You can have relay stations. That's not a problem. Yes, the rovers can do their own navigation, but caves aren't the same thing as strolling along the surface. Spelunking requires skills that even the most advanced robots to date have enormous difficulty with -- unpredictable traction, corners that require flexibility, debris around which there is no good path, the fact that the original pothole will more likely be a vertical drop than a nice, easy drive-in, etc. (Chances are that most of the entrances will be ancient sinkholes - there may have been a shallow sea on Mars but with no significant moon there would be no tides and therefore no caves formed from the lateral pounding of water.)
The flexibility plays into everything else. There are "snake" robots that can handle the kind of terrain we're talking about. They're designed to and do a wonderful job of it. Those snake robots are not, however, equipt to lug around nuclear batteries. Their ability to climb up vertical walls is astonishing but relies heavily on being able to cling to that wall. Adding a few kilos of battery would not only shift the centre of gravity in the wrong direction, it would vastly exceed the gripping ability of the robots.
Low g will almost certainly cause muscle loss, calcium loss and space sickness, though not to the same degree as zero gravity. The question is what the function is. It's doubtful it's a linear relationship between gravity and consequence, nothing in nature is that simple.
A really sick, sick mind might mention that there's been repeated talk of launching a space brothel along the lines of the Russian space hotel. With suitable danger money bonuses, the rest of your questions would be answered 9 or so months after opening.
I'd actually recommend more than 5. So long as the containers are crush-resistant, the failures of deorbiting aren't catastrophic. Doesn't matter if the supply rockets crash beyond the point where a radio transmitter would function or a rover could survive, they just have to be intact enough that whatever they're shipping (panels and poles for a geodesic dome, for example) retain structural integrity. That makes life a lot easier.
I wouldn't bother putting fuel in orbit - leakage would be a problem. Much better would be to have an orbiting module capable of housing the astronauts for a day or so plus with enough fuel to dock with a rocket that wasn't planning on stopping. (Not quite free-return, but has much of the simplicity of it. And simple is always better for this sort of thing.)
Getting the supplies to a specific point shouldn't be a huge issue -- interplanetary rockets were built to show off intercontinental ballistic missile guidance systems and Russia's guidance systems are said to be able to place rockets within a few feet of an intended target. If this is correct, then that problem is solved. So long as political barriers are not just torn down but smashed, pulverized and recycled as pot-hole filler. THAT is, I suspect, a much bigger problem. The US and Russia will never agree to trade what they regard as prized military secrets in favour of doing something useful. Especially in the current toxic climate.
The problem with highly crushable rockets is that they can hold less. Hence the need for more rockets, if we go with that approach. The advantage is that all they need to is land, they don't need to land gently and they don't need more than a minimal braking system. (The rocket contents surviving is pointless if the rocket craters, since digging the damn thing out will take too much time.)
The use of underground caves reduces radiation, which means that you can lob rockets at relatively nearby entrances to such systems. It would be safe enough to cross between them, which - on the surface - would be madness at best. That improves things somewhat.
The moon would be much harder than Mars. No significant water, the dust is microscopic and razor sharp, there's no cave networks for shielding, etc. All the arguments Carl Sagan mentions in his novel "Contact" that favoured Mars over the moon for construction work also apply.
One thing about complexities is that you can always stepwise-refine a design that you already have, but you can't ever improve on a design you never had.
I taught for a year a range of subjects using a similar method to the one your teacher used. It's impressive how much more you can convey when the kids discover the whys of things. For starters, there's much less talk of "what good is this?" when examining something real from the past or something that could be real in the future. Since the things you see are going to be the things you consider useful, you've answered your own question without the bother of asking it.
The problem with the Invisible Hand moving the markets is that the markets are an Invisible Dog that bites the Invisible Hand. Sadly, the Invisible Man, owner of the Invisible Hand, has a terrible short-term memory and is therefore never once bitten, twice shy.
The usually-quoted metric is a pound of gold per pound of material into orbit. That's just orbit, not getting the stuff to Mars, or then getting the stuff from Mars back to Earth. To deorbit in Earth's atmosphere, you would need expensive heat shielding (or you'll just get a really nice burn) and the more you plan on bringing back, the more heat shielding you need. If we find an asteroid of pure platinum, it might be commercially viable to mine, but we'll need much better launch facilities before space industry in raw material terms is viable.
Now, that's not to say space is useless commercially. Quasi-crystals are found in space and occur there naturally and frequently, you need a lab to make them on Earth. It may well be, therefore, that the value of -finished- products from space would exceed the launch costs in a few cases, even if raw materials are currently off the table. It's simply a better environment for certain things. "May well be" is not the same, however, as "certainly is". If space production of such-and-such was obviously economic, it would be done. It isn't done, so we can assume that there's no obvious case. Doesn't mean there isn't a case, just means it's not obvious.
That shouldn't be hard. There's evidence of lots of them. Caves are good -- radiation shielding, sand-storm shielding, and (most important of all) that's where the water is. Further, whilst it's easy to build rovers to explore the surface, it'll take humans to explore subterranean depths -- we can't build robots to handle unknown terrain, there's no sunlight for solar panels, and the lack of isotope production on Earth means building a high-power nuclear battery is not currently viable.
What is a spectrum but a way to distinguish? If all points along the spectrum are the same, there is no spectrum. My mind has nothing to do with it, beyond being advanced enough to know that a line of zero length is not a line, it is a point.
No, Linus does not regard Linux as a monolith. He uses monolithic kernel techniques, to avoid the communication channel issues of microkernels, but he and every other kernel developer regards it as a modular kernel. Modular systems can exploit the tightly-coupled communications of a monolithic design without being one.
In the same way that BASIC programmers used to regard procedures and functions as Evil (you can't goto any line you damn well want) but when properly use produce faster code, better results, cleaner design and more maintainable architecture, architecture in society is nothing to be scared of if done right. That most examples are done wrong just means you've been using BASIC programmers to build societies. Get rid of them.
I will use my favourite example of how to avoid bureaucracy -- the BBC. It is a quango, not a department. It is chartered and run by a director hired from the outside, not run by appointees and paid for political gain. It divests the government of 100% of the responsibility for broadcasting, bandwidth regulation, transmission licenses, emergency communications, regular communications, etc. It is responsible for something the government itself is not. Technically, it has quasi-independence, but is independent enough to be outside the direct control of anyone in government.
The BBC then divests power for regional radio broadcasts to regional radio units, regional television to regional television units, etc. All of these units are, themselves, quasi-independent, quangos within the quango. BBC Central has very little direct control over, say, BBC Scotland or Radio Lancashire.
This quasi-independent, flexible structure works and works well. There is barely any bureaucracy to speak of - if you're not managing the units under your remit but merely monitoring that the charter/contract is being stuck to and that OFCOM complaints are properly handled, what management structure do you really need? What does it take to negotiate goals for a season, divvy up the cash and rap the occasional knuckle? My guess is that the BBC is top-heavy in regards to where it could be - what the hell do you need a board of directors for when real decisions are all divested to regional units? - but that it is fundamentally along the right lines. The improvements needed are minor and mostly involve giving it enough money to actually run the service in the first place.
The same could be done in the US. Turn NASA into a quango. Charter it, rather than have it as a department. Eliminate political appointees and all politically-required structure. Allow it to partially fund itself, but have the Charter obligate the government to pay $X per year over a fixed number of years without any budget edits being possible during that time. Have the Charter specify objectives, but leave NASA to determine how to meet them and what else it is to do. No interference, no censorship, nothing. The quality of work goes up, the size of the civil service goes down, the number of managers "needed" also goes down.
NASA can then split itself the way the BBC has, into regional units and then into subdivisions of various sorts. But in a semi-autonomous system, those divisions and subdivisions eliminate upper management overhead, placing control as locally as possible. There are five NASA centres. That's far better than the BBC, which has hundreds of units. (Duplication is expensive in cash, deduplication is expensive in time.) Five budget controllers rather than one is negligible overhead but would be a massive boost in turnaround time. You wouldn't really want to push that further down the chain, as the law of diminishing returns says you'd be spending more and getting less, but that's about right. Since the central budget doesn't exist any more, except for the bri
No, it is a political issue. The opposite of cold is not purple. Conservativatism is not the opposite of liberalism. I will not waste any further time on that until you learn what political terms mean.
As far as US "blue sky" - no. The US research for scramjets was for military jet development. It had a specific purpose, a specific end-goal, specific targets and a concrete objective. That was not "blue sky". It was a failure.
Research in which you already know the result is not research. That is school homework. Research is in pushing boundaries and finding out what you did NOT know before.
95% of science and 100% of the arts are unquantifiable in advance, they can only be quantified in retrospect. You know nothing of the true cost until it is done, and the gross cost is a meaningless figure. You want the net cost. The net cost must include ALL costs NOT payed as a result of the activity.
Thus, for a train service, it is NOT enough to simply figure out the cost of moving a train from A to B with X passengers paying Y. You must ALSO factor in the deaths/injury per mile (since emergency services aren't free), cost of maintenance (how reliable is the car vs the train, what's the damage to the road vs the track, etc), heath cost due to pollution (cars fill up with nitric acid fumes, which will damage lungs, whereas electric trains have power stations generally well away from populated areas, so you've the medical costs there to consider), mean and variance of arrival times (cars are more likely to form traffic jams, time is money, so the cost to a passenger of travel is dependent on travel time), etc.
Your equation ignores ALL of these variables. Why? Because you want easy jibes, quick calculations, skewed analysis. Public transport SHOULD have tickets that make a slight loss for the transport in pure isolation, because that is how you MINIMIZE the net cost. See SIMPLEX for optimization. There's better out there, but start with something that isn't naive.
This country does indeed have limited funds. Competing with other nations where those other nations are already superior to us is a DRAIN on our resources. India, China and Japan are brilliant mass-producers -- far more than the US ever was. Let them. ALWAYS play to YOUR strengths, NEVER to your opponents. (Book of Five Rings, Art of War, and just about any other standard practices manual ever written). The strength of Britain and America is unquestionably that we have the greatest minds in research, invention and innovation anywhere in the world. That is the Anglo-American strength. We're pioneers, we live on the edge, we just don't function anywhere else. If we did, Detroit would have pwned the Japanese car market, but even after Japan lost most of their manufacturing capacity and power supply, they're still in better shape.
America and Britain aren't capable of functioning when "playing it safe". We never have. The most alive people in both nations are the ones who took enormous gambles. Some won, some lost - that's what gambling's about. Why the hell are we spending trillions on defense projects that are then scrapped? They weren't blue-sky, they could have been completed, the designs all worked, but it was precisely those qualities that made them obsolete before they even hit the production line. Throw those trillions into REAL research and maybe 25% will deliver. 25% is better than 0%. 5% is better than 0%. ANY percent at all is better than what we're currently getting in the way of return. So, you see, I don't give a shit what the percent is because so long as the percent is better than the bugger all we're getting for our money now, we've made a net gain.
So, no, the US has no advantage. It is slipping because it's too goal-oriented, too obsessed with yesterday's stuff. Russia nearly beat the US to the moon - and would have done had their top designer not died of brain cancer. Why? Werner von Braun certainly knew about staying on the cutting edge. It's because conservative minds did not. They wouldn't give him the m
My resume includes work at NASA, CERN, the ANU and the Universities of Manchester and UMIST. I've more academia than you could shake one of your pointy sticks at. Oh, I've done research alright. Real, "we haven't the faintest idea what the results will be, but that's the point of it" research. Your understanding of the field seems to be what Fox News has told you to think.
You? Practical? That's a laugh. There's nothing practical about stagnant swamp talk.
By around 1.8 - 2.0 million years ago, humans already had fire, art, complex language, symbolism, advanced stone technology, music and ritualism. Far from being conservative, humans were highly experimental. It got them killed a lot, but it also got them further, faster. Humans took a lot more risks, nearly going extinct a few times for their troubles, but ended up the only surviving hominid and one of only a tiny number of surviving Great Apes as a result of incredibly novel thinking and rapid adaptation.
That argument doesn't hold water. It is true that a representative portion must make the decisions for a specific something, but there are enough somethings in a modern society that you could have everyone responsible for something. You would then have a government that contains everyone in some faculty, even though everyone wouldn't run everything.
Alternatively, use the jury pool. Have jurors selected randomly to "try" a random selection of ideas going from committee to Congress or from Congress to be sent to the President, with a sponsor of the bill acting as the defendant and an opposing politician acting as the plaintiff, with a specific criticism of the plaintiff being the issue before the court. Is the bill innocent or guilty of the complaint made?
Are these big governments? Technically, yes. Both would make 100% of the populace in government. Everyone would be involved and you can't get bigger than that. But far fewer would be involved in specific facets, so as far as that facet is concerned it is small government. You'd be able to have proper modular structure, rather than monolithic entities. (Sounds like the Linux kernel.) And you can't get smaller than a de-duplicated normalized entity. So not only would any of these solutions be the largest government you could achieve, they'd also be the smallest. At the same time.
Which means that the entire question of the size of government is stupid. If something can exist at both extremes at the same time, then the spectrum has no validity.
He could have done the same thing Bush did with the anti-Torture bill. Bush simply signed that the bits he didn't like didn't really exist. Obama could simply have written in that the detention clauses simply didn't exist.
Yes, it defeats the purpose of a democracy, but then so does almost all US politics. In the end, it is the job for the President to do the best for his country. If that means using signing statements that effectively replace the entire bill with something that would work, well, that's his job. I understand his desire to be ethical with his power, but this isn't an age of ethics. Ethics ceased to be a factor in US politics a long time ago. If it was ever there at all. If the country needs a President who can smash heads together (it does) then the President should be the 800 lb. gorilla. An ethical, intelligent 800 lb. gorilla is fine, but an 800 lb. gorilla nonetheless.
You're not "supposed to be", you are. Blue sky research is the reason the Australians won the scramjet race. You are indeed stone-age -- nothing since then was "practical" at the time of invention, only much much later. The Neandertals had a large brain and lived in an incredibly diverse set of environments, they were not "out-evolved" by humans. They died because they were conservatives, they failed to invent even when they could. They stuck to what was practical, what had a use right there and then. You would drag us back into such an era, and then blame us for your error. Your stupidity and complete incapacity to understand the nature of science and technology beggars the belief. Or it would do, if so many other great civilizations in the past equally dropped experimentation and creativity in favour of the happy delusion of conservative thinking......and became extinct in the process.
The technology is fine. The design is perfectly good and can be implemented with as close to absolute safety as any mechanical system can. There is nothing inherently wrong with the Chinese high-speed train system. Although I have little trust in the Chinese system of governance, there is no rational reason to believe that the different varieties of governmental failure present there will all be problematic. Given the impressive safety record, I would say that it's quite reasonable to believe that the combination of flaws that would make the high-speed rail system dangerous are actually quite rare in China.
Your rabid right-wing insistence that anyone different to you has to be wrong and cannot possibly be your equal is grating. Plenty of people with views very different to yours are indeed your intellectual superiors. Given the stupefying ignorance you exhibit, there are probably stone-age tribes in New Guinea with a more enlightened view of technology and society. If you want to restart John McCarthy's witch-hunt, go ahead.
America isn't "supreme", other countries can - and already have - far surpassed it. It is people like you, blinkered, arrogant, contemptuous of anyone not you, who have ensured that those nations that had been a century or two behind are now decades ahead. The British made the same mistake in the days of the Empire - rotting rather than building, whilst those in their dominion built rather than rotted. The reason Britain has become one of the most backward nations in Europe - Turkey has now passed it on more than a few metrics - is that their fascism and nationalism, like yours, ensures nothing but the total destruction of the holder of those beliefs and the nation they are within.
Do you know WHY Australia had the world's first working scramjet, despite the US developing most of the science for it 3 decades ago? And why Australia will be the first nation with hypersonic passenger aircraft, not America, despite NASA having had the technical plans drawn up since 1998? The world doesn't slow down because right-wing fascists like you want to be the leaders. If you don't like the way the world drives, get off the road......and my damn lawn!
He has schizophrenia, which is not quite the same thing as being insane. Schizophrenics live in an entirely self-consistent universe, merely not the universe everyone else lives in. This is actually very good for a theorist (and may be why more than a few have schizo-effective symptoms) because the theory has to be abstract enough and universal enough to not be tied to implementation specifics.
Economics is a horrible problem (it's extremely noisy, and worsened by the fact that economists attempt to manipulate the markets by the latest theories, which means a theory has to remain correct even in the presence of knowledge of the theory). Thermoeconomics, bioeconomics, etc, are all attempts to model economics with the assumption that an "ignorant" system will resemble a physical system, but since economists aren't ignorant these theories become untestable. It's worse than quantum mechanics - there you have to observe the system to change it. In economics, merely thinking about the system will change it.
(Isaac Asimov recognized this aspect of people in his Foundation novels, placing those doing the modeling -outside- the system being modeled and making those being modeled as ignorant as possible of the model. It may be that economics as a whole is simply too unstable to be modeled unless you had a "Second Foundation" entirely of economists. *Shudder!*)
Let a function be a very specific operation. If you draw up a taxonomy of functions, the functions will ALL be leaf nodes and cannot be subdivided (but can be parameterized).
Let F be the set of all functions that a device can perform, and f be any given member of the set. Let U be the set of all users that will ever come into contact with that device in such a way as to use it, and u be any given member of the set. Let A(u) be a subset of F, such that A is the set of all operations that the user u will actually use.
From this:
A(u1) \/ A(u2) cannot include any element not in F. #(A(u1) \/ A(u2)) is at least 1. For all f, there exists at least one A in which f exists. If the number of u and f is sufficiently large, then plotting #(A(u)) against u will give you a bell curve.
Even the simplest mechanical alarm clock has four discrete functions. Something as incredibly primitive as a grandfather clock has 3 functions.
Tablets and phones are appliances in my interpretation. They're not simple appliances, but they are appliances. There is a finite number of functions, the bell curve of what is used and by how many will still be followed......EXCEPT when the device is modified by the manufacturer to deliberately skew the curve and prevent certain uses. When there is deliberate skew on a large scale, the curve will look much more like a Poisson distribution -- everyone hugging some specified "lawful" functions with a rapid drop-off on either side.
It wouldn't. The 'absolutely no warranty' needs to die. IIRC, it was added to prevent corporations suing free programmers out of existence whenever a bug was found, but imposing "reasonableness" and massively raising the stakes for frivolous and/or malicious lawsuits would likely have a similar effect.
I agree that manufacturers will have a go at defining themselves out of the problem, and it is quite likely existing Common Law will let them, but in principle the Reasonable Man test should limit some of it. If a Reasonable Man were to buy a machine that is sold as a computer, has the same parts as a computer, and functions just like a computer, would they Reasonably conclude that what they have is, indeed, a computer?
If it is a computer, then they can program it. They can upgrade bits inside it. So long as changes aren't incompatible, nothing in the machine will break. If the machine fails to behave as expected, or breaks itself, because of manufacturer codes, then the owner SHOULD have grounds for complaint as the manufacturer is retaining control (IANAL, but I -think- that falls somewhere into the Doctrine of First Sale) and the machine is NOT performing as a Reasonable Man would expect.
If you were to argue that -currently- the law doesn't offer any such protection, then I'll accept that it doesn't. But I see no reason as to why it shouldn't. Things like the X-Box only exist because people got to tinker with hardware to find out what would happen. The Altair, the Apple I, the KIM I, the BBC Micro -- all examples of geeks being geeks.
Sure, what's on the box should matter some. Don't expect to win too many rally races by driving a mini metro or a civilian Hum Vee. They have very specific things they are designed for - the Hum Vee is designed to rid the US of excess oil, for example - and are sold for that purpose. If you decide to go for an off-track mountain climb race in an SUV, you might well need the car extensively repaired afterwards. It is not being used for what it was sold for. However, if a manufacturer wedged a 500 lb. block of semtex into the infrastructure with a self-destruct trigger should you go rally racing, no amount of CYA-style contract clauses would cover them.
A reasonable man would NOT expect sabotage and thus a reasonable man should be protected against all unreasonable acts by the manufacturer.
Now, they might not be right now. Like I said, I'm not a lawyer. However, the entire point of law is to distinguish the reasonable from the unreasonable, so if the law doesn't protect you against unreasonable acts then it should be changed to do so.
The best I can offer as proof is that George Lucas reportedly said that he did indeed use 633 and Dambusters as the basis for that scene. He did not say that he directly lifted from either, as far as I know. You would need to find the actual quote to be able to say with any certainty as to what he did say, and you'd need to talk to the guys working in the model studios (sadly closed down, if I remember rightly) to know much beyond that.
Dambusters would have been tougher to edit, because they used actual footage from the gun cameras used in the mission itself and therefore needed exterior and interior shots to match the gun camera footage as well as possible. The start and end points were fixed, even though everything else was fluid. Sure, they weren't perfect, but it's an old film and editing suites back then involved a pack of razor blades, a magnifying glass and a bottle of whiskey.
John Nash showed that economics can be modeled mathematically, that it follows certain rules, that the implementation of the economy doesn't alter those rules, and it doesn't have to be a financial economy. ANY strategy that is self-modifying according to very specific conditions WILL translate into Game Theory and from there ALL mathematical rules will apply to the translation. However, just as there is a transform in one direction, there is a transform in the opposite direction. Thus, economics et al are merely examples of experimental mathematics. And anything that is repeatable, deterministic and experimental in the physical world is a science.
And that is why it is a science.
Computers cannot act outside the constraints of the Turing Machine. Even a Quantum Computer is nothing more than a massively parallel Turing Machine - you can do not one operation more and not one operation less. It, too, then is experimental mathematics. There is not a computer built today - or one that will ever be built - that can do even one operation more than the seven fundamental operations. I had this argument with the AI lecturer, who argued that Neural Networks weren't Turing Machines. Until I showed, mathematically, that not only were they Turing Machines, but they were actually a very tiny subset.
The "theories" in CS, for the most part, are not theories at all and should not be considered as such. What would be an example of a true theory? Well, a simple one is that Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory is Turing-Complete. If this is true, then there exists no algorithm OR computer that supports "unrestricted comprehension, or any other problem that ZFC can't handle. If ZFC is indeed Turing Complete, then everything that ZFC cannot support cannot be programmed.
Another example of a theory -- anything that cannot be done algorithmically by a computer but can be done herustically by one, cannot be done in real-life except herusticallly, and vice versa. The logic doesn't change, even when the physical constraints do.
There is nothing the doctor can do for me. I am stuck in a world of idiots who believes their box is the One True Box. (Even Maru doesn't think that.) I can do nothing for the world. I can do nothing to even broaden the horizons of even single individuals (there have been rare exceptions in the past, but those will forever be in the past - I could never do the same today). I am increasingly too frustrated with the unimaginative and the ultra-conservative around me to even do much for myself. Last time I tried, the storage place I was using burned down destroying a few tens of thousands of dollars of books and developer boards. Insurance wouldn't pay and there's not a chance in hell of replacing all that. This is intensely frustrating. To produce a physical demonstration of some of my physically implementable ideas, beyond mere Heath Robinson implementations, needs cash but the crowd-source firms universally reject anything I put forward with helpful feedback along the lines of "bugger off", only marginally politer. And I really do mean marginally.
Here's a fun one for you. I took part in Edward de Bono's full correspondence course on lateral thinking. The feedback mostly said why I was wrong, how my solutions couldn't work. Even when I sent in photographic proof (this was pre-photoshop, so photos meant something) I was still told that what I was doing was wrong and impossible. With no explanation of *why* it was wrong or impossible, just that it was.
So, yeah, I've become incredibly grumpy and cynical in my old age. In all probability, 40-50% of my ideas likely wouldn't have worked, but with a but more than a "bugger off", I might have actually learned from the experience. The remainder got identical feedback, so I can't tell you from that what category anything fell in. All I can tell you is that
Why would you want to? With the underlying structure as defective and damaged as it is, it's like learning a new procedural programming language for a computer with a burned-out main memory.
Besides, I rather like Harold McMillain's claim that ideology is SUPPOSED to be transient.
That must be because you can provably extrapolate from a single corrupt local official to every person in every discipline across an entire nation. Wow, the brains required to do that are......amazing! You must have neurologists beating at the door, wanting to scan a brain such as yours, and now there's a 13T MRI scanner that'll take people, they might even find it!
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You can have relay stations. That's not a problem. Yes, the rovers can do their own navigation, but caves aren't the same thing as strolling along the surface. Spelunking requires skills that even the most advanced robots to date have enormous difficulty with -- unpredictable traction, corners that require flexibility, debris around which there is no good path, the fact that the original pothole will more likely be a vertical drop than a nice, easy drive-in, etc. (Chances are that most of the entrances will be ancient sinkholes - there may have been a shallow sea on Mars but with no significant moon there would be no tides and therefore no caves formed from the lateral pounding of water.)
The flexibility plays into everything else. There are "snake" robots that can handle the kind of terrain we're talking about. They're designed to and do a wonderful job of it. Those snake robots are not, however, equipt to lug around nuclear batteries. Their ability to climb up vertical walls is astonishing but relies heavily on being able to cling to that wall. Adding a few kilos of battery would not only shift the centre of gravity in the wrong direction, it would vastly exceed the gripping ability of the robots.
Low g will almost certainly cause muscle loss, calcium loss and space sickness, though not to the same degree as zero gravity. The question is what the function is. It's doubtful it's a linear relationship between gravity and consequence, nothing in nature is that simple.
A really sick, sick mind might mention that there's been repeated talk of launching a space brothel along the lines of the Russian space hotel. With suitable danger money bonuses, the rest of your questions would be answered 9 or so months after opening.
I'd actually recommend more than 5. So long as the containers are crush-resistant, the failures of deorbiting aren't catastrophic. Doesn't matter if the supply rockets crash beyond the point where a radio transmitter would function or a rover could survive, they just have to be intact enough that whatever they're shipping (panels and poles for a geodesic dome, for example) retain structural integrity. That makes life a lot easier.
I wouldn't bother putting fuel in orbit - leakage would be a problem. Much better would be to have an orbiting module capable of housing the astronauts for a day or so plus with enough fuel to dock with a rocket that wasn't planning on stopping. (Not quite free-return, but has much of the simplicity of it. And simple is always better for this sort of thing.)
Getting the supplies to a specific point shouldn't be a huge issue -- interplanetary rockets were built to show off intercontinental ballistic missile guidance systems and Russia's guidance systems are said to be able to place rockets within a few feet of an intended target. If this is correct, then that problem is solved. So long as political barriers are not just torn down but smashed, pulverized and recycled as pot-hole filler. THAT is, I suspect, a much bigger problem. The US and Russia will never agree to trade what they regard as prized military secrets in favour of doing something useful. Especially in the current toxic climate.
The problem with highly crushable rockets is that they can hold less. Hence the need for more rockets, if we go with that approach. The advantage is that all they need to is land, they don't need to land gently and they don't need more than a minimal braking system. (The rocket contents surviving is pointless if the rocket craters, since digging the damn thing out will take too much time.)
The use of underground caves reduces radiation, which means that you can lob rockets at relatively nearby entrances to such systems. It would be safe enough to cross between them, which - on the surface - would be madness at best. That improves things somewhat.
No problem. The Hasselhoff Crabs will destroy them.
The moon would be much harder than Mars. No significant water, the dust is microscopic and razor sharp, there's no cave networks for shielding, etc. All the arguments Carl Sagan mentions in his novel "Contact" that favoured Mars over the moon for construction work also apply.
One thing about complexities is that you can always stepwise-refine a design that you already have, but you can't ever improve on a design you never had.
I taught for a year a range of subjects using a similar method to the one your teacher used. It's impressive how much more you can convey when the kids discover the whys of things. For starters, there's much less talk of "what good is this?" when examining something real from the past or something that could be real in the future. Since the things you see are going to be the things you consider useful, you've answered your own question without the bother of asking it.
The problem with the Invisible Hand moving the markets is that the markets are an Invisible Dog that bites the Invisible Hand. Sadly, the Invisible Man, owner of the Invisible Hand, has a terrible short-term memory and is therefore never once bitten, twice shy.
The usually-quoted metric is a pound of gold per pound of material into orbit. That's just orbit, not getting the stuff to Mars, or then getting the stuff from Mars back to Earth. To deorbit in Earth's atmosphere, you would need expensive heat shielding (or you'll just get a really nice burn) and the more you plan on bringing back, the more heat shielding you need. If we find an asteroid of pure platinum, it might be commercially viable to mine, but we'll need much better launch facilities before space industry in raw material terms is viable.
Now, that's not to say space is useless commercially. Quasi-crystals are found in space and occur there naturally and frequently, you need a lab to make them on Earth. It may well be, therefore, that the value of -finished- products from space would exceed the launch costs in a few cases, even if raw materials are currently off the table. It's simply a better environment for certain things. "May well be" is not the same, however, as "certainly is". If space production of such-and-such was obviously economic, it would be done. It isn't done, so we can assume that there's no obvious case. Doesn't mean there isn't a case, just means it's not obvious.
That shouldn't be hard. There's evidence of lots of them. Caves are good -- radiation shielding, sand-storm shielding, and (most important of all) that's where the water is. Further, whilst it's easy to build rovers to explore the surface, it'll take humans to explore subterranean depths -- we can't build robots to handle unknown terrain, there's no sunlight for solar panels, and the lack of isotope production on Earth means building a high-power nuclear battery is not currently viable.
What is a spectrum but a way to distinguish? If all points along the spectrum are the same, there is no spectrum. My mind has nothing to do with it, beyond being advanced enough to know that a line of zero length is not a line, it is a point.
No, Linus does not regard Linux as a monolith. He uses monolithic kernel techniques, to avoid the communication channel issues of microkernels, but he and every other kernel developer regards it as a modular kernel. Modular systems can exploit the tightly-coupled communications of a monolithic design without being one.
In the same way that BASIC programmers used to regard procedures and functions as Evil (you can't goto any line you damn well want) but when properly use produce faster code, better results, cleaner design and more maintainable architecture, architecture in society is nothing to be scared of if done right. That most examples are done wrong just means you've been using BASIC programmers to build societies. Get rid of them.
I will use my favourite example of how to avoid bureaucracy -- the BBC. It is a quango, not a department. It is chartered and run by a director hired from the outside, not run by appointees and paid for political gain. It divests the government of 100% of the responsibility for broadcasting, bandwidth regulation, transmission licenses, emergency communications, regular communications, etc. It is responsible for something the government itself is not. Technically, it has quasi-independence, but is independent enough to be outside the direct control of anyone in government.
The BBC then divests power for regional radio broadcasts to regional radio units, regional television to regional television units, etc. All of these units are, themselves, quasi-independent, quangos within the quango. BBC Central has very little direct control over, say, BBC Scotland or Radio Lancashire.
This quasi-independent, flexible structure works and works well. There is barely any bureaucracy to speak of - if you're not managing the units under your remit but merely monitoring that the charter/contract is being stuck to and that OFCOM complaints are properly handled, what management structure do you really need? What does it take to negotiate goals for a season, divvy up the cash and rap the occasional knuckle? My guess is that the BBC is top-heavy in regards to where it could be - what the hell do you need a board of directors for when real decisions are all divested to regional units? - but that it is fundamentally along the right lines. The improvements needed are minor and mostly involve giving it enough money to actually run the service in the first place.
The same could be done in the US. Turn NASA into a quango. Charter it, rather than have it as a department. Eliminate political appointees and all politically-required structure. Allow it to partially fund itself, but have the Charter obligate the government to pay $X per year over a fixed number of years without any budget edits being possible during that time. Have the Charter specify objectives, but leave NASA to determine how to meet them and what else it is to do. No interference, no censorship, nothing. The quality of work goes up, the size of the civil service goes down, the number of managers "needed" also goes down.
NASA can then split itself the way the BBC has, into regional units and then into subdivisions of various sorts. But in a semi-autonomous system, those divisions and subdivisions eliminate upper management overhead, placing control as locally as possible. There are five NASA centres. That's far better than the BBC, which has hundreds of units. (Duplication is expensive in cash, deduplication is expensive in time.) Five budget controllers rather than one is negligible overhead but would be a massive boost in turnaround time. You wouldn't really want to push that further down the chain, as the law of diminishing returns says you'd be spending more and getting less, but that's about right. Since the central budget doesn't exist any more, except for the bri
No, it is a political issue. The opposite of cold is not purple. Conservativatism is not the opposite of liberalism. I will not waste any further time on that until you learn what political terms mean.
As far as US "blue sky" - no. The US research for scramjets was for military jet development. It had a specific purpose, a specific end-goal, specific targets and a concrete objective. That was not "blue sky". It was a failure.
Research in which you already know the result is not research. That is school homework. Research is in pushing boundaries and finding out what you did NOT know before.
95% of science and 100% of the arts are unquantifiable in advance, they can only be quantified in retrospect. You know nothing of the true cost until it is done, and the gross cost is a meaningless figure. You want the net cost. The net cost must include ALL costs NOT payed as a result of the activity.
Thus, for a train service, it is NOT enough to simply figure out the cost of moving a train from A to B with X passengers paying Y. You must ALSO factor in the deaths/injury per mile (since emergency services aren't free), cost of maintenance (how reliable is the car vs the train, what's the damage to the road vs the track, etc), heath cost due to pollution (cars fill up with nitric acid fumes, which will damage lungs, whereas electric trains have power stations generally well away from populated areas, so you've the medical costs there to consider), mean and variance of arrival times (cars are more likely to form traffic jams, time is money, so the cost to a passenger of travel is dependent on travel time), etc.
Your equation ignores ALL of these variables. Why? Because you want easy jibes, quick calculations, skewed analysis. Public transport SHOULD have tickets that make a slight loss for the transport in pure isolation, because that is how you MINIMIZE the net cost. See SIMPLEX for optimization. There's better out there, but start with something that isn't naive.
This country does indeed have limited funds. Competing with other nations where those other nations are already superior to us is a DRAIN on our resources. India, China and Japan are brilliant mass-producers -- far more than the US ever was. Let them. ALWAYS play to YOUR strengths, NEVER to your opponents. (Book of Five Rings, Art of War, and just about any other standard practices manual ever written). The strength of Britain and America is unquestionably that we have the greatest minds in research, invention and innovation anywhere in the world. That is the Anglo-American strength. We're pioneers, we live on the edge, we just don't function anywhere else. If we did, Detroit would have pwned the Japanese car market, but even after Japan lost most of their manufacturing capacity and power supply, they're still in better shape.
America and Britain aren't capable of functioning when "playing it safe". We never have. The most alive people in both nations are the ones who took enormous gambles. Some won, some lost - that's what gambling's about. Why the hell are we spending trillions on defense projects that are then scrapped? They weren't blue-sky, they could have been completed, the designs all worked, but it was precisely those qualities that made them obsolete before they even hit the production line. Throw those trillions into REAL research and maybe 25% will deliver. 25% is better than 0%. 5% is better than 0%. ANY percent at all is better than what we're currently getting in the way of return. So, you see, I don't give a shit what the percent is because so long as the percent is better than the bugger all we're getting for our money now, we've made a net gain.
So, no, the US has no advantage. It is slipping because it's too goal-oriented, too obsessed with yesterday's stuff. Russia nearly beat the US to the moon - and would have done had their top designer not died of brain cancer. Why? Werner von Braun certainly knew about staying on the cutting edge. It's because conservative minds did not. They wouldn't give him the m
My resume includes work at NASA, CERN, the ANU and the Universities of Manchester and UMIST. I've more academia than you could shake one of your pointy sticks at. Oh, I've done research alright. Real, "we haven't the faintest idea what the results will be, but that's the point of it" research. Your understanding of the field seems to be what Fox News has told you to think.
You? Practical? That's a laugh. There's nothing practical about stagnant swamp talk.
By around 1.8 - 2.0 million years ago, humans already had fire, art, complex language, symbolism, advanced stone technology, music and ritualism. Far from being conservative, humans were highly experimental. It got them killed a lot, but it also got them further, faster. Humans took a lot more risks, nearly going extinct a few times for their troubles, but ended up the only surviving hominid and one of only a tiny number of surviving Great Apes as a result of incredibly novel thinking and rapid adaptation.
You can't really blame Stallman. It worked for the Oracles of Delphi.
It's not the human race we have a low opinion of. It's the maladjusted right-wing pond scum that thinks it's human that we have a low opinion of.
That argument doesn't hold water. It is true that a representative portion must make the decisions for a specific something, but there are enough somethings in a modern society that you could have everyone responsible for something. You would then have a government that contains everyone in some faculty, even though everyone wouldn't run everything.
Alternatively, use the jury pool. Have jurors selected randomly to "try" a random selection of ideas going from committee to Congress or from Congress to be sent to the President, with a sponsor of the bill acting as the defendant and an opposing politician acting as the plaintiff, with a specific criticism of the plaintiff being the issue before the court. Is the bill innocent or guilty of the complaint made?
Are these big governments? Technically, yes. Both would make 100% of the populace in government. Everyone would be involved and you can't get bigger than that. But far fewer would be involved in specific facets, so as far as that facet is concerned it is small government. You'd be able to have proper modular structure, rather than monolithic entities. (Sounds like the Linux kernel.) And you can't get smaller than a de-duplicated normalized entity. So not only would any of these solutions be the largest government you could achieve, they'd also be the smallest. At the same time.
Which means that the entire question of the size of government is stupid. If something can exist at both extremes at the same time, then the spectrum has no validity.
He could have done the same thing Bush did with the anti-Torture bill. Bush simply signed that the bits he didn't like didn't really exist. Obama could simply have written in that the detention clauses simply didn't exist.
Yes, it defeats the purpose of a democracy, but then so does almost all US politics. In the end, it is the job for the President to do the best for his country. If that means using signing statements that effectively replace the entire bill with something that would work, well, that's his job. I understand his desire to be ethical with his power, but this isn't an age of ethics. Ethics ceased to be a factor in US politics a long time ago. If it was ever there at all. If the country needs a President who can smash heads together (it does) then the President should be the 800 lb. gorilla. An ethical, intelligent 800 lb. gorilla is fine, but an 800 lb. gorilla nonetheless.
You're not "supposed to be", you are. Blue sky research is the reason the Australians won the scramjet race. You are indeed stone-age -- nothing since then was "practical" at the time of invention, only much much later. The Neandertals had a large brain and lived in an incredibly diverse set of environments, they were not "out-evolved" by humans. They died because they were conservatives, they failed to invent even when they could. They stuck to what was practical, what had a use right there and then. You would drag us back into such an era, and then blame us for your error. Your stupidity and complete incapacity to understand the nature of science and technology beggars the belief. Or it would do, if so many other great civilizations in the past equally dropped experimentation and creativity in favour of the happy delusion of conservative thinking... ...and became extinct in the process.
Yours is a path of death.
The technology is fine. The design is perfectly good and can be implemented with as close to absolute safety as any mechanical system can. There is nothing inherently wrong with the Chinese high-speed train system. Although I have little trust in the Chinese system of governance, there is no rational reason to believe that the different varieties of governmental failure present there will all be problematic. Given the impressive safety record, I would say that it's quite reasonable to believe that the combination of flaws that would make the high-speed rail system dangerous are actually quite rare in China.
Your rabid right-wing insistence that anyone different to you has to be wrong and cannot possibly be your equal is grating. Plenty of people with views very different to yours are indeed your intellectual superiors. Given the stupefying ignorance you exhibit, there are probably stone-age tribes in New Guinea with a more enlightened view of technology and society. If you want to restart John McCarthy's witch-hunt, go ahead.
America isn't "supreme", other countries can - and already have - far surpassed it. It is people like you, blinkered, arrogant, contemptuous of anyone not you, who have ensured that those nations that had been a century or two behind are now decades ahead. The British made the same mistake in the days of the Empire - rotting rather than building, whilst those in their dominion built rather than rotted. The reason Britain has become one of the most backward nations in Europe - Turkey has now passed it on more than a few metrics - is that their fascism and nationalism, like yours, ensures nothing but the total destruction of the holder of those beliefs and the nation they are within.
Do you know WHY Australia had the world's first working scramjet, despite the US developing most of the science for it 3 decades ago? And why Australia will be the first nation with hypersonic passenger aircraft, not America, despite NASA having had the technical plans drawn up since 1998? The world doesn't slow down because right-wing fascists like you want to be the leaders. If you don't like the way the world drives, get off the road... ...and my damn lawn!
He has schizophrenia, which is not quite the same thing as being insane. Schizophrenics live in an entirely self-consistent universe, merely not the universe everyone else lives in. This is actually very good for a theorist (and may be why more than a few have schizo-effective symptoms) because the theory has to be abstract enough and universal enough to not be tied to implementation specifics.
Economics is a horrible problem (it's extremely noisy, and worsened by the fact that economists attempt to manipulate the markets by the latest theories, which means a theory has to remain correct even in the presence of knowledge of the theory). Thermoeconomics, bioeconomics, etc, are all attempts to model economics with the assumption that an "ignorant" system will resemble a physical system, but since economists aren't ignorant these theories become untestable. It's worse than quantum mechanics - there you have to observe the system to change it. In economics, merely thinking about the system will change it.
(Isaac Asimov recognized this aspect of people in his Foundation novels, placing those doing the modeling -outside- the system being modeled and making those being modeled as ignorant as possible of the model. It may be that economics as a whole is simply too unstable to be modeled unless you had a "Second Foundation" entirely of economists. *Shudder!*)
One accident, pinpointed by investigation to corrupt officials and not to the technology. Ergo, your claim is bullshit.
Let a function be a very specific operation. If you draw up a taxonomy of functions, the functions will ALL be leaf nodes and cannot be subdivided (but can be parameterized).
Let F be the set of all functions that a device can perform, and f be any given member of the set.
Let U be the set of all users that will ever come into contact with that device in such a way as to use it, and u be any given member of the set.
Let A(u) be a subset of F, such that A is the set of all operations that the user u will actually use.
From this:
A(u1) \/ A(u2) cannot include any element not in F.
#(A(u1) \/ A(u2)) is at least 1.
For all f, there exists at least one A in which f exists.
If the number of u and f is sufficiently large, then plotting #(A(u)) against u will give you a bell curve.
Even the simplest mechanical alarm clock has four discrete functions. Something as incredibly primitive as a grandfather clock has 3 functions.
Tablets and phones are appliances in my interpretation. They're not simple appliances, but they are appliances. There is a finite number of functions, the bell curve of what is used and by how many will still be followed... ...EXCEPT when the device is modified by the manufacturer to deliberately skew the curve and prevent certain uses. When there is deliberate skew on a large scale, the curve will look much more like a Poisson distribution -- everyone hugging some specified "lawful" functions with a rapid drop-off on either side.
It wouldn't. The 'absolutely no warranty' needs to die. IIRC, it was added to prevent corporations suing free programmers out of existence whenever a bug was found, but imposing "reasonableness" and massively raising the stakes for frivolous and/or malicious lawsuits would likely have a similar effect.
I agree that manufacturers will have a go at defining themselves out of the problem, and it is quite likely existing Common Law will let them, but in principle the Reasonable Man test should limit some of it. If a Reasonable Man were to buy a machine that is sold as a computer, has the same parts as a computer, and functions just like a computer, would they Reasonably conclude that what they have is, indeed, a computer?
If it is a computer, then they can program it. They can upgrade bits inside it. So long as changes aren't incompatible, nothing in the machine will break. If the machine fails to behave as expected, or breaks itself, because of manufacturer codes, then the owner SHOULD have grounds for complaint as the manufacturer is retaining control (IANAL, but I -think- that falls somewhere into the Doctrine of First Sale) and the machine is NOT performing as a Reasonable Man would expect.
If you were to argue that -currently- the law doesn't offer any such protection, then I'll accept that it doesn't. But I see no reason as to why it shouldn't. Things like the X-Box only exist because people got to tinker with hardware to find out what would happen. The Altair, the Apple I, the KIM I, the BBC Micro -- all examples of geeks being geeks.
Sure, what's on the box should matter some. Don't expect to win too many rally races by driving a mini metro or a civilian Hum Vee. They have very specific things they are designed for - the Hum Vee is designed to rid the US of excess oil, for example - and are sold for that purpose. If you decide to go for an off-track mountain climb race in an SUV, you might well need the car extensively repaired afterwards. It is not being used for what it was sold for. However, if a manufacturer wedged a 500 lb. block of semtex into the infrastructure with a self-destruct trigger should you go rally racing, no amount of CYA-style contract clauses would cover them.
A reasonable man would NOT expect sabotage and thus a reasonable man should be protected against all unreasonable acts by the manufacturer.
Now, they might not be right now. Like I said, I'm not a lawyer. However, the entire point of law is to distinguish the reasonable from the unreasonable, so if the law doesn't protect you against unreasonable acts then it should be changed to do so.
The best I can offer as proof is that George Lucas reportedly said that he did indeed use 633 and Dambusters as the basis for that scene. He did not say that he directly lifted from either, as far as I know. You would need to find the actual quote to be able to say with any certainty as to what he did say, and you'd need to talk to the guys working in the model studios (sadly closed down, if I remember rightly) to know much beyond that.
Dambusters would have been tougher to edit, because they used actual footage from the gun cameras used in the mission itself and therefore needed exterior and interior shots to match the gun camera footage as well as possible. The start and end points were fixed, even though everything else was fluid. Sure, they weren't perfect, but it's an old film and editing suites back then involved a pack of razor blades, a magnifying glass and a bottle of whiskey.
John Nash showed that economics can be modeled mathematically, that it follows certain rules, that the implementation of the economy doesn't alter those rules, and it doesn't have to be a financial economy. ANY strategy that is self-modifying according to very specific conditions WILL translate into Game Theory and from there ALL mathematical rules will apply to the translation. However, just as there is a transform in one direction, there is a transform in the opposite direction. Thus, economics et al are merely examples of experimental mathematics. And anything that is repeatable, deterministic and experimental in the physical world is a science.
And that is why it is a science.
Computers cannot act outside the constraints of the Turing Machine. Even a Quantum Computer is nothing more than a massively parallel Turing Machine - you can do not one operation more and not one operation less. It, too, then is experimental mathematics. There is not a computer built today - or one that will ever be built - that can do even one operation more than the seven fundamental operations. I had this argument with the AI lecturer, who argued that Neural Networks weren't Turing Machines. Until I showed, mathematically, that not only were they Turing Machines, but they were actually a very tiny subset.
The "theories" in CS, for the most part, are not theories at all and should not be considered as such. What would be an example of a true theory? Well, a simple one is that Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory is Turing-Complete. If this is true, then there exists no algorithm OR computer that supports "unrestricted comprehension, or any other problem that ZFC can't handle. If ZFC is indeed Turing Complete, then everything that ZFC cannot support cannot be programmed.
Another example of a theory -- anything that cannot be done algorithmically by a computer but can be done herustically by one, cannot be done in real-life except herusticallly, and vice versa. The logic doesn't change, even when the physical constraints do.
There is nothing the doctor can do for me. I am stuck in a world of idiots who believes their box is the One True Box. (Even Maru doesn't think that.) I can do nothing for the world. I can do nothing to even broaden the horizons of even single individuals (there have been rare exceptions in the past, but those will forever be in the past - I could never do the same today). I am increasingly too frustrated with the unimaginative and the ultra-conservative around me to even do much for myself. Last time I tried, the storage place I was using burned down destroying a few tens of thousands of dollars of books and developer boards. Insurance wouldn't pay and there's not a chance in hell of replacing all that. This is intensely frustrating. To produce a physical demonstration of some of my physically implementable ideas, beyond mere Heath Robinson implementations, needs cash but the crowd-source firms universally reject anything I put forward with helpful feedback along the lines of "bugger off", only marginally politer. And I really do mean marginally.
Here's a fun one for you. I took part in Edward de Bono's full correspondence course on lateral thinking. The feedback mostly said why I was wrong, how my solutions couldn't work. Even when I sent in photographic proof (this was pre-photoshop, so photos meant something) I was still told that what I was doing was wrong and impossible. With no explanation of *why* it was wrong or impossible, just that it was.
So, yeah, I've become incredibly grumpy and cynical in my old age. In all probability, 40-50% of my ideas likely wouldn't have worked, but with a but more than a "bugger off", I might have actually learned from the experience. The remainder got identical feedback, so I can't tell you from that what category anything fell in. All I can tell you is that
Why would you want to? With the underlying structure as defective and damaged as it is, it's like learning a new procedural programming language for a computer with a burned-out main memory.
Besides, I rather like Harold McMillain's claim that ideology is SUPPOSED to be transient.
That must be because you can provably extrapolate from a single corrupt local official to every person in every discipline across an entire nation. Wow, the brains required to do that are... ...amazing! You must have neurologists beating at the door, wanting to scan a brain such as yours, and now there's a 13T MRI scanner that'll take people, they might even find it!