I submit that sending people to Mars at this point in time would be a most illogical thing to do. Here are some reasons:
We've barely been to the moon. Went there a long time ago, stayed there a day or two each time, ran back and were happy not to have had too many casualties. That's like saying you've been to Iraq, when you take a flight to Baghdad airport, stay at the airport and take the next flight back out.
We barely manage near-Earth space. These days, missions to terrestrial orbit are knuckle-gnawing adventures. If we have trouble getting people above the atmosphere and back, we have no business trying for other celestial bodies. Technology and procedure need to be improved to the point where near targets are routine.
We need more practice. I feel this kind of thing needs to be done in stages. We need to set up a permanent base at the Lagrange point between the Moon and Earth, we need to set up a permanent base on the Moon and commute there routinely and safely (with possible attendant benefits like mining for spaceship-building materials there). Before we've "conquered" the Moon in those terms, it makes no sense to shoot further - a Mars mission becomes nothing more than a daring publicity stunt.
We need better technology. Especially in terms of energy efficiency. At the moment, putting a spacecraft into space involves burning the monthly energy budget of a small country in a big, controlled, chemical explosion. That works, but is decidedly inelegant in a Flash-Gordon-y way. We need to develop better alternatives for getting out of Earth's gravity field, such as
a space elevator
a railgun space cannon
fission or fusion powered propulsion
anti gravity (if it can be done)
some other, as yet undiscovered tech
Of these alternatives, I consider the space elevator the most realistic, but I could be proven wrong by future developments. But regardless of the method, something needs to be done to improve on the current process.
We need to make the process safe and idiot-proof. I'm not talking about idiot astronauts, I'm talking about idiots in the specification, management and implementation of the whole enterprise. We need a process that doesn't result in purchasing O-rings from the cheapest bidder, in safety tests being short-circuited, in plans being altered without proper signoff, in political or budgetary compromises that threaten mission safety, etc. In other words, we need to move away from the way things are currently being done at NASA.
Only when all those prerequisites are met - and this might be in 2010, 2020 or later - are we really ready to send humans to Mars. Before then, whatever is done will be reckless grandstanding.
My personal opinion, which may or may not meet with agreement, is that Bush has no real interest in getting people to Mars. I think this project is just a bid for getting his name into a possible future history book. In other words, a long-view PR stunt. I hope humans don't end up being sacrificed for the glory of the President.
There's a reason I don't read brain-mushing, dumbed-down trash mags like PC World./. is in many ways a horrible waste of time and brain cells, but I learn more from it than I would from PC World.
And yes, I once read a few issues of PC World, so my opinion is not completely unfounded. TFA just substantiates it a little more.
I object to your simple-minded "simple test" for a country's freedom. piecewise offers a number of "if"s, of which I consider some much more relevant than the items of your simple test, and some less so. But I believe he missed out on a few important ones, which I would like to add. For conciseness, these tests are for non-freedom:
Can your government to search your house without a warrant signed by a judge?
Can your government to detain you indefinitely without access to a lawyer and a fair trial?
Can your government force your librarian to secretly surrender their records about your book loans and public browser useage?
Can your government extradite you to Syria/Pakistan for torturing?
Can your government run a jail outside its borders to avoid being confined by its own constitution?
Can your government order your death by execution/toxic gas/lethal injection?
What percentage of your population is currently in jail? Is that percentage higher than in China?
As you speak of "a more plausible hypothesis," you apparently didn't bother to read the article I linked to. As a public service, I'll summarize its contents:
When studying such things, scientists are well aware of the problem of distinguishing nurture from nature. Fortunately, there's a way to control for this, and that involves testing twins. To be precise, they tested with both identical and non-identical twins. Twins have the same parents and the same age. Identical twins additionally have identical genes.
Their finding was that the "religious" behavior of identical twins showed significantly more correlation than the religious behavior of non-identical twins. The only (apparent) difference being genetics, they reasoned that genetics seems to have an influence.
With reference to your point about the influence of parents, surely that is a powerful contributor. However, it was found that, once children move out of the parental home, they often strike out on spiritual paths different from that of their parents.
Perhaps interest in "religion," if such a thing can possibly be encoded in genes, could be selected for. But I have a hard time understanding how religiousness could be encoded into genes. Body strength is clear, but propensity to religion would require, I think, that the genetic code somehow be able to address specific abstract concepts. I have a hard time understanding how that could be, and without a lot of evidence showing how there could be such a causal chain, I would dismiss it.
I recently came across an
article on the connection of genes and religion which says there seems to be at least some evidence that religion-related behavior could be at least partially influenced by genetic makeup.
Notice my careful wording here. This doesn't say there is a "God gene".
I like to think of myself as a "the right tools for the job" kind of person. I prefer to do Windows GUI apps in Delphi, I do online game and communications apps in C, and simple CGIs and scripts in Perl. Until recently, I earned a living coding in FORTRAN, on a machine where its performance is unsurpassed by other languages.
As such, I don't see anything seriously wrong with Java. Thanks to its clean and simple syntax and its rich library, I feel it lets me solve problems faster than many other languages. At least on the server, it runs at compiled speeds, and the base of free code to build on is enormous.
There are certainly "better" languages, for various flavors of "better". Lisp and Smalltalk come to mind. Look at Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs for a glimpse at the awesome power of Lisp. Smalltalk programmers never cease to rave about what a joy it is to work with. These two languages suffer from lack of acceptance by the masses, something like why Microsoft and not {*nix|*BSD|BeOS|VMS} is the dominant operating system. I posit that it takes hardly more intellectual prowess to program in Java than in BASIC, but Lisp and Smalltalk are better suited for hardcore geeks.
The other languages you mentioned each have some glaring flaws:
PHP is a haphazardly thrown-together toy language, lacking structure, standards and consistency. It makes some things, mostly Web-related, very easy but doesn't help you not get tangled up in more complicated projects.
ASP is not a language, the underlying language is (Visual) BASIC. It runs only on Windows!
Python is not a bad language, and from what I hear, Ruby is even better. But it's still (mostly) interpreted and hence too slow for many Enterprise applications. Also, it doesn't have Java's breadth of support. Libraries, utilities, documentation, hype -- Guido/Matz just don't have as deep pockets as Sun.
C is a good systems-level language. Because a programmer must micro-manage memory, it and C++ suck as application development languages. The sheer mass of existing C/C++ coding doesn't disprove this; it dates back to a time when programmer productivity wasn't valued as much.
J2EE is horribly complicated. But because it was backed by Sun, and still much more manageable than CORBA, it was happily accepted by the industry. The standard is improving, the code base is growing -- Java has momentum, and for better or worse it isn't going away anytime soon.
Just as the implementation of IBM's OS/360 forms part of the "history" section of many Computer Science texts, so the Denver Airport baggage system is fast becoming history. The big difference of course being, OS/360 was a spectacular success, wheras Denver was a catastrophic failure.
Writing this stuff up is fine and good, but I think it would be worthwhile to try to learn from it. What was done differently?
If folklore serves me correctly, IBM was not afraid to throw money at the problem. I seem to remember they put two separate teams on the problem and took the best from each, fully conscious that half the effort would be thrown away. They sank as much money on it as was required, and ultimately succeeded.
Denver probably ate many more Dollars than OS/360, though I wouldn't know. But:
It was done by a conglomerate of consulting firms, not in-house at a computer manufacturer
It presumably had many more people contributing to the specification
It attempted to be shiny, new, revolutionary
The like had never been done before, raising both the price and the expectation of failure
Apparently, this last has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I work in software development for an airline. It's amazing how much of a megaproject a reservation system is proving to be these days, and how many past attempts have failed. That's why one of the world's major reservation systems still runs in assembler on an IBM mainframe.
I think we're talking over-engineering, Big Design Up Front, profiteering, and (attempted, far too late) price-gouging.
Either that, or the only way to make a very large project successful is to code it in Assembler on an IBM mainframe.
I was a little disappointed to find no mention in TFA about what they meant by "recently". 1 year? 5? 10? 100? 1000? 10K?
Many will be thinking, water == life!. Let's say this improves the possibility, but if most water on Mars is (and especially, was) mostly locked up as ice and/or only very ephemerally available, then I'd say it's much less likely that the "long shot" of evolution that led to our existence on Earth could have taken place similarly on Mars. Our planet spent millions of years two-thirds covered in water and under a dense methane-ammonia atmosphere. In contrast, it seems Mars had far less soup under far less atmosphere at (average) somewhat lower temperatures. I guess the only thing Mars might have had more of, sans an atmosphere of effective sunscreens, is ionizing (and hence mutagenic) radiation.
Here He Lies Below:
Boris Carloff, Noted Originally for Neverending Narrations of Manglings
(All Silent) of the Poor
Social Classes, Argued that Killing Canadian Scholars
Intimidated Very Cruel
Men:
Fear Could Nightly
Culminate in Zionists with
Gadgets from Germany Bringing
Krieg.
OK OK, it doesn't make a LOT of sense, but if you can remember the gist of the story you have the first four rows of the table memorized.
You may have heard, earlier this year, that someone proposed a change to the Constitution to allow the Terminator to become President. Of course it never went anywhere, but keeping GWB in office is a far, far simpler thing.
"I am a war president," he said. What more obvious ploy than to apply a "special wartime measure" to stay in power? It's easy enough to frighten the people into believing there's an emergency. If push comes to shove, some Special Forces unit could blow up a few buildings to "prove" that terrorism is still/again rampant in the country. Once everyone agrees that there is an emergency in progress, many "desparate measures" can be pushed through. Keeping GWB at the helm could be made to look like the only sane thing to do. Maybe "we're too endangered by terrorism at the moment to hold elections?"
So, in a few simple steps:
Declare a state of national emergency, or bring one about if necessary;
Convince the public that presidential control must be prolonged until the crisis is met; and
Keep on prolonging the crisis until people have forgotten the Constitution.
They are a business, they need not do the altruistic best thing unless something was in it for them.
Allow me to make a small correction. MS is a proven monopoly and as such has some special responsiblities and restrictions. Just as, in a decently run country, The Power Company can't simply serve up electricity blackouts at random times of day, a software monopolist can't just... oh wait.
UPDATE: Version 8.0 of SlickEdit (the latest greatest) includes a Java GUI designer. It allows drag-and-drop GUI editing like you know from other products, and produces reasonably decent Java code.
It's a wee bit quirky, perhaps pending some small bug fixes, but it works and will even use the much-dreaded GridBagLayout.
Impressive, I think, for a tool that's supposed to be an editor. I strongly second the recommendation of Visual SlickEdit as an editor and, a little more reservedly, as a Java GUI builder.
I'm very tolerant of furriners who don't write the language so well. But when someone who calls himself "Editor" puts an apostrophe into a plural in a topic title, I despair at being surrounded by illiterates.
When talking to my less computer literate friends about Knuth, I refer to him as "the Arnold Schwarzenegger of Computer Science". Just my personal picture of him, but I like it and my friends dig it.
I just looked at Kawa a few days ago. It's still alive, but Macromedia is charging so much for it that it might as well be dead. Shame, too! Kawa fills the need expressed by several people here: A quick, syntax-aware editor with hooks into the Java API documentation and other help files... a bit of debugging and running support and nothing much more. I considered it the ideal IDE for a while. I've moved on, but I don't think I'll ever find the really ideal IDE.
I'm all for pair programming as well, as long as the other half of the pair is of the opposite sex:)
But seriously... I've never done XP but I have found that programming in pairs does wonders for my productivity. This is a case where the sum is greater than its parts.
Slashdot Mirror
I submit that sending people to Mars at this point in time would be a most illogical thing to do. Here are some reasons:
Of these alternatives, I consider the space elevator the most realistic, but I could be proven wrong by future developments. But regardless of the method, something needs to be done to improve on the current process.
Only when all those prerequisites are met - and this might be in 2010, 2020 or later - are we really ready to send humans to Mars. Before then, whatever is done will be reckless grandstanding.
My personal opinion, which may or may not meet with agreement, is that Bush has no real interest in getting people to Mars. I think this project is just a bid for getting his name into a possible future history book. In other words, a long-view PR stunt. I hope humans don't end up being sacrificed for the glory of the President.
There's a reason I don't read brain-mushing, dumbed-down trash mags like PC World. /. is in many ways a horrible waste of time and brain cells, but I learn more from it than I would from PC World.
And yes, I once read a few issues of PC World, so my opinion is not completely unfounded. TFA just substantiates it a little more.
I object to your simple-minded "simple test" for a country's freedom. piecewise offers a number of "if"s, of which I consider some much more relevant than the items of your simple test, and some less so. But I believe he missed out on a few important ones, which I would like to add. For conciseness, these tests are for non-freedom:
Peter,
As you speak of "a more plausible hypothesis," you apparently didn't bother to read the article I linked to. As a public service, I'll summarize its contents:
When studying such things, scientists are well aware of the problem of distinguishing nurture from nature. Fortunately, there's a way to control for this, and that involves testing twins. To be precise, they tested with both identical and non-identical twins. Twins have the same parents and the same age. Identical twins additionally have identical genes.
Their finding was that the "religious" behavior of identical twins showed significantly more correlation than the religious behavior of non-identical twins. The only (apparent) difference being genetics, they reasoned that genetics seems to have an influence.
With reference to your point about the influence of parents, surely that is a powerful contributor. However, it was found that, once children move out of the parental home, they often strike out on spiritual paths different from that of their parents.
Notice my careful wording here. This doesn't say there is a "God gene".
I've seen it before, fairly often. Perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but still - commonly used.
Google shows 229,000 hits for "insanely great" (as a phrase).
Welcome to, umm, Geek English!
As such, I don't see anything seriously wrong with Java. Thanks to its clean and simple syntax and its rich library, I feel it lets me solve problems faster than many other languages. At least on the server, it runs at compiled speeds, and the base of free code to build on is enormous.
There are certainly "better" languages, for various flavors of "better". Lisp and Smalltalk come to mind. Look at Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs for a glimpse at the awesome power of Lisp. Smalltalk programmers never cease to rave about what a joy it is to work with. These two languages suffer from lack of acceptance by the masses, something like why Microsoft and not {*nix|*BSD|BeOS|VMS} is the dominant operating system. I posit that it takes hardly more intellectual prowess to program in Java than in BASIC, but Lisp and Smalltalk are better suited for hardcore geeks.
The other languages you mentioned each have some glaring flaws:
J2EE is horribly complicated. But because it was backed by Sun, and still much more manageable than CORBA, it was happily accepted by the industry. The standard is improving, the code base is growing -- Java has momentum, and for better or worse it isn't going away anytime soon.
Just as the implementation of IBM's OS/360 forms part of the "history" section of many Computer Science texts, so the Denver Airport baggage system is fast becoming history. The big difference of course being, OS/360 was a spectacular success, wheras Denver was a catastrophic failure.
Writing this stuff up is fine and good, but I think it would be worthwhile to try to learn from it. What was done differently?
If folklore serves me correctly, IBM was not afraid to throw money at the problem. I seem to remember they put two separate teams on the problem and took the best from each, fully conscious that half the effort would be thrown away. They sank as much money on it as was required, and ultimately succeeded.
Denver probably ate many more Dollars than OS/360, though I wouldn't know. But:
Apparently, this last has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I work in software development for an airline. It's amazing how much of a megaproject a reservation system is proving to be these days, and how many past attempts have failed. That's why one of the world's major reservation systems still runs in assembler on an IBM mainframe.
I think we're talking over-engineering, Big Design Up Front, profiteering, and (attempted, far too late) price-gouging.
Either that, or the only way to make a very large project successful is to code it in Assembler on an IBM mainframe.
I was a little disappointed to find no mention in TFA about what they meant by "recently". 1 year? 5? 10? 100? 1000? 10K?
Many will be thinking, water == life!. Let's say this improves the possibility, but if most water on Mars is (and especially, was) mostly locked up as ice and/or only very ephemerally available, then I'd say it's much less likely that the "long shot" of evolution that led to our existence on Earth could have taken place similarly on Mars. Our planet spent millions of years two-thirds covered in water and under a dense methane-ammonia atmosphere. In contrast, it seems Mars had far less soup under far less atmosphere at (average) somewhat lower temperatures. I guess the only thing Mars might have had more of, sans an atmosphere of effective sunscreens, is ionizing (and hence mutagenic) radiation.
Correct procedure, as for any failing, would have been:
...and if that proves insufficient to deter offenders, more rigorous measures should be considered.
Yeah, you're perfectly right. I previewed and edited twice, but it seems that wasn't enuff.
OK OK, it doesn't make a LOT of sense, but if you can remember the gist of the story you have the first four rows of the table memorized.
"I am a war president," he said. What more obvious ploy than to apply a "special wartime measure" to stay in power? It's easy enough to frighten the people into believing there's an emergency. If push comes to shove, some Special Forces unit could blow up a few buildings to "prove" that terrorism is still/again rampant in the country.
Once everyone agrees that there is an emergency in progress, many "desparate measures" can be pushed through. Keeping GWB at the helm could be made to look like the only sane thing to do. Maybe "we're too endangered by terrorism at the moment to hold elections?"
So, in a few simple steps:
UPDATE: Version 8.0 of SlickEdit (the latest greatest) includes a Java GUI designer. It allows drag-and-drop GUI editing like you know from other products, and produces reasonably decent Java code.
It's a wee bit quirky, perhaps pending some small bug fixes, but it works and will even use the much-dreaded GridBagLayout.
Impressive, I think, for a tool that's supposed to be an editor. I strongly second the recommendation of Visual SlickEdit as an editor and, a little more reservedly, as a Java GUI builder.
I'm very tolerant of furriners who don't write the language so well. But when someone who calls himself "Editor" puts an apostrophe into a plural in a topic title, I despair at being surrounded by illiterates.
When talking to my less computer literate friends about Knuth, I refer to him as "the Arnold Schwarzenegger of Computer Science". Just my personal picture of him, but I like it and my friends dig it.
I find the features you asked for in IBM's Visual Age. While the syntax support is a little skimpy, IMHO the debugger is the world's best!
I just looked at Kawa a few days ago. It's still alive, but Macromedia is charging so much for it that it might as well be dead. Shame, too! Kawa fills the need expressed by several people here: A quick, syntax-aware editor with hooks into the Java API documentation and other help files... a bit of debugging and running support and nothing much more. I considered it the ideal IDE for a while. I've moved on, but I don't think I'll ever find the really ideal IDE.
I'm all for pair programming as well, as long as the other half of the pair is of the opposite sex :)
But seriously... I've never done XP but I have found that programming in pairs does wonders for my productivity. This is a case where the sum is greater than its parts.