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An Indian site, YourStory, has an unusually broad ranging interview with Richard Stallman. While much of the background and goals will already be familiar to SN readers, the interview is interesting not only for its scope but also that India is starting to take an interest in these matters.
To know Richard Stallman is to know the true meaning of freedom. He's the man behind the GNU project and the free software movement, and the subject of our Techie Tuesdays this week.
This is not a usual story. After multiple attempts to get in touch for an interaction with Richard Stallman, I got a response which prepared me well for what's coming next. I'm sharing the same with you to prepare you for what's coming next.
I'm willing to do the interview — if you can put yourself into philosophical and political mindset that is totally different from the one that the other articles are rooted in.
The general mindset of your articles is to admire success. Both business success, and engineering success. My values disagree fundamentally with that. In my view, proprietary software is an injustice; it is wrongdoing. People should be _ashamed_ of making proprietary software, _especially_ if it is successful. (If nobody uses the proprietary program, at least it has not really wronged anyone.) Thus, most of the projects you consider good, I consider bad.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday August 31 2017, @12:47PM (4 children)
I see no reason to assume that. I mean, what exactly is the draw of Ceres to bring you there in the first place? Not many folks are going to be drawn to microgravity homesteading by the fertile soil and lush vegetation. Meanwhile, it has sufficient gravity (0.28g) to mostly destroy most of the advantages of zero-G mining and industry, but probably not nearly enough make it trivial to adapt terrestrial practices, nor to satisfy human health requirements.
Now, once we have a thriving asteroid mining industry, then Ceres will no doubt become a valuable resupply depot, eventually to become the thriving Mecca of the asteroid belt - but it has comparatively little to offer until then.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Thursday August 31 2017, @02:51PM (3 children)
Meanwhile, it has sufficient gravity (0.28g) to mostly destroy most of the advantages of zero-G mining and industry
Wrong. Ceres has surface gravity of 0.28 m/s2, which translates to a mere 0.029g. Units are important!!
0.029g really is microgravity (0.28g is not). It really might be very advantageous for zero-g mining and industry. But it's certainly not going to be livable by humans long-term. You'd probably achieve escape velocity just jumping, and would certainly have health problems from such low gravity.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday August 31 2017, @04:42PM (2 children)
Quite right. Careless of me.
0.029g still isn't anywhere clos to microgravity though. It's closer, you start to get some of the minor benefits, but unlike in free-fall nothing stays where you put it.
Escape velocity is also still an issue at 0.51km/s, or about 1141mph. Over 20x less than on Earth, but still nothing to sneeze at.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday September 01 2017, @06:53AM (1 child)
I want to play catch with you using a 5 kilogram boulder (hint [wikipedia.org]).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday September 03 2017, @04:14PM
5kg is hardly a boulder. And you still wouldn't be able to toss it very far, even if it effectively only weighed the same as a baseball - for the same transfer of momentum it's speed is going to be far slower, so even though it falls a lot slower it won't actually travel that far.
Meanwhile, one of the big perks of microgravity industry is that you can toss around cars and buildings in a controlled and frictionless manner, without worrying about gravity at all.