I think all of these criteria could be met by replacing our entire road system, down to the last street and cul-de-sac, with a tube or rail system and having numerous individual cars/capsules that arrive on demand and take you where you want to go,
The massive infrastructure cost and environmental damage would be comparable to paved roads and highways.
Tough nut to crack, but perhaps one can imagine a system of public electric automobiles that you just grab, use, and abandon. Unfortunately, it begs questions such as where the electricity comes from; how the cars are manufactured, distributed, maintained, and disposed of; what happens when you go somewhere and you have the only car, and someone takes it soon after you get there; how is all this paid for; etc.
Back to square one, or maybe I'm unable to switch entirely out of the private vehicle mentality.
All right, I'll right. The parent can be slightly edited to read as follows:
I'd hardly call a 5000mph plane an advance in "transport" -- "regular" humans simply aren't built to withstand such G forces (although i must admit, i would like to see how an elderly person would cope with the acceleration necessary to quickly reach such speeds). A more accurate way of saying it would be an advance in rocket and missile technology.
How convenient! Now I don't have to google all sorts of keywords to get a list of idiotic futuristic memes! From jet packs to little cars on really expensive elevated tracks, and of course the idiotic meme that refuses to die: flying cars.
Flying cars have got to be the classic poster child of the genre. For economic and safety reasons alone, the idea is a non-starter. Harder for people to grasp is the fact that flying cars can never exist, they would be private aircraft, an entirely different beast with different laws and different applications. If I may belabor the point a bit, can you see how the very term flying car negates itself and coerces itself into a different noun? There have been small private aircraft for decades, you'd think these people would have noticed them.
People's willingness to believe in the patently absurd is borne out in the authors list of the downsides of flying cars:
"The prospect of horrific crashes and air rage spring to mind."
"The British weather often prevents microlight flying, and you can only travel during daylight hours. You need an airfield and learning to fly isn't easy."
"There is also the question of developing propellers that can safely power cars."
"'Whilst taxiing up the road under propeller power, I met a group of cycling proficiency children who I thought I'd chop up, so stopped and pushed the rest of the way,' says Bill Brooks of an early test run."
And yet, the author appears to conclude that flying cars will indeed someday exist.
No doubt some of you will trot out the same old arguments about how people said Christopher Columbus was an idiot and see how he proved them wrong, or that believing in things like flying cars means you are open minded and imaginative, and folks such as myself are closed minded old farts, and damn the evidence to the contrary. Those folks often cite the evidence that contradicts their beliefs as a perverse sort of proof that they are right and everybody else is stuck in some obsolete paradigm.
And what set this off? NASA successfuly tests an aircraft that, under highly specialized and contrived conditions, flew at 5,000 mph, well over six times the speed of sound. Immediately, pundits around the world speculate that soon passenger aircraft will do the same. This in spite of the fact that aircraft flying at mach 3 have been around for half a century. In fact, the Concorde reached the end of its useful life last year. It proved too expensive and impractical. But nay say the futurists! In the future we will all fly even faster! Even farther!
The Dark Ages were characterized in part by fanatical religious beliefs that had entire regions hypnotized and enslaved. I conjecture that the same is true today. Traditional religion melts away before pop culture, consumerism, and a vast new array of supertitious beliefs. We are all equally enslaved, toiling away as our masters enrich themselves and our planet, our precious and timeless inheritance, is burned away like a cheap cigarrette.
Highly industrialized wars are fought; nations are bombed senseless, invaded, and conquered on a whim; truck bombs detonated among the innocent and passenger planes full of more innocents are slammed into buildings filled with still more innocents; fanatics strap explosives to their bodies and detonate themselves among their peers and fellow citizens, heads filled with wild dreams; fanatics kill their enemies in the name of God, Right to Life, Democracy, Liberty, Free Trade, and endless other litanies. Societies that support such acts cheer them on with empty eyes and apparently empty heads. "Soon," they must be thinking, "Soon I will have a flying car and these terrible times will be over."
I think Gates has finally become lost in his own fantasies.
I would disagree with this conclusion. What he believes, and what he says in public as a businessman are two entirely different things. His job is to maximize shareholder value, and since he owns massive amounts of Microsoft stock, guess what that means.
Most of his public speculation about the future is pretty banal stuff, and is generally forgotten within weeks or months because it is usually off the mark. It is directed largely at the average consumer, who apparently prefers flashy fantasies over boring reality in virtually every facet of life, not to mention consumers' modest memory and attention spans. Gates and his people have shown quite a lot of skill at gulling the public, and it is unlikely that this will end anytime soon.
This coming from the figurehead of a company that has lost close to $2 billion "selling" hardware.
The hardware will be free and programming will be visual memes belong next to the we will be driving flying cars by 1999 and aliens are among us memes of times past. They sound cool, and anyone can shut their eyes and dream pretty things with them, but they are still ridiculous.
Everything has a cost, in money, labor, thought, design, and plain old hard work. If a company needs software that doesn't yet exist, or serious customization of existing software, it's hard to believe that it will stop paying people to hand-design, hand-build, and hand-optimize these systems to maximize profit. It is equally hard to believe that commercially viable visual programming tools can be made so fine grained as to be competitive in power and versatility with conventional programming.
That'll teach those terrorist bastards, eh comrade?
Well, that pretty much buries it
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 1
This article should pretty much lay to rest all of the quasi-religious arguments about why people need to be sent to space.
Of course, we all know that will not occur. After a brief delay, say a day or so, slashdotters far and wide will once again pine for manned space flight, wringing their hands and shedding tears of rage over those evil people who refuse to pay for it.
To them I say, folks, you realize that you have been shown to be bozos, right?
Interesting how there are few or no compelling reasons to choose C over C++ in the above posts. Little more than a reiteration of the same old myths about how C is so much faster, efficient, cleaner, etc.
Almost all extant C practitioners would benefit greatly if they gradually abandoned C-style and learned multi-paradigm C++. The world would be a better place.
This is not a troll, and before all of you fundamentalist fanatics pull out your flamethrowers, inform yourselves:
Any activity that creates wealth for anybody is always GOOD.
How many counter examples would you like? One could almost write a perl script to generate them in bulk. Corrupt politics? Crack dealing? Sustaining big wars just to make money on Pentagon contracts? Invading and conquering a country so that a few businessmen can enrich themselves by controlling its main natural resource? Selling young women into prostitution? Scamming the elderly? Destroying competitors to monopolize an industry? Defrauding stockholders? Exploiting people's religious beliefs to take their money? Exploiting the fear of terrorism to make money on government contracts? Not "always GOOD".
Well if that's the case, then I stand corrected. Nevertheless, Friedman's articles have a tendency towards glibness and ignoring everyone other than the most infuential players. As in the rest of the lay press, details, facts, and causality prove too distracting.
Also, my South Asian friends are not nearly as optimistic about the Indian economy, and are worried about such peripheral issues as ecological destruction, loss of native flora, recent climate change in some regions, etc.
Further evidence Friedman smokes the good stuff
on
Need a Job? Move to India
·
· Score: 3, Informative
How did India, in 15 years, go from being a synonym for massive poverty to the brainy country that is going to take all our best jobs? Answer: good timing, hard work, talent and luck.
Yay! No more poverty, disease, or corruption! Thanks to some nebulous feel-good bullshit Friedman fervently believes, India is no longer "a synonym for massive poverty."
The good timing starts with India's decision in 1991 to shuck off decades of socialism and move toward a free-market economy with a focus on foreign trade. This made it possible for Indians who wanted to succeed at innovation to stay at home, not go to the West.
So, starting in 1991, "Indians who wanted to succeed at innovation" no longer had to leave India. Uh huh, cool. I always like how Friedman is able to ignore distracting facts and cut through the haze of reality to make his rhetorical points.
His conclusion:
As one Indian exec put it to me: The Americans' self-image that this tech thing was their private preserve is over. This is a "wake-up call" for U.S. workers to redouble their efforts at education and research. If they do that, he said, it will spur "a whole new cycle of innovation, and we'll both win. If we each pull down our shutters, we will both lose."
Empty bullshit pure as the driven snow.
Bill, stop speaking right now!
on
Gates on Spam
·
· Score: 1
Gates is fast approaching a situation where he needs to retire and just shut up. I hope he knows how to play golf or something.
I have patented the act of flatulence for all mammalian species. Please cease and desist the venting of any type of gaseous material from any orifice connected directly or indirectly to your digestive system at any point downstream of your esophagus, including but not limited to your anus. These activities must cease immediately, or you are in infringement of the aforementioned patent.
Tomorrow I will unveil my new iCorq line of ergonomic rectal gas valves and scalable rectal gas venting license plans.
vector<string>::iterator i; for (i = oNameVector.begin(); i != oNameVector.end(); i++) { string sName = *i; oLog.writeLog(LogLevel::warning, "Name " + sName ); StoreName(sName , oDbConn_, oLog); }
snippet #88RS:
using namespace std;
Apparently, this source code was lifted directly and without modification from not one but possibly scores of files. In the case of snippet #88RS, the quoted code appears to have been copied directly tens of thousands of times!
One piece of info that doesn't make sense to me is the claim that the Windows source code base is 40 Gb in size, so a mere CD ROM's worth is not important. Doesn't all the GNU/Linux core OS code fit on a single CD? If this is true, then Windows isn't just bloated, a new word would have to be invented for it. If it is not true, then someone is trying to spin the issue with bullshit.
Your comment would be on the mark if it were not for one thing: manned projects are carried out at the expense of unmanned. Don't believe me, though, tally them up yourself. Do it in dollar terms, not in mere numbers of projects. Don't even get me started on the fraction of "manned space exploration" missions that were nothing more than Pentagon jobs done with NASA resources.
I do not agree with your thesis that it has to be both or none. "People going places nobody has ever gone before" is as pointless as "the LEO garbage," and vastly more expensive. I agree with you, however, in that meaningful manned exploration of anything beyond LEO can only occur after extensive exploration by machines, at very least for the safety of the crew.
Also, your remarks on the SCSC are naive. The costs were exploding, and would have dwarfed the NSF and NIH budgets combined. What was the SCSC for, in comaprison to its cost? Wasn't the money far better spent spread out over many other fields? How much SCSC work was high energy particle physics for the benefit of nuclear weapons designers?
1. cheap power to manufacture anything people use.
I can't believe so many people can still harbor such a wacky belief. Cheap? Making dozens or hundreds of huge space vehicles to build the orbital or even more distant and expensive facilities and go god knows where to get the materials is cheap? Cheaper than the Third World slaves, cut-rate earth installations, and cheap surface vessels we currently use? Cheaper than strip mining? Dude, what are you smoking, pass the fucking blunt!
Or perhaps you are referring only to gathering "energy" from space and bringing it to earth. Two possibilities (ignoring the expense of setting up the energy-gathering, concentration, and preparation for transport part):
Package it up in physical containers and send them to earth. Expensive, doesn't sound practical, hard to believe it could be competitive with earth-generated energy, need to transport containers both ways.
Beam it down in some way. Try playing Sim City some day, and use their orbital microwave power stations. If you think that's not how it would be in real life, then I truly hope you are the kind of person who never votes in elections. Also, it would be very expensive.
2. more elbow room.
Where, in the space vehicle? In the stationary space facilities? They look pretty cramped and uncomfortable to me. Shit, I'll take boring old suburbia over living in a large tin can any day.
all i need is a cheap way to get there.
Yeah. Ain't thermodynamics and elementary physics a bitch?
i hear that the space elevator is a cheap way to lift mass into space, that clearly makes sense.
Yeah, and I hear that by running up half-trillion dollar deficits and giving half-trillion dollar tax cuts to wealthy people, we will soon be rolling in prosperity. A space elevator will be the most expensive single engineering project ever undertaken by mankind. And for what? What will it be used for? What will be the amortized cost per trip or cost per kg? Not exactly cheap, I'll wager.
and because of wind friction, the elevator will generate 'tons' of 'clean' electrical energy. hell, that alone is worth the endevor.
Damn, I almost wish I were that gullible. Yes, I've read the spiel, but I'm not buying it. I get the distinct impression that they are underestimating the stresses and hazards, and overestimating their as yet non-existent materials. This sounds more like a pie-in-the-sky scam than a realistic project.
But, just cuz I'm a nice guy, let's just pretend for a moment that I am wrong. An earth-to-space elevator is still a dumb idea. The first space elevator should be built on a) a smaller celestial body, with b) no atmosphere, and c) with few liabilities and possible damage to people and property as possible in case of catastrophic failure.
I find it extremely disturbing that there is still such a great emphasis on manned space exploration. It is colossally expensive and wasteful, and adds little to our access to space, our exploration of our solar system, or our overall technology base. It is too close to cronyism and pork-barrel politics, and too far from a serious and deliberate program for space exploration and broad-based technology development.
The model I would like to see take the lion's share of funding is one similar to that used on the Spirit/Opportunity mission to Mars. Unmanned missions with ever more sophisticated robotics sent in replicate (preferably triplicate or more) to the Moon and other interesting nearby celestial bodies. They should be built and sent in large numbers, with technological participation of as many US companies and academic institutions as is feasible, in order to test as wide a range of ideas as possible. The participants can be subsidied with NASA funding and have the freedom to commercialize whatever technology they develop for the projects. Companies and academic institutions from other countries should be welcom to participate, but would not be subsidized by NASA.
Emphasis should also be placed in multimedia feeds from the robotic spacecraft to earth. More stereoscopic imagery, preferably in color and full-motion video with at least stereophonic sound, as well as full-immersion virtual reality from Mars as soon as possible. This will allow all of us to be participants in the space program. Until now, we have been supposed to feel inspired by watching other people fly around in the space shuttle at great cost and modest benefit to the taxpayer. I do not feel inspired in buying these people extremely expensive amusement park rides. This is not the '60s, and they are not Neil Armstrong. It is an entirely different world from the old-time NASA mentality, and those old romantic views are long gone.
For a serious exploration of Mars, a chain of way stations orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars could form a backbone along which to transmit greater data bandwidth, as well as a distributed platform from which to study the practicality of interplanetary travel. The Mars mission hit rate is low, and clearly there are many things that could be learned from this interplanetary backbone. A similar platform could be built to Venus, and the Stairway to Mars could eventually be expanded into the asteroid belt.
ASM - GNU Assembler. AT&T standard, as commonly used on Linux. The syntax hasn't changed since the 60's - which is both very good and very bad. I personally think it should be retired.
I'm missing something here. x86 syntax hasn't changed since the '60s? There were no microprocessors in the '60s.
Slashdot Mirror
I think all of these criteria could be met by replacing our entire road system, down to the last street and cul-de-sac, with a tube or rail system and having numerous individual cars/capsules that arrive on demand and take you where you want to go,
The massive infrastructure cost and environmental damage would be comparable to paved roads and highways.
Tough nut to crack, but perhaps one can imagine a system of public electric automobiles that you just grab, use, and abandon. Unfortunately, it begs questions such as where the electricity comes from; how the cars are manufactured, distributed, maintained, and disposed of; what happens when you go somewhere and you have the only car, and someone takes it soon after you get there; how is all this paid for; etc.
Back to square one, or maybe I'm unable to switch entirely out of the private vehicle mentality.
I'd hardly call a 5000mph plane an advance in "transport" -- "regular" humans simply aren't built to withstand such G forces (although i must admit, i would like to see how an elderly person would cope with the acceleration necessary to quickly reach such speeds). A more accurate way of saying it would be an advance in rocket and missile technology.
Why was it modded down, I wonder.
Flying cars have got to be the classic poster child of the genre. For economic and safety reasons alone, the idea is a non-starter. Harder for people to grasp is the fact that flying cars can never exist, they would be private aircraft, an entirely different beast with different laws and different applications. If I may belabor the point a bit, can you see how the very term flying car negates itself and coerces itself into a different noun? There have been small private aircraft for decades, you'd think these people would have noticed them.
People's willingness to believe in the patently absurd is borne out in the authors list of the downsides of flying cars:
- "The prospect of horrific crashes and air rage spring to mind."
- "The British weather often prevents microlight flying, and you can only travel during daylight hours. You need an airfield and learning to fly isn't easy."
- "There is also the question of developing propellers that can safely power cars."
- "'Whilst taxiing up the road under propeller power, I met a group of cycling proficiency children who I thought I'd chop up, so stopped and pushed the rest of the way,' says Bill Brooks of an early test run."
And yet, the author appears to conclude that flying cars will indeed someday exist.No doubt some of you will trot out the same old arguments about how people said Christopher Columbus was an idiot and see how he proved them wrong, or that believing in things like flying cars means you are open minded and imaginative, and folks such as myself are closed minded old farts, and damn the evidence to the contrary. Those folks often cite the evidence that contradicts their beliefs as a perverse sort of proof that they are right and everybody else is stuck in some obsolete paradigm.
And what set this off? NASA successfuly tests an aircraft that, under highly specialized and contrived conditions, flew at 5,000 mph, well over six times the speed of sound. Immediately, pundits around the world speculate that soon passenger aircraft will do the same. This in spite of the fact that aircraft flying at mach 3 have been around for half a century. In fact, the Concorde reached the end of its useful life last year. It proved too expensive and impractical. But nay say the futurists! In the future we will all fly even faster! Even farther!
The Dark Ages were characterized in part by fanatical religious beliefs that had entire regions hypnotized and enslaved. I conjecture that the same is true today. Traditional religion melts away before pop culture, consumerism, and a vast new array of supertitious beliefs. We are all equally enslaved, toiling away as our masters enrich themselves and our planet, our precious and timeless inheritance, is burned away like a cheap cigarrette.
Highly industrialized wars are fought; nations are bombed senseless, invaded, and conquered on a whim; truck bombs detonated among the innocent and passenger planes full of more innocents are slammed into buildings filled with still more innocents; fanatics strap explosives to their bodies and detonate themselves among their peers and fellow citizens, heads filled with wild dreams; fanatics kill their enemies in the name of God, Right to Life, Democracy, Liberty, Free Trade, and endless other litanies. Societies that support such acts cheer them on with empty eyes and apparently empty heads. "Soon," they must be thinking, "Soon I will have a flying car and these terrible times will be over."
I would disagree with this conclusion. What he believes, and what he says in public as a businessman are two entirely different things. His job is to maximize shareholder value, and since he owns massive amounts of Microsoft stock, guess what that means.
Most of his public speculation about the future is pretty banal stuff, and is generally forgotten within weeks or months because it is usually off the mark. It is directed largely at the average consumer, who apparently prefers flashy fantasies over boring reality in virtually every facet of life, not to mention consumers' modest memory and attention spans. Gates and his people have shown quite a lot of skill at gulling the public, and it is unlikely that this will end anytime soon.
This coming from the figurehead of a company that has lost close to $2 billion "selling" hardware.
The hardware will be free and programming will be visual memes belong next to the we will be driving flying cars by 1999 and aliens are among us memes of times past. They sound cool, and anyone can shut their eyes and dream pretty things with them, but they are still ridiculous.
Everything has a cost, in money, labor, thought, design, and plain old hard work. If a company needs software that doesn't yet exist, or serious customization of existing software, it's hard to believe that it will stop paying people to hand-design, hand-build, and hand-optimize these systems to maximize profit. It is equally hard to believe that commercially viable visual programming tools can be made so fine grained as to be competitive in power and versatility with conventional programming.
Of course, we all know that will not occur. After a brief delay, say a day or so, slashdotters far and wide will once again pine for manned space flight, wringing their hands and shedding tears of rage over those evil people who refuse to pay for it.
To them I say, folks, you realize that you have been shown to be bozos, right?
Stop using C, now! Switch to Multiparadigm C++. Everything you want from C, with less code and more reliability.
Almost all extant C practitioners would benefit greatly if they gradually abandoned C-style and learned multi-paradigm C++. The world would be a better place.
This is not a troll, and before all of you fundamentalist fanatics pull out your flamethrowers, inform yourselves:
C++ FAQ
C vs. C++
The case for the continued existence of C is tenuous at best.
You probably gave away your job with your shitty attitude and ridiculous beliefs about where wealth comes from.
How many counter examples would you like? One could almost write a perl script to generate them in bulk. Corrupt politics? Crack dealing? Sustaining big wars just to make money on Pentagon contracts? Invading and conquering a country so that a few businessmen can enrich themselves by controlling its main natural resource? Selling young women into prostitution? Scamming the elderly? Destroying competitors to monopolize an industry? Defrauding stockholders? Exploiting people's religious beliefs to take their money? Exploiting the fear of terrorism to make money on government contracts? Not "always GOOD".
The parent was hardly a troll. I too find this sort of latent racism quite irritating and offensive.
Hey! Only Third Worlders were supposed to get fucked, not us!
Also, my South Asian friends are not nearly as optimistic about the Indian economy, and are worried about such peripheral issues as ecological destruction, loss of native flora, recent climate change in some regions, etc.
Yay! No more poverty, disease, or corruption! Thanks to some nebulous feel-good bullshit Friedman fervently believes, India is no longer "a synonym for massive poverty."
The good timing starts with India's decision in 1991 to shuck off decades of socialism and move toward a free-market economy with a focus on foreign trade. This made it possible for Indians who wanted to succeed at innovation to stay at home, not go to the West.
So, starting in 1991, "Indians who wanted to succeed at innovation" no longer had to leave India. Uh huh, cool. I always like how Friedman is able to ignore distracting facts and cut through the haze of reality to make his rhetorical points.
His conclusion:
As one Indian exec put it to me: The Americans' self-image that this tech thing was their private preserve is over. This is a "wake-up call" for U.S. workers to redouble their efforts at education and research. If they do that, he said, it will spur "a whole new cycle of innovation, and we'll both win. If we each pull down our shutters, we will both lose."
Empty bullshit pure as the driven snow.
Tomorrow I will unveil my new iCorq line of ergonomic rectal gas valves and scalable rectal gas venting license plans.
El dinero es cabron, compadre.
One piece of info that doesn't make sense to me is the claim that the Windows source code base is 40 Gb in size, so a mere CD ROM's worth is not important. Doesn't all the GNU/Linux core OS code fit on a single CD? If this is true, then Windows isn't just bloated, a new word would have to be invented for it. If it is not true, then someone is trying to spin the issue with bullshit.
I do not agree with your thesis that it has to be both or none. "People going places nobody has ever gone before" is as pointless as "the LEO garbage," and vastly more expensive. I agree with you, however, in that meaningful manned exploration of anything beyond LEO can only occur after extensive exploration by machines, at very least for the safety of the crew.
Also, your remarks on the SCSC are naive. The costs were exploding, and would have dwarfed the NSF and NIH budgets combined. What was the SCSC for, in comaprison to its cost? Wasn't the money far better spent spread out over many other fields? How much SCSC work was high energy particle physics for the benefit of nuclear weapons designers?
I can't believe so many people can still harbor such a wacky belief. Cheap? Making dozens or hundreds of huge space vehicles to build the orbital or even more distant and expensive facilities and go god knows where to get the materials is cheap? Cheaper than the Third World slaves, cut-rate earth installations, and cheap surface vessels we currently use? Cheaper than strip mining? Dude, what are you smoking, pass the fucking blunt!
Or perhaps you are referring only to gathering "energy" from space and bringing it to earth. Two possibilities (ignoring the expense of setting up the energy-gathering, concentration, and preparation for transport part):
- Package it up in physical containers and send them to earth. Expensive, doesn't sound practical, hard to believe it could be competitive with earth-generated energy, need to transport containers both ways.
- Beam it down in some way. Try playing Sim City some day, and use their orbital microwave power stations. If you think that's not how it would be in real life, then I truly hope you are the kind of person who never votes in elections. Also, it would be very expensive.
2. more elbow room.Where, in the space vehicle? In the stationary space facilities? They look pretty cramped and uncomfortable to me. Shit, I'll take boring old suburbia over living in a large tin can any day.
all i need is a cheap way to get there.
Yeah. Ain't thermodynamics and elementary physics a bitch?
i hear that the space elevator is a cheap way to lift mass into space, that clearly makes sense.
Yeah, and I hear that by running up half-trillion dollar deficits and giving half-trillion dollar tax cuts to wealthy people, we will soon be rolling in prosperity. A space elevator will be the most expensive single engineering project ever undertaken by mankind. And for what? What will it be used for? What will be the amortized cost per trip or cost per kg? Not exactly cheap, I'll wager.
and because of wind friction, the elevator will generate 'tons' of 'clean' electrical energy. hell, that alone is worth the endevor.
Damn, I almost wish I were that gullible. Yes, I've read the spiel, but I'm not buying it. I get the distinct impression that they are underestimating the stresses and hazards, and overestimating their as yet non-existent materials. This sounds more like a pie-in-the-sky scam than a realistic project.
But, just cuz I'm a nice guy, let's just pretend for a moment that I am wrong. An earth-to-space elevator is still a dumb idea. The first space elevator should be built on a) a smaller celestial body, with b) no atmosphere, and c) with few liabilities and possible damage to people and property as possible in case of catastrophic failure.
Yes, that would mean the Moon.
I find it extremely disturbing that there is still such a great emphasis on manned space exploration. It is colossally expensive and wasteful, and adds little to our access to space, our exploration of our solar system, or our overall technology base. It is too close to cronyism and pork-barrel politics, and too far from a serious and deliberate program for space exploration and broad-based technology development.
The model I would like to see take the lion's share of funding is one similar to that used on the Spirit/Opportunity mission to Mars. Unmanned missions with ever more sophisticated robotics sent in replicate (preferably triplicate or more) to the Moon and other interesting nearby celestial bodies. They should be built and sent in large numbers, with technological participation of as many US companies and academic institutions as is feasible, in order to test as wide a range of ideas as possible. The participants can be subsidied with NASA funding and have the freedom to commercialize whatever technology they develop for the projects. Companies and academic institutions from other countries should be welcom to participate, but would not be subsidized by NASA.
Emphasis should also be placed in multimedia feeds from the robotic spacecraft to earth. More stereoscopic imagery, preferably in color and full-motion video with at least stereophonic sound, as well as full-immersion virtual reality from Mars as soon as possible. This will allow all of us to be participants in the space program. Until now, we have been supposed to feel inspired by watching other people fly around in the space shuttle at great cost and modest benefit to the taxpayer. I do not feel inspired in buying these people extremely expensive amusement park rides. This is not the '60s, and they are not Neil Armstrong. It is an entirely different world from the old-time NASA mentality, and those old romantic views are long gone.
For a serious exploration of Mars, a chain of way stations orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars could form a backbone along which to transmit greater data bandwidth, as well as a distributed platform from which to study the practicality of interplanetary travel. The Mars mission hit rate is low, and clearly there are many things that could be learned from this interplanetary backbone. A similar platform could be built to Venus, and the Stairway to Mars could eventually be expanded into the asteroid belt.
I'm missing something here. x86 syntax hasn't changed since the '60s? There were no microprocessors in the '60s.