There is a question in this funny volume that addresses this subject. I don't have the book at hand, but it goes like this: If you had the choice, and no one could ever know that you had the choice, would you allow the United States to sink into the ocean 500 years after your death in exchange for an ATM card that can remove money from any ATM without taking money from your account.
You left out ".... and an ironclad guarantee of no retribution, prosecution, or ostracism..." In which case why not withdraw enough money to live well AND start building a giant dome over the USA to protect it once it starts to sink.
Would it maybe be possible to place a limited GPS system on mars? I imagine deploying just three sattlites in geosynchronous orbit over the area where the tumbleweed probe is to land.
Question: how difficult is it to put satellites into geosynchronous (or Areosynchronous:-) ) orbit from outer space? Two problems come to mind: 1) we are good at shooting satellites up and nudging them into the right orbit, but I suspect there's a bit of a reverse-thrust required to get a satellite to "drop down" into orbit from space. and 2), I'm a bit ignorant of the calibration methods for GPS. Just how would the three Martian satellites get their position calibrated? Drop a retro on the planet's surface or something?
Seems all you really need is: One Aeron chair (or whatever that snazzy thing is) One wireless keyboard One wireless pointing device of your choice One iMac flat panel -- easily adjustable in 3 or 4 axes to meet your viewing needs.
Well.... fundamentally, computers become allegedly obsolete in 3 yrs or less as much because software gets upgraded every time a new computer shows up, and the upgrades are not back-compatible. Washing machines, and cars, and AA-batteries have reached limitations imposed by various physical laws; CPUs and scanners and printers and video displays have not. Also, while it generally is cost-effective to repair cars, anything over very minor problems w/ washing machines, stoves, refrigerators, 35mm cameras, TVs, phones, etc. makes it far more cost-effective to buy new rather than repair.
Larger grain production area than Europe. More people and more advanced sciences than Europe, by about 500 years.
Why didn't they take over the world?
My guess is either geography (big mountain ranges) or the problem of distance screwing up both supply and control chains. Once it takes more than some length of time (month?) to communicate between the central hub and the outlying regions, it's next to impossible to maintain strict control. Just a theory.
No doubt the plan is going to be to pay Bechtel and MortonThiokol a few billion to redesign and upgrade the whole bloody shuttle. (The Bechtel crack is a response to the free ride the Bush administration just gave Bechtel in Iraq)
radiation: habitat may not be aproblem but I haven't seen refutation of the inflight problem. Gravity: when I typed "gravity well," that's shorthand for "it costs way too much to push people or hardware up from the ground in the first place." No solution to that, and thus no solution to major emigration. As to low-grav or zero-grav: there may be proposed solutions but to date IIRC no exercise program has demonstrated an ability to stop bone mass loss.
I challenge you to come up with scientific experiments which cannot be done w/ unmanned systems. Further, I disagree w/ your "300 years from now" stuff. There is no indication whatsoever that we've missed some fundamental law of physics which would let us violate gravity, accelerate reactionlessly, etc. So in all probability neither we nor any other sentient life in the universe will be able to travel in parsec-class jumps. Ever.
He said:
Personally, I find the same anti-space-exploration arguments being repeated for every single article discussing space-exploration to be a bit depressing and redundant with each other. "Why?" is certainly a good question, but when people ask it OVER and OVER again, while covering their ears when someone replies, that's just irritating.
I too question the need for things like this, but I consistently come to the conclusion that exploration is still a very necessary thing for the survival of our species. Sure, we have "localized" issues that we need to give attention to, but a good planner devotes some amount of resources to long-term goals. If we constantly forget about the big picture and devote 100% of our resources to fighting short-term problems, we piss our children off (and maybe go extinct).
I say: And yet nobody has (or can) refute the radiation problem or the gravity-well problem. It only helps to colonize Mars if we do so by moving 2.5 billion people OFF Earth. Sending 50 people over and letting them be fruitful and multiply doesn't solve anything. We've got tons of great data (aka spoils of exploration) from the Hubble scope and various planetary probes. Putting a human in deep space won't help. So about the only good reason to send a crew into space would be to lasso a wormhole or two and drag it back here (thus solving the radiation and the gravity well problems in one swell foop!).
Re:Why is legacy a bad thing?
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Legacy-Free PCs
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· Score: 1
Our houses, cars, TVs, ovens, toasters, etc... nearly everything we use on a day-to-day basis... contain "legacy" technology.
Our medical profession uses techniques that are centuries old. Why? Because they work.
Well: my toaster uses a microchip instead of a bimetallic strip to set cook times. Which works better? TV: it's taken 20 years + to start converting to HDTV which will be miles better than "legacy" NTSC. And if we'd strictly used "legacy" color TV standards, we'd have noncompatible color/B&W broadcasts. The first fielded color system used a spinning tricolor disk. Automobiles almost exclusively use front-wheel drive now. So we lose the "legacy" of driveshafts and rear differentials. This was a bad thing to happen?
Medicine: the stethescope still does wondrous things. At the same time, advances in drugs let us stop using any number of medications which had nasty side effects or mortality risks.
And as someone who thinks nothing in rock/pop compares to Trane and Diz,:-) I'd suggest your blanket condemnation of someone else's musical style is indicative only of your own poor education.
Most do, but not all. Hydrogen Peroxide is often used by itself as a monopropellant rocket fuel, for instance: just run it past a platinum screen and it reacts all on its own, no air required.
At the risk of achieving my first-ever negative mod, let me point out that "oxidizer" doesn't mean "air," and doesn't even mean oxygen. It just means something that will strip electrons from the fuel source (just like 2H +O2 --> 2H+ plus O2-- ; and sorry about no superscripts there). BTW IIRC the platinum is just a catalyst in the quoted reaction.
OK, so this is perilously close to an OT troll, but: If you haven't played pinball in a while, get out of the house:-) and try a few games. Some of the advantages over vids: You can actually win free games, it's real hardware, you can trap the ball and catch your breath every now and then, and... when you whack the cabinet it actually affects the pinball's motion (try knocking down an ogre by hitting the vid box). And BTW there are LOTS of great pinball sims available, many for free.
At what % do we look around and say, its time for a new protocol with spam avoidance built in?
I think the problem is this: Anyone (more or less) can set up his own ISP and generate his own mailserver. Once his spam mail has hit an Internet router, we've already lost the battle, in the sense that he's using other people's resources. I'm not a software or network guy, but I don't see how the Internet in its current (essentially multipath) conception can block spam at the source. The USPS can because all mail goes "in" to them before going "out" to recipients. It's hub&spoke. The Internet isn't. Solutions, anyone?
Heck, England is where Professor Branestawm (sorry, Amazon doesn't list any of the original books) invented the pancake making machine. As I recall, it went awry and tossed 24-inch pancakes about 30 feet away.
What you are preaching is communism. If you take away the incentive to develop or research these cures, then nobody will develop or research them. Are we any better off then?
No it isn't. It's just a different business model. Say the gov't runs all the research and releases approved drugs to corporations who then manufacture (or maybe develop mass production as well). Different structure, different profit structure, still nice limited-capitalism system. Lots of companies do just fine at low profit margins. The drug companies just don't want to change.
Doctors CAN prescribe drugs for "off label" uses but the Pharmacutical company gets in BIG, BIG, BIG trouble if they in ANY WAY market/encourage such unaproved uses.
But be warned that your insurance company generally won't cover this off-label usage.
Oh, and as to pharm. companies pimping the MDs: as a spouse of an MD, I can count on nearly any drug that's not class 4(no oxycontin or heroin, that is) being available by the dozens in "physician sample packs." Nice perk, eh?
I agree with the rest of your post, but I have to say I find the distinction made here to be dubious. Technically, you are correct of course - scientists could have said no, and politicians could have refused to drop, but...
The scientists would have tried to build the bomb in order for it to be used. I find the pretense of "we just built it, we didn't know it would be used" to be incredibly thin.
And untrue, and beside the point. Like it or not, proving that a bomb would work was fundamental to validating a pile (sorry;-) ) of nuclear physics. This gave us power plants, nuclear medicine, and other stuff I can't think of. Imagine designing long-lived satellites without having a nuclear reactor onboard.
Downfall does make it clear, however, that a US invasion of Japan would have been a disaster in terms of Allied casualties, and Japanese civilian deaths. All of Japan's remaining defenses were targeted at the exact point where the US invasion would have hit, and further, the strategy of bombing cities was to be turned to bombing railheads, which would have totally destroyed the food distribution system in Japan, likely causing the starvation of much of the population.
A point of reference for this: I've read articles (no, not in The Inquirer) that estimate around two million German civilians died AFTER the war, due to forced relocation, starvation, and exposure. Japanese deaths after surrender: almost none, save radiation cases.
No one else I know actually finished it...It does take a pretty serious commitment to finish though.
You're kidding! What turns them off? They didn't care about the drama when physicists are hand-sanding and drilling chunks of high-explosive to get the shape they need? Or the screwup w/ the ignitor cable which was installed backwards (wrong sex on endplugs)? Or is it just that compared to, say, Saving Private Ryan, not enough body count?
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Or the (rejected) NewYorker drawing:
[teacher talking to pirate in her classroom] "And the area of the circle is pi times what squared?"
You left out ".... and an ironclad guarantee of no retribution, prosecution, or ostracism..."
In which case why not withdraw enough money to live well AND start building a giant dome over the USA to protect it once it starts to sink.
Question: how difficult is it to put satellites into geosynchronous (or Areosynchronous
and 2), I'm a bit ignorant of the calibration methods for GPS. Just how would the three Martian satellites get their position calibrated? Drop a retro on the planet's surface or something?
Well, that sure is the way all our presidential elections have played out.
Seems all you really need is:
One Aeron chair (or whatever that snazzy thing is)
One wireless keyboard
One wireless pointing device of your choice
One iMac flat panel -- easily adjustable in 3 or 4 axes to meet your viewing needs.
Well.... fundamentally, computers become allegedly obsolete in 3 yrs or less as much because software gets upgraded every time a new computer shows up, and the upgrades are not back-compatible. Washing machines, and cars, and AA-batteries have reached limitations imposed by various physical laws; CPUs and scanners and printers and video displays have not.
Also, while it generally is cost-effective to repair cars, anything over very minor problems w/ washing machines, stoves, refrigerators, 35mm cameras, TVs, phones, etc. makes it far more cost-effective to buy new rather than repair.
OTOH that 0.01% has probably 99.9% of the disposable income, so "we all" is the target demographic.
Larger grain production area than Europe. More people and more advanced sciences than Europe, by about 500 years.
Why didn't they take over the world?
My guess is either geography (big mountain ranges) or the problem of distance screwing up both supply and control chains. Once it takes more than some length of time (month?) to communicate between the central hub and the outlying regions, it's next to impossible to maintain strict control.
Just a theory.
No doubt the plan is going to be to pay Bechtel and MortonThiokol a few billion to redesign and upgrade the whole bloody shuttle.
(The Bechtel crack is a response to the free ride the Bush administration just gave Bechtel in Iraq)
radiation: habitat may not be aproblem but I haven't seen refutation of the inflight problem.
Gravity: when I typed "gravity well," that's shorthand for "it costs way too much to push people or hardware up from the ground in the first place." No solution to that, and thus no solution to major emigration.
As to low-grav or zero-grav: there may be proposed solutions but to date IIRC no exercise program has demonstrated an ability to stop bone mass loss.
I challenge you to come up with scientific experiments which cannot be done w/ unmanned systems. Further, I disagree w/ your "300 years from now" stuff. There is no indication whatsoever that we've missed some fundamental law of physics which would let us violate gravity, accelerate reactionlessly, etc. So in all probability neither we nor any other sentient life in the universe will be able to travel in parsec-class jumps. Ever.
He said:
Personally, I find the same anti-space-exploration arguments being repeated for every single article discussing space-exploration to be a bit depressing and redundant with each other. "Why?" is certainly a good question, but when people ask it OVER and OVER again, while covering their ears when someone replies, that's just irritating.
I too question the need for things like this, but I consistently come to the conclusion that exploration is still a very necessary thing for the survival of our species. Sure, we have "localized" issues that we need to give attention to, but a good planner devotes some amount of resources to long-term goals. If we constantly forget about the big picture and devote 100% of our resources to fighting short-term problems, we piss our children off (and maybe go extinct).
I say:
And yet nobody has (or can) refute the radiation problem or the gravity-well problem. It only helps to colonize Mars if we do so by moving 2.5 billion people OFF Earth. Sending 50 people over and letting them be fruitful and multiply doesn't solve anything.
We've got tons of great data (aka spoils of exploration) from the Hubble scope and various planetary probes. Putting a human in deep space won't help. So about the only good reason to send a crew into space would be to lasso a wormhole or two and drag it back here (thus solving the radiation and the gravity well problems in one swell foop!).
Our medical profession uses techniques that are centuries old. Why? Because they work.
Well: my toaster uses a microchip instead of a bimetallic strip to set cook times. Which works better?
TV: it's taken 20 years + to start converting to HDTV which will be miles better than "legacy" NTSC. And if we'd strictly used "legacy" color TV standards, we'd have noncompatible color/B&W broadcasts. The first fielded color system used a spinning tricolor disk.
Automobiles almost exclusively use front-wheel drive now. So we lose the "legacy" of driveshafts and rear differentials. This was a bad thing to happen?
Medicine: the stethescope still does wondrous things. At the same time, advances in drugs let us stop using any number of medications which had nasty side effects or mortality risks.
And as someone who thinks nothing in rock/pop compares to Trane and Diz,
* Using the TV without a remote.
I have two TVs at home; both require the remote to access most of their customization functions.
A great book by George Dyson: Darwin Among The Machines, He draws many similarities between organic and computational evolution
At the risk of achieving my first-ever negative mod, let me point out that "oxidizer" doesn't mean "air," and doesn't even mean oxygen. It just means something that will strip electrons from the fuel source (just like 2H +O2 --> 2H+ plus O2-- ; and sorry about no superscripts there).
BTW IIRC the platinum is just a catalyst in the quoted reaction.
Yes but did they classify their algorithms for more than 25 years?
Oh yeah, like any USA citizens even KNOW there's more than one verse to our anthem (I do, but certainly don't know the words to the later verses).
OK, so this is perilously close to an OT troll, but: :-) and try a few games. Some of the advantages over vids: You can actually win free games, it's real hardware, you can trap the ball and catch your breath every now and then, and... when you whack the cabinet it actually affects the pinball's motion (try knocking down an ogre by hitting the vid box).
If you haven't played pinball in a while, get out of the house
And BTW there are LOTS of great pinball sims available, many for free.
At what % do we look around and say, its time for a new protocol with spam avoidance built in?
I think the problem is this: Anyone (more or less) can set up his own ISP and generate his own mailserver. Once his spam mail has hit an Internet router, we've already lost the battle, in the sense that he's using other people's resources. I'm not a software or network guy, but I don't see how the Internet in its current (essentially multipath) conception can block spam at the source. The USPS can because all mail goes "in" to them before going "out" to recipients. It's hub&spoke. The Internet isn't.
Solutions, anyone?
Heck, England is where Professor Branestawm (sorry, Amazon doesn't list any of the original books) invented the pancake making machine. As I recall, it went awry and tossed 24-inch pancakes about 30 feet away.
No it isn't. It's just a different business model. Say the gov't runs all the research and releases approved drugs to corporations who then manufacture (or maybe develop mass production as well). Different structure, different profit structure, still nice limited-capitalism system. Lots of companies do just fine at low profit margins. The drug companies just don't want to change.
But be warned that your insurance company generally won't cover this off-label usage.
Oh, and as to pharm. companies pimping the MDs: as a spouse of an MD, I can count on nearly any drug that's not class 4(no oxycontin or heroin, that is) being available by the dozens in "physician sample packs." Nice perk, eh?
The scientists would have tried to build the bomb in order for it to be used. I find the pretense of "we just built it, we didn't know it would be used" to be incredibly thin.
And untrue, and beside the point. Like it or not, proving that a bomb would work was fundamental to validating a pile (sorry
A point of reference for this: I've read articles (no, not in The Inquirer) that estimate around two million German civilians died AFTER the war, due to forced relocation, starvation, and exposure. Japanese deaths after surrender: almost none, save radiation cases.
You're kidding! What turns them off? They didn't care about the drama when physicists are hand-sanding and drilling chunks of high-explosive to get the shape they need? Or the screwup w/ the ignitor cable which was installed backwards (wrong sex on endplugs)?
Or is it just that compared to, say, Saving Private Ryan, not enough body count?