Oh, it's news all right. Just not end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it news. As pointed out in TFA, it's awfully hard to critique the experiment unless you're there seeing exactly what has been done. While I don't find it surprising that a few printed (or electronic) pages cannot describe hundreds of tons of equipment and countless hours of work it does speak to the complexity of modern science.
You wonder how much that is published isn't repeatable or understandable. Dropping rocks off off buildings and counting seconds with a stopwatch just doesn't cut it anymore. I read somewhere (can't quickly find it) that one of the drug companies (Bayer, IIRC) felt that over half of the experiments from the literature that they tried to repeat to consider the possibility of pharmaceutical development from the discovery, failed outright or gave much different results than published.
It's frustrating I suppose. We all know most research is wrong / useless - the hard part is teasing out which is or isn't.
Faster than light is still possible, but now it's due to gravitational effects instead of innate property of neutrinos. It makes finding the Higgs boson more important than ever.
Don't jumble words and think you know what's going on.
Make the TSA double pat down and strip search these clowns at every airport they go through. And please route them on packed Regional Jets for every flight.
Thank you and to honor your tastiness, I shall double my Parmesan Cheese tithe for one month!
Why keep anything important on a smartphone to begin with?
I've always wondered where this comes from. I'm not so worried about the police - yes, they are a real concern. On a day to day basis, however, I'm more worried about me dropping the super thin, super light smart phone out of one of my many pockets and not noticing it for hours. Then having random neer-do-well either wipe it (fine, no prob) or try to get something 'fun' out of it.
I keep it password protected, don't keep emails on it, important numbers and data go in 1Password (great little program). I don't put phone numbers of People Who Should Not Be Routinely Phoned in my address book - they stay in 1Password. A bit clunky, but I've dropped more than one expensive widget on the ground before....
Yep. Carry around a notebook with a 3G modem and a headset. Coat the device (and the headset of course) in tinfoil, slap on the "Richard Stahlman for President" bumper sticker and you're good to go.
Except that a physical key is "something you have", whereas a password is "something you know." A search warrant allows them to make off with physical objects, but a password is just bits in your head.
That's why you're supposed to write the password down on a sticky note somewhere obvious.
Sheesh. This is Slashdot. Do we have to explain everything?
Yes, in part because of graft, corruption and other assorted Human nonsense.
In large part because when the tunnels were first dug, there was relatively little in the way. Now we have tunnels, conduits, tunnels, cable, tunnels, water lines.
It's a harder job. This interesting article describes how the original subway was built. Basically dig and fill, very little tunneling.
Basically we need to co opt China into being the 'enemy'. This is why we need a robust, scary Chinese space program.
But I am afraid that, after some time of this economic stagnation, that we will end up in a resource war with China. Happened before, will happen again.
Dude, all these 'evil' patents will expire within the next 20 years. If these 20 years are crucial for the existence of mankind, we made some booboos in the past and we're beyond repair already. Just sayin'.
That's actually a very good point. Right now we're in a rending of garments / gnashing of teeth phase. When Stephenson was growing up, we were in a "Golden Age" - at least as far as the US was concerned. And this is a very US argument. Things go and come. Nobody stays on top forever. If you look at any human history you see waves of 'progress' and waves of, well, something else. All depends on your viewpoint.
Another way to look at the Industrial Age is the historically rapid (and now I'm switching to a geologic time frame) destruction / rearrangement of the entire planet's environment. Maybe that will come crashing down on us, maybe we will figure out how to sustain a couple of billion of Homo industrialis in some sort of long term balance.
Remember, what we call the 'modern world' (rapid innovation, rapid growth of mankind) is only a couple of hundred years old. Just a blink in the eye of time.
People need to get out of buildings and away from things that can fall on them when there's a major earthquake.
Here most people die when they're crushed under concrete and other building materials (stone, bricks, etc.) in poorly constructed homes.
Something that says an earthquake is imminent would definitely help.
Not so easy. Depends on your building. And the quake. If you are in a quake resistant building, you're better off staying inside and avoiding debris like the 50 stories of glass windows that are about to cascade down on you. If you are in an old masonry building, it might make sense. If you are in a fairly undeveloped area without 50 stories of glass windows, perhaps outside would be good. If you're on the coast, perhaps not.
However, 30 minutes of warning does give you more options to think about. You could determine ahead of time your strategy. You might build an 'earthquake bunker' inside a building. Unfortunately, from TFA, even if this phenomena is true, the current GPS constellation isn't set up to measure this in real time. But since earthquake prediction is one of the Holy Grail's of science, it deserves to be studied some more. Perhaps you could build local electron sensors... or whatever.
CFC might be a good name for a band. I've heard worse....
If a bunch of people presumably smart enough to run a particle accelerator can't figure out how to recycle CFCs - something every car mechanic on the planet figured out decades ago - you should check your dosimeter reports very carefully.
The other thing to remember about high latitudes is that, in the summer, the sun is up for longer periods of time. Sometimes 24 hrs a day. UV damage is due to total amount of radiation - intensity x time (IIRC)[citation needed]. Of course, reflection off of snow / water / ice increases the intensity dramatically.
However, the limiting factor for suntans in anything but the high arctic is corporal dissolution by mosquitos - the sun doesn't have much of an effect in 15 minutes.
You're correct. As long as the UI designers don't drink the Kool-Aid and go completely one way or the other, I'm OK. But I have close to 100 programs on my two main machines. About 30 of them are used frequently. While it is easy to make 100 unique program names (note to the FOSS community, don't think too hard now, we don't need any more examples like GIMP), it's nearly impossible to have 100 unique 16 x 16 pixel icons. Maybe at 50 pixel square, but then you might as well just print out the label in the system language.
People seem to want symbolic icons that represent the programs they want to run; they don't want to look through a long menu and read a bunch of text.
Really? Seems to be a common theme and maybe I'm just abnormal but I cannot stand interfaces with a dozen geometric shapes with random squiggles and colors that are different from every other interface with a dozen geometric shapes with random squiggles and colors.
Just put the damned labels in whatever language the system detects it's supposed to be in. Leave the squiggles and lines to the finger painting set.
Along these same lines, several additional survival courses are available:
Direct Meteor Strike Survival Course, offering tips on how to survive a massive meteorite landing on your city,
Ground Zero Nuclear Blast Survival Course, giving pointers and expert advice on surviving the nova-like heat and shock waves of a direct nuclear bomb hit, and
16-Ton Weight Falls On Your Head Survival Course, dispelling the myths and misconceptions that are common among people raised on Saturday morning cartoons.
The main risk to sitting upright is aortic dissection. Apparently, when the body comes to a rapid stop in a forward-facing upright seated position, your internal organs can shift forward before coming to a stop and cause the aorta to tear enough to cause you to die from uncontrollable internal bleeding -- possibly minutes or hours AFTER you've gotten off the plane and are busy celebrating your survival.
So, you bend forward, the plane decelerates and then YOUR HEAD ASPLODE!
That's a bit of a false dichotomy that misses the point anyway. Industrial pumps, as you say, are useful in an of themselves even though the vast majority of the planet couldn't tell the difference between a centrifugal and a diaphragm pump. It is not so clear what the economic advantage of space exploration actually is.
There ARE other valid endeavors besides making money. Art, Religion, Philosophy, Science - all those things that actually differentiate us from, say, a Myna bird. Economics, in fact, is really only one aspect of human civilization, albeit a rather important one.
I think, for now, Space exploration falls into that latter set of concepts. At some point, somebody will make money from it - aside from Boeing and Lockeed. But that isn 't the main point.
2001: A Space Odessey came out in 1968 - roughly the same time period as Apollo 11-17 (remember you have to fake them all). It represented the state of the art in special effects. It is no where near as visually arresting as the real on board and on-moon shots. Perhaps in 2011 James Cameron could come close to being visually and physically perfect. In 1968? No way.
Yes, NASA had lots of computers. IBM 360's and 370's with frigging punch cards (I wuz there). The MacPro that I'm typing on now wipes the entire NASA computing system, all eleven buildings, of that period, off the map.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, it's news all right. Just not end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it news. As pointed out in TFA, it's awfully hard to critique the experiment unless you're there seeing exactly what has been done. While I don't find it surprising that a few printed (or electronic) pages cannot describe hundreds of tons of equipment and countless hours of work it does speak to the complexity of modern science.
You wonder how much that is published isn't repeatable or understandable. Dropping rocks off off buildings and counting seconds with a stopwatch just doesn't cut it anymore. I read somewhere (can't quickly find it) that one of the drug companies (Bayer, IIRC) felt that over half of the experiments from the literature that they tried to repeat to consider the possibility of pharmaceutical development from the discovery, failed outright or gave much different results than published.
It's frustrating I suppose. We all know most research is wrong / useless - the hard part is teasing out which is or isn't.
Faster than light is still possible, but now it's due to gravitational effects instead of innate property of neutrinos. It makes finding the Higgs boson more important than ever.
Don't jumble words and think you know what's going on.
Let me guess - you're in management?
Oh and one more thing Oh Great Pasta:
Make the TSA double pat down and strip search these clowns at every airport they go through. And please route them on packed Regional Jets for every flight.
Thank you and to honor your tastiness, I shall double my Parmesan Cheese tithe for one month!
Oh Great Spaghetti Monster.
Smite the infidels! Turn their iPhones into Nokia phones running Symbian!
Why keep anything important on a smartphone to begin with?
I've always wondered where this comes from. I'm not so worried about the police - yes, they are a real concern. On a day to day basis, however, I'm more worried about me dropping the super thin, super light smart phone out of one of my many pockets and not noticing it for hours. Then having random neer-do-well either wipe it (fine, no prob) or try to get something 'fun' out of it.
I keep it password protected, don't keep emails on it, important numbers and data go in 1Password (great little program). I don't put phone numbers of People Who Should Not Be Routinely Phoned in my address book - they stay in 1Password. A bit clunky, but I've dropped more than one expensive widget on the ground before....
Cell phones are fundamental rights?
My god. For over half my life I've been dis righted (un righted?)!.
Help, Help! I was being repressed.
(But I'm better now).
Just overclock it and get an extended battery.
So simple even your granny could do it!
Yep. Carry around a notebook with a 3G modem and a headset. Coat the device (and the headset of course) in tinfoil, slap on the "Richard Stahlman for President" bumper sticker and you're good to go.
Except that a physical key is "something you have", whereas a password is "something you know." A search warrant allows them to make off with physical objects, but a password is just bits in your head.
That's why you're supposed to write the password down on a sticky note somewhere obvious.
Sheesh. This is Slashdot. Do we have to explain everything?
So, you're saying we need hereditary monarchies?
Do YOU want to be one of those guys hauling 15 ton blocks up inclines so tourists 5000 years later can gawk at things?
Do you know why that is?
Yes, in part because of graft, corruption and other assorted Human nonsense.
In large part because when the tunnels were first dug, there was relatively little in the way. Now we have tunnels, conduits, tunnels, cable, tunnels, water lines.
It's a harder job. This interesting article describes how the original subway was built. Basically dig and fill, very little tunneling.
Basically we need to co opt China into being the 'enemy'. This is why we need a robust, scary Chinese space program.
But I am afraid that, after some time of this economic stagnation, that we will end up in a resource war with China. Happened before, will happen again.
Dude, all these 'evil' patents will expire within the next 20 years. If these 20 years are crucial for the existence of mankind, we made some booboos in the past and we're beyond repair already. Just sayin'.
That's actually a very good point. Right now we're in a rending of garments / gnashing of teeth phase. When Stephenson was growing up, we were in a "Golden Age" - at least as far as the US was concerned. And this is a very US argument. Things go and come. Nobody stays on top forever. If you look at any human history you see waves of 'progress' and waves of, well, something else. All depends on your viewpoint.
Another way to look at the Industrial Age is the historically rapid (and now I'm switching to a geologic time frame) destruction / rearrangement of the entire planet's environment. Maybe that will come crashing down on us, maybe we will figure out how to sustain a couple of billion of Homo industrialis in some sort of long term balance.
Remember, what we call the 'modern world' (rapid innovation, rapid growth of mankind) is only a couple of hundred years old. Just a blink in the eye of time.
The book 1493 covers this nicely.
Food is innovative?
Brother, the last time I was surprised about a bit of food was Tang.
And it wasn't a particularly good surprise.
Keep working on the analogies.
Evacuate cities?
People need to get out of buildings and away from things that can fall on them when there's a major earthquake.
Here most people die when they're crushed under concrete and other building materials (stone, bricks, etc.) in poorly constructed homes.
Something that says an earthquake is imminent would definitely help.
Not so easy. Depends on your building. And the quake. If you are in a quake resistant building, you're better off staying inside and avoiding debris like the 50 stories of glass windows that are about to cascade down on you. If you are in an old masonry building, it might make sense. If you are in a fairly undeveloped area without 50 stories of glass windows, perhaps outside would be good. If you're on the coast, perhaps not.
However, 30 minutes of warning does give you more options to think about. You could determine ahead of time your strategy. You might build an 'earthquake bunker' inside a building. Unfortunately, from TFA, even if this phenomena is true, the current GPS constellation isn't set up to measure this in real time. But since earthquake prediction is one of the Holy Grail's of science, it deserves to be studied some more. Perhaps you could build local electron sensors ... or whatever.
CFC might be a good name for a band. I've heard worse....
If a bunch of people presumably smart enough to run a particle accelerator can't figure out how to recycle CFCs - something every car mechanic on the planet figured out decades ago - you should check your dosimeter reports very carefully.
The other thing to remember about high latitudes is that, in the summer, the sun is up for longer periods of time. Sometimes 24 hrs a day. UV damage is due to total amount of radiation - intensity x time (IIRC)[citation needed]. Of course, reflection off of snow / water / ice increases the intensity dramatically.
However, the limiting factor for suntans in anything but the high arctic is corporal dissolution by mosquitos - the sun doesn't have much of an effect in 15 minutes.
OTOH, you can cruise the Internet in safety and ease using the following combination:
WIndows 98
Safari for Windows
Quicktime for Windows
About the only thing you could do is run iTunes, but you would be safe!
You're correct. As long as the UI designers don't drink the Kool-Aid and go completely one way or the other, I'm OK. But I have close to 100 programs on my two main machines. About 30 of them are used frequently. While it is easy to make 100 unique program names (note to the FOSS community, don't think too hard now, we don't need any more examples like GIMP), it's nearly impossible to have 100 unique 16 x 16 pixel icons. Maybe at 50 pixel square, but then you might as well just print out the label in the system language.
People seem to want symbolic icons that represent the programs they want to run; they don't want to look through a long menu and read a bunch of text.
Really? Seems to be a common theme and maybe I'm just abnormal but I cannot stand interfaces with a dozen geometric shapes with random squiggles and colors that are different from every other interface with a dozen geometric shapes with random squiggles and colors.
Just put the damned labels in whatever language the system detects it's supposed to be in. Leave the squiggles and lines to the finger painting set.
Along these same lines, several additional survival courses are available:
cartoons.
Sign up now, spaces are limited!
Or just buy the book.
The main risk to sitting upright is aortic dissection. Apparently, when the body comes to a rapid stop in a forward-facing upright seated position, your internal organs can shift forward before coming to a stop and cause the aorta to tear enough to cause you to die from uncontrollable internal bleeding -- possibly minutes or hours AFTER you've gotten off the plane and are busy celebrating your survival.
So, you bend forward, the plane decelerates and then YOUR HEAD ASPLODE!
Happy now?
Yes! I would pay extra for an exit row seat and a whoopee slide at the end! Better than first class.
By chance, do you have a newsletter to subscribe to?
Hey! You! Stop that right now! You leave your logic out of this! This is the patent system we're talking about!
Moreover, it's on the Internet. Double patent bonus points!
That's a bit of a false dichotomy that misses the point anyway. Industrial pumps, as you say, are useful in an of themselves even though the vast majority of the planet couldn't tell the difference between a centrifugal and a diaphragm pump. It is not so clear what the economic advantage of space exploration actually is.
There ARE other valid endeavors besides making money. Art, Religion, Philosophy, Science - all those things that actually differentiate us from, say, a Myna bird. Economics, in fact, is really only one aspect of human civilization, albeit a rather important one.
I think, for now, Space exploration falls into that latter set of concepts. At some point, somebody will make money from it - aside from Boeing and Lockeed. But that isn 't the main point.
2001: A Space Odessey came out in 1968 - roughly the same time period as Apollo 11-17 (remember you have to fake them all). It represented the state of the art in special effects. It is no where near as visually arresting as the real on board and on-moon shots. Perhaps in 2011 James Cameron could come close to being visually and physically perfect. In 1968? No way.
Yes, NASA had lots of computers. IBM 360's and 370's with frigging punch cards (I wuz there). The MacPro that I'm typing on now wipes the entire NASA computing system, all eleven buildings, of that period, off the map.
Pics, it happened....