Note "romance" is theoretically distinct from pr0n, otherwise we've got tons of slash fiction with spock and kirk, all of the "spandex wearing women" from the 90s era trek TV, etc.
Aficionados might rejoice that science-fiction finally matured and could claim to be great literature, but casual readers don't want to tax themselves with the challenging prose and labyrinthine plot of, say, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun
Even that review describes itself as one of the best "science fantasies". Sorry, that means its not sci fi, its just princes and knights having swordfights for control of the kingdom, am I guessing right? I'm betting there is swordfights and horseback riding, right? Claiming on the back cover that the date is 9000 AD instead of 900 AD doesn't magically make it scifi instead of fantasy, sorry.
It may be an excellent book, but its probably not an excellent sci fi book.
Yeah but if you analyze reproduction, the 22 nm transistor and the 22 acre process plant must mate and share the work of raising the next generation of transistors and plants. I suppose the minimum size required for a complete industrial system (like a biosphere for industry) including raw material, power plants, warehouses, petrochemical facilities, is more like 22 square miles rather than 22 acres. So the average size of that "reproductive pair" is 22 miles for the big momma + 22 nm for the litte guy / 2 = about 11 miles. Pretty big.
On the other hand, a "reproductive pair" of 300 nm bacteria is pretty small, like 300 nm or so.
It makes me feel like we're living in decline portrayed in the Foundation novels.
We are in decline.
Its not just a motto, but even specific details about the foundation series apply. Big suffocating govt/culture/society holding back technology, corruption and class stratification holding back the populace, hero worship replacing admiration of equals, religion strengthening and taking over from science...
Unless we can harness the energy of the atom much better, and design propulsion systems around Fusion Explosions with enough power to hyper accelerate us at higher than gravitational effect of earth, star travel is going to be very unlikely.
Unnecessary. I'll never visit Fiji but humans DO have airline service to Fiji.
How long can you stand to travel as opposed to being "home", lets say a year. Build a station, send it out one years distance, however far away that is. Build the next station, send it out two years distance. Keep pushing stuff on the train and you'll eventually hit the next star.
Your argument is we "need" for some unspecified reason, to have all this high tech junk so there's only about 4 of these stations between us and the next star. My argument is who cares if there's 4 or 400 or 4 million stations between here and the next star, it'll all work just as well as a colonization / space travel policy. Much as I like the idea of air service to Fiji, I frankly don't care if I need to make 15 connections stops and transfers were I to try it. Even if my body could never reach Fiji, we still technically as a species have flight service to Fiji.
The majority of the human population might therefore eventually live "enroute" on various stations. OK, so what?
And nobody knows the effect of 2G acceleration over long term (probably worse than weightlessness) because we can't simulate it for more than very brief periods.
Sure we can. Take a large (to get lots of data) melting-pot of a nation (to remove racial effects) and have their corporate owned government propagandize them to eat grains and corn syrup and other carbs until their weight doubles. Wait a lifetime, analyze the results. Hmm, I wonder where we could run this experiment? It would seem that a lifetime is not so good, a year or so is frankly no big deal.
1) It seems a stable biosphere is bigger than "biosphere II" which was pretty freaking big for just a couple people.
2) It seems humanity needs something a bit bigger than West Virginia to not screw up genetically. Too much kissing cousins is not so good. I did date a total hottie from WV in the 90s who made jokes about her home states genetic issues, its not that they're ALL messed up, just a high (and growing?) proportion, which is worrisome. On the other hand, "tropical islands" seem to have turned out OK.
3) Who goes? The "Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy" implied all the Nobel prize winners might be a winning combination, for them, but I'm thinking maybe all the politicians, mbas, and illegals might be a winner, for us. Also see HHGTTG.
Its actually worse. If the IRS or whoever figures out that your "contractor" only has one account, and that single contract duration is "around as long as a normal employee relationship", they can force you to change their status to employee and you're now liable for income tax withholding, and everything else that goes with employee law vs merely contractor law.
The flippant answer is the IRS, who take an extremely dim view of that kind of activity.
The practical answer is the corporations don't want it, and since the corporations own the government (not us, thats for sure) what they say, goes.
The long answer for why all of the above is the case, is that everything that can be outsourced or contracted out, has been, including some stuff that probably shouldn't have been. Theoretically, any employee jobs left would involve conflicts of interest if you also contracted at a competitor... Sometimes there is massive flipflopping, should our front line customer service people work for us, or us and competitors, or move back to just us, or...
While most of us would never look at it, per potential employers are much more likely to look at it. I'm sure if I was hiring and actor/actress, I would use IMDB to see what info I could find on them.
That's the mysterious part. If I was hiring an actress or a booth babe or model, they're just objects, so the numbers I'm interested in are almost certainly NOT date of birth. I'm probably not trying to hire on wisdom or lack there of. The writers, yeah maybe.
FYI, it's against US Employment law to ask any applicant any age related question other than to verify they are 18 or over.
LOL that's hilarious. One place I worked was crazy enough to demand a high school transcript (WTF?). Take a wild guess how old I am if its documented that I graduated HS in '92.
"You can't ask" officially but how hard is it to look at their employment record?
Also many/most places demand a credit record check chock full of age related info. Lets see, I've been paying a phone bill (even if in a dorm) since fall of '92... I got a checking account in 92 the week after it was legally possible for me to open one. I wonder how old I might be? Yeah, I might have gone to university and lived in the dorms when I was 12, or 48. But I was almost certainly 18 in '92.
One resume has 40 years of experience listed, one has 20 years of experience listed, one has zero experience listed. I wonder how old they are?
Besides with ageism entrenched, all you need do is only hire applicants with precisely 5 years of experience listed. Got 6 years of experience? over the hill, bye bye. Got 4 years of experience? Come back next year, mm kay?
Well, all the time. Clay/sandy soil and washouts due to spring thaws, extremely severe thunderstorms where you get 3 inches of rain per hour, hurricanes... Even just plain old poor maintenance.
Also, as an earlier poster mentioned, what's to keep a user from "thrashing" the telescope from side to side possibly damaging/wearing it out?
Despite being called "new" this is very old, and historically the interface has been batchy, like gimme that R.A. and Dec and some optical parameters and away you go.
I'd be curious how they handle focusing. Live human being on site?
how are targets going to be prioritized. That's the problem with professionals getting time on scopes. Just imagine what a nightmare that will be for all us Amateurs.
With the "pay to play" providers its pretty straightforward.
With it being free, I'm assuming its going to be demographic and politically correct multiculturalism on a quota system, friends of friends, "online social media campaigns", and so forth. May as well just ignore it.
What is yahoo? I donno and I've had internet access continuously since 91.
I think they're a company like EA that buys living smaller companies and vampire kills them? Other than that...
If yahoo themselves could answer "what is yahoo" they'd at least have a chance of survival.
And lame answers like "media company" or "internet company" don't count because those mean nothing. I am looking for a real answer. "Ford" = "heavy industry making land vehicles". "Bank of America" = "Predatory bank specializing in sucking the cash out of the middle classes wallets". "Apple" = "Aspirational high quality more or less cutting edge hardware and software". "Yahoo" = "donno"
I have always been into the AAVSO and have always had this desire to do CCD photometry, or at least for a decade or so since it became easy to do. The plan has been to rent time on a scope, and if I really like it, I'll drop four or so figures on the exact same model. Rent before buy.
Or I'll run the rental for awhile until I get sick of it and swear off the hobby forever. I've never done it, always planned to "when I have time".
Kind of like how I rented a Cessna 172 for many hours but thankfully never bought one outright (given that I don't do the private pilot thing anymore, it would have been a huge money loss)
There is a book value equal to what it would cost a miner to mine it for you.
It seems to be trading WAY above that.
I made a couple hundred BTC by CPU mining before GPU mining even existed, before/. heard of BTC. Back then BTC traded for not a whole heck of a lot more than the electricity to mine them. I vaguely remember BTC difficulty factors that only had 2 digits? I don't remember exactly but I have the vague memory that my hundreds of BTC was worth about a nice dinner. Which is probably about right, 5 watt old 486 embedded processor running for a couple months at 10 cents per KwH...
It seems unlikely in the long term that BTC would spend a substantial amount of time below the cost of manufacture. Much like houses don't spend much time below the cost of manufacture. It does intermittently happen but not for long.
Another analogy is the relationship between electricity price and aluminum price for electrochemical reasons.
A barrel of oil makes a decent currency. In prison, I'm told the economic system is oriented around cigarettes. West of the rockies I'm told water would make a decent currency (east of the rockies, especially around the great lakes, water is laughably abundant, to the point of cultural problems)
Eventually people need to make that exchange, in order to pay their taxes, but there is no similar need to obtain Bitcoin tokens.
Hmm that would mean the physical paper cash in my wallet is worthless, because I can only pay my taxes by personal check, so no one will ever use cash. I donno about that. Well, technically, I can pay sales and gasoline taxes at point of sale using cash, but everything else requires a check, property, fed/state income, most licenses, etc. Lets agree I can only pay about 5% of my taxes using cash and the other 95% require personal checks.
The technical limit assumes the tokens grow in size faster than computing power increases in speed and capacity. To a Really crude first approximation our planetary wide economy only exists because computers already handle all transactions and record keeping, and it does not appear that computational power is in any way limiting our current planetary economy, so using computers to handle a tiny fraction of the worlds economy, that being digital cash, should scale even better.
Put another way, I fully agree that someday, thousand core terahertz processors will be required to follow the BTC stream, but by then, Microchip Inc will be selling thousand core terahertz PIC processors for twenty five cents each that only draw one milliamp at full speed, and still the only microcontroller posts that make it to/. will be Arduwwwweeeeeeno based projects that do the same thing the PICs did decades ago but cost 10 times as much and are slower and harder to use. But I digress...
It occurs to me that if services existed that allowed us to trade faster, the current volatility wouldn't matter as much.
That is, a poster here complains that it took him 2 days to trade some BC for dollars
Original poster needs to provide more details. I'm not aware of any BTC market at this time that takes two days to clear an at market trade. Maybe Mtgox months ago when they got hacked and shut down for a week? But recently?
There might be more to the story, like the OP put in a limit order to sell at a price that was just above market, and didn't notice for two days that it never executed because he entered too high of a limit. That's hardly the fault of the currency nor is it unique to the BTC market.
So you want your decentralised and anonymous system to vary the payout based on how many transactions are processed? I think I found a flaw in the plan.
Not necessarily... People who hold the most BTC can artificially "stir the pot" the easiest, yet they lose the most when the currency is diluted. People who hold the least BTC would benefit the most from more BTC being generated, yet they have the least ability to "stir the pot". I'm "stir the pot to make BTC" is a bit oversimplified.
There is a certain inherent limited flood control that discourages people from trading the same 1 BTC a million times per second, due to transactional costs. If those costs raised to discourage such behavior...
The majority of bitcoins is in the hands of a handful who cash in large quantities from time to time thus crashing the market.
This is very insightful, from someone who is obviously also in the BTC economy as I am. I'm getting disillusioned with BTC because we're creating a new set of 1%ers, these being the guys with server farms full of GPU cards. I love the idea of BTC, but I'm completely uninterested in making those guys billionaires.
The other inherent problem, is the protocol design tries pretty hard to make the rate of BTC production mostly constant over time. The problem is people are hoarding BTC "to eventually get rich" and occasionally cashing out. So with a mostly constant absolute rate of real world transactions, and the number of coins piling up faster than transaction rate can grow, deflation seems inevitable. At least until the last coin is mined.
A protocol that tried to hold the velocity per BTC constant by varying difficulty by transactions seen, thus varying production would be somewhat more stable.
BTC is a pretty cruddy monetary system... Its also the best one out there at this time.
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty much the same as lumping "Sci-fi and Romance" genres together.
Don't like "City on the Edge of Forever" ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_on_the_Edge_of_Forever
Note "romance" is theoretically distinct from pr0n, otherwise we've got tons of slash fiction with spock and kirk, all of the "spandex wearing women" from the 90s era trek TV, etc.
Aficionados might rejoice that science-fiction finally matured and could claim to be great literature, but casual readers don't want to tax themselves with the challenging prose and labyrinthine plot of, say, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun
Even that review describes itself as one of the best "science fantasies". Sorry, that means its not sci fi, its just princes and knights having swordfights for control of the kingdom, am I guessing right? I'm betting there is swordfights and horseback riding, right? Claiming on the back cover that the date is 9000 AD instead of 900 AD doesn't magically make it scifi instead of fantasy, sorry.
It may be an excellent book, but its probably not an excellent sci fi book.
Yeah but if you analyze reproduction, the 22 nm transistor and the 22 acre process plant must mate and share the work of raising the next generation of transistors and plants. I suppose the minimum size required for a complete industrial system (like a biosphere for industry) including raw material, power plants, warehouses, petrochemical facilities, is more like 22 square miles rather than 22 acres. So the average size of that "reproductive pair" is 22 miles for the big momma + 22 nm for the litte guy / 2 = about 11 miles. Pretty big.
On the other hand, a "reproductive pair" of 300 nm bacteria is pretty small, like 300 nm or so.
It makes me feel like we're living in decline portrayed in the Foundation novels.
We are in decline.
Its not just a motto, but even specific details about the foundation series apply. Big suffocating govt/culture/society holding back technology, corruption and class stratification holding back the populace, hero worship replacing admiration of equals, religion strengthening and taking over from science...
Unless we can harness the energy of the atom much better, and design propulsion systems around Fusion Explosions with enough power to hyper accelerate us at higher than gravitational effect of earth, star travel is going to be very unlikely.
Unnecessary. I'll never visit Fiji but humans DO have airline service to Fiji.
How long can you stand to travel as opposed to being "home", lets say a year. Build a station, send it out one years distance, however far away that is. Build the next station, send it out two years distance. Keep pushing stuff on the train and you'll eventually hit the next star.
Your argument is we "need" for some unspecified reason, to have all this high tech junk so there's only about 4 of these stations between us and the next star. My argument is who cares if there's 4 or 400 or 4 million stations between here and the next star, it'll all work just as well as a colonization / space travel policy. Much as I like the idea of air service to Fiji, I frankly don't care if I need to make 15 connections stops and transfers were I to try it. Even if my body could never reach Fiji, we still technically as a species have flight service to Fiji.
The majority of the human population might therefore eventually live "enroute" on various stations. OK, so what?
And nobody knows the effect of 2G acceleration over long term (probably worse than weightlessness) because we can't simulate it for more than very brief periods.
Sure we can. Take a large (to get lots of data) melting-pot of a nation (to remove racial effects) and have their corporate owned government propagandize them to eat grains and corn syrup and other carbs until their weight doubles. Wait a lifetime, analyze the results. Hmm, I wonder where we could run this experiment? It would seem that a lifetime is not so good, a year or so is frankly no big deal.
Undiscussed problem areas:
1) It seems a stable biosphere is bigger than "biosphere II" which was pretty freaking big for just a couple people.
2) It seems humanity needs something a bit bigger than West Virginia to not screw up genetically. Too much kissing cousins is not so good. I did date a total hottie from WV in the 90s who made jokes about her home states genetic issues, its not that they're ALL messed up, just a high (and growing?) proportion, which is worrisome. On the other hand, "tropical islands" seem to have turned out OK.
3) Who goes? The "Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy" implied all the Nobel prize winners might be a winning combination, for them, but I'm thinking maybe all the politicians, mbas, and illegals might be a winner, for us. Also see HHGTTG.
The "etc" is stuff like:
http://www.tv.com/grace-park-blog/the-confusion-over-grace-parks-real-birthday/topic/83722-645911/show_blog_entry.html&topic_id=645911
Its actually worse. If the IRS or whoever figures out that your "contractor" only has one account, and that single contract duration is "around as long as a normal employee relationship", they can force you to change their status to employee and you're now liable for income tax withholding, and everything else that goes with employee law vs merely contractor law.
The flippant answer is the IRS, who take an extremely dim view of that kind of activity.
The practical answer is the corporations don't want it, and since the corporations own the government (not us, thats for sure) what they say, goes.
The long answer for why all of the above is the case, is that everything that can be outsourced or contracted out, has been, including some stuff that probably shouldn't have been. Theoretically, any employee jobs left would involve conflicts of interest if you also contracted at a competitor... Sometimes there is massive flipflopping, should our front line customer service people work for us, or us and competitors, or move back to just us, or ...
While most of us would never look at it, per potential employers are much more likely to look at it. I'm sure if I was hiring and actor/actress, I would use IMDB to see what info I could find on them.
That's the mysterious part. If I was hiring an actress or a booth babe or model, they're just objects, so the numbers I'm interested in are almost certainly NOT date of birth. I'm probably not trying to hire on wisdom or lack there of. The writers, yeah maybe.
FYI, it's against US Employment law to ask any applicant any age related question other than to verify they are 18 or over.
LOL that's hilarious. One place I worked was crazy enough to demand a high school transcript (WTF?). Take a wild guess how old I am if its documented that I graduated HS in '92.
"You can't ask" officially but how hard is it to look at their employment record?
Also many/most places demand a credit record check chock full of age related info. Lets see, I've been paying a phone bill (even if in a dorm) since fall of '92... I got a checking account in 92 the week after it was legally possible for me to open one. I wonder how old I might be? Yeah, I might have gone to university and lived in the dorms when I was 12, or 48. But I was almost certainly 18 in '92.
One resume has 40 years of experience listed, one has 20 years of experience listed, one has zero experience listed. I wonder how old they are?
Besides with ageism entrenched, all you need do is only hire applicants with precisely 5 years of experience listed. Got 6 years of experience? over the hill, bye bye. Got 4 years of experience? Come back next year, mm kay?
When has train tipping been a major problem?
Well, all the time. Clay/sandy soil and washouts due to spring thaws, extremely severe thunderstorms where you get 3 inches of rain per hour, hurricanes... Even just plain old poor maintenance.
Also, as an earlier poster mentioned, what's to keep a user from "thrashing" the telescope from side to side possibly damaging/wearing it out?
Despite being called "new" this is very old, and historically the interface has been batchy, like gimme that R.A. and Dec and some optical parameters and away you go.
I'd be curious how they handle focusing. Live human being on site?
I can't remember the URL for goatse.cx, or I'd totally post it.
Here you go
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0 [goatse.cx]
how are targets going to be prioritized. That's the problem with professionals getting time on scopes. Just imagine what a nightmare that will be for all us Amateurs.
With the "pay to play" providers its pretty straightforward.
With it being free, I'm assuming its going to be demographic and politically correct multiculturalism on a quota system, friends of friends, "online social media campaigns", and so forth. May as well just ignore it.
What is yahoo? I donno and I've had internet access continuously since 91.
I think they're a company like EA that buys living smaller companies and vampire kills them? Other than that...
If yahoo themselves could answer "what is yahoo" they'd at least have a chance of survival.
And lame answers like "media company" or "internet company" don't count because those mean nothing. I am looking for a real answer. "Ford" = "heavy industry making land vehicles". "Bank of America" = "Predatory bank specializing in sucking the cash out of the middle classes wallets". "Apple" = "Aspirational high quality more or less cutting edge hardware and software". "Yahoo" = "donno"
Then I wished for some kind of ".nocrap.com" site that only allowed pre-checked websites that were guaranteed not to contain crap
Just do a "ask /." question like everyone else..
"Dear slashdot I'm looking for a ..."
Old old old old news
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~kolena/imagepro.html
Scroll down to "remote access telescope projects"
This seems to only list "free" options, I donno how you miss GRAS. To a first approximation GRAS is cheap enough compared to owning to be "free".
http://www.global-rent-a-scope.com/gras-news/tag/remote-telescopes
I have always been into the AAVSO and have always had this desire to do CCD photometry, or at least for a decade or so since it became easy to do. The plan has been to rent time on a scope, and if I really like it, I'll drop four or so figures on the exact same model. Rent before buy.
Or I'll run the rental for awhile until I get sick of it and swear off the hobby forever. I've never done it, always planned to "when I have time".
Kind of like how I rented a Cessna 172 for many hours but thankfully never bought one outright (given that I don't do the private pilot thing anymore, it would have been a huge money loss)
Bitcoin clearly is not way to store value.
There is a book value equal to what it would cost a miner to mine it for you.
It seems to be trading WAY above that.
I made a couple hundred BTC by CPU mining before GPU mining even existed, before /. heard of BTC. Back then BTC traded for not a whole heck of a lot more than the electricity to mine them. I vaguely remember BTC difficulty factors that only had 2 digits? I don't remember exactly but I have the vague memory that my hundreds of BTC was worth about a nice dinner. Which is probably about right, 5 watt old 486 embedded processor running for a couple months at 10 cents per KwH...
It seems unlikely in the long term that BTC would spend a substantial amount of time below the cost of manufacture. Much like houses don't spend much time below the cost of manufacture. It does intermittently happen but not for long.
Another analogy is the relationship between electricity price and aluminum price for electrochemical reasons.
A barrel of oil makes a decent currency. In prison, I'm told the economic system is oriented around cigarettes. West of the rockies I'm told water would make a decent currency (east of the rockies, especially around the great lakes, water is laughably abundant, to the point of cultural problems)
Eventually people need to make that exchange, in order to pay their taxes, but there is no similar need to obtain Bitcoin tokens.
Hmm that would mean the physical paper cash in my wallet is worthless, because I can only pay my taxes by personal check, so no one will ever use cash. I donno about that. Well, technically, I can pay sales and gasoline taxes at point of sale using cash, but everything else requires a check, property, fed/state income, most licenses, etc. Lets agree I can only pay about 5% of my taxes using cash and the other 95% require personal checks.
The technical limit assumes the tokens grow in size faster than computing power increases in speed and capacity. To a Really crude first approximation our planetary wide economy only exists because computers already handle all transactions and record keeping, and it does not appear that computational power is in any way limiting our current planetary economy, so using computers to handle a tiny fraction of the worlds economy, that being digital cash, should scale even better.
Put another way, I fully agree that someday, thousand core terahertz processors will be required to follow the BTC stream, but by then, Microchip Inc will be selling thousand core terahertz PIC processors for twenty five cents each that only draw one milliamp at full speed, and still the only microcontroller posts that make it to /. will be Arduwwwweeeeeeno based projects that do the same thing the PICs did decades ago but cost 10 times as much and are slower and harder to use. But I digress...
It occurs to me that if services existed that allowed us to trade faster, the current volatility wouldn't matter as much.
That is, a poster here complains that it took him 2 days to trade some BC for dollars
Original poster needs to provide more details. I'm not aware of any BTC market at this time that takes two days to clear an at market trade. Maybe Mtgox months ago when they got hacked and shut down for a week? But recently?
There might be more to the story, like the OP put in a limit order to sell at a price that was just above market, and didn't notice for two days that it never executed because he entered too high of a limit. That's hardly the fault of the currency nor is it unique to the BTC market.
So you want your decentralised and anonymous system to vary the payout based on how many transactions are processed?
I think I found a flaw in the plan.
Not necessarily... People who hold the most BTC can artificially "stir the pot" the easiest, yet they lose the most when the currency is diluted. People who hold the least BTC would benefit the most from more BTC being generated, yet they have the least ability to "stir the pot". I'm "stir the pot to make BTC" is a bit oversimplified.
There is a certain inherent limited flood control that discourages people from trading the same 1 BTC a million times per second, due to transactional costs. If those costs raised to discourage such behavior...
I'm pretty sure there are serious problems with bit coins model that lacks a central bank or reserve system
How would you implement a centralized control system on top of a system specifically designed to be decentralized?
The majority of bitcoins is in the hands of a handful who cash in large quantities from time to time thus crashing the market.
This is very insightful, from someone who is obviously also in the BTC economy as I am. I'm getting disillusioned with BTC because we're creating a new set of 1%ers, these being the guys with server farms full of GPU cards. I love the idea of BTC, but I'm completely uninterested in making those guys billionaires.
The other inherent problem, is the protocol design tries pretty hard to make the rate of BTC production mostly constant over time. The problem is people are hoarding BTC "to eventually get rich" and occasionally cashing out. So with a mostly constant absolute rate of real world transactions, and the number of coins piling up faster than transaction rate can grow, deflation seems inevitable. At least until the last coin is mined.
A protocol that tried to hold the velocity per BTC constant by varying difficulty by transactions seen, thus varying production would be somewhat more stable.
BTC is a pretty cruddy monetary system... Its also the best one out there at this time.