1. The Soviets used robotics to explore moon, so you did not need humans as far back as the early 70s.
good for them.
2. Your flawed assumption fails to take into account the great advancement by sending a person, aka the coolness factor.
Cool is subjective gibberish. It used to be cool to smoke cigarettes. In some countries it still is. Do we put a smoking lounge on the Mars mission? When they get there, will they grow tobacco? Your supposed "coolness factor" does not in anyway disprove his points. Or mine, for that matter.
Sending robots or whatever to wherever is not challenging enough. It lacks adventure and risk that pushes adventurer/explorer in humans.
Advanced robotics is an industry still in development. comparing it to a bunch of butcherous assholes who invaded foreign mands at point of sword and smallpox in search of gold and spices is not a comparison worth making.
3. Why leave your house, why not just sit in your house, make money programming remotely, order pizza and groceries? Because seeing a picture of a flower is not the same as seeing a flower, touching it and not to mention the unexpected, like running across a bee or humming bird.
Because it won't be YOU going to Mars. YOUR experience of Mars would be (necessarily) a mediated one. In which case, you might as well "fake it" and pretend that its real because YOU are not going. Your argument is so clueless, it's astounding.
4. To remove the adventure/explorer/risk aspect of space exploration makes not sense to me.
But it makes sense to me, and just because you haven't the horsepower to puzzle it out doesn't mean that you're correct.
5. Finally having somebody from Japan, America and Russia walk on Mars is more of a bonding experience then landing a droid built in those various countries on Mars.
Nice. Howabout, oh, I dunno - the other 6 billion people - like in Liberia, or Ghana, or Burkina Faso or Bolivia, or Cuba, or North Korea, or Mongolia or China or the Maldives, or Tuva, or Armenia or Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan or India or Somalia? Or better yet, how about using the billions you would piss away on a Mars mission and get clean water to some of the place I mentioned? And maybe some decent medical treatment and educate the women. THAT would do far more to instill good will around the world than engaging in proxy wars over resources and using the third world as the battle ground.
I guess my point is only people who lack vision, guts and balls only want to use robots.
What your points of argument say is that only people who are arrogant, clueless, testosterone poisoned meatheads don't want to use robots. I know this isn't true, but you have not made a single convincing case for manned flight, and with ever increasing sophistication of computer technology and prosthetics, the actual case for manned flight boils down to a misguided mythological teleological notion of "destiny".
There is no need to send People into space. Yes, some good work was done getting people to the moon, but it wasn't until the last few missions that actual scientists got to go. I would humbly suggest that while a variety of technologies have come from manned space flight, most of the real KNOWLEDGE about the universe has come from robots, satellites, and orbiters. No human being can see as well as the HST. No human being can withstand Mars for as long as the rovers have, using the amount of resources the rovers have. I would cheerfully send 100 rovers to Mars, of greater size and sophistication, than send ONE person there.
The usual bleatings and objections are all mythological: "it is our destiny" or some variant on that. There is no such thing as destiny. There are simply things we can and should do, things we can and shouldn't do. Sending people into space is something we can and shouldn't do. We shouldn't because of the expense, the risk, the complexity, and productivity per dollar. If we want to industrialise space, we need to apply industrial methods, and that means mechanisation where possible to eliminate labour.
I completely agree with Mr Weaver: NASA should have a policy of robots only. The sophistication of what robots can do is growing by leaps and bounds. Heck - there's an article here on slashdot: Artificial Brain 10 years away. Even if it was 1/2 as sophisticated as the human brain, it would be more than capable enough to be dedicated to a complex robotic mission to any number of planets, moons, and asteroids. And there are "dumber" machines that are basically prosthetics for ground control that we've been using for years.
My opinion: ditch the mythology and chest thumping nonsense, and get on with the real business of space exploration... using machines that are far more capable than people in these environments.
I don't see what is so extra-special about salmon DNA. Why not housefly DNA? Bog knows there's several orders of magnitude more of those little buggers than salmon. Much of the wild salmon stock has dropped, and the salmon farms aren't helping matters. You would think if they needed DNA, they could get it in bulk from termites or ants or flies or algae or crabgrass...
Not feeding troll. You have a point, however: oil is going away. Period. So we need to develop systems that are presently stationary power to do things that are presently managed by oil for portable purposes.
portable energy is portable energy. An erg is an erg. It doesn't care if it is electricity or oil or a team of horses.
Even though (per the EIA) we have about another 50 - 100 years of oil left, due to the issues I noted above, we really don't have that much time left in terms of net oil production. We must immediately set about storing electricity to act in place of oil.
There seems to be some very positive noises coming from eeStor and their ultra-capacitor technology. That is one great direction - where stationary power is turned into portable power.
Agreed. Nuclear has zero future if we can't do two things, and BOTH are required:
1. get to a Thorium breeder technology that makes its own fuel.
2. build lots of them fast.
The total amount of oil being pulled out of the ground will follow a bell curve, but the NET oil available will go down much more quickly. Why? EROEI (it takes energy to get energy, and all the easy stuff is gone) and Export Land Model (where exporting nations modernise, and as they do, they use more of their own oil. as they peak and decline and develop at the same time, their ability to export collapses and they become importers - example: UK, Indonesia, USA to name a few...) We need the energy in that oil to build the Thorium nukes, but even more so: we need the materials in the oil to build the machines to manage the nukes (computers and suchlike). We need to ramp up systems to make and store electricity immediately, so we can use the oil for the materials to keep the lights on in the longer run.
If that doesn't happen, and SOON, the second half the the 21st century is going to suck hairy monkey balls.
What if I want to play my interpretation of "sympathy for the devil"? I'm more than happy to give the Rolling Stones their cut, per the copyright law...
On 17 07 2009, 12:57 PM, NYT column "Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others" thoughtcrime describes doubleplusgood Amazon goodthink protection of rightsholders interests in thoughtcrime prolefeed "1984" and "Animal Farm" by online rectify of Kindle Minitrue prolefeed device. Rightsholders have pubclear for said prolefeed, Amazon has noclear for publication. Amazon goodthink heroes send online rectify to all Kindle infected by thoughtcrime revs of 1984 and Animal Farm. Commendation from Minitrue to Amazon for goodthink online rectify. Increased chocolate supply and Victory Gin for all Amazon inner party execs and commendations to involved Amazon employees in online rectify solution.
At heart your entire argumetn revolves around the paranoid belief that we are all doomed. If instead you assume that in the next 1,000 years we do nothing more than the average of what we have done in the past 10,000, then your beliefs are a joke.
sigh. Read the following. When you're done, get back with me. And don't think I don't read oppositional literature (cornucopians like Loborg, et al) because I do.
Read these:
1. Collapse by prof. Jared Diamond
2. The Collapse of Complex Societies by prof. Joseph Tainter
3. GeoDestinies by Prof. (ret) Walter Youngquist
4. Overshoot by Prof (ret) William Catton
5. Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin
6. Peak Everything by Richard Heinberg
7. The End of the World: the Ethics of Human Extinction by prof. James Leslie
Get acquainted with the literature - things are far more precarious than your post implies.
dude - no shit. Heck: the DVD API, when combined with NTSC (or PAL, for that matter) and rectangular pixels is a massive and very unintuitive hurdle. Put DRM on top, and fuck it: they're toast.
actually that's not really flame bait, if he had preceded it with "It's quite possible that". This kind of point is exactly what I am talking about: in 1000 there may not be the social understanding for watching a screen...
And this assumes that in 1000 years there will be:
1. a player to play the damn thing
2. the resources to build a player to play the damn thing.
3. a screen to view it on
4. the resources to build a screen to view it on
5. the cultural interest in such behaviour (sitting and watching a screen)
6. the cultural capacity to decode and understand what the hell they're watching even if they do decide to watch it, assuming they have the ability to do so. For an extreme example, there is a non-zero probability that in 1000 years, the notion of "fiction" may well not exist, in which case an episode of "Friends" or "Seinfeld" become biographical portraits of stupid foolish people, as one needs to have the fictive distance to decode what is happening.
7. that anyone will give a rat's ass about us in a 1000 years. They may well be pissing on our graves for having ruined the planet, and these disks may simply be destroyed as examples of the evil Evil EVIL petroleum age.
8. Reverse engineering NTSC (SD or HD - just getting 29.97fps with rectangular pixels is fucked up enough) from a disc filled with microscopic pits strikes me as impossible and or pointless.
I can list many more reasons why a 1000 year disk is a waste of time, those are just a few off the top of my head.
Frankly, I think we are the civilisation that in 1000 years will be a great and tantalizing mystery. Their world will be filled with our garbage, telling them how we lived (like wasteful pigs at the trough) but they won't really know that much about what we think (because it was all digital and the technology disappeared in the die-off).
Oh - and I realise that MSIE and Opera "support" it but I haven't seen them actually work doing it, so I am skeptical about MS actually "making it happen". I am more than willing to be pleasantly surprised.
I should know - I used to do it for a living. However, they are easily stolen, and fonts that once cost serious bucks are now (essentially) free. Which is why I don't do it for a living anymore. But I'm not discussing that - what I am pointing at is if you can embed fonts in a page, it is a trivial exercise to open a font, "clean" the points (creating a new drawing of the font), and then export the thing with a new name. So, you could take Arial, fry it up, and come out with Ariel. Now someone might notice something fishy about Ariel, noting it similarity to Arial. In the USA, the DESIGN of a font is something you cannot copyright. Only the software that is the font file itself. This is what torpedoed the type industry back in the mid 1990s, in Adobe vs SSI (?) case in Florida.
Sure, SSI got sued by Adobe for this, but that was pre-www - back in the day of centralised font distribution systems on floppies or CDs. MS or Adobe would have to chase down thousands of people with take-down notices. The FROEI (financial return on energy invested) would be microscopic and an endless battle due to variations in international laws.
Another strategy would be DRM. This would work on new DRM fonts, but there are literally tens of thousands of older fonts (from ancient PostScript to TrueType to newer OpenType) that are not DRM'd and they would be all over the place, effectively smothering any DRM font system.
Flash was developed initially as an animation system, but quickly it became obvious that it opened up font use, even if the test is not animated. Flash has its own and deeply obvious problems, and I look forward to its death. That said, at the time it served a useful purpose. With AJAX and now font-face, I don't see much future for Flash at all, outside of its original use as an animation engine.
I'm of mixed feelings on this - as I noted, a good font is hard to make. However, the basic digital fonts were developed way back in the 1980s and early 1990s and have only been updated for new technology (unicode, opentype, etc.) and one would think that there is little point to grinding more and more out of them, except in terms of petty greed. If Adobe had their way, we never would have seen TrueType and you would have to pay $100 for every typeface and each would have to be installed on only your machine. Of course, it would look very good. If MS had their way, everything would be TrueType and you could only use the fonts that come installed with the OS, and any extra would be excluded at the OS level... and they would all suck. So, the piracy of the 1990s (fueled by the ancient Titan and venerable program, Fontographer) led to an explosion of fonts. Most of them craptastic, but a true example of digital creativity. Some/Many were obvious rip-offs, but their hinting was often crap - delta hints were almost always missing, their letterspacing worse, and the kerning either atrocious or non-existent.
Tools, including Fontographer (resurrected by FontLab, bless their hearts) have improved since 1993, and so have "amateur" fonts. However, the market for fonts is still very poor as the saturation level increases daily.
Net result? If MS adopts @font-face for IE, game over (in a good way), and we will see a flowering of online type design. If MS drags its heels on this, @font-face could die on the vine, and we'll be stuck with Arial, for a VERY long time.
So, here's hoping @font-face spreads like crazy, and we can finally get some decent looking pages going...
or so I am told. A friend of mine (an officer in Marine Corp) put it to me this way: "I don't like computers over maps. Put a bullet in a map - what do you have? A map with a hole in it. Put a bullet in a computer - what have you got? A dead piece of junk. I prefer maps..."
I remember going to NAB in 1997 and some company had a terabyte system the size of a double door SubZero Fridge. I thought a terabyte would be an unimaginable amount of space, then. Now I have 1.8TB of drives on my desk, and 4 TB at my office...
Slashdot Mirror
good for them.
2. Your flawed assumption fails to take into account the great advancement by sending a person, aka the coolness factor.
Cool is subjective gibberish. It used to be cool to smoke cigarettes. In some countries it still is. Do we put a smoking lounge on the Mars mission? When they get there, will they grow tobacco? Your supposed "coolness factor" does not in anyway disprove his points. Or mine, for that matter.
Sending robots or whatever to wherever is not challenging enough. It lacks adventure and risk that pushes adventurer/explorer in humans.
Advanced robotics is an industry still in development. comparing it to a bunch of butcherous assholes who invaded foreign mands at point of sword and smallpox in search of gold and spices is not a comparison worth making.
3. Why leave your house, why not just sit in your house, make money programming remotely, order pizza and groceries? Because seeing a picture of a flower is not the same as seeing a flower, touching it and not to mention the unexpected, like running across a bee or humming bird.
Because it won't be YOU going to Mars. YOUR experience of Mars would be (necessarily) a mediated one. In which case, you might as well "fake it" and pretend that its real because YOU are not going. Your argument is so clueless, it's astounding.
4. To remove the adventure/explorer/risk aspect of space exploration makes not sense to me.
But it makes sense to me, and just because you haven't the horsepower to puzzle it out doesn't mean that you're correct.
5. Finally having somebody from Japan, America and Russia walk on Mars is more of a bonding experience then landing a droid built in those various countries on Mars.
Nice. Howabout, oh, I dunno - the other 6 billion people - like in Liberia, or Ghana, or Burkina Faso or Bolivia, or Cuba, or North Korea, or Mongolia or China or the Maldives, or Tuva, or Armenia or Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan or India or Somalia? Or better yet, how about using the billions you would piss away on a Mars mission and get clean water to some of the place I mentioned? And maybe some decent medical treatment and educate the women. THAT would do far more to instill good will around the world than engaging in proxy wars over resources and using the third world as the battle ground.
I guess my point is only people who lack vision, guts and balls only want to use robots.
What your points of argument say is that only people who are arrogant, clueless, testosterone poisoned meatheads don't want to use robots. I know this isn't true, but you have not made a single convincing case for manned flight, and with ever increasing sophistication of computer technology and prosthetics, the actual case for manned flight boils down to a misguided mythological teleological notion of "destiny".
RS
RS
There is no need to send People into space. Yes, some good work was done getting people to the moon, but it wasn't until the last few missions that actual scientists got to go. I would humbly suggest that while a variety of technologies have come from manned space flight, most of the real KNOWLEDGE about the universe has come from robots, satellites, and orbiters. No human being can see as well as the HST. No human being can withstand Mars for as long as the rovers have, using the amount of resources the rovers have. I would cheerfully send 100 rovers to Mars, of greater size and sophistication, than send ONE person there.
The usual bleatings and objections are all mythological: "it is our destiny" or some variant on that. There is no such thing as destiny. There are simply things we can and should do, things we can and shouldn't do. Sending people into space is something we can and shouldn't do. We shouldn't because of the expense, the risk, the complexity, and productivity per dollar. If we want to industrialise space, we need to apply industrial methods, and that means mechanisation where possible to eliminate labour.
I completely agree with Mr Weaver: NASA should have a policy of robots only. The sophistication of what robots can do is growing by leaps and bounds. Heck - there's an article here on slashdot: Artificial Brain 10 years away. Even if it was 1/2 as sophisticated as the human brain, it would be more than capable enough to be dedicated to a complex robotic mission to any number of planets, moons, and asteroids. And there are "dumber" machines that are basically prosthetics for ground control that we've been using for years.
My opinion: ditch the mythology and chest thumping nonsense, and get on with the real business of space exploration... using machines that are far more capable than people in these environments.
RS
learn to love clutter. I used to be a neat freak, then I embrced my own messiness, and life is so much simpler now.
had stayed with IBM, where would they be today?
rs
Not feeding troll. You have a point, however: oil is going away. Period. So we need to develop systems that are presently stationary power to do things that are presently managed by oil for portable purposes.
portable energy is portable energy. An erg is an erg. It doesn't care if it is electricity or oil or a team of horses.
Even though (per the EIA) we have about another 50 - 100 years of oil left, due to the issues I noted above, we really don't have that much time left in terms of net oil production. We must immediately set about storing electricity to act in place of oil.
There seems to be some very positive noises coming from eeStor and their ultra-capacitor technology. That is one great direction - where stationary power is turned into portable power.
cheers.
RS
1. get to a Thorium breeder technology that makes its own fuel.
2. build lots of them fast.
The total amount of oil being pulled out of the ground will follow a bell curve, but the NET oil available will go down much more quickly. Why? EROEI (it takes energy to get energy, and all the easy stuff is gone) and Export Land Model (where exporting nations modernise, and as they do, they use more of their own oil. as they peak and decline and develop at the same time, their ability to export collapses and they become importers - example: UK, Indonesia, USA to name a few...) We need the energy in that oil to build the Thorium nukes, but even more so: we need the materials in the oil to build the machines to manage the nukes (computers and suchlike). We need to ramp up systems to make and store electricity immediately, so we can use the oil for the materials to keep the lights on in the longer run.
If that doesn't happen, and SOON, the second half the the 21st century is going to suck hairy monkey balls.
RS
eeeewwww!
cleaning up the solar system of random rocky debris. good job!
What if I want to play my interpretation of "sympathy for the devil"? I'm more than happy to give the Rolling Stones their cut, per the copyright law...
All hail Big Brother.
RS
sigh. Read the following. When you're done, get back with me. And don't think I don't read oppositional literature (cornucopians like Loborg, et al) because I do.
Read these:
1. Collapse by prof. Jared Diamond
2. The Collapse of Complex Societies by prof. Joseph Tainter
3. GeoDestinies by Prof. (ret) Walter Youngquist
4. Overshoot by Prof (ret) William Catton
5. Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin
6. Peak Everything by Richard Heinberg
7. The End of the World: the Ethics of Human Extinction by prof. James Leslie
Get acquainted with the literature - things are far more precarious than your post implies.
RS
thank you for understanding my post. Would someone please mod this gentleman up?
dude - no shit. Heck: the DVD API, when combined with NTSC (or PAL, for that matter) and rectangular pixels is a massive and very unintuitive hurdle. Put DRM on top, and fuck it: they're toast.
actually that's not really flame bait, if he had preceded it with "It's quite possible that". This kind of point is exactly what I am talking about: in 1000 there may not be the social understanding for watching a screen...
1. a player to play the damn thing
2. the resources to build a player to play the damn thing.
3. a screen to view it on
4. the resources to build a screen to view it on
5. the cultural interest in such behaviour (sitting and watching a screen)
6. the cultural capacity to decode and understand what the hell they're watching even if they do decide to watch it, assuming they have the ability to do so. For an extreme example, there is a non-zero probability that in 1000 years, the notion of "fiction" may well not exist, in which case an episode of "Friends" or "Seinfeld" become biographical portraits of stupid foolish people, as one needs to have the fictive distance to decode what is happening.
7. that anyone will give a rat's ass about us in a 1000 years. They may well be pissing on our graves for having ruined the planet, and these disks may simply be destroyed as examples of the evil Evil EVIL petroleum age.
8. Reverse engineering NTSC (SD or HD - just getting 29.97fps with rectangular pixels is fucked up enough) from a disc filled with microscopic pits strikes me as impossible and or pointless.
I can list many more reasons why a 1000 year disk is a waste of time, those are just a few off the top of my head.
Frankly, I think we are the civilisation that in 1000 years will be a great and tantalizing mystery. Their world will be filled with our garbage, telling them how we lived (like wasteful pigs at the trough) but they won't really know that much about what we think (because it was all digital and the technology disappeared in the die-off).
RS
and puked.
Oh - and I realise that MSIE and Opera "support" it but I haven't seen them actually work doing it, so I am skeptical about MS actually "making it happen". I am more than willing to be pleasantly surprised.
I should know - I used to do it for a living. However, they are easily stolen, and fonts that once cost serious bucks are now (essentially) free. Which is why I don't do it for a living anymore. But I'm not discussing that - what I am pointing at is if you can embed fonts in a page, it is a trivial exercise to open a font, "clean" the points (creating a new drawing of the font), and then export the thing with a new name. So, you could take Arial, fry it up, and come out with Ariel. Now someone might notice something fishy about Ariel, noting it similarity to Arial. In the USA, the DESIGN of a font is something you cannot copyright. Only the software that is the font file itself. This is what torpedoed the type industry back in the mid 1990s, in Adobe vs SSI (?) case in Florida.
Sure, SSI got sued by Adobe for this, but that was pre-www - back in the day of centralised font distribution systems on floppies or CDs. MS or Adobe would have to chase down thousands of people with take-down notices. The FROEI (financial return on energy invested) would be microscopic and an endless battle due to variations in international laws.
Another strategy would be DRM. This would work on new DRM fonts, but there are literally tens of thousands of older fonts (from ancient PostScript to TrueType to newer OpenType) that are not DRM'd and they would be all over the place, effectively smothering any DRM font system.
Flash was developed initially as an animation system, but quickly it became obvious that it opened up font use, even if the test is not animated. Flash has its own and deeply obvious problems, and I look forward to its death. That said, at the time it served a useful purpose. With AJAX and now font-face, I don't see much future for Flash at all, outside of its original use as an animation engine.
I'm of mixed feelings on this - as I noted, a good font is hard to make. However, the basic digital fonts were developed way back in the 1980s and early 1990s and have only been updated for new technology (unicode, opentype, etc.) and one would think that there is little point to grinding more and more out of them, except in terms of petty greed. If Adobe had their way, we never would have seen TrueType and you would have to pay $100 for every typeface and each would have to be installed on only your machine. Of course, it would look very good. If MS had their way, everything would be TrueType and you could only use the fonts that come installed with the OS, and any extra would be excluded at the OS level... and they would all suck. So, the piracy of the 1990s (fueled by the ancient Titan and venerable program, Fontographer) led to an explosion of fonts. Most of them craptastic, but a true example of digital creativity. Some/Many were obvious rip-offs, but their hinting was often crap - delta hints were almost always missing, their letterspacing worse, and the kerning either atrocious or non-existent.
Tools, including Fontographer (resurrected by FontLab, bless their hearts) have improved since 1993, and so have "amateur" fonts. However, the market for fonts is still very poor as the saturation level increases daily.
Net result? If MS adopts @font-face for IE, game over (in a good way), and we will see a flowering of online type design. If MS drags its heels on this, @font-face could die on the vine, and we'll be stuck with Arial, for a VERY long time.
So, here's hoping @font-face spreads like crazy, and we can finally get some decent looking pages going...
RS
RS
RS
Just reportin' the news as I find it...
RS
In the USA maybe. I have a suspicion other countries might have a different notion of how that might work out...
So I listen to SOMAFM.COM
And Radio Paradise.
RS
RS