What's more, we've reached the point where the world's content creators now bypass Linden Lab entirely, to hold their own press conferences. Clay mentions recent news of Anshe Chung, the Second Life avatar putatively worth a million dollars, and he's smart to be skeptical about that figure, as was I. (When asked about it, Philip Rosedale pointed out to me that Anshe's assets are not as "illiquid" as Clay seems to think, since she can put up her virtual land holdings on the auction market immediately.)
Being able to put something up an auction does not a liquid asset make. Having a viable market makes an asset liquid.
That being said; Anshe controls thousands of sims - and typically only a dozen (non-Anshe) or so sims are up for sale at any given time. Equally typically - it's one of a dozen or so 'mid market' land barons who end up buying the sims at auction. This suggests to me that Anshe indeed isn't liquid, as it's extremely unlikely that she could find full price buyers for more than a minority of her sims.
The gold prospectors in California didn't get rich, Hilton and the guys who sold the prospectors shovels and picks got rich. Robots can explore, but you need exploitation, too, and that takes people. That's also how you get money to keep exploring further out, money that's not dependent on the whims of the electorate or the biases of elected demagogues.
In a world where private companies fund blue sky exploration - sure. But that world bears no relation to the real word.
Background: I've actually held a job where some training was done in simulators and some was OJT - and simulators, while valuable, simply aren't as good as experience in the real thing.
Sure, manned space exploration is romantic and exciting, but manned missions to the moon accomplished nothing beyond nationalistic PR that culdn't have been done better by machines,
That's the theory often bandied about - but sadly, its not true. Even today, with four decades more research into robotics, we'd be hard pressed to duplicate the efforts of even a simple mission like Apollo 12. (Let alone the more complex missions of the later flights.) Or to put it simply; What Spirit and Opportunity have accomplished in nearly three years on Mars is roughly what an average field geologist could have accomplished in about three weeks.
and the ISS has produced no science worthy of its staggering cost.
Niether has the Large Hadron Collider... But then, both the ISS and the LHC are still under construction! Now, it's quite reasonable to complain that the ISS has taken too long to complete, or will be too expensive in the end... But to complain that an incomplete facility has produced no results is a sign of ignorance.
Mostly, I tend to agree with the author of the blog. We need orbital stations first, but even so, we should also be sending robotic construction vehicles to the moon to start preparing a base for future habitation NOW. I think it makes a lot more sense to have most of a moon base built before we arrive.
Sure - after about a decade or more of research into robotics and a few billion dollars poured into development of the same. Robotics simply isn't as advanced as people seem to think.
... what 'great leap' is this? The only leap, really, is the change in vehicle. The moon is well-defined: we had the lunar prospector mission which gave us a detailed survey of the moons surface and we've been there several times in the Apollo era.
Let's put it this way: What information we have about the Moon's surface is roughly equivalent to what Google Earth has about the land area of the US combined with a quick physical survey of an area roughly the same as your average suburban mall. We know less about (detailed) Lunar geology then we did about the geology of the continental US at the end of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
The moon isn't "well-defined" by any reasonable definition of the words.
It might not be NASA who puts the habitats in orbit but Bigelow Aerospace... They envision to have their own complete habitat up by 2015, and NASA actually is interested to use them too (Bigelow licensed the tech..) Virgin Galactic is the forerunner in sub-orbital flights beginning 2008-2009 whereas Space Adventures will begin trips around moon not long after that.. the people behind aforementioned companies are highly idealistic in bringing humanity to space. We are truly living the first steps of private space exploration at the moment
Bigelow, Virgin, etc... are no more exploration than is Disney Cruise Lines or Six Flags Over [_____]. The folks that use their services are tourists, or passengers - not explorers.
The article mentioned is well over a year old. The outstanding analysis of data due in 2004 has been completed. The validity of the information is being questioned.
The gentleman who wrote the linked article questions the validity of a lot of things - to the point that I wonder if he has valid questions, or is simply a crank.
do you memeber video of bush's second election night? the streets where filled with protesters.. in fact it was the first time in history that the pres couldn't walk in because they where afraid he would be shot
No video. No evidence in the article of streets filled with protesters. (The article was filed before the Inauguration.) Not to mention the fact that President's routinely ride. (I'm old enough to remember the shock in the media because Jimmy Carter chose not to.
Article cited fails to support claim.
no one saw this in the us.. except for the people there. the news didn't cover it - sure they had people covering it but it never ever got to the air.
Linked article filed before Inauguration.
Article cited fails to support claim.
90% or more of the US doesn't know and doesn't give a shit what happens.. and that is how they want it.. it saddens me..
It is real simple answer to why. Opera supports publish standards. Those standards should be supported FIRST. From a business point of view it is real simple do you want someone to not buy your product?
Having done something that 99.999% of the Slashdot community hasn't (I.E., actually run a business), I can speak to the latter statement. Yes, sometimes it does make sense to not to offer your products or make your services available to every Tom, Dick, and Harry. Doing so costs money - and you have to compare what it will cost you to what the likely the returns will be.
finally this is a PUBLIC site run by as in run by the government! The government shouldn't require one to use a certain browser without a really good reason.
As a taxpayer, I think that supporting the browser(s) used by the *vast* majority of the people, while not supporting a tiny majority, *is* a proper use of my money. (In the same way that it's ludicrous to expect a govermental agency to have a speaker of every language they could possibly encounter constantly available.)
Yes, I wonder who really cares. If the FAA starts making tourism such a hassle, most would be tourists will go to space via Russia, on Russian rockets that are more reliable and on the cheap! Now beat that.
Actually things will prevent this fantasy from coming true.
Russian flights cost nearly 100 times more - and consume six months to a year of your time vice a week or so.
Russian flights are (at best) 2-4 times a year, as compared to the 2-3 times a week that Virgin plans.
Russian rockets are no more, and no less, reliable than US ones.
That's my first reaction. Second reaction is... shouldn't Google be pushing anything but Internet Explorer to its customers? A certain browser named after a certain bushy animal comes to mind.
Why should Google be pushing Firefox? Like any business, Google goes where the customers are. On the web, that means IE.
There have been experiments on the abundant chemicals on Titan done by astronautical & nuclear engineer Robert Zubrin who has been quite influential in the proliferation of humans to other pieces of mass ASAP.
Unhappily, the long term effects of his 'influence' have been mostly negative. It doesn't take long for most people to figure out that he's an egotistical asshole whose 'science' consists mostly of handwaving, vague and incomplete analysis, and wishful thinking.
That no settlements (as in "villages", not science labs) exist even on this much more habitable place is just a sign, how far off space colonization really is...
IT's also protected by treaty.
Even before it was protected by treaty there was no great rush by people to settle there. It's simply too inhospitable.
More hot air handwaving. (Or did it not occur to you, among the other idiocies in your post, that clover or alfalfa produce niether sugars nor fats in commercially reasonable quantities? Congratulations! You've doubled the amount of land and water required!)
Water can be recycled in many ways even in agriculture.
If you have a way to recover water that plants in the field give off, a life of wealth that would make Bill Gates look like a homeless bum awaits you. If you don't, then you are just handwaving hot air around.
For example, growing algae in enclosed ponds uses a small fraction of the water that open air crops do.
Given that a) algae has less biomass per acre than open air plants and b) there is no known algae that creates and concentrates sugars and fats the way open air crops do... you are just handwaving hot air around.
Has anybody seen that documentary movie "Who Killed the Electric Car?"
Yes, and it's largely propoganda nonsense.
In it, they look into hydrogen vehicles and the auto industry's support for it, but get a technician involved to admit that these machines are nowhere near being available to the public. This idea, along with Bush's much vaunted "hydrogen economy", is nothing more than a white elephant
Prima facie evidence the makers of the movie not only have a huge bias - but lack a clue. The Federal Goverment's push of the hydrogen economy goes well back into the Clinton years. (And it's roots all the way back to the Ford/Carter era.) Blaming it on Bush and the oil companies is just reaching for a handy scapegoat.
Where do we get the ethanol? There's plenty of arable land left for now - so much so that certain governments pay their farmers NOT to plant crops. Instead of making energy to create H2, perhaps we should use the sun's energy to work for us, as we have been doing anyway for the past few billion years...
There are two 800lb gorilla's in the room that enthanol and bio-diesel supporters hope you won't notice (if they are aware of them themselves).
Water. - the developed world is slowly but surely heading into a shortage of fresh water.
Petrochemicals. - growing these energy producing crops is going to require fertilizer and pesticides, both of which are currently derived from oil. What replaces oil as the feedstock for these chemicals?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't need to know you - you proudly display your ignorance in a very public forum.
Being able to put something up an auction does not a liquid asset make. Having a viable market makes an asset liquid.
That being said; Anshe controls thousands of sims - and typically only a dozen (non-Anshe) or so sims are up for sale at any given time. Equally typically - it's one of a dozen or so 'mid market' land barons who end up buying the sims at auction. This suggests to me that Anshe indeed isn't liquid, as it's extremely unlikely that she could find full price buyers for more than a minority of her sims.
In a world where private companies fund blue sky exploration - sure. But that world bears no relation to the real word.
My answer would be - No.
Background: I've actually held a job where some training was done in simulators and some was OJT - and simulators, while valuable, simply aren't as good as experience in the real thing.
That's the theory often bandied about - but sadly, its not true. Even today, with four decades more research into robotics, we'd be hard pressed to duplicate the efforts of even a simple mission like Apollo 12. (Let alone the more complex missions of the later flights.) Or to put it simply; What Spirit and Opportunity have accomplished in nearly three years on Mars is roughly what an average field geologist could have accomplished in about three weeks.
Niether has the Large Hadron Collider... But then, both the ISS and the LHC are still under construction! Now, it's quite reasonable to complain that the ISS has taken too long to complete, or will be too expensive in the end... But to complain that an incomplete facility has produced no results is a sign of ignorance.
Sure - after about a decade or more of research into robotics and a few billion dollars poured into development of the same. Robotics simply isn't as advanced as people seem to think.
Let's put it this way: What information we have about the Moon's surface is roughly equivalent to what Google Earth has about the land area of the US combined with a quick physical survey of an area roughly the same as your average suburban mall. We know less about (detailed) Lunar geology then we did about the geology of the continental US at the end of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
The moon isn't "well-defined" by any reasonable definition of the words.
Bigelow, Virgin, etc... are no more exploration than is Disney Cruise Lines or Six Flags Over [_____]. The folks that use their services are tourists, or passengers - not explorers.
Not to mention the effects of all the anchors and mooring cables on the seabed.
Now, let's compare that to the OP's claims
No video. No evidence in the article of streets filled with protesters. (The article was filed before the Inauguration.) Not to mention the fact that President's routinely ride. (I'm old enough to remember the shock in the media because Jimmy Carter chose not to.
Article cited fails to support claim.
Linked article filed before Inauguration.
Article cited fails to support claim.
Linked article filed before Inauguration.
Article cited fails to support claim.
Having done something that 99.999% of the Slashdot community hasn't (I.E., actually run a business), I can speak to the latter statement. Yes, sometimes it does make sense to not to offer your products or make your services available to every Tom, Dick, and Harry. Doing so costs money - and you have to compare what it will cost you to what the likely the returns will be.
As a taxpayer, I think that supporting the browser(s) used by the *vast* majority of the people, while not supporting a tiny majority, *is* a proper use of my money. (In the same way that it's ludicrous to expect a govermental agency to have a speaker of every language they could possibly encounter constantly available.)
But somehow you know about it - but cannot provide a link to it. Smells fishy to me.
(/me notes the OP got the mandatory +5 that Bush bashing gets, but I bet I get rated a troll or flamebait for questioning his 'claim'.)
I quite commonly bore people to whom thinking is an alien and tiring activity and who avoid such unpleasant things as facts. Their problem, not mine.
Actually things will prevent this fantasy from coming true.
Why should Google be pushing Firefox? Like any business, Google goes where the customers are. On the web, that means IE.
ROTFLMAO. Does the word 'propoganda' mean anything to you?
That's what the urban legend holds - but it simply isn't true.
Unhappily, the long term effects of his 'influence' have been mostly negative. It doesn't take long for most people to figure out that he's an egotistical asshole whose 'science' consists mostly of handwaving, vague and incomplete analysis, and wishful thinking.
Even before it was protected by treaty there was no great rush by people to settle there. It's simply too inhospitable.
That's true of the numerous experts that you choose to believe. It's not true of all experts.
So, truth is now determined by popularity?
More hot air handwaving. (Or did it not occur to you, among the other idiocies in your post, that clover or alfalfa produce niether sugars nor fats in commercially reasonable quantities? Congratulations! You've doubled the amount of land and water required!)
If you have a way to recover water that plants in the field give off, a life of wealth that would make Bill Gates look like a homeless bum awaits you. If you don't, then you are just handwaving hot air around.
Given that a) algae has less biomass per acre than open air plants and b) there is no known algae that creates and concentrates sugars and fats the way open air crops do... you are just handwaving hot air around.
Yes, and it's largely propoganda nonsense.
Prima facie evidence the makers of the movie not only have a huge bias - but lack a clue. The Federal Goverment's push of the hydrogen economy goes well back into the Clinton years. (And it's roots all the way back to the Ford/Carter era.) Blaming it on Bush and the oil companies is just reaching for a handy scapegoat.
There are two 800lb gorilla's in the room that enthanol and bio-diesel supporters hope you won't notice (if they are aware of them themselves).