I think SC also takes away the validation of the concept air-dropping a space vehicle. While not a pioneering effort (X-15 did this), it is new (re-discovered?) in modern times because of the efficiency and cost-savings -- something NASA and various other foreign space programs haven't focussed on. This is something that private industry will always be better at.
Rockets are least efficient in the lower atmosphere because instead of taking the oxidizer from the atmosphere around them they carry it up with them. Once the atmosphere is sufficiently thin this is the only way to go.. but in lower atmostphere, the air-breather has a huge efficiency advantage.
Maybe a future step would be to go even higher with the air-breathing first stage where the vehicle runs up at scramjet-only altitudes before releasing it's space-bound piggyback craft? I'm sure supersonic separation of the spacecraft would be tricky, but that's a different problem...
Yeah, I predicted this too - about 5 years ago. I even tried to get enough interest to start a company to produce such a 'home server' product, which would interface with entertainment, security, networking and home management functions. No one was quite interested yet. That day will come, sooner or later. Your home server will be like your refridgerator - something you buy, drop in, and turn on. And, rarely, call the Maytag repairman to come fix it when it has a problem.
So here's the key point: despite some contradictory information still being out there, it's looking really likely that what we're dealing with is some kind of launch vehicle failure. Wherever Cosmos 1 is -- in a weird orbit or in pieces on the ground somewhere -- clearly something didn't go right during the launch. We are as curious as the rest of you about what happened. But the fact that it is looking like it was a launch vehicle problem has some important implications for where the investigation goes from here.
Remember, our launch vehicle was a converted ICBM, launched by the Russian Navy. As soon as there is an issue with a foreign launch vehicle, The Planetary Society -- which, though it's international, is based here in the U.S.A. -- has to keep our hands off any investigation, because of U.S. law called "ITAR." ITAR stands for International Trafficking in Arms Regulations, and basically it governs the transfer of militarily interesting information between the U.S. and any foreign country. Since nearly all space vehicles have heritage in military vehicles, ITAR also tends to govern interaction between people in the space business here in the U.S. and other countries (and this covers not just Russia but all foreign countries, including Canada and Mexico, everybody). So while we're eager to learn new news, all we can do is to wait for the Russian investigation to proceed, and listen to what they have to tell us once they've drawn their conclusions.
So, what RKA (the Russian space agency) has said so far is that the launch vehicle failed 83 seconds into liftoff, and that the second stage of the rocket didn't separate. But, Lou told us, the data that indicates all of this has been inspected, but not really analyzed. And it's the Russians' job to analyze that stuff. It's safest for us not to speculate too much.
I seriously doubt any conditional surrender would have been accepted by the Soviets. The Germans attempted to conditionally surrender to the US/Britain, and that was refused because it must be a conditional surrender to all allied powers (including the Soviets). The Germans new darn well that they had behaved much better to the enemies of the West than to the enemies of the East.
Similarly, I do not think surrendering to the Soviet Union conditionally, a nation which sustained almost no casualties or attrocities by the Japanese, would be acceptable to the Allies.
Should we have accepted the conditional German surrender and prevented weeks of war? Likely if we did, we'd have been at war with the Soviets soon thereafter. And, there was some interest in that in some circles. Luckily for the world, sanity prevailed.
Regardless of the rhetoric, it's fairly obvious that an invasion of the Japanese islands would have sustained horrendous casualties simply based upon the Japanese 'no surrender' mentality demonstrated throughout the island-hopping campaigns. Add to this a mobilized civilian population and the ensuing guerilla war, and Iraq looks like a walk in the park.
I think people underestimate the effect of the fact that the Japanese islands had not been invaded in hundreds of years, and the Japanese were quite fanatical about defending it.
Also, the Japanese might have well resorted to their own WMDs - they had the most advanced biological weapons technology in the world at the time, and may have begun using it against an invader on their soil.
This shift of targets from the airfields and radar installations to the cities in general and London in particular is creditted with losing the Battle of Britain for the Germans - because of the reason you state: it gave the RAF time to recover and resupply.
This is exactly why the US military is pressing it's research into 'smart' weapons, and starting to use unmanned combat vehicles: to make war more easy to swallow by the public due to fewer civilian casualties, and also sustain fewer combattant casualties of our own while also causing the maximum enemy combattant casualties. If this weren't true, well, it's alot cheaper to carpet-bomb with B-52s than fire smart bombs...
This war has been incredibly light on casualties compared to any previous major combat operation (Vietnam, Korea, WWII, WWI). Since the concept of 'total war' was instituted in WWII, we are at the lowest level of peripheral damage (# civilian casualties) and the highest level of weapon accuracy (# pounds of explosives required to destroy a target complex). That trend will continue.
Some day I envision (as I suspect military planners do) an army operating mostly by remote control and telepresience. Robotic aircraft, advanced armed surveillance drones, and robotic ground combat vehicles will be first. The next generation will come in the form smaller combat robots - perhaps smaller than a person, fast, maneuverable, armed to kill. The third generation will be even smaller - microbots or nanobots?
Each generation brings less risk to military personnel, more accurate target resolution (due to the fact you have no personnel risk, so you can get closer to potential targets), and lower collateral damage.
For electronics, take a drive across the border to Paraguay -- lots of stuff nearly as cheap as in the US...and no one is checking at the Brasilian border to tax you on your purchases.
They have quite a business going in Ciudad de Este.
Consider using GnomeMeeting behind a firewall, to another machine behind a different firewall.
In this environment, Skype works, and GnomeMeeting doesn't... at least, not without some fancy firewall/NAT work, which is over the head of too many people. Skype simply 'works'.
It also works much better cross-platform. I've tried to get GM to work with NetMeeting and get very inconsistant results (no firewall) to no results (firewall).
The challenge is to get Skype to open up their protocol.
I was just involved in the configuration of a new room here at my "large aerospace company in El Segundo" into what we call a 'collaboration' room. Some useful features we've come across after setting up three previous rooms here and using them for everything from vendor training sessions to real-time design reviews:
1) two projectors. One projects the more static material, the other dynamic content. EG projector 1 will have the presentation slides, and projector 2 will have a live CAD model. Both are ceiling mounted and out of the way.
2) SMARTboard (one, lit by projector 2). This works great for almost any discussion where someone is presenting at the front of the room - the ability to use the board as a big 'mouse' is not only 'cool', but functional: no running back and forth to the presentation/CAD driving PC/laptop.
3) install a good-quality A/V switch with at least 8 inputs and two outputs. This switches XVGA and audio from any source to either or both projectors. Run video drops to the center of the conference table so mobile users can 'jack in' and take over driving the collaborative session. You may need line conditioners if the run is more than 20'. Don't skimp on cabling -- good quality PC video cable will work where cheapy low-cost ones produce noise in the signal.
4) have at least one moderately powerful PC permanently hooked up to one video/audio input to the video switch, so you'll always have the ability to hold a meeting regardless of who owns a laptop (maybe not important at some companies).
5) configure your conference tabling such that all users can easily be face-to-face without "conference room gymnastics". We've used large relatively rectangular, U-shaped and V-shaped configurations, and the one of the latter two works best. The interaction level goes way up when everyone is face-to-face. I think the "V" configuration is probably the best for this.
6) use a remote desktop software such as Webex (ok for regular content) or VNC (better for more colorful such as CAD models; NetMeeting is really bad here) to include remote users, who also conference call in (you did install a speakerphone, right??). We have not yet seen much worth in videoconferencing at the non-executive level.
7) have a whiteboard off to the side, or behind the pull-down projector 1's screen (smartboard doesn't have a pull-down screen). Sometimes you just want to free-draw something, and this still works best on a whiteboard. Consider a Panaboard (or similar), which can scan your sketches directly to the PC.
8) consider running RS232 to the center of the conference table as well from the SMARTboard so that any laptop user can take advantage of the board. This would require an A/B switch at the fixed PC. Stock some USB-RS232 pigtails for those laptop users w/o DB9 serial ports.
We use these rooms alot, and feel much more productive than a traditional conference room in them.
I agree that the N1 wasn't particularly successful, but as you point out, mostly due to quality control issues and not an inheirent design flaw.
The original poster stated that the Sat V was the "most powerful booster ever built, period". That's not correct. It's not even correct that it was the most powerful booster ever flown. It was the most powerful ever to fly completely successfully through all stages.
I suspect the N1 would have had it's bugs worked out had the political environment been different.
The Saturn V was not the most powerful booster ever produced. This honor goes to the Russian N1 - A Google will net you:
"The N1 stood 105 meters (344 ft) tall and weighed 2788 metric tons (6.1 million lb) fully fueled. This compares with 110.7 meters (363 ft) and 2913 metric tons (6.4 million lb) for the American Saturn V. The first three stages of the N1, blocks A, B, and V, each took the form of a truncated cone containing a spherical kerosene tank above a larger liquid oxygen (LOX) tank. The first stage, Block A, was powered by 30 NK-33 engines, together producing 4620 metric tons (10 million lb) of thrust. This far exceeded the 3469 metric ton (7.65 million lb) thrust of the American Saturn V Moon rocket. The N1's "KORD" (Russian acronym for control of the work of the engines) system steered the rocket in pitch and yaw by throttling the 24 fixed outer engines. Roll control was maintained by routing engine turbine exhaust through six swivelled nozzles. Arrayed around the base of the N1's first stage were four grating stabilizers, each consisting of a cross hatched array of metal strips (acting as fins) held in a horizontal frame. After a first stage burn of 110 seconds, the second stage was to ignite its eight NK-43 engines for a 130-second burn. Finally, the third stage would insert the L-3 complex into orbit with a 400-second burn of its four NK-31 engines."
The previous post is incorrect on all points. Just because the manufacturer no longer produces brake parts doesn't mean the aftermarket won't - this is not a rationale to crush the vehicles. Funny, I can still get brakes for my '73 Dodge Charger - but not from Dodge. The automotive aftermarket is alive and well, and happy to fill any void in consumable components discontinued from the OEM.
There are many much more obscure cars out there on the road, licensed, insured. Because these cars were either built in the US or imported to US standards at the time they are grandfathered in to US DOT. A 1994 model car would not be legal to be sold and licensed today due to different safety and emission standards, but no agency is forcing their removal from the road. The inability to insure a vehicle has nothing to do with this decision, and is moreover completely irrelevent. You can insure ANYTHING for the right price.
In addition, ANY INDIVIDUAL can build their OWN car from a kit or scratch and have it licensed and insured. Some of the only limitations the US DOT puts on vehicles are importing foreign-produced vehicles which were not DOT certified for the year in which they were produced. I know, I own a vehicle which is no longer imported into the US but is still produced overseas. The newer models cannot be licensed on US highways because they have not been TESTED to meet US standards (this does not necessarily mean that they would not pass, by the way).
You are also mistaken regarding salvage titles -- vehicles with salvage titles can certainly be driven on US roads and insured. The process to go about this in Georgia, at least, is listed here:
My IBM TPX31 has a BIOS lock at least for 802.11 a/b/g cards (mini-PCI). I picked up a Dell 2200 card which when installed would cause the laptop to be unable to boot. A freshly updated BIOS and chipset firmware did not help this situation. I then obtained the same model card (2200 a/b/g) but IBM-branded and it worked like a charm.
The installation in an IBM laptop of a non-whitelist card is supposed to cause it to throw some error to the screen, but mine would just hang. There are some BIOS patches in the wild which is supposed to bypass this problem, but because I didn't get the error code I was hesitant to install the hack.
Apparently there is a pin on the mini-PCI card which the IBM onboard firmware pushes high and allows the Thinkpad's BIOS to illuminate the little "wireless signal" light on the screen base. Installing the hack mentioned above will disable this feature.
From what I understand from reading, the reason that certain cards are whitelisted is so that RF emmissions from the laptops meet FCC regulations. If that's not the reason, it's the justification I've read.
Luckily, my girlfriend's R30 did not have the BIOS lock-out, so the Dell a/b/g card worked just fine in her machine.
Now if I can just find a reasonably-priced BMDC card...
1) More fuel/effort required overall - you have to get the spacecraft to LEO and dock with the ISS which requires circularizing the orbit. Then, you have to perform another burn to leave orbit and get onto an escape trajectory.
2) After leaving LEO you still need to have some powerful acceleration and deceleration burns which would put stress on fragile components like these antennae - if you've seen the pics, they are long boom antennae, not the 'radar dish' most people think of.
What temperature are you performing your calculations at for which gasses might be retained on Mars? The current "pretty darn cold" Mars, or a future greenhouse-warmed Mars? If we do produce a greenhouse effect you'll see that the warmer it gets, the more of those gasses will be lost to space due to the low mass of Mars and the higher velocity of the gasses.
To look at how much temperature makes a difference, think about Titan's methane atmosphere. Titan has less mass than Mars, but an atmosphere several times denser than that of Earth. This is only possible due to the cold temperatures on Titan -- methane on Mars would be lost to space while it's retained on Titan.
This is only a "me too" post, but I want to underscore the problems MS DRM can cause. I took me a couple of weeks to root out all the trojans, drones and other gunk that got installed when I viewed a video using MS DRM...and this is with all the security patches in place.
Fool me once, shame on you...fool me twice and it's time for Darwin to take over..
The two biggest issues holding back desktop Linux migrations are the compatability with MS-proprietary formats: MS Office docs (.doc,.xls,.ppt, etc) and IE's slightly non-standard take on HTML. Linux doesn't offer very good compatability.
I run into this all the time at work: OO does a pretty good job of opening simple documents, but has problems with those containing embedded tables, hyperlinks, custom header/footer, etc. How many legacy documents in the IBM repositories contain complex format MS Office documents? Probably alot.
As for IE - lots of sites just won't function without the viral vector ActiveX in place, or just simply don't look right in Mozilla - the format is off, the buttons don't appear aligned, etc. Some interactive web sites simply don't work.
How much of this stuff is present at a huge organization like IBM? How many "legacy" web apps and docs are running which were produced before IBM's love affair with Linux began?
That was a bold statement (migrate to Linux desktops by the end of 2005), but like so much that comes from upper management, motivated in politics and reflective of leadership slightly out of touch with reality. I doubt their project budget included the funds to rewrite IE-only web sites and modify all the company's documentation.
Slashdot Mirror
I think SC also takes away the validation of the concept air-dropping a space vehicle. While not a pioneering effort (X-15 did this), it is new (re-discovered?) in modern times because of the efficiency and cost-savings -- something NASA and various other foreign space programs haven't focussed on. This is something that private industry will always be better at.
Rockets are least efficient in the lower atmosphere because instead of taking the oxidizer from the atmosphere around them they carry it up with them. Once the atmosphere is sufficiently thin this is the only way to go.. but in lower atmostphere, the air-breather has a huge efficiency advantage.
Maybe a future step would be to go even higher with the air-breathing first stage where the vehicle runs up at scramjet-only altitudes before releasing it's space-bound piggyback craft? I'm sure supersonic separation of the spacecraft would be tricky, but that's a different problem...
Yeah, I predicted this too - about 5 years ago. I even tried to get enough interest to start a company to produce such a 'home server' product, which would interface with entertainment, security, networking and home management functions. No one was quite interested yet. That day will come, sooner or later.
Your home server will be like your refridgerator - something you buy, drop in, and turn on. And, rarely, call the Maytag repairman to come fix it when it has a problem.
I hate when someone beats me to the punch, but thanks for saying what I was thinking :)
From the Planetary Society blog:
So here's the key point: despite some contradictory information still being out there, it's looking really likely that what we're dealing with is some kind of launch vehicle failure. Wherever Cosmos 1 is -- in a weird orbit or in pieces on the ground somewhere -- clearly something didn't go right during the launch. We are as curious as the rest of you about what happened. But the fact that it is looking like it was a launch vehicle problem has some important implications for where the investigation goes from here.
Remember, our launch vehicle was a converted ICBM, launched by the Russian Navy. As soon as there is an issue with a foreign launch vehicle, The Planetary Society -- which, though it's international, is based here in the U.S.A. -- has to keep our hands off any investigation, because of U.S. law called "ITAR." ITAR stands for International Trafficking in Arms Regulations, and basically it governs the transfer of militarily interesting information between the U.S. and any foreign country. Since nearly all space vehicles have heritage in military vehicles, ITAR also tends to govern interaction between people in the space business here in the U.S. and other countries (and this covers not just Russia but all foreign countries, including Canada and Mexico, everybody). So while we're eager to learn new news, all we can do is to wait for the Russian investigation to proceed, and listen to what they have to tell us once they've drawn their conclusions.
So, what RKA (the Russian space agency) has said so far is that the launch vehicle failed 83 seconds into liftoff, and that the second stage of the rocket didn't separate. But, Lou told us, the data that indicates all of this has been inspected, but not really analyzed. And it's the Russians' job to analyze that stuff. It's safest for us not to speculate too much.
More in a moment.
I am not sure you mean 'division'. A division (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_(military)% 5Ddivision has 10,000-20,000 soldiers. I believe you meant "army" or "army group".
I seriously doubt any conditional surrender would have been accepted by the Soviets. The Germans attempted to conditionally surrender to the US/Britain, and that was refused because it must be a conditional surrender to all allied powers (including the Soviets). The Germans new darn well that they had behaved much better to the enemies of the West than to the enemies of the East.
Similarly, I do not think surrendering to the Soviet Union conditionally, a nation which sustained almost no casualties or attrocities by the Japanese, would be acceptable to the Allies.
Should we have accepted the conditional German surrender and prevented weeks of war? Likely if we did, we'd have been at war with the Soviets soon thereafter. And, there was some interest in that in some circles. Luckily for the world, sanity prevailed.
Regardless of the rhetoric, it's fairly obvious that an invasion of the Japanese islands would have sustained horrendous casualties simply based upon the Japanese 'no surrender' mentality demonstrated throughout the island-hopping campaigns. Add to this a mobilized civilian population and the ensuing guerilla war, and Iraq looks like a walk in the park.
I think people underestimate the effect of the fact that the Japanese islands had not been invaded in hundreds of years, and the Japanese were quite fanatical about defending it.
Also, the Japanese might have well resorted to their own WMDs - they had the most advanced biological weapons technology in the world at the time, and may have begun using it against an invader on their soil.
This shift of targets from the airfields and radar installations to the cities in general and London in particular is creditted with losing the Battle of Britain for the Germans - because of the reason you state: it gave the RAF time to recover and resupply.
This is exactly why the US military is pressing it's research into 'smart' weapons, and starting to use unmanned combat vehicles: to make war more easy to swallow by the public due to fewer civilian casualties, and also sustain fewer combattant casualties of our own while also causing the maximum enemy combattant casualties. If this weren't true, well, it's alot cheaper to carpet-bomb with B-52s than fire smart bombs...
This war has been incredibly light on casualties compared to any previous major combat operation (Vietnam, Korea, WWII, WWI). Since the concept of 'total war' was instituted in WWII, we are at the lowest level of peripheral damage (# civilian casualties) and the highest level of weapon accuracy (# pounds of explosives required to destroy a target complex). That trend will continue.
Some day I envision (as I suspect military planners do) an army operating mostly by remote control and telepresience. Robotic aircraft, advanced armed surveillance drones, and robotic ground combat vehicles will be first. The next generation will come in the form smaller combat robots - perhaps smaller than a person, fast, maneuverable, armed to kill. The third generation will be even smaller - microbots or nanobots?
Each generation brings less risk to military personnel, more accurate target resolution (due to the fact you have no personnel risk, so you can get closer to potential targets), and lower collateral damage.
For electronics, take a drive across the border to Paraguay -- lots of stuff nearly as cheap as in the US...and no one is checking at the Brasilian border to tax you on your purchases.
They have quite a business going in Ciudad de Este.
The Martian atmosphere is largely CO2 - there's lots of airborne carbon. I'd guess some carbonaceous rocks as well...
Very insightful.
Consider using GnomeMeeting behind a firewall, to another machine behind a different firewall.
In this environment, Skype works, and GnomeMeeting doesn't... at least, not without some fancy firewall/NAT work, which is over the head of too many people. Skype simply 'works'.
It also works much better cross-platform. I've tried to get GM to work with NetMeeting and get very inconsistant results (no firewall) to no results (firewall).
The challenge is to get Skype to open up their protocol.
I was just involved in the configuration of a new room here at my "large aerospace company in El Segundo" into what we call a 'collaboration' room. Some useful features we've come across after setting up three previous rooms here and using them for everything from vendor training sessions to real-time design reviews:
1) two projectors. One projects the more static material, the other dynamic content. EG projector 1 will have the presentation slides, and projector 2 will have a live CAD model. Both are ceiling mounted and out of the way.
2) SMARTboard (one, lit by projector 2). This works great for almost any discussion where someone is presenting at the front of the room - the ability to use the board as a big 'mouse' is not only 'cool', but functional: no running back and forth to the presentation/CAD driving PC/laptop.
3) install a good-quality A/V switch with at least 8 inputs and two outputs. This switches XVGA and audio from any source to either or both projectors. Run video drops to the center of the conference table so mobile users can 'jack in' and take over driving the collaborative session. You may need line conditioners if the run is more than 20'. Don't skimp on cabling -- good quality PC video cable will work where cheapy low-cost ones produce noise in the signal.
4) have at least one moderately powerful PC permanently hooked up to one video/audio input to the video switch, so you'll always have the ability to hold a meeting regardless of who owns a laptop (maybe not important at some companies).
5) configure your conference tabling such that all users can easily be face-to-face without "conference room gymnastics". We've used large relatively rectangular, U-shaped and V-shaped configurations, and the one of the latter two works best. The interaction level goes way up when everyone is face-to-face. I think the "V" configuration is probably the best for this.
6) use a remote desktop software such as Webex (ok for regular content) or VNC (better for more colorful such as CAD models; NetMeeting is really bad here) to include remote users, who also conference call in (you did install a speakerphone, right??). We have not yet seen much worth in videoconferencing at the non-executive level.
7) have a whiteboard off to the side, or behind the pull-down projector 1's screen (smartboard doesn't have a pull-down screen). Sometimes you just want to free-draw something, and this still works best on a whiteboard. Consider a Panaboard (or similar), which can scan your sketches directly to the PC.
8) consider running RS232 to the center of the conference table as well from the SMARTboard so that any laptop user can take advantage of the board. This would require an A/B switch at the fixed PC. Stock some USB-RS232 pigtails for those laptop users w/o DB9 serial ports.
We use these rooms alot, and feel much more productive than a traditional conference room in them.
This vehicle does not have wings as the shuttle per se, but has a lifting body.
That has some advantages:
1) lower G-loading during re-entry makes it easier on passengers and equipment
2) better yaw control and directional stability during re-entry and high-atmospheric glide prior to parachute deployment
This has to be traded off versus many other factors (weight, packaging complexity) but is far from completely useless.
According to this article, we should be shocked at the amount of news articles which are actually just press releases from PR firms:
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
I agree that the N1 wasn't particularly successful, but as you point out, mostly due to quality control issues and not an inheirent design flaw.
The original poster stated that the Sat V was the "most powerful booster ever built, period". That's not correct. It's not even correct that it was the most powerful booster ever flown. It was the most powerful ever to fly completely successfully through all stages.
I suspect the N1 would have had it's bugs worked out had the political environment been different.
The Saturn V was not the most powerful booster ever produced. This honor goes to the Russian N1 - A Google will net you:
"The N1 stood 105 meters (344 ft) tall and weighed 2788 metric tons (6.1 million lb) fully fueled. This compares with 110.7 meters (363 ft) and 2913 metric tons (6.4 million lb) for the American Saturn V. The first three stages of the N1, blocks A, B, and V, each took the form of a truncated cone containing a spherical kerosene tank above a larger liquid oxygen (LOX) tank. The first stage, Block A, was powered by 30 NK-33 engines, together producing 4620 metric tons (10 million lb) of thrust. This far exceeded the 3469 metric ton (7.65 million lb) thrust of the American Saturn V Moon rocket. The N1's "KORD" (Russian acronym for control of the work of the engines) system steered the rocket in pitch and yaw by throttling the 24 fixed outer engines. Roll control was maintained by routing engine turbine exhaust through six swivelled nozzles. Arrayed around the base of the N1's first stage were four grating stabilizers, each consisting of a cross hatched array of metal strips (acting as fins) held in a horizontal frame. After a first stage burn of 110 seconds, the second stage was to ignite its eight NK-43 engines for a 130-second burn. Finally, the third stage would insert the L-3 complex into orbit with a 400-second burn of its four NK-31 engines."
If you pull up the satellite imagry and search for Rachel, Nevada, look northeast and notice the two huge airstrips? Area 51 :)
I also noticed that while I can find my house in fairly good resolution, for some reason I can't zoom in closer on the Groom Dry Lake area....
The previous post is incorrect on all points. Just because the manufacturer no longer produces brake parts doesn't mean the aftermarket won't - this is not a rationale to crush the vehicles. Funny, I can still get brakes for my '73 Dodge Charger - but not from Dodge. The automotive aftermarket is alive and well, and happy to fill any void in consumable components discontinued from the OEM.
There are many much more obscure cars out there on the road, licensed, insured. Because these cars were either built in the US or imported to US standards at the time they are grandfathered in to US DOT. A 1994 model car would not be legal to be sold and licensed today due to different safety and emission standards, but no agency is forcing their removal from the road. The inability to insure a vehicle has nothing to do with this decision, and is moreover completely irrelevent. You can insure ANYTHING for the right price.
In addition, ANY INDIVIDUAL can build their OWN car from a kit or scratch and have it licensed and insured. Some of the only limitations the US DOT puts on vehicles are importing foreign-produced vehicles which were not DOT certified for the year in which they were produced. I know, I own a vehicle which is no longer imported into the US but is still produced overseas. The newer models cannot be licensed on US highways because they have not been TESTED to meet US standards (this does not necessarily mean that they would not pass, by the way).
You are also mistaken regarding salvage titles -- vehicles with salvage titles can certainly be driven on US roads and insured. The process to go about this in Georgia, at least, is listed here:
Georgia DMV Salvage title process
All states have similar processes.
If you really want to see if it's sensationalist worries, a good configuration or just your dumb luck, feel free to post your IP address ;)
My IBM TPX31 has a BIOS lock at least for 802.11 a/b/g cards (mini-PCI). I picked up a Dell 2200 card which when installed would cause the laptop to be unable to boot. A freshly updated BIOS and chipset firmware did not help this situation. I then obtained the same model card (2200 a/b/g) but IBM-branded and it worked like a charm.
The installation in an IBM laptop of a non-whitelist card is supposed to cause it to throw some error to the screen, but mine would just hang. There are some BIOS patches in the wild which is supposed to bypass this problem, but because I didn't get the error code I was hesitant to install the hack.
Apparently there is a pin on the mini-PCI card which the IBM onboard firmware pushes high and allows the Thinkpad's BIOS to illuminate the little "wireless signal" light on the screen base. Installing the hack mentioned above will disable this feature.
From what I understand from reading, the reason that certain cards are whitelisted is so that RF emmissions from the laptops meet FCC regulations. If that's not the reason, it's the justification I've read.
Luckily, my girlfriend's R30 did not have the BIOS lock-out, so the Dell a/b/g card worked just fine in her machine.
Now if I can just find a reasonably-priced BMDC card...
A few negatives to that approach I can think of:
1) More fuel/effort required overall - you have to get the spacecraft to LEO and dock with the ISS which requires circularizing the orbit. Then, you have to perform another burn to leave orbit and get onto an escape trajectory.
2) After leaving LEO you still need to have some powerful acceleration and deceleration burns which would put stress on fragile components like these antennae - if you've seen the pics, they are long boom antennae, not the 'radar dish' most people think of.
What temperature are you performing your calculations at for which gasses might be retained on Mars? The current "pretty darn cold" Mars, or a future greenhouse-warmed Mars? If we do produce a greenhouse effect you'll see that the warmer it gets, the more of those gasses will be lost to space due to the low mass of Mars and the higher velocity of the gasses.
To look at how much temperature makes a difference, think about Titan's methane atmosphere. Titan has less mass than Mars, but an atmosphere several times denser than that of Earth. This is only possible due to the cold temperatures on Titan -- methane on Mars would be lost to space while it's retained on Titan.
There's another element checked off the list on the road to human subservience to his creation. I've seen this plot.
I, Balthazar, for one, welcome our new lustful robotic overloards!
This is only a "me too" post, but I want to underscore the problems MS DRM can cause. I took me a couple of weeks to root out all the trojans, drones and other gunk that got installed when I viewed a video using MS DRM...and this is with all the security patches in place.
Fool me once, shame on you...fool me twice and it's time for Darwin to take over..
The two biggest issues holding back desktop Linux migrations are the compatability with MS-proprietary formats: MS Office docs (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc) and IE's slightly non-standard take on HTML. Linux doesn't offer very good compatability.
I run into this all the time at work: OO does a pretty good job of opening simple documents, but has problems with those containing embedded tables, hyperlinks, custom header/footer, etc. How many legacy documents in the IBM repositories contain complex format MS Office documents? Probably alot.
As for IE - lots of sites just won't function without the viral vector ActiveX in place, or just simply don't look right in Mozilla - the format is off, the buttons don't appear aligned, etc. Some interactive web sites simply don't work.
How much of this stuff is present at a huge organization like IBM? How many "legacy" web apps and docs are running which were produced before IBM's love affair with Linux began?
That was a bold statement (migrate to Linux desktops by the end of 2005), but like so much that comes from upper management, motivated in politics and reflective of leadership slightly out of touch with reality. I doubt their project budget included the funds to rewrite IE-only web sites and modify all the company's documentation.