After the giant list of major web businesses having a day of action - I have to say, the response seems incredibly underwhelming. Nothing on Wikipedia, nothing on Google or Amazon, Apple or Facebook - tiny banner on NetFlix - nothing on YouTube. I was expecting a "Day Of Action" where all of those major players would at least stick a popup in your face - or darken the site or some other very visible thing. To say I'm disappointed would be an understatement.
The ~500 daily visitors to my blog site will see a popup - but for all of the hooplah about a massive protest - I'm not seeing much.
Those few sites that have responded are mainly geek sites where you're preaching to the converted - or perhaps to the rationally opposed. The great mass of the "general public" aren't going to notice much.
Without a huge wave of protest - our politicians are just going to toe the party line - only by having anguished howls of outrage will anything happen.
Any product that makes at least 30% of it's owners physically sick is probably not a great investment.
Anyone who didn't read the MANY studies from NASA and the Flight Simulation world pointing out this fact - along with the fact that it can't be fixed - probably deserves to have lost their investment.
And if these contraptions every HAD become popular - we'd be worrying about the US Navy study that shows that driving your car within 24 hours of a long VR session is more dangerous than drunk driving. The US military won't allow pilots for fly within 24 hours of being in any immersive simulation.
We KNEW these things were going to be useless right back when Oculus did their original Kickstarter. Those in the know commented, posted, blogged - but did anyone listen? Nooooo! They said: "We can reduce lag, increase frame rate, improve FOV and resolution, we can add the missing 3 degrees of freedom"....yeah - but NONE of those are the problem. It's all about depth of focus - and that can't be fixed...period.
For Arduino, any decent text editor and "make" are really all I need.
On-device debugging sounds useful - but it's intrusive to performance and memory consumption - and it hogs the serial port, which I'm quite likely to be using for something else. If you're trying to squeeze the last drop from a processor with low clock speeds and very little memory (which you should be, if you're doing it right) - then all of this glitz has to go out of the window.
If you don't need timing-perfect debugging - then just compile your program on your laptop/desktop and stub out your low level I/O routines so you can debug conventionally. It's much easier!
The "dressed size" argument is bullshit. Go to home depot and measure an UNFINISHED 2x4 cedar plank...I can save you the trouble and tell you that it measures exactly the same as a FINISHED 2x4 plank. We all understand that there are traditional names and there are actual dimensions. Nobody is saying that 2x4's have to be called something different. All the lawsuit says is that for a store that markets heavily to people who are NOT general contractors - the actual dimensions should be listed alongside the traditional names.
The case of the 2x4 isn't actually the problem - as I've explained in a couple of other posts. When I go online and order four hundred 6" wide fencing planks - I expect them to be approximately 6" wide - and not 5" which is what I actually received. That's not a matter of traditional names versus actual names.
This does need to be fixed - it doesn't require much effort to do it - and it'll avoid confusion for Home Depot's primary customers.
It's fine to call it a 2-by-4 because that's what this object is actually called. But if you call it a 2" by 4" board, then it ought to measure that much. It's no big deal for them to go fix the labelling to remove the inch symbols and add the true dimensions.
For 2x4's, I doubt many people are confused - but when I buy fence planking and it says that the plank is 6" wide - then I want what I paid for...a 6" wide plank - and not a 5" wide plank. There is no "customary name" for fence planking...and if there is then it needs to be made VERY clear in the description of the product. These stores are selling to people who do not work in the fencing business - they specifically target inexperienced home owners in all of their advertising.
When I recently built a 200 foot fence - I ordered 400 of something described as a '6" rough-sawed fencing board"...and paid for delivery. What I got was 400 boards that were only 5" wide - so I had to order more boards and pay a second delivery charge to make up the deficit.
This is NOT fair...and it DOES need to be fixed.
There is absolutely no reason why those boards could not be labelled with the actual dimensions - and even if fencing contractors have a "traditional" name (6-by-1's or whatever) - the true dimensions should always be listed for the sake of clarity and honesty.
It's not true that the difference between advertised and actual sizes are due to a reduction in size due to finish planing. I've been building a deck and some fencing around my house - and the "unfinished-cedar" 2-by-4 boards sold in Home Depot are the exact same actual size as the "finished-cedar" 2-by-4 boards sold in Lowes. Both are labelled as being 2"x4" and neither of them are. So it's not "finishing" that reduces the dimensions...at least not in every case.
I truly do get it that there is an object called a "2-by-4" that is much smaller than 2" x 4" and it's fine that they *call* it a 2-by-4 in the product description - so long as they provide actual dimensions as well.
BUT when I buy rough-sawed planking to make a fence - and I figure I have 200 feet of fence, so I'll need 400 lengths of 6" wide rough-sawed planking - I order them online and have them delivered - and I *REALLY* feel cheated when the planks arrive and are only 5" wide - I run out - and when I order more, I get stung for another delivery charge. *THAT* sucks...and the "customary size" thing isn't a valid excuse.
So, yes - I think it's time for the lumber industry to come clean and label all of their products with the actual dimensions - relegating the "traditional names" to being merely names. So, by all means call it a 2-by-4 but DO NOT misrepresent it as a 2" x 4" piece of lumber. You can say it's a 6-by-1 fence panel if that truly is a "customary name" - but I actually need to know that it's only 5" wide before I order vast quantities of it.
The construction industry won't be inconvenienced in the least - they can still talk about two-by-fours - and because they never say "two inch by four inch" - nobody will get confused. An occasional labeling change is something that all businesses have to live with - so suck it up. The cost to fix this is nominal - it's time to do that.
We know for sure that the only other halfway usable planet that we can possibly ever reach is Mars. Elon Musk claims he can get us there soon and cheaply - and I believe him. BUT he didn't address how we'd be able to live there after his re-usable spacecraft drops off 100 people and 450 tonnes of cargo.
1) We have no idea of the health risks of 1/3rd g gravity - we know zero g is very unhealthy. That's all we know. 2) On a 2700 calorie/day diet, with a reasonable mix of nutrients - you need one acre of farmland per person to keep them fed...so 100 acres of farmland per 100 person "team". 3) On Mars, it's too cold for crops to grow. Mean temps of -55 C are what you get - plants don't grow below +5 degC. 4) To heat one acre of land to +5 degC will require 1.7MWatts of power - and 170MW of solar power requires about 3.7 acres of solar panels - weighing 10kg per sq.meter. To keep ourselves warm and with lights, vehicles, etc will add another 2 to 3 acres of solar panels. Crunch the numbers and roughly 250 tonnes out of our 450- tonne cargo allowance will be Solar panels. How many tonnes does it take to build 100 acres of well insulated, pressurized, heated greenhouses? Probably another 100 tonnes. That leaves just 1 tonne per person for housing, recycling, water mining, vehicles, space suits, etc. 5) There isn't enough nitrogen in Mars soil to grow plants (one part per 1000 or so is what we've seen in rover sampling). So we'll either need around 6 tonnes of fertilizer...and some means to very efficiently recycle nitrogen....or a way to mine about 6,000 tonnes of Martial soil and heat it enough to release it's nitrogen. NASA deems nitrogen too impractical to recycle aboard the ISS - so we know this ain't gonna be easy. 6) Setting up all of those acres of greenhouses and solar panels will take a long time - and the plants will take many months to produce crops. Realistically, we're going to need a year's worth of food...that's another 100 tonnes.
So for sure, there isn't enough cargo capacity in Elon's otherwise excellent plan. So instead of getting people there for $200,000 per person - it's going to be more like twice that...just for the cargo. At $400,000 per ticket - vastly fewer people can go there.
The only way out of this is to make MUCH lighter solar panels...and to come up with ways to make an acre of greenhouse that weighs a LOT less than a ton!
So, with what we currently know - I think a self-sustaining Mars colony is a bust...sadly.
If we can't get Mars up and going like that - we're talking slow, painful terraforming - bioengineered greenhous-gas-producing bacteria to warm the planet - then bioengineered algae to sit in those new lakes and make oxygen - and the problem with THAT is finding someone to pay for a project that won't produce results for 1000 years. No project in all of human history has taken more than a couple of human lifetimes (I'm thinking of the great Cathedrals of Europe and arguably, the Pyramids)...in both cases each generation who worked on them believed they'd get their reward in heaven...so it wasn't a total waste for them.
But between taxpayers and government - NOBODY will pay for a trillion dollar, 1000 year project.
So - we're not going to colonize Mars, there is no place else in the solar system that's even as good at that - and we stand ZERO chance of making it outside the solar system (see funding issues, above).
We'd better make the best of what we've got. Ways out are to become longer lived so that a 1000 year project doesn't seem quite so bad - or scan our brains into computers and shoot computers out into space where we can all be immortal.
The thing is, TFA says that they controlled for years of experience - and the phenomenon didn't go away.
They also controlled for a bunch of other effects such as which language is used, what field they worked in, what country they lived in....this makes no sense, other than (somehow) people who use spaces are somehow better programmers.
The other astounding thing is the HUGE magnitude of the effect. If it was only (say) a thousand dollars different - we'd be laughing this up and calling it a statistical anomaly...but this is EIGHT PERCENT of people's salaries.
It really doesn't make sense.
We need to get some industrial-strength statisticians on this - the kind of statisticians who indent their tables with spaces!
"They" (who ever "they" are) renamed it "climate change" because idiots like you don't understand that this is "GLOBAL" warming - an effect that is averaged over the entire planet and over many years - and that some places will get colder - others more (or less) humid, others have more or less rainfall - others worse storms.
You can't look at the local weather for one season and claim that your pathetic observation applies globally and over decades...which is what's really going on.
Sadly, calling it "climate change" still wasn't enough to educate people like you - because you're still equating "climate" (a long term trend over a large part of the world) with "weather" (what's happening right now in your back yard).
When you look at the long term averages for the entire planet - the trend is blindingly obvious. When you look at the outcomes in specific places and over short timescales - you can't see it.
However, even in just the UK, things like the fact that we can now grow grapes in enough quantities to start to become major wine makers - when countries in the more southerly latitudes are having failing harvests - is a clear sign of long term warming of the local climate.
But one colder year in one small place proves precisely nothing. No single observation in one place proves anything. So it's a combination of long term meteorological studies going back 200 years - studies of tree rings going back 1000 years - studies of ice-core samples - peat bog thicknesses - glacier retreats - ice-thinning - major storm/hurricane records - actual measurement of average ocean depths...ALL of those thing, compared together from all around the world and over the course of two dozen DECADES of data are what tell us that this is happening for 100% certain - and that human activity is 100% of the cause.
Your personal observations over 0.01% of the Earth's surface for 0.5% of the duration of the growing effect are such a piddly little amount as to be irrelevant. So either open your eyes, go out and look at ALL of the data - or STFU and listen to the conclusions of the experts who can do that for you.
As for "LOL"...well, guess what impression that makes.
Photosynthesis does: CO2 + Water => Sugar + O2...then the plant takes that sugar and turns it into biomass by converting it to starches and structural materials for the plant itself.
Carbon has a molecular weight of 12 and Oxygen is 16...so CO2 is 25% carbon by weight. So to absorb 240 tons of CO2 per year - it's got to be generating (at a minimum) 60 tons of extra plant material per year - and more likely (because dead/living moss isn't all carbon) it's at least twice that.
There is only just so much space in that concrete container - which means that a literal truckload of dead/living moss has to be removed from it every single week! Then, that biomass has to be disposed of in some way that doesn't simply re-release it into the atmosphere when it decays...you'd have to bury it or something.
This is a ridiculous claim - it can't possibly be true. Even 24 tons a year wouldn't be credible - and 2.4 tons a year would seem high...the entire installation would haves to double in size every year to keep up even that more modest amount.
What I'm sure happened here is that it's plausible that the moss has vastly more surface area than a tree - but moss is much more slow-growing than trees are - so the amount of CO2 it absorbs cannot possibly be as much per-unit-area as the leaves of a tree. So I'm betting that they did all of their math from surface area alone - and didn't stop to think beyond that.
For me, "going into work" means 6 hours of flight time, changing planes once - a hotel room for the night - a day at the office, stuck in a cube that is soulless because only people like me use it - then another 6 hours and a plane change to get home again. So I've only actually been to my companies offices twice - once for my interview and again for tech orientation!
It's definitely not necessary for motivated workers.
I'm a senior software engineer. I work from home because I'd otherwise have a 20 hour commute! The small company I work with has trouble finding qualified people where they are - and few will relocate to go there - so remote working was a necessity...and we embrace that.
When I worked in an open office - (which I hated) we still chatted over Skype and email. I still chat over Skype and email. Technical communications don't suffer too much - but a really good replacement for a whiteboard (with audio and text chat) would really be wonderful. Random connections in the break room are missing - but because all tech discussions go via engineering Skype sessions, we are all able to see all conversations and everything is archived - which is actually vastly better than face-to-face. My productivity is definitely way up.
On the plus side, I can have lunch with my wife every day - and that 15 second commute gives me back an entire hour out of every day. It's as if my life were 10% longer.
My wife wanted to spend a week visiting her family - and I didn't particularly want to take vacation time off work to do it - so plan A was for her to go alone...but then it struck us..."Work from home" is really "Work from anywhere" - so we tossed my computer and a couple of monitors into the back of the car drove - during the day, I could still work - during the evenings and over the weekend, I could put in an appearance. Win/win! This is suddenly a very liberating thing!
We did a bit of rearranging at home - so I have an office, with a door I can shut and a desk that can be as cluttered or as clean as I like. We installed a coffee machine and a soda fridge and a snack/office-supply closet...so there are less temptations to take random breaks or for people at home to interrupt me. When I'm "at work" people know not to interrupt me.
I wasn't sure how I would like this - but I'd say that it's turning out OK.
I see questions on Quora and similar places from kids who are thinking of taking up a career as computer programmers - on commonly asked one is "If I become a programmer, will AI make my career obsolete?" - and this is a very valid concern. If I were a truck driver, I'd be really worried that self-driving trucks would take my job 5 years from now.
This announcement (which effectively says to the layperson "Programmers are about to become obsolete") will have a chilling effect on those people who are just thinking about getting into this field.
In truth - this AI program will never see the light of day - it can NEVER "write a program from screenshots" because the necessary information to do that isn't present in the screenshots - even in principle. What HAPPENS when you push this button? All the screenshots tell you is that there is a button...and MAYBE...if the screenshot is somehow linked to other screenshots...it might tell you that pressing the button takes you to another panel. What it doesn't tell you is that pressing that button caused the camera to take a photo, for the software to reconstruct a 3D image of a person from that photo, that this has to be sent off to the server to match other 3D images, that the resulting match produces that person's name - which the program is then given from the server - and which then results in that "NAME" field on the next GUI panel to be populated with an actual name and not the "John Doe" that the GUI designer put there so the programmer would know that this is where the name goes.
By itself - this announcement can be laughed at and called bullshit by anyone who has anything to do with writing programs (and I'm 100% sure it's being laughed at right now) - but the CHILLING effect that such ridiculously over-stated claims make on those who might be considering entering the industry is a very, very bad thing.
As ANYONE who writes programs with GUI's will tell you - a system like this can AT BEST write 10% of the code needed in an actual "Program"...because the GUI layer isn't that tough to write - and there is no way on god's green earth that something that looks at screenshots can infer how the other 90% of the code has to work. Add to this that if it's even 99% accurate - how will a human programmer fix the remaining 1% of the bugs?
So - programmers everywhere are laughing at this claim...it's patently obvious that it can't do that.
It's over-sold. No, it isn't using "AI to create programs from simple screenshots" - that's a flat out lie.
Now - if instead, we were told that this could "create GUI layouts from pencil sketches" - then I would have been impressed...if it could do it from already designed-inside-the-computer wireframes - then I'd be less impressed...and with only 77% accuracy - I'm thinking...yeah...um - and if the code it generates isn't beautifully commented with good variable names that reflect the functions of the individual widgets and decorative elements - then it's worse than useless.
This is a very premature press release and all it's done is to make everyone who understands the problem even a tiny bit - call "bullshit" - which destroys the reputation of those involved and makes it much harder to get people interested even if it does eventually become useful.
So - come back when you get at least 99% accuracy. Be honest about what this does (No, it doesn't "write programs") and *CRUCIALLY* explain how a regular programmer will fix the 1% (or currently 23%) of the errors it makes.
Human written code will have useful names for each widget and other graphic on the screen, so if that widget isn't doing what it should - we can fix it easily. If this thing generates spaghetti code with names (at best) guessed from the icons on the screenshot - then if it's ANYTHING short of 100% perfect every single time - then the effort to debug the code it generates will utterly erase any benefits it provides.
Furthermore - if I do use it to generate the GUI code with 99% perfection - then fix the 1% that isn't - and then the design team want to add another button - or move something - the AI will go off, do it's thing and make a new 99% perfect GUI code...will I then have to go in and fix a different set of 1% screwups? Because if I do, then this AI will not only be somewhat painful - it won't help the coding of GUI's at all, it'll actually cost programmers a LOT more time to fix any bugs it produces.
So that just says "let's make batteries" because that's what using energy to reverse the process is doing.
But battery technologists (energy storage technologists in general) are not saying this is a great idea - because it's exceedingly inefficient.
Better to pump water up a mountain while you have energy - and let it drive turbines when you need energy - or just let Elon Musk build a few more gigafactories and use mountains of batteries.
Those kinds of approaches are MUCH more reasonable than trying to shunt CO2 back and forth to one or other 'ethane.
It is a fundamental flaw in the capitalist system that you have to pay for raw materials, pay for labor, pay for R&D, pay for marketting, pay for the land your business occupies - but disposing of the waste that you generate is a freebie.
This biases things in favor of businesses that generate waste compared to businesses that either don't generate waste - or pay to clean it up.
Which explains why we're trashing the planet so efficiently.
The only way to make capitalism sustainable and fair is to make the cost of disposing of waste become a part of the cost of producing the product.
High waste products would then cost more - fewer people would buy them - and if they did, the cost of cleanup would be included, so no big deal.
Making this a "tax" only works if the organization that collects the tax spends it on doing the cleanup...but that's probably not gonna happen. Instead the tax is seen as a punishment for dirty businesses - and that's not something that's really popular.
An alternative would be to have the polluters be required to do the cleanup. This is more direct than taxation - and fairer - and it removes "the middle man" - which is also good.
In pure abstract capitalism theory - we might argue that if people wanted a clean environment, that they'd simply boycott products from businesses that didn't give them what they need. But we have a "Crisis of the Commons" situation here. For each individual person, their benefit from cheaper/dirtier products exceeds their perceived loss...and that would be a problem if the vast majority of people didn't do that. But they do - it's human nature.
But however you slice it - capitalism is broken and we need to fix it somehow. No matter what, government has to be involved because "market forces" are failing miserably.
So a "carbon tax" would work - or a law that said "You make the pollution - you fix it!" would work. The former can be graduated and controlled more easily than the latter - especially for things like carbon emissions that really cannot be fixed. The latter would prevent things like plastic waste in the oceans from being a problem more effectively than a "plastics tax" and a proliferation of other taxes.
The German "green dot" program is a good example of the "you did it - you fix it" approach. Products labelled like that REQUIRE the manufacturer to provide recycling processes to de-manufacture these products...either themselves - or by paying a contribution to centralised recycling plants in proportion to the cost of recycling their products.
However, for other businesses - a carbon tax would also work.
Yes - exactly. The insane quantities of CO2 that ANY sequestration method generates ("Clean coal"...yeah...right) would be vastly more than we could use industrially - or otherwise. CO2 simply isn't a very useful gas - it's not in high demand.
So you're down to storing it somehow.
But storing it as a CO2 gas at atmospheric pressure would require a VERY large volume of storage space - even ideas like pumping it down into the underground voids where we extracted the natural gas from doesn't work because natural gas comes out at high pressure and you'd have to pressurize the CO2 to get it all to fit down there.
So no matter what - you'd have to COMPRESS the CO2 in order to store it - but when you look at the energy requirements to compress CO2, it's more than the energy produced by GENERATING the CO2 in the first place. So you can't do that either.
Great - so you've separated the CO2...now what?
This kind of research is annoying - it gives false hope to the fossil fuel proponents and does NOTHING...zip...nada...to help the global warming crisis. The researchers should have thought of this before they even started their research...and I'd bet good money that they know it to be true but accepted the research funding anyway. What they've produced is a PR "win" for a business that's trying very hard to hold on to it's income in face of rising criticism and falling wind/solar costs...and that's an intellectually dishonest thing to do...naughty *NAUGHTY* researchers.
The trouble with something like this is that once ISP's start collecting income this way, building entire business models on charging web sites to send data over their networks - it'll be hard for future (saner) governments to reverse. Passing laws that cause businesses to fail is a tough call.
But this is a truly crazy, irresponsible piece of legislation.
The idea that allowing this makes the Internet more free shows a TOTAL lack of understanding as to what makes it tick.
Ask yourself: How will WIkipedia pay ISP's for the data people pull from it? How could some new service of a similar nature spring into existence if it had to factor in those charges? How will sites like GitHub continue to operate a free service to the OpenSource movement?
If you kill those vitally important sites - this would be a disaster for humanity!
Admittedly, we don't KNOW that they'd die - but we're taking a hell of a risk here. Suppose Wikipedia says "We can only provide service to countries with net neutrality."...now the entire USA is unable to reach Wikipedia anymore.
Then there is the matter of stifling innovation - right now, a small web-based business can stick up a web site and get a service running for almost $0...this encourages all sorts of innovators to try their hand at starting an internet business. If you force them to pay for end-users bandwidth - then nobody can take the risk of providing that kind of service because you have no clue at the outset how much bandwidth you're going to be responsible for. Imagine the prospect of data caps for web site providers!
As a practical matter, there are hundreds and hundreds of ISP's - if they all start charging at different rates and with different business models, do I (as a small web business owner) have to somehow monitor which end-users consumed what bandwidth and send out hundreds of checks each month? That clearly can't happen - so you just know there will be 'aggregation' businesses that'll take a flat-rate charge from web sites and disperse this to the ISP's...so now you have yet another middle-man leaching off of all of us.
What this will do is to force small web site users to go to FaceBook and small businesses to sell via Amazon.
Produce a one-page "procedures" document - clearly, but simply lay out the process in moving code from the programmer's branch to the QA branch and into the production branch. Have everyone read and sign it.
The first time someone violates it, you give them an informal warning.
The second time they violate it, have them sit down with management and HR and tell them that if they violate the rules again, they'll be terminated.
The third time, you terminate them.
Easy...no automation required...you simply have to cause a change in the 'culture'. Programmers are very good at following rules - providing they are clearly stated and obviously put in place for a reason.
If you insist on there being an automated system...
When I've worked on setups like this, we give programmers the rights to do what they like in their own working branch(es) and into the QA branch - but deny them access to the production branch. QA get read-access to the QA branch and are the only people allowed to check stuff into the production branch. Generally programmers get their build together at the end of a sprint - then at the start of the next sprint, QA check it out and either release it or punt it back to the programmers...have two week sprints instead of six so that this doesn't add too much latency into the bug fix cycle. If you're spending more time fixing small bugs than adding large features, then you can temporarily drop the sprint cycle down to one week - if major features are being rolled out - then push the cycle up to at most 3 weeks.
Won't work. The ISS doesn't have enough radiation shielding to allow astronauts to survive for long beyond the Van Allan belts. Also, it would take a VERY long time to go anywhere on the "10 Watts in, 10 micro-Newtons of thrust out" that an EM drive provides. The ISS has about 100 kW of solar power capacity - and if 100% of that went into an array of 10,000 EM drives - you'd get 10 milli-Newtons of thrust out. The ISS has a mass of around 400,000kg and needs about 10m/s of deltaV added to it every couple of months just to stay in orbit.
There is no way for EM drives to do anything of use whatever.
Yeah - but the ISS would end up being about 1% of all of the engineering you describe...and because it doesn't have enough shielding to operate safely beyond the Van Allan belts - and it's solar panels won't deliver enough power out by Mars - you's end up with a TON or rework to do.
The trouble it brings would by far exceed it's worth.
If the ISS is going to be worth anything - it's right in the orbit it's in now. Because it needs to be re-boosted to higher orbits every 3 to 6 months - it's not a free resource.
So unless you find a benefit that it's giving to humanity that exceeds the resupply/boost cost where it is right now - then the only cost-effective thing to do is to crash it into the Pacific ocean.
You're right - but if the US doesn't pass a law to continue to fund it past 2024 - then there is no chance of the other countries providing enough cash to keep it flying. If the USA said "We're going to donate our part to private space agencies (who probably won't want to provide food/water/supplies to YOUR astronauts)"...then what could they do about it?
I agree - it's really not doing a whole lot for us.
Ditching it into the pacific would be a bad idea - but donating it to privately owned space businesses like SpaceX and Bigelow who are already working with the ISS would make a lot more sense. Consider the boost to US business if those companies had free access to the ISS!
NASA did their job here - they got private industry interested in that stuff - now they can step back from doing what they already know how to do - and get on with the difficult researchy stuff.
The trouble is that once you're out of low Earth Orbit, you don't get any of the earth's magnetic field protection from solar radiation. Long term occupancy of a structure outside of that orbit requires decent quantities of shielding - which the ISS doesn't have.
If you think the ISS is costly to maintain now - imagine what it would be if each resupply mission needs a rocket the size of a Saturn V to get food, water and oxygen up to a lunar orbit.
Sure, EVENTUALLY, you can get oxygen and water from the moon - but that won't happen until LONG after 2024.
Sadly - although this seems like a reasonable idea - I think it's a non-starter.
Slashdot Mirror
After the giant list of major web businesses having a day of action - I have to say, the response seems incredibly underwhelming. Nothing on Wikipedia, nothing on Google or Amazon, Apple or Facebook - tiny banner on NetFlix - nothing on YouTube. I was expecting a "Day Of Action" where all of those major players would at least stick a popup in your face - or darken the site or some other very visible thing. To say I'm disappointed would be an understatement.
The ~500 daily visitors to my blog site will see a popup - but for all of the hooplah about a massive protest - I'm not seeing much.
Those few sites that have responded are mainly geek sites where you're preaching to the converted - or perhaps to the rationally opposed. The great mass of the "general public" aren't going to notice much.
Without a huge wave of protest - our politicians are just going to toe the party line - only by having anguished howls of outrage will anything happen.
Any product that makes at least 30% of it's owners physically sick is probably not a great investment.
Anyone who didn't read the MANY studies from NASA and the Flight Simulation world pointing out this fact - along with the fact that it can't be fixed - probably deserves to have lost their investment.
And if these contraptions every HAD become popular - we'd be worrying about the US Navy study that shows that driving your car within 24 hours of a long VR session is more dangerous than drunk driving. The US military won't allow pilots for fly within 24 hours of being in any immersive simulation.
We KNEW these things were going to be useless right back when Oculus did their original Kickstarter. Those in the know commented, posted, blogged - but did anyone listen? Nooooo! They said: "We can reduce lag, increase frame rate, improve FOV and resolution, we can add the missing 3 degrees of freedom"....yeah - but NONE of those are the problem. It's all about depth of focus - and that can't be fixed...period.
For Arduino, any decent text editor and "make" are really all I need.
On-device debugging sounds useful - but it's intrusive to performance and memory consumption - and it hogs the serial port, which I'm quite likely to be using for something else. If you're trying to squeeze the last drop from a processor with low clock speeds and very little memory (which you should be, if you're doing it right) - then all of this glitz has to go out of the window.
If you don't need timing-perfect debugging - then just compile your program on your laptop/desktop and stub out your low level I/O routines so you can debug conventionally. It's much easier!
The "dressed size" argument is bullshit. Go to home depot and measure an UNFINISHED 2x4 cedar plank...I can save you the trouble and tell you that it measures exactly the same as a FINISHED 2x4 plank. We all understand that there are traditional names and there are actual dimensions. Nobody is saying that 2x4's have to be called something different. All the lawsuit says is that for a store that markets heavily to people who are NOT general contractors - the actual dimensions should be listed alongside the traditional names.
The case of the 2x4 isn't actually the problem - as I've explained in a couple of other posts. When I go online and order four hundred 6" wide fencing planks - I expect them to be approximately 6" wide - and not 5" which is what I actually received. That's not a matter of traditional names versus actual names.
This does need to be fixed - it doesn't require much effort to do it - and it'll avoid confusion for Home Depot's primary customers.
It's fine to call it a 2-by-4 because that's what this object is actually called. But if you call it a 2" by 4" board, then it ought to measure that much. It's no big deal for them to go fix the labelling to remove the inch symbols and add the true dimensions.
For 2x4's, I doubt many people are confused - but when I buy fence planking and it says that the plank is 6" wide - then I want what I paid for...a 6" wide plank - and not a 5" wide plank. There is no "customary name" for fence planking...and if there is then it needs to be made VERY clear in the description of the product. These stores are selling to people who do not work in the fencing business - they specifically target inexperienced home owners in all of their advertising.
When I recently built a 200 foot fence - I ordered 400 of something described as a '6" rough-sawed fencing board"...and paid for delivery. What I got was 400 boards that were only 5" wide - so I had to order more boards and pay a second delivery charge to make up the deficit.
This is NOT fair...and it DOES need to be fixed.
There is absolutely no reason why those boards could not be labelled with the actual dimensions - and even if fencing contractors have a "traditional" name (6-by-1's or whatever) - the true dimensions should always be listed for the sake of clarity and honesty.
It's not true that the difference between advertised and actual sizes are due to a reduction in size due to finish planing. I've been building a deck and some fencing around my house - and the "unfinished-cedar" 2-by-4 boards sold in Home Depot are the exact same actual size as the "finished-cedar" 2-by-4 boards sold in Lowes. Both are labelled as being 2"x4" and neither of them are. So it's not "finishing" that reduces the dimensions...at least not in every case.
I truly do get it that there is an object called a "2-by-4" that is much smaller than 2" x 4" and it's fine that they *call* it a 2-by-4 in the product description - so long as they provide actual dimensions as well.
BUT when I buy rough-sawed planking to make a fence - and I figure I have 200 feet of fence, so I'll need 400 lengths of 6" wide rough-sawed planking - I order them online and have them delivered - and I *REALLY* feel cheated when the planks arrive and are only 5" wide - I run out - and when I order more, I get stung for another delivery charge. *THAT* sucks...and the "customary size" thing isn't a valid excuse.
So, yes - I think it's time for the lumber industry to come clean and label all of their products with the actual dimensions - relegating the "traditional names" to being merely names. So, by all means call it a 2-by-4 but DO NOT misrepresent it as a 2" x 4" piece of lumber. You can say it's a 6-by-1 fence panel if that truly is a "customary name" - but I actually need to know that it's only 5" wide before I order vast quantities of it.
The construction industry won't be inconvenienced in the least - they can still talk about two-by-fours - and because they never say "two inch by four inch" - nobody will get confused. An occasional labeling change is something that all businesses have to live with - so suck it up. The cost to fix this is nominal - it's time to do that.
We know for sure that the only other halfway usable planet that we can possibly ever reach is Mars. Elon Musk claims he can get us there soon and cheaply - and I believe him. BUT he didn't address how we'd be able to live there after his re-usable spacecraft drops off 100 people and 450 tonnes of cargo.
1) We have no idea of the health risks of 1/3rd g gravity - we know zero g is very unhealthy. That's all we know.
2) On a 2700 calorie/day diet, with a reasonable mix of nutrients - you need one acre of farmland per person to keep them fed...so 100 acres of farmland per 100 person "team".
3) On Mars, it's too cold for crops to grow. Mean temps of -55 C are what you get - plants don't grow below +5 degC.
4) To heat one acre of land to +5 degC will require 1.7MWatts of power - and 170MW of solar power requires about 3.7 acres of solar panels - weighing 10kg per sq.meter. To keep ourselves warm and with lights, vehicles, etc will add another 2 to 3 acres of solar panels. Crunch the numbers and roughly 250 tonnes out of our 450- tonne cargo allowance will be Solar panels. How many tonnes does it take to build 100 acres of well insulated, pressurized, heated greenhouses? Probably another 100 tonnes. That leaves just 1 tonne per person for housing, recycling, water mining, vehicles, space suits, etc.
5) There isn't enough nitrogen in Mars soil to grow plants (one part per 1000 or so is what we've seen in rover sampling). So we'll either need around 6 tonnes of fertilizer...and some means to very efficiently recycle nitrogen....or a way to mine about 6,000 tonnes of Martial soil and heat it enough to release it's nitrogen. NASA deems nitrogen too impractical to recycle aboard the ISS - so we know this ain't gonna be easy.
6) Setting up all of those acres of greenhouses and solar panels will take a long time - and the plants will take many months to produce crops. Realistically, we're going to need a year's worth of food...that's another 100 tonnes.
So for sure, there isn't enough cargo capacity in Elon's otherwise excellent plan. So instead of getting people there for $200,000 per person - it's going to be more like twice that...just for the cargo. At $400,000 per ticket - vastly fewer people can go there.
The only way out of this is to make MUCH lighter solar panels...and to come up with ways to make an acre of greenhouse that weighs a LOT less than a ton!
So, with what we currently know - I think a self-sustaining Mars colony is a bust...sadly.
If we can't get Mars up and going like that - we're talking slow, painful terraforming - bioengineered greenhous-gas-producing bacteria to warm the planet - then bioengineered algae to sit in those new lakes and make oxygen - and the problem with THAT is finding someone to pay for a project that won't produce results for 1000 years. No project in all of human history has taken more than a couple of human lifetimes (I'm thinking of the great Cathedrals of Europe and arguably, the Pyramids)...in both cases each generation who worked on them believed they'd get their reward in heaven...so it wasn't a total waste for them.
But between taxpayers and government - NOBODY will pay for a trillion dollar, 1000 year project.
So - we're not going to colonize Mars, there is no place else in the solar system that's even as good at that - and we stand ZERO chance of making it outside the solar system (see funding issues, above).
We'd better make the best of what we've got. Ways out are to become longer lived so that a 1000 year project doesn't seem quite so bad - or scan our brains into computers and shoot computers out into space where we can all be immortal.
The thing is, TFA says that they controlled for years of experience - and the phenomenon didn't go away.
They also controlled for a bunch of other effects such as which language is used, what field they worked in, what country they lived in....this makes no sense, other than (somehow) people who use spaces are somehow better programmers.
The other astounding thing is the HUGE magnitude of the effect. If it was only (say) a thousand dollars different - we'd be laughing this up and calling it a statistical anomaly...but this is EIGHT PERCENT of people's salaries.
It really doesn't make sense.
We need to get some industrial-strength statisticians on this - the kind of statisticians who indent their tables with spaces!
"They" (who ever "they" are) renamed it "climate change" because idiots like you don't understand that this is "GLOBAL" warming - an effect that is averaged over the entire planet and over many years - and that some places will get colder - others more (or less) humid, others have more or less rainfall - others worse storms.
You can't look at the local weather for one season and claim that your pathetic observation applies globally and over decades...which is what's really going on.
Sadly, calling it "climate change" still wasn't enough to educate people like you - because you're still equating "climate" (a long term trend over a large part of the world) with "weather" (what's happening right now in your back yard).
When you look at the long term averages for the entire planet - the trend is blindingly obvious. When you look at the outcomes in specific places and over short timescales - you can't see it.
However, even in just the UK, things like the fact that we can now grow grapes in enough quantities to start to become major wine makers - when countries in the more southerly latitudes are having failing harvests - is a clear sign of long term warming of the local climate.
But one colder year in one small place proves precisely nothing. No single observation in one place proves anything. So it's a combination of long term meteorological studies going back 200 years - studies of tree rings going back 1000 years - studies of ice-core samples - peat bog thicknesses - glacier retreats - ice-thinning - major storm/hurricane records - actual measurement of average ocean depths...ALL of those thing, compared together from all around the world and over the course of two dozen DECADES of data are what tell us that this is happening for 100% certain - and that human activity is 100% of the cause.
Your personal observations over 0.01% of the Earth's surface for 0.5% of the duration of the growing effect are such a piddly little amount as to be irrelevant. So either open your eyes, go out and look at ALL of the data - or STFU and listen to the conclusions of the experts who can do that for you.
As for "LOL"...well, guess what impression that makes.
Photosynthesis does: CO2 + Water => Sugar + O2...then the plant takes that sugar and turns it into biomass by converting it to starches and structural materials for the plant itself.
Carbon has a molecular weight of 12 and Oxygen is 16...so CO2 is 25% carbon by weight. So to absorb 240 tons of CO2 per year - it's got to be generating (at a minimum) 60 tons of extra plant material per year - and more likely (because dead/living moss isn't all carbon) it's at least twice that.
There is only just so much space in that concrete container - which means that a literal truckload of dead/living moss has to be removed from it every single week! Then, that biomass has to be disposed of in some way that doesn't simply re-release it into the atmosphere when it decays...you'd have to bury it or something.
This is a ridiculous claim - it can't possibly be true. Even 24 tons a year wouldn't be credible - and 2.4 tons a year would seem high...the entire installation would haves to double in size every year to keep up even that more modest amount.
What I'm sure happened here is that it's plausible that the moss has vastly more surface area than a tree - but moss is much more slow-growing than trees are - so the amount of CO2 it absorbs cannot possibly be as much per-unit-area as the leaves of a tree. So I'm betting that they did all of their math from surface area alone - and didn't stop to think beyond that.
This is B.S.
For me, "going into work" means 6 hours of flight time, changing planes once - a hotel room for the night - a day at the office, stuck in a cube that is soulless because only people like me use it - then another 6 hours and a plane change to get home again. So I've only actually been to my companies offices twice - once for my interview and again for tech orientation!
It's definitely not necessary for motivated workers.
I'm a senior software engineer. I work from home because I'd otherwise have a 20 hour commute! The small company I work with has trouble finding qualified people where they are - and few will relocate to go there - so remote working was a necessity...and we embrace that.
When I worked in an open office - (which I hated) we still chatted over Skype and email. I still chat over Skype and email. Technical communications don't suffer too much - but a really good replacement for a whiteboard (with audio and text chat) would really be wonderful. Random connections in the break room are missing - but because all tech discussions go via engineering Skype sessions, we are all able to see all conversations and everything is archived - which is actually vastly better than face-to-face. My productivity is definitely way up.
On the plus side, I can have lunch with my wife every day - and that 15 second commute gives me back an entire hour out of every day. It's as if my life were 10% longer.
My wife wanted to spend a week visiting her family - and I didn't particularly want to take vacation time off work to do it - so plan A was for her to go alone...but then it struck us..."Work from home" is really "Work from anywhere" - so we tossed my computer and a couple of monitors into the back of the car drove - during the day, I could still work - during the evenings and over the weekend, I could put in an appearance. Win/win! This is suddenly a very liberating thing!
We did a bit of rearranging at home - so I have an office, with a door I can shut and a desk that can be as cluttered or as clean as I like. We installed a coffee machine and a soda fridge and a snack/office-supply closet...so there are less temptations to take random breaks or for people at home to interrupt me. When I'm "at work" people know not to interrupt me.
I wasn't sure how I would like this - but I'd say that it's turning out OK.
I see questions on Quora and similar places from kids who are thinking of taking up a career as computer programmers - on commonly asked one is "If I become a programmer, will AI make my career obsolete?" - and this is a very valid concern. If I were a truck driver, I'd be really worried that self-driving trucks would take my job 5 years from now.
This announcement (which effectively says to the layperson "Programmers are about to become obsolete") will have a chilling effect on those people who are just thinking about getting into this field.
In truth - this AI program will never see the light of day - it can NEVER "write a program from screenshots" because the necessary information to do that isn't present in the screenshots - even in principle. What HAPPENS when you push this button? All the screenshots tell you is that there is a button...and MAYBE...if the screenshot is somehow linked to other screenshots...it might tell you that pressing the button takes you to another panel. What it doesn't tell you is that pressing that button caused the camera to take a photo, for the software to reconstruct a 3D image of a person from that photo, that this has to be sent off to the server to match other 3D images, that the resulting match produces that person's name - which the program is then given from the server - and which then results in that "NAME" field on the next GUI panel to be populated with an actual name and not the "John Doe" that the GUI designer put there so the programmer would know that this is where the name goes.
By itself - this announcement can be laughed at and called bullshit by anyone who has anything to do with writing programs (and I'm 100% sure it's being laughed at right now) - but the CHILLING effect that such ridiculously over-stated claims make on those who might be considering entering the industry is a very, very bad thing.
As ANYONE who writes programs with GUI's will tell you - a system like this can AT BEST write 10% of the code needed in an actual "Program"...because the GUI layer isn't that tough to write - and there is no way on god's green earth that something that looks at screenshots can infer how the other 90% of the code has to work. Add to this that if it's even 99% accurate - how will a human programmer fix the remaining 1% of the bugs?
So - programmers everywhere are laughing at this claim...it's patently obvious that it can't do that.
It's over-sold. No, it isn't using "AI to create programs from simple screenshots" - that's a flat out lie.
Now - if instead, we were told that this could "create GUI layouts from pencil sketches" - then I would have been impressed...if it could do it from already designed-inside-the-computer wireframes - then I'd be less impressed...and with only 77% accuracy - I'm thinking...yeah...um - and if the code it generates isn't beautifully commented with good variable names that reflect the functions of the individual widgets and decorative elements - then it's worse than useless.
This is a very premature press release and all it's done is to make everyone who understands the problem even a tiny bit - call "bullshit" - which destroys the reputation of those involved and makes it much harder to get people interested even if it does eventually become useful.
So - come back when you get at least 99% accuracy. Be honest about what this does (No, it doesn't "write programs") and *CRUCIALLY* explain how a regular programmer will fix the 1% (or currently 23%) of the errors it makes.
Human written code will have useful names for each widget and other graphic on the screen, so if that widget isn't doing what it should - we can fix it easily. If this thing generates spaghetti code with names (at best) guessed from the icons on the screenshot - then if it's ANYTHING short of 100% perfect every single time - then the effort to debug the code it generates will utterly erase any benefits it provides.
Furthermore - if I do use it to generate the GUI code with 99% perfection - then fix the 1% that isn't - and then the design team want to add another button - or move something - the AI will go off, do it's thing and make a new 99% perfect GUI code...will I then have to go in and fix a different set of 1% screwups? Because if I do, then this AI will not only be somewhat painful - it won't help the coding of GUI's at all, it'll actually cost programmers a LOT more time to fix any bugs it produces.
So that just says "let's make batteries" because that's what using energy to reverse the process is doing.
But battery technologists (energy storage technologists in general) are not saying this is a great idea - because it's exceedingly inefficient.
Better to pump water up a mountain while you have energy - and let it drive turbines when you need energy - or just let Elon Musk build a few more gigafactories and use mountains of batteries.
Those kinds of approaches are MUCH more reasonable than trying to shunt CO2 back and forth to one or other 'ethane.
It is a fundamental flaw in the capitalist system that you have to pay for raw materials, pay for labor, pay for R&D, pay for marketting, pay for the land your business occupies - but disposing of the waste that you generate is a freebie.
This biases things in favor of businesses that generate waste compared to businesses that either don't generate waste - or pay to clean it up.
Which explains why we're trashing the planet so efficiently.
The only way to make capitalism sustainable and fair is to make the cost of disposing of waste become a part of the cost of producing the product.
High waste products would then cost more - fewer people would buy them - and if they did, the cost of cleanup would be included, so no big deal.
Making this a "tax" only works if the organization that collects the tax spends it on doing the cleanup...but that's probably not gonna happen. Instead the tax is seen as a punishment for dirty businesses - and that's not something that's really popular.
An alternative would be to have the polluters be required to do the cleanup. This is more direct than taxation - and fairer - and it removes "the middle man" - which is also good.
In pure abstract capitalism theory - we might argue that if people wanted a clean environment, that they'd simply boycott products from businesses that didn't give them what they need. But we have a "Crisis of the Commons" situation here. For each individual person, their benefit from cheaper/dirtier products exceeds their perceived loss...and that would be a problem if the vast majority of people didn't do that. But they do - it's human nature.
But however you slice it - capitalism is broken and we need to fix it somehow. No matter what, government has to be involved because "market forces" are failing miserably.
So a "carbon tax" would work - or a law that said "You make the pollution - you fix it!" would work. The former can be graduated and controlled more easily than the latter - especially for things like carbon emissions that really cannot be fixed. The latter would prevent things like plastic waste in the oceans from being a problem more effectively than a "plastics tax" and a proliferation of other taxes.
The German "green dot" program is a good example of the "you did it - you fix it" approach. Products labelled like that REQUIRE the manufacturer to provide recycling processes to de-manufacture these products...either themselves - or by paying a contribution to centralised recycling plants in proportion to the cost of recycling their products.
However, for other businesses - a carbon tax would also work.
Yes - exactly. The insane quantities of CO2 that ANY sequestration method generates ("Clean coal"...yeah...right) would be vastly more than we could use industrially - or otherwise. CO2 simply isn't a very useful gas - it's not in high demand.
So you're down to storing it somehow.
But storing it as a CO2 gas at atmospheric pressure would require a VERY large volume of storage space - even ideas like pumping it down into the underground voids where we extracted the natural gas from doesn't work because natural gas comes out at high pressure and you'd have to pressurize the CO2 to get it all to fit down there.
So no matter what - you'd have to COMPRESS the CO2 in order to store it - but when you look at the energy requirements to compress CO2, it's more than the energy produced by GENERATING the CO2 in the first place. So you can't do that either.
Great - so you've separated the CO2...now what?
This kind of research is annoying - it gives false hope to the fossil fuel proponents and does NOTHING...zip...nada...to help the global warming crisis. The researchers should have thought of this before they even started their research...and I'd bet good money that they know it to be true but accepted the research funding anyway. What they've produced is a PR "win" for a business that's trying very hard to hold on to it's income in face of rising criticism and falling wind/solar costs...and that's an intellectually dishonest thing to do...naughty *NAUGHTY* researchers.
The trouble with something like this is that once ISP's start collecting income this way, building entire business models on charging web sites to send data over their networks - it'll be hard for future (saner) governments to reverse. Passing laws that cause businesses to fail is a tough call.
But this is a truly crazy, irresponsible piece of legislation.
The idea that allowing this makes the Internet more free shows a TOTAL lack of understanding as to what makes it tick.
Ask yourself: How will WIkipedia pay ISP's for the data people pull from it? How could some new service of a similar nature spring into existence if it had to factor in those charges? How will sites like GitHub continue to operate a free service to the OpenSource movement?
If you kill those vitally important sites - this would be a disaster for humanity!
Admittedly, we don't KNOW that they'd die - but we're taking a hell of a risk here. Suppose Wikipedia says "We can only provide service to countries with net neutrality." ...now the entire USA is unable to reach Wikipedia anymore.
Then there is the matter of stifling innovation - right now, a small web-based business can stick up a web site and get a service running for almost $0...this encourages all sorts of innovators to try their hand at starting an internet business. If you force them to pay for end-users bandwidth - then nobody can take the risk of providing that kind of service because you have no clue at the outset how much bandwidth you're going to be responsible for. Imagine the prospect of data caps for web site providers!
As a practical matter, there are hundreds and hundreds of ISP's - if they all start charging at different rates and with different business models, do I (as a small web business owner) have to somehow monitor which end-users consumed what bandwidth and send out hundreds of checks each month? That clearly can't happen - so you just know there will be 'aggregation' businesses that'll take a flat-rate charge from web sites and disperse this to the ISP's...so now you have yet another middle-man leaching off of all of us.
What this will do is to force small web site users to go to FaceBook and small businesses to sell via Amazon.
I can't imagine a worse thing to do to the net.
Produce a one-page "procedures" document - clearly, but simply lay out the process in moving code from the programmer's branch to the QA branch and into the production branch. Have everyone read and sign it.
The first time someone violates it, you give them an informal warning.
The second time they violate it, have them sit down with management and HR and tell them that if they violate the rules again, they'll be terminated.
The third time, you terminate them.
Easy...no automation required...you simply have to cause a change in the 'culture'. Programmers are very good at following rules - providing they are clearly stated and obviously put in place for a reason.
If you insist on there being an automated system...
When I've worked on setups like this, we give programmers the rights to do what they like in their own working branch(es) and into the QA branch - but deny them access to the production branch. QA get read-access to the QA branch and are the only people allowed to check stuff into the production branch. Generally programmers get their build together at the end of a sprint - then at the start of the next sprint, QA check it out and either release it or punt it back to the programmers...have two week sprints instead of six so that this doesn't add too much latency into the bug fix cycle. If you're spending more time fixing small bugs than adding large features, then you can temporarily drop the sprint cycle down to one week - if major features are being rolled out - then push the cycle up to at most 3 weeks.
Won't work. The ISS doesn't have enough radiation shielding to allow astronauts to survive for long beyond the Van Allan belts. Also, it would take a VERY long time to go anywhere on the "10 Watts in, 10 micro-Newtons of thrust out" that an EM drive provides. The ISS has about 100 kW of solar power capacity - and if 100% of that went into an array of 10,000 EM drives - you'd get 10 milli-Newtons of thrust out. The ISS has a mass of around 400,000kg and needs about 10m/s of deltaV added to it every couple of months just to stay in orbit.
There is no way for EM drives to do anything of use whatever.
Yeah - but the ISS would end up being about 1% of all of the engineering you describe...and because it doesn't have enough shielding to operate safely beyond the Van Allan belts - and it's solar panels won't deliver enough power out by Mars - you's end up with a TON or rework to do.
The trouble it brings would by far exceed it's worth.
If the ISS is going to be worth anything - it's right in the orbit it's in now. Because it needs to be re-boosted to higher orbits every 3 to 6 months - it's not a free resource.
So unless you find a benefit that it's giving to humanity that exceeds the resupply/boost cost where it is right now - then the only cost-effective thing to do is to crash it into the Pacific ocean.
You're right - but if the US doesn't pass a law to continue to fund it past 2024 - then there is no chance of the other countries providing enough cash to keep it flying. If the USA said "We're going to donate our part to private space agencies (who probably won't want to provide food/water/supplies to YOUR astronauts)"...then what could they do about it?
I agree - it's really not doing a whole lot for us.
Ditching it into the pacific would be a bad idea - but donating it to privately owned space businesses like SpaceX and Bigelow who are already working with the ISS would make a lot more sense. Consider the boost to US business if those companies had free access to the ISS!
NASA did their job here - they got private industry interested in that stuff - now they can step back from doing what they already know how to do - and get on with the difficult researchy stuff.
The trouble is that once you're out of low Earth Orbit, you don't get any of the earth's magnetic field protection from solar radiation. Long term occupancy of a structure outside of that orbit requires decent quantities of shielding - which the ISS doesn't have.
If you think the ISS is costly to maintain now - imagine what it would be if each resupply mission needs a rocket the size of a Saturn V to get food, water and oxygen up to a lunar orbit.
Sure, EVENTUALLY, you can get oxygen and water from the moon - but that won't happen until LONG after 2024.
Sadly - although this seems like a reasonable idea - I think it's a non-starter.
No we aren't. I run a dozen web sites for myself, my family, my home business, my wife's home business. None of those are Facebook pages.