There's a parallel here to timekeeping technology. Not so many years ago, mechanical clocks & watches were essentially completely replaced by quartz models, that were "better" in every respect: they were cheaper, kept better time, and offered more functionality in the same space - countdown timers, stopwatches, etc. However, there are lots of us who still like mechanical timepieces BECAUSE they're old fashioned (note that the technology switch discussed above happened while I was a kid - my first watch was digital).
No matter how great eBooks become (and they've got a long ways to go), there's always going to be a market for paper books for those interested in antique technology.
You need to read Collapse, by Jared Diamond (no link, it's easily found at Amazon, etc...). Just because it would be to our advantage, in the long term, to get a handle on global warming, doesn't mean we'll do it. People (and societies) frequently make non-optimal choices - and are thus wiped out.
Also, I think you're confused about natural selection. Individuals trying to survive != natural selection - even poorly adapted individuals will make every effort to survive. It doesn't make sense to talk about any individual's motivations from an evolutionary perspective - the idea that that we (or the dinosaurs) make choices based on the "smart evolutionary move" is incorrect. Evolution isn't an end in itself, it's a by-product of the struggle to survive under changing conditions.
Sean
Most birds, incidentally, don't have receptors that capsaicin works with, so they can eat peppers all day long and not have a problem.
This property comes in really handy if squirrels start stealing from your birdfeeder. Just mix a healthy dose of cayenne pepper with the birdseed - the squirrels lose interest really fast, but the birds don't even notice. The only trouble is that the cayenne tends to cause the seed to stick together into a big solid mass when it gets damp. Also, refilling, emptying, and cleaning the birdfeeder can become an interesting process when you have clouds of cayenne pepper forming around you!
The Harpoon missile is another robot that's been around a long time. You tell it approximately where the target is, say "go kill it" and launch. The missle flies to the appropriate area, turns on its radar, and begins searching. It selects the most likely target found in the area, and uses rather sophisticated anti-jamming technology and terminal maneuvers to defeat the target's countermeasures, flying into the the target and detonating. Fully autonomous the whole time. Tomahawk does something similar for land-based targets.
by democrats who believed that he should have magically detected the 9/11 plot
Nice try. There was no magic required. In fact, the government HAD detected the 9/11 plot (August PDB, anyone?). Not to mention the various sniffs the FBI had about the eventual hijackers studying takeoffs but not landings, etc. The problem was that Bush was more interested in continuing his vacation than responding to the PDB, and various of his cronies appointed to other high positions didn't see fit to follow up on other warnings.
But isn't vCal just a way to send calendar events between calendars? I didn't think it could actually synchronize, say, the calendar on your phone with with the one on your desktop. If, for example, you sent an appointment from your desktop calendar to your phone with vCal, then changed the desktop instance of the appointment, there'd be no way to synchronize that change with the phone using vCal - you'd have to delete the appointment from your phone and send the updated instance (again) from your desktop... right?
But in reality, you've had years of notice. What the hell are you doing in New Orleans?
Oh, say, because you were born there and have never had enough money to get out? Or because you moved there in better times and have suffered reverses, and now can't afford to move?
What are you suggesting? That all poor people should move away from areas where they might experience a natural disaster? Where would they move to? Who would pay for it?
Your post is just another way of saying that people who are poor DESERVE to be victimized, because, well... they're poor.
After the september 11 attacks, NATO 'woke up' and activated the 'an attack against one is an attack against us all' article (article 5 if I'm not mistaken).
The USA government said 'no thanks'.
Actually, that's not true. The US government accepted Article V assistance from NATO. Several NATO AWACS aircraft were dispatched from Europe to help provide airborne early warning over the continental US in the days after 11 September. The link doesn't mention the types of assistance provided, but I know from my own military experience that AWACS were provided.
Meanwhile in many sections of Iraq, people have their first clean water...
From Wikipedia: "Although the water supply has reached prewar levels in some provinces, ageing and poorly maintained equipment combined with looting and vandalism leaves the drinking water system substandard."
their first reliable electricity...
From the GAO: "However, electrical service in the country as a whole has not shown a marked
improvement over the immediate postwar levels of May 2003 and has worsened in some
governorates." Not only is electrical service worse than during Saddam's rule, it's even worse than after much of their electrical capacity was destroyed DURING the war.
their first real sewer system, ever...
From Wikipedia (same link as before): "Untreated waste is polluting the Euphrates River, and many treatment plants require repair. More than 45 pipelines have exploded"
Hundreds of schools, dozens of hospitals exist where no service was available for at least 20 years
Right. And they're built to inferior standards, and you can't go to them in any case without risking death. I don't need to provide a link, you can see the story every day on CNN.
So, by a conservative estimate, the regime was killing civilians at an average rate of at least 16,000 a year between 1979 and March 2003."
From Iraqi Body Count: estimates range from 28 - 32K deaths just from coalition military activity since the start of the war. Other estimates, some of which include deaths from lawlessness and terrorist activity, are much higher, ranging up to a quarter of a million.
Way to distort the facts. Maybe you should try getting your news from somewhere other than the Weekly Standard.
I'll never understand the Slashdot crowd's fascination with space mining. Let's talk about a few issues.
I'd also like to see studies of mining operations in the asteroid belt...
What on^H^H off earth do you think could be mined in the asteroid belt that would solve our energy issues? Oil is formed from decayed organisms, of which there are a notable lack in the asteroid belt. There are some carbonaceous asteroids up there, but not many, and those that do exist have a small proportion of organic materials (reference). Uranium is in plentiful supply on earth - there's no need to mine any of that from the asteroids, even if it exists there in quantity. And even if there were huge sources of energy-rich material up there, the costs involved in getting to it, mining it, and getting it back to earth would be... astronomical, if you'll pardon the pun.
...and elsewhere in the galaxy.
100% pure pie-in-the-sky. We have no way of GETTING anywhere else in the galaxy in anything like a reasonable amount of time. So I doubt you'll see too many studies on the economics of THAT scenario.
A space elevator is needed more than ever.
By whom, exactly? While a space elevator would be a very cool piece of technology, it would still be enormously expensive, the technology to do it doesn't yet exist, and even if you built it, there's still the same problem. There's no energy to be had in the outer solar system that you can't get more cheaply on earth. Your statement is a non-sequitur.
Most of the truely revolutionary drugs are marketted and sold overseas long before being available here for this very reason.
Yeah, like Thalidomide. Approved overseas, where it caused thousands of babies to be born with very severe birth defects. Not approved in the US, because of the slow FDA process.
The US constitution says nothing about what kinds of lawful agreements (called contracts) you can and cannot make with your fellow citizens (or corporations).
Bullshit. I invite your attention to Amendment 13, which quite plainly prohibits people from entering into slavery "contracts". And while other forms of contracts are not specifically prohibited in the Constitution, there's lots of law enacted by Congress and state legislatures that prohibits some of them - usurious loans, substandard housing, etc.
The governments of the US and of the states ought to, and in fact do, protect their citizens from entering into all sorts of contracts. The question is whether our laws surrounding so-called "intellectual property" have become biased too far in favor of companies creating and distributing content, at the expensive of individual citizens.
Buy the biggest, safest car/truck you can afford. Stay alive. Profit.
Except, of course, that bigger != safer. While you're less likely to die in a COLLISION if you're in an SUV, you're MORE likely to die in a rollover. The net result is that you're no safer. And if you'd actually read the article, you'd know that.
Besides obvious findings, that heavier, bigger vehicles tend to be significantly safer, it then concludes, that heavier, bigger vehicles should be eliminated from the road because of their perceived unfairness. This is ridiculous argument.
And, of course, it's an argument that the article didn't make. The point of this post was that SUVs are only safer in COLLISIONS. When the risk of rollovers was included, you're no safer in an SUV than in a passenger car. See the second linked article for details.
Nice strawman, though. Sorry if this brief visit to reality interfered with your preconceived notions.
The whole point of the %$#@ article was that not all accidents are collisions. Sure, you do better in a collision when you're in an SUV. But you're also much more likely to be in a rollover in an SUV, and the OVERALL risk, counting both types of accident, is ABOUT THE SAME for both SUVs and passenger cars.
The whole point of this article was that your SUV is NOT SAFER for your family than a smaller vehicle, due to the increased risk of rollover in an SUV. And if you'd read the article, you'd have known that.
There are many studies which support this (besides TFA), and I've personally seen (as an EMT) some really hideous SUV/Car collisions, and can tell you: the SUV usually wins.
Yes, but the point of the article as that not all accidents are SUV/car collisions. Some are SUV rollovers, and as the second linked article points out, the OVERALL risk (including collisions, rollovers, and perhaps other risks) of dying while riding in an SUV is about the same as riding in a car. The increased risk of dying in a rollover cancels out the decreased risk of dying in a collision.
... and laying them [SUVs] over -- generally nonfatal though
As the linked article points out, this isn't true, regardless of your personal experience (insert your favorite "plural of anecdote is not data" quote here). Rollovers ARE, in fact, frequently fatal.
It was because they were fighting a more numerous, better-equipped enemy, and the only advantage they had was individual human brilliance vs the conservativism of the hive-mind. They needed life-long training and genetic engineering to try and squeeze the very best general out of the human gene pool so that humanity had a snowball's chance in hell against the buggers.
Right. Just like at Midway - when the US was fighting a more numerous, better equipped enemy, and the only advantage we had was individual human brilliance vs. the conservatism of the fanatically loyal IJN. And that was before modern comms technology - nowadays, tactical data links make a pretty good substitute for a "hive mind". Your point about being outnumbered and lacking convenient targets to nuke doesn't hold water either - our pilots currently train for that situation - being outnumbered in a air battle - all the time. The "Ender's Game" scenario is totally unrealistic.
The extended EG books are great. The original is the best but the other books tell a wonderful interesting story of the progression of mankind
Can't speak for the rest of the series, but I thought the original sucked. The premise of it - that war in space is so enormously more difficult than other forms of warfare, that you needed not only life-long training, but to be actually genetically engineered to do it - was ludicrous. Think back to 1940. Aviation was in its infancy, and no one really knew how to conduct air warfare, or even what air warfare meant. Within five years, we had progressed (if that's the word) to titanic air battles, aircraft carriers, V-2 rockets, etc, etc. No genetic engineering required - ordinary mortals could learn to do it with a year's worth of training.
And the big space battle in EG was no more complex than, say, the Battle of Midway! We could fight that battle now, with nothing more than a few quick spacecraft check flights. Pilots already have to know how to think in 3D, deal with fast moving targets, etc, etc.
Given all that, it was really tough to slog through the interminable initial sections of the book, where Ender goes through what amounts to child abuse for years, when there isn't any reason for it. Maybe the other books would have been better, but I'd had my fill.
The last thing you want within miles of a sensitive radio telescope is any kind of powerful transmitting equipment, as it would probably fry the detectors, and prevent any kind of astronomical observation
I doubt this is true. A radiotelescope is essentially a radar set without the transmit side. It would seemingly be trivial to outfit the telescope with a blanker that would protect the sensitive receive side while transmitting. If what you are saying was true, radar would be impossible - the first time the system emitted a pulse, it would "fry the detectors".
Slashdot Mirror
There's a parallel here to timekeeping technology. Not so many years ago, mechanical clocks & watches were essentially completely replaced by quartz models, that were "better" in every respect: they were cheaper, kept better time, and offered more functionality in the same space - countdown timers, stopwatches, etc. However, there are lots of us who still like mechanical timepieces BECAUSE they're old fashioned (note that the technology switch discussed above happened while I was a kid - my first watch was digital).
No matter how great eBooks become (and they've got a long ways to go), there's always going to be a market for paper books for those interested in antique technology.
Sean
You need to read Collapse, by Jared Diamond (no link, it's easily found at Amazon, etc...). Just because it would be to our advantage, in the long term, to get a handle on global warming, doesn't mean we'll do it. People (and societies) frequently make non-optimal choices - and are thus wiped out. Also, I think you're confused about natural selection. Individuals trying to survive != natural selection - even poorly adapted individuals will make every effort to survive. It doesn't make sense to talk about any individual's motivations from an evolutionary perspective - the idea that that we (or the dinosaurs) make choices based on the "smart evolutionary move" is incorrect. Evolution isn't an end in itself, it's a by-product of the struggle to survive under changing conditions. Sean
This property comes in really handy if squirrels start stealing from your birdfeeder. Just mix a healthy dose of cayenne pepper with the birdseed - the squirrels lose interest really fast, but the birds don't even notice. The only trouble is that the cayenne tends to cause the seed to stick together into a big solid mass when it gets damp. Also, refilling, emptying, and cleaning the birdfeeder can become an interesting process when you have clouds of cayenne pepper forming around you!
Sean
... but does it run Lotus Notes?
The Harpoon missile is another robot that's been around a long time. You tell it approximately where the target is, say "go kill it" and launch. The missle flies to the appropriate area, turns on its radar, and begins searching. It selects the most likely target found in the area, and uses rather sophisticated anti-jamming technology and terminal maneuvers to defeat the target's countermeasures, flying into the the target and detonating. Fully autonomous the whole time. Tomahawk does something similar for land-based targets.
So military robots have been around a long time.
Sean
Nice try. There was no magic required. In fact, the government HAD detected the 9/11 plot (August PDB, anyone?). Not to mention the various sniffs the FBI had about the eventual hijackers studying takeoffs but not landings, etc. The problem was that Bush was more interested in continuing his vacation than responding to the PDB, and various of his cronies appointed to other high positions didn't see fit to follow up on other warnings.
Sean
But isn't vCal just a way to send calendar events between calendars? I didn't think it could actually synchronize, say, the calendar on your phone with with the one on your desktop. If, for example, you sent an appointment from your desktop calendar to your phone with vCal, then changed the desktop instance of the appointment, there'd be no way to synchronize that change with the phone using vCal - you'd have to delete the appointment from your phone and send the updated instance (again) from your desktop... right?
Sean
Oh, say, because you were born there and have never had enough money to get out? Or because you moved there in better times and have suffered reverses, and now can't afford to move?
What are you suggesting? That all poor people should move away from areas where they might experience a natural disaster? Where would they move to? Who would pay for it?
Your post is just another way of saying that people who are poor DESERVE to be victimized, because, well... they're poor.
Sean
Actually, that's not true. The US government accepted Article V assistance from NATO. Several NATO AWACS aircraft were dispatched from Europe to help provide airborne early warning over the continental US in the days after 11 September. The link doesn't mention the types of assistance provided, but I know from my own military experience that AWACS were provided.
Sean
From Wikipedia: "Although the water supply has reached prewar levels in some provinces, ageing and poorly maintained equipment combined with looting and vandalism leaves the drinking water system substandard."
From the GAO: "However, electrical service in the country as a whole has not shown a marked improvement over the immediate postwar levels of May 2003 and has worsened in some governorates." Not only is electrical service worse than during Saddam's rule, it's even worse than after much of their electrical capacity was destroyed DURING the war.
From Wikipedia (same link as before): "Untreated waste is polluting the Euphrates River, and many treatment plants require repair. More than 45 pipelines have exploded"
Right. And they're built to inferior standards, and you can't go to them in any case without risking death. I don't need to provide a link, you can see the story every day on CNN.
From Iraqi Body Count: estimates range from 28 - 32K deaths just from coalition military activity since the start of the war. Other estimates, some of which include deaths from lawlessness and terrorist activity, are much higher, ranging up to a quarter of a million.
Way to distort the facts. Maybe you should try getting your news from somewhere other than the Weekly Standard.
Sean
I'll never understand the Slashdot crowd's fascination with space mining. Let's talk about a few issues.
What on^H^H off earth do you think could be mined in the asteroid belt that would solve our energy issues? Oil is formed from decayed organisms, of which there are a notable lack in the asteroid belt. There are some carbonaceous asteroids up there, but not many, and those that do exist have a small proportion of organic materials (reference). Uranium is in plentiful supply on earth - there's no need to mine any of that from the asteroids, even if it exists there in quantity. And even if there were huge sources of energy-rich material up there, the costs involved in getting to it, mining it, and getting it back to earth would be... astronomical, if you'll pardon the pun.
100% pure pie-in-the-sky. We have no way of GETTING anywhere else in the galaxy in anything like a reasonable amount of time. So I doubt you'll see too many studies on the economics of THAT scenario.
By whom, exactly? While a space elevator would be a very cool piece of technology, it would still be enormously expensive, the technology to do it doesn't yet exist, and even if you built it, there's still the same problem. There's no energy to be had in the outer solar system that you can't get more cheaply on earth. Your statement is a non-sequitur.
Sean
As if that weren't lame enough, I also appear to be involved in a contest to see whose IP address is the lamest...
***shoots self***
Yeah, like Thalidomide. Approved overseas, where it caused thousands of babies to be born with very severe birth defects. Not approved in the US, because of the slow FDA process.
Be careful what you wish for.
Sean
Bullshit. I invite your attention to Amendment 13, which quite plainly prohibits people from entering into slavery "contracts". And while other forms of contracts are not specifically prohibited in the Constitution, there's lots of law enacted by Congress and state legislatures that prohibits some of them - usurious loans, substandard housing, etc.
The governments of the US and of the states ought to, and in fact do, protect their citizens from entering into all sorts of contracts. The question is whether our laws surrounding so-called "intellectual property" have become biased too far in favor of companies creating and distributing content, at the expensive of individual citizens.
Sean
Except, of course, that bigger != safer. While you're less likely to die in a COLLISION if you're in an SUV, you're MORE likely to die in a rollover. The net result is that you're no safer. And if you'd actually read the article, you'd know that.
Sean
And, of course, it's an argument that the article didn't make. The point of this post was that SUVs are only safer in COLLISIONS. When the risk of rollovers was included, you're no safer in an SUV than in a passenger car. See the second linked article for details.
Nice strawman, though. Sorry if this brief visit to reality interfered with your preconceived notions.
Sean
The plural of anecdote is not data. Your individual experience does not indicate that this study is flawed.
Short version: you were lucky.
Sean
The whole point of the %$#@ article was that not all accidents are collisions. Sure, you do better in a collision when you're in an SUV. But you're also much more likely to be in a rollover in an SUV, and the OVERALL risk, counting both types of accident, is ABOUT THE SAME for both SUVs and passenger cars.
Sean
The whole point of this article was that your SUV is NOT SAFER for your family than a smaller vehicle, due to the increased risk of rollover in an SUV. And if you'd read the article, you'd have known that.
I know, I know, I must be new here.
Sean
Yes, but the point of the article as that not all accidents are SUV/car collisions. Some are SUV rollovers, and as the second linked article points out, the OVERALL risk (including collisions, rollovers, and perhaps other risks) of dying while riding in an SUV is about the same as riding in a car. The increased risk of dying in a rollover cancels out the decreased risk of dying in a collision.
As the linked article points out, this isn't true, regardless of your personal experience (insert your favorite "plural of anecdote is not data" quote here). Rollovers ARE, in fact, frequently fatal.
Sean
I'm holding out for the "I'm GETTING lucky" button...
Sean
There is no cat.
Sean
Right. Just like at Midway - when the US was fighting a more numerous, better equipped enemy, and the only advantage we had was individual human brilliance vs. the conservatism of the fanatically loyal IJN. And that was before modern comms technology - nowadays, tactical data links make a pretty good substitute for a "hive mind". Your point about being outnumbered and lacking convenient targets to nuke doesn't hold water either - our pilots currently train for that situation - being outnumbered in a air battle - all the time. The "Ender's Game" scenario is totally unrealistic.
Can't speak for the rest of the series, but I thought the original sucked. The premise of it - that war in space is so enormously more difficult than other forms of warfare, that you needed not only life-long training, but to be actually genetically engineered to do it - was ludicrous. Think back to 1940. Aviation was in its infancy, and no one really knew how to conduct air warfare, or even what air warfare meant. Within five years, we had progressed (if that's the word) to titanic air battles, aircraft carriers, V-2 rockets, etc, etc. No genetic engineering required - ordinary mortals could learn to do it with a year's worth of training.
And the big space battle in EG was no more complex than, say, the Battle of Midway! We could fight that battle now, with nothing more than a few quick spacecraft check flights. Pilots already have to know how to think in 3D, deal with fast moving targets, etc, etc.
Given all that, it was really tough to slog through the interminable initial sections of the book, where Ender goes through what amounts to child abuse for years, when there isn't any reason for it. Maybe the other books would have been better, but I'd had my fill.
Sean
I doubt this is true. A radiotelescope is essentially a radar set without the transmit side. It would seemingly be trivial to outfit the telescope with a blanker that would protect the sensitive receive side while transmitting. If what you are saying was true, radar would be impossible - the first time the system emitted a pulse, it would "fry the detectors".
Sean