I don't think I quite get how this is more economical. Is it actually cheaper to send up a bunch of smaller rockets with fuel as payload than it is to simply send a bigger rocket with enough fuel on it? Can somebody walk us through the math?
There's no doubt that if you work really hard (I've got colleagues who pull 80 hour weeks routinely, which I consider excessive, YMMV), then you will definitely do well in science. If, on the other hand, you are like the majority of people and go for a more even work-life balance without all those sacrifices, chances are that at some point you will get stuck in a low paying postdoc, moving from project to project, never really sure that you have a job for more than the next year or so and a salary on which you can't really support a family.
This trade-off is there in every profession of course, but I find it's a lot more exaggerated in science and technology than elsewhere. That being said, there are of course lots of places where a good work/life balance is possible and where sensible career choices are available. I do think we shouldn't kid students towards believing that it's some sort of cakewalk though. It's grueling and sometimes thankless (like being labeled a parasite by the common tax payer, always fun).
Of course, a science or technology degree is usable in lots of industries, so you're not really limiting yourself that much by getting one. Compare this with people pursuing an english degree, where there are so many more candidates than positions at the postdoc level, and you wonder why anyone would still bother.
There's a couple brands you might want to stay away from though. When people ask me, I never recommend HP (consumer) laptops because in the past I've seen them have terrible build quality (up to USB ports being installed the wrong way around) and even worse customer service.
It wouldn't be useless. Even with the interest rate of your savings account at zero, your money would still be appreciating in value and you'd still want to put it in a bank for all of the other benefits (not having to store it under your mattress, for one).
Whether deflation would be good for us is another matter, of course. (it wouldn't)
The only thing I find a little bit disturbing about this story is that they apparently found cocaine in a secure area last time, where they are supposed to know who has access, and yet nobody tested positive (or is cocaine one of those that you can break down pretty quickly?). Seems they have somewhat of a security problem.
That sounds plausible. Though, since all those soft drinks are made with high fructose corn syrup, doesn't that make your point kind of irrelevant in this case?
Actually plenty countries in (rich parts of) Europe use glass bottles. It depends on how good people are at recycling and, I suspect, how far you have to ship the bottles back and forth. Last I heard, they were still bickering over which option uses less fossil fuels though.
When you're packaging for a distro, you're working in a fixed environment (you set it that way through dependencies). Debian (python) policy is to always hardcode the path to the interpreter so you know you're using the one you're depending on. When a user actually does put a broken or newer/older version of python in their path, it otherwise tends to break in interesting ways. This is a bit lazy on the developer's part perhaps, but you don't really want to be dealing with bug reports about bugs that don't really exist and are the result of some misconfiguration on the client's side. The more you can minimize that, the better. It really isn't as insane as you make it out to be, it seems you just target a different environment.
You almost always want a specific VM anyway. No 2.6 script except the most trivial will work with 3.x. I haven't used virtualenv extensively but I thought you could just have it spawn the VM, instead of letting the shell decide.
And your perl programmers really need a better deployment process.
Re:Is the GIL removed from the interpreter
on
Python 3.2 Released
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· Score: 1
It's definitely useful when working with large data sets. I've used them extensively parsing a couple tens of gigs worth of files (larger than main memory on any box I have access to). They're not necessary, of course, but I'd argue they are if you don't want to be writing python as if it were C.
# This works with any python installation rather than only the system installation. # Using explicit path to system's python install is bad practice. Requiring a source change to run your application with a different VM is silly. Now we need only change our path.
It's not "bad practice". Sometimes having the chosen VM depend on what your path happens to be set to is a bad idea, which is why a lot of the scripts in distros have the path hardcoded.
Some policies directly screw over the environment and are just a bad idea, i.e. biofuels. It's a pretty simple trade-off there that we can now see, where basically increasing demand directly hurts the goal of using biofuels in the first place (against global warming). Mining for (rare earth) metals is a completely different matter, as that is something that can be done somewhat safely (though there will of course always be environmental damage), but it is for some reason not done that way. That is the responsibility of the Chinese and other mining countries. We can't dictate policy to them.
What we can recognize is that if we don't switch to this technology, we will be stuck relying on other technology which is almost certainly more damaging for our environment. The coal and petroleum driving our infrastructure is often mined in damaging ways, not to mention the impact of singular events such as wars (iraqis setting their wells on fire) or accidents (gulf of mexico).
Saying that green energy isn't always green is all well and good, but it's not a very useful position. Unless you're the type advocating a return to stone age technology, which if you think it a good idea involves killing off the majority of the world's population.
It's telling that you don't have a problem with the violence, but the nudity somehow upsets you. Like it's a cheap trick to get you to watch something. I've got my issues with the movie, but it's one of the few that actually approached nudity in an adult manner, instead of going "oh look here, partly obscured titties!".
- Will the next id game default to OpenGL (on windows)?
While I generally prefer OpenGL over DirectX for a number of reasons, OpenGL really isn't doing so hot in recent years.
That would be Rage, which is crossplatform and according to Carmack is an OpenGL game. Though the fact that it runs on Xbox must mean there's at least a D3D layer in there somewhere.
There is no one impressive reason to go to Mars, but many very compelling ones. Though the extinction risk is a big one. If we don't go to Mars, and then get hit with a major asteroid, we'll sure wish we had. -Taylor
No we won't, because we'll be dead.
All the other reasons you mention are good ones to explore Mars, not to colonize it.
There's a big difference in cost effectiveness. Even if we could put a viable colony down there, one that wouldn't just die out after we get wiped out, the cost would be immense, creating untold havoc on hundreds of millions of people who could have been helped where that money spent on basic things like scientific research, any and all approaches against global warming, economic development, etc.
I'm sorry but I really hate space cadettes. You were born a couple centuries too soon it seems. Suck it up.
I don't get what the problem is here. Students that are so misguided to think they can just skate by usually end up facing the results in the long run. If they don't, it's either the mark of a bad school or the hard work the student put in at other times when he was not in class. I know in my day there were a bunch of classes that really weren't worth sitting through, and I preferred studying them at my own pace. And I might have missed an assignment or two, sure, but I worked my ass off for my degree and I'm damn proud of it.
How bout you just stop overgeneralising and realise you're getting a bit too old and bitter to see things clearly, hmmm?
Actually video conferencing fills a real need. People like being able to look at each other when they talk (we get a lot out of nonverbal communication).
On current mobile networks you just can't do that though (that's why facetime is wifi only, I gather). Not to mention that it will still drain your battery pretty damn fast. You make it sound like it's really easy to do right now, while the conditions haven't even yet arrived.
3D displays on phones seems fairly implausible. An extra camera will take space, and why would we want to use that much extra resources just to see our buddy's face in 3D? Now if they had said "in 4 years time, we will have video calling generally available on phones", that sounds pretty damn plausible.
The term informatics is often used too. The problem being that people might not recognize it as being the same thing as computer science though. In English, I usually use computer science because people have a better grasp of what that is. Not that they have any idea what it really entails.
On the other hand, I'd argue that the use of computers is not just incidental to the field. A lot of computer science is the study of automated computing tools, i.e. what can we calculate, how, how fast, what are good abstractions/representations of data and algorithms,... If it was just about computing (in the narrow sense), it would still be a subfield of mathematics. Computer science isn't really a misnomer, because while the ideas can stand on their own without the presence of a computing device to use them with, that very device is often the corner stone of what we do.
>>>A completely free market eventually only leads to monopolies
False.
Even if a monopoly did form (highly unlikely in a competitive environment), eventually a new guy comes along to undercut the monopoly with lower prcies or better goods or improved service.
The cell phone market is a natural oligopoly though, not the kind of free market you're thinking of.
While it's true that the GP poster was probably wrong (I'm not that sure that CDDL is less restrictive, but probably), it's also true that Sun designed the CDDL specifically to be incompatible with the GPL.
So yes, linux is under the GPL and thus can't accept ZFS into mainline, but let's not forget which kernel was first (or at least, licensed under an open source license first).
I mostly agree. The moon is definitely doable. I don't really know why you'd want to do that (really, what problem is that solving? what new things are you learning that you can't on earth?), but it is definitely attainable. Just horribly expensive for what it is: a bunker in the middle of nowhere that has no strategic purpose and only contributes a little bit to science or engineering. I'd much rather see that money spent on some real science, or perhaps on creating habitats in certain places on earth (oceans, deserts,...).
The biggest problem though with this discussion is that the idea of sending humans off planet as a type of backup for humanity is really flawed. That would work, if we had the technology to send many and make them self-sustainable. If you put a colony on the moon, anything below a couple million people will not be self-sufficient (think of all the branches of industry, all the technology it would have to replicate, just a no-go). In fact, a good estimate I saw put it at about 100 million people, for our current level of technology. And you wouldn't even have the abundance of resources that we have here on earth, making it so much harder still.
The truth is, if earth goes, whoever you put on the moon is screwed just as much as we are. So let's try not to make that happen.
I hardly doubt you'd have much trouble finding 50 men in any country (let's forget the smaller outliers for a second), to take the chance, no matter how stupid. If reality TV can do it, so can your theoretical Mars mission.
Anyway, you said:
I had a similar thought, and it made me wonder in turn if this could be a big opportunity for China and their generation of surplus men.
Where exactly is the opportunity then? Why would China cripple itself economically just to spend a couple dozen people to their deaths? Prestige?
I posted this elsewhere already, but can you imagine the costs of shipping even a million men over to Mars? Your suggestion is a bit out there in terms of feasibility.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think I quite get how this is more economical. Is it actually cheaper to send up a bunch of smaller rockets with fuel as payload than it is to simply send a bigger rocket with enough fuel on it? Can somebody walk us through the math?
There's no doubt that if you work really hard (I've got colleagues who pull 80 hour weeks routinely, which I consider excessive, YMMV), then you will definitely do well in science. If, on the other hand, you are like the majority of people and go for a more even work-life balance without all those sacrifices, chances are that at some point you will get stuck in a low paying postdoc, moving from project to project, never really sure that you have a job for more than the next year or so and a salary on which you can't really support a family.
This trade-off is there in every profession of course, but I find it's a lot more exaggerated in science and technology than elsewhere. That being said, there are of course lots of places where a good work/life balance is possible and where sensible career choices are available. I do think we shouldn't kid students towards believing that it's some sort of cakewalk though. It's grueling and sometimes thankless (like being labeled a parasite by the common tax payer, always fun).
Of course, a science or technology degree is usable in lots of industries, so you're not really limiting yourself that much by getting one. Compare this with people pursuing an english degree, where there are so many more candidates than positions at the postdoc level, and you wonder why anyone would still bother.
There's a couple brands you might want to stay away from though. When people ask me, I never recommend HP (consumer) laptops because in the past I've seen them have terrible build quality (up to USB ports being installed the wrong way around) and even worse customer service.
It wouldn't be useless. Even with the interest rate of your savings account at zero, your money would still be appreciating in value and you'd still want to put it in a bank for all of the other benefits (not having to store it under your mattress, for one).
Whether deflation would be good for us is another matter, of course. (it wouldn't)
The only thing I find a little bit disturbing about this story is that they apparently found cocaine in a secure area last time, where they are supposed to know who has access, and yet nobody tested positive (or is cocaine one of those that you can break down pretty quickly?). Seems they have somewhat of a security problem.
That sounds plausible. Though, since all those soft drinks are made with high fructose corn syrup, doesn't that make your point kind of irrelevant in this case?
Actually plenty countries in (rich parts of) Europe use glass bottles. It depends on how good people are at recycling and, I suspect, how far you have to ship the bottles back and forth. Last I heard, they were still bickering over which option uses less fossil fuels though.
When you're packaging for a distro, you're working in a fixed environment (you set it that way through dependencies). Debian (python) policy is to always hardcode the path to the interpreter so you know you're using the one you're depending on. When a user actually does put a broken or newer/older version of python in their path, it otherwise tends to break in interesting ways. This is a bit lazy on the developer's part perhaps, but you don't really want to be dealing with bug reports about bugs that don't really exist and are the result of some misconfiguration on the client's side. The more you can minimize that, the better. It really isn't as insane as you make it out to be, it seems you just target a different environment.
You almost always want a specific VM anyway. No 2.6 script except the most trivial will work with 3.x. I haven't used virtualenv extensively but I thought you could just have it spawn the VM, instead of letting the shell decide.
And your perl programmers really need a better deployment process.
It's definitely useful when working with large data sets. I've used them extensively parsing a couple tens of gigs worth of files (larger than main memory on any box I have access to). They're not necessary, of course, but I'd argue they are if you don't want to be writing python as if it were C.
# This works with any python installation rather than only the system installation.
# Using explicit path to system's python install is bad practice. Requiring a source change to run your application with a different VM is silly. Now we need only change our path.
It's not "bad practice". Sometimes having the chosen VM depend on what your path happens to be set to is a bad idea, which is why a lot of the scripts in distros have the path hardcoded.
Some policies directly screw over the environment and are just a bad idea, i.e. biofuels. It's a pretty simple trade-off there that we can now see, where basically increasing demand directly hurts the goal of using biofuels in the first place (against global warming). Mining for (rare earth) metals is a completely different matter, as that is something that can be done somewhat safely (though there will of course always be environmental damage), but it is for some reason not done that way. That is the responsibility of the Chinese and other mining countries. We can't dictate policy to them.
What we can recognize is that if we don't switch to this technology, we will be stuck relying on other technology which is almost certainly more damaging for our environment. The coal and petroleum driving our infrastructure is often mined in damaging ways, not to mention the impact of singular events such as wars (iraqis setting their wells on fire) or accidents (gulf of mexico).
Saying that green energy isn't always green is all well and good, but it's not a very useful position. Unless you're the type advocating a return to stone age technology, which if you think it a good idea involves killing off the majority of the world's population.
It's telling that you don't have a problem with the violence, but the nudity somehow upsets you. Like it's a cheap trick to get you to watch something. I've got my issues with the movie, but it's one of the few that actually approached nudity in an adult manner, instead of going "oh look here, partly obscured titties!".
- Will the next id game default to OpenGL (on windows)?
While I generally prefer OpenGL over DirectX for a number of reasons, OpenGL really isn't doing so hot in recent years.
That would be Rage, which is crossplatform and according to Carmack is an OpenGL game. Though the fact that it runs on Xbox must mean there's at least a D3D layer in there somewhere.
Still, one has to wonder why using the API in broken ways would have to crash your X server.
Other than that it's X, of course.
Apple won't allow WebM on their iPhones either. I don't really see where you're going with this.
There is no one impressive reason to go to Mars, but many very compelling ones. Though the extinction risk is a big one. If we don't go to Mars, and then get hit with a major asteroid, we'll sure wish we had.
-Taylor
No we won't, because we'll be dead.
All the other reasons you mention are good ones to explore Mars, not to colonize it.
There's a big difference in cost effectiveness. Even if we could put a viable colony down there, one that wouldn't just die out after we get wiped out, the cost would be immense, creating untold havoc on hundreds of millions of people who could have been helped where that money spent on basic things like scientific research, any and all approaches against global warming, economic development, etc.
I'm sorry but I really hate space cadettes. You were born a couple centuries too soon it seems. Suck it up.
I don't get what the problem is here. Students that are so misguided to think they can just skate by usually end up facing the results in the long run. If they don't, it's either the mark of a bad school or the hard work the student put in at other times when he was not in class. I know in my day there were a bunch of classes that really weren't worth sitting through, and I preferred studying them at my own pace. And I might have missed an assignment or two, sure, but I worked my ass off for my degree and I'm damn proud of it.
How bout you just stop overgeneralising and realise you're getting a bit too old and bitter to see things clearly, hmmm?
Actually video conferencing fills a real need. People like being able to look at each other when they talk (we get a lot out of nonverbal communication).
On current mobile networks you just can't do that though (that's why facetime is wifi only, I gather). Not to mention that it will still drain your battery pretty damn fast. You make it sound like it's really easy to do right now, while the conditions haven't even yet arrived.
3D displays on phones seems fairly implausible. An extra camera will take space, and why would we want to use that much extra resources just to see our buddy's face in 3D? Now if they had said "in 4 years time, we will have video calling generally available on phones", that sounds pretty damn plausible.
Hold up, let me ask my telescope scientist friend his opinion of the points.
Ya, he doesn't like the degree being named after his primary tools either.
Oh, you mean your star scientist friend? If he can study stars I'd say we can study computers (and not just computing).
( not sarcasm, satire, as I'm not attempting to be rude to you, but illustrate my point ).
That's the nicest thing I've read on /. in a while. Have a merry christmas. :-)
The term informatics is often used too. The problem being that people might not recognize it as being the same thing as computer science though. In English, I usually use computer science because people have a better grasp of what that is. Not that they have any idea what it really entails.
On the other hand, I'd argue that the use of computers is not just incidental to the field. A lot of computer science is the study of automated computing tools, i.e. what can we calculate, how, how fast, what are good abstractions/representations of data and algorithms, ... If it was just about computing (in the narrow sense), it would still be a subfield of mathematics. Computer science isn't really a misnomer, because while the ideas can stand on their own without the presence of a computing device to use them with, that very device is often the corner stone of what we do.
>>>A completely free market eventually only leads to monopolies
False.
Even if a monopoly did form (highly unlikely in a competitive environment), eventually a new guy comes along to undercut the monopoly with lower prcies or better goods or improved service.
The cell phone market is a natural oligopoly though, not the kind of free market you're thinking of.
While it's true that the GP poster was probably wrong (I'm not that sure that CDDL is less restrictive, but probably), it's also true that Sun designed the CDDL specifically to be incompatible with the GPL.
So yes, linux is under the GPL and thus can't accept ZFS into mainline, but let's not forget which kernel was first (or at least, licensed under an open source license first).
I mostly agree. The moon is definitely doable. I don't really know why you'd want to do that (really, what problem is that solving? what new things are you learning that you can't on earth?), but it is definitely attainable. Just horribly expensive for what it is: a bunker in the middle of nowhere that has no strategic purpose and only contributes a little bit to science or engineering. I'd much rather see that money spent on some real science, or perhaps on creating habitats in certain places on earth (oceans, deserts, ...).
The biggest problem though with this discussion is that the idea of sending humans off planet as a type of backup for humanity is really flawed. That would work, if we had the technology to send many and make them self-sustainable. If you put a colony on the moon, anything below a couple million people will not be self-sufficient (think of all the branches of industry, all the technology it would have to replicate, just a no-go). In fact, a good estimate I saw put it at about 100 million people, for our current level of technology. And you wouldn't even have the abundance of resources that we have here on earth, making it so much harder still.
The truth is, if earth goes, whoever you put on the moon is screwed just as much as we are. So let's try not to make that happen.
I hardly doubt you'd have much trouble finding 50 men in any country (let's forget the smaller outliers for a second), to take the chance, no matter how stupid. If reality TV can do it, so can your theoretical Mars mission.
Anyway, you said:
I had a similar thought, and it made me wonder in turn if this could be a big opportunity for China and their generation of surplus men.
Where exactly is the opportunity then? Why would China cripple itself economically just to spend a couple dozen people to their deaths? Prestige?
I posted this elsewhere already, but can you imagine the costs of shipping even a million men over to Mars? Your suggestion is a bit out there in terms of feasibility.