Guy, Hubble is a dead scope walking. We won't be fixing it, ever.
Of course, if the scope had been designed for automated servicing, then it would have a long future ahead of it.
Alas, it was designed to help justify the shuttle, and as a result it will die with the shuttle - as originally intended. The planners didn't think the shuttle would get canceled anyway and that they'd lose the hubble as result. The hubble was intended to help prevent the shuttle from being canceled in the first place.
Kind of like mutually assured destruction - all those nukes whose only purpose is to deter the use of other nukes. Once somebody launches a ton of missles the remaining nukes have already failed their mission - so now we just need to decide whether we should finish off the rest of humanity. Ironic, isn't it - nukes only are effective if the enemy is thoroughly convinced that you won't hesitate to use them. On the other hand, if the enemy attacks anyway you're going to die - what is the point of taking all of humanity with you?
In any case, maybe the solution is to plan a new hubble which is servicable via robots and which complements the capabilities of the Webb and which costs less than the original Hubble. There is no law which says we can't put up somebody better some day...
Last time I checked, just about every piece of software out there has a 4-digit year hard-coded into it. Sure, some will handle 64-bit dates, but I'm guessing that much of the UI assumes a 4-digit year.
So, somebody will have to deal with the Y10K crisis in the distant future.
Ultimately, it is the same problem that caused Y2K, just a little farther off. Either way it is the same cause - the guy who designed the software figured he'd be retired by the time it had to be fixed...
Re:bad article summary from bad article title
on
Photoshop for DNA
·
· Score: 1
I must say I'm impressed! Put all this in a black box and sell it for $100k and it will do for DNA systhesis what the ABI 770 (or whatever the model number is) did for sequencing... I can picture libraries of clones with every possible single- and double-mutant of a moderate-size protein - that would have endless uses...
Yeah, but the next thing you know the spammers will figure out how to get monkeys to type sales pitches...
Re:bad article summary from bad article title
on
Photoshop for DNA
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Being able to make long synthetic DNA sequences would be immensely valuable. Right now practicality limits synthtic DNA to less than 100 bases. Genes are kilobases long even in bacteria. You need megabases for animals if you want to keep the introns intact (scary - a single animal gene can approach an entire bacterial genome in length).
What the article lacks is one critical detail - how exactly they plan on doing all this.
Imagine I started a new company designed to revolutionize computing, pointing out that your measly PC can only run at a few GHz, and I'll make them run at a few THz. Sure, that's great to say, but it would be nice to at least suggest how exactly one plans on going about this...
Try freenet, or eclipse, or gallery remote (which isn't nearly as large).
While they sometimes run, the VM will segfault frequently. Also, you often end up with one app which might work with Blackdown, and another which runs better with the Sun JDK, which is a pain.
Note that I'm taling about running a 64-bit VM. If you run a 32-bit VM then all works smoothly (as expected).
As others have suggested, the users change over time. Assumptions can paint you into corners.
For example, the intel world is slowly moving to 64-bit platforms. Clearly we aren't there yet, but things are steadily moving in this direction. It will probably be similar to the slow migration to 32-bit code that happened in the mid-90s with Win95.
If you've built up something the size of OpenOffice with 32-bit assumptions all over the place, you'll end up getting left behind. On the other hand, if your code is already clean then you'll move right along. (Incidentally, openoffice is one of the few open source apps with poor 64-bit support.)
Assumptions are fine, however poorly understood assumptions are not. If you understand your assumptions then working around them usually isn't all that hard. If you don't understand your assumptions then sooner or later you'll get burned...
Clearly you aren't running on amd64. I've given up on running just about anything other than helloworld.java on this platform, using any JDK I can get my hand on (both Blackdown and Sun, stable and beta versions).
A VM is just another architechture. In theory we could just write everything for x86 and then run emulators on every other platform, and it would be about the same thing.
The problem is that Java works great as long as you only run it on an x86, or maybe a sparc or a mac. And java apps have their downsides as well.
Sure, then we'd be able to increase salaries by a few tens of percent (maybe), and then CEOs would only be paid 300x as much as a bottom-rung worker, instead of the much loftier 400x...
Shareholders like pension funds, university endowments, and widows and orphans.
You do neglect the fact that other than pension funds, the items on your list hold virtually no stock at all (compared to the total value of the market).
The vast majority of stock is held by people who individually make well over $100,000 per year.
The pension funds are of course the exception, but if you ask a worker which he would rather have - his 401k savings or a guaranteed job for life, he'd pick the latter. Collectively 401k's are still large, but most workers they make up only a small part of their total earnings.
If you give a billionare a choice of losing his stock or losing his salary, he'd drop his salary in a heartbeat.
If you give almost any other person picked randomly off the street the same choice they'd drop their stock in a heartbeat.
This is why anything which is good for stockholders isn't necessarily great for America - at least not directly.
Don't get me wrong, investment has all kinds of benefits to the general public. However, the whole "most people own stock" argument is really a falicious one. "Most people" would throw away their stock in an instant if it kept them from losing their jobs...
After being through a half-dozen jobs in my life I realized that a capable person losing a job is an opportunity, not a tragedy.
Sure, if one person gets fired they'll bounce back - especially if their former employer gives them half-decent severance and all that.
On the other hand, if IBM closes down an office or otherwise terminates 2000 IT folks in the same town, there is no way that most will bounce back without relocating. No job market can absorb that many people when they have specialized jobs.
Cuts of that scale really are tragic. I'm not saying the solution is government regulation, but that doesn't mean that everything is swell either...
You see, the company won't be wiped out for quite a few years. Sure, it eventually will tank, but stock will go up before it goes down.
So, stock goes up, CEO sells stock. Stock goes down, CEO gets "fired" with a $10,000,000 severance package. CEO is crying all the way to the bank.
The problem is that companies have been transformed into short-sighted entities. Shareholders only care about the next few years - the only people who actually care about having jobs in 3 decades are the employees, who are the one class of people who have no say in corporate governance.
So what you are saying is that we can now breed 47 generations of people without having to actually go to the trouble of actually growing the people. Just reproduce the gametes and you can have sexual reproduction.
In theory you could do experiments on people that previously were only practical on rats/bacteria (which have shorter generation times).
I've always thought that the correct solution would be to have a small display on a smartcard with a PIN entry or biometric scanner.
The card would receive a receipt from the merchant, and it would display the name of the store, and the amount of the bill, and ask you to approve or hit the cancel button (approval by PIN or biometric). It would then sign the receipt and send it back to the merchant. You could use existing SSL technology which does a good job of preventing man-in-the-middles (require a merchant certificate issued by the credit card company, give those certs short expirations, verify the date on the receipt, etc.).
A system like this, if implemented correctly, would be VERY effective at preventing fraud. The card could generate its own keypair and import a certificate, and absolutely nobody would have a copy of the private key.
The difficulty would be online transactions. If you gave the card a USB interface or made a really cheap reader available, that might be sufficient.
Of course, when you think about it, in a large scale war almost everybody is a combatant. One person fires a gun, somebody back home makes the gun, another person makes the metal that makes the gun, another person makes the fuel used to make the metal, and a bunch of people work to keep all those people fed. The war could not be fought without all of them.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for not targetting noncombatants, but from what I've seen - when a war becomes a war of attrition, noncombattants become very tempting targets. After all, if you don't take them out, the other side will never run out of combatants (somebody has to give birth to them).
Rules of war are something that nations try to respect, but everybody tends to ignore them when the going gets tough. If you're an army commander, which are you going to work harder to protect - the million guys who work for you, or the 50 million civilians amongst which the bad guys are intersperced. Most likely your orders will be "try not to hurt anybody, but don't let that stop you from doing what you need to do to get the mission done."
I'd think that billions per projectile is stretching it. The projectiles would be compact, which means the launch vehicle can be streamlined, and even if the rods weigh 10,000 pounds each that is still only a few tens of millions each.
A few hours delay isn't a big deal - most likely this would be used against hardened fortifications - if we just want to blow up soem tanks we'd use anti-tank missles.
Plus, this is a weapons system which would give the military completely new destructive capabilities - it could potentially take out hardened bunkers which are currently impenetrable. Right now the only weapons that come close are nukes (which take about half an hour to deploy), and big bombs (which take many hours to deploy via heavy bombers which are rarely staged close to the action).
This isn't the kind of thing where you'd stockpile tens of thousands of weapons. Maybe you'd spend a billion or two to have a few hundred of them. The R&D on any military weapon costs a few billion, so this really isn't a vast sum by military standards...
As about the nickname "Rods of God", it could be just that, a nickname. But having heard some infamous speaches about good, axis of evil and so on, I'm not so sure...
I doubt that anybody in the conservative christian movement in the US would like the "Rods From God" nickname. It certainly sounds arrogant.
I think the general idea is that it is a nifty-sounding name for a massing piece of metal that comes flying at you out of the "heavens." If the US government didn't call them that already somebody on/. would and would get modded +5 funny...
So, what do UN resolutions have to do with the law?
The US has never been bound by UN resolutions. Nor for that matter has just about any other nation in general (that is - I'm sure just about every nation on earth has dodged a UN resolution when that suited its needs, although nations do try to follow them at their convenience). Treaties, perhaps (although even those have been backed out of carefully).
We already have weapons in space anyway - they're called spy satellites. It is a prefectly legal act in warfare to shoot down reconissance aircraft. Since just about every nation on earth has access to satellite imagry (either via government or commercial sources), it only makes sense to have some capabilty for defeating this tactic.
War knows no limits. Rules of warfare are only obeyed when nations can afford to do so. Every nation has dropped them almost immediately when they become expensive to follow, or when they threaten a military objective. Do you think the allies checked for hospitals when making their bombing runs over germany?
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for not going nuts with military spending. However, every nation is going to try to stay ahead, and it isn't realistic to think that just because you don't develop a technology that your enemies won't try to take advantage of that fact...
Any IT professional should expect this type of treatment. It is not discourteous, it is professional and appropriate. People who get their feathers ruffled because of this type of thing should check their egos.
Since when is expecting courtesy having an ego?
Sure, if somebody threatens a coworker they should be escorted out by armed guards. Everybody expects that, and it is should be done for the safety of everybody else if for no other reason.
Otherwise, treating employees as if you don't trust them tells them that you don't trust them. It speaks volumes.
"Professional" does not mean impersonal, or treating employees as if they are nothing more than capital.
The funny thing is that companies could accomplish most of the security-related goals without destroying the morale of everybody who is left. How about this scenario:
1. Employee is called to his boss's office. 2. Boss explains that he has to be let go. Boss has HR present, but HR is presented as being present in case employee has questions, and generally lets the boss (who has a personal relationship) do the talking. 3. Boss takes employee back to desk for "emotional support" and to help him with anything he needs to carry out. Rest of group gets to say goodbye. It is a sad day, but there is some sense of closure. Everybody gets to say goodbye. 4. Atmosphere is designed to communicate that employee is not persona-non-grata, and that his coworkers shoud feel free to pass on job openings, and generally feel free to maintain contact. Boss can be a part of this as well. 5. Employee is walked to the gate, and helped with boxes to the car by boss for emotional support. 6. Boss tells employee to call him if he needs anything before waving goodbye.
The employee has been supervised the whole time, and doesn't have an opportunity to cause mischeif. Yet, the entire time he is treated personably, and would be somewhat inclined to accept an offer to rejoin the company.
Companies often underestimate the impacts that terminations have on the people who remain behind. Seeing their coworkers treated with dignity will go a long way towards discouraging people from jumping off the sinking ship.
Nobody expects to have free reign inside a company they have just been terminated from. On the other hand, you can at least be nice about it...
Illustration in defence of point - your post was as an AC with a score of zero, so few if any/.'ers will ever read it, let alone anybody of consequence...:)
Well, while it probably should be deorbited for all the value it has, I doubt this decision would be made until conditions deterioriate to a point where it is impossible to sustain life onboard.
Nobody is ever going to admit that it was a mistake to ever build the ISS. As a result, nobody currently in power would ever make the decision to get rid of it unless it is to make room for something even more grandiose.
Actually that's about the only point of the ISS that actually makes any sense. Actually running an oxygen generator for long periods to see if it actually works. That's actually necessary to test out for a Mars mission.
Uh, why not just plug one in on the earth and hook an O2 meter to the output? Viola, you find out how well it performs over a long period of time. If you want to try out a different design or set of conditions, you can just reach over and tinker with it, and not have to send a shuttle into space.
Granted, this tells you nothing about zero-G performance, but that can be easily determined by sticking an O2 generator on a satellite with an oxygen meter on the output. You don't need to have a human being present to actually verify that the oxygen is breathable.
I'm all for making plans for long-distance solar voyages - especially if there is actually some reason to have humans present, or if there is some way to sustain an economy on another planet/moon/whatever. However, developing most of the technology to do all of this is much cheaper and easier if you don't actually do any of it in space.
If they can't even get the Biosphere project to work, how are they going to get a colony to work on Mars? Why don't we start with simulated space colonies on the surface of the earth first? If you can sustain a few dozen people in a dome for a few years on the ground, then feel free to start shooting them into space...
Slashdot Mirror
No one has a right to drive. It is a privilege.
Uh, how do you figure? Driving is a necessity of livlihood in most areas of the US.
Technically we don't have enumerated rights to walking either, but nobody would accept that walking is a "privilege."
Guy, Hubble is a dead scope walking. We won't be fixing it, ever.
Of course, if the scope had been designed for automated servicing, then it would have a long future ahead of it.
Alas, it was designed to help justify the shuttle, and as a result it will die with the shuttle - as originally intended. The planners didn't think the shuttle would get canceled anyway and that they'd lose the hubble as result. The hubble was intended to help prevent the shuttle from being canceled in the first place.
Kind of like mutually assured destruction - all those nukes whose only purpose is to deter the use of other nukes. Once somebody launches a ton of missles the remaining nukes have already failed their mission - so now we just need to decide whether we should finish off the rest of humanity. Ironic, isn't it - nukes only are effective if the enemy is thoroughly convinced that you won't hesitate to use them. On the other hand, if the enemy attacks anyway you're going to die - what is the point of taking all of humanity with you?
In any case, maybe the solution is to plan a new hubble which is servicable via robots and which complements the capabilities of the Webb and which costs less than the original Hubble. There is no law which says we can't put up somebody better some day...
Last time I checked, just about every piece of software out there has a 4-digit year hard-coded into it. Sure, some will handle 64-bit dates, but I'm guessing that much of the UI assumes a 4-digit year.
So, somebody will have to deal with the Y10K crisis in the distant future.
Ultimately, it is the same problem that caused Y2K, just a little farther off. Either way it is the same cause - the guy who designed the software figured he'd be retired by the time it had to be fixed...
I must say I'm impressed! Put all this in a black box and sell it for $100k and it will do for DNA systhesis what the ABI 770 (or whatever the model number is) did for sequencing... I can picture libraries of clones with every possible single- and double-mutant of a moderate-size protein - that would have endless uses...
Yeah, but the next thing you know the spammers will figure out how to get monkeys to type sales pitches...
Being able to make long synthetic DNA sequences would be immensely valuable. Right now practicality limits synthtic DNA to less than 100 bases. Genes are kilobases long even in bacteria. You need megabases for animals if you want to keep the introns intact (scary - a single animal gene can approach an entire bacterial genome in length).
What the article lacks is one critical detail - how exactly they plan on doing all this.
Imagine I started a new company designed to revolutionize computing, pointing out that your measly PC can only run at a few GHz, and I'll make them run at a few THz. Sure, that's great to say, but it would be nice to at least suggest how exactly one plans on going about this...
StorageTek is a profitable company with $191 million in profit
So, that means they'll break even in only 20 years!
A good buy at the wrong price isn't a good buy - unless they think they can grow the company REALLY fast!
Try freenet, or eclipse, or gallery remote (which isn't nearly as large).
While they sometimes run, the VM will segfault frequently. Also, you often end up with one app which might work with Blackdown, and another which runs better with the Sun JDK, which is a pain.
Note that I'm taling about running a 64-bit VM. If you run a 32-bit VM then all works smoothly (as expected).
As others have suggested, the users change over time. Assumptions can paint you into corners.
For example, the intel world is slowly moving to 64-bit platforms. Clearly we aren't there yet, but things are steadily moving in this direction. It will probably be similar to the slow migration to 32-bit code that happened in the mid-90s with Win95.
If you've built up something the size of OpenOffice with 32-bit assumptions all over the place, you'll end up getting left behind. On the other hand, if your code is already clean then you'll move right along. (Incidentally, openoffice is one of the few open source apps with poor 64-bit support.)
Assumptions are fine, however poorly understood assumptions are not. If you understand your assumptions then working around them usually isn't all that hard. If you don't understand your assumptions then sooner or later you'll get burned...
Clearly you aren't running on amd64. I've given up on running just about anything other than helloworld.java on this platform, using any JDK I can get my hand on (both Blackdown and Sun, stable and beta versions).
A VM is just another architechture. In theory we could just write everything for x86 and then run emulators on every other platform, and it would be about the same thing.
The problem is that Java works great as long as you only run it on an x86, or maybe a sparc or a mac. And java apps have their downsides as well.
Sure, then we'd be able to increase salaries by a few tens of percent (maybe), and then CEOs would only be paid 300x as much as a bottom-rung worker, instead of the much loftier 400x...
Shareholders like pension funds, university endowments, and widows and orphans.
You do neglect the fact that other than pension funds, the items on your list hold virtually no stock at all (compared to the total value of the market).
The vast majority of stock is held by people who individually make well over $100,000 per year.
The pension funds are of course the exception, but if you ask a worker which he would rather have - his 401k savings or a guaranteed job for life, he'd pick the latter. Collectively 401k's are still large, but most workers they make up only a small part of their total earnings.
If you give a billionare a choice of losing his stock or losing his salary, he'd drop his salary in a heartbeat.
If you give almost any other person picked randomly off the street the same choice they'd drop their stock in a heartbeat.
This is why anything which is good for stockholders isn't necessarily great for America - at least not directly.
Don't get me wrong, investment has all kinds of benefits to the general public. However, the whole "most people own stock" argument is really a falicious one. "Most people" would throw away their stock in an instant if it kept them from losing their jobs...
After being through a half-dozen jobs in my life I realized that a capable person losing a job is an opportunity, not a tragedy.
Sure, if one person gets fired they'll bounce back - especially if their former employer gives them half-decent severance and all that.
On the other hand, if IBM closes down an office or otherwise terminates 2000 IT folks in the same town, there is no way that most will bounce back without relocating. No job market can absorb that many people when they have specialized jobs.
Cuts of that scale really are tragic. I'm not saying the solution is government regulation, but that doesn't mean that everything is swell either...
We are led by short sighted morons.
Short-sighted - yes. Morons - definitely not.
You see, the company won't be wiped out for quite a few years. Sure, it eventually will tank, but stock will go up before it goes down.
So, stock goes up, CEO sells stock. Stock goes down, CEO gets "fired" with a $10,000,000 severance package. CEO is crying all the way to the bank.
The problem is that companies have been transformed into short-sighted entities. Shareholders only care about the next few years - the only people who actually care about having jobs in 3 decades are the employees, who are the one class of people who have no say in corporate governance.
Any libertarian would argue that neither attitude is right.
What you are referring to is essentially neoconservatism - and there are many who would otherwise call themselves conservative who disagree with it.
Interesting.
So what you are saying is that we can now breed 47 generations of people without having to actually go to the trouble of actually growing the people. Just reproduce the gametes and you can have sexual reproduction.
In theory you could do experiments on people that previously were only practical on rats/bacteria (which have shorter generation times).
How's that for an ethics nightmare?
I've always thought that the correct solution would be to have a small display on a smartcard with a PIN entry or biometric scanner.
The card would receive a receipt from the merchant, and it would display the name of the store, and the amount of the bill, and ask you to approve or hit the cancel button (approval by PIN or biometric). It would then sign the receipt and send it back to the merchant. You could use existing SSL technology which does a good job of preventing man-in-the-middles (require a merchant certificate issued by the credit card company, give those certs short expirations, verify the date on the receipt, etc.).
A system like this, if implemented correctly, would be VERY effective at preventing fraud. The card could generate its own keypair and import a certificate, and absolutely nobody would have a copy of the private key.
The difficulty would be online transactions. If you gave the card a USB interface or made a really cheap reader available, that might be sufficient.
Of course, when you think about it, in a large scale war almost everybody is a combatant. One person fires a gun, somebody back home makes the gun, another person makes the metal that makes the gun, another person makes the fuel used to make the metal, and a bunch of people work to keep all those people fed. The war could not be fought without all of them.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for not targetting noncombatants, but from what I've seen - when a war becomes a war of attrition, noncombattants become very tempting targets. After all, if you don't take them out, the other side will never run out of combatants (somebody has to give birth to them).
Rules of war are something that nations try to respect, but everybody tends to ignore them when the going gets tough. If you're an army commander, which are you going to work harder to protect - the million guys who work for you, or the 50 million civilians amongst which the bad guys are intersperced. Most likely your orders will be "try not to hurt anybody, but don't let that stop you from doing what you need to do to get the mission done."
I'd think that billions per projectile is stretching it. The projectiles would be compact, which means the launch vehicle can be streamlined, and even if the rods weigh 10,000 pounds each that is still only a few tens of millions each.
A few hours delay isn't a big deal - most likely this would be used against hardened fortifications - if we just want to blow up soem tanks we'd use anti-tank missles.
Plus, this is a weapons system which would give the military completely new destructive capabilities - it could potentially take out hardened bunkers which are currently impenetrable. Right now the only weapons that come close are nukes (which take about half an hour to deploy), and big bombs (which take many hours to deploy via heavy bombers which are rarely staged close to the action).
This isn't the kind of thing where you'd stockpile tens of thousands of weapons. Maybe you'd spend a billion or two to have a few hundred of them. The R&D on any military weapon costs a few billion, so this really isn't a vast sum by military standards...
As about the nickname "Rods of God", it could be just that, a nickname. But having heard some infamous speaches about good, axis of evil and so on, I'm not so sure...
/. would and would get modded +5 funny...
I doubt that anybody in the conservative christian movement in the US would like the "Rods From God" nickname. It certainly sounds arrogant.
I think the general idea is that it is a nifty-sounding name for a massing piece of metal that comes flying at you out of the "heavens." If the US government didn't call them that already somebody on
So, what do UN resolutions have to do with the law?
The US has never been bound by UN resolutions. Nor for that matter has just about any other nation in general (that is - I'm sure just about every nation on earth has dodged a UN resolution when that suited its needs, although nations do try to follow them at their convenience). Treaties, perhaps (although even those have been backed out of carefully).
We already have weapons in space anyway - they're called spy satellites. It is a prefectly legal act in warfare to shoot down reconissance aircraft. Since just about every nation on earth has access to satellite imagry (either via government or commercial sources), it only makes sense to have some capabilty for defeating this tactic.
War knows no limits. Rules of warfare are only obeyed when nations can afford to do so. Every nation has dropped them almost immediately when they become expensive to follow, or when they threaten a military objective. Do you think the allies checked for hospitals when making their bombing runs over germany?
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for not going nuts with military spending. However, every nation is going to try to stay ahead, and it isn't realistic to think that just because you don't develop a technology that your enemies won't try to take advantage of that fact...
Any IT professional should expect this type of treatment. It is not discourteous, it is professional and appropriate. People who get their feathers ruffled because of this type of thing should check their egos.
Since when is expecting courtesy having an ego?
Sure, if somebody threatens a coworker they should be escorted out by armed guards. Everybody expects that, and it is should be done for the safety of everybody else if for no other reason.
Otherwise, treating employees as if you don't trust them tells them that you don't trust them. It speaks volumes.
"Professional" does not mean impersonal, or treating employees as if they are nothing more than capital.
The funny thing is that companies could accomplish most of the security-related goals without destroying the morale of everybody who is left. How about this scenario:
1. Employee is called to his boss's office.
2. Boss explains that he has to be let go. Boss has HR present, but HR is presented as being present in case employee has questions, and generally lets the boss (who has a personal relationship) do the talking.
3. Boss takes employee back to desk for "emotional support" and to help him with anything he needs to carry out. Rest of group gets to say goodbye. It is a sad day, but there is some sense of closure. Everybody gets to say goodbye.
4. Atmosphere is designed to communicate that employee is not persona-non-grata, and that his coworkers shoud feel free to pass on job openings, and generally feel free to maintain contact. Boss can be a part of this as well.
5. Employee is walked to the gate, and helped with boxes to the car by boss for emotional support.
6. Boss tells employee to call him if he needs anything before waving goodbye.
The employee has been supervised the whole time, and doesn't have an opportunity to cause mischeif. Yet, the entire time he is treated personably, and would be somewhat inclined to accept an offer to rejoin the company.
Companies often underestimate the impacts that terminations have on the people who remain behind. Seeing their coworkers treated with dignity will go a long way towards discouraging people from jumping off the sinking ship.
Nobody expects to have free reign inside a company they have just been terminated from. On the other hand, you can at least be nice about it...
I meant anybody of importance.
/.'ers will ever read it, let alone anybody of consequence... :)
Illustration in defence of point - your post was as an AC with a score of zero, so few if any
Well, while it probably should be deorbited for all the value it has, I doubt this decision would be made until conditions deterioriate to a point where it is impossible to sustain life onboard.
Nobody is ever going to admit that it was a mistake to ever build the ISS. As a result, nobody currently in power would ever make the decision to get rid of it unless it is to make room for something even more grandiose.
Actually that's about the only point of the ISS that actually makes any sense. Actually running an oxygen generator for long periods to see if it actually works. That's actually necessary to test out for a Mars mission.
Uh, why not just plug one in on the earth and hook an O2 meter to the output? Viola, you find out how well it performs over a long period of time. If you want to try out a different design or set of conditions, you can just reach over and tinker with it, and not have to send a shuttle into space.
Granted, this tells you nothing about zero-G performance, but that can be easily determined by sticking an O2 generator on a satellite with an oxygen meter on the output. You don't need to have a human being present to actually verify that the oxygen is breathable.
I'm all for making plans for long-distance solar voyages - especially if there is actually some reason to have humans present, or if there is some way to sustain an economy on another planet/moon/whatever. However, developing most of the technology to do all of this is much cheaper and easier if you don't actually do any of it in space.
If they can't even get the Biosphere project to work, how are they going to get a colony to work on Mars? Why don't we start with simulated space colonies on the surface of the earth first? If you can sustain a few dozen people in a dome for a few years on the ground, then feel free to start shooting them into space...