If you really do work at JPL then you and your co-workers ought to be fired. If you think it will take 10 trillion dollars to put a base on the moon than you arent trying hard enough and have absolutely no imagination. However, you are correct if you think that people like yourself couldnt do it for less than 10 trillion. Its easy to spend lots of money if you dontt think about what to do very much. Ok, rant mode over. My point is, that if some ex video game developers can put people in space for a few million dollars, and the russians can put you in space for 20, we can colonize the mon for probably 10-20 billion. Make a standard lunar base module and just keep launching them. Make them so they are connectable and can have different interiors. If we go back to having a 100 ton to LE class launch vehicle like apollo, we can cut costs even further (I recall that apollo had a launch cost of ~$3000 kg to LEO). Point is, as an intelligent engineer working at JPL you shouldnt just laugh off an idea on face. Put a little thought and maybe a little research into it before you dismiss or confirm it.
Damn straight, my genes are copyright by a major drug company, anyone trying to copy them will have to get permission from them. And its hell to get permission for "derivitive works".
Finally, somone talking some sense about NASA. Its really stupid to send up the crew and the cargo simultaneously. Cargo missions can have a higher margin of error, which translates into cheaper. They can also be one use, which for the time being also translates to cheaper. Cargo by its nature is heavy, so its wiser to make a big cheap nonreusable cargo rocket and send things up that way. Most cargo on earth is not transported by Jet airplane, most is transported by ocean going ship or train. We need a container ship for space, and a little jet airplane for the people. Further, the smaller the craft the fewer parts it needs and the simpler it can be made. So by its very nature a smaller ship can be made safer than a larger more complex one.
Ultimately NASA needs to get back to its beginnings. NASA does the big expensive but basic R&D needed for commercial companies to take over. NASA should have a baseline rocket engine research program continually ongoing. They need to have a standard model rocket engine that is continually upgraded and simplified. the design is then published annually for any and all to use (with security clearance) Same needs to be done with tanks, guidance and control systems, reentry systems, spacesuits, life support systems etc.
There is no way to know if one of our spent space capsules, drifting off into the far reaches, might cause some other dawning civilization irreperable harm.
And that civilization might be technology based, and send out a probe to find the earth, and on the way destroy all of humanity. Oh and when it gets to earth the probe might send out whale songs. And then a certain Captain James T. Kirk would be forced to take his stolen klingon bird of prey back in time by slingshotting around the sun, A manuver that has never been done before! Oh and his ensign will go around saying "Alameda yes, but where are the nuclear wessels?" So as you can clearly see, we have to be very careful about our space probes, cause you never know where they might end up.
Thanks anyways, but Id rather stay here and make things harder for people who would try to take my rights away. If everyone who was unhappy with the us left, there would be no one living here. The point of my sig is that it is incredibly childish to rename something because it refers to another country that happens to disagree with us on ONE issue. The US congress was behaving like 3 year olds. Why not just find and replace all instances of france in english? If this were done, then If I said I wanted to move to france, Id have to say I wanted to move to freedom. Reminds me alot of 1984, if you control the words, you control the thoughts. I might add, your statement that if I dont like it i should leave is a logical fallacy. If you dont like something you should try to change it, and if it is impossible to change, then you should leave. I dont think that the US is beyond hope, and I dont think that you do either.
Send your notarized form, but include the following:
And furthermore, I hereby do solemly swear to never buy any CD legally or illegally produced by any artist sponsored by any RIAA member firm. I also swear to tell all and sundry of the arrogance and greed of the RIAA and prevent as many of my age group (18-32) from buying CD's from RIAA member companies.
P.S. Ill just copy songs onto tape from the radio.
I remember in HS I could own any mac in school that had office installed on it. At that time office had a find file program built in with the added "feature" that it could move files around once you found them. The security program on the macs of course disabled apples find file and locked certain folders so you couldnt delete programs. Office bypassed all that. All you had to do was find and move the security programs preference file to the trash and restart the computer. The password would be reset to the default password, which I happened to know (admin:admin is pretty easy) Voila, Office as a hacking tool. And it was a feature of office!
In post-capitalist 17th century UK, people couldn't afford bread. Rather than storm the bakeries and steal the bread, they stormed the bakeries and demanded a fair price.
And in 18th century france Marie Antoinette said "Let them eat cake" and lost her head for it. Bread prices similarly decreased. If France=Freedom, I want to live in freedom.
I'm talking about people speaking. Obviouusly if somone doesnt enforce copyright on something like the anarchists cookbook, then its free. Whoever originally wrote the anarchists cookbook (or parts of it) own copyright on that part or whole. If they chose not to enforce it, then fine, but its still copyrightable material. Extemporaneeous speech is not copyrightable, speeches that are written down beforehand are.
You ask faceotously, but theres a real answer to this. Its "free" speech if its not written down beforehand, i.e its not IP if its extemporaneous. For this reason, Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech results in no royalties for the king family because king did not write it down beforehand, he spoke from the heart. So, if its written down, youre listening to IP, if its not youre listening to free speech.
Another thing you could have done in that situation is go to his boss's boss. Assuming your guy wasnt CEO of the company. If you go up a level and let that manager know that your boss is giving you unreasonable workloads, and that if it doesnt stop you'll quit (and sue) The problem will get cleared up pretty quick. Documentation is key, have the problem manager document what he wants you to do (through email) If you can show his boss a stack of email of all the tasks hes assigned you, and maybe a little spreadshet of when each task was asigned, and when each task would normally get done, any reasonable person would come down hard on the problem manager. And hey, if that fails, you have lots of nice evidence with which to sue. Obviously this isnt the first time this has happened with this manager, and not the last either, hes the one who deserves to be fired for driving away good talent.
Unfortunately, I think NASA is pretty low on every candidates radar. Things here on earth tend to take precedence. So NASA makes an easy target for people who need a few million dollars here and a few million dollars there. Same thing happens with foriegn aid. People think its alot more than it is, and nobody really corrects them, so when candidates say "slash foriegn aid" people think its ok. (Americans think that 15% of the budget goes to foriegn aid, and it should be around 5%, wheras in reality its more like.4%)
There is a culture of NASA. I had a professor tell me a story about how they came up with the toilet on the shuttle. Aparently they already had a perfectly good toilet design from skylab, and it actually worked nearly as well as a conventional toilet, you didnt have to strap yourself down or anything. Just hold on and a centrifugical pump in the bowl takes care of everything. At any rate, it was designed at Marshall Spaceflight center. Of course the shuttle was beign designed at Johnson Spaceflight center (or maybe it was the other way around, dont quite remember) At any rate, Johnson couldnt use ANYTHING that had been designed by Marshall (and vise verse) So Johnson deisgned a completely new toliet, at very great expense to the program (~$10mil) When they could have used an existing design for much cheaper(probably still ~$1mil, but hey thats 10 times less). Similar thing happened with the flooring of the ISS. Again same two center, but reversed in stupidity. Skylab had an "isogrid" flooring system which basically was a bunch of aluminum triangles. You put a rubber triange on somebodys boot and voila, you canstand wherever you want and work without floating away by jamming your boot into the floor. Well that wasnt designed where the ISS was being designed so that was out the window. I think they use some sort of seat restraint system and velcro on the ISS now. Velcro is fine but it wears out over time, and of course seat restraints are more expensive than the floor you have to put in anyways. NASA needs to get rid of the Not Invented HERE (tm) syndrome and use the best ideas available and not whatever will boost a certain centers prestige.
Whew! you know its hot when your engine is glowing brighter than your exhaust! Yeah, active cooling will do the trick, but the problem is of course lots of pipes, a tank and a heavy pump that needs power. Transpiration cooling is worse because youre losing your working fluid as you go. This isnt as big a problem for reentry vehicles (except for the added expense). Im working on a steady state hypersonic cruise vehicle so I need something that will work for more than 15 minutes. High temp ceramics look promising but are pretty brittle. So far the compromise weve come up with is using the hypersoar trajectory, which skips out of the atmosphere periodically and keeps a lower total heat load.
Well, first let me say IAAAE (I am an Aerospace Engineer) I work with hypersonic vechicles, so I know a thing or three about high temperature materials. As far as I know, there is no metal or metallic alloy that can withstand 1650C without yielding. According to NASA TPSX Inconel, the best commonly used alloy has a single use temperature limit of about 1030K, or 757C. It melts at ~1400C On the other hand, there have been significant advances in ceramics in the last 30 years. Current experimental ceramics can withstand temps up to 5000K. To demonstrate how important this is consider this: The temperature on the surface of the vehicle is directly proportional to the radius of curvature at that point. I.e a pointy vehicle has a hotter nose than a blunt one, which is why reentry capsule have a very blunt leading edge. Heres the kicker, the radius of the nose at a given temperature increases or decreases proportional to T^8. In other words if you double the amount of heat that your surface can take, you can decrease that radius of curvature by 256 times. So if your old heat tiles could withstand 1500K and you needed a nose radius of 10m to prevent damage, now if youve got a material that can take 3000K, your new nose radius can be ~4cm. Think MIT dome vs Baseball.
One of the reasons that ordinary light bulbs are so cheap is the process of manufacturing. The glass blanks are made with a ribbon machine That is so incredibly efficient that only 15 of these machines produce all the glass blanks for all the lightbulbs produced today(see P10 of the linked pdf). It will be hard to top that for LED's or anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
If you really do work at JPL then you and your co-workers ought to be fired. If you think it will take 10 trillion dollars to put a base on the moon than you arent trying hard enough and have absolutely no imagination. However, you are correct if you think that people like yourself couldnt do it for less than 10 trillion. Its easy to spend lots of money if you dontt think about what to do very much. Ok, rant mode over. My point is, that if some ex video game developers can put people in space for a few million dollars, and the russians can put you in space for 20, we can colonize the mon for probably 10-20 billion. Make a standard lunar base module and just keep launching them. Make them so they are connectable and can have different interiors. If we go back to having a 100 ton to LE class launch vehicle like apollo, we can cut costs even further (I recall that apollo had a launch cost of ~$3000 kg to LEO). Point is, as an intelligent engineer working at JPL you shouldnt just laugh off an idea on face. Put a little thought and maybe a little research into it before you dismiss or confirm it.
Work for $5.75 an hour with no benefits ;-)
Damn straight, my genes are copyright by a major drug company, anyone trying to copy them will have to get permission from them. And its hell to get permission for "derivitive works".
Bruce, I know you read slashdot, did you actually say thing thingsquoted in the article?
Ultimately NASA needs to get back to its beginnings. NASA does the big expensive but basic R&D needed for commercial companies to take over. NASA should have a baseline rocket engine research program continually ongoing. They need to have a standard model rocket engine that is continually upgraded and simplified. the design is then published annually for any and all to use (with security clearance) Same needs to be done with tanks, guidance and control systems, reentry systems, spacesuits, life support systems etc.
And that civilization might be technology based, and send out a probe to find the earth, and on the way destroy all of humanity. Oh and when it gets to earth the probe might send out whale songs. And then a certain Captain James T. Kirk would be forced to take his stolen klingon bird of prey back in time by slingshotting around the sun, A manuver that has never been done before! Oh and his ensign will go around saying "Alameda yes, but where are the nuclear wessels?" So as you can clearly see, we have to be very careful about our space probes, cause you never know where they might end up.
Thanks anyways, but Id rather stay here and make things harder for people who would try to take my rights away. If everyone who was unhappy with the us left, there would be no one living here. The point of my sig is that it is incredibly childish to rename something because it refers to another country that happens to disagree with us on ONE issue. The US congress was behaving like 3 year olds. Why not just find and replace all instances of france in english? If this were done, then If I said I wanted to move to france, Id have to say I wanted to move to freedom. Reminds me alot of 1984, if you control the words, you control the thoughts. I might add, your statement that if I dont like it i should leave is a logical fallacy. If you dont like something you should try to change it, and if it is impossible to change, then you should leave. I dont think that the US is beyond hope, and I dont think that you do either.
I thought it was a Mainframe? ;-)
Wasnt it the Jesuits who said "give me a boy for 5 years and ill give you a missionary for a lifetime."?
And furthermore, I hereby do solemly swear to never buy any CD legally or illegally produced by any artist sponsored by any RIAA member firm. I also swear to tell all and sundry of the arrogance and greed of the RIAA and prevent as many of my age group (18-32) from buying CD's from RIAA member companies.
P.S. Ill just copy songs onto tape from the radio.
I remember in HS I could own any mac in school that had office installed on it. At that time office had a find file program built in with the added "feature" that it could move files around once you found them. The security program on the macs of course disabled apples find file and locked certain folders so you couldnt delete programs. Office bypassed all that. All you had to do was find and move the security programs preference file to the trash and restart the computer. The password would be reset to the default password, which I happened to know (admin:admin is pretty easy) Voila, Office as a hacking tool. And it was a feature of office!
And in 18th century france Marie Antoinette said "Let them eat cake" and lost her head for it. Bread prices similarly decreased. If France=Freedom, I want to live in freedom.
That should read "For the Freedom-impaired"
I'm talking about people speaking. Obviouusly if somone doesnt enforce copyright on something like the anarchists cookbook, then its free. Whoever originally wrote the anarchists cookbook (or parts of it) own copyright on that part or whole. If they chose not to enforce it, then fine, but its still copyrightable material. Extemporaneeous speech is not copyrightable, speeches that are written down beforehand are.
You ask faceotously, but theres a real answer to this. Its "free" speech if its not written down beforehand, i.e its not IP if its extemporaneous. For this reason, Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech results in no royalties for the king family because king did not write it down beforehand, he spoke from the heart. So, if its written down, youre listening to IP, if its not youre listening to free speech.
Another thing you could have done in that situation is go to his boss's boss. Assuming your guy wasnt CEO of the company. If you go up a level and let that manager know that your boss is giving you unreasonable workloads, and that if it doesnt stop you'll quit (and sue) The problem will get cleared up pretty quick. Documentation is key, have the problem manager document what he wants you to do (through email) If you can show his boss a stack of email of all the tasks hes assigned you, and maybe a little spreadshet of when each task was asigned, and when each task would normally get done, any reasonable person would come down hard on the problem manager. And hey, if that fails, you have lots of nice evidence with which to sue. Obviously this isnt the first time this has happened with this manager, and not the last either, hes the one who deserves to be fired for driving away good talent.
You mean thisMiles O'Brien?
Unfortunately, I think NASA is pretty low on every candidates radar. Things here on earth tend to take precedence. So NASA makes an easy target for people who need a few million dollars here and a few million dollars there. Same thing happens with foriegn aid. People think its alot more than it is, and nobody really corrects them, so when candidates say "slash foriegn aid" people think its ok. (Americans think that 15% of the budget goes to foriegn aid, and it should be around 5%, wheras in reality its more like .4%)
There is a culture of NASA. I had a professor tell me a story about how they came up with the toilet on the shuttle. Aparently they already had a perfectly good toilet design from skylab, and it actually worked nearly as well as a conventional toilet, you didnt have to strap yourself down or anything. Just hold on and a centrifugical pump in the bowl takes care of everything. At any rate, it was designed at Marshall Spaceflight center. Of course the shuttle was beign designed at Johnson Spaceflight center (or maybe it was the other way around, dont quite remember) At any rate, Johnson couldnt use ANYTHING that had been designed by Marshall (and vise verse) So Johnson deisgned a completely new toliet, at very great expense to the program (~$10mil) When they could have used an existing design for much cheaper(probably still ~$1mil, but hey thats 10 times less). Similar thing happened with the flooring of the ISS. Again same two center, but reversed in stupidity. Skylab had an "isogrid" flooring system which basically was a bunch of aluminum triangles. You put a rubber triange on somebodys boot and voila, you canstand wherever you want and work without floating away by jamming your boot into the floor. Well that wasnt designed where the ISS was being designed so that was out the window. I think they use some sort of seat restraint system and velcro on the ISS now. Velcro is fine but it wears out over time, and of course seat restraints are more expensive than the floor you have to put in anyways. NASA needs to get rid of the Not Invented HERE (tm) syndrome and use the best ideas available and not whatever will boost a certain centers prestige.
P.S good luck with the X-Prize, Im rootin for ya.
What, is it full of feminists? *ducks*
So basically the Eurpeans have invented the unmanned aireal vehicle, oh and its rocket launched.
Well, first let me say IAAAE (I am an Aerospace Engineer) I work with hypersonic vechicles, so I know a thing or three about high temperature materials. As far as I know, there is no metal or metallic alloy that can withstand 1650C without yielding. According to NASA TPSX Inconel, the best commonly used alloy has a single use temperature limit of about 1030K, or 757C. It melts at ~1400C On the other hand, there have been significant advances in ceramics in the last 30 years. Current experimental ceramics can withstand temps up to 5000K. To demonstrate how important this is consider this: The temperature on the surface of the vehicle is directly proportional to the radius of curvature at that point. I.e a pointy vehicle has a hotter nose than a blunt one, which is why reentry capsule have a very blunt leading edge. Heres the kicker, the radius of the nose at a given temperature increases or decreases proportional to T^8. In other words if you double the amount of heat that your surface can take, you can decrease that radius of curvature by 256 times. So if your old heat tiles could withstand 1500K and you needed a nose radius of 10m to prevent damage, now if youve got a material that can take 3000K, your new nose radius can be ~4cm. Think MIT dome vs Baseball.
One of the reasons that ordinary light bulbs are so cheap is the process of manufacturing. The glass blanks are made with a ribbon machine That is so incredibly efficient that only 15 of these machines produce all the glass blanks for all the lightbulbs produced today(see P10 of the linked pdf). It will be hard to top that for LED's or anything else.
Catburglary is down. In other news, vicious sack beatings up 300%