So, what happens when - not if - the identity information gets stripped out while it's being reported by others, because the others care about the dirt and not so much about who vouches for it? ("A bunch of people sent me video of you doing this thing we object to. No, I'm not gonna tell you who they are. No, I'm not gonna spend the bandwidth to forward you all that video so you can see it yourself and see if they're faked, or all actually the same person. I'm just gonna find you guilty.")
Sure, all companies - like all organizations, teams, governments, clans, and so forth - are ultimately temporary, no matter how long they do last. It is sad to see the good ones go, but like (current) people, they do eventually die. But that does not mean their lives must be in vain.
Support the ones you like. Let the lessons they demonstrated be applied to new forms. Find out why they died, and if you are ever in a similar position, learn from their mistakes and their sucesses.
Celebrate the dead, perhaps. Does anyone know the legal status of SNK's games now? If they are now abandonware, then play those and encourage others to do likewise instead of playing the worst of what's new, such that SNK's products may set an eternal minimum quality bar for all future games of that nature. (No, I'm not advocating ripping them off to drive them out of business, just saying what we should do now that they are. If they were still in business, they could keep improving. It's kind of like harvesting fruit and wood from a tree that has been knocked down.)
Death is a part of the cycle of life. But make sure it is a cycle, and not just a one-shot: recycle its bits into new births; don't let its death erase the good in it from existance. The degree to which it can live on is the degree to which it will have mattered, and the degree to which it is immortal...
...this is actually justified, IMO. The shuttle really is a high-visibility target with lots of national pride attached.
Would it be too unusual to wonder just how a terrorist could attack something like that, though? I mean, once it gets off the ground, it'll be able to outrace any missile, and crashing another plane into it is just about impossible too. Sneaking a bomb onboard would seem difficult at best, and it might not be able to ignite the fuel (one of the few ways to completely blow up the shuttle) since the main engines' fuel requires two components to ignite...unless maybe on a RC plane piloted up one of the solid booster's exhausts, igniting said booster prematurely.
It's power transmission, not power production. Though, one could power cities more efficiently if one did not have to worry about losing power during transmission.
CPUs that produce no heat (or, at least, a lot less, if the transistors still produced heat but the rest of the circuits did not), super efficient long distance power transmission (look for this to be among the first uses, since it's among the simplest), power storage (get current going through a superconducting loop, then switch the loop back on itself so the current keeps going - though this might prove impossible to do, at least without losing small amounts of energy over time to the environment), all kinds of electromagnetic propulsion (technically available now, but can be done a lot better if one can use high amperages without worrying about melting the cables)...and that's just off the top of my head.
Most of the fuel use by a modern rocket occurs just getting off the launch pad.
Incorrect, if you mean "getting from the launch pad into space before acquiring orbital velocity". Less than half of the fuel is used in that stage; it's actually more like a third. Still non-zero, true.
Somewhere slightly under a fifth of the delta V comes from plowing through the air. Frankly, all the minor benefits of a 20 km launch seem to not add up to nearly as much as the cost (in money, especially for maintenance, and mass) of the systems to link the two craft and release them when desired. Then again, I'm also of the opinion that fuels that need extensive cryo (like liquid oxygen or nitrogen) tend to require more, in terms of their heavy cryo systems, than they gain in terms of better specific impulse.
Funding: there's ways of developing it that don't cost too much money. They're slow, and they require volunteer time from engineers (which can be obtained for working on a cool project, so long as there's not too much pressure from management), but they can be done.
Payload design: ok, so build your launcher to the same specifications as existing ones, and treat them as de facto standards. That's what standards are for: to allow people to build to then instead of vendor-specific specifications.
Market: this is the most significant of these three challenges, though there are solutions even here. Space tourism, for instance, though you need to really get launch costs down (to below $100/lb) before this becomes viable. And if you've designed to, say, NASA"s specs and can outperform NASA, there may well be some US gov't contracts who wouldn't mind not dealing with another beauracracy - so long as you can put up with their beauracracy, of course.
A quick search on google for bioterrorism sensors gives one a pretty good idea of how much advances need to be made in this field.
Not quite. Bioterrorism sensors detect chemicals, spores, and the like. Integrating neurons and silicon is more a matter of decoding the signals: translating from messy bioelectric signals into smooth artificial electronic ones and vice versa. Much work remains to be done in both areas, but it's not the same work.
...but only so long as those skills are objectively testable. For instance, a certain type of artist needs to know how to paint, how to communicate ideas through pictures, and use pictures to inspire certain emotions or thoughts in others. Ok, there's your skill list, and a pretty short one at that. But how do you test it without so much observer bias getting in as to make scores or rankings of ability unusable?
Hate to break it to you, but just such a government is trying to seize power and ban computers, music, and TV - at least, when used to express anything they disagree with (which is most of the time) or when their sponsors haven't been paid off to their satisfaction. Fortunately, they haven't been able to get their act completely together yet, and some in the government remain dedicated to to principles on which America was founded.
Re:From the "Reminds me of this classic prose" guy
on
Review: Harry Potter
·
· Score: 2
Karma tops at 50, after that, you'll be like me, trying to find another reason to life for;)
Aww, maaan...and I just hit 50 this weekend. (After hitting it some time ago, only to get knocked down to high 40s by a few neg mods.)
<sigh> So...how long does this period of angst last before I accept this little fact of life?;)
For those that did not see it: dungeness crab. Iron Chef American won (unsurprisingly, for the pilot).
Not too bad an adaptation, IMO, though there was showboating by both sides - more from the Iron Chef than his opponent. A little excessive explanation of the rules, though that can perhaps be forgiven for the pilot. Even the commentators got involved at one point (Chairman Shatner was tasting some caviar, the commentators made a quip about getting some themselves, and the Iron Chef obliged, tossing it up to them).
Overall: it could have been a little more faithful to the original - but at the risk of being nothing more than a clone/ripoff. They had fun with it, and it showed. If they can keep that up, they may well have enough audience for at least a few seasons' run.
"It appears that Quark is having second thoughts about challenging Iron Chef Klingon. He's headed over to talk to him, and..."
[Half a minute later]
"Well, *that* was unexpected. Worf's display has convinced Picard to change the theme ingredient to Ferengi, which of course disqualifies all of Quark's dishes so far. Quark will have a hard time preparing more while being the theme ingredient."
"If my memory serves me correctly, this happened the last time someone challenged Iron Chef Klingon."
--- or ---
Q: "The theme ingredient..." [removes drape with a dramatic flourish] "...PARADOXES!"
What if you made a game where you could stamp out chips, then linked them together in a cluster, and...
Yeah, I know it wouldn't help in RL. But, if Slashdot were ever to be made into IF, I suspect that would be one of the steps necessary to complete the game. Probably with chips made out of hot grits stuffed down (and any veteran Slashdotters know the rest)...;)
And the best form of comment is one that is the code itself, IMO. Well-chosen variable and function names, for example, or debug messages that clearly state what the F is going on when they're invoked.
Or someone just put it under something heavy while loading it on a truck, and said truck went for a long drive over bumpy roads from city A to city B. No malice need be required...though this is an object lesson in why shippers of fragile stuff should supply their own armor (packing peanuts, or wood crates as the image page suggests).
I wonder what parts of the 'rest of the mission' you think wouldn't be covered by existing law?
Everything after the craft gets to orbit and before it re-enters Earth's atmosphere. Maybe more.
Plus, without insurance on the whole mission, you certainly wouldn't be able to raise the money to get the first rocket up.
Ah...no. You raise the money from those who know it's a risk. Show them that the odds of return on investment show greater results without insurance. Keep in mind: anyone providing insurance will weight the odds in their favor...therefore, to buy insurance is to lower your maximum possible returns, without comparable advantage in case of an accident. Insurance is a sucker's bet, unless you really can't afford to lose (like, say, for house or life insurance - and a rocket is neither of those).
And thats not considering the threats countries would give before launch... "If this comes down on any part of the US mainland, a few hundred bombs will be coming down on you"
Once you have it in Earth orbit, even random chance gives you about a 2/3rds chance of oceanic splashdown. But once you have it in Earth orbit, aiming re-entry is pretty easy relative to the rest of the mission - de-orbits have been done for a long time. Getting it into Earth orbit is the tricky part, but it's easy enough just to aim wide so that, even if the worst happens, the asteroid just scoots on by like so many other near misses we've had over the years.
Eventually, yes. But how do we get from here to there? Once there are space colonies and so forth being built, then it makes sense to use on-orbit materials. But I don't see any today. (The ISS doesn't count - it was made with 100% Earth materials - but maybe a future version of it would.)
More to the point, they won't exist until after some profit comes from space to Earth to fund the development of things needed to build them. One possibility: mining platinum-group metals for use on Earth, since they are valuable in and of themselves on Earth. Leave the rock, and maybe the iron and nickel, up there for later when we get around to building colonies. But bring that shiny pricey metal down here so we can pay off our creditors today, so that we can build space colonies tomorrow!
The answer: testing. First, get surveyors to latch onto an asteroid reliably. Then, slowly alter its orbit in stages, so that (at least for the first few stages, while trust is building up) any single stage's mishap will not cause the asteroid to come crashing to Earth uncontrolled. Eventually coax it into Earth orbit, and bring it down the final several hundred miles in small, pre-separated pieces.
Granted, launch insurance may be required by law, but there's not much that can go wrong during launch (while you're still far far away from the asteroid). The legal structures do not yet exist for the rest of the mission...so why buy insurance if you don't have to, when you know it'll be overpriced relative to the true risk?
If one wishes to make it expensive, then yes, it will be expensive. And the companies that NASA contracted to were more interested in billing for high rates than actually developing cheap space access.
That doesn't prove it can't be done. Just that NASA and its contractors seem incapable of getting it done.
Contempt of the law isn't a crime per se. But it does cast doubt on one's willingness to follow a conduct remedy when the only enforcement provision is to lengthen said remedy, and when one has demonstrated willingness to completely ignore similar conduct remedies.
Slashdot Mirror
So, what happens when - not if - the identity information gets stripped out while it's being reported by others, because the others care about the dirt and not so much about who vouches for it? ("A bunch of people sent me video of you doing this thing we object to. No, I'm not gonna tell you who they are. No, I'm not gonna spend the bandwidth to forward you all that video so you can see it yourself and see if they're faked, or all actually the same person. I'm just gonna find you guilty.")
Actually, it took me all of five minutes. It's usually (not always) not too hard to say stuff from the heart. ^_^;
what is TBFD?
Sure, all companies - like all organizations, teams, governments, clans, and so forth - are ultimately temporary, no matter how long they do last. It is sad to see the good ones go, but like (current) people, they do eventually die. But that does not mean their lives must be in vain.
Support the ones you like. Let the lessons they demonstrated be applied to new forms. Find out why they died, and if you are ever in a similar position, learn from their mistakes and their sucesses.
Celebrate the dead, perhaps. Does anyone know the legal status of SNK's games now? If they are now abandonware, then play those and encourage others to do likewise instead of playing the worst of what's new, such that SNK's products may set an eternal minimum quality bar for all future games of that nature. (No, I'm not advocating ripping them off to drive them out of business, just saying what we should do now that they are. If they were still in business, they could keep improving. It's kind of like harvesting fruit and wood from a tree that has been knocked down.)
Death is a part of the cycle of life. But make sure it is a cycle, and not just a one-shot: recycle its bits into new births; don't let its death erase the good in it from existance. The degree to which it can live on is the degree to which it will have mattered, and the degree to which it is immortal...
...this is actually justified, IMO. The shuttle really is a high-visibility target with lots of national pride attached.
Would it be too unusual to wonder just how a terrorist could attack something like that, though? I mean, once it gets off the ground, it'll be able to outrace any missile, and crashing another plane into it is just about impossible too. Sneaking a bomb onboard would seem difficult at best, and it might not be able to ignite the fuel (one of the few ways to completely blow up the shuttle) since the main engines' fuel requires two components to ignite...unless maybe on a RC plane piloted up one of the solid booster's exhausts, igniting said booster prematurely.
...I hope that wasn't prescient.
Not even for one...MILLION...dollars. ;)
It's power transmission, not power production. Though, one could power cities more efficiently if one did not have to worry about losing power during transmission.
CPUs that produce no heat (or, at least, a lot less, if the transistors still produced heat but the rest of the circuits did not), super efficient long distance power transmission (look for this to be among the first uses, since it's among the simplest), power storage (get current going through a superconducting loop, then switch the loop back on itself so the current keeps going - though this might prove impossible to do, at least without losing small amounts of energy over time to the environment), all kinds of electromagnetic propulsion (technically available now, but can be done a lot better if one can use high amperages without worrying about melting the cables)...and that's just off the top of my head.
Most of the fuel use by a modern rocket occurs just getting off the launch pad.
Incorrect, if you mean "getting from the launch pad into space before acquiring orbital velocity". Less than half of the fuel is used in that stage; it's actually more like a third. Still non-zero, true.
Somewhere slightly under a fifth of the delta V comes from plowing through the air. Frankly, all the minor benefits of a 20 km launch seem to not add up to nearly as much as the cost (in money, especially for maintenance, and mass) of the systems to link the two craft and release them when desired. Then again, I'm also of the opinion that fuels that need extensive cryo (like liquid oxygen or nitrogen) tend to require more, in terms of their heavy cryo systems, than they gain in terms of better specific impulse.
Funding: there's ways of developing it that don't cost too much money. They're slow, and they require volunteer time from engineers (which can be obtained for working on a cool project, so long as there's not too much pressure from management), but they can be done.
Payload design: ok, so build your launcher to the same specifications as existing ones, and treat them as de facto standards. That's what standards are for: to allow people to build to then instead of vendor-specific specifications.
Market: this is the most significant of these three challenges, though there are solutions even here. Space tourism, for instance, though you need to really get launch costs down (to below $100/lb) before this becomes viable. And if you've designed to, say, NASA"s specs and can outperform NASA, there may well be some US gov't contracts who wouldn't mind not dealing with another beauracracy - so long as you can put up with their beauracracy, of course.
A quick search on google for bioterrorism sensors gives one a pretty good idea of how much advances need to be made in this field.
Not quite. Bioterrorism sensors detect chemicals, spores, and the like. Integrating neurons and silicon is more a matter of decoding the signals: translating from messy bioelectric signals into smooth artificial electronic ones and vice versa. Much work remains to be done in both areas, but it's not the same work.
...but only so long as those skills are objectively testable. For instance, a certain type of artist needs to know how to paint, how to communicate ideas through pictures, and use pictures to inspire certain emotions or thoughts in others. Ok, there's your skill list, and a pretty short one at that. But how do you test it without so much observer bias getting in as to make scores or rankings of ability unusable?
Hate to break it to you, but just such a government is trying to seize power and ban computers, music, and TV - at least, when used to express anything they disagree with (which is most of the time) or when their sponsors haven't been paid off to their satisfaction. Fortunately, they haven't been able to get their act completely together yet, and some in the government remain dedicated to to principles on which America was founded.
Karma tops at 50, after that, you'll be like me, trying to find another reason to life for ;)
;)
Aww, maaan...and I just hit 50 this weekend. (After hitting it some time ago, only to get knocked down to high 40s by a few neg mods.)
<sigh> So...how long does this period of angst last before I accept this little fact of life?
For those that did not see it: dungeness crab. Iron Chef American won (unsurprisingly, for the pilot).
Not too bad an adaptation, IMO, though there was showboating by both sides - more from the Iron Chef than his opponent. A little excessive explanation of the rules, though that can perhaps be forgiven for the pilot. Even the commentators got involved at one point (Chairman Shatner was tasting some caviar, the commentators made a quip about getting some themselves, and the Iron Chef obliged, tossing it up to them).
Overall: it could have been a little more faithful to the original - but at the risk of being nothing more than a clone/ripoff. They had fun with it, and it showed. If they can keep that up, they may well have enough audience for at least a few seasons' run.
"Data-san?"
"Yes, Wesley?"
"It appears that Quark is having second thoughts about challenging Iron Chef Klingon. He's headed over to talk to him, and..."
[Half a minute later]
"Well, *that* was unexpected. Worf's display has convinced Picard to change the theme ingredient to Ferengi, which of course disqualifies all of Quark's dishes so far. Quark will have a hard time preparing more while being the theme ingredient."
"If my memory serves me correctly, this happened the last time someone challenged Iron Chef Klingon."
--- or ---
Q: "The theme ingredient..." [removes drape with a dramatic flourish] "...PARADOXES!"
What if you made a game where you could stamp out chips, then linked them together in a cluster, and...
;)
Yeah, I know it wouldn't help in RL. But, if Slashdot were ever to be made into IF, I suspect that would be one of the steps necessary to complete the game. Probably with chips made out of hot grits stuffed down (and any veteran Slashdotters know the rest)...
And the best form of comment is one that is the code itself, IMO. Well-chosen variable and function names, for example, or debug messages that clearly state what the F is going on when they're invoked.
Or someone just put it under something heavy while loading it on a truck, and said truck went for a long drive over bumpy roads from city A to city B. No malice need be required...though this is an object lesson in why shippers of fragile stuff should supply their own armor (packing peanuts, or wood crates as the image page suggests).
I wonder what parts of the 'rest of the mission' you think wouldn't be covered by existing law?
... "If this comes down on any part of the US mainland, a few hundred bombs will be coming down on you"
Everything after the craft gets to orbit and before it re-enters Earth's atmosphere. Maybe more.
Plus, without insurance on the whole mission, you certainly wouldn't be able to raise the money to get the first rocket up.
Ah...no. You raise the money from those who know it's a risk. Show them that the odds of return on investment show greater results without insurance. Keep in mind: anyone providing insurance will weight the odds in their favor...therefore, to buy insurance is to lower your maximum possible returns, without comparable advantage in case of an accident. Insurance is a sucker's bet, unless you really can't afford to lose (like, say, for house or life insurance - and a rocket is neither of those).
And thats not considering the threats countries would give before launch
Once you have it in Earth orbit, even random chance gives you about a 2/3rds chance of oceanic splashdown. But once you have it in Earth orbit, aiming re-entry is pretty easy relative to the rest of the mission - de-orbits have been done for a long time. Getting it into Earth orbit is the tricky part, but it's easy enough just to aim wide so that, even if the worst happens, the asteroid just scoots on by like so many other near misses we've had over the years.
Tech-for-the-sake-of-tech-so-it-will-grow-to-allow -us-to-implement-our-dreams.
There's more to the argument than just tech-for-the-sake-of-tech...
Eventually, yes. But how do we get from here to there? Once there are space colonies and so forth being built, then it makes sense to use on-orbit materials. But I don't see any today. (The ISS doesn't count - it was made with 100% Earth materials - but maybe a future version of it would.)
More to the point, they won't exist until after some profit comes from space to Earth to fund the development of things needed to build them. One possibility: mining platinum-group metals for use on Earth, since they are valuable in and of themselves on Earth. Leave the rock, and maybe the iron and nickel, up there for later when we get around to building colonies. But bring that shiny pricey metal down here so we can pay off our creditors today, so that we can build space colonies tomorrow!
The answer: testing. First, get surveyors to latch onto an asteroid reliably. Then, slowly alter its orbit in stages, so that (at least for the first few stages, while trust is building up) any single stage's mishap will not cause the asteroid to come crashing to Earth uncontrolled. Eventually coax it into Earth orbit, and bring it down the final several hundred miles in small, pre-separated pieces.
Granted, launch insurance may be required by law, but there's not much that can go wrong during launch (while you're still far far away from the asteroid). The legal structures do not yet exist for the rest of the mission...so why buy insurance if you don't have to, when you know it'll be overpriced relative to the true risk?
Yeah, and they spent most of the prize money donations on promoting the thing, instead of keeping it as prize money like they promised.
Still, it could be a good use of NASA's money to fund the prize, then back off and see what happens.
If one wishes to make it expensive, then yes, it will be expensive. And the companies that NASA contracted to were more interested in billing for high rates than actually developing cheap space access.
That doesn't prove it can't be done. Just that NASA and its contractors seem incapable of getting it done.
Contempt of the law isn't a crime per se. But it does cast doubt on one's willingness to follow a conduct remedy when the only enforcement provision is to lengthen said remedy, and when one has demonstrated willingness to completely ignore similar conduct remedies.