"The mission will result in Mars being more carefully mapped than Earth has been to date!
Uhh.. I'm sure you're not including military mapping"
-1 uninformed
Five words for you: Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern, Arctic. The maps you mention may be accurate, but they only describe around 30% of our planet's surface. To date, the world whose surface we know best is Venus.
Recent polls say as many as 61% of Americans are against the idea of spending money on a mission to Mars (or the moon, or anywhere interesting, really). Fine. Who needs 'em?
I fired off an email to NASA to see if there was a way I could bypass Congress and give them money directly (they take my money anyway, so why shouldn't I be allowed to add to it?). No response as of yet (sent it on the 15th), and I figure odds are any response I'll get will boil down to "What, are you crazy?" but the pessimist in me says this might be the only chance I'll get of seeing someone on Mars before I die and the malcontent in me would enjoy giving my elected "representatives" the finger.:)
If that treaty isn't a red herring I don't know what is. Even ignoring the question "How can it be enforced?" there's still the matter that it's going on 40 years and it still hasn't been enforced in any way, shape or form. "Not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty?" I can think of 268 violators on this celestial body right here.
The Outer Space Treaty is just another piece of feel-good diplomacy that still accomplishes nothing beyond getting in peoples way. Consider: If it were enforced, there'd be no incentive to deveolop space; any and all profits would belong to "the people of the world," which sure doesn't leave much for upkeep and incidentals in your asteroid mine.
"Nearly three-quarters of women surveyed by the industry group complained about being ignored, patronized or offended by sales people when shopping for electronics."
"I played in a few paintball tournaments, and what it really cofirmed in my mind is that any situation where people are spraying projectiles at each other involves a lot of luck. It doesn't matter how good you are, everyone gets hit eventually."
Paintballs are typically spheroids fired from a smooth barrel, so you won't be getting much better accuracy than your typical handgun. Smoothbore fell out of style in modern armies by the early Nineteenth Century, with ball ammunition not far behind. "Spray and pray" becomes less effective proportionally to the square of the distance to your target, especially if your target knows how to use his/her accurate weapon with precision.
"The people who manage to get hit only rarely are the people way in the back with as little as possible of themselves showing,"
"If I were to get drafted into a war, I would be very greatful for my paintball experience because it has taught me just how easy it is to get hit."
No it hasn't. Paintballs are stopped by silly things like shrubbery, trees, cars, cinder block walls, etc. Rounds from a modern assult rifle aren't. Concealment != cover. In fact I've heard anecdotes about real soldiers doing poorly in paintball matches simply because they're used to the Real Thing.
"We went because space was the next frontier of the Cold War."
Yeah, that's why Armstrong muttered the immortal phrase "Take that, you commie pinkos!" as he first set foot on the moon.
I'm sorry, but anybody who claims (over and over) that "Beat the Russians!" was the one and only reason why millions of people worked on the Apollo program needs to take a look at some of the names listed on the plaque we left at Tranquility. You can't claim that everybody involved had only a single, competitive "We're #1!" motivation and then turn around and say those very same people were that gracious in victory.
At most, "Beat the Russians!" doesn't work very well outside of the Capitol, and even then you needed to add in liberal doses of "Lots of jobs!" during the process.
"I believe we need the technology experts, the computer industry, the peer-to-peer industry, the software industry, the entertainment industry, the privacy experts and the business experts to come together"
I like how "customers" doesn't appear in this list.
No, I'm serious. I've been really disturbed by some of the things I've read from people who are against the idea and words cannot describe the pity I feel for those that are incapable of understanding the "Because it's there" argument.
Are we that incapable, as either a nation or a species, of having big dreams and pursuing them every once in a while? Do we always have to wait for something to be practical before we get around to doing it? Yes, we have war, famine and pestilence. Yes, this will probably take away some funds from fighting those scourges. Whether or not that loss of funds will be noticable is another issue but ultimately the whole thing is a red herring. We're trying to feed people and save lives for... what exactly? So that future generations can also try to eliminate them better than us, feeding the cycle? What's the point in saving and lengthening lives when nobody's actually living?
Sure, there's the "practical" argument that we could always wait until all these problems were solved and then we could follow our dreams of going out there. So we wait and wait and wait and before you know it we're all pensioners in retirement communities still waiting "just another ten years..." If waiting until everything is "just so" isn't a vague, amorphous, intangible and ultimately hollow goal to work towards, I don't know what is.
The moon. Mars. They're right there. We can go there. Now. That stirs up passions even in me, and I'm a jaded, cynical bastard.
If we as a culture and a species are that incapable of dreaming, even about something so utterly attainable as the moon, then maybe we shouldn't be going up there. We deserve to chase our tails over "standards of living" until the sun goes nova. Heck, maybe that's the solution to the Fermi Paradox; they're not here because they had more important things to do or they simply couldn't be bothered...
Prersonally, I'd rather live in a country that bankrupts itself trying to get to Mars than what I seem to be living among today. Hell, set up a "Mars or bust!" fund at NASA and I'll gladly start tithing to them. Anything but this malaise.
"Anybody doing anything nontrival should be using metric. My least favorite part of physics class was when the prof would make us do stuff in imperial units. God, what a pain in the ass.
More steps, arcane conversion factors to remember, lots more chances to screw up."
Anybody doing anything nontrivial should be using a calculator. My least favorite part of math class was when the prof would make us do long division by hand. God, what a pain in the ass.
More time, arcane multiplication tables to remember, lots more chances to screw up.
"Easier" doesn't mean "better," especially when you're in a class learning as opposed to doing these things in the Real World. If nothing else it taught you to check your work as well as drive the point home that SI has been molded to the Real World instead of the other way around. F=ma * 1 in SI because the SI unit of force is younger than Sir Isaac by over a century (pushing 2, IIRC) and had the luxury of making the data fit the theory instead of the other way around.
SI is still pretty damned screwy for discoveries that are quite a bit younger. Sure, it makes Newton's Law of Gravitation look prettier, but basing your units on the form of said law does absolutely nothing to make Coulomb's Law any easier to cope with. That's probably why SI is based off of current instead of charge.
"How many cubic inches in a gallon?"
In the US, 231. To quote a Deku Scrub, "23 is number 1!"
In the UK, the number is ugly. Their legal definition of their gallon is based on SI units directly (defined as x number of liters) instead of indirectly as we do in the US (defined as x number of cuibic inches, where the inch is defined as 2.54 cm).
"When you start talking about slugs, even a farm-raised midwest american boy like me"
I sure hope you don't deal with acres and bushells, then.
"OK, that's a unit of mass, not weight, so it's converted to grams."
Actually, despite what all too many first-semester physics teachers talk about, the pound, too, is a unit of mass. The slug is another of those units far younger than Newton for the same reason from before. It's defined as 454-and-change grams, while the slug depends on both the pound and local gravitational acceleration. It's kinda hard to weigh steam, after all...
Which brings up another guy who lived well after Newton that kinematics-based SI doesn't do so well with: Joule. The thermal engergy required to heat one cubic centimeter of water one Kelvin simply isn't an integer number of kg*m^2/s^2, let alone a power of ten.
"The problem is, you can't do full immersion, because people will always speak in the language that they know."
So here's a question, if we should all learn metric and nothing but metric, should we also all learn the English language and nothing but English? Even if books in another language don't translate easily to English?
When the US purchased the Louisiana Territory, the land was still parcelled out using the royal French units like "toise" and "arpent." Because the US didn't use such units, the USGS had to go through and resurvey the whole thing, or at least the important parts. But even today those terms still persist in land deeds in the southeast US and Quebec has a similar problem. Keep in mind that surveying is a job where they care about the difference between 2.54 and (10 000/3937).
If land measurement is too arcane for you, what about engines and power generation? The countries that have gone straight metric in the commercial sector as well as government have had to perform ignominious tasks like starting their steam tables over from scratch. When you must sell your products based on Joules and Watts, you can be forced to ignore two centuries of research simply because it was done in pounds, feet and Rankine.
True geeks prefer watches with a far niftier feature. Sure, you might be able to pay for gas with your watch, but mine's about as accurate as my GPS receiver!
"Meanwhile, an increasingly jaded marketplace is judging the Beta against the same standards they judge games at launch, or even years past their launch."
Well, if game companies actually gave a damn about what they claim are "finished products," where the released game didn't require as many patches as (if not more than) what a beta should be, we wouldn't be comparing the two as if there were no difference between the two classes (and really, are there?)
"You know whose script was bootlegged and photocopied a zillion times? William Fucking Shatner's, that's who."
"It's easy to find out who was the rightful owner of a script, screener, or whatever . . . but determining exactly who was responsible for releasing it into the wild is a bit more difficult."
Everybody knows that the environmental folks would pitch a fit if we tried to launch a fission-based spacecraft. But they already hate President Bush as it is, so he could include a proposal for a new fission-based shuttle replacement tomorrow and it won't get them any more angry at him than they are now (I mean, is it possible?).
And President Bush could even help handle crowd control at the launch site as well! Let's say we're launching from Cape Canaveral. During that week, Bush flies off to... say... Amundsen-Scott, muttering phrases like "oil exploration," "WTO" and "nukuler." Maybe suggest he's going to do something that will kill off the ultra-rare Antarctic Dodo. Those myopic protesters that don't die of an instant embolism upon hearing of it will then take off after him, leaving the Cape nearly deserted for lift-off.
"Basically, the elevator would be made out of a ribbon so light and with such a surface area that it would fall to the earth like a peice of paper."
You know, boxcars have a lot of surface area along their sides that would create a great deal of drag... if trains moved sideways. Since they don't, most freight trains have a breaking distance measured in miles.
I don't see how the "piece of paper" analogy holds water because it assumes there's a leading edge that can be deflected to one side. But by definition of a beanstalk the leading edge is already on the ground. This isn't a sheet of paper, it's form-feed.
Metal tape measures are pretty flimsy and can be difficult to hook onto a distant object without a second pair of hands helping you. But if that second pair of hands lets go of the far end of your spring-loaded tape masure...
Slashdot Mirror
But judging from spam content, that's not what they do most of their thinking with.
"The mission will result in Mars being more carefully mapped than Earth has been to date!
Uhh.. I'm sure you're not including military mapping"
-1 uninformed
Five words for you: Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern, Arctic. The maps you mention may be accurate, but they only describe around 30% of our planet's surface. To date, the world whose surface we know best is Venus.
Recent polls say as many as 61% of Americans are against the idea of spending money on a mission to Mars (or the moon, or anywhere interesting, really). Fine. Who needs 'em?
:)
I fired off an email to NASA to see if there was a way I could bypass Congress and give them money directly (they take my money anyway, so why shouldn't I be allowed to add to it?). No response as of yet (sent it on the 15th), and I figure odds are any response I'll get will boil down to "What, are you crazy?" but the pessimist in me says this might be the only chance I'll get of seeing someone on Mars before I die and the malcontent in me would enjoy giving my elected "representatives" the finger.
If that treaty isn't a red herring I don't know what is. Even ignoring the question "How can it be enforced?" there's still the matter that it's going on 40 years and it still hasn't been enforced in any way, shape or form. "Not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty?" I can think of 268 violators on this celestial body right here.
The Outer Space Treaty is just another piece of feel-good diplomacy that still accomplishes nothing beyond getting in peoples way. Consider: If it were enforced, there'd be no incentive to deveolop space; any and all profits would belong to "the people of the world," which sure doesn't leave much for upkeep and incidentals in your asteroid mine.
You're mis-interpreting. He says it's hard to put in because it's hard for him to put in. If he could do it easily, he wouldn't be working there.
"Nearly three-quarters of women surveyed by the industry group complained about being ignored, patronized or offended by sales people when shopping for electronics."
Payback's a bitch, ain't it?
"Anyone know how much 14,800 yen is in US Dollars?"
General rule of thumb: 1 JPY = 0.01 USD. Not precise, but close enough.
"I played in a few paintball tournaments, and what it really cofirmed in my mind is that any situation where people are spraying projectiles at each other involves a lot of luck. It doesn't matter how good you are, everyone gets hit eventually."
Paintballs are typically spheroids fired from a smooth barrel, so you won't be getting much better accuracy than your typical handgun. Smoothbore fell out of style in modern armies by the early Nineteenth Century, with ball ammunition not far behind. "Spray and pray" becomes less effective proportionally to the square of the distance to your target, especially if your target knows how to use his/her accurate weapon with precision.
"The people who manage to get hit only rarely are the people way in the back with as little as possible of themselves showing,"
"If I were to get drafted into a war, I would be very greatful for my paintball experience because it has taught me just how easy it is to get hit."
No it hasn't. Paintballs are stopped by silly things like shrubbery, trees, cars, cinder block walls, etc. Rounds from a modern assult rifle aren't. Concealment != cover. In fact I've heard anecdotes about real soldiers doing poorly in paintball matches simply because they're used to the Real Thing.
"And we should, of course, base all of our decisions on what the media considers interesting."
Compromise: Send Michael Jackson to Mars.
Speaking of which, does anybody know if there's a way to turn off the "entertainment" and "sports" sections of Google News?
"We went because space was the next frontier of the Cold War."
Yeah, that's why Armstrong muttered the immortal phrase "Take that, you commie pinkos!" as he first set foot on the moon.
I'm sorry, but anybody who claims (over and over) that "Beat the Russians!" was the one and only reason why millions of people worked on the Apollo program needs to take a look at some of the names listed on the plaque we left at Tranquility. You can't claim that everybody involved had only a single, competitive "We're #1!" motivation and then turn around and say those very same people were that gracious in victory.
At most, "Beat the Russians!" doesn't work very well outside of the Capitol, and even then you needed to add in liberal doses of "Lots of jobs!" during the process.
"If you didn't think of this until after arriving on Mars, you've been sitting in the basement reading /. waaaaaaaay too long."
Mars Needs Broadband!
"Not www.goatse.cx."
Sometimes, though, it's hard to tell the difference...
Unless you're one of those mythical female geeks, I do not want to hear about what your legs look like.
You do realize that training involves more than just simulator practice, right?
"When I play Couter-Strike, or BattleField, I don't care if I die."
You don't have to deal with an irate drill seargent.
Also, you're just doing it for entertainment. They are doing what they want to do with their lives. Different motivations.
"I believe we need the technology experts, the computer industry, the peer-to-peer industry, the software industry, the entertainment industry, the privacy experts and the business experts to come together"
I like how "customers" doesn't appear in this list.
"In terms of doing something useful in space,"
Why does it always have to be "useful?"
No, I'm serious. I've been really disturbed by some of the things I've read from people who are against the idea and words cannot describe the pity I feel for those that are incapable of understanding the "Because it's there" argument.
Are we that incapable, as either a nation or a species, of having big dreams and pursuing them every once in a while? Do we always have to wait for something to be practical before we get around to doing it? Yes, we have war, famine and pestilence. Yes, this will probably take away some funds from fighting those scourges. Whether or not that loss of funds will be noticable is another issue but ultimately the whole thing is a red herring. We're trying to feed people and save lives for... what exactly? So that future generations can also try to eliminate them better than us, feeding the cycle? What's the point in saving and lengthening lives when nobody's actually living?
Sure, there's the "practical" argument that we could always wait until all these problems were solved and then we could follow our dreams of going out there. So we wait and wait and wait and before you know it we're all pensioners in retirement communities still waiting "just another ten years..." If waiting until everything is "just so" isn't a vague, amorphous, intangible and ultimately hollow goal to work towards, I don't know what is.
The moon. Mars. They're right there. We can go there. Now. That stirs up passions even in me, and I'm a jaded, cynical bastard.
If we as a culture and a species are that incapable of dreaming, even about something so utterly attainable as the moon, then maybe we shouldn't be going up there. We deserve to chase our tails over "standards of living" until the sun goes nova. Heck, maybe that's the solution to the Fermi Paradox; they're not here because they had more important things to do or they simply couldn't be bothered...
Prersonally, I'd rather live in a country that bankrupts itself trying to get to Mars than what I seem to be living among today. Hell, set up a "Mars or bust!" fund at NASA and I'll gladly start tithing to them. Anything but this malaise.
"You mean "looks like they are using X" - it could easuly be BSD"
Would they jynx the mission by using a dying OS?
"Anybody doing anything nontrival should be using metric. My least favorite part of physics class was when the prof would make us do stuff in imperial units. God, what a pain in the ass.
More steps, arcane conversion factors to remember, lots more chances to screw up."
Anybody doing anything nontrivial should be using a calculator. My least favorite part of math class was when the prof would make us do long division by hand. God, what a pain in the ass.
More time, arcane multiplication tables to remember, lots more chances to screw up.
"Easier" doesn't mean "better," especially when you're in a class learning as opposed to doing these things in the Real World. If nothing else it taught you to check your work as well as drive the point home that SI has been molded to the Real World instead of the other way around. F=ma * 1 in SI because the SI unit of force is younger than Sir Isaac by over a century (pushing 2, IIRC) and had the luxury of making the data fit the theory instead of the other way around.
SI is still pretty damned screwy for discoveries that are quite a bit younger. Sure, it makes Newton's Law of Gravitation look prettier, but basing your units on the form of said law does absolutely nothing to make Coulomb's Law any easier to cope with. That's probably why SI is based off of current instead of charge.
"How many cubic inches in a gallon?"
In the US, 231. To quote a Deku Scrub, "23 is number 1!"
In the UK, the number is ugly. Their legal definition of their gallon is based on SI units directly (defined as x number of liters) instead of indirectly as we do in the US (defined as x number of cuibic inches, where the inch is defined as 2.54 cm).
"When you start talking about slugs, even a farm-raised midwest american boy like me"
I sure hope you don't deal with acres and bushells, then.
"OK, that's a unit of mass, not weight, so it's converted to grams."
Actually, despite what all too many first-semester physics teachers talk about, the pound, too, is a unit of mass. The slug is another of those units far younger than Newton for the same reason from before. It's defined as 454-and-change grams, while the slug depends on both the pound and local gravitational acceleration. It's kinda hard to weigh steam, after all...
Which brings up another guy who lived well after Newton that kinematics-based SI doesn't do so well with: Joule. The thermal engergy required to heat one cubic centimeter of water one Kelvin simply isn't an integer number of kg*m^2/s^2, let alone a power of ten.
"The problem is, you can't do full immersion, because people will always speak in the language that they know."
So here's a question, if we should all learn metric and nothing but metric, should we also all learn the English language and nothing but English? Even if books in another language don't translate easily to English?
When the US purchased the Louisiana Territory, the land was still parcelled out using the royal French units like "toise" and "arpent." Because the US didn't use such units, the USGS had to go through and resurvey the whole thing, or at least the important parts. But even today those terms still persist in land deeds in the southeast US and Quebec has a similar problem. Keep in mind that surveying is a job where they care about the difference between 2.54 and (10 000/3937).
If land measurement is too arcane for you, what about engines and power generation? The countries that have gone straight metric in the commercial sector as well as government have had to perform ignominious tasks like starting their steam tables over from scratch. When you must sell your products based on Joules and Watts, you can be forced to ignore two centuries of research simply because it was done in pounds, feet and Rankine.
True geeks prefer watches with a far niftier feature. Sure, you might be able to pay for gas with your watch, but mine's about as accurate as my GPS receiver!
"Meanwhile, an increasingly jaded marketplace is judging the Beta against the same standards they judge games at launch, or even years past their launch."
Well, if game companies actually gave a damn about what they claim are "finished products," where the released game didn't require as many patches as (if not more than) what a beta should be, we wouldn't be comparing the two as if there were no difference between the two classes (and really, are there?)
Me? Jaded? Nah!
"You know whose script was bootlegged and photocopied a zillion times? William Fucking Shatner's, that's who."
"It's easy to find out who was the rightful owner of a script, screener, or whatever . . . but determining exactly who was responsible for releasing it into the wild is a bit more difficult."
KHAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!
Everybody knows that the environmental folks would pitch a fit if we tried to launch a fission-based spacecraft. But they already hate President Bush as it is, so he could include a proposal for a new fission-based shuttle replacement tomorrow and it won't get them any more angry at him than they are now (I mean, is it possible?).
And President Bush could even help handle crowd control at the launch site as well! Let's say we're launching from Cape Canaveral. During that week, Bush flies off to... say... Amundsen-Scott, muttering phrases like "oil exploration," "WTO" and "nukuler." Maybe suggest he's going to do something that will kill off the ultra-rare Antarctic Dodo. Those myopic protesters that don't die of an instant embolism upon hearing of it will then take off after him, leaving the Cape nearly deserted for lift-off.
"Two: (which brings us back to our point of discussion) If you go as far as 91000km, you can slingshot payloads as far as jupiter and its moons."
That's nice. But what if you want to... you know... come back?
"Basically, the elevator would be made out of a ribbon so light and with such a surface area that it would fall to the earth like a peice of paper."
You know, boxcars have a lot of surface area along their sides that would create a great deal of drag... if trains moved sideways. Since they don't, most freight trains have a breaking distance measured in miles.
I don't see how the "piece of paper" analogy holds water because it assumes there's a leading edge that can be deflected to one side. But by definition of a beanstalk the leading edge is already on the ground. This isn't a sheet of paper, it's form-feed.
Metal tape measures are pretty flimsy and can be difficult to hook onto a distant object without a second pair of hands helping you. But if that second pair of hands lets go of the far end of your spring-loaded tape masure...