We have lots of data for everything in 1G. We have some data on various life forms (mostly humans, some plants, and a few other animals) in ~0G. The only data for anything in-between is the ~24 man-days on the Moon of the Apollo crews, and that data is essentially "well, they didn't die."
So basically we know nothing about the long-term effects of Moon or Mars gravity. Nothing at all. How much gravity do we need to be functionally the same as Earth? How much gravity is functionally the same as micro-G? What are the effects in the middle of those values? Are they the same numbers for plants? None of this is known in the slightest--and is all of very high importance for any significant human presence off-Earth.
And it's not even all that hard to test in LEO, so it's pretty perverse that no space science organisation has done so. NASA and co have put lots of resources into figuring out how humans work in 0G, which is a stupid place to live, and none into mid-G which is how the Moon and Mars must work, and is also an option for long-term orbital habitats if it works better (as it likely will).
And why is that? One can posit lots of answers, but I'd have to say that it's another demonstration that the real purpose of the major space programs is prestige and pork.
Now that's a strategy that'll work. Centralized spamming goes away (or at least decreases), as it becomes more costly than the receipts, and zombies are limited in effectiveness. (Consider that currently a computer could easily send 8000 emails in a couple of minutes.) A serious reduction in volume. There are a couple of holes to be plugged:
Getting people to use the new protocol? Exploit the existing protocol, use a hybrid system, and/or punish those who don't comply with, say, a 20s wait.
Dealing with zombies? ISPs cut off port 25 for machines constantly sending email. Better OS/mailer security would be nice too.
Computers get faster? Make sure the computation price can become more costly. Jack it up every now and then.
Much more useful and likely to be effective than any law ('cause we know nobody breaks those) or a stongly worded declaration from the UN.
Anyone bothering to even read the post--not even the article, but the 90-word post--would see that it *was* looked into, and the idea was discarded as hopeless and possibly even counter-productive. And anyone with a moderate understanding of how the email system works would see that this is obvious.
Does that seem like a good idea for a project to you? If so, I have some wonderful investment opportunities for you.
Come on guys: do you really have to call every single concept in the system a "cell"? I know you're excited about the concept, but come on. It's just plain confusing.
It could be really neat, but I suspect that (a) it won't work as well as it sounds (b) it'll be a nightmare to program for, so will be poorly used, and (c) no one will use it but Sony.
I would bet that the PRC has worked out the process of liquidation of undesirables to a fine art, or at least a series of slavishly followed forms.
My wacky conspiracy theory is that the Area 51 Fake Moon Surface Studio had already been repurposed to look like Mars and the Chinese didn't care to construct a new facility.
Did you just equate "more free" to "more European"?
I will have to imagine you mean free with regards to "we drink legally at a younger age and show breasts on broadcast television" (in which case you'd be right) rather than toleration of speech (in which case you'd be wrong.)
Harbor Freight is dangerous if you treat it like a regular tool store, but fine as long as you understand what categories of tools you can get away with at that level of quality.
This includes tools you'll only use for a few hours, those things which are useful primarily in just existing, tools which are very simple and rugged by nature, and tools that don't benefit any from features. I've had pretty good luck with their air tools, and benchtop-type tools. Things like anvils and jack stands are probably fine. Stay away from hand tools, both power and otherwise.
"Your suggesting, then, that bold-faced type or other forms of often inappropriately-selected HTML markup is a superior method of adding emphasis or delineating portions of one's comments?"
Yes. Quotation marks, in case you missed it, are for demarcating *quotations*, much as I have done above. To use them otherwise, regardless of what limitations the medium might have, really only serves to show that you probably haven't been paying attention.
If you think that there are no viable alternatives for emphasis than overloading the use of such a well-defined and widely-used punctutation mark, I suggest you simply go without. Good writing doesn't need emphasis markup anyway: I suspect that you'll find no bold typefaces in the nearest novel or newspaper to hand, nor quotations used for emphasis. (Unless you have one of the perticularly trashy examples of these media.)
Fair enough. But season five suffered not due to poor initial story planning, or because the suits wanted to scrape some more money off the franchise, but because it didn't look likely there would be a fifth season.
So that the series could end gracefully if production were to halt after season 4, a lot of the story that should have been in season 5 (like the war to free Earth, I suppose) was brought out early and compressed, leaving a bit of a vacuum when season 5 actually happened. The result: the terrible disaster of the telepath story arc, the mind-numbingly obvious Garibaldi problem, and a lot of other filler.
But considering that there was an unexpected cast change to deal with, and that the plan had been screwed up, it didn't turn out so bad. And perhaps we can credit the excellentness of season 4 to its compression. But I kinda think that had season 5 been in the bag the whole time, the last two would have been much better.
The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft aglay, you know. That's one thing that the endlessly serialized American TV show has on something with an actual story: no one really cares if it can't make it all the way. And if it's not guaranteed to go all the way, the makers of a planned show have a choice: leave it heartbreakingly hanging (see Big O, thankfully being finally completed) or doing what JMS did for B5, and winding things down too soon.
I suppose that my Theory of Life Being Randomly Built Every Time Atom By Atom By Equally Tiny Gnomes With Grey Beards And Pointy Hats has just as much chance of being right?
Completely ignoring your mis-use of the idea of the theory in science, hasn't anyone ever told you that semantic arguments are facile?
Lindbergh flew non-stop by himself across the Atlantic.
That's a big deal. It meant planes were reliable, powerful, long-range, and easy to handle. Possibly reliable, powerful, long-range, and easy enough to make some real use of (which followed shortly after.)
Plus it was a media circus. Both which made it more significant.
Abortion isn't about population control. It's about correcting the mistakes of stupid people. You want to lower the birth rate you do it through education and building a middle class. (Which is, not coincidentally, the same way to improve standard of living.)
Or, if you don't care about civil society, by trying to legislate your way out of it. (This is my not-so-subtle dig at China.)
While we're at it, that's not a fact. It's a naive supposition. And not a very well formulated one at that.
That's a flippin' cool idea. I'm so making a shoji case. Gonna have to find some way to create a proper Faraday cage; maybe using aluminum foil instead of rice paper.
I know where all the holes in the wall are in my house, and would damn well notice a new one. But I suppose it depends on how observant the owner is. But in any case, all it takes to repair a reasonably-sized hole in the wall right before you move out is fiberglass tape, some joint compound, paint, and maybe a can of spray-on texturizer.
What're they gonna do, anyway? Knock a twenty off your deposit?
Okay, so the title isn't all one word, but I still maintain that simply having a ring doesn't make one a Ringworld. You have to be a ring, in the full Larry Niven-sense. You don't call something a Discworld that just has a disc, do you?
The majority of the world's (Egyptian) mummies are in the ground. Late (read: Roman) Egypt generated so many darn mummies that even the Brits wouldn't be able to cart them off.
Not that they didn't take most of the noteworthy ones.
I don't know where this comes from, but you seem to have a bit of region-centric thinking going on here.
First, unless some states are doing things very strangely, almost no land has any zoning restrictions whatsoever. Zoning is for incorporated areas, and in most of those you don't grab 20-acre parsels and not live there.
Second, tree farms are pretty nice places. They're forests, you know, if rather boring ones. Lots of places are already partially or were previously forests, making trees on the property not so unattractive as you imply. (In commodity land, trees are usually an extra resource, unless a buyer wants to plant corn there Right Now, and raise the property value a little.) And there's probably nobody living there anyway to do any of the more labor-intensive things one might do with land. Trees are a lot easier to grow, especially in absentee, than cows or corn.
What the first poster suggested was doing something simple with mostly idle land. We're not talking about a forestry operation here. Who cares if you can't compete on a real scale. You're just selling a few truckloads of timber a year. More like selling your used books than being Amazon.
And most of those trees can be harvested and stumped at the same time with a truck, a rope, and a chainsaw.
You can also slip a luggage lock in the hole to keep people from, say, plugging in ye old circular saw when they really shouldn't be. So dunno about locking the plug in the outlet, but locking it out is certainly done.
Slashdot Mirror
You can disable autoplay. You just have to do it on their website. Under "Playback Settings".
We have lots of data for everything in 1G. We have some data on various life forms (mostly humans, some plants, and a few other animals) in ~0G. The only data for anything in-between is the ~24 man-days on the Moon of the Apollo crews, and that data is essentially "well, they didn't die."
So basically we know nothing about the long-term effects of Moon or Mars gravity. Nothing at all. How much gravity do we need to be functionally the same as Earth? How much gravity is functionally the same as micro-G? What are the effects in the middle of those values? Are they the same numbers for plants? None of this is known in the slightest--and is all of very high importance for any significant human presence off-Earth.
And it's not even all that hard to test in LEO, so it's pretty perverse that no space science organisation has done so. NASA and co have put lots of resources into figuring out how humans work in 0G, which is a stupid place to live, and none into mid-G which is how the Moon and Mars must work, and is also an option for long-term orbital habitats if it works better (as it likely will).
And why is that? One can posit lots of answers, but I'd have to say that it's another demonstration that the real purpose of the major space programs is prestige and pork.
Get your facts straight, or at least look a little past the headlines. You might start by reading some of the posts above this one.
Aren't you supposed to be all into nuance and such?
And did you know that you can actually read the text of the treaty itself rather than trust some media "authority"? A fascinating concept.
Now that's a strategy that'll work. Centralized spamming goes away (or at least decreases), as it becomes more costly than the receipts, and zombies are limited in effectiveness. (Consider that currently a computer could easily send 8000 emails in a couple of minutes.) A serious reduction in volume. There are a couple of holes to be plugged:
Getting people to use the new protocol? Exploit the existing protocol, use a hybrid system, and/or punish those who don't comply with, say, a 20s wait.
Dealing with zombies? ISPs cut off port 25 for machines constantly sending email. Better OS/mailer security would be nice too.
Computers get faster? Make sure the computation price can become more costly. Jack it up every now and then.
Much more useful and likely to be effective than any law ('cause we know nobody breaks those) or a stongly worded declaration from the UN.
Anyone bothering to even read the post--not even the article, but the 90-word post--would see that it *was* looked into, and the idea was discarded as hopeless and possibly even counter-productive. And anyone with a moderate understanding of how the email system works would see that this is obvious.
Does that seem like a good idea for a project to you? If so, I have some wonderful investment opportunities for you.
Come on guys: do you really have to call every single concept in the system a "cell"? I know you're excited about the concept, but come on. It's just plain confusing.
It could be really neat, but I suspect that (a) it won't work as well as it sounds (b) it'll be a nightmare to program for, so will be poorly used, and (c) no one will use it but Sony.
I would bet that the PRC has worked out the process of liquidation of undesirables to a fine art, or at least a series of slavishly followed forms.
My wacky conspiracy theory is that the Area 51 Fake Moon Surface Studio had already been repurposed to look like Mars and the Chinese didn't care to construct a new facility.
You're erupting? My condolences. Do they have treatments for that yet?
Astroturfing is very common. Call 'em on it if you will, but I question if it's even close to unethical At worst it's probably slimy.
You set up a situation that allows this and then get upset when people use it? Really.
Did you just equate "more free" to "more European"?
I will have to imagine you mean free with regards to "we drink legally at a younger age and show breasts on broadcast television" (in which case you'd be right) rather than toleration of speech (in which case you'd be wrong.)
Harbor Freight is dangerous if you treat it like a regular tool store, but fine as long as you understand what categories of tools you can get away with at that level of quality.
This includes tools you'll only use for a few hours, those things which are useful primarily in just existing, tools which are very simple and rugged by nature, and tools that don't benefit any from features. I've had pretty good luck with their air tools, and benchtop-type tools. Things like anvils and jack stands are probably fine. Stay away from hand tools, both power and otherwise.
Fines on the Autobahn, as I recall, are proportional to income. Tickets of 30000 euro or more have been written.
Just think how much Bill Gates would pay for a speeding ticket. That would be a happy day for the Washington state troopers.
"Your suggesting, then, that bold-faced type or other forms of often inappropriately-selected HTML markup is a superior method of adding emphasis or delineating portions of one's comments?"
h tm
Yes. Quotation marks, in case you missed it, are for demarcating *quotations*, much as I have done above. To use them otherwise, regardless of what limitations the medium might have, really only serves to show that you probably haven't been paying attention.
If you think that there are no viable alternatives for emphasis than overloading the use of such a well-defined and widely-used punctutation mark, I suggest you simply go without. Good writing doesn't need emphasis markup anyway: I suspect that you'll find no bold typefaces in the nearest novel or newspaper to hand, nor quotations used for emphasis. (Unless you have one of the perticularly trashy examples of these media.)
http://ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/marks/quotation.
http://www.juvalamu.com/qmarks/#current
Fair enough. But season five suffered not due to poor initial story planning, or because the suits wanted to scrape some more money off the franchise, but because it didn't look likely there would be a fifth season.
So that the series could end gracefully if production were to halt after season 4, a lot of the story that should have been in season 5 (like the war to free Earth, I suppose) was brought out early and compressed, leaving a bit of a vacuum when season 5 actually happened. The result: the terrible disaster of the telepath story arc, the mind-numbingly obvious Garibaldi problem, and a lot of other filler.
But considering that there was an unexpected cast change to deal with, and that the plan had been screwed up, it didn't turn out so bad. And perhaps we can credit the excellentness of season 4 to its compression. But I kinda think that had season 5 been in the bag the whole time, the last two would have been much better.
The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft aglay, you know. That's one thing that the endlessly serialized American TV show has on something with an actual story: no one really cares if it can't make it all the way. And if it's not guaranteed to go all the way, the makers of a planned show have a choice: leave it heartbreakingly hanging (see Big O, thankfully being finally completed) or doing what JMS did for B5, and winding things down too soon.
I suppose that my Theory of Life Being Randomly Built Every Time Atom By Atom By Equally Tiny Gnomes With Grey Beards And Pointy Hats has just as much chance of being right?
Completely ignoring your mis-use of the idea of the theory in science, hasn't anyone ever told you that semantic arguments are facile?
While your attention to detail is appreciated, you missed the most important one:
it was a joke.
Admittedly not a good one, but still.
Lindbergh flew non-stop by himself across the Atlantic.
That's a big deal. It meant planes were reliable, powerful, long-range, and easy to handle. Possibly reliable, powerful, long-range, and easy enough to make some real use of (which followed shortly after.)
Plus it was a media circus. Both which made it more significant.
They may have died.
But they won.
Abortion isn't about population control. It's about correcting the mistakes of stupid people. You want to lower the birth rate you do it through education and building a middle class. (Which is, not coincidentally, the same way to improve standard of living.)
Or, if you don't care about civil society, by trying to legislate your way out of it. (This is my not-so-subtle dig at China.)
While we're at it, that's not a fact. It's a naive supposition. And not a very well formulated one at that.
That's a flippin' cool idea. I'm so making a shoji case. Gonna have to find some way to create a proper Faraday cage; maybe using aluminum foil instead of rice paper.
Except if you have a flaky VIA/Athlon combo. IT doesn't like anything much more advanced than 2.4.6.
I know where all the holes in the wall are in my house, and would damn well notice a new one. But I suppose it depends on how observant the owner is. But in any case, all it takes to repair a reasonably-sized hole in the wall right before you move out is fiberglass tape, some joint compound, paint, and maybe a can of spray-on texturizer.
What're they gonna do, anyway? Knock a twenty off your deposit?
Okay, so the title isn't all one word, but I still maintain that simply having a ring doesn't make one a Ringworld. You have to be a ring, in the full Larry Niven-sense. You don't call something a Discworld that just has a disc, do you?
The majority of the world's (Egyptian) mummies are in the ground. Late (read: Roman) Egypt generated so many darn mummies that even the Brits wouldn't be able to cart them off.
Not that they didn't take most of the noteworthy ones.
I don't know where this comes from, but you seem to have a bit of region-centric thinking going on here.
First, unless some states are doing things very strangely, almost no land has any zoning restrictions whatsoever. Zoning is for incorporated areas, and in most of those you don't grab 20-acre parsels and not live there.
Second, tree farms are pretty nice places. They're forests, you know, if rather boring ones. Lots of places are already partially or were previously forests, making trees on the property not so unattractive as you imply. (In commodity land, trees are usually an extra resource, unless a buyer wants to plant corn there Right Now, and raise the property value a little.) And there's probably nobody living there anyway to do any of the more labor-intensive things one might do with land. Trees are a lot easier to grow, especially in absentee, than cows or corn.
What the first poster suggested was doing something simple with mostly idle land. We're not talking about a forestry operation here. Who cares if you can't compete on a real scale. You're just selling a few truckloads of timber a year. More like selling your used books than being Amazon.
And most of those trees can be harvested and stumped at the same time with a truck, a rope, and a chainsaw.
You can also slip a luggage lock in the hole to keep people from, say, plugging in ye old circular saw when they really shouldn't be. So dunno about locking the plug in the outlet, but locking it out is certainly done.