Layman's explanation: the blackhole as you imagine it is giant mass that sucks things in and don't let them out. The side effect of such nasty behaviour is some ugly physics taking place inside. When you hear about small black holes, you imagine the same kind of horror, just very small. In fact, the small bastards have almost no mass, don't suck in anything _at all_, they just have the same ugly physics scientists are interested in. To put it short, in layman's words - it's not a black hole at all.
It isn't much more terrorism outside US. It's much more terrorism being shown on CNN, because nowdays CNN spends more time where the terrorists are.
And no, I don't live in US.
As for spin-offs, they're a drop in the sea of useful products, and I can't come with a single reason why they wouldn't be developed without manned space missions anyway.
Global warming looks just like y2k was for programmers - scary stories, inflated budjets. And noone ever apologised for all the hype. I bet in 100 years people won't hear the names of anti-GW proponents, and they'll all enjoy (posthumous) dignity they don't deserve.
Well, I have some really bad news for you. War misteriosly correlates with decline of terrorism within US, so you can't call it useless unless you're ready to prove that it's just a coincidence (that doesn't make war cheap/effective/whatever else you can grieve about, of course). Getting people to other celestial bodies, in contrast, is utterly useless. The only thing that people can do outside our planet is research. Not that it's only thing that we want to do, but alas - we're limited by how successful our tecnology is in protecting us from hostile environments. And the only sensible way to conduct research there is to use automatic probes. If you send humans there you essentially have automatic probe with some costly human ballast attached.
On the money side, sending humans to Mars right now isn't much better economically then repeating WWII again. Nowhere near Iraq spendings...
If you're burning with desire to spend a few billions on space programmes, launch a newer better Hubble ST.
US Missile Shield is already defeated because of sheer number of Russian ICBMs. What this announcement really means is that "The Father of the Nation has a new shiny super-duper weapon to hurt those arrogant americans". I'm quite sceptical about reliability and (especially) accuracy of this system. I think it's just another PR step in ongoing anti-american campaign...
You haven't been watching the state of Russian economy recently, do you?
Thanks to oil prices, state authorities are preoccupied with keeping incoming money avalanche away from local market, to curb inflation. That doesn't mean that economy is in perfect health, but that does mean that selling something to obtain some money is not exactly a priority.
I've heard from one linguist that there's one-to-one mapping for every Eskimo word for snow and corresponding word in Russian language, except for the difference between falling and lying snow. Russian snow vocabulary depends on latitude, the closer you are to North Pole, the more types of snow you are exposed to (snow behaves somewhat differently depending on the temperature), the more words you know.
1. This verdict is absolutely crap. COPYING child porn is not the same as CREATING NEW child porn. No children are harmed by such an act.
This would be an argument that child pornography should not be illegal. From an economic perspective though, if people are consuming child porn, they are creating a demand which is going to increase the supply. This is why child porn is illegal to possess--it indirectly contributes to more children being exploited for it (the general wisdom being that the vast majority of child pornography is exploitative--if not all of it).
That doesn't render making and copying CP even remotely equal. Anyway, what makes you think that ppl create demand that way? Now, in the days of p2p, they can get it for free, and noone's gonna protect creators "rights".
Tap all arabic/international lines, install zillions speech recognition nodes, make them write everyting to log files and use grep to find whatever you want. Your Arabic may be a hundred times better, but you cannot do anything like that even if you hire a whole Lebanon to help you.
As a Russian, I'm quite surprised to hear that Yuschenko is anti-Russian. Our wannabe-world-dominatrix president uses every chance to punish him for not being his sub, which prompts a (sometimes not very friendly) reaction, but (afair) he's never been caught saying something anti-Russian (otherwise our puppet tv would be touting it daily)
None. Zero. Zilch. One doesn't need a tokamak or quark-gluon plasma or whatever nifty buzzword you've heard from the media lately to create a black hole. The only way to do it is to have alot of mass.
not some small-size cosmic garbage. Mir flew for more then decade at once, under protection of magnitosphere, but not atmosphere. Did it have any problems with "small damage"? Not really (collision with supply ship is a big damage). Do interplanetary probes suffer from micrometiorites? If memory serves me well, they suffer from human mistakes and radiation/cosmic rays...
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like being a string theoryst is worse than developing a death-march-style software...
Layman's explanation: the blackhole as you imagine it is giant mass that sucks things in and don't let them out. The side effect of such nasty behaviour is some ugly physics taking place inside. When you hear about small black holes, you imagine the same kind of horror, just very small. In fact, the small bastards have almost no mass, don't suck in anything _at all_, they just have the same ugly physics scientists are interested in. To put it short, in layman's words - it's not a black hole at all.
It isn't much more terrorism outside US. It's much more terrorism being shown on CNN, because nowdays CNN spends more time where the terrorists are. And no, I don't live in US. As for spin-offs, they're a drop in the sea of useful products, and I can't come with a single reason why they wouldn't be developed without manned space missions anyway.
At least, TV has courtesy not to say the same about Slashdot.
Global warming looks just like y2k was for programmers - scary stories, inflated budjets. And noone ever apologised for all the hype. I bet in 100 years people won't hear the names of anti-GW proponents, and they'll all enjoy (posthumous) dignity they don't deserve.
Well, I have some really bad news for you. War misteriosly correlates with decline of terrorism within US, so you can't call it useless unless you're ready to prove that it's just a coincidence (that doesn't make war cheap/effective/whatever else you can grieve about, of course). Getting people to other celestial bodies, in contrast, is utterly useless. The only thing that people can do outside our planet is research. Not that it's only thing that we want to do, but alas - we're limited by how successful our tecnology is in protecting us from hostile environments. And the only sensible way to conduct research there is to use automatic probes. If you send humans there you essentially have automatic probe with some costly human ballast attached. On the money side, sending humans to Mars right now isn't much better economically then repeating WWII again. Nowhere near Iraq spendings... If you're burning with desire to spend a few billions on space programmes, launch a newer better Hubble ST.
Well, if you pay, why not?
It would make a great episode in Futurama. Think of it, the idea that DNF is not released by the year 3k is very plausible...
Weapons? I see... But you've forgotten to elaborate on porn.
US Missile Shield is already defeated because of sheer number of Russian ICBMs. What this announcement really means is that "The Father of the Nation has a new shiny super-duper weapon to hurt those arrogant americans". I'm quite sceptical about reliability and (especially) accuracy of this system. I think it's just another PR step in ongoing anti-american campaign...
You haven't been watching the state of Russian economy recently, do you? Thanks to oil prices, state authorities are preoccupied with keeping incoming money avalanche away from local market, to curb inflation. That doesn't mean that economy is in perfect health, but that does mean that selling something to obtain some money is not exactly a priority.
I've heard from one linguist that there's one-to-one mapping for every Eskimo word for snow and corresponding word in Russian language, except for the difference between falling and lying snow. Russian snow vocabulary depends on latitude, the closer you are to North Pole, the more types of snow you are exposed to (snow behaves somewhat differently depending on the temperature), the more words you know.
Am I the only one who thinks that you know who is driven by irrational longing for acception?
That's what happens because of unhealthy drinking habits.
This would be an argument that child pornography should not be illegal. From an economic perspective though, if people are consuming child porn, they are creating a demand which is going to increase the supply. This is why child porn is illegal to possess--it indirectly contributes to more children being exploited for it (the general wisdom being that the vast majority of child pornography is exploitative--if not all of it).
That doesn't render making and copying CP even remotely equal. Anyway, what makes you think that ppl create demand that way? Now, in the days of p2p, they can get it for free, and noone's gonna protect creators "rights".
It's not often you can claim you've played some multiplayer game precisely once.
I'm sure that the most profound effect would be that many of them actually will start using Linux.
Can't you imagine how much better than nothing it is?
Tap all arabic/international lines, install zillions speech recognition nodes, make them write everyting to log files and use grep to find whatever you want. Your Arabic may be a hundred times better, but you cannot do anything like that even if you hire a whole Lebanon to help you.
As a Russian, I'm quite surprised to hear that Yuschenko is anti-Russian. Our wannabe-world-dominatrix president uses every chance to punish him for not being his sub, which prompts a (sometimes not very friendly) reaction, but (afair) he's never been caught saying something anti-Russian (otherwise our puppet tv would be touting it daily)
None. Zero. Zilch. One doesn't need a tokamak or quark-gluon plasma or whatever nifty buzzword you've heard from the media lately to create a black hole. The only way to do it is to have alot of mass.
Stardast is essentially gargantuan effort to encouter such particles. Unless you try really hard, you'll not get hit.
not some small-size cosmic garbage. Mir flew for more then decade at once, under protection of magnitosphere, but not atmosphere. Did it have any problems with "small damage"? Not really (collision with supply ship is a big damage). Do interplanetary probes suffer from micrometiorites? If memory serves me well, they suffer from human mistakes and radiation/cosmic rays...