Apple tracks you. There's a file. It's created. It keeps track of all the locations you've been to. That's tracking, Apple is doing it. Therefore, Apple is tracking you. End of discussion.
Now what Apple might NOT be doing is *collecting* the tracking information they gather. They may simply leave it to rot on your phone without gathering it to a central location and parsing it.
And now you are into pure semantics.
What's doing the tracking is your phone, which was manufactured by Apple. So does Apple do the tracking or do you do it? If you buy a pen from, say, Pelikan, do you do the writing or does Pelikan do it? When I save a file on my computer (a Mac), does Apple store information or am I doing it? When Firefox saves a file without telling me explicitly (say, preferences), does the Mozilla Foundation store information about my preferences?
Yes, you can argue that whoever caused the process to be executed (i.e. in the case of software, whoever manufactured it) is the lead cause, especially if done without explicit user interaction.
However, in most real-world usage scenarios of the word, "tracking" does include at least the collection of this data as well. And it is media hype and insincerity that blew this issue up as big as it is.
Counterexample: Your Mac tracks your browsing habit, even with Safari in privacy mode! Shock! Well, yes. The culprit is the DNS cache, because that stores all domain names you've recently resolved. That's an issue known for years and nobody has accused Apple of tracking its users because - well, it's a local cache, it's not sent out to Apple. Pretty similar case, isn't it?
The mere fact that it exists means that it can therefore be used against me by LEA, malicious software, and thieves. The record should not exist, but it does, and Apple needs to own up to that mistake and fix it, or acknowledge it and make it public knowledge. If Steve Jobs says "Apple does not track you", then he is explicitly and blatantly lying.
Never attribute to malice what you can explain by different points of view. Steve has a different concept of the word "track", and in fact his is more in line with the common use.
Yes, the information should've been made public and there should be a config option to enable or disable it. I completely agree on that, because you are right that someone will find a way to abuse it.
You didn't get my point. I am saying that space travel IS impossible unless you solve this first.
Why? Because a single idiot can doom your colony or your generation ship. Damage that is horrible down here on earth is terminal disaster when the environment itself is deadly. And it doesn't matter if that idiot is just stupid or intentionally malicious.
The idea of the justice system is to deliver fair and equal treatment based on the book of the laws.
The implementation of the justice system is to give the people the illusions of justice so they are less likely to kill the parasites that feed off the rest of society like vampires. Of course there is plenty of inofficial workarounds included for them, just in case they ever get in trouble with the law.
It's a fascinating construct, really. I can't stop being amazed at how much you can fuck people over before they start to realize what's going on. It's not new, either - we just have a generation of politicians, lawyers and such who're doing it more obvious than before.
Because if man is to survive as a species, we must leave this planet.
We can kill each other and destroy our environment anywhere else just as well as here. In fact, in enclosed environments such as a colony on a non-terraformed planet, a lot easier.
How about stopping to kill each other and destroy what we need for survival before we worry about going somewhere where that's going to be even easier?
You think a colony will have problems such as water supply, power generation and budget. I look around at human nature, and I think about what smoking, religious fanatics or a single killing spree will do to the place.
If you take your survival tips from Hollywood movies - sure, go ahead.
In the real world, there is one simple formula for survival: Simpler means more reliable.
Your hydroponics facility and even more your nuclear power plant can't operate on its own. It needs maintainance, spare parts, resources coming in from the outside. Do you remember the news how they couldn't shut down the Fukushima plant because they had no outside power?
Forget salvaging spare parts. You don't McGyver a nuclear power plant. And let's not forget that you rely on many external resources to control it. Water to cool everything, for one. A "blotting out the sun" event has a pretty good chance at causing quakes powerful enough to make the river you're relying on go somewhere else. And if you're at the coast - well, we know what can happen there.
Sorry, but your best bet for an event of that size is to have a personal shelter so you can survive the immediate blast and first week, and then hope that it wasn't all that bad.
Trust me, if something blocks out the sun for any period of time that really matters, lack of power will be the least of our worries. We're talking a mass-extinction event here, you do realize that, yes?
the Internet, if it were treated as its own country,
And there's your problem, right there. If you start with a nonsensical assumption, then your result is nonsensical, even if it sounds like it makes sense.
"a horse, if it were treated as a mobile phone..." - does that make it clear? No matter what you say after that, it's bullshit.
The Internet isn't a country. And it is not in the same category as countries. A county, or a group of countries, like the EU, you can "treat as as a country" in many (but not all) respects, because they are in the same category. A computer network is not in any sense similar to a country.
Why is that important? Well, among other things, because the CO2 emissions of "the Internet" are already included in the countries where the server farms stand. You can't just extract them out and add them as their own table row. Two, different from countries, there is no binary assignement. Every hosting center also has some non-Internet machines, some the majority. What about mobile phones and PCs, i.e. the end systems? Count or not? What about construction, satellites (and their launches), etc.? Once you so much as start to think about it, you realize how much interpretation there is.
because "more information" is not always a good thing. There have been numerous studies showing that something like 5 key pieces of information is optimal, additional information beyond that does not improve decision-making, counter-intuitive as that may be.
I wouldn't mind the info being available, but you do need a layer of summary information.
The loss of manufacturing and design know-how is truly worrisome.
And the fact that the best minds of our time are being employed to manipulate the rest of us isn't?
Advertisements has turned evil long ago. The original idea of getting your product out there, letting people know about it so they can come to buy it if they want - how far have we come since? Marketing is psychological warfare on the population.
I've flown Lufthansa, AA and Air France on inter-Europe and Europe-Asian routes several times during the past three or four years, and never noticed they had options between 1st and Economy.
Thanks for the notice, I'll keep a closer eye on my next flights.
Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes, the stated reason really is the real reason.
Ok, we're talking about politicians, forget everything I said. If I look at the slimeballs we have, and imagine that plus near absolute power... brrr...
Given that running the big, cost-optimized subsonic allows the carrier to adjust the split(not quite per-flight; but reasonably quickly) between comfort seats and low cost seats as the market dictates, while the small, supersonic one only allows choosing between expensive discomfort and really expensive comfort, the economics behind running the subsonic craft seem pretty compelling.
Where do I book those "comfort seats"?
I'd really, really pay a reasonable extra fee for a more comfortable trip, but all that I see on flights is economy and first class (apparently, business class has vanished from european long-distance flights, or am I just flying the wrong airlines?). And 1st is ridiculously expensive - my whole holiday costs about as much as the 1st class flight, and I book fairly expensive holidays.
I once had the pleasure of flying Premium Economy on Garuda Airlines. Unfortunately, they don't offer that anymore, but it was exactly what I was looking for and would book again any day. It was around â50 more per person and direction (so â200 for both of us and the round-trip) and it gave you a bit more space in a smaller cabin (top-floor of a 747, 2x2 seats to a row) but no champagne or turn-into-bed chairs like 1st class. Definitely a great compromise.
You think money is the primary reason for video conferencing?
I've done quite a bit of business travel, and I would take a good video conference any day over the travel.
Fact is that of all the business trips I've made, only a fraction were really absolutely necessary, and I already tried to cut them down. From my experience with both myself and others, in decreasing order of relative frequency, these are the real reasons for business trips: 1.) desire to feel important or demonstrate worth, including the nice hotel and other amenities. 2.) side-reasons related to business but not officially stated, e.g. networking with customers or employees, judging something in person, meeting someone else over lunch or simply getting out of the office for a day 3.) actual need of being there in person
I did, in fact, set up a working conferencing system for four locations. It was very interesting to see how two of them constantly experienced inexplainable "technical problems" that the third could all solve or never had, despite them all being quite similar in both infrastructure and available technical support (the fourth was my own main office location). The two who just couldn't get it working were also the ones where, for the relevant persons, reason #1 was very obviously quite important.
Money is an important part, but it doesn't tell the whole story, as any large company that has tried to cut travel expenses has found out the hard way. The main problem is that the rational, good people are the ones who are most likely to cut down on unnecessary - and sometimes even on necessary - trips. The ego-trippers and "networkers" will find or make up reasons why the trip is required. You'll do quite a bit of damage to your company if you don't realize that and take steps to make sure you eliminate #1 and #2 first, before you reduce the amount of #3 events. Also, unless you realize that a little bit of #1 and #2 is necessary. I went to quite a few company meetings where I had to give a presentation. I could have given them remotely, technically that wouldn't have been a problem. But a couple hundred employees really appreciated that I had taken the time and effort and come, and the feeling of being taken seriously is an important motivator. Likewise, your good networkers will accomplish more over lunch than in three meetings. Your first goal in reducing travel expenses is to create an atmosphere in which they can write "lunch with decider XYZ" on the form instead of making up a bullshit pseudo-reason. Once you have that atmosphere of mutual trust, you can start looking for bullshit reasons and eliminate those trips.
At least with regard to commercial air traffic, the focus is way too narrow.
Ignoring the intercontinental flights, what really is a higher speed worth? If you can cut down flight time from 4 hours to 3 hours, that's an hour saved - but it's not 25% of your travel time saved, because your actual travel time doesn't start with take-off and doesn't end with landing. Once you take into account the commute to and from the out-of-city airports, the security theatre, taxiing, etc. etc. that 4/3 hour flight easily becomes a 7/6 hour trip, and your time saved is just half of what you thought, in percent of the total time.
It seems to me that their real fear is people latching on to the idea that things could ever have worked out differently. If people explore alternative histories and conjecture what would have happened if the ruling regime didn't come to power, how things might have been changed... perhaps for the better.
Because that is how history changes always work out - in Hollywood.
So, if you want to play a serious round of "what if", you have to think about the other, less attractive, alternatives as well.
China could have missed the trip into the future and entered the modern world with an agricultural economy and exploding population numbers. Because population control requires strict government control as much as the Big Firewall. So in your "alternate history", don't forget to account for a few hundred million starvation victims. Or maybe a major war with Russia, there were several points in the past 50 years where that could very well have happened. Or imagine a war between China and India, they are not exactly best friends, either. Can you even imagine that? 2.5 billion people at war with each other? That is roughly the entire world population at the time of WW2, except that despite the name, WW2 only affected less than half of the world population. So, accounting for modern weapons and higher population densities, 100 million dead is optimistic.
Oh yeah. How things might have changed... perhaps much, much worse. Or perhaps better. I certainly don't support not being able to explore the possibilities, but let's not forget that Hollywood does not depict reality and you shouldn't take your convictions from movies.
You would still have to lift material into orbit to supply an orbital colony. Even if you use material from asteroids, you still have to get it into a planetary orbit from its solar orbit. It makes ridiculously more sense in the long term to pt your colony where the resources and work are, and that is on the ground if you are colonizing mars.
Sure it "makes sense". If you ignore that you're talking about human beings and what kind of environment they need.
I already addressed the gravity problem in my first post. A small reactor or moderately sized array of solar cells, could provide plenty of power to run a train in a circular track to amplify the felt gravity from the ~.3 to closer to 1 on the big IF that it is needed. 1/3 gravity is greatly different from microgravity, it is much much closer to normal. I would not bet that we would really need more gravity.
If you think you've addressed the problem, then you and I are talking about different sizes of colonies. How many people does yours have? A dozen or two? Yeah, you can fit the sleeping and living quarters for those on a train.
Now try a few thousand, or a few ten-thousand. An operation of this kind won't be profitable if you think small.
You are talking about a more or less daily commute to and from orbit using propellant,
Where did you get the "daily" from? No, I'm more thinking about having largely automated mining facilities on the surface and the actual colony in orbit.
What we can do, and do in the next few decades with current technology is create an automated seed factory capable of building a colony on mars without humans present from local materials.
You missed the context. Sure we can build something there. The problem the OP posted about was whether or not the surface is even suitable for human colonists, even if they have a biodome. What about gravity?
Building a rocket is not very hard, you can do it in your backyard. Building one that reaches orbit is a larger problem in scale, but not complexity, a dedicated university team can probably do it. But lifting a human into orbit, that is where it gets tricky. Same with the colony. Building something on Mars - I agree, not so tricky. We can do it today, theoretically. But building a colony of humans on Mars is a different beast, not just a larger beast.
The energy cost of orbiting and de-orbiting personnel are so horrific,
As is flying out a space station, or a colony, or really anything, to Mars. We've just started thinking seriously about this problem. When the solution finally comes up, we'll probably all say "oh, it's so obvious!" - but until someone puts it into words, it's not.
I agree. But then again, I don't take the GP serious in that. Because, you know, his "not ever" will die with him and the next generations will make up their own minds about it.
"never" is so unlike what the word means when a being with a ~100 year life-span talks about spans of millions and billions of years.
Americans aren't bred for burger flipping either. That's what illegal immigrants are for.
Oh, I thought they do the pool and then the wife. Sorry, my mess-up.
Latin is a fad language ("the smart people know Latin, so if I learn Latin, I'll be smart too"). It used to have utility in education, but most of the great works have been translated. Now, living languages are more useful.
Because translations are done by whom? Oh yes, people who know both languages.
I am totally against making languages like latin or greek mandatory for everyone. Absolutely opposed, that would be utterly brain-dead.
But I am entirely for having them as options. For some of us, a dead language with massive amounts of culture, history and philosophy is a lot more interesting than a living language. I live in Germany and had the choice between french and greek. France is maybe 500 km from here, and it's a lot more likely I'd ever be there than in Greece. In fact, I've since been to France, but never to Greece. And sometimes I'd like to speak more french than I do (had a bit of a crash course long after school), but I wouldn't want to miss my greek. Not for the language, but for the concepts, the thoughts, the philosophy, all the things beyond grammar and vocabulary that you pick up in learning a language.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no idea what form interstellar travel will take, but surely it would include redundancy?
Redundancy is a measure against system faults, breakdowns, etc. - against someone who wants to do damage, it doesn't do all that much.
Perhaps in 2 billion years we will have better psych screening?
Which would fall under what I'm saying: Solve the mental issues first.
I certainly wouldn't wait on that breakthrough in order to progress our space-faring tech.
I'm not saying "stop space exploration". I'm saying: "When you launch humans into space, how about not forgetting that they are humans?"
Apple tracks you. There's a file. It's created. It keeps track of all the locations you've been to. That's tracking, Apple is doing it. Therefore, Apple is tracking you. End of discussion.
Now what Apple might NOT be doing is *collecting* the tracking information they gather. They may simply leave it to rot on your phone without gathering it to a central location and parsing it.
And now you are into pure semantics.
What's doing the tracking is your phone, which was manufactured by Apple. So does Apple do the tracking or do you do it? If you buy a pen from, say, Pelikan, do you do the writing or does Pelikan do it? When I save a file on my computer (a Mac), does Apple store information or am I doing it? When Firefox saves a file without telling me explicitly (say, preferences), does the Mozilla Foundation store information about my preferences?
Yes, you can argue that whoever caused the process to be executed (i.e. in the case of software, whoever manufactured it) is the lead cause, especially if done without explicit user interaction.
However, in most real-world usage scenarios of the word, "tracking" does include at least the collection of this data as well. And it is media hype and insincerity that blew this issue up as big as it is.
Counterexample: Your Mac tracks your browsing habit, even with Safari in privacy mode! Shock! Well, yes. The culprit is the DNS cache, because that stores all domain names you've recently resolved. That's an issue known for years and nobody has accused Apple of tracking its users because - well, it's a local cache, it's not sent out to Apple. Pretty similar case, isn't it?
The mere fact that it exists means that it can therefore be used against me by LEA, malicious software, and thieves. The record should not exist, but it does, and Apple needs to own up to that mistake and fix it, or acknowledge it and make it public knowledge. If Steve Jobs says "Apple does not track you", then he is explicitly and blatantly lying.
Never attribute to malice what you can explain by different points of view. Steve has a different concept of the word "track", and in fact his is more in line with the common use.
Yes, the information should've been made public and there should be a config option to enable or disable it. I completely agree on that, because you are right that someone will find a way to abuse it.
You didn't get my point. I am saying that space travel IS impossible unless you solve this first.
Why? Because a single idiot can doom your colony or your generation ship. Damage that is horrible down here on earth is terminal disaster when the environment itself is deadly. And it doesn't matter if that idiot is just stupid or intentionally malicious.
You needed proof for that?
The idea of the justice system is to deliver fair and equal treatment based on the book of the laws.
The implementation of the justice system is to give the people the illusions of justice so they are less likely to kill the parasites that feed off the rest of society like vampires. Of course there is plenty of inofficial workarounds included for them, just in case they ever get in trouble with the law.
It's a fascinating construct, really. I can't stop being amazed at how much you can fuck people over before they start to realize what's going on. It's not new, either - we just have a generation of politicians, lawyers and such who're doing it more obvious than before.
Because if man is to survive as a species, we must leave this planet.
We can kill each other and destroy our environment anywhere else just as well as here. In fact, in enclosed environments such as a colony on a non-terraformed planet, a lot easier.
How about stopping to kill each other and destroy what we need for survival before we worry about going somewhere where that's going to be even easier?
You think a colony will have problems such as water supply, power generation and budget. I look around at human nature, and I think about what smoking, religious fanatics or a single killing spree will do to the place.
I must say, I've just seen the first animated GIFs that I actually enjoyed.
Thanks, guys.
If you take your survival tips from Hollywood movies - sure, go ahead.
In the real world, there is one simple formula for survival: Simpler means more reliable.
Your hydroponics facility and even more your nuclear power plant can't operate on its own. It needs maintainance, spare parts, resources coming in from the outside. Do you remember the news how they couldn't shut down the Fukushima plant because they had no outside power?
Forget salvaging spare parts. You don't McGyver a nuclear power plant. And let's not forget that you rely on many external resources to control it. Water to cool everything, for one. A "blotting out the sun" event has a pretty good chance at causing quakes powerful enough to make the river you're relying on go somewhere else. And if you're at the coast - well, we know what can happen there.
Sorry, but your best bet for an event of that size is to have a personal shelter so you can survive the immediate blast and first week, and then hope that it wasn't all that bad.
Trust me, if something blocks out the sun for any period of time that really matters, lack of power will be the least of our worries. We're talking a mass-extinction event here, you do realize that, yes?
the Internet, if it were treated as its own country,
And there's your problem, right there. If you start with a nonsensical assumption, then your result is nonsensical, even if it sounds like it makes sense.
"a horse, if it were treated as a mobile phone..." - does that make it clear? No matter what you say after that, it's bullshit.
The Internet isn't a country. And it is not in the same category as countries. A county, or a group of countries, like the EU, you can "treat as as a country" in many (but not all) respects, because they are in the same category. A computer network is not in any sense similar to a country.
Why is that important? Well, among other things, because the CO2 emissions of "the Internet" are already included in the countries where the server farms stand. You can't just extract them out and add them as their own table row. Two, different from countries, there is no binary assignement. Every hosting center also has some non-Internet machines, some the majority. What about mobile phones and PCs, i.e. the end systems? Count or not? What about construction, satellites (and their launches), etc.? Once you so much as start to think about it, you realize how much interpretation there is.
Essentially, it's a made-up number.
"Any amount of sex is okay, but no violence"
Totally with you on that one, mate.
Oh, you were still talking about computer games? Dang.
because "more information" is not always a good thing. There have been numerous studies showing that something like 5 key pieces of information is optimal, additional information beyond that does not improve decision-making, counter-intuitive as that may be.
I wouldn't mind the info being available, but you do need a layer of summary information.
The loss of manufacturing and design know-how is truly worrisome.
And the fact that the best minds of our time are being employed to manipulate the rest of us isn't?
Advertisements has turned evil long ago. The original idea of getting your product out there, letting people know about it so they can come to buy it if they want - how far have we come since? Marketing is psychological warfare on the population.
Hm, maybe it's specific to USA-Europe.
I've flown Lufthansa, AA and Air France on inter-Europe and Europe-Asian routes several times during the past three or four years, and never noticed they had options between 1st and Economy.
Thanks for the notice, I'll keep a closer eye on my next flights.
Can you list a few of those airlines? I'm seriously interested to consider them for my next holiday.
Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes, the stated reason really is the real reason.
Ok, we're talking about politicians, forget everything I said. If I look at the slimeballs we have, and imagine that plus near absolute power... brrr...
Given that running the big, cost-optimized subsonic allows the carrier to adjust the split(not quite per-flight; but reasonably quickly) between comfort seats and low cost seats as the market dictates, while the small, supersonic one only allows choosing between expensive discomfort and really expensive comfort, the economics behind running the subsonic craft seem pretty compelling.
Where do I book those "comfort seats"?
I'd really, really pay a reasonable extra fee for a more comfortable trip, but all that I see on flights is economy and first class (apparently, business class has vanished from european long-distance flights, or am I just flying the wrong airlines?). And 1st is ridiculously expensive - my whole holiday costs about as much as the 1st class flight, and I book fairly expensive holidays.
I once had the pleasure of flying Premium Economy on Garuda Airlines. Unfortunately, they don't offer that anymore, but it was exactly what I was looking for and would book again any day. It was around â50 more per person and direction (so â200 for both of us and the round-trip) and it gave you a bit more space in a smaller cabin (top-floor of a 747, 2x2 seats to a row) but no champagne or turn-into-bed chairs like 1st class. Definitely a great compromise.
You think money is the primary reason for video conferencing?
I've done quite a bit of business travel, and I would take a good video conference any day over the travel.
Fact is that of all the business trips I've made, only a fraction were really absolutely necessary, and I already tried to cut them down. From my experience with both myself and others, in decreasing order of relative frequency, these are the real reasons for business trips:
1.) desire to feel important or demonstrate worth, including the nice hotel and other amenities.
2.) side-reasons related to business but not officially stated, e.g. networking with customers or employees, judging something in person, meeting someone else over lunch or simply getting out of the office for a day
3.) actual need of being there in person
I did, in fact, set up a working conferencing system for four locations. It was very interesting to see how two of them constantly experienced inexplainable "technical problems" that the third could all solve or never had, despite them all being quite similar in both infrastructure and available technical support (the fourth was my own main office location). The two who just couldn't get it working were also the ones where, for the relevant persons, reason #1 was very obviously quite important.
Money is an important part, but it doesn't tell the whole story, as any large company that has tried to cut travel expenses has found out the hard way. The main problem is that the rational, good people are the ones who are most likely to cut down on unnecessary - and sometimes even on necessary - trips. The ego-trippers and "networkers" will find or make up reasons why the trip is required. You'll do quite a bit of damage to your company if you don't realize that and take steps to make sure you eliminate #1 and #2 first, before you reduce the amount of #3 events.
Also, unless you realize that a little bit of #1 and #2 is necessary. I went to quite a few company meetings where I had to give a presentation. I could have given them remotely, technically that wouldn't have been a problem. But a couple hundred employees really appreciated that I had taken the time and effort and come, and the feeling of being taken seriously is an important motivator. Likewise, your good networkers will accomplish more over lunch than in three meetings. Your first goal in reducing travel expenses is to create an atmosphere in which they can write "lunch with decider XYZ" on the form instead of making up a bullshit pseudo-reason. Once you have that atmosphere of mutual trust, you can start looking for bullshit reasons and eliminate those trips.
At least with regard to commercial air traffic, the focus is way too narrow.
Ignoring the intercontinental flights, what really is a higher speed worth? If you can cut down flight time from 4 hours to 3 hours, that's an hour saved - but it's not 25% of your travel time saved, because your actual travel time doesn't start with take-off and doesn't end with landing. Once you take into account the commute to and from the out-of-city airports, the security theatre, taxiing, etc. etc. that 4/3 hour flight easily becomes a 7/6 hour trip, and your time saved is just half of what you thought, in percent of the total time.
It seems to me that their real fear is people latching on to the idea that things could ever have worked out differently. If people explore alternative histories and conjecture what would have happened if the ruling regime didn't come to power, how things might have been changed... perhaps for the better.
Because that is how history changes always work out - in Hollywood.
So, if you want to play a serious round of "what if", you have to think about the other, less attractive, alternatives as well.
China could have missed the trip into the future and entered the modern world with an agricultural economy and exploding population numbers. Because population control requires strict government control as much as the Big Firewall. So in your "alternate history", don't forget to account for a few hundred million starvation victims. Or maybe a major war with Russia, there were several points in the past 50 years where that could very well have happened. Or imagine a war between China and India, they are not exactly best friends, either. Can you even imagine that? 2.5 billion people at war with each other? That is roughly the entire world population at the time of WW2, except that despite the name, WW2 only affected less than half of the world population. So, accounting for modern weapons and higher population densities, 100 million dead is optimistic.
Oh yeah. How things might have changed... perhaps much, much worse. Or perhaps better. I certainly don't support not being able to explore the possibilities, but let's not forget that Hollywood does not depict reality and you shouldn't take your convictions from movies.
You would still have to lift material into orbit to supply an orbital colony. Even if you use material from asteroids, you still have to get it into a planetary orbit from its solar orbit. It makes ridiculously more sense in the long term to pt your colony where the resources and work are, and that is on the ground if you are colonizing mars.
Sure it "makes sense". If you ignore that you're talking about human beings and what kind of environment they need.
I already addressed the gravity problem in my first post. A small reactor or moderately sized array of solar cells, could provide plenty of power to run a train in a circular track to amplify the felt gravity from the ~.3 to closer to 1 on the big IF that it is needed. 1/3 gravity is greatly different from microgravity, it is much much closer to normal. I would not bet that we would really need more gravity.
If you think you've addressed the problem, then you and I are talking about different sizes of colonies. How many people does yours have? A dozen or two? Yeah, you can fit the sleeping and living quarters for those on a train.
Now try a few thousand, or a few ten-thousand. An operation of this kind won't be profitable if you think small.
You are talking about a more or less daily commute to and from orbit using propellant,
Where did you get the "daily" from? No, I'm more thinking about having largely automated mining facilities on the surface and the actual colony in orbit.
What we can do, and do in the next few decades with current technology is create an automated seed factory capable of building a colony on mars without humans present from local materials.
You missed the context. Sure we can build something there. The problem the OP posted about was whether or not the surface is even suitable for human colonists, even if they have a biodome. What about gravity?
Building a rocket is not very hard, you can do it in your backyard. Building one that reaches orbit is a larger problem in scale, but not complexity, a dedicated university team can probably do it. But lifting a human into orbit, that is where it gets tricky.
Same with the colony. Building something on Mars - I agree, not so tricky. We can do it today, theoretically. But building a colony of humans on Mars is a different beast, not just a larger beast.
The energy cost of orbiting and de-orbiting personnel are so horrific,
As is flying out a space station, or a colony, or really anything, to Mars. We've just started thinking seriously about this problem. When the solution finally comes up, we'll probably all say "oh, it's so obvious!" - but until someone puts it into words, it's not.
I agree. But then again, I don't take the GP serious in that. Because, you know, his "not ever" will die with him and the next generations will make up their own minds about it.
"never" is so unlike what the word means when a being with a ~100 year life-span talks about spans of millions and billions of years.
Americans aren't bred for burger flipping either. That's what illegal immigrants are for.
Oh, I thought they do the pool and then the wife. Sorry, my mess-up.
Latin is a fad language ("the smart people know Latin, so if I learn Latin, I'll be smart too"). It used to have utility in education, but most of the great works have been translated. Now, living languages are more useful.
Because translations are done by whom? Oh yes, people who know both languages.
I am totally against making languages like latin or greek mandatory for everyone. Absolutely opposed, that would be utterly brain-dead.
But I am entirely for having them as options. For some of us, a dead language with massive amounts of culture, history and philosophy is a lot more interesting than a living language. I live in Germany and had the choice between french and greek. France is maybe 500 km from here, and it's a lot more likely I'd ever be there than in Greece. In fact, I've since been to France, but never to Greece. And sometimes I'd like to speak more french than I do (had a bit of a crash course long after school), but I wouldn't want to miss my greek. Not for the language, but for the concepts, the thoughts, the philosophy, all the things beyond grammar and vocabulary that you pick up in learning a language.
Sorry, it just always drives me nuts when people fail to realize that schools paid for with tax dollars are not "free".
you're an idiot hung up on an arbitrarily picked definition of "free", at least one of which fits my use, so bugger off