One of the potential problems with antimatter is how to use it. If one just removes it from its isolation container, it may just glow, spit and fizzle for an extended period of time, rather than explode properly. As the first particles of matter comes in contact with it, that matter (and the corresponding amount of anti-matter) will annihilate, causing a blast that may separate the two objects for a while. So to detonate properly one might need some very fancy geometries or implosion schemes that make an atomic bomb look like child's play.
Alternatively antimatter may blow up just fine without any assistance. It's all theory just now. We'll have to drop a gram of it to be sure.
> Well, everything is digital nowadays, but our cinemas are still running on good ole mechanical and analogue technology.
Movies are already half digital. The X and Y of the pictures are analog. But the Z (time, made up of frames) is digital. Always has been. Most theaters now encode sound digitally too.
In contrast, normal TV is half digital and half analog, but in a different way. Analog X, digital Y (discrete lines), digital Z (discrete frames) and analog sound.
And sometimes technology advances from digital solutions to analog solutions. Look at rotary telephones (digital) which lost out to DTMF (analog).
My value is 100%. Both for Windows and for Linux. The reason is that my computers are always on. The only time I reboot is when it crashes. So that means _every_ session ends with a crash.
Of course the big difference is uptime. My Windows (98) box has been up for 48 hours and is starting to feel sluggish, whereas my Linux box has been running for 4 months.
This was an interesting mission, but not a vital one. Thre was nobody on board, there were no missions that depended on the success of this mission. NASA was right to try to keep costs down and take some small gambles on this one.
I'd much rather NASA send up three cheaper/faster/riskier missions of which one crashes and two succeed, than send up one bullet-proof mission. So don't jump all over NASA for screwing up. If they didn't screw up now and again (on this type of mission), then they were clearly playing it too safe.
> Good test? Old news. A friend of mine, Milo, did this two weeks ago.
Not old news. Your friend simply filled his Gmail account. That's no big deal. Your friend even said "nothing unexpected happened". What makes Kevin Rose's news interesting is that continued traffic on an account can lock out the owner. That's a significant bug in that one can launch a denial of service attack on a Gmail user.
Re:Pity about the threads
on
3D Mouse
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· Score: 1
> I'd imagine it would possible to 'trace' 3d objects with this by simply moving the little ring over the surface of 3d objects. Unfortunatly, the threads would get in the way.
You're thinking two-dimensionally. Flip the mouse over and mount/suspend it upside down. Then the strings are converging down to a point.
"The scariest part of the article, however, is when a spokesman for iBackup, an Internet-based backup company, disclaims,'We do not provide a 100 percent guarantee that the backup will take place' of customers' data being stored with them for a fee."
Scary? No, that's plain honesty. Which should be respected.
Do you honestly expect your backup provider to cover you in the event of a gamma ray burst in the stellar neighbourhood which vapourizes half the planet within 5 minutes? An extreme example to be sure, but 100% coverage is not realistic, nor is it financially desirable.
I have no respect for any company whose sales staff claim 100% uptime or 100% reliable coverage.
To illustrate how quickly things can change in the field of planetary exploration, the details for the 'Messenger' probe to Mercury are already out of date. Liftoff has been postponed from May to July, and it will take a different route to get to Mercury. It won't get there until 2011.
The list only includes NASA, ESA and JAXA. Completely missing are the upcoming probes from China and India . Oddly, Russia doesn't seem to have anything planned.
"We don't have an adequate backup system for 911, which is more important than ever as we fight the war against terrorism." -- Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr.
Eh? Did NYPD and NYFD need the 911 system to find out about the WTC strikes? Terrorism isn't about killing people, it's about getting publicity.
The councilman can rest assured that the terrorists will helpfully keep their activities high-profile enough that 911 notification will not be required.
[Sheesh, why does *everything* have to be about terrorism these days.]
The technology inside these communicators was the hard bit. While Vocera appear to have solved the technical problems, they screwed up the easy bit: Style. Which would you rather carry, this or this?
What they've produced is an ugly little box which you keep in your pocket, purse or belt. What they could have had -- for minimal extra investment -- is something that people would be proud to show off. Vocera need to have a conversation with the folk at Apple.
Most people seem to agree that going to the Moon is a silly thing to do if your goal is to get to Mars. But I don't think that's the goal here. I think the goal is to go to the Moon. The word "Mars" doesn't even appear in the executive order. Bush just added the "and at some point on to Mars" to the end of his speech to keep the Mars camp happy.
Frankly I don't care where we go, Moon, Mars or asteroids. Let's just get off this rock.
Check out the telescope array they used to find this lens. I don't know what's more impressive, the sheer size or the fact that each of the dishes are mobile and shift up and down the tracks so that the array can reconfigure itself for different types of observations.
I remember seeing a photo of this array as a child. Back then it only had five dishes. I had no idea that it had been filled out. Why don't we hear about this sort of thing?
I routinely reboot and reprogram machines in our data-center that is 2000 miles away from me.
As long as all hardware components are working and there is connectivity to the machine, it doesn't matter whether the machine is a few miles away or a million miles away.
There are some fundamental differences, my friend:
If you screw up leaving the computer unbootable, you get local tech support to check the console and fix it. NASA on the other hand doesn't have tech support on Mars.
If you hose the server, it means a day's worth of reinstallation. If NASA hoses their rover, they just lost $300,000,000.
You can poke around the system and see what's wrong. NASA has a harder time since their lag time is 20 minutes.
You can download core dumps, NASA were operating on the low-bandwidth antenna which meant looking at file sizes, time stamps, selected lines, but not file contents.
You have your boss breathing down your neck (hoping for success), NASA have the international media breathing down their necks (hoping for a disaster).
The article (I know, I know, this is Slashdot) is really good. It contains everything that is missing from traditional media. The story, the background, technical details, and follow through.
Granted mainstream media have to keep their coverage dumbed down if Joe Public are going to read it. But what really bugs me is the lack of follow-up. We hear about poorly understood events as they are unfolding, then never heard about them later when they are completely understood.
A recent example is the gangway between ship and shore at the QM2's drydock. It collapsed killing lots of people, an investigation was launched. Why did it collapse? At the time it wasn't known. I'm sure it's known now, but there's been absolutely no followup.
This article about the rover is great not so much because of the level of detail but because it reports on an event with the benefit of hindsight.
> Assuming a two-year trip and ZERO radiation shielding (even the ISS would offer some), the dose would be on the order of 500 rad.
Under normal space conditions, yes. But what if there is a solar flare? There was one between Apollo 16 and 17 which might have killed any moon-bound astronauts who happened to be up at the time. A trip to the moon is just a few days, Mars is a lot longer. That scared NASA, and was one of the reasons they terminated the landings.
>The rest of your objections to the use of ISS as the core of the hypothetical Mars vessel are quite valid.
Except the bit about the amount of fuel needed to shift from 52 degree orbit to equitorial orbit. I forgot to cancel out the north-south velocity, so the fromula should be sin(52)+(1-cos(52)) = 1.17. Which means it would take 117% of the original launch cost to reposition the station. Eek!
> why not build an engine module to attach to the ISS and transform it into a spaceship to go to Mars?
Ok, I'll bite.
Said engine module is completely feasible. Unfortunately the fuel tank that would be needed would have to be aproximately 16 times the mass of ISS if it is to power the station to Mars, break into orbit, break out of Mars orbit, then break into Earth orbit.
Crew would be dead before they got back, ISS doesn't have enough radiation shielding in its walls to protect the crew outside the protective shield of Earth's magnetic field. Mars doesn't offer any such protection, nor does interplanetary space. You'll need to wrap the station in lead, and add 16 times the mass to your fuel tank.
Mars is nearly twice as far from the Sun as Earth is, which means it gets 1/4 of the light (inverse square). Therefore you'd only get a quarter of the power you'd need from the solar panels when you reach Mars. You'll need to redesign the station to quadruple the panels, and add 16 times their mass to your fuel tank.
ISS wasn't designed as a closed system, it needs regular shipments of water (that's the primary reason why there's only two crew members on it while the shuttle is grounded). There's no water between here and Mars, and lifting it from Mars would be more expensive than shipping it from Earth. So you'll need three years worth of food and water sent to ISS in advance, and don't forget to add 16 times its mass to your fuel tank.
ISS is in an Earth orbit inclined at 52 degrees away from the equator. Before you even get started, you'll want to shift to an equitorial orbit (especially if you're about to start shipping up literally megatons of fuel). That will cost you 40% [1-cos(52)] of ISS's original launch cost just to reposition the orbit.
In short, I think ISS is firmly anchored to exactly where it is.
> Here's another number: 50 billion. That's how much money MS has in the bank.
AOL lost 100 billion in 2003. Even if you get to put your little finger to your mouth when reading the bank ballance, remember that it is still a finite number. If investors start to think that you are not going to get bigger, expect things to turn ugly really quickly.
> At a few hundred degrees the transformation would occur in seconds instead of thousands of years, and you would end up with very expensive bits of graphite.
But according to the article:
> Today's speedy microprocessors run hot - at upwards of 200 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact, they can't go much faster without failing. Diamond microchips, on the other hand, could handle much higher temperatures, allowing them to run at speeds that would liquefy ordinary silicon.
I've held one of the replaced shuttle tiles. They're almost as light as a brick of styrofoam. It is no small wonder that the damn stuff broke off so easily.
They didn't. If the ET insulation had impacted the tiles, there would have been only minor damage (a weeks worth of repair time before the next flight was estimated).
The insulation didn't hit the tiles, it hit the RCC panels at the front of the wing. These are entirely different. They are big, tough, heavy elements which turn out to be unexpectedly brittle.
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board found lots and lots of errors in the way the shuttle flight was handled. That's only natural when you spend months and millions of dollars examining an event in microscopic detail. Some of those errors were trivial, others were serious. But one in particular frightens me.
Some junior NASA engineers made an unauthorised request to the military to get some photos of Columbia so that they could see if there was damage. At the same time, a senior NASA engineer made the same request. NASA management heard about the first request, and (rightly) were upset because it was made without authorisation (these photos are very expensive, only the boss can ok them). So management contacted the military and told them not to take photos at this time. Now this is the scary bit. What they didn't realise was that there was a second (authorised) request. They accidentally cancelled both.
Now how do you protect yourself against that sort of misunderstanding? The only way I can think of is to go overly bureaucratic and assign tracking numbers to everything. The amount of paperwork explodes and you drown in self imposed red tape. Is there a way for a large organisation to avoid this sort of no-fault errors without needing a signature every time someone sneezes?
> Being a stop-motion hobbyist, a setpiece like this would just be a dream to work with. Amazing!
"Now arriving on platform 1 is the 10:45 from Yosemite."
"Ready to depart on platform 3 is the 12:05 to Kirkwood".
"The AT-AT from Hoth is currently boarding on platform 7."
If customers want the ability to transfer a game from one person to another (be it cartridge, license code, or whatever) and companies aren't providing this ability, it simply opens the door to a new games company who does. Supply and demand.
Remember Id? Came out of nowhere, provided something that the heavy hitters didn't. Now they are a heavy hitter. It's not rocket science. (Ok, mabye it is in Id's case).
The Launch Umbilical Tower which supported the Saturn Vs was chopped up into pieces and left to rust in a field at the Cape. There's a group who are trying to raise funds to reassemble the tower.
I really can't get my head around how a society could undertake such a massive project as Apollo, then fail to preserve the artifacts for future generations. Heck, I am a future generation. I was only one year old when the last Saturn flew. I've seen the Saturn V in Houston, it's really astonishing. I can only imagine what it would look like standing next to the LUT.
> just awarded a $2.5 million contract to build a prototype of a large robot dog that would follow soldiers into battle
If I were a soldier, the first thing I'd do is reprogram my dog to walk ahead of me, not behind me. Let it step on the landmines, absorb enemy fire, etc.
Oh wait, this robot is worth $2.5m, eh? Ah, now I understand why the soldier is in front.
Slashdot Mirror
Alternatively antimatter may blow up just fine without any assistance. It's all theory just now. We'll have to drop a gram of it to be sure.
Movies are already half digital. The X and Y of the pictures are analog. But the Z (time, made up of frames) is digital. Always has been. Most theaters now encode sound digitally too.
In contrast, normal TV is half digital and half analog, but in a different way. Analog X, digital Y (discrete lines), digital Z (discrete frames) and analog sound.
And sometimes technology advances from digital solutions to analog solutions. Look at rotary telephones (digital) which lost out to DTMF (analog).
Weird huh?
Of course the big difference is uptime. My Windows (98) box has been up for 48 hours and is starting to feel sluggish, whereas my Linux box has been running for 4 months.
I'd much rather NASA send up three cheaper/faster/riskier missions of which one crashes and two succeed, than send up one bullet-proof mission. So don't jump all over NASA for screwing up. If they didn't screw up now and again (on this type of mission), then they were clearly playing it too safe.
Sounds odd, but "Well done NASA". Keep it up.
Not old news. Your friend simply filled his Gmail account. That's no big deal. Your friend even said "nothing unexpected happened". What makes Kevin Rose's news interesting is that continued traffic on an account can lock out the owner. That's a significant bug in that one can launch a denial of service attack on a Gmail user.
You're thinking two-dimensionally. Flip the mouse over and mount/suspend it upside down. Then the strings are converging down to a point.
Scary? No, that's plain honesty. Which should be respected.
Do you honestly expect your backup provider to cover you in the event of a gamma ray burst in the stellar neighbourhood which vapourizes half the planet within 5 minutes? An extreme example to be sure, but 100% coverage is not realistic, nor is it financially desirable.
I have no respect for any company whose sales staff claim 100% uptime or 100% reliable coverage.
The list only includes NASA, ESA and JAXA. Completely missing are the upcoming probes from China and India . Oddly, Russia doesn't seem to have anything planned.
Eh? Did NYPD and NYFD need the 911 system to find out about the WTC strikes? Terrorism isn't about killing people, it's about getting publicity.
The councilman can rest assured that the terrorists will helpfully keep their activities high-profile enough that 911 notification will not be required.
[Sheesh, why does *everything* have to be about terrorism these days.]
What they've produced is an ugly little box which you keep in your pocket, purse or belt. What they could have had -- for minimal extra investment -- is something that people would be proud to show off. Vocera need to have a conversation with the folk at Apple.
Frankly I don't care where we go, Moon, Mars or asteroids. Let's just get off this rock.
I remember seeing a photo of this array as a child. Back then it only had five dishes. I had no idea that it had been filled out. Why don't we hear about this sort of thing?
As long as all hardware components are working and there is connectivity to the machine, it doesn't matter whether the machine is a few miles away or a million miles away.
There are some fundamental differences, my friend:
Granted mainstream media have to keep their coverage dumbed down if Joe Public are going to read it. But what really bugs me is the lack of follow-up. We hear about poorly understood events as they are unfolding, then never heard about them later when they are completely understood.
A recent example is the gangway between ship and shore at the QM2's drydock. It collapsed killing lots of people, an investigation was launched. Why did it collapse? At the time it wasn't known. I'm sure it's known now, but there's been absolutely no followup.
This article about the rover is great not so much because of the level of detail but because it reports on an event with the benefit of hindsight.
Under normal space conditions, yes. But what if there is a solar flare? There was one between Apollo 16 and 17 which might have killed any moon-bound astronauts who happened to be up at the time. A trip to the moon is just a few days, Mars is a lot longer. That scared NASA, and was one of the reasons they terminated the landings.
>The rest of your objections to the use of ISS as the core of the hypothetical Mars vessel are quite valid.
Except the bit about the amount of fuel needed to shift from 52 degree orbit to equitorial orbit. I forgot to cancel out the north-south velocity, so the fromula should be sin(52)+(1-cos(52)) = 1.17. Which means it would take 117% of the original launch cost to reposition the station. Eek!
Ok, I'll bite.
- Said engine module is completely feasible. Unfortunately the fuel tank that would be needed would have to be aproximately 16 times the mass of ISS if it is to power the station to Mars, break into orbit, break out of Mars orbit, then break into Earth orbit.
- Crew would be dead before they got back, ISS doesn't have enough radiation shielding in its walls to protect the crew outside the protective shield of Earth's magnetic field. Mars doesn't offer any such protection, nor does interplanetary space. You'll need to wrap the station in lead, and add 16 times the mass to your fuel tank.
- Mars is nearly twice as far from the Sun as Earth is, which means it gets 1/4 of the light (inverse square). Therefore you'd only get a quarter of the power you'd need from the solar panels when you reach Mars. You'll need to redesign the station to quadruple the panels, and add 16 times their mass to your fuel tank.
- ISS wasn't designed as a closed system, it needs regular shipments of water (that's the primary reason why there's only two crew members on it while the shuttle is grounded). There's no water between here and Mars, and lifting it from Mars would be more expensive than shipping it from Earth. So you'll need three years worth of food and water sent to ISS in advance, and don't forget to add 16 times its mass to your fuel tank.
- ISS is in an Earth orbit inclined at 52 degrees away from the equator. Before you even get started, you'll want to shift to an equitorial orbit (especially if you're about to start shipping up literally megatons of fuel). That will cost you 40% [1-cos(52)] of ISS's original launch cost just to reposition the orbit.
In short, I think ISS is firmly anchored to exactly where it is.AOL lost 100 billion in 2003. Even if you get to put your little finger to your mouth when reading the bank ballance, remember that it is still a finite number. If investors start to think that you are not going to get bigger, expect things to turn ugly really quickly.
But according to the article:
> Today's speedy microprocessors run hot - at upwards of 200 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact, they can't go much faster without failing. Diamond microchips, on the other hand, could handle much higher temperatures, allowing them to run at speeds that would liquefy ordinary silicon.
Which is correct?
They didn't. If the ET insulation had impacted the tiles, there would have been only minor damage (a weeks worth of repair time before the next flight was estimated).
The insulation didn't hit the tiles, it hit the RCC panels at the front of the wing. These are entirely different. They are big, tough, heavy elements which turn out to be unexpectedly brittle.
Some junior NASA engineers made an unauthorised request to the military to get some photos of Columbia so that they could see if there was damage. At the same time, a senior NASA engineer made the same request. NASA management heard about the first request, and (rightly) were upset because it was made without authorisation (these photos are very expensive, only the boss can ok them). So management contacted the military and told them not to take photos at this time. Now this is the scary bit. What they didn't realise was that there was a second (authorised) request. They accidentally cancelled both.
Now how do you protect yourself against that sort of misunderstanding? The only way I can think of is to go overly bureaucratic and assign tracking numbers to everything. The amount of paperwork explodes and you drown in self imposed red tape. Is there a way for a large organisation to avoid this sort of no-fault errors without needing a signature every time someone sneezes?
Prime Minister?!?
Holy cow. When did that happen? Gee, I've been out of the country too long.
Paul Martin, eh? Hmm...
"Now arriving on platform 1 is the 10:45 from Yosemite."
"Ready to depart on platform 3 is the 12:05 to Kirkwood".
"The AT-AT from Hoth is currently boarding on platform 7."
Remember Id? Came out of nowhere, provided something that the heavy hitters didn't. Now they are a heavy hitter. It's not rocket science. (Ok, mabye it is in Id's case).
I really can't get my head around how a society could undertake such a massive project as Apollo, then fail to preserve the artifacts for future generations. Heck, I am a future generation. I was only one year old when the last Saturn flew. I've seen the Saturn V in Houston, it's really astonishing. I can only imagine what it would look like standing next to the LUT.
If I were a soldier, the first thing I'd do is reprogram my dog to walk ahead of me, not behind me. Let it step on the landmines, absorb enemy fire, etc.
Oh wait, this robot is worth $2.5m, eh? Ah, now I understand why the soldier is in front.