... that for a lot of people who had their home and family blown up, the job was done by remote control (via Predators or whatever). So there's literally no one TO hate but the faceless US military in general.
... of what we spend on keeping the Middle East subjugated, we could have done a Manhattan Project style crash program to become energy independent. But it turns out that there's a lot of money in it for the likes of Lockheed Martin and ExxonMobil to do what we're doing.
... if it weren't so sad. All of the same crowd that was A-OK with NSA wiretapping, deporting people to GTMO, waterboarding, imprisonment without trial, etc, etc is now drawing a line in the sand... over airport patdowns. And all the folks who couldn't stand any of that stuff during the Bush administration, are now perfectly fine with all the same stuff during the Obama administration (with some notable exceptions - Glenn Greenwald, take a bow).
This effort to do absolutely anything, no matter how expensive, degrading, anti-freedom, or silly, to protect ourselves from the highly unlikely threat of terrorism, is nuts. Oh, right, I guess we won't do absolutely anything - we certainly wouldn't consider, for example, cease invading and bombing random places all over the world. That would make too much sense.
I also think understanding what causes someone to become a terrorist will be helpful.
Hmmm, whatever could those crazy terrorists be so upset about? Could it be... that maybe people (particularly in Muslim countries) are getting radicalized because we keep bombing and invading their homelands? Maybe we could, you know, stop doing that. It would be a lot cheaper and easier than x-raying everything in sight. Seriously, Janet, maybe you could ask Captain Obvious to help you with this question.
Yes, low density areas exist. So? What about that fact prevents the Verizons of the world from offering high-speed, low-cost internet in high density areas? They're already providing the different categories of service - on the spectrum of dialup (rural)/DSL (or cable) (intermediate density)/FiOS (high density). The answer is that they can get away with high prices because there's insufficient competition and regulation.
Most countries offering 1GB to the home have 4M people in an area the size of Most Small towns in Canada or the States. Most of it is population Density.
The US has plenty of areas - San Diego/Orange County/LA county, the Northeast Corridor - that are every bit as dense as a European country. Yet we don't have low-cost, high quality broadband service anywhere. Why is that? I think the second part of your post is the true answer.
The point is the service they're delivering. I really don't care if my TV/phone/internet comes in over copper wires or glass ones. And I really have experienced Cox and Verizon competing very intensely for my business, which is both holding down the price and improving the service. I used Cox for many years, but Verizon recruited me very diligently, and when I ultimately switched to FiOS, Cox fell all over themselves trying to keep me.
You do not know the meaning of the word "pain" if you never attempted to get ISDN hooked up. The approximate timeline: sometime in the mid-90's ISDN became available in my area. The company involved was GTE (now absorbed into Verizon). It took me at least 5 or 6 calls over a period of a week or so before I could even find someone at GTE who knew what ISDN was, then some transferring around before I finally got to someone who could actually sell me the service. So we set a date to get the ISDN "modem" installed and service turned on. The earliest available date was in like 25 days, and they couldn't specify the time at all - I had to take the entire day off work. So I wait around all day, the installer never shows.
I place an irate "WTF?" call to GTE the next day. More transferring around to find someone who has the first clue about what's going on. Finally, get the "we're so sorry" routine, and they reschedule. In another month. Grrr. So on the appointed day I take another day off, and the installers actually show up. I bring them up to the office where I need the outlet. They begin tinkering around, I go off to do other stuff around the house. I'm in the kitchen doing something, I hear them coming downstairs. They go out the front door. I went to the door to see what was up, and they're driving off! Go up to the office, and there's a chit with instructions on using the service and a completed service ticket. Try to follow the instructions. Needless to say, the service is not working.
Another irate phone call to GTE. They claim the guys couldn't find me so they left. Rather than get into an argument about that, I ask for a service call to get it fixed. Which it turns out can't be scheduled for another three weeks. So I wait impatiently for yet another three weeks, take yet another day off, and the service guy shows up. It turns out that the line is working fine, but the modem itself was dead. "I can't understand why this wasn't caught at installation - the installers are supposed to test the thing before they leave". My reply was that apparently a lot of things that were supposed to be happening, in fact, were not. So then I ask if he's got a replacement modem. "Oh, no, we're out of stock - they'll be back ordered for at least a month!".
So by this point I've been at this for almost three months already and I'm no closer to having "high-speed" service than when I started. And I'm looking at at least another month before it can be made functional. I called GTE the next day and cancelled the entire thing, as I had lost confidence they were ever going to be able to deliver. Luckily, Cox cable came out with high speed cable internet soon thereafter, so it became a moot point.
So, yeah, DSL rollout was a picnic compared to that. And (obligatory) you kids get off my lawn.
If we followed this argument earlier in the 20th century, much of the US would still not even have electricity service. In the 21st century, not having low-cost, reliable, quality internet service is just as big a handicap - it seriously affects our national competitiveness. While I'm not sure that the GP post is the right solution, at the very least the government should be encouraging the development of internet cooperatives in underserved areas... not, as now, shutting down such organizations at the behest of Verizon, et al.
The Boston - DC corridor is roughly the size of a European country, and every bit as densely populated. So why don't we have high quality, low-cost broadband there? Yours is a good argument for why we don't have good, cheap broadband in Bismark, ND. For Boston-New York-Philly-DC... not so much.
That's actually not so clear - most recent common ancestor of us all lived most likely in historical times; and when limiting to "...of people of European descent", probably only a millennium ago. With the level of travel and intermixing nowadays, that will probably shorten significantly in the coming centuries.
I'm not sure what you're even talking about here. There are 6 billion people on earth. I have one daughter (I'm too old to go myself). What's a reasonable number of people to send to Mars? 50? It would costs billions just to GET that number there, much less support them in place, so it's hard to imagine how you could send any more. So my daughter has a 50 in 6 billion chance of being selected. Even if you, say, assume this is an American mission and only Americans will be selected, still - 50 out of 300 million is pretty poor odds. So the bottom line here is that I'd be getting nothing out of this mission and almost certainly, none of my descendants would either. What's in this for me (other than big tax bills)?
And luckily colonies need to "only" achieve self-sufficiency
I guarantee you that the colonization efforts of the Americas didn't "only" need to achieve self-sufficiency. These efforts were business ventures that required financing, and the financing was undertaken by people who expected a return on their investment. In fact, I challenge you to identify ANY colonization effort daunting enough to require monetary investment that wasn't expected to provide a return. Not all of them did, of course - colonization, like other business ventures, can fail. But the investors thought they had some chance of getting a good return on the deal. It's hard to see how that would be the case for a Mars colonization mission - what would a Mars colony be able to sell at a profit?
... more of the Slashdot we've come to know and love: people focusing on the exact distance involved, rather than engaging with your actual argument. Dudes - regardless of the exact number of light-minutes involved, it costs really huge dollars to get to Mars. Consider that getting to low earth orbit costs like $10k/kg. You could house prisoners for a really, really long time at those prices.
Of those three, the only thing you can recycle easily is the water. Recycling the air and producing food pretty much requires plants (you can scrub CO2 from the air using filters, but the filters are consumable. Also you'd need an oxygen source from somewhere). So in addition to the daunting power requirements you list, you'd need tons of greenhouse space, plus an assortment of minerals to do hydroponics, plus a big initial amount of water. Mars almost certainly doesn't have any source of fixed nitrogen, and while you can recycle some of it from waste products, some becomes "unfixed" and is lost as N2, so you'll need to fix more. Potassium is probably available from rock sources on Mars, but would need to be extracted. I doubt there are any sources of rock phosphate (or other phosphorus sources usable by earth plants), so you'd have to figure out where to get that. Plus you need to figure out all the micronutrients - where are you getting stuff like iron (easy on Mars), calcium (?), iodine (?), etc?
Things like power and food are representative of the issues involved - even easy things are difficult on Mars.
You haven't engaged my argument in the slightest. Why do you think this is any more economical for China to do than anyone else?
Cold war style "we've got to get there before the Commies!" arguments may have flown during the 60's. They're probably not going to get the job done today.
Earth has many millions of square miles just on the land surface that are essentially empty (Antarctica alone has some 5 million square miles that are completely uninhabited). And every one of those square miles is about a million times more hospitable than any part of Mars - for starters, you don't need a space suit to continue breathing, and you can get to anywhere on earth for a tiny fraction of what it costs to get to anywhere on Mars.
Maybe there are arguments for colonizing Mars, but "we're running out of physical space" is not one of them.
And for better or worse, it's impossible to imagine a privately funded mission of this type either... because it's impossible to imagine how you could profit from it.
... nor are there any economically exploitable resources. Geez, I get so tired of this - otherwise intelligent people spouting nonsense about colonizing other planets. What, for example, are these colonists going to do for a living? Bear in mind that Mars is effectively made of rust and silica, that shipping stuff to Mars is ludicrously expensive, and that even the most basic needs for life (air, water, food, shelter) are not available on Mars without a lot of equipment to process them. Also bear in mind that there is no market for any product on Mars, so whatever you make would have to be shipped back to Earth to be sold - and what imaginable product could you sell at a profit? This project would have a gigantic up-front cost with no realistic hope of any payoff. Who's going to invest in something like this?
And the "we need a colony to preserve the human race in the event of disaster" doesn't hold either, due at least in part to tragedy of the commons issues. At most, very, very few people would be able to be transported to Mars - meaning that neither I nor any of my direct descendants are very likely to personally benefit. So why would I be interested in expending enormous amounts of tax dollars on this? Additionally, it would be a lot cheaper to safeguard the earth (which is a lot more hospitable to life than Mars will ever be) against looming disasters, than to try to establish colonies on other planets.
Sure, colonization of the solar system is a cool idea - so why haven't plans gotten off the ground? There's no money in it.
Dude, the only evidence we have is a launch trail. This missile could very easily be a surface launched missile, or as someone pointed out, even an airplane. There is precisely zero evidence that this is an SLBM. And the only thing the Navy has REALLY done is issued a non-denial denial that they did it. I think the chance that some foreign power is launching SLBMs off our coast is approximately zero.
... is that this was a perfectly ordinary test launch that the Navy, for all the usual reasons, doesn't want to talk about. And why does everyone (not necessarily including you) assume this was an SLBM launch? It's just as likely that it was a surface launched missile.
People have jumped to the conclusion that this was an SLBM launch, when there is absolutely no evidence that this is the case. This could have very easily been a test launch from a US Navy surface ship.
Just because you didn't fire on unknown watercraft while you were in the NAVY doesn't mean that it was illegal to do so.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that we wouldn't, in fact, have sunk such a submarine - I think we almost certainly would do so. You could probably even build a legal case around the fact that a missile launch represented a "hostile act". But your legal theory is simply wrong - you do not get to shoot other military units simply because they don't identify themselves. I spent many, many years in the Navy, and none of our ships and none of anyone else's ships goes around announcing their identity. If the other guys can figure out who you are, great. But if they don't tell you, it's not open season to shoot them.
Re: the ones we know about - dude, they have, count 'em, 3 SSBNs. We know a lot about all their acoustic signatures (my bet would be that our STs can identify them by name just from their signatures). It is quite simply not credible to assert that they've developed, built, and launched an entirely new class of SSBNs, much stealthier than the ones we know about, without us getting wind of it. And re: hiding under a container ship - it's relatively easy to tell when an SSBN has left port, as you can see it on a satellite pass.
The whole "the Chinese did it" theory is just way too Tom Clancy to be real.
Yep, totally agree with that reasoning. If you were a foreign power who wanted to demonstrate this capability, you'd just do it in your home waters. The only way sneaking this close to the US would make any sense is if you wanted to demonstrate your ability to be stealthy... and frankly, there's absolutely no way a foreign power could get all the way across the Pacific without being detected at all.
Slashdot Mirror
... that for a lot of people who had their home and family blown up, the job was done by remote control (via Predators or whatever). So there's literally no one TO hate but the faceless US military in general.
You insensitive clod!
... of what we spend on keeping the Middle East subjugated, we could have done a Manhattan Project style crash program to become energy independent. But it turns out that there's a lot of money in it for the likes of Lockheed Martin and ExxonMobil to do what we're doing.
... if it weren't so sad. All of the same crowd that was A-OK with NSA wiretapping, deporting people to GTMO, waterboarding, imprisonment without trial, etc, etc is now drawing a line in the sand... over airport patdowns. And all the folks who couldn't stand any of that stuff during the Bush administration, are now perfectly fine with all the same stuff during the Obama administration (with some notable exceptions - Glenn Greenwald, take a bow).
This effort to do absolutely anything, no matter how expensive, degrading, anti-freedom, or silly, to protect ourselves from the highly unlikely threat of terrorism, is nuts. Oh, right, I guess we won't do absolutely anything - we certainly wouldn't consider, for example, cease invading and bombing random places all over the world. That would make too much sense.
Hmmm, whatever could those crazy terrorists be so upset about? Could it be... that maybe people (particularly in Muslim countries) are getting radicalized because we keep bombing and invading their homelands? Maybe we could, you know, stop doing that. It would be a lot cheaper and easier than x-raying everything in sight. Seriously, Janet, maybe you could ask Captain Obvious to help you with this question.
Yes, low density areas exist. So? What about that fact prevents the Verizons of the world from offering high-speed, low-cost internet in high density areas? They're already providing the different categories of service - on the spectrum of dialup (rural)/DSL (or cable) (intermediate density)/FiOS (high density). The answer is that they can get away with high prices because there's insufficient competition and regulation.
The US has plenty of areas - San Diego/Orange County/LA county, the Northeast Corridor - that are every bit as dense as a European country. Yet we don't have low-cost, high quality broadband service anywhere. Why is that? I think the second part of your post is the true answer.
The point is the service they're delivering. I really don't care if my TV/phone/internet comes in over copper wires or glass ones. And I really have experienced Cox and Verizon competing very intensely for my business, which is both holding down the price and improving the service. I used Cox for many years, but Verizon recruited me very diligently, and when I ultimately switched to FiOS, Cox fell all over themselves trying to keep me.
You do not know the meaning of the word "pain" if you never attempted to get ISDN hooked up. The approximate timeline: sometime in the mid-90's ISDN became available in my area. The company involved was GTE (now absorbed into Verizon). It took me at least 5 or 6 calls over a period of a week or so before I could even find someone at GTE who knew what ISDN was, then some transferring around before I finally got to someone who could actually sell me the service. So we set a date to get the ISDN "modem" installed and service turned on. The earliest available date was in like 25 days, and they couldn't specify the time at all - I had to take the entire day off work. So I wait around all day, the installer never shows.
I place an irate "WTF?" call to GTE the next day. More transferring around to find someone who has the first clue about what's going on. Finally, get the "we're so sorry" routine, and they reschedule. In another month. Grrr. So on the appointed day I take another day off, and the installers actually show up. I bring them up to the office where I need the outlet. They begin tinkering around, I go off to do other stuff around the house. I'm in the kitchen doing something, I hear them coming downstairs. They go out the front door. I went to the door to see what was up, and they're driving off! Go up to the office, and there's a chit with instructions on using the service and a completed service ticket. Try to follow the instructions. Needless to say, the service is not working.
Another irate phone call to GTE. They claim the guys couldn't find me so they left. Rather than get into an argument about that, I ask for a service call to get it fixed. Which it turns out can't be scheduled for another three weeks. So I wait impatiently for yet another three weeks, take yet another day off, and the service guy shows up. It turns out that the line is working fine, but the modem itself was dead. "I can't understand why this wasn't caught at installation - the installers are supposed to test the thing before they leave". My reply was that apparently a lot of things that were supposed to be happening, in fact, were not. So then I ask if he's got a replacement modem. "Oh, no, we're out of stock - they'll be back ordered for at least a month!".
So by this point I've been at this for almost three months already and I'm no closer to having "high-speed" service than when I started. And I'm looking at at least another month before it can be made functional. I called GTE the next day and cancelled the entire thing, as I had lost confidence they were ever going to be able to deliver. Luckily, Cox cable came out with high speed cable internet soon thereafter, so it became a moot point.
So, yeah, DSL rollout was a picnic compared to that. And (obligatory) you kids get off my lawn.
If we followed this argument earlier in the 20th century, much of the US would still not even have electricity service. In the 21st century, not having low-cost, reliable, quality internet service is just as big a handicap - it seriously affects our national competitiveness. While I'm not sure that the GP post is the right solution, at the very least the government should be encouraging the development of internet cooperatives in underserved areas... not, as now, shutting down such organizations at the behest of Verizon, et al.
The Boston - DC corridor is roughly the size of a European country, and every bit as densely populated. So why don't we have high quality, low-cost broadband there? Yours is a good argument for why we don't have good, cheap broadband in Bismark, ND. For Boston-New York-Philly-DC... not so much.
I'm not sure what you're even talking about here. There are 6 billion people on earth. I have one daughter (I'm too old to go myself). What's a reasonable number of people to send to Mars? 50? It would costs billions just to GET that number there, much less support them in place, so it's hard to imagine how you could send any more. So my daughter has a 50 in 6 billion chance of being selected. Even if you, say, assume this is an American mission and only Americans will be selected, still - 50 out of 300 million is pretty poor odds. So the bottom line here is that I'd be getting nothing out of this mission and almost certainly, none of my descendants would either. What's in this for me (other than big tax bills)?
I guarantee you that the colonization efforts of the Americas didn't "only" need to achieve self-sufficiency. These efforts were business ventures that required financing, and the financing was undertaken by people who expected a return on their investment. In fact, I challenge you to identify ANY colonization effort daunting enough to require monetary investment that wasn't expected to provide a return. Not all of them did, of course - colonization, like other business ventures, can fail. But the investors thought they had some chance of getting a good return on the deal. It's hard to see how that would be the case for a Mars colonization mission - what would a Mars colony be able to sell at a profit?
... more of the Slashdot we've come to know and love: people focusing on the exact distance involved, rather than engaging with your actual argument. Dudes - regardless of the exact number of light-minutes involved, it costs really huge dollars to get to Mars. Consider that getting to low earth orbit costs like $10k/kg. You could house prisoners for a really, really long time at those prices.
Of those three, the only thing you can recycle easily is the water. Recycling the air and producing food pretty much requires plants (you can scrub CO2 from the air using filters, but the filters are consumable. Also you'd need an oxygen source from somewhere). So in addition to the daunting power requirements you list, you'd need tons of greenhouse space, plus an assortment of minerals to do hydroponics, plus a big initial amount of water. Mars almost certainly doesn't have any source of fixed nitrogen, and while you can recycle some of it from waste products, some becomes "unfixed" and is lost as N2, so you'll need to fix more. Potassium is probably available from rock sources on Mars, but would need to be extracted. I doubt there are any sources of rock phosphate (or other phosphorus sources usable by earth plants), so you'd have to figure out where to get that. Plus you need to figure out all the micronutrients - where are you getting stuff like iron (easy on Mars), calcium (?), iodine (?), etc?
Things like power and food are representative of the issues involved - even easy things are difficult on Mars.
You haven't engaged my argument in the slightest. Why do you think this is any more economical for China to do than anyone else?
Cold war style "we've got to get there before the Commies!" arguments may have flown during the 60's. They're probably not going to get the job done today.
Earth has many millions of square miles just on the land surface that are essentially empty (Antarctica alone has some 5 million square miles that are completely uninhabited). And every one of those square miles is about a million times more hospitable than any part of Mars - for starters, you don't need a space suit to continue breathing, and you can get to anywhere on earth for a tiny fraction of what it costs to get to anywhere on Mars.
Maybe there are arguments for colonizing Mars, but "we're running out of physical space" is not one of them.
And for better or worse, it's impossible to imagine a privately funded mission of this type either... because it's impossible to imagine how you could profit from it.
... nor are there any economically exploitable resources. Geez, I get so tired of this - otherwise intelligent people spouting nonsense about colonizing other planets. What, for example, are these colonists going to do for a living? Bear in mind that Mars is effectively made of rust and silica, that shipping stuff to Mars is ludicrously expensive, and that even the most basic needs for life (air, water, food, shelter) are not available on Mars without a lot of equipment to process them. Also bear in mind that there is no market for any product on Mars, so whatever you make would have to be shipped back to Earth to be sold - and what imaginable product could you sell at a profit? This project would have a gigantic up-front cost with no realistic hope of any payoff. Who's going to invest in something like this?
And the "we need a colony to preserve the human race in the event of disaster" doesn't hold either, due at least in part to tragedy of the commons issues. At most, very, very few people would be able to be transported to Mars - meaning that neither I nor any of my direct descendants are very likely to personally benefit. So why would I be interested in expending enormous amounts of tax dollars on this? Additionally, it would be a lot cheaper to safeguard the earth (which is a lot more hospitable to life than Mars will ever be) against looming disasters, than to try to establish colonies on other planets.
Sure, colonization of the solar system is a cool idea - so why haven't plans gotten off the ground? There's no money in it.
Dude, the only evidence we have is a launch trail. This missile could very easily be a surface launched missile, or as someone pointed out, even an airplane. There is precisely zero evidence that this is an SLBM. And the only thing the Navy has REALLY done is issued a non-denial denial that they did it. I think the chance that some foreign power is launching SLBMs off our coast is approximately zero.
... is that this was a perfectly ordinary test launch that the Navy, for all the usual reasons, doesn't want to talk about. And why does everyone (not necessarily including you) assume this was an SLBM launch? It's just as likely that it was a surface launched missile.
People have jumped to the conclusion that this was an SLBM launch, when there is absolutely no evidence that this is the case. This could have very easily been a test launch from a US Navy surface ship.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that we wouldn't, in fact, have sunk such a submarine - I think we almost certainly would do so. You could probably even build a legal case around the fact that a missile launch represented a "hostile act". But your legal theory is simply wrong - you do not get to shoot other military units simply because they don't identify themselves. I spent many, many years in the Navy, and none of our ships and none of anyone else's ships goes around announcing their identity. If the other guys can figure out who you are, great. But if they don't tell you, it's not open season to shoot them.
Re: the ones we know about - dude, they have, count 'em, 3 SSBNs. We know a lot about all their acoustic signatures (my bet would be that our STs can identify them by name just from their signatures). It is quite simply not credible to assert that they've developed, built, and launched an entirely new class of SSBNs, much stealthier than the ones we know about, without us getting wind of it. And re: hiding under a container ship - it's relatively easy to tell when an SSBN has left port, as you can see it on a satellite pass.
The whole "the Chinese did it" theory is just way too Tom Clancy to be real.
Yep, totally agree with that reasoning. If you were a foreign power who wanted to demonstrate this capability, you'd just do it in your home waters. The only way sneaking this close to the US would make any sense is if you wanted to demonstrate your ability to be stealthy... and frankly, there's absolutely no way a foreign power could get all the way across the Pacific without being detected at all.