If you are going to characterize evolutionary progress as a group of 12 monkeys on a typewriter and infinite time, then they would not produce Shakespeare as a final product because they wouldn't know when they had it!
However, if you could get those monkeys to have sex, they could, through differential success in reproduction, evolve Shakespeare himself, and then they would know that they had it!
Sergey Brin is, according to Forbes, already worth $7.2B. Wouldn't it be great to be so incredibly rich that you did'nt have to worry about personal income ever again?
Anyway, this is PR that's probably worth way more than the salary itself. Steve Jobs does the same thing, IIRC.
Your point is basically valid, but is prep time really all that important? Spending 10 years on preparing a spectacular mission is a prospect most scientists will agree to, I think.
And yes, the overall effort is important, when it comes to the goal and result of a given planetary exploration mission boils down to two things: The amount and quality of data, which is directly linked to what instrumentation the probe has been equipped with and its ability to implement them. Two, the time and effort Earth scientists are willing to spend on analyzing these data. You'd be surprised on the tenacity of these folks; I know some who are still correlating data from the Viking probes this day.
With regards to strength and precision, my point is that an astronaut is capable of something a robot is able to only in Star Trek: situational improvisation. Sure, the rover can avoid rocks and simple stuff like that, but at some point a problem can occur or an idea be had that a rover will be unequipped to handle. Ok, maybe the cave thing would be a bad idea, but what if you need to dig a trench, climb down a crater or gully, blow something up, chase martian rabbits, etc. These things could technically be performed by robots, but here the timeframe becomes horrible; you encounter a problem your robot can't handle. Fine, you apply for a new mission that can do this thing, launch it, and provided it doesn't crash, you can solve your interesting riddle about 10 years later. Until we have walking, pseudo-simian androids a la Star Trek, an astronaut will always be able to gather data that is orders of magnitude better than robotic results.
Now, I definitely see your point in this, and I'm not knocking the economic feasibility of robots.In fact, I work on the MER project for my graduate studies, and I have several colleagues who hold your position on this issue. But I strongly belive that manned missions are the goal of all these things and that such missions will blow everything else out of the water.
Well, first off, I think that it's really important to think of goals in other terms than science. The kind of science done in space projects is, with few exceptions, basic research. And basic research is not something investors, be they government or corporate, are big fans of.
In other words, I think space exploration should be driven by a long term plan for giving a solid payback in science or even profit. This will not be done by having mechanical toys drive around in ditches or staying in low earth orbit testing if frog legs twitch the same way in microgravity.
Another point I'd like to make is that I remain skeptical of the cost-effectiveness of robots vs. humans. Sure, a manned mission will cost several orders of magnitude more than an unmanned one, but consider the other problems of robots:
They're sloooow. MER is fast compared to pathfinder, but it'll still only drive a few feet every day.
They're STUPID. You can't ask a rover to do anything else than what it has been painstakingly designed for. MER has 5 simple instruments plus a few more passive ones. A manned expedition could have hundreds, and the possibility of combining them.
They're weak and clumsy. You can't ask them to turn over a large rock to look what's under it. Or go looking for caves and explore them.
We had a conversation about this at my university(we designed the (passive)magnetic properties experiment), and decided that a manned mission could accomplish as much data collection in an afternoon as the Viking probes had in their mission. In a couple of days, a couple of astronauts could accomplish more than all landers put together.
And something to think about: what knowledge of other bodies could we gain by sending carbon water-bags instead of metallic automatons that would otherwise be totally impossible?
Don't hold your breath for the next total eclipse. It won't happen in the US until 2017.
However, if you're willing to travel, there will be one in March 2006. Come visit sunny Libya, meet the Colonel, and try to counter the angry natives who want to waste your American ass by threatening to "use your magic western technology to blot out the sun".
Seriously, though, watching a total eclipse is something that will mark a defining point in your life as an astronomy geek. I pilgrimaged to Paris in 1999 to see the eclipse back then(I live in Denmark, so it wasn't that big a trip). I had to sit in a train that was crammed with people Indian style to get to the totality zone, and when it finally occurred, the one single goddamn cloud on an otherwise clear sky obstructed my view of the halo.
The **AA is conducting a huge campaign against copyright infringement, but until now there has been an enormous gaping hole in their armor: That people comitting copyright infringement don't give a damn which country they're downloading their MP3s from, thus making prosecution and, more importantly, intimidation very difficult. By setting this precedence, they hope to send a message to the international pirate community that they're not safe no matter where they are.
I think that because it's impossible to prosecute everyone who owns an illegal MP3, the entire campaign is based solely on scare tactics. That's why those prosecuted are always sued for completely unreasonable amounts. That's why 12-year olds are no exception. And now, that's why the US will drag your ragged ass all over the world and into their courts. Just to set an example.
Of course, one precedence isn't enough to set a general policy, at least not one as borderline as this one. So whether the strategy will pay off remains to be seen.
The war wages on;)
Microsoft is building a navy of secret submarine labs under our noses for their evil experiments! They don't want a monopoly. They're finally going for world domination!
Maybe, but popular stuff tends to get more cold hard cash to produce, and even though that isn't enough by itself to produce high quality material, it certainly helps. Personally, I can't stand the run-of-the-mill anime with their 'flying' backgrounds and fixed character-only-moves-his-mouth stuff. They did that to save money on the budget. GITS 2 was an incredible achievement in animation that wouldn't have been possible without some major dough.
And finally, it is hardly a fools quest to try to promote some quality entertainment into the brainless mainstream. Let's try and raise the bar.
But is be legal to download anything that I'm ever going to have any interest in?
I somehow doubt that the content of these sites, and by extension the sites themselves, are going to be popular in the long run.
Well, I have to grant you that point. This evidence is pretty new, however, and I think, even from a purely academic perspective, that it'll be a few years before an issue with as far-reaching consequences as this one will be subject to legislation in any country. In fact, this evidence, as far as I know, have been known for a number of years already.
My statements about corporate power over Nordic affairs is purely one that I base on previous experience. A few years ago, for example, a certain brand of dental hygeine chewing gum was declared ineffective by a group of university researchers. The company immediately attempted to discredit them in an attempt to limit the damage. The political and public opinion fallout from that action did more damage to the company than the research results themselves.
I have to say that I'm not at all certain which part of the world would be the first to legislate.
Your point is taken, but coming from Northern Europe(Denmark) and having spent a long time in the US, I can tell you that corporations just don't have the same kind of power over politicians in these parts(that would include Finland, which falls in the same category).
But I'll grant that the transnationals are extremely powerful, even here, much to the dismay of the ex-vikings, who at first approximation are socialist idealists. And being small countries, politicians are easily pressured by protests.
I think the situation is a lot different in larger countries like France and the UK. Not to mention asia and the rest of the world, but I won't pretend to know anything about them and their situation.
That's not tinfoil talk at all. It happens constantly.
Sugar company lobbyists basically tried to label the WHO as idiots and liars when they published reports that recommended decreased sugar consumption as means of increasing cardiovascular health and reducing obesity.
I'm not even going to get in on the fast-food industry.
This is just yet another example of the corporations exerting their stranglehold on US policy to up profits, damn the consequences.
It's really amazing the kind of short-sightedness they exhibit, considering that consumers, and by extension, healthy consumers, are their prime income creating resource.
agreed. My argument is about budget. And MSL, with its much larger mass and plutonium power, I believe, will be a very much more expensive mission than Phoenix. The 'old school' lander strategy for Phoenix is just the easiest and cheapest way to get an 'interim' mission off to the poles and do some novel science while there. But of course what I always argue is that an astronaut would basically be able to achieve in an afternoon what all these other missions have achieved over the last 20 years...
Well, no doubt the rovers are great, but projects like the trenchdigging of this lander just wouldn't be possible within the confines of rover projects. It really is a problem of mass economics. A rover project needs a landing capsule where a lander doesn't; so you sacrifice mobility for mass and get a chance to do other experiments.
The budget for the Scout program was so tight that it would have been almost impossible to meet the criteria. Then Peter Smith suggested that they simply haul from storage and modify the existing backup MPL probe. This means saving a shitload of money on development(that's your tax dollars). So, not a coincidence, just numbers. I seriously doubt that a project like Glider would be able to fit within the limits and still have an acceptable chance of success.
Don't worry -they are. I helped out at my university(of Copenhagen) when they were shipping out the magnet experiments for the Exploration Rovers, and I can tell you the decontamination regulations are almost anal-retentive. Basically, anything that goes into flight assembly is completely sterilized, exactly because of the risk of 'forward contamination'.
There was, however, an incident where a baby rattlesnake had gotten itself into a computer box that by accident was placed in the clean room. That ought to have been a lot of fun...
Slashdot Mirror
If you are going to characterize evolutionary progress as a group of 12 monkeys on a typewriter and infinite time, then they would not produce Shakespeare as a final product because they wouldn't know when they had it!
However, if you could get those monkeys to have sex, they could, through differential success in reproduction, evolve Shakespeare himself, and then they would know that they had it!
Sergey Brin is, according to Forbes, already worth $7.2B. Wouldn't it be great to be so incredibly rich that you did'nt have to worry about personal income ever again?
Anyway, this is PR that's probably worth way more than the salary itself. Steve Jobs does the same thing, IIRC.
Your point is basically valid, but is prep time really all that important? Spending 10 years on preparing a spectacular mission is a prospect most scientists will agree to, I think.
And yes, the overall effort is important, when it comes to the goal and result of a given planetary exploration mission boils down to two things:
The amount and quality of data, which is directly linked to what instrumentation the probe has been equipped with and its ability to implement them.
Two, the time and effort Earth scientists are willing to spend on analyzing these data. You'd be surprised on the tenacity of these folks; I know some who are still correlating data from the Viking probes this day.
With regards to strength and precision, my point is that an astronaut is capable of something a robot is able to only in Star Trek: situational improvisation. Sure, the rover can avoid rocks and simple stuff like that, but at some point a problem can occur or an idea be had that a rover will be unequipped to handle. Ok, maybe the cave thing would be a bad idea, but what if you need to dig a trench, climb down a crater or gully, blow something up, chase martian rabbits, etc.
These things could technically be performed by robots, but here the timeframe becomes horrible; you encounter a problem your robot can't handle. Fine, you apply for a new mission that can do this thing, launch it, and provided it doesn't crash, you can solve your interesting riddle about 10 years later. Until we have walking, pseudo-simian androids a la Star Trek, an astronaut will always be able to gather data that is orders of magnitude better than robotic results.
Now, I definitely see your point in this, and I'm not knocking the economic feasibility of robots.In fact, I work on the MER project for my graduate studies, and I have several colleagues who hold your position on this issue.
But I strongly belive that manned missions are the goal of all these things and that such missions will blow everything else out of the water.
Well, first off, I think that it's really important to think of goals in other terms than science. The kind of science done in space projects is, with few exceptions, basic research. And basic research is not something investors, be they government or corporate, are big fans of.
In other words, I think space exploration should be driven by a long term plan for giving a solid payback in science or even profit. This will not be done by having mechanical toys drive around in ditches or staying in low earth orbit testing if frog legs twitch the same way in microgravity.
Another point I'd like to make is that I remain skeptical of the cost-effectiveness of robots vs. humans. Sure, a manned mission will cost several orders of magnitude more than an unmanned one, but consider the other problems of robots:
They're sloooow.
MER is fast compared to pathfinder, but it'll still only drive a few feet every day.
They're STUPID.
You can't ask a rover to do anything else than what it has been painstakingly designed for. MER has 5 simple instruments plus a few more passive ones. A manned expedition could have hundreds, and the possibility of combining them.
They're weak and clumsy.
You can't ask them to turn over a large rock to look what's under it. Or go looking for caves and explore them.
We had a conversation about this at my university(we designed the (passive)magnetic properties experiment), and decided that a manned mission could accomplish as much data collection in an afternoon as the Viking probes had in their mission. In a couple of days, a couple of astronauts could accomplish more than all landers put together.
And something to think about: what knowledge of other bodies could we gain by sending carbon water-bags instead of metallic automatons that would otherwise be totally impossible?
Don't hold your breath for the next total eclipse. It won't happen in the US until 2017.
However, if you're willing to travel, there will be one in March 2006. Come visit sunny Libya, meet the Colonel, and try to counter the angry natives who want to waste your American ass by threatening to "use your magic western technology to blot out the sun".
Seriously, though, watching a total eclipse is something that will mark a defining point in your life as an astronomy geek. I pilgrimaged to Paris in 1999 to see the eclipse back then(I live in Denmark, so it wasn't that big a trip). I had to sit in a train that was crammed with people Indian style to get to the totality zone, and when it finally occurred, the one single goddamn cloud on an otherwise clear sky obstructed my view of the halo.
So I guess I'll go for Libya. Or maybe Turkey.
Of course, companies using the software in question could simply tell their emplyees not to installl SP2...
Well, thank God they refused your patent. Otherwise you would have been one of those assholes everybody hates and write about on Slashdot!
IMHO this is very much a question of politics.
;)
The **AA is conducting a huge campaign against copyright infringement, but until now there has been an enormous gaping hole in their armor: That people comitting copyright infringement don't give a damn which country they're downloading their MP3s from, thus making prosecution and, more importantly, intimidation very difficult.
By setting this precedence, they hope to send a message to the international pirate community that they're not safe no matter where they are.
I think that because it's impossible to prosecute everyone who owns an illegal MP3, the entire campaign is based solely on scare tactics.
That's why those prosecuted are always sued for completely unreasonable amounts.
That's why 12-year olds are no exception.
And now, that's why the US will drag your ragged ass all over the world and into their courts. Just to set an example.
Of course, one precedence isn't enough to set a general policy, at least not one as borderline as this one. So whether the strategy will pay off remains to be seen.
The war wages on
Microsoft is building a navy of secret submarine labs under our noses for their evil experiments!
They don't want a monopoly. They're finally going for world domination!
Even better, gimme a Neural Digital Assistant...
I mean, a Neuronanonic Digital Assistant!
Hell, while we're at it, give me a Positronic Neuronanonic Thermonuclear Mindcontrolling Personal Digital Master!!
Maybe, but popular stuff tends to get more cold hard cash to produce, and even though that isn't enough by itself to produce high quality material, it certainly helps.
Personally, I can't stand the run-of-the-mill anime with their 'flying' backgrounds and fixed character-only-moves-his-mouth stuff. They did that to save money on the budget. GITS 2 was an incredible achievement in animation that wouldn't have been possible without some major dough.
And finally, it is hardly a fools quest to try to promote some quality entertainment into the brainless mainstream. Let's try and raise the bar.
But is be legal to download anything that I'm ever going to have any interest in?
I somehow doubt that the content of these sites, and by extension the sites themselves, are going to be popular in the long run.
Just to state the bleeding obvious, of course.
Well, I have to grant you that point. This evidence is pretty new, however, and I think, even from a purely academic perspective, that it'll be a few years before an issue with as far-reaching consequences as this one will be subject to legislation in any country. In fact, this evidence, as far as I know, have been known for a number of years already.
My statements about corporate power over Nordic affairs is purely one that I base on previous experience. A few years ago, for example, a certain brand of dental hygeine chewing gum was declared ineffective by a group of university researchers. The company immediately attempted to discredit them in an attempt to limit the damage. The political and public opinion fallout from that action did more damage to the company than the research results themselves.
I have to say that I'm not at all certain which part of the world would be the first to legislate.
Your point is taken, but coming from Northern Europe(Denmark) and having spent a long time in the US, I can tell you that corporations just don't have the same kind of power over politicians in these parts(that would include Finland, which falls in the same category).
But I'll grant that the transnationals are extremely powerful, even here, much to the dismay of the ex-vikings, who at first approximation are socialist idealists. And being small countries, politicians are easily pressured by protests.
I think the situation is a lot different in larger countries like France and the UK. Not to mention asia and the rest of the world, but I won't pretend to know anything about them and their situation.
Yeah, those 100 studies from the Motorola Laboratories really helped raise the bar there.
That's not tinfoil talk at all. It happens constantly.
Sugar company lobbyists basically tried to label the WHO as idiots and liars when they published reports that recommended decreased sugar consumption as means of increasing cardiovascular health and reducing obesity.
I'm not even going to get in on the fast-food industry.
This is just yet another example of the corporations exerting their stranglehold on US policy to up profits, damn the consequences.
It's really amazing the kind of short-sightedness they exhibit, considering that consumers, and by extension, healthy consumers, are their prime income creating resource.
sure I did, I was just... ah, forget it.
Indeed, it was a fitting tribute to him. What? It's not a tribute to you?
agreed. My argument is about budget. And MSL, with its much larger mass and plutonium power, I believe, will be a very much more expensive mission than Phoenix. The 'old school' lander strategy for Phoenix is just the easiest and cheapest way to get an 'interim' mission off to the poles and do some novel science while there.
But of course what I always argue is that an astronaut would basically be able to achieve in an afternoon what all these other missions have achieved over the last 20 years...
Well, no doubt the rovers are great, but projects like the trenchdigging of this lander just wouldn't be possible within the confines of rover projects. It really is a problem of mass economics. A rover project needs a landing capsule where a lander doesn't; so you sacrifice mobility for mass and get a chance to do other experiments.
You better go edit that wiki page. The official name was changed in 2000 to Mars Polar Crasher.
The budget for the Scout program was so tight that it would have been almost impossible to meet the criteria. Then Peter Smith suggested that they simply haul from storage and modify the existing backup MPL probe.
This means saving a shitload of money on development(that's your tax dollars). So, not a coincidence, just numbers.
I seriously doubt that a project like Glider would be able to fit within the limits and still have an acceptable chance of success.
Don't worry -they are. I helped out at my university(of Copenhagen) when they were shipping out the magnet experiments for the Exploration Rovers, and I can tell you the decontamination regulations are almost anal-retentive. Basically, anything that goes into flight assembly is completely sterilized, exactly because of the risk of 'forward contamination'. There was, however, an incident where a baby rattlesnake had gotten itself into a computer box that by accident was placed in the clean room. That ought to have been a lot of fun...
It'll CREATE JOBS!
Possibly as many as 50, and only at a price of around 200000000 McDonald's value meals. Think about it...
Jeez, someone mod this guy funny. Most hilarious post *ever*!