> Most "viruses" at the moment need a stupid user.
Hmm, I was under the impression that most viruses these days just need a stupid email client (read: Outlook), with no intervention by the user required one way or the other.
A virus, by definition, requires human intervention to propagate.
Folks who think this will run natively on OS X will be disappointed. It runs on X11. So no pretty Aqua interface.
You need Fink to make it work.
Dive Into Python
on
Think Python
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Another excellent free book for Python is Dive Into Python by Mark Pilgrim. It is available in HTML, PDF, Word 97, Windows Help, plain text, and XML formats.
This book has plenty of examples and pointers to further reading on each subject. It features good layout, use of colors, and typography which makes for easy reading and comprehension.
The organization that is devoted to evangelizing Web standards is the Web Standards Project, aka The WaSP. They have been promoting web standards for years now.
Originally The WaSP targeted the browser makers to support standards in their browsers. They also targeted WYSIWYG Web development applications like Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe Golive.
Now that modern browsers are (mostly) standards compliant and WYSIWYG developers have released programs that generate standards compliant code, The WaSP has changed focus to the Web developers.
The WaSP agrees that the last bastion of old school, standards flaunting Web junk lies with Web developers. Now that we've got good browsers and good tools, there is no excuse why we don't have standards compliant sites.
I have to admit that I fell for Verisign's mailer and I gave them permission to "renew" (transfer) one of my domains. I have a few with Verisign already, which is why I got duped, but this particular one wasn't.
The great thing was that the registrar with whom my domain was actually hosted (Tucows) sent me an e-mail asking for my permission to release the domain. Realizing I had fallen prey to Verisign's schemes, I replied that I do not give permission.
The popularity of Windows Media with content providers is a direct result of the ubiquity of the Windows Media client. It is another example of how Microsoft has used (abused?) their monopoly of the OS.
Windows Media Player is available on every Windows machine. The Quicktime Player isn't. Quality loses out to quantity.
Redmond, WA - In a ruling yesterday delivered by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in the U.S. vs. Microsoft antitrust trial, the software giant was sentenced to spend 28 days in the Sunnybrook Corporate Rehabilitation Facility.
Convicted of abusing its status as a monopoly, Microsoft will spend the next month in a bug-free zone and will be required to examine the unlawful and destructive activities of its past in group therapy.
"It's really for the best. Now Microsoft will finally be able to get the help it truly needs," said U.S. Department of Justice spokesman Mark Evans.
Although Microsoft continually disclaims any wrongdoing, the scene turned ugly when U.S. Marshals showed up at Microsoft Corporation's home Friday afternoon. The Marshals had come to take the multi-billion dollar software company to the rehabilitation facility after it failed to show up at the bus station that morning.
After not responding to law enforcement officials' pleas to open the door, the Marshals bust in, only to find Microsoft actively engaged in excluding users of the unpopular and barely used Opera web browser from the Microsoft Network (MSN).
Marshals were able to subdue the giant and dragged it from its home in Redmond. Microsoft could be heard to scream "WE MAKE THE STANDARDS! Tim Berners-Lee can go [expletive] himself!" as it was shoved into a Redmond police car.
"You can't place the blame entirely on Microsoft," said Dr. Jessica Fowler of Harvard Business School. "Microsoft is very sick, and it needs professional care. It's obvious to anyone that the ranting of Craig Mundie [about the Linux OS] was really just a cry for help."
Judge Kollar-Kotelly told Microsoft that the 28 day sentence to Sunnybrook was a minimum. "I'll evaluate your progress after this month. If I see a blue screen in March you are going right back."
An important part of corporate rehabilitation, say the experts, is to be exposed to peers who have similar histories of abuse. Microsoft will be joined in group therapy by Monsanto, Ford, CSFB, and Arthur Anderson.
I'm a team member for the Mars Desert Research Station, which is about to begin assembly on site in Utah. Just wanted to clarify some things...
First, MDRS, here in the U.S., will be the next simulation to begin, not the one in Australia. They are still looking for sites in Oz.
The first field season of a Mars Society hab (this past summer in the Arctic) featured a completed hab and at least three mock suits.
Also, several teams are developing pressurized rovers to test engineering designs. Some of these rovers will be tested as part of the mission simulations.
I was on the site selection committee for the MDRS and I was also a field scout. The Mars Society uses a combination of satellite and aerial reconnaisance, GIS data, and on-site scouting to locate potential sites. This is the phase Mars Society Australia is currently in.
The field season for Utah will be focused primarily on the cooler seasons, but it will be equipped with air conditioning.
Moreover, the initiative to travel or occupy another planet or moon would likely not ever be based on intelligent astronomical or planetary curiousities but, rather, it would likely be based on human's animal instincts to survive.
Actually, we'll probably go for money before circumstances necessitate a survival situation. Money has long been the driver for exploration and expansion. There's a lot of money to be made in space, it just takes a considerable amount of investment to jump-start the cash machine.
To paraphrase Carl Sagan: Extraordinary returns require extraordinary capital.
Steve Jackson is definitely one of the best in the business. He once came over and played Illuminati (the original) with us when I was in high school. A few of my friends and I joined up with the EFF Austin chapter, of which he was a major player. We went and saw "Sneakers".
I remember using The Mentor's hacking guides to help me learn the Net. The Mentor was an infamous hacker at the time. He was Lloyd Blankenship and he wrote GURPS Cyberpunk, which was later seized by the SS as a guide to hacking.
I remember the day that the Federal Judge (Sparks, I think) ruled against the Secret Service. I was in the courtroom. The only people I remember are Steve and Paco Xander. That was a long time ago. I still have my copy of Cyberpunk.
And I will forever be grateful to Steve Jackson for including my first writing efforts in his edition of the Principia Discordia.
Not *just* NASA. It's on a gov't site, but the other project involved is FMARS, which is private. It isn't all tax dollars at work, so I suppose that justifies the departure from the usual NASA drollness. Non-profits can't afford not to have a sense of humor.
I think what's interesting are the shotgun classes.:-)
FMARS is the Flashline Mars Analog Research Station, which is a project of The Mars Society (Flashline is the name sponsor for the mission). It is a simulated Mars base. There is an article about it in the print version of this month's Scientific American.
This is one of The Mars Society's projects for establishing a human presence on Mars. There will be a series of these simulated bases placed in analogous Mars environments throughout the world. The first is on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic. The next will be placed in the American Southwest. Currently it is on exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center Visitors' Center. It will begin its field season this September in the desert.
Additionally, The Mars Society has a prototype pressurized Mars rover program. It also has a trust fund established to raise money for a privately funded mission to establish a permanent presence on Mars. It may take a century or two of saving, but The Mars Society will *do* it.
"Personally I'd rather see a standard stereo component sized box, a UI that operates through your television and normal remote, and 30+ gigs, but this one is looking like a great start."
Now that web designers are more and more gaining the ability to control how their pages look, users seem to have less and less.
Old school web programmers indicate this is a terrible loss. New web designers, many influenced by the firmly established print world, feel the opposite.
Do you feel that the designer, or the user, should have ultimate control?
If they re-enter the atmosphere, the Iridium satellites will make quite a show. However, they are well known to already put on a show.
The Iridium satellites have large reflective dish antennas that, when hit at the right angle by the Sun, produce spectacularly bright flares in the sky. Sometimes the flares are bright enough to be visible by daylight.
To figure out when and where these flares will be visible in your area, visit Heavens Above. There you can plug in your location and receive data which will tell you where to look.
So far I have seen several. The flares are usually short-lived, much like the company that spawned them.
What if there was a powerful chip like Crusoe in each and every electrical appliance and device in which it was practical? Then wire them all for wireless communications. They can also communicate through the high bandwidth Internet gateway in the home with all your other more portable or distant devices like a car, PDA, laptop, office computer, etc.
Then create a powerful open source operating system (perhaps modifications to Linux) that is capable of wireless distributed computing. Basically it would use the combined processing power of all of the chips that you owned in order to achieve computing tasks. I guess it would be a wireless Beowulf cluster. The more devices you owned, the more powerful your home computer system.
Plus, it would be nice if people could pool the resources of their home systems together in a larger cluster to solve larger problems. Perhaps all of the cars on the road would use their spare CPU cycles to run a program that efficiently manages traffic for the entire city. Or all of the home distributed systems in a neighborhood could pool together in order to monitor neighborhood watch cameras that look for suspicious activity and notify homeowners of such.
My vision: the PC will go away and be replaced by a global interconnected and distributed computer system. This computer system will be scalable and universal. All of our communication, all of our computation, and all of our data storage will live on this system. It will evolve and adapt as a living organism. It will be transparent and automatic. Every computer program will run like SETI@home. Some programs will only be meant for a local geographical area, others will clamor for global attention. People will instruct their computers as to which programs they wish to run and what level of importance they wish to give them.
So can I patent the idea of a global scalable distributed computer?:-)
The reason not to opensource SETI@home is a scientific one. In order to ensure that the experiment goes smoothly and in order to ensure accurate and consistent reporting of results, the scientists must maintain control over the methods of the experiment.
The program code is an essential part of the method of the experiment. Different methods (which would erupt if it was opensourced) would ruin the validity of the results, since consistency was not maintained. Thus, the scientists are protecting the credibility and validity of their results while also minimizing uncertainty.
This is a single experiment that uses the help of a lot of people. It isn't a lot of experiments. A single experiment must maintain consistency throughout. Tracking and documenting multiple versions would be a larger endeavor than the scientists have time for and it would introduce an unacceptable level of uncertainty in the results.
If our current understanding of physical laws is accurate then it seems that the extrapolations being made on the possibilities afforded us by molecular nanotechnology point to achieving a world that is orders of magnitude more advanced in every conceivable field sometime in the next century. Do you think such a "phase shift" is likely to occur and, if so, when? What are the obstacles to such dramatic changes? How do we prepare ourselves?
As far as the effectiveness of this petition goes, I cannot say. It does well to provide a forum for people to learn about The Mars Society and thinkMARS and get involved, which may be much more useful.
However, as to your point about technology, read _The Case for Mars_ by Dr. Robert Zubrin in which he clearly outlines a method for getting to Mars using off-the-shelf technology. Since his book was published, numerous improvements and redesigns have been made to his Mars Direct plan. The technology exists, it is only the political will that is required.
There are indeed parts of the "Space Race" that were merely meant as a showing off of technological prowess to support political objectives. In fact, that is why it was called a race. The most obvious example of this was the Apollo program; the science of which could probably have been achieved by more mundane means. But that race came to an end a long time ago. Since Apollo, the space program has been more about keeping people in the aerospace industry employed, rather than achieving any sort of goal. There are a few exceptions of course.
The important thing to remember is that space is a place, not a government program. It isn't a hole into which taxpayers throw money. Exploring new places and overcoming the challenges of getting to, living in, and working in space have created technologies that have spun off into the public sector. There are medical technologies that save lives, communications technologies (remember the satellites?) that have made international banking and commerce possible, imaging technologies that have improved crop yields, and explorations of the Solar System that allow us to perform comparitive planetology and learn more about the world on which we live.
You may think of a space hotel as a glorified rich people's fantasy, but the reality is that government sponsored space programs do not drive down the cost of space transportation and living. It takes commercial investors with a profit motive to drive down the prices. Computers used to cost millions of dollars, now you can get a desktop for a few hundred. A space hotel would, in part, bring down the cost for everyone. Build a space elevator and everyone could afford it.
Cash does not solve the ills of society. It spreads the wealth, it does not create wealth, and it certainly does not maintain wealth. The only thing that solves those problems is education and energy. The exploration of space is technologically challenging and it demands highly educated labor. Also, space exploration is a powerful tool for education, merely look at the number of college degrees vs. the timeline for Apollo missions and you'll see what I mean. The energy and resources available to humans in the Solar System is incredibly high, enabling trillions of humans to have incredibly high standards of living, should they desire it.
Your point is, why should I support paying $20-$30 billion dollars to go for sending humans to Mars when we have so many problems here on Earth? Your point is that you think sending humans to Mars is a waste of money. The $20 billion you spend will enable humans to establish a permanent settlement on Mars. It will allow the development of new technologies. It will spur cheap access to space, enabling even further ventures to take place there. It will empower any civilzation that engages it. It will also put our eggs in more than one basket, which is necessary if you do not wish all of the "lesser humans" to get vaporized by an errant asteroid. The return on your $20 billion dollar investment becomes enormous. It *creates* wealth. We could push the envelope to send humans to Mars, discover a new method of irrigating crops, and feed 10 times the amount that the original $20 billion would have fed. There is a great deal of historical precedent available to back me up. Cash injections do not prevent social disease, they ease symptoms for a pitifully short time.
There are also the environmental aspects... the science. Comparative planetology is an extremely strong and robust tool for understanding our own Earth. And there is the possibility of life on Mars, or past life on Mars. This may be the single most important reason for going. Such a discovery would mean a great deal for humanity, both spiritually and scientifically. The effect on the science of biology would be astounding, seeing as how we only have one data point.
And for those who think we can make these discoveries and do this science by robotic exploration alone, I say you have no real concept of how paleontology and geology are properly done. Send your best robot explorer into the desert to look for fossils and send a human being, even a marginally trained human, and the human will return better science and more discoveries every time.
We must prepare for our future and we must accept our destiny. If it is possible it shall be done, the trick is to anticipate possibilities and do them *right*.
Slashdot Mirror
> Most "viruses" at the moment need a stupid user.
Hmm, I was under the impression that most viruses these days just need a stupid email client (read: Outlook), with no intervention by the user required one way or the other.
A virus, by definition, requires human intervention to propagate.
A worm can propagate without human intervention.
Folks who think this will run natively on OS X will be disappointed. It runs on X11. So no pretty Aqua interface.
You need Fink to make it work.
Another excellent free book for Python is Dive Into Python by Mark Pilgrim. It is available in HTML, PDF, Word 97, Windows Help, plain text, and XML formats.
This book has plenty of examples and pointers to further reading on each subject. It features good layout, use of colors, and typography which makes for easy reading and comprehension.
The organization that is devoted to evangelizing Web standards is the Web Standards Project, aka The WaSP. They have been promoting web standards for years now.
Originally The WaSP targeted the browser makers to support standards in their browsers. They also targeted WYSIWYG Web development applications like Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe Golive.
Now that modern browsers are (mostly) standards compliant and WYSIWYG developers have released programs that generate standards compliant code, The WaSP has changed focus to the Web developers.
The WaSP agrees that the last bastion of old school, standards flaunting Web junk lies with Web developers. Now that we've got good browsers and good tools, there is no excuse why we don't have standards compliant sites.
I have to admit that I fell for Verisign's mailer and I gave them permission to "renew" (transfer) one of my domains. I have a few with Verisign already, which is why I got duped, but this particular one wasn't.
The great thing was that the registrar with whom my domain was actually hosted (Tucows) sent me an e-mail asking for my permission to release the domain. Realizing I had fallen prey to Verisign's schemes, I replied that I do not give permission.
The transfer didn't occur and I kept my money.
For more information about The Mars Society's Mars Desert Research Station, I suggest you have a look at the MDRS Website.
The popularity of Windows Media with content providers is a direct result of the ubiquity of the Windows Media client. It is another example of how Microsoft has used (abused?) their monopoly of the OS.
Windows Media Player is available on every Windows machine. The Quicktime Player isn't. Quality loses out to quantity.
February 01, 2002
Redmond, WA - In a ruling yesterday delivered by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in the U.S. vs. Microsoft antitrust trial, the software giant was sentenced to spend 28 days in the Sunnybrook Corporate Rehabilitation Facility.
Convicted of abusing its status as a monopoly, Microsoft will spend the next month in a bug-free zone and will be required to examine the unlawful and destructive activities of its past in group therapy.
"It's really for the best. Now Microsoft will finally be able to get the help it truly needs," said U.S. Department of Justice spokesman Mark Evans.
Although Microsoft continually disclaims any wrongdoing, the scene turned ugly when U.S. Marshals showed up at Microsoft Corporation's home Friday afternoon. The Marshals had come to take the multi-billion dollar software company to the rehabilitation facility after it failed to show up at the bus station that morning.
After not responding to law enforcement officials' pleas to open the door, the Marshals bust in, only to find Microsoft actively engaged in excluding users of the unpopular and barely used Opera web browser from the Microsoft Network (MSN).
Marshals were able to subdue the giant and dragged it from its home in Redmond. Microsoft could be heard to scream "WE MAKE THE STANDARDS! Tim Berners-Lee can go [expletive] himself!" as it was shoved into a Redmond police car.
"You can't place the blame entirely on Microsoft," said Dr. Jessica Fowler of Harvard Business School. "Microsoft is very sick, and it needs professional care. It's obvious to anyone that the ranting of Craig Mundie [about the Linux OS] was really just a cry for help."
Judge Kollar-Kotelly told Microsoft that the 28 day sentence to Sunnybrook was a minimum. "I'll evaluate your progress after this month. If I see a blue screen in March you are going right back."
An important part of corporate rehabilitation, say the experts, is to be exposed to peers who have similar histories of abuse. Microsoft will be joined in group therapy by Monsanto, Ford, CSFB, and Arthur Anderson.
I'm a team member for the Mars Desert Research Station, which is about to begin assembly on site in Utah. Just wanted to clarify some things...
First, MDRS, here in the U.S., will be the next simulation to begin, not the one in Australia. They are still looking for sites in Oz.
The first field season of a Mars Society hab (this past summer in the Arctic) featured a completed hab and at least three mock suits.
Also, several teams are developing pressurized rovers to test engineering designs. Some of these rovers will be tested as part of the mission simulations.
I was on the site selection committee for the MDRS and I was also a field scout. The Mars Society uses a combination of satellite and aerial reconnaisance, GIS data, and on-site scouting to locate potential sites. This is the phase Mars Society Australia is currently in.
The field season for Utah will be focused primarily on the cooler seasons, but it will be equipped with air conditioning.
Actually, we'll probably go for money before circumstances necessitate a survival situation. Money has long been the driver for exploration and expansion. There's a lot of money to be made in space, it just takes a considerable amount of investment to jump-start the cash machine.
To paraphrase Carl Sagan: Extraordinary returns require extraordinary capital.
Steve Jackson is definitely one of the best in the business. He once came over and played Illuminati (the original) with us when I was in high school. A few of my friends and I joined up with the EFF Austin chapter, of which he was a major player. We went and saw "Sneakers".
I remember using The Mentor's hacking guides to help me learn the Net. The Mentor was an infamous hacker at the time. He was Lloyd Blankenship and he wrote GURPS Cyberpunk, which was later seized by the SS as a guide to hacking.
I remember the day that the Federal Judge (Sparks, I think) ruled against the Secret Service. I was in the courtroom. The only people I remember are Steve and Paco Xander. That was a long time ago. I still have my copy of Cyberpunk.
And I will forever be grateful to Steve Jackson for including my first writing efforts in his edition of the Principia Discordia.
Hail Eris. All Hail Discordia.
Good luck, Steve.
Remember this is from nasa.gov
:-)
Not *just* NASA. It's on a gov't site, but the other project involved is FMARS, which is private. It isn't all tax dollars at work, so I suppose that justifies the departure from the usual NASA drollness. Non-profits can't afford not to have a sense of humor.
I think what's interesting are the shotgun classes.
FMARS is the Flashline Mars Analog Research Station, which is a project of The Mars Society (Flashline is the name sponsor for the mission). It is a simulated Mars base. There is an article about it in the print version of this month's Scientific American.
This is one of The Mars Society's projects for establishing a human presence on Mars. There will be a series of these simulated bases placed in analogous Mars environments throughout the world. The first is on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic. The next will be placed in the American Southwest. Currently it is on exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center Visitors' Center. It will begin its field season this September in the desert.
Additionally, The Mars Society has a prototype pressurized Mars rover program. It also has a trust fund established to raise money for a privately funded mission to establish a permanent presence on Mars. It may take a century or two of saving, but The Mars Society will *do* it.
"Personally I'd rather see a standard stereo component sized box, a UI that operates through your television and normal remote, and 30+ gigs, but this one is looking like a great start."
Then get an Audio Request.
Now that web designers are more and more gaining the ability to control how their pages look, users seem to have less and less.
Old school web programmers indicate this is a terrible loss. New web designers, many influenced by the firmly established print world, feel the opposite.
Do you feel that the designer, or the user, should have ultimate control?
The Iridium satellites have large reflective dish antennas that, when hit at the right angle by the Sun, produce spectacularly bright flares in the sky. Sometimes the flares are bright enough to be visible by daylight.
To figure out when and where these flares will be visible in your area, visit Heavens Above. There you can plug in your location and receive data which will tell you where to look.
So far I have seen several. The flares are usually short-lived, much like the company that spawned them.
Then create a powerful open source operating system (perhaps modifications to Linux) that is capable of wireless distributed computing. Basically it would use the combined processing power of all of the chips that you owned in order to achieve computing tasks. I guess it would be a wireless Beowulf cluster. The more devices you owned, the more powerful your home computer system.
Plus, it would be nice if people could pool the resources of their home systems together in a larger cluster to solve larger problems. Perhaps all of the cars on the road would use their spare CPU cycles to run a program that efficiently manages traffic for the entire city. Or all of the home distributed systems in a neighborhood could pool together in order to monitor neighborhood watch cameras that look for suspicious activity and notify homeowners of such.
My vision: the PC will go away and be replaced by a global interconnected and distributed computer system. This computer system will be scalable and universal. All of our communication, all of our computation, and all of our data storage will live on this system. It will evolve and adapt as a living organism. It will be transparent and automatic. Every computer program will run like SETI@home. Some programs will only be meant for a local geographical area, others will clamor for global attention. People will instruct their computers as to which programs they wish to run and what level of importance they wish to give them.
So can I patent the idea of a global scalable distributed computer? :-)
The program code is an essential part of the method of the experiment. Different methods (which would erupt if it was opensourced) would ruin the validity of the results, since consistency was not maintained. Thus, the scientists are protecting the credibility and validity of their results while also minimizing uncertainty.
This is a single experiment that uses the help of a lot of people. It isn't a lot of experiments. A single experiment must maintain consistency throughout. Tracking and documenting multiple versions would be a larger endeavor than the scientists have time for and it would introduce an unacceptable level of uncertainty in the results.
If our current understanding of physical laws is accurate then it seems that the extrapolations being made on the possibilities afforded us by molecular nanotechnology point to achieving a world that is orders of magnitude more advanced in every conceivable field sometime in the next century. Do you think such a "phase shift" is likely to occur and, if so, when? What are the obstacles to such dramatic changes? How do we prepare ourselves?
As far as the effectiveness of this petition goes, I cannot say. It does well to provide a forum for people to learn about The Mars Society and thinkMARS and get involved, which may be much more useful.
However, as to your point about technology, read _The Case for Mars_ by Dr. Robert Zubrin in which he clearly outlines a method for getting to Mars using off-the-shelf technology. Since his book was published, numerous improvements and redesigns have been made to his Mars Direct plan. The technology exists, it is only the political will that is required.
There are indeed parts of the "Space Race" that were merely meant as a showing off of technological prowess to support political objectives. In fact, that is why it was called a race. The most obvious example of this was the Apollo program; the science of which could probably have been achieved by more mundane means. But that race came to an end a long time ago. Since Apollo, the space program has been more about keeping people in the aerospace industry employed, rather than achieving any sort of goal. There are a few exceptions of course.
The important thing to remember is that space is a place, not a government program. It isn't a hole into which taxpayers throw money. Exploring new places and overcoming the challenges of getting to, living in, and working in space have created technologies that have spun off into the public sector. There are medical technologies that save lives, communications technologies (remember the satellites?) that have made international banking and commerce possible, imaging technologies that have improved crop yields, and explorations of the Solar System that allow us to perform comparitive planetology and learn more about the world on which we live.
You may think of a space hotel as a glorified rich people's fantasy, but the reality is that government sponsored space programs do not drive down the cost of space transportation and living. It takes commercial investors with a profit motive to drive down the prices. Computers used to cost millions of dollars, now you can get a desktop for a few hundred. A space hotel would, in part, bring down the cost for everyone. Build a space elevator and everyone could afford it.
Cash does not solve the ills of society. It spreads the wealth, it does not create wealth, and it certainly does not maintain wealth. The only thing that solves those problems is education and energy. The exploration of space is technologically challenging and it demands highly educated labor. Also, space exploration is a powerful tool for education, merely look at the number of college degrees vs. the timeline for Apollo missions and you'll see what I mean. The energy and resources available to humans in the Solar System is incredibly high, enabling trillions of humans to have incredibly high standards of living, should they desire it.
Your point is, why should I support paying $20-$30 billion dollars to go for sending humans to Mars when we have so many problems here on Earth? Your point is that you think sending humans to Mars is a waste of money. The $20 billion you spend will enable humans to establish a permanent settlement on Mars. It will allow the development of new technologies. It will spur cheap access to space, enabling even further ventures to take place there. It will empower any civilzation that engages it. It will also put our eggs in more than one basket, which is necessary if you do not wish all of the "lesser humans" to get vaporized by an errant asteroid. The return on your $20 billion dollar investment becomes enormous. It *creates* wealth. We could push the envelope to send humans to Mars, discover a new method of irrigating crops, and feed 10 times the amount that the original $20 billion would have fed. There is a great deal of historical precedent available to back me up. Cash injections do not prevent social disease, they ease symptoms for a pitifully short time.
There are also the environmental aspects... the science. Comparative planetology is an extremely strong and robust tool for understanding our own Earth. And there is the possibility of life on Mars, or past life on Mars. This may be the single most important reason for going. Such a discovery would mean a great deal for humanity, both spiritually and scientifically. The effect on the science of biology would be astounding, seeing as how we only have one data point.
And for those who think we can make these discoveries and do this science by robotic exploration alone, I say you have no real concept of how paleontology and geology are properly done. Send your best robot explorer into the desert to look for fossils and send a human being, even a marginally trained human, and the human will return better science and more discoveries every time.
We must prepare for our future and we must accept our destiny. If it is possible it shall be done, the trick is to anticipate possibilities and do them *right*.