Even the lightest of trains going at 200+ km/h is not something to be taken (pun intended) lightly and I bet a creative terrorist would not find it to be very challenging to plant a bomb in such a way to cause a really big mess.
"Apparently the idiots who wrote the sequel trilogy a few years ago failed to read this book (or Robots and Empire), and retcon'd the robots in as Eternals who killed off all competing intelligences in a bizarre and nonsensical addition."
It's been a while since I read those, but, IIRC, it was Asimov himself who wrote that line and, in the book, it was told as a legend that has been told for countless generations.
As such, it could have some resemblance to reality, bu also include many elements of fiction.
And, BTW, I found very interesting the way he worked to integrate all major series into a single one. And he did that right up to the End of Eternity and the Susan Calvin stories. He was good.
Now that companies that do nothing but sue people based on patents they acquired are getting more and more attention, one can hope the entire absurdity of the system as it is serves as an argument to restructure it.
GPS is accurate to a few feet, while radar is not.
IIRC, it's also more automated and allows mostly straight-line flights until you reach the airport, reducing distances traveled and fuel consumption. Even a modest reduction in fuel consumption gets a huge number in the end. This ends up in lower fares and more profit for airlines that, in turn, allows them to invest more in more sophisticated technology.
The increased accuracy and automation also allow for more density - more planes in the air at the same time in a given area, less pressure on ground control and more people being taken to their destinations.
I would risk it's going to pay for itself very shortly.
Books have some major problems people don't see because they can only express their wishes about books in book terms. It's kind of like explaining recursion to a GW-BASIC programmer.
- Books can't be searched by terms not in their indexes - Books can't be reassembled by the owner for different reading experiences (say the book itself and notes from a different author) - Books don't self-update (but this is also an advantage) - Libraries can't be easily searched - Books occupy space (I have no problem about my good books - the ones I enjoy re-reading after 20+ years - taking up space, but I do with all those throwaway technical books about a single version of something I ended up accumulating over time - You can't easily publish them
What I would love (and I suppose many geek friends would, too) is a simple tablet, maybe with an e-ink display that:
- when connected via USB, bluetooth or wi-fi (IP and CUPS-based), behaved like a PostScript printer and a hard disk - when printing, documents would become.PDFs visible on the hard-disk side -.PDFs,.ODTs and.DOCs could be saved to the device and become immediately visible - all documents would be indexed for search - browser, pim, e-mail and messaging clients wouldn't hurt - could be automatically rsynced to a folder on your desktop/laptop (so you wouldn't lose IM logs and would have a full backup available)
Most the software required to build it already exists. All of it is GPL. The hardware could be very low-power, OLPC-like (except for the screen) and very inexpensive.
A day of deployment could probably fund a couple Arecibos for years.
For a week of deployment, you could even build a second one, including building the volcano and digging a crater to go under the dish.
And yes. While the NSF may have huge funds available, this war is, perhaps, the most stupid war ever fought. And keep in mind wars are usually a very stupid thing to do.
The US could as well invade Mexico, as they are every bit as guilty of building WMDs and of harboring terrorists as Iraq was and, all the more convenient, they are a lot closer. I bet they would not even resist much.
Right now, leaving Iraq would be even more irresponsible than invading it was - they would plunge (even more) into chaos and civil war and a theocracy that builds WMDs, harbors terrorists and has a very understandable grudge against the US would certainly emerge.
"Growing edible skeletal muscle, which is what beef is, from embryos bypasses creation of a brain and other central nervous system components that are able to feel pain and other unpleasant stimuli during the manufacture of beef and other edible animal foodstuffs."
I stretched the argument to the point of nearly breaking so I think you did not get it completely.
I am totally in when it comes to growing beef in vitro and not taking it out of cows - they sure have feelings and they sure would not be very happy with it.
I commented about using human embryos as raw material for medical supplies and where the line between admissible and inadmissible should be drawn. If we start redrawing these lines according to our convenience, what will prevent us from using human embryos to grow food?
No problem. This is a - mind you - serious question and I don't read sarcasm in it.
I lack the faith required to say "Zeus does not exist" or "Allah does not exist" (it also seems remarkably unsafe to say so in certain countries these days) and so on up to the blanket "no such thing as a god exists". I will never be able to proof their non-existence and thus, I cannot affirm they do not exist. It sure seems likely, as all evidence in favor of the existence of even one of them is very faint, but it is still not certain. Since all models of the Universe I use disregard divine influences, their existence is irrelevant for me.
As LordLucless pointed out, an Atheist is also a believer - who believes in the non-existence of something - and believing is an act of faith. I lack the faith required to do it.;-)
And when people really ask about my religion, that's what I answer. Surprisingly many people accept the answer while the people who would usually try to convert me gets so hopelessly confused they are incapable to react.
BTW, I also have no faith in Science - I just use it because it seems to work fine.
I concede it's funny, but it is also a horrible thing to say.
As a father, I can tell you that, while you may sometimes get tired of your kids (kids _are_ noisy), there are no moments as precious as those when they are around.
Even those rare moments when you got all the config values just right and, for the first time in months your wireless work flawlessly under WPA2, cannot compare.
"You'd think everybody is in favor of longevity, but one of Bush's early science advisers made it clear that he was opposed to life extension in principle and Bush explicitly backed him up on that. It blew me away, but they clearly were making the case in favor of death."
I can pretty much support the case against extending their lives. I am just surprised they agree.
But let's not exaggerate our enthusiasm with that specific idea. I am also sure it will take more than their natural lifetimes to undo all the damage their mindset brought.
While I am no Atheist (I lack the required faith on something I can't prove neither it exist nor it doesn't) I am also very uncomfortable with people experimenting on "human precursors" or however you label those.
As someone pointed out earlier, if the most viable route to get stem cells is harvesting embryos, the demand will be so huge as to create an economic incentive for people to make as many of them as they can sell stem cells.
And that is plain ugly.
If we cross that barrier, how long until we start using human stem cells to make (forgive me, Arthur) beef?
One of the requirements for her computer was absolute Office-compatibility. When I have to present a Powerpoint presentation on OOo on my computer, I have to make sure everything converted OK and correct whatever crept into it. The same goes with Word documents and, even worse, Excel spreadsheets. While I do these things infrequently enough to be able to use OOo, she doesn't. The Mac was the right choice for her. The second option would be Windows.
The majority of Mac converts are people who gave up on Windows. Being a geek with geek friends, I saw some Linux users switch to Mac (3, actually), but the growth of the Mac platform cannot be explained only by Linux geeks - Windows converts are a major group (not among geeks, because not many of my geek friends use Windows).
Also, the ex-Linux users keep justifying their choice to themselves with arguments like "I can install APT" or "There is DarwinPorts" which, while missing the whole point of having a package-managed OS, help them satisfy themselves.
My wife uses a Macbook and I must tell you... I don't find any compelling reason for moving from Linux to OSX apart from the beautiful computer.
My Ubuntu box has APT integrated deep into the OS, managing upgrades for just about everything including Skype and Miro. APT is really the key factor here - with it, I can install and uninstall bits and pieces as I see fit without having to hunt downloads and keep track of updates for non-OS software.
With a Mac, everything I use is non-OS (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Python 2.3, 2.4 and 2.5) while with Ubuntu the only things the OS doesn't update automatically are the things I chose to install by hand (Eclipse, NetBeans, Java SDK). It's pretty much hassle free.
I deeply respect NeXT's and Apple's commitment to build a user-friendly Unix box since the days of the NeXT cube (from which all OSX releases descend), but, sadly, they are not for me. I need the unfriendlyness of a chainsaw from time to time.
I know this is off-topic and such, but, since this is/., I feel free to do it.
I have been constantly annoyed by pop-up boxes, messages, warnings coming from Evolution on my Ubuntu box. It is a serious usability issue because I don't care if it failed to ping the IMAP server while I was writing an article, reviewing a spreadsheet or writing some code. It's annoying to a point I am considering filing a bug report.
As Gnome progresses to become a newbie-friendly desktop, it seems some usability is getting lost. Unless a message requires immediate attention (like "your laptop battery is going to die in 1 minute" or "battery overheated - risk of explosion"), it should never, ever, interrupt whatever you are doing.
Being unable to ping my IMAP server is hardly an emergency.
+1 insightful for you, but, since I am out of modpoints, I will comment a bit.
While the automatic garbage collection did nothing to save those guys, relying on an unclaimed pointer is something very dangerous to do, even when in pre-release stages. Specially dangerous when you are talking about a 1 ton, 200 hp robot that becomes unresponsive after about an hour running.
Complaining about how garbage collection made their bug all the more subtle is to miss the point a bit - the program was wrong and whatever language they used, it would be just as wrong.
If C (and I love C) can be described as a low-level language with some high-level features added on, C++ can be described as C with some nice syntactic sugar (//, declarations anywhere) and an object-like system afterthought glued to it. It took me years to even learn C++ because of the yuck factor from being introduced to OOP with Smalltalk.
I agree they did, indeed, program in the wrong language, but I would not recommend something as low-level as C or C++ or even C# (or Java) for this job. I would recommend them doing it in the highest level language available (and, if the highest level available for them is C#, to make something more adequate available ASAP) and to build a domain-specific language on top of that.
By having to focus on potential collision event handlers that could be partially freed (and, in effect, lost in memory) they did make a good point that they were looking at a far lower abstraction level than they perhaps should.
The proper way to do it would be a "getRidOfMyself" method that notified all its subscribers that the subscribed object is going to be deleted and should no longer be referenced. It's nothing the GC could or should do and making the GC "delete-no-matter-what" option available is bad design practice because it allows an incorrect program to behave like a correct one.
Sorry to be late for the post (it's been a day or so).
How much would wind-based energy cost for added power generation for your setup? Did you consider it? Since you already need a tower for antennas and stuff, a small wind generator should be easy to set up on top of it if stresses can be dealt with by the structure.
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While I can't disagree with the TGV numbers, it's not every train accident that has a happy ending. This one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschede_train_disaster comes to mind.
Even the lightest of trains going at 200+ km/h is not something to be taken (pun intended) lightly and I bet a creative terrorist would not find it to be very challenging to plant a bomb in such a way to cause a really big mess.
"Apparently the idiots who wrote the sequel trilogy a few years ago failed to read this book (or Robots and Empire), and retcon'd the robots in as Eternals who killed off all competing intelligences in a bizarre and nonsensical addition."
It's been a while since I read those, but, IIRC, it was Asimov himself who wrote that line and, in the book, it was told as a legend that has been told for countless generations.
As such, it could have some resemblance to reality, bu also include many elements of fiction.
And, BTW, I found very interesting the way he worked to integrate all major series into a single one. And he did that right up to the End of Eternity and the Susan Calvin stories. He was good.
Now that companies that do nothing but sue people based on patents they acquired are getting more and more attention, one can hope the entire absurdity of the system as it is serves as an argument to restructure it.
Patents are not inherently bad. Bad patents are.
"traveling from Toronto to Ottawa (about 450km) takes about the same time by air as by rail (including check-in, security times, etc)"
Just wait until people start bombing and de-railing fast trains...
GPS is accurate to a few feet, while radar is not.
IIRC, it's also more automated and allows mostly straight-line flights until you reach the airport, reducing distances traveled and fuel consumption. Even a modest reduction in fuel consumption gets a huge number in the end. This ends up in lower fares and more profit for airlines that, in turn, allows them to invest more in more sophisticated technology.
The increased accuracy and automation also allow for more density - more planes in the air at the same time in a given area, less pressure on ground control and more people being taken to their destinations.
I would risk it's going to pay for itself very shortly.
"A land-based Mode S receiver is probably $100"
;-)
You obviously never saw a government buying stuff
Books have some major problems people don't see because they can only express their wishes about books in book terms. It's kind of like explaining recursion to a GW-BASIC programmer.
- Books can't be searched by terms not in their indexes
- Books can't be reassembled by the owner for different reading experiences (say the book itself and notes from a different author)
- Books don't self-update (but this is also an advantage)
- Libraries can't be easily searched
- Books occupy space (I have no problem about my good books - the ones I enjoy re-reading after 20+ years - taking up space, but I do with all those throwaway technical books about a single version of something I ended up accumulating over time
- You can't easily publish them
But I agree most e-readers suck real badly.
I have a wishlist: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=367599&cid=21445193
At US$699, the Illiad is also hideously expensive.
What I would love (and I suppose many geek friends would, too) is a simple tablet, maybe with an e-ink display that:
.PDFs visible on the hard-disk side .PDFs, .ODTs and .DOCs could be saved to the device and become immediately visible
- when connected via USB, bluetooth or wi-fi (IP and CUPS-based), behaved like a PostScript printer and a hard disk
- when printing, documents would become
-
- all documents would be indexed for search
- browser, pim, e-mail and messaging clients wouldn't hurt
- could be automatically rsynced to a folder on your desktop/laptop (so you wouldn't lose IM logs and would have a full backup available)
Most the software required to build it already exists. All of it is GPL. The hardware could be very low-power, OLPC-like (except for the screen) and very inexpensive.
It can't be that hard.
A day of deployment could probably fund a couple Arecibos for years.
For a week of deployment, you could even build a second one, including building the volcano and digging a crater to go under the dish.
And yes. While the NSF may have huge funds available, this war is, perhaps, the most stupid war ever fought. And keep in mind wars are usually a very stupid thing to do.
The US could as well invade Mexico, as they are every bit as guilty of building WMDs and of harboring terrorists as Iraq was and, all the more convenient, they are a lot closer. I bet they would not even resist much.
Right now, leaving Iraq would be even more irresponsible than invading it was - they would plunge (even more) into chaos and civil war and a theocracy that builds WMDs, harbors terrorists and has a very understandable grudge against the US would certainly emerge.
"Growing edible skeletal muscle, which is what beef is, from embryos bypasses creation of a brain and other central nervous system components that are able to feel pain and other unpleasant stimuli during the manufacture of beef and other edible animal foodstuffs."
I stretched the argument to the point of nearly breaking so I think you did not get it completely.
I am totally in when it comes to growing beef in vitro and not taking it out of cows - they sure have feelings and they sure would not be very happy with it.
I commented about using human embryos as raw material for medical supplies and where the line between admissible and inadmissible should be drawn. If we start redrawing these lines according to our convenience, what will prevent us from using human embryos to grow food?
No problem. This is a - mind you - serious question and I don't read sarcasm in it.
;-)
I lack the faith required to say "Zeus does not exist" or "Allah does not exist" (it also seems remarkably unsafe to say so in certain countries these days) and so on up to the blanket "no such thing as a god exists". I will never be able to proof their non-existence and thus, I cannot affirm they do not exist. It sure seems likely, as all evidence in favor of the existence of even one of them is very faint, but it is still not certain. Since all models of the Universe I use disregard divine influences, their existence is irrelevant for me.
As LordLucless pointed out, an Atheist is also a believer - who believes in the non-existence of something - and believing is an act of faith. I lack the faith required to do it.
And when people really ask about my religion, that's what I answer. Surprisingly many people accept the answer while the people who would usually try to convert me gets so hopelessly confused they are incapable to react.
BTW, I also have no faith in Science - I just use it because it seems to work fine.
I concede it's funny, but it is also a horrible thing to say.
As a father, I can tell you that, while you may sometimes get tired of your kids (kids _are_ noisy), there are no moments as precious as those when they are around.
Even those rare moments when you got all the config values just right and, for the first time in months your wireless work flawlessly under WPA2, cannot compare.
"You'd think everybody is in favor of longevity, but one of Bush's early science advisers made it clear that he was opposed to life extension in principle and Bush explicitly backed him up on that. It blew me away, but they clearly were making the case in favor of death."
I can pretty much support the case against extending their lives. I am just surprised they agree.
But let's not exaggerate our enthusiasm with that specific idea. I am also sure it will take more than their natural lifetimes to undo all the damage their mindset brought.
And one can always hope they see the light.
While I am no Atheist (I lack the required faith on something I can't prove neither it exist nor it doesn't) I am also very uncomfortable with people experimenting on "human precursors" or however you label those.
As someone pointed out earlier, if the most viable route to get stem cells is harvesting embryos, the demand will be so huge as to create an economic incentive for people to make as many of them as they can sell stem cells.
And that is plain ugly.
If we cross that barrier, how long until we start using human stem cells to make (forgive me, Arthur) beef?
Actually it's horrible. It brings Evolution to focus.
Worst of all - Evolution and the message capture some keystrokes that should have gone to the other program.
+1 insightful. Wish I had modpoints...
Not quite.
One of the requirements for her computer was absolute Office-compatibility. When I have to present a Powerpoint presentation on OOo on my computer, I have to make sure everything converted OK and correct whatever crept into it. The same goes with Word documents and, even worse, Excel spreadsheets. While I do these things infrequently enough to be able to use OOo, she doesn't. The Mac was the right choice for her. The second option would be Windows.
The majority of Mac converts are people who gave up on Windows. Being a geek with geek friends, I saw some Linux users switch to Mac (3, actually), but the growth of the Mac platform cannot be explained only by Linux geeks - Windows converts are a major group (not among geeks, because not many of my geek friends use Windows).
Also, the ex-Linux users keep justifying their choice to themselves with arguments like "I can install APT" or "There is DarwinPorts" which, while missing the whole point of having a package-managed OS, help them satisfy themselves.
Because, unlike Vista, Windows 7 will not be a major rewrite of the core OS.
Windows 7 will be to Vista what Windows XP is to 2000.
They don't have the guts to try it again.
My wife uses a Macbook and I must tell you... I don't find any compelling reason for moving from Linux to OSX apart from the beautiful computer.
My Ubuntu box has APT integrated deep into the OS, managing upgrades for just about everything including Skype and Miro. APT is really the key factor here - with it, I can install and uninstall bits and pieces as I see fit without having to hunt downloads and keep track of updates for non-OS software.
With a Mac, everything I use is non-OS (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Python 2.3, 2.4 and 2.5) while with Ubuntu the only things the OS doesn't update automatically are the things I chose to install by hand (Eclipse, NetBeans, Java SDK). It's pretty much hassle free.
I deeply respect NeXT's and Apple's commitment to build a user-friendly Unix box since the days of the NeXT cube (from which all OSX releases descend), but, sadly, they are not for me. I need the unfriendlyness of a chainsaw from time to time.
I know this is off-topic and such, but, since this is /., I feel free to do it.
I have been constantly annoyed by pop-up boxes, messages, warnings coming from Evolution on my Ubuntu box. It is a serious usability issue because I don't care if it failed to ping the IMAP server while I was writing an article, reviewing a spreadsheet or writing some code. It's annoying to a point I am considering filing a bug report.
As Gnome progresses to become a newbie-friendly desktop, it seems some usability is getting lost. Unless a message requires immediate attention (like "your laptop battery is going to die in 1 minute" or "battery overheated - risk of explosion"), it should never, ever, interrupt whatever you are doing.
Being unable to ping my IMAP server is hardly an emergency.
+1 insightful for you, but, since I am out of modpoints, I will comment a bit.
While the automatic garbage collection did nothing to save those guys, relying on an unclaimed pointer is something very dangerous to do, even when in pre-release stages. Specially dangerous when you are talking about a 1 ton, 200 hp robot that becomes unresponsive after about an hour running.
Complaining about how garbage collection made their bug all the more subtle is to miss the point a bit - the program was wrong and whatever language they used, it would be just as wrong.
If C (and I love C) can be described as a low-level language with some high-level features added on, C++ can be described as C with some nice syntactic sugar (//, declarations anywhere) and an object-like system afterthought glued to it. It took me years to even learn C++ because of the yuck factor from being introduced to OOP with Smalltalk.
I agree they did, indeed, program in the wrong language, but I would not recommend something as low-level as C or C++ or even C# (or Java) for this job. I would recommend them doing it in the highest level language available (and, if the highest level available for them is C#, to make something more adequate available ASAP) and to build a domain-specific language on top of that.
By having to focus on potential collision event handlers that could be partially freed (and, in effect, lost in memory) they did make a good point that they were looking at a far lower abstraction level than they perhaps should.
The proper way to do it would be a "getRidOfMyself" method that notified all its subscribers that the subscribed object is going to be deleted and should no longer be referenced. It's nothing the GC could or should do and making the GC "delete-no-matter-what" option available is bad design practice because it allows an incorrect program to behave like a correct one.
+1 good idea for you
Sorry to be late for the post (it's been a day or so).
How much would wind-based energy cost for added power generation for your setup? Did you consider it? Since you already need a tower for antennas and stuff, a small wind generator should be easy to set up on top of it if stresses can be dealt with by the structure.