Its easy to piss on a future projection, but I'm going to try to be as positive as I can.
1. fMRI scanners at entrances. Even if this can be done accurately enough - these scanners require magnetic fields on the order of a Tesla or so. Standing in front of it would rip your keys out of your pocket, at best.
2. Europe in economic/environmental collapse whilst the US is business at usual. Your politics are showing. The idea that Europe is going to be begging China for aid 15 years from now is absurd as it is insulting.
3. Zero human contact. Your hero never speaks to another human face to face throughout his entire day. People don't want to live like this.
4. Commuting to the office. What is the point if you don't see anybody face to face?
5. The CID. Why bother with this? Dongles fell out of fashion years ago. Existing authentication is better than this.
6. Apparently completely unfree computing. Each system the person interacts with is a walled garden. Its possible, but I would hope that the tech savvy wouldn't voluntarily submit to this.
7. Water quota. Fine, this could easily happen - but only whilst there was a shortage of energy for desalination. If there were such a shortage, your guy certainly wouldn't wasted electricity driving to work.
There are a few more flaws, but don't want to do a TLDR post.
False. He is drawing on publicly funded works, even if they are in the public domain. This fatally undermines both his persona as a 'self made' space traveler, and your entire argument. Thanks for playing.
How are people supposed to lock down an open source platform, and stop this being a truly disruptive technology? Won't somebody PLEASE thing of the rent seekers!!!??
How is building nitrous oxide hybrids that can't even get into orbit advancing us as a species? Especially as, like all of these supposedly self-made "new space" types, he draws on publicly funded research? Fuck off to Galt's gulch already.
The idea that these entrepreneurs are opening space to the masses is sheer absurdity. The realistic costs involved will mean that ordinary plebs like us are confined to this rock for the rest of our lives. Having sucked this world dry of all the physical resources they can, exploited every idea from the public domain, the rich will declare they owe society nothing in return, then fuck off to another planet.
One would hope that the first sniff of a serious bidding war would cause them to reconsider and go for a plot of land that would be the subject of a nerd fundraising campaign.
What the hell? I've visited America, and I was not struck by any great shortage of a) land or b) retail outlets. Why do they have to try and build one on this historic site?
Anger at social injustice is not jealously. I'm perfectly comfortable myself, but the rampant greed of the super-rich offends me. I don't want their cash. I want them to get an honest fucking job and pay their taxes.
But don't let the way people actually feel get in the way of your moronic libertarian rant, will you?
A supernova would have to be very close to threaten life on Earth. The closest likely candidate is Betelgeuse, and all that would give us is an amazing light show. Neutrino bursts, however, will be more intense than the Sun from a large distance, as they were for 1987A
How about:
1. Tear down the whole stock market and replace it with something else
Surely HFC demonstrates that the stock market has almost no relevance to real world economics, and exists purely as a means for people who are already rich to basically extract rents.
Is caused when everyone has their pension money in high frequency neutrino trading, and then a nearby supernova accidentally tells all the traders on the planet to sell everything fast...
You can pick out causation (or at least decent evidence for it) if you know what you are doing. If someone has a bunch of stats they think are relevant, I would want to see something like PCA to show which ones are actually doing anything. I'd also like to see that if you picked a date in the past, say 1950, and only gave your model information before that date, how well it could predict what came after.
This wouldn't give you a formula to predict which government is going to fall next year. But it will let you figure out a good metric (probably a composite of other data, like the Human Development Index) that policy makers can understand as 'likely to lead to trouble' if its high/low.
“For some aspects of history, a scientific or cliodynamic approach is suitable, natural and fruitful,” he says. For example, “when we map the frequency versus magnitude of an event — deaths in vari- ous battles in a war, casualties in natural disasters, years to rebuild a state — we find that there is a consistent pattern of higher frequencies at low magnitudes, and lower frequencies at high magnitudes, that fol- lows a precise mathematical formula.”
This same mathematical pattern occurs when you look at earthquakes (and many, many other things). It doesn't help you predict them one little bit, so has no practical value.
Its all well and good spotting cycles. A few years ago, someone claimed to have found a 26 million year cycle in mass extinctions, and attributed it to an invisible stellar companion of the Sun disturbing the Oort cloud when it past perihelion (he called it 'Nemesis', because if you are proposing a hypothesis which is going to be greeted with scepticism by the scientific community, its always best to give it a needlessly melodramatic name...). It turns out, there is no statistically significant pattern in mass extinctions, and despite numerous infrared surveys of the sky, no death star lurking at the edge of our solar system.
This is not insightful, its simplistic and idiotic. NASA was doing everything for the first time. SpaceX is just rehashing a well established technology - hence their very low development costs. This may cause problems down the road; in order to have these very low development costs, SpaceX takes from the common pool of knowledge (all the help/free R&D they got from NASA) but do not give back, because of course everything they do develop is a commercial secret. This may be a sign that technological development in the space industry is slowing down, if all people are interested in is the lowest possible costs - because they can only be achieved by being a technological free rider.
They cost $20m last time I checked, and there have only been 7 customers over 11 years of operation. The size of that market, year on year, is about 1000 times smaller than the current NASA budget. So no, the profit motive is not going to expand us into the universe.
You've forgotten 2008 already then, or perhaps for ideological reasons, taken the wrong lesson from it. If the private sector couldn't manage banks, what makes you think it can manage a mission to Mars?
The 'failure' of social democracy? Notice how people in the UK live as long, and have similar health outcomes, as people in the US - despite spending 3 times less on their (state provided) healthcare?
Libertarians are hilariously ignorant, and hence why you have an absurd view of the 'new' space industry.
No. This is not commercial spaceflight, because the only customer is the government. The idea that profit motives will make everything work is largely discredited in real life these days.
This is all true - but it is still the case that ESA will not move on manned spaceflight without a nudge from NASA. The only indigenous European manned space hardware is the ATV - which only exists so that we can have a stake in the ISS.
Its not like there is a shortage of technical ideas; EADS were quite willing to turn ATV into a proper manned spacecraft, and Ariane 5 shouldn't have been too hard to man rate, seeing as it was designed to be man rated in the first place for the abandoned Hermes shuttle. The problem has always been political will. You need to get the UK, France, Germany and probably Italy and a few others to approve a manned program and stick with it. The UK, I'm ashamed to say, has often been the major stumbling block for this.
Despite current differences with NASA, most of ESAs best stuff has been done as part of international collaboration - ATV, Columbus module, Huygens - so I can see an international manned exploration project being the only way, realistically, that European citizens are ever going to have a decent, native, manned space program.
Its nice to see NASA talking about international cooperation. Perhaps this will make ESA, and certain ESA member states who are notoriously tight fisted with contributions and refuse to participate in any manned flight *coughUKcough*, start to think seriously about how Europe can be involved. I know people who work for ESA and for EADS, and there is no shortage of will in the industry to start pushing out properly.
As far as I'm concerned, any non-international deep space exploration runs the risk of leading to conflict between nations in space, and that is a really dumb idea. We've seen, from ASAT tests and accidental collisions, what even a handful of destroyed satellites can do to the space debris situation. A full-on space war means we lose access to LEO entirely, for a very long time.
Slashdot Mirror
Its easy to piss on a future projection, but I'm going to try to be as positive as I can.
1. fMRI scanners at entrances. Even if this can be done accurately enough - these scanners require magnetic fields on the order of a Tesla or so. Standing in front of it would rip your keys out of your pocket, at best.
2. Europe in economic/environmental collapse whilst the US is business at usual. Your politics are showing. The idea that Europe is going to be begging China for aid 15 years from now is absurd as it is insulting.
3. Zero human contact. Your hero never speaks to another human face to face throughout his entire day. People don't want to live like this.
4. Commuting to the office. What is the point if you don't see anybody face to face?
5. The CID. Why bother with this? Dongles fell out of fashion years ago. Existing authentication is better than this.
6. Apparently completely unfree computing. Each system the person interacts with is a walled garden. Its possible, but I would hope that the tech savvy wouldn't voluntarily submit to this.
7. Water quota. Fine, this could easily happen - but only whilst there was a shortage of energy for desalination. If there were such a shortage, your guy certainly wouldn't wasted electricity driving to work.
There are a few more flaws, but don't want to do a TLDR post.
False. He is drawing on publicly funded works, even if they are in the public domain. This fatally undermines both his persona as a 'self made' space traveler, and your entire argument. Thanks for playing.
How are people supposed to lock down an open source platform, and stop this being a truly disruptive technology? Won't somebody PLEASE thing of the rent seekers!!!??
How is building nitrous oxide hybrids that can't even get into orbit advancing us as a species? Especially as, like all of these supposedly self-made "new space" types, he draws on publicly funded research? Fuck off to Galt's gulch already.
The idea that these entrepreneurs are opening space to the masses is sheer absurdity. The realistic costs involved will mean that ordinary plebs like us are confined to this rock for the rest of our lives. Having sucked this world dry of all the physical resources they can, exploited every idea from the public domain, the rich will declare they owe society nothing in return, then fuck off to another planet.
I know he mentioned it, retard, I was talking about the picture he posted. It isn't there
Maybe you should do some reading yourself before you snark at other people?
One would hope that the first sniff of a serious bidding war would cause them to reconsider and go for a plot of land that would be the subject of a nerd fundraising campaign.
That infographic seems to miss out the successful Soviet landing in 1971...
What the hell? I've visited America, and I was not struck by any great shortage of a) land or b) retail outlets. Why do they have to try and build one on this historic site?
Anger at social injustice is not jealously. I'm perfectly comfortable myself, but the rampant greed of the super-rich offends me. I don't want their cash. I want them to get an honest fucking job and pay their taxes.
But don't let the way people actually feel get in the way of your moronic libertarian rant, will you?
A supernova would have to be very close to threaten life on Earth. The closest likely candidate is Betelgeuse, and all that would give us is an amazing light show. Neutrino bursts, however, will be more intense than the Sun from a large distance, as they were for 1987A
Wow, passive aggressive troll is passive aggressive.
Then perhaps refrain from posting until you can use your words?
Of course, that would require you having some form of counter argument ;)
How about: 1. Tear down the whole stock market and replace it with something else Surely HFC demonstrates that the stock market has almost no relevance to real world economics, and exists purely as a means for people who are already rich to basically extract rents.
Is caused when everyone has their pension money in high frequency neutrino trading, and then a nearby supernova accidentally tells all the traders on the planet to sell everything fast...
You can pick out causation (or at least decent evidence for it) if you know what you are doing. If someone has a bunch of stats they think are relevant, I would want to see something like PCA to show which ones are actually doing anything. I'd also like to see that if you picked a date in the past, say 1950, and only gave your model information before that date, how well it could predict what came after.
This wouldn't give you a formula to predict which government is going to fall next year. But it will let you figure out a good metric (probably a composite of other data, like the Human Development Index) that policy makers can understand as 'likely to lead to trouble' if its high/low.
From TFA
This same mathematical pattern occurs when you look at earthquakes (and many, many other things). It doesn't help you predict them one little bit, so has no practical value.
Its all well and good spotting cycles. A few years ago, someone claimed to have found a 26 million year cycle in mass extinctions, and attributed it to an invisible stellar companion of the Sun disturbing the Oort cloud when it past perihelion (he called it 'Nemesis', because if you are proposing a hypothesis which is going to be greeted with scepticism by the scientific community, its always best to give it a needlessly melodramatic name...). It turns out, there is no statistically significant pattern in mass extinctions, and despite numerous infrared surveys of the sky, no death star lurking at the edge of our solar system.
This is not insightful, its simplistic and idiotic. NASA was doing everything for the first time. SpaceX is just rehashing a well established technology - hence their very low development costs. This may cause problems down the road; in order to have these very low development costs, SpaceX takes from the common pool of knowledge (all the help/free R&D they got from NASA) but do not give back, because of course everything they do develop is a commercial secret. This may be a sign that technological development in the space industry is slowing down, if all people are interested in is the lowest possible costs - because they can only be achieved by being a technological free rider.
They cost $20m last time I checked, and there have only been 7 customers over 11 years of operation. The size of that market, year on year, is about 1000 times smaller than the current NASA budget. So no, the profit motive is not going to expand us into the universe.
You've forgotten 2008 already then, or perhaps for ideological reasons, taken the wrong lesson from it. If the private sector couldn't manage banks, what makes you think it can manage a mission to Mars?
None of those are manned flights, which is what NASAs 'commercial' contracts are for. Try to keep up.
The 'failure' of social democracy? Notice how people in the UK live as long, and have similar health outcomes, as people in the US - despite spending 3 times less on their (state provided) healthcare?
Libertarians are hilariously ignorant, and hence why you have an absurd view of the 'new' space industry.
No. This is not commercial spaceflight, because the only customer is the government. The idea that profit motives will make everything work is largely discredited in real life these days.
This is all true - but it is still the case that ESA will not move on manned spaceflight without a nudge from NASA. The only indigenous European manned space hardware is the ATV - which only exists so that we can have a stake in the ISS.
Its not like there is a shortage of technical ideas; EADS were quite willing to turn ATV into a proper manned spacecraft, and Ariane 5 shouldn't have been too hard to man rate, seeing as it was designed to be man rated in the first place for the abandoned Hermes shuttle. The problem has always been political will. You need to get the UK, France, Germany and probably Italy and a few others to approve a manned program and stick with it. The UK, I'm ashamed to say, has often been the major stumbling block for this.
Despite current differences with NASA, most of ESAs best stuff has been done as part of international collaboration - ATV, Columbus module, Huygens - so I can see an international manned exploration project being the only way, realistically, that European citizens are ever going to have a decent, native, manned space program.
Its nice to see NASA talking about international cooperation. Perhaps this will make ESA, and certain ESA member states who are notoriously tight fisted with contributions and refuse to participate in any manned flight *coughUKcough*, start to think seriously about how Europe can be involved. I know people who work for ESA and for EADS, and there is no shortage of will in the industry to start pushing out properly.
As far as I'm concerned, any non-international deep space exploration runs the risk of leading to conflict between nations in space, and that is a really dumb idea. We've seen, from ASAT tests and accidental collisions, what even a handful of destroyed satellites can do to the space debris situation. A full-on space war means we lose access to LEO entirely, for a very long time.