We were fools, fools to desire such silence! Silence was never meant to be this clear, this pure, this... quiet. For a few short days, we marveled. Then the... whispers... began.
Were they Aramaic? Hyperborean? Some even more ancient tongue, first spoken by elder races under the red light of dying suns far from here? We do not know, but somehow, slowly... we began to UNDERSTAND.
No, no, please! I don't want to remember! YOU WILL NOT MAKE ME REMEMBER! I saw brave men claw their own eyes out... oh, god, the screaming... the mobs of feral children feasting on corpses, the shadows MOVING, the fires burning in the air! The CHANTING!
That was my first thought too, except the ring belongs to a planet (or brown dwarf, at best), not the primary star.
Plus, no matter how cool the Ringworld is as a feat of engineering, it would probably just end up inhabited by a bunch of stupid pre-Industrial savages./mutters stupid Ringworld Throne...
"Birds can fly into the rotors. Then they have to send the janitor Steve out to clean the thing, and it just ruins his day. Then he goes home and beats his kids. So if you support wind energy, you support domestic violence."
Count me among the purist sourpusses by whom they would be yelled at to be:P (englilish)
Part of the charm of homestarrunner.net was the fact that they didn't sell out. No advertising, no product placement, no pay wall, or other attempts to monetize the web content. When they ran out of steam they just stopped updating, but kept the site intact.
I'm glad they didn't sell their creation for forty pieces of silver... it's nice to see some artists care about integrity, even if people like you don't.
Because religious folks would never do anything morally objectionable, like fly planes into buildings, or start wars of choice, or use atomic bombs on cities. Nope... it's only atheists who do awful things.
"Dictating what religious values they may or may not teach would itself be a an establishment of religion."
Thanks for being honest enough to call creationism what it is... the teaching of religion.
Here's a radical idea you might like... we could set up whole institutions, independent of the government, whose primary purpose is to teach religion to people. We could amend the Constitution to forbid the government from interfering with these institutions... hell, we could even make them tax exempt, to really drive home the separation. This would nicely solve the problem of which religious viewpoint should be taught in public schools science classes... that would be left up to these newfangled institutions instead!
If people are blocking your ads, it's probably because they're not interested in seeing the god damn ads. Sneaking past the ad blocker won't result in me going "gee, you got me, I'll be good and click on your ad now." More likely it will piss me off to the point where I stop visiting your site.
Stupid marketers and their "arms race" mentality was what resulted in people developing and using adblock and noscript in the first place. "What do you mean people still aren't clicking on our ads? It's got a dancing monkey with a flashing background and it occupies half the browser window! Fine, we'll make it play music too, and pop up fifty windows... maybe THEN they'll realize the error of their ways and click on it."
It's possible, I suppose. The Andromeda galaxy is the closest large neighbor to the Milky Way, and it is 2.5 million light years away. At "more than a million miles per hour" (0.0015 c) a star would take only one or two billion years to make the trip across the intergalactic void... a long journey, to be sure, but doable within a stellar lifetime. However, because our galaxy occupies less than 1% of the sky as seen from Andromeda, the odds of randomly flung stars hitting our galaxy from that distance away seems pretty low.
Exactly... he could have done it a hundred times, in which case he would have stolen five whole dollars worth of electricity. This is super serious stuff, people.
Congratulations... by keeping a gun in your home, you've substantially increased the risk that you, your loved ones, or your neighbors will die by accidental shooting, suicide, or homicide. On the other hand, you've done virtually nothing to reduce the risk of being a victim of a crime, nor have you reduced the risk of being injured during a home break-in.
Of course, those are just the statistics... no doubt you are exceptional and much more careful than all those other guys who brought a gun home thinking it would make them safer.
Funny... I use Europe as evidence that the conservative obsession with austerity as a solution for recession is a recipe for failure. The Greeks have been implementing increasingly brutal austerity measures for years, and yet (as Keynes would have predicted) their deficit is only getting worse as revenues collapse faster than they can cut spending.
Nevertheless, despite the abysmal failure of the austerity measures in Europe, the conversation in America is all about cutting spending rather than stimulating growth. It's like conservatives "don't have the ability to learn anything that they haven't been subjected to themselves."
Who is "them"? Seriously... name one country we'd realistically need these planes to fight.
Russia and China have nukes and missiles. Just try "blowing their radars to shit", and watch as the resulting war immediately escalates way beyond the "planes dog-fighting in the air" stage. Besides, war with China simply isn't going to happen... not while they (quite literally) own our asses, and manufacture all our stuff.
So who does that leave? Iran and North Korea are decades behind our existing tech... hell, Iran's latest "stealth fighter" was an obviously fake plastic model. Mighty hard to justify an arms race when the opponent is a one-legged cripple and we've got a 30 year head start.
The only countries that have planes that could possibly dog fight against ours (Europe, Canada, etc.), also happen to be our allies. I guess we could hope one of them turns evil so that we'll finally have an excuse for needing these fancy, useless weapons.
Ever notice how in movies like Top Gun they never really identified which country they were fighting against in the climactic dog-fighting scene? Even in a fictional setting it was too difficult for the writers to identify a realistic enemy for our fighters to play with. In reality, we're much more likely to need ground-support craft like the A10, if not drones, for the kinds of air battles we actually engage in.
How did this get moderated insightful? We're not talking about "getting the world to buy" a trillion dollar coin. This isn't even about the willingness of other nations to extend credit to the US and buy American debt, which they're quite willing to do.
This whole mess is about Congress threatening to default on paying for the debts they had previously voted to accumulate via an arcane "debt ceiling" rule, and Obama potentially using a procedural loophole to raise that artificial ceiling and deprive them of that weapon. It's equivalent to moving money from my left pocket to my right... it doesn't actually change how rich or in-debt I am, but it makes a difference procedurally.
Incidentally, I agree that reducing the deficit is important in the long term... ideally we should be running surpluses during times of growth. During times of contraction and crisis, however, it's a remarkably stupid idea to reduce spending by hacking away at the safety net, as we're seeing in Greece in recent years.
This is a problem with the US economy in general - it is based on growth.
If by "growth" you mean primarily population growth, this is balderdash.
Historically speaking, the way the US became an economic giant was by increasing productivity at rates far higher than mere population growth (thereby raising living standards and income per capita.) Things like mechanization, industrialization, automation, and the information age have made it possible for an individual in each successive generation to produce more than individuals from prior generations. If the US economy only grew at the same pace as the population, then on a per capita basis that's the same as standing still, which is clearly not the case for most of US history.
In fact, I'd argue it was the lack of population that fueled American innovation since early colonial times. When confronted with vast resources and a shortage of labor, the early pioneers were forced to develop the technologies that could amplify any one individual's efforts. (At least in the North. In the South they attempted to solve the labor shortage through the importation of slaves.) Contrast this with Europe, which had the inverse problem of large population and limited land, which made increasing individual productivity less of a priority.
If the US population stopped growing today, economic growth would still be fueled by gains in productivity, just as it always has been.
We weren't in Afghanistan before 9/11, and yet Al Qaeda used it as a base of operations anyway. Furthermore, leaving Afghanistan won't make it suddenly peaceful and terrorist-free... much the opposite, in fact. Premature withdrawal gives us the worst of both worlds: all the hatred engendered by the original invasion and occupation, plus a power vacuum in the region created by leaving the work of reconstruction half-finished. Sounds like the perfect environment for incubating more terrorists. Pretending we can simply walk away without negative consequences is naive at best.
That said, I agree that our meddling in the Middle East has caused enormous problems, and the less meddling we do the better off we'll be. The problem is that there's no easy solution to the current predicament: occupation with troops, drone strikes, or complete withdrawal... they each have drawbacks.
Slashdot Mirror
We were fools, fools to desire such silence! Silence was never meant to be this clear, this pure, this... quiet. For a few short days, we marveled. Then the... whispers... began.
Were they Aramaic? Hyperborean? Some even more ancient tongue, first spoken by elder races under the red light of dying suns far from here? We do not know, but somehow, slowly... we began to UNDERSTAND.
No, no, please! I don't want to remember! YOU WILL NOT MAKE ME REMEMBER! I saw brave men claw their own eyes out... oh, god, the screaming... the mobs of feral children feasting on corpses, the shadows MOVING, the fires burning in the air! The CHANTING!
DO NOT MOVE INTO THE FOREST!
That was my first thought too, except the ring belongs to a planet (or brown dwarf, at best), not the primary star.
Plus, no matter how cool the Ringworld is as a feat of engineering, it would probably just end up inhabited by a bunch of stupid pre-Industrial savages. /mutters stupid Ringworld Throne...
At least we know the Beagle has landed
Here you go: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/ear...
You're welcome!
"Birds can fly into the rotors. Then they have to send the janitor Steve out to clean the thing, and it just ruins his day. Then he goes home and beats his kids. So if you support wind energy, you support domestic violence."
They have discovered a truly remarkable groupware solution which this header is too narrow to contai
"is actually a quined phrase that makes its point via repetition" is actually a quined phrase that makes its point via repetition.
That's a shockingly unscientific attitude from someone who presumes to lecture NASA researchers on scientific competency.
The downmods are just slashdot's way of shutting that whole thing down.
Count me among the purist sourpusses by whom they would be yelled at to be :P (englilish)
Part of the charm of homestarrunner.net was the fact that they didn't sell out. No advertising, no product placement, no pay wall, or other attempts to monetize the web content. When they ran out of steam they just stopped updating, but kept the site intact.
I'm glad they didn't sell their creation for forty pieces of silver... it's nice to see some artists care about integrity, even if people like you don't.
Because religious folks would never do anything morally objectionable, like fly planes into buildings, or start wars of choice, or use atomic bombs on cities. Nope... it's only atheists who do awful things.
"Dictating what religious values they may or may not teach would itself be a an establishment of religion."
Thanks for being honest enough to call creationism what it is... the teaching of religion.
Here's a radical idea you might like... we could set up whole institutions, independent of the government, whose primary purpose is to teach religion to people. We could amend the Constitution to forbid the government from interfering with these institutions... hell, we could even make them tax exempt, to really drive home the separation. This would nicely solve the problem of which religious viewpoint should be taught in public schools science classes... that would be left up to these newfangled institutions instead!
If people are blocking your ads, it's probably because they're not interested in seeing the god damn ads. Sneaking past the ad blocker won't result in me going "gee, you got me, I'll be good and click on your ad now." More likely it will piss me off to the point where I stop visiting your site.
Stupid marketers and their "arms race" mentality was what resulted in people developing and using adblock and noscript in the first place. "What do you mean people still aren't clicking on our ads? It's got a dancing monkey with a flashing background and it occupies half the browser window! Fine, we'll make it play music too, and pop up fifty windows... maybe THEN they'll realize the error of their ways and click on it."
It's possible, I suppose. The Andromeda galaxy is the closest large neighbor to the Milky Way, and it is 2.5 million light years away. At "more than a million miles per hour" (0.0015 c) a star would take only one or two billion years to make the trip across the intergalactic void... a long journey, to be sure, but doable within a stellar lifetime. However, because our galaxy occupies less than 1% of the sky as seen from Andromeda, the odds of randomly flung stars hitting our galaxy from that distance away seems pretty low.
TL:DR I got kicked out of college for videotaping the lectures without permission.
That's been been tried before... the results usually aren't so good.
I'm guessing you meant 1800 arcseconds, unless the moon really let itself go while I wasn't looking and is now several thousand light years across. :)
Exactly... he could have done it a hundred times, in which case he would have stolen five whole dollars worth of electricity. This is super serious stuff, people.
Congratulations... by keeping a gun in your home, you've substantially increased the risk that you, your loved ones, or your neighbors will die by accidental shooting, suicide, or homicide. On the other hand, you've done virtually nothing to reduce the risk of being a victim of a crime, nor have you reduced the risk of being injured during a home break-in.
Of course, those are just the statistics... no doubt you are exceptional and much more careful than all those other guys who brought a gun home thinking it would make them safer.
Funny... I use Europe as evidence that the conservative obsession with austerity as a solution for recession is a recipe for failure. The Greeks have been implementing increasingly brutal austerity measures for years, and yet (as Keynes would have predicted) their deficit is only getting worse as revenues collapse faster than they can cut spending.
Nevertheless, despite the abysmal failure of the austerity measures in Europe, the conversation in America is all about cutting spending rather than stimulating growth. It's like conservatives "don't have the ability to learn anything that they haven't been subjected to themselves."
Who is "them"? Seriously... name one country we'd realistically need these planes to fight.
Russia and China have nukes and missiles. Just try "blowing their radars to shit", and watch as the resulting war immediately escalates way beyond the "planes dog-fighting in the air" stage. Besides, war with China simply isn't going to happen... not while they (quite literally) own our asses, and manufacture all our stuff.
So who does that leave? Iran and North Korea are decades behind our existing tech... hell, Iran's latest "stealth fighter" was an obviously fake plastic model. Mighty hard to justify an arms race when the opponent is a one-legged cripple and we've got a 30 year head start.
The only countries that have planes that could possibly dog fight against ours (Europe, Canada, etc.), also happen to be our allies. I guess we could hope one of them turns evil so that we'll finally have an excuse for needing these fancy, useless weapons.
Ever notice how in movies like Top Gun they never really identified which country they were fighting against in the climactic dog-fighting scene? Even in a fictional setting it was too difficult for the writers to identify a realistic enemy for our fighters to play with. In reality, we're much more likely to need ground-support craft like the A10, if not drones, for the kinds of air battles we actually engage in.
How did this get moderated insightful? We're not talking about "getting the world to buy" a trillion dollar coin. This isn't even about the willingness of other nations to extend credit to the US and buy American debt, which they're quite willing to do.
This whole mess is about Congress threatening to default on paying for the debts they had previously voted to accumulate via an arcane "debt ceiling" rule, and Obama potentially using a procedural loophole to raise that artificial ceiling and deprive them of that weapon. It's equivalent to moving money from my left pocket to my right... it doesn't actually change how rich or in-debt I am, but it makes a difference procedurally.
Incidentally, I agree that reducing the deficit is important in the long term... ideally we should be running surpluses during times of growth. During times of contraction and crisis, however, it's a remarkably stupid idea to reduce spending by hacking away at the safety net, as we're seeing in Greece in recent years.
I wish I had mod points... well said!
This is a problem with the US economy in general - it is based on growth.
If by "growth" you mean primarily population growth, this is balderdash.
Historically speaking, the way the US became an economic giant was by increasing productivity at rates far higher than mere population growth (thereby raising living standards and income per capita.) Things like mechanization, industrialization, automation, and the information age have made it possible for an individual in each successive generation to produce more than individuals from prior generations. If the US economy only grew at the same pace as the population, then on a per capita basis that's the same as standing still, which is clearly not the case for most of US history.
In fact, I'd argue it was the lack of population that fueled American innovation since early colonial times. When confronted with vast resources and a shortage of labor, the early pioneers were forced to develop the technologies that could amplify any one individual's efforts. (At least in the North. In the South they attempted to solve the labor shortage through the importation of slaves.) Contrast this with Europe, which had the inverse problem of large population and limited land, which made increasing individual productivity less of a priority.
If the US population stopped growing today, economic growth would still be fueled by gains in productivity, just as it always has been.
We weren't in Afghanistan before 9/11, and yet Al Qaeda used it as a base of operations anyway. Furthermore, leaving Afghanistan won't make it suddenly peaceful and terrorist-free... much the opposite, in fact. Premature withdrawal gives us the worst of both worlds: all the hatred engendered by the original invasion and occupation, plus a power vacuum in the region created by leaving the work of reconstruction half-finished. Sounds like the perfect environment for incubating more terrorists. Pretending we can simply walk away without negative consequences is naive at best.
That said, I agree that our meddling in the Middle East has caused enormous problems, and the less meddling we do the better off we'll be. The problem is that there's no easy solution to the current predicament: occupation with troops, drone strikes, or complete withdrawal... they each have drawbacks.