What's all this 0.3c stuff about? Mars is between 3 and 22 light minutes from Earth. If you launched when it was farthest away you'd have only hours to accelerate up to any appreciable fraction of the speed of light before you had to slow down.
Returning to the Earth involves getting into an orbit of the sun that is close to that of the Earth, at the right time. Actually entering orbit around the Earth is a matter of slowing down or speeding up a bit, relative to the sun.
You can go pretty much anywhere in the solar system using a laser based wherever (or the sun itself), and the orbital mechanics are pretty basic. Probably the easiest place to go is back to your light source.
If you're going to another star, you dive in towards the sun and use it as a light source for your sail. If you're going to Mars, because of the way solar sails and orbital mechanics works, you can use the Earth-based laser to "slow down" (actually, speed up) to enter Mars orbit as well.
Every hospital I've been in in the last ten years or so has wifi (and I work in a hospital so...). Medical devices never were sensitive to wifi or cellular and, unlike airplanes, at some point everybody just started ignoring the old paranoia.
You wouldn't use a switch. The easiest way to do it would be to install some DC LED lights, powered by a single DC power supply somewhere. DC strip lights currently do this, and it's more efficient than having a power supply built into each bulb, so it's probably the way of the future anyway. You'd run ethernet to the DC power supply, which would modulate the power to all the lights. You could wire up all the lights in your house to broadcast a single signal (one port on your router) or you could wire up each room with it's own channel if you wanted more bandwidth. You COULD have separate channels serving individual bits of a single room, but you'd probably only do that if you had very special, high bandwidth needs.
I doubt it. Until you get down into MUCH lower frequencies, the bandwidth is limited by the speed with which you can modulate (and detect the modulation of) the light rather than the frequency of the light itself.
I didn't really read much of the rant past the first paragraph. Microsoft is on record updating some copies of Windows 7 to 10 without giving the owner an opportunity to "click no." It did not happen to my copy of Windows 7, possibly because it's a corporate site license through the university.
Every OS does not have that problem. I'm not even sure that iOS does. It's possible Apple has a way to forcibly push an over the air OS update to your phone, but I don't recall ever hearing any confirmation of that. As far as non-mobile OSes, the only one I've ever heard about forcing updates on you is Windows 10.
So if a regular cab company introduced tracking they should be allowed to skip the background checks on their employees too? That's a really cheap app to avoid a considerable expense. And everyone is safer, right?
I replied to a comment by some guy who's phone wouldn't let him remove the battery. I didn't believe him, but it turned out the case was glued together. Some kind of Android phone.
"Done, now you can't track my habits, you don't know where I am, AND you can't reach me."
Hey, it's the 90s again!
I'm kind of ashamed of Slashdot. If I were a teenager and my parents got one of these things installed I'd solder in an off switch so I could go dark when I wanted. And I'd hack the account so I could watch what they were doing.
That's only a mean time of 2.25 years. And, as the GP said, virtually everyone uses a four digit number anyway. If it was possible to bypass the ten-tries-then-wipe protection the cops could pay somebody to sit there and enter the combinations by hand and still get it done in a reasonable amount of time.
The probability of an individual being killed by an asteroid is quite a bit more likely than dying in a terrorist attack. It's also higher than dying to a lightning strike, and is about the same as being killed by an amusement park ride. Note also that the probability of civilization being ended by an asteroid strike is much, much higher than by any of those other causes.
And yet the cost of reducing those chances enormously is very small compared to the cost of, say, reducing the chance of death by terrorist. When you run the numbers, asteroid defence is a very cost effective way to reduce risk.
Hypotheses are specific predictions. The idea that an asteroid had a big part in killing the dinosaurs is the theory, and so far it's the one that checks out the best, via the hypotheses it generates.
I went and watched the video (I only skipped the pretentious parts... "imagine with me..."). The tech they showed still looks really clunky. I remember the last time VR was on the edge of exploding. There seems to be a remarkable lack of progress since then.
Perhaps if those people had college degrees Trump wouldn't be as likely to become your next president?
Does a janitor need a college degree for his work? Probably not. Would a college degree improve his life and his functioning as a member of a modern democracy? Probably.
The real reason is that no employer wants their employees remote: managers just like to feel that there are real people under them, not e-mail addresses.
You're right, that's an unpopular opinion among people who don't profess faith in a magic being. The reason is that it's nonsense. It's perfectly possible to seek knowledge, appreciate beauty and "search for the exceptional in the mundane" without attributing it all to a magic father figure.
The claim is as ridiculous as religious people's claim that without religious belief there is no morality. Read the bible sometime. Nobody who wouldn't be called a psychopath in today's world would hold up the bible as a moral source unless they a) hadn't read it or b) were blinded by faith.
Religious people can certainly contribute to science. I didn't say otherwise. However, faith restricts the kind of science you can do. A Catholic friar who believes in the literal truth of Genesis will not extrapolate what we know about geology and biology to discover what we know about the age of the planet or the evolution of the species.
You've stated exactly why faith is the opposite of skepticism. When faith is "tested," i.e. contrary evidence is presented, the faithful dismiss the evidence and congratulate themselves. Their faith is "stronger." Faith involves not only belief without evidence, but a refusal to change your beliefs when faced with contrary evidence. Never mind actually going out and LOOKING for such evidence. Skepticism is just the opposite: a motivation to test any idea by looking for evidence, and making up your mind based on that evidence, not on pre-existing preferences.
I don't think that's true. The formal religion we have in the west is usually very watered down, yes, but even that can still have an enormous impact on public policy. In the US, policies regarding things like stem cell research and abortion are affected by a strong religious lobby. Then there are the indirect effects of being indoctrinated in magical thinking. You only have to watch Oprah or on of the TV physician shows to see how people will believe anybody who comes along with a white smile and a good story. Or mention the word "socialism" to an American.
Yes, lots of decent scientists will say they believe in a god. It's certainly possible to do good science and be religious. The problem is, as another poster pointed out, it introduces enormous blind spots into your thinking. For individual scientists in the world today that's not so much of a problem, because someone else will come along and do the work they can't or won't because of their religious convictions. The problem is when the public, who are the arbiters of what science gets done and how scientific knowledge is used, has group level blind spots, either directly due to religion or indirectly due to being used to blind belief.
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What's all this 0.3c stuff about? Mars is between 3 and 22 light minutes from Earth. If you launched when it was farthest away you'd have only hours to accelerate up to any appreciable fraction of the speed of light before you had to slow down.
Returning to the Earth involves getting into an orbit of the sun that is close to that of the Earth, at the right time. Actually entering orbit around the Earth is a matter of slowing down or speeding up a bit, relative to the sun.
You can go pretty much anywhere in the solar system using a laser based wherever (or the sun itself), and the orbital mechanics are pretty basic. Probably the easiest place to go is back to your light source.
If you're going to another star, you dive in towards the sun and use it as a light source for your sail. If you're going to Mars, because of the way solar sails and orbital mechanics works, you can use the Earth-based laser to "slow down" (actually, speed up) to enter Mars orbit as well.
You wouldn't put the converter at the breaker panel.
You know people use DC strip lights right now, right? Just for the light.
Every hospital I've been in in the last ten years or so has wifi (and I work in a hospital so...). Medical devices never were sensitive to wifi or cellular and, unlike airplanes, at some point everybody just started ignoring the old paranoia.
You wouldn't use a switch. The easiest way to do it would be to install some DC LED lights, powered by a single DC power supply somewhere. DC strip lights currently do this, and it's more efficient than having a power supply built into each bulb, so it's probably the way of the future anyway. You'd run ethernet to the DC power supply, which would modulate the power to all the lights. You could wire up all the lights in your house to broadcast a single signal (one port on your router) or you could wire up each room with it's own channel if you wanted more bandwidth. You COULD have separate channels serving individual bits of a single room, but you'd probably only do that if you had very special, high bandwidth needs.
I doubt it. Until you get down into MUCH lower frequencies, the bandwidth is limited by the speed with which you can modulate (and detect the modulation of) the light rather than the frequency of the light itself.
Correlation absolutely implies causation. It just doesn't tell you what direction it's in or whether there's a third party involved.
I didn't really read much of the rant past the first paragraph. Microsoft is on record updating some copies of Windows 7 to 10 without giving the owner an opportunity to "click no." It did not happen to my copy of Windows 7, possibly because it's a corporate site license through the university.
Every OS does not have that problem. I'm not even sure that iOS does. It's possible Apple has a way to forcibly push an over the air OS update to your phone, but I don't recall ever hearing any confirmation of that. As far as non-mobile OSes, the only one I've ever heard about forcing updates on you is Windows 10.
That 1800 isn't per month, it's a global ranking. It's still bad, but it's not as bad.
So if a regular cab company introduced tracking they should be allowed to skip the background checks on their employees too? That's a really cheap app to avoid a considerable expense. And everyone is safer, right?
Another option: http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files...
I replied to a comment by some guy who's phone wouldn't let him remove the battery. I didn't believe him, but it turned out the case was glued together. Some kind of Android phone.
"Done, now you can't track my habits, you don't know where I am, AND you can't reach me."
Hey, it's the 90s again!
I'm kind of ashamed of Slashdot. If I were a teenager and my parents got one of these things installed I'd solder in an off switch so I could go dark when I wanted. And I'd hack the account so I could watch what they were doing.
That's only a mean time of 2.25 years. And, as the GP said, virtually everyone uses a four digit number anyway. If it was possible to bypass the ten-tries-then-wipe protection the cops could pay somebody to sit there and enter the combinations by hand and still get it done in a reasonable amount of time.
The probability of an individual being killed by an asteroid is quite a bit more likely than dying in a terrorist attack. It's also higher than dying to a lightning strike, and is about the same as being killed by an amusement park ride. Note also that the probability of civilization being ended by an asteroid strike is much, much higher than by any of those other causes.
And yet the cost of reducing those chances enormously is very small compared to the cost of, say, reducing the chance of death by terrorist. When you run the numbers, asteroid defence is a very cost effective way to reduce risk.
You could paint the whole asteroid and only the sunward side would be affected. That would produce asymmetric thrust that would change the orbit.
Hypotheses are specific predictions. The idea that an asteroid had a big part in killing the dinosaurs is the theory, and so far it's the one that checks out the best, via the hypotheses it generates.
I went and watched the video (I only skipped the pretentious parts... "imagine with me..."). The tech they showed still looks really clunky. I remember the last time VR was on the edge of exploding. There seems to be a remarkable lack of progress since then.
Perhaps if those people had college degrees Trump wouldn't be as likely to become your next president?
Does a janitor need a college degree for his work? Probably not. Would a college degree improve his life and his functioning as a member of a modern democracy? Probably.
The real reason is that no employer wants their employees remote: managers just like to feel that there are real people under them, not e-mail addresses.
You're right, that's an unpopular opinion among people who don't profess faith in a magic being. The reason is that it's nonsense. It's perfectly possible to seek knowledge, appreciate beauty and "search for the exceptional in the mundane" without attributing it all to a magic father figure.
The claim is as ridiculous as religious people's claim that without religious belief there is no morality. Read the bible sometime. Nobody who wouldn't be called a psychopath in today's world would hold up the bible as a moral source unless they a) hadn't read it or b) were blinded by faith.
Religious people can certainly contribute to science. I didn't say otherwise. However, faith restricts the kind of science you can do. A Catholic friar who believes in the literal truth of Genesis will not extrapolate what we know about geology and biology to discover what we know about the age of the planet or the evolution of the species.
You've stated exactly why faith is the opposite of skepticism. When faith is "tested," i.e. contrary evidence is presented, the faithful dismiss the evidence and congratulate themselves. Their faith is "stronger." Faith involves not only belief without evidence, but a refusal to change your beliefs when faced with contrary evidence. Never mind actually going out and LOOKING for such evidence. Skepticism is just the opposite: a motivation to test any idea by looking for evidence, and making up your mind based on that evidence, not on pre-existing preferences.
I don't think that's true. The formal religion we have in the west is usually very watered down, yes, but even that can still have an enormous impact on public policy. In the US, policies regarding things like stem cell research and abortion are affected by a strong religious lobby. Then there are the indirect effects of being indoctrinated in magical thinking. You only have to watch Oprah or on of the TV physician shows to see how people will believe anybody who comes along with a white smile and a good story. Or mention the word "socialism" to an American.
Yes, lots of decent scientists will say they believe in a god. It's certainly possible to do good science and be religious. The problem is, as another poster pointed out, it introduces enormous blind spots into your thinking. For individual scientists in the world today that's not so much of a problem, because someone else will come along and do the work they can't or won't because of their religious convictions. The problem is when the public, who are the arbiters of what science gets done and how scientific knowledge is used, has group level blind spots, either directly due to religion or indirectly due to being used to blind belief.