"Look at all the Space Station rescue vehicles that NASA has funded and decided not fly, and in many cases not to build."
The first three test vehicles for one of them were built by Scaled Composites, BTW. And although the fourth and final one was going to be built by NASA itself, the list of planned materials hints at further SC involvement.
"Obviously Scaled Composites hasn't sent anything up besides SS1, and you (as well as others) are correct that SS1 by itself simply won't scale up to orbital velocities without some very substantial structural and raw materials changes. Essentially a whole new spacecraft from the ground up."
The past ten years SC have been involved in building at least four different orbital space craft: they built the aeroshell and aerodynamic control structures of the DC-X 1/3 Scale Demonstrator for McDonnell Douglas, and entirely built the Roton test vehicle for Rotary Rocket and the X-38 Crew Return Vehicle for NASA. These programs died because funding dried up.
However, you would still be right (if entirely beside the point) that "Scaled Composites hasn't sent anything up besides SS1", if it weren't for the wings of the Pegasus rocket SC builds for Orbital Sciences, a rocket which has succesfully flown to orbit dozens of to times.
You may not trust in the space faring abilities of Burt Rutan and his team, but the space corporations of the USA do. Guess who I am going to believe.
"I wonder if this approach has been tried with the copyright extension laws, if not maybe they should be, someone can sue saying the laws can't be applied ex post facto."
Eric Eldred already tried this, and SCOTUS gave him a wedgie.
As an entrepeneur who uses Mambo commercially, I find it odd, to say the least, that Miro have been acting dumb on their websites. Of course, one should not needlessly frighten one's customers, but if your top developers run away, at least some assurance that business will continue as usual would have been nice.
Now they are pretending that nothing has happened. Does the emperor really expect us not to notice his lack of clothes?
It would have been better if Miro had responded directly, rather than via 3rd parties.
It'll re-enter like a lifting body or a glider (like the Space Shuttle). Capsules drop.
Russia had several plans for lifting body or glider manned orbital space craft, such as the Spiral.
So did NASA, which recently had Scaled Composites (of SpaceShipOne fame) develop the X-38 (notice the similarity to the Russian Bor), only to see it cancelled because of the cost. That cost, incidentally, was slightly higher than the projected cost for the Kliper, and still half that of a successful Space Shuttle flight.
That is the one thing of the US space program I still don't get. Why have a hugely expensive and dangerous shuttle program, then claim at the same time that astronauts' lives and money are so important, when you have a half-developed, modern, cheap and presumably safe system sitting on the shelves?
"Projects like the shuttle are just too expensive and large scale to keep secret."
NASA has performed a bewildering array of studies into new space craft the past 40, 50 years; that nobody knows about them is not because NASA is keeping them secret, but because nobody really cares. (That and the fact that any list of recent proposals/studies, if it exists, is hard to find.)
"But the US won't be joining in on this effort because their shuttle program is state of the art and more advanced than any russian next-generation program could ever hope to be!"
Wrong. The US won't be joining because a self-imposed law that was meant to "punish" the Russians for collaborating with Iran forbids them to. What's more, starting next year Russia is no longer obliged to ferry US astronauts from and to the ISS; that may mean that NASA will decide to stop having an astronaut stationed at the ISS at all.
"The amount of money that would be spent on a completely new shuttle design would be astronomical, especially seeing how our country is already ridiculously in debt."
You don't need a new shuttle design, you need a whole different vehicle. Shuttles are great feats of engineering, and undoubtedly they fulfilled whatever military purpose they once had well. But the shuttle does not fit today's space faring needs.
What you need is a taxi to bring people and small cargos to and from orbit (like the Kliper, or the X-38), and a heavy lifter to put chunks of space station or of manned moon/mars explorers in orbit.
As for the costs of these new craft:
$US 1,000,000,000 A single Shuttle Launch $US 0,350,000,000 Design, testing and first flight of the Kliper
You do the math.
(And if Shuttles go boom during the flight, the launch of the next one costs $3,000,000,000.)
"I'd say the Shuttle is relatively reliable for what it does. Though I think the Soyuz has an edge here."
IIRC, both systems have had two manned space flights in which cosmonauts/astronauts died, and both have had about the same number of manned flights (well over a hundred).
I'd say they're about as reliable. It might seem that the Soyuz is becoming more reliable and the Shuttle less, but we really do not have enough data to draw any, er, reliable conclusions.
What if reliability were a main goal of the manned space programs (instead of a minor detail like, say, getting people into orbit). How would space craft look then?
"Now, if you can show an instance of somone doing that (not highlighting SOME data, but highlighting NUMERICAL data) than you will have prior art. But, I am gonna guess you cant."
I guess I can, because I built a scanner like that some ten years ago. I don't have the code right here, though, so you'll just have to believe me.
My scanner (which, with a hard word, is called a natural language tokenizer, although the text-to-speech people call it a pre-processor) also scanned for names, abbreviations, mathematical formulas and other things that some linguists would call "noise".
Scanners for names had already been around for awhile, because they were used in stock news abstraction generators. The idea behind my scanner was to build something that would allow corpus linguists to build more complex grammars that were rooted more in reality than what had come before.
"No, I hate to see knowledge, information, and skill watered down."
Well, you're a hacker, and that's cool.
But we weren't talking about what it takes to be a good writer, we were talking about what the word "writer" means. And a writer is somebody who writes.
"Typically techno-fascism. Don't let users select the tools they want to use. Force them to use the tools that make your job easier."
Yada-yada-yada. It's "Force them to make their job easier." In some realms (most?) MS Word is just a toy. You wouldn't expect a professional cook to use a Fisher Price plastic oven, nor would you expect somebody in academia to use MS Word, unless they need to write a letter to auntie Jane.
That's got nothing to do with arrogance, it's got to do with "use the right tool for the job at hand". Somehow, Microsoft have managed to convince a hell of a lot of people that MS Word is suited for writing long and complex documents. Again and again that implicit claim has been disproved. There is a reason some faculties make the use of TeX obligatory, and it's got nothing to do with forcing users to do it the hard way.
"Usually they are from academic users, come in Word format, and ultimately need to be posted in HTML."
Are you trolling? When they start sending in MS Word documents, we stop calling them "academic users", regardless of how useful MS Word is for their particular needs. No self-respecting academic uses MS Word, and at my old university you would quite deservedly get a low mark if you turned something in that had been made in MS Word. (And yes, that would be noticeable; footnotes all over the place, misnumbered TOCs, and lack of substance, because the students often spent up to 90% of their allotted time in wrestling with the program instead of writing the damn paper.)
If I were you, I would just outlaw MS Word. Force users to use more sensible formats. It's good for you and even better for them.
Traditional story of a gatekeeper who is so afraid of losing his job to this here new-fangled medium that he is trying to blame TBL of everything that is wrong in this world.
Hey, Slashdot, how about a _real_ interview with TBL? Or at least, next time you write about something like this what I shall loosely refer to as an interview, give it a heading like "BBC blames Tim Berners-Lee for terrorism", which is of course the real news behind this story.
Hey moron, the claim was that he invented the web, which he did. But I guess you haven't been on the internet long enough to know the difference. It will still take a long time for you to become an old-timer.
"I know that if I were a writer, I'd be pissed as hell with people calling anybody who signs up for a blog a "writer"."
A writer is someone who writes, just like a cook is someone who cooks.
Sounds to me though that you are hooked on authority. You must have been pleased as punch when that "writer" from the BBC tried to take old Tim down a peg or two. That'll show him!
"Kinda like calling anybody who can make a web page a "programmer". Big difference."
Big difference indeed, because a web page is not a program, but a document. But I guess someone who likes his authority deep inside from behind makes his documents with MS Word, where the difference is indeed negligable.
When TBL invented the web, he wanted it to be RW, but it got repurposed almost immediately; something we (there's that "we" again) only notice when angstridden little BBC-reporters forget to prepare for an interview and are outed as the nth gatekeeper afraid to lose out to a medium they will never in a million years understand. But that aside...
Today, we (ywy) have to invent new words to describe that which the web ever was really about: wiki, blog. You're right that we should be speaking about author and page and mean the same thing as when we say blogger and wiki, but we're past that.
As we all know, the biggest dent in budgets is made by personnel costs.
Unless the information manager is only doing information management 2 or 3 hours a week, I would say it is useless for such a small company to have one on staff. If the company has such a strange spending pattern that spending on other things actually outweighs hiring an information manager, then you're not doing your job; and if you are doing your job, your job is redundant.
It's been done before. (Though that wasn't retrofitting, but design--but if you can turn a Volkswagen Beetle into a stretch limo, you can retrofit a shuttle.)
Slashdot Mirror
"Look at all the Space Station rescue vehicles that NASA has funded and decided not fly, and in many cases not to build."
The first three test vehicles for one of them were built by Scaled Composites, BTW. And although the fourth and final one was going to be built by NASA itself, the list of planned materials hints at further SC involvement.
"Obviously Scaled Composites hasn't sent anything up besides SS1, and you (as well as others) are correct that SS1 by itself simply won't scale up to orbital velocities without some very substantial structural and raw materials changes. Essentially a whole new spacecraft from the ground up."
The past ten years SC have been involved in building at least four different orbital space craft: they built the aeroshell and aerodynamic control structures of the DC-X 1/3 Scale Demonstrator for McDonnell Douglas, and entirely built the Roton test vehicle for Rotary Rocket and the X-38 Crew Return Vehicle for NASA. These programs died because funding dried up.
However, you would still be right (if entirely beside the point) that "Scaled Composites hasn't sent anything up besides SS1", if it weren't for the wings of the Pegasus rocket SC builds for Orbital Sciences, a rocket which has succesfully flown to orbit dozens of to times.
You may not trust in the space faring abilities of Burt Rutan and his team, but the space corporations of the USA do. Guess who I am going to believe.
There being:
- Virgin Galactic?
- Scaled Composites?
- just any place in orbit?
Considering your poor Googling skills though, I imagine you couldn't get a job there, despite the short corporate ladder.
"You people"? Who are you? The Redneck Anthropologist?
"I wonder if this approach has been tried with the copyright extension laws, if not maybe they should be, someone can sue saying the laws can't be applied ex post facto."
Eric Eldred already tried this, and SCOTUS gave him a wedgie.
As an entrepeneur who uses Mambo commercially, I find it odd, to say the least, that Miro have been acting dumb on their websites. Of course, one should not needlessly frighten one's customers, but if your top developers run away, at least some assurance that business will continue as usual would have been nice.
Now they are pretending that nothing has happened. Does the emperor really expect us not to notice his lack of clothes?
It would have been better if Miro had responded directly, rather than via 3rd parties.
It'll re-enter like a lifting body or a glider (like the Space Shuttle). Capsules drop.
Russia had several plans for lifting body or glider manned orbital space craft, such as the Spiral.
So did NASA, which recently had Scaled Composites (of SpaceShipOne fame) develop the X-38 (notice the similarity to the Russian Bor), only to see it cancelled because of the cost. That cost, incidentally, was slightly higher than the projected cost for the Kliper, and still half that of a successful Space Shuttle flight.
That is the one thing of the US space program I still don't get. Why have a hugely expensive and dangerous shuttle program, then claim at the same time that astronauts' lives and money are so important, when you have a half-developed, modern, cheap and presumably safe system sitting on the shelves?
"Projects like the shuttle are just too expensive and large scale to keep secret."
NASA has performed a bewildering array of studies into new space craft the past 40, 50 years; that nobody knows about them is not because NASA is keeping them secret, but because nobody really cares. (That and the fact that any list of recent proposals/studies, if it exists, is hard to find.)
"But the US won't be joining in on this effort because their shuttle program is state of the art and more advanced than any russian next-generation program could ever hope to be!"
Wrong. The US won't be joining because a self-imposed law that was meant to "punish" the Russians for collaborating with Iran forbids them to. What's more, starting next year Russia is no longer obliged to ferry US astronauts from and to the ISS; that may mean that NASA will decide to stop having an astronaut stationed at the ISS at all.
"The amount of money that would be spent on a completely new shuttle design would be astronomical, especially seeing how our country is already ridiculously in debt."
You don't need a new shuttle design, you need a whole different vehicle. Shuttles are great feats of engineering, and undoubtedly they fulfilled whatever military purpose they once had well. But the shuttle does not fit today's space faring needs.
What you need is a taxi to bring people and small cargos to and from orbit (like the Kliper, or the X-38), and a heavy lifter to put chunks of space station or of manned moon/mars explorers in orbit.
As for the costs of these new craft:
$US 1,000,000,000 A single Shuttle Launch
$US 0,350,000,000 Design, testing and first flight of the Kliper
You do the math.
(And if Shuttles go boom during the flight, the launch of the next one costs $3,000,000,000.)
"I'd say the Shuttle is relatively reliable for what it does. Though I think the Soyuz has an edge here."
IIRC, both systems have had two manned space flights in which cosmonauts/astronauts died, and both have had about the same number of manned flights (well over a hundred).
I'd say they're about as reliable. It might seem that the Soyuz is becoming more reliable and the Shuttle less, but we really do not have enough data to draw any, er, reliable conclusions.
What if reliability were a main goal of the manned space programs (instead of a minor detail like, say, getting people into orbit). How would space craft look then?
"Now, if you can show an instance of somone doing that (not highlighting SOME data, but highlighting NUMERICAL data) than you will have prior art. But, I am gonna guess you cant."
I guess I can, because I built a scanner like that some ten years ago. I don't have the code right here, though, so you'll just have to believe me.
My scanner (which, with a hard word, is called a natural language tokenizer, although the text-to-speech people call it a pre-processor) also scanned for names, abbreviations, mathematical formulas and other things that some linguists would call "noise".
Scanners for names had already been around for awhile, because they were used in stock news abstraction generators. The idea behind my scanner was to build something that would allow corpus linguists to build more complex grammars that were rooted more in reality than what had come before.
"No, I hate to see knowledge, information, and skill watered down."
Well, you're a hacker, and that's cool.
But we weren't talking about what it takes to be a good writer, we were talking about what the word "writer" means. And a writer is somebody who writes.
"Typically techno-fascism. Don't let users select the tools they want to use. Force them to use the tools that make your job easier."
Yada-yada-yada. It's "Force them to make their job easier." In some realms (most?) MS Word is just a toy. You wouldn't expect a professional cook to use a Fisher Price plastic oven, nor would you expect somebody in academia to use MS Word, unless they need to write a letter to auntie Jane.
That's got nothing to do with arrogance, it's got to do with "use the right tool for the job at hand". Somehow, Microsoft have managed to convince a hell of a lot of people that MS Word is suited for writing long and complex documents. Again and again that implicit claim has been disproved. There is a reason some faculties make the use of TeX obligatory, and it's got nothing to do with forcing users to do it the hard way.
Re: inventing new words to describe the old default situation.
This is called shifting baselines, I found out just a minute ago. (Via Joho the Blog.)
"Usually they are from academic users, come in Word format, and ultimately need to be posted in HTML."
Are you trolling? When they start sending in MS Word documents, we stop calling them "academic users", regardless of how useful MS Word is for their particular needs. No self-respecting academic uses MS Word, and at my old university you would quite deservedly get a low mark if you turned something in that had been made in MS Word. (And yes, that would be noticeable; footnotes all over the place, misnumbered TOCs, and lack of substance, because the students often spent up to 90% of their allotted time in wrestling with the program instead of writing the damn paper.)
If I were you, I would just outlaw MS Word. Force users to use more sensible formats. It's good for you and even better for them.
Traditional story of a gatekeeper who is so afraid of losing his job to this here new-fangled medium that he is trying to blame TBL of everything that is wrong in this world.
Hey, Slashdot, how about a _real_ interview with TBL? Or at least, next time you write about something like this what I shall loosely refer to as an interview, give it a heading like "BBC blames Tim Berners-Lee for terrorism", which is of course the real news behind this story.
Hey moron, the claim was that he invented the web, which he did. But I guess you haven't been on the internet long enough to know the difference. It will still take a long time for you to become an old-timer.
"I'm glad I'm not the only person who thinks so."
Well, they say one is born every day.
"I know that if I were a writer, I'd be pissed as hell with people calling anybody who signs up for a blog a "writer"."
A writer is someone who writes, just like a cook is someone who cooks.
Sounds to me though that you are hooked on authority. You must have been pleased as punch when that "writer" from the BBC tried to take old Tim down a peg or two. That'll show him!
"Kinda like calling anybody who can make a web page a "programmer". Big difference."
Big difference indeed, because a web page is not a program, but a document. But I guess someone who likes his authority deep inside from behind makes his documents with MS Word, where the difference is indeed negligable.
Bah!
When TBL invented the web, he wanted it to be RW, but it got repurposed almost immediately; something we (there's that "we" again) only notice when angstridden little BBC-reporters forget to prepare for an interview and are outed as the nth gatekeeper afraid to lose out to a medium they will never in a million years understand. But that aside...
Today, we (ywy) have to invent new words to describe that which the web ever was really about: wiki, blog. You're right that we should be speaking about author and page and mean the same thing as when we say blogger and wiki, but we're past that.
Thank you for that insightful post, but perhaps next time you could save it for your blog, where it would be more at home.
(I did, of course, notice that your mind was taking a crap.)
"Umm Amazon existed in 1998."
So?
As we all know, the biggest dent in budgets is made by personnel costs.
Unless the information manager is only doing information management 2 or 3 hours a week, I would say it is useless for such a small company to have one on staff. If the company has such a strange spending pattern that spending on other things actually outweighs hiring an information manager, then you're not doing your job; and if you are doing your job, your job is redundant.
How frickin' hard could it be?
It's been done before. (Though that wasn't retrofitting, but design--but if you can turn a Volkswagen Beetle into a stretch limo, you can retrofit a shuttle.)
Books are not protected by DRM. Author's interests are. Books would be much better off if they could be disseminated as freely as possible.