MERs and other Mars surface landers and rovers don't use wind turbines because the atmosphere is incredibly thin - far to thin to turn turbine blades. Think about it... they've only received puffs of wind strong enough to blow the thin coating of (incredibly small) dust particles off the solar cells half a dozen times in three years. You'd barely feel the touch of the wind on your skin even when it's blowing at it's strongest.
Useless? Not at all - the write-up finally cleared up something that's been bugging me since 1996:
root [is] the name of the privileged administration account on UNIX based systems.
Oh of course, it's all so obvious once you know, isn't it? I always wondered why no-one else's init scripts included a
Pawn shops in high crime areas, such as St. Louis, have an overload of camcorders for sale dirt cheap! Well, so what? It wouldn't get in the way of them being used for the intended purpose. I guess they'd have a sticker on the side with the ACLU number & "Please call here if you witness the cops beating the shit out of some defenceless person caught in looking funny in public. $$$ Reward! $$$ " If the market is flooded with cheap cams, that's ubiquitous surveillance controlled by the people, rather than the police or the State.
Find something that you find really interesting. That could be a specific kind of software (media players, CRM systems...), or particular functional areas - say, printing, bookmarks, inter-component messaging frameworks...) Or just a particular bit of software you get interested in because you find yourself using it a lot, and are *constantly* getting annoyed by that *one* missing option to use an LDAP backend, which would make it perfect for you... I've got involved (very very slightly) with a web browser, and some network security stuff, because I was using them anyway (or working in the general area in some way); I was also consciously looking out for some way to contribute something - you take the opportunities you find.
Or some other type of abstract class of programming task. Writing documentation is also a good way to learn - there's always a need for good docs, and you have to get to know the software really well to write them.
Pull the current source. Take a poke around. Grep for comments. Look at the changelogs. Look at what's being worked on, where the problems are, how much activity is going on, how many contributors there have been. Scratch your itch!
And if you can't find anything you actually *want* to do, why, then you can't do better than get some good experience on the wonderful Mozilla projects! Head over to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/, pick an interesting open bug, and go to it!
Good luck, and have the appropriate amount of fun:)
I'm really disappointed by the pathetic trekie nonsense posts on this story, as wild a selection of 2nd year (secondary school 2nd year) and stale assertions based on nothing more than too much crap SF on the TV. No-one's engaged with Charlie's undeniable points about the spatial distances and energy required. And really, if you think thermodynamics or relativity will turn out to have neat convenient holes through which humans can sail magic-wand spacecraft... you're a moron.
*sigh* such a wasteful thread,... virtually everyone seems to be confusing technology for science. Yes, our computers work faster now than 10,20,40 years ago, but there was never any *scientific* reason why they couldn't be built - it was always simply a case of making small enough switches, an implementation detail.
Colonisation of space isn't possible for reasons of really really basic physics, and it's a depressing how few 'believers' are engaging with Mr Stross' actual case.
> it would be interesting to see reasoned responses from the community
In that case why are you posting on Slashdot?
OK, story submitter here, blowing away my mod points by posting. (What are the odds of having mod points when a submission gets accepted? Ah well it felt like cheating somehow, modding down those I disgreed with... ahh, the power!!! *ahem*)
I posted here because I'd had tangential down-thread discussions on this some months back. I'd noticed that whenever I suggested that basic physics rules out human colonisation without what Charlie Stross calls magic wands - hand-waving stuff about the singularity or speculative physics that fell off the back of a pre-print server - I got a lot of abuse and what seem like silly arguments ("but they said man could never fly!!" riiiight, so everything that's currently thought IMpossible, must actually be possible. Thanks for straightening that out).
Anyway someone and I had a ding-dong for 3 or 4 exchanges where it looked like there was an *actual* argument to be had, as opposed to simple assertions that I'm right, no you're not, yes I am. That was on a story that only touched tangentially onto the human colonisation thing; so I ended up saying "there's a debate to be had, this is the wrong story to have it on though - see you when someone posts something relevant". I reckon there's still signal amongst the noise on Slashdot.
I'm probably wrong, but hey!! I'm a dreamer, so shoot me.
I'm sure I'd seen the "case for physics" argument against colonisation laid out elsewhere, possibly during a five year period when I read two or three popular astronomy magazines a month - Sky & Telescope, that sort of thing.) I've also got a pet hobby-horse theory about why generation ships can't work (or in fact anything that requires longer than a century, tops, in flight.) Hardware breaks, wears out, needs repairing & maintaining, and some stuff needs repairing. Now consider the reason the hundred billion dollar ISS is going to be charred scraps of molten steel and vapourised aluminium within twenty years at the very most: there's no way to do major engineering work on the fundamental structural elements in flight. Once they're up, they're up, and you better hope nothing bigger than, say, a small fridge breaks down - either you fix it in situ, or you take it out the airlock and bring a replacement unit in the same way.
I also found it interesting that there seemed to be a very knee-jerk, un-thought-through - dare I say "religious" - element to people's reactions to the idea. Sure enough, I see a lot of that already in the comments here. But from having spent much much too much time on/. over the years, I know that if you browse at +2 and don't mind skipping a lot of repetitive crap and repetitious 'humour', there's usually SOMEONE who is at least familiar with the pros and cons of whatever's under discussion. If there ARE realistic (to me) reasons Charlie's wrong, I'd expect to find them here somewhere.
So then when I saw the story on BoingBoing and read the article, I was already thinking "Great, perhaps I can get this posted to Slashdot and actually have that argument!"
Oh, and I like seeing my name in lights on the Slashdot front page once in a while. That and the girls, of course - wait! I think I hear them hammering on the front door right now. Gotta dash!!
Hallelujah brother, yes sir the circus is hitting the road once again. Personally I have a date with the L - o - r - d on the 29th at what was once Bar Lorca on Brixton Road.
We turn our water heater off for 60% of the year; we've some cheap (GBP 5000) panels on the roof that give nice hot water even when the skies are cloudy (they take their energy from IR, not visible light) and they even carry on working when the grid's out (we live in the middle of a forest, and trees grow branches specially to drop on the lines several times a year.) In fact as luck would have it we had a power cut at 8:15am this morning, just as I was getting up, and lo! I was still able to wash in hot water.
We'll give it another year or two for the newer more efficient PV panels to hit the market, and any grants & subsidies to turn up, then I think we'll be generating power too. We've thought about a wind turbine (it's also on top of a hill & sited close enough to the Bristol Channel that we get good strong winds quite a lot) but are leaving that one for now on grounds of cost, hassle and noise. Now if only I could bring myself to down my systems overnight...
Where the UK is doing especially badly is public transport outside major urban areas - trying to get to the site of my office would take 4 hours or so by bus (there's two per day in our village...) so unless I move nearer the office, I pretty much have to drive 50-60 miles/day. And I don't want to move, as I don't trust my employer (*any* employer) not to saxx0r me at the drop of a hat, most likely a few days after I sign a 6 month tenancy agreement. (There's SFA work for an infosec specialist in Gloucestershire unless you're security cleared, and I wouldn't want to work for the gov't or defence corps anyway.
None of the ISPs (or NSPs) are spying on you; they merely provide the lawful intercept functionality are required by CALEA, PATRIOT, and other legislation. It's the CIA/ TIA / NSA that do the actual spying.
At the risk of wandering slightly off-topic, the theme tune ("Woke up this morning") is by the UK - Brixton! - band Alabama 3, who absolutely fucking rock live. Highly recommended if you get the chance to see 'em live.
Sweet goddamn pretty motherfuckin country acid house music all night long!
Sad really, as skipping PE every week when I found that enabled me to skive off to the school library and read the NS (along with the other NS, assorted leftie rags of the 80s, oh and some books) was one of the things that really got me interested in Mars in the first place - that and a big coffee-table atlas with gorgeous repros of Viking Orbiter images of landscapes with obviously terrestrial analogues.
A grip on reality? Well I don't dispute many of those items you've listed, I'd be very interested to see any evidence that the US had anything to do with the implosion of Yugoslavia. Believe me, there's no outside influence needed to destabilise the Balkans. If you know differently, please share...
Yeah... it was a fantasy five years ago, it's a fantasy today, and it'll remain a fantasy for many years to come (indefinitely, IMO, though I allow the possibility of some magic material being discovered which is incredibly strong, light, and cheap, ahthough there's no evidence for such a breakthrough . (yeah yeah, nanotubes... heard it all before, let's just file it along with cold fusion and the flying cars, etc . I could be proved wrong but so far Ive been right about this stuff (and mining the asteroid belts, permanent colonisation of Mars, etc) as delusional fantasy for emotional adolescents who read too much SF.
It says here, "Putin Threatens US Missile Bases In Europe" -- but surely it's the Bushy regime that's threatening to install bomb-magnet "missile defence stations" in Europe? All long the EU's border with Russia and the vassal states. Odd, that...
Yesterday seemed to be one bit of bad news after another; we also had Prime Minister designate threatening to introduce even more so-called "anti-terror legislation" giving yet more powers of arbitrary searches, surveillance, arrest and detention without trial than Blair. What is it about government that 5 minutes with their hands on the levers of power that turns even the most reasonable civil rights activist into a raging authoritarians, and - dare I say - "fascists"? *shrug* Sharmi Chakrabarti for PM, that's what I say.
Huh? There was only the one previous LotR film before the Jackson Three - it gallops through the first couple of books and stalls after Helm's Deep. I think it looks great, though - IIRC it's one of the first examples of rotoscoping.
The market will correct and life will go on. You may recall that significant corrections of major imbalances in terms of trade and currency rates tend to be rather painful for a large proportion of the population.
No, robotic exploration absolutely rocks. I just think the idea of real human colonisation off earth is delusional. I'd love to get into the whole back and forth and name-calling I sense you're longing for:) but what I'm really complaining about is that this isn't the story to do it in! What we need is something like a story about the back-to-the-moon-then-to-mars plan. See you there when it next turns up. Actually I heard some interesting stuff about prototype semi-autonomous robots at JPL planned for use on the moon - one was called ATHLETE I remember, the other's a sort of six-limbed spider monkey thing. Hmmmmmm...
Slashdot Mirror
Smart-arse.
Right, it's not as if Microsoft just bought a firm that does exactly what Postini does, or anything.
Obscure?
You keep using that word...
MERs and other Mars surface landers and rovers don't use wind turbines because the atmosphere is incredibly thin - far to thin to turn turbine blades. Think about it... they've only received puffs of wind strong enough to blow the thin coating of (incredibly small) dust particles off the solar cells half a dozen times in three years. You'd barely feel the touch of the wind on your skin even when it's blowing at it's strongest.
Oh of course, it's all so obvious once you know, isn't it? I always wondered why no-one else's init scripts included a
sudo find / -type f -exec chmod 777 {} \;
...line.
Or some other type of abstract class of programming task. Writing documentation is also a good way to learn - there's always a need for good docs, and you have to get to know the software really well to write them.
Pull the current source. Take a poke around. Grep for comments. Look at the changelogs. Look at what's being worked on, where the problems are, how much activity is going on, how many contributors there have been. Scratch your itch!
And if you can't find anything you actually *want* to do, why, then you can't do better than get some good experience on the wonderful Mozilla projects! Head over to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/, pick an interesting open bug, and go to it!
Good luck, and have the appropriate amount of fun :)
I'm really disappointed by the pathetic trekie nonsense posts on this story, as wild a selection of 2nd year (secondary school 2nd year) and stale assertions based on nothing more than too much crap SF on the TV. No-one's engaged with Charlie's undeniable points about the spatial distances and energy required. And really, if you think thermodynamics or relativity will turn out to have neat convenient holes through which humans can sail magic-wand spacecraft... you're a moron.
Colonisation of space isn't possible for reasons of really really basic physics, and it's a depressing how few 'believers' are engaging with Mr Stross' actual case.
I posted here because I'd had tangential down-thread discussions on this some months back. I'd noticed that whenever I suggested that basic physics rules out human colonisation without what Charlie Stross calls magic wands - hand-waving stuff about the singularity or speculative physics that fell off the back of a pre-print server - I got a lot of abuse and what seem like silly arguments ("but they said man could never fly!!" riiiight, so everything that's currently thought IMpossible, must actually be possible. Thanks for straightening that out).
Anyway someone and I had a ding-dong for 3 or 4 exchanges where it looked like there was an *actual* argument to be had, as opposed to simple assertions that I'm right, no you're not, yes I am. That was on a story that only touched tangentially onto the human colonisation thing; so I ended up saying "there's a debate to be had, this is the wrong story to have it on though - see you when someone posts something relevant". I reckon there's still signal amongst the noise on Slashdot. I'm probably wrong, but hey!! I'm a dreamer, so shoot me.
I'm sure I'd seen the "case for physics" argument against colonisation laid out elsewhere, possibly during a five year period when I read two or three popular astronomy magazines a month - Sky & Telescope, that sort of thing.) I've also got a pet hobby-horse theory about why generation ships can't work (or in fact anything that requires longer than a century, tops, in flight.) Hardware breaks, wears out, needs repairing & maintaining, and some stuff needs repairing. Now consider the reason the hundred billion dollar ISS is going to be charred scraps of molten steel and vapourised aluminium within twenty years at the very most: there's no way to do major engineering work on the fundamental structural elements in flight. Once they're up, they're up, and you better hope nothing bigger than, say, a small fridge breaks down - either you fix it in situ, or you take it out the airlock and bring a replacement unit in the same way.
I also found it interesting that there seemed to be a very knee-jerk, un-thought-through - dare I say "religious" - element to people's reactions to the idea. Sure enough, I see a lot of that already in the comments here. But from having spent much much too much time on /. over the years, I know that if you browse at +2 and don't mind skipping a lot of repetitive crap and repetitious 'humour', there's usually SOMEONE who is at least familiar with the pros and cons of whatever's under discussion. If there ARE realistic (to me) reasons Charlie's wrong, I'd expect to find them here somewhere.
So then when I saw the story on BoingBoing and read the article, I was already thinking "Great, perhaps I can get this posted to Slashdot and actually have that argument!"
Oh, and I like seeing my name in lights on the Slashdot front page once in a while. That and the girls, of course - wait! I think I hear them hammering on the front door right now. Gotta dash!!
Hallelujah brother, yes sir the circus is hitting the road once again. Personally I have a date with the L - o - r - d on the 29th at what was once Bar Lorca on Brixton Road.
We turn our water heater off for 60% of the year; we've some cheap (GBP 5000) panels on the roof that give nice hot water even when the skies are cloudy (they take their energy from IR, not visible light) and they even carry on working when the grid's out (we live in the middle of a forest, and trees grow branches specially to drop on the lines several times a year.) In fact as luck would have it we had a power cut at 8:15am this morning, just as I was getting up, and lo! I was still able to wash in hot water.
We'll give it another year or two for the newer more efficient PV panels to hit the market, and any grants & subsidies to turn up, then I think we'll be generating power too. We've thought about a wind turbine (it's also on top of a hill & sited close enough to the Bristol Channel that we get good strong winds quite a lot) but are leaving that one for now on grounds of cost, hassle and noise. Now if only I could bring myself to down my systems overnight...
Where the UK is doing especially badly is public transport outside major urban areas - trying to get to the site of my office would take 4 hours or so by bus (there's two per day in our village...) so unless I move nearer the office, I pretty much have to drive 50-60 miles/day. And I don't want to move, as I don't trust my employer (*any* employer) not to saxx0r me at the drop of a hat, most likely a few days after I sign a 6 month tenancy agreement. (There's SFA work for an infosec specialist in Gloucestershire unless you're security cleared, and I wouldn't want to work for the gov't or defence corps anyway.
None of the ISPs (or NSPs) are spying on you; they merely provide the lawful intercept functionality are required by CALEA, PATRIOT, and other legislation. It's the CIA/ TIA / NSA that do the actual spying.
Sweet goddamn pretty motherfuckin country acid house music all night long!
Here's a comprehensive range of responses from a wide selection of informed MER followers at UMSF, ranging from "horsepucky" to "hogwash" via "ludicrous" and "bunk". I'll take UMSF over New Scientist any day.
Sad really, as skipping PE every week when I found that enabled me to skive off to the school library and read the NS (along with the other NS, assorted leftie rags of the 80s, oh and some books) was one of the things that really got me interested in Mars in the first place - that and a big coffee-table atlas with gorgeous repros of Viking Orbiter images of landscapes with obviously terrestrial analogues.
I haz a flamethrowa!!
A grip on reality? Well I don't dispute many of those items you've listed, I'd be very interested to see any evidence that the US had anything to do with the implosion of Yugoslavia. Believe me, there's no outside influence needed to destabilise the Balkans. If you know differently, please share...
Yeah... it was a fantasy five years ago, it's a fantasy today, and it'll remain a fantasy for many years to come (indefinitely, IMO, though I allow the possibility of some magic material being discovered which is incredibly strong, light, and cheap, ahthough there's no evidence for such a breakthrough . (yeah yeah, nanotubes ... heard it all before, let's just file it along with cold fusion and the flying cars, etc . I could be proved wrong but so far Ive been right about this stuff (and mining the asteroid belts, permanent colonisation of Mars, etc) as delusional fantasy for emotional adolescents who read too much SF.
Yesterday seemed to be one bit of bad news after another; we also had Prime Minister designate threatening to introduce even more so-called "anti-terror legislation" giving yet more powers of arbitrary searches, surveillance, arrest and detention without trial than Blair. What is it about government that 5 minutes with their hands on the levers of power that turns even the most reasonable civil rights activist into a raging authoritarians, and - dare I say - "fascists"? *shrug* Sharmi Chakrabarti for PM, that's what I say.
Johnny Fartpants.
Children of Hurin... a "story arc".*head in hands* Forgive them, Ronald, for they know not what they do.
...endless cartoon adaptations...Huh? There was only the one previous LotR film before the Jackson Three - it gallops through the first couple of books and stalls after Helm's Deep. I think it looks great, though - IIRC it's one of the first examples of rotoscoping.
yeah, pretty much the only people who'd follow Jesus if he were alive today would be godless hippies and new-age freaks.
No, robotic exploration absolutely rocks. I just think the idea of real human colonisation off earth is delusional. I'd love to get into the whole back and forth and name-calling I sense you're longing for :) but what I'm really complaining about is that this isn't the story to do it in! What we need is something like a story about the back-to-the-moon-then-to-mars plan. See you there when it next turns up. Actually I heard some interesting stuff about prototype semi-autonomous robots at JPL planned for use on the moon - one was called ATHLETE I remember, the other's a sort of six-limbed spider monkey thing. Hmmmmmm...