If by "losing it" you mean that he is spitting mad because narrow minded bigots are using the Constitution to wipe their asses, then yes, he is "losing it".
you think it's easier to educate everyone needed to research, manufacture, test, program, and operate robots than to educate astronauts?
No, that's not what I said or implied.
The martian rovers have done great things, make no mistake, but people wouldn't take a week to crawl 10 meters and look at 2 rocks the size of paperweights.
The rovers are the first cut. These robots need to be improved, obviously. You seem to be implying that robot technology will not advance, and glacial speeds are the best that can ever be done.
NASA won't service the Hubble because it would "risk" astronauts.
I'm not saying we shouldn't use robots, or perform robot missions where it makes sense. But to cower under our beds at the thought of stepping outside our atmosphere because it's 'risky' is nausiating.
Then you are making yourself sick. I am saying that we should dominate, subjigate, and beat down the dangers of our entire solar system. The idea that we should cower under our beds originated inside of your own head.
Go back and read what I wrote in a positive light. I am not saying stay on Earth. I am saying get out into space faster, using robots to expand the sphere of safety that humans can operate in. I am saying that spending money on the space shuttle and space station should be better spent on building systems that can build space systems humans can live in. The end result is humans living in space centuries before they will at our current rate.
No, robots can't do those things today. I think that besides the computer capabilities, we need to figure out how to build robots that have the versatility of a human. But I think it can be done, and if I were king of the universe we'd be giving it a try.
what are the humans going to do living permanently there?
I'd imagine they'd do what they do here. Work for a living, work for fun, drink beer, watch TV. My vision of moving people into space isn't just for the smartest and brightest. I will know that I've succeeded when I read a help-wanted ad for string quartet to play on the moon, no other qualifications needed.
With the technology to robotically build moon housing, we could move thousands and thousands of people there, in scaled-up Soyuz spacecraft. No need to waste time and money building something completely new, because after the moon, we need to design systems to do the same thing on Mars. It's a completely different planet, with completely different challenges.
I have no problem with you believing that. But the reason for this discussion is to look at both sides, bring up points positive and negative, and see how they compare.
I already knew what your position was.
Let me ask you a question: What would you say if NASA were to today cancel both the space shuttle, and the space station in favor of a new program that would
-use a robot to scope out sites from orbit -use a robot lander to scope out sites from the ground -use a robot factory to separate raw materials from the lunar soil -use a robot to construct shelters and greenhouses -use robots to maintain the shelter -finish off with a single launch of some humans that would permanently live on the surface of the moon, in a station that was ready when they arrived.
That is exactly what I am proposing. If you read anything different, then you misread what I wrote.
Wow, you completely misunderstood everything I said.
If anything, I possess more ambition and daring than everyone else has, including Neil Armstrong. How? Because I dare to outline a plan for getting people into space, faster than we are currently moving, in the face of hostility from people who just don't understand what I have written.
Not trying to be the troll here, but in fact humans are pretty cheap - easy to manufacture, more or less self maintaning given oxygen, water, food and shelter from harsh environments. Heck, we've got BILIONS of them just lying around.
I know you're not a troll. Humans are easy to manufacture, but hard to educate, that's the essential difference. And I think we have to include a nod to sentience. We sometimes may not think the other guy's life is particularly valuable, but to him it's everything.
Your other points about people volunteering to go to space I agree with, but there's still the political aspect. When a human dies, things shut down more than when a robot probe dies.
I'm just keeping my eye on the ball. The goal is to get people into space, working and living on other planets and moons. We can do a heck of a lot more than we are with robots, and we should. We should terminate the space shuttle, and the space station to free up funds to make this happen. I think that it's possible to use robots to prepare homes for us on other worlds, so that when we arrive we can be effective immediately, and not having to construct everything from scratch in a hostile environment.
Right, we lost how many probes at Mars recently, (three or four, I lost count). But look at what's coming down the pipeline. The number of new robot exploration missions has increased in response. And the budgets for them have gotten relatively bigger, since it became apparent that cutting corners on the Discovery missions affected reliability.
Sorry, the real world data doesn't support your statement.
Let the robots be the magellans and the columbuses of space exploration.
This is the opposite of what I said. Let me ask this rhetorical quesiton: "Do you suppose that the Cassini mission controllers are NOT like Magellan and Columbus?" Robots are tools, not explorers, unless you're talking about a master race of intelligent robots supplanting the human desire to explore.
But if we stop at merely learning about our universe, we do ourselves a great disservice.
Once again, the opposite of what I said. I said that we should use robots to explore, because we could learn much faster, and more efficiently. That's quite a bit different that cessation of learning.
because both were too cowardly to leave their tiny sphere of safety.
Also, distinctly different from what I was saying. I am calling for a dramatic expansion of our sphere of safety. We humans never need to leave safety at all. We are smart enough to expand the sphere of safety as large as we want it to be, through our robots. When I get to Mars, I will have a house and greenhouse with tomatoes on the vine ready to eat, all waiting for me.
Bridge building isn't dangerous anymore. We have tens of thousands of bridges in this country, and most were built without killing anyone. Even the modern mega bridges can get away with nobody being killed. Also, argument by analogy isn't persuasive anymore.
Are they too valuable to risk if we're building a bridge to the moons, planets and stars? No.
Whenever an accident happens, it shuts everything down. Humans are an impedement to progress. As an example, see the space shuttle program, which has been shut down for a long time now. Resources that would be better spent elsewhere are being used to make an inherently bad design marginally safer. And most of this is politically based. The shuttle didn't become more dangerous after each one was lost. We were all comfortable flying the shuttle before the accidents, and the risk hasn't changed. What has changed is the politics.
Robots are resistant to all the politics, except for the monetary cost. I think everyone accepts that difficult things are going to fail sometimes. Our perception of things is that losing 7 astronauts is FAR more expensive than losing a billion dollar probe. So, losing an occasional robot probe is acceptable, politically and economically.
The goal here is to get people working, living, and thinking on other planets. It's been nice to see humans perform tasks in space, such as repair Hubble, or construct a space station. But I don't think that people should be doing these jobs on Earth either. A human being on an assembly line is wasted if a robot can do it. If I were the emperor of the universe, I would have humans design and plan space missions, and robots would do the mundane work of assembling the probes, building rockets and launching rockets. That's well into the future though, obviously.
Space exploration is a dangerous business, and humans are too valuable to risk. Or at least they should be.
Computers and robots are terrific explorers. I believe that they can also be terrific builders of infrastructure. That's the direction that future space missions should follow.
I'm not saying that humans should stay home. I am saying that if I had to build a log cabin on the moon myself, or have a robot do it for me, I'd let the robot do it.
We need to reduce expenditures on manned spaceflight and redirect those resources to basic research in materials, computer systems, robotics, and planetary chemistry. Out of this research would come technologies allowing us to explore the solar system remotely, build robust spacecraft, and actually make a living off the materials available on the planet or moon we happen to be standing on.
A "waste" of something is when you're not using it for anything. Wasting a computer is when you have a computer, but you don't use it. If you don't have a computer, you can't waste it. If you have a computer and use it, you're not wasting it.
Similarly, putting something in a space is using that space. We have the space, and that space is being used. Therefore, the space is not wasted.
On a similar but unrelated subject, it's viruses, not virii.
The author compares Linux to the Trojan horse. But the story of the Trojan horse isn't meant to point out the risks of accepting gifts. It's meant to point out the risk of accepting a gift, and failing to inspect it properly. It's ironic that the Chinese are adopting Linux because of the threat of a trojan horse in Linux. They seem to have learned the lesson of the horse, because they have picked an OS that can be inspected properly. Windows can't be inspected in the same way. Yes, I know about "shared source" but I haven't read where MS C++.NET is a part of that. You have to be able to examine the entire tool chain, or you haven't looked inside the horse.
I don't think it's erroneous, but it's definitely badly worded. When I was a kid I read about the incident in a book that described the side rails being submerged in the water. Just a little bit more roll would have capsized her. As it was, the bow of the ship was nearly torn off, and she needed repairs when she arrived in port.
I can see how some would consider that sort of thing "rolling over", even though it didn't capsize.
When it seems technology moves too slow, consider that 4 years is a very long time in the computer world.
1981 - start of Reagan 1st term. IBM PC barely exists.
1985 - Reagan 2nd term. Amiga still months from introduction.
1989 - Bush Sr. 1st term. Gopher looks like it's going to be a real winner.
1993 - Bill Clinton 1st term. Most people are stil l having trouble accessing more than 1 Megabyte of memory. Microsoft offers users "himem.sys" as a solution. Linux begins to change all that.
1997 - Bill clinton 2nd term. Everybody's reading about who poked who in the Oval Office - on a computer network that spans the globe
2001 - GWBush 1st term. Cheap computers perform at a more than a billion FLOPS. Hard drive prices crash through the floor. Wireless networking barely alive.
2005 - Wireless networking causes massive chaos in the government, allowing robotic overlords to storm the Democratic Convention. Scene is repeated three weeks later at the Republican Convention. Robots declare martial law, and institute an omnipotent supercomputer and the emperor of the world. Declares Sunday to be free ice cream day. Jaded citizens eat it up.
When you look at the state of the art at 4 year intervals, it seems like a lifetime. When GW Bush was first elected, a nice computer would have been 1 GHZ or less, with 64 megs of RAM. And before that, it would have been a little Celeron 300A, or maybe a Pentium MMX.
This paragraph that I found on should provide enough information that with a little Google searching a wealth of maritime history and lore about big waves can be found:
A single rogue wave can wreak havoc on even the sturdiest vessels, and our maritime history is littered with the lore and legend of these sea monsters. In 1942, the Queen Mary was struck by a mountainous wave that rolled her over. Fortunately, the ship righted herself and continued on to England. In 1965, the U.S.S. Pittsburgh lost 90 feet of her bow to a rogue wave in the North Pacific. In 1966, while crossing from Lisbon to New York, the S.S. Michelangelo was stuck by an 80 foot wave that tore 30 feet of bulwark off, smashing it into the bridge and first class rooms. Every year, major ocean vessels suffer structural damage while traveling south along the standard route from the Middle East to the United States or Europe.
I think that they left the characters 'ff' off the end of the name by accident. So, is anyone else creeped out by this little insight into the mind of a marketer?
A lot of meteorites will be small. Smaller than your fist. Maybe as big as a small marble. These won't leave craters. Other than that, I don't know how to hunt for them.
You can reach the following with a Google "feeling lucky" search on "meteorite Vesta": http://www.solarviews.com/cap/meteor/vest amet.htm
This describes some other meteorites that we know with good certainty come from the asteroid Vesta. The process is the same for knowing a meteorite came from Mars.
Slashdot Mirror
If by "losing it" you mean that he is spitting mad because narrow minded bigots are using the Constitution to wipe their asses, then yes, he is "losing it".
Well don't just stand there, write a Wikipedia article about mass deleters using rotating open proxies. That's what a free encyclopedia is all about.
you think it's easier to educate everyone needed to research, manufacture, test, program, and operate robots than to educate astronauts?
No, that's not what I said or implied.
The martian rovers have done great things, make no mistake, but people wouldn't take a week to crawl 10 meters and look at 2 rocks the size of paperweights.
The rovers are the first cut. These robots need to be improved, obviously. You seem to be implying that robot technology will not advance, and glacial speeds are the best that can ever be done.
NASA won't service the Hubble because it would "risk" astronauts.
I'm not saying we shouldn't use robots, or perform robot missions where it makes sense. But to cower under our beds at the thought of stepping outside our atmosphere because it's 'risky' is nausiating.
Then you are making yourself sick. I am saying that we should dominate, subjigate, and beat down the dangers of our entire solar system. The idea that we should cower under our beds originated inside of your own head.
Go back and read what I wrote in a positive light. I am not saying stay on Earth. I am saying get out into space faster, using robots to expand the sphere of safety that humans can operate in. I am saying that spending money on the space shuttle and space station should be better spent on building systems that can build space systems humans can live in. The end result is humans living in space centuries before they will at our current rate.
No, robots can't do those things today. I think that besides the computer capabilities, we need to figure out how to build robots that have the versatility of a human. But I think it can be done, and if I were king of the universe we'd be giving it a try.
what are the humans going to do living permanently there?
I'd imagine they'd do what they do here. Work for a living, work for fun, drink beer, watch TV. My vision of moving people into space isn't just for the smartest and brightest. I will know that I've succeeded when I read a help-wanted ad for string quartet to play on the moon, no other qualifications needed.
With the technology to robotically build moon housing, we could move thousands and thousands of people there, in scaled-up Soyuz spacecraft. No need to waste time and money building something completely new, because after the moon, we need to design systems to do the same thing on Mars. It's a completely different planet, with completely different challenges.
I have no problem with you believing that. But the reason for this discussion is to look at both sides, bring up points positive and negative, and see how they compare.
I already knew what your position was.
Let me ask you a question: What would you say if NASA were to today cancel both the space shuttle, and the space station in favor of a new program that would
-use a robot to scope out sites from orbit
-use a robot lander to scope out sites from the ground
-use a robot factory to separate raw materials from the lunar soil
-use a robot to construct shelters and greenhouses
-use robots to maintain the shelter
-finish off with a single launch of some humans that would permanently live on the surface of the moon, in a station that was ready when they arrived.
That is exactly what I am proposing. If you read anything different, then you misread what I wrote.
Wow, you completely misunderstood everything I said.
:-)
If anything, I possess more ambition and daring than everyone else has, including Neil Armstrong. How? Because I dare to outline a plan for getting people into space, faster than we are currently moving, in the face of hostility from people who just don't understand what I have written.
That takes real balls.
Not trying to be the troll here, but in fact humans are pretty cheap - easy to manufacture, more or less self maintaning given oxygen, water, food and shelter from harsh environments. Heck, we've got BILIONS of them just lying around.
I know you're not a troll. Humans are easy to manufacture, but hard to educate, that's the essential difference. And I think we have to include a nod to sentience. We sometimes may not think the other guy's life is particularly valuable, but to him it's everything.
Your other points about people volunteering to go to space I agree with, but there's still the political aspect. When a human dies, things shut down more than when a robot probe dies.
I'm just keeping my eye on the ball. The goal is to get people into space, working and living on other planets and moons. We can do a heck of a lot more than we are with robots, and we should. We should terminate the space shuttle, and the space station to free up funds to make this happen. I think that it's possible to use robots to prepare homes for us on other worlds, so that when we arrive we can be effective immediately, and not having to construct everything from scratch in a hostile environment.
Right, we lost how many probes at Mars recently, (three or four, I lost count). But look at what's coming down the pipeline. The number of new robot exploration missions has increased in response. And the budgets for them have gotten relatively bigger, since it became apparent that cutting corners on the Discovery missions affected reliability.
Sorry, the real world data doesn't support your statement.
I hope you didn't think that's what I meant.
Let the robots be the magellans and the columbuses of space exploration.
This is the opposite of what I said. Let me ask this rhetorical quesiton: "Do you suppose that the Cassini mission controllers are NOT like Magellan and Columbus?" Robots are tools, not explorers, unless you're talking about a master race of intelligent robots supplanting the human desire to explore.
But if we stop at merely learning about our universe, we do ourselves a great disservice.
Once again, the opposite of what I said. I said that we should use robots to explore, because we could learn much faster, and more efficiently. That's quite a bit different that cessation of learning.
because both were too cowardly to leave their tiny sphere of safety.
Also, distinctly different from what I was saying. I am calling for a dramatic expansion of our sphere of safety. We humans never need to leave safety at all. We are smart enough to expand the sphere of safety as large as we want it to be, through our robots. When I get to Mars, I will have a house and greenhouse with tomatoes on the vine ready to eat, all waiting for me.
Bridge building isn't dangerous anymore. We have tens of thousands of bridges in this country, and most were built without killing anyone. Even the modern mega bridges can get away with nobody being killed. Also, argument by analogy isn't persuasive anymore.
Are they too valuable to risk if we're building a bridge to the moons, planets and stars? No.
Whenever an accident happens, it shuts everything down. Humans are an impedement to progress. As an example, see the space shuttle program, which has been shut down for a long time now. Resources that would be better spent elsewhere are being used to make an inherently bad design marginally safer. And most of this is politically based. The shuttle didn't become more dangerous after each one was lost. We were all comfortable flying the shuttle before the accidents, and the risk hasn't changed. What has changed is the politics.
Robots are resistant to all the politics, except for the monetary cost. I think everyone accepts that difficult things are going to fail sometimes. Our perception of things is that losing 7 astronauts is FAR more expensive than losing a billion dollar probe. So, losing an occasional robot probe is acceptable, politically and economically.
The goal here is to get people working, living, and thinking on other planets. It's been nice to see humans perform tasks in space, such as repair Hubble, or construct a space station. But I don't think that people should be doing these jobs on Earth either. A human being on an assembly line is wasted if a robot can do it. If I were the emperor of the universe, I would have humans design and plan space missions, and robots would do the mundane work of assembling the probes, building rockets and launching rockets. That's well into the future though, obviously.
Space exploration is a dangerous business, and humans are too valuable to risk. Or at least they should be.
Computers and robots are terrific explorers. I believe that they can also be terrific builders of infrastructure. That's the direction that future space missions should follow.
I'm not saying that humans should stay home. I am saying that if I had to build a log cabin on the moon myself, or have a robot do it for me, I'd let the robot do it.
We need to reduce expenditures on manned spaceflight and redirect those resources to basic research in materials, computer systems, robotics, and planetary chemistry. Out of this research would come technologies allowing us to explore the solar system remotely, build robust spacecraft, and actually make a living off the materials available on the planet or moon we happen to be standing on.
A "waste" of something is when you're not using it for anything. Wasting a computer is when you have a computer, but you don't use it. If you don't have a computer, you can't waste it. If you have a computer and use it, you're not wasting it.
Similarly, putting something in a space is using that space. We have the space, and that space is being used. Therefore, the space is not wasted.
On a similar but unrelated subject, it's viruses, not virii.
The remote control perpetually wins the category of "most dropped electronic device in a typical home." Good way to scratch the iPod.
That's a leftover from the 70's and the energy crisis. I still have memories of my childhood, freezing my ass off in a chilly house.
The author compares Linux to the Trojan horse. But the story of the Trojan horse isn't meant to point out the risks of accepting gifts. It's meant to point out the risk of accepting a gift, and failing to inspect it properly. It's ironic that the Chinese are adopting Linux because of the threat of a trojan horse in Linux. They seem to have learned the lesson of the horse, because they have picked an OS that can be inspected properly. Windows can't be inspected in the same way. Yes, I know about "shared source" but I haven't read where MS C++ .NET is a part of that. You have to be able to examine the entire tool chain, or you haven't looked inside the horse.
That would in the butt, Bob!
(if you don't get it, don't moderate)
I don't think it's erroneous, but it's definitely badly worded. When I was a kid I read about the incident in a book that described the side rails being submerged in the water. Just a little bit more roll would have capsized her. As it was, the bow of the ship was nearly torn off, and she needed repairs when she arrived in port.
I can see how some would consider that sort of thing "rolling over", even though it didn't capsize.
When it seems technology moves too slow, consider that 4 years is a very long time in the computer world.
1981 - start of Reagan 1st term. IBM PC barely exists.
1985 - Reagan 2nd term. Amiga still months from introduction.
1989 - Bush Sr. 1st term. Gopher looks like it's going to be a real winner.
1993 - Bill Clinton 1st term. Most people are stil l having trouble accessing more than 1 Megabyte of memory. Microsoft offers users "himem.sys" as a solution. Linux begins to change all that.
1997 - Bill clinton 2nd term. Everybody's reading about who poked who in the Oval Office - on a computer network that spans the globe
2001 - GWBush 1st term. Cheap computers perform at a more than a billion FLOPS. Hard drive prices crash through the floor. Wireless networking barely alive.
2005 - Wireless networking causes massive chaos in the government, allowing robotic overlords to storm the Democratic Convention. Scene is repeated three weeks later at the Republican Convention. Robots declare martial law, and institute an omnipotent supercomputer and the emperor of the world. Declares Sunday to be free ice cream day. Jaded citizens eat it up.
When you look at the state of the art at 4 year intervals, it seems like a lifetime. When GW Bush was first elected, a nice computer would have been 1 GHZ or less, with 64 megs of RAM. And before that, it would have been a little Celeron 300A, or maybe a Pentium MMX.
Can anyone predict the state of the art in 2009?
The name of the product is the Jackito(ff). I think you're right.
I think that they left the characters 'ff' off the end of the name by accident. So, is anyone else creeped out by this little insight into the mind of a marketer?
A lot of meteorites will be small. Smaller than your fist. Maybe as big as a small marble. These won't leave craters. Other than that, I don't know how to hunt for them.
Same cloud, but it wasn't uniform. Each planet is different from each other, and from the Sun. They also came out of the same cloud.
You can reach the following with a Google "feeling lucky" search on "meteorite Vesta":t amet.htm
http://www.solarviews.com/cap/meteor/ves
This describes some other meteorites that we know with good certainty come from the asteroid Vesta. The process is the same for knowing a meteorite came from Mars.
I find it odd that the URL is cadsoftusa.com, but the page is in German. Is the software also in German? If it's English, I'll give it a shot.