I've written software that supports the launch of manned and unmanned launch vehicles, so I have some familiarity with the process. Everything used to be done by the government, but most of it has been privatised. Delta used to be run by NASA's Delta Project Office. That office no longer exists and Boeing deals directly with the customers and the range. NASA isn't involved, except for some minor range and engineering support.
I'm just sick and tiring of hearing conspiracy theories about how "The Government" is preventing the bold pioneers of private industry from going into space. If they can't raise the money, find customers or do the engineering, someone always pops up and blames NASA and "The Government". It couldn't possibly be because they had no business plan, investors or a working launch vehicle.
Government approval is always needed, it just won't be granted in some cases, and they'll make you pay to prove to them that they should let you.
Please be more specific. You are making vague assertions.
Boeing and Lockheed-Martin have already negotiated for the use of government facilities at the Eastern Range (Cape Canaveral) and Western Range (Vandenberg). They already have type approval for their launch vehicles. If you want to launch something, you sign a contract with a private company, not the government. They schedule the launch with the appropriate range, integrate your spacecraft, and launch it for you. You only need to obtain government permission if the satellite is being sold to a foreign country, triggering an export control review.
If launch costs could be reduced to $100 per pound of payload, what would be the new applications of space flight? Don't say space tourism, that is manned spaceflight and has different safety requirements and costs.
As the article pointed out, when you are launching a $100 million satellite, cheaper launch services would be nice but they wouldn't make much of a difference in your decision to launch a satellite. You would be more concerned about the reliability of the launch vehicle. Nobody wants to be the pioneer with a new or redesigned launch vehicle. More often than not, something goes wrong and your satellite is lost.
If price is the only problem and nobody will bother using rockets, why won't the U.S. government remove its restrictions against non-government launches?
What restrictions?
If you want to launch a satellite today, just scrounge up $50 million and call up Boeing. They will sign a contract with you and launch your satellite. Government approval isn't needed unless you are doing something weird like launching a personal death-ray battle station.
If you are developing a new launch vehicle, you will have to convince the government that you can keep flaming wreckage from landing on nearby cities before they let you launch a rocket.
I had to beg to get a postscript printer at work. The vast majority of printers there are HP PCL LaserJets. Most of the postscript printers disappeared along with the Macs when Windows was declared to be the standard corporate platform.
My first computer was a DIGI-COMP 1, a 3-bit mechanical computer. It was built out of pieces of plastic and wire.
In high school, I learned how to program on the school district's RCA Spectra 70 mainframe that was connected to a 110 bps KSR-35 teletype in each high school via modem. The RCA Spectra 70 was a clone of the IBM 360, except for the reliability bits. It crashed all the time. It offered Dartmouth BASIC, COBOL, WATFOR FORTRAN and RPG.
My first electronic computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1 (AKA Trash-80) with 4K of DRAM. I really wanted an Apple II but I couldn't afford one.
This is the reason why people need to hold their nose and vote for Democrats. Republicans are so much in the pocket of large corporations that they try to elminate all methods of redress that individuals have.
Since I'm a Republican, maybe I should sue you for slander. The Democrats running my state were eager to sell out the average citizen by passing UCITA into law. The corporations say "jump!", they say "how high?"
Gross generalizations are usually inaccurate. There are many different varieties of Democrats and Republicans. I used to have a Republican congresswoman who voted with the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. If you think that a Democratic (or Republican) politician is going to protect you from the abuses of corporations, you need to lay off the weed. Many politicians are more interested in campaign contributions, bread and circuses, and good P.R. than they are in principles and freedom.
NASA does a lot of research and development on remote sensing from aircraft and satellites. This is closely tied to weather and climate research. It isn't much of a jump.
Don't expect science from the EPA or Ralph Nader and his minions.
Pray tell me how one gets one's message out as much as, say, Rush Limbaugh, when the big players in the media systematically refuse to carry your message.
Oh, I don't know, you might start with talent and a message that people want to hear.
Of course, "progressives" can't get on the radio because The Man(TM) is holding them back. It wouldn't have anything to do with ratings.
Many budget classical records and CDs used eastern European orchestras because they are much cheaper to hire than western European or American orchestras. That is also why they are popular for movie soundtracks.
China does have legitimate security concerns about using a closed source operating system. U.S. intelligence agencies have a history of arranging for design modifications in equipment provided to intelligence targets.
Would the NSA sign off on the use of an operating system for sensitive data by the U.S. Government if they weren't allowed to audit and evaluate the source code?
You can multicast with IPV4. Multicasting supports UDP, not TCP. You need routers that support IGMP.
NASA is already using multicasting on some of their internal networks to efficiently send high-rate spacecraft telemetry streams to multiple destinations.
During the last Olympic Games, the IOC got its fingers burned by initially disqualifying some women competitors, alleging they were men (!). Eventually, genetic tests proved the girls were really girls.
I just have to ask, why wasn't a physical examination sufficient to determine the sex of the athletes? Excluding weird genetic defects, you either have testicles or ovaries.
I thought trademarks were only valid while they were actually being used to sell something. You could always start selling Garblefizz(TM) bottled water or something else that was simple to do.
It seems like it should be a relatively simple and profitable business. 99% of it could be automated. The only difficult part that I see is how to avoid getting caught in the legal crossfire over trademark disputes. The domain names should be first come, first served, unless you have a court order transferring the domain.
Why do we need NSI? Their customer service is terrible and they seem interested in becoming the Microsoft of domain name registration.
How difficult would it be to replace them? The DNS database isn't complicated and shouldn't be difficult to replicate. The customer interface and billing software would be more complicated.
TAPR has a PC board that will let you use a CompactFlash memory card as a replacement for an IDE disk drive. You plug the memory card into the PC board and attach the IDE drive cable to the connector on the PC board. It looks ideal for Linux based controllers, routers and firewalls. Flash memory cards are getting cheaper. I've seen 16 MB flash cards selling for about $50.
I know some people who have used PCs for radio repeater controllers. These are usually installed in unheated shacks exposed to the weather. The big problem is the hard drive. One solution is to put the hard drive in an insulated box to keep it warm and protect it from rapid temperature changes.
The OS/2 Workplace Shell had a nice, advanced GUI. Somewhere I have an IBM book (CUA?) that described the ideas and principles behind the new GUI. Everything was supposed to be document centered. If you needed a new spreadsheet, you dragged a new spreadsheet from a spreadsheet template icon to the desktop and then double clicked on it. You didn't directly run a spreadsheet program. Everything was an object and you could right-click for the object's methods and properties. Microsoft stole some of the elements of the GUI when they created Windows 95.
But I don't want customizability. I want a standard GUI that looks and behaves the same way on every computer. I don't want to have to figure out how to use some bizarre personalized mutation of the program's interface every time I use a different computer.
You are all wrong:-). Baseband means the data signal is directly connected to the wire, like an RS-232 serial interface. Broadband means that the data signal is used to modulate one or more carriers, also known as FDM (frequency division multiplexing). Broadband supports multiple channels.
The signal transmitted by an FM radio station is broadband, the audio output of an FM receiver is baseband.
The base in 10base2 stands for baseband, the broad in 10broad36 stands for broadband.
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I'm just sick and tiring of hearing conspiracy theories about how "The Government" is preventing the bold pioneers of private industry from going into space. If they can't raise the money, find customers or do the engineering, someone always pops up and blames NASA and "The Government". It couldn't possibly be because they had no business plan, investors or a working launch vehicle.
Please be more specific. You are making vague assertions.
Boeing and Lockheed-Martin have already negotiated for the use of government facilities at the Eastern Range (Cape Canaveral) and Western Range (Vandenberg). They already have type approval for their launch vehicles. If you want to launch something, you sign a contract with a private company, not the government. They schedule the launch with the appropriate range, integrate your spacecraft, and launch it for you. You only need to obtain government permission if the satellite is being sold to a foreign country, triggering an export control review.
You can add a security fuse that is blown after the chip's ROM is programmed. Once the security fuse is blown, the ROM can't be reprogrammed.
As the article pointed out, when you are launching a $100 million satellite, cheaper launch services would be nice but they wouldn't make much of a difference in your decision to launch a satellite. You would be more concerned about the reliability of the launch vehicle. Nobody wants to be the pioneer with a new or redesigned launch vehicle. More often than not, something goes wrong and your satellite is lost.
What restrictions?
If you want to launch a satellite today, just scrounge up $50 million and call up Boeing. They will sign a contract with you and launch your satellite. Government approval isn't needed unless you are doing something weird like launching a personal death-ray battle station.
If you are developing a new launch vehicle, you will have to convince the government that you can keep flaming wreckage from landing on nearby cities before they let you launch a rocket.
Maybe I'm too old, I find it much easier to read text printed on a good laser printer. CRTs are low rez and hard on my eyes.
I had to beg to get a postscript printer at work. The vast majority of printers there are HP PCL LaserJets. Most of the postscript printers disappeared along with the Macs when Windows was declared to be the standard corporate platform.
In high school, I learned how to program on the school district's RCA Spectra 70 mainframe that was connected to a 110 bps KSR-35 teletype in each high school via modem. The RCA Spectra 70 was a clone of the IBM 360, except for the reliability bits. It crashed all the time. It offered Dartmouth BASIC, COBOL, WATFOR FORTRAN and RPG.
My first electronic computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1 (AKA Trash-80) with 4K of DRAM. I really wanted an Apple II but I couldn't afford one.
Since I'm a Republican, maybe I should sue you for slander. The Democrats running my state were eager to sell out the average citizen by passing UCITA into law. The corporations say "jump!", they say "how high?"
Gross generalizations are usually inaccurate. There are many different varieties of Democrats and Republicans. I used to have a Republican congresswoman who voted with the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. If you think that a Democratic (or Republican) politician is going to protect you from the abuses of corporations, you need to lay off the weed. Many politicians are more interested in campaign contributions, bread and circuses, and good P.R. than they are in principles and freedom.
Don't expect science from the EPA or Ralph Nader and his minions.
Oh, I don't know, you might start with talent and a message that people want to hear.
Of course, "progressives" can't get on the radio because The Man(TM) is holding them back. It wouldn't have anything to do with ratings.
Many budget classical records and CDs used eastern European orchestras because they are much cheaper to hire than western European or American orchestras. That is also why they are popular for movie soundtracks.
Would the NSA sign off on the use of an operating system for sensitive data by the U.S. Government if they weren't allowed to audit and evaluate the source code?
NASA is already using multicasting on some of their internal networks to efficiently send high-rate spacecraft telemetry streams to multiple destinations.
Computers break, even expensive ones. That is why there are warranties and service contracts.
I just have to ask, why wasn't a physical examination sufficient to determine the sex of the athletes? Excluding weird genetic defects, you either have testicles or ovaries.
I thought trademarks were only valid while they were actually being used to sell something. You could always start selling Garblefizz(TM) bottled water or something else that was simple to do.
It seems like it should be a relatively simple and profitable business. 99% of it could be automated. The only difficult part that I see is how to avoid getting caught in the legal crossfire over trademark disputes. The domain names should be first come, first served, unless you have a court order transferring the domain.
How difficult would it be to replace them? The DNS database isn't complicated and shouldn't be difficult to replicate. The customer interface and billing software would be more complicated.
TAPR has a PC board that will let you use a CompactFlash memory card as a replacement for an IDE disk drive. You plug the memory card into the PC board and attach the IDE drive cable to the connector on the PC board. It looks ideal for Linux based controllers, routers and firewalls. Flash memory cards are getting cheaper. I've seen 16 MB flash cards selling for about $50.
The DSL interface box is a modem. The data is used to modulate one or more carriers.
I know some people who have used PCs for radio repeater controllers. These are usually installed in unheated shacks exposed to the weather. The big problem is the hard drive. One solution is to put the hard drive in an insulated box to keep it warm and protect it from rapid temperature changes.
The OS/2 Workplace Shell had a nice, advanced GUI. Somewhere I have an IBM book (CUA?) that described the ideas and principles behind the new GUI. Everything was supposed to be document centered. If you needed a new spreadsheet, you dragged a new spreadsheet from a spreadsheet template icon to the desktop and then double clicked on it. You didn't directly run a spreadsheet program. Everything was an object and you could right-click for the object's methods and properties. Microsoft stole some of the elements of the GUI when they created Windows 95.
But I don't want customizability. I want a standard GUI that looks and behaves the same way on every computer. I don't want to have to figure out how to use some bizarre personalized mutation of the program's interface every time I use a different computer.
The signal transmitted by an FM radio station is broadband, the audio output of an FM receiver is baseband.
The base in 10base2 stands for baseband, the broad in 10broad36 stands for broadband.