It's that they are nice, or humble - it's that handing out praise, trinkets, and bennies is a well known method of garnering support. It's also a well known mechanism for lulling your enemies into underestimating you because you don't seem politically savvy.
Nice guys don't finish first because they are nice. They finish first because they've quietly built an empire.
They're about networking, social skills, and shameless self-promotion. People like me, and I suspect most geeks on slashdot, want to be judged on our merits
And who says you aren't being judged on your merits? Or did never occur to you that the real world might value things differently than your insular little self absorbed haven?
Among other things, a desert simulation doesn't really do a good job of simulating the lack of any significant amount of atmosphere on Mars. That's a pretty big deal. An orbiting space station is a much better simulation, despite the lack of much gravity.
An orbiting station is important, but reasons other than you think... Any Mars mission will spend the bulk of it's time in transit, and the systems need to be proved in their operational environment - in space, in zero-G. Thus an orbiting station is extremely valuable for that purpose. The thermal environment will be a bit different, but we've had enough probes in solar and Martian orbits that once you proven the basic systems and components designing the actual system is fairly straightforward.
But the real kicker is the whole "You're pretty much on your own for at least two years, longer if the next mission gets canned" thing. The closest we come to that now is the south pole base which is *difficult* (not impossible) to get supplies to in the winter. In a pinch we make overflights and drop packages in. It takes a couple of weeks to make it happen, due to the weather issues, but a couple of weeks is *not* the same thing as a couple of years.
You're setting an unreasonably high goal. There is no need for a full dry run of two years unsupplied - something almost certainly bound to fail the first few tries.
You do need to operate the equipment for a period of years, but sending supplies doesn't harm anything. In fact, sending supplies is a good thing because it tells you where your logistics calculations were off. So you send a few supplies (mostly repair parts as food and water consumption is easily calculated in advance), update your logistics information, and continue the mission simulation. Constantly starting and stopping the simulation is hard on the equipment, hard on the personnel, and makes things overall much harder for essentially zero return. (I've done simulations like this on a smaller scale in the Navy - sitting next to the pier and pretending we were underway.)
However, those both happened back in the days of corner-cutting space race mode, the same era when we put highly flammable upholstery in 100% oxygen capsules. IIRC, they were due to small details (stuck air valve, parachute packing) that could be corrected in later flights.
Which neatly dodges the issue of discussing the ongoing problems Soyuz has. The same problem described in TFA happened *again* just last year.
The shuttle accidents, however, were the results of fundamental design blunders which cannot be fixed (strapping a manned vehicle with no escape system below a cryogenic ice-spewing tank and next to uncontrollable multi-ton firework sticks with seams).
As opposed to the Soyuz accidents which were the result of fundamental design issues? Like packing too many couches in? Like jettisoning your life support module prior to ensuring that you are on a re-entry trajectory?
Showing that their system is highly survivable even with shoddy Soviet quality control. Imagine what a great launch system it would be if *we* operated this design.
No, what it shows is the great grandparents thesis is false as it is unsupported by the facts. Yours is equally false, because it is unsupported by facts, requires ignoring relevant facts, and requires special pleadings to explain why design flaws in Shuttle are bad but design flaws in Soyuz aren't germane to the discussion.
The number of people killed is irrelevant except as an emotional argument. If you do insist on comparing numbers - also compare the number of people carried to and from orbit. Shuttle has killed three times as many, but carried five times as many.
The fact the Komarov died on the first flight is irrelevant because it wasn't an Alpha test. Even if you insist on counting it as such, you still face the problem of explaining away the ongoing failures - failures coming pretty steadily across the entire program. The failure describe here during the Soyuz 4/5 flight has happened within the last year!
In short, no matter how you slice it, the difference between the two craft is minute. The claim that cheap and rugged trumps expensive and delicate is unsupported by facts.
The Soyuz space capsule was an incredible engineering accomplishment. Sometimes, a simpler, robust design is vastly superior to a complex, brilliant piece of engineering.
People keep claiming that - I'm still waiting for an example. Soyuz has flown fewer times (90 odd vice 120 odd times) than the Shuttle, yet has killed the same number of crews, had multiple reentry problems (failing to detach a module once, detaching a module too early another time, plus numerous ballistic entries and off target landings due to failed equipment), plus two non fatal loss of mission launch accidents.
I've read that the clever Russian solution to updating the computers in Soyuz. Rather than a start from scratch rewrite of the controls and instruments, they choose to emulate all their old computers in modern circuitry, and to display the same gauges and instruments on modern LCDs.
For various reasons, somehow NASA has never done this.
No, NASA has never done this. Instead what NASA did was to replace their old analog controls with vastly more flexible and functional digital controls when they upgraded the Shuttle's control systems. (The computers run the same code they always have - the display system serves as an emulator/translator between the displays and the computers.)
Yes - I have been keeping up. What I am not doing is merely parroting the Party Line and pretending that if I claim "2+2=5" long enough it will become true.
As you yourself say, they offer licenses. They don't sit it without profiting from it. And those that pay for the license profit from it. And presumably the customers profit as well - else they wouldn't buy.
Keep in mind the original thesis: they sit it, which is patently false. And, nobody profits, which is equally patently false.
Horseshit. Patent 'trolls' buy an idea and then license it. Only an idiot would spend good money for something and then sit on it - especially something like a patent with a limited lifespan.
No one benefits from it (except lining their pockets with no efforts on their part).
Again, horseshit. If nobody licenses it, then and only then does nobody benefit. If a company does license it - then they make money selling the product, and the buyers benefit from the use of the product.
I know, "airplanes are rich mans toys", but that isn't true. You can buy a taylorcraft for $15000, and ercoupes for under $20000. Most planes out there can be bought for under $50000.
$15k for a toy is about as firmly in the category of "rich mans toys" as you can get.
On the other hand, Thomas Harriot introduced a plant to Europeans that fed millions or people cheaply and has become the staple food for much of the planet's population.
The potato was introduced into Europe in 1536 - Harriot was born in 1560. You do the math. Even if Harriot had introduced the potato, which would be curious because his only visits to North America were a hemisphere away from potato cultivation areas, it still languished as human food until the work of Antoine-Augustin Parmentier in the late 1700's.
I find it hard to believe that they have a T1 line - and no cable.
But then, there has been an effort to run fiber to all the school districts in Washington. Here on the Peninsula they are running fiber to individual schools as part of a county wide fiber optic backbone.
We geeks tend to live in a bit of an echo chamber and so we can lose perspective on just how ignorant and computer illiterate the average citizen is.
It's more than an echo chamber, it's a deafening chorus of self congratulating virtual masturbation. You see, the geek (even though he won't admit it) shares the same passion as Everyman - the need to prove how much better he is than the next person.
Don't believe me? Scroll down and read the highly rated comments.
There are real, and hard, limits on how efficient you can make them - most installed refrigerators are going to have to fit into a standard slot. Increasing insulation means losing internal capacity, and remodeling a kitchen to increase the size of the 'slot' is expensive even where practical.
That's actually the broken window fallacy. If someone breaks your window, they're helping the economy because you will then spend money to buy a new window and pay a worker to install it for you.
But actually what's happening is that resources that would go into something productive for the economy get diverted to replacing something previously existent, thus reducing economic growth.
Which is pretty much what I see this proposal as - breaking the software industry window and then paying FOSS developers to replace it.
But the current idea of FOSS will be replacing software that generates a billion dollars in revenue from other companies.
You will have to be very sure that the FOSS software savings will stimulate the economy more than the software industry collapse will hurt it.
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head there - how exactly is wiping out the existing software industry supposed to lead to economic benefits? It's not like FOSS is even remotely likely to produce magic pixie dust software that will noticeably increase productivity. Not to mention the lost productivity during the software changeover.
Reading the linked articles - he didn't actually 'call' the housing bubble. He just kept claiming there was one long enough that he was eventually 'right'.
Obama is a notorious IM addict. He pretty much ran his campaign through his Blackberry. Now of course, you can use a Blackberry to make phone calls and track your appointments, but that's not why he's under pressure to give it up. The security wonks don't like the potential for text messages getting intercepted, and the lawyers don't like the legal exposure he'd get if the messages were subpoenaed or FOIAed.
There's also the concern that the President of the United States isn't supposed to be spending his time micromanaging things - he's got a whole staff to do all that, as well as the entire Executive Branch.
Reflector systems at L2 are heavy too (heavier than you might think anyway), and they'll require fuel too (for stationkeeping)... Not to mention they'll need constant monitoring, occasional maintenance and resupply, and occasional repairs.
Nor will they be in a convenient place where you're sending people and supplies anyhow.
And they won't work anyhow, not with near or medium term tech.
Why sea cables? Europe and Asia are connected by land. While it might have to divert around a few non-cooperative countries, you'd think that sufficient backbone could be laid down over land routes to all necessary countries.
Because laying land cables is extraordinarily expensive - after all, sea bed is free while someone owns the land. Another problem is that you'll be laying cable across some pretty tough and inhospitable terrain far from civilization, which raises maintenance costs considerably. Finally, if you actually look at a map rather than just say "you'd think", you'll note the lack of cooperative and stable countries on the land route.
Well they already plan to use nuclear reactors on the moon base, but oh, what's that big yellow ball of gas there right there?
What big yellow ball? Oh yeah, the one that set yesterday and that we won't see again for about two weeks.
Good thing we have this here nuclear reactor to keep us warm and the lights on till then.
Seriously, even near the poles about the best you can do on solar is run a very modest sized base. Away from the poles, it takes a significantly large energy storage to keep even a modest base in near hibernation across the Lunar night - large enough that nobody is quite sure how do it. Which is why they plan on going nuclear as soon as practical, as doing so is much cheaper and simpler than storing solar.
"where's the evidence of improvement in the way business runs or works? Cars are shoddy, consumer goods are junk."
So Dvorak would want us to all drive the biodegradable pieces of crap cars from 1979? Those Fords and K-Cars were really awful. Then there was the AMC Pacer... a goldfish bowl on wheels...
No shit. When I was a kid (in the 1970's) a car making 100k miles would make the newspapers - almost no cars made it to 100k miles. Yet the 1992 minivan I bought used and drove for ten years (and sold to a buddy) survived to over 130k with normal maintenance. The 1998 van I've been driving for four years just went past 100k and runs like a champ.
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It's that they are nice, or humble - it's that handing out praise, trinkets, and bennies is a well known method of garnering support. It's also a well known mechanism for lulling your enemies into underestimating you because you don't seem politically savvy.
Nice guys don't finish first because they are nice. They finish first because they've quietly built an empire.
And who says you aren't being judged on your merits? Or did never occur to you that the real world might value things differently than your insular little self absorbed haven?
Which is why we wouldn't send a Norwegian whaler to Mars. Duh.
An orbiting station is important, but reasons other than you think... Any Mars mission will spend the bulk of it's time in transit, and the systems need to be proved in their operational environment - in space, in zero-G. Thus an orbiting station is extremely valuable for that purpose. The thermal environment will be a bit different, but we've had enough probes in solar and Martian orbits that once you proven the basic systems and components designing the actual system is fairly straightforward.
You're setting an unreasonably high goal. There is no need for a full dry run of two years unsupplied - something almost certainly bound to fail the first few tries.
You do need to operate the equipment for a period of years, but sending supplies doesn't harm anything. In fact, sending supplies is a good thing because it tells you where your logistics calculations were off. So you send a few supplies (mostly repair parts as food and water consumption is easily calculated in advance), update your logistics information, and continue the mission simulation. Constantly starting and stopping the simulation is hard on the equipment, hard on the personnel, and makes things overall much harder for essentially zero return. (I've done simulations like this on a smaller scale in the Navy - sitting next to the pier and pretending we were underway.)
You're a couple of years behind the times, they've have a simulation in the Arctic going for years now -the Flashline Arctic Research Station
Which neatly dodges the issue of discussing the ongoing problems Soyuz has. The same problem described in TFA happened *again* just last year.
As opposed to the Soyuz accidents which were the result of fundamental design issues? Like packing too many couches in? Like jettisoning your life support module prior to ensuring that you are on a re-entry trajectory?
No, what it shows is the great grandparents thesis is false as it is unsupported by the facts. Yours is equally false, because it is unsupported by facts, requires ignoring relevant facts, and requires special pleadings to explain why design flaws in Shuttle are bad but design flaws in Soyuz aren't germane to the discussion.
The number of people killed is irrelevant except as an emotional argument. If you do insist on comparing numbers - also compare the number of people carried to and from orbit. Shuttle has killed three times as many, but carried five times as many.
The fact the Komarov died on the first flight is irrelevant because it wasn't an Alpha test. Even if you insist on counting it as such, you still face the problem of explaining away the ongoing failures - failures coming pretty steadily across the entire program. The failure describe here during the Soyuz 4/5 flight has happened within the last year!
In short, no matter how you slice it, the difference between the two craft is minute. The claim that cheap and rugged trumps expensive and delicate is unsupported by facts.
People keep claiming that - I'm still waiting for an example. Soyuz has flown fewer times (90 odd vice 120 odd times) than the Shuttle, yet has killed the same number of crews, had multiple reentry problems (failing to detach a module once, detaching a module too early another time, plus numerous ballistic entries and off target landings due to failed equipment), plus two non fatal loss of mission launch accidents.
No, NASA has never done this. Instead what NASA did was to replace their old analog controls with vastly more flexible and functional digital controls when they upgraded the Shuttle's control systems. (The computers run the same code they always have - the display system serves as an emulator/translator between the displays and the computers.)
Yes - I have been keeping up. What I am not doing is merely parroting the Party Line and pretending that if I claim "2+2=5" long enough it will become true.
As you yourself say, they offer licenses. They don't sit it without profiting from it. And those that pay for the license profit from it. And presumably the customers profit as well - else they wouldn't buy.
Keep in mind the original thesis: they sit it, which is patently false. And, nobody profits, which is equally patently false.
Horseshit. Patent 'trolls' buy an idea and then license it. Only an idiot would spend good money for something and then sit on it - especially something like a patent with a limited lifespan.
Again, horseshit. If nobody licenses it, then and only then does nobody benefit. If a company does license it - then they make money selling the product, and the buyers benefit from the use of the product.
$15k for a toy is about as firmly in the category of "rich mans toys" as you can get.
Exercising such coordination is hardly needed, as this has been done pretty routinely for nearly forty years.
The potato was introduced into Europe in 1536 - Harriot was born in 1560. You do the math. Even if Harriot had introduced the potato, which would be curious because his only visits to North America were a hemisphere away from potato cultivation areas, it still languished as human food until the work of Antoine-Augustin Parmentier in the late 1700's.
I find it hard to believe that they have a T1 line - and no cable.
But then, there has been an effort to run fiber to all the school districts in Washington. Here on the Peninsula they are running fiber to individual schools as part of a county wide fiber optic backbone.
It's more than an echo chamber, it's a deafening chorus of self congratulating virtual masturbation. You see, the geek (even though he won't admit it) shares the same passion as Everyman - the need to prove how much better he is than the next person.
Don't believe me? Scroll down and read the highly rated comments.
There are real, and hard, limits on how efficient you can make them - most installed refrigerators are going to have to fit into a standard slot. Increasing insulation means losing internal capacity, and remodeling a kitchen to increase the size of the 'slot' is expensive even where practical.
Which is pretty much what I see this proposal as - breaking the software industry window and then paying FOSS developers to replace it.
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head there - how exactly is wiping out the existing software industry supposed to lead to economic benefits? It's not like FOSS is even remotely likely to produce magic pixie dust software that will noticeably increase productivity. Not to mention the lost productivity during the software changeover.
Reading the linked articles - he didn't actually 'call' the housing bubble. He just kept claiming there was one long enough that he was eventually 'right'.
Hell, even I can do that.
Generally if one has to come up with a Rube Goldberg scheme to make things 'simpler'... You're doing it wrong.
There's also the concern that the President of the United States isn't supposed to be spending his time micromanaging things - he's got a whole staff to do all that, as well as the entire Executive Branch.
Reflector systems at L2 are heavy too (heavier than you might think anyway), and they'll require fuel too (for stationkeeping)... Not to mention they'll need constant monitoring, occasional maintenance and resupply, and occasional repairs.
Nor will they be in a convenient place where you're sending people and supplies anyhow.
And they won't work anyhow, not with near or medium term tech.
Because laying land cables is extraordinarily expensive - after all, sea bed is free while someone owns the land. Another problem is that you'll be laying cable across some pretty tough and inhospitable terrain far from civilization, which raises maintenance costs considerably. Finally, if you actually look at a map rather than just say "you'd think", you'll note the lack of cooperative and stable countries on the land route.
What big yellow ball? Oh yeah, the one that set yesterday and that we won't see again for about two weeks.
Good thing we have this here nuclear reactor to keep us warm and the lights on till then.
Seriously, even near the poles about the best you can do on solar is run a very modest sized base. Away from the poles, it takes a significantly large energy storage to keep even a modest base in near hibernation across the Lunar night - large enough that nobody is quite sure how do it. Which is why they plan on going nuclear as soon as practical, as doing so is much cheaper and simpler than storing solar.
No shit. When I was a kid (in the 1970's) a car making 100k miles would make the newspapers - almost no cars made it to 100k miles. Yet the 1992 minivan I bought used and drove for ten years (and sold to a buddy) survived to over 130k with normal maintenance. The 1998 van I've been driving for four years just went past 100k and runs like a champ.
Dvorak is an idiot.