Several people have interpreted my post to mean that I am totally convinced that GM foods are universally safe and desirable. I'm not. For instance, does it really make sense to have plants produce pesticides internally (where the lower levels when compared to application give the chance for insects to develop resistance, and they're continuously present rather than sprayed on and then dissipate before consumption by humans)? Nor am I convinced that farmers are reaping benefits from GM crops - I have a friend who works for a grain growers advocacy group, and her studies suggested that most of the benefits of proposed GM crops would go to the biotech companies rather than farmers themselves.
However, none of the above alters the fact that some green groups use propaganda rather than facts about GM crops and other issues to convince others to their point of view, just like governments and corporations don't let the truth get in the way of a good story sometimes.
I wouldn't be so sure about biotechnology.
The European green movements have been fighting the introduction of GM crops for years, and they've managed to convince consumers that GM crops are dangerous to their health - ergo, governments have passed laws requiring that any food containing GM crops must be labelled as such, and consumers won't buy them. Hence, the interest in biotechnology for agriculture is apparently less keen.
As for the US's stone-age cellphone and television technologies, that is another example of how the distaste for government-imposed solutions has its downside - kind of like adoption of the metric system, in fact.
While I can verify that the mass-market lagers are as bad as any I have tasted, on a trip to the States I found that the microbrews and specialty breweries are quite good. Sam Adams, though I suppose it doesn't really count as a "microbrewery" anymore, is available in Australia (and I'd presume also available in the UK) and is quite acceptable.
just saying "it's XML" doesn't naturally guarantee compatability. It just makes parsing the file. Working out what that means, and translating into the different structure of a foriegn application, is still distinctly non-trivial.
Good points. We've managed to build things that are faster and stronger than anything nature has produced, partly from copying what nature has done, but also things that nature has never evolved (the wheel, for instance). What's fundamentally different about "intelligence"?
Because we can measure the relative mass of macroscopic objects to something like 20 significant figures, whereas we can only determine Avogadro's number (which is the number for converting macroscopic masses to atomic quantities) to 10 or so, IIRC.
At least, that was the explanation back when I took first-year physics. Presumably the accuracy of Avogradro's number will improve over time, but an extra 10 sig figs is a challenge . . .
Because you start running into the limits of precision (ie you scrape out a line one atom wide, if the rod is n atoms "long", you only get lg n bits of precision (maybe 60-70 bits or so?) which is not enough, you would need millions even assuming he used arithmetic compression.
What I really wanted to say was, though, cool nickname . . . so when are you coming down to Earth and scaring the crap out of old the old-testament bible bashers?:)
Well, when I moderate, I've been known to use overrated for "wrong". Saying the moon is made of green cheese is not informative. Not a troll/flamebait either. What do you do with such posts?
Excellent point. If there's something that's at +5 and just plain wrong on a factual point, overrated is entirely appropriate. I do like the idea of overrrated and underrated metamoderations with the score displayed.
...but for most people, even professional programmers, speed has gone beyond what we know what to do with.
Have you tried compiling anything substantial lately? I have, and there is still lots of waiting for the CPU to do its thing.
Professional programmers can continue to soak up more CPU for a while yet . . .
I metamoderate regularly, and I tend to agree with at least 7 out of 10 moderations. One or two are typically too hard to tell without context whether the moderation is appropriate or not ("Redundant" is impossible without context), and maybe one of the ten is definitely unfair.
The one area where moderation falls down is sometimes coherent, well-written posts that are nevertheless uninformed, ignorant spouting of garbage get modded up inappropriately. Other than that, I think the system works reasonably well.
Before everyone gets too excited, I should point out that there are still several things that will happen before this stupid ruling actually means anything:
The ruling was in the Victorian Supreme Court. There is a higher state court to appeal to - the Court of Appeal, in which instead of one Supreme Court judge you get five (I think it's five, certainly it's more than one) of them and a majority decision is reached. An appeal here seems likely.
After that, there is the national High Court, which like the US Supreme Court rules on constitutional issues. IANAL, but I suspect that an inventive lawyer could find constitutional issues (related to the power of the Federal vs. the State government to control international commerce, and free trade between states) that might be ground for a High Court appeal.
After all that, you have to remember that it's case law interpreting an Act of Parliament, not the constitution or anything (even if it was, the Victorian state constitution doesn't require a referendum to amend, just Parliament). There's nothing stopping the State Government amending the legislation, and if this ruling is left to stand they will come under fairly substantial pressure to do so.
This ruling has had a fair bit mainstream press attention, and most of it is well aware of the potential damage the decision could do. Anyway, don't panic quite yet. There's still a way to go before we really have to worry about this piece of judicial stupidity.
Once you're in orbit, the rocket engine that lifts you off Mars is expendable. Hence, you get another rope and hook it up for the return trip.
I should point out that in Zubrin's Mars Direct architecture the habitat that you do the trip there on, and the vehicle you use for Earth return, are two different vehicles, but even if they were one and the same it doesn't pose a major problem.
Why are we trying to colonize mars when we have the moon soclose? Think about the possibilities.. If raw materials such as iron where to be refined, the cost to transfer the materials would be cheaper because of the short distance.
Because the Moon, in some ways, is actually not closer to us at all, and there are a lot more things worth having on Mars when we get there.
Firstly, Mars has a day almost identical in length to Earth's. Why is this so important? Because it means you might be able to grow plants there by the natural light. Growing plants under artificial light is very inefficient - the only ones that we can afford to do so for are kind of illegal in many places:) You can't grow plants by natural light on the moon because the two-week night would kill most plants (let alone the problems of your greenhouse heating up to boiling point during the two-week day).
Secondly, Mars has almost certainly got a lot more water available than the Moon does. The moon has virtually no water available. You can't have a colony without a water supply:)
Thirdly, just because Mars is further away doesn't mean it's more difficult to get stuff to and from it. The travel time is an important issue for humans, but for cargo it often doesn't matter, and for cargo it takes *less* fuel to land stuff on Mars because you can use the Martian atmosphere to slow down when you get there, unlike the moon where you have to use more fuel slowing down. Going the other way, it's easier to get stuff off the Moon than Mars (because the moon has less gravity), but you can make rocket fuel for your rocket a lot more easily on Mars than you can on the Moon (because if you have water, you can use electrolysis to get hydrogen and oxygen - instant rocket fuel).
Finally, if you're going to run a self-sustaining colony which pays its own way, to pay for imports from Earth you need something you can export back. From what we know about the composition of the moon, we're fairly sure that there's not much there of value (except for Helium-3, which is a fuel that might be used in fusion power plants in the future but is very difficult to extract), but on Mars there's a distinct possibility of finding high-grade deposits of gold, platinum, and other commercially valuable metals. In addition, if we ever mine the asteroids (many of which are virtually pure precious metal and are thus incredibly valuable), it's much easier to supply the miners with food and supplies from Mars than from the Earth or Moon.
In any case, we're not really trying to colonize either yet. As to the interest in exploring Mars, we've been to the Moon and have a fairly good idea of what it's like. Mars is the next step along the line.
Even looking at it from a safety standpoint.. If something were to happen where an evacuation needed to take place, they are that much closer to home. I guess we are just trying to see how far humans can reach into space.
It's quite possible. The trouble is that the smaller the "orbit", the faster you have to spin to get decent gravity, and you start getting rather disorienting side effects. However, what you do is get a big heavy piece of stuff (for instance, a spent upper stage of a rocket), a nice big strong (but actually not all that heavy) rope, and attach your Mars vehicle to that, and set the system spinning. If you make your rope reasonably long, the rotation can be nice and slow, and when you get to Mars you just cut the rope and let the useless spent upper stage go.
In Robert Zubrin's book The Case For Mars he proposes just such a system. I haven't checked the physics myself, but it's introductory college physics to do (in fact, I should probably grab my old physics book and do the math just to see if I still can:) )
As others have pointed out, the NSA has two jobs - one is to spy on foriegners' communications (and possibly run the spy photosats, I'm not sure) and the other is to help secure US government communications against foriegn spy agencies.
While this certainly sounds like a devious, underhanded and nasty thing to, is astroturfing in this manner a crime?
Asuming the answer is "no it's not a crime" the next questions I wonder are - can it be (given the First Amendment), and should it be (seeing that it's essentially political fraud)?
From what I've seen (mostly in academia, admittedly), most people use word processors as glorified typewriters.
I'd have to disagree. Actual academics *do* push Word quite hard, mostly to make it do the same sort of thing that LaTeX does by default . . .:)
However, your essential point is right. Very few people push word processors hard. Many of those that do would be better served with something else entirely.
On Earth, the Helios solar-powered plane reached nearly 100,000 feet. A manned balloon has reached 121,000 feet, and unmanned balloons have undoubtedly gone considerably higher without the weight of life support gear for a crew. Atmospheric pressures at these altitudes are comparable to the pressure at Mars datum altitude. You've also got to remember that payloads way only about 1/3 as much on Mars, considerably reducing the lift required.
So, yes, it's a considerable challenge to fly a balloon, let alone a plane, in the Martian atmosphere, but it's not impossible.
Because the difference between broadband and dialup connections are *considerably* greater than the differences between a "normal car" and a Porsche, particularly under typical road conditions.
In terms of relative damage one can do, a better analogy might be comparing the damage potential of a kid on a bicycle compared to an 18-wheeler.
C also has better facilities for bit-twiddling, and mixing itself with assembler than Java does.
It's worse than that
on
Dorm Storm?
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· Score: 3, Informative
You get assigned to the category of "the guy that not only can fix my computer, but can be called up at any time of the day or night to fix my (or my friend's) computer for free". Whilst on campus, the *only* people who should know about your tech-savvy status are fellow hackers/geeks so you can set up LAN games and so on . . .
Being the designated computer geek will *NOT* get you laid. It will *NOT* win you friends. All it will get is people calling you any time of the day or night, particularly the week where all the arts students with the crappy old computers and rotting floppies ask you whether you can recover their Word 6.0 document for them . . .
I've no idea what average wind speeds at 100,000 feet are, but I know wind speeds at airliner altitudes are typically *much* faster than 20 mph.
Assuming that's the case at these higher altitudes, sounds like you'd have about as much control over where these planes went as a high-altitude balloon (ie not very much).
If that's so, what's the advantage of the plane, nifty though the technology is?
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However, none of the above alters the fact that some green groups use propaganda rather than facts about GM crops and other issues to convince others to their point of view, just like governments and corporations don't let the truth get in the way of a good story sometimes.
As for the US's stone-age cellphone and television technologies, that is another example of how the distaste for government-imposed solutions has its downside - kind of like adoption of the metric system, in fact.
While I can verify that the mass-market lagers are as bad as any I have tasted, on a trip to the States I found that the microbrews and specialty breweries are quite good. Sam Adams, though I suppose it doesn't really count as a "microbrewery" anymore, is available in Australia (and I'd presume also available in the UK) and is quite acceptable.
just saying "it's XML" doesn't naturally guarantee compatability. It just makes parsing the file. Working out what that means, and translating into the different structure of a foriegn application, is still distinctly non-trivial.
Good points. We've managed to build things that are faster and stronger than anything nature has produced, partly from copying what nature has done, but also things that nature has never evolved (the wheel, for instance). What's fundamentally different about "intelligence"?
At least, that was the explanation back when I took first-year physics. Presumably the accuracy of Avogradro's number will improve over time, but an extra 10 sig figs is a challenge . . .
What I really wanted to say was, though, cool nickname . . . so when are you coming down to Earth and scaring the crap out of old the old-testament bible bashers? :)
Excellent point. If there's something that's at +5 and just plain wrong on a factual point, overrated is entirely appropriate. I do like the idea of overrrated and underrated metamoderations with the score displayed.
Quite true. I assumed it's just people bending over backwards to try and be fair, but you might be right.
Have you tried compiling anything substantial lately? I have, and there is still lots of waiting for the CPU to do its thing. Professional programmers can continue to soak up more CPU for a while yet . . .
The one area where moderation falls down is sometimes coherent, well-written posts that are nevertheless uninformed, ignorant spouting of garbage get modded up inappropriately. Other than that, I think the system works reasonably well.
. . . and I managed to point out that this case had been mentioned on /. before here
This ruling has had a fair bit mainstream press attention, and most of it is well aware of the potential damage the decision could do. Anyway, don't panic quite yet. There's still a way to go before we really have to worry about this piece of judicial stupidity.
I should point out that in Zubrin's Mars Direct architecture the habitat that you do the trip there on, and the vehicle you use for Earth return, are two different vehicles, but even if they were one and the same it doesn't pose a major problem.
Because the Moon, in some ways, is actually not closer to us at all, and there are a lot more things worth having on Mars when we get there.
Firstly, Mars has a day almost identical in length to Earth's. Why is this so important? Because it means you might be able to grow plants there by the natural light. Growing plants under artificial light is very inefficient - the only ones that we can afford to do so for are kind of illegal in many places :) You can't grow plants by natural light on the moon because the two-week night would kill most plants (let alone the problems of your greenhouse heating up to boiling point during the two-week day).
Secondly, Mars has almost certainly got a lot more water available than the Moon does. The moon has virtually no water available. You can't have a colony without a water supply :)
Thirdly, just because Mars is further away doesn't mean it's more difficult to get stuff to and from it. The travel time is an important issue for humans, but for cargo it often doesn't matter, and for cargo it takes *less* fuel to land stuff on Mars because you can use the Martian atmosphere to slow down when you get there, unlike the moon where you have to use more fuel slowing down. Going the other way, it's easier to get stuff off the Moon than Mars (because the moon has less gravity), but you can make rocket fuel for your rocket a lot more easily on Mars than you can on the Moon (because if you have water, you can use electrolysis to get hydrogen and oxygen - instant rocket fuel).
Finally, if you're going to run a self-sustaining colony which pays its own way, to pay for imports from Earth you need something you can export back. From what we know about the composition of the moon, we're fairly sure that there's not much there of value (except for Helium-3, which is a fuel that might be used in fusion power plants in the future but is very difficult to extract), but on Mars there's a distinct possibility of finding high-grade deposits of gold, platinum, and other commercially valuable metals. In addition, if we ever mine the asteroids (many of which are virtually pure precious metal and are thus incredibly valuable), it's much easier to supply the miners with food and supplies from Mars than from the Earth or Moon.
In any case, we're not really trying to colonize either yet. As to the interest in exploring Mars, we've been to the Moon and have a fairly good idea of what it's like. Mars is the next step along the line.
In Robert Zubrin's book The Case For Mars he proposes just such a system. I haven't checked the physics myself, but it's introductory college physics to do (in fact, I should probably grab my old physics book and do the math just to see if I still can :) )
However, as others have pointed out, simply spinning the ship is by far the easiest and simplest way to get around this issue.
As others have pointed out, the NSA has two jobs - one is to spy on foriegners' communications (and possibly run the spy photosats, I'm not sure) and the other is to help secure US government communications against foriegn spy agencies.
Asuming the answer is "no it's not a crime" the next questions I wonder are - can it be (given the First Amendment), and should it be (seeing that it's essentially political fraud)?
I'd have to disagree. Actual academics *do* push Word quite hard, mostly to make it do the same sort of thing that LaTeX does by default . . . :)
However, your essential point is right. Very few people push word processors hard. Many of those that do would be better served with something else entirely.
So, yes, it's a considerable challenge to fly a balloon, let alone a plane, in the Martian atmosphere, but it's not impossible.
In terms of relative damage one can do, a better analogy might be comparing the damage potential of a kid on a bicycle compared to an 18-wheeler.
C also has better facilities for bit-twiddling, and mixing itself with assembler than Java does.
Being the designated computer geek will *NOT* get you laid. It will *NOT* win you friends. All it will get is people calling you any time of the day or night, particularly the week where all the arts students with the crappy old computers and rotting floppies ask you whether you can recover their Word 6.0 document for them . . .
If that's so, what's the advantage of the plane, nifty though the technology is?