On the other hand flying without having to make connections is so much better
For some people, but not all. Most parents of small children will tell you it is better to get off the plane every few hours than to be stuck on the plane for 6-8 hours at a time....
So too will the passengers who sit next to said small children tell you it is better to switch planes.
Airports can host a finite amount of flights only. So the more people you can squeeze into a plane the more you can transport in any given timeframe from one airport to another.
That's not a given. A factor rarely discussed is turnaround time for a given plane. Passenger boarding alone does not, in my experience, seem to be a linear scale. For some double the passenger count means more than double load times. Then there are also times to load the plane itself. Some of this is cargo related, some is fuel realted, food realted, etc..
It is entirely possible, maybe probable that more passengers per plane can mean less passenger throughput for the airport. Especially if the scale of the infrastructure is not up to the task of a series of very large capacity planes.
If, for example, it takes 3x as long to load an A380 (from land to takeoff) than say to planes of half capacity, you are better off with the smaller planes from a throughput point of view. And that is assuming each plane is at max capacity. Once you start shrinking from 100% seated the differential becomes more in favor of the smaller planes.
There is more to passenger throughput than per-plane throughput. A lot more.
As much as my Nerd Gene wants a manned mission to Mars, it's hard to argue with the scientific value of (relatively) cheap missions like this. NASA shifted in the late 90's to a series of relatively inexpensive probes with a narrow purpose (as opposed to the Voyager-class missions). These probes make sense. For one, there's less financial damage if one fails or is destroyed. And two, they can be put together, tested, and launched more cheaply and more quickly.
Again it depends on what you mean by "science". Correctly speaking, the rovers, cool as they are, do not do science. They merely gather data. They are (very) remote instruments, nothing more. Indeed, we have even more remote instruments. Not fundamentally different than a thermostat or my digital camera. They all gather data, humans are doing any science. Therefore, the *science* return from these guys is nil. That's a high price to pay for zero return. Perhaps not so bad for data, though that is questionable too.
Now, put a crew of 4-6 people on board and send them to Mars - now that is big-time publicity. You get something interesting to talk about leading up to the launch (interviews with the crew, stories about them, the mission, etc.). You get something interesting to watch during the launch and for the next six months as they travel there, their experiences little space tricks, etc.. You get something interesting to watch as they arrive and land. You get at least a few good months of coverage after planetfall. You get at least a month or so at the one year mark. You get something enticing as they launch from mars to come home. Perhaps you get stuff on the way back; maybe some return trip exclusive interviews or something. And of course arrival in orbit and return to "home" is exciting stuff to watch, too. Then for a few months after touchdown you've got interviews, talk shows, book deals, conventions, etc..
Robots will not acheive such a potential for acpturing the eye, spirit, and attention like a manned mission can; at least for for a few human generations at least. If you want people excited and interested, sending people is the name of the game.
And no, "science of robotics" doesn't count as all that work was done here before they ever left (duh;)).
They dropped from the public's radar so quickly in part due to them being machines. Their limited travel and feature set meant that after a while the day to day activities were mostly unchanging. This is bad, or at least not good, for maintaining public interest.
As far as human exploration, the costs are not as you believe, nor is the timeframe.
Robotic missions are not so effective in the temporal scale as you might think. The time frames invovled in designing testing, retesting, etc are not small. Nor are the timeframes involved in getting it from drawing board to planetary landing site. IIRC, MSL is scheduled for a 2009/2010 launch. It'll take a year to get there. It's been in the works since at least 2002, as I recall.
That gives us a total time of somewhere between eight and ten years from concept to Martian landing. Follow up missions are not looking to take any less time. But they should.
Follow on missions don't take less time because robotics engineers always want to try something else. That means years of research and testing, most of which is NOT reported in the cost of the final rover. After the research come the tests and applications to get on a launch schedule, etc.. Then comes the wait for a launch window opportunity.
Adding to this is the natural size increase in the forthcoming proposed and planned rovers. MSL is looking to weigh in at 6600 pounds, over 3 tons. It is going to weigh in at about twice the weight of my car. The days of small rovers are over. We liek to rave about their "unexpected life" and the allegedly high "science" they are doing. Reality of it is they are primarily producing lots of pictures.
The biggest discoveries, and most significant, regarding Mars over t
5 may, 1961 - Freedom 7, first manned sub-orbital flight 20 feb, 1962 - Friendship 7, first manned orbital flight 21 Dec, 1968 - launch Apollo 8, first manned lunar orbit 21 July, 1969 - First manned lunar landing 12 April, 1981 - First launch of space shuttle 1 feb, 2003 - shuttle fleet grounded
You left out the entire non-manned aspect of space flight. Blowing up an asteroid is a far different cry than sending man into space. We already know how to put cargo in space, the trick would be intercepting the target and eliminating the threat. Therefore to plot that ability you should plot the advance in the ability to blow stuff to ashes and sand.
Your "detail" about what is happening is not representative of the technological advancement and is thus not insightful, and even off base. You conspicously left out the hundreds of non-manned cargo launches, the Martian orbiter and landings, and so on that have taken place in short periods of time.
That said, a rock this big isn't that much to destroy -- it could be done with today's tech. A series of nuclear blasts should reduce most of it to rubble and down even further. IIRC, this thing is only about a third of a kilometer in diameter.
Indeed the most difficult part would be dealing with the differing trajectories of the chunks as they get blown into successively smaller rocks.
But even then, a well coordinated spread pattern timed properly would effectively clear the earth of any serious danger. The largest danger we'd face would be the "shrapnel", if any, taking out a few satellites.
On the other hand, it's all for naught. All we need to do is track it to keep it from hitting the Earth:
"In all likelihood, the possibility of impact will eventually be eliminated as the asteroid continues to be tracked by astronomers around the world."
See, just track it better and the problem goes away.;)
I reckon if we gather up as much lead and place it by the Oval Office, we might just be able to alter the asteroid's trajectory and save ourselves from self-anihilation.
And don't give me any of this "Space travel is really hard and expensive" crap either. Most of the cost of the space shuttle is tied up in our desire to have the astronauts return alive to the ground with little risk of anybody on the ground getting killed.
Close but not quite. Most of the costs wrapped up in current manned travel is in the insistence on a bloated and wasteful "resuable laucnh vehicle" strategy. "Disposable" launch craft have a far better safety record than the Shuttle's abysmal track record and for a lot less money.
The major roadblocks however would still be bureaucratic. Nation vs nation level stuff. The US could foot the bill, take the risk, and go it alone in order to ensure it gets done and still get politically lambasted over it.
We'd hear about how we first knew of this threat under Bush the Second's watch and he/we did nothing about it, how it was all for oil and about Americon Imperialism and space hegemony, and how the "War on Terrorism" was really just a big coverup for the eventual asteroid strike, etceteras, etceteras, etceteras.
How much would it cost to create a colony on Mars? What would we be able to do on own planet for the same amount of money? It seems to me that for the same amount of money we could develop a way to protect all of humanity from an asteroid strike, rather than send off a select few to the new home of humanity in the stars.
Over the course of 10-12 years from the word go, about 25-30 billion or so if you want to live quite well and have a lot of luxury and high tech toys for the sake of having high tech toys. That includes a minimum of 24-48 people on Mars, and all they need to provide for their own power, food, air, and water as well as ability to expand their living quarters and the beginnings of heavy industry.
Not a paradise, but a lot more than you may realize can be done with today's or even testerday's technology.
The cost of a system you propose? About 10 times that, and over a longer period of time.
Besides, is colonizing Mars really any easier or better than colonizing a post-apocalyptic Earth? I would think a self contained biosphere built on Earth would be hella cheaper than one built on Mars. I would guess that Earth after a worst case asteroid scenario would still be more habitable than Mars. If nothing else, the "colonists" will sure have a ton of biomater to subsist on for awhile.
Yes, actually it is. First, you don't need a fully self contained biosphere. Second, on a post-apocalyptic Earth where are you going to find the capability to build a fully self contained biosphere when we haven't been able to do it on a pre-apocalyptic Earth?
Indeed agriculture on Mars is remarkably easier due to lack of contamination of post-apocalypic dangers, no roving bands of mailman hunting humans, and plenty of dry land to keep us from growing webbed feet.
Personally, these arguements that we need to colonize space because we're trashing Earth sound a bit to me like someone who wants to buy a new house because they don't feel like cleaning their perfectly good existing house.
Fortunately, those are strawman arguments put up by people who don't know what it takes and thus assume it must be the end-all-be-all of technology.
Most of us don't want to go to Mars (for example) because it's "dirty" here (it really isn't that bad), or even to keep mankind alive after a nuke exchange or asteroid impact. We seek to go because we *can* do it, because it is a new place to go, and it brings new challenges and opportunity to mankind. Humans are a migratory species. Denying that only leads to problems of misunderstanding.
There are other reasons. It's cheaper to set up a Mars colony and use it for space based asset production (food, water, air, heavy materials) than it is to do it from here. If you want a system to protect "all of humanity" from asteroid threats you'll need a lot of material in orbit. Enough so it will take several decades to get it into orbit. And you still won't have any better of a launch infrastructure when you get halfway.
On the other hand, a Class 2 Martian base backed by a Class 1 Martian Colony can provide the interplanetary transit system for shipping that material as well as support infrastructure in about two decades. That's starting from the word go. Given the way orbital weapon systems progress we'd barely have any assets in space by then, if any.
These are all decent places to start exploring (no pun intended) what is known. Granted, for true understanding you'll need to go beyond mere web pages but the resources to get there are on those sites.
Establishing an off planet colony isn't exactly the same as getting up to turn the TV off, even if we started really focusing on this idea now, without some new propulsion technology i doubt even by 2029 we will have this option.
Yet those of us who actually pay attention to real science know we don't need any new propulsion technology. We have the option right now, we just choose to not exercise it.
Some of us are, on the other hand, quite familiar with what it takes and know that getting there is the easy part. We've had the propulsion technology since the late sixties.
Remember when Sony said the PS2 could do Toy Story in real time? They did.
No, and truth told, neither do you. Know how I know? They didn't claim it. A puff peice written by a so-called journalist said that. Not Sony.
The power of the PS2 will allow for real time manipulation of Toy Story-quality graphics, as well as digital surround sound audio. Full orchestras, rock, techno, hip hop, and punk rock bands have already begun chipping in to make these games sonically as well as visually an art form of their own. If you think I am being a tad dramatic, it may interest you to know that Titanic director James Cameron is currently involved in an underwater action/adventure game similar to "The Abyss".
-- http://www.deadontheweb.com/june_2000/psx2/
There you go, the original. From a "fanboy" of sorts. Not sony. So no, none of us remember when Sony made that claim. Not even you.
Mods: No insight to the parent post, just unadulterated crap. Insightful *should* require truth or accuracy. The parent post had neither.
An no, this post isn't insightful either,. informative perhaps but not insightful.
As for Sony and Microsoft, I am going to enjoy this battle and am, in a lot of ways, rooting for Microsoft to do well. Where Sony has followed their traditional arrogance (lack of support, proprietary hardware, proprietary accessories) with most of their consumer electronics (cameras, CLIE, etc.) Microsoft has really done a good job distancing the xbox from the mothership that we all complain about.
Like proprietary hardware, lack of support...
If you want to separate Xbox from MS, you must do the same for PS vs. Sony. Did Microsoft provide teh needfuls for putting Linux on the Xbox? No. Does Sony have a bunch of proprietary PS2 accessories? Not that I can tell. My USB devices work there as well as other places.
Who would have thought that it would be Microsoft trying to force game companies to support older titles (EA's sports titles to be exact) for longer than the game publisher had intended.
Certainly not anybody that *knows* that Sony was the first to bring out backward compatibility, not MS. Sony's PS2 plays PS1 games. Over a thousand of them. They've already announced the PS3 will support PS2 AND PS1 games. I've got games that were put out nearly a *decade* that are still able to be played in my PS2. Do you think the makers of all those games thought that Sony would come out with it's next *two* (so far) console systems still playing them? No, I don't either.
Xbox2 support Xbox1 games? Last I heard the word was "NO".
On the other hand, Microsoft trying to FORCE someone ELSE to do SUPPORT? No, never would have occured to me that they'd do something like that. Not in a million years.;)
Online console gaming is something to look at too. Unless things have changed in the last six months, only the PS2 can be played on the 'Net over a dialup connection. PS2's SOCOM II on it's own is played online more than all Xbox titles *combined* worldwide.
Will Microsoft continue to sell the Xbox after the Xbox2 comes out? I've my doubts and they are justified. Sony, however, still produces the PS1. Curiously, game makers *still* make games for it. Even after a decade years of production (November 15th marks nine years of PSOne availability in teh US, IIRC, but the PSOne was laucnhed in Japan in 94), sales are still strong for PSOne and PSOne titles/accessories.
I suspect that when the PS3 comes out, we'll still see the PS2 kicking around in supported production format, and games for it, for a long while. Whether PSOne is still around will be an interesting thing to watch.
Yes, it will be an interesting battle between behemoths. But there is not much hope from MS in this battle. Their desktop monopoly gives no assistance to the console world. And in the console world, Sony is the 1600 pound gorrilla.
AntiMS zealots will take heart in this. Personally, I'd hoped for better competition for Sony (drives it all forward), but so afar I've not seen it.
As of December, the PS1/PSOne has over a hundred million units shipped. The PS2 about 81 million. For GameCube we're talking about 18M, and 20M for Xbox. In other words, of actively sold non-handheld gaming consoles, Sony's got about 83% market share. Microsoft and Nintendo split the remainder nearly evenly, with each holding single digit shares. Seen in this light, or even in raw shipments, Nintendo is no more dead than Microsoft is. On the other hand, taking the GB:Advance and GB:Advance SP, as well as the Nintendo DS into account, they too dwarf MS' presence in the non-PC gaming industry. So I wouldn't count Nintendo out just yet unless you count MS out as well. Indeed I expect the handheld gaming scene to spark up some interest in the looming battle between Nintendo and Sony, a section of console gaming left essentially entirely to Nintendo by MS and Sony until Sony's PSP.
The PS2/GC/Xbox generation of consoles is expected to top out at around 160M consoles over the life of the cycle. Sony already has the majority of them for th
One of the main things Langa complains about in his article is that some websites do not render properly under Firefox. Of course these sites are probably using IE proprietary extensions and not W3C suggested standards.
Actually, it's not the proprietary extensions that cause the biggest problem. It is the willful failure to follow the standards. Offering additional features is fine, as long as the standards work as they should.
If you want your browser to offer aditional things, cool. Just don't sacrifice the following of standards thus making web designers and coders (IE standards ignorance bugs often affect more than just browser appearance) have to work around your inability to get it right.
Hell if you can't get the box model right, you shouldn't be coding the rendering engine. If you can't add features w/o breaking the standards compliance you shouldn't be modifying the rendering engine.
While Firefox is loaded with useful options, I find it interesting that I stayed not because it was technically superior to ie, but provided better and actually useful features.
I view that statement as a self-contradiction. Features that work is "technically superior" to features that don't work. "Better" features I'll grant as not necessarily indicative of being better technically. But *working* code *is* better than non-working code; technically or otherwise.;)
We're using SQLObject, which is in version 0.6, as an object-relational-mapper. It's got some limitations and is admittedly not 'enterprise ready'. it's hard to compare to the Perl DBI because the dbi just is an interface and doesn't do mapping.
This is a case of comparing two entirely different things. The PERL DBI is for accessing databses (DataBase Interface). SQLObject is an ORM: an Object-Relational-Mapper.
For comparison to PERL DBI you should use Python DB-API: DataBase API. http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0249.html
a database API and an ORM are entirely different animals. To compare one langauges DB-API to another's ORM is well... not worthy. Nor is it demonstrative of a "lack of mature toolsets". With your 14 years of programming, I'd have thought you knew the difference between an ORM and an API.;)
For example, GUI programming toolsets are more mature in Python than in Perl. The scientific toolsets likewise. I've found SQL-DB access via the Python DB-API to be far easier and more "mature" than Perl's.
Regarding CPAN. Well, Python includes in the std. library much of the things in CPAN. In environments where the management is adverse to "third party" libraries and modules, this is a big win for Python.XML-RPC, SMTP, HTTP, NNTP, IMAP, POP3? They're all in there. Decent, usable, easy-to-configure command line parsing? It's in there. CSV file parsing, object persistence, network libraries, logging, sets, DBM, compressed file support, telnet, ftplib, cgilib, html libraries, xml libraries, cookies, queues, and memory mapped file support, generators? Yup, all in there.
Much/most of those you have to CPAN out to get in Perl last I knew. When you have a million ways to do the same thing, something like CPAN is indeed a lifesaver. If you can find out what the submitters called the solution to your problem. When there isn't a million and one ways to do a thing, and your standard library is much more inclusive, it is less important to have a CPAN like tool.
That said, there is PyPI ( http://www.python.org/pypi) and the Vaults of Parnassus (http://www.vex.net/parnassus).
Well I'd expect in the next 2 years to be able to go to McDonalds and enter my order on a touch screen and have it brought out to me.
Arby's was doing that at the local mall a few years ago.
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But that's because there is another computer that isn't needed: the computerized register. If you don't introduce that, then the paper order can go right to the kitchen and then serve as bill and receipt. A diner usually operates in that manner. A little piece of paper that serves as order to waiter, order to kitchen, bill, receipt. Simple, elegant, non-computerized.
You forgot: cheaper, and often faster. Yes, I've dealt with both.
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The person still gets minimum wage here in America--McDonald's biggest market. A typical McD is open from 6 until 11 -- seventeen hours, every day of the year.
Every single McD's I've seen over the last 5 years has paid 2-4 dollars above minimum wage. McD's hasn't been a minimum wage employer for quite some time. Most seem to start ~$2 above, not some.
That said, as soemone who has had employees the costs of a person tend to be around 30% of their pay. So someone making 10/hour costs more like 13/hour. Assuming administrative overhead as equal is a non-viable assumption.
But your machines also have power and maintenance to consider, so sale price alone is a poor determinant. In many cases the ongoing costs are larger than the purchase price. Especially in bulk.
The fast food industry is a lot of non-trivial actions and movements. Variances in natrual food state and quality can wreak havoc with bots.
Vending machines still screw up hot chocolate and coffe filling. Add in ice, foaming, and so on and it gets ugly fast. Cooking burgers.. that's best done automatically by running over a flame broiler conveyor belt like Burger King (or dominos Pizza) do. Problem is the removal and application to a bun as well as application of accessories -condiments, lettuce, pickles.. are the pickle and tomatoes looking any good today?- get really hairy as well.
Now, find bots that can do those things as well as a teenager, can do it within 2x the cost of the teenager, before pronouncing it is "well within the range". I'm not joking here, I'd truly love to see these things, even though the fast food places will not use them.
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Minus the never-going-to-fly-with-customers RFID stuff, it sounds just like the order pads the waiters use at some busy North Beach restaurants. Don't need distracting eyegear popups, it just takes a glance down at the pad. Orders are entered and every table's order is displayed on the pad, by number. Any waiter that can't handle learning the table numbers on their first day is not cut out for the job, and no amount of technology can cover for that lack of ability.
I dunno, tag each table with a very short range RFID that communicates it's identifier to the pad and there you go. Perhaps combine it with a small layout w/numbers and there you go. Maybe the person is not numerically inclined, but is spacially adept. For them the map might be easier than the number.
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Imagine a restaurant where all the wait staff have glasses. They carry around a small black to "write" on,
You'd think a pad and pencil would be cheaper than giving out small blacks to your wait staff. (it's a joke about a typo, deal with it.)
If on the other hand your code cannot be read out loud (because of inaudible variable names), then the odds are some other programmer is going to have to review every other line of your code just to try and make sense of it all.
Sounds like perl.;)
Just for fun sometime read a perl script aloud and pronounce each dollar sign "eater of flesh" in a somewhat lower "subscript" voice. Read each @ symbol as "devourer of souls", and each non-comment # as "consumer of wisdom".
Slashdot Mirror
Everybody knows a Rolls is more quiet than a Corvette.
/me ducks too
Sure any car that won't start is quieter than a started car.
On the other hand flying without having to make connections is so much better
...
For some people, but not all. Most parents of small children will tell you it is better to get off the plane every few hours than to be stuck on the plane for 6-8 hours at a time.
So too will the passengers who sit next to said small children tell you it is better to switch planes.
Airports can host a finite amount of flights only. So the more people you can squeeze into a plane the more you can transport in any given timeframe from one airport to another.
That's not a given. A factor rarely discussed is turnaround time for a given plane. Passenger boarding alone does not, in my experience, seem to be a linear scale. For some double the passenger count means more than double load times. Then there are also times to load the plane itself. Some of this is cargo related, some is fuel realted, food realted, etc..
It is entirely possible, maybe probable that more passengers per plane can mean less passenger throughput for the airport. Especially if the scale of the infrastructure is not up to the task of a series of very large capacity planes.
If, for example, it takes 3x as long to load an A380 (from land to takeoff) than say to planes of half capacity, you are better off with the smaller planes from a throughput point of view. And that is assuming each plane is at max capacity. Once you start shrinking from 100% seated the differential becomes more in favor of the smaller planes.
There is more to passenger throughput than per-plane throughput. A lot more.
As much as my Nerd Gene wants a manned mission to Mars, it's hard to argue with the scientific value of (relatively) cheap missions like this. NASA shifted in the late 90's to a series of relatively inexpensive probes with a narrow purpose (as opposed to the Voyager-class missions). These probes make sense. For one, there's less financial damage if one fails or is destroyed. And two, they can be put together, tested, and launched more cheaply and more quickly.
;)).
Again it depends on what you mean by "science". Correctly speaking, the rovers, cool as they are, do not do science. They merely gather data. They are (very) remote instruments, nothing more. Indeed, we have even more remote instruments. Not fundamentally different than a thermostat or my digital camera. They all gather data, humans are doing any science. Therefore, the *science* return from these guys is nil. That's a high price to pay for zero return. Perhaps not so bad for data, though that is questionable too.
Now, put a crew of 4-6 people on board and send them to Mars - now that is big-time publicity. You get something interesting to talk about leading up to the launch (interviews with the crew, stories about them, the mission, etc.). You get something interesting to watch during the launch and for the next six months as they travel there, their experiences little space tricks, etc.. You get something interesting to watch as they arrive and land. You get at least a few good months of coverage after planetfall. You get at least a month or so at the one year mark. You get something enticing as they launch from mars to come home. Perhaps you get stuff on the way back; maybe some return trip exclusive interviews or something. And of course arrival in orbit and return to "home" is exciting stuff to watch, too. Then for a few months after touchdown you've got interviews, talk shows, book deals, conventions, etc..
Robots will not acheive such a potential for acpturing the eye, spirit, and attention like a manned mission can; at least for for a few human generations at least. If you want people excited and interested, sending people is the name of the game.
And no, "science of robotics" doesn't count as all that work was done here before they ever left (duh
They dropped from the public's radar so quickly in part due to them being machines. Their limited travel and feature set meant that after a while the day to day activities were mostly unchanging. This is bad, or at least not good, for maintaining public interest.
As far as human exploration, the costs are not as you believe, nor is the timeframe.
Robotic missions are not so effective in the temporal scale as you might think. The time frames invovled in designing testing, retesting, etc are not small. Nor are the timeframes involved in getting it from drawing board to planetary landing site. IIRC, MSL is scheduled for a 2009/2010 launch. It'll take a year to get there. It's been in the works since at least 2002, as I recall.
That gives us a total time of somewhere between eight and ten years from concept to Martian landing. Follow up missions are not looking to take any less time. But they should.
Follow on missions don't take less time because robotics engineers always want to try something else. That means years of research and testing, most of which is NOT reported in the cost of the final rover. After the research come the tests and applications to get on a launch schedule, etc.. Then comes the wait for a launch window opportunity.
Adding to this is the natural size increase in the forthcoming proposed and planned rovers. MSL is looking to weigh in at 6600 pounds, over 3 tons. It is going to weigh in at about twice the weight of my car. The days of small rovers are over. We liek to rave about their "unexpected life" and the allegedly high "science" they are doing. Reality of it is they are primarily producing lots of pictures.
The biggest discoveries, and most significant, regarding Mars over t
I'm sure I'm not the only one who immediately thought "Titanic" when I saw the headline...
Actually we took a poll and it was decided that yes, you are actually the only one to think of that. Oh, and the cat is dead.
5 may, 1961 - Freedom 7, first manned sub-orbital flight
;)
20 feb, 1962 - Friendship 7, first manned orbital flight
21 Dec, 1968 - launch Apollo 8, first manned lunar orbit
21 July, 1969 - First manned lunar landing
12 April, 1981 - First launch of space shuttle
1 feb, 2003 - shuttle fleet grounded
You left out the entire non-manned aspect of space flight. Blowing up an asteroid is a far different cry than sending man into space. We already know how to put cargo in space, the trick would be intercepting the target and eliminating the threat. Therefore to plot that ability you should plot the advance in the ability to blow stuff to ashes and sand.
Your "detail" about what is happening is not representative of the technological advancement and is thus not insightful, and even off base. You conspicously left out the hundreds of non-manned cargo launches, the Martian orbiter and landings, and so on that have taken place in short periods of time.
That said, a rock this big isn't that much to destroy -- it could be done with today's tech. A series of nuclear blasts should reduce most of it to rubble and down even further. IIRC, this thing is only about a third of a kilometer in diameter.
Indeed the most difficult part would be dealing with the differing trajectories of the chunks as they get blown into successively smaller rocks.
But even then, a well coordinated spread pattern timed properly would effectively clear the earth of any serious danger. The largest danger we'd face would be the "shrapnel", if any, taking out a few satellites.
On the other hand, it's all for naught. All we need to do is track it to keep it from hitting the Earth:
"In all likelihood, the possibility of impact will eventually be eliminated as the asteroid continues to be tracked by astronomers around the world."
See, just track it better and the problem goes away.
I reckon if we gather up as much lead and place it by the Oval Office, we might just be able to alter the asteroid's trajectory and save ourselves from self-anihilation.
So let's start collecting lead! Who's with me?
Lead the way.
And don't give me any of this "Space travel is really hard and expensive" crap either. Most of the cost of the space shuttle is tied up in our desire to have the astronauts return alive to the ground with little risk of anybody on the ground getting killed.
Close but not quite. Most of the costs wrapped up in current manned travel is in the insistence on a bloated and wasteful "resuable laucnh vehicle" strategy. "Disposable" launch craft have a far better safety record than the Shuttle's abysmal track record and for a lot less money.
The major roadblocks however would still be bureaucratic. Nation vs nation level stuff. The US could foot the bill, take the risk, and go it alone in order to ensure it gets done and still get politically lambasted over it.
We'd hear about how we first knew of this threat under Bush the Second's watch and he/we did nothing about it, how it was all for oil and about Americon Imperialism and space hegemony, and how the "War on Terrorism" was really just a big coverup for the eventual asteroid strike, etceteras, etceteras, etceteras.
How much would it cost to create a colony on Mars? What would we be able to do on own planet for the same amount of money? It seems to me that for the same amount of money we could develop a way to protect all of humanity from an asteroid strike, rather than send off a select few to the new home of humanity in the stars.
y .org
Over the course of 10-12 years from the word go, about 25-30 billion or so if you want to live quite well and have a lot of luxury and high tech toys for the sake of having high tech toys. That includes a minimum of 24-48 people on Mars, and all they need to provide for their own power, food, air, and water as well as ability to expand their living quarters and the beginnings of heavy industry.
Not a paradise, but a lot more than you may realize can be done with today's or even testerday's technology.
The cost of a system you propose? About 10 times that, and over a longer period of time.
Besides, is colonizing Mars really any easier or better than colonizing a post-apocalyptic Earth? I would think a self contained biosphere built on Earth would be hella cheaper than one built on Mars. I would guess that Earth after a worst case asteroid scenario would still be more habitable than Mars. If nothing else, the "colonists" will sure have a ton of biomater to subsist on for awhile.
Yes, actually it is. First, you don't need a fully self contained biosphere. Second, on a post-apocalyptic Earth where are you going to find the capability to build a fully self contained biosphere when we haven't been able to do it on a pre-apocalyptic Earth?
Indeed agriculture on Mars is remarkably easier due to lack of contamination of post-apocalypic dangers, no roving bands of mailman hunting humans, and plenty of dry land to keep us from growing webbed feet.
Personally, these arguements that we need to colonize space because we're trashing Earth sound a bit to me like someone who wants to buy a new house because they don't feel like cleaning their perfectly good existing house.
Fortunately, those are strawman arguments put up by people who don't know what it takes and thus assume it must be the end-all-be-all of technology.
Most of us don't want to go to Mars (for example) because it's "dirty" here (it really isn't that bad), or even to keep mankind alive after a nuke exchange or asteroid impact. We seek to go because we *can* do it, because it is a new place to go, and it brings new challenges and opportunity to mankind. Humans are a migratory species. Denying that only leads to problems of misunderstanding.
There are other reasons. It's cheaper to set up a Mars colony and use it for space based asset production (food, water, air, heavy materials) than it is to do it from here. If you want a system to protect "all of humanity" from asteroid threats you'll need a lot of material in orbit. Enough so it will take several decades to get it into orbit. And you still won't have any better of a launch infrastructure when you get halfway.
On the other hand, a Class 2 Martian base backed by a Class 1 Martian Colony can provide the interplanetary transit system for shipping that material as well as support infrastructure in about two decades. That's starting from the word go. Given the way orbital weapon systems progress we'd barely have any assets in space by then, if any.
http://www.marshome.org/
http://www.marssociet
http://www.moonsociety.org/
These are all decent places to start exploring (no pun intended) what is known. Granted, for true understanding you'll need to go beyond mere web pages but the resources to get there are on those sites.
Establishing an off planet colony isn't exactly the same as getting up to turn the TV off, even if we started really focusing on this idea now, without some new propulsion technology i doubt even by 2029 we will have this option.
Yet those of us who actually pay attention to real science know we don't need any new propulsion technology. We have the option right now, we just choose to not exercise it.
Some of us are, on the other hand, quite familiar with what it takes and know that getting there is the easy part. We've had the propulsion technology since the late sixties.
So, making yourselves feel better by attacking the messenger Symantec is foolhardy because there are other messengers that agree with them.
Messengers have no business agreeing or disagreeing with the message. Their sole purpose is to relay it.
I think IBM see open source as valuable for what it can add to IBM's portfolio, but it's certainly not the only option they push.
It's posts like this one that make me long for a moderation option of "stated the bleedingly obvious"
No, and truth told, neither do you. Know how I know? They didn't claim it. A puff peice written by a so-called journalist said that. Not Sony.
-- http://www.deadontheweb.com/june_2000/psx2/
There you go, the original. From a "fanboy" of sorts. Not sony.
So no, none of us remember when Sony made that claim. Not even you.
Mods:
No insight to the parent post, just unadulterated crap. Insightful *should* require truth or accuracy. The parent post had neither.
An no, this post isn't insightful either,. informative perhaps but not insightful.
As for Sony and Microsoft, I am going to enjoy this battle and am, in a lot of ways, rooting for Microsoft to do well. Where Sony has followed their traditional arrogance (lack of support, proprietary hardware, proprietary accessories) with most of their consumer electronics (cameras, CLIE, etc.) Microsoft has really done a good job distancing the xbox from the mothership that we all complain about.
...
;)
Like proprietary hardware, lack of support
If you want to separate Xbox from MS, you must do the same for PS vs. Sony. Did Microsoft provide teh needfuls for putting Linux on the Xbox? No. Does Sony have a bunch of proprietary PS2 accessories? Not that I can tell. My USB devices work there as well as other places.
Who would have thought that it would be Microsoft trying to force game companies to support older titles (EA's sports titles to be exact) for longer than the game publisher had intended.
Certainly not anybody that *knows* that Sony was the first to bring out backward compatibility, not MS. Sony's PS2 plays PS1 games. Over a thousand of them. They've already announced the PS3 will support PS2 AND PS1 games. I've got games that were put out nearly a *decade* that are still able to be played in my PS2. Do you think the makers of all those games thought that Sony would come out with it's next *two* (so far) console systems still playing them? No, I don't either.
Xbox2 support Xbox1 games? Last I heard the word was "NO".
On the other hand, Microsoft trying to FORCE someone ELSE to do SUPPORT? No, never would have occured to me that they'd do something like that. Not in a million years.
Online console gaming is something to look at too. Unless things have changed in the last six months, only the PS2 can be played on the 'Net over a dialup connection. PS2's SOCOM II on it's own is played online more than all Xbox titles *combined* worldwide.
Will Microsoft continue to sell the Xbox after the Xbox2 comes out? I've my doubts and they are justified. Sony, however, still produces the PS1. Curiously, game makers *still* make games for it. Even after a decade years of production (November 15th marks nine years of PSOne availability in teh US, IIRC, but the PSOne was laucnhed in Japan in 94), sales are still strong for PSOne and PSOne titles/accessories.
I suspect that when the PS3 comes out, we'll still see the PS2 kicking around in supported production format, and games for it, for a long while. Whether PSOne is still around will be an interesting thing to watch.
Yes, it will be an interesting battle between behemoths. But there is not much hope from MS in this battle. Their desktop monopoly gives no assistance to the console world. And in the console world, Sony is the 1600 pound gorrilla.
AntiMS zealots will take heart in this. Personally, I'd hoped for better competition for Sony (drives it all forward), but so afar I've not seen it.
As of December, the PS1/PSOne has over a hundred million units shipped. The PS2 about 81 million. For GameCube we're talking about 18M, and 20M for Xbox. In other words, of actively sold non-handheld gaming consoles, Sony's got about 83% market share. Microsoft and Nintendo split the remainder nearly evenly, with each holding single digit shares. Seen in this light, or even in raw shipments, Nintendo is no more dead than Microsoft is. On the other hand, taking the GB:Advance and GB:Advance SP, as well as the Nintendo DS into account, they too dwarf MS' presence in the non-PC gaming industry. So I wouldn't count Nintendo out just yet unless you count MS out as well. Indeed I expect the handheld gaming scene to spark up some interest in the looming battle between Nintendo and Sony, a section of console gaming left essentially entirely to Nintendo by MS and Sony until Sony's PSP.
The PS2/GC/Xbox generation of consoles is expected to top out at around 160M consoles over the life of the cycle. Sony already has the majority of them for th
One of the main things Langa complains about in his article is that some websites do not render properly under Firefox. Of course these sites are probably using IE proprietary extensions and not W3C suggested standards.
Actually, it's not the proprietary extensions that cause the biggest problem. It is the willful failure to follow the standards. Offering additional features is fine, as long as the standards work as they should.
If you want your browser to offer aditional things, cool. Just don't sacrifice the following of standards thus making web designers and coders (IE standards ignorance bugs often affect more than just browser appearance) have to work around your inability to get it right.
Hell if you can't get the box model right, you shouldn't be coding the rendering engine. If you can't add features w/o breaking the standards compliance you shouldn't be modifying the rendering engine.
While Firefox is loaded with useful options, I find it interesting that I stayed not because it was technically superior to ie, but provided better and actually useful features.
;)
I view that statement as a self-contradiction. Features that work is "technically superior" to features that don't work. "Better" features I'll grant as not necessarily indicative of being better technically. But *working* code *is* better than non-working code; technically or otherwise.
We're using SQLObject, which is in version 0.6, as an object-relational-mapper. It's got some limitations and is admittedly not 'enterprise ready'. it's hard to compare to the Perl DBI because the dbi just is an interface and doesn't do mapping.
... not worthy. Nor is it demonstrative of a "lack of mature toolsets". With your 14 years of programming, I'd have thought you knew the difference between an ORM and an API. ;)
This is a case of comparing two entirely different things. The PERL DBI is for accessing databses (DataBase Interface). SQLObject is an ORM: an Object-Relational-Mapper.
For comparison to PERL DBI you should use Python DB-API: DataBase API. http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0249.html
a database API and an ORM are entirely different animals. To compare one langauges DB-API to another's ORM is well
For example, GUI programming toolsets are more mature in Python than in Perl. The scientific toolsets likewise. I've found SQL-DB access via the Python DB-API to be far easier and more "mature" than Perl's.
Regarding CPAN. Well, Python includes in the std. library much of the things in CPAN. In environments where the management is adverse to "third party" libraries and modules, this is a big win for Python.XML-RPC, SMTP, HTTP, NNTP, IMAP, POP3? They're all in there. Decent, usable, easy-to-configure command line parsing? It's in there. CSV file parsing, object persistence, network libraries, logging, sets, DBM, compressed file support, telnet, ftplib, cgilib, html libraries, xml libraries, cookies, queues, and memory mapped file support, generators? Yup, all in there.
Much/most of those you have to CPAN out to get in Perl last I knew. When you have a million ways to do the same thing, something like CPAN is indeed a lifesaver. If you can find out what the submitters called the solution to your problem. When there isn't a million and one ways to do a thing, and your standard library is much more inclusive, it is less important to have a CPAN like tool.
That said, there is PyPI ( http://www.python.org/pypi) and the Vaults of Parnassus (http://www.vex.net/parnassus).
Then I had to watch the slow decline and shittification (to coin a word) of the industry
;)
You got beat
I knew I'd heard it before.
Cheers
Well I'd expect in the next 2 years to be able to go to McDonalds and enter my order on a touch screen and have it brought out to me.
Arby's was doing that at the local mall a few years ago.
But that's because there is another computer that isn't needed: the computerized register. If you don't introduce that, then the paper order can go right to the kitchen and then serve as bill and receipt. A diner usually operates in that manner. A little piece of paper that serves as order to waiter, order to kitchen, bill, receipt. Simple, elegant, non-computerized.
You forgot: cheaper, and often faster. Yes, I've dealt with both.
The person still gets minimum wage here in America--McDonald's biggest market. A typical McD is open from 6 until 11 -- seventeen hours, every day of the year.
.. that's best done automatically by running over a flame broiler conveyor belt like Burger King (or dominos Pizza) do. Problem is the removal and application to a bun as well as application of accessories -condiments, lettuce, pickles .. are the pickle and tomatoes looking any good today?- get really hairy as well.
Every single McD's I've seen over the last 5 years has paid 2-4 dollars above minimum wage. McD's hasn't been a minimum wage employer for quite some time. Most seem to start ~$2 above, not some.
That said, as soemone who has had employees the costs of a person tend to be around 30% of their pay. So someone making 10/hour costs more like 13/hour. Assuming administrative overhead as equal is a non-viable assumption.
But your machines also have power and maintenance to consider, so sale price alone is a poor determinant. In many cases the ongoing costs are larger than the purchase price. Especially in bulk.
The fast food industry is a lot of non-trivial actions and movements. Variances in natrual food state and quality can wreak havoc with bots.
Vending machines still screw up hot chocolate and coffe filling. Add in ice, foaming, and so on and it gets ugly fast. Cooking burgers
Now, find bots that can do those things as well as a teenager, can do it within 2x the cost of the teenager, before pronouncing it is "well within the range". I'm not joking here, I'd truly love to see these things, even though the fast food places will not use them.
Minus the never-going-to-fly-with-customers RFID stuff, it sounds just like the order pads the waiters use at some busy North Beach restaurants. Don't need distracting eyegear popups, it just takes a glance down at the pad. Orders are entered and every table's order is displayed on the pad, by number. Any waiter that can't handle learning the table numbers on their first day is not cut out for the job, and no amount of technology can cover for that lack of ability.
I dunno, tag each table with a very short range RFID that communicates it's identifier to the pad and there you go. Perhaps combine it with a small layout w/numbers and there you go. Maybe the person is not numerically inclined, but is spacially adept. For them the map might be easier than the number.
Imagine a restaurant where all the wait staff have glasses. They carry around a small black to "write" on,
You'd think a pad and pencil would be cheaper than giving out small blacks to your wait staff.
(it's a joke about a typo, deal with it.)
Soon everything will come with a warning label ...
"Warning: this product contains no other warning labels. This is your last warning."
If on the other hand your code cannot be read out loud (because of inaudible variable names), then the odds are some other programmer is going to have to review every other line of your code just to try and make sense of it all.
;)
Sounds like perl.
Just for fun sometime read a perl script aloud and pronounce each dollar sign "eater of flesh" in a somewhat lower "subscript" voice. Read each @ symbol as "devourer of souls", and each non-comment # as "consumer of wisdom".