The thing that bothers me most about it is that it underscores the 'us against them' mentality in US politics. I certainly understand that an adversary system is a useful tool, we use it frequently when designing a system. But it just seems to me that the people in our government should be working together to get things done, not hiding from each other and forumlating secret plans to thwart each other.
Once we've used an adversary model to find the flaws in a system and picked the design that best fits the requirments, we all cooperate to *make it work*, not bitch and moan that our ideas from the design phase were better and find ways to sabotage the final design, or take our toys and go home.
I'm not sure why the author was so intent on seperating the stuff on the moon. Its not like its hard to get stuff back from the moon. You've got all the solar power you could want to put the unrefined stuff into an Earth orbit (either into an orbit where it can be picked up, or into a reentry vector so it can land somewhere on the ground and be picked up).
They are predicting that we will run out of regular helium here on Earth in the next few decades anyway, the seperation plants could sell both products.
Not that I'm convinced that mining the moon is a good way to do this. By the time we have figured out how to make He3 fusion work commercially we'll probably have some kind of space elevator technology too (the problems there seem to be mostly materials science, how to make nanotubes into suitable cables) that could be used to send down electric power from solar collectors on the counterweight.
I think too many people here in America don't know that there are people like that, and that if they'd turn off the TV and organize their time, they themselves could be more like that.
From what I've read, the point of the vibrations is that they place stress on the bones that has similar effects to the shock experienced under use in normal gravity. It is best applied by having the subject stand on a vertically vibrating plate so that the shock waves travel lengthwise through the bones. Lying on such a plate would probably be fairly ineffective as the stresses would not be in the right places.
Anyway, none of this addresses other issues like cardiovascular fitness that could also be an issue.
Finally, I don't think anyone who would volunteer for a long-term Mars mission would be overly concerned about these. The chances of dying before a return mission was available are pretty good no matter what. Anyone who is going has already commited their life to doing the job, much like current astronauts. Long life and a return to Earth would be icing on the cake.
Nuclear rocket technology would probably help quite a bit with a manned mission.
I think that if we didn't have the possibility of nuclear rockets being available in the next couple decades a one-way manned mission would be fine, but at this point I think its probably better to keep sending robot missions to learn what we need to do successful human missions in the future when we have technology that will make it cheaper and easier.
there is this stupid UN treaty signed in the sixties that prohibits any private ownership outside Earth
Are you sure about that? IIRC it states that no country can claim extraterrestrial territory. I'd bet that if you were to mount a private mission to Mars and staked out and improve a reasonable claim (a few hundred or thousand acres, as opposed to, say, the entire planet), I would guess that the governments that matter would recognize it.
Eventually the colony would be self-sustaining by sending more people there
I know this is difficult to answer without knowing more about Mars, but I'm curious what it would take to make a colony truely self-sustaining.
You'd have to have the technology to produce all your own food and oxygen and all that technology would have to be rugged and reliable enough to last until your colony had some kind of manufacturing ability. And of course the more advanced the technology you use to sustain life, the more advanced technology you have to have around to support that other technology.
Short term self-sustaining colony (producing their own food and basic tools) probably isn't hard, but a colony that can survive completely without Earth? Thats got to be at least a century or more off unless a heck of a lot more people with lots of money decide they want to live on Mars.
a human pilot has the ability to feel a situation and adjust accordingly
You've never flown a small plane have you?
Human 'feelings' are very poor when compaired to a good computer controlled landing system.
Now, I'm not saying that a human can't do these things quite well, or can't assist in the process where it makes sense, just that we should use computers and humans where each makes the most sense. Let the computer do the flying and landing, they are extemely good at that kind of stuff. Let the human pick out a good hazard-sparse landing site and let the machine handle the mechanics of flying around and landing.
Kind of like how the Stealth bomber flys. Human directs it where to go, computers keep it stable and do what the human directs.
The US Treasury has investigated using holograms and other such difficult to reproduce features, but their wear testing always rules them out.
One of the many tests they use involves rolling the bill into a small tube, inserting it into a tube, and ramming a rod in after it to crush it vertically.
Anything that can't survive many such tests, some including water and other common liquids) simulating many months of wear, won't be used.
It is nice that they are finally addind some color though.
After that first PS story, I went home and put a $1 bill on my Epson scanner/printer and pressed the color copy button. The copy it made was remarkable, at more than a foot or so away its very convincing. I cut it out and spent some time crinkling it up like a normal bill (that bonded paper is way too smooth to pass as a bill), and hung it on the fridge next to the original bill. From a couple steps away I can't tell the difference.
It would be pretty trivial to print a page of $5's front and back and pass them in a bar or someplace where they won't be closely examined.
After that experiment (which I've disposed of, since its illegal because the replica, while single sided, was the same size as a real bill), I'm less inclined to object to code in copy and scan devices that mutilates images of bills in some way. It should still be easy to order scanners without such protection, or even run a firmware upgrade to remove it (possibly with the printer leaving a hidden unique identifying mark on the copy, which, for all I know, it already does) , since there are plenty of ligit reasons to do it. But making it as easy as slapping down a bill and pressing 'copy' just seems like asking for trouble.
How comfortable would you be to call an sound pocessing API or a OS kernel call or a image processng API or a database when you do not know how it works??
How comfortable would you be using a government provided closed source operating system?
This isn't about not knowing how it works, its about not knowing how it works, not trusting the software provider and being forced to run the software anyway (microsoft users have a choice not to use microsoft, users of thise version of photoshop don't have a choice not to use this blackbox software. Yes, they could use something else).
Overall, this is a minor issue, but it would get big much faster if the government decideds that people have to run special blackbox software for other reasons too. Its difficult to show that they are not being monitored by the software.
I agree that its borderline tin-foil hat stuff, but if we dismiss that stuff outright, without at least doing a bit of poking around first, it makes it that much easier for someone to actually do it without being noticed.
Blocking all those legal uses to prevent one illegal use is a violation of our rights.
It appears that someone at Adobie agrees with you. There are so many ways around this that its hard to believe that whomever was responsible for its implimentation intended it to be a serious effort.
It seems to me that it is more of a token gesture to satisfy some political connection.
Have you ever done this with a recent (Li-Ion) battery?
Nope, but there is no reason you need to use the charging circuit in the laptop or whatever it is you are using. Set your new battery up to disable charging in the device and get a stand-alone charger for it. If that is too inconvienant for you, buy a new device, and this time get extra batteries for it while they are still available.
Lithium ion or lithium polymer batteries are not at all difficult to get.
NASA's response to that point was, essentially, "We don't hit planets by mistake". That was good enough to avoid the various court orders and injunctions that were being cooked up, but it might not suffice today. A few months after the Cassini flyby, NASA (or JPL or Lockheed, depending on whom you ask) did hit a planet by mistake, when the mars probe impacted instead of aerobraking.
Possibly, but its much easier to determine the exact position of something a couple thousand miles away and headed toward us than it is to tell if something a few million miles away is in the right position. I'd be willing to bet that the chances of anyone being harmed by the plutonium on that probe were vanishingly small, orders of magnitude lower than hundreds of other risks we all routinely face every day without a second thought.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing that bothers me most about it is that it underscores the 'us against them' mentality in US politics. I certainly understand that an adversary system is a useful tool, we use it frequently when designing a system. But it just seems to me that the people in our government should be working together to get things done, not hiding from each other and forumlating secret plans to thwart each other.
Once we've used an adversary model to find the flaws in a system and picked the design that best fits the requirments, we all cooperate to *make it work*, not bitch and moan that our ideas from the design phase were better and find ways to sabotage the final design, or take our toys and go home.
So if I leave some files in a public share on my computer, and someone comes and copies them, who is committing copyright infringment?
I'm not sure why the author was so intent on seperating the stuff on the moon. Its not like its hard to get stuff back from the moon. You've got all the solar power you could want to put the unrefined stuff into an Earth orbit (either into an orbit where it can be picked up, or into a reentry vector so it can land somewhere on the ground and be picked up).
They are predicting that we will run out of regular helium here on Earth in the next few decades anyway, the seperation plants could sell both products.
Not that I'm convinced that mining the moon is a good way to do this. By the time we have figured out how to make He3 fusion work commercially we'll probably have some kind of space elevator technology too (the problems there seem to be mostly materials science, how to make nanotubes into suitable cables) that could be used to send down electric power from solar collectors on the counterweight.
Forget +5 Funny, tell whomever owns it to get a saws-all and get busy, I'll buy 3!
In short, give me pioneers.
Hear hear!
I think too many people here in America don't know that there are people like that, and that if they'd turn off the TV and organize their time, they themselves could be more like that.
From what I've read, the point of the vibrations is that they place stress on the bones that has similar effects to the shock experienced under use in normal gravity. It is best applied by having the subject stand on a vertically vibrating plate so that the shock waves travel lengthwise through the bones. Lying on such a plate would probably be fairly ineffective as the stresses would not be in the right places.
Anyway, none of this addresses other issues like cardiovascular fitness that could also be an issue.
Finally, I don't think anyone who would volunteer for a long-term Mars mission would be overly concerned about these. The chances of dying before a return mission was available are pretty good no matter what. Anyone who is going has already commited their life to doing the job, much like current astronauts. Long life and a return to Earth would be icing on the cake.
Nuclear rocket technology would probably help quite a bit with a manned mission.
I think that if we didn't have the possibility of nuclear rockets being available in the next couple decades a one-way manned mission would be fine, but at this point I think its probably better to keep sending robot missions to learn what we need to do successful human missions in the future when we have technology that will make it cheaper and easier.
there is this stupid UN treaty signed in the sixties that prohibits any private ownership outside Earth
Are you sure about that? IIRC it states that no country can claim extraterrestrial territory. I'd bet that if you were to mount a private mission to Mars and staked out and improve a reasonable claim (a few hundred or thousand acres, as opposed to, say, the entire planet), I would guess that the governments that matter would recognize it.
Eventually the colony would be self-sustaining by sending more people there
I know this is difficult to answer without knowing more about Mars, but I'm curious what it would take to make a colony truely self-sustaining.
You'd have to have the technology to produce all your own food and oxygen and all that technology would have to be rugged and reliable enough to last until your colony had some kind of manufacturing ability. And of course the more advanced the technology you use to sustain life, the more advanced technology you have to have around to support that other technology.
Short term self-sustaining colony (producing their own food and basic tools) probably isn't hard, but a colony that can survive completely without Earth? Thats got to be at least a century or more off unless a heck of a lot more people with lots of money decide they want to live on Mars.
a human pilot has the ability to feel a situation and adjust accordingly
You've never flown a small plane have you?
Human 'feelings' are very poor when compaired to a good computer controlled landing system.
Now, I'm not saying that a human can't do these things quite well, or can't assist in the process where it makes sense, just that we should use computers and humans where each makes the most sense. Let the computer do the flying and landing, they are extemely good at that kind of stuff. Let the human pick out a good hazard-sparse landing site and let the machine handle the mechanics of flying around and landing.
Kind of like how the Stealth bomber flys. Human directs it where to go, computers keep it stable and do what the human directs.
Thanks to Alice in Quantumland I actually understood exactly what you said. Cool.
The US Treasury has investigated using holograms and other such difficult to reproduce features, but their wear testing always rules them out.
One of the many tests they use involves rolling the bill into a small tube, inserting it into a tube, and ramming a rod in after it to crush it vertically.
Anything that can't survive many such tests, some including water and other common liquids) simulating many months of wear, won't be used.
It is nice that they are finally addind some color though.
My submission for created words is:
// This will speed up this loop infripitly
:)
Infripit
One of our programmers modifed some code and left a comment like:
We aren't sure if that is good or bad, but we sure like the word. Its one of my Magnetic Word Poetry words now
I knew a guy in high school named Thomas Estes. His login on the Novel server was, of course, 'testes'.
After that first PS story, I went home and put a $1 bill on my Epson scanner/printer and pressed the color copy button. The copy it made was remarkable, at more than a foot or so away its very convincing. I cut it out and spent some time crinkling it up like a normal bill (that bonded paper is way too smooth to pass as a bill), and hung it on the fridge next to the original bill. From a couple steps away I can't tell the difference.
It would be pretty trivial to print a page of $5's front and back and pass them in a bar or someplace where they won't be closely examined.
After that experiment (which I've disposed of, since its illegal because the replica, while single sided, was the same size as a real bill), I'm less inclined to object to code in copy and scan devices that mutilates images of bills in some way. It should still be easy to order scanners without such protection, or even run a firmware upgrade to remove it (possibly with the printer leaving a hidden unique identifying mark on the copy, which, for all I know, it already does) , since there are plenty of ligit reasons to do it. But making it as easy as slapping down a bill and pressing 'copy' just seems like asking for trouble.
How comfortable would you be to call an sound pocessing API or a OS kernel call or a image processng API or a database when you do not know how it works??
How comfortable would you be using a government provided closed source operating system?
This isn't about not knowing how it works, its about not knowing how it works, not trusting the software provider and being forced to run the software anyway (microsoft users have a choice not to use microsoft, users of thise version of photoshop don't have a choice not to use this blackbox software. Yes, they could use something else).
Overall, this is a minor issue, but it would get big much faster if the government decideds that people have to run special blackbox software for other reasons too. Its difficult to show that they are not being monitored by the software.
I agree that its borderline tin-foil hat stuff, but if we dismiss that stuff outright, without at least doing a bit of poking around first, it makes it that much easier for someone to actually do it without being noticed.
Blocking all those legal uses to prevent one illegal use is a violation of our rights.
It appears that someone at Adobie agrees with you. There are so many ways around this that its hard to believe that whomever was responsible for its implimentation intended it to be a serious effort.
It seems to me that it is more of a token gesture to satisfy some political connection.
Photoshop is a tool for professionals.
Thats ok, I wasn't going to buy it anyway. I'll just rename the icon to 'Paintshop' and call it good.
I wonder if that black-box software emails your user details to the agency responsible for tracking down counterfiters each time you scan a bill.
Have you ever done this with a recent (Li-Ion) battery?
Nope, but there is no reason you need to use the charging circuit in the laptop or whatever it is you are using. Set your new battery up to disable charging in the device and get a stand-alone charger for it. If that is too inconvienant for you, buy a new device, and this time get extra batteries for it while they are still available.
Lithium ion or lithium polymer batteries are not at all difficult to get.
NASA's response to that point was, essentially, "We don't hit planets by mistake". That was good enough to avoid the various court orders and injunctions that were being cooked up, but it might not suffice today. A few months after the Cassini flyby, NASA (or JPL or Lockheed, depending on whom you ask) did hit a planet by mistake, when the mars probe impacted instead of aerobraking.
Possibly, but its much easier to determine the exact position of something a couple thousand miles away and headed toward us than it is to tell if something a few million miles away is in the right position. I'd be willing to bet that the chances of anyone being harmed by the plutonium on that probe were vanishingly small, orders of magnitude lower than hundreds of other risks we all routinely face every day without a second thought.
Would it be in compliance with the GPL if the only way you offered your source was printed on paper?
$150-200 for a watch that looses or gains up to 15 seconds a day?
The whole point of a watch that keeps Mars time is so I don't have to keep resetting it!
Most battery packs use 'standard' size cells in a box. If you open the box you can usually obtain replacement cells.
By standard I mean one of about 2 dozen sizes, not just the consumer sizes you cay buy at the grocery store.
I have no idea what the battery for a palmax looks like, but there is a good chance that you can get suitable replacement cells for it.
What? No self-righting mechanism? Somebody get those engineers rereuns of Battlebots!