Isaac Asimov wrote an essay about this a long time ago (in the 1960's IIRC), and I doubt the idea originated with him.
I believe Asimov was talking about 3 billion heartbeats or so as the limit; 1.5 billion heartbeats is only about 60 years for a human, and we tend to live longer than that under good conditions.
It is not delegating all work to the machines, that is a profound misconception. It is delegating all profits to the billionaires, and that, unfortunately, has a very, very long track record.
I thought as a society we had long ago decided that was not an excuse.
Haven't you heard ? In this century, the US only prosecutes those who are following orders. Those giving the orders are apparently totally immune. This started with Abu Graib and continues, literally, to this Friday.
If I were in charge of the bailout process, the first step in any bailout would be to fire the entire management team, without exceptions. Anyone with truly unique knowledge of the company's processes could be hired as a short term consultant. Modern American management tends to be both incompetent and convinced of their irreplaceability; if they wreck a company, they need to be shown the door.
Also, anything too big to fail should be nationalized and broken up and then the pieces sold on the market (e.g., by an IPO).
Yes, this would tend to hurt the old shareholders. Guess what? Their company went broke. If it is liquidated, the shareholders are last in line to share in the assets and will typically get nothing.
All over Europe people are rioting in the streets, protesting the actions of their politicians. Why in God's name aren't Americans doing the same??
Very simple. Europe has austerity. We just have people yammering about the deficit who want to institute austerity.
Note, by the way, that, when the Great Depression started, Herbert Hoover's response was... austerity. It has a long history of both being very appealing to wealthy people and not working.
The thing that this coin farce is supposed to prove is that the debt ceiling is a construct invented by the Carter Administration with no real regulatory or constitutional basis.
The debt ceiling dates from World War I, and it replaces Congress having to pass legislation granting specific borrowing authority on a per bond issue (or other instrument) basis.
"and you can rule out every planet / asteroid but Mars" where is this catalog of every single asteroid to ever come close to earth since creation of earth?
The list of asteroids with an atmosphere and liquid water is rather short (as in, non-existant). That also rules out Venus and Mercury. The isotope data rules out the Earth (or the Moon). These arguments also rule out the Jovian satellites and stuff further out. Conversely, other isotope data make it clear these objects do come from within the solar system somewhere.
This was all argued out at length in the 1980's and there were many skeptics, but they were eventually convinced. I remember being at a debate in Paris where one of the leading skeptics was reduced to saying that, although these came from a body very much like Mars, and not like any other solar system body, that didn't prove they are from Mars. That was about when he lost me. Now, this is regarded as well established and not controversial at all.
1. How do we know that a rock is from Mars, especially when its composition is different from what we've found on Mars to date.
Isotope ratios and certain element ratios. These depend on the history of a planetary body, and you can rule out every planet / asteroid but Mars. I always liked the conclusion in this paper:
There seems little likelihood that the SNCs are not from Mars. If they were from another planetary body, it would have to be substantially identical to Mars
Of course, there is no such other Mars in the solar system.
The existence and composition of little atmospheric inclusions (i.e., tiny little bits of Martian air trapped in the rock) were another convincing piece of evidence for the Mars meteorites, as was the evidence of alteration by water.
2. How do rocks leave Mars' gravity well in the first place? Are they shrapnel from Mars being hit by big meteorites?
In a way. Suppose you have a big meteor hit (the size of the one that formed the Baringer Meteor Crater, or bigger). The meteor drills into the body and goes beneath the surface. At some point, it is stopped, and it dumps its kinetic energy into the body of the planet (i.e., for big impacts the meteorite explodes at depth). The shock wave is roughly spherical, and so the part directed upwards lifts up the surface above where the meteorite hit. Most of this material is lifted not much more than the depth of the explosion, forming the characteristic lip of the crater, and typically turning the layers in the rock upside down at the lip. Some of this material can be accelerated to much higher velocities, however, forming (for example) the rays of the new craters on the Moon. If the meteorite is really big, some of the surface material is accelerated to escape velocity and away it goes. After a little while (a few dozen to no more than a million years), some material will hit another planet. Mars and Earth have been trading material like this for the life of the solar system.
The really amazing thing is that some of the material ejected is not treated too roughly. Spores and seeds etc. could definitely survive the trip.
Without the money spent on probes (and, in particular, without the Apollo Lunar samples and the Viking Mars descent mass spectrometer), we wouldn't know that this was a Martian rock.
If you read the article, this is basically a trademark battle, with some copyright FUD thrown in for good measure.
Trademark is basically about fraud - would a reasonable person think that they have bought an official Batman car, or just a unofficial replica? So, Warner may or may not have a case, depending on how these are marketed and sold. However, what I think Warner is really trying to do is to spend Mr. Towle under the table, and they are likely to be quite successful in that.
You can bet serious money that GM had its lawyers look very carefully at the employee contracts, at least for the 18 leaders (or the most important of them). Not to say they might not lose in court, but I am sure that GM thinks the contracts allow for this.
Note that GM is (was) a client of HP. This is an unusual thing to do a client; it basically guarantees that HP will never get GM's IT business again. I would not be at all surprised if GM has some major issues with EDS; they may even have a suit planned. (I.e., I bet that this particular bridge has already been burned, so HP has no reason not to get what they can out of the ruins of the relationship.)
Tunny was broken because of a test message that had to be resent, and was re-encoded with the same key. The cryptographer was bored, and he made some abbreviations in the second encoding (which was manually typed). That put them out of phase, which meant that the message could be broken in crab-fashion. (Guess a word in the cipher text. If you are correct that gives you a little of the key and thus the decryption of the same block of characters in the other text. That, if you are lucky, will reveal another word, which gives more characters in the second text, which yields more in the first, making the entire decrypt fairly straightforward once you get going.) Breaking that message was enough to reveal how the machine worked, it was reverse engineered, and in operational use it was broken by computer basically from the start.
All of this because one operator got sloppy on one test message that wasn't even intrinsically important anyway. But, i think it is fair to say that more crypto is broken by sloppiness than by advanced math (not that the math might not be useful in exploiting the break).
Am I the only person who thought this article was about Marvel Comics, and wondered what they could do to get a billion dollar patent judgement against them? A patent on rocket-propellled iron suits?
Yes, and the same could be said for asteroid observations. Not only are there a lot of asteroids that come closer to Mars than to the Earth, but the difference in phase angle would make simultaneous observations especially valuable.
My guess is here, however, is that this is something that they could give them to do that is both close to what you might do on Mars, and independently checkable.
Slashdot Mirror
Jabba the Hut is really Jar Jar Binks in a fat suit.
Han Solo starts smuggling fish to an ice planet inhabited by singing penguins.
The Phantom Menace is remade as The Phantom Tollbooth. But with Jedi.
Darth Vader stars in a sequel to Treasure Planet.
Snow White and the Seven Jedi.
Boba Fett. 101 Dalmatians. Need I say more?
Is there some way I can be encased in Carbonite for the duration?
After http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Folded_Himself I have been unable to take any time travel stories.
Ah, that was just a rip-pff of "—All You Zombies—". Either that, or Heinlein got a copy through his time machine.
Isaac Asimov wrote an essay about this a long time ago (in the 1960's IIRC), and I doubt the idea originated with him.
I believe Asimov was talking about 3 billion heartbeats or so as the limit; 1.5 billion heartbeats is only about 60 years for a human, and we tend to live longer than that under good conditions.
It is not delegating all work to the machines, that is a profound misconception. It is delegating all profits to the billionaires, and that, unfortunately, has a very, very long track record.
"Over eleven years ago, the possibility of using the retired Homestake Mine as an underground science laboratory was first proposed.
You mean, the place where the Homestake experiment (the first to observe solar neutrinos) ran from 1970 to 1994?
"It's not my fault, I was just following orders."
I thought as a society we had long ago decided that was not an excuse.
Haven't you heard ? In this century, the US only prosecutes those who are following orders. Those giving the orders are apparently totally immune. This started with Abu Graib and continues, literally, to this Friday.
Isn't that more or less what is happening now?
This is a non-event - prosecutors basically never admit error, until they are forced to.
On this subject, there is a White House petition to Remove United States District Attorney Carmen Ortiz from office for overreach in the case of Aaron Swartz.
If I were in charge of the bailout process, the first step in any bailout would be to fire the entire management team, without exceptions. Anyone with truly unique knowledge of the company's processes could be hired as a short term consultant. Modern American management tends to be both incompetent and convinced of their irreplaceability; if they wreck a company, they need to be shown the door.
Also, anything too big to fail should be nationalized and broken up and then the pieces sold on the market (e.g., by an IPO).
Yes, this would tend to hurt the old shareholders. Guess what? Their company went broke. If it is liquidated, the shareholders are last in line to share in the assets and will typically get nothing.
All over Europe people are rioting in the streets, protesting the actions of their politicians. Why in God's name aren't Americans doing the same??
Very simple. Europe has austerity. We just have people yammering about the deficit who want to institute austerity.
Note, by the way, that, when the Great Depression started, Herbert Hoover's response was... austerity. It has a long history of both being very appealing to wealthy people and not working.
The thing that this coin farce is supposed to prove is that the debt ceiling is a construct invented by the Carter Administration with no real regulatory or constitutional basis.
The debt ceiling dates from World War I, and it replaces Congress having to pass legislation granting specific borrowing authority on a per bond issue (or other instrument) basis.
This is way, way too late. (As in, 2 or 3 years too late.)
My feeling is that Obama
1.) Has a plan B. Maybe this is it, maybe not, but you can be sure it has been vetted by actual lawyers, not just Slashdot, and
2.) Merely the existence of the Plan B will make it unnecessary to ever use it but
3.) Right now he is benefiting from the brewing Republican civil war, so there is no reason to reveal Plan B for the time being.
Makes sense.
I am not sure I would.
sounds a little BS to me
"and you can rule out every planet / asteroid but Mars"
where is this catalog of every single asteroid to ever come close to earth since creation of earth?
The list of asteroids with an atmosphere and liquid water is rather short (as in, non-existant). That also rules out Venus and Mercury. The isotope data rules out the Earth (or the Moon). These arguments also rule out the Jovian satellites and stuff further out. Conversely, other isotope data make it clear these objects do come from within the solar system somewhere.
This was all argued out at length in the 1980's and there were many skeptics, but they were eventually convinced. I remember being at a debate in Paris where one of the leading skeptics was reduced to saying that, although these came from a body very much like Mars, and not like any other solar system body, that didn't prove they are from Mars. That was about when he lost me. Now, this is regarded as well established and not controversial at all.
"At some point, it is stopped"
yea when its out of energy genius
It has to get vaporized first.
1. How do we know that a rock is from Mars, especially when its composition is different from what we've found on Mars to date.
Isotope ratios and certain element ratios. These depend on the history of a planetary body, and you can rule out every planet / asteroid but Mars. I always liked the conclusion in this paper :
There seems little likelihood that the SNCs are not from Mars. If they were from another planetary body, it would have to be substantially identical to Mars
Of course, there is no such other Mars in the solar system.
The existence and composition of little atmospheric inclusions (i.e., tiny little bits of Martian air trapped in the rock) were another convincing piece of evidence for the Mars meteorites, as was the evidence of alteration by water.
2. How do rocks leave Mars' gravity well in the first place? Are they shrapnel from Mars being hit by big meteorites?
In a way. Suppose you have a big meteor hit (the size of the one that formed the Baringer Meteor Crater, or bigger). The meteor drills into the body and goes beneath the surface. At some point, it is stopped, and it dumps its kinetic energy into the body of the planet (i.e., for big impacts the meteorite explodes at depth). The shock wave is roughly spherical, and so the part directed upwards lifts up the surface above where the meteorite hit. Most of this material is lifted not much more than the depth of the explosion, forming the characteristic lip of the crater, and typically turning the layers in the rock upside down at the lip. Some of this material can be accelerated to much higher velocities, however, forming (for example) the rays of the new craters on the Moon. If the meteorite is really big, some of the surface material is accelerated to escape velocity and away it goes. After a little while (a few dozen to no more than a million years), some material will hit another planet. Mars and Earth have been trading material like this for the life of the solar system.
The really amazing thing is that some of the material ejected is not treated too roughly. Spores and seeds etc. could definitely survive the trip.
How does someone become a meteorite dealer?
Go out in the desert and find some meteorites. Or, get to be a good friend with someone who does.
Without the money spent on probes (and, in particular, without the Apollo Lunar samples and the Viking Mars descent mass spectrometer), we wouldn't know that this was a Martian rock.
If you read the article, this is basically a trademark battle, with some copyright FUD thrown in for good measure.
Trademark is basically about fraud - would a reasonable person think that they have bought an official Batman car, or just a unofficial replica? So, Warner may or may not have a case, depending on how these are marketed and sold. However, what I think Warner is really trying to do is to spend Mr. Towle under the table, and they are likely to be quite successful in that.
You can bet serious money that GM had its lawyers look very carefully at the employee contracts, at least for the 18 leaders (or the most important of them). Not to say they might not lose in court, but I am sure that GM thinks the contracts allow for this.
Note that GM is (was) a client of HP. This is an unusual thing to do a client; it basically guarantees that HP will never get GM's IT business again. I would not be at all surprised if GM has some major issues with EDS; they may even have a suit planned. (I.e., I bet that this particular bridge has already been burned, so HP has no reason not to get what they can out of the ruins of the relationship.)
D'uh, don't you know that right to work is a management right, not a worker right.
Patent attorney's I have talked to say not to start a patent lawsuit without a few million US dollars for initial costs.
Tunny was broken because of a test message that had to be resent, and was re-encoded with the same key. The cryptographer was bored, and he made some abbreviations in the second encoding (which was manually typed). That put them out of phase, which meant that the message could be broken in crab-fashion. (Guess a word in the cipher text. If you are correct that gives you a little of the key and thus the decryption of the same block of characters in the other text. That, if you are lucky, will reveal another word, which gives more characters in the second text, which yields more in the first, making the entire decrypt fairly straightforward once you get going.) Breaking that message was enough to reveal how the machine worked, it was reverse engineered, and in operational use it was broken by computer basically from the start.
All of this because one operator got sloppy on one test message that wasn't even intrinsically important anyway. But, i think it is fair to say that more crypto is broken by sloppiness than by advanced math (not that the math might not be useful in exploiting the break).
Am I the only person who thought this article was about Marvel Comics, and wondered what they could do to get a billion dollar patent judgement against them? A patent on rocket-propellled iron suits?
Yes, and the same could be said for asteroid observations. Not only are there a lot of asteroids that come closer to Mars than to the Earth, but the difference in phase angle would make simultaneous observations especially valuable.
My guess is here, however, is that this is something that they could give them to do that is both close to what you might do on Mars, and independently checkable.