Here's the problem. All our good "mundane" explanations were all conclusively disproved.
Now what?
Now we put it in the "don't know" file until we come up with a good explanation. Any explanation which is not testable isn't science, it's just imagination.
True, but there are certainly some testable criteria to the hypothesis of a Dyson sphere. If there is a Dyson sphere it should have reached thermal equilibrium by now and so if there is a drop in the normal output of the sun but a rise in the infrared region, it could be assumed that something is occulting the star. The hotter the object, the thinner the occulting object.
Still, what we need right, and what they are calling for, now is more data. The more we know about exactly what is going on, the more likely the solution will come out of it.
Crimea invasion and now this? It looks like long-time KGBer Vladimir Putin is serious about rebuilding the Union of Soviet Social-ist Republics.
More about rebuilding Imperial Russia if you ask me. Then again, even the Soviet Union was just an Imperial Russia with some economic and presentation differences.
The only vote that the Constitution allows is the Electoral Vote.
True, but in my lifetime is has gone from being a quirk of the US Constitution that I was told I would probably never see in high school and college to the road to putting Republicans in the White House. While I'm not going to argue against the system, it is a sign of things that are going on in the US, namely large populous states versus small populous states which is what the system was created with regards to. Of course, you can look t why those states are less populous, and in many cases worse off economically per capita. Add in recent (in our lifetimes) changes in politics to more polarized partisan systems and you start to see what is going on in the US.
Why the heck do you have to have a "weekend family getaway" to get people off of screens? When I was a kid, my parents just kicked me out of the house most of the summer, and I spent it outside (now get off my lawn!).
Illegal in many states. Leaving a pre-teen unsupervised is against the law. Now kids used to be left to do as they pleased and things are a lot safer now than they were, however, I've yet to see any study if there is causation or correlation between the two.
Um,..ok. But we're talking about the Boston Tea Party and the like and what the English considered treason. For this conversation, nobody is debating that what Chelsea Manning did was treason which seems to be what you are discussing. Perhaps you hit Reply in the wrong conversation?
Trump consistently acts incompetent, and needs a serious medical check-up to verify his cognitive capability to remain president or be removed for medical reasons (Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, or simply Dementia, etc.)
Dumping cargo into the bay is not treason. Illegal, but not treason.
By our current standards as written in the US constitution. I will bet you that treason got clarified in our constitution as what it is because it was applied to all sorts of behavior previously.
The components will still need to be shipped from China where they're produced, near the resource mines which avoid environmental regulation and cost significantly less than domestic.
Last time I saw information on this, the components were actually produced in Taiwan, Japan, and Korea and the shipped to China for assemblage. Some raw materials also came from China, but overall, all three of those countries ended up each getting more of the percentage of manufacturing costs than China. So, what we're really talking about here is moving component fabrication back to the us. This was from The Economist breakdown of where all the cost of Apple products were going, but it was from a few years ago. If you have newer info, could you please post it?
I was just watching Pearl Harbor - not a great film, but it brought back to me that the greatest threat to these people is the sheer force of American willpower. The Japanese military machine tugged at the tail of a sleeping tiger, and they lived to regret it.
I doubt American willpower was a serious contender considering the other side had people litter lay training to be suicide bombers. Americans troops typically were the first to break and run away. We had some advantages in that Americans were also the first to rally and run back into battle with more resolve, and with a different plan to make sure the last mistake didn't happen. The first mistake the Japanese did was mistakenly think that bombing people would make them want to give up. If anything, actively bombing a population has the opposite effect. Second, the sleeping tiger that the Japanese actually awoke was American industrial might. The Japanese could not replace sunken ships, downed airplanes, or dead pilots and soldiers. They US was pumping out enough for two fronts to double every year or two (not to mention while also supplying the Brits and Russians with considerable war material at the same time). Part of that was bad Japanese military tactics that aided in their downfall just like Sparta, while the US will try a different tactic till they find one that works, but mostly, it was just American has the industry, economy, and population to win a war through attrition.
Or the manufacturers of the expensive hardware could update their software to work on a more modern up to date operating system, be that Windows 10, Linux or whatever.
Oh, they do, all you have to do is sign and pay for the service agreement, buy all new servers and equipment, upgrade to the latest version of their product and retrain. Chances are that the price of all that is a multiple of what they told you it would cost when you signed the previous contract.
Hardly, if it's any one who should take more responsibility here it's the vendors of said embedded devices. To even implement such devices on software that they know will be EOLd while still be connected to a network is beyond me.
Trust me, the vendors have covered their asses with their install/support contract. They probably have an upgrade path, and only require the hospital to buy the new version along with new servers to begin the migration. $10 million isn't unusual for such an upgrade and a single departmental system, which may or may not be only payable out of departmental, capital, or some other budget by either hospital policy or state law. Plus, they're not really EOL'd. MS is still supporting older systems for those with volume licensing that are paying, and hospitals are paying if still running many of these machines.* Still, from my readings of the articles, its not really the clinical systems themselves being hit but all the user computers used to access them.
*Not to say that there aren't completely unsupported examples out there. Where I worked had some Win95 boxes connected by Novel Network (complete with their own network routers on old beige boxes sitting in the network closets) until the department responsible finally replaced the system in the late 2000's. My department's last XP machine was connected to a special purpose film scanner using a horribly old proprietary SCSI card that wouldn't have fit in a newer computer even if we could have found the drivers for it or the scanner. it had one purpose which would be over in another six months and new replacement would have been in excess of $15k just for the hardware and the contract probably would have taken several months to get signed. In the end we let it sit and do its job for a few more months and then pitched it.
I was watching the first season of Daredevil, and I was struck by the anachronism of a Manhattan depicted as being full of working class immigrants who needed protection from greedy, ruthless developers. That battle was lost decades ago.
Of course, as the stories are being lifted from the Daredevil comics of the mid 80's which are probably the writer's impression of NYC in the 70's or earlier. They play it off as the result of the alien invasion of the Avengers movie, but really, they're just using old material that few outside of New England have any real idea of. The stories are a bit behind the times, but they are generally good stories. That's why Marvel movie are doing so well, they are pulling from 50+ years of stories that have been told and cherry picking the best characters and plots. Most can be re-written such as the Punisher's new background as it really doesn't make sense to have him be a Vietnam vet anymore, but others just have to be left as is to make for a good story.
That's only useful for extinction causing things we can actually do something about.
Just what exactly is your plan for dealing with a direct hit from a Gamma-Ray burst ? One of those would sterilise everything on earth it doesn't kill, it would pass right through the planet so you wouldn't even be safe at the bottom of a mine - and they travel at the speed of light to so the laws of physics actually declare it impossible to build a warning system for them. You can NEVER get a warning to earth faster than the thing you're warning about gets there.
Non-sequitur. Creating a colony on Mars also wouldn't protect versus gamma-ray burst.
None of those meet the reason why colonizing elsewhere is a good idea: so that the next time the universe throws a giant rock at earth this isn't the only place in the universe where humans exist.
If that's the reason, our money would be better spent on mapping our solar system, early warning system, and deflection methods.
Why not operate facilities where people who need treatment can be placed until they're stable enough to actually live in the community?
Well, IIRC, a large part of that deinstitutionalization movement was because the courts decided that people can't normally be institutionalized against their will. Unless there is a crime involved, if they say they want to leave, they get to leave. Add in that the Republicans won't want to pay for it. So, now, they just walk and are homeless till they commit a crime and get jailed which is where most of those deinstitutionalized people went.
Nice post. But it doesn't explain why the problem is biggest on the west coast.
Economies are booming. Lots of people are moving here. Housing is getting more expensive by rising rents or by being replaced with new builds. Almost all of the homeless are locals that have been displaced because even cheap housing is being taken up by professionals now. People are falling through the cracks and have nowhere to go.
If time didn't exist, then there was no time for a god to create the universe.
Pretty sure this is an actual case of "begging the question". As I see it described in the physics books I have read is that while our time and space dimensions did not exist prior to the big bang, they probably came from other dimensions that could very well have been time-like and space-like. Even if our space-time was created at the big bang is still under discussion as before a certain point, we have no data and no grand theory to tell us exactly what was happening.
Sure they play little tricks to nudge out those extra cents of profit but it's important to realize that it makes a huge difference for them if the margin is 2% or 5%. If you're paying $1.02 or $1.05 not so much. If you made it a state monopoly it'd probably cost $1.50 because nobody has strong incentive to make it cheaper, it'll sell because people need it and they can't have it from anywhere else.
I'd have to say that hasn't been the case of the state monopolies I've seen. WA had state monopoly on liquor. Had to go to their stores which were fairly well spread out and open till 9. Had a wide selection of call brands at prices you could try different brands you'd never heard of. State voted to give that monopoly up and let stores sell liquor. Prices on the rot gut stayed about the same or perhaps dropped a dollar a bottle. Selection was pretty much only common brands. Any call liquor doubled or tripled in price. What was a $35 dollar bottle under state monopoly became $70-100 from stores all across town, if you could still find it. That's not even including the special taxes that people agreed to just so they could have the convenience to buy their rot gut liquor at a grocery store. In my experience, a state monopoly has no strong reason to make it more expensive as they have no profit motive to push for.
I really wish this were true, but it's just so far from reality. Political grandstanding of the worst order. As someone who speaks the broken English of a U.S. American, I think it is a terrible language and absolutely should not be the "universal" language of the world. It's just bad. Not particularly expressive, difficult for newcomers to learn, ridiculous, inconsistent grammar rules, etc.
However actual usage patterns and current language theory from articles I've read seem to say the exact opposite. English's willingness to mangle its grammar, borrow loan words, and define meaning by use makes it easier to learn, more expressive, and adopted more widely than the languages. The opposite side of things would be French with their Académie française which seems to be losing out due to its rigidity.
I've never understood this. These two groups couldn't have more different needs. Students need basic word processing and internet browsing. Professionals need all kinds of other things, such as virtual machines, high-end graphics software, video editing, etc. etc. Why do they always get lumped together? Is it just because students so often want to waste their time playing video games?
You misunderstand. When computer companies say "professionals" in reference to laptops, they do not mean coders, techs, or people that use VMs. They mean people who fly around in airplanes in suits and give powerpoint presentations in other people's conference rooms. Their workload is perhaps even less intensive than a students.
It would be worth getting Space-X's estimate for the goal though.
I've read an interview with Musk putting the cost of a manned Mars mission at $200-600 billion. Even at the lowest estimate, it makes it the largest engineering project humanity has ever done. It will beat the ISS as a manned Mars mission is essentially building another ISS and then sending it to Mars and back.
Money. LOTS of money. Ludicrous amounts of money. But it would make a difference, and it could be done.
Musk has said somewhere between 200-600 billion. I think that is a bit optimistic, but he's got the guys who can run the numbers and tell him what they think it would cost with his own rockets if nothing else. So, it's not really even worrying about till NASA gets and additional $20 billion/year and then we can look at it happening in a decade or three.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the problem. All our good "mundane" explanations were all conclusively disproved. Now what?
Now we put it in the "don't know" file until we come up with a good explanation. Any explanation which is not testable isn't science, it's just imagination.
True, but there are certainly some testable criteria to the hypothesis of a Dyson sphere. If there is a Dyson sphere it should have reached thermal equilibrium by now and so if there is a drop in the normal output of the sun but a rise in the infrared region, it could be assumed that something is occulting the star. The hotter the object, the thinner the occulting object.
Still, what we need right, and what they are calling for, now is more data. The more we know about exactly what is going on, the more likely the solution will come out of it.
Crimea invasion and now this? It looks like long-time KGBer Vladimir Putin is serious about rebuilding the Union of Soviet Social-ist Republics.
More about rebuilding Imperial Russia if you ask me. Then again, even the Soviet Union was just an Imperial Russia with some economic and presentation differences.
Apples and Oranges. And potatoes for tha matter.
The only vote that the Constitution allows is the Electoral Vote.
True, but in my lifetime is has gone from being a quirk of the US Constitution that I was told I would probably never see in high school and college to the road to putting Republicans in the White House. While I'm not going to argue against the system, it is a sign of things that are going on in the US, namely large populous states versus small populous states which is what the system was created with regards to. Of course, you can look t why those states are less populous, and in many cases worse off economically per capita. Add in recent (in our lifetimes) changes in politics to more polarized partisan systems and you start to see what is going on in the US.
Why the heck do you have to have a "weekend family getaway" to get people off of screens? When I was a kid, my parents just kicked me out of the house most of the summer, and I spent it outside (now get off my lawn!).
Illegal in many states. Leaving a pre-teen unsupervised is against the law. Now kids used to be left to do as they pleased and things are a lot safer now than they were, however, I've yet to see any study if there is causation or correlation between the two.
Um, ..ok. But we're talking about the Boston Tea Party and the like and what the English considered treason. For this conversation, nobody is debating that what Chelsea Manning did was treason which seems to be what you are discussing. Perhaps you hit Reply in the wrong conversation?
Let me get this straight. People...
They weren't People, they were an AC. Nothing of importance and most likely a small Perl script meant to troll.
Trump consistently acts incompetent, and needs a serious medical check-up to verify his cognitive capability to remain president or be removed for medical reasons (Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, or simply Dementia, etc.)
Trouble is that people very familiar with him, including the guy that helped work on The Art of the Deal book who wrote an article today, have been saying since he started running for office, that he has always been like this and the way he is acting is no surprise and even predicted.
Dumping cargo into the bay is not treason. Illegal, but not treason.
By our current standards as written in the US constitution. I will bet you that treason got clarified in our constitution as what it is because it was applied to all sorts of behavior previously.
The components will still need to be shipped from China where they're produced, near the resource mines which avoid environmental regulation and cost significantly less than domestic.
Last time I saw information on this, the components were actually produced in Taiwan, Japan, and Korea and the shipped to China for assemblage. Some raw materials also came from China, but overall, all three of those countries ended up each getting more of the percentage of manufacturing costs than China. So, what we're really talking about here is moving component fabrication back to the us. This was from The Economist breakdown of where all the cost of Apple products were going, but it was from a few years ago. If you have newer info, could you please post it?
I was just watching Pearl Harbor - not a great film, but it brought back to me that the greatest threat to these people is the sheer force of American willpower. The Japanese military machine tugged at the tail of a sleeping tiger, and they lived to regret it.
I doubt American willpower was a serious contender considering the other side had people litter lay training to be suicide bombers. Americans troops typically were the first to break and run away. We had some advantages in that Americans were also the first to rally and run back into battle with more resolve, and with a different plan to make sure the last mistake didn't happen. The first mistake the Japanese did was mistakenly think that bombing people would make them want to give up. If anything, actively bombing a population has the opposite effect. Second, the sleeping tiger that the Japanese actually awoke was American industrial might. The Japanese could not replace sunken ships, downed airplanes, or dead pilots and soldiers. They US was pumping out enough for two fronts to double every year or two (not to mention while also supplying the Brits and Russians with considerable war material at the same time). Part of that was bad Japanese military tactics that aided in their downfall just like Sparta, while the US will try a different tactic till they find one that works, but mostly, it was just American has the industry, economy, and population to win a war through attrition.
Or the manufacturers of the expensive hardware could update their software to work on a more modern up to date operating system, be that Windows 10, Linux or whatever.
Oh, they do, all you have to do is sign and pay for the service agreement, buy all new servers and equipment, upgrade to the latest version of their product and retrain. Chances are that the price of all that is a multiple of what they told you it would cost when you signed the previous contract.
Hardly, if it's any one who should take more responsibility here it's the vendors of said embedded devices. To even implement such devices on software that they know will be EOLd while still be connected to a network is beyond me.
Trust me, the vendors have covered their asses with their install/support contract. They probably have an upgrade path, and only require the hospital to buy the new version along with new servers to begin the migration. $10 million isn't unusual for such an upgrade and a single departmental system, which may or may not be only payable out of departmental, capital, or some other budget by either hospital policy or state law. Plus, they're not really EOL'd. MS is still supporting older systems for those with volume licensing that are paying, and hospitals are paying if still running many of these machines.* Still, from my readings of the articles, its not really the clinical systems themselves being hit but all the user computers used to access them.
*Not to say that there aren't completely unsupported examples out there. Where I worked had some Win95 boxes connected by Novel Network (complete with their own network routers on old beige boxes sitting in the network closets) until the department responsible finally replaced the system in the late 2000's. My department's last XP machine was connected to a special purpose film scanner using a horribly old proprietary SCSI card that wouldn't have fit in a newer computer even if we could have found the drivers for it or the scanner. it had one purpose which would be over in another six months and new replacement would have been in excess of $15k just for the hardware and the contract probably would have taken several months to get signed. In the end we let it sit and do its job for a few more months and then pitched it.
I was watching the first season of Daredevil, and I was struck by the anachronism of a Manhattan depicted as being full of working class immigrants who needed protection from greedy, ruthless developers. That battle was lost decades ago.
Of course, as the stories are being lifted from the Daredevil comics of the mid 80's which are probably the writer's impression of NYC in the 70's or earlier. They play it off as the result of the alien invasion of the Avengers movie, but really, they're just using old material that few outside of New England have any real idea of. The stories are a bit behind the times, but they are generally good stories. That's why Marvel movie are doing so well, they are pulling from 50+ years of stories that have been told and cherry picking the best characters and plots. Most can be re-written such as the Punisher's new background as it really doesn't make sense to have him be a Vietnam vet anymore, but others just have to be left as is to make for a good story.
That's only useful for extinction causing things we can actually do something about. Just what exactly is your plan for dealing with a direct hit from a Gamma-Ray burst ? One of those would sterilise everything on earth it doesn't kill, it would pass right through the planet so you wouldn't even be safe at the bottom of a mine - and they travel at the speed of light to so the laws of physics actually declare it impossible to build a warning system for them. You can NEVER get a warning to earth faster than the thing you're warning about gets there.
Non-sequitur. Creating a colony on Mars also wouldn't protect versus gamma-ray burst.
None of those meet the reason why colonizing elsewhere is a good idea: so that the next time the universe throws a giant rock at earth this isn't the only place in the universe where humans exist.
If that's the reason, our money would be better spent on mapping our solar system, early warning system, and deflection methods.
Why not operate facilities where people who need treatment can be placed until they're stable enough to actually live in the community?
Well, IIRC, a large part of that deinstitutionalization movement was because the courts decided that people can't normally be institutionalized against their will. Unless there is a crime involved, if they say they want to leave, they get to leave. Add in that the Republicans won't want to pay for it. So, now, they just walk and are homeless till they commit a crime and get jailed which is where most of those deinstitutionalized people went.
Nice post. But it doesn't explain why the problem is biggest on the west coast.
Economies are booming. Lots of people are moving here. Housing is getting more expensive by rising rents or by being replaced with new builds. Almost all of the homeless are locals that have been displaced because even cheap housing is being taken up by professionals now. People are falling through the cracks and have nowhere to go.
Especially considering Microsoft's monopoly power over OEMs,...
That and business licenses. I'm wondering if my business' 5000 seats are listed in there as technically we're buying that many Windows 10 installs*
*With the right to downgrade to something else because our software requires it, but that probably isn't recorded anywhere.
If time didn't exist, then there was no time for a god to create the universe.
Pretty sure this is an actual case of "begging the question". As I see it described in the physics books I have read is that while our time and space dimensions did not exist prior to the big bang, they probably came from other dimensions that could very well have been time-like and space-like. Even if our space-time was created at the big bang is still under discussion as before a certain point, we have no data and no grand theory to tell us exactly what was happening.
Sure they play little tricks to nudge out those extra cents of profit but it's important to realize that it makes a huge difference for them if the margin is 2% or 5%. If you're paying $1.02 or $1.05 not so much. If you made it a state monopoly it'd probably cost $1.50 because nobody has strong incentive to make it cheaper, it'll sell because people need it and they can't have it from anywhere else.
I'd have to say that hasn't been the case of the state monopolies I've seen. WA had state monopoly on liquor. Had to go to their stores which were fairly well spread out and open till 9. Had a wide selection of call brands at prices you could try different brands you'd never heard of. State voted to give that monopoly up and let stores sell liquor. Prices on the rot gut stayed about the same or perhaps dropped a dollar a bottle. Selection was pretty much only common brands. Any call liquor doubled or tripled in price. What was a $35 dollar bottle under state monopoly became $70-100 from stores all across town, if you could still find it. That's not even including the special taxes that people agreed to just so they could have the convenience to buy their rot gut liquor at a grocery store. In my experience, a state monopoly has no strong reason to make it more expensive as they have no profit motive to push for.
"Eccentric" is a term reserved for rich people who are batshit crazy.
The difference, at least from a sociological viewpoint is the eccentrics are not considered threats to society while deviants are.
I really wish this were true, but it's just so far from reality. Political grandstanding of the worst order. As someone who speaks the broken English of a U.S. American, I think it is a terrible language and absolutely should not be the "universal" language of the world. It's just bad. Not particularly expressive, difficult for newcomers to learn, ridiculous, inconsistent grammar rules, etc.
However actual usage patterns and current language theory from articles I've read seem to say the exact opposite. English's willingness to mangle its grammar, borrow loan words, and define meaning by use makes it easier to learn, more expressive, and adopted more widely than the languages. The opposite side of things would be French with their Académie française which seems to be losing out due to its rigidity.
"The focus is on students and professionals."
I've never understood this. These two groups couldn't have more different needs. Students need basic word processing and internet browsing. Professionals need all kinds of other things, such as virtual machines, high-end graphics software, video editing, etc. etc. Why do they always get lumped together? Is it just because students so often want to waste their time playing video games?
You misunderstand. When computer companies say "professionals" in reference to laptops, they do not mean coders, techs, or people that use VMs. They mean people who fly around in airplanes in suits and give powerpoint presentations in other people's conference rooms. Their workload is perhaps even less intensive than a students.
It would be worth getting Space-X's estimate for the goal though.
I've read an interview with Musk putting the cost of a manned Mars mission at $200-600 billion. Even at the lowest estimate, it makes it the largest engineering project humanity has ever done. It will beat the ISS as a manned Mars mission is essentially building another ISS and then sending it to Mars and back.
Money. LOTS of money. Ludicrous amounts of money. But it would make a difference, and it could be done.
Musk has said somewhere between 200-600 billion. I think that is a bit optimistic, but he's got the guys who can run the numbers and tell him what they think it would cost with his own rockets if nothing else. So, it's not really even worrying about till NASA gets and additional $20 billion/year and then we can look at it happening in a decade or three.