I think Evolution is overkill for a POP/IMAP email client. There are some excellent GTK email clients that are much better on resources than evolution.
Also, I was a bit of a math nerd in high school, and so I suggested to my math teacher that he try a class where you give the students a simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher, do a quick rundown on how to crack them, and then give them some time to crack it. The declaration of independence was long enough for most of the kids to have gotten most of the alphabet cracked by the end of the hour. Saved me a boring class and it was a big hit. You might think about setting some kind of similar challenge.
You might look at some of Simon Singh's stuff if you haven't already- there are some good chapters in The Code Book regarding the basics of public-key cryptography which don't require any more than a basic education in algebra.
Solar faces the same problem. The sun isn't always up and even when it is, it isn't always out. The solution is usually to somehow store surplus energy for later use, and this is made a little easier for both solar and tidal by being very predictable.
I've never moused with my left hand on anything approaching a regular basis- it's simply too awkward. I was just taught to use my right hand to mouse like everyone else in elementary school so that's what I do.
I think the "beta" reference is referring to the fact that thus far the only publicly-available version of Windows 7 is in beta. Whether or not it's just a better-marketed Vista doesn't change the fact that if all you do is mess with the UI somewhat you still want to test to make sure your changes don't break anything.:)
I apologize, that bit about intelligent life and likelihood ended up in a block of text and my brain just sort of glazed over. I'll still stick by what I said, though: intelligent life is damn unlikely. Just thinking about the development of multicellular life, the confluence of factors is just mind-boggling. The development of multicellular life I'd rate pretty unlikely already, and after that it just keeps getting unlikelier and unlikelier: the chances of intelligent life? Can't say they're very good. The chance of intelligent life that develops a society which can sustain itself long enough for the pre-requisite technology... the list goes on.
Admittedly, it only takes the one entity... but it takes that one entity to "colonize" a single star as you described. After they've got that star's solar output to themselves you'd think the simulacra would be happy as pigs in shit until that star started to die. I'll own that what you describe could probably have happened elsewhere but I don't think it necessarily would expand rapidly or to a great volume, and if it did, who's to say we should be anywhere near enough to see it?
Way to miss the point. It's not enough and it never is enough for something to simply be a good idea: you need people to buy into it and for something where you end up spending a lot of money to build everything you need to establish an interstellar colony and selecting and training your colonizers and then literally launch it into space and never see it again, you're probably going to have a hard time finding investors of any species.
Well, duh! I put that in there for rhetorical effect. Obviously you wouldn't just throw a dart somewhere on the star chart and send your interstellar ark there. I was kinda hoping I wouldn't need to be exactly literal and that I could trust people to get what I was saying. Evidently not.
Realistically, once you get into a new star system, the only thing you can really do is settle down and get to work replacing everything you left behind.
You're assuming that nanotech and interstellar drives + enough fuel to power said interstellar drive are readily-available and cheap enough in this hypothetical civilization to make it feasible for Joe "Sixpack" E.T. to go out and buy himself a self-replicating computer-building solar-system consuming interstellar probe. Not impossible... but how damn likely is that? Also, keep in mind that the emerging scientific consensus is that tool-using intelligent life is probably extremely rare in the Universe (on the order of a few such independent instances in every galaxy or so).
I think the answer to the Fermi paradox is simply that there aren't any aliens, at least none near enough to make them detectable.
Are you kidding me? England worked their prisoners into the ground. They paid back the cost of a one-way ticket to Australia several times over before their term was finished. Again, any wealth an interstellar colony generates is effectively trapped in that system without FTL. Anyway, there are plenty of good penal colony sites right here in the Solar system. Assuming us humans ever even get to interplanetary travel we won't need more for a penal colony than to rope off a few of the dozens of moons right here, not for a good long while at least.
And of course, even after we've only counted the societies that got far enough to build a sustainable, long-term society, we then have to count the ones that got to the level of galactic expansion... good luck at less than the speed of light, and just assuming the light barrier is something that can be broken or skirted around well enough to make interstellar travel feasible strikes me as wishful thinking.
Not necessarily. It may just be that interstellar travel isn't feasible, the ardent wishes of sci-fi writers everywhere notwithstanding. Remember, it's never enough to simply be able to do something: it has to make economic sense if you expect to get anybody else on board, too.
Assuming you can't skirt around the light barrier then that basically means sending small groups of people (or aliens or whatever) across trillions of miles, probably in some kind of hibernated state, in the hope that they'll bump into a habitable somewhere, set up shop, and begin to populate. Any returns on investment will be very intangible indeed- physical goods have to come back the same way they came (meaning it would have to be extraordinarily valuable to merit the shipping and handling on an interstellar ark) and information is cheap. You'd need to expect a very valuable treasure-trove of knowledge indeed for information to start making sense as an expected ROI.
I know many people just assume that interstellar travel is the "next step" in the development of societies but the longer I look at it the less it seems to offer tangible benefits for the people who have to invest in this.
I expect a society thinking in the long-term would obviously see the benefits of spreading one's seed across multiple star systems... but you have to postulate the existence of a society that takes the long view. Considering how easily a society as advanced as ours (not saying we're very advanced: just a society at the same level of advancement as us) is busily undermining its own biome, knows it's doing it, and doesn't care, and took pains to smother other societies which might have taken the longer view, I don't think we should expect many societies to reach the "long-view" stage before they wiped themselves out or got wiped out.
3) Can we "smoke" marijuana in a way that won't cause side effects akin to tobacco smoking? This will probably rule out smoking a joint, and would probably require an FDA-approved medicial bong.
By "twice that per month" I'm talkin' the proposed $6bn in grants not the bailouts... for which I'm not trying to exculpate anybody, Democrat or Republican.
Perhaps I wasn't clear, though I felt confident it would be difficult to mix up "military misadventure" with "bailout". I was referring to the military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan which cumulatively cost us about twice that per month.[1]
Since it seems every time Iraq and Afghanistan come up it has to be mentioned that it was voted for by Democrats as well, I feel obliged to make clear right away that I'm not really trying to make this a Republicans vs. Democrats thing. It's just that they're both ruinously expensive and badly-run and if it's okay to spend $12bn a month on that it doesn't seem unreasonable to budget $6 billion to expand telecoms infrastructure right here in the US. (That said, I don't trust any of the telecoms and feel confident our money will be wasted but if I thought it would be spent well I'd be all for it)
You know the old saying about death and taxes? Taxation has been a part of life since before names like Gilgamesh were all the rage. They're not going to go away so the least one might ask is that they not be spent wastefully.
$6bn, as absurd an amount as it is, is a drop in the water compared to some of the things the last President put through. At least that kind of spending is starting to get funneled back into the US as opposed to, say, across the world in military misadventures that are actively damaging our security.
As long as we get some return on the investment I'm all for it, but as the FS says: we've sunk a lot more than $6bn into this same thing already and got nowhere.
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I think Evolution is overkill for a POP/IMAP email client. There are some excellent GTK email clients that are much better on resources than evolution.
Also, I was a bit of a math nerd in high school, and so I suggested to my math teacher that he try a class where you give the students a simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher, do a quick rundown on how to crack them, and then give them some time to crack it. The declaration of independence was long enough for most of the kids to have gotten most of the alphabet cracked by the end of the hour. Saved me a boring class and it was a big hit. You might think about setting some kind of similar challenge.
You might look at some of Simon Singh's stuff if you haven't already- there are some good chapters in The Code Book regarding the basics of public-key cryptography which don't require any more than a basic education in algebra.
Strictly speaking you're right. I was just thinking in the context of like a local solar array.
anthropomorphic climate change.
Anthropomorphic climate change? What's that, at the center of the earth there's a guy turning the thermostat all the way up?
Solar faces the same problem. The sun isn't always up and even when it is, it isn't always out. The solution is usually to somehow store surplus energy for later use, and this is made a little easier for both solar and tidal by being very predictable.
Are you hoping that the guards will also be infected by your malware?
I've never moused with my left hand on anything approaching a regular basis- it's simply too awkward. I was just taught to use my right hand to mouse like everyone else in elementary school so that's what I do.
--Southpaw
I think the "beta" reference is referring to the fact that thus far the only publicly-available version of Windows 7 is in beta. Whether or not it's just a better-marketed Vista doesn't change the fact that if all you do is mess with the UI somewhat you still want to test to make sure your changes don't break anything. :)
Or you could also just leave used needles strewn across the floor or something. There's more than one way to contract HIV.
I apologize, that bit about intelligent life and likelihood ended up in a block of text and my brain just sort of glazed over. I'll still stick by what I said, though: intelligent life is damn unlikely. Just thinking about the development of multicellular life, the confluence of factors is just mind-boggling. The development of multicellular life I'd rate pretty unlikely already, and after that it just keeps getting unlikelier and unlikelier: the chances of intelligent life? Can't say they're very good. The chance of intelligent life that develops a society which can sustain itself long enough for the pre-requisite technology... the list goes on.
Admittedly, it only takes the one entity... but it takes that one entity to "colonize" a single star as you described. After they've got that star's solar output to themselves you'd think the simulacra would be happy as pigs in shit until that star started to die. I'll own that what you describe could probably have happened elsewhere but I don't think it necessarily would expand rapidly or to a great volume, and if it did, who's to say we should be anywhere near enough to see it?
Way to miss the point. It's not enough and it never is enough for something to simply be a good idea: you need people to buy into it and for something where you end up spending a lot of money to build everything you need to establish an interstellar colony and selecting and training your colonizers and then literally launch it into space and never see it again, you're probably going to have a hard time finding investors of any species.
Well, duh! I put that in there for rhetorical effect. Obviously you wouldn't just throw a dart somewhere on the star chart and send your interstellar ark there. I was kinda hoping I wouldn't need to be exactly literal and that I could trust people to get what I was saying. Evidently not.
Realistically, once you get into a new star system, the only thing you can really do is settle down and get to work replacing everything you left behind.
You're assuming that nanotech and interstellar drives + enough fuel to power said interstellar drive are readily-available and cheap enough in this hypothetical civilization to make it feasible for Joe "Sixpack" E.T. to go out and buy himself a self-replicating computer-building solar-system consuming interstellar probe. Not impossible... but how damn likely is that? Also, keep in mind that the emerging scientific consensus is that tool-using intelligent life is probably extremely rare in the Universe (on the order of a few such independent instances in every galaxy or so).
I think the answer to the Fermi paradox is simply that there aren't any aliens, at least none near enough to make them detectable.
Are you kidding me? England worked their prisoners into the ground. They paid back the cost of a one-way ticket to Australia several times over before their term was finished. Again, any wealth an interstellar colony generates is effectively trapped in that system without FTL. Anyway, there are plenty of good penal colony sites right here in the Solar system. Assuming us humans ever even get to interplanetary travel we won't need more for a penal colony than to rope off a few of the dozens of moons right here, not for a good long while at least.
And of course, even after we've only counted the societies that got far enough to build a sustainable, long-term society, we then have to count the ones that got to the level of galactic expansion... good luck at less than the speed of light, and just assuming the light barrier is something that can be broken or skirted around well enough to make interstellar travel feasible strikes me as wishful thinking.
Not necessarily. It may just be that interstellar travel isn't feasible, the ardent wishes of sci-fi writers everywhere notwithstanding. Remember, it's never enough to simply be able to do something: it has to make economic sense if you expect to get anybody else on board, too.
Assuming you can't skirt around the light barrier then that basically means sending small groups of people (or aliens or whatever) across trillions of miles, probably in some kind of hibernated state, in the hope that they'll bump into a habitable somewhere, set up shop, and begin to populate. Any returns on investment will be very intangible indeed- physical goods have to come back the same way they came (meaning it would have to be extraordinarily valuable to merit the shipping and handling on an interstellar ark) and information is cheap. You'd need to expect a very valuable treasure-trove of knowledge indeed for information to start making sense as an expected ROI.
I know many people just assume that interstellar travel is the "next step" in the development of societies but the longer I look at it the less it seems to offer tangible benefits for the people who have to invest in this.
I expect a society thinking in the long-term would obviously see the benefits of spreading one's seed across multiple star systems... but you have to postulate the existence of a society that takes the long view. Considering how easily a society as advanced as ours (not saying we're very advanced: just a society at the same level of advancement as us) is busily undermining its own biome, knows it's doing it, and doesn't care, and took pains to smother other societies which might have taken the longer view, I don't think we should expect many societies to reach the "long-view" stage before they wiped themselves out or got wiped out.
3) Can we "smoke" marijuana in a way that won't cause side effects akin to tobacco smoking? This will probably rule out smoking a joint, and would probably require an FDA-approved medicial bong.
Or you could buy a vaporizer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporizer
By "twice that per month" I'm talkin' the proposed $6bn in grants not the bailouts... for which I'm not trying to exculpate anybody, Democrat or Republican.
Perhaps I wasn't clear, though I felt confident it would be difficult to mix up "military misadventure" with "bailout". I was referring to the military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan which cumulatively cost us about twice that per month.[1]
Since it seems every time Iraq and Afghanistan come up it has to be mentioned that it was voted for by Democrats as well, I feel obliged to make clear right away that I'm not really trying to make this a Republicans vs. Democrats thing. It's just that they're both ruinously expensive and badly-run and if it's okay to spend $12bn a month on that it doesn't seem unreasonable to budget $6 billion to expand telecoms infrastructure right here in the US. (That said, I don't trust any of the telecoms and feel confident our money will be wasted but if I thought it would be spent well I'd be all for it)
[1] http://theiraqinsider.blogspot.com/2008/02/how-much-does-iraq-war-cost-per-month.html
You know the old saying about death and taxes? Taxation has been a part of life since before names like Gilgamesh were all the rage. They're not going to go away so the least one might ask is that they not be spent wastefully.
That seems to be the approach they're taking.
$6bn, as absurd an amount as it is, is a drop in the water compared to some of the things the last President put through. At least that kind of spending is starting to get funneled back into the US as opposed to, say, across the world in military misadventures that are actively damaging our security.
As long as we get some return on the investment I'm all for it, but as the FS says: we've sunk a lot more than $6bn into this same thing already and got nowhere.
Fool me once, shame on you...