Great, let me challenge the existence of gravity then. Man naturally is sucked into hell and to make things more interesting the gods inserted a layer of arbitrary thickness and infinite extension called earth into the heaven/hell boundary.
I don't think so either but I'm forever puzzled about the motives of the greens.
I think, ultimately we have to make sure we understand how earth is supposed to look like and how we are going to keep it close to that.
Sometimes the greens are too averse to any human endeavour and often enough use the irrational fears people harbour, for political goals. Granted other parties do so as well, but somehow I have the impression some green groups activities are counter productive.
I can't rule out that I'm seeing it all wrong either. My greatest problem is not knowing the environmental footprint of whatever I'm doing. I sense some educational gap there, that isn't closed by political debates though.
The checks and balances are still in place and killing an irritating voice won't change anything.
The problem is that antropomorphosizing earth and nature through giving them political tools like "checks and balances" doesn't really shed any light on the real problem that not all people have access to the education/knowledge that puts them in control of how many kids they will have.
There is nothing wrong about recognizing natures limits and living accordingly I would say.
What might arrise from using his particularly unfitting words is that some people may go ahead and enforce the checks and balances before "mother nature" does it, much like your need to keep the idiot count low.
Well fed people are notoriously difficult subjects to be dragged into a revolution. So they don't just complain, they are worried about their loss of power.
Not anymore my friend, not anymore. Not since the nineties at least.
Oh and by the way:
"You and I in a little toy shop Buy a bag of balloons with the money we've got. Set them free at the break of dawn 'Til one by one, they were gone. Back at base, bugs in the software Flash the message, Something's out there. Floating in the summer sky. 99 red balloons go by."
Bugs in the software, eh? Well, they may still have them. Maybe it is still a relevant song.
Maybe near a neutron star you could find a proper spot to test this. Damn we need spaceflight - oh wait! Just getting into orbit costs you a few million whereas your big fat magnet costs what? Maybe you are better off with plain old free fall in an orbit or the vomit commet.
1. Agreed. 2. Somewhat funny, but what makes you think gay men are more discriminating (could be right though). However, they could be less discriminating because the difficulty to find a partner is higher. 3. No, there are about as many lesbians as there are gay people. Checkout NATSAL2000, I would never trust Americans about the topic.
Also it is not so much a matter of attractivity that you don't find a partner if you hide in the basement all the time.
Oh I was supposed to add more, Hmm...
4. You can't find the time to chat with either sex between arguing about the virtues of emacs vs vi and little vs big endian.
5. Personally, I like to stand aside and let evolution deal with complex stochastical systems of self reproducing entities and watch from the safety of my underground bunker.
Regarding the Flynn effect, the IQ score growth has hit a ceiling it seems. (Hey, you could even wonder about its impact on the economy.) The reason I mentioned this natural improvement is that I wanted to cool you down so to say.
Any improvement of human beings will have an impact on society and also an impact on research into further improvements. There is no need for an Apollo like project to improve human mental abilities if you have a bit of time.
The problem is that you want it now, and implicitly suggest dramatic efforts should be made so you can get it done in your lifetime, but since you probably won't be able to pull off anything like it (most likely), it will remain an unfulfilled dream. Yet you might be able to contribute in less grand ways to this long term goal of yours. The problem might be that you are blind to it if you focus on the end result too much.
During my time at the university we had a great variation in the didactic abilities of our lecturers. Some were outstanding, some others were not so great. While people differ in their abilities I guess it would have helped if there had been some standard requirements for their teaching abilities. This is just a rather mundane example of what you might be missing out on.
If you really want to have a brain interface I would be curious how one could pull it off. Our visual system seems to offer the highest bandwidth and you would have to duplicate it somehow. Thinking about how I gather information it occurs to me that I can't read a whole A5 page within say a few seconds even though I could scan it all with my eyes during that time. So it seems my short term visual memory sucks and the processing time also sucks. Who knows, research into the brain might very well come up with more accessible information storage that is better tuned to our brains, instead of providing us with the Ethernet interface I have been talking about.
So you would like to avoid specialization in some way. I can see that specialization is a workaround for a problem (lack of mental capacity - whatever that is exactly) that could be fixed in another way.
I would like to challenge your statement about the cause for specialization though. Whenever you try to deal with problems that can be arbitrarily complex you will be confronted with the decision to improve a single human's capabilities or to split the problem and distribute it. If you can do both, you can address even more complex problems. If you were in a competition for the most complex problem solved you will probably end up with specialization and improvement. (If improvement wasn't so hard and specialization so natural we would possibly see less specialization, especially since there are probably limits for parallelization)
So specialization is probably going to be with us and I would think your Borg collective is the answer to a processing/communication imbalance nature has presented us with. You can store information and process it but how fast can you communicate it to your peers so they can make use of it quickly.
I have this impression though that the Borg collective is too big a step to be immediately implementable. What else can we do? Can we quantify any io/processing imbalance? What other issues are there regarding information transfer between people?
This comes all about without controversial means like putting an Ethernet plug into your brain or irresponsible genetic experiments, decent nutrition supposedly makes a lot of difference.
But yes, I also want to know what the next big thing is after the internet.
Interestingly enough I just heard the complaint that some of the craftsmen in our village have the tendency to dislike doing any paperwork even if it means delayed income, just because they are uncomfortable doing it. Maybe they should hire somebody for it.
Also you may want to think about how the earths population has grown along with industrialization and thereby increased the surplus the society produced enabling further specialization (don't look so much at our times since the G8 seem to be shrinking population wise).
So if you take a few thousand likeminded people to another planet you might enjoy your unspecialized lifestyle for a while and after a few tens of generations growth and evolution will probably let your planet look like our earth.
I started using Linux for actually providing me with a modern operating system that used the processor features of the time (leading to memory protection, preemptive multitasking, flat memory model,...) when the alternatives where too expensive or inferior.
It provided me with a state of the art baseline of an operating system and fulfilled my requirements towards playing around with it.
Also gcc is not a clone of anything, gcc is a multios/multitarget compiler something no single bussiness entity in its right mind would support. For that reason gcc is build by a consortium with a common product.
Inherently OSS will have a different focus than commercial software. I see the main benefits comming from the continued access to the codebase. Someday I hope we can just build 99% of an application from preexisting code without dependencies and lack of maintenance making a nightmare out of it. OSS might benefit from a bit of organization there.
What Wired calls innovation might be that in the business world, i.e. shiny new thing reaps sufficiently large ROI from an as large as possible crowd of people with a certain need for the product, but it is not the innovation I see in the OSS world. That would be more like, a bunch of developers scratched their itch by developing tool with a steep learning curve that got them as far as they wanted to get. If you get a hold of it, it helps to understand the code to figure out how to use it and to extend it to scratch your itch.
So it is not "good enough" in the business sense, where you have to produce a product that possibly addresses a broader range of needs with a certain quality. The OSS product may very well fit the exact needs of the developers and you, but there is no guarantee that they worry about other users, even though they frequently do.
In the end we all deal with finite resources just how they are invested differs between the worlds.
Funny is how everything changes after 2012, they will have a different type of transistors. Maybe the guy really thinks things won't matter after 2012 - nut-case.
Just in case, I ask you to hold them to their other words too:
Next year we are going to see 10GHz processors, this is going to be an interesting exercise. Maybe Tom's Hardware or some other brave soul will manage.
>Certainly the wrong way to help is to tell someone with a problem to do the 2-Step Program: > >Step 1. Turn the computer off and go outside. > >Step 2. Repeat Step 1.
If you are already on the outside and the computer is off, how do you repeat step 1 ? This is certainly wrong, but for what reason?
The australian car rental people I met once were much better. I asked them for some hints about driving on the left side, they just said "do that and stay there". It worked.
Reading the article I found that they need 40KW of electrical energy for a moon base. So you will get a larger array. Looking at their large radiators I wonder though whether that changes anything about your question.
You will waste energy splitting water for energy storage, and you will waste energy using other storage mechanisms as well, so now you are looking at an even larger array.
Ultimately I would like to see their rationale for this particular solution as far as the moon is concerned. Other missions might very well need this particular setup. From that I would argue it would be possible that development and test of a reactor in an environment like the moon could be beneficial later, even though on the moon it would simplify things at best.
So how high do you value well tested equipment and a simplified development process? I also love reusability.
I don't think mankind should go to mars any time soon, I still think your previous president supported the right position about going to the moon first. You can get more stuff up there cheaper and in a shorter time frame. If you actually want a permanent pressence in space my guess is that this would have a better chance of succeding. I just hope that people find a cheap way of getting water to the moon, i.e. not up from earth.
Slashdot Mirror
Great, let me challenge the existence of gravity then. Man naturally is sucked into hell and to make things more interesting the gods inserted a layer of arbitrary thickness and infinite extension called earth into the heaven/hell boundary.
Infinite, because they really wanted to be sure.
Yup, a flat earth could technically be infinite in size.
>The best way to fight ignorance isn't always to ridicule; sometimes, clarity of argument and thought goes a long way.
Just to nag you a bit, sometimes putting your name on the line helps with the clarity of argument ;).
I don't think so either but I'm forever puzzled about the motives of the greens.
I think, ultimately we have to make sure we understand how earth is supposed to look like and how we are going to keep it close to that.
Sometimes the greens are too averse to any human endeavour and often enough use the irrational fears people harbour, for political goals. Granted other parties do so as well, but somehow I have the impression some green groups activities are counter productive.
I can't rule out that I'm seeing it all wrong either. My greatest problem is not knowing the environmental footprint of whatever I'm doing.
I sense some educational gap there, that isn't closed by political debates though.
The checks and balances are still in place and killing an irritating voice won't change anything.
The problem is that antropomorphosizing earth and nature through giving them political tools like "checks and balances" doesn't really shed any light on the real problem that not all people have access to the education/knowledge that puts them in control of how many kids they will have.
There is nothing wrong about recognizing natures limits and living accordingly I would say.
What might arrise from using his particularly unfitting words is that some people may go ahead and enforce the checks and balances before "mother nature" does it, much like your need to keep the idiot count low.
>radicals and reactionaries just complain
Well fed people are notoriously difficult subjects to be dragged into a revolution.
So they don't just complain, they are worried about their loss of power.
Not anymore my friend, not anymore. Not since the nineties at least.
Oh and by the way:
"You and I in a little toy shop
Buy a bag of balloons with the money we've got.
Set them free at the break of dawn
'Til one by one, they were gone.
Back at base, bugs in the software
Flash the message, Something's out there.
Floating in the summer sky.
99 red balloons go by."
Bugs in the software, eh? Well, they may still have them. Maybe it is still a relevant song.
I never knew there was an english version:
http://www.eightyeightynine.com/music/nena-99luftballoons.html
It has been toned down quite a bit.
Maybe near a neutron star you could find a proper spot to test this. Damn we need spaceflight - oh wait! Just getting into orbit costs you a few million whereas your big fat magnet costs what? Maybe you are better off with plain old free fall in an orbit or the vomit commet.
This sounds too much like affirmative action.
Some are probably lazy bums.
Meritocracy FTW!
1. Agreed.
2. Somewhat funny, but what makes you think gay men are more discriminating (could be right though). However, they could be less discriminating because the difficulty to find a partner is higher.
3. No, there are about as many lesbians as there are gay people. Checkout NATSAL2000, I would never trust Americans about the topic.
Also it is not so much a matter of attractivity that you don't find a partner if you hide in the basement all the time.
Oh I was supposed to add more, Hmm ...
4. You can't find the time to chat with either sex between arguing about the virtues of emacs vs vi and little vs big endian.
5. Personally, I like to stand aside and let evolution deal with complex stochastical systems of self reproducing entities and watch from the safety of my underground bunker.
Awesome! Teach those little buggers manners.
I have to reply because I accidently modded you overrated and now I have to invalidate my mis-click.
Thats what love handles are for.
According to the comments so far, people see no gravity in the situation.
Regarding the Flynn effect, the IQ score growth has hit a ceiling it seems. (Hey, you could even wonder about its impact on the economy.) The reason I mentioned this natural improvement is that I wanted to cool you down so to say.
Any improvement of human beings will have an impact on society and also an impact on research into further improvements. There is no need for an Apollo like project to improve human mental abilities if you have a bit of time.
The problem is that you want it now, and implicitly suggest dramatic efforts should be made so you can get it done in your lifetime, but since you probably won't be able to pull off anything like it (most likely), it will remain an unfulfilled dream.
Yet you might be able to contribute in less grand ways to this long term goal of yours. The problem might be that you are blind to it if you focus on the end result too much.
During my time at the university we had a great variation in the didactic abilities of our lecturers. Some were outstanding, some others were not so great. While people differ in their abilities I guess it would have helped if there had been some standard requirements for their teaching abilities. This is just a rather mundane example of what you might be missing out on.
If you really want to have a brain interface I would be curious how one could pull it off. Our visual system seems to offer the highest bandwidth and you would have to duplicate it somehow. Thinking about how I gather information it occurs to me that I can't read a whole A5 page within say a few seconds even though I could scan it all with my eyes during that time. So it seems my short term visual memory sucks and the processing time also sucks. Who knows, research into the brain might very well come up with more accessible information storage that is better tuned to our brains, instead of providing us with the Ethernet interface I have been talking about.
I'm in favour of some large nuclear explosions. Those would probably break up the plastic.
So you would like to avoid specialization in some way. I can see that specialization is a workaround for a problem (lack of mental capacity - whatever that is exactly) that could be fixed in another way.
I would like to challenge your statement about the cause for specialization though. Whenever you try to deal with problems that can be arbitrarily complex you will be confronted with the decision to improve a single human's capabilities or to split the problem and distribute it. If you can do both, you can address even more complex problems. If you were in a competition for the most complex problem solved you will probably end up with specialization and improvement. (If improvement wasn't so hard and specialization so natural we would possibly see less specialization, especially since there are probably limits for parallelization)
So specialization is probably going to be with us and I would think your Borg collective is the answer to a processing/communication imbalance nature has presented us with. You can store information and process it but how fast can you communicate it to your peers so they can make use of it quickly.
I have this impression though that the Borg collective is too big a step to be immediately implementable. What else can we do? Can we quantify any io/processing imbalance? What other issues are there regarding information transfer between people?
This whole thing is not so terribly new:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think
Just in case you are skeptical about IQ improvements check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
This comes all about without controversial means like putting an Ethernet plug into your brain or irresponsible genetic experiments, decent nutrition supposedly makes a lot of difference.
But yes, I also want to know what the next big thing is after the internet.
Thats the way specialization goes.
Interestingly enough I just heard the complaint that some of the craftsmen in our village have the tendency to dislike doing any paperwork even if it means delayed income, just because they are uncomfortable doing it. Maybe they should hire somebody for it.
Also you may want to think about how the earths population has grown along with industrialization and thereby increased the surplus the society produced enabling further specialization (don't look so much at our times since the G8 seem to be shrinking population wise).
So if you take a few thousand likeminded people to another planet you might enjoy your unspecialized lifestyle for a while and after a few tens of generations growth and evolution will probably let your planet look like our earth.
I started using Linux for actually providing me with a modern operating system that used the processor features of the time (leading to memory protection, preemptive multitasking, flat memory model,...) when the alternatives where too expensive or inferior.
It provided me with a state of the art baseline of an operating system and fulfilled my requirements towards playing around with it.
Also gcc is not a clone of anything, gcc is a multios/multitarget compiler something no single bussiness entity in its right mind would support. For that reason gcc is build by a consortium with a common product.
Inherently OSS will have a different focus than commercial software. I see the main benefits comming from the continued access to the codebase. Someday I hope we can just build 99% of an application from preexisting code without dependencies and lack of maintenance making a nightmare out of it. OSS might benefit from a bit of organization there.
What Wired calls innovation might be that in the business world, i.e. shiny new thing reaps sufficiently large ROI from an as large as possible crowd of people with a certain need for the product, but it is not the innovation I see in the OSS world. That would be more like, a bunch of developers scratched their itch by developing tool with a steep learning curve that got them as far as they wanted to get. If you get a hold of it, it helps to understand the code to figure out how to use it and to extend it to scratch your itch.
So it is not "good enough" in the business sense,
where you have to produce a product that possibly addresses a broader range of needs with a certain quality. The OSS product may very well fit the exact needs of the developers and you, but there is no guarantee that they worry about other users, even though they frequently do.
In the end we all deal with finite resources just how they are invested differs between the worlds.
Funny is how everything changes after 2012, they will have a different type of transistors. Maybe the guy really thinks things won't matter after 2012 - nut-case.
Just in case, I ask you to hold them to their other words too:
http://www.design-reuse.com/news/4850/intel-building-blocks-10-ghz-processors.html
Next year we are going to see 10GHz processors, this is going to be an interesting exercise.
Maybe Tom's Hardware or some other brave soul will manage.
From the article:
>Certainly the wrong way to help is to tell someone with a problem to do the 2-Step Program:
>
>Step 1. Turn the computer off and go outside.
>
>Step 2. Repeat Step 1.
If you are already on the outside and the computer is off, how do you repeat step 1 ? This is certainly wrong, but for what reason?
The australian car rental people I met once were much better. I asked them for some hints about driving on the left side, they just said "do that and stay there". It worked.
If you want to try it yourself check out orbiter:
http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/
At least getting into earth orbit is simple, especially with the high powered experimental rocket plane they have.
You may actually need another burn to circularize your orbit if you want to get into earth orbit. It is called apogee burn.
This is not quite child's play but they offer you some nice tools while flying to actually get to the moon and planets.
I never thought Florida is that bad.
Reading the article I found that they need 40KW of electrical energy for a moon base. So you will get a larger array. Looking at their large radiators I wonder though whether that changes anything about your question.
You will waste energy splitting water for energy storage, and you will waste energy using other storage mechanisms as well, so now you are looking at an even larger array.
Ultimately I would like to see their rationale for this particular solution as far as the moon is concerned. Other missions might very well need this particular setup. From that I would argue it would be possible that development and test of a reactor in an environment like the moon could be beneficial later, even though on the moon it would simplify things at best.
So how high do you value well tested equipment and a simplified development process? I also love reusability.
I don't think mankind should go to mars any time soon, I still think your previous president supported the right position about going to the moon first. You can get more stuff up there cheaper and in a shorter time frame. If you actually want a permanent pressence in space my guess is that this would have a better chance of succeding. I just hope that people find a cheap way of getting water to the moon, i.e. not up from earth.
I'm not sure yet, what with being a Heinlein fan and all, but there is a promising non-Heinlein movie coming up:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KEueJnsu80
Just in case somebody can't stand gratuitous use of mirrored and non-mirrored swastikas, this is a comedy.
Restroom, WD40, WhaT For?