Hey, this is slashdot - I can write off anything I want.
But seriously - I'm not talking about RTG powered ion thrusters. I'm talking stage 1 boosters. (NO, NOT ORION - think NERVA). Treehuggers? Hey, I love my environment. That's why I'm pro-nuclear. Specifically, I love my species. Carbon energy is limited, doomed, and far more dangerous than nuclear has so far proven to be.
Think not? That's a gut reaction, and I totally get it. "I don't wanna glow in the dark". But here's a question. Did the documentarians who did 'Chernobyl Heart', which chronicled the horrific aftermath, not of a nuclear energy failure, but of a stunning path of incompetence and gross negligence ever go to West Virginia? I can pretty much guarantee you, black-lung is not at all an enjoyable way to die - slowly being asphyxiated. But that's fine - those are coal miners - they chose it, they can live with it, and besides, we're not coal miners, so we can get in our SUVs and feel warm and fuzzy.
But what about our yuppie kids with asthma? There's a non-zero chance that they will die, sometimes even from the asthma medication and secondary infections. And yes, asthma and other cardio-pulmonary conditions are more and more being directly linked to our carbon energy "needs". There are other consequences, which while more indirect, are directly related to fossil fuel use, and no less disastrous. Global warming? It's just a theory - but it seems a theory with more teeth in it these days. So a few folks in Europe die in a heat wave. So a few crop failures in Africa mean a few more babies die of starvation. Or a few hundred - or a few hundred thousand. Are they any less dead than if they ate a chunk of plutoniom?
It's all connected, and the average treehugger, frankly spouts the rhetoric, and just doesn't get it - because it's just a little too uncomfortable to get it, and it would mean selling the Chevy Suburban and letting little Jimmy ride his bike to soccer practice. But we can't have that. We need our SUVs. We need our A/C. We need our electric vegi-slicer, and auto shoe-buffer, and our entertainment centers, and, god yes, we need our computers.
Do I want a reactor in my backyard and nuclear boosters going over my head? Hell no - but I want the alternative even less. We need those things because we have maxed out the alternative. And I am neither willing to go back to living in a cave, or to consigning my species to die on one planet (as over 99% of all single-planet species that we know of have died).
As things stand, our best hope of getting usable mass into space, and to providing energy for our margarita mixers on the ground is nuclear. And no, I don't like it a bit. It's just the best we've got right now.
Frankly, I think you should standardize on COBOL for your video game product.
A question for you. When you take your car to be serviced, do you feel like effective work is being done when the entire collection of shop tools in the garage fit into a lunchbox?
I've been doing this for thirty years. I have worked, both as management and grunt in highly standardized, and very non-standardized environments.
My take? It's a bell curve. At one end, development anarchy is non-productive, and unmaintainable. On the other hand, you absolutely cannot be afraid of the idea that a hammer is not a universal tool.
Somewhere in the ideal is the notion that it often take more than one tool to do the job effectively - balanced with the knowledge that it seldom takes fifteen wrenches to change a tire.
In general, simply because of human fear of the unknown, or sheer sloth and inertia, a large majority of shops gravitate WAY too far towards standardization. Your development manager DOES NOT WANT NEW TOOLS - it makes their job harder (i.e. challenging) "We're a VB shop - you can do anything in VB. VB Rules". Yeah, well, sometimes that's exactly right. Sometimes.
Sorry, but I promise, whatever the cost of acquiring those new tools, if they're appropriate to the job, not acquiring them costs even more in the long run. Every time. But hey, if all you care about is the next quarterly budget, pick your poison and live with it.
Otherwise, get used to the idea that your mission is going to be constrained and compromised by the fact that you bought the $9.99 tool set at autozone instead of hanging out at the back of the Snap-On tool van learning something. In the meantime, if your business is at all competitive, someone is out there gunning for you - with a little faster gun.
OK, I'm late on this one, but I gotta post anyway.
There's a fundamental problem with "filtering" the data. Invariably, the filter is biased towards "what we expect". I have some examples.
Seismologists (of the petroleum variety) used to record data in the field using so-called notch-pass frequency filters. If they didn't see anything interesting after a few "shots", they packed up their explosives and moved down the road. But the field got interesting when they began, in the early 60's, recording "wide open" and letting computers filter the data. They were still filtering that data for "what we expect" - but in the face of new knowledge, "interesting" data was often found in old unfiltered datasets - sometimes much after the fact.
How many "interesting" astronomical objects have been discovered/confirmed by looking at old, unfiltered images?
Even new fossil finds have been made - not in the field, but by reviewing old fossils archived in museum basements.
Is planet Earth being bombarded by strangelets? We don't know. Earthquake detection software now filters these events out as "anomolous". But older, unfiltered data sure looks interesting.
Science, almost by definition, often happens where we don't expect it - sometimes it happens where we least expect it. We filter and discard data with all-too-human bias - often, to our loss.
Sometimes, the choice between grep and grep -v is a poor choice.
Sorry, but at the relative orbital velocities of these particles, the fairly puny gravity of the earth just doesn't act like a cosmic hoover vacuum cleaner. If someone is shooting rifle bullets at me, my gravity isn't going to change the hit ratio by much. Do the math.
The moon gets hit by about the same number of interplanetary debris as the earth, proportinate not to it's gravity, but by it's apparent disk. But meter for meter, it gets just about as many hits as we do. But we have an atmosphere. That's the real thing that makes a what on the earth would be a pretty flash in the sky a potentially lethal event on the moon.
As far as radiation goes, you have valid concerns. But you can block a lot of radiation by piling up moondust - it doesn't take much to block a lot of solar particles. And, incidently, give you a buffer against micrometeorites.
Use your own brain. You know the real problem with idiots pointing at everything as a conspracy? It is that the very real evils perpetrated by members of our government get lost in the static, and in the end, the "everything is a conspiracy" fruitbats serve the purposes of those slimeballs who actually are perptrating evil - because they can hide under the clutter.
You want to use your brain? Don't think about nuclear missile technology in the 60s (which by the way, was incredibly well funded) - because that's what the Apollo program went to the moon on. Instead, think about Hollywood technology in the 60's. Frankly, dollar for dollar, it would have been more cost-effective by an order of magnitude to strap a few guys on an ICBM (basically) and shoot them at the moon. If I had to direct the movie, that's what I'd have done. Special effects just weren't that great at the time. In short, I contend, not from a science standpoint, but from a purely hollywood standpoint, that the best special effects bang-for-the-buck was achievable in exactly the way we did it - by putting Neil Armstrong on the surface of the moon.
The next time, you're "trusting your brain" try not feeding it low-octane fuel.
Been there, done that. In case you missed it, we already have succesfully launched a number of reactors - as recently as a few weeks ago. Get over it. What we need, and soon (and almost had) is a nuclear launch engine. There's only so much energy you can get from chemical reactions - and we're right at the edge of that.
And in space, no one can hear you... oh never mind. So that means that the spacecraft we currently have with active nuclear power plants aren't working? So why do we keep launching them? Silly scientists.
In short... Bit is Binary digIT. It may have one of two values - hence the "Binary" part of the acronym.
Those values, in the base two system are: (get ready for it) 1 ond 0
By convention, you only get eight of these critters per byte. There have been some exceptions - Univac for a while had 9-bit "bytes" - which were conveniently represented as three octal valus - as opposed to the 2 4-bit hexadecimal values we more commonly see today. But, unless you've got a quantum compooter, there are no octal bits.
Is this ringing a bell?
Now click your ruby slippers together three times and go back home.
"IIRC, he had some friends that lived near a big AM tower and not only their tooth fillings, but everything in their house resonated. Listening to the washing machine was a favorite pasttime."
Absolutely true. For a while, I lived very nearly in the shadow of the kvoo antenna (1170 AM, if I recall) which was nearly a "clear channel" station (50,000 watts during the day, FCC max, but they had to "throttle down" to 25kw at night) I don't recall my washer or dryer picking up the signal audibly, but I can attest that when my toaster was properly aligned, you could hear the broadcast. And of course, damn near anything in my house that had a speaker (tv, radios, record players - you know, those flat vinyl disks -) would suffer from the signal. I have numerous fillings, but apparently they were (fortunately for my sanity) not resonate at that frequency - but after hearing the morning show on my toaster, I have no problem believing dental hardware might pick up a strong AM signal.
Now, if you start picking up satellite radio on your orthondontics, I'll be impressed!
"I'm still hunting and pecking at the old qwerty keyboards. My typing is erratic, as is my spelling, but I can get up to sixty words a minute if I even bother."
Umm, if you're hunting and pecking at 60WPM, I'd like to gently suggest that you're touchtyping - unless you're an android. If you can hit that speed, "hunting" for keys, you have to have android reflexes, and I'm very, very scared of you. Is it possible that "looking" at the keys after 15 years of typing and still "hunting" is more of a psychological placebo?
Aww, c'mon. "Freedom" this and "Freedom" that is such a joke that you have to give the poster the benefit of the doubt. I mean really, we Yanks are notorious for doing such things as labeling fascist legislation with such tags as "Patriot Act" and swallowing it with a straight face. The whole "freedom fries" farce is too well known for you not to see the jest here.
It's a joke - and I'm pretty sure Belgians still have a sense of humor, no?
Amen. I don't use Dvorak for the speed. My speed IS slightly faster with Dvorak, but it's a very marginal difference. QWERTY doesn't suck for speed, although I don't know if that's more of a tribute to the layout, or the sheer adaptability of human wet-wiring. I don't use it because after a half century of various kinds of wear and tear on my digits... Dvorak doesn't hurt at the end of the day.
Dvorak's much easier on the fingers. I switched after nearly 30 years of QWERTY - and I've never looked back. There are occasions when I have to spend some qwerty time, and the result is always the same - pain.
But propagating myths about qwerty being "designed" to slow down typists, IMHO, totally obscures some of the real benefits of Dvorak. Stop the FUD.
Exchanging the keycaps is trivial on some keyboards. For example, No Big Deal on my IBM Model M - the last good keyboard made. Other keyboards have the keys contoured differently depending on the row they are on, and even if you switch the keycaps around, the different contours feel really uneven.
Why re-arrange anyway? Presumably if you bothered to learn Dvorak, you learned to touchtype anyway. I'm typing this in Dvorak, on my laptop, and my fingers really can't tell the difference as far as what's painted on the keycaps. I did my personal Model M, but 99% of the keyboards I type on have qwerty painted on them. So?
If you are not if favor of this law, then please let's see a bit of outrage for the computer professionals who market and write software as though the Internet is a walk in the park. It isn't, but expecting your kid sister to be criminally liable for not knowing that is a bit of a stretch - it should be a source of outrage that the corporate criminals (as usual) have absolutely no liability. Wonderful.
I cannot understand at all on an intellectual level why marketing PCs as toaster-oven appliances, with crap operating systems with even more crappy default configurations is not the crime - except the lawmakers never seem to put the blame where it belongs. And the sheep who elected them somehowe miss this. Joe sixpack is NOT the criminal, and is NOT responsible for the current state of the Internet.
Can you understand on an intellectual level why I should be liable for the six-car pileup when the car I bought in good faith from a major manufacturer blows up/rolls over/accelerates uncrontollably and injures others?
Is the rational here that everyone should know everything about any piece of technology they use, or they're criminally responsible for any misuse? I've got to draw a line here and say this is a pretty pathetic legal stretch, especially when there appears to be no culpability for those who SHOULD know better - the PC vendors and O/S designers. I'm pretty sure there are a number if clever ways to misuse many things in my home. Am I criminal because I don't know you can make a bomb from 60 inches of wire, an electrical outlet, a toilet tank and a cigarette? Am I criminally negligent for having these items in my home and not implementing proper security measures against their misuse?
This law is "Intellectually" incomprehensible to me because it utterly fails to address the criminal misuse of my property, and it fails to hold accountable those who market and design the product in what borders on a reckless and irresponsible way - they not only should know better, they DO know better. Criminalizing the poor schmuck in the middle has become too much of an American method of criminalizing the Least culpable, and I am dissapointed to see less than total outrage at yet another example of this.
A-freakin'-men. Tragic, yes, but dammit, it's not your job to make up for other's parental negligence. And yes, I AM a parent. And a grandparent. And my kids have been hurt doing what they should not have been doing. And received love, support and TLC from me for their injuries - and sheer castigation for what they did wrong. It's called responsibility.
But part of responsibility is realizing who should be responsible. This law would make grandma and your kid sister responsible for the corporate negligence of almost every PC vendor out there, and one O/S vendor in particular. And that's just not the right thing to do. If the Internet is a dangerous place, pursue the corporate criminals who have mismarketed, poorly designed and improperly configured their products in hopes of a 2% better quarterly stock report.
Stunnning. So when do we hold the vendors who market computers like washing machines responsible? When do we hold the designers of crap oprating systems with even crappier default configurations responsible? If a Ford blows a tire, we're all ready to attack the manufacturer - but when Joe sixpack just wants to download some naughty pix, or Grandma just wants to email to get emails from her grandkids, suddenly they're the criminals?
Should your mom be fined, penalized as a criminal, because someone sold her a machine that lets her visit the on-line bingo site her friend told her about? Give me a freakin' break.
Who's really responsible here? The multi-billionares who misrepresent their products and dump shoddy operating system designs on the market? Or your great-Aunt. Who do you honestly think should be accountable for their actions?
OK, clearly you've missed something. Your ability to buy a high-end machine is largely due to the dollars spent by "average idiot users". Don't disrespect them too much - they made much of what you enjoy possible. Interestingly, you seem utterly reluctant to blame the computer professionals who have marketed computers as appliances roughly equivalent in complexity to a microwave. You also totally fail to blame one of the major causes of crap on the Internet - Operating systems, also marketed in an "appliance" fashion that are utter crap when it comes to quality and default configuration.
Sorry, but I can't fault the "idiot users" too bloody much. They are using what they were sold as represented and configured. Consider moving the blame where it belongs. Squarely on marketing that borders on deceiptful and O/S design that borders on criminally negligent.
Your "idiot users" probably can't rebuild the automatic transmission in their cars, either. Can you? Should it be a crime for you to drive on the public highways because of your lack of automotive knowledge?
"If someone has an idea that flows against the scientific norm, it does NOT mean that it's wrong."
No, it means they'd better have something called evidence. No scientist will tell you otherwise.
"Science is a continually shifting 'truth.' Historically speaking, putting total trust in current scientific theory is stupid, and upholding it as the exclusive truth is shortsighted."
Actually, historically, ignoring science for the "truth" of the theocrats has proved stunningly shortsighted. And frankly, believing something in the face of all evidence is what I call stupid.
"The earth is the center of the universe, the earth is flat, ether...all outdated ideas that we no longer beleive because people dared to challenge 'modern' science."
Really. Perhaps you were asleep in history class. What people challenged was theocratic BS - not science. The "pseudo-science" that was a symptom of that disease should never be confused with science - as you just have. The earth has been proved round multiple times - each time to be qaushed, and ignored by theocratic pseudo-scientists.
Get a clue about what science is. It is constantly and relentlessly self-challenging or it's not science. No scientist will ever tell you otherwise.
"There is a happy middle, but of course it is the most vocal on both sides of the issue who cannot compromise and who get most of the press."
What exactly is the "happy middle" between utterly unfounded theocratic dogma disguised as "science" and actual science? Or, to phrase it a little more precisely, what is the happy middle you would give us between the dark ages and actual informed enlightenment? Where do you "compromise" between the flat earth and evidence that we live on a round rock orbiting the sun? Your "compromise" is the insidious tug of intellectual sloth that too many lazy christians subscribe to these days.
ALL science that I'm aware of says "Hey, this might be wrong, but PROVE it wrong". That concept seems to have eluded you. Your "compromise" would have us dilute and distort the fundamental precepts of science by saying "We don't get it, so we're gonna invent a big guy in the sky to explain it". If it weren't so tragic it would be comical.
"Ironic that this post is being submitted through an American-developed web browser through the American-developed Internet on an American-developed domain registrar."
Much of which is coasting on the educational framework of 2-3 decades ago. If by American-developed web Browser, you mean owned by Microsoft, I wonder just what percentage of native-born Americans were involved. Micorosoft hires a great many Asian/Indian developers. If you mean the Mozilla family, I've seen a disproportionate percentage of non-American contributors.
Frankly, the last decade of education in America just hasn't met the mark. We can chuckle about the Kansas School Board teaching Creat^H^H^H^H^H Intelujint desyn, but that IS the heartland of America. Blithely ignoring such disturbing trends while spouting about our past accomplishments conveniently ignores these trends, which really merit deep concern. It's not about what we built yesterday. It's about what we will be able to build tomorrow, and we ignore this at our peril.
"It is important to point out that FSM is a spoof and nobody takes it seriously. However, the spoof is flawed and missed the point so I don't know why people keep talking about it."
Current evangalistic fundamentalism in the U.S. is self-spoofing and totally misses a great many points - yet people keep talking about it - at the top of their lungs. Frankly, this is also the group whose members too often believe that the moon landings were faked - and profeshunal rasslin' is real. I find the creation mythos of the Flying Spaghetti Monster no less credible and not a bit more flawed than Genesis. Which IS the freakin' point. Get over it. I'm going to go meditate on the sheer and utter breakdown of intelligent design reflected in the creation of these self-lobotomized evangalistic zombies that walk the earth with homo sapiens.
"They had all the natural resources (food, wood, ore, stone, tobaccy). Guess who's be a third-world-country by now?"
True, but your economic theory is a little weak - it seems the North had most of the technology to process and transport those resources. The South had... a bunch of enslaved minorities. Sorry, but that puts the North higher on the economic food chain. Raw materials and cheap labor lose out every time over the ability to transport and process finished goods. Study your global economics.
In the final analysis, we either become spacefaring or extinct - and today, we stand at a crossroads where both possibilities can be seen on the horizon.
Really? Supporting evidence? As usual for these sorts of advocacy groups, what they're after is, "we have a fantasy and you need to pay for it."
OK, supporting evidence? It's in the rocks under your feet.
As astronaut John Young neatly summed up, "Single-Planet species don't last." There are simply too many documented mass extinction events that make it clear that from time to time, for whatever reason, whether vulcanism, orbital vagaries, solar output, interstellar dust clouds, and, the ever-popular big rock smacking into us, that having all of our eggs in one somewhat fragile basket is a poor long-term survival strategy.
The evidence is there. It's in the fossil record. Or had you assumed that over 90% of all species that have lived on this planet being extinct was merely a simple oversight on Noah's part when he was packing the Ark?
No, all fusion requires is a magic bottle somewhere in Utah.
Hey, I'm all in favor of fusion engines - but they don't exist - unless you count the Mr. Fusion option on my DeLorean. The closest we have to fusion is... zip? In spite of multiple megawatt laser facilities working very hard on the problem.
In the meantime, some very good work has been done on fission engines - work that has been discarded. But if we really want TRUE heavy-lift capability, if we really want TRUE long-distance propulsion, fission seems like a technology we are going to have to get rational about.
The fact is, if we could build workable coal-powered rockets today, we would - in spite of the fact that black-lung disease alone has killed far more people than all of the fission reactor meltdowns in the history of power generation.
Is the potential of a fission accident a factor? You bet. But if the options of serious space utilization are either chemical, which is at it's limits now, or fictional (see Mr. Fusion) then we are going to have to take a long hard rational look at much more proven and feasable technologies.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, this is slashdot - I can write off anything I want.
But seriously - I'm not talking about RTG powered ion thrusters. I'm talking stage 1 boosters. (NO, NOT ORION - think NERVA). Treehuggers? Hey, I love my environment. That's why I'm pro-nuclear. Specifically, I love my species. Carbon energy is limited, doomed, and far more dangerous than nuclear has so far proven to be.
Think not? That's a gut reaction, and I totally get it. "I don't wanna glow in the dark". But here's a question. Did the documentarians who did 'Chernobyl Heart', which chronicled the horrific aftermath, not of a nuclear energy failure, but of a stunning path of incompetence and gross negligence ever go to West Virginia? I can pretty much guarantee you, black-lung is not at all an enjoyable way to die - slowly being asphyxiated. But that's fine - those are coal miners - they chose it, they can live with it, and besides, we're not coal miners, so we can get in our SUVs and feel warm and fuzzy.
But what about our yuppie kids with asthma? There's a non-zero chance that they will die, sometimes even from the asthma medication and secondary infections. And yes, asthma and other cardio-pulmonary conditions are more and more being directly linked to our carbon energy "needs". There are other consequences, which while more indirect, are directly related to fossil fuel use, and no less disastrous. Global warming? It's just a theory - but it seems a theory with more teeth in it these days. So a few folks in Europe die in a heat wave. So a few crop failures in Africa mean a few more babies die of starvation. Or a few hundred - or a few hundred thousand. Are they any less dead than if they ate a chunk of plutoniom?
It's all connected, and the average treehugger, frankly spouts the rhetoric, and just doesn't get it - because it's just a little too uncomfortable to get it, and it would mean selling the Chevy Suburban and letting little Jimmy ride his bike to soccer practice. But we can't have that. We need our SUVs. We need our A/C. We need our electric vegi-slicer, and auto shoe-buffer, and our entertainment centers, and, god yes, we need our computers.
Do I want a reactor in my backyard and nuclear boosters going over my head? Hell no - but I want the alternative even less. We need those things because we have maxed out the alternative. And I am neither willing to go back to living in a cave, or to consigning my species to die on one planet (as over 99% of all single-planet species that we know of have died).
As things stand, our best hope of getting usable mass into space, and to providing energy for our margarita mixers on the ground is nuclear. And no, I don't like it a bit. It's just the best we've got right now.
Yep, you're an IT manager all right.
Frankly, I think you should standardize on COBOL for your video game product.
A question for you. When you take your car to be serviced, do you feel like effective work is being done when the entire collection of shop tools in the garage fit into a lunchbox?
I've been doing this for thirty years. I have worked, both as management and grunt in highly standardized, and very non-standardized environments.
My take? It's a bell curve. At one end, development anarchy is non-productive, and unmaintainable. On the other hand, you absolutely cannot be afraid of the idea that a hammer is not a universal tool.
Somewhere in the ideal is the notion that it often take more than one tool to do the job effectively - balanced with the knowledge that it seldom takes fifteen wrenches to change a tire.
In general, simply because of human fear of the unknown, or sheer sloth and inertia, a large majority of shops gravitate WAY too far towards standardization. Your development manager DOES NOT WANT NEW TOOLS - it makes their job harder (i.e. challenging) "We're a VB shop - you can do anything in VB. VB Rules". Yeah, well, sometimes that's exactly right. Sometimes.
Sorry, but I promise, whatever the cost of acquiring those new tools, if they're appropriate to the job, not acquiring them costs even more in the long run. Every time. But hey, if all you care about is the next quarterly budget, pick your poison and live with it.
Otherwise, get used to the idea that your mission is going to be constrained and compromised by the fact that you bought the $9.99 tool set at autozone instead of hanging out at the back of the Snap-On tool van learning something. In the meantime, if your business is at all competitive, someone is out there gunning for you - with a little faster gun.
OK, I'm late on this one, but I gotta post anyway.
There's a fundamental problem with "filtering" the data. Invariably, the filter is biased towards "what we expect". I have some examples.
Seismologists (of the petroleum variety) used to record data in the field using so-called notch-pass frequency filters. If they didn't see anything interesting after a few "shots", they packed up their explosives and moved down the road. But the field got interesting when they began, in the early 60's, recording "wide open" and letting computers filter the data. They were still filtering that data for "what we expect" - but in the face of new knowledge, "interesting" data was often found in old unfiltered datasets - sometimes much after the fact.
How many "interesting" astronomical objects have been discovered/confirmed by looking at old, unfiltered images?
Even new fossil finds have been made - not in the field, but by reviewing old fossils archived in museum basements.
Is planet Earth being bombarded by strangelets? We don't know. Earthquake detection software now filters these events out as "anomolous". But older, unfiltered data sure looks interesting.
Science, almost by definition, often happens where we don't expect it - sometimes it happens where we least expect it. We filter and discard data with all-too-human bias - often, to our loss.
Sometimes, the choice between grep and grep -v is a poor choice.
Sorry, but at the relative orbital velocities of these particles, the fairly puny gravity of the earth just doesn't act like a cosmic hoover vacuum cleaner. If someone is shooting rifle bullets at me, my gravity isn't going to change the hit ratio by much. Do the math. The moon gets hit by about the same number of interplanetary debris as the earth, proportinate not to it's gravity, but by it's apparent disk. But meter for meter, it gets just about as many hits as we do. But we have an atmosphere. That's the real thing that makes a what on the earth would be a pretty flash in the sky a potentially lethal event on the moon. As far as radiation goes, you have valid concerns. But you can block a lot of radiation by piling up moondust - it doesn't take much to block a lot of solar particles. And, incidently, give you a buffer against micrometeorites.
Use your own brain. You know the real problem with idiots pointing at everything as a conspracy? It is that the very real evils perpetrated by members of our government get lost in the static, and in the end, the "everything is a conspiracy" fruitbats serve the purposes of those slimeballs who actually are perptrating evil - because they can hide under the clutter.
You want to use your brain? Don't think about nuclear missile technology in the 60s (which by the way, was incredibly well funded) - because that's what the Apollo program went to the moon on. Instead, think about Hollywood technology in the 60's. Frankly, dollar for dollar, it would have been more cost-effective by an order of magnitude to strap a few guys on an ICBM (basically) and shoot them at the moon. If I had to direct the movie, that's what I'd have done. Special effects just weren't that great at the time. In short, I contend, not from a science standpoint, but from a purely hollywood standpoint, that the best special effects bang-for-the-buck was achievable in exactly the way we did it - by putting Neil Armstrong on the surface of the moon.
The next time, you're "trusting your brain" try not feeding it low-octane fuel.
Been there, done that. In case you missed it, we already have succesfully launched a number of reactors - as recently as a few weeks ago. Get over it. What we need, and soon (and almost had) is a nuclear launch engine. There's only so much energy you can get from chemical reactions - and we're right at the edge of that.
"Without water you have no nuclear power"
And in space, no one can hear you... oh never mind. So that means that the spacecraft we currently have with active nuclear power plants aren't working? So why do we keep launching them? Silly scientists.
Nice save - and the parent was funny.
BUT - for the math to work, we pretty much have to agree that we're talking in Base 2 - which means the values gotta be 1 and 0.
Cheers
Octal Bit? I only WISH I had had access when I was
a kid to the stuff they're smoking now.
Bit - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit
In short... Bit is Binary digIT. It may have one of
two values - hence the "Binary" part of the acronym.
Those values, in the base two system are:
(get ready for it)
1 ond 0
By convention, you only get eight of these critters per byte. There have been some exceptions - Univac for a while had 9-bit "bytes" - which were conveniently represented as three octal valus - as opposed to the 2 4-bit hexadecimal values we more commonly see today. But, unless you've got a quantum compooter, there are no octal bits.
Is this ringing a bell?
Now click your ruby slippers together three times and go back home.
Sheesh.
"IIRC, he had some friends that lived near a big AM tower and not only their tooth fillings, but everything in their house resonated. Listening to the washing machine was a favorite pasttime."
Absolutely true. For a while, I lived very nearly in the shadow of the kvoo antenna (1170 AM, if I recall) which was nearly a "clear channel" station (50,000 watts during the day, FCC max, but they had to "throttle down" to 25kw at night) I don't recall my washer or dryer picking up the signal audibly, but I can attest that when my toaster was properly aligned, you could hear the broadcast. And of course, damn near anything in my house that had a speaker (tv, radios, record players - you know, those flat vinyl disks -) would suffer from the signal. I have numerous fillings, but apparently they were (fortunately for my sanity) not resonate at that frequency - but after hearing the morning show on my toaster, I have no problem believing dental hardware might pick up a strong AM signal.
Now, if you start picking up satellite radio on your orthondontics, I'll be impressed!
"I'm still hunting and pecking at the old qwerty keyboards. My typing is erratic, as is my spelling, but I can get up to sixty words a minute if I even bother."
Umm, if you're hunting and pecking at 60WPM, I'd like to gently suggest that you're touchtyping - unless you're an android. If you can hit that speed, "hunting" for keys, you have to have android reflexes, and I'm very, very scared of you. Is it possible that "looking" at the keys after 15 years of typing and still "hunting" is more of a psychological placebo?
Aww, c'mon. "Freedom" this and "Freedom" that is such a joke that you have to give the poster the benefit of the doubt. I mean really, we Yanks are notorious for doing such things as labeling fascist legislation with such tags as "Patriot Act" and swallowing it with a straight face. The whole "freedom fries" farce is too well known for you not to see the jest here.
It's a joke - and I'm pretty sure Belgians still have a sense of humor, no?
Amen. I don't use Dvorak for the speed. My speed IS slightly faster with Dvorak, but it's a very marginal difference. QWERTY doesn't suck for speed, although I don't know if that's more of a tribute to the layout, or the sheer adaptability of human wet-wiring. I don't use it because after a half century of various kinds of wear and tear on my digits... Dvorak doesn't hurt at the end of the day.
Dvorak's much easier on the fingers. I switched after nearly 30 years of QWERTY - and I've never looked back. There are occasions when I have to spend some qwerty time, and the result is always the same - pain.
But propagating myths about qwerty being "designed" to slow down typists, IMHO, totally obscures some of the real benefits of Dvorak. Stop the FUD.
Exchanging the keycaps is trivial on some keyboards. For example, No Big Deal on my IBM Model M - the last good keyboard made. Other keyboards have the keys contoured differently depending on the row they are on, and even if you switch the keycaps around, the different contours feel really uneven.
Why re-arrange anyway? Presumably if you bothered to learn Dvorak, you learned to touchtype anyway. I'm typing this in Dvorak, on my laptop, and my fingers really can't tell the difference as far as what's painted on the keycaps. I did my personal Model M, but 99% of the keyboards I type on have qwerty painted on them. So?
If you are not if favor of this law, then please let's see a bit of outrage for the computer professionals who market and write software as though the Internet is a walk in the park. It isn't, but expecting your kid sister to be criminally liable for not knowing that is a bit of a stretch - it should be a source of outrage that the corporate criminals (as usual) have absolutely no liability. Wonderful.
I cannot understand at all on an intellectual level why marketing PCs as toaster-oven appliances, with crap operating systems with even more crappy default configurations is not the crime - except the lawmakers never seem to put the blame where it belongs. And the sheep who elected them somehowe miss this. Joe sixpack is NOT the criminal, and is NOT responsible for the current state of the Internet.
Can you understand on an intellectual level why I should be liable for the six-car pileup when the car I bought in good faith from a major manufacturer blows up/rolls over/accelerates uncrontollably and injures others?
Is the rational here that everyone should know everything about any piece of technology they use, or they're criminally responsible for any misuse? I've got to draw a line here and say this is a pretty pathetic legal stretch, especially when there appears to be no culpability for those who SHOULD know better - the PC vendors and O/S designers. I'm pretty sure there are a number if clever ways to misuse many things in my home. Am I criminal because I don't know you can make a bomb from 60 inches of wire, an electrical outlet, a toilet tank and a cigarette? Am I criminally negligent for having these items in my home and not implementing proper security measures against their misuse?
This law is "Intellectually" incomprehensible to me because it utterly fails to address the criminal misuse of my property, and it fails to hold accountable those who market and design the product in what borders on a reckless and irresponsible way - they not only should know better, they DO know better. Criminalizing the poor schmuck in the middle has become too much of an American method of criminalizing the Least culpable, and I am dissapointed to see less than total outrage at yet another example of this.
A-freakin'-men. Tragic, yes, but dammit, it's not your job to make up for other's parental negligence. And yes, I AM a parent. And a grandparent. And my kids have been hurt doing what they should not have been doing. And received love, support and TLC from me for their injuries - and sheer castigation for what they did wrong. It's called responsibility.
But part of responsibility is realizing who should be responsible. This law would make grandma and your kid sister responsible for the corporate negligence of almost every PC vendor out there, and one O/S vendor in particular. And that's just not the right thing to do. If the Internet is a dangerous place, pursue the corporate criminals who have mismarketed, poorly designed and improperly configured their products in hopes of a 2% better quarterly stock report.
Stunnning. So when do we hold the vendors who market computers like washing machines responsible? When do we hold the designers of crap oprating systems with even crappier default configurations responsible? If a Ford blows a tire, we're all ready to attack the manufacturer - but when Joe sixpack just wants to download some naughty pix, or Grandma just wants to email to get emails from her grandkids, suddenly they're the criminals? Should your mom be fined, penalized as a criminal, because someone sold her a machine that lets her visit the on-line bingo site her friend told her about? Give me a freakin' break. Who's really responsible here? The multi-billionares who misrepresent their products and dump shoddy operating system designs on the market? Or your great-Aunt. Who do you honestly think should be accountable for their actions?
OK, clearly you've missed something. Your ability to buy a high-end machine is largely due to the dollars spent by "average idiot users". Don't disrespect them too much - they made much of what you enjoy possible. Interestingly, you seem utterly reluctant to blame the computer professionals who have marketed computers as appliances roughly equivalent in complexity to a microwave. You also totally fail to blame one of the major causes of crap on the Internet - Operating systems, also marketed in an "appliance" fashion that are utter crap when it comes to quality and default configuration.
Sorry, but I can't fault the "idiot users" too bloody much. They are using what they were sold as represented and configured. Consider moving the blame where it belongs. Squarely on marketing that borders on deceiptful and O/S design that borders on criminally negligent.
Your "idiot users" probably can't rebuild the automatic transmission in their cars, either. Can you? Should it be a crime for you to drive on the public highways because of your lack of automotive knowledge?
"If someone has an idea that flows against the scientific norm, it does NOT mean that it's wrong."
No, it means they'd better have something called evidence. No scientist will tell you otherwise.
"Science is a continually shifting 'truth.' Historically speaking, putting total trust in current scientific theory is stupid, and upholding it as the exclusive truth is shortsighted."
Actually, historically, ignoring science for the "truth" of the theocrats has proved stunningly shortsighted. And frankly, believing something in the face of all evidence is what I call stupid.
"The earth is the center of the universe, the earth is flat, ether...all outdated ideas that we no longer beleive because people dared to challenge 'modern' science."
Really. Perhaps you were asleep in history class. What people challenged was theocratic BS - not science. The "pseudo-science" that was a symptom of that disease should never be confused with science - as you just have. The earth has been proved round multiple times - each time to be qaushed, and ignored by theocratic pseudo-scientists.
Get a clue about what science is. It is constantly and relentlessly self-challenging or it's not science. No scientist will ever tell you otherwise.
"There is a happy middle, but of course it is the most vocal on both sides of the issue who cannot compromise and who get most of the press."
What exactly is the "happy middle" between utterly unfounded theocratic dogma disguised as "science" and actual science? Or, to phrase it a little more precisely, what is the happy middle you would give us between the dark ages and actual informed enlightenment? Where do you "compromise" between the flat earth and evidence that we live on a round rock orbiting the sun? Your "compromise" is the insidious tug of intellectual sloth that too many lazy christians subscribe to these days.
ALL science that I'm aware of says "Hey, this might be wrong, but PROVE it wrong". That concept seems to have eluded you. Your "compromise" would have us dilute and distort the fundamental precepts of science by saying "We don't get it, so we're gonna invent a big guy in the sky to explain it". If it weren't so tragic it would be comical.
"Ironic that this post is being submitted through an American-developed web browser through the American-developed Internet on an American-developed domain registrar."
Much of which is coasting on the educational framework of 2-3 decades ago. If by American-developed web Browser, you mean owned by Microsoft, I wonder just what percentage of native-born Americans were involved. Micorosoft hires a great many Asian/Indian developers. If you mean the Mozilla family, I've seen a disproportionate percentage of non-American contributors.
Frankly, the last decade of education in America just hasn't met the mark. We can chuckle about the Kansas School Board teaching Creat^H^H^H^H^H Intelujint desyn, but that IS the heartland of America. Blithely ignoring such disturbing trends while spouting about our past accomplishments conveniently ignores these trends, which really merit deep concern. It's not about what we built yesterday. It's about what we will be able to build tomorrow, and we ignore this at our peril.
"It is important to point out that FSM is a spoof and nobody takes it seriously. However, the spoof is flawed and missed the point so I don't know why people keep talking about it."
Current evangalistic fundamentalism in the U.S. is self-spoofing and totally misses a great many points - yet people keep talking about it - at the top of their lungs. Frankly, this is also the group whose members too often believe that the moon landings were faked - and profeshunal rasslin' is real. I find the creation mythos of the Flying Spaghetti Monster no less credible and not a bit more flawed than Genesis. Which IS the freakin' point. Get over it. I'm going to go meditate on the sheer and utter breakdown of intelligent design reflected in the creation of these self-lobotomized evangalistic zombies that walk the earth with homo sapiens.
"They had all the natural resources (food, wood, ore, stone, tobaccy). Guess who's be a third-world-country by now?" True, but your economic theory is a little weak - it seems the North had most of the technology to process and transport those resources. The South had... a bunch of enslaved minorities. Sorry, but that puts the North higher on the economic food chain. Raw materials and cheap labor lose out every time over the ability to transport and process finished goods. Study your global economics.
In the final analysis, we either become spacefaring or extinct - and today, we stand at a crossroads where both possibilities can be seen on the horizon.
Really? Supporting evidence? As usual for these sorts of advocacy groups, what they're after is, "we have a fantasy and you need to pay for it."
OK, supporting evidence? It's in the rocks under your feet.
As astronaut John Young neatly summed up, "Single-Planet species don't last." There are simply too many documented mass extinction events that make it clear that from time to time, for whatever reason, whether vulcanism, orbital vagaries, solar output, interstellar dust clouds, and, the ever-popular big rock smacking into us, that having all of our eggs in one somewhat fragile basket is a poor long-term survival strategy.
The evidence is there. It's in the fossil record. Or had you assumed that over 90% of all species that have lived on this planet being extinct was merely a simple oversight on Noah's part when he was packing the Ark?
No, all fusion requires is a magic bottle somewhere in Utah.
Hey, I'm all in favor of fusion engines - but they don't exist - unless you count the Mr. Fusion option on my DeLorean. The closest we have to fusion is... zip? In spite of multiple megawatt laser facilities working very hard on the problem.
In the meantime, some very good work has been done on fission engines - work that has been discarded. But if we really want TRUE heavy-lift capability, if we really want TRUE long-distance propulsion, fission seems like a technology we are going to have to get rational about.
The fact is, if we could build workable coal-powered rockets today, we would - in spite of the fact that black-lung disease alone has killed far more people than all of the fission reactor meltdowns in the history of power generation.
Is the potential of a fission accident a factor? You bet. But if the options of serious space utilization are either chemical, which is at it's limits now, or fictional (see Mr. Fusion) then we are going to have to take a long hard rational look at much more proven and feasable technologies.
Sigs? We don't need no steenking sigs!