We don't yet have the slightest notion how to make self-replicating robots. Probably the best we could do is to send up the sophisticated parts, but make some of the physical chassis components from available resources, to reduce somewhat the mass required from Earth.
What available resources? Mars has no petrochemicals. It's very rich in iron, which is certainly nice, and I'm sure there are other metals you can find and mine
That's more or less that I was thinking of when I said you'd bring the sophisticated parts from Earth, but might be able to make the physical chassis and the structural components from available materials. Steel, in particular, is easily available on Mars: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009457650800266X
If you needed petrochemicals, you can make hydrocarbons from carbon dioxide. But I'm not sure that this would be my first choice for a resource for making things (although it will, of course, be one of the first resources to be exploited: to make rocket fuel.)
- but doing so needs industrial machines, and smelting/refining equipment, and a lot of power.
We don't yet have the slightest notion how to make self-replicating robots. Probably the best we could do is to send up the sophisticated parts, but make some of the physical chassis components from available resources, to reduce somewhat the mass required from Earth.
Or they could send humans, which are less efficient, but self replicate already.
Raising babies takes a tremendous amount of infrastructure. An adult human is mostly self-sufficient; babies are not. As somebody said, it really does "take a village" to raise a child.
Mars doesn't have dirt- it has regolith, an abiotic rock dust that can't support most plant life, even if it weren't full of volatile poisons
Other than nitrogen, plants don't derive their nutrients from the soil; it's not relevant that the soil is "abiotic". You will have to either supply nitrogen, or else grow plants that incorporate nitrogen-fixing bacteria (e.g., legumes, alfalfa).
By "volatile poisons" I assume you are referring to perchlorates (which aren't actually all that volatile). These can be washed out of the soil. (You'd probably want to do this to reduce the level of salts in the soil anyway).
Growing plants is a technology that is pretty well understood. Soil is unlikely to be the bottleneck. Frankly, the hardest problem isn't going to be the soil; it's going to be the power supply to keep the greenhouses above freezing at night. (Presumably waste heat from a nuclear reactor).
I don't disagree. I have not been arguing in favor of the current copyright terms-- the very post you are replying to called that "absurd". I was arguing that copyright should be reformed, not eliminated.
The absurdly long duration of copyrights, from the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension act, is indeed absurd.
A good discussion, how can we fix copyright without telling artists that they don't own their own work, would be useful.
The fact that copyright law has problems, however, does not mean that it has no value and should be discarded entirely. Except on slashdot, where any problem whatsoever can only be seen in black or white, a complete dichotomy: if copyright law isn't perfect then it's useless, no other possibilities.
Possibly a start would be to roll back the absurdly long duration of copyright. (anecdotally, implemented to prevent Mickey Mouse from entering public domain).
As an author, I think your message "we should take away copyright, because authors would keep on writing even if they got no money and no credit for it" to be, basically, utterly and completely despicable.
Samsung is, for the moment ay least, a multi-billion dollar company with huge pockets. Win or lose the cost of this type of court case is a blip in their budget. However for the defendant the financial risk is huge: he could lose his life savings on a case like this.
Creative writing/art/etc was doing well before anyone thought of copyright.
No, actually it wasn't. Before copyright, writers got no credit and no money for their work. Most of the works surviving from the middle ages we don't even know who wrote them-- the authors are called things like "the Pearl poet" by scholars, because all we know of him (?) is that he (or she) wrote the Pearl sequence (and Gawain).
Copyright law might be broken, but no copyright is not the solution.
Interestingly, by not doing the burn they will get more science on this orbit, not less, since most of the science instruments would have been off if they had been doing the perijove burn for orbit lowering (but can now be turned on, to make this a science pass instead of a burn.)
Of course, they will have to spend a later perijove pass for the burn instead of doing science (most likely on the December perijove), so over the whole mission they don't actually get any more science-- but this change means that they get earlier science.
You're aware that the most of the generally-used General Circulation Models (what you call "climate change simulations") do have the source code publicly available, right?
Here are some links (For the most part, they run on supercomputers, so don't expect to compile them for your little Windoze box.):
I like the term "Social Justice Warrior". Anybody to whom the term accurately applies is always proud to have the term applied to them. I like the fact that the social conversation is using a term of which the targets of the term agree it applies to them.
Anyone who brings up SJW is an idiot. It's a manufactured name tailor-made to offend beck beards.
It does seem to be true that when somebody uses the term SJW, you aren't going to learn anything from them. It seems to be mostly used as a tag to say "I disagree with these other peoples' political opinions but I'm going to call them names rather than discuss any issues."
(and I don't know what a beck beard is, or why that's an insult.)
The problem is not that decisions are being made by machines with little human input. The problem is that humans are getting very little insight into how the decisions are being made, and thus very little input into the decision making processes, and even less ability to find and correct errors.
Machines making decisions can be a very good thing. Machines making decisions for reasons that humans are not given enough information to follow is likely to be not.
Maybe some scientist may have predicted ice free by 2016, but most predicted the date as much later.
"Many scientists have attempted to estimate when the Arctic will be "ice-free". They have noted that climate model predictions have tended to be overly conservative regarding sea ice decline.[2][13] A 2013 paper suggested that models commonly underestimate the solar radiation absorption characteristics of wildfire soot.[14] A 2006 paper predicted "near ice-free September conditions by 2040".[15] Overland & Wang (2009) predicted that there would be an ice-free Arctic in the summer by 2037.[16] The same year Boé et al. found that the Arctic will probably be ice-free in September before the end of the 21st century.[17] A follow-up study concluded with the possibility of major sea ice loss within a decade or two.[18] The IPCC AR5 (for at least one scenario) estimates an ice-free summer might occur around 2050.[3] The Third U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA), released May 6, 2014, reports that the Arctic Ocean is expected to be ice free in summer before mid-century. Models that best match historical trends project a nearly ice-free Arctic in the summer by the 2030s.[19] However, these models do tend to underestimate the rate of sea ice loss since 2007. A 2010 study suggested that the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free sooner than global climate models predict. They chart the summer of 2016 as ice-free, but show a possible date range out to 2020.[20] This assessment was reported in the press as "US Navy predicts summer ice free Arctic by 2016" [21] In a study from 2016, the prediction uncertainty of an ice-free Arctic was quantified to be at around two decades, based on model simulations [22]"
I appreciate seeing Egan brought up. I've always felt he was overlooked by the masses as the father of "stuck in the machine" popular sci-fi of the 90's (13th Floor and The Matrix owe him much recognition).
The movie The 13th Floor was based on Daniel F. Galouye's 1964 novel Simulacron-3, so I don't think you can credit that to Greg Egan, who was only 3 years old when the novel came out.
(Nevertheless, I'll second the nomination of Greg Egan as a writer worth reading.)
What's the difference between you and any other religious person talking about my salvation in the sky?
Well, unlike the heaven promised in other religions, space is objectively there. We can actually see Mars and even send probes there.
Send some probes to heaven and get a chemical composition of the surface rocks, and then we can say that spaceflight and religion are on a comparable basis.
No. they're not. Where in the world did that idea come from? Asteroids aren't particularly rich in rare earth metals. (Which, despite the name, aren't actually rare).
if they capture and crash even ONE, they'll be the richest men on earth. (the refining and processing is minimal, these are PURE at the core, nature sorted the elements already)
What?? No.
Nature has sorted out iron and nickel. Platinum group metals are sideorphiles, and segregate with the iron and nickel, albeit still at parts per million concentration, so you need a lot of refining. Rare earths, however, are not segregated in asteroids. On Earth they tend to be concentrated by aqueous processes, so you wouldn't expect to find rare earth segregated in asteroids.
There is a finite amount of energy currently available to our species, both in an absolute sense and a per unit of time sense.
Well, I suppose the amount of energy is technically "finite", but the amount is huge by human standards. You do the math. The solar power striking Earth is 173,000 terawatts. All the energy used by humanity is a trivial fraction of a percent of that.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't yet have the slightest notion how to make self-replicating robots. Probably the best we could do is to send up the sophisticated parts, but make some of the physical chassis components from available resources, to reduce somewhat the mass required from Earth.
What available resources? Mars has no petrochemicals. It's very rich in iron, which is certainly nice, and I'm sure there are other metals you can find and mine
That's more or less that I was thinking of when I said you'd bring the sophisticated parts from Earth, but might be able to make the physical chassis and the structural components from available materials. Steel, in particular, is easily available on Mars: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009457650800266X
If you needed petrochemicals, you can make hydrocarbons from carbon dioxide. But I'm not sure that this would be my first choice for a resource for making things (although it will, of course, be one of the first resources to be exploited: to make rocket fuel.)
- but doing so needs industrial machines, and smelting/refining equipment, and a lot of power.
Well, yes.
Why isn't there a similar push to get men into kindergarten education or nursing?
Men in nursing has been increasing for a while, although the figures are still pretty small.
But rising at a pretty good rate: http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/releases/2013/cb13-32_figure1-hi.jpg
They could be self replicating.
We don't yet have the slightest notion how to make self-replicating robots. Probably the best we could do is to send up the sophisticated parts, but make some of the physical chassis components from available resources, to reduce somewhat the mass required from Earth.
Or they could send humans, which are less efficient, but self replicate already.
Raising babies takes a tremendous amount of infrastructure. An adult human is mostly self-sufficient; babies are not. As somebody said, it really does "take a village" to raise a child.
Mars doesn't have dirt- it has regolith, an abiotic rock dust that can't support most plant life, even if it weren't full of volatile poisons
Other than nitrogen, plants don't derive their nutrients from the soil; it's not relevant that the soil is "abiotic". You will have to either supply nitrogen, or else grow plants that incorporate nitrogen-fixing bacteria (e.g., legumes, alfalfa).
By "volatile poisons" I assume you are referring to perchlorates (which aren't actually all that volatile). These can be washed out of the soil. (You'd probably want to do this to reduce the level of salts in the soil anyway).
Growing plants is a technology that is pretty well understood. Soil is unlikely to be the bottleneck. Frankly, the hardest problem isn't going to be the soil; it's going to be the power supply to keep the greenhouses above freezing at night. (Presumably waste heat from a nuclear reactor).
...Axes are pretty cheap, and most homeless i see have those stashed....
I assume your post is trying to be humorous, right?
Really, on slashdot it is getting to be completely impossible to tell.
Assuming it is a kind of tongue-in-cheek dry humor: ok, LOL.
I don't disagree. I have not been arguing in favor of the current copyright terms-- the very post you are replying to called that "absurd". I was arguing that copyright should be reformed, not eliminated.
The absurdly long duration of copyrights, from the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension act, is indeed absurd.
A good discussion, how can we fix copyright without telling artists that they don't own their own work, would be useful.
The fact that copyright law has problems, however, does not mean that it has no value and should be discarded entirely. Except on slashdot, where any problem whatsoever can only be seen in black or white, a complete dichotomy: if copyright law isn't perfect then it's useless, no other possibilities.
Possibly a start would be to roll back the absurdly long duration of copyright.
(anecdotally, implemented to prevent Mickey Mouse from entering public domain).
As an author, I think your message "we should take away copyright, because authors would keep on writing even if they got no money and no credit for it" to be, basically, utterly and completely despicable.
Samsung is, for the moment ay least, a multi-billion dollar company with huge pockets. Win or lose the cost of this type of court case is a blip in their budget. However for the defendant the financial risk is huge: he could lose his life savings on a case like this.
Isn't Youtube the defendant here?
No, it's not.
Creative writing/art/etc was doing well before anyone thought of copyright.
No, actually it wasn't. Before copyright, writers got no credit and no money for their work. Most of the works surviving from the middle ages we don't even know who wrote them-- the authors are called things like "the Pearl poet" by scholars, because all we know of him (?) is that he (or she) wrote the Pearl sequence (and Gawain).
Copyright law might be broken, but no copyright is not the solution.
Hang on - how come Namibia's not on that list? Don't they have a US military base halfway up their coastline?
I think you're confusing the US with China.
The US doesn't have bases there, but China is interested in building a naval base in Namibia:
http://www.namibian.com.na/ind...
http://mgafrica.com/article/20...
http://www.turkishweekly.net/2...
Interestingly, by not doing the burn they will get more science on this orbit, not less, since most of the science instruments would have been off if they had been doing the perijove burn for orbit lowering (but can now be turned on, to make this a science pass instead of a burn.)
Of course, they will have to spend a later perijove pass for the burn instead of doing science (most likely on the December perijove), so over the whole mission they don't actually get any more science-- but this change means that they get earlier science.
So.. how many countries do you know that keep military bases in other countries?
Ten.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_overseas_military_bases
Climate change simulations?
You're aware that the most of the generally-used General Circulation Models (what you call "climate change simulations") do have the source code publicly available, right?
Here are some links (For the most part, they run on supercomputers, so don't expect to compile them for your little Windoze box.):
http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2009/06/getting-the-source-code-for-climate-models/
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelii/
http://mitgcm.org
http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/en/science/models/echam/
OK, that's one section of the act. What do the other 43 sections say?
I like the term "Social Justice Warrior". Anybody to whom the term accurately applies is always proud to have the term applied to them. I like the fact that the social conversation is using a term of which the targets of the term agree it applies to them.
Anyone who brings up SJW is an idiot. It's a manufactured name tailor-made to offend beck beards.
It does seem to be true that when somebody uses the term SJW, you aren't going to learn anything from them. It seems to be mostly used as a tag to say "I disagree with these other peoples' political opinions but I'm going to call them names rather than discuss any issues."
(and I don't know what a beck beard is, or why that's an insult.)
The SJWs themselves coined the phrase.
I would love to see a citation to this.
The problem is not that decisions are being made by machines with little human input. The problem is that humans are getting very little insight into how the decisions are being made, and thus very little input into the decision making processes, and even less ability to find and correct errors.
Machines making decisions can be a very good thing. Machines making decisions for reasons that humans are not given enough information to follow is likely to be not.
Maybe some scientist may have predicted ice free by 2016, but most predicted the date as much later.
"Many scientists have attempted to estimate when the Arctic will be "ice-free". They have noted that climate model predictions have tended to be overly conservative regarding sea ice decline.[2][13] A 2013 paper suggested that models commonly underestimate the solar radiation absorption characteristics of wildfire soot.[14] A 2006 paper predicted "near ice-free September conditions by 2040".[15] Overland & Wang (2009) predicted that there would be an ice-free Arctic in the summer by 2037.[16] The same year Boé et al. found that the Arctic will probably be ice-free in September before the end of the 21st century.[17] A follow-up study concluded with the possibility of major sea ice loss within a decade or two.[18] The IPCC AR5 (for at least one scenario) estimates an ice-free summer might occur around 2050.[3] The Third U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA), released May 6, 2014, reports that the Arctic Ocean is expected to be ice free in summer before mid-century. Models that best match historical trends project a nearly ice-free Arctic in the summer by the 2030s.[19] However, these models do tend to underestimate the rate of sea ice loss since 2007. A 2010 study suggested that the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free sooner than global climate models predict. They chart the summer of 2016 as ice-free, but show a possible date range out to 2020.[20] This assessment was reported in the press as "US Navy predicts summer ice free Arctic by 2016" [21] In a study from 2016, the prediction uncertainty of an ice-free Arctic was quantified to be at around two decades, based on model simulations [22]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline
I appreciate seeing Egan brought up. I've always felt he was overlooked by the masses as the father of "stuck in the machine" popular sci-fi of the 90's (13th Floor and The Matrix owe him much recognition).
The movie The 13th Floor was based on Daniel F. Galouye's 1964 novel Simulacron-3 , so I don't think you can credit that to Greg Egan, who was only 3 years old when the novel came out.
(Nevertheless, I'll second the nomination of Greg Egan as a writer worth reading.)
This is insanely stupid. Entities simulated in computer programs can't "break out" of the simulation: if you stop the simulation, they cease to exist.
I detest all these idiotic absolutist concepts
All of them?
Absolutely!
What's the difference between you and any other religious person talking about my salvation in the sky?
Well, unlike the heaven promised in other religions, space is objectively there. We can actually see Mars and even send probes there.
Send some probes to heaven and get a chemical composition of the surface rocks, and then we can say that spaceflight and religion are on a comparable basis.
many asteroids are full of rare earths.
No. they're not. Where in the world did that idea come from? Asteroids aren't particularly rich in rare earth metals. (Which, despite the name, aren't actually rare).
if they capture and crash even ONE, they'll be the richest men on earth. (the refining and processing is minimal, these are PURE at the core, nature sorted the elements already)
What?? No.
Nature has sorted out iron and nickel. Platinum group metals are sideorphiles, and segregate with the iron and nickel, albeit still at parts per million concentration, so you need a lot of refining. Rare earths, however, are not segregated in asteroids. On Earth they tend to be concentrated by aqueous processes, so you wouldn't expect to find rare earth segregated in asteroids.
There is a finite amount of energy currently available to our species, both in an absolute sense and a per unit of time sense.
Well, I suppose the amount of energy is technically "finite", but the amount is huge by human standards. You do the math. The solar power striking Earth is 173,000 terawatts. All the energy used by humanity is a trivial fraction of a percent of that.