initial price is not an issue. My first mac (a Mac II with a 15inch color monitor) cost $5000 too. Without the printer or extra SCSI harddisk. One can't say that it was a barrier for mass adoption, eh ?
Let's see - you provide me with exactly one example - yourself - who bought one of these things at the given price point, and conclude from that that the price wasn't an obstacle to "mass adoption"?
News flash: you != the masses. Lots of people did end up buying Macs... but not at $5k. They waited for the price to come down. It remains to be seen whether a) Segway's price will drop and b) if anyone will bother buying them even if it does.
What's really annoying about this guy is that he seems to think that un-manned spaceflight will somehow benefit if manned spaceflight is scaled back. Of course, that's nonsense. Cut manned spaceflight and I will bet you a donut to a Delta VH that within a decade NASA will cease to exist. This guy, who benefitted professionally to a huge extent from the existence of manned spaceflight programs, now has the nerve to turn around and bite the hand that (probably quite literally) fed him. That's annoying.
So what you're saying is not that manned space science is superior to unmanned space science. It's that unmanned space science won't benefit from scrapping the manned kind anyway - the government will just waste it on health care, tax cuts, etc - so we might as well keep throwing money at the not-very-useful manned program? I suppose the fact that you personally profit from the manned space industry has nothing to do with this conclusion.
On a dollar-for-dollar basis space research of any kind (manned or unmanned) is pretty much a total waste of money.
The only logical conclusion, then, is that we should drop the ENTIRE space program. What exactly are you advocating here?
Even if we lost 6 million men and women in a quest to conquer space, that would be a mere 1/1000th of the population. Barely a scratch.
Flying airplanes into tall buildings, killing thousands of people... that's a mere fraction of the population of the US. Barely a scratch. So why did every get so excited?
You're awfully cavalier about killing millions of people.
And they're going to the bank, presumably, to deposit some... recognition? Recognition is very nice, but it doesn't pay any bills. Ultimately, you have to have a product.
We must go because we must go? This is known as "begging the question" - at least if your object is to persuade us to pony up for a space program.
If you're trying to say that it's inevitable that we WILL go, perhaps you could offer some evidence to back that up. The bit about Everest, the North Pole, etc, is interesting... but even getting out of Earth orbit is orders of magnitude more difficult. I don't think you can look at mountain climbing and conclude from that that it's inevitable that we're headed for space.
The danger is an obscure security hole that would allow infiltration.
The key point where this guys whole argument falls apart is that proprietary software isn't any better.
IAAWSSE (I am a weapons systems safety engineer) and I can tell you there's another point where this argument falls apart. It's not like weapons systems software is accessible via the Internet - there's an "air gap" between these kind of systems and the rest of the world. So even if there are security holes in the software, it's not like J. Random Hacker is going to be able to connect to these systems to exploit them.
While insider attacks are possible, a) the people who operate these things are fairly thoroughly checked out before they get in the military, b) generally speaking, they have a vested interest in having their systems operate properly, and c) if in spite of all that, they were still motivated to do mischief, they'd have to be signed into a military computer terminal somewhere inside the system... and chances are very high they'd be caught.
Just ask Cheney! I'm surprised we haven't invaded them already.
Then again, having your Army strained to the breaking point by a useless war may have cooled even this adminstration's desire to start any more.
Sean
Microsoft includes Mozilla and IE in its default Windows install. This is something we would NEVER expect any other company to do. See the Nissan/Mazda example above.
Has Bush done, said, implied, mimed, ANYTHING that would lead to the impression that he is a "messenger of God"
Yes - from Common Dreams (who, in turn was quoting the Israeli newspaper Haaretz):
Bush said: 'God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.'
Claim: "The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons...And according to the British government, the Iraqi regime could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes." [Source: White House Web site - since taken down]
Fact:
"Iraq did not have a large, ongoing, centrally controlled chemical weapons program after 1991. Information found to date suggests that Iraq's large-scale capability to develop, produce, and fill new CW munitions was reduced - if not entirely destroyed - during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, 13 years of UN sanctions and UN inspections." - Bush Administration Weapons Inspector David Kay, 10/2/03
Bush knew, or should have known, that his claim was false.
I haven't seen Americans enjoy freedoms that I do not have as a Finnish citizen, for example. Quite the contrary.
So there.
Nice content-free post... next time, would you care to provide some actual examples of freedoms you have in fun-loving Finland, that we don't have here in the US? I'm not saying you don't have them, but a one-liner post like this, containing nothing but an assertion of how wonderful things are in your hometown, isn't of much value.
While I'm generally in favor of making the distinction you are referring to, in this case, the rights being trampled on are pretty much consumer's rights. If you're not buying CDs/DVDs/etc, you aren't affected by this problem.
Sean
Yes, you can run Mozilla. But then you are replacing part of what Microsoft says is the OS. You might as well run cygwin with X server and no native Win32 programs and then compare your security to other people.
This is the most ludicrous statement I've seen on Slashdot in quite a while. Running an alternative browser is just like stripping out every bit of Windows and replacing it with cygwin?
"Don't like genuine GM parts? Sure, you could use generic ones, but then you might as well completely remove your car's gasoline engine and replace it with a boiler and steam turbine and then compare your performance with other people's."
I'm as suspicious of MS as the next guy... but let's not let Bill Gates bashing degenerate into paranoia.
... but England certainly did practice the indefinite detention without trial of IRA types. In fact, some of the ground rules for indefinite detention at GTMO were based on the British protocols. Not that I'm in favor of the practice.
Didn't have a lot of time for googling, but here's a cached post that talks about this.
More US citizens die from drug-related crime than from terrorists.
More US citizens die from car crashes than from terrorists. Like an order of magnitude more, even in 2001. More of us die from heart disease than from terrorists. More of us die from lots of causes than from terrorists.
We fought the Cold War for 50 years, and faced nuclear destruction every day of our lives... and we managed to keep the Constitution in pretty good shape. So why, why, why are we giving up our freedom now in the fight against a couple of thousand assholes living in CAVES, for God's sake?
Wake up, people. We need to change direction in the US... now.
That if you did manage to get enough CO2 into the atmosphere to warm the planet sufficiently... you wouldn't be able to breathe the atmosphere, even if there was also sufficient O2. Carbon dioxide isn't just an asphixiant - if you breathe any significant quantity of it, even if there is plenty of O2, your blood chemistry gets fouled up - and you die. CO2 is poisonous.
Why do most mainstream news articles seem to censor themselves by giving us six paragraphs of patting one self ( the author that is) on the back and rhetorical questions before hitting the meat of the story?
Umm... because it wasn't a news story? A little help with definitions: "news" is reporting on stuff that JUST HAPPENED, and contains the who, what, where, etc, right up front. "Analysis" is talking about stuff that (usually) happened long enough ago that there's been some time to think about it. It frequently requires some rhetorical "setting up" before it comes to the point.
Since it's by no means a sure thing that computers will EVER attain consciousness.
I also have heartburn with the term "singularity" as applied to the growth in computer capability. "Singularity" is a mathematical term with a precise definition: it's a point on the curve representing some function at which the slope of the curve is infinite - think of the limit of f(x)=1/(x-1) as x approaches 1. But "Moore's Law" is an exponential function - its slope is finite everywhere on the curve.
While I understand what people mean when they discuss a computer "singularity", it's really not a very accurate way to use the word.
One of this same author's earlier columns was one of the most absurd things I've ever read. Look at it and laugh. Can you spot what's so wrong with this paragraph?
$2 million a day. It's difficult for one to even imagine what it would be like to have that kind of pure income. But it won't be as difficult for your grandchildren. If U.S. per capita income manages to grow in real terms at a plausible 2 percent per year, then in just 400 years, the average American family of four will enjoy a daily income of $2 million. And those are not some future, ravaged-by-inflation dollars--I'm measuring everything in the dollars of 1997.
Gee-whiz! In 1904, a $75/day income would've seemed amazing too. But in 2104, kids will borrow $50k to grab some Pepsi.
Umm, no, I don't see what's wrong with it. Did you miss the line about how these AREN'T inflation-ravaged dollars?
The word stealing has more than one meaning. "I stole the book", "I stole his research", "I stole a kiss".
Yes it does. And the RIAA (and their apologists) are using this fact to blur the line between actual, in-the-legal-sense "theft" and mere copyright violation. And having blurred this distinction, they want to apply theft penalties to a situation they were never intended for.
At this point, I'm reaching the outer limits of my own understanding of the physics of the situation, but here's some further info.
To clarify what I was saying with negative (again understanding that I have a huge hole in my head where this knowledge should be)...
My limited understanding of negative energy is that there is a pushing away (not gravity) that is basically making the innards of the universe catch up to the faster speeds of the outer reaches of the universe. This pushing, to me, seems similar to the generally outer movement of photons from any light source.
Here, your common sense hasn't failed you - the repulsive force between like charges is, in fact, mediated by photons. Imagine two electrons travelling towards each other. As they get closer, a photon is emitted by one electron and absorbed by the other. Although they are massless, strangely enough, photons have non-zero momentum. So when the first electron emits the photon, it recoils, and when the second one absorbs it, it recoils. Hence the electrons are repelled from each other (this is a rather oversimplified version of what's happening).
A similar effect may be in play in "negative energy"... but I don't know enough to speculate.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see - you provide me with exactly one example - yourself - who bought one of these things at the given price point, and conclude from that that the price wasn't an obstacle to "mass adoption"?
News flash: you != the masses. Lots of people did end up buying Macs... but not at $5k. They waited for the price to come down. It remains to be seen whether a) Segway's price will drop and b) if anyone will bother buying them even if it does.
Sean
So what you're saying is not that manned space science is superior to unmanned space science. It's that unmanned space science won't benefit from scrapping the manned kind anyway - the government will just waste it on health care, tax cuts, etc - so we might as well keep throwing money at the not-very-useful manned program? I suppose the fact that you personally profit from the manned space industry has nothing to do with this conclusion.
The only logical conclusion, then, is that we should drop the ENTIRE space program. What exactly are you advocating here?
Sean
Eventually, ALL the stars will grow cold and go out. What was your point again?
Sean
Flying airplanes into tall buildings, killing thousands of people... that's a mere fraction of the population of the US. Barely a scratch. So why did every get so excited?
You're awfully cavalier about killing millions of people.
Sean
And they're going to the bank, presumably, to deposit some... recognition? Recognition is very nice, but it doesn't pay any bills. Ultimately, you have to have a product.
Sean
We must go because we must go? This is known as "begging the question" - at least if your object is to persuade us to pony up for a space program.
If you're trying to say that it's inevitable that we WILL go, perhaps you could offer some evidence to back that up. The bit about Everest, the North Pole, etc, is interesting... but even getting out of Earth orbit is orders of magnitude more difficult. I don't think you can look at mountain climbing and conclude from that that it's inevitable that we're headed for space.
Sean
IAAWSSE (I am a weapons systems safety engineer) and I can tell you there's another point where this argument falls apart. It's not like weapons systems software is accessible via the Internet - there's an "air gap" between these kind of systems and the rest of the world. So even if there are security holes in the software, it's not like J. Random Hacker is going to be able to connect to these systems to exploit them.
While insider attacks are possible, a) the people who operate these things are fairly thoroughly checked out before they get in the military, b) generally speaking, they have a vested interest in having their systems operate properly, and c) if in spite of all that, they were still motivated to do mischief, they'd have to be signed into a military computer terminal somewhere inside the system... and chances are very high they'd be caught.
Sean
Just ask Cheney! I'm surprised we haven't invaded them already. Then again, having your Army strained to the breaking point by a useless war may have cooled even this adminstration's desire to start any more. Sean
Nissan/Mazda aren't convicted monopolists.
Sean
Yes - from Common Dreams (who, in turn was quoting the Israeli newspaper Haaretz):
link for your convenience.
Another link
Too many to even list here, but here's a typical example (from the Center for American Progress claim vs. fact db):
Bush knew, or should have known, that his claim was false.
Sean
So there.
Nice content-free post... next time, would you care to provide some actual examples of freedoms you have in fun-loving Finland, that we don't have here in the US? I'm not saying you don't have them, but a one-liner post like this, containing nothing but an assertion of how wonderful things are in your hometown, isn't of much value.
Sean
While I'm generally in favor of making the distinction you are referring to, in this case, the rights being trampled on are pretty much consumer's rights. If you're not buying CDs/DVDs/etc, you aren't affected by this problem. Sean
This is the most ludicrous statement I've seen on Slashdot in quite a while. Running an alternative browser is just like stripping out every bit of Windows and replacing it with cygwin?
"Don't like genuine GM parts? Sure, you could use generic ones, but then you might as well completely remove your car's gasoline engine and replace it with a boiler and steam turbine and then compare your performance with other people's."
I'm as suspicious of MS as the next guy... but let's not let Bill Gates bashing degenerate into paranoia.
Sean
... but England certainly did practice the indefinite detention without trial of IRA types. In fact, some of the ground rules for indefinite detention at GTMO were based on the British protocols. Not that I'm in favor of the practice.
Didn't have a lot of time for googling, but here's a cached post that talks about this.
More US citizens die from car crashes than from terrorists. Like an order of magnitude more, even in 2001. More of us die from heart disease than from terrorists. More of us die from lots of causes than from terrorists.
We fought the Cold War for 50 years, and faced nuclear destruction every day of our lives... and we managed to keep the Constitution in pretty good shape. So why, why, why are we giving up our freedom now in the fight against a couple of thousand assholes living in CAVES, for God's sake?
Wake up, people. We need to change direction in the US... now.
Sean
That if you did manage to get enough CO2 into the atmosphere to warm the planet sufficiently... you wouldn't be able to breathe the atmosphere, even if there was also sufficient O2. Carbon dioxide isn't just an asphixiant - if you breathe any significant quantity of it, even if there is plenty of O2, your blood chemistry gets fouled up - and you die. CO2 is poisonous.
Sean
Umm... because it wasn't a news story? A little help with definitions: "news" is reporting on stuff that JUST HAPPENED, and contains the who, what, where, etc, right up front. "Analysis" is talking about stuff that (usually) happened long enough ago that there's been some time to think about it. It frequently requires some rhetorical "setting up" before it comes to the point.
Make more sense now?
Sean
... that 100 km is over the radar horizon, and neither ship would be able to see the other.
Sean
Since it's by no means a sure thing that computers will EVER attain consciousness.
I also have heartburn with the term "singularity" as applied to the growth in computer capability. "Singularity" is a mathematical term with a precise definition: it's a point on the curve representing some function at which the slope of the curve is infinite - think of the limit of f(x)=1/(x-1) as x approaches 1. But "Moore's Law" is an exponential function - its slope is finite everywhere on the curve.
While I understand what people mean when they discuss a computer "singularity", it's really not a very accurate way to use the word.
Sean
And not, of course, even attributed. Moderators, even if no one ever reads the article, you should.
Sean
Umm, no, I don't see what's wrong with it. Did you miss the line about how these AREN'T inflation-ravaged dollars?
Sean
Kill your stereo and make your own music. Just because you're not happy with RIAA-provided options, doesn't mean you have to break the law.
You get the best of both worlds - you're not liable for being sued, and you're not giving any money to the RIAA.
Sean
Yes it does. And the RIAA (and their apologists) are using this fact to blur the line between actual, in-the-legal-sense "theft" and mere copyright violation. And having blurred this distinction, they want to apply theft penalties to a situation they were never intended for.
Sean
At this point, I'm reaching the outer limits of my own understanding of the physics of the situation, but here's some further info.
Here, your common sense hasn't failed you - the repulsive force between like charges is, in fact, mediated by photons. Imagine two electrons travelling towards each other. As they get closer, a photon is emitted by one electron and absorbed by the other. Although they are massless, strangely enough, photons have non-zero momentum. So when the first electron emits the photon, it recoils, and when the second one absorbs it, it recoils. Hence the electrons are repelled from each other (this is a rather oversimplified version of what's happening).
A similar effect may be in play in "negative energy"... but I don't know enough to speculate.
Sean
Others have pointed out some problems with your statement... I'd like to add another. The universe has no center.
Sean