I -love- this idea! I've suffered from the same problem for years, especially in long articles like those to which Slashdot frequently links, and never bothered thinking about how to fix it-- but this idea is a WINNER!
Yeah yeah, I know, I'm not really adding anything to the value of this thread-- but i wanted undertow3886 to know how much I like the way he (she?) thinks.
At low tide, the sea truly is miles away from the shore.
And how, pray tell, is this feat accomplished?
Actually this reminds me of one of the stupid practical jokes the more experienced hands would pull on the 'boots' (newcomers, green-behind-the-ears, etc) when I was in the Coast Guard. They were so used to finding various lines (ropes) for different things-- anchor lines, mooring lines, whatever, that when told to go find a shore line, they'd start looking for rope. The laughter would always come after they'd come to you asking where to find it. Just like that left-handed monkey wrench, or the smoke shifter.
Maybe the strategy should be to encourage ISPs to include Firefox in their install cds (that are mostly useless anyway, but for some reason most people believe they need to install their provider's software...) instead of IE.
That should read micrometeorite -resistant-. Unless & until someone can come up with a material that will block 1 gram of matter travelling at relativistically high velocities, I refuse to concede that -anything- can be proof against all micrometeorites.
This is like the difference between saying your watch is waterproof and saying it's water resistant to 300 meters.
As a software developer, I am frequently surprised when a user takes the application I've developed and does something with it that I didn't expect and for which I didn't plan (unfortunately this is also my best method of testing, but you get the idea...)
It seems that what's happening to the GNOME crowd is similar, but where there is so much pride getting in their way that, even when faced with a user who says, "Why not just make ten louder?" they just sit there, stammer for a while, and say, "but, but... this one goes to eleven!"
The US Supreme Court has always recognized the importance of protecting the safety of the citizenry. Thus, each of the constitutional liberties against which the government is forbidden to legislate is limited. For instance, you may not scream 'fire!' in a crowded theater and later proclaim freedom of speech. Your freedom ends where it intersects the freedom and safety of another.
I can't speak to the second amendment issue described above, nor the fifth amendment issue (since no example was given), but your fourth amendment issue falls squarely in the public safety arena. Newer technologies used by the TSA (and most likely in the future by other screening organizations outside the aviation arena) may make us nervous if for no other reason than the resolution of personal intimate details, but that doesn't invalidate the need for the security measures in the first place. It only limits them.
Concerning the "regulation of electronic media and control of all sorts of information", again, you're not citing any examples. If you want to rail against Clear Channel, Fox News, Disney, or whatever other organizations as being tilted highly to the right, or simply not good corporate citizens or news organizations, feel free. Just don't for a minute believe that all relevant media is in the hands of the government. Try reading those notorious liberal newspapers instead of just watching TV. You could try reading overseas news sources for awhile too. I personally make it a point to review major news stories from the points of view of multiple sources whenever possible. Start with a domestic network (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, whatever), then add in BBC news, CBC, ABC (not the American one, the Australian one), a few good Asian sources, etc. Most of the time the coverage is fairly similar, but occasionaly something in one of the overseas sources lets me see the US in a different light.
In general, stop bitching about your lack of choices and learn to use the fsckin internet!
Good question, but no. You idea presupposes that there is a center to the universe, from which the galaxies (and the black holes contained therein) have expanded, much like shrapnel from an explosive. Think of it instead as being like points on a balloon as it expands; they're all getting further away from eachother, but none of them can lay claim to being at the center. Therefore there is no point at which one of them is 'outside' the others. Without that vantage point, there is no way to pull.
Yes, the evidence is in, this is apparently true-- but the article didn't say anything about buckeyballs. It talked about silicon nanotubes arrayed like towers, with nanoscopic aluminum droplets atop the tubes. No buckeyballs involved.
Yeah, and people couldn't figure out what good electricity or radio were when they were first (commercially) introduced. Many policitians and members of the clergy thought the only use for radio would be to broadcast Sunday morning sermons for those who couldn't get to church.
Here's another one: British Prime Minister Gladstone once asked the father of electromagnetic
induction, Michael Faraday, what the results of his current research might be. Faraday replied, "I don't know, but I'm sure you'll
find a way to tax it."
(with apologies to http://www.draughonpa.com/drletter/drltr021.pdf, from which I directly lifted that entire paragraph).
Damnit, I'm supposed to be the neoluddite around here, stop trying usurp my role!
The evolution of their society was such that, as new data was obtained and analyzed over the course of their history, they discarded outmoded philosophies and superstitions, and wonder why we haven't.
Do you have any idea what I'd give to have Evolution's vFolders in Outlook when I'm forced to work in a windows environment? That one feature is worth more than gold for me...
And yeah, I realize there are a lot of windiots out there who don't sort their email by folder at all... but they're the type who haven't refinanced their houses since 1977, too.
People who disbelieve in the Bible will insist that lack of photographic evidence substantiates their own view.
Incorrrect. We'll just continue on, aware that no evidence for the ark has ever been presented. That doesn't mean the myth doesn't have a germ of truth somewhere in the mists of time. It doesn't even mean the ark never existed. It just means that there is still no evidence for the existence of the ark.
My jaw dropped when I saw this unsupported line of BS in that rebuttal:
# By the days of Noah there were not enough people on the earth to require a worldwide flood.
I estimate that 12 to 15 generations had been born on the earth by the time of the flood. (Genesis chapter 5 tells us that Noah was the ninth generation from Adam.) Easily, there could have been a billion people alive on the earth by the 600th birthday of Noah. "
A few quick calculations, starting with two people (Adam & Eve, of course, since Lilith got the boot):
Let's assume each generation has ten offspring per mating pair, and that puberty occurred in both genders at the same age it does today. I realize many couples in earlier days had plenty more than ten children, but then again, a lot of them died as infants.
Ok, so we have Adam & Eve, who only had a couple of children, but for the sake of simplicity we'll keep every generation at 10 offspring per mating period. (I'm assuming that, for instance, Adam & Eve had ten children, and then as their children were having children, Adam & Eve were having another back of 10, and so on.)
We'll also assume a zero death rate, again for the sake of simplicity.
So, we get divergent series where each generation is the sum of all previous generations, times 10.
2
12
140
1,540
16,940
186,340
3,726,800
39,317,740
432,495,140
864,990,280
Now, by completely inflating the number of possible offspring (by the 10th generation, Adam & Eve have had one hundred kids!), we've gotten to the point where we're even close to a billion.
According to a US Census Bureau report, the global human population was just about one billion in the mid 18th century. If it only took us ten generations the first time around, why'd it take us so long to repeat it?
A guy I used to know, a reformed drunk, used to be in the Navy (whether or not the drunkenness had anything to do with getting out, I don't know).
One night in a foreign port he got particularly plastered, but managed to find his way back to the pier. He went onboard ship, found his way to his rack (bed? bunk? I have no idea what they're called on large ships), and promptly passed out.
He came to in the morning very groggy and for some reason hearing the ship's horn blast. He was expecting to be in port for several days, so this came as a bit of a surprise... until he realized he was on the wrong ship.
His excuse? "All destroyers look alike in the dark!"
It'd be a whole lot more valuable to put either a visible light telescope or a radio telescope on the far side of the moon than to put either on the near side. For a good chunk of each lunar month, there's no sun or earth in the sky-- no light/radio-wave pollution that way.
My wife & I took a vacation near Bracebridge, Ontario, a couple of years ago-- just the car & us. The phone was in the glove box, but we live in the US, not Canada, and didn't bother to purchase a temporary plan for the trip, so it was worthless for the week we were there.
It was entirely refreshing to be away from the net for a week, and even from the hassle of phone calls & everything that goes along with them... but during the entire drive home I was desperate to get back to my email.
I don't even own a PDA, or a phone-camera, or a USB-enabled watch, or any of the other nice gizmos my dad has. I sometimes feel like I'm an odd cross between bleeding edge geek & Luddite.
You don't need to be nuclear to do damage in orbit-- or anywhere else, for that matter. You just need velocity.
Considering the thickness of the shells on satellites, or of the solar panels, or whatever else, and the fact that these little bits are nuclear is irrelevant.
Let's not whip our over-active imaginations into a frenzy over what is, essentially, a meaningless addition to the current threat. It's like being concerned about the.45 bullet sitting top of the stack of nuclear bombs.
By the sheet, yes... and even by the ream it's pretty cheap (even very high quality stock only costs about as much as a cheap power supply these days)... but the total volume of any given paper mill is far from free, even on only a daily basis. Yes, to the consumer the stuff is cheap, since we typically buy it in small quantities; but to the producer, the shipper, the retailer, etc, it's a major expense.
I expect this will probably continue to be true in the future.
What makes Bill's proclamation so wrong-headed is just a matter of scaling: the chips, hard drives, etc, that were cutting edge ten years ago are now worthless. Today's cutting edge equipment (even the 2.8ghz upgrade I bought for my computer yesterday) will be worthless in 10 years. That doesn't mean there won't be new cutting edge equipment performing tasks we haven't yet imagined.
Bill has a talent for being very long-sighted on the business end (after all, his strategy nearly 20 years ago was to write the operating system used by the most popular processor on the market-- and it's worked well, so far), but incredibly short-sighted on technology trends. After all, as Bill said back in 1981, "640k should be enough for anyone."
It was also used in David Brin's book _Earth_ (btw, why can't we use underline markups?!). Excellent book the first few times I read it... but then I got a few years older, tried again, and was amazed that I ever enjoyed it.
Brin makes a vailid point about subvocal pickups though: Not everyone will be able to use them well. Some people will just never get used to all the extraneous thoughts that the mind refuses to filter out (and thus will reveal more on their monitors than they intend), while others simply won't like the interface.
One question: what's the best way to transmit the signals from the telescope back to our Earth-bound scientists?
I only see a few solutions, but maybe someone else can suggest others:
Build a really friggin' long cable to carry the signal to the near side, and then have a broadcasting station to send the signal the rest of the way
Put the broadcasting station at the telescope itself, but use a frequency so low that the wave form is larger than the moon's diameter (of course, bleed-off from this could interfere with the observations, but that's an engineering problem)
Put a narrowcasting station near the telescope, and have it aimed at a satellite in halo orbit around L5. In that orbit, the satellite would always be visible both to the telescope and to Earth-orbiting satellites that could then repeat the signal.
Use the same narrowcasting station, but use more repeaters: a few in lunar polar orbit, and more in lunar equatorial orbit. A properly configured network of satellites would guarantee that a continuous link between the telescope and Earth is always available. Of course, this & the L5 halo orbit both have the potential to intefere with observations. Both of these also have problems associated with maintenance. With Hubble, we've been able to send the shuttle up for repair & maintenance missions-- and now that we're not, we've numbered its days. What do we do with setups like we're talking about here? Crash land old satellites on the lunar surface & send up replacements?
Slashdot Mirror
I -love- this idea! I've suffered from the same problem for years, especially in long articles like those to which Slashdot frequently links, and never bothered thinking about how to fix it-- but this idea is a WINNER!
Yeah yeah, I know, I'm not really adding anything to the value of this thread-- but i wanted undertow3886 to know how much I like the way he (she?) thinks.
At low tide, the sea truly is miles away from the shore.
And how, pray tell, is this feat accomplished?
Actually this reminds me of one of the stupid practical jokes the more experienced hands would pull on the 'boots' (newcomers, green-behind-the-ears, etc) when I was in the Coast Guard. They were so used to finding various lines (ropes) for different things-- anchor lines, mooring lines, whatever, that when told to go find a shore line, they'd start looking for rope. The laughter would always come after they'd come to you asking where to find it. Just like that left-handed monkey wrench, or the smoke shifter.
Maybe the strategy should be to encourage ISPs to include Firefox in their install cds (that are mostly useless anyway, but for some reason most people believe they need to install their provider's software...) instead of IE.
At least Enterprise & Voyager have eye candy... anyone remember 38 of double-D? :)
Or possibly...
The martians have watching our politics, our wars, our genocides, and what we'll find instead is...
Aieeeee!
That should read micrometeorite -resistant-. Unless & until someone can come up with a material that will block 1 gram of matter travelling at relativistically high velocities, I refuse to concede that -anything- can be proof against all micrometeorites.
This is like the difference between saying your watch is waterproof and saying it's water resistant to 300 meters.
As a software developer, I am frequently surprised when a user takes the application I've developed and does something with it that I didn't expect and for which I didn't plan (unfortunately this is also my best method of testing, but you get the idea...) It seems that what's happening to the GNOME crowd is similar, but where there is so much pride getting in their way that, even when faced with a user who says, "Why not just make ten louder?" they just sit there, stammer for a while, and say, "but, but... this one goes to eleven!"
The US Supreme Court has always recognized the importance of protecting the safety of the citizenry. Thus, each of the constitutional liberties against which the government is forbidden to legislate is limited. For instance, you may not scream 'fire!' in a crowded theater and later proclaim freedom of speech. Your freedom ends where it intersects the freedom and safety of another.
I can't speak to the second amendment issue described above, nor the fifth amendment issue (since no example was given), but your fourth amendment issue falls squarely in the public safety arena. Newer technologies used by the TSA (and most likely in the future by other screening organizations outside the aviation arena) may make us nervous if for no other reason than the resolution of personal intimate details, but that doesn't invalidate the need for the security measures in the first place. It only limits them.Concerning the "regulation of electronic media and control of all sorts of information", again, you're not citing any examples. If you want to rail against Clear Channel, Fox News, Disney, or whatever other organizations as being tilted highly to the right, or simply not good corporate citizens or news organizations, feel free. Just don't for a minute believe that all relevant media is in the hands of the government. Try reading those notorious liberal newspapers instead of just watching TV. You could try reading overseas news sources for awhile too. I personally make it a point to review major news stories from the points of view of multiple sources whenever possible. Start with a domestic network (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, whatever), then add in BBC news, CBC, ABC (not the American one, the Australian one), a few good Asian sources, etc. Most of the time the coverage is fairly similar, but occasionaly something in one of the overseas sources lets me see the US in a different light.
In general, stop bitching about your lack of choices and learn to use the fsckin internet!
Good question, but no. You idea presupposes that there is a center to the universe, from which the galaxies (and the black holes contained therein) have expanded, much like shrapnel from an explosive. Think of it instead as being like points on a balloon as it expands; they're all getting further away from eachother, but none of them can lay claim to being at the center. Therefore there is no point at which one of them is 'outside' the others. Without that vantage point, there is no way to pull.
Yes, the evidence is in, this is apparently true-- but the article didn't say anything about buckeyballs. It talked about silicon nanotubes arrayed like towers, with nanoscopic aluminum droplets atop the tubes. No buckeyballs involved.
Voyagers I & II both used this same technology. So does Cassini.
Yeah, and people couldn't figure out what good electricity or radio were when they were first (commercially) introduced. Many policitians and members of the clergy thought the only use for radio would be to broadcast Sunday morning sermons for those who couldn't get to church.
Here's another one: British Prime Minister Gladstone once asked the father of electromagnetic induction, Michael Faraday, what the results of his current research might be. Faraday replied, "I don't know, but I'm sure you'll find a way to tax it."
(with apologies to http://www.draughonpa.com/drletter/drltr021.pdf, from which I directly lifted that entire paragraph).Damnit, I'm supposed to be the neoluddite around here, stop trying usurp my role!
The evolution of their society was such that, as new data was obtained and analyzed over the course of their history, they discarded outmoded philosophies and superstitions, and wonder why we haven't.
Do you have any idea what I'd give to have Evolution's vFolders in Outlook when I'm forced to work in a windows environment? That one feature is worth more than gold for me...
And yeah, I realize there are a lot of windiots out there who don't sort their email by folder at all... but they're the type who haven't refinanced their houses since 1977, too.
rtfa.
Floating about 13 miles above the earth and holding a stationary orbit for 12 to 18 months,
Sure, you got a gun that can shoot 13 miles straight up?
People who disbelieve in the Bible will insist that lack of photographic evidence substantiates their own view.
Incorrrect. We'll just continue on, aware that no evidence for the ark has ever been presented. That doesn't mean the myth doesn't have a germ of truth somewhere in the mists of time. It doesn't even mean the ark never existed. It just means that there is still no evidence for the existence of the ark.
My jaw dropped when I saw this unsupported line of BS in that rebuttal:
A few quick calculations, starting with two people (Adam & Eve, of course, since Lilith got the boot):
Let's assume each generation has ten offspring per mating pair, and that puberty occurred in both genders at the same age it does today. I realize many couples in earlier days had plenty more than ten children, but then again, a lot of them died as infants.
Ok, so we have Adam & Eve, who only had a couple of children, but for the sake of simplicity we'll keep every generation at 10 offspring per mating period. (I'm assuming that, for instance, Adam & Eve had ten children, and then as their children were having children, Adam & Eve were having another back of 10, and so on.)
We'll also assume a zero death rate, again for the sake of simplicity.
So, we get divergent series where each generation is the sum of all previous generations, times 10.
Now, by completely inflating the number of possible offspring (by the 10th generation, Adam & Eve have had one hundred kids!), we've gotten to the point where we're even close to a billion.
According to a US Census Bureau report, the global human population was just about one billion in the mid 18th century. If it only took us ten generations the first time around, why'd it take us so long to repeat it?
It could be worse.
A guy I used to know, a reformed drunk, used to be in the Navy (whether or not the drunkenness had anything to do with getting out, I don't know).
One night in a foreign port he got particularly plastered, but managed to find his way back to the pier. He went onboard ship, found his way to his rack (bed? bunk? I have no idea what they're called on large ships), and promptly passed out.
He came to in the morning very groggy and for some reason hearing the ship's horn blast. He was expecting to be in port for several days, so this came as a bit of a surprise... until he realized he was on the wrong ship.
His excuse? "All destroyers look alike in the dark!"
It'd be a whole lot more valuable to put either a visible light telescope or a radio telescope on the far side of the moon than to put either on the near side. For a good chunk of each lunar month, there's no sun or earth in the sky-- no light/radio-wave pollution that way.
My wife & I took a vacation near Bracebridge, Ontario, a couple of years ago-- just the car & us. The phone was in the glove box, but we live in the US, not Canada, and didn't bother to purchase a temporary plan for the trip, so it was worthless for the week we were there.
It was entirely refreshing to be away from the net for a week, and even from the hassle of phone calls & everything that goes along with them... but during the entire drive home I was desperate to get back to my email.
I don't even own a PDA, or a phone-camera, or a USB-enabled watch, or any of the other nice gizmos my dad has. I sometimes feel like I'm an odd cross between bleeding edge geek & Luddite.
As it turns out, a litle further research shows that he didn't.
My apologies for furthering an urban legend, I thought I was beyond that.
I guess this is a lot like the George Washington vs. the cherry tree legend. Oh well.
You don't need to be nuclear to do damage in orbit-- or anywhere else, for that matter. You just need velocity.
.45 bullet sitting top of the stack of nuclear bombs.
Considering the thickness of the shells on satellites, or of the solar panels, or whatever else, and the fact that these little bits are nuclear is irrelevant.
Orbital junk is already a concern.
Let's not whip our over-active imaginations into a frenzy over what is, essentially, a meaningless addition to the current threat. It's like being concerned about the
By the sheet, yes... and even by the ream it's pretty cheap (even very high quality stock only costs about as much as a cheap power supply these days)... but the total volume of any given paper mill is far from free, even on only a daily basis. Yes, to the consumer the stuff is cheap, since we typically buy it in small quantities; but to the producer, the shipper, the retailer, etc, it's a major expense.
I expect this will probably continue to be true in the future.
What makes Bill's proclamation so wrong-headed is just a matter of scaling: the chips, hard drives, etc, that were cutting edge ten years ago are now worthless. Today's cutting edge equipment (even the 2.8ghz upgrade I bought for my computer yesterday) will be worthless in 10 years. That doesn't mean there won't be new cutting edge equipment performing tasks we haven't yet imagined.
Bill has a talent for being very long-sighted on the business end (after all, his strategy nearly 20 years ago was to write the operating system used by the most popular processor on the market-- and it's worked well, so far), but incredibly short-sighted on technology trends. After all, as Bill said back in 1981, "640k should be enough for anyone."
It was also used in David Brin's book _Earth_ (btw, why can't we use underline markups?!). Excellent book the first few times I read it... but then I got a few years older, tried again, and was amazed that I ever enjoyed it.
Brin makes a vailid point about subvocal pickups though: Not everyone will be able to use them well. Some people will just never get used to all the extraneous thoughts that the mind refuses to filter out (and thus will reveal more on their monitors than they intend), while others simply won't like the interface.
I only see a few solutions, but maybe someone else can suggest others:
Any other ideas?