My guess, without having any particular knowledge, is that the factory will have some kind of internal grid system (fairly common), and aligning the factory with a compass direction means you can easily convert between internal coordinates and lat/lon GPS coordinates. Of course assuming you aren't converting by hand, it's not really hard to convert even if the factory were not axis-aligned.

Even if it has an internal grid system, I can't come up with a plausible why you'd want to convert from GPS to the internal grid. To be accurate enough to use GPS to locate yourself on the grid... well, unless the grid is good sized (at least 2-3 meters on a side) you simply can't, not in real time anyway. And once the building is closed in, the accuracy will likely degrade even further. Using GPS to establish the grid... well, again the compass heading of the grid is easy to correct for. There's no particular advantage to aligning to any particular compass heading because you can correct in software, and that's already common.

Well, true. After all this time I don't know why I continue to be surprised.

(Different AC) What original AC is saying is that our current medicine doesn't resemble Star Trek style tricorder, hypospray, targeted transporter non-penetrative surgery that we might expect from a Star Trek future.

So, let me get this straight... you're unhappy with the present because it doesn't hold up to the predictions of a piece of fiction?

If the Apollo program were announced today, in 9 years we'd still be arguing over the color of the rocket by PhDs in colorometry.

The Apollo program was successful because it had a clear goal (put a man on the moon, and return him safely to earth) and a hard deadline (before the decade is out).

You left out two other key factors... It was founded on a body of engineering, research, and development that was already in progress at the time President Kennedy announced it. And President Kennedy died in Dallas, allowing it to be pushed as his monument and temporarily stilling the debate over the stunning cost of the program.
 

Modern scientists and engineers can do the same when given the same framework. The DARPA Grand Challenge and the Ansari X Prize are two examples where clear goals and hard deadlines in a competitive environment lead to rapid advances.

It's no clear that either program lead to useful advances. I'm less knowledgeable about the DARPA Grand Challenge, but the X-Prize lead to an evolutionary dead end that's still grounded. Such prizes often do, as they tend to select for designs optimized to win the prize rather than for technology that's amenable to scaling or to wider introduction and use.
 

Instead of doling out grants to people that write boring unambitious proposals, we should be setting bold and ambitious goals, and redirect the money to reward actual accomplishments. Pulling a string works a lot better than pushing it.

Pulling a string is easy, because you know where to pull... that's not even remotely true of research.

Secondly, that's a generalization which ignores matriarchal cultures, and cultures ruled by women.
I.e. Entire British Empire (which basically ruled the world) for quite a while, even having entire eras named after their queens and not their family names, which should be assumed practice if those cultures were inherently misogynistic.

  Matriarchal cultures and "cultures ruled by women" (which are the same thing, women ruling the state != women ruling the culture) are, especially in the West, quite the exception. (As anyone educated, which category you are not included in, quite well knows.) In fact, the culture of the British Empire was heavily misogynistic. For further insight into this, look into who served in Parliament, as Ministers, etc... etc... during the reigns of those queens.

And that's the least of the logical, factual, and historical errors your ignorance and imbecility leads you into. You haven't a clue what you're talking about.

It doesn't teach to laugh at geeks and nerds. It laughs at the stereotypes tied to geeks and nerds

A difference completely without distinction.
 

When we make fudge packing references do we laugh at homosexuals? The answer is no.

Of course we don't laugh, that reference isn't used for humor, it's used as an insult.

What a moron you are.

It's basically irrelevant, if nothing else because the show teaches people to laugh at geeks and nerds. The "science" is just window dressing to enable this, it could be techno-babble for all the audience knows - or cares.

It doesn't seem to be pervasive. We've all seen the recent stats on similar stories. Over half of all gamers are female.

About half of all humans are female... and misogyny is widely documented across history and across cultures. The presence or absence of misogyny is thus not correlated with the percentage of females in the population. Not to mention the multiple incidents that have come to light recently should provide further clue that there's far more than 'one bad apple'.

Which seems kind of idiotic, to me, since one could use kinetic bombardment (Rods from God) instead of nuclear weapons, and avoid all that nasty fallout badness.

In a world where useful kinetic bombardment weapons weren't fiction, I'd agree. They'd make great replacements for nuclear weapons.

We don't live in such a world.

They need to control their communications around bases and know who is saying or doing what.

No they the hell do not. The US Military has, by law, no jurisdiction beyond the base's fence line.

Bullshit. The law [nasa.gov] authorizing NASA directs NASA at numerous points to plan and promote things that fall under "having vision".

Only if you're under the influence of sufficient drugs to be having hallucinations, or have a complete lack of understanding of the English language. Given your posting history and complete lack of connection to reality, it's hard to discern which is the case. (Not that it matters, as the end result is the same.)
 

Decades is the usual shortest time frame discussed for this sort of thing anyway. You're not in disagreement with most "space fanboys" on that. I think it's a bit dishonest to downplay someone's ambitions as delusions and hallucinations while simultaneously admitting that the only real problem is that you think their estimates of time to achievements are mildly ambitious.

Space fanboys never discuss time-frames, as that requires doing a painful thing that they never voluntarily do - which is deal with reality. (And estimation of time-to-achieve is hardly the only problem with their fantasies, err..., ambitions.)

NASA will again look inept and directionless

Only to the clueless that don't realize that NASA is an organization that executes the policies of others subject to the funding whims of yet others. (I.E. pretty much everyone sadly.)

Part of the reasoning was that the scientific developments driven would then flow out into the broader economy, powering the US forwards. It was pretty successful in that regard.

It was almost entirely unsuccessful in that regard. Despite the efforts of generations of NASA PAO's to convince people otherwise, the reality is that space program is a net consumer of technology and has produced very little that has subsequently made it's way out into the general economy.
 

This would entirely be the land of make believe, but just imagine what NASA could have achieved by today if it had continued to receive sponsorship and support at the same level as it did for the Apollo program...

Sponsorship and support when during the Apollo program? If you actually look at the funding, it's pretty much define by a sharp spike in '63-'65, followed by an almost equally sharp decline in '65-'67 and a gradual decrease from there onwards. By the time we landed on the Moon, the program was already running on fumes.

they're handicapped by a management structure that's too fat and doesn't have an aggressive vision for the future. NASA depends too much on contractors that can't produce anything on budget and there's no penalty for not performing.

NASA is not supposed to have vision - they're a branch of the Executive Department and carry out the policies of the Executive as funded by Congress. Ditto for contractors, NASA has always relied on contractors.
 

If we're going to explore space then we have to face the fact that it's unlikely we're going to get there with NASA as it exists today.

NASA is an engineering and scientific agency (with an overlay of flags-and-footprints) and always has been, not an exploratory agency. They do not exist to feed the wet dreams and masturbation fantasies of the space fanboys.
 

And we have to find a way to fund that exploration so it's more insulated from politics. Otherwise we're stuck on this rock until a giant comet, asteroid or neutron star wanders by or we get fried by our own sun or a gamma ray burst.

Exploration has always been about money, not as in funding, but as in making it by the bucketload. Space exploration pretty much no chance of doing so, and thus is unlikely to ever be funded. (See the above about wet dreams.) As far as using space to avoid some planetary disaster... you're hallucinating. We know so little about what will be required we can barely describe the known unknowns. Even with significant investment, that's unlikely to change for decades, maybe centuries.
 
Seriously, the problem isn't NASA. The problem is clueless space fanboys who have somehow decided the world should provide them with and endless supply of willing supermodels and free supercars - and who blame reality for failing to live up to their fantasies.

The only possible way for someone to think I'm confusing the two is to be even more ignorant and clueless than the poster I was replying to. Not an easy feat, I salute you!