> That's because. with electric cars, every owner's garage is also a personal fueling station. The GP was pointing out that difference.
I dunno, for compressed NG cars, every owner's garage who has natural gas piped in is also a personal fueling station. It's a strong argument, but didn't seem to have helped in that case.
I assume there are tons more when aggregated across global subspecies of ferret.
(Caveat: I'm not in my area of expertise. I happen to know someone who knows a lot about ferrets, but I can only parrot what I think I remember her saying.) If you consider the entire weasel family, yes, but of the species (subspecies?) that is considered "ferret", my understanding is that there is only one variety (the black footed ferret?) that still exists in the wild. I'm told that among other things, domestic ferrets have lost their homing instinct, and get lost very easily outdoors.
I want me a dodo. Apparently they were so tasty, the islanders couldn't bear to leave a single one living.
I don't think so. According to the wiki, it probably wasn't humans eating the dodo to extinction (the meat was described as "tasteless" and pigeon was considered a superior game bird) but introducing predators (pigs, cats) to an environment where there hadn't been any before.
As I understand it, the problem with the dodo is that there aren't any frozen carcasses from which to get intact DNA. I heard a carcass was found in a cave not too long ago, and was more preserved, but last I heard it was up in the air as to whether it could be done.
As to the ethics, why not? We breed animals to be pets, how is this different? I'm told that there is only one species of ferret in the world, for instance, that can still fend for itself in the wild.
Well, yeah, but you wouldn't be using a human zygote for this. Seems like only the 3 craziest members of PETA in the world would have an ethical problem with this...
The ones who think eating chickens is murder are probably paying attention to this.
> There will be Hydrogen energy skeptics, the same way there was a reasonable skepticism towards electric cars. Most of the skeptic comments coming from the opponents of electric cars are actually, valid. Such as electric cars are being charged with the coal burned electricity.
Mind you, I want to see this succeed (although I think it's a long shot) but I feel duty bound to point out, hydrogen is usually created with electricity, making it highly likely that hydrogen cars will also be fueled via coal burned electricity.
About 40 years ago, when practical fusion was 40 years away, I saw hydrogen fuel as an interesting ancillary product of fusion power plants. You could use the electrical output of the plant split water, use the deuterium to power the plant, (continuing the cycle) and compress the remaining hydrogen to be used as fuel. Unfortunately, 40 years later, practical fusion is still 40 years away.
At the time, what was exciting about hydrogen is that the alterations to existing internal combustion engines to burn hydrogen as fuel weren't onerous. Of course, we learned later that pressurized hydrogen in a moving vehicle could be a safety issue. So hydrogen-electric hybrids are probably more practical. (We're assuming here that fuel cells have come a long way since Apollo 13, and I believe that's the case.)
There's probably a lot of work still to be done on the other parts of a hydrogen-based transportation infrastructure, so what Toyota is doing will probably advance the art, and if nothing else provide some competition to gas-hybrid and all-electric solutions, but without a large, cheap, non-polluting source of electricity, I don't see hydrogen as being practical.
I agree that working in an area gives you more exposure to the culture than being a tourist. It's not just your attitude but the attitude of the indigenous people -- act like a tourist, get treated like a tourist. Act like an employee, see stuff and experience stuff that tourists don't get to see and experience.
Part of my living comes from taking pictures, so that part doesn't necessarily apply, but I get what you're saying.
But... travel is overrated *if* you go there as a prepackaged tourist taking a prepackage tour. If you act the part, you will be presented mostly with the familiar plus a few photo ops. The author was spending a *year* there, which doesn't speak "tourist" to me.
oooook. So. Very interesting replies. Reminds me of TBBT episode where Sheldon traveled all over the country via train and never left any of the stations. As I recall he was going to write a thesis on the ketchup dispensers in train station hot dog stands. I see now why geeks tend not to like the show -- it hits too close to home.
Yes, it's a whole year. But a year isn't that long, and trips to the Himalayas isn't something that happens every day (for most people). Close the laptop, put on your far seeing glasses, and look around.
First I'd like to say, I'm bookmarking this set of responses. There's a lot of excellent information here. One of the most informative discussions on Slashdot in recent memory.
I suspect that there is so much animosity against Comcast that you may not ever get this resolved. The advice to "get another ISP" is indicated, but there may not be another viable solution in your neighborhood. (Which is what we as a country should *really* be addressing before we even talk about net neutrality.)
If you have Comcast, you probably have already switched your land line to cable. That's unfortunate, because it makes this solution more difficult to implement: Consider that email is very low traffic (I think you said it was only a few messages a month) and the bandwidth you're getting from Comcast isn't really helping. One solution would be to get a business DSL account with an alternate ISP and use that for email only. This would allow you to scale back Comcast to a consumer account, which might mitigate some of the cost of having two ISPs.
At one time I had Comcast cable modem and a static IP with Speakeasy DSL at the same time. I had to keep my copper wire phone service in order to do this. Comcast gave me high download speeds, Speakeasy gave me a circuit that I could basically do anything with. The DSL speed was what you'd expect for DSL, but that doesn't really matter for email.
Later I dropped Comcast because I got so tired of trying to deal with them, and I'd gouge out my eyeballs rather than go back to them, but that's another story. I went back to DSL only for awhile, and then picked up FIOS when it became available. Running both side by side, I didn't see any limitations to the FIOS circuit so with a tinge of sadness, let the Speakeasy account go. (And before a bunch of anonymous cowards jump on this, yes, I'm aware that some people have had bad experiences with FIOS. I haven't, really. The circuit has been dead nuts reliable. I went through four routers until I got one that worked correctly, but that's not necessarily the ISPs fault, and they were always quick to overnight a replacement when necessary.)
> Then you terminate the contract because it's now useless and the conditions you can use it under have changed - you can NO LONGER SEND EMAIL.
Agreed. Also, be sure to record the conversation when you try to terminate the contract. It might help you later, and it'll amuse the hell outta the rest of us.
Yes, that's the big drawback of renewable. Not like oil and gas centrals that renew themselves spontaneously and have built in self-repair capabilities.
Snark noted, but at no point did I imply that there was no cost to maintaining conventional power sources. Look, I'm not against renewables -- I have solar power in my home. (Panels feeding a bank of marine batteries on a separate circuit, used for lights and a few appliances.) But to make silly claims that renewables cost nothing to run sullies the case for renewables, as it's demonstrably not true. It's important to be honest up front or risk being shut down when costs become apparent.
> The trouble is that while renewable power sources like wind and solar cost nothing to run [...]
Wait, what? Maybe on the very short term, but with a significant number of units in play, maintenance and replacement are going to be pretty much a continuous cost.
Reductio ad absurdum? C'mon, you're better than that. Anything can be made to look goofy if taken to extremes. Put a little more effort in your arguments, please.
Honestly speaking: These proposals for a Mars colony *are* goofy. They *are* extreme.
There is room for more than one opinion on this. I would agree that it's challenging, perhaps impossible. But I certainly don't begrudge someone the chance to try.
...at least for the first few episodes. This could be really, really good, and pave the way for more hard science fiction shows that are not remakes of earlier shows, if it's successful.
Or, it could suck. It could suck like Skiffy's Earthsea miniseries. We'll have to see.
The potential is there. We have the technology to show pretty much everything that happened in the books, at a budget that a TV series could afford. Hell, Hari Seldon's future history handheld calculator is practically current technology.
What I'd like to see in the design is something mildly retro-futuristic. Not totally camp like Flash Gordon, but with visual cues from the 1950's view of the future.
I'm trying really hard not to be a raging fanatic about this. I read the trilogy back in the seventies and they were my favorite series for a long while. I always thought they'd make a good TV series. But to quell excitement, one only has to see how other novel properties have been developed for TV, and how much a crapshoot it would be that the series would (a) be watchable, and (b) be successful enough to continue for the entire run of the novels. I guess we'll see.
Another thing I wonder about -- where do they start? with Foundation? Alternates include Prelude to Foundation, or going back further, Pebble in the Sky, or even further, Caves of Steel. Personally I'd like them to start with Foundation and set their sites on doing the original three novels. If it's a howling success they could always decide to do more.
, technology inevitably comes out of space exploration that's valuable elsewhere.
The same could be said of a popsicle skyscraper. Such an undertaking would inevitably result in technological advances.
Reductio ad absurdum? C'mon, you're better than that. Anything can be made to look goofy if taken to extremes. Put a little more effort in your arguments, please.
I guess my position is, you have to start somewhere,
My position is that this is like saying that an ice block is the first step toward building a popsicle skyscraper. If end goal is unjustified, then so are the intermediate steps.
I don't think the end goal is unjustified, but even if it is, technology inevitably comes out of space exploration that's valuable elsewhere.
Not rocket science -- we saw the same thing in the sixties. Association with a movement -- "hipster" in this case, "hippie" back then -- although intending noncomformity, in truth only means conforming with a different set of rules. Or as Frank Zappa said decades ago, "Everyone in this room is wearing a uniform, and don't kid yourself".
So long as it's not the same uniform as their parents, they're probably fine with that.
Agreed. And they're probably not old enough to see the irony in that.
Wow, all you needed was the trope that the moon landings were faked by the US government to bring down the Soviet empire, and that's the entire parent/teacher conference from Interstellar. Minus the engineer's retort, of course.
The right to cheat becomes the right to that degree which opens the doors to the right to an H1-B visa and a right to that better life in the great US of A.
> rather the throw-em-in-the-deep-end sink-or-swim type tests.
Besides this being inefficient as you said, you can't get a proper assessment if the employee in question works for an offshore contracting firm. So, um, "tom" does a terrible job, and you complain to the contracting firm. They say very sorry, we will fix -- and hand the assignment to, um, "mark", who for all you know could be the same person. Because the objective is not to complete the project correctly and on time, but to string out the contract as long as possible, maximizing profits by paying the developers as little as possible.
So, remind me, why are we hiring from this particular labor pool? I mean there's demonstrably many who know their stuff, but also demonstrably many who are faking it. Why take the chance?
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> That's because. with electric cars, every owner's garage is also a personal fueling station. The GP was pointing out that difference.
I dunno, for compressed NG cars, every owner's garage who has natural gas piped in is also a personal fueling station. It's a strong argument, but didn't seem to have helped in that case.
I assume there are tons more when aggregated across global subspecies of ferret.
(Caveat: I'm not in my area of expertise. I happen to know someone who knows a lot about ferrets, but I can only parrot what I think I remember her saying.) If you consider the entire weasel family, yes, but of the species (subspecies?) that is considered "ferret", my understanding is that there is only one variety (the black footed ferret?) that still exists in the wild. I'm told that among other things, domestic ferrets have lost their homing instinct, and get lost very easily outdoors.
Sure, I get that. I guess I'm just wondering why a Mommoth, as opposed to, I dunno, a human, is so valuable in a cloning exercise.
Part of the answer may be, you can make a lot of mistakes cloning a mammoth without people getting too upset.
I want me a dodo. Apparently they were so tasty, the islanders couldn't bear to leave a single one living.
I don't think so. According to the wiki, it probably wasn't humans eating the dodo to extinction (the meat was described as "tasteless" and pigeon was considered a superior game bird) but introducing predators (pigs, cats) to an environment where there hadn't been any before.
As I understand it, the problem with the dodo is that there aren't any frozen carcasses from which to get intact DNA. I heard a carcass was found in a cave not too long ago, and was more preserved, but last I heard it was up in the air as to whether it could be done.
As to the ethics, why not? We breed animals to be pets, how is this different? I'm told that there is only one species of ferret in the world, for instance, that can still fend for itself in the wild.
Well, yeah, but you wouldn't be using a human zygote for this. Seems like only the 3 craziest members of PETA in the world would have an ethical problem with this...
The ones who think eating chickens is murder are probably paying attention to this.
I hear wooly mammoth is a little gamy.
> There will be Hydrogen energy skeptics, the same way there was a reasonable skepticism towards electric cars. Most of the skeptic comments coming from the opponents of electric cars are actually, valid. Such as electric cars are being charged with the coal burned electricity.
Mind you, I want to see this succeed (although I think it's a long shot) but I feel duty bound to point out, hydrogen is usually created with electricity, making it highly likely that hydrogen cars will also be fueled via coal burned electricity.
About 40 years ago, when practical fusion was 40 years away, I saw hydrogen fuel as an interesting ancillary product of fusion power plants. You could use the electrical output of the plant split water, use the deuterium to power the plant, (continuing the cycle) and compress the remaining hydrogen to be used as fuel. Unfortunately, 40 years later, practical fusion is still 40 years away.
At the time, what was exciting about hydrogen is that the alterations to existing internal combustion engines to burn hydrogen as fuel weren't onerous. Of course, we learned later that pressurized hydrogen in a moving vehicle could be a safety issue. So hydrogen-electric hybrids are probably more practical. (We're assuming here that fuel cells have come a long way since Apollo 13, and I believe that's the case.)
There's probably a lot of work still to be done on the other parts of a hydrogen-based transportation infrastructure, so what Toyota is doing will probably advance the art, and if nothing else provide some competition to gas-hybrid and all-electric solutions, but without a large, cheap, non-polluting source of electricity, I don't see hydrogen as being practical.
I agree that working in an area gives you more exposure to the culture than being a tourist. It's not just your attitude but the attitude of the indigenous people -- act like a tourist, get treated like a tourist. Act like an employee, see stuff and experience stuff that tourists don't get to see and experience.
Part of my living comes from taking pictures, so that part doesn't necessarily apply, but I get what you're saying.
But... travel is overrated *if* you go there as a prepackaged tourist taking a prepackage tour. If you act the part, you will be presented mostly with the familiar plus a few photo ops. The author was spending a *year* there, which doesn't speak "tourist" to me.
oooook. So. Very interesting replies. Reminds me of TBBT episode where Sheldon traveled all over the country via train and never left any of the stations. As I recall he was going to write a thesis on the ketchup dispensers in train station hot dog stands. I see now why geeks tend not to like the show -- it hits too close to home.
Yes, it's a whole year. But a year isn't that long, and trips to the Himalayas isn't something that happens every day (for most people). Close the laptop, put on your far seeing glasses, and look around.
Do you necessarily have to work on your coding skills? What about enjoying the ride and soaking up the scene?
I was going to say the same thing. Concentrate on being a better person, rather than a better programmer. Travel broadens the mind. Let it do so.
First I'd like to say, I'm bookmarking this set of responses. There's a lot of excellent information here. One of the most informative discussions on Slashdot in recent memory.
I suspect that there is so much animosity against Comcast that you may not ever get this resolved. The advice to "get another ISP" is indicated, but there may not be another viable solution in your neighborhood. (Which is what we as a country should *really* be addressing before we even talk about net neutrality.)
If you have Comcast, you probably have already switched your land line to cable. That's unfortunate, because it makes this solution more difficult to implement: Consider that email is very low traffic (I think you said it was only a few messages a month) and the bandwidth you're getting from Comcast isn't really helping. One solution would be to get a business DSL account with an alternate ISP and use that for email only. This would allow you to scale back Comcast to a consumer account, which might mitigate some of the cost of having two ISPs.
At one time I had Comcast cable modem and a static IP with Speakeasy DSL at the same time. I had to keep my copper wire phone service in order to do this. Comcast gave me high download speeds, Speakeasy gave me a circuit that I could basically do anything with. The DSL speed was what you'd expect for DSL, but that doesn't really matter for email.
Later I dropped Comcast because I got so tired of trying to deal with them, and I'd gouge out my eyeballs rather than go back to them, but that's another story. I went back to DSL only for awhile, and then picked up FIOS when it became available. Running both side by side, I didn't see any limitations to the FIOS circuit so with a tinge of sadness, let the Speakeasy account go. (And before a bunch of anonymous cowards jump on this, yes, I'm aware that some people have had bad experiences with FIOS. I haven't, really. The circuit has been dead nuts reliable. I went through four routers until I got one that worked correctly, but that's not necessarily the ISPs fault, and they were always quick to overnight a replacement when necessary.)
> Then you terminate the contract because it's now useless and the conditions you can use it under have changed - you can NO LONGER SEND EMAIL.
Agreed. Also, be sure to record the conversation when you try to terminate the contract. It might help you later, and it'll amuse the hell outta the rest of us.
Yes, that's the big drawback of renewable. Not like oil and gas centrals that renew themselves spontaneously and have built in self-repair capabilities.
Snark noted, but at no point did I imply that there was no cost to maintaining conventional power sources. Look, I'm not against renewables -- I have solar power in my home. (Panels feeding a bank of marine batteries on a separate circuit, used for lights and a few appliances.) But to make silly claims that renewables cost nothing to run sullies the case for renewables, as it's demonstrably not true. It's important to be honest up front or risk being shut down when costs become apparent.
> The trouble is that while renewable power sources like wind and solar cost nothing to run [...]
Wait, what? Maybe on the very short term, but with a significant number of units in play, maintenance and replacement are going to be pretty much a continuous cost.
Hey, I'm desperate for any sci-fi show that involves at least one space ship at some point. Isn't there currently a grand total of zero on?
I actually don't know. I don't watch broadcast TV. Wait, does Doctor Who count?
Reductio ad absurdum? C'mon, you're better than that. Anything can be made to look goofy if taken to extremes. Put a little more effort in your arguments, please.
Honestly speaking: These proposals for a Mars colony *are* goofy. They *are* extreme.
There is room for more than one opinion on this. I would agree that it's challenging, perhaps impossible. But I certainly don't begrudge someone the chance to try.
Or, it could suck. It could suck like Skiffy's Earthsea miniseries. We'll have to see.
The potential is there. We have the technology to show pretty much everything that happened in the books, at a budget that a TV series could afford. Hell, Hari Seldon's future history handheld calculator is practically current technology.
What I'd like to see in the design is something mildly retro-futuristic. Not totally camp like Flash Gordon, but with visual cues from the 1950's view of the future.
I'm trying really hard not to be a raging fanatic about this. I read the trilogy back in the seventies and they were my favorite series for a long while. I always thought they'd make a good TV series. But to quell excitement, one only has to see how other novel properties have been developed for TV, and how much a crapshoot it would be that the series would (a) be watchable, and (b) be successful enough to continue for the entire run of the novels. I guess we'll see.
Another thing I wonder about -- where do they start? with Foundation? Alternates include Prelude to Foundation, or going back further, Pebble in the Sky, or even further, Caves of Steel. Personally I'd like them to start with Foundation and set their sites on doing the original three novels. If it's a howling success they could always decide to do more.
Broken window fallacy.
, technology inevitably comes out of space exploration that's valuable elsewhere.
The same could be said of a popsicle skyscraper. Such an undertaking would inevitably result in technological advances.
Reductio ad absurdum? C'mon, you're better than that. Anything can be made to look goofy if taken to extremes. Put a little more effort in your arguments, please.
I guess my position is, you have to start somewhere,
My position is that this is like saying that an ice block is the first step toward building a popsicle skyscraper. If end goal is unjustified, then so are the intermediate steps.
I don't think the end goal is unjustified, but even if it is, technology inevitably comes out of space exploration that's valuable elsewhere.
Not rocket science -- we saw the same thing in the sixties. Association with a movement -- "hipster" in this case, "hippie" back then -- although intending noncomformity, in truth only means conforming with a different set of rules. Or as Frank Zappa said decades ago, "Everyone in this room is wearing a uniform, and don't kid yourself".
So long as it's not the same uniform as their parents, they're probably fine with that.
Agreed. And they're probably not old enough to see the irony in that.
I guess my position is, you have to start somewhere, and you can't reasonably expect the first try to succeed.
Wow, all you needed was the trope that the moon landings were faked by the US government to bring down the Soviet empire, and that's the entire parent/teacher conference from Interstellar. Minus the engineer's retort, of course.
The right to cheat becomes the right to that degree which opens the doors to the right to an H1-B visa and a right to that better life in the great US of A.
> rather the throw-em-in-the-deep-end sink-or-swim type tests.
Besides this being inefficient as you said, you can't get a proper assessment if the employee in question works for an offshore contracting firm. So, um, "tom" does a terrible job, and you complain to the contracting firm. They say very sorry, we will fix -- and hand the assignment to, um, "mark", who for all you know could be the same person. Because the objective is not to complete the project correctly and on time, but to string out the contract as long as possible, maximizing profits by paying the developers as little as possible.
So, remind me, why are we hiring from this particular labor pool? I mean there's demonstrably many who know their stuff, but also demonstrably many who are faking it. Why take the chance?