The whole point of going back this time is to build more permanent structures and figure out how to live there. While pure science is important I'd rather spend the money on better propulsion and environmental systems. I want to see Jupiter! I want to walk on Mars! Who cares if there's habitable planets 100 light years away if we have no way in hell to get there? Let's make space useful so we can help preserve our environment on earth and access the resources of our solar system.
Science is important, but not as important as living and working in space. If the scientific discoveries wait 1 extra year or 100 it makes little difference in the scheme of things. Personally I'd rather increase manned exploration, which will have more immediate benefits.
Regardless of the underlying cause of climate change, we need to focus on treating the symptom by the fastest method. Lowering co2 is important long-term but short term we need to focus on whatever method will reverse the loss of the icecaps. Consider:
- CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas. Water vapor, nitrous oxide, and methane are other greenhouse gasses. We could spend huge money to lower CO2 (which could take 30 years to mature which is more time than we've got) and find out that all the methane and nitrous oxide is still causing too much heat retention - There are many promising technologies for artificially reducing co2 and greenhouse gasses but we are a long way from deploying them. Planting massive forests would also do a good job but it will be 10-20 years before we see the effects. - There's significant evidence (tree ring studies and other sources) to show that the earth goes through heating and cooling trends due to the sun. We are in a heating trend, and we are compounding it with greenhouse gasses.
In other words the only sure-fire way to reverse global warming is to prevent some energy from being absorbed by the atmosphere. There are several ways I can think of to do this:
- prevent light from reaching the earth's atmosphere. This is not as far-fetched as one may think at first. The closer you get to the sun the smaller something has to be to block a larger area on earth. A small satellite close to the sun could cause a full eclipse. Other ways to do this could be to blow up asteroids or comets to create dust clouds, use a strong magnetic field to deflect photons away from the earth. - Artificially increase the earth's albedo, meaning reflect more light away before it can be absorbed and released as infrared (ie heat). Clouds reflect light, some aerosols reflect light (pollution, ironically, is one of the reasons the earth hasn't heated up more because of greenhouse gasses. See Global Dimming), and materials reflect light. Simply covering a large area with tinfoil, or painting everyone's roof white could go a long way toward slowing down climate change. A wide use of solar panels would help. Other ideas are to use lots of large mylar balloons (or millions of small mylar balloons) to reflect light.
My point is that we are focusing on reducing greenhouse gasses too much instead of the real problem. Greenhouse gas reduction is the cure, we need a bandage to keep the patient alive! Who cares what the cause is, or who's to blame? We all are, and nobody is! Let's fix the problem.
I think it's great that there's finally technology that can make use of the vegetable waste we have, instead of throwing it into landfill we can make fuel out of it. Using the waste will require municipal support for vegetable wate recycling but it's worth it.
An interesting idea from MIT is to directly use pollutants at the source while it's in concentration. Atmospheric waste is pumped through cylinders with algae in them. The rich carbon dioxide concentration makes the algea grow like crazy, they produce oxygen in quantity, and then can be squeezed for biodiesel. The rest of the algae can then feed cattle. The co2 never gets to the atmosphere. This works great large-scale at fixed locations but is no good for cars or homes. For that another solution is needed.
We're thinking about atmospheric pollution the wrong way, it's just another form of waste. Our tax money goes to sewage treatement, garbage disposal, and recycling. We know we can't just dump raw sewage into the river or big heaps or trash on the streets because it will cause disease and make our lives hell - we're taught this from an early age. Yet we think nothing of dumping waste into the air, we are finally waking up to the fact that it's bad but we can't do anything about it. It takes a whole infrastructure to dispose of waste effectively and efficiently, one person can't do it alone and we all recognize this.
Carbon waste needs to be handled at the community level the same with all other waste disposal, the difference is that it doesn't have to be directly handled by the community - it can be outsourced. Tax money in Deluth Iowa can fund carbon waste in Botswana and the effect is the same. There's a tremendous growth industry there, but communities must start demanding it as it's not going to come from the central government.
Personally I never thought Enterprise was any good. Maybe the failure of the series will spur paramount to put some effort into making the next one less crap.
I know the aerodynamics, I'm a pilot. What I am saying is that being able to take more passengers on a bigger aircraft is not the answer to the airline's problems, passenger safety, noise pollution, etc. The fact that the plane costs so much in the first place increases the risk for the airlines in that they will have to fill up the airplanes all the time. They can't do that now and it's killing them, this airplane won't help.
It's just going to be a larger cattle-carrier. It'll take even longer to get into and out of, and every time one crashes there will be 800 people dead versus 400 with a 747. virtually every new passenger airpcraft has been touted as "ultra-luxury" but in the end they pack as many seats as humanly possible. Big Friggin Deal! Only Boeing seems to be trying to increase passenger aircraft by increasing the internal air pressure at high altitudes.
This may be a ploy in Microsoft's battle against open-source. Even though this may be a solution in search of a problem, big-corporate types may not realize this and think they're about to get hit with a zillion lawsuits unless they use microsoft.
BGP already has security capability in it with MD5 encryption, but many times that isn't enabled by network admins. Implementing it takes care of using spoofed IP addresses and makes it "a secure protocol". The only relevant point of the article is that there is implicit trust in the internet, there has to be.
Someone can send me incorrect information that causes routing problems no matter whether the protocol is secure or not. You can encrypt, key it, whatever, but the data coming from it has to be correct. There's more chance of a mistake causing routing instability, I can think of more examples of that than the one in the article!
The main difference between the bionic man and the people of the future is that we're likely to be bombarded 24 hours a day by unwanted ads. I wouldn't mind being able to lift 2000 lbs but I'm leery of having an electronic device control what I see and hear.
So African ISPs pay for their own overseas connections, so do Asian ISPs, European ISPs, South American ISPs. It's the cost of doing business. Why should other ISPs pay for somebody's transit links?
Why use an airplane for this sort of job? Why not use a tethered helium balloon instead? Balloons have great lifting capabilities, can go much higher than a conventional airplane, and would be much cheaper to operate. Have a balloon hoist the rocket up to 100K feet and shoot it out from there.
However, look at the study. Basically it says that people who use napster buy more music than people who don't, but that's all it says. It doesn't say anything about causality, meaning it doesn't say whether Napster makes people buy more music or whether Napster users are music lovers who are predisposed to buy more music than the general population. Think about it! If you don't like music that much you aren't going to buy music or listen to Napster, are you?
My point with the solar panels is that you should use every available resource to reduce your load on the power grid. Using solar power will:
a. generate some electricity, not nearly enough, but enough solar panels around will help the situation a lot.
b. Reduce the amount solar energy heating the building or getting reflected back into the atmosphere by converting that photonic energy into electricity. We should be mass-producing solar panels and putting them on top of all building in sunny areas.
It isn't a lack of technology but a lack of regulation that's the problem. Nobody wants to make more efficient equipment of facilities because it's going to hit them in the pocketbook. So why not be smarter about it?
Instead of building a co-lo facility where you couldn't find any skilled labor to run it, why not build one near a source of cool water instead. Then you could exchange the heat into a moving current of a large body of water. The heat you add would be negligible to the environment, and you'd save money. It could also be built near a source of skilled labor. Nuclear power plants already do this.
Some more ideas on better co-lo facilities:
a. Don't build them in hot climates.
b. If you do build them in hot climates you should have to build a large solar panel array on the top of the facility.
c. When it's cold outside, open the windows. Nothing is dumber than having the air conditioning on in the winter! If dust bothers you, suck in outside air and filter it.
d. In hot climates build them underground. Once you get a few feet down the earth's crust is actually pretty cool. Extend large heat sinks into the surrounding terrain to use the earth's natural cooling.
e. the source of the problem is the heat generated by equipment, why not design coller equipment instead? This is possible, there just is a lack of motivation to do it
Unions will develop where there is a need
on
IT Unions?
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· Score: 1
In a new industry, Unions will move in where they are needed to aid the worker. Typically these are lower paid, lower skill workers. This doesn't describe most Technology workers. If you don't like working to fix problems at 3:00am, find a position where you don't have to, you don't need somebody stepping in, taking %20 of your income to get a better position for you
We are not seeing any more routes than we can handle out there. As routing tables have grown, so has the power and memory capacity of the routers. There are also open source route servers like GateD and Zebra which can take the load off the routers as well. Plus, routes are being aggregated more and more.
The human body is most likely the next frontier for computers. Computers that will augment the senses and memory, as well as take over some nervous system functions. Can you say direct brain to brain interface?
I agree with you to a certain point in that we do want to train people. However, without a core of experienced people your apprentices will get no real-world training. I don't insist on certifications or college degrees. Some of the best people I've seen in the past barely graduated high school.
The problem is that when you are starting a new company you need experienced core people who know how it's done. That's the hard people to find. There is mismanagement out there, I've been mismanaged plenty, but I've always gotten fed up with it and gone someplace else.
Let's see, we're a well funded startup with great ideas and great leadership. We're also based in NYC in a nice building. Also, Monster.com doesn't really work for high-level UNIX and Cisco engineers. DICE is a better way to go, and yes, we've tried DICE.
The problem is definitely a shortage of skilled candidates all over the country.
Oh yeah, we like our engineers sober, so we give them soda instead.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole point of going back this time is to build more permanent structures and figure out how to live there. While pure science is important I'd rather spend the money on better propulsion and environmental systems. I want to see Jupiter! I want to walk on Mars! Who cares if there's habitable planets 100 light years away if we have no way in hell to get there? Let's make space useful so we can help preserve our environment on earth and access the resources of our solar system.
Science is important, but not as important as living and working in space. If the scientific discoveries wait 1 extra year or 100 it makes little difference in the scheme of things. Personally I'd rather increase manned exploration, which will have more immediate benefits.
Never gonna grow up
Regardless of the underlying cause of climate change, we need to focus on treating the symptom by the fastest method. Lowering co2 is important long-term but short term we need to focus on whatever method will reverse the loss of the icecaps. Consider:
- CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas. Water vapor, nitrous oxide, and methane are other greenhouse gasses. We could spend huge money to lower CO2 (which could take 30 years to mature which is more time than we've got) and find out that all the methane and nitrous oxide is still causing too much heat retention
- There are many promising technologies for artificially reducing co2 and greenhouse gasses but we are a long way from deploying them. Planting massive forests would also do a good job but it will be 10-20 years before we see the effects.
- There's significant evidence (tree ring studies and other sources) to show that the earth goes through heating and cooling trends due to the sun. We are in a heating trend, and we are compounding it with greenhouse gasses.
In other words the only sure-fire way to reverse global warming is to prevent some energy from being absorbed by the atmosphere. There are several ways I can think of to do this:
- prevent light from reaching the earth's atmosphere. This is not as far-fetched as one may think at first. The closer you get to the sun the smaller something has to be to block a larger area on earth. A small satellite close to the sun could cause a full eclipse. Other ways to do this could be to blow up asteroids or comets to create dust clouds, use a strong magnetic field to deflect photons away from the earth.
- Artificially increase the earth's albedo, meaning reflect more light away before it can be absorbed and released as infrared (ie heat). Clouds reflect light, some aerosols reflect light (pollution, ironically, is one of the reasons the earth hasn't heated up more because of greenhouse gasses. See Global Dimming), and materials reflect light. Simply covering a large area with tinfoil, or painting everyone's roof white could go a long way toward slowing down climate change. A wide use of solar panels would help. Other ideas are to use lots of large mylar balloons (or millions of small mylar balloons) to reflect light.
My point is that we are focusing on reducing greenhouse gasses too much instead of the real problem. Greenhouse gas reduction is the cure, we need a bandage to keep the patient alive! Who cares what the cause is, or who's to blame? We all are, and nobody is! Let's fix the problem.
I think it's great that there's finally technology that can make use of the vegetable waste we have, instead of throwing it into landfill we can make fuel out of it. Using the waste will require municipal support for vegetable wate recycling but it's worth it.
An interesting idea from MIT is to directly use pollutants at the source while it's in concentration. Atmospheric waste is pumped through cylinders with algae in them. The rich carbon dioxide concentration makes the algea grow like crazy, they produce oxygen in quantity, and then can be squeezed for biodiesel. The rest of the algae can then feed cattle. The co2 never gets to the atmosphere. This works great large-scale at fixed locations but is no good for cars or homes. For that another solution is needed.
We're thinking about atmospheric pollution the wrong way, it's just another form of waste. Our tax money goes to sewage treatement, garbage disposal, and recycling. We know we can't just dump raw sewage into the river or big heaps or trash on the streets because it will cause disease and make our lives hell - we're taught this from an early age. Yet we think nothing of dumping waste into the air, we are finally waking up to the fact that it's bad but we can't do anything about it. It takes a whole infrastructure to dispose of waste effectively and efficiently, one person can't do it alone and we all recognize this.
Carbon waste needs to be handled at the community level the same with all other waste disposal, the difference is that it doesn't have to be directly handled by the community - it can be outsourced. Tax money in Deluth Iowa can fund carbon waste in Botswana and the effect is the same. There's a tremendous growth industry there, but communities must start demanding it as it's not going to come from the central government.
Personally I never thought Enterprise was any good. Maybe the failure of the series will spur paramount to put some effort into making the next one less crap.
I know the aerodynamics, I'm a pilot. What I am saying is that being able to take more passengers on a bigger aircraft is not the answer to the airline's problems, passenger safety, noise pollution, etc. The fact that the plane costs so much in the first place increases the risk for the airlines in that they will have to fill up the airplanes all the time. They can't do that now and it's killing them, this airplane won't help.
It's just going to be a larger cattle-carrier. It'll take even longer to get into and out of, and every time one crashes there will be 800 people dead versus 400 with a 747. virtually every new passenger airpcraft has been touted as "ultra-luxury" but in the end they pack as many seats as humanly possible. Big Friggin Deal! Only Boeing seems to be trying to increase passenger aircraft by increasing the internal air pressure at high altitudes.
This may be a ploy in Microsoft's battle against open-source. Even though this may be a solution in search of a problem, big-corporate types may not realize this and think they're about to get hit with a zillion lawsuits unless they use microsoft.
BGP already has security capability in it with MD5 encryption, but many times that isn't enabled by network admins. Implementing it takes care of using spoofed IP addresses and makes it "a secure protocol". The only relevant point of the article is that there is implicit trust in the internet, there has to be.
Someone can send me incorrect information that causes routing problems no matter whether the protocol is secure or not. You can encrypt, key it, whatever, but the data coming from it has to be correct. There's more chance of a mistake causing routing instability, I can think of more examples of that than the one in the article!
The main difference between the bionic man and the people of the future is that we're likely to be bombarded 24 hours a day by unwanted ads. I wouldn't mind being able to lift 2000 lbs but I'm leery of having an electronic device control what I see and hear.
You may want to amend that to Jim Henson Studios. I'm not sure he'd approve of this deal anyway.
So African ISPs pay for their own overseas connections, so do Asian ISPs, European ISPs, South American ISPs. It's the cost of doing business. Why should other ISPs pay for somebody's transit links?
Attack of the clones... he probably saw a training video for the Mormon church. It's an understandable mistake.
Why use an airplane for this sort of job? Why not use a tethered helium balloon instead? Balloons have great lifting capabilities, can go much higher than a conventional airplane, and would be much cheaper to operate. Have a balloon hoist the rocket up to 100K feet and shoot it out from there.
For the record, I am a Napster user and love it.
However, look at the study. Basically it says that people who use napster buy more music than people who don't, but that's all it says. It doesn't say anything about causality, meaning it doesn't say whether Napster makes people buy more music or whether Napster users are music lovers who are predisposed to buy more music than the general population. Think about it! If you don't like music that much you aren't going to buy music or listen to Napster, are you?
My point with the solar panels is that you should use every available resource to reduce your load on the power grid. Using solar power will:
a. generate some electricity, not nearly enough, but enough solar panels around will help the situation a lot.
b. Reduce the amount solar energy heating the building or getting reflected back into the atmosphere by converting that photonic energy into electricity. We should be mass-producing solar panels and putting them on top of all building in sunny areas.
It isn't a lack of technology but a lack of regulation that's the problem. Nobody wants to make more efficient equipment of facilities because it's going to hit them in the pocketbook. So why not be smarter about it?
Instead of building a co-lo facility where you couldn't find any skilled labor to run it, why not build one near a source of cool water instead. Then you could exchange the heat into a moving current of a large body of water. The heat you add would be negligible to the environment, and you'd save money. It could also be built near a source of skilled labor. Nuclear power plants already do this.
Some more ideas on better co-lo facilities:
a. Don't build them in hot climates.
b. If you do build them in hot climates you should have to build a large solar panel array on the top of the facility.
c. When it's cold outside, open the windows. Nothing is dumber than having the air conditioning on in the winter! If dust bothers you, suck in outside air and filter it.
d. In hot climates build them underground. Once you get a few feet down the earth's crust is actually pretty cool. Extend large heat sinks into the surrounding terrain to use the earth's natural cooling.
e. the source of the problem is the heat generated by equipment, why not design coller equipment instead? This is possible, there just is a lack of motivation to do it
In a new industry, Unions will move in where they are needed to aid the worker. Typically these are lower paid, lower skill workers. This doesn't describe most Technology workers. If you don't like working to fix problems at 3:00am, find a position where you don't have to, you don't need somebody stepping in, taking %20 of your income to get a better position for you
-egg and Bacon
-Egg, sausage and bacon
-Egg and Spam
-Spam, egg, sausage and spam
-Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Baked Beans, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam
We are not seeing any more routes than we can handle out there. As routing tables have grown, so has the power and memory capacity of the routers. There are also open source route servers like GateD and Zebra which can take the load off the routers as well. Plus, routes are being aggregated more and more.
A. Don't leave your laptops lying around where the cleaning person can get them. B. Try a lock on the door. C. Try a safe
The human body is most likely the next frontier for computers. Computers that will augment the senses and memory, as well as take over some nervous system functions. Can you say direct brain to brain interface?
I agree with you to a certain point in that we do want to train people. However, without a core of experienced people your apprentices will get no real-world training. I don't insist on certifications or college degrees. Some of the best people I've seen in the past barely graduated high school.
The problem is that when you are starting a new company you need experienced core people who know how it's done. That's the hard people to find. There is mismanagement out there, I've been mismanaged plenty, but I've always gotten fed up with it and gone someplace else.
Let's see, we're a well funded startup with great ideas and great leadership. We're also based in NYC in a nice building. Also, Monster.com doesn't really work for high-level UNIX and Cisco engineers. DICE is a better way to go, and yes, we've tried DICE.
The problem is definitely a shortage of skilled candidates all over the country.
Oh yeah, we like our engineers sober, so we give them soda instead.