So, you go to Fry's, buy a WiFi router and a WiFi laptop or whatever, and set them up at home or at work. Must we conclude that it is not obvious to anyone "skilled in the art" that you can use the WiFi router to connect your laptop to a network? What are patents for again?
Har. and like me I'd wager you don't give a rat's ass. On the contrary, you'll occasionally take advantage of some discount or other. People are blowing this way out of proportion out of sheer boredom or something.
It is a sad tragedy that so few people realize this. Maybe I sound like a broken record calling these people sci fi space adventure magical religious cultists, but that's how they behave and express themselves. All reason, fact, physics, and accountability are abandoned to promote simple-minded childish fantasies. Planning to send humans to Mars is effectively as realistic as sending them to the mythical North Pole to visit Santa Claus and his elves.
I should have lived to see a thriving colony on Mars! I'm not dead yet, but these sickening roadmaps make it obvious that the chance of me living long enough to see ANY offworld colony is pretty slim. What the fuck happened?
For the benefit of your fellow sci fi space adventure magical religious cultists, please calculate the cost of the following:
Transport 100,000 people to an off-world location of your choosing
Make sure accommodations are built and ready for them
Make them go from 100% to 0% dependent on earth for their survival within 100 years
Explain who will pay for it, how, and why
Hear, hear, Dude. Though I can't help but notice that the sci fi space adventure magical religious cultists that dominate this forum are making sure nobody will ever read your post.
I don't think it leaves all that much emotion on the ground. As a poster above noted, most Americans probably don't give a crap about manned space exploration or NASA. The only people who are really invested are those that make money through NASA contracts.
I don't agree that it costs a trivial amount of money. That is the old argument based on comparing NASA's budget with the total Federal budget, a rather goofy comparison. That can be claimed about any government program, but sum them all up and sum them with our ridiculously evil military adventures and you bleed an extra trillion dollars a year that must be paid by incurring more debt. Manned space exploration is a corrupt waste, better to cut it and save the money, and do the same for every government program that is little more than pork for the lobbyist-wielding plutocracy.
I agree with your overall point, but graft is very much the driver of NASA's budget. The singular insistence on manned space exploration is because it is what costs the most and therefore what will make the most money for the government contractors that drive NASA. Most people don't give a shit about NASA just as they don't give a shit about NIH, NSF, National Endowment for the Arts, and the many, many institutions that are our true national treasures. Our fellow stereotypical American citizens care mainly about getting iPads and iPhones, watching videos, making sure they pump pop music through their earbuds at every available moment, making sure they are perceived as "cool," avoiding any and all undue effort, eating junk food, getting laid, getting wasted, etc, all the while reserving the right to whine, bitch, and moan about nearly everything. They also appear to fervently believe that Battlestar Galactica and the like are credible visualizations of the future. We are truly a sorry spectacle.
That's the whole point. To channel money to aerospace contractors and all other lobbyist-wielding gravy train rider wannabes. There is no useful scientific or engineering purpose to be served by manned space exploration. It is a worthless, purposeless enterprise, a mere excuse to loot money from national treasuries. This roadmap comprises a formal list of corrupt governments. Only true-believing sci fi space adventure magical religious cultists are gullible enough to swallow the "space exploration" excuse. Space should be explored by robotic devices only for the foreseeable future, i.e. the next century or two. The rest is just graft-driven government corruption.
That's great for your iPad. I doubt that you can be productive with Maya, computational chemistry, or a wide variety of other profession-specific applications that people use at work and at play. This is software that can take hours, days, or weeks to run even on an i7. Maybe you don't use it, maybe you don't know anyone that does (although you almost certainly do), but powerful software requires powerful hardware. iPads are not intended to replace them nor capable of doing so. Also, you will not just have an iPad, but eventually scores and further ahead hundreds of autonomous devices of various types in your home or office. A local compute node is the answer for security, although most will probably hook up to their cloud motherships sending all sorts of dangerous info out of your control. Imagine a Roomba with a kinect-like system constantly sending scans of its surroundings to a cloud datastore and compute server so that it can figure out whether an object is trash, an obstacle, clothing, a living being, etc. Privacy concerns go to a new level when your little robot is constantly sending ever more detailed scans of your house to an offshored data center god knows where. Many devices in your home, office, or on your person will be doing this.
I agree with your post with regards to uses like iPad web-browsing, watching videos, and playing lightweight games (i.e. that don't have numerous AI threads and rich 3D environments with millions of shaded polygons and hundreds or thousands of moving objects), but there's a lot more that computers are used for.
Apple can do this in a blink by the way. They have a powerful desktop OS they can just integrate straight into their mobile stack. They're already laying out the groundwork in fact - notice how you can show your iPad screen on an external display wirelessly? Notice how the "PC" was demoted below the cloud? Or how iDevices no longer require a PC tether?
Think how useful it'll be when your iPhone is running real desktop stuff in an app. And driving an external 30'' display and keyboard wirelessly.
Interesting scenario, but it is more likely that the phone will be a slave rather than a master. People lose phones and they get stolen, and there will always be terrifying pressure to extend battery life. It is more likely that everyone will have a a compute appliance of ever increasing horsepower somewhere in the relatively secure perimeter of their home or office to which their growing horde of devices are wirelessly connected, at least when their are nearby. More and more horsepower and storage, and damn the wattage. Many people do things like play games, create and edit digital content, and other things that continue to soak up compute cycles without any foreseeable limit. Google isn't stupid or shortsighted. I suspect they and Apple have a very good idea of what role phones will play over the next 20 years or so.
Microsoft, however (those dedicated stock price masturbators), are almost certainly clueless. If anyone is going to screw it up and forcibly, tenaciously extract failure from the jaws of success, it will be them.
Astronauts are not cheap at all. Again, show us how much it would cost to transport, deploy, and support enough of them to build the project. Nothing in space is cheap. It is all colossally expensive. That's why all those sappy TV and movie sci fi stories will never occur. Not even this ridiculous little pizza parlor.
What are you talking about? Slashdotters love this kind of crap. This is probably the single greatest bastion of sci fi space-adventure magical-religious cultism on the planet. No doubt plenty of people here think there will eventually really be fast food joints on the moon, that it is economically attractive to mine asteroids, that we will all one day "get off this rock" or at least "get our asses to mars" and many other such childish beliefs. I would speculate that lots of slashdotters think the $20+ billion is a realistic figure that someone will one day cough up to do something like this.
Many people are tired of right-click and then look down through the list for the function you want... yes, there still are beginners on computers today..
Funny you should mention that. I worked with high school kids for a year, and digging around in the "ribbon" for functionality that used to be easy to find in either the menu or the right-click list wasted many, many valuable hours. I have never had the impression that the "ribbon" improved navigation. It was different, cool-looking, cutesy, and looked as if it was better, but in practice it was clumsier to use and difficult to see all of the functionality that it represents. Customizing paragraph definitions, for example, is much less straightforward and requires more navigation than before. The kids were limited to using what little functionality was obvious in the ribbon, and only haphazardly were able to find finer adjustments and customization.
Slashdot Mirror
So, you go to Fry's, buy a WiFi router and a WiFi laptop or whatever, and set them up at home or at work. Must we conclude that it is not obvious to anyone "skilled in the art" that you can use the WiFi router to connect your laptop to a network? What are patents for again?
Har. and like me I'd wager you don't give a rat's ass. On the contrary, you'll occasionally take advantage of some discount or other. People are blowing this way out of proportion out of sheer boredom or something.
It is a sad tragedy that so few people realize this. Maybe I sound like a broken record calling these people sci fi space adventure magical religious cultists, but that's how they behave and express themselves. All reason, fact, physics, and accountability are abandoned to promote simple-minded childish fantasies. Planning to send humans to Mars is effectively as realistic as sending them to the mythical North Pole to visit Santa Claus and his elves.
I should have lived to see a thriving colony on Mars! I'm not dead yet, but these sickening roadmaps make it obvious that the chance of me living long enough to see ANY offworld colony is pretty slim. What the fuck happened?
For the benefit of your fellow sci fi space adventure magical religious cultists, please calculate the cost of the following:
Transport 100,000 people to an off-world location of your choosing
Make sure accommodations are built and ready for them
Make them go from 100% to 0% dependent on earth for their survival within 100 years
Explain who will pay for it, how, and why
That will fully answer your question.
China isn't stupid enough to waste money on such a boondoggle. Only we are.
Hear, hear, Dude. Though I can't help but notice that the sci fi space adventure magical religious cultists that dominate this forum are making sure nobody will ever read your post.
You're right about the dissenting view, though. I'm racking up those zero scores at quite a healthy clip.
I don't think it leaves all that much emotion on the ground. As a poster above noted, most Americans probably don't give a crap about manned space exploration or NASA. The only people who are really invested are those that make money through NASA contracts.
I don't agree that it costs a trivial amount of money. That is the old argument based on comparing NASA's budget with the total Federal budget, a rather goofy comparison. That can be claimed about any government program, but sum them all up and sum them with our ridiculously evil military adventures and you bleed an extra trillion dollars a year that must be paid by incurring more debt. Manned space exploration is a corrupt waste, better to cut it and save the money, and do the same for every government program that is little more than pork for the lobbyist-wielding plutocracy.
Oh get off your high horse. You are nobody to pity anyone. Substantiate your superstitious beliefs with something other than pious horseshit.
I agree with your overall point, but graft is very much the driver of NASA's budget. The singular insistence on manned space exploration is because it is what costs the most and therefore what will make the most money for the government contractors that drive NASA. Most people don't give a shit about NASA just as they don't give a shit about NIH, NSF, National Endowment for the Arts, and the many, many institutions that are our true national treasures. Our fellow stereotypical American citizens care mainly about getting iPads and iPhones, watching videos, making sure they pump pop music through their earbuds at every available moment, making sure they are perceived as "cool," avoiding any and all undue effort, eating junk food, getting laid, getting wasted, etc, all the while reserving the right to whine, bitch, and moan about nearly everything. They also appear to fervently believe that Battlestar Galactica and the like are credible visualizations of the future. We are truly a sorry spectacle.
That's the whole point. To channel money to aerospace contractors and all other lobbyist-wielding gravy train rider wannabes. There is no useful scientific or engineering purpose to be served by manned space exploration. It is a worthless, purposeless enterprise, a mere excuse to loot money from national treasuries. This roadmap comprises a formal list of corrupt governments. Only true-believing sci fi space adventure magical religious cultists are gullible enough to swallow the "space exploration" excuse. Space should be explored by robotic devices only for the foreseeable future, i.e. the next century or two. The rest is just graft-driven government corruption.
That's great for your iPad. I doubt that you can be productive with Maya, computational chemistry, or a wide variety of other profession-specific applications that people use at work and at play. This is software that can take hours, days, or weeks to run even on an i7. Maybe you don't use it, maybe you don't know anyone that does (although you almost certainly do), but powerful software requires powerful hardware. iPads are not intended to replace them nor capable of doing so. Also, you will not just have an iPad, but eventually scores and further ahead hundreds of autonomous devices of various types in your home or office. A local compute node is the answer for security, although most will probably hook up to their cloud motherships sending all sorts of dangerous info out of your control. Imagine a Roomba with a kinect-like system constantly sending scans of its surroundings to a cloud datastore and compute server so that it can figure out whether an object is trash, an obstacle, clothing, a living being, etc. Privacy concerns go to a new level when your little robot is constantly sending ever more detailed scans of your house to an offshored data center god knows where. Many devices in your home, office, or on your person will be doing this.
I agree with your post with regards to uses like iPad web-browsing, watching videos, and playing lightweight games (i.e. that don't have numerous AI threads and rich 3D environments with millions of shaded polygons and hundreds or thousands of moving objects), but there's a lot more that computers are used for.
Apple can do this in a blink by the way. They have a powerful desktop OS they can just integrate straight into their mobile stack. They're already laying out the groundwork in fact - notice how you can show your iPad screen on an external display wirelessly? Notice how the "PC" was demoted below the cloud? Or how iDevices no longer require a PC tether? Think how useful it'll be when your iPhone is running real desktop stuff in an app. And driving an external 30'' display and keyboard wirelessly.
Interesting scenario, but it is more likely that the phone will be a slave rather than a master. People lose phones and they get stolen, and there will always be terrifying pressure to extend battery life. It is more likely that everyone will have a a compute appliance of ever increasing horsepower somewhere in the relatively secure perimeter of their home or office to which their growing horde of devices are wirelessly connected, at least when their are nearby. More and more horsepower and storage, and damn the wattage. Many people do things like play games, create and edit digital content, and other things that continue to soak up compute cycles without any foreseeable limit. Google isn't stupid or shortsighted. I suspect they and Apple have a very good idea of what role phones will play over the next 20 years or so.
Microsoft, however (those dedicated stock price masturbators), are almost certainly clueless. If anyone is going to screw it up and forcibly, tenaciously extract failure from the jaws of success, it will be them.
Why people not only continue to use MS Office but are willing to pay 200 bucks or so for it is beyond me.
Astronauts are not cheap at all. Again, show us how much it would cost to transport, deploy, and support enough of them to build the project. Nothing in space is cheap. It is all colossally expensive. That's why all those sappy TV and movie sci fi stories will never occur. Not even this ridiculous little pizza parlor.
You're joking, right? It's worse than slashdot. Far worse.
Thank you for faithfully illustrating my point. Now calculate the construction costs and timelines.
What are you talking about? Slashdotters love this kind of crap. This is probably the single greatest bastion of sci fi space-adventure magical-religious cultism on the planet. No doubt plenty of people here think there will eventually really be fast food joints on the moon, that it is economically attractive to mine asteroids, that we will all one day "get off this rock" or at least "get our asses to mars" and many other such childish beliefs. I would speculate that lots of slashdotters think the $20+ billion is a realistic figure that someone will one day cough up to do something like this.
Neither for power users nor for the stupid. It is not at all clear who benefits from "the ribbon."
Many people are tired of right-click and then look down through the list for the function you want... yes, there still are beginners on computers today..
Funny you should mention that. I worked with high school kids for a year, and digging around in the "ribbon" for functionality that used to be easy to find in either the menu or the right-click list wasted many, many valuable hours. I have never had the impression that the "ribbon" improved navigation. It was different, cool-looking, cutesy, and looked as if it was better, but in practice it was clumsier to use and difficult to see all of the functionality that it represents. Customizing paragraph definitions, for example, is much less straightforward and requires more navigation than before. The kids were limited to using what little functionality was obvious in the ribbon, and only haphazardly were able to find finer adjustments and customization.
Why, why, why, why, WHY?
I'd see C extended with supple string handling and regexes, for example. On top of a class model, obviously.
You mean like C++ with Boost?
Believe it or not, 2011 could be the year of C++.
Starting in August? Maybe we can also make it the Year of the Linux Desktop starting, say, on Christmas.
Read The Shock Doctrine . Then weep. Then vote for anyone other than Republicans or Democrats.
There's an app for that. I hope.