The problem is that Canada has this big loophole in it's charter of rights called the "non withstanding clause", which allows the government to pass unconstitutional laws regardless of what the supreme court says. Of course, currently it would be suicide for any politician to abuse of this right, but maybe after the populace is conditioned a little...
For me, #1 means that we should be careful to make sure our spaceships are bug free so we don't contaminate places we land on with life that could wipe out any indigenous life.
This is the default. Radiation from the sun and a zero pressure, zero gravity environment is enough to kill any microbes on our spaceships.
Actually, the submitter did bother to read the article, and also did bother reading the replies. Perhaps my headline was a bit sensational, but I didn't have much time to write a decent summary being at work.
Of course, what did I expect?/. readers actually RTFA and commenting on that, or making sarcastic comments about the headline. That could never happen on/., right?
...or that the president used pictures of a Canadian gay marriage in his speech on national television for homophobic propaganda purposes, and then denied being aware of it.
Yeah, politics in Poland are more than just a little fucked up. Same as usual.
All these private "space flights" are nothing but airplanes thrown up very high and falling back. I don't think many people are going to pay 200,000 euros for a 15 minute long vomit comet ride.
The fundamental problem is that all these private space ships only have a fraction of the energy required to achieve orbital flight. As the rocket equation shows the energy cost of any self-propelled space vehicle is exponential. The only way to solve this problem is to create a propulsion system that doesn't have to accelerate its own fuel. The only plausible solutions that I can think of right now are:
Space elevator
Huge acceleration ramp that shoots into the sky
Big freaking laser gun and mirrors
I realize that these are still in the realm of sci-fi at the moment, but until the private companies start working on these solutions there is no future for tourism in space. Period.
Okay, maybe my post was sensationalist, but I still argue that the situation is very bad. The 1945 situation was completely different. To come out of the Great Depression and finance WWII the US government just had to have enormous deficit spending. There is absolutely nothing in the present relatively peaceful and prosperous world that warrants the current astronomical military spending (please don't mention imaginary and artificially created wars). Also, the blue line on your graph for future years is probably based on optimistic GDP scenarios presented by the US administration. Independent institutions estimate that the deficit will continue increasing at the same rate or faster than the GDP. That means the blue line should be going upwards linearly or slightly exponentially.
Your chart also shows quite nicely who is to blame for the situation.;)
Nice speech, but please look at the facts first. Reality check:
The US debt is currently almost 9.4 TRILLION dollars. The biggest debt of any government in the history of the world, adjusted for inflation. Even the Romans had a better financial situation and historians agree that the Roman empire fell largely because it went broke.
It's not like the trend is reversing either. The US government has declared a deficit of 175.6 billion dollars just for the month of February. The largest single month deficit ever.
Even with the cheap dollar, the trade deficit continues to increase (0.6% larger in January).
Just looking at inflation rates is silly and ignoring the other side of the equation. Looking at REAL growth rate (growth minus inflation) we see that the US has a growth rate of about 3% per year, while China has a growth rate of over 10% per year. This means that EVEN AFTER INFLATION the Chinese still grow richer every year.
The US economy is already highly developed so that growth can only be achieved through technological advances. China is still developing so it can achieve substantially larger growth than the US by investing in infrastructure. China is only catching up to the rest of the world and still has plenty of growth potential left. The Chinese government knows this very well and that's exactly what they are doing.
Rural people loosing their homes is not a concern for the Chinese government. Those people will just move to the cities and that's exactly what the government wants. The rate of rural-urban migration is so high that the urban population is predicted to surpass the rural population within the next 5 years.
Unemployment is mostly a problem in rural areas. Bring those people to the cities so they can work and the problem is solved!
There are many, many more points that I could bring up (Chinese trade, investments, the real value of the yuan, etc) but I don't have the time to find all the data at this moment.
It's nice to find comfort in thinking that the situation is just temporary, but let's face it - the golden age of the USA has ended. The US is on the decline while other parts of the world are raising to prominence.
I happen to work with large banking systems. Actually, currency data is usually stored as a single fixed-point number in the DB. When the data is passed around between systems it's just plain old strings, but I can assure you that many of those systems actually process currency data using floating-point numbers.
I applaud attempts to create a tourism of space, but so far there is nothing especially interesting in the presented solutions. They are just building smaller and cheaper rockets. These "space ships" don't even achieve stable orbits. They're basically only throwing a large object high enough that it needs a few minutes to fall back. So besides the nice view and the temporary weightlessness (which can be achieved by an airplane), there's nothing special about it.
What I would like to see is some truly innovative solutions. Things that bring us closer to a conquest of space. Contests such as the X Prize should focus on that instead of giving money away for stuff that's been done 50 years ago.
Glutony: It will probably require at least 32 GB of RAM.
Envy: They keep copying other peoples ideas.
Sloth: Too lazy to fix bugs, so they release new operating systems instead.
Lust: It's hard to beat all those porn trojans.
Greed: Well, it's M$ after all.
Wrath: That's how you feel after 5 minutes of using it.
Pride: And after all that they'll still pretend it's the best OS ever...
Now back to the actual point. The GP wrote "if your time has come". This outcome is not determinable in advance. If you die in a crash then your time has come. If you survive then your time has not come. This is kind of like Schrodinger's cat.
You're going to have a lot harder time landing on a body with no surface (or at least it's so deep we don't know where it becomes solid).
Landing on Jupiter doesn't even have any meaning. The transition from the gaseous atmosphere to the liquid body of the planet is continuous, so there's no clearly defined surface at all. The GP's point is still valid for "landable" bodies in the solar system.
It's surreal to see this, because I really think that the guy just doesn't know that he doesn't have this power. And it's weirder because people seem to pretend like he does, and actually follow them. Indirectly, I guess that means he does have the power. It's very weird.
It's not weird at all, and his power is not indirect at all. He has de facto usurped this power by convincing everyone of its legitimacy. Such things were not unusual at all throughout human history and still happen all the time. I have no idea why you Americans think that you are somehow magically immune to this phenomenon.
To me, this feels like 1933 all over again.
It's not about the picture, or the cat. It's about the f***ing principle. You shouldn't have to close your blinds and turn down the lights anytime you're home just to expect a little privacy. This kind of trend is troubling and insane, and it has to stop. I remember the first time I saw Big Brother on TV and my first impression was "OMG! This is going to catch on. There goes ALL our privacy". Others thought I was freaking out. Well, a few years later and what do you know? You can't even expect to leave your blinds open and not be seen by anyone anywhere in the world.
They are deliberately transferring power from the Judicial Branch to the Executive Branch in order to appear "tough" on crime. When it's impractical to enforce a law that is broken by many people, the Executive Branch doesn't enforce it, unless they need an excuse to bust someone they don't like, or to search someone they're suspicious of. This gap between what is commonly enforced and what CAN be enforced, I like to call "The Facade of Law" as opposed to "The Rule of Law".
Actually, this is common practice in totalitarian governments such as countries from the former communist block. Over here in Poland we still have left over laws like this. Some are self-contradictory. Some exist only to allow police and government workers to get bribes. I hear that in neighboring Russia and Belarus these things are even more common than here. One funny example I heard recently was the obligation, in Russia, to have a first aid kit in your car. But hold on! The kit must contain a condom and must be purchased in Russia. Obviously, people driving across the border for the first time are screwed.
Then there's real superhackers. One former coworker built a railgun for fun, cracked DES (key recovery in 24 hours on a p3, given certain fairly common preconditions), cracked the remote management on a major commercial firewall (because we lost the password, and it was easier than going offsite for password recovery), then founded a security company, got rich when they got bought out, and moved onto toy around with things for nasa and the DoD. So, if someone like somehow finds their way onto - and stays on - a black hat path, well, the mere fact that securing something is harder than cracking it means he will always find a way in, if he wants to badly enough. I think they'd have to be unbalanced to stay black hat, since that sort of talent will either get them illegitimately rich enough that they'll avoid danger, or get them legitimately rich enough that they'll give up black hat activities to go legit.
But it should make you feel uneasy that someone like that may also work for the NSA or the FBI on some not-so-legitimate project. Heck, it's almost certain that the NSA and FBI employ such people, even only to have the expertise to make counter-measures.
Frankly China doesn't give a shit! If the US wants to impose sanctions they're going to be hurting themselves more than China. They can threaten all they like. China should just ignore them.
Slashdot Mirror
What did you expect from a totalitarian government? I mean, this is China we're talking about.
The problem is that Canada has this big loophole in it's charter of rights called the "non withstanding clause", which allows the government to pass unconstitutional laws regardless of what the supreme court says. Of course, currently it would be suicide for any politician to abuse of this right, but maybe after the populace is conditioned a little...
There is a quote, widely attributed to Voltaire, but which is actually from Evelyn Beatrice Hall:
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I think this quote is quite appropriate to the current situation.
For me, #1 means that we should be careful to make sure our spaceships are bug free so we don't contaminate places we land on with life that could wipe out any indigenous life.
This is the default. Radiation from the sun and a zero pressure, zero gravity environment is enough to kill any microbes on our spaceships.
Actually, the submitter did bother to read the article, and also did bother reading the replies. Perhaps my headline was a bit sensational, but I didn't have much time to write a decent summary being at work.
/. readers actually RTFA and commenting on that, or making sarcastic comments about the headline. That could never happen on /., right?
Of course, what did I expect?
...or that the president used pictures of a Canadian gay marriage in his speech on national television for homophobic propaganda purposes, and then denied being aware of it.
Yeah, politics in Poland are more than just a little fucked up. Same as usual.
The fundamental problem is that all these private space ships only have a fraction of the energy required to achieve orbital flight. As the rocket equation shows the energy cost of any self-propelled space vehicle is exponential. The only way to solve this problem is to create a propulsion system that doesn't have to accelerate its own fuel. The only plausible solutions that I can think of right now are:
- Space elevator
- Huge acceleration ramp that shoots into the sky
- Big freaking laser gun and mirrors
I realize that these are still in the realm of sci-fi at the moment, but until the private companies start working on these solutions there is no future for tourism in space. Period.This is hilarious. You should submit this story to The Daily WTF.
Okay, maybe my post was sensationalist, but I still argue that the situation is very bad. The 1945 situation was completely different. To come out of the Great Depression and finance WWII the US government just had to have enormous deficit spending. There is absolutely nothing in the present relatively peaceful and prosperous world that warrants the current astronomical military spending (please don't mention imaginary and artificially created wars). Also, the blue line on your graph for future years is probably based on optimistic GDP scenarios presented by the US administration. Independent institutions estimate that the deficit will continue increasing at the same rate or faster than the GDP. That means the blue line should be going upwards linearly or slightly exponentially.
;)
Your chart also shows quite nicely who is to blame for the situation.
- The US debt is currently almost 9.4 TRILLION dollars. The biggest debt of any government in the history of the world, adjusted for inflation. Even the Romans had a better financial situation and historians agree that the Roman empire fell largely because it went broke.
- It's not like the trend is reversing either. The US government has declared a deficit of 175.6 billion dollars just for the month of February. The largest single month deficit ever.
- Even with the cheap dollar, the trade deficit continues to increase (0.6% larger in January).
- Just looking at inflation rates is silly and ignoring the other side of the equation. Looking at REAL growth rate (growth minus inflation) we see that the US has a growth rate of about 3% per year, while China has a growth rate of over 10% per year. This means that EVEN AFTER INFLATION the Chinese still grow richer every year.
- The US economy is already highly developed so that growth can only be achieved through technological advances. China is still developing so it can achieve substantially larger growth than the US by investing in infrastructure. China is only catching up to the rest of the world and still has plenty of growth potential left. The Chinese government knows this very well and that's exactly what they are doing.
- Rural people loosing their homes is not a concern for the Chinese government. Those people will just move to the cities and that's exactly what the government wants. The rate of rural-urban migration is so high that the urban population is predicted to surpass the rural population within the next 5 years.
- Unemployment is mostly a problem in rural areas. Bring those people to the cities so they can work and the problem is solved!
There are many, many more points that I could bring up (Chinese trade, investments, the real value of the yuan, etc) but I don't have the time to find all the data at this moment.It's nice to find comfort in thinking that the situation is just temporary, but let's face it - the golden age of the USA has ended. The US is on the decline while other parts of the world are raising to prominence.
I happen to work with large banking systems. Actually, currency data is usually stored as a single fixed-point number in the DB. When the data is passed around between systems it's just plain old strings, but I can assure you that many of those systems actually process currency data using floating-point numbers.
at the time of life, the area was between 55 and 65 degrees south, suggesting a climate similar to the Falkland Islands or Tierra del Fuego.
At that time the climate in the area between 55 and 65 degrees south was not that of today's Falkland Islands. The world was several degrees warmer.
Our present-day "patriotic" nationalists are mostly braindead "Greater Russia" style, bent on restoring the border to the original USSR one...
I even heard some Russian politician say that Russia should claim back all the lands that were Russian under the rule of Catherine.
ever heard of Holodomor, Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, or the Katyn massacre?
Being Polish I certainly have, and I'm glad to see that at least some Russians also remember those horrible things.
I applaud attempts to create a tourism of space, but so far there is nothing especially interesting in the presented solutions. They are just building smaller and cheaper rockets. These "space ships" don't even achieve stable orbits. They're basically only throwing a large object high enough that it needs a few minutes to fall back. So besides the nice view and the temporary weightlessness (which can be achieved by an airplane), there's nothing special about it.
What I would like to see is some truly innovative solutions. Things that bring us closer to a conquest of space. Contests such as the X Prize should focus on that instead of giving money away for stuff that's been done 50 years ago.
Let's see:
Glutony: It will probably require at least 32 GB of RAM.
Envy: They keep copying other peoples ideas.
Sloth: Too lazy to fix bugs, so they release new operating systems instead.
Lust: It's hard to beat all those porn trojans.
Greed: Well, it's M$ after all.
Wrath: That's how you feel after 5 minutes of using it.
Pride: And after all that they'll still pretend it's the best OS ever...
Yeah, Windows 7 is a pretty good name for it.
But the pilot does have control over the plane.
Now back to the actual point. The GP wrote "if your time has come". This outcome is not determinable in advance. If you die in a crash then your time has come. If you survive then your time has not come. This is kind of like Schrodinger's cat.
You're going to have a lot harder time landing on a body with no surface (or at least it's so deep we don't know where it becomes solid).
Landing on Jupiter doesn't even have any meaning. The transition from the gaseous atmosphere to the liquid body of the planet is continuous, so there's no clearly defined surface at all. The GP's point is still valid for "landable" bodies in the solar system.
It's surreal to see this, because I really think that the guy just doesn't know that he doesn't have this power. And it's weirder because people seem to pretend like he does, and actually follow them. Indirectly, I guess that means he does have the power. It's very weird.
It's not weird at all, and his power is not indirect at all. He has de facto usurped this power by convincing everyone of its legitimacy. Such things were not unusual at all throughout human history and still happen all the time. I have no idea why you Americans think that you are somehow magically immune to this phenomenon. To me, this feels like 1933 all over again.
Other than the fact that Hollywood tends to pander to the far left, I can't, for the life of me, imagine why this is a Bad Thing .
Far left? You Americans have really fucked up politics.
Yeah, I know what you're talking about. It's called doublethink.
It's not about the picture, or the cat. It's about the f***ing principle. You shouldn't have to close your blinds and turn down the lights anytime you're home just to expect a little privacy. This kind of trend is troubling and insane, and it has to stop. I remember the first time I saw Big Brother on TV and my first impression was "OMG! This is going to catch on. There goes ALL our privacy". Others thought I was freaking out. Well, a few years later and what do you know? You can't even expect to leave your blinds open and not be seen by anyone anywhere in the world.
They are deliberately transferring power from the Judicial Branch to the Executive Branch in order to appear "tough" on crime. When it's impractical to enforce a law that is broken by many people, the Executive Branch doesn't enforce it, unless they need an excuse to bust someone they don't like, or to search someone they're suspicious of. This gap between what is commonly enforced and what CAN be enforced, I like to call "The Facade of Law" as opposed to "The Rule of Law".
Actually, this is common practice in totalitarian governments such as countries from the former communist block. Over here in Poland we still have left over laws like this. Some are self-contradictory. Some exist only to allow police and government workers to get bribes. I hear that in neighboring Russia and Belarus these things are even more common than here. One funny example I heard recently was the obligation, in Russia, to have a first aid kit in your car. But hold on! The kit must contain a condom and must be purchased in Russia. Obviously, people driving across the border for the first time are screwed.
Socrates in the 400s BC was already complaining about how sophistry is winning over logic and reason. The world will never change.
Then there's real superhackers. One former coworker built a railgun for fun, cracked DES (key recovery in 24 hours on a p3, given certain fairly common preconditions), cracked the remote management on a major commercial firewall (because we lost the password, and it was easier than going offsite for password recovery), then founded a security company, got rich when they got bought out, and moved onto toy around with things for nasa and the DoD. So, if someone like somehow finds their way onto - and stays on - a black hat path, well, the mere fact that securing something is harder than cracking it means he will always find a way in, if he wants to badly enough. I think they'd have to be unbalanced to stay black hat, since that sort of talent will either get them illegitimately rich enough that they'll avoid danger, or get them legitimately rich enough that they'll give up black hat activities to go legit.
But it should make you feel uneasy that someone like that may also work for the NSA or the FBI on some not-so-legitimate project. Heck, it's almost certain that the NSA and FBI employ such people, even only to have the expertise to make counter-measures.
Frankly China doesn't give a shit! If the US wants to impose sanctions they're going to be hurting themselves more than China. They can threaten all they like. China should just ignore them.