Greater tech benefits by funding robots instead
on
The Wrong Stuff
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· Score: 2, Interesting
People keep hyping the benefits of technological gains from sending humans to Mars, but there are much greater technological gains to be made from a massive expansion of robotic exploration of the galaxy. In addition to most of the earth-useful technological advancements you would get from research into a manned mission, you would also get great advances in the fields of AI and robotics, which are potentially on the cusp of real and revolutionary breakthroughs within the next two decades.
Furthermore, the manned space flight to Mars won't even begin any kind of implementation until at least 2015-2020. If we were sending large numbers of robots into space and pouring money into this research over these intervening years, how much more powerful will these robots be by that time? I don't really believe the 1000-to-1 mission ratio that the article states between robots and manned missions per dollar, but it's still quite high. How much improvement would we see after 20 years and several hundred iterations?
Finally, the manned plan doesn't realize any of these benefits for probably at least 20 years. With robots I think you would get at least as much benefit, but it would come sooner because it can be done continuously starting *now*. Take all the advances that happen in the intervening years and then compound all of the private sector innovation that happens when the technology trickles down from NASA and I don't see how a manned mission could stack up.
Decentralize the power grid and generate your own
on
The Power of Sewage
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I would like to see all kinds of technologies that allow private parties to generate electricity become more prevalent. You can decentralize the power grid and open it up as a peer to peer trading network. It's the logic of the internet applied to the outdated logic of the power grid.
Put solar, wind, sewage treatment, and other types of generators in your house. Use what you need and trade what you don't. If you've got a shortage then buy back what you need. In January, south africans can sell solar generated energy to russia. In june, russians can sell it back. Private and commercial ventures alike can create power in large amounts by any means and then sell it in the free market directly to end users and other public entities with large energy demands that are all then free to buy from the lowest cost sources.
Hydrogen fuel cells will also help enable this by allowing the banking of energy for later use and/or trade. Superconductors can improve the efficiency of the whole system and help the private sector economics reach critical mass. Are all of these kinds of technologies going to inevitably converge toward an energy revolution? Between all the bits and pieces it really looks like something is going to come together...
J.R.R. Tolkien himself started and, thankfully, abandoned a sequel. Christopher Tolkien printed the fragment not too long ago. It's called "The New Shadow" and the idea for the plot, frankly, sounded rather unworthy. Sounds kind of like a Star Wars title...
There's no evidence for or against in either case... so don't make positive assertions that you can only prove by making the assumption that what you ultimately believe is necessarily the only possibility in the first place.
If you are trying to apply scientific criteria, Occam's Razor might reflect poorly on religion. It is the wrong tool for the job. It is demonstrated on a regular basis that humans invent religions complete with elaborate mythology. They have done so for a long time and continue to do so today. The new age movement provides a very nice example of healthy and robust myth-making perhaps very similar sociologically to the rapid spread of mystery cults in the Roman Empire from which Christianity emerged. Even Judeo-Christianity shows a long record of reinventing itself to accomodate changes in secular worldview, and this flexibility has greatly contributed to its staying power. The large diversity of religious beliefs that evolve and have evolved over time would indicate that even if there is a divine agent, it's extremely unlikely that the body of Christian myth at this specific point in time or a Judeo Christian god, Yahweh, at all has any more resemblance to it than any of the countless other belief systems that exist, will exist, and have existed for at least hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of years. Furthermore, history also shows that religion has been a very powerful self-replicating, organization, social tool, which helps to explain in part why it has been so prevalent in human culture. However, this is of course only valid when applying a scientific perspective.
I think that attempts to apply any kind of evidence based rationality to religion actually severely weaken religion in the long run. Religion's greatest strength is the rejection of rationality via faith. It asserts that some things simply can not be determined rationally and must be accepted without any evidence. This is a very powerful statement which I think highlights the real beauty, power, usefulness, and majesty of religion, as well as one of the potential pitfalls.
On the flipside, one of science's most powerful statements against religion is that it really can't explain many things...yet. Check back later. It's an erosive effect, but coincidentally it is also one of the weaknesses of the scientific view as it will always open the door for dismissal due to uncertainty.
Diebold is a perfect counterargument to this article. Here, proprietary source mixed with a documented conflict of interest has possibly led to intentional security backdoors with the potential of creating massive social upheaval in the most powerful country in the world. Furthermore, while Diebold is getting caught with it's hand in the cookie jar because of leaked code and internal memos, we don't even know at all what the other electronic voting software companies are doing with their closed and secret code. Perhaps Mr. Jones could give a current example from the open source community with the same scope and complexity.
I just wish that they were more honest about the cost. The funding really seems low-balled to me, which would be consistant with most new non-military program introduced in the last 3 years. I think NASA needs to determine the real projected cost within the next couple of months and then return a proposed budget to the White House. Then they need to draw a line and say that they need this much money or they can not take on the project...period. I also don't think, considering the tiny cost of the space program in total, we should be redistributing funds from other, demonstrably productive, parts of NASA into this project.
It should be new money. Where does this money? How about wiping out the billions and billions of dollars that go into pork barrel projects just so corrupt politicians in congress can get re-elected? The amount of pork barrel money has exploded in the years since Republicans have taken control of congress (the Democrats do it too though).
Well, I don't see any catapults and seige towers in our military inventory, so you're wrong there. We're not impaling people on pikes. We're not slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians. Nope, no middle ages here.
And for one last time, I'll address this supposed bloodlust for death that the U.S. seems to have. If we wished to kill everyone in Iraq, don't you think we could've done it much more efficiently and quickly? Tactical nukes could've reduced much of the population to ashes while leaving the valuable oil fields untouched. Chemical and biological agents could've been used and even left all the cities standing. Even a 1940's still conventional bombing campaign could've reduced the entire country to ruins in less than a year, killing most of the population.
But we didn't take that tack. We went in on the ground with tanks and close air support, we tried to keep collateral damage to a minimum. The actual number of civilians killed were less than those killed in one bombing raid during WWII. So you can just drop the whole bloodthirsty American idea, because it's stupid, it's crass, and it's not supported by the facts.
I think he was referring to the justification, not the means of warfare. Pre-emptive US policy takes us back to before the acceptance concept of Just War. This concept was most systematically described by St. Thomas Aquinas, so medieval is not entirely out of the question. You could easily argue it is far older and would probably be more accurate. However, it was strongly revived in the 1960's when threats of mutual assured destruction made it imperative, so you could also argue that it is a more modern contrivance in the form that it is being rejected today by the Bush administration.
I believe that without just cause we are even more at risk of nuclear destruction and on a larger scale. While the threat of nuclear terrorism is frightening, the threat of a nuclear world war is much more so and still not an impossibility.
Computer security is too complicated for end users who barely know the difference between email and internet, let alone anything about anti-virus, firewall, and discretion with attachments.
If anyone is negligent, it is not duped end users, but Microsoft for leaving several blatant security holes that should have been fixed years ago. For example, why hasn't the Outlook address book been locked down? This one act would have prevented pretty much all of the major virus outbreaks in the last 5 years.
This is an awful idea. You are shifting the blame from the culprits (spam trojan writers) to the victims, and encouraging the culprits to continue their abusive activities.
The fact that many in congress are or were lawyers doesn't mean much when you consider they most of them voted yes on the bill before having a chance to read it.
The difference is symbollic. This gives the appearance of crass commercialization of politics, whether or not helping to enable more people to donate smaller amounts actually supports that. The clear subtext here is that politics is now a sub-category of capitalism and candidates are up for sale in an online shopping mall. The ever implicit connection through history is now made explicit.
Similarly, from what I understand you can't patent cooking/baking recipes, rules for games, or sewing patterns. I would love to see a court case contest the grounds for all software patents in general.
So 99% of the government now belongs to terrorist organizations. It's time for the military to intervene, rooting out all of the terrorists and hauling their asses of to Guatanamo. Then they can install Jim Jeffords as president of the United States, while he simultaneously holds the singularity in the Senate pending filling all of the other 49 vacancies.
One thing to consider is that there is a problem with using a 802.11g card in that the backward compatibility with 802.11b works such that only one standard can be in use at a time. So, a single 802.11b NIC on the wireless network will make the router drop to 802.11b standard and all of the 802.11g NICs will be stuck with the slower speed as well. This means you only get the added speed gains for 802.11g if every single device in range is using that standard. I believe the manufacturers are looking into addressing this with a possible firmware upgrade, but I'm not sure where that stands currently.
I see your Ti-99 4/a and raise you a voice modulator. "Fuelling station ahead" in a lusty female voice...
Who needs to remember your first kiss, anyway, when your first computer sounds totally hot?
I bet he's going to announce a $50 billion program and then it will get $50.00 in funding, like the AIDS initiative and No Child Left Behind. He'll claim a big win in November, knowing that it will never actually happen.
Slashdot Mirror
People keep hyping the benefits of technological gains from sending humans to Mars, but there are much greater technological gains to be made from a massive expansion of robotic exploration of the galaxy. In addition to most of the earth-useful technological advancements you would get from research into a manned mission, you would also get great advances in the fields of AI and robotics, which are potentially on the cusp of real and revolutionary breakthroughs within the next two decades. Furthermore, the manned space flight to Mars won't even begin any kind of implementation until at least 2015-2020. If we were sending large numbers of robots into space and pouring money into this research over these intervening years, how much more powerful will these robots be by that time? I don't really believe the 1000-to-1 mission ratio that the article states between robots and manned missions per dollar, but it's still quite high. How much improvement would we see after 20 years and several hundred iterations? Finally, the manned plan doesn't realize any of these benefits for probably at least 20 years. With robots I think you would get at least as much benefit, but it would come sooner because it can be done continuously starting *now*. Take all the advances that happen in the intervening years and then compound all of the private sector innovation that happens when the technology trickles down from NASA and I don't see how a manned mission could stack up.
I would like to see all kinds of technologies that allow private parties to generate electricity become more prevalent. You can decentralize the power grid and open it up as a peer to peer trading network. It's the logic of the internet applied to the outdated logic of the power grid.
Put solar, wind, sewage treatment, and other types of generators in your house. Use what you need and trade what you don't. If you've got a shortage then buy back what you need. In January, south africans can sell solar generated energy to russia. In june, russians can sell it back. Private and commercial ventures alike can create power in large amounts by any means and then sell it in the free market directly to end users and other public entities with large energy demands that are all then free to buy from the lowest cost sources.
Hydrogen fuel cells will also help enable this by allowing the banking of energy for later use and/or trade. Superconductors can improve the efficiency of the whole system and help the private sector economics reach critical mass. Are all of these kinds of technologies going to inevitably converge toward an energy revolution? Between all the bits and pieces it really looks like something is going to come together...
J.R.R. Tolkien himself started and, thankfully, abandoned a sequel. Christopher Tolkien printed the fragment not too long ago. It's called "The New Shadow" and the idea for the plot, frankly, sounded rather unworthy. Sounds kind of like a Star Wars title...
Can someone explain to me why MS hasn't locked down the Outlook address book yet?
There's no evidence for or against in either case... so don't make positive assertions that you can only prove by making the assumption that what you ultimately believe is necessarily the only possibility in the first place.
If you are trying to apply scientific criteria, Occam's Razor might reflect poorly on religion. It is the wrong tool for the job. It is demonstrated on a regular basis that humans invent religions complete with elaborate mythology. They have done so for a long time and continue to do so today. The new age movement provides a very nice example of healthy and robust myth-making perhaps very similar sociologically to the rapid spread of mystery cults in the Roman Empire from which Christianity emerged. Even Judeo-Christianity shows a long record of reinventing itself to accomodate changes in secular worldview, and this flexibility has greatly contributed to its staying power. The large diversity of religious beliefs that evolve and have evolved over time would indicate that even if there is a divine agent, it's extremely unlikely that the body of Christian myth at this specific point in time or a Judeo Christian god, Yahweh, at all has any more resemblance to it than any of the countless other belief systems that exist, will exist, and have existed for at least hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of years. Furthermore, history also shows that religion has been a very powerful self-replicating, organization, social tool, which helps to explain in part why it has been so prevalent in human culture. However, this is of course only valid when applying a scientific perspective.
I think that attempts to apply any kind of evidence based rationality to religion actually severely weaken religion in the long run. Religion's greatest strength is the rejection of rationality via faith. It asserts that some things simply can not be determined rationally and must be accepted without any evidence. This is a very powerful statement which I think highlights the real beauty, power, usefulness, and majesty of religion, as well as one of the potential pitfalls.
On the flipside, one of science's most powerful statements against religion is that it really can't explain many things...yet. Check back later. It's an erosive effect, but coincidentally it is also one of the weaknesses of the scientific view as it will always open the door for dismissal due to uncertainty.
Diebold is a perfect counterargument to this article. Here, proprietary source mixed with a documented conflict of interest has possibly led to intentional security backdoors with the potential of creating massive social upheaval in the most powerful country in the world. Furthermore, while Diebold is getting caught with it's hand in the cookie jar because of leaked code and internal memos, we don't even know at all what the other electronic voting software companies are doing with their closed and secret code. Perhaps Mr. Jones could give a current example from the open source community with the same scope and complexity.
It should be new money. Where does this money? How about wiping out the billions and billions of dollars that go into pork barrel projects just so corrupt politicians in congress can get re-elected? The amount of pork barrel money has exploded in the years since Republicans have taken control of congress (the Democrats do it too though).
Well, I don't see any catapults and seige towers in our military inventory, so you're wrong there. We're not impaling people on pikes. We're not slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians. Nope, no middle ages here. And for one last time, I'll address this supposed bloodlust for death that the U.S. seems to have. If we wished to kill everyone in Iraq, don't you think we could've done it much more efficiently and quickly? Tactical nukes could've reduced much of the population to ashes while leaving the valuable oil fields untouched. Chemical and biological agents could've been used and even left all the cities standing. Even a 1940's still conventional bombing campaign could've reduced the entire country to ruins in less than a year, killing most of the population. But we didn't take that tack. We went in on the ground with tanks and close air support, we tried to keep collateral damage to a minimum. The actual number of civilians killed were less than those killed in one bombing raid during WWII. So you can just drop the whole bloodthirsty American idea, because it's stupid, it's crass, and it's not supported by the facts. I think he was referring to the justification, not the means of warfare. Pre-emptive US policy takes us back to before the acceptance concept of Just War. This concept was most systematically described by St. Thomas Aquinas, so medieval is not entirely out of the question. You could easily argue it is far older and would probably be more accurate. However, it was strongly revived in the 1960's when threats of mutual assured destruction made it imperative, so you could also argue that it is a more modern contrivance in the form that it is being rejected today by the Bush administration. I believe that without just cause we are even more at risk of nuclear destruction and on a larger scale. While the threat of nuclear terrorism is frightening, the threat of a nuclear world war is much more so and still not an impossibility.
I guess you're more of a pragmatist than I am. A stupid tax smacks of eugenics to me.
Computer security is too complicated for end users who barely know the difference between email and internet, let alone anything about anti-virus, firewall, and discretion with attachments. If anyone is negligent, it is not duped end users, but Microsoft for leaving several blatant security holes that should have been fixed years ago. For example, why hasn't the Outlook address book been locked down? This one act would have prevented pretty much all of the major virus outbreaks in the last 5 years.
This is an awful idea. You are shifting the blame from the culprits (spam trojan writers) to the victims, and encouraging the culprits to continue their abusive activities.
The fact that many in congress are or were lawyers doesn't mean much when you consider they most of them voted yes on the bill before having a chance to read it.
The difference is symbollic. This gives the appearance of crass commercialization of politics, whether or not helping to enable more people to donate smaller amounts actually supports that. The clear subtext here is that politics is now a sub-category of capitalism and candidates are up for sale in an online shopping mall. The ever implicit connection through history is now made explicit.
Similarly, from what I understand you can't patent cooking/baking recipes, rules for games, or sewing patterns. I would love to see a court case contest the grounds for all software patents in general.
So 99% of the government now belongs to terrorist organizations. It's time for the military to intervene, rooting out all of the terrorists and hauling their asses of to Guatanamo. Then they can install Jim Jeffords as president of the United States, while he simultaneously holds the singularity in the Senate pending filling all of the other 49 vacancies.
One thing to consider is that there is a problem with using a 802.11g card in that the backward compatibility with 802.11b works such that only one standard can be in use at a time. So, a single 802.11b NIC on the wireless network will make the router drop to 802.11b standard and all of the 802.11g NICs will be stuck with the slower speed as well. This means you only get the added speed gains for 802.11g if every single device in range is using that standard. I believe the manufacturers are looking into addressing this with a possible firmware upgrade, but I'm not sure where that stands currently.
I see your Ti-99 4/a and raise you a voice modulator. "Fuelling station ahead" in a lusty female voice... Who needs to remember your first kiss, anyway, when your first computer sounds totally hot?
I bet he's going to announce a $50 billion program and then it will get $50.00 in funding, like the AIDS initiative and No Child Left Behind. He'll claim a big win in November, knowing that it will never actually happen.