I was never questioning the premise that we are very unlikely to meet another species. I was just disagreeing with your assertion that no civilization will ever engage in interstelar travel. I agree that it would be rare, but I am still not convinced that it could not happen.
We are both talking about stuff that we have no idea about. And we both seem to be projecting our own respective cultural biases onto alien civilizations that, as far as we can tell, probably not even exist. I therefore do not see the necessity for presenting a theory how some specific technological advancement would work. After all, a person from 1000 years ago, if confronted with out current tiny technological advancements, would most likely be convinced that "fairies did it".
Energy, or rather work, is the ultimate 'currency'. That's what you always pay for things in, or that is that's what their cost is, which you never pay less than.
Sure, but if you have plenty of it, and nothing to spend it on, it becomes very cheap.
Every civilization, in order to advance, will have to discover new ways of harnessing energy that is available to them. Almost all energy at any planetary system comes from the star. Ultimately, at least some civilizations will concentrate their attention at harvesting energy from the star itself. It could be done in a slow way, so that the energy will last for very long time, or the star can be quickly destroyed and the energy used to get the hell out of there. It seems to me that controlled long time harvesting would be harder. I don't see any reason why some civilization would not choose the other way. And once you have that kind of technology, there is no reason to stop and settle. You can just base your whole existence on going from star to star, using each star to get to the next one. There are only two risks: one that you will accidentally end up at a star that does not have enough energy to take you to another one, and get stuck. Another, that you will run into another civilization, that will attempt to defend their system. Even there, though, the advantage is on your side: they will want to defeat you in such a way that they can keep living on their planets, and will therefore want to preserve the system as completely as possible. You don't care, since you only want to use the systems energy to continue your travel.
What exactly do you hope to buy with this currency? Anyway, you still did not tell me the need to stay. You say you don't see the need to go, I don't see the need to stay.
Finally, there could be very good need to go, if, for example, your star, or some other star nearby, is about to go kaboom.
But why is staying in one place, extracting resources so one can improve his ways of extracting more resources and so on, any more rational than simply moving to where there are some resources, staying for a little, and then move on? You could also ask what reason is there to stay put? Since universe is indeed pretty homogenous, it does not really matter where you are. Once you figure out a way to travel, what reason is there not to do it?
The Solar System is made up of nothing but hydrogen and helium basically,
Exactly, it is made of hydrogen and helium. If you can use hydrogen and helium to travel, you can certainly use the hydrogen and helium from solar system. You don't need to transport it anywhere, you don't need to make anything from it, you just use it to get somewhere else.
I do not understand why are you using "output of the human race" as unit of energy when the universe is full of nothing but energy. Besides, you first ask what would they come here to get, and then you yourself answer that.
There is a difference in email, though. An unencrypted email message gets transferred through any number of other servers, ones that you have absolutely no legal agreement with, and anybody with admin access to those smtp servers can intercept and read your message. I believe that is what they are talking about when they say there is no expectation of privacy.
Now they could issue a different default for every device, but that would require printing a unique card for each device...
As noted by others, lot of consumer devices that people buy for their homes or offices do that. However, things like traffic light, pool water system or nuclear power plant control systems are supposed to be installed by some sort of qualified technician, and they should know better than to leave the default login and password in place.
I don't know anytihing about visio, I create most of my diagrams with tikz (http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/), but I would be very surprised if did not have a way to produce decend vector format of some sort. If it can export pdf or svg, it can be included in pdflatex.
With appropriate packages, and conversion software installed (e.g. inkscape for svg) you can use both eps and svg with pdflatex. Just use the 'svg' package.
Of course, if your only decision criterium for hireing new employees is "real world experience", you are, by definition, not going to get that from people who just spent years at school studying. People with PhD, though, usually have one skill that is difficult to find in others: they spent years working on their learning skills. One of the main points of getting an advanced degree is learning how to learn, and how to figure out things that you do not know. I would agree with you that someone with BA, or even with a master degree, have no "real world experience, and pretty low ability to learn, which makes them pretty much useless. Some of the best more capable programmers I know have PhD degrees, true, none of those is in computer science, there are several physics, several mathematics, and even one english literature. Those people can look at a problem and figure out how to solve it before your non-college educated programmer with years of "real world experience" even finishes deciphering the description.
Re:neither should receive government support
on
Let Them Eat Teslas
·
· Score: 1
So, the question is, what justifies the cost of the raise by that much?
I don't know if that applies to your school, but most public universities state funding got severely slashed during the 11 years. I do not know the exact numbers and am not going to spend time to look them up for a slashdot comment, but roughly our school went from about 80% state, 20% tuition funded to 20% state 80% tuition funded in the last perhaps 15 or 20 years.
There are other factors that contribute the growing tuition (and you are right, professor salaries are not among them:(, I can attest to that), but the drop in state support is definitely a huge one.
make the output of 'ls' drag&dropable and call it done.
I *hate* grag&drop. What I would like would be a feature like vimperator or pentadactyl, or maybe lynx numbered links, where a hotkey would make all displayed files, paths and objects in general labeled in some way, and I could start applications on the labeled objects, or use the labels on the command line in some way.
The reason I like this is that it seems to be good for everybody. inexperienced non-technical users will find it easier using a terminal, while experienced users will get to use a terminal just like before, with added stuff that does not seem to get in the way. I would like to know how configurable all the graphical stuff is. Can I add graphics into my shell prompt? I guess since it works using escape sequences, the answer is probably yes. Including a little sparkline displaying system load, or a miniature image of the filesystem tree into your prompt, that sounds pretty useful to me.
I bet that we can probably find old usenet posts from people complaining about color terminals, saying that that sort of eye candy is good only for inexperienced users, the real men use only green phosphor.
Slashdot Mirror
I hoped for a moment that chat applications are finally getting Romany localization.
Anyway, that's similar to what happened to usenet.
I was never questioning the premise that we are very unlikely to meet another species. I was just disagreeing with your assertion that no civilization will ever engage in interstelar travel. I agree that it would be rare, but I am still not convinced that it could not happen.
We are both talking about stuff that we have no idea about. And we both seem to be projecting our own respective cultural biases onto alien civilizations that, as far as we can tell, probably not even exist. I therefore do not see the necessity for presenting a theory how some specific technological advancement would work. After all, a person from 1000 years ago, if confronted with out current tiny technological advancements, would most likely be convinced that "fairies did it".
Energy, or rather work, is the ultimate 'currency'. That's what you always pay for things in, or that is that's what their cost is, which you never pay less than.
Sure, but if you have plenty of it, and nothing to spend it on, it becomes very cheap.
Every civilization, in order to advance, will have to discover new ways of harnessing energy that is available to them. Almost all energy at any planetary system comes from the star. Ultimately, at least some civilizations will concentrate their attention at harvesting energy from the star itself. It could be done in a slow way, so that the energy will last for very long time, or the star can be quickly destroyed and the energy used to get the hell out of there. It seems to me that controlled long time harvesting would be harder. I don't see any reason why some civilization would not choose the other way. And once you have that kind of technology, there is no reason to stop and settle. You can just base your whole existence on going from star to star, using each star to get to the next one. There are only two risks: one that you will accidentally end up at a star that does not have enough energy to take you to another one, and get stuck. Another, that you will run into another civilization, that will attempt to defend their system. Even there, though, the advantage is on your side: they will want to defeat you in such a way that they can keep living on their planets, and will therefore want to preserve the system as completely as possible. You don't care, since you only want to use the systems energy to continue your travel.
Cost in what? Labor? Energy? Time?
What exactly do you hope to buy with this currency? Anyway, you still did not tell me the need to stay. You say you don't see the need to go, I don't see the need to stay.
Finally, there could be very good need to go, if, for example, your star, or some other star nearby, is about to go kaboom.
But why is staying in one place, extracting resources so one can improve his ways of extracting more resources and so on, any more rational than simply moving to where there are some resources, staying for a little, and then move on? You could also ask what reason is there to stay put? Since universe is indeed pretty homogenous, it does not really matter where you are. Once you figure out a way to travel, what reason is there not to do it?
The Solar System is made up of nothing but hydrogen and helium basically,
Exactly, it is made of hydrogen and helium. If you can use hydrogen and helium to travel, you can certainly use the hydrogen and helium from solar system. You don't need to transport it anywhere, you don't need to make anything from it, you just use it to get somewhere else.
Somehow, I don't think they will be coming by icebike.
I do not understand why are you using "output of the human race" as unit of energy when the universe is full of nothing but energy. Besides, you first ask what would they come here to get, and then you yourself answer that.
One reason they may want to come here is to get away from all the smartasses on their home planet.
I have a problem with equating smartness with having quick access to information.
There is a difference in email, though. An unencrypted email message gets transferred through any number of other servers, ones that you have absolutely no legal agreement with, and anybody with admin access to those smtp servers can intercept and read your message. I believe that is what they are talking about when they say there is no expectation of privacy.
Now they could issue a different default for every device, but that would require printing a unique card for each device...
As noted by others, lot of consumer devices that people buy for their homes or offices do that. However, things like traffic light, pool water system or nuclear power plant control systems are supposed to be installed by some sort of qualified technician, and they should know better than to leave the default login and password in place.
TFA actually talks about all the descendants of TeX you mention, plus some more.
Actually very easy when using ConTeXt, but nearly impossible in LaTeX.
I don't know anytihing about visio, I create most of my diagrams with tikz (http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/), but I would be very surprised if did not have a way to produce decend vector format of some sort. If it can export pdf or svg, it can be included in pdflatex.
With appropriate packages, and conversion software installed (e.g. inkscape for svg) you can use both eps and svg with pdflatex. Just use the 'svg' package.
Of course, if your only decision criterium for hireing new employees is "real world experience", you are, by definition, not going to get that from people who just spent years at school studying. People with PhD, though, usually have one skill that is difficult to find in others: they spent years working on their learning skills. One of the main points of getting an advanced degree is learning how to learn, and how to figure out things that you do not know. I would agree with you that someone with BA, or even with a master degree, have no "real world experience, and pretty low ability to learn, which makes them pretty much useless. Some of the best more capable programmers I know have PhD degrees, true, none of those is in computer science, there are several physics, several mathematics, and even one english literature. Those people can look at a problem and figure out how to solve it before your non-college educated programmer with years of "real world experience" even finishes deciphering the description.
So, the question is, what justifies the cost of the raise by that much?
I don't know if that applies to your school, but most public universities state funding got severely slashed during the 11 years. I do not know the exact numbers and am not going to spend time to look them up for a slashdot comment, but roughly our school went from about 80% state, 20% tuition funded to 20% state 80% tuition funded in the last perhaps 15 or 20 years.
There are other factors that contribute the growing tuition (and you are right, professor salaries are not among them :(, I can attest to that), but the drop in state support is definitely a huge one.
Imagine ipython or isympy optimized for this terminal.
Why have a window manager at all when one may have emacs?
Because viper is not quite good enough yet.
make the output of 'ls' drag&dropable and call it done.
I *hate* grag&drop. What I would like would be a feature like vimperator or pentadactyl, or maybe lynx numbered links, where a hotkey would make all displayed files, paths and objects in general labeled in some way, and I could start applications on the labeled objects, or use the labels on the command line in some way.
The reason I like this is that it seems to be good for everybody. inexperienced non-technical users will find it easier using a terminal, while experienced users will get to use a terminal just like before, with added stuff that does not seem to get in the way. I would like to know how configurable all the graphical stuff is. Can I add graphics into my shell prompt? I guess since it works using escape sequences, the answer is probably yes. Including a little sparkline displaying system load, or a miniature image of the filesystem tree into your prompt, that sounds pretty useful to me.
I bet that we can probably find old usenet posts from people complaining about color terminals, saying that that sort of eye candy is good only for inexperienced users, the real men use only green phosphor.
He is saying it as the rasterman, duh!
TSDR, judging grom the few pieces that I managed to get to before giving up.
In just to make things clear, the S does not mean "short".
It works just like our cops - it looks at the color of your skin: if your skin is somewhat darker, you are a criminal!