### The Earth is running into a log jam of population and industrial production / food production.
How about pumping all that money into fixing up earth? Heck, if we don't get it right on the earth, how to you expect to get it right on some mars colonnie, generation spaceship or whatever with much harder constrains?
The earth is good enough to serve mankind easily for a few million years, I have little doubt that we would even surrive a astroid hit without much problem, sure not all of us, but enough to not let humanity die out. Space is 99.9999999 (insert lots for 9s) dead empty space, there is little reason to go there, since earth will be a MUCH better place to live on for a long time, no matter what happens.
### 1-10 deaths per launch, caused by the resulting fallout, doesn't seem all that much.
Given the weight that they could transfer it really isn't that much, every once in a while people blow semself up with chemical rockets too. The problem is who dies? Surly not the once that are doing the launch, but some innocent people to which the wind ends up blowing the fallout and that is the real problem. And beside from the dead people you would surly do a lot of havok to a wide area and cause illness for lots of people, not just those handfull that die in the end.
If we would need such a launch to save humanity from a big astroid or so, I would say go for it. But as long as it would only be used for some USA PR-trip to mars there is no way such a thing would ever happen.
### Tell that to the people who handled depleted uranium for stronger shell casings to penetrate armours.
As far as I know the problem with the depleted uranium wasn't that its radioactive, but simply that it is toxic. So shooting around with it and producing lots of uranium dust is not to good for health, while simply handling the stuff itself shouldn't be to much of a problem.
While those numbers sound truely cool, this little sentence from the Wikipedia article sounds a little less nice:
### There were also ethical issues with launching such a vehicle from the surface of the earth; calculations showed that between 1 and 10 people would die from each takeoff from fallout. ###
Unless they got that problem solved you won't see those 8000000 tonns launch anytime soon.
### Nintendo [...] would never release anything like this.
Nintendo already has released something like that, its called VirtualBoy and flopped pretty badly. So its more a question of if they would try it again. That said, yes, its not real, but I am still not sure exactly where it did come from.
### I hate to threadjack, but can anyone verify if the Nintendo ON video is real or fake?
Its definitvly not real, first of the VR stuff just seems way to fantastic to be real, secondly the presented device clearly violates the specs that Nintendo has given out just a few days ago. The Revolution should have a size of around three DVD boxes, that VR-toaster however is quite a bit larger than that.
The castle demo in the beginning however looks pretty realistically for a techdemo, somewhat similar to the Mario128 one. Wouldn't be much supprised if Nintendo shows something like that at the E3.
The Mario and Samus models in the end however look pretty weird again, a bit ugly and badly animated compared to Nintendo standards.
In the end I am not really sure what this is, I clearly doubt that it is real, but then it looks far to good for just a homebrew fake. Maybe some design study, internal aprils fools joke or something like that of Nintendo.
### Can you hookup a keyboard+mouse or some kind of third party controller to consoles like Xbox?
Yes, there are adapters that allow you to plug-in mouse and keyboard to use them in shooters, however no idea how well that works or if that requires special support from the games. In general however you can live very good without mouse+keyboard. Its true that aiming gets a bit harder, but the games are tuned to handle that by offering a little auto-aim and things like that. Some games such as MetroidPrime(Gamecube) even go as far as to go away from the mouse-look completly and use a more Zelda-like Look-On system to aim at enemies.
The biggest problem of cramping everything into one is really just the interface, something like the iPod Touchwheel would have a hard time finding free space on a small phone, but hey, maybe a potential iPhone could revive one of these these...
### The Xbox is the coolest console at the moment. It does pretty much everything right.
Well, everything beside the price (even so they fixed that soon after the release here in europe), the size of the console, the controller and the games... That said, yes the XBox has still the most power of all the consoles on the market, but beside from that it really doesn't have all that much to offer. Its just to much a brute force attempt to enter the market.
### Isn't competition GOOD?
Microsoft doesn't do fair competition, they can invest basically as much as they want and then just wait till the others die out due to lack of money. See their investment into Rare or Bungie, that wasn't much like 'Lets make a good console and wait till people jump the train', but more like 'Which game companies do we want to buy today'. Luckily they didn't seem to have all that much success with their stratagie so far and the other parties are still holding well, but Microsoft really hasn't much to do with fair competition.
The 'trackball' however has a big fat green X written on it, which makes it unlikly that it is a regular trackball, beside from that the position would be pretty bad for a trackball. On the other side it also looks quite a bit to clumsy for just being there for the logo. If you look closely the 'trackball' has 1,2,3,4 written around it, so it might be a frequency- or id-selector for the wireless gamepad.
There are NO controller ports on that XBox2, see this picture, you can see that those ports have "Memory Unit A/B" written on them, so the controllers must be wireless. The black port on the left might be a USB one, however thats just a guess.
The terminal should *not* be a text terminal, but just one which accepts textual input, since there is really no good reason to do statusbars as ascii art, when you are running on a 1280x960x32bit display. And yes, in an ideal world, the right libraries would take care that your text tools would even work on a real VT100 connected via serial console.
### Ive no idea what you mean by 'structured' grep.
A structured grep would we one that would search for real objects in a stream/tree of objects and not toy around with just plain text. For XML for example this would allow to use XPath expressions to select a specific part of the document, which is almost impossible or at least super ugly to do with a plain text based grep. Simalar it would allow to access the output of 'df' in a structured way so that I could exactly the amount of used space on a device, without the danger of getting consfused by spaces or newlines in the textual output.
CLIs are nice, the sad thing is that they have advanged even less then GUIs in the last years, almost not at all. XTerms are still basically emulating old serial terminals with all there fundamental problems (hard to get Backspace/Delete correctly over the wire, etc.) for basically little good reason. Interaction between GUI and CLI is also almost not there, you can click a link here and there and maybe do copy&paste, but thats often as far as you get. Where is my thumbnail preview on 'ls', where are more then 16 colors and when can I finally do a structured grep, not a line based one. There really hasn't been much innovation in this area, XMLTerm is one of the few, but not a much successfull one. On MacOSX is all the same, the only real progress (as in end user product) seems to come out of Microsoft with the MSH, wondering when we will see some of its features cloned over on the Unix side.
IQ isn't some magical number that exactly points out how clever you are, its just a number you get in a test and how good you score in that test depends heavily on your state of mind at the time when you solve it, busy with other things, under stress or relaxed and you will score differently.
And well, in the end IQ tests are overrated anyway, they don't say much over your real life cleverness, which depends on a heapload of other factors (social interaction skills, etc.), they simply rate how could you are at solving IQ test questions, not much more.
Good idea to let Gnome2 and Gnome3 run in parallel for a while, especially when looking back at the transition from 1.4 to 2.0 which was quite painfull. Lots and lots of features got removed in that transition, either because they simply wern't implemented yet or because somebody considered it a 'good thing' to have unconfigurable applications. It took till around Gnome2.4/2.6 till Gnome2 really was a good replacement to Gnome1.4 and most featured either have found their way back or the default behaviour was something more sane. Quiete often I wished I could just go back to Gnome1.4, but that wasn't easily possible, since the packages dropped out of Debian and a whole selfcompiled Gnome was just to much of a hassle to bother. Might be nice if that horrorstory doesn't repeat with Gnome3 and I can decide when I want to switch and am not forced to upgrade just because a dist-upgrade makes the switch unavoidable.
Its also a good idea in practice, but only when you have only three folders to maintain with not more then a handfull of files in it... Back then in the day of Amiga500 that was the case, your programms came on floppies, there was no Internet and everything was simple, spartial worked great, I loved it. Today however you have a gazillion files on your computer, the OS directories are basically impossible to browse in spartial mode and even the emptiest home directory ends up having more then spartial mode can handle. It might still be a nice mode for total computer newbies, but the problem is it simply doesn't handle the grow, with time comes knowledge and experience and with experince come more files, sooner or later spartial will be unusable.
Now for sure some people will come around and tell me how great spartial is, to those, please do me a favor, take xvidcap and create a movie how you browse around/usr/share/doc/ and friends. I really would like to see how somebody can stand that spatial disaster in deep directory strucutres for extended periods of time.
Since I have little hope that nautilus ever turns into a usable product, and I have really tried hard to use it for numerous times, I have switched over to Rox, which is really pretty close to the perfect file browser, sure it still has some faults and missing features, but at least its actually confortable to use.
### I must say I haven't used it, but from reviews and comparisons I've read, it seems to be a good tool.
Well, try to use it then. The feature that it has indeed sound nice in theory, but Arch has huge problems when it comes to usability and performance, which make it unusable for something as large as Linux and unconfortable for most other projects around. A simple look at the 'help' already makes that pretty clear that there is something wrong with the userinterface:
$ svn help | wc -l 41 $ tla help | wc -l 186
Its however not a lost case, Bazaar-ng is trying to fix those problems of Arch:
### Point out ANYTHING that would cause natural selection to take place.
Birth rate in germany is currently ~1.6 per female if I remember correctly, if we continue that way we are extingt in around ~500 years if my math is right. One might call that evolution, but it goes in quite another direction than expected, since wealth has little todo with how far once genes spread these days.
### while not all of intelligence is genetic, a good portion of it is.
The problem (feature?!) with evolution is that doesn't care if you are intelligent, it cares if your genes spread and intelligence doesn't seem to help all that much with that any longer. Current brith rate in germany for example is ~1.6 per female, meaning we will be extinct sooner or later if it continues that way. It doesn't mean we are not intelligent or that we all die a early, it simply means that our culture evoled into a state where having children isn't considered necessary and carrer is often considered more important. In other much less developed countries in the world the birth rate on the other side is much higher, there genes spread, ours don't.
So yes, evolution still takes place, but it doesn't really go into the direction of some very intelligent advanced human.
### slowed down? It's gone *insanely* fast. Keep timeline in context; life started 3.5 billion years ago. Humanity's first written language was only 6k years ago -.5Millionth of life's entire time.
Cultural evolution of course has gone insanely fast, biological evolution on the other side doesn't seem to have made much changes for quite a while and I don't see how it ever should in an industrial nation, after all your survival and your reproduction has little or nothing todo with your genes. Humans might of course one day adjust their genes to fit the job, but thats not something I would call evolution.
### But evolution is a biological mechanism, and (at least, in just the next thousand years) won't allow us to stop being biological.
Evolution has for most part already slowed down a lot or stoped for humans, so I wouldn't expect any major change any time soon anyway. What however will happen sooner or later is that we ourself construct our future development. We are already growing organs (just little pieces of skin, but its a start), transplanting organs and constructing mechanical prosthesis, its just a matter of time until those things will not only be used as inferior replacments for lost or damages organs or body parts, but will be used to enhance humans with specific abilities. Its also quite possible that computer based AI will take over, not necessary here on earth, but sending out some clever AI todo space exploration isn't that unlickly. All this will not happen in the next few years, but in the next 100 or 1000 years some major advancements isn't that unlikly.
The good old sun will continue to burn for quite a while and good old earth would also be able to support us for quite a bit longer. There is really no reason to start to evacuate to other planets any time soon. The problem is that menkind still hasn't even learned to live happily on this one planet, we extingt species, polute the air, wreak havok the eco system, start major wars every few years. If we continue that way menkind will have itself extingt much before sun even starts to cause throuble.
Space travel is still important and should be continued, but the SpaceShuttle as is is really for most part just waste of tax payers money.
### We cannot make another saturn V because some of the paperwork has been lost.
This is incorrect, the reason why we can't build another Saturn V is not because lost papers, all those are still available, but because there are no longer vendors for mid-1960's hardware. See:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/space/controversy/
This is also the reason why we can't just build another shuttle, while the papes are there, the tools and factories to manufactor them are not. Thus the cost would be higher then a build from scratch.
### Would you rather someone be accountable for an accident
If you are going to blame 'someone' you are already doing the wrong thing. Humans make errors, so replacing the human that did the error with another one that will do a similar random error will do nothing to improve the overall situation. To really fix a problem you need to find out how to avoid it in the future, not who is to blame for it. If Jim forgot some screws, the solution is not to replace Jim with Bob, but to let Bob cross check that all screws that Jim placed. It of course can still go wrong, but it requires that both Jim and Bob make an error, which is quite less likly then only one doing an error.
So yes, paperwork is important to track who did what, when and why. The solution to fixing problems lays however in the procedure and much less in the people performing the procedure.
Slashdot Mirror
### The Earth is running into a log jam of population and industrial production / food production.
How about pumping all that money into fixing up earth? Heck, if we don't get it right on the earth, how to you expect to get it right on some mars colonnie, generation spaceship or whatever with much harder constrains?
The earth is good enough to serve mankind easily for a few million years, I have little doubt that we would even surrive a astroid hit without much problem, sure not all of us, but enough to not let humanity die out. Space is 99.9999999 (insert lots for 9s) dead empty space, there is little reason to go there, since earth will be a MUCH better place to live on for a long time, no matter what happens.
### 1-10 deaths per launch, caused by the resulting fallout, doesn't seem all that much.
Given the weight that they could transfer it really isn't that much, every once in a while people blow semself up with chemical rockets too. The problem is who dies? Surly not the once that are doing the launch, but some innocent people to which the wind ends up blowing the fallout and that is the real problem. And beside from the dead people you would surly do a lot of havok to a wide area and cause illness for lots of people, not just those handfull that die in the end.
If we would need such a launch to save humanity from a big astroid or so, I would say go for it. But as long as it would only be used for some USA PR-trip to mars there is no way such a thing would ever happen.
### Tell that to the people who handled depleted uranium for stronger shell casings to penetrate armours.
As far as I know the problem with the depleted uranium wasn't that its radioactive, but simply that it is toxic. So shooting around with it and producing lots of uranium dust is not to good for health, while simply handling the stuff itself shouldn't be to much of a problem.
While those numbers sound truely cool, this little sentence from the Wikipedia article sounds a little less nice:
### There were also ethical issues with launching such a vehicle from the surface of the earth; calculations showed that between 1 and 10 people would die from each takeoff from fallout. ###
Unless they got that problem solved you won't see those 8000000 tonns launch anytime soon.
### Nintendo [...] would never release anything like this.
Nintendo already has released something like that, its called VirtualBoy and flopped pretty badly. So its more a question of if they would try it again. That said, yes, its not real, but I am still not sure exactly where it did come from.
### I hate to threadjack, but can anyone verify if the Nintendo ON video is real or fake?
Its definitvly not real, first of the VR stuff just seems way to fantastic to be real, secondly the presented device clearly violates the specs that Nintendo has given out just a few days ago. The Revolution should have a size of around three DVD boxes, that VR-toaster however is quite a bit larger than that.
The castle demo in the beginning however looks pretty realistically for a techdemo, somewhat similar to the Mario128 one. Wouldn't be much supprised if Nintendo shows something like that at the E3.
The Mario and Samus models in the end however look pretty weird again, a bit ugly and badly animated compared to Nintendo standards.
In the end I am not really sure what this is, I clearly doubt that it is real, but then it looks far to good for just a homebrew fake. Maybe some design study, internal aprils fools joke or something like that of Nintendo.
### Can you hookup a keyboard+mouse or some kind of third party controller to consoles like Xbox?
Yes, there are adapters that allow you to plug-in mouse and keyboard to use them in shooters, however no idea how well that works or if that requires special support from the games. In general however you can live very good without mouse+keyboard. Its true that aiming gets a bit harder, but the games are tuned to handle that by offering a little auto-aim and things like that. Some games such as MetroidPrime(Gamecube) even go as far as to go away from the mouse-look completly and use a more Zelda-like Look-On system to aim at enemies.
The biggest problem of cramping everything into one is really just the interface, something like the iPod Touchwheel would have a hard time finding free space on a small phone, but hey, maybe a potential iPhone could revive one of these these...
Doesn't look much like a gamecube controller to me, more like a cross between Logitech Wingman Wireless and the original XBox controller.
### The Xbox is the coolest console at the moment. It does pretty much everything right.
Well, everything beside the price (even so they fixed that soon after the release here in europe), the size of the console, the controller and the games... That said, yes the XBox has still the most power of all the consoles on the market, but beside from that it really doesn't have all that much to offer. Its just to much a brute force attempt to enter the market.
### Isn't competition GOOD?
Microsoft doesn't do fair competition, they can invest basically as much as they want and then just wait till the others die out due to lack of money. See their investment into Rare or Bungie, that wasn't much like 'Lets make a good console and wait till people jump the train', but more like 'Which game companies do we want to buy today'. Luckily they didn't seem to have all that much success with their stratagie so far and the other parties are still holding well, but Microsoft really hasn't much to do with fair competition.
The 'trackball' however has a big fat green X written on it, which makes it unlikly that it is a regular trackball, beside from that the position would be pretty bad for a trackball. On the other side it also looks quite a bit to clumsy for just being there for the logo. If you look closely the 'trackball' has 1,2,3,4 written around it, so it might be a frequency- or id-selector for the wireless gamepad.
There are NO controller ports on that XBox2, see this picture, you can see that those ports have "Memory Unit A/B" written on them, so the controllers must be wireless. The black port on the left might be a USB one, however thats just a guess.
### (on a *text* terminal??? wtf)
The terminal should *not* be a text terminal, but just one which accepts textual input, since there is really no good reason to do statusbars as ascii art, when you are running on a 1280x960x32bit display. And yes, in an ideal world, the right libraries would take care that your text tools would even work on a real VT100 connected via serial console.
### Ive no idea what you mean by 'structured' grep.
A structured grep would we one that would search for real objects in a stream/tree of objects and not toy around with just plain text. For XML for example this would allow to use XPath expressions to select a specific part of the document, which is almost impossible or at least super ugly to do with a plain text based grep. Simalar it would allow to access the output of 'df' in a structured way so that I could exactly the amount of used space on a device, without the danger of getting consfused by spaces or newlines in the textual output.
CLIs are nice, the sad thing is that they have advanged even less then GUIs in the last years, almost not at all. XTerms are still basically emulating old serial terminals with all there fundamental problems (hard to get Backspace/Delete correctly over the wire, etc.) for basically little good reason. Interaction between GUI and CLI is also almost not there, you can click a link here and there and maybe do copy&paste, but thats often as far as you get. Where is my thumbnail preview on 'ls', where are more then 16 colors and when can I finally do a structured grep, not a line based one. There really hasn't been much innovation in this area, XMLTerm is one of the few, but not a much successfull one. On MacOSX is all the same, the only real progress (as in end user product) seems to come out of Microsoft with the MSH, wondering when we will see some of its features cloned over on the Unix side.
IQ isn't some magical number that exactly points out how clever you are, its just a number you get in a test and how good you score in that test depends heavily on your state of mind at the time when you solve it, busy with other things, under stress or relaxed and you will score differently.
And well, in the end IQ tests are overrated anyway, they don't say much over your real life cleverness, which depends on a heapload of other factors (social interaction skills, etc.), they simply rate how could you are at solving IQ test questions, not much more.
Good idea to let Gnome2 and Gnome3 run in parallel for a while, especially when looking back at the transition from 1.4 to 2.0 which was quite painfull. Lots and lots of features got removed in that transition, either because they simply wern't implemented yet or because somebody considered it a 'good thing' to have unconfigurable applications. It took till around Gnome2.4/2.6 till Gnome2 really was a good replacement to Gnome1.4 and most featured either have found their way back or the default behaviour was something more sane. Quiete often I wished I could just go back to Gnome1.4, but that wasn't easily possible, since the packages dropped out of Debian and a whole selfcompiled Gnome was just to much of a hassle to bother. Might be nice if that horrorstory doesn't repeat with Gnome3 and I can decide when I want to switch and am not forced to upgrade just because a dist-upgrade makes the switch unavoidable.
Its also a good idea in practice, but only when you have only three folders to maintain with not more then a handfull of files in it... Back then in the day of Amiga500 that was the case, your programms came on floppies, there was no Internet and everything was simple, spartial worked great, I loved it. Today however you have a gazillion files on your computer, the OS directories are basically impossible to browse in spartial mode and even the emptiest home directory ends up having more then spartial mode can handle. It might still be a nice mode for total computer newbies, but the problem is it simply doesn't
/usr/share/doc/ and friends. I really would like to see how somebody can stand that spatial disaster in deep directory strucutres for extended periods of time.
handle the grow, with time comes knowledge and experience and with experince come more files, sooner or later spartial will be unusable.
Now for sure some people will come around and tell me how great spartial is, to those, please do me a favor, take xvidcap and create a movie how you browse around
Since I have little hope that nautilus ever turns into a usable product, and I have really tried hard to use it for numerous times, I have switched over to Rox, which is really pretty close to the perfect file browser, sure it still has some faults and missing features, but at least its actually confortable to use.
### I must say I haven't used it, but from reviews and comparisons I've read, it seems to be a good tool.
Well, try to use it then. The feature that it has indeed sound nice in theory, but Arch has huge problems when it comes to usability and performance, which make it unusable for something as large as Linux and unconfortable for most other projects around. A simple look at the 'help' already makes that pretty clear that there is something wrong with the userinterface:
$ svn help | wc -l
41
$ tla help | wc -l
186
Its however not a lost case, Bazaar-ng is trying to fix those problems of Arch:
* http://bazaar-ng.org/
### Point out ANYTHING that would cause natural selection to take place.
Birth rate in germany is currently ~1.6 per female if I remember correctly, if we continue that way we are extingt in around ~500 years if my math is right. One might call that evolution, but it goes in quite another direction than expected, since wealth has little todo with how far once genes spread these days.
### while not all of intelligence is genetic, a good portion of it is.
The problem (feature?!) with evolution is that doesn't care if you are intelligent, it cares if your genes spread and intelligence doesn't seem to help all that much with that any longer. Current brith rate in germany for example is ~1.6 per female, meaning we will be extinct sooner or later if it continues that way. It doesn't mean we are not intelligent or that we all die a early, it simply means that our culture evoled into a state where having children isn't considered necessary and carrer is often considered more important. In other much less developed countries in the world the birth rate on the other side is much higher, there genes spread, ours don't.
So yes, evolution still takes place, but it doesn't really go into the direction of some very intelligent advanced human.
### slowed down? It's gone *insanely* fast. Keep timeline in context; life started 3.5 billion years ago. Humanity's first written language was only 6k years ago - .5Millionth of life's entire time.
Cultural evolution of course has gone insanely fast, biological evolution on the other side doesn't seem to have made much changes for quite a while and I don't see how it ever should in an industrial nation, after all your survival and your reproduction has little or nothing todo with your genes. Humans might of course one day adjust their genes to fit the job, but thats not something I would call evolution.
### But evolution is a biological mechanism, and (at least, in just the next thousand years) won't allow us to stop being biological.
Evolution has for most part already slowed down a lot or stoped for humans, so I wouldn't expect any major change any time soon anyway. What however will happen sooner or later is that we ourself construct our future development. We are already growing organs (just little pieces of skin, but its a start), transplanting organs and constructing mechanical prosthesis, its just a matter of time until those things will not only be used as inferior replacments for lost or damages organs or body parts, but will be used to enhance humans with specific abilities. Its also quite possible that computer based AI will take over, not necessary here on earth, but sending out some clever AI todo space exploration isn't that unlickly. All this will not happen in the next few years, but in the next 100 or 1000 years some major advancements isn't that unlikly.
The good old sun will continue to burn for quite a while and good old earth would also be able to support us for quite a bit longer. There is really no reason to start to evacuate to other planets any time soon. The problem is that menkind still hasn't even learned to live happily on this one planet, we extingt species, polute the air, wreak havok the eco system, start major wars every few years. If we continue that way menkind will have itself extingt much before sun even starts to cause throuble.
Space travel is still important and should be continued, but the SpaceShuttle as is is really for most part just waste of tax payers money.
### We cannot make another saturn V because some of the paperwork has been lost.
This is incorrect, the reason why we can't build another Saturn V is not because lost papers, all those are still available, but because there are no longer vendors for mid-1960's hardware. See:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/space/controversy/
This is also the reason why we can't just build another shuttle, while the papes are there, the tools and factories to manufactor them are not. Thus the cost would be higher then a build from scratch.
### Would you rather someone be accountable for an accident
If you are going to blame 'someone' you are already doing the wrong thing. Humans make errors, so replacing the human that did the error with another one that will do a similar random error will do nothing to improve the overall situation. To really fix a problem you need to find out how to avoid it in the future, not who is to blame for it. If Jim forgot some screws, the solution is not to replace Jim with Bob, but to let Bob cross check that all screws that Jim placed. It of course can still go wrong, but it requires that both Jim and Bob make an error, which is quite less likly then only one doing an error.
So yes, paperwork is important to track who did what, when and why. The solution to fixing problems lays however in the procedure and much less in the people performing the procedure.