I find this highly amusing. Since when does ST need to be "saved"?
Particularly when considering that "Enterprise" is better than "Voyager" (i.e., "captain janeway's trip to places we couldn't care less about"), "Deep Space 9" (i.e., "The-Space-Station-so-full-of-twits-even-NASA-coud -be-more-interesting") and "The Next Generation" (i.e., "One cool captain and a bunch of ninnies in shitty makeup have a fun time battling lame aliens") ALL PUT TOGETHER.
Don't get me wrong - I enjoy ST enough that I'd be glad to give yet another franchise show a chance - but I reject the notion that ST needs "saving". Especially considering that I never thought B5 was even remotely as good as many people seem to think it was. But then, they're usually people who liked "farscape", which was also lame. Oh well.
Bring on the flamebait mods...I'm just calling it like I see it.
> LET'S brush up on history and current events and > remember the 70s oil crisis. Or how gas is > pushing $2 a gallon today because of OPEC's > manuvering.
LET'S remember that it's THEIR OIL, NOT OURS. If they want to "maneuver", that's their right. It's all about the free market, right?
Selling oil, at a profit, isn't a terrorist act...unless we are willing to call our own industries 'terrorist'. Oh, wait...
> "The Sci Fi Channel has decided to continue > the Farscape series in the form of a miniseries
Why?
Farscape was always a weak show: bad science, bad fiction = bad science-fiction. They'd be better off signing Joss Whedon & crew to do more episodes of Firefly - which is a REAL sf show.
Re:A thick atmosphere in low gravity?
on
Titanic Saturn
·
· Score: 1
Think cold atmosphere (i.e., denser & with less energy -> less able to escape), with the additional assistance of Titan being small.
Why does small matter? Because g falls off as distance squared. On a small moon of given mass, the force of gravity at the surface will be greater than on a moon of the same mass but larger radius (i.e, less dense).
> In all honesty though, why hasn't any UI had a > check box under the mouse settings which says > "Click here to have focus follow mouse."
Well, I can't speak to 'any UI', but in Apple's case, the answer is: "because daddy Apple knows best, you have no choice, you will be assimilated".
People love to gripe and moan (including me) about M$'s dominance, but Apple has always been fond of enforcing its own UI choices on its users (economic slaves?), rather than offering an open system that end-users (and coders) could modify at will. M$ ain't much better...but it's BETTER THAN APPLE.
> And with your kind of thinking, Man literally > would have never stepped on the Moon.
Nonsense. There are plenty of ways to pay for things without gutting a specific, single, valuable government program such as what you call 'welfare' (I'm assuming you're referring broadly to social programs designed to help the poor and/or disadvantaged).
All one needs to do is look at the various studies about privatization of space to see this. And while you mention the Apollo era, during LBJ's tenure, social spening ROSE, rather than declined, during the period of greatest increase in Apollo-related spending.
>Only wish I could talk you into taking a one-way > trip to Mars...
> 2) Kill the budge for welfare and give it to > NASA, that is where the money would come from. > > 3) There are enough Science Fiction fans right > now willing to colonize it.
Well, then, let all of those SF fans pay for it themselves, rather than consigning countless people to starvation, lack of education, and lack of proper medical care.
*I* am a diehard SF fan, and would jump at the chance to go...but I'd rather not go at all if it means taking funds from something as fundamentally useful, important, and morally right as providing for those less fortunate than myself.
> Not to troll...but we can't spare that 100 > billion because then we wouldn't have so many > cool shinny things that go boom.;-)
Actually, most expensive things that go boom aren't shiny - they're painted olive green or dark grey......but your point is well-taken. However, we can't begin talking about terraforming, thinking that by doing so we're going to 'force' the issue of arms expenditures into resolution. Rather, it has to come from the other side - we need to fix those issues, and THEN decide that we can use this nice big nifty peace surplus to do cool things like become a starfaring civilization, etc.
I'm not a "let's fix everything here before we go to space" kinda guy, but it's clear that there are practicalities - like paying for our big projects - that we simply can't ignore. This is one reason why I see commercial space development (and the legal frameworks needed to make it happen) as such an important issue.
Personally, I'd like to see us gain the ability to create human-friendly environments away from Earth. But discussing the issue seems to me to be a pointless exercise, best left to university classrooms and NASA cafeterias during lunch hour.
Why? Because we're not even remotely capable of actually doing any terraforming, for several reasons:
1: We don't have the technological ability. We have some marginal sense of what might work, and lots of good ideas, but we're decades away from having the technological means to terraform.
2: We don't have the economic ability to terraform. This is the real kicker. Assume that even a modest, trial attempt to terraform would cost $100 billion dollars; since we don't have even $1 billion to spend on it, we're at least a hundred orders of magnitude away from having the financial means to engage in even the most limited terraforming.
3: We lack the political & social drive to engage in terraforming. Assuming (1) and (2) from above were no longer problems, there would need to be a strong, global, urgent demand that we engage in terraforming. There are many ways we might conceive of this happening, but none of them are apparently in the works, as of yet. This may change, but if it did, then we could spend time then debating the ethics of terraforming Mars, which, by then, will have been investigated to a much greater degree than it currently is.
I figure we ought to be spending our money, time, and effort doing that investigation, rather than getting worked up over ethical debates that, ultimately, don't matter one whit.
I've seen down to a little better than m=6.8 in dark skies, and given the magnitude scale's logarithmic nature, that's a fair bit better than m=5. From cities, it's often impossible to see much better than m=3 or so.
With a little more specificity, if this object is m=24, then it's about (24-7)=17 magnitudes fainter than the *best* that the human eye can do. To put that into perspective, given that five magnitudes of difference is about 100x difference in actual brightness (~2.5^5), a difference of 17 magnitudes is *roughly* 5.8E6 (2.5^17) times fainter than the human eye is capable seeing in optimal, dark-sky conditions.
The following was provided to me by someone in the industry, specifically for me to post here, to answer this precise question. Chain stores are not a positive thing, and ultimately do NOT foster the capitalist/free market ideals that benefit them so much. Please read:
This article -- is very, very old (1999), but a number of the points the author wrote about then are very applicable when you're talking about online chain/mega stores. The sales tax issue is perhaps most interesting to bring up -- the purchase of, well, most everything online, with the exception of items from a business in one's state, or a business having a nexus in one's state, deprives the local community (sometimes city, more often county) of sales tax revenue. It is that revenue that pays for emergency services, roads, and schools, in many parts of the country.
And here's one of Richard Howorth's (a great person) articles:
Better yet, order the book from a local, non-chain bookstore. Chances are you'll pay the same or close, and you'll be helping a bookstore that doesn't engage in ethically questionable pricing, supporting local business, and generally bumping up your Karma score.
For instance, if you lived in the Rocky Mountain region, I'd suggest The Tattered Cover. If you lived in Portland & the Northwest, I'd suggest Powell's, and if you live in California I'd point you towards my personal favorite Bay Area bookstore, Cody's Books.
Independent Bookstores are to Barnes & Noble as Linux is to Windows, etc.
Please consider using independent stores when buying books: Amazon & B&N might be "easy" and have nifty websites...but that doesn't make them GOOD. Remember, indeps can provide the same book, with the same service, while helping, rather than hurting, small business and media independence.
Slashdot Mirror
Particularly when considering that "Enterprise" is better than "Voyager" (i.e., "captain janeway's trip to places we couldn't care less about"), "Deep Space 9" (i.e., "The-Space-Station-so-full-of-twits-even-NASA-coud -be-more-interesting") and "The Next Generation" (i.e., "One cool captain and a bunch of ninnies in shitty makeup have a fun time battling lame aliens") ALL PUT TOGETHER.
Don't get me wrong - I enjoy ST enough that I'd be glad to give yet another franchise show a chance - but I reject the notion that ST needs "saving". Especially considering that I never thought B5 was even remotely as good as many people seem to think it was. But then, they're usually people who liked "farscape", which was also lame. Oh well.
Bring on the flamebait mods...I'm just calling it like I see it.
Ah, I didn't know. Thanks!
> This is expressed by the Hubble constant,
> which has a value of about 50 km/s/Mpc.
Actually, the currently accepted value is around 71 +/- 4 km/s/Mpc, based on WMAP (http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/) observations.
The Chandra instrument is named after Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, an astrophysicist from early in the previous century. Not the moon.
> LET'S brush up on history and current events and
> remember the 70s oil crisis. Or how gas is
> pushing $2 a gallon today because of OPEC's
> manuvering.
LET'S remember that it's THEIR OIL, NOT OURS. If they want to "maneuver", that's their right. It's all about the free market, right?
Selling oil, at a profit, isn't a terrorist act...unless we are willing to call our own industries 'terrorist'. Oh, wait...
Here in Boulder, our "Kinetics" is to "Burning Man" as MTV's "Road Rules" is to "Easy Rider".
> and designed to not have small piece come
> off during use.
and LARGE pieces?
> Granted all I've found is that internet access
> in class just gives me a better way to not pay
> attention.
Then perhaps you're just a bad student. For the rest of us, it's another tool - just like a chalkboard, a desk, a calculator.
People don't pay attention in classes of all kinds - the presence of another learning tool seems, to me, to be just that - another tool.
why mod this flamebait?
If you disagree with me, fine - but don't mod me down as flamebait.
Expressin opinion != flamebait.
Now there's a comment I can agree with. Farscape = (Red Dwarf - the humor)
err, sorry:
Farscape = (Red Dwarf - the humor) = (Firefly - everything)
Now there's a comment I can agree with. Farscape = (Red Dwarf - the humor)
> "The Sci Fi Channel has decided to continue
> the Farscape series in the form of a miniseries
Why?
Farscape was always a weak show: bad science, bad fiction = bad science-fiction. They'd be better off signing Joss Whedon & crew to do more episodes of Firefly - which is a REAL sf show.
Think cold atmosphere (i.e., denser & with less energy -> less able to escape), with the additional assistance of Titan being small.
Why does small matter? Because g falls off as distance squared. On a small moon of given mass, the force of gravity at the surface will be greater than on a moon of the same mass but larger radius (i.e, less dense).
> In all honesty though, why hasn't any UI had a
> check box under the mouse settings which says
> "Click here to have focus follow mouse."
Well, I can't speak to 'any UI', but in Apple's case, the answer is: "because daddy Apple knows best, you have no choice, you will be assimilated".
People love to gripe and moan (including me) about M$'s dominance, but Apple has always been fond of enforcing its own UI choices on its users (economic slaves?), rather than offering an open system that end-users (and coders) could modify at will. M$ ain't much better...but it's BETTER THAN APPLE.
> And with your kind of thinking, Man literally
> would have never stepped on the Moon.
Nonsense. There are plenty of ways to pay for things without gutting a specific, single, valuable government program such as what you call 'welfare' (I'm assuming you're referring broadly to social programs designed to help the poor and/or disadvantaged).
All one needs to do is look at the various studies about privatization of space to see this. And while you mention the Apollo era, during LBJ's tenure, social spening ROSE, rather than declined, during the period of greatest increase in Apollo-related spending.
>Only wish I could talk you into taking a one-way
> trip to Mars...
Temper, temper.
> 2) Kill the budge for welfare and give it to
> NASA, that is where the money would come from.
>
> 3) There are enough Science Fiction fans right
> now willing to colonize it.
Well, then, let all of those SF fans pay for it themselves, rather than consigning countless people to starvation, lack of education, and lack of proper medical care.
*I* am a diehard SF fan, and would jump at the chance to go...but I'd rather not go at all if it means taking funds from something as fundamentally useful, important, and morally right as providing for those less fortunate than myself.
> Not to troll...but we can't spare that 100 ;-)
...but your point is well-taken. However, we can't begin talking about terraforming, thinking that by doing so we're going to 'force' the issue of arms expenditures into resolution. Rather, it has to come from the other side - we need to fix those issues, and THEN decide that we can use this nice big nifty peace surplus to do cool things like become a starfaring civilization, etc.
> billion because then we wouldn't have so many
> cool shinny things that go boom.
Actually, most expensive things that go boom aren't shiny - they're painted olive green or dark grey...
I'm not a "let's fix everything here before we go to space" kinda guy, but it's clear that there are practicalities - like paying for our big projects - that we simply can't ignore. This is one reason why I see commercial space development (and the legal frameworks needed to make it happen) as such an important issue.
> Er, that would be *two* orders of magnitude.
err, you are, of course correct. Typing too fast today, I think. Thanks.
Personally, I'd like to see us gain the ability to create human-friendly environments away from Earth. But discussing the issue seems to me to be a pointless exercise, best left to university classrooms and NASA cafeterias during lunch hour.
Why? Because we're not even remotely capable of actually doing any terraforming, for several reasons:
1: We don't have the technological ability. We have some marginal sense of what might work, and lots of good ideas, but we're decades away from having the technological means to terraform.
2: We don't have the economic ability to terraform. This is the real kicker. Assume that even a modest, trial attempt to terraform would cost $100 billion dollars; since we don't have even $1 billion to spend on it, we're at least a hundred orders of magnitude away from having the financial means to engage in even the most limited terraforming.
3: We lack the political & social drive to engage in terraforming. Assuming (1) and (2) from above were no longer problems, there would need to be a strong, global, urgent demand that we engage in terraforming. There are many ways we might conceive of this happening, but none of them are apparently in the works, as of yet. This may change, but if it did, then we could spend time then debating the ethics of terraforming Mars, which, by then, will have been investigated to a much greater degree than it currently is.
I figure we ought to be spending our money, time, and effort doing that investigation, rather than getting worked up over ethical debates that, ultimately, don't matter one whit.
> Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle
> Motion.
heh.
smurfs are asexual.
With a little more specificity, if this object is m=24, then it's about (24-7)=17 magnitudes fainter than the *best* that the human eye can do. To put that into perspective, given that five magnitudes of difference is about 100x difference in actual brightness (~2.5^5), a difference of 17 magnitudes is *roughly* 5.8E6 (2.5^17) times fainter than the human eye is capable seeing in optimal, dark-sky conditions.
Also, see: International Dark-Sky Association
The following was provided to me by someone in the industry, specifically for me to post here, to answer this precise question. Chain stores are not a positive thing, and ultimately do NOT foster the capitalist/free market ideals that benefit them so much. Please read:
This article -- is very, very old (1999), but a number of the points the author wrote about then are very applicable when you're talking about online chain/mega stores. The sales tax issue is perhaps most interesting to bring up -- the purchase of, well, most everything online, with the exception of items from a business in one's state, or a business having a nexus in one's state, deprives the local community (sometimes city, more often county) of sales tax revenue. It is that revenue that pays for emergency services, roads, and schools, in many parts of the country.
And here's one of Richard Howorth's (a great person) articles:
For instance, if you lived in the Rocky Mountain region, I'd suggest The Tattered Cover. If you lived in Portland & the Northwest, I'd suggest Powell's, and if you live in California I'd point you towards my personal favorite Bay Area bookstore, Cody's Books.
Independent Bookstores are to Barnes & Noble as Linux is to Windows, etc.
Please consider using independent stores when buying books: Amazon & B&N might be "easy" and have nifty websites...but that doesn't make them GOOD. Remember, indeps can provide the same book, with the same service, while helping, rather than hurting, small business and media independence.
Heinlein, and I disagree completely. But whatever.
> If Cadillac's ran on something... Why the hell can't /.-ers use punctuation properly?
It's very simple, people.