Imagine that we were talking about gas turbines here. Every new test machine costs ten billion dollars. Lots of people have been able to make a turbine work by spinning it with an electric motor. The believe that in theory it should be possible to get electricity out if enough heat can be generated to make combustion self sustaining.
I think that puts the technology at about the year 1850 for power generation. Making fusion a viable energy source (not a lab experiment) will take fifty years after the experiments have finished.
In the end Heinlein determined that the pot was not worth the stakes.
His characters tended towards individualism. Valentine Michael Smith was the exception. Its interesting that, as you point out, the life of L. Ron Hubbard seemed to follow the plot of Stranger.
to the point of a "Bet between sci-fi authors regarding the invention of a popular religion" I have no evidence.
I am pretty sure I heard about it pre-internet but I can't find the source just now.
But of course you would know this
Hard to say. I was born in 1965. Our houshold had a copy of Stranger as well as all the Heinlein juveniles.
Not being much for groupthink myself I believe that the human tendency to categorise people should be resisted. Heinlein defended the Scientologists in Friday, and made me wonder whether he was still friends with Hubbard in the early 1980s. But his point was just that people should have a right to not be threatened because of their associations with others.
I tangled with the Scientologists once in Melbourne. They were interviewing people in the city centre and taking them off for some sessions in a building nearby. I can see how they recruit people who are prone to suggestion. But I am afraid that the cure would be worse than the disease.
What is it about us what makes us so willing (sometimes longing) to believe the supernatural? Why do we believe fantastic stories told by men while we disbelieve irrefutable facts we hold in our hands? Did society fail these people who become so consumed by their beliefs?
The ability to pass on practices and knowledge from one generation to the next confers survival value. Most of us just take the BS we are taught at face value. A small minority think for themselves and create genuinely new knowledge.
When my son was about two years old we took him to a science museum. There was a school group there at the time in the classic configuration. A circle of children sitting on the floor listening to a teacher. My son seemed to immediately recognise the configuration because he found/made a gap in the circle and joined him. I think that behaviour is built into us, and part of what makes us human. Unfortunately it can make us soak up low quality information.
So the Europeans and the US governments say they are firmly convinced of dangerous anthropogenic global warming but they won't spend 15 Bn over 10 years to speed this up?
Probably because its not going to work. Fusion can only be made to work on a large scale, if at all. Every step along the way will cost the 15 billion you speak of and we are probably 100 years away from commercial production of energy. Wind, tide, photovoltaic and solar thermal power work right now. They can be tested on a small scale for a couple of thousand bucks then scaled up as far as you want in many cases.
Here in Victoria, Australia 90% of road work happens in the last month of the financial year, which is now. I used to work for the state road authority. One year, on the last day of june:
One person I know with obsessive compulsive disorder constantly blamed outside influences for his problems. When I made suggestions he would immediately fire back with reasons why they wouldn't work. Healthy people find ways to cope with their environment.
As for your theory, well, I dunno really. Our low population density tends to give us a slightly different attitude to waste and security issues. It really is possible to walk away from your problems here. Its different from the UK where people are crammed in a lot more and have to live with their mistakes. Also we make our living from mining, basically. We dig stuff up and flog it to the Japanese and Chinese who sell it right back to us with a million percent markup. Eventually the stuff in the ground will dry up and we will have to find an honest way to make a living.
The mobile phone market moves so fast that investment is needed to keep up with the market. Investors want to see a solid return which a totally Free software stack can't provide.
Build a machine to load the batteries. The new pack gets pushed in from the right. This pushes the old pack out the left where a human helper drags it out of the way so the car can drive off. Maybe when the car parks it gets pushed off the ground by pins in a lift mechanism. That fixes the location of the battery bay and enables automatic tyre changing at the same time.
I don't have a problem with acting against individuals who break the law but if we start banning groups because of their beliefs it might be hard to know where to stop.
How about World of Warcraft. Isn't that sort of a cult?
Slashdot Mirror
I have a new bullshit meter. It measures in units of "picosofts".
Hey, I might start using that.
How about making window management not block when a modal dialog is open?
At least someone realized that it was an epicly bad idea before the thing was released into the real world.
Maybe Microsoft are responding to competition for once.
Imagine that we were talking about gas turbines here. Every new test machine costs ten billion dollars. Lots of people have been able to make a turbine work by spinning it with an electric motor. The believe that in theory it should be possible to get electricity out if enough heat can be generated to make combustion self sustaining.
I think that puts the technology at about the year 1850 for power generation. Making fusion a viable energy source (not a lab experiment) will take fifty years after the experiments have finished.
In the end Heinlein determined that the pot was not worth the stakes.
His characters tended towards individualism. Valentine Michael Smith was the exception. Its interesting that, as you point out, the life of L. Ron Hubbard seemed to follow the plot of Stranger.
to the point of a "Bet between sci-fi authors regarding the invention of a popular religion" I have no evidence.
I am pretty sure I heard about it pre-internet but I can't find the source just now.
But of course you would know this
Hard to say. I was born in 1965. Our houshold had a copy of Stranger as well as all the Heinlein juveniles.
Not being much for groupthink myself I believe that the human tendency to categorise people should be resisted. Heinlein defended the Scientologists in Friday, and made me wonder whether he was still friends with Hubbard in the early 1980s. But his point was just that people should have a right to not be threatened because of their associations with others.
I tangled with the Scientologists once in Melbourne. They were interviewing people in the city centre and taking them off for some sessions in a building nearby. I can see how they recruit people who are prone to suggestion. But I am afraid that the cure would be worse than the disease.
What is it about us what makes us so willing (sometimes longing) to believe the supernatural? Why do we believe fantastic stories told by men while we disbelieve irrefutable facts we hold in our hands? Did society fail these people who become so consumed by their beliefs?
The ability to pass on practices and knowledge from one generation to the next confers survival value. Most of us just take the BS we are taught at face value. A small minority think for themselves and create genuinely new knowledge.
When my son was about two years old we took him to a science museum. There was a school group there at the time in the classic configuration. A circle of children sitting on the floor listening to a teacher. My son seemed to immediately recognise the configuration because he found/made a gap in the circle and joined him. I think that behaviour is built into us, and part of what makes us human. Unfortunately it can make us soak up low quality information.
So the Europeans and the US governments say they are firmly convinced of dangerous anthropogenic global warming but they won't spend 15 Bn over 10 years to speed this up?
Probably because its not going to work. Fusion can only be made to work on a large scale, if at all. Every step along the way will cost the 15 billion you speak of and we are probably 100 years away from commercial production of energy. Wind, tide, photovoltaic and solar thermal power work right now. They can be tested on a small scale for a couple of thousand bucks then scaled up as far as you want in many cases.
Reading the post by dgcaste it seems more likely that Scientology attracts people with schizophrenia spectrum personality defects.
See this bit: "our opponents deserve litigation because they intend to suppress us"
I dunno. The word google does vaguely imply searching, looking, grepping. To me anyway.
The site and the code don't even identify the owner. There is no copyright notice. It looks too amateurish to be from either MSFT or Asus.
How sick would a person have to be to be incapable of disloyalty?
That or living much much closer to the equator in which case you may not have ever needed heat...
An understatement if ever there was. Many of the cars I have seen in Malaysia don't even have a a switch for the aircon.
They should have built a second LHC in the southern hemisphere. That way they could operate all year.
OMG the LHC is a Klingon plot to destroy the Earth. I wonder if they tried this on Vulcan...
I'd just love to see Conformity declared a mental illness.
You are absolutely right.
One person I know with obsessive compulsive disorder constantly blamed outside influences for his problems. When I made suggestions he would immediately fire back with reasons why they wouldn't work. Healthy people find ways to cope with their environment.
(I am an Australian).
As for your theory, well, I dunno really. Our low population density tends to give us a slightly different attitude to waste and security issues. It really is possible to walk away from your problems here. Its different from the UK where people are crammed in a lot more and have to live with their mistakes. Also we make our living from mining, basically. We dig stuff up and flog it to the Japanese and Chinese who sell it right back to us with a million percent markup. Eventually the stuff in the ground will dry up and we will have to find an honest way to make a living.
Xenophon used to support the filter but he withdrew support some time ago.
The mobile phone market moves so fast that investment is needed to keep up with the market. Investors want to see a solid return which a totally Free software stack can't provide.
Okay, interesting. That one seems to be a binary release only so I assume it is in the category of non-free and non-portable.
Build a machine to load the batteries. The new pack gets pushed in from the right. This pushes the old pack out the left where a human helper drags it out of the way so the car can drive off. Maybe when the car parks it gets pushed off the ground by pins in a lift mechanism. That fixes the location of the battery bay and enables automatic tyre changing at the same time.
Maybe so you can develop android applications on ubuntu.
I'd rather run Ubuntu on my smart phone.
Yeah we know how well that went.
I don't have a problem with acting against individuals who break the law but if we start banning groups because of their beliefs it might be hard to know where to stop.
How about World of Warcraft. Isn't that sort of a cult?