But if the US is destroying the planet, doesn't it make sense to develop the technology that will allow us to colonize other planets before it is too late?
NO it does not.
It makes a lot more sense to try to stop the destruction.
That is what President Bush's moon initiative is about.
Rrrright... That's it... Bush has some futuristic vision of the destruction of our planet...oh wait... that's not been proven yet... we had better cut off the science budgets of those people that actually study these things, pump the cash into the coffers of the corporations that funded me.. and then convince the mindless masses that I'm all into this whole space thing, I've got a vision, trust me...
While there are a lot of things that robots can do, there are a hell of a lot of things they can't. For instance, having a robot on Mars doing geology investigations is great, but all the stuff the rovers take a day to do could be done by a human in just a few minutes.
The amount of time it takes is irrelevant. How much is costs to get the job done is the point.
Robots can't react to new situations the way humans do, either; present one with something outside of its programming and it'll just sit there. And do you really trust the robot to not screw up?
Um... And like there is not a documented paper trail of people screwing up?
There are reasons why humans still drive trucks, fly planes, and operate trains.
What planet do you live on? You have never heard of robots flying planes or operating trains or driving trucks? The military uses flying planes now. Every other airport I go to uses robots to drive the trams. Nearly every distribution plant uses robots to truck goods from one end to the other.
You use the right tool for the right job. And the choice of a human over a robot can sometimes be just another case where you choose the right method for the right situation.
Bullshit
You use the tools you can afford! I would love to use a helicopter to transport me from my house to my work every day. It would save time, the technology is available, what's the downside? I cant afford it
I could hire a doctor to put a bandage on my kids "boo-boo". The doctor is certainly qualified, what's the downside? It's too expensive
I could send a dude to Mars to pick up rocks. "Dude" is certainly qualified, he can do it faster, what is the downside? do you really need the math?
"One of my main goals as the mayor of Provo City is to use technology to bless the lives of Provo residents, and Me Inc. is simply and effectively allowing me to do that," said Lewis K. Billings, mayor of Provo, Utah. "Me Inc. is an incredible technology, one which I plan to use continually throughout my term as it dramatically enhances my ability to personally reach constituents."
A reference here is in order... For the argument, let's take it at face value...
The real story here isn't that SCO == carp (floating around eating shit that falls from above, we are all convinced of that already), but that they have convinced/bribed/bought some local politician who now thinks (has been convinced) it's a good idea to spam his constituents.
The first time I get a politician that spams me on my cell (at my expense), will make it very easy to know who NOT to vote for.
As I clearly indicated in my post this has nothing to do with the GP post but with your comment "That means he's made up some new physics, something completely untested, and is therefore a crackpot."
That comment is factually anti-science. Perhaps you simply did not mean it that way, in which case this debate is null. Every single significant debate in the scientific community has come from someone who rocked the boat... who decided to publish something that was "untested", who countered the common dogma. Do you want to read an ass-load of papers with the entire point being we agree with this dude or that dude? I certainly hope not.
I do solar physics. Over the last few years this dude named Fisk has been publishing all sorts of papers that aggravate the solar physics community (you can google it yourself). Does this mean that this Fisk dude is wrong? No, it does not. It simply means that someone in the scientific community is rocking the boat (right or wrong), is pushing the common dogma, is trying to get people to think outside the box. For those of you not in the field, Fisk would suggest that there is a whole hell of a lot of open magnetic flux on the sun, while others would suggest that the open magnetic flux is confined to specific regions.
As a physicist I am "religiously" opposed to anyone labeling someone a "crackpot" just because they have a new idea. A new idea needs to be put through peer review, it may live, it may die, but to label someone a crackpot for an untested idea is simply jumping the gun.
Dude, you seriously need to take a chill pill. The guy was essentially bitching about his job. You don't need me to link to the endless/. Posts along the lines of "would you quit your good job for less money if it made you happier?"
If the GP is some I'm-lucky-to-have-my-job-because-I'm-not-very-comp etent kind of guy then he should shut his trap and take it like a man. If he is a competent person then there ARE other jobs out there.
I guess the problem here is the use of the word NOW?. As you should know what I meant by that is the dude should start NOW to look for another job. Obviously you don't quit until you have set your self up.
Yes, I am for real. I do not think life "sux". Every time I have seen someone who is a "life sux" kind of person it's always been their choice (did not want to relocate, did not want to educate themselves further, did not etc...), basically it came down to I think I deserve a free-ride...(perhaps, as you suggest, I am damn lucky?).
That means he's made up some new physics, something completely untested, and is therefore a crackpot.
Truly unique concepts are always met with opposition. There is a quote that I love (don't know the source) "Don't worry about having a unique idea stolen, if it's truly unique you will have to beat them over the head with it."
I'm not saying I support grandparent, I'm just saying that your comment is anti-science. Just because someone has a new idea does in no way make them a crackpot... most (if not all) of our significant advancements happen when people come up with "new physics".
As those vehicals get built, the technology to build non combustion vehicals on earth gets better.
I've heard these types of arguments for years and I have never understood the justification.
(A.) Spend 20 M to build a non-combustion doom-buggy, launch it on a $100+ M rocket, required spacecraft $100+M, telemetry/DSN/FOT 50+M, etc....
(B.) Spend 20 M to build a non-combustion doom-buggy (for arguments sake lets say the exact same one, same company/university/lab and include the anal-retentive quality control costs as well), no launch required $0, no spacecraft $0, telemetry... ~100k (at best, running OSS of course)
How does (A.) somehow improve the adoption of "said" tech better than (B.) regardless of the massive difference in costs?
The reason for doing something in space/moon/mars/etc... vs. doing something on the ground (on Earth) had better have a justifiable scientific purpose. If you struggle with this (as you damn well should) then perhaps the whole tech-infusion argument should be given a more critical eye.
I dont know who Ambrose Bierce is (and I really dont care) but mormon was the dude who supposedly put the plates together, like the editor I guess. It was the macarroni or the moroni dude who was the last of "his" species. So it's a choice (not a mispelling), didn't you see the matrix?
The claims the mormons make are no different than the rediculious claims any other religion makes.
Is it stranger that God would choose a "people", a specific genetic line to be somehow better then everyone else (think the chosen people now, old Testement), then it is to believe that god would choose a back-woods 12 year old to bring back the faith? I dont think so, I think these are both very cute stories that go right along with the monster in that damn lake, that white furry dude who wonders around the Klondike, and the UFOs.
everyone has their God, mine just happens to exist in the low corona.
So next time you clip your toe nails in the bathroom then have some strange need to scratch your ass (hey, it happens), you have just inserted thousands/millions of the company's property rights, well,... right up your...
I'm all for a Beowulf cluster but location is kind of important.
Why do you say that? Perhaps you should read up to find out what oxidation actually means. Just because it has that "ox" in it doesn't mean that it's directly related to Oxygen.
And "Teflon" does not hurt you...
Please restrain yourself... your smart, you get the point...
All right, I'll admit, my windows comment was nothing but a karma whore on my part... bad me...
you want to reward those engineers and scientists with what drives them, getting into space themselves.
Hey, I am a scientist (insert an obligatory "you insensitive clod" here) in the field and I do not want to go into space... well OK perhaps just a little bit... Oh shit, alright, take my left nut, take it dammit... I really want to thrust my instrument down the throat of the solar acceleration mechanism. I want to "feel" the non-gyrotropic gradient anisotropies my self, I want to be there when the near-relativistic electrons show (as I have predicted in my many papers) clear evidence of scatter-free propagation from the sun... oh... oh... ohhh... I'd better get a towel.
Halo was my first game in a long time. I had not played a game since probably doom2. I thought the story was interesting, interaction was intuitive, the graphics were more than I expected, and the online game play was, well... new to me (except that stupid quake 3, or at least I think that was it, running around in circles all day, jumping off everything, no story at all,...Lame... It turned me off to games for quite a while)
Compared to a couple of movie tickets I thought (and still do) it was money well spent. If Bungie can make it better then that is great news to me as I have been waiting for the PC release.
As another reply pointed out there have been many space plasma instruments launched over the last decades. Think of the Voyager spacecraft. Voyager 1 passed the termination shock last year and has a plasma instrument (unfortunately not functional). Voyager 2 which is approaching the termination shock has a fully functional plasma instrument and the results are at worst astounding.
It would be silly to try to name all of the spacecraft that have flown plasma instruments during the space age as many would be left out (Helios-xx, IMP-xxxx, Ulysses, Galileo, Cassini, Wind, ACE, etc...insert many more here.......)
Of course I did not RTFA but plasma instruments are difficult to build, calibrate, etc... You can't just slap one together on a bench and launch it. We would all love to see significant scientific advancement coming from a new launch, this just seems like a waste of funds... well perhaps I'm too entrenched... good luck to those guys and I'll keep my eyes on the scientific literature... time will tell.
Are you talking about error in a mathematical sense or a religious sense?
As you more-or-less pointed out in your post, it really comes down to a choice, a decision, an interpretation as to where you/I/we personally draw the line.
The only problem I have with your post is the We part of it. If you want to restate it as " I" that would be fine. We != You != Me
Thanks, that concurs with what I was told (without the actual name).
I remember my prof. catagorized this as one of the dumbest things that we have done in the last x+ years (that was of course 10 years ago but I haven't forgotten it).
My curiosity on this topic falls along the lines of all the fancy GPS military hardware we have. If the oposition (whoever that may be) could detonate a device in a GPS orbit would that cripple the defense/offense system of the military? No doubt? smart men have thought about this and have solved this problem long ago???
Your right. I love my Crock. But the Crock is designed for cooking meals in a liquid. If you need to cook something dry then the Crock is not the best tool. For example if I needed to cook a prime rib... now i could do it in a crock, but it would have a very different flavor than if I cooked it dry. Professional kitchens always (as far as I know) cook the prime rib in an "oven", at low temperatures, with some humidity. The result is, as we all know, awsome. The Crock does not deliver the same flavor.
Slashdot Mirror
But if the US is destroying the planet, doesn't it make sense to develop the technology that will allow us to colonize other planets before it is too late?
NO it does not.
It makes a lot more sense to try to stop the destruction.
That is what President Bush's moon initiative is about.
Rrrright... That's it... Bush has some futuristic vision of the destruction of our planet...oh wait... that's not been proven yet... we had better cut off the science budgets of those people that actually study these things, pump the cash into the coffers of the corporations that funded me.. and then convince the mindless masses that I'm all into this whole space thing, I've got a vision, trust me...
it is also designed to go farther, to the Moon and Mars
Lemming
OK, let's get this misconception out of the way.
misconception my ass.
While there are a lot of things that robots can do, there are a hell of a lot of things they can't. For instance, having a robot on Mars doing geology investigations is great, but all the stuff the rovers take a day to do could be done by a human in just a few minutes.
The amount of time it takes is irrelevant. How much is costs to get the job done is the point.
Robots can't react to new situations the way humans do, either; present one with something outside of its programming and it'll just sit there. And do you really trust the robot to not screw up?
Um... And like there is not a documented paper trail of people screwing up?
There are reasons why humans still drive trucks, fly planes, and operate trains.
What planet do you live on? You have never heard of robots flying planes or operating trains or driving trucks? The military uses flying planes now. Every other airport I go to uses robots to drive the trams. Nearly every distribution plant uses robots to truck goods from one end to the other.
You use the right tool for the right job. And the choice of a human over a robot can sometimes be just another case where you choose the right method for the right situation.
Bullshit
You use the tools you can afford! I would love to use a helicopter to transport me from my house to my work every day. It would save time, the technology is available, what's the downside? I cant afford it
I could hire a doctor to put a bandage on my kids "boo-boo". The doctor is certainly qualified, what's the downside? It's too expensive
I could send a dude to Mars to pick up rocks. "Dude" is certainly qualified, he can do it faster, what is the downside? do you really need the math?
"One of my main goals as the mayor of Provo City is to use technology to bless the lives of Provo residents, and Me Inc. is simply and effectively allowing me to do that," said Lewis K. Billings, mayor of Provo, Utah. "Me Inc. is an incredible technology, one which I plan to use continually throughout my term as it dramatically enhances my ability to personally reach constituents."
A reference here is in order... For the argument, let's take it at face value...
The real story here isn't that SCO == carp (floating around eating shit that falls from above, we are all convinced of that already), but that they have convinced/bribed/bought some local politician who now thinks (has been convinced) it's a good idea to spam his constituents.
The first time I get a politician that spams me on my cell (at my expense), will make it very easy to know who NOT to vote for.
You make me laugh!.
No, you presume way too much
As I clearly indicated in my post this has nothing to do with the GP post but with your comment "That means he's made up some new physics, something completely untested, and is therefore a crackpot."
That comment is factually anti-science. Perhaps you simply did not mean it that way, in which case this debate is null. Every single significant debate in the scientific community has come from someone who rocked the boat... who decided to publish something that was "untested", who countered the common dogma. Do you want to read an ass-load of papers with the entire point being we agree with this dude or that dude? I certainly hope not.
I do solar physics. Over the last few years this dude named Fisk has been publishing all sorts of papers that aggravate the solar physics community (you can google it yourself). Does this mean that this Fisk dude is wrong? No, it does not. It simply means that someone in the scientific community is rocking the boat (right or wrong), is pushing the common dogma, is trying to get people to think outside the box. For those of you not in the field, Fisk would suggest that there is a whole hell of a lot of open magnetic flux on the sun, while others would suggest that the open magnetic flux is confined to specific regions.
As a physicist I am "religiously" opposed to anyone labeling someone a "crackpot" just because they have a new idea. A new idea needs to be put through peer review, it may live, it may die, but to label someone a crackpot for an untested idea is simply jumping the gun.
Dude, you seriously need to take a chill pill. The guy was essentially bitching about his job. You don't need me to link to the endless /. Posts along the lines of "would you quit your good job for less money if it made you happier?"
p etent kind of guy then he should shut his trap and take it like a man. If he is a competent person then there ARE other jobs out there.
If the GP is some I'm-lucky-to-have-my-job-because-I'm-not-very-com
I guess the problem here is the use of the word NOW?. As you should know what I meant by that is the dude should start NOW to look for another job. Obviously you don't quit until you have set your self up.
Yes, I am for real. I do not think life "sux". Every time I have seen someone who is a "life sux" kind of person it's always been their choice (did not want to relocate, did not want to educate themselves further, did not etc...), basically it came down to I think I deserve a free-ride...(perhaps, as you suggest, I am damn lucky?).
That means he's made up some new physics, something completely untested, and is therefore a crackpot.
Truly unique concepts are always met with opposition. There is a quote that I love (don't know the source) "Don't worry about having a unique idea stolen, if it's truly unique you will have to beat them over the head with it."
I'm not saying I support grandparent, I'm just saying that your comment is anti-science. Just because someone has a new idea does in no way make them a crackpot... most (if not all) of our significant advancements happen when people come up with "new physics".
Weapons don't need to stop..
They arn't weapons until they stop
that's ironic
...has fired people for sitting down at work and for even using a cell phone in a private break area away from guests.
Sounds to me like it's time to get a new job.
If you are good at what you do, then why are you putting up with these kind of working conditions?
My recomendation is to quit NOW
As those vehicals get built, the technology to build non combustion vehicals on earth gets better.
I've heard these types of arguments for years and I have never understood the justification.
(A.) Spend 20 M to build a non-combustion doom-buggy, launch it on a $100+ M rocket, required spacecraft $100+M, telemetry/DSN/FOT 50+M, etc....
(B.) Spend 20 M to build a non-combustion doom-buggy (for arguments sake lets say the exact same one, same company/university/lab and include the anal-retentive quality control costs as well), no launch required $0, no spacecraft $0, telemetry... ~100k (at best, running OSS of course)
How does (A.) somehow improve the adoption of "said" tech better than (B.) regardless of the massive difference in costs?
The reason for doing something in space/moon/mars/etc... vs. doing something on the ground (on Earth) had better have a justifiable scientific purpose. If you struggle with this (as you damn well should) then perhaps the whole tech-infusion argument should be given a more critical eye.
As Ambrose Bierce noted, it's a mispelling.
I dont know who Ambrose Bierce is (and I really dont care) but mormon was the dude who supposedly put the plates together, like the editor I guess. It was the macarroni or the moroni dude who was the last of "his" species. So it's a choice (not a mispelling), didn't you see the matrix?
The claims the mormons make are no different than the rediculious claims any other religion makes.
Is it stranger that God would choose a "people", a specific genetic line to be somehow better then everyone else (think the chosen people now, old Testement), then it is to believe that god would choose a back-woods 12 year old to bring back the faith? I dont think so, I think these are both very cute stories that go right along with the monster in that damn lake, that white furry dude who wonders around the Klondike, and the UFOs.
everyone has their God, mine just happens to exist in the low corona.
This surface must outgas or undergo some level of desorption http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desorption/
... right up your...
So next time you clip your toe nails in the bathroom then have some strange need to scratch your ass (hey, it happens), you have just inserted thousands/millions of the company's property rights, well,
I'm all for a Beowulf cluster but location is kind of important.
Why do you say that? Perhaps you should read up to find out what oxidation actually means. Just because it has that "ox" in it doesn't mean that it's directly related to Oxygen.
And "Teflon" does not hurt you...
Please restrain yourself... your smart, you get the point...
I was going to post some smart-ass/funny comment along the lines of...
go grab ebarge.com while its still available...
Then I checked and well... http://www.ebarge.com/
I can predict yesterdays stock price too
I work in field where: A+B+C+D+?=Z
Z is the observable. We have little pieces of A and perhaps C but the other factors are simply unknown to us. Given that I know Z can I predict Z?
A large solar flare happens(A), a bunch of stuff happens(B+C+etc...), energetic particles hit the Earth(Z).
Knowing yesterdays stock price and predicting yesterdays stock price are totally different (just a semantics argument I know/predict?)
All right, I'll admit, my windows comment was nothing but a karma whore on my part... bad me...
you want to reward those engineers and scientists with what drives them, getting into space themselves.
Hey, I am a scientist (insert an obligatory "you insensitive clod" here) in the field and I do not want to go into space... well OK perhaps just a little bit... Oh shit, alright, take my left nut, take it dammit... I really want to thrust my instrument down the throat of the solar acceleration mechanism. I want to "feel" the non-gyrotropic gradient anisotropies my self, I want to be there when the near-relativistic electrons show (as I have predicted in my many papers) clear evidence of scatter-free propagation from the sun... oh... oh... ohhh... I'd better get a towel.
Halo was my first game in a long time. I had not played a game since probably doom2. I thought the story was interesting, interaction was intuitive, the graphics were more than I expected, and the online game play was, well... new to me (except that stupid quake 3, or at least I think that was it, running around in circles all day, jumping off everything, no story at all, ...Lame... It turned me off to games for quite a while)
Compared to a couple of movie tickets I thought (and still do) it was money well spent. If Bungie can make it better then that is great news to me as I have been waiting for the PC release.
the President should tell them to make a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none vehicle
... WINDOWS.
In the software world that would be called
It is always more expensive to make some super-do-everything vehicle. NASA should make every attempt to avoid the shuttle-type mistake again.
Gearbox's incredibly horrible port of Halo 1
I liked it.
As another reply pointed out there have been many space plasma instruments launched over the last decades. Think of the Voyager spacecraft. Voyager 1 passed the termination shock last year and has a plasma instrument (unfortunately not functional). Voyager 2 which is approaching the termination shock has a fully functional plasma instrument and the results are at worst astounding.
... well perhaps I'm too entrenched ... good luck to those guys and I'll keep my eyes on the scientific literature ... time will tell.
It would be silly to try to name all of the spacecraft that have flown plasma instruments during the space age as many would be left out (Helios-xx, IMP-xxxx, Ulysses, Galileo, Cassini, Wind, ACE, etc...insert many more here.......)
Of course I did not RTFA but plasma instruments are difficult to build, calibrate, etc... You can't just slap one together on a bench and launch it. We would all love to see significant scientific advancement coming from a new launch, this just seems like a waste of funds
"We should error on the side of protecting life"
Are you talking about error in a mathematical sense or a religious sense?
As you more-or-less pointed out in your post, it really comes down to a choice, a decision, an interpretation as to where you/I/we personally draw the line.
The only problem I have with your post is the We part of it. If you want to restate it as " I" that would be fine. We != You != Me
Thanks, that concurs with what I was told (without the actual name).
I remember my prof. catagorized this as one of the dumbest things that we have done in the last x+ years (that was of course 10 years ago but I haven't forgotten it).
My curiosity on this topic falls along the lines of all the fancy GPS military hardware we have. If the oposition (whoever that may be) could detonate a device in a GPS orbit would that cripple the defense/offense system of the military? No doubt? smart men have thought about this and have solved this problem long ago???
I apologize in advance but any chance you are German? It just sounds suspiciously like abendbrot
Your right. I love my Crock. But the Crock is designed for cooking meals in a liquid. If you need to cook something dry then the Crock is not the best tool. For example if I needed to cook a prime rib... now i could do it in a crock, but it would have a very different flavor than if I cooked it dry. Professional kitchens always (as far as I know) cook the prime rib in an "oven", at low temperatures, with some humidity. The result is, as we all know, awsome. The Crock does not deliver the same flavor.