Only looking at 2.4 km/s to escape the moon's gravity well, vs 11.2 km/s here on earth.
Do you even need that much speed? After all, escape velocity is the speed needed to rise a mass to infinity from Earths/Moons surface, but Moon is within Earth's gravity well, just like Earth is within Moons gravity well, so you only need to rise the mass to the Lagrance point between them. Not only that, but as you near said point, the other body's gravity will cancel more and more of the other's, so moving between these two should require far less initial speed.
Because if we the humanity stay limited on a single world, we're dead as soon as the next killer asteroid, megavolcano, or superplague comes along. We have to expand to space.
It's not about nations. It's not about ideology. It's about survival: if we the humanity want to have a future, we must take space. For hope's sake, someone take the fucking moon already!
Fuck Empire. Everywhere, always. Don't take that bullshit to space, kthx.
If it takes imperialistic pride to do what has to be done, then so be it.
The explanation is simple: the Sun is actually getting hotter, but the climatologists, in their conspiracy to frame things like the Earth was getting warmer due to greenhouse gasses, have forged all records to make it seem like the Sun was at low activity instead. That way the warming climate is blamed on human activity.
I will consider all replies and downmods to this post as further evidence of the Anthropogenic Global Warming Conspiracy. If you disagree with me, you're obvilously a paid chill or a poor, deluded fool. Or maybe you're just an evil ecoterrorist who wants to destroy our economy despite knowing better.
Science is about creating falsifiable hypotheses to explain observations, engaging in more observations, and either modifying or discarding hypotheses.
Science is systematic study of something. What you described - the scientific method - is not applicable to, for example, mathematics.
This is when a rational person would do some research into both sides and think about it for themselves.
No, a rational person will weight the importance of being right vs. the effort required to do the research, taking into account the initial estimated chance of being right and how much it's likely to increase with reasearch, and decide whether it's worth it. Most of the time it isn't, since most of the time it doesn't matter if you're right or wrong, as proven by the fact that most supporters of Intelligent Design keep on living as comfortably as ever.
And a good thing, that! If in 1930, a constitutional amendment had been passed requiring a Ph.D to be eligible for voting, today Soviet America would be picking itself out of the same mess the countries that comprised the late Soviet Union are.
Or any other dictatorship, left or right, inevitably ends up in.
Highly intelligent does not necessarily correlate to political astuteness. In fact, the correlation would seem to be negative.
As "astuteness" is a synonym of "shrewd", which means "intelligent", your statement directly contradicts itself.
Also, I'd like to point out that stupid, uneducated people have usually been far easier to convince by various demagogues to give them absolute power than smart ones. Smart people, however, have been more likely to convince themselves that "smart" means "infallibe", and that they should thus be the ones wielding that absolute power. That particular human folly keeps on rearing its ugly head even here on Slashdot all the time.
No, what we need is linguists developing a better (ie, more formal) way to communicate ideas clearly, after that making scientists translate their formal languages to this new language ought to be trivial, but not before. Otherwise, the informality of human languages will mean that people can derive wildly different meanings from your statements, which they *will* use to "prove" you wrong and, therefore, justify their refusal of science.
It's the informality of human language that gives it its expressive power. We can invent new symbols (words) as we need them; a formally defined language would only have a static set, since otherwise two humans could invent the same symbol to mean different things, or invent different symbols to mean the same thing, and we'd be right back where we started.
Also, people who refuse to learn scientific theories aren't going to learn your formal language either, so it wouldn't help at all. All you'd get for your troubles would be another Esperanto.
In fact, there are MANY constituencies in the United States where an anti-science attitude is a prerequisite for getting elected to office. It doesn't hurt in the slightest even for high office. So, again, it would seem that being seen as 'idiots' by 'those elitist witches and warlocks' (aka, science-based folk) is actually a point of pride for some people.
Well it's good too see that you are doing your best to dispell this notion of science being for elitists looking down on everyone else. Yes, you are behaving in an extremely rational way here; any of the "idiots" reading your post is sure to drop their hostility of you and choose you as their leader.
[snark] As we all know, faith is always superior to reason and no god-fearing American would consort with the scientists, who suck at the Debul's teat. [/snark] Need I say more?
It's fun to snark, isn't it? It's fun to reduce other people's positions to strawmen and mock them. However, if you do that, don't complain when those others label you as an elitistic, hostile prick, and treat you accordingly.
It never ceases to amaze me how people can accuse others of irrationality yet themselves behave in ways that are certain to harm their stated goals. Is this an example of cognitive dissonance, or is your true goal to ensure that you'll always have someone to look down to?
To a true scientist, this whole argument is rather silly, and just boils down to: what arbitrary size do you want to set as the minimum size for "planet" status?
This assumes that "planet" refers to any entity that fulfils certain qualifications. However, we can just as easily define "planet" to refer to a particular set of entities.
Basically, it's "planet is an object that's spherical due to self-gravitation, orbits Sun, and has cleared its orbit" vs. "planet is Mars, Mercurius Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptunus or Pluto". Both are perfectly valid definitions; one is more general than other, but that doesn't mean that the other couldn't be used.
Scientists can't help it if regular people are stupid and can't handle a greater understanding of the universe.
What "greater understanding of the universe" is gained by redefining words in common usage? If I insist that it's incorrect to refer to both spiders and houseflies as "bugs" because houseflies are insects and spiders are not, is it a mark of stupidity that people ignore me?
If regular people get this worked up over a simple change in nomenclature, just imagine how berserk everyone will go if aliens make contact, or the secret to the afterlife is discovered, or parallel universes are discovered, or some other major change to our worldview.
Regular people aren't getting worked up over change of nomenclature. Some of the scientists are getting worked up because regular people are ignoring their change of nomenclature and continue referring to Pluto as a planet. And you are getting worked up for nothing.
You don't have a "right" as a person or a consumer to a certain kind of product if someone chooses not to make or release it. No amount of wishful thinking lets you just take things they make because the world isn't what you want it to be.
You don't need a specific right for that. Your rights aren't enumerated; the default position for "can I do X" is always "yes". The exceptions to your rights are enumerated, and one of those exceptions, namely copyright law, is being contested and more and more just ignored by the public. And rightly so; after all, why would I allow my right to freely receive and send information to be infringed upon by media cartels?
NO no no... The point of that post... That post was made to wake someone out of their sleep. To evoke an emotional impact that will help someone realize that they're not the well-adjusted, ok person they thought they were. That can not be done with a dissertation. It must be done with a bucket of cold water.
Protip: frothing at your mouth on an online forum doesn't evoke an emotional response besides amusement and/or annoyance. Talking about "breaking bones" isn't a bucket of cold water, it's noise, and will be filtered out as such. And calling anyone who dares talk about child pornography without getting hysterical a "sick fuck" doesn't "wake up" anyone, it just makes you seem like an idiot and the people you attempted to insult as the smart ones by contrast.
Another protip: Slashdot servers are located in the USA, so if the FBI wants the IP addresses of the poster, they can get them, making your "I'd turn them over" stance quite redundant.
For the most part, the people who actively look for and download CP are not well (mentally).
People who like viewing child pornography are usually pedophiles, meaning that they are sexually attracted to prepubescent children. I don't think that this, alone, should be considered a sign of mental illness, because other forms of abnormal sexual orientations aren't, so the only justification seems to be that it's socially unacceptable.
Normal people like you and I would have adverse reactions if we accidentally saw this material, some more then others.
I find many forms of pornography distasteful, but that doesn't mean that the people who like them are mentally ill. "I'm normal and I dislike this, therefore anyone who likes it is abnormal, therefore they are mentally ill" is insane troll logic.
Those who are looking for the less serious types can be helped with counselling, those who are looking for the more extreme forms should be put where they can do no harm.
I argue that someone who watches pornography is not harming anyone, even if other people find that particular form of porno unappealing. I also doubt that counseling can change anyone's sexual orientation.
Not posting anonymously. But that doesn't mean I don't think this is a good example of communication people would want to keep anonymized, relating back to the story today about tracking prepaid cellphones. There are things people legitimately want to talk about anonymously, because even talking about it is stigmatized.
Yes, and by preventing people from talking anonymously you prevent people from talking at all about those things without being stigmatized, thus ensuring that values related to them can't be re-evaluated. That's the goal of many of those who want to prevent anonymous speech: keep things from changing, because they might change to something they don't approve of.
First off, if I had concrete information on a pedophile IRC distribution channel that I knew would be helpful to law enforcement I would forward the information immediately. I may hate a lot about government, but I am a strong supporter of the concept of civic duty.
And then become under accusation yourself for having seen the material distributed there. Unless, of course, you were accusing people based on rumors? And even if you did, you moved in circles where such rumors circulated, making you suspect and thus warranting surveillance.
I do not need any motivation other than my own personal ethics to do the right thing.
As it is, there's plenty of motivation to not do the right thing.
Secondly, 5K can't buy you shit. I would spend that much on monitors and hard drives before I even got the rest of it.
$5000 buys a very nice monitor and over 30 terabytes of hard disk space. Just what are you trying to store, and why do you want such an excellent monitor? And you hang with the crowd who can point you to child porn IRC channels. Hmm...
Or would you want to stop people from leering over your underage child?
That you want to stop people doing X is not a good reason for making X illegal. If it was, then pretty much everything would be illegal, because there's always someone who dislikes it. This does not change just because you are talking about children.
You can be damned sure that if you were paying someone to make snuff tapes you'd be charged along with the producers.
And yet the audiences of most action movies haven't been charged with anything, despite there being on-screen bodycount comparable to a minor - or sometimes not so minor - war. Perhaps we should take a cue there and offer pedophiles artificial substitutes, the same way we offer substitutes for people to slake their bloodlust on?
Also, you wouldn't be charged merely for possessing snuff tapes, nor downloading or even uploading them on the Net. Why would you?
Yeah exactly. If I wanted to pay to be lied to, I'd become a Scientologist.
So... If both Murdoch and the Church of Scientology sue Slashdot for publishing that comment, will they next sue each other for implying that they are like each other?
However most of it is empty of anything other than said randomly generated terrain, and the occasional random encounter with an animal or bandit.
If you generate terrain randomly, then you also need to generate content randomly/procedurally. That means starting with an empty world, generating geology, laying out cities and such and letting them develop in simulated history, then using that data to generate the final terrain (with buildings, random encounters, quests etc.) during the actual gameplay. I'm pretty sure that Dwarf Fortress does something like this.
Do it like Arcanum: You have the World map and can walk anywhere either on that or in the local area map. No fast travel (unless you use teleport magic, trains or ships), but you can still travel across a small continent in a reasonable time - and find special locations by passing near them.
It's nowhere near perfect due to technical limitations of the engine, of course; for example, there are no roads or railroads between cities because that would require them be placed manually (as opposed to being able to express them as features of the "world tile"). Even so, it's still completely unique in that way, and I'd love to see what modern procedural generation and 3D engines could do with it.
In other news: Repubs were elected. That means that they have a mandate to use all the powers of the positions they were elected to in whatever way they see fit... Would you still stand behind your argument? I didn't think so!
Yes I would, that's what being elected to a position means: you are given the mandate to use the power the position brings.
Now, it turns out that it was unwise to elect Republicans - or right-wingers in general - since their politics led the country to ruin, but they certainly had the mandate to use their positions to implement their politics.
LOL, nice strawman.
LOL, it's not a strawman but an Epic Straw Golem:).
And it's ironic that someone complains about floating bars of fail on Slashdot of all places. Or is it intentional, to encourage people to setup accounts, because you can turn it off then?
According to any poll, majority of people were against the bailouts, majority of people were against the stimulus, majority of people were against Obamacare, majority of people are in favour of Arizona type immigration control. I guess the change the according to you the populace should enact would be very different to the change that he is actually enacting. Dems were elected simply because people were sick of Bush and neo-cons, they never got the mandate or popular support to do any of those things they are doing.
Dems were elected. That means that they have a mandate to use all the powers of the positions they were elected to in whatever way they see fit. That's the whole idea of representative democracy: you don't vote for issues, you vote for people.
You're just bitter because they did something you don't approve of, and are grasping at straws to make it seem like villainy. It isn't, it's a politician doing his job with the mandate of the masses he got fair and square.
They won, and they do have the mandate and popular support to do the things they do; get over it already.
Here's the conclusion I came to after believing the Slashdot line about printer ink: Yes, the manufacturer makes the best ink. The difference is astounding. It doesn't run; it doesn't clog. It's worth the money.
It clogs. It clogs constantly. I'll never again use an inkjet, not ever again.
As for the money, your entire post reads like inept astroturfing, from "worth the money" to the scaremongering bit about rubber being corroded by ink.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you even need that much speed? After all, escape velocity is the speed needed to rise a mass to infinity from Earths/Moons surface, but Moon is within Earth's gravity well, just like Earth is within Moons gravity well, so you only need to rise the mass to the Lagrance point between them. Not only that, but as you near said point, the other body's gravity will cancel more and more of the other's, so moving between these two should require far less initial speed.
The difference between "vast" and "trace" amount is really all about how valuable the stuff is, now isn't it? And He3 is about $1500 per gram, which is over 120 times that of gold.
Because if we the humanity stay limited on a single world, we're dead as soon as the next killer asteroid, megavolcano, or superplague comes along. We have to expand to space.
It's not about nations. It's not about ideology. It's about survival: if we the humanity want to have a future, we must take space. For hope's sake, someone take the fucking moon already!
If it takes imperialistic pride to do what has to be done, then so be it.
The explanation is simple: the Sun is actually getting hotter, but the climatologists, in their conspiracy to frame things like the Earth was getting warmer due to greenhouse gasses, have forged all records to make it seem like the Sun was at low activity instead. That way the warming climate is blamed on human activity.
I will consider all replies and downmods to this post as further evidence of the Anthropogenic Global Warming Conspiracy. If you disagree with me, you're obvilously a paid chill or a poor, deluded fool. Or maybe you're just an evil ecoterrorist who wants to destroy our economy despite knowing better.
Go on, conspirators! Give me your best shot!
Science is systematic study of something. What you described - the scientific method - is not applicable to, for example, mathematics.
No, a rational person will weight the importance of being right vs. the effort required to do the research, taking into account the initial estimated chance of being right and how much it's likely to increase with reasearch, and decide whether it's worth it. Most of the time it isn't, since most of the time it doesn't matter if you're right or wrong, as proven by the fact that most supporters of Intelligent Design keep on living as comfortably as ever.
Or any other dictatorship, left or right, inevitably ends up in.
As "astuteness" is a synonym of "shrewd", which means "intelligent", your statement directly contradicts itself.
Also, I'd like to point out that stupid, uneducated people have usually been far easier to convince by various demagogues to give them absolute power than smart ones. Smart people, however, have been more likely to convince themselves that "smart" means "infallibe", and that they should thus be the ones wielding that absolute power. That particular human folly keeps on rearing its ugly head even here on Slashdot all the time.
It's the informality of human language that gives it its expressive power. We can invent new symbols (words) as we need them; a formally defined language would only have a static set, since otherwise two humans could invent the same symbol to mean different things, or invent different symbols to mean the same thing, and we'd be right back where we started.
Also, people who refuse to learn scientific theories aren't going to learn your formal language either, so it wouldn't help at all. All you'd get for your troubles would be another Esperanto.
Well it's good too see that you are doing your best to dispell this notion of science being for elitists looking down on everyone else. Yes, you are behaving in an extremely rational way here; any of the "idiots" reading your post is sure to drop their hostility of you and choose you as their leader.
It's fun to snark, isn't it? It's fun to reduce other people's positions to strawmen and mock them. However, if you do that, don't complain when those others label you as an elitistic, hostile prick, and treat you accordingly.
It never ceases to amaze me how people can accuse others of irrationality yet themselves behave in ways that are certain to harm their stated goals. Is this an example of cognitive dissonance, or is your true goal to ensure that you'll always have someone to look down to?
This assumes that "planet" refers to any entity that fulfils certain qualifications. However, we can just as easily define "planet" to refer to a particular set of entities.
Basically, it's "planet is an object that's spherical due to self-gravitation, orbits Sun, and has cleared its orbit" vs. "planet is Mars, Mercurius Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptunus or Pluto". Both are perfectly valid definitions; one is more general than other, but that doesn't mean that the other couldn't be used.
What "greater understanding of the universe" is gained by redefining words in common usage? If I insist that it's incorrect to refer to both spiders and houseflies as "bugs" because houseflies are insects and spiders are not, is it a mark of stupidity that people ignore me?
Regular people aren't getting worked up over change of nomenclature. Some of the scientists are getting worked up because regular people are ignoring their change of nomenclature and continue referring to Pluto as a planet. And you are getting worked up for nothing.
You don't need a specific right for that. Your rights aren't enumerated; the default position for "can I do X" is always "yes". The exceptions to your rights are enumerated, and one of those exceptions, namely copyright law, is being contested and more and more just ignored by the public. And rightly so; after all, why would I allow my right to freely receive and send information to be infringed upon by media cartels?
Protip: frothing at your mouth on an online forum doesn't evoke an emotional response besides amusement and/or annoyance. Talking about "breaking bones" isn't a bucket of cold water, it's noise, and will be filtered out as such. And calling anyone who dares talk about child pornography without getting hysterical a "sick fuck" doesn't "wake up" anyone, it just makes you seem like an idiot and the people you attempted to insult as the smart ones by contrast.
Another protip: Slashdot servers are located in the USA, so if the FBI wants the IP addresses of the poster, they can get them, making your "I'd turn them over" stance quite redundant.
Well, since this was posted by CorporateSuit, I'd say he was referring to anything that doesn't involve bending over and grabbing your ankles ;).
People who like viewing child pornography are usually pedophiles, meaning that they are sexually attracted to prepubescent children. I don't think that this, alone, should be considered a sign of mental illness, because other forms of abnormal sexual orientations aren't, so the only justification seems to be that it's socially unacceptable.
I find many forms of pornography distasteful, but that doesn't mean that the people who like them are mentally ill. "I'm normal and I dislike this, therefore anyone who likes it is abnormal, therefore they are mentally ill" is insane troll logic.
I argue that someone who watches pornography is not harming anyone, even if other people find that particular form of porno unappealing. I also doubt that counseling can change anyone's sexual orientation.
Yes, and by preventing people from talking anonymously you prevent people from talking at all about those things without being stigmatized, thus ensuring that values related to them can't be re-evaluated. That's the goal of many of those who want to prevent anonymous speech: keep things from changing, because they might change to something they don't approve of.
And then become under accusation yourself for having seen the material distributed there. Unless, of course, you were accusing people based on rumors? And even if you did, you moved in circles where such rumors circulated, making you suspect and thus warranting surveillance.
As it is, there's plenty of motivation to not do the right thing.
$5000 buys a very nice monitor and over 30 terabytes of hard disk space. Just what are you trying to store, and why do you want such an excellent monitor? And you hang with the crowd who can point you to child porn IRC channels. Hmm...
That you want to stop people doing X is not a good reason for making X illegal. If it was, then pretty much everything would be illegal, because there's always someone who dislikes it. This does not change just because you are talking about children.
And yet the audiences of most action movies haven't been charged with anything, despite there being on-screen bodycount comparable to a minor - or sometimes not so minor - war. Perhaps we should take a cue there and offer pedophiles artificial substitutes, the same way we offer substitutes for people to slake their bloodlust on?
Also, you wouldn't be charged merely for possessing snuff tapes, nor downloading or even uploading them on the Net. Why would you?
So... If both Murdoch and the Church of Scientology sue Slashdot for publishing that comment, will they next sue each other for implying that they are like each other?
If you generate terrain randomly, then you also need to generate content randomly/procedurally. That means starting with an empty world, generating geology, laying out cities and such and letting them develop in simulated history, then using that data to generate the final terrain (with buildings, random encounters, quests etc.) during the actual gameplay. I'm pretty sure that Dwarf Fortress does something like this.
Do it like Arcanum: You have the World map and can walk anywhere either on that or in the local area map. No fast travel (unless you use teleport magic, trains or ships), but you can still travel across a small continent in a reasonable time - and find special locations by passing near them.
It's nowhere near perfect due to technical limitations of the engine, of course; for example, there are no roads or railroads between cities because that would require them be placed manually (as opposed to being able to express them as features of the "world tile"). Even so, it's still completely unique in that way, and I'd love to see what modern procedural generation and 3D engines could do with it.
Yes I would, that's what being elected to a position means: you are given the mandate to use the power the position brings.
Now, it turns out that it was unwise to elect Republicans - or right-wingers in general - since their politics led the country to ruin, but they certainly had the mandate to use their positions to implement their politics.
LOL, it's not a strawman but an Epic Straw Golem :).
And that's terrible.
Gotta love Firefox addons :).
And it's ironic that someone complains about floating bars of fail on Slashdot of all places. Or is it intentional, to encourage people to setup accounts, because you can turn it off then?
According to any poll, majority of people were against the bailouts, majority of people were against the stimulus, majority of people were against Obamacare, majority of people are in favour of Arizona type immigration control. I guess the change the according to you the populace should enact would be very different to the change that he is actually enacting. Dems were elected simply because people were sick of Bush and neo-cons, they never got the mandate or popular support to do any of those things they are doing.
Dems were elected. That means that they have a mandate to use all the powers of the positions they were elected to in whatever way they see fit. That's the whole idea of representative democracy: you don't vote for issues, you vote for people.
You're just bitter because they did something you don't approve of, and are grasping at straws to make it seem like villainy. It isn't, it's a politician doing his job with the mandate of the masses he got fair and square.
They won, and they do have the mandate and popular support to do the things they do; get over it already.
It clogs. It clogs constantly. I'll never again use an inkjet, not ever again.
As for the money, your entire post reads like inept astroturfing, from "worth the money" to the scaremongering bit about rubber being corroded by ink.