For my dad's machine, I just delete the quicklaunch icon for IE, install FF, and tell him "just click this orange and blue thingie instead of the blue E. It's the same thing". Works fine.
I've only ever been in charge of naming my home machines, but I've been through a couple of schemes. For a while, it was names of the homes of various pantheons ("Olympus", "Valhalla", etc). Then for a while I was down to just one machine - Valhalla. As new machines showed up, Valhalla became a file server, and the individual machines became Norse gods: my wife's machine was Frigg, and we also had Baldur, Njord, etc. There have been a couple of Loki's, which for some reason I've always reserved for small devices (once a laptop, now my iPhone).
... provided you can solve the technical problems involved in maintaining a self-contained, artificial ecosystem over a relatively long period of time - far from a sure thing. But it's not economically viable. The cost of doing even step 1 is beyond exorbitant. And what's the payoff? We do large scale interplanetary transport... to what end?
Until you can answer the questions of who could make money at this, how do they make it, and how much they could make, this is going nowhere. You'd never get anyone to invest.
1) The economic value of keeping at least some of these species alive is almost certainly non-zero 2) Extinction is frequently indicative of widespread ecosystem problems, which in turn can cause problems for us, such as health issues and reduced agricultural productivity (strictly speaking, this is an argument in favor of avoiding habitat destruction, but it has reduced extinction as a side effect).
And this is before considering the aesthetic benefits of avoiding extinction - if you've ever witnessed a birder sight a rare species, you know what I'm talking about.
We should avoid fouling our own nest because it's good for US, not just because we feel sorry for attractive creatures.
With smartphones, wireless broadband cards for laptops, and the wide availability of broadband Internet access, how often does someone use an email-capable computer that is not also connected to the Internet with one of the above connections?
When you're in an airplane? When you're visiting your parents, who still only have crappy dialup service? When you're visiting someone else's office, and you can't get into their wired network, the 3g network is too weak (or you don't have an air card, as I don't), and they don't have a wireless network available to you (our building has coverage only in certain areas)?
The basic attitude of the show is that the accused is always guilty, and police work is all about getting the evidence to convict, not to find out the truth.
That IS what police work is all about. There's a common misconception that police (and prosecutors) mission in life is to dispense justice. In fact, their job is to get convictions with the least possible amount of fuss. Evidence that contradicts the theory of the accused's guilt is unwanted and not looked for (and in some cases, actively obfuscated or destroyed). Fundamental rights like due process are portrayed as the enemy of justice, because that's how law enforcement perceives it. If you're ever arrested, it would behoove you to keep this in mind.
This particular nanny-state regulation was introduced by a Republican, dumbass. So I think it's unlikely that the scary Democrats are going to do much to advance this.
In Virginia, local law enforcement can't refuse to grant the permit per state law. Not sure where you live, but other states no doubt have similar statutes.
... would get wise to this pretty quickly. "Hey, another of our customers rear-ended Joe Schmoe? That's the third one this year." An investigation would get going pretty quickly.
I'm mostly onboard with the idea that our society has remained almost unbelievably prudish about sex. But regarding this:
In earlier centuries, it was normal for a 15 year old girl (sometimes younger) to get married. Personally, if she does it consensually, then it's none of my business as far as I'm concerned.
The thing is, we have age-of-consent laws because it's sort of meaningless for a 15 year old girl to give "consent" to marriage. At that age, neither girls nor boys know enough about what they're getting into to truly consent to a marriage.
And sure, mores do change with the times. In earlier centuries, it was also pretty common for those 15 year olds to be literally purchased from their parents. So while we're far from utopia, I think that things are a whole lot better now on balance than they were back then. I vote for increasing sexual freedom for grownups, with continued protection for kids.
For the life of me, I can't understand why we continue to waste time and money trying to prohibit things that 1) don't affect anyone not involved in the transaction and 2) people are absolutely, positively going to do, no matter how illegal they are. People are going to gamble, use drugs, and patronize prostitutes, period. Why can't we just accept the fact and move on?
Coriolis force as a show stopper? Well, given that:
current nano-fiber technology has to improve by a couple orders of magnitude before we can even think about building such a cable
the costs for building the cable aren't even possible to estimate, and are likely to dwarf the cost of conventional rocket launch for the foreseeable future
the technology required to construct the climbers, moor the counterweight, produce and deploy the cable, provide power, etc, doesn't exist
"space management" issues such as collisions with space junk, aircraft, etc, are going to be difficult at best to resolve
and because the above factors, financial backing for such an enterprise is all but non-existent
... let's just say I wouldn't be holding my breath waiting for the space elevator. Unless we can solve the problems involving manufacturing of carbon fibers with the appropriate properties (which is far from a sure thing), worrying about issues like Coriolis on the ascending climbers is like discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Answer: more than all the governments on earth put together could afford to spend. Just the first part of step 1 - "establish moon base" - is ludicrously expensive.
Seems to me that there are plenty of companies, states, countries, and so on, who would be delighted to get the chance to spend millions of dollars to have their stuff being used by a Mars crew.
There's this thing called "return on investment". I'm a manager at a very large engineering company, and anyone at our outfit who proposed spending millions of dollars to send stuff with our logo on it to Mars would get laughed out of the room. I doubt our company is alone in this.
Why is nobody trying to convince Wisconsin to start their own Mars mission to send five kilos of cheese into Mars orbit along with some clothes from Lands' End and fifteen or twenty kilos of brats and cheese bread?
You're kidding, right? For starters, because the taxpayers would string up the legislature if they wasted tax funds this way. And even if you managed to persuade them to do this, you'd only need to do it, what, a million times before you had enough food (and the ever important Squall jackets) necessary to outfit a Mars colony for any length of time?
What's the likely gain? Specifically, can anyone make any money from this? If the answer is no, you're left with stuff like prestige for country that launched the mission, and increased scientific knowledge. There's a limit to the risks people will take and the money they'll spend in exchange for this.
If you think there is money to be made, well, make the case. Bear in mind that getting stuff out of earth's gravity well, into Mars', and back again, is almost unimaginably expensive (and for the return trip at least, technically very difficult to accomplish). Also bear in mind that Mars is mostly made out of the same things as earth: iron, oxygen, silicon, etc.
and even people who climb Mt. Everest bring their own oxygen, food & water. why would astronauts going to Mars need to worry about no air/food?
Do you seriously mean to suggest that Mars colonists are going to bring all the air, water, and food they need WITH THEM? Do you have any idea how much mass you're talking about? The only way this could possibly be done is in some sort of Biosphere II type environment... and we don't know how to do that.
astronauts are also not at risk of getting lost due to a lack of modern navigation technology.
Three words: Mars Climate Orbiter.
our astronauts aren't going to be stricken by scurvy, nor are they going to contract polio, malaria, or other now preventable diseases. they also won't die form bacterial infections that killed millions of people before antibiotics were discovered.
No, they'll get radiation poisoning instead.
People intent on doing this Mars colonization thing need to take these problems seriously. Yes, technology has advanced since 1492. The problem is also orders of magnitude more difficult.
A rather important difference being that in, say, Jamestown, you didn't need freaking life support systems to walk outside. All you needed to do was bring your farm implements, seeds, and livestock, and you were in business. And even then, the first colonists barely made it, even with periodic resupply. Given that our track record of maintaining "biosphere" type systems on earth has been mixed at best, I wouldn't give too much for your chances on Mars. Colonizing North America: dangerous. Colonizing Mars: yes, truly suicidal, at least for now.
And it's right out there in TFA... e-book readers cost too damn much money. You'd have to be buying 50 books a year before it makes sense to buy a Kindle, and most of us aren't spending that much on books. The "can't read in bathtub" "don't like the screen" "DRM makes me mad" arguments are all just icing on the cake.
And apparently it's not just annoying/. geeks who have reached this conclusion, as the Kindle does not appear to be on track to replace the printed book any time soon. If Amazon really wanted to change the reading world, they'd be giving away huge numbers of Kindles... then maybe they'd get somewhere.
The thing is that there are already tons of "no-profit" textbooks out there - books that professors wrote because they didn't like any of the existing texts, and wanted something different for their classes. I had a number of classes with texts like this. Generally, the profs are prohibited from earning profits on these things... but the publishing companies and bookstores are not, and they don't end up being much cheaper than any other text. This sort of thing would be perfect for e-book distro - the prof could just issue the books straight to his/her students at essentially no cost. And this could conceivably force down prices for other texts, as students gravitated toward the professors with the lowest book costs.
I think all the PDE (partial diff. eq.) like heat equation, wave equation, gravitation should have been covered in high school. Just get a basic high school text...
You've got to be fucking kidding me. Name one high school in the US that's covering PDE's. Calculus I could believe - differential equations of any flavor? Not a chance.
Yes, I agree that PDEs probably should have been introduced before the 3rd year of a PHD program (maybe they were, TFA isn't totally clear on that point). But saying that they are being covered in high school is a ludicrous exaggeration.
I got my BS (physics) from Texas A&M (cue the Aggie jokes in 3... 2... 1...) and every physics major had to get their PDE merit badge before going on to linear systems/matrix math. So the grand math total was 3 semesters calc, 1 ODE, 1 PDE, and 1 linear systems. To my knowledge, that's pretty routine for physics programs - in fact, I don't see how you could get through stuff like QM without it. I'm not sure what math majors took for math, but surely it had to be at least that in-depth.
It's not impossible. It's just that there weren't terribly many planets to choose from a billion+ years before us, and the earlier you go, the fewer there would have been. My guess is that the number drops off rather sharply as you go back in time, because you need some critical mass of heavy elements to form large bodies at all. If there's not enough dust around, planets don't coalesce.
The same guy who paid to go to the moon. Wait, there was no such guy.
...and we last went to the moon... in 1974ish. Under the influence of the Cold War. And once that stimulus went away, so did the manned space program. And an interstellar probe would cost WAAAY more money even than Apollo. The technology to do it doesn't even exist - we can't get to relativistic speeds, and even if we could, we don't know how to make a self-contained ecosystem (recall Biosphere II).
the worldn't doesn't need to have the attention span of a hummingbird on steroids
It may not NEED to, but in fact it does.
We've been able to commit like that ever since the pharaos got the huge pyramids built
Which happened thousands of years ago, by a guy who commanded thousands of slaves. Nowadays, people expect to get something for their tax dollars.
Look, you can't just wave your hands and make this problem go away. To get people to go along with funding a giant interstellar expedition, there has to be at least some possibility of a return on the (enormous) investment. And there just isn't one. With Apollo we got a) a technological leg up on the Russians, b) a big PR boost, and c) lots of valuable scientific data. With some kind of generational, relativistic probe, you'd never even hear from them again - because of the distances involved, exchanging signals would take forever, would be hard to even detect, and because of time dilation would have to be picked up by your fairly distant descendants. There's just nothing in it for the people who'd have to pay for it.
Slashdot Mirror
For my dad's machine, I just delete the quicklaunch icon for IE, install FF, and tell him "just click this orange and blue thingie instead of the blue E. It's the same thing". Works fine.
I've only ever been in charge of naming my home machines, but I've been through a couple of schemes. For a while, it was names of the homes of various pantheons ("Olympus", "Valhalla", etc). Then for a while I was down to just one machine - Valhalla. As new machines showed up, Valhalla became a file server, and the individual machines became Norse gods: my wife's machine was Frigg, and we also had Baldur, Njord, etc. There have been a couple of Loki's, which for some reason I've always reserved for small devices (once a laptop, now my iPhone).
Economic break-even is not the same as energy break-even, but even so, wind farms manage to do both and more. Polar Red has provided links below.
... but the explosions in my car aren't from NUCLEAR FRICKEN' BOMBS! Yes, I think we need to worry about this.
... provided you can solve the technical problems involved in maintaining a self-contained, artificial ecosystem over a relatively long period of time - far from a sure thing. But it's not economically viable. The cost of doing even step 1 is beyond exorbitant. And what's the payoff? We do large scale interplanetary transport... to what end?
Until you can answer the questions of who could make money at this, how do they make it, and how much they could make, this is going nowhere. You'd never get anyone to invest.
1) The economic value of keeping at least some of these species alive is almost certainly non-zero
2) Extinction is frequently indicative of widespread ecosystem problems, which in turn can cause problems for us, such as health issues and reduced agricultural productivity (strictly speaking, this is an argument in favor of avoiding habitat destruction, but it has reduced extinction as a side effect).
And this is before considering the aesthetic benefits of avoiding extinction - if you've ever witnessed a birder sight a rare species, you know what I'm talking about.
We should avoid fouling our own nest because it's good for US, not just because we feel sorry for attractive creatures.
When you're in an airplane? When you're visiting your parents, who still only have crappy dialup service? When you're visiting someone else's office, and you can't get into their wired network, the 3g network is too weak (or you don't have an air card, as I don't), and they don't have a wireless network available to you (our building has coverage only in certain areas)?
This capability definitely has some uses.
That IS what police work is all about. There's a common misconception that police (and prosecutors) mission in life is to dispense justice. In fact, their job is to get convictions with the least possible amount of fuss. Evidence that contradicts the theory of the accused's guilt is unwanted and not looked for (and in some cases, actively obfuscated or destroyed). Fundamental rights like due process are portrayed as the enemy of justice, because that's how law enforcement perceives it. If you're ever arrested, it would behoove you to keep this in mind.
This particular nanny-state regulation was introduced by a Republican, dumbass. So I think it's unlikely that the scary Democrats are going to do much to advance this.
In Virginia, local law enforcement can't refuse to grant the permit per state law. Not sure where you live, but other states no doubt have similar statutes.
... would get wise to this pretty quickly. "Hey, another of our customers rear-ended Joe Schmoe? That's the third one this year." An investigation would get going pretty quickly.
I'm mostly onboard with the idea that our society has remained almost unbelievably prudish about sex. But regarding this:
The thing is, we have age-of-consent laws because it's sort of meaningless for a 15 year old girl to give "consent" to marriage. At that age, neither girls nor boys know enough about what they're getting into to truly consent to a marriage.
And sure, mores do change with the times. In earlier centuries, it was also pretty common for those 15 year olds to be literally purchased from their parents. So while we're far from utopia, I think that things are a whole lot better now on balance than they were back then. I vote for increasing sexual freedom for grownups, with continued protection for kids.
For the life of me, I can't understand why we continue to waste time and money trying to prohibit things that 1) don't affect anyone not involved in the transaction and 2) people are absolutely, positively going to do, no matter how illegal they are. People are going to gamble, use drugs, and patronize prostitutes, period. Why can't we just accept the fact and move on?
Coriolis force as a show stopper? Well, given that:
... let's just say I wouldn't be holding my breath waiting for the space elevator. Unless we can solve the problems involving manufacturing of carbon fibers with the appropriate properties (which is far from a sure thing), worrying about issues like Coriolis on the ascending climbers is like discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Answer: more than all the governments on earth put together could afford to spend. Just the first part of step 1 - "establish moon base" - is ludicrously expensive.
There's this thing called "return on investment". I'm a manager at a very large engineering company, and anyone at our outfit who proposed spending millions of dollars to send stuff with our logo on it to Mars would get laughed out of the room. I doubt our company is alone in this.
You're kidding, right? For starters, because the taxpayers would string up the legislature if they wasted tax funds this way. And even if you managed to persuade them to do this, you'd only need to do it, what, a million times before you had enough food (and the ever important Squall jackets) necessary to outfit a Mars colony for any length of time?
What's the likely gain? Specifically, can anyone make any money from this? If the answer is no, you're left with stuff like prestige for country that launched the mission, and increased scientific knowledge. There's a limit to the risks people will take and the money they'll spend in exchange for this.
If you think there is money to be made, well, make the case. Bear in mind that getting stuff out of earth's gravity well, into Mars', and back again, is almost unimaginably expensive (and for the return trip at least, technically very difficult to accomplish). Also bear in mind that Mars is mostly made out of the same things as earth: iron, oxygen, silicon, etc.
Do you seriously mean to suggest that Mars colonists are going to bring all the air, water, and food they need WITH THEM? Do you have any idea how much mass you're talking about? The only way this could possibly be done is in some sort of Biosphere II type environment... and we don't know how to do that.
Three words: Mars Climate Orbiter.
No, they'll get radiation poisoning instead.
People intent on doing this Mars colonization thing need to take these problems seriously. Yes, technology has advanced since 1492. The problem is also orders of magnitude more difficult.
A rather important difference being that in, say, Jamestown, you didn't need freaking life support systems to walk outside. All you needed to do was bring your farm implements, seeds, and livestock, and you were in business. And even then, the first colonists barely made it, even with periodic resupply. Given that our track record of maintaining "biosphere" type systems on earth has been mixed at best, I wouldn't give too much for your chances on Mars. Colonizing North America: dangerous. Colonizing Mars: yes, truly suicidal, at least for now.
And it's right out there in TFA... e-book readers cost too damn much money. You'd have to be buying 50 books a year before it makes sense to buy a Kindle, and most of us aren't spending that much on books. The "can't read in bathtub" "don't like the screen" "DRM makes me mad" arguments are all just icing on the cake.
And apparently it's not just annoying /. geeks who have reached this conclusion, as the Kindle does not appear to be on track to replace the printed book any time soon. If Amazon really wanted to change the reading world, they'd be giving away huge numbers of Kindles... then maybe they'd get somewhere.
The thing is that there are already tons of "no-profit" textbooks out there - books that professors wrote because they didn't like any of the existing texts, and wanted something different for their classes. I had a number of classes with texts like this. Generally, the profs are prohibited from earning profits on these things... but the publishing companies and bookstores are not, and they don't end up being much cheaper than any other text. This sort of thing would be perfect for e-book distro - the prof could just issue the books straight to his/her students at essentially no cost. And this could conceivably force down prices for other texts, as students gravitated toward the professors with the lowest book costs.
You've got to be fucking kidding me. Name one high school in the US that's covering PDE's. Calculus I could believe - differential equations of any flavor? Not a chance.
Yes, I agree that PDEs probably should have been introduced before the 3rd year of a PHD program (maybe they were, TFA isn't totally clear on that point). But saying that they are being covered in high school is a ludicrous exaggeration.
I got my BS (physics) from Texas A&M (cue the Aggie jokes in 3... 2... 1...) and every physics major had to get their PDE merit badge before going on to linear systems/matrix math. So the grand math total was 3 semesters calc, 1 ODE, 1 PDE, and 1 linear systems. To my knowledge, that's pretty routine for physics programs - in fact, I don't see how you could get through stuff like QM without it. I'm not sure what math majors took for math, but surely it had to be at least that in-depth.
It's not impossible. It's just that there weren't terribly many planets to choose from a billion+ years before us, and the earlier you go, the fewer there would have been. My guess is that the number drops off rather sharply as you go back in time, because you need some critical mass of heavy elements to form large bodies at all. If there's not enough dust around, planets don't coalesce.
It may not NEED to, but in fact it does.
Which happened thousands of years ago, by a guy who commanded thousands of slaves. Nowadays, people expect to get something for their tax dollars.
Look, you can't just wave your hands and make this problem go away. To get people to go along with funding a giant interstellar expedition, there has to be at least some possibility of a return on the (enormous) investment. And there just isn't one. With Apollo we got a) a technological leg up on the Russians, b) a big PR boost, and c) lots of valuable scientific data. With some kind of generational, relativistic probe, you'd never even hear from them again - because of the distances involved, exchanging signals would take forever, would be hard to even detect, and because of time dilation would have to be picked up by your fairly distant descendants. There's just nothing in it for the people who'd have to pay for it.