So a single browser will support an extension to the Ogg format to give it the ability MPEG-4 has had since its inception? They're only eleven years behind MPEG-4 part 12. Are they going to roll out edit lists sometime around 2020? The indexing only works if you go through all of your existing Ogg content and rebuild it using the new keyframe indexing. If YouTube had bet the farm on Ogg a year ago they would be currently going back through their years worth of archive video to rebuild it to add indexes. Even then only Firefox would support it and stand alone players or other plug-ins might not.
The Xiph guys feel it is appropriate to build the Ogg specification iteratively which dicks over anyone trying to implement it. Tomorrow will always bring a new feature that your plug-in or player needs to handle. I remember reading back in 2001 on the Ogg format mailing lists the Xiph people (Monty et al) admitting Ogg wasn't going to be great for realtime distribution over the web and that video services would likely avoid the Ogg container in favor of Theora/Vorbis inside RTP streams. That prediction fell on its face when the likes of YouTube picked HTTP for the application layer protocol.
The Xiph's group rebuttal page does nothing to show Chris DiBona's contention was false. As I have said before, through either ignorance or malice the Xiph guys dropped the ball on their comparison.
1. Their larger Theora video has an audio track that's about 64kbps. The H264 video from YouTube has a 128kbps audio track (the numbers are rough since they're VBR tracks). This means for every second of video the Theora video has an extra 64kbps to throw at the video. While 64kbps might not sound like much that's 13% of the file's total bitrate. This gives the Theora track a 13% data rate advantage over YouTube's video. Every objective test I've ever seen has gauged AAC and Vorbis to have roughly equivalent audio quality at the same bitrate. If they want to make an actual comparison they would need to use a 128kbps Vorbis audio track.
2. The Ogg file format really sucks for streaming over the internet. The Ogg container tries to be too general of a format when it's only being used to represent time based media. FFMPEG developer Mans has a lot to say about the container format. Thanks to sample and chunk tables in the MPEG-4 format seeks are really efficient over the network since the header gives you an index to all of the samples in the file. A single HTTP request or file seek is needed to seek to a particular time in the file, even if the full file hasn't been downloaded yet. For services like YouTube and Vimeo, especially in context of mobile connections, Ogg's inefficiency is a real detriment.
3. MPEG-4 files with H.264/AAC tracks can be handled by the Flash plug-in as well as natively in browsers. YouTube and Vimeo and others can encode a single version of a file and serve it up to older browsers using Flash and newer browsers using the HTML5 video tag. If Ogg is added as an option that is another step in your decision tree. For individual requests this extra logic might be trivial but when you're handling millions of requests per hour this really adds up.
I'm not defending any hyperbole Chris DiBona was spouting off about the internet grinding to a halt but Ogg and Theora are simply not optimal for a "baseline" media format. It's only real feature is the fact it is open source and doesn't require a license. This isn't the most useful feature in today's world because all of the mobile devices that would be served Theora files already have licenses for MPEG-4. Tens to hundreds of millions of phones already support MPEG-4. They're using MPEG-4 to do send video over MMS and e-mail and for watching video on the web. Theora improve any of those experiences.
XHTML is easy to generate, manipulate, and validate? Have you ever written software that tried to handle XHTML? It's as complex as writing an XML handler which is not trivial to do properly. Things like tag attributes add a whole extra layer of complexity to getting a machine to actually understand the document. Your contention that HTML5 is regressing with respect mixing presentation and content is ignorant and borderline stupid. It makes me wonder if you've even read the spec. HTML5 eliminates presentation tags like center, tt, and the font tag. It does add tags that make it easier for user agents to determine the context of different parts of a document.
For instance the header, footer, and article tags let the UA figure out in a search which parts of the document they ought to pay more attention to. Search engines can focus on text inside article tags and ignore text matches in the footer or nav tags for instance. Screen readers don't need to try to parse pages based on tag attributes like they have to with HTML4/XHTML. A screen reader can know that it doesn't need to bother reading the contents of the footer or it can more easily provide a verbal menu based on the sections of the document.
I dont understand why the Americans (in cities with existing public transport anyway)
Man that was a good one! Public transit in American cities! You're a wily one. To be a bit more serious, except for the middle of big metropolitan areas there's not a lot of really good public transit in many cities in the US. The city centers tend to be all commercially zoned with everyone living further out from the center. If there is any public transit it usually only goes from the outskirts of town to the center of town. Even in the middle of cities houses are build in subdivided tracts with a lot of small curving streets that are not appropriate for buses and in many cases can't handle larger vehicles. In order to get to a bus stop from the middle of one of these tracts you need to walk a ways to one of the artery roads and hope there's a bus stop around. It's a very everyone-owns-a-car design of housing.
Housing tracts built in this manner often have schools between different tracts so public buses that only travel on arterial roads aren't useful for a majority of students. School buses are lighter weight than public buses and tend to ride higher to be able to handle turns and curves better. Running these extremely limited routes isn't going to be profitable for the public transit agency so the school districts usually operate the buses. They're the only large vehicles that can really get around the curvy streets of housing tracts and carry a lot of people.
People that live in cities that have good public transit use it to get their kids to school but a large percentage of people don't really live where public transit is workable and so you have school buses.
Pre-existing conditions covers a lot of ground including things like asthma which is not expensive to treat but often times goes completely untreated. For someone with insurance a treatment inhaler for asthma is inexpensive and easy to obtain. Unfortunately such inhalers require a prescription which most people simply cannot get without seeing a doctor. If they lack any health insurance the trip to the doctor, even a non-profit clinic, can cost more than they can bear. So a chronic but easily treatable condition goes untreated in a country that purports to be the world's only superpower.
More expensive conditions won't necessarily raise premiums because people who can't afford insurance won't have to resort to emergency care when their condition becomes acute. Without their unpaid ER bills hospitals won't have to charge me as much when I (with insurance and an ability to pay) need treatment. Over time my premiums are likely to go down a bit.
Did you actually read about the taxes for the plan? Most Americans will not have their wallets touched by the taxes. Also, who estimates the bill would drive doctors out of the health care industry? I would be really interested if you could provide a source for that claim.
Health care is something everybody needs at some point but does not always buy (for very loose usage of the word buy). As you suggest it will encourage more people to use preventative care rather than resort to emergency rooms visits. It will also help cover emergency room visits which are actual emergencies since more people will be covered by Medicaid and a Public insurance option is now available. Because a higher percentage of emergency care will be paid for hospitals will have to do less cost shifting onto paying patients. Your and my visits to a hospital will be cheaper because they're not footing us with a portion of the bill of someone who went to the ER and couldn't pay the bill.
As it stands many emergency rooms are overloaded in part because people are go to the ER instead of a GP or don't go to see a doctor until a condition in chronic. About half of the care provided in ERs goes unpaid by the patients so the cost of that care gets written off or shifted onto other patients. Younger people getting access to health care means when they get older they're less likely to have chronic and expensive age related problems. While the current generation of over-65 people won't suddenly get healthier the baby boomer generation can get better access to care and thus have fewer medical problems and lower medical bills as they get older.
This is complete bullshit. While the Pentiums were introduced in 1993 they weren't actually available in volume until early 1994 which was about the same time the PowerMacs were released and available. PowerPC native applications (especially media/graphics ones) had a real-world advantage over their Windows/DOS counterparts since they could make use of the FPU on the PowerPC chips where on PCs couldn't rely on an FP coprocessor being available. It was a while after the Pentium came out that people shipping applications that depended on its FPU. PowerPC machines were actually available to customers and often performed at least a little better than Pentium based machines of the time. The PowerMac 8100 was a beast of a machine that shipped before a 100MHz Pentium part was ever available to people.
The 68k emulation had nothing to do with "porting their OS properly" but everything to do with allocation of resources. The fast 68k emulation allowed Apple to use large amounts of code that was already written and working rather than throw it all out. Reimplementing a significant portion of the OS would have been extremely expensive and time consuming. This is even more ridiculous when you consider that the emulated code could run as fast or faster than it did on 68k chips. It also allowed customers to have a viable upgrade path. You could buy a new PowerMac and your old 68k applications would continue to work.
PowerPC didn't start to have problems until the G4/G5 era when performance gains were relatively small with each iteration and Intel was locked in a performance battle with AMD. The first G3s were extremely fast and handily beat the Pentium IIs of the time in a number of areas. Once AMD bought the IP for the Alpha and started work on the Athlons Intel wasn't really pushing performance boundaries. Motorola easily kept pace with Intel and the two kept leap-frogging one another in performance. The Athlon changed that dynamic and Intel went ape shit with clock speeds and performance and largely left Motorola in the dust.
To suggest the PowerPC was a failure because Intel eventually made chips that were way faster is to ignore or simply be ignorant of a lot of history. The Pentium line suffered a good deal from Intel's hubris while Motorola and IBM were very interested in making high performance chips.
HD movies taking 8-10GB? The HD fare from iTunes is about 5Mbps or about 2.2GB per hour. This puts a two hour movie at about 4.5GB or fully half of your estimate. The 64GB iPad could store 14 HD movies if that's all you loaded on the thing. A 720p video at 5Mbps looks pretty damned good and would look fine on an iPad screen. The SD content from iTunes is about 1.5Mbps which puts it at only 675MB per hour. If you're alright with SD movies you can store more than 40 of them on the iPad. iTunes SD content wouldn't look too bad on the iPad since most movies are anamorphic so they're around 853x480 and thus only need to be scaled by about 20% to play full screen on the iPad.
Note that Handbrake and the like can make the equivalent files out of your existing DVDs.
This is a bit of an absurd statement. Even if absolutely every aspect of the Area I program went according to plan it wouldn't see a manned mission until 2016. Even then it will only do a handful of launches per year (IIRC only two Orion missions are scheduled per year once they begin) with each costing about a billion dollars. Since the Ares I can barely launch the Orion with a crew on board the only thing it can do is send crews to the ISS. Until the Ares V is finished and actually working the Ares I is a billion dollar taxi ride to the ISS. It simply cannot do anything else. That same taxi ride on a Soyuz would only cost about $75m as the Russians only charge $25m a seat on the Soyuz. SpaceX is feeling pretty confident about the Falcon 9 and NASA is planning to use them as a taxi service as well.
The Orion is not necessarily a bad spacecraft but the Ares program was basically a jobs program for major STS contractors. I think it should be obvious now that Ares was chosen over other HLVs because it could funnel money into Congressional districts with contractors or NASA facilities. Ares is a aerospace contractor jobs program. It wasn't a good idea on paper and it has turned out to be even worse in practice. The Obama administration proposing to axe the program and refocus on developing a real HLV (like DIRECT or the SDLV) is exactly what needs to happen. The job of the Ares I can be done entirely by the Soyuz or the Falcon 9 for a much better cost.
A good portion of NASA is bureaucracy and if that gets trimmed by axing the Ares program then all the better. A lot of them can easily get jobs in the private sector weighing down the middles of corporations so they shouldn't be out of work long.
Not in the slightest. There's two big hurdles using the Shuttles as long term space stations or hooking them up to the ISS. The first is the electrical power systems of the Shuttles. To provide power while in space the Shuttle uses hydrogen fuel cells where the ISS uses solar panels. While the fuel cells provide a lot of power to the Shuttle they do have a finite fuel supply. The life support system aboard the Shuttle is also a short duration design using chemical CO2 scrubbers. At best a Shuttle station would need to be refueled and resupplied every few weeks. Besides power and life support the Shuttle doesn't really carry its own scientific payload. If you were going to leave one in orbit you would need to send it up with a SpaceLab module or something to be able to do anything useful.
Hooking a Shuttle up to the ISS for long periods would also not be very useful since without the weekly resupply of hydrogen and oxygen the Shuttle would be a power and life support vampire for the ISS. It would also affect the ISS' atmospheric drag such that it would require more reboosts than it already does. These could not be performed by the Shuttle because it carries a limited fuel for its OMS/RCS system which can't be refueled in orbit. A Shuttle plugged into the ISS for a long period of time would end up being a dead weight with no real scientific utility of its own.
The Shuttles were designed for relatively short term missions and for resupply and refurbishment on the ground. Leaving them parked in orbit is a nice thought but ultimately impractical.
QuickTime no longer enables the system tray icon by default and has not for a long time. I also don't see how you can get confused and end up with iTunes installed. The QuickTime installer only contains QuickTime, the iTunes installer contains both iTunes and QuickTime. I guess see how you can get confused on a second look, one is named QuickTimeInstaller.exe and the other is named iTunesInstaller.ex;, they both have "installer" in their name. How confusing, be careful out there!
People put a lot of information into Facebook and other social network sites. If the login cookies are all sent in the clear it's trivial to sit and sniff the network. From there it's pretty easy to grab all the information you want out of someone's account. While the threat of identity theft is a bit overblown by the media it is an actual problem that costs people a lot of money. With a little bit of information out of Facebook or Ancestry.com it wouldn't be terribly difficult to sign up for some credit cards in Aunt Martha's name and go on a little spending spree.
Keep in mind it is ridiculously easy to sniff your local cable modem segment. Connect your system directly to a cable modem sometime. An hour running ettercap or tcpdump can get you tons of e-mail and website logins. While you might not see a lot of value on Aunt Martha's Facebook postings scammers, spammers, and identity thieves are extremely interested.
If they support MPEG-4 part 2 and MP3 they've already paid for licenses to the patent pools needed to play DivX/Xvid files. Supporting DivX/MP3 content in an AVI container is just an issue of supporting the specifics of the file format. DivX/Xvid are just implementations of the MPEG-4 part 2 video specification and "DivX files" are just that video track with an MP3 audio track stuffed into an AVI container file.
The ATSC A/53 standard in the US uses MPEG-2 for video compression. In July 2008 the A/72 spec was approved which supports H.264 as a video codec but I don't know any countries that have implemented that yet. MPEG-2 was chosen originally because the decoding was relatively simple which kept the hardware complexity fairly low. The A/72 spec is targeted at countries that haven't yet transitioned to DTV and the Mobile/Handheld spec which is meant to be similar to Japan's 1seg service so mobile devices can easily grab over the air video content.
The Ares I design is not simple, cheap, or even really effective. A good portion of the expense of launching the Shuttle, an Ares I, or anything else is manpower. You have a lot of people that get paid salaries no matter how many launches take place every year. The cost of a launch then becomes (vehicle cost) + (yearly operations and personnel cost/scheduled launches that year). If you launch one rocket a year it's fairly expensive, if you launch six then the price of each launch goes down. You might recognize this cost-production curve an economy of scale which is what it is.
The Ares I was meant to be able to carry a fully decked out Orion capsule capable of carrying four people, long solo flights with an extended service module, a toilet, and the ability to to land on the ground with parachutes and airbags. It turns out the Ares I can't do any of that so the Orion had to be scaled down to only carry three people, no toilet, no air bags for ground landings, and a service module just barely capable of getting astronauts to the ISS or some other vehicle.
The rub with the Ares I is that it is damn near useless without the Ares V follow-on. Because it can't carry much into orbit it is essentially an expensive bus to take three astronauts to the ISS. People bitch about the Shuttle being an expensive tow truck but it can carry seven astronauts in addition to twenty tons of cargo and can survive independently for weeks. Going back to the launch cost problem, the Ares V requires significant changes made to one of the two launch pads at KSC. This leaves only one available for Ares I launches. Only having a single pad available for the Ares I puts a limit on the number of Ares I flights that can be made every year. The low frequency of flights increases the cost of every kilo launched on an Ares I rocket.
The cost per unit of mass problem with the Ares I determines what sort of missions you can afford to use it for. There was an unmanned Orion capsule design that was intended to be used for cargo resupply to the ISS. The low launch frequency put the cost per unit of mass too high for that design to make any sense and the low number of flights even possible for the Ares I meant there were scheduling problems as well. Since the Ares I can't launch a well equipped Orion capsule the only use for it until the Ares V is ready is to ferry people (no meaningful cargo) back and forth to the ISS. Again the low launch frequency means this is really expensive, it would be cheaper to buy assembled Soyuz rockets from Russia and launch them ourselves than it would be to send crews up in Orions via the Ares I.
Electricity and water are limited in practical terms. There's finite generating and transmission capacity. Every switching station turns some of the transmitted electricity into heat. You running your TV turns that electricity into projected light and heat, this is electricity I can't use to run my microwave. Data transmission is quite different, data packets can be duplicated an infinite number of times. Downloading a file from a server doesn't affect the availability file for anyone else. The only resource in contention is data transmission capacity. As long as the transmission capacity exceeds the demand data networks don't really have any limits of what can go over them. Data also doesn't need to be converted directly into work of some sort so it can be split and recombined through multiplexing with no loss of utility. This also means that transmission lines can add more channels to increase their capacity (providing both ends of the connection can be upgraded).
There has, to my knowledge, never been a platform or group of any appreciable size or influence that really wanted, as an end, to mess up the environment.
Few groups set out to mess up the environment. However most businesses don't account for negative externalities of their business operations. A factory might pay for the raw materials to build widgets and the fuel to run their furnace but there's no up front cost for exhaust put into the atmosphere. Even if you want to assume that manmade greenhouse gases aren't causing global warming you can't ignore the impact of exhaust gases on air quality (smog etc.). These are externalities that don't get accounted for and thus don't show up in the cost of fuel or the final cost of the products. Since these aren't on the balance sheet they're not "problems" for many companies or their shareholders and they tend to pretend they don't exist.
The Bay Bridge is not the only way from Oakland to San Francisco, there's the Richmond-San Rafael bridge to the North and San Mateo bridge to the south. There's also BART and various ferries and worst case scenario a trip through the South Bay and then up the peninsula. There's lots of ways into the city even if one of the bridges is out of service for some reason. The past two labor day weekends the Bay Bridge was shut down for repairs (the latest of which apparently caused the current problems).
The positioning of the Bay Bridge is limited by the layout of both San Francisco and Oakland. The Bay Bridge already spans one of the narrowest points between the cities and is bisected by Yerba Buena Island to reduce the effective length of the individual spans. There's nowhere else to really put another bridge in the area. There's no other spots with convenient freeway locations on both sides of the bay which would require whole new sections of freeways be build which means buying out a whole bunch of land that people already live on and a host of other problems. This construction would be in addition to building a whole new bridge.
The best way to explain this is with pictures so take a look at this Ares I cutaway. A solid rocket motor does not burn from one end to the other like a candle but is instead a hollow tube of rocket fuel. An igniter mechanism in the hollow central tube ignites the fuel and it burns from the inside out. The exhaust travels down the hollow central tube to produce thrust. The thickness of the fuel walls determines how long the engine will burn and the overall length will determine the amount of thrust it produces.
With respect to a Shuttle SRB, notice from the image that the hollow center of the rocket motor isn't a simple tube but tapers in some places. This tapered shape affects how the fuel burns, since you can't adjust the flow of fuel and oxidizer with a pump in a solid rocket you throttle the thrust by changing the amount of burnable surface area. The existing Shuttle SRBs with four stages have a very particular and well known internal shape that are optimal for helping launch the Shuttle. Increasing the length of the tube means you need to change the geometry of all of the segments. This change in geometry means you have to recalculate all of the dynamics of the engine, everything from the specific mixture of the fuel to the amount of time needed to cure the binding agent will end up changing. This means data on nearly thirty years of Shuttle launches is useless for the Ares and can only help validate some portions of computer models.
...but reuse of proven existing hardware is not a bad thing
This is true but the Ares I isn't really reusing all of that many major components from the Shuttle. This test certainly doesn't test the important change from the Shuttle SRB, the fifth engine segment. As the GP states, this was simply a test of an existing Shuttle SRB with Atlas V avionics and Peacekeeper RoCS while interesting on its own is not a real integration test of Ares systems that will fly in manned versions of the rocket. The extra segment changes the dynamics of the whole engine. An extra segment means the shape of all of the propellant molds will need to change, it's not like adding an extra Lego block to an existing stack of Lego blocks. A fully integrated engine with all five segments in place will not be tested until the Ares I-Y mission in 2013. Having a full integration test being that far in the future basically locks NASA into the Ares design no matter what the data of the Ares I-X mission says and necessitates the canceling of the Shuttle in 2010. If anything goes wrong it with the Ares I-Y flight then it will push the schedule back even farther making the Ares even less cost effective than its current schedule makes it.
Contrary to the prevailing opinion here I actually really enjoyed this premiere. For starters I bought the season on iTunes so I didn't have to put up with the commercials that many people did, commercial breaks every ten seconds would have pissed me off too. It seems this season there's several high budget shows premiering and the networks are trying to make all of their money on the first few episodes in case the viewership wanes later in the season. Unfortunately that tactic is likely to backfire and cause a drop-off in live viewers because no one wants to be assaults by dozens of super loud commercials over the course of an hour. Way to shoot yourself in the foot Syfy, if that's even your real name!
On to the show itself, I enjoyed the premise and I think the show will be done well. SGU is obviously influenced by shows like Lost and Battlestar Galactica and that is fine with me, I like BSG though I have never gotten into Lost I have seen a few episodes. Stargate needed a little more creative camera work and less stable/professional characters. The SG-1 team were all highly trained experts in their fields and that made sense since they were usually the first group of people to go through a particular Stargate. Atlantis was meant from the get-go to be an expedition where they knew they would be out of contact with Earth for a long time.
Both SG-1 and the Atlantis teams were meant to be self sufficient A-teams. The personnel of Icarus Base were third stringers on garrison duty or scientists/civilians with rudimentary if any survival and combat training. They were also not prepared to be self sufficient or separated from logistical support for any period of time. It'll be interesting to see this group survive and how well they do so, they have a fairly large cast of extras so they can potentially mow through bodies before getting to the title cast.
The camera work I didn't really mind as it gave Stargate a different look. Both SG-1 and Atlantis were very bright and often had unobstructed camera views while SGU went for more obstructed views and a darker overall look. I think this works because they're supposed to be on a ship that is millennia old and is slowly breaking down. To me the odd camera angles and focal lengths of BSG gave a better illusion of size. Even though the set might have been forty feet across the short focal distance made the blurred background look farther away and provided the illusion of space. The darker set also helped out in this illusion. I think SGU using this technique will help make the ship look more realistic as Atlantis looked like painted wood paneling as did every planet SG-1 visited except some parts of their base.
I think Atlantis missed the opportunity to use the darker broken down look, Atlantis like the Destiny was supposed to be old and busted it shouldn't have looked freshly painted and unworn. I hope SGU stays with the old and busted look for the Destiny. Planets they go to can look new and maintained but I'd like to see them come back to their worn down rust bucket ship at the end of the episode. This like the untrained crew could also make for some good episodes, marginally habitable planets might look pretty good to the crew compared to their broken down ship but then they have to consider they'll be stranded on that planet forever as the Destiny isn't going to be coming back for them.
I also didn't mind the minor plot holes in the episode because they at least threw a line in afterward to give an explanation for them. Some things just have to move the story along. The Senator with a heart condition and badly broken ribs who was dying anyways decided to press the button and save everyone. I don't know why people have a problem with that. Unlike SG-1 and Atlantis there's no central decision making group (yet) that vets all solutions before deciding on one.
I think they went to great lengths to show that the civilian and military leadership were not a unitary body and that some groups were acting with semi-autonomy from the others.
The delta between a voice plan and a voice plan with iPhone data is $360 a year. If someone replaces a voice-only plan/phone with an iPhone they're paying $360 more a year. So your cute numbers ought to be $200 iPhone + $360 data service + some price for games. The point of the article was that people can actually play satisfying games on a device that is always handy and already own. I have a DS Lite but I only play it when I'm at home or take it on vacation because it's too big to fit in my pocket, I play games or browse the web on my iPhone whenever I have a few minutes to kill.
I know its in vogue to bash the Shuttle and ISS but you really need to do some research. They both have their problems but they are far from being pointless. At the most basic level the ISS has taught us how to design and build a large structure that needs to be assembled in space. Future long term missions require this domain knowledge. The most Apollo era technology achieved was very basic two-craft docking (Apollo CM-LM, Apollo-Soyuz, Apollo CM-Skylab). The ISS is also what has enabled the private manned launch industry. SpaceX would have nowhere to go and nothing to do if it weren't for the ISS. The ISS can house and bus experiments that aren't tied to a single manned mission meaning extremely long term experiments can be run without needing to design and build a new long duration spacecraft. The Space Shuttle despite its flaws can lift twenty tons of cargo the size of a school bus along with seven astronauts in a single launch. No other current or past spacecraft can boast that capability. This capability allowed the Shuttle to launch satellites, perform five Hubble servicing missions, perform dozens of SpaceLab missions, and build the ISS.
You talk about LEO like getting there is a bad thing. LEO is a great place to do space science without getting your crew killed. LEO has the benefit of Earth's magnetic field which protects astronauts from heavy doses of solar radiation. The presence of the magnetic field obviates some amount of shielding a manned mission might otherwise need which means more spacecraft mass can be dedicated to experimentation. It's also much cheaper (relatively speaking) to get a lot of mass into LEO than it is into other orbits. Getting something the size of the Space Shuttle into a MEO or GEO would be extremely difficult to do with a single launch. The LEO environment is then a great place to perform long duration manned missions to figure out how the hell to keep a crew alive and sane on a mission to Mars or a NEO. LEO is also a good place to learn and practice techniques for building things reliably in space. We're learning how to get a crew to Mars or a NEO by orbiting "pointlessly" in LEO, the skills learned in orbit will be useful on NEO and Mars missions. The altitude of the orbit isn't quite as important as the skills learned while you were there.
On paper anyone can list magic materials and say "oh that would be good for a rocket motor or spaceship". The assumption being that just because a material or technology has one good property that it will be good for all uses. To reiterate the GP's point, rocket science is hard and engineering rockets is even harder. Just because an alloy is "lighter and stronger" than another doesn't mean it is necessarily better. The ability to machine a material within particular tolerances is often as important if not more important as weight and strength. If your magical new alloy or composite material is too difficult to form or machine or is three times as expensive then it's not appropriate for the job. All materials are not good for all purposes. For instance, carbon fiber is light and strong but is not always appropriate for use inside the habitable volume of a spacecraft because it can absorb water and outgas VOCs. In a system like the ISS where water vapor in the air is recycled into drinking water, having your walls suck up water can be annoying if not dangerous.
Rockets are hundreds or thousands of individual parts operating at hellish temperatures all of different materials each with their own physical properties. It takes a long time to make sure those materials in that design not only work well but that you also understand that configuration modes of failure. Changing the material of even one of those components alters the parameters of the design even if only slightly. A lot of small changes can lead to large failures. Even if some new alloy ended up being perfect for rocket turbopumps it would still require a significant amount of testing to make sure it's "perfect" nature didn't affect any of the thousands of surrounding parts.
Rocket engines and spacecraft don't just appear because advanced technology to build them exists. It takes a lot of system integration to make a workable design. Research in advanced technology is fine but research and development in rocket science is also important. Rockets don't just spring forth from piles or advanced technology. Rocket science also works in the reverse direction. Trying to find a better or more cost effective material for motor housings or turbopumps might find a material that works really well for gasoline engines or turbojet engines. It might make a rocket half a percent more efficient but might make a jet engine on an airliner fifty percent more efficient.
The Ares I-X is a stunt at best and a sham at worst. The Ares I-X has a dummy fifth segment and a dummy payload attached meaning it's simply a Shuttle SRB with an inert payload attached. One of the major challenges with the Ares I is the fifth engine segment, it completely changes the dynamics of the rocket. The Ares I-X launch does nothing to test the Ares I design in anything resembling its actual flight configuration. It won't be until the Ares I-Y flight in 2013 that the five segment engine will actually be tested and even that won't be testing the J-2X engine. The whole Ares I stack won't be tested with the Orion 1 until at least 2014 and likely not until 2015.
To say there's no problems with the Ares I is disingenuous. The thrust oscillation issues have theoretical fixes but until the Ares I-Y and Orion 1 flights there's still a lot of unknowns. The likely solution will be added dampening mass and stiffeners which will mean the Orion won't be able to launch with a full compliment. The Block 1A Orions will only be able to launch three astronauts to the ISS instead of the originally planned four. Because of launch pad changes needed for the Ares V the Ares I is only going to have a single civilian launch pad (LC-39B). This puts a hard limit on the number of Ares I launches that can be done in a year which increases the cost of each individual launch. Because of this the Block 1B (cargo only) Orion was canceled entirely.
Having a low limit on the number of launches that can be made every year and the low payload mass make the Ares I almost entirely unsuitable for ISS missions. The per launch cost is derived from the cost of the actual launch vehicle and the infrastructure costs to run the manned spaceflight operations divided by the number of launches per year. The infrastructure/operations costs are the same (or similar) no matter how many launches are performed every year since you don't stop paying people in between launches. The more launches that happen the cheaper each individual one is since you're getting more payload out of every man-hour worked and thus the cost of a pound of payload decreases. The Ares I being limited to a single launch pad means at best you can get six launches a year if there's a 60 day turnaround for the pad and nothing ever goes wrong.
The Ares I being unsuitable for ISS missions means it doesn't have anything it is good at until the Ares V is completed and lunar missions are ongoing. The Ares I doesn't have enough launch capability to launch an Orion with an experiment module/palette so it can't do Spacelab type missions. Orions could be launched for independent operations but with only three crew members each person would have to wear multiple hats which puts a lot of strain on individual astronauts and keeps their schedules booked. Such a configuration would also make for a cramped cabin since mission instruments would need to be packed in alongside the rest of their supplies. I'm sorry but the Ares I is a shitty rocket and a waste of time and money for NASA. It might be a different story if the Orion was smaller or the Ares I wouldn't kill the crew without vibration dampeners. As it stands however the Ares I is a boondoggle and the sooner we shitcan it the better. An EELV or DIRECT option would be far better not just for Orion missions but eventual Moon, NEO, and Mars missions.
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So a single browser will support an extension to the Ogg format to give it the ability MPEG-4 has had since its inception? They're only eleven years behind MPEG-4 part 12. Are they going to roll out edit lists sometime around 2020? The indexing only works if you go through all of your existing Ogg content and rebuild it using the new keyframe indexing. If YouTube had bet the farm on Ogg a year ago they would be currently going back through their years worth of archive video to rebuild it to add indexes. Even then only Firefox would support it and stand alone players or other plug-ins might not.
The Xiph guys feel it is appropriate to build the Ogg specification iteratively which dicks over anyone trying to implement it. Tomorrow will always bring a new feature that your plug-in or player needs to handle. I remember reading back in 2001 on the Ogg format mailing lists the Xiph people (Monty et al) admitting Ogg wasn't going to be great for realtime distribution over the web and that video services would likely avoid the Ogg container in favor of Theora/Vorbis inside RTP streams. That prediction fell on its face when the likes of YouTube picked HTTP for the application layer protocol.
The Xiph's group rebuttal page does nothing to show Chris DiBona's contention was false. As I have said before, through either ignorance or malice the Xiph guys dropped the ball on their comparison.
1. Their larger Theora video has an audio track that's about 64kbps. The H264 video from YouTube has a 128kbps audio track (the numbers are rough since they're VBR tracks). This means for every second of video the Theora video has an extra 64kbps to throw at the video. While 64kbps might not sound like much that's 13% of the file's total bitrate. This gives the Theora track a 13% data rate advantage over YouTube's video. Every objective test I've ever seen has gauged AAC and Vorbis to have roughly equivalent audio quality at the same bitrate. If they want to make an actual comparison they would need to use a 128kbps Vorbis audio track.
2. The Ogg file format really sucks for streaming over the internet. The Ogg container tries to be too general of a format when it's only being used to represent time based media. FFMPEG developer Mans has a lot to say about the container format. Thanks to sample and chunk tables in the MPEG-4 format seeks are really efficient over the network since the header gives you an index to all of the samples in the file. A single HTTP request or file seek is needed to seek to a particular time in the file, even if the full file hasn't been downloaded yet. For services like YouTube and Vimeo, especially in context of mobile connections, Ogg's inefficiency is a real detriment.
3. MPEG-4 files with H.264/AAC tracks can be handled by the Flash plug-in as well as natively in browsers. YouTube and Vimeo and others can encode a single version of a file and serve it up to older browsers using Flash and newer browsers using the HTML5 video tag. If Ogg is added as an option that is another step in your decision tree. For individual requests this extra logic might be trivial but when you're handling millions of requests per hour this really adds up.
I'm not defending any hyperbole Chris DiBona was spouting off about the internet grinding to a halt but Ogg and Theora are simply not optimal for a "baseline" media format. It's only real feature is the fact it is open source and doesn't require a license. This isn't the most useful feature in today's world because all of the mobile devices that would be served Theora files already have licenses for MPEG-4. Tens to hundreds of millions of phones already support MPEG-4. They're using MPEG-4 to do send video over MMS and e-mail and for watching video on the web. Theora improve any of those experiences.
XHTML is easy to generate, manipulate, and validate? Have you ever written software that tried to handle XHTML? It's as complex as writing an XML handler which is not trivial to do properly. Things like tag attributes add a whole extra layer of complexity to getting a machine to actually understand the document. Your contention that HTML5 is regressing with respect mixing presentation and content is ignorant and borderline stupid. It makes me wonder if you've even read the spec. HTML5 eliminates presentation tags like center, tt, and the font tag. It does add tags that make it easier for user agents to determine the context of different parts of a document.
For instance the header, footer, and article tags let the UA figure out in a search which parts of the document they ought to pay more attention to. Search engines can focus on text inside article tags and ignore text matches in the footer or nav tags for instance. Screen readers don't need to try to parse pages based on tag attributes like they have to with HTML4/XHTML. A screen reader can know that it doesn't need to bother reading the contents of the footer or it can more easily provide a verbal menu based on the sections of the document.
Man that was a good one! Public transit in American cities! You're a wily one. To be a bit more serious, except for the middle of big metropolitan areas there's not a lot of really good public transit in many cities in the US. The city centers tend to be all commercially zoned with everyone living further out from the center. If there is any public transit it usually only goes from the outskirts of town to the center of town. Even in the middle of cities houses are build in subdivided tracts with a lot of small curving streets that are not appropriate for buses and in many cases can't handle larger vehicles. In order to get to a bus stop from the middle of one of these tracts you need to walk a ways to one of the artery roads and hope there's a bus stop around. It's a very everyone-owns-a-car design of housing.
Housing tracts built in this manner often have schools between different tracts so public buses that only travel on arterial roads aren't useful for a majority of students. School buses are lighter weight than public buses and tend to ride higher to be able to handle turns and curves better. Running these extremely limited routes isn't going to be profitable for the public transit agency so the school districts usually operate the buses. They're the only large vehicles that can really get around the curvy streets of housing tracts and carry a lot of people.
People that live in cities that have good public transit use it to get their kids to school but a large percentage of people don't really live where public transit is workable and so you have school buses.
Pre-existing conditions covers a lot of ground including things like asthma which is not expensive to treat but often times goes completely untreated. For someone with insurance a treatment inhaler for asthma is inexpensive and easy to obtain. Unfortunately such inhalers require a prescription which most people simply cannot get without seeing a doctor. If they lack any health insurance the trip to the doctor, even a non-profit clinic, can cost more than they can bear. So a chronic but easily treatable condition goes untreated in a country that purports to be the world's only superpower.
More expensive conditions won't necessarily raise premiums because people who can't afford insurance won't have to resort to emergency care when their condition becomes acute. Without their unpaid ER bills hospitals won't have to charge me as much when I (with insurance and an ability to pay) need treatment. Over time my premiums are likely to go down a bit.
Did you actually read about the taxes for the plan? Most Americans will not have their wallets touched by the taxes. Also, who estimates the bill would drive doctors out of the health care industry? I would be really interested if you could provide a source for that claim.
Health care is something everybody needs at some point but does not always buy (for very loose usage of the word buy). As you suggest it will encourage more people to use preventative care rather than resort to emergency rooms visits. It will also help cover emergency room visits which are actual emergencies since more people will be covered by Medicaid and a Public insurance option is now available. Because a higher percentage of emergency care will be paid for hospitals will have to do less cost shifting onto paying patients. Your and my visits to a hospital will be cheaper because they're not footing us with a portion of the bill of someone who went to the ER and couldn't pay the bill.
As it stands many emergency rooms are overloaded in part because people are go to the ER instead of a GP or don't go to see a doctor until a condition in chronic. About half of the care provided in ERs goes unpaid by the patients so the cost of that care gets written off or shifted onto other patients. Younger people getting access to health care means when they get older they're less likely to have chronic and expensive age related problems. While the current generation of over-65 people won't suddenly get healthier the baby boomer generation can get better access to care and thus have fewer medical problems and lower medical bills as they get older.
This is complete bullshit. While the Pentiums were introduced in 1993 they weren't actually available in volume until early 1994 which was about the same time the PowerMacs were released and available. PowerPC native applications (especially media/graphics ones) had a real-world advantage over their Windows/DOS counterparts since they could make use of the FPU on the PowerPC chips where on PCs couldn't rely on an FP coprocessor being available. It was a while after the Pentium came out that people shipping applications that depended on its FPU. PowerPC machines were actually available to customers and often performed at least a little better than Pentium based machines of the time. The PowerMac 8100 was a beast of a machine that shipped before a 100MHz Pentium part was ever available to people.
The 68k emulation had nothing to do with "porting their OS properly" but everything to do with allocation of resources. The fast 68k emulation allowed Apple to use large amounts of code that was already written and working rather than throw it all out. Reimplementing a significant portion of the OS would have been extremely expensive and time consuming. This is even more ridiculous when you consider that the emulated code could run as fast or faster than it did on 68k chips. It also allowed customers to have a viable upgrade path. You could buy a new PowerMac and your old 68k applications would continue to work.
PowerPC didn't start to have problems until the G4/G5 era when performance gains were relatively small with each iteration and Intel was locked in a performance battle with AMD. The first G3s were extremely fast and handily beat the Pentium IIs of the time in a number of areas. Once AMD bought the IP for the Alpha and started work on the Athlons Intel wasn't really pushing performance boundaries. Motorola easily kept pace with Intel and the two kept leap-frogging one another in performance. The Athlon changed that dynamic and Intel went ape shit with clock speeds and performance and largely left Motorola in the dust.
To suggest the PowerPC was a failure because Intel eventually made chips that were way faster is to ignore or simply be ignorant of a lot of history. The Pentium line suffered a good deal from Intel's hubris while Motorola and IBM were very interested in making high performance chips.
HD movies taking 8-10GB? The HD fare from iTunes is about 5Mbps or about 2.2GB per hour. This puts a two hour movie at about 4.5GB or fully half of your estimate. The 64GB iPad could store 14 HD movies if that's all you loaded on the thing. A 720p video at 5Mbps looks pretty damned good and would look fine on an iPad screen. The SD content from iTunes is about 1.5Mbps which puts it at only 675MB per hour. If you're alright with SD movies you can store more than 40 of them on the iPad. iTunes SD content wouldn't look too bad on the iPad since most movies are anamorphic so they're around 853x480 and thus only need to be scaled by about 20% to play full screen on the iPad.
Note that Handbrake and the like can make the equivalent files out of your existing DVDs.
This is a bit of an absurd statement. Even if absolutely every aspect of the Area I program went according to plan it wouldn't see a manned mission until 2016. Even then it will only do a handful of launches per year (IIRC only two Orion missions are scheduled per year once they begin) with each costing about a billion dollars. Since the Ares I can barely launch the Orion with a crew on board the only thing it can do is send crews to the ISS. Until the Ares V is finished and actually working the Ares I is a billion dollar taxi ride to the ISS. It simply cannot do anything else. That same taxi ride on a Soyuz would only cost about $75m as the Russians only charge $25m a seat on the Soyuz. SpaceX is feeling pretty confident about the Falcon 9 and NASA is planning to use them as a taxi service as well.
The Orion is not necessarily a bad spacecraft but the Ares program was basically a jobs program for major STS contractors. I think it should be obvious now that Ares was chosen over other HLVs because it could funnel money into Congressional districts with contractors or NASA facilities. Ares is a aerospace contractor jobs program. It wasn't a good idea on paper and it has turned out to be even worse in practice. The Obama administration proposing to axe the program and refocus on developing a real HLV (like DIRECT or the SDLV) is exactly what needs to happen. The job of the Ares I can be done entirely by the Soyuz or the Falcon 9 for a much better cost.
A good portion of NASA is bureaucracy and if that gets trimmed by axing the Ares program then all the better. A lot of them can easily get jobs in the private sector weighing down the middles of corporations so they shouldn't be out of work long.
Not in the slightest. There's two big hurdles using the Shuttles as long term space stations or hooking them up to the ISS. The first is the electrical power systems of the Shuttles. To provide power while in space the Shuttle uses hydrogen fuel cells where the ISS uses solar panels. While the fuel cells provide a lot of power to the Shuttle they do have a finite fuel supply. The life support system aboard the Shuttle is also a short duration design using chemical CO2 scrubbers. At best a Shuttle station would need to be refueled and resupplied every few weeks. Besides power and life support the Shuttle doesn't really carry its own scientific payload. If you were going to leave one in orbit you would need to send it up with a SpaceLab module or something to be able to do anything useful.
Hooking a Shuttle up to the ISS for long periods would also not be very useful since without the weekly resupply of hydrogen and oxygen the Shuttle would be a power and life support vampire for the ISS. It would also affect the ISS' atmospheric drag such that it would require more reboosts than it already does. These could not be performed by the Shuttle because it carries a limited fuel for its OMS/RCS system which can't be refueled in orbit. A Shuttle plugged into the ISS for a long period of time would end up being a dead weight with no real scientific utility of its own.
The Shuttles were designed for relatively short term missions and for resupply and refurbishment on the ground. Leaving them parked in orbit is a nice thought but ultimately impractical.
QuickTime no longer enables the system tray icon by default and has not for a long time. I also don't see how you can get confused and end up with iTunes installed. The QuickTime installer only contains QuickTime, the iTunes installer contains both iTunes and QuickTime. I guess see how you can get confused on a second look, one is named QuickTimeInstaller.exe and the other is named iTunesInstaller.ex;, they both have "installer" in their name. How confusing, be careful out there!
People put a lot of information into Facebook and other social network sites. If the login cookies are all sent in the clear it's trivial to sit and sniff the network. From there it's pretty easy to grab all the information you want out of someone's account. While the threat of identity theft is a bit overblown by the media it is an actual problem that costs people a lot of money. With a little bit of information out of Facebook or Ancestry.com it wouldn't be terribly difficult to sign up for some credit cards in Aunt Martha's name and go on a little spending spree.
Keep in mind it is ridiculously easy to sniff your local cable modem segment. Connect your system directly to a cable modem sometime. An hour running ettercap or tcpdump can get you tons of e-mail and website logins. While you might not see a lot of value on Aunt Martha's Facebook postings scammers, spammers, and identity thieves are extremely interested.
If they support MPEG-4 part 2 and MP3 they've already paid for licenses to the patent pools needed to play DivX/Xvid files. Supporting DivX/MP3 content in an AVI container is just an issue of supporting the specifics of the file format. DivX/Xvid are just implementations of the MPEG-4 part 2 video specification and "DivX files" are just that video track with an MP3 audio track stuffed into an AVI container file.
The ATSC A/53 standard in the US uses MPEG-2 for video compression. In July 2008 the A/72 spec was approved which supports H.264 as a video codec but I don't know any countries that have implemented that yet. MPEG-2 was chosen originally because the decoding was relatively simple which kept the hardware complexity fairly low. The A/72 spec is targeted at countries that haven't yet transitioned to DTV and the Mobile/Handheld spec which is meant to be similar to Japan's 1seg service so mobile devices can easily grab over the air video content.
The Ares I design is not simple, cheap, or even really effective. A good portion of the expense of launching the Shuttle, an Ares I, or anything else is manpower. You have a lot of people that get paid salaries no matter how many launches take place every year. The cost of a launch then becomes (vehicle cost) + (yearly operations and personnel cost/scheduled launches that year). If you launch one rocket a year it's fairly expensive, if you launch six then the price of each launch goes down. You might recognize this cost-production curve an economy of scale which is what it is.
The Ares I was meant to be able to carry a fully decked out Orion capsule capable of carrying four people, long solo flights with an extended service module, a toilet, and the ability to to land on the ground with parachutes and airbags. It turns out the Ares I can't do any of that so the Orion had to be scaled down to only carry three people, no toilet, no air bags for ground landings, and a service module just barely capable of getting astronauts to the ISS or some other vehicle.
The rub with the Ares I is that it is damn near useless without the Ares V follow-on. Because it can't carry much into orbit it is essentially an expensive bus to take three astronauts to the ISS. People bitch about the Shuttle being an expensive tow truck but it can carry seven astronauts in addition to twenty tons of cargo and can survive independently for weeks. Going back to the launch cost problem, the Ares V requires significant changes made to one of the two launch pads at KSC. This leaves only one available for Ares I launches. Only having a single pad available for the Ares I puts a limit on the number of Ares I flights that can be made every year. The low frequency of flights increases the cost of every kilo launched on an Ares I rocket.
The cost per unit of mass problem with the Ares I determines what sort of missions you can afford to use it for. There was an unmanned Orion capsule design that was intended to be used for cargo resupply to the ISS. The low launch frequency put the cost per unit of mass too high for that design to make any sense and the low number of flights even possible for the Ares I meant there were scheduling problems as well. Since the Ares I can't launch a well equipped Orion capsule the only use for it until the Ares V is ready is to ferry people (no meaningful cargo) back and forth to the ISS. Again the low launch frequency means this is really expensive, it would be cheaper to buy assembled Soyuz rockets from Russia and launch them ourselves than it would be to send crews up in Orions via the Ares I.
Electricity and water are limited in practical terms. There's finite generating and transmission capacity. Every switching station turns some of the transmitted electricity into heat. You running your TV turns that electricity into projected light and heat, this is electricity I can't use to run my microwave. Data transmission is quite different, data packets can be duplicated an infinite number of times. Downloading a file from a server doesn't affect the availability file for anyone else. The only resource in contention is data transmission capacity. As long as the transmission capacity exceeds the demand data networks don't really have any limits of what can go over them. Data also doesn't need to be converted directly into work of some sort so it can be split and recombined through multiplexing with no loss of utility. This also means that transmission lines can add more channels to increase their capacity (providing both ends of the connection can be upgraded).
Few groups set out to mess up the environment. However most businesses don't account for negative externalities of their business operations. A factory might pay for the raw materials to build widgets and the fuel to run their furnace but there's no up front cost for exhaust put into the atmosphere. Even if you want to assume that manmade greenhouse gases aren't causing global warming you can't ignore the impact of exhaust gases on air quality (smog etc.). These are externalities that don't get accounted for and thus don't show up in the cost of fuel or the final cost of the products. Since these aren't on the balance sheet they're not "problems" for many companies or their shareholders and they tend to pretend they don't exist.
The Bay Bridge is not the only way from Oakland to San Francisco, there's the Richmond-San Rafael bridge to the North and San Mateo bridge to the south. There's also BART and various ferries and worst case scenario a trip through the South Bay and then up the peninsula. There's lots of ways into the city even if one of the bridges is out of service for some reason. The past two labor day weekends the Bay Bridge was shut down for repairs (the latest of which apparently caused the current problems).
The positioning of the Bay Bridge is limited by the layout of both San Francisco and Oakland. The Bay Bridge already spans one of the narrowest points between the cities and is bisected by Yerba Buena Island to reduce the effective length of the individual spans. There's nowhere else to really put another bridge in the area. There's no other spots with convenient freeway locations on both sides of the bay which would require whole new sections of freeways be build which means buying out a whole bunch of land that people already live on and a host of other problems. This construction would be in addition to building a whole new bridge.
The best way to explain this is with pictures so take a look at this Ares I cutaway. A solid rocket motor does not burn from one end to the other like a candle but is instead a hollow tube of rocket fuel. An igniter mechanism in the hollow central tube ignites the fuel and it burns from the inside out. The exhaust travels down the hollow central tube to produce thrust. The thickness of the fuel walls determines how long the engine will burn and the overall length will determine the amount of thrust it produces.
With respect to a Shuttle SRB, notice from the image that the hollow center of the rocket motor isn't a simple tube but tapers in some places. This tapered shape affects how the fuel burns, since you can't adjust the flow of fuel and oxidizer with a pump in a solid rocket you throttle the thrust by changing the amount of burnable surface area. The existing Shuttle SRBs with four stages have a very particular and well known internal shape that are optimal for helping launch the Shuttle. Increasing the length of the tube means you need to change the geometry of all of the segments. This change in geometry means you have to recalculate all of the dynamics of the engine, everything from the specific mixture of the fuel to the amount of time needed to cure the binding agent will end up changing. This means data on nearly thirty years of Shuttle launches is useless for the Ares and can only help validate some portions of computer models.
...but reuse of proven existing hardware is not a bad thing
This is true but the Ares I isn't really reusing all of that many major components from the Shuttle. This test certainly doesn't test the important change from the Shuttle SRB, the fifth engine segment. As the GP states, this was simply a test of an existing Shuttle SRB with Atlas V avionics and Peacekeeper RoCS while interesting on its own is not a real integration test of Ares systems that will fly in manned versions of the rocket. The extra segment changes the dynamics of the whole engine. An extra segment means the shape of all of the propellant molds will need to change, it's not like adding an extra Lego block to an existing stack of Lego blocks. A fully integrated engine with all five segments in place will not be tested until the Ares I-Y mission in 2013. Having a full integration test being that far in the future basically locks NASA into the Ares design no matter what the data of the Ares I-X mission says and necessitates the canceling of the Shuttle in 2010. If anything goes wrong it with the Ares I-Y flight then it will push the schedule back even farther making the Ares even less cost effective than its current schedule makes it.
Contrary to the prevailing opinion here I actually really enjoyed this premiere. For starters I bought the season on iTunes so I didn't have to put up with the commercials that many people did, commercial breaks every ten seconds would have pissed me off too. It seems this season there's several high budget shows premiering and the networks are trying to make all of their money on the first few episodes in case the viewership wanes later in the season. Unfortunately that tactic is likely to backfire and cause a drop-off in live viewers because no one wants to be assaults by dozens of super loud commercials over the course of an hour. Way to shoot yourself in the foot Syfy, if that's even your real name!
On to the show itself, I enjoyed the premise and I think the show will be done well. SGU is obviously influenced by shows like Lost and Battlestar Galactica and that is fine with me, I like BSG though I have never gotten into Lost I have seen a few episodes. Stargate needed a little more creative camera work and less stable/professional characters. The SG-1 team were all highly trained experts in their fields and that made sense since they were usually the first group of people to go through a particular Stargate. Atlantis was meant from the get-go to be an expedition where they knew they would be out of contact with Earth for a long time.
Both SG-1 and the Atlantis teams were meant to be self sufficient A-teams. The personnel of Icarus Base were third stringers on garrison duty or scientists/civilians with rudimentary if any survival and combat training. They were also not prepared to be self sufficient or separated from logistical support for any period of time. It'll be interesting to see this group survive and how well they do so, they have a fairly large cast of extras so they can potentially mow through bodies before getting to the title cast.
The camera work I didn't really mind as it gave Stargate a different look. Both SG-1 and Atlantis were very bright and often had unobstructed camera views while SGU went for more obstructed views and a darker overall look. I think this works because they're supposed to be on a ship that is millennia old and is slowly breaking down. To me the odd camera angles and focal lengths of BSG gave a better illusion of size. Even though the set might have been forty feet across the short focal distance made the blurred background look farther away and provided the illusion of space. The darker set also helped out in this illusion. I think SGU using this technique will help make the ship look more realistic as Atlantis looked like painted wood paneling as did every planet SG-1 visited except some parts of their base.
I think Atlantis missed the opportunity to use the darker broken down look, Atlantis like the Destiny was supposed to be old and busted it shouldn't have looked freshly painted and unworn. I hope SGU stays with the old and busted look for the Destiny. Planets they go to can look new and maintained but I'd like to see them come back to their worn down rust bucket ship at the end of the episode. This like the untrained crew could also make for some good episodes, marginally habitable planets might look pretty good to the crew compared to their broken down ship but then they have to consider they'll be stranded on that planet forever as the Destiny isn't going to be coming back for them.
I also didn't mind the minor plot holes in the episode because they at least threw a line in afterward to give an explanation for them. Some things just have to move the story along. The Senator with a heart condition and badly broken ribs who was dying anyways decided to press the button and save everyone. I don't know why people have a problem with that. Unlike SG-1 and Atlantis there's no central decision making group (yet) that vets all solutions before deciding on one.
I think they went to great lengths to show that the civilian and military leadership were not a unitary body and that some groups were acting with semi-autonomy from the others.
The delta between a voice plan and a voice plan with iPhone data is $360 a year. If someone replaces a voice-only plan/phone with an iPhone they're paying $360 more a year. So your cute numbers ought to be $200 iPhone + $360 data service + some price for games. The point of the article was that people can actually play satisfying games on a device that is always handy and already own. I have a DS Lite but I only play it when I'm at home or take it on vacation because it's too big to fit in my pocket, I play games or browse the web on my iPhone whenever I have a few minutes to kill.
I know its in vogue to bash the Shuttle and ISS but you really need to do some research. They both have their problems but they are far from being pointless. At the most basic level the ISS has taught us how to design and build a large structure that needs to be assembled in space. Future long term missions require this domain knowledge. The most Apollo era technology achieved was very basic two-craft docking (Apollo CM-LM, Apollo-Soyuz, Apollo CM-Skylab). The ISS is also what has enabled the private manned launch industry. SpaceX would have nowhere to go and nothing to do if it weren't for the ISS. The ISS can house and bus experiments that aren't tied to a single manned mission meaning extremely long term experiments can be run without needing to design and build a new long duration spacecraft. The Space Shuttle despite its flaws can lift twenty tons of cargo the size of a school bus along with seven astronauts in a single launch. No other current or past spacecraft can boast that capability. This capability allowed the Shuttle to launch satellites, perform five Hubble servicing missions, perform dozens of SpaceLab missions, and build the ISS.
You talk about LEO like getting there is a bad thing. LEO is a great place to do space science without getting your crew killed. LEO has the benefit of Earth's magnetic field which protects astronauts from heavy doses of solar radiation. The presence of the magnetic field obviates some amount of shielding a manned mission might otherwise need which means more spacecraft mass can be dedicated to experimentation. It's also much cheaper (relatively speaking) to get a lot of mass into LEO than it is into other orbits. Getting something the size of the Space Shuttle into a MEO or GEO would be extremely difficult to do with a single launch. The LEO environment is then a great place to perform long duration manned missions to figure out how the hell to keep a crew alive and sane on a mission to Mars or a NEO. LEO is also a good place to learn and practice techniques for building things reliably in space. We're learning how to get a crew to Mars or a NEO by orbiting "pointlessly" in LEO, the skills learned in orbit will be useful on NEO and Mars missions. The altitude of the orbit isn't quite as important as the skills learned while you were there.
On paper anyone can list magic materials and say "oh that would be good for a rocket motor or spaceship". The assumption being that just because a material or technology has one good property that it will be good for all uses. To reiterate the GP's point, rocket science is hard and engineering rockets is even harder. Just because an alloy is "lighter and stronger" than another doesn't mean it is necessarily better. The ability to machine a material within particular tolerances is often as important if not more important as weight and strength. If your magical new alloy or composite material is too difficult to form or machine or is three times as expensive then it's not appropriate for the job. All materials are not good for all purposes. For instance, carbon fiber is light and strong but is not always appropriate for use inside the habitable volume of a spacecraft because it can absorb water and outgas VOCs. In a system like the ISS where water vapor in the air is recycled into drinking water, having your walls suck up water can be annoying if not dangerous.
Rockets are hundreds or thousands of individual parts operating at hellish temperatures all of different materials each with their own physical properties. It takes a long time to make sure those materials in that design not only work well but that you also understand that configuration modes of failure. Changing the material of even one of those components alters the parameters of the design even if only slightly. A lot of small changes can lead to large failures. Even if some new alloy ended up being perfect for rocket turbopumps it would still require a significant amount of testing to make sure it's "perfect" nature didn't affect any of the thousands of surrounding parts.
Rocket engines and spacecraft don't just appear because advanced technology to build them exists. It takes a lot of system integration to make a workable design. Research in advanced technology is fine but research and development in rocket science is also important. Rockets don't just spring forth from piles or advanced technology. Rocket science also works in the reverse direction. Trying to find a better or more cost effective material for motor housings or turbopumps might find a material that works really well for gasoline engines or turbojet engines. It might make a rocket half a percent more efficient but might make a jet engine on an airliner fifty percent more efficient.
The Ares I-X is a stunt at best and a sham at worst. The Ares I-X has a dummy fifth segment and a dummy payload attached meaning it's simply a Shuttle SRB with an inert payload attached. One of the major challenges with the Ares I is the fifth engine segment, it completely changes the dynamics of the rocket. The Ares I-X launch does nothing to test the Ares I design in anything resembling its actual flight configuration. It won't be until the Ares I-Y flight in 2013 that the five segment engine will actually be tested and even that won't be testing the J-2X engine. The whole Ares I stack won't be tested with the Orion 1 until at least 2014 and likely not until 2015.
To say there's no problems with the Ares I is disingenuous. The thrust oscillation issues have theoretical fixes but until the Ares I-Y and Orion 1 flights there's still a lot of unknowns. The likely solution will be added dampening mass and stiffeners which will mean the Orion won't be able to launch with a full compliment. The Block 1A Orions will only be able to launch three astronauts to the ISS instead of the originally planned four. Because of launch pad changes needed for the Ares V the Ares I is only going to have a single civilian launch pad (LC-39B). This puts a hard limit on the number of Ares I launches that can be done in a year which increases the cost of each individual launch. Because of this the Block 1B (cargo only) Orion was canceled entirely.
Having a low limit on the number of launches that can be made every year and the low payload mass make the Ares I almost entirely unsuitable for ISS missions. The per launch cost is derived from the cost of the actual launch vehicle and the infrastructure costs to run the manned spaceflight operations divided by the number of launches per year. The infrastructure/operations costs are the same (or similar) no matter how many launches are performed every year since you don't stop paying people in between launches. The more launches that happen the cheaper each individual one is since you're getting more payload out of every man-hour worked and thus the cost of a pound of payload decreases. The Ares I being limited to a single launch pad means at best you can get six launches a year if there's a 60 day turnaround for the pad and nothing ever goes wrong.
The Ares I being unsuitable for ISS missions means it doesn't have anything it is good at until the Ares V is completed and lunar missions are ongoing. The Ares I doesn't have enough launch capability to launch an Orion with an experiment module/palette so it can't do Spacelab type missions. Orions could be launched for independent operations but with only three crew members each person would have to wear multiple hats which puts a lot of strain on individual astronauts and keeps their schedules booked. Such a configuration would also make for a cramped cabin since mission instruments would need to be packed in alongside the rest of their supplies. I'm sorry but the Ares I is a shitty rocket and a waste of time and money for NASA. It might be a different story if the Orion was smaller or the Ares I wouldn't kill the crew without vibration dampeners. As it stands however the Ares I is a boondoggle and the sooner we shitcan it the better. An EELV or DIRECT option would be far better not just for Orion missions but eventual Moon, NEO, and Mars missions.