Look, I thought this when Bush announced it and every bit of news like this only confirms it:
A manned mission to Mars will NOT happen within our lifetimes. Not the US, not China.
As far as I understand it, there's no way currently to get something down onto the surface, with enough fuel to get back up into space again. Therefore, any manned excursion to the surface will be a one-way ticket. Anyone fancy volunteering for that?
As for sending enough kit to manufacture fuel from the resources on Mars and use that to come back, don't make me laugh.
I guess you could use dozens of shuttle-launches to assemble a massive spaceship in Earth orbit before sending it off, but that'd take decades and cost far more than the $100bn proposed by Bush, at least if the ISS is anything to go by.
The whole thing's pie in the sky nonsense dreamed up by (probably) Karl Rove to keep a few geeks onside during elections.
I don't think Star Trek, even in the 60's, was meant to be a prediction of how interstellar travel would or could work. Actually I think it was an allegory about how nation states should behave in relation to others. TNG expanded on this but the basic concept of the TOS always had more to do with philosophy and ethics than with hard science fiction.
Actually attempting to define a possible method of FTL travel is almost pointless since (obviously) nobody has much of a clue how it might be possible, or even if physics allows for it in any sense whatsoever. Charlie Stross has a good poke, Iain Banks doesn't even try and Frank Herbert went miles into left field (interstellar travel via mind-bending drugs), which is perversely the most sensible approach, given our total ignorance. Vernor Vinge is also notable in this sense, since he postulates that while FTL travel is impossible in this part of the galaxy, thus conforming to our observations, physical 'constants' might vary with proximity to the centre of the galaxy thereby allowing interstellar travel near the rim.
Pure speculation, of course, but then that's all we can do at this stage and hell, it's good fun.
Frankly I can't believe nobody has mentioned this!
I did almost nothing else but play this game, the sequels, updates and special editions, between the ages of 16 and 21.
I know it's a football sim and Slashdotters tend not to like sports so much (apologies for rank generalisation) but you never actually got to SEE any sports - just buy and sell the stars, set the tactics, pick the team and watch the text commentary.
The tension when you get Colchester United to the Champions League final and it's 3-3 after 80 minutes against Milan, is unmatched by any other game I've ever played.
Not scary tension like Half-Life but a sort of engrossing, professional tension. You WANT your team to win, for that £250k striker you bought to bang in that far-post header in extra time and become a hero. You can almost smell the money, success and fame. The career progression on offer is amazing as well - start off with a bottom-rung band of English donkeys, turn them into a decent team, then take a job somewhere like Brazil or Japan, make your name there, then to Serie B for a couple of years, then perhaps if you win a cup you could go to a top-flight outfit like Eintracht Frankfurt, then back to England to take charge at Palace to fight relegation, then if you stay up.... I could go on. Absolutely unique.
Well we're looking at this from a very bottom-up perspective (as us geeks are wont to do). Consider it a bit more top-down and you've got a very different outlook...
A classic example of where the SW would be very helpful considers simple information interchange between two or three entities, each containing disparate but related data. Say you're sitting at your PC, when your boss schedules an offsite meeting for you. You get his email, which has the address of where you're meant to go. How about if your PC could look up this address automatically on the web, get a route, then Bluetooth it into your car's SatNav system?
You can't currently do that because your email program doesn't know an address when it sees it, and your SatNav can't interpret a route created by, say, Multimap.
Naturally, you could pick holes in that example (SatNav's can plot their own routes, I know) but it's illustrative nonetheless.
We don't have to switch the entire web over to be semantic in a short period of time, but the technology should be available for when it would be useful. Then, as people adopt it, it will cause that paradigm shift people are talking about... albeit very slowly.
Actually I reckon this chap would have the lot of them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bronson_(pris oner)http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/646857.stm
"In 1998, seven years were added to his jail sentence after he took two Iraqi hijackers and another inmate hostage at Belmarsh prison in London.
He insisted his hostages call him "General" and told negotiators he would eat one of his victims unless his demands were met."
Reading TFA, it looks as if most "IT pros" will support moving over to Vista, even if the improvements are completely superficial.
As a previous poster has already noted, Vista doesn't look like the fundamental leap over the incumbent as XP was over 98/ME.
I did note that a couple of the people writing in TFA were somehow associated with Microsoft - they get given beta code and such well before launch, which is just another way that Microsoft keeps market position. I think this is pretty much the story with the IT industry in general - good or bad, corporate bods generally succumb to the cult of Microsoft because it's become part, not only of their thinking, but of their very livelihoods.
I used to get angry about Billy G and his Machiavellian ways, but since he's giving away tons of his cash to help out with preventable diseases and such in the third world, I'm actually glad that he's able to hoover up such vast quantities of corporate cash and redistribute it somewhat more fairly.
Let them have their little game, if you don't like it, there's always the free alternative of Linux, so I'm pretty cheerful.
It's all about the kids. Indigenous cultures in places like Brazil tend to bleed over from the jungle into the civilised farms and cities not because they want to, but because they can obtain medicine to alleviate naturally horiffic infant mortality rates. In fact, most such indigenous people have absolutely no future in the civilised world, since they can't read, write or even speak in any widespread language. Suicide levels are rampant and common occupations include prostitution and manual labour. But they do it because watching one's children die from simple bacterial infections is even worse.
Cheerful, eh?
So it's not because they really love civilisation - in fact most hunter gatherers have to do about 3 hours foraging each day (depending on the environment of course I'm assuming somewhere rich like a rainforest) and the rest of the time is spent getting outrageously high on whatever hallucinogens are available from the nearest tree/ mushroom/ toad.
I can see where they're coming from - I was probably a bit nihilistic and anti-human until I had a kid, now I love people.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, I thought this when Bush announced it and every bit of news like this only confirms it:
A manned mission to Mars will NOT happen within our lifetimes. Not the US, not China.
As far as I understand it, there's no way currently to get something down onto the surface, with enough fuel to get back up into space again. Therefore, any manned excursion to the surface will be a one-way ticket. Anyone fancy volunteering for that?
As for sending enough kit to manufacture fuel from the resources on Mars and use that to come back, don't make me laugh.
I guess you could use dozens of shuttle-launches to assemble a massive spaceship in Earth orbit before sending it off, but that'd take decades and cost far more than the $100bn proposed by Bush, at least if the ISS is anything to go by.
The whole thing's pie in the sky nonsense dreamed up by (probably) Karl Rove to keep a few geeks onside during elections.
I don't think Star Trek, even in the 60's, was meant to be a prediction of how interstellar travel would or could work. Actually I think it was an allegory about how nation states should behave in relation to others. TNG expanded on this but the basic concept of the TOS always had more to do with philosophy and ethics than with hard science fiction.
Actually attempting to define a possible method of FTL travel is almost pointless since (obviously) nobody has much of a clue how it might be possible, or even if physics allows for it in any sense whatsoever. Charlie Stross has a good poke, Iain Banks doesn't even try and Frank Herbert went miles into left field (interstellar travel via mind-bending drugs), which is perversely the most sensible approach, given our total ignorance. Vernor Vinge is also notable in this sense, since he postulates that while FTL travel is impossible in this part of the galaxy, thus conforming to our observations, physical 'constants' might vary with proximity to the centre of the galaxy thereby allowing interstellar travel near the rim.
Pure speculation, of course, but then that's all we can do at this stage and hell, it's good fun.
Frankly I can't believe nobody has mentioned this!
I did almost nothing else but play this game, the sequels, updates and special editions, between the ages of 16 and 21.
I know it's a football sim and Slashdotters tend not to like sports so much (apologies for rank generalisation) but you never actually got to SEE any sports - just buy and sell the stars, set the tactics, pick the team and watch the text commentary.
The tension when you get Colchester United to the Champions League final and it's 3-3 after 80 minutes against Milan, is unmatched by any other game I've ever played.
Not scary tension like Half-Life but a sort of engrossing, professional tension. You WANT your team to win, for that £250k striker you bought to bang in that far-post header in extra time and become a hero. You can almost smell the money, success and fame. The career progression on offer is amazing as well - start off with a bottom-rung band of English donkeys, turn them into a decent team, then take a job somewhere like Brazil or Japan, make your name there, then to Serie B for a couple of years, then perhaps if you win a cup you could go to a top-flight outfit like Eintracht Frankfurt, then back to England to take charge at Palace to fight relegation, then if you stay up.... I could go on. Absolutely unique.
Well we're looking at this from a very bottom-up perspective (as us geeks are wont to do). Consider it a bit more top-down and you've got a very different outlook...
A classic example of where the SW would be very helpful considers simple information interchange between two or three entities, each containing disparate but related data. Say you're sitting at your PC, when your boss schedules an offsite meeting for you. You get his email, which has the address of where you're meant to go. How about if your PC could look up this address automatically on the web, get a route, then Bluetooth it into your car's SatNav system?
You can't currently do that because your email program doesn't know an address when it sees it, and your SatNav can't interpret a route created by, say, Multimap.
Naturally, you could pick holes in that example (SatNav's can plot their own routes, I know) but it's illustrative nonetheless.
We don't have to switch the entire web over to be semantic in a short period of time, but the technology should be available for when it would be useful. Then, as people adopt it, it will cause that paradigm shift people are talking about... albeit very slowly.
Actually I reckon this chap would have the lot of them:s oner)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/646857.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bronson_(pri
"In 1998, seven years were added to his jail sentence after he took two Iraqi hijackers and another inmate hostage at Belmarsh prison in London.
He insisted his hostages call him "General" and told negotiators he would eat one of his victims unless his demands were met."
Reading TFA, it looks as if most "IT pros" will support moving over to Vista, even if the improvements are completely superficial. As a previous poster has already noted, Vista doesn't look like the fundamental leap over the incumbent as XP was over 98/ME. I did note that a couple of the people writing in TFA were somehow associated with Microsoft - they get given beta code and such well before launch, which is just another way that Microsoft keeps market position. I think this is pretty much the story with the IT industry in general - good or bad, corporate bods generally succumb to the cult of Microsoft because it's become part, not only of their thinking, but of their very livelihoods. I used to get angry about Billy G and his Machiavellian ways, but since he's giving away tons of his cash to help out with preventable diseases and such in the third world, I'm actually glad that he's able to hoover up such vast quantities of corporate cash and redistribute it somewhat more fairly. Let them have their little game, if you don't like it, there's always the free alternative of Linux, so I'm pretty cheerful.
We'll let Marketing worry about that!
Just wait for them to have a heart attack, then attach a turbine to the crematorium... Come on, it's better than coal!
Chuck Norris? Pah. Bruce Lee beat him up real good.
I hear Vin Diesel actually does produce about 5MW when sitting perfectly still.
It's all about the kids. Indigenous cultures in places like Brazil tend to bleed over from the jungle into the civilised farms and cities not because they want to, but because they can obtain medicine to alleviate naturally horiffic infant mortality rates. In fact, most such indigenous people have absolutely no future in the civilised world, since they can't read, write or even speak in any widespread language. Suicide levels are rampant and common occupations include prostitution and manual labour. But they do it because watching one's children die from simple bacterial infections is even worse.
Cheerful, eh?
So it's not because they really love civilisation - in fact most hunter gatherers have to do about 3 hours foraging each day (depending on the environment of course I'm assuming somewhere rich like a rainforest) and the rest of the time is spent getting outrageously high on whatever hallucinogens are available from the nearest tree/ mushroom/ toad.
I can see where they're coming from - I was probably a bit nihilistic and anti-human until I had a kid, now I love people.