Also, if I tell something to shut down, it had better well shut down. It's my computer and it works the way I want it to.
Not when you're running Windows 10 it doesn't.
Re:When you have a hammer
on
KDE Turns 19
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· Score: 1
Binary compatibility shouldn't be a problem on Linux, assuming you're using the same architecture as was built for (e.g., 32-bit x86, 64-bit x86, etc.). The problem is libraries: open-source stuff always links to a lot of libraries which are included with the distros, so you can't easily just take a binary from one distro and run it on another, because the libs won't match up.
For proprietary stuff, this shouldn't be a problem: they just need to statically link everything. I'm pretty sure that's how actual proprietary software on Linux is distributed (there is some out there, you know; most of it is really high-end stuff).
Huh? Where'd you get that idea? If you visit someone's web site, they can track you to some extent because they have your IP address (and a lot more if you log in), regardless of your browser and OS. Nothing is 100%.
But that's still a lot better than sending all your keystrokes to MS.
Anyway, you can prevent a lot of the tracking by using an ad-blocker, again regardless of OS or browser.
No, it's easier (at least on desktop PCs and laptops; phones are a different matter). Linux distros have gotten better and better: easier to use, easier to install. Just install Linux and stop using Windows and you don't have to worry about privacy on your PC.
You say you need some software that only works on Windows? Well do you need it so much that you're willing to let Microsoft run a keylogger on your PC and send all your personal data, passwords, etc. to MS's servers, for who knows what purpose?
NASA never spent any money on a pen, the Fisher pen company decided to make a "space pen" all by themselves using private capital. The pen was adopted by NASA, and later by the Soviets/Russians. Pencils are dangerous in space "because of the substantial dangers that broken pencil tips and graphite dust pose to electronics in zero gravity, the flammable nature of wood present in pencils, and the inadequate quality documentation produced by non-permanent or smeared recordkeeping".
Re:Why do you like KDE?
on
KDE Turns 19
·
· Score: 2
My main reason is KWin (the window manager). It's not about the apps to me, it's about the overall system, including the window manager, the configuration tools, etc. I can configure my desktop to my liking, without having to jump through hoops or do it all over again every time the DE gets a version number bump (unlike Gnome).
Almost no one actually uses Konqueror any more, we all use Firefox or Chromium. Same with LibreOffice. KDE doesn't prevent you from running non-KDE apps. However, you cherry-picked the worst examples. Krita is a really good image editor (better than GIMP in many ways, but its focus is a little different), K3B is a nice CD/DVD burner, Kcalc works well for me, etc. For a lot of the smaller stuff, the KDE apps are good. Okular (for PDFs) and KTorrent are great too. I even like Amarok though a lot of people prefer Clementine.
Re:When you have a hammer
on
KDE Turns 19
·
· Score: 1
I disagree. Currently, Linux desktop share (in reality, not just looking at sales numbers which of course is idiotic since most people install Linux themselves rather than buying a PC with it pre-installed) is tiny, and has very little visibility. It's hard to say exactly how small it is, but it's not likely to be have more users than MacOSX. Anyway, as a consequence the availability of applications is rather poor, which prevents more people, who would like to switch, from adopting it because they rely on certain proprietary apps (usually business-related).
It'd be nice to have better marketshare, maybe around 25%, because then there'd be much better support.
Also, mainstream adoption wouldn't kill it; why do you think that? The big strength of Linux is its open-source nature and lack of centralized control. Even if, say, Ubuntu became the new Microsoft and all Windows users suddenly installed Ubuntu (not likely, but let's suppose), most of the software is open-source: the kernel, main libraries, etc. All those other distros will still be around, and doing things differently than Ubuntu: different DEs, maybe even different init systems, etc. You'll still be able to use a distro that suits you better.
For those who don't know, KHTML was used and modified by Apple, and became "WebKit", which is the rendering engine used in Safari, iOS, and all the Chrome-related browsers.
Re:I Didn't Realize
on
KDE Turns 19
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· Score: 3, Informative
Unfortunately, part of this is a byproduct of lack of developer resources, because there's too much competition in the Linux DE space, and like most Linux projects, there aren't that many developers to begin with. Projects with high corporate interest like the kernel get lots of developer time (thanks to companies paying their employees to work on it); the kernel is used in countless embedded devices plus servers, so there's a lot of corporate backing. There isn't much corporate backing for desktop work, so we get the garbage that Red Hat shovels to us (Gnome3). Why RH doesn't want to push a DE that would work extremely well in a corporate desktop environment as a Windows replacement, I have no idea; my guess is that their management is buddy-buddy with the top Gnome devs (who also work there, and have built themselves a little empire within the company) and refuses to change course even though years and years and years of Gnome hasn't helped Red Hat penetrate the business desktop market at all.
Anyway, add that to some lackluster leadership within KDE wherein they've pushed for new features (akonadi, nepomuk, desktop search, activities, etc.) over improving existing code, which is also a big Achilles' heel for FOSS software in general: devs prefer to work on new shiny stuff instead of making things reliable and fixing bugs, and most of these devs are unpaid so the effect is much worse. Proprietary software isn't immune to this (new features sell software, bug-fixes and reliability improvements do not), but it can be worse in FOSS depending on who's involved in the project.
Re:K in KDE
on
KDE Turns 19
·
· Score: 3, Informative
This is just plain idiotic. Qt uses less memory than Gtk+, and is a far superior and more complete toolkit as well. Qt is commonly used in low-resource embedded systems; Gtk+ is not.
And this is why the metric system is wrong and should be abandoned: it's used in North Korea. Since North Korea is a horrible regime and uses metric, I refuse to use it.
Also, Iran has a horrible regime, and they fly F-14 jets. Because of this, I refuse to watch Top Gun, and because Tom Cruise is in Top Gun, I refuse to watch any movies with him in it.
Well another responder to my post addressed this. I guess I'm a little out-of-touch; I've been using DuckDuckGo for a while now because of all the privacy problems. I liked the way Google *used* to be, where they showed you targeted ads based on your *current* search, not the way they seem to be now where they remember all your previous searches and show you ads based on those.
I'm not trying to be a Google shill here, but this is exactly why I like Google's ads (or rather, liked, back when they were more obviously ads on the right side of the search results). If I'm looking for something, I might do a Google search for it; if one of the AdWords ads shows up, as a small text-only ad, and it's exactly the thing I'm looking for, that's a good thing IMO. I guess this is called "targeted advertising", and IMO it's the best kind. If I'm explicitly searching for something, or have some kind of problem I'm Googling for an answer to, having a small,text-only ad pop up with a product that solves my problem is a big help.
This all sounds interesting, but I don't really agree about the cost of mining bit. Yes, launch costs are high, but once you have all the stuff you need on-site on the Moon (or wherever, but obviously the Moon is cheaper than Mars or Venus), the only costs are getting workers to the Moon (and tired ones back home), and whatever it costs to send (hopefully refined) material back to Earth. Basically, it's a one-time cost to get the infrastructure up there. If you're doing enough mining up there (between the Moon, and maybe capturing asteroids and then refining them on the Moon, or in orbital or Lagrangian stations), then it would be profitable, of course assuming there's enough valuable ore there to begin with.
So it really comes down to a question of: what's the total cost of establishing all that infrastructure up there, plus the ongoing cost of actually operating up there, compared to how much you'll be able to sell the material for down here (taking into account time value of money of course)? With the huge up-front costs, it probably doesn't seem like it'd be worth it, but there's a lot of material up there between the Moon and the asteroids, and over a long enough time span it might make sense. Throw in space tourism (who wouldn't want to spend a week on the Moon?) and that should sweeten things. On top of that, launch costs are coming down thanks to the efforts of SpaceX and others. Ongoing costs can be minimized with heavy usage of either automated robotic systems, or with remote-control (or a combination of the two): with the Moon only a few light-seconds away, two-way radio control isn't such a problem as it would be for Venus or Mars. The fewer humans you need to regularly cycle there, the less things will cost to operate.
Now obviously, if the break-even time is 4 centuries, then you're not going to get many investors for that. But what if it's less, maybe only 30 or 50 years? It does seem like several billionaires are very interested in asteroid mining, among other space ventures. All it took for Columbus (today's namesake, even if he was a murderous bastard) to help start colonization of the Americas was an investment by the Spanish crown. What if some silicon valley billionaires pump a bunch of money into this, not really caring if they see a return on their investment in their lifetimes? (Plus, these same billionaires are also pumping money into longevity research, so if that works out and they live to 250, they might very well see a return.)
This is extremely informative, and if Slashdot's moderation system weren't such a broken mess, I'd mod you up.
However, I do have some questions and concerns, but realize I'm not a geologist as I stated before. Do you work for NASA or something?
The main problem I see is that it seems like you're making a lot of assumptions based on geology here on Earth, such as which minerals are likely to be present at sites with particular geologies. Doesn't that depend a lot on the early planetary formation?
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought I had read that, just like you say with the Moon and heavy elements sinking to the core, the exact same thing happened to the Earth, and as a result, we have no heavy metals, including iron(!), accessible here on the crust left over from the formation of this planet, and that all our valuable ores (iron, gold, silver, even tin and lead) came from asteroid impacts over the eons, which is why they're concentrated in particular places.
And while it sounds like we understand a good deal about geological processes, I'm not so sure it's that complete: didn't we only figure out the southern part of Mexico was formed by a giant asteroid impact within the last few decades, and that that was the cause of all the caves and such along what's left of the rim of the crater?
Anyway, with asteroid impacts, the moon is full of them, as we can see easily with a small telescope, and unlike the Earth, there's been little tectonic activity and no atmospheric or water-based erosion. So wouldn't that mean that each impact site could potentially have a lot of valuable ores? I see what you said about them being concentrated too deep though, but is that necessarily the case? Here on earth, erosion would wipe away most traces of any low-velocity impacts, leaving only the deeply-buried stuff. On the Moon, there's no real erosion, so maybe there's more stuff close to the surface. And as for cost, sure it costs a lot to get equipment up there, but once there's infrastructure in place, shouldn't digging be fairly cheap at that point? It's not like you have to worry about paying for environmental impact studies and the like.
For Rubidium, Wikipedia does list a fair number of applications. With lower cost, I believe there might be more. You also mentioned titanium being plentiful there. Wouldn't that be a good enough reason? Titanium isn't exactly cheap here. It's not expensive like gold by any means, but it's a lot more than steel, and having cheap titanium would be great for the auto industry. How much fuel are we wasting because we still build cars out of steel instead of titanium? Yes, there are a lot of titanium deposits here on Earth too, but last I heard most of them were in Russia, which is probably restricting the supply for economic and military reasons (they built the only titanium-hulled submarines). Of course, with the high cost of building infrastructure on the Moon and getting refined Ti back here, it might not be so cheap, but has anyone really crunched the numbers to see?
As for Venus, that sounds interesting, but unlike the Moon where it's 3 days away and wouldn't be *that* hard to just go there and do some deeper digging and exploration, Venus is completely inhospitable at the surface for both humans and machinery, so I have no idea how we'd exploit mineral resources there. If you can't even get a lander to last more than an hour or two before succumbing to heat failure (plus failure from the atmosphere), I can't imagine how you'd get heavy equipment to stay down there and dig up stuff.
How about Mercury? Any chance of that being commercially valuable? Though that place is inhospitably hot too; you could stay on the back side, but the planet rotates, so your mining station would have to slowly move, or at least be able to handle the heat on the sunny side while your crew travels across the planet in the opposite direction to stay in the shade.
Which summary did you read? The one I read said they're looking at switching to Python, away from LabVIEW. That's perfectly understandable. LabVIEW is completely proprietary, and on top of that, it's really hard to find someone to take the job. I had some company try to talk me into a LabVIEW job a while ago, even though I had precisely zero experience with it, and no interest. Just because I have a EE degree and a lot of background in software (mostly embedded programming), they figured they could convince me to take the job and they'd train me. No thanks: the last thing I want is be stuck as a LabVIEW programmer forever.
That whole "best tool for the job" thing really isn't true. When looking for candidates, employers usually want someone with prior experience in the language (/tool) they're using. So this tends to make everyone gravitate towards certain popular tools and languages. Thus, we have C, C++, Java, Python, JavaScript, etc. which have become very popular, depending on application and industry of course, and a fair amount of trying to force one language into a role it might not be best-suited for, because it's the language people know and favor, and because you can hire people more easily who already know it. Other languages keep trying to make headway, but usually don't go very far: Rust, Go, Ruby, etc., and other languages which are dying out: Perl. Becoming an expert in a proprietary language and toolset is a bad, bad idea for career longevity.
No, it's really just another symptom of America's overall decline, as most of Slashdot's readership is American. Now we just need to sit back and see which nation becomes the next superpower; it'll probably be China.
The moon is nearby and a conveniently low gravity well, but as far as minerals go, it's pretty boring
Huh? How exactly do we know this? Because of some rocks the Apollo astronauts brought back? I admit, I'm not a geologist, but don't you need to do a lot more exploration to determine if a body the size of the Moon (which is one of the larger bodies in the solar system actually, at #14, with only 4 moons larger; it's even #11 by gravity) has useful minerals? Such as exploring the "dark side", doing some digging, etc.? The Apollo missions only explored a few sites; they didn't get to the back side which looks entirely different, they didn't get to the poles, etc. The Moon has obviously been bombarded with many asteroids; there's no telling what deposits those impacts left behind. Almost all the useful minerals in our own crust was left there by asteroid impacts; it didn't occur naturally (as part of the planet's formation).
I think we're seriously discounting the Moon here. Heck, the Apollo missions didn't even figure out that the Moon has significant water deposits; that was only found recently by some other country's probe.
There might be benefits to sending humans to Mars, but I agree, the Moon should be the first big step. It's very close, and likely has significant mineral resources. It also has less gravity, and would be a good base for doing asteroid-capture missions and low-g refinement and manufacturing close to the Earth for easy material return. It'd be a great place for tourism too: you could build a luxury resort there and people could take 2-3 week vacations there, since each trip is only 3 days, unlike Mars where you're exposed to hard cosmic radiation for 6-9 months in each direction, making a short vacation there impossible until someone figures out a much, much faster propulsion method.
Perhaps later, after that's all in place, they can scout out Mars more and find more valuable resources that aren't present on nearby asteroids or the Moon, and maybe some people will want to start colonies there since the gravity is a more human-friendly 1/3g (instead of the Moon's 1/6g which might not be so great healthwise for long-term stays).
Oh please. There's a lot more to the planet and the human race than the USA and its imbecilic inhabitants who utterly suck at electing decent leaders.
And this "rock" is really a lush paradise; what's really stupid is how much we're trashing it. We should be doing much of our resource extraction in space and moving heavy industry there so we can preserve this place.
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How? External hardware? Simply selecting a checkbox within Windows isn't guaranteed to do anything, or not be undone when the next update arrives.
Also, if I tell something to shut down, it had better well shut down. It's my computer and it works the way I want it to.
Not when you're running Windows 10 it doesn't.
Binary compatibility shouldn't be a problem on Linux, assuming you're using the same architecture as was built for (e.g., 32-bit x86, 64-bit x86, etc.). The problem is libraries: open-source stuff always links to a lot of libraries which are included with the distros, so you can't easily just take a binary from one distro and run it on another, because the libs won't match up.
For proprietary stuff, this shouldn't be a problem: they just need to statically link everything. I'm pretty sure that's how actual proprietary software on Linux is distributed (there is some out there, you know; most of it is really high-end stuff).
Huh? Where'd you get that idea? If you visit someone's web site, they can track you to some extent because they have your IP address (and a lot more if you log in), regardless of your browser and OS. Nothing is 100%.
But that's still a lot better than sending all your keystrokes to MS.
Anyway, you can prevent a lot of the tracking by using an ad-blocker, again regardless of OS or browser.
Linux generally works very well on business-class laptops like the Thinkpad.
No, it's easier (at least on desktop PCs and laptops; phones are a different matter). Linux distros have gotten better and better: easier to use, easier to install. Just install Linux and stop using Windows and you don't have to worry about privacy on your PC.
You say you need some software that only works on Windows? Well do you need it so much that you're willing to let Microsoft run a keylogger on your PC and send all your personal data, passwords, etc. to MS's servers, for who knows what purpose?
-1 Idiotic and Stupid.
NASA never spent any money on a pen, the Fisher pen company decided to make a "space pen" all by themselves using private capital. The pen was adopted by NASA, and later by the Soviets/Russians. Pencils are dangerous in space "because of the substantial dangers that broken pencil tips and graphite dust pose to electronics in zero gravity, the flammable nature of wood present in pencils, and the inadequate quality documentation produced by non-permanent or smeared recordkeeping".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
My main reason is KWin (the window manager). It's not about the apps to me, it's about the overall system, including the window manager, the configuration tools, etc. I can configure my desktop to my liking, without having to jump through hoops or do it all over again every time the DE gets a version number bump (unlike Gnome).
Almost no one actually uses Konqueror any more, we all use Firefox or Chromium. Same with LibreOffice. KDE doesn't prevent you from running non-KDE apps. However, you cherry-picked the worst examples. Krita is a really good image editor (better than GIMP in many ways, but its focus is a little different), K3B is a nice CD/DVD burner, Kcalc works well for me, etc. For a lot of the smaller stuff, the KDE apps are good. Okular (for PDFs) and KTorrent are great too. I even like Amarok though a lot of people prefer Clementine.
I disagree. Currently, Linux desktop share (in reality, not just looking at sales numbers which of course is idiotic since most people install Linux themselves rather than buying a PC with it pre-installed) is tiny, and has very little visibility. It's hard to say exactly how small it is, but it's not likely to be have more users than MacOSX. Anyway, as a consequence the availability of applications is rather poor, which prevents more people, who would like to switch, from adopting it because they rely on certain proprietary apps (usually business-related).
It'd be nice to have better marketshare, maybe around 25%, because then there'd be much better support.
Also, mainstream adoption wouldn't kill it; why do you think that? The big strength of Linux is its open-source nature and lack of centralized control. Even if, say, Ubuntu became the new Microsoft and all Windows users suddenly installed Ubuntu (not likely, but let's suppose), most of the software is open-source: the kernel, main libraries, etc. All those other distros will still be around, and doing things differently than Ubuntu: different DEs, maybe even different init systems, etc. You'll still be able to use a distro that suits you better.
For those who don't know, KHTML was used and modified by Apple, and became "WebKit", which is the rendering engine used in Safari, iOS, and all the Chrome-related browsers.
Unfortunately, part of this is a byproduct of lack of developer resources, because there's too much competition in the Linux DE space, and like most Linux projects, there aren't that many developers to begin with. Projects with high corporate interest like the kernel get lots of developer time (thanks to companies paying their employees to work on it); the kernel is used in countless embedded devices plus servers, so there's a lot of corporate backing. There isn't much corporate backing for desktop work, so we get the garbage that Red Hat shovels to us (Gnome3). Why RH doesn't want to push a DE that would work extremely well in a corporate desktop environment as a Windows replacement, I have no idea; my guess is that their management is buddy-buddy with the top Gnome devs (who also work there, and have built themselves a little empire within the company) and refuses to change course even though years and years and years of Gnome hasn't helped Red Hat penetrate the business desktop market at all.
Anyway, add that to some lackluster leadership within KDE wherein they've pushed for new features (akonadi, nepomuk, desktop search, activities, etc.) over improving existing code, which is also a big Achilles' heel for FOSS software in general: devs prefer to work on new shiny stuff instead of making things reliable and fixing bugs, and most of these devs are unpaid so the effect is much worse. Proprietary software isn't immune to this (new features sell software, bug-fixes and reliability improvements do not), but it can be worse in FOSS depending on who's involved in the project.
This is just plain idiotic. Qt uses less memory than Gtk+, and is a far superior and more complete toolkit as well. Qt is commonly used in low-resource embedded systems; Gtk+ is not.
And this is why the metric system is wrong and should be abandoned: it's used in North Korea. Since North Korea is a horrible regime and uses metric, I refuse to use it.
Also, Iran has a horrible regime, and they fly F-14 jets. Because of this, I refuse to watch Top Gun, and because Tom Cruise is in Top Gun, I refuse to watch any movies with him in it.
Well another responder to my post addressed this. I guess I'm a little out-of-touch; I've been using DuckDuckGo for a while now because of all the privacy problems. I liked the way Google *used* to be, where they showed you targeted ads based on your *current* search, not the way they seem to be now where they remember all your previous searches and show you ads based on those.
I'm not trying to be a Google shill here, but this is exactly why I like Google's ads (or rather, liked, back when they were more obviously ads on the right side of the search results). If I'm looking for something, I might do a Google search for it; if one of the AdWords ads shows up, as a small text-only ad, and it's exactly the thing I'm looking for, that's a good thing IMO. I guess this is called "targeted advertising", and IMO it's the best kind. If I'm explicitly searching for something, or have some kind of problem I'm Googling for an answer to, having a small,text-only ad pop up with a product that solves my problem is a big help.
This all sounds interesting, but I don't really agree about the cost of mining bit. Yes, launch costs are high, but once you have all the stuff you need on-site on the Moon (or wherever, but obviously the Moon is cheaper than Mars or Venus), the only costs are getting workers to the Moon (and tired ones back home), and whatever it costs to send (hopefully refined) material back to Earth. Basically, it's a one-time cost to get the infrastructure up there. If you're doing enough mining up there (between the Moon, and maybe capturing asteroids and then refining them on the Moon, or in orbital or Lagrangian stations), then it would be profitable, of course assuming there's enough valuable ore there to begin with.
So it really comes down to a question of: what's the total cost of establishing all that infrastructure up there, plus the ongoing cost of actually operating up there, compared to how much you'll be able to sell the material for down here (taking into account time value of money of course)? With the huge up-front costs, it probably doesn't seem like it'd be worth it, but there's a lot of material up there between the Moon and the asteroids, and over a long enough time span it might make sense. Throw in space tourism (who wouldn't want to spend a week on the Moon?) and that should sweeten things. On top of that, launch costs are coming down thanks to the efforts of SpaceX and others. Ongoing costs can be minimized with heavy usage of either automated robotic systems, or with remote-control (or a combination of the two): with the Moon only a few light-seconds away, two-way radio control isn't such a problem as it would be for Venus or Mars. The fewer humans you need to regularly cycle there, the less things will cost to operate.
Now obviously, if the break-even time is 4 centuries, then you're not going to get many investors for that. But what if it's less, maybe only 30 or 50 years? It does seem like several billionaires are very interested in asteroid mining, among other space ventures. All it took for Columbus (today's namesake, even if he was a murderous bastard) to help start colonization of the Americas was an investment by the Spanish crown. What if some silicon valley billionaires pump a bunch of money into this, not really caring if they see a return on their investment in their lifetimes? (Plus, these same billionaires are also pumping money into longevity research, so if that works out and they live to 250, they might very well see a return.)
This is extremely informative, and if Slashdot's moderation system weren't such a broken mess, I'd mod you up.
However, I do have some questions and concerns, but realize I'm not a geologist as I stated before. Do you work for NASA or something?
The main problem I see is that it seems like you're making a lot of assumptions based on geology here on Earth, such as which minerals are likely to be present at sites with particular geologies. Doesn't that depend a lot on the early planetary formation?
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought I had read that, just like you say with the Moon and heavy elements sinking to the core, the exact same thing happened to the Earth, and as a result, we have no heavy metals, including iron(!), accessible here on the crust left over from the formation of this planet, and that all our valuable ores (iron, gold, silver, even tin and lead) came from asteroid impacts over the eons, which is why they're concentrated in particular places.
And while it sounds like we understand a good deal about geological processes, I'm not so sure it's that complete: didn't we only figure out the southern part of Mexico was formed by a giant asteroid impact within the last few decades, and that that was the cause of all the caves and such along what's left of the rim of the crater?
Anyway, with asteroid impacts, the moon is full of them, as we can see easily with a small telescope, and unlike the Earth, there's been little tectonic activity and no atmospheric or water-based erosion. So wouldn't that mean that each impact site could potentially have a lot of valuable ores? I see what you said about them being concentrated too deep though, but is that necessarily the case? Here on earth, erosion would wipe away most traces of any low-velocity impacts, leaving only the deeply-buried stuff. On the Moon, there's no real erosion, so maybe there's more stuff close to the surface. And as for cost, sure it costs a lot to get equipment up there, but once there's infrastructure in place, shouldn't digging be fairly cheap at that point? It's not like you have to worry about paying for environmental impact studies and the like.
For Rubidium, Wikipedia does list a fair number of applications. With lower cost, I believe there might be more. You also mentioned titanium being plentiful there. Wouldn't that be a good enough reason? Titanium isn't exactly cheap here. It's not expensive like gold by any means, but it's a lot more than steel, and having cheap titanium would be great for the auto industry. How much fuel are we wasting because we still build cars out of steel instead of titanium? Yes, there are a lot of titanium deposits here on Earth too, but last I heard most of them were in Russia, which is probably restricting the supply for economic and military reasons (they built the only titanium-hulled submarines). Of course, with the high cost of building infrastructure on the Moon and getting refined Ti back here, it might not be so cheap, but has anyone really crunched the numbers to see?
As for Venus, that sounds interesting, but unlike the Moon where it's 3 days away and wouldn't be *that* hard to just go there and do some deeper digging and exploration, Venus is completely inhospitable at the surface for both humans and machinery, so I have no idea how we'd exploit mineral resources there. If you can't even get a lander to last more than an hour or two before succumbing to heat failure (plus failure from the atmosphere), I can't imagine how you'd get heavy equipment to stay down there and dig up stuff.
How about Mercury? Any chance of that being commercially valuable? Though that place is inhospitably hot too; you could stay on the back side, but the planet rotates, so your mining station would have to slowly move, or at least be able to handle the heat on the sunny side while your crew travels across the planet in the opposite direction to stay in the shade.
The summaries on this site are always awful.
Which summary did you read? The one I read said they're looking at switching to Python, away from LabVIEW. That's perfectly understandable. LabVIEW is completely proprietary, and on top of that, it's really hard to find someone to take the job. I had some company try to talk me into a LabVIEW job a while ago, even though I had precisely zero experience with it, and no interest. Just because I have a EE degree and a lot of background in software (mostly embedded programming), they figured they could convince me to take the job and they'd train me. No thanks: the last thing I want is be stuck as a LabVIEW programmer forever.
That whole "best tool for the job" thing really isn't true. When looking for candidates, employers usually want someone with prior experience in the language (/tool) they're using. So this tends to make everyone gravitate towards certain popular tools and languages. Thus, we have C, C++, Java, Python, JavaScript, etc. which have become very popular, depending on application and industry of course, and a fair amount of trying to force one language into a role it might not be best-suited for, because it's the language people know and favor, and because you can hire people more easily who already know it. Other languages keep trying to make headway, but usually don't go very far: Rust, Go, Ruby, etc., and other languages which are dying out: Perl. Becoming an expert in a proprietary language and toolset is a bad, bad idea for career longevity.
No, it's really just another symptom of America's overall decline, as most of Slashdot's readership is American. Now we just need to sit back and see which nation becomes the next superpower; it'll probably be China.
If we need to rely on the Russians to hitch a ride to ISS, that tells much about our decline in ability for space exploration.
It's not just space exploration. America, in general, is in decline. Our time is over, it's just like the later days of the Roman Empire.
The moon is nearby and a conveniently low gravity well, but as far as minerals go, it's pretty boring
Huh? How exactly do we know this? Because of some rocks the Apollo astronauts brought back? I admit, I'm not a geologist, but don't you need to do a lot more exploration to determine if a body the size of the Moon (which is one of the larger bodies in the solar system actually, at #14, with only 4 moons larger; it's even #11 by gravity) has useful minerals? Such as exploring the "dark side", doing some digging, etc.? The Apollo missions only explored a few sites; they didn't get to the back side which looks entirely different, they didn't get to the poles, etc. The Moon has obviously been bombarded with many asteroids; there's no telling what deposits those impacts left behind. Almost all the useful minerals in our own crust was left there by asteroid impacts; it didn't occur naturally (as part of the planet's formation).
I think we're seriously discounting the Moon here. Heck, the Apollo missions didn't even figure out that the Moon has significant water deposits; that was only found recently by some other country's probe.
There might be benefits to sending humans to Mars, but I agree, the Moon should be the first big step. It's very close, and likely has significant mineral resources. It also has less gravity, and would be a good base for doing asteroid-capture missions and low-g refinement and manufacturing close to the Earth for easy material return. It'd be a great place for tourism too: you could build a luxury resort there and people could take 2-3 week vacations there, since each trip is only 3 days, unlike Mars where you're exposed to hard cosmic radiation for 6-9 months in each direction, making a short vacation there impossible until someone figures out a much, much faster propulsion method.
Perhaps later, after that's all in place, they can scout out Mars more and find more valuable resources that aren't present on nearby asteroids or the Moon, and maybe some people will want to start colonies there since the gravity is a more human-friendly 1/3g (instead of the Moon's 1/6g which might not be so great healthwise for long-term stays).
Oh please. There's a lot more to the planet and the human race than the USA and its imbecilic inhabitants who utterly suck at electing decent leaders.
And this "rock" is really a lush paradise; what's really stupid is how much we're trashing it. We should be doing much of our resource extraction in space and moving heavy industry there so we can preserve this place.
Well, Republican voters are morons, and they elect moronic Tea Party representatives to Congress, so that is to be expected.
Barry Goldwater is probably turning in his grave now.