I'm a professional tax preparer and special enrollment exam passer.
That is not at all clear. What we know is that you're an AC posting without the slightest bit of attribution, and as such, your words are worth nothing at all, and your claimed skills and attributes might as well be sanitation engineer.
Being able to recall managers is about democratising the workplace.
No. It isn't. In the normal course of a capitalist business: Person A starts a business, hires person B to manage, and persons C through Z are hired to work at the manager's behest. This entire structure is the creation of person A, using person A's resources, choices, expertise and expertise hired in to support the operation. Persons C through Z have two reasonable choices: They can reject the job they originally accepted and seek their fortunes elsewhere, perhaps in the role of A in some other business, or B, or back into C/Z. Or, they can work within the system designed by person A and continue to receive the agreed-upon remuneration for performing the tasks they were hired to do.
At no point in that structure is it "democratic" for persons C through Z to "recall" or "select" managers. That role falls naturally to person A. No one else, unless that also, is delegated. If it were delegated to the workers by person A, that would be one thing. When it is taken by the workers, with or without the assistance of a coercive government or paramilitary force, that is ethically and morally bankrupt.
You can't claim to have democracy if the decisions about what's produced are made by people who are outside the democratic process, can you?
You have confused the presumption of parity with freedom, and both of them with democracy.
But we're not talking about controlling people's lives, we're talking about controlling production. I never said anything about controlling people's lives. Where did you get that from?
You want to take from person A - and B - and give to persons C through Z, that which they never owned, that which they were never offered, and more to the point, that which they never earned. You extol the virtues for persons C through Z, while blithely ignoring what you have taken from A and B.
As a general rule, the level of development of capitalism inside a country mirrors the level of attacks on personal freedoms.
No, sorry, I don't buy this at all; nor do I think that workers being able to recall managers has anything to do with freedom. What it has to do with is control. Freedom means less control over other people's lives, not more.
Not arguing, really, but it brings up a question: What nation is the most free nation, then?
Personally, I think the USA was potentially the most free nation, but our government and our courts have never been able to live up to our constitution, and lately, things are getting worse a great deal faster than they were before. I look at our constitution these days and all I see is lost potential.
It says that the laser wavelength is 1 micron (into the infrared). Since glass isn't transparent to that wavelength, you can't reflect it with a mirror.
You need to put the reflective surface on the intercept side of the substrate, glass or otherwise. That way, it is the first thing the laser hits. And of course, you'd better make sure that the efficiency is high enough that the laser doesn't manage to ablate the coating. Maybe coatings aren't that good an idea in the first place. Maybe thick, mirror-polished armor that can direct heat away from the surface really quickly is more what you want. Of course, a little dirt on there, you have a localized heat event, and all of a sudden things aren't as reflective as they should be, and zonk, you have a hole right through the armor.
100 KW for a battlefield laser, eh? Personally, I'm thinking being in front of one of these is a very, very bad idea.
he CAN NOT take away access to files unrelated to his application.
This may seem like a grammar quibble, but it really isn't. You may be thinking about this wrong. The developer can, in fact, take away such access. What you are trying to say, I think, is that you believe the law forbids this. That is not at all the same as "can not." From the point of view of a court, the phrase would be "may not." In other words, it is disallowed; it is not a practical problem to implement, quite the contrary, it is the work of a few minutes, one time, to inflict this on the entire userbase of the version carrying the code.
I think this is a very dangerous step: what if there was a bug that caused the software to delete your files without a pirated serial being entered?
It is a very dangerous step. The risk you mention is there, and so are others. It is a step so insidious, so tempting, that it could change the entire viability of being involved in the software industry, putting one member of the developer/user pair at extreme risk, even to the point of going out of business or losing things dear to them. It is thoughtless, cruel, and unethical, yet the benefit is so tempting that this same member is unlikely to be able to resist it without at least some soul-searching. The idea of getting something so useful accomplished for just a tiny bit of extra work — regardless of the consequences to the other party — is compelling indeed. So profound is the benefit, it may be that the mantle of social stigma one presumes would be associated with this type of activity will be assumed with pride, perhaps even hats and t-shirts bearing some type of cultural touchstone that signifies the wearer supports this will be produced. Yes, it displays a level of disregard that is no less than appalling to those of us who would like to think that the developer/user relationship would be one based on ethics that should be deeply ingrained into both parties; but we know these characteristics are widespread throughout not only one society, but the world's societies. Because we have seen all of this before.
In the software piracy community.
I suspect that developers in general have worked up just about the same regard for software pirates as the software pirates have displayed for them over the last few decades. That would be... none. So if this gets a foothold, it may be that the only thing that can stop it will be legislation. The only salient difference here is that developers tend to be easily found and prosecuted, as compared to pirates, and utterly toothless though congress and the states have proven to be with regard to protecting the developer's interests, I rather doubt they'll allow the developers to act as judge, jury and executioner in the matter of people who appropriate IP from them without providing the asking price.
So this is probably a tempest in a teapot. It'd be nice if it made the pirates think about what they are doing, but if there is one thing I am sure of, it is that software pirates don't do a lot of deep thinking. These are people with the behavior patterns of small, scheming children. Knowing they are unlikely to be caught, nothing remains to hold them back; they are truly ethical simpletons. I am sad to see developers falling to their level. But I am not surprised.
Virtual machines are an option for everyone under any OS
Really? I didn't know you could run OSX on anything but Apple hardware legitimately. Please enlighten me further; this is very interesting news. Also, only the considerably more expensive versions of Vista can be run legitimately in a VM. Makes no never mind to me, because Vista offers me nothing and I have no intention of buying it, but it is an issue for VM users who want to use it.
If it can't run natively, I'm not interested.
That seems... silly. Why would it even be an issue, unless the host OS is notably unstable or vulnerable? It isn't slower, and it is a lot more secure and recoverable, should something untoward occur; I actually prefer VM-ized systems by quite a margin. As well as the convenience of having Linux, OSX, and XP all on one laptop w/o having to do so much as reboot.
Again, YMMV.
Sadly, almost everyone's milage varies in the "they have adware" direction, if they run Windows XP or previous and they aren't one of the computer elite (which a very large proportion on slashdot are, of course.) It's too soon to see how much trouble Vista is in this regard, though those zero-day vulnerabilities were a little bit eye-opening. You'll find out soon enough, I am sure. I won't; XP is my last Windows OS, and I only use it for a couple applications, and only in a VM. Vista seems to me to be a step backwards; slower, more restrictive for media, and carrying what appear to be some compatibility issues, especially with drivers. Plus, if it is as aggravating as XP is with it's little "notices", I don't think I could tolerate it, long term. But like you say, YMMV.:)
Now you know why I don't use Linux or a Mac. Vista runs everything I need, something I can't say for Linux or OS X.
Funny. I run a Mac, and it runs everything I need, including Linux and Windows via Parallels. So I have access to everything, with the Mac OS at the top, safe, secure, easy to use, and beautiful. I can dip into Windows and Linux and the applications that run on them at will, and better yet, Windows is sandboxed, which any sensible person knows it needs to be because it is an adware and viral nightmare. Linux doesn't need a sandbox, particularly, but it doesn't hurt it in any way to be in one, either.
So unless your use for PC's is about high performance 3D (think games, mostly), the Mac is the most sensible and broadly powerful way to go. No way around it. And if Parallels comes through on the promise to get high performance 3D acceleration working in virtualization, there won't be any reasons left.:)
By the way; I sell Windows graphics software, but personally, I only run said software on my Mac. Why shiver in the rain when you can relax in a hot-tub?
Well, my apologies, then. It seemed to me all along that what I wrote, and how I wrote it, were quite obvious. Apparently not to you. However, I believe I have explained this sufficiently, without having to modify what I wrote, so you should be with the program now.
My presumption that you were trolling didn't come from your inability to understand what I wrote, though; it came from this statement: "So you're saying Xenu visited Earth and uplifted us?"... which I considered (and still consider) to be troll-like, having never mentioned any such thing. Perhaps ideas about Xenu are central to your thought-processes; they aren't to mine.
Life that spreads beats out life that doesn't spread. So all life that survives has a drive to spread.
That is far too simplistic. On the one hand, you're talking about competing for resources from a common repository of same. On the other, you're saying that said competition is built into every life form in such a way that, even though intelligent, they cannot modify or abdicate the drive. Humans already show that such abdication is possible, and common. Firemen save people at the cost of their own lives. This neither propagates their line nor extends their life; yet the urge to live is strong and built-in. A more advanced race can no doubt easily defeat such abstracts as "gee, it'd be nice to own more territory that we have to cross light years to get to, and then perhaps fight for." If it likes. So while I agree such a scenario is possible, I don't agree that it is inevitable.
Presuming that a really technologically advanced race couldn't take a solar system apart & put it back together however they like is naive.
On the contrary; such capabilities have not been demonstrated outside of science fiction (of which I am a huge fan, and work with professionally) and therefore it is naive to assume that they exist until (a) they are demonstrated by someone else, or (b) we work out how to do it ourselves.
Presuming that a race that has had advanced technology for 1000 years would be recognizable, and could fall back into some prehistoric state, is naive.
Well, you're saying two things. Recognizable is not something I am presuming. In fact, I specifically said that many possibilities include the very idea that we're simply not recognizing them, and they are already here. The other, that a race of some arbitrary advancement could fall back into some prehistoric state, is a presumption that I take from our own very close brush with this via the cold war. We were on many days just seconds from destroying our entire technological base, running head-on into huge obstacles in the form of disease, starvation, desperate competition for scarce resources, radiation, extreme weather... the more technical we become, the further back a fall like that would likely take us, at least the way it seems to me. One simple example is that should such a thing happen to us today, virtually no one has the skills needed to survive. Computer skills would be worthless; computers would no longer function. Shopping is out of the question. Heat won't come from utility companies, nor will power. Medicine, a high technology undertaking if there ever was one, would fall back to the bare minimums of "keep warm, elevate feet, wash hands." Most people would die under such a change in conditions. So I reject your assertion that such a fall is unlikely or preventable. I think the higher you go, the harder you'll fall.
Most humans in 200 years will probably not be recognizable as humans, and may well not be recognizable as discrete beings
Perhaps this is the case. So?
Matter converts to energy at a pretty incredible rate, and there's no reason to believe we won't be able to convert all mass we come across into smart mass that supports our purposes.
Actually, there are plenty of reasons to so believe, not the least of which is science doesn't support such an idea. There are hints, but we have no tools that can do the kinds of manipulations you are positing. It is a lovely idea, but so far, it is restricted to Star Trek's matter duplication and food creation props. In other words, science fiction again.
That is ignoring the obvious fact that a race that survives 1000 years of advanced technology won't just be able to do anything we can imagine;
It is not at all obvious that they will be able to do "anything we can imagine." It is perhaps
No, I agree, it takes more if you do that, no question about it. I didn't say exactly what I intended to say in that part, and you're quite right to call me on it it as written.
The thing is, if you go to the moon and build an infrastructure that eliminates the earth/fuel part of the equation, you win in the long run, instead of the short run, because you won't be doing that - you'll have propulsion where the energy is produced on the moon, not on earth, and you will only be dealing with lifting from a 1/6th gravity well. Ergo, we're better off going to the moon and building that infrastructure.
Okay, perhaps I'm missing something, but in order to launch from the Moon to Mars, you need to get fuel to the Moon first
One time, yes you do. But you also need to do that for a shot straight from earth. So that's pretty much a wash, agreed? The problem comes from multiple moon ->mars shots.
You can't make fuel on the Moon, after all. There's nothing to make it from.
Certainly you can, and yes there is. Think about the basics. What is a space drive, generally speaking? It is a device that expels [something] in the opposite direction from that which you desire to go. And how do we get some of the highest exhaust velocities we've ever attained? Ion drives. Electricity. Ion drives expel stuff [any stuff that will hold a charge] using electricity. And is there electricity on the moon? Think solar panels, and the answer, of course, is yes. Right now, Ion drives are limited in thrust, but they are *very* efficient. That's one useful approach, and there's nothing to say we won't improve them hugely. They're really excellent space drives because they can keep adding thrust on a continuous basis; they use less reaction mass because they can attain such a high exhaust velocity. They're low, constant thrust.
But wait... How do you get anything off the surface with a low thrust engine? You need more power than an ion drive, right? Yep. Can you do it electrically? Sure. You can use a linear accelerator. Again, purely electrical technology, and you can fling things at astounding velocities. The longer the accelerator, the more human-freindly the acceleration will be. Short tracks require high G's, and we hate that. Anyway, again, it's down to electricity and nothing else. No need to lift anything out of the earth's gravity well, once the system is running. We're doing better and better at capacitive storage, and batteries will soon fall to ultracaps, or at least, that's how it looks today. Solar panels are getting less and less expensive, and more and more efficient, and silicon... is there silicon on the moon? Yep. There is.:-)
And landing? Next, there are space elevators. We've got some really tough technical issues trying to build a space elevator on earth. The materials strength to gravity well challenge is just about at the edge of what is possible. But on the moon, this isn't at all the case. 1/6th the gravity means, pretty much anyway, 1/6th the problem. You can bring all manner of cargo up and down at absolute minimum cost and a reasonable constant energy expenditure. After all, space vessels should probably remain in space; it isn't them we want to get from here to there, it is the cargo. Space elevators are also much happier when there is no atmosphere; they just sit there. No blowing around, etc. On Mars, while the gravity is in your favor there, the atmosphere might be a little annoying. Still, it's more doable than it is here on earth.
So, tell me... where is the savings, here?
It's like anything else. You have to spend to build the infrastructure required to get things running on their own, but once that's done, then the returns defray, and eventually eliminate, the original investment. But it doesn't have to be an infinite loop of bringing things from earth to the moon. There are plenty of creative solutions to these problems - I'm not saying they aren't problems - and in the end, there is every reason to think we can pull this off and make it work, and work well.
There are enormous amounts of natural resources out there. We should go get them. We should land and establish bases everywhere we can. We should explore, because knowledge rarely proves useless, and because a lot of us like to explore. The more resources we pull from space, the fewer we'll need to pull from the earth. Delivery of raw materials from space is pretty trivial, basically let gravity do it; the main thing, I would think, is to make them come in gently enough so as not to cook the atmosphere in the process, and avoid scattering them on impact. Water landings and gliding bodies come to mind. But that's not my area of expertise.:)
The moon is out of the way of mars. it would take more fuel to travel to the moon then from the moon to mars as opposed to to making a straight shot to mars.
I don't know where you got your information, but the moon has - at some point in it's orbit - the same relative velocity as the earth with regard to mars. This is unavoidable, as the moon orbits the earth, if you'll recall. Launching at the appropriate time will ensure no loss with regard to the moon's orbit. However, with 1/6th the gravity well, the same amount of energy will result in a higher velocity, or less energy the same, with regard to a trip to mars from there as compared to the earth. It's just math. And of course, there is no air resistance, no weather, and little air traffic to contend with.
How about spending the money learning about earth and settling the Climate change debate rather than wasting trillions of dollars over a pipe dream.
How about not making the terrifically dim assumption that we can only do one of those at a time? Do you fall over when you chew gum? Sheesh.
Why? Colonizing the moon is a drastically different undertaking from colonizing Mars. The moon is essentially a vacuum. It's cold. It has no useful resources to speak of (and no, He3 won't be useful any time soon). 1/6th Earth's gravity. And it's fairly close.
Well, let's see. 1/6th gravity might be nice for some things. It does equate to 1/6th the difficulty in managing heavy objects. Vacuum is, amazingly enough, common for many likely working environments in space. We need practice; better to do it around a developed moonbase with medical facilities, manufacturing and so on than around some asteroid that has a lot of something we want, plus vacuum. It's not necessarily "cold", by the way, it is in vacuum, which is something else entirely. There is plenty of energy falling on its surface from which heat can be gathered. And power. In any case, it isn't like you're going to lie on the surface naked. Another thing is it is closer than anything else, and once we have a base there, going other places is a lot less costly -- launching from a 1/6th gravity well is much less costly than launching from a 1G gravity well. Not just into space in general, but to Mars, to Earth orbit, moon orbit, everywhere. There have been many suggestions about how to mine the moon's resources and get worthwhile products from them. Once there and we get a little practice, I have little doubt there would be more of the same. If materials can be obtained to build spacecraft, for instance, then we're WAY better off with a moonbase. It's a great place for telescopes, too. And RF research. And vacations (I'd love to have a 1/6th G environment to practice martial arts in, or to have sex in, or even to just turn backflips in.) As for creating a self-contained biosphere, you know what they say about necessity being the mother of invention.
Maybe he's talking about the fact that the two-button emulation doesn't emulate all the things you can do, in fact need to do, with two buttons? Yeah, I think that might be exactly what he's talking about, considering the last time that bit me was ten minutes ago.
Cool feature: While sizing an area selection with left button down, pressing the right button releases the area selection's anchor and you can re-position the entire area selection, as drawn. When you release the right button, the anchor locks where you are now. You can now go on repositioning the area selection. Except - not with the Apple trackpad, you can't. As soon as you drop the 2nd finger, it locks, no re-positioning for you. And of course, if you plug in a mouse with 2 buttons, this works fine.
Two buttons are better than one. Period. End of story. Apple is wrong.
So if it wasn't colonized, what are dolphins the remains of?
The subject is Fermi's idea that we cannot have been visited, because otherwise, we would have been colonized. Got that so far? Then, I said: [implicit Fermi's idea...] "Presumes... earth wasn't colonized and dolphins (or something else, maybe cats or fleas) are the remains of it." This suggestion of mine is meant to undermine Fermi's idea.
Do you understand now? Fermi's idea presumed there was no colonization; I am suggesting the possibility there was colonization, and that the dolphins, or some other species, could represent degenerate remains of such an effort.
So you're saying Xenu visited Earth and uplifted us?
I'm not saying anything of the kind. I observe that the organic systems here use DNA; and I was suggesting that if we were visited by someone, and they decided to meddle, DNA is the obvious place to do it. It's simply a suggestion of an abstract idea for the reader's consideration, not an endorsement of some specific superstition.
Look. I'm an iPod owner. I use it often. It is in no way comparable to radio. An iPod carries your stuff, already preselected. The radio offers other stuff, things you would have never thought of. It's not just an issue of commercials; I listen to the radio because I know that I will hear things I would otherwise go unaware of, and that is how I expand my musical collection.
There is no way that an iPod can replace radio. Likewise, there is no way that radio can replace an iPod. They are entirely different beasts. Sometimes there is no substitute for knowing no one is going to throw something in your ear you will hate; sometimes there is no substitute for snooping around and seeing what is new and different.
Having said that, commercial FM has never, at least in any city I have been in (that would be quite a few), come even close to the variety that either XM or Sirius offers. Markets for FM are local, and they can't afford to broadcast hard rock in the middle of a country demographic; likewise, you're not going to hear a lot of bluegrass in the middle of New York or Seattle. Satellite gives you access to what your taste in music is, no matter where you are. FM can't do that; that's why I no longer listen to FM. At all. And yes, there are no commercials, no "farm reports", no loss of music for some lame-ass high-school football game. FM. Yech.
A while ago, I had occasion to drive from Montana to Oregon to pick up some equipment. I listened to satellite radio the whole way. I had very few incidents of lost reception, mainly in deep canyons in Idaho for a few minutes here and there. Not perfect, but still very, very good. I listened to rock most of the time, but late at night, I switched to talk shows, and had 100% fade-free and constant reception for many hundreds of miles. You simply can't tell me that FM (or AM, for talk) can even approach satellite for any useful feature at all. Given that you can afford the gear and the fee, satellite simply cleans the competition's clock. And I use the term "competition" here quite loosely.
Re: Photon gathering (and x-rays, RF, IR, etc.)
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Interstellar Ark
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Do the math. "A few" - say ten or so in the 10-25 kt range, airdropped - is not nearly enough to crumble a system of mountain caves a mere five miles across and half deep. What odds?
I'm talking about dropping them into the cave openings. Not just pounding on the ground above the system. I completely agree otherwise. Massive over-pressure travels along tubes in a fashion very unfavorable to tube dwellers, though, unless you have blast doors in place. Thinking of your average Afghan, I don't think that's likely. And of course, after the over pressure, there will be widespread collapse.
Those soldiers didn't actually get to the mouths of those caves so some form of missile or bomb would have had to be used - and the RNEP only exists in budget appropriation wet dreams.
US fighter-bombers can put air-launched weapons into openings with an accuracy measured in inches, not feet, as long as a straight line exists to the opening from the launch platform. Videos as far back as the 1st gulf war show weapons being dropped down exhaust vents on Iraqi buildings and then detonated at a particular floor. No one need be on the ground for this; typically there is one aircraft serving as a designator with a laser, and another, appropriately downrange for the required glideslope, carrying the weapon(s). GPS controls are similar in capability.
Would you accept the idea that Bush's minders are trying their best not to lose Pakistan to the globalist Islamic movement, for instance? It doesn't matter if the fallout is a real threat or not - the pakis would be shaken by it no end.
No. I think it would directly serve their purposes - that of building an ever-stronger military industrial complex, selling a great deal of fuel - to have Pakistan go completely Muslim and become an enemy of the non-Muslim world. No one here is worried about Pakistan (or India) except programmers and tech support folks. Look at Iraq: Clearly, every day we spend there, we increase the Muslim resentment against us on multiple fronts. We should leave, if that was our concern. But we don't, because our actual concern - not the crap they put out for public consumption, but the actual concern - is providing a funding mechanism for Haliburton and every other downstream company involved in perpetrating the war. It's borrowed money, true enough, but it is still money. Every day we stay there, we spend an amazing amount of money on our own industrial infrastructure and products. This is at the cost of a few young, relatively unskilled men a day; to the administration, this is more than equitable.
Do they believe you? Does their aging, mostly automated, severely underfunded early warning system believe you when you actually do launch, at a target which is actually (literally) next door?
One thing is for certain, and that is, we would launch from a stealth platform because that reduces the risks. Given that, they would know we were going to do it because we tell them, and they would know we had done it because their seismic detectors would say "thump", or, possibly, they wouldn't know at all. They certainly would not see us coming. So no ICBMs, no cruise missiles, no problems.
"They" (or their constituencies) may have morals (far-fetched, I know)
No. They don't. They have zero respect for human life; they've established this beyond any capacity to doubt. They are perfectly willing to kill huge numbers of innocents without targeting a single person in the actual chain of responsibility. These are established facts.
uild a dozen scenarios where a threat is a more valuable political tool than the actual use (including the real-world scenario we call the cold war) but I'm sure you're intelligent enough to make up some of your own. Why you don't is beyond me.
Why _living_things_ need sun, atmosphere or gravity? Why isn't possible for a _living_thing_ to exist without these sun, etc.? Should always everyone depend on these things what we depend o
Certainly. But that's not the point. The point is that Fermi's approach carries these underlying assumptions along without noting that they should affect the argument. A race that doesn't care about the atmosphere is the same, effectively, as one that does, but for whom the atmosphere is ok. Either one can colonize, if that is the issue. But a race that needs a different mix of gases may be entirely disinterested in Earth other than in an academic fashion. That is the point. They may be colonizing like heck, but like us when we encounter an airless asteroid, they're not going to colonize if the conditions aren't right. The presumption that all life is like our life (and thus has our needs) is precisely the thing I was arguing against.
Slashdot Mirror
That is not at all clear. What we know is that you're an AC posting without the slightest bit of attribution, and as such, your words are worth nothing at all, and your claimed skills and attributes might as well be sanitation engineer.
No. It isn't. In the normal course of a capitalist business: Person A starts a business, hires person B to manage, and persons C through Z are hired to work at the manager's behest. This entire structure is the creation of person A, using person A's resources, choices, expertise and expertise hired in to support the operation. Persons C through Z have two reasonable choices: They can reject the job they originally accepted and seek their fortunes elsewhere, perhaps in the role of A in some other business, or B, or back into C/Z. Or, they can work within the system designed by person A and continue to receive the agreed-upon remuneration for performing the tasks they were hired to do.
At no point in that structure is it "democratic" for persons C through Z to "recall" or "select" managers. That role falls naturally to person A. No one else, unless that also, is delegated. If it were delegated to the workers by person A, that would be one thing. When it is taken by the workers, with or without the assistance of a coercive government or paramilitary force, that is ethically and morally bankrupt.
You have confused the presumption of parity with freedom, and both of them with democracy.
You want to take from person A - and B - and give to persons C through Z, that which they never owned, that which they were never offered, and more to the point, that which they never earned. You extol the virtues for persons C through Z, while blithely ignoring what you have taken from A and B.
Note that I didn't say that this would have a drastic negative effect on the software industry, however. Nor is that what I was implying.
No, sorry, I don't buy this at all; nor do I think that workers being able to recall managers has anything to do with freedom. What it has to do with is control. Freedom means less control over other people's lives, not more.
Not arguing, really, but it brings up a question: What nation is the most free nation, then?
Personally, I think the USA was potentially the most free nation, but our government and our courts have never been able to live up to our constitution, and lately, things are getting worse a great deal faster than they were before. I look at our constitution these days and all I see is lost potential.
You need to put the reflective surface on the intercept side of the substrate, glass or otherwise. That way, it is the first thing the laser hits. And of course, you'd better make sure that the efficiency is high enough that the laser doesn't manage to ablate the coating. Maybe coatings aren't that good an idea in the first place. Maybe thick, mirror-polished armor that can direct heat away from the surface really quickly is more what you want. Of course, a little dirt on there, you have a localized heat event, and all of a sudden things aren't as reflective as they should be, and zonk, you have a hole right through the armor.
100 KW for a battlefield laser, eh? Personally, I'm thinking being in front of one of these is a very, very bad idea.
This may seem like a grammar quibble, but it really isn't. You may be thinking about this wrong. The developer can, in fact, take away such access. What you are trying to say, I think, is that you believe the law forbids this. That is not at all the same as "can not." From the point of view of a court, the phrase would be "may not." In other words, it is disallowed; it is not a practical problem to implement, quite the contrary, it is the work of a few minutes, one time, to inflict this on the entire userbase of the version carrying the code.
It is a very dangerous step. The risk you mention is there, and so are others. It is a step so insidious, so tempting, that it could change the entire viability of being involved in the software industry, putting one member of the developer/user pair at extreme risk, even to the point of going out of business or losing things dear to them. It is thoughtless, cruel, and unethical, yet the benefit is so tempting that this same member is unlikely to be able to resist it without at least some soul-searching. The idea of getting something so useful accomplished for just a tiny bit of extra work — regardless of the consequences to the other party — is compelling indeed. So profound is the benefit, it may be that the mantle of social stigma one presumes would be associated with this type of activity will be assumed with pride, perhaps even hats and t-shirts bearing some type of cultural touchstone that signifies the wearer supports this will be produced. Yes, it displays a level of disregard that is no less than appalling to those of us who would like to think that the developer/user relationship would be one based on ethics that should be deeply ingrained into both parties; but we know these characteristics are widespread throughout not only one society, but the world's societies. Because we have seen all of this before.
In the software piracy community.
I suspect that developers in general have worked up just about the same regard for software pirates as the software pirates have displayed for them over the last few decades. That would be... none. So if this gets a foothold, it may be that the only thing that can stop it will be legislation. The only salient difference here is that developers tend to be easily found and prosecuted, as compared to pirates, and utterly toothless though congress and the states have proven to be with regard to protecting the developer's interests, I rather doubt they'll allow the developers to act as judge, jury and executioner in the matter of people who appropriate IP from them without providing the asking price.
So this is probably a tempest in a teapot. It'd be nice if it made the pirates think about what they are doing, but if there is one thing I am sure of, it is that software pirates don't do a lot of deep thinking. These are people with the behavior patterns of small, scheming children. Knowing they are unlikely to be caught, nothing remains to hold them back; they are truly ethical simpletons. I am sad to see developers falling to their level. But I am not surprised.
Really? I didn't know you could run OSX on anything but Apple hardware legitimately. Please enlighten me further; this is very interesting news. Also, only the considerably more expensive versions of Vista can be run legitimately in a VM. Makes no never mind to me, because Vista offers me nothing and I have no intention of buying it, but it is an issue for VM users who want to use it.
That seems... silly. Why would it even be an issue, unless the host OS is notably unstable or vulnerable? It isn't slower, and it is a lot more secure and recoverable, should something untoward occur; I actually prefer VM-ized systems by quite a margin. As well as the convenience of having Linux, OSX, and XP all on one laptop w/o having to do so much as reboot.
Sadly, almost everyone's milage varies in the "they have adware" direction, if they run Windows XP or previous and they aren't one of the computer elite (which a very large proportion on slashdot are, of course.) It's too soon to see how much trouble Vista is in this regard, though those zero-day vulnerabilities were a little bit eye-opening. You'll find out soon enough, I am sure. I won't; XP is my last Windows OS, and I only use it for a couple applications, and only in a VM. Vista seems to me to be a step backwards; slower, more restrictive for media, and carrying what appear to be some compatibility issues, especially with drivers. Plus, if it is as aggravating as XP is with it's little "notices", I don't think I could tolerate it, long term. But like you say, YMMV. :)
Funny. I run a Mac, and it runs everything I need, including Linux and Windows via Parallels. So I have access to everything, with the Mac OS at the top, safe, secure, easy to use, and beautiful. I can dip into Windows and Linux and the applications that run on them at will, and better yet, Windows is sandboxed, which any sensible person knows it needs to be because it is an adware and viral nightmare. Linux doesn't need a sandbox, particularly, but it doesn't hurt it in any way to be in one, either.
So unless your use for PC's is about high performance 3D (think games, mostly), the Mac is the most sensible and broadly powerful way to go. No way around it. And if Parallels comes through on the promise to get high performance 3D acceleration working in virtualization, there won't be any reasons left. :)
By the way; I sell Windows graphics software, but personally, I only run said software on my Mac. Why shiver in the rain when you can relax in a hot-tub?
Well, my apologies, then. It seemed to me all along that what I wrote, and how I wrote it, were quite obvious. Apparently not to you. However, I believe I have explained this sufficiently, without having to modify what I wrote, so you should be with the program now.
My presumption that you were trolling didn't come from your inability to understand what I wrote, though; it came from this statement: "So you're saying Xenu visited Earth and uplifted us?"... which I considered (and still consider) to be troll-like, having never mentioned any such thing. Perhaps ideas about Xenu are central to your thought-processes; they aren't to mine.
That is far too simplistic. On the one hand, you're talking about competing for resources from a common repository of same. On the other, you're saying that said competition is built into every life form in such a way that, even though intelligent, they cannot modify or abdicate the drive. Humans already show that such abdication is possible, and common. Firemen save people at the cost of their own lives. This neither propagates their line nor extends their life; yet the urge to live is strong and built-in. A more advanced race can no doubt easily defeat such abstracts as "gee, it'd be nice to own more territory that we have to cross light years to get to, and then perhaps fight for." If it likes. So while I agree such a scenario is possible, I don't agree that it is inevitable.
On the contrary; such capabilities have not been demonstrated outside of science fiction (of which I am a huge fan, and work with professionally) and therefore it is naive to assume that they exist until (a) they are demonstrated by someone else, or (b) we work out how to do it ourselves.
Well, you're saying two things. Recognizable is not something I am presuming. In fact, I specifically said that many possibilities include the very idea that we're simply not recognizing them, and they are already here. The other, that a race of some arbitrary advancement could fall back into some prehistoric state, is a presumption that I take from our own very close brush with this via the cold war. We were on many days just seconds from destroying our entire technological base, running head-on into huge obstacles in the form of disease, starvation, desperate competition for scarce resources, radiation, extreme weather... the more technical we become, the further back a fall like that would likely take us, at least the way it seems to me. One simple example is that should such a thing happen to us today, virtually no one has the skills needed to survive. Computer skills would be worthless; computers would no longer function. Shopping is out of the question. Heat won't come from utility companies, nor will power. Medicine, a high technology undertaking if there ever was one, would fall back to the bare minimums of "keep warm, elevate feet, wash hands." Most people would die under such a change in conditions. So I reject your assertion that such a fall is unlikely or preventable. I think the higher you go, the harder you'll fall.
Perhaps this is the case. So?
Actually, there are plenty of reasons to so believe, not the least of which is science doesn't support such an idea. There are hints, but we have no tools that can do the kinds of manipulations you are positing. It is a lovely idea, but so far, it is restricted to Star Trek's matter duplication and food creation props. In other words, science fiction again.
It is not at all obvious that they will be able to do "anything we can imagine." It is perhaps
No, I agree, it takes more if you do that, no question about it. I didn't say exactly what I intended to say in that part, and you're quite right to call me on it it as written.
The thing is, if you go to the moon and build an infrastructure that eliminates the earth/fuel part of the equation, you win in the long run, instead of the short run, because you won't be doing that - you'll have propulsion where the energy is produced on the moon, not on earth, and you will only be dealing with lifting from a 1/6th gravity well. Ergo, we're better off going to the moon and building that infrastructure.
One time, yes you do. But you also need to do that for a shot straight from earth. So that's pretty much a wash, agreed? The problem comes from multiple moon ->mars shots.
Certainly you can, and yes there is. Think about the basics. What is a space drive, generally speaking? It is a device that expels [something] in the opposite direction from that which you desire to go. And how do we get some of the highest exhaust velocities we've ever attained? Ion drives. Electricity. Ion drives expel stuff [any stuff that will hold a charge] using electricity. And is there electricity on the moon? Think solar panels, and the answer, of course, is yes. Right now, Ion drives are limited in thrust, but they are *very* efficient. That's one useful approach, and there's nothing to say we won't improve them hugely. They're really excellent space drives because they can keep adding thrust on a continuous basis; they use less reaction mass because they can attain such a high exhaust velocity. They're low, constant thrust.
But wait... How do you get anything off the surface with a low thrust engine? You need more power than an ion drive, right? Yep. Can you do it electrically? Sure. You can use a linear accelerator. Again, purely electrical technology, and you can fling things at astounding velocities. The longer the accelerator, the more human-freindly the acceleration will be. Short tracks require high G's, and we hate that. Anyway, again, it's down to electricity and nothing else. No need to lift anything out of the earth's gravity well, once the system is running. We're doing better and better at capacitive storage, and batteries will soon fall to ultracaps, or at least, that's how it looks today. Solar panels are getting less and less expensive, and more and more efficient, and silicon... is there silicon on the moon? Yep. There is. :-)
And landing? Next, there are space elevators. We've got some really tough technical issues trying to build a space elevator on earth. The materials strength to gravity well challenge is just about at the edge of what is possible. But on the moon, this isn't at all the case. 1/6th the gravity means, pretty much anyway, 1/6th the problem. You can bring all manner of cargo up and down at absolute minimum cost and a reasonable constant energy expenditure. After all, space vessels should probably remain in space; it isn't them we want to get from here to there, it is the cargo. Space elevators are also much happier when there is no atmosphere; they just sit there. No blowing around, etc. On Mars, while the gravity is in your favor there, the atmosphere might be a little annoying. Still, it's more doable than it is here on earth.
It's like anything else. You have to spend to build the infrastructure required to get things running on their own, but once that's done, then the returns defray, and eventually eliminate, the original investment. But it doesn't have to be an infinite loop of bringing things from earth to the moon. There are plenty of creative solutions to these problems - I'm not saying they aren't problems - and in the end, there is every reason to think we can pull this off and make it work, and work well.
There are enormous amounts of natural resources out there. We should go get them. We should land and establish bases everywhere we can. We should explore, because knowledge rarely proves useless, and because a lot of us like to explore. The more resources we pull from space, the fewer we'll need to pull from the earth. Delivery of raw materials from space is pretty trivial, basically let gravity do it; the main thing, I would think, is to make them come in gently enough so as not to cook the atmosphere in the process, and avoid scattering them on impact. Water landings and gliding bodies come to mind. But that's not my area of expertise. :)
I don't know where you got your information, but the moon has - at some point in it's orbit - the same relative velocity as the earth with regard to mars. This is unavoidable, as the moon orbits the earth, if you'll recall. Launching at the appropriate time will ensure no loss with regard to the moon's orbit. However, with 1/6th the gravity well, the same amount of energy will result in a higher velocity, or less energy the same, with regard to a trip to mars from there as compared to the earth. It's just math. And of course, there is no air resistance, no weather, and little air traffic to contend with.
How about not making the terrifically dim assumption that we can only do one of those at a time? Do you fall over when you chew gum? Sheesh.
Well then, the sooner we start, the sooner it will serve. We'd better get after it.
Mod parent up. :)
Well, let's see. 1/6th gravity might be nice for some things. It does equate to 1/6th the difficulty in managing heavy objects. Vacuum is, amazingly enough, common for many likely working environments in space. We need practice; better to do it around a developed moonbase with medical facilities, manufacturing and so on than around some asteroid that has a lot of something we want, plus vacuum. It's not necessarily "cold", by the way, it is in vacuum, which is something else entirely. There is plenty of energy falling on its surface from which heat can be gathered. And power. In any case, it isn't like you're going to lie on the surface naked. Another thing is it is closer than anything else, and once we have a base there, going other places is a lot less costly -- launching from a 1/6th gravity well is much less costly than launching from a 1G gravity well. Not just into space in general, but to Mars, to Earth orbit, moon orbit, everywhere. There have been many suggestions about how to mine the moon's resources and get worthwhile products from them. Once there and we get a little practice, I have little doubt there would be more of the same. If materials can be obtained to build spacecraft, for instance, then we're WAY better off with a moonbase. It's a great place for telescopes, too. And RF research. And vacations (I'd love to have a 1/6th G environment to practice martial arts in, or to have sex in, or even to just turn backflips in.) As for creating a self-contained biosphere, you know what they say about necessity being the mother of invention.
s/b " You can now go on re-sizing or applying the area selection"
[more coffee]!!!
Maybe he's talking about the fact that the two-button emulation doesn't emulate all the things you can do, in fact need to do, with two buttons? Yeah, I think that might be exactly what he's talking about, considering the last time that bit me was ten minutes ago.
Cool feature: While sizing an area selection with left button down, pressing the right button releases the area selection's anchor and you can re-position the entire area selection, as drawn. When you release the right button, the anchor locks where you are now. You can now go on repositioning the area selection. Except - not with the Apple trackpad, you can't. As soon as you drop the 2nd finger, it locks, no re-positioning for you. And of course, if you plug in a mouse with 2 buttons, this works fine.
Two buttons are better than one. Period. End of story. Apple is wrong.
I think he meant the machine costs were bleeding edge. Not the software. I could be wrong. :)
The subject is Fermi's idea that we cannot have been visited, because otherwise, we would have been colonized. Got that so far? Then, I said: [implicit Fermi's idea...] "Presumes... earth wasn't colonized and dolphins (or something else, maybe cats or fleas) are the remains of it." This suggestion of mine is meant to undermine Fermi's idea.
Do you understand now? Fermi's idea presumed there was no colonization; I am suggesting the possibility there was colonization, and that the dolphins, or some other species, could represent degenerate remains of such an effort.
I'm not saying anything of the kind. I observe that the organic systems here use DNA; and I was suggesting that if we were visited by someone, and they decided to meddle, DNA is the obvious place to do it. It's simply a suggestion of an abstract idea for the reader's consideration, not an endorsement of some specific superstition.
I know. IHBT. I answered out of courtesy.
Look. I'm an iPod owner. I use it often. It is in no way comparable to radio. An iPod carries your stuff, already preselected. The radio offers other stuff, things you would have never thought of. It's not just an issue of commercials; I listen to the radio because I know that I will hear things I would otherwise go unaware of, and that is how I expand my musical collection.
There is no way that an iPod can replace radio. Likewise, there is no way that radio can replace an iPod. They are entirely different beasts. Sometimes there is no substitute for knowing no one is going to throw something in your ear you will hate; sometimes there is no substitute for snooping around and seeing what is new and different.
Having said that, commercial FM has never, at least in any city I have been in (that would be quite a few), come even close to the variety that either XM or Sirius offers. Markets for FM are local, and they can't afford to broadcast hard rock in the middle of a country demographic; likewise, you're not going to hear a lot of bluegrass in the middle of New York or Seattle. Satellite gives you access to what your taste in music is, no matter where you are. FM can't do that; that's why I no longer listen to FM. At all. And yes, there are no commercials, no "farm reports", no loss of music for some lame-ass high-school football game. FM. Yech.
A while ago, I had occasion to drive from Montana to Oregon to pick up some equipment. I listened to satellite radio the whole way. I had very few incidents of lost reception, mainly in deep canyons in Idaho for a few minutes here and there. Not perfect, but still very, very good. I listened to rock most of the time, but late at night, I switched to talk shows, and had 100% fade-free and constant reception for many hundreds of miles. You simply can't tell me that FM (or AM, for talk) can even approach satellite for any useful feature at all. Given that you can afford the gear and the fee, satellite simply cleans the competition's clock. And I use the term "competition" here quite loosely.
I'm talking about dropping them into the cave openings. Not just pounding on the ground above the system. I completely agree otherwise. Massive over-pressure travels along tubes in a fashion very unfavorable to tube dwellers, though, unless you have blast doors in place. Thinking of your average Afghan, I don't think that's likely. And of course, after the over pressure, there will be widespread collapse.
US fighter-bombers can put air-launched weapons into openings with an accuracy measured in inches, not feet, as long as a straight line exists to the opening from the launch platform. Videos as far back as the 1st gulf war show weapons being dropped down exhaust vents on Iraqi buildings and then detonated at a particular floor. No one need be on the ground for this; typically there is one aircraft serving as a designator with a laser, and another, appropriately downrange for the required glideslope, carrying the weapon(s). GPS controls are similar in capability.
No. I think it would directly serve their purposes - that of building an ever-stronger military industrial complex, selling a great deal of fuel - to have Pakistan go completely Muslim and become an enemy of the non-Muslim world. No one here is worried about Pakistan (or India) except programmers and tech support folks. Look at Iraq: Clearly, every day we spend there, we increase the Muslim resentment against us on multiple fronts. We should leave, if that was our concern. But we don't, because our actual concern - not the crap they put out for public consumption, but the actual concern - is providing a funding mechanism for Haliburton and every other downstream company involved in perpetrating the war. It's borrowed money, true enough, but it is still money. Every day we stay there, we spend an amazing amount of money on our own industrial infrastructure and products. This is at the cost of a few young, relatively unskilled men a day; to the administration, this is more than equitable.
One thing is for certain, and that is, we would launch from a stealth platform because that reduces the risks. Given that, they would know we were going to do it because we tell them, and they would know we had done it because their seismic detectors would say "thump", or, possibly, they wouldn't know at all. They certainly would not see us coming. So no ICBMs, no cruise missiles, no problems.
No. They don't. They have zero respect for human life; they've established this beyond any capacity to doubt. They are perfectly willing to kill huge numbers of innocents without targeting a single person in the actual chain of responsibility. These are established facts.
Certainly. But that's not the point. The point is that Fermi's approach carries these underlying assumptions along without noting that they should affect the argument. A race that doesn't care about the atmosphere is the same, effectively, as one that does, but for whom the atmosphere is ok. Either one can colonize, if that is the issue. But a race that needs a different mix of gases may be entirely disinterested in Earth other than in an academic fashion. That is the point. They may be colonizing like heck, but like us when we encounter an airless asteroid, they're not going to colonize if the conditions aren't right. The presumption that all life is like our life (and thus has our needs) is precisely the thing I was arguing against.