> Firstly, their claim on their website "While complex, the Mars One Mission is feasible. The science and technology required to place humans on Mars exists today. "

Yes, as I said, wishful thinking. Fraud is "deliberate deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain." There's no evidence here that people are being deliberately deceived. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

So far there's no evidence that it's an outright fraud; it's just REALLY wishful thinking. But that's almost equally bad, because when it inevitably fails it's going to hurt the space community because they will be permanently associated with failures and scams. This is why I think the onus is on the space community (The Planetary Society, the Mars Society, etc.) to quickly refute and bury Mars One as fast as possible.

Cancer cells also aggressively compete with other cells to survive and propagate, in the end destroying life. Hooray for aggression, I guess.

Testosterone has nothing to do with aggression.

This has been debunked multiple times.

Hurr durr. Warrior leader good! Thoughtful, reserved, intelligent leader bad! Vote for President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho!

No, more like "I appreciate your effort, but you haven't made the right decisions and so I am going to go somewhere else. Thanks."

> The most important Engineering Principle is to measure everything using metrics to guide the process

This sentence is literally meaningless. If you mean 'quantify everything', you're communicating your intent extremely badly, and you're also wrong, because it's not right to try to quantify everything.

> You know, in our times schools (and kids) are no longer what they used to be. ...and you're just blindly assuming I got my degree yesterday.

What every single person in reply to my comment is getting wrong is mixing up engineering SKILLS (mathematics, general problem solving, etc.) with engineering PRINCIPLES. Principles are things like "keep it simple" or "safety first." I guess some of these are relevant to programming but it's not like these are particularly difficult concepts to realize (or that software engineering doesn't already have them).

> and we covered bio, chem, physics, math beyond diffeq and engineering fundamentals and techniques

So did we. Do you really think these are engineering principles? Are you that confused?

> is that people from my program often get hired as engineering scientists

I have a graduate degree in engineering science.

What is it with all the pathetic ACs around here?

AC strikes again! No I didn't miss the point. All those things are either self-evident or not related to engineering. Is 'breaking down and analyzing big problems' an engineering principle? If so then politics, law, and art are also engineering.

Those things you mentioned are either not general or are general principles of thinking, not really related to engineering. Understanding of physics is the only one that could be said to be a general engineering principle, but that's kind of a tautology. "To understand physical systems you have to understand physical systems."

> Really? I have a four year engineering degree, and spend the first two years of that learning mostly general principles.

I don't know where you went to school but I spent the first two years learning physics and math. Are you saying general engineering principles include math? If that's what you're saying then we are in full agreement. Programmers should learn math.

> We aren't all "good at coding", or paid to work on Software Libre: that means that those people who are need to be much more responsible, and to start — finally — to listen to what people are saying.

Even if we could work on the distros, there's no reason we would. Open source development isn't a bunch of angels selflessly providing gifts to the rest of humanity at their own expense. It's a community based on cooperation and competition like all other human communities. It is NOT WRONG to expect responsibility from someone who's software you're using. Quite the contrary. It's the duty of everyone who uses a Linux distro to point out flaws and areas of improvement, and history has shown that those who repeatedly refuse to listen to these complaints eventually die off.

Let's face it, most open source developers are irresponsible twats who only care about their own intellectual masturbation (and I say this as an open source user and developer). They have no commitments to anything and will happily break years of compatibility just to make the system more 'elegant', something no one except them gives a fuck about. Rarely do you get people who actually care about the users.

More to the point, what the hell are "general engineering principles"? I have a formal training in engineering and no one ever gave me a set of general principles to learn. Based on what I and other engineers do, I'd say the most general engineering skill is how to use ANSYS :)

But seriously, I've only ever heard the phrase "general engineering principles" from programmers, and it usually stems from a gross lack of understanding of non-software engineering and how relevant software design is to things like building bridges or cars (hint: not at all relevant, except in the trivial sense that all of them involve clicking buttons and sitting in front of a computer for a long period of time. Maybe a "general engineering principle" would be to use an ergonomic chair? :)

Plenty. Virtually all the AI software of the 60's and 70's is lost now. They were usually written in custom Lisp dialects for which no interpreter exists today. Even if you can find the interpreter code, there's no way you could run them, because they were heavily optimized for custom hardware that is long gone, the companies developing them also long gone, along with critical information that you'd need to write an emulator.

Lisp is especially problematic in this area because of the huge variety of non-standard implementations that were used, but many other languages also have this problem.