You can start by going through the list of thousands (literally) of experiences that have been run on the ISS and categorise each one individually as science vs not science
I don't have to: NASA already selected the most important scientific results and made their best argument in this book: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/626862...
I'm saying: I'm looking at that and I don't think the $100 billion was well spent. I'm saying that I believe spending the same amount of money on 50000 additional research scientists on Earth or doubling the NSF budget would have been better. You yourself gave Hertz, Maxwell and Dirac as examples. You yourself brought up funding for theoretical physics. Those are exactly the kinds of things those $100 billion haven't been funding.
Even though you pay lip service to theoretical physics, the policy you advocate is to hand even more money to military contractors developing jets and rockets, and occasionally shutting a few people into an orbital tin can to conduct some high school science experiments. That's the kind of "practical science" your Lord Mandelson loves, and you evidently support his views wholeheartedly.
OK, so you want science. Let me ask you a dumb question. Do you really think that science can continue with launches that costs 1B or more? How about launches that costs 250-300 million or more? Because that is how much we have been spending for first, the shuttle, and now Atlas and Delta. These are EXPENSIVE.
We're talking about whether the ISS was worth the money; those are exactly the kinds of launches that the ISS wasted money on year after year. So, you just agreed with me.
So, while you are so cock sure of your BS, here is private space [...] That is also why ppl like Neil Tyson and stephen hawkings support human launches, along with cheap science
How is this new "private space" any different from the old "private space"? Instead of shoving hundreds of billions into the hands of big US corporations for building launch technologies, we are now going to... shove billions into the hands of big US corporations for building launch technologies, with even less supervision.
I think human launches are great, and so is "private space". The problem is that NASA is failing to deliver either. What they are doing is putting a bunch of people into orbit at astronomical costs while engaging in massive crony capitalism.
And to be fair, I will take THEIR word over yours since it is obvious that you are not capable of intelligent thought.
Since you take someone's word in order to make political decisions rather than thinking for yourself, it is obviously you who isn't capable of intelligent thought.
Thank god you are not capable of winning a position in CONgress or the WH. Sadly, idiots like you are in the GOP who would rather fund SLS and Putin than America's private space manned program.
Actually, idiots like me would redirect this funding to real, basic science, as opposed to the kinds of corporate boondoggles and crony capitalism that you favor.
Everything in space is special run. You can't easily automate the tasks.
It doesn't need to be automated; we are talking about earth orbit, telemanipulation is a perfectly good option. Furthermore, I'm not talking about "everything", I'm talking about the trivial examples in that book, used to justify the ISS. And even if they couldn't have been achieved by telemanipulation, launching new hardware as needed would still have been orders of magnitude cheaper than the ISS.
Now he's facing backlash from the entire scientific community as it's almost impossible to predict how for example theoretical physics would affect future prosperity.
That is exactly the problem. $100 billion over 17 years could have funded 50000 theoretical physicists. That's more theoretical physicists than exist in the entire world right now. Imagine what kinds of advances we could have made with that kind of spending.
Instead, those $100 billion were wasted on ferrying a few astronauts back and forth between an obsolete rust bucket and earth, while handing out extremely lucrative contracts to corporations close to the government. And we do that because people like you can't tell a government boondoggle from actual science.
As I was saying, the actual price tag is arguably several hundred billion dollars, and I (like I hope most people on Slashdot) pay above average income taxes. So, I stand by my statement that I probably paid several thousand dollars for it.
Furthermore, even $819.67 would be too much for that flying piece of junk. In fact, the opportunity cost of all the space exploration NASA didn't do because they kept that rust bucket up there is even worse.
The arguments seem to fall into three classes: (1) dual use technologies (stuff developed for the ISS that also has other uses), (2) experiments in microgravity or in orbit, and (3) experiments related to the effect of microgravity on astronauts.
Of these (1) doesn't require actually launching or paying for the ISS; you can have that more cheaply by directly financing those programs. (2) can be done far more cheaply using robotics and remote operation. And (3) is really only a "benefit" if you intend to launch more people into space.
But, after that, there will still be a need for a space station of some sort, either in low Earth orbit, or at one of the Lagrange points where the gravity of the moon and Earth cancel one another out.
The ISS cost at least $100 billion over its lifetime, arguably more like several hundred billions. That means I have paid thousands of dollars for it through my taxes. As far as I'm concerned, the money was worse than wasted: not only did the ISS not deliver much of value, it actually held back meaningful space exploration and research.
Look at the bullshit coming from the NASA administrator:
For the United States, "we're seeing some benefits from station that the partners have not yet realized. They are doing more traditional kinds of research, in my words. So they are not quite seeing that return on investment. They still see the cost side," Gerstenmaier added. "The cost side is very easy to measure. The benefit side is not so easy to measure."
What this verbal diarrhea amounts to is that he actually has no data on benefits (let alone a "need"), can't tell us convincingly what the benefits are, and can't even demonstrate to our partners that there are benefits. He just thinks that there are benefits and that's why the tax payers should waste money on his pet project.
So, who should pay for it? Easy: whoever actually thinks that the benefits outweigh the costs. That means people like him should go out and convince investors to invest in his crap. Congress shouldn't give him a dime.
NASA should continue unmanned robotic space exploration and scientific earth observing satellites. No public money should be spent on manned space missions at all at this point.
Really, are you such a beginner in C++ that you feel the need to state that C++ doesn't have garbage collection and reflection standardized? Are you such a beginner to feel the need to point out that using reflection is expensive? What I said was that "C++ pretty much offers both". That is, garbage collection and reflection are available if C++ programmers want them, as a combination of built-in facilities, template metaprogramming, and some simple conventions or tools. That allows us to estimate the overhead for offering these features in C++, and there is basically none. The runtime cost of offering reflection is no higher than offering RTTI, and the runtime cost of offering full garbage collection is no more than that of smart pointers. Both reflection and garbage collection are likely going to be standardized in upcoming C++ releases
So, contrary to what you said, the fact that Java "has a bunch of neat features" does not "inherently come at the cost of runtime efficiency". The reasons Java programs tend to be slow are different.
Seastar looks like it might be a useful library, but the documentation I can find on the web site seems a little thin. Any suggestions for code samples/documentation besides the distribution?
C's Achilles heel is the lack of standardization of common programming facilities. That is, you can write a kick-ass piece of software in your mom's basement using your own homegrown set of string libraries and OO abstractions, but the guy in the next basement over will have a completely different set of tools, and making the two work together will be an exercise in frustration.
C++ tried to build on C's strengths while standardizing a lot of stuff; that's why it has become so popular.
Java (and other managed languages like C#) have a bunch of neat features like reflection and automatic memory management, which inherently comes at the cost of runtime efficiency
Reflection and automatic memory management have almost no runtime cost. In fact, C++ pretty much offers both.
Simply learning C or C++ won't point out exactly why those languages are so much faster than managed languages.
Switching from Java to C++ won't make your code magically faster. In fact, if you continue to write in Java style, your C++ code will probably be even slower than the equivalent code would have been in Java (not to mention a lot buggier).
The difference between Java and C++ is that a competent programmer can write code that uses abstractions yet predictably compiles into something efficient in C++. But taking advantage of that requires a lot of skill and experience.
For most people, Java (or C#) is probably the right choice: it gives them acceptable performance and keeps them from screwing up too badly. Most programmers simply lack the skill and experience to write halfway decent C++ code.
You're right that Java's JIT is really good, but good code generation is not sufficient for developing high performance software. The problem with Java is that it doesn't support efficient abstractions. In C++, you can define high level abstractions and still have them compile down predictably to efficient code due to the existence of template classes, overloading, and value classes. In Java, using abstractions frequently kills performance. And unlike C++, in Java, you can't even "drop down' to a lower level easily: there are no unsafe or low-level operations in Java itself, and the JNI is also quite inefficient.
So, theoretically, you can write high performance code in Java if you use a good, modern implementation. But the experience is so tedious and cumbersome that you're better off using C++ anyway.
It comes from an old (15+ years) defense of Java. The claim was that Java was no longer slow thank to JIT, with HotSpot making it possible for Java code to run faster than equivalent code written in C or C++.
High performance software requires several things, among them good native code generation and good libraries. Java used to have neither, then it got the JIT. Unfortunately, Java's semantics and built-in data types make writing high performance software in it really hard.
C++ started out with good native code generation, and its standard library and built in data types make writing high performance software a bit easier if you know what you are doing. Most C++ programmers don't know what they are doing, though, so their software ends up bloated and inefficient anyway.
If you only depend on economic investment to drive basic science, then scientific advancement would come to a dead stop
So? Neither colonizing Mars nor mining the asteroid belt are "scientific advancements" in and of themselves. Again, nowhere did I suggest that tax payers should spend money on either venture.
The lesson here is to sell the taxpayer to spend their tax dollars to send Man to Mars. Then spend even more money to colonize Mars.
Don't project your own ludicrous premise on others.
Its only a pipedream for government bureaucrats with a science background. There's nothing out in the asteroid belts which we can't mine on Earth (or Mars).
Correct. But the thing that makes the stuff in the asteroids valuable is that it isn't at the bottom of a gravity well.
Mars is anything but a dead end.
Well, you're welcome to waste your own private money on it. I don't want to see tax dollars spent on any manned space program.
Obama's got fuck-all to do with this. Thanks for playing, though.
You're completely wrong. These are regulatory matters decided by the FDA and other government agencies, and it's the president who has ultimate authority. That authority actually got strengthened with the ACA. Obama could end this tomorrow if he wanted to.
If Google can't comply with it, it has no place doing business in the EU.
No, but what they can do is create a separate "Euro-Google" subsidiary that complies with EU law, while Google US does whatever it wants. And if France doesn't like what Google US is doing, they'll have to block access to it themselves. Good luck with that.
What would we do without your beneficent and omniscient leadership? All Hail to Our Leader, Master of Regulations, Protector of Health, Promoter of Justice and Equality!
I agree: a near earth asteroid would probably be a better target to get started.
But time and space are only an issue if you think in terms of tiny planet-launched rockets. Once you have enough mass in space (e.g., from a near earth asteroid), you can easily create huge habitats, and taking a few years to move those around the solar system wouldn't be a big deal.
Spending tax dollars specifically to "mine" the "asteroid belt" has got to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
Where did I say anything about "spending tax dollars"? Like all colonization in human history, colonization only works if there is some economic incentive for it. There is no economic incentive going to Mars, no matter how many tax dollars you spend. That's why we aren't back on the moon either. There is an economic incentive to mine asteroids.
There is nothing more important that man can do in space than ensure its survival from a random galactic event.
Well, if you believe that, then going to Mars is the wrong thing to do. Mars is a dead end, just like the moon was.
If US-based DMCA takedowns affect more than just Google's US-local domains, and they do, why should these EU-based takedowns not be treated similarly?
Because copyrights have been nearly universally recognized for decades based on the Berne convention. The DMCA didn't create those rights, it simply creates a safe harbor for companies to get sued over copyright violations in the US. Furthermore, other nations do not, in fact, enforce or respect the DMCA safe harbor; applying DMCA the way they do is a choice Google is making. Finally, many people agree at least in principle with copyright as a reward for creative activity, even if they may disagree with the details of how it's implemented.
European "privacy rights", the kind that declares even public records and newspaper articles to be "private", are recent and inconsistent, not universally recognized, and, most importantly, there are no treaties or conventions by which the US has agreed to honoring them. Furthermore, restricting the availability of public records and news is fundamentally wrong and offensive, and that alone makes me hope that Google and others will stand up to the EU.
Can you explain why you think Google should be able to violate an individual's privacy for profit?
Google isn't violating anybody's privacy; they are providing links to public, published web pages.
Or why you should have a right to know about things in an individual's past that are either irrelevant to you or have been deemed by law to have been forgiven and forgotten.
Why should the state have the right to tell you what is relevant and what you may remember? You're thinking and talking like a fascist.
That's the nature of doing business in different countries, you have to abide by their laws or leave.
Oh, there are plenty of other options, like a company splitting itself up.
Maybe Google should leave the US, to avoid being oppressed by the mentally retarded people who drafted that law.
The DMCA doesn't "oppress" Google, it provides a safe harbor, a protection against spurious lawsuits. Google happens to be a bit activist and speaks out against the DMCA because they genuinely believe it's a bad law for the people, but as far as the company goes, there is no problem with it.
If the EU can impose this world wide
You suffer from delusions of grandeur; the EU is lucky if it still exists in a decade.
And you don't recognize this for what it is: failing European publishers whipping up a frenzy and lobbying to hurt Google.
Same principle applies: the EU can enforce its laws against EU companies. It has no jurisdiction over US companies that happen to be held by the same holding company as the EU company. If it tries to enforce laws against US companies by punishing EU companies that happen to be owned by the same parent, all hell would break loose.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have to: NASA already selected the most important scientific results and made their best argument in this book: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/626862...
I'm saying: I'm looking at that and I don't think the $100 billion was well spent. I'm saying that I believe spending the same amount of money on 50000 additional research scientists on Earth or doubling the NSF budget would have been better. You yourself gave Hertz, Maxwell and Dirac as examples. You yourself brought up funding for theoretical physics. Those are exactly the kinds of things those $100 billion haven't been funding.
Even though you pay lip service to theoretical physics, the policy you advocate is to hand even more money to military contractors developing jets and rockets, and occasionally shutting a few people into an orbital tin can to conduct some high school science experiments. That's the kind of "practical science" your Lord Mandelson loves, and you evidently support his views wholeheartedly.
We're talking about whether the ISS was worth the money; those are exactly the kinds of launches that the ISS wasted money on year after year. So, you just agreed with me.
How is this new "private space" any different from the old "private space"? Instead of shoving hundreds of billions into the hands of big US corporations for building launch technologies, we are now going to... shove billions into the hands of big US corporations for building launch technologies, with even less supervision.
I think human launches are great, and so is "private space". The problem is that NASA is failing to deliver either. What they are doing is putting a bunch of people into orbit at astronomical costs while engaging in massive crony capitalism.
Since you take someone's word in order to make political decisions rather than thinking for yourself, it is obviously you who isn't capable of intelligent thought.
Actually, idiots like me would redirect this funding to real, basic science, as opposed to the kinds of corporate boondoggles and crony capitalism that you favor.
It doesn't need to be automated; we are talking about earth orbit, telemanipulation is a perfectly good option. Furthermore, I'm not talking about "everything", I'm talking about the trivial examples in that book, used to justify the ISS. And even if they couldn't have been achieved by telemanipulation, launching new hardware as needed would still have been orders of magnitude cheaper than the ISS.
That is exactly the problem. $100 billion over 17 years could have funded 50000 theoretical physicists. That's more theoretical physicists than exist in the entire world right now. Imagine what kinds of advances we could have made with that kind of spending.
Instead, those $100 billion were wasted on ferrying a few astronauts back and forth between an obsolete rust bucket and earth, while handing out extremely lucrative contracts to corporations close to the government. And we do that because people like you can't tell a government boondoggle from actual science.
As I was saying, the actual price tag is arguably several hundred billion dollars, and I (like I hope most people on Slashdot) pay above average income taxes. So, I stand by my statement that I probably paid several thousand dollars for it.
Furthermore, even $819.67 would be too much for that flying piece of junk. In fact, the opportunity cost of all the space exploration NASA didn't do because they kept that rust bucket up there is even worse.
They tried to make an argument in this "book" (marketing PDF):
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/626862...
The arguments seem to fall into three classes: (1) dual use technologies (stuff developed for the ISS that also has other uses), (2) experiments in microgravity or in orbit, and (3) experiments related to the effect of microgravity on astronauts.
Of these (1) doesn't require actually launching or paying for the ISS; you can have that more cheaply by directly financing those programs. (2) can be done far more cheaply using robotics and remote operation. And (3) is really only a "benefit" if you intend to launch more people into space.
The ISS cost at least $100 billion over its lifetime, arguably more like several hundred billions. That means I have paid thousands of dollars for it through my taxes. As far as I'm concerned, the money was worse than wasted: not only did the ISS not deliver much of value, it actually held back meaningful space exploration and research.
Look at the bullshit coming from the NASA administrator:
What this verbal diarrhea amounts to is that he actually has no data on benefits (let alone a "need"), can't tell us convincingly what the benefits are, and can't even demonstrate to our partners that there are benefits. He just thinks that there are benefits and that's why the tax payers should waste money on his pet project.
So, who should pay for it? Easy: whoever actually thinks that the benefits outweigh the costs. That means people like him should go out and convince investors to invest in his crap. Congress shouldn't give him a dime.
NASA should continue unmanned robotic space exploration and scientific earth observing satellites. No public money should be spent on manned space missions at all at this point.
Really, are you such a beginner in C++ that you feel the need to state that C++ doesn't have garbage collection and reflection standardized? Are you such a beginner to feel the need to point out that using reflection is expensive? What I said was that "C++ pretty much offers both". That is, garbage collection and reflection are available if C++ programmers want them, as a combination of built-in facilities, template metaprogramming, and some simple conventions or tools. That allows us to estimate the overhead for offering these features in C++, and there is basically none. The runtime cost of offering reflection is no higher than offering RTTI, and the runtime cost of offering full garbage collection is no more than that of smart pointers. Both reflection and garbage collection are likely going to be standardized in upcoming C++ releases
So, contrary to what you said, the fact that Java "has a bunch of neat features" does not "inherently come at the cost of runtime efficiency". The reasons Java programs tend to be slow are different.
Seastar looks like it might be a useful library, but the documentation I can find on the web site seems a little thin. Any suggestions for code samples/documentation besides the distribution?
C's Achilles heel is the lack of standardization of common programming facilities. That is, you can write a kick-ass piece of software in your mom's basement using your own homegrown set of string libraries and OO abstractions, but the guy in the next basement over will have a completely different set of tools, and making the two work together will be an exercise in frustration.
C++ tried to build on C's strengths while standardizing a lot of stuff; that's why it has become so popular.
Reflection and automatic memory management have almost no runtime cost. In fact, C++ pretty much offers both.
Switching from Java to C++ won't make your code magically faster. In fact, if you continue to write in Java style, your C++ code will probably be even slower than the equivalent code would have been in Java (not to mention a lot buggier).
The difference between Java and C++ is that a competent programmer can write code that uses abstractions yet predictably compiles into something efficient in C++. But taking advantage of that requires a lot of skill and experience.
For most people, Java (or C#) is probably the right choice: it gives them acceptable performance and keeps them from screwing up too badly. Most programmers simply lack the skill and experience to write halfway decent C++ code.
You're right that Java's JIT is really good, but good code generation is not sufficient for developing high performance software. The problem with Java is that it doesn't support efficient abstractions. In C++, you can define high level abstractions and still have them compile down predictably to efficient code due to the existence of template classes, overloading, and value classes. In Java, using abstractions frequently kills performance. And unlike C++, in Java, you can't even "drop down' to a lower level easily: there are no unsafe or low-level operations in Java itself, and the JNI is also quite inefficient.
So, theoretically, you can write high performance code in Java if you use a good, modern implementation. But the experience is so tedious and cumbersome that you're better off using C++ anyway.
High performance software requires several things, among them good native code generation and good libraries. Java used to have neither, then it got the JIT. Unfortunately, Java's semantics and built-in data types make writing high performance software in it really hard.
C++ started out with good native code generation, and its standard library and built in data types make writing high performance software a bit easier if you know what you are doing. Most C++ programmers don't know what they are doing, though, so their software ends up bloated and inefficient anyway.
So? Neither colonizing Mars nor mining the asteroid belt are "scientific advancements" in and of themselves. Again, nowhere did I suggest that tax payers should spend money on either venture.
Don't project your own ludicrous premise on others.
Correct. But the thing that makes the stuff in the asteroids valuable is that it isn't at the bottom of a gravity well.
Well, you're welcome to waste your own private money on it. I don't want to see tax dollars spent on any manned space program.
You're completely wrong. These are regulatory matters decided by the FDA and other government agencies, and it's the president who has ultimate authority. That authority actually got strengthened with the ACA. Obama could end this tomorrow if he wanted to.
No, but what they can do is create a separate "Euro-Google" subsidiary that complies with EU law, while Google US does whatever it wants. And if France doesn't like what Google US is doing, they'll have to block access to it themselves. Good luck with that.
What would we do without your beneficent and omniscient leadership? All Hail to Our Leader, Master of Regulations, Protector of Health, Promoter of Justice and Equality!
New scientific insights, new technologies, new survival skills.
Of course we will, eventually. Why ever do you think we would not? It just makes more sense to start with asteroids rather than Mars.
I agree: a near earth asteroid would probably be a better target to get started.
But time and space are only an issue if you think in terms of tiny planet-launched rockets. Once you have enough mass in space (e.g., from a near earth asteroid), you can easily create huge habitats, and taking a few years to move those around the solar system wouldn't be a big deal.
Where did I say anything about "spending tax dollars"? Like all colonization in human history, colonization only works if there is some economic incentive for it. There is no economic incentive going to Mars, no matter how many tax dollars you spend. That's why we aren't back on the moon either. There is an economic incentive to mine asteroids.
Well, if you believe that, then going to Mars is the wrong thing to do. Mars is a dead end, just like the moon was.
Because copyrights have been nearly universally recognized for decades based on the Berne convention. The DMCA didn't create those rights, it simply creates a safe harbor for companies to get sued over copyright violations in the US. Furthermore, other nations do not, in fact, enforce or respect the DMCA safe harbor; applying DMCA the way they do is a choice Google is making. Finally, many people agree at least in principle with copyright as a reward for creative activity, even if they may disagree with the details of how it's implemented.
European "privacy rights", the kind that declares even public records and newspaper articles to be "private", are recent and inconsistent, not universally recognized, and, most importantly, there are no treaties or conventions by which the US has agreed to honoring them. Furthermore, restricting the availability of public records and news is fundamentally wrong and offensive, and that alone makes me hope that Google and others will stand up to the EU.
Google isn't violating anybody's privacy; they are providing links to public, published web pages.
Why should the state have the right to tell you what is relevant and what you may remember? You're thinking and talking like a fascist.
Oh, there are plenty of other options, like a company splitting itself up.
The DMCA doesn't "oppress" Google, it provides a safe harbor, a protection against spurious lawsuits. Google happens to be a bit activist and speaks out against the DMCA because they genuinely believe it's a bad law for the people, but as far as the company goes, there is no problem with it.
You suffer from delusions of grandeur; the EU is lucky if it still exists in a decade.
And you don't recognize this for what it is: failing European publishers whipping up a frenzy and lobbying to hurt Google.
Same principle applies: the EU can enforce its laws against EU companies. It has no jurisdiction over US companies that happen to be held by the same holding company as the EU company. If it tries to enforce laws against US companies by punishing EU companies that happen to be owned by the same parent, all hell would break loose.
Yes, and the rules make no sense. Convictions, arrests, news reports, etc. are matters of public record. Calling that "personal data" is idiotic.