No. There is still such a thing as a public that pays attention to these things. C-SPAN may not be your favorite viewing but plenty of people watch on a regular basis. Also, after six years of crimes, fraud, and self-dealing I think that we can afford four hours of truth.
If we were to allow Congressman Kucinich ten minutes of airtime for every legally questionable act by the Bush administration, he would still have many hours of airtime left today. Or how about we do it one to one? One minute of airtime for every minute used up in White House press briefings by their fake journalist?
Four hours is a drop in the bucket. My only regret is that Dubya didn't have to stand in a stress position and listen to all of it and then recite it back.
Gotta disagree with you there. I found it interesting that in the SDK release video from last month, which ran well over an hour, they kept emphasizing the "iPhone/iTouch platform". Looks to me like they're positioning both devices as entrees to a whole new developing device type. Convergence device? Ultra PDA? Whatever; I've heard too many names to care anymore. But one very practical implication of this is that the iTouch gives them a way to sell what is, in effect, an iPhone-platform device to people who don't want to be locked into AT&T but are otherwise their core userbase - high budget, style conscious, UI conscious, mobile lifestyle fans of the glossy and cool.
We've all read that Apple's relationship with AT&T hasn't gone swimmingly and gawd know plenty of people (me included) REALLY don't want to get cell service from them, if only for privacy reasons. Apple may do plenty of jerky things but they ain't dumb. Or slow. So it's only natural that they've created a routearound. I agree that the markets are *somewhat* different, but far from "completely". Plenty of overlap there, especially from the several year perspective.
So no, I'll be watching the iTouch and the iPhone as just what they are: devices from the same platform for the same general kinds of customers. No more "completely different" than buyers of BMW versus buyers of Mercedes.
I don't know about you, but I'm more than a bit afraid of self-replicating machines. But then again we're so far away from actually making those that realistically, we can safely assume that anything we make will die off in, at most, a few generations. Creating things like electronics from raw ore is hard!. Not to mention all the kinds of raw materials needed for components, or simply to run the reactions to make those components.
Oh, I'm very much aware of these, though I was quite saddened to not only see the recent drop out of, imo, the best team competing for the Google X Prize, but to see that, afaict, they did it because of increasingly obstructive requirements from the people running the competition that will hobble every remaining team.
I agree that we should do our best to take advantage of features like the ones you pointed out but even those will require some digging. Nice link, though. Thanks.
I'm by no means under the delusion that I'm the only one backing this approach. I'm just adamant that we not forget all of these things and let a discussion like this one focus only on the NASA effort.
We've been working on "what to do" for over fifty years already. How much is enough?
Note, please, that I'm suggesting a first step of sending relays to be put in moon orbit. What more do we possibly need to know to do that? Note also my suggested second step, which involves not only sticking with the least complex task, it's explicitly designed to let us test different approaches, give us a reserve of useful mechanical parts there for later when the robots fail, and reduce the stress on any later machinery we send. I don't know about you, cobber, but in my world, one of the best ways to keep equipment running in a hostile environment is to do everything you can to minimize the exposure of that equipment to that environment. Another is to build a nearby reserve of spare parts. This approach provides both.
If you haven't already done so, let me suggest that you watch Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. This will give you more of an idea of what I am talking about.
Yeah. Sure. I agree. Lots of starving people out there. People whose lives are made far better by weather satellites, lightweight materials, insulators, high temperature plastics, photovoltaics, and other things developed for aerospace, communications technologies that help them do things like find current accurate prices for their crops, topographical data from space imaging, and, not so trivial, better options for a free media to weaken the kinds of totalitarian slime who keep them so desperate in the first place. Myanmar's best hope right now is the kind of complex, high-bandwidth media attention the regime is only subject to because of modern telecommunications.
I spend much of my time working on things like low cost ways to build food-producing planters out of post-consumer waste. I spent about half an hour yesterday helping a couple of homeless kids find food and a place to sleep since their expected ride just had a heroin overdose. I think that I'm pretty safe in saying that I'm middlin' concerned about the problems of the truly poor. And afaic, getting humans on the moon is an excellent idea. If nothing else, as a very effective way to encourage more kids to go into the sciences.
I'm less interested in WHAT we do than in HOW we do it. I would hate to see us end up spending more decades with our thumbs up our metaphorical posteriors waiting for NASA and their associated agencies to get something built up there.
What should NASA do? Damned if I know. Or care all that much for now. AFAIC the real concern is for a private group to choose some location well away from the various government-run bases and just bloody well start shooting itty bitty robots up there ASAP.As I've said about Mars, the rational thing to do is to start processing minerals, digging tunnels that are deep enough to be radiation resistant, establishing power generation capacity, and maybe even starting a few teeny separate greenhouse enclosures in which the beginnings of working ecosystems can get going. In the next few years. Not to mention building the kinds of expertise one only gets through real world implementation.
To wait to do this with human-optimized vehicles or even simply to wait to do this until the billions of dollars in funding needed for a full mission can be rounded up and the milions of man-hours in research and development needed to make a moonbase human-capable is as boneheaded as, say, using only Microsoft products "because that's the established approach".
We already know that dust is going to make every job bloody difficult. We already know that our attempts at equipment that reliably works in vacuum and under those temperature changes haven't gone all that well. We have a lot of learning to do. And it will all go a lot better if the first humans get there to find as much mass and equipment already waiting and running as possible. So let's start with the least demanding tasks and get more ambitious as we go.
So I say:
A.) Put a couple of relays in Moon orbit. This massively cuts power and complexity demands down for the devices we later send moonside. If they can take pictures of the moon as they orbit, that's jim dandy too.
B.) Have at least two teams launch at least two different approaches to digger robots. These robots will, hopefully, if nothing else, build the first enclosures in which other robots can do things like wait out the worst radiation storms.
C.) Send more robots to survey the local area for mineral resources. Each package also includes some amount of additional power generation capacity. Ideally some mix is used of solar, temperature differential-based systems, and other approaches.
D.) And only then send robots to start doing things like making rocket fuel from moon mass.
Maybe I'm wrong about the ideal order. But I'm pretty damn sure that I'm right about my basic point. We should be launching payloads as soon as we possibly can. Barring some other group stealing what we send, we lose far more than we gain by waiting.
Oh, and if we do it right, the group that does so may even get to have that/. classic become true.
E.) PROFIT!!!!
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So, I'm curious, how do propose to impeach a president who is already out of office?
If we were to allow Congressman Kucinich ten minutes of airtime for every legally questionable act by the Bush administration, he would still have many hours of airtime left today. Or how about we do it one to one? One minute of airtime for every minute used up in White House press briefings by their fake journalist?
Four hours is a drop in the bucket. My only regret is that Dubya didn't have to stand in a stress position and listen to all of it and then recite it back.
Excellent. I'm delighted to hear it. Thanks.
We've all read that Apple's relationship with AT&T hasn't gone swimmingly and gawd know plenty of people (me included) REALLY don't want to get cell service from them, if only for privacy reasons. Apple may do plenty of jerky things but they ain't dumb. Or slow. So it's only natural that they've created a routearound. I agree that the markets are *somewhat* different, but far from "completely". Plenty of overlap there, especially from the several year perspective.
So no, I'll be watching the iTouch and the iPhone as just what they are: devices from the same platform for the same general kinds of customers. No more "completely different" than buyers of BMW versus buyers of Mercedes.
I don't know about you, but I'm more than a bit afraid of self-replicating machines. But then again we're so far away from actually making those that realistically, we can safely assume that anything we make will die off in, at most, a few generations. Creating things like electronics from raw ore is hard!. Not to mention all the kinds of raw materials needed for components, or simply to run the reactions to make those components.
I agree that we should do our best to take advantage of features like the ones you pointed out but even those will require some digging. Nice link, though. Thanks.
I'm by no means under the delusion that I'm the only one backing this approach. I'm just adamant that we not forget all of these things and let a discussion like this one focus only on the NASA effort.
Note, please, that I'm suggesting a first step of sending relays to be put in moon orbit. What more do we possibly need to know to do that? Note also my suggested second step, which involves not only sticking with the least complex task, it's explicitly designed to let us test different approaches, give us a reserve of useful mechanical parts there for later when the robots fail, and reduce the stress on any later machinery we send. I don't know about you, cobber, but in my world, one of the best ways to keep equipment running in a hostile environment is to do everything you can to minimize the exposure of that equipment to that environment. Another is to build a nearby reserve of spare parts. This approach provides both.
If you haven't already done so, let me suggest that you watch Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. This will give you more of an idea of what I am talking about.
I spend much of my time working on things like low cost ways to build food-producing planters out of post-consumer waste. I spent about half an hour yesterday helping a couple of homeless kids find food and a place to sleep since their expected ride just had a heroin overdose. I think that I'm pretty safe in saying that I'm middlin' concerned about the problems of the truly poor. And afaic, getting humans on the moon is an excellent idea. If nothing else, as a very effective way to encourage more kids to go into the sciences.
If it were up to me, every kid with an IQ over 120 would get a free copy of that book, among others, on their twelfth birthday.
What should NASA do? Damned if I know. Or care all that much for now. AFAIC the real concern is for a private group to choose some location well away from the various government-run bases and just bloody well start shooting itty bitty robots up there ASAP. As I've said about Mars, the rational thing to do is to start processing minerals, digging tunnels that are deep enough to be radiation resistant, establishing power generation capacity, and maybe even starting a few teeny separate greenhouse enclosures in which the beginnings of working ecosystems can get going. In the next few years. Not to mention building the kinds of expertise one only gets through real world implementation.
To wait to do this with human-optimized vehicles or even simply to wait to do this until the billions of dollars in funding needed for a full mission can be rounded up and the milions of man-hours in research and development needed to make a moonbase human-capable is as boneheaded as, say, using only Microsoft products "because that's the established approach".
We already know that dust is going to make every job bloody difficult. We already know that our attempts at equipment that reliably works in vacuum and under those temperature changes haven't gone all that well. We have a lot of learning to do. And it will all go a lot better if the first humans get there to find as much mass and equipment already waiting and running as possible. So let's start with the least demanding tasks and get more ambitious as we go.
So I say:
A.) Put a couple of relays in Moon orbit. This massively cuts power and complexity demands down for the devices we later send moonside. If they can take pictures of the moon as they orbit, that's jim dandy too.
B.) Have at least two teams launch at least two different approaches to digger robots. These robots will, hopefully, if nothing else, build the first enclosures in which other robots can do things like wait out the worst radiation storms.
C.) Send more robots to survey the local area for mineral resources. Each package also includes some amount of additional power generation capacity. Ideally some mix is used of solar, temperature differential-based systems, and other approaches.
D.) And only then send robots to start doing things like making rocket fuel from moon mass.
Maybe I'm wrong about the ideal order. But I'm pretty damn sure that I'm right about my basic point. We should be launching payloads as soon as we possibly can. Barring some other group stealing what we send, we lose far more than we gain by waiting. /. classic become true.
Oh, and if we do it right, the group that does so may even get to have that
E.) PROFIT!!!!