I'm not against controlled explosions, either. They're about to take me home.
But until we mature, the more energy we have laying around, be it controlled explosions or otherwise, the more energy will be available to some idiot to do something naughty with.
It's probably useless to try and keep high energy under tight wraps. We tried that with nuclear proliferation, and while it worked fairly well for 50 years, it's showing its age.
We need to mature as a species AS we gain access to more energy.
I agree with you. They need vaccines, bandages, etc far more than they do access. But if the satellite is up there, access is cheap, and it doesn't push vaccines and bandages away, IMHO it's still good. At the very least, it gives them a more direct path to let others know what supplies they need.
There's an extra ring of authenticity to, "I need xxx and yyy, and z patients suffer every month because I don't have them," over "Please donate $$$ so that doctors in can have the supplies they need." Not that either plea is guaranteed to be better than the other, of course.
I won't dispute your numbers, but I'll view them in a different light. First off, I doubt you'll ever think of lifting anything less than 1000kg (about a ton, for a more visceral number) to LEO or geo.
So new we're talking about something like 2.3 megawatt-hours, (or 5 times that) the output of a small generating station focused on a compact car. Even with your improved efficiency, that's still a pretty high energy density. Rockets generally reach orbital velocity in much less than an hour, pushing your energy density up higher.
Even if the space elevator (of which I approve, by the way) does take a day to lift loads to geo, you can bet that there will be multiple loads at various stages of lift, simultaneously. It will still take a generating station to run the thing, though I suspect it will be solar-powered, at the top. Your idea of scavenging energy from the return trip is good, but I suspect that until we get asteroid mining running, most of the sheer weight will be one-way, up. Most of the returning weight will be people and some specialty space-manufactured goods.
We will still need some serious energy, and more maturity.
IMHO, you have to burn out the immaturity before becoming truly spacefaring.
Another post talks about how we shouldn't put men in space as long as we have to do it on top of controlled explosives. But the controlled explosives brings home a key point: It takes a LOT of energy to get into orbit, and even more energy to leave orbit. You can get that energy with controlled explosives, or some other way, but we're then quibbling about matters of efficiency. Even at 100% efficiency, it still takes a LOT of energy to reach orbit or beyond.
Ready access to orbit and beyond means ready access to that much energy. As long as we're an immature species, ready access to that much energy means that it's practically certain that someone is going to use it for immature purposes. (war)
We don't currently have ready access to orbit and beyond, and we're already struggling to avoid wiping ourselves out. We probably need ready access to an order of magnitude more energy before we're really 'there', spacewise, and that might mean an order of magnitude more likely to wipe ourselves out, too.
But what can really make those hospitals and schools effective, and multiply the value of each one of them many times, is satellites. An isolated hospital or school out in the rough really amounts to a few dedicated workers trying push the world uphill. Give them a satellite link, and the rest of the world can easily give them help and make them more effective. (Open Source style)
"If only I knew more about surgery, I could save this man's/woman's leg instead of amputating." How about remote assistance that can give that local doctor a shot at saving the leg?
a million miles away, back on Day One when Icaza started talking up Mono?
An eventual attack by Microsoft of some sort, be it fuzzily defined protocols, patents, or something critical they 'forgot' to document was inevitable.
I actually figured that Microsoft would let Mono go on a bit longer before slamming the lid, and would have let the Linux community waste more effort and become more dependent on it.
I had an optimistic hope that perhaps Icaza was clever enough to walk a tightrope and come up with an unassailable implementation for Mono. I didn't see how it could be done, but he's much more programmer than me, and perhaps clever enough.
But what really stinks is that I have this cynical a view of Microsoft and their ethics. What stinks even worse is that generally believing the worse appears justified. We'll see what happens with Mono.
>Sorry, I was flashing back to how NEOCONSERVATIVES slammed the Clinton administration. Sucks to take your own medicine, doesn't it?
Bad comparison... Slamming Clinton was "Right Thinking." Since we're now talking about the opposite side of things, we must be talking about, "Wrong Thinking," when the shoe is on the other foot.
In Al Franken's new book, he makes an interesting response to this "Liberals hate America!" type of claim.
He says that the far right loves America the way a 4-year-old loves his/her Mommy - anyone who says anything bad about Mommy must be BAD!
On the other hand, there is the way the mother loves her 4-year-old son/daugher - realizing that nurturing and behavior modification are needed, loving the kid in spite of flaws and helping to correct them.
Perhaps the latter view doesn't apply to all of these items, but it is another point of view to apply toward criticism of America.
Otherwise, I find the Terms Of Service of my cable provider absolutely abhorrent, and their plain-old service isn't 100%, especially the DNS.
Fortunately they don't seem to be enforcing the "no servers of any kind" rule, though I haven't needed to have my SSH port open for a few months now, anyway. But I'd jump ship in a minute for better TOS, assuming the price jump wasn't TOO bad.
Dave Chess wrote an automatic level generator for Doom, called SLIGE. Search against "SLIGE" and "doom" and you'll find it on top, add "chess" if you wish.
I've never actually tried one of these levels myself, but it is automatically generated content for a game, pertinent to the thread. Imagine a pseudorandom (deterministic, repeatable) in-game SLIGE based on x and y coordinates, a garbage-collecting in-core map, and you could have infinite space to play in. The map keeps expanding in your direction of travel, and it gets thrown away behind you. (There would be some problems of course, especially with switches, objects, and monsters.)
The article (Yes, I RTFA.) talks about the responsivness of the new kernel, showing dramatic improvements in active and maximum latencies. Yet at the same time, there are people working very hard on a set of 'interactivity patches' and complaining of skipping when playing music on 2.6.
I haven't followed those discussions back to the beginning, so I don't know if they're gilding the lilly. But the intense work on interactive scheduling *now* scares me about like the late work on the VM did with the 2.4.0 release.
Just like the VM was the Achilles heel of 2.4 will interactive response, particularly playing music on a system under load, be the bane of 2.6?
Actually, some of the current shuttle design came out of military dictates. They wanted to be able to access high-inclination orbits normally useful for spy satellites, as well as Vandenberg launch/return. These requirements drove the delta-wing design, specifically.
The Vandenberg requirement went away. Spy satellites go up on expendables. Most science is close enough to equatorial that a simpler shuttle design would have sufficed.
But in making the ISS a joint US-Soviet project, we were pushed back into high-inclination orbits, in order that we could both get at it. So for the current ISS, the current shuttle isn't a bad design.
I guess this qualifies as an urban legend, and I certainly would not treat it as factual. It predates me, but is still interesting.
Supposedly, IBM was building aa semiconductor fabricator in the late 60's/early 70's, but due to a recession they were 'slowing' the project and had a building shell, but no equipment. They filled the empty building with documents being subpoenaed by the feds for the antitrust case.
Re:Not an Athlon64, but an Opteron
on
AMD64 Preview
·
· Score: 1
More to the point, you forgot Celeron.
If you want to complicate things more, you can bring up Pentium-M, but then of course you'd have to bring up the various flavors of Mobile Athlon, but then you'd also have to bring up the various flavors of Pentium-4.
As someone else mentioned, you also forgot Itanium and Itanium 2. If you want to bring up the differences between Opteron 1xx and 2xx you have to bring up McKinley, Deerfield, and Madison, and the plethora of cache options between them.
Or just give up. Realize that AMDs 64 bit line really isn't here in volume yet, and that's why it may look confusing. IMHO, it's approximately as mixed-up as Intel's.
Usually when a girl is violating the dress code, a male teacher will find a woman to enforce the dress code. My wife has been asked to do so when she has been substitute teaching. (This is at a middle school, not a high school.)
Aren't the TRUE marks of quality on computers the 'Intel Inside' and 'Designed for Windows' labels?
For those who can't detect humor without emoticons, I took the 'Intel Inside' sticker from my company-issued laptop and put it on the company-issued wastebasket. The 'Designed for Windows 2000' sticker went on the urinal at the nearest restroom.
Not to truly disparage either product, but IMHO the marketing campaigns and especially pricing practices behind both stickers are counter-competitive and should be BANNED in both cases.
Somehow I doubt RealMyst knew what to do with that second P3.
Even so, your machine clearly outweighed the K6-3, 128MB RAM, G400 w/32MB RAM that I played it on. I posted on/. once before that "the Rime Age was downright glacial." My fast machine is now an Athlon XP-2100, still 128MB RAM, and ATI 8500LE w/64MB RAM. Plays much better, but I haven't had time to redo the game enough to retry the Rime Age.
Stoneship Age was the best, I agree.
Re:Scudder/ The Past Through Tomorrow
on
New Heinlein Novel
·
· Score: 1
Reminds me a little of something I heard Ross Perot did. He had a bunch of worthless land in Texas a ways from the city. So he donated a parcel to the city big enough to make a nice-sized airport, and donated enough land for a nice-sized highway. Sounds awfully nice of him.
He kept all the land on both sides of the highway, and made a killing on development rights as/after the airport went in. It was perfectly legal, though. I presume there was no identity-hiding, like Disney did when they quietly snapped up a bunch of unused land near Orlando.
Something in this reminded me of, "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey," and the seance scene with Missy. (The early part of the seance, not later.)
Re:Scudder/ The Past Through Tomorrow
on
New Heinlein Novel
·
· Score: 1
Thanks, now I just have to find a copy.
I read "The Roads Must Roll" in "The Past Through Tomorrow." Wonder why other stories were published so many times, and "Let There Be Light" apparently only once, in spite of numerous references.
Maybe it's not that good a story, but I'd still like to read it for completeness. (I can't say that about "To Sail Beyond the Sunset.") I also once read "Fourth (or was it Fifth or Sixth) Column," another Heinlein oldie, perhaps better left buried.)
An old Heinlein quote, "He talks about XXXX the way a virgin talks about sex, enthusiastically and ignorantly."
Heinlein was also prone to preach about how to raise children... though he was childless. His own quote applies to himself.
Re:Scudder/ The Past Through Tomorrow
on
New Heinlein Novel
·
· Score: 1
I read "The Roads Must Roll" as a short-ish story in "The Past Through Tomorrow." I don't know why you refer to "To Sail Beyond the Sunset," unless because it makes a back-reference, because it was the last work, while "Let There Be Light" must have been an early one.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not against controlled explosions, either. They're about to take me home.
But until we mature, the more energy we have laying around, be it controlled explosions or otherwise, the more energy will be available to some idiot to do something naughty with.
It's probably useless to try and keep high energy under tight wraps. We tried that with nuclear proliferation, and while it worked fairly well for 50 years, it's showing its age.
We need to mature as a species AS we gain access to more energy.
I agree with you. They need vaccines, bandages, etc far more than they do access. But if the satellite is up there, access is cheap, and it doesn't push vaccines and bandages away, IMHO it's still good. At the very least, it gives them a more direct path to let others know what supplies they need.
There's an extra ring of authenticity to, "I need xxx and yyy, and z patients suffer every month because I don't have them," over "Please donate $$$ so that doctors in can have the supplies they need." Not that either plea is guaranteed to be better than the other, of course.
I won't dispute your numbers, but I'll view them in a different light. First off, I doubt you'll ever think of lifting anything less than 1000kg (about a ton, for a more visceral number) to LEO or geo.
So new we're talking about something like 2.3 megawatt-hours, (or 5 times that) the output of a small generating station focused on a compact car. Even with your improved efficiency, that's still a pretty high energy density. Rockets generally reach orbital velocity in much less than an hour, pushing your energy density up higher.
Even if the space elevator (of which I approve, by the way) does take a day to lift loads to geo, you can bet that there will be multiple loads at various stages of lift, simultaneously. It will still take a generating station to run the thing, though I suspect it will be solar-powered, at the top. Your idea of scavenging energy from the return trip is good, but I suspect that until we get asteroid mining running, most of the sheer weight will be one-way, up. Most of the returning weight will be people and some specialty space-manufactured goods.
We will still need some serious energy, and more maturity.
The gripe about rockets isn't necessarily the efficiency of generating thrust, but that you have to accelerate fuel and its container.
IMHO, you have to burn out the immaturity before becoming truly spacefaring.
Another post talks about how we shouldn't put men in space as long as we have to do it on top of controlled explosives. But the controlled explosives brings home a key point: It takes a LOT of energy to get into orbit, and even more energy to leave orbit. You can get that energy with controlled explosives, or some other way, but we're then quibbling about matters of efficiency. Even at 100% efficiency, it still takes a LOT of energy to reach orbit or beyond.
Ready access to orbit and beyond means ready access to that much energy. As long as we're an immature species, ready access to that much energy means that it's practically certain that someone is going to use it for immature purposes. (war)
We don't currently have ready access to orbit and beyond, and we're already struggling to avoid wiping ourselves out. We probably need ready access to an order of magnitude more energy before we're really 'there', spacewise, and that might mean an order of magnitude more likely to wipe ourselves out, too.
Obviously Ethiopia needs hospitals and schools...
But what can really make those hospitals and schools effective, and multiply the value of each one of them many times, is satellites. An isolated hospital or school out in the rough really amounts to a few dedicated workers trying push the world uphill. Give them a satellite link, and the rest of the world can easily give them help and make them more effective. (Open Source style)
"If only I knew more about surgery, I could save this man's/woman's leg instead of amputating." How about remote assistance that can give that local doctor a shot at saving the leg?
a million miles away, back on Day One when Icaza started talking up Mono?
An eventual attack by Microsoft of some sort, be it fuzzily defined protocols, patents, or something critical they 'forgot' to document was inevitable.
I actually figured that Microsoft would let Mono go on a bit longer before slamming the lid, and would have let the Linux community waste more effort and become more dependent on it.
I had an optimistic hope that perhaps Icaza was clever enough to walk a tightrope and come up with an unassailable implementation for Mono. I didn't see how it could be done, but he's much more programmer than me, and perhaps clever enough.
But what really stinks is that I have this cynical a view of Microsoft and their ethics.
What stinks even worse is that generally believing the worse appears justified.
We'll see what happens with Mono.
"Informative" or "Interesting"
>Sorry, I was flashing back to how NEOCONSERVATIVES slammed the Clinton administration. Sucks to take your own medicine, doesn't it?
Bad comparison... Slamming Clinton was "Right Thinking." Since we're now talking about the opposite side of things, we must be talking about, "Wrong Thinking," when the shoe is on the other foot.
Right?
In Al Franken's new book, he makes an interesting response to this "Liberals hate America!" type of claim.
He says that the far right loves America the way a 4-year-old loves his/her Mommy - anyone who says anything bad about Mommy must be BAD!
On the other hand, there is the way the mother loves her 4-year-old son/daugher - realizing that nurturing and behavior modification are needed, loving the kid in spite of flaws and helping to correct them.
Perhaps the latter view doesn't apply to all of these items, but it is another point of view to apply toward criticism of America.
Otherwise, I find the Terms Of Service of my cable provider absolutely abhorrent, and their plain-old service isn't 100%, especially the DNS.
Fortunately they don't seem to be enforcing the "no servers of any kind" rule, though I haven't needed to have my SSH port open for a few months now, anyway. But I'd jump ship in a minute for better TOS, assuming the price jump wasn't TOO bad.
Dave Chess wrote an automatic level generator for Doom, called SLIGE. Search against "SLIGE" and "doom" and you'll find it on top, add "chess" if you wish.
I've never actually tried one of these levels myself, but it is automatically generated content for a game, pertinent to the thread. Imagine a pseudorandom (deterministic, repeatable) in-game SLIGE based on x and y coordinates, a garbage-collecting in-core map, and you could have infinite space to play in. The map keeps expanding in your direction of travel, and it gets thrown away behind you. (There would be some problems of course, especially with switches, objects, and monsters.)
The article (Yes, I RTFA.) talks about the responsivness of the new kernel, showing dramatic improvements in active and maximum latencies. Yet at the same time, there are people working very hard on a set of 'interactivity patches' and complaining of skipping when playing music on 2.6.
I haven't followed those discussions back to the beginning, so I don't know if they're gilding the lilly. But the intense work on interactive scheduling *now* scares me about like the late work on the VM did with the 2.4.0 release.
Just like the VM was the Achilles heel of 2.4 will interactive response, particularly playing music on a system under load, be the bane of 2.6?
Actually, some of the current shuttle design came out of military dictates. They wanted to be able to access high-inclination orbits normally useful for spy satellites, as well as Vandenberg launch/return. These requirements drove the delta-wing design, specifically.
The Vandenberg requirement went away. Spy satellites go up on expendables. Most science is close enough to equatorial that a simpler shuttle design would have sufficed.
But in making the ISS a joint US-Soviet project, we were pushed back into high-inclination orbits, in order that we could both get at it. So for the current ISS, the current shuttle isn't a bad design.
Sorry I don't have any mod points, today.
You'd get some.
I guess this qualifies as an urban legend, and I certainly would not treat it as factual. It predates me, but is still interesting.
Supposedly, IBM was building aa semiconductor fabricator in the late 60's/early 70's, but due to a recession they were 'slowing' the project and had a building shell, but no equipment. They filled the empty building with documents being subpoenaed by the feds for the antitrust case.
More to the point, you forgot Celeron.
If you want to complicate things more, you can bring up Pentium-M, but then of course you'd have to bring up the various flavors of Mobile Athlon, but then you'd also have to bring up the various flavors of Pentium-4.
As someone else mentioned, you also forgot Itanium and Itanium 2. If you want to bring up the differences between Opteron 1xx and 2xx you have to bring up McKinley, Deerfield, and Madison, and the plethora of cache options between them.
Or just give up. Realize that AMDs 64 bit line really isn't here in volume yet, and that's why it may look confusing. IMHO, it's approximately as mixed-up as Intel's.
Usually when a girl is violating the dress code, a male teacher will find a woman to enforce the dress code. My wife has been asked to do so when she has been substitute teaching. (This is at a middle school, not a high school.)
Then it obviously can't be any good, can it?
Aren't the TRUE marks of quality on computers the 'Intel Inside' and 'Designed for Windows' labels?
For those who can't detect humor without emoticons, I took the 'Intel Inside' sticker from my company-issued laptop and put it on the company-issued wastebasket. The 'Designed for Windows 2000' sticker went on the urinal at the nearest restroom.
Not to truly disparage either product, but IMHO the marketing campaigns and especially pricing practices behind both stickers are counter-competitive and should be BANNED in both cases.
Somehow I doubt RealMyst knew what to do with that second P3.
/. once before that "the Rime Age was downright glacial." My fast machine is now an Athlon XP-2100, still 128MB RAM, and ATI 8500LE w/64MB RAM. Plays much better, but I haven't had time to redo the game enough to retry the Rime Age.
Even so, your machine clearly outweighed the K6-3, 128MB RAM, G400 w/32MB RAM that I played it on. I posted on
Stoneship Age was the best, I agree.
Reminds me a little of something I heard Ross Perot did. He had a bunch of worthless land in Texas a ways from the city. So he donated a parcel to the city big enough to make a nice-sized airport, and donated enough land for a nice-sized highway. Sounds awfully nice of him.
He kept all the land on both sides of the highway, and made a killing on development rights as/after the airport went in. It was perfectly legal, though. I presume there was no identity-hiding, like Disney did when they quietly snapped up a bunch of unused land near Orlando.
Something in this reminded me of, "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey," and the seance scene with Missy. (The early part of the seance, not later.)
Thanks, now I just have to find a copy.
I read "The Roads Must Roll" in "The Past Through Tomorrow." Wonder why other stories were published so many times, and "Let There Be Light" apparently only once, in spite of numerous references.
Maybe it's not that good a story, but I'd still like to read it for completeness. (I can't say that about "To Sail Beyond the Sunset.") I also once read "Fourth (or was it Fifth or Sixth) Column," another Heinlein oldie, perhaps better left buried.)
An old Heinlein quote, "He talks about XXXX the way a virgin talks about sex, enthusiastically and ignorantly."
Heinlein was also prone to preach about how to raise children... though he was childless. His own quote applies to himself.
I read "The Roads Must Roll" as a short-ish story in "The Past Through Tomorrow." I don't know why you refer to "To Sail Beyond the Sunset," unless because it makes a back-reference, because it was the last work, while "Let There Be Light" must have been an early one.