If the U.S. had made territorial claims then, it really would have made has of the "we come in peace for all mankind" plaque the astronauts left there, plus more importantly needlessly heated up the rhetoric level of the cold war. It hadn't been that long ago that we had come dangerously close to a nuclear exchange during the Cuban missile crisis.
Besides, I think we finally learned during the Phillipine Insurrection that we can not be both a "nation of the free" and a imperialistic power, at least not in style. Claiming tracts of land just to claim them is out of style anyway. The game today is to manipulate the natives already there so they hand you their resources (or a right to setup toxic polluting plants) cheaply. That's why Arabia was portioned out by the British into big countrys that mainly have no resources and little sheikdoms that are the balance of OPEC today.
Only on the Moon, there aren't any natives, nor any resources worth the freight to haul them back to Earth. (even if we had the means to do so.) If anyone claims the Moon, it'll be the one who actually goes and stays, and their claim willd depend on how far they want to go and how much others will contest them.
Centuries ago, the Pope divided South America between Spain and Portugal. Go there now and you'll find a distinct lack of flags from either country. ('course Portugal only had Brazil.:) Similarly, anyone else who makes a real stake on the Moon would hardly be inclined to honor a territorial stake made in 1969 and not enforced.
Just the standard region encoding found on the typical DVD player. The Japanese units used software decoders and apparantly were pretty lousy at playing DVD's. i.e. losing audio/video sync. The upcoming crop is using hardware based decoding.
It's not documented, but I'm using a three button Belkin mouse on my iMac running OS X Public Beta. The right most button now does a Windows style right-click, or in Mac terms control-click. And it does not seem to matter whether the app is OS X native ofr an OS 9 app running in the Classic environment.
And Steve Wozniak didn't get out of computing, he works on integrating computers into society. And he still buys at least 2 of everything Apple puts out.
But you are wrong, the core of Apple's OS, Darwin is derived from FreeBSD. Darwin will and has been compiled for Intel platforms and at least one person is working on an X Server for it.
This is another classic response when Technocrat wannabes find their sacred cow in danger of being tipped.
It's not a matter of where we're going to be or do when the Sun overheats this planet in a billion years or so. It what dangers we face to the quality of life in the next century. I'm a bit older here than the average poster or reader hereabouts and remember a lot of the promises made during the Atomic Age about "trips to the Moon", "automated grocery shopping" and my personal favorite, "the 4 day work week." Despite the promise of enablement, we find ourselves working harder to make a basic living than most of us remember. There was a time when most of us could take care of rent with just one week's paycheck. That was about a decade ago.
Then of course are the increasing stresses made on the environment, natural resources, and the complete inability to remember the lessons pounded on us during the '74 energy crisis.
But most of all, in our rush to abandon the analog for the digital, we overlook one important fact. Organics run circles around cybernetics in the most important encompassing area, adaptability. Computers, AI, etc. are still confounded by the most simple errors. A single wrong digit totally incapacitated a supermodern battleship. The immense work involved in getting a cybernetic arm to lift an egg without crushing pales the average human's ability to cope with the loss or replacement of one or both arms.
Then there is the plain matter of quality. The new anthem these days draws largely from the ongoing refrain; Analog Bad, Digital Good. I still remember quite vividly the raging debate of CD versus Vinyl. CD makes possible incredible fidelity long unattainable at the present prices until now. But slicing up the Analog signal and breaking it down to a range of discrete choices has a price tag. Now, you won't notice this on the cheap audio equipment most people buy, but play an album on a good turntable audio system and listen with a sensitive ear, and you'll pick up what was thrown away on the digital cutting floor.
Another example that's even easier for most to see is to compare Laser Discs vs. DVD's. DVD's give us lots of great options, but compare the video quality with their admittedly bulkier forbears, especially in low-light scenes. The artifacts of DVD images are part of the price we pay for DVD feautures. Again it's a choice we made.
And lastly, let's keep another thing in mind. At present, humans require a substantial amount of abuse and effort to brainwash. But how easy will it be for me to control you when you're receiving your information by direct download to your brain, and I'm the guy running the 22nd century version of Time Warner?
These are my three laws from the Book of Lazar:
1. Embrace the future with an open mind.
2. Keep both feet on the ground.
3. When one hand offers you the keys to the kingdom, keep an eye on what's hidden in the other.
There's no point in spending money on something that there's not even a theory for. Right now, every conceivable scientific model on how the universe is actually built has that unbreakable speed limit of c. There simply isn't anything to spend money ON.
Radio is still the most practical method for SETI and will probably remain so for millenia to come.
Right now, we qualify as a unusual piece of space. A radio astronomer who happens to find earth will note at first glance a binary radio source with an unusually small mass component emitting in the radio spectrum. Our best chance at proving tthe existence of ET is too look for civilizations that are.... much like us, at least in this technological area.
Sol should be good for a bout a billion years before it gets too hot for Earth's biosphere to adapt. (Yes I know the red giant stage isn't due for at least 3-4 more but Sol will be expanding slowly allthrough that time and after the billion it's estimated it'll be too hot for Earth's biota to adapt. If we actually last that long, we should be able to handle the problem when it actually becomes acute.
For right now however it's the things that can kill us off in the next century that need top priority:
1. Pollution we're making this a dirty poisoned planet and we're running out of time to rethink our habits. Not just the obvious ones like spilling oil tankers on to beaches, and dumping acid rain onto Canada, but thermal pollution as well.
2. The uggunning of the resource rush. Right now less than a quarter of Earth's population consumes 80% of the resources and fuel. How do we handle bringing more of the Third World into the 21st century? What do we do about China, for instance?
3. Spacewatch: Granted the chances of us facing something comparable to the KT event are fairly remote but we do need to finish mapping all the significant flying mountains out there. Compared to the first 2 and just about any others we can think of, it's a relatively easy task to accomplish by throwing enough resources at it without going into the red.
There are probably more but you should get my point. Rather than worrying about Humankind surviving the next million years, let's take care of the next couple of centuries first.
When Ars Magica first came out there was a little gaming company called Lion Rampant. There was also an up and coming gaming magazine known as White Wolf. A close look at the staff sheet of the magazine and the credits list for Ars would show a lot of overlap. Eventually they made it official and merged the two groups into one.
White Wolf games with a bad or mediocre GM are sucky games, but that's not the fault of the game system, any more than it would be in Amber. It's just that compared to D&D and its compeers, these are games that raise the bar for both game master and player alike.
That was Gil Amelio, the man who in true Apple tradition brought in the man who would oust him, Steve Jobs, who started the tradition in the first place, by hiring John Sculley.:)
I got a chance to heft the G4 Cube during Macworld. It's no flyweight box. Imagine take a G4. Nix the three PCI slots, the power supply (which is in a separate module and squeeze most of the rest down to an 8x8x8 size. You get something that even the average cat would have problems knocking over.:)
Perhaps some golfer out there would suggest the proper iron for such cases.:)
Well, Apple is going to offer the new keyboard and mouse for under sixty bucks each. The mouse is cool to look at, but still a single button model for those to whom that matters. The keyboard represents the real improvement, a full size keyboard with almost all the Apple trimmings with the trade of multimedia keys for a Power ON/OFF.
This used to be NASA's standard policy from the Pioneer, Mariner, Viking missions, to basicaly launch in pairs. Mariner 9 took on an extended mission when it's sister ship Mariner 8 woundup in the Atlantic Ocean instead of Mars Orbit.
For even two of these probles the Titan would be an overkill anyway compared to a pair of Deltas. Mars doesn't require the same level of Delata V that a reasonably quick mission to the outer planets would call for.
Every recognised country has it's own two letter domain. (like the seldome used.us) Some enterprisng folks have noticed certain handy ones like the.to demain used by the welcome.to people. In virtually all of these cases however, these are poor Third World nations lacking in either awareness, tech, and/or funds to properly use their domains for thier own benefit. So the usual scenario is that a foreign company comes in and buys the rights to the entire country's domain for a song, virtually hijacking the country's entire web space for their own use.
Then the culture that didn't have the directive would have expanded and swallowed up the culture that did. Of course the thing might simply be that there would be no profit in opening communications with Earth, what would they have to say to us?
Our star is a singleton, that alone puts in in the minority.
Stars smaller that our sun are so weak that a theorectically habitable planet would have to orbit so close to it it's rotation would be locked like that of Mercury.
Larger stars would have wider "life belts", but as you get significantly beyond one solar mass, the total life expectancy of said star drops quite steeply. Sol's estimated to be around another 5 billion years or so, though it's expansion would make the Earth uninhabitable in just a billion.
The leading life form on any planet, just like ours would be the most aggressive, compeititive, species that developed on said planet. So more than likely, they'd have a history much like ours.
Like you'd believe that the human race would actually FOLLOW such a law if it did exist? BTW, as referred to in "Angel One", the Prime Directive only applied to Star Fleet. Private citizens of the Federation could break it as much as they pleased.
If this could actually work, we'd have to call it a spindizzy drive.
Then again if you have antigravity, why bother with something as small as a spaceship. You could do what he did in his novel and turn the entire bloody isle of Manhattan, the city of Scranton, and some slavic town whose name I don't recall into your starships. (Blish's spindizzy had as a handy side effect a forcefield which you could use to retain atmosphere.)
Ion engines are neat low-thrust idea for space to space travel over long distances.
The real sticky item in space costs however still remains ground to orbit. We might succeed in shaving some of that by using hybrid wing/rocket solutions, but the ultimate cost savings await physics which doesn't exist yet, or possibly never will.
Knowing that ocean travel is risky and accepting that to chart unknown regions is one thing.
Launching a space shuttle with a known risk element in a weather situation in which your gut tells you that you are literally playing with fire is something completely different.
There are inherent risks in riding on top of a flying bomb. That doesn't however excuse the particular circumstances that surround the Challenger explosion. The Apollo 13 tank rupture was also due to a similar case of neglect.
That's absolutely correct. I've successfully swapped RAM between a Compaq Pentium 3 Presario and a Blue and White G3 (which is RAM compatible with Apple's G4. with the exception that the G3 will not support the 512 meg modules.)
Put yourself in NonGeek shoes....
on
SuSE 7.0
·
· Score: 1
You have to keep in mind that people who read Law Office Computing, and other non-Linux trade magazines generally look for shrinkwrap software with printed manuals with sufficient handholding during installation. That along with printing mass CD's is going to cost. These are also people who tend to be suspicious about anything just given away "free" and are downright leery of anything that requires mailing list help to support.
It's for these people that the shrinkwrap sets, Corel Linux, Caldera et. al, were made and it's been this slow creep into the non gearhead world which has brought Linux into the mainstream.
In short, in many cases whether press is "bad" or "good" can depend very much on the target audience.
With it's lower gravity, something is a lot more likely to be blasted to escape velocity from Mars than Earth.
The problem however, is partly because of that lower gravity, Mars lost the bulk of it's volatiles in relatively short order. It's debatable whether Mars had temperate conditions long enough for any life to evolve. It is clear that for the bulk of it's history, Mars was as it is now.
Slashdot Mirror
If the U.S. had made territorial claims then, it really would have made has of the "we come in peace for all mankind" plaque the astronauts left there, plus more importantly needlessly heated up the rhetoric level of the cold war. It hadn't been that long ago that we had come dangerously close to a nuclear exchange during the Cuban missile crisis.
:) Similarly, anyone else who makes a real stake on the Moon would hardly be inclined to honor a territorial stake made in 1969 and not enforced.
Besides, I think we finally learned during the Phillipine Insurrection that we can not be both a "nation of the free" and a imperialistic power, at least not in style. Claiming tracts of land just to claim them is out of style anyway. The game today is to manipulate the natives already there so they hand you their resources (or a right to setup toxic polluting plants) cheaply. That's why Arabia was portioned out by the British into big countrys that mainly have no resources and little sheikdoms that are the balance of OPEC today.
Only on the Moon, there aren't any natives, nor any resources worth the freight to haul them back to Earth. (even if we had the means to do so.) If anyone claims the Moon, it'll be the one who actually goes and stays, and their claim willd depend on how far they want to go and how much others will contest them.
Centuries ago, the Pope divided South America between Spain and Portugal. Go there now and you'll find a distinct lack of flags from either country. ('course Portugal only had Brazil.
Just the standard region encoding found on the typical DVD player. The Japanese units used software decoders and apparantly were pretty lousy at playing DVD's. i.e. losing audio/video sync. The upcoming crop is using hardware based decoding.
It's not documented, but I'm using a three button Belkin mouse on my iMac running OS X Public Beta. The right most button now does a Windows style right-click, or in Mac terms control-click. And it does not seem to matter whether the app is OS X native ofr an OS 9 app running in the Classic environment.
And Steve Wozniak didn't get out of computing, he works on integrating computers into society. And he still buys at least 2 of everything Apple puts out.
But you are wrong, the core of Apple's OS, Darwin is derived from FreeBSD. Darwin will and has been compiled for Intel platforms and at least one person is working on an X Server for it.
This is another classic response when Technocrat wannabes find their sacred cow in danger of being tipped.
It's not a matter of where we're going to be or do when the Sun overheats this planet in a billion years or so. It what dangers we face to the quality of life in the next century. I'm a bit older here than the average poster or reader hereabouts and remember a lot of the promises made during the Atomic Age about "trips to the Moon", "automated grocery shopping" and my personal favorite, "the 4 day work week." Despite the promise of enablement, we find ourselves working harder to make a basic living than most of us remember. There was a time when most of us could take care of rent with just one week's paycheck. That was about a decade ago.
Then of course are the increasing stresses made on the environment, natural resources, and the complete inability to remember the lessons pounded on us during the '74 energy crisis.
But most of all, in our rush to abandon the analog for the digital, we overlook one important fact. Organics run circles around cybernetics in the most important encompassing area, adaptability. Computers, AI, etc. are still confounded by the most simple errors. A single wrong digit totally incapacitated a supermodern battleship. The immense work involved in getting a cybernetic arm to lift an egg without crushing pales the average human's ability to cope with the loss or replacement of one or both arms.
Then there is the plain matter of quality. The new anthem these days draws largely from the ongoing refrain; Analog Bad, Digital Good. I still remember quite vividly the raging debate of CD versus Vinyl. CD makes possible incredible fidelity long unattainable at the present prices until now. But slicing up the Analog signal and breaking it down to a range of discrete choices has a price tag. Now, you won't notice this on the cheap audio equipment most people buy, but play an album on a good turntable audio system and listen with a sensitive ear, and you'll pick up what was thrown away on the digital cutting floor.
Another example that's even easier for most to see is to compare Laser Discs vs. DVD's. DVD's give us lots of great options, but compare the video quality with their admittedly bulkier forbears, especially in low-light scenes. The artifacts of DVD images are part of the price we pay for DVD feautures. Again it's a choice we made.
And lastly, let's keep another thing in mind. At present, humans require a substantial amount of abuse and effort to brainwash. But how easy will it be for me to control you when you're receiving your information by direct download to your brain, and I'm the guy running the 22nd century version of Time Warner?
These are my three laws from the Book of Lazar:
1. Embrace the future with an open mind.
2. Keep both feet on the ground.
3. When one hand offers you the keys to the kingdom, keep an eye on what's hidden in the other.
Actually I consider the nomenclature quite appropriate given the following 2 factors.
1. It is a continuation of the Mac OS System software line that includes support for OS 9 applications.
2. it has an entirely different BSD based foundation that takes the Os in a new direction.
Perhaps the next version of the software will be labled not OS Eleven but OS X ver 2.
I won't go into your characterisation of Malcom X, save for the fact that much of the same was said of Martin Luther King while he was alive.
Besides it's not true for that mattter. It's not pronounced "OS Ecks", but "OS Ten".
There's no point in spending money on something that there's not even a theory for. Right now, every conceivable scientific model on how the universe is actually built has that unbreakable speed limit of c. There simply isn't anything to spend money ON.
Radio is still the most practical method for SETI and will probably remain so for millenia to come.
Right now, we qualify as a unusual piece of space. A radio astronomer who happens to find earth will note at first glance a binary radio source with an unusually small mass component emitting in the radio spectrum. Our best chance at proving tthe existence of ET is too look for civilizations that are.... much like us, at least in this technological area.
Sol should be good for a bout a billion years before it gets too hot for Earth's biosphere to adapt. (Yes I know the red giant stage isn't due for at least 3-4 more but Sol will be expanding slowly allthrough that time and after the billion it's estimated it'll be too hot for Earth's biota to adapt. If we actually last that long, we should be able to handle the problem when it actually becomes acute.
For right now however it's the things that can kill us off in the next century that need top priority:
1. Pollution we're making this a dirty poisoned planet and we're running out of time to rethink our habits. Not just the obvious ones like spilling oil tankers on to beaches, and dumping acid rain onto Canada, but thermal pollution as well.
2. The uggunning of the resource rush. Right now less than a quarter of Earth's population consumes 80% of the resources and fuel. How do we handle bringing more of the Third World into the 21st century? What do we do about China, for instance?
3. Spacewatch: Granted the chances of us facing something comparable to the KT event are fairly remote but we do need to finish mapping all the significant flying mountains out there. Compared to the first 2 and just about any others we can think of, it's a relatively easy task to accomplish by throwing enough resources at it without going into the red.
There are probably more but you should get my point. Rather than worrying about Humankind surviving the next million years, let's take care of the next couple of centuries first.
When Ars Magica first came out there was a little gaming company called Lion Rampant. There was also an up and coming gaming magazine known as White Wolf. A close look at the staff sheet of the magazine and the credits list for Ars would show a lot of overlap. Eventually they made it official and merged the two groups into one.
White Wolf games with a bad or mediocre GM are sucky games, but that's not the fault of the game system, any more than it would be in Amber. It's just that compared to D&D and its compeers, these are games that raise the bar for both game master and player alike.
That was Gil Amelio, the man who in true Apple tradition brought in the man who would oust him, Steve Jobs, who started the tradition in the first place, by hiring John Sculley. :)
I got a chance to heft the G4 Cube during Macworld. It's no flyweight box. Imagine take a G4. Nix the three PCI slots, the power supply (which is in a separate module and squeeze most of the rest down to an 8x8x8 size. You get something that even the average cat would have problems knocking over. :)
:)
Perhaps some golfer out there would suggest the proper iron for such cases.
Well, Apple is going to offer the new keyboard and mouse for under sixty bucks each. The mouse is cool to look at, but still a single button model for those to whom that matters. The keyboard represents the real improvement, a full size keyboard with almost all the Apple trimmings with the trade of multimedia keys for a Power ON/OFF.
...... especially in suburbia where they don't build public sewage systems. :)
This used to be NASA's standard policy from the Pioneer, Mariner, Viking missions, to basicaly launch in pairs. Mariner 9 took on an extended mission when it's sister ship Mariner 8 woundup in the Atlantic Ocean instead of Mars Orbit.
For even two of these probles the Titan would be an overkill anyway compared to a pair of Deltas. Mars doesn't require the same level of Delata V that a reasonably quick mission to the outer planets would call for.
Every recognised country has it's own two letter domain. (like the seldome used .us) Some enterprisng folks have noticed certain handy ones like the .to demain used by the welcome.to people. In virtually all of these cases however, these are poor Third World nations lacking in either awareness, tech, and/or funds to properly use their domains for thier own benefit. So the usual scenario is that a foreign company comes in and buys the rights to the entire country's domain for a song, virtually hijacking the country's entire web space for their own use.
Then the culture that didn't have the directive would have expanded and swallowed up the culture that did. Of course the thing might simply be that there would be no profit in opening communications with Earth, what would they have to say to us?
Our star is a singleton, that alone puts in in the minority.
Stars smaller that our sun are so weak that a theorectically habitable planet would have to orbit so close to it it's rotation would be locked like that of Mercury.
Larger stars would have wider "life belts", but as you get significantly beyond one solar mass, the total life expectancy of said star drops quite steeply. Sol's estimated to be around another 5 billion years or so, though it's expansion would make the Earth uninhabitable in just a billion.
The leading life form on any planet, just like ours would be the most aggressive, compeititive, species that developed on said planet. So more than likely, they'd have a history much like ours.
Like you'd believe that the human race would actually FOLLOW such a law if it did exist? BTW, as referred to in "Angel One", the Prime Directive only applied to Star Fleet. Private citizens of the Federation could break it as much as they pleased.
If this could actually work, we'd have to call it a spindizzy drive.
Then again if you have antigravity, why bother with something as small as a spaceship. You could do what he did in his novel and turn the entire bloody isle of Manhattan, the city of Scranton, and some slavic town whose name I don't recall into your starships. (Blish's spindizzy had as a handy side effect a forcefield which you could use to retain atmosphere.)
Patreides has it only partially right.
Ion engines are neat low-thrust idea for space to space travel over long distances.
The real sticky item in space costs however still remains ground to orbit. We might succeed in shaving some of that by using hybrid wing/rocket solutions, but the ultimate cost savings await physics which doesn't exist yet, or possibly never will.
Knowing that ocean travel is risky and accepting that to chart unknown regions is one thing.
Launching a space shuttle with a known risk element in a weather situation in which your gut tells you that you are literally playing with fire is something completely different.
There are inherent risks in riding on top of a flying bomb. That doesn't however excuse the particular circumstances that surround the Challenger explosion. The Apollo 13 tank rupture was also due to a similar case of neglect.
That's absolutely correct. I've successfully swapped RAM between a Compaq Pentium 3 Presario and a Blue and White G3 (which is RAM compatible with Apple's G4. with the exception that the G3 will not support the 512 meg modules.)
You have to keep in mind that people who read Law Office Computing, and other non-Linux trade magazines generally look for shrinkwrap software with printed manuals with sufficient handholding during installation. That along with printing mass CD's is going to cost. These are also people who tend to be suspicious about anything just given away "free" and are downright leery of anything that requires mailing list help to support.
It's for these people that the shrinkwrap sets, Corel Linux, Caldera et. al, were made and it's been this slow creep into the non gearhead world which has brought Linux into the mainstream.
In short, in many cases whether press is "bad" or "good" can depend very much on the target audience.
With it's lower gravity, something is a lot more likely to be blasted to escape velocity from Mars than Earth.
The problem however, is partly because of that lower gravity, Mars lost the bulk of it's volatiles in relatively short order. It's debatable whether Mars had temperate conditions long enough for any life to evolve. It is clear that for the bulk of it's history, Mars was as it is now.