Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Those are Baby steps (Score 1) 352

.. and are questionable boot strapping projects.

The biggest cost and therefore barrier to Space exploration is launch costs. These needs to be side stepped.

Launch a design prize for low cost probes to be sent in their dozens, hundreds or perhaps even
thousands to the asteroid belt on low energy transfer trajectories. These need to include cheap & reliable ways to analyse the asteroids for useful materials.

Have a second round to design low cost extraction 'bots' to follow up the analysis probes to 'mine' those materials. These could hoard the supplies or even again use low energy transfer to Earth/Lunar Lagrangian points.

Sell futures to fund the next step based on the value of those materials.

We don't need (and probably don't want) full functional Von Neumann machines.

Submission + - How Women Became Gamers Through D&D (medium.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: To shed further light on the currently controversy surrounding female participation in gaming, via Playing at the World comes an in-depth historical look at the unsurprisingly male origins of the "gamer" identity and the way that Dungeons & Dragons pretty much accidentally opened the door to women in gaming — overturning a sixty-year-old dogma that was born when Wells's Little Wars first assumed the 'disdain' of women for gaming.

Submission + - Confidence Shaken In Open Source Security Idealism (bloomberg.com) 1

Submitted by iONiUM
iONiUM writes: According to a few news articles, the general public has taken notice of all the recent security breaches in open source software. From the article: 'Hackers have shaken the free-software movement that once symbolized the Web’s idealism. Several high-profile attacks in recent months exploited security flaws found in the “open-source” software created by volunteers collaborating online, building off each other’s work.'

While it's true that open source means you can review the actual code to ensure there's no data-theft, loggers, or glaring security holes, that idealism doesn't really help out most people who simply don't have time, or the knowledge, to do it. As such, the trust is left to the open source community, and is that really so different than leaving it to a corporation with closed source?

Submission + - How English Beat German as the Language Of Science

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: German was the dominant scientific language in 1900. Today if a scientist is going to coin a new term, it's most likely in English. And if they are going to publish a new discovery, it is most definitely in English. Look no further than the Nobel Prize awarded for physiology and medicine to Norwegian couple May-Britt and Edvard Moser. Their research was written and published in English. How did English come to dominate German in the realm of science? BBC reports that the major shock to the system was World War One, which had two major impacts. According to Gordin, after World War One, Belgian, French and British scientists organized a boycott of scientists from Germany and Austria. They were blocked from conferences and weren't able to publish in Western European journals. "Increasingly, you have two scientific communities, one German, which functions in the defeated [Central Powers] of Germany and Austria, and another that functions in Western Europe, which is mostly English and French," says Gordin.

The second effect of World War One took place in the US. Starting in 1917 when the US entered the war, there was a wave of anti-German hysteria that swept the country. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Minnesota there were many, many German speakers. World War One changed all that. "German is criminalized in 23 states. You're not allowed to speak it in public, you're not allowed to use it in the radio, you're not allowed to teach it to a child under the age of 10," says Gordin. The Supreme Court overturned those anti-German laws in 1923, but for years they were the law of the land. What that effectively did, according to Gordin, was decimate foreign language learning in the US resulting in a generation of future scientists who come of age with limited exposure to foreign languages. That was also the moment, according to Gordin, when the American scientific establishment started to take over dominance in the world. "The story of the 20th Century is not so much the rise of English as the serial collapse of German as the up-and-coming language of scientific communication," concludes Gordin.

Submission + - MIT study finds fault with Mars One colony concept (examiner.com) 2

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: The Mars One project created a great deal of fanfare when it was first announced in 2012. The project, based in Holland, aspires to build a colony on Mars with the first uncrewed flight taking place in 2018 and the first colonists setting forth around 2024. The idea is that the colonists would go to Mars to stay, slowly building up the colony in four-person increments every 26-month launch window. However, Space Policy Online on Tuesday reported that an independent study conducted by MIT has poured cold water on the Mars colony idea.

The MIT team consisting of engineering students had to make a number of assumptions based on public sources since the Mars One concept lacks a great many technical details. The study made the bottom line conclusion that the Mars One project is overly optimistic at best and unworkable at worst. The concept is “unsustainable” given the current state of technology and the aggressive schedule that the Mars One project has presented.

Submission + - Code.org: Blame Tech Diversity on Education Pipeline, Not Hiring Discrimination

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "The biggest reason for a lack of diversity in tech," writes Code.org's Hadi Partovi in a featured Re/code story, "isn't discrimination in hiring or retention. It’s the education pipeline" (Code.org just disclosed "we have no African Americans or Hispanics on our team of 30"). Supporting his argument, Partovi added: "In 2013, not one female student took the AP computer science exam in Mississippi" (left unsaid is that only one male student took the exam in Mississippi). Microsoft earlier vilified the CS education pipeline in its U.S. Talent Strategy as it sought "targeted, short-term, high-skilled immigration reforms" from lawmakers. And Facebook COO and "Lean In" author Sheryl Sandberg recently suggested the pipeline is to blame for Facebook's lack of keg stand diversity (actual Facebook diversity 'disclosure'). "Girls are at 18% of computer science college majors," Sandberg told USA Today in August. "We can't go much above 18% in our coders [Facebook has 7,185 total employees] if there's only 18% coming into the workplace."

Submission + - Mystery Signal Could be Dark Matter Hint in ISS Detector (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Analysis of 41 billion cosmic rays striking the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer particle detector aboard the International Space Station shows an unknown phenomena that is “consistent with a dark matter particle” known as a neutralino, researchers announced Thursday. Key to the hunt is the ratio of positrons to electrons and so far the evidence from AMS points in the direction of dark matter. The smoking gun scientists look for is a rise in the ratio of positrons to electrons, followed by a dramatic fall — the telltale sign of dark matter annihilating the Milky Way’s halo, which lies beyond its central disk of stars and dust. However, “we have not found the definitive proof of dark matter,” AMS lead researcher Samuel Ting, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and CERN in Switzerland, wrote in an email to Discovery News. “Whereas all the AMS results point in the right direction, we still need to measure how quickly the positron fraction falls off at the highest energies in order to rule out astrophysical sources such as pulsars.” But still, this new finding is a tantalizing step in the dark matter direction.

Submission + - Satanists dramatize distribution of religious materials at schools

Submitted by tylikcat
tylikcat writes: In response to a ruling allowing Christian groups to distribute bibles and other Christian oriented materials in schools, the Satanic Temple has decided to distributed their own The Satanic Children's Big Book of Activities. Let the games begin!

To be fair, the Satanic Temple is is forthright in stating that they would not have sought the right to distibute such materials on their own, but point out that most children will already be aware of Christianity, but this might be the first time they encounter to the practice of Satanism.

Submission + - Mozilla Labs Closed And Nobody Noticed (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: When Google Labs closed there was an outcry. How could an organization just pull the rug from under so many projects?
At least Google announced what it was doing. Mozilla, it seems since there is no official record, just quietly tiptoes away — leaving the lights on since the Mozilla Labs Website is still accessible. It is accessible but when you start to explore the website you notice it is moribund with the last blog post being December 2013 with the penultimate one being September 2013.
The fact that it is gone is confirmed by recent blog posts and by the redeployment of the people who used to run it. The projects that survived have been moved to their own websites. It isn't clear what has happened to the Hatchery -the incubator that invited new ideas from all and sundry.
One of the big advantages of open source is the ease with which a project can be started. One of the big disadvantages of open source is the ease with which projects can be allowed to die — often without any clear cut time of death. It seems Mozilla applies this to groups and initiatives as much as projects. This isn't good.

Submission + - US Military Unaware of Chinese Attacks Against Transport Contractors (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: The Senate Armed Service Committee released on Wednesday an unclassified version of a report (PDF) commissioned last year to investigate cyberattacks against contractors for the U.S. Transportation Command (TRANSCOM). The report alleges that the Chinese military successfully stole emails, documents, login credentials and more from contractors, but few of those incidents were ever reported to TRANSCOM. During a one-year period starting in June 2012, TRANSCOM contractors endured more than 50 intrusions, 20 of which were successful in planting malware. TRANSCOM learned of only two of the incidents. The FBI, however, was aware of 10 of the attacks.

Submission + - News Corp chief lambasts Google (ft.com)

Submitted by Martin Spamer
Martin Spamer writes: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has lambasted Google’s dominance of internet search, accusing the internet search company of “cynical management”, “egregious aggregation” and a willingness to “stifle competition”. Given their own past anti-competitive practices, should view this as cynical hypocracy or irony?

Slashdot Top Deals

"Show business is just like high school, except you get paid." - Martin Mull

Close