I do find it funny that people will shrug off the probability of something bad happening to them if it's less than being struck by lightning, and then go ahead and by a super-mega-lotto ticket.
Well airline security wasn't really an issue before Al-Queda's sightseeing tour of New York and DC, either.
Cybersecurity isn't sexy because there isn't a body count. Terrorists strike an airliner, there are 100 souls. Terrorists strike a refinery, there might be a couple of workers and firemen. The real impact is sticker shock at the gas pump. Terrorists strike a bank computer, and people can't use their ATM cards. Computer security really doesn't rank up there.
As a geek I would like to think I'm saving the world. But we do have to have some perspective.
Anyone else wondering about the exact timing of this? It sure is handy to have a semi-scandal pop up just in time to gloss past the Prez's piss poor performance on the stage last night.
That might explain that "I'm a Volcanologist, if you see this van breaking away ay high speed, try to keep up" bumper stickers on some pretty fast moving trucks in Route 504...
I agree. If you look at pictures of Mt. St. Helen's today, you see that the present lava dome is in the middle of a giant crater. That giant crater is where the rest of the mountain used to be.
So I suppose the Toothbrush was classified during it's early development because it kept fighting men's teeth clean, and Vitamin C was considered war material by the British Navy.
Without that motivation ( capitalism in Europe from ~1500s on, industrialism in Europe and America from ~1800s on), the only motivator for massive changes in the way people live their lives has been war.
Well those are two big exceptions right there. To which I would like to add Religion, patriotism, famine, disease, trade, and just plain curiosity.
I'm pretty sure the Pyramids was Egypts answer to the Etruscan threat. And the domestication of cattle was part of the Anatolian war machine.
I would like to point out that since the Columbia accident, the U.S. is holding up construction. We weren't batting 1000 before the accident either. They may have had budget and manpower problems, but their technology is pretty rock solid. We bet all our eggs on the space shuttle. We lost.
As far as the incremental approach, it's crap. The complexities of trans-planetary flight are a quantum leap above that of orbital flight. Most of the conditions in orbit can be re-created on the ground. (Ok, maybe not zero-g. But certainly the sealed environment.)
What incremental development gives you is an illusion of progress. Just look at the shuttle. We have dumped 30 years and countless billions into it's development. We have nothing to show for it. It has fewer capabilities than the Apollo program. It costs more to launch. The vehicle is starting to make the Russian program safe by comparison.
There are a lot of problems with flying cars as a concept, before you even work out the implementations. Are you going to trust an aircraft to a population that can't be bothered to change the oil? Where are they going to take off and land from? How are you going to coordinate millions of these things trying to get back and forth from work?
For your information, stability and poor power/weight is the START of problems. And they haven't been solved. A stable aircraft is very fuel inefficient and slow. A fast and fuel efficient design isn't very stable. It's a fact of life. Power requires fuel. What good is a thrust to weight ratio greater than one if you can't make it past the end of the driveway without a top-off?
Hiller's car demonstrated 2 critical facts that doom any subsequent attempts to wed a car and a plane. First: for all the trouble of getting a pilot's license, most people opt for the real thing. Second: design properties for a good car are almost mutually exclusive with the design requirements of a good airplane.
Um, the X-prize entries are not in orbit. Yes, they are 90 miles above the surface of the earth, but they drop like a rock as soon as the trust is cut.
Orbit is a process by which you are constantly falling, but your forward is so fast that the Earth is out of the road by the time you do. Orbit requires a tremendous amount of energy.
Think about it. Satellites in low orbit traverse the earth every 90 minutes. All of the X-prize entries land roughly where they took off.
Nuclear weapons, yes. Nuclear power came about after the war. The first nuclear reactor was built by the Soviets and went into operation in December, 1946. Construction on the first reactor in the U.S. wasn't started until April 1947.
There are plenty of counter-examples though. The automobile, steel-suspension bridges, elevators, electric light, and the telephone have neglible military value, yet they seemed to flourish. Indeed they flourished in peace-time. And each has radically transformed society as we know it.
The airplane was actually developed for civilian uses first, and only became a military technology after entrepreneurs worked out the fundimental problems of control surfaces, navigation, range, and cargo capacity. The same is true with rail, trucks and automobiles.
Skip mars. If you needed to move civilization in a hurry a much better bet would be to simply construct a large fleet of space platforms. We would require sealed environments to live in on Mars. We would have less access to sunlight on Mars because of it's orbit.
A better use of the energy required to evacuate the Earth would be to simply keep it in orbit and move there. If Earth's particular location is bad, strap on some engines and you can move our "Super Platform (or better yet a couple of them)" somewhere else.
But consumers, thanks to Intel mostly, don't understand that, and so AMD came up with their numbering system instead. (they were lucky this worked, because at least one prior attempts at this, by Cyrix, failed utterly.)
If it was anything like my Cyrix-base laptop, the "numbers" were probably more of disclaimer than a sales point.
Someone mentioned licensing. There are also a few architectural headaches that come with a dual core design. The real bottleneck to performance hasn't been the MIPS of the processors, it's been the speed of the I/O bus.
Adding a second core is like throwing in a second engine onto a car while leaving all of the other components the same. Sure it's twice as powerful. But all the extra power is good for is spinning the tires. Towing capacity is a function of what your suspension, brakes, and drive train will handle. Speed is a function of how much traction your tires provide, as well as factors like road conditions, speed limits, etc. Brakes suspension and drive train are also big factors for speed. Your transmisson has a top gear, and once there after a certain land speed you will red-line the engine.
Lack of reason has certainly not kept people from doing stupid things in the past. Hell Nixon had the 1972 election in the bag, but his staff still pressed on with the Watergate Burglaries.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the first answer is always "I didn't do anything."
I do find it funny that people will shrug off the probability of something bad happening to them if it's less than being struck by lightning, and then go ahead and by a super-mega-lotto ticket.
Cybersecurity isn't sexy because there isn't a body count. Terrorists strike an airliner, there are 100 souls. Terrorists strike a refinery, there might be a couple of workers and firemen. The real impact is sticker shock at the gas pump. Terrorists strike a bank computer, and people can't use their ATM cards. Computer security really doesn't rank up there.
As a geek I would like to think I'm saving the world. But we do have to have some perspective.
(Tinfoil cap, check.)
That might explain that "I'm a Volcanologist, if you see this van breaking away ay high speed, try to keep up" bumper stickers on some pretty fast moving trucks in Route 504...
I agree. If you look at pictures of Mt. St. Helen's today, you see that the present lava dome is in the middle of a giant crater. That giant crater is where the rest of the mountain used to be.
Oh. Nevermind
Or would that be a magma flow war?
Survivor XXIII - Utopia Planetia
So I suppose the Toothbrush was classified during it's early development because it kept fighting men's teeth clean, and Vitamin C was considered war material by the British Navy.
Well those are two big exceptions right there. To which I would like to add Religion, patriotism, famine, disease, trade, and just plain curiosity.
I'm pretty sure the Pyramids was Egypts answer to the Etruscan threat. And the domestication of cattle was part of the Anatolian war machine.
As far as the incremental approach, it's crap. The complexities of trans-planetary flight are a quantum leap above that of orbital flight. Most of the conditions in orbit can be re-created on the ground. (Ok, maybe not zero-g. But certainly the sealed environment.)
What incremental development gives you is an illusion of progress. Just look at the shuttle. We have dumped 30 years and countless billions into it's development. We have nothing to show for it. It has fewer capabilities than the Apollo program. It costs more to launch. The vehicle is starting to make the Russian program safe by comparison.
For your information, stability and poor power/weight is the START of problems. And they haven't been solved. A stable aircraft is very fuel inefficient and slow. A fast and fuel efficient design isn't very stable. It's a fact of life. Power requires fuel. What good is a thrust to weight ratio greater than one if you can't make it past the end of the driveway without a top-off?
Hiller's car demonstrated 2 critical facts that doom any subsequent attempts to wed a car and a plane. First: for all the trouble of getting a pilot's license, most people opt for the real thing. Second: design properties for a good car are almost mutually exclusive with the design requirements of a good airplane.
It worked for the Mesoptamians...
Then the Egyptians...
And after them the Greeks...
And after them the Romans...
Every other elected office is fair game, though.
Orbit is a process by which you are constantly falling, but your forward is so fast that the Earth is out of the road by the time you do. Orbit requires a tremendous amount of energy.
Think about it. Satellites in low orbit traverse the earth every 90 minutes. All of the X-prize entries land roughly where they took off.
National Defense: 379 billion
Education, Training, employment and Social Services: 81 Billion
And we'll get there in our flying cars.
Nuclear weapons, yes. Nuclear power came about after the war. The first nuclear reactor was built by the Soviets and went into operation in December, 1946. Construction on the first reactor in the U.S. wasn't started until April 1947.
There are plenty of counter-examples though. The automobile, steel-suspension bridges, elevators, electric light, and the telephone have neglible military value, yet they seemed to flourish. Indeed they flourished in peace-time. And each has radically transformed society as we know it.
The airplane was actually developed for civilian uses first, and only became a military technology after entrepreneurs worked out the fundimental problems of control surfaces, navigation, range, and cargo capacity. The same is true with rail, trucks and automobiles.
History is not so cut and dry.
Well that can't be. A typewriter from 1981 couldn't produce ][. The open and close brackets didn't come about until Microsoft Word.
A better use of the energy required to evacuate the Earth would be to simply keep it in orbit and move there. If Earth's particular location is bad, strap on some engines and you can move our "Super Platform (or better yet a couple of them)" somewhere else.
If it was anything like my Cyrix-base laptop, the "numbers" were probably more of disclaimer than a sales point.
Adding a second core is like throwing in a second engine onto a car while leaving all of the other components the same. Sure it's twice as powerful. But all the extra power is good for is spinning the tires. Towing capacity is a function of what your suspension, brakes, and drive train will handle. Speed is a function of how much traction your tires provide, as well as factors like road conditions, speed limits, etc. Brakes suspension and drive train are also big factors for speed. Your transmisson has a top gear, and once there after a certain land speed you will red-line the engine.
Lack of reason has certainly not kept people from doing stupid things in the past. Hell Nixon had the 1972 election in the bag, but his staff still pressed on with the Watergate Burglaries.