I suspect that the time required for our garbage to decompose is actually lower than we predict since we don't really factor in the possibility of bacterial mutations which can make them good consumers of the garbage.
The fact that actual studies of landfills indicate exactly the opposite notwithstanding...
I got out of pure IT all together, I've found that it's far easier to get a traditional business off the ground and with the skills I've got my new company is light years ahead of the competition. How many small catering businesses do you know of that have 1TB File Server, there own dedicated web/mail server, asterisk PBX with VOIP/POTS lines etc, and a dedicated 24/7 tech support person with excellent dish washing skills?
I don't know of any small catering company with that level of IT infrastructure. OTOH, I don't know of any small catering company that needs anything even remotely resembling that level of IT infrastructure either. Competitively, it's really a wash even though it sounds impressive,
Just because you read slashdot does not mean you are not the most scientifically literate person on the planet.
One doesn't have to be the most scientifically literate person on the planet to keep up with what NASA is doing. Not even close.
I love people that pretend that it is.
I did not 'pretend' anything, I simply stated bald facts. Ignorant jackasses like yourself may have a hard time telling the difference since they wallow in their ignorance and wear it as if was a badge of honor.
Science is hard work and should not be trivialized.
Ah, the final sign of a total ignoramus - throw in a statement that, while true, has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion. It makes the ignorant feel like they are smart, since they can parrot things they've read elsewhere, but to anyone with an education it merely reveals the shallowness of the jackass they are conversing with.
I'm actually glad to see NASA doing stuff that might not work. It seems that a lot of the space work thats been happening in the last decade or two has been stuff that we know we can do.
NASA has never stopped doing stuff that might not work - it's just that 99.99% percent of what does (successful or not) never makes Slashdot, let alone the mainstream media. Heck, even most of the stuff that's made the mainstream media hasn't really been 'stuff we know how to do'... Pathfinder, Spirit, Opportunity. Deep Space 1, Deep Impact, the Hubble repair missions, quite of the ISS assembly flights... I could go on, but those alone should suffice.
There are still failures, but those tend to be metric vs imperial units issues, not because they're pushing forward in to new areas.
Had NASA suffered a failure because of a units error - you'd have a point. I assume you mean Mars Climate Orbiter - which was lost because NASA failed to analyze it's trajectory during the cruise phase. Not because of a units error. The units error was a contributing cause, but one trivially corrected for had standard monitoring been in place (both in testing and in flight) - but it wasn't because of sharp budget restrictions.
Not to be offensive, but it seems your impression of what NASA is or isn't doing seems to arise from not paying attention.
I know very little about these laws, but at least at first sight the above seems a bit of a tricky issue:
It is tricky - which is why there are the international courts at The Hague, various regulatory and advisory bodies and committees like the UN, etc... etc...
To address your specific examples:
The USSR explicitly transmitted it's rights and responsibilities under international law to the CIS/Russia. (I.E. there was a continuity of government.)
Yes, a vessel of the Armada or Spanish treasure ships off the coast of the Americas belongs to Spain.
Vessels from antiquity are generally claimed by the local government under their own laws protecting antiquities and archaeological sites since the wrecks are generally in national waters. (Don't play semantic games with the word 'forever'.)
Things like UXB's everyone just generally turns a blind eye to and hopes the problem will just go away.
How do you define "government"? I'm dead serious, what is the legal definition of the government that has perpetual property rights?
There really isn't one... International law isn't like a national civil or criminal code. It's a mix of black letter law, custom, tradition, and pragmatism.
I believe that the Moon is covered by the Law of the Sea, which also covers Space.
It isn't and it doesn't.
So, for example, Mars Pathfinder is not derelict, but jetsam, flotsam or lagan which is remains the property of their original owner.
Mars Pathfinder isn't any of those four legal states - it is clearly and plainly the property of the USG. Period. This is plainly spelled out in the various treaties that address the issue.
This same principle is found in Maritime Law, where government property always remains government property unless the government specifically gives up jurisdiction. (This is the legal principle under which the US Government supervised the salvage of the Hunley - since the USG had assumed control of all CSA property at the close of the Civil War, and neither government had ever yielded title.)
The American bird that was shot down by the Navy this year, might technically be a derelict and could be salvaged legally, had it come down mostly intact.
The various treaties that address the topic are quite clear - in space, as on earth, government property remains government property forever unless specifically yields title.
The Internet however has one huge difference from the BBS's of yesteryear - it's distributed. Back in the day, BBS's were hubs of meatspace social activity as well as means of asynchronous communications. The 'net has only incompletely replaced that. The 'net is also far more anonymous, where back in the BBS days if you were an asshole or flamer on one board - you'd find yourself peremptorily banned on many other local boards. (Usually based on something not easily changed back then, your home phone number.) Etc... Etc...
BBS's weren't just about messaging, they were based on providing a social space, a third place if you will. The 'net has supplanted that function but not replaced it.
While he article touches on a lot of the obvious issues (piracy, sovereignty, etc)
He touches on them, but he doesn't address them to any degree. Which isn't surprising because many of the proponents of these projects are a bit vague and handwavish on the details themselves. To take the two issues you mention:
Sovereignty - these colonies are no more sovereign than a condominium complex. In fact, legally speaking, (though IANAL) they appear to be little more than condominiums. There's a fairly good size body of law concerning vessels at sea, and nowhere in that body is (as proponents seem to believe) is the line "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law".
Piracy - David Friedman, quoted in the article, is dead wrong on this issue. Pirates attack much more than container vessels. In recent years they've attacked cruise ships and private yachts as well. Pirates aren't something you can just handwave away.
'Nation problems'. Without any allies, any nation can declare war on you and sink you. You're a nation now, so you're expected to play at that level. Likewise, your neighbor on his own platform can declare war on you - he's running a nation, too. PirateBay platform, meet the RIAA platform... Do you plan to appeal to the United Nations? Can you even do that if you're not a member? What about trade agreements? There's really a LOT to consider here.
As much as proponents of this scheme like to pretend otherwise - they aren't nations in a legal sense. They are passengers and/or operators of a vessel at sea. They are subject to the laws of the nation who flags the vessel, the laws of the nation(s) issuing their passports, and a wide variety of laws and conventions covering behavior at sea, environmental regulations, etc... etc... (Not to mention more obscure bodies of law like banking regulations, passport agreements, postal agreements, agricultural agreements...)
They can claim to be a nation - but I suspect that will be a hollow claim, little more than LARP on a grand scale.
No natural resources. Or in other words, there's nothing there that anyone wants. You might be able to grow your own food and harvest the necessities from the sea, but you can basically forget about having any exports. This would be a deficit economy just about any way you shake it.
That's going to be a bigger issue than you might think. The infrastructure costs of these platforms is going to run into the hundreds of millions, and the operating costs won't exactly be pocket change either. The folks that put up the gold are going to be very interested in protecting their investment - I suspect the desire to run a libertarian paradise is going to run sharply into the brick wall of dollars and cents.
I'm a bit split on this, but mostly agree with you. I've been in guilds, but I don't have the time to sit for hours for a raid on a friday or saturday night. So I never get a chance to really play that side of the game. It's hard enough to get 5 people to run an instance, let alone split the loot that you get, let alone 30 or more people
So play a game that lets you play solo. Or in small groups. Or that has missions that don't take hours. Etc... Etc...
Don't sit down at a backgammon board and whine because you can't find Park Place.
your second bit is also weird. How many CP cases are NOT at the federal level? It's a federal felony, no?
It's a federal crime, it's also a state crime, or a local crime depending on circumstances.
Searching Google News gives you an idea of the dimensions of the problem.
You're left with (liberal estimate) 5K cases a year... for $1B?????
It's $1Bn over eight years, or $125 million a year. Dividing that figure by your estimated 5k cases/year yields $25,000 per case, which really isn't much.
Still, everything under the runtime libraries or virtual machine will be completely opaque for this programmer who has no clear understanding of even how the processor accesses main memory.
That's my whole point - you don't need to know how the processor accesses main memory in order to program, unless you are programming in assembler directly on the bare silicon.
that freedom exists regardless of price tag on the OS or the apps.
Way to miss the point! It's not free as opposed to expensive, it's Free as opposed to Caged.
No, I didn't miss the point, I showed where the point was illusory. The goal here is to free the mind and to open the world to them. Many here on Slashdot, and in the OLPC project itself, have forgotten that simple point in the rush to load the XO down with their own philosophical and political baggage.
(Aside the from the very minor and likely to be little used ability to look 'under the hood' and modify the code.)
It's not "very minor and likely to be little used", that's the whole freaking point. It's vitally important to be able to poke about inside. Whilst it's by no means certain that everybody will do so, it's important for them to have the opportunity to. Because there's no way of knowing in advance who is going to be a programmer.
Did you bother to read the individual I quoted? (Here is a link so you can go back and do so.) I started off, like tens of thousands of other programmers today, on a close and proprietary system - an PC of some flavor, as BASIC interpreter, and a couple of crappy books. A kid with an XO and access to the 'net is orders of magnitude better off than we were. You delude yourself if think the the only way to expose them to programming is to load them down with your baggage.
Imagine a whole generation of kids growing up never having been exposed to proprietary, Caged software. A whole generation of kids where some have learned to program their OLPCs, and shared the programs they wrote freely. Basically, those kids are going to be used to the whole Free software ethos in a way that most people in the West don't get -- and there's no way in hell they'd ever want to use a piece of Caged software.
That generation of kids will be just like the West - 99.99999% of them simply won't care. Software is something they install and expect to Just Work. The price tag and the philosophical and political baggage is simply irrelevant to them.
You can't do that with any modern computer. You can't learn from watching a multi-layer motherboard where you can't find out what connects to what in what fashion without a multi-thousand-dollar lab and a high-res X-ray machine. You can't just look up what a modern thousand-leg GPU does the way you could with a 74LS74. There are no books on that. You can't cut a trace and rewire something, not anymore.
Nor do you need to do all those fancy things. The vast majority of modern programmers got their start programming, not hacking hardware I wager.
Different times require different tools. Open source is probably the only way to see what happens in a computer these days.
Sorry, but you are comparing apples to oranges - because you start with hardware and then swap to software. Along the way, you somehow missed that a whole generation of programmers got their start on proprietary computers (Apple, C64, IBM/clones) with a crappy language and tools (BASIC) and a handful of books and magazine (no interwebs). Today, one can start with Python/Java/Ruby/whatever and the internet and be light years ahead of where we all started out.
Why should I have to convince you, why don't you engage your own brain and ask yourself why their requirements should be any different? (But then the bias and handwaving in your answer shows the unlikelihood of that happening.)
Because it's a dammfool idea to throw away a tested, proven, and most importantly working paradigm in favor of an untested and unproven one. You experiment with new paradigms in your development lab - not with your end users.
The freedom he's talking about isn't the "freedom to do whatever you want" but the freedom to explore.
And frankly, from the point of view of education, that freedom exists regardless of price tag on the OS or the apps. (Aside the from the very minor and likely to be little used ability to look 'under the hood' and modify the code.)
When I grew up we had no idea what free software was, all we had were our Apple II's, C64's, etc, that were pretty much 100% proprietary. Yet, we somehow learned about computers by reading books and writing our own programs in the cruddy BASIC interpreters they came with. A kid with XP, Java/Python/what-have-you, and the Internet is a million times better off than we were.
The Slashmind is seriously misguided if it thinks education and learning can only be accomplished via F/OSS OS's and applications.
In fact, as usual, Wikipedia doesn't quite get it right. 'International treaties' != 'Space Law', and are in fact covered by a long existing body of law. 'Consensus' != 'Law'. '1998 ISS agreement' like other international agreements is done in conformance with a long existing body of law. Etc... Etc...
Not to mention given the age of many of those agreements we should have space lawyers approaching retirement age. We don't. Why? Because there isn't a body of such law to specialize in. This is nothing like maritime law or patent law where a separate and specialized body of law exists - this is more like specializing in 'murder law' or 'theft law'. It's featherbedding and marketing.
Space's importance in national security mostly end with upper satelite orbits, what importance did landing on the Moon have on USA national security compared to sending satelites in upper orbit? None, so why should landing on Mars be considered differently?
The national security value of space extends much further than providing hardware for direct support. It also includes propaganda.
I don't remember when digital watches started appearing, but I suppose there's a bit of code in there?
There almost certainly isn't a line of code in them. "Digital" != "Computer". Digital watches are nothing but a clock, a counter, a display matrix and a little bit of logic for setting/resetting the counter.
As long as the weather isn't bad doing those things while flying would be easier than doing it in a car. Once you are in the air modern aircraft pretty much fly themselves.
Except - this isn't a modern aircraft. It's an overgrown ultralight.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that actual studies of landfills indicate exactly the opposite notwithstanding...
I don't know of any small catering company with that level of IT infrastructure. OTOH, I don't know of any small catering company that needs anything even remotely resembling that level of IT infrastructure either. Competitively, it's really a wash even though it sounds impressive,
One doesn't have to be the most scientifically literate person on the planet to keep up with what NASA is doing. Not even close.
I did not 'pretend' anything, I simply stated bald facts. Ignorant jackasses like yourself may have a hard time telling the difference since they wallow in their ignorance and wear it as if was a badge of honor.
Ah, the final sign of a total ignoramus - throw in a statement that, while true, has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion. It makes the ignorant feel like they are smart, since they can parrot things they've read elsewhere, but to anyone with an education it merely reveals the shallowness of the jackass they are conversing with.
It's not as if on a text based site anyone can really notice latency below a couple of hundred microseconds.
NASA has never stopped doing stuff that might not work - it's just that 99.99% percent of what does (successful or not) never makes Slashdot, let alone the mainstream media. Heck, even most of the stuff that's made the mainstream media hasn't really been 'stuff we know how to do'... Pathfinder, Spirit, Opportunity. Deep Space 1, Deep Impact, the Hubble repair missions, quite of the ISS assembly flights... I could go on, but those alone should suffice.
Had NASA suffered a failure because of a units error - you'd have a point. I assume you mean Mars Climate Orbiter - which was lost because NASA failed to analyze it's trajectory during the cruise phase. Not because of a units error. The units error was a contributing cause, but one trivially corrected for had standard monitoring been in place (both in testing and in flight) - but it wasn't because of sharp budget restrictions.
Not to be offensive, but it seems your impression of what NASA is or isn't doing seems to arise from not paying attention.
It is tricky - which is why there are the international courts at The Hague, various regulatory and advisory bodies and committees like the UN, etc... etc...
To address your specific examples:
There really isn't one... International law isn't like a national civil or criminal code. It's a mix of black letter law, custom, tradition, and pragmatism.
It isn't and it doesn't.
Mars Pathfinder isn't any of those four legal states - it is clearly and plainly the property of the USG. Period. This is plainly spelled out in the various treaties that address the issue.
This same principle is found in Maritime Law, where government property always remains government property unless the government specifically gives up jurisdiction. (This is the legal principle under which the US Government supervised the salvage of the Hunley - since the USG had assumed control of all CSA property at the close of the Civil War, and neither government had ever yielded title.)
The various treaties that address the topic are quite clear - in space, as on earth, government property remains government property forever unless specifically yields title.
The Internet however has one huge difference from the BBS's of yesteryear - it's distributed. Back in the day, BBS's were hubs of meatspace social activity as well as means of asynchronous communications. The 'net has only incompletely replaced that. The 'net is also far more anonymous, where back in the BBS days if you were an asshole or flamer on one board - you'd find yourself peremptorily banned on many other local boards. (Usually based on something not easily changed back then, your home phone number.) Etc... Etc...
BBS's weren't just about messaging, they were based on providing a social space, a third place if you will. The 'net has supplanted that function but not replaced it.
He touches on them, but he doesn't address them to any degree. Which isn't surprising because many of the proponents of these projects are a bit vague and handwavish on the details themselves. To take the two issues you mention:
As much as proponents of this scheme like to pretend otherwise - they aren't nations in a legal sense. They are passengers and/or operators of a vessel at sea. They are subject to the laws of the nation who flags the vessel, the laws of the nation(s) issuing their passports, and a wide variety of laws and conventions covering behavior at sea, environmental regulations, etc... etc... (Not to mention more obscure bodies of law like banking regulations, passport agreements, postal agreements, agricultural agreements...)
They can claim to be a nation - but I suspect that will be a hollow claim, little more than LARP on a grand scale.
That's going to be a bigger issue than you might think. The infrastructure costs of these platforms is going to run into the hundreds of millions, and the operating costs won't exactly be pocket change either. The folks that put up the gold are going to be very interested in protecting their investment - I suspect the desire to run a libertarian paradise is going to run sharply into the brick wall of dollars and cents.
So play a game that lets you play solo. Or in small groups. Or that has missions that don't take hours. Etc... Etc...
Don't sit down at a backgammon board and whine because you can't find Park Place.
It's a federal crime, it's also a state crime, or a local crime depending on circumstances.
Searching Google News gives you an idea of the dimensions of the problem.
It's $1Bn over eight years, or $125 million a year. Dividing that figure by your estimated 5k cases/year yields $25,000 per case, which really isn't much.
Not to mention that it's $1Bn over eight years, which really isn't very much money. Just a handful or so of full time investigators/examiners.
That's my whole point - you don't need to know how the processor accesses main memory in order to program, unless you are programming in assembler directly on the bare silicon.
No, I didn't miss the point, I showed where the point was illusory. The goal here is to free the mind and to open the world to them. Many here on Slashdot, and in the OLPC project itself, have forgotten that simple point in the rush to load the XO down with their own philosophical and political baggage.
Did you bother to read the individual I quoted? (Here is a link so you can go back and do so.) I started off, like tens of thousands of other programmers today, on a close and proprietary system - an PC of some flavor, as BASIC interpreter, and a couple of crappy books. A kid with an XO and access to the 'net is orders of magnitude better off than we were. You delude yourself if think the the only way to expose them to programming is to load them down with your baggage.
That generation of kids will be just like the West - 99.99999% of them simply won't care. Software is something they install and expect to Just Work. The price tag and the philosophical and political baggage is simply irrelevant to them.
Nor do you need to do all those fancy things. The vast majority of modern programmers got their start programming, not hacking hardware I wager.
Sorry, but you are comparing apples to oranges - because you start with hardware and then swap to software. Along the way, you somehow missed that a whole generation of programmers got their start on proprietary computers (Apple, C64, IBM/clones) with a crappy language and tools (BASIC) and a handful of books and magazine (no interwebs). Today, one can start with Python/Java/Ruby/whatever and the internet and be light years ahead of where we all started out.
Why should I have to convince you, why don't you engage your own brain and ask yourself why their requirements should be any different? (But then the bias and handwaving in your answer shows the unlikelihood of that happening.)
Because it's a dammfool idea to throw away a tested, proven, and most importantly working paradigm in favor of an untested and unproven one. You experiment with new paradigms in your development lab - not with your end users.
And frankly, from the point of view of education, that freedom exists regardless of price tag on the OS or the apps. (Aside the from the very minor and likely to be little used ability to look 'under the hood' and modify the code.)
As this individual points out:
The Slashmind is seriously misguided if it thinks education and learning can only be accomplished via F/OSS OS's and applications.
In fact, as usual, Wikipedia doesn't quite get it right. 'International treaties' != 'Space Law', and are in fact covered by a long existing body of law. 'Consensus' != 'Law'. '1998 ISS agreement' like other international agreements is done in conformance with a long existing body of law. Etc... Etc...
Not to mention given the age of many of those agreements we should have space lawyers approaching retirement age. We don't. Why? Because there isn't a body of such law to specialize in. This is nothing like maritime law or patent law where a separate and specialized body of law exists - this is more like specializing in 'murder law' or 'theft law'. It's featherbedding and marketing.
Given that there really isn't a body of space law for a 'space lawyer' to specialize in... How exactly does this work?
The national security value of space extends much further than providing hardware for direct support. It also includes propaganda.
I was referring to watches, not stopwatches, nor calculators.
There almost certainly isn't a line of code in them. "Digital" != "Computer". Digital watches are nothing but a clock, a counter, a display matrix and a little bit of logic for setting/resetting the counter.
Except - this isn't a modern aircraft. It's an overgrown ultralight.
Assuming that the drives haven't died and the disks haven't suffered from bitrot or aging effects on the materials they are made of.