maaku

67 ms·

691.
by maaku 12y ago
Tow of our laws are the rights of assembly, and freedom of speech. They are written into the constitution. If that's not reasonably interpreted as a right to (peaceful) protest, I don't know what to say.
692.
by maaku 12y ago
There's obvious survivor bias, but those who attempted suicide and failed often go on to live fulfilling lives. Making it harder to carry out a self-homicide, or making it much more painful/scary than a gunshot to the head means f
693.
by maaku 12y ago
Applying overwhelming physical force is much less likely to have resulted in death than a gunshot wound.
694.
by maaku 12y ago
Most people outside of NASA still consider a standard Hohmann-like orbit for getting people to Mars too.
695.
by maaku 12y ago
I favor constructivism, btw. I just don't find this particular example to be very convincing for the cause. Take the square root of 2 -- it's a real number that can never be written down with any finite pencil and paper. Except fo
696.
by maaku 12y ago
Why re-enter?
697.
by maaku 12y ago
There does exist real numbers that cannot be specified in (finite) space or time...
698.
by maaku 12y ago
Well Mars is inside the traditionally defined habitable zone (which extends halfway into the asteroid belt), but Europa is a point. More generally one can imagine e.g. larger rocky planets whose active core keeps them warm, rather than just
699.
by maaku 12y ago
C is a simple language when you compare it to C++. Especially if you need nailed down standards-compliant behavior.
700.
by maaku 12y ago
Everywhere on Earth is still within the habitable zone of the solar system.
701.
by maaku 12y ago
Am I supposed to disagree with that? High atmospheric oxygen content is suggestive of biology. So is seasonal blooms of methane on a planet like Mars. Is that suggestive that there is life on Mars? Yes! Can we definitively infer that there
702.
by maaku 12y ago
But the earliest source we have for Matthew are Greek.
703.
by maaku 12y ago
It's actually more likely that Jesus as an out of wedlock child that pre-dates Joseph. Jesus was referred to as "Jesus son of Mary" not Joseph, which was the custom at the time for illegitimate children. It particularly contr
704.
by maaku 12y ago
Meh, it's a long way from saying that "we don't know how the O2 could have been produced except by life" to "the O2 was produced by life." Just look at the current debate about methane on Mars.
705.
by maaku 12y ago
We have plenty of ideas for how that would work. Are you familiar with a Dyson sphere? A Type III civilization is just a Dyson sphere around every star in the galaxy.
706.
by maaku 12y ago
Yes, and those were both my points :)
707.
by maaku 12y ago
Drain on the home planet? I think your model of how this would occur needs updating. Let me give you a hint: Earth represents a minuscule, tiny, not even worth counting fraction of the resources readily available in the solar system.
708.
by maaku 12y ago
No, but I haven't read any science fiction since my teenage years. (Sadly, because I would like to... just don't have the time.) I actually don't remember reading this anywhere, it just seemed an obvious idea. The idea that
709.
by maaku 12y ago
Another testable variation of this is the gravitational effect of voids. Voids[1]are regions of the universe devoid of visible matter (stars), as far as we can tell. These are predicted by the inflationary model as regions of low energy dis
710.
by maaku 12y ago
A very short distance. IIRC something like 20 or so light years, but I'm having trouble finding the citation. That's for radio waves (and the number is getting smaller as the technology is getting better -- EM radiation blasted in
711.
by maaku 12y ago
The "we are the first" argument seemed less convincing than it could have been. A better argument from that perspective is the observation that Type III civilizations expand at an alarming rate. Whatever the motivation for expansi
712.
by maaku 12y ago
I was comparing with ULA, and should have clarified I meant Falcon 9h ($85 million). The domestic competition for that is Delta 4 Heavy ($435 million).
713.
by maaku 12y ago
The Falcon 9 is already 5x - 10x cheaper than the competition.
714.
by maaku 12y ago
If only all bailouts went like this...
715.
by maaku 12y ago
Probably lots, but there would be no exploitable occupation. The south would take over a unified Korea, and they have plenty of qualified resource extraction companies.
716.
by maaku 12y ago
Correlation and causation... Pretty graphs though.
717.
by maaku 12y ago
Quite the contrary, the level of service can vary wildly in nationalized health care, where the state runs the hospitals. There are pluses and minuses -- you can get much better health care at a much cheaper price to the tax payer, but with
718.
by maaku 12y ago
Nationalized health insurance, which is a little different.
719.
by maaku 12y ago
Disk encryption only protects against physical theft of the drive, which is not the primary concern with most servers. If a server is up 24/7 and I hack into it, it doesn't matter that the drive is encrypted since I have access to
720.
by maaku 12y ago
That's missing the point, I think. In the simulation the Earth doesn't exist. Instead, some high-level model is used to generate the observations we make at the macro scale. Only when we perform sensitive experiments which require

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