"The argument that Habeas Corpus needs to apply to literally everyone because otherwise there is no way to "prove" that you are a US citizen to which MCA doesn't apply is something of a curious one. MCA already does not apply to US citizens apprehended on US soil. You do not need a court to affirm what is already known. If you believe the authorities will ignore the fact that someone is a US citizen and detain them anyway, then there are larger fundamental issues than whether or not someone can challenge detention; indeed, if the government really wanted to secretly detain someone without cause or ability to challenge, US citizen or not, they simply wouldn't give them any recourse at all, Habeas Corpus or no, now would they?"
So maybe we should just do away with it completely, right?
It's always puzzled me how our country's leadership feels it can export democracy, but not the rights that come along with it. Odd.
Maybe, just maybe, the Constitution refers to human beings, and not just "citizens". It's just a thought.
"SCO and Darl are virtually dead. Stop looking back and move on instead."
Not until their corpses start to stink.
Some of us want to know more about the "license" deals that kept SCO financially alive for so long. We may just get that wish...
This is just the first real battle. Just because we appear to have won it doesn't mean it shouldn't be analyzed as thoroughly as possible by "all the eyes" that can be brought to bear.
I agree with everything you say, mostly, but - this isn't over, not by a long shot. We can't move on, not yet.
And it *does* feel good to crow about it, dangit.:)
"The issue here isn't Lunar vs. Orbital costs of living, but Near-Earth Asteroid costs vs. Lunar costs when you take the whole infrastructure into the equation and large scale mining operations. Also, you have a larger percentage of silicates in Lunar soils compared to the heavier metals you can obtain from the obviously high density asteroids."
We're talking about bootstrapping operations, tho. The heavier metals are worth a lot more than silicates - we aren't likely to have silica shortages soon - are we? Any mining operation on this scale will have to pay off as quickly as possible and as much as possible. A large influx of heavy metals from mining operations off-planet could provide a huge boost to the industrial and electronic industries.
I urge both of you to read Lewis's book, he covers these arguments in much greater detail than I can. I'll buy a copy for you if necessary:)
Doc Ruby, I respect you, and I follow your posts (I say this because we don't really know one another, but Teancum and I do) and I'd love to continue this discussion elsewhere if it gets cut off here. Mkay?:)
"I personally think there is a place for Lunar exploration and mining, but it isn't so cut and dried as some would have you think it is. But there are some very definite adantages for Lunar exploration."
Agreed.
"One of the most significant is that the Moon is never more than 250,000 miles away. You can't say that about the rest of the Solar System, and nearly any effort to travel to the Moon is more or less trivial with even the current level of rocket travel. There is no need for exotic propulsion methods if you need to travel to the Moon in less than a week."
There isn't any need for one for most if not all NEAs, either.
LEO to Moon landing 6.3 km/s LEO to Near Earth Asteroid approx 5.5 km/s
There are also NEAs that have resonance orbits with Earth that are much easier to get to - the figures given there are averages (but not for the Moon!).
" Even the Apollo astronauts got to the Moon in less time than that."
Travel time will depend entirely on how much fuel we can burn and which target we select. Which will depend directly on how much resources we put into the mission. A half-hearted effort would likely suffer the same fate as Apollo did. (and so will a half-hearted moon effort directed towards putting some people in a tin can on the surface without the machinery to be at least semi-self-sufficient. Keep in mind that that mass of machinery masses many times what the life support does, and that building it for the moon or building it for an asteroid mining operation is building pretty much the same hardware. )
Resupply of astronauts on a NEA is easy - just launch your robot supply packages beforehand, and as often as a launch window presents (remember, these aren't emergency things, they can take low-fuel orbits and there's no "landing" per se).
Emergencies, sure, they are a problem. So make damned sure the astronauts are equipped - both hardware and personnel - as well as possible. But remember that a min-time emergency response to the moon is going to likely be at least two days - if the loonies there can't handle it in that time, it's probably game over anyway.
I think too many people forget just what our ancestors went thru when they went exploring in their dugout canoes and teakwood sail rafts. It's a new frontier. People are going to get killed exploring it. It's heartening that there's no shortage of volunteers, at least:)
" Getting to Mars in less than a month is going to be considered an exceptional task worthy of the most exotic propulsion systems that may ever be invented
Beautiful, thanks. That's amazing. It looks like the moon was split in half and then somewhat gently crunched back together, not quite evenly. There's a couple of mid-size craters I can see (from this and other photos, and a lot of smaller ones) that overlay the fault, and it's covered with ejecta debris in some places, but the event still has to be relatively young, maybe a billion years or so. Did the moon came very close to the Roche limit of Saturn at one time when it wasn't quite solid? Weird terrain, reminds me of the Sierra Nevadas. That big mountain has to be a volcano - Iapetus still molten inside at the time?
There should be more images of the ridge coming as the data gets downloaded, right? Iapetus deserves a probe of it's own, even just one with some good cameras.
What for? Back up your data (4 GB usbsticks are about $60 right now if you watch the sales), do a OEM fresh install, bring it in to whatever idiotshop there is locally and tell them that a fresh install of windows from the OEM disks didn't fix the cracks in the casing. *sarcastic grin*
If that fails, beat them over the head with it. Or just plain don't worry about it. (I have two laptops, both with various physical defects that don't detract from the usability. One of them is held together by Black Gorilla Duct Tape (800lb). It's probably sturdier than the other one, which doesn't have the duct tape. I use it to administer the headless cli ubuntu server VM from my main machine; it's perfect in the role, and I didn't have to throw away that 'old' pcmcia 802.b card.:) )
What, are they supposed to retain their resale value, or something? Oh come on...
"My guess is that M$ turns your computer into a node for some sort of grid computer they are running, which will run DDOS attacks on mirrors.kernel.org."
"It's still a long way from perfect, but the Ubuntu team are challenging all these things which should be completely hidden from the user so they don't have to know how to modify their X config, write a Modeline, or learn m4 so they can create a sendmail config. They're doing the things which have always been considered "good enough" to the hardcore, but which have prevented mainstream acceptance, and I think that's bloody great. "
And they are doing it RIGHT. As a PT home user OS tech, it's almost impossible to articulate just how sweet it is to be able to boot a ubuntu LiveOS on a customer's machine and have it JUST WORK. Not only is it a quantum leap in the tools available to fix machines (I just finished building my first 4GB USB ubuntu tool stick and it's going to save me huge amounts of time diagnosing problems) but it's great PR as well. "What's that you're using?" was a frequently heard comment this summer when I was using the dsl usbstick... My next custom version will be a usbstick with KDE configured to look and act like windows... even a few years ago, the thought of trying to build custom operating systems like this was daunting. Not anymore. Now it's almost easy. The Ubuntu team played a huge part in that. Kudos.
This is just the beginning. It's gonna get better. I can't wait.:)
From the link you gave to the oldest slashdot page:
Booker writes "So IBM announces a 25 gig hard drive... does the world need this yet? Unless this is in a RAID, would you really want to trust 25 gigs on a single drive? What would you use this for? 400+ hours of MP3s comes to mind... "
I don't know what's scarier, the echoes from the past, or the echoes from the present;-)
SB
(remembering with fondness my first 5MB IBM PC drive)
We *could do it*, however. (if we can't we're screwed anyway...)
The sooner, the better, I say. That hardware is going to fail, sooner or later, and if the two Voyagers are still operating at that time, we'll look pretty foolish, yes?
"Be polite but firm when dealing with companies and remember that the goal is to ensure a company stops violating the GPL and does not violate it again, rather than to leave a smoking crater at the location of their HQ... at least not on the first offence."
On the second offense, we nuke'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure they won't do it again.
I suspect that many people who remember the old Soviet Union would recognize that technique as well.
Just as a general comment on this thread, not @ you asuffield, is that those of you who yammer on, constantly, about how much freedom we have in this country would be better off looking after it, rather than boasting about it. Especially because the boasting makes you looked pretty damned foolish to some people who have perhaps considered the issue a little more objectively and at least made an effort to learn some history. Start at least as early as the Greeks;)
Slashdot Mirror
"The argument that Habeas Corpus needs to apply to literally everyone because otherwise there is no way to "prove" that you are a US citizen to which MCA doesn't apply is something of a curious one. MCA already does not apply to US citizens apprehended on US soil. You do not need a court to affirm what is already known. If you believe the authorities will ignore the fact that someone is a US citizen and detain them anyway, then there are larger fundamental issues than whether or not someone can challenge detention; indeed, if the government really wanted to secretly detain someone without cause or ability to challenge, US citizen or not, they simply wouldn't give them any recourse at all, Habeas Corpus or no, now would they?"
So maybe we should just do away with it completely, right?
It's always puzzled me how our country's leadership feels it can export democracy, but not the rights that come along with it. Odd.
Maybe, just maybe, the Constitution refers to human beings, and not just "citizens". It's just a thought.
SB
"SCO and Darl are virtually dead. Stop looking back and move on instead."
:)
Not until their corpses start to stink.
Some of us want to know more about the "license" deals that kept SCO financially alive for so long. We may just get that wish...
This is just the first real battle. Just because we appear to have won it doesn't mean it shouldn't be analyzed as thoroughly as possible by "all the eyes" that can be brought to bear.
I agree with everything you say, mostly, but - this isn't over, not by a long shot. We can't move on, not yet.
And it *does* feel good to crow about it, dangit.
SB
There's probably a good number of chairs.
SB
"The issue here isn't Lunar vs. Orbital costs of living, but Near-Earth Asteroid costs vs. Lunar costs when you take the whole infrastructure into the equation and large scale mining operations. Also, you have a larger percentage of silicates in Lunar soils compared to the heavier metals you can obtain from the obviously high density asteroids."
:)
:)
:)
We're talking about bootstrapping operations, tho. The heavier metals are worth a lot more than silicates - we aren't likely to have silica shortages soon - are we? Any mining operation on this scale will have to pay off as quickly as possible and as much as possible. A large influx of heavy metals from mining operations off-planet could provide a huge boost to the industrial and electronic industries.
I urge both of you to read Lewis's book, he covers these arguments in much greater detail than I can. I'll buy a copy for you if necessary
Doc Ruby, I respect you, and I follow your posts (I say this because we don't really know one another, but Teancum and I do) and I'd love to continue this discussion elsewhere if it gets cut off here. Mkay?
"I personally think there is a place for Lunar exploration and mining, but it isn't so cut and dried as some would have you think it is. But there are some very definite adantages for Lunar exploration."
Agreed.
"One of the most significant is that the Moon is never more than 250,000 miles away. You can't say that about the rest of the Solar System, and nearly any effort to travel to the Moon is more or less trivial with even the current level of rocket travel. There is no need for exotic propulsion methods if you need to travel to the Moon in less than a week."
There isn't any need for one for most if not all NEAs, either.
LEO to Moon landing
6.3 km/s
LEO to Near Earth Asteroid
approx 5.5 km/s
(from http://www.nss.org/settlement/asteroids/sonter.html, see chart about a third of the way down the page)
There are also NEAs that have resonance orbits with Earth that are much easier to get to - the figures given there are averages (but not for the Moon!).
" Even the Apollo astronauts got to the Moon in less time than that."
Travel time will depend entirely on how much fuel we can burn and which target we select. Which will depend directly on how much resources we put into the mission. A half-hearted effort would likely suffer the same fate as Apollo did. (and so will a half-hearted moon effort directed towards putting some people in a tin can on the surface without the machinery to be at least semi-self-sufficient. Keep in mind that that mass of machinery masses many times what the life support does, and that building it for the moon or building it for an asteroid mining operation is building pretty much the same hardware. )
Resupply of astronauts on a NEA is easy - just launch your robot supply packages beforehand, and as often as a launch window presents (remember, these aren't emergency things, they can take low-fuel orbits and there's no "landing" per se).
Emergencies, sure, they are a problem. So make damned sure the astronauts are equipped - both hardware and personnel - as well as possible. But remember that a min-time emergency response to the moon is going to likely be at least two days - if the loonies there can't handle it in that time, it's probably game over anyway.
I think too many people forget just what our ancestors went thru when they went exploring in their dugout canoes and teakwood sail rafts. It's a new frontier. People are going to get killed exploring it. It's heartening that there's no shortage of volunteers, at least
" Getting to Mars in less than a month is going to be considered an exceptional task worthy of the most exotic propulsion systems that may ever be invented
Exploiting NEA resources is a much, MUCH better choice.
I don't have the time nor room to explain why here; read "Mining the Sky" by Lewis. He presents a great case, with math to back it up.
Cheers,
SB
Ultimate Weapon of Mass Distinction?
SB
Beautiful, thanks. That's amazing. It looks like the moon was split in half and then somewhat gently crunched back together, not quite evenly. There's a couple of mid-size craters I can see (from this and other photos, and a lot of smaller ones) that overlay the fault, and it's covered with ejecta debris in some places, but the event still has to be relatively young, maybe a billion years or so. Did the moon came very close to the Roche limit of Saturn at one time when it wasn't quite solid? Weird terrain, reminds me of the Sierra Nevadas. That big mountain has to be a volcano - Iapetus still molten inside at the time?
There should be more images of the ridge coming as the data gets downloaded, right? Iapetus deserves a probe of it's own, even just one with some good cameras.
Back to the rawpix...
SB
What for? Back up your data (4 GB usbsticks are about $60 right now if you watch the sales), do a OEM fresh install, bring it in to whatever idiotshop there is locally and tell them that a fresh install of windows from the OEM disks didn't fix the cracks in the casing. *sarcastic grin*
If that fails, beat them over the head with it. Or just plain don't worry about it. (I have two laptops, both with various physical defects that don't detract from the usability. One of them is held together by Black Gorilla Duct Tape (800lb). It's probably sturdier than the other one, which doesn't have the duct tape. I use it to administer the headless cli ubuntu server VM from my main machine; it's perfect in the role, and I didn't have to throw away that 'old' pcmcia 802.b card.
What, are they supposed to retain their resale value, or something? Oh come on...
SB
"My guess is that M$ turns your computer into a node for some sort of grid computer they are running, which will run DDOS attacks on mirrors.kernel.org."
Wouldn't that be redundant?
SB
"It's still a long way from perfect, but the Ubuntu team are challenging all these things which should be completely hidden from the user so they don't have to know how to modify their X config, write a Modeline, or learn m4 so they can create a sendmail config. They're doing the things which have always been considered "good enough" to the hardcore, but which have prevented mainstream acceptance, and I think that's bloody great. "
:)
And they are doing it RIGHT. As a PT home user OS tech, it's almost impossible to articulate just how sweet it is to be able to boot a ubuntu LiveOS on a customer's machine and have it JUST WORK. Not only is it a quantum leap in the tools available to fix machines (I just finished building my first 4GB USB ubuntu tool stick and it's going to save me huge amounts of time diagnosing problems) but it's great PR as well. "What's that you're using?" was a frequently heard comment this summer when I was using the dsl usbstick... My next custom version will be a usbstick with KDE configured to look and act like windows... even a few years ago, the thought of trying to build custom operating systems like this was daunting. Not anymore. Now it's almost easy. The Ubuntu team played a huge part in that. Kudos.
This is just the beginning. It's gonna get better. I can't wait.
SB
Exactly, yes.
SB
"Experience is unfair. You only get it after you needed it."
One only _understands it_ after one needed it - learning is a continuous process.
SB
Um. 1980
SB
"The psychotic Jack Thompson is sending a subpoena to the psychopathic George Bush."
Strange that when I read that, I was listening to Don Henley singing "you can't get the genie back in the bottle..."
SB
Reminder to self, , not
SB
From the link you gave to the oldest slashdot page:
Booker writes "So IBM announces a 25 gig hard drive... does the world need this yet? Unless this is in a RAID, would you really want to trust 25 gigs on a single drive? What would you use this for? 400+ hours of MP3s comes to mind... "
I don't know what's scarier, the echoes from the past, or the echoes from the present
SB
(remembering with fondness my first 5MB IBM PC drive)
That's a reply guaranteed to drive people to moving to Canada, methinks
SB
n/t
SB
We *could do it*, however. (if we can't we're screwed anyway...)
The sooner, the better, I say. That hardware is going to fail, sooner or later, and if the two Voyagers are still operating at that time, we'll look pretty foolish, yes?
Not that that's anything new...
SB
"Be polite but firm when dealing with companies and remember that the goal is to ensure a company stops violating the GPL and does not violate it again, rather than to leave a smoking crater at the location of their HQ... at least not on the first offence."
On the second offense, we nuke'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure they won't do it again.
SB
"Would you want to piss away a bunch of your developers time writing in crazy DRM crap that only keeps your company from innovating?"
;-|
Are you saying that all this DRM crap is stalling the development of Clippy 2?
SB
I would have put a post-it note or piece of tape over the part of the monitor where the head showed up.
SB
No, in this case you're watching Big Brother. Make a fool of it's collective self. On teh intarweb tube.
How long until someone does a client-side browser hack that turns these figures into penguins?
SB
A string with that, the dates, and some names specific to the event would likely suffice.
SB
I suspect that many people who remember the old Soviet Union would recognize that technique as well.
;)
:)
Just as a general comment on this thread, not @ you asuffield, is that those of you who yammer on, constantly, about how much freedom we have in this country would be better off looking after it, rather than boasting about it. Especially because the boasting makes you looked pretty damned foolish to some people who have perhaps considered the issue a little more objectively and at least made an effort to learn some history. Start at least as early as the Greeks
Oh, and get off my lawn
SB