"The site is the host to discussion forums, in which some union members posted internal company documents that detailed safe methods for crossing picket lines, as well as digital photos of workers and managers still on the job."
If the company did not act to block the site I think that would be more of a problem. It is not acceptable to have a website that posts photos of employees who are crossing the picket line.
Hey, I am Steve Jones of UBC Team Thunderbird. We are a Canadian team based out of the University of British Columbia. We have a very clear plan for how we are going to use Fuzzy Logic to deal with the unique challenges of this vehicle and are very actively implementing those plans at this time. We have been making an incredible amount of progress over the past few weeks as we have moved into the full implementation stage after a lot of planning. We are already well beyond what is visible in the Discovery Channel segment. You can find out more about our team at http://www.ubcthunderbird.com/. (We should have our entrance video posted later today but right now you can see a segment that was broadcast on Discovery Channel and CTV.)
Thanks, Steve Jones Instrumentation and Sensors Group Leader steventy@gmail.com
Robotics and Atificial Intelligence is going to a major transforming part of the next century and it is something that needs to be dealt with by all levels of society. Currently most of the debate on the matter is limited to a few people who know a lot. Movies about robots help bring the debate to all levels of society.
- Steven
Can you imagine ford decided to stop making parts for 95 mustangs? There would be a huge uproar. When you have an operating system with the quality of windows 95 or a car with similar quality and you put a large investment into it, you expect that it will remain relevent for at least 6 years.
My school is part of an organization called Engineers Without Borders.
http://www.ewb-isf.org/
I appears to be a Canadian organization, but if you are from the states they will at least be able to give you more information about what you are looking for.
Is hydrogen that dangerous? In a leak situation it quickly disperses and floats away right? As opposed to other fuels that will burn in an accident. I mean everyone dies in plan crashes anyways, I donlt think the survival record can get much worse. And if we all had secure hydrogen fuel tanks in a safe location in our cars and then I proposed that we instead carry around many gallons of flamable and explosive gasoline in thin tanks that rupture in accidents followed by the fuel spilling and flowing until it found a spark you would all call me crazy.
Any creative ideas of how to use large icebergs like this for any good? I mean if it is moving it would take a lot of force to move it. What if you attached a cable to it and the other end to a motor so that as the cable got stretched it would be moving a motor and creating electricity?
I had a reasonable argument and I backed it up with a reasonable idea. If we all sit around and say that encryption is bad, we are just shooting ourselves in the foot. I think that we need to quit fighting this on an encryption by encryption method and make some real progress. In the end we all want to be able to access music and software and other things online, and in the end this means that there are going to have to be control systems. We should back up, and start fresh with some new inititives that are followed by a wide variety of companies.
If people were allowed to break into stores and steal everything then there would be no stores.
If a store owner hires a gaurd dog and it bites a robber than I don't have any sympathy for the dog.
If we as a society are to evolve and support a digital market place then we must support control factors like encryption techniques. If we want to sit around and say that all software and music should be free and no "gaurd dogs" are allowed then we will not get anywhere. If we let the electronic market place continue to evolve then there are many great oppourtunities for the future. Granted the current state of the matter is really messy. What really needs to happen is a large meeting, with consumer groups, software companies, record labels, musicians, presidents...and they need to try to come to some agreement of where they are starting and where they want to go.
- Steven
Human exploration of space is a waste of $$$
on
The Real Mission to Mars
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
For the time being anyway, I believe that human exploration of space is a waste of money.
Thirty years ago man walked on the moon and the whole world watched in awe. It was a great accomplishment, both in its sheer difficulty and its scientific value. Making goals and managing the missions of NASA is a complicated task. It is a government organization with no income, and no clear objective, yet 14 billion dollars of the entire federal budget is dedicated to it each year1. Although sending a man to the moon was an appropriate goal in the 1960's, I believe that because of many conditions that have changed in the past thirty years all human space travel should be suspended for the time being in light of other, equally exciting robotic missions.
Missions to space can have many positive outcomes besides the immediate and direct objectives of the mission and all of these must be considered when determining the value of a mission. In the 1960's there was a huge race for the first nation to land a man on the moon. When the Russians beat the United states to launching a satellite, "it seemed that everyone[In the United States] from school children to newspaper reporters to politicians was bemoaning national failure."2 The space race was a huge unifying force within the nation and so space missions to land on a moon had huge political purpose as well as their scientific purpose. In the 1960's not very much was known about the surface of the moon and human observation and collection of samples, including 384 kg of moon rocks3 provided a great deal of scientific data. There was also a lot of discovery about the effects of space on humans. In that era of time, human exploration of the local space around the Earth and of the moon provided huge amounts of scientific information while also having large political uses.
It is thirty years later and NASA has come a long way in its scientific discovery of the moon and its superiority over other nations in space travel. The United States is now the predominant force in space, and after twelve men on the moon and thirty years of humans living in space the human race has discovered huge amounts of information about the moon and living in space. Instruments have been placed on the moon, we have maps of its complete surface and we are still doing analysis on samples of its rocks. National pride, although still an aspect of the space mission is not nearly as huge an aspect as it was in the 1960's and there is no longer a race with any other nation. Because of changes in our understanding of space and the technology available to us today's space missions have the opportunity to make new discoveries about the many other planets in our solar system and many other things about the expansive space beyond it. We should be focussing our energy on exploring other planets as we have the moon, as well as performing experiments on the nature of the universe and on how the Earth is changing. Missions along these lines are the exploration of Mars, advanced biological and physical experiments in microgravity situations, the satellites and space telescopes which collect information about outerspace as well as many other missions that have not yet come to light. NASA is in a situation in which they have a huge potential that is currently not being utilized.
Currently NASA is making some progress in the exploration of mars with robots but they are spending huge amounts of money and time on the International Space Station (ISS) which is an orbiting laboratory designed to perform experiments in low gravity conditions.4 Performing these kinds of experiments is a good idea, but due to advances in robotic technology, this mission does not need to be performed by humans.
In the 1960's robots were very primitive, basically non-existent. The computer brains that powered them were only a fraction as powerful as today's computers. If any dynamic task were to be achieved it had to be done by a human, so sending humans to space was a given for planetary exploration and in space experiments. Today humans have the exact same capabilities as they did in the 60's, but their robotic colleagues have matured greatly. Robots are good in space because they do not need life support systems and they can detect many more things than humans. A robot can have 10 different kinds of cameras detecting 10 different kinds of information and recording it all perfectly whereas a human can only see one kind of information, visible light, and has no perfect memory of the encounter. A robot is also reproducible and it would be feasible to design one robot and then send 20 to a planet instead of just sending one human. Quote on success of mars pathfinder mission. The robots of today are different than the robots of the 60's, and are much better suited to space travel.
When sending a human into space there is a large amount of effort spent on life support systems. The cost and design time to provide a human with oxygen, food, water, heat and to return the human to Earth is incredibly huge compared to the cost of installing a solar panel on a robot which can meet all of its needs, and if the robot mission fails, no lives are lost so the amount of safety precautions and over-engineering is greatly reduced. The cost of the ISS is being estimated to run over $100 billion5, whereas the cost of the mars pathfinder mission was only $264 million6.
In the 1960's due to the hype surrounding the space race, the US government was giving basically unlimited funds to NASA to sponsor the space race 7 This gave the huge amount of monetary resources required for the development and deployment of many manned missions. Whatever was needed to get a man on the moon was given to NASA.
In the beginning of the 21st century the budget for NASA is much tighter, less than 1% of the federal budget or about $14 B. The developments of new technologies have opened the possibilities for many new kinds of missions so the reduced funding is spread more thinly and the full potential of the space program is not being realized. The best way for NASA to deal with this is to take funding away from very inefficient missions such as human space flight, which can not compete with robotics for the amount of scientific discovery per dollar spent, and to spend that money on the robotic and electronic discovery sectors. The human space flight division currently uses up $5.5 billion of the $14 billion in the NASA budget. That would be enough money for 21 complete Mars Pathfinder missions, each year or if applied to a robotic ISS the number of experiments could increase.
Due to shifts in the goals of space exploration, the monetary resources available, and the technical resources available, a dramatic shift towards robotic exploration in space should be made. In the future the variables will shift again and we will be faced with this question again, but if the program is to remain successful it must be able to adapt to these changing conditions.
Space expolration should be preformed by robots.
on
Poor NASA
·
· Score: 2, Informative
At least for the time being, I think that NASA should be concentrating on exploring space by robots. I think that NASA may think that every americans dream is going to space. Because of that, and a lack of concrete motives for NASA, programs like the ISS happen. Sending humans to space is much more expensive than sending robots, and with todays robotic technology, I think that a lot more discovery could be made with robotic explorers. This may lead to sending humans to space, but the robots should go first.
-CheezWizFire
Slashdot Mirror
This kind of a service is already available in the US http://www.infosat.com/services/hsi/index.html#
"The site is the host to discussion forums, in which some union members posted internal company documents that detailed safe methods for crossing picket lines, as well as digital photos of workers and managers still on the job."
If the company did not act to block the site I think that would be more of a problem. It is not acceptable to have a website that posts photos of employees who are crossing the picket line.
Hey,
I am Steve Jones of UBC Team Thunderbird. We are a Canadian team based out of the University of British Columbia. We have a very clear plan for how we are going to use Fuzzy Logic to deal with the unique challenges of this vehicle and are very actively implementing those plans at this time. We have been making an incredible amount of progress over the past few weeks as we have moved into the full implementation stage after a lot of planning. We are already well beyond what is visible in the Discovery Channel segment. You can find out more about our team at http://www.ubcthunderbird.com/. (We should have our entrance video posted later today but right now you can see a segment that was broadcast on Discovery Channel and CTV.)
Thanks,
Steve Jones
Instrumentation and Sensors Group Leader
steventy@gmail.com
Robotics and Atificial Intelligence is going to a major transforming part of the next century and it is something that needs to be dealt with by all levels of society. Currently most of the debate on the matter is limited to a few people who know a lot. Movies about robots help bring the debate to all levels of society. - Steven
Yeah, my point did kinda suck a lot.
Can you imagine ford decided to stop making parts for 95 mustangs? There would be a huge uproar. When you have an operating system with the quality of windows 95 or a car with similar quality and you put a large investment into it, you expect that it will remain relevent for at least 6 years.
My school is part of an organization called Engineers Without Borders. http://www.ewb-isf.org/ I appears to be a Canadian organization, but if you are from the states they will at least be able to give you more information about what you are looking for.
Is hydrogen that dangerous? In a leak situation it quickly disperses and floats away right? As opposed to other fuels that will burn in an accident. I mean everyone dies in plan crashes anyways, I donlt think the survival record can get much worse. And if we all had secure hydrogen fuel tanks in a safe location in our cars and then I proposed that we instead carry around many gallons of flamable and explosive gasoline in thin tanks that rupture in accidents followed by the fuel spilling and flowing until it found a spark you would all call me crazy.
-Steven
Well that explains the bed of nails.
ARe there the same differences in a university setting?
Any creative ideas of how to use large icebergs like this for any good? I mean if it is moving it would take a lot of force to move it. What if you attached a cable to it and the other end to a motor so that as the cable got stretched it would be moving a motor and creating electricity?
I had a reasonable argument and I backed it up with a reasonable idea. If we all sit around and say that encryption is bad, we are just shooting ourselves in the foot. I think that we need to quit fighting this on an encryption by encryption method and make some real progress. In the end we all want to be able to access music and software and other things online, and in the end this means that there are going to have to be control systems. We should back up, and start fresh with some new inititives that are followed by a wide variety of companies.
If people were allowed to break into stores and steal everything then there would be no stores. If a store owner hires a gaurd dog and it bites a robber than I don't have any sympathy for the dog. If we as a society are to evolve and support a digital market place then we must support control factors like encryption techniques. If we want to sit around and say that all software and music should be free and no "gaurd dogs" are allowed then we will not get anywhere. If we let the electronic market place continue to evolve then there are many great oppourtunities for the future. Granted the current state of the matter is really messy. What really needs to happen is a large meeting, with consumer groups, software companies, record labels, musicians, presidents...and they need to try to come to some agreement of where they are starting and where they want to go. - Steven
For the time being anyway, I believe that human exploration of space is a waste of money.
Thirty years ago man walked on the moon and the whole world watched in awe. It was a great accomplishment, both in its sheer difficulty and its scientific value. Making goals and managing the missions of NASA is a complicated task. It is a government organization with no income, and no clear objective, yet 14 billion dollars of the entire federal budget is dedicated to it each year1. Although sending a man to the moon was an appropriate goal in the 1960's, I believe that because of many conditions that have changed in the past thirty years all human space travel should be suspended for the time being in light of other, equally exciting robotic missions.
Missions to space can have many positive outcomes besides the immediate and direct objectives of the mission and all of these must be considered when determining the value of a mission. In the 1960's there was a huge race for the first nation to land a man on the moon. When the Russians beat the United states to launching a satellite, "it seemed that everyone[In the United States] from school children to newspaper reporters to politicians was bemoaning national failure."2 The space race was a huge unifying force within the nation and so space missions to land on a moon had huge political purpose as well as their scientific purpose. In the 1960's not very much was known about the surface of the moon and human observation and collection of samples, including 384 kg of moon rocks3 provided a great deal of scientific data. There was also a lot of discovery about the effects of space on humans. In that era of time, human exploration of the local space around the Earth and of the moon provided huge amounts of scientific information while also having large political uses.
It is thirty years later and NASA has come a long way in its scientific discovery of the moon and its superiority over other nations in space travel. The United States is now the predominant force in space, and after twelve men on the moon and thirty years of humans living in space the human race has discovered huge amounts of information about the moon and living in space. Instruments have been placed on the moon, we have maps of its complete surface and we are still doing analysis on samples of its rocks. National pride, although still an aspect of the space mission is not nearly as huge an aspect as it was in the 1960's and there is no longer a race with any other nation. Because of changes in our understanding of space and the technology available to us today's space missions have the opportunity to make new discoveries about the many other planets in our solar system and many other things about the expansive space beyond it. We should be focussing our energy on exploring other planets as we have the moon, as well as performing experiments on the nature of the universe and on how the Earth is changing. Missions along these lines are the exploration of Mars, advanced biological and physical experiments in microgravity situations, the satellites and space telescopes which collect information about outerspace as well as many other missions that have not yet come to light. NASA is in a situation in which they have a huge potential that is currently not being utilized.
Currently NASA is making some progress in the exploration of mars with robots but they are spending huge amounts of money and time on the International Space Station (ISS) which is an orbiting laboratory designed to perform experiments in low gravity conditions.4 Performing these kinds of experiments is a good idea, but due to advances in robotic technology, this mission does not need to be performed by humans.
In the 1960's robots were very primitive, basically non-existent. The computer brains that powered them were only a fraction as powerful as today's computers. If any dynamic task were to be achieved it had to be done by a human, so sending humans to space was a given for planetary exploration and in space experiments. Today humans have the exact same capabilities as they did in the 60's, but their robotic colleagues have matured greatly. Robots are good in space because they do not need life support systems and they can detect many more things than humans. A robot can have 10 different kinds of cameras detecting 10 different kinds of information and recording it all perfectly whereas a human can only see one kind of information, visible light, and has no perfect memory of the encounter. A robot is also reproducible and it would be feasible to design one robot and then send 20 to a planet instead of just sending one human. Quote on success of mars pathfinder mission. The robots of today are different than the robots of the 60's, and are much better suited to space travel.
When sending a human into space there is a large amount of effort spent on life support systems. The cost and design time to provide a human with oxygen, food, water, heat and to return the human to Earth is incredibly huge compared to the cost of installing a solar panel on a robot which can meet all of its needs, and if the robot mission fails, no lives are lost so the amount of safety precautions and over-engineering is greatly reduced. The cost of the ISS is being estimated to run over $100 billion5, whereas the cost of the mars pathfinder mission was only $264 million6.
In the 1960's due to the hype surrounding the space race, the US government was giving basically unlimited funds to NASA to sponsor the space race 7 This gave the huge amount of monetary resources required for the development and deployment of many manned missions. Whatever was needed to get a man on the moon was given to NASA.
In the beginning of the 21st century the budget for NASA is much tighter, less than 1% of the federal budget or about $14 B. The developments of new technologies have opened the possibilities for many new kinds of missions so the reduced funding is spread more thinly and the full potential of the space program is not being realized. The best way for NASA to deal with this is to take funding away from very inefficient missions such as human space flight, which can not compete with robotics for the amount of scientific discovery per dollar spent, and to spend that money on the robotic and electronic discovery sectors. The human space flight division currently uses up $5.5 billion of the $14 billion in the NASA budget. That would be enough money for 21 complete Mars Pathfinder missions, each year or if applied to a robotic ISS the number of experiments could increase.
Due to shifts in the goals of space exploration, the monetary resources available, and the technical resources available, a dramatic shift towards robotic exploration in space should be made. In the future the variables will shift again and we will be faced with this question again, but if the program is to remain successful it must be able to adapt to these changing conditions.
At least for the time being, I think that NASA should be concentrating on exploring space by robots. I think that NASA may think that every americans dream is going to space. Because of that, and a lack of concrete motives for NASA, programs like the ISS happen. Sending humans to space is much more expensive than sending robots, and with todays robotic technology, I think that a lot more discovery could be made with robotic explorers. This may lead to sending humans to space, but the robots should go first. -CheezWizFire