"Most people" will never ever have the resources to go to a four star moon hotel. Why only four stars, BTW? Spend scores of millions of dollars, go through some very intense training, and risk life and limb on a half million mile round trip to go to a four star hotel? You'd have to be not just repugnantly, disgustingly, filthy rich, in top athletic shape, and have the balls of a bull, but also willing to take second best. I just don't see it. For the cost of the trip you could literally build your own little private resort with lots of chicks with big tits and people acting out any alien combat or whatnot you would like. Much less risk, too.
There is no good metaphysical argument either, at least not one that outweighs the huge cost. Given the fidelity of VR data feeds, and the potential to provide a high quality suspension of disbelief and simulate a tele-presence, even metaphysical arguments will be more convincing in favor of unmanned vs. manned space exploration.
Because most people grew up watching Star Wars and space cartoons, and think it is man's destiny to fly around in gigantic spaceships fighting evil aliens with rayguns and getting the girl with the big boobs in the end. What's the fun in doing space exploration efficiently, cheaply, and with a huge scientific payoff if there are no aliens or chicks with big tits?
You are clearly a late-comer. Your argument is not merely rubbish, it is a straw man made of rubbish. I favor space exploration at least as much as anyone on this forum. The point you are missing is that a human being does not need to be physically present to explore space. In fact, the presence of humans impedes exploration by burning up the lion's share of resources in maintaining livable conditions. Look at the history of space exploration, from the points of view of both scientific achievement and exploratory coverage. The vast bulk was done with unmanned equipment.
Why do you provide those quotes to refute my post? In what way am I in opposition to them? They were written long before there were robots. Your tone is starry-eyed, shallow-thinking, and reliant purely on emotional impulse, precisely the sorts of traits that explorers tend not to possess.
Unlike you, apparently, I actually want space exploration to occur, not just talk about it or daydream about my favorite sci-fi stories and cartoons.
Making robots build "the outpost." It never fails to amaze how close people can come to seeing that which is right before their eyes, but not actually get there. We do not need a human outpost. There is no technical or scientific justification for one. Everything worth doing on the moon or in the rest of our solar system can be done with robots. Sending people up there to putter around is a colossal waste of money that detracts from the valuable work of scientific research and technical innovation. It is just plain stupid.
provide products and services with vendor lock-in, many or most of them billable
???
Profit
Seriously, where is the novelty in this list:
Expanded access to basic technology literacy and skills training
Basic-level information technology training resources through Microsoft Unlimited Potential and Digital Literacy curricula
Intermediate technology skills training courses, online and instructor-led, plus selected certification exams
Vouchers for eLearning course collections offered by Microsoft
Vouchers for certification exams leading to Microsoft business certification
Grants of cash and software to community partners to build in-classroom training capacity
Discounted membership rates for institutions participating in the Microsoft IT Academy program
Access to a new Web portal that will help guide individuals to training and resources that position them for success in the economy today, and tomorrow
You have to hand it to them though, if anyone can find a silver... um, golden lining to a problem, it's MS.
Provisions in the Congressional stimulus bill could help jump-start a new, multibillion-dollar industry in the US for manufacturing advanced briberies for congressmen and senators and for siphoning off money from government pork to enable the widespread use of luxury homes and lifestyles by politicians. The nearly $790 billion economic stimulus legislation contains tens of billions of dollars in loans, grants, and tax incentives for advanced bribery research and manufacturing, as well as incentives for earmarks and kickbacks, which could help create a market for these briberies. Significant advances in bribery techniques, including the development of new fully off-shored briberies, have been made by corporate legal departments in the past few years. Advanced bribery manufacturing is primarily at the state and federal level, particularly in Washington D.C., but local governments are looking forward to far greater participation.
All of you people who favor manned space exploration should clearly see why we can't do both. If we didn't waste so much money on the low earth orbit ferris wheel to "research the effects of weightlessness/space-travel on the human body" and other scientifically worthless bullshit, we would be able to do both. Cue the "If Christopher Columbus..." and "It's our destiny to leave earth..." moronic fairy tales.
The "not invented here" syndrome collides with an "everybody in the world must buy my product immediately" delusion. Who could have predicted that it would fail?
Now if only commercial software houses would write cross-platform code that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. So many companies got suckered into writing to captured-audience (Windows only or at best Windows plus MacOS) libraries during the last 20 years. It'll be hard and costly to port all that code. I suspect few companies have the resources or even perceive the need to do it.
IANAL, but patents are for protection from copying. For it to be public domain and practically unpatentable all you should have to do is publically disclose it as widely as possible in venues with a clear timestamp. It would also be wise for you to have a notebook with notarized dates, etc to demonstrate invention dates.
That said, I hope all software and business patents are abolished as soon as possible.
The article sums up the entirety of the justification for manned space travel: nothing but sappy, soapy emotional arguments.
What has to occur for people to understand that manned space flight 1) is as colossally expensive as it is devoid of any redeeming scientific value, 2) far from fulfilling our need for exploration and discovery, actually prevents it, and 3) is possibly the least efficient way to explore the cosmos.
Don't start with the moronic "if Christopher Columbus blah blah blah" argument. Manned space exploration is the equivalent of Columbus going out about 10 or 20 miles from port, sailing around in circles for days or weeks, then coming back and claiming that he was investigating the effects of sailing on the human body in preparation for real exploration that never really occurs.
Manned space exploration means missions to lower earth orbit, and maybe a few trips to the moon every fifty years. Utterly pointless, of no scientific value, a caricature of "space exploration," and nothing more than a huge subsidy to the aerospace industry and the Pentagon. There is no credible or compelling reason to do it!
Unmanned space exploration is exactly the opposite. It is far less expensive and has already managed preliminary exploration of almost our entire solar system, transforming our scientific understanding of the universe in less than half a century. That is true exploration, sans bullshit emotional arguments.
For those of you enamored with the notion of a manned mission to mars, forget it. Its cost is unreachable and unjustifiable. Psychological issues cast great doubt on its human feasibility. No credible return mission has ever been put forward. It is morally unconscionable to send people on a suicide mission. Death or serious biological damage are highly likely even before they get there due to radiation and other dangers. With an enormous burden of expense year after year over decades it might be achievable, but for what? Robots have been exploring the martian surface for the better part of a decade at a miniscule fraction of the cost in time, money, and resources that would be required for a manned mission, also transforming our scientific understanding of that planet.
The idea that our destiny is to somehow leave earth a la Battlestar Galactica even more absurd for the same reasons multiplied over an even grander scale. People who hold this belief are victims of a magical religious superstition akin to a belief in a spiritual life after death. It is nothing but uninformed faith, specious emotional arguments by another name.
Grow up, people. We are adults, not silly uneducated children.
H.R.414
Title: To require mobile phones containing digital cameras to make a sound when a photograph is taken.
Sponsor: Rep King, Peter T. [NY-3] (introduced 1/9/2009)
Please do everything within your power to reject this bill and eliminate it from any further consideration. It has many flaws: 1) it will be a nuisance at a wide variety of occasions and circumstances for phones to emit constant noises; 2) a modestly motivated individual will be able to circumvent the law by a) disconnecting the speaker that emits the click, b) removing the sound file responsible for the click from the phone's memory, c) modifying the phone software in a variety of ways to prevent the clicking noise from occurring, d) using a small digital or film camera that makes little or no noise instead of a phone, or e) taking photos from a distance or with artificially high ambient noise (there are no doubt many other ways); 3) This is an intrusive and in practice pointless case of nanny-state disruption of citizens' everyday affairs, more appropriate to a soviet-inspired regime than one that cherishes freedom and liberty.
If illicit photos are taken and used for stalking or other predatory behavior, they can be used in a court of law as evidence to prosecute criminal behavior as no doubt occurs today. To restrict the general use of all camera equipment in this way to address a very narrow and infrequent problem is absurdly cumbersome and unwarranted.
This is the sort of legislation that motivates the almost universally held belief among US citizens and residents that congressional representatives are corrupt and incompetent parasites. It is dangerous to a democracy for such a view to become entrenched in the public mind, and I am shocked each time legislation is proposed that confirms such a notion. HR414 is a shining example of such rubbish.
I still harbor hope that you are neither corrupt nor incompetent, your vote in favor of the "bailout" of financial institutions notwithstanding. Please stop this moronic claptrap as soon as possible.
Anecdotally, I have also noticed that Ubuntu boxes tend to hog bandwidth, as compared to an XP box at home. When someone on the home LAN starts downloading or streaming something from a linux box, everyone else notices it immediately. The XP box is (inadvertently?) more polite about it. Still, if you're the only one pulling in the big byte loads, faster is definitely better.
You people are wimps. At my employer, we have decreed that work weeks consist of four consecutive 42 hour days (that's 24, backwards). The days are now named Plem, Spweep, Nawngk, and Joel. We get every second Joel and every fourth Plem off, and have 12 hours off per day to go home or whatever. The company provides diapers and all necessary medications. Productivity has risen 5% over the last Phlenkature.
Great. Coal is even worse than nuclear, is in far more widespread use, scores (hundreds?) of new plants are being built every year, you need to destroy entire mountains or excavate square kilometers of land to feed them, and the mines' remains are dumped at arbitrary locations. And there I was, thinking that we would only be fucked at some undefined time in the future. My mistake.
Yay! Nuclear is Clean! It is now the Cleanest Energy Source, so now we can just bury reactors in our towns and forget about them, they're so clean! No worries about corrosion, wayward backhoes, leaks, manufacturing defects, faulty installation or setup, unforeseen design issues, ground settling or shifting, people digging them up and damaging them, government and utilities losing track of some of them, venting of radioactive fission products, etc. That won't happen. It can't happen because Nuclear is Clean! It's The Cleanest Of Them All!
Come on you stupid backward dipshit ignorant latte-sipping bisexual liberal faggots, get with the program!
The most crucial metric is the lobbytheons of force directed in a concentrated beam from energy industrialists to the US Capitol building and its immediate surroundings.
Slashdot Mirror
"Most people" will never ever have the resources to go to a four star moon hotel. Why only four stars, BTW? Spend scores of millions of dollars, go through some very intense training, and risk life and limb on a half million mile round trip to go to a four star hotel? You'd have to be not just repugnantly, disgustingly, filthy rich, in top athletic shape, and have the balls of a bull, but also willing to take second best. I just don't see it. For the cost of the trip you could literally build your own little private resort with lots of chicks with big tits and people acting out any alien combat or whatnot you would like. Much less risk, too.
There is no good metaphysical argument either, at least not one that outweighs the huge cost. Given the fidelity of VR data feeds, and the potential to provide a high quality suspension of disbelief and simulate a tele-presence, even metaphysical arguments will be more convincing in favor of unmanned vs. manned space exploration.
Because most people grew up watching Star Wars and space cartoons, and think it is man's destiny to fly around in gigantic spaceships fighting evil aliens with rayguns and getting the girl with the big boobs in the end. What's the fun in doing space exploration efficiently, cheaply, and with a huge scientific payoff if there are no aliens or chicks with big tits?
Why do you provide those quotes to refute my post? In what way am I in opposition to them? They were written long before there were robots. Your tone is starry-eyed, shallow-thinking, and reliant purely on emotional impulse, precisely the sorts of traits that explorers tend not to possess.
Unlike you, apparently, I actually want space exploration to occur, not just talk about it or daydream about my favorite sci-fi stories and cartoons.
Amazing. Absolutely amazing.
Seriously, where is the novelty in this list:
You have to hand it to them though, if anyone can find a silver... um, golden lining to a problem, it's MS.
Boy, those things were built!
Provisions in the Congressional stimulus bill could help jump-start a new, multibillion-dollar industry in the US for manufacturing advanced briberies for congressmen and senators and for siphoning off money from government pork to enable the widespread use of luxury homes and lifestyles by politicians. The nearly $790 billion economic stimulus legislation contains tens of billions of dollars in loans, grants, and tax incentives for advanced bribery research and manufacturing, as well as incentives for earmarks and kickbacks, which could help create a market for these briberies. Significant advances in bribery techniques, including the development of new fully off-shored briberies, have been made by corporate legal departments in the past few years. Advanced bribery manufacturing is primarily at the state and federal level, particularly in Washington D.C., but local governments are looking forward to far greater participation.
Doesn't look good so far. At least I didn't get modded down to Troll right off the bat.
All of you people who favor manned space exploration should clearly see why we can't do both. If we didn't waste so much money on the low earth orbit ferris wheel to "research the effects of weightlessness/space-travel on the human body" and other scientifically worthless bullshit, we would be able to do both. Cue the "If Christopher Columbus..." and "It's our destiny to leave earth..." moronic fairy tales.
The "not invented here" syndrome collides with an "everybody in the world must buy my product immediately" delusion. Who could have predicted that it would fail?
Try Qt, which is about to go fully open source. It is much easier than C#, Mono, or Java.
Now if only commercial software houses would write cross-platform code that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. So many companies got suckered into writing to captured-audience (Windows only or at best Windows plus MacOS) libraries during the last 20 years. It'll be hard and costly to port all that code. I suspect few companies have the resources or even perceive the need to do it.
That said, I hope all software and business patents are abolished as soon as possible.
Blah blah blah singularity blah blah blah TED blah blah blah NASA blah blah blah Ray Kurzweil blah blah blah Ames blah blah blah disruptive blah blah blah innovation blah blah blah Nobel Prize blah blah blah Vint Cerf blah blah blah information technology blah blah blah Will Wright blah blah blah $25,000 blah blah blah executives blah blah blah Google blah blah blah Singularity U blah blah blah tackle huge issues facing humanity blah blah blah San Francisco Bay Area blah blah blah cross section of emerging disciplines blah blah blah nanotechnology blah blah blah biotechnology blah blah blah pandemics blah blah blah global health care concerns blah blah blah.
Hear, hear! Government subsidies for TV watching. Jesus H. Christ.
What has to occur for people to understand that manned space flight 1) is as colossally expensive as it is devoid of any redeeming scientific value, 2) far from fulfilling our need for exploration and discovery, actually prevents it, and 3) is possibly the least efficient way to explore the cosmos.
Don't start with the moronic "if Christopher Columbus blah blah blah" argument. Manned space exploration is the equivalent of Columbus going out about 10 or 20 miles from port, sailing around in circles for days or weeks, then coming back and claiming that he was investigating the effects of sailing on the human body in preparation for real exploration that never really occurs.
Manned space exploration means missions to lower earth orbit, and maybe a few trips to the moon every fifty years. Utterly pointless, of no scientific value, a caricature of "space exploration," and nothing more than a huge subsidy to the aerospace industry and the Pentagon. There is no credible or compelling reason to do it!
Unmanned space exploration is exactly the opposite. It is far less expensive and has already managed preliminary exploration of almost our entire solar system, transforming our scientific understanding of the universe in less than half a century. That is true exploration, sans bullshit emotional arguments.
For those of you enamored with the notion of a manned mission to mars, forget it. Its cost is unreachable and unjustifiable. Psychological issues cast great doubt on its human feasibility. No credible return mission has ever been put forward. It is morally unconscionable to send people on a suicide mission. Death or serious biological damage are highly likely even before they get there due to radiation and other dangers. With an enormous burden of expense year after year over decades it might be achievable, but for what? Robots have been exploring the martian surface for the better part of a decade at a miniscule fraction of the cost in time, money, and resources that would be required for a manned mission, also transforming our scientific understanding of that planet.
The idea that our destiny is to somehow leave earth a la Battlestar Galactica even more absurd for the same reasons multiplied over an even grander scale. People who hold this belief are victims of a magical religious superstition akin to a belief in a spiritual life after death. It is nothing but uninformed faith, specious emotional arguments by another name.
Grow up, people. We are adults, not silly uneducated children.
H.R.414 Title: To require mobile phones containing digital cameras to make a sound when a photograph is taken. Sponsor: Rep King, Peter T. [NY-3] (introduced 1/9/2009)
Please do everything within your power to reject this bill and eliminate it from any further consideration. It has many flaws: 1) it will be a nuisance at a wide variety of occasions and circumstances for phones to emit constant noises; 2) a modestly motivated individual will be able to circumvent the law by a) disconnecting the speaker that emits the click, b) removing the sound file responsible for the click from the phone's memory, c) modifying the phone software in a variety of ways to prevent the clicking noise from occurring, d) using a small digital or film camera that makes little or no noise instead of a phone, or e) taking photos from a distance or with artificially high ambient noise (there are no doubt many other ways); 3) This is an intrusive and in practice pointless case of nanny-state disruption of citizens' everyday affairs, more appropriate to a soviet-inspired regime than one that cherishes freedom and liberty.
If illicit photos are taken and used for stalking or other predatory behavior, they can be used in a court of law as evidence to prosecute criminal behavior as no doubt occurs today. To restrict the general use of all camera equipment in this way to address a very narrow and infrequent problem is absurdly cumbersome and unwarranted.
This is the sort of legislation that motivates the almost universally held belief among US citizens and residents that congressional representatives are corrupt and incompetent parasites. It is dangerous to a democracy for such a view to become entrenched in the public mind, and I am shocked each time legislation is proposed that confirms such a notion. HR414 is a shining example of such rubbish.
I still harbor hope that you are neither corrupt nor incompetent, your vote in favor of the "bailout" of financial institutions notwithstanding. Please stop this moronic claptrap as soon as possible.
Thanks!
Anecdotally, I have also noticed that Ubuntu boxes tend to hog bandwidth, as compared to an XP box at home. When someone on the home LAN starts downloading or streaming something from a linux box, everyone else notices it immediately. The XP box is (inadvertently?) more polite about it. Still, if you're the only one pulling in the big byte loads, faster is definitely better.
Welcome to the Union of Soviet Capitalist Republics!
Beat that, you lazy bastards!.
Damn...
Come on you stupid backward dipshit ignorant latte-sipping bisexual liberal faggots, get with the program!
Oh! Es inutil...
The most crucial metric is the lobbytheons of force directed in a concentrated beam from energy industrialists to the US Capitol building and its immediate surroundings.