"Art is not simply something that someone made that you like to look at/listen to/read/etc."
Yeah, actually it is.
No, actually it isn't. And never has been.
That is exactly why so many people that are into "Art" sound like such pompous asses.
No, so many people that are into "Art" sound like pompous asses because of the increasingly divide between Art and the general public. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the biggest is a the loss of widely shared culture and iconography over the last century-and-some.
It is also why people have such a hard time defining what is "Art". They are obsessed with trying to make it more than it is.
No, they are having such a hard time - because they were raised without a solid definition and understanding, see "loss of widely shared culture and iconography".
Convincing them there's a legitimate problem, aside from your ideal form of etiquette, ought to be step one. Otherwise - why would random_employee_002 do anything different?
It's not 'his' ideal form of etiquette - it used to be quite common and well understood.
Where OS/2 failed was some top boneheads in IBM asked their major software competitor, Microsoft, to develop the initial OS/2 1.x.
In that timeframe, who else was going to write a graphical multi-tasking OS with the associated GUI? Especially since Microsoft, at the time, was in a bit of a shakey position with various DOS clones starting to make inroads on the market and with hardware at a cross roads. The near total [Microsoft] dominance that folks seem to take for granted today doesn't really start until 1992 with the release of Windows 3.1 and the associated applications suite - nearly four years after the delivery of OS/2 2.1 and seven years after Microsoft and IBM started their collaboration.
I take it you've never bought anything more complex than a brick? Well, even that's a bad example because bricks come in a wide variety of styles and colors.
Seriously - even with a simple menu of features, not all phone will be alike. This one might have a slightly better screen, this one a keypad that's easier for you to use, etc... etc...
You simply cannot trust a product from Microsoft not to screw up. I seriously doubt any of us Windows users haven't had to reformat at least once (of the Windows users here anyway).
Been running Windows since 3.1.... Three XP machines currently in this computer room.
For many decades now, organizations - NASA included - have worked on replacing the first stage rocket completely with a turbine-assisted ramjet.
No, NASA gave it up years ago - as it simply doesn't work. The turbines are too heavy, useful for too small a portion of the flight profile, etc... etc...
Other alternative launch-assist methods include using linear accelerators - basically strap the rocket onto something akin to a bullet train and then get the train up to the critical speed, or using a very powerful gas cannon to fire the rocket into the air at the critical speed.
Two more ideas that don't work, despite years of fanboy cheerleading for them. Among other large drawbacks - you still need to get a substantial portion (99%+) of the required velocity from rockets, but the weight of the structure needed to withstand these methods of 'assisting' means a rocket launched this way is actually larger and heavier than one that launched in a conventional fashion.
This law allowed small bookstores to stay alive. You might see this as an attack on free market (which it is), but it is also allowing French people to buy books they would have a hard time to find otherwise. In the US, on the other hand, the big stores are healthy, but finding something which is not mainstream is rather hard, especially outside the big cities.
It has always been hard to find books that aren't mainstream - even in the big cities, contrary to the myth that in some idyllic and pastoral past, there existed legions of small oddball bookstores ready to serve your every reading whim. The few exceptions were mostly topics out of the mainstream, but still so popular they were practically mainstream. (Wicca and other forms of mysticism, leftist politics, various forms of back-the-land/organic/etc... living.) The there was the niche mainstream (military modelers, model railroaders, various crafts, etc...), which were well served by specialty stores. But if your interest were in something really oddball or really niche (18th century poets, culinary history, etc...), prior to Amazon - you were really screwed. Bookstores, even big ones in big cities, rarely carried the books you were interested in - it was hard as hell to even find out which books existed, let alone be able to peruse them.[1]
The truth is, the smaller independent bookstore by and large carried the same books as the big guys - because going after the large mainstream market was the only way to stay afloat.
On this very issue - Jeff Bezos has said on several occasions that Amazon's early growth came not from best sellers and mainstream topics, but on specialized technical books (computers), and books on "obscure or unusual topics". I.E., the very books is was hardest to locate prior to the Internet.
[1] Dover Books grew big because they realized this - and printed a catalog of related books in the back of books they published. They, unlike other (especially mainstream) publishers, made it very easy to get their catalogs by mail as well.
Notice that it refers to MMOs and not necessarily MMORPGs which, IMHO, is the most common kind of MMO. The two primary activities in MMORPGs are questing and grinding, and I don't think those activities lend themselves to accomplishing the goals NASA has set out.
So, how are they going to make this fun?
That's a tough question - because a great deal of what NASA does bears much greater resemblence to questing and grinding than it does to any other aspect of gameplay.
The first step in being scientific is comparing apples to apples. The grandparent is comparing cosmetic prothstetics to specially designed and engineered racing prothstetics.
The fact that Oscar Pistorius is a world-class sprinter indicates that he's something special. He's not a world-class distance runner. He's missing a large chunk of power and still competes well.
Somebody scientific would view evidence (like Pistorious's performance) that did not fit the theory (double knee amputees should not perform so well) as evidence that just possibly something is wrong with the theory.
I've read nearly all of the comments thus far, and I have to say I'm pretty disappointed in the general lack of clue.
And then you continue the trend.
. I have had a prosthetic right leg for going on 13 years now.
So what? He's a double amputee who has had prosthetic legs since a very young age. His legs are specially designed for racing - I bet your aren't. Comparing his legs to your leg is comparing apples to oranges.
That's exactly what's wrong with the industry. Or rather, people's views of the "users" of the industry's output.
Hands up. How many here are above 18? Eligible to drive, drink liquor and (most of all) vote? Ok, hands down again, I can't see the opposite wall anymore.
Clue: Slashdot doesn't represent even a visible fraction of gamers.
It's funny how many slashdotters are posting to say that Windows sucks and boots slow,
I'm wondering how they know this - since so many slashdotters also tell us they don't use Windows.
I'm also wondering why they care. I only have to reboot my my (XP based) machines when there are patches... It could take ten minutes or even half an hour (rather than the three it currently does) for all I care. I'll just go do something else while it boots.
He's absolutely correct that fair use isn't a right, it's an exception. But it's an exception to the rights of the copyright holder. And this distinction is important because it underscores how entertainment companies misrepresent copyright. Rather than copyright defining the few excepted uses allowed to people/entities who don't hold the copyright, it actually defines the few rights granted exclusively to the copyright holder.
Huh? Copyright does no such thing - copyright defines the rights of the copyholder ('he can do pretty much what he wants' is a fair first order summation), and then defines fair use as exceptions to that broad slate of rights.
And this is an important observation about the intent of copyright. Namely, that anything not explicitly granted to the copyright holder is permissible rather than forbidden.
No, it's not an important observation. It's a near complete misstatement of the facts based on a near complete lack of understanding of how copyright works.
The big content producers would like copyright to be a limited set of things that we (those not producing the content) are allowed to do with their content, which they believe they own.
Oddly enough, that is pretty much exactly how copyright works..
Yes, and using web pages on a web forum as an example doesn't preclude me from being someone who's put effort into studing this matter, does it?
No, the amount of knowledge (more correctly the lack of knowledge) you have displayed on the issues, combined with the routine substitution of handwaving and ungrounded assumptions for for facts precludes you from being someone who has studied the matter.
One of the reasons many forms of extraction of infeasible is energy cost. Simply put, that's less of an issue on the moon. Reliable solar energy, no cost for land usage, less atmospheric ware on solar panels. Energy can become quite cheap.
Sure - once you solve the non trivial problems. Like how to deploy and support the panels. How to interconnect them. Etc... etc... And then there is the elephant in the room - lunar night. (Not mention, given the cost of getting the panels to the moon... the energy isn't going to be cheap.)
do they mean using solid fuel rockets for landing and takeoff? That seems silly since you want controllable thrust
Actually, with a bit of cleverness - you only need throttleability for a fairly small portion of the powered phase of landing.
One method is using a 'crasher stage' - where you use a large non-throttleable engine to remove nearly all of your velocity at once, discard it, and then complete the landing using a fairly small throttleable engine. NASA's Surveyor landers used this method, as did (IIRC) all of the Soviet landers - all of them with solids. Those were direct landing trajectories, but you could do the same thing from orbit. One crasher to take you out of orbit, and then a second shortly before landing.
You can do the same thing on takeoff, use one large unit to get you off the ground and on the general trajectory you want to be on - and then use smaller, throttleable, engines to fine tune your trajectory.
luna hasn't got enough gravity that you'd need the SRB's like on the shuttle.
The Shuttle needed extra boosters because of its configuration, and SRB's were thought to be cheaper and more reliable than L(iquid)RB's. In a large part, they are - as refurbishing a LRB after an ocean landing would be expensive indeed. (You can fly 'em back and avoid that, but that turned out to be very expensive.) At one complete failure (STS-51L) out of 250 odd SRB's launched, their reliability is not significantly different than liquid boosters.
The choice between solid and liquid is a set of complex engineering and financial tradeoffs. Gravity isn't an issue at all - as we can build small solids as easy (in fact - much, much easier) as we do large ones. (I worked with one in the Navy that produced 500lbs of thrust for.75 seconds - you could pick it up in both hands.)
Yes, really. There are also people who have spent time actually studying the issue rather than skimming relevant webpages and handwaving.
"Common elements" are not the same thing as "useable ore deposits". If you do a similiar long distance scan of the Earth's surface, you'll find lots of silicates, lots of iron, and quite a bit of aluminum - but 99.9999999% of it is either of too low a concentration to be recoverable without a massive effort, and a similiar percentage is locked up in chemical forms that make it difficult to recover in the first place. (There is considerable overlap between the two sets.)
Tech in these areas is much less advanced than you assume it to be.
Do I really need to point out that lab trials are a very long way from actual equipment? And that we haven't got any equivalent machinery on earth that functions like this - despite decades of trying?
In so far as weight goes - the bare structure (which is all than can be expected to be produced, even with hurricane strength handwaving) is the lightest part of the base. The equipment you'll have to launch to produce it will weigh at least two orders of magnitude more than the material they will produce. That is, unless you want to spend a couple of decades building the base... but equipment reliable enough to do that without manned intervention isn't anywhere on the horizon. Getting the equipment reliable enough to last a month is going to take an incredible effort.
The areas which actually have eternal sunlight are actually very, very small. They are also at a very, very acute angle to the sun - which means either very inefficient solar collectors, or a very large amount of structure to hold them at a better angle.
The advantages of being at the lunar poles are vastly overstated.
Is an automated drilling/mining/processing plant. There are mineral deposits up there. If we could go up there and have the materials made on site, so we only needed to set up the base, a long term moon base would be fairly cheap.
Actually, we don't know if there are mineral deposits on the Moon, as it hasn't been explored in enough detail to even make a reasonable guess. Anything below the top couple of centimeters is pretty much a complete mystery. On top of which, it is not clear the Moon has gone through the tectonic procesess that create ore bodies on Earth.
Insofar as automation goes - let's just say the relevant processes are essentially undeveloped and the known problems quite staggering. It's a sure bet that beyond the known unknowns lies a minefield of unknown unknowns.
Energy certainly wouldn't be a problem, with every day sunny.
It's only sunny for half the time - the other half is complete darkness. Storing enough energy to keep any significant amount of machinery warm enough during the night, let alone operating, is one of those unsolved staggering problems mentioned above.
Because it's an opportunity to laugh a Microsoft, an opportunity the Slashdot editors can rarely pass up on. (Hey, it means they make their quota and everyone gets a free shot at karma from upmods. What's not to like?)
Slashdot Mirror
No, actually it isn't. And never has been.
No, so many people that are into "Art" sound like pompous asses because of the increasingly divide between Art and the general public. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the biggest is a the loss of widely shared culture and iconography over the last century-and-some.
No, they are having such a hard time - because they were raised without a solid definition and understanding, see "loss of widely shared culture and iconography".
It's not 'his' ideal form of etiquette - it used to be quite common and well understood.
In that timeframe, who else was going to write a graphical multi-tasking OS with the associated GUI? Especially since Microsoft, at the time, was in a bit of a shakey position with various DOS clones starting to make inroads on the market and with hardware at a cross roads. The near total [Microsoft] dominance that folks seem to take for granted today doesn't really start until 1992 with the release of Windows 3.1 and the associated applications suite - nearly four years after the delivery of OS/2 2.1 and seven years after Microsoft and IBM started their collaboration.
I take it you've never bought anything more complex than a brick? Well, even that's a bad example because bricks come in a wide variety of styles and colors.
Seriously - even with a simple menu of features, not all phone will be alike. This one might have a slightly better screen, this one a keypad that's easier for you to use, etc... etc...
Been running Windows since 3.1.... Three XP machines currently in this computer room.
Not one reformat.
No, NASA gave it up years ago - as it simply doesn't work. The turbines are too heavy, useful for too small a portion of the flight profile, etc... etc...
Two more ideas that don't work, despite years of fanboy cheerleading for them. Among other large drawbacks - you still need to get a substantial portion (99%+) of the required velocity from rockets, but the weight of the structure needed to withstand these methods of 'assisting' means a rocket launched this way is actually larger and heavier than one that launched in a conventional fashion.
It has always been hard to find books that aren't mainstream - even in the big cities, contrary to the myth that in some idyllic and pastoral past, there existed legions of small oddball bookstores ready to serve your every reading whim. The few exceptions were mostly topics out of the mainstream, but still so popular they were practically mainstream. (Wicca and other forms of mysticism, leftist politics, various forms of back-the-land/organic/etc... living.) The there was the niche mainstream (military modelers, model railroaders, various crafts, etc...), which were well served by specialty stores. But if your interest were in something really oddball or really niche (18th century poets, culinary history, etc...), prior to Amazon - you were really screwed. Bookstores, even big ones in big cities, rarely carried the books you were interested in - it was hard as hell to even find out which books existed, let alone be able to peruse them.[1]
The truth is, the smaller independent bookstore by and large carried the same books as the big guys - because going after the large mainstream market was the only way to stay afloat.
On this very issue - Jeff Bezos has said on several occasions that Amazon's early growth came not from best sellers and mainstream topics, but on specialized technical books (computers), and books on "obscure or unusual topics". I.E., the very books is was hardest to locate prior to the Internet.
[1] Dover Books grew big because they realized this - and printed a catalog of related books in the back of books they published. They, unlike other (especially mainstream) publishers, made it very easy to get their catalogs by mail as well.
That's a tough question - because a great deal of what NASA does bears much greater resemblence to questing and grinding than it does to any other aspect of gameplay.
The first step in being scientific is comparing apples to apples. The grandparent is comparing cosmetic prothstetics to specially designed and engineered racing prothstetics.
Somebody scientific would view evidence (like Pistorious's performance) that did not fit the theory (double knee amputees should not perform so well) as evidence that just possibly something is wrong with the theory.
When you wear racing legs like Pistorius, then you can give us a lecture.
And then you continue the trend.
So what? He's a double amputee who has had prosthetic legs since a very young age. His legs are specially designed for racing - I bet your aren't. Comparing his legs to your leg is comparing apples to oranges.
Clue: Slashdot doesn't represent even a visible fraction of gamers.
I'm wondering how they know this - since so many slashdotters also tell us they don't use Windows.
I'm also wondering why they care. I only have to reboot my my (XP based) machines when there are patches... It could take ten minutes or even half an hour (rather than the three it currently does) for all I care. I'll just go do something else while it boots.
Huh? Copyright does no such thing - copyright defines the rights of the copyholder ('he can do pretty much what he wants' is a fair first order summation), and then defines fair use as exceptions to that broad slate of rights.
No, it's not an important observation. It's a near complete misstatement of the facts based on a near complete lack of understanding of how copyright works.
Oddly enough, that is pretty much exactly how copyright works..
No, the amount of knowledge (more correctly the lack of knowledge) you have displayed on the issues, combined with the routine substitution of handwaving and ungrounded assumptions for for facts precludes you from being someone who has studied the matter.
Sure - once you solve the non trivial problems. Like how to deploy and support the panels. How to interconnect them. Etc... etc... And then there is the elephant in the room - lunar night. (Not mention, given the cost of getting the panels to the moon... the energy isn't going to be cheap.)
Actually, with a bit of cleverness - you only need throttleability for a fairly small portion of the powered phase of landing.
One method is using a 'crasher stage' - where you use a large non-throttleable engine to remove nearly all of your velocity at once, discard it, and then complete the landing using a fairly small throttleable engine. NASA's Surveyor landers used this method, as did (IIRC) all of the Soviet landers - all of them with solids. Those were direct landing trajectories, but you could do the same thing from orbit. One crasher to take you out of orbit, and then a second shortly before landing.
You can do the same thing on takeoff, use one large unit to get you off the ground and on the general trajectory you want to be on - and then use smaller, throttleable, engines to fine tune your trajectory.
The Shuttle needed extra boosters because of its configuration, and SRB's were thought to be cheaper and more reliable than L(iquid)RB's. In a large part, they are - as refurbishing a LRB after an ocean landing would be expensive indeed. (You can fly 'em back and avoid that, but that turned out to be very expensive.) At one complete failure (STS-51L) out of 250 odd SRB's launched, their reliability is not significantly different than liquid boosters.
The choice between solid and liquid is a set of complex engineering and financial tradeoffs. Gravity isn't an issue at all - as we can build small solids as easy (in fact - much, much easier) as we do large ones. (I worked with one in the Navy that produced 500lbs of thrust for
Yes, really. There are also people who have spent time actually studying the issue rather than skimming relevant webpages and handwaving.
"Common elements" are not the same thing as "useable ore deposits". If you do a similiar long distance scan of the Earth's surface, you'll find lots of silicates, lots of iron, and quite a bit of aluminum - but 99.9999999% of it is either of too low a concentration to be recoverable without a massive effort, and a similiar percentage is locked up in chemical forms that make it difficult to recover in the first place. (There is considerable overlap between the two sets.)
It's not enough to just say 'the stuff is there'.
Tech in these areas is much less advanced than you assume it to be.
Do I really need to point out that lab trials are a very long way from actual equipment? And that we haven't got any equivalent machinery on earth that functions like this - despite decades of trying?
In so far as weight goes - the bare structure (which is all than can be expected to be produced, even with hurricane strength handwaving) is the lightest part of the base. The equipment you'll have to launch to produce it will weigh at least two orders of magnitude more than the material they will produce. That is, unless you want to spend a couple of decades building the base... but equipment reliable enough to do that without manned intervention isn't anywhere on the horizon. Getting the equipment reliable enough to last a month is going to take an incredible effort.
The areas which actually have eternal sunlight are actually very, very small. They are also at a very, very acute angle to the sun - which means either very inefficient solar collectors, or a very large amount of structure to hold them at a better angle.
The advantages of being at the lunar poles are vastly overstated.
It's always easy when all you do is handwave. Real Life is rather messier than you think.
Actually, we don't know if there are mineral deposits on the Moon, as it hasn't been explored in enough detail to even make a reasonable guess. Anything below the top couple of centimeters is pretty much a complete mystery. On top of which, it is not clear the Moon has gone through the tectonic procesess that create ore bodies on Earth.
Insofar as automation goes - let's just say the relevant processes are essentially undeveloped and the known problems quite staggering. It's a sure bet that beyond the known unknowns lies a minefield of unknown unknowns.
It's only sunny for half the time - the other half is complete darkness. Storing enough energy to keep any significant amount of machinery warm enough during the night, let alone operating, is one of those unsolved staggering problems mentioned above.
Because it's an opportunity to laugh a Microsoft, an opportunity the Slashdot editors can rarely pass up on. (Hey, it means they make their quota and everyone gets a free shot at karma from upmods. What's not to like?)
Ah, yes. Seeking to maximize uptime, system reliability, and performance predictabilty is a symptom that I don't think. You're an idiot.
What makes you think I didn't think about what I said? That I proposed a solution based on sound engineering rather than guesswork?
Y2K may not have been a problem for you - but your experience is not universal.