I bought 4 of his books in a fit of madness recently (They're letting me write this from my padded cell). After reading the first two in the series, Revelation Space and Chasm City, I can honestly say that I have seldom been so irritated by books that have loads of promise and constantly seem on the verge of attaining some measure of plot consistency and depth of character portrayal, yet never actually get there.
It was uncannily like being forced to stop having sex moments before orgasm.
It should be obvious that Sun wants to make money with Forte (The commercial edition) and are enraged that SWT is so successful compared to the cop out that is Swing. IBM don't make money with the IDE but with the underlying application servers etc. It is to IBM's credit that they found eclipse to be better than the VisualAge stuff they were using before, even thuogh they made more money with VA.
That said, all these arguments over what is better get on my nerves and make me think that using vim wasn't so bad after all.
Linda H. Lamone, the administrator of the Maryland State Board of elections, said that the group had produced "a very good report," and that the state would take its recommendations seriously.
Still, she noted that tampering with voting equipment is a felony. "I'm not sure how many people would be willing to get a felony conviction and risk going to jail over an election," she said. Citing the problem of easily opened locks on the machines, she said an attempt to unlock a machine "would be very unlikely to succeed, because it would have to occur in a public place."
This woman should be fired from her job. She basically states that because some act would be a crime that no one would do it!!!
Did that stop Richard Nixon? Did that stop whoever blew valerie Plame's cover? Did that stop the authors of MyDoom from writing the virus? Did that stop all the people in the US who committed crimes last year? Did that stop Ken Lay and the fine folk at Enron? Did that stop Halliburton from overcharging the Army?
What a fucking joke. It could have been a Microsoft security advisory for all the good it will do.
My premontion: There will be massive irregularities in the 2004 elections and guess who will win again?
It's not your integrity that people object to, Jeff. It's your massive ego that forces you, even in a place like slashdot where nobody really cares, to promote yourself and reference the same article on your homepage, detailing all the people and events in mordern history that wronged you by miscrediting your achievements, as you did in your other post further up.
Your wounded ego trip has been carrying on for how many years exactly now, Jeff? Don't you ever get the feeling that perhaps it's time to move on, because I for one know with certainty that any article or posts by Jeff Raskin that I read is going to have a tidbit of interesting information and tons of ego trip and wounded soul? To be honest, Jeff, people will accredit you for your achievements without your bleating about it, which only makes people irritated.
Not only that, wise and wounded man, but if you were such a genious, why didn't you stay at Apple and convince them of your ideas or continue to contribute?
I don't mean to flame you, Jeff, but after I became aware that you existed while reading The Humane Interface (^v^^vv etc), not because I had read all the lying histroies about the Macintosh, but rather because, like most people, I simply wasn't interested, I pretty soon realised that you are one of those people who a)Is always right(TM), and b) always is upset because he doesn't get enough attention. Reading your article, "Holes in the histories" -full to the brim with self pity and righteous anger- on your site only confirmed that for me.
Taking The Humane Interface as an example. You have some very interesting insights and ideas about human computer interaction (The ^v notation for example) but then spend a good deal of the book whining away about how the Canon Cat, whose design you influenced and/or liked, was so much superior to modern GUI systems. You talk about a word processor from before the age of GUI everything. You neglect to notice that many programmes would be especially hard to use without a GUI, most notably those for which the Mac became famous: Layout, design and image editing.
A tip, Jeff. Your ideas would be better appreciated if you kept your wounded ego out of them for a change.
I remember a non-fiction book on this subject when I was a young adult back in the cold war. Reagan's SDI stuff was in the news and Gorbachev was the new saviour. The book explained what the possibilities of future combat in space would be, including things as space based lasers, anti-satellite missiles, communication systems and electronic counter measures.
Everybody knew that, in a traditional conventional war, controlling space would be one of the keys to controlling the battlefield down on earth. Of course everybody thought about putting nuclear missiles into orbit, even as early as kruschev's days, because orbital missiles would be almost impossible to provide early warning against. But, apart from many science fiction stories based on that premise, no one ever did it. The danger of said missiles falling out of orbit by accident was very real, apart from which such missiles would be be very vulnerable to first strike counter measures from the other side.
However, the Bush administration has seen the obvious direction of China's space effort, and to a certain extent India's as well. China's space agency is fully integrated with the military, much the same as NASA is (although neither nation advertises this fact). China has stated that they plan to put a man on the moon in the 2015 to 2020 time period and China's military has expressed interest in developing methods of destroying satellites in order to deny the enemy the advantage of communications and navigation in time of war.
In terms of national prestige it would be an obviously huge boost to China's image to be able to land on the moon, and I cannot a nationalistic US President such as Bush allowing such a feat to take place without the US getting there first. However the the budget allocated for this endevour is almost certainly too small, and will stretch the US economy if a permanent manned moon base is implemented. Apart from the national prestige there is no real benefit to the national economy and given that a future US government might just see this as a waste of money and resources.
But I can see the US and China getting involved in a ridiculous race in space in both arms and to the moon that will benefit neither in the long run as the modern Chinese government is obviously not given to costly foreign military adventures and will simply go at a pace that it can afford as opposed to the US tendency to want it all and now.
Not only this but presumably, given that Russia unexpectedly recently renewed the lease on its Baikonur launch base in Kazakhstan, it could very well be that a nationalistic Russia under Putin might want to get in on the act. And what about a future nationalistic India?
I find it both sad and a testimony to nationalistic stupidity that only the military and nationalistic pipe dreams get such priority in an area which could finally break down the barriers of space.
While the cynical non American part of me thinks that this is very possibly an election year exercise in yahoo vote gathering, the other part of me wishes that it will come to pass, and for one reason only: Survival of the species.
While an American moon base and mars mission would be excellent for American morale, it would perhaps also serve as a stepping stone for the real colonisation of space by the human race. And I think it is vitally important that we as a species expand beyond our planet, but more on that later.
I don't think it will be possible to get the Bush programme working on the budget that he claims and even if the programme isn't cancelled by the next president after Bush (or by Bush himself after getting reelected) the costs will probably balloon into five or tens times the initial amount before it actually gets there. Simply taking a look at the ruinous costs of the American war effort in Iraq ($4 billion per month) and the way that massive cronyism led to connected companies such as Halliburton being able to charge what they wanted for gasoline, and companies such as Bechtel charging $10 million to repair a bridge where a local Iraqi competitor was offering to rebuild it for $500 000, and thereby blow costs in the war wildly out of proportion, I don't think, given the way that the current American administration is run, that it would be possible.
Even the so called spin offs from a space programme are mostly propaganda myths. It is true that space provides bountiful resources and the ability to develop whole new techniques in engineering, medicine and science, such as those advertised by Permanent.com, but obviously those things would primarily be of interest and value to colonists in space, not to people on earth.
But that doesn't mean it should be done. Even the tiny chance of an asteroid or comet hitting the earth could mean the extinction of our species, and given how humanity is incapable of living in peace with itself or even solving easier problems such as hunger, disease and the enironment on our own planet, it is not unthinkable that we might wipe ourselves out in the future. It's not like we haven't been close to that point in the past (Black death, the Cuba crisis).
Nothing has really changed much in human nature, really. We still fight and squabble, oppress and murder, cheat and steal, suffer from greed and egoism just like we have throughout history. Yet in spite, or perhaps because of those dark sides of our nature (The discovery and colonisation of America was mainly a commericial and political power venture) we have achieved great things. I think it is important that we as a species accept ourselves for what we are, intelligent primates but animals none the less, and expand off our planet to colonise the solar system.
I don't think anyone alive today will ever see the first true colonists making the first martian version of a homestead, and not even our great great grandchildren will see the terraforming of mars, but we as a species need to go, I think, simply because it's a part of what life is about.
I grew up in Southern Africa at an altitutde of around 1500 meters (somewhere near 5000 feet) above sea level. I remember the sky of my childhood being a dark deep blue. Take a loof at the pictures taken at the top of K2 or everest, or even better, if you can find them, colour images of the X-15 experimental planes of the 60s. At that altitude where the X-15 is soon after launch, close to 30'000 meters (100'000 feet) the sky is almost black.
That is, as most of know, because the very low air density at higher altitudes refracts far less light.
The average surface air density on Mars is more or less the same as it is on Earth at 30'000 meters. That means that the sky on Mars will probably be almost black with a small band of colour on the horizon.
That band of colour will be due to so called rayleigh scattering, by which air molecules scatter the light passing through them. Oxygen and Nitrogen on earth, being small molecules will scatter light of a smaller wavelength (blue) than on mars, where the atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide. The light thus produced on mars will be NOT be red and NOT be blue but somewhere in the middle (yellow/brown) as the larger carbon dioxide molecules will scatter light of larger wavelengths than on earth, but not enough to make the light seem red as that would require a gas of larger molecules such as methane or propane which, of course, is the main atmospheric component on Titan, saturns moon, and lo and behold, we get a deep orange light there.
I have just read through a whole load of "damn tree-hugger", "this theory is crappola" and the insanley cliched "statistics can be made to fit any point of view" posts. Nothing unusual for the slashdot crowd who seem to fear the nature and its consequences as much as they love out of this world science fiction.
I have a message for you: There is a difference between a scientific study and a "raving" environmentalist.
I've lived here in Europe for 17 years now, and even here I can that climate is changing. The yearly winter and fall storms are getting worse, the summers are getting much hotter and drier (three of the last four summers have been far hotter than normal accompanied by droughts and flash floods) and the winters are much warmer than they were 12 years ago (When I got here there was snow for months in winter, now if there's snow for weeks you're lucky), and all that repeatedly, so please spare me the comments on sunspot cycles and freak seasons.
Mod this down if you wish, but I firmly believe that this demonising of the warning on climatic change is extremely counter productive.
Another poster further down made the points, gathered from various sources covering the story, that basically Bush's plan is to drastically cut back unmanned space exploration, finish the ISS with the present shuttle, build a new larger Apollo module type craft capable of reaching the moon, thereafter cease support of the ISS, include the military in NASA decision making and then step by step build a permanent moon base as a testing ground for a mars trip.
Firstly, one could quite easily see this as an election year joke made by the son of a president who stated similar goals back in 1989, and there is good evidence for that as well: Bush has not been remotely interested in space apart from military projects, and cut funding on a number of science projects. Also, Bush has a track record of trying to accomplish what his father did not.
Secondly, America has done huge projects in the past in order to rally national pride and out do foreign competitors. The whole Apollo programme was announced at the height of the cold war when Russia was breaking space records and third world countries were warming to communism. By the early 70's, after the initial landings had been done, national pride had already been dented by a huge and costly lossful foreign war that had sapped morale and by a revolution of the young not interested in high tech, but in sex 'n drugs 'n rock 'n roll. (That has only changed in that the young are now interested in tech again).
Thirdly, in 1989, although the warsaw pact (eastern europe) was falling apart, the Soviets had by then again achieved a number of space successes by way of a practical manned launch programme with the soyuz vehicles, a long term manned space station with mir (it put spacelab to shame in terms of mission length) and had already launched their own version of the shuttle with the buran, whose launcher , energia, could carry far larger tonnage into space than anything else at the time (or now for that matter - 120 tonnes without the buran). My personal view is that Bush Sr's vision was mainly made to counteract the flagging morale of american space ventures.
Fourthly, now, in 2004, we have just had a number of years , since 9/11, that have been turbulent to say the very least. America is involved in military conflicts with two nations, one of which (Iraq) is an outright mess to say the least, involving the nations' involveds' politicians in distrust from their own and foreign nations. (Don't believ me? Take a snap poll here on/. on how many still believe that WMD was the main reason for Iraq). Americans (and the west in general) are, in principle involved in new type of cold (and hot) war, this time with Islam (One can say it isn't, that it's only against Moslem fanatics, but this is basically what it boils down to). At the same time China, the main competitor to the US left after the USSR collapsed, has been making huge strides in almost every direction over the past one and a half decades. While they are basically still an authoritarian police state, they are no longer communist in any sense of the word, have a huge and strongly growing economy, a military that is improving in quality and technology constantly, which has expressed interest in developing weapons for use against satellites, and a space programme that launched its first manned mission last year. This is the same year that the space shuttle experienced yet another disaster, breaking up on re-entry.
Fifthly, this leads me to believe that the goals stated at the top of this post have been made in earnest, but not for the stated reasons. I would think that there is a large interest in the current administration, to develop improved and newer types of space weaponry, in order to deny the Chinese future superiority in that theater. Thus the idea of directly involving the military in NASA. I also think that the moon goal is one of of national pride on the one hand, to get there before the Chinese and Indians do, and partly because the moon would make an ideal place for
The Dinosaurs and the asteroid
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Lonely Planets
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I am as big a science fiction fan as everybody else here on slashdot, and have recently read some alternate history novels, one of them on the dinosaurs surviving. I find the question of the dinosaur extinction a fascinating one, because, if the asteroid had not hit the planet (assuming that's why they died out of course) what would the chances be of our being here today. From what we can tell the dinosaurs reigned over the earth for an improbably long time and it was only their extinction that enabled mammals to rise to the position they did.
I recently also saw that at there was at least one type of dinosaur that was developing an opposing claw and had the largest brain of all known dinos, which, apparently were quite dumb on the whole. Perhaps those dinos would have evolved into an intelligent species in another 20 or 40 million years.
I think that illustrates one of the problems with analogies based on the here and now: We at simply lucky that we even made it this far. Any other planet that had evolved life would almost certainly have been hit by a number of asteroids in its time (Look at all our planets in this system and the craters on them). Some of them might well have made it far earlier than we have, many millions of years ago, but from what I can see the chances of life developing in any system face a big problem of getting hit by life extinguishing asteroids and comets, which, if they don't kill everything completely, throw the whole thing back a few dozen million years.
Frustrating for life in general, and very probably making the chances of local concentrations of life minimal (neighbouring systems) added to which the problems of us only having listened for the last few decades, relativity and the huge distances invloved make the chances of listening at the right time, at the right frequency, in the right direction, even smaller.
However, this in no way shuts out the very good chances that there is a lot of life in the universe (organic compounds in comets etc) and it also doesn't shut out the chance that we simply haven't the right method of either listening or traveling yet. Imagine our ancestors 1000 years ago, sitting on the shores of a continent, putting messages into bottles in the ocean, shouting into the wind and listening for someone on another continent to shout back.
Things like the Alcubierre drive etc may one day become fact, as well as methods of FTL communication, whereupon some life form somewhere may ask, "Why didn't you use this technology long ago?".
On the other hand imagine us being the most advanced being in the universe: In that case God must have a supreme sense of irony.
Considering that the atmosphere of mars is just 1% of Earths and that parachutes are not enough to slow the Landers down-retro rockets and airbags are needed as well-I think I just realised a potential source of aid right here on this board for both the Martian atmosphere and the airbags: One hell of a lot of hot air!
Well, that clearly makes NASA the mosts expensive ISP not only on planet earth, but also in the Solar system, and their bandwidth cap is something horrible. I'm sure the Martians will appreciate it when competition finally gets to Mars, that is until they discover the pleasures of junk mail and spam.
I predict that Daniel Lyons will, after continuously having made completely false analysis and predictions on everything from SCO to Linux, either lose his job at Forbes (watch that MBA smile dissappear in a split second when he gets the slip) or be moved to the comics section, where he will at least do somethiing productive at Forbes.
I see this guy (and most other so called tech analysts for that matter) as one of the worst things to ever happen to both markets and journalism. This is one of those people who were still pushing the dotbomb revolution when it had already collapsed, and then, in true two faced lying son of a bitch sell your soul marketing fashion, turn around and say they had seen it all coming and that people are dumb for not having listened to him.
I think that the best remedy for scum like this would be to actually give them the job of ceo of some tech company and see how long it takes them to run it into the ground.
Babelfish is terrible at even translating Germanic and Latin languages and this thing is supposed to be worse than that?
I know that people want to solve everything with technology, but is it so much more difficult to learn another language or perhaps even a few phrases of the country where you are going to. Why does one even go to another country if one doesn't want to understand even the smallest part of that place?
I see all the "Why bother" posts and have seen only one short paragraph with the obvious answer: KOffice.
The majority of OSX users may not need Konqueror, even though it seems to support many features only available on OSX through payable alternatives (GUI SSH and SFTP support with RBrowser for example), but it is a first step to getting KOffice ported natively to the Mac which could finally help OSX users drop MS software in a large number of cases.
KOffice is not where OpenOffice is but a native Mac port could spur development so that it becomes a first rate alternative to MS' Office X suite, and given that there is no guarantee that MS will ever make a Mac version compatible with it's new so called security features, this is an excellent idea.
I have wondered for a while on the logic and wisdom behind the Beagle mission. I found the idea of sending a 60kg lander without any guidance boosters or rockets, no matter how small, an incredibly bad idea. The probe seperated 3 million kilometers away from the planet and then carried on to mars and atmostpheric entry without any possibility of attitude or course correction. Just think about it, 3 million kilometers and even the smallest of deviations of attitude could have meant the probe arriving in the atmosphere on its side or even upside down.
I somehow think that it probably arrived with an incorrect entry attitude and then burnt up on entry.
Perhaps the next time around they'll add a few kilograms to the package for small attitude coreectional motors.
According to what I know of Iran, Azeri, the language of Azerbaijan is spoken by about 25% of the population, but uses the same Arabic script and is interestingly referred to as Turkish by most Iranians.
I can well imagine that, as with any article on/. relating to anything not understood/foreign/not american there will be a fairly high noise to signal ratio around here. So, I thought I could mention that Farsi (written from right to left in a modifed Arabic script) is an Indoeuropean language with no relation whatsover to Arabic, apart from the script (The Alphabet for those who think that script means VBS or Perl) and loan words.
Iran, with its odd mix of religious and democratic government (The religious side seems to be making it very hard for the elected officials to do anything), also has an interesting approach to copyright. According to Islamic law If I understand it correctly(), God is the source of all invention and creation and therefore the holder of all copyright. That means that things like MS anti-piracy drives are unknown there, as practically everything is pirated.
While it certainly is an interesting way of looking at things, I can see countries like the US (surprise, they don't get on well with the Iranians) making it very difficult for the Iranians ever getting into the WTO because so called IP has no value there (Read: Britney will not make much cash on CD sales in Teheran and the Matrix 2&3 will flop just as it did in the west, but for other reasons).
I truly wonder if anyone here, on the Kernel mailing list or at Grocklaw actually thought about sending Linus' message over to the major IT shitrags, such as CNet, or even Forbes and Business World (Hopefully in language that is not as technically heavy as Linus')?
This claim by SCO should, although IANAL, finally be enough for Linus to start sueing SCO for, at the very least, Libel, and the cops should truly be able to do something in an extortion case.
I mean, please! Finally SCO has named some files directly, in a letter which is on record. It has claimed DMCA rights on those files, illegally and is attempting to extort money for them as well as illegally control the files destiny.
But no, all we loudmouth idiots here at slashdot are so busy feeling self satisfied that we don't even thin of alerting the press.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought 4 of his books in a fit of madness recently (They're letting me write this from my padded cell). After reading the first two in the series, Revelation Space and Chasm City, I can honestly say that I have seldom been so irritated by books that have loads of promise and constantly seem on the verge of attaining some measure of plot consistency and depth of character portrayal, yet never actually get there.
It was uncannily like being forced to stop having sex moments before orgasm.
Perhaps Chinese interest in Linux as opposed to Windows makes more sense when viewed in the light of lrojans, software backdoors etc?
It should be obvious that Sun wants to make money with Forte (The commercial edition) and are enraged that SWT is so successful compared to the cop out that is Swing. IBM don't make money with the IDE but with the underlying application servers etc. It is to IBM's credit that they found eclipse to be better than the VisualAge stuff they were using before, even thuogh they made more money with VA.
That said, all these arguments over what is better get on my nerves and make me think that using vim wasn't so bad after all.
Linda H. Lamone, the administrator of the Maryland State Board of elections, said that the group had produced "a very good report," and that the state would take its recommendations seriously.
Still, she noted that tampering with voting equipment is a felony. "I'm not sure how many people would be willing to get a felony conviction and risk going to jail over an election," she said. Citing the problem of easily opened locks on the machines, she said an attempt to unlock a machine "would be very unlikely to succeed, because it would have to occur in a public place."
This woman should be fired from her job. She basically states that because some act would be a crime that no one would do it!!!
Did that stop Richard Nixon?
Did that stop whoever blew valerie Plame's cover?
Did that stop the authors of MyDoom from writing the virus?
Did that stop all the people in the US who committed crimes last year?
Did that stop Ken Lay and the fine folk at Enron?
Did that stop Halliburton from overcharging the Army?
What a fucking joke. It could have been a Microsoft security advisory for all the good it will do.
My premontion: There will be massive irregularities in the 2004 elections and guess who will win again?
Using Hydrogen as a fuel source in a military vehicle :D
It's not your integrity that people object to, Jeff. It's your massive ego that forces you, even in a place like slashdot where nobody really cares, to promote yourself and reference the same article on your homepage, detailing all the people and events in mordern history that wronged you by miscrediting your achievements, as you did in your other post further up.
Your wounded ego trip has been carrying on for how many years exactly now, Jeff? Don't you ever get the feeling that perhaps it's time to move on, because I for one know with certainty that any article or posts by Jeff Raskin that I read is going to have a tidbit of interesting information and tons of ego trip and wounded soul? To be honest, Jeff, people will accredit you for your achievements without your bleating about it, which only makes people irritated.
Not only that, wise and wounded man, but if you were such a genious, why didn't you stay at Apple and convince them of your ideas or continue to contribute?
I don't mean to flame you, Jeff, but after I became aware that you existed while reading The Humane Interface (^v^^vv etc), not because I had read all the lying histroies about the Macintosh, but rather because, like most people, I simply wasn't interested, I pretty soon realised that you are one of those people who a)Is always right(TM), and b) always is upset because he doesn't get enough attention. Reading your article, "Holes in the histories" -full to the brim with self pity and righteous anger- on your site only confirmed that for me.
Taking The Humane Interface as an example. You have some very interesting insights and ideas about human computer interaction (The ^v notation for example) but then spend a good deal of the book whining away about how the Canon Cat, whose design you influenced and/or liked, was so much superior to modern GUI systems. You talk about a word processor from before the age of GUI everything. You neglect to notice that many programmes would be especially hard to use without a GUI, most notably those for which the Mac became famous: Layout, design and image editing.
A tip, Jeff. Your ideas would be better appreciated if you kept your wounded ego out of them for a change.
I remember a non-fiction book on this subject when I was a young adult back in the cold war. Reagan's SDI stuff was in the news and Gorbachev was the new saviour. The book explained what the possibilities of future combat in space would be, including things as space based lasers, anti-satellite missiles, communication systems and electronic counter measures.
Everybody knew that, in a traditional conventional war, controlling space would be one of the keys to controlling the battlefield down on earth. Of course everybody thought about putting nuclear missiles into orbit, even as early as kruschev's days, because orbital missiles would be almost impossible to provide early warning against. But, apart from many science fiction stories based on that premise, no one ever did it. The danger of said missiles falling out of orbit by accident was very real, apart from which such missiles would be be very vulnerable to first strike counter measures from the other side.
However, the Bush administration has seen the obvious direction of China's space effort, and to a certain extent India's as well. China's space agency is fully integrated with the military, much the same as NASA is (although neither nation advertises this fact). China has stated that they plan to put a man on the moon in the 2015 to 2020 time period and China's military has expressed interest in developing methods of destroying satellites in order to deny the enemy the advantage of communications and navigation in time of war.
In terms of national prestige it would be an obviously huge boost to China's image to be able to land on the moon, and I cannot a nationalistic US President such as Bush allowing such a feat to take place without the US getting there first. However the the budget allocated for this endevour is almost certainly too small, and will stretch the US economy if a permanent manned moon base is implemented. Apart from the national prestige there is no real benefit to the national economy and given that a future US government might just see this as a waste of money and resources.
But I can see the US and China getting involved in a ridiculous race in space in both arms and to the moon that will benefit neither in the long run as the modern Chinese government is obviously not given to costly foreign military adventures and will simply go at a pace that it can afford as opposed to the US tendency to want it all and now.
Not only this but presumably, given that Russia unexpectedly recently renewed the lease on its Baikonur launch base in Kazakhstan, it could very well be that a nationalistic Russia under Putin might want to get in on the act. And what about a future nationalistic India?
I find it both sad and a testimony to nationalistic stupidity that only the military and nationalistic pipe dreams get such priority in an area which could finally break down the barriers of space.
While the cynical non American part of me thinks that this is very possibly an election year exercise in yahoo vote gathering, the other part of me wishes that it will come to pass, and for one reason only: Survival of the species.
While an American moon base and mars mission would be excellent for American morale, it would perhaps also serve as a stepping stone for the real colonisation of space by the human race. And I think it is vitally important that we as a species expand beyond our planet, but more on that later.
I don't think it will be possible to get the Bush programme working on the budget that he claims and even if the programme isn't cancelled by the next president after Bush (or by Bush himself after getting reelected) the costs will probably balloon into five or tens times the initial amount before it actually gets there. Simply taking a look at the ruinous costs of the American war effort in Iraq ($4 billion per month) and the way that massive cronyism led to connected companies such as Halliburton being able to charge what they wanted for gasoline, and companies such as Bechtel charging $10 million to repair a bridge where a local Iraqi competitor was offering to rebuild it for $500 000, and thereby blow costs in the war wildly out of proportion, I don't think, given the way that the current American administration is run, that it would be possible.
Even the so called spin offs from a space programme are mostly propaganda myths. It is true that space provides bountiful resources and the ability to develop whole new techniques in engineering, medicine and science, such as those advertised by Permanent.com, but obviously those things would primarily be of interest and value to colonists in space, not to people on earth.
But that doesn't mean it should be done. Even the tiny chance of an asteroid or comet hitting the earth could mean the extinction of our species, and given how humanity is incapable of living in peace with itself or even solving easier problems such as hunger, disease and the enironment on our own planet, it is not unthinkable that we might wipe ourselves out in the future. It's not like we haven't been close to that point in the past (Black death, the Cuba crisis).
Nothing has really changed much in human nature, really. We still fight and squabble, oppress and murder, cheat and steal, suffer from greed and egoism just like we have throughout history. Yet in spite, or perhaps because of those dark sides of our nature (The discovery and colonisation of America was mainly a commericial and political power venture) we have achieved great things. I think it is important that we as a species accept ourselves for what we are, intelligent primates but animals none the less, and expand off our planet to colonise the solar system.
I don't think anyone alive today will ever see the first true colonists making the first martian version of a homestead, and not even our great great grandchildren will see the terraforming of mars, but we as a species need to go, I think, simply because it's a part of what life is about.
I grew up in Southern Africa at an altitutde of around 1500 meters (somewhere near 5000 feet) above sea level. I remember the sky of my childhood being a dark deep blue. Take a loof at the pictures taken at the top of K2 or everest, or even better, if you can find them, colour images of the X-15 experimental planes of the 60s. At that altitude where the X-15 is soon after launch, close to 30'000 meters (100'000 feet) the sky is almost black.
That is, as most of know, because the very low air density at higher altitudes refracts far less light.
The average surface air density on Mars is more or less the same as it is on Earth at 30'000 meters. That means that the sky on Mars will probably be almost black with a small band of colour on the horizon.
That band of colour will be due to so called rayleigh scattering, by which air molecules scatter the light passing through them. Oxygen and Nitrogen on earth, being small molecules will scatter light of a smaller wavelength (blue) than on mars, where the atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide. The light thus produced on mars will be NOT be red and NOT be blue but somewhere in the middle (yellow/brown) as the larger carbon dioxide molecules will scatter light of larger wavelengths than on earth, but not enough to make the light seem red as that would require a gas of larger molecules such as methane or propane which, of course, is the main atmospheric component on Titan, saturns moon, and lo and behold, we get a deep orange light there.
'nuff said.
I have just read through a whole load of "damn tree-hugger", "this theory is crappola" and the insanley cliched "statistics can be made to fit any point of view" posts. Nothing unusual for the slashdot crowd who seem to fear the nature and its consequences as much as they love out of this world science fiction.
I have a message for you: There is a difference between a scientific study and a "raving" environmentalist.
I've lived here in Europe for 17 years now, and even here I can that climate is changing. The yearly winter and fall storms are getting worse, the summers are getting much hotter and drier (three of the last four summers have been far hotter than normal accompanied by droughts and flash floods) and the winters are much warmer than they were 12 years ago (When I got here there was snow for months in winter, now if there's snow for weeks you're lucky), and all that repeatedly, so please spare me the comments on sunspot cycles and freak seasons.
Mod this down if you wish, but I firmly believe that this demonising of the warning on climatic change is extremely counter productive.
Another poster further down made the points, gathered from various sources covering the story, that basically Bush's plan is to drastically cut back unmanned space exploration, finish the ISS with the present shuttle, build a new larger Apollo module type craft capable of reaching the moon, thereafter cease support of the ISS, include the military in NASA decision making and then step by step build a permanent moon base as a testing ground for a mars trip.
/. on how many still believe that WMD was the main reason for Iraq). Americans (and the west in general) are, in principle involved in new type of cold (and hot) war, this time with Islam (One can say it isn't, that it's only against Moslem fanatics, but this is basically what it boils down to). At the same time China, the main competitor to the US left after the USSR collapsed, has been making huge strides in almost every direction over the past one and a half decades. While they are basically still an authoritarian police state, they are no longer communist in any sense of the word, have a huge and strongly growing economy, a military that is improving in quality and technology constantly, which has expressed interest in developing weapons for use against satellites, and a space programme that launched its first manned mission last year. This is the same year that the space shuttle experienced yet another disaster, breaking up on re-entry.
Firstly, one could quite easily see this as an election year joke made by the son of a president who stated similar goals back in 1989, and there is good evidence for that as well: Bush has not been remotely interested in space apart from military projects, and cut funding on a number of science projects. Also, Bush has a track record of trying to accomplish what his father did not.
Secondly, America has done huge projects in the past in order to rally national pride and out do foreign competitors. The whole Apollo programme was announced at the height of the cold war when Russia was breaking space records and third world countries were warming to communism. By the early 70's, after the initial landings had been done, national pride had already been dented by a huge and costly lossful foreign war that had sapped morale and by a revolution of the young not interested in high tech, but in sex 'n drugs 'n rock 'n roll. (That has only changed in that the young are now interested in tech again).
Thirdly, in 1989, although the warsaw pact (eastern europe) was falling apart, the Soviets had by then again achieved a number of space successes by way of a practical manned launch programme with the soyuz vehicles, a long term manned space station with mir (it put spacelab to shame in terms of mission length) and had already launched their own version of the shuttle with the buran, whose launcher , energia, could carry far larger tonnage into space than anything else at the time (or now for that matter - 120 tonnes without the buran). My personal view is that Bush Sr's vision was mainly made to counteract the flagging morale of american space ventures.
Fourthly, now, in 2004, we have just had a number of years , since 9/11, that have been turbulent to say the very least. America is involved in military conflicts with two nations, one of which (Iraq) is an outright mess to say the least, involving the nations' involveds' politicians in distrust from their own and foreign nations. (Don't believ me? Take a snap poll here on
Fifthly, this leads me to believe that the goals stated at the top of this post have been made in earnest, but not for the stated reasons. I would think that there is a large interest in the current administration, to develop improved and newer types of space weaponry, in order to deny the Chinese future superiority in that theater. Thus the idea of directly involving the military in NASA. I also think that the moon goal is one of of national pride on the one hand, to get there before the Chinese and Indians do, and partly because the moon would make an ideal place for
I am as big a science fiction fan as everybody else here on slashdot, and have recently read some alternate history novels, one of them on the dinosaurs surviving. I find the question of the dinosaur extinction a fascinating one, because, if the asteroid had not hit the planet (assuming that's why they died out of course) what would the chances be of our being here today. From what we can tell the dinosaurs reigned over the earth for an improbably long time and it was only their extinction that enabled mammals to rise to the position they did.
I recently also saw that at there was at least one type of dinosaur that was developing an opposing claw and had the largest brain of all known dinos, which, apparently were quite dumb on the whole. Perhaps those dinos would have evolved into an intelligent species in another 20 or 40 million years.
I think that illustrates one of the problems with analogies based on the here and now: We at simply lucky that we even made it this far. Any other planet that had evolved life would almost certainly have been hit by a number of asteroids in its time (Look at all our planets in this system and the craters on them). Some of them might well have made it far earlier than we have, many millions of years ago, but from what I can see the chances of life developing in any system face a big problem of getting hit by life extinguishing asteroids and comets, which, if they don't kill everything completely, throw the whole thing back a few dozen million years.
Frustrating for life in general, and very probably making the chances of local concentrations of life minimal (neighbouring systems) added to which the problems of us only having listened for the last few decades, relativity and the huge distances invloved make the chances of listening at the right time, at the right frequency, in the right direction, even smaller.
However, this in no way shuts out the very good chances that there is a lot of life in the universe (organic compounds in comets etc) and it also doesn't shut out the chance that we simply haven't the right method of either listening or traveling yet. Imagine our ancestors 1000 years ago, sitting on the shores of a continent, putting messages into bottles in the ocean, shouting into the wind and listening for someone on another continent to shout back.
Things like the Alcubierre drive etc may one day become fact, as well as methods of FTL communication, whereupon some life form somewhere may ask, "Why didn't you use this technology long ago?".
On the other hand imagine us being the most advanced being in the universe: In that case God must have a supreme sense of irony.
Considering that the atmosphere of mars is just 1% of Earths and that parachutes are not enough to slow the Landers down-retro rockets and airbags are needed as well-I think I just realised a potential source of aid right here on this board for both the Martian atmosphere and the airbags: One hell of a lot of hot air!
Well, that clearly makes NASA the mosts expensive ISP not only on planet earth, but also in the Solar system, and their bandwidth cap is something horrible. I'm sure the Martians will appreciate it when competition finally gets to Mars, that is until they discover the pleasures of junk mail and spam.
They're actually Su-30 MKI (M- Modified, Advanced, K-Export, I-India), but they're damn good planes all the same.
I predict that Daniel Lyons will, after continuously having made completely false analysis and predictions on everything from SCO to Linux, either lose his job at Forbes (watch that MBA smile dissappear in a split second when he gets the slip) or be moved to the comics section, where he will at least do somethiing productive at Forbes.
I see this guy (and most other so called tech analysts for that matter) as one of the worst things to ever happen to both markets and journalism. This is one of those people who were still pushing the dotbomb revolution when it had already collapsed, and then, in true two faced lying son of a bitch sell your soul marketing fashion, turn around and say they had seen it all coming and that people are dumb for not having listened to him.
I think that the best remedy for scum like this would be to actually give them the job of ceo of some tech company and see how long it takes them to run it into the ground.
Babelfish is terrible at even translating Germanic and Latin languages and this thing is supposed to be worse than that?
I know that people want to solve everything with technology, but is it so much more difficult to learn another language or perhaps even a few phrases of the country where you are going to. Why does one even go to another country if one doesn't want to understand even the smallest part of that place?
I see all the "Why bother" posts and have seen only one short paragraph with the obvious answer: KOffice.
The majority of OSX users may not need Konqueror, even though it seems to support many features only available on OSX through payable alternatives (GUI SSH and SFTP support with RBrowser for example), but it is a first step to getting KOffice ported natively to the Mac which could finally help OSX users drop MS software in a large number of cases.
KOffice is not where OpenOffice is but a native Mac port could spur development so that it becomes a first rate alternative to MS' Office X suite, and given that there is no guarantee that MS will ever make a Mac version compatible with it's new so called security features, this is an excellent idea.
I have wondered for a while on the logic and wisdom behind the Beagle mission. I found the idea of sending a 60kg lander without any guidance boosters or rockets, no matter how small, an incredibly bad idea. The probe seperated 3 million kilometers away from the planet and then carried on to mars and atmostpheric entry without any possibility of attitude or course correction. Just think about it, 3 million kilometers and even the smallest of deviations of attitude could have meant the probe arriving in the atmosphere on its side or even upside down.
I somehow think that it probably arrived with an incorrect entry attitude and then burnt up on entry.
Perhaps the next time around they'll add a few kilograms to the package for small attitude coreectional motors.
Because then you would have read to the end of my sentence, where I mentioned loan words.
According to what I know of Iran, Azeri, the language of Azerbaijan is spoken by about 25% of the population, but uses the same Arabic script and is interestingly referred to as Turkish by most Iranians.
I can well imagine that, as with any article on /. relating to anything not understood/foreign/not american there will be a fairly high noise to signal ratio around here. So, I thought I could mention that Farsi (written from right to left in a modifed Arabic script) is an Indoeuropean language with no relation whatsover to Arabic, apart from the script (The Alphabet for those who think that script means VBS or Perl) and loan words.
Iran, with its odd mix of religious and democratic government (The religious side seems to be making it very hard for the elected officials to do anything), also has an interesting approach to copyright. According to Islamic law If I understand it correctly(), God is the source of all invention and creation and therefore the holder of all copyright. That means that things like MS anti-piracy drives are unknown there, as practically everything is pirated.
While it certainly is an interesting way of looking at things, I can see countries like the US (surprise, they don't get on well with the Iranians) making it very difficult for the Iranians ever getting into the WTO because so called IP has no value there (Read: Britney will not make much cash on CD sales in Teheran and the Matrix 2&3 will flop just as it did in the west, but for other reasons).
I truly wonder if anyone here, on the Kernel mailing list or at Grocklaw actually thought about sending Linus' message over to the major IT shitrags, such as CNet, or even Forbes and Business World (Hopefully in language that is not as technically heavy as Linus')?
This claim by SCO should, although IANAL, finally be enough for Linus to start sueing SCO for, at the very least, Libel, and the cops should truly be able to do something in an extortion case.
I mean, please! Finally SCO has named some files directly, in a letter which is on record. It has claimed DMCA rights on those files, illegally and is attempting to extort money for them as well as illegally control the files destiny.
But no, all we loudmouth idiots here at slashdot are so busy feeling self satisfied that we don't even thin of alerting the press.
Depressing, or am I seeing this too darkly?