3 times the mass, not 3 times the gravity. Gravity and mass are very different things. I see a surprising number of people here making that same mistake.
We have only ONE place that we know life flourishes.
NO. We have (at the moment) one planet where we know life flourishes. On this one planet though we have an incredible diversity of places where life flourishes. At every extremity where we least expect to find life we have eventually found it. There are a LOT of places and environments where life flourishes and of the places that we know of not all are particularly "suited" to "life".
All of that life is related, though. We have no evidence of separate origins of life. That means we have no clue of the likelihood of life on any other planet.
Two double-planet pairs in a system with as few spherical bodies (now that "planet" isn't socially acceptable;-) as ours is a hint that such arrangements might be common.
What do you mean "few"? If you count KBOs, we might have hundreds or thousands of spherical bodies.
I agree. I think the evolution of intelligent life is incredibly rare, and that the presence of Jupiter, the moon, tides, continental drift,changing climates, etc all play a fundamental role in making complex life possible, and intelligence worth the extreme cost.
But microbial life could easily be dead common in the universe, for all we know.
You mean Europe, where there are riots in the streets now because the governments there can no longer afford any more of the same failed big-government policies our President & Congress are busy trying to implement in the US, and that Europe is desperately trying to back out of before they collapse completely?
I think he explicitly mentioned Northern Europe. Greece is not Northern Europe.
What's your alternative to bailing out GM and wall street? Once the house is on fire, there's fuck all you can do in the short term.
You could nationalize them. Then you get some value and control in return for your money. And once you're in control, kick out the bad apples without any golden parachutes.
"Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it,"
I continued reading, but it was indeed a remarkably stupid thing to say. He could have said 90%, 95%, or even 99%.
In my opinion, it's not 100% until we've observed oxygen in the atmosphere or some other indisputable sign of life. For now, it's mostly guess work and assumptions about the likelihood of life. I'd say it's very likely the planet can sustain some form of life. But that's no guarantee.
You might be right about an archer, but I don't think there's a hell of a lot a swordsman's gonna do about an M16.
I think you've got that backwards. An M16 is superior in every possible way, at any possible range, to a bow. But at close quarters, I'm not sure an M16 would really be better than a good sword.
You just don't go around openly rubbishing former employers like that as it makes prospective employers wary. After all you'll probably rubbish them when you're done too.
I thought he was pretty positive about his time at Sun. Oracle sucks, of course, but that's no surprise to anyone. His remarks about IBM are funny, but again, no big surprise. The only prospective employers that need to be wary of him are the ones that suck, and he won't want to work there anyway. So it's actually a very effective filter.
I'm not convinced Netherland is in the same league. It's where I live, and I tell you: we're headed towards hell in a hand basket here. Just take a look at the new government coalition they're forming here.
I have similar doubts about Denmark, but I know too little of Danish politics. Or Norwegian or Finnish, for that matter. But Sweden keeps sounding better and better.
You go ahead and do that once, and tell us how many people get physically injured in the process.
No idea, but the perpetrators will likely get locked up for quite some time. We don't like people using threats of violence to get their way around here.
Edison bulbs are older but still superior tech to CFLs, since they eliminate mercury poisoning, dim turnons (waiting 3-4 minutes until I can see my book),
3-4 minutes before you can see your book? Maybe it's time to replace that bulb after 20 years. Modern CFLs are quite a bit better than that.
premature heat-death from enclosed fixtures
I think you have that backwards. If heat death is an issue, that a good reason to move from incandescents to CFLs, because they're quite a bit cooler. I've had fittings that would quickly destroy any incandescent bulb, but would work fine with CFLs.
and high cost (about ten times more).
10 times? Do you think your 30-cent incandescents will last as long as a CFL?
I get it that you don't like CFLs much, and I'm not going to pretend they're perfect in every possible way, but you're wildly exaggerating, and mostly wrong.
Or do other people similarly dislike CFCs? In the cold they take several minutes to come on. The light they give off is harsh. And, at least where I am,
Where is that? The 1980s? There are plenty of CFLs that give "warm" light. And modern ones don't take minutes to come on either (although it does get a bit worse with age).
Even so, CFLs aren't the solution. LED lights use even less energy, and you can do ridiculously cool stuff with them. The big downside is that you need special dimmers, though.
I'm not sure if the law really does all that much harm, though I admit it doesn't do a whole lot of good either.
I mean, I'm as much against incandescent bulbs as the next guy. I'm trying to get rid of all incandescent and halogen lighting in my home, but CFLs aren't always the best choice either, and while there are a lot of really awesome LED ideas around, good, practical LED lights are still rare and often expensive. I know it's the way of the future and all, but the light in my toilet isn't on all that much, and I'm not convinced a $15 LED light really helps the environment that much more than an incandescent in that situation.
My sick leave is fine, because it's handled by law. But my parental leave (no idea how to translate that; it's not maternity leave) is unpaid, whereas my wife's is 75% paid. I don't think she's a union member even, but she works for the government, so unions have negotiated all the contracts already, and she gets way more benefits than I do in my completely ununionized line of work (software).
And how do you "get a new union" when the current union has a legal contract saying that the employer is not allowed to hire anyone in your line of work who isn't a member of that current union?
Have that contract declared illegal. Many countries have anti-cartel laws.
Scary that it's even like that in Denmark. Dutch unions are very different. There are several, and they compete and cooperate in the same labour market. Unions negotiate for their members, but the results of those negotiations are also binding for non-members (which those non-members generally like - it's good to work in a unionized market here).
It has on occasion happened that the members didn't like the results their union negotiated for them. They called their own strike, formed their own union, renegotiated, and then merged with their original union again.
Strikes very rarely happen. Unions negotiate with employer organisations and the government all the time, and usually problems are caught and fixed before they get way out of hand. Unions are, as far as I know, completely opt-in, and they generally have a very positive effect on the work environment. When they don't, protests usually come quickly, and they have to fix it.
Excuse me, but aren't those things criminal? It looks like you're confusing unions with the mob. Maybe unions where you live really are like the mob, but that's by no means universal.
There are such things as good unions. The handle contract negotiations for their members (where I live they apply equally to non-members, who tend to be quite happy about that). And when they call for a strike, I think they even reimburse non-members for their lost income (non-members will have to chose whether they join the strike and lose income, or go to work and sit there on their own). Good unions do not demand any kind of exclusivity, and personally I think any kind of exclusivity contract needs to be illegal. (Unfortunately it rarely it.)
Slashdot Mirror
German SpaceBrau
Shouldn't that be Raumbrau?
It's questionable to what extent it's still "us" that survive.
3 times the mass, not 3 times the gravity. Gravity and mass are very different things. I see a surprising number of people here making that same mistake.
Punctuated Equilibrium suggests that changes in the environment are the biggest driving forces in evolution, however.
We have only ONE place that we know life flourishes.
NO. We have (at the moment) one planet where we know life flourishes. On this one planet though we have an incredible diversity of places where life flourishes. At every extremity where we least expect to find life we have eventually found it. There are a LOT of places and environments where life flourishes and of the places that we know of not all are particularly "suited" to "life".
All of that life is related, though. We have no evidence of separate origins of life. That means we have no clue of the likelihood of life on any other planet.
Two double-planet pairs in a system with as few spherical bodies (now that "planet" isn't socially acceptable ;-) as ours is a hint that such arrangements might be common.
What do you mean "few"? If you count KBOs, we might have hundreds or thousands of spherical bodies.
I agree. I think the evolution of intelligent life is incredibly rare, and that the presence of Jupiter, the moon, tides, continental drift,changing climates, etc all play a fundamental role in making complex life possible, and intelligence worth the extreme cost.
But microbial life could easily be dead common in the universe, for all we know.
-- Margaret Thatcher
Both Europe AND the US needs leaders like that now more than ever.
I hope you're kidding. People like Maggie Thatcher are what got us into this mess.
Go to Europe some time.
You mean Europe, where there are riots in the streets now because the governments there can no longer afford any more of the same failed big-government policies our President & Congress are busy trying to implement in the US, and that Europe is desperately trying to back out of before they collapse completely?
I think he explicitly mentioned Northern Europe. Greece is not Northern Europe.
What's your alternative to bailing out GM and wall street? Once the house is on fire, there's fuck all you can do in the short term.
You could nationalize them. Then you get some value and control in return for your money. And once you're in control, kick out the bad apples without any golden parachutes.
This is where I stopped reading:
"Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it,"
I continued reading, but it was indeed a remarkably stupid thing to say. He could have said 90%, 95%, or even 99%.
In my opinion, it's not 100% until we've observed oxygen in the atmosphere or some other indisputable sign of life. For now, it's mostly guess work and assumptions about the likelihood of life. I'd say it's very likely the planet can sustain some form of life. But that's no guarantee.
You might be right about an archer, but I don't think there's a hell of a lot a swordsman's gonna do about an M16.
I think you've got that backwards. An M16 is superior in every possible way, at any possible range, to a bow. But at close quarters, I'm not sure an M16 would really be better than a good sword.
You just don't go around openly rubbishing former employers like that as it makes prospective employers wary. After all you'll probably rubbish them when you're done too.
I thought he was pretty positive about his time at Sun. Oracle sucks, of course, but that's no surprise to anyone. His remarks about IBM are funny, but again, no big surprise. The only prospective employers that need to be wary of him are the ones that suck, and he won't want to work there anyway. So it's actually a very effective filter.
I'm not convinced Netherland is in the same league. It's where I live, and I tell you: we're headed towards hell in a hand basket here. Just take a look at the new government coalition they're forming here.
I have similar doubts about Denmark, but I know too little of Danish politics. Or Norwegian or Finnish, for that matter. But Sweden keeps sounding better and better.
sweden is also in europe by the way.
It is, but not all of Europe is like Sweden. Most of it isn't.
You go ahead and do that once, and tell us how many people get physically injured in the process.
No idea, but the perpetrators will likely get locked up for quite some time. We don't like people using threats of violence to get their way around here.
And don't forget the much, much higher cost for LED lighting solutions.
Definitely. I expect that cost will go down a lot in the coming years, but it's a bit to early to force people to buy it.
Edison bulbs are older but still superior tech to CFLs, since they eliminate mercury poisoning, dim turnons (waiting 3-4 minutes until I can see my book),
3-4 minutes before you can see your book? Maybe it's time to replace that bulb after 20 years. Modern CFLs are quite a bit better than that.
premature heat-death from enclosed fixtures
I think you have that backwards. If heat death is an issue, that a good reason to move from incandescents to CFLs, because they're quite a bit cooler. I've had fittings that would quickly destroy any incandescent bulb, but would work fine with CFLs.
and high cost (about ten times more).
10 times? Do you think your 30-cent incandescents will last as long as a CFL?
I get it that you don't like CFLs much, and I'm not going to pretend they're perfect in every possible way, but you're wildly exaggerating, and mostly wrong.
Or do other people similarly dislike CFCs? In the cold they take several minutes to come on. The light they give off is harsh. And, at least where I am,
Where is that? The 1980s? There are plenty of CFLs that give "warm" light. And modern ones don't take minutes to come on either (although it does get a bit worse with age).
Even so, CFLs aren't the solution. LED lights use even less energy, and you can do ridiculously cool stuff with them. The big downside is that you need special dimmers, though.
I'm not sure if the law really does all that much harm, though I admit it doesn't do a whole lot of good either.
I mean, I'm as much against incandescent bulbs as the next guy. I'm trying to get rid of all incandescent and halogen lighting in my home, but CFLs aren't always the best choice either, and while there are a lot of really awesome LED ideas around, good, practical LED lights are still rare and often expensive. I know it's the way of the future and all, but the light in my toilet isn't on all that much, and I'm not convinced a $15 LED light really helps the environment that much more than an incandescent in that situation.
Electric resistance heat is ridiculously expensive.
That depends on where you live. I've heard that in some countries, electric heating can be cheaper than gas.
Non-union employees - how's your sick leave?
My sick leave is fine, because it's handled by law. But my parental leave (no idea how to translate that; it's not maternity leave) is unpaid, whereas my wife's is 75% paid. I don't think she's a union member even, but she works for the government, so unions have negotiated all the contracts already, and she gets way more benefits than I do in my completely ununionized line of work (software).
And how do you "get a new union" when the current union has a legal contract saying that the employer is not allowed to hire anyone in your line of work who isn't a member of that current union?
Have that contract declared illegal. Many countries have anti-cartel laws.
Scary that it's even like that in Denmark. Dutch unions are very different. There are several, and they compete and cooperate in the same labour market. Unions negotiate for their members, but the results of those negotiations are also binding for non-members (which those non-members generally like - it's good to work in a unionized market here).
It has on occasion happened that the members didn't like the results their union negotiated for them. They called their own strike, formed their own union, renegotiated, and then merged with their original union again.
Strikes very rarely happen. Unions negotiate with employer organisations and the government all the time, and usually problems are caught and fixed before they get way out of hand. Unions are, as far as I know, completely opt-in, and they generally have a very positive effect on the work environment. When they don't, protests usually come quickly, and they have to fix it.
Excuse me, but aren't those things criminal? It looks like you're confusing unions with the mob. Maybe unions where you live really are like the mob, but that's by no means universal.
There are such things as good unions. The handle contract negotiations for their members (where I live they apply equally to non-members, who tend to be quite happy about that). And when they call for a strike, I think they even reimburse non-members for their lost income (non-members will have to chose whether they join the strike and lose income, or go to work and sit there on their own). Good unions do not demand any kind of exclusivity, and personally I think any kind of exclusivity contract needs to be illegal. (Unfortunately it rarely it.)