"life in jail" means 12 years. We're not USA, and we're happy to not be as strict on crime.
Speak for yourself. My parent's murderer got away with 12 years and that's a woefully insufficient penalty for ruining the life of two children forever.
It's not about laziness. If it was about laziness, I'd jump on the new tech because it saves me the "arduous" step of *plugging in* (gasp). Instead I'm planning on staying with the far more demanding step of actually plugging in.
It's about forgetfulness. As I grow older and more senile, I plain and simple don't *remember* to put my devices at their designated charging locations every single night. If there was a tech that charged my devices no matter where I left them inside the confines of my house, that would something that would produce a useful value add for me.
Eliminating the plugging in phase does not produce a useful value add because I'm not so lazy that plugging in is some huge obstacle.
I don't really see the point. As long as you have to put the device in a specific location anyway, I don't see that it's much of an improvement over having to connect it with your charger. You have to connect it with a location just the same, with this new tech, just the plug is different (a pad vs a plug).
Wake me when you have a tech that charges my mobile from the moment I step in my home door and leave my mobile in my jacket pocket hanging in the foyer.
Until that use case can be satisfied, I think this is just the same-old, same-old.
A rocket engine is a pretty specialized piece of hardware, and without any major world wars going on, who's going to invest in advancing the technology for faster rockets? The airline industry is in dire straits as it is, it's not exactly going to be developing rocket jetliners anytime soon.
So I don't really see which of currently researched techs could make the rocket engine cheaper. I'd like to hear your thoughts on which of the technologies you mentioned (or any others) look likely to produce a better rocket engine?
We could simply defer manned space exploration until such time as it becomes less expensive
What makes you assume such time will come without investing in it?
You're suggesting just sitting on our asses and hoping some magical tech will just materialize that will make everything just teddy bears and rainbows.
Until someone can come up with that "something better" than ion/chemical rockets, this is the only road available to us.
Travel with us on it, or don't.
We fully understand how massive an operation manufacturing is. That's why we need to get started *now* so we can get something built someday.
We either do something with what we tangibly, actually have, or we sit down and dream about, "oh, we could do so much if only we had MacGuffin so-and-so".
However, propellants can be mined in space instead of exported from the very expensive Earth gravity well. Hence, a mining station. I know I said "smelting", but I didn't mean an exclusively metal processing yard. NEOs have volatiles too, and they can be mined and processed into fuel without needing to import volatiles from Earth. So, a station at L4 that mines both volatiles and metals, would be invaluable to space exploration.
Yeah, that's why we need to build bases at the LPs, so we can finally experiment and figure out if we can make artificial gravity work right to compensate for things like bone loss.
One of the possibilities for radiation shielding is picking an interesting NEO and burrowing inside it, letting its crust take care of the shielding. Or the moon. Either, really. A NEO would be easier to spin up for artificial gravity experiments, though.
That's all nice and science fiction-y, but the cold, expensive reality is that we can barely get stuff to, and keep things at LEO.
We got the Apollo modules to the moon and back. L4/5 are easier to get to than the moon. Ergo, there is no technical barrier preventing us from ferrying Apollo module sized chunks of ISS-A to L4 and leaving them there. Accumulate them over time and build.
You're absolutely correct that moving the ISS itself is unfeasible. I meant building a new ISS, call it ISS-A if you want.
Yes, it would require massive amounts of tonnage to be lifted from Earth, but at least it would be a long-term investment that won't fall out of the sky someday like ISS will. Build it slower than the ISS for all I care, but something permanent needs to be built in space, and unless you get it to a Lagrange Point, it will be a wasted effort.
Carrying any significant amount of raw materials from NEOs to an LP requires a lot more than "trivial" amounts of fuel.
The delta-v required once you've achieved Earth escape velocity, to the closest NEOs, is 0.8 km/s. That's *half* of what you need to get from lunar surface to lunar orbit, in other words the Apollo lander module's fuel supply would be enough for a trip to a NEO and back, once you've gotten out of Earth's gravity well.
All of this is way beyond our technology level
Not really. It just hasn't been tried yet because NASA, for all its achievements, isn't exactly a daring and innovative agency.
There's no big technological barrier preventing us from an L4 - NEO - L4 trip. It's totally within the realm of possibility. It only needs to be done.
There were many other meaningful things to Apollo than just its newness. You may not believe space exploration to be inherently meaningful, but I for one do.
Doing the same thing again with the same vastly expensive inefficient technology would be pointless
I agree that doing the same thing would be pointless. Instead of just going, planting a flag and coming back home, we should be building an infrastructure in space that will eventually facilitate staying there.
Getting humans further than the moon, and back again (eg to Mars and back) with chemical rockets is a joke. Never going to happen.
I'm inclined to agree, but I didn't say anything about further than the moon. There's plenty of infrastructure to build inside the moon's orbit. Like our first space shipyard at a Lagrange Point.
The whole "flexible path" thing is gaining traction, but its basically just a nice way of saying don't go anywhere, or stay there
I don't really agree with that. Putting an ISS at a Lagrange Point would be far more stable and a 100x better long-term investment than putting an ISS in LEO.
Since an ISS at LEO will require *constant* re-boosting to keep its altitude (its orbit naturally decays about 20km lower every month and fuel needs to constantly be ferried up to keep it from falling down), but an ISS at a Lagrange Point would require trivial stationkeeping.
Therefore, an LP base makes more sense than a LEO base. Now, one could say that a Moon base makes more sense because it has raw materials available, but that is ignoring all the Near-Earth Asteroids, which could be reached from an LP at trivial fuel amounts. You can mine the NEOs just as well as you can mine the Moon, thus building a nifty base at an LP that would serve as a great staging ground for humans in space. No gravity well to descend into or try to get out of.
The #1 thing humanity should build is a mining/smelting/shipyard at a Lagrange Point. Before a moonbase, before anything else, really.
And Flexible Path accommodates those kinds of goals.
The reason would be thinking really long term. As in, on a scale of hundreds, maybe thousands of years.
No, of course sending people to the Moon or Mars will not produce "profit" (in the financial sense) on a scale of years or decades. But in the extreme long term, we'll have new worlds to populate, new planets to colonize.
Well, arguably, a nation that doesn't turn a profit will see things like -- well, like last year. Yes, I know that's an oversimplification, but still. If you let the nation's economy go down the tubes, it will have pretty bad effects.
Having said that, I have personally a strong belief in non-profit scientific expenditures. And if the US wants to maintain its role as a superpower, there is really no alternative. It has to produce some results -- not just profit -- if it wants to be seen as the leader of the world.
I think the most important thing can be crystallized:
Without more money, there will be no meaningful human space flight.
As for the details, I agree with the report where it says that Mars is not a good first destination. I concur that the Flexible Path scenario would be pretty smart. There's a wealth of information and experience to be made in exploring the Lagrange Points and Near-Earth Asteroids.
Basically, is the United States willing to cede space to China and Russia?
This is the difference between a *creative* work (i.e. something created out of nothing) and an *invention* (i.e. something discovered).
I think the difference is far from as clear as you make it out to be.
For example, Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of Christ" is not something created out of nothing. It is built directly on top of previous literary inventions, in this case the Bible. Many Disney movies are directly built on fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. Alan Moore's comic book "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" is built on many 19th century literary inventions, as is his "Lost Girls". How about "West Side Story"? "Romeo and Juliet".
It's quite easy to show that many creative works are, in fact, derivative from previous creative works, just as many scientific works are, in fact, derivative from previous scientific works.
Now, imagine if we did as you propose, and the rights to creative works were retained "forever". "Passion" couldn't have been made, Disney would have been sued by the heirs of Grimm. And I'm not even going to get into how many times Paramount would have been sued for episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" where they were in violation of Shakespeare's copyrights.
Vast swaths of our cultural landscape would be eliminated if copyrights were forever.
Scientific inventions aren't made in a vacuum, and neither are creative inventions (i.e. they are not "created out of nothing").
Like scientific inventions, literary inventions also need to be freed eventually, so that the society can make derivative works.
Therefore, since there must be a limit of protected years that is between zero and infinity, why should literary inventions merit a greater number than scientific inventions?
Who's fanboying? Oh right, you -- you admitted it even.
I, on the other hand, know full well WinMo is far from perfect and isn't the best choice for some people with different priorities than mine.
So if you want to slam WinMo, feel free, I won't stop you. But if you want to accuse me of being a blind WinMo advocate, you couldn't be more wrong.
I don't really know in what delusional world "because from what I've seen, the iPhone OS seems to be a better OS" amounts to "talking shit about the one you don't have". Just makes it sound like you invented some imaginary post inside your head to rail against.
Well, frankly, Symbian and Android don't come anywhere near the amount of available applications that WinMo has. For me one of the top criteria is whether I can find applications for every need.
So you're making a compromise between the level of flexibility you want to control your phone and development environment, compared to the features and usability offered.
I believe that is normal behavior. Everybody makes their own personal judgment on what are important criteria for them and how important they are, and pick a product based on their own priorities.
You just draw the line in a different place than the average user.
If I'm not an "average user", I'm thankful for that.
Apple is pitching it as a feature, as in, they police the spectrum of apps completely and thus remove the majority of security risks either immediately or when discovered.
I don't need any Big Brother picking my apps for me. I'm an adult and I take my own risks.
You might find yourself having fewer non-crippled choices if Apple's model is successful.
And that's why I don't buy Apple.
people don't want all that many applications on their phone
I don't make my decisions on what platform I'm going to spend my money on, based on what *other* people want.
What most people are talking about when they talk about these copyright issues are the copyrighting and/or trademarking of artistic creations.
What's rarely brought up is the fact that there's a very analogous system in the world, too. For scientific creations, there's such a thing as patents. Patents are basically copyright for scientific inventions, as opposed to artistic inventions.
Now, if we compare patents to copyright, the vast disparity in protection length becomes obvious. In most countries, patents protect the exclusivity of scientific inventions for 15-25 years.
Artistic inventions are protected for *95* years. That is to say, 4-5 times longer.
Why? What makes them worth so much longer a protection than scientific inventions get?
The purpose of exclusivity expiring eventually (that is, not being forever) is to release the invented concept into the public domain so that the general public can eventually benefit from making use of the invention in whatever way society feels fit.
However, this right of the general public is by and large being denied at present when it comes to artistic inventions. Copyright terms are being extended and extended by Disney and other megacorporations because they don't want their big brands to become public property.
Imagine if Alexander Bell would have retained exclusive rights to the telephone for 95 years. The patent was issued in 1876. That means the telephone would have become public domain in 1971! The steam turbine would have become available to the general public in 1979 and barbed wire in 1982. The roller coaster and the diesel engine would have expired in 1993.
More importantly, what things would still be patented? We'd be waiting for the zipper to expire in 2012. Aerosol cans would become available in 2022, electric shavers in 2023. Radar wouldn't fall out of protection until 2030.
Imagine how much slower technology would have advanced if things like *zippers* would have to be licensed in order to be used in clothes.
Excessively long protection times directly harm the public, whether it be in the field of our scientific development or in the field of our artistic development.
Slashdot Mirror
"life in jail" means 12 years. We're not USA, and we're happy to not be as strict on crime.
Speak for yourself. My parent's murderer got away with 12 years and that's a woefully insufficient penalty for ruining the life of two children forever.
It's not about laziness. If it was about laziness, I'd jump on the new tech because it saves me the "arduous" step of *plugging in* (gasp). Instead I'm planning on staying with the far more demanding step of actually plugging in.
It's about forgetfulness. As I grow older and more senile, I plain and simple don't *remember* to put my devices at their designated charging locations every single night. If there was a tech that charged my devices no matter where I left them inside the confines of my house, that would something that would produce a useful value add for me.
Eliminating the plugging in phase does not produce a useful value add because I'm not so lazy that plugging in is some huge obstacle.
I don't really see the point. As long as you have to put the device in a specific location anyway, I don't see that it's much of an improvement over having to connect it with your charger. You have to connect it with a location just the same, with this new tech, just the plug is different (a pad vs a plug).
Wake me when you have a tech that charges my mobile from the moment I step in my home door and leave my mobile in my jacket pocket hanging in the foyer.
Until that use case can be satisfied, I think this is just the same-old, same-old.
A rocket engine is a pretty specialized piece of hardware, and without any major world wars going on, who's going to invest in advancing the technology for faster rockets? The airline industry is in dire straits as it is, it's not exactly going to be developing rocket jetliners anytime soon.
So I don't really see which of currently researched techs could make the rocket engine cheaper. I'd like to hear your thoughts on which of the technologies you mentioned (or any others) look likely to produce a better rocket engine?
We could simply defer manned space exploration until such time as it becomes less expensive
What makes you assume such time will come without investing in it?
You're suggesting just sitting on our asses and hoping some magical tech will just materialize that will make everything just teddy bears and rainbows.
It proved it could be done. That's pretty meaningful.
Without Apollo, we'd still in 2009 be wondering if putting a man on the moon was even possible.
Now we *know* it's possible, it's just a matter of money.
That's a pretty damn meaningful difference.
Note that a space station orbiting the Moon is also easier to reach from Earth than one in a LP.
Actually no, it's not. They both have the same delta-v requirement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget
From LEO to lunar orbit is 4.1 km/s.
From LEO to L4/5 is *also* 4.1 km/s.
I imagine it's actually cheaper to go to the L-point on the line between Earth and Moon but it's less interesting than 4-5 IMO.
Until someone can come up with that "something better" than ion/chemical rockets, this is the only road available to us.
Travel with us on it, or don't.
We fully understand how massive an operation manufacturing is. That's why we need to get started *now* so we can get something built someday.
We either do something with what we tangibly, actually have, or we sit down and dream about, "oh, we could do so much if only we had MacGuffin so-and-so".
However, propellants can be mined in space instead of exported from the very expensive Earth gravity well. Hence, a mining station. I know I said "smelting", but I didn't mean an exclusively metal processing yard. NEOs have volatiles too, and they can be mined and processed into fuel without needing to import volatiles from Earth. So, a station at L4 that mines both volatiles and metals, would be invaluable to space exploration.
Yeah, that's why we need to build bases at the LPs, so we can finally experiment and figure out if we can make artificial gravity work right to compensate for things like bone loss.
One of the possibilities for radiation shielding is picking an interesting NEO and burrowing inside it, letting its crust take care of the shielding. Or the moon. Either, really. A NEO would be easier to spin up for artificial gravity experiments, though.
I agree that flag-planting missions are pointless. Unless something permanent is built, one might as well not do it.
You are correct, though, when you say that an L4/NEO mining station would have bigger long-term delta-v costs than a moonbase mining station.
That's all nice and science fiction-y, but the cold, expensive reality is that we can barely get stuff to, and keep things at LEO.
We got the Apollo modules to the moon and back. L4/5 are easier to get to than the moon. Ergo, there is no technical barrier preventing us from ferrying Apollo module sized chunks of ISS-A to L4 and leaving them there. Accumulate them over time and build.
You're absolutely correct that moving the ISS itself is unfeasible. I meant building a new ISS, call it ISS-A if you want.
Yes, it would require massive amounts of tonnage to be lifted from Earth, but at least it would be a long-term investment that won't fall out of the sky someday like ISS will. Build it slower than the ISS for all I care, but something permanent needs to be built in space, and unless you get it to a Lagrange Point, it will be a wasted effort.
Carrying any significant amount of raw materials from NEOs to an LP requires a lot more than "trivial" amounts of fuel.
The delta-v required once you've achieved Earth escape velocity, to the closest NEOs, is 0.8 km/s. That's *half* of what you need to get from lunar surface to lunar orbit, in other words the Apollo lander module's fuel supply would be enough for a trip to a NEO and back, once you've gotten out of Earth's gravity well.
All of this is way beyond our technology level
Not really. It just hasn't been tried yet because NASA, for all its achievements, isn't exactly a daring and innovative agency.
There's no big technological barrier preventing us from an L4 - NEO - L4 trip. It's totally within the realm of possibility. It only needs to be done.
Apollo was meaningful because it was new.
There were many other meaningful things to Apollo than just its newness. You may not believe space exploration to be inherently meaningful, but I for one do.
Doing the same thing again with the same vastly expensive inefficient technology would be pointless
I agree that doing the same thing would be pointless. Instead of just going, planting a flag and coming back home, we should be building an infrastructure in space that will eventually facilitate staying there.
Getting humans further than the moon, and back again (eg to Mars and back) with chemical rockets is a joke. Never going to happen.
I'm inclined to agree, but I didn't say anything about further than the moon. There's plenty of infrastructure to build inside the moon's orbit. Like our first space shipyard at a Lagrange Point.
The whole "flexible path" thing is gaining traction, but its basically just a nice way of saying don't go anywhere, or stay there
I don't really agree with that. Putting an ISS at a Lagrange Point would be far more stable and a 100x better long-term investment than putting an ISS in LEO.
Since an ISS at LEO will require *constant* re-boosting to keep its altitude (its orbit naturally decays about 20km lower every month and fuel needs to constantly be ferried up to keep it from falling down), but an ISS at a Lagrange Point would require trivial stationkeeping.
Therefore, an LP base makes more sense than a LEO base. Now, one could say that a Moon base makes more sense because it has raw materials available, but that is ignoring all the Near-Earth Asteroids, which could be reached from an LP at trivial fuel amounts. You can mine the NEOs just as well as you can mine the Moon, thus building a nifty base at an LP that would serve as a great staging ground for humans in space. No gravity well to descend into or try to get out of.
The #1 thing humanity should build is a mining/smelting/shipyard at a Lagrange Point. Before a moonbase, before anything else, really.
And Flexible Path accommodates those kinds of goals.
Without the usage of something other than chemical rockets, there will be no meaningful human space flight.
I don't concur with that. The Apollo program was implemented under chemical rockets.
Having said that, I fully agree that billions thrown in research for alternative propulsion methods would be spectacular.
I think he means worship of the almighty dollar.
The reason would be thinking really long term. As in, on a scale of hundreds, maybe thousands of years.
No, of course sending people to the Moon or Mars will not produce "profit" (in the financial sense) on a scale of years or decades. But in the extreme long term, we'll have new worlds to populate, new planets to colonize.
We can't stay solely on Earth forever.
Well, arguably, a nation that doesn't turn a profit will see things like -- well, like last year. Yes, I know that's an oversimplification, but still. If you let the nation's economy go down the tubes, it will have pretty bad effects.
Having said that, I have personally a strong belief in non-profit scientific expenditures. And if the US wants to maintain its role as a superpower, there is really no alternative. It has to produce some results -- not just profit -- if it wants to be seen as the leader of the world.
I think the most important thing can be crystallized:
Without more money, there will be no meaningful human space flight.
As for the details, I agree with the report where it says that Mars is not a good first destination. I concur that the Flexible Path scenario would be pretty smart. There's a wealth of information and experience to be made in exploring the Lagrange Points and Near-Earth Asteroids.
Basically, is the United States willing to cede space to China and Russia?
This is the difference between a *creative* work (i.e. something created out of nothing) and an *invention* (i.e. something discovered).
I think the difference is far from as clear as you make it out to be.
For example, Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of Christ" is not something created out of nothing. It is built directly on top of previous literary inventions, in this case the Bible. Many Disney movies are directly built on fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. Alan Moore's comic book "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" is built on many 19th century literary inventions, as is his "Lost Girls". How about "West Side Story"? "Romeo and Juliet".
It's quite easy to show that many creative works are, in fact, derivative from previous creative works, just as many scientific works are, in fact, derivative from previous scientific works.
Now, imagine if we did as you propose, and the rights to creative works were retained "forever". "Passion" couldn't have been made, Disney would have been sued by the heirs of Grimm. And I'm not even going to get into how many times Paramount would have been sued for episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" where they were in violation of Shakespeare's copyrights.
Vast swaths of our cultural landscape would be eliminated if copyrights were forever.
Scientific inventions aren't made in a vacuum, and neither are creative inventions (i.e. they are not "created out of nothing").
Like scientific inventions, literary inventions also need to be freed eventually, so that the society can make derivative works.
Therefore, since there must be a limit of protected years that is between zero and infinity, why should literary inventions merit a greater number than scientific inventions?
Who's fanboying? Oh right, you -- you admitted it even.
I, on the other hand, know full well WinMo is far from perfect and isn't the best choice for some people with different priorities than mine.
So if you want to slam WinMo, feel free, I won't stop you. But if you want to accuse me of being a blind WinMo advocate, you couldn't be more wrong.
I don't really know in what delusional world "because from what I've seen, the iPhone OS seems to be a better OS" amounts to "talking shit about the one you don't have". Just makes it sound like you invented some imaginary post inside your head to rail against.
Why Windows Mobile in particular?
Well, frankly, Symbian and Android don't come anywhere near the amount of available applications that WinMo has. For me one of the top criteria is whether I can find applications for every need.
So you're making a compromise between the level of flexibility you want to control your phone and development environment, compared to the features and usability offered.
I believe that is normal behavior. Everybody makes their own personal judgment on what are important criteria for them and how important they are, and pick a product based on their own priorities.
You just draw the line in a different place than the average user.
If I'm not an "average user", I'm thankful for that.
Apple is pitching it as a feature, as in, they police the spectrum of apps completely and thus remove the majority of security risks either immediately or when discovered.
I don't need any Big Brother picking my apps for me. I'm an adult and I take my own risks.
You might find yourself having fewer non-crippled choices if Apple's model is successful.
And that's why I don't buy Apple.
people don't want all that many applications on their phone
I don't make my decisions on what platform I'm going to spend my money on, based on what *other* people want.
What most people are talking about when they talk about these copyright issues are the copyrighting and/or trademarking of artistic creations.
What's rarely brought up is the fact that there's a very analogous system in the world, too. For scientific creations, there's such a thing as patents. Patents are basically copyright for scientific inventions, as opposed to artistic inventions.
Now, if we compare patents to copyright, the vast disparity in protection length becomes obvious. In most countries, patents protect the exclusivity of scientific inventions for 15-25 years.
Artistic inventions are protected for *95* years. That is to say, 4-5 times longer.
Why? What makes them worth so much longer a protection than scientific inventions get?
The purpose of exclusivity expiring eventually (that is, not being forever) is to release the invented concept into the public domain so that the general public can eventually benefit from making use of the invention in whatever way society feels fit.
However, this right of the general public is by and large being denied at present when it comes to artistic inventions. Copyright terms are being extended and extended by Disney and other megacorporations because they don't want their big brands to become public property.
Imagine if Alexander Bell would have retained exclusive rights to the telephone for 95 years. The patent was issued in 1876. That means the telephone would have become public domain in 1971! The steam turbine would have become available to the general public in 1979 and barbed wire in 1982. The roller coaster and the diesel engine would have expired in 1993.
More importantly, what things would still be patented? We'd be waiting for the zipper to expire in 2012. Aerosol cans would become available in 2022, electric shavers in 2023. Radar wouldn't fall out of protection until 2030.
Imagine how much slower technology would have advanced if things like *zippers* would have to be licensed in order to be used in clothes.
Excessively long protection times directly harm the public, whether it be in the field of our scientific development or in the field of our artistic development.