Yeah, but that's Crichton's audience, I read Prey, it was ok, I handed it over to a plumber so he could read it, and then my uncle the painter who liked Andromeda Strain and Jur-ass-has-had-it Park. Why?, Cause after they read it their eyes don't glaze over when you talk about nano-shit, they ask questions and when they do that they stop being luddites.
Don't underestimate the value of an author like Crichton just because you're not his target audience. The best thing he could do is write the very stories he does, that raise awareness to an audience that would not know what nano engineering or 'grey goo' is, the very people who need to grasp the concepts, so support at a political level continues and the real science can occur.
Get over it people, thats why they call it fiction - crappy writing style or not, scientific accuracy is not criteria. Crichton is not Clarke, Asimov, Bear, Brin or any of the other 'giants' of Sci-Fi but he still has a place and an audience to people who would never get past the first or second chapter Greg Bear's 'Eon' or 'Forge of God'.
Most of the times kids will see worse on television then ever in a game. I am sure seeing reporters on the 8 o'clock news getting their head blown off is much tamer then a video game.
It begs the question, Is the brain in a different "mode" when playing a video game than when watching a movie? Like comparing witnessing to participating?
If a movie is good I get wound up and involved, when I play a video game it's like an outlet for aggression - for me anyway.
I watched a documentary about the brain recently, and this trait was addressed specifically - and you can change it. The aggressive reaction was a trait left of from post puberty teenage brain development while the amygdala was learning coordination of the varying areas of the brain.
According to the documentary you can condition yourself out of the behaviour by developing a reaction that takes you out of that moment, e.g when you were playing warcraft by programming your self to say "one moment" calmly as a reaction to any interruption.
Adrenaline may have been flowing but you should still be able to exert control, and thats a lot better than yelling at your wife dood.
Also, did you ever notice that in the US its ok for prime time tv to show someone's bullet riddled corpse, but its not ok for two people to be shown having sex, or even showing nudity?
Interesting, if showing heaps of violence on TV leads to violent brains and people carrying guns and shooting people, I wonder if the reverse is true? hmmmm, If showing heaps of sex and nudity on TV leads to sexual brains more interested in sex than violence? hmmmm.., sounds pretty good to me.
It's kinda like getting confirmation of the DUH moment.
While you might not care for Murdoch's brand of politics or his business style, it is difficult to argue that he has done anything but increase diversity in the media marketplace.
Perhaps for now, but like his now-dead compatriate, Kerry Packer, his unwavering faith in himself is a curse to you all because of his own mortality. Let me explain...
Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch were players in the Australian media market place, they each staked their claim but from different parts of the market - Murdoch from News Papers and Packer from Television stations, both were conservatives. They both expanded until they were eyeing each other off, Murdoch looking over some local television stations and Packer eyeing off some print news assets, there was only one thing stopping them, Cross media ownership laws. Now they had a common cause.
In Australia they lobbied tirelessly to have cross media ownership laws broken down until finally our previous conservative government gave in and relaxed the laws, the buying frenzy began even before the laws were passed, and as we regress to what is happening in Canada something happened that gave us a glimpse of post-media-mogul media.
Murdoch finally realised that the Australian market was just too small for him to play in anymore, and expanded into America, grooming his son for taking over the growing media empire.
Packer expanded into Internet gambling assets, bought into Fox and kept an iron fist on the control of the Nine network in Australia. When he was passing the media empire over to his son, you could see the glint of pride in his eyes. Then he died, James sold the nine network to concentrate on greener pastures (I guess he wasn't interested in his fathers passion), leaving nine as a shell of what it once was pwned by some faceless investment con-glomerate.
The legacy of both these men are the media cross ownership laws as a template for the world. The moral of the story is once the man with the passion dies you are left with the banal framework of the control he established and you might not like who/what takes over that control - that is what happened here.
Any process we industrialise will produce toxic externalities, the question is, how manageable are the externalities compared to other energy sources? For Coal it's Carbon Dioxide, for nuclear is radioactive by-products etc. One thing missing from that list was...
d) It addresses base load power requirements.
The nuclear and coal industry have long argued they are the sole companies able to address this market requirement. So in that respect Geo Thermal would be a direct competitor to those big industries especially to other big industries that are big electricity users - like steel smelters, and metal refineries. Geo Thermal would be placed ideally to capitalise on those markets, especially as carbon trading takes hold as a supplier of cheap bulk electricity.
As for the waste heat issue, water desalination and purification would be a good use in more arid regions.
That's true, but in the same vein Oil companies are mostly drilling oil for energy, they can still drill for oil to make plastics and the other products made from oil.
I guess when carbon trading is finally established it will be less profitable for 1 PetaJoule of energy from oil than if they sell 1 PetaJoule of energy from Geothermal Energy, after all it's an energy transaction - so to speak.
I hope it works, we could use all the geothermal power we can get.
It's the banal manager type that facilitate the western worlds slide into despotism or some other kind of ism by being complicit in this sort of crime. This is an externality of our information industry, the same way a chemical company pumps toxic waste into a river, or the energy industry pumps carbon into the atmosphere.
It's the reason our entire western society strives for mediocrity nowadays, being mediocre is the new black and striving to be the same as everyone else is the only way to get noticed, as soon as you put a video up of someone getting tortured you stand out to much and should be mashed back into the crowd.
You know, you're free to agree with what you are being told, and in that way the failure of the left and right is utterly complete in demonstrating that the corruption results in the same shit, just a different bucket.
It's the kind of violence we need to be aware of as this was committed against an INDIVIDUAL by a STATE, not staged or contrived, not harrasment, but evidence.
We should witness it so we are informed, but they want us in our dumb, complacent, apathetic state of comforted.
that manned spaceflight is going to take a VERY long break. Perhaps a century or more.
Let's hope not, because whether you realise it or not you are talking about the survival of our civilisation as we know it, and it won't be some benign "oh well we didn't make it into space, so lets just do something else". I hope you're wrong, so so wrong, because at best you are talking about a decline into orwellian nightmare and at worst a die-off of people NEVER seen in human history and thats presuming we don't get slugged by a space rock in the meantime. You won't be talking a century you are talking a millennia for us to recover from it - we need the resources, we need the redundancy, we need the energy, we need them now because our planet cannot sustain the human race in this mode of expansion - it's time to secure our survival.
Want a taste of the reality your gripping there? If we don't build a space infrastructure Darwin's "survival of the fittest" will apply to our civilisation, which appears to be rotting from the inside out, because the idealogical structures we had put in place would not let us adapt. We will rapidly reach the capability of this planet to sustain us and the change to our civilisation will make it unrecognisable, then the decline will begin.
If you are right future archeologist's will discover our remains and mourn the potential of what could have been, the remains of our architecture and industry. They will wonder why we didn't choose to go into space whilst we had the opportunity and resources, instead of crawling on our knees. Humanity will be reduced to a shadow of what it is today, and perhaps when there is a only a few hundred million of us left and we forget who we were - they eventually will go to the moon themselves, set themselves up and they will find us there to, and maybe on mars and they will expend a great deal of energy trying to understand WHY didn't we choose to advance beyond what were are today, why we chose to suffer.
How interested do you think people will be in creating a Space infrastructure when our survival depends on it? Yes, I mean WHEN. The key issue at hand is whether we still have the capabilities and resources to make those choices when the realisation becomes reality.
They are the very frightening facts that you overlook - we either get of this rock or we die.
Whilst I agree with most of what you say, will power is the biggest factor, not technology. The US went from practically a standing start to moon landings in roughly a decade. The key factor was the will to do something "not because it's easy, but because it's hard". This should have been a capability kept once earned and now the US has to earn it again because there has been no motivating factor to keep the US going back to the moon. Now were are being told it will take us another decade and a half to get back to the moon, what I read (between the lines) is the capability to go to the moon has been squandered.
For example what if congress had mandated that manned moon missions HAD to occur at a minimum of once every two years to maintain the capability to goto the moon. How many moon missions would have occurred by now, another 15 perhaps? What about the scope of a moon base, we certainly would have had a lot more support data than we have now, and potentially a rudimentary moonbase. I believe we went to the moon, but I have no tangible proof, and after a while cynicism leads to questioning what you believe. Not maintaining a moon landing capability gives scope for the form of thinking that gives the moon landing conspiracy theorists the leeway to maintain their argument. So worse still, the will power was squandered.
Instead we are talking about what is realistically a standing start to a Mars landing "sometime in the future", without the drive of a population to do it. Joe Public thinks "We've been to the moon - whats the big deal - why should I care", Bush is not JFK and I cannot see him inspiring the American populace to Mars, he has already defined his legacy.
Yes, you could build a space elevator. If you had those cool materials and a cheaper launch system.
We have plenty of heavy launch capability to build a space elevator, but you have nailed it with material sciences, we NEED that problem solved. It is the final link for us to establish a space infrastructure. The will to do this will usher in a new phase of terrestrial engineering and the beginning of the space age, indeed the beginning of Human history. It is the only practical means of achieving our long term space aspirations, the only practical means of utilising enough mass to build the ships required to traverse to Mars. The only practical means of "landing" on Mars and indeed returning, any thought of doing all this with chemical rockets to escape planetary gravity wells is a fantasy. A space elevator is the only means of developing many of the nuclear rocket concepts safely outside of our gravity well that frankly should be on ships that are to large to practically land in our gravity well.
So unless there are aliens that have secretly made an agreement with our governments that we will never leave Low Earth Orbit, the only explaination I have for our hesitation to become a space faring race is WILLPOWER. Is there anyone here who honestly believes that we cannot overcome the material sciences problem of making CNT's in enough length to build a space elevator if we focused our resources on doing it, "Not because it's easy, but because it's hard".
It's the 21st Century - why are we still talking about this instead of doing it.
All tell-tale signs that we have commenced the 21st Century however for many in the third world those technologies are still not accessible. Their way of living still hasn't changed much and if anything has gotten worse due to the first worlds voracious use of resources required to support our "advancement".
The issue of course is resources that can only be accessed from space to support "advancement" that brings us out of mediocrity, because for all of those excellent advancements you cite, we still live at home. We haven't tested ourselves in a way that guarantees humanities survival and allows access to technology for all, as the space age is yet to begin.
As a species, and more so those participating in this very conversation, live at the peak of human society as you rightly pointed out, but the realisation that we live in a time where most of the world lives with crippling poverty that denies them the benefits of such technology makes our technological advancements seem incredibly vapid and self serving, because of our inability to share them in a sustainable way.
Our affluence should make us more generous and the realisation of our mediocrity (and these pictures remind us all of our mediocrity) should drive us to take those steps into space that makes those visions of a space based humanity look quaint instead of a wonderous possibility of what we still haven't achieved. If we are complacent then I'm afraid our future won't look as optimistic as it did in the 1950's and 60's and indeed we are in a modern dark ages, because all this technology is great but without a space age the question for us is whether this is the beginning or the end of human history.
Mr Anonymous Coward really standing up and making yourself counted eh. It takes courage to face reality.
DU is not a nuclear weapon any more than the guts of an X-ray machine
Only barely, and X-Ray machines don't spread radioactive isotopes when used,
The Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities of the United Nations Human Rights Commission,[15] passed two motions[16] the first in 1996[17] and the second in 1997.[18] They listed weapons of mass destruction, or weapons with indiscriminate effect, or of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering and urged all states to curb the production and the spread of such weapons. Included in the list was weaponry containing depleted uranium.
Depleted Uranium weapons are Weapons of mass destruction, it only exists because enriched Uranium exists. It's a nuclear weapon with a gradual deployment whose pyrophoric properties spread radioactivity into a food chain, accommodating bio-accumulation in the local population, a cancer war for decades.
If we use nuclear weapons, you'll know it.
How clever, I guess it's just convenient that D.U allows you to use up nuclear material without everyone knowing it then isn't it.
Actually, quite the opposite, it dramatically decreases the chances that bombs will be used.
Oh really? How so? Seems to be bombs want to be used as much as information wants to be free. And with the scope of an accidental launch triggering AT BEST a limited exchange (perhaps between pakistan and india) how is the M.A.D scenario even relevant anymore. Your saying with Pakistan now suspended from the commonwealth and under martial law, there is no scope for a terrorist organisation to seize control of ONE silo and see what they can do, what if they pitched one at the states and russia? Do you think that four minutes would be enough time for "dubya" to decide "oh - it's not really russia attacking us" at four o'clock in the morning - puuuuleeezz.
The U.S is the only country to use a nuclear weapon in war, and in fact, invented the nuclear bomb. You lost the right to use the "defending yourself" argument a long time ago and what freedom are you defending? the right to choose pepsi over coke? Your "freedom" was lost once your countries participation in elections fell below 50% (and is now lower than 20%), your freedom is a manipulated at best and an illusion at worst.
And the nerve of you to say "A county is threatening us with nuclear weapons" when right at this moment you are conducting an in-theatre nuclear war for the second time in Iraq with Depleted Uranium (D.U) munitions that make your own soldiers mysteriously sick. Clinton had the opportunity to disarm Russia in the '90's, all he had to do was put Yeltzin's drunken hand on a peice of paper.
I don't blame the U.S citizen's because they have been manipulated by government and corporations that are no longer under the control of the people. If you want to defend freedom why don't you start encouraging people to vote. The scope for a weapons grade accident is something we have already been too close to. You may be willing to stake everyones children's life on that, but I'm not!
Both space programs had some fantastic accomplishments (Russian space endurance and American science and moon landings), and any criticism you can level at one you can level at the other. The reality is that America's space program was born of Industrial might and the Russiam program was born from political might. Where the Russian program was pragmatic the American program was ambitious, I admire both.
Both programs were driven from the passion of just two men - Korolov and Von Braun - championing similar goals, to advance humanity into the space age. The reality is the space age was born out of the paranoia of the other capability to inflict harm. Our risk mitigated litigious society doesn't do things "because they are hard" to achieve any more, instead our mantra is "better, faster, cheaper". Both programs are now the victims of pork barreling and both suffer from a critical "lack of relevance" to Joe Public.
More than likely the Baikonur cosmodrome will be opened up to more commercial use as it gets more expensive to maintain, so additional launch facilities have got to be a good thing. The shuttle downtime did demonstrate that collaboration works when it comes to utilising redundancy in a space program, which is a positive outcome for the ISS. I just wonder how much could be achieved if co-operation and standardisation across space programs were the norm and not just an exception.
I might, I was recalling from memory. The point I'm making is that our ancestors had considerably more physical activity than we do to get their food. From memory, Aboriginal people were found to do 20 hours of physical activity a week (whose more civilised eh?) thats roughly a three hour workout a day, how much physical activity do we do now to get our food?
The research of Western A Price is good work. He examined the diets of tribal peoples and orangutans (our digestive systems are very close to orangutans) and found that fruit (most), meat (some) and fat (when available) were the primary components of their diet - fat being the most valuable food. Carbohydrates and sugar are not very far away from each other, I think that carbs are at least as addictive as sugar and should be managed in the diet - eaten early in the day and rarely at night. Unprocessed Carbs with complex molecular structures (Complex Carbohydrates) is what was originally being recommended back in the day as being healthy, like oats, brown breads, you need some carbs and the more complex the slower the energy release in the body. As for sugars, unprocessed raw sugars and brown sugar won't leech as much nutrients out of the body as white sugar. Just steer clear of processed foods as much as possible and you will be ok.
Certain fats change chemically when heated, some fat is bad and some is lethal. A few fats and oils are excellent, i.e Olive oil. In our society fat is easy to aquire and in nature it isn't. High fat and protein diets are DANGEROUS for extended periods of time without an equivalent amount of fruit goodness and fibre. Fruit is the human beings best friend making up the majority of the orangutan and native human diet, want to loose fat - eat more fruit, sendentary lifestyle - eat LOTS more fruit.
But you have to excercise. Our bodies were designed to walk a minimum of 35-40 Kilometres a day - there is no other way to explain our legs in an evolutionary sense (our ancestors had to hunt and gather food) and this guy trys to wriggle out of that. I excercise a lot - train a number of different martial arts, played soccer, run and swim not to stay thin (I'm 96 kilos or 211 pounds and pretty fit) but to keep that black dog (depression) at bay and be a better coder. For some, food is a replacement for something else in their lives and they will eat lots of processed foods, not excercise and wonder how they got fat. I think obesity and depression are linked as I have seen many examples of one leading to the other, so (for me at least) the consequences of not excercising are too serious to risk.
The bottom line is it's too easy for us to get a hold of processed foods in our diets, The key to knowing is by asking yourself "How processed is this food?". I suspect the industrialisation of our food processes will be held up as the cause of Obesity and Depression sometime in the future when we stop looking at food as just broad set of components and look at it as a whole. Mass production of food stuffs have served to lower the nutritional content of all foods, and how do we know that the cruel treatment of food animals isn't introducing toxins and poisons into our diets that make us sick? Taubs is just swinging the pendulum the other way, not explaining that there are several pendulums to co-ordinate.
Now, I'm going to polish off this rockmelon before I go for a swim.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if the same thing is happening in the South Pole?
Don't underestimate the value of an author like Crichton just because you're not his target audience. The best thing he could do is write the very stories he does, that raise awareness to an audience that would not know what nano engineering or 'grey goo' is, the very people who need to grasp the concepts, so support at a political level continues and the real science can occur.
Get over it people, thats why they call it fiction - crappy writing style or not, scientific accuracy is not criteria. Crichton is not Clarke, Asimov, Bear, Brin or any of the other 'giants' of Sci-Fi but he still has a place and an audience to people who would never get past the first or second chapter Greg Bear's 'Eon' or 'Forge of God'.
If a movie is good I get wound up and involved, when I play a video game it's like an outlet for aggression - for me anyway.
It's like billions of minds suddenly went, "DUUUUUH" and then were suddenly silenced.
Mod parent up.
According to the documentary you can condition yourself out of the behaviour by developing a reaction that takes you out of that moment, e.g when you were playing warcraft by programming your self to say "one moment" calmly as a reaction to any interruption.
Adrenaline may have been flowing but you should still be able to exert control, and thats a lot better than yelling at your wife dood.
It's kinda like getting confirmation of the DUH moment.
Just sayin, ya know.
Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch were players in the Australian media market place, they each staked their claim but from different parts of the market - Murdoch from News Papers and Packer from Television stations, both were conservatives. They both expanded until they were eyeing each other off, Murdoch looking over some local television stations and Packer eyeing off some print news assets, there was only one thing stopping them, Cross media ownership laws. Now they had a common cause.
In Australia they lobbied tirelessly to have cross media ownership laws broken down until finally our previous conservative government gave in and relaxed the laws, the buying frenzy began even before the laws were passed, and as we regress to what is happening in Canada something happened that gave us a glimpse of post-media-mogul media.
Murdoch finally realised that the Australian market was just too small for him to play in anymore, and expanded into America, grooming his son for taking over the growing media empire.
Packer expanded into Internet gambling assets, bought into Fox and kept an iron fist on the control of the Nine network in Australia. When he was passing the media empire over to his son, you could see the glint of pride in his eyes. Then he died, James sold the nine network to concentrate on greener pastures (I guess he wasn't interested in his fathers passion), leaving nine as a shell of what it once was pwned by some faceless investment con-glomerate.
The legacy of both these men are the media cross ownership laws as a template for the world. The moral of the story is once the man with the passion dies you are left with the banal framework of the control he established and you might not like who/what takes over that control - that is what happened here.
One thing is for sure, that Yellowstone is an old geyser!
Just a thought.
d) It addresses base load power requirements.
The nuclear and coal industry have long argued they are the sole companies able to address this market requirement. So in that respect Geo Thermal would be a direct competitor to those big industries especially to other big industries that are big electricity users - like steel smelters, and metal refineries. Geo Thermal would be placed ideally to capitalise on those markets, especially as carbon trading takes hold as a supplier of cheap bulk electricity.
As for the waste heat issue, water desalination and purification would be a good use in more arid regions.
I guess when carbon trading is finally established it will be less profitable for 1 PetaJoule of energy from oil than if they sell 1 PetaJoule of energy from Geothermal Energy, after all it's an energy transaction - so to speak.
I hope it works, we could use all the geothermal power we can get.
maybe activision can learn something from blizzard. blizzards games seem to work pretty good under wine on linux
It's the reason our entire western society strives for mediocrity nowadays, being mediocre is the new black and striving to be the same as everyone else is the only way to get noticed, as soon as you put a video up of someone getting tortured you stand out to much and should be mashed back into the crowd.
You know, you're free to agree with what you are being told, and in that way the failure of the left and right is utterly complete in demonstrating that the corruption results in the same shit, just a different bucket.
It's the kind of violence we need to be aware of as this was committed against an INDIVIDUAL by a STATE, not staged or contrived, not harrasment, but evidence.
We should witness it so we are informed, but they want us in our dumb, complacent, apathetic state of comforted.
And if they put the video back now they can drool over all the advertising revenue from a slashdotting.
Oh, I forgot...
Want a taste of the reality your gripping there? If we don't build a space infrastructure Darwin's "survival of the fittest" will apply to our civilisation, which appears to be rotting from the inside out, because the idealogical structures we had put in place would not let us adapt. We will rapidly reach the capability of this planet to sustain us and the change to our civilisation will make it unrecognisable, then the decline will begin.
If you are right future archeologist's will discover our remains and mourn the potential of what could have been, the remains of our architecture and industry. They will wonder why we didn't choose to go into space whilst we had the opportunity and resources, instead of crawling on our knees. Humanity will be reduced to a shadow of what it is today, and perhaps when there is a only a few hundred million of us left and we forget who we were - they eventually will go to the moon themselves, set themselves up and they will find us there to, and maybe on mars and they will expend a great deal of energy trying to understand WHY didn't we choose to advance beyond what were are today, why we chose to suffer.
How interested do you think people will be in creating a Space infrastructure when our survival depends on it? Yes, I mean WHEN. The key issue at hand is whether we still have the capabilities and resources to make those choices when the realisation becomes reality.
They are the very frightening facts that you overlook - we either get of this rock or we die.
For example what if congress had mandated that manned moon missions HAD to occur at a minimum of once every two years to maintain the capability to goto the moon. How many moon missions would have occurred by now, another 15 perhaps? What about the scope of a moon base, we certainly would have had a lot more support data than we have now, and potentially a rudimentary moonbase. I believe we went to the moon, but I have no tangible proof, and after a while cynicism leads to questioning what you believe. Not maintaining a moon landing capability gives scope for the form of thinking that gives the moon landing conspiracy theorists the leeway to maintain their argument. So worse still, the will power was squandered.
Instead we are talking about what is realistically a standing start to a Mars landing "sometime in the future", without the drive of a population to do it. Joe Public thinks "We've been to the moon - whats the big deal - why should I care", Bush is not JFK and I cannot see him inspiring the American populace to Mars, he has already defined his legacy.
We have plenty of heavy launch capability to build a space elevator, but you have nailed it with material sciences, we NEED that problem solved. It is the final link for us to establish a space infrastructure. The will to do this will usher in a new phase of terrestrial engineering and the beginning of the space age, indeed the beginning of Human history. It is the only practical means of achieving our long term space aspirations, the only practical means of utilising enough mass to build the ships required to traverse to Mars. The only practical means of "landing" on Mars and indeed returning, any thought of doing all this with chemical rockets to escape planetary gravity wells is a fantasy. A space elevator is the only means of developing many of the nuclear rocket concepts safely outside of our gravity well that frankly should be on ships that are to large to practically land in our gravity well.So unless there are aliens that have secretly made an agreement with our governments that we will never leave Low Earth Orbit, the only explaination I have for our hesitation to become a space faring race is WILLPOWER. Is there anyone here who honestly believes that we cannot overcome the material sciences problem of making CNT's in enough length to build a space elevator if we focused our resources on doing it, "Not because it's easy, but because it's hard".
It's the 21st Century - why are we still talking about this instead of doing it.
The issue of course is resources that can only be accessed from space to support "advancement" that brings us out of mediocrity, because for all of those excellent advancements you cite, we still live at home. We haven't tested ourselves in a way that guarantees humanities survival and allows access to technology for all, as the space age is yet to begin.
As a species, and more so those participating in this very conversation, live at the peak of human society as you rightly pointed out, but the realisation that we live in a time where most of the world lives with crippling poverty that denies them the benefits of such technology makes our technological advancements seem incredibly vapid and self serving, because of our inability to share them in a sustainable way.
Our affluence should make us more generous and the realisation of our mediocrity (and these pictures remind us all of our mediocrity) should drive us to take those steps into space that makes those visions of a space based humanity look quaint instead of a wonderous possibility of what we still haven't achieved. If we are complacent then I'm afraid our future won't look as optimistic as it did in the 1950's and 60's and indeed we are in a modern dark ages, because all this technology is great but without a space age the question for us is whether this is the beginning or the end of human history.
The U.S is the only country to use a nuclear weapon in war, and in fact, invented the nuclear bomb. You lost the right to use the "defending yourself" argument a long time ago and what freedom are you defending? the right to choose pepsi over coke? Your "freedom" was lost once your countries participation in elections fell below 50% (and is now lower than 20%), your freedom is a manipulated at best and an illusion at worst.
And the nerve of you to say "A county is threatening us with nuclear weapons" when right at this moment you are conducting an in-theatre nuclear war for the second time in Iraq with Depleted Uranium (D.U) munitions that make your own soldiers mysteriously sick. Clinton had the opportunity to disarm Russia in the '90's, all he had to do was put Yeltzin's drunken hand on a peice of paper.
I don't blame the U.S citizen's because they have been manipulated by government and corporations that are no longer under the control of the people. If you want to defend freedom why don't you start encouraging people to vote. The scope for a weapons grade accident is something we have already been too close to. You may be willing to stake everyones children's life on that, but I'm not!
Both programs were driven from the passion of just two men - Korolov and Von Braun - championing similar goals, to advance humanity into the space age. The reality is the space age was born out of the paranoia of the other capability to inflict harm. Our risk mitigated litigious society doesn't do things "because they are hard" to achieve any more, instead our mantra is "better, faster, cheaper". Both programs are now the victims of pork barreling and both suffer from a critical "lack of relevance" to Joe Public.
More than likely the Baikonur cosmodrome will be opened up to more commercial use as it gets more expensive to maintain, so additional launch facilities have got to be a good thing. The shuttle downtime did demonstrate that collaboration works when it comes to utilising redundancy in a space program, which is a positive outcome for the ISS. I just wonder how much could be achieved if co-operation and standardisation across space programs were the norm and not just an exception.
umm - In Soviet Russia, slashdot slashdots slashdot!
Personally, I welcome our "In Soviet Russia" slashdotting overlords!
All this talk of food is making me hungry.
Just sayin.
Certain fats change chemically when heated, some fat is bad and some is lethal. A few fats and oils are excellent, i.e Olive oil. In our society fat is easy to aquire and in nature it isn't. High fat and protein diets are DANGEROUS for extended periods of time without an equivalent amount of fruit goodness and fibre. Fruit is the human beings best friend making up the majority of the orangutan and native human diet, want to loose fat - eat more fruit, sendentary lifestyle - eat LOTS more fruit.
But you have to excercise. Our bodies were designed to walk a minimum of 35-40 Kilometres a day - there is no other way to explain our legs in an evolutionary sense (our ancestors had to hunt and gather food) and this guy trys to wriggle out of that. I excercise a lot - train a number of different martial arts, played soccer, run and swim not to stay thin (I'm 96 kilos or 211 pounds and pretty fit) but to keep that black dog (depression) at bay and be a better coder. For some, food is a replacement for something else in their lives and they will eat lots of processed foods, not excercise and wonder how they got fat. I think obesity and depression are linked as I have seen many examples of one leading to the other, so (for me at least) the consequences of not excercising are too serious to risk.
The bottom line is it's too easy for us to get a hold of processed foods in our diets, The key to knowing is by asking yourself "How processed is this food?". I suspect the industrialisation of our food processes will be held up as the cause of Obesity and Depression sometime in the future when we stop looking at food as just broad set of components and look at it as a whole. Mass production of food stuffs have served to lower the nutritional content of all foods, and how do we know that the cruel treatment of food animals isn't introducing toxins and poisons into our diets that make us sick? Taubs is just swinging the pendulum the other way, not explaining that there are several pendulums to co-ordinate.
Now, I'm going to polish off this rockmelon before I go for a swim.