Because it's not necessarily so easy to move to where your job is. When I moved to my current home, I carefully selected one that was convenient to mass transit. And life was good - until our company started developing contract problems with the customer I was supporting. So I needed to find a new job, and did - in a rural area about 30 miles away. There's no way to get there except to drive, and the supply of housing there is not really that good, so moving is probably not happening. And if I did move I'd still have to drive, just not quite as far.
Bottom line: in the US lots of people, for lots of reasons, can't live close to their jobs, or need to live/work in areas not well served by mass transit. A system like this would be a boon for many.
We've not driven there, yet. Actually, we've hardly even visited the country yet (no history and no unique wildlife, and that's what we travel for).
Regarding history - just as a quick example, we had this little thing called the Civil War. It went on all over the continent for a period of years and killed millions of people. In the process, a large number of very colorful and interesting figures appeared on the scene, and a number of innovations in warfare were developed. The war settled a number of lingering political issues left over from the American Revolution, abolished the evil of slavery, and arguably set the stage for later American domination of the international scene.
History: just because ours doesn't appeal to you doesn't mean we don't have any.
Your statement with respect to wildlife, if possible, is even more ludicrous. A huge proportion of North American birds is made up of species not found in Europe. There are numerous mammal, reptile, and amphibian species found here that exist nowhere else. To claim there's no unique wildlife is just plain dumb.
Hey, don't get me wrong - if you'd rather visit Reykjavik, knock yourself out. But let's not pretend that there's nothing worth seeing in the US.
It seems to me the use case here would be that you have the bluetooth keyboard/mouse at your desk at work, and then when it's time to travel, you just yank the iPad (or whatever) out of the dock and go. Now you've got the best of both worlds: a super portable device that has all the data entry goodness of a keyboard & mouse when needed. If I traveled more, I can totally see this replacing a laptop. YMMV if you do software development or whatever, but lots of people don't need that much power.
That being said, I think the iPad itself is still a little too dependent on being tethered to a computer (come on, Steve, when are we going to be able to do synchronization, backup, or OS updates over the air?) to truly be a laptop replacement. I'm also a little dubious about the touchscreen interface metaphor - I never realize how useful it was to be able to hover the mouse over a UI element, or right click, until I couldn't - but I think the day is coming when we'll have an appropriate device.
Of course, you can look it up on the internet, and before that, you could look it up in phone books. The reason they're doing all this is that random lists of names and addresses are not very useful to anyone - what they REALLY need are your name and address tied to your browsing, buying, and social habits... so they can sell, sell, sell to you even harder. What people are getting in a snit about is not that anyone can figure out where they live. It's that just about any organization, anywhere, can start building a dossier on you to a positively creepy level of detail - even if you've never had any relationship with that organization, and without their knowledge that it's even happening.
Then again, the cure is pretty easy too - use tools like AdBlock, NoScript, etc; and above all, don't put your damn phone number into Facebook.
But: I do use AdBlock Plus. I don't provide any phone numbers, only provide a junk e-mail address, and provide a city only for the address. I find I can tolerate Facebook's privacy shenanigans just fine... when I don't provide them with any information that would really violate my privacy.
Yeah, but realistically jailbreaking is only a tiny bit more complicated than that - download a file, reboot your phone. And your warranty is only in jeopardy if you are dumb enough to bring the phone in with the jailbreak still installed. If you need service, you just revert it back to the stock iOS.
Trouble is, there are huge sections of the country that are not served by any form of broadband other than 3G. I understand that Virgin probably had to do something, but why can't they just offer a higher tier of service (at an additional cost)?
You keep hearing arguments to the effect that "Android is superior to iPhone because you don't have to jailbreak it". What goes unmentioned is that for practically every Android device (as mentioned, the Nexus line is an exception) you can't install from anywhere but the Android market without doing something similar. There are plenty of things you could legitimately bash the iOS universe for - high on the list is Apple's control-freakery about what they allow into the App Store, but I don't think jailbreaking is really one of them - in almost all cases, you have to diddle with your phone to use anything but the approved store, and it's not like jailbreaking is some tremendously difficult thing to do.
Does that mean I think it's ok that manufacturers try to keep us to their walled gardens? No, I think that kinda sucks. But it's not a situation that's unique to Apple.
... who've ported Linux to the iPhone. Not sure what flavor of Linux we're talking about here, but I've certainly seen Android proper running on an iPhone.
All models of iPhone with the exception of the original can be updated to iOS 4.x via the regular old Apple process. And given the hardware limitations of the original iPhone, I can't imagine the user experience would be even close to tolerable on that device.
So no, there are no "roll your own" distros of iOS. No one needs them.
... to do stuff like upgrade the software/firmware of the device? I don't think they can remove it, but frankly, I don't really think they can remove the home button either.
If there's anything we've learned over the course of history, it's that people can't keep secrets. The US couldn't keep its hydrogen bomb secrets, and if that can't be done, there's no way this would work. Mean time until secret is revealed seems to drop exponentially with the number of people involved, and this project would require tons of people involved. So I doubt this will be happening.
Dude, you can't just deploy the word "terraforming" and wave away the problems with this. We don't have the faintest idea how to do terraforming, and it almost certainly can't be done. For one thing, even if you were able to create an acceptable atmosphere, you'd have to add considerable mass to Mars and generate a planetary magnetic field to prevent it from escaping/sputtering off.
Further, there are about a billion acres on earth that are 1) unoccupied, 2) easier to get to, and 3) much more hospitable than the surface of Mars. Once we fill up the Gobi Desert and Antarctica, then maybe I'll believe there's a big demand for off-world real-estate. Until then... not so much.
One, there may be an endless supply of people who want to go to Mars, but they can't afford it - as a reminder, it costs $10k/kg to get to low earth orbit. So just to get an 80 kg man to LEO would cost $800,000 - and that's just his body. He's presumably going to need housing, clothing, food, oxygen, and lots of various sorts of machinery, but just the $800k to get his body into orbit is going to be out of reach of almost the entire population of the earth. Bill Gates could afford it, but I doubt there are very many people that rich who are interested in chucking it all to become Martian colonists.
Two, everyone likes to talk about the valuable minerals to be found in space. Ok, name some. Bear in mind that Mars is made primarily of iron oxides and silicates, just like earth. And even if you could find something valuable there, the cost of recovering it is prohibitive - someone on here did the math, and found that even if the surface of Mars was littered with platinum bars, you couldn't economically recover them. Costs to get there and back are too high. It's not a question of capability - the technology exists or could be developed. It's a question of economics.
Three - the He3 canard. For one thing, He3 may be more abundant on the moon than on earth, but you're still only talking about.01 ppm. You'd have to grind up the entire moon to get any significant quantity of He3. And further... call me when we think of an actual (vs. theoretical) use for He3. Evidently it would make good fusion fuel... if we knew how to do controlled fusion. But we're (still) a long way from that.
I'd really like to see a good argument for interplanetary colonization, but this is must more question-begging and handwaving.
As far as why, the simplest answer is because its what we as people do.
In fact, starting colonies without any possibility of making money is more or less never what we as people do. With a few religiously motivated exceptions, almost the entire history of exploring the New World was done with the idea that the Old World was going to exploit it for resources and/or set up profitable colonies.
If the costs to keep looking at it are low, my question is then why not.
This is still just begging the question. Sure, if it's cheap, then there's no reason not to do it. But it currently costs around $10k/kg just to get stuff to low earth orbit. Getting to Mars is going to be much more expensive on a per kilogram basis, and you'd have to send a staggering number of kilograms.
And funding for colonization would not come out of public money anyway -- if its sustainable it will be profitable and privately funded.
The fact that no private company has even begun to invest in a Mars colonization project is telling - it means that they don't see a profit to be made. And again with the "if it's sustainable".
... whose permission you're going to need to proceed. The point is that I'm a representative taxpayer, a majority of whom you WILL need to convince. And so far, there's no compelling case to do this.
don't invest in the company sending the expedition.
It's nice to think that a private company would do this, but private companies are even more bottom-line focused than the government. The fact that no companies have even begun to make investments toward the goal of a Martian colony is telling - they don't see any potential profit. Not to mention the fact that up-front costs are almost certainly going to be too high for any private outfit to bear, particularly given the level of risk.
Can't the profit come later, or do you need the cash right now, maybe for a big TV or playoff tickets for every male voter in your district?
Sure, it could come later. Provided there's at least some realistic chance it comes at all. But I've never heard any compelling case for a payoff of any kind.
People are simply not going to make an investment of this size without an idea that they're ultimately going to get something worthwhile in return.
Sure, I've thought about it, and it doesn't change a thing.
In almost any conceivable asteroid strike scenario, the surface of the earth remains way more hospitable to human life than the surface of Mars.
The people who would be asked to pay for the mission (the taxpayers) are not the ones who would benefit (the astronauts). So what's in it for them?
Most people are not willing to spend very much money to save a few people they don't even know when they themselves and everyone they do know is going to die.
Call me after we fill up the Gobi desert, Antarctica, and the sea floor, all of which are much cheaper to get to and way more hospitable to human life than Mars. Insufficient earthly real estate is far from being a realistic motivator for a Mars colony.
I've never quite understood why, as a society, we pretend that our imperial adventures are free. We probably would get more out of a Martian colony than we did with the whole Iraq/Afghanistan mess... but that's not a very high bar to clear.
In the end, I don't think this changes much, though. For whatever reason, the cost of our staggeringly dumb wars is swept under the rug, but other stuff has to be justified.
All it takes is one wayward asteroid and millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of civilization will be gone without a trace.
In almost any conceivable asteroid strike scenario, the earth will STILL be a more hospitable environment for human life than Mars. And in any case, the people being asked to pay for this project are not going to benefit from it - they'll still be wiped out. So... what's in it for them?
Think how much longer it could have taken for the transistor to be created without the demand from and support of the space program.
I'm not proposing we cancel the space program. What I'm saying is this particular part of the space program is not likely to be cost-effective.
Assuming we don't destroy ourselves or go into a dark age with no science on Earth, technology will eventually get good enough that it will become cheap to colonize Mars. If you accept that premise then it's just a question of when and by whom.
But I don't accept that premise. There's absolutely nothing to indicate that space travel is going to get radically better/cheaper. If you don't agree, name some promising technology that's going to get us there.
As a nation, can you afford not to be among the first?
Yes. Lots of countries are not going to be among the first. I'm guessing they'll be just fine.
You're willing to pay more taxes to get this done. Now all you need to do is convince at least 50% of the other 2.999 x 10^8 Americans to go along. The point here is you can't just wave away the problem by saying "well, it's only money". Because it's really a colossal amount of money.
You need to watch some good scifi. Earth orbit has given us numerous things that we wouldn't have otherwise.
Ok, name something. Your taxpayers and/or investors are going to need more to go on than "we'll think of some valuable product later".
As for the investors, it will more than likely be a billionaire who doesn't care who will fund it.
No one has stepped up so far, and in any case, even Bill Gates wouldn't have enough money to fund this himself. This kind of an effort would more or less require government involvement.
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Because it's not necessarily so easy to move to where your job is. When I moved to my current home, I carefully selected one that was convenient to mass transit. And life was good - until our company started developing contract problems with the customer I was supporting. So I needed to find a new job, and did - in a rural area about 30 miles away. There's no way to get there except to drive, and the supply of housing there is not really that good, so moving is probably not happening. And if I did move I'd still have to drive, just not quite as far.
Bottom line: in the US lots of people, for lots of reasons, can't live close to their jobs, or need to live/work in areas not well served by mass transit. A system like this would be a boon for many.
Yeah, probably shouldn't feed the trolls, but:
Regarding history - just as a quick example, we had this little thing called the Civil War. It went on all over the continent for a period of years and killed millions of people. In the process, a large number of very colorful and interesting figures appeared on the scene, and a number of innovations in warfare were developed. The war settled a number of lingering political issues left over from the American Revolution, abolished the evil of slavery, and arguably set the stage for later American domination of the international scene.
History: just because ours doesn't appeal to you doesn't mean we don't have any.
Your statement with respect to wildlife, if possible, is even more ludicrous. A huge proportion of North American birds is made up of species not found in Europe. There are numerous mammal, reptile, and amphibian species found here that exist nowhere else. To claim there's no unique wildlife is just plain dumb.
Hey, don't get me wrong - if you'd rather visit Reykjavik, knock yourself out. But let's not pretend that there's nothing worth seeing in the US.
It seems to me the use case here would be that you have the bluetooth keyboard/mouse at your desk at work, and then when it's time to travel, you just yank the iPad (or whatever) out of the dock and go. Now you've got the best of both worlds: a super portable device that has all the data entry goodness of a keyboard & mouse when needed. If I traveled more, I can totally see this replacing a laptop. YMMV if you do software development or whatever, but lots of people don't need that much power.
That being said, I think the iPad itself is still a little too dependent on being tethered to a computer (come on, Steve, when are we going to be able to do synchronization, backup, or OS updates over the air?) to truly be a laptop replacement. I'm also a little dubious about the touchscreen interface metaphor - I never realize how useful it was to be able to hover the mouse over a UI element, or right click, until I couldn't - but I think the day is coming when we'll have an appropriate device.
Of course, you can look it up on the internet, and before that, you could look it up in phone books. The reason they're doing all this is that random lists of names and addresses are not very useful to anyone - what they REALLY need are your name and address tied to your browsing, buying, and social habits... so they can sell, sell, sell to you even harder. What people are getting in a snit about is not that anyone can figure out where they live. It's that just about any organization, anywhere, can start building a dossier on you to a positively creepy level of detail - even if you've never had any relationship with that organization, and without their knowledge that it's even happening.
Then again, the cure is pretty easy too - use tools like AdBlock, NoScript, etc; and above all, don't put your damn phone number into Facebook.
But: I do use AdBlock Plus. I don't provide any phone numbers, only provide a junk e-mail address, and provide a city only for the address. I find I can tolerate Facebook's privacy shenanigans just fine... when I don't provide them with any information that would really violate my privacy.
Yeah, but realistically jailbreaking is only a tiny bit more complicated than that - download a file, reboot your phone. And your warranty is only in jeopardy if you are dumb enough to bring the phone in with the jailbreak still installed. If you need service, you just revert it back to the stock iOS.
Trouble is, there are huge sections of the country that are not served by any form of broadband other than 3G. I understand that Virgin probably had to do something, but why can't they just offer a higher tier of service (at an additional cost)?
... I can't really argue about this too much, but still - "Unlimited" Broadband2Go. For certain smaller values of "unlimited".
You keep hearing arguments to the effect that "Android is superior to iPhone because you don't have to jailbreak it". What goes unmentioned is that for practically every Android device (as mentioned, the Nexus line is an exception) you can't install from anywhere but the Android market without doing something similar. There are plenty of things you could legitimately bash the iOS universe for - high on the list is Apple's control-freakery about what they allow into the App Store, but I don't think jailbreaking is really one of them - in almost all cases, you have to diddle with your phone to use anything but the approved store, and it's not like jailbreaking is some tremendously difficult thing to do.
Does that mean I think it's ok that manufacturers try to keep us to their walled gardens? No, I think that kinda sucks. But it's not a situation that's unique to Apple.
... who've ported Linux to the iPhone. Not sure what flavor of Linux we're talking about here, but I've certainly seen Android proper running on an iPhone.
All models of iPhone with the exception of the original can be updated to iOS 4.x via the regular old Apple process. And given the hardware limitations of the original iPhone, I can't imagine the user experience would be even close to tolerable on that device.
So no, there are no "roll your own" distros of iOS. No one needs them.
... to do stuff like upgrade the software/firmware of the device? I don't think they can remove it, but frankly, I don't really think they can remove the home button either.
If there's anything we've learned over the course of history, it's that people can't keep secrets. The US couldn't keep its hydrogen bomb secrets, and if that can't be done, there's no way this would work. Mean time until secret is revealed seems to drop exponentially with the number of people involved, and this project would require tons of people involved. So I doubt this will be happening.
Dude, you can't just deploy the word "terraforming" and wave away the problems with this. We don't have the faintest idea how to do terraforming, and it almost certainly can't be done. For one thing, even if you were able to create an acceptable atmosphere, you'd have to add considerable mass to Mars and generate a planetary magnetic field to prevent it from escaping/sputtering off.
Further, there are about a billion acres on earth that are 1) unoccupied, 2) easier to get to, and 3) much more hospitable than the surface of Mars. Once we fill up the Gobi Desert and Antarctica, then maybe I'll believe there's a big demand for off-world real-estate. Until then... not so much.
One, there may be an endless supply of people who want to go to Mars, but they can't afford it - as a reminder, it costs $10k/kg to get to low earth orbit. So just to get an 80 kg man to LEO would cost $800,000 - and that's just his body. He's presumably going to need housing, clothing, food, oxygen, and lots of various sorts of machinery, but just the $800k to get his body into orbit is going to be out of reach of almost the entire population of the earth. Bill Gates could afford it, but I doubt there are very many people that rich who are interested in chucking it all to become Martian colonists.
Two, everyone likes to talk about the valuable minerals to be found in space. Ok, name some. Bear in mind that Mars is made primarily of iron oxides and silicates, just like earth. And even if you could find something valuable there, the cost of recovering it is prohibitive - someone on here did the math, and found that even if the surface of Mars was littered with platinum bars, you couldn't economically recover them. Costs to get there and back are too high. It's not a question of capability - the technology exists or could be developed. It's a question of economics.
Three - the He3 canard. For one thing, He3 may be more abundant on the moon than on earth, but you're still only talking about .01 ppm. You'd have to grind up the entire moon to get any significant quantity of He3. And further... call me when we think of an actual (vs. theoretical) use for He3. Evidently it would make good fusion fuel... if we knew how to do controlled fusion. But we're (still) a long way from that.
I'd really like to see a good argument for interplanetary colonization, but this is must more question-begging and handwaving.
In fact, starting colonies without any possibility of making money is more or less never what we as people do. With a few religiously motivated exceptions, almost the entire history of exploring the New World was done with the idea that the Old World was going to exploit it for resources and/or set up profitable colonies.
This is still just begging the question. Sure, if it's cheap, then there's no reason not to do it. But it currently costs around $10k/kg just to get stuff to low earth orbit. Getting to Mars is going to be much more expensive on a per kilogram basis, and you'd have to send a staggering number of kilograms.
The fact that no private company has even begun to invest in a Mars colonization project is telling - it means that they don't see a profit to be made. And again with the "if it's sustainable".
... whose permission you're going to need to proceed. The point is that I'm a representative taxpayer, a majority of whom you WILL need to convince. And so far, there's no compelling case to do this.
It's nice to think that a private company would do this, but private companies are even more bottom-line focused than the government. The fact that no companies have even begun to make investments toward the goal of a Martian colony is telling - they don't see any potential profit. Not to mention the fact that up-front costs are almost certainly going to be too high for any private outfit to bear, particularly given the level of risk.
Which means it's inevitably an economic question.
Sure, it could come later. Provided there's at least some realistic chance it comes at all. But I've never heard any compelling case for a payoff of any kind.
People are simply not going to make an investment of this size without an idea that they're ultimately going to get something worthwhile in return.
Sure, I've thought about it, and it doesn't change a thing.
Most people are not willing to spend very much money to save a few people they don't even know when they themselves and everyone they do know is going to die.
Call me after we fill up the Gobi desert, Antarctica, and the sea floor, all of which are much cheaper to get to and way more hospitable to human life than Mars. Insufficient earthly real estate is far from being a realistic motivator for a Mars colony.
I've never quite understood why, as a society, we pretend that our imperial adventures are free. We probably would get more out of a Martian colony than we did with the whole Iraq/Afghanistan mess... but that's not a very high bar to clear.
In the end, I don't think this changes much, though. For whatever reason, the cost of our staggeringly dumb wars is swept under the rug, but other stuff has to be justified.
In almost any conceivable asteroid strike scenario, the earth will STILL be a more hospitable environment for human life than Mars. And in any case, the people being asked to pay for this project are not going to benefit from it - they'll still be wiped out. So... what's in it for them?
I'm not proposing we cancel the space program. What I'm saying is this particular part of the space program is not likely to be cost-effective.
But I don't accept that premise. There's absolutely nothing to indicate that space travel is going to get radically better/cheaper. If you don't agree, name some promising technology that's going to get us there.
Yes. Lots of countries are not going to be among the first. I'm guessing they'll be just fine.
You're willing to pay more taxes to get this done. Now all you need to do is convince at least 50% of the other 2.999 x 10^8 Americans to go along. The point here is you can't just wave away the problem by saying "well, it's only money". Because it's really a colossal amount of money.
Ok, name something. Your taxpayers and/or investors are going to need more to go on than "we'll think of some valuable product later".
No one has stepped up so far, and in any case, even Bill Gates wouldn't have enough money to fund this himself. This kind of an effort would more or less require government involvement.