talking about building planetary outposts without knowing how to build sustainable space stations, is like talking about building space stations without knowing how to get off the Earth.
Emphasis mine. Dare I say, a truly self-sustainable space station is a tougher engineering challenge then a planet based settlement where local resources can be utilized (provided the appropriate tools).
After all with current tech it is still going to take months to travel to another planet, and if you go down to the planet's surface, how are you going to get back up?
Put yourself in the shoes of an Englishmen during the late 1690's. The voyage to America would take months and be very dangerous. Survival is not assured. A return journey is virtually out of the question.
To me it is a really stupid idea to try to colonize other planets before we figure out how to do space colonies.
We have figured out space colonies. It is called the International Space Station, and it has had a continuous crew for many years.
If you want it to support more than 4 people, though, you need to pick someplace that has usable resources. Mars has dirt and CO2. These are building materials for breathable air, edible plant-life, and drinkable water.
In my opinion, it would be easier to (a) setup factories that can produce the resources needed for survival for a colony of 20+ people on Mars than to (b) keep sending these supplies on Progress docking ships every 4 weeks to support the same sized crew.
Of course, if you are would like to argue further about whether you still think (b) is better than (a), I am up for the debate.
(a) VOIP, (b) 7zip, (c) random crashing, (d) sound from multiple internal sources, (e) TV Card, (f) Joost, (g) Civ II, (h) Desktop Layout, (i) ZsNES
(a) I agree that having an Open Source VOIP program that runs wonderfully would be a great addition for Linux. Fortunately, Linux on Mobile Devices is a very strong market right now, so in 2 or 3 years this product will likely become a reality.
(b) You can't open zipfiles? I don't understand this gripe. Maybe you could elaborate on *what* is specifically broken?
(c) I agree! I see a crash when I launch a program (such as Pidgin or Firefox) while the "New updates" notification system message is popped up. It is frustrating and the OS (Ubuntu 7.10) thrashes so badly that I am forced to reboot.
(d) I agree that this would be annoying, but has never been a problem for me so I don't share your pain.
(e) Again, not my cup of tea. It would be good to make it work, but this isn't important for me.
(f) Joost is a product I have never heard of. What does it do? Maybe there is a comparable Linux tool that accomplishes the same thing...
(g) Hell, FreeCiv (the open source version of Civilization) runs like shit on my computer.
(h) I disagree that Windows layout is better. I like having the top and the bottom. The ability to easily switch between different virtual desktops is a big plus that I don't think Windows has figured out yet. And in Windows, I typically have to double the size of the bar at the bottom of the screen to usefully click around from Window to Window in a meaningful way anyway.
(i) Also, not important to me to emulate SNES games.
And my own gripe... I tried downloading HDV video from a Sony HDR-HC3 video camera the other day. I have a Dell Inspiron 6400 with a built in Firewire/1394 interface, so this should have been pretty easy. Ultimately, I had to down-covert it to DV in order for Kino to understand it. I believe Cinelerra is capable of capturing HDV, but it ran so massively slowly that it was not usable.
Also, the install of Kino (through the Applications=>Add/Remove menu) required me to INSERT MY Ubuntu 7.10 DISC!!! This means I had to go searching for that disc. How annoying when the files are easily accessible through the internet.
That being said, I LOVE the ability to have fully functional video editing software for FREE. I certainly don't have the cash to do INVEST in the really expensive stuff (Final Cut and Avid... I am looking at you).
Advanced Systems Format is a Microsoft-defined container format for audio and video streams that can also hold arbitrary content such as images or links to Web resources.
Who in their right mind would develop a format that allows people to do malicious things like this?
Are their any really good quality resources that enumerate the different audio formats... the advantages and disadvantages... and which ones to stay away because of shit like this?
Honestly, if I want "embedded content" I will use a Media Player that will search the current directory for an album cover JPEG or a text-file lyrics file. At no point should the Fileformat be permitted to establish an internet connection to download ANYTHING!
I look forward to the day when Microsoft changes their slogan from "Where do you want to go today?" to "Do you think we care if you object to what we are trying to do to your computer today?"
Why are they sending it commands that could damage it?
Have you ever gotten your finger caught in a door, or otherwise injured yourself? Robots aren't sufficiently advanced where they can know everything about their environment to completely avoid injury (especially a robot on Mars).
Recently I almost burned my apartment down. There was a distinctive switch from (a) cooking mode to (b) emergency mode to (c) coping mode. Believe me, this robot isn't so different then you and me.
It's scarry to think that NASA could be the new GOD.
Why is it so scary? What is more unbelievable... that Noah could have constructed a wooden ship to save the world from a massive flood, or that a sufficiently advanced civilization could have packaged up some amount of their wildlife and sent them in a spacecraft to the inhabitable planet Earth so that we can survive the destruction that we had created on whatever the last planet we inhabited was?
Nintendo used to have the Glove game controller on the original 8-bit NES system.
I wonder if the end-game is to embed sensors into something with the same textile properties of a baseball batting glove and add a small battery/transmitter to a bracelet/wristwatch. I would imagine that the ability to produce a game for a platform where the controller is that advanced would finally make it possible for realistic artificial reality games that we all imagined 10-15 years ago.
And the could still sell them for less than it costs Sony to manufacture a PS3. If they can pull this off... then they have already won the next generation of console video games (which will start appearing in 2013 based on the standard 7-year development cycle).
Many of the candidates turn out to have no idea how to use the Linux command line, or don't know what a man page is, or how to run the compiler (and this is after extensive screening of their CVs already for a job which specifies Linux skills). This becomes very obvious in the practical test, and such people can be quickly rejected.
Few and far between do I ever have to think about how the compiler works. I suppose I could write a very simple program with a "main" function and then compile that to print some fairly trivial output, but in the industry I have always had the build system(s) (make and VxWorks alternatives) get established by experts. In that case, "using the compiler" because as simple of button pressing.
To be perfectly honest though, I completely agree with your 10 minute test to validate whether "10 years of Linux" is true or exaggerated. I had "Perl" on my Resume and was asked about some fairly simple Regex's that I didn't know because I only use Perl for fairly trivial programs. I doubt that failing that part of the interview was what killed my chances at that job, but I certainly wasn't what they were looking for if an extensive knowledge of Perl was required.
I believe illegal quartering, unfair taxation, and lack of dependence on anything from the Motherland were the main reasons why the colonists revolved.
In "Common Sense", there is a section devoted to the logistics of building a Navy and an argument that the Redcoats were so spread apart fighting other regional wars that America could easily over-power them with a realistically sized fleet.
I also find it sad that current launches go off with out much fan fare or press. It's like we as a Nation have become spoiled to the fact that we send folks into space these days.
Surprisingly, I have seen the last two shuttle launches covered by articles in mainstream media sites and on the nightly news. These launches added the Japanese research lab and the Canadian Arm to the ISS.
What isn't surprising is that prior to that NASA hadn't really had a goal to strive towards because Apollo was such a major achievement that figuring out where to go from there was a huge problem. Asteroids? Venus? Mars? Jupiter? Alpha Centuri? Lagrange Points? Space station?
Skylab (which cannibalized resources from three unlaunched/canceled Apollo missions) was the path towards the ISS. Hubble was a path towards exploring deep space to learn more about it. Numerous unmanned probes were sent around the solar system during the 4 decades since Apollo to do the important job of information gathering.
Only now is there a clear goal for NASA to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on: a Lunar Outpost and men on Mars. We didn't have the technology for this 40 years ago. With a little bit on invention, that hurdle can be leaped in the next couple years.
You did not state why you think it's not a necessity.
Security. You can secure water and electricity plants because an attacker would need to have some serious resources at his disposal to knock off a source node from the water and electric grid. With broadband internet, an attack could occur from anywhere in the world that would disable the network. With the network disabled, emergency broadcast signals wouldn't be deliverable (another post mentioned the benefits of land-line phones) and the government would have no way to communicate.
Simply put, broadband cannot be made into a utility until it can be made cheap enough to guarantee that it will be there when it is most important for it to be there... during an emergency.
Having said that... the above is why it *currently* should NOT be considered a necessity. In the future, the technology should be expected to catch up with the needs of a tele-connected society.
In my line of work, the industry has been migrating from Cobol and Fortran to C/C++ in recent years. I have seen small bits of Java on tertiary projects. I have seen vastly different development toolchains.
My 2 cents? Standardize intelligently. Let experimental groups explore whatever they want, but reign them in when it is time to make evaluations.
One area that I love seeing standardization is in the tool for managing the software repository where you commit your periodic code changes. There are also benefits for standardizing on compilers and code libraries that you use.
One area that I hate to see standardization is in text editors. Let people pick whatever fancy or simple typing program suites their needs best.
Obviously, this post is not geared towards whiz-bang web developers who actually need to push the envelope a little bit to stay ahead of the latest trends.... but there is something to be said from the benefits of specialization and so I generally agree that *most* areas of company code development should be locked down and projects at the company that are not in compliance should have good reasons.
Perhaps we should all become known by our e-mail addresses or IM screennames in the future to avoid this.
So says, "Peter Cooper (660482)". But "Equality (72521)" would disagree.
The irony of uniqueness and individuality are actually pretty huge. Certainly, there are enough unique 5-10 sylable names for the world's 7 Billion people, but most people don't want to give their children "weird" names. And the governmental idea of assigning numbers to act as UUIDs has very much crept into the online world... though the numbers don't make you an individual, they just make you track-able.
You can transfer your portfolio from one company to another without having to pay capital gains, and without incurring transaction costs.
I am an AMTD customer. Can you please explain this transfer in a little more details to spare me from doing the research?
Gmail succesfully filters all my stock spam, but it wasn't until just now that I realized WHY I was getting it. That is a scumbag thing for a securities broker to do....
You either didn't read, or didn't understand the post you replied to, moron.
The argument was that corporations DO have the right to control the secondary market for the goods they manufactured as long as they are willing to be be a buyer who will pay the highest price to re-buy their products.
There was nothing about denying people the rights to sell the crap they own.
There are two pretty legitimate sides of this argument. (1) an individual has a right to sell the stuff that she owns, and (2) a company has a right to protect their "brand".
I don't know what the EBay policy is on selling "fake" items, but if the companies care so much about "defending their brand" they should feel obligated to "re-buy" their products from customers who no longer have a use for such things. That would seem to balance the resale market.
Basically, if Tiffany's, Rolex, and L'Oreal will pay a "market price" to buy back legitimate goods that their customers want to resell, they can claim that EVERYTHING on EBay is fake, broken, or otherwise overpriced.
Because I work in the technology business, I see a candidate who understands what is going on in it to be more sympathetic to views that I have towards the world. I want a technologically literate candidate. Neither Obama or McCain qualify, but McCain qualifies less and it is partially an age factor.
Why should someone who works harder, innovates, starts their own business, or pursues a higher-wage career be penalized? It is not 'unfair' that some people have higher salaries than others.
I won't argue that different salary levels are naturally an "unfair" thing. But lots of people who couldn't do my job make more than me. That is unfair. Thus, I assert that salary and skill should be related. All to often nepotism and unfair dealings seem to be more rewarded than effort.
As to why high-wage earners should be penalized... because as a medium-wage earner I would prefer to give low-wage earners a disincentive from robbing me. As a high-wage earner... you would probably prefer to give me a disincentive from robbing you.
It is preferable to balance the economy with rules and taxation. Nobody wants a world where power rests in the hands of the most corrupt, least skilled members of society, and that is what happens when it is impossible to live comfortably as a lazy, rotten, unmotivated low-wage worker.
Even crazier is that fact that your post was modded "Insightful", and is the reason that I am going to actual RTFA.
Thank you, kind article reading, sir. Hopefully your good will and optimism rubs off on the/. editors and they will start to actively filter AD PAGE LINKS from being published to the main page.
Slashdot Mirror
talking about building planetary outposts without knowing how to build sustainable space stations, is like talking about building space stations without knowing how to get off the Earth.
Emphasis mine. Dare I say, a truly self-sustainable space station is a tougher engineering challenge then a planet based settlement where local resources can be utilized (provided the appropriate tools).
After all with current tech it is still going to take months to travel to another planet, and if you go down to the planet's surface, how are you going to get back up?
Put yourself in the shoes of an Englishmen during the late 1690's. The voyage to America would take months and be very dangerous. Survival is not assured. A return journey is virtually out of the question.
To me it is a really stupid idea to try to colonize other planets before we figure out how to do space colonies.
We have figured out space colonies. It is called the International Space Station, and it has had a continuous crew for many years.
If you want it to support more than 4 people, though, you need to pick someplace that has usable resources. Mars has dirt and CO2. These are building materials for breathable air, edible plant-life, and drinkable water.
In my opinion, it would be easier to (a) setup factories that can produce the resources needed for survival for a colony of 20+ people on Mars than to (b) keep sending these supplies on Progress docking ships every 4 weeks to support the same sized crew.
Of course, if you are would like to argue further about whether you still think (b) is better than (a), I am up for the debate.
(a) VOIP, (b) 7zip, (c) random crashing, (d) sound from multiple internal sources, (e) TV Card, (f) Joost, (g) Civ II, (h) Desktop Layout, (i) ZsNES
(a) I agree that having an Open Source VOIP program that runs wonderfully would be a great addition for Linux. Fortunately, Linux on Mobile Devices is a very strong market right now, so in 2 or 3 years this product will likely become a reality.
(b) You can't open zipfiles? I don't understand this gripe. Maybe you could elaborate on *what* is specifically broken?
(c) I agree! I see a crash when I launch a program (such as Pidgin or Firefox) while the "New updates" notification system message is popped up. It is frustrating and the OS (Ubuntu 7.10) thrashes so badly that I am forced to reboot.
(d) I agree that this would be annoying, but has never been a problem for me so I don't share your pain.
(e) Again, not my cup of tea. It would be good to make it work, but this isn't important for me.
(f) Joost is a product I have never heard of. What does it do? Maybe there is a comparable Linux tool that accomplishes the same thing...
(g) Hell, FreeCiv (the open source version of Civilization) runs like shit on my computer.
(h) I disagree that Windows layout is better. I like having the top and the bottom. The ability to easily switch between different virtual desktops is a big plus that I don't think Windows has figured out yet. And in Windows, I typically have to double the size of the bar at the bottom of the screen to usefully click around from Window to Window in a meaningful way anyway.
(i) Also, not important to me to emulate SNES games.
And my own gripe... I tried downloading HDV video from a Sony HDR-HC3 video camera the other day. I have a Dell Inspiron 6400 with a built in Firewire/1394 interface, so this should have been pretty easy. Ultimately, I had to down-covert it to DV in order for Kino to understand it. I believe Cinelerra is capable of capturing HDV, but it ran so massively slowly that it was not usable.
Also, the install of Kino (through the Applications=>Add/Remove menu) required me to INSERT MY Ubuntu 7.10 DISC!!! This means I had to go searching for that disc. How annoying when the files are easily accessible through the internet.
That being said, I LOVE the ability to have fully functional video editing software for FREE. I certainly don't have the cash to do INVEST in the really expensive stuff (Final Cut and Avid... I am looking at you).
And what happens when escorts start calling their business model "fuck friends"? Will that wash away the "f" section too?
Advanced Systems Format is a Microsoft-defined container format for audio and video streams that can also hold arbitrary content such as images or links to Web resources.
Who in their right mind would develop a format that allows people to do malicious things like this?
Are their any really good quality resources that enumerate the different audio formats... the advantages and disadvantages... and which ones to stay away because of shit like this?
Honestly, if I want "embedded content" I will use a Media Player that will search the current directory for an album cover JPEG or a text-file lyrics file. At no point should the Fileformat be permitted to establish an internet connection to download ANYTHING!
I look forward to the day when Microsoft changes their slogan from "Where do you want to go today?" to "Do you think we care if you object to what we are trying to do to your computer today?"
Why are they sending it commands that could damage it?
Have you ever gotten your finger caught in a door, or otherwise injured yourself? Robots aren't sufficiently advanced where they can know everything about their environment to completely avoid injury (especially a robot on Mars).
Recently I almost burned my apartment down. There was a distinctive switch from (a) cooking mode to (b) emergency mode to (c) coping mode. Believe me, this robot isn't so different then you and me.
It's scarry to think that NASA could be the new GOD.
Why is it so scary? What is more unbelievable... that Noah could have constructed a wooden ship to save the world from a massive flood, or that a sufficiently advanced civilization could have packaged up some amount of their wildlife and sent them in a spacecraft to the inhabitable planet Earth so that we can survive the destruction that we had created on whatever the last planet we inhabited was?
standards compliant browser
Firefox?
Nintendo used to have the Glove game controller on the original 8-bit NES system.
I wonder if the end-game is to embed sensors into something with the same textile properties of a baseball batting glove and add a small battery/transmitter to a bracelet/wristwatch. I would imagine that the ability to produce a game for a platform where the controller is that advanced would finally make it possible for realistic artificial reality games that we all imagined 10-15 years ago.
And the could still sell them for less than it costs Sony to manufacture a PS3. If they can pull this off... then they have already won the next generation of console video games (which will start appearing in 2013 based on the standard 7-year development cycle).
Many of the candidates turn out to have no idea how to use the Linux command line, or don't know what a man page is, or how to run the compiler (and this is after extensive screening of their CVs already for a job which specifies Linux skills). This becomes very obvious in the practical test, and such people can be quickly rejected.
Few and far between do I ever have to think about how the compiler works. I suppose I could write a very simple program with a "main" function and then compile that to print some fairly trivial output, but in the industry I have always had the build system(s) (make and VxWorks alternatives) get established by experts. In that case, "using the compiler" because as simple of button pressing.
To be perfectly honest though, I completely agree with your 10 minute test to validate whether "10 years of Linux" is true or exaggerated. I had "Perl" on my Resume and was asked about some fairly simple Regex's that I didn't know because I only use Perl for fairly trivial programs. I doubt that failing that part of the interview was what killed my chances at that job, but I certainly wasn't what they were looking for if an extensive knowledge of Perl was required.
you will 1. Have to pay full price to get a new one (not too surprising imo) and 2. Re-sign up for a 2 year contract
I assume the same would apply if the iPhone 2 were dropped into the BlendTec?
I'm sure there were people who didn't believe American democracy would work when our forefathers started this country.
You mean the Loyalists/Tories?
I believe illegal quartering, unfair taxation, and lack of dependence on anything from the Motherland were the main reasons why the colonists revolved.
In "Common Sense", there is a section devoted to the logistics of building a Navy and an argument that the Redcoats were so spread apart fighting other regional wars that America could easily over-power them with a realistically sized fleet.
I also find it sad that current launches go off with out much fan fare or press. It's like we as a Nation have become spoiled to the fact that we send folks into space these days.
Surprisingly, I have seen the last two shuttle launches covered by articles in mainstream media sites and on the nightly news. These launches added the Japanese research lab and the Canadian Arm to the ISS.
What isn't surprising is that prior to that NASA hadn't really had a goal to strive towards because Apollo was such a major achievement that figuring out where to go from there was a huge problem. Asteroids? Venus? Mars? Jupiter? Alpha Centuri? Lagrange Points? Space station?
Skylab (which cannibalized resources from three unlaunched/canceled Apollo missions) was the path towards the ISS. Hubble was a path towards exploring deep space to learn more about it. Numerous unmanned probes were sent around the solar system during the 4 decades since Apollo to do the important job of information gathering.
Only now is there a clear goal for NASA to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on: a Lunar Outpost and men on Mars. We didn't have the technology for this 40 years ago. With a little bit on invention, that hurdle can be leaped in the next couple years.
Sanitation is not "necessary infrastructure".
I recall that you need to develop sanitation in a city so that it can grow to larger than 12 Civilization II citizens.
You did not state why you think it's not a necessity.
Security. You can secure water and electricity plants because an attacker would need to have some serious resources at his disposal to knock off a source node from the water and electric grid. With broadband internet, an attack could occur from anywhere in the world that would disable the network. With the network disabled, emergency broadcast signals wouldn't be deliverable (another post mentioned the benefits of land-line phones) and the government would have no way to communicate.
Simply put, broadband cannot be made into a utility until it can be made cheap enough to guarantee that it will be there when it is most important for it to be there... during an emergency.
Having said that... the above is why it *currently* should NOT be considered a necessity. In the future, the technology should be expected to catch up with the needs of a tele-connected society.
In my line of work, the industry has been migrating from Cobol and Fortran to C/C++ in recent years. I have seen small bits of Java on tertiary projects. I have seen vastly different development toolchains.
My 2 cents? Standardize intelligently. Let experimental groups explore whatever they want, but reign them in when it is time to make evaluations.
One area that I love seeing standardization is in the tool for managing the software repository where you commit your periodic code changes. There are also benefits for standardizing on compilers and code libraries that you use.
One area that I hate to see standardization is in text editors. Let people pick whatever fancy or simple typing program suites their needs best.
Obviously, this post is not geared towards whiz-bang web developers who actually need to push the envelope a little bit to stay ahead of the latest trends.... but there is something to be said from the benefits of specialization and so I generally agree that *most* areas of company code development should be locked down and projects at the company that are not in compliance should have good reasons.
Perhaps we should all become known by our e-mail addresses or IM screennames in the future to avoid this.
So says, "Peter Cooper (660482)". But "Equality (72521)" would disagree.
The irony of uniqueness and individuality are actually pretty huge. Certainly, there are enough unique 5-10 sylable names for the world's 7 Billion people, but most people don't want to give their children "weird" names. And the governmental idea of assigning numbers to act as UUIDs has very much crept into the online world... though the numbers don't make you an individual, they just make you track-able.
Your name is essentially your very own brand; might as well try to paint it in a decent light.
Sounds like Whuffie might not be as far fetched as it seemed when I read Doctorow's novel a year ago.
The web is still way better than anything else we got.
That's not true. I got outside and ride my bike sometimes. I think that is better.
You can transfer your portfolio from one company to another without having to pay capital gains, and without incurring transaction costs.
I am an AMTD customer. Can you please explain this transfer in a little more details to spare me from doing the research?
Gmail succesfully filters all my stock spam, but it wasn't until just now that I realized WHY I was getting it. That is a scumbag thing for a securities broker to do....
You either didn't read, or didn't understand the post you replied to, moron.
The argument was that corporations DO have the right to control the secondary market for the goods they manufactured as long as they are willing to be be a buyer who will pay the highest price to re-buy their products.
There was nothing about denying people the rights to sell the crap they own.
There are two pretty legitimate sides of this argument. (1) an individual has a right to sell the stuff that she owns, and (2) a company has a right to protect their "brand".
I don't know what the EBay policy is on selling "fake" items, but if the companies care so much about "defending their brand" they should feel obligated to "re-buy" their products from customers who no longer have a use for such things. That would seem to balance the resale market.
Basically, if Tiffany's, Rolex, and L'Oreal will pay a "market price" to buy back legitimate goods that their customers want to resell, they can claim that EVERYTHING on EBay is fake, broken, or otherwise overpriced.
Because I work in the technology business, I see a candidate who understands what is going on in it to be more sympathetic to views that I have towards the world. I want a technologically literate candidate. Neither Obama or McCain qualify, but McCain qualifies less and it is partially an age factor.
Why should someone who works harder, innovates, starts their own business, or pursues a higher-wage career be penalized? It is not 'unfair' that some people have higher salaries than others.
I won't argue that different salary levels are naturally an "unfair" thing. But lots of people who couldn't do my job make more than me. That is unfair. Thus, I assert that salary and skill should be related. All to often nepotism and unfair dealings seem to be more rewarded than effort.
As to why high-wage earners should be penalized... because as a medium-wage earner I would prefer to give low-wage earners a disincentive from robbing me. As a high-wage earner... you would probably prefer to give me a disincentive from robbing you.
It is preferable to balance the economy with rules and taxation. Nobody wants a world where power rests in the hands of the most corrupt, least skilled members of society, and that is what happens when it is impossible to live comfortably as a lazy, rotten, unmotivated low-wage worker.
Even crazier is that fact that your post was modded "Insightful", and is the reason that I am going to actual RTFA.
Thank you, kind article reading, sir. Hopefully your good will and optimism rubs off on the /. editors and they will start to actively filter AD PAGE LINKS from being published to the main page.
One can only hope...