Sigh. I tried to rename a desktop icon by typing on it too. My keystrokes went no-where. That's so braindead. If I'm pressing keys on the keyboard obviously I want the computer to do something with them.
Yes, but you're a geek. Normal people don't say "I've gotta reboot the microwave now." I remember when saying "power cycle" was cool. Face it, we can't even tell when we're using jargon anymore.
The whole point of my post was to say that chemical rockets are a dead end. NASA should be flying new propulsion technology like nuclear fission powered plasma rockets and M2P2 engines. Instead, these technologies remain purely hypothetical. There's hope that the later will be tested by commercial space industry but there's no hope of the former.
Umm no. If you accelerated as 9.8 m/s^2 to the midpoint between earth and mars and then decelerated the same until you got to mars the entire trip would take *hours* not weeks and the human occupants would experience a standard gravity.. much more confortable than zero gravity. And yes, it would take vast amounts of fuel to do this with existing space propulsion technology.. but that's the whole point of my post! We should be testing new technologies. For example, something we could do right now with today's technology is essentially a nuclear submarine in space with an ion drive instead of a propeller. Use a nuclear fission engine (that the navy has years and years of experience running) to heat plasma and you'd have no problems completing the above scenario. And to think, that's not even harnessing the energy rich environment of space to propel our craft. Using an electromagnetic plasma bubble it's possible to capture the solar wind to propel our craft. You don't even need fuel to power the sail once it gets going.
But all this is speculation until you actually get up there and fly it. A magnetosphere solar sail might be something that a university or commercial interest can flight test, but a nuclear powered ion engine is something only the government can launch.. and is therefore clearly what NASA should be working on.
Well commercial interests are supposed to push this, but there's simply no market for it yet, so we're dependant on government funding. Hopefully that will change in the next 20 years. Here's some cool space propulsion technology. When will we see a flight test of this stuff?
If the mars rovers were to discover proof that there is still life on Mars it would be in the interest of every pharmaceutical company on earth to get that sample into their lab before their competitor. One alien microbe would be worth more than a zillion times its weight in gold. The ability to study a new form of life would give us so much insight into the life sciences that we could help many more "folks" than if we shut our eyes and turn our back on the universe.
Last time I checked people still bought houses after they are built as well as before they are built. If robots are delegated solely to this market they'll still revolutionise the industry.
Is our current level of technology the end state for space probes? It seems we hear about a new mission every week built with the same old technology. I mean, SMART-1 was a different story, it was new technology and the mission was simply to test fly it. That's what we should be doing isn't it? Flying new technology so we can get to Mars in two weeks instead of two years.
Yeah, I really long for the good old days where laws had something to do with morality. Cause all this freedom to practice religious beliefs, not get married to the person you live with, even go out in public if you happen to be female, it's getting a bit old. Better to go back to a time where the government dictated morality to me.
Laws are supposed to exist to reduce the amount of conflict in society and help people resolve their differences so they can live in peace.
As with any invention, the proof is in the pudding. When someone makes an entire modern house using 100% robotic labor we will start to see a revolution, until then, it's just hot air.
But does that mean you should just ignore the millions of instances of copyright infringment that occur daily using P2P software? Should you ignore crime?
Absolutely not. We should remove the laws that make this a crime and rethink the entire system under which these laws came about.
See, fuck the unions. If a bunch of robotics postgrads decided to start a construction company because they saw they had the capability of building robots which can do all the manual labor required, there's nothing in the world that could stop them. Any attempt by government to shut them down would be struck down by the courts as anti-competitive and unconstitutional.
Unfortunately everyone would rather post the exact same thing as they posted last time there was a space elevator story. Essentially ignorant The Sky Will Fall arguments that have been debunked since the Space Elevator was proposed in the 70s.
No, the cool bit is that you could conceivably build a self assembling system out of these macroscale parts which works the same way as an equivalent microscale system. Much easier to design something when you can work with it. In fact, I bet if you were to give 1000 of these parts to a bunch of 5th graders and teach them the concept of self assembly they could come up with a working system in a day.
My g/f puts vegemite on so that it is black. I put my vegemite on so that it mixes with the butter and becomes light brown. It's got a strong taste so you've got to build up a tolerance to it. Kind of the inverse of seafood.
I'm going to reply to this post and this post only. You don't know what you're on about. You havn't even read the patent. How can you possibily hold an opinion about how obvious this patent is? STFU.
Yep, cause why can't Smuckers just stock their factory with thousands of people standing in front of a chopping board using butter knives and to fish the product out of jars? That's how my mum used to make em! For one, it's a peanut butter and jelly filled pastry, not a sandwich. Obviously the current mechanisms for putting this filling into the type of pastry they use isn't adequate, so they needed new machinery, which means they needed to design and get them built. What stops the manufacturer of these machines from selling them to a competitor? What stops other manufacturers from making them if the design gets leaked? Why, patent law does.
I was refering to the fact that you seem to think that because person A was making product X before person B invented process Z to make product X that for some reason process Z couldn't not be patented. Which is simply false.
This pisses me off. All you geeks are ranting about how you basically shouldn't be able to patent anything. It doesn't matter what the product is that you're making, you should be able to patent a novel process. If I figure out a way to synthesize a new drug I should be able to patent that process. If I figure out a way to put together a toaster faster than my competitor then I should be able to patent that process. No-one is trying to patent peanut butter (paste) and jelly (jam) sandwiches, Smuckers is trying to defend their patent on a particular process they use to make a product that just happens to include these ingredients. You're free to clone their product and compete with them, you just have to come up with your own process to do it. Without this protection any innovation Smuckers puts into improving their process can be just copied by competitors. That means Smuckers cant put any significant amount of investment into refining their process or they'll be undercut by competitors that copy it without cost. That's the justification for patents and without it we wouldn't have all the innovative technology we use every day. Unlike copyright, patents are not about incentives, they're about outright survival in a competitive market place.
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Sigh. I tried to rename a desktop icon by typing on it too. My keystrokes went no-where. That's so braindead. If I'm pressing keys on the keyboard obviously I want the computer to do something with them.
Yes, but you're a geek. Normal people don't say "I've gotta reboot the microwave now." I remember when saying "power cycle" was cool. Face it, we can't even tell when we're using jargon anymore.
The whole point of my post was to say that chemical rockets are a dead end. NASA should be flying new propulsion technology like nuclear fission powered plasma rockets and M2P2 engines. Instead, these technologies remain purely hypothetical. There's hope that the later will be tested by commercial space industry but there's no hope of the former.
It does with that attitude.
Umm no. If you accelerated as 9.8 m/s^2 to the midpoint between earth and mars and then decelerated the same until you got to mars the entire trip would take *hours* not weeks and the human occupants would experience a standard gravity.. much more confortable than zero gravity. And yes, it would take vast amounts of fuel to do this with existing space propulsion technology.. but that's the whole point of my post! We should be testing new technologies. For example, something we could do right now with today's technology is essentially a nuclear submarine in space with an ion drive instead of a propeller. Use a nuclear fission engine (that the navy has years and years of experience running) to heat plasma and you'd have no problems completing the above scenario. And to think, that's not even harnessing the energy rich environment of space to propel our craft. Using an electromagnetic plasma bubble it's possible to capture the solar wind to propel our craft. You don't even need fuel to power the sail once it gets going.
But all this is speculation until you actually get up there and fly it. A magnetosphere solar sail might be something that a university or commercial interest can flight test, but a nuclear powered ion engine is something only the government can launch.. and is therefore clearly what NASA should be working on.
Well commercial interests are supposed to push this, but there's simply no market for it yet, so we're dependant on government funding. Hopefully that will change in the next 20 years. Here's some cool space propulsion technology. When will we see a flight test of this stuff?
If the mars rovers were to discover proof that there is still life on Mars it would be in the interest of every pharmaceutical company on earth to get that sample into their lab before their competitor. One alien microbe would be worth more than a zillion times its weight in gold. The ability to study a new form of life would give us so much insight into the life sciences that we could help many more "folks" than if we shut our eyes and turn our back on the universe.
Last time I checked people still bought houses after they are built as well as before they are built. If robots are delegated solely to this market they'll still revolutionise the industry.
Is our current level of technology the end state for space probes? It seems we hear about a new mission every week built with the same old technology. I mean, SMART-1 was a different story, it was new technology and the mission was simply to test fly it. That's what we should be doing isn't it? Flying new technology so we can get to Mars in two weeks instead of two years.
Yeah, I really long for the good old days where laws had something to do with morality. Cause all this freedom to practice religious beliefs, not get married to the person you live with, even go out in public if you happen to be female, it's getting a bit old. Better to go back to a time where the government dictated morality to me.
Laws are supposed to exist to reduce the amount of conflict in society and help people resolve their differences so they can live in peace.
As with any invention, the proof is in the pudding. When someone makes an entire modern house using 100% robotic labor we will start to see a revolution, until then, it's just hot air.
Absolutely not. We should remove the laws that make this a crime and rethink the entire system under which these laws came about.
See, fuck the unions. If a bunch of robotics postgrads decided to start a construction company because they saw they had the capability of building robots which can do all the manual labor required, there's nothing in the world that could stop them. Any attempt by government to shut them down would be struck down by the courts as anti-competitive and unconstitutional.
Unfortunately everyone would rather post the exact same thing as they posted last time there was a space elevator story. Essentially ignorant The Sky Will Fall arguments that have been debunked since the Space Elevator was proposed in the 70s.
No, the cool bit is that you could conceivably build a self assembling system out of these macroscale parts which works the same way as an equivalent microscale system. Much easier to design something when you can work with it. In fact, I bet if you were to give 1000 of these parts to a bunch of 5th graders and teach them the concept of self assembly they could come up with a working system in a day.
My g/f puts vegemite on so that it is black. I put my vegemite on so that it mixes with the butter and becomes light brown. It's got a strong taste so you've got to build up a tolerance to it. Kind of the inverse of seafood.
No-one was talking about software genius, go back to sleep.
Oh for fuck sake, READ THE GOD DAMN ARTICLE.
I'm going to reply to this post and this post only. You don't know what you're on about. You havn't even read the patent. How can you possibily hold an opinion about how obvious this patent is? STFU.
Yep, cause why can't Smuckers just stock their factory with thousands of people standing in front of a chopping board using butter knives and to fish the product out of jars? That's how my mum used to make em! For one, it's a peanut butter and jelly filled pastry, not a sandwich. Obviously the current mechanisms for putting this filling into the type of pastry they use isn't adequate, so they needed new machinery, which means they needed to design and get them built. What stops the manufacturer of these machines from selling them to a competitor? What stops other manufacturers from making them if the design gets leaked? Why, patent law does.
I was refering to the fact that you seem to think that because person A was making product X before person B invented process Z to make product X that for some reason process Z couldn't not be patented. Which is simply false.
Braindead hippy gets modded up on Slashdot, news at 11.
This pisses me off. All you geeks are ranting about how you basically shouldn't be able to patent anything. It doesn't matter what the product is that you're making, you should be able to patent a novel process. If I figure out a way to synthesize a new drug I should be able to patent that process. If I figure out a way to put together a toaster faster than my competitor then I should be able to patent that process. No-one is trying to patent peanut butter (paste) and jelly (jam) sandwiches, Smuckers is trying to defend their patent on a particular process they use to make a product that just happens to include these ingredients. You're free to clone their product and compete with them, you just have to come up with your own process to do it. Without this protection any innovation Smuckers puts into improving their process can be just copied by competitors. That means Smuckers cant put any significant amount of investment into refining their process or they'll be undercut by competitors that copy it without cost. That's the justification for patents and without it we wouldn't have all the innovative technology we use every day. Unlike copyright, patents are not about incentives, they're about outright survival in a competitive market place.
pocket bread? Beats the hell out of me, I'm aussie too :)
Yep, cause every MMORPG has Interlock, gunplay, professional actors and screenplay writers.