I don't know this show and am not interested in viewing it. However I can think of two models that will work. MODEL I: Copy iTunes or Mubi. But it probably will not deliver enough viewers to fund the series by itself. So, on to...
MODEL II: 1. Ideally create one global launch date for all languages/regions and stick to it. This will provide maximum social networking and minimal spoilers. This would require sales to other markets starting after the pilot is made but before a whole season has been created. In other words, a new global sales strategy. So talk to a global ad agency. The other option is to make one global launch date per language, but you may get pirate versions I would imagine. 2. Insert reasonable number of advertisements into market-specific versions, e.g. EN-US, EN-UK, EN-AU, etc. 3a. If you can just provide speedy downloads from your site and akamai then do it. But that is going to be awfully expensive.. unless you have an amazing contract with ISPs all over the world already. 3b. Instead, create a bittorrent for each format, with many seeders of the appropriate version within each region's territory. This way Australians can download the Australian version with Australian advertisements fastest due to having many seeds provisioned within its continental LAN. A few college kids could do this, but if you ask the ad agency to do it, they will charge you the same as or slightly less than the cost if you had hired akamai.
Video quality should be 720p or higher. The easier the delivery is made, the less important and moralistic will any other pirate versions (undoubtedly somebody will edit out ads and make an uninterrupted version. Maybe the honest version will only have ads at beginning end and same points as TV version, so people may still prefer it and give back to the creators.) 4. Create websites and social networking to advertise and link it all up. Word of mouth / magazine / twitter all linking there. Websites point to the torrents. Also sell via app stores, amazon, etc. Try to get fans to sign up. They can read blogs, teasers, special cilps on the website, post in forums, ask questions and maybe even help guide the series. Imagine if Joss Whedon was doing this. 5. Offer extra things to purchase, maybe Amazon wants to do a special product deal. 6. Offer DVD, Blu-Ray box sets and 1080p files as standalones or full season download via bittorrent or app stores. These products have no advertisements and will include special extras like making of clips, interviews with director and actors, printable pamphlets, maybe desktop wallpapers, 3d printable models, suscriptions to follow the different actors, blogs by the fashion designers or whatever. Pricing of the collections should however be the same price or cheaper than the current box sets if buying the digital version since no physical distribution is then necessary. 7. $$$
In the post-scrub press conference SpaceX President Gwynn Shotwell said that on flight 1 there was a high pressure problem on engine 5 IIRC but that it was trending differently from the way it did this time [so possibly a different cause]. They are going to open it up and check it out. This has 9 engines and all are needed at liftoff, though after liftoff is achieved it can do without 1 or 2 engines she said. Either they will determine that the engine can be used as-is, or they might take an engine off a rocket they have in the garage and use it instead.
I can imagine a few cases when it could be allowed, based on mathematical proof in advance that error level would be acceptable.
Audio/Video playback in a noisy environment Processing similar to PageRank and the recently announced NetRank for biochemical analysis might be able to produce better results for a given cost in electricity. In other words, deeper graph analysis traded for less significant digits CPU-controlled activities that depend on statistics and sensors, for example street light control, voice/gesture based activation of lighting Applications in which low power is the most important thing, especially if it is output meant for a human brain which already operates on a lossy basis. A wristwatch might be lower power if it is allowed to be correct within plus or minus 15 seconds.
There was a short window of time at the beginning when I was curious about Google Plus but it was closed or something. I currently stay away from anything Google Plus like the plague. I have been known to click a +1 button but I don't even know if that is the same as the Google Plus blog network or whatever it is where they pay celebs to be cool online somewhere I don't ever go. For me, I would visit someone's blog or website but only not if on Google Plus. G+ Die fast!
There is a reason why people say an Internet technology year is like 7 years in another industry.
If patents are intended to protect inventors while commercializing their inventions, then current patent policy is a grevious failure and harm to inventors, and must be scrapped or greatly reformed.
Following are some key points:
- Huge number of obvious patents
- Large companies forced to buy tens of billions of dollars in patents as insurance against mutually assured destruction. This warfare means a single inexperienced jury can greatly impact trillion dollar multinational business strategies and a great segment of the global population, while making further invention exponentially risky.
- Smaller companies are unable to defend themselves in this warfare. They are periodically destroyed by large companies wielding patent weapons.
- U.S. inventors are put at a disadvantage by patents / legislation due to the immediate nature of software / Internet / speed of development overseas
- Mathematical nature of software languages and code
- Cooperative nature of software repositories, libraries, class hierarchies and APIs
- Revolution of the software industry, as a simultaneously cottage industry and international in nature
- The nature of software and the Internet means code can be transparently executed on servers in other jurisdictions.
- Legislation is both hidebound, slow and naive while having a permanent and disproportionately large impact on the software industry. A quickly reacting and quickly editable legal board is probably necessary if laws on software are to continue realistically.
As other industries become more and more dependent on software, they too will become more endangered by software patents, and by Internet-style information technology based disruptions. As it currently stands, individuals are at a severe disadvantage in patent wars and on a global stage due to the USPTO's spamming of software patents with a total lack of responsibility for the massive losses in time and money required to justly determine the patents' validity after the development of critical infrastructure using them.
What about systems with more than one elevator per shaft.. I know a couple high rises like that and they are probably software controlled through and through. Or I wonder is there a hardware mechanism that could handle idiotproofing it?
I have used a number of languages and have to say I love Perl the most. It has always had much more power, flexibility, speed and breadth than say Python or Ruby (no not asking for flames thanks), is a real language unlike PHP, and has much extensibility to allow you to develop your own style. There is a reason why it has been the glue of the Internet and I enjoyed for example developing quickly responding websites (with fcgi and catalyst on apache) or for short utility programs. There is a joke about line noise though I have never seen it to really be true. The point is to reduce the amount of work and lines of code while maximizing creativity. Many people prefer python or ruby for that. And a text editor like XEmacs (free) works fine. Some javascript maybe. Some sql. But this assumes web development on linux / LAMP stack and we don't even know what you want to do.
If you want to be marketable then perhaps saying you can do python or java or is useful. If you had to you could pick up PHP quickly. I doubt ruby would get you far marketing-wise though it could be fun. But the important thing is to decide what you want to make first and then choose a technology, and be willing to learn new ones. I would say try to stay away from proprietary technologies, like C# or other things that only work on Windows for example.
Apex for Salesforce is an interesting Java derivative but really locked in and takes a lot of learning including quirks and online development. If you pick an open source environment like eclipse or emacs and an open source language with a vibrant community and easy to reach libraries (Perl's CPAN for example) and run the server on your own mac or pc then you can stay in control. Even if you are aiming at the mobile market there are many ways you can do things, some of which can save you time so you can focus on the parts that are most important. So the answer is that you don't have to do anything lower than C these days. If you can find some areas where you feel comfortable and maintain an interest in learning you can become strong in any space.
There is another major earthquake due in the near future, and IIRC at least 1 or 2 nuclear power plants with identical vulnerability. What strikes me is that the Japanese government has always stressed how nuclear power is the cornerstone of the energy policy and there is no way to do without it, and yet the country is operating fine without any reactors in operation. Granted people still are saving energy and summer is not upon us yet, the overwhelming message is that the government, politics, and energy industry in Japan at least has been completely corrupted by money and the idea of maintaining a vaguely defined nuclear capability based on plutonium cycle. In other words if there was a need for nuclear weapons they could instantaneously become a nuclear weapons power, similarly there is IIRC no currently existing biowarfare grade lab but such could instantly be created. Actually the Japanese government pretty much destroyed the Japanese geothermal industry 10 years ago but there are enough geothermal resources to run the entire country. Let's see if there is any evidence of sanity. Most Japanese do not believe the government has told the truth about any of this, hence families with tiny kids have all been very worried.
You forgot Bill Joy's rant against nanotechnology which is not entirely crazy, but completely impossible to implement. In addition it seems to require that the U.S. somehow improve science education and dominate the technology so as to control it. Less and less likely.
p.s. Tor can you give me a version that works with Calibre, with beautiful artwork I can view on my Mac? I would probably read it mostly on my Kindle but would enjoy collateral like information about the author and so on. And I wouldn't hold it against you if you want to sell me DVDs or cool comics, etc.
Seems to me Tor now has as good or better than a name as Baen. I was already on Tor email list because I think they publish great stuff. But I only have bought from them dead tree versions in bookstores when I have seen them. Since I am overseas much this will give me an incentive to buy. If there was a way to buy via Kindle that would be great or maybe there is a way to buy directly from Tor which would be better and ought to save me some money since no middleman? Also I have bought from Tor books that I have read many times in the past because I love them. I would very, very much like to have a Tor digital library on my hard disk. Also I would be very willing to consider buying exclusives like maybe interviews with authors or special content that is only available to fans of authors etc. This is going to be AWESOME for Tor and to me anyway this makes them the best publisher for sci-fi in the world. I already enjoy very much the emails they send. Next, if they would sell me a zip file of all the winners of Hugo or similar awards in the future (I dunno, is it worth $50 for a digital version?) I would snap it up in a flash. It is hard to find them sometimes. Good luck Tor!
It is a fabulously wonderful thing they are doing and it will profit themselves and the human race. Maybe only these guys could do it. I just had another thought for the naysayers of whom there are even some on slashdot. Can you imagine a safer investment than strategically placed caches of air, water and refined platinum group metals, in a nonreflective wrapping, where only YOU know its exact location? And when YOU are the only people with an advanced swarm of lightweight explorer bots in space? Really any number of disasters, wars, political swings, bank imposions, plagues, tidal waves are as nothing to this. There is literally nothing that could wipe it out, even an asteroid could only bump into one of them. 100 years from now it will still be valuable, diamonds stored in a cold vault in the sky. Anyway its real value is in enabling manne missions and inhabitation of space and they will do that too.
Sorry. The concept is that a mechanical or biological machine can, given the necessary elements oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and so on, build human scale structures, devices, food, plants, etc. including all necessary compounds. Sounds like a magic wand since we are not close yet to such an assembler technology. Until we have magic seeds you can plant that will send down roots and grow a house for you, we will need factories.
Thanks for your comment. Yes I know there are actually individuals who would go. But, politically it would be a big downer. And I am not so sure it would be a good way to enthuse the next generation with space flight. I could of course be wrong but I would much rather see a nuclear powered space fleet that could send people to Mars and back, instead of seeing a one way trip. Presumably anyone fit enough to get to Mars and do something useful on the planet, has plenty of years left to their natural span but unlikely they could survive alone on Mars for an extended period with current tech.
I was lucky enough to get an Apple ][ when I was a kid. Not the ][+ so it had Integer Basic not Applesoft floating point basic. So you could only use integers..
I remember many, many hours spent making an animation for my middle school art class project (everyone else was drawing stuff). It was a drive through the desert looking through a dashboard, with cacti going by and I think engine sound.
I remember getting a Language Card (a 16KB memory expansion I think) so I could use Pascal which was very cool though it would tend to switch to a wierd graphic character set, hence I had to learn to read a new alphabet. I also ended up getting a modem. A color taxan monitor and discovering how to set a high bit to get a couple more colors (ending up with magenta, green, and IIRC brown and orange). I wrote a database to search for National Geographic magazines with it I remember.
A friend (Steven Hayes) introduced me to 6502 assembler. He would write programs in a paper notebook and test before typing in. He made a polyphonic synthesizer played from the keyboard, which he used to do a performance in front of the highschool - with the computer wrapped in tinfoil. Also he created arcade games - a robotwar clone and an asteroids game using 3D space, 3D polygons and two paddles to control pitch and yaw.
I still think PIE (Programmers Interactive Editor) by Hayden(?) was an awesome program. The Bilestoad was a cool game but Wizardry ][ was the best.
Let's think of a realistic plan and what its purpose is. I submit the purpose should be meaningful exploration toward expansion of the human race to the stars in order to: - understand our environment, - increase survivability of catastrophes, and - grow our technical capabilities to a scale necessary to meet the challenges this endeavor presents.
The purpose is not to waste human lives, or waste time, or make political basketball. We gain the hearts of the populace by making solid progress on the timescales of everyday lives, building momentum, and teaching science so that the populace understands why space is important.
Incidentally nobody wants to go die on Mars or to make a mission that will require dying so let's just stop talking about getting volunteers.
If we try to make a manned mission to Mars in the near future, it is going to be extremely risky and in the best case will end up like the manned moon mission: a success after many years but then a long hiatus of no exploration after that, since we have "gone there". I recommend we do not waste resources on manned travel to Mars yet, at least not without a much faster engine, and proceed with the following:
First of all we need funded projects immediately covering: - develop a robust, automated, semi-intelligent manufacturing capability able to mine, create parallel worker bots, build smelter and factory, develop energy sources such as solar and heat gradient, etc. - develop an ultra-high velocity launcher - develop high speed space engines, whether this is nuclear or ion-based remains to be seen - develop micro-size exploration craft
The manufacturing technology will be built for use on our own planet and perfect here for many uses and climes. It will work underwater, on arid mountain slopes, in antarctica, in the steamy tropics. It will survive attacks by wild animals, tornadoes, floods and monsoons. This project will revolutionize the human realities and economies of Africa and will turn our deserts into solar energy farms. It can be approached as if an alien space exploration and exploitation mission to Earth, which will might help its promotion.
The high-speed space engine will allow us to explore moon, asteroids and Mars on a time-scale that allows many missions during our lifetimes. Do it in months and years not decades.
The launcher will launch seed of this technology to the moon and will be perfected there with astronauts going there for a specific purpose, not just "to go" and make everyone feel good. In other words, the next time we go to the Moon we will take with us a superior technology and feel we can easily set up shop anywhere on the Moon we want.
The exploration craft will be useable on the Earth, Moon, Mars and anywhere else we want to go. Ultimately we want to be able to add capabilities so these semi-autonomous agents can roll, jump, fly, swim, climb etc. as needed and take advantage of local energy sources. Use on the Moon, Mars, Europa and the asteroid belt will be the goals. Before we get there, we can use them on Earth for exploration underwater or in jungles, and for search and rescue, and response to natural disasters like forest fires and tsunamis. Certainly such a capability would have been useful in the Fukushima disaster.
Realistically, our current technology is not high enough at the present moment to sustain a human presence on Mars or the Moon. Ideally from the perspective of someone going there, we would like to have an intelligent, autonomous nanotechnology that could somehow go there ahead of us and build us an entire self-contained, self-repairing station while allowing us to decide what we want to do with the planet. For example whether to leave it as-is, bombard it with ice, seed it with hardy lifeforms, etc.
However an advanced semi-automated manufacturing technology that can slash at the costs and time scales required to develop and maintain this machinery would be very useful, both on Earth and on Mars. If we can better marshal our resources through superior technology it will make life better on Earth as well as bring us a step closer to meaningful exploitation of space.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know this show and am not interested in viewing it. However I can think of two models that will work.
MODEL I:
Copy iTunes or Mubi.
But it probably will not deliver enough viewers to fund the series by itself.
So, on to...
MODEL II:
1. Ideally create one global launch date for all languages/regions and stick to it. This will provide maximum social networking and minimal spoilers. This would require sales to other markets starting after the pilot is made but before a whole season has been created. In other words, a new global sales strategy. So talk to a global ad agency. The other option is to make one global launch date per language, but you may get pirate versions I would imagine.
2. Insert reasonable number of advertisements into market-specific versions, e.g. EN-US, EN-UK, EN-AU, etc.
3a. If you can just provide speedy downloads from your site and akamai then do it. But that is going to be awfully expensive.. unless you have an amazing contract with ISPs all over the world already.
3b. Instead, create a bittorrent for each format, with many seeders of the appropriate version within each region's territory. This way Australians can download the Australian version with Australian advertisements fastest due to having many seeds provisioned within its continental LAN. A few college kids could do this, but if you ask the ad agency to do it, they will charge you the same as or slightly less than the cost if you had hired akamai.
Video quality should be 720p or higher. The easier the delivery is made, the less important and moralistic will any other pirate versions (undoubtedly somebody will edit out ads and make an uninterrupted version. Maybe the honest version will only have ads at beginning end and same points as TV version, so people may still prefer it and give back to the creators.)
4. Create websites and social networking to advertise and link it all up. Word of mouth / magazine / twitter all linking there. Websites point to the torrents. Also sell via app stores, amazon, etc. Try to get fans to sign up. They can read blogs, teasers, special cilps on the website, post in forums, ask questions and maybe even help guide the series. Imagine if Joss Whedon was doing this.
5. Offer extra things to purchase, maybe Amazon wants to do a special product deal.
6. Offer DVD, Blu-Ray box sets and 1080p files as standalones or full season download via bittorrent or app stores. These products have no advertisements and will include special extras like making of clips, interviews with director and actors, printable pamphlets, maybe desktop wallpapers, 3d printable models, suscriptions to follow the different actors, blogs by the fashion designers or whatever. Pricing of the collections should however be the same price or cheaper than the current box sets if buying the digital version since no physical distribution is then necessary.
7. $$$
In the post-scrub press conference SpaceX President Gwynn Shotwell said that on flight 1 there was a high pressure problem on engine 5 IIRC but that it was trending differently from the way it did this time [so possibly a different cause]. They are going to open it up and check it out.
This has 9 engines and all are needed at liftoff, though after liftoff is achieved it can do without 1 or 2 engines she said. Either they will determine that the engine can be used as-is, or they might take an engine off a rocket they have in the garage and use it instead.
I can imagine a few cases when it could be allowed, based on mathematical proof in advance that error level would be acceptable.
Audio/Video playback in a noisy environment
Processing similar to PageRank and the recently announced NetRank for biochemical analysis might be able to produce better results for a given cost in electricity. In other words, deeper graph analysis traded for less significant digits
CPU-controlled activities that depend on statistics and sensors, for example street light control, voice/gesture based activation of lighting
Applications in which low power is the most important thing, especially if it is output meant for a human brain which already operates on a lossy basis. A wristwatch might be lower power if it is allowed to be correct within plus or minus 15 seconds.
There was a short window of time at the beginning when I was curious about Google Plus but it was closed or something.
I currently stay away from anything Google Plus like the plague.
I have been known to click a +1 button but I don't even know if that is the same as the Google Plus blog network or whatever it is where they pay celebs to be cool online somewhere I don't ever go.
For me, I would visit someone's blog or website but only not if on Google Plus. G+ Die fast!
>> The angry cop cannot be held responsible.
Wrong. What planet do you live on? Tasemeinbed World?
The software industry is indeed different.
There is a reason why people say an Internet technology year is like 7 years in another industry.
If patents are intended to protect inventors while commercializing their inventions, then current patent policy is a grevious failure and harm to inventors, and must be scrapped or greatly reformed.
Following are some key points:
- Huge number of obvious patents
- Large companies forced to buy tens of billions of dollars in patents as insurance against mutually assured destruction. This warfare means a single inexperienced jury can greatly impact trillion dollar multinational business strategies and a great segment of the global population, while making further invention exponentially risky.
- Smaller companies are unable to defend themselves in this warfare. They are periodically destroyed by large companies wielding patent weapons.
- U.S. inventors are put at a disadvantage by patents / legislation due to the immediate nature of software / Internet / speed of development overseas
- Mathematical nature of software languages and code
- Cooperative nature of software repositories, libraries, class hierarchies and APIs
- Revolution of the software industry, as a simultaneously cottage industry and international in nature
- The nature of software and the Internet means code can be transparently executed on servers in other jurisdictions.
- Legislation is both hidebound, slow and naive while having a permanent and disproportionately large impact on the software industry. A quickly reacting and quickly editable legal board is probably necessary if laws on software are to continue realistically.
As other industries become more and more dependent on software, they too will become more endangered by software patents, and by Internet-style information technology based disruptions. As it currently stands, individuals are at a severe
disadvantage in patent wars and on a global stage due to the USPTO's spamming of software patents with a total lack of responsibility for the massive losses in time and money required to justly determine the patents' validity after the development of critical infrastructure using them.
What about systems with more than one elevator per shaft.. I know a couple high rises like that and they are probably software controlled through and through. Or I wonder is there a hardware mechanism that could handle idiotproofing it?
The right language depends what you want to do.
I have used a number of languages and have to say I love Perl the most. It has always had much more power, flexibility, speed and breadth than say Python or Ruby (no not asking for flames thanks), is a real language unlike PHP, and has much extensibility to allow you to develop your own style. There is a reason why it has been the glue of the Internet and I enjoyed for example developing quickly responding websites (with fcgi and catalyst on apache) or for short utility programs. There is a joke about line noise though I have never seen it to really be true. The point is to reduce the amount of work and lines of code while maximizing creativity. Many people prefer python or ruby for that. And a text editor like XEmacs (free) works fine. Some javascript maybe. Some sql. But this assumes web development on linux / LAMP stack and we don't even know what you want to do.
If you want to be marketable then perhaps saying you can do python or java or is useful. If you had to you could pick up PHP quickly. I doubt ruby would get you far marketing-wise though it could be fun. But the important thing is to decide what you want to make first and then choose a technology, and be willing to learn new ones. I would say try to stay away from proprietary technologies, like C# or other things that only work on Windows for example.
Apex for Salesforce is an interesting Java derivative but really locked in and takes a lot of learning including quirks and online development. If you pick an open source environment like eclipse or emacs and an open source language with a vibrant community and easy to reach libraries (Perl's CPAN for example) and run the server on your own mac or pc then you can stay in control. Even if you are aiming at the mobile market there are many ways you can do things, some of which can save you time so you can focus on the parts that are most important. So the answer is that you don't have to do anything lower than C these days. If you can find some areas where you feel comfortable and maintain an interest in learning you can become strong in any space.
Boy am I happy you said never ever in italics.
That makes it almost certain to come true.
There is another major earthquake due in the near future, and IIRC at least 1 or 2 nuclear power plants with identical vulnerability.
What strikes me is that the Japanese government has always stressed how nuclear power is the cornerstone of the energy policy and there is no way to do without it, and yet the country is operating fine without any reactors in operation. Granted people still are saving energy and summer is not upon us yet, the overwhelming message is that the government, politics, and energy industry in Japan at least has been completely corrupted by money and the idea of maintaining a vaguely defined nuclear capability based on plutonium cycle. In other words if there was a need for nuclear weapons they could instantaneously become a nuclear weapons power, similarly there is IIRC no currently existing biowarfare grade lab but such could instantly be created. Actually the Japanese government pretty much destroyed the Japanese geothermal industry 10 years ago but there are enough geothermal resources to run the entire country. Let's see if there is any evidence of sanity. Most Japanese do not believe the government has told the truth about any of this, hence families with tiny kids have all been very worried.
You forgot Bill Joy's rant against nanotechnology which is not entirely crazy, but completely impossible to implement.
In addition it seems to require that the U.S. somehow improve science education and dominate the technology so as to control it. Less and less likely.
p.s. Tor can you give me a version that works with Calibre, with beautiful artwork I can view on my Mac? I would probably read it mostly on my Kindle but would enjoy collateral like information about the author and so on.
And I wouldn't hold it against you if you want to sell me DVDs or cool comics, etc.
Seems to me Tor now has as good or better than a name as Baen.
I was already on Tor email list because I think they publish great stuff. But I only have bought from them dead tree versions in bookstores when I have seen them. Since I am overseas much this will give me an incentive to buy.
If there was a way to buy via Kindle that would be great or maybe there is a way to buy directly from Tor which would be better and ought to save me some money since no middleman?
Also I have bought from Tor books that I have read many times in the past because I love them.
I would very, very much like to have a Tor digital library on my hard disk.
Also I would be very willing to consider buying exclusives like maybe interviews with authors or special content that is only available to fans of authors etc. This is going to be AWESOME for Tor and to me anyway this makes them the best publisher for sci-fi in the world. I already enjoy very much the emails they send.
Next, if they would sell me a zip file of all the winners of Hugo or similar awards in the future (I dunno, is it worth $50 for a digital version?) I would snap it up in a flash. It is hard to find them sometimes.
Good luck Tor!
Well the 10:30AM PDT webcast is coming up so no need to guess.
http://www.planetaryresources.com/
It is a fabulously wonderful thing they are doing and it will profit themselves and the human race.
Maybe only these guys could do it.
I just had another thought for the naysayers of whom there are even some on slashdot.
Can you imagine a safer investment than strategically placed caches of air, water and refined platinum group metals, in a nonreflective wrapping, where only YOU know its exact location? And when YOU are the only people with an advanced swarm of lightweight explorer bots in space? Really any number of disasters, wars, political swings, bank imposions, plagues, tidal waves are as nothing to this. There is literally nothing that could wipe it out, even an asteroid could only bump into one of them. 100 years from now it will still be valuable, diamonds stored in a cold vault in the sky. Anyway its real value is in enabling manne missions and inhabitation of space and they will do that too.
The word is weltschmerz.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/weltschmerz
Thanks to http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-german-words.php
It is fairly easy to find this out from google.
Generally, no appreciable levels of radiation are found in meteorites. One meteorite which fell in Japan a few years ago had some measurable radioactivity.
http://www.meteoritelab.com/meteorites/#13
http://earth.s.kanazawa-u.ac.jp/ishiwata/labo/neagariUS.html
Thank you very much. I will look at the site.
Sorry. The concept is that a mechanical or biological machine can, given the necessary elements oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and so on, build human scale structures, devices, food, plants, etc. including all necessary compounds. Sounds like a magic wand since we are not close yet to such an assembler technology. Until we have magic seeds you can plant that will send down roots and grow a house for you, we will need factories.
Thanks for your comment. Yes I know there are actually individuals who would go. But, politically it would be a big downer. And I am not so sure it would be a good way to enthuse the next generation with space flight. I could of course be wrong but I would much rather see a nuclear powered space fleet that could send people to Mars and back, instead of seeing a one way trip. Presumably anyone fit enough to get to Mars and do something useful on the planet, has plenty of years left to their natural span but unlikely they could survive alone on Mars for an extended period with current tech.
You are welcome to go then.
Hi,
No I haven't read it but will check it out. Thanks.
Matt
I was lucky enough to get an Apple ][ when I was a kid. Not the ][+ so it had Integer Basic not Applesoft floating point basic. So you could only use integers..
I remember many, many hours spent making an animation for my middle school art class project (everyone else was drawing stuff). It was a drive through the desert looking through a dashboard, with cacti going by and I think engine sound.
I remember getting a Language Card (a 16KB memory expansion I think) so I could use Pascal which was very cool though it would tend to switch to a wierd graphic character set, hence I had to learn to read a new alphabet. I also ended up getting a modem. A color taxan monitor and discovering how to set a high bit to get a couple more colors (ending up with magenta, green, and IIRC brown and orange). I wrote a database to search for National Geographic magazines with it I remember.
A friend (Steven Hayes) introduced me to 6502 assembler. He would write programs in a paper notebook and test before typing in. He made a polyphonic synthesizer played from the keyboard, which he used to do a performance in front of the highschool - with the computer wrapped in tinfoil. Also he created arcade games - a robotwar clone and an asteroids game using 3D space, 3D polygons and two paddles to control pitch and yaw.
I still think PIE (Programmers Interactive Editor) by Hayden(?) was an awesome program. The Bilestoad was a cool game but Wizardry ][ was the best.
Let's think of a realistic plan and what its purpose is. I submit the purpose should be meaningful exploration toward expansion of the human race to the stars in order to:
- understand our environment,
- increase survivability of catastrophes, and
- grow our technical capabilities to a scale necessary to meet the challenges this endeavor presents.
The purpose is not to waste human lives, or waste time, or make political basketball.
We gain the hearts of the populace by making solid progress on the timescales of everyday lives, building momentum, and teaching science so that the populace understands why space is important.
Incidentally nobody wants to go die on Mars or to make a mission that will require dying so let's just stop talking about getting volunteers.
If we try to make a manned mission to Mars in the near future, it is going to be extremely risky and in the best case will end up like the manned moon mission: a success after many years but then a long hiatus of no exploration after that, since we have "gone there". I recommend we do not waste resources on manned travel to Mars yet, at least not without a much faster engine, and proceed with the following:
First of all we need funded projects immediately covering:
- develop a robust, automated, semi-intelligent manufacturing capability able to mine, create parallel worker bots, build smelter and factory, develop energy sources such as solar and heat gradient, etc.
- develop an ultra-high velocity launcher
- develop high speed space engines, whether this is nuclear or ion-based remains to be seen
- develop micro-size exploration craft
The manufacturing technology will be built for use on our own planet and perfect here for many uses and climes. It will work underwater, on arid mountain slopes, in antarctica, in the steamy tropics. It will survive attacks by wild animals, tornadoes, floods and monsoons. This project will revolutionize the human realities and economies of Africa and will turn our deserts into solar energy farms. It can be approached as if an alien space exploration and exploitation mission to Earth, which will might help its promotion.
The high-speed space engine will allow us to explore moon, asteroids and Mars on a time-scale that allows many missions during our lifetimes. Do it in months and years not decades.
The launcher will launch seed of this technology to the moon and will be perfected there with astronauts going there for a specific purpose, not just "to go" and make everyone feel good. In other words, the next time we go to the Moon we will take with us a superior technology and feel we can easily set up shop anywhere on the Moon we want.
The exploration craft will be useable on the Earth, Moon, Mars and anywhere else we want to go. Ultimately we want to be able to add capabilities so these semi-autonomous agents can roll, jump, fly, swim, climb etc. as needed and take advantage of local energy sources. Use on the Moon, Mars, Europa and the asteroid belt will be the goals. Before we get there, we can use them on Earth for exploration underwater or in jungles, and for search and rescue, and response to natural disasters like forest fires and tsunamis. Certainly such a capability would have been useful in the Fukushima disaster.
Realistically, our current technology is not high enough at the present moment to sustain a human presence on Mars or the Moon. Ideally from the perspective of someone going there, we would like to have an intelligent, autonomous nanotechnology that could somehow go there ahead of us and build us an entire self-contained, self-repairing station while allowing us to decide what we want to do with the planet. For example whether to leave it as-is, bombard it with ice, seed it with hardy lifeforms, etc.
However an advanced semi-automated manufacturing technology that can slash at the costs and time scales required to develop and maintain this machinery would be very useful, both on Earth and on Mars. If we can better marshal our resources through superior technology it will make life better on Earth as well as bring us a step closer to meaningful exploitation of space.
Actually Martin Lo discovered low energy gravitational paths or "superhighways" that would allow objects like space probes and maybe rocks to travel all around the solar system without power. These calculations were used in the Genesis probe NASA project IIRC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network
http://genesismission.jpl.nasa.gov/gm2/team/people/lo/interview1.htm
Presumably it will be built out of bits from the unclean Internet.
But how are they going to download patches? I guess everyone there will massively mirror every conceivable repository until the switch get flipped?
Something tells me there is a room where there will be a DMZ and both clean and unclean Internet exist in this room without an airgap.
Perhaps if you are clean enough you will be able to get advanced Internet which lets you email outside and conduct foreign trade?