"I disagree. The long term effects of weightlessness on the human body require more study. Especially in terms of ways to mitigate muscular and skeletal degeneration. It's hard to do that kind of work without sending people up there for significant amounts of time."
That is hardly urgent work. We could wait hundreds of years without manned space flight, but robotic systems are valuable now and will absolutely be required to exploit the universe. We should perfect sending robots to work in space to the point that nothing is required of human passengers.
We could drop manned missions of the government-sponsored variety while letting for-profit corporations provide a romantic space ride for those willing to pay.
It's virtues are ease of installation and convenience of adding useful software that isn't included in "purist" distros, but Ubuntu is the "AOL" of the Linux world.AOL was once very useful to masses of users. They don't need it any more...
Given the indifference of Ubuntu management to release quality Ubuntu won't be useful much longer. The beauty of Linux is that there are and will remain many alternatives.
Keeping Saddam from plinking Israel was well worth killing Gerald Bull, though I do appreciate that Saddam was the only person capable of keeping Iraqis from doing to each other what they did after he was removed.
We don't urgently need people (as opposed to machines which are more useful) in space and that nonsense about prosperity for all mankind won't follow from space exploration.
Americans don't band together because we don't have anything in common.
Our country is full of people who are here for the (now diminished) economic opportunity and because the failure of their states of origin coerced them to move to the Land of Free Stuff. They are not here for anything else because the culture of those who founded the US is as utterly alien to them as Mars. The US needed stoop labor, but doesn't need it as much any more because the bubble which funded it burst.
We are not a melting pot that can digest extremely dissimilar societies (this is not to say one is better than another), so it's every man for himself and selected peers. That is a logical response.
The government hands out stuff to people who squall loud enough. It doesn't reward virtue because it must buy votes from the mob and from business. If you don't have a bloc of votes to sell you cannot matter. Diversity means smaller voting blocs, coercing voters to choose between them.
Our pro-theocracy religionists disapprove of any distraction from suffering for Jesus. Any pleasure must be rationed by the religionists (sex) or eliminated (pleasurable chemicals) because they are levers of social control and damn (pun intended) the consequences.
The War on Some Drugs is a pure product of US religionist (p)uritanism.
"disclaimer: I'm a former military backshop avionics technician"
Represent! Erm...
As a former flightline avionics weenie, engine troop, and later crew chief I concur with your assessment, and I wouldn't want that shit on ground vehicles either. A rugged notebook with a combination of.pdf manuals, photos, and videos would be much better because it need not be worn on the head and can be easily shared.
What it COULD be useful for is training. Once trained and with some experience, people know their systems and can rapidly troubleshoot them. Key to that is a combination of BIT (Built In Test) and electronic system diagnosis.
"This sort of thing will only agitate paranoid netizens and make the rest of us even less trusting of the government (and information that appears to be supportive of it) than we already are."
Good. We should not trust government, be it Republicrat or Democan.
We should name and shame the bad guys, we should foster public resentment of government, and government should fear the people else it will not serve them.
Pakistan is militant, Muslim and therefore a threat. There is no reason to be politically correct and accord Islam respect it does not deserve.
India should be ready to destroy Pakistan if attacked. It would be doing the rest of the non-Jihadist world a considerable favor should it come to that.
India needs a first strike capability should Pakistan government control collapse and the (more dedicated) Jihadists take over.
India is large enough to absorb a moderate number of Pak nukes and then finish the job with boots on the ground, but every advantage is to be sought in advance.
"This distinction will be lost on millions of reactionaries."
The political mass to stop the enemy comes from reactionaries. Corporations like Monsanto have established long ago that they have no ethics, and the only way to get amoral entities to behave themselves is to master them with oversight and punishment.
Genetic engineering is fine, but corporations are inherently untrustworthy and should be viewed as "tolerated, necessary enemies". The default should be to restrict them as they are incapable of innocence.
"Thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of people die in Haiti due to a massive earthquake and we're talking about freaking LORAN-C??
Get some PRIORITIES!"
Haiti isn't worthy of discussion. It's tragic, there are lots of tragedies, but that a thing is tragic doesn't make it worth discussion in a tech forum.
Haiti is BTW a hopeless case, the people who live there maintain it so, and their choices aren't my concern. Go to an appropriate forum to whine about Haiti, or go there yourself ("PRIORITIES!") and help out.
"Doesn't it just give you a warm fuzzy to see people driving past you in cars that you can't afford to buy because the Government gouged you so hard in order to give your tax money to the people who can afford to buy them?"
Joe Shiftworker with any sense doesn't buy new vehicles, he buys them used. (I'd never buy a new hybrid and I can afford to pay cash for one.) New vehicles are a luxury purchase the public have been conditioned to make.
Get early adopters to kickstart the market and the rest will follow, just as with other vehicles. Cars last a long time and "trickle down" is intrinsic to the auto business.
"Why are the same people that bitch about the safety of nuclear reactors all at once the people whole also hold it back from being a, somewhat, excellent energy source? Uncool green peace, uncool."
Because Big Government and Bible Thumpers are far from being the only people without an agenda for social control.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting that attacks on manned platforms are so often modded Troll.
How about some valid counterarguments instead of hiding behind moderation like a little bitch?
"I disagree. The long term effects of weightlessness on the human body require more study. Especially in terms of ways to mitigate muscular and skeletal degeneration. It's hard to do that kind of work without sending people up there for significant amounts of time."
That is hardly urgent work. We could wait hundreds of years without manned space flight, but robotic systems are valuable now and will absolutely be required to exploit the universe. We should perfect sending robots to work in space to the point that nothing is required of human passengers.
We could drop manned missions of the government-sponsored variety while letting for-profit corporations provide a romantic space ride for those willing to pay.
"I'm not much enthused by Ubuntu anymore."
It's virtues are ease of installation and convenience of adding useful software that isn't included in "purist" distros, but Ubuntu is the "AOL"
of the Linux world.AOL was once very useful to masses of users. They don't need it any more...
Given the indifference of Ubuntu management to release quality Ubuntu won't be useful much longer. The beauty of Linux is that there are and will remain many alternatives.
Keeping Saddam from plinking Israel was well worth killing Gerald Bull, though I do appreciate that Saddam was the only person capable of keeping Iraqis from doing to each other what they did after he was removed.
We don't urgently need people (as opposed to machines which are more useful) in space and that nonsense about prosperity for all mankind won't follow from space exploration.
Americans don't band together because we don't have anything in common.
Our country is full of people who are here for the (now diminished) economic opportunity and because the failure of their states of origin coerced them to move to the Land of Free Stuff. They are not here for anything else because the culture of those who founded the US is as utterly alien to them as Mars. The US needed stoop labor, but doesn't need it as much any more because the bubble which funded it burst.
We are not a melting pot that can digest extremely dissimilar societies (this is not to say one is better than another), so it's every man for himself and selected peers. That is a logical response.
The government hands out stuff to people who squall loud enough. It doesn't reward virtue because it must buy votes from the mob and from business. If you don't have a bloc of votes to sell you cannot matter. Diversity means smaller voting blocs, coercing voters to choose between them.
Our pro-theocracy religionists disapprove of any distraction from suffering for Jesus.
Any pleasure must be rationed by the religionists (sex) or eliminated (pleasurable chemicals) because they are levers of social control and damn (pun intended) the consequences.
The War on Some Drugs is a pure product of US religionist (p)uritanism.
"I'm suffering massive losses too - nobody gave a billion dollars yesterday! That's a billion dollar loss in a single day!"
I'm being deprived of sex because other people are getting laid.
I, for one, welcome our new Sino-Ballmerian overlords!
"disclaimer: I'm a former military backshop avionics technician"
Represent!
Erm...
As a former flightline avionics weenie, engine troop, and later crew chief I concur with your assessment, and I wouldn't want that shit on ground vehicles either. A rugged notebook with a combination of .pdf manuals, photos, and videos would be much better because it need not be worn on the head and can be easily shared.
What it COULD be useful for is training. Once trained and with some experience, people know their systems and can rapidly troubleshoot them. Key to that is a combination of BIT (Built In Test) and electronic system diagnosis.
"This sort of thing will only agitate paranoid netizens and make the rest of us even less trusting of the government (and information that appears to be supportive of it) than we already are."
Good. We should not trust government, be it Republicrat or Democan.
We should name and shame the bad guys, we should foster public resentment of government, and government should fear the people else it will not serve them.
"The only people I know who use the Caps Lock Key are AOLers."
THERE ARE MORE OF US THAN LUNIX USERS. CAPS LOCK 4 TEH WIN!
Pakistan is militant, Muslim and therefore a threat. There is no reason to be politically correct and accord Islam respect it does not deserve.
India should be ready to destroy Pakistan if attacked. It would be doing the rest of the non-Jihadist world a considerable favor should it come to that.
That support is in return for substantial military aid, which the Paks want for preparedness against India. F-16s aren't designed for COIN work.
The Paks do as little as possible to fight people who are just like them because tribal areas are more "real" than arbitrary borders on a map.
"Think of the "money" shot...shudder."
3D will revolutionize endoscope porn.
India needs a first strike capability should Pakistan government control collapse and the (more dedicated) Jihadists take over.
India is large enough to absorb a moderate number of Pak nukes and then finish the job with boots on the ground, but every advantage is to be sought in advance.
When you have Jihadist neighbors like Pakistan, weaponizing space is a good idea.
"This distinction will be lost on millions of reactionaries."
The political mass to stop the enemy comes from reactionaries. Corporations like Monsanto have established long ago that they have no ethics, and the only way to get amoral entities to behave themselves is to master them with oversight and punishment.
Genetic engineering is fine, but corporations are inherently untrustworthy and should be viewed as "tolerated, necessary enemies". The default should be to restrict them as they are incapable of innocence.
"Thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of people die in Haiti due to a massive earthquake and we're talking about freaking LORAN-C??
Get some PRIORITIES!"
Haiti isn't worthy of discussion. It's tragic, there are lots of tragedies, but that a thing is tragic doesn't make it worth discussion in a tech forum.
Haiti is BTW a hopeless case, the people who live there maintain it so, and their choices aren't my concern. Go to an appropriate forum to whine about Haiti, or go there yourself ("PRIORITIES!") and help out.
"Doesn't it just give you a warm fuzzy to see people driving past you in cars that you can't afford to buy because the Government gouged you so hard in order to give your tax money to the people who can afford to buy them?"
Joe Shiftworker with any sense doesn't buy new vehicles, he buys them used. (I'd never buy a new hybrid and I can afford to pay cash for one.) New vehicles are a luxury purchase the public have been conditioned to make.
Get early adopters to kickstart the market and the rest will follow, just as with other vehicles. Cars last a long time and "trickle down" is intrinsic to the auto business.
"Why are the same people that bitch about the safety of nuclear reactors all at once the people whole also hold it back from being a, somewhat, excellent energy source? Uncool green peace, uncool."
Because Big Government and Bible Thumpers are far from being the only people without an agenda for social control.
"Chernobyl style accident that causes contamination of a large area for thousands of years cannot happen with other kinds of power plant"
Don't build "Chernobyl style" nuclear plants.
Oh, wait, we don't.
"clean eco-friendly coal burning plants at once."
Beats hearing the "slap, slap, slap" of bats being splattered by wind turbines, or earthquakes caused by frac'ing for geothermal.
I want my consequence-free power and I want it now!
"Nuclear reactors, threat or menace?"
Yes, because it coerces vendors to fix vulns and therefore improves ecosystem health.
If the internet ecosystem were not under steady attack, it would be weak and much more vulnerable.
What does not kill it makes it stronger.
Some live CDs have extra writable area to save files, but it's stretching it to say a virus would be at all likely to make use of that.