"At the very least, someone should have sent out self replicating probes by now. By we've seen absolutely nothing."
Oh, someone mapped the asteroid field between mars and Jupiter when I was sleeping last night? To be frank, there could be a hundred probes the size of an SUV floating among those asteroids and even if they looked interesting enough to warrant investigation instead of being cleverly disguised as a rock using the technology of a million year old civilization... odds are we wouldn't have noticed yet. And that's not even taking into account the billions of rocks floating around in the Kuiper belt, *none* of which we have pictures of.
Combine our woeful lack of a comprehensive survey of our own inner solar system with the fact that any advanced civ would probably be using directed line-of-sight communications, and I personally believe the best answer to the Fermi Paradox at this point is that we just haven't looked (for probes) and we aren't in a place where we could ever hear (communication). That and we've been "interesting" for *maybe* two or three thousand years, and it might well take that long for someone to show up in person once they decided we were worth visiting.
Well, the delays for Spore are starting to get frustrating. On the other hand, after all these delays it better be a pretty freaking good game... which it won't be if they rush it to put an end to the delays.
Obviously no game is ever perfect, so it is up to the developers to decide the proper balance between time spent improving the game and delays before release.
That said, nobody wants another "Duke Nukem Forever." If you spend too much time on the whole "revolutionizing videogames" someone will take the lessons presented at all these talks Wright does and actually *finish* a game that heavily utilizes procedural generation or whatever before Spore comes out, and it won't be revolutionary anymore.
"guess what - that is what the kids will see in the corporate world by the time they graduate from college."
And why is that? Why, it is because all the bosses and 90% of all the (non-IT) people never used anything but Word in High School and College! So yea, as long as you tell everyone in highschool to use Word, that's what they'll see in the workplace. Of course, if you used a variety of things, there would be much more variety in the "real world" and businesses might even be able to make an informed decision! Can't have that! Point is, there is no real reason to upgrade to office 2007 unless you just like giving microsoft money, to be perfectly honest.
And as others have pointed out, all high school students are computer illiterate and can only use one piece of software.
... and yet again I get the urge to attend a political rally and hold up such a sign whenever someone makes an outrageous statement that probably isn't true. And now I remember that I've never been to a political rally and that I'd probably get tired of holding it up after a few hours. Okay, I'm good.
I'm sure you could get away with some insulation and some heat/cooling coils that would directly heat your skin instead of the air around your skin. Though you'd need finer control then you need with the air between you and the heating/cooling element. Or something. As for puncturing you instead of the suit... well, I fail to see how that is worse then puncturing you *and* depressurizing your old suit. I mean, it isn't like the old suit was more resistant to these type of punctures then the new one. You can probably even tack on *more* protection with a net increase in mobility this way. Anyway, your body will eventually stop pumping blood to an extremity that gets a hole in it rather then keep pushing it into space, I believe. Obviously you'd have to get back to pressure ASAP, but I'd think you have a better chance this way then the old way.
1.) The Internet - Throw in the desktop computer with this, and it is pretty freaking close to a technological singularity. Totally agreed. 2.) Electricity - Seeing the coastlines outlined at night is pretty freaking cool. I'd throw in "modern infrastructure" just to include running water and such. Then again, it isn't complete. If it reached across the entire world it would *certainly* be a wonder. 3.) Large Hadron Collider - I disagree with the Voyager Probes. They qualify as the farthest we've gotten a man-made object from earth, but they are at the tail end of their usefulness and not exactly difficult or awe inspiring. I'd throw in the Large Hadron Collider in this spot, tentatively, for the advancement of scientific knowledge it probably will bring. 4.) Man-made Satellites - GPS alone? Na, not really. First off, it is kinda-sorta included in the internet for most useful applications. Secondly, why not just toss in "human presence in space" and include the weather sats and the ISS as well?
Those are the only four that exist today that I would say qualify as marvels of the modern world, and I can't ever see removing any except LHC. Though I could see combining electricity and the internet in a hundred years or so. I'd add in a moon base if/when we actually build one and get a human presence on the moon. A space elevator would be on my list for as long as it stood, but obviously we're a long way from that.
I disagree with the human genome project. At least the other ones on the list are entities (even if two are distributed, and one not even actually visible). The human genome project may someday be the foundation for radical changes in human health... but if that happens I'd call the changes the marvel not the scientific legwork that backed them up. For example, we call The Great Pyramid of Egypt a marvel. We don't call slave labor or ancient poured concrete a marvel... it is in part because of those things that the pyramid *is* a marvel, but all the same the finished project is the marvel, not the work.
I disagree with nuclear power. Today we have fission - and if we went 100% fission power today, our fuel wouldn't last 100 years. Fusion is somewhat better, lasting thousands of years if we care to mine the moon. Still, I'd rather see 100% renewable (no fuel burned) power - solar, wind, water, heat difference.... and then you can throw it in with electricity grid.
Cochlear implants... are you kidding? I mean, I'd rather have a list of four wonders then stretch *this* far. Sure, it is a wonder to the.0016% (or 1 in 60 thousand) people who have them (100k out of 6+ billion) but really most deaf people get along fine without them. Get me something that even *potentially* effects the entire world and it'd go on the list.
1.) First off, you have to define machine. The real definition is anything that reduces the work required to preform a task, something that includes one or more of the six simple machines - Inclined Plane, Wheel and Axle, Lever, Pulley, Wedge, and Screw. Good luck building something big without a lever or an inclined plane. If you're going to accept the simple machines, do you accept combinations of them? Where, then, do you cut off what you can use? Electricity?
2.) Seems beyond the scope based on who's judgment? Yours? I mean, obviously an engineer has a better idea of what is possible and a good one might actually *know* the scope of the tools you define as "not machines" so that *nothing* actually possible seems beyond their scope.
3.) Once again, who decides what is "beyond their time." We know that many ancient cultures had a very through understanding of the planets/sun/seasons and that it wasn't really that hard to align things by them seeing as they did it every day. Marking the sun daily for a year is trivial, and building something in line with those marks just takes time - it isn't *that* difficult. So who, again, judges difficulty?
4.) Why does something have to be old to be a marvel? What if, today, someone finally perfected manufacture of carbon nanotubes and in 5 years we had a working space elevator? I'd say that would qualify as a marvel of the world despite not being old, and despite being built by machine and despite being aligned with things we understand well (the rotation of the earth). Remember that the original list documented things that were in use or even new at the time the list was made, not things that were necessarily old. And most of these were destroyed long ago, so they didn't last thousands of years more.
Stars rotate on an axis. I'm not an astrophysicist, but I'd assume that most of the radiation and gasses would go either in the direction of the axis or in the plane perpendicular to it. I mean, there is a *huge* amount of angular momentum that has to be preserved when you consider mass and the speed of rotation.
So yea, kinda like the death star explosion in the remake. Or maybe perpendicular to that. Once again, not an astrophysicist.
If you read all of Michael Crichton's opinion, he acknowledges that humans have measurably warmed the earth. He just doesn't like the fact that anyone who so much as *thinks* there is the *slightest chance* that anything but catastrophic global climate change caused by carbon dioxide will happen in the next 20 years is automatically being paid by big oil or incredibly stupid and either way can't find two pennies of funding to rub together to test his theory (outside of big oil, of course).
The fact of the matter is that we really aren't *sure* CO2 is what is causing global warming. We have no idea what the end result will be. We don't know how much is humans and how much is natural. We don't even have accurate data for most of the planet. We don't accurately measure the urban heat island and correct for it - we guess. Correlation isn't the same as causation. The entire thing is blown out of proportion, with wildly high local variations being reported as proof of global warming when in fact there are places that are just as quickly getting colder - but the fact that on average the world has warmed up somewhere around 1 degree doesn't make the news.
I tend to agree with Crichton's stance. Global warming is real. Humans are part of the cause. We just don't know how much or how, and taking drastic action in the wrong direction because nobody can get funding to look in other directions is incredibly stupid. This whole attitude of "if you don't agree with this model of global warming you are being paid off" needs to stop so real science can start. People are starting off with the assumption that they are right and then proving it, for to do otherwise is to lose all funding. That isn't real science - real science has to have the possibility of failure.
To see that the god of the bible isn't true one needs only look at two people god created. Once is Jesus (or the pope or your favorite saint), the other is your favorite murderer. Both were created in god's image (supposedly) and both have free will (or don't, whatever you believe). One committed no (or very, very few) sins while the other dedicated themselves to a life of crime. Both have been exposed to the bible and both probably would describe themselves as religious (atheists are vastly underrepresented in prisons).
Now, how could god create one thing that is in his image with free will that is nearly perfectly good and another who is bad by any definition? Obviously he did something different between the two and just as obviously one of them he made a mistake on. If god were real and he cared about humanity I have no doubt he would have made everyone with the traits of the pope rather then the traits of a murderer.
He has also clearly created me, who after a few hours of thought and a few more on the internet came to the conclusion that there is no god, and you (or either of the two people I mentioned above) who presented with the same arguments remain convinced that they know the true god. Both have free will and are allegedly created in the same god's image and yet one doesn't believe in him (lacking "faith" which this god believes is a virtue). How is that this god made such a mistake?
Oh, and what is this about everyone looking for a god? I don't look for a religion with god - I believe all religions are full of shit and mainly exist to take money from the gullible in return for warding away bogeymen and explaining their ignorance. I don't look for god in nature - I appreciate the results of natural selection in a complex system, yet I don't think this requires an artist. I certainly don't look for god in science - I look for evidence to explain the world by making testable predictions in the hope that they will make the world a better place.
I don't think the universe requires a god - currently I believe that our universe came into being when two three D membranes collided in 11-D space creating all matter and energy in the universe at a single point from where it began accelerating outward, I believe that quantum mechanics and chaos caused this matter to form temporary (in the timeframe of the universe) patterns in the form of stars and galaxies and planets. I believe that on at least one of these planets billions of years later certain chemicals reacted in a special way creating an expanding, self-sustaining reaction in the form of single celled organisms, and that over time mutations occurred and ones that changed the organisms for the better were preserved, eventually leading to myself. I will believe this until someone presents to me testable evidence showing an alternative theory to be correct.
Oh, and for the record "I don't understand how...." isn't evidence. It is incredibly presumptuous to assume yourself the peak of human knowledge - to assume that because *today* nobody can explain complexity or the big bang to your satisfaction that nobody *ever* will do this... is just stupid.
And how do you know you are the parent? Maybe god is the sandbox (putting limits on what you may understand and discouraging exploration outside) and the unlimited knowledge and betterment of science is the beach. In fact I'd argue that is probably the case, seeing as humanity is coming from a history of religion and finally those who understand the world are beginning to grow in number. From childhood into adulthood and so far only a few early bloomers have hit puberty. I hope you start to grow up soon, though I fear it may be too late for most people alive today - they will die never having known there was a world outside their little box.
The problem is fuel. Our fission fuel is very limited, if we went 100% fusion we wouldn't be much better off then staying with oil and coal as far as how long we last is concerned. Fusion fuel is more abundant in our solar system, but even that is limited.
The sun, on the other hand, will burn for another few billion years. It will burn most of its fuel (though not all) if we use what hits the earth of not. I see no reason to burn our limited nuclear fuel if we can avoid it. All domestic power can be met with solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal. Special scientific and military applications require more concentrated energy, but even that is usually only for short durations, and solar or whatever can be used to split water or make fuel to be burned in some other way for bursts of energy.
There is no reason we shouldn't save our nuclear fuel for when solar isn't enough (in deep space or whatever) since solar should meet all our needs for the foreseeable future if implemented on a wide scale.
"What I'm trying to get at, you can't stop anyone who wants to kill Bush, so maybe he should just give up and resign from the job."
Wrong. You can't stop *everyone* who wants to kill bush, assuming infinite. It is child's play to stop one person - look for the guy with the big missile launcher and arrest him before he can get a lock. Stopping anyone is easy. Stopping everyone is the challenge.
Oh, and so far the secret service has a pretty good record. One presidential death since they have been guarding presidents, and two failed attempts that got as far as shooting. Not to mention the countless other attempts they have nipped in the bud. And for our current president they seem to be doing a good job, seeing as most of the world hates bush and yet he lives on.
Probably because the last time I did that (/etc/x11/xorg.conf) I forgot a quotation mark and the next time I turned my computer on I got a nice friendly blue screen informing me that there was a serious error before dumping me into a terminal. Fortunately the instructions had included a line that made a backup of the correct file. Unfortunately I had no idea what the command was to rename the file from a command line.
No, I'm afraid that editing these files still has the chance of screwing everything up, even with instructions. Until they auto-backup and auto-replace the files when you screw something up (or IDK, maybe check to see if the file is valid before letting you save changes that would cause a crash? Would that be so hard?) editing those files is just as bad as editing the windows registries - not something you should do unless you're really familiar with them.
Also, I seriously want a graphical interface for the mouse. Not just "speed" and "acceleration" I want to turn off my freaking touchpad by clicking a button. I want to enable all the buttons and even change their function in a few clicks.
It is really that hard. Cloning is just copying genetic material, but changing things is much harder. Small things that already vary are fairly easy to change. You have a flower that can be red or white? It isn't that hard to find the difference between the two and change that area further to make a new color. But there is no line of DNA that says "edible" that you can change. You have to change individual proteins and such. You can't copy another fruit's skin either, since there isn't a discrete section of DNA referring to "skin." Skin also has quite a bit to do with how a fruit grows...
Changing the size might be easier (though still not *that* easy if you don't want it to just stop growing before it's ripe), but with how thick a watermelon's skin is that would be kinda silly.
In the end changing the skin would certainly be possible, but it would be much harder - you'd almost certainly have to modify quite a few genes and you'd probably have to try dozens of combinations that *did* change the skin before you found one that didn't also change the already edible part or stall up development. Then you have to ask - how much *more* would you really be willing to pay for a thin skinned watermelon? Would it be enough to cover the R&D that only has a chance of success, and the added cost of growing the new watermelons, which would certainly require different harvesting and shipping mechanisms since they don't have a protective shell? What about the fact that it would be easier for them to be destroyed by bugs?
Changing the skin from big and hard to soft and edible sounds nice, but it may be more trouble then it is worth. Not to mention trying to make it taste good even after it is edible...
Possibly the best I've ever seen. Not as a source for a research paper, but for background knowledge. Someone mentioned "eugenics" in one of my classes and I realized I wasn't really sure what it was. Sure, I could use a dictionary, but wikipedia gives a bit more useful detail.
Just put "wikipedia doesn't count as a source" on research paper prompts (which you'll have to do anyway, because believe it or not a couple of the students may use the internet at home!) and I'd go so far as to encourage use of wikipedia to learn about things you don't know much about. Hell, you could probably say "encyclopedias don't count as sources" (something many of my highschool teachers have said) if you don't want to bring attention to wikipedia.
But seriously I can understand blocking myspace and facebook, which are social networking tools, at a school... 99.9% of use wouldn't have anything to do with learning. For the person who is doing a project on "social networking" they can do research at home or even get special permission from the school... use a teacher's account if your IT department can't be bothered with it. (The IT dept at my school was one person for the entire county and she would have done it if our school blocked anything but porn. It would take a few days but she would do it). Wikipedia on the other hand is an unorthodox encyclopedia. It exists for spreading knowledge. To block it at a school citing educational reasons would be stupid. (no offense)
Of course a big corporation can buy cool! The only question is who you pay. The answer is "your consumers," not "your stockholders." Spend money making an innovative product and go out of your way to be helpful instead of *trying* to make a cool product and going out of your way to cut costs and max profits... and you have a good chance at being "cool."
Of course, it is kinda hard for a big corporation to survive while thinking of its consumers wants over the bottom line, but then nobody said it was easy to be cool.
Of course, you could try to buy something that is already cool (google buying youtube and such) but that doesn't make *you* cool... you could brand your logo everywhere and/or try to change something so that it is "you" instead of "the thing you bought" that is "cool" but more likely you'll ruin a perfectly good thing and people will think you even less "cool."
Bah. I get the feeling I'm going to be making that switch fairly soon. As soon as feisty comes out I'm going to wipe my linux partition (I've screwed something up on the graphics end and I've decided to let it slide for a few months).
My main problem right now is trying to get 3D acceleration working for my laptop video card so I can run modern games under wine... "glxinfo | grep rendering" returned "direct rendering: No" so I tried to fix it and ended up with a string of 5-6 errors instead of the desired "direct rendering: Yes" and honestly I'm not going to stop using windows until I can get that working. Here's to hoping I don't screw up again on feisty...
The issue is that "is the world round" is testable. Try to walk around it, or look at it from space or something and anyone can clearly see that the world is in fact not flat. How do you test "global warming is caused by humans"? You'd have to take a pre-industrial world and not allow the industrial revolution to happen, and then measure temperatures anyway for a few hundred years. Obviously we can't do that.
Perhaps a more apt comparison would be "the world is round because of X mechanism" where X is how a planet forms (say... mutual gravity between dust particles). To back this up you look at one big asteroid in the kupier belt through a telescope, and you throw some rocks at each other in a lab and find that they do sometimes stick. Now someone comes along and says... "well, I think that maybe the world is round because of Y mechanism" where X is only a tiny part of Y (say... maybe something about orbits around stars draws the dust to narrow bands, and only then does mutual gravity become important). Naturally the correct thing to do would be to do your best to test Y as well (you can't really test X or Y, since you don't have a huge cloud of gas/dust and billions of years), and then after of years of debate and small experiments people would accept one or the other method as probably correct.
That is much closer to the climate change debate. The fact that the globe *is* warming is as indisputable as the fact that the world is round. The cause is much less certain. CO2 in the air is proven to influence temperature in small experiments and theoretical math, and we've observed it being correlated with temperature via ice core samples. The question is whether increasing CO2 is responsible for a significant part of the increasing global temperatures, or if changes in cloud patterns and cyclic changes in the sun and/or earth make up 99% of it. And rather then debating openly and testing both sides, anyone who disagrees with fossil-fuel caused warming is labeled an oil shill or denied funding (except from oil companies, of course... and obviously you can't take that money).
I personally believe that humans probably have a significant influence on global warming and that we should do what we can to reduce carbon emissions. I really can't get behind global warming groups and such, however, because I really don't believe good scientific practices are being carried out - there is too much downright dismissal of opposing theories and too many wild accusations flying around - I can't really be satisfied with the current explanation. Maybe forces outside man's control will cause global warming even if we cap carbon emissions, or even bring industrial carbon down to zero. Maybe our money would be better spent preparing for inevitable change, or doing something fancy with mirrors in space, then on converting to solar ASAP (obviously we'll run out of oil and coal eventually). I really doubt it, but unless it is open to debate I just can't discount it.
Why, why was it on two pages! There is *no* reason! Even dialup can handle all the text of the article on one page without trouble. The only reason is to repeat the ads.
Well to be fair you're allowed to win a few hundred grand before they kick you out. And vegas is better about breaking things... they usually just let you sweat in a back room for a while then blacklist you. Of course out of the country is a different matter. Also, they have those high roller sweets for a reason... not *everyone* loses, especially if you go high stakes and fewer games. They try to convince you to either spend the money at the hotel or stay the next day and lose even more then you've won.
But you have a point... someone suspected of counting cards, who is just making bets based on information everyone can see is treated pretty much the same as someone who slips a thousand dollar chip under their bet of one dollar after they're sure they've won.
The Outer Space Treaty says no.... but will that really hold when people start trying to develop commercial interests outside earth? It doesn't deal with private industry very well, pretty much saying their gov't is responsible for them.
Moreover I have to assume that eventually people will actually begin to *live* on mars. First just to work, sending money back, but eventually bringing families over and having kids and such... and at that point they'll start thinking about making a new country. And then what... as a country outside earth would they have a right to have a military presence, something forbidden to countries who signed the outer space treaty?
Basically I'm saying that someday it'll fail, the only question is how soon. Legally we can withdraw from it with one year warning, which is plenty of time to still be first to mars by decades, probably.
They went to the moon, picked up some rocks and came back. Today they want to go there with the goal of surveying for a permanent base, which they'll build and go to with the same technology. They pretty much want to check out a few good places, and get to building. Apollo couldn't have done "start building" no matter how hard it tried. Then we also want to use the same rocket and main vehicle (though a different lander) to do the same thing on mars... another feat beyond apollo by orders of magnitude.
Apollo was a shot in the dark. They didn't have the technology to do things reliably... there was a human layer with a good chance of failure in nearly every operation, and if they had kept going they would have started paying for that. Today we can land (at forces a human can survive) and orbit by remote control, with nobody's hands on the stick. But that takes years of programing and testing instead of years of practice. Yes, it seems a little wrong but despite the reused tech we still have a pile of work ahead of us... and this time an incident like apollo 13 would probably shut down the program for years instead of causing a celebration.
If NASA got a mandate to return in 10 years and start rebuilding they could probably do it (given twice as much money as they get today and minimal other commitments). But it would burn more total money and not be as safe, and we just don't need to go *that* badly. We still need to go but we have, it seems, more pressing concerns here on earth.
And this is where the resources on the moon come in handy. If you could actually mine the needed metals and maybe even fuel (He3 as fuel is a long way off but not impossible) on the moon, build the craft on the moon, and *then* launch to mars, you'd be far better off then anything built on earth as far as launch costs go.
I personally doubt that will be viable for a while, but thinking long term moon launches will certainly be a "reason."
All the same, I'm personally of the opinion that mars would make better practice for the moon then the other way around. The actual exercise of getting to the moon, landing, and returning is about all that would be useful that we couldn't do in earth orbit (or in the case of biosphere *on* the earth) easier. Also mars is far more useful in and of itself (instead of just practice for something else) then the moon is in the near future. Add to that it isn't really more technically difficult to get to mars, besides transit time, and I think it would make a better first target.
So why the moon first? Because we're afraid that if we don't someone else will, and before we can get to mars (because lets face it that'll add a few years of checking calculations). That and going to the moon will probably take less money in new research, and if something goes wrong we at least have a chance of fixing it (see apollo 13... much harder to do with a 14 minute delay). Once we gain confidence (and public support with the great new images for the conspiracy theorists to compare to the originals... because lets face it one of the things to do on the moon is to reproduce the original photos with old cameras to explain why some things happen) people won't think mars is too much. And I'm willing to wait 15 years to go to mars if it means we'll do it right.
OK, so we shouldn't be testing things that could end up with a grey goo on the moon any more then on earth. We shouldn't try to build a bomb that could crack a world. But it really takes an effort to destroy a big rock in space in any meaningful way. What about experiments with bacteria and viruses that could (if we mess up *and* they escape) could kill everyone, or fusion power or exotic elements and crap like that? What if you wanted to use a virus to kill cancer but you weren't sure if it could easily mutate and kill regular cells as well. A nice place like the moon could prevent accidental genocide while you did some long term tests.
The nice thing about the moon is that if accidentally release a huge cloud of radiation we just get a green moon instead of a black moon when it isn't lit by the sun, whereas on earth we would have hundreds of miles of radioactive wasteland that could otherwise be a nice place to live. I mean it would still kinda suck long term if we teraformed the moon (in the long term), but it would still not be nearly as bad as on earth.
Slashdot Mirror
"At the very least, someone should have sent out self replicating probes by now. By we've seen absolutely nothing."
Oh, someone mapped the asteroid field between mars and Jupiter when I was sleeping last night? To be frank, there could be a hundred probes the size of an SUV floating among those asteroids and even if they looked interesting enough to warrant investigation instead of being cleverly disguised as a rock using the technology of a million year old civilization... odds are we wouldn't have noticed yet. And that's not even taking into account the billions of rocks floating around in the Kuiper belt, *none* of which we have pictures of.
Combine our woeful lack of a comprehensive survey of our own inner solar system with the fact that any advanced civ would probably be using directed line-of-sight communications, and I personally believe the best answer to the Fermi Paradox at this point is that we just haven't looked (for probes) and we aren't in a place where we could ever hear (communication). That and we've been "interesting" for *maybe* two or three thousand years, and it might well take that long for someone to show up in person once they decided we were worth visiting.
Well, the delays for Spore are starting to get frustrating. On the other hand, after all these delays it better be a pretty freaking good game... which it won't be if they rush it to put an end to the delays.
Obviously no game is ever perfect, so it is up to the developers to decide the proper balance between time spent improving the game and delays before release.
That said, nobody wants another "Duke Nukem Forever." If you spend too much time on the whole "revolutionizing videogames" someone will take the lessons presented at all these talks Wright does and actually *finish* a game that heavily utilizes procedural generation or whatever before Spore comes out, and it won't be revolutionary anymore.
"guess what - that is what the kids will see in the corporate world by the time they graduate from college."
And why is that? Why, it is because all the bosses and 90% of all the (non-IT) people never used anything but Word in High School and College! So yea, as long as you tell everyone in highschool to use Word, that's what they'll see in the workplace. Of course, if you used a variety of things, there would be much more variety in the "real world" and businesses might even be able to make an informed decision! Can't have that! Point is, there is no real reason to upgrade to office 2007 unless you just like giving microsoft money, to be perfectly honest.
And as others have pointed out, all high school students are computer illiterate and can only use one piece of software.
... and yet again I get the urge to attend a political rally and hold up such a sign whenever someone makes an outrageous statement that probably isn't true. And now I remember that I've never been to a political rally and that I'd probably get tired of holding it up after a few hours. Okay, I'm good.
I'm sure you could get away with some insulation and some heat/cooling coils that would directly heat your skin instead of the air around your skin. Though you'd need finer control then you need with the air between you and the heating/cooling element. Or something. As for puncturing you instead of the suit... well, I fail to see how that is worse then puncturing you *and* depressurizing your old suit. I mean, it isn't like the old suit was more resistant to these type of punctures then the new one. You can probably even tack on *more* protection with a net increase in mobility this way. Anyway, your body will eventually stop pumping blood to an extremity that gets a hole in it rather then keep pushing it into space, I believe. Obviously you'd have to get back to pressure ASAP, but I'd think you have a better chance this way then the old way.
1.) The Internet - Throw in the desktop computer with this, and it is pretty freaking close to a technological singularity. Totally agreed.
.0016% (or 1 in 60 thousand) people who have them (100k out of 6+ billion) but really most deaf people get along fine without them. Get me something that even *potentially* effects the entire world and it'd go on the list.
2.) Electricity - Seeing the coastlines outlined at night is pretty freaking cool. I'd throw in "modern infrastructure" just to include running water and such. Then again, it isn't complete. If it reached across the entire world it would *certainly* be a wonder.
3.) Large Hadron Collider - I disagree with the Voyager Probes. They qualify as the farthest we've gotten a man-made object from earth, but they are at the tail end of their usefulness and not exactly difficult or awe inspiring. I'd throw in the Large Hadron Collider in this spot, tentatively, for the advancement of scientific knowledge it probably will bring.
4.) Man-made Satellites - GPS alone? Na, not really. First off, it is kinda-sorta included in the internet for most useful applications. Secondly, why not just toss in "human presence in space" and include the weather sats and the ISS as well?
Those are the only four that exist today that I would say qualify as marvels of the modern world, and I can't ever see removing any except LHC. Though I could see combining electricity and the internet in a hundred years or so. I'd add in a moon base if/when we actually build one and get a human presence on the moon. A space elevator would be on my list for as long as it stood, but obviously we're a long way from that.
I disagree with the human genome project. At least the other ones on the list are entities (even if two are distributed, and one not even actually visible). The human genome project may someday be the foundation for radical changes in human health... but if that happens I'd call the changes the marvel not the scientific legwork that backed them up. For example, we call The Great Pyramid of Egypt a marvel. We don't call slave labor or ancient poured concrete a marvel... it is in part because of those things that the pyramid *is* a marvel, but all the same the finished project is the marvel, not the work.
I disagree with nuclear power. Today we have fission - and if we went 100% fission power today, our fuel wouldn't last 100 years. Fusion is somewhat better, lasting thousands of years if we care to mine the moon. Still, I'd rather see 100% renewable (no fuel burned) power - solar, wind, water, heat difference.... and then you can throw it in with electricity grid.
Cochlear implants... are you kidding? I mean, I'd rather have a list of four wonders then stretch *this* far. Sure, it is a wonder to the
Your criteria are silly.
1.) First off, you have to define machine. The real definition is anything that reduces the work required to preform a task, something that includes one or more of the six simple machines - Inclined Plane, Wheel and Axle, Lever, Pulley, Wedge, and Screw. Good luck building something big without a lever or an inclined plane. If you're going to accept the simple machines, do you accept combinations of them? Where, then, do you cut off what you can use? Electricity?
2.) Seems beyond the scope based on who's judgment? Yours? I mean, obviously an engineer has a better idea of what is possible and a good one might actually *know* the scope of the tools you define as "not machines" so that *nothing* actually possible seems beyond their scope.
3.) Once again, who decides what is "beyond their time." We know that many ancient cultures had a very through understanding of the planets/sun/seasons and that it wasn't really that hard to align things by them seeing as they did it every day. Marking the sun daily for a year is trivial, and building something in line with those marks just takes time - it isn't *that* difficult. So who, again, judges difficulty?
4.) Why does something have to be old to be a marvel? What if, today, someone finally perfected manufacture of carbon nanotubes and in 5 years we had a working space elevator? I'd say that would qualify as a marvel of the world despite not being old, and despite being built by machine and despite being aligned with things we understand well (the rotation of the earth). Remember that the original list documented things that were in use or even new at the time the list was made, not things that were necessarily old. And most of these were destroyed long ago, so they didn't last thousands of years more.
Stars rotate on an axis. I'm not an astrophysicist, but I'd assume that most of the radiation and gasses would go either in the direction of the axis or in the plane perpendicular to it. I mean, there is a *huge* amount of angular momentum that has to be preserved when you consider mass and the speed of rotation.
So yea, kinda like the death star explosion in the remake. Or maybe perpendicular to that. Once again, not an astrophysicist.
If you read all of Michael Crichton's opinion, he acknowledges that humans have measurably warmed the earth. He just doesn't like the fact that anyone who so much as *thinks* there is the *slightest chance* that anything but catastrophic global climate change caused by carbon dioxide will happen in the next 20 years is automatically being paid by big oil or incredibly stupid and either way can't find two pennies of funding to rub together to test his theory (outside of big oil, of course).
The fact of the matter is that we really aren't *sure* CO2 is what is causing global warming. We have no idea what the end result will be. We don't know how much is humans and how much is natural. We don't even have accurate data for most of the planet. We don't accurately measure the urban heat island and correct for it - we guess. Correlation isn't the same as causation. The entire thing is blown out of proportion, with wildly high local variations being reported as proof of global warming when in fact there are places that are just as quickly getting colder - but the fact that on average the world has warmed up somewhere around 1 degree doesn't make the news.
I tend to agree with Crichton's stance. Global warming is real. Humans are part of the cause. We just don't know how much or how, and taking drastic action in the wrong direction because nobody can get funding to look in other directions is incredibly stupid. This whole attitude of "if you don't agree with this model of global warming you are being paid off" needs to stop so real science can start. People are starting off with the assumption that they are right and then proving it, for to do otherwise is to lose all funding. That isn't real science - real science has to have the possibility of failure.
To see that the god of the bible isn't true one needs only look at two people god created. Once is Jesus (or the pope or your favorite saint), the other is your favorite murderer. Both were created in god's image (supposedly) and both have free will (or don't, whatever you believe). One committed no (or very, very few) sins while the other dedicated themselves to a life of crime. Both have been exposed to the bible and both probably would describe themselves as religious (atheists are vastly underrepresented in prisons).
Now, how could god create one thing that is in his image with free will that is nearly perfectly good and another who is bad by any definition? Obviously he did something different between the two and just as obviously one of them he made a mistake on. If god were real and he cared about humanity I have no doubt he would have made everyone with the traits of the pope rather then the traits of a murderer.
He has also clearly created me, who after a few hours of thought and a few more on the internet came to the conclusion that there is no god, and you (or either of the two people I mentioned above) who presented with the same arguments remain convinced that they know the true god. Both have free will and are allegedly created in the same god's image and yet one doesn't believe in him (lacking "faith" which this god believes is a virtue). How is that this god made such a mistake?
Oh, and what is this about everyone looking for a god? I don't look for a religion with god - I believe all religions are full of shit and mainly exist to take money from the gullible in return for warding away bogeymen and explaining their ignorance. I don't look for god in nature - I appreciate the results of natural selection in a complex system, yet I don't think this requires an artist. I certainly don't look for god in science - I look for evidence to explain the world by making testable predictions in the hope that they will make the world a better place.
I don't think the universe requires a god - currently I believe that our universe came into being when two three D membranes collided in 11-D space creating all matter and energy in the universe at a single point from where it began accelerating outward, I believe that quantum mechanics and chaos caused this matter to form temporary (in the timeframe of the universe) patterns in the form of stars and galaxies and planets. I believe that on at least one of these planets billions of years later certain chemicals reacted in a special way creating an expanding, self-sustaining reaction in the form of single celled organisms, and that over time mutations occurred and ones that changed the organisms for the better were preserved, eventually leading to myself. I will believe this until someone presents to me testable evidence showing an alternative theory to be correct.
Oh, and for the record "I don't understand how...." isn't evidence. It is incredibly presumptuous to assume yourself the peak of human knowledge - to assume that because *today* nobody can explain complexity or the big bang to your satisfaction that nobody *ever* will do this... is just stupid.
And how do you know you are the parent? Maybe god is the sandbox (putting limits on what you may understand and discouraging exploration outside) and the unlimited knowledge and betterment of science is the beach. In fact I'd argue that is probably the case, seeing as humanity is coming from a history of religion and finally those who understand the world are beginning to grow in number. From childhood into adulthood and so far only a few early bloomers have hit puberty. I hope you start to grow up soon, though I fear it may be too late for most people alive today - they will die never having known there was a world outside their little box.
The problem is fuel. Our fission fuel is very limited, if we went 100% fusion we wouldn't be much better off then staying with oil and coal as far as how long we last is concerned. Fusion fuel is more abundant in our solar system, but even that is limited.
The sun, on the other hand, will burn for another few billion years. It will burn most of its fuel (though not all) if we use what hits the earth of not. I see no reason to burn our limited nuclear fuel if we can avoid it. All domestic power can be met with solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal. Special scientific and military applications require more concentrated energy, but even that is usually only for short durations, and solar or whatever can be used to split water or make fuel to be burned in some other way for bursts of energy.
There is no reason we shouldn't save our nuclear fuel for when solar isn't enough (in deep space or whatever) since solar should meet all our needs for the foreseeable future if implemented on a wide scale.
"What I'm trying to get at, you can't stop anyone who wants to kill Bush, so maybe he should just give up and resign from the job."
Wrong. You can't stop *everyone* who wants to kill bush, assuming infinite. It is child's play to stop one person - look for the guy with the big missile launcher and arrest him before he can get a lock. Stopping anyone is easy. Stopping everyone is the challenge.
Oh, and so far the secret service has a pretty good record. One presidential death since they have been guarding presidents, and two failed attempts that got as far as shooting. Not to mention the countless other attempts they have nipped in the bud. And for our current president they seem to be doing a good job, seeing as most of the world hates bush and yet he lives on.
Because people expect them not to welcome them?
Probably because the last time I did that (/etc/x11/xorg.conf) I forgot a quotation mark and the next time I turned my computer on I got a nice friendly blue screen informing me that there was a serious error before dumping me into a terminal. Fortunately the instructions had included a line that made a backup of the correct file. Unfortunately I had no idea what the command was to rename the file from a command line.
No, I'm afraid that editing these files still has the chance of screwing everything up, even with instructions. Until they auto-backup and auto-replace the files when you screw something up (or IDK, maybe check to see if the file is valid before letting you save changes that would cause a crash? Would that be so hard?) editing those files is just as bad as editing the windows registries - not something you should do unless you're really familiar with them.
Also, I seriously want a graphical interface for the mouse. Not just "speed" and "acceleration" I want to turn off my freaking touchpad by clicking a button. I want to enable all the buttons and even change their function in a few clicks.
It is really that hard. Cloning is just copying genetic material, but changing things is much harder. Small things that already vary are fairly easy to change. You have a flower that can be red or white? It isn't that hard to find the difference between the two and change that area further to make a new color. But there is no line of DNA that says "edible" that you can change. You have to change individual proteins and such. You can't copy another fruit's skin either, since there isn't a discrete section of DNA referring to "skin." Skin also has quite a bit to do with how a fruit grows...
Changing the size might be easier (though still not *that* easy if you don't want it to just stop growing before it's ripe), but with how thick a watermelon's skin is that would be kinda silly.
In the end changing the skin would certainly be possible, but it would be much harder - you'd almost certainly have to modify quite a few genes and you'd probably have to try dozens of combinations that *did* change the skin before you found one that didn't also change the already edible part or stall up development. Then you have to ask - how much *more* would you really be willing to pay for a thin skinned watermelon? Would it be enough to cover the R&D that only has a chance of success, and the added cost of growing the new watermelons, which would certainly require different harvesting and shipping mechanisms since they don't have a protective shell? What about the fact that it would be easier for them to be destroyed by bugs?
Changing the skin from big and hard to soft and edible sounds nice, but it may be more trouble then it is worth. Not to mention trying to make it taste good even after it is edible...
Possibly the best I've ever seen. Not as a source for a research paper, but for background knowledge. Someone mentioned "eugenics" in one of my classes and I realized I wasn't really sure what it was. Sure, I could use a dictionary, but wikipedia gives a bit more useful detail.
Just put "wikipedia doesn't count as a source" on research paper prompts (which you'll have to do anyway, because believe it or not a couple of the students may use the internet at home!) and I'd go so far as to encourage use of wikipedia to learn about things you don't know much about. Hell, you could probably say "encyclopedias don't count as sources" (something many of my highschool teachers have said) if you don't want to bring attention to wikipedia.
But seriously I can understand blocking myspace and facebook, which are social networking tools, at a school... 99.9% of use wouldn't have anything to do with learning. For the person who is doing a project on "social networking" they can do research at home or even get special permission from the school... use a teacher's account if your IT department can't be bothered with it. (The IT dept at my school was one person for the entire county and she would have done it if our school blocked anything but porn. It would take a few days but she would do it). Wikipedia on the other hand is an unorthodox encyclopedia. It exists for spreading knowledge. To block it at a school citing educational reasons would be stupid. (no offense)
Of course a big corporation can buy cool! The only question is who you pay. The answer is "your consumers," not "your stockholders." Spend money making an innovative product and go out of your way to be helpful instead of *trying* to make a cool product and going out of your way to cut costs and max profits... and you have a good chance at being "cool."
Of course, it is kinda hard for a big corporation to survive while thinking of its consumers wants over the bottom line, but then nobody said it was easy to be cool.
Of course, you could try to buy something that is already cool (google buying youtube and such) but that doesn't make *you* cool... you could brand your logo everywhere and/or try to change something so that it is "you" instead of "the thing you bought" that is "cool" but more likely you'll ruin a perfectly good thing and people will think you even less "cool."
Bah. I get the feeling I'm going to be making that switch fairly soon. As soon as feisty comes out I'm going to wipe my linux partition (I've screwed something up on the graphics end and I've decided to let it slide for a few months).
My main problem right now is trying to get 3D acceleration working for my laptop video card so I can run modern games under wine... "glxinfo | grep rendering" returned "direct rendering: No" so I tried to fix it and ended up with a string of 5-6 errors instead of the desired "direct rendering: Yes" and honestly I'm not going to stop using windows until I can get that working. Here's to hoping I don't screw up again on feisty...
The issue is that "is the world round" is testable. Try to walk around it, or look at it from space or something and anyone can clearly see that the world is in fact not flat. How do you test "global warming is caused by humans"? You'd have to take a pre-industrial world and not allow the industrial revolution to happen, and then measure temperatures anyway for a few hundred years. Obviously we can't do that.
Perhaps a more apt comparison would be "the world is round because of X mechanism" where X is how a planet forms (say... mutual gravity between dust particles). To back this up you look at one big asteroid in the kupier belt through a telescope, and you throw some rocks at each other in a lab and find that they do sometimes stick. Now someone comes along and says... "well, I think that maybe the world is round because of Y mechanism" where X is only a tiny part of Y (say... maybe something about orbits around stars draws the dust to narrow bands, and only then does mutual gravity become important). Naturally the correct thing to do would be to do your best to test Y as well (you can't really test X or Y, since you don't have a huge cloud of gas/dust and billions of years), and then after of years of debate and small experiments people would accept one or the other method as probably correct.
That is much closer to the climate change debate. The fact that the globe *is* warming is as indisputable as the fact that the world is round. The cause is much less certain. CO2 in the air is proven to influence temperature in small experiments and theoretical math, and we've observed it being correlated with temperature via ice core samples. The question is whether increasing CO2 is responsible for a significant part of the increasing global temperatures, or if changes in cloud patterns and cyclic changes in the sun and/or earth make up 99% of it. And rather then debating openly and testing both sides, anyone who disagrees with fossil-fuel caused warming is labeled an oil shill or denied funding (except from oil companies, of course... and obviously you can't take that money).
I personally believe that humans probably have a significant influence on global warming and that we should do what we can to reduce carbon emissions. I really can't get behind global warming groups and such, however, because I really don't believe good scientific practices are being carried out - there is too much downright dismissal of opposing theories and too many wild accusations flying around - I can't really be satisfied with the current explanation. Maybe forces outside man's control will cause global warming even if we cap carbon emissions, or even bring industrial carbon down to zero. Maybe our money would be better spent preparing for inevitable change, or doing something fancy with mirrors in space, then on converting to solar ASAP (obviously we'll run out of oil and coal eventually). I really doubt it, but unless it is open to debate I just can't discount it.
Why, why was it on two pages! There is *no* reason! Even dialup can handle all the text of the article on one page without trouble. The only reason is to repeat the ads.
Well to be fair you're allowed to win a few hundred grand before they kick you out. And vegas is better about breaking things... they usually just let you sweat in a back room for a while then blacklist you. Of course out of the country is a different matter. Also, they have those high roller sweets for a reason... not *everyone* loses, especially if you go high stakes and fewer games. They try to convince you to either spend the money at the hotel or stay the next day and lose even more then you've won.
But you have a point... someone suspected of counting cards, who is just making bets based on information everyone can see is treated pretty much the same as someone who slips a thousand dollar chip under their bet of one dollar after they're sure they've won.
The Outer Space Treaty says no.... but will that really hold when people start trying to develop commercial interests outside earth? It doesn't deal with private industry very well, pretty much saying their gov't is responsible for them.
Moreover I have to assume that eventually people will actually begin to *live* on mars. First just to work, sending money back, but eventually bringing families over and having kids and such... and at that point they'll start thinking about making a new country. And then what... as a country outside earth would they have a right to have a military presence, something forbidden to countries who signed the outer space treaty?
Basically I'm saying that someday it'll fail, the only question is how soon. Legally we can withdraw from it with one year warning, which is plenty of time to still be first to mars by decades, probably.
They went to the moon, picked up some rocks and came back. Today they want to go there with the goal of surveying for a permanent base, which they'll build and go to with the same technology. They pretty much want to check out a few good places, and get to building. Apollo couldn't have done "start building" no matter how hard it tried. Then we also want to use the same rocket and main vehicle (though a different lander) to do the same thing on mars... another feat beyond apollo by orders of magnitude.
Apollo was a shot in the dark. They didn't have the technology to do things reliably... there was a human layer with a good chance of failure in nearly every operation, and if they had kept going they would have started paying for that. Today we can land (at forces a human can survive) and orbit by remote control, with nobody's hands on the stick. But that takes years of programing and testing instead of years of practice. Yes, it seems a little wrong but despite the reused tech we still have a pile of work ahead of us... and this time an incident like apollo 13 would probably shut down the program for years instead of causing a celebration.
If NASA got a mandate to return in 10 years and start rebuilding they could probably do it (given twice as much money as they get today and minimal other commitments). But it would burn more total money and not be as safe, and we just don't need to go *that* badly. We still need to go but we have, it seems, more pressing concerns here on earth.
And this is where the resources on the moon come in handy. If you could actually mine the needed metals and maybe even fuel (He3 as fuel is a long way off but not impossible) on the moon, build the craft on the moon, and *then* launch to mars, you'd be far better off then anything built on earth as far as launch costs go.
I personally doubt that will be viable for a while, but thinking long term moon launches will certainly be a "reason."
All the same, I'm personally of the opinion that mars would make better practice for the moon then the other way around. The actual exercise of getting to the moon, landing, and returning is about all that would be useful that we couldn't do in earth orbit (or in the case of biosphere *on* the earth) easier. Also mars is far more useful in and of itself (instead of just practice for something else) then the moon is in the near future. Add to that it isn't really more technically difficult to get to mars, besides transit time, and I think it would make a better first target.
So why the moon first? Because we're afraid that if we don't someone else will, and before we can get to mars (because lets face it that'll add a few years of checking calculations). That and going to the moon will probably take less money in new research, and if something goes wrong we at least have a chance of fixing it (see apollo 13... much harder to do with a 14 minute delay). Once we gain confidence (and public support with the great new images for the conspiracy theorists to compare to the originals... because lets face it one of the things to do on the moon is to reproduce the original photos with old cameras to explain why some things happen) people won't think mars is too much. And I'm willing to wait 15 years to go to mars if it means we'll do it right.
OK, so we shouldn't be testing things that could end up with a grey goo on the moon any more then on earth. We shouldn't try to build a bomb that could crack a world. But it really takes an effort to destroy a big rock in space in any meaningful way. What about experiments with bacteria and viruses that could (if we mess up *and* they escape) could kill everyone, or fusion power or exotic elements and crap like that? What if you wanted to use a virus to kill cancer but you weren't sure if it could easily mutate and kill regular cells as well. A nice place like the moon could prevent accidental genocide while you did some long term tests.
The nice thing about the moon is that if accidentally release a huge cloud of radiation we just get a green moon instead of a black moon when it isn't lit by the sun, whereas on earth we would have hundreds of miles of radioactive wasteland that could otherwise be a nice place to live. I mean it would still kinda suck long term if we teraformed the moon (in the long term), but it would still not be nearly as bad as on earth.