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Comment Re:MOXIE is a lame and idiotic politcal stunt (Score 1) 109

Both Russia and China have reaffirmed their plans to go to Mars. Just this week Russia announced that they were building a new super heavy lift rocket for such a purpose. Since those are the only two countries with human spaceflight programs currently, they're the most likely to accomplish these goals. I would no longer count on the United States to lead the way here.

Comment Re:MOXIE is a lame and idiotic politcal stunt (Score 1) 109

Sure, but it I said, "hey, I found a spare trillion USD in the budget, let's setup a moon base and rotate the crew every 3 months", you would say "ok great, we've proven getting men to the moon and back is a realistic goal". And so it goes. The Russians and the Chinese are both looking at this as something they want to achieve in the next 20 years. It's a proven thing, there's no ifs ands or buts, you can put a man on the moon and bring him home safely.
 
If something goes horribly wrong on the moon, you can send them back in 4 days express mail style. No big deal.
 
It's six+ months to get someone home from Mars, and if something happens en route to mars, you just have to wait, there's no early return. If you find out you have terminal brain cancer three days after you leave earth, you have a full year before you can come home for treatment.
 
But some day we're going to send a man to Mars. Or I will weep for humanity. Hopefully in my lifetime.
 
At some point you have to prove out that it's possible to sustain human life for 6 months, a year, two years on the surface. That needs to happen sooner rather than later. Would you rather send a man to Mars with a system that has 6 months of flight heritage, or one with 12 years flight heritage? Your astronaut has to live for 2 years on the surface. Do you trust the design with 6 months or 12 years testing without failure? There's very little to no free oxygen on Mars. You have to send an oxygen generator there early on. You couldn't sail very far from shore without a reliable way to carry drinking water for 12 hours, 2, 3 days trip. If you can't provide drinking water for a 6 month trip across the atlantic, you're going to be stuck in Europe. You have to prove out the technology at some point.
 
If you don't understand the concept of "flight heritage", don't bother replying.

Comment Re:MOXIE is a lame and idiotic politcal stunt (Score 1) 109

Nobody's landed a MOXIE on Mars before, not one broken or working. Until that happens you can't definitively say "yes you can produce rocket fuel to go back home to Earth with". Once you can say this, the logistics for putting a human on Mars and returning him safely become a realistic goal. Right now it's just a theory.

Comment Re:MORE STATS!!! (Score 1) 258

Yes, this is idea. The google play store is completely useless for finding top notch apps. As with the PC market, there's usually 2-3 applications that have all the features and aren't buggy and don't have a terrible user interface, and then 1-2 open source options that are very similar, and then 10,000 one-off single feature applets which are mostly useless and ancient.
 
I don't even use the google play store search function. I just google for lists of top versions of the type of app I need (with this year's year in the search results), then go download/buy that one and hope it stays updated.
 
I used to wonder why people use brand names when product names are so important. This is why. Complete chaos. In 10-15 years there will probably be an umbrella of 20-30 companies that offer suites of good programs that all work together well. Right now I'm going to avoid a new program by a new developer unless it does proper magic like Word Lens (which is now owned by Google), and just stick with curated lists on %RandomAndroidApprRviewSite%.

Comment Re:Dust (Score 2) 171

DUST
 
So you've come up with the ultimate heat sink, but now you have to run it in a positive pressure ventilation clean room.
 
Might as well just stick the PC in the closet and run an HDMI over Ethernet to your desk and use wireless mouse/keyboard. Now that we're not forced to use a maximum of 9' VGA cable, and nobody uses physical media anymore, there's zero reason not to stick the PC somewhere else and run an extra CAT-6 drop for the video (HDMI over Ethernet needs 2x1gbps)

Comment Re:GPLv4 - the good public license? (Score 1) 140

And in the 20th century Spain was mostly a ghetto and the rest of the Spanish speaking countries, banana republics were mainly dealing with internal conflict (or US intervention *cough* Guatemala *cough*; all of South America has been peaceful since the Bolivar republic split over 100 years ago; China hasn't had a military victory of note in the last 120 years, which is why I explicitly said 20th century. Thanks for the irrelevant 400-year history lesson, though.

Comment Re:I wonder how long it would've taken NASA? (Score 4, Interesting) 49

It's really hard to do this kind of landing burn (nicknamed 'suicide burn' as you run out of fuel as the landing feet touch the ground at 0 velocity, and miscalculation and splat or a nice bounce (elon called it the hover slam)) with a solid rocket booster, which we keep buying/making to prop up the ICBM industry with civilian dollars. The shuttle ended up with SRBs instead of L(iquid)RBs purely due to political reasons.
 
Actually, for the Saturn V, blueprint drawings do exist made by NASA of a cockpit on the side of the main booster tank with glider wings, to take it the 300 miles back to a safe landing site. Obviously that complication got scrapped in the mad rush to get to the moon in a decade.

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