You claim that you don't care about people doing stuff like BASE jumping, mountain climbing up Mt. Everest, or doing other potentially life threatening things, yet you complain about people going into space on their own dime.... with or without voluntary sponsorships from others. Yet here you go and say precisely the opposite.

It is the same thing for those who want to go into space.

As for Mars One, I think those guys are full of it and don't know what they are doing, and legitimate engineers and even fans are trying to offer help yet it is being rejected in favor of fluff and pomp. That is why Mars One is going to fail, not because they are trying to attempt something foolish. I'll also agree that there will be scam artists and people with less than honorable intentions who are trying to milk those with a dream of someday working and living in space, some of whom have some serious money to offer as well.

Still, what you fail to realize is that there is a good chance that with enough effort, brains, and attention to details that some of these project which are being proposed can succeed. I can't say if Elon Musk and his crazy idea of going to Mars is going to succeed or not, but one thing that certainly distinguishes him from Mars One is that he has put stuff into space, vehicles are orbiting the Earth right now that have been put there with his companies, with several billion dollars worth of money from people who do not lightly spend that kind of money already committed to sending much more into space on his rockets. I think that should count for something, which seems like you are casually dismissing too.

Again, I am not asking you for anything explicitly other than to suggest if you want to help, work with me and others who want to go into space. If you think it is stupid, move along so you don't get in my way. And please, give me the permission and opportunity to do this kind of stuff instead of holding a gun to my head and telling me I can't go into space. It doesn't matter if you do it personally or have laws enacted and a government thug does that instead... it is the same thing in the end.

I don't want to rob you through taxation as I think this can be done completely with private funds and without the government's help. I do know there are some in the space advocacy community, notably Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who want to point a gun at you and force you to pay for activities in space... so know that not everybody even has the same attitude about how to get there either. For myself, if the funds to do activities in space can't be found, that sort of is a "vote with wallets" to show that it may indeed be a futile effort but if the means to get this done can happen with private funds it is something that should be permitted to happen too.

I am not asking for your faith. I am merely asking you to shut up and get out of the way in terms of trying to stop those who want to do this kind of thing with their own dime. If you think this is a foolish task, don't bother participating and I will leave you alone to do whatever it is that you want to do or think is a better use of your time and resources.

It pisses me off when people like you are forcing me to think this is impossible and are actively preventing me and others from even trying. It may be that such endeavors will fail, that people may even die in the process of trying. I just don't want to live in so safe of a world that even the attempt to reach out and do such things has been driven from humanity. I certainly can't stand having a gun placed against my head telling me to forget about this stuff and that I must conform to some dogma that the world is flat and that I need to shut up and be a faithful factory worker churning out your wonderful hunk of plastic crap.

Define farmland, and note that Mars has more surface area than all of the land on the Earth, and millions of metric tons of water as well that is even visible from modest telescopes on the Earth. It will take technology to make the water usable for farming, but it isn't that hard, and flat land capable of being farmed is also possible.

You might be surprised at how much farmland can be created on Mars. One very likely view of what farms on Mars will look like can be found here:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4UgDFk5Mego/UkRCQ1TG5SI/AAAAAAAAC8U/f9Ku2VzmGqQ/s1600/MartianOasis01-signe2000.jpg

I happen to agree with you, but it is a thought provoking thing that smacks against political correctness when I bring the term up with regards to Elon Musk. He deserves to be proud of his South African heritage, and it should be pointed out that any kid from Africa likely could have achieved the success of Elon Musk if they shared his passion and drive (with a bit of intelligence thrown in). Family connections in Canada certainly helped, but it should be an inspirational story to everybody on that continent who deserves some local heroes as well.

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Last I checked, a simple threat of violence isn't a reason enough to take away someone's liberty this long.

So is prison rape. Does that make it okay too?

In fact this is precisely why I wish there were something like a comp.sci wiki. A lot of this knowledge should be easier to access for people who didn't need a full degree to get where they are but realize they have a problem to solve and need a better way to do it than posting their current code on stackexchange.

Yes, the possibility of doing wrong is obvious but that root CA installation is very common when dealing with 802.1x authentication with Windows clients. Its a side-effect of how stupid Windows' handling of certificates is.

cf. this vendor's suggestion https://kb.meraki.com/knowledg... to disable certificate checking altogether to make it work instead.

The problem with Golden Spike is that I have yet to see a single customer. A nice idea in theory, in practice they aren't going to the Moon yet.

I hope that changes.

I would love to see the tank that holds F2 for anything longer than a few minutes or perhaps hours.

Seriously, as Florine is one nasty chemical that eats its way through almost anything. It eats through glass for crying out loud. I agree it might be a more efficient mixture, but there are some damn good reasons it isn't used, mostly dealing with reality and building actual vehicles rather than something on paper.

The only thing keeping SpaceX from sending people up into space on the Dragon is the lack of approval by the U.S. government, specifically the FAA-AST. I believe Elon Musk when he points out that putting seats in the Dragon and launching it with a crew on the next CRS flight (which will be in a couple of weeks) would already be safer than it was for the astronauts traveling on the Space Shuttle.

There is a launch escape system that SpaceX has currently in development, and is going to perform a test of that system later on this year. It is going to happen soon enough that it is reasonable to check regularly with the Patrick AFB website or upcoming NASA flights for more details.

If you are going to use California as an example, keep in mind that the original Spanish settlement of Buena Vista (modern-day Los Angeles) completely died out because everybody died from starvation and thirst from a lack of water. The only way California is able to sustain its current population is strictly because it can import a large amount of its food from elsewhere (in spite of being a net food exporter as a state) and because of the technology which sustains the current population of the state.

California is in fact proof that through the use of advanced technology we can take an inhospitable wilderness which is determined to kill off everybody who lives there and turn it into a place where morons and idiots can survive and thrive.

Perhaps my ancestors (who were some early residents of California) did too good of a job teraforming California and making it a nice place to live. I promise that the Polynesians traveling from Tonga or Samoa and made the trip to Hawaii would not have been capable of setting up a survivable settlement in the Los Angeles basin at the same time Hawaii was first being settled.

Who says that cows, muffins, or lighthouses won't be in space? I can see practical reasons for sending all three.

A lighthouse in space might not look like a lighthouse on the Earth, but can and will exist in some form in the future.

Try for a better example, because this one has utterly failed.

So technically he is an African-American?

At least he has as good of a claim to that title as anybody else who uses the term. He just lacks the dark skin, as if that mattered for anything.