Ignoring most of the response, as it has nothing to do with my argument (or the one put forth in the grandparent post). The main point made by DaVinci1980 is that comparing the rendering speeds of PNGs and SVGs is not a simple exercise. All PNGs of a set resolution will unpack in the same time (+/- 50% for compressability). But for a set of SVGs of the same output resolution, there is no bound on how much longer some of them can take to draw.
It isn't safe to assume that all the SVGs you'll be handed will be optimally built to use exactly as many vectors as they need, and no more.
not how stupidly one could implement something
Many people misquote it, but Murphy's Law is "If there's a wrong way to do something, someone will do it".
Today's developers and artists who create icon sets (or application button-images, or similar) are prevented by the pixelmap technology from creating images so complex that they take too long to display.
A widespread use of SVG in these roles will allow developers to inadvertently produce too-complex artwork for icons. Sure, it looks great on the artist's 22 inch monitor, and he doesn't think it refreshes slowly at all. But after I download the app onto my P133 and run it alonside 7 other programs, I might form a different opinion. Alternatively, automatically generated SVGs (thumbnails of documents, for instance), can balloon to excessive size if nobody's careful.
Those are just 2 scenarios where the unlimited complexity allowed by vector graphics can lead to unforseen dangers (the UI system getting choked up on an unreasonable SVG). It's easy to imagine more.
Someday software will incorporate smart filters which downsample offensively-large SVGs into their most visually important elements, but this won't be soon.
(My opinion of SVG speed is biased by experience with Sodipodi, which can hardly even display an 800k computer generated SVG on my 1.8ghz P4. Editing it is completely out of the question)
comparing to PNG is rather ambiguous since it has more than one way of performing compression.
Compression algorithms, or other details related to on-disk representation of a file, don't really matter when evaluating the speed something can be drawn onscreen.
The comparison is between pixelmaps (incidently loaded from PNGs) and vector graphics (loaded from SVG), not between the file formats directly.
A program will read images from disk fairly few times (often just once at startup), but may draw them onscreen 100s of times per second. Loading time doesn't matter in the long run.
Because it's XML, everyone acknowledges that loading and parsing SVG file is not as speedy as possible. It's assumed that SVG-based desktop software will cache the images (either in RAM, or in a non-XML disk file). In the same way, a developer whose program was slowed by PNG decompression times could automatically generate pre-decompressed versions of the image data.
Aside: Although software can handle pixelmap data virtually identically regardless of which file format it came from (jpeg, png, gif, tiff, etc), the more complicated natures of vector graphics means there are many potential differences once the file is loaded. Comparisons between vector formats (Flash, SVG, Postscript, etc) will also need to consider the different capabilities offered by representation. Some may have features which are very slow to implement.
You make a cool icon and save it in PNG, and you're (virtually) assured it'll draw just as quickly as any other pixelmap icon. Labor over an intricately beautiful Postscript file, and you computer may grind to a halt as it refreshes. (Postscript is a Turing-complete language. Therefore rendering a Postscript file can take an arbitrarily long time)
You want smaller icons and text? Once you get a vector-based OS interface, you can reduce the size of user-interface elements without needing to change your whole screen resolution.
In the best system, the sizes of UI controls and the pixel-resolution of the output device should be completely decoupled, so the operator can fine-tune each one however he likes.
Some people have gotten results from that, but even if it works, the result isn't really the same.
0) VC++ is non-free. (And not just by RMS's libre definition either. Legally acquiring it can take many $$$) 1) VC++ speaks a different dialect of C++ than gcc does. While neither of them is 100% standards compliant, you'd want the same set of workarounds to function for both target platforms. 2) You'd need some tricky scripting to propagate error conditions from VC++ through WINE and into make's status knowledge. Connecting it to a makefile, or an Ant build.xml, or whatever your buildchain is, would be more complicated than simply inserting a gcc cross-compiler.
So this entire thread is something of a small "fund me!!!" rant delivered even before Columbia's embers have cooled?
Actually, the DoD has lined me up with more work than I can handle for years. Have had no luck hiring... you'd have expected the soft economy to shake loose some affordable programmers, but no...
the vast majority of Americans would agree.
That's the mark of a successful public-releations campaign, yes.
find the Red Chinese flag waving on the moon
Well bully for them. Duplicating a well documented experiment 50 years later is a simple matter of money. Hope their second opinion will shut up some kooks.
considers a death or two in advancing their nation worth the price.
Oh, like the USA? There's no nation that doesn't acknowledge it's citizen's lives are an expendable resource.
The definition of simplicity, as percieved by humans, is a complex thing. It includes not just the axis you chose (number of characters), but also the information content per-character, ease of distinguishing between characters, and most subjective of all, ease of acquiring training about the characters. The English alphabet scores high on all scales.
More specifically, humans can easily remember series of about 8 characters. Using binary you'd only have 256 values represented. Decimal gives you 10 million. Decimal + alphabet is 300,000 million. Start adding many more characters, and you're exceeding people's abilities to tell them apart.
How do you pronounce ztz01588a.xxqcji.org?
Zee tee zee oh five ate ate ay dot ecks ecks que see jay eye dot oh are gee.
It wasn't easy, but in a minute of effort anyone could do it. Now tell me what percentage of the words on this page you can pronounce?
Try reading the IP address.
IP addresses change. For instance if I wanted to inform a website operator to remove my copyrighted materials, per DMCA. If there's no comprehensible hostname, my lawyers won't be able to tell one Asian warez site from another!
The argument to "just use IP addresses" can be applied against the whole DNS system.
We already had a vehicle which didn't need to be rebuilt between missions. You'd just throw it out and buy a new one. Still cheaper and safer than a shuttle- the crew didn't even need to know how to fly a plane! (But he couldn't strech his legs). An enhanced Gemini would've been better than the Shuttle for all missions- it just doesn't give you the Buck Rogers feeling of piloting the same craft back and forth into space.
Hubble seems to be the only example I can find of an important satellite being repaired. Maybe there were others, less newsworthy. If only the Hubble and a few other satellites were repaired, then they hardly justify even a fraction of the shuttle program's $20,000+ million startup cost. The entire brand new Hubble cost $1,500 million- just 3 times the price of a shuttle launch. (Most satelittes cost less than $50 million, much of that recoverable design costs. Hubble's lenses made it's replacement cost uniquely higher)
The major other use of the Shuttle's "space-truck" abilities is to assemble space stations, and the same astronomers who love the Hubble widely agree that ISS is a boondoggle (they keep quiet to stay friendly with NASA).
I don't see how evolution would be superlinear- the more individuals there are, the greater chance for evolution- but each person is experiencing about the same environmental pressures, and evolving towards the same goal. Repeating the same process in parrelell gives the same results. Only if both the number of individuals and the different environments they're in are both large, would it seem exponential (divergent) evolution would take place.
And anyway, evolution (what little there can be, in the next few centuries) can work in our favor, and slightly stave off self-inflicted doom.
The first few million years of human evolution took place in a sparsely populated world, where aggression and boldly conquering new terrain were the ways to succeed.
Today, the world is densely populated. Cooperation and resource conservation are the new ways to succeed. Maybe, evolution will begin to prefer those more peaceful traits from here on out.
The comparison does make sense -- you consider a robot to be expendable today, and the aristocracy considered Moors expendable in the middle ages.
No. But robots truely are expendable. Unlike humans (as most gentle people would say). But expendability is a lesser point (we can get willing volunteers for a risky mission, as long as it's glamorous)- robots are cheaper and better. No air, no sleep, no re-entry. They can't smile for the cameras or sign autographs as well as a human astronaut, though. And public-relations is the real goal of the space program, right?
then I don't think they can effectively do much beyond take measurements.
Today's astronauts only take measurements too. They don't explore new worlds, and don't go anyplace that 100s of people haven't gone before. If you're talking about hypothetical self-aware AIs, then you've departed from any kind of reality we'll see for a century.
Whereas I'm talking about a currently true fact: today, manned space flight doesn't contribute to research, and only wastes money that could better be used elsewhere (other space research, or completely separate government programs, or even a tax-cut)
Sending a guy into space is an engineering problem: solvable.
Not just solvable. Solved. We're not learning anything new by repeating it again and again. Computer research would break new ground, and improve millions of lives.
Creating intelligent robots is something we don't even know is possible:
Therefore it is risky, and challenging it is an act of bravery.
you must be an AI researcher
Yes.
The one thing we could do here on earth (as another poster mentioned)
No. As I mentioned. In the very post you first replied to.
The phone number thing isn't off-base. The most important public use for typing in hostnames is as the prefix of a web-address you've gotten off of printed materials, like a billboard or advertising circular or bibliography.
Yes, in that case, it is functioning mostly like a phone number. The addition of more length and more characters only makes it somewhat easier to remember. (Pizza stores will almost always have the "pizza" substring in their names. No analysis of a list of phone numbers can give you the slightest clue where they go, without dialing them up)
Not only is the implementation a painful, incomplete hack, but even if the DNS protocol were cleanly extended to handle non-ASCII names, it would still be wrong.
DNS names are a very low level component of the internet- they layer just above IP addresses, and provide a persistent way to find an IP host. Today, with hostnames in ASCII, any person smart enough to use a computer can write down a name off a printout, and type it in later. Everybody, regardless of speaking Spanish, Korean, Russian, Chinese, Swedish, or Hindi, can basically recognize and repeat the ASCII alphabet. Not only is it the shortest, simplest character set the world has to offer, but most internet users are already getting some training in it.
Sure, with a Russian character map it might not be completely convenient to punch in an ASCII name- but with a little effort, anyone can do it. But if DNS hostnames start to come in Kanji or Hangul, it will be inestimably worse.
It's trivial to print the whole English alphabet on a single page, and with a rudimentary pronounciation-guide too. But Chinese contains more than 10k characters, many so rare that just 10% of the Chinese population can reproduce them. How'd you like that as the hostname that's been DNSing you? Try reading it over the phone to the upstream sysadmin, maybe?
The system of DNS hostnames is most useful when it uses a least-common-denomintator character set which every literate human can reasonably read, input, and maybe even pronounce. It's mostly like that today, and keeping it ASCII is the way to maintain it.
Naturally, non-English speakers will want to be able to publish server addresses in their own language. But systems to perform these lookups should be created separately from DNS- either on top of it (resolving to DNS hostnames), or alongside (resolving to IP addresses). That way, major international servers will tend to be dual-named: local language for primary users, ASCII-DNSname for everyone else.
The system libraries that software uses to lookup names can be extended to optionally check alternative-charset nameservers before going to the DNS ones, depending on the user's i8n settings.
That solution would be drastically more complete, and less disruptive, than what is presented in the article.
The ISS is merely the strongly argument against manned spaceflight.
However, a big motivator for the design of the shuttle was that it should be usable to ferry space-station building materials back & forth into orbit. Most of the shuttle's bulk isn't needed for each mission (NASA solicits "hitchhiker" experiments to use up some of the extra space).
The fates of the ISS and space shuttle programs are intertwined- each is used to justify the continuance of the other. Acknowledging that ISS is worthless weakens the value of the shuttle program too.
but you can't fix one without people.
A space shuttle mission costs around $500 million, versus less than $200 million to get into orbit ontop of an Arriane rocket. It's a rare satellite that is expensive enough by itself to be worthy of repair, instead of replacement.
Your response is orthogonal to my point (which is that the mere fact that a few people died shouldn't squelch discussion of the best programs to invest money in), but if you read the link a bit you'd see that healthcare disasters don't only happen in Africa. (It's only one of the 4 continents that are illustrated to have problems)
In fact, Russia is one of the nations profiled. To maintain national pride at being a "superpower", Russia continues to waste money on manned spaceflights (primarily in support of the ISS). If those were cancelled (as some of them will likely be, in today's wake), then funds would be freed, some of which will make it directly into their healthcare system.
Looniness is quite natural for me, I don't mind at all. But the explanation is entertaining, so I'll share with you. (Hint: negative evidence is still evidence)
Carl Sagan said it better than I ever could. The Drake Equation posits that by now, at least 100 (or anywhere from 5 to 50000, depending on your assumptions) electronics-capable intelligent species have existed in our area of the galaxy so far.
So where are their radio signals? Their space probes? Why does SETI strain fruitless to discover any kind of extraterrestrial signal?
The possible explanations are that there either never was any other intelligent life, or that it lost its ability to send radio signals and space probes shortly after acquiring it. (The Dyson Sphere is another possiblity. So is the Prime Directive, and plain xenophobic paranoia.)
Look at the technology level on earth today. We can already send probes out of the solar system. Given this ability, within 100-300 years at most, we'll be flinging a capsule laden with data storage and solar-powered radio transmitters towards every star we can see.
If we ever manage to colonize other worlds, then over a few millenia there will be an exponential population growth, and nary a corner of the galaxy will be free of us.
But evidently, this hasn't happened yet. Where are all the alien visitors?
Again, using ourselves as an example, the most likely possibility is that whenever technology increases to the point where a species can venture into space, it also allows the species to destroy the viability of it's entire ecosystem. Looking around at the relative popularity of military activities vice space exploration, which one do you think will happen first?
Darwinian evolution dooms us- it creates a locally optimal species, which struggles violently against its peers for resources, always knowing there is a frontier to explore where more open land can be found. But when the frontiers are gone, and the planet is full, it leaves us with a competitive psychology that will be unlikely to abide cooperation long enough for us to "get off the rock".
Look at the science-fiction worlds of something like Clarke's 2001. Flight to Jupiter in 1997? It seemed reasonable then- because it was on the assumption that petty nationalist squabbles wouldn't divert our attention and resources in the meantime. Sadly, that is exactly what's been happening.
By the same logic, the search for the new world should have taken place with ships populated by Moors
Completely bizarre! No comparison like that makes sense at all. (Ignoring, of course, the archaic idea that some races' lives are less valued, because that's not what you meant)
A more correct analogy should be this: "the search for the new world should have taken place with ships populated by tough, sailing men, because obviously it was too dangerous for civilized thinkers and women to roam the seas". And they were absolutely correct. That's why Columbus went, and not Queen Isabella. The best man for the job. Or best robot, as the case may be.
They knew they were pioneers, and that not all pioneers return home safe. The first shuttle crew were pioneers. Maybe even the 12th crew. But there have been hundreds of flights since then. Those guys? Truckdrivers.
They are heroes not because they died Heroes are defined subjectively. You're a hero if the public thinks you are. Only Ilan Ramon was popular enough to be called "heroic" until yesterday. The rest of them were anonymous to the public, until death cast a limelight on them.
sitting pretty on Earth waiting for robots to solve our problems* is not the solution Not just sitting around! We've got to build and maintain those robots. Tinkering in a lab or pondering at a computer isn't as glamorous as blasting into orbit, but it's where the real results will come from. The benefit:cost ratio for advancements in robots and computation simply dwarfs anything astronauts can give us.
read Penrose's "the emperor's new mind" That book includes much interesting discussion, but by no means proves its thesis without granting some unsupportable leaps. (At least you didn't invoke his like-minded colleague Searle, whose argument is simply laughable)
Umm, not exactly. Ask the people of Texas -- they're having to dodge the remains of Columbia which have been scattered over a large proportion of their back yard.
relatively risk-free, of course. But these people you mention aren't really "dodging". Nobody was hurt. I haven't heard of any real property damage yet.
Can you name any examples of a person killed by an unmanned spacecraft accident? I can't think of any. (If they exist, then they'll be prosaic non-events. Workplace accidents like "fell off a ladder tightening fuel hose")
Unmanned flight is fundamentally safer for many reasons: The vehicle is slimmer and sturdier, because there's no crew compartment. You don't need to land the craft on return. The launch (and recovery, if any) can be further from civilization. If anything goes wrong in flight, the ground team can detonate the rocket in a controlled manner, rather than having to pray that the plummeting ship will meet a miracle. And above all else, it's safer because there's no potential victims strapped atop 50 tons of TNT.
There is one, compelling reason why venturing out into space is a _really_ good idea:
Yes, that's true. Science-fiction has so much to teach us! (The Sun expiring is not the real threat. Astronomers have evidence that within 500 years or so, humanity on earth will be wiped out by nuculear or biological warfare. This evidence is necessarily indirect, but many find it compelling.)
But it won't be relevant for 75 years at least. Today's astronauts don't go to space to live there- they go to operate some buttons and levers, unpack a few sensor arrays, wave to the cameras, struggle with vacum-toilets, and then fly home.
Each of those tasks is either unimportant, or better handled by a machine.
Doesn't make it seem like quite as much any more, does it?
No, it still seems like a huge amount. The US Military, like it or not, is accomplishing things with it's money. They are supporting an army of 1 million and dominating the planet. Just a little of that is R&D- most is fuel, maint, mass produced equipment, and payroll. With this spending, they can cause any object on earth to explode within 24 hour notice.
That's what they're supposed to do. I, and many others, would argue that military spending can be safely cut back, but we can't dispute that their mission is succeeding.
NASA's mission, on the other hand, is supposedly to perform research in outer space. Historically, of course, they've mainly been a showcase for US economic primacy.
It doesn't have to stay that way. NASA could finally put science first- and the way to start is foregoing expensive manned flights in favor of less expensive rocket launches.
Yes, I naturally picked the dumbest looking experiment to showcase.
But reading through the page you mention, it seems that just about every experiment description contains the line "control via the remote Payload Operations Control Center (POCC)".
Meaning that it could've been accomplished just as well on an unmanned rocket. The people are there as figureheads- to give the public of Israel and the US something to feel proud of.
(That they can also serve to unpack a few experimental rigs is of no importance- the experiment designers could've added in a little automation if they hadn't known there would be astronauts on hand for the busywork)
If we can develop the technique of moving Life into Space, we can better manage the resources of this planet.
Your order is reversed. If we can manage resources better on earth, then maybe we can move life into space.
Developing improved resource management will be hard enough- we don't need the extra burden of flying into orbit to do it!
Maybe you think that the public won't support this research without the romantic vision of brave spacemen to inspire them.
A lot cheaper than here on Earth.
I can hardly fanthom an industry (besides scientific research) whose outputs are more valuable, per gram, than the cost of getting that gram through re-entry to planet surface. (Not to mention the raw materials and capital equipment that would have to go up there to get started)
Go build a plexiglass dome in Antartica and live there for a few years, to see how moon life would feel. Remember to keep it sealed, so you can't have any additional air, water, or food. Only sunlight gets in. If you survive, then we can talk about extraterrestrial colonies.
"Getting off this rock" is a good goal- for a 100+ year timeframe! This discussion is science-fiction terrirtory.
There's no need to start moving off-planet yet. Sure, it's arguably overpopulated already, and it'll get more crowded as the century goes on- but the most barren, desolate wasteland on earth is a paradise compared to what you'd find on the surface of Mars or Luna!
To live in space soonest, we should fork the research into 2 branches:
The space element: developing rocket boosters, atomic engines, and robot-drones to perfect interplanetary travel techology. Once the robots have managed to erect a powerplant and radio array on the moon's surface, then we can start to build habitats.
The human element: learn how to keep people alive in a self-contained environment for a decade at a time. Essentially, keep repeating the BioSphere experiment until it finally works.
Once those 2 research branches have been followed through to independent success, true space colonization research can begin. But trying to develop both the spaceflight technology and the human sustainment skills at the same time- as the ISS program is doing- is an expensive, dangerous folly.
People die everyday. We generally ignore this fact and continue on- why should today be any different, just because the victims were famous and driving a $100,000,000 bus?
20,000 people are dead, and the dollars spent on this shuttle trip could've saved them.
Slashdot Mirror
Ignoring most of the response, as it has nothing to do with my argument (or the one put forth in the grandparent post). The main point made by DaVinci1980 is that comparing the rendering speeds of PNGs and SVGs is not a simple exercise. All PNGs of a set resolution will unpack in the same time (+/- 50% for compressability). But for a set of SVGs of the same output resolution, there is no bound on how much longer some of them can take to draw.
It isn't safe to assume that all the SVGs you'll be handed will be optimally built to use exactly as many vectors as they need, and no more.
not how stupidly one could implement something
Many people misquote it, but Murphy's Law is "If there's a wrong way to do something, someone will do it".
Today's developers and artists who create icon sets (or application button-images, or similar) are prevented by the pixelmap technology from creating images so complex that they take too long to display.
A widespread use of SVG in these roles will allow developers to inadvertently produce too-complex artwork for icons. Sure, it looks great on the artist's 22 inch monitor, and he doesn't think it refreshes slowly at all. But after I download the app onto my P133 and run it alonside 7 other programs, I might form a different opinion.
Alternatively, automatically generated SVGs (thumbnails of documents, for instance), can balloon to excessive size if nobody's careful.
Those are just 2 scenarios where the unlimited complexity allowed by vector graphics can lead to unforseen dangers (the UI system getting choked up on an unreasonable SVG). It's easy to imagine more.
Someday software will incorporate smart filters which downsample offensively-large SVGs into their most visually important elements, but this won't be soon.
(My opinion of SVG speed is biased by experience with Sodipodi, which can hardly even display an 800k computer generated SVG on my 1.8ghz P4. Editing it is completely out of the question)
comparing to PNG is rather ambiguous since it has more than one way of performing compression.
Compression algorithms, or other details related to on-disk representation of a file, don't really matter when evaluating the speed something can be drawn onscreen.
The comparison is between pixelmaps (incidently loaded from PNGs) and vector graphics (loaded from SVG), not between the file formats directly.
A program will read images from disk fairly few times (often just once at startup), but may draw them onscreen 100s of times per second. Loading time doesn't matter in the long run.
Because it's XML, everyone acknowledges that loading and parsing SVG file is not as speedy as possible. It's assumed that SVG-based desktop software will cache the images (either in RAM, or in a non-XML disk file). In the same way, a developer whose program was slowed by PNG decompression times could automatically generate pre-decompressed versions of the image data.
Aside: Although software can handle pixelmap data virtually identically regardless of which file format it came from (jpeg, png, gif, tiff, etc), the more complicated natures of vector graphics means there are many potential differences once the file is loaded. Comparisons between vector formats (Flash, SVG, Postscript, etc) will also need to consider the different capabilities offered by representation. Some may have features which are very slow to implement.
You make a cool icon and save it in PNG, and you're (virtually) assured it'll draw just as quickly as any other pixelmap icon. Labor over an intricately beautiful Postscript file, and you computer may grind to a halt as it refreshes. (Postscript is a Turing-complete language. Therefore rendering a Postscript file can take an arbitrarily long time)
You want smaller icons and text? Once you get a vector-based OS interface, you can reduce the size of user-interface elements without needing to change your whole screen resolution.
In the best system, the sizes of UI controls and the pixel-resolution of the output device should be completely decoupled, so the operator can fine-tune each one however he likes.
Some people have gotten results from that, but even if it works, the result isn't really the same.
0) VC++ is non-free. (And not just by RMS's libre definition either. Legally acquiring it can take many $$$)
1) VC++ speaks a different dialect of C++ than gcc does. While neither of them is 100% standards compliant, you'd want the same set of workarounds to function for both target platforms.
2) You'd need some tricky scripting to propagate error conditions from VC++ through WINE and into make's status knowledge. Connecting it to a makefile, or an Ant build.xml, or whatever your buildchain is, would be more complicated than simply inserting a gcc cross-compiler.
So this entire thread is something of a small "fund me!!!" rant delivered even before Columbia's embers have cooled?
Actually, the DoD has lined me up with more work than I can handle for years. Have had no luck hiring... you'd have expected the soft economy to shake loose some affordable programmers, but no...
the vast majority of Americans would agree.
That's the mark of a successful public-releations campaign, yes.
find the Red Chinese flag waving on the moon
Well bully for them. Duplicating a well documented experiment 50 years later is a simple matter of money. Hope their second opinion will shut up some kooks.
considers a death or two in advancing their nation worth the price.
Oh, like the USA?
There's no nation that doesn't acknowledge it's citizen's lives are an expendable resource.
Not. 0 and 1 is shorter and simpler,
The definition of simplicity, as percieved by humans, is a complex thing. It includes not just the axis you chose (number of characters), but also the information content per-character, ease of distinguishing between characters, and most subjective of all, ease of acquiring training about the characters. The English alphabet scores high on all scales.
More specifically, humans can easily remember series of about 8 characters. Using binary you'd only have 256 values represented. Decimal gives you 10 million. Decimal + alphabet is 300,000 million. Start adding many more characters, and you're exceeding people's abilities to tell them apart.
How do you pronounce ztz01588a.xxqcji.org?
Zee tee zee oh five ate ate ay dot ecks ecks que see jay eye dot oh are gee.
It wasn't easy, but in a minute of effort anyone could do it. Now tell me what percentage of the words on this page you can pronounce?
Try reading the IP address.
IP addresses change. For instance if I wanted to inform a website operator to remove my copyrighted materials, per DMCA. If there's no comprehensible hostname, my lawyers won't be able to tell one Asian warez site from another!
The argument to "just use IP addresses" can be applied against the whole DNS system.
We already had a vehicle which didn't need to be rebuilt between missions. You'd just throw it out and buy a new one. Still cheaper and safer than a shuttle- the crew didn't even need to know how to fly a plane! (But he couldn't strech his legs). An enhanced Gemini would've been better than the Shuttle for all missions- it just doesn't give you the Buck Rogers feeling of piloting the same craft back and forth into space.
Hubble seems to be the only example I can find of an important satellite being repaired. Maybe there were others, less newsworthy. If only the Hubble and a few other satellites were repaired, then they hardly justify even a fraction of the shuttle program's $20,000+ million startup cost. The entire brand new Hubble cost $1,500 million- just 3 times the price of a shuttle launch. (Most satelittes cost less than $50 million, much of that recoverable design costs. Hubble's lenses made it's replacement cost uniquely higher)
The major other use of the Shuttle's "space-truck" abilities is to assemble space stations, and the same astronomers who love the Hubble widely agree that ISS is a boondoggle (they keep quiet to stay friendly with NASA).
Whoops, a better link is gives the number as between 6500 and 46964, depending on how obsessive you want to be. Still inside an OOM.
You're off by at least one order of magnitude on the first figure, maybe 2
Writing 10000 instead of 13000 is not what I'd call an "order of magnitude".
I don't see how evolution would be superlinear- the more individuals there are, the greater chance for evolution- but each person is experiencing about the same environmental pressures, and evolving towards the same goal. Repeating the same process in parrelell gives the same results. Only if both the number of individuals and the different environments they're in are both large, would it seem exponential (divergent) evolution would take place.
And anyway, evolution (what little there can be, in the next few centuries) can work in our favor, and slightly stave off self-inflicted doom.
The first few million years of human evolution took place in a sparsely populated world, where aggression and boldly conquering new terrain were the ways to succeed.
Today, the world is densely populated. Cooperation and resource conservation are the new ways to succeed. Maybe, evolution will begin to prefer those more peaceful traits from here on out.
The comparison does make sense -- you consider a robot to be expendable today, and the aristocracy considered Moors expendable in the middle ages.
No. But robots truely are expendable. Unlike humans (as most gentle people would say). But expendability is a lesser point (we can get willing volunteers for a risky mission, as long as it's glamorous)- robots are cheaper and better. No air, no sleep, no re-entry. They can't smile for the cameras or sign autographs as well as a human astronaut, though. And public-relations is the real goal of the space program, right?
then I don't think they can effectively do much beyond take measurements.
Today's astronauts only take measurements too. They don't explore new worlds, and don't go anyplace that 100s of people haven't gone before. If you're talking about hypothetical self-aware AIs, then you've departed from any kind of reality we'll see for a century.
Whereas I'm talking about a currently true fact: today, manned space flight doesn't contribute to research, and only wastes money that could better be used elsewhere (other space research, or completely separate government programs, or even a tax-cut)
Sending a guy into space is an engineering problem: solvable.
Not just solvable. Solved. We're not learning anything new by repeating it again and again. Computer research would break new ground, and improve millions of lives.
Creating intelligent robots is something we don't even know is possible:
Therefore it is risky, and challenging it is an act of bravery.
you must be an AI researcher
Yes.
The one thing we could do here on earth (as another poster mentioned)
No. As I mentioned. In the very post you first replied to.
The phone number thing isn't off-base. The most important public use for typing in hostnames is as the prefix of a web-address you've gotten off of printed materials, like a billboard or advertising circular or bibliography.
Yes, in that case, it is functioning mostly like a phone number. The addition of more length and more characters only makes it somewhat easier to remember. (Pizza stores will almost always have the "pizza" substring in their names. No analysis of a list of phone numbers can give you the slightest clue where they go, without dialing them up)
Not only is the implementation a painful, incomplete hack, but even if the DNS protocol were cleanly extended to handle non-ASCII names, it would still be wrong.
DNS names are a very low level component of the internet- they layer just above IP addresses, and provide a persistent way to find an IP host. Today, with hostnames in ASCII, any person smart enough to use a computer can write down a name off a printout, and type it in later. Everybody, regardless of speaking Spanish, Korean, Russian, Chinese, Swedish, or Hindi, can basically recognize and repeat the ASCII alphabet. Not only is it the shortest, simplest character set the world has to offer, but most internet users are already getting some training in it.
Sure, with a Russian character map it might not be completely convenient to punch in an ASCII name- but with a little effort, anyone can do it. But if DNS hostnames start to come in Kanji or Hangul, it will be inestimably worse.
It's trivial to print the whole English alphabet on a single page, and with a rudimentary pronounciation-guide too. But Chinese contains more than 10k characters, many so rare that just 10% of the Chinese population can reproduce them. How'd you like that as the hostname that's been DNSing you? Try reading it over the phone to the upstream sysadmin, maybe?
The system of DNS hostnames is most useful when it uses a least-common-denomintator character set which every literate human can reasonably read, input, and maybe even pronounce. It's mostly like that today, and keeping it ASCII is the way to maintain it.
Naturally, non-English speakers will want to be able to publish server addresses in their own language. But systems to perform these lookups should be created separately from DNS- either on top of it (resolving to DNS hostnames), or alongside (resolving to IP addresses). That way, major international servers will tend to be dual-named: local language for primary users, ASCII-DNSname for everyone else.
The system libraries that software uses to lookup names can be extended to optionally check alternative-charset nameservers before going to the DNS ones, depending on the user's i8n settings.
That solution would be drastically more complete, and less disruptive, than what is presented in the article.
The ISS is merely the strongly argument against manned spaceflight.
However, a big motivator for the design of the shuttle was that it should be usable to ferry space-station building materials back & forth into orbit.
Most of the shuttle's bulk isn't needed for each mission (NASA solicits "hitchhiker" experiments to use up some of the extra space).
The fates of the ISS and space shuttle programs are intertwined- each is used to justify the continuance of the other. Acknowledging that ISS is worthless weakens the value of the shuttle program too.
but you can't fix one without people.
A space shuttle mission costs around $500 million, versus less than $200 million to get into orbit ontop of an Arriane rocket. It's a rare satellite that is expensive enough by itself to be worthy of repair, instead of replacement.
That's the only time the Martian heat-ray is in alignment.
It's the American Way!
("If the Governmint didn't want me to have this, they shuldah kept it outta my backyard!")
Your response is orthogonal to my point (which is that the mere fact that a few people died shouldn't squelch discussion of the best programs to invest money in), but if you read the link a bit you'd see that healthcare disasters don't only happen in Africa. (It's only one of the 4 continents that are illustrated to have problems)
In fact, Russia is one of the nations profiled. To maintain national pride at being a "superpower", Russia continues to waste money on manned spaceflights (primarily in support of the ISS). If those were cancelled (as some of them will likely be, in today's wake), then funds would be freed, some of which will make it directly into their healthcare system.
Looniness is quite natural for me, I don't mind at all. But the explanation is entertaining, so I'll share with you. (Hint: negative evidence is still evidence)
Carl Sagan said it better than I ever could. The Drake Equation posits that by now, at least 100 (or anywhere from 5 to 50000, depending on your assumptions) electronics-capable intelligent species have existed in our area of the galaxy so far.
So where are their radio signals? Their space probes? Why does SETI strain fruitless to discover any kind of extraterrestrial signal?
The possible explanations are that there either never was any other intelligent life, or that it lost its ability to send radio signals and space probes shortly after acquiring it. (The Dyson Sphere is another possiblity. So is the Prime Directive, and plain xenophobic paranoia.)
Look at the technology level on earth today. We can already send probes out of the solar system. Given this ability, within 100-300 years at most, we'll be flinging a capsule laden with data storage and solar-powered radio transmitters towards every star we can see.
If we ever manage to colonize other worlds, then over a few millenia there will be an exponential population growth, and nary a corner of the galaxy will be free of us.
But evidently, this hasn't happened yet. Where are all the alien visitors?
Again, using ourselves as an example, the most likely possibility is that whenever technology increases to the point where a species can venture into space, it also allows the species to destroy the viability of it's entire ecosystem. Looking around at the relative popularity of military activities vice space exploration, which one do you think will happen first?
Darwinian evolution dooms us- it creates a locally optimal species, which struggles violently against its peers for resources, always knowing there is a frontier to explore where more open land can be found. But when the frontiers are gone, and the planet is full, it leaves us with a competitive psychology that will be unlikely to abide cooperation long enough for us to "get off the rock".
Look at the science-fiction worlds of something like Clarke's 2001. Flight to Jupiter in 1997? It seemed reasonable then- because it was on the assumption that petty nationalist squabbles wouldn't divert our attention and resources in the meantime. Sadly, that is exactly what's been happening.
By the same logic, the search for the new world should have taken place with ships populated by Moors
Completely bizarre! No comparison like that makes sense at all. (Ignoring, of course, the archaic idea that some races' lives are less valued, because that's not what you meant)
A more correct analogy should be this: "the search for the new world should have taken place with ships populated by tough, sailing men, because obviously it was too dangerous for civilized thinkers and women to roam the seas". And they were absolutely correct. That's why Columbus went, and not Queen Isabella. The best man for the job. Or best robot, as the case may be.
They knew they were pioneers, and that not all pioneers return home safe.
The first shuttle crew were pioneers. Maybe even the 12th crew. But there have been hundreds of flights since then. Those guys? Truckdrivers.
They are heroes not because they died
Heroes are defined subjectively. You're a hero if the public thinks you are. Only Ilan Ramon was popular enough to be called "heroic" until yesterday. The rest of them were anonymous to the public, until death cast a limelight on them.
sitting pretty on Earth waiting for robots to solve our problems* is not the solution
Not just sitting around! We've got to build and maintain those robots. Tinkering in a lab or pondering at a computer isn't as glamorous as blasting into orbit, but it's where the real results will come from. The benefit:cost ratio for advancements in robots and computation simply dwarfs anything astronauts can give us.
read Penrose's "the emperor's new mind"
That book includes much interesting discussion, but by no means proves its thesis without granting some unsupportable leaps. (At least you didn't invoke his like-minded colleague Searle, whose argument is simply laughable)
Umm, not exactly. Ask the people of Texas -- they're having to dodge the remains of Columbia which have been scattered over a large proportion of their back yard.
relatively risk-free, of course. But these people you mention aren't really "dodging". Nobody was hurt. I haven't heard of any real property damage yet.
Can you name any examples of a person killed by an unmanned spacecraft accident? I can't think of any. (If they exist, then they'll be prosaic non-events. Workplace accidents like "fell off a ladder tightening fuel hose")
Unmanned flight is fundamentally safer for many reasons:
The vehicle is slimmer and sturdier, because there's no crew compartment. You don't need to land the craft on return. The launch (and recovery, if any) can be further from civilization. If anything goes wrong in flight, the ground team can detonate the rocket in a controlled manner, rather than having to pray that the plummeting ship will meet a miracle.
And above all else, it's safer because there's no potential victims strapped atop 50 tons of TNT.
There is one, compelling reason why venturing out into space is a _really_ good idea:
Yes, that's true. Science-fiction has so much to teach us! (The Sun expiring is not the real threat. Astronomers have evidence that within 500 years or so, humanity on earth will be wiped out by nuculear or biological warfare. This evidence is necessarily indirect, but many find it compelling.)
But it won't be relevant for 75 years at least. Today's astronauts don't go to space to live there- they go to operate some buttons and levers, unpack a few sensor arrays, wave to the cameras, struggle with vacum-toilets, and then fly home.
Each of those tasks is either unimportant, or better handled by a machine.
Doesn't make it seem like quite as much any more, does it?
No, it still seems like a huge amount. The US Military, like it or not, is accomplishing things with it's money. They are supporting an army of 1 million and dominating the planet. Just a little of that is R&D- most is fuel, maint, mass produced equipment, and payroll. With this spending, they can cause any object on earth to explode within 24 hour notice.
That's what they're supposed to do. I, and many others, would argue that military spending can be safely cut back, but we can't dispute that their mission is succeeding.
NASA's mission, on the other hand, is supposedly to perform research in outer space. Historically, of course, they've mainly been a showcase for US economic primacy.
It doesn't have to stay that way. NASA could finally put science first- and the way to start is foregoing expensive manned flights in favor of less expensive rocket launches.
Idunno. I think you were clicking the wrong link.
Yes, I naturally picked the dumbest looking experiment to showcase.
But reading through the page you mention, it seems that just about every experiment description contains the line "control via the remote Payload Operations Control Center (POCC)".
Meaning that it could've been accomplished just as well on an unmanned rocket. The people are there as figureheads- to give the public of Israel and the US something to feel proud of.
(That they can also serve to unpack a few experimental rigs is of no importance- the experiment designers could've added in a little automation if they hadn't known there would be astronauts on hand for the busywork)
If we can develop the technique of moving Life into Space, we can better manage the resources of this planet.
Your order is reversed. If we can manage resources better on earth, then maybe we can move life into space.
Developing improved resource management will be hard enough- we don't need the extra burden of flying into orbit to do it!
Maybe you think that the public won't support this research without the romantic vision of brave spacemen to inspire them.
A lot cheaper than here on Earth.
I can hardly fanthom an industry (besides scientific research) whose outputs are more valuable, per gram, than the cost of getting that gram through re-entry to planet surface. (Not to mention the raw materials and capital equipment that would have to go up there to get started)
Go build a plexiglass dome in Antartica and live there for a few years, to see how moon life would feel. Remember to keep it sealed, so you can't have any additional air, water, or food. Only sunlight gets in. If you survive, then we can talk about extraterrestrial colonies.
"Getting off this rock" is a good goal- for a 100+ year timeframe! This discussion is science-fiction terrirtory.
There's no need to start moving off-planet yet. Sure, it's arguably overpopulated already, and it'll get more crowded as the century goes on- but the most barren, desolate wasteland on earth is a paradise compared to what you'd find on the surface of Mars or Luna!
To live in space soonest, we should fork the research into 2 branches:
Once those 2 research branches have been followed through to independent success, true space colonization research can begin. But trying to develop both the spaceflight technology and the human sustainment skills at the same time- as the ISS program is doing- is an expensive, dangerous folly.
People die everyday. We generally ignore this fact and continue on- why should today be any different, just because the victims were famous and driving a $100,000,000 bus?
20,000 people are dead, and the dollars spent on this shuttle trip could've saved them.
Sickening?