The obvious solution to this is to not climb aboard the craft until it's reached a decent speed. Launch it a decade or so before you wish to fly anywhere and have it do trips around the sun and back building up it's speed. When it's going fast enough build a very fast short range rocket to match it's speed and allow the astronauts to board.
I'm not sure it's the same for kids though, nowadays if I manage to do any excercise then it does indeed lead to increased lazing about afterwards but it wasn't like that when I was a kid.
From the age of 8 or 9 onwards I'd spend 1 and a half hours every day doing quite strenuous excercise in the swimming pool and somedays go in the mornings for an hour before school as well. Once swimming finished on Saturday morning we'd go and have breakfast and then in the summer spend the rest of the day on our bikes in the park. I really think you can keep excercising more or less indefinitely when you're a kid.
I was at school in the 1980s when the British educational establishment was firmly in the grip of people who believed everyone was equal and that competition was a bad thing.
Consequently sport at school during this time was a joke, more often than not the teachers were on strike anyway and when they were around all they did was teach the bare minimum, they never encouraged anyone who showed an interest in any particular sport to take it any further and on the odd occasion when schools did get over their hatred of competition and arrange athletics meets, swimming galas or rugby/cricket/football matches they would basically announce that the competition was happening and tell anyone who was interested in taking part to put their name down. They would then choose the team/participants from whoever put their names down first and expect the pupils to make their own way to the event.
Thanks to these policies I once attended a swimming gala with 3 other people who basically couldn't swim despite there being other people in the school who could. None of the teaching staff from the school had turned up and they had told us the wrong time so we could only enter the relays. In the freestyle relay by the time they'd finished doggy paddling the first 3 lengths we were way way behind and came second last at which point we discovered no one but me could swim anything other than doggy paddle very well and they were so disheartened from the first relay no one wanted to even bother with the medley relay so we went home and that was the one and only swimming competition we had at school.
I also went to an athletics meet which had been organised by a teacher who was nothing to do with the PE department where they had picked me to run the mile race despite the fact that I was easily beaten each week in the PE lessons by another lad who spent most of his evenings at a running club. The PE teachers didn't think he deserved to take part in school sports events ( because he wasn't exactly an attentive pupil academically ) so I lost a race which I'm pretty sure he could have won.
Competition is good and in sport it's absolutely essential because otherwise it just becomes a more or less pointless excercise in which everyone loses interest.
First of all you have no idea at all what my present behaviour pattern is but assuming you are meaning to address the behaviour patterns of the average Britain then you will have to concede that our behaviour as a society changes constantly as a matter of course, It's hard for you to argue that we prefer to cling to some static behavioural pattern and need to invent excuses to justify this stasis. Look at the last 10 years, or the last 200 years and you will see that there is much more evidence of society changing than there is of it resisting change.
Once again, if we are considering embarking on a programme which will effect a global change it seems to me that it is better to make sure we understand both the impact and the risks associated with either making those changes or not. Please explain what the problem is with this approach ?
I am not arguing that global warming does not exist, neither is the scientist in the article and neither were any of the scientists taking part in the documentary mentioned in the article. We need to understand what is driving this change, how its likely to play out and the risks associated with it and we do not need to be pressured into premature and ill considered actions which may have negative impacts elsewhere.
I think in general it's a good idea to take action yourself to live more efficiently, energy saving light bulbs, riding or cycling to work etc but these are actions we can take which are not going to have a impact elsewhere. What we need to be careful about is larger scale reactions which people suggest our governments should be taking.
Actually, if you changed your behavior today, you would still have 20-40 years of continuing negative impacts. They would slow very gradually, and then, assuming the world's oceans and seas don't become too acidic to support sea life (fish, coral, etc), stop accelerating. I doubt you have any evidence at all to back this claim up with the level of specificity you are predicting.
As I said I'm not ignoring anything whereas you seem to be ignoring everything you hear which you don't agree with.
I'm not sure you're actually reading what I and others are saying to you.
The number of Africans likely to die from HIV, TB or Malaria has nothing to do with this debate unless you think that there is likely to be a change in this statistic based on either global warming its self or action taken to alleviate it.
I'm not sure where you think you've read me saying that irrelevant statistics about the number of Africans contracting diseases means I think everyone should buy larger SUV's, this is a nonsensical statement.
In your conlcusion you make some unsubstantiated claim that people who don't agree with you are certain to be lying which is a state of mind I'd expect to see in a fundamentalist member of the Taleban rather than someone who's opinion I should value in a debate which is of great importance to todays societies throughout the world.
My point, once again, is that we should assess the situation holistically and consider the results of our actions before we take them and not allow pressure groups, from either side of the debate, to prematurely force our hand into what could be extremely harmful actions for societies across the globe, not least our own. This seems to me to be a reasonable position to take and I'd like to know why you appear to be so opposed to it ?
You didn't address his point which was that by encouraging developing communities in Africa to do without their substantial fossil fuel reserves is equally likely to lead to deaths and hardship for the people in those communities as may also be experienced by those communities elsewhere inundated by global warming derived flooding.
This is one issue which is not simply black and white, if we are going to take action which we expect to have a global impact then we need to consider the global impact of those actions and this can be done better in an atmosphere where people can consider their actions and their motivations impartially without partisan pressure groups shouting the decision makers down if they don't make decisions which fit with their beliefs.
I'm afraid you're talking nonsense, people may be forced to migrate because of the effects of a global climate change but not because of scientists disagreeing with the popular scientific consenus.
Scientists like this guy aren't denying that we are undergoing a climate change but they do disagree about the underlying cause of the change which is something they are perfectly entitled to do.
Having watched the documentary mentioned in the article I have some sympathy with the viewpoint that this whole issue has been hijacked by a number of pressure groups and political associations which is leading to an overly emotional and hysterical treatment of the entire issue.
Personally I am in two minds on the subject, I see a lot of people saying the case is comprehensively proven who want to decide what action we should now take and also a lot of people saying that the case isn't yet proven and there are a number of scientific arguments which still need to be overcome.
What I would like is for the hysteria and the political posturing to stop and instead promote a more balanced approach to considering the scientific arguments.
Even if global warming is largely due to human activities I don't believe and I have not seen any evidence to support the view that the effects are going to be anywhere near as catastrophic as is made out in various news reports and in the media, e.g. huge tidal waves towering over the Thames Barrier and destroying the City of London seem to me to be based more on a need for sensastional television than anything else.
"Yes your honour I apparently was ordered to construct 200 hundred death camps and eliminate 30% of the population but I have no recollection of who gave that order."
"Your honour, it appears that records were kept detailing the implementation of the death camps and the specific instructions and conversations between all parties. However unfortunately these documents were DRM protected and have been irretrievably lost when the system detected a surrender situation had occured. Not to mention that they were entirely innapropriately stored in a series of gigangtic Excel files with a lot of VBA code which would make the job of deciphering them impossible even with the original files."
But on the bright side once you're caught wandering aimlessly around the battlefield having forgotten all your basic training when they capture you you can just take a drug which wipes all knowledge of any sensitive information they may otherwise torture you to obtain.
Jack should have some idea how hard it is to support Windows since his column in the Guardian is an advice column telling people how to fix their Windows problems. From time to time people ask him whether or not they should switch to Linux and he always advises them to stick with Windows so it's fair to say he is a bit of an adovocate for Microsoft.
I haven't seen that site before but based on my experience of other sites where people post their UFO experiences every single posting on there is likely to be complete and utter nonsense.
The most obvious solution, given how pervasive and abrasive the moon dust is, is to design space suits like snake skins where you simply shed the outer layer in the airlock and dump it outside onto the moon leaving the inner suit dust free for you to procede into the living area and change into uniform.
You'd need some clever way of unpeeling the skin from the suit without spreading the dust everywhere but I'm sure that's perfectly possible.
A fair point but my cat can push my PC off the desk, cover it in firewood, pour on petrol and set it alight destroying not just my PC but my house and possibly my neighbours houses into the bargain. I've even caught it dragging a couple of kilos of semtex to my off site backup locations with a joyful gleam in it's eye but luckily I was able to distract it with tuna.
For this reason I've now banned my cat from playing with matches. I had a maths teacher once who claimed his cat could do quadratic equations better than anyone in his class which did make me wonder that if he was able to teach his cat so successfully to do maths why he couldn't teach his class to do it so well, I suggested he may have had a more fulfilling career in a circus at which he looked surprised and said he thought that's what he had done.
I get that with Firefox too, I think you can install a download plugin for it which lets you specify exactly where files should go and I think it can put them in different locations dependent on the file type.
Personally I use Konqueror to download stuff because it lets you choose where to put it or you could you use KGet in conjunction with Konqueror which also lets you choose the destination based on the filetype.
Really, are you completely sure about that ? I mean even though Quincy was only a medical examiner he managed to solve a lot of the cases, Mrs Marple is only a little old lady with no connection at all to the police and yet they're more than happy for her to do most of their work for them not to mention Poirot who has a similar arrangement where he can direct the actions of the police almost totally. Judge John Deed may well be a judge but that can't stop him solving cases.
I really can't believe you seem to be suggesting that these roles are really strictly delinated and that in real life it's not exactly like it's portrayed in the programs.
Only if you choose to define yourself by that hunk of meat. Only if what you choose to define yourself as makes any actual difference to the reality of your situation, an assertion for which there is no actual evidence at all. I could choose to define myself as a cornfield but I won't have a magnificent crop to harvest come harvest time no matter how much I believe I might.
I think of the soul as the electromagnetic field that controls/is controlled by/results from the firing of neurons in your brain. If we accept this... You may well think that but I think otherwise so why should anyone accept your explanation rather than mine ? It makes no difference what explanation we believe, there is no evidence whatsoever for the existence of souls.
Well usually such people become amoral self absorbed automatons willing to commit any atrocity no matter how horrific provided their religous fervour told them it was OK in Gods eyes.
Actually most people didn't ever believe the world was flat, long before Christopher Columbus everyone acted as though they were perfectly aware that the Earth was a globe, sailing ships being able to see the sails of other boats before the hulls when the ships were over the horizon was a pretty good clue.
I'm not sure boob is really typically British insult, I have a German friend with the same trouble who believes that the word ignoramus is in common enough use to pass himself off as a native although he is sadly mistaken in this.
For future reference you could try using words like:
Fuckwit, wanker, bastard, fuckhead, tosser, cunt, spanner, moron, dickhead or even shit for brains.
For example:
"The commentator on the Inquirer Web site is obviously a total fucking wanker. The fuckwit is cheering theft which is in its own right sleazy. Worse, the cretin seems to be happy that the legitimate and paying Windows Vista customers are going to be at best confused and worst case screwed because some idiot stole their key. What a fucking cock !"
I must admit I probably have the same problem in my belief that most Scottish people curse each other by calling them sassenachs.
Re:Artificial intelligence and intellectual proper
on
Marvin Minsky On AI
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· Score: 1
Our thought processes do indeed seem to take a measurable amount of time and although computers today are able to do maths very quickly I don't think this is any guarantee that they would be able to think conciously at that speed, at least not immediately.
If you look at nature in general evolution has led to a lot of very successful solutions for the various environmental factors on Earth and our current technology is still largely incapable of building anything as effective as a bird, for instance, at flying around, catching food, making baby birds etc so it's fair to think that our intelligence is also a very good way of creating intelligence which is going to be very hard to beat with current technology or that of the immediate future.
Re:Artificial intelligence and intellectual proper
on
Marvin Minsky On AI
·
· Score: 1
Any AI would have the self same survival imperatives that we do.
It's perfectly possible for a human to live hooked up to a life support machine and reliant on doctors for sustenance and maintenance but given the chance most people do not choose to live like this.
An AI would definitely need energy of some description and I can't see any reason why, if it was truly intelligent, it would be content to rely on the good nature of it's creators to supply it for it.
Perhaps the 1st AI's will be intelligent but naive and stupid, like small children and Americans, and won't realise the options open to it and the danger it faces but presumably later ones would realise this.
It would be a little daft designing an AI which spoke in a languauge no-one understood and experienced and entirely different range of sensations to those that a human does. Not only would we never be able to communicate with it but even if we did there would be no points of reference for us to agree on.
Any machine AI would have as much use for touch, taste and smell as it did for sight and hearing since each of them provide it with information about the world around it which, unless you're going to construct AI's which spend their entire lives in the machine equivalent of a locked cupboard with no interaction at all with the outside world, is the only way they're going to be any use to anyone - themselves included.
Slashdot Mirror
The obvious solution to this is to not climb aboard the craft until it's reached a decent speed. Launch it a decade or so before you wish to fly anywhere and have it do trips around the sun and back building up it's speed. When it's going fast enough build a very fast short range rocket to match it's speed and allow the astronauts to board.
I'm not sure it's the same for kids though, nowadays if I manage to do any excercise then it does indeed lead to increased lazing about afterwards but it wasn't like that when I was a kid.
From the age of 8 or 9 onwards I'd spend 1 and a half hours every day doing quite strenuous excercise in the swimming pool and somedays go in the mornings for an hour before school as well. Once swimming finished on Saturday morning we'd go and have breakfast and then in the summer spend the rest of the day on our bikes in the park. I really think you can keep excercising more or less indefinitely when you're a kid.
I was at school in the 1980s when the British educational establishment was firmly in the grip of people who believed everyone was equal and that competition was a bad thing.
Consequently sport at school during this time was a joke, more often than not the teachers were on strike anyway and when they were around all they did was teach the bare minimum, they never encouraged anyone who showed an interest in any particular sport to take it any further and on the odd occasion when schools did get over their hatred of competition and arrange athletics meets, swimming galas or rugby/cricket/football matches they would basically announce that the competition was happening and tell anyone who was interested in taking part to put their name down. They would then choose the team/participants from whoever put their names down first and expect the pupils to make their own way to the event.
Thanks to these policies I once attended a swimming gala with 3 other people who basically couldn't swim despite there being other people in the school who could. None of the teaching staff from the school had turned up and they had told us the wrong time so we could only enter the relays. In the freestyle relay by the time they'd finished doggy paddling the first 3 lengths we were way way behind and came second last at which point we discovered no one but me could swim anything other than doggy paddle very well and they were so disheartened from the first relay no one wanted to even bother with the medley relay so we went home and that was the one and only swimming competition we had at school.
I also went to an athletics meet which had been organised by a teacher who was nothing to do with the PE department where they had picked me to run the mile race despite the fact that I was easily beaten each week in the PE lessons by another lad who spent most of his evenings at a running club. The PE teachers didn't think he deserved to take part in school sports events ( because he wasn't exactly an attentive pupil academically ) so I lost a race which I'm pretty sure he could have won.
Competition is good and in sport it's absolutely essential because otherwise it just becomes a more or less pointless excercise in which everyone loses interest.
Once again, if we are considering embarking on a programme which will effect a global change it seems to me that it is better to make sure we understand both the impact and the risks associated with either making those changes or not. Please explain what the problem is with this approach ?
I am not arguing that global warming does not exist, neither is the scientist in the article and neither were any of the scientists taking part in the documentary mentioned in the article. We need to understand what is driving this change, how its likely to play out and the risks associated with it and we do not need to be pressured into premature and ill considered actions which may have negative impacts elsewhere.
I think in general it's a good idea to take action yourself to live more efficiently, energy saving light bulbs, riding or cycling to work etc but these are actions we can take which are not going to have a impact elsewhere. What we need to be careful about is larger scale reactions which people suggest our governments should be taking. Actually, if you changed your behavior today, you would still have 20-40 years of continuing negative impacts. They would slow very gradually, and then, assuming the world's oceans and seas don't become too acidic to support sea life (fish, coral, etc), stop accelerating. I doubt you have any evidence at all to back this claim up with the level of specificity you are predicting.
As I said I'm not ignoring anything whereas you seem to be ignoring everything you hear which you don't agree with.
I'm not sure you're actually reading what I and others are saying to you.
The number of Africans likely to die from HIV, TB or Malaria has nothing to do with this debate unless you think that there is likely to be a change in this statistic based on either global warming its self or action taken to alleviate it.
I'm not sure where you think you've read me saying that irrelevant statistics about the number of Africans contracting diseases means I think everyone should buy larger SUV's, this is a nonsensical statement.
In your conlcusion you make some unsubstantiated claim that people who don't agree with you are certain to be lying which is a state of mind I'd expect to see in a fundamentalist member of the Taleban rather than someone who's opinion I should value in a debate which is of great importance to todays societies throughout the world.
My point, once again, is that we should assess the situation holistically and consider the results of our actions before we take them and not allow pressure groups, from either side of the debate, to prematurely force our hand into what could be extremely harmful actions for societies across the globe, not least our own. This seems to me to be a reasonable position to take and I'd like to know why you appear to be so opposed to it ?
You didn't address his point which was that by encouraging developing communities in Africa to do without their substantial fossil fuel reserves is equally likely to lead to deaths and hardship for the people in those communities as may also be experienced by those communities elsewhere inundated by global warming derived flooding.
This is one issue which is not simply black and white, if we are going to take action which we expect to have a global impact then we need to consider the global impact of those actions and this can be done better in an atmosphere where people can consider their actions and their motivations impartially without partisan pressure groups shouting the decision makers down if they don't make decisions which fit with their beliefs.
I'm afraid you're talking nonsense, people may be forced to migrate because of the effects of a global climate change but not because of scientists disagreeing with the popular scientific consenus.
Scientists like this guy aren't denying that we are undergoing a climate change but they do disagree about the underlying cause of the change which is something they are perfectly entitled to do.
Having watched the documentary mentioned in the article I have some sympathy with the viewpoint that this whole issue has been hijacked by a number of pressure groups and political associations which is leading to an overly emotional and hysterical treatment of the entire issue.
Personally I am in two minds on the subject, I see a lot of people saying the case is comprehensively proven who want to decide what action we should now take and also a lot of people saying that the case isn't yet proven and there are a number of scientific arguments which still need to be overcome.
What I would like is for the hysteria and the political posturing to stop and instead promote a more balanced approach to considering the scientific arguments.
Even if global warming is largely due to human activities I don't believe and I have not seen any evidence to support the view that the effects are going to be anywhere near as catastrophic as is made out in various news reports and in the media, e.g. huge tidal waves towering over the Thames Barrier and destroying the City of London seem to me to be based more on a need for sensastional television than anything else.
A very handy use I would think.
"Yes your honour I apparently was ordered to construct 200 hundred death camps and eliminate 30% of the population but I have no recollection of who gave that order."
"Your honour, it appears that records were kept detailing the implementation of the death camps and the specific instructions and conversations between all parties. However unfortunately these documents were DRM protected and have been irretrievably lost when the system detected a surrender situation had occured. Not to mention that they were entirely innapropriately stored in a series of gigangtic Excel files with a lot of VBA code which would make the job of deciphering them impossible even with the original files."
But on the bright side once you're caught wandering aimlessly around the battlefield having forgotten all your basic training when they capture you you can just take a drug which wipes all knowledge of any sensitive information they may otherwise torture you to obtain.
Jack should have some idea how hard it is to support Windows since his column in the Guardian is an advice column telling people how to fix their Windows problems. From time to time people ask him whether or not they should switch to Linux and he always advises them to stick with Windows so it's fair to say he is a bit of an adovocate for Microsoft.
I haven't seen that site before but based on my experience of other sites where people post their UFO experiences every single posting on there is likely to be complete and utter nonsense.
The most obvious solution, given how pervasive and abrasive the moon dust is, is to design space suits like snake skins where you simply shed the outer layer in the airlock and dump it outside onto the moon leaving the inner suit dust free for you to procede into the living area and change into uniform.
You'd need some clever way of unpeeling the skin from the suit without spreading the dust everywhere but I'm sure that's perfectly possible.
A fair point but my cat can push my PC off the desk, cover it in firewood, pour on petrol and set it alight destroying not just my PC but my house and possibly my neighbours houses into the bargain. I've even caught it dragging a couple of kilos of semtex to my off site backup locations with a joyful gleam in it's eye but luckily I was able to distract it with tuna.
For this reason I've now banned my cat from playing with matches. I had a maths teacher once who claimed his cat could do quadratic equations better than anyone in his class which did make me wonder that if he was able to teach his cat so successfully to do maths why he couldn't teach his class to do it so well, I suggested he may have had a more fulfilling career in a circus at which he looked surprised and said he thought that's what he had done.
I get that with Firefox too, I think you can install a download plugin for it which lets you specify exactly where files should go and I think it can put them in different locations dependent on the file type.
Personally I use Konqueror to download stuff because it lets you choose where to put it or you could you use KGet in conjunction with Konqueror which also lets you choose the destination based on the filetype.
Really, are you completely sure about that ? I mean even though Quincy was only a medical examiner he managed to solve a lot of the cases, Mrs Marple is only a little old lady with no connection at all to the police and yet they're more than happy for her to do most of their work for them not to mention Poirot who has a similar arrangement where he can direct the actions of the police almost totally. Judge John Deed may well be a judge but that can't stop him solving cases.
I really can't believe you seem to be suggesting that these roles are really strictly delinated and that in real life it's not exactly like it's portrayed in the programs.
Bollocks does he, how do you explain Ian Paisley then ?
Well usually such people become amoral self absorbed automatons willing to commit any atrocity no matter how horrific provided their religous fervour told them it was OK in Gods eyes.
Actually most people didn't ever believe the world was flat, long before Christopher Columbus everyone acted as though they were perfectly aware that the Earth was a globe, sailing ships being able to see the sails of other boats before the hulls when the ships were over the horizon was a pretty good clue.
A good alternative to "Bloody Hell" is "Ruddy Nora" or in situations "Cripes !"
I'm not sure boob is really typically British insult, I have a German friend with the same trouble who believes that the word ignoramus is in common enough use to pass himself off as a native although he is sadly mistaken in this.
For future reference you could try using words like:
Fuckwit, wanker, bastard, fuckhead, tosser, cunt, spanner, moron, dickhead or even shit for brains.
For example:
"The commentator on the Inquirer Web site is obviously a total fucking wanker. The fuckwit is cheering theft which is in its own right sleazy. Worse, the cretin seems to be happy that the legitimate and paying Windows Vista customers are going to be at best confused and worst case screwed because some idiot stole their key. What a fucking cock !"
I must admit I probably have the same problem in my belief that most Scottish people curse each other by calling them sassenachs.
Our thought processes do indeed seem to take a measurable amount of time and although computers today are able to do maths very quickly I don't think this is any guarantee that they would be able to think conciously at that speed, at least not immediately.
If you look at nature in general evolution has led to a lot of very successful solutions for the various environmental factors on Earth and our current technology is still largely incapable of building anything as effective as a bird, for instance, at flying around, catching food, making baby birds etc so it's fair to think that our intelligence is also a very good way of creating intelligence which is going to be very hard to beat with current technology or that of the immediate future.
Any AI would have the self same survival imperatives that we do.
It's perfectly possible for a human to live hooked up to a life support machine and reliant on doctors for sustenance and maintenance but given the chance most people do not choose to live like this.
An AI would definitely need energy of some description and I can't see any reason why, if it was truly intelligent, it would be content to rely on the good nature of it's creators to supply it for it.
Perhaps the 1st AI's will be intelligent but naive and stupid, like small children and Americans, and won't realise the options open to it and the danger it faces but presumably later ones would realise this.
It would be a little daft designing an AI which spoke in a languauge no-one understood and experienced and entirely different range of sensations to those that a human does. Not only would we never be able to communicate with it but even if we did there would be no points of reference for us to agree on.
Any machine AI would have as much use for touch, taste and smell as it did for sight and hearing since each of them provide it with information about the world around it which, unless you're going to construct AI's which spend their entire lives in the machine equivalent of a locked cupboard with no interaction at all with the outside world, is the only way they're going to be any use to anyone - themselves included.