Your argument might hold, and I'd agree for almost any other species... but these are MOSQUITOES. They're probably the second most lethal species on the planet, in terms of the deaths they cause by spreading malaria. I don't care what it does to the rest of the food chain, extermiating the mosquito would be the greatest favour anyone has done for humanity since we did for smallpox.
The way I see it we shouldn't be causing harm or suffering without good reason.
Powering autonomous robots sounds like a good reason to me.
If any of you people are really thinkers I would urge you consider why you don't torture dogs or other small mammals. If it is to do with empathy and the fact that these small mammals are seemingly capable of experiencing severe suffering and pain, consider that even flies may be capable of not too dissimilar sensations.
Nothing whatever to do with empathy. I don't torture dogs or other small mammals because I have no reason to torture them; I'm not a sadist, my ~/.pr0n directory notwithstanding. If I did have a reason - say, scientific research - whose benefits exceeded the potential social stigma incurred, I'd do it.
I guess from your post that you're a vegan. Well... I'm not. I eat meat and enjoy it, and I eat meat because I enjoy it. Many animals die to power me, and they die needlessly - I could live on only plants if I wanted, but I choose to eat meat for my own pleasure. The pleasure of a good dinner is, to me, sufficient reason for a cow to die. Powering a robot is, to me, a perfectly sufficient reason for flies to die in vast numbers.
Let's say your hardware firm needs linux device drivers or hardware designed or software or whatever, don't just consider European and American companies, give a thought to Indian companies too. Prevent governments from instituting unfair tarrifs and sanctions
And people say there's too much groupthink on Slashdot... a post favouring competition from the Indian IT industry, and against government protectionism.
Wow, that's not going to make any friends. FWIW, I agree, though...
Give them some time for the nature of politics to change and for some of the issues of today be different.
The world agenda changed a LOT about three years ago. I think more could have been made of the Maquis - these people who were sold out by the Federation, moved off their land by force while the world looked the other way. They were the enemy, yes, but an entirely different kind of enemy.
I know you. I was like you once, but then I opened my eyes... open your eyes, Captain. Why is the Federation so obsessed about the Maquis? We've never harmed you. And yet we're constantly arrested and charged with terrorism... Starships chase us through the Badlands... and our supporters are harassed and ridiculed. Why? Because we've left the Federation, and that's the one thing you can't accept. Nobody leaves paradise. Everyone should want to be in the Federation. Hell, you even want the Cardassians to join. You're only sending them replicators so that one day they can take their "rightful place" on the Federation Council. You know, in some ways you'r worse than the Borg. At least they tell you about their plans for assimilation. You're more insidious...you assimilate people and they don't even know it.
1) I think the opening theme is pretty good, when combined with the scenes they show. Sure, it isn't another orchestra piece, but it fits in well to show how we got where we're going.
I look at the Enterprise intro, and I say '35 years and we've never been back', 'two out of five of those have blown up', and 'that will never be finished now'.
Then I just get depressed, and laugh bitterly at the future spaceships depicted.
Agreed, Doctor Who was excellent - sometimes. Don't tell me there weren't some bloody awful stories, though. What was that crap with the maggot things in that Welsh mine?
But it's an entirely different show from Star Trek. If time travel was a weekly occurrence in Trek, and not just something that happens occasionally and uncontrollably, then it would no longer be Star Trek.
I watched most of Voyager. It was... bad, but not dire, until they met the Borg and we got into weapons inflation problems. Voyager just had to get harder and harder as time went by, didn't it? That ship should have been half-wrecked after years on the run in deep space, it should have looked like Nostromo or Red Dwarf, but not only does it remain Starfleet-clean, it makes a ruin of half the Borg collective and ends up violating just about every law of physics in the Trek universe.
Enterprise isn't that bad. It's very different, but I think it's decent enough. Some of the plots are excellent, and by its nature as a prequel it can't be driven by technobabble quite as much.
The best SF space show I've seen in recent years is undoubtedly Cowboy Bebop. Definitely not Starfleet-clean, that one...;-)
I like the idea of Enterprise. A primitive starship does away with all the ridiculous technological dei ex machinae that plagued Voyager's plots: Enterprise NX-01 doesn't have a tractor beam, it has a harpoon! The low-tech scenario means the writers can't use bullshit physics to resolve a plot quite so often.
I'm not so convinced by the actual implementation of Enterprise... I can't see how Archer's universe is going to become Kirk's universe, and it doesn't feel quite like Trek all the time. But there have been some damn good episodes - I actually like Enterprise a lot better than Voyager.
More like twenty. Things went to hell in a handbasket when TNG started to spawn all these spinoffs. In a better world, TNG would have ended with season 7, and after that a long wait, until in say 2005 we'll be salivating over the prospect of a new ST series carrying on from there, perhaps concentrating on Timefleet.
I wouldn't go for Timefleet, though. A time travel show is wholly different from a space travel show, and would turn into Doctor Who. I like the idea of Enterprise, but it just isn't quite Star Trek. Perhaps the Enterprise-C would be worth following someday?
Anyone who knows about USB tech, is this possible?
1: I connect my iHP-140 directly to another USB mass-storage device
2: With its hacked firmware, the iRiver is smart enough to read and write the other devices disk
3: Hmm, what might I do next, having linked my mp3 player to somebody else's, and having access to their files? Nope, can't think of anything...
The problem with democracy is that every idiot gets a vote, true. But what's the alternative? Plato's philosopher kings - rule by intellectual elite? I'm sure that appeals to Slashdotters' egos, but who decides who gets to be a member of this elite and who doesn't? Why, the people already in it, of course...
Perhaps for a while they really would select people on intellectual grounds, but that wouldn't last. You'll soon have nepotism: 'perhaps my boy's not so bright, but I'll pull some strings for him'. You'll have bribery and corruption and favouritism. Your intellectual elite of philosopher princes will soon degenerate into another self-selecting elite of corrupt robber barons, and we're back to feudalism.
Greece has been many things over the years, but democracy did get its start there. Which country, now a democracy, has been a democracy for the longest time? Hard to say; for instance, the USA has been a democracy for some 200 years - or is it only 40, since you're not really a democracy if black people can't vote? The English parliament is certainly ancient, but at what point did it become a democratic assembly? Perhaps 100 years ago, with womens' suffrage?
ISTR that a good case can be made for Iceland as the oldest democracy, but it's certainly a thorny issue.
However there's a few glaring problems - the biggest, for me, is the lack of a real shuffle mode. It's easy to end up with the 100-series playing the same sequence of tracks when in random mode. That sucks. Gapless is the next most important for me with the rest of the options such as on-the-fly playlist editing and and file deletion taking up the rear of my priority list by some margin. I can live without that, to be frank.
I don't mind the lack of a real shuffle. It seems to re-randomise whenever I add or remove tracks, and I'm still in the process of filling the thing. Gaps in playback can be annoying - just ask Billy Shears:-) But I'd really quite like on-the-fly playlists: I want to be able to queue up some good tunes and then leave the box alone, if I'm using it as a music source at a party or something.
This is true. No (well, few, anyway) games have caused me to quit back to the options screen and turn off the music quite so quickly.
Doom would invariably crash within ten seconds of the start of the game if I had the music on. Never found out why... Worked just fine throughout with only sound effects. I'd stalk through a totally silent corridor in the dark...
Umm... no. Quarks are quarks; leptons are leptons. They're entirely different.
The quarks are up, down, strange, charmed, bottom, and top, and corresponding antiparticles. The leptons are the electron, muon and tau, and their associated neutrinos, and again, the corresponding antiparticles.
Quarks and leptons are all fermions, as opposed to bosons, such as photons and other force-carrying particles.
On the other hand, _if_ there's a God, you have to give the guy some credit. This is a much more clever way to devastate a planet than just a flood. Very efficient too.
Efficient?
The photon radiation from a supernova is utterly trivial; supernovae emit monstrous amounts of energy in neutrinos, but only a tiny amout as gamma. Since it's the gamma you want if you're planning to cook the Earth, that's inefficient enough right there. Not to mention the fact that the Earth will only intercept a tiny fraction of the radiation, most of which will fly off into space forever...
God knows what he's doing. Floods are a much more efficient way of cleaning up planets. Shame about the ugly hack he used as a backup system; all that business with the boatful of animals needs far too many miracles to be really useful. He should have flooded the Earth in segments, always leaving an area dry for Noah and friends to hide in.
(note: although I describe the photon flux from a supernova as trivial, it's quite a lot by terrestrial standards. Stand well back when detonating stars.)
Actually our sun does not have enough mass to go supernova. A star needs a mass about 1.4 times our own for it to go supernova, and this is called the Chandra Limit.
Close: it's the Chandrasekhar Limit.
It's not the star, but the core of the star that needs to exceed 1.4 solar masses. The Sun will eventually run out of hydrogen in its core, and fusion will end. The core will then be unsupported against its weight, and will contract and heat up dramatically. The increased heat will trigger nuclear fusion of helium, then the Sun switches on again. While the core's heating up, the increased temperature makes the outer layers balloon out to a huge volume, forming the red giant.
It's the core that's interesting, though. Eventually the helium runs out too, and we have a very dense gas of carbon. It contracts and heats up, but the Sun isn't big enough to reach carbon-burning temperatures. So the core can't support itself by burning to produce heat, and instead collapses until it's supported by 'degeneracy pressure' resulting from the fact that in quantum mechanics, no two electrons can occupy the same state.
The Chandrasekhar limit is the maximum mass that can be supported this way, and it's 1.4 solar masses. Get above that mass, the core of the dead star collapses, FAST. The next state down is the neutron star, held up by degeneracy between neutrons rather than electrons. All that matter falling at very high speed hits a core of hard neutronium and the fun starts. Lots and lots and lots of energy has got to go somewhere... the result being a star-shattering kaboom.
There've been supernovae observed within our own Galaxy: the famous example is the Crab Nebula, whose supernova was recorded by Chinese astronomers in the 11th century, and was visible in daylight for months. There's a pulsar there now. There just haven't been any recently.
There are plenty of stars just itching to blow, though. Eta Carinae is about ready to pop, and Betelgeuse isn't far off. Either of these stars blow, we'll have a hell of a show.
Quite a lot, if you get the thermal kinetic energy up into the relativistic territory... once you stop thinking in kelvin and start using teraelectronvolts, you're getting warmer.
Slashdot Mirror
Your argument might hold, and I'd agree for almost any other species... but these are MOSQUITOES. They're probably the second most lethal species on the planet, in terms of the deaths they cause by spreading malaria. I don't care what it does to the rest of the food chain, extermiating the mosquito would be the greatest favour anyone has done for humanity since we did for smallpox.
Powering autonomous robots sounds like a good reason to me.
If any of you people are really thinkers I would urge you consider why you don't torture dogs or other small mammals. If it is to do with empathy and the fact that these small mammals are seemingly capable of experiencing severe suffering and pain, consider that even flies may be capable of not too dissimilar sensations.
Nothing whatever to do with empathy. I don't torture dogs or other small mammals because I have no reason to torture them; I'm not a sadist, my ~/.pr0n directory notwithstanding. If I did have a reason - say, scientific research - whose benefits exceeded the potential social stigma incurred, I'd do it.
I guess from your post that you're a vegan. Well... I'm not. I eat meat and enjoy it, and I eat meat because I enjoy it. Many animals die to power me, and they die needlessly - I could live on only plants if I wanted, but I choose to eat meat for my own pleasure. The pleasure of a good dinner is, to me, sufficient reason for a cow to die. Powering a robot is, to me, a perfectly sufficient reason for flies to die in vast numbers.
And people say there's too much groupthink on Slashdot... a post favouring competition from the Indian IT industry, and against government protectionism.
Wow, that's not going to make any friends. FWIW, I agree, though...
The world agenda changed a LOT about three years ago. I think more could have been made of the Maquis - these people who were sold out by the Federation, moved off their land by force while the world looked the other way. They were the enemy, yes, but an entirely different kind of enemy.
I know you. I was like you once, but then I opened my eyes... open your eyes, Captain. Why is the Federation so obsessed about the Maquis? We've never harmed you. And yet we're constantly arrested and charged with terrorism... Starships chase us through the Badlands... and our supporters are harassed and ridiculed. Why? Because we've left the Federation, and that's the one thing you can't accept. Nobody leaves paradise. Everyone should want to be in the Federation. Hell, you even want the Cardassians to join. You're only sending them replicators so that one day they can take their "rightful place" on the Federation Council. You know, in some ways you'r worse than the Borg. At least they tell you about their plans for assimilation. You're more insidious...you assimilate people and they don't even know it.
I look at the Enterprise intro, and I say '35 years and we've never been back', 'two out of five of those have blown up', and 'that will never be finished now'.
Then I just get depressed, and laugh bitterly at the future spaceships depicted.
Not yet. Personally I'd like to see what clevernickname will post on this subject. He gets a guaranteed +5 on all Trek-related posts.
But it's an entirely different show from Star Trek. If time travel was a weekly occurrence in Trek, and not just something that happens occasionally and uncontrollably, then it would no longer be Star Trek.
Enterprise isn't that bad. It's very different, but I think it's decent enough. Some of the plots are excellent, and by its nature as a prequel it can't be driven by technobabble quite as much.
The best SF space show I've seen in recent years is undoubtedly Cowboy Bebop. Definitely not Starfleet-clean, that one... ;-)
I'm not so convinced by the actual implementation of Enterprise... I can't see how Archer's universe is going to become Kirk's universe, and it doesn't feel quite like Trek all the time. But there have been some damn good episodes - I actually like Enterprise a lot better than Voyager.
More like twenty. Things went to hell in a handbasket when TNG started to spawn all these spinoffs. In a better world, TNG would have ended with season 7, and after that a long wait, until in say 2005 we'll be salivating over the prospect of a new ST series carrying on from there, perhaps concentrating on Timefleet. I wouldn't go for Timefleet, though. A time travel show is wholly different from a space travel show, and would turn into Doctor Who. I like the idea of Enterprise, but it just isn't quite Star Trek. Perhaps the Enterprise-C would be worth following someday?
1: I connect my iHP-140 directly to another USB mass-storage device
2: With its hacked firmware, the iRiver is smart enough to read and write the other devices disk
3: Hmm, what might I do next, having linked my mp3 player to somebody else's, and having access to their files? Nope, can't think of anything...
I doubt anyone's still reading this, but... yes.
Perhaps for a while they really would select people on intellectual grounds, but that wouldn't last. You'll soon have nepotism: 'perhaps my boy's not so bright, but I'll pull some strings for him'. You'll have bribery and corruption and favouritism. Your intellectual elite of philosopher princes will soon degenerate into another self-selecting elite of corrupt robber barons, and we're back to feudalism.
Quis custodiet, eh?
ISTR that a good case can be made for Iceland as the oldest democracy, but it's certainly a thorny issue.
I don't mind the lack of a real shuffle. It seems to re-randomise whenever I add or remove tracks, and I'm still in the process of filling the thing. Gaps in playback can be annoying - just ask Billy Shears :-) But I'd really quite like on-the-fly playlists: I want to be able to queue up some good tunes and then leave the box alone, if I'm using it as a music source at a party or something.
DMCA? How does that apply? There's no copy protection on the iHP players.
Doom would invariably crash within ten seconds of the start of the game if I had the music on. Never found out why... Worked just fine throughout with only sound effects. I'd stalk through a totally silent corridor in the dark...
--- total silence.....
... nothing, nothing...
*eek-creek* GYAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHDAKKADAKKADAKKADAKKADAKKADAKKADA KKADAKKADAKKADAKKADAKKADAKKA... oh... nothing there... [door] WHIRRR... ARRRRGH!
The quarks are up, down, strange, charmed, bottom, and top, and corresponding antiparticles. The leptons are the electron, muon and tau, and their associated neutrinos, and again, the corresponding antiparticles.
Quarks and leptons are all fermions, as opposed to bosons, such as photons and other force-carrying particles.
Efficient?
The photon radiation from a supernova is utterly trivial; supernovae emit monstrous amounts of energy in neutrinos, but only a tiny amout as gamma. Since it's the gamma you want if you're planning to cook the Earth, that's inefficient enough right there. Not to mention the fact that the Earth will only intercept a tiny fraction of the radiation, most of which will fly off into space forever...
God knows what he's doing. Floods are a much more efficient way of cleaning up planets. Shame about the ugly hack he used as a backup system; all that business with the boatful of animals needs far too many miracles to be really useful. He should have flooded the Earth in segments, always leaving an area dry for Noah and friends to hide in.
(note: although I describe the photon flux from a supernova as trivial, it's quite a lot by terrestrial standards. Stand well back when detonating stars.)
Close: it's the Chandrasekhar Limit.
It's not the star, but the core of the star that needs to exceed 1.4 solar masses. The Sun will eventually run out of hydrogen in its core, and fusion will end. The core will then be unsupported against its weight, and will contract and heat up dramatically. The increased heat will trigger nuclear fusion of helium, then the Sun switches on again. While the core's heating up, the increased temperature makes the outer layers balloon out to a huge volume, forming the red giant.
It's the core that's interesting, though. Eventually the helium runs out too, and we have a very dense gas of carbon. It contracts and heats up, but the Sun isn't big enough to reach carbon-burning temperatures. So the core can't support itself by burning to produce heat, and instead collapses until it's supported by 'degeneracy pressure' resulting from the fact that in quantum mechanics, no two electrons can occupy the same state.
The Chandrasekhar limit is the maximum mass that can be supported this way, and it's 1.4 solar masses. Get above that mass, the core of the dead star collapses, FAST. The next state down is the neutron star, held up by degeneracy between neutrons rather than electrons. All that matter falling at very high speed hits a core of hard neutronium and the fun starts. Lots and lots and lots of energy has got to go somewhere... the result being a star-shattering kaboom.
No, electrons are leptons.
I do believe its season 6, episode 7. 'once more with feeling'. If I recall correctly. You do indeed. Easily the greatest 45 minutes of TV ever.
There are plenty of stars just itching to blow, though. Eta Carinae is about ready to pop, and Betelgeuse isn't far off. Either of these stars blow, we'll have a hell of a show.
He's a counterfeiter who's grown several million dollars' worth of pot... yeah, I think I'd go with the gifts rather than the money, myself.
Quite a lot, if you get the thermal kinetic energy up into the relativistic territory... once you stop thinking in kelvin and start using teraelectronvolts, you're getting warmer.