and people were charged more often, there would be less computer-crime - especially among script-kiddies.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that a consistent slap on the wrist is more effective than the occasional punch to the face.
Because you remove two lives in the process - the dead, and the driver. The driver effectively loses his life, but the state pays to keep his body alive.
The Internet has become the circulatory system of our nation's economy.
Highways have become an integral party of our nation's economy.
We depend on the security of the sites we visit in order to enjoy the benefits of the Web.
We depend on the speed and direct route provided in order to enjoy the benefits of these big roads.
When the performance of the Internet is disturbed...
When the performance of these roads are disturbed by people who drive too quickly, too slowly, or otherwise disrupt traffic...
The only way to stifle the motivation of hackers is to impose harsh sentences on hacking,
The only way to stifle the motivation of such bad drivers is to impose harsh sentences on bad driving.
When a person only receives 8 months of jailtime...
When a person only receives a ticket for speeding, it only encourages more bad drivers into the fray, and ruin the roads for us all.
You get the idea. Let's have life in prison - no parole - for anyone going over the speed limit. I'm not against punishing computer crime, I'm against the punishment not fitting the crime.
It seems that the US government wants to define any action that might invoke fear as "terrorism". They may have a semantic point, but that's really about it. Ashcroft is trying to "broaden" the meaning of the word "terrorism" to include things that really aren't. What about rape? Murder? Burglary? Any one of these usually cause far more fear and "terror" than any computer-related crime.
The point of this rant is - Where does crime stop and Terrorism begin? Why are computer crimes so much more global, more terrorist than any other crimes that they have to be included in laws like this one?
The speed of a typist is pretty inversly related to the distance between keys.
Argh - I replied to this one post earlier, so feel free to mod this redundant.
You have more than one finger, if I guess correctly. You don't have to move your single finger all the way from "a" to "l" when typing those two letters. The farther apart on the keyboard, the easier it is to hit a lot of combinations, because you don't have to press the two keys with the same finger.
According to a few articles I've read, any non-biased tests pretty much show that qwerty and dvorak are pretty much similar in learning curve, max. typing speed, etc.
And as for "Thus slowing down the typist", I don't understand why putting letters that are commonly together far apart on the keyboard could slow down typing. Much of the design of QWERTY is to have alternating hands typing the keys, and not to have a single finger doing a lot of the work (yes, a glaring exception in "ed", but aside from that, not bad). Keys on opposite sides of the keyboard would never jam when pressed at the same time.
I don't see any appreciable difference from, say "jljljljljl" (same hand), and "jfjfjfjfjf" (opposite hands) when it comes to speed.
Yeah - I stopped reading at that point. It's hard to believe that someone who allegedly put so much work into keyboard research is willing to say that on the record.
Installing new programs/configuring old ones, I'll give you. You have to wade through a bunch of man pages and websites to even figure out which of the 200/etc files you should be looking in.
However I recently installed Redhat 7.1, and it was at least as easy - if not easier - to do a default workstation install than Win98 (the last one I installed). All my hardware was auto-detected, and works perfectly - which is commendable for a system for which many companies still do not provide drivers.
If I were an average Windows user who didn't want anything more than out-of-the-box usability, then this would have been perfect for me. As soon as install was done, I had web access, e-mail, an office suite (not perfect, as people will point out, but still good), more built-in card games than Windows can shake a stick at, etc, etc. It took me a complete screw-up of KDE to figure out rpm, but now that I can use that, I don't have to worry about installations anymore either.
The biggest learning-curve problem is that there is no easy-to-use GUI version of a lot of command-line stuff, so people still have to know their way around the command line. Even that's disappearing though, so I think the learning-curve problem will be no worse than Windows' in a short while.
I'm not sure we'd be so slow if it were the CN tower that had been destroyed. The American government had a much greater incentive to react quickly than the Canadian government. If the same tragedy had happened on Canadian soil, the outcome may have been much the same.
To be fair, it was in Science magazine. What do you expect? A few years ago I was doing research for a high school project, and picked up an issue of Science. One of the first things that caught my eye was a perfectly normal advertisement, with all the ad-wording you'd expect, except that their pitch was along the lines of :
We know a secret the other cryogenics companies don't want you to know - our cryogenic freezing chambres are more energy-efficient!
I think that with ads like this, you can expect that this article is reaching its target audience.
I installed 7.1 a few months ago. You can chooose all of the default values and have a good workstation up in no time. Perfect for the non-techie user.
Something that caught my mind as I was reading the article...he states that w/o easy-upgrade capabilities, it will never be accepted. How many Windows home-users do you know who regularly get system updates/whatever? It's a much easier system (download a file, click "Finish"), but I think that the people with the tech-savvy to understand the need for updates are the same people who wouldn't be afraid to do a bit of command-line stuff. So many users are content to install, use what's available, and never look back - especially in an office environment where they use the same programs all day.
Carter noted that large amounts of public money go into scientific discoveries in the form of grants for research and clinical trials.
"The patents typically taken out at the very end stage end of a long, long process that the public has already paid for," he said.
If a company gets a grant to do research, they shouldn't be able to burn the candle at both ends by getting a patent as well. Not only that, patenting genes is a silly idea anyway. All the researchers have done is determine what existing "technology" does (technology being natural genes in this case, but whatever).
If you go back a few hundred years, you'll find that people didn't know exactly how gravity worked. There was no real knowledge of inertia, energy, heat transfer, etc. What would have been the consequences if these ideas had been patented by their pioneers (and don't think that Newton wouldn't have done it, the bastard)? The discovery of these naturally-occuring concepts was no different than the discovery of a new gene today, in terms of intellectual property.
If a company comes up with a new machine to deal with gene analysis faster and more accurately, they should be able to get a patent for the technology they've invented, but handing out patents for genes? Prior art.
There's nothing keeping guns *out* of Washington DC though. At the Canadian border, there are checks. If someone is seen with a handgun in public, the police will likely be summoned, as "only outlaws have handguns".
In Washington DC, it's legal to own handguns, and it's easy to get them after a relatively short drive, so that the rule is more like "all outlaws have handguns". I prefer the former.
I don't know that much about Mars atmosphere, pressure, and so on, so this might be a silly question, but...
Do they need suits at all? Is running around the surface of Mars that much different than being halfway up Mt Everest? If it's too cold for extended trips, then a suit would be great, but if it's warm enough to go outside for a while, imagine how an astronaut would feel with the wind against his/her bare skin - knowing that it's the wind of a different planet...
Did you read the rest of the comment? I wouldn't want to allow it if they were likely to do it for no reason at all. But if 50% of their raids turned up something worth turning up, then that's fine by me (as long as they're replacing the door, and whatever else they may have broken).
I'd be willing to give up some privacy freedoms to prevent this sort of thing from happening - random search and siezure for instance.
BUT - there would have to be some way to hold the government in check. I've always thought that an interesting (I'm not advocating it - I haven't thought it through yet) solution would be compensation for the inconvenience. There are a lot of cases where police don't have enough evidence to get a search warrant, but *know* there's something going on. This would allow them to go into someone's - anyone's house and search it. But if they didn't find what they were looking for, they'd pay a hefty sum to the victim of the search.
Once again - I haven't thought it completely through, so it's probably got a whole host of flaws, but I'm tossing it out here.
FUCK ALL THAT. What have we learned in history? Revenge doesn't work. Saddam's still around, all of the Mid-East conflicts are still around, Irish Protestants vs Irish Catholics is still around.
This is a complicated situation. This is NOT simple.
First - who do you bomb? It's currently unknown who did this.
Second - Let's assume you find out who to bomb, and it's Osama Bin Laden. How do you find him? There's no proof that he's even in Afghanistan anymore.
Third - Assuming you screw that and bomb Afghanistan anyway. You create a whole new legion of terrorists who see the US as bad as we see them - killing civilians without just cause.
When they fight back. Destroy those who fight back
And when more fight back? When your own countrymen turn against you because their families back home are being slaughtered? Or do you propose killing everyone who isn't white? I'd say that whatever you're fighting for in that case, you've already lost.
I don't expect many people will read this. I expect that the parent will be modded down soon anyway, but I hope that the original poster gets that this is not as simple as (s)he would like to think.
Slashdot Mirror
I wondered about that myself.
Here's the math :
Neptune : 4.2 light hours from the sun
Earth : 8.3 light minutes
"She can get to Neptune in 6 minutes"
4 * 24 * 60 / 6 = 960
So 4 days is 960 times the distance from earth to neptune. Assuming the greatest distance (earth is diametrically opposed to Neptune in the solar system),
4.3 light hours * 960 = 4165 light hours =
0.475 light years.
From nasa
Which stars are closest to the Sun? The closest is Proxima Centauri, one of three stars that orbit each other about 4 light-years away in the Alpha-Centauri system.
So, ideally this trip should have taken 4/(0.475 / 4) days (light years / (distance in four days / 4)) = 33.65 days to get to the closest star
So the Klingon homeworld should have been months and months away. Possibly years, according to the quote on their speed. From what I understand about warp (as much as one can understand something fictional), it's a lot harder to get from 8 to 9 than 7 to 8, and impossible to achieve warp 10. So I think that this series would have been better served starting at a higher warp - maybe 7. Otherwise these characters aren't even going to be able to have an adventure every few months, let alone every week - there's a lot of empty space out there.
"where no man has gone before,"
:-), then there is gender neutrality.
Couldn't the years have neutered that word (man)? If everyone takes the sentence to mean "mankind (and takes "mankind" to mean "humanity"
For instance, we're looking at the later appearance of the Klingons
Aside from all the time-travel theories here, I think there's another reasonable explanation. It may be a self-inflicted thing. Klingon physiology is pretty different from our own, of course (see the NextGen episode where Worf devolved into some spitting-reptile thing?) Maybe there's some vitamin/drug/hormone that can have such drastic effects on Klingon appearances - or perhaps it's more like piecings or tattoos.
Anyway, that explains why now the Klingons aren't like that, and if it were considered an extreme social stigma or something like that later on, it explains why Worf didn't want to talk about it.
It was a completely different feel than the other series' I've liked (ie NextGen/DS9/Voyager). I thought on it, wondering what it was that made it so different than the others, and it came down to the exploration aspect. NextGen didn't really explore in the same way. They had the technology, they knew how to use it. There were few new concepts explored, only new ways of using the old concepts.
Enterprise seemed to me to be on a whole new level of exploration. Humans really haven't penetrated much of the galaxy. The best warp they can achieve is warp 4.5, transporters are for cargo only, phasers (phase pistols) are a new technology, no Universal Translater!. I could feel the sense of accomplishment they showed when talking about the "incredible" speeds the new ship could achieve. Everything's new.
My only disappointment was putting in a "temporal cold war" so early in the series. Time travel has been overused in the other series, and I had hoped that it would be used cautiously, if at all, in these archaic pre-Federation times. Ah well. All in all, I approve.
Thanks a lot - that's been bothering me for a while - good skit too :-)
If it was a genuine argument, then I apologize for the "troll" label.
As for your own highway argument, I agree that something should be done. I just disagree that stricter laws would help that much. *Enforced* laws would help.
How many times do you go over the speed limit. Maybe you don't, but nearly everyone I drive with consistently drives over the speed limit. They're caught speeding maybe once a year, if that. It's because the laws aren't enforced. If you increased the penalty to 6 months in jail, but only one person in a thousand was charged, let alone convicted - of course people ignore the law.
If, on the other hand, one was charged every time their speedometer tipped over the speed limit, you'd see speeding drop to nearly zero.
The same goes for crackers. If there were more people enforcing computer-crime laws, and people were charged more often, there would be less computer-crime - especially among script-kiddies.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that a consistent slap on the wrist is more effective than the occasional punch to the face.
Because you remove two lives in the process - the dead, and the driver. The driver effectively loses his life, but the state pays to keep his body alive.
troll....I'll bite.
The Internet has become the circulatory system of our nation's economy.
Highways have become an integral party of our nation's economy.
We depend on the security of the sites we visit in order to enjoy the benefits of the Web.
We depend on the speed and direct route provided in order to enjoy the benefits of these big roads.
When the performance of the Internet is disturbed...
When the performance of these roads are disturbed by people who drive too quickly, too slowly, or otherwise disrupt traffic...
The only way to stifle the motivation of hackers is to impose harsh sentences on hacking,
The only way to stifle the motivation of such bad drivers is to impose harsh sentences on bad driving.
When a person only receives 8 months of jailtime...
When a person only receives a ticket for speeding, it only encourages more bad drivers into the fray, and ruin the roads for us all.
You get the idea. Let's have life in prison - no parole - for anyone going over the speed limit. I'm not against punishing computer crime, I'm against the punishment not fitting the crime.
It seems that the US government wants to define any action that might invoke fear as "terrorism". They may have a semantic point, but that's really about it. Ashcroft is trying to "broaden" the meaning of the word "terrorism" to include things that really aren't. What about rape? Murder? Burglary? Any one of these usually cause far more fear and "terror" than any computer-related crime.
The point of this rant is - Where does crime stop and Terrorism begin? Why are computer crimes so much more global, more terrorist than any other crimes that they have to be included in laws like this one?
Can anyone tell my why this is "terrorism"?
The speed of a typist is pretty inversly related to the distance between keys.
Argh - I replied to this one post earlier, so feel free to mod this redundant.
You have more than one finger, if I guess correctly. You don't have to move your single finger all the way from "a" to "l" when typing those two letters. The farther apart on the keyboard, the easier it is to hit a lot of combinations, because you don't have to press the two keys with the same finger.
According to a few articles I've read, any non-biased tests pretty much show that qwerty and dvorak are pretty much similar in learning curve, max. typing speed, etc.
And as for "Thus slowing down the typist", I don't understand why putting letters that are commonly together far apart on the keyboard could slow down typing. Much of the design of QWERTY is to have alternating hands typing the keys, and not to have a single finger doing a lot of the work (yes, a glaring exception in "ed", but aside from that, not bad). Keys on opposite sides of the keyboard would never jam when pressed at the same time.
I don't see any appreciable difference from, say "jljljljljl" (same hand), and "jfjfjfjfjf" (opposite hands) when it comes to speed.
Yeah - I stopped reading at that point. It's hard to believe that someone who allegedly put so much work into keyboard research is willing to say that on the record.
Maybe not, if he thinks he can get away with it.
Installing new programs/configuring old ones, I'll give you. You have to wade through a bunch of man pages and websites to even figure out which of the 200 /etc files you should be looking in.
However I recently installed Redhat 7.1, and it was at least as easy - if not easier - to do a default workstation install than Win98 (the last one I installed). All my hardware was auto-detected, and works perfectly - which is commendable for a system for which many companies still do not provide drivers.
If I were an average Windows user who didn't want anything more than out-of-the-box usability, then this would have been perfect for me. As soon as install was done, I had web access, e-mail, an office suite (not perfect, as people will point out, but still good), more built-in card games than Windows can shake a stick at, etc, etc. It took me a complete screw-up of KDE to figure out rpm, but now that I can use that, I don't have to worry about installations anymore either.
The biggest learning-curve problem is that there is no easy-to-use GUI version of a lot of command-line stuff, so people still have to know their way around the command line. Even that's disappearing though, so I think the learning-curve problem will be no worse than Windows' in a short while.
I'm not sure we'd be so slow if it were the CN tower that had been destroyed. The American government had a much greater incentive to react quickly than the Canadian government. If the same tragedy had happened on Canadian soil, the outcome may have been much the same.
To be fair, it was in Science magazine. What do you expect? A few years ago I was doing research for a high school project, and picked up an issue of Science. One of the first things that caught my eye was a perfectly normal advertisement, with all the ad-wording you'd expect, except that their pitch was along the lines of :
We know a secret the other cryogenics companies don't want you to know - our cryogenic freezing chambres are more energy-efficient!
I think that with ads like this, you can expect that this article is reaching its target audience.
I installed 7.1 a few months ago. You can chooose all of the default values and have a good workstation up in no time. Perfect for the non-techie user.
Something that caught my mind as I was reading the article...he states that w/o easy-upgrade capabilities, it will never be accepted. How many Windows home-users do you know who regularly get system updates/whatever? It's a much easier system (download a file, click "Finish"), but I think that the people with the tech-savvy to understand the need for updates are the same people who wouldn't be afraid to do a bit of command-line stuff. So many users are content to install, use what's available, and never look back - especially in an office environment where they use the same programs all day.
As previous poster said - no - there's no election.
But I'm glad to have him on our side. No one can Refuse To Be Swayed (yes, capitals) like Mikey.
Carter noted that large amounts of public money go into scientific discoveries in the form of grants for research and clinical trials.
"The patents typically taken out at the very end stage end of a long, long process that the public has already paid for," he said.
If a company gets a grant to do research, they shouldn't be able to burn the candle at both ends by getting a patent as well. Not only that, patenting genes is a silly idea anyway. All the researchers have done is determine what existing "technology" does (technology being natural genes in this case, but whatever).
If you go back a few hundred years, you'll find that people didn't know exactly how gravity worked. There was no real knowledge of inertia, energy, heat transfer, etc. What would have been the consequences if these ideas had been patented by their pioneers (and don't think that Newton wouldn't have done it, the bastard)? The discovery of these naturally-occuring concepts was no different than the discovery of a new gene today, in terms of intellectual property.
If a company comes up with a new machine to deal with gene analysis faster and more accurately, they should be able to get a patent for the technology they've invented, but handing out patents for genes? Prior art.
Here's a useful guide for those who don't.
"Teach a man to hit himself on his head with a fish, he'll have a headache for the rest of his life?"
There's nothing keeping guns *out* of Washington DC though. At the Canadian border, there are checks. If someone is seen with a handgun in public, the police will likely be summoned, as "only outlaws have handguns".
In Washington DC, it's legal to own handguns, and it's easy to get them after a relatively short drive, so that the rule is more like "all outlaws have handguns". I prefer the former.
I don't know that much about Mars atmosphere, pressure, and so on, so this might be a silly question, but...
Do they need suits at all? Is running around the surface of Mars that much different than being halfway up Mt Everest? If it's too cold for extended trips, then a suit would be great, but if it's warm enough to go outside for a while, imagine how an astronaut would feel with the wind against his/her bare skin - knowing that it's the wind of a different planet...
Did you read the rest of the comment? I wouldn't want to allow it if they were likely to do it for no reason at all. But if 50% of their raids turned up something worth turning up, then that's fine by me (as long as they're replacing the door, and whatever else they may have broken).
I'd be willing to give up some privacy freedoms to prevent this sort of thing from happening - random search and siezure for instance.
BUT - there would have to be some way to hold the government in check. I've always thought that an interesting (I'm not advocating it - I haven't thought it through yet) solution would be compensation for the inconvenience. There are a lot of cases where police don't have enough evidence to get a search warrant, but *know* there's something going on. This would allow them to go into someone's - anyone's house and search it. But if they didn't find what they were looking for, they'd pay a hefty sum to the victim of the search.
Once again - I haven't thought it completely through, so it's probably got a whole host of flaws, but I'm tossing it out here.
FUCK ALL THAT. What have we learned in history? Revenge doesn't work. Saddam's still around, all of the Mid-East conflicts are still around, Irish Protestants vs Irish Catholics is still around.
This is a complicated situation. This is NOT simple.
First - who do you bomb? It's currently unknown who did this.
Second - Let's assume you find out who to bomb, and it's Osama Bin Laden. How do you find him? There's no proof that he's even in Afghanistan anymore.
Third - Assuming you screw that and bomb Afghanistan anyway. You create a whole new legion of terrorists who see the US as bad as we see them - killing civilians without just cause.
When they fight back. Destroy those who fight back
And when more fight back? When your own countrymen turn against you because their families back home are being slaughtered? Or do you propose killing everyone who isn't white? I'd say that whatever you're fighting for in that case, you've already lost.
I don't expect many people will read this. I expect that the parent will be modded down soon anyway, but I hope that the original poster gets that this is not as simple as (s)he would like to think.