It's a valid complaint. TNG, DS9 and Voyager had wonderful symphonic themes, that were themes for the rest of the musical score in the show. Enterprise has horrible music. Rod Stewart has as much to do with Star Trek as Snoop Doggy Dogg.
Dammit, now Gin and Juice will be the theme for the next series.
Don't you have to pay monthly fees for server upkeep and other infrastructure costs? That could be perceived as a tax. Granted, it is flat and regressive, but it's still a tax. I guess it could be perceived as a tax for existing in the system.
And the idea that poor people don't want to work hard ignores the fact that quite a few working poor bust their asses at two jobs just to get by at the minimum wage, which has lost its meaning when it can't support someone working full time in most parts of the country. If you have to work 80 hours per week to get by or sit on your ass and pick up welfare, what will you do? Raising minimum wage would let people work reasonable hours and stay off of social programs.
This guy paid for something I can get for free, then complains that he paid too much for it? Does he realize he's actually paying for support and not for the software?
And sound card support? Is this all he's grading Linux on? Excuse me, but what about stability or available software. And I've installed Linux a bunch of times, even on machines made by no-name hardware assemblers where I didn't know the manufacturers of any of the hardware, and it all still worked. And all that without having to pay for a single distribution.
So he pays for something he could get for free just so he could have support, and then doesn't use the support when he encounters a problem. Whose fault is that, the distros or his own?
While I admit that there are a few problems with Linux (mostly due to the fact that not enough people use it), hardware compatibility and price aren't any of them.
If you're installing Linux in a commercial environment, where it shines, you're dealing with standard hardware configurations. You can use one system to figure out how to configure it, then put that configuration on your own custom install CD, and produce your own version, customized for your use. *This* is the power of Linux that Windows can never touch. Need a customized version of Windows, it'll cost you way more than your own custom version of Linux.
And he still hasn't told us what brand of sound card he was using. Fancy that.
The planet isn't going away. We are. Do disrespect to Mr. Carlin, but I don't want to go away. I realize the planet will be fine without us, but I also realize I don't want us to die out.
People go because they're better at doing things than even the best robot. Maybe not at mining, but definitely at science related stuff, like studying rocks and searching for life.
The moon suffers from three main issues. First, it has no atmosphere. Second, it has a 28 day light-dark cycle, and third, it is very resource poor, from a survival standpoint.
Not having an atmosphere is a big problem. Experiments have shown that C02 can be cheaply made into hydrogen and oxygen, with little more than hydrogen feed stock. From hydrogen and oxygen you can get air, fuel, and water; three of the four things you'll need on a colony. Mars has a lot of C02. Plants also use C02 to function. This means that a Mars base can use pressurized greenhouses to grow food. On the moon you would have to create a biosphere, which we've never succeeded at on Earth, let alone on the Moon. Also, the atmosphere on Mars provides protection from a lot of radiation. This means that a Lunar base would have to be underground in order to work, making construction that much more difficult.
The 28-day 'day' on the moon presents another problem. Plants have been growing on earth with a 24-hour light-dark cycle for billions of years. To get them to grow like heck during the 14 days of light and then to lay dormant for 14 days of darkness on a lunar greenhouse would be very difficult, not to mention the glass would also have to provide protection from radiation as well as thermal extremes of ~400 degrees. Growing them underground would require having enough light bulbs to last for a few years and a nuclear reactor or solar panels and enough batteries to run for 14 days straight, unless it was a polar station (which limits the amount of space we have to build on considerably). Martian greenhouses could use construction much like terrestrial greenhouses, and with the Arean (Ares, Mars. Get it?) day only about 30 minutes longer than that of Earth's, the plants would adjust quickly. Not to mention that the Martian colonists wouldn't be out of direct communication for half the time they are there.
Finally, there is no atmosphere and very little water on the surface of the moon. Most of the water has been evaporated away. Unless we find a lot of water, there's no economical way we could colonize the moon: I'm not going to pay to ship water to a colony on the moon. Mars has recently been shown to have lots and lots of water, as evidenced by the Free Shrimp Give-Away from Long John Silvers. This is easily processed on the surface into all the things needed for life.
Also, space is such that the total cost of going to the Moon is only slightly smaller than going to Mars, because most of the cost is from getting off of Earth and out of our gravity. And since we have to ship everything to the moon (air, food, water) the cost rises quickly compared to the needs of a self-sufficient Martian colony. Not to mention that Mars is closer to the asteroid belt, which is where all the really great stuff is, like raw materials.
So, as you can see, a Martian colony, though farther away, is a better option than a lunar colony, unless you want a nice, quiet place to set up a major astronomical station. (The far side of the moon is always radio-silent and has lots of ready-made craters for radio telescopes and no atmosphere to interfere with visual/IR/UV observation.)
Space activity actually takes very, very little energy. When you push something in space it doesn't stop moving unless it runs into something or you expend energy to stop it. As for moving about on the surface of a planet, the Mars rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) need 100 watts of continous power a piece. The most expensive part of any space program is the infrastructure and the fuel to get objects off of this planet.
With the same amount of energy that you send equipment to a nearby meteor, you could have simply extracted these resources from the earth itself. Yes, but what about the energy needed to reclaim the land where you took the resources for human habitation? And what about the increasing energy that is being used to extract ever more rare material? Is it more efficient to dig two miles into the earth to get at gold ore than to launch a robotic spacecraft toward a gold-bearing asteroid and send some home? And what about cleaning up the mercury that's used in processing gold ore? Or reclaiming the mines once they are out of easily-retrievable ore? And protecting the environment around the mines?
Not pursuing space resources is very short-sighted. Why wait until resources are nigh-exhausted on Earth (which they one day will be) to develop the technologies to mine asteroids and planets?
Mars is a lot cheaper and a lot better for making a base on than the moon, for a lot of reasons that my current work schedule won't let me elaborate on right now! Maybe later...
I think this would be an excellent idea. I'm new to my current organization, and have no way to find out information except for the rather time-consuming process of calling/emailing/asking people. And when I do find something out, I have no way to record it except memory or, if I'm lucky, an email exchange.
Setting up an organization-wide wikipedia for all issues from how the lunchroom works to how to contact payroll to the business logic for a certain process would provide an invaluable resource. And since it's editable by everyone, you don't have to worry about getting it up to MIS to change the Intranet. And authentication could be handled by the current login/password system...
I like it. Thanks for making me look good at the meeting with the new CIO.
To say that we haven't gotten any further than the moon in four decades of manned space flight isn't actually correct. We got to the moon in a little over 8 years of manned space flight (Gagarin was launched April 12 1961, and Apollo 11 landed July 24 1969). We've stagnated since then. And it was passion that got us that far in 8 years. Misdirected, nationalistic passion, yes, but passion nonetheless.
To suggest that we should give up pushing for a goal because it's far off is a strange notion. The less we work for something, the further off it will become, until eventually it will never happen. NASA is an organization without a goal. We accomplished a lot when our goal was the moon, but what is our goal now? To research how frogs respond to zero-g? To sever rat's heads with a zero-g guillotine for $12 million each?
To be an effective entity, one needs well-defined goals with benchmarks. Only then will we have a way to gauge our success.
Great breakthroughs can only come if we are willing to risk the possibility that they will not come. NASA is not in a position to do that precisely because they do not have a goal or the proper structure to let teams make those breakthroughs. As Kennedy said, we have to throw our hat over the wall so that we may have the impetous to climb it. Unfortunately, we got our hat back with Apollo. We need to throw it over again.
You wouldn't want to divert an asteroid to earth orbit. Considering something the size of Dactyl could destroy civilization, we wouldn't want to be sending it's bigger sister hurtling toward us.
Ideally we'd go up, carve a hunk off, and launch it into orbit around Earth. This can be done using simple robots and low energy boosters. Heck, even TNT could provide the oomph to move something of of an asteroidal gravity well. Then gravity would do the rest, pulling it into orbit around Earth. A small steering package would allow the hunk of rock to be steered in transit. If things look bad, it could be redirected to skip off the atmosphere or into the moon. We already have more advanced guidance systems on Maverick missiles, and we're blowing them up.
Nobody is rushing to grab them because it costs too much to get into orbit. Not in terms of technology, but in terms of fuel and infrastructure. If someone developed a way to put things in orbit for, say, $500 per pound (instead of $40,000 per pound), companies wouldn't be so hesitant to get up there.
And to say that the resources are beyond the means of the worlds largest corporations is false. Zubrin has estimated that it would cost $50 billion to send four people to Mars five times over 10 years. Bill Gates is worth $47 billion dollars. If he and the other billionaires donated the same amount, we'd be there already.
The only way launch costs are going to come down is if NASA or the ESA or Russia or China (or all of them) work together to bring the costs down, and quickly. Mass production of a general purpose launch vehicle capable of lifting 100 tons to LEO for a cost of $100,000,000 per launch would bring the price per pound to under $500. Companies would then be able to finance exploratory robotic missions and experiments in harvesting ET materials. And NASA could make a profit on these launches, allowing it to fund its own research.
Instead, NASA is content to dabble in LEO, risking astronauts lives to do zero-gravity experiments in Good Ol' Bricks-n-Wings at a cost of $1.2 billion per launch. All while perpetuating the notion that because space flight is risky, ordinary people shouldn't do it, and even astronauts aren't brave enough to risk their actually lives exploring space.
And unlike America the lure, the promise of a commercial harvest is so much slimmer. Have you any idea what kind of resourcesHave you any idea what kind of resources are in space? Everything you could ever want (Iron, nickel, cobalt, platinum-group metals, He-3) in effectively infinite supply. And because there's no tectonic motions or air resistance (and because we live at the bottom of a gravity well) it costs almost nothing to harvest, and is in extremely pure forms. The value of one asteroid is over $10 TRILLION. How's that return for a $10 billion investment?
The rarest thing in the universe isn't petroleum or gold or diamonds or iridium, it is life.
Once America had been discovered and the seas charted, it was a matter of affordable logistics and courage, not technology, to get people to the US. It isn't a matter of technology. We have the technology *right now* to go to Mars, and colonize it at the same rate as America was colonized in the 1500s. Heck, we could have done it with Apollo-era technology. The chemical reactions for processing Martian and lunar materials have been used for almost a hundred years and are very robust. All it takes is someone willing to take the risk. I'm willing, but I don't have the money. The only reason it takes a major nation-state to foot the bill isn't because the technology is all that expensive, but because the fuel costs are so high. Solve the problem of lifting 100 tons to earth orbit for the cost of electricity, and it's relatively economical. Cost-plus accounting is mostly to blame for the myth that space flight is monetarily expensive.
Why limit ourselves to this planet when we could easily (and cheaply, compared to the cost of blowing each other up) spread throughout the solar system and universe? Once you get to orbit, the cost of going to the moon or mars or anywhere else in terms of energy is very, very cheap. Focus our energies on getting to orbit cheaply and then humanity will take over.
I can imagine that visualization makes it easier for you to add fractions. I, unfortunately, don't work that way. So I end up substitution fractions for decimals, performing the function, then switching back if I'm working with someone who prefers fractions. It's how I always got As on math tests with fractions in school.
1/4 + 1/8 = 0.25 + 0.125 = 0.375 = 3/8
This makes cooking really easy for me because I can scale recipes by moving the number to decimal and multiplying or dividing
1/2 cup * 3 = 0.5 * 3 = 1.5 = 1 1/2 cups
I guess it's just a matter of how you see the world. (And I think it helps that I have a lot of programming experience and am used to storing variable values in *wetware* memory and plugging them into the syntax of a function in my head.)
But I understand the car problem. I had a 13 year old VW that had been fixed by at least 10 different mechanics. It had Torx screws in it in addition to metric and standard bolts and nuts.
Cycling safety is often counter-intuitive. You're more likely to be hit by a car if you cycle on the sidewalk or shoulder (really) than if you cycle in the road. Most accidents happen at junctions; few people are ever hit from behind. Ah, yes, but you are more likely to be shot by someone who is late for work if you ride at 25mph on a 45 mph road with all traffic moving a 65 mph.
Slashdot Mirror
It works on OS X. I'm so tempted to open up my wireless so people can get a big finger when they ping my machines while wardriving.
Dammit, now Gin and Juice will be the theme for the next series.
DAMN YOU BERMAN!!!
I read both articles and didn't see any of this. Sorry about that. But my points still stand: Linux is good, windows bad, Mac Best.
And the idea that poor people don't want to work hard ignores the fact that quite a few working poor bust their asses at two jobs just to get by at the minimum wage, which has lost its meaning when it can't support someone working full time in most parts of the country. If you have to work 80 hours per week to get by or sit on your ass and pick up welfare, what will you do? Raising minimum wage would let people work reasonable hours and stay off of social programs.
And sound card support? Is this all he's grading Linux on? Excuse me, but what about stability or available software. And I've installed Linux a bunch of times, even on machines made by no-name hardware assemblers where I didn't know the manufacturers of any of the hardware, and it all still worked. And all that without having to pay for a single distribution.
So he pays for something he could get for free just so he could have support, and then doesn't use the support when he encounters a problem. Whose fault is that, the distros or his own?
While I admit that there are a few problems with Linux (mostly due to the fact that not enough people use it), hardware compatibility and price aren't any of them.
If you're installing Linux in a commercial environment, where it shines, you're dealing with standard hardware configurations. You can use one system to figure out how to configure it, then put that configuration on your own custom install CD, and produce your own version, customized for your use. *This* is the power of Linux that Windows can never touch. Need a customized version of Windows, it'll cost you way more than your own custom version of Linux.
And he still hasn't told us what brand of sound card he was using. Fancy that.
I'm working on that, too.
The planet isn't going away. We are.
Do disrespect to Mr. Carlin, but I don't want to go away. I realize the planet will be fine without us, but I also realize I don't want us to die out.
People go because they're better at doing things than even the best robot. Maybe not at mining, but definitely at science related stuff, like studying rocks and searching for life.
If you want more reasons why the moon is just a dull rock and why Mars is the best place for an ET colony, check out the Mars Direct Home Page.
The moon suffers from three main issues. First, it has no atmosphere. Second, it has a 28 day light-dark cycle, and third, it is very resource poor, from a survival standpoint.
Not having an atmosphere is a big problem. Experiments have shown that C02 can be cheaply made into hydrogen and oxygen, with little more than hydrogen feed stock. From hydrogen and oxygen you can get air, fuel, and water; three of the four things you'll need on a colony. Mars has a lot of C02. Plants also use C02 to function. This means that a Mars base can use pressurized greenhouses to grow food. On the moon you would have to create a biosphere, which we've never succeeded at on Earth, let alone on the Moon. Also, the atmosphere on Mars provides protection from a lot of radiation. This means that a Lunar base would have to be underground in order to work, making construction that much more difficult.
The 28-day 'day' on the moon presents another problem. Plants have been growing on earth with a 24-hour light-dark cycle for billions of years. To get them to grow like heck during the 14 days of light and then to lay dormant for 14 days of darkness on a lunar greenhouse would be very difficult, not to mention the glass would also have to provide protection from radiation as well as thermal extremes of ~400 degrees. Growing them underground would require having enough light bulbs to last for a few years and a nuclear reactor or solar panels and enough batteries to run for 14 days straight, unless it was a polar station (which limits the amount of space we have to build on considerably). Martian greenhouses could use construction much like terrestrial greenhouses, and with the Arean (Ares, Mars. Get it?) day only about 30 minutes longer than that of Earth's, the plants would adjust quickly. Not to mention that the Martian colonists wouldn't be out of direct communication for half the time they are there.
Finally, there is no atmosphere and very little water on the surface of the moon. Most of the water has been evaporated away. Unless we find a lot of water, there's no economical way we could colonize the moon: I'm not going to pay to ship water to a colony on the moon. Mars has recently been shown to have lots and lots of water, as evidenced by the Free Shrimp Give-Away from Long John Silvers. This is easily processed on the surface into all the things needed for life.
Also, space is such that the total cost of going to the Moon is only slightly smaller than going to Mars, because most of the cost is from getting off of Earth and out of our gravity. And since we have to ship everything to the moon (air, food, water) the cost rises quickly compared to the needs of a self-sufficient Martian colony. Not to mention that Mars is closer to the asteroid belt, which is where all the really great stuff is, like raw materials.
So, as you can see, a Martian colony, though farther away, is a better option than a lunar colony, unless you want a nice, quiet place to set up a major astronomical station. (The far side of the moon is always radio-silent and has lots of ready-made craters for radio telescopes and no atmosphere to interfere with visual/IR/UV observation.)
With the same amount of energy that you send equipment to a nearby meteor, you could have simply extracted these resources from the earth itself.
Yes, but what about the energy needed to reclaim the land where you took the resources for human habitation? And what about the increasing energy that is being used to extract ever more rare material? Is it more efficient to dig two miles into the earth to get at gold ore than to launch a robotic spacecraft toward a gold-bearing asteroid and send some home? And what about cleaning up the mercury that's used in processing gold ore? Or reclaiming the mines once they are out of easily-retrievable ore? And protecting the environment around the mines?
Not pursuing space resources is very short-sighted. Why wait until resources are nigh-exhausted on Earth (which they one day will be) to develop the technologies to mine asteroids and planets?
Mars is a lot cheaper and a lot better for making a base on than the moon, for a lot of reasons that my current work schedule won't let me elaborate on right now! Maybe later...
Setting up an organization-wide wikipedia for all issues from how the lunchroom works to how to contact payroll to the business logic for a certain process would provide an invaluable resource. And since it's editable by everyone, you don't have to worry about getting it up to MIS to change the Intranet. And authentication could be handled by the current login/password system...
I like it. Thanks for making me look good at the meeting with the new CIO.
To suggest that we should give up pushing for a goal because it's far off is a strange notion. The less we work for something, the further off it will become, until eventually it will never happen. NASA is an organization without a goal. We accomplished a lot when our goal was the moon, but what is our goal now? To research how frogs respond to zero-g? To sever rat's heads with a zero-g guillotine for $12 million each?
To be an effective entity, one needs well-defined goals with benchmarks. Only then will we have a way to gauge our success.
Great breakthroughs can only come if we are willing to risk the possibility that they will not come. NASA is not in a position to do that precisely because they do not have a goal or the proper structure to let teams make those breakthroughs. As Kennedy said, we have to throw our hat over the wall so that we may have the impetous to climb it. Unfortunately, we got our hat back with Apollo. We need to throw it over again.
I'd be more than willing if I had the money; I'd already be there.
Ideally we'd go up, carve a hunk off, and launch it into orbit around Earth. This can be done using simple robots and low energy boosters. Heck, even TNT could provide the oomph to move something of of an asteroidal gravity well. Then gravity would do the rest, pulling it into orbit around Earth. A small steering package would allow the hunk of rock to be steered in transit. If things look bad, it could be redirected to skip off the atmosphere or into the moon. We already have more advanced guidance systems on Maverick missiles, and we're blowing them up.
And to say that the resources are beyond the means of the worlds largest corporations is false. Zubrin has estimated that it would cost $50 billion to send four people to Mars five times over 10 years. Bill Gates is worth $47 billion dollars. If he and the other billionaires donated the same amount, we'd be there already.
The only way launch costs are going to come down is if NASA or the ESA or Russia or China (or all of them) work together to bring the costs down, and quickly. Mass production of a general purpose launch vehicle capable of lifting 100 tons to LEO for a cost of $100,000,000 per launch would bring the price per pound to under $500. Companies would then be able to finance exploratory robotic missions and experiments in harvesting ET materials. And NASA could make a profit on these launches, allowing it to fund its own research.
Instead, NASA is content to dabble in LEO, risking astronauts lives to do zero-gravity experiments in Good Ol' Bricks-n-Wings at a cost of $1.2 billion per launch. All while perpetuating the notion that because space flight is risky, ordinary people shouldn't do it, and even astronauts aren't brave enough to risk their actually lives exploring space.
No, it's from the first book I linked to. And that's assuming an average sized ferrous asteroid like Ida.
Have you any idea what kind of resourcesHave you any idea what kind of resources are in space? Everything you could ever want (Iron, nickel, cobalt, platinum-group metals, He-3) in effectively infinite supply. And because there's no tectonic motions or air resistance (and because we live at the bottom of a gravity well) it costs almost nothing to harvest, and is in extremely pure forms. The value of one asteroid is over $10 TRILLION. How's that return for a $10 billion investment?
The rarest thing in the universe isn't petroleum or gold or diamonds or iridium, it is life.
Once America had been discovered and the seas charted, it was a matter of affordable logistics and courage, not technology, to get people to the US.
It isn't a matter of technology. We have the technology *right now* to go to Mars, and colonize it at the same rate as America was colonized in the 1500s. Heck, we could have done it with Apollo-era technology. The chemical reactions for processing Martian and lunar materials have been used for almost a hundred years and are very robust. All it takes is someone willing to take the risk. I'm willing, but I don't have the money. The only reason it takes a major nation-state to foot the bill isn't because the technology is all that expensive, but because the fuel costs are so high. Solve the problem of lifting 100 tons to earth orbit for the cost of electricity, and it's relatively economical. Cost-plus accounting is mostly to blame for the myth that space flight is monetarily expensive.
Why limit ourselves to this planet when we could easily (and cheaply, compared to the cost of blowing each other up) spread throughout the solar system and universe? Once you get to orbit, the cost of going to the moon or mars or anywhere else in terms of energy is very, very cheap. Focus our energies on getting to orbit cheaply and then humanity will take over.
For more information check out Mining the Sky and The Case for Mars. And for more information about the best way to get to Mars, check out Mars Direct.
I think Mr. Bradbury is simplifying the topic. Most people hear "Columbus" and think either "discovered America" or "that other city in Ohio."
I live in one of those parallel universes. Please stop shining laser beams in my eyes.
1/4 + 1/8 = 0.25 + 0.125 = 0.375 = 3/8
This makes cooking really easy for me because I can scale recipes by moving the number to decimal and multiplying or dividing
1/2 cup * 3 = 0.5 * 3 = 1.5 = 1 1/2 cups
I guess it's just a matter of how you see the world. (And I think it helps that I have a lot of programming experience and am used to storing variable values in *wetware* memory and plugging them into the syntax of a function in my head.)
But I understand the car problem. I had a 13 year old VW that had been fixed by at least 10 different mechanics. It had Torx screws in it in addition to metric and standard bolts and nuts.
They do have showers... at the main facility. I work at a satellite facility that's about 5 miles away.
He actually put it in our greenhouse, which got into the 90s on sunny days in the winter.
Cycling safety is often counter-intuitive. You're more likely to be hit by a car if you cycle on the sidewalk or shoulder (really) than if you cycle in the road. Most accidents happen at junctions; few people are ever hit from behind.
Ah, yes, but you are more likely to be shot by someone who is late for work if you ride at 25mph on a 45 mph road with all traffic moving a 65 mph.