I'm responding to you, but there is also an AC who has a similar, if more verbose, response to my comment, which I will cite here:
Another thing that is very odd about humanities survival. Our intelligence, mixed with our aggressiveness, may end up being our downfall.
A big smart brain that can invent things is not necessarily agood adaptation whne the inventions may allow us to gleefully push the self destruct button (read those among us who have a belief in end of the world prophecies, and want it to happen as soon as possible.
Pure conjecture here, but the stupid among us who want to reproduce like bunnies just might be better adapted to survive. They might be all too happy to torture and kill each other for shits and giggles, but since they aren't smart enough to invent weapons that can kill us all at the same time, nature might not even care.
Not meaning that I would even want that situation, but Mike Judges "ideocracy" premise has some merit even if it gets damn goofy at times.
I mean, Let's take the people elected president, smart, folks - all politics aside. One or two kids. But on the other end of the spectrum, the Duggars, Octomom, and Jon and Kate + 8 are reproducing voraciously, and no doubt, with more of people just like them.
If you want a one off publicity stunt trip to Mars, a pure Mars Direct scheme is probably the best way to go. If you want to do repeated trips (to Mars or elsewhere) and also build some useful space infrastructure while you're at it, a lunar fuel mining operation has a lot of advantages.
If you want a one off publicity stunt of establishing a lunar base, then going to Mars, and coming back, you can do that too.
Can you tell me what the expenses of researching, designing and sending ships to the moon to establish a lunar colony, then sending the parts for the Mars trip there, assembling them, and reaching escape velocity - twice are going to add to a Mars mission? A percentage will be fine.
I'm calculating 1000 percent increase in the establishment, of the base and a similar increase in the needed fuel costs over a LEO construction.
As well a long time to stabilize the colony to the point where they will be able to efficiently work on the stuff. You don't just send them up with a box of wrenches, some Oreos, and tell em "Get to Work!" Gotta get food to them, or grow it, gotta take care of a lot of basic necessities completely unrelated to a Mars trip.
Now imagine assembling the needed copmponents in Earth Orbit using technology we already understand. I have nothing against the establishment of a Lunar colony, but it makes no sense as a springboard to Mars, unless we want to wait a few hundred years.
Having a national program that jump starts American science and technology is a great idea, but you can get the same results at less cost using other types of projects.
After all, endless research has proven that we can't do more than one thing at a time. How many people you figure died waiting for replacement organs because of NASA?
And the terraforming of California has already been tried - and it's an utter failure. Already the Colorado river no longer reaches the sea, http://www.counterpunch.org/20... ground level is falling - in some places at a foot per year! - http://www.bakersfieldnow.com/... and now they want Oregon's water as well. They're framing it a sending "surplus water from the Columbia River to California." California doesn't want surplus water - they want all of it, Certainly in every case so far -I suspect they'll want to plant rice paddies if they get Oregon's water. A really bad example you chose.
You can't do a one launch manned trip to Mars, land and relaunch back to Earth. Isn't going to happen.
It's going to take multiple launches with some construction in space. Might as well do the construction on the Moon which is easily reachable.
Back in the day, one of the concepts they were considering was several trips to bring up the various parts they needed. It lost out to the discarded parts concept, where you just continued to throw away parts of the vehicle over time, finally ending up with only the capsule.
Worked pretty good.
With a Mars trip, it will be more likley needed to assemble parts outside of the earth's atmosphere. But certainly the Mars and earth re-entry vehicles will need real life testing, but other parts? They would be candidates for off earth assembly.
But here's the dig. All of the tonnage will first need to reach Earth's escape velocity, head to the moon, and then after assembly, head off toward Mars at the lunar escape velocity. So first you have to accellerate to around 7 miles per second on every flight, then decelerate to orbit the moon, then after assembly, accerate to around 1.5 miles per second.
And that's just from orbit. If you plan on landing and relauncinh from the moon, there's just all that much more fuel used. to get to escape velocity.
Having one off-earth assembly station in orbit around earth will require one launch for each component, assembly, then one acceleration to escape velocity. Other advantages are being nearer to earth for changes or emergencies, and a whole lot less unknowns. We already have experience with off-earth in oprbit construction with the ISS.
Couple with the needed research and construction and development needed to build a moon base, doing a Mars trip this way is probably approaching a hundred years. In earth orbit, much much less time.
The Moon is locked, one side is constantly in sunlight, the other constantly in darkness.
Oh
My
God
The moon is locked in relation to the earth, not the sun. Half of the moon is always in full sunshine. The phases of the moon? Those mean that the part of the moon we don't see is getting sunshine. Then when there is a New Moon - when we can't see it at all, the whole badly named "dark side" is fully illuminated by the sun.
You don't have to get fuel to the moon, you can make fuel there. Aluminum & water ice are all you need, and the Moon has plenty of aluminum. Sources of water are more questionable, the dark side of the moon may have some, or we could capture a comet for it, or if necessary truck it up from Earth. It's still better than towing 100% of the fuel from Earth.
Have you calculated the costs of 2 escape velodities no needed instead of one? You will burn more fuel.
And the idea of using any water the moon has a fuel source has some bad flaws. First is that there isn't much of it if any, and you're looking at a moon colony that will need water as well. Better to not use it all up for fuel. It's like a fuel or life matter. Second is that would be a dead end resource. After using it up, waddya do then. and lugging water around still has that two escape velocites needed, plus conversion inefficiencies.
There's just no economic value to using the moon as a gas station.
Correct. We should just let the Chinese explore space, and others explore space We'll just do more important things, like slip into a closet, and make money by selling our hats to each other.
I use it every day to cumulate sales, hours, "normal" calculation such as adding number, date, multiplication and division between rows. Do I qualify as non-import task?
It's not something that happened today. But it's interesting.
The problem I see with the "Why is this even on slashdot?" crowd is if we say, allowed everyone who gets pissed that something they don't like, could have it removed, there wouldn't be much slashdot left.
Can't keep everyone happy. I learned that long ago when I made videos. Everyone loved them. But the aggregate of what people didn't like showed me that everything about the video was hated. By someone.
Anyhow, I did enjoy the article and wouldn't mind even seeing more - disclaimer - I am a total slut for military history.
And in other breaking World War II news, there was this amazing breakthru where vacuum tubes were used to create a powerful electronic machine called "ENIAC".
Which was very cool indeed. Well, not really - all those tubes made for a lot of heat.
This was on the History Channel, "Band Of Brothers", etc.
The latest generation needs their chance to learn it, just as my generation did.
This needs to be modded to 5.
Just because some guy on Slashdot has heard of this doesn't mean that it doesn't need repeated.
It reminds me of people who get pissed off at Thanksgiving when the media gives out advice on how to cook Turkey so that we don't get sick. There's always some asshat that might have heard it for the first time a couple years ago, and is angry that everyone didn't hear it when they did.
Boards themselves are elected by the shareholders. That in and of itself is probably enough to guarantee that a board member is not a techie. The IT expert is probably going to be hired on person - who may conflict with the CTO...
In this day and age, when the folks at the top can get a substantial reward for figuring out ways to fire as many people as possible, and the employee is enemy number one......
This is a huge opportunity for IP address brokerage. It's the gold & oil of a new digital era of prosperity!!! And don't be mistaken: As always, the money will trickle down from the rich to the poor!
They already found a new source of IP addresses which could support everyone with enough IP addresses to the end of time
Another liberal scare tactic.
We have plenty of IP addresses to go around, and any right thinking American knows that there is a controversy, and that not all scientists believe in this hogwash.
That, and there's a virulent belief that IT can simply be outsourced.
That's not so much a belief as a truth. You can outsource your IT, firms exist to do that. You will probably save money doing that, and that's all that matters to the suits.
How odd, in a corporate world, obsessed with secrecy, one that has workers sign documents that they won't reveal anything, that they won't compete, very secure, very hush hush - we must protect our trade secrets
Then they simply give everything away via the cloud.
This argues to the OP, the idea of there needs to be someone in the decision process that is technically savvy, that isn't there just to rubber stamp the "cost saving" to be had by trying to implement the too good to be true promises made by snake oil salesmen.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm responding to you, but there is also an AC who has a similar, if more verbose, response to my comment, which I will cite here:
Another thing that is very odd about humanities survival. Our intelligence, mixed with our aggressiveness, may end up being our downfall.
A big smart brain that can invent things is not necessarily agood adaptation whne the inventions may allow us to gleefully push the self destruct button (read those among us who have a belief in end of the world prophecies, and want it to happen as soon as possible.
Pure conjecture here, but the stupid among us who want to reproduce like bunnies just might be better adapted to survive. They might be all too happy to torture and kill each other for shits and giggles, but since they aren't smart enough to invent weapons that can kill us all at the same time, nature might not even care.
Not meaning that I would even want that situation, but Mike Judges "ideocracy" premise has some merit even if it gets damn goofy at times.
I mean, Let's take the people elected president, smart, folks - all politics aside. One or two kids. But on the other end of the spectrum, the Duggars, Octomom, and Jon and Kate + 8 are reproducing voraciously, and no doubt, with more of people just like them.
I'd prefer universal birth control myself.
If you want to start World War 3, go right ahead and try starting a world-wide campaign to control people's reproduction.
It's one of those odd things - uncontrolled population will just as likely bring about World War 3.
But any way I know of of blocking any updates blocks all of them. like pulling the cable or disabling wifi.
If you want a one off publicity stunt trip to Mars, a pure Mars Direct scheme is probably the best way to go. If you want to do repeated trips (to Mars or elsewhere) and also build some useful space infrastructure while you're at it, a lunar fuel mining operation has a lot of advantages.
If you want a one off publicity stunt of establishing a lunar base, then going to Mars, and coming back, you can do that too.
Can you tell me what the expenses of researching, designing and sending ships to the moon to establish a lunar colony, then sending the parts for the Mars trip there, assembling them, and reaching escape velocity - twice are going to add to a Mars mission? A percentage will be fine.
I'm calculating 1000 percent increase in the establishment, of the base and a similar increase in the needed fuel costs over a LEO construction.
As well a long time to stabilize the colony to the point where they will be able to efficiently work on the stuff. You don't just send them up with a box of wrenches, some Oreos, and tell em "Get to Work!" Gotta get food to them, or grow it, gotta take care of a lot of basic necessities completely unrelated to a Mars trip. Now imagine assembling the needed copmponents in Earth Orbit using technology we already understand. I have nothing against the establishment of a Lunar colony, but it makes no sense as a springboard to Mars, unless we want to wait a few hundred years.
Having a national program that jump starts American science and technology is a great idea, but you can get the same results at less cost using other types of projects.
After all, endless research has proven that we can't do more than one thing at a time. How many people you figure died waiting for replacement organs because of NASA?
And the terraforming of California has already been tried - and it's an utter failure. Already the Colorado river no longer reaches the sea, http://www.counterpunch.org/20... ground level is falling - in some places at a foot per year! - http://www.bakersfieldnow.com/... and now they want Oregon's water as well. They're framing it a sending "surplus water from the Columbia River to California." California doesn't want surplus water - they want all of it, Certainly in every case so far -I suspect they'll want to plant rice paddies if they get Oregon's water. A really bad example you chose.
You can't do a one launch manned trip to Mars, land and relaunch back to Earth. Isn't going to happen.
It's going to take multiple launches with some construction in space. Might as well do the construction on the Moon which is easily reachable.
Back in the day, one of the concepts they were considering was several trips to bring up the various parts they needed. It lost out to the discarded parts concept, where you just continued to throw away parts of the vehicle over time, finally ending up with only the capsule.
Worked pretty good.
With a Mars trip, it will be more likley needed to assemble parts outside of the earth's atmosphere. But certainly the Mars and earth re-entry vehicles will need real life testing, but other parts? They would be candidates for off earth assembly.
But here's the dig. All of the tonnage will first need to reach Earth's escape velocity, head to the moon, and then after assembly, head off toward Mars at the lunar escape velocity. So first you have to accellerate to around 7 miles per second on every flight, then decelerate to orbit the moon, then after assembly, accerate to around 1.5 miles per second.
And that's just from orbit. If you plan on landing and relauncinh from the moon, there's just all that much more fuel used. to get to escape velocity.
Having one off-earth assembly station in orbit around earth will require one launch for each component, assembly, then one acceleration to escape velocity. Other advantages are being nearer to earth for changes or emergencies, and a whole lot less unknowns. We already have experience with off-earth in oprbit construction with the ISS.
Couple with the needed research and construction and development needed to build a moon base, doing a Mars trip this way is probably approaching a hundred years. In earth orbit, much much less time.
The Moon is locked, one side is constantly in sunlight, the other constantly in darkness.
Oh
My
God
The moon is locked in relation to the earth, not the sun. Half of the moon is always in full sunshine. The phases of the moon? Those mean that the part of the moon we don't see is getting sunshine. Then when there is a New Moon - when we can't see it at all, the whole badly named "dark side" is fully illuminated by the sun.
At this stage in our ability to do stuff in space, we aren't building a TIE fighter that can navigate to Denaba and destroy the Death Star.
That would be an X-wing. TIE fighters had no hyperdrive. :-)
But if you shot one down, would it be TIE-died?
At this stage in our ability to do stuff in space, we aren't building a TIE fighter that can navigate to Denaba and destroy the Death Star.
And we sure as hell can't make the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs.
You don't have to get fuel to the moon, you can make fuel there. Aluminum & water ice are all you need, and the Moon has plenty of aluminum. Sources of water are more questionable, the dark side of the moon may have some, or we could capture a comet for it, or if necessary truck it up from Earth. It's still better than towing 100% of the fuel from Earth.
Have you calculated the costs of 2 escape velodities no needed instead of one? You will burn more fuel.
And the idea of using any water the moon has a fuel source has some bad flaws. First is that there isn't much of it if any, and you're looking at a moon colony that will need water as well. Better to not use it all up for fuel. It's like a fuel or life matter. Second is that would be a dead end resource. After using it up, waddya do then. and lugging water around still has that two escape velocites needed, plus conversion inefficiencies.
There's just no economic value to using the moon as a gas station.
no it doesn't. it proves it should not go at all.
Correct. We should just let the Chinese explore space, and others explore space We'll just do more important things, like slip into a closet, and make money by selling our hats to each other.
I use it every day to cumulate sales, hours, "normal" calculation such as adding number, date, multiplication and division between rows. Do I qualify as non-import task?
Yes.
No it can't. Read the reports would you. People would need to know for this to happen. This was not the work of one lone rogue employee.
Nah - some maintenance guy, or someone in the mailroom is going to pay dearly for their crime. The folks at the top will get a big bonus.
I always thought it was intersection, not union.
Perhaps I should submit a story about Roman manipular tactics during the late republican period?
I had to chuckle reading the replies to this. Probably not what you expected.
But it was a trick wasn't it? the Maniple was replaced by the Cohort around that time.
I always thought it was intersection, not union.
Perhaps I should submit a story about Roman manipular tactics during the late republican period?
Kewl! I'd like that.
Sure. But it's not really news, is it?
It's not something that happened today. But it's interesting.
The problem I see with the "Why is this even on slashdot?" crowd is if we say, allowed everyone who gets pissed that something they don't like, could have it removed, there wouldn't be much slashdot left.
Can't keep everyone happy. I learned that long ago when I made videos. Everyone loved them. But the aggregate of what people didn't like showed me that everything about the video was hated. By someone.
Anyhow, I did enjoy the article and wouldn't mind even seeing more - disclaimer - I am a total slut for military history.
And in other breaking World War II news, there was this amazing breakthru where vacuum tubes were used to create a powerful electronic machine called "ENIAC".
Which was very cool indeed. Well, not really - all those tubes made for a lot of heat.
Where did I say anyone shouldn't hear about it? Read a history book about WW II if you are interesting. But it is NOT FUCKING NEWS! Got it?
It is news to someone. Get over yourself. You aren't the arbiter of what is or isn't news.
It is interesting, but it's also something that anyone interested in WW II has known about for years. How on earth is this "news".
So no one is now allowed to get interested in WW2?
Unfortunately, not everyone is like you, who was born knowing everything.
It's "news" to someone, and who the fuck are you to tell them they shouldn't hear about it.
This was on the History Channel, "Band Of Brothers", etc.
The latest generation needs their chance to learn it, just as my generation did.
This needs to be modded to 5.
Just because some guy on Slashdot has heard of this doesn't mean that it doesn't need repeated.
It reminds me of people who get pissed off at Thanksgiving when the media gives out advice on how to cook Turkey so that we don't get sick. There's always some asshat that might have heard it for the first time a couple years ago, and is angry that everyone didn't hear it when they did.
Looks like even the cloud isn't the cloud.
Boards themselves are elected by the shareholders. That in and of itself is probably enough to guarantee that a board member is not a techie. The IT expert is probably going to be hired on person - who may conflict with the CTO...
In this day and age, when the folks at the top can get a substantial reward for figuring out ways to fire as many people as possible, and the employee is enemy number one......
And we present to you......... the cloud.
This is a huge opportunity for IP address brokerage. It's the gold & oil of a new digital era of prosperity!!! And don't be mistaken: As always, the money will trickle down from the rich to the poor!
When God closes one door, Ayn Rand opens another.
They already found a new source of IP addresses which could support everyone with enough IP addresses to the end of time
Another liberal scare tactic.
We have plenty of IP addresses to go around, and any right thinking American knows that there is a controversy, and that not all scientists believe in this hogwash.
That's not so much a belief as a truth. You can outsource your IT, firms exist to do that. You will probably save money doing that, and that's all that matters to the suits.
How odd, in a corporate world, obsessed with secrecy, one that has workers sign documents that they won't reveal anything, that they won't compete, very secure, very hush hush - we must protect our trade secrets
Then they simply give everything away via the cloud.
This argues to the OP, the idea of there needs to be someone in the decision process that is technically savvy, that isn't there just to rubber stamp the "cost saving" to be had by trying to implement the too good to be true promises made by snake oil salesmen.