Our God-given curiosity will force us to go there ourselves because in the final analysis, only man can fully evaluate the moon in terms understandable to other men.
-Gus Grissom
Gus was biased by his desire to go there personally. I don't blame him, but he wasn't planning to buy his own ticket. He also said that back when robots were incredibly primitive.
several instances where manual human intervention saved a mission when automated systems failed
Sure, they used the shuttle to put spectacles on Hubble but only because they already had the shuttle. Do the overall economics make sense? Unmanned missions are so much cheaper that you can just send another if the first fails. A bit embarrassing but no dead astronauts.
I'd also agree that sending the Mars automated rovers were the best first step, rather than jumping right to a manned landing.
For a fraction the price of a manned mission, we could send fleets of ever more advanced rovers. Probably even bring samples back to Earth. And go to even more interesting places, like the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
The myth only pops up with a certain subset of people who are utterly convinced that NASA spinoffs include computers and ICs.
I'll give you that. I've heard the same sort of ignorant worship for many things.
wasn't the whole Moon landing a "we tried it and who cares what it costs" type of exercise as well?
ii
Sure it was, but I'm skeptical of NASA using much CNC. It was very rare then and NASA's focus was on going to the moon, not developing manufacturing techniques that were not essential to that effort. NC may be another story, and already widely used. With few exceptions, CNC (and even NC) are more about doing things cheaper than about doing things you can't do by hand. For a handful of units, who cares.
Don't be brainwashed by all this "process" crap. These days you have to talk to guys in their 60's and 70's to get the full oral history, but they wistfully recall days when the emphasis was on getting things done and making them work, rather than mindlessly following "process". There were always procedures and so forth to keep documentation straight, but it was a means to an end instead of an end in itself. These days you get more brownie points for following process than you do for making things work. "Process" should be a way to get things done, not a fetish.
Nor was everything simple in the old days. For example, the B-29 project was hideously complex. If they'd injected modern "process" instead of making it work and writing ECO's, everyone west of the Mississippi would probably be speaking Japanese now.
Concrete was a useful technology. I'm not sure that's true of manned space flight. For a fraction of the money you can send a robot.
As someone who grew up as an enthusiastic proto-nerd on the Gemini and Apollo programs, I hate to say that. I still feel privileged that I lived at the time in history where I could watch the first man walk on the moon. But amongst the things we learned is that manned space flight is hideously expensive, and our robots have gotten a lot better since then too.
A typical design document for something like the F-1, though, was produced under intense deadline pressure and lacked even the barest forms of computerized design aids.
Thank goodness for that. People still know how to read paper drawings. If it was computerized, we might be able to read the media if it survived (1/2" mag tape or punch cards) but would probably have to spend a lot of time reverse engineering obsolete CAD formats.
This flies in the face of at least history. It also flies in the face of the usual mythology that NASA invented the computer. Which is it?
I never heard that myth. But NASA and its contractors were pioneers in some CAD tech, like FEM (finite element modelling), and the computers for Apollo spacecraft designed at MIT/Lincoln labs were marvels of miniaturization for their day.
But by 1963 manufacturing, at least for the money-means-nothing military, was already computerized.
Maybe a tiny amount of it. Don't confuse NC (numerically controlled) with CNC (computer numerically controlled). NC was developed largely in the late 40's and was widely used by the 50's. It used relay logic and so forth. CNC was too expensive until "inexpensive" minicomputers came along later in the 60's, and didn't take off until micros came along in the 70's. The video probably shows a futuristic "we tried it who cares what it costs" type of setup, like Doug Engelbart's WIMP interfaces in the 60's. Good forward looking stuff, but not necessarily ubiquitous, even for NASA.
I think states and cities should be rolling out their own fiber. Sort of like building roads. And then subsidize installation... Cites could then individually choose to offer "free" internet.... Cities pay for these sorts of things through property taxes.... I may be libertarian but I classify this as necessary infrastructure that will benefit the vast majority.
Considering your plan, you are definitely not a libertarian. Even this statist pinko thinks it's going too far. What would be reasonable is a municipally owned utility, but it would have to pay for itself through subscription fees. Even though I'd take advantage of it, I'd go ballistic if this were paid for with my property taxes.
Open borders, maybe that's a good idea. It wouldn't be restricted to programmers and engineers though, right? Anybody regardless of income or skills could just come and go. And it would be reciprocal of course, so other countries would have open borders and I could go live anywhere I wanted. Alright, I'm a little busy right now, but get back to me when you convince a majority of the American people, and the populations of at least a few other major countries that it's a good idea. In the interim I don't think we should have a unilateral policy that applies only to programmers and engineers and provides for indentured servants (oops, I mean guest workers) instead immigrants. The appropriate name for somebody who'd accept such a partial implementation of your idea is "sucker".
H-1B advocates are notoriously averse to "facts", as they have trouble finding any that support their arguments. But that's ok, because if you're rich and the Washington Post will slavishly print any drivel you write, you're obviously right and only have the best interests of the country at heart.
they're stretching the definition of "middle class"
Hardly. You and your wife are obviously doing quite well (and you're making way above average, even for a senior programmer) but you are upper middle class, and a long way from being rich.
I know the curve there is definitely not linear, but you're still comparing people WAY above average, with other people way above average
"Not linear" may get you the understatement of the year award. It's dicey comparing wealth and income, but let's have a little back of the envelope fun. $200k/yr is about 14x full-time minimum wage. Congratulations, you're living the American dream. If Zuckerberg is worth $9.3B and he made it over 10 years, that's 4650x your income. 14 vs 4650? Where I come from we don't call that roughly equivalent. We don't even call it the same ball park. Charitably it's only a couple of galaxies over.
Tech companies don't have 4+ years to wait to hire people
An example of the tantrums I mentioned. You're sooo special and important that we should change all the rules for you.
Not to mention people use this same argument every time there is a labor shortage, and it has yet to be proven true.
Right. No increase in the number of programmers in the 90's. No crash in CS enrollments after the tech crash. Programmers are such a special market that the laws of supply and demand are suspended.
new college grad who plodded through school because "the money is good"
How awful! They should do it for the love of it, just like Zuckerberg. I also don't want a doctor who plodded through school because "the money is good", so I'll only see physicians who work for free. Thankfully I haven't gotten sick lately.
Google... Facebook... the products and services these companies created have kickstarted or revitalized a lot of other industries
Right, housing, cars, restaurants, aircraft, etc. are all booming because Google and Facebook are selling more advertising. Those online ads, customized by sniffing up their users butts, are just sooo important to the rest of the economy.
Creating artificial scarcity
Oh, those artificial scarcities are just so terrible. Thank heavens they've gotten rid of them so I can now travel to any country I want and get a job. Or that doctors, dentists, lawyers and accountants from any country can just come here and work, because their services used to be so expensive. Or that region pricing has been eliminated. This global village is great!
You responded to a comment that addressed it, then claimed you didn't mention it, when you directly replied to a comment that mentioned it
Putting aside the redundancy in your sentence, replying to a comment that mentioned "claims" does not mean that I mentioned "claims", because I did not address that specific part of your post. It actually is possible to make more than one point in a post. Even trickier: sometimes I make obvious inferences.
And even quoted it
Yes, believe it or not it's actually possible to make more than one point, even in a single sentence! That's even more true when the sentence involves an obvious implication. However, a sentence fragment necessary to extricate a single point in a sentence does not always lead to a comprehensible result. Hence it is left as an exercise for the reader to infer which point is being addressed in the rebuttal.
If you don't find it worthy of addressing, why did you?
Forgive me if I assumed that the lapse in your logic might be temporary. On weekends I tilt at windmills.
Does not include anybody who has switched to waiting tables because they have to make ends meet. Of course most of those people will never get another SWE job because of the prejudice that says anybody who has been out of the field for a year or two must not be any good. Hellooo! Have any of the hiring geniuses who take this attitude been out in the job market lately? I've known lots of very good people who were out of work for that long. This is about perceptions and prejudice, not quality.
Sure, I'd have no problem hiring them away from another company if they want to leave, but that does zero to solve the resource shortage.
Yes, it does. It's based on a principle called a "market". The idea is that if a "resource" (formerly known as skilled people) is in short supply, then the price will rise. Hence more people will enter that market, and the "shortage" will disappear. I know it's a radical idea, but it just might work.
Please note that this response is not always instantaneous, particularly when dealing with a "resource" that may require years of education. Unfortunately many of our tech "leaders" have tantrums when they don't get what they want immediately. They figure that since they can fire as many people as they want at a moment's notice, they should be able to hire as many people with specialized skills as they want at a moment's notice. If this is not possible they suddenly turn socialist and ask the government for help. Once satisfied by the government's largesse, they immediately revert to being capitalists.
An interesting history lesson: at one time many tech and business leaders seem to have more emotional maturity than a five year old, and were less prone to throwing tantrums. Old fashioned folks opine that this was because they were taught by a mommy government that didn't immediately give in to every demand. Many of these leaders learned to fend for themselves more, just like grownups! For example, knowing that large numbers of highly skilled people couldn't be hired at a moment's notice, they would retain many of the skilled people they had hired, even when business wasn't great. In the short term this reduced their company's profits, but like mature people they were willing to make that sacrifice for the delayed gratification of having those people available when business improved. For example, IBM instituted a no layoffs policy in the midst of the Great Depression. Note to younger readers: as hard as it may be to believe, this is actual history, not a fairy tale.
Slashdot Mirror
Our God-given curiosity will force us to go there ourselves because in the final analysis, only man can fully evaluate the moon in terms understandable to other men. -Gus Grissom
Gus was biased by his desire to go there personally. I don't blame him, but he wasn't planning to buy his own ticket. He also said that back when robots were incredibly primitive.
several instances where manual human intervention saved a mission when automated systems failed
Sure, they used the shuttle to put spectacles on Hubble but only because they already had the shuttle. Do the overall economics make sense? Unmanned missions are so much cheaper that you can just send another if the first fails. A bit embarrassing but no dead astronauts.
I'd also agree that sending the Mars automated rovers were the best first step, rather than jumping right to a manned landing.
For a fraction the price of a manned mission, we could send fleets of ever more advanced rovers. Probably even bring samples back to Earth. And go to even more interesting places, like the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
The myth only pops up with a certain subset of people who are utterly convinced that NASA spinoffs include computers and ICs.
I'll give you that. I've heard the same sort of ignorant worship for many things.
wasn't the whole Moon landing a "we tried it and who cares what it costs" type of exercise as well?
ii Sure it was, but I'm skeptical of NASA using much CNC. It was very rare then and NASA's focus was on going to the moon, not developing manufacturing techniques that were not essential to that effort. NC may be another story, and already widely used. With few exceptions, CNC (and even NC) are more about doing things cheaper than about doing things you can't do by hand. For a handful of units, who cares.
Don't be brainwashed by all this "process" crap. These days you have to talk to guys in their 60's and 70's to get the full oral history, but they wistfully recall days when the emphasis was on getting things done and making them work, rather than mindlessly following "process". There were always procedures and so forth to keep documentation straight, but it was a means to an end instead of an end in itself. These days you get more brownie points for following process than you do for making things work. "Process" should be a way to get things done, not a fetish.
Nor was everything simple in the old days. For example, the B-29 project was hideously complex. If they'd injected modern "process" instead of making it work and writing ECO's, everyone west of the Mississippi would probably be speaking Japanese now.
Concrete was a useful technology. I'm not sure that's true of manned space flight. For a fraction of the money you can send a robot.
As someone who grew up as an enthusiastic proto-nerd on the Gemini and Apollo programs, I hate to say that. I still feel privileged that I lived at the time in history where I could watch the first man walk on the moon. But amongst the things we learned is that manned space flight is hideously expensive, and our robots have gotten a lot better since then too.
A typical design document for something like the F-1, though, was produced under intense deadline pressure and lacked even the barest forms of computerized design aids.
Thank goodness for that. People still know how to read paper drawings. If it was computerized, we might be able to read the media if it survived (1/2" mag tape or punch cards) but would probably have to spend a lot of time reverse engineering obsolete CAD formats.
This flies in the face of at least history. It also flies in the face of the usual mythology that NASA invented the computer. Which is it?
I never heard that myth. But NASA and its contractors were pioneers in some CAD tech, like FEM (finite element modelling), and the computers for Apollo spacecraft designed at MIT/Lincoln labs were marvels of miniaturization for their day.
But by 1963 manufacturing, at least for the money-means-nothing military, was already computerized.
Maybe a tiny amount of it. Don't confuse NC (numerically controlled) with CNC (computer numerically controlled). NC was developed largely in the late 40's and was widely used by the 50's. It used relay logic and so forth. CNC was too expensive until "inexpensive" minicomputers came along later in the 60's, and didn't take off until micros came along in the 70's. The video probably shows a futuristic "we tried it who cares what it costs" type of setup, like Doug Engelbart's WIMP interfaces in the 60's. Good forward looking stuff, but not necessarily ubiquitous, even for NASA.
I wonder how much will the corrector lens cost.
Corrector lenses are cheap - it's the service call that ups the bill.
Only if you volunteer to get it up.
Even for /. that's an odd way to phrase it.
Careful what you ask for. Lots of people will volunteer, but will the OP pick up the tab?
World's largest optical telescope is $1.3 billion! You could buy half a stealth bomber for that.
Could you see a stealth bomber with the telescope?
Search engines are your friend: TMT.
Amazing technology.
Cue flamebait about lazy USians needing TLA's for everything
Shouldn't the be USAians?
I think states and cities should be rolling out their own fiber. Sort of like building roads. And then subsidize installation ... Cites could then individually choose to offer "free" internet. ... Cities pay for these sorts of things through property taxes. ... I may be libertarian but I classify this as necessary infrastructure that will benefit the vast majority.
Considering your plan, you are definitely not a libertarian. Even this statist pinko thinks it's going too far. What would be reasonable is a municipally owned utility, but it would have to pay for itself through subscription fees. Even though I'd take advantage of it, I'd go ballistic if this were paid for with my property taxes.
cities in between the Alleghenies and the Rockies
Have about a nice little burg like Chicago.
Probably not, but the coax is a sunk cost. New housing construction would be another story.
Open borders, maybe that's a good idea. It wouldn't be restricted to programmers and engineers though, right? Anybody regardless of income or skills could just come and go. And it would be reciprocal of course, so other countries would have open borders and I could go live anywhere I wanted. Alright, I'm a little busy right now, but get back to me when you convince a majority of the American people, and the populations of at least a few other major countries that it's a good idea. In the interim I don't think we should have a unilateral policy that applies only to programmers and engineers and provides for indentured servants (oops, I mean guest workers) instead immigrants. The appropriate name for somebody who'd accept such a partial implementation of your idea is "sucker".
Where are the facts?
H-1B advocates are notoriously averse to "facts", as they have trouble finding any that support their arguments. But that's ok, because if you're rich and the Washington Post will slavishly print any drivel you write, you're obviously right and only have the best interests of the country at heart.
they're stretching the definition of "middle class"
Hardly. You and your wife are obviously doing quite well (and you're making way above average, even for a senior programmer) but you are upper middle class, and a long way from being rich.
I know the curve there is definitely not linear, but you're still comparing people WAY above average, with other people way above average
"Not linear" may get you the understatement of the year award. It's dicey comparing wealth and income, but let's have a little back of the envelope fun. $200k/yr is about 14x full-time minimum wage. Congratulations, you're living the American dream. If Zuckerberg is worth $9.3B and he made it over 10 years, that's 4650x your income. 14 vs 4650? Where I come from we don't call that roughly equivalent. We don't even call it the same ball park. Charitably it's only a couple of galaxies over.
Tech companies don't have 4+ years to wait to hire people
An example of the tantrums I mentioned. You're sooo special and important that we should change all the rules for you.
Not to mention people use this same argument every time there is a labor shortage, and it has yet to be proven true.
Right. No increase in the number of programmers in the 90's. No crash in CS enrollments after the tech crash. Programmers are such a special market that the laws of supply and demand are suspended.
new college grad who plodded through school because "the money is good"
How awful! They should do it for the love of it, just like Zuckerberg. I also don't want a doctor who plodded through school because "the money is good", so I'll only see physicians who work for free. Thankfully I haven't gotten sick lately.
Google ... Facebook ... the products and services these companies created have kickstarted or revitalized a lot of other industries
Right, housing, cars, restaurants, aircraft, etc. are all booming because Google and Facebook are selling more advertising. Those online ads, customized by sniffing up their users butts, are just sooo important to the rest of the economy.
Creating artificial scarcity
Oh, those artificial scarcities are just so terrible. Thank heavens they've gotten rid of them so I can now travel to any country I want and get a job. Or that doctors, dentists, lawyers and accountants from any country can just come here and work, because their services used to be so expensive. Or that region pricing has been eliminated. This global village is great!
There is greed on both sides
Billionaire who wants to shave a few bucks off the payroll versus people who want to keep their middle class jobs. Clearly equivalent.
You responded to a comment that addressed it, then claimed you didn't mention it, when you directly replied to a comment that mentioned it
Putting aside the redundancy in your sentence, replying to a comment that mentioned "claims" does not mean that I mentioned "claims", because I did not address that specific part of your post. It actually is possible to make more than one point in a post. Even trickier: sometimes I make obvious inferences.
And even quoted it
Yes, believe it or not it's actually possible to make more than one point, even in a single sentence! That's even more true when the sentence involves an obvious implication. However, a sentence fragment necessary to extricate a single point in a sentence does not always lead to a comprehensible result. Hence it is left as an exercise for the reader to infer which point is being addressed in the rebuttal.
If you don't find it worthy of addressing, why did you?
Forgive me if I assumed that the lapse in your logic might be temporary. On weekends I tilt at windmills.
The current 2.2% SWE unemployment figure
Does not include anybody who has switched to waiting tables because they have to make ends meet. Of course most of those people will never get another SWE job because of the prejudice that says anybody who has been out of the field for a year or two must not be any good. Hellooo! Have any of the hiring geniuses who take this attitude been out in the job market lately? I've known lots of very good people who were out of work for that long. This is about perceptions and prejudice, not quality.
Sure, I'd have no problem hiring them away from another company if they want to leave, but that does zero to solve the resource shortage.
Yes, it does. It's based on a principle called a "market". The idea is that if a "resource" (formerly known as skilled people) is in short supply, then the price will rise. Hence more people will enter that market, and the "shortage" will disappear. I know it's a radical idea, but it just might work.
Please note that this response is not always instantaneous, particularly when dealing with a "resource" that may require years of education. Unfortunately many of our tech "leaders" have tantrums when they don't get what they want immediately. They figure that since they can fire as many people as they want at a moment's notice, they should be able to hire as many people with specialized skills as they want at a moment's notice. If this is not possible they suddenly turn socialist and ask the government for help. Once satisfied by the government's largesse, they immediately revert to being capitalists.
An interesting history lesson: at one time many tech and business leaders seem to have more emotional maturity than a five year old, and were less prone to throwing tantrums. Old fashioned folks opine that this was because they were taught by a mommy government that didn't immediately give in to every demand. Many of these leaders learned to fend for themselves more, just like grownups! For example, knowing that large numbers of highly skilled people couldn't be hired at a moment's notice, they would retain many of the skilled people they had hired, even when business wasn't great. In the short term this reduced their company's profits, but like mature people they were willing to make that sacrifice for the delayed gratification of having those people available when business improved. For example, IBM instituted a no layoffs policy in the midst of the Great Depression. Note to younger readers: as hard as it may be to believe, this is actual history, not a fairy tale.
So you are arguing that the US does not claim a merit-based society?
Since I didn't even mention what the US claims, it's incomprehensible why you would ask that.
Don't worry, we'll get a guest worker program for skilled trades next year.
Right, but studying medicine is a piece of cake. Think of something besides the "hard work" line; it's getting old.