Why leave the comfort of Baltimore for the wilds of California? There are Indians, deserts, starvation, loneliness, wild animals, snakes, tornadoes, earthquakes, locusts, bandits...
Don't forget dysentery...although maybe that's only along the trail to Oregon.
Bonus points will be awarded if your solution also includes extra equipment, such as monopods/tripods, high gain antenna, solar recharge kit, is capable of surviving other hostile environments, such as the surface of mars, is capable of using different filters for uv/IR/etc, remote control options, etc.
Are there extra bonus points if it drives around by itself? My money's on Steve Squyres.
Don't get me wrong here. I am not saying I am encouraging this or that i am proud that NASA is doing this, but at least it will bring more attention to our space program than the average American has been giving it in recent years. It's sad, people used to crowd around the TV to watch when a shuttle launched, now they just catch a glimpse on the news when they are flipping channels from tool academy and Hasselhoff on America's got talent.
This could (and is) said of every half-baked NASA effort, including the whole "name-node-3" thing. To my mind, asking the general public to come up with ideas for Centennial Challenges means that: (a) NASA can't come up with a clear picture of what technologies are high priority and could benefit from a Centennial Challenge. (b) NASA sees the Centennial Challenges as public outreach with no real engineering payoff - so it doesn't matter what the topics are. (c) both (a) and (b).
Pick a platform, with all it warts, short of fundamental design flaws, and keep developing it.
I especially like the way VADM Joe Dyer, Chairman of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) put it:
We note that the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee summary report compares current plans for the Constellation program with a number of conceptual alternatives. Here, we offer a word of caution -- PowerPoint presentations addressing future programs will always out shine current programs of record. Why is that the case? It is because current programs have garnered the professional peer and public review during the accomplishment of real work. Technical challenges will have been discovered, cost stress will have been revealed, and the reality of conducting high risk business in an unforgiving environment will have been highlighted and publicized. Future concepts do not yet have the benefit of this reality testing. This experience led to one of the ASAP's prime recommendations presented to the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee. Specifically, the ASAP believes that if Constellation is not the optimum answer, then any other new design must be substantially superior to justify starting over.
Once in lunar orbit, Nebojsa and Miroslav will split a liter of vodka and wrestle to see who will be "the robot". The winner will then paint the loser silver, hand him a HD camera, and strap him into the descent stage.
If that blows up without delivering the results that get you payed (satellite in orbit etc...) your business is dead and your creditors crying. That's life.
That's life if you're a private company. If Inter-orbital has some catastrophic failure that sinks the whole company, it's not that big a deal in the big picture. Failure is an option for a private company - it's just not a very attractive option.
Private enterprise and investors can't survive the impact of things going wrong.
I agree with you, but I've been very impressed with SpaceX's persistence. I think that most of the private launchers will fail, but the lucky/persistent ones might actually pull it off. Presumably, each of them is convinced that they're the lucky ones.
In all fairness Alenia (owner of Aermacchi) is one of the leading aeronautical manufacturers in the world having designed, built and maintained over 12,000 airplanes.
What about this "Boeing" company, do they know anything about airplanes?
No amount of watch dogging for pork is gonna matter to him if the people in his district are happy about the new money flowing in.
It's also worth noting that the people who will be doing this crowdsourced watch dogging will have agendas and biases of their own. The people of Michigan's 7th district probably won't take kindly to having their pork shot down by others who aren't finding the recession quite as painful. It will simply become more important to make your earmark sound good on paper (or at least avoid key search terms) to avoid drawing attention.
Sounds like there's a layer of security that he didn't anticipate: "Trespass here, and you will be hunted down." I'd say this whole episode sends a pretty clear message.
The *actual* paper isn't about citation at all - that only comes up in the Techdirt piece. The paper seems to basically say "Open Access is good, but somebody's got to pay for all this. Consumers shouldn't pay, and authors shouldn't pay, so I nominate the institutions."
The abstract:
The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to
foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in
a world without copyright of academic writing, academics would still benefit from
publishing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gaining scholarly esteem.
Yet publishers would presumably have to impose fees on authors, because publishers
would not be able to profit from reader charges. If these publication fees would be borne
by academics, their incentives to publish would be reduced. But if the publication fees
would usually be paid by universities or grantors, the motive of academics to publish
would be unlikely to decrease (and could actually increase) - suggesting that ending
academic copyright would be socially desirable in view of the broad benefits of a
copyright-free world. If so, the demise of academic copyright should be achieved by a
change in law, for the 'open access' movement that effectively seeks this objective
without modification of the law faces fundamental difficulties.
No fooling - Red (never heard him called "William") Whittaker is involved. It's a little strange that the summary states he "teamed up" with Astrobotic, given that he is the Chairman and CTO.
You can't begrudge a person just because they have more money than you do. While I agree a lot of rich people can be annoying and rude, there are also a lot of really great people as well.
I'm not begrudging anyone anything. I'm (a) making a reference to Pulp's "Common People" to illustrate that (b) Madoff's victims are not alone in facing an uncertain and unpromising "senior life".
Because of madoff, thousands will suffer through the last years of their lives living from social security check to check, will not have access to the medications they need or the mobility required to live a healthy senior life.
Slashdot Mirror
For the itinerary you found, an 18-hour trip, you should probably expect to add a random number of hours from 0 to 6 into your arrival time.
Agreed. But in fairness to Amtrak, you'd probably do well to add that kind of margin to a flight as well.
you'd think the sunnier southern states would catch on
Bingo. Worldwide, you'd think Australia would be leading the way, but instead it's Germany.
Why leave the comfort of Baltimore for the wilds of California? There are Indians, deserts, starvation, loneliness, wild animals, snakes, tornadoes, earthquakes, locusts, bandits ...
Don't forget dysentery...although maybe that's only along the trail to Oregon.
Bonus points will be awarded if your solution also includes extra equipment, such as monopods/tripods, high gain antenna, solar recharge kit, is capable of surviving other hostile environments, such as the surface of mars, is capable of using different filters for uv/IR/etc, remote control options, etc.
Are there extra bonus points if it drives around by itself? My money's on Steve Squyres.
Don't get me wrong here. I am not saying I am encouraging this or that i am proud that NASA is doing this, but at least it will bring more attention to our space program than the average American has been giving it in recent years. It's sad, people used to crowd around the TV to watch when a shuttle launched, now they just catch a glimpse on the news when they are flipping channels from tool academy and Hasselhoff on America's got talent.
This could (and is) said of every half-baked NASA effort, including the whole "name-node-3" thing. To my mind, asking the general public to come up with ideas for Centennial Challenges means that:
(a) NASA can't come up with a clear picture of what technologies are high priority and could benefit from a Centennial Challenge.
(b) NASA sees the Centennial Challenges as public outreach with no real engineering payoff - so it doesn't matter what the topics are.
(c) both (a) and (b).
Pick a platform, with all it warts, short of fundamental design flaws, and keep developing it.
I especially like the way VADM Joe Dyer, Chairman of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) put it:
We note that the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee summary report compares current plans for the Constellation program with a number of conceptual alternatives. Here, we offer a word of caution -- PowerPoint presentations addressing future programs will always out shine current programs of record. Why is that the case? It is because current programs have garnered the professional peer and public review during the accomplishment of real work. Technical challenges will have been discovered, cost stress will have been revealed, and the reality of conducting high risk business in an unforgiving environment will have been highlighted and publicized. Future concepts do not yet have the benefit of this reality testing. This experience led to one of the ASAP's prime recommendations presented to the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee. Specifically, the ASAP believes that if Constellation is not the optimum answer, then any other new design must be substantially superior to justify starting over.
because the price has doubled in the last year where I live, not because it's cool.
So it's not cool enough to justify the cost. People are more than willing to pay for cool/sleek/nifty.
Once in lunar orbit, Nebojsa and Miroslav will split a liter of vodka and wrestle to see who will be "the robot". The winner will then paint the loser silver, hand him a HD camera, and strap him into the descent stage.
If that blows up without delivering the results that get you payed (satellite in orbit etc...) your business is dead and your creditors crying. That's life.
That's life if you're a private company. If Inter-orbital has some catastrophic failure that sinks the whole company, it's not that big a deal in the big picture. Failure is an option for a private company - it's just not a very attractive option.
Private enterprise and investors can't survive the impact of things going wrong.
I agree with you, but I've been very impressed with SpaceX's persistence. I think that most of the private launchers will fail, but the lucky/persistent ones might actually pull it off. Presumably, each of them is convinced that they're the lucky ones.
Aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan said a few years ago that if we're not killing people, we're not pushing hard enough.
I really hope he didn't say that after the accident that killed 3 of his employees.
Things *used* to be done on a sane budget, until everything became a nest of private contractors trying to get their hands in the pie.
Go easy on the mythology - It's always been that way. The Lunar Rovers were built by Boeing on a cost plus contract that went over budget by 100%.
No fancy expensive components here -- he bolted the top end of a lawn chair to the thing for a seat.
Notably, the astronauts had to repair the rovers with duct tape once the fenders fell off.
the "lady" behind the counter shoots a 4 foot flame from her anus that burned my ticket to little cinders.
Wait, she only assaulted you but left your luggage intact? You must have platinum elite status, you lucky dog.
In all fairness Alenia (owner of Aermacchi) is one of the leading aeronautical manufacturers in the world having designed, built and maintained over 12,000 airplanes.
What about this "Boeing" company, do they know anything about airplanes?
It is very easy to accidentally "tweet" some information that can be used to infer your location.
The simple fact that you are "tweeting" implies that you are in front of a computer, and not out doing other things.
No amount of watch dogging for pork is gonna matter to him if the people in his district are happy about the new money flowing in.
It's also worth noting that the people who will be doing this crowdsourced watch dogging will have agendas and biases of their own. The people of Michigan's 7th district probably won't take kindly to having their pork shot down by others who aren't finding the recession quite as painful. It will simply become more important to make your earmark sound good on paper (or at least avoid key search terms) to avoid drawing attention.
Yes, the systems should have been secured better.
Sounds like there's a layer of security that he didn't anticipate: "Trespass here, and you will be hunted down." I'd say this whole episode sends a pretty clear message.
Point being technology has bring lots of improvements, so theres no reason why wouldn't it work the same way with food.
Technology makes food more profitable. More profitable food may or may not be better for you.
there's a reason one doesn't hear the Chinese in China railing against the Chinese government
Because it's hard to talk from underneath a tank tread? Did I win?
The *actual* paper isn't about citation at all - that only comes up in the Techdirt piece. The paper seems to basically say "Open Access is good, but somebody's got to pay for all this. Consumers shouldn't pay, and authors shouldn't pay, so I nominate the institutions."
The abstract: The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in a world without copyright of academic writing, academics would still benefit from publishing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gaining scholarly esteem. Yet publishers would presumably have to impose fees on authors, because publishers would not be able to profit from reader charges. If these publication fees would be borne by academics, their incentives to publish would be reduced. But if the publication fees would usually be paid by universities or grantors, the motive of academics to publish would be unlikely to decrease (and could actually increase) - suggesting that ending academic copyright would be socially desirable in view of the broad benefits of a copyright-free world. If so, the demise of academic copyright should be achieved by a change in law, for the 'open access' movement that effectively seeks this objective without modification of the law faces fundamental difficulties.
Send one old guy with a shovel
Good luck doing that on a Scout budget.
All in all, this is a PR job.
No fooling - Red (never heard him called "William") Whittaker is involved. It's a little strange that the summary states he "teamed up" with Astrobotic, given that he is the Chairman and CTO.
You can't begrudge a person just because they have more money than you do. While I agree a lot of rich people can be annoying and rude, there are also a lot of really great people as well.
I'm not begrudging anyone anything. I'm (a) making a reference to Pulp's "Common People" to illustrate that (b) Madoff's victims are not alone in facing an uncertain and unpromising "senior life".
Because of madoff, thousands will suffer through the last years of their lives living from social security check to check, will not have access to the medications they need or the mobility required to live a healthy senior life.
So they'll have to live like common people do?
How many cwts [wikipedia.org] of Mars Orbiters [slashdot.org] must be lost before we learn?!
The lesson I learn from MCO is that it is a bad idea to blindly reuse code and then forgo adequate testing.