That's kind of like buying an eighteen wheeler to haul your minvan across country. The minivan will get great gas mileage, having consumed none to travel a vast distance...
Or, in other words, no. The vast expense of setting up fuel infrastructure on the Moon is not balanced by the vanishingly small amount of fuel you'll save on the vehicle.
Would it not be more practical to send robots to the Moon and set up infrastructure in an experimental effort to identify problems. Granted the two are VERY different environments, atmosphere, and gravity, but surely the money saved on fuel and communication time would give the Moon a a very strong case to be first settled.
That's kind of like using the Sahara Desert to test for problems and issues in setting up a colony under the Arctic ocean. No amount of money saved or decreased communications time can make apple butter out of orange marmalade.
In comparing 4Frontiers and Mars One, it looks like there are two competing companies working to establish outposts on Mars and both have similar plans for funding - virtual tourism and monitoring of the participants.
Your question about declining interest is a valuable one. I fail to consider that in order to fund their mission, the resulting "reality" show would have to be more popular than any other show - ever. By several orders of magnitude.
How long until the same is true for every "high tech" manufacturing today done in the US?
A very long time, if ever. Not everything "high tech" is a mass market consumer good. And that's what folks keep missing - we've outsourced the hell out of mass market consumer goods, but there's still a great deal of manufacturing in the US. Not to mention that a "high tech" assembly line is still an assembly line. There's nothing magical about it, and the folks working on it aren't rocket surgeons. Stop making a fetish of it.
As far as "can't" or "don't", should that unnamed country for some inexplicable reason decide to commit economic suicide by ceasing to sell to us... Then we will start producing them domestically again, and people will re-evaluate their priorities. We act as though cheap shiny things are somehow vital to life and something deserved by right - but nothing could be further from the truth.
My thought is that within the next few hundred years we'll be recovering resources from landfills and all sorts of spaces too toxic to deal with now.
Probably not. The problem isn't that the places are too toxic, but that the concentration of anything economically valuable on it's own is way, way, too low. Absent a breakthrough that drops the cost of recovery several orders of magnitude (which I think is very unlikely), it's simply not economically viable.
But the truth is, other people own us. They've got us by the balls, and anytime they want, they just have to squeeze and it's the end of the line for us.
Who would that be, and how are they going to do it without destroying their own economy?
We can't manufacture most of the goods and services we depend on.
Well, setting aside the fact that you can't manufacture services (one of the many logical errors you make), you confuse "don't" with "can't".
The only thing we have in abundance is fresh water, farmable land, and a lot of nuclear missiles. Everything else is decaying. It's been outsourced.
Yeah, everything's been outsourced... Oh, wait... Our manufacturing sector, taken by itself, is the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world.
Etc... etc...
You're a clueless git parroting crap you've read elsewhere without the slightest understanding what you're talking about.
Technological progress from decade to decade wasn't that fast.
Maybe in the middle ages, but certainly not by the time industrial revolution got underway.
Ford created the assembly line, and 14 years later, it was still a novel concept.
Huh? Within less than a decade it was widely used.
Today, much of the equipment and processes we had a decade ago isn't worth much more than scrap. 10 years is a very long time.
What planet do you live one? Pretty much every business I know that's older than ten years is happily buzzing along with a mix of stuff from last week to thirty years ago. Heck, I know a business doing quite well with no tools (other than their computers) younger than half a century.
I fail to see how destroying competition by undercutting local shops is a good thing for the local economy in the long term.
In order to meet a Same Day Delivery promise Amazon will have to be LOCAL. So there went your major point. Poof.
Amazon can trivially serve an entire metropolitan area from a single warehouse employing a fraction of the people that the multiple stores spread across the area did. So, no, his major point still holds.
Workers walk out of one failing business model which requires customers to come to them, and walk into a better business model which puts the "shelves" right there in people's homes (on the computer or their phone), and offers same day delivery.
The worker at the store down the street will be glad to know that he can "walk into" a warehouse two hours away. Assuming that he's the one out of the dozen or more applicants for that one job that gets hired. His supervisor/manager? He's probably not going to be so lucky. He's sixty and can't work a warehouse anymore.
If the US manufacturing segment was considered on it's own - it would the fifth or sixth largest economy in the entire world. We've outsourced the hell out of cheap mass market consumer goods, but most everything else is made here and sold globally.
The FDA certainly has its own set of Things It Takes Seriously; but those largely concern testing.
Testing, and production, and quality assurance, and packaging, and marketing and advertising, and... There's a lot that falls under the FDA's regulatory umbrella even though almost none of it other than testing makes the news.
what possible interest would the FDA have in the accounting structure of the company bringing a device/drug/whatever before them?
I suspect that advertising for investment while making medical claims would be of great interest. They're not interested in the accounting structure I suspect, but in keeping out the snake oil salesmen and other flavors of scammers.
Not as delightful as the original, but it works, it is enjoyable to watch, because the TONE is the same: they really care about the food, and they really pay attention to the cooking and technique.
No they don't, though they do an excellent job of making you think they do. The whole point of the show is to showcase the Food Network's favored sons, name drop foodie celebrities and flavors of the moment, and oh - bring in Cat Cora, an untrained third rater, so the Food Network couldn't be accused of not being politically correct.
The burden of proof is on "skeptics" to explain why a reproducible, verifiable model on a small scale won't work on a large scale.
Yet, we're supposed to take the claim that it will on faith...
This has never been the way science works.
Right in one...
An analogy would be if we said that since Pluto's orbit is 248 years, then we've probably only recorded it orbiting the sun a few times (arguably less than that if we only count modern record-keeping), and so therefore we haven't collected enough data to determine that orbital mechanics apply to Pluto.
Not even close, in fact your analogy is so far off that 'hyperbole' is a distant fading memory in the search for superlatives to describe it. Why? Because we have accurate long term models of orbital mechanics - and we do not have them for climate science.
The idea that we should start with two separate models, one for large scale and another for the small scale, is precisely the opposite of what science seeks to do, and is a severe mis-representation of science.
True, but your emotionally charged rhetoric and numerous logical errors and appeals to faith aren't science either. Science is demonstrating a connection between the various scales, and backing up that connection with data - not saying "it's not our responsibility to finish up the job".
Note, I'm not a skeptic, but you need to learn a thing or three about science before even attempting to defend it. Confused smokescreens like yours do no one any favors.
Our infrastructure was built 40 years ago and had a 25 year life expectancy. Every day that things dont simply fall apart is a blessing. Since apparently putting people to work rebuilding and improving things would be socialsim, so I guess there's nothing we can do about it.
That's what the soundbites you hear would have you believe. But it's bullshit. We, as a nation, spend tens of billions a year maintaining and upgrading existing infrastructure and building new infrastructure.
So does Starbucks - but according to a friend (who works as a DBMS manager for their business intelligence/analysis division) that has more to do with keeping the data under tight wraps.
It's not always about cost cutting or rapid turnaround or whatever.
It hasn't been funny for a while. The law enforcement class is becoming a separate body from the average citizen class. (I know this through personally speaking with a friend who is a law enforcement officer, he has changed in a way that separates him from the way your average person thinks
Most geeks think differently than your average person. So do most accountants. So do most veterans. (Though how they think differently varies wildly depending on the branch they served in and/or their specific specialty.) So do most engineers. Etc... etc... I suspect you suffer from confirmation bias.
Currently my organization uses Excel spreadsheets to handle this, and it's invariably error ridden.
In the real world, away from press releases, sadly, Excel is the real world enterprise DBMS for almost all corporations.
Even before Excel I was using Lotus 1-2-3 as DBMS... why? Because it's easy to setup, easy to use, and it Just Works for many basic database applications.
Yet, somehow, this is (on Slashdot) always the user misusing the [spreadsheet] program rather the failure of DBMS's.
What's the challenge in getting computers to use traditional navigation techniques?
There isn't a challenge - it's a well trodden path. The problem is that for the most part the sensors required are much more expensive than a GPS receiver, moderately complex, and require significant calibration and maintenance.
The United Nations Human Rights Council has passed a landmark resolution (PDF) declaring that internet freedom is a basic human right.
Which has about as much meaning as if my local Girl Scouts got together and passed a resolution declaring that internet freedom is a basic human right.
I know satellites and objects near Earth are heavily measured but why isn't there more attention paid to precision of deep space objects?
For those objects for which high precision is required - there is. For those objects for which it's not - there isn't. There's surprisingly few of the former, and many, many, of the latter.
The ultimate problem however is that the input data is (relative to what we're used to for terrestrial applications) generally of fairly poor quality. Thus you need either a great many observations, or a great many observers, and considerable computation and analysis... And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter so much if galaxy M189432 is 10x10^19 light years away, or 10.0001x10^19 light years away. Or at least it doesn't currently matter enough for anyone to go to the effort.
In Science Fiction, where writers drink bourbon and eat science magazines with sprinkles, we'll do it right, as usual, for the real SF devotees.
having been a reader of what you call "Science Fiction" for decades - the only possible response is ROTFLMAO. You'll get it right 'as usual' - what have you been smoking?
Cue the state-owned lapdogs prattling on about the dangers of military secrets becoming public knowledge, in spite of the fact that all the fallout from leaked documents thus far has been political, and in no way put any of our troops at risk.
It's fascinating that you have to pre-flame those who might disagree with you... But you sound like the guy who, after jumping off a twenty story building, was asked how things were going as he passed the tenth floor - "pretty good so far!". Not to mention you have no way of knowing whether troops have been put at risk or not.
And the fact remains, whether you like it or not, that when military secrets are leaked, the risks to the troops *do* increase - whether or not those risks translate into casualties in the short term.
Slashdot Mirror
That's kind of like buying an eighteen wheeler to haul your minvan across country. The minivan will get great gas mileage, having consumed none to travel a vast distance...
Or, in other words, no. The vast expense of setting up fuel infrastructure on the Moon is not balanced by the vanishingly small amount of fuel you'll save on the vehicle.
That's kind of like using the Sahara Desert to test for problems and issues in setting up a colony under the Arctic ocean. No amount of money saved or decreased communications time can make apple butter out of orange marmalade.
Your question about declining interest is a valuable one. I fail to consider that in order to fund their mission, the resulting "reality" show would have to be more popular than any other show - ever. By several orders of magnitude.
A very long time, if ever. Not everything "high tech" is a mass market consumer good. And that's what folks keep missing - we've outsourced the hell out of mass market consumer goods, but there's still a great deal of manufacturing in the US. Not to mention that a "high tech" assembly line is still an assembly line. There's nothing magical about it, and the folks working on it aren't rocket surgeons. Stop making a fetish of it.
As far as "can't" or "don't", should that unnamed country for some inexplicable reason decide to commit economic suicide by ceasing to sell to us... Then we will start producing them domestically again, and people will re-evaluate their priorities. We act as though cheap shiny things are somehow vital to life and something deserved by right - but nothing could be further from the truth.
Probably not. The problem isn't that the places are too toxic, but that the concentration of anything economically valuable on it's own is way, way, too low. Absent a breakthrough that drops the cost of recovery several orders of magnitude (which I think is very unlikely), it's simply not economically viable.
If it's not explicitly open source - it's not open source. Four legs good, two legs bad.
Who would that be, and how are they going to do it without destroying their own economy?
Well, setting aside the fact that you can't manufacture services (one of the many logical errors you make), you confuse "don't" with "can't".
Yeah, everything's been outsourced... Oh, wait... Our manufacturing sector, taken by itself, is the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world.
Etc... etc...
You're a clueless git parroting crap you've read elsewhere without the slightest understanding what you're talking about.
Maybe in the middle ages, but certainly not by the time industrial revolution got underway.
Huh? Within less than a decade it was widely used.
What planet do you live one? Pretty much every business I know that's older than ten years is happily buzzing along with a mix of stuff from last week to thirty years ago. Heck, I know a business doing quite well with no tools (other than their computers) younger than half a century.
There's a lot more to world than PC's mate.
Amazon can trivially serve an entire metropolitan area from a single warehouse employing a fraction of the people that the multiple stores spread across the area did. So, no, his major point still holds.
The worker at the store down the street will be glad to know that he can "walk into" a warehouse two hours away. Assuming that he's the one out of the dozen or more applicants for that one job that gets hired. His supervisor/manager? He's probably not going to be so lucky. He's sixty and can't work a warehouse anymore.
If the US manufacturing segment was considered on it's own - it would the fifth or sixth largest economy in the entire world. We've outsourced the hell out of cheap mass market consumer goods, but most everything else is made here and sold globally.
Testing, and production, and quality assurance, and packaging, and marketing and advertising, and... There's a lot that falls under the FDA's regulatory umbrella even though almost none of it other than testing makes the news.
I suspect that advertising for investment while making medical claims would be of great interest. They're not interested in the accounting structure I suspect, but in keeping out the snake oil salesmen and other flavors of scammers.
No they don't, though they do an excellent job of making you think they do. The whole point of the show is to showcase the Food Network's favored sons, name drop foodie celebrities and flavors of the moment, and oh - bring in Cat Cora, an untrained third rater, so the Food Network couldn't be accused of not being politically correct.
The FDA regulates medical advertising, so this may fall under that umbrella.
Yet, we're supposed to take the claim that it will on faith...
Right in one...
Not even close, in fact your analogy is so far off that 'hyperbole' is a distant fading memory in the search for superlatives to describe it. Why? Because we have accurate long term models of orbital mechanics - and we do not have them for climate science.
True, but your emotionally charged rhetoric and numerous logical errors and appeals to faith aren't science either. Science is demonstrating a connection between the various scales, and backing up that connection with data - not saying "it's not our responsibility to finish up the job".
Note, I'm not a skeptic, but you need to learn a thing or three about science before even attempting to defend it. Confused smokescreens like yours do no one any favors.
That's what the soundbites you hear would have you believe. But it's bullshit. We, as a nation, spend tens of billions a year maintaining and upgrading existing infrastructure and building new infrastructure.
So does Starbucks - but according to a friend (who works as a DBMS manager for their business intelligence/analysis division) that has more to do with keeping the data under tight wraps.
It's not always about cost cutting or rapid turnaround or whatever.
This is Slashdot - we only deal in facts when they're not likely to disturb a Two Minute Hate.
Most geeks think differently than your average person. So do most accountants. So do most veterans. (Though how they think differently varies wildly depending on the branch they served in and/or their specific specialty.) So do most engineers. Etc... etc... I suspect you suffer from confirmation bias.
Even before Excel I was using Lotus 1-2-3 as DBMS... why? Because it's easy to setup, easy to use, and it Just Works for many basic database applications.
Yet, somehow, this is (on Slashdot) always the user misusing the [spreadsheet] program rather the failure of DBMS's.
There isn't a challenge - it's a well trodden path. The problem is that for the most part the sensors required are much more expensive than a GPS receiver, moderately complex, and require significant calibration and maintenance.
No, it's not easy - because Slashdot reminds us of every trivial thing about the Raspberry Pi on a daily basis.
Which has about as much meaning as if my local Girl Scouts got together and passed a resolution declaring that internet freedom is a basic human right.
For those objects for which high precision is required - there is. For those objects for which it's not - there isn't. There's surprisingly few of the former, and many, many, of the latter.
The ultimate problem however is that the input data is (relative to what we're used to for terrestrial applications) generally of fairly poor quality. Thus you need either a great many observations, or a great many observers, and considerable computation and analysis... And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter so much if galaxy M189432 is 10x10^19 light years away, or 10.0001x10^19 light years away. Or at least it doesn't currently matter enough for anyone to go to the effort.
having been a reader of what you call "Science Fiction" for decades - the only possible response is ROTFLMAO. You'll get it right 'as usual' - what have you been smoking?
It's fascinating that you have to pre-flame those who might disagree with you... But you sound like the guy who, after jumping off a twenty story building, was asked how things were going as he passed the tenth floor - "pretty good so far!". Not to mention you have no way of knowing whether troops have been put at risk or not.
And the fact remains, whether you like it or not, that when military secrets are leaked, the risks to the troops *do* increase - whether or not those risks translate into casualties in the short term.