I would have asked that you take somebody along I really don't like but now that I read the lyrics for the song I applaud your sense of humor. I'm also damn sure that no one is going to call mars paradise.
He wants to use chemical rockets to orbit to assemble a nuclear space ship which should be reusable. The sixty launches could cost $6 billion if you assume a third of the Shuttle launch cost of $300 million (Shuttle program budget/launches). I just invented a third of the shuttle launch but it gives you a ball park figure.
The $6-$18 billion would be the Shuttle Budget over 3 to 9 years. So yes it would cost a bit more.
I like this thinking big idea. Especially since I have read some posts which suggest that it is oh so much more efficient to have a one way trip.
I don't like this at all since this also implies that there will not be enough resources and means being sent to the settlers on Mars. This is what the people on Mars should be - settlers and not scientists who want to satisfy our curiosity and then die some short while later from lack of resources.
I'm not sure how many flights to Mars would be necessary to establish a base there, but given the ridiculously bad mass ratio rockets have I would guess that one could easily send around ten flights to Mars to build a spaceship there for the trip home. Those would be rather well spent on establishing a permanent outpost on Mars. My suspicion is though that many more trips are necessary to keep things going over the years people live on Mars. So it might well be possible that any additional ten flights wouldn't matter if you want to get the real thing going.
The fact though that people want to skimp on the return trip smells like they want to get to Mars quickly to look good and then forget the whole thing. That could be acceptable. That loss of interest has happened before. But this time it would be different, you would leave a human being over there.
Frankly said this is unacceptable and I don't care the least how suicidal that scientist is or how long drawn out you can make the dying so it doesn't look like a suicide mission anymore. Also I don't want to deal with the elaborate pile of bullshit future historians will come up with to justify our failing to care for our own.
Just imagine what impression that will make on potential future explorers. Saying, "Well you provide us with some nice material for a large number of doctoral thesis's but beyond that we can't be bothered with supporting you because you know, a green golf course looks rather nicer than a bunch of red dunes no matter how much image processing the HiRise people were employing" is just not the right kind of encouragement for risking ones life.
Once you get around to the idea that you will have to share a bit of the inconvenience the explorers will have, it will be much easier to accept that we either can't send a human being there, we will have to commit huge resources to staying on Mars, or we come up with some high powered technology which lets us commit only reasonably large resources and inconveniences the night sleep of the greens.
The step from the last choice to staying on Mars and committing only moderately huge resources into the project is a rather small one don't you think. So unless you want to stay on earth there is only one real option left open - total commitment.
You are right. But he added a nice level of additional complexity to it with the base64 stuff. I'm grateful for that, and guess what nice quote I found on the base64 wiki:
"Man is distinguished, not only by his reason, but by this singular passion from other animals, which is a lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continued and indefatigable generation of knowledge, exceeds the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure."
I had no luck with stty -istrip and unicode input. The reason is mentioned on the cat info page:
"On systems like MS-DOS that distinguish between text and binary files, `cat' normally reads and writes in binary mode. However, `cat' reads in text mode if one of the options `-bensAE' is used or if `cat' is reading from standard input and standard input is a terminal."
So if I enter something like Ctrl-Shift-U 00ff I only ever get 0x3f in the output file.
Even if the current systems aren't capable of providing good image recognition from security cameras, it seems to be mainly an image processing challenge to make it work.
Notice how the first link explains that pixelisation isn't effective at thwarting facial recognition. The paper I mentioned last in the thread discusses methods of improving resolution of video sequences.
That view angle problem of yours seems to be a major issue though.
I've always thought that things happen more slowly and with more inertia here in Germany, so moving from yellow to red seems possible despite relative calm on the terrorism front.
The unemployment rates are interesting. There seems to be an anticorrelation between unemployment rate and surveillance state. I wonder whether it will stay that way.
Good point! I just couldn't find this one, I had seen it before. Germany still looks better than Britain though.
The fact that most other places are not improving is no surprise really, how else would you combat terrorism.
Although I have this suspicion that this comes in handy when keeping all those impoverished people in check when the financial crisis we are in right now, finally hits home. I'm still waiting for a map showing a correlation between surveillance measures and unemployment rate.
>Nobody moves out of the UK due to surveillance,...
Not yet!
On the other hand I don't trust my German fellow citizens with regard to preventing excessive surveillance either. Our minister of the interior, Wolfgang Schaeuble got shot once by some nutcase and has been paralyzed since then. I wonder whether he can separate this personal mishap from his political position. He has also shown some tendency for somewhat drastic measures regarding surveillance and terrorism.
Fortunately not all seems to be lost. Today we had a street protest against excessive surveillance:
This is great indeed! Soon we will be so secure that I can have the nuclear powered car I have been yearning for. I mean what else could society gain from more security. Security for its own sake is pointless. So its either nuclear power in peoples hands or to match Russian ramped up spying in Europe.
This problem is almost as old as C itself and every new generation of programmers has to invent idiotic coding rules about tabs and who knows what, so you have something to keep your minds occupied while you are programming.
That said I remember reading somewhere about laser effects. While we all know about welding robots and laser cutting devices and now might think about cut up and burned corpses, lets also not forget that sufficiently high powered lasers cause some sort of explosive vaporization and also shock waves traveling into the material.
I also have the suspicion that you won't see a CW laser in this type of application since it kind of defeats the idea of getting a large amount of energy into the target fast. Especially moving targets could spread the energy over a larger area. So I would expect point like burn wounds and some sort of craters ripped into tissue and body armor when higher powered lasers are involved. The internet contains precious little information about that topic and I doubt that we will see this soon apart from some accidents maybe.
Given the amount of energy which is involved I would guess that Laser shots will be rare and well targeted. Any shot will probably be so expensive energy and material wise that only important threats will be addressed and I doubt that any human targets will be that high up on the list.
Actually now that I have read the article I find the part at the bottom far more interesting about the tagging stuff, this is far more real than soldiers with laser wounds.
Those trees store carbon for a few thousand years, not quite as good as your typical coal deposit but enough to weather most human induced idiocy like the carbon credit program you should rather be complaining about.
After all, those plants were there way before you arrived on planet earth and maybe you find the Araucaria araucana you have in your garden in some of those coal deposits or some of those fossils you have lying around in one of those deserts towards the south.
Those where the times when a puny 500MHz PowerPC could be as fast as a 2GHz x86 processor. When Motorola hadn't vanished into the mists of decaying memory (http://www.google.com/trends?q=motorola) and Freescale could have been a GNU project involving our scaly friends in some obscure way.
Oh well, Freescale should sue Intel for stolen glory or something like that. Also somebody should remind Intel/AMD that decent multiprocessors always come with 2^k cores and not any odd prime composites of cores.
After all, everybody knows that CELL is the new 7400. Oops, that one got 9 cores, maybe thats how it is nowadays. Well I could adjust to 3^k cores. Anybody up for k=4?
My leet numerology skills allow me to predict that IBM will triumph over INTEL with a 81 core processor.
They could just call it a large scale industrial accident, or target practice with a death star out in an intergalactic/interstellar proving ground whatever the distance ends up being.
"Until you've got positive karma, you might as well be posting directly to/dev/null most of the time."
You are right, I remember this. Then one magical day I got modded as Troll - the first time - and all of a sudden I received excellent karma. I wonder whether other users are similarly blessed.
I just find him great: "...because of the filth you are tending in this rank garden". I might not agree with him, but the particular green at the top of the page reminds me of certain jungle plants which grow in deep shade and have developed a similar hue. Also they show a metallic luster which comes from certain crystals they are growing to gather even more light. I just can't find any - oh wait it is on google books: "Vegetation-climate Interaction", Jonathan Adams, Ning Zeng. On page 89 you will find something about Begonia leaves being blueish green and iridescent and living on the rain forest floor.
I wonder what the odd id in the link means, but appart from this it is a nice introductory book about plant-climate interaction.
Well, living on the forest floor gives plants a lot of access to the fumes of decaying matter from the canopy above and also to much higher CO_2 levels. I don't know whether this says anything about Slashdot but with some suspension of disbelief one might find some truth in his statement.
I mean, I admire these plants living with all these hardships - low light, the stink. I just hope they make good use of the CO_2.
It is a refinement though. Actually what makes me not so much afraid about this kind of linguistical manipulation is the possibility that I can make a conscious effort against falling for it.
The problem is the people who don't make the extra effort shovelling out the bullshit. Frankly said, if you are living in the upper/middle class you are dependent on the people who support your specialized lifestyle so please make sure they don't mistake the latrine propaganda for anything but.
Regarding that other thing involving technology, where would you draw the line?
All those fancy new technologies will -according to the article- yield painless results.... "The concept of torture could also be altered by products in this market. It is possible that some day there could be a technique developed to extract information from a prisoner that does not have any lasting side effects," the report states....
So torture was only a bad thing because to be effective you had to actually hurt someone?
To remember A.C.Clarke, would you wear a scull cap or subject your fellow citizens to it? I mean face it, would you allow anyone without one to use your nuclear powered flying car or other high powered/highly potent house hold appliances like that selfreplicating swarm of nanites for weed control? Apart from those examples just imagine what we could achieve.
Scientists seem already hell bent on getting rid of this concept of free will anyway, so why bother. I mean I mentioned this responsibility/dependency for/on your fellow citizens before, so why not do the ultimate thing and become part of some sort of hive?
Slashdot Mirror
I would have asked that you take somebody along I really don't like but now that I read the lyrics for the song I applaud your sense of humor. I'm also damn sure that no one is going to call mars paradise.
He wants to use chemical rockets to orbit to assemble a nuclear space ship which should be reusable. The sixty launches could cost $6 billion if you assume a third of the Shuttle launch cost of $300 million (Shuttle program budget/launches). I just invented a third of the shuttle launch but it gives you a ball park figure.
The $6-$18 billion would be the Shuttle Budget over 3 to 9 years. So yes it would cost a bit more.
I like this thinking big idea. Especially since I have read some posts which suggest that it is oh so much more efficient to have a one way trip.
I don't like this at all since this also implies that there will not be enough resources and means being sent to the settlers on Mars. This is what the people on Mars should be - settlers and not scientists who want to satisfy our curiosity and then die some short while later from lack of resources.
I'm not sure how many flights to Mars would be necessary to establish a base there, but given the ridiculously bad mass ratio rockets have I would guess that one could easily send around ten flights to Mars to build a spaceship there for the trip home. Those would be rather well spent on establishing a permanent outpost on Mars. My suspicion is though that many more trips are necessary to keep things going over the years people live on Mars. So it might well be possible that any additional ten flights wouldn't matter if you want to get the real thing going.
The fact though that people want to skimp on the return trip smells like they want to get to Mars quickly to look good and then forget the whole thing. That could be acceptable. That loss of interest has happened before. But this time it would be different, you would leave a human being over there.
Frankly said this is unacceptable and I don't care the least how suicidal that scientist is or how long drawn out you can make the dying so it doesn't look like a suicide mission anymore. Also I don't want to deal with the elaborate pile of bullshit future historians will come up with to justify our failing to care for our own.
Just imagine what impression that will make on potential future explorers. Saying, "Well you provide us with some nice material for a large number of doctoral thesis's but beyond that we can't be bothered with supporting you because you know, a green golf course looks rather nicer than a bunch of red dunes no matter how much image processing the HiRise people were employing" is just not the right kind of encouragement for risking ones life.
Once you get around to the idea that you will have to share a bit of the inconvenience the explorers will have, it will be much easier to accept that we either can't send a human being there, we will have to commit huge resources to staying on Mars, or we come up with some high powered technology which lets us commit only reasonably large resources and inconveniences the night sleep of the greens.
The step from the last choice to staying on Mars and committing only moderately huge resources into the project is a rather small one don't you think. So unless you want to stay on earth there is only one real option left open - total commitment.
It could be a lottery for the large crowd which wants to go to Mars no matter how.
Check this out:
http://www.universetoday.com/2008/03/04/a-one-way-one-person-mission-to-mars/
You are right. But he added a nice level of additional complexity to it with the base64 stuff. I'm grateful for that, and guess what nice quote I found on the base64 wiki:
"Man is distinguished, not only by his reason, but by this singular passion from other animals, which is a lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continued and indefatigable generation of knowledge, exceeds the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64)
Explains Slashdot well enough.
I had no luck with stty -istrip and unicode input. The reason is mentioned on the cat info page:
"On systems like MS-DOS that distinguish between text and binary
files, `cat' normally reads and writes in binary mode. However, `cat'
reads in text mode if one of the options `-bensAE' is used or if `cat'
is reading from standard input and standard input is a terminal."
So if I enter something like Ctrl-Shift-U 00ff I only ever get 0x3f in the output file.
Wow! Does that even work? I mean how do I enter binary codes into cat?
I know this has to work somehow - I'll read the man page.
>Note that Perforce is free for open source projects.
Yeah, so was BitKeeper and that used to really work too.
I have my doubts about your statement. See the following paper:
http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/2003/CMU-CS-03-119.pdf
I wrote about this earlier:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=321921&cid=20915905
Even if the current systems aren't capable of providing good image recognition from security cameras, it seems to be mainly an image processing challenge to make it work.
Notice how the first link explains that pixelisation isn't effective at thwarting facial recognition. The paper I mentioned last in the thread discusses methods of improving resolution of video sequences.
That view angle problem of yours seems to be a major issue though.
I've always thought that things happen more slowly and with more inertia here in Germany, so moving from yellow to red seems possible despite relative calm on the terrorism front.
The unemployment rates are interesting. There seems to be an anticorrelation between unemployment rate and surveillance state. I wonder whether it will stay that way.
Good point! I just couldn't find this one, I had seen it before. Germany still looks better than Britain though.
The fact that most other places are not improving is no surprise really, how else would you combat terrorism.
Although I have this suspicion that this comes in handy when keeping all those impoverished people in check when the financial crisis we are in right now, finally hits home. I'm still waiting for a map showing a correlation between surveillance measures and unemployment rate.
>Nobody moves out of the UK due to surveillance, ...
Not yet!
On the other hand I don't trust my German fellow citizens with regard to preventing excessive surveillance either. Our minister of the interior, Wolfgang Schaeuble got shot once by some nutcase and has been paralyzed since then. I wonder whether he can separate this personal mishap from his political position. He has also shown some tendency for somewhat drastic measures regarding surveillance and terrorism.
Fortunately not all seems to be lost. Today we had a street protest against excessive surveillance:
http://wiki.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/Freedom_Not_Fear_2008/Berlin
He might have had a look at the following map:
"http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd[347]=x-347-545269&als[theme]=Privacy and Human Rights"
This is great indeed! Soon we will be so secure that I can have the nuclear powered car I have been yearning for. I mean what else could society gain from more security. Security for its own sake is pointless. So its either nuclear power in peoples hands or to match Russian ramped up spying in Europe.
You can write C code anyway you like just run indent later (assuming you aren't afraid of command line tools like the other guys around here ;).
Here is a wonderful manual:
http://www.gnu.org/software/indent/manual/html_node/Index.html
Now look what it says under Copyright notices: ...
Copyright © 1976 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
Damn it guys, you had 32 years to figure it out!
This problem is almost as old as C itself and every new generation of programmers has to invent idiotic coding rules about tabs and who knows what, so you have something to keep your minds occupied while you are programming.
Well all war is nasty.
That said I remember reading somewhere about laser effects. While we all know about welding robots and laser cutting devices and now might think about cut up and burned corpses, lets also not forget that sufficiently high powered lasers cause some sort of explosive vaporization and also shock waves traveling into the material.
I also have the suspicion that you won't see a CW laser in this type of application since it kind of defeats the idea of getting a large amount of energy into the target fast. Especially moving targets could spread the energy over a larger area. So I would expect point like burn wounds and
some sort of craters ripped into tissue and body armor when higher powered lasers are involved. The internet contains precious little information about that topic and I doubt that we will see this soon apart from some accidents maybe.
Given the amount of energy which is involved I would guess that Laser shots will be rare and well targeted. Any shot will probably be so expensive energy and material wise that only important threats will be addressed and I doubt that any human targets will be that high up on the list.
Actually now that I have read the article I find the part at the bottom far more interesting about the tagging stuff, this is far more real than soldiers with laser wounds.
Well you should have planted some other kind of trees:
http://www.parks.ca.gov/default.asp?page_id=1151
or if you want something more mundane:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway_Spruce
Those trees store carbon for a few thousand years, not quite as good as your typical coal deposit but enough to weather most human induced idiocy like the carbon credit program you should rather be complaining about.
After all, those plants were there way before you arrived on planet earth and maybe you find the Araucaria araucana you have in your garden in some of those coal deposits or some of those fossils you have lying around in one of those deserts towards the south.
Those where the times when a puny 500MHz PowerPC could be as fast as a 2GHz x86 processor. When Motorola hadn't vanished into the mists of decaying memory (http://www.google.com/trends?q=motorola) and Freescale could have been a GNU project involving our scaly friends in some obscure way.
Oh well, Freescale should sue Intel for stolen glory or something like that. Also somebody should remind Intel/AMD that decent multiprocessors always come with 2^k cores and not any odd prime composites of cores.
After all, everybody knows that CELL is the new 7400. Oops, that one got 9 cores, maybe thats how it is nowadays. Well I could adjust to 3^k cores.
Anybody up for k=4?
My leet numerology skills allow me to predict that IBM will triumph over INTEL with a 81 core processor.
They could just call it a large scale industrial accident, or target practice with a death star out in an intergalactic/interstellar proving ground whatever the distance ends up being.
How about Megamaid then?
Uh that reminds me:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs
I wonder whether it inspired anyone.
"Until you've got positive karma, you might as well be posting directly to /dev/null most of the time."
You are right, I remember this. Then one magical day I got modded as Troll - the first time - and all of a sudden I received excellent karma.
I wonder whether other users are similarly blessed.
I just find him great: "...because of the filth you are tending in this rank garden". I might not agree with him, but the particular green at the top of the page reminds me of certain jungle plants which grow in deep shade and have developed a similar hue. Also they show a metallic luster which comes from certain crystals they are growing to gather even more light. I just can't find any - oh wait it is on google books: "Vegetation-climate Interaction", Jonathan Adams, Ning Zeng. On page 89 you will find something about Begonia leaves being blueish green and iridescent and living on the rain forest floor.
http://books.google.com/books?id=NMgirQi1oDMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=vegetation+climate&sig=ACfU3U2YZnCT2_M7jfZLZElOzEZ9ljgm8w#PPA89,M1
I wonder what the odd id in the link means, but appart from this it is a nice introductory book about plant-climate interaction.
Well, living on the forest floor gives plants a lot of access to the fumes of decaying matter from the canopy above and also to much higher CO_2 levels. I don't know whether this says anything about Slashdot but with some suspension of disbelief one might find some truth in his statement.
I mean, I admire these plants living with all these hardships - low light, the stink. I just hope they make good use of the CO_2.
Thanks for the link. Apparently this tree shaping business reaches back to the 16th century at least.
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/20/foer.php
This is nothing new I guess, but thanks alerting me to it:
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/djg7/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language
It is a refinement though. Actually what makes me not so much afraid about this kind of linguistical manipulation is the possibility that I can make a conscious effort against falling for it.
The problem is the people who don't make the extra effort shovelling out the bullshit. Frankly said, if you are living in the upper/middle class you are dependent on the people who support your specialized lifestyle so please make sure they don't mistake the latrine propaganda for anything but.
Regarding that other thing involving technology, where would you draw the line?
All those fancy new technologies will -according to the article- yield painless results. ... "The concept of torture could also be altered by products in this market. It is possible that some day there could be a technique developed to extract information from a prisoner that does not have any lasting side effects," the report states. ...
So torture was only a bad thing because to be effective you had to actually hurt someone?
To remember A.C.Clarke, would you wear a scull cap or subject your fellow citizens to it? I mean face it, would you allow anyone without one to use your nuclear powered flying car or other high powered/highly potent house hold appliances like that selfreplicating swarm of nanites for weed control? Apart from those examples just imagine what we could achieve.
Scientists seem already hell bent on getting rid of this concept of free will anyway, so why bother. I mean I mentioned this responsibility/dependency for/on your fellow citizens before, so why not do the ultimate thing and become part of some sort of hive?