The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years due to a super volcano or asteroid or comet impact is 1 in 455. How does that relate? You're 10 times more likely to get wiped out by a civilization-ending event in the next 100 years than you are getting killed in a commercial airline crash.
My repect for John Young's intelligence is gone. Is he suffering from Alzheimers?
A terminal K/T like comet or asteroid impact is
a 1 in 50 million year event. A super volcanic eruption like Taal or Yellowstone is about a
1 in 500,000 year event and would only be
locally devastating, but wouldn't mean the
end of Homo Sapiens. He must be getting his
numbers from the same people who make global
warming predictions.
Expensing stock options is simply honest book keeping. Companies who ignore option payouts simply
dilute the value of shares purchased honestly
in the market. It is a slimy practice that used to
go unnoticed. Real shareholders have been ripped
of by option holders long enough. This is a good
thing for anyone who is not an insider and purchases stocks will real money.
You often hear Kyotoists making apocalyptic statements like this. So the dustbowl would be
caused by...? It seems to me that increased
CO2 and global temperature would result in higher
concentrations of water vapor in the atmosphere
and more rain, higher crop yields.
If the Greenland ice-shelf slides into the sea you'd better be living in the Rockies with a large stash of tinned goods.
Another hyperbolic statement, and equally wrong. If Greenland flash thawed into water tomorrow
the result would be less than 1 meter rise in sea
level. Having said that there is no evidence
the Greenland ice cap is shrinking any faster
than it has been for 12000 years!
Long long time ago Precambrian, still it probably did happen once
This event is thought to have happened during
the
Silurian Period 250M years ago. There may have been glaciations during the Precambrian (> 530 M years ago) but evidence is obscured by the fact that there are very few sedimentary rocks of
age that preserve the evidence. Continental landmasses were far smaller as well.
It is wise that Mr. Bush is doing this. With the
success the US has shown with GPS guided weapons
it is only a matter of time before terrorists
begin to incorporate the technology. GPS/Galileo
are potential weapons for US enemies. Planning to neutralize them in times of national emergency
is the responsible thing to do.
What a great idea! I wonder what form factor
it would accomodate? This reminds me of the
show "American Hotrod" on the Discovery channel
where they rip the guts out of a 1969 GTO
and replace it with modern stuff. Might have
to try this myself.
Remember in the '90's when the tech boom was in full swing and SGI was the darling of the 3D graphics industry, whatever happened to those days?
I used an SGI Iris 24 bit color workstation
with a 21" monitor back in 1990. I still
get misty thinking about it. We used
them for computational chemistry and
visualization. Shading, transparency, GL
had it all even back then. Coming as I did from a Vax 750 background, this was pretty amazing.
The workstation came with a flight simulator
to show off GL graphic power. These were
beautiful machines, solid, well engineered.
The aethetics have not been surpassed to this day.
Sadly, some business guy tried to turn SGI
into a PC company, and they alienated their
devoted scientific and engineering users.
Same thing happened to Sun except they sold
out to corporate IT and big iron.
O'Keefe is indeed reluctant to veer from the
Columbia Accident Review Board recommendations.
The fact is the orbiter is just as vulnerable
to debris strikes as it was 2 years ago. It is
hoped that debris shed from the tank is reduced
but it cannot be eliminated. Vulnerability
to debris strikes is yet another flaw in the
design of the shuttle that cannot be undone. Since the shuttle has
no on orbit thermal protection repair capability
or safe abort option, using the ISS is the only
(and tenuous at that) option for a shuttle disabled on ascent. I think Mr. O'Keefe is
doing the prudent thing. If I were NASA
administrator and an exact repeat of the
Columbia disaster was still a possibility,
I would be cautious too. Do you think any
NASA administrator would relish 2 shuttle
disasters on his watch? If there is another
shuttle disaster, that is the end of US
manned spaceflight until the CEV era sets in.
Milking the shuttle for 30 flights to finish
ISS is ambitious enough. Risky billion dollar manned
missions to an observatory already scheduled
to be replaced is foolhardy.
Researchers find that men who place portable computers on their laps are inadvertently raising the temperature of their scrotums
Scrotal Warming is a problem now. Laptop makers
should be given a total heat flux quota. If
they exceed it, they must buy scrotal heating
credits from other more scrotum friendly makers.
Lets call it the Scroto Treaty! America, get
on board! Stop going it alone. Stop
scrotal warming before it is too late!
I totally agree with you. Unfortunately you
will be modded down to flamebait my the
Kyoto-Nazis within a few
minutes. 6 billion people seeking a better
material life will have an effect, won't they?
However, the dollar is devaluing. This raises the cost of the Indians relative to the Americans. It also makes the Indians richer. This is how the market is supposed to work.
Great point. But the average consumer in India
(and especially China and Japan) takes it in the shorts in high prices because their government's policy is to
depress the value of the currency relative
to the dollar
to protect exports and increase employment.
This is why Asia buys US Treasuries. Maximum
economic growth is not the goal in Asia. Full
employment is. The US wisely has a weak dollar
policy. Asia ends up giving their stuff to us! The race to the bottom cannot continue, however.
Asian currencies must strengthen eventually.
I am amazed that your criticism of the report
was modded up. This forum is dominated Kyoto fanatics who froth at the mouth at any scepticism
of climate research. Good job!
Things that get Really Fsking Hot are black because the only thing that will handle the heat is a carbon-carbon composite.
The carbon-carbon panels on the space shuttle
are grey, not black. The black tiles on underside
of the
space shuttle are silica based, not carbon composites.
Think of all the good medicine we would not have today if some brave people did not push the issue of using corpses for medical research.
Donors knowingly give their corpses up for
scientific use. Embryos do not. Fact is
stem cell proponents want to enslave a race
of subhumans bred only to supply stem cells.
Toward what end? So a few people with spinal
injuries can regain some limited mobility?
I join Mr. Bush in his revulsion of the idea.
The market is definitely firming as compared
to the Iraq War period when the market was
non-existent. But companies (like mine) are addicted to programmers in India. So hiring
will be slow. One of our "senior programmers"
has said "we have hired that special 1 in 100
person in the past. Now we want to hire that 1 in 1000 and surround him by willing learners."
Person for person they are
nowhere near as productive as Americans, yet,
but they are still paid proportionately even less.
I have to think that even in India the number
of adequately trained programmers in not inexhaustable.
Management likes them because they can be treated
like a commodity, which they can understand.
I think the H1B program should be suspendended for tech in
the US when unemployment levels rise to a structural level, say 5%. That did not happen in this tech cycle
and there is still a massive excess of labor.
Re:They had bugs...
on
Apollo 12 at 35
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The lopsoded nature of the moon is part of the reason why only one side always faces Earth. I don't know if scientists didn't know it was lopsided back then, or if technicians simply forgot to include that info in their calculations.
The moon's rotation period is synchronous to its
orbital period due to tidal forces that warp the
moon into a triaxial ellipsoid shape and cause
rotation energy to dissapate through friction.
Scientists new very well of the existence of
lunar "mascons", mass concentrations of basaltic
lava revealed by their dark color and gravitational signature. Their location on the
earth facing side of the moon is due to the fact
that the lunar crust, of anorthositic composition,
is thinner on that face. At the time of its formation the moon was so close to earth that
it center of gravity was offset from its
geometrical center.
The climate is changing NOW. We need to use an alternative to fossil fuels NOW. Wind power, solar power etc arn't up to the job , only nuclear is.
The climate has changed radically in the last
10,000 years having nothing to do with the activity
of man. It will continue to change. There will
be new ices ages, there will be warm interglacial
periods. It is been that way throughout geological
history. The climate transforming effects of
fossil fuels is nothing compared to: continental
drift, meteorite impacts, volcanic outgasing, planetary dynamical
cycles, or Solar variation. Please stop with
the sky is falling stuff about CO2 and fossil
fuels. 3 Billion years ago when cyanobacteria
first began emitting oxygen in large quantities
you would have sought to exterminate those
poor microbes to avoid climate change! Fossil
fuels or no fossil fuels climate change is
here. It has always been here. Wide scale
variations in climate cannot be avoided, and
certainly not controlled, just
adapted to.
If I were a fusion scientist going to work on ITER, I'd much prefer to live in beautiful France than in the sparsely populated bit of North Japan where ITER would be built.
If we were to follow your moronic line of reasoning to its conclusion Bora Bora would be
the ITER host site.
Chances are that building a second reactor will be way too expensive
If a commercially viable fusion reactor is within
technical reach you can be very sure that tremendous
competition will erupt. Not just between nations
but corporate consortia as well. In reality, there is no
reason to believe ITER will be any more successful
than the 'promising' magnetic confinement projects
that preceded it.
No. I should read 'France Intent on Hosting
International Fusion Reactor'. France and Japan
have been battling over the reactor since the
project was announced. It looks like the
consortium will splinter. That is not a bad
thing. It might inject some real high stakes
competition into nuclear fusion reaseach.
Yes it is. When used in the context of a
a for loop (what a cheezy contruct that is!) an assignment like this
will compile perfectly well but will lead to
horrendous results. The lisp expression evaluates
to bool. (set! a b) evaluates to undefined and
would cause the loop to fail. It is also a mistake to think that traditional mathematical notation
is desirable. Lisp's structured expressions
promote better understanding of algebra by
dispensing with C's confusing order of operations. In short, infix sucks.
Sadly, Disney went they way of many talented
and innovative companies that installed "real"
management. They tanked. But those earnings
statements sure look good, and you can bet they
have a strong strategic vision. I'm sure Disney will setup a M$ Animation Studio and the results will be just as good as Pixar. Somehow I think
that Walt Disney would not have approved of his company's course in the last 15 years. Pixar, a real innovator, will clean their clock.
Slashdot Mirror
The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years due to a super volcano or asteroid or comet impact is 1 in 455. How does that relate? You're 10 times more likely to get wiped out by a civilization-ending event in the next 100 years than you are getting killed in a commercial airline crash.
My repect for John Young's intelligence is gone. Is he suffering from Alzheimers? A terminal K/T like comet or asteroid impact is a 1 in 50 million year event. A super volcanic eruption like Taal or Yellowstone is about a 1 in 500,000 year event and would only be locally devastating, but wouldn't mean the end of Homo Sapiens. He must be getting his numbers from the same people who make global warming predictions.
Expensing stock options is simply honest book keeping. Companies who ignore option payouts simply dilute the value of shares purchased honestly in the market. It is a slimy practice that used to go unnoticed. Real shareholders have been ripped of by option holders long enough. This is a good thing for anyone who is not an insider and purchases stocks will real money.
Think the US turning into a dustbowl.
You often hear Kyotoists making apocalyptic statements like this. So the dustbowl would be caused by ...? It seems to me that increased
CO2 and global temperature would result in higher
concentrations of water vapor in the atmosphere
and more rain, higher crop yields.
If the Greenland ice-shelf slides into the sea you'd better be living in the Rockies with a large stash of tinned goods.
Another hyperbolic statement, and equally wrong. If Greenland flash thawed into water tomorrow the result would be less than 1 meter rise in sea level. Having said that there is no evidence the Greenland ice cap is shrinking any faster than it has been for 12000 years!
Long long time ago Precambrian, still it probably did happen once
This event is thought to have happened during the Silurian Period 250M years ago. There may have been glaciations during the Precambrian (> 530 M years ago) but evidence is obscured by the fact that there are very few sedimentary rocks of age that preserve the evidence. Continental landmasses were far smaller as well.
It is wise that Mr. Bush is doing this. With the success the US has shown with GPS guided weapons it is only a matter of time before terrorists begin to incorporate the technology. GPS/Galileo are potential weapons for US enemies. Planning to neutralize them in times of national emergency is the responsible thing to do.
What a great idea! I wonder what form factor it would accomodate? This reminds me of the show "American Hotrod" on the Discovery channel where they rip the guts out of a 1969 GTO and replace it with modern stuff. Might have to try this myself.
Remember in the '90's when the tech boom was in full swing and SGI was the darling of the 3D graphics industry, whatever happened to those days?
I used an SGI Iris 24 bit color workstation with a 21" monitor back in 1990. I still get misty thinking about it. We used them for computational chemistry and visualization. Shading, transparency, GL had it all even back then. Coming as I did from a Vax 750 background, this was pretty amazing. The workstation came with a flight simulator to show off GL graphic power. These were beautiful machines, solid, well engineered. The aethetics have not been surpassed to this day. Sadly, some business guy tried to turn SGI into a PC company, and they alienated their devoted scientific and engineering users. Same thing happened to Sun except they sold out to corporate IT and big iron.
O'Keefe is indeed reluctant to veer from the Columbia Accident Review Board recommendations. The fact is the orbiter is just as vulnerable to debris strikes as it was 2 years ago. It is hoped that debris shed from the tank is reduced but it cannot be eliminated. Vulnerability to debris strikes is yet another flaw in the design of the shuttle that cannot be undone. Since the shuttle has no on orbit thermal protection repair capability or safe abort option, using the ISS is the only (and tenuous at that) option for a shuttle disabled on ascent. I think Mr. O'Keefe is doing the prudent thing. If I were NASA administrator and an exact repeat of the Columbia disaster was still a possibility, I would be cautious too. Do you think any NASA administrator would relish 2 shuttle disasters on his watch? If there is another shuttle disaster, that is the end of US manned spaceflight until the CEV era sets in. Milking the shuttle for 30 flights to finish ISS is ambitious enough. Risky billion dollar manned missions to an observatory already scheduled to be replaced is foolhardy.
Researchers find that men who place portable computers on their laps are inadvertently raising the temperature of their scrotums
Scrotal Warming is a problem now. Laptop makers should be given a total heat flux quota. If they exceed it, they must buy scrotal heating credits from other more scrotum friendly makers. Lets call it the Scroto Treaty! America, get on board! Stop going it alone. Stop scrotal warming before it is too late!
You are so stupid it would have been better if you were killed and not allowed to pollute the gene pool
I totally agree with you. Unfortunately you will be modded down to flamebait my the Kyoto-Nazis within a few minutes. 6 billion people seeking a better material life will have an effect, won't they?
However, the dollar is devaluing. This raises the cost of the Indians relative to the Americans. It also makes the Indians richer. This is how the market is supposed to work.
Great point. But the average consumer in India (and especially China and Japan) takes it in the shorts in high prices because their government's policy is to depress the value of the currency relative to the dollar to protect exports and increase employment. This is why Asia buys US Treasuries. Maximum economic growth is not the goal in Asia. Full employment is. The US wisely has a weak dollar policy. Asia ends up giving their stuff to us! The race to the bottom cannot continue, however. Asian currencies must strengthen eventually.
I am amazed that your criticism of the report was modded up. This forum is dominated Kyoto fanatics who froth at the mouth at any scepticism of climate research. Good job!
Things that get Really Fsking Hot are black because the only thing that will handle the heat is a carbon-carbon composite.
The carbon-carbon panels on the space shuttle are grey, not black. The black tiles on underside of the space shuttle are silica based, not carbon composites.
Think of all the good medicine we would not have today if some brave people did not push the issue of using corpses for medical research.
Donors knowingly give their corpses up for scientific use. Embryos do not. Fact is stem cell proponents want to enslave a race of subhumans bred only to supply stem cells. Toward what end? So a few people with spinal injuries can regain some limited mobility? I join Mr. Bush in his revulsion of the idea.
Well said.
The market is definitely firming as compared to the Iraq War period when the market was non-existent. But companies (like mine) are addicted to programmers in India. So hiring will be slow. One of our "senior programmers" has said "we have hired that special 1 in 100 person in the past. Now we want to hire that 1 in 1000 and surround him by willing learners." Person for person they are nowhere near as productive as Americans, yet, but they are still paid proportionately even less. I have to think that even in India the number of adequately trained programmers in not inexhaustable. Management likes them because they can be treated like a commodity, which they can understand.
I think the H1B program should be suspendended for tech in the US when unemployment levels rise to a structural level, say 5%. That did not happen in this tech cycle and there is still a massive excess of labor.
The lopsoded nature of the moon is part of the reason why only one side always faces Earth. I don't know if scientists didn't know it was lopsided back then, or if technicians simply forgot to include that info in their calculations.
The moon's rotation period is synchronous to its orbital period due to tidal forces that warp the moon into a triaxial ellipsoid shape and cause rotation energy to dissapate through friction. Scientists new very well of the existence of lunar "mascons", mass concentrations of basaltic lava revealed by their dark color and gravitational signature. Their location on the earth facing side of the moon is due to the fact that the lunar crust, of anorthositic composition, is thinner on that face. At the time of its formation the moon was so close to earth that it center of gravity was offset from its geometrical center.
The climate is changing NOW. We need to use an alternative to fossil fuels NOW. Wind power, solar power etc arn't up to the job , only nuclear is.
The climate has changed radically in the last 10,000 years having nothing to do with the activity of man. It will continue to change. There will be new ices ages, there will be warm interglacial periods. It is been that way throughout geological history. The climate transforming effects of fossil fuels is nothing compared to: continental drift, meteorite impacts, volcanic outgasing, planetary dynamical cycles, or Solar variation. Please stop with the sky is falling stuff about CO2 and fossil fuels. 3 Billion years ago when cyanobacteria first began emitting oxygen in large quantities you would have sought to exterminate those poor microbes to avoid climate change! Fossil fuels or no fossil fuels climate change is here. It has always been here. Wide scale variations in climate cannot be avoided, and certainly not controlled, just adapted to.
If I were a fusion scientist going to work on ITER, I'd much prefer to live in beautiful France than in the sparsely populated bit of North Japan where ITER would be built.
If we were to follow your moronic line of reasoning to its conclusion Bora Bora would be the ITER host site.
Chances are that building a second reactor will be way too expensive
If a commercially viable fusion reactor is within technical reach you can be very sure that tremendous competition will erupt. Not just between nations but corporate consortia as well. In reality, there is no reason to believe ITER will be any more successful than the 'promising' magnetic confinement projects that preceded it.
How will 100 satellites be able to image China at one time? Low altitude US surveillance satellites only get global coverage once per day.
EU Intent on Hosting International Fusion Reactor
No. I should read 'France Intent on Hosting International Fusion Reactor'. France and Japan have been battling over the reactor since the project was announced. It looks like the consortium will splinter. That is not a bad thing. It might inject some real high stakes competition into nuclear fusion reaseach.
It is not ambiguous when given the language.
Yes it is. When used in the context of a a for loop (what a cheezy contruct that is!) an assignment like this will compile perfectly well but will lead to horrendous results. The lisp expression evaluates to bool. (set! a b) evaluates to undefined and would cause the loop to fail. It is also a mistake to think that traditional mathematical notation is desirable. Lisp's structured expressions promote better understanding of algebra by dispensing with C's confusing order of operations. In short, infix sucks.
Sadly, Disney went they way of many talented and innovative companies that installed "real" management. They tanked. But those earnings statements sure look good, and you can bet they have a strong strategic vision. I'm sure Disney will setup a M$ Animation Studio and the results will be just as good as Pixar. Somehow I think that Walt Disney would not have approved of his company's course in the last 15 years. Pixar, a real innovator, will clean their clock.