... and although the main knock against them has been poor network coverage, I actually haven't had any problems with that. I think AT&T's real screwup was to allow network coverage problems to go on in New York and the SF Bay area. I mean, come on - if you had to pick a couple places to screw up that would absolutely guarantee the most negative publicity, it would be there. Meanwhile, my coverage out here in the sticks is actually pretty damn good. I get 3-4 bars of 3G coverage even where I work in rural Virginia, which is kind of amazing.
I used to use a Treo on Sprint, and while I liked Sprint's policies (there was none of the nickel-and-diming that Verizon always pulls), their coverage was absolutely horrible. I could barely get a call through anywhere. It wasn't just the phone, either - my wife was on a more basic flip phone with Sprint, and her coverage absolutely sucked too. Maybe things are better now, but I doubt I'll be leaving AT&T anytime soon.
Sharing documents via, say Google Docs: go to Google docs, work on your document, click "share". Sharing documents via a wiki: go to... where? To my knowledge, there's nothing even remotely as well known, easily accessible, and oh yes, free, as Google Docs. So you pretty much do need to know something about setting up a server to make this happen, and the idea that "with the state of software today", you need to have such expertise (or spend the money) just to be able to share a document with someone is simply laughable.
And regarding the sharing of homework... when did you go to school - the Neolithic? I went to high school around 30 years ago, and even then we had these things called "group assignments". You know, the same way that people actually work in offices and stuff. You should look into it.
... in the form of aluminum oxides. It is most certainly not plentiful in the form of metallic aluminum, and the oxidized form is, well, already oxidized, and won't be oxidizing again in your propellant unless you reduce it first. Which takes an enormous amount of energy. Which means we're pretty much back to where we started. Not that ALICE is a useless technology, but you'll either need to haul your aluminum with you or make it on site - both of which would have significant problems.
... by just not going at all. The point is that we have an obligation to provide a launch system for our astronauts that provides reasonable levels of safety for them. It is just plain unethical even to ask people to volunteer for what amounts to a game of Russian roulette without a much better reason than messing around with the ISS.
... on one of my ships (where they actually thought things through) the motto was "readiness through safety". The idea being that, yes, if you put safety uber alles, you couldn't get anything done. But reasonable levels of safety actually help you accomplish your mission by eliminating unnecessary injuries and equipment damage. I think that the space shuttle program has a long, long way to go before they've achieved "reasonable levels of safety". The monetary cost alone of the two failures to date was pretty freakin' high, to say nothing of the opportunity costs (lost missions, etc), and of course, the loss of human life.
As an aside, will these safety rules apply to contracted launches through other countries? Will NASA stop flying people to the ISS because the only vehicles (namely, Soyuz) can't and won't bother to meet stringent safety requirements?
Deaths on space shuttle flights: 14. Deaths on Soyuz flights: 4. Deaths on most recent version of Soyuz flights: 0. So, NASA could buy a safer rocket: Soyuz. Of course, that would make Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, et. al, very angry, so that'll never happen.
I also have to say that the general feeling around here that astronauts are expendable is pretty fucking reprehensible. Launching people into space onboard a system that we damn well KNOW has a terrible safety record is not ok, people. We have an obligation to provide a system with reasonable levels of safety for our astronauts, and if we can't, then we damn well better not go until we can. The American people are hardly being irrational to insist upon this.
I'm all in favor of increased spending on domestic priorities, but NASA's budget is not the place to look. The real money is in the defense/homeland security budgets, which combined are pushing a trillion dollars a year (when you include costs for various wars, VA costs, and actual DOD/DHS budgets). Why is it, exactly, that we're spending more on the DOD alone than the entire rest of the world - combined - spends on defense?
whereas physicists, chemists, etc; can do experiments, economists and sociologists for the most part can't. It's not like you can have the Fed, for example, change around interest rates to see if your economic model is valid. You have to wait for natural economic conditions to reproduce the conditions in your model and see if the model predicts the appropriate results... and it can take quite a while for that to happen. In the meantime, your model may be producing inaccurate results, but there's no way to know.
I agree 100%. We can choose to leave within our environmental means... but we'll have to do so. Appropriate valuation of environmental services is an important part of this - by setting a market value on environmental services, this problem (at least in part) is taken care of automatically.
PC is a fucking bludgeon used by the left to beat down people who disagree with them, and politeness is a dainty instrument used by the right to deny disfavored groups things like equal access to housing. Yeah, I can see how horrible political correctness is.
You cannot possibly expect me to believe that "politeness" is natural and wonderful and "PC" is artificial and icky. Here's a news flash: while the two terms don't necessarily mean the same thing, they're both systems of rules meant to help people get along with each other. And they were both invented and codified by people. One is no less "invented" than the other.
Our society is predicated on the idea that the economy can grow at some rate... forever. The trouble is that there are only two ways to grow the economy. You can either 1) get more workers or 2) increase productivity of your existing workforce. And the trouble with this is that there's only so much room for new people, and productivity can't be increased without limits either. So one way or another, either due to lack of labor or insufficient resource inputs... the economy is going to have to stop growing at some point. And I'm not sure anyone knows how that will affect society.
... whether this model is valid, but I can say this: 1) it isn't exactly intuitively obvious that you can model interactions between the economy and the climate in terms of a heat engine, and 2) attempts by non-climate scientists to work on climate science have a long and fairly sordid history of producing garbage (see Superfreakonomics for an excellent example). So I think there's a lot of room for skepticism here.
Also, eyerolls at the slap at so-called "soft sciences". First of all, it's just not true that such things "resist the idea of applying math". Economics and sociology are both very math/statistics intensive. Also, economics (as stated in the GP post) is clearly within the realm of human behavior, but you're going to diss attempts to explain it in those terms because you don't like those icky "soft" sciences?
For what it's worth, I have a BS in physics and an MS in applied physics, so it's not like I'm some squishy "soft scientist". I just think it's silly to look down your nose at other disciplines based on your prejudices about them.
Yes, it's funny, but there's a large element of truth here. There's a long and sordid history of experts in other fields applying what they know to climate science, and coming up with stupid results. I think there's a really good chance that the earth's economy isn't really like a heat engine all, and these results will turn out not to mean much.
Yes, science has a better track record than religion in solving the world's problems. But blindly assuming that "science" is going to solve all our problems is itself not science - it's religion. There are certain facts involved here: 1) the earth's population is growing exponentially, while earth's resources are not. 2) there's no credible mechanism for exploiting resources off earth (at least, at a price anyone could afford).
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that those assuming that science/technology will save us are doing anything other than channelling Pollyanna. To state this another way: using the scientific method/technological processes to solve actual problems: science. Assuming that science will solve a problem, without any evidence that it's possible: religion (or might as well be).
I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern.
It's a side issue, but this is complete hogwash. Every organism will increase as much as possible - they don't "instinctively" come to equilibrium, equilibrium is forced on them by competition. In the event that an organism becomes so well adapted that it dominates its competition, its numbers will increase until it dies off as a result of increasing beyond the carrying capacity of the environment. A good example: snow geese. For many years, snow goose populations were very low because their natural habitats were limited. But then, beginning about in the 70's, two things happened: 1) snowy owl populations increased in the far north, which had the effect of increasing snow goose nesting success by driving away snow goose predators, and 2) snow geese learned to exploit a new (to them) resource: agricultural waste. As a result of those two factors, the snow goose population exploded. Unfortunately, however, it didn't "come to equilibrium" with its environment - snow geese are now so overpopulated that they're destroying both their spring breeding grounds and their wintering grounds. Unless the population can be gotten under control through hunting (which so far has had pretty limited success), a population crash is inevitable
There are other examples of the same phenomenon in other species, but what's relevant here is that humans are just an extreme example. We are so tremendously adaptable that we've been able to colonize nearly every environment on the surface of the earth, and have so outstripped every other creature that our population has grown too much for the earth to support it. That's a real problem, and I don't mean to pooh-pooh it. But I do get annoyed when I hear more examples of the meme that "animals (and primitive humans) lived in harmony with the earth, but evil (modern) man has forgotten how to do this". It's just not true - all species expand to fill all available space in whatever niche they occupy.
Looking at the text tells you your fingers are off somehow. Then you get to look at the keyboard to figure out how to get your fingers back onto the keys. Really, this is not a hard concept.
This is arguably the first substantial improvement to the mouse since it was invented in 1968 by Doug Englebart.
Ok, can't agree with this one. Since then we've added the scroll wheel, which was a huge improvement in mouse technology. If you don't believe me, try going back to a plain two-button mouse, and then work with a document bigger than your screen. You used to spend your life moving back and forth between the scroll bar and the text. We've also, for the most part, done away with crappy ball mice in favor of the light tracking ones, which eliminated the sticky mouse problem.
Multi-touch may turn out to be a big deal, but it's certainly a stretch to say that mice haven't improved substantially since '68.
... how often do you click, anyway? If your finger would seriously get tired from being lifted a millimeter off the mouse and then letting it fall back... man, see a doctor. If you can't manage the effort involved in lifting your finger occasionally to click, I'd hate to see what happened when you have to actually TYPE something.
I'm sort of lukewarm to the whole mighty mouse concept myself, but I can't see this as a serious objection to it.
Dude, without any kind of tactile feedback, you have to look at the keyboard, instead of looking at the text you're typing. How can that not be a problem? Reasonable people can disagree over whether that means tactile feedback is "nice-to-have" or "critical", but let's not pretend the issue doesn't even exist.
The website 1) is designed for the general public to publish comments, and 2) apparently allows "anonymous" posting, so it's hard to know what "unauthorized use" even means. "To protect against misuse" is ridiculously vague, and in practice, means "to protect against anything we decide we don't like". So this doesn't change much - yes, revealing his identity was probably strictly legal. It's still a crappy thing to do.
Slashdot Mirror
... and although the main knock against them has been poor network coverage, I actually haven't had any problems with that. I think AT&T's real screwup was to allow network coverage problems to go on in New York and the SF Bay area. I mean, come on - if you had to pick a couple places to screw up that would absolutely guarantee the most negative publicity, it would be there. Meanwhile, my coverage out here in the sticks is actually pretty damn good. I get 3-4 bars of 3G coverage even where I work in rural Virginia, which is kind of amazing.
I used to use a Treo on Sprint, and while I liked Sprint's policies (there was none of the nickel-and-diming that Verizon always pulls), their coverage was absolutely horrible. I could barely get a call through anywhere. It wasn't just the phone, either - my wife was on a more basic flip phone with Sprint, and her coverage absolutely sucked too. Maybe things are better now, but I doubt I'll be leaving AT&T anytime soon.
Sharing documents via, say Google Docs: go to Google docs, work on your document, click "share". Sharing documents via a wiki: go to... where? To my knowledge, there's nothing even remotely as well known, easily accessible, and oh yes, free, as Google Docs. So you pretty much do need to know something about setting up a server to make this happen, and the idea that "with the state of software today", you need to have such expertise (or spend the money) just to be able to share a document with someone is simply laughable.
And regarding the sharing of homework... when did you go to school - the Neolithic? I went to high school around 30 years ago, and even then we had these things called "group assignments". You know, the same way that people actually work in offices and stuff. You should look into it.
Both locally run applications and "cloud"-based applications have problems. Choose among them based on your needs.
Next!
... in the form of aluminum oxides. It is most certainly not plentiful in the form of metallic aluminum, and the oxidized form is, well, already oxidized, and won't be oxidizing again in your propellant unless you reduce it first. Which takes an enormous amount of energy. Which means we're pretty much back to where we started. Not that ALICE is a useless technology, but you'll either need to haul your aluminum with you or make it on site - both of which would have significant problems.
... by just not going at all. The point is that we have an obligation to provide a launch system for our astronauts that provides reasonable levels of safety for them. It is just plain unethical even to ask people to volunteer for what amounts to a game of Russian roulette without a much better reason than messing around with the ISS.
... on one of my ships (where they actually thought things through) the motto was "readiness through safety". The idea being that, yes, if you put safety uber alles, you couldn't get anything done. But reasonable levels of safety actually help you accomplish your mission by eliminating unnecessary injuries and equipment damage. I think that the space shuttle program has a long, long way to go before they've achieved "reasonable levels of safety". The monetary cost alone of the two failures to date was pretty freakin' high, to say nothing of the opportunity costs (lost missions, etc), and of course, the loss of human life.
Deaths on space shuttle flights: 14. Deaths on Soyuz flights: 4. Deaths on most recent version of Soyuz flights: 0. So, NASA could buy a safer rocket: Soyuz. Of course, that would make Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, et. al, very angry, so that'll never happen.
I also have to say that the general feeling around here that astronauts are expendable is pretty fucking reprehensible. Launching people into space onboard a system that we damn well KNOW has a terrible safety record is not ok, people. We have an obligation to provide a system with reasonable levels of safety for our astronauts, and if we can't, then we damn well better not go until we can. The American people are hardly being irrational to insist upon this.
I'm all in favor of increased spending on domestic priorities, but NASA's budget is not the place to look. The real money is in the defense/homeland security budgets, which combined are pushing a trillion dollars a year (when you include costs for various wars, VA costs, and actual DOD/DHS budgets). Why is it, exactly, that we're spending more on the DOD alone than the entire rest of the world - combined - spends on defense?
whereas physicists, chemists, etc; can do experiments, economists and sociologists for the most part can't. It's not like you can have the Fed, for example, change around interest rates to see if your economic model is valid. You have to wait for natural economic conditions to reproduce the conditions in your model and see if the model predicts the appropriate results... and it can take quite a while for that to happen. In the meantime, your model may be producing inaccurate results, but there's no way to know.
I agree 100%. We can choose to leave within our environmental means... but we'll have to do so. Appropriate valuation of environmental services is an important part of this - by setting a market value on environmental services, this problem (at least in part) is taken care of automatically.
PC is a fucking bludgeon used by the left to beat down people who disagree with them, and politeness is a dainty instrument used by the right to deny disfavored groups things like equal access to housing. Yeah, I can see how horrible political correctness is.
Show me someone complaining about "hypersensitivity to safety", and I'll show you someone who's not exposed to much risk in his daily life.
You cannot possibly expect me to believe that "politeness" is natural and wonderful and "PC" is artificial and icky. Here's a news flash: while the two terms don't necessarily mean the same thing, they're both systems of rules meant to help people get along with each other. And they were both invented and codified by people. One is no less "invented" than the other.
Our society is predicated on the idea that the economy can grow at some rate... forever. The trouble is that there are only two ways to grow the economy. You can either 1) get more workers or 2) increase productivity of your existing workforce. And the trouble with this is that there's only so much room for new people, and productivity can't be increased without limits either. So one way or another, either due to lack of labor or insufficient resource inputs... the economy is going to have to stop growing at some point. And I'm not sure anyone knows how that will affect society.
... whether this model is valid, but I can say this: 1) it isn't exactly intuitively obvious that you can model interactions between the economy and the climate in terms of a heat engine, and 2) attempts by non-climate scientists to work on climate science have a long and fairly sordid history of producing garbage (see Superfreakonomics for an excellent example). So I think there's a lot of room for skepticism here.
Also, eyerolls at the slap at so-called "soft sciences". First of all, it's just not true that such things "resist the idea of applying math". Economics and sociology are both very math/statistics intensive. Also, economics (as stated in the GP post) is clearly within the realm of human behavior, but you're going to diss attempts to explain it in those terms because you don't like those icky "soft" sciences?
For what it's worth, I have a BS in physics and an MS in applied physics, so it's not like I'm some squishy "soft scientist". I just think it's silly to look down your nose at other disciplines based on your prejudices about them.
Yes, it's funny, but there's a large element of truth here. There's a long and sordid history of experts in other fields applying what they know to climate science, and coming up with stupid results. I think there's a really good chance that the earth's economy isn't really like a heat engine all, and these results will turn out not to mean much.
Yes, science has a better track record than religion in solving the world's problems. But blindly assuming that "science" is going to solve all our problems is itself not science - it's religion. There are certain facts involved here: 1) the earth's population is growing exponentially, while earth's resources are not. 2) there's no credible mechanism for exploiting resources off earth (at least, at a price anyone could afford).
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that those assuming that science/technology will save us are doing anything other than channelling Pollyanna. To state this another way: using the scientific method/technological processes to solve actual problems: science. Assuming that science will solve a problem, without any evidence that it's possible: religion (or might as well be).
It's a side issue, but this is complete hogwash. Every organism will increase as much as possible - they don't "instinctively" come to equilibrium, equilibrium is forced on them by competition. In the event that an organism becomes so well adapted that it dominates its competition, its numbers will increase until it dies off as a result of increasing beyond the carrying capacity of the environment. A good example: snow geese. For many years, snow goose populations were very low because their natural habitats were limited. But then, beginning about in the 70's, two things happened: 1) snowy owl populations increased in the far north, which had the effect of increasing snow goose nesting success by driving away snow goose predators, and 2) snow geese learned to exploit a new (to them) resource: agricultural waste. As a result of those two factors, the snow goose population exploded. Unfortunately, however, it didn't "come to equilibrium" with its environment - snow geese are now so overpopulated that they're destroying both their spring breeding grounds and their wintering grounds. Unless the population can be gotten under control through hunting (which so far has had pretty limited success), a population crash is inevitable
There are other examples of the same phenomenon in other species, but what's relevant here is that humans are just an extreme example. We are so tremendously adaptable that we've been able to colonize nearly every environment on the surface of the earth, and have so outstripped every other creature that our population has grown too much for the earth to support it. That's a real problem, and I don't mean to pooh-pooh it. But I do get annoyed when I hear more examples of the meme that "animals (and primitive humans) lived in harmony with the earth, but evil (modern) man has forgotten how to do this". It's just not true - all species expand to fill all available space in whatever niche they occupy.
Looking at the text tells you your fingers are off somehow. Then you get to look at the keyboard to figure out how to get your fingers back onto the keys. Really, this is not a hard concept.
From TFA:
Ok, can't agree with this one. Since then we've added the scroll wheel, which was a huge improvement in mouse technology. If you don't believe me, try going back to a plain two-button mouse, and then work with a document bigger than your screen. You used to spend your life moving back and forth between the scroll bar and the text. We've also, for the most part, done away with crappy ball mice in favor of the light tracking ones, which eliminated the sticky mouse problem.
Multi-touch may turn out to be a big deal, but it's certainly a stretch to say that mice haven't improved substantially since '68.
... how often do you click, anyway? If your finger would seriously get tired from being lifted a millimeter off the mouse and then letting it fall back... man, see a doctor. If you can't manage the effort involved in lifting your finger occasionally to click, I'd hate to see what happened when you have to actually TYPE something.
I'm sort of lukewarm to the whole mighty mouse concept myself, but I can't see this as a serious objection to it.
MS: displaying prototypes of multi-touch mice. Apple: actually selling one. That right there is sort of a microcosm of the whole industry.
Dude, without any kind of tactile feedback, you have to look at the keyboard, instead of looking at the text you're typing. How can that not be a problem? Reasonable people can disagree over whether that means tactile feedback is "nice-to-have" or "critical", but let's not pretend the issue doesn't even exist.
The website 1) is designed for the general public to publish comments, and 2) apparently allows "anonymous" posting, so it's hard to know what "unauthorized use" even means. "To protect against misuse" is ridiculously vague, and in practice, means "to protect against anything we decide we don't like". So this doesn't change much - yes, revealing his identity was probably strictly legal. It's still a crappy thing to do.
Where "misuse" is defined as "whatever we say it is". That's a loophole big enough to drive a truck through.