If you're trying to defend "Truthers" like the stupid fucking twat Donald Trump you might as well save your breath. They're discredited xenophobes and racists, and you and they know it. They attempted to use their influence on the overwelmingly right wing (from a non-US perspective) media to create a storm in a teacup, when there wasn't even any fucking teacup.
Pathetic all round, and not really a good idea to remind people about it.
Here you have a tech website in its natural habitat, being a gigantic hypocrite
Slashdot posted one story, the rest of the material was comments by slashdot readers. We didn't get hourly updates inviting us to agree with our challenge the latest incorrect rumour.
So you'd rather that no one was allowed to report on any news until it had been sanitised and given some official seal of approval?
If you or anyone else sits down in front of a news website/TV and watches the same stories being repeated time after time, that's your fault, not the news providers. They're there to tell you the news.
I personally still like watching the scheduled news at 10 on the BBC, once a day, and maybe listening to the radio on the way to work in case there's anything urgent happening, thern reading the newspapers next day for a more considered viewpoint.
No one forces you to get live twitter/facebook/whatever updates 24/7. It's up to you.
There isn't one. Physics, chemistry and engineering show that we'll never go there, and they'll never get here. Just getting a signal across the gulf of space is hard enough.
and man will never land on the moon
No offence, but the argument that, because some things in the past have been perceived as impossible but were achieved, so therefore anything is possible, is just magical thinking.
Will we ever travel faster than light and solve time travel? Discover a free infinite energy source? Be able to reanimate long dead historical figures? Prove the existence of gods?
they'd probably be very roughly at the same level of technology. (Roughly -- give or take a millennia, that's how "rough."
Either you're using the wrong word, or you're absurdly over-precise. Hoiw can you possibly know that any other civilisation would be within one thousand years of ours technologically?
If you meant a million years, that is a very, very long time in human technology terms and so useless the other way.
Simply being completely free of meddling outside influences upsetting your vision of how the country should operate would make many experimental societies possible, the ultimate isolationist society fantasy.
So basically it's an excuse for getting somewhere you can live out your anarcho-capitalist fantasies?
Colonize a nearby star, wait a hundred or a thousand years to build up, then repeat
That sounds vaguely plausible if every star has an habitable Earth-style planet and you can send a pretty large number of people there to develop the infrastructure.
Otherwise, unless you're talking about terra-forming fantasies, you're just going to have a lot of people travelling for a very, very long time and ending up on places like Mars, where no one sane would want to spend their lives.
Our race has little interest in a voyage to even the nearest star if it is going to take that long.
That's because we're just not bored enough yet. Give us a few more thousand years to run out of other things to do.
Yes, because if I got bored, the thing I'd want to do is spend the rest of my life travelling in a big tin can through nothingness, to eventually land on a piece of bare rock.
If I ever got that bored, there's always bungee jumping without the elastic.
The Alucbierre drive requires negative energy, which could be possible with some kind of spongy foam exploiting the Casmir effect
Blah blah...antimatter dark-energy pixie dust drive...blah blah...hyperspace transluminal black hole stargate...blah blah...wormhole brane superstring anti-reality transfer protocol...blah blah...more energy than contained in the entire galaxy...blah blah...negative gravitonic warp drive...blah blah...
if you could find a couple of thousand people willing to... NEVER see their family or friends ever again
Sounds easy for the ones whose family and friends are on the ship too.
It didn't exactly take generation ships, but people did overcome that and colonize remote lands in the past.
"Remote" before the Twentieth Century meant many months (or possibly a couple of years) travel away, not many generations. Plus, when you got where you were going, you knew the air was breathable, water was available, you could eat the plants/animals, and so on.
In Victorian times, for instance, people transported to the other side of the world from England to Australia did sometimes come back during their lifetime. 12,000 miles in a ship takes a long time, but it's not the same as saying that only your great-great-great grandchildren might possibly meet again.
Indeed, I think ~30 million years was calculated for populating the entire galaxy with beings using only sedentary, rocket launched, ark-ships. 300 year voyage followed by 300 years of settlement on each planet before the next diaspora.
Even assuming that would work, you'd still end up with a galaxy full of people unable even to talk to each other except with huge delays, never mind physically trade/contact each other.
That sort of separation of the personal and the professional is something I see in a lot of people with jobs for money, not in professionals who really have a passion for what they do. It's an attitude you find in all kinds of people, from plumbers to CEO's. Some do it for the money, and some have a trade that happens to bring in money.
Don't be so smug. There are just some people who are lucky enough to get paid for doing something they enjoy. They are not the majority. But everyone has to get money somehow, regardless of whether their interests pay them.
And to be fair, as a computer programmer, it's much less tedious to write a program to solve a particular goal than to write a system that incorporates genetic algorithms, and wait for it to evolve and to that goal on its own.
Whatever some slashdotters might think, computer programmers are not omnipotent, omniscient supernatural beings.
You have just written the worst analogy in slashdot history. Good work.
If you say that god basically lit the blue paper for the Big Bang and then retired from the universe, it is both impossible to disprove, and indistinguishable from saying "it just happened". Either way, evolution happened, and there just seems no logical reason why an omnipotent being would choose such a slow-acting mechanism with such unpredictable results. Why wouldn't god just do what it said in the Bible and create the universe whole from scratch?
You are close to stating the ontological argument for the existence of god, namely that because god is perfect, he must exist, because one of the qualities of perfection is that it exists.
It's rubbish.
And the "idea" of a triangle doesn't exist in any but the most trivially true sense that it is a good description of any 3-sided object we can see or draw. There are no Platonic ideals that exist in some higher sphere of existence than our own.
Slashdot Mirror
When you're a gun nut, every problem looks like a problem about guns.
Pathetic all round, and not really a good idea to remind people about it.
Here you have a tech website in its natural habitat, being a gigantic hypocrite
Slashdot posted one story, the rest of the material was comments by slashdot readers. We didn't get hourly updates inviting us to agree with our challenge the latest incorrect rumour.
Profit is good.
No inherently it isn't.
We need to foster innovation in news.
Why? And innovation!= improvement anyway.
If no one pursued profit, what revolutionary developments in soundbite and factoid technology will go missed?
Ah, apologies, I missed the sarcasm initially.
And they are mutually exclusive?
Not absolutely, but when push comes to shove profits will come first.
The Daily Fail probably blames the Boston Marathon bombings on asylum seekers in the UK.
Who knew?
No, it's your doing. If you listen to, and take seriously, any random twitter or facebook message, you're a fucking moron.
If you or anyone else sits down in front of a news website/TV and watches the same stories being repeated time after time, that's your fault, not the news providers. They're there to tell you the news.
I personally still like watching the scheduled news at 10 on the BBC, once a day, and maybe listening to the radio on the way to work in case there's anything urgent happening, thern reading the newspapers next day for a more considered viewpoint.
No one forces you to get live twitter/facebook/whatever updates 24/7. It's up to you.
that would be ILLEGAL and violate the fifth ammendment. The constitution does NOT EXPLICITLY permit video surveillance.
(roman_mir, blocked by liberal moderators)
Joke or not? It's impossible to tell.
Thanks, you at least show that belief in religion is not incompatible with a good sense of humour.
There isn't one. Physics, chemistry and engineering show that we'll never go there, and they'll never get here. Just getting a signal across the gulf of space is hard enough.
and man will never land on the moon
No offence, but the argument that, because some things in the past have been perceived as impossible but were achieved, so therefore anything is possible, is just magical thinking.
Will we ever travel faster than light and solve time travel? Discover a free infinite energy source? Be able to reanimate long dead historical figures? Prove the existence of gods?
... I forgot sarcasm does not work on the internet. I was agreeing with you, but thanks for the blistering review.
I didn't think agreeing with people was allowed on the internet.
they'd probably be very roughly at the same level of technology. (Roughly -- give or take a millennia, that's how "rough."
Either you're using the wrong word, or you're absurdly over-precise. Hoiw can you possibly know that any other civilisation would be within one thousand years of ours technologically?
If you meant a million years, that is a very, very long time in human technology terms and so useless the other way.
Simply being completely free of meddling outside influences upsetting your vision of how the country should operate would make many experimental societies possible, the ultimate isolationist society fantasy.
So basically it's an excuse for getting somewhere you can live out your anarcho-capitalist fantasies?
Cool.
Colonize a nearby star, wait a hundred or a thousand years to build up, then repeat
That sounds vaguely plausible if every star has an habitable Earth-style planet and you can send a pretty large number of people there to develop the infrastructure.
Otherwise, unless you're talking about terra-forming fantasies, you're just going to have a lot of people travelling for a very, very long time and ending up on places like Mars, where no one sane would want to spend their lives.
Our race has little interest in a voyage to even the nearest star if it is going to take that long.
That's because we're just not bored enough yet. Give us a few more thousand years to run out of other things to do.
Yes, because if I got bored, the thing I'd want to do is spend the rest of my life travelling in a big tin can through nothingness, to eventually land on a piece of bare rock.
If I ever got that bored, there's always bungee jumping without the elastic.
The Alucbierre drive requires negative energy, which could be possible with some kind of spongy foam exploiting the Casmir effect
Blah blah...antimatter dark-energy pixie dust drive...blah blah...hyperspace transluminal black hole stargate...blah blah...wormhole brane superstring anti-reality transfer protocol...blah blah...more energy than contained in the entire galaxy...blah blah...negative gravitonic warp drive...blah blah...
if you could find a couple of thousand people willing to ... NEVER see their family or friends ever again
Sounds easy for the ones whose family and friends are on the ship too.
It didn't exactly take generation ships, but people did overcome that and colonize remote lands in the past.
"Remote" before the Twentieth Century meant many months (or possibly a couple of years) travel away, not many generations. Plus, when you got where you were going, you knew the air was breathable, water was available, you could eat the plants/animals, and so on.
In Victorian times, for instance, people transported to the other side of the world from England to Australia did sometimes come back during their lifetime. 12,000 miles in a ship takes a long time, but it's not the same as saying that only your great-great-great grandchildren might possibly meet again.
Indeed, I think ~30 million years was calculated for populating the entire galaxy with beings using only sedentary, rocket launched, ark-ships. 300 year voyage followed by 300 years of settlement on each planet before the next diaspora.
Even assuming that would work, you'd still end up with a galaxy full of people unable even to talk to each other except with huge delays, never mind physically trade/contact each other.
That sort of separation of the personal and the professional is something I see in a lot of people with jobs for money, not in professionals who really have a passion for what they do. It's an attitude you find in all kinds of people, from plumbers to CEO's. Some do it for the money, and some have a trade that happens to bring in money.
Don't be so smug. There are just some people who are lucky enough to get paid for doing something they enjoy. They are not the majority. But everyone has to get money somehow, regardless of whether their interests pay them.
And to be fair, as a computer programmer, it's much less tedious to write a program to solve a particular goal than to write a system that incorporates genetic algorithms, and wait for it to evolve and to that goal on its own.
Whatever some slashdotters might think, computer programmers are not omnipotent, omniscient supernatural beings.
You have just written the worst analogy in slashdot history. Good work.
If you say that god basically lit the blue paper for the Big Bang and then retired from the universe, it is both impossible to disprove, and indistinguishable from saying "it just happened". Either way, evolution happened, and there just seems no logical reason why an omnipotent being would choose such a slow-acting mechanism with such unpredictable results. Why wouldn't god just do what it said in the Bible and create the universe whole from scratch?
If there was such a thing as intelligent design, wouldn't God have made everyone capable of using paragraphs?
It's rubbish.
And the "idea" of a triangle doesn't exist in any but the most trivially true sense that it is a good description of any 3-sided object we can see or draw. There are no Platonic ideals that exist in some higher sphere of existence than our own.