Already some consumer drones can proceed to a set GPS coordinates by themselves. If you don't need to be in constant or even frequent contact with the drone but only need to occasionally send a quick "GOTO $lat,$long,$altitude" it might be very hard to track you down.
Exactly. It would probably be easier to jam the GPS signal and/or all radio transmissions but even this isn't foolproof as image recognition is improving as well as multiple ways of counting steps which could easily allow a drone to complete the voyage without GPS or any guidance.
it's not going to do real damage to a full size airplane.
I'm sure that's comforting to the pilots that are blinded right before they crash the plane. Pilots already frequently report encountering laser incidents, on average 10 a night and those incidents aren't using lasers specifically designed to destroy things.
You're talking about a $10 laser pointer owned by a punk kid versus a multi thousand dollar device and the technical knowledge to modify it to target a full size aircraft instead of a drone. Even if you could buy one the limited number of these sold would make them trivial to track. This is FUD. The odds of someone buying one of these and using it on a commercial aircraft is pretty much nil as there would be a dozen easier ways to harass an aircraft.
I don't want to shoot down the drone. I want to shoot the person piloting the drone. Triangulate the signal controlling the drone to locate the pilot, and then shine your own laser at the pilot.
Wow! We don't have a nuclear arms escalation race anymore. But we have a drone arms escalation race. Armaments manufacturers will make a bundle on drone/anti-drone selling weapons.
Triangulating is an arms race too. A drone on autopilot doesn't need to be controlled and even if you needed to control it, you could control it with a burner phone so the only thing you would be triangulating on would be the nearest cell tower. There are plenty of other technologies like multiple repeaters, multiple channels, public channels, etc... that could also very easily prevent triangulation.
While this sounds like a great way to take down those pesky drones that interfere with firefighting, planes landing and taking off, etc. what sort of safeguard does this thing have against something that suddenly occludes its view? Drones can fly up to several hundred, even a thousand feet. Even though it can be controlled via a laptop, reaction time as well as latency in communications would mean anything that happens to get in between the laser and the drone could get severely hurt or damaged. Don't we have enough problems as is with just "common" lasers being pointed at aircraft?
My guess is that this will be mostly used in restricted air spaces like above the white house, above the prisons, and other places like that. It could possibly be used in airports and other restricted areas but it sounds like it's accurate enough so it's not going to mistake a full size aircraft with a small drone and even if it does, it's not going to do real damage to a full size airplane.
Yawn, did you know you can buy cheap cameras with 100x zoom? This law just pretends to give privacy to property owners, because you can take detailed photos from a drone even a mile high, let alone 350 feet.
It's a worthless law unless they write the law such that drones should fly a lot lower than 350 feet (maybe 50 feet) AND they should not fly over private property. Anything else and it's an invasion of privacy.
I couldn't care less about the cameras. 350ft seems like a reasonable level so that the noise/visual is minimal. The reason airplanes flying over your house is not a big deal is that unless you live near the airport they are far enough away that you barely see them. My grandma tells stories of dishes falling off the shelves when early jets would cross the sound barrier. They passed a law that outlawed breaking the sound barrier across land. This has completely halted faster than sound travel and made it basically impossible to fly from LA to NY in two hours. We would probably have much faster commercial jets today if this law wasn't enacted but it was deemed too intrusive to people on the ground to not have a law like this. I don't think 350ft is that hard to work with. It means you do a vertical takeoff, get to 350ft, arrive at your destination and then lower yourself down to the destination (which presumably gave you explicit permission)
It will be much more than 1.5 drones. According to this, http://www.quora.com/How-much-... , a UPS truck will normally carry around 250 packages on a residential route. How many will that drone carry, or how many drones will it take to carry the equivalent?
A UPS truck isn't delivering 250 packages at once. 1.5 drones is probably the number of physical drones needed to replace a single UPS truck. There is one huge difference though. Those 1.5 drones have to make 250 trips to deliver those 250 packages so to the final neighbourhood getting the package, it's approximately the same amount of traffic but to the unfortunate neighbourhood in between the final neighbourhood and the distribution center those 1.5 drones cross over your property 500 times.
The accountant should consider this the other way around and ask himself how they'd feel if the programmers started coming up to him to ask if his receivable cash bases are dollar averaged or some other mishmash of terms that will hopefully sound inane to an accountant.
No, this isn't what the accountant is asking at all. He's asking "how can I get a basic overview of programming so I can better interact with programmers". It would be closer to a programmer learning to balance a check book so that he better understands debits and credits. Most "programming for dummies" books are expecting you to learn to program. What he's really after is a "how stuff works" or "programming for managers" type book with a simple overview that doesn't go into the details of for loops and while loops but instead takes the "explain what you do for a living to a 4th grader" approach. My kids have tons of books on their shelves that would fit the bill. They explain things like "how a washing machine works" in ways kids can understand not in a way that would be very useful to an actual repair person. Off the top of my head, I don't know of any books about programming like this but surely they exist and more importantly, it's not a stupid question to ask.
Somewhere in their billing structure is a gotcha. You haven't hit it yet. It could be higher loads, it could be when you need something quickly.
Why so pessimistic? Believe it or not, there are plenty of companies out there with straightforward upfront pricing that don't nickle and dime their customers and instead charge a fair price for their services. Yes, if you need technical support for something that's not under contract, a company might charge you a reasonable hourly rate but believe it or not most companies aren't out to screw their customers. Especially where there is a lot of competition, it's hard to stay in business if you're always trying to squeeze your customers. It's a lot easier to make money if you just charge a fair price for a good service.
* If I own a router, I should have say as to who can access it. I think if the ISP is going to provide public access via a router/AP, they need to own it or compensate the owner. * If I provide electricity to power ISP infrastructure, I need to be compensated for that.
My guess is that they do own it and definitely control it and are probably leasing it to the customer. It's pretty much impossible to do it on a third party router they don't own and control. And they are compensating the customer via free service. If you opt out then you can't use the free wifi of other customers.
...and by moving to the cloud we have a fixed bill......and by moving to the cloud we think we have a fixed bill... FTFY
How do you figure? We now have a monthly fee that is the same each month versus previously we had an initial outlay of several thousand dollars per server, ongoing costs of hardware repairs, and then another outlay a few years later for new servers. Yes, if you don't have a contract then the monthly fee can possibly go up but it usually just tracks inflation and is much more fixed and steady than owning your own servers. You can argue that it's more expensive, it's less secure, or a host of other things but I honestly can't see how you can argue that the bill isn't fixed. I can show you our bill for the past 2 plus years and it is definitely the same every month.
Sure, the person who pays the bills makes the call but they usually make that call based on cost. If it costs less in hardware/support/security/reliability/etc.. to move to the cloud, then it's usually a safe bet to do it. In most organizations, the person paying the bill would ask the IT department for costs and make the decision based on that. In the company I work for, we only have a few servers and by moving to the cloud we have a fixed bill, a reduced workload, no need to replace hardware, more reliability, etc... Once we found a good provider, there was really no downside. On a side note, our first attempt to move to amazon was a disaster and we have been much happier with stormondemand. The cloud isn't a single entity and each provider has different offerings and what works for one company might not work for the next so the whole vague "move to the cloud" is almost as useless as saying you need to buy a server or a network. You need to spec it out the same way you would spec out an in-house server, network device, or ISP connection and weigh all the pros/cons.
If you want continuity of location, build a scale model or keep a current drawing of the town. That being said, the episode of Simpsons you mention is done for the comedic effect. Simpsons is a show set in a generic town of Springfield which can be any of the dozens of Springfields and the comedic value comes before plot continuity. In South Park, Kenny dies in every almost every episode. It's funny. For the most part there is no explanation of how he magically reappears again. No one cares. Simpsons, Family Guy, etc.. are the same way, they take liberties, get the characters into impossible situations, burn down buildings, etc and unless it adds to the storyline, the next episode is back to normal where everything is back to the way it was.
MS Office 2013 requires Win8.1 or 10 and doesn't work on WINE.
I converted our entire office to openoffice about 5 years ago and no one even noticed. They still run windows (mostly for quickbooks) but there is no longer a single copy of microsoft office in our office.
Now if he were installing Linux and copying Windows binaries onto a system that never had a legitimate Windows license, you may have a point (I would suspect the Windows license is tied to the original hardware).
I don't believe the older systems were tied to the hardware. It was just a single license for a single machine. There was no problem with deleting it from one system and installing it on a new machine. I have several legal copies of XP and win98se with keys that I keep around. As far as I know, as they are not physically installed anywhere that I still own the license and would be legally allowed to use it in vmware, wine, etc.. as long as I only use the single copy on a single machine.
Like it or not, you pretty much have to use some version of windows. Whether it's at work or because of some windows-only software, there's really no way to avoid windows.
please tell us all what indispensible apps run on windows that have no equivalents on any other operating system
Management.
That's not a software title as far as I'm aware. Give a specific example of software that requires windows. The closest I know of is quickbooks but even that has a mac version so you still have some choice. Anything important or popular or expensive is going to be ported to at least mac. You don't have to run windows. I don't run windows or mac and haven't for over a decade.
For a company that has demonstrated zero respect for your privacy, then using their device, which every single piece of data flows through, wouldn't be such a prudent decision.
Oh, I wouldn't put it past them to attempt to data mine what sites you visit, but I don't see them trying to inject ads into your packets like the person I was replying to was implying.
They want to control your network. They want to inject advertising into everything you do. They want you to have no choice but to use DNS servers they control.
This isn't some benevolent endeavor, its purpose is to make money by selling you again.
I agree with the first part: "They want to control your network" but I don't think the intent is to screw with your network. I think the intent is actually defensive and it's to keep other people from screwing with your network. Same with DNS servers. They want to provide fast and reliable DNS servers so that their own service is fast and reliable. I think that's the same reason they initially entered the mobile phone market and the ISP market.. They are scared of walled gardens and the more they control the connection from you to them then the less dependent they are on the whims of some other corporation that would like to interfere with and steal their customers.
It's not a real test if you know money is going to end in N years. If you get $3000/month in a basic income, would you buy a house with a $2500/month mortgage if you knew that you'd lose your income in 7 months vs guaranteed for life?
There is a huge different between 7 months and N years. For instance, if you had a basic income guaranteed for 10 years then going back to college becomes a practical solution for quite a few people who otherwise can't go back to school because they need to provide for their family. You wouldn't have to go lifetime but to see the real results you probably need to commit to a minimum of 10 years or barring that long enough that someone could go back to school and train for some career that exceeds the basic income.
Didn't live in $town before January 1st, 2016? You're not part of the experiment. No exceptions.
If you set it in the past, I could see this working ok if you kept the old system around for the newcomers and if there wasn't too many voids created that still attracted people. A potential void that could cause it to still be a problem is a bunch of people who now have basic incomes quit their crappy jobs at mcdonalds so the town has an influx of new people taking advantage of all the job openings. There are plenty of other voids like that which could affect the study if it's a small scale.
I don't see how a "limited, geographical experiment" would work. If you just did it for a town, you would think that that town would get flooded. How do you prevent people from moving into the area to take advantage of the free money? I think the idea of a small-scale test would be interesting, just not sure how it works in practice.
How about a double dome? The outer dome's translucency is changed so the amount of sunlight coming through is the same as on Mars, and the pressure, temperature and composition of the air between the domes is carefully maintained to resemble Mars as much as possible. Then the self-sufficient system has to recreate earth-like conditions inside the inner dome. You can use all sorts of tricks and as much energy as you like to maintain the Mars atmosphere between the domes, but the inner dome has to be self-sufficient. The only thing that doesn't match Mars conditions then, is gravity.
This would work rather well. There are acceptable tricks the inner dome could do too like outgassing, pulling in the "martian air" to correct imbalances, etc... Also, I'm not sure 100% self-contained and self-sufficient is necessary. One reason that the biodomes failed is that they set the bar too high. If they set the bar a little lower and instead of being deceitful, just kept track of when they "cheated" and recorded the amount of outgassing, extra food needed, extra oxygen needed, etc... then that would be good data to have. If we knew we could build a 1 acre dome that is livable by 4 humans for 10 years but we need 50lbs extra food per month and 50lbs extra oxygen per month to keep it stable, that would be a workable solution and the only thing that would be needed to make it self-sufficient would be to figure out once you get to mars how to obtain that extra 100 lbs locally but until then you could depend on supply ships to make up the shortfall.
if you spend half a decade training your astronauts and have them die in the final shakeout you're out literally millions of dollars and irreplaceable training time.
If you can't keep an astronaut alive in Antarctica then you have no business planning a trip to mars. Antarctica is a cakewalk compared to all the additional risks and dangers associated with mars. You have no issue with air quality, you can burn an open fire to stay warm until help arrives. We can fly a plane in to get you. It's several orders of magnitude easier and safer in Antarctica than a trip to Mars would be.
We're already doing "test runs" on Antartica, with longer "closed transport windows" than the moon would have.
If you want an explicit Mars colony simulation, put it under a dome on some spare land in Space Center Houston and only access it through strict procedural simulation.
The Antarctica station is nowhere close to an actual "test run". Yes, it might have limited transport windows and it's cold but that's about where the similarity ends. It's not the limited transport window that's the big problem but the fact that we have no clue how to create a self sustaining biodome. A proper test station in Antarctica should be completely airtight and should have enough room inside to actually grow enough food to eat and to produce the needed oxygen. Another option to produce the oxygen would be to produce it from the ice but again, this should be self-contained and similar to how it would be done on mars.
Building a Moon Base and making it self sufficient would be much easier than doing so on Mars. If nothing else, the Moon's only a few days away from Earth, so that emergency supplies could be brought in much more quickly. That means that we'd be able to learn how to construct and maintain a closed ecology without being forced to get everything absolutely right the first time. Then, once we've done that, doing it again on Mars would be much simpler because we'd know ahead of time what we needed to take and what we didn't.
Although I don't disagree with your assessment, the same assessment could be made for doing a "test run" on earth. Antarctica is probably closer to the conditions found on mars than the moon is. It seems like it would make the most sense to set up a closed ecology in Antarctica or some place similar first and test everything out there first. An underwater habitat would also be a good option but would most likely be a different construction that what would work best on mars. A lightweight positive pressure dome that can withstand extreme cold would probably work best on mars. You could simulate this easily in Antarctica with a dome of 2psi instead of 1psi so you could see how it all worked for a fraction of the cost of mars or the moon. Growing plants in this dome and any other tests while monitoring co2 levels and other living conditions. I have a hard time taking any country or organization serious that plans on sending a manned mission to mars if they don't also have a plan to do a test run first at one of the two poles and to my knowledge no one has any plans like this so my only conclusion is that no one is seriously planning on trying to send humans to another planet anytime soon.
I still think we need to cluster them all together and make recycled phones do some meaningful computing such as sequencing genomes for rain forest flora and fauna. It seems like a good enough use for them and, when they die, they can be thrown into the recycle bin and have their parts recycled or disposed of properly. Mind you, the only reason I think this is a good idea is because I want to giggle when they try it but I have been promoting this idea for a while now. A cluster of old smart phones being used for meaningful science is surely going to attract some kickstarter funds.
The problem with this idea is that it's more effective to buy a single new cpu than it is to try to wire up a bunch of slow unreliable phones. I have a closet full of 1U servers that are about 7 years old. Today, I can buy a $150 computer that sits in my hand and uses 1/10 the power and is twice as fast. I can buy a single server that uses the same power as one of them that is faster than the entire rack. If electricity was free AND maintenance was free AND you could network them together for free AND the task you wanted to do was easy to do in parallel so that you could easily scale horizontally then it might be worth it but none of those conditions hold true.
Slashdot Mirror
Already some consumer drones can proceed to a set GPS coordinates by themselves. If you don't need to be in constant or even frequent contact with the drone but only need to occasionally send a quick "GOTO $lat,$long,$altitude" it might be very hard to track you down.
Exactly. It would probably be easier to jam the GPS signal and/or all radio transmissions but even this isn't foolproof as image recognition is improving as well as multiple ways of counting steps which could easily allow a drone to complete the voyage without GPS or any guidance.
I'm sure that's comforting to the pilots that are blinded right before they crash the plane. Pilots already frequently report encountering laser incidents, on average 10 a night and those incidents aren't using lasers specifically designed to destroy things.
You're talking about a $10 laser pointer owned by a punk kid versus a multi thousand dollar device and the technical knowledge to modify it to target a full size aircraft instead of a drone. Even if you could buy one the limited number of these sold would make them trivial to track. This is FUD. The odds of someone buying one of these and using it on a commercial aircraft is pretty much nil as there would be a dozen easier ways to harass an aircraft.
I don't want to shoot down the drone. I want to shoot the person piloting the drone. Triangulate the signal controlling the drone to locate the pilot, and then shine your own laser at the pilot.
Wow! We don't have a nuclear arms escalation race anymore. But we have a drone arms escalation race. Armaments manufacturers will make a bundle on drone/anti-drone selling weapons.
Triangulating is an arms race too. A drone on autopilot doesn't need to be controlled and even if you needed to control it, you could control it with a burner phone so the only thing you would be triangulating on would be the nearest cell tower. There are plenty of other technologies like multiple repeaters, multiple channels, public channels, etc... that could also very easily prevent triangulation.
While this sounds like a great way to take down those pesky drones that interfere with firefighting, planes landing and taking off, etc. what sort of safeguard does this thing have against something that suddenly occludes its view? Drones can fly up to several hundred, even a thousand feet. Even though it can be controlled via a laptop, reaction time as well as latency in communications would mean anything that happens to get in between the laser and the drone could get severely hurt or damaged. Don't we have enough problems as is with just "common" lasers being pointed at aircraft?
My guess is that this will be mostly used in restricted air spaces like above the white house, above the prisons, and other places like that. It could possibly be used in airports and other restricted areas but it sounds like it's accurate enough so it's not going to mistake a full size aircraft with a small drone and even if it does, it's not going to do real damage to a full size airplane.
Yawn, did you know you can buy cheap cameras with 100x zoom? This law just pretends to give privacy to property owners, because you can take detailed photos from a drone even a mile high, let alone 350 feet.
It's a worthless law unless they write the law such that drones should fly a lot lower than 350 feet (maybe 50 feet) AND they should not fly over private property. Anything else and it's an invasion of privacy.
I couldn't care less about the cameras. 350ft seems like a reasonable level so that the noise/visual is minimal. The reason airplanes flying over
your house is not a big deal is that unless you live near the airport they are far enough away that you barely see them. My grandma tells stories
of dishes falling off the shelves when early jets would cross the sound barrier. They passed a law that outlawed breaking the sound barrier across
land. This has completely halted faster than sound travel and made it basically impossible to fly from LA to NY in two hours. We would probably
have much faster commercial jets today if this law wasn't enacted but it was deemed too intrusive to people on the ground to not have a law like
this. I don't think 350ft is that hard to work with. It means you do a vertical takeoff, get to 350ft, arrive at your destination and then lower yourself
down to the destination (which presumably gave you explicit permission)
It will be much more than 1.5 drones. According to this, http://www.quora.com/How-much-... , a UPS truck will normally carry around 250 packages on a residential route. How many will that drone carry, or how many drones will it take to carry the equivalent?
A UPS truck isn't delivering 250 packages at once. 1.5 drones is probably the number of physical drones needed to replace a single UPS truck.
There is one huge difference though. Those 1.5 drones have to make 250 trips to deliver those 250 packages so to the final neighbourhood getting
the package, it's approximately the same amount of traffic but to the unfortunate neighbourhood in between the final neighbourhood and the
distribution center those 1.5 drones cross over your property 500 times.
The accountant should consider this the other way around and ask himself how they'd feel if the programmers started coming up to him to ask if his receivable cash bases are dollar averaged or some other mishmash of terms that will hopefully sound inane to an accountant.
No, this isn't what the accountant is asking at all. He's asking "how can I get a basic overview of programming so I can better interact with programmers". It would be closer to a programmer learning to balance a check book so that he better understands debits and credits. Most "programming for dummies" books are expecting you to learn to program. What he's really after is a "how stuff works" or "programming for managers" type book with a simple overview that doesn't go into the details of for loops and while loops but instead takes the "explain what you do for a living to a 4th grader" approach. My kids have tons of books on their shelves that would fit the bill. They explain things like "how a washing machine works" in ways kids can understand not in a way that would be very useful to an actual repair person. Off the top of my head, I don't know of any books about programming like this but surely they exist and more importantly, it's not a stupid question to ask.
Somewhere in their billing structure is a gotcha. You haven't hit it yet.
It could be higher loads, it could be when you need something quickly.
Why so pessimistic? Believe it or not, there are plenty of companies out there with straightforward upfront pricing that don't nickle and dime their customers and instead charge a fair price for their services.
Yes, if you need technical support for something that's not under contract, a company might charge you a reasonable hourly rate but believe it or not most companies aren't out to screw their customers. Especially where there is a lot of competition, it's hard to stay in business if you're always trying to squeeze your customers. It's a lot easier to make money if you just charge a fair price for a good service.
* If I own a router, I should have say as to who can access it. I think if the ISP is going to provide public access via a router/AP, they need to own it or compensate the owner.
* If I provide electricity to power ISP infrastructure, I need to be compensated for that.
My guess is that they do own it and definitely control it and are probably leasing it to the customer.
It's pretty much impossible to do it on a third party router they don't own and control.
And they are compensating the customer via free service. If you opt out then you can't use the free wifi of other customers.
FTFY
How do you figure? We now have a monthly fee that is the same each month versus previously we had an initial outlay of several thousand dollars per server, ongoing costs of hardware repairs, and then another outlay a few years later for new servers. Yes, if you don't have a contract then the monthly fee can possibly go up but it usually just tracks inflation and is much more fixed and steady than owning your own servers. You can argue that it's more expensive, it's less secure, or a host of other things but I honestly can't see how you can argue that the bill isn't fixed. I can show you our bill for the past 2 plus years and it is definitely the same every month.
makes the call.
Next silly question?
Sure, the person who pays the bills makes the call but they usually make that call based on cost. If it costs less in hardware/support/security/reliability/etc.. to move to the cloud, then it's usually a safe bet to do it. In most organizations, the person paying the bill would ask the IT department for costs and make the decision based on that. In the company I work for, we only have a few servers and by moving to the cloud we have a fixed bill, a reduced workload, no need to replace hardware, more reliability, etc... Once we found a good provider, there was really no downside. On a side note, our first attempt to move to amazon was a disaster and we have been much happier with stormondemand. The cloud isn't a single entity and each provider has different offerings and what works for one company might not work for the next so the whole vague "move to the cloud" is almost as useless as saying you need to buy a server or a network. You need to spec it out the same way you would spec out an in-house server, network device, or ISP connection and weigh all the pros/cons.
If you want continuity of location, build a scale model or keep a current drawing of the town. That being said, the episode of Simpsons you mention is done for the comedic effect. Simpsons is a show set in a generic town of Springfield which can be any of the dozens of Springfields and the comedic value comes before plot continuity. In South Park, Kenny dies in every almost every episode. It's funny. For the most part there is no explanation of how he magically reappears again. No one cares. Simpsons, Family Guy, etc.. are the same way, they take liberties, get the characters into impossible situations, burn down buildings, etc and unless it adds to the storyline, the next episode is back to normal where everything is back to the way it was.
MS Office 2013 requires Win8.1 or 10 and doesn't work on WINE.
I converted our entire office to openoffice about 5 years ago and no one even noticed. They still run windows (mostly for quickbooks) but there is no longer a single copy of microsoft office in our office.
Now if he were installing Linux and copying Windows binaries onto a system that never had a legitimate Windows license, you may have a point (I would suspect the Windows license is tied to the original hardware).
I don't believe the older systems were tied to the hardware. It was just a single license for a single machine. There was no problem with deleting it from one system and installing it on a new machine. I have several legal copies of XP and win98se with keys that I keep around. As far as I know, as they are not physically installed anywhere that I still own the license and would be legally allowed to use it in vmware, wine, etc.. as long as I only use the single copy on a single machine.
Like it or not, you pretty much have to use some version of windows. Whether it's at work or because of some windows-only software, there's really no way to avoid windows.
please tell us all what indispensible apps run on windows that have no equivalents on any other operating system
Management.
That's not a software title as far as I'm aware. Give a specific example of software that requires windows. The closest I know of is quickbooks but even that has a mac version so you still have some choice. Anything important or popular or expensive is going to be ported to at least mac. You don't have to run windows. I don't run windows or mac and haven't for over a decade.
For a company that has demonstrated zero respect for your privacy, then using their device, which every single piece of data flows through, wouldn't be such a prudent decision.
Oh, I wouldn't put it past them to attempt to data mine what sites you visit, but I don't see them trying to inject ads into your packets like the person I was replying to was implying.
They want to control your network. They want to inject advertising into everything you do. They want you to have no choice but to use DNS servers they control.
This isn't some benevolent endeavor, its purpose is to make money by selling you again.
I agree with the first part: "They want to control your network" but I don't think the intent is to screw with your network. I think the intent is actually defensive and it's to keep other people from screwing with your network. Same with DNS servers. They want to provide fast and reliable DNS servers so that their own service is fast and reliable. I think that's the same reason they initially entered the mobile phone market and the ISP market.. They are scared of walled gardens and the more they control the connection from you to them then the less dependent they are on the whims of some other corporation that would like to interfere with and steal their customers.
It's not a real test if you know money is going to end in N years. If you get $3000/month in a basic income, would you buy a house with a $2500/month mortgage if you knew that you'd lose your income in 7 months vs guaranteed for life?
There is a huge different between 7 months and N years. For instance, if you had a basic income guaranteed for 10 years then going back to college becomes a practical solution for quite a few people who otherwise can't go back to school because they need to provide for their family. You wouldn't have to go lifetime but to see the real results you probably need to commit to a minimum of 10 years or barring that long enough that someone could go back to school and train for some career that exceeds the basic income.
Didn't live in $town before January 1st, 2016? You're not part of the experiment. No exceptions.
If you set it in the past, I could see this working ok if you kept the old system around for the newcomers and if there wasn't too many voids created that still attracted people. A potential void that could cause it to still be a problem is a bunch of people who now have basic incomes quit their crappy jobs at mcdonalds so the town has an influx of new people taking advantage of all the job openings. There are plenty of other voids like that which could affect the study if it's a small scale.
I don't see how a "limited, geographical experiment" would work. If you just did it for a town, you would think that that town would get flooded.
How do you prevent people from moving into the area to take advantage of the free money? I think the idea of a small-scale test would be
interesting, just not sure how it works in practice.
How about a double dome? The outer dome's translucency is changed so the amount of sunlight coming through is the same as on Mars, and the pressure, temperature and composition of the air between the domes is carefully maintained to resemble Mars as much as possible. Then the self-sufficient system has to recreate earth-like conditions inside the inner dome. You can use all sorts of tricks and as much energy as you like to maintain the Mars atmosphere between the domes, but the inner dome has to be self-sufficient. The only thing that doesn't match Mars conditions then, is gravity.
This would work rather well. There are acceptable tricks the inner dome could do too like outgassing, pulling in the "martian air" to correct imbalances, etc... Also, I'm not sure 100% self-contained and self-sufficient is necessary. One reason that the biodomes failed is that they set the bar too high. If they set the bar a little lower and instead of being deceitful, just kept track of when they "cheated" and recorded the amount of outgassing, extra food needed, extra oxygen needed, etc... then that would be good data to have. If we knew we could build a 1 acre dome that is livable by 4 humans for 10 years but we need 50lbs extra food per month and 50lbs extra oxygen per month to keep it stable, that would be a workable solution and the only thing that would be needed to make it self-sufficient would be to figure out once you get to mars how to obtain that extra 100 lbs locally but until then you could depend on supply ships to make up the shortfall.
if you spend half a decade training your astronauts and have them die in the final shakeout you're out literally millions of dollars and irreplaceable training time.
If you can't keep an astronaut alive in Antarctica then you have no business planning a trip to mars. Antarctica is a cakewalk compared to all the additional risks and dangers associated with mars. You have no issue with air quality, you can burn an open fire to stay warm until help arrives. We can fly a plane in to get you. It's several orders of magnitude easier and safer in Antarctica than a trip to Mars would be.
We're already doing "test runs" on Antartica, with longer "closed transport windows" than the moon would have.
If you want an explicit Mars colony simulation, put it under a dome on some spare land in Space Center Houston and only access it through strict procedural simulation.
The Antarctica station is nowhere close to an actual "test run". Yes, it might have limited transport windows and it's cold but that's about where the similarity ends. It's not the limited transport window that's the big problem but the fact that we have no clue how to create a self sustaining biodome. A proper test station in Antarctica should be completely airtight and should have enough room inside to actually grow enough food to eat and to produce the needed oxygen. Another option to produce the oxygen would be to produce it from the ice but again, this should be self-contained and similar to how it would be done on mars.
Building a Moon Base and making it self sufficient would be much easier than doing so on Mars. If nothing else, the Moon's only a few days away from Earth, so that emergency supplies could be brought in much more quickly. That means that we'd be able to learn how to construct and maintain a closed ecology without being forced to get everything absolutely right the first time. Then, once we've done that, doing it again on Mars would be much simpler because we'd know ahead of time what we needed to take and what we didn't.
Although I don't disagree with your assessment, the same assessment could be made for doing a "test run" on earth. Antarctica is probably closer to the conditions found on mars than the moon is. It seems like it would make the most sense to set up a closed ecology in Antarctica or some place similar first and test everything out there first. An underwater habitat would also be a good option but would most likely be a different construction that what would work best on mars. A lightweight positive pressure dome that can withstand extreme cold would probably work best on mars. You could simulate this easily in Antarctica with a dome of 2psi instead of 1psi so you could see how it all worked for a fraction of the cost of mars or the moon. Growing plants in this dome and any other tests while monitoring co2 levels and other living conditions. I have a hard time taking any country or organization serious that plans on sending a manned mission to mars if they don't also have a plan to do a test run first at one of the two poles and to my knowledge no one has any plans like this so my only conclusion is that no one is seriously planning on trying to send humans to another planet anytime soon.
I still think we need to cluster them all together and make recycled phones do some meaningful computing such as sequencing genomes for rain forest flora and fauna. It seems like a good enough use for them and, when they die, they can be thrown into the recycle bin and have their parts recycled or disposed of properly. Mind you, the only reason I think this is a good idea is because I want to giggle when they try it but I have been promoting this idea for a while now. A cluster of old smart phones being used for meaningful science is surely going to attract some kickstarter funds.
The problem with this idea is that it's more effective to buy a single new cpu than it is to try to wire up a bunch of slow unreliable phones.
I have a closet full of 1U servers that are about 7 years old. Today, I can buy a $150 computer that sits in my hand and uses 1/10
the power and is twice as fast. I can buy a single server that uses the same power as one of them that is faster than the entire rack.
If electricity was free AND maintenance was free AND you could network them together for free AND the task you wanted to do was
easy to do in parallel so that you could easily scale horizontally then it might be worth it but none of those conditions hold true.