Tell congress we're under attack from space A-rabs and we need surveillance equipment pronto. We also need drones to go up there and find out what's going on. And manned craft as well just for good measure in case the drones miss anything.
Slashdot has interesting and informative posts on many topics, but I don't know why everything goes to hell the moment India is mentioned..
1) It doesn't take a hugeass rocket to send an unmanned probe to Mars. The amount of energy needed once you're in the right orbit to escape earth's gravity is minimal. So it's not that crazy to imagine India doing it given that they already got a probe to reach the moon. It's the next step, not a massive leap. Putting a lander on the moon or Mars, or manned spaceflight would be a much bigger step. So the figure of 100 million is not outlandish and it's very possible and a logical progression given the current technical capabilities of the Indian space program. In fact, India may well be able to use one of their existing rockets for this, the hard part is making sure interplanetary probes get captured into the orbit of the target planet, instead of missing it completely (something that's not that hard to do and multiple countries have aimed and missed in the past, I remember a Mercury probe that ended up orbiting the sun).
2) Yes, India has overwhelming amounts of corruption. The space program is one of the better run organizations though.
3) Even though India is a poor country, due to the sheer size of the population the amount of money the government controls is huge. Not USA/China huge but at least the size of large European economies. 100 million is pocket change. And not spending it on a research mission to Mars that can help advance technology in the country doesn't mean it would go towards feeding hungry people. Just like reducing 100 million of the defence budget in the US won't put that money into schools or universities or healthcare or whatever.
4) It has little to do with the slowing Indian economy (even if it grows at 5% that's far more than most other countries in the world right now).
5) Talk of burning cars or powerless villages is just bigoted racist arrogant illogical bullshit.
Preach it brother! Every time I see a post about a technical development in India or any other developing country I just brace myself for the usual tidal wave of ignorant racist pricks and Michael Scott/David Brent aspiring comedians who think it's okay to poke fun at dark skinned people who talk funny. "Oh look at the little wogs trying to be all advanced and civilized like us, aren't they adorable?" "They need to solve all their poverty problems first before they start exploring space." Makes me sick.
Supposedly 30% of their households don't have electricity and the remainder suffer from regular blackouts, and they want to go to Mars? How about a simpler mission first: get from one side of Delhi to the other without hours in traffic.
LOL!
Priceless. Better abolish NASA until the travel times across LA are cut back a little, eh?
Not only that. It's clear that india is a country how have not anymore any problems to solve like enegy production and distribution, rising education level in the poorest places of the country... They should spend their money to make india a place where i would love to emigrate than to spend it for the glory to be the first to send humans on mars.
Jesus Christ will you people give it a fucking rest?
You're responding to a post about a:
(*) Technical innovation in a developing country ( ) Product shipped to a developing market ( ) General discussion about IT in the developing world
The location is:
( ) Africa (*) India ( ) Bangladesh ( ) China ( ) Somewhere else in Asia ( ) South America ( ) Central America ( ) Other _unspecified_
You're objecting to it on the basis that:
(*) Poverty hasn't been eliminated in that country yet ( ) American jobs will be lost
Your argument is bogus because:
(*) Poverty hasn't been eliminated in the developed world either, that doesn't mean we should halt all technological research (*) This will not adversely affect any efforts to alleviate poverty (*) This will help to alleviate poverty ( ) Poverty in that country isn't as widespread as you say it is ( ) The US does not have a divine right to keep all the cool jobs
The colors in this image are not what a human standing on Mars would see — the presence of dust in the atmosphere would make the scene appear much redder. Instead, the pictures have been white-balanced to show how it would appear under typical Earth lighting conditions. This will help the Earth-centered geologists who are trained to recognize features based on how they look using more familiar light.
The "Windows 8 belongs in the toilet" joke was funny the first time, but please do not allow this thread to be polluted by a billion repetitions of it when we're discussing such a serious issue. The "redundant" tag is there, please use it. I had to do a considerable amount of scrolling to find some legitimate, informative and relevant discussion.
Honestly, I think the karma system for "funny" posts needs to be re-examined. The karma whores trying to be comedians are making/. less informative by the day.
Your comment was not censored, it's on the article, and I'm glad to see you showing yourself here so that I can mock you.
He isn't pushing for a better design of toilet for the UK. He's pushing for a better design of toilet in the developing world.
And yes, your sanitation system does need electricity because your crap (including the stuff you're talking) goes to a waste treatment plant that depends on electrically driven machinery to operate. It doesn't just sit in your septic tank and decompose, by your own admission septic tanks have to be emptied at regular intervals by men in tanker lorries.
And a lot of people in the developing world don't live near water, so your randomly-generated 60% figure is irrelevant.
Now go back and read the article properly this time before posting further retarded comments and making a complete and utter dick of yourself.
That last link in the summary purports to link to an article explaining why the legal online film market is hopeless. All it links to is a tweet saying that the legal online film market is hopeless, and in turn links to the BBC report about this conviction. There is no evidence presented to back up the claim that the legal online film market is "hopeless", whatever that means.
If anyone has a link to a better article backing up this claim, I'm all ears.
Nukes are becoming increasingly easy to produce. Does that mean we should just give up and say "Fuck it, everyone's gonna have one, so we might as well have one too"?
Good weather. Anglophone. Fun people. Healthy culture. Melbourne was just voted the most livable city in the world again. Economy booming because of natural resources being mined out of the ground and sent to China. All you really need to adapt to is driving on the left.
I hear what others say about Scandinavia, and those countries truly have their shit together, but I'd find the long dark winters to be very depressing.
Nukes don't kill people, people kill people. If we ban certain countries from getting nukes, they're going to get nukes anyway. All that bans on nuclear weapons do is prevent law-abiding countries from getting their own nuclear deterrents, so only the bad guys end up armed. The world will be a lot safer with more nukes, not less. Nukes keep people safer. In fact everyone should carry them as their patriotic duty.
People don't come to Slashdot for the stories. They're badly written, usually days behind the mainstream and other tech media and frequently misrepresent stuff.
People come to Slashdot for the comments.
I don't want to read comments from people too fucking stupid to use Google to work out how to set up a proxy. I don't expect regular readers of Slashdot to need to use Google to find out how to set up a proxy.
I don't understand why this story exists. I'm reading it for the comedy value, and so that I can help feed back to Slashdot admin that dumbing down the content on Slashdot will be a great way of killing the site.
Ooooh, you're so superior! Look at you! I'll bet there never was a time when you had to learn how to do a Hello World prompt.
Some people might find this useful, so let's not get too carried away with our technical superiority. If you don't find the story informative, don't read it.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people on messageboards will weight in on a topic that they're not interested in just to say "I'm not interested in this topic." On/. we seem to have people who do nothing but post inane comments about how they're not interested in a particular story, usually in the Idle section. I find it amusing because clicking two buttons to post a reply was an even bigger waste of their time than the few seconds they spent reading the summary.
go watch Lawrence Lessig talk about "How money corrupts Congress, and a plan to stop it."
Can you give me the Cliff Notes? I'm all ears. The military industrial complex has spread itself into so many congressional districts that I don't see how their lobbying power can ever be blunted.
No. Is wasting money on the machinery of death okay with you? Frankly I think that answering the greatest question mankind has ever asked, "are we alone in the universe?", is something worth spending a bit of money on.
From what I've read, the new Total Recall movie doesn't even happen on Mars.
WTF!?
Then it ain't Total Recall. If I can't see a mutant 3-titted Martian hooker in cheap biodome light, then I just don't see the point in watching that movie...
The original story (written in a book) was not set on Mars. Therefore Arnie's Total Recall was not Total Recall.
However, the collapse of the Soviet Union, which even the CIA missed predicting, made the whole U.N. running the world to avoid nuclear war thing moot. Meanwhile, the current situation in Syria and the ineffectiveness of the U.N. in dealing with it only illustrates how far off the mark he was in predicting a world at peace.
Au contraire, with India and Pakistan in possession of nukes, and the technology in increasing danger of falling into the wrong hands, I would say that international bodies like the UN are needed more than ever. The UN was never intended to "run the world" anyway, that's just redneck paranoia. The UN is about providing a forum and framework in which nations can discuss their concerns and make them known without resorting to conflict as the first option. There's nothing "moot" about the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Sad thing is, "the industry" will say this is a small price to pay, and NASA being a government agency will not pursue it.
Quoth TFA: "NASA, which has a powerful presence on YouTube, likely contacted Google directly for help getting the video reinstated. But most YouTube uploaders don’t have that luxury."
It is up to the individuals, not the tube, to decide what is fact and what is not. If they chose the tube, and the tube is wrong, then the individual is just as guilty as the tube.
Besides, who gets their news from the TV anymore when there is the internet?
You know what really grinds my gears? Bank of America customer support.
You go into their system when you call them up, you enter your credentials to prove that you are who you say you are, fight your way through the menu system to a human being, and when you finally speak to someone you have to verbally repeat what you just did through the automated system. What's the point of a machine asking you to enter your information if they're not going to use it? Then every time you get passed to another person you have to start from the top, prove that you are who you say you are, and begin your story from the beginning again. I had one nightmare call where I had to go through this about five different times, including two with the same department because they kept passing me around like a soccer ball because they hadn't a clue who in their corporation does what.
Contrast that with HSBC bank in the UK.
Call them up, enter your account number, it then asks for two digits from your security number (sometimes it's the first and last, sometimes it's the second and third, and so on). The menu is easy to use, and you get through to a person very quickly. As soon as they pick up (within seconds) the first thing the say is "Hi Mr G______ how can I help?" They know my name because my details popped up on their screen before they picked up. If they do need to pass me on to someone else, they put me on hold, contact the other department, explain the situation to them, and then they come back to me saying "Okay Mr G_______, I'm now going to pass you on to Kevin who's going to take it from here." Kevin then says "Hi Mr G_______ I understand that you're trying to do x, y and z, so here we go..."
What can take an hour with BoA can be a five minute job with HSBC. No repeated re-entering of my details, no starting the story from the top with every person I speak to, and people who actually know not only what they're doing, but also know what other people in the company are doing. And that was my experience with HSBC over 10 years ago when I lived in the UK.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell congress we're under attack from space A-rabs and we need surveillance equipment pronto. We also need drones to go up there and find out what's going on. And manned craft as well just for good measure in case the drones miss anything.
Slashdot has interesting and informative posts on many topics, but I don't know why everything goes to hell the moment India is mentioned..
1) It doesn't take a hugeass rocket to send an unmanned probe to Mars. The amount of energy needed once you're in the right orbit to escape earth's gravity is minimal. So it's not that crazy to imagine India doing it given that they already got a probe to reach the moon. It's the next step, not a massive leap. Putting a lander on the moon or Mars, or manned spaceflight would be a much bigger step. So the figure of 100 million is not outlandish and it's very possible and a logical progression given the current technical capabilities of the Indian space program. In fact, India may well be able to use one of their existing rockets for this, the hard part is making sure interplanetary probes get captured into the orbit of the target planet, instead of missing it completely (something that's not that hard to do and multiple countries have aimed and missed in the past, I remember a Mercury probe that ended up orbiting the sun).
2) Yes, India has overwhelming amounts of corruption. The space program is one of the better run organizations though.
3) Even though India is a poor country, due to the sheer size of the population the amount of money the government controls is huge. Not USA/China huge but at least the size of large European economies. 100 million is pocket change. And not spending it on a research mission to Mars that can help advance technology in the country doesn't mean it would go towards feeding hungry people. Just like reducing 100 million of the defence budget in the US won't put that money into schools or universities or healthcare or whatever.
4) It has little to do with the slowing Indian economy (even if it grows at 5% that's far more than most other countries in the world right now).
5) Talk of burning cars or powerless villages is just bigoted racist arrogant illogical bullshit.
Preach it brother! Every time I see a post about a technical development in India or any other developing country I just brace myself for the usual tidal wave of ignorant racist pricks and Michael Scott/David Brent aspiring comedians who think it's okay to poke fun at dark skinned people who talk funny. "Oh look at the little wogs trying to be all advanced and civilized like us, aren't they adorable?" "They need to solve all their poverty problems first before they start exploring space." Makes me sick.
Supposedly 30% of their households don't have electricity and the remainder suffer from regular blackouts, and they want to go to Mars?
How about a simpler mission first: get from one side of Delhi to the other without hours in traffic.
LOL!
Priceless. Better abolish NASA until the travel times across LA are cut back a little, eh?
Not only that. It's clear that india is a country how have not anymore any problems to solve like enegy production and distribution, rising education level in the poorest places of the country... They should spend their money to make india a place where i would love to emigrate than to spend it for the glory to be the first to send humans on mars.
Jesus Christ will you people give it a fucking rest?
You're responding to a post about a:
(*) Technical innovation in a developing country
( ) Product shipped to a developing market
( ) General discussion about IT in the developing world
The location is:
( ) Africa
(*) India
( ) Bangladesh
( ) China
( ) Somewhere else in Asia
( ) South America
( ) Central America
( ) Other _unspecified_
You're objecting to it on the basis that:
(*) Poverty hasn't been eliminated in that country yet
( ) American jobs will be lost
Your argument is bogus because:
(*) Poverty hasn't been eliminated in the developed world either, that doesn't mean we should halt all technological research
(*) This will not adversely affect any efforts to alleviate poverty
(*) This will help to alleviate poverty
( ) Poverty in that country isn't as widespread as you say it is
( ) The US does not have a divine right to keep all the cool jobs
Quoth TFA:
The colors in this image are not what a human standing on Mars would see — the presence of dust in the atmosphere would make the scene appear much redder. Instead, the pictures have been white-balanced to show how it would appear under typical Earth lighting conditions. This will help the Earth-centered geologists who are trained to recognize features based on how they look using more familiar light.
The "Windows 8 belongs in the toilet" joke was funny the first time, but please do not allow this thread to be polluted by a billion repetitions of it when we're discussing such a serious issue. The "redundant" tag is there, please use it. I had to do a considerable amount of scrolling to find some legitimate, informative and relevant discussion.
Honestly, I think the karma system for "funny" posts needs to be re-examined. The karma whores trying to be comedians are making /. less informative by the day.
Your comment was not censored, it's on the article, and I'm glad to see you showing yourself here so that I can mock you.
He isn't pushing for a better design of toilet for the UK. He's pushing for a better design of toilet in the developing world.
And yes, your sanitation system does need electricity because your crap (including the stuff you're talking) goes to a waste treatment plant that depends on electrically driven machinery to operate. It doesn't just sit in your septic tank and decompose, by your own admission septic tanks have to be emptied at regular intervals by men in tanker lorries.
And a lot of people in the developing world don't live near water, so your randomly-generated 60% figure is irrelevant.
Now go back and read the article properly this time before posting further retarded comments and making a complete and utter dick of yourself.
Maybe so, but if I was confronted with this, I would be quite baffled. I mean, 38 buttons on a toilet control panel?
I'm betting a lot of Western visitors find themselves with a big "what the heck do I do now" moment. :-P
Whatever you do, don't press the button marked "ATR". It's the Automatic Tampon Remover.
That last link in the summary purports to link to an article explaining why the legal online film market is hopeless. All it links to is a tweet saying that the legal online film market is hopeless, and in turn links to the BBC report about this conviction. There is no evidence presented to back up the claim that the legal online film market is "hopeless", whatever that means.
If anyone has a link to a better article backing up this claim, I'm all ears.
Nukes are becoming increasingly easy to produce. Does that mean we should just give up and say "Fuck it, everyone's gonna have one, so we might as well have one too"?
It's expensive and time consuming with unpredictable returns.
"Time consuming"? This isn't the ocean liner era, this is the jet age! Leave Heathrow and 13 hours later you're in San Francisco.
When I left England I was excited as all hell about moving to California. The excitement has never 100% worn off, and I've been here 12 years now.
Australia. See my post below.
Good weather. Anglophone. Fun people. Healthy culture. Melbourne was just voted the most livable city in the world again. Economy booming because of natural resources being mined out of the ground and sent to China. All you really need to adapt to is driving on the left.
I hear what others say about Scandinavia, and those countries truly have their shit together, but I'd find the long dark winters to be very depressing.
Nukes don't kill people, people kill people. If we ban certain countries from getting nukes, they're going to get nukes anyway. All that bans on nuclear weapons do is prevent law-abiding countries from getting their own nuclear deterrents, so only the bad guys end up armed. The world will be a lot safer with more nukes, not less. Nukes keep people safer. In fact everyone should carry them as their patriotic duty.
Yes. Smug. Arrogant. Superior. I'll bet you get a huge erection from posting about your superiority on /.
People don't come to Slashdot for the stories. They're badly written, usually days behind the mainstream and other tech media and frequently misrepresent stuff.
People come to Slashdot for the comments.
I don't want to read comments from people too fucking stupid to use Google to work out how to set up a proxy. I don't expect regular readers of Slashdot to need to use Google to find out how to set up a proxy.
I don't understand why this story exists. I'm reading it for the comedy value, and so that I can help feed back to Slashdot admin that dumbing down the content on Slashdot will be a great way of killing the site.
Ooooh, you're so superior! Look at you! I'll bet there never was a time when you had to learn how to do a Hello World prompt.
Some people might find this useful, so let's not get too carried away with our technical superiority. If you don't find the story informative, don't read it.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people on messageboards will weight in on a topic that they're not interested in just to say "I'm not interested in this topic." On /. we seem to have people who do nothing but post inane comments about how they're not interested in a particular story, usually in the Idle section. I find it amusing because clicking two buttons to post a reply was an even bigger waste of their time than the few seconds they spent reading the summary.
go watch Lawrence Lessig talk about "How money corrupts Congress, and a plan to stop it."
Can you give me the Cliff Notes? I'm all ears. The military industrial complex has spread itself into so many congressional districts that I don't see how their lobbying power can ever be blunted.
No. Is wasting money on the machinery of death okay with you? Frankly I think that answering the greatest question mankind has ever asked, "are we alone in the universe?", is something worth spending a bit of money on.
Why spend 2.5 billion on NASA when you can buy a few more Solyndra's.
Why spend 2.5 billion on NASA when you can buy one B2 stealth bomber?
From what I've read, the new Total Recall movie doesn't even happen on Mars.
WTF!?
Then it ain't Total Recall. If I can't see a mutant 3-titted Martian hooker in cheap biodome light, then I just don't see the point in watching that movie...
The original story (written in a book) was not set on Mars. Therefore Arnie's Total Recall was not Total Recall.
However, the collapse of the Soviet Union, which even the CIA missed predicting, made the whole U.N. running the world to avoid nuclear war thing moot. Meanwhile, the current situation in Syria and the ineffectiveness of the U.N. in dealing with it only illustrates how far off the mark he was in predicting a world at peace.
Au contraire, with India and Pakistan in possession of nukes, and the technology in increasing danger of falling into the wrong hands, I would say that international bodies like the UN are needed more than ever. The UN was never intended to "run the world" anyway, that's just redneck paranoia. The UN is about providing a forum and framework in which nations can discuss their concerns and make them known without resorting to conflict as the first option. There's nothing "moot" about the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Sad thing is, "the industry" will say this is a small price to pay, and NASA being a government agency will not pursue it.
Quoth TFA: "NASA, which has a powerful presence on YouTube, likely contacted Google directly for help getting the video reinstated. But most YouTube uploaders don’t have that luxury."
TL;DR
Tinfoil a little too tight on the head today?
It is up to the individuals, not the tube, to decide what is fact and what is not. If they chose the tube, and the tube is wrong, then the individual is just as guilty as the tube.
Besides, who gets their news from the TV anymore when there is the internet?
Whoosh!
You know what really grinds my gears? Bank of America customer support.
You go into their system when you call them up, you enter your credentials to prove that you are who you say you are, fight your way through the menu system to a human being, and when you finally speak to someone you have to verbally repeat what you just did through the automated system. What's the point of a machine asking you to enter your information if they're not going to use it? Then every time you get passed to another person you have to start from the top, prove that you are who you say you are, and begin your story from the beginning again. I had one nightmare call where I had to go through this about five different times, including two with the same department because they kept passing me around like a soccer ball because they hadn't a clue who in their corporation does what.
Contrast that with HSBC bank in the UK.
Call them up, enter your account number, it then asks for two digits from your security number (sometimes it's the first and last, sometimes it's the second and third, and so on). The menu is easy to use, and you get through to a person very quickly. As soon as they pick up (within seconds) the first thing the say is "Hi Mr G______ how can I help?" They know my name because my details popped up on their screen before they picked up. If they do need to pass me on to someone else, they put me on hold, contact the other department, explain the situation to them, and then they come back to me saying "Okay Mr G_______, I'm now going to pass you on to Kevin who's going to take it from here." Kevin then says "Hi Mr G_______ I understand that you're trying to do x, y and z, so here we go..."
What can take an hour with BoA can be a five minute job with HSBC. No repeated re-entering of my details, no starting the story from the top with every person I speak to, and people who actually know not only what they're doing, but also know what other people in the company are doing. And that was my experience with HSBC over 10 years ago when I lived in the UK.