No it isn't. It's just about the most hospitable planet we know of except for Earth. You want inhospitable, see Mercury or Uranus.
To offer a counterpoint to your general pessimism, I'd say that with enough power you can live pretty much anywhere. Want oxygen to breathe? Just crack CO2 from the Martian atmosphere and you can have all the O2 you could want. Want food? Set up shop like the indoor pot growers use and farm your own. Need water? There's tons of it if you just dig in the right place. Or vaporize the Martian soil and extract water. All it takes is power to run the machines (which we can already build easily) and power (in the form of Falcon Heavies) to get everything there.
quality of life was better. Kids actually went outside and played on a regular basis. Physically playing, not 3DS or iPad games... or facebooking each other on the "information superhighway".
They rode bicycles without a helmet -- nanny state hadn't passed mandatory helmet laws for bicycles back then -- and didn't die! And no, 60% of kids weren't obese and didn't have diabetes back then.
that's correct. But the biggest reason prison guards here make $90k AVERAGE plus another $50k in benefits is their union. Believe it or not, the prison guards union is one of the most powerful in the state. For some reason the heavily Democratic state legislature gives them whatever they want.
State records show the average vacation payout for Corrections employees is $25,000. But in 2010, a $97,000-a-year-parole agent received a lump sum of $269,000 for unused leave, a $119,000-a-year administrator got $243,000 and a $70,000-a-year parole agent got $176,000.
well, maybe Craigslist is awesome where you live. But here in Los Angeles, and probably in most of the big cities, Craigslist sucks donkey dick due to spam and scammer posts.
I'm looking at the Los Angeles apartment/housing section now, and it's about 70% spam, 15% scammer (con artist) and 15% legitimate posts.
Now the sections that they require payment to post ads - such as jobs - are fine and spam free. But for much of CL, trying to find something is a royal pain in the ass. Makes you wonder why they don't require at least a small payment for posting an ad. That would end pretty much all spam instantaneously.
Not only is the low barrier to entry for posting an ad (actually there is no barrier) causing a spam-fest, it also has a negative effect on legitimate posts. Since it costs nothing to post an ad, and you can post as many as you want for as long as you want, sellers develop a tendency to price their items ridiculously high in hopes of landing a sucker. The Motorcycle section for instance, is full of guys dreaming... seriously. And they post the same ads again and again (because their overpriced items don't sell).
Example: back in late April, a guy advertised his 2007 VFR800 for $8500. I remember it well because that was one of the models I was searching for. The guy was dreaming, $8500 is well above Blue Book value and a realistic price would be $6500 for a *pristine* bike in excellent condition. Since nobody bought it, he would keep reposting the same ad again and again every few days. Once in a while he would lower the price a bit.
The ad is still there, 2 months later. The price is now $7500. Nobody's bought it yet still.
Back in the days of paid classified ads, this would never happen. Sellers would price their items realistically, since they paid money for the ad and wouldn't want to waste it on a very low percentage gamble.
Another interesting bit is how spamming on CL has become a cottage industry. If you go to Freelancer.com or Elance.com (sites where you can hire programmers from India), you'll see many projects for Craigslist scrapers and auto-posters and so on.
So yeah... CL isn't the wonderful unicorns and flower petals some people think it is. I wish it would die already and something similar (but more sensible) take its place.
Scientology is big on confronting painful memories, instead of repressing them or forgetting about them as advocated in this article. That's what a "clear" is, someone who has confronted all his painful memories ("engrams") and is no longer affected by them.
Problem arises when someone confronts (or "runs") his painful memories, and he doesn't get any better. They have an answer for this too -- they look for an "earlier similar" incident and run that. The theory is that a later incident will lock on top of a similar incident which happened earlier, and the later one will not erase until the earlier one has been confronted.
So what happens is that they end up running whole chains of similar incidents, going back further and further until they find the earliest one. And more often then not, they end up running incidents that happened before the guy was born. (past life incidents)
Now, since there is no such thing as past lives, and modern science has proven that a person's consciousness begins at birth and ends when the brain dies, Scientology and Hubbard have been shown to be a quackery and a sham.
I've always been a moderately conservative/libertarian-leaning dude who supported Republicans in the past because they seemed less loony than the Dems.
No longer. The current crop of Republicans pushing for the Shuttle Contractor Pork Program (a.k.a. SLS) disgust me. They can fuck off and die as far as I'm concerned. Obama is giving SpaceX and other private firms a chance, and whatever faults Obama has, this one action is enough to deserve support.
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter whether the GOP comes into power and wastes X billion dollars on their brand of pork (defense contractors, corporations) or the Dems remain in power and waste Y billion on theirs (welfare, public employee pensions, wall street). But having allowed private space industry to blossom will change the course of history, THAT matters.
None of his other businesses matter very much... sure they're successful and making money, congratulations, but really, if Paypal and Tesla never existed, we'd just be using Google Payments and driving Nissan Leafs, no big deal.
On the other hand, SpaceX is a game-changer and completely different from anything else that came before. They're shaking the space industry to its very foundations and I think if they're successful with the Falcon Heavy, nothing will ever be the same again.
Well of course evolution happens, it's easily observable. And yes, people who refuse to accept this and believe God created the everything simultaneously five thousand years ago are delusional.
However, in the ultimate sense (and I mean really ultimate, as in Budha's "All is illusion") the creationists might have a kernel of truth. What happened before the Big Bang? Modern belief is "nothing" or "no one can know". But according to quantum physics, matter does not exist unless it has been observed... it's all probability waves until observation takes place. If you extend this further, you could argue that before the beginning of the universe, there had to have been an observer who observed the big bang.
Even if zero G is a problem you can build a larger ship and spin it enough to get 1/3 G.
You don't have to build a larger ship. You can just swing a counterweight on a long tether and get centrifugal gravity that way. The counterweight can be the spent 2nd stage from your launch vehicle, or an external pod containing the fuel for your return trip, or drinking water, or... ?
SpaceX is commercializing technology that we've been hammering out since Project Mercury in the late 1950s.
Well if you put it that way, SpaceshipOne is just a bigger version of X-15 from the 1950's also.
You know what it looks like to me? It looks like SpaceX's dotcom billionaire (Elon Musk) put everything he has on the line - his fortune, his time, energy, everything - whereas Virgin Galactic's dotcom billionaire (Paul Allen) put a little bit of a seed money, and that's about it. Burt Rutan retired already, he doesn't seem to be burning the midnight oil either. The whole thing seems to be kind of coasting without a lot of funding or urgency.
so then you will just get sued for failing to keep the car's AV definitions up to date?
That would be Google's job, not yours. And why would the car need AV at all? It's not gonna be running Windows and it will be an embedded system.
Or for rooting your car to get rid of the carrier bloatware (car will still an internet connection, after all... subsidized cars on a two year contract, anyone?) so the turn by turn navigation won't drive you ten miles out of your way in order to pass in front of an olive garden that has a targeted ad pushed to you?
If the system has been perfected, this would not be an issue. There would be no carrier. Why would anyone in their right mind consider relying on internet connection for safety? The car would be completely autonomous with no need for the internet. Maybe a map upgrade once in a while only, which can be done via wifi overnight.
I also ride motorcycles. After reviewing many fatal motorcycle accidents, I"ve come to the conclusion that 99% of them can be avoided by careful riding on the part of the biker... even while sharing the road with brain-dead car drivers.
#1 rule for avoiding fatal accidents is to slow the fuck down while crossing an intersection. In every single fatal accident involving a left-turning car that I've seen, even though technically the car is at fault, the biker was traveling at excessive speed. Most city streets have a speed limit of 35mph. By going 30mph through intersections (only a little bit slower than the posted limit), and by covering the brake lever and being alert for any potential left-turning cars, you can almost completely avoid dying from plowing into a left-turning car. I've crashed into a car at 25mph before and while it was not a pleasant experience, I can't see any possibility of dying from it if wearing a proper helmet. Double so if wearing body armor also.
#2: avoid twisty two-lane canyon roads, and if cannot, go slow and keep to the right side of the lane. Disproportionately large number of accidents happen on these roads. Some because squids think they're Rossi and crash by themselves, and some because of oncoming cars crossing the center line. By simply not going to these type of roads, you reduce your chance of dying by several orders of magnitude.
I personally will be violating this rule because I ride sportbikes, but if you ride Harleys or Goldwings you can do this.
#3 Not only know the proper technique, but drill and practice until it becomes second nature. Mostly I'm talking about knowing how to steer quickly (countersteering is the only possible method) and looking where you want to go, not where you're going to crash. This is common knowledge and many if not most people know this, but it's not second nature!
I've been watching rnickeymouse youtube videos and some of the guys crashing are actually quite good, they're dragging their knees in corners and their head is turned way to the inside, looking at the corner exit (as is proper). However, something unexpected happens, such as rear end sliding or footpeg dragging, and it throws them off. Even after they recover from the little mishap, now their attention is all shot to hell and they target-fixate and run off into the dirt and crash. So even though they *know* about countersteering and looking where you want to go, it hasn't become second nature to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Mars is the definition of an inhospitable world
No it isn't. It's just about the most hospitable planet we know of except for Earth. You want inhospitable, see Mercury or Uranus.
To offer a counterpoint to your general pessimism, I'd say that with enough power you can live pretty much anywhere. Want oxygen to breathe? Just crack CO2 from the Martian atmosphere and you can have all the O2 you could want. Want food? Set up shop like the indoor pot growers use and farm your own. Need water? There's tons of it if you just dig in the right place. Or vaporize the Martian soil and extract water. All it takes is power to run the machines (which we can already build easily) and power (in the form of Falcon Heavies) to get everything there.
Has that method ever worked in the history of mankind?
Yes it has, actually. Many people I know would rob banks if they were sure police wouldn't bother to arrest them.
quality of life was better. Kids actually went outside and played on a regular basis. Physically playing, not 3DS or iPad games... or facebooking each other on the "information superhighway".
They rode bicycles without a helmet -- nanny state hadn't passed mandatory helmet laws for bicycles back then -- and didn't die! And no, 60% of kids weren't obese and didn't have diabetes back then.
Here's an example of the lunacy that is the state of California:
State records show the average vacation payout for Corrections employees is $25,000. But in 2010, a $97,000-a-year-parole agent received a lump sum of $269,000 for unused leave, a $119,000-a-year administrator got $243,000 and a $70,000-a-year parole agent got $176,000.
well, maybe Craigslist is awesome where you live. But here in Los Angeles, and probably in most of the big cities, Craigslist sucks donkey dick due to spam and scammer posts.
I'm looking at the Los Angeles apartment/housing section now, and it's about 70% spam, 15% scammer (con artist) and 15% legitimate posts.
Now the sections that they require payment to post ads - such as jobs - are fine and spam free. But for much of CL, trying to find something is a royal pain in the ass. Makes you wonder why they don't require at least a small payment for posting an ad. That would end pretty much all spam instantaneously.
Not only is the low barrier to entry for posting an ad (actually there is no barrier) causing a spam-fest, it also has a negative effect on legitimate posts. Since it costs nothing to post an ad, and you can post as many as you want for as long as you want, sellers develop a tendency to price their items ridiculously high in hopes of landing a sucker. The Motorcycle section for instance, is full of guys dreaming... seriously. And they post the same ads again and again (because their overpriced items don't sell).
Example: back in late April, a guy advertised his 2007 VFR800 for $8500. I remember it well because that was one of the models I was searching for. The guy was dreaming, $8500 is well above Blue Book value and a realistic price would be $6500 for a *pristine* bike in excellent condition. Since nobody bought it, he would keep reposting the same ad again and again every few days. Once in a while he would lower the price a bit.
The ad is still there, 2 months later. The price is now $7500. Nobody's bought it yet still.
Back in the days of paid classified ads, this would never happen. Sellers would price their items realistically, since they paid money for the ad and wouldn't want to waste it on a very low percentage gamble.
Another interesting bit is how spamming on CL has become a cottage industry. If you go to Freelancer.com or Elance.com (sites where you can hire programmers from India), you'll see many projects for Craigslist scrapers and auto-posters and so on.
So yeah... CL isn't the wonderful unicorns and flower petals some people think it is. I wish it would die already and something similar (but more sensible) take its place.
You know that prison guards in California can make over 100k a year.
And now you know why the fricking looney of a state (which I live in unfortunately) is broke and makes Greece look good.
Scientology is big on confronting painful memories, instead of repressing them or forgetting about them as advocated in this article. That's what a "clear" is, someone who has confronted all his painful memories ("engrams") and is no longer affected by them.
Problem arises when someone confronts (or "runs") his painful memories, and he doesn't get any better. They have an answer for this too -- they look for an "earlier similar" incident and run that. The theory is that a later incident will lock on top of a similar incident which happened earlier, and the later one will not erase until the earlier one has been confronted.
So what happens is that they end up running whole chains of similar incidents, going back further and further until they find the earliest one. And more often then not, they end up running incidents that happened before the guy was born. (past life incidents)
Now, since there is no such thing as past lives, and modern science has proven that a person's consciousness begins at birth and ends when the brain dies, Scientology and Hubbard have been shown to be a quackery and a sham.
I've always been a moderately conservative/libertarian-leaning dude who supported Republicans in the past because they seemed less loony than the Dems.
No longer. The current crop of Republicans pushing for the Shuttle Contractor Pork Program (a.k.a. SLS) disgust me. They can fuck off and die as far as I'm concerned. Obama is giving SpaceX and other private firms a chance, and whatever faults Obama has, this one action is enough to deserve support.
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter whether the GOP comes into power and wastes X billion dollars on their brand of pork (defense contractors, corporations) or the Dems remain in power and waste Y billion on theirs (welfare, public employee pensions, wall street). But having allowed private space industry to blossom will change the course of history, THAT matters.
None of his other businesses matter very much... sure they're successful and making money, congratulations, but really, if Paypal and Tesla never existed, we'd just be using Google Payments and driving Nissan Leafs, no big deal.
On the other hand, SpaceX is a game-changer and completely different from anything else that came before. They're shaking the space industry to its very foundations and I think if they're successful with the Falcon Heavy, nothing will ever be the same again.
China will land a man on the moon first, but SpaceX will win the race to Mars.
What is Assange afraid of?
getting pounded in the ass by Lars and Sven
James Cameron has said he is using for Avatar sequels
what the fuck? He's making sequels? Are you serious?
kill me now. Please
but they did do some cave hentai tentacle drawings
can change them back
release it for public use, put "Beta" in the logo, monitor the complaints.
Well of course evolution happens, it's easily observable. And yes, people who refuse to accept this and believe God created the everything simultaneously five thousand years ago are delusional.
However, in the ultimate sense (and I mean really ultimate, as in Budha's "All is illusion") the creationists might have a kernel of truth. What happened before the Big Bang? Modern belief is "nothing" or "no one can know". But according to quantum physics, matter does not exist unless it has been observed... it's all probability waves until observation takes place. If you extend this further, you could argue that before the beginning of the universe, there had to have been an observer who observed the big bang.
his wife ran away with a php developer circus, and now he hates all php with a passion.
Even if zero G is a problem you can build a larger ship and spin it enough to get 1/3 G.
You don't have to build a larger ship. You can just swing a counterweight on a long tether and get centrifugal gravity that way. The counterweight can be the spent 2nd stage from your launch vehicle, or an external pod containing the fuel for your return trip, or drinking water, or ... ?
SpaceX is commercializing technology that we've been hammering out since Project Mercury in the late 1950s.
Well if you put it that way, SpaceshipOne is just a bigger version of X-15 from the 1950's also.
You know what it looks like to me? It looks like SpaceX's dotcom billionaire (Elon Musk) put everything he has on the line - his fortune, his time, energy, everything - whereas Virgin Galactic's dotcom billionaire (Paul Allen) put a little bit of a seed money, and that's about it. Burt Rutan retired already, he doesn't seem to be burning the midnight oil either. The whole thing seems to be kind of coasting without a lot of funding or urgency.
so you don't have to use the NASA icon for every SpaceX story.... of which there's gonna be many in the future
and kill two birds with one stone
a motorcycle using high beams during daytime is not only not illegal, it's a mandatory requirement in some states.
You didn't read the paragraph which said,
"I personally will be violating this rule because I ride sportbikes, but if you ride Harleys or Goldwings you can do this."
so then you will just get sued for failing to keep the car's AV definitions up to date?
That would be Google's job, not yours. And why would the car need AV at all? It's not gonna be running Windows and it will be an embedded system.
Or for rooting your car to get rid of the carrier bloatware (car will still an internet connection, after all... subsidized cars on a two year contract, anyone?) so the turn by turn navigation won't drive you ten miles out of your way in order to pass in front of an olive garden that has a targeted ad pushed to you?
If the system has been perfected, this would not be an issue. There would be no carrier. Why would anyone in their right mind consider relying on internet connection for safety? The car would be completely autonomous with no need for the internet. Maybe a map upgrade once in a while only, which can be done via wifi overnight.
I also ride motorcycles. After reviewing many fatal motorcycle accidents, I"ve come to the conclusion that 99% of them can be avoided by careful riding on the part of the biker... even while sharing the road with brain-dead car drivers.
#1 rule for avoiding fatal accidents is to slow the fuck down while crossing an intersection. In every single fatal accident involving a left-turning car that I've seen, even though technically the car is at fault, the biker was traveling at excessive speed. Most city streets have a speed limit of 35mph. By going 30mph through intersections (only a little bit slower than the posted limit), and by covering the brake lever and being alert for any potential left-turning cars, you can almost completely avoid dying from plowing into a left-turning car. I've crashed into a car at 25mph before and while it was not a pleasant experience, I can't see any possibility of dying from it if wearing a proper helmet. Double so if wearing body armor also.
#2: avoid twisty two-lane canyon roads, and if cannot, go slow and keep to the right side of the lane. Disproportionately large number of accidents happen on these roads. Some because squids think they're Rossi and crash by themselves, and some because of oncoming cars crossing the center line. By simply not going to these type of roads, you reduce your chance of dying by several orders of magnitude.
I personally will be violating this rule because I ride sportbikes, but if you ride Harleys or Goldwings you can do this.
#3 Not only know the proper technique, but drill and practice until it becomes second nature. Mostly I'm talking about knowing how to steer quickly (countersteering is the only possible method) and looking where you want to go, not where you're going to crash. This is common knowledge and many if not most people know this, but it's not second nature!
I've been watching rnickeymouse youtube videos and some of the guys crashing are actually quite good, they're dragging their knees in corners and their head is turned way to the inside, looking at the corner exit (as is proper). However, something unexpected happens, such as rear end sliding or footpeg dragging, and it throws them off. Even after they recover from the little mishap, now their attention is all shot to hell and they target-fixate and run off into the dirt and crash. So even though they *know* about countersteering and looking where you want to go, it hasn't become second nature to them.
#4 get ABS.