Of course they're relevant. You're looking at exploiting a vast new territory. You have to have pioneers to go out there and figure out where the pitfalls and useful stuff are. They're not going to go out on tankers, cargoships, and passenger liners. They'll take small "boats".
No they could not unless they had the backing of someone wealthy to pay for the ships
Yes they could. People cross the ocean in small boats all of the time. And just look at the Pacific? All of those islands were colonized by people with Stone Age level tech. It's not a great analogy to space, but surely you don't need a billion dollar rocket to get into orbit. Surely it can be made more affordable, and that's what they're trying to do.
All focus on destroying the opponent's will to fight, rather than his ability to fight.
And yet, this didn't seem to be what 9/11 was about at all. Nor the previous WTC attack, nor the attack on the Cole.
Actually, the more I read your reply, the more you seemed to strengthen my point that their true motives cannot be simply gleaned from a word.
Regardless, they are called "terrorists" because their strategy is not to defeat through superior military power, but to instill terror into the populace.
Terrorist is a pejorative term applied to them by the targets of the violence. They don't call themselves that. You can't determine their strategy with insults.
Fun fact, I classified all of my channels on DirectTv the other day. Apparently I have over 70 channels dedicated to paid advertisements....that includes the 16 religious channels that are all showing religious based paid programs.
So are we allowed to mention any company names in a slashdot news article? Or is it all Slashvertisement? As one who is a user of 23andme, this is actually fairly significant news for me. It also has enormous privacy implications and is seems quite news-for-nerds worthy.
Really? The US is far from benevolent, but it's far more benevolent than Russia in terms of censorship and dragging you off in the middle of the night to the gulag.
We currently have no way of fixing this problem so all the grand plans to terraform Mars won't work, unless they also restart the magnetic field
The process of bleeding away the atmosphere happens over geological time spans. If we could increase the density of the atmosphere it would still be there for tens of thousands of generations. I would not call that a terraforming failure. Given that you're argument is based on that one misunderstanding, your pessimism seems to have political roots, not intellectual roots.
It's a beverage that's very addictive and very unhealthy. Coffee is simply not as abused or as unhealthy. You don't see people walking around with one litter cups of coffee. Sode is causing a major health crisis in the country. That is why we see regulation. It's also worth pointing out that all classes of people from low to ruling class drink coffee and soda both. This isn't class based prejudice; it's pure paranoia and your political prejudice.
My original reply was poorly worded. I retract it. And replace it with this: Perhaps we should ask which is worse, the extra CO2, or preventing *some* of the plastics from spilling over into the ocean where they can stay for thousands of years. I'm not which is worse because I don't know. I'm just pointing out that all that plastic lying around isn't as innocuous as everyone thinks.
Please "beat the shit" out of the companies that call my grandmother to deliver unsolicited advertisements about a "warranty extension" on her car.
Is this a thing now? Because god damn, this company has been harassing me non stop about a warranty extension on my car. It's the first time I've experienced this many unsolicited phones calls and junk mail since they came out with the do-not-call list. I've told them four times now that I'm not interested and they keep calling.
Well, I was more referring to the waste that never makes it into the ground. But up until this article, there were no known natural processes that broke down plastics aside from sunlight. So, that waste sits in the landfill indefinitely until natural erosive and/or other geological forces move it into the sea, or down into the earth where it's destroy by heat.
If a person is going to live in a new land, he must first have some idea how he's going to live. For example, you don't just pack up your family's day sailer and go to Antarctica without any idea where you're going to get food or warmth...or anything. That's the problem with Mars now. The moon is a good place to figure out such things...and magnitudes cheaper.
I tend to agree that a human visit to Mars is premature. With current technological knowledge, we could not make a self sustaining colony. We'd just visit for a little while and leave, accomplishing little. The goal absolutely has to be self sustainability. That means--first and foremost--understanding how/where to get air, water, food, and shelter. That means understanding how to manufacture--onsite--the tools we need to do this, because bringing them with us is not an affordable option. The obvious thing to do is to first learn how to do this. We know air and water is somewhat easily obtained on Mars. There's some question on the source of nitrogen for growing food. There's a huge question about building infrastructure out of local material. How do we obtain metals? Which are the best ores on Mars for mining? Where are they? What are the processes for extracting the metals? Answering these questions obviously has to happen before people are sent. And NASA's focus is not on these things. NASA is focused on the quest for life on Mars, and these other questions are secondary and not uttered openly because people think industry=bad, and runs counter to the idea that we need to keep sending probes to Mars to search for life, which justifies what little money they get. The only affordable options are to do this on the moon. Asteroids are not an option, because mining an asteroid is totally different than mining in a gravity well and you're dealing with different minerals and more limited source materials.
Three things need to happen here:
1. The moon must be the stepping stone.
2. Telling the American people that our focus is colonization, not searching for ET.
3. Politicians need to stop shifting NASA goals.
And for fucks sake, just stick with one heavy launch platform and stop trying to reinvent the wheel. The shuttle was a white elephant. The space station was a welfare program for the shuttle. Just use a normal fucking rocket. That's the most efficient way to put stuff into orbit. Stick with it.
Slashdot Mirror
This may explain every girlfriend I've ever had.
Every few years Russians make a grand announcement then few years later it is forgotten. Then another big announcement (rinse, repeat).
Remind you of anyone we know? cough-US-manned-space-program-cough.
Of course they're relevant. You're looking at exploiting a vast new territory. You have to have pioneers to go out there and figure out where the pitfalls and useful stuff are. They're not going to go out on tankers, cargoships, and passenger liners. They'll take small "boats".
And then closed the road.
No they could not unless they had the backing of someone wealthy to pay for the ships
Yes they could. People cross the ocean in small boats all of the time. And just look at the Pacific? All of those islands were colonized by people with Stone Age level tech. It's not a great analogy to space, but surely you don't need a billion dollar rocket to get into orbit. Surely it can be made more affordable, and that's what they're trying to do.
Isn't this often the case with the pharmaceutical and medical industry charging prices waaay beyond cost.
All focus on destroying the opponent's will to fight, rather than his ability to fight.
And yet, this didn't seem to be what 9/11 was about at all. Nor the previous WTC attack, nor the attack on the Cole. Actually, the more I read your reply, the more you seemed to strengthen my point that their true motives cannot be simply gleaned from a word.
Exactly. I guess I should have worded that a little less ambiguously...but I guess I just expected more from Slashdot's readership.
Regardless, they are called "terrorists" because their strategy is not to defeat through superior military power, but to instill terror into the populace.
Terrorist is a pejorative term applied to them by the targets of the violence. They don't call themselves that. You can't determine their strategy with insults.
Due to extreme difference in altitude you can't shine into the cockpit, the pilots eyes, or disrupt the craft or the flight in any way.
Where did you get this? If the pilot can see the ground, there's a direct line of sight with some guy with a laser.
Fun fact, I classified all of my channels on DirectTv the other day. Apparently I have over 70 channels dedicated to paid advertisements....that includes the 16 religious channels that are all showing religious based paid programs.
So I can only have 10 accounts per website? That's not nearly enough.
So are we allowed to mention any company names in a slashdot news article? Or is it all Slashvertisement? As one who is a user of 23andme, this is actually fairly significant news for me. It also has enormous privacy implications and is seems quite news-for-nerds worthy.
I use my penis as a third hand
Londo Mollari? Is that you?
.22LR, being cheap and plentiful
This was true right up until everyone else found out it was cheap and plentiful. Now it's expensive and impossible to find.
Really? The US is far from benevolent, but it's far more benevolent than Russia in terms of censorship and dragging you off in the middle of the night to the gulag.
Yeah, I've gotten that one. Also: "program doesn't work"
Bug report:
Reported by: Joe User
Description: Got an error.
Steps to reproduce: blank
We currently have no way of fixing this problem so all the grand plans to terraform Mars won't work, unless they also restart the magnetic field
The process of bleeding away the atmosphere happens over geological time spans. If we could increase the density of the atmosphere it would still be there for tens of thousands of generations. I would not call that a terraforming failure. Given that you're argument is based on that one misunderstanding, your pessimism seems to have political roots, not intellectual roots.
It's a beverage that's very addictive and very unhealthy. Coffee is simply not as abused or as unhealthy. You don't see people walking around with one litter cups of coffee. Sode is causing a major health crisis in the country. That is why we see regulation. It's also worth pointing out that all classes of people from low to ruling class drink coffee and soda both. This isn't class based prejudice; it's pure paranoia and your political prejudice.
My original reply was poorly worded. I retract it. And replace it with this: Perhaps we should ask which is worse, the extra CO2, or preventing *some* of the plastics from spilling over into the ocean where they can stay for thousands of years. I'm not which is worse because I don't know. I'm just pointing out that all that plastic lying around isn't as innocuous as everyone thinks.
Please "beat the shit" out of the companies that call my grandmother to deliver unsolicited advertisements about a "warranty extension" on her car.
Is this a thing now? Because god damn, this company has been harassing me non stop about a warranty extension on my car. It's the first time I've experienced this many unsolicited phones calls and junk mail since they came out with the do-not-call list. I've told them four times now that I'm not interested and they keep calling.
Well, I was more referring to the waste that never makes it into the ground. But up until this article, there were no known natural processes that broke down plastics aside from sunlight. So, that waste sits in the landfill indefinitely until natural erosive and/or other geological forces move it into the sea, or down into the earth where it's destroy by heat.
If a person is going to live in a new land, he must first have some idea how he's going to live. For example, you don't just pack up your family's day sailer and go to Antarctica without any idea where you're going to get food or warmth...or anything. That's the problem with Mars now. The moon is a good place to figure out such things...and magnitudes cheaper.
I tend to agree that a human visit to Mars is premature. With current technological knowledge, we could not make a self sustaining colony. We'd just visit for a little while and leave, accomplishing little. The goal absolutely has to be self sustainability. That means--first and foremost--understanding how/where to get air, water, food, and shelter. That means understanding how to manufacture--onsite--the tools we need to do this, because bringing them with us is not an affordable option. The obvious thing to do is to first learn how to do this. We know air and water is somewhat easily obtained on Mars. There's some question on the source of nitrogen for growing food. There's a huge question about building infrastructure out of local material. How do we obtain metals? Which are the best ores on Mars for mining? Where are they? What are the processes for extracting the metals? Answering these questions obviously has to happen before people are sent. And NASA's focus is not on these things. NASA is focused on the quest for life on Mars, and these other questions are secondary and not uttered openly because people think industry=bad, and runs counter to the idea that we need to keep sending probes to Mars to search for life, which justifies what little money they get. The only affordable options are to do this on the moon. Asteroids are not an option, because mining an asteroid is totally different than mining in a gravity well and you're dealing with different minerals and more limited source materials.
Three things need to happen here: 1. The moon must be the stepping stone. 2. Telling the American people that our focus is colonization, not searching for ET. 3. Politicians need to stop shifting NASA goals.
And for fucks sake, just stick with one heavy launch platform and stop trying to reinvent the wheel. The shuttle was a white elephant. The space station was a welfare program for the shuttle. Just use a normal fucking rocket. That's the most efficient way to put stuff into orbit. Stick with it.