Eight year round trips to Mars are never going to work. Name me one voyage that lasted longer than even one year without having to dock in some fashion.
We will never be able to fully explore, experiment and gather resources in out solar system if trips between planets take 5+ years. We need to look into saner proplusion systems that seperate the ground to orbit engine from the interplanetary engine. Even sci-fi shows seem to have grasped that fact.
But despite the fact that the show has occasionally floundered a bit, I've generally had the feeling that the show is actually going somewhere, that Ron Moore et. al. are actually interested in telling a story.
Moore openly admits on his blog and on forums that he too is making it up as he goes along. With the way that the Third series was going, and the degenerate travesty that was the Bob Dylan song in the finale, you can tell he's lost his footing. I predict the fourth series will be a hackneyed flop, unworthy of comparision to seasons 1 and 2.
Sorry guys. It may not require tens of millions of dollars to produce gobs and gobs of high quality video entertainment with mass appeal, but it does take more then a couple dudes with a camcorder and six bucks.
Admittedly not a lot more. After all quality improvement is exponentially function of current investment.
Competition and profit are strong motivators for many people.
What competition? The academic publishing sector is undergoing merger after merger. Monopolisation is a fact of life. Prices of papers keep going up an up. Profit is the main motivator here and it is directly opposed to the principles of research; open exchange of ideas.
However, working for a private company does free you from the waste endemic in universities, and provide greater opportunity and increased freedom for many people.
Waste in terms of what? We're talking about access to information here. If a lazy university academic produces a only one publically viewable paper in 10 years, while a private researcher produces 100 private papers in the same time, the lazy academic is still infinitely more productive when it comes to disseminating research.
Privatisation is not all bad.
That's true. Corporate shills for example profit exorbitantly.
As a researcher, I can tell you flat out that the privatisation of information is putting up serious barrier to the work I do. Aside from prohibitively high prices on journal papers, etc, many old papers, experiments and historical documents are under lock and key, with the private companies that hold onto them totally unwilling to go to the (minor) expense of open up their archives. Such papers have effectively dropped off the face of the earth, and when those companies go under or dissolve or simply move headquarters, it's likely that the papers will in truth become lost forever.
Try to find scientific articles or papers before about 1960. It's a nightmare. Aside from paying about $50-60 if you do find anything, finding it will be a challenge. Go back to the 50's and you're in trouble. The 40's is pretty bleak. You can find more papers on ancient Egypt than you can from the 1930's.
It's possible that you can find old articles in Libraries, if you're willing to try about a dozen libraries. But many libraries are "downsizing" their paper collections(for financial reasons brought on by high journal prices). You can try an inter library loan but there are incredibly stringent copyright signoffs for every single item.
Books are not so bad. Libraries usually have good collections, and book publishers don't seem to be as rabidly concerned with copyright as journal publishers. If the material you want is in a book, you're OK. The book can have been published in 1700 and you'll still be able to find a copy relatively easily, and cheaply. Paper's from the 1700's, except seminal ones, probably have all been lost by now.
Private companies cannot be trusted to archive material. I really cannot put it plainer than that. If we place our scientific data, history and writings in the hands of private industry future generations will speak of a "Dark Age" in the 20th century, where apparently a lot was accomplished, but there will simply be no record of it. Our books aren't getting burned, they're getting privatised, a much surer method of destruction.
What if we create a subspecies with limited intellect and self awareness, but capable of simple tasks: dig here, carry this from here to there, turn the red lever sideways, turn the blue lever up and down, etc. What now? What rights do they have? do we allow them to work in mines and nuclear plants? are they disposable? or better yet: are humans (homo sapiens) less disposable?
In the past human societies may not have had the ability to create subspecies genetically, but they did have the ability to declare entire groups of people as a subspecies and treat them accordingly.
Women, Slavs, Africans, Native Americans, subjugated peoples of all kinds have at one time or another been declared a human "subspecies" and have been forced under duress to labour without pay or freedom. It's a common thread throughout history one which we think in our enlightenment will "never happen again", but we are really just fooling ourselves.
If we did manage to create a species that could talk, understand our speech, perform complex chores, (work in nuclear plants!), it would be ridiculous to state that they were entitled to no rights whatsoever. They would clearly be self aware and as intelligent as us. However, people would declare them to be "inferior", and they would become the new slave caste in society. People would justify this with all kinds of pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo, but at the end of the day we'd be no different from the old southern whipmasters going out of their way to justify an unjustifiable act.
Nonsense! All we have to do is put even younger, more cheerful people in those ads and consumers will gurgle happily again. When has sex and delusion never sold a product?
We could wipe out most inherited conditions in 2 or 3 generations. A lot of people think it's too much like engineering a society, but I think it would be a great service to the species.
It will be the death knell of mankind. Seriously.
Humanity is still subject to that powerful force called evolution. There are those who say that genetic selection will help us control our own evolution. No it won't. Evolution is based on natural selection of random mutations. If you start pruning off things you don't like; sickle cell disease, red hair genes, "aspergerish" genes, and promoting the ones you do like; blond hair and blue eyes, no freckles, no appendix, you've stopped the evolution of the human race.
What you're now doing is reducing variation in the human gene pool and artificially promoting gense you think, think will be better for humanity in the long term. Since you don't seem to have a crystal ball to predict the future, I'm going to have to call complete bullshit on your predictions. Evolution works because the random mutations and variations allow species to adapt to the ever changing world. Even if you pick the best the gene pool currently has to offer, that's all you're ever going to get. The best currently on offer, and all the while mother nature will be slowly passing you out.
If fully expect that within 50 years, western nations will implement genetic selection of offspring as standard procedure. I also expect that this will, over time, lead to the inevitable genetic and physical degradation of those same societies. GATTACA won't be filled with ultra fit supermen. It will be filled with sickly and homogeneous subhumans, products of a hundred years of carefully controlled inbreeding.
In short, everyone will look like the british royal family.
Like I was telling my daughter yesterday, the appropriate thing to do when you meet such a person is to drill them in the nose with your knuckles as hard as you can, unless they outweigh you by a significant margin, in which case you should hit them with a chair until they crumple to the ground.
Forget it. The chair would get to within a foot of Bill's nose before being parried by Darth Balmer's lighting counterstrike. Bill would then begin a wide gaped laughing as their pair of you batter each other back and forth across the meeting room to a backdrop of animated powerpoint slides and starfield screensavers.
Two important facts stand against you 1) Balmer is not related to you 2) There are no impossibly deep shafts nearby.
Even if your friends managed to get the firewalls down, how are they going to get all the way into the heart of Redmond campus to save your fallen ass? You gave into your anger. Such is the reward of the dark side.
In many walks a life, there are not an insignificant number of people who are hoplophiliacs. Often they have served in the military or grew up in an enviornment where gun ownership is common and accepted. They've probably handled hundreds of firearms throughout their life. This causes problems where they are asked to make rational decisions about personnel or firearms policy and their kneejerk reaction is that "guns are safe" and "guns don't kill people, people kill people". Instead of thinking, they let their desires dictate their actions.
The term "terroristic threat" has been around a long time, and has nothing to do with "terrorism" or a "terrorist threat", as it is used in the vernacular.
To my knowladge, "terroristic" isn't even a real word, except in the sense that even engrish words that come into common usage do get promoted to the OED or somesuch publication.
Basically, people who use the word "terroristic" sound like an eight year old exclaiming "meanienater" when they're told to go to bed. So I kind of doubt that the term has been around all that long. Under that name at least.
I could be wrong. American is a very strange dialect.
Spammers have already laid.ru low. I know of more than a few small to medium companies that flat out drop emails if there's a.ru _anywhere_ in the email. Not just the from or reply to fields. If there's a http link pointing to a.ru domain, they drop it.
I try to tell them that just dropping "mail.ru" would be a better longterm strategy, but their minds are usually made up. I think this may be some kind of holdover from the cold war.("The Russian's have internets?! Blockade their commie propaganda!")
Anyway, my point is that lack of whois information is the least of.ru's problems right now. Though it boggles me how a TLD trustee can get away with not publishing whois information while still under ICANN's rules.
Or you could just apply a short, preset burn, measure the acceleration and infer the ships current mass from Netwon's first law, plus some calculus. This would entail wasting fuel, but since you're lighter now that shouldn't be so much of a problem.
Not *all* humans are heterosexual men, thankyouverymuch...
This is why I hate public washrooms.
Re:Can't anyone create a GNU version of Mathematic
on
Mathematica 6 Launched
·
· Score: 1
Why can't the FOSS community beat Wolfram at this? Octave, Maxima, Yacas; they all fail miserably in comparison.
As a mathematician, and more to the point an applied mathematician, I can confirm that indeed the FOSS offerings are usually significantly inferior to proprietary solutions.
Maxima, though theoretically powerful, lacks the sane(r) syntax of either Mathematica or Maple. It's also buggier and lacks the sheer breadth of abilities that Mathematica has on hand. I'm not as familiar with Yacas, but if I remember correctly it suffers from much the same flaws. Put simply, there is no open source symbolic language that can realistically compete.
The exception is Octave. Vanilla Octave is only slightly behind Matlab in its capabilities, and indeed performance. However, with the addition of capabilities offered by the Octave-Forge packages, and VTK visualisation via Octaviz(If you can get it to compile), Octave IMHO actually surpasses Matlab in ability.
Octave is an example of how FOSS can do better. The core package can be built on and expanded by others. This has yet to happen for symbolic algebra and calculus packages, probably due to the inherently arcane nature of Maxima and Yacas' syntax. The great FOSS symbolic system has yet to be written, but once it is, I have little doubt that it will be up to and past the standard of Mathematica as time goes by.
Basically, my post is a plea for someone, somewhere to start writing the One True Computer Algebra System form scratch. I'd do it myself, but I'm too busy trying to get my Maxima code to run.
So one of Wiley's most overzealous employee's just happened upon the graph by chance in their free time? Sure it might sound like some kind of conspiracy theory, but you've got to admit that a newly assembled Wiley "copyfight" team trolling for victi^H^H^H^H^Hinfringers is not an order of magnitude more unlikely than a random webclick.
Slashdot Mirror
Eight year round trips to Mars are never going to work. Name me one voyage that lasted longer than even one year without having to dock in some fashion.
We will never be able to fully explore, experiment and gather resources in out solar system if trips between planets take 5+ years. We need to look into saner proplusion systems that seperate the ground to orbit engine from the interplanetary engine. Even sci-fi shows seem to have grasped that fact.
Television.
Moore openly admits on his blog and on forums that he too is making it up as he goes along. With the way that the Third series was going, and the degenerate travesty that was the Bob Dylan song in the finale, you can tell he's lost his footing. I predict the fourth series will be a hackneyed flop, unworthy of comparision to seasons 1 and 2.
Admittedly not a lot more. After all quality improvement is exponentially function of current investment.
What competition? The academic publishing sector is undergoing merger after merger. Monopolisation is a fact of life. Prices of papers keep going up an up. Profit is the main motivator here and it is directly opposed to the principles of research; open exchange of ideas.
Waste in terms of what? We're talking about access to information here. If a lazy university academic produces a only one publically viewable paper in 10 years, while a private researcher produces 100 private papers in the same time, the lazy academic is still infinitely more productive when it comes to disseminating research.
That's true. Corporate shills for example profit exorbitantly.
As a researcher, I can tell you flat out that the privatisation of information is putting up serious barrier to the work I do. Aside from prohibitively high prices on journal papers, etc, many old papers, experiments and historical documents are under lock and key, with the private companies that hold onto them totally unwilling to go to the (minor) expense of open up their archives. Such papers have effectively dropped off the face of the earth, and when those companies go under or dissolve or simply move headquarters, it's likely that the papers will in truth become lost forever.
Try to find scientific articles or papers before about 1960. It's a nightmare. Aside from paying about $50-60 if you do find anything, finding it will be a challenge. Go back to the 50's and you're in trouble. The 40's is pretty bleak. You can find more papers on ancient Egypt than you can from the 1930's.
It's possible that you can find old articles in Libraries, if you're willing to try about a dozen libraries. But many libraries are "downsizing" their paper collections(for financial reasons brought on by high journal prices). You can try an inter library loan but there are incredibly stringent copyright signoffs for every single item.
Books are not so bad. Libraries usually have good collections, and book publishers don't seem to be as rabidly concerned with copyright as journal publishers. If the material you want is in a book, you're OK. The book can have been published in 1700 and you'll still be able to find a copy relatively easily, and cheaply. Paper's from the 1700's, except seminal ones, probably have all been lost by now.
Private companies cannot be trusted to archive material. I really cannot put it plainer than that. If we place our scientific data, history and writings in the hands of private industry future generations will speak of a "Dark Age" in the 20th century, where apparently a lot was accomplished, but there will simply be no record of it. Our books aren't getting burned, they're getting privatised, a much surer method of destruction.
In the past human societies may not have had the ability to create subspecies genetically, but they did have the ability to declare entire groups of people as a subspecies and treat them accordingly.
Women, Slavs, Africans, Native Americans, subjugated peoples of all kinds have at one time or another been declared a human "subspecies" and have been forced under duress to labour without pay or freedom. It's a common thread throughout history one which we think in our enlightenment will "never happen again", but we are really just fooling ourselves.
If we did manage to create a species that could talk, understand our speech, perform complex chores, (work in nuclear plants!), it would be ridiculous to state that they were entitled to no rights whatsoever. They would clearly be self aware and as intelligent as us. However, people would declare them to be "inferior", and they would become the new slave caste in society. People would justify this with all kinds of pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo, but at the end of the day we'd be no different from the old southern whipmasters going out of their way to justify an unjustifiable act.
Nonsense! All we have to do is put even younger, more cheerful people in those ads and consumers will gurgle happily again. When has sex and delusion never sold a product?
Godsdamn Communists!!
In the UK for instance.
It will be the death knell of mankind. Seriously.
Humanity is still subject to that powerful force called evolution. There are those who say that genetic selection will help us control our own evolution. No it won't. Evolution is based on natural selection of random mutations. If you start pruning off things you don't like; sickle cell disease, red hair genes, "aspergerish" genes, and promoting the ones you do like; blond hair and blue eyes, no freckles, no appendix, you've stopped the evolution of the human race.
What you're now doing is reducing variation in the human gene pool and artificially promoting gense you think, think will be better for humanity in the long term. Since you don't seem to have a crystal ball to predict the future, I'm going to have to call complete bullshit on your predictions. Evolution works because the random mutations and variations allow species to adapt to the ever changing world. Even if you pick the best the gene pool currently has to offer, that's all you're ever going to get. The best currently on offer, and all the while mother nature will be slowly passing you out.
If fully expect that within 50 years, western nations will implement genetic selection of offspring as standard procedure. I also expect that this will, over time, lead to the inevitable genetic and physical degradation of those same societies. GATTACA won't be filled with ultra fit supermen. It will be filled with sickly and homogeneous subhumans, products of a hundred years of carefully controlled inbreeding.
In short, everyone will look like the british royal family.
Forget it. The chair would get to within a foot of Bill's nose before being parried by Darth Balmer's lighting counterstrike. Bill would then begin a wide gaped laughing as their pair of you batter each other back and forth across the meeting room to a backdrop of animated powerpoint slides and starfield screensavers.
Two important facts stand against you
1) Balmer is not related to you
2) There are no impossibly deep shafts nearby.
Even if your friends managed to get the firewalls down, how are they going to get all the way into the heart of Redmond campus to save your fallen ass? You gave into your anger. Such is the reward of the dark side.
In many walks a life, there are not an insignificant number of people who are hoplophiliacs. Often they have served in the military or grew up in an enviornment where gun ownership is common and accepted. They've probably handled hundreds of firearms throughout their life. This causes problems where they are asked to make rational decisions about personnel or firearms policy and their kneejerk reaction is that "guns are safe" and "guns don't kill people, people kill people". Instead of thinking, they let their desires dictate their actions.
To my knowladge, "terroristic" isn't even a real word, except in the sense that even engrish words that come into common usage do get promoted to the OED or somesuch publication.
Basically, people who use the word "terroristic" sound like an eight year old exclaiming "meanienater" when they're told to go to bed. So I kind of doubt that the term has been around all that long. Under that name at least.
I could be wrong. American is a very strange dialect.
Just to emphasise that Nesson is a Professor of law, not a laywer, so we don't have a contridiction in terms here.
Too Late!
.... kommissars of the new fascism.
Spammers have already laid .ru low. I know of more than a few small to medium companies that flat out drop emails if there's a .ru _anywhere_ in the email. Not just the from or reply to fields. If there's a http link pointing to a .ru domain, they drop it.
.ru's problems right now. Though it boggles me how a TLD trustee can get away with not publishing whois information while still under ICANN's rules.
I try to tell them that just dropping "mail.ru" would be a better longterm strategy, but their minds are usually made up. I think this may be some kind of holdover from the cold war.("The Russian's have internets?! Blockade their commie propaganda!")
Anyway, my point is that lack of whois information is the least of
Or you could just apply a short, preset burn, measure the acceleration and infer the ships current mass from Netwon's first law, plus some calculus. This would entail wasting fuel, but since you're lighter now that shouldn't be so much of a problem.
Good luck getting into NASA carrying a classical Sunni religious text.
This is why I hate public washrooms.
As a mathematician, and more to the point an applied mathematician, I can confirm that indeed the FOSS offerings are usually significantly inferior to proprietary solutions.
Maxima, though theoretically powerful, lacks the sane(r) syntax of either Mathematica or Maple. It's also buggier and lacks the sheer breadth of abilities that Mathematica has on hand. I'm not as familiar with Yacas, but if I remember correctly it suffers from much the same flaws. Put simply, there is no open source symbolic language that can realistically compete.
The exception is Octave. Vanilla Octave is only slightly behind Matlab in its capabilities, and indeed performance. However, with the addition of capabilities offered by the Octave-Forge packages, and VTK visualisation via Octaviz(If you can get it to compile), Octave IMHO actually surpasses Matlab in ability.
Octave is an example of how FOSS can do better. The core package can be built on and expanded by others. This has yet to happen for symbolic algebra and calculus packages, probably due to the inherently arcane nature of Maxima and Yacas' syntax. The great FOSS symbolic system has yet to be written, but once it is, I have little doubt that it will be up to and past the standard of Mathematica as time goes by.
Basically, my post is a plea for someone, somewhere to start writing the One True Computer Algebra System form scratch. I'd do it myself, but I'm too busy trying to get my Maxima code to run.
So one of Wiley's most overzealous employee's just happened upon the graph by chance in their free time? Sure it might sound like some kind of conspiracy theory, but you've got to admit that a newly assembled Wiley "copyfight" team trolling for victi^H^H^H^H^Hinfringers is not an order of magnitude more unlikely than a random webclick.
If one were so inclined.
They could always advertise Preparation H.