You're missing the point. Did you even READ his article? It doesn't seem so (especially doubtful since it wasn't linked to) (I didn't link it then either, but close enough).
Bottom line here people: If we do not get off this rock and into space
Bottom line: Launching astronauts today, or anytime within the next 30 years, does nothing to "get us off this rock" and just wastes money that might go towards inventing a truely practical space vehicle.
Anybody who thinks exploring space is just an adventure
Anybody who thinks "exploring space" requires "the US manned space program" just hasn't been paying attention.
Humans degrade very quickly if not in a 1.0G environment.
You say "non-1.0G" when you really mean "less than 1 g" (btw it's lower case "g"; "G" is something else!). So let's just go to Venus instead of Mars!
and the issues with keeping a planetary installation permanently rotating are really a big problem.
Yes, that's difficult- but minor compared with other problems of Martian life.
However, rather than rotating the whole facility, you could just build the sleeping-quarters to spin. To compensate for only experiencing "gravity" say 50% of the time, you could boost it to provide a 2g or higher acceleration. (Whether or not a human could learn to sleep like that is questionable, so higher-g might have to be used more like a daily exercise period)
This story is what, 19 years late? James Van Allen has been saying the same thing at least since his 1985 article, Myths and Realities of Space Flight.
Every time a Shuttle explodes, he goes off on it again... but at least this article you can read on the web, unlike this current one which is still only accessible to subscribers. I suggest everyone read it- he directly addresses some of the objections raised by "persons of a science fiction mind-set" on Slashdot.
Shuttle flights can accomplish so much because they have a)... b)... c)... d)... e)
None of those things require a shuttle! All they need is a LARGE launch vehicle. Not a reusable one, and especially not one that makes a controlled landing.
without using an (expensive) Saturn or Titan class vehicle to bring up the fuel required.
Stop right there! You dare call them expensive? Titan IV is the most expensive rocket ever, and it's much cheaper than a shuttle flight (plus carries a bigger payload). (And of course, if we'd been using pods on expendable rockets for most of the STS missions through the years, economy of scale would brought the price down even further- something STS costs have already benefitted from)
(as I did above)
I didn't see any facts up there. Putting a lot of words around your opinions doesn't make them fact.
For instance did you know that no fewer than five times has a Soyuz capsule
Yes... demonstrating it's vastly superior safety. The fact that you can LOSE POWER and SURVIVE tells the story.
Soyuz loses control on re-entry: crew shivers in a blizzard for 5 hours.
Shuttle loses control on re-entry: crew particles scattered over 600 mile radius.
The fact that the shuttle lands under its own control, instead of on a parachute, is it's largest and most dangerous mistake. No statistics are required to demonstrate that it's safer, any more than I need to conduct an experiment to prove that knives are safer to juggle than chainsaws. A superficial engineering analysis reveals the truth.
When you start adding in the need to launch the additional materiel that those not-Shuttles would need to accomplish the same missions
That's a naively false assumption that (not a shuttle) would be significantly smaller.
Nope. The paper reciept you get from an ATM is too easily tampered with. It doesn't improve trust in the ATM system at all (except prehaps in an irrational way). It's just a convenience for the customer's own recordkeeping.
What, you think that you can walk into a bank with a reciept and tell them "I only withdrew $30, not $3000, so put $2970 into my account immediately." Good luck! (If it does work, it'd be due to a personal trust between the banker and you, not the strength of a faded slip of paper)
specifically mentioning that everyone trusts ATMs, why not e-votes?
That's the rational position. An ATM fraud would be enormously more damaging to the victim than a voter fraud- it's $1000s of dollars versus a single lost vote that statistically wouldn't have changed anything anyhow.
Of course, rationally, we wouldn't vote at all... so it's good we're not always rational.
Permitting a voter to walk away from the polls with hard evidence of how he voted is an open invitation to corruption and coercion.
If you get a smart mathematician to design the reciept, it will not consititute hard evidence. The trick is to have a reciept which isn't human readable text, but only a single inscrutable digital number.
That number does not, by itself, tell which way you voted. But, when brought back to the center and combined with the corresponding number recorded (on paper) in the voting machine, it reveals your choices. Both the voter and the machine hold 1/2 of the reciept- but by cryptography, neither piece is enough to learn what it says.
Of course, that creates a problem in that the voter still in the booth can't tell if the reciept he's getting is accurate, or if it was printed by tampered software. So a more advanced solution won't just have a number on it, but a subset of the pixels making up the candidate's name, so that the 2 reciepts together show the selection. (There is a webpage somewhere which shows pictorally exactly how this works... but I don't recall where)
(It's separately debatable on whether or not vote-selling is truely wrong. Sure, conventional wisdom says it is, but isn't that an anti-capitalism position...)
Gigabit transmission is already fatally slow compared to the data rate between CPUs of an SMP box. (If you had meant gigabit ethernet, it'd be even worse)
And furthermore, as we saw in the last presidential election, you don't have time for a recount. In 2000, they had all the paper ballots in-hand, but the court ruled it was more important to have a result quickly than to take time to go through the paper again.
If they first had to collect all the reciepts from everyone in the state, the deadline to accomplish a recount would become even more impossible...
So now you prove you don't know what "satire" means in addition to not knowing what "parody" means.
I've got a dictionary right here, buddy. I know quite what they mean.... although it's not my interpretation that matters, but the courts. And I've already linked you to rulings that, if you weren't too inept to read, would explain the legal position in great detail.
So here are those definitions. Let me know why you disagree with them: parody: A literary or artistic work that imitates the characteristic style of an author or a work for comic effect or ridicule.
satire: A literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit.
Cut manned spaceflight and I will bet you a donut to a Delta VH that within a decade NASA will cease to exist.
So you admit that manned spaceflight is basically just a big advertising campaign. Public relations to keep the funding coming. Ok then...
If the USA people are too stupid to spend one good dollar without wasting $3 alongside it, that's their problem- don't fault him for pointing out their idiocy.
This guy, who benefitted professionally to a huge extent from the existence of manned spaceflight programs, now has the nerve to turn around
If a stockbroker tells you not to put $15k into SCO, even though he's sacrificing his own commission on the sale, then most people interpret that as a virtue.
Since Columbus already saw cargo arriving from India every few weeks, he probably knew it was possible somehow. (He just wanted to sail west, instead of the usual east)
I don't want the Union government doing a fucking thing that isn't enumerated in the Constitution.
So why is your sig promoting Reagan, the 20th century President who caused the largest (absolute) growth in the size of government spending ? (You know, including the military spending for staring down those commies...)
Moving humans off of earth.... Mining ore from asteroids...Building a stable Lagrange point station
The manned space program helps none of those things! It harms them.
So many space-boosting people misunderstand the scientists. All Van Allen is saying that manned space travel is a waste of resources today. He's not saying it should never be done in the future... but that spending 50% of NASA's budget to keep a few humans breathing at 300km altitude doesn't actually advance science and technology. It diverts money that could be researching ways to get all those things you want.
The analogy that I'm making today is that if you want to go to China, then don't spend 10 hours/day practicing swimming and instead come up the beach to read about sailing. Yes, it brings you a little further from the goal for a while- but the better preparation will pay off in the end.
The first nation to develop a strong and stable, manned presence in space will have a substantial tactical advantage over the rest of the globe.
No they won't. It'll be less effective than an armed robotic satellite. A manned moon-base, on the other hand, would be a mighty fortress. TNSTAFL!
advancing the science of unmanned space flight does not advance manned space flight.
Congratulations. That's the most completely wrong thing I've read so far today.
How can you possibly think that learning to send a robot to Mars and back won't help us when it comes time to send people there? Why, even Dubya Bush understands this!
Because of SpaceShipOne, Scaled Composites is very nearly a household name.
Hurray- now when those householders want to spend $10,000,000 on an aircraft, they know where to come!
Name recognition is not very important to aerospace companies. Boeing, Lockheed, and Northrop don't really care if the public recognizes them or not. It isn't an advertising-driven market. The products are so expensive that if someone can't find you on his own, you don't want him as a customer.
That means that after the first ones optics failed
We'd send up a crew to spacewalk and fix it.
Weinburg takes a fairly complex technical, political, and fiscal realities and reduces them to a grade school aphorism.
You've done the same, by claiming that the lack of a shuttle program means an inability to repair satellites in orbit.
What's that? You think that spacewalks are only possible from a shuttle? Think again. Manned flight to orbit was possible before the shuttle, and it was both cheaper and safer.
It has turned out that the shuttle project could've met all it's practical goals safer and more cheaply if it hadn't been based on a reusable, controlled-landing spaceplane.
Robots make very poor scientists. Moving the people to the science produces better science.
Sigh. That's so backwards, I hardly know where to begin. It would take a lot of typing to argue against it, so I'll try a quick appeal to authority:
Van Allen is an important, respected space scientist, and he says humans in space are not scientifically useful. Do you claim to understand the scientific method better than him? And he's not alone. Virtually every major scientist who's brave enough to give a public answer (for fear of losing NASA funding) has admitted that humans in space aren't really needed to run the experiments.
This is why we send manned submarines to the depths of the oceans and put guys into heat suits to risk their asses at the edges of volcanos.
Both of those things are false, or at best anachronisms to before developing robotics.
Its about getting maximum bang for the buck. It's about how many times you get to spend each dollar.
Yes, exactly. And because we want maximum payoff from our investment, we should work on improving robots to the point where they can do everything an on-site human could do. Then not only will we have cheaper ways to run experiments in space, but we'll have these awesome robots ready to do all sorts of cool (profitable) stuff on earth!
But a sub is a lot harder to hit then a surface destroyer by terrorists....is it a waste of money now given this bit of information
But a sub is a lot harder to hit then a surface destroyer by terrorists....is it a waste of money now given this bit of information
No, the difficulty is the same. Terrorists can't hit a surface destroyer either... unless it were taking on supplies at a port... in which case a sub would be EVEN MORE vulnerable. (A sub has fewer Marines onboard to patrol the deck and watch for suspicious boats)
People that think manned space flight is a complete waste of money are just narrow minded and are unwilling to recognise any long term benifits in most research
For the last time: Manned space flight IS NOT RESEARCH. It's a risky, expensive distraction from research. If you want to spend tax dollars on space research, fine- but putting humans out there doesn't teach us anything more, but does increase the cost 100x!
PS. Experiment with ending your sentences with one of these three symbols: ".?!" It's fun!
Think back to the 1980s... there was someplace called "the USSR"... why, even this year manned launches came from there!
Space exploration WITH science is boring!... But [SpaceShipOne is] interesting in a way that a spaceprobe to Pluto could never be.
So what's that mean? You see spaceflight fun and entertaining, in the same way that airshows and NASCAR are? That attitude says it's not about the stars and planets, it's just about the ships and satellites. "Boys and their toys".
If you view the hardware of spaceflight as an end in itself, and not a means to something more, that's your perogative. But you won't convince the rest of the world to devote taxes to those projects unless they expect to get something bigger.
In the past, "something bigger" was cold-war propaganda leverage. But that's obselete, so the only remaining motivator is science. (Or industrial exploitation... which of course, has a prerequisite of serious science and engineering, from which manned spaceflight is only a distraction)
PS. Never fall into the trap of thinking that today's manned space projects contribute to eventual habitats on Mars and beyond. They're just like trying to reach Australia by walking into the sea and swimming- you'd be better off using that effort to build a ship ashore, rather than struggling to keep above water and then having nothing to show for it. 50% of NASA's current budget goes to maintennance of manned space projects, instead of researching any new transportation technology.
If the computer knows those are the recent errors that occurred, why force the user to type in questions?
Because a computer cannot automatically detect all errors. For all it knows, that was the programmer's expected way to terminate the program.
And the the general capability of interrogating the computer for why a program did something would be helpful. It could be used not just to explain obvious crashes, but also misbehavior of a program that's still running. "Why is that thing blurry? Why is this checkbox disabled?" Of course, something like that would require extreme levels of OS integration, and probably even new ways of authoring software.
There have been pleanty of elections where the winning party had much more than 50%. In 1984 Reagan won by 60% of the popular vote and 98% of the Electoral College vote.
That was 20 years ago! The process wasn't as fine-tuned back then. And I don't count 60% as a whole lot more than 50%. It's the upper limit of trying to exceed 50%, without wasting effort going too much over. 60 is the point where you sit back, relax, and wait to sink past 55 before worrying again. (and that 98% number is just another meaningless manifestation of the winner-take-all effect).
Reagan's 60 was above his party's overall support, and he got it through a variety of factors, including luck, lesser computational power, and tactical superiority to a less charismatic opponent. But as you can see, the GOP since then has sunk down to the optimal 51% approval range.
It was to make sure that the government reflects the wishes of the people.
My vote will NEVER make the government reflect my will. Especially since I don't live in one of the 17 swing states.
Do you actually calculate out how much you think you'll get in returns before going to the polls?
I know I'll get exactly zero. What is the chance that buying a lottery ticket will make a difference for you? 1/100,000,000, and if you actually win, the improvement to your life will be enormous. What's the chance that my vote will effect the election? 1/148,000,000,000,000, and if it does, the practical effect of the different president will be less meaningful to me than the $7 mil would've been.
(Making a donation would, in my circumstance, be much more effective than actually voting)
and you get several hours of entertainment in exchange if you follow the results afterwards.
I still get it regardless of how I vote. My state has already been "called"- the network's have already set it's color on the big board, because it was never even in the contest.
since we were speaking of "democrat" in reference to the american political party.
That's what you were trying to do. But if you don't capitalize it, it's WRONG. The context allows me to guess what you meant, but it's still incorrect. It's just as wrong as writing "This week lance won another Tour de France". That sentence incorrectly states that the race was won by a wooden stabbing weapon, instead of an American cyclist.
The words democrat/Democrat, republican/Republican, and especially libertarian/Libertarian all mean very different things. (So do windows/Windows and apple/Apple, for that matter).
So, yes, one of the two parties can try to co-opt any growing third parties, but that risks alienating the middle.
They just have to decide whichever group of supporters is bigger, the 3rdies or the middlers. Because the changes aren't instantaneous, they'll tend to suck up only what they need to reach 51%, and no more.
So if you really care about ending the two party system
Actually what I want to see done is an expansion of the electronic-voting system so that there is no longer a single "election" day. A system where people can vote for an entire month, shifting their choice as they see fit during an ongoing negotiation. Of course, it'll be a while before internet literacy, universality, and security makes it practical- and there are insurmountable institutional obstacles too.
Amazing how many people manage to post on the internet but still haven't heard about Google.com. Here's one of the better hits for you, but you'll have to read a lot of PDFs from there. What it comes down to is that eating causes slightly more accidents each year than cellphone, but the percentage of drivers that eat is much higher than those who phone.
Actually, the FARs summary is a good one for comparing the danger of alcohol and cellphones, but I can't find a place to download it. Various newspapers have reported it's conclusions, though.
I've seen these studies, and I doubt they are unbiased studies by people in a neutral position on the issue.
In other words, all that is needed is a nice, understandable backtrace.
No, much more than that. A "backtrace", per se, captures only the state of a program's stack at one instance in time. Answering the questions listed in my post requires historical data on recent actions of the program- a succession of backtraces, if you like.
It is actually extremely rare that a parody is making fun of the original material itself and nothing else.
Nope. What you claim is semantically impossible. Well... by the definitions in an English dictionary, it's arguable. But the USA's legal definition of parody is clear: a "parody" is only a commentary on the infringed work. Everything else is a "satire". Just go back and read one of those court rulings I linked to earlier.
(For example, Right Wing Eye is correctly labelled as a satirical site. It infringes on Queer Eye, but it is commenting on anti-abortion Republicans. That makes it satire, not parody)
but that's about it.
Ok, so what do you think "Amish Paradise" and "Like A Surgeon" are commenting on? They certainly don't have anything to say about the Amish or surgery... they are (weak, repetitive) parody of the song itself. Note that most all parodies make the same simplistic "comment" about the source material: "So&so musician takes him/herself way too seriously". It's a cheap shot, but there ya go.
then that would mean almost all parody produced would be unprotected.
It's not "parody". But you're right, most satire is protected only by the fact that it's usually too obscure to bother suing. When it gets as famous as this jibjab video, it has no defense.
Slashdot Mirror
This misses the point entirely.
You're missing the point. Did you even READ his article? It doesn't seem so (especially doubtful since it wasn't linked to) (I didn't link it then either, but close enough).
Bottom line here people: If we do not get off this rock and into space
Bottom line: Launching astronauts today, or anytime within the next 30 years, does nothing to "get us off this rock" and just wastes money that might go towards inventing a truely practical space vehicle.
Anybody who thinks exploring space is just an adventure
Anybody who thinks "exploring space" requires "the US manned space program" just hasn't been paying attention.
Humans degrade very quickly if not in a 1.0G environment.
You say "non-1.0G" when you really mean "less than 1 g" (btw it's lower case "g"; "G" is something else!). So let's just go to Venus instead of Mars!
and the issues with keeping a planetary installation permanently rotating are really a big problem.
Yes, that's difficult- but minor compared with other problems of Martian life.
However, rather than rotating the whole facility, you could just build the sleeping-quarters to spin. To compensate for only experiencing "gravity" say 50% of the time, you could boost it to provide a 2g or higher acceleration. (Whether or not a human could learn to sleep like that is questionable, so higher-g might have to be used more like a daily exercise period)
This story is what, 19 years late? James Van Allen has been saying the same thing at least since his 1985 article, Myths and Realities of Space Flight.
Every time a Shuttle explodes, he goes off on it again... but at least this article you can read on the web, unlike this current one which is still only accessible to subscribers. I suggest everyone read it- he directly addresses some of the objections raised by "persons of a science fiction mind-set" on Slashdot.
Agreed. You are Hilarious!
Shuttle flights can accomplish so much because they have a)
None of those things require a shuttle! All they need is a LARGE launch vehicle. Not a reusable one, and especially not one that makes a controlled landing.
without using an (expensive) Saturn or Titan class vehicle to bring up the fuel required.
Stop right there! You dare call them expensive? Titan IV is the most expensive rocket ever, and it's much cheaper than a shuttle flight (plus carries a bigger payload). (And of course, if we'd been using pods on expendable rockets for most of the STS missions through the years, economy of scale would brought the price down even further- something STS costs have already benefitted from)
(as I did above)
I didn't see any facts up there. Putting a lot of words around your opinions doesn't make them fact.
For instance did you know that no fewer than five times has a Soyuz capsule
Yes... demonstrating it's vastly superior safety. The fact that you can LOSE POWER and SURVIVE tells the story.
The fact that the shuttle lands under its own control, instead of on a parachute, is it's largest and most dangerous mistake. No statistics are required to demonstrate that it's safer, any more than I need to conduct an experiment to prove that knives are safer to juggle than chainsaws. A superficial engineering analysis reveals the truth.
When you start adding in the need to launch the additional materiel that those not-Shuttles would need to accomplish the same missions
That's a naively false assumption that (not a shuttle) would be significantly smaller.
(answer: IT'S THE PAPER TRAIL, STUPID!)
Nope. The paper reciept you get from an ATM is too easily tampered with. It doesn't improve trust in the ATM system at all (except prehaps in an irrational way). It's just a convenience for the customer's own recordkeeping.
What, you think that you can walk into a bank with a reciept and tell them "I only withdrew $30, not $3000, so put $2970 into my account immediately." Good luck! (If it does work, it'd be due to a personal trust between the banker and you, not the strength of a faded slip of paper)
specifically mentioning that everyone trusts ATMs, why not e-votes?
That's the rational position. An ATM fraud would be enormously more damaging to the victim than a voter fraud- it's $1000s of dollars versus a single lost vote that statistically wouldn't have changed anything anyhow.
Of course, rationally, we wouldn't vote at all... so it's good we're not always rational.
Permitting a voter to walk away from the polls with hard evidence of how he voted is an open invitation to corruption and coercion.
If you get a smart mathematician to design the reciept, it will not consititute hard evidence. The trick is to have a reciept which isn't human readable text, but only a single inscrutable digital number.
That number does not, by itself, tell which way you voted. But, when brought back to the center and combined with the corresponding number recorded (on paper) in the voting machine, it reveals your choices. Both the voter and the machine hold 1/2 of the reciept- but by cryptography, neither piece is enough to learn what it says.
Of course, that creates a problem in that the voter still in the booth can't tell if the reciept he's getting is accurate, or if it was printed by tampered software. So a more advanced solution won't just have a number on it, but a subset of the pixels making up the candidate's name, so that the 2 reciepts together show the selection. (There is a webpage somewhere which shows pictorally exactly how this works... but I don't recall where)
(It's separately debatable on whether or not vote-selling is truely wrong. Sure, conventional wisdom says it is, but isn't that an anti-capitalism position...)
virtual shared memory store on a gigabit network
Gigabit transmission is already fatally slow compared to the data rate between CPUs of an SMP box. (If you had meant gigabit ethernet, it'd be even worse)
How would that affect the recount?
And furthermore, as we saw in the last presidential election, you don't have time for a recount. In 2000, they had all the paper ballots in-hand, but the court ruled it was more important to have a result quickly than to take time to go through the paper again.
If they first had to collect all the reciepts from everyone in the state, the deadline to accomplish a recount would become even more impossible...
So now you prove you don't know what "satire" means in addition to not knowing what "parody" means.
I've got a dictionary right here, buddy. I know quite what they mean.... although it's not my interpretation that matters, but the courts. And I've already linked you to rulings that, if you weren't too inept to read, would explain the legal position in great detail.
So here are those definitions. Let me know why you disagree with them:
parody: A literary or artistic work that imitates the characteristic style of an author or a work for comic effect or ridicule.
satire: A literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit.
Cut manned spaceflight and I will bet you a donut to a Delta VH that within a decade NASA will cease to exist.
So you admit that manned spaceflight is basically just a big advertising campaign. Public relations to keep the funding coming. Ok then...
If the USA people are too stupid to spend one good dollar without wasting $3 alongside it, that's their problem- don't fault him for pointing out their idiocy.
This guy, who benefitted professionally to a huge extent from the existence of manned spaceflight programs, now has the nerve to turn around
If a stockbroker tells you not to put $15k into SCO, even though he's sacrificing his own commission on the sale, then most people interpret that as a virtue.
"You can't sail to India. Everyone knows that."
Since Columbus already saw cargo arriving from India every few weeks, he probably knew it was possible somehow. (He just wanted to sail west, instead of the usual east)
I don't want the Union government doing a fucking thing that isn't enumerated in the Constitution.
So why is your sig promoting Reagan, the 20th century President who caused the largest (absolute) growth in the size of government spending ? (You know, including the military spending for staring down those commies...)
Or feel free to answer the question I posed - what role of government is manned space flight related to?
The "by the people, for the people" bit. You know, doing what the voters/taxpayers actually WANT...
Moving humans off of earth.... Mining ore from asteroids...Building a stable Lagrange point station
The manned space program helps none of those things! It harms them.
So many space-boosting people misunderstand the scientists. All Van Allen is saying that manned space travel is a waste of resources today. He's not saying it should never be done in the future... but that spending 50% of NASA's budget to keep a few humans breathing at 300km altitude doesn't actually advance science and technology. It diverts money that could be researching ways to get all those things you want.
The analogy that I'm making today is that if you want to go to China, then don't spend 10 hours/day practicing swimming and instead come up the beach to read about sailing. Yes, it brings you a little further from the goal for a while- but the better preparation will pay off in the end.
The first nation to develop a strong and stable, manned presence in space will have a substantial tactical advantage over the rest of the globe.
No they won't. It'll be less effective than an armed robotic satellite. A manned moon-base, on the other hand, would be a mighty fortress. TNSTAFL!
advancing the science of unmanned space flight does not advance manned space flight.
Congratulations. That's the most completely wrong thing I've read so far today.
How can you possibly think that learning to send a robot to Mars and back won't help us when it comes time to send people there? Why, even Dubya Bush understands this!
Because of SpaceShipOne, Scaled Composites is very nearly a household name.
Hurray- now when those householders want to spend $10,000,000 on an aircraft, they know where to come!
Name recognition is not very important to aerospace companies. Boeing, Lockheed, and Northrop don't really care if the public recognizes them or not. It isn't an advertising-driven market. The products are so expensive that if someone can't find you on his own, you don't want him as a customer.
That means that after the first ones optics failed
We'd send up a crew to spacewalk and fix it.
Weinburg takes a fairly complex technical, political, and fiscal realities and reduces them to a grade school aphorism.
You've done the same, by claiming that the lack of a shuttle program means an inability to repair satellites in orbit.
What's that? You think that spacewalks are only possible from a shuttle? Think again. Manned flight to orbit was possible before the shuttle, and it was both cheaper and safer.
It has turned out that the shuttle project could've met all it's practical goals safer and more cheaply if it hadn't been based on a reusable, controlled-landing spaceplane.
Robots make very poor scientists. Moving the people to the science produces better science.
Sigh. That's so backwards, I hardly know where to begin. It would take a lot of typing to argue against it, so I'll try a quick appeal to authority:
Van Allen is an important, respected space scientist, and he says humans in space are not scientifically useful. Do you claim to understand the scientific method better than him? And he's not alone. Virtually every major scientist who's brave enough to give a public answer (for fear of losing NASA funding) has admitted that humans in space aren't really needed to run the experiments.
This is why we send manned submarines to the depths of the oceans and put guys into heat suits to risk their asses at the edges of volcanos.
Both of those things are false, or at best anachronisms to before developing robotics.
Its about getting maximum bang for the buck. It's about how many times you get to spend each dollar.
Yes, exactly. And because we want maximum payoff from our investment, we should work on improving robots to the point where they can do everything an on-site human could do. Then not only will we have cheaper ways to run experiments in space, but we'll have these awesome robots ready to do all sorts of cool (profitable) stuff on earth!
But a sub is a lot harder to hit then a surface destroyer by terrorists....is it a waste of money now given this bit of information
But a sub is a lot harder to hit then a surface destroyer by terrorists....is it a waste of money now given this bit of information
No, the difficulty is the same. Terrorists can't hit a surface destroyer either... unless it were taking on supplies at a port... in which case a sub would be EVEN MORE vulnerable. (A sub has fewer Marines onboard to patrol the deck and watch for suspicious boats)
People that think manned space flight is a complete waste of money are just narrow minded and are unwilling to recognise any long term benifits in most research
For the last time: Manned space flight IS NOT RESEARCH. It's a risky, expensive distraction from research. If you want to spend tax dollars on space research, fine- but putting humans out there doesn't teach us anything more, but does increase the cost 100x!
PS. Experiment with ending your sentences with one of these three symbols: ".?!" It's fun!
That's 144 total flights.
Think back to the 1980s... there was someplace called "the USSR"... why, even this year manned launches came from there!
Space exploration WITH science is boring!... But [SpaceShipOne is] interesting in a way that a spaceprobe to Pluto could never be.
So what's that mean? You see spaceflight fun and entertaining, in the same way that airshows and NASCAR are? That attitude says it's not about the stars and planets, it's just about the ships and satellites. "Boys and their toys".
If you view the hardware of spaceflight as an end in itself, and not a means to something more, that's your perogative. But you won't convince the rest of the world to devote taxes to those projects unless they expect to get something bigger.
In the past, "something bigger" was cold-war propaganda leverage. But that's obselete, so the only remaining motivator is science. (Or industrial exploitation... which of course, has a prerequisite of serious science and engineering, from which manned spaceflight is only a distraction)
PS. Never fall into the trap of thinking that today's manned space projects contribute to eventual habitats on Mars and beyond. They're just like trying to reach Australia by walking into the sea and swimming- you'd be better off using that effort to build a ship ashore, rather than struggling to keep above water and then having nothing to show for it. 50% of NASA's current budget goes to maintennance of manned space projects, instead of researching any new transportation technology.
If the computer knows those are the recent errors that occurred, why force the user to type in questions?
Because a computer cannot automatically detect all errors. For all it knows, that was the programmer's expected way to terminate the program.
And the the general capability of interrogating the computer for why a program did something would be helpful. It could be used not just to explain obvious crashes, but also misbehavior of a program that's still running. "Why is that thing blurry? Why is this checkbox disabled?" Of course, something like that would require extreme levels of OS integration, and probably even new ways of authoring software.
There have been pleanty of elections where the winning party had much more than 50%. In 1984 Reagan won by 60% of the popular vote and 98% of the Electoral College vote.
That was 20 years ago! The process wasn't as fine-tuned back then. And I don't count 60% as a whole lot more than 50%. It's the upper limit of trying to exceed 50%, without wasting effort going too much over. 60 is the point where you sit back, relax, and wait to sink past 55 before worrying again. (and that 98% number is just another meaningless manifestation of the winner-take-all effect).
Reagan's 60 was above his party's overall support, and he got it through a variety of factors, including luck, lesser computational power, and tactical superiority to a less charismatic opponent. But as you can see, the GOP since then has sunk down to the optimal 51% approval range.
It was to make sure that the government reflects the wishes of the people.
My vote will NEVER make the government reflect my will. Especially since I don't live in one of the 17 swing states.
Do you actually calculate out how much you think you'll get in returns before going to the polls?
I know I'll get exactly zero. What is the chance that buying a lottery ticket will make a difference for you? 1/100,000,000, and if you actually win, the improvement to your life will be enormous. What's the chance that my vote will effect the election? 1/148,000,000,000,000, and if it does, the practical effect of the different president will be less meaningful to me than the $7 mil would've been.
(Making a donation would, in my circumstance, be much more effective than actually voting)
and you get several hours of entertainment in exchange if you follow the results afterwards.
I still get it regardless of how I vote. My state has already been "called"- the network's have already set it's color on the big board, because it was never even in the contest.
since we were speaking of "democrat" in reference to the american political party.
That's what you were trying to do. But if you don't capitalize it, it's WRONG. The context allows me to guess what you meant, but it's still incorrect. It's just as wrong as writing "This week lance won another Tour de France". That sentence incorrectly states that the race was won by a wooden stabbing weapon, instead of an American cyclist.
The words democrat/Democrat, republican/Republican, and especially libertarian/Libertarian all mean very different things. (So do windows/Windows and apple/Apple, for that matter).
So, yes, one of the two parties can try to co-opt any growing third parties, but that risks alienating the middle.
They just have to decide whichever group of supporters is bigger, the 3rdies or the middlers. Because the changes aren't instantaneous, they'll tend to suck up only what they need to reach 51%, and no more.
So if you really care about ending the two party system
Actually what I want to see done is an expansion of the electronic-voting system so that there is no longer a single "election" day. A system where people can vote for an entire month, shifting their choice as they see fit during an ongoing negotiation. Of course, it'll be a while before internet literacy, universality, and security makes it practical- and there are insurmountable institutional obstacles too.
Amazing how many people manage to post on the internet but still haven't heard about Google.com. Here's one of the better hits for you, but you'll have to read a lot of PDFs from there. What it comes down to is that eating causes slightly more accidents each year than cellphone, but the percentage of drivers that eat is much higher than those who phone.
Actually, the FARs summary is a good one for comparing the danger of alcohol and cellphones, but I can't find a place to download it. Various newspapers have reported it's conclusions, though.
I've seen these studies, and I doubt they are unbiased studies by people in a neutral position on the issue.
Go ahead and point out the "bias" here.
In other words, all that is needed is a nice, understandable backtrace.
No, much more than that. A "backtrace", per se, captures only the state of a program's stack at one instance in time. Answering the questions listed in my post requires historical data on recent actions of the program- a succession of backtraces, if you like.
It is actually extremely rare that a parody is making fun of the original material itself and nothing else.
Nope. What you claim is semantically impossible. Well... by the definitions in an English dictionary, it's arguable. But the USA's legal definition of parody is clear: a "parody" is only a commentary on the infringed work. Everything else is a "satire". Just go back and read one of those court rulings I linked to earlier.
(For example, Right Wing Eye is correctly labelled as a satirical site. It infringes on Queer Eye, but it is commenting on anti-abortion Republicans. That makes it satire, not parody)
but that's about it.
Ok, so what do you think "Amish Paradise" and "Like A Surgeon" are commenting on? They certainly don't have anything to say about the Amish or surgery... they are (weak, repetitive) parody of the song itself. Note that most all parodies make the same simplistic "comment" about the source material: "So&so musician takes him/herself way too seriously". It's a cheap shot, but there ya go.
then that would mean almost all parody produced would be unprotected.
It's not "parody". But you're right, most satire is protected only by the fact that it's usually too obscure to bother suing. When it gets as famous as this jibjab video, it has no defense.