This would be a much better device with 4x USB and/or WiFi. Then, it could be used as a camera server and for similar purposes. If you have to add another powered external box for that, the small form factor quickly loses its appeal.
The press isn't one of those communities because the press doesn't deal in the kinds of concepts you can plagiarize. If AHN copied AP text verbatim, you might say that they plagiarized the writing, but then they would get sued for copyright infringement. But they are merely stating the same fact as a fact stated in an AP news story, and it's a fact that, unlike a scientific experiment, didn't require creativity to observe--it merely required presence.
Liquid water can be stable on Mars' atmosphere provided the water contains a LOT of perchlorate minerals in the water.
It also works for pure water, barely.
The pressure on the surface of Mars is 600-1200 Pa (bottom of Hellas Basin). The triple point of water is at 611 Pa and 0.01C. Around the triple point, you gain about 0.02C in boiling point per Pa, so at lower elevations, you can have pure liquid water from about 0C to 10C. Surface temperature can reach 0C. So, you can barely have pure liquid water on the surface of Mars. People have actually verified this experimentally... it works.
That has a number of implications. Thawing frost can turn liquid and wet the soil microscopically. And many kinds of salt (not just perchlorate) will have a big effect.
Too late. X runs everywhere. It's a good, flexible set of protocols, and there are dozens of different implementations. Microsoft and Apple have been making their window systems more and more X-like over the years--but they are slower and less efficient.
The X Window System is like UNIX/Linux: so-called experts have hated it because they thought it should all be done differently, but in the end, it turns out that X (and UNIX) got it right from the start.
You have no expectation of privacy on a public street. Why should you?
Trying to create such a right to privacy on public streets would be quite harmful to the interests of citizens in a democracy; we want to be able to record, document, and share what happens in public.
The real problem with surveillance cameras is that they are not public, so the police can use them against you, but you may not be able to use them against the police or government. Video from surveillance cameras should be publicly accessible by everybody.
Apple would probably just love to split the pie with Microsoft and enjoy a cozy duopoly. After all, both companies make their profits based on being as proprietary as they can get away with.
If Ballmer is really interested in openness, he can have that tomorrow: adopt Android, adopt SyncML, drop other proprietary protocols, open source.NET, etc.
Space based solar power is a useless idea. The earth's atmosphere is quite transparent to light, so you don't gain much by moving outside it. If you do everything right, you gain up to a factor of two because you can stay in sunlight much longer. But to get that modest improvement you pay many orders of magnitude more in transport and maintenance costs.
The biggest issue with space-based solar power, however, is that you're giving someone access to megawatts of power ready to be aimed at any point on the globe. The people who wan t space-based solar power want a weapon, nothing more.
Boxee produces open source software with a commercial tie-in. Those kinds of projects tend to be vulnerable to pressures like this. Boxee needs to play nice with the content providers and Hulu or else all their channels will close.
An independent open source project could have just told Hulu to go and fsck themselves.
Add to that I've also been in the technical side of the automation & robotics industry for many years. I'm very aware of what current tech is capable of. More so than you apparently.
You are missing the point. Although you are wrong on robotics and automation anyway, that doesn't really matter. What matters is what we know works and doesn't work today, as demonstrated by actual missions.
Mars global surveyor cost $200m and lasted for 10 years. Spirit and Opportunity cost $410m each and have lasted for six years each and counting. That's technology that works now and yields a wealth of scientific data. That makes any of these probes cheaper than the total cost of a space shuttle launch.
That technology is mature enough that we can scale it up to many more probes and get the cost down. We can make evolutionary improvements to propulsion, robotics, power, and autonomy. It's there, it works. The same technology works for Titan, Europa, Ceres, and lots of other bodies we should be visiting.
A manned mission to Mars using existing technology would cost upwards of $500 billion, and that's optimistic and assumes that some unsolved problems can be solved. It would deposit people on a single location on Mars for a few months and have a high risk of mission failure, both during planning and during the actual mission. It would yield less data than a good robotic probe could yield. Proposal like Mars Direct, on the other hand, are completely dependent on advances in robotics and autonomy. Targets other than Mars are completely unattainable with manned missions for the foreseeable future.
You wouldn't change your views under any circumstances.
Why should I? You haven't presented any coherent argument, and the numbers are crystal clear: we can invest upwards of $500 billion and have a slight change of getting a few men to Mars for a few months, or we can send a thousand robotic probes across the solar system, exploring dozens of worlds in detail and for years on end.
Of course, given that you (say you) come from the aerospace industry, it's easy to see where you're coming from: you like spending government and tax payer money on useless projects and fantasies. You still think of space exploration in terms of Buck Rogers and Star Trek.
If his managers order him to disclose the passwords, that's what he has to do. It doesn't matter whether it's on national television. But he could have handled it better.
He should have put in writing that he recommended against disclosing the passwords prior to doing so and asked his managers to sign off on it (a receipt, if you will).
Afterwards, he could either have quit, or he could have stayed on and dealt with the security fallout. Quitting probably would have been the more prudent choice.
Altogether, his managers come across as complete idiots, and he comes across as a bad employee. Everybody loses.
What you're overlooking here is that it isn't *just* hardware & tech that's involved here. It's learning how humans themselves react to long periods in space and how best to make sure the people not only arrive at their destination, but arrive alive, healthy, and sane.
What you're overlooking is that these human factors are being worked out as part of medical research anyway. And it's going to take a few decades whether or not we have a manned space program.
[Unmanned space probes] cannot think outside their programming. They cannot adapt to unforeseen problems and emergencies (see: Apollo 13). They are unable to interpret what they encounter, and change to meet new and unexpected circumstances.
They don't have to, they aren't on a schedule. They don't have to move fast or take risks. They can sit patiently for a few hours waiting for new instructions. And even if they do something wrong, it doesn't matter: for the price of a single human, we can send hundreds of probes that operate for years; it doesn't matter if even most of them fail.
But your assumption that machines can't do these things is wrong, too. Machines can already do those things, and they will be getting better and better at it over the next few decades.
I leave you to bask in the light of your own political/ideological blindness and ignorance.
You really have no clue about robotics or technology. Go back to reading science fiction novels and leave science and engineering to people who actually know something about it.
This has been known for quite a while. However, only fairly little information can be transmitted this way, and that information lives on a DNA substrate.
Think of the DNA as a printed book, and the "acquired characteristics" are like little bookmarks you leave in the book: they can't alter the text, but they can direct you more quickly to different parts and change your reading experience.
We've already progressed past '60s tech...or did you miss the shuttle program? If we let what we've learned atrophy from disuse
We have learned little that is relevant to the future of manned space flight because developments in material science, propulsion, biotech, and AI are making the technologies that our manned space program has been built on so far obsolete.
In 50 years, manned space flight will be easy even if we don't invest a dime in it until then, because a lot of necessary technologies will have been developed for other uses. But if we start spending a lot of money on manned space flight now, most of the money will be wasted because the technologies developed to make manned space flight happen today will be obsoleted by other technologies.
That's a common pattern in the history of science and engineering: if you start working on some technology too early, you end up finishing no faster than if you had simply waited and started with newer technologies in the first place.
Whether you like it or not, there *will* be a manned spaceflight program. It may end up being the Russians or the Chinese that end up controlling space and therefor the planet though if the US follows your ideas. [...] why not just come clean and say you want the US to become a second- or third-world nation?
Your assumption that manned space flight has any relevance to controlling space is just wrong. For the money that it takes to send a single crew to Mars, you can build thousands of intelligent robots that could be used to completely dominate space. If anybody is going to control space over the next decades, it's going to be with unmanned drones and satellites: they are cheap, effective, and can do anything a human can do--and better.
I can only assume you're holding to these views out of some sort of political or ideological beliefs, as the facts plainly contradict your ideas as you've stated them here.
The facts plainly contradict your position. You just don't see it because you are evidently ignorant of the history of science and the economics of innovation. You're apparently being driven by some kind of Star Trek fantasy.
Let the Russians and Chinese waste their money. The US should do the technologically and economically rational thing and put all its money into robotic space exploration for now. That promises the fastest progress for both manned and unmanned space flight.
If you piss off some one.. they will simply take a digital picture of your license plate and run through all the toll plazas they can find.
There are plenty of ways of making other people's lives miserable, so one more doesn't matter.
Don't laugh it is become a big problem in Europe where kids to get back a teachers.. take pic of the teachers license plate and then go speeding through as many speed traps as they can find.
A bunch of news reports does not make this "a big problem".
2) Most of the money doesn't go back to up keep of the road.. it goes to profit for the corporation running the toll system
That's still better than the current situation. Right now, I pay taxes and there is no guarantee that any road gets maintained around where I live.
At least the toll operators have an incentive of keeping the road operable.
Quite a few of the companies running such systems are run by European companies that take all the profits back home rather than reinvesting in this country.
Well, once there's a big enough market, American companies will get into the game too.
I'm tired of having my taxes go to maintaining roads halfway around the country. Let's move to a fully toll-based system where everybody pays for the roads they actually use.
This is not an either/or problem. There's no reason other than political posturing and pork-barrel spending why both manned and unmanned programs couldn't be seriously pursued.
Yes, there is: every dollar we spend on manned space exploration is more effectively spent on unmanned exploration right now; the resulting scientific and engineering insights will accelerate both unmanned and manned space exploration.
If you're that much of a monster that you're ok with sentencing a whole new crop of poor schmoes to repeat what we've already achieved
You're the monster, because you want to continue to send astronauts into space using flaky, dangerous 1960's technology, instead of creating the space technologies that make manned space exploration safe and efficient.
I'm sorry, but your type of view and attitude is the type of short-sighted Luddite-thinking that would still have people riding horses and reading by candle light.
You're the Luddite here: you're so eager to realize your Star Trek fantasies and so unwilling to look at space travel rationally that you end up holding space exploration back.
It's people like you that condemned us to a failed space shuttle program and "space stations" and that have held back space exploration by decades. If it weren't for your irrational insistence on constantly putting men into tin cans, we probably would have orbiting space habitats and manned interplanetary travel right now.
manned flight is a waste of money right now
on
Russia Aims Towards Mars
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Not trying to be insulting, but don't be penny-wise and pound-foolish. For a tiny fraction of the treasure wasted in the "stimulus" package just passed (and assuming that only a fraction of the total package is "waste"), we could have *both* types of programs fully-funded and running in parallel
There is no "fully funded" in unmanned space exploration. There are hundreds of targets we should be exploring and that we are technologically ready to explore, and we should be working our first interstellar probe. Every dollar that we spend on sending people into space right now is holding the space program back. Yes, it is even holding back manned space exploration, because any serious manned exploration will need the data, propulsion technologies, and robotic technologies that would be developed as part of unmanned space exploration.
The current manned space program is a colossal waste of money. We'd do well to go entirely unmanned for a few decades and then restart from scratch. If all the "skills and experienced personnel" from the programs that exist today are gone by then, that's not necessarily a bad thing; those people tend to think in old, expensive ways.
I am often asked why we can't vacuum up the particles. In fact, it would be more difficult than vacuuming up every square inch of the entire United States, it's larger and the fragments are mixed below the surface down to at least 30 meters. Also, untold numbers of organisms would be destroyed in the process. Besides, there is no economic resource that would be directly benefited by this process. We have not yet learned how to factor the health of the environment into our economic paradigm. We need to get to work on this calculus quickly, for a stock market crash will pale by comparison to an ecological crash on an oceanic scale.
The stuff that's floating around there is much, much harder to extract and use (it's tiny particles suspended in water) than the stuff we are still dumping every day. If we can't even be bothered to recycle all plastics and organics when they are in big trucks, what makes you think it's economical to do it halfway around the world, filtering millions of gallons of water to get at it?
Better to blame Begich, Murkowski, and Young, and the tendency for ALL legislatures to overlook other's pork in favor of having their own ignored.
You can blame all you want, that's not going to fix it.
What may fix it is to start paying for local infrastructure locally, and insisting on federal tax reductions. Local fees make those feasible because if you don't get much from the federal government, you don't have to engage in the horse trading that goes on.
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How much time do YOU spend analyzing at the rat's nest of cabling located under your desk
I have a webcam there with motion detection! You can never be too secure!
This would be a much better device with 4x USB and/or WiFi. Then, it could be used as a camera server and for similar purposes. If you have to add another powered external box for that, the small form factor quickly loses its appeal.
The press isn't one of those communities because the press doesn't deal in the kinds of concepts you can plagiarize. If AHN copied AP text verbatim, you might say that they plagiarized the writing, but then they would get sued for copyright infringement. But they are merely stating the same fact as a fact stated in an AP news story, and it's a fact that, unlike a scientific experiment, didn't require creativity to observe--it merely required presence.
So, I don't think it's plagiarism.
the skills needed to succeed in the field of technology.
That means that Microsoft is finally teaching people Linux and open source?
Liquid water can be stable on Mars' atmosphere provided the water contains a LOT of perchlorate minerals in the water.
It also works for pure water, barely.
The pressure on the surface of Mars is 600-1200 Pa (bottom of Hellas Basin). The triple point of water is at 611 Pa and 0.01C. Around the triple point, you gain about 0.02C in boiling point per Pa, so at lower elevations, you can have pure liquid water from about 0C to 10C. Surface temperature can reach 0C. So, you can barely have pure liquid water on the surface of Mars. People have actually verified this experimentally... it works.
That has a number of implications. Thawing frost can turn liquid and wet the soil microscopically. And many kinds of salt (not just perchlorate) will have a big effect.
No! X must not be ported! X must die!
Too late. X runs everywhere. It's a good, flexible set of protocols, and there are dozens of different implementations. Microsoft and Apple have been making their window systems more and more X-like over the years--but they are slower and less efficient.
The X Window System is like UNIX/Linux: so-called experts have hated it because they thought it should all be done differently, but in the end, it turns out that X (and UNIX) got it right from the start.
A 17000 sq ft cave is pretty cool, figuratively and literally. Great for geeks, great in times of global warming.
But who wants to live in Festus, MO?
You have no expectation of privacy on a public street. Why should you?
Trying to create such a right to privacy on public streets would be quite harmful to the interests of citizens in a democracy; we want to be able to record, document, and share what happens in public.
The real problem with surveillance cameras is that they are not public, so the police can use them against you, but you may not be able to use them against the police or government. Video from surveillance cameras should be publicly accessible by everybody.
Apple would probably just love to split the pie with Microsoft and enjoy a cozy duopoly. After all, both companies make their profits based on being as proprietary as they can get away with.
If Ballmer is really interested in openness, he can have that tomorrow: adopt Android, adopt SyncML, drop other proprietary protocols, open source .NET, etc.
Space based solar power is a useless idea. The earth's atmosphere is quite transparent to light, so you don't gain much by moving outside it. If you do everything right, you gain up to a factor of two because you can stay in sunlight much longer. But to get that modest improvement you pay many orders of magnitude more in transport and maintenance costs.
The biggest issue with space-based solar power, however, is that you're giving someone access to megawatts of power ready to be aimed at any point on the globe. The people who wan t space-based solar power want a weapon, nothing more.
I'm quite convinced someone sufficiently motivated could replicate the Eclipse IDE in ASCII format and functionality in emacs.
GNU Emacs has had Eclipse-like functionality for longer than Eclipse even exists.
Other versions of Emacs had IDEs that are still not matched by anything existing C++, Java, or C#.
Eclipse has a lot of buttons and windows, but other than that, it doesn't do that much.
Boxee produces open source software with a commercial tie-in. Those kinds of projects tend to be vulnerable to pressures like this. Boxee needs to play nice with the content providers and Hulu or else all their channels will close.
An independent open source project could have just told Hulu to go and fsck themselves.
Add to that I've also been in the technical side of the automation & robotics industry for many years. I'm very aware of what current tech is capable of. More so than you apparently.
You are missing the point. Although you are wrong on robotics and automation anyway, that doesn't really matter. What matters is what we know works and doesn't work today, as demonstrated by actual missions.
Mars global surveyor cost $200m and lasted for 10 years. Spirit and Opportunity cost $410m each and have lasted for six years each and counting. That's technology that works now and yields a wealth of scientific data. That makes any of these probes cheaper than the total cost of a space shuttle launch.
That technology is mature enough that we can scale it up to many more probes and get the cost down. We can make evolutionary improvements to propulsion, robotics, power, and autonomy. It's there, it works. The same technology works for Titan, Europa, Ceres, and lots of other bodies we should be visiting.
A manned mission to Mars using existing technology would cost upwards of $500 billion, and that's optimistic and assumes that some unsolved problems can be solved. It would deposit people on a single location on Mars for a few months and have a high risk of mission failure, both during planning and during the actual mission. It would yield less data than a good robotic probe could yield. Proposal like Mars Direct, on the other hand, are completely dependent on advances in robotics and autonomy. Targets other than Mars are completely unattainable with manned missions for the foreseeable future.
You wouldn't change your views under any circumstances.
Why should I? You haven't presented any coherent argument, and the numbers are crystal clear: we can invest upwards of $500 billion and have a slight change of getting a few men to Mars for a few months, or we can send a thousand robotic probes across the solar system, exploring dozens of worlds in detail and for years on end.
Of course, given that you (say you) come from the aerospace industry, it's easy to see where you're coming from: you like spending government and tax payer money on useless projects and fantasies. You still think of space exploration in terms of Buck Rogers and Star Trek.
If his managers order him to disclose the passwords, that's what he has to do. It doesn't matter whether it's on national television. But he could have handled it better.
He should have put in writing that he recommended against disclosing the passwords prior to doing so and asked his managers to sign off on it (a receipt, if you will).
Afterwards, he could either have quit, or he could have stayed on and dealt with the security fallout. Quitting probably would have been the more prudent choice.
Altogether, his managers come across as complete idiots, and he comes across as a bad employee. Everybody loses.
What you're overlooking here is that it isn't *just* hardware & tech that's involved here. It's learning how humans themselves react to long periods in space and how best to make sure the people not only arrive at their destination, but arrive alive, healthy, and sane.
What you're overlooking is that these human factors are being worked out as part of medical research anyway. And it's going to take a few decades whether or not we have a manned space program.
[Unmanned space probes] cannot think outside their programming. They cannot adapt to unforeseen problems and emergencies (see: Apollo 13). They are unable to interpret what they encounter, and change to meet new and unexpected circumstances.
They don't have to, they aren't on a schedule. They don't have to move fast or take risks. They can sit patiently for a few hours waiting for new instructions. And even if they do something wrong, it doesn't matter: for the price of a single human, we can send hundreds of probes that operate for years; it doesn't matter if even most of them fail.
But your assumption that machines can't do these things is wrong, too. Machines can already do those things, and they will be getting better and better at it over the next few decades.
I leave you to bask in the light of your own political/ideological blindness and ignorance.
You really have no clue about robotics or technology. Go back to reading science fiction novels and leave science and engineering to people who actually know something about it.
This has been known for quite a while. However, only fairly little information can be transmitted this way, and that information lives on a DNA substrate.
Think of the DNA as a printed book, and the "acquired characteristics" are like little bookmarks you leave in the book: they can't alter the text, but they can direct you more quickly to different parts and change your reading experience.
We've already progressed past '60s tech...or did you miss the shuttle program? If we let what we've learned atrophy from disuse
We have learned little that is relevant to the future of manned space flight because developments in material science, propulsion, biotech, and AI are making the technologies that our manned space program has been built on so far obsolete.
In 50 years, manned space flight will be easy even if we don't invest a dime in it until then, because a lot of necessary technologies will have been developed for other uses. But if we start spending a lot of money on manned space flight now, most of the money will be wasted because the technologies developed to make manned space flight happen today will be obsoleted by other technologies.
That's a common pattern in the history of science and engineering: if you start working on some technology too early, you end up finishing no faster than if you had simply waited and started with newer technologies in the first place.
Whether you like it or not, there *will* be a manned spaceflight program. It may end up being the Russians or the Chinese that end up controlling space and therefor the planet though if the US follows your ideas. [...] why not just come clean and say you want the US to become a second- or third-world nation?
Your assumption that manned space flight has any relevance to controlling space is just wrong. For the money that it takes to send a single crew to Mars, you can build thousands of intelligent robots that could be used to completely dominate space. If anybody is going to control space over the next decades, it's going to be with unmanned drones and satellites: they are cheap, effective, and can do anything a human can do--and better.
I can only assume you're holding to these views out of some sort of political or ideological beliefs, as the facts plainly contradict your ideas as you've stated them here.
The facts plainly contradict your position. You just don't see it because you are evidently ignorant of the history of science and the economics of innovation. You're apparently being driven by some kind of Star Trek fantasy.
Let the Russians and Chinese waste their money. The US should do the technologically and economically rational thing and put all its money into robotic space exploration for now. That promises the fastest progress for both manned and unmanned space flight.
Seriously, being _forced_ to spend $2/trashbag just to throw shit away in?
Are you really so dense that you don't really how costly getting rid of trash is?
If you don't want to pay the $2, keep the trash or find someone else to haul it away. Then you'll see that $2/bag is a good deal.
If you piss off some one.. they will simply take a digital picture of your license plate and run through all the toll plazas they can find.
There are plenty of ways of making other people's lives miserable, so one more doesn't matter.
Don't laugh it is become a big problem in Europe where kids to get back a teachers.. take pic of the teachers license plate and then go speeding through as many speed traps as they can find.
A bunch of news reports does not make this "a big problem".
2) Most of the money doesn't go back to up keep of the road .. it goes to profit for the corporation running the toll system
That's still better than the current situation. Right now, I pay taxes and there is no guarantee that any road gets maintained around where I live.
At least the toll operators have an incentive of keeping the road operable.
Quite a few of the companies running such systems are run by European companies that take all the profits back home rather than reinvesting in this country.
Well, once there's a big enough market, American companies will get into the game too.
I'm tired of having my taxes go to maintaining roads halfway around the country. Let's move to a fully toll-based system where everybody pays for the roads they actually use.
This is not an either/or problem. There's no reason other than political posturing and pork-barrel spending why both manned and unmanned programs couldn't be seriously pursued.
Yes, there is: every dollar we spend on manned space exploration is more effectively spent on unmanned exploration right now; the resulting scientific and engineering insights will accelerate both unmanned and manned space exploration.
If you're that much of a monster that you're ok with sentencing a whole new crop of poor schmoes to repeat what we've already achieved
You're the monster, because you want to continue to send astronauts into space using flaky, dangerous 1960's technology, instead of creating the space technologies that make manned space exploration safe and efficient.
I'm sorry, but your type of view and attitude is the type of short-sighted Luddite-thinking that would still have people riding horses and reading by candle light.
You're the Luddite here: you're so eager to realize your Star Trek fantasies and so unwilling to look at space travel rationally that you end up holding space exploration back.
It's people like you that condemned us to a failed space shuttle program and "space stations" and that have held back space exploration by decades. If it weren't for your irrational insistence on constantly putting men into tin cans, we probably would have orbiting space habitats and manned interplanetary travel right now.
Not trying to be insulting, but don't be penny-wise and pound-foolish. For a tiny fraction of the treasure wasted in the "stimulus" package just passed (and assuming that only a fraction of the total package is "waste"), we could have *both* types of programs fully-funded and running in parallel
There is no "fully funded" in unmanned space exploration. There are hundreds of targets we should be exploring and that we are technologically ready to explore, and we should be working our first interstellar probe. Every dollar that we spend on sending people into space right now is holding the space program back. Yes, it is even holding back manned space exploration, because any serious manned exploration will need the data, propulsion technologies, and robotic technologies that would be developed as part of unmanned space exploration.
The current manned space program is a colossal waste of money. We'd do well to go entirely unmanned for a few decades and then restart from scratch. If all the "skills and experienced personnel" from the programs that exist today are gone by then, that's not necessarily a bad thing; those people tend to think in old, expensive ways.
http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Ocean-Plastic-Landfill-Algalita1nov02.htm
The stuff that's floating around there is much, much harder to extract and use (it's tiny particles suspended in water) than the stuff we are still dumping every day. If we can't even be bothered to recycle all plastics and organics when they are in big trucks, what makes you think it's economical to do it halfway around the world, filtering millions of gallons of water to get at it?
I wasn't aware that bullets come with little radio beacons or flashing lights attached that say "I'm coming".
The only thing they do seem to do is make noise, and that's why gun detection systems use sound, not EM radiation.
Better to blame Begich, Murkowski, and Young, and the tendency for ALL legislatures to overlook other's pork in favor of having their own ignored.
You can blame all you want, that's not going to fix it.
What may fix it is to start paying for local infrastructure locally, and insisting on federal tax reductions. Local fees make those feasible because if you don't get much from the federal government, you don't have to engage in the horse trading that goes on.