I meant this as an introductory concept, a quick means to reveal just how different space sex would be. On Earth, mere mortals propel themselves by walking, crawling against a surface (bed, floor, table.) When you say "no friction" it instantly conveys the feeling of the new conditions. Technically you're right, there is friction, e.g. when you tie yourself up, or grab your partner, you don't have to do it near geometric constraining points, such as the neck or wrists or ankles, because you'd just slip out of some greasy ropes if you're tied up across the belly or thighs, or your hands would just slip all over the place.
If I recall correctly my Engineering Science 101, called Statics (with Newton's laws and all that good stuff), frictional force is defined as
F1 = mu * N
where mu is the friction coefficient, and N is the normal force against the surface, pushing the two things together, or the normal(perpendicular) component of the force vector. In space, in the absence of this normal vector pushing you up against a surface (in the absence of being tied up, or magnetic shoes, the minute imbalance gravity inside a gravitational Faraday cage don't count as big enough here), even if the frictional coefficient is there, the frictional force is still 0, because you ain't got the N.
Wind is currently the most cost competitive of any energy technology, because it's so cheap to put up a turbine and just harness the energy. But in the long run, I don't think there is enough wind to satisfy all the energy needs of our planet (estimated at 5x current global energy consumption, covering 13% of all land area.)
You'll also have to remember that besides energy, most of our raw material productions rely on some kind of fossil fuel consumption (steel requires coal to be reduced from ore), and as our high concentration ores get used up, just like our fossil fuel sources get used up, we'll have to resort to processing low grade ores, which will need even more energy (even 10x as much as high grade ores.)
Also as human populations boom even further (imagine all of USA and Canada having the population density of Japan), there will simply not be enough energy to suit everyone's air conditioning needs, let alone produce all the hydrogen needing to bind air nitrogen to make liquid ammonia for fuel and fertilizer to feed all the hungry mouths and drive all the cars.
One of the issues with solar is that the rate of return is very slow (payback is near 5 years compared to 0.7 months on nuclear plant, note:these numbers could be inaccurate.) If you have high grade ore nothing beats the energy density of nuclear fuel, and in fact, there is even talk that moon oxygen extraction would not rely on local solar panels that get damaged by asteroids, but on a nuclear fuel device we take up there, similar to what powers submarines. With all the thorium around, do not be so quick to write off nuclear as an option. We may even end up completely relying on nuclear energy, only 150 years from the time it was invented by humankind (between 1900 and 1940.) As far as safety goes, you'd have to build these things deep into mountains, so in case they do blow up, it will be just like an underground nuclear testing. People would live in cities, then go to train station to board a super high speed train that goes inside a vacuum tube at 500km/hr to get to their work that's 250km away carved deep into the mountain, do their daily job, then go home live in the city. Just like firefighters are willing to enter a burning house, I don't think you'd have a problem finding employees for such power stations, willing to risk their own lifes if they think it's for a worthy cause. Hey, if a plant blows, it blows, it's well contained, and the other plants carved into the same mountain 10 km away are still safe and can go on churning out energy. The only issue with this scheme that I don't have a good idea for is the need for a large thermal sink with current nuclear technology. These days nuke plants are constructed near large bodies of water, with huge cooling towers and tremendous thermal pollution. That's a safety issue, and if there were only a way to not need such a thermal sink (i.e. when you got energy, is there a way you can get to it by a different route, by a non-carnot-thermal-engine to mechanical-to-electrical way, but instead, say use it to generate ions then harvest those ions through deflecting magnets to create electricity, basically some non-thermal way, so your nuke plant doesn't need so much interaction with the outside thermodynamic universe, other than two copper wires coming out of it carrying juice?
Don't worry, you'll just have unofficially approved sex, and the officials will look the other way, treat it as taboo, as long as you don't jeopardize the mission's success, and you continue providing peak performance.
Just imagine the weightlessness! Yipee, what fun! You'd probably have to tie yourself up to some posts because with weightlessness you can't stand in one spot, because there is no friction between your feet and the ground. Handcuffs anyone? Or just hold on to some bars, while your mate holds on to you. Or you can pretty much just hold on to each other as you both spin floating in the middle of the space cabin, getting very dizzy, then just imagine the goo floating in a big ball in mid air, when you're done, flying slowly toward the wall to make a splat. If you get carried away and spin too fast, you might hit and smash your head into the instrumentation if you're not careful. Imagine the reporters talking about an accident on the spaceship causing a few million dollars damage to some instrument, and we can cross off one of the missions from the list, cuz we no longer can do it. I guess in space 'safe sex' will have a different meaning.
Still, this is one of the best ways to attract young college students to space school! Don't even need an ad campaign! But you better be very good at math, and in top physical shape, if you want to go on this joyride! If you didn't have an incentive to take up a science career, now you have one! And your status as a nerd will suddenly surge to the top, because not blondes, but nerds will have the most fun, that mere mortals stuck on the high gravity ground here can only dream of!
"Locating ores rich in oxygen" - practically all lunar ores are rich in oxygen. I think what they should be looking for is locating nonsilicate ores of iron oxide concentrates for easy hydrogen reduction, if there are any high concentration regions. They should also keep an eye out for fluoride. The iron reduction by hydrogen we could even do today, but as far as fluoride goes I have a hunch that that's what it's gonna come down to in the end, a good local supply of fluoride ores, if there are any. The hydrogen we could keep can hauling up there from Earth, but as far as hauling even fluoride goes, the atomic mass of fluorine is 19 times that of hydrogen, but that 19 still beats the 35 that chlorine would require. Another downside of chlorine is that it may need carbon too to bite anything in the first place.
I have a hunch, that, since extracting the oxygen from moonrock is going to be so friggin energy costly, we will probably separate the other rock components too, we won't just extract oxygen and dump the resulting metalloid slag back out on the surface. Whether the separation is done in a high temperature way, or via low temperature compound separations, you'll need some kind of salt, most likely fluoride/chloride, either for flux to drop melting points, or for volatile/moblizied compound generation. And the fluoride/chloride losses are inevitable - for example the aluminium industry uses quite a bit of artificial cryolite, even though in theory they shouldn't need to keep replenishing, because it's a theoretically nonconsumable thing in their process. In practice however, everything is a consumable.
So try to find a good local supply. Good luck, Hubble, break a leg, or more exactly, break a gyroscope!:)
I think you're very right on this point, about agrarian economy. But when it comes to tractors, ever hear of horses instead? Horses, or "sun dogs" revolutionized Native American life when they were reintroduced to North America by the Spanish conquistadors. Why don't I see lots of horses in African footages, like I saw in indian/cowboy movies or Amish video footages? Won't horses survive the African climate? Are there other domesticated animals that could be used instead then, like them cows are used in India? The nice thing about horses is that, unlike tractors, that wear out, horses reproduce themselves, for almost free, and you don't need to go to find parts at your local Autozone dealer, all horses need is grass, and someone to take care of them (i.e. keep the stable clean by shoveling the horse manure, which, by the way, is an excellent fertilizer.) Then when everybody got a full stomach, they can start actually paying attention in school, to get an industry going. It's hard to concentrate and learn the alphabet or basic math when you're about to fall over and die from starvation, your classmates having to carry you out and bury you, then get back to class to continue where they left off? By the way, just giving people lots of food, without enabling them to be self sufficient may just end up with a population boom, and now you have to feed 20x more mouths. An interesting phenomenon, that while in extreme poverty couples tend to have 20 kids with a 17 kid mortality rate, 2 of the 20 making it to adulthood (even in Europe during the Dark Middle ages, or just about anywhere on the face of the planet), in technologically advanced nations with plenty of food, there is no population explosion, but to the contrary, the population growth levels down, or even gets negative. When the standard of living gets very high, people end up with 2 kids, both of which make it to adulthood. Wouldn't that be a nicer scenario than when a mother having 20 kids and losing 18, is just a fact of life, and nobody bothers? How can one get sensitive towards other people, other ethnic groups, when you get so callous about your own family members, because 18 out of 20 die, because that's just simply how life is, how things are, and being callous is the only way to get by? I'm not saying simply feeding everyone will stop all war and conflict, because there is also the problem of everyone having a full stomach, satisfied, with nothing left to do, so instead of sitting around bored, people go do heroic deeds to each other and invade and conquer each other, for an ego boost, out of boredom. You have to watch out for that stuff too, so besides creating an easy life where everyone is well fed, you have to keep up with education to teach people interesting activities, to give them something interesting to do, besides bashing each other's heads in. Hopefully they won't just become WWF addicts.
Of course even domesticated animals won't work in places where the Sahara is advancing, like Niger, or the place where Lake Chad used to be, where all you have is a barren piece of rock and desert sand blowing. The only chance for a significant sustainable human population there is what Japan and Switzerland has. When you're stuck on a barren piece of rock, all you can really do is either something really high tech, where they import raw materials, and convert them into something even higher value, and buy food on the difference. (Barren pieces of rock can also turn to the sea, for fish, like Japan used to, but these days there isn't enough fish left in the Ocean - the biological activity in seas, per square mile is a lot lower than on land, or the seas wouldn't be blue, but green instead, when looked at from outer space.)
If we ever get solar panels economically efficient, there is no better place for them than the desert regions - land is cheap, and the biggest resource is lots of sunshine, blue skies, and little cloud cover. Then they could turn all that surplus energy into ore processing - silicon/semiconductor foundries (sand is mostly silicon), a
Assuming we're talking about an heavy bowling ball, made of metal denser than water, that will fully sink:
The level of the lake water will technically rise by an infinitesimally small amount, relative to sea level/mountain level/some steady reference in Newton's Absolute Space, however small that amount may be - it's calculable if you know the lake surface area, the lake level will rise by volume of the ball divided by lake surface area. It's basically added volume to the lake.
The level of the water relative to a marker mark drwan on the side of the boat will drop, or more exactly, the boat will lift out of the water, by the amount calculable from air replacing the bowling ball volume inside the boat - you can average out the overall density of the boat below the water mark plus adding the - steel frame + air inside the steel frame, to find the buoyant force according to Archimedes' law. Then on top of this you add the force due to the weight that sticks out of the water, but the air space that's above the water surface doesn't matter now, just get the raw weight, you only need to average densities below the liquid line. With basics physics 101, using Newton's force diagrams, you can set up an equation to find where the new equilibrium line will be, below the initial mark. This density averaging math involves the shape of the bottom of the boat - whether it's a steep V shape, or some very flat |_______| shape steel, wood, fiberglass-plastic, inflated plastic, or whatever kind of boat you got. The same bowling ball will not have much effect on the level of a squaremile wide flat boat, but if your boat is only 2 square feet area V shape, expect a huge effect from the ball missing from the density averaging.
Here's hoping that Google will keep not abusing their power for another 7 years, and that we will still have a Free (as in Freedom, not as in Beer) Internet for another 7 years.
The economy is moving towards a service economy world where everything can be replaced by a machine, and then humans still have to find a way to have daily activities and not get too bored and invade each other, like them indians did after they got the horse and an easy life. Have you recently dealt with an ATM machine, a self-checkout-lane, or an automated phone service? I don't care how cheap chinese or malaysian and indian laborers get, ultimately nothing beats a machine. Imagine replacing telephone switchboard ladies from the 1930's with cheap chinese and indians - guess what, an automated telephone switch "machine" does it seemlessly. Humans cannot compete with machines when it comes to productivity, forget it. Even mathematical proofs are more and more getting done by machines - maybe in the future machines will be very easy to program(with caveats here), because you can just request what you want from them, and there you go, instead of having to hire a programmer whose job is to struggle with ever more complex code. These days you see more and more job functions that sound like pie in the sky: facilitator, expeditor, associate, even miles and miles of cubicles filled with customer service representatives selling policies - what's any of this have to do with generating the daily bread, shelter, and clothing. Yes, throughout history, a sophisticated society gets more and more involved at the higher levels - art, religion, science, spiritual things - but when the bulk of the society is priests, artists, gentlemen-in-clubs, what really supports that, what's the infrastructure? Machines. Is giving everyone a customer-service-representative hamster-wheel, promotion-haggle-each-other-harassment-economy, where the 99 cents out of the dollar is the promotion cost, 1 cent is the actual production, the ideal way to go about things? Yeah, ok, it's safe, people don't get bored that's the root of all problems, but still. Can't you ask more, some better fulfillment out of a human life? There are many things that machines can't do, and a lot of those things involve matters of the spiritual, and machines are very far from getting involved in such things.
Yeah, well what happened to that Chess Prize challenge, offered to anyone who can build a computer program that could beat a grandmaster? IBM came up with Deep Blue, that had chess moves implemented in hardware. It beat the world chess champion. Did they do it for the money? Yeah, sure, what a great investment it must have been! Wall Street was in ecstasy! IBM's computer beat Kasparov! Weee! And their stock instantly went through the roof because of the huge income from that prize! These things are not about profit from the prize, but for prestige. The profit from these feats comes later, perhaps a century later, the amount money is just a symbol, of relative significance.
I bet you anything that Deep Blue was a lot more costly than any kind of chess prize it could get in exchange. I bet you the whole Deep Blue project ended with a big number in red ink at the quarterly bottom line. Just like research, or even marketing keeps producing negative quarterly bottom lines. Try running a company without research or marketing - you're destinded for obsolescence and extinction. The Deep Blue project wasn't about immediate profit, but it was a significant step for humanity when it comes to artificial intelligence. One bastillon of what we used to call human intelligence striked down. We keep finding out that we're not that special, we're not the center of the universe - Copernicus, Darwin, Wohler, Deep Blue.. what's next? Our forward scouts, our humans of inhuman intelligence, such as accountant-number-adders, or grandmaster-chess-players, they keep retreating. The last bastillon of 'human intellgience' is probably gonna be held by women, in the form of interpesonal and social skills that they excel at and computers or even nerds really suck at, because these "manly" abstract but concrete mathematical challenges are more and more likely to be tackled by machines, way before they can engange in a pleasant conversation with any of us. See this
Similarly, successful extraction of moon oxygen is not just gonna be for "the prize", but it's a way to pave the future. One important thing that would result in having breathable oxygen is being able to create a self sustaining human+tropical rainforest ecosystem on the Moon, and on Mars, as an insurance policy against human stupidity here on Earth, against the nullifying effect of a WW3. Chances are humans won't be stupid enough to pull the nuclear trigger on each other, with the promise mututually assured destruction looming over their heads, but do you like betting chances? Let's talk to Mr. Murphy, and ask him to revise his Law. Here is the optimist version of Murphy's Law: If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong, except when chances of it going wrong are minute. Now, with this newfound optimism we can start betting chances! How about not having to bet when you don't have to, how about establishing certainty instead of having to rely on luck in a risk? How about having an ecosphere on the Moon and Mars who can be remote spectators to some idiotic WW3 going on down here on Earth, and they can just sit back in their couches and shake their heads, and say, "man, those idiots down there don't know what they are doing, they've all gone nuts!" The farther they can spectate from, the better chances they have of not getting involved. At least somebody then would survive, and when the dust settles on Earth, and radioactiviy dies down, a century later maybe, then these Moon and Mars and Saturn-freaks can take a trip back here, bring their rainforest seeds and their elephant babies and their kitties and rabbits with their Noah's Ark's along, and replant the rainforest, one seed at a time, and let earth turn green again, and the rainforests loud. They'd send a team of explorers, to boldly go where man has been before, except his stupidity got the best of him.
Besides such insurance policy against some imminent apocalypse, the success of moon-mineral processing would have relevance to raw material extracti
They did not say deliver it to Earth. Whatever your gadget, it should work well with simulated regolith delivering the stuff within a few hundred feet radius both here on Earth, and up there on the Moon.
Whatever happened to those autonomos car-driving teams that made it across the nevada desert? They sure have the capacity to cook something up. This challenge is to get electrical/mechanical engineers excited too, besides the chemists thinking about oxygen extraction techniques.
How do I sign up to be an inmate in this penal colony you talk of? Do I have to kill someone for such a sentence? Oww.. hope not. How about a premeditated murder of a fly or mosquito? I might be willing to commit such a selfish act of specieism motivated atrocity, but there should be less harsh means to hitch a ride, to be among the cargo of the inmate ship delivery?
Using small explosive charges is not such a bad idea. You know, mining on earth hasn't quite been the same ever since Nobel discovered cheap and safe dynamite.
It was 5 kilos of O2, 11 lbs, and you had the capability, to do it for a day maybe, but your device would have been chewed to pieces by corrosion in no time. There is a reason why they offered it to the public. $200,000 is not about the money, it's a gesture, it's about something that NASA - listen up, NASA! - is asking help with. They have no problem with controlling and talking to something flying by Pluto. Pluto!!! That's the big deal there, the bowing, the recognition that you'd like a helping hand, because you're not all that, you're not the shit, and something this simple stupefies you. Well, of course you could do it, anything is doable - you could vaporize everything to ions, and produce 2 nanograms per hour. Nasa could do it today, but what they are asking for is doing things efficiently, and economically, which is a topic they usually don't have to deal with. They are used to complete luxury, getting any amount of money or energy they want, but when it comes to oxygen extraction from the mooon to save money or energy, that's a new ballgame for them.
Platinum electrodes/crucible? Forget it - metallic silicon corrodes platinum even at 800C. Melting the regolith? You need 1600C for that. Graphite crucibles? They will slowly gasify at that temperature by reacting with the oxygen compounds. Wait, quartz crucibles, they melt at 1700C. Duh, you're trying to rip quartz apart, whatever you do, you're doing it to quartz. Half of the beach sand on Earth world is quartz. Half the minerals on the Moon have quartz. Separate it from the rest? Good luck. Maybe magnesium oxide crucibles? Yeah, that too will slowly be dissolved away by the silicate lava. By the way metallic calcium and magnesium are vapors at temperatures above 1300C, even above 900C in vacuum - how are you gonna keep them from dissolving in your melt and wandering over to your oxygen electrodes? How about attacking and alloying with your crucible/electrodes. Whoever did such a test in a lab, noted a funky blue vapor, and intese fizzing at the cathode - I bet you those are metallic sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium and zinc vapors, at 1600C. You know how potent and corrosive those things are? Good luck with it. Ah, you want to use flux, bring the temperature down. Say 900C. What are you gonna use as flux, and there are always losses, how are you gonna replace it? Keep bringing it from earth? Any chemicals you use that are different from what you're facing on the moon need to be super-efficiently recycled - you can justify losing maybe 0.1% into your products, that means 1000x reuse before it's consumed away, before you need to replenish it from Earth. That might be a fair deal, get 1000 lb product for each trip from earth, plus all the headache of running a process on the moon, without full self-sufficiency, but do you have such a process? Can you come up with a process, equipment, that either lasts without using any other chemicals, or a process that uses other chemicals without losing say more than 0.1% per equivalent weight? Hydrogen? Fluoride? Sulfur? Carbon? Cloride? Iodide? Nitrogen/ammonia? What is your effluent, what are your products, and how much of the above mentioned reactants are you dragging out from your process? Purifications are very expensive.
If money were the issue, if that $0.3M is what you really needed to make it work.. hell.. take $5M, just make it work, make it work well. It takes $20,000 per lb oxygen to get lifted into space. 11 lbs O2 is $220,000, pays off in less than a trip. That's why whoever pushed this out the door from NASA could get away with it, and encounter no resistance - how can you argue with that on a financial basis? It's not about money, it's all about pride, and NASA wasn't too proud, in the end. And who knows, that days of Tesla and Edison, and Heroult-Hall, and Ford and Benz might return. It takes $580M for a single shuttle lunch, a lof of that cost is energy, and the bulk of the weight is oxygen, because 2g H2 go with 16g O2, 8x more oxygen is dragged along on the trip. If you could just make a pi
Did anybody mention that if your data is truly that top secret, don't sell the drive. Melt it, like the terminator dude was molten. Or at the very least take it apart, and toss it off a bridge somewhere, though don't overdo this because of pollution concerns. Most people don't have that many secrets, and even if your data ends up in other people's hands, including personally identifiable info, the culprit attempting to steal your bank money still has quite a chance of being caught by authorities. Chances are if you formatted your drive, people who buy it on ebay won't jump it and de-format it, looking for all kinds of cool stuff. It'd be easier to dig through other people's trash outside their front-yard, on garbage day, or even at the nearest landfill site. Who cares that much anyway? There is more to life than stealing other people's info, bank account numbers, and there is life even after someone stole your identity, though it can be quite a change and a struggle to gain your identity back and clear it, it's still nowhere near as bad as what just happened in New Orleans when someone you loved died in a flood. Still, instead of all this talk, if someone is truly involved, show me the code, like Linus used to say. Provide the world with a utility that will relatively safely erase your disk so you can sell it on ebay - though pranksters might abuse that tool for other things. When you look at the big picture, lost data is quite a horrible thing, and living with difficulty of complete data erasure might be preferable to making completely unrecovarable erasing way too easy.
Graphite is fine as a noncorrodable electrode at low temperatures in almost any circumstance - even naked fluorine is made with graphite - though it definitely has higher electrode gas-overpotential than the noble metals, thus much lower conversion(of electrical to chemical energy) efficiency.
You are right, but there is always 2 sides of the story.
When it comes to things you don't know about the enemy, you simply don't know it about the enemy. Saddam was extremely meticulous, unapproachable, unpoisonable because he carried his own food, and ruthless because he killed his own son in law. Things could have been just the other way around, and he could have actually had something, some nasty weapons. Now we made sure he didn't, but got a mess. After all, he was at least a secular leader, and there was peace, and everybody got fed, even if people who ran their mouths like you and me ended up in some prison then discarded as waste. Still, it's a failure of intelligence, failure of satellite spying, but as long as we could freely roam around the country with inspectors, there was a fine, balanced line of judgement somewhere, and our paranoia got the best of us and we lost our balance.
Now we're there, and there is lots of oil, so we'd like to stay, which could be the whole reason for this show in the first place, and we might have really had good intelligence, and knew he didn't have anything, for sure, and we just pretended this paranoia, so we can go after the good stuff. I used to think religion and language cause wars, but someone enlightened me, and now I know that religion and language are always the excuses, and the real motive is always property, and has been, ever since the cave days. You went off from the cave, and returned empty handed? Your woman would beat you in the head with a legbone for being so stupid, what will she give the kids to eat now? You went off, you better return with something, and she didn't care whether you hunted it/gathered it, or invaded the next cave and stole it/forcibly took it from the people there.
I'm a US citizen, and live in the US. You think I have a power against this cowboy, other than running my mouth on slashdot, cry foul, like you do, in blind hope that it will have an effect somewhere? We elected him? You trust our voting system? It's all a show. And they even can't run the show right, without hiccups, cuz they had to resort to the Supreme Court to elect him, at least the first time around. And looky look, who gets to nominate the Supreme Court justices? Whatever dazzling speeches that please my ear and make me wet my panties these nominees can come up with, it's still, Supreme Court electing the President, and the President nominating the Supreme Court. Something is wrong with that picture. Words, words now, empty inaguration words, let's see what actual decisions come down the pipeline that bite, have the power to actually matter, and if those are the same as the fairytale speeches, that's when I say, okay, I give, I shut up, and thank the Almighty that luck has been with us.
Though they say it's not practical for actual use, from the people standing next to it in the picture, it looks like it would fit inside a small size truck. Look at that picture, how scary that is. Such a small thing, really, it's unbelievable. So I don't really buy the nonpractical stuff, fact is, humanity does have the power to completely wipe not only itself out, but everything else alive on the planet, including cockroaches if it so desires. Chances are that it won't desire so. You like betting chances?
Ok, maybe the bacteria that currently live inside our nuclear reactors, and have a fast enough regeneration and self-repair function to keep up with the damage, will survive - aren't you happy for them, that they live just fine? But still, would you like to roll back and restart evolution starting from bacteria? I wonder if such a thing happened before on Earth, and wonder what the sansient beings would have been like before they wiped out themselves and the planet and rolled back evolution to the bacterial state? They might have looked like bugs, like octapuses, hey, maybe even like us, monkeys! If it happened.. is there convicing geological fossil evidence that it never ever could have happened?
I think our biggest hope is to create self-sustaining Noah's Ark space ships freely roaming and hiding out in the asteroid belt, or behind Jupiter, containing lots of life, as an insurance policy against human stupidity. Though you'd have a hard time controlling the chances that one of those Noah's Ark's doesn't go nuts, and while right now whoever pulls the trigger here on Earth also dies, if they pull the trigger from a Noah's Ark, they wouldn't. Same if we inhabitate Mars, the collective chance that life disappears will decrease, but the individual planets both get to bear higher risk, because in an interplanetary nuclear war one planet may not be completely eradicated, while the other yes, so the mutually assured destruction argument doesn't have such a stopping force. So what's a good answer here?
Re:Let's don't get ahead of ourselves
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I realize there are two sides to every story, and I could probably argue the maintanance side, being there for the customer, the "customer is always right even when they are not" side a lot more eloquently, but I chose to voice that side that's falling out of perspective, and doesn't get enough attention.
Re:Let's don't get ahead of ourselves
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TrollTech to IPO?
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You too!:)
Re:Let's don't get ahead of ourselves
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TrollTech to IPO?
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Maintaining code? Sometimes all you want is just to create something, make it work, and then hope it does the same thing over and over for a decade. A lot of nonreprogrammable hardware devices are designed, made, and their design no longer 'maintained' just the parts changed out as they wear off. Works pretty good for a lot of things. My mouse or keyboard here are a few years old, for instance. Same with my pen and pencil, or 900 MHz phone, or laser printer or monitor. Maintaining code is a bit over emphasised, especially as a job-security aspect for someone who can't come up with something new, and in the name of creating this new, information economy. Write a program, design a car. Make it work well. Then use it. 10 years later you can almost just start from scratch, design from scratch, and use it again for 10 years. How about something that stands the test of time? Make a software like a bridge - designed to function for 50 years before first major overhaul. If you're a software designer, like MS, go hide for 10 years until really come up with something new, insead of this get your daily patches hell that fix what we broke yesterday trying to fix something else business model. You shouldn't have to dick with software constantly if it was made to work well in the first place. I'm still on the 2.4 linux kernel. Works fine. Not even the latest version of 2.4.xx. I'd probably still be happy with a 2.2 kernel, if I had to pay for 2.4. 2.6 is free, so what. As long as it works, that's what counts. I could not say the same thing about MSDOS 6, or Windows 3.1, since I know better now, and want better. I'd buy something better than either DOS of Win31 if all the free choices were gone. But maybe even Win95 would be fine for me, in almost 2006, 10 years later, if the hardware drivers were updated. The interface had all I needed. Windows Explorer with right click menus let me take charge of my harddrive, better than File Manager. But where is the new stuff since? After all this billion dollar 'maintaining'? WinXP from the user interface standpoint is still just Win95 with different colors. OK no blue screens. But even blue screens weren't so bad, people rebooted, and life went on. I'd rather not have this constant reinventing the wheel - DDE, OLE, COM/Activex, dotNet - progress? They should have made Activex hard iron sandbox secure like java applets in the first place, and it could be something to last for 50 years. Constantly shooting yourself in the foot and make something crappy on purpose just so you can sell yet another solution later, which, mind you, comes with its own submarine load of defects as investment toward the future, is a business strategey, but not one that pleases the customer.
Classic VB was perfect for cooking up something quick, making it work, and then it just worked, over and over, for years and years. Why is everyone bitchin at how bad pre-dotnet VB was? Are you sure you're not the surgeon bitching at the surgical knifes the amateur's used, bitchin at their tool instead of their incompetence using that tool? Classic VB was perhaps not the best choice for a large project, such as MS Antispyware that does use Classic VB6 SP5 in 2005, but for everyday needs of home-programmers, hobby programmers, and small businesses you simply shouldn't have to sit down and start pulling your hair out abstracting and conceptualizing the classes and contstructors and navigate through the zoo of.h and.cpp files typing some 200 lines of code, when all you needed was pick a control, drop it on a form, double click it, type 5 lines of code that actually do someting besides instantiating the whole bells and whistles mechanism, and incorrectly destructing it later because you haven't made the right things virtual in the constructor of what you are subclassing, because you didn't think you'd ever have to subclass it - no, I'd rather not deal with that hell if I don't have to. A massive project like MS Antispyware using VB6 - go use C++! That project is big enough! My hobby program I
Re:Let's don't get ahead of ourselves
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TrollTech to IPO?
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· Score: 1
I'm not a computer professional, I've always known that - that stuff takes years of forging - if nothing else this dismal rating shows it very clearly. I was offered to take on writing some database app for a company wide implementation, that worked very well in a single local department. Now I can see just how right I was to decline, over incompetence. I'm willing to work around the edges to interface the local needs to some main company wide database system, with my self learned programming skills, and bang together something that works, and works very well, but to run a company wide business on it, to make me create that company wide db that everything depends on? Give me a break. Hire professionals who have a chest fully decorated with medals for that kind of stuff, who have really chosen this kind of thing as their profession.
Still, nobody commented on how unecessarily difficult programming is made. Is it wrong to ask that the programming interface of a computer to be more human? I don't want just the user interface to be easy to use and human, or just the generic, widely used programs to be human - there is always that area where I need to do something for which there is no generic solution, there are always special cases, and people are left feeling very dumb, not because they can't explain what they want, or they can't write it down in correct and super-exact english terms, but because those english terms are not easily interfacable, translatable to the computer. It's worse than having to translate from english to japanese. Just because nonprofessional programmers such as business, accounting, hr and science folks cooked up a whole lot of spaghetti VB code then a real programmer got hired to straighten out the unstraightenable mess - instead it just ends up rewritten from scratch, while the professional keeps cussing at VB, like a professional surgeon cussing at the knife used by amateur surgeons, instead of cussing at the amateur incompetence - just because this is so, it doesn't mean easy VB should be eliminated, because that spaghetti code that did actually work was still preferable to no code at all, no solution and people just suffering without one, and it may never have been recognized that there was actually a spot there, a obvious need for a professional programmer, because there were directly tangible business benefits to derive. DIY programming, though dangerous, it's nowhere near as dangerous as DIY surgery.
I did that same Kmart experiment myself, for similar personal reasons. I did find some items even lower priced, and better quality, so if for nothing else, you could justify coming there to buy at least some items - not that the cheap items help Kmart's bottom line. But in general I did see higher prices, even if there is some truth to parent's parent post about the mid-isle items, especially when you take the quality into consideration too. I do have a fault of buying useless junk, wasting money, for example on 10 $0.99 earphone-speakers from China, because it looks like a good deal. But guess what? They are all in the trash now, and I stil have to keep using that $8.99 US made earphone I bought at Best Buy 5 years ago. That still works like a charm. Yet I am still stupid and keep buying the $0.99 cent crap. I guess the educational period is long, but people outgrow it eventually. Eventually might be too late though for that US earphone maker.
The biggest problem was that Kmart was a ghost-town. People are reinforced by the herd effect at WalMart, by seeing other people flock through the doors, and actually more than a single lonely cashier at the exit, 2 people standing in line, and her still taking 20 minutes with them before it's your turn. I have no problem with Aldi for instance, even if it's a crappy warehouse, because the cashiers are so fast and work so dear hard. I have so much respect for the Aldi cashiers. Anyway, there is no eerie feeling at WalMart. The herd effect is kind of like IT managers who used to buy IBM, because you can't get fired for buying IBM, unlike if you pick something cheaper, and you might pick wrong. Same with MS software, you can't get fired for buying anything that has MS logo on it, because everybody is doing it. Same with WalMart. You think if other people are doing it, you are safe, and there is probably some value to this behavior entrusted onto us by evolution.
I was once tricked out of like 20 bux by a card-trick-street-entrepreneur. I followed his hands, saw other people put a wager down, pick the same card I would have picked, and win, and walk away with the winnings. Hey if they can do it I can too! So I volunteered too for a challenge, he shuffled the cards around one at a time for me, before my eyes, and of course I didn't pick the right one. Then later I saw the trickster, and 3 more guys walk together with the packed up stand. And guess what - that's when I realized I only ever saw those 3 other guys win anything. It was a conspiracy, they were in it together! Mind control doesn't work? Hey, it works on me! People who can be mind controlled best are those who won't admit that yes, advertising and mind control affects them. Maybe Kmart should try hiring some actors who drive up to it, fill up the parking lot like there is a big sale, go in, pretend to 'win' or buy something, walk out, put it in the car trunk, then drive in a big circle behind the building to offload it and do it all over again. Hey, if other people are buying, there is probably something good there!
But yes, when it comes to tangible goods, and allocation of resources, in the long run the free market works, and those who are able to supply lower prices overall end up prevailing. People tend to know where to spend their money, even as a herd. IBM didn't stay as the prime choice forever, and the herd can thank that to the 'experimenters', who were willing to take risk and go down for making the wrong choice, but for each 1 thousand that go down over deviating from the norm, there will be one that doesn't. Had IBM better targeted these experimenters, the "conservative" herd could have been milked dry for a lot longer, a lot easier. Also, you can only trick me with that cardtrick and similar tricks once in a lifetime, maybe twice, but running a business on the selling 'once' strategy is not a long term vision for any company, even if many businesses come into being, sell 'once', go out of business, start a new one with a different name but the same scheme all over again. They sho
Re:Let's don't get ahead of ourselves
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TrollTech to IPO?
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· Score: -1, Troll
Trolltech's only product is C++, and their Qt libraries. Qt is only half the cake.. KDE is the other.. Trolltech got C++ as little assinine as possible, and turned it into something that "makes sense", however there is a whole lot that comes with KDE that isn't packaged in Qt.. how do you IPO KDE when it's free? Where is the cash?
As far as C++ goes, let me grab the opportunity to bitch about it. C++ and Qt C++ is comparable to java and dotnet in terms of bloat and raw speed. Why isn't everything written in java or dotnet? Cuz they suck! You can just feel the object oriented speed penalty in both kde and trolltech windows, compared gtk or win32 api c.
C++ is a nice idea for very complex designs, and it stays somewhat close to the bare metal, compared to higher level dotNet, Java, Basic, Pyhton and the other interpreted bunch, but not close enough compared to C. You neither get the superb speed and control over what the cpu does that you get with C, nor the ease of use and fluency that Basic provides. Object oriented people tend to come up with overly complex designs, and it's a source of endless nightmares and bugs. Even visual C++ is called C++, because it's capable of compiling and using C++, but most of windows is still C, the interfaces are C, and the C++ promise hasn't materialized. We're currently in an anti-Java frenzy by Microsoft who got scared of college professors liking the abstract concepts that Java provides, and universities basically becoming java-programmer tradeschools, so in fear of this Microsoft released their own java-monstrosity, labeled dotNet. But they dare not eat their own dogfood, their own cake. You could argue and operating system will always stay assembler/C mix, but on the application front, neither Internet Explorer, nor MSOffice is written in dotnet. We'll just end up in a world where MSOffice and IE are rewritten in dotnet, for the sake of intellectual property, and watch them lose their flare, their speed, their pizzazz. As far as C++ goes, at least Trolltech made the best of it that was possible, even if you can still feel the speed penalties in KDE, but at least Trolltech made it easy on the programmers. Just because gtk is c, try looking at the monstrous gtk c api compared to a qt c++ source file. Elegance and simplicity in complex designs is very important. Still, citing http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/oopbad.htm
OOP is the greatest boon for those who like to write bloated code. I am not saying that all OOP code is bloated. But, something or someone is encouraging the practice of taking the most amount of code to do the fewest things. Further, OOP has added new ways to write bloated code that procedural has a hard time competing with. Hypothetical example for adding two numbers:
NORMAL
print(a + b)
BLOATED
am = new math.ArithmeticManager()
opA = new math.Operand((float) a)
opB = new math.Operand((float) b)
am.addOperand(opA)
am.addOperand(opB)
am.operator = new math.operators.Addition()
am.executeMathOperation()
system.io.output.print(am.mathOperationResult())
I'd much rather see good old Basic as something to start learning programming in, and get fluent in, with a very clear way of how Basic gets first compiled to C instructions, that are very clean and human readable and optimizable, and then C to assembler instructions. Every programming package should come with a code analyzer. Just because C or C++ compile programs that run faster than say Python or Basic, it doesn't mean everything should be done in it. Instead, you should be able to put together your code in Basic, look at the speed analyzer highlighting you the slow code, pop and open up that code in the c translation, and optimize it there, with the Basic code turning color and letting you edit only the hand optimized C portion. Same with C to
Slashdot Mirror
I meant this as an introductory concept, a quick means to reveal just how different space sex would be. On Earth, mere mortals propel themselves by walking, crawling against a surface (bed, floor, table.) When you say "no friction" it instantly conveys the feeling of the new conditions. Technically you're right, there is friction, e.g. when you tie yourself up, or grab your partner, you don't have to do it near geometric constraining points, such as the neck or wrists or ankles, because you'd just slip out of some greasy ropes if you're tied up across the belly or thighs, or your hands would just slip all over the place.
If I recall correctly my Engineering Science 101, called Statics (with Newton's laws and all that good stuff), frictional force is defined as
F1 = mu * N
where mu is the friction coefficient, and N is the normal force against the surface, pushing the two things together, or the normal(perpendicular) component of the force vector. In space, in the absence of this normal vector pushing you up against a surface (in the absence of being tied up, or magnetic shoes, the minute imbalance gravity inside a gravitational Faraday cage don't count as big enough here), even if the frictional coefficient is there, the frictional force is still 0, because you ain't got the N.
Wind is currently the most cost competitive of any energy technology, because it's so cheap to put up a turbine and just harness the energy. But in the long run, I don't think there is enough wind to satisfy all the energy needs of our planet (estimated at 5x current global energy consumption, covering 13% of all land area.)
You'll also have to remember that besides energy, most of our raw material productions rely on some kind of fossil fuel consumption (steel requires coal to be reduced from ore), and as our high concentration ores get used up, just like our fossil fuel sources get used up, we'll have to resort to processing low grade ores, which will need even more energy (even 10x as much as high grade ores.)
Also as human populations boom even further (imagine all of USA and Canada having the population density of Japan), there will simply not be enough energy to suit everyone's air conditioning needs, let alone produce all the hydrogen needing to bind air nitrogen to make liquid ammonia for fuel and fertilizer to feed all the hungry mouths and drive all the cars.
One of the issues with solar is that the rate of return is very slow (payback is near 5 years compared to 0.7 months on nuclear plant, note:these numbers could be inaccurate.) If you have high grade ore nothing beats the energy density of nuclear fuel, and in fact, there is even talk that moon oxygen extraction would not rely on local solar panels that get damaged by asteroids, but on a nuclear fuel device we take up there, similar to what powers submarines. With all the thorium around, do not be so quick to write off nuclear as an option. We may even end up completely relying on nuclear energy, only 150 years from the time it was invented by humankind (between 1900 and 1940.) As far as safety goes, you'd have to build these things deep into mountains, so in case they do blow up, it will be just like an underground nuclear testing. People would live in cities, then go to train station to board a super high speed train that goes inside a vacuum tube at 500km/hr to get to their work that's 250km away carved deep into the mountain, do their daily job, then go home live in the city. Just like firefighters are willing to enter a burning house, I don't think you'd have a problem finding employees for such power stations, willing to risk their own lifes if they think it's for a worthy cause. Hey, if a plant blows, it blows, it's well contained, and the other plants carved into the same mountain 10 km away are still safe and can go on churning out energy. The only issue with this scheme that I don't have a good idea for is the need for a large thermal sink with current nuclear technology. These days nuke plants are constructed near large bodies of water, with huge cooling towers and tremendous thermal pollution. That's a safety issue, and if there were only a way to not need such a thermal sink (i.e. when you got energy, is there a way you can get to it by a different route, by a non-carnot-thermal-engine to mechanical-to-electrical way, but instead, say use it to generate ions then harvest those ions through deflecting magnets to create electricity, basically some non-thermal way, so your nuke plant doesn't need so much interaction with the outside thermodynamic universe, other than two copper wires coming out of it carrying juice?
Don't worry, you'll just have unofficially approved sex, and the officials will look the other way, treat it as taboo, as long as you don't jeopardize the mission's success, and you continue providing peak performance.
Just imagine the weightlessness! Yipee, what fun! You'd probably have to tie yourself up to some posts because with weightlessness you can't stand in one spot, because there is no friction between your feet and the ground. Handcuffs anyone? Or just hold on to some bars, while your mate holds on to you. Or you can pretty much just hold on to each other as you both spin floating in the middle of the space cabin, getting very dizzy, then just imagine the goo floating in a big ball in mid air, when you're done, flying slowly toward the wall to make a splat. If you get carried away and spin too fast, you might hit and smash your head into the instrumentation if you're not careful. Imagine the reporters talking about an accident on the spaceship causing a few million dollars damage to some instrument, and we can cross off one of the missions from the list, cuz we no longer can do it. I guess in space 'safe sex' will have a different meaning.
Still, this is one of the best ways to attract young college students to space school! Don't even need an ad campaign! But you better be very good at math, and in top physical shape, if you want to go on this joyride! If you didn't have an incentive to take up a science career, now you have one! And your status as a nerd will suddenly surge to the top, because not blondes, but nerds will have the most fun, that mere mortals stuck on the high gravity ground here can only dream of!
Blah, I guess my browser remembers some forms and autofills them, cuz I didn't type that title, it automatically got there.
"Locating ores rich in oxygen" - practically all lunar ores are rich in oxygen. I think what they should be looking for is locating nonsilicate ores of iron oxide concentrates for easy hydrogen reduction, if there are any high concentration regions. They should also keep an eye out for fluoride. The iron reduction by hydrogen we could even do today, but as far as fluoride goes I have a hunch that that's what it's gonna come down to in the end, a good local supply of fluoride ores, if there are any. The hydrogen we could keep can hauling up there from Earth, but as far as hauling even fluoride goes, the atomic mass of fluorine is 19 times that of hydrogen, but that 19 still beats the 35 that chlorine would require. Another downside of chlorine is that it may need carbon too to bite anything in the first place.
:)
I have a hunch, that, since extracting the oxygen from moonrock is going to be so friggin energy costly, we will probably separate the other rock components too, we won't just extract oxygen and dump the resulting metalloid slag back out on the surface. Whether the separation is done in a high temperature way, or via low temperature compound separations, you'll need some kind of salt, most likely fluoride/chloride, either for flux to drop melting points, or for volatile/moblizied compound generation. And the fluoride/chloride losses are inevitable - for example the aluminium industry uses quite a bit of artificial cryolite, even though in theory they shouldn't need to keep replenishing, because it's a theoretically nonconsumable thing in their process. In practice however, everything is a consumable.
So try to find a good local supply.
Good luck, Hubble, break a leg, or more exactly, break a gyroscope!
I think you're very right on this point, about agrarian economy. But when it comes to tractors, ever hear of horses instead? Horses, or "sun dogs" revolutionized Native American life when they were reintroduced to North America by the Spanish conquistadors. Why don't I see lots of horses in African footages, like I saw in indian/cowboy movies or Amish video footages? Won't horses survive the African climate? Are there other domesticated animals that could be used instead then, like them cows are used in India? The nice thing about horses is that, unlike tractors, that wear out, horses reproduce themselves, for almost free, and you don't need to go to find parts at your local Autozone dealer, all horses need is grass, and someone to take care of them (i.e. keep the stable clean by shoveling the horse manure, which, by the way, is an excellent fertilizer.) Then when everybody got a full stomach, they can start actually paying attention in school, to get an industry going. It's hard to concentrate and learn the alphabet or basic math when you're about to fall over and die from starvation, your classmates having to carry you out and bury you, then get back to class to continue where they left off? By the way, just giving people lots of food, without enabling them to be self sufficient may just end up with a population boom, and now you have to feed 20x more mouths. An interesting phenomenon, that while in extreme poverty couples tend to have 20 kids with a 17 kid mortality rate, 2 of the 20 making it to adulthood (even in Europe during the Dark Middle ages, or just about anywhere on the face of the planet), in technologically advanced nations with plenty of food, there is no population explosion, but to the contrary, the population growth levels down, or even gets negative. When the standard of living gets very high, people end up with 2 kids, both of which make it to adulthood. Wouldn't that be a nicer scenario than when a mother having 20 kids and losing 18, is just a fact of life, and nobody bothers? How can one get sensitive towards other people, other ethnic groups, when you get so callous about your own family members, because 18 out of 20 die, because that's just simply how life is, how things are, and being callous is the only way to get by? I'm not saying simply feeding everyone will stop all war and conflict, because there is also the problem of everyone having a full stomach, satisfied, with nothing left to do, so instead of sitting around bored, people go do heroic deeds to each other and invade and conquer each other, for an ego boost, out of boredom. You have to watch out for that stuff too, so besides creating an easy life where everyone is well fed, you have to keep up with education to teach people interesting activities, to give them something interesting to do, besides bashing each other's heads in. Hopefully they won't just become WWF addicts.
Of course even domesticated animals won't work in places where the Sahara is advancing, like Niger, or the place where Lake Chad used to be, where all you have is a barren piece of rock and desert sand blowing. The only chance for a significant sustainable human population there is what Japan and Switzerland has. When you're stuck on a barren piece of rock, all you can really do is either something really high tech, where they import raw materials, and convert them into something even higher value, and buy food on the difference. (Barren pieces of rock can also turn to the sea, for fish, like Japan used to, but these days there isn't enough fish left in the Ocean - the biological activity in seas, per square mile is a lot lower than on land, or the seas wouldn't be blue, but green instead, when looked at from outer space.)
If we ever get solar panels economically efficient, there is no better place for them than the desert regions - land is cheap, and the biggest resource is lots of sunshine, blue skies, and little cloud cover. Then they could turn all that surplus energy into ore processing - silicon/semiconductor foundries (sand is mostly silicon), a
Assuming we're talking about an heavy bowling ball, made of metal denser than water, that will fully sink:
The level of the lake water will technically rise by an infinitesimally small amount, relative to sea level/mountain level/some steady reference in Newton's Absolute Space, however small that amount may be - it's calculable if you know the lake surface area, the lake level will rise by volume of the ball divided by lake surface area. It's basically added volume to the lake.
The level of the water relative to a marker mark drwan on the side of the boat will drop, or more exactly, the boat will lift out of the water, by the amount calculable from air replacing the bowling ball volume inside the boat - you can average out the overall density of the boat below the water mark plus adding the - steel frame + air inside the steel frame, to find the buoyant force according to Archimedes' law. Then on top of this you add the force due to the weight that sticks out of the water, but the air space that's above the water surface doesn't matter now, just get the raw weight, you only need to average densities below the liquid line. With basics physics 101, using Newton's force diagrams, you can set up an equation to find where the new equilibrium line will be, below the initial mark. This density averaging math involves the shape of the bottom of the boat - whether it's a steep V shape, or some very flat |_______| shape steel, wood, fiberglass-plastic, inflated plastic, or whatever kind of boat you got. The same bowling ball will not have much effect on the level of a squaremile wide flat boat, but if your boat is only 2 square feet area V shape, expect a huge effect from the ball missing from the density averaging.
Here's hoping that Google will keep not abusing their power for another 7 years, and that we will still have a Free (as in Freedom, not as in Beer) Internet for another 7 years.
The economy is moving towards a service economy world where everything can be replaced by a machine, and then humans still have to find a way to have daily activities and not get too bored and invade each other, like them indians did after they got the horse and an easy life. Have you recently dealt with an ATM machine, a self-checkout-lane, or an automated phone service? I don't care how cheap chinese or malaysian and indian laborers get, ultimately nothing beats a machine. Imagine replacing telephone switchboard ladies from the 1930's with cheap chinese and indians - guess what, an automated telephone switch "machine" does it seemlessly. Humans cannot compete with machines when it comes to productivity, forget it. Even mathematical proofs are more and more getting done by machines - maybe in the future machines will be very easy to program(with caveats here), because you can just request what you want from them, and there you go, instead of having to hire a programmer whose job is to struggle with ever more complex code. These days you see more and more job functions that sound like pie in the sky: facilitator, expeditor, associate, even miles and miles of cubicles filled with customer service representatives selling policies - what's any of this have to do with generating the daily bread, shelter, and clothing. Yes, throughout history, a sophisticated society gets more and more involved at the higher levels - art, religion, science, spiritual things - but when the bulk of the society is priests, artists, gentlemen-in-clubs, what really supports that, what's the infrastructure? Machines. Is giving everyone a customer-service-representative hamster-wheel, promotion-haggle-each-other-harassment-economy, where the 99 cents out of the dollar is the promotion cost, 1 cent is the actual production, the ideal way to go about things? Yeah, ok, it's safe, people don't get bored that's the root of all problems, but still. Can't you ask more, some better fulfillment out of a human life? There are many things that machines can't do, and a lot of those things involve matters of the spiritual, and machines are very far from getting involved in such things.
Yeah, well what happened to that Chess Prize challenge, offered to anyone who can build a computer program that could beat a grandmaster? IBM came up with Deep Blue, that had chess moves implemented in hardware. It beat the world chess champion. Did they do it for the money? Yeah, sure, what a great investment it must have been! Wall Street was in ecstasy! IBM's computer beat Kasparov! Weee! And their stock instantly went through the roof because of the huge income from that prize! These things are not about profit from the prize, but for prestige. The profit from these feats comes later, perhaps a century later, the amount money is just a symbol, of relative significance.
I bet you anything that Deep Blue was a lot more costly than any kind of chess prize it could get in exchange. I bet you the whole Deep Blue project ended with a big number in red ink at the quarterly bottom line. Just like research, or even marketing keeps producing negative quarterly bottom lines. Try running a company without research or marketing - you're destinded for obsolescence and extinction. The Deep Blue project wasn't about immediate profit, but it was a significant step for humanity when it comes to artificial intelligence. One bastillon of what we used to call human intelligence striked down. We keep finding out that we're not that special, we're not the center of the universe - Copernicus, Darwin, Wohler, Deep Blue.. what's next? Our forward scouts, our humans of inhuman intelligence, such as accountant-number-adders, or grandmaster-chess-players, they keep retreating. The last bastillon of 'human intellgience' is probably gonna be held by women, in the form of interpesonal and social skills that they excel at and computers or even nerds really suck at, because these "manly" abstract but concrete mathematical challenges are more and more likely to be tackled by machines, way before they can engange in a pleasant conversation with any of us. See this
Similarly, successful extraction of moon oxygen is not just gonna be for "the prize", but it's a way to pave the future. One important thing that would result in having breathable oxygen is being able to create a self sustaining human+tropical rainforest ecosystem on the Moon, and on Mars, as an insurance policy against human stupidity here on Earth, against the nullifying effect of a WW3. Chances are humans won't be stupid enough to pull the nuclear trigger on each other, with the promise mututually assured destruction looming over their heads, but do you like betting chances? Let's talk to Mr. Murphy, and ask him to revise his Law. Here is the optimist version of Murphy's Law: If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong, except when chances of it going wrong are minute. Now, with this newfound optimism we can start betting chances! How about not having to bet when you don't have to, how about establishing certainty instead of having to rely on luck in a risk? How about having an ecosphere on the Moon and Mars who can be remote spectators to some idiotic WW3 going on down here on Earth, and they can just sit back in their couches and shake their heads, and say, "man, those idiots down there don't know what they are doing, they've all gone nuts!" The farther they can spectate from, the better chances they have of not getting involved. At least somebody then would survive, and when the dust settles on Earth, and radioactiviy dies down, a century later maybe, then these Moon and Mars and Saturn-freaks can take a trip back here, bring their rainforest seeds and their elephant babies and their kitties and rabbits with their Noah's Ark's along, and replant the rainforest, one seed at a time, and let earth turn green again, and the rainforests loud. They'd send a team of explorers, to boldly go where man has been before, except his stupidity got the best of him.
Besides such insurance policy against some imminent apocalypse, the success of moon-mineral processing would have relevance to raw material extracti
They did not say deliver it to Earth. Whatever your gadget, it should work well with simulated regolith delivering the stuff within a few hundred feet radius both here on Earth, and up there on the Moon.
Whatever happened to those autonomos car-driving teams that made it across the nevada desert? They sure have the capacity to cook something up. This challenge is to get electrical/mechanical engineers excited too, besides the chemists thinking about oxygen extraction techniques.
How do I sign up to be an inmate in this penal colony you talk of? Do I have to kill someone for such a sentence? Oww.. hope not. How about a premeditated murder of a fly or mosquito? I might be willing to commit such a selfish act of specieism motivated atrocity, but there should be less harsh means to hitch a ride, to be among the cargo of the inmate ship delivery?
Using small explosive charges is not such a bad idea. You know, mining on earth hasn't quite been the same ever since Nobel discovered cheap and safe dynamite.
It was 5 kilos of O2, 11 lbs, and you had the capability, to do it for a day maybe, but your device would have been chewed to pieces by corrosion in no time. There is a reason why they offered it to the public. $200,000 is not about the money, it's a gesture, it's about something that NASA - listen up, NASA! - is asking help with. They have no problem with controlling and talking to something flying by Pluto. Pluto!!! That's the big deal there, the bowing, the recognition that you'd like a helping hand, because you're not all that, you're not the shit, and something this simple stupefies you. Well, of course you could do it, anything is doable - you could vaporize everything to ions, and produce 2 nanograms per hour. Nasa could do it today, but what they are asking for is doing things efficiently, and economically, which is a topic they usually don't have to deal with. They are used to complete luxury, getting any amount of money or energy they want, but when it comes to oxygen extraction from the mooon to save money or energy, that's a new ballgame for them.
Platinum electrodes/crucible? Forget it - metallic silicon corrodes platinum even at 800C. Melting the regolith? You need 1600C for that. Graphite crucibles? They will slowly gasify at that temperature by reacting with the oxygen compounds. Wait, quartz crucibles, they melt at 1700C. Duh, you're trying to rip quartz apart, whatever you do, you're doing it to quartz. Half of the beach sand on Earth world is quartz. Half the minerals on the Moon have quartz. Separate it from the rest? Good luck. Maybe magnesium oxide crucibles? Yeah, that too will slowly be dissolved away by the silicate lava. By the way metallic calcium and magnesium are vapors at temperatures above 1300C, even above 900C in vacuum - how are you gonna keep them from dissolving in your melt and wandering over to your oxygen electrodes? How about attacking and alloying with your crucible/electrodes. Whoever did such a test in a lab, noted a funky blue vapor, and intese fizzing at the cathode - I bet you those are metallic sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium and zinc vapors, at 1600C. You know how potent and corrosive those things are? Good luck with it. Ah, you want to use flux, bring the temperature down. Say 900C. What are you gonna use as flux, and there are always losses, how are you gonna replace it? Keep bringing it from earth? Any chemicals you use that are different from what you're facing on the moon need to be super-efficiently recycled - you can justify losing maybe 0.1% into your products, that means 1000x reuse before it's consumed away, before you need to replenish it from Earth. That might be a fair deal, get 1000 lb product for each trip from earth, plus all the headache of running a process on the moon, without full self-sufficiency, but do you have such a process? Can you come up with a process, equipment, that either lasts without using any other chemicals, or a process that uses other chemicals without losing say more than 0.1% per equivalent weight? Hydrogen? Fluoride? Sulfur? Carbon? Cloride? Iodide? Nitrogen/ammonia? What is your effluent, what are your products, and how much of the above mentioned reactants are you dragging out from your process? Purifications are very expensive.
If money were the issue, if that $0.3M is what you really needed to make it work.. hell.. take $5M, just make it work, make it work well. It takes $20,000 per lb oxygen to get lifted into space. 11 lbs O2 is $220,000, pays off in less than a trip. That's why whoever pushed this out the door from NASA could get away with it, and encounter no resistance - how can you argue with that on a financial basis? It's not about money, it's all about pride, and NASA wasn't too proud, in the end. And who knows, that days of Tesla and Edison, and Heroult-Hall, and Ford and Benz might return. It takes $580M for a single shuttle lunch, a lof of that cost is energy, and the bulk of the weight is oxygen, because 2g H2 go with 16g O2, 8x more oxygen is dragged along on the trip. If you could just make a pi
Did anybody mention that if your data is truly that top secret, don't sell the drive. Melt it, like the terminator dude was molten. Or at the very least take it apart, and toss it off a bridge somewhere, though don't overdo this because of pollution concerns. Most people don't have that many secrets, and even if your data ends up in other people's hands, including personally identifiable info, the culprit attempting to steal your bank money still has quite a chance of being caught by authorities. Chances are if you formatted your drive, people who buy it on ebay won't jump it and de-format it, looking for all kinds of cool stuff. It'd be easier to dig through other people's trash outside their front-yard, on garbage day, or even at the nearest landfill site. Who cares that much anyway? There is more to life than stealing other people's info, bank account numbers, and there is life even after someone stole your identity, though it can be quite a change and a struggle to gain your identity back and clear it, it's still nowhere near as bad as what just happened in New Orleans when someone you loved died in a flood. Still, instead of all this talk, if someone is truly involved, show me the code, like Linus used to say. Provide the world with a utility that will relatively safely erase your disk so you can sell it on ebay - though pranksters might abuse that tool for other things. When you look at the big picture, lost data is quite a horrible thing, and living with difficulty of complete data erasure might be preferable to making completely unrecovarable erasing way too easy.
Graphite is fine as a noncorrodable electrode at low temperatures in almost any circumstance - even naked fluorine is made with graphite - though it definitely has higher electrode gas-overpotential than the noble metals, thus much lower conversion(of electrical to chemical energy) efficiency.
You are right, but there is always 2 sides of the story.
When it comes to things you don't know about the enemy, you simply don't know it about the enemy. Saddam was extremely meticulous, unapproachable, unpoisonable because he carried his own food, and ruthless because he killed his own son in law. Things could have been just the other way around, and he could have actually had something, some nasty weapons. Now we made sure he didn't, but got a mess. After all, he was at least a secular leader, and there was peace, and everybody got fed, even if people who ran their mouths like you and me ended up in some prison then discarded as waste. Still, it's a failure of intelligence, failure of satellite spying, but as long as we could freely roam around the country with inspectors, there was a fine, balanced line of judgement somewhere, and our paranoia got the best of us and we lost our balance.
Now we're there, and there is lots of oil, so we'd like to stay, which could be the whole reason for this show in the first place, and we might have really had good intelligence, and knew he didn't have anything, for sure, and we just pretended this paranoia, so we can go after the good stuff. I used to think religion and language cause wars, but someone enlightened me, and now I know that religion and language are always the excuses, and the real motive is always property, and has been, ever since the cave days. You went off from the cave, and returned empty handed? Your woman would beat you in the head with a legbone for being so stupid, what will she give the kids to eat now? You went off, you better return with something, and she didn't care whether you hunted it/gathered it, or invaded the next cave and stole it/forcibly took it from the people there.
I'm a US citizen, and live in the US. You think I have a power against this cowboy, other than running my mouth on slashdot, cry foul, like you do, in blind hope that it will have an effect somewhere? We elected him? You trust our voting system? It's all a show. And they even can't run the show right, without hiccups, cuz they had to resort to the Supreme Court to elect him, at least the first time around. And looky look, who gets to nominate the Supreme Court justices? Whatever dazzling speeches that please my ear and make me wet my panties these nominees can come up with, it's still, Supreme Court electing the President, and the President nominating the Supreme Court. Something is wrong with that picture. Words, words now, empty inaguration words, let's see what actual decisions come down the pipeline that bite, have the power to actually matter, and if those are the same as the fairytale speeches, that's when I say, okay, I give, I shut up, and thank the Almighty that luck has been with us.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
Though they say it's not practical for actual use, from the people standing next to it in the picture, it looks like it would fit inside a small size truck. Look at that picture, how scary that is. Such a small thing, really, it's unbelievable. So I don't really buy the nonpractical stuff, fact is, humanity does have the power to completely wipe not only itself out, but everything else alive on the planet, including cockroaches if it so desires. Chances are that it won't desire so. You like betting chances?
Ok, maybe the bacteria that currently live inside our nuclear reactors, and have a fast enough regeneration and self-repair function to keep up with the damage, will survive - aren't you happy for them, that they live just fine? But still, would you like to roll back and restart evolution starting from bacteria? I wonder if such a thing happened before on Earth, and wonder what the sansient beings would have been like before they wiped out themselves and the planet and rolled back evolution to the bacterial state? They might have looked like bugs, like octapuses, hey, maybe even like us, monkeys! If it happened.. is there convicing geological fossil evidence that it never ever could have happened?
I think our biggest hope is to create self-sustaining Noah's Ark space ships freely roaming and hiding out in the asteroid belt, or behind Jupiter, containing lots of life, as an insurance policy against human stupidity. Though you'd have a hard time controlling the chances that one of those Noah's Ark's doesn't go nuts, and while right now whoever pulls the trigger here on Earth also dies, if they pull the trigger from a Noah's Ark, they wouldn't. Same if we inhabitate Mars, the collective chance that life disappears will decrease, but the individual planets both get to bear higher risk, because in an interplanetary nuclear war one planet may not be completely eradicated, while the other yes, so the mutually assured destruction argument doesn't have such a stopping force. So what's a good answer here?
I realize there are two sides to every story, and I could probably argue the maintanance side, being there for the customer, the "customer is always right even when they are not" side a lot more eloquently, but I chose to voice that side that's falling out of perspective, and doesn't get enough attention.
You too! :)
Maintaining code? Sometimes all you want is just to create something, make it work, and then hope it does the same thing over and over for a decade. A lot of nonreprogrammable hardware devices are designed, made, and their design no longer 'maintained' just the parts changed out as they wear off. Works pretty good for a lot of things. My mouse or keyboard here are a few years old, for instance. Same with my pen and pencil, or 900 MHz phone, or laser printer or monitor. Maintaining code is a bit over emphasised, especially as a job-security aspect for someone who can't come up with something new, and in the name of creating this new, information economy. Write a program, design a car. Make it work well. Then use it. 10 years later you can almost just start from scratch, design from scratch, and use it again for 10 years. How about something that stands the test of time? Make a software like a bridge - designed to function for 50 years before first major overhaul. If you're a software designer, like MS, go hide for 10 years until really come up with something new, insead of this get your daily patches hell that fix what we broke yesterday trying to fix something else business model. You shouldn't have to dick with software constantly if it was made to work well in the first place. I'm still on the 2.4 linux kernel. Works fine. Not even the latest version of 2.4.xx. I'd probably still be happy with a 2.2 kernel, if I had to pay for 2.4. 2.6 is free, so what. As long as it works, that's what counts. I could not say the same thing about MSDOS 6, or Windows 3.1, since I know better now, and want better. I'd buy something better than either DOS of Win31 if all the free choices were gone. But maybe even Win95 would be fine for me, in almost 2006, 10 years later, if the hardware drivers were updated. The interface had all I needed. Windows Explorer with right click menus let me take charge of my harddrive, better than File Manager. But where is the new stuff since? After all this billion dollar 'maintaining'? WinXP from the user interface standpoint is still just Win95 with different colors. OK no blue screens. But even blue screens weren't so bad, people rebooted, and life went on. I'd rather not have this constant reinventing the wheel - DDE, OLE, COM/Activex, dotNet - progress? They should have made Activex hard iron sandbox secure like java applets in the first place, and it could be something to last for 50 years. Constantly shooting yourself in the foot and make something crappy on purpose just so you can sell yet another solution later, which, mind you, comes with its own submarine load of defects as investment toward the future, is a business strategey, but not one that pleases the customer.
.h and .cpp files typing some 200 lines of code, when all you needed was pick a control, drop it on a form, double click it, type 5 lines of code that actually do someting besides instantiating the whole bells and whistles mechanism, and incorrectly destructing it later because you haven't made the right things virtual in the constructor of what you are subclassing, because you didn't think you'd ever have to subclass it - no, I'd rather not deal with that hell if I don't have to. A massive project like MS Antispyware using VB6 - go use C++! That project is big enough! My hobby program I
Classic VB was perfect for cooking up something quick, making it work, and then it just worked, over and over, for years and years. Why is everyone bitchin at how bad pre-dotnet VB was? Are you sure you're not the surgeon bitching at the surgical knifes the amateur's used, bitchin at their tool instead of their incompetence using that tool? Classic VB was perhaps not the best choice for a large project, such as MS Antispyware that does use Classic VB6 SP5 in 2005, but for everyday needs of home-programmers, hobby programmers, and small businesses you simply shouldn't have to sit down and start pulling your hair out abstracting and conceptualizing the classes and contstructors and navigate through the zoo of
I'm not a computer professional, I've always known that - that stuff takes years of forging - if nothing else this dismal rating shows it very clearly. I was offered to take on writing some database app for a company wide implementation, that worked very well in a single local department. Now I can see just how right I was to decline, over incompetence. I'm willing to work around the edges to interface the local needs to some main company wide database system, with my self learned programming skills, and bang together something that works, and works very well, but to run a company wide business on it, to make me create that company wide db that everything depends on? Give me a break. Hire professionals who have a chest fully decorated with medals for that kind of stuff, who have really chosen this kind of thing as their profession.
Still, nobody commented on how unecessarily difficult programming is made. Is it wrong to ask that the programming interface of a computer to be more human? I don't want just the user interface to be easy to use and human, or just the generic, widely used programs to be human - there is always that area where I need to do something for which there is no generic solution, there are always special cases, and people are left feeling very dumb, not because they can't explain what they want, or they can't write it down in correct and super-exact english terms, but because those english terms are not easily interfacable, translatable to the computer. It's worse than having to translate from english to japanese. Just because nonprofessional programmers such as business, accounting, hr and science folks cooked up a whole lot of spaghetti VB code then a real programmer got hired to straighten out the unstraightenable mess - instead it just ends up rewritten from scratch, while the professional keeps cussing at VB, like a professional surgeon cussing at the knife used by amateur surgeons, instead of cussing at the amateur incompetence - just because this is so, it doesn't mean easy VB should be eliminated, because that spaghetti code that did actually work was still preferable to no code at all, no solution and people just suffering without one, and it may never have been recognized that there was actually a spot there, a obvious need for a professional programmer, because there were directly tangible business benefits to derive. DIY programming, though dangerous, it's nowhere near as dangerous as DIY surgery.
I did that same Kmart experiment myself, for similar personal reasons. I did find some items even lower priced, and better quality, so if for nothing else, you could justify coming there to buy at least some items - not that the cheap items help Kmart's bottom line. But in general I did see higher prices, even if there is some truth to parent's parent post about the mid-isle items, especially when you take the quality into consideration too. I do have a fault of buying useless junk, wasting money, for example on 10 $0.99 earphone-speakers from China, because it looks like a good deal. But guess what? They are all in the trash now, and I stil have to keep using that $8.99 US made earphone I bought at Best Buy 5 years ago. That still works like a charm. Yet I am still stupid and keep buying the $0.99 cent crap. I guess the educational period is long, but people outgrow it eventually. Eventually might be too late though for that US earphone maker.
The biggest problem was that Kmart was a ghost-town. People are reinforced by the herd effect at WalMart, by seeing other people flock through the doors, and actually more than a single lonely cashier at the exit, 2 people standing in line, and her still taking 20 minutes with them before it's your turn. I have no problem with Aldi for instance, even if it's a crappy warehouse, because the cashiers are so fast and work so dear hard. I have so much respect for the Aldi cashiers. Anyway, there is no eerie feeling at WalMart. The herd effect is kind of like IT managers who used to buy IBM, because you can't get fired for buying IBM, unlike if you pick something cheaper, and you might pick wrong. Same with MS software, you can't get fired for buying anything that has MS logo on it, because everybody is doing it. Same with WalMart. You think if other people are doing it, you are safe, and there is probably some value to this behavior entrusted onto us by evolution.
I was once tricked out of like 20 bux by a card-trick-street-entrepreneur. I followed his hands, saw other people put a wager down, pick the same card I would have picked, and win, and walk away with the winnings. Hey if they can do it I can too! So I volunteered too for a challenge, he shuffled the cards around one at a time for me, before my eyes, and of course I didn't pick the right one. Then later I saw the trickster, and 3 more guys walk together with the packed up stand. And guess what - that's when I realized I only ever saw those 3 other guys win anything. It was a conspiracy, they were in it together! Mind control doesn't work? Hey, it works on me! People who can be mind controlled best are those who won't admit that yes, advertising and mind control affects them. Maybe Kmart should try hiring some actors who drive up to it, fill up the parking lot like there is a big sale, go in, pretend to 'win' or buy something, walk out, put it in the car trunk, then drive in a big circle behind the building to offload it and do it all over again. Hey, if other people are buying, there is probably something good there!
But yes, when it comes to tangible goods, and allocation of resources, in the long run the free market works, and those who are able to supply lower prices overall end up prevailing. People tend to know where to spend their money, even as a herd. IBM didn't stay as the prime choice forever, and the herd can thank that to the 'experimenters', who were willing to take risk and go down for making the wrong choice, but for each 1 thousand that go down over deviating from the norm, there will be one that doesn't. Had IBM better targeted these experimenters, the "conservative" herd could have been milked dry for a lot longer, a lot easier. Also, you can only trick me with that cardtrick and similar tricks once in a lifetime, maybe twice, but running a business on the selling 'once' strategy is not a long term vision for any company, even if many businesses come into being, sell 'once', go out of business, start a new one with a different name but the same scheme all over again. They sho
Trolltech's only product is C++, and their Qt libraries. Qt is only half the cake.. KDE is the other.. Trolltech got C++ as little assinine as possible, and turned it into something that "makes sense", however there is a whole lot that comes with KDE that isn't packaged in Qt.. how do you IPO KDE when it's free? Where is the cash?
As far as C++ goes, let me grab the opportunity to bitch about it. C++ and Qt C++ is comparable to java and dotnet in terms of bloat and raw speed. Why isn't everything written in java or dotnet? Cuz they suck! You can just feel the object oriented speed penalty in both kde and trolltech windows, compared gtk or win32 api c.
C++ is a nice idea for very complex designs, and it stays somewhat close to the bare metal, compared to higher level dotNet, Java, Basic, Pyhton and the other interpreted bunch, but not close enough compared to C. You neither get the superb speed and control over what the cpu does that you get with C, nor the ease of use and fluency that Basic provides. Object oriented people tend to come up with overly complex designs, and it's a source of endless nightmares and bugs. Even visual C++ is called C++, because it's capable of compiling and using C++, but most of windows is still C, the interfaces are C, and the C++ promise hasn't materialized. We're currently in an anti-Java frenzy by Microsoft who got scared of college professors liking the abstract concepts that Java provides, and universities basically becoming java-programmer tradeschools, so in fear of this Microsoft released their own java-monstrosity, labeled dotNet. But they dare not eat their own dogfood, their own cake. You could argue and operating system will always stay assembler/C mix, but on the application front, neither Internet Explorer, nor MSOffice is written in dotnet. We'll just end up in a world where MSOffice and IE are rewritten in dotnet, for the sake of intellectual property, and watch them lose their flare, their speed, their pizzazz. As far as C++ goes, at least Trolltech made the best of it that was possible, even if you can still feel the speed penalties in KDE, but at least Trolltech made it easy on the programmers. Just because gtk is c, try looking at the monstrous gtk c api compared to a qt c++ source file. Elegance and simplicity in complex designs is very important. Still, citing http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/oopbad.htm
OOP is the greatest boon for those who like to write bloated code. I am not saying that all OOP code is bloated. But, something or someone is encouraging the practice of taking the most amount of code to do the fewest things. Further, OOP has added new ways to write bloated code that procedural has a hard time competing with. Hypothetical example for adding two numbers:
NORMAL
print(a + b)
BLOATED
am = new math.ArithmeticManager()
opA = new math.Operand((float) a)
opB = new math.Operand((float) b)
am.addOperand(opA)
am.addOperand(opB)
am.operator = new math.operators.Addition()
am.executeMathOperation()
system.io.output.print(am.mathOperationResult())
I'd much rather see good old Basic as something to start learning programming in, and get fluent in, with a very clear way of how Basic gets first compiled to C instructions, that are very clean and human readable and optimizable, and then C to assembler instructions. Every programming package should come with a code analyzer. Just because C or C++ compile programs that run faster than say Python or Basic, it doesn't mean everything should be done in it. Instead, you should be able to put together your code in Basic, look at the speed analyzer highlighting you the slow code, pop and open up that code in the c translation, and optimize it there, with the Basic code turning color and letting you edit only the hand optimized C portion. Same with C to