I was actually thinking more along the lines of a logistics issue. Storing something for 10,000 years is hard work. The Egyptians thought their pharoah was a god, and even he didn't last 1000 years undisturbed. I can't imagine how we could keep people away from garbage for 10,000 years if a god is up for grabs after 1/10th that time.
I would hope scientists would also be looking for a way to tap the energy off the burning of the coal vs superheating turbine water. How much energy is wasted in the conversion process that could be better tapped through other methods?
The only thing Hitler socialized was the defense industry. Guess what, we're doing that here, too. Large standing armies are excellent examples of an uncontrollable nationalist socialists society. And guess who has the largest standing army in the world...
> From 1 square meter you can maybe boil a glass of water, but you can't heat your house in winter, nor make cars or computers.
You're wrong. I lived in a home that got almost all of its heat from the sun during winter. From a greenhouse, no less. When that wasn't enough, we burned wood to get it to a comfortable level, or we put on warmer clothes. Heating and cooling costs for a year, all electric, was around $300. Most of our heat was from the sun or wood burning stove, which doesn't introduce any fossilized carbon back into the cycle.
And I think that had I been in charge, the plots would be more cerebral and less action-packed. They basically took a bunch of characters and put them on a ship roaming the universe. This is dumb because the plot is the same every week; Go to planet, get in trouble, get out of trouble, and go to another planet.
DS9 is rapidly becoming my favorite Trek because it has done so much with its premise. Conflicts between Bajoran and Cardassian, the politics of reconstructing a world that has been invaded, former enemies allying themselves against a greater threat. These are plotlines that make for great story telling. And characters that people care about. (In the episode with the Romulan minefield, I saw the weapons officer about to die and thought "oh well...")
Because of its temporal setting, Enterprise could have become this. And it did for a couple episodes, namely the one where the independent freighter captains have to deal with the pirates. That was excellent. Talk more about that. About how some people on Earth don't want to become members of the Federation, about how some Vulcans don't want to. Talk about the interspecies friction affects diplomacy without acting like a bunch of whiny brats. Talk about the changes on Earth. Talk about first contacts with other species. There are many different long-term plot devices that could be used to create a show where people get hooked and watch just to see what's going on. (The news is still one of the highest rated television shows for exactly this reason, but if you miss an episode of Enterprise, you're not missing much. Archer yelled at some alien, and the Xindi are still trying to destroy Earth.)
Instead, Berman and Braga turned it into half action show, half softcore Vulcan porn, with a MASSIVE THREAT TO LIFE ON EARTH!!! to attempt to keep people's interests from week to week.
Don't forget that the plants themselves are agents of intellectual property theft because they can reproduce. What happens when a third world farmer plants these seeds, grows a crop, and then saves some of that crop (say, some corn kernels) to plant next season? THAT MAN HAS JUST COMMITTED THEFT. He's just doing what people have done forever, taking advantage of the fact that plants produce seeds that can be planted to make more seeds.
What happens when some of it spills on the way to market? Since it doesn't look any different than regular corn, gets grown by him next year, totally by accident. It breeds with other, normal corn, and the gene spreads. Will he get sued by Monsanto for patent infringement because he spilled some corn kernels that happened to breed with regular corn? This case allows for a precedent.
Yes, I realize that this guy has been found to have intentionally planted it, but don't think for a second that Monsanto wouldn't be pushing us down the slippery slope towards a world where every seed has to be picked up off of a field lest they lose profits.
Patenting things that can copy themselves is lunacy.
Frankenfood giant Monsanto sued itself today in what can only be described as absolute lunacy.
Claiming that the genetically modified corn it produced can reproduce itself without human assistance, Monsanto has sued itself for intellectual property infringement under the DMCA.
"It's clear that the corn is a decryption device because it can take the code we gave it and illegally copy itself," said Monsanto's legal head Hebert R. Pufinstuf. "The fact that this deprives us of profits leaves us only one recourse; we must sue ourselves for the profits lost by producing reproducing corn."
If there was proof of God, he would cease to exist, for He is a being of faith. But if God created the universe, that proves he exists. So God doesn't exist because he created the universe.
So scientists, in looking for a scientific explanation for everything (including branes bouncing together to make the universe), are in fact saving religion. Can't have a religion without God, can you?
We know he had them, because we gave them to him. The war wasn't necessary. If we had stayed out of their business in the 80's (and 70's and 60's and 50's and 40's), we wouldn't have the problem. But noooo, we have to play nanny to the world.
Space exploration = extra-solar space exploration. This takes a lot of resources and central control over long periods of time.
Hive minds would be able to do it, but would rule out exploration as a way to get there. They would follow 'cross that bridge when we come to it' approach. Spread across the world, then once resources start to become depleted, find a new place to live. Fortunately for us, there is enough material in the solar system (if it's anything like ours) to allow a civilization to survive for billions of years, especially if wasteful things like profit and greed are removed.
I don't believe that a fascist state could control space. The distances are too great for them to control portions of their society on remote outposts in their own solar system. There are always more prisoners than gaurds, and so a revolution is almost inevitable.
Advanced = scientifically advanced, not morally. They can be related, but often aren't. Space flight requires significant advancements technologically and scientifically.
A cruel dictatorship doesn't last. Ever. Short of mind control, there is no way in which a dictatorship could survive, and even then it will probably fail.
Hive mind is a possibility I hadn't thought of. Good job!
Space exploration needs worldwide cooperation over a very long term. If they are a space-faring species, they would have to have been able to keep enough of their GDP available for space flight for hundreds of years. Thus, they are peaceful and hence enlightened. Second, space flight involves high technology. This means that they have to have high technology, and are more advanced.
The signals we get from SETI, if we get any, will probably start out with dots and dashes, followed by audio and, about fifty years later, video of "Howdy Skwarklar" the puppet from Dontbotherus VII.
Attention Dumbass: One very tiny amount of sarin does not mean there were chemical weapons in Iraq. What happened to the trailers that Powell showed us? What happened to the WMD we gave Saddam in the 80s, that Rumsfeld hand delivered? This is like me seeing one Mac in a room and saying they have 100% market share. Not categorically untrue (the market share in that room is 100%), but there's no way for us to prove it outside of our own frame of reference.
The cable guy came to hook up my future mother-in-law's computer. I had recommended an eMac, since I know I'll be the one maintaining it and I know Macs better.
He rings the doorbell. At 8:30 in the morning. My mother-in-law opened the door (in her bedclothes) and asked him to wait a minute while she woke me up. He sighed and tapped his foot. I dragged myself out of bed and threw a shirt on.
Immediately upon entering the house, he says he's having a bad morning. Oh great. Then he asks what operating system the computer's running. "Mac OS X 10.2," I say.
"It won't work," he says. At this point, I'm feeling two things. First, I feel like I screwed over my future mother-in-law for recommending a computer that wouldn't work, and second, I want to know why this guy thinks an eMac won't work. So I ask.
"Well, uh, our software, uh, hasn't been upgraded, so, uh, I can, uh, get your name and number and we can, uh, call you when it gets upgraded. It works in OS 9, though."
"This computer has OS 9, too. Will it work if I boot into OS 9?"
"Uh, no," he says, "it's something about being upgrade to OS 10. It doesn't work anymore. It also doesn't work in Windows 95, or on computers that were upgraded from Windows 95 to 98, and people have problems using the service on HPs that have Windows XP installed"
At this point I knew he was lying out of his ass, because there's no difference in booting into OS 9 from an eMac and running OS 9 on a computer where it's the default OS. At least to the applications. And my parents have an HP with Windows XP installed, and haven't had a problem. This got me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry. So I tell him to install the line, and I will set it up myself.
He walks out in a huff because (I think) he was hoping to get out of this job and get a doughnut or something. At this point, he's woken everyone in the house up by talking too loudly, and he returns with a HUGE drill bit. (Like an inch in diameter. Way bigger than you'll ever need to run a cable wire. I know, I helped my dad run cable in my house and we did it with a 3/8" bit and a coat hanger.) My future mother-in-law asks him what he's going to do with it.
"I have to drill a hole in the floor."
"Wait a minute, I'm paying $89 to have in installed in an outlet on the wall."
"Well, that's a different team, you'll have to get someone else to come out, and that computer's not internet ready, so it might not work anyway."
At this point, she's starting to cry because she just bought this house and he wants to put a 1" hole in the floor, and she thinks she just wasted $800 on a computer that won't work.
"Why isn't it Internet ready?" I ask.
"It doesn't have ethernet" the idiot says.
"Yes it does"
"But it's not the same on a Macintosh." (Yes, he's that dumb.)
"My friend's got four Macs running OS X hooked up to Comcast hi-speed in the same township."
"Well, maybe he figured it out how to do it," he says. "I don't know how."
Not knowing how is a lot different than "it won't work."
Under my breath I say "Maybe I should call Comcast and get a friggin' job."
"FINE!" says he. "YOU DO MY F*%ING JOB." Then he grabs his stuff and slams the door as my future mother-in-law is holding me back from rushing the asshole.
So now we have my future mother-in-law and fiancée in hysterics, kids scared in the other room, and my future brother-in-law and myself ready to hunt this guy down. All in the space of fifteen minutes of this guy ringing the doorbell.
We all calm down, and my mother-in-law calls Comcast and asks what computers aren't supported. As it turns out, there shouldn't be any problems using Comcast broadband, and they "don't know why any of their repairmen would say that." Then she got transferred to this guy's supervisor.
"Well, I'm getting a different story from him," he says. No shite sherlock, he wants to keep his job.
Like, are they going to provide a pack of Sticky Notes (TM, did they buy 3M?) with every copy of Longhorn or Blackcomb that they sell so that the developer may leave a note for the user?
And, yet again, they would be doing a poor job of copying Apple.
Flash is used by 99.99999% of web sites because it CAN and because it look cool, not because it SHOULD.
I'm working on a system right now that requires visitors (it's a student loan system, so it's used by students and schools) to have Flash installed. Why? Because there is one graphic, used while they are waiting for the credit reporting agency to report back the results. ONE. FRIGGING. GRAPHIC. And this makes people without Flash stop what they're doing and install something they probably don't want, just because the original design could do it. That's wrong.
All these people are complaining that IE isn't standards compliant. Well, there are work arounds. Lots of them. Or you could do what I do with my personal site: If it looks like crap, you're using IE, and you should get a standards compliant browser. Not good for a professional site, but great for me.
How does space research cost life? Sure, in accidents. Military research is about how to subjugate people by hurting them and breaking things more efficiently than before. Space research is about learning about space and how to survive and thrive there. There will be accidents, yes, but unintentional loss of life is more favorable than intentional loss of life.
When everything works in space, people survive and thrive. When everything works in the military, people die. I would rather the vast majority of my tax dollars go to putting men and women on Mars than putting them in the ground.
And I dislike your condescending tone. I do not presume that space exploration will solve all of society's ills. Merely that it is a better way to spend my money.
And why should we not try to improve life? Life is about struggle, but why should the struggle be against each other? Shouldn't it be against our limitations, as a species, a world, a culture, and a person? Exploration is a far more noble struggle than war.
Slashdot Mirror
This has to be modded up.
Yes. It borders Canada.
I was actually thinking more along the lines of a logistics issue. Storing something for 10,000 years is hard work. The Egyptians thought their pharoah was a god, and even he didn't last 1000 years undisturbed. I can't imagine how we could keep people away from garbage for 10,000 years if a god is up for grabs after 1/10th that time.
I would hope scientists would also be looking for a way to tap the energy off the burning of the coal vs superheating turbine water. How much energy is wasted in the conversion process that could be better tapped through other methods?
50-100 years is way better than tens of thousands of years, as with fission waste. That won't outlast the containers it's in.
And who are these Cassandras? They sound hot.
"You can't destroy the Earth, that's where I keep all my stuff!"
You're wrong. I lived in a home that got almost all of its heat from the sun during winter. From a greenhouse, no less. When that wasn't enough, we burned wood to get it to a comfortable level, or we put on warmer clothes. Heating and cooling costs for a year, all electric, was around $300. Most of our heat was from the sun or wood burning stove, which doesn't introduce any fossilized carbon back into the cycle.
And I think that had I been in charge, the plots would be more cerebral and less action-packed. They basically took a bunch of characters and put them on a ship roaming the universe. This is dumb because the plot is the same every week; Go to planet, get in trouble, get out of trouble, and go to another planet.
DS9 is rapidly becoming my favorite Trek because it has done so much with its premise. Conflicts between Bajoran and Cardassian, the politics of reconstructing a world that has been invaded, former enemies allying themselves against a greater threat. These are plotlines that make for great story telling. And characters that people care about. (In the episode with the Romulan minefield, I saw the weapons officer about to die and thought "oh well...")
Because of its temporal setting, Enterprise could have become this. And it did for a couple episodes, namely the one where the independent freighter captains have to deal with the pirates. That was excellent. Talk more about that. About how some people on Earth don't want to become members of the Federation, about how some Vulcans don't want to. Talk about the interspecies friction affects diplomacy without acting like a bunch of whiny brats. Talk about the changes on Earth. Talk about first contacts with other species. There are many different long-term plot devices that could be used to create a show where people get hooked and watch just to see what's going on. (The news is still one of the highest rated television shows for exactly this reason, but if you miss an episode of Enterprise, you're not missing much. Archer yelled at some alien, and the Xindi are still trying to destroy Earth.)
Instead, Berman and Braga turned it into half action show, half softcore Vulcan porn, with a MASSIVE THREAT TO LIFE ON EARTH!!! to attempt to keep people's interests from week to week.
DAMN YOU BERMAN!!!
Will it make my butt look fat?
Yeah, Sony has done the same thing; Sony records suing Sony computers for copyright infringement.
What happens when some of it spills on the way to market? Since it doesn't look any different than regular corn, gets grown by him next year, totally by accident. It breeds with other, normal corn, and the gene spreads. Will he get sued by Monsanto for patent infringement because he spilled some corn kernels that happened to breed with regular corn? This case allows for a precedent.
Yes, I realize that this guy has been found to have intentionally planted it, but don't think for a second that Monsanto wouldn't be pushing us down the slippery slope towards a world where every seed has to be picked up off of a field lest they lose profits.
Patenting things that can copy themselves is lunacy.
Frankenfood giant Monsanto sued itself today in what can only be described as absolute lunacy.
Claiming that the genetically modified corn it produced can reproduce itself without human assistance, Monsanto has sued itself for intellectual property infringement under the DMCA.
"It's clear that the corn is a decryption device because it can take the code we gave it and illegally copy itself," said Monsanto's legal head Hebert R. Pufinstuf. "The fact that this deprives us of profits leaves us only one recourse; we must sue ourselves for the profits lost by producing reproducing corn."
This will let you make biodiesel in small batches and run straight veggie most of the time, saving time and money.
I'd imagine that you may be running a TDI (which are great for veggie), so TDI Club is another great site to check out.
Have fun saving money on fuel and smelling like fried foods. I hope to join you once I've saved enough money to pick up a TDI wagon.
Oil? Listen here, wippersnapper; I used to live in Wilkes-Barre, PA and there were people who still had coal delivered. That's right, COAL.
So scientists, in looking for a scientific explanation for everything (including branes bouncing together to make the universe), are in fact saving religion. Can't have a religion without God, can you?
We know he had them, because we gave them to him. The war wasn't necessary. If we had stayed out of their business in the 80's (and 70's and 60's and 50's and 40's), we wouldn't have the problem. But noooo, we have to play nanny to the world.
Hive minds would be able to do it, but would rule out exploration as a way to get there. They would follow 'cross that bridge when we come to it' approach. Spread across the world, then once resources start to become depleted, find a new place to live. Fortunately for us, there is enough material in the solar system (if it's anything like ours) to allow a civilization to survive for billions of years, especially if wasteful things like profit and greed are removed.
I don't believe that a fascist state could control space. The distances are too great for them to control portions of their society on remote outposts in their own solar system. There are always more prisoners than gaurds, and so a revolution is almost inevitable.
Advanced = scientifically advanced, not morally. They can be related, but often aren't. Space flight requires significant advancements technologically and scientifically.
Hive mind is a possibility I hadn't thought of. Good job!
The signals we get from SETI, if we get any, will probably start out with dots and dashes, followed by audio and, about fifty years later, video of "Howdy Skwarklar" the puppet from Dontbotherus VII.
Attention Dumbass: One very tiny amount of sarin does not mean there were chemical weapons in Iraq. What happened to the trailers that Powell showed us? What happened to the WMD we gave Saddam in the 80s, that Rumsfeld hand delivered? This is like me seeing one Mac in a room and saying they have 100% market share. Not categorically untrue (the market share in that room is 100%), but there's no way for us to prove it outside of our own frame of reference.
The cable guy came to hook up my future mother-in-law's computer. I had recommended an eMac, since I know I'll be the one maintaining it and I know Macs better.
He rings the doorbell. At 8:30 in the morning. My mother-in-law opened the door (in her bedclothes) and asked him to wait a minute while she woke me up. He sighed and tapped his foot. I dragged myself out of bed and threw a shirt on.
Immediately upon entering the house, he says he's having a bad morning. Oh great. Then he asks what operating system the computer's running. "Mac OS X 10.2," I say.
"It won't work," he says. At this point, I'm feeling two things. First, I feel like I screwed over my future mother-in-law for recommending a computer that wouldn't work, and second, I want to know why this guy thinks an eMac won't work. So I ask.
"Well, uh, our software, uh, hasn't been upgraded, so, uh, I can, uh, get your name and number and we can, uh, call you when it gets upgraded. It works in OS 9, though."
"This computer has OS 9, too. Will it work if I boot into OS 9?"
"Uh, no," he says, "it's something about being upgrade to OS 10. It doesn't work anymore. It also doesn't work in Windows 95, or on computers that were upgraded from Windows 95 to 98, and people have problems using the service on HPs that have Windows XP installed"
At this point I knew he was lying out of his ass, because there's no difference in booting into OS 9 from an eMac and running OS 9 on a computer where it's the default OS. At least to the applications. And my parents have an HP with Windows XP installed, and haven't had a problem. This got me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry. So I tell him to install the line, and I will set it up myself.
He walks out in a huff because (I think) he was hoping to get out of this job and get a doughnut or something. At this point, he's woken everyone in the house up by talking too loudly, and he returns with a HUGE drill bit. (Like an inch in diameter. Way bigger than you'll ever need to run a cable wire. I know, I helped my dad run cable in my house and we did it with a 3/8" bit and a coat hanger.) My future mother-in-law asks him what he's going to do with it.
"I have to drill a hole in the floor."
"Wait a minute, I'm paying $89 to have in installed in an outlet on the wall."
"Well, that's a different team, you'll have to get someone else to come out, and that computer's not internet ready, so it might not work anyway."
At this point, she's starting to cry because she just bought this house and he wants to put a 1" hole in the floor, and she thinks she just wasted $800 on a computer that won't work.
"Why isn't it Internet ready?" I ask.
"It doesn't have ethernet" the idiot says.
"Yes it does"
"But it's not the same on a Macintosh." (Yes, he's that dumb.)
"My friend's got four Macs running OS X hooked up to Comcast hi-speed in the same township."
"Well, maybe he figured it out how to do it," he says. "I don't know how."
Not knowing how is a lot different than "it won't work."
Under my breath I say "Maybe I should call Comcast and get a friggin' job."
"FINE!" says he. "YOU DO MY F*%ING JOB." Then he grabs his stuff and slams the door as my future mother-in-law is holding me back from rushing the asshole.
So now we have my future mother-in-law and fiancée in hysterics, kids scared in the other room, and my future brother-in-law and myself ready to hunt this guy down. All in the space of fifteen minutes of this guy ringing the doorbell.
We all calm down, and my mother-in-law calls Comcast and asks what computers aren't supported. As it turns out, there shouldn't be any problems using Comcast broadband, and they "don't know why any of their repairmen would say that." Then she got transferred to this guy's supervisor.
"Well, I'm getting a different story from him," he says. No shite sherlock, he wants to keep his job.
So th
And, yet again, they would be doing a poor job of copying Apple.
I'm working on a system right now that requires visitors (it's a student loan system, so it's used by students and schools) to have Flash installed. Why? Because there is one graphic, used while they are waiting for the credit reporting agency to report back the results. ONE. FRIGGING. GRAPHIC. And this makes people without Flash stop what they're doing and install something they probably don't want, just because the original design could do it. That's wrong.
All these people are complaining that IE isn't standards compliant. Well, there are work arounds. Lots of them. Or you could do what I do with my personal site: If it looks like crap, you're using IE, and you should get a standards compliant browser. Not good for a professional site, but great for me.
When everything works in space, people survive and thrive. When everything works in the military, people die. I would rather the vast majority of my tax dollars go to putting men and women on Mars than putting them in the ground.
And I dislike your condescending tone. I do not presume that space exploration will solve all of society's ills. Merely that it is a better way to spend my money.
And why should we not try to improve life? Life is about struggle, but why should the struggle be against each other? Shouldn't it be against our limitations, as a species, a world, a culture, and a person? Exploration is a far more noble struggle than war.