OK, some hand-waving and vague flammage going on. I'm not aware that he's done anything heinous. I'm willing to be corrected. But he's undoubtedly done some Good Things. If you must slander the guy, at least provide a link to something he's done that's so frapping evil. People trash Bill Gates, me included. But in the Gates case I could point to specific things. Given his contributions, don't you think Murdoch deserves as least that much respect?
Productivity improvements might be determined by how badly you need Dtrace functionality: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/dtrace/ I'm not confident that a clone will make it into Linux any time soon.
In audience terms, I'm thinking that the limiter is still hardware support. I don't get much time to look at OpenSolaris, so I could be in left field.
No, no, no. Networks are attack amplifiers. Think in term of *herds* of implacable robot third-rail minivans filled with screaming soccer moms and *gasp* children migrating across a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Destination still McDonalds, o'course. No fault in your thinking on that score.
That wwas a few years ago. The best cell I know of, for sure, is 18% now. I've heard of one at Boeing that does 20%. That's in silicon, not thin films. And this year was the first time that more silicon was used in solar than in semiconductors. A breakthrough in thin film efficiency would be a something of a game changer.
But solar still isn't contributing as much as wind, and wind isn't contributing much yet.
But have a look at: http://www.skywindpower.com/ww/index.htm I'm really surprised that I'm nearing more about high altitude wind power research. This approach sounds as if it could outperform solar by an enormous margin, if you look at fixed infrastructure costs. These people are talking as low as 2 cents per kWh. The whole site is only a dozen or so pages, and worth a read.
It seems much more doable than covering vast regions of desert with solar voltaics, at would would be enormous cost, even after economies of scale.
Last time I heard "where do you want to go" in connection with computers, it was an advertising campaign from a vendor of an operating system famous for being pwned. This could add a whole new dimension to the term botnet.
I don't know. Would I still be able to buy canned or frozen, when fresh is unavailable? How about corn meal? I'm not sure that you're in favor of that given, "Corn is as bad for us as a food crop..."
Nor do I think getting rid of high-fructose corn syrup is going to help the obesity problem much. It's a piece of a piece of the problem.
"Could we all please just take a step back, acknowledge that corn is wrecking our planet..." I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to take a *long* step back (possibly *off* the freaking planet) before I'm going to acknowledge that. I've heard a lot of people get upset about some of the strangest things, but I don't think I've ever heard from a potential serial corn-killer 'till now.
Not creepy at all, and he may not be pretending to anything. It's more likely that he doesn't know that he doesn't know. Post 20026461 below gives a link showing this is an elected position. So what we have is a guy that knows how to win elections. For all I know, he's a solid, honest citizen, with a heart of gold, that every woman wants to take home to meet Mom.
That doesn't mean that he realized anything about the complexity of system security when he ran, and certainly doesn't mean that the general populace is going to be able to form the vaguest conclusions before they vote for or against him. But I wouldn't be comfortable with this being an appointed position, either.
To me, this is all a strong argument against e-voting without a paper receipt. The study didn't go on long enough, and new techniques for cracking systems are being still being developed, such as the recent dangling pointer article http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/23/162 4203 here on Slashdot.
Even old avenues are extremely difficult to protect against, when the stakes are very high, (see Ken Thompson's paper "Reflections on Trusting Trust" at http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/. These stakes are about as high as they get, for a democracy.
As far as I can tell at this point, this isn't the time to be investing in e-voting systems. The odds are good that we'll end up replacing them one or more times, at vast expense, or more likely owning an ad-hoc system in which would be worse than paper ballots.
There's no harm in staying with paper ballots until we get this sorted. In fact, let's make the ability to successfully build and roll out a glorified paper punch a prerequisite for building an electronic system.
It will inconvenience news junkies, and people with instant-gratification issues, but I'm lot more interested in preserving electoral accuracy than enabling people with various personality disorders.
"Linux without Linus cannot succeed. A lot of young folks don't realize this. RMS can't advance the cause of Linux like Linus does."
What does age have to do with it? You seem to be staking out some sort of claim to having a few more years and wisdom than some, but you're running an OS whose future you believe would end if Torvalds were hit by a bus tomorrow. This doesn't seem the pinnacle of old and wise.
The reality is that there would be a great disturbance in the force, and another maintainer would step in. Obviously, that wouldn't be Stallman, who has nothing to do with the Linux kernel, and never has. This the case with most major projects: kernel, GNU tools, X, Apache, PostgreSQL, Samba, or what have you. That's very nearly a defining characteristic of a major project.
As for your arguments about GPL versions, the facts of the matter are that different people have different goals, and different takes on what is the most moral thing to do--or exactly how much morality should even be part of the issue. As the creators, they certainly have that right.
The Linux kernel crowd and the Free Software Foundation generate a lot of press, arguing back and forth. This seems to have lead you to conflate the kernel and the GNU tools that surround it. They're very much different things. As is X, etc. So long as all the software produced by these major projects, and sharply different and philosophies, plays together well enough to run your hardware, and provide a userland, what's your beef?
Excellent point. Now, could we please never hear the phrase "made me throw up a little in my mouth" again? I think it was seeing it in an interview with that dweeb that played Wesley Crusher on Start Trek The Next Generation that absolutely tore it for me.
Yes, I know that this will probably generate "you're not the boss of me" posts. But Some Things Must be Said.
I'll take it back further, using constant dollars, and the numbers just get worse. In '84, the price was about the same for a CP/M machine, with a 4 MHz Z80A, 64K of RAM, a pair of 5.25" floppies (394KB each, instead of the more standard 360KB each, IIRRC), and a dot matrix printer. I think that bad boy set me back right around $2700. According to Fedreal Reserve Bank CPI calculator at http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/data/us/cal c/ that would be $5200 in today's dollars. The $2500 you spent in '82 would be $3600 today.
The reason is as you no doubt suspect. We don't know a helluva lot about how to create software. Object-oriented software was going to allow vast code re-use. Java, or another language du Jour was going to save the world. Every consultant and his/her mother has had a methodology to promote, and supporting tools to sell. The stream of 'paridigm shifts' that lead to agile programming don't seem to have done it, either.
You can even argue either way about whether code is getting better or worse. It gets into definitions, and some highly conflicting data sets. Also conflicting opinions from people that are widely recognized as pretty damned smart.
I'll add to my 'We don't know a helluva lot about how to create software.' statement. We're not getting better at any rapid pace--save in expanding to fill the vastly greater machine resources available. To preempt a few people--this isn't about open or closed source. Neither camp can claim any victory, when you do a straight-up comparison between how much better hardware has gotten, compared to software.
That's how I see it, anyway, and I've been in both camps, almost evenly divided over 30 years. Hardware has progressed much further than the buggy, difficult to maintain bloatware we run on it. What Edsger Dijkstra said many years ago is still true today:
I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, viz. "How not to make a mess of it," has/not/ been met.
I work exclusively on the software side today, and it's pretty freaking humbling. IMO, it's because the standards are higher in hardware. Committing to silicon costs *money*. In software, you can trot out any damned thing, and fix it later if the economics are right. Taking that approach in hardware, whether a chip, board, or system, is riskier simply because the product is less malleable. There's more of an imperative to get it right the first time, and more importantly learn *how* to get it right the first time.
I don't see a fix with all the consultants, development methodologies, etc., in the world, as we've been going. The only thing that I can see helping is doing away with 'absolve us of everything' software licenses. If your car's breaks fail, you have recourse, but if your OS spews your identity to the four corners of the earth, you have none. That's borked.
Before all the Linux guys (and I'm one of you) freak out, that wouldn't have to be the death of open source. Upstream, there would have to be some pretty rigorous testing. But closed source vendors would have the same responsibilities. My take is that Linux vendor's costs would increase, while Microsoft would find the challenge insurmountable, due to an inferior development model.
Poof, we win. So does the end user. Free distros don't have to go away. They'd simply be 'use at your own risk', which is the current state. Every copy that goes out is a potential bug report, driving costs down for the commercial distros. Microsoft could take the same approach, of course. That's a level playing field, and let the best system win.
It might even force the Linux vendors to get together on standards a bit more, so they could more easily pool testing, bug reports, etc. The differences in such basic things as filesystem layout that we have today are ridiculous. Maybe even systems administrators would win. OK. Never mind. That last bit was just crazy talk.
In fact, it's all crazy talk. No way will it ever happen. Not in my lifetime, anyway.
Failing to RTWFT--guilty. Got called away, and on return, just hit Submit.
I don't know what you regard as "newfangled technology", vice "clever application of current technology". IMO, the new aerobraking ideas could be placed in either category. Others might decide that it ain't "newfangled technology" unless we have to tether an exotic airfoil with carbon nanotubes or something.
Be that as it may, from TFA, "Depending on the success of the Sky Crane with MSL, its likely that this system can be scaled for larger payloads, but probably not the size needed to land humans on Mars." As most of the Slashdot discussion was about *manned" exploration, I'm not sure why you brought this up.
Also from TFA: Nobody knows how to do it. Surprised? Most people are, says Rob Manning the Chief Engineer for the Mars Exploration Directorate and presently the only person who has led teams to land three robotic spacecraft successfully on the surface of Mars. It turns out that most people arent aware of this problem and very few have worried about the details of how you get something very heavy safely to the surface of Mars, said Manning.
Since we don't know how to do it, your claim that, "This problem will be solved by clever application of current technology," seems somewhat premature. It can be argued that by the time we're in a position to seriously consider a manned mission, there's no telling what the final solution will be. Materials science is progressing rapidly.
I don't think that a hypersonic lander would be a viable manned return vehicle. Cool link to the ARES platform, but that's another small, light package, where parachute designs, etc., aren't as much of a problem.
A hypersonic lander would have to function like the spaceplane we still haven't built for use here on earth, unless you subscribe to some of the Aurora/Area 51 theories. In addition, it would have to do a fuel-intensive vertical takeoff, as well as the landing. So this is probably even harder than something we haven't yet been able to do here--though I'll grant that the problems in doing it here may have been more financial then technological. I've no information on that, pro or con.
Parent post is not a troll. He's referring to the Americas having turned out to be rather useful, and an example of why exploration can generally be regarded as a Good Thing.
Helicopters don't do well in thin air. It's a problem during some military operations in Afghanistan, some mountain rescues in the Western US, etc.
At 15,000 feet above Earth, you're down to 57% of sea-level density, and you're into the regime where many helicopters are having problems. At 0 feet above Mars, you have under 1% of Earth's sea-level density. I think around 0.8%.
Read Zubrin's _The Case for Mars_, which goes into quite a lot of detail. It covers cancer risks, etc. It *doesn't* cover the landing issue, beyond assuming aerobraking.
The basic scheme is to send an atmosphere converter ahead of the manned mission to create a stock of methane and oxygen propellants for the return, as most of the mass you'll need is still fuel. Mars has a surface gravity around 1/3 of Earth's, so quantities required are much lower than for the trip out. In a way, you're right about using nuclear power to lessen the weight somehow. The fuel factory uses a nuclear reactor.
You might be still be right about it never happening, though. Ten years ago, Zubrin thought it could be done for 55 billion. He might well have been conservative, there's been ten years of inflation, and of course we're broke. I wonder how many of these we could have flown for what we've spent in Iraq?
So the only people who could possibly disagree with you are demagogues and/or fools? That is such nonsense that it's difficult to judge where to even begin. Arguments range from not keeping all of our eggs in one basket, to an almost spiritual belief in a larger destiny for mankind than being limited to one planet. That essentially covers the range from the hyper-practical to the spiritual, right there.
Next time you're in the library, have a look at Dr. Robert Zubrin's _The Case for Mars_. Specifically, Chapter 10 and the Epilogue. That's the only reference I have to hand, and can specifically recommend. I could do a Web search, but I suspect there's little point in spending the time.
No. Spinright was a lifesaver, the couple of times I needed it, back in FAT32 days. Supposedly it does NTFS, and some Linux filesystems now. At some point he seems to have gotten slammed in the head or something. Whatever went wrong, it's a shame. Although the raw sockets nonsense did at least provide us with some entertainment.
IBM is using 'By making this irrevocable patent covenant' language at http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/opensource/isplist.sht ml, which is linked from TFA. TFA contains some content from Sun about "Necessary Claims" while the IBM page provides the following definition:
IBM® Definition Necessary Claims "Necessary Claims" are those patent claims that can not be avoided by any commercially reasonable, compliant implementation of the Required Portions of a Covered Specification. "Required Portions" are those portions of a specification that must be implemented to comply with such specification. If the specification prescribes discretionary extensions, Required Portions include those portions of the discretionary extensions that must be implemented to comply with such discretionary extensions.
Part of Sun's comments was probably an effort to steal IBM's thunder, but Sun has definitely done some good things in this area as well. There's the OpenDocument stuff that most people here are already aware of, but also some specialized (but very cool, if you're in my business) stuff like the Sun OpenID Non-Assertion Covenant at http://www.sun.com/software/standards/persistent/o penid/nac.xml
BTW, you do know that it's madness to ask 'can they' questions about legal matters on Slashdot, right?:)
Multiple pages seems reasonable in a way. If you have to have the adds due to your business model, at least the shorter first page would make for a shorter download for those who are still on dialup, and don't run an add blocker.
I generally look that the first page of a multi-part article, and if I want to read the entire thing, I look for a print function to get it all on one page. Many hardware sites have them, and they work well enough for me. My browser/OS doesn't actually perform a print function, though. If yours does, never mind...
Slashdot Mirror
OK, some hand-waving and vague flammage going on. I'm not aware that he's done anything heinous. I'm willing to be corrected. But he's undoubtedly done some Good Things. If you must slander the guy, at least provide a link to something he's done that's so frapping evil. People trash Bill Gates, me included. But in the Gates case I could point to specific things. Given his contributions, don't you think Murdoch deserves as least that much respect?
Contrary to the opinion of some people, it is possible to have both principles and an income.
I'd want to see references. If it's just some header lines, I doubt anyone much cares.
Productivity improvements might be determined by how badly you need Dtrace functionality: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/dtrace/
I'm not confident that a clone will make it into Linux any time soon.
In audience terms, I'm thinking that the limiter is still hardware support. I don't get much time to look at OpenSolaris, so I could be in left field.
No, no, no. Networks are attack amplifiers. Think in term of *herds* of implacable robot third-rail minivans filled with screaming soccer moms and *gasp* children migrating across a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Destination still McDonalds, o'course. No fault in your thinking on that score.
I understand Michael Bay is to direct the film.
That wwas a few years ago. The best cell I know of, for sure, is 18% now. I've heard of one at Boeing that does 20%. That's in silicon, not thin films. And this year was the first time that more silicon was used in solar than in semiconductors. A breakthrough in thin film efficiency would be a something of a game changer.
But solar still isn't contributing as much as wind, and wind isn't contributing much yet.
But have a look at: http://www.skywindpower.com/ww/index.htm
I'm really surprised that I'm nearing more about high altitude wind power research. This approach sounds as if it could outperform solar by an enormous margin, if you look at fixed infrastructure costs. These people are talking as low as 2 cents per kWh. The whole site is only a dozen or so pages, and worth a read.
It seems much more doable than covering vast regions of desert with solar voltaics, at would would be enormous cost, even after economies of scale.
Last time I heard "where do you want to go" in connection with computers, it was an advertising campaign from a vendor of an operating system famous for being pwned. This could add a whole new dimension to the term botnet.
I don't know. Would I still be able to buy canned or frozen, when fresh is unavailable? How about corn meal? I'm not sure that you're in favor of that given, "Corn is as bad for us as a food crop..."
Nor do I think getting rid of high-fructose corn syrup is going to help the obesity problem much. It's a piece of a piece of the problem.
"Could we all please just take a step back, acknowledge that corn is wrecking our planet..." I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to take a *long* step back (possibly *off* the freaking planet) before I'm going to acknowledge that. I've heard a lot of people get upset about some of the strangest things, but I don't think I've ever heard from a potential serial corn-killer 'till now.
Not creepy at all, and he may not be pretending to anything. It's more likely that he doesn't know that he doesn't know. Post 20026461 below gives a link showing this is an elected position. So what we have is a guy that knows how to win elections. For all I know, he's a solid, honest citizen, with a heart of gold, that every woman wants to take home to meet Mom.
2 4203 here on Slashdot.
That doesn't mean that he realized anything about the complexity of system security when he ran, and certainly doesn't mean that the general populace is going to be able to form the vaguest conclusions before they vote for or against him. But I wouldn't be comfortable with this being an appointed position, either.
To me, this is all a strong argument against e-voting without a paper receipt. The study didn't go on long enough, and new techniques for cracking systems are being still being developed, such as the recent dangling pointer article http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/23/16
Even old avenues are extremely difficult to protect against, when the stakes are very high, (see Ken Thompson's paper "Reflections on Trusting Trust" at http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/. These stakes are about as high as they get, for a democracy.
As far as I can tell at this point, this isn't the time to be investing in e-voting systems. The odds are good that we'll end up replacing them one or more times, at vast expense, or more likely owning an ad-hoc system in which would be worse than paper ballots.
There's no harm in staying with paper ballots until we get this sorted. In fact, let's make the ability to successfully build and roll out a glorified paper punch a prerequisite for building an electronic system.
It will inconvenience news junkies, and people with instant-gratification issues, but I'm lot more interested in preserving electoral accuracy than enabling people with various personality disorders.
It's a stripes and plaids kind of thing.
"Linux without Linus cannot succeed. A lot of young folks don't realize this. RMS can't advance the cause of Linux like Linus does."
What does age have to do with it? You seem to be staking out some sort of claim to having a few more years and wisdom than some, but you're running an OS whose future you believe would end if Torvalds were hit by a bus tomorrow. This doesn't seem the pinnacle of old and wise.
The reality is that there would be a great disturbance in the force, and another maintainer would step in. Obviously, that wouldn't be Stallman, who has nothing to do with the Linux kernel, and never has. This the case with most major projects: kernel, GNU tools, X, Apache, PostgreSQL, Samba, or what have you. That's very nearly a defining characteristic of a major project.
As for your arguments about GPL versions, the facts of the matter are that different people have different goals, and different takes on what is the most moral thing to do--or exactly how much morality should even be part of the issue. As the creators, they certainly have that right.
The Linux kernel crowd and the Free Software Foundation generate a lot of press, arguing back and forth. This seems to have lead you to conflate the kernel and the GNU tools that surround it. They're very much different things. As is X, etc. So long as all the software produced by these major projects, and sharply different and philosophies, plays together well enough to run your hardware, and provide a userland, what's your beef?
*Hadn't* expect that one. Somebody please mod parent funny.
See the iSporkoBlender nano next week.
Excellent point. Now, could we please never hear the phrase "made me throw up a little in my mouth" again? I think it was seeing it in an interview with that dweeb that played Wesley Crusher on Start Trek The Next Generation that absolutely tore it for me.
Yes, I know that this will probably generate "you're not the boss of me" posts. But Some Things Must be Said.
I'll take it back further, using constant dollars, and the numbers just get worse. In '84, the price was about the same for a CP/M machine, with a 4 MHz Z80A, 64K of RAM, a pair of 5.25" floppies (394KB each, instead of the more standard 360KB each, IIRRC), and a dot matrix printer. I think that bad boy set me back right around $2700. According to Fedreal Reserve Bank CPI calculator at http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/data/us/cal c/ that would be $5200 in today's dollars. The $2500 you spent in '82 would be $3600 today.
/not/ been met.
The reason is as you no doubt suspect. We don't know a helluva lot about how to create software. Object-oriented software was going to allow vast code re-use. Java, or another language du Jour was going to save the world. Every consultant and his/her mother has had a methodology to promote, and supporting tools to sell. The stream of 'paridigm shifts' that lead to agile programming don't seem to have done it, either.
You can even argue either way about whether code is getting better or worse. It gets into definitions, and some highly conflicting data sets. Also conflicting opinions from people that are widely recognized as pretty damned smart.
I'll add to my 'We don't know a helluva lot about how to create software.' statement. We're not getting better at any rapid pace--save in expanding to fill the vastly greater machine resources available. To preempt a few people--this isn't about open or closed source. Neither camp can claim any victory, when you do a straight-up comparison between how much better hardware has gotten, compared to software.
That's how I see it, anyway, and I've been in both camps, almost evenly divided over 30 years. Hardware has progressed much further than the buggy, difficult to maintain bloatware we run on it. What Edsger Dijkstra said many years ago is still true today:
I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, viz. "How
not to make a mess of it," has
I work exclusively on the software side today, and it's pretty freaking humbling. IMO, it's because the standards are higher in hardware. Committing to silicon costs *money*. In software, you can trot out any damned thing, and fix it later if the economics are right. Taking that approach in hardware, whether a chip, board, or system, is riskier simply because the product is less malleable. There's more of an imperative to get it right the first time, and more importantly learn *how* to get it right the first time.
I don't see a fix with all the consultants, development methodologies, etc., in the world, as we've been going. The only thing that I can see helping is doing away with 'absolve us of everything' software licenses. If your car's breaks fail, you have recourse, but if your OS spews your identity to the four corners of the earth, you have none. That's borked.
Before all the Linux guys (and I'm one of you) freak out, that wouldn't have to be the death of open source. Upstream, there would have to be some pretty rigorous testing. But closed source vendors would have the same responsibilities. My take is that Linux vendor's costs would increase, while Microsoft would find the challenge insurmountable, due to an inferior development model.
Poof, we win. So does the end user. Free distros don't have to go away. They'd simply be 'use at your own risk', which is the current state. Every copy that goes out is a potential bug report, driving costs down for the commercial distros. Microsoft could take the same approach, of course. That's a level playing field, and let the best system win.
It might even force the Linux vendors to get together on standards a bit more, so they could more easily pool testing, bug reports, etc. The differences in such basic things as filesystem layout that we have today are ridiculous. Maybe even systems administrators would win. OK. Never mind. That last bit was just crazy talk.
In fact, it's all crazy talk. No way will it ever happen. Not in my lifetime, anyway.
Failing to RTWFT--guilty. Got called away, and on return, just hit Submit.
I don't know what you regard as "newfangled technology", vice "clever application of current technology". IMO, the new aerobraking ideas could be placed in either category. Others might decide that it ain't "newfangled technology" unless we have to tether an exotic airfoil with carbon nanotubes or something.
Be that as it may, from TFA, "Depending on the success of the Sky Crane with MSL, its likely that this system can be scaled for larger payloads, but probably not the size needed to land humans on Mars." As most of the Slashdot discussion was about *manned" exploration, I'm not sure why you brought this up.
Also from TFA:
Nobody knows how to do it.
Surprised? Most people are, says Rob Manning the Chief Engineer for the Mars Exploration Directorate and presently the only person who has led teams to land three robotic spacecraft successfully on the surface of Mars.
It turns out that most people arent aware of this problem and very few have worried about the details of how you get something very heavy safely to the surface of Mars, said Manning.
Since we don't know how to do it, your claim that, "This problem will be solved by clever application of current technology," seems somewhat premature. It can be argued that by the time we're in a position to seriously consider a manned mission, there's no telling what the final solution will be. Materials science is progressing rapidly.
I don't think that a hypersonic lander would be a viable manned return vehicle. Cool link to the ARES platform, but that's another small, light package, where parachute designs, etc., aren't as much of a problem.
A hypersonic lander would have to function like the spaceplane we still haven't built for use here on earth, unless you subscribe to some of the Aurora/Area 51 theories. In addition, it would have to do a fuel-intensive vertical takeoff, as well as the landing. So this is probably even harder than something we haven't yet been able to do here--though I'll grant that the problems in doing it here may have been more financial then technological. I've no information on that, pro or con.
Maybe it could be made to work, but to me, Mars Direct http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct still seems to use less risky technology.
Parent post is not a troll. He's referring to the Americas having turned out to be rather useful, and an example of why exploration can generally be regarded as a Good Thing.
Helicopters don't do well in thin air. It's a problem during some military operations in Afghanistan, some mountain rescues in the Western US, etc.
At 15,000 feet above Earth, you're down to 57% of sea-level density, and you're into the regime where many helicopters are having problems. At 0 feet above Mars, you have under 1% of Earth's sea-level density. I think around 0.8%.
Read Zubrin's _The Case for Mars_, which goes into quite a lot of detail. It covers cancer risks, etc. It *doesn't* cover the landing issue, beyond assuming aerobraking.
The basic scheme is to send an atmosphere converter ahead of the manned mission to create a stock of methane and oxygen propellants for the return, as most of the mass you'll need is still fuel. Mars has a surface gravity around 1/3 of Earth's, so quantities required are much lower than for the trip out. In a way, you're right about using nuclear power to lessen the weight somehow. The fuel factory uses a nuclear reactor.
You might be still be right about it never happening, though. Ten years ago, Zubrin thought it could be done for 55 billion. He might well have been conservative, there's been ten years of inflation, and of course we're broke. I wonder how many of these we could have flown for what we've spent in Iraq?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct
"This is not so obvious to me."
Because you didn't RTFA. The last two rovers, incidentally, massed less than 200 kilos.
"The only folks who care..."
So the only people who could possibly disagree with you are demagogues and/or fools? That is such nonsense that it's difficult to judge where to even begin. Arguments range from not keeping all of our eggs in one basket, to an almost spiritual belief in a larger destiny for mankind than being limited to one planet. That essentially covers the range from the hyper-practical to the spiritual, right there.
Next time you're in the library, have a look at Dr. Robert Zubrin's _The Case for Mars_. Specifically, Chapter 10 and the Epilogue. That's the only reference I have to hand, and can specifically recommend. I could do a Web search, but I suspect there's little point in spending the time.
"Gibson is an idiot"
No. Spinright was a lifesaver, the couple of times I needed it, back in FAT32 days. Supposedly it does NTFS, and some Linux filesystems now. At some point he seems to have gotten slammed in the head or something. Whatever went wrong, it's a shame. Although the raw sockets nonsense did at least provide us with some entertainment.
IBM is using 'By making this irrevocable patent covenant' language at http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/opensource/isplist.sht ml, which is linked from TFA. TFA contains some content from Sun about "Necessary Claims" while the IBM page provides the following definition:
o penid/nac.xml
:)
IBM® Definition
Necessary Claims
"Necessary Claims" are those patent claims that can not be avoided by any commercially reasonable, compliant implementation of the Required Portions of a Covered Specification. "Required Portions" are those portions of a specification that must be implemented to comply with such specification. If the specification prescribes discretionary extensions, Required Portions include those portions of the discretionary extensions that must be implemented to comply with such discretionary extensions.
Part of Sun's comments was probably an effort to steal IBM's thunder, but Sun has definitely done some good things in this area as well. There's the OpenDocument stuff that most people here are already aware of, but also some specialized (but very cool, if you're in my business) stuff like the Sun OpenID Non-Assertion Covenant at http://www.sun.com/software/standards/persistent/
BTW, you do know that it's madness to ask 'can they' questions about legal matters on Slashdot, right?
Multiple pages seems reasonable in a way. If you have to have the adds due to your business model, at least the shorter first page would make for a shorter download for those who are still on dialup, and don't run an add blocker.
I generally look that the first page of a multi-part article, and if I want to read the entire thing, I look for a print function to get it all on one page. Many hardware sites have them, and they work well enough for me. My browser/OS doesn't actually perform a print function, though. If yours does, never mind...