Beyond some unknown future economic potential that Mars could provide that the Earth simply could not, once you go past the scientific/adventure angles, there's really only one compelling reason to go to Mars - survival of the species. We are presently a one-planet species, but even if we cleaned up our act and made the Earth a sustainable place to live for the very long term, we're one catastrophic event away from oblivion. Pick any time horizon that you like, we're eventually extinct. Once we're a viable two-planet species, and by that I mean there's a self-sustaining human presence someplace else, the end of humans can at least be forestalled.
But there's so much we don't know still. Even if we could convert lava tubes into viable habitats for some protection from radiation, and grow food, and have a long-term self-sustaining energy and manufacturing infrastructure - if we could simply bootstrap long-term human viability on Mars - we don't know what making babies in a place like that is like. Will we bring the right microbiome with us to impart healthy immune systems? How fundamentally tied to the Earth are we?
We could spend a tremendous amount of money and have a lot of astronauts/colonists die finding the answers. I think it's worth trying.
With the number of pills taken by the elderly these days, not to mention people who die in the hospital who may have all sorts of compounds pumped into them before they die, I wonder if the composting process fully breaks them down, or at least to safe levels. I didn't see any mention of it in TFA.
The irony is the real fall off in quality is Japan. Toyota and Honda aren't what they used to be.
What leads you to believe that? My empirical observations from owning two Toyota vehicles ('05 Prius, '06 Highlander hybrid) is that even with the complex systems on these vehicles, they have required nothing but regular maintenance. Seriously, I had to replace the water pump on my Prius at 175K miles due to seepage at the seal, and that's it. Both vehicles have been trouble-free. My brother's Avalon is pushing 200K, and he abuses vehicles. So I'm honestly curious whether your experience has differed from mine.
The point made earlier by a poster regarding acceleration lag is very true, he described it perfectly. Other than that, the Prius is a great car. Mine has 160K miles on it and it runs the same as the day I bought it, and it has been more reliable than any other car I've ever owned (and I have owned many). Brake linings never replaced. Not a bunch of rattles and squeaks, although it's not the quietest care on noisy roads. I'm planning to take mine to 300K miles if at all possible, and I know others who feel the same - keep it as long as possible, there's no real reason to replace it.
Conspiracy may be too strong a word. Tech companies want to be able to hire in a buyer's market, which almost certainly requires a larger pool of talent to pick and choose from than would occur naturally. Having a position go unfilled for weeks or even months due to a lack of qualified talent isn't in their best interest, and if there's anything we can agree upon, it's that companies will always act in their perceived best interests.
That said, I must agree whole-heartedly with your statement regarding "qualified". Having participated in many phone screens and in-person interviews, it is astounding how much resume inflation goes on. If you say you know Perl, I'm going to ask you about it and ask you to write a short, easy script. Oh, you meant that you once ran a Perl script written by a co-worker? That's nice. And in most cases, when there's one inflated claim like that on the resume, there are more.
Beyond that, so many candidates say they know how to do something in particular - driver development, firmware, chip design/verification/layout, etc. But when you delve into the qualitative aspects of the job, many can only cover the mechanics of the tasks they perform -- they don't show more than a surface understanding of it. Yet they are already employed and have titles that have "Senior" in them, and they expect a raise and maybe even a better title.
The ratio of mediocre to "OMG this person really knows their shit!" talent is not nearly what I think it ought to be.
It's a mix of cryptography, freedom of speech, computing, networking, finance, economics, and even politics -- most of us here dig that stuff.
Yes, but we usually recognize things as belonging to one or more of these categories. For better or worse, trying to explain to the vast majority of the population what a Bitcoin is has been akin to saying "Play Minecraft for fun and profit!"
I don't think it's any more ludicrous for Bitcoin to have value than it is for gold to have value.
That's quite possibly fair. But if you buy into the theory that all of the gold on Earth was likely created during numerous supernova billions of years ago, you just might have a hard time comparing that to a Bitcoin.
The future world she envisioned felt so much like an obvious extrapolation from the world of today. It affected me for awhile afterwards; just kept thinking about it...
You are unfortunately right. My father had a really nasty bout of shingles that laid him low last fall. I didn't see him for a couple of weeks during the worst of it, but he took a photo of what his shoulder looked like with the lesions and the discoloration caused by the silver-based topical medication prescribed by his doctor. I don't think a zombie ever looked as bad as that.
It laid him low, and he hasn't ever quite recovered. Chicken pox was nothing compared to this.
Comcast also is offering free subscriptions to Norton Security Suite for up to 7 computers per customer — including Mac versions of the Symantec suite.
At least most bots have the decency to let you use your own computer. Norton (and in my experience, McAfee) security suites are much less inclined to leave enough free resources for that to be possible.
There's a good history of Buran over at Astronautix. First the article about the craft itself, another (with a lot of overlap) about the project, then a short piece about the Buran Analogue. A very good write-up with several good photos (sad ones at the end) over at Aerospaceweb.
If you've got some time to kill, you can find a Buran mock-up sitting at the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Google Earth. Also the final resting place of the Buran that flew and the Energia reusable launch vehicle, but it's a little hard to locate.
It's not as if there's no alternative if this happens. Pop in your live CD/DVD of a Linux distro, most people would be back online. Your data on the FAT32/NTFS filesystems can be read from within the Linux environment. Maybe your proprietary programs aren't there to access some of the data, but that's not blocking your communications. Those still forced to use dialup with their internal Winmodems, yes, their communications would be impacted. I suspect there are more people still forced to use dialup than we'd want in these "modern times".
Given how fast the geeks would get broadband-connected friends and family back online, I think you should be more concerned about the big ISPs being controlled. That's much more universal than just controlling ~85-90% of the PCs running a particular operating system.
I'm much more of a hardware (chip) guy than I'll ever be a software guy. I'd like to ask (honestly), how can Flash remain such a security nightmare? After all this time, all of the preceding versions of flash, how can vulnerabilities continue to be found in light of more scrutiny by the developers (code audits, bounds checkers, etc.)? I realize no complex piece of software is bug-free, but Flash (and of course, Acrobat Reader) have continuous vulnerability discoveries... must it be so forevermore?
Twenty years from now, your USB thumb drives and CD-R's may have their data physically intact, but only museums will have equipment that can read them.
Nah... according to my wife, I'll almost certainly still have hardware "archived" that can read those formats. She's of course delighted that I feel the need to save humanity from a potential digital Armageddon... she didn't want to park the car in the garage, anyway.
Manufacturing the parts is, nevertheless, still the essential problem. A quote from Paul Shawcross, from NASA's Office of Inspector General several years ago:
"The problem in recreating the Saturn 5 is not finding the drawings, it is finding vendors who can supply mid-1960's vintage hardware," he wrote, "and the fact that the launch pads and vehicle assembly buildings have been converted to space shuttle use, so you have no place to launch from.
"By the time you redesign to accommodate available hardware and re-modify the launch pads, you may as well have started from scratch with a clean sheet design," he wrote.
Unless he/she lives real close to the state border, sheer vehicle depreciation will eat up much/all of the savings from this scheme. Not just talking gas prices, but wear & tear on the car as well. At my company we get something like 60 cents a mile on our expense reports; fifty miles means thirty bucks.
Add onto that time & inconvenience and you've got yourself a pretty low return on your investment.
You're quite right about PSU quality, but a brand name doesn't guarantee anything either. I bought three Antec cases (at separate times) with PSUs; two Sonata II (quite expensive) and one lower-end but with a similar, lower wattage power supply. All three have failed and required a RMA. I have no other brand of PSU that has done this to me, and my usage is very light. I love 'em when they work, as they are quiet supplies. But (only somewhat) sadly, I'm done with Antec.
Psystar ships its own flavor of hackintosh... they are not clones. I don't get the persistence of the label. Is it just the desire of folks to have an actual clone as a choice to run OS X that keeps the term active in discussions?
I don't know enough about the issue to comment, but that's still bad reasoning.
CO2 is a naturally-occurring gas that is part of the life cycle of, jeez, just about everything? And we're making too much of it. That's probably not good, but we can have a like/dislike discussion about that. Mercury, on the other hand, is a substance that requires only minute amounts of to render food virtually inedible, water undrinkable and cause terrible neurological disorders in children. I truly doubt that like/dislike really enters the picture.
Read a bit more about mercury poisoning, and you've probably heard about mercury in fish before. In its elemental form it's not particularly dangerous, but when it changes chemically to methylmercury, it's damned nasty.
Bottom line, regardless of whether we're talking about nuclear vs. coal power, globa warming, etc., there's always one more piece of information that you need to consider before you start to get "the big picture". And everything is so fscking complicated, we tend to try to keep it simple and stake out positions that we feel we can defend. But winning the argument doesn't mean we're right, or that we've moved the discussion forward.
Slashdot Mirror
Beyond some unknown future economic potential that Mars could provide that the Earth simply could not, once you go past the scientific/adventure angles, there's really only one compelling reason to go to Mars - survival of the species. We are presently a one-planet species, but even if we cleaned up our act and made the Earth a sustainable place to live for the very long term, we're one catastrophic event away from oblivion. Pick any time horizon that you like, we're eventually extinct. Once we're a viable two-planet species, and by that I mean there's a self-sustaining human presence someplace else, the end of humans can at least be forestalled.
But there's so much we don't know still. Even if we could convert lava tubes into viable habitats for some protection from radiation, and grow food, and have a long-term self-sustaining energy and manufacturing infrastructure - if we could simply bootstrap long-term human viability on Mars - we don't know what making babies in a place like that is like. Will we bring the right microbiome with us to impart healthy immune systems? How fundamentally tied to the Earth are we?
We could spend a tremendous amount of money and have a lot of astronauts/colonists die finding the answers. I think it's worth trying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Oh come now, it has a "butt-mounted Velodyne VLP-16 system". What's not to understand?
With the number of pills taken by the elderly these days, not to mention people who die in the hospital who may have all sorts of compounds pumped into them before they die, I wonder if the composting process fully breaks them down, or at least to safe levels. I didn't see any mention of it in TFA.
The irony is the real fall off in quality is Japan. Toyota and Honda aren't what they used to be.
What leads you to believe that? My empirical observations from owning two Toyota vehicles ('05 Prius, '06 Highlander hybrid) is that even with the complex systems on these vehicles, they have required nothing but regular maintenance. Seriously, I had to replace the water pump on my Prius at 175K miles due to seepage at the seal, and that's it. Both vehicles have been trouble-free. My brother's Avalon is pushing 200K, and he abuses vehicles. So I'm honestly curious whether your experience has differed from mine.
I can't quite grok what form this might take, but whatever it might be, it surely needs to be a Kickstarter campaign.
This.
The point made earlier by a poster regarding acceleration lag is very true, he described it perfectly. Other than that, the Prius is a great car. Mine has 160K miles on it and it runs the same as the day I bought it, and it has been more reliable than any other car I've ever owned (and I have owned many). Brake linings never replaced. Not a bunch of rattles and squeaks, although it's not the quietest care on noisy roads. I'm planning to take mine to 300K miles if at all possible, and I know others who feel the same - keep it as long as possible, there's no real reason to replace it.
Conspiracy may be too strong a word. Tech companies want to be able to hire in a buyer's market, which almost certainly requires a larger pool of talent to pick and choose from than would occur naturally. Having a position go unfilled for weeks or even months due to a lack of qualified talent isn't in their best interest, and if there's anything we can agree upon, it's that companies will always act in their perceived best interests.
That said, I must agree whole-heartedly with your statement regarding "qualified". Having participated in many phone screens and in-person interviews, it is astounding how much resume inflation goes on. If you say you know Perl, I'm going to ask you about it and ask you to write a short, easy script. Oh, you meant that you once ran a Perl script written by a co-worker? That's nice. And in most cases, when there's one inflated claim like that on the resume, there are more.
Beyond that, so many candidates say they know how to do something in particular - driver development, firmware, chip design/verification/layout, etc. But when you delve into the qualitative aspects of the job, many can only cover the mechanics of the tasks they perform -- they don't show more than a surface understanding of it. Yet they are already employed and have titles that have "Senior" in them, and they expect a raise and maybe even a better title.
The ratio of mediocre to "OMG this person really knows their shit!" talent is not nearly what I think it ought to be.
It's a mix of cryptography, freedom of speech, computing, networking, finance, economics, and even politics -- most of us here dig that stuff.
Yes, but we usually recognize things as belonging to one or more of these categories. For better or worse, trying to explain to the vast majority of the population what a Bitcoin is has been akin to saying "Play Minecraft for fun and profit!"
I don't think it's any more ludicrous for Bitcoin to have value than it is for gold to have value.
That's quite possibly fair. But if you buy into the theory that all of the gold on Earth was likely created during numerous supernova billions of years ago, you just might have a hard time comparing that to a Bitcoin.
The future world she envisioned felt so much like an obvious extrapolation from the world of today. It affected me for awhile afterwards; just kept thinking about it...
You are unfortunately right. My father had a really nasty bout of shingles that laid him low last fall. I didn't see him for a couple of weeks during the worst of it, but he took a photo of what his shoulder looked like with the lesions and the discoloration caused by the silver-based topical medication prescribed by his doctor. I don't think a zombie ever looked as bad as that.
It laid him low, and he hasn't ever quite recovered. Chicken pox was nothing compared to this.
From Krebs' article:
Comcast also is offering free subscriptions to Norton Security Suite for up to 7 computers per customer — including Mac versions of the Symantec suite.
At least most bots have the decency to let you use your own computer. Norton (and in my experience, McAfee) security suites are much less inclined to leave enough free resources for that to be possible.
There's a good history of Buran over at Astronautix. First the article about the craft itself, another (with a lot of overlap) about the project, then a short piece about the Buran Analogue. A very good write-up with several good photos (sad ones at the end) over at Aerospaceweb.
If you've got some time to kill, you can find a Buran mock-up sitting at the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Google Earth. Also the final resting place of the Buran that flew and the Energia reusable launch vehicle, but it's a little hard to locate.
It's not as if there's no alternative if this happens. Pop in your live CD/DVD of a Linux distro, most people would be back online. Your data on the FAT32/NTFS filesystems can be read from within the Linux environment. Maybe your proprietary programs aren't there to access some of the data, but that's not blocking your communications. Those still forced to use dialup with their internal Winmodems, yes, their communications would be impacted. I suspect there are more people still forced to use dialup than we'd want in these "modern times".
Given how fast the geeks would get broadband-connected friends and family back online, I think you should be more concerned about the big ISPs being controlled. That's much more universal than just controlling ~85-90% of the PCs running a particular operating system.
I'm much more of a hardware (chip) guy than I'll ever be a software guy. I'd like to ask (honestly), how can Flash remain such a security nightmare? After all this time, all of the preceding versions of flash, how can vulnerabilities continue to be found in light of more scrutiny by the developers (code audits, bounds checkers, etc.)? I realize no complex piece of software is bug-free, but Flash (and of course, Acrobat Reader) have continuous vulnerability discoveries... must it be so forevermore?
I'm pretty sure the hosting company I had a few years ago (aka "kiddie hosting") had that many customers on the server that I was on. Does that count?
Twenty years from now, your USB thumb drives and CD-R's may have their data physically intact, but only museums will have equipment that can read them.
Nah... according to my wife, I'll almost certainly still have hardware "archived" that can read those formats. She's of course delighted that I feel the need to save humanity from a potential digital Armageddon... she didn't want to park the car in the garage, anyway.
I've known employees who have dropped them in the toilet and they still functioned afterwards
Oh well. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again!
I'd much rather have my kid playing with titties and ass than 9mm pistols.
Damn, dude... how old is she?
Manufacturing the parts is, nevertheless, still the essential problem. A quote from Paul Shawcross, from NASA's Office of Inspector General several years ago:
"The problem in recreating the Saturn 5 is not finding the drawings, it is finding vendors who can supply mid-1960's vintage hardware," he wrote, "and the fact that the launch pads and vehicle assembly buildings have been converted to space shuttle use, so you have no place to launch from.
"By the time you redesign to accommodate available hardware and re-modify the launch pads, you may as well have started from scratch with a clean sheet design," he wrote.
Unless he/she lives real close to the state border, sheer vehicle depreciation will eat up much/all of the savings from this scheme. Not just talking gas prices, but wear & tear on the car as well. At my company we get something like 60 cents a mile on our expense reports; fifty miles means thirty bucks.
Add onto that time & inconvenience and you've got yourself a pretty low return on your investment.
You're quite right about PSU quality, but a brand name doesn't guarantee anything either. I bought three Antec cases (at separate times) with PSUs; two Sonata II (quite expensive) and one lower-end but with a similar, lower wattage power supply. All three have failed and required a RMA. I have no other brand of PSU that has done this to me, and my usage is very light. I love 'em when they work, as they are quiet supplies. But (only somewhat) sadly, I'm done with Antec.
In my case, it's a "Martha" that has the greatest influence over my monogamous inclinations.
Psystar ships its own flavor of hackintosh... they are not clones. I don't get the persistence of the label. Is it just the desire of folks to have an actual clone as a choice to run OS X that keeps the term active in discussions?
CO2 is a naturally-occurring gas that is part of the life cycle of, jeez, just about everything? And we're making too much of it. That's probably not good, but we can have a like/dislike discussion about that. Mercury, on the other hand, is a substance that requires only minute amounts of to render food virtually inedible, water undrinkable and cause terrible neurological disorders in children. I truly doubt that like/dislike really enters the picture.
Read a bit more about mercury poisoning, and you've probably heard about mercury in fish before. In its elemental form it's not particularly dangerous, but when it changes chemically to methylmercury, it's damned nasty.
Bottom line, regardless of whether we're talking about nuclear vs. coal power, globa warming, etc., there's always one more piece of information that you need to consider before you start to get "the big picture". And everything is so fscking complicated, we tend to try to keep it simple and stake out positions that we feel we can defend. But winning the argument doesn't mean we're right, or that we've moved the discussion forward.