How hard is it to see that manned space flight inhibits space exploration? What does physical human presence on a spacecraft do that can't be done by remotely controlled or autonomous robotics? Why spend billions upon billions of dollars to provide food, water, atmosphere, heat, radiation protection, cabin space, lighting, and excrement processing when these are entirely tangential to any compelling mission? Almost the entirety of productive and scientifically valuable space exploration of the past half century has been performed by machines.
The "get off this rock" crowd is a magical-religious cult, not a serious proponent of realistic, feasible, affordable, desirable, or even specific projects. Manned colonization of the cosmos is, at the present time and likely for centuries to come, no different from a belief in an afterlife filled with saints, virgins, and angelic personages. It is not real. If you want inspiration, stick to anime.
This report is in effect equally applicable to that age-old baby boomer consensual hallucination: the flying car. Flying cars will never exist because the term is incorrect. They are not members of the set of Cars, they are members of the set of Private Aircraft. For them to work, they are also most likely members of the subset Autonomous Private Aircraft, because it is absurd to expect traffic similar in size and complexity to that of cars and trucks in the skies above urban areas unless each vehicle can robustly and safely fly itself without the user being in control. Per-capita morbidity and mortality related to Autonomous Private Aircraft accidents will have to be well below that of motor vehicles for widespread acceptance.
I have always contended that there will never be "flying cars" for this reason, and that autonomous private aircraft are decades away, between 20 and 50 years in the future at current exponentially increasing technological development rates.
Of course, if the P2P SW manages to tunnel through using http, you're back on square 1. I know, I know, you have a super duper deep-packet-sniffing sure-fire 100% secure proxy. Uh Huh. Sure.
You are mistaken. They (the people who created the instruments that caused the disaster) sold them on down the line and made a great deal of money. Even the people in the bucket brigade that bought and sold the stuff were smart by any reasonable measure, including those who ended up holding the bad assets at the end. Part of American Capitalism is the glorification of risk taking, and these people took risks. Ultimately, many or most of the big players were bailed out with public money, or with fiat money from the Fed which will ultimately be paid for one way or another by the general public. One can only wonder if there was an expectation of bailout, which emboldened them even more. They were smart alright. The idiots are the people who borrowed money they couldn't possibly pay back.
If I may, I would politely suggest that you not view Capitalism or any other model of political economy as an ideology that needs to be defended against some other ideology, as if it were a religion.
Capitalism per se has serious flaws, as do all other alternatives, and the variant that is practiced in the U.S. is flawed to the point of barbarism.
What is the 60 year cost of maintaining these operations at a typical decommissioned site? I mean salaries, taxes, expendables, equipment maintenance, amortization, and renewal, land use, security, utilities, insurance, finance costs, etc.
Capitalism is like any other tool in that in the hands of idiots it can be deadly.
As we found out last year, Capitalism in the hands of very smart people can cause worldwide havoc. So, in summary, Capitalism in the hands of both idiots and very smart people can be deadly. So, why are we using it again?
Always remember: Nuclear energy generation is the cleanest and least polluting energy source, so this is a non-issue! Ask anyone here on Slashdot, they'll be more than happy to enlighten you. For example, just put the entire site into a breeder reactor and voila!. Not only is it cleaned up and recycled but it generates even more clean nuclear fuel to generate even more energy! Lather, rinse, repeat! Forever!
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 32, 2009 - Details about a U.S. Secret Service safe house for the First Family - to be used in a national emergency - were found to have leaked written in pencil in a composition book recently, members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee were told this morning.
Also unearthed in other spiral-bound notebooks, composition books, and loose sheets of paper in recent days were presidential motorcade routes and a sensitive but unclassified document listing details on every nuclear facility in the country, Robert Boback, CEO of Tiversa Inc. told committee members. The data came in a variety of forms: written in longhand, hand printed, in pencil, in ink, in crayon, even in photocopies or computer printouts.
The disclosures prompted the chairman of the committee Rep. Edolphus Moronicus Estupidisimus, (D-N.Y.), to call for a ban on the use of pens, pencils, notebooks, paper, photocopting equipment, and computer printers at all government offices and installations. "For our sensitive government information, the risk is simply too great to ignore," said Towns who plans to introduce a bill to enforce just such a ban on all forms of written information.
The problem is well-understood, but remains difficult to stop. The leaks typically occur when an office worker writes down, photocopies or prints information out on paper or in notebooks of various kinds for the purposes of sharing it with others in the workplace. In many cases, users inadvertently expose not just the documents they want to share, but also many other kinds of knowledge and information in their possession. Sometimes, it is done deliberately, sometimes accidentally due to poor adherence to security policies or simple incompetence.
"People just don't pay attention to what they're doing or think of the consequences of their acts," said Moronicus Estupidisimus.
I guess you don't know about estuaries and their intimate relation with water use, wildlife habitat, etc. I would speculate that you are precisely 17 years old, the age at which a person knows and understands absolutely everything in the world.
In a time where there is a huge and rapidly growing potable water crisis, some bozo creates an economic incentive to salinate what precious fresh water there is! By Jove, Holmes, you've done it again!
Like the whole corn-based ethanol disaster never happened. Jesus H. Christ...
Oh dead tree books are so obsolete, even though they are cheap, last longer than I ever will, can't be altered from a distance, and don't need electricity! Same with CDs, DVDs, and other durable backup media that can't be taken from me and don't depend on some here-today-gone-tomorrow license server! And land lines! Who needs them when we have such fickle and expensive cell phone service with far less coverage!
You know, it's one thing to be a Luddite, and quite another to stay with reliable, cheap, and fully functional technologies until the newer alternatives truly surpass them.
I can't agree. Removing the curly braces opens the door to a lot of ambiguity. See above.
Re:Blocks by indentation
on
Hello World!
·
· Score: 1
Sane people use tabs to separate blocks for the purposes of readability, anyway.
Not anyplace I've worked at. People constantly differ as to the number of spaces per tab, and it is common to prohibit tab characters in code altogether. This is not because the compiler/interpreter cares, it doesn't. It is for human readability. Even in languages with curly braces, erratic indentation is difficult to read and gets in the way of code analysis and programming. This promotes bugs and errors.
The suggestion that the programmer make the visual distinction between tabs and spaces while coding is foolhardy, even if the spaces and tabs are visualized with different characters. For code to be of high quality, the programmer must remove whatever noise or clutter is keeping her from correctly grasping what is going on. To add gratuitous indentation constraints works against this. Python would be just as great a language if it had curly braces. Nothing would be lost, and clarity would be gained. This indentation gimmick makes it a rebel without a cause.
Re:Not Python!
on
Hello World!
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Not just kvetching, though that is certainly part of it. I like to format code for 1) readability and 2) printability on 100 character lines. This means I do a lot of indentation that Python does not like, but has no syntactical meaning or importance.
It is, of course, purely a matter of taste and habit. Python is certainly as good a language as any. The indentation thing is a showstopper for me, but evidently not for many other people. Also, choosing a programming language for kids is no simple matter, Python or not.
Not Python!
on
Hello World!
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Why, Lord, Oh why are blocks defined by indentation!
Computers were supposed to bring in the paperless office. Has it? Nope.
The Universal Argument! All possible arguments suggesting further use of databases, tracking, and even computers in general can now be easily and concisely countered by noting that the Paperless Office never arrived! By Jove, Holmes! You've done it again!
'Tracking $STUPID_EXAMPLE now, tracking you soon.'
Try substituting $STUPID_EXAMPLE with any other RFIDed product or item currently on the market at WalMart, at the local mall, at the airport, etc. Pretty stupid-sounding, eh? This has absolutely nothing to do with privacy rights, Big Brother, armageddon, etc. It is a cost benefit issue only!
There are so many ways you are being tracked already, the 'Tracking cattle now, tracking you soon" fear isn't paranoia, it's whistling in the dark. This issue has nothing whatsoever to do with privacy issues. It is a purely industrial matter. Both agribusiness and small farmers are whining about something that will increase their costs. That's all. Will it put anyone out of business? No, unless they sell less than a few tens of cows a year, in which case they might be better off leaving the business on that small a scale.
There will certainly be an up front hit for the equipment, but the operating expenses afterwards will be low. The internet connection issue is bogus. If the farm is connected by phone, it can sync data. There are consumer-oriented satellite connections as well. Most of the other complaints are about as easy to explain away.
This leaves the cost issue. Is the problem that it is supposed to remedy serious enough to warrant the additional cost and bureaucracy, or not? Do other industries have similar tracking and bureaucracy burdens that they simply chalk up to costs of doing business? I can't see the cattle folks arguing their way out of this. Surely this compares favorably in cost with their heavy use of antibiotics, hormones, and other biologicals.
Slashdot Mirror
How hard is it to see that manned space flight inhibits space exploration? What does physical human presence on a spacecraft do that can't be done by remotely controlled or autonomous robotics? Why spend billions upon billions of dollars to provide food, water, atmosphere, heat, radiation protection, cabin space, lighting, and excrement processing when these are entirely tangential to any compelling mission? Almost the entirety of productive and scientifically valuable space exploration of the past half century has been performed by machines.
The "get off this rock" crowd is a magical-religious cult, not a serious proponent of realistic, feasible, affordable, desirable, or even specific projects. Manned colonization of the cosmos is, at the present time and likely for centuries to come, no different from a belief in an afterlife filled with saints, virgins, and angelic personages. It is not real. If you want inspiration, stick to anime.
I can confirm that. If it was on TV or in a movie or on the intarwebz, it's true.
This report is in effect equally applicable to that age-old baby boomer consensual hallucination: the flying car. Flying cars will never exist because the term is incorrect. They are not members of the set of Cars, they are members of the set of Private Aircraft. For them to work, they are also most likely members of the subset Autonomous Private Aircraft, because it is absurd to expect traffic similar in size and complexity to that of cars and trucks in the skies above urban areas unless each vehicle can robustly and safely fly itself without the user being in control. Per-capita morbidity and mortality related to Autonomous Private Aircraft accidents will have to be well below that of motor vehicles for widespread acceptance.
I have always contended that there will never be "flying cars" for this reason, and that autonomous private aircraft are decades away, between 20 and 50 years in the future at current exponentially increasing technological development rates.
I think it's the other way around: 95% of Republicans vote cockroach.
Of course, if the P2P SW manages to tunnel through using http, you're back on square 1. I know, I know, you have a super duper deep-packet-sniffing sure-fire 100% secure proxy. Uh Huh. Sure.
You are mistaken. They (the people who created the instruments that caused the disaster) sold them on down the line and made a great deal of money. Even the people in the bucket brigade that bought and sold the stuff were smart by any reasonable measure, including those who ended up holding the bad assets at the end. Part of American Capitalism is the glorification of risk taking, and these people took risks. Ultimately, many or most of the big players were bailed out with public money, or with fiat money from the Fed which will ultimately be paid for one way or another by the general public. One can only wonder if there was an expectation of bailout, which emboldened them even more. They were smart alright. The idiots are the people who borrowed money they couldn't possibly pay back.
If I may, I would politely suggest that you not view Capitalism or any other model of political economy as an ideology that needs to be defended against some other ideology, as if it were a religion.
Capitalism per se has serious flaws, as do all other alternatives, and the variant that is practiced in the U.S. is flawed to the point of barbarism.
What is the 60 year cost of maintaining these operations at a typical decommissioned site? I mean salaries, taxes, expendables, equipment maintenance, amortization, and renewal, land use, security, utilities, insurance, finance costs, etc.
Capitalism is like any other tool in that in the hands of idiots it can be deadly.
As we found out last year, Capitalism in the hands of very smart people can cause worldwide havoc. So, in summary, Capitalism in the hands of both idiots and very smart people can be deadly. So, why are we using it again?
Always remember: Nuclear energy generation is the cleanest and least polluting energy source, so this is a non-issue! Ask anyone here on Slashdot, they'll be more than happy to enlighten you. For example, just put the entire site into a breeder reactor and voila!. Not only is it cleaned up and recycled but it generates even more clean nuclear fuel to generate even more energy! Lather, rinse, repeat! Forever!
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 32, 2009 - Details about a U.S. Secret Service safe house for the First Family - to be used in a national emergency - were found to have leaked written in pencil in a composition book recently, members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee were told this morning. Also unearthed in other spiral-bound notebooks, composition books, and loose sheets of paper in recent days were presidential motorcade routes and a sensitive but unclassified document listing details on every nuclear facility in the country, Robert Boback, CEO of Tiversa Inc. told committee members. The data came in a variety of forms: written in longhand, hand printed, in pencil, in ink, in crayon, even in photocopies or computer printouts.
The disclosures prompted the chairman of the committee Rep. Edolphus Moronicus Estupidisimus, (D-N.Y.), to call for a ban on the use of pens, pencils, notebooks, paper, photocopting equipment, and computer printers at all government offices and installations. "For our sensitive government information, the risk is simply too great to ignore," said Towns who plans to introduce a bill to enforce just such a ban on all forms of written information.
The problem is well-understood, but remains difficult to stop. The leaks typically occur when an office worker writes down, photocopies or prints information out on paper or in notebooks of various kinds for the purposes of sharing it with others in the workplace. In many cases, users inadvertently expose not just the documents they want to share, but also many other kinds of knowledge and information in their possession. Sometimes, it is done deliberately, sometimes accidentally due to poor adherence to security policies or simple incompetence.
"People just don't pay attention to what they're doing or think of the consequences of their acts," said Moronicus Estupidisimus.
If only it were that simple:
http://washasia.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/bangladesh-cyclone-leaves-trail-of-contaminated-water-sources/
http://www.wateraid.org/bangladesh/about_us/5458.asp
I guess you don't know about estuaries and their intimate relation with water use, wildlife habitat, etc. I would speculate that you are precisely 17 years old, the age at which a person knows and understands absolutely everything in the world.
In a time where there is a huge and rapidly growing potable water crisis, some bozo creates an economic incentive to salinate what precious fresh water there is! By Jove, Holmes, you've done it again!
Like the whole corn-based ethanol disaster never happened. Jesus H. Christ...
Welcome, Comrades!
Welcome to the Union of Soviet Capitalist Republics!
Oh dead tree books are so obsolete, even though they are cheap, last longer than I ever will, can't be altered from a distance, and don't need electricity! Same with CDs, DVDs, and other durable backup media that can't be taken from me and don't depend on some here-today-gone-tomorrow license server! And land lines! Who needs them when we have such fickle and expensive cell phone service with far less coverage!
You know, it's one thing to be a Luddite, and quite another to stay with reliable, cheap, and fully functional technologies until the newer alternatives truly surpass them.
I can't agree. Removing the curly braces opens the door to a lot of ambiguity. See above.
Sane people use tabs to separate blocks for the purposes of readability, anyway.
Not anyplace I've worked at. People constantly differ as to the number of spaces per tab, and it is common to prohibit tab characters in code altogether. This is not because the compiler/interpreter cares, it doesn't. It is for human readability. Even in languages with curly braces, erratic indentation is difficult to read and gets in the way of code analysis and programming. This promotes bugs and errors.
The suggestion that the programmer make the visual distinction between tabs and spaces while coding is foolhardy, even if the spaces and tabs are visualized with different characters. For code to be of high quality, the programmer must remove whatever noise or clutter is keeping her from correctly grasping what is going on. To add gratuitous indentation constraints works against this. Python would be just as great a language if it had curly braces. Nothing would be lost, and clarity would be gained. This indentation gimmick makes it a rebel without a cause.
I heartily agree!
Not just kvetching, though that is certainly part of it. I like to format code for 1) readability and 2) printability on 100 character lines. This means I do a lot of indentation that Python does not like, but has no syntactical meaning or importance.
It is, of course, purely a matter of taste and habit. Python is certainly as good a language as any. The indentation thing is a showstopper for me, but evidently not for many other people. Also, choosing a programming language for kids is no simple matter, Python or not.
Why, Lord, Oh why are blocks defined by indentation!
Computers were supposed to bring in the paperless office. Has it? Nope.
The Universal Argument! All possible arguments suggesting further use of databases, tracking, and even computers in general can now be easily and concisely countered by noting that the Paperless Office never arrived! By Jove, Holmes! You've done it again!
Dude, I don't even get it, let alone understand why it was immediately modded up to 3 Funny.
Clearly I missed something...
Not to mention that if someone pirates the bovine's copyrights, the bovine can make money doing concert tours instead.
Gratuitous whining.
Oh wake the fuck up.
'Tracking $STUPID_EXAMPLE now, tracking you soon.'
Try substituting $STUPID_EXAMPLE with any other RFIDed product or item currently on the market at WalMart, at the local mall, at the airport, etc. Pretty stupid-sounding, eh? This has absolutely nothing to do with privacy rights, Big Brother, armageddon, etc. It is a cost benefit issue only!
There are so many ways you are being tracked already, the 'Tracking cattle now, tracking you soon" fear isn't paranoia, it's whistling in the dark. This issue has nothing whatsoever to do with privacy issues. It is a purely industrial matter. Both agribusiness and small farmers are whining about something that will increase their costs. That's all. Will it put anyone out of business? No, unless they sell less than a few tens of cows a year, in which case they might be better off leaving the business on that small a scale.
There will certainly be an up front hit for the equipment, but the operating expenses afterwards will be low. The internet connection issue is bogus. If the farm is connected by phone, it can sync data. There are consumer-oriented satellite connections as well. Most of the other complaints are about as easy to explain away.
This leaves the cost issue. Is the problem that it is supposed to remedy serious enough to warrant the additional cost and bureaucracy, or not? Do other industries have similar tracking and bureaucracy burdens that they simply chalk up to costs of doing business? I can't see the cattle folks arguing their way out of this. Surely this compares favorably in cost with their heavy use of antibiotics, hormones, and other biologicals.