It's like debugging the code of that guy who wrote most of the project, was consuming entire coffee in the office, outtalked everyone at the meetings, and then relocated for a new job to Zurich or London.
Anybody know why these web crawling/bot standards are not evolving ? I believe robots.txt was invented in 1994(thx chatgpt). People have tried with sitemaps, RSS and IndexNow, but its like huge$$ organizations are depending on HelloWorld.bas tech to control their entire platform.
I want to spin up endpoints/mcp/etc. and let intelligent bots communicate with my services. Let them ask for access, ask for content, pay for content, etc. I want to offer solutions for bots to consume my content, instead of having to choose between full or no access.
I am all for AI, but please try to do better. Right now the internet is about to be eaten up by stupid bot farms and served into chat screens. They dont want to refer back to their source and when they do its with insane error rates.
> I believe robots.txt was invented in 1994(thx chatgpt).
Not to pick on you, but I find it quicker to open new tab and do "!w robots.txt" (for search engines supporting the bang notation) or "wiki robots.txt"<click> (for Google I guess). The answer is right there, no need to explain to LLM what I want or verify [1].
[1] Ok, Wikipedia can be wrong, but at least it is a commonly accessible source of wrong I can point people to if they call me out. Plus my predictive model of Wikipedia wrongness gives me pretty low likelihood for something like this, while for ChatGPT it is more random.
This phrasing is very misleading. To bullet point directly from "possibility" to "standard" implies the standardization was a turning point where it could start being used. But it was massively used long before that. The standard is a side note that's barely relevant.
Here's a 2010 discussion about Google's explicit support, and I'm sure I could find earlier.
The thing google did in 2019 was submit it as a standard, nothing to do with adoption or starting to recommend. In that very post they said "For 25 years, the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) has been one of the most basic and critical components of the web" "The proposed REP draft reflects over 20 years of real world experience of relying on robots.txt rules, used both by Googlebot and other major crawlers, as well as about half a billion websites that rely on REP."
This comment seems like it comes from a Cloudflare employee.
This is clearly the first step in cf building out a marketplace where they will (fail) at attempting to be the middleman in a useless market between crawlers and publishers.
As many have stated, I would assume more than 38%. But good quality content is rare and the dynamic content made page combinations go infinite 20 years ago.
We are maintaining 25y old urls is a bit ehh. cumbersome, and I sometime wonder if its worth it. Most of the traffic seem to come from bots and they do seem to learn some of the 301's. It seems to be good for SEO, etc.
Some users also gets redirected to the content on the new urls. It feels a bit like helping an elderly person over the street to where the shop is.
Anyway, I hope that bots and humans trust our services more.
But somewhere inside (my little star-wars/trek spirit), I wish that it was not so tricky. That we all could just travel and explore the universe.
Everybody always talk about how difficult it is in space and how much better earth is. Wish the debate would be more about all the possibilities in space or on other planets. What can we do with zero gravity? For all the bad things with living on Mars, could there be some amazing benefits, new materials and so on..
The first commercial space manufacturing application is likely to be ZBLAN, a super pure fiber optic. When made in microgravity it has superior optical properties. It's extremely expensive, $450k to $1m per kg.
A lot of human knowledge cannot be written down and has to be passed on person to person. There isn't enough bandwidth in a book to actually convey a lot of it.
Machining is one instance of this. You basically have to have somebody show you how to do some of it. Same thing with forging.
The difference between the most detailed written instructions and apprenticeship / personal instruction is instant expert feedback. Skills transfer can happen much faster when the loop is closed.
The examples you cited can be written down and they don't have to be taught in person. You could instruct somebody to do these without being present in person. I'm sure there are reasons that's not the way it's taught primarily, but you've not convinced me it's fundamentally impossible.
You don't need a complex example. Your first language is something that can only be taught by people who are alive. Even if there is a comprehensive textbook that teaches all languages you still have to learn your first language to read the book.
We’re perfectly capable of building electronics that can run for many tens of years without issue… it’s just that such things don’t get built because that’s not profitable for manufacturers. If an organization like NASA puts in an order for computers or handheld devices specifically designed to not break for long stretches of time, it wouldn’t be a problem to fulfill said order.
You mention billionaires and then list off new money entrepreneurs. Don’t conflate the two. There are jobless people born into billion dollar family dynasties that do absolutely nothing for humanity. They hide and live out their lives entirely for them.
What are _you_ doing to leave a long-lasting meaningful impact? Billionaires are people too, just with more money. Having money doesn't make you "just ego".
Colonies don't subsist in isolation, they require trade to survive. See Jared Diamond's Collapse for the pop science version of what happened to a few isolated colonies (Greenland, Easter Island, etc) when trade stops.
What happened in the past in very different circumstances won't be all that informative. Differences in education, environment, technological requirements and capacities, different world-views, different superstitions, native populations (or lack thereof), medical practices, air gravity and radiation.
Moreover, colony is a soft boundary word. I daresay that the United States (former European, now independent Colony) could survive without external trade if it came to that..what would it take for a colony on another planet to be self-sufficient? Minimally, the ability to produce items required for survival (e.g., airtight living quarters and vegetable gardens, energy, oxygen, etc).
> A successful mars colony would need to have a plan to reach self-sufficiency through Martian plus asteroid resources.
Not at all. While there will be an economic and logistical incentive to reduce the dependence on imports from earth, it is not reasonable to expect the colony to fully duplicate the manufacturing capabilities of earth. There will be drugs, electronic components and human experts that will imported from earth for a very long time.
I believe a Martian colony would be successful when they achieve economic viability (import value lower than export value). This would happen well before they would reach actual self sufficiency.
it is not reasonable to expect the colony to fully duplicate the manufacturing capabilities of earth. There will be drugs, electronic components and human experts that will imported from earth for a very long time.
Aren't there former colonies of western empires that now produce their own drugs, electronic components, and human experts? Granted, it's a bit more difficult because it requires first building the life support infrastructure or the world, whereas colonies on Earth have their life support for free. However, Mars has geologic processes that produce minerals, and people have already mapped out the chemical processes that could be conducted with in-situ resources, all the way up to production of feedstocks for making plastics like ethylene. (Also done for Venus.)
I believe a Martian colony would be successful when they achieve economic viability (import value lower than export value). This would happen well before they would reach actual self sufficiency.
There are political reasons for self sufficiency, which can warp the market a bit.
I don't think any country on earth is currently wholey self sufficient due to the nature of globalism. Nobody can cut off all exports without losing access to some necessary components or materials. A colony on Mars would have higher and more advanced needs to support and protect human life.
A colony on Mars would have higher and more advanced needs to support and protect human life.
This is mostly false and slightly true. The level of technology needed to imperfectly supply the bulk of life support needs isn't that high. Pressurized, radiation shielded homes could be built by making bricks, building structures out of masonry arches, sealing them with an airtight liner, then burying them. The chemistry for extracting breathing gasses and plastics feed-stocks out of the atmosphere dates from the industrial revolution and 20th century. Mars is much more likely to be dependent on Earth for products like microprocessors for far longer than environmental needs.
Completely balancing and stabilizing artificial ecosystems to be 100% self sustaining and recycling might take many decades. However, the elements and materials needed are all available as inputs from sources outside of the Earth.
What products would a martian colony produce that are worth transport costs? Even taking into account you only need to pay for the return trip, because the earth-mars leg is payed for by imports anyway.
Data has much more favorable transport costs, but there is only so much valuable data on Mars. Especially since astronomy isn't really a free market.
There might be resources on Mars that are rare enough on Earth to be worth it. I'd be interested in hearing more on those.
It seems to me like the main value of a Mars colony (human exploration, achievement, and insurance against planetary wipe-out) are abstract, and can't be exported in any real sense.
I don't think any imports from Mars could be profitable. Except scientific data, of course. The colony will depend on Earth tech for a long time.
The only case for a self-sustained colony I see is some local political extremism. To prefer to live on Mars by one's own means would take some very strong Earth-incompatible views.
The chance of a colony on Mars NOT seeking independence when it reaches a modicum of self-sufficiency is nil. Look at the US; separated by 6-12 weeks of sailing. It's human nature to seek to govern your own affairs, and with travel time to Mars being around 300 days, as soon as they can, they'll become independent.
I don't know. Look at Canada; separated by the same distance yet it remained a colony until 1931.
While rebellious space colonies has been a dependable sci-fi trope since the 50's, I am skeptical things would really work out that way given how dependent Mars would be on Earth for everything other than the very basics of self-sufficiency. I am talking about things like art (music, books, films) and the kinds of developments in science, medicine and engineering that can only be generated by having a support base of 8 billion people.
I think it also depends on what flag the Mars colony flies. If a country (e.g. the U.S) claims the colony for themselves, I think it makes sense that there will be more and more pressure to disassociate especially as people from different countries on Earth mix together. I can see a united colony, however, something like the ISS, working better as there is the cultural idea of being "for humanity" as opposed to "for this country that not everybody identifies with".
The one import from Mars that might be profitable does not come from Mars: resources mined from asteroids. Mars is closer to it (and in a shallower gravity well than Earth), so if for whatever reason we want people closer to asteroid mining operations, that might be a viable niche for Mars.
That's very speculative, though. Asteroid mining is probably going to be entirely robots, and both supply of those robots and the demand for the resources are almost entire based on Earth, so it's very questionable a Mars colony will add any value there. But it's the one area where I can see the possibility.
A refueling station on Deimos, however, sounds like a much more interesting prospect.
One thing I never thought about with the intro is that, at the time it was produced, the ISS didn't look like how they represent it, but now it does look pretty close to it. They must have gotten some idea from NASA of how it would probably turn out to look.
They used the original plans and artist drawings for Freedom which became the basis of the ISS for the intro, the ISS was about half way with being completed when Enteeprise got pull off the air and when it first aired the ISS had only 3 modules.
But all the industrial scale processes we use require gravity, plenty of liquid water or solvents and a LOT of other infrastructure in place.
Sure, you could pack up some tools in 10 ships 500 years ago and could start a colony in a hospitable part of Earth.
I'm convinced you cannot bootstrap a colony in an unhospitable place in the Solar System without ships 3-4 orders of magnitude above what we have today.
If the BFR/Starship works as well as Musk envisions, it will be near 3 orders of magnitude better than current launch system.
For example, it will carry substantially larger payloads than the SLS, at less than 100th the cost per launch ($15M vs $3B), and launch almost daily, vs twice a year. The Shuttle flew every couple months, at a payload cost of over $30,000/lb, vs under $100/lb for the BFR.
Now I don’t think the first versions of the BFR will achieve those goals, but the crazy part is they are achievable. Reusability drives costs rapidly down towards to the cost of fuel, which is under $1M per launch.
The problem Elon faces is refurbishment costs. It seems premature to think that the BFR and Starship can fly ten flights with only minor refurbishment, and fly one hundred times before replacement. But the benefits of reuse are so huge that even if they fly only ten times each launch costs can be less than a Falcon 9.
That's because it's the only way we currently know. I'm no materials scientist, but how many novel methods of making materials in microgravity will we discover in the next few decades? Or new, better materials.
It's all conjecture obviously. The point is that we probably don't need to carry all our heavy tools and infrastructure up there- we just need to find new (hopefully better) ways of creating the stuff we need.
This is why I like the idea of building a spinning station in orbit and wrangling asteroids into orbit for mining and refining. Simulating a full Earth gravity in space would allow using existing industrial processes and allow humans to work there indefinitely without physical deterioration.
To address the things you raise directly: Mars has gravity, and if you have plenty of energy to melt it, it has plenty of water. Nuclear power can supply plenty of energy.
Advancement follows the money. And money does not yet follow neocortex/new brain. Otherwise it is possible to explore and live permanently in space. Treat yourself to some Isaac Arthur to taste some of the space future as you wait evolution to catch up: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g
Right now we need to terminate manned missions at some destination (like Mars or the ISS) so we can follow up with supplies. Everything we learn figuring out how to keep humans alive on the eventual Mars trips will help us send humans on more exploratory, less mapped out, trips to asteroids, etc, in the future. Hopefully within some of our lifetimes.
I honestly don’t see any benefits to living on Mars until every inch of space on Earth is used up. Everything about living on Mars is hostile to life. Doing anything there like mining and manufacturing will be orders of magnitude more difficult and for what? To say we are somewhere else that looks like the Atacama but infinitely more difficult to get to? It seems silly to be trying to rush to a place that wants to kill you when we have a great place here already that we could just stop messing up.
It only counts as a redundancy site if the colony could survive without Earth. What's the minimum Martian colony size that's self sufficient? Self sufficient doesn't just mean the ability to create sufficient food, water, air, shelter, sewage, etc but the ability to recreate all of the necessary machinery starting only from your initial supplies and undeveloped Martian natural resources.
So many of the industrial processes that we've developed assume a huge interconnected network of supplies. To make Mars self sufficient you'd have to reinvent a huge chunk of the modern industrial system while also trying to keep your small population of colonists from dying. It's a monumental challenge with today's technology.
I agree with you, but this isn't about creating fully working self-sufficient backup in a single go. There needs to be a first step, and then another, and so on. We will learn great deal from it, be it IT technology, materials, physics but also about us - psychology, physiology etc.
Which is inversely correlated with the chances of it coming in any particular timeframe.
I'm the biggest fan of colonizing Mars, but my children know that if Daddy ever has the chance he is going to Mars to suffer, not to play. Mars will be hard and unforgiving. Life will be horrible for the first two generations at least. At no point will it ever be better than life on Earth.
> if Daddy ever has the chance he is going to Mars to suffer, not to play. Mars will be hard and unforgiving. Life will be horrible for the first two generations at least. At no point will it ever be better than life on Earth.
This reminded me of computer tech in its first approximation: hard and unforgiving. It took about 2 generations to make it into a ubiquitous mobile device. In about four generations AI will make space colonies possible. "And AI shall produce acomodations for adventurous humans and preserve them". Space seems first and foremost the realm of AI, embodying our outreach. We won't actually go to space unless a planet is discovered and farmed to be hospitable.
Bioterrorism strongly depends on the incubation period. Probably safe on Mars. Rogue nanotech - not unless it has AI. (Though gray goo is not considered very realistic nowadays, as we've realized just how hard even regular nanotech is, and how hostile the natural environment is to nano-scale mechanisms.)
Nuclear war is the big one. Mars colonization would be less about preserving human life, per se, and more about preserving an operational duplicate of the peak state of human civilization.
My opinion is that these are just be symptoms of our social mental state. We're the virus. We need to fix ourselves. Maybe space exploration will help us see a little more long term? Hope so.
But our "redundancy site" is awful for human life. Imagine if we just worked on fixing up the place we live on already that has air we can breathe, abundant liquid water, and isn't inundated with deadly radiation. We will need to leave Earth in 5 billion years when the sun goes red giant. 5 billion years is an INCREDIBLE amount of time. Things we do in 2019 will have zero influence on those times. It is much more likely we annihilate ourselves with nuclear weapons or global climate change and pollution way before then. In my opinion, it is better to spend money that would be spent on a silly Mars pipedream to put out those fires first.
Imagine if we just worked on fixing up the place we live on already that has air we can breathe, abundant liquid water, and isn't inundated with deadly radiation.
Funny, but extremely high altitudes of the atmosphere of Venus could fit the bill in the context of places in the Solar System. Temperatures and pressures are around room temperature and pressure there. The thick atmosphere of Venus provides some radiation protection, and water can be extracted from the clouds of sulfuric acid droplets there. You couldn't directly breathe the air, but oxygen could be produced in-situ, and bags full of breathable atmosphere would be buoyant, so you could easily suspend cloud cities there just by using the atmosphere inside the environment domes.
But without easy access to heavier minerals it would be essentially a dead end
People who have been thinking about this are way ahead of you. There are plenty of minerals on the surface. We should be able to build remotely piloted mining equipment using phase change materials (like water) to shed heat. To cool the equipment off, we just haul it back to the high altitude base before the phase change material tank runs dry.
You can do both. It's not an either-or scenario like you are describing.
Also a very tiny amount of people are working on space right now (maybe 500,000 between NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, ESA, ISRO, JAXA, etc). That's 0.00625% of the world's population.
Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu, Einstein, Morobuto, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes .. and all of this .. all of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars."
Apparently the Earth's orbit places us in the hot end of the inhabitable zone, so only a relatively modest increase in received energy makes us go the way of Venus.
Yea, I think a good demonstration is Antarctica. Antarctica is both much more accessible and much more hospitable than Mars. But there's very little human activity there.
It's hard to imagine there's an economic case for Mars or the Moon while Antarctica remains undeveloped.
Antartica is not a stepping stone to further and greater endeavors out into the cosmos It's more of a "dead end", cosmically speaking. This is why it doesn't have same interest or appeal.
There are also other reasons. You can't learn about the possibility of life on other planets in Antartica, and seek to answer one of the greatest questions of all time: "are we alone?". You can't closely study another planet in Antartica. You can't be a brave new explorer seeing incredible places for the very first time in Antartica. There are far less new scientific and engineering challenges in Antartica whose solutions will greatly benefit everyone here on Earth. And so on.
Note, these things are true for any next-gen space endeavor in our corner of the solar system. It doesn't have to be Mars, or even just Mars. For example, we could build larger and more advanced facilities and machinery in LEO, while also building a small base on the moon and exploring Mars for the first time.
Antarctica is a great place to do science, and the majority of the activity at the US South Pole base is currently astronomy. Mars and the Moon will pass through that sort of phase before they might become actual colonies.
Yeah, I don't mean to put down Antartica. I think the research we do there is very cool, and we should keep doing what we can there. But it isn't even close to an alternative to humanity pushing further out into space.
> There are also other reasons. You can't learn about the possibility of life on other planets in Antartica, and seek to answer one of the greatest questions of all time: "are we alone?". You can't closely study another planet in Antartica. You can't be a brave new explorer seeing incredible places for the very first time in Antartica. There are far less new scientific and engineering challenges in Antartica whose solutions will greatly benefit everyone here on Earth. And so on.
That's an argument against research on Antarctica, but that's the one thing humans do there.
For example, Antarctica is a great place to research Antarctica. And Mars is a great place to research Mars. For that reason alone, there will be people on Mars, even if there's nothing to commercially exploit there and no reason to colonize it.
No light for part of the year vs no air ever. Hmm, let me think about that one for a minute.
I think settling Mars will and should happen, but anyone who doesn’t realise it will be thousands of times more expensive, risky and dependent on external support than eg Antarctica I think isn’t really grasping the difference in scale of the problem.
Yea, I mean, just as far as accessibility, it costs 10,000 times more to deliver a pound of cargo to the ISS vs McMurdo station in antartica. I don't have numbers for the building and maintenance of the two stations, but presumably its even more than that.
The irony is that this kind of technology could be important on earth now. From an environmental perspective a closed ecological system could be very beneficial. A system where resources are not wasted or allowed to pollute. And where all outputs are used as an input for something else.
Everything about living on Mars is hostile to life. Doing anything there like mining and manufacturing will be orders of magnitude more difficult and for what?
Wasn't there a fair bit of difficulty involved in building fleets of sailing ships and exploring the Earth? As it so happens, the reward for doing so was to become dominant in the new global geopolitical context. There's an incentive to keep up in the new expansion of context to keep from being left behind and engulfed in a larger context. The potential total population of the solar system, even based on just on foreseeable technologies, asteroid resources, and solar power could easily be in the hundreds of billions. Fusion power increases that potential by orders of magnitude.
It seems silly to be trying to rush to a place that wants to kill you when we have a great place here already that we could just stop messing up.
These aren't mutually exclusive things. And make no mistake: Many things involving ocean travel prior to the industrial revolution literally involved rushing to places that want to kill you, via another place that wants to kill you. Isn't rushing to a place that wants to kill you another kind of "doing things that don't scale (at first)?" If it means eventual geopolitical dominance in a future larger context, there will be wealthy nations willing to foot the bill.
It's been claimed that the high demand for timber is partially responsible for much of the deforestation of the British Isles. In fact, the demand was so high that the Colonies also provided a significant quantity.
The benefit of going to mars is that it opens up knowledge and know how / experience upon the human race to go further beyond. Spreading our species gives an evolutionary advantage.
This is how we get there. That kind of space flight would be the end result of hundreds of years (probably) of space flight development. Compare polynesian canoes with modern powered ships.
The common element between military motivation and going multiplanetary is the same: My people and our way of life will end forever if we don’t do this
An interesting sentiment. Consider what doesn't seem tricky today. Imagine explaining using the internet with a smartphone to someone in 1950, for example. Oh, you just take out this handheld device you keep in your pocket which contains micro-chips that have billions of transistors and an entire city-grid of nanoscopic wires connecting them together to form a processor (actually several of them on the same chip) which then operates at a clock frequency of billions of hertz. This battery powered device then communicates over the airwaves sending and receiving data at up to many megabytes per second, and which communication occurs through a complicated globe-spanning network of millions of nodes and components, each of which are based on various types of miniaturized computers. Every step along the way represents more miracles and more computers: the LTE data connection to a cell tower, the LAN connection from the tower through switches and routers through the service provider through more switches and routers on the internet backbone and then through other switches, routers, load balancers, firewalls, cloud services, etc. to some end-point service. From radio to back and forth beween electrical signals in wires to light pulses in fiber optics and then maybe back to radio at the end. And all of this might facilitate anything as "simple" as sending an instantaneous message almost anywhere in the entire world, or making a video call (also almost anywhere in the world), or mobile banking, or shopping online, or reading an online encyclopedia article, or catching up on the news, or any other sundry tasks that would seem bewildering to someone from a pre-internet age.
In contrast, rocketry seems practically easy, it's just an engineering problem in comparison. You exercise literally trillions of transistors just to send an emoji to a friend, and yet the modern world we've built makes all that seem trivially easy. Not because it is easy, but just because we've invested a ton of effort into building and optimizing every bit and piece of it. We're already on some Nth generation of smartphones (retina displays, quad-cores, GPUs, LTE, etc, etc, etc.) whereas we're really not on that many generations of rockets, certainly less than a dozen, maybe only half a dozen depending on how you count. Once we get rolling with reusable rockets the iterations on development will speed up and we'll progress faster. And we'll get to a place where what seems like an adventure into the barren wilderness today will become merely routine and ubiquitous. Just as today using computers or flying on a jet aircraft thousands of miles seems routine and ubiquitous.
As for the benefits of space exploration and colonization I expect a lot of them will come in ways that people won't expect. A greater appreciation for what we take for granted here on Earth, for example. A tree on Mars is a treasure to be protected and revered, as is clean air and water. On Earth it's not much different, but we don't take care of the gifts we have to the degree they deserve. We dirty our air and pollute our water, we overfish our oceans, etc. Similarly, advanced off-Earth habitats are going to need to seriously invest in things like renewable energy, energy storage, recycling, end-to-end stewardship of the "CHON-cycle", and all that stuff. Here on Earth we can be reckless and treat topsoil, groundwater, and phosphorous as practically unlimited resources we abuse and discard all too readily. We kill our bug populations indiscriminately, etc. On, say, Mars they will need to be very thoughtful and careful about every single one of those things. They'll need to treat their resources as the precious and limited things they actually are. Which is true of here too (we're draining our aquifers like there's no tomorrow, but there is a tomorrow). Those habitats will drive development of technologies and solutions which will be incredibly valuable here on Earth as well, and may help drive us toward a more mature relationship with our environment and our use of resources.
Im a huge SpaceX fan, but Blueorigin's New Shepard does seem more robust. Maybe just because its a smaller and more thick rocket, but somehow by not being as spectacular it makes space travel more "normal" as we all hope it someday will become.
> Im a huge SpaceX fan, but Blueorigin's New Shepard does seem more robust.
That's a little like comparing a F1 racer to a wheelbarrow, isn't it? Both are immensely useful for specific things, and would fail miserably if applied to the other's thing. New Shepard is cool, and I'd love to hop in it some day, but it's doing a little up-and-down suborbital hop. The two launchers have totally different purposes, and are constructed in entirely different ways as a result.
Also, the BE-3 engine will be very useful and seeing how stable it performs is very good. It will fly on the upper stage of New Glenn (BE-3U). There are other projects that are suspected to use the BE-3.
With the super-chilled densified propellants, the Falcon 9 would be better off shorter and thicker to reduce surface area. However, the Falcon 9 must be ground-transported, which is why it has the same diameter restriction that the SST's SRBs had: 3.6 meter.
With no restriction on ground transport, the New Shepard can be as thick as engineering deems is necessary.
Lots of people have done the calculations. Poke around the Reddit Spacex forum and NSF forums, lots of discussions there.
> The first goal is to maximize aerodynamic efficiency, which means minimizing frontal surface area.
The fairing is already wider than the first or upper stages, so increasing those stages to the fairing's width would actually improve the aerodynamics.
Well, NS was designed for re-usability from the start, while F9 had only re-usability plugged-in later as an experimental feature. SpaceX's priority was to get to orbit ASAP in order to be commercially viable.
Comparing REST to SOAP, is to me like comparing HTML to SASS/LESS.
SOAP had so many flaws, no need to repeat. But the fact that you could not trust that SOAP software created using Microsoft software would work with something created with Java software was a disaster. Sometimes I ended up building custom SOAP libraries to connect with the other services. It was promised to solve all our problems, but ended up creating more.
REST is not a "standard" library, it is just a basic guideline on how to use the HTTP protocol "out of the box".
What the author seems to be looking for, is one hammer to fix all problems.
If you are spending too much time writing REST services, maybe your frameworks are flawed, you could be automating more or your interface is too complex?
SOAP is a very complicated spec, and intended to be used to automatically generate bindings in whatever language you're using base in the service definition fine (WSDL). It's not intended to be human-readable.
So to provide a SOAP framework you need to not only provide all the plumbing for dealing with the actual messages, but all the rolling to auto-generate the client library for an API. The whole mechanism is very complex and there were lots of places where the spec was not specific enough, or the implementations had slightly different opinions about interpretation.
Then on top of that, Microsoft for a good while purposefully deviated from the spec to provide "enhancements" that other implementations had to reverse engineer to be compatible.
Then on to of that you had a whole raft of extensions to the spec like WS-Security, WS-Reliability, and (ironically for a "standard") WS-Interoperability. The chances that all of those specific extensions worked across different implementations was even more remote.
So, there were two big reasons in my opinion, that SOAP failed and REST shined:
1. The only way you could really trust that your SOAP client would generate compatible bindings for an API is if you wrote the API. This defeats the purpose of having public APIs. The author's complaint about REST implementation taking hours when his known tools take minutes rings hollow to me because I've spent weeks trying to get two simple SOAP systems communicating.
2. SOAP reinvents the wheel in a much more complicated fashion. Mant of those WS-* extensions were written to provide things that you already get if you embrace the existing networking stack (TCP/IP, HTTP, etc.). SOAP was trying to be transport-agnostic, so it ignored the existing stack and had to reinvent most of it itself. One of the key principles of REST is to embrace HTTP and let the existing system do with for you.
For example, SOAP used POST requests for everything. So all the tools that work with HTTP requests on the wire have to be rewritten to understand SOAP semantics instead of just looking at the request method.
Most of the use-cases in practice of WS-Security is covered by TLS/SSL. Theoretically WS-Security provides more flexibility, and can handle use-cases that TLS/SSL can't, but in practice it leads to over-complicated and less-secure systems.
WS-Reliability exists because you might use SOAP over something that isn't TCP. Most of the guarantees WS-Reliability gives you could have gotten for free if you entrance TCP.
I am a computer engineer so I know nothing of nature :)
But, it boggles my mind why so many people don't believe global warming can be man-made. I know you can have disagreements, scientists can be wrong, a lot of things can contribute to things heating up, an so forth. But to be 100% sure that its not man-made, I dont get it. Is it because these deniers grow up in a eco system so large that they dont sense human interference, is it pure denial or ?
Its the gift of the republican party and the american media.
Man I remember back in the day when they decided to tell their base that this was all a conspiracy - I watched with naive outrage "How could you lie to your people like that!".
But no. They did it, and everyone else barely cared.
Remember that For decades people couldn't be bothered to recycle, or save water. They still barely care.
And then you have people - rich and able to employ talented people, who will spread FUD for their bottom line.
Don't be hard on your country men. They got lied to by the better liars in the world. They were cut from facts, they were given enterntainment instead of news, and cranks were brought onto the same level as scientists.
They never had a chance.
To jog everyones memmories - scientists would never engage with cranks - it gave them too much credibility.
But then a certain news channel started giving them a platform, and the trappings of credibility, till finally in an attempt to reason with the public, scientists came onto this network to argue the facts.
In classic fashion, it was a trap. There was never an actual debate, it was a circus - a spectacle for viewers to see the ivory tower intellectuals trip up on simple questions.
And the audience, presented with this farce, obviously saw what they were nudged to see.
Now after that much effort has been expended to keep things from you, and to "teach the controversy" it is also linked to identity.
Most people don't engage with the science directly. I know I don't. And your beliefs about climate change don't make a difference in daily life one way or another.
Thus what you get is stated beliefs being entirely driven by appeals to authority and tribal affiliation.
As a small experiment for how hard it is: come up with some good arguments to convince me that earth is actually roughly spherical--without resorting to appeals to authority.
Just using observations and little experiments available to the common layman it's doable, but way harder than you think.
And now just extrapolate how much harder climate change is to argue about.
It's not that hard. Watch a lunar eclipse. Watch the sun rise, follow an arc, set, and then watch the stars rise, follow their arcs, and then set. Then travel to a few degrees south and see the whole thing again, except the pole around which everything revolves shifts by exactly the amount you moved south.
Yes, that's good evidence. Though I think the flat earthers had some convoluted explanation for it, too.
What's also easy to do in today's world is calling up someone in a different time zone that you trust, and ask them for when their sunset is. (The interactive calling is important, so that it's harder to have a conspiracy delay your messages or fake some news.)
Flat earthers? Who has ever thought the Earth was flat? Even medieval people didn't think that, it's obvious to anyone who ever watched a ship sail over the horizon that the planet is not flat. They used to think the sun revolved around the Earth, which is a lot harder to check with common sense logic.
Oh, I didn't want to imply any one particular society though the earth was flat. Flat earthers are just an example to show that it's not trivial to argue against someone with a weird believe that they are motivated to defend.
But, it boggles my mind why so many people don't believe global warming can be man-made
I used to think the same way, but part of the issue is that most people are not abstract or systems thinkers. They don't perceive abstraction or systems the way many HN readers do or would.
In addition, and related, most people have strong tribal identities that overwhelm their limited intellectual capabilities; Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind is very good on this: https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig... and there are others as well.
Climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, and other conspiracy theorists share some key underlying traits.
Most of us, including me, also live in our own bubbles. You're likely in a rationalist and data-driven bubble, so you don't see people to whom you'd have explain an entire rationalist and data-driven worldview.
I am also confused by these people, but I assume the are the type that have no self-doubt and therefore believe their beliefs to be true.
The problem I face is that I can see it going both ways. I can human pollution to be the cause of climate-change. But I can also see the argument that we don't have the whole picture and this is an over-reaction to the system we have observed and modeled.
I don't know much about the science and am hesitant to accept finding on such a politically hot topic. But if I had to bet I'd say both sides are just polarizing each other.
I can imagine in 100yrs the ocean has not risen and the world climate is the way it is today. But I can also imagine a world with a climate that has become hostile and having a home with "climate control" to keep you alive is necessary and will further increase social disparity in the poor that won't be able to afford such luxuries.
I know this is a lot. But I welcome anyone to provide me some more information on how avoid false claims and to educate myself on this topic.
AFAICT it's largely a matter of the cultural correlation for evidently many people between "belief in anthropogenic climate change" and "liberalism." I.e., if I were to believe in climate change, I'd be "a liberal," and that is super bad.
Related but different is the extreme right-wing attitude of, "Sure, maybe climate change is a real thing, but who cares, competition for and consumption of natural resources is our God-given right" etc etc. I'd like to say this extreme is rare, but if it's even a few people who happen to be in control of extremely large amounts of pollutants...
A lot of climate change denial isn't actually complete denial that the climate is changing, but rather the poking of holes in the science and claiming that the confidence level of that science has been grossly overstated by the media for political and ideological ends.
Unfortunately, when viewed from a "who benefits" perspective, global warming theory does not look good to your average libertarian small-government cynic:
- Climate change researchers are virtually all academics.
- Academics are strongly incentivised to make the grandest, scariest claims possible because that is what unlocks large streams of grant money.
- The claim they're making in this case is literally "the world is going to end unless you give us lots of research money".
- They have been wrong before, c.f. global cooling.
- Many of the proposed solutions look suspiciously like excuses for vast government power grabs to monitor and micro-manage every aspect of one's life and business. Such people tend to assume the powerful are always looking for convenient excuses to become even more powerful still, and "we must take away your trucks and your meat against your will to save the world" looks like the ultimate power grab.
These concerns are not entirely meritless. A typical example of the genre can be found here:
I haven't looked into the claims in depth but they sound plausible, in particular, the notion that certain kinds of papers showing negative results don't get published, the notion that entire fields of study that appear to have hundreds of peer reviewed papers can nonetheless fall apart when subjected to rigorous meta-review. We have seen this in other scientific fields like psychology so it is not implausible that it could happen in climate science as well.
Ocean acidification is not the same thing as regular global warming. But you can see why doubt sets in given the alignment of interests involved. For people who have lost their confidence in the academic establishment, climate change is effectively invisible.
The only semi-reasonable viewpoint out of the stuff you listed is #4.
Economic policy on a global scale is obviously going to be hard to get right, so they are right to be skeptical. But to use the "it's hard" as an excuse to do nothing is worse than just being skeptical.
