Not sure about that: the Tsar Bomba had it's yield halved by replacing the third stage with lead rather than uranium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_bomba. So the most powerful bomb ever would have got over half of it's power from fission. Of course as it was they didn't utilize a 3rd stage and so it got 97% of its power from fusion, but if they could have put up with the fallout then most of the bang would be fission based.
If you ask me if there is a god I would reply No. If I replied 'there may be one, there may be many I don't know' then in my definition that would make me agnostic
To rehash an old argument if you asked me if there were a teapot in orbit around Mars I would say no there isn't (actually I'd say you were a bloody silly sod first for asking such a stupid question). However if undeniable proof of one turned up then I would be astonished and somewhat baffled but I would let the evidence speak for itself. That does not make me Mars-teapot agnostic...
I've heard this argument many times, but in my heart I don't believe it - I must be missing something. Granted this is oversimplifying the problem but: An adsl modem costs me approx £100. Assuming that they telco buys in bulk and has multi line boxes (which will reduce the cost per line) but that they will buy at the leading edge of design then I'll assume their modem costs about the same as mine. In the UK at least the phone lines that constitude the bulk of investment were paid off years ago as part of the phone service so there's no incremental cost of the line there. Therefore the cost to telco of providing me with a broadband connection is £100 one off cost + electric for their modem + the cost of their bulk data line. I don't buy that their bulk data line should be much more expensive though per byte than the connection to my house because we're always being told that it's the last copper mile that is expensive and even if that is a lie by the telcos then they would charge for connection by the byte not by the connection. With that assumption in mind I'll assume £100 of capex per line for the back haul link. This means the cost of providing a broadband line is a one off £200 cost per line + monthly electric. I've had ADSL now for nearly a decade so at approx £24 a month then either I've used £2500 worth of electric in 10 years or my assumptions are very wrong and I've missed something in my calculations.
Maybe they had a one off cost in 2000 for installing fibre to all of their exchanges - but that shouldn't have been that expensive because they could have just pulled the fibre through their existing runs that they used to connect their exchanges together.
Ah, but what about shortly where it'll be fibre to the cabinet. Same situation surely? The exchange already has a conduit from the exchange to the cabinet for the copper lines, so just pull some fibre through that conduit. The modem they need to install in the cabinet cannot be more expensive than the one I have to install at my house, so the cost again is £100 per line, some shared fibre and an ethernet hub. And that technology they'll be able to charge me £30 a month for the next 10 years?
You know I'm fed up of this every atheist has blind faith thing... So if I state that I don't believe in any god then am I an atheist? This being different from saying I believe there is no god. The second statement requires faith, the first does not. I'm not saying there isn't one, just that I see no evidence for one therefore it doesn't make a point of my world view. Is lack of belief a belief? (except the belief in logical conjecture based upon repeatable experiment and evidence)
I don't claim to be agnostic because that has connotations of god potentially being allowed in my current world view, which isn't the case. Can't an atheist be someone who just doesn't believe in god, as opposed to believes that there is no god.
I think historically - say middle ages - then someone would have to say they believed there wasn't a god because there wasn't a good explanation for many natural phenomenon. These days so many phenomenon are explained then it is more applicable to be able to say I don't believe in any god (because there is no evidence/need for one). So there is, for me, no faith needed that there is no god, just like there is no faith needed that there is no invisible pink unicorn that makes sure that gravity happens. Be careful what you ascribe to faith, faith is a concept held in lack of evidence. There is sufficient evidence for me that no god is needed and that my world view can be almost completely described as a lack of faith in pretty much anything, but a marvel and wonder at everything.
While I appreciate your sentiment, are you sure? Why do you need a detailed requirements list other than "we'll pay up to $100 Million for each person you can launch to the ISS with a minimum of 10 people per year, and a maximum of 50. We will use the lowest cost provider available at the time of booking. Capacity must be first demonstrated by the company's CEO delivered to the ISS." Does it matter if it is one person per capsule or ten, does it matter if it takes one day to get there or twenty provided that they are delivered alive and for the agreed price?
You bring up cost: Light peak requires a fibre optic connection - so you need multiple chips to do an interface, whereas with usb3 the same chip that is your usb logic can also be your usb phy, so it will be the technologically cheaper solution. So for use in mobile devices it will be cheaper to use usb3 because of the lower part count and smaller space requirements. This is ignoring licensing issues of course.
What if you have 2 hard drives connected to a hub? Backing up from a pen drive to an external drive would I thought be a common use case of bulk data transfer.Or from video camera to my mass storage device. As soon as you allow hubs and caches and protocol overhead and software inefficiencies then a connection significantly faster than the media makes a lot of sense
The problem is, your argument would result in a remarkably lower biodiversity than we see at present - there is not "one form only" that is suited for living in a forest, or living in the ocean. Numerous species with varying degrees of variation can all be perfectly well suited for their environmental conditions - evolution is not a deterministic process - selection pressures work on the mutations and variations that arise in a population, there is not some end blueprint that they're working towards.
I'm not implying that there is some true blueprint that we are evolving towards, but one need only look at current life on earth to suggest that a 6 fingered or tailed human evolving from rhodesiensis is very unlikely since they had neither. I guess what I was getting at is that in the situation I posted humans would probably be almost identical if not completely genetically compatible with modern humans because the progenitor species would be identical in both cases. Now if I had gone back and killed the first mammal, then I'm reasonably certain the slight differences would make it unlikely that humans would have ended up evolving exactly the same; but I believe that whatever sentient tool using techno-sapien that eventually evolved would be basically 4 limbed, 2 arms, vertebrate because that is what the source material was and about the only thing likely to fill the niche that we have carved for ourselves. However I don't think that they would be genetically compatible with us and I'd be astonished if they had reached the same level of development in the same amount of time. Maybe they would have got here sooner or later, but they'd probably be different.
I think for me this is the sort of thing that experiment would help to answer, try some artificial evolution of fruit flies and see if you do get the same evolutionary jumps happening twice. Given that parallel evolution of complex things such as eyes is accepted, I find it hard to believe (I admit a lot of this is belief) that something as simple as "why bother with chlorophyll when I can steal the vital sugars from my colleague over there" is such a massive leap. But I'm not a biologist so I'm talking from complete ignorance here so I'll shut up...
As I understand it a part of this is the assumption that animal life would be improbable to evolve twice. I always like to question assumptions - so let me take a different example and come back to the article shortly: A very quick bit of research says that homo sapiens evolved from Homo rhodesiensis (common ancestor with Neanderthals). Now suppose I go back in time and kill off the first Homo Sapien that evolved, or at least exterminated any tribes that showed those leanings. I would be astonished that in that situation provided rhodesiensis still survived and the environment remained relatively similar if Homo Sapiens didn't evolve again - that is, whatever evolutionary pressure pushed rhodesiensis into being more sapiens-like if it was still around should cause a similar evolutionary outcome.
Back to the original problem, whatever species animal life evolved from, provided it - or at least a sufficiently similar descendant - survived snowball earth, then why isn't it highly probable that once conditions returned that a similar creature could re-evolve in a similar manner. Therefore the question then becomes not "How could this early animal survive snowball earth, and what does that mean" but any of "What was its progenitor like to be able to survive", or "Once plant lifeforms reach a certain stage is it almost certain that animals will evolve" etc
If the curve is one sharpness, and I am able to reduce that by apexing the turn, I can either go around it faster, or I can go around it with less lateral Gs
Agreed, the point I failed to make sufficiently was that what also applies to cars is that you should be choosing your road position both for comfort and safety. Part of that is seeing, part of that is being seen. Apexing interferes with both these safety factors both for cars and motorbikes.
Apexing doesn't mean going as fast as possible.
Agreed, but most people seek both speed and safety; so I was assuming that you were chasing the maximum speed with a given comfort level - that was certainly the implication I got from your post, because it was about maximising comfort for a given speed. - whereas I was trying to mention that road position could affect safety quite significantly.
As for your other comments about how I phrased my example, I was trying to give examples that I could directly talk about because I am not 100% certain of how things work in the states having never visited there. It seemed more sensible to state that than to assume everyone reading this would have your frame of reference and instead just state mine.
The use of knowing esoterica of sports is that the vast majority of the population does, so it leaves me a bit of a social outcast. That said the vast majority of the population seems to like American Idol and soaps so...
As for hitting the apex of a corner (Yes I'm going to be modded as offtopic here, but this is a pet thing of mine): {puts on IAM motorcycling hat} Hitting the apex of a corner is the fastest/lowest G force way of getting around a corner. It is very suited to use on a racetrack but completely unsuited to use on the road. In England here so we drive on LHS of the road, but on a left hand corner you want to be towards the centre of the road to get a better view around the corner. If you apex the turn you have to go slower to give yourself the necessary braking distance for any obstacle that may be around the corner. The same applies to a right hand corner, if you were near the apex there then you're not only losing visibility but you're making yourself very susceptible to people who overshoot the corner, and therefore putting yourself right in their path. Now I know this is written from a motorcycle point of view, but the same applies to cars; your speed should be limited not by what your car is capable of, but what you can see and your margins for error (stopping distances, distance between you and opposing traffic etc); apex-ing a turn minimises these...
Is there any reason they couldn't raid the Extended universe? I remember the Thrawn trilogy being quite good and if i remember correctly wasn't there something about extra galactic invaders or something. I'm sure there's plenty of material there if they wanted to use it. Any ideas why they don't?
Then again, if I built a Death Star and some asshole blew it up by dropping a bomb down a tiny little hole that leads to the core, I probably wouldn't build another one with a hole leading to the core that's big enough to fly the Millenium Falcon through.
You did notice they hadn't finished building that death star?
I always justified that to myself as "we don't know enough about the force to comment on what was unbalanced". We can assume that the Jedi were referring to another way in which the force was currently unbalanced or turbulent. Perhaps the force users struggled to work with the force because of the slightly turbulent nature of the force as it is derived from all life. So they thought balance to the force referred to some aspect of making the force more manageable and less turbulent. I'm guessing like crazy, but this is a problem with the writing in the prequels. If we had been given more info on what was unbalanced in the force we could have understood how the Jedi had been tricked into thinking that the chosen one would fix another problem. As it was the half thought through plot left us cold. So much potential wasted by small bits of sloppy writing. I still believe that the PM was potentially a very clever film. The idea that "oh it's just about a pointless trade dispute" while underneath Chancellor Palatine gets his first grip on power and the seeds of the foundation of the empire are sown was very clever because so many people didn't see it; yes that was the entire point, a pointless trade dispute was how the empire started and the lesson there was lost because of second rate writing. Grumble...
While I agree with everything you say there, I chose my examples very carefully and while my expectation may be slightly unrealistic i think it is a responsibility of engineers (myself included) to aim for that in the things we build. Fundamentally if the average person cannot use a system designed to be used by the average user then I have to blame the designer. Take my bank example, many people who were unaware of the finer details of how the finance system works were bit by sub prime mortgages. I'm fairly sure on a daily basis car owners are ripped off by those who run car maintenance businesses. Even people who know what they're talking about can be mistaken and mislead by the electronics in modern cars. And the less I say about some software engineers and how they abuse, misuse and underutilise the underlying hardware the better.
I think what I'm getting at is that all this seems very important and obvious to us as geeks, but there are many other things in life that should be obvious and are fundamental to modern life, but that I don't understand. Take the offside rule in football for example, much to the annoyance of my fiancée I haven't a clue about it and she would treat that as something as basic as we treat ionizing radiation. Do I really care? Not really, so I don't bother to fix that missing piece of knowledge. I think the same applies to none geeks and even the more basic parts of online security. For me it's been a lesson learned in life that what is important and fundamental to me is not so to everyone and one of the best things to do is accept that and work out how we can make the world a better place knowing that. I would also say that blaming the other person rarely helps, so what can we do as geeks and engineers to improve the situation from our side.
I think the reason I blame facebook is twofold. First they keep changing things, so it's hard for a newbie to get used to what is a legitimate intrusion because it's out of the ordinary, or just facebook playing with their interface. To use your example, imagine day 1 you didn't dial your phone you always asked to speak to the operator. Then day 3 you had to dial the number yourself. Then by day 5 adverts had started to appear whenever you dialled an 0800 number, then by day 6 instead of dialling first then advert, you had to wait for the advert then dial. If someone was used to this before the phone call, then if one day you start to get the situation you describe above I don't think you'd be that surprised by the Jamaica trip... Yes I know we'd baulk if the phone service was like this, but that to me begs the question of why we accept it from the web.
The second beef I have with facebook is their all or nothing security model for applications. If they'd just have even the most basic security layering then I think a lot of these problems would be less worrysome. If you could set your preferences to allow what you allowed application to have access to then I think many of these problems wouldn't be half as bad. I suspect the reason they don't do this is because their code base has grown quite spaghetti-like with the evolution path they have had and so it is currently too difficult to do. I can't see any other reason why they wouldn't do it. I think however the combination of these two failings of facebook means that the novice user is used to weird stuff changing and asking for things he doesn't understand and there is no way for an experienced friend to lock down the system so it is safe. Where is the facebook equivalent of training wheels or the rifle range? I see your point that people should have some basic concepts of common sense, but there's nothing common about it and where are you suggesting these people learn these basic rules?
I think that's harsh to most users. In this day and age we expect to be able to do most things without understanding the fundamentals that they are built on. How many people who use a bank/have a mortgage have a degree in economics and accounting? How many people who drive a car can strip the engine down to component parts and successfully rebuild it. How many software engineers can architect a modern CPU right down to the logic synthesis and asic layout complete with timing closure and dealing with sub micron silicon effects such as crosstalk and antenna diodes. You shouldn't need to have the underlying structural knowledge of everything in order to accomplish common everyday tasks. Tools for staying in touch with friends are tools to help a common everyday task.
As long as facebook aims itself at novices to the web then it should be usable by newbies. Being a clueless novice is not a crime, we've all been there. Facebook is sold to many as one of the reasons to start going on the web, but yet is one of the most dangerous places for new people to play about with, I blame those who run facebook not the users. So yes I am on facebook because it is a great place to tag photos of people and because almost all my friends are on it so it's a good way keep up with people who you don't see as often as you'd like. I don't think that means that I am about to buy a pet rock because I am on facebook to be tagged in photos, get invited to parties, be reminded of birthdays, and be informed that my old friend from Uni has just had a baby.
Hang on so email is worse than a letter because it means you have put in less work. Interesting; but you try going around to your MPs house and giving him your opinions in person with all the extra effort that requires and suddenly they're talking about restraining orders and violation of privacy. There's no pleasing some people;-)
In all seriousness, it is the MP's job to represent the views of their constituents. I would have thought any MP who was interested in this job as it is rather than a meal ticket or a career path would have welcomed something that made his job more effective. This is assuming of course the website is playing fair and effectively providing a direct petition. It does take more effort to send an email than it does to sign a petition so I would have thought that that should be more effective/representative than a similarly sized pressure group that you describe because everyone has to take an active role in the email rather than simply be a counted member of a group.
- Imagine that an MP sets up an open session with his constituents, maybe in a local town hall which takes 200 people. - His intention is to get questions from members of the public and answer the as best as he can, maybe picking up some of the cases he hears about and checking int them further. - During the whole session, there is a group of 10 people which came in together and spend the whole time shouting out loud how they want something specific done, drowning everybody else during the whole session and pretty much not letting anybody else be heard.
I think your last point is the problem with the metaphor. I would agree that shouting out the whole time would be very wrong, but that this isn't what is happening here, what is happening here is you have a few people who feel strongly about an issue (or simply have too much free time) have organised so that as many people as possible come to this meeting and raise their views at the meeting. The email equivalent of shouting others down would be to make sure that others couldn't be heard, so if for example they set up a script to constantly email the MP then I would agree that is very wrong, but encouraging people to contact their MP and raise the issue with him and to even go so far as to provide a method to do this is not spamming, well no more than the old technique of collecting signatures for petitions, or let's say going around door to door to people's houses indiscriminately and trying to convince them to vote for you.
As long as it's only the constituents of the MP who write to him about the issue, or join in the campaign to contact him, who cares what motivates them as long as they genuinely feel that way about the issue. How is a lobby group that tries to organise people together to complain (for example) about the Iraq war worse than a tobacco lobby group (except that the lobby group probably takes the MP out to an all expenses lunch). AFAICT the main job of an MP is to work out what the views of his electorate are and then represent those views in the debate sessions of parliament. Now if you want to organise a pressure group a standard email that is easy to filter is probably a boon because then the MP can easily say 40% of my electorate cared enough about this issue, to at least go online, fill out their details an let him know their thoughts, whereas only 20% objected to the issue enough to do the same. Even if this amounts to hundreds of thousands of emails then that is quickly dealt with by even the most trivial email filters and he has very useful information about how to do his job well. All this of course supposes that the MP realises that he works for the electorate, which in my experience is not as common as it should be.
Tempted to argue with the first bit, but: "pump billions of dollars into you to get your economy back up and running when it's over." Funny I seem to remember that it was only a few years ago the UK finished paying back all the money it borrowed from the US to pay for all the things that were shipped over during the WWII. This was after selling off large chunks of its reserves that it held too. I'm not saying the US didn't help greatly, but as I understand history it was paid for a lot/most of its efforts.
You could argue that founding America didn't really work out that well for the founding country. They invest all that money and people in getting it started and then the ungrateful sods go and fight a war of independence against you just as soon as they start to generate meaningful tax revenue to recoop your investment. Bloody ungrateful sods. You think space won't be any different? Why should a government invest money in getting people into space when they won't be able to tax them, or if they do (outland revenue) then the buggers just declare a war of independence on you and they have the high ground. Nope governments are not the way to space, corporations however...
As far as I'm aware nuclear thermal is a bad idea for a take off engine, it's comparatively low thrust even if it is high(er) ISP. Apart from Gas Cored rockets (which as you say are still science fiction at the moment) I've not seen a serious suggestion that Nuclear be used for takeof from earth (Nuclear salt rockets though for Mars takeoff could be interesting:-))
As I understand it where a Nuclear Thermal is good is where you need moderate thrust but for a long time, so they make a good 2nd stage engine or a great 3rd stage engine. The proposal as i understood it was to develop both nuclear reactors to supply power for ion engines and to develop nuclear thermal for the crew stage. As I understood the article this then meant you had 2 types of tugs, one ion engine based, and one nuclear thermal based. The first was used to get cargo from Earth to Mars using the least propellant, the second got your crew to Mars as quickly as possibly but at a lower fuel efficiency. As far as I was aware VASIMR is more theoretical than the straight Nuclear Thermal proposed here, so while a great design was a higher risk approach. Also because of it's multimode operation it was much harder to flight qualify and heavier so possibly not the best choice for the crew insertion mission.
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Not sure about that: the Tsar Bomba had it's yield halved by replacing the third stage with lead rather than uranium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_bomba. So the most powerful bomb ever would have got over half of it's power from fission. Of course as it was they didn't utilize a 3rd stage and so it got 97% of its power from fusion, but if they could have put up with the fallout then most of the bang would be fission based.
To be fair, I thought so far more scientists had been sent into orbit than uber-rich people
If you ask me if there is a god I would reply No. If I replied 'there may be one, there may be many I don't know' then in my definition that would make me agnostic
To rehash an old argument if you asked me if there were a teapot in orbit around Mars I would say no there isn't (actually I'd say you were a bloody silly sod first for asking such a stupid question). However if undeniable proof of one turned up then I would be astonished and somewhat baffled but I would let the evidence speak for itself. That does not make me Mars-teapot agnostic...
I've heard this argument many times, but in my heart I don't believe it - I must be missing something.
Granted this is oversimplifying the problem but:
An adsl modem costs me approx £100. Assuming that they telco buys in bulk and has multi line boxes (which will reduce the cost per line) but that they will buy at the leading edge of design then I'll assume their modem costs about the same as mine. In the UK at least the phone lines that constitude the bulk of investment were paid off years ago as part of the phone service so there's no incremental cost of the line there. Therefore the cost to telco of providing me with a broadband connection is £100 one off cost + electric for their modem + the cost of their bulk data line.
I don't buy that their bulk data line should be much more expensive though per byte than the connection to my house because we're always being told that it's the last copper mile that is expensive and even if that is a lie by the telcos then they would charge for connection by the byte not by the connection. With that assumption in mind I'll assume £100 of capex per line for the back haul link.
This means the cost of providing a broadband line is a one off £200 cost per line + monthly electric. I've had ADSL now for nearly a decade so at approx £24 a month then either I've used £2500 worth of electric in 10 years or my assumptions are very wrong and I've missed something in my calculations.
Maybe they had a one off cost in 2000 for installing fibre to all of their exchanges - but that shouldn't have been that expensive because they could have just pulled the fibre through their existing runs that they used to connect their exchanges together.
Ah, but what about shortly where it'll be fibre to the cabinet. Same situation surely? The exchange already has a conduit from the exchange to the cabinet for the copper lines, so just pull some fibre through that conduit. The modem they need to install in the cabinet cannot be more expensive than the one I have to install at my house, so the cost again is £100 per line, some shared fibre and an ethernet hub. And that technology they'll be able to charge me £30 a month for the next 10 years?
I just don't get it.
You know I'm fed up of this every atheist has blind faith thing...
So if I state that I don't believe in any god then am I an atheist? This being different from saying I believe there is no god. The second statement requires faith, the first does not. I'm not saying there isn't one, just that I see no evidence for one therefore it doesn't make a point of my world view.
Is lack of belief a belief? (except the belief in logical conjecture based upon repeatable experiment and evidence)
I don't claim to be agnostic because that has connotations of god potentially being allowed in my current world view, which isn't the case. Can't an atheist be someone who just doesn't believe in god, as opposed to believes that there is no god.
I think historically - say middle ages - then someone would have to say they believed there wasn't a god because there wasn't a good explanation for many natural phenomenon. These days so many phenomenon are explained then it is more applicable to be able to say I don't believe in any god (because there is no evidence/need for one).
So there is, for me, no faith needed that there is no god, just like there is no faith needed that there is no invisible pink unicorn that makes sure that gravity happens. Be careful what you ascribe to faith, faith is a concept held in lack of evidence. There is sufficient evidence for me that no god is needed and that my world view can be almost completely described as a lack of faith in pretty much anything, but a marvel and wonder at everything.
While I appreciate your sentiment, are you sure?
Why do you need a detailed requirements list other than "we'll pay up to $100 Million for each person you can launch to the ISS with a minimum of 10 people per year, and a maximum of 50. We will use the lowest cost provider available at the time of booking. Capacity must be first demonstrated by the company's CEO delivered to the ISS."
Does it matter if it is one person per capsule or ten, does it matter if it takes one day to get there or twenty provided that they are delivered alive and for the agreed price?
You bring up cost:
Light peak requires a fibre optic connection - so you need multiple chips to do an interface, whereas with usb3 the same chip that is your usb logic can also be your usb phy, so it will be the technologically cheaper solution.
So for use in mobile devices it will be cheaper to use usb3 because of the lower part count and smaller space requirements.
This is ignoring licensing issues of course.
What if you have 2 hard drives connected to a hub?
Backing up from a pen drive to an external drive would I thought be a common use case of bulk data transfer.Or from video camera to my mass storage device.
As soon as you allow hubs and caches and protocol overhead and software inefficiencies then a connection significantly faster than the media makes a lot of sense
I'm not implying that there is some true blueprint that we are evolving towards, but one need only look at current life on earth to suggest that a 6 fingered or tailed human evolving from rhodesiensis is very unlikely since they had neither.
I guess what I was getting at is that in the situation I posted humans would probably be almost identical if not completely genetically compatible with modern humans because the progenitor species would be identical in both cases. Now if I had gone back and killed the first mammal, then I'm reasonably certain the slight differences would make it unlikely that humans would have ended up evolving exactly the same; but I believe that whatever sentient tool using techno-sapien that eventually evolved would be basically 4 limbed, 2 arms, vertebrate because that is what the source material was and about the only thing likely to fill the niche that we have carved for ourselves. However I don't think that they would be genetically compatible with us and I'd be astonished if they had reached the same level of development in the same amount of time. Maybe they would have got here sooner or later, but they'd probably be different.
I think for me this is the sort of thing that experiment would help to answer, try some artificial evolution of fruit flies and see if you do get the same evolutionary jumps happening twice. Given that parallel evolution of complex things such as eyes is accepted, I find it hard to believe (I admit a lot of this is belief) that something as simple as "why bother with chlorophyll when I can steal the vital sugars from my colleague over there" is such a massive leap.
But I'm not a biologist so I'm talking from complete ignorance here so I'll shut up...
As I understand it a part of this is the assumption that animal life would be improbable to evolve twice. I always like to question assumptions - so let me take a different example and come back to the article shortly:
A very quick bit of research says that homo sapiens evolved from Homo rhodesiensis (common ancestor with Neanderthals). Now suppose I go back in time and kill off the first Homo Sapien that evolved, or at least exterminated any tribes that showed those leanings.
I would be astonished that in that situation provided rhodesiensis still survived and the environment remained relatively similar if Homo Sapiens didn't evolve again - that is, whatever evolutionary pressure pushed rhodesiensis into being more sapiens-like if it was still around should cause a similar evolutionary outcome.
Back to the original problem, whatever species animal life evolved from, provided it - or at least a sufficiently similar descendant - survived snowball earth, then why isn't it highly probable that once conditions returned that a similar creature could re-evolve in a similar manner.
Therefore the question then becomes not "How could this early animal survive snowball earth, and what does that mean" but any of "What was its progenitor like to be able to survive", or "Once plant lifeforms reach a certain stage is it almost certain that animals will evolve" etc
Dude, chill!
If the curve is one sharpness, and I am able to reduce that by apexing the turn, I can either go around it faster, or I can go around it with less lateral Gs
Agreed, the point I failed to make sufficiently was that what also applies to cars is that you should be choosing your road position both for comfort and safety. Part of that is seeing, part of that is being seen. Apexing interferes with both these safety factors both for cars and motorbikes.
Apexing doesn't mean going as fast as possible.
Agreed, but most people seek both speed and safety; so I was assuming that you were chasing the maximum speed with a given comfort level - that was certainly the implication I got from your post, because it was about maximising comfort for a given speed. - whereas I was trying to mention that road position could affect safety quite significantly.
As for your other comments about how I phrased my example, I was trying to give examples that I could directly talk about because I am not 100% certain of how things work in the states having never visited there. It seemed more sensible to state that than to assume everyone reading this would have your frame of reference and instead just state mine.
The use of knowing esoterica of sports is that the vast majority of the population does, so it leaves me a bit of a social outcast. That said the vast majority of the population seems to like American Idol and soaps so...
As for hitting the apex of a corner (Yes I'm going to be modded as offtopic here, but this is a pet thing of mine):
{puts on IAM motorcycling hat}
Hitting the apex of a corner is the fastest/lowest G force way of getting around a corner. It is very suited to use on a racetrack but completely unsuited to use on the road. In England here so we drive on LHS of the road, but on a left hand corner you want to be towards the centre of the road to get a better view around the corner. If you apex the turn you have to go slower to give yourself the necessary braking distance for any obstacle that may be around the corner. The same applies to a right hand corner, if you were near the apex there then you're not only losing visibility but you're making yourself very susceptible to people who overshoot the corner, and therefore putting yourself right in their path.
Now I know this is written from a motorcycle point of view, but the same applies to cars; your speed should be limited not by what your car is capable of, but what you can see and your margins for error (stopping distances, distance between you and opposing traffic etc); apex-ing a turn minimises these...
Is there any reason they couldn't raid the Extended universe?
I remember the Thrawn trilogy being quite good and if i remember correctly wasn't there something about extra galactic invaders or something. I'm sure there's plenty of material there if they wanted to use it.
Any ideas why they don't?
Then again, if I built a Death Star and some asshole blew it up by dropping a bomb down a tiny little hole that leads to the core, I probably wouldn't build another one with a hole leading to the core that's big enough to fly the Millenium Falcon through.
You did notice they hadn't finished building that death star?
I always justified that to myself as "we don't know enough about the force to comment on what was unbalanced". We can assume that the Jedi were referring to another way in which the force was currently unbalanced or turbulent. Perhaps the force users struggled to work with the force because of the slightly turbulent nature of the force as it is derived from all life. So they thought balance to the force referred to some aspect of making the force more manageable and less turbulent.
I'm guessing like crazy, but this is a problem with the writing in the prequels. If we had been given more info on what was unbalanced in the force we could have understood how the Jedi had been tricked into thinking that the chosen one would fix another problem. As it was the half thought through plot left us cold.
So much potential wasted by small bits of sloppy writing. I still believe that the PM was potentially a very clever film. The idea that "oh it's just about a pointless trade dispute" while underneath Chancellor Palatine gets his first grip on power and the seeds of the foundation of the empire are sown was very clever because so many people didn't see it; yes that was the entire point, a pointless trade dispute was how the empire started and the lesson there was lost because of second rate writing.
Grumble...
While I agree with everything you say there, I chose my examples very carefully and while my expectation may be slightly unrealistic i think it is a responsibility of engineers (myself included) to aim for that in the things we build. Fundamentally if the average person cannot use a system designed to be used by the average user then I have to blame the designer.
Take my bank example, many people who were unaware of the finer details of how the finance system works were bit by sub prime mortgages.
I'm fairly sure on a daily basis car owners are ripped off by those who run car maintenance businesses. Even people who know what they're talking about can be mistaken and mislead by the electronics in modern cars.
And the less I say about some software engineers and how they abuse, misuse and underutilise the underlying hardware the better.
I think what I'm getting at is that all this seems very important and obvious to us as geeks, but there are many other things in life that should be obvious and are fundamental to modern life, but that I don't understand. Take the offside rule in football for example, much to the annoyance of my fiancée I haven't a clue about it and she would treat that as something as basic as we treat ionizing radiation. Do I really care? Not really, so I don't bother to fix that missing piece of knowledge. I think the same applies to none geeks and even the more basic parts of online security.
For me it's been a lesson learned in life that what is important and fundamental to me is not so to everyone and one of the best things to do is accept that and work out how we can make the world a better place knowing that. I would also say that blaming the other person rarely helps, so what can we do as geeks and engineers to improve the situation from our side.
I think the reason I blame facebook is twofold. First they keep changing things, so it's hard for a newbie to get used to what is a legitimate intrusion because it's out of the ordinary, or just facebook playing with their interface.
To use your example, imagine day 1 you didn't dial your phone you always asked to speak to the operator. Then day 3 you had to dial the number yourself. Then by day 5 adverts had started to appear whenever you dialled an 0800 number, then by day 6 instead of dialling first then advert, you had to wait for the advert then dial. If someone was used to this before the phone call, then if one day you start to get the situation you describe above I don't think you'd be that surprised by the Jamaica trip...
Yes I know we'd baulk if the phone service was like this, but that to me begs the question of why we accept it from the web.
The second beef I have with facebook is their all or nothing security model for applications. If they'd just have even the most basic security layering then I think a lot of these problems would be less worrysome. If you could set your preferences to allow what you allowed application to have access to then I think many of these problems wouldn't be half as bad.
I suspect the reason they don't do this is because their code base has grown quite spaghetti-like with the evolution path they have had and so it is currently too difficult to do. I can't see any other reason why they wouldn't do it.
I think however the combination of these two failings of facebook means that the novice user is used to weird stuff changing and asking for things he doesn't understand and there is no way for an experienced friend to lock down the system so it is safe. Where is the facebook equivalent of training wheels or the rifle range?
I see your point that people should have some basic concepts of common sense, but there's nothing common about it and where are you suggesting these people learn these basic rules?
and then seal it in concrete and bury it at the bottom of the nearest sea.
Even then...
I think that's harsh to most users.
In this day and age we expect to be able to do most things without understanding the fundamentals that they are built on.
How many people who use a bank/have a mortgage have a degree in economics and accounting?
How many people who drive a car can strip the engine down to component parts and successfully rebuild it.
How many software engineers can architect a modern CPU right down to the logic synthesis and asic layout complete with timing closure and dealing with sub micron silicon effects such as crosstalk and antenna diodes.
You shouldn't need to have the underlying structural knowledge of everything in order to accomplish common everyday tasks. Tools for staying in touch with friends are tools to help a common everyday task.
As long as facebook aims itself at novices to the web then it should be usable by newbies. Being a clueless novice is not a crime, we've all been there. Facebook is sold to many as one of the reasons to start going on the web, but yet is one of the most dangerous places for new people to play about with,
I blame those who run facebook not the users.
So yes I am on facebook because it is a great place to tag photos of people and because almost all my friends are on it so it's a good way keep up with people who you don't see as often as you'd like. I don't think that means that I am about to buy a pet rock because I am on facebook to be tagged in photos, get invited to parties, be reminded of birthdays, and be informed that my old friend from Uni has just had a baby.
Hang on so email is worse than a letter because it means you have put in less work. ;-)
Interesting; but you try going around to your MPs house and giving him your opinions in person with all the extra effort that requires and suddenly they're talking about restraining orders and violation of privacy.
There's no pleasing some people
In all seriousness, it is the MP's job to represent the views of their constituents. I would have thought any MP who was interested in this job as it is rather than a meal ticket or a career path would have welcomed something that made his job more effective.
This is assuming of course the website is playing fair and effectively providing a direct petition. It does take more effort to send an email than it does to sign a petition so I would have thought that that should be more effective/representative than a similarly sized pressure group that you describe because everyone has to take an active role in the email rather than simply be a counted member of a group.
- Imagine that an MP sets up an open session with his constituents, maybe in a local town hall which takes 200 people.
- His intention is to get questions from members of the public and answer the as best as he can, maybe picking up some of the cases he hears about and checking int them further.
- During the whole session, there is a group of 10 people which came in together and spend the whole time shouting out loud how they want something specific done, drowning everybody else during the whole session and pretty much not letting anybody else be heard.
I think your last point is the problem with the metaphor. I would agree that shouting out the whole time would be very wrong, but that this isn't what is happening here, what is happening here is you have a few people who feel strongly about an issue (or simply have too much free time) have organised so that as many people as possible come to this meeting and raise their views at the meeting.
The email equivalent of shouting others down would be to make sure that others couldn't be heard, so if for example they set up a script to constantly email the MP then I would agree that is very wrong, but encouraging people to contact their MP and raise the issue with him and to even go so far as to provide a method to do this is not spamming, well no more than the old technique of collecting signatures for petitions, or let's say going around door to door to people's houses indiscriminately and trying to convince them to vote for you.
As long as it's only the constituents of the MP who write to him about the issue, or join in the campaign to contact him, who cares what motivates them as long as they genuinely feel that way about the issue. How is a lobby group that tries to organise people together to complain (for example) about the Iraq war worse than a tobacco lobby group (except that the lobby group probably takes the MP out to an all expenses lunch).
AFAICT the main job of an MP is to work out what the views of his electorate are and then represent those views in the debate sessions of parliament. Now if you want to organise a pressure group a standard email that is easy to filter is probably a boon because then the MP can easily say 40% of my electorate cared enough about this issue, to at least go online, fill out their details an let him know their thoughts, whereas only 20% objected to the issue enough to do the same. Even if this amounts to hundreds of thousands of emails then that is quickly dealt with by even the most trivial email filters and he has very useful information about how to do his job well.
All this of course supposes that the MP realises that he works for the electorate, which in my experience is not as common as it should be.
Tempted to argue with the first bit, but:
"pump billions of dollars into you to get your economy back up and running when it's over."
Funny I seem to remember that it was only a few years ago the UK finished paying back all the money it borrowed from the US to pay for all the things that were shipped over during the WWII. This was after selling off large chunks of its reserves that it held too.
I'm not saying the US didn't help greatly, but as I understand history it was paid for a lot/most of its efforts.
You could argue that founding America didn't really work out that well for the founding country. They invest all that money and people in getting it started and then the ungrateful sods go and fight a war of independence against you just as soon as they start to generate meaningful tax revenue to recoop your investment.
Bloody ungrateful sods.
You think space won't be any different? Why should a government invest money in getting people into space when they won't be able to tax them, or if they do (outland revenue) then the buggers just declare a war of independence on you and they have the high ground.
Nope governments are not the way to space, corporations however...
As far as I'm aware nuclear thermal is a bad idea for a take off engine, it's comparatively low thrust even if it is high(er) ISP. Apart from Gas Cored rockets (which as you say are still science fiction at the moment) I've not seen a serious suggestion that Nuclear be used for takeof from earth (Nuclear salt rockets though for Mars takeoff could be interesting :-))
As I understand it where a Nuclear Thermal is good is where you need moderate thrust but for a long time, so they make a good 2nd stage engine or a great 3rd stage engine. The proposal as i understood it was to develop both nuclear reactors to supply power for ion engines and to develop nuclear thermal for the crew stage. As I understood the article this then meant you had 2 types of tugs, one ion engine based, and one nuclear thermal based. The first was used to get cargo from Earth to Mars using the least propellant, the second got your crew to Mars as quickly as possibly but at a lower fuel efficiency.
As far as I was aware VASIMR is more theoretical than the straight Nuclear Thermal proposed here, so while a great design was a higher risk approach. Also because of it's multimode operation it was much harder to flight qualify and heavier so possibly not the best choice for the crew insertion mission.