I have to tell you, I think your first post was OK, but I think that planesdragon made a better case and I think that your response to him was way off base. You lost this one.

No, I'm afraid not. It takes about twenty words and two seconds to prove that gender (that is to say, sex-correlated behavior) is not entirely cultural or subjective. Oh sure, there are cultural components like "women wear dresses" but it's not all, or even mostly culture.

The dripping irony here is that you have been told that gender is entirely cultural and subjective. It's your own religious or personal belief about how the world "should be" - and I'm sorry to say, you're wrong.

citation needed

I'm pretty sure that factoring OF primes is easy. I think you mean to say either factoring large polynomials or factoring DOWN TO primes. Specifically (as you probably know) cryptographic keys are usually the products of two large primes. So the factors of the key are exactly two numbers that were non-trivial to compute.

Bees collect pollen and stick it to their legs to carry back to the hive. Can they carry sugar water on their legs? No? Then they'll still have to go to the flowers.

That isn't true either. Even in the most dark of the global warming scenarios, the Earth will remain habitable by humans.

It's our civilization that is fragile. Something as simple as lack of easily obtainable fresh water will destroy our civilization. And the scariest part is, we may never be able to rebuild it this time. Our civilization was built on cheap oil - the cheap (easy to get to) oil is gone now. That fundamentally limits the size of any civilization that can grow to replace us, and that essentially condemns our descendants to (at best) city-states where life will revolve around the toil of growing food, and occasional warfare.

We have a very short window during which we can access the resources of space - for all practical purposes, limitless resources. But if we screw it up, I can't see how we could get into space again.

Keep in mind, intelligence doesn't necessarily lead to technology. For two easy examples, consider the aboriginal people of Australia. When the made it to Australia, they went farther than any other humans alive at that time - they were by definition the most advanced culture on Earth. Some 60,000 years later, their highest mathmatics had five "numbers": 1,2,3,4 and "a lot" They were stuck in an evolutionary cul de sac. Something similar happened in the Americas.

Bottom line, humans will survive global warming, but we will remain at a level that, today we would consider laughably primative, until the sun finally destroys all life on Earth. And that will be the story of us.

If you want to prevent it, the most important thing we should be doing is exploiting resources in space. That's more important than everything else - more important than healthcare or education, more important than everything.

"NOES! They'll destroy the historic bootprints!" - Idiot who thinks there was only one Apollo landing, or that the robot will necessarily visit Apollo 11's site.

The robots will likely be sent to the site of Apollo 17. After all, that's the one for which we have the most and the best photographs. Therefore, a second expedition to that site would be the most valuable. You can say, "here's a picture of this rock from 50 years ago, and here's a picture today" and make some kind of sciency discovery that way. Also, that was the only Apollo mission to include an actual scientist, a geologist to be exact, and the use a hammer to break open a few rocks. It might be interesting to go back and have a second look at those rocks.

I can't understand the people in this thread who assume the robot will go to Apollo 11's landing site. That was the shortest mission and it was in one of the most boring (but easiest to land on) areas of the moon.

It is not the business of scientists to decide what must be done at "any" cost. Economists decide cost/benefit situations. I invite you to watch this TED talk that echos my point quite well.

Bottom line: scientists study and discover facts and principals about how the universe works. Economists decide how best to prioritize resources. If we did it your way and let scientsts decide what "must" be done at "any" cost then every scientists is going to say that their field is the most important.

I've been researching this on my own over the weekend. Here are the conclusions I've come to:

1. the Delta IV can't fly what's called a depressed trajectory. It *will* need a new upper stage.

2. the high cost of the Ares I is in part due to the fact that they are designing in commonality with Ares V. For example, the same six-segment SRB will be used on both. The same J2X engine will be used on the upper stages of both. Translation: if you scrap Ares I you *still* have to pay for this development unless you also scrap Ares V.

Neither the delta IV nor the Atlas has (or will ever have) the launch capacity to support a moon mission. So if you scrap the Ares V, you condemn the US space program to LEO for another 50 years.

3. Boeing is promising a lot of great stuff, but it's easy to promise stuff. It's harder to deliver. It may be true that the Delta IV-H is cheaper than Ares I, but Delta IV-H plus Ares V is likely more expensive than Ares I plus Ares V.

You might be interested in heading over to the bad astronomy board. There is a lot of discussion over there (some of the people are even rocket scientists) and the consensus seems to be developing that scrapping Ares I would be a bad idea. nasaspaceflight.com also has a lively discussion.

The Ares I currently has a projected cost of $35 billion (and rising). There's absolutely no way it would cost that much to reliably transport humans on a Delta IV.

That certainly does sound insane. What exactly are they spending all that money on? It looks like such a simple design.

I think the Delta IV heavy is a great launcher, but wouldn't you still need a new upper stage if you used it launch Orion? I'm wondering if the Delta IV would mostly just be a replacement for Ares I's SRB stage - meaning, we'd still need to spend how many ever billions it's taking to develop the Ares I's second stage.

Also, wikipedia claims that Ares I can deliver 55,000lb to LEO, while the Delta IV heavy can only deliver 50,000lb. So, (baring a magical upper stage) it sounds like you'd have to either scale back the Orion to the point of making it useless, or spend a lot more money redesigning the D IV.

You seem to know more about this than I do, so I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Well then I agree with you.

When an actual scientist tells me that CFCs are bad or whatever, then I listen. But if some random joe says he's afraid that there may possibly be some unknown danger that nobody has thought of, I think he's just a fear monger. What pisses me off is that every new idea that appears on Slashdot is met with legions of random Joes. I'm starting to burn out from all this cynicism. Why can't people say, "that's an interesting idea, let's test it out." Why must there always be multiple posts about how it may be bad.

If you feel a few microwaves will burn ya

What makes you think that I feel a few microwaves will burn me?

Weren't those considered unsafe for manned flight?

The story I heard was thus: There is a process called "man-rating" which means that you certify a particular launch vehicle to be able to carry a capsule containing people. The process is sort of like ISO9000 or whatever. Essentially, you have gobs of documentation that say things like, "this bolt will fail in this circumstance. The resulting stress on the other 20 bolts is X" "In the event that this tube leaks, the pressure will be Y" In some cases, you have to make things redundant: "the failure rate of this pump is X, which is beyond the risk tolerance for manned flight, so we have this backup pump - the chance that both pumps will fail is Y"

Bottom line: you might have to replace or redesign parts of the rocket in order to make it man-rated. And what I was told is that it might actually be more expensive to man-rate a Delta IV heavy, than to simply design a man-rated rocket like Ares from the ground up.

I hate people who take a stance without considering all the possibilities

All the possibilities huh. There's a difference between rational consideration and the constant cynical sniping that is so common today. We can't suggest *anything* without people leaping over themselves to suggest a doomsday scenario associated with it. Those are the people (and you're in that group) that need to STFU. If there's a scientist or an engineer who says, "wait a minute" then I'll listen. Everyone else is just being attention whores.

Someone proposes wind power. Response:whoa whoa whoa, you haven't considered all the possibilities! Low frequency noise from the blades could cause earthquakes!!

Someone proposes creating an "internet" Response: whoa whoa whoa, you haven't considered all the possibilities! Haven't you read 1984??

GPS. Response: whoa whoa whoa, you haven't considered all the possibilities! Those satelites contain nuclear clocks. NUCLEAR! If they crash, they'll explode and kill all life on earth!

Electric cars. Response: whoa whoa whoa, batteries contain toxic chemicals!

Millions of years ago in Africa: hey, let's get the fuck out of here and move North. Response: whoa whoa whoa, you haven't considered all the possibilities.

All I'm saying is that I'm tired of people like you that think it's your duty to imagine some scary consequence. If there were a few of you, it wouldn't bother me, but you're legion. It pisses me off. Your attitude should be, let's try something new and keep our eyes and minds open to see how it works. Once we have at least one of these stations working, THEN we talk about what it's doing to the environment. If it's bad, we shut it down or work to fix it. Sitting back in your chair criticizing proposals by actual smart people just pisses me off - it's a bit like that scene in Cryptonomicon where the snooty academic says, "how many neighborhoods will be bulldoze to build this information superhighway." The guy thought he was being clever, but actually he was just making a fool of himself. He didn't understand the technology - he should STFU.

Please remind me, how many times have YOU subjected an ecosystem to increased concentrations of directed microwave emissions?

LOL. Every time I've used bluetooth device, an AM/FM radio, or a cell phone.

Question: Why are arguments from the position of ignorance even allowed on slashdot? You are just as stupid as someone arguing against evolution or saying that the apollo landings never happened. Either get on the side of science or get away from a computer.

[citation needed]

See, I think that your comment is FUD. I think that if these microwaves are at the right frequency to excite water molecules (and thus hurt animals) that they'd also be absorbed by the atmosphere and thus not useful for the transmission of power. But every time this story comes up, someone makes a post based on fear. How sad.