Sorry, just saw that movie and thought it was awesome... if you haven't seen it, you won't get the above.
No. If you read Watchmen 20 years ago you'll also get it. (Towards the end of page)
It's interesting that movie versions of both Fantastic Four and Watchmen are in development, immediately after The Incredibles made such a big show of borrowing/stealing major elements from those stories. Many viewers next year could make the wrong assumption about who is copying from who.
If you read the reviews, the biggest critical complaint leveled at the film is the run-time.
But other parts of the story were extended for no reason. Look at the ongoing Frodo-Gollum wrestling match over the volcano: it was supposed to be a few seconds, and it ballooned out to minutes (also changing the meaning of what happened, from accident to intent)
One of many things that didn't need to take so long.
If I put anything else in there, it is still there... fully intact, until I tell it to empty the trash.
No it isn't.
If you take a file from a floppy disk, and put it in the trash, and then put the floppy disk also in the trash, then your file is no longer in the trash.
Carrying out the "trash metaphor" fully would mean transparently copying files from removable media to HD whenever you start to delete them, which would be prohibitively slow...
At least part of the problem is that people tend to believe that the icons they see are the data, rather than the links that they actually represent.
But Apple invested $millions to create and sustain that conception. It was entirely intentional.
They had an "The Icon is the File" mantra going for a while. It's part of the "spatially consistent" GUI concept.
Stepping back, and relying on the visual metaphor alone, what could dragging the disk into the trash possibly do besides remove the disk from the computer?
Erase all data on the disk (but in a reversible way). Exactly like what happens when you drag a folder into the trash.
For users that don't know how to or don't bother cleaning their start menus, the most recently used option actually helps.
Yes, but this is an elaborate workaround which doesn't touch on the core problem: bad/lacking package management in Microsoft Windows.
On a Linux PC, each application comes in a package including a little metadata telling it's general category. On the Start menu they're filed into Internet, Games, Graphics, Office (etc) automatically.
But the usual Windows layout is Programs->VendorName->ApplicationName->Application , which is in a submenu mixed in with 5 other included things you'll never ever need, like the complementary spyware installer and WordPerfect importer, and the eternal Uninstall program.
It's understandable that applications can include several lesser programs- but it's not too much to ask that each installer also add its most important icons to functionally sorted categories.
I'm not saying the Linux approach is perfect (it's not!) but that the Windows method is excessively bad.
If my PC dies when the hard drive is being written to, I'm a lot more likely to end up in deep shit, even if the OS uses a journaling filesystem.
That's a specific implementation detail which programmers must account for, but not an inherent obstacle to decent Continual Save software.
Each "Document" should be represented by 3 noninterfering files, transparently managed by the OS/GUI. One file is for manual saves by the user, the other two are for automatic backups of current changes. They should be written to alternatingly, with a single-byte flag used to atomically indicate which one is the most recent. Worse case if you power-down when a write is in progress is that instead of getting a 1-minute old copy, you have the 2-minute old one (with the other manually retrievable)
Some software today already uses this approach, if persistence-through-crashes is a major design goal (as it is for DHCP servers, for example)
every step you take to making the computer work correctly for complete dumbasses (and I say that in a kind way) will put more money in your pocket.
But many of Tog's habitual complaints are about flaws that offend mostly his sense of elegance, and which don't present any compelling economic rationale (in the profit/effort sense)
His item #1 is the most blatant, but all his complaints share the same weakeness: software is basically written by capitalists, so if enough customers really cared about these things, they'd already have been fixed. And in many of the cases, the best place to correct the flaw would be in a shared OS-wide library, so that less work is replicated in each app. But that's "tradegy of the commons"; nobody controls the reward, so nobody makes the investment.
(Of course, one can say the same thing to anyone who complains that Microsoft(tm) Windows(r) isn't very secure...)
Not that it matters, but you're still dragging up the unnecessary comparison of 1974 dollars to 2004 dollars.
You really want that Twirp award, huh? I mentioned it once, and only in response to you asking about it twice- and yet you accuse ME of "still dragging up"...
If you stick with 2004 dollars, it's constant within the bounds necessary for this discussion.
No it isn't, as I've abundantly explained. In 2004 currency, putting a satellite in orbit costs $X004, while a building an android with an effective IQ of 75 costs $Y004. Knowing the cost of a satellite launch in 2204 will provide one way to compare purchasing-power across the centuries, but knowing the X004/X204 ratio gives you no insight into $Y204. (Especially since $Y004 was nigh-infinite)
This is actually pretty important: What if you assume the SF concept of "Von Neuman Colonizers" are feasible? That's a self replicating machine (possibly but not necessarily nanotech) which builds as many duplicates as needed to accomplish a job. If they turn out to be workable, they could pave Mars with habitats quickly and cheaply. (In a logarythmic timeframe, actually). The cost is the effort to invent and program the first one, and then the rest comes almost for free.
Full-planet terraforming, on the other hand, may require huge importations of mass and multiple centuries of waiting, for which there is no conceivable shortcut. It's time on this side versus skill on the other, not dollars vs dollars.
So, let's be constructive and discuss
I have trouble visualizing Slashdot as a place for anything constructive. "Accentuate the negative", that's my motto.
Life or no life, Mars almost certainly has no fossil fuels.
In all but the very most aggressive timeframes on which terraforming can be contemplated, Earth has no fossil fuels either. They might even be depleted in 75 years; but definately within 200 we 'll need to have already gotten an alternative working on this planet (or we'll be in no shape to aim elsewhere)
A source of energy is needed.
Why don't you mention fission/fusion? The safety-arguments against fission power on Earth are far weaker on Mars, where (at least initially) the whole place is one big Yucca Mountain.
Wind power might be useful, depending on the reliability of Martian windstorms.
That's very odd to mention, unless you were assuming that an atmosphere-thickening project (such as comet-dropping) were already underway. Wind farms are impractical on most of Earth, and yet it's hard to picture Mar's vastly thinner atmosphere pushing any turbines. (If this were a Venus colonization, then you'd have some force...)
Wind power is really just a special case of solar energy, anyhow. It takes advantage of . If the hopeful predictions about solar-cell efficiency pan out, then soon windmills will be obselete in favor of direct cells. (Note that power is needed by colonists of a terraformed planet as well, but their solar cells would be less efficient, as they're blocked by the thickened atmosphere)
What are your thoughts on the challenges I've identified here?
Sorry, it'd take far too much time & typing to do it justice. Such topics are so contingent on unpredictable future technology paths that they can play out in exponentially many ways. Will we have fusion power? Cryonic reanimation? Strong AI? Weak AI? Space elevators? Genetic biocompilers? Nanoassemblers? Peace on Earth? For each possible combination of answers, that's another answer one could write.
Beyond a small range of safe extrapolations (or gross applications of big-picture physics), all we can honestly say is "Anything's Possible". (Which is why I objected to your original message which apparently excluded a broad category of colonization methods from consideration)
In general, once you enter the physical (vs online) world, you create huge costs for attackers, who now have to travel to a real place, case a place out, avoid getting seen, etc.
This is why those people who try to create theft/vandalism analogies to argue for harsh punishment of online "piracy" / "hacking" are so off base.
Why on earth do you believe that the application itself should have any knowledge of this?
Why on earth are you beating your wife?
Meaning, he wrote nothing to suggest the misperception you accuse him of. Blame wasn't assigned to Mozilla specifically, but to the GUI environment as a whole, like the mysterious They.
You probably meant "kwin", but that can demonstrate bad window-focus-handling too.
For a test, run XMMS and kwin. First set XMMS to be on all workspaces (a little difficult, because it doesn't draw standard borders, but try pressing Alt-F3). Next, open and close an auxilliary XMMS window, such as the playlist, and see if you can get the workspace setting to persist...
Does it have to follow me to the current active workspace?
The "best" behavior isn't clearly defined. Some people may really want their applications to be able to alert them of urgent events, even if switched to a different workspace. (Gaim is a superb example of this need, although you might consider it a special exception because it's frequently stored in a workspace-spanning taskbar)
2. Check "Prevent applications from stealing focus"
That's not a fix, it's a workaround which introduces other problems. Activating that change will sometimes prevent the user from noticing a legitimate emergency message from a background program.
The better solutions are more complex and invasive (and thus aren't backwards compatible). One idea is to have a dedicated screen area where small-but-informative messages can pop up, which will never cover an existing app.
Another related idea is to create all dialog boxes opened by a non-foreground app with a timer blocking input for a few seconds, so they won't accidently steal input meant for other programs. (Firefox already has a similar feature in a few situations)
look at the giant statues of various Buddha and many other prominent figures from each of the religions and how they are treated. They're gods, basically.
Technically they're not gods or deities, although for many purposes they're treated that way (and only in some branches, such as Amida, but certainly not Zen). "Buddha" isn't the name of one entity; it really translates as "saint": a normal human who recieved immortal powers for living especially virtuously.
For comparison, look at the Catholic church. Technically it's monothesistic, but you can go to shrines and find big statues of saints who are worshipped about like a lesser god from any pagan religion. Each one is reputed to grant prayers in a fairly narrow specialty.
In both Buddhism and Catholism, therefore, we can see that to enhance popularity with a public that enjoys paganism, saints have grown to take on characteristics of deities.
How can you see little difference between two parties that have a stark partisan divide on about 90% of votes?
That rhetorical question is unpersuasive on its own, because it ignores selection bias in creating votes. If votes were randomly selected amoung all possible decisions, you'd see the similarity more strongly ("Should we ban puppydogs?" "Should we invade Canada?" "Mexico?")
Votes are designed for the purpose of highlighting differences, not underscoring concenus. Positions which are shared will have one quick vote and then be forgotten, while divisive topics will be repeatedly re-voted in minorly different configurations across different levels of government. To a Marxist or Randian, both major parties appear indistinguishable.
After all, when was the last vote to decriminalize slavery? More seriously, even though the Democrats are somewhat more pro-gun-control, they wouldn't repeal the 2nd Amendment. And although Republicans are somewhat more states-rights, they wouldn't legalize secession. Neither of those two changes would drastically alter USA life, yet they're just two of the many topics where Dem and Rep parties are in complete alignment.
For comparison, look at the physical differences between you and me. 90% of the entries on a police identity-sheet would differ (hair/eye coloration, height/weight, gender). Yet from biological, anatomical, or genetic standpoints we're variously from 96 to 99.9995% identical.
The questions that get asked are those where the answer is likely to be different; if the result was already known, why bother asking/voting?
it was an attempt to prove to ea that we could create original properties
Ok, mistake #1: If you want to create an ORIGINAL property, don't take an EXISTING property and then shoot it up with a twist of dark attitude. That's not what "original" means.
But that's counterproductive. The more heat added, the faster atmospheric molecules move, and the more readily they fly off into space- which with low planetary gravity would happen quickly anyhow.
If Mars COULD hold an atmosphere, it WOULD have an atmosphere... so the tent-based concept is even more important, compared to idealistic unenclosed terraforming.
If you've seen Futurama, then you should've heard of the wily "Gravity", who will foil all your plans to build an atmosphere on Mars.
You can't hold air without Gravity on your side. So start saving to build a diamond shell around the planet, or simply accumulate enough asteroids to bulk up the mass to the point of restraining an atmosphere... either way, LUDICROUSLY EXPENSIVE.
live in an actual biodome
You're the one who brought up "biodomes". I had only said "enclosed habitats", which are a much broader category, and include not only non-dome shapes, but totally different approaches to life.
Also, you operate upon the mistaken assumption that NYC is self-contained.
Try reading next time before you reply. If I had made that assumption, the numbers would've come out an additional 30x factor in my favor.
(Furthermore, if I'd used my own interpretation of an "ultra-conservative population", as based on observations of self-sufficiency on isolated Pacific islands, then my side would come out an additional 100,000 times better. And given that future medical technology will include genetic engineering, it might be possible to survive with an even smaller headcount)
But anyway, the question is really so simple that there's no need to get into concrete numbers: both enclosed habitats (what you wrongly call "biodomes") and terraforming are trying to do the same thing: alter an area of Mars so that it's survivable for human life. The only difference is how big of an area needs to change. It it's obvious that 100 million people can live in a tiny fraction of Mar's total space.
So the question then becomes: it it easier to do this work on a rather small space, or on one 50 million times as large?
Hopefully I don't need to explain the significance of eight orders of magnitude.
And dollars would have been just fine, as long as you stick to today's dollars, because 2004 dollars are static.
No they aren't. Just look at the CPI: we can't even use modern dollars to measure cost-of-living 30 years ago!
If necessary, we could talk about specifics like kilotons of mass launched through space, or number of fusion reactors constructed; but it's foolhardy to pretend we can predict future technology well enough to assign relative prices to dissimilar commodities.
Overall, what bothers me is not that you think terraforming is so much easier than it ever could be, but that you've decided enclosed habitats are flat-out impossible. Given that terraforming is concievable, smaller-scale colonization should be possible too, and it's bizarre of you to totally dismiss that whole option.
PS. All serious terraforming-advocates I've ever read assume enclosed Mars colonies will be in place for the centuries during which the terraforming is underway.
(do this 1000 times probably and you're getting there)
No you're not. First, the mass of a comet is so small that you'd need many more to start collecting enough water to call it "earth like". Secondly, the gravity of Mars is so low (compared to its distance from the sun) that any air or vapor produced would quickly fly off into space.
That's the fatal flaw with standard terraforming theories: there's no way for so small an object to hold an atmosphere, unless it were also very cold.
Looking at a list of planets, it's clear that everything bigger than Venus has an atmosphere, and all of the smaller ones (which includes Mars, of course) have none. (Titan is small with an atmosphere, but it's 200C colder)
There's no such thing as a serious debate with people who are EATING JESUS. The very idea is oxymoronic.
Because God made other fish appear.
Bible doesn't say so. It mentions no appearance of more fish, instead explicitly stating that the starting number of fish sufficed, without ever being depleted. That's a more abstact miracle than just conjuring up duplicates, because it defies the imagination to even picture the event.
But, if you like that view anyway, then God is making more Jesus-meat appear. None of those wafers is ALL of Jesus. (Each one is only 5g, and Jesus is at least 100kg) Since he's immortal, he heals instantaneously, whenever a bit is sliced off to eat in Communion.
There's a priest, an altar and Jesus being eaten in order to atone for sin. That's a sacrifice.
No, that's not a "sacrifice" by either the technical meaning ("to make sacred") or the common understanding ("to give up something of value").
One could somewhat say that the wafers are being consecrated (even though that actually happened earlier), which is like one definition of sacrifice, but it's the common meaning that matters regarding "Jesus's Sacrifice", and there is no similar offering of value during a Mass. You can call Mass a "rememberance of sacrifice", but not a sacrifice itself.
Seeing as we have trouble funding individual biodomes capable of housing 10 people for a year here on Earth, my statement is accurate.
No it's not. Both are impossible today, so for you to single out just one of them as undoable is misleading.
I then conclude that we have a long-term decision to make regarding whether terraforming it or leaving it alone is best.
And, once again, that conclusion is wrong, because you have no call to restrict the options that way. It's intellectual dishonesty akin to the trilemma.
You somehow take the fact that we can't build workable biodomes today, and use it to claim that we'll NEVER be able to. We can't terraform today either (in fact, we can come closer to biodomes than terraforming) so why does an overall more-ambitious option get a free pass from you?
Let's be ultra-conservative and say that "significant" means no less than 100 million people
No, an ultra-conservative version of "significant" would be 10,000. After all, the total population of all humans has been above 100 million for under 1% of humanity's history.
Since you're the biodome expert, tell me how many biodomes it would take to support that level of human population for 50 years (which is short-term).
No, 200 years would be short-term for colonization. But the number of shelters required is the same for 1 year or 1000, so it doesn't matter. (The idea of proposing terraforming looks silly alongside a 50-year duration. Terraforming only begins to seem attractive if you're working in timescales of more than 10k years)
Then, tell me how much it would cost to construct said biodomes, ignoring the cost of either transporting the components from Earth or setting up manufacturing facilities on Mars.
But anyway, let's play your game, using the target of 100 mill. But we can't use money, because future inflation rates are inestimable, so we'll just need to compare the alternatives relative to each other.
Think about earth cities: NYC has 25 million people, and we want to support 4x on Mars. That needs 4x the space, and then add in another 4x factor to allow them to grow food (which is really more than needed). And then double it one more time to cover space for H2O and O2 recycling.
NYC area * (4 * 4 * 2) = 1200 km^2 * 32 = 33840 km^2. Mars has 144800000000 km^2 surface area.
So, my plan needs to alter only 0.0000003% as much land area as yours does. (If altitude were also taken into consideration, then an additional 50x factor comes in).
Since the technology for either approach defies current description, we just need to rely on common sense: does requiring a few 100 less kilometers of airtight walls outweigh needing to introduce 3,000,000x more air and water? (The total assumed mass of all solar-local comets can't make a dent in that)
Also remember why past biodome experiemnts failed: because ecologies are hard to predict. That's an argument against biodomes, but it's an even stronger danger with terraforming (on the order of 3 million times worse). If something goes wrong and resources begin to shift out of livable balance, the colonists of a "terraformed" Mars are stuck. But residents in a biodome can just add another nuclear reactor and use the power to mine/clean/grow/electrolyze whatever they're lacking. A controlled environment is a correctable environment.
Assuming that either of these tasks are possible at all, the biodome could be self-sufficient in 300 years, while the terraforming will still be ramping up 3000 years later.
Covering the entire surface of Mars save for the "national park" areas is ridiculous at best.
You may be eligible for the 2004 Twirp-Pudge Memorial Auto-Accusatory Medal!
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AC: I guess with this definition, George W. has got to be the most liberal president in recent history..
No no. Bush is generous with other people's LIVES.
Sorry, just saw that movie and thought it was awesome... if you haven't seen it, you won't get the above.
No. If you read Watchmen 20 years ago you'll also get it. (Towards the end of page)
It's interesting that movie versions of both Fantastic Four and Watchmen are in development, immediately after The Incredibles made such a big show of borrowing/stealing major elements from those stories. Many viewers next year could make the wrong assumption about who is copying from who.
Look up genkernel. What you say isn't correct.
She never said that- it was a hypothetical comment from 50% of the Gentoo-boosters out there.
If you DON'T really need intimate knowledge to get a working system, then their claims that Gentoo will teach users about Linux are incorrect.
If you read the reviews, the biggest critical complaint leveled at the film is the run-time.
But other parts of the story were extended for no reason. Look at the ongoing Frodo-Gollum wrestling match over the volcano: it was supposed to be a few seconds, and it ballooned out to minutes (also changing the meaning of what happened, from accident to intent)
One of many things that didn't need to take so long.
If I put anything else in there, it is still there... fully intact, until I tell it to empty the trash.
No it isn't.
If you take a file from a floppy disk, and put it in the trash, and then put the floppy disk also in the trash, then your file is no longer in the trash.
Carrying out the "trash metaphor" fully would mean transparently copying files from removable media to HD whenever you start to delete them, which would be prohibitively slow...
At least part of the problem is that people tend to believe that the icons they see are the data, rather than the links that they actually represent.
But Apple invested $millions to create and sustain that conception. It was entirely intentional.
They had an "The Icon is the File" mantra going for a while. It's part of the "spatially consistent" GUI concept.
Stepping back, and relying on the visual metaphor alone, what could dragging the disk into the trash possibly do besides remove the disk from the computer?
Erase all data on the disk (but in a reversible way). Exactly like what happens when you drag a folder into the trash.
For users that don't know how to or don't bother cleaning their start menus, the most recently used option actually helps.
n , which is in a submenu mixed in with 5 other included things you'll never ever need, like the complementary spyware installer and WordPerfect importer, and the eternal Uninstall program.
Yes, but this is an elaborate workaround which doesn't touch on the core problem: bad/lacking package management in Microsoft Windows.
On a Linux PC, each application comes in a package including a little metadata telling it's general category. On the Start menu they're filed into Internet, Games, Graphics, Office (etc) automatically.
But the usual Windows layout is Programs->VendorName->ApplicationName->Applicatio
It's understandable that applications can include several lesser programs- but it's not too much to ask that each installer also add its most important icons to functionally sorted categories.
I'm not saying the Linux approach is perfect (it's not!) but that the Windows method is excessively bad.
If my PC dies when the hard drive is being written to, I'm a lot more likely to end up in deep shit, even if the OS uses a journaling filesystem.
That's a specific implementation detail which programmers must account for, but not an inherent obstacle to decent Continual Save software.
Each "Document" should be represented by 3 noninterfering files, transparently managed by the OS/GUI. One file is for manual saves by the user, the other two are for automatic backups of current changes. They should be written to alternatingly, with a single-byte flag used to atomically indicate which one is the most recent. Worse case if you power-down when a write is in progress is that instead of getting a 1-minute old copy, you have the 2-minute old one (with the other manually retrievable)
Some software today already uses this approach, if persistence-through-crashes is a major design goal (as it is for DHCP servers, for example)
every step you take to making the computer work correctly for complete dumbasses (and I say that in a kind way) will put more money in your pocket.
But many of Tog's habitual complaints are about flaws that offend mostly his sense of elegance, and which don't present any compelling economic rationale (in the profit/effort sense)
His item #1 is the most blatant, but all his complaints share the same weakeness: software is basically written by capitalists, so if enough customers really cared about these things, they'd already have been fixed. And in many of the cases, the best place to correct the flaw would be in a shared OS-wide library, so that less work is replicated in each app. But that's "tradegy of the commons"; nobody controls the reward, so nobody makes the investment.
(Of course, one can say the same thing to anyone who complains that Microsoft(tm) Windows(r) isn't very secure...)
Not that it matters, but you're still dragging up the unnecessary comparison of 1974 dollars to 2004 dollars.
You really want that Twirp award, huh? I mentioned it once, and only in response to you asking about it twice- and yet you accuse ME of "still dragging up"...
If you stick with 2004 dollars, it's constant within the bounds necessary for this discussion.
No it isn't, as I've abundantly explained. In 2004 currency, putting a satellite in orbit costs $X004, while a building an android with an effective IQ of 75 costs $Y004. Knowing the cost of a satellite launch in 2204 will provide one way to compare purchasing-power across the centuries, but knowing the X004/X204 ratio gives you no insight into $Y204. (Especially since $Y004 was nigh-infinite)
This is actually pretty important: What if you assume the SF concept of "Von Neuman Colonizers" are feasible? That's a self replicating machine (possibly but not necessarily nanotech) which builds as many duplicates as needed to accomplish a job. If they turn out to be workable, they could pave Mars with habitats quickly and cheaply. (In a logarythmic timeframe, actually). The cost is the effort to invent and program the first one, and then the rest comes almost for free.
Full-planet terraforming, on the other hand, may require huge importations of mass and multiple centuries of waiting, for which there is no conceivable shortcut. It's time on this side versus skill on the other, not dollars vs dollars.
So, let's be constructive and discuss
I have trouble visualizing Slashdot as a place for anything constructive. "Accentuate the negative", that's my motto.
Life or no life, Mars almost certainly has no fossil fuels.
In all but the very most aggressive timeframes on which terraforming can be contemplated, Earth has no fossil fuels either. They might even be depleted in 75 years; but definately within 200 we 'll need to have already gotten an alternative working on this planet (or we'll be in no shape to aim elsewhere)
A source of energy is needed.
Why don't you mention fission/fusion? The safety-arguments against fission power on Earth are far weaker on Mars, where (at least initially) the whole place is one big Yucca Mountain.
Wind power might be useful, depending on the reliability of Martian windstorms.
That's very odd to mention, unless you were assuming that an atmosphere-thickening project (such as comet-dropping) were already underway. Wind farms are impractical on most of Earth, and yet it's hard to picture Mar's vastly thinner atmosphere pushing any turbines. (If this were a Venus colonization, then you'd have some force...)
Wind power is really just a special case of solar energy, anyhow. It takes advantage of . If the hopeful predictions about solar-cell efficiency pan out, then soon windmills will be obselete in favor of direct cells. (Note that power is needed by colonists of a terraformed planet as well, but their solar cells would be less efficient, as they're blocked by the thickened atmosphere)
What are your thoughts on the challenges I've identified here?
Sorry, it'd take far too much time & typing to do it justice. Such topics are so contingent on unpredictable future technology paths that they can play out in exponentially many ways. Will we have fusion power? Cryonic reanimation? Strong AI? Weak AI? Space elevators? Genetic biocompilers? Nanoassemblers? Peace on Earth? For each possible combination of answers, that's another answer one could write.
Beyond a small range of safe extrapolations (or gross applications of big-picture physics), all we can honestly say is "Anything's Possible". (Which is why I objected to your original message which apparently excluded a broad category of colonization methods from consideration)
In general, once you enter the physical (vs online) world, you create huge costs for attackers, who now have to travel to a real place, case a place out, avoid getting seen, etc.
This is why those people who try to create theft/vandalism analogies to argue for harsh punishment of online "piracy" / "hacking" are so off base.
Why on earth do you believe that the application itself should have any knowledge of this?
Why on earth are you beating your wife?
Meaning, he wrote nothing to suggest the misperception you accuse him of. Blame wasn't assigned to Mozilla specifically, but to the GUI environment as a whole, like the mysterious They.
I have seen in this thread are handled by KDM exactly how people are dreaming they would be implemented.
I doubt that, since KDM isn't even a window manager.
You probably meant "kwin", but that can demonstrate bad window-focus-handling too.
For a test, run XMMS and kwin. First set XMMS to be on all workspaces (a little difficult, because it doesn't draw standard borders, but try pressing Alt-F3). Next, open and close an auxilliary XMMS window, such as the playlist, and see if you can get the workspace setting to persist...
Does it have to follow me to the current active workspace?
The "best" behavior isn't clearly defined. Some people may really want their applications to be able to alert them of urgent events, even if switched to a different workspace. (Gaim is a superb example of this need, although you might consider it a special exception because it's frequently stored in a workspace-spanning taskbar)
2. Check "Prevent applications from stealing focus"
That's not a fix, it's a workaround which introduces other problems. Activating that change will sometimes prevent the user from noticing a legitimate emergency message from a background program.
The better solutions are more complex and invasive (and thus aren't backwards compatible). One idea is to have a dedicated screen area where small-but-informative messages can pop up, which will never cover an existing app.
Another related idea is to create all dialog boxes opened by a non-foreground app with a timer blocking input for a few seconds, so they won't accidently steal input meant for other programs. (Firefox already has a similar feature in a few situations)
look at the giant statues of various Buddha and many other prominent figures from each of the religions and how they are treated. They're gods, basically.
Technically they're not gods or deities, although for many purposes they're treated that way (and only in some branches, such as Amida, but certainly not Zen). "Buddha" isn't the name of one entity; it really translates as "saint": a normal human who recieved immortal powers for living especially virtuously.
For comparison, look at the Catholic church. Technically it's monothesistic, but you can go to shrines and find big statues of saints who are worshipped about like a lesser god from any pagan religion. Each one is reputed to grant prayers in a fairly narrow specialty.
In both Buddhism and Catholism, therefore, we can see that to enhance popularity with a public that enjoys paganism, saints have grown to take on characteristics of deities.
How can you see little difference between two parties that have a stark partisan divide on about 90% of votes?
That rhetorical question is unpersuasive on its own, because it ignores selection bias in creating votes. If votes were randomly selected amoung all possible decisions, you'd see the similarity more strongly ("Should we ban puppydogs?" "Should we invade Canada?" "Mexico?")
Votes are designed for the purpose of highlighting differences, not underscoring concenus. Positions which are shared will have one quick vote and then be forgotten, while divisive topics will be repeatedly re-voted in minorly different configurations across different levels of government. To a Marxist or Randian, both major parties appear indistinguishable.
After all, when was the last vote to decriminalize slavery? More seriously, even though the Democrats are somewhat more pro-gun-control, they wouldn't repeal the 2nd Amendment. And although Republicans are somewhat more states-rights, they wouldn't legalize secession. Neither of those two changes would drastically alter USA life, yet they're just two of the many topics where Dem and Rep parties are in complete alignment.
For comparison, look at the physical differences between you and me. 90% of the entries on a police identity-sheet would differ (hair/eye coloration, height/weight, gender). Yet from biological, anatomical, or genetic standpoints we're variously from 96 to 99.9995% identical.
The questions that get asked are those where the answer is likely to be different; if the result was already known, why bother asking/voting?
it was an attempt to prove to ea that we could create original properties
Ok, mistake #1: If you want to create an ORIGINAL property, don't take an EXISTING property and then shoot it up with a twist of dark attitude. That's not what "original" means.
You need huge amounts of heat
But that's counterproductive. The more heat added, the faster atmospheric molecules move, and the more readily they fly off into space- which with low planetary gravity would happen quickly anyhow.
If Mars COULD hold an atmosphere, it WOULD have an atmosphere... so the tent-based concept is even more important, compared to idealistic unenclosed terraforming.
Obligatory Futurama reference:
If you've seen Futurama, then you should've heard of
the wily "Gravity", who will foil all your plans to build an atmosphere on Mars.
You can't hold air without Gravity on your side. So start saving to build a diamond shell around the planet, or simply accumulate enough asteroids to bulk up the mass to the point of restraining an atmosphere... either way, LUDICROUSLY EXPENSIVE.
live in an actual biodome
You're the one who brought up "biodomes". I had only said "enclosed habitats", which are a much broader category, and include not only non-dome shapes, but totally different approaches to life.
Where did you get your figure for the area of NYC?
Web-searching isn't too hard, these days.
Also, you operate upon the mistaken assumption that NYC is self-contained.
Try reading next time before you reply. If I had made that assumption, the numbers would've come out an additional 30x factor in my favor.
(Furthermore, if I'd used my own interpretation of an "ultra-conservative population", as based on observations of self-sufficiency on isolated Pacific islands, then my side would come out an additional 100,000 times better. And given that future medical technology will include genetic engineering, it might be possible to survive with an even smaller headcount)
But anyway, the question is really so simple that there's no need to get into concrete numbers: both enclosed habitats (what you wrongly call "biodomes") and terraforming are trying to do the same thing: alter an area of Mars so that it's survivable for human life. The only difference is how big of an area needs to change. It it's obvious that 100 million people can live in a tiny fraction of Mar's total space.
So the question then becomes: it it easier to do this work on a rather small space, or on one 50 million times as large?
Hopefully I don't need to explain the significance of eight orders of magnitude.
And dollars would have been just fine, as long as you stick to today's dollars, because 2004 dollars are static.
No they aren't. Just look at the CPI: we can't even use modern dollars to measure cost-of-living 30 years ago!
If necessary, we could talk about specifics like kilotons of mass launched through space, or number of fusion reactors constructed; but it's foolhardy to pretend we can predict future technology well enough to assign relative prices to dissimilar commodities.
Overall, what bothers me is not that you think terraforming is so much easier than it ever could be, but that you've decided enclosed habitats are flat-out impossible. Given that terraforming is concievable, smaller-scale colonization should be possible too, and it's bizarre of you to totally dismiss that whole option.
PS. All serious terraforming-advocates I've ever read assume enclosed Mars colonies will be in place for the centuries during which the terraforming is underway.
(do this 1000 times probably and you're getting there)
No you're not. First, the mass of a comet is so small that you'd need many more to start collecting enough water to call it "earth like". Secondly, the gravity of Mars is so low (compared to its distance from the sun) that any air or vapor produced would quickly fly off into space.
That's the fatal flaw with standard terraforming theories: there's no way for so small an object to hold an atmosphere, unless it were also very cold.
Looking at a list of planets, it's clear that everything bigger than Venus has an atmosphere, and all of the smaller ones (which includes Mars, of course) have none. (Titan is small with an atmosphere, but it's 200C colder)
It was a serious debate.
There's no such thing as a serious debate with people who are EATING JESUS. The very idea is oxymoronic.
Because God made other fish appear.
Bible doesn't say so. It mentions no appearance of more fish, instead explicitly stating that the starting number of fish sufficed, without ever being depleted. That's a more abstact miracle than just conjuring up duplicates, because it defies the imagination to even picture the event.
But, if you like that view anyway, then God is making more Jesus-meat appear. None of those wafers is ALL of Jesus. (Each one is only 5g, and Jesus is at least 100kg) Since he's immortal, he heals instantaneously, whenever a bit is sliced off to eat in Communion.
There's a priest, an altar and Jesus being eaten in order to atone for sin. That's a sacrifice.
No, that's not a "sacrifice" by either the technical meaning ("to make sacred") or the common understanding ("to give up something of value").
One could somewhat say that the wafers are being consecrated (even though that actually happened earlier), which is like one definition of sacrifice, but it's the common meaning that matters regarding "Jesus's Sacrifice", and there is no similar offering of value during a Mass. You can call Mass a "rememberance of sacrifice", but not a sacrifice itself.
as here it is able to produce skips and strange decoding errors no matter how modern x86
Just re-confirming what you say: I have an AMD Athlon 64 at 2200 mhz, and arts audio is just as delayed and garbled as on a 500mhz P3.
However, I'm not overly impressed with their scalability, as the competing Gnome esound has achieved similar levels of performance.
Seeing as we have trouble funding individual biodomes capable of housing 10 people for a year here on Earth, my statement is accurate.
No it's not. Both are impossible today, so for you to single out just one of them as undoable is misleading.
I then conclude that we have a long-term decision to make regarding whether terraforming it or leaving it alone is best.
And, once again, that conclusion is wrong, because you have no call to restrict the options that way. It's intellectual dishonesty akin to the trilemma.
You somehow take the fact that we can't build workable biodomes today, and use it to claim that we'll NEVER be able to. We can't terraform today either (in fact, we can come closer to biodomes than terraforming) so why does an overall more-ambitious option get a free pass from you?
Let's be ultra-conservative and say that "significant" means no less than 100 million people
No, an ultra-conservative version of "significant" would be 10,000. After all, the total population of all humans has been above 100 million for under 1% of humanity's history.
Since you're the biodome expert, tell me how many biodomes it would take to support that level of human population for 50 years (which is short-term).
No, 200 years would be short-term for colonization. But the number of shelters required is the same for 1 year or 1000, so it doesn't matter. (The idea of proposing terraforming looks silly alongside a 50-year duration. Terraforming only begins to seem attractive if you're working in timescales of more than 10k years)
Then, tell me how much it would cost to construct said biodomes, ignoring the cost of either transporting the components from Earth or setting up manufacturing facilities on Mars.
But anyway, let's play your game, using the target of 100 mill. But we can't use money, because future inflation rates are inestimable, so we'll just need to compare the alternatives relative to each other.
Think about earth cities: NYC has 25 million people, and we want to support 4x on Mars. That needs 4x the space, and then add in another 4x factor to allow them to grow food (which is really more than needed). And then double it one more time to cover space for H2O and O2 recycling.
NYC area * (4 * 4 * 2) = 1200 km^2 * 32 = 33840 km^2. Mars has 144800000000 km^2 surface area.
So, my plan needs to alter only 0.0000003% as much land area as yours does. (If altitude were also taken into consideration, then an additional 50x factor comes in).
Since the technology for either approach defies current description, we just need to rely on common sense: does requiring a few 100 less kilometers of airtight walls outweigh needing to introduce 3,000,000x more air and water? (The total assumed mass of all solar-local comets can't make a dent in that)
Also remember why past biodome experiemnts failed: because ecologies are hard to predict. That's an argument against biodomes, but it's an even stronger danger with terraforming (on the order of 3 million times worse). If something goes wrong and resources begin to shift out of livable balance, the colonists of a "terraformed" Mars are stuck. But residents in a biodome can just add another nuclear reactor and use the power to mine/clean/grow/electrolyze whatever they're lacking. A controlled environment is a correctable environment.
Assuming that either of these tasks are possible at all, the biodome could be self-sufficient in 300 years, while the terraforming will still be ramping up 3000 years later.
Covering the entire surface of Mars save for the "national park" areas is ridiculous at best.
You may be eligible for the 2004 Twirp-Pudge Memorial Auto-Accusatory Medal!