There are really not that many kinds of elementary particles. We're talking quarks (6 kinds), leptons (electrons, mus, and taus, and their associated neutrinos); and various force-mediating particles like photons, gluons (a few kinds), and a few of these other particles such as the theorized Higgs. Compare these fundamental units of particle physics to the elements, which are the fundamental units of chemistry. There are 92 natural elements, and a couple dozen synthetic ones. How can nature be so complex?
The answer is that it's as complex as it is. If that doesn't conform to "your expectations as a layman"... then change your expectations.
This kind of life cycle - slowly gathering energy for a long time, then expending it all in a burst of flowering activity - is fairly common among plants. I'm sure botanists specializing in palm trees are fascinated, but why is this on the front page at Slashdot?
In this case, however, users of such sites are probably better off assuming that their personal safety remains a personal responsibility, rather than placing faith in a background check that has little chance of uncovering any information on a person attempting to hide it.'"
You're kidding me, right? The background check, conducted by some presumably reliable company, with corporate resources behind it, is unlikely to uncover any information on the potential date... but I'm going to do better myself by using "personal responsibility"?
Don't get me wrong - there's lots not to like about this bill. But let's not kid ourselves - "personal responsibility" doesn't give you some kind of magical powers that reveal information not available to a formal investigation.
... because from what I can gather, the law doesn't force dating sites to conduct background checks, just to indicate whether they conduct them or not. It's a big difference.
... but I can pretty well guarantee it's not true. One's rights in the Army are highly circumscribed, and the "right" to overrule your boss on what's communicated to higher headquarters is not one of them.
This idea is rather half-baked - whether the candidates are science experts is neither here nor there. Their ATTITUDES toward science are what's important.
... but you're talking out your ass. You have no idea whether the results of interfering with the natural course of the hurricane would be better or worse than leaving well enough alone. And since we're talking about the potential for billions of dollars worth of damage and an unknown number of lost lives, we really, really need to be sure of what we're doing before we just blindly start doing it.
There's nothing "vague and unspecified" about the potential problems - you are a) messing about with the transfer of enormous quantities of energy from the tropics to the temperate and polar regions, b) substantially changing rainfall patterns for a large chunk of the North American continent, and c) "playing God" by deliberately aiming a hurricane from one area to another (which presumably has its own population). We don't know the consequences of any of this, and in any case, this assumes nothing goes wrong. Here's a scenario for you: we divert a hurricane away from Miami, but hit unprepared Havana instead, killing 10,000 people. In retaliation, Venezuela announces an oil embargo against the US. War breaks out.
The argument that those who oppose weather control are Luddites is a red herring. There's a little more at stake here than acceptance of, say, labor-saving technology. Given that even the amount of risk we're taking on is unknown, we need to be extra careful to understand the consequences of our actions before proceeding.
It's not as if the fate of human civilization depends on steering hurricanes - our hurricane-filled environment still supports us "as we currently are" acceptably well. Before we undertake a project like this, in which even the level of risk we propose to accept is unknown, we need to be sure that the cure isn't worse than the disease. For example (as I've pointed out elsewhere), the Eastern US gets some significant portion of its rainfall from tropical storm precipitation. Once we start steering these things out to sea, the clamor to avoid hurricane damage from ALL tropical weather systems is likely to be irresistible. We've got an idea what storm damages cost. But what are the costs when the average annual rainfall drops by 10 or 20" over a huge portion of North America?
We need to understand what we're doing before we leap into this kind of thing. If we had been scientifically advanced enough to ask these kinds of questions BEFORE we dumped enormous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, our history of the use of fossil fuels (and the apparently inevitable evolution into a significantly changed planet) may have been different.
The east coast of the US gets a significant portion of its annual rainfall in the form of tropical storm-related precipitation. If these storms were steered out to sea, what effect would that have on North American ecosystems? Agriculture? No one knows.
Who really cares about reducing "bloat" any more? There was a time when hard disk space was at a premium (Stacker, anyone?), but these days, I've got more disk space than I know what to do with. And 90% of what I do have there is data: pictures, music, etc. Reducing the size of the applications would result in a barely noticeable change.
I can still sort of see the argument with respect to memory, particularly if you're running an older machine... but for a relatively new one, you've got plenty of RAM in there for almost anything. Even if you're running an older rig, just buy more damn memory!
I've read some callous stuff on Slashdot before, but I think that a post longing for the good old days when bankruptcy was punished by "death, prison, slavery, etc", tops them all. Congratulations - I didn't think it was possible for me to be shocked anymore. I also like how you've managed to completely disclaim any responsibility on the part of irresponsible creditors, who've been pushing credit to people who are unlikely to be able to manage it, for any of these problems.
Instead, we must all bear the burden of the massive consumer debt.
WTF are you even talking about here? If I run up massive debt, it doesn't affect you in any way. You won't be making the payments. You, having (presumably) good credit, are not going to be asked to pay any more interest than you were before. So what's this about how "we all" are bearing the burden?
The very people who have the biggest problem with consumption are debtors, who are, by definition, not wealthy.
It seems rather anticlimactic to bring this up at this point in the post, but I think you've missed the point here. He's not talking about the fiscal problems with "gluttony" - it's the emotional problems associated with it, which are also experienced by the "wealthy".
... that the rails were manufactured in relatively short sections and then assembled (welded) in place. The space elevator would have to be MANUFACTURED in one continuous 36,000 km piece, without a single defect.
There's thousands of Near Earth Asteroids which contain hundreds of times more metal than the entire crust of the Earth is believed to hold.
Yes, and 99% of it is iron and nickel, which are already present on Earth in great abundance. Meaning we can extract it right here much, much cheaper than going into space to get it. The idea that the space elevator is somehow going to make getting to orbit really cheap is, well, not very realistic, as has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread. There are numerous other problems involved in space mining; such as the need to deliver entire factories, plus the miners and support people needed to man them, to the asteroid belt; the need to get your mined metals back to the Earth; etc.
Also, you talk talk about coal & oil in addition to "precious metals", but coal & oil are not present in space. Nor is any other energy source in abundance. Sure, there's solar power, but you don't need the space elevator to get that.
Finally, these are our choices? Either mine the asteroids or kill off our surplus population? I think it's entirely reasonable that we could do neither. If we applied ourselves, we could get our population under control without having to forcibly sterilize or murder anyone. And with proper attention to recycling, etc, we could curb our appetite for resources. And we could do all that a whole lot cheaper than building a space elevator, deep space mining facilities, etc.
The bottom line: getting resources from space is not economically feasible, and won't be for the foreseeable future. This is not to say that I think space exploration is a bad idea - I think the scientific value alone justifies the expense of that. But it's not going to be a paying proposition anytime soon.
You my friend, are totally missing the point. The actual building of a space elevator might be insanely expensive, but once it's there, getting things into space will be insanely cheap
You're right about one thing - the actual building of the space elevator would be insanely expensive. So I'm baffled as to why you think that actually getting things into space using one would be insanely cheap. How do you think they mean to fund construction? Being a slashdotter, you're familiar with the general steps:
Borrow a huge amount of money
Use money to build space elevator, while paying insane interest rates because of the risk involved
???
Profit!
In this case, the missing ??? is "charge absolutely enormous fees to use the space elevator, so we can pay off our debts". Trouble is, proven rocket technology is already in place for only sorta-enormous fees. Meaning it's highly likely you'll never get past the "borrow enormous sums of money" step. You can substitute "attract investors" for "borrow money" if you like, but it doesn't change the overall picture very much. Investors will be looking for a huge payoff to compensate them for their huge risk, and it's doubtful that will ever happen.
Would the US stay in Iraq if it had reliable guesses as to its chances, instead of lots of lobbyists persuading everyone that of course success is just around the corner if just another billion is dumped into whatever they're lobbying for?
We had reliable estimates of what was likely to happen before we invaded Iraq. We did it anyway. We have reliable guesses now as to the likely outcome if we stay. But we're not leaving. The point here is that sometimes people don't behave rationally, and better statistics about the outcome are not likely to change that.
... that threaten the US regional aircraft carrier, USS Israel?
I have to disagree with this characterization of Israel - we don't have any significant amount of force based there, and we've never to my knowledge used it as a base from which to project power into the region, so I don't think it makes sense to refer to Israel as our "regional aircraft carrier". Israel is an important ally in the region, but that's not the same thing at all.
The biggest limitation I see is not the lack of a killer app(s), but the lack of free, easily accessible WiFi everywhere. You'll need a connection to something to use these apps, and with only a few cities and towns in US with decent WiFi blanketing, this may end up being a huge problem.
Seems to me that Google's interest in WiFi and Apple's device that really needs WiFi is a match made in heaven. Apple's part of the deal is to supply a device loaded up with cool Google apps that, BTW, require lots of bandwidth. Google's part of the deal is to supply the apps and push wireless networking all over the place.
God, what a mess the "Top 10 Exoplanets" site is! Bright orange background that is absolutely physically painful to look at, requires 10 click-throughs to read the whole article (when each page has about a paragraph of text), the text itself is in little iframes that require you to scroll to get past the first few sentences - and don't get me started about the content (what little there is). If you haven't visited it... don't.
There weren't well-financed groups of hidden Nazis willing to kill themselves and everyone in a vegetable market because a cave-dwelling extremist with buckets of cash has pursuaded them that Allah will open the doors to Virgin-Mart on their behalf if they can cause as much horrifying death as possible to scare people out of wanting a simple democratic, constitutional governement, and scare them back into settling for a brutal, theocratic, medieval-style thugocracy. With nukes.
It's not the same thing. Oh, and neither has it been 7 years since the end of hostilities or even close to it, because the people stoking the current conflict (the Iranians) are still busy DOING it.
I could pick a few nits with this, but you're largely right. The question is, what is our continued presence likely to accomplish? The answer is, more of the same, but with our folks caught in the middle. The simple fact is that not even ORDER is going to be imposed on Iraq by us, to say nothing of DEMOCRACY. It's time to cut our losses and get out.
The Roman republic was characterized by an incredible degree of persistence in military matters. This was how they won their wars, not by superior military leadership/organization/technology.
Yeah, and look how well that turned out for them! We're well down the path of giving up democracy in favor of empire, bread and circuses, etc, ourselves.
Not being a part of the Defense Department, the Coast Guard isn't even IN the Pentagon. Also, the Air Force didn't exist as a service at the time the Pentagon was built. So I don't think your theory holds up.
I was working as a defense contractor at Ft. Belvoir (just outside the DC Beltway) when the Pentagon was attacked on 11 September. After the initial shock was over, the impulse for black humor kicked in, and we universally referred to the building as "the Square" from then on.
... at least, not completely. The US Armed Forces are very good at winning battles and fighting wars. They are also pretty good at doing humanitarian service and peace enforcement (although some others are better; Canada comes to mind). However, no one is very good at fighting a war and doing peace enforcement/humanitarian service at the same time. The problem is that because of political considerations, there were never enough troops alloted to Iraq to provide basic security, and that means it's never been possible for the humanitarian service aspect of the operation to be effective. And now, it's more or less too late.
Slashdot Mirror
There are really not that many kinds of elementary particles. We're talking quarks (6 kinds), leptons (electrons, mus, and taus, and their associated neutrinos); and various force-mediating particles like photons, gluons (a few kinds), and a few of these other particles such as the theorized Higgs. Compare these fundamental units of particle physics to the elements, which are the fundamental units of chemistry. There are 92 natural elements, and a couple dozen synthetic ones. How can nature be so complex?
The answer is that it's as complex as it is. If that doesn't conform to "your expectations as a layman"... then change your expectations.
Damn, beat me to it. Oh, well... move along!
This kind of life cycle - slowly gathering energy for a long time, then expending it all in a burst of flowering activity - is fairly common among plants. I'm sure botanists specializing in palm trees are fascinated, but why is this on the front page at Slashdot?
Billosaur:
You're kidding me, right? The background check, conducted by some presumably reliable company, with corporate resources behind it, is unlikely to uncover any information on the potential date... but I'm going to do better myself by using "personal responsibility"?
Don't get me wrong - there's lots not to like about this bill. But let's not kid ourselves - "personal responsibility" doesn't give you some kind of magical powers that reveal information not available to a formal investigation.
... because from what I can gather, the law doesn't force dating sites to conduct background checks, just to indicate whether they conduct them or not. It's a big difference.
... but I can pretty well guarantee it's not true. One's rights in the Army are highly circumscribed, and the "right" to overrule your boss on what's communicated to higher headquarters is not one of them.
This idea is rather half-baked - whether the candidates are science experts is neither here nor there. Their ATTITUDES toward science are what's important.
Sean
... but you're talking out your ass. You have no idea whether the results of interfering with the natural course of the hurricane would be better or worse than leaving well enough alone. And since we're talking about the potential for billions of dollars worth of damage and an unknown number of lost lives, we really, really need to be sure of what we're doing before we just blindly start doing it.
There's nothing "vague and unspecified" about the potential problems - you are a) messing about with the transfer of enormous quantities of energy from the tropics to the temperate and polar regions, b) substantially changing rainfall patterns for a large chunk of the North American continent, and c) "playing God" by deliberately aiming a hurricane from one area to another (which presumably has its own population). We don't know the consequences of any of this, and in any case, this assumes nothing goes wrong. Here's a scenario for you: we divert a hurricane away from Miami, but hit unprepared Havana instead, killing 10,000 people. In retaliation, Venezuela announces an oil embargo against the US. War breaks out.
The argument that those who oppose weather control are Luddites is a red herring. There's a little more at stake here than acceptance of, say, labor-saving technology. Given that even the amount of risk we're taking on is unknown, we need to be extra careful to understand the consequences of our actions before proceeding.
Oh, the possibilities for abuse are a lot greater than you imagine...
Insurance agent: Nice house, Mr. Public. Be a shame if anything were to, you know, "happen" to it.
It's not as if the fate of human civilization depends on steering hurricanes - our hurricane-filled environment still supports us "as we currently are" acceptably well. Before we undertake a project like this, in which even the level of risk we propose to accept is unknown, we need to be sure that the cure isn't worse than the disease. For example (as I've pointed out elsewhere), the Eastern US gets some significant portion of its rainfall from tropical storm precipitation. Once we start steering these things out to sea, the clamor to avoid hurricane damage from ALL tropical weather systems is likely to be irresistible. We've got an idea what storm damages cost. But what are the costs when the average annual rainfall drops by 10 or 20" over a huge portion of North America?
We need to understand what we're doing before we leap into this kind of thing. If we had been scientifically advanced enough to ask these kinds of questions BEFORE we dumped enormous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, our history of the use of fossil fuels (and the apparently inevitable evolution into a significantly changed planet) may have been different.
The east coast of the US gets a significant portion of its annual rainfall in the form of tropical storm-related precipitation. If these storms were steered out to sea, what effect would that have on North American ecosystems? Agriculture? No one knows.
I can tell you that the Southeastern US would gladly take a hurricane right now, as long as it wasn't too severe.
Who really cares about reducing "bloat" any more? There was a time when hard disk space was at a premium (Stacker, anyone?), but these days, I've got more disk space than I know what to do with. And 90% of what I do have there is data: pictures, music, etc. Reducing the size of the applications would result in a barely noticeable change.
I can still sort of see the argument with respect to memory, particularly if you're running an older machine... but for a relatively new one, you've got plenty of RAM in there for almost anything. Even if you're running an older rig, just buy more damn memory!
I've read some callous stuff on Slashdot before, but I think that a post longing for the good old days when bankruptcy was punished by "death, prison, slavery, etc", tops them all. Congratulations - I didn't think it was possible for me to be shocked anymore. I also like how you've managed to completely disclaim any responsibility on the part of irresponsible creditors, who've been pushing credit to people who are unlikely to be able to manage it, for any of these problems.
WTF are you even talking about here? If I run up massive debt, it doesn't affect you in any way. You won't be making the payments. You, having (presumably) good credit, are not going to be asked to pay any more interest than you were before. So what's this about how "we all" are bearing the burden?
It seems rather anticlimactic to bring this up at this point in the post, but I think you've missed the point here. He's not talking about the fiscal problems with "gluttony" - it's the emotional problems associated with it, which are also experienced by the "wealthy".
... that the rails were manufactured in relatively short sections and then assembled (welded) in place. The space elevator would have to be MANUFACTURED in one continuous 36,000 km piece, without a single defect.
... to justify space travel. A couple of things:
Yes, and 99% of it is iron and nickel, which are already present on Earth in great abundance. Meaning we can extract it right here much, much cheaper than going into space to get it. The idea that the space elevator is somehow going to make getting to orbit really cheap is, well, not very realistic, as has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread. There are numerous other problems involved in space mining; such as the need to deliver entire factories, plus the miners and support people needed to man them, to the asteroid belt; the need to get your mined metals back to the Earth; etc.
Also, you talk talk about coal & oil in addition to "precious metals", but coal & oil are not present in space. Nor is any other energy source in abundance. Sure, there's solar power, but you don't need the space elevator to get that.
Finally, these are our choices? Either mine the asteroids or kill off our surplus population? I think it's entirely reasonable that we could do neither. If we applied ourselves, we could get our population under control without having to forcibly sterilize or murder anyone. And with proper attention to recycling, etc, we could curb our appetite for resources. And we could do all that a whole lot cheaper than building a space elevator, deep space mining facilities, etc.
The bottom line: getting resources from space is not economically feasible, and won't be for the foreseeable future. This is not to say that I think space exploration is a bad idea - I think the scientific value alone justifies the expense of that. But it's not going to be a paying proposition anytime soon.
You're right about one thing - the actual building of the space elevator would be insanely expensive. So I'm baffled as to why you think that actually getting things into space using one would be insanely cheap. How do you think they mean to fund construction? Being a slashdotter, you're familiar with the general steps:
In this case, the missing ??? is "charge absolutely enormous fees to use the space elevator, so we can pay off our debts". Trouble is, proven rocket technology is already in place for only sorta-enormous fees. Meaning it's highly likely you'll never get past the "borrow enormous sums of money" step. You can substitute "attract investors" for "borrow money" if you like, but it doesn't change the overall picture very much. Investors will be looking for a huge payoff to compensate them for their huge risk, and it's doubtful that will ever happen.
We had reliable estimates of what was likely to happen before we invaded Iraq. We did it anyway. We have reliable guesses now as to the likely outcome if we stay. But we're not leaving. The point here is that sometimes people don't behave rationally, and better statistics about the outcome are not likely to change that.
I have to disagree with this characterization of Israel - we don't have any significant amount of force based there, and we've never to my knowledge used it as a base from which to project power into the region, so I don't think it makes sense to refer to Israel as our "regional aircraft carrier". Israel is an important ally in the region, but that's not the same thing at all.
Seems to me that Google's interest in WiFi and Apple's device that really needs WiFi is a match made in heaven. Apple's part of the deal is to supply a device loaded up with cool Google apps that, BTW, require lots of bandwidth. Google's part of the deal is to supply the apps and push wireless networking all over the place.
Steve, Sergey, are you listening?
God, what a mess the "Top 10 Exoplanets" site is! Bright orange background that is absolutely physically painful to look at, requires 10 click-throughs to read the whole article (when each page has about a paragraph of text), the text itself is in little iframes that require you to scroll to get past the first few sentences - and don't get me started about the content (what little there is). If you haven't visited it... don't.
I could pick a few nits with this, but you're largely right. The question is, what is our continued presence likely to accomplish? The answer is, more of the same, but with our folks caught in the middle. The simple fact is that not even ORDER is going to be imposed on Iraq by us, to say nothing of DEMOCRACY. It's time to cut our losses and get out.
Yeah, and look how well that turned out for them! We're well down the path of giving up democracy in favor of empire, bread and circuses, etc, ourselves.
Not being a part of the Defense Department, the Coast Guard isn't even IN the Pentagon. Also, the Air Force didn't exist as a service at the time the Pentagon was built. So I don't think your theory holds up.
I was working as a defense contractor at Ft. Belvoir (just outside the DC Beltway) when the Pentagon was attacked on 11 September. After the initial shock was over, the impulse for black humor kicked in, and we universally referred to the building as "the Square" from then on.
... at least, not completely. The US Armed Forces are very good at winning battles and fighting wars. They are also pretty good at doing humanitarian service and peace enforcement (although some others are better; Canada comes to mind). However, no one is very good at fighting a war and doing peace enforcement/humanitarian service at the same time. The problem is that because of political considerations, there were never enough troops alloted to Iraq to provide basic security, and that means it's never been possible for the humanitarian service aspect of the operation to be effective. And now, it's more or less too late.