So are they now going to go after Amazon.co.uk for refusing to sell me (in Italy) electronics? The fact is that corporations always have, and always will, do what they can to restrain free trade (DVD region coding, anyone?), while at the same time the politicians they've bought and paid for are telling us we should fall to our knees and worship the free market and its magic, invisible hand.
If I were Apple I would want one store - worldwide. Good luck with that.
Well, I wanted to add my snarky comment (as a Mac user living in Europe) but the Feedback button just leads to a server error... now why would that be? Ah, well. Here in Italy, downloading files is not illegal as long as you're not doing it for profit, according to a recent court decision. That decision may not make much sense even to me, but at least it means I no longer have to watch Italy's appalling public television, a trackless desert of infantilising mediocrity. Now let's see what Azureus has got for me this evening...
Commerical remote sensing is quite distinct from the kind of Earth Observation TFA is talking about. The commercial business concentrates for the most part on very high resolution imagery, 1 metre pixel size or less -- optical for now, radar too in the near future -- while the kind of science data offered by the Landsat programme, for example, or ESA's ERS/Envisat, has limited commercial value (much of it is available free or at nominal cost to qualified researchers -- or anyone who knows where to look). With Landsat 7 ailing, and Landsat 5 older than most Slashdot contributors, the U.S.'s failure to ensure a Landsat continuity mission after 35 years of uninterrupted data is idiotic, and hopes that this continuity mission can be fobbed off on commercial operators even more so. A useful analogy would be high-energy physics research, or astronomy -- these are pure science and cannot show any immediate commercial return. Meanwhile the Bush administration ties up funds for dumb stunts like the Moon base or a manned mission to Mars, projects with a very poor scientific rationale and such limited feasibility that a non-gambling man like myself would happily bet they will never come to fruition.
...we're Americans. With a capital "A", huh? And you know what that means? Do you? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world.
What Spirit and Opportunity have accomplished in nearly three years on Mars is roughly what an average field geologist could have accomplished in about three weeks
That may be true, but how much would it have cost to get the geologist there - and back - alive, compared to the robots. Resources are always finite, especially with a government and culture dead set on squandering them on futile wars, tax breaks and automobiles.
I'm know, too, that early robotic missions to the Moon in the 60s could well have failed to begin with, then they would have succeeded.
And I know the ISS is not finished - it never will be, as originally conceived - and in the meantime all those resources, not to mention lives, poured into the station and the shuttle could have been spent on real science, not least on robotics research. I have no time for the view that NASA is somehow in the PR business, not the the science and exploration business. If people need to be entertained, they can watch TV, or even read a book.
No doubt we'll go to Mars one day, accelerating all the way. And our leaders - or yours anyway - will fight a war on the Moon for control of the Helium3 deposits.
I'd fly into space tomorrow if someone offered me a ride. It would be wonderful... But this talk of going to Mars now is as if Columbus had planned to swim to India.
We should learn from the builders of the great medieval cathedrals, which took generations to build, and the master masons who designed them never saw their work finished. They believed they were working for the glory of God; today many of us doubt the meaning of that notion, but the buildings remain as monuments to the glory of human imagination, courage and energy. These days, as Carrire Fisher wrote: "Instant gratification takes too long."
Sure, manned space exploration is romantic and exciting, but manned missions to the moon accomplished nothing beyond nationalistic PR that culdn't have been done better by machines, and the ISS has produced no science worthy of its staggering cost. We will inhabit space one day but for now current talk of manned Moon bases and Mars missions are not like trying to run before we can walk, they're like trying to fly before we can stand up. There are two little machines working away on Mars still that would agree with me. Read Bob Park http://www.bobpark.org/ for detailed, expert reasoning.
Of course it's not rocket science - it's easy-peasy. But if you've ever provided technical support to the seriously technically challenged - and I work with some - you'd know that diagnosing and fixing such an elementary problem is way beyond many otherwise bright people, and given that the machine was still under warranty, they were quite right to make sure there really was a problem and I wasn't going to make things worse. Blindly shipping parts to anyone who asks wouldn't be very clever.
Another good experience: the optical drive on my G5 desktop went south a few weeks after delivery. The dealer wanted to take the whole machine back and would have kept it probably for weeks, to say nothing of the hassle of getting it there (I'm in Italy, where efficiency is not the watchword...) It took a very long conversation with a customer service guy - I think in Ireland - to convince him that I knew what I was talking about and was capable of swapping out the drive, but they sent me a new drive and post-paid packaging to send the old one back - 2 days and I was back in business.
On the other hand I once had to call Customer Service at Quark: I still get mad thinking about it and I switched to InDesign years ago.
I'd like to put in a plug for Russel Hoban's Riddley Walker , while we're on the subjectof SF literary masterpieces. It's interesting that the literary establishment, which tends to scorn SF (not without reason - most of it really is rubbish), will still take to heart a 'serious' writer who strays into the genre. Even Nabokov wrote SF, but while detective stories can get reviewed in the heavyweight papers, SF is still routinely ignored.
True, but at least the market demonstrably exists...
"So we followed the Gods of the Market, and sometimes word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its ice-floe, or the lights had gone out in Rome" - Kipling
I know, let's privatize the government! Let all those congressmen and senators recover their salaries and expenses from the marketplace -- those unable to show a profit, go to the wall. This is only half a joke: it's what the lobbying industry is working towards anyway. But this blind worship of the free market is as silly and in the long run as destructive as the blind worship of all those other gods.
"They denied that wishes were horses, they denied that pigs had wings,
But we followed the Gods of the Market, that promised these marvellous things." - Kipling
Orbital Science's Pegasusalready does this - launched from Tristar flying much lower and slower than this
XB70 thing is supposed to have done. Can somebody who really knows about this do the actual math for us?
There's no brilliance, beyond pitching the book at the perfect level for an audience of illiterates. It not only celebrates a perfect ignorance of every subject it touches -- art history, church history, even aviation -- and is shot through with superstition (pace the Roma Catholic objectors, it actually swallows the Christian myth whole, merely adding a little sexual and dynastic speculation), but it is astonishingly badly written and constructed. The book's huge success is a rebuke to Western Civilsation. Holy Blood is no better. Personally, for once I hope the lawsuit goes on for ever and the lawyers get all the money.
Actually, helping to make the US a world 'superpower' is what NASA is for.
I take your point. The sad thing is that NASA also does, or did, a lot of important science,
(by mistake? for no good reason?) and that is being pushed aside:
Delayed indefinitely - the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), a mission to detect and study Earth-like planets
Delayed by about three years - the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), designed to map stars with unprecedented accuracy and search for planets slightly larger than Earth will now launch no earlier than 2015
Cancelled - four to six 1.8-metre "outrigger" telescopes designed to bolster the twin 10-metre Keck telescopes in Hawaii. The outriggers would have searched for planets and imaged newborn stars
Delayed indefinitely - the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a 2.5-metre infrared telescope built into a Boeing 747 plane, will be put under "review" because it is behind schedule. It has been given no funding for the foreseeable future
Delayed indefinitely - NASA's cosmology programme, "Beyond Einstein", is under review. Two of its missions - LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna), to search for ripples in space-time called gravitational waves, and Constellation-X, to study black holes - will be delayed indefinitely
Cancelled/Delayed indefinitely - Mars research has been cut by $243.3 million to $700.2 million. This reflects the cancellation or indefinite postponement of missions such as the Mars Sample Return Mission and the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter
Cut - solar system research, largely in astrobiology, has been cut by $96.5
million to $273.6 million
All this to pay for a shuttle system already slated for retirement, a Space
Station with no clear mission, a return to the moon, which will be fun but little
more than a stunt, and a manned mission to Mars which is not going to happen,
not in the foreseeable future. How does this help to make the US a world 'superpower'?
(Never mind whether that in itself is a good idea.)
Did the Mars Rovers do nothing for America's standing? Did anyone notice the
enormous amount of attention that was paid (at least in Europe) to the return
of the Stardust mission? Right now, nobody can be in much doubt about how powerful
the US is - the doubt is all about how wise.
Actually what I submitted was something entirely different: I highlighted Griiffin's
comment that "NASA's human spaceflight programme... had served to define the
US as a world 'superpower."' (As if that were what NASA is for!) I wished to
emphasise that this focus on human spaceflight was at the expense of
real science, and
quoted Louis Friedman, director of the Planetary
Society, who said: "I would almost describe it as 'anti-science NASA'
now". My point was that NASA is sacrificing substance for style - or politics
for science.
Maybe Zonk works for NASA, or the US Government - certainly he spun
the story in a way that would make Scott McLellan proud. It's one thing for/.
editors to edit submissions, but if they're going to wholly distort my meaning
I'd rather they took my name off the story, thanks all the same.
My current boss likes to hold meetings in which he simply thinks aloud for anything up to five hours while the poor fools trapped in there with him doodle on their pads and fiddle with their phones. He thinks he's a creative type, and the more bored we get, the more outlandish and useless his ideas become. I worked once in a place where they would have long acrimonious meetings to decide what to do about something but never got around to assigning anyone to be responsible for doing it or agreeing on how to know when it was done.
The best meetings I've ever attended were held every Monday morning by a Managing Director - a fairly nasty piece of work himself, but the rules were: the meeting cannot last more than 15 minutes, nobody sits down, any decision must be accompanied by a Next Step, a Timeline, and a Person Responsible. Excellent principles. Pity it was a management consultancy and the actual work would have been just as useful if we'd all stayed in bed and watched Captain Kangaroo...
Slashdot Mirror
So are they now going to go after Amazon.co.uk for refusing to sell me (in Italy) electronics? The fact is that corporations always have, and always will, do what they can to restrain free trade (DVD region coding, anyone?), while at the same time the politicians they've bought and paid for are telling us we should fall to our knees and worship the free market and its magic, invisible hand.
If I were Apple I would want one store - worldwide. Good luck with that.
Well, I wanted to add my snarky comment (as a Mac user living in Europe) but the Feedback button just leads to a server error... now why would that be? Ah, well. Here in Italy, downloading files is not illegal as long as you're not doing it for profit, according to a recent court decision. That decision may not make much sense even to me, but at least it means I no longer have to watch Italy's appalling public television, a trackless desert of infantilising mediocrity. Now let's see what Azureus has got for me this evening...
The Serene phone from Samsung/Bang & Olufsen http://www.serenemobile.com/ already does this -- even lets you switch configurations.
Commerical remote sensing is quite distinct from the kind of Earth Observation TFA is talking about. The commercial business concentrates for the most part on very high resolution imagery, 1 metre pixel size or less -- optical for now, radar too in the near future -- while the kind of science data offered by the Landsat programme, for example, or ESA's ERS/Envisat, has limited commercial value (much of it is available free or at nominal cost to qualified researchers -- or anyone who knows where to look). With Landsat 7 ailing, and Landsat 5 older than most Slashdot contributors, the U.S.'s failure to ensure a Landsat continuity mission after 35 years of uninterrupted data is idiotic, and hopes that this continuity mission can be fobbed off on commercial operators even more so. A useful analogy would be high-energy physics research, or astronomy -- these are pure science and cannot show any immediate commercial return. Meanwhile the Bush administration ties up funds for dumb stunts like the Moon base or a manned mission to Mars, projects with a very poor scientific rationale and such limited feasibility that a non-gambling man like myself would happily bet they will never come to fruition.
Strictly speaking, shouldn't it be: "... just so long as I were the dictator."?
I'm know, too, that early robotic missions to the Moon in the 60s could well have failed to begin with, then they would have succeeded.
And I know the ISS is not finished - it never will be, as originally conceived - and in the meantime all those resources, not to mention lives, poured into the station and the shuttle could have been spent on real science, not least on robotics research. I have no time for the view that NASA is somehow in the PR business, not the the science and exploration business. If people need to be entertained, they can watch TV, or even read a book.
No doubt we'll go to Mars one day, accelerating all the way. And our leaders - or yours anyway - will fight a war on the Moon for control of the Helium3 deposits.
I'd fly into space tomorrow if someone offered me a ride. It would be wonderful... But this talk of going to Mars now is as if Columbus had planned to swim to India.
And don't call me ignorant, you don't know me.
I am in Europe.
We should learn from the builders of the great medieval cathedrals, which took generations to build, and the master masons who designed them never saw their work finished. They believed they were working for the glory of God; today many of us doubt the meaning of that notion, but the buildings remain as monuments to the glory of human imagination, courage and energy. These days, as Carrire Fisher wrote: "Instant gratification takes too long."
Sure, manned space exploration is romantic and exciting, but manned missions to the moon accomplished nothing beyond nationalistic PR that culdn't have been done better by machines, and the ISS has produced no science worthy of its staggering cost. We will inhabit space one day but for now current talk of manned Moon bases and Mars missions are not like trying to run before we can walk, they're like trying to fly before we can stand up. There are two little machines working away on Mars still that would agree with me. Read Bob Park http://www.bobpark.org/ for detailed, expert reasoning.
Hand over your badge and your blue pencil, you're off the case.
A /. contributor who actually is a lawyer?
I hope his mom tracks you down and paddles your butt, you patronizing little boy.
Of course it's not rocket science - it's easy-peasy. But if you've ever provided technical support to the seriously technically challenged - and I work with some - you'd know that diagnosing and fixing such an elementary problem is way beyond many otherwise bright people, and given that the machine was still under warranty, they were quite right to make sure there really was a problem and I wasn't going to make things worse. Blindly shipping parts to anyone who asks wouldn't be very clever.
Another good experience: the optical drive on my G5 desktop went south a few weeks after delivery. The dealer wanted to take the whole machine back and would have kept it probably for weeks, to say nothing of the hassle of getting it there (I'm in Italy, where efficiency is not the watchword...) It took a very long conversation with a customer service guy - I think in Ireland - to convince him that I knew what I was talking about and was capable of swapping out the drive, but they sent me a new drive and post-paid packaging to send the old one back - 2 days and I was back in business.
On the other hand I once had to call Customer Service at Quark: I still get mad thinking about it and I switched to InDesign years ago.
I'd like to put in a plug for Russel Hoban's Riddley Walker , while we're on the subjectof SF literary masterpieces. It's interesting that the literary establishment, which tends to scorn SF (not without reason - most of it really is rubbish), will still take to heart a 'serious' writer who strays into the genre. Even Nabokov wrote SF, but while detective stories can get reviewed in the heavyweight papers, SF is still routinely ignored.
Orbital Science's Pegasusalready does this - launched from Tristar flying much lower and slower than this XB70 thing is supposed to have done. Can somebody who really knows about this do the actual math for us?
There's no brilliance, beyond pitching the book at the perfect level for an audience of illiterates. It not only celebrates a perfect ignorance of every subject it touches -- art history, church history, even aviation -- and is shot through with superstition (pace the Roma Catholic objectors, it actually swallows the Christian myth whole, merely adding a little sexual and dynastic speculation), but it is astonishingly badly written and constructed. The book's huge success is a rebuke to Western Civilsation. Holy Blood is no better. Personally, for once I hope the lawsuit goes on for ever and the lawyers get all the money.
All this to pay for a shuttle system already slated for retirement, a Space Station with no clear mission, a return to the moon, which will be fun but little more than a stunt, and a manned mission to Mars which is not going to happen, not in the foreseeable future. How does this help to make the US a world 'superpower'? (Never mind whether that in itself is a good idea.)
Did the Mars Rovers do nothing for America's standing? Did anyone notice the enormous amount of attention that was paid (at least in Europe) to the return of the Stardust mission? Right now, nobody can be in much doubt about how powerful the US is - the doubt is all about how wise.
Actually what I submitted was something entirely different: I highlighted Griiffin's comment that "NASA's human spaceflight programme ... had served to define the
US as a world 'superpower."' (As if that were what NASA is for!) I wished to
emphasise that this focus on human spaceflight was at the expense of
real science, and
quoted Louis Friedman, director of the Planetary
Society, who said: "I would almost describe it as 'anti-science NASA'
now". My point was that NASA is sacrificing substance for style - or politics
for science.
/.
editors to edit submissions, but if they're going to wholly distort my meaning
I'd rather they took my name off the story, thanks all the same.
Maybe Zonk works for NASA, or the US Government - certainly he spun the story in a way that would make Scott McLellan proud. It's one thing for
"History is a bunk on which I am trying to awaken" - John Sladek
The best meetings I've ever attended were held every Monday morning by a Managing Director - a fairly nasty piece of work himself, but the rules were: the meeting cannot last more than 15 minutes, nobody sits down, any decision must be accompanied by a Next Step, a Timeline, and a Person Responsible. Excellent principles. Pity it was a management consultancy and the actual work would have been just as useful if we'd all stayed in bed and watched Captain Kangaroo...