I don't understand what benefits will accrue from marooning dozens of people on mars. Will it reinvigorate space exploration to know that we sent out a Jamestown colony?
Nothing as there is no real chance these people will go to Mars, on a one way trip or otherwise. What might do is reinvigorate space exploration at a time when there are still decades of research left to do before going to Mars by keeping it in the minds and attentions of the general public. As for one way trips, by the time we can reliably get people to Mars, coming back will be a trivial issue compared to the other things that will have to be figured out.
the IAU should grant Pluto a once-in-the-universe exception to the definition of 'planet'
Same as we have a term for the Classical Planets as those that could be seen with the naked eye and known though history, I suspect we'll end up with a term such as Modern Planets or Classical Modern Planets that will include Pluto simply because it was a planet for some time.
What you're describing is an incredibly challenging tasks. One needs several missions to get to better know Europa in general, and specific potential entry areas in particular, first. These missions are going to be expensive and have long lead times. And an actual boring / submersible mission is going to be extremely expensive.
What!?! Next you'll be talking us that even with Apollo levels of funding and political commitment, it'll take us at least 30 years to put a person on Mars.
Weirdly enough, women were quite well represented in technology before the 80s. Clearly there was an interest - so what's changed?
My guess is that tech in the 80's was mostly composed of newly created fields where more conservative established males did not want to risk. Therefore it was open to women and they went there. Once they acted as the pioneers, the more conservative good ol'boys settled in and took over.
And I'm getting very sick of the anti-SJW "I refuse to read the article, but will expound about how awful SJWs are because of my truthy gut feelings" bullshiat.
That because if they have to resort to using terms like SJW as a pejorative to begin with, it's because they are resorting to an ad hominem attack because they can't attack the actual arguments.
What if the other brane also has a reactor shield in the same spot?
Doesn't matter, from my reading of TFA, the true variable is the gravitational field around the Earth from the sun it orbits. Unless there is a similar earth in the same spot with a gravitational field that varies exactly inversely to ours, shielding shouldn't matter.
What? Why should the creation rate fall with the square of the distance? I can understand the inverse square law from the standpoint of neutron emissions from our own universe, but wouldn't entanglement across branes be, by definition, independent of distance?
Reading TFA, it seems that the neutrons are coming from reactor and they are bouncing between the branes due to collisions and the affect of our gravitational field. It's long been suspected that gravity reaches across the branes which is why it is so weak compared to the the forces. This is probably an assumption of their experiment if not of the brane theory they are working with. Gravity is the key as what they are really looking for is a change in the rate they detect neutrons with the difference of the gravitational field that goes with the Earths change in distance from the sun due to its orbit. So, they are next to the reactor probably because it will drown out the other source such as neutrons from cosmic rays, but are hoping to see a change in the number of neutrons that related to the distance from the sun while other variables remain the same.
Nearly two grand for a days work? Get the fuck out of here. No wonder nobody is hiring them.
More like three days work including post production, meeting with the family before and after the wedding, and reviewing and turing over prints. Possibly including assistants, all acting as contractors so that has to cover all sorts of stuff. Like anything else, if you want to hire a professional with professional equipment, you're going to get what you pay for in most cases. Then there's the issues of having to work with Bridezilla and her Archie Bunker father. There are both photographers who won't shoot weddings or up their prices for them simply because putting up with the human elements of the event make it not worth it.
In many ways, it is similar to the computer industry. Just like everybody can use a camera, it's pretty much where everybody can plug in and set up a computer. Thus the value of perceived work is lowered. "Why pay some boffin and outrageous amount to do what my cousin can do?" In many cases it might work just fine. It's good enough just as tablets are good enough for many people instead of laptops and phone cameras are good enough instead of point and shoots. For that matter, why pay for expensive coders when there are cheap coders out there? Get what you pay for. If phone cameras are going to be good enough for the wedding will probably be up to the bride anyway. You can probably find somebody who will shoot the wedding for free or cheap just like you can find somebody to come over and work on your computer for free or cheap. Unless they're a friend that is a professional or a pro-hobbiest doing it for friends and family, you're still probably going to get what you pay for.
what I was thinking was more like a non-recoil pistol, since I would be flung back unless I had my back up against a rock
Currently, what you want is the HK G11. It has a rotating breech using caseless ammo so that it gets rid of the issue of angular momentum caused by ejecting shells. The recoil in the direction of the firing can be handled with training to fire from the hip and center of mass but is minor compared to other gun operations that will cause the firer to spin along an additional axis. Of course, HK never moved the gun to full production, but of course, countries don't already have moon based either (no matter what conspiracy theorists will tell you).
I doubt that China will be giving much of a shit about the FAA either.
Rights to the moon will be hammered out using rights to the Earth long before the rights to the moon really mean much. China will care as much about the FAA as the US decides to ply them with political pressure. The game of who gets rights to the moon will be played out with chips made of Earth based political and trade power. This matches much of how the settlement of the new world was handled. Vast areas were claimed by many European nations (and indigenous peoples) but they were settled mostly in political deals caused by other issues.
This, absolutely this. I believe the number one reason many people choose to disbelieve that energy balance is the primary determinant for weight gain/loss is simply that they don't like the answer it gives them: That to lose weight, you have to eat less food and that this means sometimes feeling hungry.
More voodoo and fad diets form somebody that doesn't have any scientific background in nutrition. Just like everything Mr. Dilbert is talking about. I suspect that if you actually talked to a person with the proper scientific background, a nutritionalist, or even a personal trainer, they'd give you a list of not only what to eat, when to eat, but also of exercise (and that none of those will probably be sufficient by themselves). Saying to lose weight, just eat less is like saying to win a marathon, run faster than everybody else. Technically correct, but just a useless suggestion by somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about.
A service call? Seriously? A syadmin (or operator if it's a big place) can't see the yellow light on a disk and replace the pack with in-house spares? Have we become so inept as an IT community that we can no longer do a walk-through of our machine room and service simple things like this? Maybe we do deserve to be outsourced.
And if one must have a service contract such that only the vendor can touch the hardware, (why would you do that? never mind) wouldn't you negotiate a provision that includes drive replacement (as drives are consumables that must eventually be replaced) without being charged for an "office visit"?
First off, are things so bad you still have to do physical inspection of the servers? Where we work, there are multiple monitoring systems and they don't expect anybody inside the data centers unless there is a change order for work of known parameters. Beyond that, it's not even the IT community in many cases but the business community that will all too easily not spend the money for the protection measures the IT department requests, decide to go with the said vendor, and not make the changes to the contract that the IT department requests (if they even get to see the contract before its signed).
Now, what does it cost to swap it? Let's say the chance of failure is 20%, it takes ten minutes, and you pay the admin $30/hour (I just made up all these numbers). ($30/hour * 1/6 hour * 0.2 failures) = $1.
I don't know where you work at or what your processes are like that it only takes ten minutes to swap a drive. Where I work, it takes 10 minutes for the admin to tell that the drive has failed and determine what model it is for the replacement. Add in another 30 minutes to submit RFQs to three different vendors because his request for extra drives at implementation was denied. Once he gets a quote, it takes another 60 minutes of email and meetings with the guy that OKs budget requests before getting his boss involved and telling him that, yes, the department really does need these drives. Another 30 minutes over the next month checking on the backorder of the said drives till they finally ship. 90 minutes after seeing that the drives have arrived at the enterprise to go down to the loading dock, confirm that they have been delivered, get somebody to tell him who they have been delivered to, track down that wrong person and get them to find the drives which they have already misplaced, and hand them over. In that time is another 5 minutes to fill out the proper change control forms and submit them, another 15 minutes to explain change control request and answer questions at weekly meeting to boss and coworkers, 10 minutes over the next three weekly meetings to explain he is still waiting on the drives to complete that change control. 60 minutes to explain change control request to the server farm department of the IT department and argue till they give their permission. Another 30 minutes to schedule a visit time with the server farm guardians for time to access the lights out center (where the lights are never really out, but they like to call it that). 20 minutes waiting for the guy to show up to let you into the server farm to swap the drive and find the server. 10 minutes to do the physical work of swapping the drive. 20 minutes of checking on the drive swap to make sure that the drives have been swapped successfully and data is being replicated to it correctly. 15 more minutes in the weekly meeting to explain that the drive has been swapped and that the change control request is now closed. Which comes to more like six hours and five minutes to swap a drive.
Great, let's just redefine "chess program" to mean "any program that anyone on earth could consider a game."
There, now we have all possible chess variants covered you annoying pedant.
Well, the real question is if this program was replicating the same rules as the one that was previously accepted and supposedly beat?
Flexible configuration: LSM elevators can propel a vehicle in any direction, and cabs can be switched from hoistway to hoistway, enabling the creation of “one-way” hoistways with multiple cabs in each. Modular stators allow the height of the elevator to be customized at installation and extended in the future with minimal disruption. LSM elevators can also accommodate inclined layouts, providing an alternative to stairways or escalators.
Interestingly, I oftened wondered if it was in the interests of intelligent life to focus their "expansion" inward to cyberspace vs. outerspace; transcending their evolution via forgoing the flesh bodies to machines of silicon based computers (or some such). Meaning, we're looking in the wrong places.
There was a Charles Stross book like that. The population of the solar system was moving into progressive levels of virtual worlds and never really looked at exploring the universe (except for the main characters of the book). Still, their civilization was limited by actual matter and energy in the real world. I find it surpassing they wouldn't look at getting some of that from nearby solar systems as the tech was there to do so. The main characters of the book did so, but they started early with great financial costs. Perhaps local matter and energy are so costly in the virtual world that it is really hard to get an investment large enough to make the jump. Sort of like the Easter Islanders cutting the last trees (or having rats eat the seeds) for fishing boats rather than to move to a different island.
Cue the Star Trek music as the Enterprise begins to circle yet another duplicate of the planet Earth. Spock turns to the Captain and says "It seems an exact duplicate of the Sol system, but formed billions of years earlier. Before even the creation of your solar system Captain. Most interesting."
the problem with SAFE deposit boxes is that the renter of said box almost always has no contingency plan in place for access to that box when they die due to security restrictions on access that limit it to the renter only (and then only upon presentation of key, signature, identification, and perhaps a secret code and/or biometrics).
Yes, but that is a PEBCAK issue, not a technical one. It would probably be the same with any other secure off site storage. In this case, the backup hard drive is probably the least of the families worries or at least allows for eventual recovery if the computer is locked and nobody knows the passwords.
Every year, I just back up my files to an external hard drive and put it in my safety deposit box in the bank. If my house burns down, I still have all my photos (long since scanned in all my old film stuff), documents, and even music. I've got the last several years in there so it would take three or so drives not working to really lose everything (after I lost everything at home). Usually I spend a little extra money to make sure I have small external hard drives that don't have wall worts to power them as they'll fit in the safety deposit box easier and I won't have to keep track of the wall worts either. In the past, I suggested my parents do the same with a flash drive and my father scoffed when I mentioned keeping on in the safety deposit box. Of course, his computer got hit with the encryption malware and they lost everything including the flash drive we back up everything several years earlier because they can't remember where it might be.
Slashdot Mirror
Birth is a death sentence.
Survival is the slowest form of suicide.
I don't understand what benefits will accrue from marooning dozens of people on mars. Will it reinvigorate space exploration to know that we sent out a Jamestown colony?
Nothing as there is no real chance these people will go to Mars, on a one way trip or otherwise. What might do is reinvigorate space exploration at a time when there are still decades of research left to do before going to Mars by keeping it in the minds and attentions of the general public. As for one way trips, by the time we can reliably get people to Mars, coming back will be a trivial issue compared to the other things that will have to be figured out.
the IAU should grant Pluto a once-in-the-universe exception to the definition of 'planet'
Same as we have a term for the Classical Planets as those that could be seen with the naked eye and known though history, I suspect we'll end up with a term such as Modern Planets or Classical Modern Planets that will include Pluto simply because it was a planet for some time.
What you're describing is an incredibly challenging tasks. One needs several missions to get to better know Europa in general, and specific potential entry areas in particular, first. These missions are going to be expensive and have long lead times. And an actual boring / submersible mission is going to be extremely expensive.
What!?! Next you'll be talking us that even with Apollo levels of funding and political commitment, it'll take us at least 30 years to put a person on Mars.
Her problem is she has a track record. A terrible track record of incompetence.
Interesting. Please explain.
Weirdly enough, women were quite well represented in technology before the 80s. Clearly there was an interest - so what's changed?
My guess is that tech in the 80's was mostly composed of newly created fields where more conservative established males did not want to risk. Therefore it was open to women and they went there. Once they acted as the pioneers, the more conservative good ol'boys settled in and took over.
And I'm getting very sick of the anti-SJW "I refuse to read the article, but will expound about how awful SJWs are because of my truthy gut feelings" bullshiat.
That because if they have to resort to using terms like SJW as a pejorative to begin with, it's because they are resorting to an ad hominem attack because they can't attack the actual arguments.
It wasn't wealthy greeks who spent the money that put greece in debt. It was the government.
Hrrm. The Greeks have government by poor people. How unusual.
What if the other brane also has a reactor shield in the same spot?
Doesn't matter, from my reading of TFA, the true variable is the gravitational field around the Earth from the sun it orbits. Unless there is a similar earth in the same spot with a gravitational field that varies exactly inversely to ours, shielding shouldn't matter.
I have a big problem with that.
What? Why should the creation rate fall with the square of the distance? I can understand the inverse square law from the standpoint of neutron emissions from our own universe, but wouldn't entanglement across branes be, by definition, independent of distance?
Reading TFA, it seems that the neutrons are coming from reactor and they are bouncing between the branes due to collisions and the affect of our gravitational field. It's long been suspected that gravity reaches across the branes which is why it is so weak compared to the the forces. This is probably an assumption of their experiment if not of the brane theory they are working with. Gravity is the key as what they are really looking for is a change in the rate they detect neutrons with the difference of the gravitational field that goes with the Earths change in distance from the sun due to its orbit. So, they are next to the reactor probably because it will drown out the other source such as neutrons from cosmic rays, but are hoping to see a change in the number of neutrons that related to the distance from the sun while other variables remain the same.
Nearly two grand for a days work? Get the fuck out of here. No wonder nobody is hiring them.
More like three days work including post production, meeting with the family before and after the wedding, and reviewing and turing over prints. Possibly including assistants, all acting as contractors so that has to cover all sorts of stuff. Like anything else, if you want to hire a professional with professional equipment, you're going to get what you pay for in most cases. Then there's the issues of having to work with Bridezilla and her Archie Bunker father. There are both photographers who won't shoot weddings or up their prices for them simply because putting up with the human elements of the event make it not worth it.
In many ways, it is similar to the computer industry. Just like everybody can use a camera, it's pretty much where everybody can plug in and set up a computer. Thus the value of perceived work is lowered. "Why pay some boffin and outrageous amount to do what my cousin can do?" In many cases it might work just fine. It's good enough just as tablets are good enough for many people instead of laptops and phone cameras are good enough instead of point and shoots. For that matter, why pay for expensive coders when there are cheap coders out there? Get what you pay for. If phone cameras are going to be good enough for the wedding will probably be up to the bride anyway. You can probably find somebody who will shoot the wedding for free or cheap just like you can find somebody to come over and work on your computer for free or cheap. Unless they're a friend that is a professional or a pro-hobbiest doing it for friends and family, you're still probably going to get what you pay for.
As opposed to forcibly enslaving millions of people around the world through several centuries of colonial rule?
So, what about Ireland?
Fucks like you should be deported to Somalia. Or maybe Antarctica. Or maybe intergalactic space.
CAPTCHA: 'nonlocal', which I wish you were.
Why do these trolls bother to post as AC? Can't they even bother to create sock puppets?
what I was thinking was more like a non-recoil pistol, since I would be flung back unless I had my back up against a rock
Currently, what you want is the HK G11. It has a rotating breech using caseless ammo so that it gets rid of the issue of angular momentum caused by ejecting shells. The recoil in the direction of the firing can be handled with training to fire from the hip and center of mass but is minor compared to other gun operations that will cause the firer to spin along an additional axis. Of course, HK never moved the gun to full production, but of course, countries don't already have moon based either (no matter what conspiracy theorists will tell you).
I doubt that China will be giving much of a shit about the FAA either.
Rights to the moon will be hammered out using rights to the Earth long before the rights to the moon really mean much. China will care as much about the FAA as the US decides to ply them with political pressure. The game of who gets rights to the moon will be played out with chips made of Earth based political and trade power. This matches much of how the settlement of the new world was handled. Vast areas were claimed by many European nations (and indigenous peoples) but they were settled mostly in political deals caused by other issues.
This, absolutely this. I believe the number one reason many people choose to disbelieve that energy balance is the primary determinant for weight gain/loss is simply that they don't like the answer it gives them: That to lose weight, you have to eat less food and that this means sometimes feeling hungry.
More voodoo and fad diets form somebody that doesn't have any scientific background in nutrition. Just like everything Mr. Dilbert is talking about. I suspect that if you actually talked to a person with the proper scientific background, a nutritionalist, or even a personal trainer, they'd give you a list of not only what to eat, when to eat, but also of exercise (and that none of those will probably be sufficient by themselves). Saying to lose weight, just eat less is like saying to win a marathon, run faster than everybody else. Technically correct, but just a useless suggestion by somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about.
A service call? Seriously? A syadmin (or operator if it's a big place) can't see the yellow light on a disk and replace the pack with in-house spares? Have we become so inept as an IT community that we can no longer do a walk-through of our machine room and service simple things like this? Maybe we do deserve to be outsourced.
And if one must have a service contract such that only the vendor can touch the hardware, (why would you do that? never mind) wouldn't you negotiate a provision that includes drive replacement (as drives are consumables that must eventually be replaced) without being charged for an "office visit"?
First off, are things so bad you still have to do physical inspection of the servers? Where we work, there are multiple monitoring systems and they don't expect anybody inside the data centers unless there is a change order for work of known parameters. Beyond that, it's not even the IT community in many cases but the business community that will all too easily not spend the money for the protection measures the IT department requests, decide to go with the said vendor, and not make the changes to the contract that the IT department requests (if they even get to see the contract before its signed).
Now, what does it cost to swap it? Let's say the chance of failure is 20%, it takes ten minutes, and you pay the admin $30/hour (I just made up all these numbers). ($30/hour * 1/6 hour * 0.2 failures) = $1.
I don't know where you work at or what your processes are like that it only takes ten minutes to swap a drive. Where I work, it takes 10 minutes for the admin to tell that the drive has failed and determine what model it is for the replacement. Add in another 30 minutes to submit RFQs to three different vendors because his request for extra drives at implementation was denied. Once he gets a quote, it takes another 60 minutes of email and meetings with the guy that OKs budget requests before getting his boss involved and telling him that, yes, the department really does need these drives. Another 30 minutes over the next month checking on the backorder of the said drives till they finally ship. 90 minutes after seeing that the drives have arrived at the enterprise to go down to the loading dock, confirm that they have been delivered, get somebody to tell him who they have been delivered to, track down that wrong person and get them to find the drives which they have already misplaced, and hand them over. In that time is another 5 minutes to fill out the proper change control forms and submit them, another 15 minutes to explain change control request and answer questions at weekly meeting to boss and coworkers, 10 minutes over the next three weekly meetings to explain he is still waiting on the drives to complete that change control. 60 minutes to explain change control request to the server farm department of the IT department and argue till they give their permission. Another 30 minutes to schedule a visit time with the server farm guardians for time to access the lights out center (where the lights are never really out, but they like to call it that). 20 minutes waiting for the guy to show up to let you into the server farm to swap the drive and find the server. 10 minutes to do the physical work of swapping the drive. 20 minutes of checking on the drive swap to make sure that the drives have been swapped successfully and data is being replicated to it correctly. 15 more minutes in the weekly meeting to explain that the drive has been swapped and that the change control request is now closed. Which comes to more like six hours and five minutes to swap a drive.
Great, let's just redefine "chess program" to mean "any program that anyone on earth could consider a game." There, now we have all possible chess variants covered you annoying pedant.
Well, the real question is if this program was replicating the same rules as the one that was previously accepted and supposedly beat?
Modern Chess is not now a variant called Mad Queen. It is a standardized game referred to as Chess and understood world-wide.
Ya! Just like football!
Did you see that ludicrous display last night?
Flexible configuration: LSM elevators can propel a vehicle in any direction, and cabs can be switched from hoistway to hoistway, enabling the creation of “one-way” hoistways with multiple cabs in each. Modular stators allow the height of the elevator to be customized at installation and extended in the future with minimal disruption. LSM elevators can also accommodate inclined layouts, providing an alternative to stairways or escalators.
Sounds like a Wonkavator.
Interestingly, I oftened wondered if it was in the interests of intelligent life to focus their "expansion" inward to cyberspace vs. outerspace; transcending their evolution via forgoing the flesh bodies to machines of silicon based computers (or some such). Meaning, we're looking in the wrong places.
There was a Charles Stross book like that. The population of the solar system was moving into progressive levels of virtual worlds and never really looked at exploring the universe (except for the main characters of the book). Still, their civilization was limited by actual matter and energy in the real world. I find it surpassing they wouldn't look at getting some of that from nearby solar systems as the tech was there to do so. The main characters of the book did so, but they started early with great financial costs. Perhaps local matter and energy are so costly in the virtual world that it is really hard to get an investment large enough to make the jump. Sort of like the Easter Islanders cutting the last trees (or having rats eat the seeds) for fishing boats rather than to move to a different island.
Cue the Star Trek music as the Enterprise begins to circle yet another duplicate of the planet Earth. Spock turns to the Captain and says "It seems an exact duplicate of the Sol system, but formed billions of years earlier. Before even the creation of your solar system Captain. Most interesting."
the problem with SAFE deposit boxes is that the renter of said box almost always has no contingency plan in place for access to that box when they die due to security restrictions on access that limit it to the renter only (and then only upon presentation of key, signature, identification, and perhaps a secret code and/or biometrics).
Yes, but that is a PEBCAK issue, not a technical one. It would probably be the same with any other secure off site storage. In this case, the backup hard drive is probably the least of the families worries or at least allows for eventual recovery if the computer is locked and nobody knows the passwords.
Every year, I just back up my files to an external hard drive and put it in my safety deposit box in the bank. If my house burns down, I still have all my photos (long since scanned in all my old film stuff), documents, and even music. I've got the last several years in there so it would take three or so drives not working to really lose everything (after I lost everything at home). Usually I spend a little extra money to make sure I have small external hard drives that don't have wall worts to power them as they'll fit in the safety deposit box easier and I won't have to keep track of the wall worts either. In the past, I suggested my parents do the same with a flash drive and my father scoffed when I mentioned keeping on in the safety deposit box. Of course, his computer got hit with the encryption malware and they lost everything including the flash drive we back up everything several years earlier because they can't remember where it might be.