SpaceX claims that their SuperDraco thrusters are capable of igniting during Mars EDL, at supersonic speeds. Of course, we won't know for sure until they actually do it, but given their accomplishments to date, I see no reason to doubt them.
Yes, SpaceX seems to be the only one researching how to do this. They've always said that their ultimate goal is Mars, and their engineering shows it.
As much as I try not to be a Linux fanboy, pro-Israel, or any other bias, I find it very difficult to not be a SpaceX fanboy!
Temperature extremes, radiation, micro-meteorites (common to any space mission, I suppose). Needing to lift gear much further up than a 300~400 km low orbit. Actually succeeding in landing that gear undamaged. Gravity - but lower than on Earth. Redundant and/or extremely reliable life support systems, since Earth will be 'close' but still too far away for actual emergencies.
Not at all the same. Due to having an atmosphere, almost all those parameters are vastly different. The temperature extremes are not nearly as extreme on Mars, there is (slightly) less radiation, and almost no micro-meteorites. There is no 'landing' on Mars like with the moon, but rather EDL (Entry, Descent, Landing) as on Earth. That is actually much more difficult than landing on the moon: the atmosphere really isn't thick enough for parachuting a large mass, but too thick to light a retro rocket at high speed. I suspect that this is one of the reasons that SpaceX ignite a retrorocket on landing the Falcon 9 first stage: to practice doing so for a Mars mission. Also, Mars has twice the gravity of the moon, which will bear in ways that we don't know yet on astronaut's physiology.
Other than the "getting there" stage, Mars will be much easier to colonize than the moon. And the "getting there" challenges are surmountable with current technology, the "living there" challenges are much, much more difficult.
Greed is supposed to rule in Corporate America. But Corporate America is not supposed to rule America.
Of course Corporate America is supposed to rule America. What do you think the word "capital" in "Capitalism" means? Rule of those with capital., i.e. rule of the rich.
The only surprise is how "capitalism" has been marketed to Americans such that generations of them defend the rule of the rich as some utopia or ideal.
So you would like to enter your username and password for every Gmail page load and AJAX request and every slashdot comment? The server should have no way of knowing that you are the same you who entered "anti-pop-frustration" and "hunter2" in the login form just two page views ago?
That's a video of exactly why autopilot isn't ready.
The car on the right was already stopped, since the beginning of the video, to let the guy turn and the tesla proceded until it had to suddenly brake, nonsense.
If you're stuck in traffic you have to let others cars pass on the side roads.
That sounds more like a failure of the meatbag pilot than the poorly-named "autopilot" feature.
In any case, I do not agree. The vehicle traveling straight has right-of-way, the fact that the lane to the right of him was blocked with traffic has no bearing on that. The Tesla clearly could proceed without hindrance in its own lane, and the driver that cut him off was clearly at fault by any interpretation of law, common sense, or safety.
That was a great read, and I could add some points of my own. The author goes off track at the end (complaining about distributing cross-platform binaries to non-technical users has no place in an article about scientific computation development) which comes off as grasping for straws, but otherwise I do see that the author is sincere and wrote the article in order to help improve Python, which he obviously esteems.
That was one datapoint, and it doesn't really address the GP AC's concern to which I had replied. The only relevancy between the two is the mention of hstack() and zeros() requiring a tuple as the argument, and even the author mentions that the only issue with that is teaching it to beginners. Anybody doing scientific computing will understand that a tuple can be an argument to a function, and may superficially look like double parentheses. That should be reason for laughter, not complaint.
I'm sure that there is no lack of similar datapoints against Matlab, Maple, and R. Julia probably has similar issues. The more a technology is used, the more people complain about it (see: Windows, Java). None of the issues on that page are really major, and especially not for new users who don't have a legacy Python 2 or Matlab background. The only really problematic issue mentioned on that page is one that is not limited to Python scientific computing: the GIL. You can complain about the GIL all day and I'll stand by you!
And before you give me the "Metro is shit! Flat icons are shit! Fuck Unity!" arguments, show me *one* place where the general Slashdot consensus on a updated UI/UX (within the last 5 years) was actually positive and then I'll listen, because there aren't any.
I've got to go back 7 years: KDE 4.
Yes, I hated KDE 4 because I loved KDE 3 so much. KDE 4 was so broken for years, and even today there are things that I can't do with it that I could with KDE 3. Plasma 5 (not KDE 5 because the KDE brand is tarnished) is even worse. But from a UX perspective KDE 4 was terrific. Almost everything was intuitive, and those that weren't were fixed by 4.4 or 4.5. For all it's flaws, KDE 4 was a UX winner. Too bad everything else in it ruined the experience so bad that few people acknowledged, or even now remember, the UX experience that was not only leaps and bounds above anything else available for Linux, but outshined whatever shiny Apple had overpriced that day, and anything ever to come out of Redmond. Only maybe the Amiga had ever been in that league for its time.
Thank you. I would love to see an example of the issue. Numpy mostly works with it's own ndarray datatype, so I suspect that you got the issues when performing Numpy operations with native Python lists, sets, and tuples?
Part of the point of Julia is that you don't have to screw around with different libraries to get things working. Ever done matrix manipulations on Matlab? It is incomparable to anything Python and Numpy can provide. But Julia works the same.
Actually I haven't done matrix manipulations in Matlab but I believe that PyLab (based on Numpy and Scipy) addresses the concern that you make. I don't use Matlab so I cannot make a better comparison.
I agree with you 100%. I'm just pointing out that the aspect that you observe is considered a feature, not a bug, of capitalist society. Whoever managed to market capitalism such that generations of the American people so vigorously defend the concept in name, without examining what it is, did a terrific job,
How does that change the fact that Python is slow? Julia uses BLAS as a linear algebra backend too, but that has nothing to do with this.
Presumably the i.e. LA operations that the OP were doing were slow. If the OP is complaining that the code that presents his GUI takes an extra 100ms to load, then he is just trolling. This is a discussion of programming languages for scientific, statistical, and other numeric operations. In Python those operations can be done with not-slow code with the proper library.
If you are simply calling a library (written in C) there will not be a big speed difference between Julia and Python.
The big difference is that you could write this library in Julia with similar performance to the C code.
That's the biggest attraction to me: a high level language where you do not need to fall back to C for doing performance oriented or even really low level programming
Thank you, now I see what the fuss is about. I had previously had the impression that Julia is more like Python (scripting, great syntax) than R (numerical calculation performance, horrible syntax). I'll have to take a better look at it.
I'd enjoy them a lot more if I didn't live right next to an airport! I still don't even know where I can reasonably fly.
That's the problem that every city dweller with a telescope has! For the telescope (actually 20x80 binoculars in my case) I try to get out of the city once every few weeks, and occasionally I'll take one of the kids. But don't take kids the first few times that you fly the quad. Those props are really dangerous, go google quadcopter injuries. You might even consider bringing a 1 meter by 1 meter cardboard shield along just in case.
They could have, but their bid would have been in no way competitive with SpaceX since the Delta 4 is a lot more expensive, and doesn't make economic sense to use on a small launch.
SpaceX should seize the opportunity to set their bidding to whatever ULA was charging before SpaceX came along. That's what happens when "bidding contracts" can be fulfilled by exactly one supplier. Isn't that what the Russians did with sending NASA astronaughts to the ISS? NASA is now paying >60 million USD per seat, when the shuttle was flying the cost was 20 million USD per seat.
Thanks for the info. Note that I am _not_ talking about the high-end models, the contrary, I am talking about the cost-cutting Chinese manufacturers, such as Eachines. I don't fly the drones, only the piloted quads.
Enjoy your drones, especially the quad! I'm now looking at the page about it that you wrote on your blog.
That's also why I see this as a good thing. It raises the bar of getting to the point of doing something dangerous, but doesn't make anything new illegal or stop the really motivated tinkerers.
1. Locate GPS antenna.
2. Stab with pointy object.
Does mean you'll have to pilot it though, not rely on automatic following of a flight path.
I pilot (non-robotic) quadcopters, not drones, and let me tell you that without a fair bit of practice a "drone pilot" will do little more than crash his expensive plastic without the robotic positioning. I don't think that the current models even come with a proper transmitter for really controlling the flight, a good transmitter costs more than the flight hardware. The GPS is used for more than navigation, for instance I believe that some devices don't have accelerometers and use the GPS to hold altitude, position, and heading. Wind blows, the weight is not evenly distributed, the four motors are not all equal, and neither are the props.
A good way to work around the restriction would be to intercept the updates. Even if they're encrypted (likely) then simply disabling network access should prevent the "temporary" restrictions such as at sporting events. The "permanent" restrictions, such as those around Washington, DC (not Washington as mentioned in the poor article) and airports will probably require a way to either flash the storage medium via JTAG or decrypt the traffic. I figure the community will take less than a year before it figures out one or the other, based on how quickly other consumer devices are cracked.
Slashdot Mirror
SpaceX claims that their SuperDraco thrusters are capable of igniting during Mars EDL, at supersonic speeds. Of course, we won't know for sure until they actually do it, but given their accomplishments to date, I see no reason to doubt them.
Yes, SpaceX seems to be the only one researching how to do this. They've always said that their ultimate goal is Mars, and their engineering shows it.
As much as I try not to be a Linux fanboy, pro-Israel, or any other bias, I find it very difficult to not be a SpaceX fanboy!
Temperature extremes, radiation, micro-meteorites (common to any space mission, I suppose). Needing to lift gear much further up than a 300~400 km low orbit. Actually succeeding in landing that gear undamaged. Gravity - but lower than on Earth. Redundant and/or extremely reliable life support systems, since Earth will be 'close' but still too far away for actual emergencies.
Not at all the same. Due to having an atmosphere, almost all those parameters are vastly different. The temperature extremes are not nearly as extreme on Mars, there is (slightly) less radiation, and almost no micro-meteorites. There is no 'landing' on Mars like with the moon, but rather EDL (Entry, Descent, Landing) as on Earth. That is actually much more difficult than landing on the moon: the atmosphere really isn't thick enough for parachuting a large mass, but too thick to light a retro rocket at high speed. I suspect that this is one of the reasons that SpaceX ignite a retrorocket on landing the Falcon 9 first stage: to practice doing so for a Mars mission. Also, Mars has twice the gravity of the moon, which will bear in ways that we don't know yet on astronaut's physiology.
Other than the "getting there" stage, Mars will be much easier to colonize than the moon. And the "getting there" challenges are surmountable with current technology, the "living there" challenges are much, much more difficult.
All you'd save is the water you could mine from the comet. Which could be significant I guess.
You could also use the comet as protection from the solar radiation, especially if its rotational axis is pointed fairly close to the sun.
We could just hitch a ride on a comet that is flying close by both planets to avoid fuel costs and size of spacecraft limitations :)
At what relative velocity would you like your spacecraft to land on the comet?
I know that you are joking, but I've heard this idea proposed seriously more than once. This comment is for those people.
Greed is supposed to rule in Corporate America. But Corporate America is not supposed to rule America.
Of course Corporate America is supposed to rule America. What do you think the word "capital" in "Capitalism" means? Rule of those with capital., i.e. rule of the rich.
The only surprise is how "capitalism" has been marketed to Americans such that generations of them defend the rule of the rich as some utopia or ideal.
There was no alt-text to be found!
As a child, they kept telling me that monsters were not real.
But in fact, the cookie monster really does exists.
Out parents also told us that sharing was good. Look at what RIAA has done to people who thought that was good advice.
There's no such thing as legitimate tracking
So you would like to enter your username and password for every Gmail page load and AJAX request and every slashdot comment? The server should have no way of knowing that you are the same you who entered "anti-pop-frustration" and "hunter2" in the login form just two page views ago?
That's a video of exactly why autopilot isn't ready. The car on the right was already stopped, since the beginning of the video, to let the guy turn and the tesla proceded until it had to suddenly brake, nonsense. If you're stuck in traffic you have to let others cars pass on the side roads.
That sounds more like a failure of the meatbag pilot than the poorly-named "autopilot" feature.
In any case, I do not agree. The vehicle traveling straight has right-of-way, the fact that the lane to the right of him was blocked with traffic has no bearing on that. The Tesla clearly could proceed without hindrance in its own lane, and the driver that cut him off was clearly at fault by any interpretation of law, common sense, or safety.
http://cyrille.rossant.net/wha...
That was a great read, and I could add some points of my own. The author goes off track at the end (complaining about distributing cross-platform binaries to non-technical users has no place in an article about scientific computation development) which comes off as grasping for straws, but otherwise I do see that the author is sincere and wrote the article in order to help improve Python, which he obviously esteems.
That was one datapoint, and it doesn't really address the GP AC's concern to which I had replied. The only relevancy between the two is the mention of hstack() and zeros() requiring a tuple as the argument, and even the author mentions that the only issue with that is teaching it to beginners. Anybody doing scientific computing will understand that a tuple can be an argument to a function, and may superficially look like double parentheses. That should be reason for laughter, not complaint.
I'm sure that there is no lack of similar datapoints against Matlab, Maple, and R. Julia probably has similar issues. The more a technology is used, the more people complain about it (see: Windows, Java). None of the issues on that page are really major, and especially not for new users who don't have a legacy Python 2 or Matlab background. The only really problematic issue mentioned on that page is one that is not limited to Python scientific computing: the GIL. You can complain about the GIL all day and I'll stand by you!
And before you give me the "Metro is shit! Flat icons are shit! Fuck Unity!" arguments, show me *one* place where the general Slashdot consensus on a updated UI/UX (within the last 5 years) was actually positive and then I'll listen, because there aren't any.
I've got to go back 7 years: KDE 4.
Yes, I hated KDE 4 because I loved KDE 3 so much. KDE 4 was so broken for years, and even today there are things that I can't do with it that I could with KDE 3. Plasma 5 (not KDE 5 because the KDE brand is tarnished) is even worse. But from a UX perspective KDE 4 was terrific. Almost everything was intuitive, and those that weren't were fixed by 4.4 or 4.5. For all it's flaws, KDE 4 was a UX winner. Too bad everything else in it ruined the experience so bad that few people acknowledged, or even now remember, the UX experience that was not only leaps and bounds above anything else available for Linux, but outshined whatever shiny Apple had overpriced that day, and anything ever to come out of Redmond. Only maybe the Amiga had ever been in that league for its time.
Typical future scenario in your autonomous vehicle: "Why the hell is the car slowing d... oh, I see..."
Here is a video of that actually happening, with Tesla's autopilot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Thank you. I would love to see an example of the issue. Numpy mostly works with it's own ndarray datatype, so I suspect that you got the issues when performing Numpy operations with native Python lists, sets, and tuples?
Part of the point of Julia is that you don't have to screw around with different libraries to get things working. Ever done matrix manipulations on Matlab? It is incomparable to anything Python and Numpy can provide. But Julia works the same.
Actually I haven't done matrix manipulations in Matlab but I believe that PyLab (based on Numpy and Scipy) addresses the concern that you make. I don't use Matlab so I cannot make a better comparison.
I agree with you 100%. I'm just pointing out that the aspect that you observe is considered a feature, not a bug, of capitalist society. Whoever managed to market capitalism such that generations of the American people so vigorously defend the concept in name, without examining what it is, did a terrific job,
How does that change the fact that Python is slow? Julia uses BLAS as a linear algebra backend too, but that has nothing to do with this.
Presumably the i.e. LA operations that the OP were doing were slow. If the OP is complaining that the code that presents his GUI takes an extra 100ms to load, then he is just trolling. This is a discussion of programming languages for scientific, statistical, and other numeric operations. In Python those operations can be done with not-slow code with the proper library.
If you are simply calling a library (written in C) there will not be a big speed difference between Julia and Python. The big difference is that you could write this library in Julia with similar performance to the C code. That's the biggest attraction to me: a high level language where you do not need to fall back to C for doing performance oriented or even really low level programming
Thank you, now I see what the fuss is about. I had previously had the impression that Julia is more like Python (scripting, great syntax) than R (numerical calculation performance, horrible syntax). I'll have to take a better look at it.
Python is pretty slow.
Use Numpy for data analysis. It runs on ATLAS, an open source BLAS implementation and is plenty fast.
I'd enjoy them a lot more if I didn't live right next to an airport! I still don't even know where I can reasonably fly.
That's the problem that every city dweller with a telescope has! For the telescope (actually 20x80 binoculars in my case) I try to get out of the city once every few weeks, and occasionally I'll take one of the kids. But don't take kids the first few times that you fly the quad. Those props are really dangerous, go google quadcopter injuries. You might even consider bringing a 1 meter by 1 meter cardboard shield along just in case.
They could have, but their bid would have been in no way competitive with SpaceX since the Delta 4 is a lot more expensive, and doesn't make economic sense to use on a small launch.
SpaceX should seize the opportunity to set their bidding to whatever ULA was charging before SpaceX came along. That's what happens when "bidding contracts" can be fulfilled by exactly one supplier. Isn't that what the Russians did with sending NASA astronaughts to the ISS? NASA is now paying >60 million USD per seat, when the shuttle was flying the cost was 20 million USD per seat.
Thanks for the info. Note that I am _not_ talking about the high-end models, the contrary, I am talking about the cost-cutting Chinese manufacturers, such as Eachines. I don't fly the drones, only the piloted quads.
Enjoy your drones, especially the quad! I'm now looking at the page about it that you wrote on your blog.
That's also why I see this as a good thing. It raises the bar of getting to the point of doing something dangerous, but doesn't make anything new illegal or stop the really motivated tinkerers.
1. Locate GPS antenna. 2. Stab with pointy object.
Does mean you'll have to pilot it though, not rely on automatic following of a flight path.
I pilot (non-robotic) quadcopters, not drones, and let me tell you that without a fair bit of practice a "drone pilot" will do little more than crash his expensive plastic without the robotic positioning. I don't think that the current models even come with a proper transmitter for really controlling the flight, a good transmitter costs more than the flight hardware. The GPS is used for more than navigation, for instance I believe that some devices don't have accelerometers and use the GPS to hold altitude, position, and heading. Wind blows, the weight is not evenly distributed, the four motors are not all equal, and neither are the props.
A good way to work around the restriction would be to intercept the updates. Even if they're encrypted (likely) then simply disabling network access should prevent the "temporary" restrictions such as at sporting events. The "permanent" restrictions, such as those around Washington, DC (not Washington as mentioned in the poor article) and airports will probably require a way to either flash the storage medium via JTAG or decrypt the traffic. I figure the community will take less than a year before it figures out one or the other, based on how quickly other consumer devices are cracked.
FTFY
FFFF
Fun For Four Fixes!
And alliteration is always awesome.
FTFY