Comment Neuland (Score 1) 314
Yet another influential person, for whom, like for the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Internet is "Neuland", Terra Incognita, a "Here Be Dragons" place, foreign and scary.
Yet another influential person, for whom, like for the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Internet is "Neuland", Terra Incognita, a "Here Be Dragons" place, foreign and scary.
"It wasn't long ago that asteroid mining was only found in the pages of science fiction. Now [...] a Kick Starter campaign aimed at raising public awareness about asteroid mining..."
A Kickstarter campaign to raise money to raise awareness still seems like a few steps from mining asteroids...
Also their business model seems somewhat speculative. One of the main ideas seems to be that they can get around the return-it-to-earth problem by not returning it to earth. What good will the mining do then, you ask? Well, they'll just sell the resources to the Mars colony:
Space habitats, space stations are going to need hundreds of thousands or millions of liters of water, but there are some asteroids 75 meters across that are water rich. Just one has enough hydrogen and oxygen to fuel every Space Shuttle that’s ever been launched. It’s useful for fuel, its useful for supporting life and it’s full-blown radiation shielding for all those people talking about going to Mars. So, that is a resource that is of near-term interest.
Yes, it is speculative as any new and breakthrough business plan. It is very risky, very dependent on progress in other areas (like the trip to Mars and establishing a colony there), but it is potentially very lucrative.
And yes, it moved from the sci-fi pages to the realm of business plans and strategies. Far-fetched and speculative, but still business plans with financial backing, even if for the first step now.
The Weyland-Yutani Corporation will not be created in a day, you know.
I will add to all other uninformed responses with mine:
Aren't they endlessly into the singularity, but never actually reach it? I mean, they speed up almost to the speed of light (hence x-ray bursts), so time slows down for them more and more.
Excelent offtop
The snippet in the sig is sufficient, because Western civilisation forgot about this heritage. The EU documents do not even mention Christian ethics as the foundation of Europe. Which is kind of WTF, because e.g. "Give the emperor what belongs to the emperor, give God what belongs to God, and give me what is mine" is the foundation of religion-state separation. Did it always work properly? No, but we are talking about basics here, not practicalities.
But I agree that the whole citation is much more, it is an atheist admitting that it is possible and beneficial to reconcile science and religion - very strong declaration, very strong.
Sorry to dissappoint you, but in all totalitarian states (Nazi Germany, Soviet Union and its sattelite communist states etc.) majority didn't care. I remember the '80s in communist Poland, during the Martial Law period. Most people no longer cared. Independent TV broadcasts, which were overlayed on the official TV channel, were despised, as they "deprived people of their sitcoms". Most people just wanted to be left alone. "We have basic food and TV, why bother?" Underground dissidents were considered "troublemakers". And it was shortly after the Solidarity movement, which involved like 25% of the population.
Bread and circuses are more important to masses than freedom. Change is always driven by the few who care.
With glass, all I have to do is say something like, "OK Glass, record video" (or whatever the actual command is).
Well, I would call someone wearing smartglasses and saying "OK Glass, record video" at least as conspicuous as someone taking a smartphone out of a pocket and recording. Wait a decade or so when it will be possible to communicate with wearable computers without speaking.
You just described a private assisstant. People were entrusting their whole lives, including most intimate details, to selected individuals for ages. And these individuals could cheat on their employers, spread gossips or even blackmail them. This was a significant risk. And yet many people considered this risk smaller than benefits of being able to focus on things important to them, while the assisstant took care of all things mundane. Caveat: personal assistants of this type were extremely expensive. It was not a work assistant, answering phonecalls and arranging meetings 8 (maybe 10) hours a day. These were people living in the same house, sharing lives of their employers.
Fast forward to present and personal assistants become available to almost everyone. Risks are mainly the same: you have to share your life with someone, including intimate details maybe. Difference: instead of a human being you have a piece of software backed by a corporation. So instead of having an individual who could cheat on you, your data becomes a part of a database and you are fed taylored ads (best scenario) or your personal data is sold to the highest bidder and anything may happen (worst scenario). The best scenario does not differ much from having a trusty personal assistant, whom you have to pay, while the worst case scenario is still probably better than being blackmailed by a former assisstant.
So there is risk and there is benefit.
Intelligence is still recognized comparatively, usually related to something like the capability to resolve difficult or ambiguous problems with similar or greater effect than humans, or can learn and react to dynamic environmental situations to similar effect as other living things.
The second part is an important milestone for me. Take the Big Dog - a marvel of robotics in itself. If it interacted with environment and its operator on a level that real dogs interact with environment and their masters, we would have a real breakthrough. An essential thing would be to make it learn new tricks, like a dog learns, instead of programming them in.
My point was that any attempt to build such a thing inevitably leads to dictatorship.
No, it doesn't.
I know it is cool to bash religion on
As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.
It is possible if voters either agree on a set of totalitarian principles, or simply do not care. It seems that this is what is happening now in the US. I do not see mass protests against the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, War on Drugs, all computer-related discrimination and restrictions. It is also not popular enough among voters to build a new party, or to compell one of parties to change their stance.
As long as voters in the US either approve this new trend, or simply do not care, both parties will continue introducing further restrictive laws.
X7A, on which Piston is based, costs 999$. Good luck gathering adoption at this price point.
It will most likely work fine with Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc, as well as Mint and Debian. Linux dependency management is very mature, and there will likely be minimal problems getting it working on other distributions.
Steam on Linux beta, designed for Ubuntu, requires quite a lot of magic to get installed on Debian. Definitely within capabilities of a Linux enthusiast, but too much hassle even for a veteran who polished his system a couple of years ago and now just expects everything to work fine.
I would love to be able to play GW2 on Linux, since it constitutes 99+% of the gaming that I do these days.
Warhammer Online (yes, still alive and kicking). 99+% of my gaming recently. I have tried to run it in Wine, same with LotRO, but to no avail. Got tired, rebooted into Win7 and had fun.
Because, of course, it contributes NO greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
When are we going to get serious about NOT actively promoting global warming with every 'solution' we come up with? Sure, incineration reduces methane emissions, but couldn't we either recycle more, (and more efficiently), and/or just consume less?
Our pursuit of 'shiny' is killing us.
First of all Sweden seems to recycle as much as possible to the point they ran out of garbage and have to import it.
Second, this matter would decompose anyway releasing (as you noticed) methane, a much worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. If in those countries all this garbage would end up on landfills, why not to burn it thus both reducing coal burning and reducing methane emissions?
Third, nothing is lost. Do you think that if Sweden wasn't burning Italian trash, Italians would start recycling?
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" shows that Communism must lead to totalitarian regime. Atrocities of Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Red Khmers were not "errors", they were natural consequence of the essence of Communism.
Greed and laziness will ensure that most people would overestimate their needs and underestimate their abilities. This would require some external judgement, by the state, by the party, by the system. So, basically someone else would judge how much you can work and enforce that you work that much. Similarily someone would have to assess your needs and provide you with goods according to this. So the result is that an individual cannot decide for himself, which would be... slavery?
And in fact, apart from short periods of enthusiasm e.g. right after WW2, all communist states were founded on slavery, both hidden (compulsory employment) and official (e.g. Gulag).
"Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth."
Einstein was wrong about this one, if it is in fact an authentic Einstein quote. Can someone please verify for me?
The Catholic and Protestant Churches supported both Nazism and Fascism.
On the Catholic:
The Lateran Treaty of 1929 was when the Catholic Church threw its full formal support behind Mussolini. Of course, there had been longstanding informal support long before this, but this is the formal document that the Church cannot deny! It is a impossibility to win power in heavily Christian countries like Italy and Germany were in the 1920's without the active support of the church.
Typical fallacy of equating Nazism and Fascism. Did the Catholic Church supported Fascism? Probaby, I do not know. It did support Franco, if only due to "enemy of my enemy is my friend" reasons, but maybe for other as well. But while both Franco's and Mussolini's regimes were authoritarian and commited crimes, they do not in any scale compare with Nazis. Even today many tyrans oppress opposition and even attack whole cities (see Syria or Libya), but atrocities on the level of Nazis or Red Khmers are something absolutely unique.
So Einstein might have been right that the Church opposed Nazis even though it supported Fascism. In fact Nazis disdained Christianity as a Jewish sect propagating, as they saw it, "weakness". You know, that whole stuff about the other cheek and submitting to torture because of the God and the Truth - completely in opposition to "healthy" Aryan values of strength, victory and the whole "Ubermensch" concept.
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?
