If so, why spend all that money to find out what something looked at 24 million years ago (unless you're trying to identify the brown liquid lying at the bottom of my fridge)?
I guess I don't understand why it'd be better if we were looking at a more recent picture of that galaxy. In the age of the Universe 24 million years isn't very long. Even when astronomers do look at very old (or young in terms of the age of the universe) galaxies it's still very interesting.
I don't think you understand. They're trying to develop software to make all those solutions inter-operate, not some new hardware they can all sell. They'll all gain in the end if it works.
but why do we need IBM between the Open Source community and customers who already bought their equipment?
Because when you've got a billion dollar company riding on open source software you need someone to help you NOW when you run into a problem, not try to call up the open source developer who may be on vacation, screwing his girlfriend, whatever. This is even true for the small companies out there, just more true for the larger ones.
As far as cancer goes...since cancer is caused by uncontrolled cell division (and the fact that these cells can invade other tissues) and in my understanding, pretty much sporadic or random if outside environmental issues (smoking, etc) are ignored, it seems like it is only a matter of time before someone gets cancer.
Yah, but we all have cancer cells in our body all the time. Our immune system is able to take care of them though before they can overwhelm it. What if a lot of cancer were caused by the immune system breaking down due to the ageing process though? Immune system gets weaker, and can't keep up with the cancer cells like it used to. If you could stop or slow the ageing process, you'd have less people getting cancer.
We can't even cure hunger and this guy wants to talk about curing aging?
Hunger stopped being a scientific problem long ago. Hunger is a political and/or economic problem. Cancer is a different story. One of the biggest risk factors for cancer is simply age. The very old are far more likely to develop cancer. If this is a result of accumulated cellular damage, then curing aging would also be a major step towards preventing cancer in the first place.
Also the biggest cause of death (at least in the developed nations) is simply a result of the ageing process. We ignore that because we've always assumed it's inevidible. But what if it's not?
Doesn't say a thing about "so long as a reasonabl person won't confuse it with official endorsement". Not sure where you got that.
Maybe the relevant part is here:
for the purpose of conveying, or in a manner reasonably calculated to convey, a false impression of sponsorship or approval by the Government of the United States
Isn't it fairly obvious The Onion is doing satire and parody here isn't isn't trying to convey "a false impression of sponsorship or approval"? Unless you're retarded you should know The Onion is a publication of satire and there's no approval or sponsorship implied.
The only thing literally preventing the sound from traveling around the world is the placement of the continents.
I don't know if you're ever experienced this with this "sound" thing, but it gets quieter the further away you are from the source. Intensity fall off with the square of the distance, so at 200 meters it's 4 times quieter than at 100 meters.
It's interesting, but hardly proof of sonar as the culprit in the whale beachings. It's not as if these "environmental" groups don't have a history of just plain lying and ignoring evidence, so I have a hard time accepting anything they say at face value. PETA and Greenpeace are full of nutjob fanatics who only seem to care about their own emotions and not about actual truth. Is the NRDC the same?
I actually don't think you've thought about this. Not everything is complicated simply because the tools are complicated. Fixing your own car involves multiple tools and is complicated. You don't just sit down and can do it right away. Writing software involves complicated tools like compilers. You get back complicated messages that aren't immediately obvious what they mean unless you understand what's going on. Editing photos is such a complex activity and requires complex tools.
Because they're hard to do and take skill. Someone who's never used a keyboard before might think it's "overly complex". "Unless you are using the keyboard full time, you spend a lot of time figuring it out".
Here's a clue Dvorak, doing complex things requires you to learn how to do them. Why do you make this assumption that doing everything is simple?
Well, considering the thing above, it took less then 100 years, and mostly the persistance of a single farao. It wasn't his bold statement as much as his bold desire and a vision.
How do you know they didn't just get lucky? We never hear about the bold desires and visions that fail. Maybe there were other cultures that tried to create great things and had the same desire and vision. They failed because they didn't have the right techniques, didn't try something that was attainable, etc. I think you should try to do great things, but you can't set a timetable for doing things you currently don't know how to do.
If you want a recent example just look at the people advocating fusion power. 25 years ago they said we might have fusion power in 25 years. Obviously we have no fusion power right now, and now people are saying it'll happen in another 25 years. It might, and I think we should continue the research, but you can't plan on fusion happening at all since we don't know how to do it.
This is just an example of moving the pollution elsewhere. The metal must be refined, at great cost to the environment. Then it is oxidized in a "pollution free" car.
The idea would be to recycle the metal and de-oxidize it. You're right that this isn't a source of energy, but an energy storage mechanism. Saying it moves the pollution somewhere else is missng the point. If you can create an energy storage mechanism then you can use clean source of energy to produce the energy stored in the metal.
The problem with the whole system comes here: In order for the Hydrogen car to be able to travel as far as a conventional car it needs a metal coil three-times heavier than an equivalent petrol tank. Although this sound like a lot in most cars this will add up to about 100kg (220 pounds) and should not affect the performance of the car.
So it's just very impractical since you need some way of loading and unloading very heavy coils of metal every time you refuel. Liquid is easier to put in your tank and 12 gallons of gas only weighs about 72 pounds.
I think the point the poster is trying to make is that individual parts of a single html docments aren't "addressable" inside HTML. For instance when I quote you I have to copy your text and put it in italics. There's no way to link to JUST the parts I want to quote. If I could do so I could link to your quote from anywhere on the web and make comments about it.
I do have to admit that the whole argument against "linearity" is awfully confusing and more than a bit biased against so-called "techies". The article essentially reads like ramblings of a lunatic who doesn't want to explain himself and only wants to insult the current implementation we have of hypertext. He's more into labeling people as either "techies" or "humanists", two words which Ted seems to define as "the bad people" and "the good people". This kind of labeling is always a bad thing as it's only tends to polarize people into different camps and doesn't actually teach anyone anything.
If you ignore all the political ramblings and insults the idea isn't so crazy. HTML is great for publishing information, but it's not so great for creating dialogue between people. Have you ever read an article on a news site and wish you could find what other people are saying about it? Some newspapers have crappy versions of this, but if there were a standard way to find comments about everything published on the web that would be a vast improvement. It'd be like having a slashdot for everything on the internet. Wading through all the crap might be difficult, but I'm sure that problem can be solved through indexing.
But I think you've just shown my point. The egyptians did progress from a stage of not knowing much about building stone structures to one of knowing quite a bit through failures, trial and error, etc. What I'm getting at is that we need to do the same thing. I doubt the egyptians made some bold statement early in stone architecture that they'd build the pyramid at Giza in 100 years. It'd be impossible to know if the techniques they were using would scale properly, not to mention simple economic factors of food availability.
Seeing that far in the future about things we don't currently know is difficult at best, and usually impossible. Bold statements like Japan has made are just that, bold statements. If you don't know if you can do it, it's hope, not a plan.
Not really. The pay back times I've seen on on the order of 10-20 years. That's not exactly low cost.
No matter how efficient the cell is on Earth, it will *always* be an order of magnitude more efficient in space.
Sure, and probbably about 100 times harder to get that energy as well. Anything in orbit is essentially throwaway. When it breaks you de-orbit it and build another. That tends to be expensive.
We CAN build solar collector satellites RIGHT NOW; the technology isn't something that's brand new.
Can we do it in an economically viable way? Can we hope to have technology that'll allow us to build kilometer sized solar arrays? That's quite a big hope for something we've never done. The thing about technology and science is on a longer time scale you can never know what you're going to develop next. You can't simply plan on technological advances to happen, you can only hope they will.
Your argument fails with regards to Egypt and the early buildings there. They were the first in known history to build huge stone buildings, and while they did not achieve the pyramids at the first try, you can't exactly say that they were basing themselves on long standing tradition and experience while building them.
And how do we know they didn't try progressively larger stone buildings? Any small structures were far less likely to survive. Maybe they did survive but they're burried in sand because they're relatively small. You don't start out building a massive structure, you start out small to see how well your process works. You don't build something until you're fairly sure you can do it. Otherwise you're doomed to failure. At the moment we haven't built anything in space, so planning on building a massive structure at this point is just ridiculous.
You look at stuff like some of the cathedrals/castles in Europe that they made with tech that was nowhere near ours, (or temples in the far east, some of the stuff the egyptians built etc) and thye had vision to build stuff that took well in excess of 35 years
Cathedrals and castles in Europe were all built after we had built much smaller and simple things like houses, for hundreds of years. They used known techniques, they planned everything out, etc. What have we built in space so far that we think we could plan on building something on the scale of kilometers now? Basically nothing. The ISS is all built on Earth, and it's tiny by comparison. The 35 year estimate is basically just a thrown out number that no one will ever have to answer too. It's like saying you're going to get married in 5 years, or George Bush saying we're going to have hydrogen cars in 15 years. All of those events could certainly happen, but I wouldn't bet any money on it.
Come off it. 10 years from now there's going to be the Same Old Stuff in space.
But what about the needs that drive the power generating satellite? Will we have low cost efficient solar cells by then? Will wind power or other green power sources advance to the point where a satellite providing power is pointless? 35 years is a long time in terms of technology. There's even an off chance that fusion power generation will be a reality.
Re:Watch a little more closely ...
on
Deep in the Core
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There is still quite a bit of speculation on whether or not Black Holes even exist.
Two of those links point to the same article that doesn't actually say black holes don't exist, but has one guy who thinks there's different explanations about extremely compact objects. He even says he accepts that galaxies have objects general relativity would say are black holes at the center. The other only talks about how Einstein (who died 50 years ago) didn't believe black holes existed. I don't know how much speculation there still is about black holes, but those two articles have very little evidence for speculation within physics.
The thing neither of the articles mention however is what aspects of general relativity Einstein or this other guy don't think are true. From what I understand most physicists who study general relativity believe that the non-light escaping aspect of a black hole does exist. What's at issue is whether a black hole collapses to a point. This presents a real problem because quantum mechanics, which deals with the very small, and general relativity, which deals with massive gravitation are incompatible with each other. Normally this is fine since gravitational effects are ignored at the quantum level, and quantum effects are ignored at the macroscopic level of massive bodies. Black holes produce both of these effects at the same time/place, so we don't really know what happens.
Various theories have come out to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, but I don't know if any are complete or produce any testable predictions. String theory is an example of a unified theory that is both incomplete, and one that hasn't produced any testable predictions (not already predicted by current theory that is).
You really need to look no further than the virus. It is little more than a small bit of DNA or RNA and a protective coating. They generally are parasites on cells since they don't have some of the machinery to reproduce on their own, but as you can tell from the epidemics and pandemics they cause they are a quite successful form of life at its most elemental level.
Viruses aren't usually defined as being alive. This is because they don't have any mechanism to reproduce themselves, but rely upon the host in able to reproduce. They're very much equivalant to computer viruses, which rely on a host operating system to reproduce.
Not to say the definitions of life are particularly scientific. By a simple reading of the need for reproduction a mule isn't alive either because it's sterile.
Sorry, but as others have pointed out this isn't the way the word created is used or understood by anyone but probbably yourself. By your definition NOTHING is created except by a god. People DO use this word quite commonly when referring to things not created by a god.
Your word definitions are thus extremely confusing because you're using a word with an existing definition and giving it a new definition contrary to the accepted definition. I could for example define cat as an aquatic animal that swims in the sea, but if I used my definition of the word cat in conversation expecting people to understand my personal definition, no one would understand me.
Slashdot Mirror
The Atari 2600 had upset folks by flooding the market with bad software
What? I had an Atari 2600 and I don't remember being "upset at bad software" at all. Was everyone else upset and I just somehow missed it?
If so, why spend all that money to find out what something looked at 24 million years ago (unless you're trying to identify the brown liquid lying at the bottom of my fridge)?
I guess I don't understand why it'd be better if we were looking at a more recent picture of that galaxy. In the age of the Universe 24 million years isn't very long. Even when astronomers do look at very old (or young in terms of the age of the universe) galaxies it's still very interesting.
I don't think you understand. They're trying to develop software to make all those solutions inter-operate, not some new hardware they can all sell. They'll all gain in the end if it works.
but why do we need IBM between the Open Source community and customers who already bought their equipment?
Because when you've got a billion dollar company riding on open source software you need someone to help you NOW when you run into a problem, not try to call up the open source developer who may be on vacation, screwing his girlfriend, whatever. This is even true for the small companies out there, just more true for the larger ones.
As far as cancer goes...since cancer is caused by uncontrolled cell division (and the fact that these cells can invade other tissues) and in my understanding, pretty much sporadic or random if outside environmental issues (smoking, etc) are ignored, it seems like it is only a matter of time before someone gets cancer.
Yah, but we all have cancer cells in our body all the time. Our immune system is able to take care of them though before they can overwhelm it. What if a lot of cancer were caused by the immune system breaking down due to the ageing process though? Immune system gets weaker, and can't keep up with the cancer cells like it used to. If you could stop or slow the ageing process, you'd have less people getting cancer.
We can't even cure hunger and this guy wants to talk about curing aging?
Hunger stopped being a scientific problem long ago. Hunger is a political and/or economic problem. Cancer is a different story. One of the biggest risk factors for cancer is simply age. The very old are far more likely to develop cancer. If this is a result of accumulated cellular damage, then curing aging would also be a major step towards preventing cancer in the first place.
Also the biggest cause of death (at least in the developed nations) is simply a result of the ageing process. We ignore that because we've always assumed it's inevidible. But what if it's not?
Doesn't say a thing about "so long as a reasonabl person won't confuse it with official endorsement". Not sure where you got that.
Maybe the relevant part is here:
Isn't it fairly obvious The Onion is doing satire and parody here isn't isn't trying to convey "a false impression of sponsorship or approval"? Unless you're retarded you should know The Onion is a publication of satire and there's no approval or sponsorship implied.
The only thing literally preventing the sound from traveling around the world is the placement of the continents.
I don't know if you're ever experienced this with this "sound" thing, but it gets quieter the further away you are from the source. Intensity fall off with the square of the distance, so at 200 meters it's 4 times quieter than at 100 meters.
It's interesting, but hardly proof of sonar as the culprit in the whale beachings. It's not as if these "environmental" groups don't have a history of just plain lying and ignoring evidence, so I have a hard time accepting anything they say at face value. PETA and Greenpeace are full of nutjob fanatics who only seem to care about their own emotions and not about actual truth. Is the NRDC the same?
I actually don't think you've thought about this. Not everything is complicated simply because the tools are complicated. Fixing your own car involves multiple tools and is complicated. You don't just sit down and can do it right away. Writing software involves complicated tools like compilers. You get back complicated messages that aren't immediately obvious what they mean unless you understand what's going on. Editing photos is such a complex activity and requires complex tools.
Personally, I prefer activism to terrorism.
Personally, I prefer not taking signatures so literally.
Because they're hard to do and take skill. Someone who's never used a keyboard before might think it's "overly complex". "Unless you are using the keyboard full time, you spend a lot of time figuring it out".
Here's a clue Dvorak, doing complex things requires you to learn how to do them. Why do you make this assumption that doing everything is simple?
Well, considering the thing above, it took less then 100 years, and mostly the persistance of a single farao. It wasn't his bold statement as much as his bold desire and a vision.
How do you know they didn't just get lucky? We never hear about the bold desires and visions that fail. Maybe there were other cultures that tried to create great things and had the same desire and vision. They failed because they didn't have the right techniques, didn't try something that was attainable, etc. I think you should try to do great things, but you can't set a timetable for doing things you currently don't know how to do.
If you want a recent example just look at the people advocating fusion power. 25 years ago they said we might have fusion power in 25 years. Obviously we have no fusion power right now, and now people are saying it'll happen in another 25 years. It might, and I think we should continue the research, but you can't plan on fusion happening at all since we don't know how to do it.
This is just an example of moving the pollution elsewhere. The metal must be refined, at great cost to the environment. Then it is oxidized in a "pollution free" car.
The idea would be to recycle the metal and de-oxidize it. You're right that this isn't a source of energy, but an energy storage mechanism. Saying it moves the pollution somewhere else is missng the point. If you can create an energy storage mechanism then you can use clean source of energy to produce the energy stored in the metal.
The problem with the whole system comes here:
In order for the Hydrogen car to be able to travel as far as a conventional car it needs a metal coil three-times heavier than an equivalent petrol tank. Although this sound like a lot in most cars this will add up to about 100kg (220 pounds) and should not affect the performance of the car.
So it's just very impractical since you need some way of loading and unloading very heavy coils of metal every time you refuel. Liquid is easier to put in your tank and 12 gallons of gas only weighs about 72 pounds.
I think the point the poster is trying to make is that individual parts of a single html docments aren't "addressable" inside HTML. For instance when I quote you I have to copy your text and put it in italics. There's no way to link to JUST the parts I want to quote. If I could do so I could link to your quote from anywhere on the web and make comments about it.
I do have to admit that the whole argument against "linearity" is awfully confusing and more than a bit biased against so-called "techies". The article essentially reads like ramblings of a lunatic who doesn't want to explain himself and only wants to insult the current implementation we have of hypertext. He's more into labeling people as either "techies" or "humanists", two words which Ted seems to define as "the bad people" and "the good people". This kind of labeling is always a bad thing as it's only tends to polarize people into different camps and doesn't actually teach anyone anything.
If you ignore all the political ramblings and insults the idea isn't so crazy. HTML is great for publishing information, but it's not so great for creating dialogue between people. Have you ever read an article on a news site and wish you could find what other people are saying about it? Some newspapers have crappy versions of this, but if there were a standard way to find comments about everything published on the web that would be a vast improvement. It'd be like having a slashdot for everything on the internet. Wading through all the crap might be difficult, but I'm sure that problem can be solved through indexing.
But I think you've just shown my point. The egyptians did progress from a stage of not knowing much about building stone structures to one of knowing quite a bit through failures, trial and error, etc. What I'm getting at is that we need to do the same thing. I doubt the egyptians made some bold statement early in stone architecture that they'd build the pyramid at Giza in 100 years. It'd be impossible to know if the techniques they were using would scale properly, not to mention simple economic factors of food availability.
Seeing that far in the future about things we don't currently know is difficult at best, and usually impossible. Bold statements like Japan has made are just that, bold statements. If you don't know if you can do it, it's hope, not a plan.
We already have low-cost efficient solar cells.
Not really. The pay back times I've seen on on the order of 10-20 years. That's not exactly low cost.
No matter how efficient the cell is on Earth, it will *always* be an order of magnitude more efficient in space.
Sure, and probbably about 100 times harder to get that energy as well. Anything in orbit is essentially throwaway. When it breaks you de-orbit it and build another. That tends to be expensive.
We CAN build solar collector satellites RIGHT NOW; the technology isn't something that's brand new.
Can we do it in an economically viable way? Can we hope to have technology that'll allow us to build kilometer sized solar arrays? That's quite a big hope for something we've never done. The thing about technology and science is on a longer time scale you can never know what you're going to develop next. You can't simply plan on technological advances to happen, you can only hope they will.
Mother Theresa, and the like
Mother Theresa certainly got a lot of good press, but her particular brand of religion encourged suffering, not the relief of it.
Your argument fails with regards to Egypt and the early buildings there. They were the first in known history to build huge stone buildings, and while they did not achieve the pyramids at the first try, you can't exactly say that they were basing themselves on long standing tradition and experience while building them.
And how do we know they didn't try progressively larger stone buildings? Any small structures were far less likely to survive. Maybe they did survive but they're burried in sand because they're relatively small. You don't start out building a massive structure, you start out small to see how well your process works. You don't build something until you're fairly sure you can do it. Otherwise you're doomed to failure. At the moment we haven't built anything in space, so planning on building a massive structure at this point is just ridiculous.
You look at stuff like some of the cathedrals/castles in Europe that they made with tech that was nowhere near ours, (or temples in the far east, some of the stuff the egyptians built etc) and thye had vision to build stuff that took well in excess of 35 years
Cathedrals and castles in Europe were all built after we had built much smaller and simple things like houses, for hundreds of years. They used known techniques, they planned everything out, etc. What have we built in space so far that we think we could plan on building something on the scale of kilometers now? Basically nothing. The ISS is all built on Earth, and it's tiny by comparison. The 35 year estimate is basically just a thrown out number that no one will ever have to answer too. It's like saying you're going to get married in 5 years, or George Bush saying we're going to have hydrogen cars in 15 years. All of those events could certainly happen, but I wouldn't bet any money on it.
Come off it. 10 years from now there's going to be the Same Old Stuff in space.
But what about the needs that drive the power generating satellite? Will we have low cost efficient solar cells by then? Will wind power or other green power sources advance to the point where a satellite providing power is pointless? 35 years is a long time in terms of technology. There's even an off chance that fusion power generation will be a reality.
There is still quite a bit of speculation on whether or not Black Holes even exist.
Two of those links point to the same article that doesn't actually say black holes don't exist, but has one guy who thinks there's different explanations about extremely compact objects. He even says he accepts that galaxies have objects general relativity would say are black holes at the center. The other only talks about how Einstein (who died 50 years ago) didn't believe black holes existed. I don't know how much speculation there still is about black holes, but those two articles have very little evidence for speculation within physics.
The thing neither of the articles mention however is what aspects of general relativity Einstein or this other guy don't think are true. From what I understand most physicists who study general relativity believe that the non-light escaping aspect of a black hole does exist. What's at issue is whether a black hole collapses to a point. This presents a real problem because quantum mechanics, which deals with the very small, and general relativity, which deals with massive gravitation are incompatible with each other. Normally this is fine since gravitational effects are ignored at the quantum level, and quantum effects are ignored at the macroscopic level of massive bodies. Black holes produce both of these effects at the same time/place, so we don't really know what happens.
Various theories have come out to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, but I don't know if any are complete or produce any testable predictions. String theory is an example of a unified theory that is both incomplete, and one that hasn't produced any testable predictions (not already predicted by current theory that is).
35 years in the future? When you don't know what technology will be like in even 10 years, how can you possibly plan 35 years ahead?
You really need to look no further than the virus. It is little more than a small bit of DNA or RNA and a protective coating. They generally are parasites on cells since they don't have some of the machinery to reproduce on their own, but as you can tell from the epidemics and pandemics they cause they are a quite successful form of life at its most elemental level.
Viruses aren't usually defined as being alive. This is because they don't have any mechanism to reproduce themselves, but rely upon the host in able to reproduce. They're very much equivalant to computer viruses, which rely on a host operating system to reproduce.
Not to say the definitions of life are particularly scientific. By a simple reading of the need for reproduction a mule isn't alive either because it's sterile.
Sorry, but as others have pointed out this isn't the way the word created is used or understood by anyone but probbably yourself. By your definition NOTHING is created except by a god. People DO use this word quite commonly when referring to things not created by a god.
Your word definitions are thus extremely confusing because you're using a word with an existing definition and giving it a new definition contrary to the accepted definition. I could for example define cat as an aquatic animal that swims in the sea, but if I used my definition of the word cat in conversation expecting people to understand my personal definition, no one would understand me.