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Project M Could Send Every Scientist To the Moon, By Proxy
An anonymous reader writes with this interesting bit of speculation: "NASA can put humanoids on the Moon in just 1000 days. They would be controlled by scientists on Earth using motion capture suits, giving them the feeling of being on the lunar surface. If they can achieve this for real, the results for science research of our satellite could be amazing."
You can't get instant feedback from the moon. There's a slight delay. So, it doesn't really feel like you are holding something in your hands unless you're standing still. It mostly feels like you're drunk when you operate a waldo with a delay. People are going to have to get trained to deal with that.
Bruce Perens.
I probably would have gone with "You can't take and hold ground with bots - to stake a claim requires Men on the ground." But that works.
The bot thing is a distraction. If we don't get our genome off this mudball we're as doomed as the dinosaurs. Sooner or later some unpleasantness will occur.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If you're a subscriber to Slashdot you see stories like this hit the front page a half hour or so before they go live. There's a link that says "Any serious problems with this story? Drop our on duty editor a line." and there's an email link with prefilled subjected line etc. I sent basically what I wrote here as an email nearly an hour ago.. they chose to ignore me. I've done this before and they've pulled stories.. so it seems some editors are interested in stopping nonsense and some are not. So yes, I do blame Slashdot for being part of the echo chamber. There's no reason to post shit that is obviously fake.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I tend to hold Slashdot to a higher standard too, which is why I'm here rather than Digg/Reddit (where anything that draws clicks is welcome, and any discussion is, well, you know...). However, occasionally Slashdot will post bait stories (not necessarily "flaimbait", just "plain bait"), especially when it comes to anything regarding MS/Apple/YRO where the main purpose is to let people vent. In such cases, I don't really see it as a mistake, or "wrong", partly because anyone with high karma doesn't see ads, so at most it's "pandering", rather than something used to boost page views. In the case of this particular story, I imagine that the editor thought it would make a good discussion piece in its field, and the source (and even validity) was irrelevant because just the theory/concept will produce an interesting discussion (as users discuss the viability of such an undertaking).
I'd blame Gizmodo, if I visited the site directly, but I don't -- I let other filters point me there if they think there's anything interested posted. As for Slashdot, probably less so in this particular case. If they ignored the comment that you sent, then it changes the "judgment" somewhat, but it may still be arguable that the story was posted just for general interest, and the source/validity wasn't a factor. As you said, it's also (or primarily) up to individual editors, though I'd hope that they at least talk to one another and try to get minimal feedback prior to posting (I've no idea what their actual process is, of course).
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
In addition to sending human-controlled robots to the moon, lets send along refineries and factories to produce solar panels.
Yeah, right. Back around 1985, I went to a conference where some AI professors were mouthing off about putting self-replicating factories on the Moon within 20 years. I asked "How soon can you do it in Arizona?" They didn't like that.