Rules Set for $50 Million America's Space Prize

An anonymous reader wrote in to say that The rules have been set for Robert Bigelow's $50 million 'America's Space Prize'. The gist of it is that the winner needs to get a crew of five people up 400km, complete two orbits of the Earth, and then do it again within 60 days. I've got a gremlin and a huge rubber band... now if I only had 4 friends!

Comments

Better Idea

[AmericanInKiev]

Prize for an effecient Wind Power Station.

Re:Better Idea

[interiot]

And just to pound that point home, the first discoveries of oil in the Middle East were Iran in 1908 and Saudi Arabi in 1938. Compare that to a timeline of Jerusalem where conflict was evident from at least the first century AD.

Curiously enough, the middle east was a place of relatively high tolerance and prosperity during the time of the European "Dark Ages". Though with most of Islam's, Christianity's, and Jadaism's religious cities in the mid-east, it does seem destined to be a place of conflict.

Re:Better Idea

[interiot]

I saw a good summary of this on TV the other day... The Middle East has been relatively wealthy at other times in the past as well (eg. especially Istanbul, being placed in the center of trade across the continents). The biggest difference from a religious-extremist standpoint though, is that generation of wealth used to involve a large amount of the population... That is, the leaders had to be mindful of the citizen's happiness, or risk their position of power. Now, with money generated from oil, non-democratic leaders basically don't have to worry about how happy the citizens are, and can leave them poor and starving while they themselves are the primary beneficiaries of the oil. Certainly many in the middle east aren't evil, but this situation at least gives tyrants more comfort whereas normally they'd have to work harder to stay in power. Then the implication was that the ill-will that the poor population feels is sometimes transformed into hatred for the west, rather than directed towards the exploitative leaders.

Re:Hah!

[FatherKabral]

They do provide a way to turn off ads. Subscribe.

Re:Hah!

[sadangel]

PS - why the _HELL_ is Slashdot having an applet in the ads? It freezes up my browser in Windows for a while. It's getting to be a pain. At the very least, provide some way of turning off Applet ads.


There is a way.
http://adblock.mozdev.org/dev.html

What would be funny now

[Timesprout]

Is if India or China set up a corp in the US and win it.

Re:Hah!

[metlin]

PS -- I'm a subscriber.

If I turn off the ads on stories and the home page, I lose a couple of plums, so I have to keep them on.

Besides, I actually like some of the ads that come on Slashdot, but I'd just have to block them.

Applet ads for Christ's sake! This was the same shit that people here used to complain about. What next, click on the monkey ad?

Sheesh.

Re:Hah!

[dema]

I just turned off Java in FF. The only thing that was taking forever for me was some weird "Buy Them On Ebay" link below the square ad after stories. After disabling Java, everything loads quickly and all the other ads (which i also like to catch) remain.

Re:Hah!

[Angstroem]

PS - why the _HELL_ is Slashdot having an applet in the ads? It freezes up my browser in Windows for a while. It's getting to be a pain. At the very least, provide some way of turning off Applet ads.

What, there are ads on /.? Or on any other website?

One word for you: squid... Never seen ads again since the installation of squid together with a nice redirector script effectively replacing all picture and applet ads with something less distractive.

Re:Hah!

[timster]

Slashdot can't be described as rendering "properly" on any browser. Its HTML is a mess of hacks that flagrantly violates any standard which you care to use. The browsers that aim for standards compliance are going to have a hard time processing the FrontPage-caliber code that constitutes Slashdot.