I won't knock what you're doing but I'm curious what you get out of it that you couldn't get out of a Rand McNally trucker's road atlas and a dedicated GPS.
The dedicated GPS would give you turn-turn directions without any data service and the atlas would give you decent printed maps for most highway planning.
The GPS doesn't allow annotation, and the Rand McNally atlas is at too large a scale for much useful annotation. Annotations are useful for "this exit has y restaurant" and "that [exit|rest stop] has an RV dump" or "if we're ahead of schedule, that exit has a [geocache|historical marker|whatever else". Sure, much of this is covered in printed gazettes and guides, but being able to annotate it all on a hardcopy strip map makes life so much more convenient because you don't have to look stuff up on the fly. Plus hard copy strip maps don't require a data connection or a battery or remembering which button does what. And unless your traveling companion(s) suffer from severe vision problems... they're always 100% compatible (I.E. no worries about the latest version of the OS, or you have an iPhone while your companion has a 'droid or just plain doesn't understand how to use your software).
As kids in the 70s we covered most of the Deep South and Eastern Seaboard in an RV with just a paper map. I don't remember us getting lost and we sure seemed to spend a lot of time off the beaten path.
I suppose the trip planning part would be OK if you were really compulsive about it, but it seems like a lot of work.
As shown above, there's a lot more involved than just turn-by-turn directions and not getting lost. And there are a lot of people who enjoy planning, or who simply must plan in order to meet a schedule or a goal.
I think the problem is that they can't compete with the dedicated units. Garmins and Tomtoms are fairly cheap and fit nicely on the dashboard, and even they're losing market share (or redirecting their business) to built-in systems.
Those units are fine for turn-by-turn directions... but there is more to the world of maps than turn-by-turn directions. They're completely useless for advance planning. Google and Bing are moderately useful for advance planning, but don't allow the level of customization that S&T does or the level of annotation that S&T or hardcopy (S&T or 'normal' folding) maps allow.
I for one had never even heard of these products, and I don't think I've ever encountered a web site using it. All I see is Google Maps when sites need to do something with mapping.
Well, duh. MapPoint and S&T was a plastic-disc software title, intended for end users to do stuff without an internet connection. See kids, in the days between the joys of attempting to re-fold a paper map and always-on, always-connected internet streamed maps, companies got all the street information together and sold a software release in a perpetual licensing format. People could then take their laptops and a serial (later USB and/or Bluetooth) GPS add-on and navigate with a laptop, without worrying about data plans, cellular outages, or getting stuck on a necessary phone call that brought into question one's allegiance to accurate navigation.
All this... Plus for preparing and printing route maps in advance or any kind of customized map, S&T is (was) light years ahead of any Google offering. As a geocacher, I use it extensively for planning caching trips because I can prepare a custom map with pins (showing the location of the cache), routes highlighted, and everything that needs a custom label (caches, restaurant locations, spots likely to have public restrooms) neatly labeled. Then I could use the map *without* requiring a data connection, and the map is much larger than my phone screen, and can be handed off to a partner because it needs no technology or explanation. (Heck, for a large group or multiple vehicles I could print multiple copies and hand them out.) When playing tourist, a custom map made it handy to plan routes and during the day to compare progress to what's left of the day. Etc... etc..
I have a phone, and a tablet, and a dashboard navigator, and use them all. But there's a lot more to the world of maps (even if you aren't a cartography geek like I am) than just turn-by-turn routing from where you are to a single specific destination where you want to be, and so far "solutions" that either require always-on connections to the cloud and/or sufficient remaining battery life fall way short for many of them. Sometimes a good old fashioned hardcopy map can't be beat.
I imagine it's same spittle-flecked, buzzword-fueled delusion of the paranoid maniac who insists we must forgo any technology that might have a downside.
Which was just changes the problem to a different domain... diverting the probe is going to be a stone cold bitch. By the time you're a couple of hundred feet up, you're only a few seconds from landing and it'll take quite a bit of energy to divert any significant distance. (Energy == weight.) And that's without pondering how amazing the optics and processing system will have to be.
Interesting work to be sure, but applying it in practice will be even more so.
I'm disappointed that he ignored the entire Mars Direct (Dr. Zubrin) component of my question, and instead only responded peripherally to the core component of the question.
Just because he didn't say what you wanted to hear doesn't mean he didn't answer your question. He did answer your question - with the cold sober truth. He correctly identified the bits that matter, and the bits that are handwaving window dressing and addressed the former while ignoring the latter.
Zubrin's plans are... more than a little optimistic. (In particular he doesn't have a firm grasp on the difference between speculative laboratory proof-of-concept experiments and actual developed technology. His plan relies heavily on treating the former as the latter.) Musk? Musk is irrelevant. Musk is playing to the fanboy crowd, but don't look behind the curtain. There's nothing there but a pile of powerpoints and someday, maybe's.
I think Dr. Stone's Mars response is a great example of everything that's wrong with NASA. There's no leadership at NASA, and NASA is adrift (in the same manner Dr. Stone is afraid a manned mission to Mars would become adrift), and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.
I think you represent what's wrong with space fandom, geekdom, and advocacy today.
In the first place, you completely fail to grasp that it is not NASA's role to provide leadership - they're a part of the Executive Branch, and their job is to carry out the policies of the Administration within the bounds of the budget as set by Congress. No more, no less. If NASA had it's way, we might have landed on the Moon by the Bicentennial. Or maybe not. Their plans were vague at best. Then Kennedy was killed in Dallas, and LBJ pushed the moon program as a monument to Kennedy. Which momentum didn't last all that long... by '66/'67 Congress was swinging the budget axe, and by '69 the program was running mostly on fumes and force of habit. (which is something else fandom, geekdom, and advocacy have failed to grasp for nearly a half century - just how unique the alignment of circumstances was that propelled Apollo and just how short lived support actually was.)
Second, in that you name check... but you complete fail to grasp the meaning of Dr Stone's answer - Mars is going to be very hard, and it's not visionaries and buzzwords that will get us there. It's technology, technology we don't have but are (as Dr Stone says) working on figuring out. By the time we can send men there, the probes will have done the advance scout work and identified the places and areas of research where men can make the real difference.
It can be. It can also crumble in years to decades. It can crack within months to years. In worst case, it can fail completely even before construction is complete.
It all depends on... well, a multitude of factors.
I think that Amazon and others love BTC simply because they dont have to pay a tithe to credit card companies
That's only true if they operate their own exchange - otherwise they're paying exchange fees. (Which admittedly are likely far lower than what they pay the credit card companies.)
but credit card companies help us deal with fraud, bad products, identity theft, etc. If you pay your credit cards off in time you get a company that can be helpful in dealing with fraud and identity theft vs nothing.
BTC is like walking around with krugerrands and bearer bonds without security.
This. And also the reason I refer to BTC as "casino tokens" rather than "cash money".
To be fair, in the domain of common experience a 7' tall ape man living in the pacific northwest *is* far less crazy than the idea of a subatomic particle being in two places at once.
Good point, and one many of the/. types often forget.
There's this great book
But here... here you come off the rails. How about not acting like a creepy religious zealot who must witness and prosthelytize and lead people to the Light?
Ever wonder why, after almost a century of technological development, a lot of small time and hobby farmers still drive 1940's era tractors?
Because they're either dead broke, stupid, or they're fascinated by retro things. 1940's era tractors are uncomfortable, low power, and at best middling in reliability. (And while you can with ever increasing investment of man hours jerry rig them along, you can't get parts for them anywhere but on the (expensive) hobbyist market.) Just as with cars and most other things, anyone who can afford better has long since moved onto better.
That was my thought too... Nineteen pages of the size shown in the pictures is pretty much nothing compared to a complete set of diagrams. It's like getting nineteen pages out of Game of Thrones (which is itself just one volume of a much larger series). If they found errors with so little new information, it does not give me much confidence that their recreation is accurate to any great degree. (Especially given that they tossed out an approach now known to be the one used.)
NASA safety guidelines require any facility handling more than a dozen or so kilograms of hydrogen to have a roof designed to be blown away in an explosion.
FWIW, on the (US) submarine I served on there was only one gas for which we had not one but two (one primary and an identical backup) dedicated real-time atmosphere monitoring devices - good ol' H2. Submarines have learned the hard way over the years just how dangerous it can be.
It didn't work right, did not fully deploy and it was considered a success?
What the summary does not make clear (but which you could have discovered yourself had you followed the second link) is that the part that failed to deploy was a "bonus" test - not the main goal. The main goal was to test the basic handling and flight characteristics of the test vehicle. Two additional tests are planned (and were planned long before today) to test the SIAD and the parachute.
Now I see why SpaceX could replace NASA and this is coming from a Sci geek.
Being a science geek doesn't make you an expert on well... anything, it just makes you a science geek. In this case, you haven't [censored] clue what you're talking about - and as proof I invite you to consider the results of SpaceX's first three launches, as well as the preperations for the first Dragon COTS demo, and the second flight's problems as well as the ongoing problems with their current launch campaign. You're just repeating cargo cult crap you've read elsewhere from similarly ignorant soi-disant "geeks". SpaceX has a lot going for them, but unlike you, they and NASA live in the real world. And in the real world, shit breaks. Especially (essentially) one-of-a-kind prototype hardware on it's first flight - like the LDSD.
Score you -1 "Clueless". The purpose of the protest wasn't to be seen by people nearby - it was to generate articles and blog posts and tweets that will be seen by tens of millions.
I thought pretty much the same thing, people routinely get recognized for this kind of stuff. Though a Commendation medal is probably a bit much for what he did, I'd think it would have only have rated a Command letter or a Group or Force Commander letter at best.
But award inflation had already set in when I was in during the 80's, and despite several attempts no one has ever been able to even slow it down more than temporarily.
"But he also pointed to Street View as a case where privacy concerns mostly melted away after people used it and found it helpful. "In the early days of Street View, this was a huge issue, but it's not really a huge issue now. People understand it now and it's very useful. And it doesn't really change your privacy that much. A lot of these things are like that."
No Larry, the privacy concerns have not melted away. You've simply ignored the issue except where forced by the courts and keep repeating that the privacy issue has gone away - and people believe you because you have the bully pulpit and defenders of privacy don't.
Might have something to do with the ridiculous pricing in the US.
It might. It might also have something to do with the heavy taxes laid (by the German government) on those who don't install solar that were used to subsidize the installations and the utility bills of those who do. Massive dumping by the Chinese, dramatically dropping the wholesale price of the panels, is probably a factor too.
There's a lot more to what has happened in Germany than the "Germany installs solar, and a miracle happened" narrative so often heard in the US.
We have more than enough people telling us how difficult things are and how we shouldn't try - yours is just another voice in that cacophony.
Had he even remotely implied that we shouldn't try, you'd have a point. But he didn't. The problem is that you, like so many others in the cacophony (emphasis on the phony), don't want to hear the facts as they run sharply counter to your dogma and thus you attack the messenger rather than dealing with the facts.
What we need are people who tell us how to make it work. What we need are people who tell us how to make it work. Nuclear plants might be necessary for a very long time, but they should be secondary to renewable sources.
He did tell you how to make it work, and more importantly why it has to work that way. You just gave us dogma that verges on being little more than unreasoning religious propaganda.
If we want to reduce carbon emissions, then we need to reduce or eliminate our reliance of carbon emitting power sources or at a minimum reduce or eliminate the worst offenders along with reducing total consumption. If we want to maintain a reasonably comfortable industrial lifestyle (even taking reductions into account), then we need a reliable and predictable supply of power. While renewable power sources can meet the first precondition, for the most of the industrialized world for the foreseeable future they cannot and will not meet the second. Period. This means a mix of nuclear, gas, and renewable sources is the only way forward. (Unless fusion becomes practical in which case it takes it's place in the mix.) If your worldview cannot deal with this harsh truth, then the problem is in your worldview not in reality.
It seems to me that if a reasonable interpretation of a law leads to negative unintended consequences, it then becomes the legislative branch's duty to rectify it, not the judicial branch's.
Rectifying and clarifying the interpretation of the law is basically the job description of the judicial branch as what constitutes reasonable is not only not black and white, but changes over time as technology and social expectations change. That's what makes the whole system of checks and balances work in the first place.
When the current generation who grew up on Star Wars go away, will it remain in public memory like paintings or music, or even cinema?
That's about the silliest way to phrase a question I've ever heard... I know, it's probably meant to sound intellectual, but really you just sound like a pretentious jackass to ask "will this movie be remembered like this type of art, that type of art, and movies?"
Me thinks there is no permanence to Star Wars. Its already looking dated and silly. Meanwhile '2012 A Space Odyssey' still feels fresh.
Huh? No, 2012 feels dated and faded. It was already feeling dated and faded the last time I saw it back in the late 70's. (And I wasn't even out of my teens yet.) It's sterile shiny technocratic future vision was already discredited before it even began filming, and further dimmed by the multiples crises and shocks of the 70's. It's special effects long since surpassed. It's dull and plodding 'plot' a distant memory (because it was only shown on TV but rarely.)
Star Wars on the other hand lives *today*. Five year old kids are playing with Star Wars toys, and watching Star Wars movies. Star Wars merchandise fills retail outlets all over the country even though there has been no new film in nearly a decade. Etc... etc... Star Wars is deeply embedded in popular culture in a way that 2001 never was.
I thought from the the post I replied to that you might be a bit naive... your reply shows the situation is worse than that. You're actually completely clueless and ignorant almost beyond belief.
Slashdot Mirror
The GPS doesn't allow annotation, and the Rand McNally atlas is at too large a scale for much useful annotation. Annotations are useful for "this exit has y restaurant" and "that [exit|rest stop] has an RV dump" or "if we're ahead of schedule, that exit has a [geocache|historical marker|whatever else". Sure, much of this is covered in printed gazettes and guides, but being able to annotate it all on a hardcopy strip map makes life so much more convenient because you don't have to look stuff up on the fly. Plus hard copy strip maps don't require a data connection or a battery or remembering which button does what. And unless your traveling companion(s) suffer from severe vision problems... they're always 100% compatible (I.E. no worries about the latest version of the OS, or you have an iPhone while your companion has a 'droid or just plain doesn't understand how to use your software).
As shown above, there's a lot more involved than just turn-by-turn directions and not getting lost. And there are a lot of people who enjoy planning, or who simply must plan in order to meet a schedule or a goal.
Those units are fine for turn-by-turn directions... but there is more to the world of maps than turn-by-turn directions. They're completely useless for advance planning. Google and Bing are moderately useful for advance planning, but don't allow the level of customization that S&T does or the level of annotation that S&T or hardcopy (S&T or 'normal' folding) maps allow.
All this... Plus for preparing and printing route maps in advance or any kind of customized map, S&T is (was) light years ahead of any Google offering. As a geocacher, I use it extensively for planning caching trips because I can prepare a custom map with pins (showing the location of the cache), routes highlighted, and everything that needs a custom label (caches, restaurant locations, spots likely to have public restrooms) neatly labeled. Then I could use the map *without* requiring a data connection, and the map is much larger than my phone screen, and can be handed off to a partner because it needs no technology or explanation. (Heck, for a large group or multiple vehicles I could print multiple copies and hand them out.) When playing tourist, a custom map made it handy to plan routes and during the day to compare progress to what's left of the day. Etc... etc..
I have a phone, and a tablet, and a dashboard navigator, and use them all. But there's a lot more to the world of maps (even if you aren't a cartography geek like I am) than just turn-by-turn routing from where you are to a single specific destination where you want to be, and so far "solutions" that either require always-on connections to the cloud and/or sufficient remaining battery life fall way short for many of them. Sometimes a good old fashioned hardcopy map can't be beat.
I imagine it's same spittle-flecked, buzzword-fueled delusion of the paranoid maniac who insists we must forgo any technology that might have a downside.
Which was just changes the problem to a different domain... diverting the probe is going to be a stone cold bitch. By the time you're a couple of hundred feet up, you're only a few seconds from landing and it'll take quite a bit of energy to divert any significant distance. (Energy == weight.) And that's without pondering how amazing the optics and processing system will have to be.
Interesting work to be sure, but applying it in practice will be even more so.
This isn't about truth and reality. This about Slashdot's daily Two Minutes Hate.
Just because he didn't say what you wanted to hear doesn't mean he didn't answer your question. He did answer your question - with the cold sober truth. He correctly identified the bits that matter, and the bits that are handwaving window dressing and addressed the former while ignoring the latter.
Zubrin's plans are... more than a little optimistic. (In particular he doesn't have a firm grasp on the difference between speculative laboratory proof-of-concept experiments and actual developed technology. His plan relies heavily on treating the former as the latter.) Musk? Musk is irrelevant. Musk is playing to the fanboy crowd, but don't look behind the curtain. There's nothing there but a pile of powerpoints and someday, maybe's.
I think you represent what's wrong with space fandom, geekdom, and advocacy today.
In the first place, you completely fail to grasp that it is not NASA's role to provide leadership - they're a part of the Executive Branch, and their job is to carry out the policies of the Administration within the bounds of the budget as set by Congress. No more, no less. If NASA had it's way, we might have landed on the Moon by the Bicentennial. Or maybe not. Their plans were vague at best. Then Kennedy was killed in Dallas, and LBJ pushed the moon program as a monument to Kennedy. Which momentum didn't last all that long... by '66/'67 Congress was swinging the budget axe, and by '69 the program was running mostly on fumes and force of habit. (which is something else fandom, geekdom, and advocacy have failed to grasp for nearly a half century - just how unique the alignment of circumstances was that propelled Apollo and just how short lived support actually was.)
Second, in that you name check... but you complete fail to grasp the meaning of Dr Stone's answer - Mars is going to be very hard, and it's not visionaries and buzzwords that will get us there. It's technology, technology we don't have but are (as Dr Stone says) working on figuring out. By the time we can send men there, the probes will have done the advance scout work and identified the places and areas of research where men can make the real difference.
It can be. It can also crumble in years to decades. It can crack within months to years. In worst case, it can fail completely even before construction is complete.
It all depends on... well, a multitude of factors.
That's only true if they operate their own exchange - otherwise they're paying exchange fees. (Which admittedly are likely far lower than what they pay the credit card companies.)
This. And also the reason I refer to BTC as "casino tokens" rather than "cash money".
Good point, and one many of the /. types often forget.
But here... here you come off the rails. How about not acting like a creepy religious zealot who must witness and prosthelytize and lead people to the Light?
Because they're either dead broke, stupid, or they're fascinated by retro things. 1940's era tractors are uncomfortable, low power, and at best middling in reliability. (And while you can with ever increasing investment of man hours jerry rig them along, you can't get parts for them anywhere but on the (expensive) hobbyist market.) Just as with cars and most other things, anyone who can afford better has long since moved onto better.
Logic more twisted and tortured I have rarely if ever seen.
That was my thought too... Nineteen pages of the size shown in the pictures is pretty much nothing compared to a complete set of diagrams. It's like getting nineteen pages out of Game of Thrones (which is itself just one volume of a much larger series). If they found errors with so little new information, it does not give me much confidence that their recreation is accurate to any great degree. (Especially given that they tossed out an approach now known to be the one used.)
FWIW, on the (US) submarine I served on there was only one gas for which we had not one but two (one primary and an identical backup) dedicated real-time atmosphere monitoring devices - good ol' H2. Submarines have learned the hard way over the years just how dangerous it can be.
What the summary does not make clear (but which you could have discovered yourself had you followed the second link) is that the part that failed to deploy was a "bonus" test - not the main goal. The main goal was to test the basic handling and flight characteristics of the test vehicle. Two additional tests are planned (and were planned long before today) to test the SIAD and the parachute.
Being a science geek doesn't make you an expert on well... anything, it just makes you a science geek. In this case, you haven't [censored] clue what you're talking about - and as proof I invite you to consider the results of SpaceX's first three launches, as well as the preperations for the first Dragon COTS demo, and the second flight's problems as well as the ongoing problems with their current launch campaign. You're just repeating cargo cult crap you've read elsewhere from similarly ignorant soi-disant "geeks". SpaceX has a lot going for them, but unlike you, they and NASA live in the real world. And in the real world, shit breaks. Especially (essentially) one-of-a-kind prototype hardware on it's first flight - like the LDSD.
Score you -1 "Clueless". The purpose of the protest wasn't to be seen by people nearby - it was to generate articles and blog posts and tweets that will be seen by tens of millions.
I thought pretty much the same thing, people routinely get recognized for this kind of stuff. Though a Commendation medal is probably a bit much for what he did, I'd think it would have only have rated a Command letter or a Group or Force Commander letter at best.
But award inflation had already set in when I was in during the 80's, and despite several attempts no one has ever been able to even slow it down more than temporarily.
"But he also pointed to Street View as a case where privacy concerns mostly melted away after people used it and found it helpful. "In the early days of Street View, this was a huge issue, but it's not really a huge issue now. People understand it now and it's very useful. And it doesn't really change your privacy that much. A lot of these things are like that."
No Larry, the privacy concerns have not melted away. You've simply ignored the issue except where forced by the courts and keep repeating that the privacy issue has gone away - and people believe you because you have the bully pulpit and defenders of privacy don't.
The topic under discussion is parking - which is sensitive to the *length* of the streets, and only in unusual conditions sensitive to the *width*.
It might. It might also have something to do with the heavy taxes laid (by the German government) on those who don't install solar that were used to subsidize the installations and the utility bills of those who do. Massive dumping by the Chinese, dramatically dropping the wholesale price of the panels, is probably a factor too.
There's a lot more to what has happened in Germany than the "Germany installs solar, and a miracle happened" narrative so often heard in the US.
Had he even remotely implied that we shouldn't try, you'd have a point. But he didn't. The problem is that you, like so many others in the cacophony (emphasis on the phony), don't want to hear the facts as they run sharply counter to your dogma and thus you attack the messenger rather than dealing with the facts.
He did tell you how to make it work, and more importantly why it has to work that way. You just gave us dogma that verges on being little more than unreasoning religious propaganda.
If we want to reduce carbon emissions, then we need to reduce or eliminate our reliance of carbon emitting power sources or at a minimum reduce or eliminate the worst offenders along with reducing total consumption. If we want to maintain a reasonably comfortable industrial lifestyle (even taking reductions into account), then we need a reliable and predictable supply of power. While renewable power sources can meet the first precondition, for the most of the industrialized world for the foreseeable future they cannot and will not meet the second. Period. This means a mix of nuclear, gas, and renewable sources is the only way forward. (Unless fusion becomes practical in which case it takes it's place in the mix.) If your worldview cannot deal with this harsh truth, then the problem is in your worldview not in reality.
Rectifying and clarifying the interpretation of the law is basically the job description of the judicial branch as what constitutes reasonable is not only not black and white, but changes over time as technology and social expectations change. That's what makes the whole system of checks and balances work in the first place.
Not "right" by the OP's definition, no. Even in 1906 they could not have reasonably predicted the conditions of 2014.
That's about the silliest way to phrase a question I've ever heard... I know, it's probably meant to sound intellectual, but really you just sound like a pretentious jackass to ask "will this movie be remembered like this type of art, that type of art, and movies?"
Huh? No, 2012 feels dated and faded. It was already feeling dated and faded the last time I saw it back in the late 70's. (And I wasn't even out of my teens yet.) It's sterile shiny technocratic future vision was already discredited before it even began filming, and further dimmed by the multiples crises and shocks of the 70's. It's special effects long since surpassed. It's dull and plodding 'plot' a distant memory (because it was only shown on TV but rarely.)
Star Wars on the other hand lives *today*. Five year old kids are playing with Star Wars toys, and watching Star Wars movies. Star Wars merchandise fills retail outlets all over the country even though there has been no new film in nearly a decade. Etc... etc... Star Wars is deeply embedded in popular culture in a way that 2001 never was.
I thought from the the post I replied to that you might be a bit naive... your reply shows the situation is worse than that. You're actually completely clueless and ignorant almost beyond belief.