The point is, the Playfair person or persons never sat down and said, "Here's what I want to be able to do. I do not want to enable people to pirate iTunes music, nor do I want to break the law. What's the solution?"
And Apple's answer... taken directly from your own grandparent post... is as follows:
[We] specifically added features to iMovie, iDVD, and iPhoto that allow you to use purchased or ripped music in your own media projects, even if the tracks you want to use are protected by FairPlay.
They don't care whether you have good reason (or perhaps arguably, a right) to use the purchased material in some other format. Support in iMovie, iDVD, and iPhoto is much less about fair use than it is about the same old Apple vendor lock-in.
Come on, man. You'd imagine that anybody who could create something like Playfair must be at least fairly bright. A person like that should jump at the chance to solve that kind of tricky, complex problem.
The question is, would Apple be at all interested in discussing it? The answer is most likely "No," as it would be difficult to belive they are unaware of the controversy and the various legitimate reasons behind it.
Damn. I had to wade through THREE pages of cricket/baseball BS before I found the only other person who is actually thinking.
The best example that comes immediately to mind is the F1 race in Monaco in 2002, when the McLaren/Mercedes engineers fixed a stuck valve on Coulthard's car -- remotely while he was out racing on-track. If that doesn't imply an underlying level of hardcore geekery, nothing does.
The compulsive recording of mind-numbing statistics about a bunch of sweaty jocks is relatively -- and absolutely -- boring.
The real culprits here are the crappy installers. The sooner all Windows apps are installed using MSI (microsoft installer) services, the easier it will be to audit and rollback, and monitor what is going on. MSI's scope is enormous: it is fully transactional; it audits/logs everything, and it supports every option you could wish for.
I have to disagree with you. Having "every" app use MSI might help cleanup of reasonably legit software like Kaaza, but the GAIN/Gators of the world aren't going to make it that easy for you. And if they decide using MSI makes it easier on THEM, those features you mention are easy enough to disable through that same API. The API is intended for use by legimate software, which is not the problem being discussed.
I do agree that if Windows eventually reaches full-on.NET under the hood, the Windows-using world will potentially become quite a bit less spyware-friendly, particularly if future versions of Windows take certain obvious measures to automatically further restrict installed software, but no technical measure will "fix" the problem of the clueless from installing CometCursor and BanziBuddy intentionally.
If I understand it correctly, this is intended to be run manually before an intentional installation. It doesn't appear to just run in the background and log activity, as the article requests. (I didn't install it, so I might be wrong -- am I?)
I'm not normally one to defend misspellings (I finally had to admit I'm a card-carrying Grammar Nazi), but one might interpret his inability to spell it after a year of use as a sure sign that it really does "just work" as advertised: silently and automatically, unnoticed in the background... He never sees it, so he doesn't learn to spell it.
Maybe you should read the article you link to. Most of that concerns differences between the Mac and Xerox GUI, such as overlapping windows with region invalidation. He doesn't actually disagree that Xerox had the GUI thing going on first, he just says that the Mac GUI wasn't a direct ripoff.
Hence... the AC grandparent's characterization as a form of "embrace and extend" does apply. This is further supported by many of the other anecdotes on folklore.org (which is a cool site worth reading through, and I don't even really like Macs).
LOL -- That would certainly make for an "odd" format, wouldn't it? (The original parent post's title was "Another advantage of Nintendo's (odd) format").
The speed varies depending on the position of the read head.
Can you clarify what you mean by that? I'd argue Sun is suffering from exactly the opposite problem: the marketplace very clearly knows what "it wants" -- and that doesn't seem to include Sun hardware.
Embedded MIDI, yes. Flash no -- for the same reason a similar setting in Moz (if it existed) probably wouldn't work for the Flash plugin or, say, Java. Frankly, I can't say I've EVER wanted to hear embedded audio from a web page.:)
Do you happen to know what kind of timeout they're using in Longhorn?
I have a computer illiterate friend who got somebody he knew to build his latest machine. When I dropped by to help him get his modem working, I was surprised to see that this other guy had installed Longhorn. I've been on a a bunch of MS OS betas in the past, so I know they typically time out in anything from a year to as little as 90 days. I just want to know what kind of urgency I should communicate to him to switch back to a regular release of XP or whatever.
There are web-based spinoffs all over the place. One of the most successful (and fairly close to the original) is cleverly named Legend of the Green Dragon. I'm sure you can find lots of sites offering it if you check Google.
For the record, regular CDs and DVDs can withstand about 75K RPM before they fly apart. Some college kids with access to a lab with high-RPM destructive testing equipment did this a couple years back; I Googled for the link, but all I could find was boring, legitimate stuff.:)
No indication of the speed at which deformation would make them useless, but I'd assume it has to be much lower. Still, 75K RPM is quite a bit higher than current drive speeds. 1X speed is 500RPM in the center and 200RPM at the edge.
IE -> Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced -> Play Sounds in Web Pages
I see no equivalent option in the latest Firebird. Yes, I know embedded audio isn't a standard "feature". And yes, I know you were mostly trolling (at least I hope so, with a phrase like "your web" in there). But, in fact, short of using about:config (which somebody asking a question like this wouldn't know about), Firebird currently has a severe shortage of user-accessible options compared to IE or the last Mozilla I used.
That was the assumption of the post to which I was replying.
However, it is my opinion that a moon base will have few benefits compared to a Mars base. The benefits would be very different in each case, and judging their relative merits would be rather difficult, but that is my opinion. I'm sure an astronomer, for example, would feel very differently.
In any case, I firmly believe the moon is of almost no value as a "jumping off point" for a Mars base. Even if we had a moon base, it would make a lot more economic sense to go to Mars directly from Earth. It's just too expensive and complicated to make a moon base useful for Mars launches. Going there directly from Earth isn't particularly hard or expensive by comparison.
I'd wondered about a massive rail gun that could fire small-ish canisters into orbit
Unfortunately the details don't come to mind immediately (hopefully somebody else will have a link), but there are several plans on the table to do this, mostly involving really long ramp/rail arrangements in the mountains of South America. Useful Google search terms are "mass driver" and "linear accelerator".
here is one example that even takes a stab at the math and concludes that a reasonably-sized linear accelerator would result in 60 g's of acceleration!
Yes, the FAA enforces it, and the penalty is a big juicy fine. The reason is to ensure you know the rules and that you can afford the consequences if you do something dumb like (to oversimplify it) take out an airliner on the way up, or crash land into something expensive on the way down.
and they could hardly intercept in the time the flight would take place
You must have never seen military jets scramble.
When I was a kid, we lived on base only a few hundred yards off (and well below) the end of the runways in Iceland. Every few days the Russians would send Bears towards or into Icelandic airspace to test our response time. My father worked in Air Ops so I heard about this all the time. Once the USAF post at Hofn had a positive ID, it was only about three minutes before a pair of F4's were airborne, and they usually intercepted the bombers well off the eastern cost (the opposite side of Iceland, which is about 220 miles wide) in about 15 minutes.
And that was in 1979. A half-hour would be more than enough time to get planes in the air and take out a target within a few hundred miles of the base in question.
Why does everyne think the X-prize will revolutionize space? Just because someone's doing something for money they will necessarily do it well.
The X-prize itself won't revolutionize space and none of the realistic contenders are doing it just for the X-prize money. The X-prize money is a drop in the bucket compared to the costs of actually winning the prize. The X-prize is useful because it provides a goal for companies and people already interested in doing this.
These people and companies generally are doing it with eventual profit in mind. Because this is such a difficult thing to do, in order to do it at all, let alone make it profitable, they WILL necessarily do it well -- they MUST, otherwise they will fail.
If the engineers are serious about what they do... then they'll concentrate on the problem at hand and ignore where their funding comes from
How do you know this isn't already the case with the X-prize competitor's engineers?
It seems to be an article of faith among many slashdotters that anything the government does it will automatically mess up. It might be worth remembering that all achievements in space flight so far have been government-funded, and that the so-called commercial airlines exist only because of government supsidies.
Actually, it is an article of faith that the private sector can probably do anything the government does BETTER. That doesn't mean the government messes it up. That also doesn't mean those things are always necessarily worth doing in the private sector.
The expense of getting started in space flight, particularly in the past, practically guarantees it could only be done with the massive financial resources a government is able to muster. The X-prize exists because that is no longer the case -- it is finally realistic to expect private parties to be able to tackle these problems without government funding. Comparing this to government airline subsidies is inaccurate. You should compare it to early aircraft development (which was almost exclusively a government-funded affair) to modern aircraft development (which is now privately addressed by a huge number of companies -- like Rutan's, not surprisingly).
If Windows is so widely known, then using a similar name and making a similar product was most definitely intentional.
No, it's the MS logo that distinguishes them, not the word "windows". Pretty much every graphical OS in history has used windows, the term is diluted beyond recognition.
That's REALLY reaching.
Hell, this SITE probably provides some of the best evidence I can think of which completely contradicts what you're saying. Almost EVERY article ever posted will have replies containing multiple references to "Windows" which are NOT preceded by the word Microsoft or any reference to the MS logo -- yet EVERYBODY knows what it means.
In fact, in YOUR own initial post here, you typed "Windows ME" and even though you committed the heinous crime of leaving off the all-important "Microsoft" qualifying prefix, the rest of us still managed to guess at your meaning. Want some other examples? How about when you whined about Windows here? Or here?
However -- sending the fuel plant and a return vehicle doesn't require ANY robotic capability. The fuel plant is a ~$45K collection of pipes and chambers and pumps. It has to land safely, open up, and start cranking out fuel. Sending a return vehicle is even more simple. It just has to land and sit there and wait.
Frankly, I think people who ask, "Why send humans?" lack the basic human curiosity which is behind a great deal of the important things people have achieved throughout history. This is no personal attack on you -- a lot of people have asked that here (and there are a lot of good answers available elsewhere under this article) -- I'm just saying, if you have to ask, you'll probably never understand. And yeah, there is a lot more to it than joy-riding.
Keep political whining out of this. It isn't interesting or useful to a discussion of the relative merits of the subject.
The thing is, establishing a base on the moon or on Mars is likely to have similar costs. You'll need shelter and the same living facilities, lots of storage, and a power source (here Mars may be cheaper since it has an atmosphere which could help fuel chemical reaction based power sources). If anything, shelter on the moon will be quite a bit more expensive since the moon is a much harsher environment -- there is less atmosphere (none), much higher radiation levels, greater exposure to metorites and micrometorites, and more severe temperature extremes over longer periods of time. There is also zero practical chance a moon base could be self-sustaining (Zubrin's book does a good job of detailing the critical elements which we've never found traces of in lunar soil). But for the sake of argument, we'll say a long-term Mars base would be roughly equivalent to the cost of a long-term lunar base.
Beyond the cost of establishing a base, the cost of basic 60s style heavy launch vehicles and other equipment and supplies are roughly the same whether they're destined for the moon or for Mars. Regardless of your long term plans, to get started, quite a lot of stuff has to be lifted off the Earth. (You could invoke the wonders of nanotech, and sure I hope that works out some day, but obviously that isn't a realistic option today. Even our large-scale robotics aren't really up to the task of anything but the most rudimentary construction.)
On the other hand, it is extremely expensive and complicated to build from scratch: mining facilities, ore transportation, ore processing and refinement facilities, and the myraid processes required to transform the refined output into useful products -- and consider the vast range of materials (to say nothing of finished products) required to build even a modest life support system, let alone a full-blown interplanetary craft with reentry capabilities and whatever else you're looking for. All this effort, and the only thing you REALLY gain is not having to lift a launch vehicle out of the Earth's gravity well -- and you only gain that benefit some day in the very, very distant future, since all this lunar mining is going to take a lifetime to establish.
The next question is, what progress on Mars could have been made using the same effort that you'd have to expend in order to establish the complicated infrastructure to mine lunar ore and turn it into something useful? At the very least, obviously, you'd already have a Mars base ready to go. If you didn't bother with mining and processing, the Mars base could be fantastically elaborate and still be cheaper and easier to construct and maintain.
There are other good questions. How much extra offworld manpower would be required in order to make useful lunar mining a practical reality? What would be the cost and labor overhead of supporting that additional manpower?
How many moon-to-Mars launches would have to follow before you recouped the losses of establishing this elaborate lunar mining and processing operation and started to actually realize any benefits? At that point you'd just be back to zero, presumably finally ready to start on the Mars base. And again, all you've really saved is not having to send stuff out of the Earth's gravity well.
The value of a moon base just isn't there compared to a Mars base.
Actually, Zubrin has you covered there, too. I probably won't do his plan justice with my summary (after all, he wrote a whole book on it), but off the top of my head, here are several safety factors he described.
First of all, his plan involves sending as much as possible ahead of the manned mission. Beyond the obvious launch of critical supplies, he describes a very cheap system for generating huge amounts of fuel using the Martian atmosphere. On top of that, we'd send the RETURN vehicle to the surface ahead of a manned mission.
That means you know in advance that you have a return vehicle and fuel already waiting for you -- before you even leave.
Second, the most optimal trajectory for a Mars mission automatically results in a "free return trajectory" -- which means if something goes wrong, the ship will automatically slingshot around Mars and return to Earth, without any fuel usage or other manuvering input from the crew whatsoever.
That means the main risks are surviving space itself (radiation, lack of gravity, isolation psychology), landing (this will remain high risk for a long time to come), and living in the relatively harsh Mars environment until the return launch window opens. (I no longer remember the numbers, but that isn't a terribly long wait.) Of those risks, only the last one requires much from a technological development perspective, and we can learn a lot from a very relevant example of survival under similarly extreme conditions: long term nuclear submarine missions.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is, the Playfair person or persons never sat down and said, "Here's what I want to be able to do. I do not want to enable people to pirate iTunes music, nor do I want to break the law. What's the solution?"
And Apple's answer... taken directly from your own grandparent post... is as follows:
[We] specifically added features to iMovie, iDVD, and iPhoto that allow you to use purchased or ripped music in your own media projects, even if the tracks you want to use are protected by FairPlay.
They don't care whether you have good reason (or perhaps arguably, a right) to use the purchased material in some other format. Support in iMovie, iDVD, and iPhoto is much less about fair use than it is about the same old Apple vendor lock-in.
Come on, man. You'd imagine that anybody who could create something like Playfair must be at least fairly bright. A person like that should jump at the chance to solve that kind of tricky, complex problem.
The question is, would Apple be at all interested in discussing it? The answer is most likely "No," as it would be difficult to belive they are unaware of the controversy and the various legitimate reasons behind it.
Damn. I had to wade through THREE pages of cricket/baseball BS before I found the only other person who is actually thinking.
The best example that comes immediately to mind is the F1 race in Monaco in 2002, when the McLaren/Mercedes engineers fixed a stuck valve on Coulthard's car -- remotely while he was out racing on-track. If that doesn't imply an underlying level of hardcore geekery, nothing does.
The compulsive recording of mind-numbing statistics about a bunch of sweaty jocks is relatively -- and absolutely -- boring.
The real culprits here are the crappy installers. The sooner all Windows apps are installed using MSI (microsoft installer) services, the easier it will be to audit and rollback, and monitor what is going on. MSI's scope is enormous: it is fully transactional; it audits/logs everything, and it supports every option you could wish for.
.NET under the hood, the Windows-using world will potentially become quite a bit less spyware-friendly, particularly if future versions of Windows take certain obvious measures to automatically further restrict installed software, but no technical measure will "fix" the problem of the clueless from installing CometCursor and BanziBuddy intentionally.
I have to disagree with you. Having "every" app use MSI might help cleanup of reasonably legit software like Kaaza, but the GAIN/Gators of the world aren't going to make it that easy for you. And if they decide using MSI makes it easier on THEM, those features you mention are easy enough to disable through that same API. The API is intended for use by legimate software, which is not the problem being discussed.
I do agree that if Windows eventually reaches full-on
If I understand it correctly, this is intended to be run manually before an intentional installation. It doesn't appear to just run in the background and log activity, as the article requests. (I didn't install it, so I might be wrong -- am I?)
I'm not normally one to defend misspellings (I finally had to admit I'm a card-carrying Grammar Nazi), but one might interpret his inability to spell it after a year of use as a sure sign that it really does "just work" as advertised: silently and automatically, unnoticed in the background... He never sees it, so he doesn't learn to spell it.
Maybe you should read the article you link to. Most of that concerns differences between the Mac and Xerox GUI, such as overlapping windows with region invalidation. He doesn't actually disagree that Xerox had the GUI thing going on first, he just says that the Mac GUI wasn't a direct ripoff.
Hence... the AC grandparent's characterization as a form of "embrace and extend" does apply. This is further supported by many of the other anecdotes on folklore.org (which is a cool site worth reading through, and I don't even really like Macs).
LOL -- That would certainly make for an "odd" format, wouldn't it? (The original parent post's title was "Another advantage of Nintendo's (odd) format").
The speed varies depending on the position of the read head.
because of the lack of vision in the marketplace.
Can you clarify what you mean by that? I'd argue Sun is suffering from exactly the opposite problem: the marketplace very clearly knows what "it wants" -- and that doesn't seem to include Sun hardware.
Embedded MIDI, yes. Flash no -- for the same reason a similar setting in Moz (if it existed) probably wouldn't work for the Flash plugin or, say, Java. Frankly, I can't say I've EVER wanted to hear embedded audio from a web page. :)
Do you happen to know what kind of timeout they're using in Longhorn?
I have a computer illiterate friend who got somebody he knew to build his latest machine. When I dropped by to help him get his modem working, I was surprised to see that this other guy had installed Longhorn. I've been on a a bunch of MS OS betas in the past, so I know they typically time out in anything from a year to as little as 90 days. I just want to know what kind of urgency I should communicate to him to switch back to a regular release of XP or whatever.
There are web-based spinoffs all over the place. One of the most successful (and fairly close to the original) is cleverly named Legend of the Green Dragon. I'm sure you can find lots of sites offering it if you check Google.
For the record, regular CDs and DVDs can withstand about 75K RPM before they fly apart. Some college kids with access to a lab with high-RPM destructive testing equipment did this a couple years back; I Googled for the link, but all I could find was boring, legitimate stuff. :)
No indication of the speed at which deformation would make them useless, but I'd assume it has to be much lower. Still, 75K RPM is quite a bit higher than current drive speeds. 1X speed is 500RPM in the center and 200RPM at the edge.
you may ponder what the carpenter said a couple thousand years back
"I'm so frigging tire of sawing logs. I wonder if I could run one of those prophet scams without the Romans catching on?"
IE -> Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced -> Play Sounds in Web Pages
I see no equivalent option in the latest Firebird. Yes, I know embedded audio isn't a standard "feature". And yes, I know you were mostly trolling (at least I hope so, with a phrase like "your web" in there). But, in fact, short of using about:config (which somebody asking a question like this wouldn't know about), Firebird currently has a severe shortage of user-accessible options compared to IE or the last Mozilla I used.
That was the assumption of the post to which I was replying.
However, it is my opinion that a moon base will have few benefits compared to a Mars base. The benefits would be very different in each case, and judging their relative merits would be rather difficult, but that is my opinion. I'm sure an astronomer, for example, would feel very differently.
In any case, I firmly believe the moon is of almost no value as a "jumping off point" for a Mars base. Even if we had a moon base, it would make a lot more economic sense to go to Mars directly from Earth. It's just too expensive and complicated to make a moon base useful for Mars launches. Going there directly from Earth isn't particularly hard or expensive by comparison.
Not only that, they're cheaper (only ten bucks per year) than a vanity plate for a car.
I'd wondered about a massive rail gun that could fire small-ish canisters into orbit
Unfortunately the details don't come to mind immediately (hopefully somebody else will have a link), but there are several plans on the table to do this, mostly involving really long ramp/rail arrangements in the mountains of South America. Useful Google search terms are "mass driver" and "linear accelerator".
here is one example that even takes a stab at the math and concludes that a reasonably-sized linear accelerator would result in 60 g's of acceleration!
Yes, the FAA enforces it, and the penalty is a big juicy fine. The reason is to ensure you know the rules and that you can afford the consequences if you do something dumb like (to oversimplify it) take out an airliner on the way up, or crash land into something expensive on the way down.
and they could hardly intercept in the time the flight would take place
You must have never seen military jets scramble.
When I was a kid, we lived on base only a few hundred yards off (and well below) the end of the runways in Iceland. Every few days the Russians would send Bears towards or into Icelandic airspace to test our response time. My father worked in Air Ops so I heard about this all the time. Once the USAF post at Hofn had a positive ID, it was only about three minutes before a pair of F4's were airborne, and they usually intercepted the bombers well off the eastern cost (the opposite side of Iceland, which is about 220 miles wide) in about 15 minutes.
And that was in 1979. A half-hour would be more than enough time to get planes in the air and take out a target within a few hundred miles of the base in question.
Why does everyne think the X-prize will revolutionize space?
... then they'll concentrate on the problem at hand and ignore where their funding comes from
Just because someone's doing something for money they will necessarily do it well.
The X-prize itself won't revolutionize space and none of the realistic contenders are doing it just for the X-prize money. The X-prize money is a drop in the bucket compared to the costs of actually winning the prize. The X-prize is useful because it provides a goal for companies and people already interested in doing this.
These people and companies generally are doing it with eventual profit in mind. Because this is such a difficult thing to do, in order to do it at all, let alone make it profitable, they WILL necessarily do it well -- they MUST, otherwise they will fail.
If the engineers are serious about what they do
How do you know this isn't already the case with the X-prize competitor's engineers?
It seems to be an article of faith among many slashdotters that anything the government does it will automatically mess up. It might be worth remembering that all achievements in space flight so far have been government-funded, and that the so-called commercial airlines exist only because of government supsidies.
Actually, it is an article of faith that the private sector can probably do anything the government does BETTER. That doesn't mean the government messes it up. That also doesn't mean those things are always necessarily worth doing in the private sector.
The expense of getting started in space flight, particularly in the past, practically guarantees it could only be done with the massive financial resources a government is able to muster. The X-prize exists because that is no longer the case -- it is finally realistic to expect private parties to be able to tackle these problems without government funding. Comparing this to government airline subsidies is inaccurate. You should compare it to early aircraft development (which was almost exclusively a government-funded affair) to modern aircraft development (which is now privately addressed by a huge number of companies -- like Rutan's, not surprisingly).
If Windows is so widely known, then using a similar name and making a similar product was most definitely intentional.
No, it's the MS logo that distinguishes them, not the word "windows". Pretty much every graphical OS in history has used windows, the term is diluted beyond recognition.
That's REALLY reaching.
Hell, this SITE probably provides some of the best evidence I can think of which completely contradicts what you're saying. Almost EVERY article ever posted will have replies containing multiple references to "Windows" which are NOT preceded by the word Microsoft or any reference to the MS logo -- yet EVERYBODY knows what it means.
In fact, in YOUR own initial post here, you typed "Windows ME" and even though you committed the heinous crime of leaving off the all-important "Microsoft" qualifying prefix, the rest of us still managed to guess at your meaning. Want some other examples? How about when you whined about Windows here? Or here?
CasualPoster sums it up well.
However -- sending the fuel plant and a return vehicle doesn't require ANY robotic capability. The fuel plant is a ~$45K collection of pipes and chambers and pumps. It has to land safely, open up, and start cranking out fuel. Sending a return vehicle is even more simple. It just has to land and sit there and wait.
Frankly, I think people who ask, "Why send humans?" lack the basic human curiosity which is behind a great deal of the important things people have achieved throughout history. This is no personal attack on you -- a lot of people have asked that here (and there are a lot of good answers available elsewhere under this article) -- I'm just saying, if you have to ask, you'll probably never understand. And yeah, there is a lot more to it than joy-riding.
Keep political whining out of this. It isn't interesting or useful to a discussion of the relative merits of the subject.
The thing is, establishing a base on the moon or on Mars is likely to have similar costs. You'll need shelter and the same living facilities, lots of storage, and a power source (here Mars may be cheaper since it has an atmosphere which could help fuel chemical reaction based power sources). If anything, shelter on the moon will be quite a bit more expensive since the moon is a much harsher environment -- there is less atmosphere (none), much higher radiation levels, greater exposure to metorites and micrometorites, and more severe temperature extremes over longer periods of time. There is also zero practical chance a moon base could be self-sustaining (Zubrin's book does a good job of detailing the critical elements which we've never found traces of in lunar soil). But for the sake of argument, we'll say a long-term Mars base would be roughly equivalent to the cost of a long-term lunar base.
Beyond the cost of establishing a base, the cost of basic 60s style heavy launch vehicles and other equipment and supplies are roughly the same whether they're destined for the moon or for Mars. Regardless of your long term plans, to get started, quite a lot of stuff has to be lifted off the Earth. (You could invoke the wonders of nanotech, and sure I hope that works out some day, but obviously that isn't a realistic option today. Even our large-scale robotics aren't really up to the task of anything but the most rudimentary construction.)
On the other hand, it is extremely expensive and complicated to build from scratch: mining facilities, ore transportation, ore processing and refinement facilities, and the myraid processes required to transform the refined output into useful products -- and consider the vast range of materials (to say nothing of finished products) required to build even a modest life support system, let alone a full-blown interplanetary craft with reentry capabilities and whatever else you're looking for. All this effort, and the only thing you REALLY gain is not having to lift a launch vehicle out of the Earth's gravity well -- and you only gain that benefit some day in the very, very distant future, since all this lunar mining is going to take a lifetime to establish.
The next question is, what progress on Mars could have been made using the same effort that you'd have to expend in order to establish the complicated infrastructure to mine lunar ore and turn it into something useful? At the very least, obviously, you'd already have a Mars base ready to go. If you didn't bother with mining and processing, the Mars base could be fantastically elaborate and still be cheaper and easier to construct and maintain.
There are other good questions. How much extra offworld manpower would be required in order to make useful lunar mining a practical reality? What would be the cost and labor overhead of supporting that additional manpower?
How many moon-to-Mars launches would have to follow before you recouped the losses of establishing this elaborate lunar mining and processing operation and started to actually realize any benefits? At that point you'd just be back to zero, presumably finally ready to start on the Mars base. And again, all you've really saved is not having to send stuff out of the Earth's gravity well.
The value of a moon base just isn't there compared to a Mars base.
Touche. Interesting coincidence.
(Knowing Niven, it probably isn't.)
Actually, Zubrin has you covered there, too. I probably won't do his plan justice with my summary (after all, he wrote a whole book on it), but off the top of my head, here are several safety factors he described.
First of all, his plan involves sending as much as possible ahead of the manned mission. Beyond the obvious launch of critical supplies, he describes a very cheap system for generating huge amounts of fuel using the Martian atmosphere. On top of that, we'd send the RETURN vehicle to the surface ahead of a manned mission.
That means you know in advance that you have a return vehicle and fuel already waiting for you -- before you even leave.
Second, the most optimal trajectory for a Mars mission automatically results in a "free return trajectory" -- which means if something goes wrong, the ship will automatically slingshot around Mars and return to Earth, without any fuel usage or other manuvering input from the crew whatsoever.
That means the main risks are surviving space itself (radiation, lack of gravity, isolation psychology), landing (this will remain high risk for a long time to come), and living in the relatively harsh Mars environment until the return launch window opens. (I no longer remember the numbers, but that isn't a terribly long wait.) Of those risks, only the last one requires much from a technological development perspective, and we can learn a lot from a very relevant example of survival under similarly extreme conditions: long term nuclear submarine missions.