No, actually, that's not true either. Although the gun-ownership is explicitly enumerated in the Bill of Rights as a right, even the most liberal locales (like Texas) treat it as a mere privilege — and, somehow, we are all Ok with that.
Well, it's not like people don't treat the rest of the Bill of Rights the same way. It seems most people these days consider such thing only being a right when they want to do it (or the other guy's party seems to infringe).
50% of light-speed would get you to the next solar system, in the same time it would take to get a university degree. From there, you or your offspring can choose to try again, and see what's on the next one.
You don't need exotic technology to colonize the universe...
50% light speed for a macro sized object is fairly exotic technology. The energy needed to get something like a space habitat needed for a human for a number of years up to that speed would require Star Trek level tech in just handling the antimatter needed to accelerate up and down.
"I'm with you; these moderate-to-left RINO old farts have to go."
Of course, the funny thing is that the Tea Party are the RINOs. A bunch of religious Southern state's rights people who are upset that black man is president? They're all the Dixiecrats that abandoned the Democratic party when it decided to support civil rights, invited to join the Republicans by Nixon, and cultivated for their money and votes by Reagan. They are not traditional Republicans and certainly not in line with the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. There's a reason that only in the last year that the Confederate states all finally were red Republican states. It's because 30 or 40 years ago, they'd all be blue dog Democrats.
I think libertarian leaning Republicans have a bright future.
Define Libertarian. When I was a card carrying member in the 80's and 90's, they were mostly strong Bill of Rights and anti-drug law people. Now they seem like a bunch of Ann Rand nuts looking to blame the government for all their woes (except where strong government is in their favor).
If Uber were really offering legitimate competition, I would be more sympathetic. But they're partly undercutting existing taxis through ridiculous things like using drivers who lack commercial vehicle insurance, which is rather irresponsible.
Only undercutting in some instances. In others they are charging more and winning out because of better service.
I'm much more interested in building up a meaningful, sustainable space program.
Well, the thing is that we'll realistically need a meaningful sustainable space program to get to Mars. That's why we're not getting to Mars. The work ahead of us to have a successful mission to Mars currently means a lot more than just building a ship and going. The intervening steps pretty much require the space program you want. Nobody wants to pay for it, thus we're not going to Mars either.
We can bend space already dude. It's called mass, gravity, and movement. You know, gravity bends space itself and moving that mass at a high speed dilates time because of the bending of space? It's proven already.
That's not hyperspace. Hyperspace is where you leave our space (xyz coordinates) travel to a different space (ijk coordinates) where the physical laws are different, or the distance between to corresponding points in our universe are closer. Thus we either are allowed to travel faster than lightspeed or travel less distance in a universe that is not bound by our rules. Closest thing I can really think of in actual science would be string theory and their extra dimensions or some other possible evidence that other dimensions might exist (eg possibly through evidence of a non-isotropic universe), but I don't think there is anything that has really stated that the physical laws there would be different or what they would be if the were. That doesn't even begin to discuss how we would get there if it did exist.
Better? Say, where is that magical land where the drugs are BETTER today?
If anything, you get more junk, more crap, more additives and less of the good stuff.
Actually, it's gone in a circle. Things were all mixed up and still are if you are getting "X", but if you are buying "Molly", then you should be getting the pure MDMA. There is a market for it so somebody is fulfilling it, but it says something when things have gotten such as a new name has to be come up with to describe the pure form of what you always thought you were buying to begin with.
But now we raise minimum wage to $15 per hour, which is really $30 per hour once you get done with taxes and benefits.
Benefits? For a minimum wage job? In Seattle? This wage increase isn't affecting people with benefits, but people that get their wage pay and that's it. It's the dish washers, baristas, and food prepers that are going to be affected by this. Their only benefits are usually a shift meal. Of course, this just means more people will be put on salary for $30k a year and work 60 hours a week, but then they might get benfits.
Until SP3 it had an issue where randomly the registry would get corrupted and it would blue screen at boot, requiring a system restore. It didn't happen often, but no matter your configuration, the longer you used it, the closer to 1 the probability of it happening. The issue was fixed in SP3 and then life was good.
Yes, but that was a standard feature of all Windows versions up till that point.
I would agree, and I am once again very grateful that Kickstarter exists. I've seen lots of things on Kickstarter that I wanted that never would have come about if there hadn't been a way to crowd source the project because it was so niche or because ROI was such that nobody would have invested in it. Now these things can happen by people who directly want them to happen. Sure, some things fail. Some projects end up going in ways people might not like. I think the world is better for it that these projects are even attempted and have a chance and have been very happy with the ones I have supported.
The numbers work out for habitat-stealing if interstellar travel involved some quirk of technology that made dropping back into a gravity well somehow attractive at the end of the trip.
From what we can extrapolate given our current rudimentary state of technology, we think that if you can work out interstellar travel, then Iain Banks' popularized Culture series take on the matter is probably correct: that is, interstellar travel necessarily solves space habitat issues as a precondition. And once you have an interstellar-travel-grade space habitat, it is only the eccentrics who want to drop back down a gravity well.
I tend to think that assuming post singularity level tech like the Culture novels is a much greater jump than assuming otherwise. There, the assumption is that those things are possible and preferable. Using the culture series as an excuse why aliens wouldn't need our resources or a gravity well pretty much is a proper use of "begging the question".
No. I know exactly what the need. they need matter and energy. There is matter and energy everywhere in the universe. Why the hell would they go light years away from home to come and take matter and energy from earth, when there perfectly good matter in their neighborhood. There is no material known to modern science that is easier to obtain by going light years away than synthesizing at home with chemistry.
Could be they aren't coming here to take the matter and energy away. They are coming to Earth for lebensraum. A nice gravity well with a nice atmosphere and little to no terraforming needed. Space habitats require steady and costly upkeep like any ship as they leak and break, only a gravity well with a nice magnetic fiedl offers long term, cheap, steady state environment.
Okay, let's assume that a space-faring civilization needed resources and had so exhausted the resources of their home solar system that they needed to exploit the resources of another solar system, then further assuming that our solar system was convenient to them, and further assuming that they had the capacity to exploit the resources in our solar system.
Given all of that, why would they come into a gravity well like the Earth's when they could get enormously more water and organic molecules from Kuiper Belt objects and enormously more metals/silicon/rocky elements from the asteroid belt than from here, without ever entering a gravity well of any consequence?
The gravity well itself could be a resource. A nice place to have an atmosphere that doesn't leak away like a space habitat's would with a magnetic shield to protect both the atmosphere and the population from the sun's rays in a nice reasonably energy rich part of the solar system. It could be more like why somebody would want to take over somebody else's house rather than wandering into the woods and building their own out of trees and rocks. The energy requirements for terraforming Mars or Venus are huge (in units of days of total energy output of the sun). If coming in on a Civ game style generation ship from a distance away, they might not be expecting inhabitants and might not have any other options due to lack of tech, resources, or time.
I have no idea why anybody works for them... they sure don't make the company seem appealing.
It's pretty much a stepping stone. People who have worked there tell me that the average length of employment is around 18 months before you'll leave for someplace better or be booted out in the toxic review process. Still, it's a job and you know you won't be there forever and will get experience out of it.
Slashdot Mirror
No, actually, that's not true either. Although the gun-ownership is explicitly enumerated in the Bill of Rights as a right, even the most liberal locales (like Texas) treat it as a mere privilege — and, somehow, we are all Ok with that.
Well, it's not like people don't treat the rest of the Bill of Rights the same way. It seems most people these days consider such thing only being a right when they want to do it (or the other guy's party seems to infringe).
50% of light-speed would get you to the next solar system, in the same time it would take to get a university degree. From there, you or your offspring can choose to try again, and see what's on the next one.
You don't need exotic technology to colonize the universe...
50% light speed for a macro sized object is fairly exotic technology. The energy needed to get something like a space habitat needed for a human for a number of years up to that speed would require Star Trek level tech in just handling the antimatter needed to accelerate up and down.
They should do Wagner. Hitler would have liked that.
Why should Duke or Kucinich not be allowed to be on the ballet?
Well, if they can dance well enough, sure.
"I'm with you; these moderate-to-left RINO old farts have to go."
Of course, the funny thing is that the Tea Party are the RINOs. A bunch of religious Southern state's rights people who are upset that black man is president? They're all the Dixiecrats that abandoned the Democratic party when it decided to support civil rights, invited to join the Republicans by Nixon, and cultivated for their money and votes by Reagan. They are not traditional Republicans and certainly not in line with the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. There's a reason that only in the last year that the Confederate states all finally were red Republican states. It's because 30 or 40 years ago, they'd all be blue dog Democrats.
I think libertarian leaning Republicans have a bright future.
Define Libertarian. When I was a card carrying member in the 80's and 90's, they were mostly strong Bill of Rights and anti-drug law people. Now they seem like a bunch of Ann Rand nuts looking to blame the government for all their woes (except where strong government is in their favor).
If Uber were really offering legitimate competition, I would be more sympathetic. But they're partly undercutting existing taxis through ridiculous things like using drivers who lack commercial vehicle insurance, which is rather irresponsible.
Only undercutting in some instances. In others they are charging more and winning out because of better service.
I'm much more interested in building up a meaningful, sustainable space program.
Well, the thing is that we'll realistically need a meaningful sustainable space program to get to Mars. That's why we're not getting to Mars. The work ahead of us to have a successful mission to Mars currently means a lot more than just building a ship and going. The intervening steps pretty much require the space program you want. Nobody wants to pay for it, thus we're not going to Mars either.
We can bend space already dude. It's called mass, gravity, and movement. You know, gravity bends space itself and moving that mass at a high speed dilates time because of the bending of space? It's proven already.
That's not hyperspace. Hyperspace is where you leave our space (xyz coordinates) travel to a different space (ijk coordinates) where the physical laws are different, or the distance between to corresponding points in our universe are closer. Thus we either are allowed to travel faster than lightspeed or travel less distance in a universe that is not bound by our rules. Closest thing I can really think of in actual science would be string theory and their extra dimensions or some other possible evidence that other dimensions might exist (eg possibly through evidence of a non-isotropic universe), but I don't think there is anything that has really stated that the physical laws there would be different or what they would be if the were. That doesn't even begin to discuss how we would get there if it did exist.
Better? Say, where is that magical land where the drugs are BETTER today?
If anything, you get more junk, more crap, more additives and less of the good stuff.
Actually, it's gone in a circle. Things were all mixed up and still are if you are getting "X", but if you are buying "Molly", then you should be getting the pure MDMA. There is a market for it so somebody is fulfilling it, but it says something when things have gotten such as a new name has to be come up with to describe the pure form of what you always thought you were buying to begin with.
But now we raise minimum wage to $15 per hour, which is really $30 per hour once you get done with taxes and benefits.
Benefits? For a minimum wage job? In Seattle? This wage increase isn't affecting people with benefits, but people that get their wage pay and that's it. It's the dish washers, baristas, and food prepers that are going to be affected by this. Their only benefits are usually a shift meal. Of course, this just means more people will be put on salary for $30k a year and work 60 hours a week, but then they might get benfits.
"I can code faster than ever!" Tom said swiftly.
I thought Tom just did hardware.
Until SP3 it had an issue where randomly the registry would get corrupted and it would blue screen at boot, requiring a system restore. It didn't happen often, but no matter your configuration, the longer you used it, the closer to 1 the probability of it happening. The issue was fixed in SP3 and then life was good.
Yes, but that was a standard feature of all Windows versions up till that point.
It was a kick-starter wet dream.
I would agree, and I am once again very grateful that Kickstarter exists. I've seen lots of things on Kickstarter that I wanted that never would have come about if there hadn't been a way to crowd source the project because it was so niche or because ROI was such that nobody would have invested in it. Now these things can happen by people who directly want them to happen. Sure, some things fail. Some projects end up going in ways people might not like. I think the world is better for it that these projects are even attempted and have a chance and have been very happy with the ones I have supported.
I like the way you think.
one of the more depressing things is that no one is building a von neumann machine.
Sure we are. They're called genetic engineers.
The numbers work out for habitat-stealing if interstellar travel involved some quirk of technology that made dropping back into a gravity well somehow attractive at the end of the trip.
From what we can extrapolate given our current rudimentary state of technology, we think that if you can work out interstellar travel, then Iain Banks' popularized Culture series take on the matter is probably correct: that is, interstellar travel necessarily solves space habitat issues as a precondition. And once you have an interstellar-travel-grade space habitat, it is only the eccentrics who want to drop back down a gravity well.
I tend to think that assuming post singularity level tech like the Culture novels is a much greater jump than assuming otherwise. There, the assumption is that those things are possible and preferable. Using the culture series as an excuse why aliens wouldn't need our resources or a gravity well pretty much is a proper use of "begging the question".
No. I know exactly what the need. they need matter and energy. There is matter and energy everywhere in the universe. Why the hell would they go light years away from home to come and take matter and energy from earth, when there perfectly good matter in their neighborhood. There is no material known to modern science that is easier to obtain by going light years away than synthesizing at home with chemistry.
Could be they aren't coming here to take the matter and energy away. They are coming to Earth for lebensraum. A nice gravity well with a nice atmosphere and little to no terraforming needed. Space habitats require steady and costly upkeep like any ship as they leak and break, only a gravity well with a nice magnetic fiedl offers long term, cheap, steady state environment.
Okay, let's assume that a space-faring civilization needed resources and had so exhausted the resources of their home solar system that they needed to exploit the resources of another solar system, then further assuming that our solar system was convenient to them, and further assuming that they had the capacity to exploit the resources in our solar system.
Given all of that, why would they come into a gravity well like the Earth's when they could get enormously more water and organic molecules from Kuiper Belt objects and enormously more metals/silicon/rocky elements from the asteroid belt than from here, without ever entering a gravity well of any consequence?
That would be like mining salt in the Mariana Trench.
The gravity well itself could be a resource. A nice place to have an atmosphere that doesn't leak away like a space habitat's would with a magnetic shield to protect both the atmosphere and the population from the sun's rays in a nice reasonably energy rich part of the solar system. It could be more like why somebody would want to take over somebody else's house rather than wandering into the woods and building their own out of trees and rocks. The energy requirements for terraforming Mars or Venus are huge (in units of days of total energy output of the sun). If coming in on a Civ game style generation ship from a distance away, they might not be expecting inhabitants and might not have any other options due to lack of tech, resources, or time.
If humans aren't magic, then they can be simulated by a sufficiently complex machine. Therefore, if humans can be 'intelligent', a machine can, too.
Otherwise you have to believe humans are magic and 'intelligence' somehow exists outside physical reality.
However, in that case, still nothing to say that machines can't also be magic and have intelligence also outside of physical reality.
Khasim nails it. We can all get back to work now.
Nope. Must keep going. Too hard to skip a front page article.
Right. This entire premise is dumb from the start.
Ya, it's like the Dvorak articles of old. It gives me nostalgia for the /. of ten years ago.
I've maintained for years 'civilization' is a thin veneer over mankind essentially being barbarians, and that it's getting thinner every year.
The end of civilization is always just three meals away.
The name "Google" has itself been verbed in a way that has never really happened to the names Apple and Microsoft
Yes, but I remember when "Yahoo" was a verb also.
I have no idea why anybody works for them... they sure don't make the company seem appealing.
It's pretty much a stepping stone. People who have worked there tell me that the average length of employment is around 18 months before you'll leave for someplace better or be booted out in the toxic review process. Still, it's a job and you know you won't be there forever and will get experience out of it.