The current cost is closer to about $5k/kg to LEO due to the entrance of companies like SpaceX, and if some of the other entrepreneurial companies get going I can see that getting down to $1k/kg, but the point is well taken that it is still expensive.
The game changer would be to be able to extract resources from extra-terrestrial locations like the Moon, where you could bring that cost way down so it could be about $1k/kg to Mars... from Lunar materials. That sort of blows away efforts to do Mars first if you think about it.
I agree that a colony must be self-sufficient, although it is hard to say what a "return on investment" might be in terms of establishing a colony.
Generally throughout human history, it has been profitable for most groups to establish colonies when possible. Arguably the effort to establish colonies in North America by the United Kingdom ended up being its saving grace by the 20th Century when the pay-back became incredibly obvious. Generally it isn't so painfully obvious as that but it can be.
I will have to agree with at least the line of thinking you are making here, where there does need to be an economic driver for colonization. I think there is money that can be made in space beyond the current realm of commercial enterprises. The main commercial drivers of spaceflight right now are reconnaissance (including general Earth observation/weather sats & stuff like Google Earth), telecommunications, and navigation (aka GPS-like systems). There is the potential for energy production and tourism to be some additional sources of revenue in space, as well as resource extraction, but those "alternate" uses for space simply haven't been able to bear fruit yet with tourism being the one area most likely to succeed in the upcoming decade.
For most of these applications, the only purpose for going to Mars is essentially tourism-related. Mineral extraction on Mars, if it happens, is going to be done for the benefit of those on Mars itself as those resources would be in a deep enough gravity well to not be practical for export to the Earth or somewhere else in the Solar System, at least in bulk quantities.
The Moon would in this sense be a much better destination, at least initially, as it can serve as a base for resource extraction and be used to support other commercial activities near the Earth... something which Mars simply can't do at the moment.
I didn't think about the role that the Korean War played in maintaining the size of the U.S. military. I think that is a very good point. The feeling that something needed to be done to "contain" communism was valid, but the consequences to those actions have had some rather negative long-term effect that America is still trying to deal with.
The resources needed to defeat the Third Reich and Japan were simply insane by any rational measure, and that conflict changed America in many profound ways. The temptation to use such an army to further political ambitions is usually so irresistible that it becomes very difficult to not use that army for something when an opportunity presents itself.
One of my major complaints with regards to NASA and the "space researchers" is that the concept of sex in space is unfortunately a taboo subject that really hasn't been studied all that much. I'm not talking porn in space, which certainly has had quite a bit of speculation and yes even somebody who did film a porn flick somewhat recently (on a Zero-G Adventures flight... look it if up you don't believe me) but in terms of a genuine scientific exploration of the topic on other placental mammals and what the impact upon child rearing might be in space.
There certainly have been experiments proposed and some speculation on that topic too, but I consider that to be all science fiction until somebody does an actual study and tries to see what happens. Apparently there have been some pregnant rats who have been sent into space and one that gave birth in orbit, but those were short term studies lasting mere days. What is desperately needed is a long-term multi-generational study of something like some mice or rats in space to see what heath effects we ought to be looking for or if it may even be a problem at all raising kids in space at all. The point is there is no data at all to come to any conclusion of any kind in terms of what problems there might be producing kids in an extra-terrestrial environment.
There have been and indeed there currently are mice in space right now on the ISS so there are some long-term studies on the health of mammals in space, but we have human physiological data to compare over the past 60 years or so for that point as well that goes more into depth about what people do. Unfortunately none of the human data really relates to adolescent development or embryological development in space.
There are cries that men and women going to Mars ought to be sterilized in some fashion before going to Mars, which to me may or may not be valid in any context except for the fact that unfortunately humans may be the first placental mammals that will be studied in this environment. In that sense it is unfortunate to be using human children as experimental guinea pigs when in fact Guinea Pigs would seem like an ideal test creature for such an experiment in the first place. If long-term planning is now happening, we ought to find out what should be an issue.
I would put it this way though: in spite of the fact that it seems like cruel calculus, having a man and a woman heartily cooperating with each other to produce a child on Mars makes incredible economic sense too. The expense and effort to send an astronaut from the Earth to Mars is so huge that the minor additional effort to take an infant and raise them to adulthood using colony resources seems very trivial by comparison. Labor shortages are going to be so severe on Mars that children are going to be cherished and prized by those in the colony. Besides, kids growing up on Mars will also be uniquely adapted to the environment and will "know" how to survive in that environment much better than any astronaut getting sent there from the Earth.
Concerns about genetic diversity seem to me to be completely overblown unless you are worried that a population on a planet like Mars is going to be prematurely cut-off from all physical contact from the Earth. I find that to be quite unlikely for one simple fact: Since 1970 nearly every orbital window for a launch between the Earth and Mars has had at least one spacecraft of some kind make a journey to Mars, with the trend to have multiple spacecraft from multiple nations make that trip in recent years. While not Moore's Law in space, it does show an exponential function over time and seems likely to include people in the not too distant future. It would seem as if within the window of a human generation (give or take 15-30 years) there would be plenty of a window of opportunity for children on Mars to "expand the gene pool" in terms of mitigating any problems of a restricted population. Waiting for a specific numerical threshold to be reached on Mars before people are "permit
The advantage of going to the Moon is that it is close, and remains close to the Earth. Even using chemical rockets and traveling on a free return trajectory for getting to the Moon (close to a minimal energy path to get there) only takes a couple of days. If there is an "oops" or some other sort of significant problem for folks on the Moon, presuming that the infrastructure for getting to low-earth orbit is already well established, an emergency resupply mission to the Moon would only need to take a couple of weeks at most with most of the effort simply trying to scramble to get the supplies put together. A similar kind of emergency mission to Mars would take months and likely the better part of a year.
I'm not trying to discourage a mission to Mars for its own sake here, but I think that both destinations have their merits and benefits, with the additional "fact" that we already know how to put people on the Moon and at least have them stick around for the duration of a typical weekend camping trip. The technology for having people go to Mars has yet to be invented, and it certainly can't be a weekend camping trip type expedition or anything shy of a permanent colony once you get there.
Going to the Moon can be bootstrapped much easier in part because you don't have to send people there on a one-way trip. Besides, once resources are starting to be extracted from the Moon in significant quantities, it will also make sending somebody to Mars much, much easier too. By bootstrapping here, I am implying that incremental designs can be tried on the Moon where expedition can be extended a day or two at a time to perhaps staying there for a couple months at a time. That is how LEO has been "colonized" and is perhaps the standard that best suits exploration in the solar system. Going to Mars is a huge leap of faith all at once.
I don't think you can realistically say that somebody from Europe could necessarily land "anywhere" with 13th century technology. There is also a whole lot of nothing in the mid-Atlantic that is sort of hard to stop and build a city or even a remote outpost. There are the Azores, but then again the Portuguese had already charted those islands before Columbus set sail in 1492.
Seriously, our ability to survive on Mars is roughly comparable to being able to establish a base of operations in the Caribbean at the period of time when Columbus was able to set sail for there.
Even well financed and established colonies like Virginia... in the 15th Century well after knowledge and skills about establishing settlements in the Americas had been an established fact... you have cities like Jamestown that died off to the last man in spite of massive advanced preparations. Arguably the people in Jamestown made several mistakes while they where trying to build their town, but the same could be said about any pioneering effort. My own direct ancestors were involved in several pioneering efforts at least comparable to sending a crew off to Mars to build a permanent colony.
In terms of resources on Mars, there is water, CO2, methane, iron ore (sort of what makes the sky and the planetary surface red), and presumably all of the "naturally occurring elements" that can be found on the Earth including uranium and other "heavy metals"... including "rare earth metals" as well. Indeed many of the ore processing techniques that are common on the Earth can be applied on Mars with little difficulty, in contrast to mining techniques in a vacuum that are going to require some major adaptations. A simple open pit mine is entirely possible on Mars. There is even reason to believe that Mars may have limestone (presuming Mars may have harbored life at some time in its past), and certainly various kinds of concrete can be made from Martian materials. The surface of Mars is also full of silicates that have other uses too.
Compared to the rest of the Solar System, Mars is a paradise that is incredibly hospitable to life and practically begging to be developed. Yes, mistakes will likely be made, but with 21st century technology and scientific understanding I think the development of Mars will likely be much easier than it was for the first colonists to other parts of the Earth.
The problem is that he didn't care who he was messing around with, and one of the idiot bimbos decided to file rape charges... putting him in the position to get screwed over in more ways than one.
I personally don't care what he does or with whom he does it... male or female... but the point here is that randomly and indiscriminately banging on any available tail does have its consequences. It is also a common way that most law enforcement agencies and many governments use to catch somebody if they can't get you on anything else.
If you are going to be leading a "revolutionary idea" that is certain to draw political flak, you need to high slightly higher standards than that average schmuck... at least if you want your political concept and movement to have any sort of traction and not get bogged down with a legal morass. In other words, Julian Assange pretty much shot himself in the foot here.
The one thing different between the old USSR and travel by air right now is obtaining formal permission from the government in order to travel from one state to another.
The sad thing is that beyond that sort of travel approval, there is little difference or as you point out travelers in the old USSR didn't have to go through that kind of security screening before they got on board trains or airlines.
I guess give it time before ordinary people need explicit permission before they are allowed to board an airliner and have to prove a need for traveling to a specific destination.
The problem is that junk like the menu from the kitchen of the White House is being labeled as a classified document... on the fear that some terrorist is going to spike the bunch for the next press conference or something else equally stupid.
It certainly would take a FOIA request to get the menu from the White House for the last social function which happened there, much less to find out what the Obama family ate last night.
The U.S. government had a much, much smaller profile for most of its history. Stating that the size of the government is strictly a function the number of people that "it represents" is a gross mischaracterization of the issues involved. In the 1920s, when America was already a "large empire" already industrialized with electronic communications and possessing most of the attributes of a "1st world nation", it had about a half million employees in total. Why is 100 times that number needed now.... because we have 100 times the population?
As for the Great Depression, it was horrible mismanagement on the part of the Federal Government trying to intervene into the situation under the Hoover administration that caused most of the problems, and the Roosevelt administration trying to cover up those mistakes by making many more of them. The recession of 1921 certainly could have been duplicated in 1930 with perhaps a little bit of pain for the major banks and the political elite, but the country as a whole would have been much better off as a result. It didn't take growing the federal government and instituting socialism to restore economic prosperity and I would argue that it got in the way of the economic recovery... just as similar policies today are getting in the way.
The problem with the current recession is mostly because the bankers who got stuck with the bad debt due to the housing bubble don't want to lose their shirts over a lousy investment... and want the rest of America to bail them out on what should have been an insanely risky investment. A big ouch where housing prices got back to more sane levels and a temporary deflationary period would have been over by now had the big central banks simply been allowed to collapse. The politics involved are mainly to protect those who made a bad judgment call.
More to the point, I'm arguing here that the size of the government bureaucracy is contributing to the problem of leaks by requiring many more "secrets" when more of what they are doing ought to be done by private industry or charity groups in the first place. Let people keep their own money and spend it as they best see fit and not have how that money needs to be spent by some central bureaucracy that knows jack.
Typically the largest employer in most municipalities is the local school district, often followed closely by other government agencies of various kinds. The total work force in the U.S. that is employed by the government at some level is about 40% based upon some studies I've seen, and in the UK that number is a bit more than 60%.
In 1900, the largest department of the U.S. federal government was the Post Office Department with about 200,000 workers, followed by the predecessors to the Border Patrol and customs agents. The War Department usually averaged between 20,000 to 30,000 soldiers, and the Navy Department a little bit more than the Army but not too much more. The USMC was usually about the size of a regiment for most of its history... except in times of war.
If the federal government remained about that size, or returned to that size at the end of World War II, the number of secrets that would be needed for a bureaucracy that size would have been minimal. If America was able to thrive and survive for more than a century with essentially no significant government bureaucracy, why is one needed now? I'm saying that one of the problems with why leaks are so prevalent is precisely because there are too many people who need to keep secrets from the general public.
There are whistleblower laws that have been enacted precisely because it is important from time to time to not only encourage but also protect people who may want to publicly offer an opinion contrary to official policy. This is also a dangerous and slippery slope where you get examples such as what happened during the late 19th Century in America where employers would make employment conditional upon how you voted in the most recent election. If you voted for the "wrong" political candidate, you would lose your job.
There are most certainly limits to how far an entity can limit your opinions, and the only real restriction is mostly upon the officers of a corporation at best. As they also set policy, it is sort of hard for them to express an opinion contrary to that policy too.
There can and should be differences between "sensitive" information and something covered by an official secret. My point in raising the issue of a government employee saying that "the king of Saudi Arabia is an ass" is that shouldn't be "an official secret". It should be kept as sensitive material so far as it would likely be expressed as a private communication.... but revealing that information shouldn't be the moral equivalent of treason and have the death penalty attached. That is a whole different situation compared to somebody leaking the source code for a missile guidance system that can land a 100 kg bomb 1000 km from the launch location to within a centimeter of the intended target. If you can't tell the difference in which ought to be a secret and which is merely embarrassing, I'm at a loss to help you here.
I hate to break the news, but America was involved in World War II as early as 1940. The problem was that the entire U.S. Army consisted of about 30,000 soldiers mostly stationed in the "colonies" of America (the Philippines primarily, although in a few other places too) and of course in a few training bases. Instead, like what Wilson did during World War I, America became the "arsenal of democracy" and all that other BS while Roosevelt tried to build up the armed forces of America. Airmen from America were openly encouraged to join the Royal Air Force to develop some necessary skills (normally that forces you to renounce your citizenship... accepting a position in the officer corps of another country).
By 1941 America was supplying most of the raw materials (steel, grain, and other stuff) to the UK to help fight off Nazi Germany. There were of course indigenous industries in the UK as well, but it was more than a mere supplement to those resources, and Liberty Ship production. At its peak about three ships of this class were launched each day. That is an insane amount of metal, not to mention the contents of those ships was rather large too.
As to if America ought to have been involved to that extent, that is certainly something debatable. The debate about going into World War II was something that was extensive and there certainly were many opinions about the topic well before December 1941. This is a debate that I wish had happened prior to going into Iraq, where I believe a formal declaration of war should have happened... with the territory acquired to become sovereign territory of the USA. If America wasn't prepared to do something that raw, it shouldn't have gone into there in the first place. Ditto for Afghanistan and I dare say Vietnam as well.
I love knowing how America keeps creeping to become more and more like the Soviet Union with a similar kind of loss of privileges.
Where the debate really needs to be centered is on two things:
What items ought to be kept secret?
Does the federal bureaucracy really need to be so big in the first place?
By far and away too much is classified material. I don't mind having things like the locations of military units and certain other generally time-sensitive information being classified, but there certainly is a whole bunch of stuff being labeled as classified material mainly because it would be embarrassing if the information was disclosed. That stuff should not be protected under an official secrets act and I wish that a harder evaluation would result in trying to decide what exactly should be considered classified material in the first place.
Speculating that the King of Saudi Arabia is an ass should not be considered an official secret.
Laws that restrict speech based upon time, manner, or place restrictions have proven to be "constitutional", but you had better explain how that applies to Wikileaks. Laws that define the speech itself are almost universally declared unconstitutional.
But then again, most judges forget there is also this silly clause "congress shall pass no law". It means exactly that and nothing more or less. I can't help it if judges can't read something like the constitution in the first place, and it is a slippery slope if you decide to pass any law that restricts free speech in any way.
Using the excuse of "national security" to prevent individuals from spreading information based upon a contract has merit, where that individual is breaking an agreement if they divulge the information. That exists with trade secrets as much as it applies to classified information. The difference is when an uninvolved third party has the information and what the rational basis for preventing them from further dissemination of the information may lie. If you restrict that in any way, you have essentially killed off anything resembling journalism... which is precisely the point of the 1st amendment.
You can't put stuff into Pandora's box once it is out, no matter how hard your try. Any legal restrictions to do so are futile and can only become more repressive to the point that free speech in any form is a meaningless exercise.
I just can't stand people being sheep in accepting what the courts rule, as if the courts are the ultimate arbitrator of what is constitutional and washing their hands of the matter as if nine men alone run the government or ought to run the government. As citizens we can and indeed we must be holding our government officials to a higher law, and complaining about abuses to the foundational principles when they happen. What is going on with Wikileaks is an abuse of these foundational principles even if the courts are whitewashing the whole thing as if it was legal.
Tidal forces from the Sun upon the Earth are sufficient to be noticed and a significant factor when calculating what the daily high tide is going to be, and its impact can usually be measured on the order meters in tidal height on a daily basis. I consider that to be substantial.
The Moon is for all practical purposes at the same distance, although a bit smaller so the tidal forces from the Sun will be reduced... not due to the distance from the Sun itself but rather the sheer size of the Moon. And the Moon is still a pretty big place... we aren't talking something the size of Phobos or some other insignificant rock... the Moon does exhibit hydrostatic equilibrium and is on the same order of size as places like Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and the other largest bodies in the Solar System. IMHO it ought to be classified as a dwarf planet.
Sell to whom? The information would all be out in the open anyway. I suppose that you have hundreds of people with "check user privileges" on Wikimedia projects who discretely log and sell everything they can get to interested parties too?
It isn't as if this information is being kept from those who would screw you over. It just isn't available to "the general public".
Countries that have strict gun control laws also have strict controls over the press and other ways that freedom is repressed. What proper "scientific controls" can you possible put in to suggest if or if not such gun control laws actually work in a free and open society?
In most other countries that have strict gun control laws, the leaders of the government wouldn't possibly have or need to have such open interchange with its citizens on this level. Being able to be alone on a one on one basis with your local congressman, even if you are a complete stranger to that congressman, is to me something that ought to be encouraged.
It may be possible that you are correct, but I don't consider this to be the gospel truth in terms of a proven fact that gun control legislation actually does anything to reduce incidents like this. My fear is that an incident like this will expand the role of the Secret Service or Capital Hill Police Department to become a much larger bureaucracy than they already are.... something I sure hope doesn't happen. This is an unfortunate incident by an idiot who couldn't confine his anger to free speech or to the ballot box.
Then again, the shooter may have felt frustrated that the system is so corrupt that he couldn't use the soap box, the ballot box, or the jury box to get his point across. That is the real tragedy, as the ammo box should be a last resort option.
Once the information is in the public, it can't be made secret again.
I'd suggest somebody read a little used document I suppose, at least if you claim to be an American: The U.S. Constitution. Most particularly the first article of amendment. What WIkileaks is doing clearly falls within the realm of that document where congress is explicitly prohibited from making a law in the first place to restrict such speech.
Why not? Supposedly the whole point of Wikileaks is to uncover secrets and to push them into the open, not to be gatekeepers over what is secret.
There is some legitimate concern over protecting the privacy of "innocent people" who may be mentioned in some of the content. I do think it may be possible to train tens of thousands of people to be able to discretely and quietly remove that kind of information which can do unintended harm, but it certainly wouldn't be easy.
What is the whole point of the secrecy anyway with Wikileaks, beyond that simple goal of processing the information to protect privacy? And more significantly, who is Wikileaks going to get "clearance" from in terms of a background check? The FBI? Department of State? Yeah, I'd like to see that happen.
Of course part of the problem here is that they really don't use the "wiki" in Wikileaks. At least in theory they were going to be using wiki or wiki-like tools that would let newcommers and ordinary people help with the processing of the information, but apparently that has been thrown out the window. Yes, it started that way, but it isn't any more.
Certainly something like Distributed Proofreaders could help in processing the information, to show what a "crowdsourcing" model or at least community development effort could look like without the wiki itself.
Yeah, there is political infighting, but a great deal of that is self-inflicted. There is a need for something like WIkileaks and I'm glad that they are doing what they are doing, but they also need to get their act together if they are going to pull through this as well. That Julian Assange couldn't keep his pants zipped up has also hurt a whole bunch too.
To put this in better context, and as mentioned in the original article, buffers are being used here in many cases to cover up the flaws of the engineers developing the products.
We'd all love to know that a top-notch engineer who just got laid off from NASA due to budget cutbacks (and not incompetence) is the dude who designed the hardware you are using. Unfortunately that is rarely the case and indeed there are a bunch of lazy engineers who take shortcuts to get things done. Often these engineers are also rewarded for their behavior by supervisors because they get the job done (or so the supervisor is led to believe) and get the promotions while a more careful engineer simply is fired for lack of performance.
And then you become the poor schmuck who has to look at the disaster left behind by these lazy engineers, where you try to clean up that mess or work around their incompetence. As a result, since the sloppy engineering has huge jitters anyway and needs the monster buffer, at least for all of the tests that your customers care about the equipment works better with the larger buffers. Since no actual engineering theory was done on the development of the equipment but was merely muddled through when it was created, the buffer size is merely a random wild guess and the lazy engineer decided that a little bit is good and a whole lot is better. Why not go for a larger buffer size when the part costs and extra dime for 16x the size.
Besides, marketing loves to brag about how their equipment is so much better, and the larger buffer size is a big deal that makes the equipment so much better, isn't it? The engineer screaming that the buffer size needs to be scaled back is ignored because nobody wants to hear that they are ruining the product due to lack of theory in its design.
Yeah, I've been there and done that, at least in different contexts.
It is a good point to note, however, that the buffering ought to happen on the application level and not on the network level. The problem comes from a crappy operating system using sub-standard applications and then expecting the network engineers to fix the problems caused by those lousy applications that simply should have been fixed by good design in the first place.
There are a number of problems that are being masked by the "simple solution" of throwing up a buffer.
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The current cost is closer to about $5k/kg to LEO due to the entrance of companies like SpaceX, and if some of the other entrepreneurial companies get going I can see that getting down to $1k/kg, but the point is well taken that it is still expensive.
The game changer would be to be able to extract resources from extra-terrestrial locations like the Moon, where you could bring that cost way down so it could be about $1k/kg to Mars... from Lunar materials. That sort of blows away efforts to do Mars first if you think about it.
I agree that a colony must be self-sufficient, although it is hard to say what a "return on investment" might be in terms of establishing a colony.
Generally throughout human history, it has been profitable for most groups to establish colonies when possible. Arguably the effort to establish colonies in North America by the United Kingdom ended up being its saving grace by the 20th Century when the pay-back became incredibly obvious. Generally it isn't so painfully obvious as that but it can be.
I will have to agree with at least the line of thinking you are making here, where there does need to be an economic driver for colonization. I think there is money that can be made in space beyond the current realm of commercial enterprises. The main commercial drivers of spaceflight right now are reconnaissance (including general Earth observation/weather sats & stuff like Google Earth), telecommunications, and navigation (aka GPS-like systems). There is the potential for energy production and tourism to be some additional sources of revenue in space, as well as resource extraction, but those "alternate" uses for space simply haven't been able to bear fruit yet with tourism being the one area most likely to succeed in the upcoming decade.
For most of these applications, the only purpose for going to Mars is essentially tourism-related. Mineral extraction on Mars, if it happens, is going to be done for the benefit of those on Mars itself as those resources would be in a deep enough gravity well to not be practical for export to the Earth or somewhere else in the Solar System, at least in bulk quantities.
The Moon would in this sense be a much better destination, at least initially, as it can serve as a base for resource extraction and be used to support other commercial activities near the Earth... something which Mars simply can't do at the moment.
I didn't think about the role that the Korean War played in maintaining the size of the U.S. military. I think that is a very good point. The feeling that something needed to be done to "contain" communism was valid, but the consequences to those actions have had some rather negative long-term effect that America is still trying to deal with.
The resources needed to defeat the Third Reich and Japan were simply insane by any rational measure, and that conflict changed America in many profound ways. The temptation to use such an army to further political ambitions is usually so irresistible that it becomes very difficult to not use that army for something when an opportunity presents itself.
One of my major complaints with regards to NASA and the "space researchers" is that the concept of sex in space is unfortunately a taboo subject that really hasn't been studied all that much. I'm not talking porn in space, which certainly has had quite a bit of speculation and yes even somebody who did film a porn flick somewhat recently (on a Zero-G Adventures flight... look it if up you don't believe me) but in terms of a genuine scientific exploration of the topic on other placental mammals and what the impact upon child rearing might be in space.
There certainly have been experiments proposed and some speculation on that topic too, but I consider that to be all science fiction until somebody does an actual study and tries to see what happens. Apparently there have been some pregnant rats who have been sent into space and one that gave birth in orbit, but those were short term studies lasting mere days. What is desperately needed is a long-term multi-generational study of something like some mice or rats in space to see what heath effects we ought to be looking for or if it may even be a problem at all raising kids in space at all. The point is there is no data at all to come to any conclusion of any kind in terms of what problems there might be producing kids in an extra-terrestrial environment.
There have been and indeed there currently are mice in space right now on the ISS so there are some long-term studies on the health of mammals in space, but we have human physiological data to compare over the past 60 years or so for that point as well that goes more into depth about what people do. Unfortunately none of the human data really relates to adolescent development or embryological development in space.
There are cries that men and women going to Mars ought to be sterilized in some fashion before going to Mars, which to me may or may not be valid in any context except for the fact that unfortunately humans may be the first placental mammals that will be studied in this environment. In that sense it is unfortunate to be using human children as experimental guinea pigs when in fact Guinea Pigs would seem like an ideal test creature for such an experiment in the first place. If long-term planning is now happening, we ought to find out what should be an issue.
I would put it this way though: in spite of the fact that it seems like cruel calculus, having a man and a woman heartily cooperating with each other to produce a child on Mars makes incredible economic sense too. The expense and effort to send an astronaut from the Earth to Mars is so huge that the minor additional effort to take an infant and raise them to adulthood using colony resources seems very trivial by comparison. Labor shortages are going to be so severe on Mars that children are going to be cherished and prized by those in the colony. Besides, kids growing up on Mars will also be uniquely adapted to the environment and will "know" how to survive in that environment much better than any astronaut getting sent there from the Earth.
Concerns about genetic diversity seem to me to be completely overblown unless you are worried that a population on a planet like Mars is going to be prematurely cut-off from all physical contact from the Earth. I find that to be quite unlikely for one simple fact: Since 1970 nearly every orbital window for a launch between the Earth and Mars has had at least one spacecraft of some kind make a journey to Mars, with the trend to have multiple spacecraft from multiple nations make that trip in recent years. While not Moore's Law in space, it does show an exponential function over time and seems likely to include people in the not too distant future. It would seem as if within the window of a human generation (give or take 15-30 years) there would be plenty of a window of opportunity for children on Mars to "expand the gene pool" in terms of mitigating any problems of a restricted population. Waiting for a specific numerical threshold to be reached on Mars before people are "permit
The advantage of going to the Moon is that it is close, and remains close to the Earth. Even using chemical rockets and traveling on a free return trajectory for getting to the Moon (close to a minimal energy path to get there) only takes a couple of days. If there is an "oops" or some other sort of significant problem for folks on the Moon, presuming that the infrastructure for getting to low-earth orbit is already well established, an emergency resupply mission to the Moon would only need to take a couple of weeks at most with most of the effort simply trying to scramble to get the supplies put together. A similar kind of emergency mission to Mars would take months and likely the better part of a year.
I'm not trying to discourage a mission to Mars for its own sake here, but I think that both destinations have their merits and benefits, with the additional "fact" that we already know how to put people on the Moon and at least have them stick around for the duration of a typical weekend camping trip. The technology for having people go to Mars has yet to be invented, and it certainly can't be a weekend camping trip type expedition or anything shy of a permanent colony once you get there.
Going to the Moon can be bootstrapped much easier in part because you don't have to send people there on a one-way trip. Besides, once resources are starting to be extracted from the Moon in significant quantities, it will also make sending somebody to Mars much, much easier too. By bootstrapping here, I am implying that incremental designs can be tried on the Moon where expedition can be extended a day or two at a time to perhaps staying there for a couple months at a time. That is how LEO has been "colonized" and is perhaps the standard that best suits exploration in the solar system. Going to Mars is a huge leap of faith all at once.
I don't think you can realistically say that somebody from Europe could necessarily land "anywhere" with 13th century technology. There is also a whole lot of nothing in the mid-Atlantic that is sort of hard to stop and build a city or even a remote outpost. There are the Azores, but then again the Portuguese had already charted those islands before Columbus set sail in 1492.
Seriously, our ability to survive on Mars is roughly comparable to being able to establish a base of operations in the Caribbean at the period of time when Columbus was able to set sail for there.
Even well financed and established colonies like Virginia... in the 15th Century well after knowledge and skills about establishing settlements in the Americas had been an established fact... you have cities like Jamestown that died off to the last man in spite of massive advanced preparations. Arguably the people in Jamestown made several mistakes while they where trying to build their town, but the same could be said about any pioneering effort. My own direct ancestors were involved in several pioneering efforts at least comparable to sending a crew off to Mars to build a permanent colony.
In terms of resources on Mars, there is water, CO2, methane, iron ore (sort of what makes the sky and the planetary surface red), and presumably all of the "naturally occurring elements" that can be found on the Earth including uranium and other "heavy metals"... including "rare earth metals" as well. Indeed many of the ore processing techniques that are common on the Earth can be applied on Mars with little difficulty, in contrast to mining techniques in a vacuum that are going to require some major adaptations. A simple open pit mine is entirely possible on Mars. There is even reason to believe that Mars may have limestone (presuming Mars may have harbored life at some time in its past), and certainly various kinds of concrete can be made from Martian materials. The surface of Mars is also full of silicates that have other uses too.
Compared to the rest of the Solar System, Mars is a paradise that is incredibly hospitable to life and practically begging to be developed. Yes, mistakes will likely be made, but with 21st century technology and scientific understanding I think the development of Mars will likely be much easier than it was for the first colonists to other parts of the Earth.
The problem is that he didn't care who he was messing around with, and one of the idiot bimbos decided to file rape charges... putting him in the position to get screwed over in more ways than one.
I personally don't care what he does or with whom he does it... male or female... but the point here is that randomly and indiscriminately banging on any available tail does have its consequences. It is also a common way that most law enforcement agencies and many governments use to catch somebody if they can't get you on anything else.
If you are going to be leading a "revolutionary idea" that is certain to draw political flak, you need to high slightly higher standards than that average schmuck... at least if you want your political concept and movement to have any sort of traction and not get bogged down with a legal morass. In other words, Julian Assange pretty much shot himself in the foot here.
The one thing different between the old USSR and travel by air right now is obtaining formal permission from the government in order to travel from one state to another.
The sad thing is that beyond that sort of travel approval, there is little difference or as you point out travelers in the old USSR didn't have to go through that kind of security screening before they got on board trains or airlines.
I guess give it time before ordinary people need explicit permission before they are allowed to board an airliner and have to prove a need for traveling to a specific destination.
The problem is that junk like the menu from the kitchen of the White House is being labeled as a classified document... on the fear that some terrorist is going to spike the bunch for the next press conference or something else equally stupid.
It certainly would take a FOIA request to get the menu from the White House for the last social function which happened there, much less to find out what the Obama family ate last night.
The U.S. government had a much, much smaller profile for most of its history. Stating that the size of the government is strictly a function the number of people that "it represents" is a gross mischaracterization of the issues involved. In the 1920s, when America was already a "large empire" already industrialized with electronic communications and possessing most of the attributes of a "1st world nation", it had about a half million employees in total. Why is 100 times that number needed now.... because we have 100 times the population?
As for the Great Depression, it was horrible mismanagement on the part of the Federal Government trying to intervene into the situation under the Hoover administration that caused most of the problems, and the Roosevelt administration trying to cover up those mistakes by making many more of them. The recession of 1921 certainly could have been duplicated in 1930 with perhaps a little bit of pain for the major banks and the political elite, but the country as a whole would have been much better off as a result. It didn't take growing the federal government and instituting socialism to restore economic prosperity and I would argue that it got in the way of the economic recovery... just as similar policies today are getting in the way.
The problem with the current recession is mostly because the bankers who got stuck with the bad debt due to the housing bubble don't want to lose their shirts over a lousy investment... and want the rest of America to bail them out on what should have been an insanely risky investment. A big ouch where housing prices got back to more sane levels and a temporary deflationary period would have been over by now had the big central banks simply been allowed to collapse. The politics involved are mainly to protect those who made a bad judgment call.
More to the point, I'm arguing here that the size of the government bureaucracy is contributing to the problem of leaks by requiring many more "secrets" when more of what they are doing ought to be done by private industry or charity groups in the first place. Let people keep their own money and spend it as they best see fit and not have how that money needs to be spent by some central bureaucracy that knows jack.
Typically the largest employer in most municipalities is the local school district, often followed closely by other government agencies of various kinds. The total work force in the U.S. that is employed by the government at some level is about 40% based upon some studies I've seen, and in the UK that number is a bit more than 60%.
In 1900, the largest department of the U.S. federal government was the Post Office Department with about 200,000 workers, followed by the predecessors to the Border Patrol and customs agents. The War Department usually averaged between 20,000 to 30,000 soldiers, and the Navy Department a little bit more than the Army but not too much more. The USMC was usually about the size of a regiment for most of its history... except in times of war.
If the federal government remained about that size, or returned to that size at the end of World War II, the number of secrets that would be needed for a bureaucracy that size would have been minimal. If America was able to thrive and survive for more than a century with essentially no significant government bureaucracy, why is one needed now? I'm saying that one of the problems with why leaks are so prevalent is precisely because there are too many people who need to keep secrets from the general public.
There are whistleblower laws that have been enacted precisely because it is important from time to time to not only encourage but also protect people who may want to publicly offer an opinion contrary to official policy. This is also a dangerous and slippery slope where you get examples such as what happened during the late 19th Century in America where employers would make employment conditional upon how you voted in the most recent election. If you voted for the "wrong" political candidate, you would lose your job.
There are most certainly limits to how far an entity can limit your opinions, and the only real restriction is mostly upon the officers of a corporation at best. As they also set policy, it is sort of hard for them to express an opinion contrary to that policy too.
There can and should be differences between "sensitive" information and something covered by an official secret. My point in raising the issue of a government employee saying that "the king of Saudi Arabia is an ass" is that shouldn't be "an official secret". It should be kept as sensitive material so far as it would likely be expressed as a private communication.... but revealing that information shouldn't be the moral equivalent of treason and have the death penalty attached. That is a whole different situation compared to somebody leaking the source code for a missile guidance system that can land a 100 kg bomb 1000 km from the launch location to within a centimeter of the intended target. If you can't tell the difference in which ought to be a secret and which is merely embarrassing, I'm at a loss to help you here.
I hate to break the news, but America was involved in World War II as early as 1940. The problem was that the entire U.S. Army consisted of about 30,000 soldiers mostly stationed in the "colonies" of America (the Philippines primarily, although in a few other places too) and of course in a few training bases. Instead, like what Wilson did during World War I, America became the "arsenal of democracy" and all that other BS while Roosevelt tried to build up the armed forces of America. Airmen from America were openly encouraged to join the Royal Air Force to develop some necessary skills (normally that forces you to renounce your citizenship... accepting a position in the officer corps of another country).
By 1941 America was supplying most of the raw materials (steel, grain, and other stuff) to the UK to help fight off Nazi Germany. There were of course indigenous industries in the UK as well, but it was more than a mere supplement to those resources, and Liberty Ship production. At its peak about three ships of this class were launched each day. That is an insane amount of metal, not to mention the contents of those ships was rather large too.
As to if America ought to have been involved to that extent, that is certainly something debatable. The debate about going into World War II was something that was extensive and there certainly were many opinions about the topic well before December 1941. This is a debate that I wish had happened prior to going into Iraq, where I believe a formal declaration of war should have happened... with the territory acquired to become sovereign territory of the USA. If America wasn't prepared to do something that raw, it shouldn't have gone into there in the first place. Ditto for Afghanistan and I dare say Vietnam as well.
.... to be replaced by a bunch of llamas in technicolor dreamcoats!
I love knowing how America keeps creeping to become more and more like the Soviet Union with a similar kind of loss of privileges.
Where the debate really needs to be centered is on two things:
By far and away too much is classified material. I don't mind having things like the locations of military units and certain other generally time-sensitive information being classified, but there certainly is a whole bunch of stuff being labeled as classified material mainly because it would be embarrassing if the information was disclosed. That stuff should not be protected under an official secrets act and I wish that a harder evaluation would result in trying to decide what exactly should be considered classified material in the first place.
Speculating that the King of Saudi Arabia is an ass should not be considered an official secret.
Laws that restrict speech based upon time, manner, or place restrictions have proven to be "constitutional", but you had better explain how that applies to Wikileaks. Laws that define the speech itself are almost universally declared unconstitutional.
But then again, most judges forget there is also this silly clause "congress shall pass no law". It means exactly that and nothing more or less. I can't help it if judges can't read something like the constitution in the first place, and it is a slippery slope if you decide to pass any law that restricts free speech in any way.
Using the excuse of "national security" to prevent individuals from spreading information based upon a contract has merit, where that individual is breaking an agreement if they divulge the information. That exists with trade secrets as much as it applies to classified information. The difference is when an uninvolved third party has the information and what the rational basis for preventing them from further dissemination of the information may lie. If you restrict that in any way, you have essentially killed off anything resembling journalism... which is precisely the point of the 1st amendment.
You can't put stuff into Pandora's box once it is out, no matter how hard your try. Any legal restrictions to do so are futile and can only become more repressive to the point that free speech in any form is a meaningless exercise.
I just can't stand people being sheep in accepting what the courts rule, as if the courts are the ultimate arbitrator of what is constitutional and washing their hands of the matter as if nine men alone run the government or ought to run the government. As citizens we can and indeed we must be holding our government officials to a higher law, and complaining about abuses to the foundational principles when they happen. What is going on with Wikileaks is an abuse of these foundational principles even if the courts are whitewashing the whole thing as if it was legal.
Tidal forces from the Sun upon the Earth are sufficient to be noticed and a significant factor when calculating what the daily high tide is going to be, and its impact can usually be measured on the order meters in tidal height on a daily basis. I consider that to be substantial.
The Moon is for all practical purposes at the same distance, although a bit smaller so the tidal forces from the Sun will be reduced... not due to the distance from the Sun itself but rather the sheer size of the Moon. And the Moon is still a pretty big place... we aren't talking something the size of Phobos or some other insignificant rock... the Moon does exhibit hydrostatic equilibrium and is on the same order of size as places like Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and the other largest bodies in the Solar System. IMHO it ought to be classified as a dwarf planet.
Sell to whom? The information would all be out in the open anyway. I suppose that you have hundreds of people with "check user privileges" on Wikimedia projects who discretely log and sell everything they can get to interested parties too?
It isn't as if this information is being kept from those who would screw you over. It just isn't available to "the general public".
And prove to me that the "Men in Black" actually exist. Really. And they have agents that look like Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith too?
Countries that have strict gun control laws also have strict controls over the press and other ways that freedom is repressed. What proper "scientific controls" can you possible put in to suggest if or if not such gun control laws actually work in a free and open society?
In most other countries that have strict gun control laws, the leaders of the government wouldn't possibly have or need to have such open interchange with its citizens on this level. Being able to be alone on a one on one basis with your local congressman, even if you are a complete stranger to that congressman, is to me something that ought to be encouraged.
It may be possible that you are correct, but I don't consider this to be the gospel truth in terms of a proven fact that gun control legislation actually does anything to reduce incidents like this. My fear is that an incident like this will expand the role of the Secret Service or Capital Hill Police Department to become a much larger bureaucracy than they already are.... something I sure hope doesn't happen. This is an unfortunate incident by an idiot who couldn't confine his anger to free speech or to the ballot box.
Then again, the shooter may have felt frustrated that the system is so corrupt that he couldn't use the soap box, the ballot box, or the jury box to get his point across. That is the real tragedy, as the ammo box should be a last resort option.
Once the information is in the public, it can't be made secret again.
I'd suggest somebody read a little used document I suppose, at least if you claim to be an American: The U.S. Constitution. Most particularly the first article of amendment. What WIkileaks is doing clearly falls within the realm of that document where congress is explicitly prohibited from making a law in the first place to restrict such speech.
Why not? Supposedly the whole point of Wikileaks is to uncover secrets and to push them into the open, not to be gatekeepers over what is secret.
There is some legitimate concern over protecting the privacy of "innocent people" who may be mentioned in some of the content. I do think it may be possible to train tens of thousands of people to be able to discretely and quietly remove that kind of information which can do unintended harm, but it certainly wouldn't be easy.
What is the whole point of the secrecy anyway with Wikileaks, beyond that simple goal of processing the information to protect privacy? And more significantly, who is Wikileaks going to get "clearance" from in terms of a background check? The FBI? Department of State? Yeah, I'd like to see that happen.
Of course part of the problem here is that they really don't use the "wiki" in Wikileaks. At least in theory they were going to be using wiki or wiki-like tools that would let newcommers and ordinary people help with the processing of the information, but apparently that has been thrown out the window. Yes, it started that way, but it isn't any more.
Certainly something like Distributed Proofreaders could help in processing the information, to show what a "crowdsourcing" model or at least community development effort could look like without the wiki itself.
Yeah, there is political infighting, but a great deal of that is self-inflicted. There is a need for something like WIkileaks and I'm glad that they are doing what they are doing, but they also need to get their act together if they are going to pull through this as well. That Julian Assange couldn't keep his pants zipped up has also hurt a whole bunch too.
To put this in better context, and as mentioned in the original article, buffers are being used here in many cases to cover up the flaws of the engineers developing the products.
We'd all love to know that a top-notch engineer who just got laid off from NASA due to budget cutbacks (and not incompetence) is the dude who designed the hardware you are using. Unfortunately that is rarely the case and indeed there are a bunch of lazy engineers who take shortcuts to get things done. Often these engineers are also rewarded for their behavior by supervisors because they get the job done (or so the supervisor is led to believe) and get the promotions while a more careful engineer simply is fired for lack of performance.
And then you become the poor schmuck who has to look at the disaster left behind by these lazy engineers, where you try to clean up that mess or work around their incompetence. As a result, since the sloppy engineering has huge jitters anyway and needs the monster buffer, at least for all of the tests that your customers care about the equipment works better with the larger buffers. Since no actual engineering theory was done on the development of the equipment but was merely muddled through when it was created, the buffer size is merely a random wild guess and the lazy engineer decided that a little bit is good and a whole lot is better. Why not go for a larger buffer size when the part costs and extra dime for 16x the size.
Besides, marketing loves to brag about how their equipment is so much better, and the larger buffer size is a big deal that makes the equipment so much better, isn't it? The engineer screaming that the buffer size needs to be scaled back is ignored because nobody wants to hear that they are ruining the product due to lack of theory in its design.
Yeah, I've been there and done that, at least in different contexts.
It is a good point to note, however, that the buffering ought to happen on the application level and not on the network level. The problem comes from a crappy operating system using sub-standard applications and then expecting the network engineers to fix the problems caused by those lousy applications that simply should have been fixed by good design in the first place.
There are a number of problems that are being masked by the "simple solution" of throwing up a buffer.