If you dont have anything to hide you really shouldnt be against it.
Yup.. because the federal government *cough-McCarthyism-cough* has such a great *cough-Watergate-cough* history *cough-Guantanamo Bay-cough* of not abusing it's *cough-Japanese internment-cough* power..
Hell, my *high* *school* had a cyclotron, and this was the early-to-mid sixties. (If you're wondering, Central High, in Philly.)
That's kind of like saying your high school produced and used a superconducting magnet, so no one should worry about someone having an MRI in their apartment.
Cyclotrons vary by many orders of magnitude in power. Just because your high school cyclotron didn't produce any apreciable radiation or radioactive material doesn't mean this one doesn't. People do get quite scared whenever the word "nuclear" in mentioned, and it's not always warranted. In this case though I wouldn't leap to that conclusion unless you have an idea of the scale of this particular cyclotron.
Narrowing the field to abiogenesis for a moment -- when respected nonreligious scientists espouse speculative, largely unfalsifiable hypotheses of origins that have no evidentiary basis other than (hmm) the lack of evidence for abiogenesis, they are welcome to speak publicly, and write for journals and magazines. Where is the outcry?
I'm not sure what you're getting at here, but I don't see any links to scientific papers. The first article you linked too sounds more like philosophy than science. That's fine, philosophy can potentialy turn into science and it has value in directing science. Scientists should be allowed to engage in philosophy, as long as they don't purport it's science. Maybe you can explain further what your debate entails? If you want a theory that's more philosophy (at least currently) than science I'd choose superstring theory. There's quite a bit of debate among physicists if superstring theory is science. This doesn't reach the public sphere too much, but the debate is there. by far the greatest threat to science today is radical postmodernism whose adherents thrive in overwhelming numbers on university campuses, enjoying secure and unassailable academic respectability
And who listens to the humanities departments on university campuses? (other than other humanities departments). I've had my experience with these people, and by and large they're ignored by everyone but themselves. Within the ivory tower I'm sure they think they're influencing the world, but the world they influence is by and large an insular one.
No, I think the biggest threat to science is the good 'ol public school system. Science isn't taught as an investigation, it's taught as a series of facts. The media doesn't really help here either with it's awfull mainstream science reporting. We're not a whole lot better off when everyone believed that contagious disease was caused by "bad air". Sure, we've got the facts straight now, but the society at large doesn't really get the core of what science is. That's why the fundamentalists can swoop in and claim ID is science, because people just understand science as a collection of facts that come from guys called "scientists". Here's a personal observation. Although it's unfortunately true that most ID activists are motivated by a prior agenda, in my experience (of moderate sample size) most evolution activists are motivated by a prior agenda as well.
Hmm.. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "prior agenda", but it sounds like you're talking about a hidden agenda. That is saying you're for one thing, but really you're trying to accomplish something quite different. That's just simple deception of course.
I think much of that stems from the kind of people that become activists. From what I've seen they tend to be people driven by passion, and who invest an entire belief structure into something. Passion is a nice motivator, but it can blind you to anything that comes into opposition to that passion. You can see the same thing in any fanatical group, be it PETA, or Operation Rescue.
You're seriously comparing rebooting Firefox, a single user application to rebooting an entire OS? While I agree that having to reboot firefox every time you add an extension is stupid, it has no comparison whatsover to taking down an operating system.
Even if you're not talking about a server (which is a major major downtime problem) it's still annoying as hell to have to reboot my workstation and kill everything I currently have running every other time there's an update. The 3 seconds it takes to restart firefox (and only firefox) isn't really that big a deal.
Because they've discovered that ants not only leave "follow me" trails, but also "don't follow me" trails. Feynman only found evidence for the "follow me" trails, which I'd guess had been known about for a while.
But you attempt to make it sound as though enforcement of a agreement is a trivial matter
Where did I say that? The implication is that repo men aren't heroes, puveyors of goodness, etc. They enforce contracts, or agreements as you say. That doesn't mean they have an easy job.
The examples you gave have nothing to do with taking out a loan against a car or house.
Re:Repossession is not a joke
on
High-Tech RepoMan
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Repo men, whatever you think about their profession, risk their lives daily in order to prevent auto theft, which in a way is what failing to pay car payments is.
Why is it everyone has to turn every crime that involves property into theft? If you fail to make house payments have you "stolen" the house? I have no problem with repo men and reposession in general, but failing to make payments isn't theft. Don't try to make repo men into some sort of heroes. They're nothing more than contract enforcers.
An interesting list of qualities, mostly because they many of them don't contradict each other. You can: Enjoy time alone, be a good listener, appear calm and self contained, think, then speak or act, think while speaking, like to the in the thick of things, relish variety, and enjoy chit-chatting without being self contradictory.
So.. if these two qualities "introversion and extroversion" aren't really mutually exclusive, then is this categorization even real and not just bad taxonomy? I can take 15 random qualities, divide them up into two seperate categories and decide that my labels are important distinctions between people. The question I have is, why is introvert/extrovert any better than my random qualities distinction?
Plus, I don't buy the brainpower thing either. I mean, the guy presided over an economy with a prime rate of 18% and gas lines like you won't believe. Brainpower....yeah, right.
If you want the guy who's responsible for price controls (and thus lines for gas) his name is Richard Nixon. Though price controls did continue on into the Carter administration, Carter is also responsible for starting the end of price controls.
That's not to say Nixon was stupid. Obviously he wasn't. But blaming every mistake someone makes on stupidity is just plain wrong. Very smart people make enormous mistakes. Look no further than Nixon (Watergate) or Clinton (Monica Lewinsky) for evidence of that.
Einstein, you might have noticed that the article appeared in the Los Angeles Times. There is a huge water problem throughout pretty much the entire state of California. The San Joaquin and its tributaries have been totally tapped out by Northern California, the excess of which is sent down a concrete-lined artificial river hundreds of miles long to Los Angeles and the rest of southern California.
I have absolutely no problem with water conservation efforts in places where there is a shortage of water. What I have serious problems with is the "environmentalists" who take the water conservation movement in places like California and try to import them in areas where there is NO water shortage whatsoever. They've taken on the idea that "conservation is good" but they've forgotten why we need to conserve. It's taken on a religious dogma like not eating pork because your religion forbids eating pork. Nevermind that the original reason (avoiding disease) has long since gone away.
You can't plan for something you know nothing about. Anyone speculating about whether ET will be war-like, peaceful, care about us, or not care about us is engaging in the art of "making shit up". Our basis for understanding intelligence is almost entirely based on ourselves and how we think, act, behave, and look at the world. Much of this is based on our underlying brain structure and not on culture. We all have emotions and much of our being is based on that.
But yet when we even look at a Jellyfish it's extremely different from us (and even so, very similar in terms of underlying biology). Will ET have better technology (tools) than us? Well, based on our own experience with technology you'd think that anyone capable of solving the problem of inter-stellar travel certainly would have a far better understanding of physics than us. But I fear when I even say that I'm also probbably practicing the art of "making shit up".
The point is that planning for any of this is just absurd, and that's ignoring the fact that we have no idea if there even IS intelligent life elsewhere, much less life that's interested in coming here. I don't believe this kind of question is one of science, but of philosophy. That doesn't mean it's not an interesting or important question, but just one we can't find an actual answer to. Devoting money to it makes about as much sense as to devoting money to trying to find god.
I think a more sane approach would be trying to find out if there IS intelligence life elsewhere. That means putting more money into SETI searches for instance. I personally doubt whether UFOs (the alien spacecraft type) exist, but you'll never find them if you don't look. Because of this I think it's important for such a survey to have a dual purpose. Put money into mapping asteroids (and as a side effect maybe you can look for UFOs, or maybe other purely astronomical phenomenon).
Assuming both my boiler and my hot water tank are equally efficient (which is likely fair, since both appliances do the same job, they heat water), and since they use the same energy source and hence neither is more economical, I don't think I'm losing anything by using a hot water tank rather then an on-demand method, am I?
That depends on how and where you're using the "waste" heat put out by the hot water heater. If you've got a basement, I'd bet your hot water heater is in the basement. You're then heating up the basement which you wouldn't normally do. Some of that heat probbably makes it into the upper floors, but some of it is just going to be lost to the outside.
I thought dark energy was added to make our modern theories "work" to our expectations without knowing what dark energy was
Pretty much, yah. To be fair though this is often a practice in science, to modify theory to meet new observation. and now it's told a concept that Einstein added to make his equations work to his expectations "sort of" matches (10% is still a big deviation) with this.
Welcome to Cosmology! Where a 10% error is considered pretty good. This is probbably the biggest problem in Cosmology, namely the quality of the data. Because of the difficulty in "proving" almost anyhing it becomes difficult to rely on well tested theory. This is the big reason that Cosmologists almost never receive the Nobel prize in physics.
I vote for the theory that makes sense with matter and energy as-is and doesn't require some exotic matter/energy that exists only as speculation to fill an unknown.
And I think most scientists would agree with you. Of course you still have to come up with this theory you speak of that explains all observations without requiring exotic matter/energy that hasn't been directly observed.
(psst... this story is about dark energy, not dark matter).
The evidence for dark energy is that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, not slowing down. We'd expect that the expansion of the universe would be slowing down, because all the mass in the universe should be attracting everything to everything else. We don't see that, in fact we see the exact opposite. This means there must be some kind of "anti-gravity" force that operates at very large distances. The current accepted way this happens is called "dark energy".
In comparison and contrast to the GW issue, however, I think it's empirically clear the threat is real and eventually there will be (but I hope not) some catastrophic event with the internet.
Well, I'd say we've either already had those catastrophes, or the Internet isn't vulnerable to what we think of as a catastrophe. When I think of catastrophe, I think of something that happens in a short period of time and causes wisespread damage that takes months to cleanup.
So.. either the various virus outbreaks, phishing attacks, and DOS attacks on major websites are all catastrophes, or the internet as a whole isn't really vulnerable to major catastrophes. What's currently happening is lots of minor catastrophes every day.
So, what I'm getting at is the model you should be looking at is a disease model, not a catastrophe model. Phishing, viruses, DOS attacks are all more like diseases that different parts of the internet develop.
I was looking for a good response to the ridiculous claim that "corporations not take a stand" on things, and you've done it much better than I could. I'm not sure what "taking a stand" means as far as the original post goes, but it seems to imply anything that any group (no matter how small) is vocal enough about. To add a non-scientific case, I think it's a good thing that some corporations "took a stand" and hired Jews in the 30s and 40s. By the original posters argument, they shouldn't have done so.
The only thing I can add that the original poster seems to miss is that "doing nothing" and remaining neutral is taking a stand as well.
I'm not European, so this specific issue doesn't effect me, but you're still talking about $1.2 million. Sure your share of that is jack squat, but that $1.2 million being spent to feed the hungry, fight crime, save the whales, insert-your-pet-issue-here will go a long way.
Not really. 1.2 million dollars just isn't the fortune you're making it out to be when you're talking about the big problems you referred to. Sure it might make a difference for a year or a few months, but what after that? If this thing works, it's a much more permanent solution and a solution for other towns with similar problems.
This is not an attempt to argue, I have just never understood the logic behind the contention that it's OK to blow tax dollars on crackpot schemes because it only personally cost me $0.0004.
I think that's a valid concern. It sure sounds like a nutty idea, but there's nothing to say it won't work. It's not as if the government is funding truly nutty ideas like perpetual motion machines or extracting zero-point energy.
So once again the government/PTBs are footing the bill for people too lazy to move. *cough* New Orleans *cough* Florida *cough*
The question you seem to miss in all these cases is how much does it cost everyone in terms of lost jobs, damage to the economy, etc to just move an entire city? (especially in the case of New Orleans). If it's more cost effective to rebuild, you do it. In this case if it's cheaper to put in a big mirror to bring in light, (and it actually works to get people to stay) you do it. The cost is only 2.4 million dollars, and the EU only pays half of that. With 440 people in the town that's about $2250 per person.
The question you SHOULD be asking is is this an effective strategy (cost included) to stop stagnation and economic deday in a region and promote growth, vs just letting the city die (and puttting the money somwehere else)? It seems a bit crazy to me that a few lit up spots are going to make much difference, but then again I don't live in this town.
Re:How About Best Geek History Books...
on
Top 20 Geek Novels
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· Score: 1
The best I've read is The Double Helix by James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. It's probbably the best account of how actual science is done (the blind alleys, the competitiveness, etc) ever written. The Cukoos Egg by Cliff Stoll is another great book about tracking down Soviet spies (albiet ameturish ones) that hacked into Cliff's computer through arpanet. The Making Of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is another great book. It chronicles much of the project. Anyone know any great books on the history of computing?
Wow. Are you sure that's not a list of top 25 bad sci-fi movies? There's not a single movie in that list that's good, and not just OK. Paycheck was OK, but not really good. Skycaptain was entertaining, but not worthy of being on any top movies list. On the actual top 25 list you have to go all the way down to #18 with 12 Monkeys to get an actually good movie (which is really one of the greatest time travel movies I've seen).
I didn't like this movie at all (yes, the Tarkovsky version), and I do like slow movies without explosions, etc. Stalker was great and 2001 is one of the best sci-fi movies ever made. Solaris was just too boring though. I honestly don't see why people like this movie so much.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like Rudolph's misfit train will finally have a purpose.
If you dont have anything to hide you really shouldnt be against it.
Yup.. because the federal government *cough-McCarthyism-cough* has such a great *cough-Watergate-cough* history *cough-Guantanamo Bay-cough* of not abusing it's *cough-Japanese internment-cough* power..
Hell, my *high* *school* had a cyclotron, and this was the early-to-mid sixties. (If you're wondering, Central High, in Philly.)
That's kind of like saying your high school produced and used a superconducting magnet, so no one should worry about someone having an MRI in their apartment.
Cyclotrons vary by many orders of magnitude in power. Just because your high school cyclotron didn't produce any apreciable radiation or radioactive material doesn't mean this one doesn't. People do get quite scared whenever the word "nuclear" in mentioned, and it's not always warranted. In this case though I wouldn't leap to that conclusion unless you have an idea of the scale of this particular cyclotron.
Narrowing the field to abiogenesis for a moment -- when respected nonreligious scientists espouse speculative, largely unfalsifiable hypotheses of origins that have no evidentiary basis other than (hmm) the lack of evidence for abiogenesis, they are welcome to speak publicly, and write for journals and magazines. Where is the outcry?
I'm not sure what you're getting at here, but I don't see any links to scientific papers. The first article you linked too sounds more like philosophy than science. That's fine, philosophy can potentialy turn into science and it has value in directing science. Scientists should be allowed to engage in philosophy, as long as they don't purport it's science. Maybe you can explain further what your debate entails? If you want a theory that's more philosophy (at least currently) than science I'd choose superstring theory. There's quite a bit of debate among physicists if superstring theory is science. This doesn't reach the public sphere too much, but the debate is there.
by far the greatest threat to science today is radical postmodernism whose adherents thrive in overwhelming numbers on university campuses, enjoying secure and unassailable academic respectability
And who listens to the humanities departments on university campuses? (other than other humanities departments). I've had my experience with these people, and by and large they're ignored by everyone but themselves. Within the ivory tower I'm sure they think they're influencing the world, but the world they influence is by and large an insular one.
No, I think the biggest threat to science is the good 'ol public school system. Science isn't taught as an investigation, it's taught as a series of facts. The media doesn't really help here either with it's awfull mainstream science reporting. We're not a whole lot better off when everyone believed that contagious disease was caused by "bad air". Sure, we've got the facts straight now, but the society at large doesn't really get the core of what science is. That's why the fundamentalists can swoop in and claim ID is science, because people just understand science as a collection of facts that come from guys called "scientists".
Here's a personal observation. Although it's unfortunately true that most ID activists are motivated by a prior agenda, in my experience (of moderate sample size) most evolution activists are motivated by a prior agenda as well.
Hmm.. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "prior agenda", but it sounds like you're talking about a hidden agenda. That is saying you're for one thing, but really you're trying to accomplish something quite different. That's just simple deception of course.
I think much of that stems from the kind of people that become activists. From what I've seen they tend to be people driven by passion, and who invest an entire belief structure into something. Passion is a nice motivator, but it can blind you to anything that comes into opposition to that passion. You can see the same thing in any fanatical group, be it PETA, or Operation Rescue.
You're seriously comparing rebooting Firefox, a single user application to rebooting an entire OS? While I agree that having to reboot firefox every time you add an extension is stupid, it has no comparison whatsover to taking down an operating system.
Even if you're not talking about a server (which is a major major downtime problem) it's still annoying as hell to have to reboot my workstation and kill everything I currently have running every other time there's an update. The 3 seconds it takes to restart firefox (and only firefox) isn't really that big a deal.
Why is it that everyone keeps making a crime out of a civil dispute?
Yah, I miss-spoke a bit in calling it a crime. Missing payments isn't a crime and shouldn't be. It's a civil matter and should remain so.
Because they've discovered that ants not only leave "follow me" trails, but also "don't follow me" trails. Feynman only found evidence for the "follow me" trails, which I'd guess had been known about for a while.
But you attempt to make it sound as though enforcement of a agreement is a trivial matter
Where did I say that? The implication is that repo men aren't heroes, puveyors of goodness, etc. They enforce contracts, or agreements as you say. That doesn't mean they have an easy job.
The examples you gave have nothing to do with taking out a loan against a car or house.
Repo men, whatever you think about their profession, risk their lives daily in order to prevent auto theft, which in a way is what failing to pay car payments is.
Why is it everyone has to turn every crime that involves property into theft? If you fail to make house payments have you "stolen" the house? I have no problem with repo men and reposession in general, but failing to make payments isn't theft. Don't try to make repo men into some sort of heroes. They're nothing more than contract enforcers.
An interesting list of qualities, mostly because they many of them don't contradict each other. You can: Enjoy time alone, be a good listener, appear calm and self contained, think, then speak or act, think while speaking, like to the in the thick of things, relish variety, and enjoy chit-chatting without being self contradictory.
So.. if these two qualities "introversion and extroversion" aren't really mutually exclusive, then is this categorization even real and not just bad taxonomy? I can take 15 random qualities, divide them up into two seperate categories and decide that my labels are important distinctions between people. The question I have is, why is introvert/extrovert any better than my random qualities distinction?
Plus, I don't buy the brainpower thing either. I mean, the guy presided over an economy with a prime rate of 18% and gas lines like you won't believe. Brainpower....yeah, right.
If you want the guy who's responsible for price controls (and thus lines for gas) his name is Richard Nixon. Though price controls did continue on into the Carter administration, Carter is also responsible for starting the end of price controls.
That's not to say Nixon was stupid. Obviously he wasn't. But blaming every mistake someone makes on stupidity is just plain wrong. Very smart people make enormous mistakes. Look no further than Nixon (Watergate) or Clinton (Monica Lewinsky) for evidence of that.
Einstein, you might have noticed that the article appeared in the Los Angeles Times. There is a huge water problem throughout pretty much the entire state of California. The San Joaquin and its tributaries have been totally tapped out by Northern California, the excess of which is sent down a concrete-lined artificial river hundreds of miles long to Los Angeles and the rest of southern California.
I have absolutely no problem with water conservation efforts in places where there is a shortage of water. What I have serious problems with is the "environmentalists" who take the water conservation movement in places like California and try to import them in areas where there is NO water shortage whatsoever. They've taken on the idea that "conservation is good" but they've forgotten why we need to conserve. It's taken on a religious dogma like not eating pork because your religion forbids eating pork. Nevermind that the original reason (avoiding disease) has long since gone away.
You can't plan for something you know nothing about. Anyone speculating about whether ET will be war-like, peaceful, care about us, or not care about us is engaging in the art of "making shit up". Our basis for understanding intelligence is almost entirely based on ourselves and how we think, act, behave, and look at the world. Much of this is based on our underlying brain structure and not on culture. We all have emotions and much of our being is based on that.
But yet when we even look at a Jellyfish it's extremely different from us (and even so, very similar in terms of underlying biology). Will ET have better technology (tools) than us? Well, based on our own experience with technology you'd think that anyone capable of solving the problem of inter-stellar travel certainly would have a far better understanding of physics than us. But I fear when I even say that I'm also probbably practicing the art of "making shit up".
The point is that planning for any of this is just absurd, and that's ignoring the fact that we have no idea if there even IS intelligent life elsewhere, much less life that's interested in coming here. I don't believe this kind of question is one of science, but of philosophy. That doesn't mean it's not an interesting or important question, but just one we can't find an actual answer to. Devoting money to it makes about as much sense as to devoting money to trying to find god.
I think a more sane approach would be trying to find out if there IS intelligence life elsewhere. That means putting more money into SETI searches for instance. I personally doubt whether UFOs (the alien spacecraft type) exist, but you'll never find them if you don't look. Because of this I think it's important for such a survey to have a dual purpose. Put money into mapping asteroids (and as a side effect maybe you can look for UFOs, or maybe other purely astronomical phenomenon).
Assuming both my boiler and my hot water tank are equally efficient (which is likely fair, since both appliances do the same job, they heat water), and since they use the same energy source and hence neither is more economical, I don't think I'm losing anything by using a hot water tank rather then an on-demand method, am I?
That depends on how and where you're using the "waste" heat put out by the hot water heater. If you've got a basement, I'd bet your hot water heater is in the basement. You're then heating up the basement which you wouldn't normally do. Some of that heat probbably makes it into the upper floors, but some of it is just going to be lost to the outside.
I thought dark energy was added to make our modern theories "work" to our expectations without knowing what dark energy was
Pretty much, yah. To be fair though this is often a practice in science, to modify theory to meet new observation.
and now it's told a concept that Einstein added to make his equations work to his expectations "sort of" matches (10% is still a big deviation) with this.
Welcome to Cosmology! Where a 10% error is considered pretty good. This is probbably the biggest problem in Cosmology, namely the quality of the data. Because of the difficulty in "proving" almost anyhing it becomes difficult to rely on well tested theory. This is the big reason that Cosmologists almost never receive the Nobel prize in physics.
I vote for the theory that makes sense with matter and energy as-is and doesn't require some exotic matter/energy that exists only as speculation to fill an unknown.
And I think most scientists would agree with you. Of course you still have to come up with this theory you speak of that explains all observations without requiring exotic matter/energy that hasn't been directly observed.
(psst... this story is about dark energy, not dark matter).
The evidence for dark energy is that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, not slowing down. We'd expect that the expansion of the universe would be slowing down, because all the mass in the universe should be attracting everything to everything else. We don't see that, in fact we see the exact opposite. This means there must be some kind of "anti-gravity" force that operates at very large distances. The current accepted way this happens is called "dark energy".
In comparison and contrast to the GW issue, however, I think it's empirically clear the threat is real and eventually there will be (but I hope not) some catastrophic event with the internet.
Well, I'd say we've either already had those catastrophes, or the Internet isn't vulnerable to what we think of as a catastrophe. When I think of catastrophe, I think of something that happens in a short period of time and causes wisespread damage that takes months to cleanup.
So.. either the various virus outbreaks, phishing attacks, and DOS attacks on major websites are all catastrophes, or the internet as a whole isn't really vulnerable to major catastrophes. What's currently happening is lots of minor catastrophes every day.
So, what I'm getting at is the model you should be looking at is a disease model, not a catastrophe model. Phishing, viruses, DOS attacks are all more like diseases that different parts of the internet develop.
If humans are too complex to have evolved, what does that say about the aliens that might have designed us?
Nice try buddy, but it's aliens designing other aliens all the way down.
I was looking for a good response to the ridiculous claim that "corporations not take a stand" on things, and you've done it much better than I could. I'm not sure what "taking a stand" means as far as the original post goes, but it seems to imply anything that any group (no matter how small) is vocal enough about. To add a non-scientific case, I think it's a good thing that some corporations "took a stand" and hired Jews in the 30s and 40s. By the original posters argument, they shouldn't have done so.
The only thing I can add that the original poster seems to miss is that "doing nothing" and remaining neutral is taking a stand as well.
I'm not European, so this specific issue doesn't effect me, but you're still talking about $1.2 million. Sure your share of that is jack squat, but that $1.2 million being spent to feed the hungry, fight crime, save the whales, insert-your-pet-issue-here will go a long way.
Not really. 1.2 million dollars just isn't the fortune you're making it out to be when you're talking about the big problems you referred to. Sure it might make a difference for a year or a few months, but what after that? If this thing works, it's a much more permanent solution and a solution for other towns with similar problems.
This is not an attempt to argue, I have just never understood the logic behind the contention that it's OK to blow tax dollars on crackpot schemes because it only personally cost me $0.0004.
I think that's a valid concern. It sure sounds like a nutty idea, but there's nothing to say it won't work. It's not as if the government is funding truly nutty ideas like perpetual motion machines or extracting zero-point energy.
So once again the government/PTBs are footing the bill for people too lazy to move. *cough* New Orleans *cough* Florida *cough*
The question you seem to miss in all these cases is how much does it cost everyone in terms of lost jobs, damage to the economy, etc to just move an entire city? (especially in the case of New Orleans). If it's more cost effective to rebuild, you do it. In this case if it's cheaper to put in a big mirror to bring in light, (and it actually works to get people to stay) you do it. The cost is only 2.4 million dollars, and the EU only pays half of that. With 440 people in the town that's about $2250 per person.
The question you SHOULD be asking is is this an effective strategy (cost included) to stop stagnation and economic deday in a region and promote growth, vs just letting the city die (and puttting the money somwehere else)? It seems a bit crazy to me that a few lit up spots are going to make much difference, but then again I don't live in this town.
The best I've read is The Double Helix by James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. It's probbably the best account of how actual science is done (the blind alleys, the competitiveness, etc) ever written. The Cukoos Egg by Cliff Stoll is another great book about tracking down Soviet spies (albiet ameturish ones) that hacked into Cliff's computer through arpanet. The Making Of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is another great book. It chronicles much of the project. Anyone know any great books on the history of computing?
Wow. Are you sure that's not a list of top 25 bad sci-fi movies? There's not a single movie in that list that's good, and not just OK. Paycheck was OK, but not really good. Skycaptain was entertaining, but not worthy of being on any top movies list. On the actual top 25 list you have to go all the way down to #18 with 12 Monkeys to get an actually good movie (which is really one of the greatest time travel movies I've seen).
I didn't like this movie at all (yes, the Tarkovsky version), and I do like slow movies without explosions, etc. Stalker was great and 2001 is one of the best sci-fi movies ever made. Solaris was just too boring though. I honestly don't see why people like this movie so much.