No. Believe it or not some of us don't need a seperate word for non-Americans in space. Cosmonaut was the Russian word for Astronaut (though I'd still guess its popularization had something to do with the cold war). This taikonaut thing is just stupid. Who cares what nation they're from? Slashdot is an english language site, so the term is astronaut.
Many of my friends complained they weren't getting these messages they heard about from other friends (though I don't know whether any were forwarded into spamtraps). Will spam destroy the Internet by raising our guards so much that some messages never get through, though we want to exchange them? How much political and commercial power do these spam filter companies have now?
My guess is the emails you're referring too were mass-mailings about "give money to blah" or "political candidate X did this, Don't let him get away with it!". Someone in the company marked these messages as spam, and everyone else got it filtered. I seriously doubt the company was specifically targeting political messages.
The big problem is that some people/organizations have turned to actually blocking spam from being delivered. That's entirely the wrong approach as it leads to false positives (and probbably does more harm than good). I know certain (IMO very bad) ISPs are actually blocking email based on widely cast IP blackhole lists. Spam should always be simply tagged, and left for the client to deal with. If the spam recipient find the tagging usefull they can auto-delete it themselves or filter it into a spam folder. If they don't, don't enable filtering/seperation at the client level and no harm is done.
The danger of making broad statements like this, however scientifically accurate, is that people tend to read them and say "Oh, I'm a woman, that must mean I'm not good at spacial analysis and that I will live longer than the men in my life."
That's a problem with peoples understanding of science, not a problem of science itself. Are we not supposed to state facts now because people will missunderstand them? If women are scientifically pre-dispositioned to be poor at math, why did I do so well? Oh, simple: I'm the exception to the rule. But this is science we're talking about. There are no exceptions.
It's not a rule, it's a statistical obervation (at least in this theoretical case). It's like saying 95% of adults are between 5 feet and 7 feet tall. When you find someone 4 feet tall it's not disputing anything. No one is saying all women are bad at math, just that statistically women tend to be worse at math. Just like statistically women are shorter than men. Now, here comes the controvertial part. The closed-minded and faint of heart need not read any farther. What if gender is not a digital (1 or 0) quality? What if gender is an analog (a range between 1 and 0) quality? Scientifically, sex is an analog quality.
I won't step into the murky waters that are "gender", but the studies referred to are based on sex, not gender. For those who don't know, "sex" refers to the physical sex of a being (usually defined by the genetalia) and "gender" refers to the self-identity of the being as either male or female.
Which is a recent distinction which has a distinct political bent to it. If you tell me that the presence of testosterone leads to improved math skills (and show me studies to prove it!) I won't doubt it. But if you tell me that being a man leads to improved math skills I'm going to tell you your science needs work.
Except testosterone/estrogen levels aren't the only difference (biologically speaking) between men and women. There's been decent evidence that there's developmental difference in the brain during pregnancy.
Which part of "very few people" didn't you understand? Very few people have a media system. The vast majority of users use probbably under 20 gigs of drive space. They aren't storing masses of movies, MP3s, etc. They don't have 5 different games installed, they just use the computer for email, online shopping, and word/excel. The storage requirements for those uses aren't going up too fast.
But do you honestly think calling people concerned about plutonium dispersal "stupid hippies" helps the debate?
But they aren't simply people concerned about plutonium dispersal. That's entirely reasonable. They are a bunch of fear mongering fanatics. These people are concered about 2.7 grams of plutonium in the Mars missions.. 2.7 grams? Do these people truly have no sense of scale? Just take a look at that website and try to tell me stupid hippies isn't entirely appropriate.
It's sites like that that give enviromental concerns a bad name.
I guess I don't see your story as a matter of logic or emotionlessness, but rather over identification. Rationalism and emtotion aren't really opposites, but simply different. It's not about Star Trek vulncans or computers, but the bounds of humor. Maybe in some circles black humour is inapproriate.
Anyway, I think the sensitivity train works both ways. People who are overly sensitive will also lose friends do to their reactions. Are we all supposed to be forced into a bland existence where we don't say anything that might offend the most sensitive person?
That sounds like a very stupid woman. Maybe she has some legitimate reason for being offended if she were an Astronaut, or if she knew McAuliffe.. but simply being a schoolteacher? Were all the women in the room offended too because you told a joke involving a woman? How far are peoples artificial identifications with strangers supposed to go?
Some do, some don't. There's no home version MRI machine, and MRI has been around for 20 years at least. I really see about zero market for someone developing EMP bombs, sp the technology will likely never be developed.
Maybe this idea that you have some right to be contacted wherever you go? If you don't like it, go to another theatre. it's not as if you're guaranteed a good signal indoors anyway.
Looking at the heat shield doesn't seem like a very revealing bit of science -- more of a "gee look how far we've come" sort of cool thing.
You're right, looking at the heat shield isn't about science, but it is about engineering. The heat shield can obviously never be adequately tested, and until you take a look at it you never know exactly how well it performed. Were there areas where it could have failed? Was is over-engineered? Those are usefull questions that if we had answers to we could design better/more efficient heat shielding in the future.
The heat shield also digs into the surface far more than the rovers ever could, so you might see whats below the surface. Though looking at the heat shield sounds like a total geek thing to do, it can reveal a lot of non obvious information.
At this point you're probbably right about finding something to do. In the area where the rovers have landed we've seen the everyday stuff, and now it's all about being lucky enough to see the more rare things.
The scenario is still ridiculous. Criminals aren't a bunch of genius technologists experimenting with EMP weapons like in a comic book (at least not the ones robbing banks at gunpoint). If you're that smart you'll figure out a far less dangerous means to steal. There's been several successfull breakins to vaults on long weekends for instance. That said -- just because something is vehicle-mounted today doesn't mean it won't be suitcase-sized five years from now.
And it doesn't mean it won't be exactly the same size five years from now. Electronics shrink because of process improvements. Shrinking something like an EMP generator would be far harder since you rely on energy storage, large coils, etc.
You didn't demonstrate anything in your post, you just made a bunch of unsubstantied claims. As far as saying something, I find it pointless to argue with someone who's personally insulting.
And yes, such devices exist (in vehicle-mounted form) and are available to civilians
Yah, so criminals are going to drag out the massive vehicle mounted EMP generating device to disable peoples guns.
See the part where I said something about _portable_ devices? You can make a super-conducting magnet that'll pull all the guns from everyones hands too.. but you can't make it portable.
Uhh... if you're smart enough, and have enough resources to make a small EMP powerfull enough to take out all electronics within a 5-10 mile radius.. why the hell are you doing smalltime burglary? I guess you could rob banks.. but people already do that without any guns at all.
An EMP isn't something that that Mr. T of the A-Team just assembles out of junk from a garage.
Right, because criminals always cary high tech equipment that will produce an EMP. What kind of fantasy land do you live in? If they cary an EMP, why not a super-strong electro magnet that'll suck the gun (smart or not) right from your hand? Better yet they could carry a death ray and force field to protect them from your bullets.
Try to stay within the bounds of reality and not Star Trek where no one but _possibly_ the military has produced a nice portable EMP weapon powerfull enough to destroy electronics from a few feet away.
Uhh.. if I were a buyer of safes, I'd want to know which ones were actually secure, and which ones can be broken into by someone with a little extra knowledge. The safe maker is going to do jack (there ARE known vulnerabilities to safes, and the safe makers do squat).
It's things like this that makes me glad I live in a country where freedom of speech is our highest law (even if it has been worn away by the patriot act).
Maybe these Indian kids need to realize that higher education in CSCI isn't the ticket they were lead to believe. Stop thinking in such a rigid mindset and believing whatever you were taught when you were 10.
Oh please. Nuclear weapons are good for one thing only, and that's preventing a foreign power from invading your land. All the countries you mentioned are members of NATO, so Russia would never dream of using nuclear weapons against them.
Maybe if you had read the parents post you would have realized he was talking about icepacks that AREN'T floating.
You're right though, most of the ice in the arctic is already floating. The antarctic glaciers are the ones we should worry about as far as sea level is concerned.
Right, because we _just_ discovered this Space Shuttle thing was dangerous 2 years ago february. I've never bought that argument, and I don't buy it now. We've know the thing is dangerous since its creation. Since when did the human race (or at least the US) turn into a bunch of whiny little gits that don't want to take any risk of "people dying"? How many people have died for a far smaller payoff like climbing Mt. Everest? The astronauts are willing to do it, and the Shuttle itself probbably couldn't be repaired in orbit at the space station anyway.
The real deal is the administrators are covering their collective asses. No one wants to go down in the media shitstorm if a Shuttle is lost repairing hubble. Another casualty of our reactive media-wacko society.
I hope to hell you're not right. If corporations can cry foul anytime "secret" information is leaked that's a major problem with freedom of the press. All corps need do is make any problem with their products a "trade secret" and the press will be muzzled on reporting on it. Firestone tires de-treading? Trade secret. Phen-Fed causing pulmonary problems? Trade secret. Cigarette companies knowing the addictiveness of nicotine and trying to enhance it's addictiveness? Trade secret, can't publish.
I truly fear a country where Corporations can just hush up whatever they want. Apple's cheap PCs isn't in the same scope of public interest as pharmaceutical companies keeping secrets about harmfull products, but it would set a dangerous precedent.
If I were in ThinkSecret's place, I'd sit down with Apple's lawyer, tell them the name of the source who provided the information, pay a tiny little fee to the lawyers involved, and have a nice day.
Assuming they have the money to fight it, I'd wait for a court order to reveal the source. If they reveal the source anytime a tiny amount of pressure is applied then no one will to them ever again (which is what Apple really wants).
Slashdot Mirror
No. Believe it or not some of us don't need a seperate word for non-Americans in space. Cosmonaut was the Russian word for Astronaut (though I'd still guess its popularization had something to do with the cold war). This taikonaut thing is just stupid. Who cares what nation they're from? Slashdot is an english language site, so the term is astronaut.
Many of my friends complained they weren't getting these messages they heard about from other friends (though I don't know whether any were forwarded into spamtraps). Will spam destroy the Internet by raising our guards so much that some messages never get through, though we want to exchange them? How much political and commercial power do these spam filter companies have now?
My guess is the emails you're referring too were mass-mailings about "give money to blah" or "political candidate X did this, Don't let him get away with it!". Someone in the company marked these messages as spam, and everyone else got it filtered. I seriously doubt the company was specifically targeting political messages.
The big problem is that some people/organizations have turned to actually blocking spam from being delivered. That's entirely the wrong approach as it leads to false positives (and probbably does more harm than good). I know certain (IMO very bad) ISPs are actually blocking email based on widely cast IP blackhole lists. Spam should always be simply tagged, and left for the client to deal with. If the spam recipient find the tagging usefull they can auto-delete it themselves or filter it into a spam folder. If they don't, don't enable filtering/seperation at the client level and no harm is done.
The danger of making broad statements like this, however scientifically accurate, is that people tend to read them and say "Oh, I'm a woman, that must mean I'm not good at spacial analysis and that I will live longer than the men in my life."
That's a problem with peoples understanding of science, not a problem of science itself. Are we not supposed to state facts now because people will missunderstand them?
If women are scientifically pre-dispositioned to be poor at math, why did I do so well? Oh, simple: I'm the exception to the rule. But this is science we're talking about. There are no exceptions.
It's not a rule, it's a statistical obervation (at least in this theoretical case). It's like saying 95% of adults are between 5 feet and 7 feet tall. When you find someone 4 feet tall it's not disputing anything. No one is saying all women are bad at math, just that statistically women tend to be worse at math. Just like statistically women are shorter than men.
Now, here comes the controvertial part. The closed-minded and faint of heart need not read any farther. What if gender is not a digital (1 or 0) quality? What if gender is an analog (a range between 1 and 0) quality? Scientifically, sex is an analog quality.
I won't step into the murky waters that are "gender", but the studies referred to are based on sex, not gender.
For those who don't know, "sex" refers to the physical sex of a being (usually defined by the genetalia) and "gender" refers to the self-identity of the being as either male or female.
Which is a recent distinction which has a distinct political bent to it.
If you tell me that the presence of testosterone leads to improved math skills (and show me studies to prove it!) I won't doubt it. But if you tell me that being a man leads to improved math skills I'm going to tell you your science needs work.
Except testosterone/estrogen levels aren't the only difference (biologically speaking) between men and women. There's been decent evidence that there's developmental difference in the brain during pregnancy.
Which part of "very few people" didn't you understand? Very few people have a media system. The vast majority of users use probbably under 20 gigs of drive space. They aren't storing masses of movies, MP3s, etc. They don't have 5 different games installed, they just use the computer for email, online shopping, and word/excel. The storage requirements for those uses aren't going up too fast.
But do you honestly think calling people concerned about plutonium dispersal "stupid hippies" helps the debate?
But they aren't simply people concerned about plutonium dispersal. That's entirely reasonable. They are a bunch of fear mongering fanatics. These people are concered about 2.7 grams of plutonium in the Mars missions.. 2.7 grams? Do these people truly have no sense of scale? Just take a look at that website and try to tell me stupid hippies isn't entirely appropriate.
It's sites like that that give enviromental concerns a bad name.
You've got it all wrong. This is by far the coolest toaster.
I guess I don't see your story as a matter of logic or emotionlessness, but rather over identification. Rationalism and emtotion aren't really opposites, but simply different. It's not about Star Trek vulncans or computers, but the bounds of humor. Maybe in some circles black humour is inapproriate.
Anyway, I think the sensitivity train works both ways. People who are overly sensitive will also lose friends do to their reactions. Are we all supposed to be forced into a bland existence where we don't say anything that might offend the most sensitive person?
Sure. Then that obligation means you can't go places where you can no signal. Tough bounce.
That sounds like a very stupid woman. Maybe she has some legitimate reason for being offended if she were an Astronaut, or if she knew McAuliffe.. but simply being a schoolteacher? Were all the women in the room offended too because you told a joke involving a woman? How far are peoples artificial identifications with strangers supposed to go?
Agreed. But so do their professions of innocence.
It sounds like they are innocent, at least legally.
I don't think they were professing to innocence of being jackasses.
but technologies do filter down.
Some do, some don't. There's no home version MRI machine, and MRI has been around for 20 years at least. I really see about zero market for someone developing EMP bombs, sp the technology will likely never be developed.
Exactly what's wrong with that?
Maybe this idea that you have some right to be contacted wherever you go? If you don't like it, go to another theatre. it's not as if you're guaranteed a good signal indoors anyway.
Looking at the heat shield doesn't seem like a very revealing bit of science -- more of a "gee look how far we've come" sort of cool thing.
You're right, looking at the heat shield isn't about science, but it is about engineering. The heat shield can obviously never be adequately tested, and until you take a look at it you never know exactly how well it performed. Were there areas where it could have failed? Was is over-engineered? Those are usefull questions that if we had answers to we could design better/more efficient heat shielding in the future.
The heat shield also digs into the surface far more than the rovers ever could, so you might see whats below the surface. Though looking at the heat shield sounds like a total geek thing to do, it can reveal a lot of non obvious information.
At this point you're probbably right about finding something to do. In the area where the rovers have landed we've seen the everyday stuff, and now it's all about being lucky enough to see the more rare things.
The scenario is still ridiculous. Criminals aren't a bunch of genius technologists experimenting with EMP weapons like in a comic book (at least not the ones robbing banks at gunpoint). If you're that smart you'll figure out a far less dangerous means to steal. There's been several successfull breakins to vaults on long weekends for instance.
That said -- just because something is vehicle-mounted today doesn't mean it won't be suitcase-sized five years from now.
And it doesn't mean it won't be exactly the same size five years from now. Electronics shrink because of process improvements. Shrinking something like an EMP generator would be far harder since you rely on energy storage, large coils, etc.
You didn't demonstrate anything in your post, you just made a bunch of unsubstantied claims. As far as saying something, I find it pointless to argue with someone who's personally insulting.
And yes, such devices exist (in vehicle-mounted form) and are available to civilians
Yah, so criminals are going to drag out the massive vehicle mounted EMP generating device to disable peoples guns.
See the part where I said something about _portable_ devices? You can make a super-conducting magnet that'll pull all the guns from everyones hands too.. but you can't make it portable.
Where do you get off using a condescending expression like "oh, please", when you're so naive?
I guess the same place you do when you make the "you're so naive" claim.
Uhh... if you're smart enough, and have enough resources to make a small EMP powerfull enough to take out all electronics within a 5-10 mile radius.. why the hell are you doing smalltime burglary? I guess you could rob banks.. but people already do that without any guns at all.
An EMP isn't something that that Mr. T of the A-Team just assembles out of junk from a garage.
Right, because criminals always cary high tech equipment that will produce an EMP. What kind of fantasy land do you live in? If they cary an EMP, why not a super-strong electro magnet that'll suck the gun (smart or not) right from your hand? Better yet they could carry a death ray and force field to protect them from your bullets.
Try to stay within the bounds of reality and not Star Trek where no one but _possibly_ the military has produced a nice portable EMP weapon powerfull enough to destroy electronics from a few feet away.
Uhh.. if I were a buyer of safes, I'd want to know which ones were actually secure, and which ones can be broken into by someone with a little extra knowledge. The safe maker is going to do jack (there ARE known vulnerabilities to safes, and the safe makers do squat).
It's things like this that makes me glad I live in a country where freedom of speech is our highest law (even if it has been worn away by the patriot act).
Maybe these Indian kids need to realize that higher education in CSCI isn't the ticket they were lead to believe. Stop thinking in such a rigid mindset and believing whatever you were taught when you were 10.
backed by nuclear weapons.
Oh please. Nuclear weapons are good for one thing only, and that's preventing a foreign power from invading your land. All the countries you mentioned are members of NATO, so Russia would never dream of using nuclear weapons against them.
Maybe if you had read the parents post you would have realized he was talking about icepacks that AREN'T floating.
You're right though, most of the ice in the arctic is already floating. The antarctic glaciers are the ones we should worry about as far as sea level is concerned.
Right, because we _just_ discovered this Space Shuttle thing was dangerous 2 years ago february. I've never bought that argument, and I don't buy it now. We've know the thing is dangerous since its creation. Since when did the human race (or at least the US) turn into a bunch of whiny little gits that don't want to take any risk of "people dying"? How many people have died for a far smaller payoff like climbing Mt. Everest? The astronauts are willing to do it, and the Shuttle itself probbably couldn't be repaired in orbit at the space station anyway.
The real deal is the administrators are covering their collective asses. No one wants to go down in the media shitstorm if a Shuttle is lost repairing hubble. Another casualty of our reactive media-wacko society.
I hope to hell you're not right. If corporations can cry foul anytime "secret" information is leaked that's a major problem with freedom of the press. All corps need do is make any problem with their products a "trade secret" and the press will be muzzled on reporting on it. Firestone tires de-treading? Trade secret. Phen-Fed causing pulmonary problems? Trade secret. Cigarette companies knowing the addictiveness of nicotine and trying to enhance it's addictiveness? Trade secret, can't publish.
I truly fear a country where Corporations can just hush up whatever they want. Apple's cheap PCs isn't in the same scope of public interest as pharmaceutical companies keeping secrets about harmfull products, but it would set a dangerous precedent.
If I were in ThinkSecret's place, I'd sit down with Apple's lawyer, tell them the name of the source who provided the information, pay a tiny little fee to the lawyers involved, and have a nice day.
Assuming they have the money to fight it, I'd wait for a court order to reveal the source. If they reveal the source anytime a tiny amount of pressure is applied then no one will to them ever again (which is what Apple really wants).