Dude, here's a nickel, buy a clue. Sure, large bureaucracies cause inefficiencies but that is so far from the primary reason for North Korea's current situation it's absurd, in fact offensive, to make the comparison. You are seriously lacking in a sense of perspective.
Go for it, son, define "large" for me. Give me some numbers. We have plenty of bureaucracies that are as large or far larger than the entire North Korean government, General Motors, for example, and while they may be inefficient, they do not leave millions of their own starving to death or subject to a high likelihood of torture or death. Equating the two is beyond wrong, it's flat out irresponsible.
Those of us living in reality point, rather, to lack of accountability, lack of transparency, inefficient cross-communications, y'know, the stuff that us actual experts in industrial organization are always willing to explain to those clued enough to pay attention.
You go out there and talk to some genuine experts in the reasons for North Korea's current state. Read up on, say, rule of law. See what energetically capitalist outlets like the Wall Street Journal have to say about the causes of North Korea's problems.Then come back and we'll have this chat again.
Oh, and if you're so hyped on decentralization, tell me, what in the real world have you done to bring that about? Personally, I've been working at that for over twenty years, just testified this past week on government procedures to New York's city council. This wasn't so bad since I've been dealing with the senior relevant councilman since, oh, about two months since he was elected, back in '01.
Agggh, the pain! Yep, the wondrous, neglected Apple Newton, stranded to die an abandoned death by the Jobs regime for reasons they never did really justify.
"It canniblizes our other sales"
Really, now? The Marine corps wants to carry iMacs into battle?
"It puts us in marketplaces we can't afford to focus on."
Oh, you mean like education, already a core market, and vertical stuff like insurance that is vastly profitable?
"There was never really any demand."
Funny, that's not what, say, Infoworld said, let alone teachers, doctors, mobile salespeople, and, as mentioned above, the U.S. Marine Corps.
"Shareholders are upset about all that investment in plant."
So better to just write it all off and cut your profit numbers down further?
"We can't afford the distraction from important projects."
As CNet showed two months ago, the Newton is still better than most of what's out there. And from the scuttlebutt I heard from folks inside Apple, there were plenty of people wanting to buy the rights to the molds, the IP, the whole damn package. Apple (read Jobs and buddies) was just too snitty to accept any of the offers.
I'm impressed by what I'm seeing about the iPhone, though a little more comparison to the Nokia 800 and various Psions would be appreciated. But this is pissant compared to what we would have now if we had gotten TEN FRICKIN' YEARS more improvement of the Newton.
Speaking as a publisher, there is no chance whatsoever that children's textbooks need to cost twenty bucks each to print.
Go for it, you find me quotes from printers for runs of over five thousand books where they cost any more than, oh, five bucks apiece. And that is assuming conventional paper, hardcover (which is, btw, a terrible design approach compared to, say, tyvek over soft plastic), and the book being the awkward size and design of "normal" textbooks.
But then what would I know? I've only done textbook production work for Harcourt-Brace, Houghton-Mifflin, and Scholastic, not to mention collateral materials and periodicals production for The Trumpet Club, Time, Inc., McGraw-Hill, and, oh, right, my own publishing company.
No, the pricing of textbooks is a result of back-assed production systems, government contractor pricing, schoolbook adoption board warping of design, and terrible legacy choices related to all of the above. And with new digital printing systems coming on line all the time, real world limitations are dropping every year.
Admittedly, I'm delighted at all of the above. I'm just now bringing my first bound products to press and I expect to underprice the buggers by fifty to eighty percent.
But don't believe them when they tell you their mahooah about printing costs. You might as well take Halliburton's word for it on their costs.
Silly me, I forgot that I was posting to/., land of niggling disagreement.
Now, first of all, I mostly don't buy ramen at all these days. My noodle fix of choice is some Wei Wei rice noodles with amchur (mango powder), a bit of tienjin dried cabbage, pickled ginger, an egg and or shredded meat, fresh scallions (I grow my own), maybe greens or sprouts, maybe peanut butter, a bit of soy sauce, smidgens of other seasonings, and some fresh lime juice. Comes out to about a buck a meal.
My fifty cent estimate was in recognition of the great ramen king, Sapporo Ichiban (original flavor or miso flavor), which I have found to go for about fifty cents a pack in NYC, Portland, Toronto, Milwaukee, and half a dozen other cities.
As for other varieties, yeah, sure Top Ramen is far less, but why bother? The south Asian versions are less but they're too friggin small for me. so yeah, you can pay less, but then you can also buy a CPU at Walmart but I suspect that most of you wouldn't.
So let me just say that not only was my price estimate a good average (because many of the cup noodles are more) it was, if referring solely to packets, an implicit statement of my confidence in the good taste of/.ers.
Yes and no. Let's keep in mind that most people unless a few generations back dies too young for us to know how bad their heart disease would have been. They also, on average, exercised far more. Remember, going to take a crap used to mean walking out to the yard and back. Getting your room warm meant building a fire. Traveling quickly meant riding a horse. Stuff we do effortlessly took more exertion for them than many modern folks experience in a routine at the gym.
Yeah, sure, he started this. Of course when it first came out it was ungodly expensive, so right there it wasn't quite what it is now.
But then again, AFAIC, at this point ramen is still the perfect geek food.
1.) It's hugely high tech. That little fifty cent packet depends on freeze-drying, foil packaging (thank you NASA), fifth or later gen styrofoam if it's in a cup (only recent gens are low in leached plasticizers), chances are you're cooking it in a microwave oven, and on and on. An awful lot of geek skull sweat went into every little pack of noodly goodness.
2.) It's truly imternational. Go for it, tell me again about the evil American cultural hegemony. Ramen is a Chinese food reworked by a Japanese inventor, and increasingly done in south Asian flavors, all sold through American-style distibution.
3.) It's a triumph of free-market capitalism. A better product that succeeded because it is better and getting constantly revised due to low barriers to entry and fierce competition.
4.) It's hackable. Don't want the palm oil? Drain off the water before you eat it and rinse in fresh hot water. Want to add stuff? Folks have been customizing their ramen for thousands of years. Add peanut butter and veggies and it's damn healthy.
5.) It's still cheap. State of the art product for sale so cheap you can buy a case of it for the cost of one meal at, say, Dennys, let alone real food.
Amen. As another 40-year old in NYC, I find the current situation pathetic. NASA would be getting better bang for the buck rounding up funding for new eps of The Cape, Firefly, and Farscape then they ever will with the sort of dog and pony shows they put their attention into now. They wouldn't even need to provide most of the cash themselves, just help out the existing funding efforts, perhaps loan an astronaut out for a cameo now and again, maybe give 'em some dead equipment for props and let them use defunct facilities as sets.
But oops, now I remember; NASA was asked to help with Farscape and they turned them down unless they could get veto power over all script details for the run of the show. Pissed off the show execs no end.
I've been passionate about space all my life. Won an award from NASA in high school as it happens.
And these days I'ld have to think long and hard before condescending to piss on 'em in a fire.
Goddamn shame they weren't more sincere about backing The Cape, eh?
The stick up the ass bureaucrats who have run NASA most of the past few DECADES got themselves into this.
I m disgusted to read of the lack of interest in space issues but not surprised at all.
For years everybody from Gerard K. O'Neil to Laurie Anderson has been trying to help the fat-assed chowderheads down there to capture the public's enthusiasm and reliably as sunrise NASA fucks it up.
I dunno, the first community I ever dealt with that was into haiku was the Mad Scientist's Club in my geeky high school, which then got trumped by the haiku writers I met from MIT which then got trumped by the early music variants at my ever geekier college (while, of course early music was percolating through the entire Cambridge scene).
I'ld say that if/. is going to carry "news" about Star Wars movies and be paid for in part by toy vendors like Think Geek[1] then fibonacci poetry fits right in. The real issue, which, in fairness,/. is working on, is a better system of tags and categories so that users can set which kinds of stuff we see.
btw, if you liked the stapler poetry, wanna write some? I'm always looking for more;->
-Rustin
[1] One of these days I'm gonna open a real geek store, selling oscilloscopes, power supplies for industrial lasers, smart materials, nanotech and superconductor devkits, custom O'Reilly manuals, and, someday, sharks! with frickin' lasers on their heads!
I figure if you can do that, you can also attack a normal bolt. (With a wrench, or something dumb like that.) Maybe not. If you can raise the ambient temp enough, perhaps by putting one of those miniheaters for tea next to it and wrapping the sealed enclosure in a few layers of reflectix (or, my fave from the old days, silvered kapton bubble wrap) then you can unbolt something that you can't touch. A cruder technique would be a teeny bit of thermite, say, immersed in wax and with a magnesium strip fuse, fastened somewhere nearby. For Cthulu's sake, you could get a pretty solid number of joules with some water and a few packages of frickin' Drano if you felt like it.
Burning sh*t is easy. Heating it easier yet. Speaking as a guy who used to run 600 C heating elements and survived months in a burn ward, trust me, dude, heating is far easier, especially if you only have two or three seconds of access, then undoing an enclosed, secured, hardened bolt with a wrench.
Note, btw, that we're not even beginning to discuss the implications in event of an unintended fire.
Wrong again, sparky. Any defensive analysis that starts with motive is a fatally flawed one. As for cost, dude, from what I'm reading, a DOS device could be as simple as a used pager or PDA, one of dozens one could buy at swaps or just get under the counter from cell phone stores for a couple bucks each, jiggered with an antenna. Total cost, other than labor, maybe twenty bucks per and your red team, on a regular flight, flown a couple of times, could drop fifty or sixty into various nooks and crannies, no prob.
Penalty? Dude, here's your serving of clue, again, any defensive strategy especially for attacking airplanes, you idiot that depends on "the penalty for being caught is too high" is fatally stupid.
As pointed out above, I'ld stick to the temperature attack if I were serious. Heat up alloys like that and they bend. You could actually do it safecracker-style. Heat it up a bit, check for deformation or just "listen" for the sound of the bolt deforming, heat it up a bit more, check again, blah, blah, blah. We know that it doesn't take much deltaT or the heat of intended use would foobar the electronics.
I'm betting that we'll be seeing some real unpretty bug incidences of such units used where they can heat or chill by mistake (remote utility boxes, vending machines, etc.) and they just snap open all by themselves.
'Course, I might be up for "helping" those vending machine examples;->
Would you be willing to extend that conclusion to other types of education? In parts of Europe they still have kids learn writing with fountain pens and study Latin to better learn the underpinnings of their first languages. Personally, I learned logic and protoboarding with TTY chips and resistors.
I mean, one could extend this to just about anything, though I'm curious as to how you would describe this technique in non-CS specific terms. Would you consider the relevant variables that the learning context be one that is less forgiving than the typical RL one? That it be more abstract? Would you consider obscurity itself a good thing as it avoids distraction by "mere" commercial applications or tool-specific hacks?
It'd be a good excuse to wear my hair in bunches with my undercut, anyway;)
Yeah, but what about people who want these cells on their hands, arms, legs...
Gonna cause whole different attitudes about clothing. Maybe the only relevant story isn't Green Patches. Maybe we should be looking at The Puppet Masters
That said, I think this new colour goes with my skin colour.
That's nice, sweetie, and i'm so glad that you brought that up. i've been in an absolute tizzy for positively hours!
i'm so worried that the new look here at slashdottipoo is really best for winters and i'm so a fall.
i just, like, don't know what to do with myself!!!
i have to think of something or all the other girls in my cheerleading squad will laugh at me and force me to use old drivers for all my peripherals and then *sob* my banners for the school spirit day will come out all wrong!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*cries*
*dries eyes, adjusts eye shadow, mascara, foundation, bangs, sparkley pink leatherman pouch, and strap of Hello Kitty packet sniffer*
Thank you for listening; you're such a dear. i feel so, so much better.
*straightens up*
i'll just tell the other girls that i don't go to slashdot anymore because they refused to front page my guide to heat dispersal techniques for faux fur case mods. Then when the color scheme changes back i'll say that i've forgiven them.
Dude, they created two modified logos and modified one color in the style sheets. Two hours, tops. The only thing that may have taken time was choosing just the right shade of bubble gum pink.
One kilogram probe would not be able to beam info back.
I agree, as you can see from my comment further down in the post. My point was that I'll take anything I can get at this stage of the game. Even a probe, any probe, scheduled to take five hundred years there and back would make me very happy as it would force us to address the technical issues involved and give kids something to aspire to as they work out what they want to do with their lives.
As for your mission duration numbers, I'd say that with ten years to design and build we should certainly be able to cut that down to fifty if it's done as a government mega-project. Given the idiocies we spend money on now, I might even agree that NASA should put exploratory money into next year's budget for such a probe.
But my point was that we don't have to wait for NASA at all. A far smaller organization with far less pork and distractions, getting experience by building a succession of probes going farther and farther within the solar system, using that learning curve as they go, could start today, be launching useful probes in five years, and interstellar not too long after that.
And I can guarantee you that Rutan, and/or Bezos and/or Branson and/or any of the several dozen other contenders think the very same thing.
Hell, if I had the resources that would certainly be on my radar.
Sending a 1 ton probe to Alpha Centauri (that would get there within 50 years
I'd be satisfied if we could send a ten KILO probe to Alpha Centauri if it could take pictures and come back within, oh, a hundred and fifty years.
I'd guess that if somebody with their sh*t together and the right funding and staff (let's say the almost accepted applicants from Blue Origin) could get a one ton ship on the way in fifteen years. Start with a goal of sending multiple round-trip explorer robots to the moon within three years, the asteroid belt within five years, to the Kuiper belt within ten years, robot landers to the asteroids within eleven years, and then launching an interstellar probe by year fifteen.
Maybe I'm overoptimistic, but if so only by about ten years for the whole series if we assume redesigns based on performance of previous probes. Though this timeline assumes no NASA control at all, purely private organizations under private control.
Fifteen to twenty-five years to the launching of the first interstellar explorer. Think about it.
Not sure I agree with all of your conclusions but love your substantive approach. Facts, costs, context. I wish I had mod points to use up on this thred. You'd be getting at least one.
[blah, blah, ill-thought out blah]Every doomsday scenario in history has thus far turned out to be wrong.
Depends on how you define "doomsday scenario", there, cobber.
Some Native Americans were predicting the destruction of their civilizations back in the mid-1700s but nobody much listened. Same thing re the decimating of the buffalo, passenger pigeon, dodo, and so on.
Greek politicians and scholars were predicting their own downfall and the conquest by Rome *way* before it happened. IIRC, some pretty insightful predictions were made about the time Pyrrus was creating a new word for useless battle triumph.
Michael Brown tried to warn Dubya before Katrina but Shrub just yawned.
When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor one of their own admirals made a famous comment about "waking the sleeping tiger" that was none too happy and basically spot on.
And before that a U.S. military analyst had predicted Japanese imperialist island-hopping decades before it happened.
The sinking of a ship like the Titanic was laid out in great detail by a period writer.
Dozens (at least) of known examples exist of predictions of aircraft hitting the World Trade Center.
Plenty of Celts and, later Highlanders, predicted the triumph of the Romans and later, English.
And on and on and on.
Sometimes the Cassandras have a point. Sometimes it really doesn't come out okay.
Actually, no, they *lose* distance since the number of efficient trajectories to Mars, IIRC, goes down. On the other hand an automated station on the moon that extracted water and minerals and boosted that up to a Lagrange point would certainly be muy choice.
btw, no biggie, but you might want to check the definition of "minimalistic". I strongly suspect that you meant "minimal". Gotta watch the tendency to add extra syllawobbles.
Waiting to buy my ticket on RutanAir, fantasizing about tickets on ReseuneAir,
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, here's a nickel, buy a clue. Sure, large bureaucracies cause inefficiencies but that is so far from the primary reason for North Korea's current situation it's absurd, in fact offensive, to make the comparison. You are seriously lacking in a sense of perspective.
Go for it, son, define "large" for me. Give me some numbers. We have plenty of bureaucracies that are as large or far larger than the entire North Korean government, General Motors, for example, and while they may be inefficient, they do not leave millions of their own starving to death or subject to a high likelihood of torture or death. Equating the two is beyond wrong, it's flat out irresponsible.
Those of us living in reality point, rather, to lack of accountability, lack of transparency, inefficient cross-communications, y'know, the stuff that us actual experts in industrial organization are always willing to explain to those clued enough to pay attention.
You go out there and talk to some genuine experts in the reasons for North Korea's current state. Read up on, say, rule of law. See what energetically capitalist outlets like the Wall Street Journal have to say about the causes of North Korea's problems.Then come back and we'll have this chat again.
Oh, and if you're so hyped on decentralization, tell me, what in the real world have you done to bring that about? Personally, I've been working at that for over twenty years, just testified this past week on government procedures to New York's city council. This wasn't so bad since I've been dealing with the senior relevant councilman since, oh, about two months since he was elected, back in '01.
So, how about you. What have you accomplished?
XP is so 2006. I want to see Vista running on these machines.
;->
Really? Are all of your tastes so perverted?
"It canniblizes our other sales"
Really, now? The Marine corps wants to carry iMacs into battle?
"It puts us in marketplaces we can't afford to focus on."
Oh, you mean like education, already a core market, and vertical stuff like insurance that is vastly profitable?
"There was never really any demand."
Funny, that's not what, say, Infoworld said, let alone teachers, doctors, mobile salespeople, and, as mentioned above, the U.S. Marine Corps.
"Shareholders are upset about all that investment in plant."
So better to just write it all off and cut your profit numbers down further?
"We can't afford the distraction from important projects."
As CNet showed two months ago, the Newton is still better than most of what's out there. And from the scuttlebutt I heard from folks inside Apple, there were plenty of people wanting to buy the rights to the molds, the IP, the whole damn package. Apple (read Jobs and buddies) was just too snitty to accept any of the offers.
I'm impressed by what I'm seeing about the iPhone, though a little more comparison to the Nokia 800 and various Psions would be appreciated. But this is pissant compared to what we would have now if we had gotten TEN FRICKIN' YEARS more improvement of the Newton.
Speaking as a publisher, there is no chance whatsoever that children's textbooks need to cost twenty bucks each to print.
Go for it, you find me quotes from printers for runs of over five thousand books where they cost any more than, oh, five bucks apiece. And that is assuming conventional paper, hardcover (which is, btw, a terrible design approach compared to, say, tyvek over soft plastic), and the book being the awkward size and design of "normal" textbooks.
But then what would I know? I've only done textbook production work for Harcourt-Brace, Houghton-Mifflin, and Scholastic, not to mention collateral materials and periodicals production for The Trumpet Club, Time, Inc., McGraw-Hill, and, oh, right, my own publishing company.
No, the pricing of textbooks is a result of back-assed production systems, government contractor pricing, schoolbook adoption board warping of design, and terrible legacy choices related to all of the above. And with new digital printing systems coming on line all the time, real world limitations are dropping every year.
Admittedly, I'm delighted at all of the above. I'm just now bringing my first bound products to press and I expect to underprice the buggers by fifty to eighty percent.
But don't believe them when they tell you their mahooah about printing costs. You might as well take Halliburton's word for it on their costs.
Now, first of all, I mostly don't buy ramen at all these days. My noodle fix of choice is some Wei Wei rice noodles with amchur (mango powder), a bit of tienjin dried cabbage, pickled ginger, an egg and or shredded meat, fresh scallions (I grow my own), maybe greens or sprouts, maybe peanut butter, a bit of soy sauce, smidgens of other seasonings, and some fresh lime juice. Comes out to about a buck a meal.
My fifty cent estimate was in recognition of the great ramen king, Sapporo Ichiban (original flavor or miso flavor), which I have found to go for about fifty cents a pack in NYC, Portland, Toronto, Milwaukee, and half a dozen other cities.
As for other varieties, yeah, sure Top Ramen is far less, but why bother? The south Asian versions are less but they're too friggin small for me. so yeah, you can pay less, but then you can also buy a CPU at Walmart but I suspect that most of you wouldn't.
So let me just say that not only was my price estimate a good average (because many of the cup noodles are more) it was, if referring solely to packets, an implicit statement of my confidence in the good taste of /.ers.
Yes and no. Let's keep in mind that most people unless a few generations back dies too young for us to know how bad their heart disease would have been. They also, on average, exercised far more. Remember, going to take a crap used to mean walking out to the yard and back. Getting your room warm meant building a fire. Traveling quickly meant riding a horse. Stuff we do effortlessly took more exertion for them than many modern folks experience in a routine at the gym.
But then again, AFAIC, at this point ramen is still the perfect geek food.
1.) It's hugely high tech. That little fifty cent packet depends on freeze-drying, foil packaging (thank you NASA), fifth or later gen styrofoam if it's in a cup (only recent gens are low in leached plasticizers), chances are you're cooking it in a microwave oven, and on and on. An awful lot of geek skull sweat went into every little pack of noodly goodness.
2.) It's truly imternational. Go for it, tell me again about the evil American cultural hegemony. Ramen is a Chinese food reworked by a Japanese inventor, and increasingly done in south Asian flavors, all sold through American-style distibution.
3.) It's a triumph of free-market capitalism. A better product that succeeded because it is better and getting constantly revised due to low barriers to entry and fierce competition.
4.) It's hackable. Don't want the palm oil? Drain off the water before you eat it and rinse in fresh hot water. Want to add stuff? Folks have been customizing their ramen for thousands of years. Add peanut butter and veggies and it's damn healthy.
5.) It's still cheap. State of the art product for sale so cheap you can buy a case of it for the cost of one meal at, say, Dennys, let alone real food.
Hell, yeah. Ramen. Gimme some more.
But oops, now I remember; NASA was asked to help with Farscape and they turned them down unless they could get veto power over all script details for the run of the show. Pissed off the show execs no end.
I've been passionate about space all my life. Won an award from NASA in high school as it happens.
And these days I'ld have to think long and hard before condescending to piss on 'em in a fire.
Goddamn shame they weren't more sincere about backing The Cape, eh?
The stick up the ass bureaucrats who have run NASA most of the past few DECADES got themselves into this.
I m disgusted to read of the lack of interest in space issues but not surprised at all.
For years everybody from Gerard K. O'Neil to Laurie Anderson has been trying to help the fat-assed chowderheads down there to capture the public's enthusiasm and reliably as sunrise NASA fucks it up.
Thanks guys.
So much.
-Rustin
I'ld say that if /. is going to carry "news" about Star Wars movies and be paid for in part by toy vendors like Think Geek[1] then fibonacci poetry fits right in. The real issue, which, in fairness, /. is working on, is a better system of tags and categories so that users can set which kinds of stuff we see.
btw, if you liked the stapler poetry, wanna write some? I'm always looking for more ;->
-Rustin
[1] One of these days I'm gonna open a real geek store, selling oscilloscopes, power supplies for industrial lasers, smart materials, nanotech and superconductor devkits, custom O'Reilly manuals, and, someday, sharks! with frickin' lasers on their heads!
Much fun, cool exercise of the faculties, and you'ld be amazed at the stuff I've seen people free associate after trying it.
-Rustin
-Rustin
Maybe not. If you can raise the ambient temp enough, perhaps by putting one of those miniheaters for tea next to it and wrapping the sealed enclosure in a few layers of reflectix (or, my fave from the old days, silvered kapton bubble wrap) then you can unbolt something that you can't touch. A cruder technique would be a teeny bit of thermite, say, immersed in wax and with a magnesium strip fuse, fastened somewhere nearby. For Cthulu's sake, you could get a pretty solid number of joules with some water and a few packages of frickin' Drano if you felt like it.
Burning sh*t is easy. Heating it easier yet. Speaking as a guy who used to run 600 C heating elements and survived months in a burn ward, trust me, dude, heating is far easier, especially if you only have two or three seconds of access, then undoing an enclosed, secured, hardened bolt with a wrench.
Note, btw, that we're not even beginning to discuss the implications in event of an unintended fire.
-Rustin
Wrong again, sparky. Any defensive analysis that starts with motive is a fatally flawed one. As for cost, dude, from what I'm reading, a DOS device could be as simple as a used pager or PDA, one of dozens one could buy at swaps or just get under the counter from cell phone stores for a couple bucks each, jiggered with an antenna. Total cost, other than labor, maybe twenty bucks per and your red team, on a regular flight, flown a couple of times, could drop fifty or sixty into various nooks and crannies, no prob.
Penalty? Dude, here's your serving of clue, again, any defensive strategy especially for attacking airplanes, you idiot that depends on "the penalty for being caught is too high" is fatally stupid.
Go home, replace your brain, try again.
-Rustin
I'm betting that we'll be seeing some real unpretty bug incidences of such units used where they can heat or chill by mistake (remote utility boxes, vending machines, etc.) and they just snap open all by themselves.
'Course, I might be up for "helping" those vending machine examples ;->
-Rustin
I mean, one could extend this to just about anything, though I'm curious as to how you would describe this technique in non-CS specific terms. Would you consider the relevant variables that the learning context be one that is less forgiving than the typical RL one? That it be more abstract? Would you consider obscurity itself a good thing as it avoids distraction by "mere" commercial applications or tool-specific hacks?
-Rustin
Yeah, but what about people who want these cells on their hands, arms, legs...
Gonna cause whole different attitudes about clothing. Maybe the only relevant story isn't Green Patches. Maybe we should be looking at The Puppet Masters
*snert*
-Rustin
That's nice, sweetie, and i'm so glad that you brought that up. i've been in an absolute tizzy for positively hours!
i'm so worried that the new look here at slashdottipoo is really best for winters and i'm so a fall.
i just, like, don't know what to do with myself!!!
i have to think of something or all the other girls in my cheerleading squad will laugh at me and force me to use old drivers for all my peripherals and then *sob* my banners for the school spirit day will come out all wrong!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*cries*
*dries eyes, adjusts eye shadow, mascara, foundation, bangs, sparkley pink leatherman pouch, and strap of Hello Kitty packet sniffer*
Thank you for listening; you're such a dear. i feel so, so much better.
*straightens up*
i'll just tell the other girls that i don't go to slashdot anymore because they refused to front page my guide to heat dispersal techniques for faux fur case mods. Then when the color scheme changes back i'll say that i've forgiven them.
toodles!
-Rustina
Rustin(a)
-Rustina
-giggles!-
I agree, as you can see from my comment further down in the post. My point was that I'll take anything I can get at this stage of the game. Even a probe, any probe, scheduled to take five hundred years there and back would make me very happy as it would force us to address the technical issues involved and give kids something to aspire to as they work out what they want to do with their lives.
As for your mission duration numbers, I'd say that with ten years to design and build we should certainly be able to cut that down to fifty if it's done as a government mega-project. Given the idiocies we spend money on now, I might even agree that NASA should put exploratory money into next year's budget for such a probe.
But my point was that we don't have to wait for NASA at all. A far smaller organization with far less pork and distractions, getting experience by building a succession of probes going farther and farther within the solar system, using that learning curve as they go, could start today, be launching useful probes in five years, and interstellar not too long after that.
And I can guarantee you that Rutan, and/or Bezos and/or Branson and/or any of the several dozen other contenders think the very same thing.
Hell, if I had the resources that would certainly be on my radar.
Rustin
I'd be satisfied if we could send a ten KILO probe to Alpha Centauri if it could take pictures and come back within, oh, a hundred and fifty years.
I'd guess that if somebody with their sh*t together and the right funding and staff (let's say the almost accepted applicants from Blue Origin) could get a one ton ship on the way in fifteen years. Start with a goal of sending multiple round-trip explorer robots to the moon within three years, the asteroid belt within five years, to the Kuiper belt within ten years, robot landers to the asteroids within eleven years, and then launching an interstellar probe by year fifteen.
Maybe I'm overoptimistic, but if so only by about ten years for the whole series if we assume redesigns based on performance of previous probes. Though this timeline assumes no NASA control at all, purely private organizations under private control.
Fifteen to twenty-five years to the launching of the first interstellar explorer. Think about it.
-Rustin
Rustin
Depends on how you define "doomsday scenario", there, cobber.
Some Native Americans were predicting the destruction of their civilizations back in the mid-1700s but nobody much listened. Same thing re the decimating of the buffalo, passenger pigeon, dodo, and so on.
Greek politicians and scholars were predicting their own downfall and the conquest by Rome *way* before it happened. IIRC, some pretty insightful predictions were made about the time Pyrrus was creating a new word for useless battle triumph.
Michael Brown tried to warn Dubya before Katrina but Shrub just yawned.
When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor one of their own admirals made a famous comment about "waking the sleeping tiger" that was none too happy and basically spot on.
And before that a U.S. military analyst had predicted Japanese imperialist island-hopping decades before it happened.
The sinking of a ship like the Titanic was laid out in great detail by a period writer.
Dozens (at least) of known examples exist of predictions of aircraft hitting the World Trade Center.
Plenty of Celts and, later Highlanders, predicted the triumph of the Romans and later, English.
And on and on and on.
Sometimes the Cassandras have a point. Sometimes it really doesn't come out okay.
-Rustin
btw, no biggie, but you might want to check the definition of "minimalistic". I strongly suspect that you meant "minimal". Gotta watch the tendency to add extra syllawobbles.
Waiting to buy my ticket on RutanAir, fantasizing about tickets on ReseuneAir,
-Rustin