I understand your point, but it does not address my complaint. It is by no means a given that sci fi writers per se fulfill your point. Getting policy ideas from fiction writers is a dubious ploy at best, and utterly insane at worst.
"Ideas, created with pure thought and imagination, that are offered to the government" sounds like the kind of insane bullshit spouted by political and religious extremists. We don't want this. We want government to be based on a factual, informed, and insightful understanding of reality. The Evangelical Talibanization of American society and government is what we should be escaping, not promoting. I know, I know, these are sci fi writers, not Commercial Christianity preachers like the last administartion. It is a slippery slope, though.
Is it "Microsoft patents operating systems that cripple users," or "Microsoft patents the crippling of operating systems." If it is the latter, is it "Microsoft patents operating systems that cripple other operating systems," or "Microsoft patents the selling of crippled operating systems?" If it is the latter, then their own extensive prior art would seem to render it unpatentable.
24/7 colonoscopy webcam (includes supply of flexible, waterproof enclosures plus lubricant).
Automobile Oil Temperature Monitor (includes supply of flexible, heat-resistant oil-tight enclosures)
App for monitoring money under matress (includes jumbo external battery pack)
Tire pressure monitoring and reporting app (you'll need at least 4 iPhones + contracts; includes generous supply of foam rubber padding; includes plug-in pressure transducer)
I can easily imagine AT&T jumping for joy over anything that will produce more billable traffic. Why host a web server on an iPhone, BTW? Why not occasionally update a typical El Cheapo web host from your iPhone, if you are so hot to report things from it.
the sexual workers don't want to pay taxes and business licenses like the rest of us.
That's just flat out wrong. There are all sorts of sex worker defense groups. The only people who don't want it are uptight, short-sighted, meddlesome social conservatives.
There are several sites where sex workers can be rated. Most also point to craigslist ads, as well as others, for convenience. Locating these sites is left as an exercise for the reader.
Of course. This is just a symbolic gesture to deal with negative PR. A year from now, it will be forgotten and things will be as they were, until yet another psycho does something after responding to a Craigslist ad.
Craigslist will change the name of the section from Erotic Services to [begin fanfare] Adult Services [end fanfare]. Moralists, pretentious busybodies, and deranged religious fanatics can now celebrate and return to their burrows to once again stay out of the way of civilized society.
As time goes by, the parade of human folly seems more and more absurd. Maybe it's because I'm getting older. I hate to think what "for which each posting will be manually reviewed before it appears" means, though. I can only assume there were thousands of them. I suspect that the law only requires them to not print ads for flagrant exchanges of money for sex. Most Craigslist erotic ads already used a variety of vague euphemisms anyway (or so I've read).
I doubt it. I would expect that iPhone use would increase dramatically. Videos, apps, and all sorts of unpredictable phone and networky stuff will ensue.
Assuming you are not being facetious, nothing has occurred in the past 6 to 9 months to justify the increase. Oil industry PR folks point to this or that minor and often intentional glitch to justify disproportional price increases with only a rough coincidence in time. They do it because they can, and nobody with any authority over them tells them otherwise.
If you can demonstrate otherwise, by all means enlighten us.
It isn't "the energy industry." Specific companies fund research, and the funds available have to do with expected profits. Oil companies have a vastly larger predictable income with a short lead time or low risk from research bench to market compared to nascent technologies like wind or solar. The time to subsidize oil exploration ended generations ago. Not the same case for technologies that are 1) just starting to ramp up, and 2) have a small market penetration and cash flow.
You goddamn communist! You America Hater! Those who support and subsidize oil companies are PATRIOTS! They are True Americans, not like you latte-sipping bisexual socialist hippies! They're... they're...
You will undoubtedly hear the rest of it on your favorite pro-establishment news source. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, you can try to figure out why gasoline prices have risen nearly 10% this month, in spite of the deepest worldwide recession in two generations and in the presence of a petroleum glut.
Well, there goes another beloved pipe-dream from 2008.
[pulls out beloved pipedream list from pocket, crosses something off with a small, chewed-up #2 pencil, and returns the wrinkled scrap of paper to pocket]
Burn it? It has no electrons, just nuclear particles held together very very tenuously. No electrons means no oxidation means no burning. This is an exotic state of matter whose existence is barely detectable. Too many posts here confuse it with ordinary fuels, of which it is not. It is not even similar to fuels in fission reactors, and as a few posts have pointed out its feasibility as a fusion fuel is not at all clear.
...Thad and Tiffany had only 3 minutes to crack the safe, or they wouldn't have enough air to get back outside.
As the seconds crept onward, Thad continued to struggle with the code, so he quickly moved to plan B, which involved unbolting the heavy safe from the ground, loading it on to a small dolly and carting it back out to the car. It wasn't easy, but within the remaining time allotted to them, the two managed to slip out of the vault,
In less than three minutes they unbolted a heavy safe from the floor and hoisted it onto a small dolly. No doubt they had a couple of big wrenches, plenty of WD-40, and maybe even some paint stripper, in case there was an annoying coat of enamel on the bolts. Bad TV yet again.
The mix of the three glows under blacklight, and by paying careful attention to the absorption of the powder it is possible to tell which finger came down first and so forth. It doesn't quite make sense that Thad could use this trick to figure out the exact sequence for all the codes, based off such rudimentary information. But once Thad had eventually thrown his whole weight against the vault door, the two were inside.
This is the kind of stuff crappy TV and movie writers have to put in to get through the hard parts or when they can't think of anything else. Sort of like when the main character throws a pointless tantrum and throws all the pots and pans on the floor to "emote" and kill a few seconds until the next commercial. This is not believable at all.
While it still uses Pu 238, it uses much less, and the current supply could last for another 20 years. No doubt you already knew about this when you claimed "There is nothing better than an RTG for this problem and probably never will be."
No need to be snide or allow your knee-jerk reactions to kick in.
"'I am sure they can think of something' is not an answer"
It isn't? What, do they expect slashdot users to come up with something? Aren't they paid to do this? Didn't they see this coming 20 or 30 years ago? Do NASA scientists wait until the last minute to solve something like this? Of course they have to think of something, that's what their job entails. If they ran out of Pu 238 they can either 1) make or get more, or 2) figure something else out. If you have another alternative, "Sparky," please clue us in.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand your point, but it does not address my complaint. It is by no means a given that sci fi writers per se fulfill your point. Getting policy ideas from fiction writers is a dubious ploy at best, and utterly insane at worst.
"Ideas, created with pure thought and imagination, that are offered to the government" sounds like the kind of insane bullshit spouted by political and religious extremists. We don't want this. We want government to be based on a factual, informed, and insightful understanding of reality. The Evangelical Talibanization of American society and government is what we should be escaping, not promoting. I know, I know, these are sci fi writers, not Commercial Christianity preachers like the last administartion. It is a slippery slope, though.
No joke. This is the last thing we should be doing. They need a crash course in understanding factual reality, not some wacky sci fi hallucination.
It just gets worse and worse. Hard not to be paranoid, though as a class or as a population rather than as an individual.
Is it "Microsoft patents operating systems that cripple users," or "Microsoft patents the crippling of operating systems." If it is the latter, is it "Microsoft patents operating systems that cripple other operating systems," or "Microsoft patents the selling of crippled operating systems?" If it is the latter, then their own extensive prior art would seem to render it unpatentable.
More like "Better than Vista, not nearly as bad as the Swine Flu!"
Automobile Oil Temperature Monitor (includes supply of flexible, heat-resistant oil-tight enclosures)
App for monitoring money under matress (includes jumbo external battery pack)
Tire pressure monitoring and reporting app (you'll need at least 4 iPhones + contracts; includes generous supply of foam rubber padding; includes plug-in pressure transducer)
I can easily imagine AT&T jumping for joy over anything that will produce more billable traffic. Why host a web server on an iPhone, BTW? Why not occasionally update a typical El Cheapo web host from your iPhone, if you are so hot to report things from it.
While glib, bombastic, cynical, and implicitly tolerant of IP theft, there is nevertheless a lot of truth to this.
Does that mean that they are like Herpes Type I and type II? Can you become a book pirate via unprotected sex?
Good luck getting people to figure that out. Piaget himself would have been baffled at the difficulty people have in progressing to that stage.
That's just flat out wrong. There are all sorts of sex worker defense groups. The only people who don't want it are uptight, short-sighted, meddlesome social conservatives.
There are several sites where sex workers can be rated. Most also point to craigslist ads, as well as others, for convenience. Locating these sites is left as an exercise for the reader.
Of course. This is just a symbolic gesture to deal with negative PR. A year from now, it will be forgotten and things will be as they were, until yet another psycho does something after responding to a Craigslist ad.
As time goes by, the parade of human folly seems more and more absurd. Maybe it's because I'm getting older. I hate to think what "for which each posting will be manually reviewed before it appears" means, though. I can only assume there were thousands of them. I suspect that the law only requires them to not print ads for flagrant exchanges of money for sex. Most Craigslist erotic ads already used a variety of vague euphemisms anyway (or so I've read).
I doubt it. I would expect that iPhone use would increase dramatically. Videos, apps, and all sorts of unpredictable phone and networky stuff will ensue.
If you can demonstrate otherwise, by all means enlighten us.
It isn't "the energy industry." Specific companies fund research, and the funds available have to do with expected profits. Oil companies have a vastly larger predictable income with a short lead time or low risk from research bench to market compared to nascent technologies like wind or solar. The time to subsidize oil exploration ended generations ago. Not the same case for technologies that are 1) just starting to ramp up, and 2) have a small market penetration and cash flow.
You will undoubtedly hear the rest of it on your favorite pro-establishment news source. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, you can try to figure out why gasoline prices have risen nearly 10% this month, in spite of the deepest worldwide recession in two generations and in the presence of a petroleum glut.
[pulls out beloved pipedream list from pocket, crosses something off with a small, chewed-up #2 pencil, and returns the wrinkled scrap of paper to pocket]
Burn it? It has no electrons, just nuclear particles held together very very tenuously. No electrons means no oxidation means no burning. This is an exotic state of matter whose existence is barely detectable. Too many posts here confuse it with ordinary fuels, of which it is not. It is not even similar to fuels in fission reactors, and as a few posts have pointed out its feasibility as a fusion fuel is not at all clear.
As the seconds crept onward, Thad continued to struggle with the code, so he quickly moved to plan B, which involved unbolting the heavy safe from the ground, loading it on to a small dolly and carting it back out to the car. It wasn't easy, but within the remaining time allotted to them, the two managed to slip out of the vault,
In less than three minutes they unbolted a heavy safe from the floor and hoisted it onto a small dolly. No doubt they had a couple of big wrenches, plenty of WD-40, and maybe even some paint stripper, in case there was an annoying coat of enamel on the bolts. Bad TV yet again.
The mix of the three glows under blacklight, and by paying careful attention to the absorption of the powder it is possible to tell which finger came down first and so forth. It doesn't quite make sense that Thad could use this trick to figure out the exact sequence for all the codes, based off such rudimentary information. But once Thad had eventually thrown his whole weight against the vault door, the two were inside.
This is the kind of stuff crappy TV and movie writers have to put in to get through the hard parts or when they can't think of anything else. Sort of like when the main character throws a pointless tantrum and throws all the pots and pans on the floor to "emote" and kill a few seconds until the next commercial. This is not believable at all.
http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2009/01/solution-to-plutonium-problem.html
While it still uses Pu 238, it uses much less, and the current supply could last for another 20 years. No doubt you already knew about this when you claimed "There is nothing better than an RTG for this problem and probably never will be."
"'I am sure they can think of something' is not an answer"
It isn't? What, do they expect slashdot users to come up with something? Aren't they paid to do this? Didn't they see this coming 20 or 30 years ago? Do NASA scientists wait until the last minute to solve something like this? Of course they have to think of something, that's what their job entails. If they ran out of Pu 238 they can either 1) make or get more, or 2) figure something else out. If you have another alternative, "Sparky," please clue us in.