It's frustrating for me because there's now two totally independent sets of comments that I may want to read. People posting in one article will continue to post there and only there (and may not even have any idea about the other article). Frequently the same sorts of posts will end up in both places redundantly, sometimes prompting replies in both places if you want to get your viewpoint known.
Plus, it's just annoying and amateurish to keep seeing them over and over and over again. This is supposed to be a high-tech-oriented site, yet the folks at MSNBC seem to do a better job at managing articles.
Yah, because, you know, the media is unbiased and devoted to understanding the truth and the circumstances surrounding it, right? They wouldn't cater to the public's lust for blame. Certainly not.
I find it amusing that you're pointing us at the media's take on the events and not the real reports and interviews.
Hindsight is 20/20. Always remember that.
Until you actually work in a high-risk position like this, I don't think you will ever understand what it's like to have a small army of experts dealing with issues like this every day and determining levels of acceptable risk. I'm quite frankly getting a little disgusted at this lust for blood here.
Clearly the shuttle wasn't "designed" for these types of impacts. And if you read the article, it says the shuttle is routinely impacted 50-100 times during each mission by small debris. When it was discovered that the shuttle does get impacted, what would you have rather done? Scrap the design and start anew? Or examine the design and construction and determine whether or not those impacts actually posed a danger? They did the latter, and determined they did not. Over a hundred missions later without a hiccup, and then a larger-than-normal impact in a more-sensitive-than-normal place and it's all over. Hindsight is 20/20, but at the time, the risk from both a potential impact of this kind was acceptable, and the likelyhood for damage after investigating this impact was determined to be acceptable.
Design or no design, impacts were very much investigated and the experts determined that the risk would be acceptable. This goes back to my picture frame example. Not designed for an impact, but small impacts are perfectly safe. To redesign a picture frame to withstand impacts at a certain rating would be cost-prohibitive and unnecessary.
If this is indeed what brought the shuttle down, clearly that determination was in error. But I'm frankly getting a little sick of people calling for resignations and blood. Again, if you think you can do a better job of risk assessment, NASA NEEDS YOU. Stop posting on Slashdot and actually do something about the problem. It's easy to criticize others (founded or not), but you're not helping the situation.
Would actual candidates who differed from each other and offered something of interest reduce apathy?
Look beyond the two major party candidates. I've generally found only the two major party candidates are the ones that were effectively clones.
Would a "check off all acceptable candidates" (not 1-4, just yeah/nay) make a difference and broaden the number of parties from the republicrat monopoly?
Ahhhh, yes. There are lots of different voting methods out there that I think would revolutionize our system here. Borda counts, approval votes, etc., are definitely worth looking at. I continue to be surprised when these things are used by scientists, at board meetings and everywhere that people really need the best score for a list of candidates, yet in government elections, we stick with the dumb "pick the best". The major political parties know they'll be out the door if something like this ever got through the legislature, so I suspect it'll take an act of God to make this happen.
Or is the answer closed source voting software controlled by questionably influenced companies?
I personally would like to see some open-source voting mechanisms out there. Use open cryptography standards to ensure validity, generate a printout of each person's vote so that a manual recount is possible, and publish your methods and protocols.
Second to that, I don't think a closed-source solution is that bad here. So long as there's sufficient auditing going on, and a compulsory manual count for a random certain percentage of the polling locations, and you'll have a fairly good idea whether or not the software is doing its job.
To leave the design as-is is to subject yourself to a risk you have not accounted for.
Unless you study the risks and determine that the existing design is capable of handling it.
I do have an engineering degree and I do have a graduate degree in engineering risk analysis.
So basically, you're saying that you're smarter than the guys running things at NASA and you think you can do things better than they can, right? I just want to be sure that's what you're trying to get off your chest here.
Because they said it? Repeatedly? Because this is what all of the published information about the conversations, e-mails that went between researchers, managers, etc.? The event and review have undergone a tremendous amount of scrutiny, and most of that was as transparent as I've ever seen.
The leading edges and the protective tiles were never designed for ANY impact.
So? I have a picture frame that wasn't intended to withstand an impact. If I throw a ball at it, though, I can pretty accurately estimate whether or not that frame will be damaged based on the nature of the ball, the speed I throw it, and where the impact occurs.
Do you want me to repeat that.
If it makes you feel better..
he leading edge Carbon-Carbon structures and the protective tiles were never designed for any impact.
Do you feel better?
under conditions it was not designed for and which they did not understand.
I don't guess you're in charge of many missions to space, so I'll try to explain this in layman's terms. Operating an orbiting spacecraft is a high-risk endeavor. You very much do take into account potential unexpected hazards when you design and build one of these crafts. You take certain economical measures to ensure that things like micrometeroid impacts don't threaten the life of your crew, and try to plan contingencies to handle unexpected events. Just because someone didn't "rate" the craft's hull for a certain type of impact doesn't mean impacts of that type were completely ignored or unplanned for, or that the craft will be unable to withstand them.
Again, go look at the immense volume of information published during this investigation. This wasn't a cursory ho-hum "it doesn't matter" check, nor was it a "holy crap, it wasn't designed for this, they're going to die, but let's not tell anyone" type of thing. The experts there (of which you are not one) examined the data at their disposal (which you do not possess) and consulted their own education and experience with the program (which you do not have) and made a determination (which you are not qualified to do) that the risk to the orbiter was low. This is proving to be incorrect. That doesn't mean they "fucked up". They had no way of knowing any better. Again, if you're 99% right 100 times, you'll be wrong once. It happens. Deal with it.
If you're going to ignore the advice of the experts, just because that advice very infrequently ends up being wrong, you are going to end up wrong far more often than not, much to the detriment of the space program and the lives of those depending on you.
Especially when equipment is experiencing conditions it was never designed for.
If you can design a spacecraft that's perfectly safe, and designed to withstand any and all forms of abuse and unexpected events that the existing orbiter could potentially experience, and do that at a cost less than 100 times what the existing orbiter costs, you will be rich.
Again, sending people into orbit is a highly risky activity. You have to spend money to be prepared for certain types of events, but when the likelyhood of those events is low and the cost to mitigate them is high, you have to make a decision and frequently a compromise. If you don't understand this, or have issues with it, feel free to make them known, but I applaud our astronauts for being willing to take these risks on our behalf, and I applaud NASA for making the achievents they do with the funding they have. I wouldn't have it any other way.
continued to flaunt their disregard for basic engineering principles.
Whoa there, this is a pretty loaded statement. In what ways does NASA continue to "flaunt their disregard for basic engineering principles"? Care to give us some examples? Or are you just throwing out unsubstantiated, emotional statements because you're pissed off at something?
Do we continue to have Slashdot readers that think they can do a better job than the guys with the PhD's and decades of experience? Maybe you should start up your own space exploration company.
Based on the information they had at the time, the risk that there would be catastrophic damage from the foam hitting the wing was not significant.
If you are 99% positive about something 100 times, you will be wrong once. Sometimes margins of error and lack of data lead you to an incorrect conclusion.
They could not have foreseen the damage and based on their extensive knowledge of the orbiter and the nature of the foam and impact, determined that any damage was unlikely to pose a re-entry risk.
This may seen "obvious" to you and all of the other armchair NASA administrators out there, but they had to investigate to be sure, and to understand precisely what happened and how it happened so that when similar situations come up in the future, they can make a more educated analysis of what form of damage is likely and what that damage is capable of. It would be just as irresponsible for them to claim this was the problem and close the book on the case in the first week.
Please give the guys at NASA a little more credit.
This is relevant only in the very narrowly defined areas of active intelligence and active military operations.
And public safety. The patrol routes of domestic police, the response strategies for certain types of attacks or crimes, etc. (Though with a loss of privacy in many respects, perhaps domestic problems where this information is valuable simply wouldn't occur?)
Good point, though.
the reasons for those actions are in fact the items being made transparent, and the reason WHY you need transparent government.
And I might suggest that some areas still may need to be kept from the public, at least until certain events pass. Things that might incite a mob panic, for example.
I think this could be a very good idea, though. Perhaps the areas (like, as you suggest, active military and intelligence) that are "exempt" from the transparency should be made that way only through oversight of related branches? (I.e., in the US, amend the Constitution so that it requires transparency in all government activities where that transparency does not expose a demonstrable risk to life. The legislature can, through legislation, allow certain activities to become less-than-transparent, and judicial oversight can ensure that that follows the spirit of the amendment..)
This sounds like a good exercise for a sociology class.
Quite how one can wipe one's arse, or have a Tommy Tank, in such a situation, is beyond my feeble mind
In a world free of privacy, activities like this would need to be tolerated and respected. It gets to the point where it ceases to be a nasty curiosity and becomes another of those things you don't really care to think about.
if we're going to be monitored by the government, then we need to be able to monitor their every activity also.
A very excellent point! But it also has a hidden prerequisite: that the people watching the government understand why some seemingly strange or dangerous decisions may be necessary. Faith in one's leaders is very important. Complete transparency can be dangerous if we're allowing the general public to influence the informed decisions of someone at the center of it all.
Plus, if your government is transparent to its citizens, it's also transparent to its enemies. In an ideal world, nations wouldn't be working against each other, and this wouldn't matter.
We're still a long ways away from a world where these concepts would work.
Given access to this sort of data, they will abuse it.
Then I highly suggest you re-examine your choice in ISP's. You may have missed the second point I was trying to make: they already have the means to do this today! Nearly any enterprise-quality network device has modes of operation that allow snooping of network traffic. There is nothing stopping malicious ISP's from performing these acts right this second. These new "features" simply allow this type of snopping to be done with a high degree of sensitivity to the privacy of other users' data that might otherwise be captured accidentally with the way things are done today.
"Hmmm, I wonder what kind of weird things so-and-so is into? Let's just take a peek at his account..."
This disgusts me. I too have worked for Internet providers, and these privileges were never made available to lowly techs (that were immature enough to act like this). There was more than ample oversight and auditing to prevent this very type of abuse. If your ISP is filled with people like you, I highly suggest you find another ISP now.
And if there are other ISP tech managers reading this, please ask yourself if your guys can or will have access to the tools to perform this type of abuse. If you're hiring high school kiddies, I really hope it's common sense to keep their privileges restricted in this regard.
Physical limitations that provide what we today call "privacy" are already on the way out the door. In a hundred years, technology will be at the point where every private citizen will be able to see and hear just about anything anywhere.
Whether this is good or bad for society is another matter, but it's been suggested that we'll simply need to adapt. Arguably, using information obtained through "privacy-invading" means is just childish immaturity, when you look at the big picture. Maybe our society just needs to grow out of that?
Fighting change in this area of technology only delays the inevitable and keeps the abilities in the hands of the surreptitious and those who *would* use it solely for their own benefit.
So does it hurt your privacy more when an ISP has to honor a subpoena by collecting *all data* flowing through a switch, sift through it by hand, and pull out anything that might be related to the user in question, or by activating a feature designed for the purpose and guaranteed to pull exactly the data you're interested in?
At all times, this equipment is completely under the control of the ISP, not your local evil abusive government. One way or the other, your ISP has to honor the subpoena. This just lets them do it with a minimum of unnecessary traffic monitored.
I do wholeheartedly agree, though, that some form of auditing (the digital signature idea was good) along with the capturing of data is highly desirable, but really, there's little incentive for your ISP to abuse these features any more than they're abusing their abilities today. They already have more than enough technology to sniff all of your Internet traffic today.
My experiences do not agree with yours. I do exactly the same thing and have given out only maybe 50-75 e-mail addresses so conceived. Out of those, 5-10 of them receive spam, including two or three sites (e.g. HAM Radio Outlet) that I'd never suspect. It's not just spam from related advertisers, it's the nasty penis enlargement spam, porn, etc.
(Indeed, when I confront many of these sites with this information, they seem legitimately confused and concerned, and in most cases, don't believe my story and never do anything further to investigate.)
Some of the other ones I expected to get spam from, including web sites using 3rd-party collection agents like CCbill, and two or three "removal" forms set up by spammers. (Two or three out of 20 or so.. not a bad rate, but still bad.)
More qualified how? What insight into alien biochemistry does a background in artificial intelligence give you?
Remember that life forms evolving on other worlds are going to be doing so using the same elements that we deal with in chemistry today. It's highly unlikely that a JVM is going to spontaneously appear on some world and artificial life forms are going to evolve within it. More likely, it will be a traditional series of complex chemical reactions. Understanding how these molecules interact with each other is the foundation for understanding how life (in any form) can evolve. I really don't think your area of expertise makes you more qualified to speak on these matters than those who explicitly study these things. In fact, you've just secured your place among the Slashdot couch scientists I was speaking of. Everyone thinks they have experience in some slightly related field, so they must be smarter than those that have been studying and researching these specific things for dozens of years. Please concede the possibility that they are more qualified than you are to make these types of statements.
or perhaps some subtle physical effect we don't even know about yet.
If we don't know about it yet, it's unlikely that the effect will occur enough with a frequency or significance that life will evolve based on it.
Likewise with your other points. These things are not noticable to ordinary matter, which makes it unlikely for these things to affect ordinary matter in such a way as to create life based on ordinary matter.
It is possible that chemical-based life will evolve (probably deliberately) to some form of life based on more complex phenomena, but odds are, it's gone through that "chemical" phase first. It makes most sense to start our search there, one way or the other.
No offense to you personally, but I trust the biologists and astrophysicists with PhD's a little more about what types of life might be out there than most Slashdot couch scientists. (Not that you're one, but a lot of Slashdot posters are asking the same questions, and I would really hope that the people paid to think about these things would have come up with these questions and satisfactory responses to them by now...)
carbon is the only good choice for rich biochemistry.
This is based on the analysis of one single biosphere. Again, generalizations based on a sample set of one.
Chemical interactions are understood fairly well. Carbon is the only element that is capable of a hugely diverse set of molecules, owing to its relatively small mass and its ability to bond with a large number of other elements. This complexity makes it uniquely suitable for complex chemical reactions, which are needed to develop life.
Other primary elements (like Silicon) achieve a similar degree of freedom in their bondings, but their mass is greater and bonds proportionally weaker, making them less flexible in the long run.
Lots of study has gone into what other forms life might be able to take. Lots of imagination and toying with elements in a variety of environments, and we haven't come up with anything as flexible as carbon-based life.
What of water vapor? Consider this, and your wild guesses could at least include those Jovian planets. You have to get past such provincial thinking.
Without a surface of liquid water, it's very difficult to get even single-celled life to catch hold. If all of your water is in the form of vapor in the atmosphere, in what medium do you plan on getting different chemicals and acids together in just the right way? In order for your rudimentary forms of life to progress, they have to be able to propel themselves through the air in order to "feed" off of other chemicals and raw material. You really need a fairly viscous medium for organisms to push themselves against in order to move around, and to carry nutrients. It's unlikely that this viscous medium will be anything other than water if water is present in any form.
So no, water vapor is not likely to do the job as well. But I suppose it's possible. I don't exactly have a xenobiology degree either.
Further, a planet must exist long enough for evolution to occur.
This is an even wilder assumption (unwarranted generalization).
I disagree, but I suspect that's because I disagree with your other points. If I bought into the suggestion that forms of life are equally likely to take other, non-carbon, non-liquid-water-originating forms, this assumption might not necessarily be accurate.
But still, how long do you think is "long enough"? Do you think a spacefaring species can evolve in 100 years? 1000? 100,000? 100 million? As the article says, it took about 800 million years for us to evolve, but single-celled organisms still needed a few billion years to come about first. Granted, this is a single data point, as you note, but can you suggest a better one, based on the data we have?
If you are looking for intelligent life out there, throwing a dart at a star chart while blindfolded makes as much sense.
I completely disagree here. You are deliberately ignoring the one data point we do have. What the researchers here are doing is saying, "OK, we probably have a whole spectrum of environments and situations where life can evolve. Let's eliminate the conditions that make it completely unlikely that any form of life can take hold and put the rest on a probability function with our situation at its peak."
Absolutely this is making an assumption that life will evolve elsewhere that is similar to life on earth. But what you fail to acknowledge is that there is no evidence to suggest life can evolve in any other way. In fact, we've been collecting a lot of evidence lately that suggests many other "alternative" families of chemicals do not give rise to conditions that may make life possible. That's why those conditions are excluded. We aren't being closed-minded, we're filtering the data set based on the data we do have.
shouldn't the goal be too look for life, rather than just a much more limited and unlikely type of life?
The analog solution from the electronic world would be for the publishers send them an confirmation letter or something asking whether they really subscribed.
In that situation, they'd send 600 letters instead of 600 magazines.
your views of letting the government take care of everything rather than relying upon ones honor and reputation rather than upon legal action
You are drawing some extreme generalizations and some truly nasty assumptions from what I've said in these comments. I very much believe the government should keep its hands out of many, many things it's currently regulating.
This is not one of those things, however.
I only hope to God your views... will pass.
Keeping strictly to the topic of this thread, I really don't think they're going to pass any time soon. These "views" were those expressed by the authors of the founding documents of our nation, and views expressed by the majority (as well as our elected leadership and judicial bodies) over the last 200+ years. You are seriously misinterpreting or misunderstanding something if you believe the first amendment was intended to protect your right to lie to the general public. Who cares if it's beneath you? That's not the issue. It's not beneath everyone. And some lies are difficult to prove (or disprove). A guy whose life is destroyed by such a lie is just SOL in your world? A kid yelling "fire!" in a theater, causing a dozen people to be killed in a stampede shouldn't be reprimanded for it? So he and his friends can get a good chuckle and do it again down the street? Oh darn, those people should have gotten out of the way, right?
What you're driving for is a fundamentally different form of basic rights and privileges than the ones that were put in place, not a new and "proper" interpretation of laws that have been interpreted basically the same way since they were created.
Which isn't to say that I think your goal isn't a worthy one. By all means pursue it, but don't pretend that what you're shooting for is what the founding fathers or the drafters of these laws intended.
Again, I'm not going to repeat all of the thousands of comments and hundreds of articles on Slashdot that have covered your ignorance (though some search terms have been provided below). Clearly you are uninterested in actually having your questions answered, since answers have been given many, many times.
Think about the state of the world 300 years ago. How many things are we doing today that people would have scoffed at then? Are you really that closed-minded that you believe we've hit the end of the line of technological advancement? That our long journey of discovery is over? Thank God people like you aren't in charge of these types of programs! Also, you're the first person in this thread to discuss "parsec-class jumps". I won't even speculate in that direction yet, but I prefer to err on the side of optimism so I won't make blanket, pessimistic "it will never happen" statements like you.
Addressing your human-versus-robot argument, how much science have we done with robotic probes to Mars to date, and over what time period has that occurred? Everything has to be meticulously planned, scripted, and contingencies *built* into the probes before they ever leave the ground. If some interesting readings show up, we have no means to investigate them further. We have to build another probe. So yah, you have an argument that robots can do much of the planetary science that people can do, if you don't mind the huge delays in getting your questions answered, but you learn very little about how people might survive to or on another world. You're effectively limiting yourself to what you can learn with a space probe.
I was also referring to an "in-flight" habitat here, not the habitat they'd live in on Mars. Sorry if that was unclear.
Other things I think you should do a search on before you continue saying things are impossible, have no solution, or that our species is doomed to live on one world:
space elevator
orbital assembly
generational ship
And PLEASE remember that some of these things may be impossible or impractical today, but still might be perfectly practical in the future.
If you still don't understand the benefits of ever sending people out there, then I don't think you ever will. You may save yourself some annoyance by just ignoring articles like this in the future. I won't respond anymore unless you have a question or argument that hasn't already been rehashed a hundred times on Slashdot.
Huh? The Constitution evolves through amendments. You do not create amendments just because the language and context of a statement changes over time.
If there was a constitutional provision that required the president to appear "gay" (as in "happy", using the language at the time) in public, would you accuse the president for violating the constitution by not exhibiting homosexual behavior? Society changes, and the meaning of the letter of the constitution may change, but the intent of each and every word has to be looked at with the eyes of someone living today.
Basically judges have to translate. Languages and society evolves over time, so it is very necessary to read and interpret laws and the constitution so that they can be applied sensically today.
To suggest that we need a "revolution" whenever our language evolves to the point where aging laws can no longer be interpreted literally is sheer lunacy. Please take a basic law or government class before you make these kinds of statements.
We do not live by the letter of the Constitution. We live by the meaning and intent of the law prescribed within it. The intent of the writers of the First Amendment was to preserve our right to speak out against the government, not your perceived right to incite a riot or libel. So while the "letter" of the law may seem to allow you to say whatever the hell you please, the amendment itself was not intended to have that effect, and that's how judges interpret it.
No, the supreme court ruled that a ban on cross burning is legal. They did not ban cross burning. It's up to the individual states or localities to enact laws that make it illegal, if it's in their constituency's best interests to do so. It's still very much considered legal free speech in many areas of the country.
And yet nobody has (or can) refute the radiation problem
This is just your lack of knowledge here. There are very effective remedies for the problem and there will be solutions in place before a manned mission will be launched. This is just common sense. As another poster pointed out, a relatively minor quantity of water shields perfectly well. Several designs have been proposed for potential mars mission habitats that involve a layer of water surrounding the inhabitable areas.
In short, the guys paid to plan these things have either already solved these problems, or anticipate solutions that just need a few years of development to become practical.
The "gravity" problem has several solutions as well. Another poster mentioned the impacts of drugs and exercise. Many habitat designs also call for a rotating habitat, which would produce an artificial gravity that would counter the effects of weightlessness. There have been countless ISS and shuttle missions to study precisely these problems, and to come up with possible solutions, specifically for an extended manned space mission.
Please have a little more faith here. If NASA is suggesting that a mission to Mars will be feasible in 10-15 years, please concede the possibility that they will have solved some of the fundamental problems towards getting there. You are not the first person to have thought of them. Think about it.
Sending 50 people over and letting them be fruitful and multiply doesn't solve anything.
Sure it does. It's a first step! You can't reasonably expect to pool a huge amount of funding towards a manned mission to mars consisting of 2.5 billion people. That's just lunacy. You have to take it in stages. Send a few people over at a tremendous expense. Figure out what works, what could be improved on, how to do it cheaper. Send over a few more a while later. Repeat this process until you have the entire procedure nailed down to a safe, efficient process, even if that takes 300 years.
The point is, in 300 years, are we going to have a space program where all of these things have been figured out, or are we going to be struggling to overcome a huge lack of knowledge because these programs were cancelled early in their life by people like you?
So about the only good reason to send a crew into space [that you can think of]
I can think of a dozen more, but again, these have all been discussed ad nauseum repeatedly every time a space-exploration article has been posted and a poster has asked these same old questions. I'm not going to rehash them.
And like I said earlier, I have no problem if they want to fund this through non-general taxation. Let me decide to spend an extra 1% of my income on these programs, so long as me and my descendents will be the only ones reaping its benefits. That's not very democratic of me, though, so maybe after a few years I'd be willing to cool down and let the devisionaries reap some of the benefits too.. Your grandchildren can thank my grandchildren. I might be OK with that.
Slashdot Mirror
It's frustrating for me because there's now two totally independent sets of comments that I may want to read. People posting in one article will continue to post there and only there (and may not even have any idea about the other article). Frequently the same sorts of posts will end up in both places redundantly, sometimes prompting replies in both places if you want to get your viewpoint known.
Plus, it's just annoying and amateurish to keep seeing them over and over and over again. This is supposed to be a high-tech-oriented site, yet the folks at MSNBC seem to do a better job at managing articles.
Yah, because, you know, the media is unbiased and devoted to understanding the truth and the circumstances surrounding it, right? They wouldn't cater to the public's lust for blame. Certainly not.
I find it amusing that you're pointing us at the media's take on the events and not the real reports and interviews.
Hindsight is 20/20. Always remember that.
Until you actually work in a high-risk position like this, I don't think you will ever understand what it's like to have a small army of experts dealing with issues like this every day and determining levels of acceptable risk. I'm quite frankly getting a little disgusted at this lust for blood here.
Clearly the shuttle wasn't "designed" for these types of impacts. And if you read the article, it says the shuttle is routinely impacted 50-100 times during each mission by small debris. When it was discovered that the shuttle does get impacted, what would you have rather done? Scrap the design and start anew? Or examine the design and construction and determine whether or not those impacts actually posed a danger? They did the latter, and determined they did not. Over a hundred missions later without a hiccup, and then a larger-than-normal impact in a more-sensitive-than-normal place and it's all over. Hindsight is 20/20, but at the time, the risk from both a potential impact of this kind was acceptable, and the likelyhood for damage after investigating this impact was determined to be acceptable.
Design or no design, impacts were very much investigated and the experts determined that the risk would be acceptable. This goes back to my picture frame example. Not designed for an impact, but small impacts are perfectly safe. To redesign a picture frame to withstand impacts at a certain rating would be cost-prohibitive and unnecessary.
If this is indeed what brought the shuttle down, clearly that determination was in error. But I'm frankly getting a little sick of people calling for resignations and blood. Again, if you think you can do a better job of risk assessment, NASA NEEDS YOU. Stop posting on Slashdot and actually do something about the problem. It's easy to criticize others (founded or not), but you're not helping the situation.
Would actual candidates who differed from each other and offered something of interest reduce apathy?
Look beyond the two major party candidates. I've generally found only the two major party candidates are the ones that were effectively clones.
Would a "check off all acceptable candidates" (not 1-4, just yeah/nay) make a difference and broaden the number of parties from the republicrat monopoly?
Ahhhh, yes. There are lots of different voting methods out there that I think would revolutionize our system here. Borda counts, approval votes, etc., are definitely worth looking at. I continue to be surprised when these things are used by scientists, at board meetings and everywhere that people really need the best score for a list of candidates, yet in government elections, we stick with the dumb "pick the best". The major political parties know they'll be out the door if something like this ever got through the legislature, so I suspect it'll take an act of God to make this happen.
Or is the answer closed source voting software controlled by questionably influenced companies?
I personally would like to see some open-source voting mechanisms out there. Use open cryptography standards to ensure validity, generate a printout of each person's vote so that a manual recount is possible, and publish your methods and protocols.
Second to that, I don't think a closed-source solution is that bad here. So long as there's sufficient auditing going on, and a compulsory manual count for a random certain percentage of the polling locations, and you'll have a fairly good idea whether or not the software is doing its job.
To leave the design as-is is to subject yourself to a risk you have not accounted for.
Unless you study the risks and determine that the existing design is capable of handling it.
I do have an engineering degree and I do have a graduate degree in engineering risk analysis.
So basically, you're saying that you're smarter than the guys running things at NASA and you think you can do things better than they can, right? I just want to be sure that's what you're trying to get off your chest here.
I really hope you realize how unlikely that is, but if you don't: http://www.nasajobs.nasa.gov/
Stop posting on Slashdot and start using your clearly superior education and engineering abilities to fix NASA.
And you know this how?
Because they said it? Repeatedly? Because this is what all of the published information about the conversations, e-mails that went between researchers, managers, etc.? The event and review have undergone a tremendous amount of scrutiny, and most of that was as transparent as I've ever seen.
The leading edges and the protective tiles were never designed for ANY impact.
So? I have a picture frame that wasn't intended to withstand an impact. If I throw a ball at it, though, I can pretty accurately estimate whether or not that frame will be damaged based on the nature of the ball, the speed I throw it, and where the impact occurs.
Do you want me to repeat that.
If it makes you feel better..
he leading edge Carbon-Carbon structures and the protective tiles were never designed for any impact.
Do you feel better?
under conditions it was not designed for and which they did not understand.
I don't guess you're in charge of many missions to space, so I'll try to explain this in layman's terms. Operating an orbiting spacecraft is a high-risk endeavor. You very much do take into account potential unexpected hazards when you design and build one of these crafts. You take certain economical measures to ensure that things like micrometeroid impacts don't threaten the life of your crew, and try to plan contingencies to handle unexpected events. Just because someone didn't "rate" the craft's hull for a certain type of impact doesn't mean impacts of that type were completely ignored or unplanned for, or that the craft will be unable to withstand them.
Again, go look at the immense volume of information published during this investigation. This wasn't a cursory ho-hum "it doesn't matter" check, nor was it a "holy crap, it wasn't designed for this, they're going to die, but let's not tell anyone" type of thing. The experts there (of which you are not one) examined the data at their disposal (which you do not possess) and consulted their own education and experience with the program (which you do not have) and made a determination (which you are not qualified to do) that the risk to the orbiter was low. This is proving to be incorrect. That doesn't mean they "fucked up". They had no way of knowing any better. Again, if you're 99% right 100 times, you'll be wrong once. It happens. Deal with it.
If you're going to ignore the advice of the experts, just because that advice very infrequently ends up being wrong, you are going to end up wrong far more often than not, much to the detriment of the space program and the lives of those depending on you.
Especially when equipment is experiencing conditions it was never designed for.
If you can design a spacecraft that's perfectly safe, and designed to withstand any and all forms of abuse and unexpected events that the existing orbiter could potentially experience, and do that at a cost less than 100 times what the existing orbiter costs, you will be rich.
Again, sending people into orbit is a highly risky activity. You have to spend money to be prepared for certain types of events, but when the likelyhood of those events is low and the cost to mitigate them is high, you have to make a decision and frequently a compromise. If you don't understand this, or have issues with it, feel free to make them known, but I applaud our astronauts for being willing to take these risks on our behalf, and I applaud NASA for making the achievents they do with the funding they have. I wouldn't have it any other way.
continued to flaunt their disregard for basic engineering principles.
Whoa there, this is a pretty loaded statement. In what ways does NASA continue to "flaunt their disregard for basic engineering principles"? Care to give us some examples? Or are you just throwing out unsubstantiated, emotional statements because you're pissed off at something?
Do we continue to have Slashdot readers that think they can do a better job than the guys with the PhD's and decades of experience? Maybe you should start up your own space exploration company.
Based on the information they had at the time, the risk that there would be catastrophic damage from the foam hitting the wing was not significant.
If you are 99% positive about something 100 times, you will be wrong once. Sometimes margins of error and lack of data lead you to an incorrect conclusion.
They could not have foreseen the damage and based on their extensive knowledge of the orbiter and the nature of the foam and impact, determined that any damage was unlikely to pose a re-entry risk.
This may seen "obvious" to you and all of the other armchair NASA administrators out there, but they had to investigate to be sure, and to understand precisely what happened and how it happened so that when similar situations come up in the future, they can make a more educated analysis of what form of damage is likely and what that damage is capable of. It would be just as irresponsible for them to claim this was the problem and close the book on the case in the first week.
Please give the guys at NASA a little more credit.
This is relevant only in the very narrowly defined areas of active intelligence and active military operations.
And public safety. The patrol routes of domestic police, the response strategies for certain types of attacks or crimes, etc. (Though with a loss of privacy in many respects, perhaps domestic problems where this information is valuable simply wouldn't occur?)
Good point, though.
the reasons for those actions are in fact the items being made transparent, and the reason WHY you need transparent government.
And I might suggest that some areas still may need to be kept from the public, at least until certain events pass. Things that might incite a mob panic, for example.
I think this could be a very good idea, though. Perhaps the areas (like, as you suggest, active military and intelligence) that are "exempt" from the transparency should be made that way only through oversight of related branches? (I.e., in the US, amend the Constitution so that it requires transparency in all government activities where that transparency does not expose a demonstrable risk to life. The legislature can, through legislation, allow certain activities to become less-than-transparent, and judicial oversight can ensure that that follows the spirit of the amendment..)
This sounds like a good exercise for a sociology class.
Great comments.
Quite how one can wipe one's arse, or have a Tommy Tank, in such a situation, is beyond my feeble mind
In a world free of privacy, activities like this would need to be tolerated and respected. It gets to the point where it ceases to be a nasty curiosity and becomes another of those things you don't really care to think about.
if we're going to be monitored by the government, then we need to be able to monitor their every activity also.
A very excellent point! But it also has a hidden prerequisite: that the people watching the government understand why some seemingly strange or dangerous decisions may be necessary. Faith in one's leaders is very important. Complete transparency can be dangerous if we're allowing the general public to influence the informed decisions of someone at the center of it all.
Plus, if your government is transparent to its citizens, it's also transparent to its enemies. In an ideal world, nations wouldn't be working against each other, and this wouldn't matter.
We're still a long ways away from a world where these concepts would work.
Given access to this sort of data, they will abuse it.
Then I highly suggest you re-examine your choice in ISP's. You may have missed the second point I was trying to make: they already have the means to do this today! Nearly any enterprise-quality network device has modes of operation that allow snooping of network traffic. There is nothing stopping malicious ISP's from performing these acts right this second. These new "features" simply allow this type of snopping to be done with a high degree of sensitivity to the privacy of other users' data that might otherwise be captured accidentally with the way things are done today.
"Hmmm, I wonder what kind of weird things so-and-so is into? Let's just take a peek at his account..."
This disgusts me. I too have worked for Internet providers, and these privileges were never made available to lowly techs (that were immature enough to act like this). There was more than ample oversight and auditing to prevent this very type of abuse. If your ISP is filled with people like you, I highly suggest you find another ISP now.
And if there are other ISP tech managers reading this, please ask yourself if your guys can or will have access to the tools to perform this type of abuse. If you're hiring high school kiddies, I really hope it's common sense to keep their privileges restricted in this regard.
Physical limitations that provide what we today call "privacy" are already on the way out the door. In a hundred years, technology will be at the point where every private citizen will be able to see and hear just about anything anywhere.
Whether this is good or bad for society is another matter, but it's been suggested that we'll simply need to adapt. Arguably, using information obtained through "privacy-invading" means is just childish immaturity, when you look at the big picture. Maybe our society just needs to grow out of that?
Fighting change in this area of technology only delays the inevitable and keeps the abilities in the hands of the surreptitious and those who *would* use it solely for their own benefit.
Something to think about...
So does it hurt your privacy more when an ISP has to honor a subpoena by collecting *all data* flowing through a switch, sift through it by hand, and pull out anything that might be related to the user in question, or by activating a feature designed for the purpose and guaranteed to pull exactly the data you're interested in?
At all times, this equipment is completely under the control of the ISP, not your local evil abusive government. One way or the other, your ISP has to honor the subpoena. This just lets them do it with a minimum of unnecessary traffic monitored.
I do wholeheartedly agree, though, that some form of auditing (the digital signature idea was good) along with the capturing of data is highly desirable, but really, there's little incentive for your ISP to abuse these features any more than they're abusing their abilities today. They already have more than enough technology to sniff all of your Internet traffic today.
My experiences do not agree with yours. I do exactly the same thing and have given out only maybe 50-75 e-mail addresses so conceived. Out of those, 5-10 of them receive spam, including two or three sites (e.g. HAM Radio Outlet) that I'd never suspect. It's not just spam from related advertisers, it's the nasty penis enlargement spam, porn, etc.
(Indeed, when I confront many of these sites with this information, they seem legitimately confused and concerned, and in most cases, don't believe my story and never do anything further to investigate.)
Some of the other ones I expected to get spam from, including web sites using 3rd-party collection agents like CCbill, and two or three "removal" forms set up by spammers. (Two or three out of 20 or so.. not a bad rate, but still bad.)
More qualified how? What insight into alien biochemistry does a background in artificial intelligence give you?
Remember that life forms evolving on other worlds are going to be doing so using the same elements that we deal with in chemistry today. It's highly unlikely that a JVM is going to spontaneously appear on some world and artificial life forms are going to evolve within it. More likely, it will be a traditional series of complex chemical reactions. Understanding how these molecules interact with each other is the foundation for understanding how life (in any form) can evolve. I really don't think your area of expertise makes you more qualified to speak on these matters than those who explicitly study these things. In fact, you've just secured your place among the Slashdot couch scientists I was speaking of. Everyone thinks they have experience in some slightly related field, so they must be smarter than those that have been studying and researching these specific things for dozens of years. Please concede the possibility that they are more qualified than you are to make these types of statements.
I'd still trust their educated guesses over statements of fact by an AC on Slashdot any day.
or perhaps some subtle physical effect we don't even know about yet.
If we don't know about it yet, it's unlikely that the effect will occur enough with a frequency or significance that life will evolve based on it.
Likewise with your other points. These things are not noticable to ordinary matter, which makes it unlikely for these things to affect ordinary matter in such a way as to create life based on ordinary matter.
It is possible that chemical-based life will evolve (probably deliberately) to some form of life based on more complex phenomena, but odds are, it's gone through that "chemical" phase first. It makes most sense to start our search there, one way or the other.
No offense to you personally, but I trust the biologists and astrophysicists with PhD's a little more about what types of life might be out there than most Slashdot couch scientists. (Not that you're one, but a lot of Slashdot posters are asking the same questions, and I would really hope that the people paid to think about these things would have come up with these questions and satisfactory responses to them by now...)
carbon is the only good choice for rich biochemistry.
This is based on the analysis of one single biosphere. Again, generalizations based on a sample set of one.
Chemical interactions are understood fairly well. Carbon is the only element that is capable of a hugely diverse set of molecules, owing to its relatively small mass and its ability to bond with a large number of other elements. This complexity makes it uniquely suitable for complex chemical reactions, which are needed to develop life.
Other primary elements (like Silicon) achieve a similar degree of freedom in their bondings, but their mass is greater and bonds proportionally weaker, making them less flexible in the long run.
Lots of study has gone into what other forms life might be able to take. Lots of imagination and toying with elements in a variety of environments, and we haven't come up with anything as flexible as carbon-based life.
What of water vapor? Consider this, and your wild guesses could at least include those Jovian planets. You have to get past such provincial thinking.
Without a surface of liquid water, it's very difficult to get even single-celled life to catch hold. If all of your water is in the form of vapor in the atmosphere, in what medium do you plan on getting different chemicals and acids together in just the right way? In order for your rudimentary forms of life to progress, they have to be able to propel themselves through the air in order to "feed" off of other chemicals and raw material. You really need a fairly viscous medium for organisms to push themselves against in order to move around, and to carry nutrients. It's unlikely that this viscous medium will be anything other than water if water is present in any form.
So no, water vapor is not likely to do the job as well. But I suppose it's possible. I don't exactly have a xenobiology degree either.
Further, a planet must exist long enough for evolution to occur.
This is an even wilder assumption (unwarranted generalization).
I disagree, but I suspect that's because I disagree with your other points. If I bought into the suggestion that forms of life are equally likely to take other, non-carbon, non-liquid-water-originating forms, this assumption might not necessarily be accurate.
But still, how long do you think is "long enough"? Do you think a spacefaring species can evolve in 100 years? 1000? 100,000? 100 million? As the article says, it took about 800 million years for us to evolve, but single-celled organisms still needed a few billion years to come about first. Granted, this is a single data point, as you note, but can you suggest a better one, based on the data we have?
If you are looking for intelligent life out there, throwing a dart at a star chart while blindfolded makes as much sense.
I completely disagree here. You are deliberately ignoring the one data point we do have. What the researchers here are doing is saying, "OK, we probably have a whole spectrum of environments and situations where life can evolve. Let's eliminate the conditions that make it completely unlikely that any form of life can take hold and put the rest on a probability function with our situation at its peak."
Absolutely this is making an assumption that life will evolve elsewhere that is similar to life on earth. But what you fail to acknowledge is that there is no evidence to suggest life can evolve in any other way. In fact, we've been collecting a lot of evidence lately that suggests many other "alternative" families of chemicals do not give rise to conditions that may make life possible. That's why those conditions are excluded. We aren't being closed-minded, we're filtering the data set based on the data we do have.
shouldn't the goal be too look for life, rather than just a much more limited and unlikely type of life?
Your argument seems to come back to this th
your views of letting the government take care of everything rather than relying upon ones honor and reputation rather than upon legal action
... will pass.
You are drawing some extreme generalizations and some truly nasty assumptions from what I've said in these comments. I very much believe the government should keep its hands out of many, many things it's currently regulating.
This is not one of those things, however.
I only hope to God your views
Keeping strictly to the topic of this thread, I really don't think they're going to pass any time soon. These "views" were those expressed by the authors of the founding documents of our nation, and views expressed by the majority (as well as our elected leadership and judicial bodies) over the last 200+ years. You are seriously misinterpreting or misunderstanding something if you believe the first amendment was intended to protect your right to lie to the general public. Who cares if it's beneath you? That's not the issue. It's not beneath everyone. And some lies are difficult to prove (or disprove). A guy whose life is destroyed by such a lie is just SOL in your world? A kid yelling "fire!" in a theater, causing a dozen people to be killed in a stampede shouldn't be reprimanded for it? So he and his friends can get a good chuckle and do it again down the street? Oh darn, those people should have gotten out of the way, right?
What you're driving for is a fundamentally different form of basic rights and privileges than the ones that were put in place, not a new and "proper" interpretation of laws that have been interpreted basically the same way since they were created.
Which isn't to say that I think your goal isn't a worthy one. By all means pursue it, but don't pretend that what you're shooting for is what the founding fathers or the drafters of these laws intended.
Think about the state of the world 300 years ago. How many things are we doing today that people would have scoffed at then? Are you really that closed-minded that you believe we've hit the end of the line of technological advancement? That our long journey of discovery is over? Thank God people like you aren't in charge of these types of programs! Also, you're the first person in this thread to discuss "parsec-class jumps". I won't even speculate in that direction yet, but I prefer to err on the side of optimism so I won't make blanket, pessimistic "it will never happen" statements like you.
Addressing your human-versus-robot argument, how much science have we done with robotic probes to Mars to date, and over what time period has that occurred? Everything has to be meticulously planned, scripted, and contingencies *built* into the probes before they ever leave the ground. If some interesting readings show up, we have no means to investigate them further. We have to build another probe. So yah, you have an argument that robots can do much of the planetary science that people can do, if you don't mind the huge delays in getting your questions answered, but you learn very little about how people might survive to or on another world. You're effectively limiting yourself to what you can learn with a space probe.
I was also referring to an "in-flight" habitat here, not the habitat they'd live in on Mars. Sorry if that was unclear.
Other things I think you should do a search on before you continue saying things are impossible, have no solution, or that our species is doomed to live on one world:
- space elevator
- orbital assembly
- generational ship
And PLEASE remember that some of these things may be impossible or impractical today, but still might be perfectly practical in the future.If you still don't understand the benefits of ever sending people out there, then I don't think you ever will. You may save yourself some annoyance by just ignoring articles like this in the future. I won't respond anymore unless you have a question or argument that hasn't already been rehashed a hundred times on Slashdot.
You honestly think it's your God-given (err, constitutionally-granted) right to libel, slander and incite riot? Do you even live in the US?
Thank God your views are not in the majority.
Huh? The Constitution evolves through amendments. You do not create amendments just because the language and context of a statement changes over time.
If there was a constitutional provision that required the president to appear "gay" (as in "happy", using the language at the time) in public, would you accuse the president for violating the constitution by not exhibiting homosexual behavior? Society changes, and the meaning of the letter of the constitution may change, but the intent of each and every word has to be looked at with the eyes of someone living today.
Basically judges have to translate. Languages and society evolves over time, so it is very necessary to read and interpret laws and the constitution so that they can be applied sensically today.
To suggest that we need a "revolution" whenever our language evolves to the point where aging laws can no longer be interpreted literally is sheer lunacy. Please take a basic law or government class before you make these kinds of statements.
We do not live by the letter of the Constitution. We live by the meaning and intent of the law prescribed within it. The intent of the writers of the First Amendment was to preserve our right to speak out against the government, not your perceived right to incite a riot or libel. So while the "letter" of the law may seem to allow you to say whatever the hell you please, the amendment itself was not intended to have that effect, and that's how judges interpret it.
show proof that you have, in fact, discovered a security flaw?
Demonstrate.
No, the supreme court ruled that a ban on cross burning is legal. They did not ban cross burning. It's up to the individual states or localities to enact laws that make it illegal, if it's in their constituency's best interests to do so. It's still very much considered legal free speech in many areas of the country.
And yet nobody has (or can) refute the radiation problem
This is just your lack of knowledge here. There are very effective remedies for the problem and there will be solutions in place before a manned mission will be launched. This is just common sense. As another poster pointed out, a relatively minor quantity of water shields perfectly well. Several designs have been proposed for potential mars mission habitats that involve a layer of water surrounding the inhabitable areas.
In short, the guys paid to plan these things have either already solved these problems, or anticipate solutions that just need a few years of development to become practical.
The "gravity" problem has several solutions as well. Another poster mentioned the impacts of drugs and exercise. Many habitat designs also call for a rotating habitat, which would produce an artificial gravity that would counter the effects of weightlessness. There have been countless ISS and shuttle missions to study precisely these problems, and to come up with possible solutions, specifically for an extended manned space mission.
Please have a little more faith here. If NASA is suggesting that a mission to Mars will be feasible in 10-15 years, please concede the possibility that they will have solved some of the fundamental problems towards getting there. You are not the first person to have thought of them. Think about it.
Sending 50 people over and letting them be fruitful and multiply doesn't solve anything.
Sure it does. It's a first step! You can't reasonably expect to pool a huge amount of funding towards a manned mission to mars consisting of 2.5 billion people. That's just lunacy. You have to take it in stages. Send a few people over at a tremendous expense. Figure out what works, what could be improved on, how to do it cheaper. Send over a few more a while later. Repeat this process until you have the entire procedure nailed down to a safe, efficient process, even if that takes 300 years.
The point is, in 300 years, are we going to have a space program where all of these things have been figured out, or are we going to be struggling to overcome a huge lack of knowledge because these programs were cancelled early in their life by people like you?
So about the only good reason to send a crew into space [that you can think of]
I can think of a dozen more, but again, these have all been discussed ad nauseum repeatedly every time a space-exploration article has been posted and a poster has asked these same old questions. I'm not going to rehash them.
And like I said earlier, I have no problem if they want to fund this through non-general taxation. Let me decide to spend an extra 1% of my income on these programs, so long as me and my descendents will be the only ones reaping its benefits. That's not very democratic of me, though, so maybe after a few years I'd be willing to cool down and let the devisionaries reap some of the benefits too.. Your grandchildren can thank my grandchildren. I might be OK with that.