Believing that God exists is a religion. If your God is all fuzzy and distant like Antony Flew's, it's called Deism but it's still religion. Believing that God does not exist is religion. Believing that God's existence is unprovable one way or another is religion.
Religion as a principle has nothing to do with monks, fasting, cathedrals, stained-glass windows or wearing saffron robes. These are all what you might call implementation details. Some forms of religion manifest obviously, some do not.
I post all kinds of incendiary stuff, even in support of unpopular-on-SlashDot ideas like creationism and my karma's been slammed against the stops since the day they put the cap on. There's no point in being careful with your posts.
Considers FleaPlus's UID (this is actually my third ID, I have no idea what happened to the first two). Hmm. "In our day, don'ch'a remember, we had real Karma, not this namby-pamby limited-to-fifty stuff. You could open 'er up and have karma races!" (-:
Given that 44% of the US population do not accept evolution, and that persecution is their lot if they enter most scientific fields, is it any wonder that interest in science is flagging? The US is suffering the same fate as France after the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre and similar religious persecutions. France drove out their best and brightest and fell into a scientific and industrial malaise as a result, now the USA (most Western countries too) is beginning to do the same.
On a more serious note, yes, the rise of the Religious Right presents a steadily increasing problem. Did you know that "religious nuts" are responsible for the separation-of-church-and-state provisions in both the US and Australian Constitutions? A chap by the name of Alonzo T Jones dunnit. The Powers That Were wanted to enact blue laws, so Mr Jones and crew first directed them to a literal reading of Exodus 20, and then when the politicians switched to walling off Saturdays instead of Sundays, convinced them to - if there is such a word - deshrine religious holidays in the law: make sure that none were enforced, all were permitted.
From your tone, you would like to outlaw what you see as religion, which would in reality be outlawing every religion but one: Atheism. Let's put this another way: you would make Atheism the State Religion as the Religious Right would make a concensus "Christianity" the State Religion.
Not only is Atheism a social disaster (France tried it, along with China and the USSR, North Korea and numerous others; go read the dismal record if you want to get depressed), but it's actually being done by stealth all across Western society as we type, using the exact same Constitutional provision intended to prevent it. The Religious Right is both a reaction to this and an excuse for it. If they get their way, we'll be living in a Puritan state, re-living the Dark Ages. If they don't, we'll be reliving Lenin's purges. The end of both their actions or yours will be a disaster, either way.
What we really need is to properly enforce the Constitution. To do this, simply formally recognise Atheism as a religion and enforce the existing no-religious-preferences rules rigorously. That would both starve the Religious Right of fuel by removing an excuse to react, and begin to remove the existing shackles from science. Scientists today are forced to ensure that their work fits within Materialist (Atheist) dogma, or face systematic attack from powerful religious forces. Without that handicap, they'd be free to explore a lot more options.
More along the lines of churning money through Bill's pharma companies while at the same time using the US Trade people to slap down competitors who would have had the medication there years ago otherwise.
And on top of this, the Africans are slowly discovering that the simplest, cheapest and most effective AIDS "drug" is monogamy.
Cave homes have a long history and are still being built. They have good temperature regulation, are quiet, and use up less arable land than a conventional house.
This would give you a "lens" much bigger and clearer than the current one, more suitable for stretching the muscles of the newer generation of imaging devices.
It would also be sensible to spend an extra kg or 2 to put in a turret with several of each kind of imager that they want to use mounted on it. That way, if one breaks or degrades it's not such a showstopper. Something as grossly mechanical as a turret does contain moving parts, but isn't anywhere near as delicate as the instrumentation it carries. Providing it with several independent drives and positioning systems would be relatively trivial.
Two in Earth orbit to provide immediate redundancy and a longer baseline for simultaneous observations (triangulation), then put one in an orbit perpendicular (or nearly so) to the ecliptic (with a planetary slingshot, might even have to send it around Jupiter to get enough delta-vee). This will give #3 a much longer baseline, a unique viewpoint and clearer seeing (less solar system junk between it and targets).
Make them a bit more redundant, too, multiple independently steered comms links, multiple cross-linked power sources, redundant navigation gear, that kind of thing. Repair will not be an option for #3, and even for #1 and #2 bumping up the cost by $200M is a great investment if it doubles the useful life of each 'scope.
I've often wondered about the effect of barrel-bottom-scraping on a lot of these missions. Cassini cost $3G, but what else could they have done given $4G? Added another half-dozen Huygens-sized landers? One for a second site/go at Titan, one each for Iapetus, Rhea, Dione, Encelades, Mimas? Added more propellant for a longer mission, more instruments for a more informative mission?
...rather than the construction. "We built this ourselves, but got Gilette to raise 'er."
Sorry, it's very early AM for me, and my brain's still a bit... random.
You may laugh at Honda, but...
on
Hondas in Space
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· Score: 1
...a FOAF built himself a Lamborghini Countach replica. It was cheaper (even factoring his own time at $80 an hour and swapping the kit from left-hand drive to run on Aussie roads), faster, more stable on the road, safer in an accident, could take a driver up to 15cm taller (an original Lambo maxes out at about 180cm) than the real thing and unlike said real thing you can't make a permanent dent in it with your thumb.
Some of the modern Honda street-legal factory-made sports-cars will also out-accelerate and out-handle most if not all Ferraris. And so will the Subarus. The epithet "rice-burner" isn't what it used to be.
Many, perhaps the majority of our local (Perth, WestOz) wholesalers will sell you a "naked" system for AUD$50-150 apiece less than an XP-burdened system. Many of them have been offering this for over a year.
Forex, one wholesaler is offering 2.4GHz Celery, 256MB, 40GB, CD, Floppy for AUD$399exGST. With XP Home OEM, AUD$514; with XP Pro OEM, AUD$584; with 98SE OEM, AUD$578. Their home page proudly displays the Microsoft logo, too, and until recently had a direct link to their "piracy" (as in, "We're going to copy down all of your sea shanties and not pay you any money for them!") page.
Thanks to the efforts of our local telco mostly-monopoly, it's actually cheaper at the wholesale level to call from overseas, just like from here in Perth it's much cheaper to fly to Bali than Sydney. I once worked for a bloke who would make a call to a Sydney number from his mobile, then hang up. Sydney would recognise the calling number, and pass the information to a site in Japan, which would ring him back. He would then dial the number he really wanted and Japan would connect them. Two calls from Japan were much cheaper than a direct call mobile-to-mobile through a single tower which was more or less in line of sight. Economists have a lot to answer for.
As long as enough white-hats have scanned the code, it doesn't matter how many black-hats look at it. The whole point in Open Source is that it is inherently secure.
The uber-paranoid (and Gentoo users) can read the code of something to check it before compiling their own binaries, the less paranoid can trust their distribution packagers to have done so, or trust the scanning eyes or threat of scanning eyes from an unknown number of "net randoms" to have had the same effect.
Kazaa assure us that their stuff is ridgy-didge, secure and clean but the only way we can know for sure is by using a disassembler (illegal in some places) and a lot of patience.
One method is much easier than the other, and one method has proven to be considerably more effective in practice than the other.
Pile up some popcorn. Maybe half a meter high. Now measure the angle at which the sides naturally fall. Now calculate how large a cone you would need to cover the house (just measure the outside dimensions, presume that the roof is 3.5m up at the wall caps, and multiply). Subtract the volume inside the house. You'll probably need of the order of ten tons of popcorn for a small house, which will most definitely not fit into one cement truck. You might also collapse the house, if this isn't snow or cyclone country where houses are designed for loads like that.
Also, for making the popcorn, can I recommend an oil drum mounted at an angle over a barbecue and slowly, constantly spun? You'd feed the raw corn in through a pipe at the top and you'd have to stop every so often to clean (shovel) out the duds. The easiest way to both mount and spin the drum is to bolt it onto a suitably angled car axle and heat the side of the drum rather than the bottom to protect the bearings. Bolt a pulley to the other end and hook up the motor from a washing machine, suitably geared (well, pullied) down. If you want to get fancy, choose a hollow axle and feed the raw corn in through it.
Slashdot Mirror
...of having a meaningless life if you already have one so confusing and painful that you can't even think. (-:
There is some merit, however, in the breeding licence. Certainly, you've offered a powerful and immediate motivation to pass.
Believing that God exists is a religion. If your God is all fuzzy and distant like Antony Flew's, it's called Deism but it's still religion. Believing that God does not exist is religion. Believing that God's existence is unprovable one way or another is religion.
Religion as a principle has nothing to do with monks, fasting, cathedrals, stained-glass windows or wearing saffron robes. These are all what you might call implementation details. Some forms of religion manifest obviously, some do not.
Clear?
I post all kinds of incendiary stuff, even in support of unpopular-on-SlashDot ideas like creationism and my karma's been slammed against the stops since the day they put the cap on. There's no point in being careful with your posts.
Considers FleaPlus's UID (this is actually my third ID, I have no idea what happened to the first two). Hmm. "In our day, don'ch'a remember, we had real Karma, not this namby-pamby limited-to-fifty stuff. You could open 'er up and have karma races!" (-:
...the longer it will be until Hubble is replaced. And one day, it will fail, so the obvious answer is to shut up and start building the sucker.
Given that 44% of the US population do not accept evolution, and that persecution is their lot if they enter most scientific fields, is it any wonder that interest in science is flagging? The US is suffering the same fate as France after the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre and similar religious persecutions. France drove out their best and brightest and fell into a scientific and industrial malaise as a result, now the USA (most Western countries too) is beginning to do the same.
Here are his instructions to Abram, who was renamed Abraham: "Look attentively, I pray thee, towards the heavens, and count the stars, if thou art able to count them". (-;
On a more serious note, yes, the rise of the Religious Right presents a steadily increasing problem. Did you know that "religious nuts" are responsible for the separation-of-church-and-state provisions in both the US and Australian Constitutions? A chap by the name of Alonzo T Jones dunnit. The Powers That Were wanted to enact blue laws, so Mr Jones and crew first directed them to a literal reading of Exodus 20, and then when the politicians switched to walling off Saturdays instead of Sundays, convinced them to - if there is such a word - deshrine religious holidays in the law: make sure that none were enforced, all were permitted.
From your tone, you would like to outlaw what you see as religion, which would in reality be outlawing every religion but one: Atheism. Let's put this another way: you would make Atheism the State Religion as the Religious Right would make a concensus "Christianity" the State Religion.
Not only is Atheism a social disaster (France tried it, along with China and the USSR, North Korea and numerous others; go read the dismal record if you want to get depressed), but it's actually being done by stealth all across Western society as we type, using the exact same Constitutional provision intended to prevent it. The Religious Right is both a reaction to this and an excuse for it. If they get their way, we'll be living in a Puritan state, re-living the Dark Ages. If they don't, we'll be reliving Lenin's purges. The end of both their actions or yours will be a disaster, either way.
What we really need is to properly enforce the Constitution. To do this, simply formally recognise Atheism as a religion and enforce the existing no-religious-preferences rules rigorously. That would both starve the Religious Right of fuel by removing an excuse to react, and begin to remove the existing shackles from science. Scientists today are forced to ensure that their work fits within Materialist (Atheist) dogma, or face systematic attack from powerful religious forces. Without that handicap, they'd be free to explore a lot more options.
More along the lines of churning money through Bill's pharma companies while at the same time using the US Trade people to slap down competitors who would have had the medication there years ago otherwise.
And on top of this, the Africans are slowly discovering that the simplest, cheapest and most effective AIDS "drug" is monogamy.
Very bad for astronomers. Not to mention having to install MS Media Player XVIII to get the DRM to view the images.
EUR7700 per kg? Or should we use Francs? (-:
You don't get 12t up to a 750km orbit with a bottle rocket.
Cave homes have a long history and are still being built. They have good temperature regulation, are quiet, and use up less arable land than a conventional house.
...but even so, adding launch costs of $150M doesn't upset the applecart.
This would give you a "lens" much bigger and clearer than the current one, more suitable for stretching the muscles of the newer generation of imaging devices.
It would also be sensible to spend an extra kg or 2 to put in a turret with several of each kind of imager that they want to use mounted on it. That way, if one breaks or degrades it's not such a showstopper. Something as grossly mechanical as a turret does contain moving parts, but isn't anywhere near as delicate as the instrumentation it carries. Providing it with several independent drives and positioning systems would be relatively trivial.
Two in Earth orbit to provide immediate redundancy and a longer baseline for simultaneous observations (triangulation), then put one in an orbit perpendicular (or nearly so) to the ecliptic (with a planetary slingshot, might even have to send it around Jupiter to get enough delta-vee). This will give #3 a much longer baseline, a unique viewpoint and clearer seeing (less solar system junk between it and targets).
Make them a bit more redundant, too, multiple independently steered comms links, multiple cross-linked power sources, redundant navigation gear, that kind of thing. Repair will not be an option for #3, and even for #1 and #2 bumping up the cost by $200M is a great investment if it doubles the useful life of each 'scope.
I've often wondered about the effect of barrel-bottom-scraping on a lot of these missions. Cassini cost $3G, but what else could they have done given $4G? Added another half-dozen Huygens-sized landers? One for a second site/go at Titan, one each for Iapetus, Rhea, Dione, Encelades, Mimas? Added more propellant for a longer mission, more instruments for a more informative mission?
- Super hi-rez!
- Candid actors!
- Exciting remote locations!
- New 'live' footage every day!
- All colours, races, ages!
- 'Steerable' option for our platinum members!
- No keywords to trigger the proxy filter at work (.nasa.gov domain)!
Find your higher calling today!"...rather than the construction. "We built this ourselves, but got Gilette to raise 'er."
Sorry, it's very early AM for me, and my brain's still a bit... random.
...a FOAF built himself a Lamborghini Countach replica. It was cheaper (even factoring his own time at $80 an hour and swapping the kit from left-hand drive to run on Aussie roads), faster, more stable on the road, safer in an accident, could take a driver up to 15cm taller (an original Lambo maxes out at about 180cm) than the real thing and unlike said real thing you can't make a permanent dent in it with your thumb.
Some of the modern Honda street-legal factory-made sports-cars will also out-accelerate and out-handle most if not all Ferraris. And so will the Subarus. The epithet "rice-burner" isn't what it used to be.
Many, perhaps the majority of our local (Perth, WestOz) wholesalers will sell you a "naked" system for AUD$50-150 apiece less than an XP-burdened system. Many of them have been offering this for over a year.
Forex, one wholesaler is offering 2.4GHz Celery, 256MB, 40GB, CD, Floppy for AUD$399exGST. With XP Home OEM, AUD$514; with XP Pro OEM, AUD$584; with 98SE OEM, AUD$578. Their home page proudly displays the Microsoft logo, too, and until recently had a direct link to their "piracy" (as in, "We're going to copy down all of your sea shanties and not pay you any money for them!") page.
Typically from Asia: Thailand, India and so on.
Thanks to the efforts of our local telco mostly-monopoly, it's actually cheaper at the wholesale level to call from overseas, just like from here in Perth it's much cheaper to fly to Bali than Sydney. I once worked for a bloke who would make a call to a Sydney number from his mobile, then hang up. Sydney would recognise the calling number, and pass the information to a site in Japan, which would ring him back. He would then dial the number he really wanted and Japan would connect them. Two calls from Japan were much cheaper than a direct call mobile-to-mobile through a single tower which was more or less in line of sight. Economists have a lot to answer for.
As long as enough white-hats have scanned the code, it doesn't matter how many black-hats look at it. The whole point in Open Source is that it is inherently secure.
The uber-paranoid (and Gentoo users) can read the code of something to check it before compiling their own binaries, the less paranoid can trust their distribution packagers to have done so, or trust the scanning eyes or threat of scanning eyes from an unknown number of "net randoms" to have had the same effect.
Kazaa assure us that their stuff is ridgy-didge, secure and clean but the only way we can know for sure is by using a disassembler (illegal in some places) and a lot of patience.
One method is much easier than the other, and one method has proven to be considerably more effective in practice than the other.
...would do anything straightforwardly, if they had a chance to "improve" it?
Kelvinator?
Westinghouse?
FisherAndPaykel?
All of them >= 8 chars, none in the dictionary.
Apparently, gunning down PID#1 is not recommended, can't think why. (-:
Or is it you who's being loud while they chew?
This of course opens another question: can a vegetarian swallow in good conscience?
There hasn't been much discussion of the OP's tagline, no meating of minds, so to speak.
Pile up some popcorn. Maybe half a meter high. Now measure the angle at which the sides naturally fall. Now calculate how large a cone you would need to cover the house (just measure the outside dimensions, presume that the roof is 3.5m up at the wall caps, and multiply). Subtract the volume inside the house. You'll probably need of the order of ten tons of popcorn for a small house, which will most definitely not fit into one cement truck. You might also collapse the house, if this isn't snow or cyclone country where houses are designed for loads like that.
Also, for making the popcorn, can I recommend an oil drum mounted at an angle over a barbecue and slowly, constantly spun? You'd feed the raw corn in through a pipe at the top and you'd have to stop every so often to clean (shovel) out the duds. The easiest way to both mount and spin the drum is to bolt it onto a suitably angled car axle and heat the side of the drum rather than the bottom to protect the bearings. Bolt a pulley to the other end and hook up the motor from a washing machine, suitably geared (well, pullied) down. If you want to get fancy, choose a hollow axle and feed the raw corn in through it.