Well there's a huge amount of CYA when it comes to devices that people's lives depend on. If a Sony Walkman breaks, who cares. But if one thing goes wrong with a medical device, it can kill people. A single engineer could reasonably be expected to design most of a walkman and assume the risk of it working or succeeding, but who would really, in a corporation, accept the responsibility of life or death by themselves. You have to have a large layer to spread the blame around if something goes wrong, or, pay people to add layers of bloat to make sure the device goes out the door with perfect reliability.
If you read between the lines on this, you would get the impression that we can only be scientific leaders if we were a religious country. However, American technological leadership peaked in World War II, and at that time we were distinctly a religious, racist, and sexist country.
With that in mind, I think we need to rethink how and why we teach science. Teaching young boys that science is "cool" is a recipe for boredom. Those of us boys who do well in science all realize at some level that science is a tool for domination. However, that message is not being taught because it is considered politically incorrect to dominate.
Therefor, I propose that:
a) we segregate men and women in public schools. b) we teach men that as American citizens they are the vanguard of a vast commmercial empire and that science is one of the tools for our dominance.
I guarantee that within a generation, we will be at the top of the world, again.
Kyoto: We couldn't possibly burden the impoverished oil producing companies and countries with the costs associated with their defective CO2 laden product, so instead we'll charge the consumers.
No other form of energy in the United States is as heavily subsidized or untaxed as much as petroleum is. If we did not have these subsidies or untaxed on other forms of energy, most likely what would happen would be that the cost of oil would drop because of real competition.
Well, no, that's just Clinton being a shrewd politician. He signed it to satisfy his own basis, but then didn't send it to the Senate knowing that the treaty sucked. If he really wanted to make an issue out of it, he would have sent it and forced a debate, as he did with many other forms of legislation.
Clinton's thing was to sign it, then, not send it to the Senate until he got more concessions.
Sure, as far as we know, we theoretically can't go faster than light, but... we've never actually tried to go faster than light.
And even our theory has some gaps. We still have no provable mechanism to say how gravity works. No one has built a machine that can turn gravity on or off and isolate gravity into a box the same way you can electricity. We don't even have any experimental verification for what causes mass.
So, other than it can't tell us what keeps our feet on the ground, physics is batting a thousand.
Kyoto is a bad plan because it is a consumer pays treaty, not a producer pays treaty. CO2 is tagged specifically by the consumers of the product, not the producers. This was done pretty much to screw the USA.
Forget Bush, even Clinton wouldn't sign off on it without major changes.
The right way to do Kyoto would be to charge those nations that export carbon fuels with the CO2, not the nations that import them. Thus, Saudi Arabia, Venezuala, Nigeria should get whacked with Kyoto charges, because they produce all the CO2. If those nations want to avoid Kyoto taxes, they should either sink all this CO2 they produce, or, make a more CO2 efficient energy system.
A friend of mine did do a fiber to the curb sales pilot in Texas for quite a well that could give insane bandwidths. In fact I think Verizon ran a DSL fiber to the curb trial in Arizona where you could get 50+ Mbs up and down.
The avionics is the hard part. You want your cruise missile to be ground hugging. So you need a radar with a frequency high enough to resolve ground details in time to avoid a collision.
Any act not done for money is an act of voluntarily enslaving yourself to someone else's idea that you have little time to prove for yourself. Feel good about your acts, but be sure you understand what you are doing.
Programmers should know how computers work and today's breed often knows less about what goes on inside of object systems than they should. Send them to class to write one in assembly.
Going off the grid is actually less efficient because a modern high end energy station will waste far less energy than your home generation will, even if you count transmission losses.
That's like saying, well, just trust us to stand in your house with a gas can and a lighter after we got out prison for arson. We'll be good, we promise.
Other countries use reformulated rods to cut down on waste. While the USA set a notable example for trying to cut down on proliferation, the rest of the world ignored it in favor of reducing the amount of nuclear waste it had in their nuclear programs.
b. because it avoids the problems that occur with the present shuttle - stuff falling from the booster onto the thermal system.
c. true.
d & e. agreed, but NASA has had captured lessons learned about the shuttle for future avionics that can be used to kickstart requirements for a new bird.
I was all on board the idea of giving up on the OSP and getting a simple capsule, but then I saw something.
The inside of the shuttle is -big-. Capsules are small. We can stuff 7 people in a shuttle and they have more than enough room to hang out in. The cargo bay is big and roomy. There's plenty of stuff in there.
So, I'm going to come out and say that yes the shuttle is a hideously complicated system, aging technology, but we should keep in mind that we have a working orbital space plane.
Instead of building a cramped little capsule, why not design a newer shuttle that:
a) can be configured for lunar orbital missions b) rides on top of a booster, rather than its side c) has its own onboard jet engines (avoid the need for deadstick landings) d) has a more reliable thermal protection system than the shuttle. e) works to address designed in defects of the shuttle.
There's a huge amount of design knowledge around the shuttle, and just pitching it for a capsule seems like a waste.
The United States is the largest single sovereign economic zone on the planet, and with the highest growth rate. I think in absolute terms, the USA will pass the EU by sometime around 2010 - we're already way ahead per capita.
I remember dialing into "chats" on different bulletin board systems. You could upload / download files, send messages to other people. It was pretty cool. All text stuff.
The reason China's economy is growing really fast is because they stopped centrally planning it. Yes they do have a lot of state sponsored works but the real dynamo of China's economy is that a lot of a generals in the Chinese army took their military contract funds and opened up factories to produce goods bound for America. Chinese banks now underwrite this production dramatically, so that, anyone in China can get a loan to start a factory if they can convince the bank they have a buyer in America for the goods that it produces.
The British Empire and the Soviet Union had no real used for the United Nations. Churchill signed on board because Roosevelt goaded him into it and Churchill needed to get the United States into the war.
The facts of the matter is:
We arrogant Americans created the League of Nations, then refused to join it.
We arrogant Americans created the United Nations, and now some of us think it has outlawed its usefulness.
Of course other nations got their two cents worth in, but, the United Nations and present structure of the world was driven by the United States primarily.
The United Nations had in its genesis the League of Nations, advocated by the American President Woodrow Wilson. Impressed with the ideas of the League but also mindful of its failures was the young politician Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
When World War II was fought, it was through Roosevelt's insistence that the United Nations was founded. Roosevelt though, like Wilson, felt that the United Nations should ideally only apply to Democratic Nations. Unfortunately, he had to get Stalin on board the United Nations and in doing so ruined it.
For historical reference, please read the original Atlantic Charter, and also the text of Wilson's request for war against Germany in 1917.
Slashdot Mirror
Well there's a huge amount of CYA when it comes to devices that people's lives depend on. If a Sony Walkman breaks, who cares. But if one thing goes wrong with a medical device, it can kill people. A single engineer could reasonably be expected to design most of a walkman and assume the risk of it working or succeeding, but who would really, in a corporation, accept the responsibility of life or death by themselves. You have to have a large layer to spread the blame around if something goes wrong, or, pay people to add layers of bloat to make sure the device goes out the door with perfect reliability.
If you read between the lines on this, you would get the impression that we can only be scientific leaders if we were a religious country. However, American technological leadership peaked in World War II, and at that time we were distinctly a religious, racist, and sexist country.
With that in mind, I think we need to rethink how and why we teach science. Teaching young boys that science is "cool" is a recipe for boredom. Those of us boys who do well in science all realize at some level that science is a tool for domination. However, that message is not being taught because it is considered politically incorrect to dominate.
Therefor, I propose that:
a) we segregate men and women in public schools.
b) we teach men that as American citizens they are the vanguard of a vast commmercial empire and that science is one of the tools for our dominance.
I guarantee that within a generation, we will be at the top of the world, again.
Kyoto: We couldn't possibly burden the impoverished oil producing companies and countries with the costs associated with their defective CO2 laden product, so instead we'll charge the consumers.
No other form of energy in the United States is as heavily subsidized or untaxed as much as petroleum is. If we did not have these subsidies or untaxed on other forms of energy, most likely what would happen would be that the cost of oil would drop because of real competition.
Well, no, that's just Clinton being a shrewd politician. He signed it to satisfy his own basis, but then didn't send it to the Senate knowing that the treaty sucked. If he really wanted to make an issue out of it, he would have sent it and forced a debate, as he did with many other forms of legislation.
Clinton's thing was to sign it, then, not send it to the Senate until he got more concessions.
Sure, as far as we know, we theoretically can't go faster than light, but... we've never actually tried to go faster than light.
And even our theory has some gaps. We still have no provable mechanism to say how gravity works. No one has built a machine that can turn gravity on or off and isolate gravity into a box the same way you can electricity. We don't even have any experimental verification for what causes mass.
So, other than it can't tell us what keeps our feet on the ground, physics is batting a thousand.
Never say never.
Kyoto is a bad plan because it is a consumer pays treaty, not a producer pays treaty. CO2 is tagged specifically by the consumers of the product, not the producers. This was done pretty much to screw the USA.
Forget Bush, even Clinton wouldn't sign off on it without major changes.
The right way to do Kyoto would be to charge those nations that export carbon fuels with the CO2, not the nations that import them. Thus, Saudi Arabia, Venezuala, Nigeria should get whacked with Kyoto charges, because they produce all the CO2. If those nations want to avoid Kyoto taxes, they should either sink all this CO2 they produce, or, make a more CO2 efficient energy system.
A friend of mine did do a fiber to the curb sales pilot in Texas for quite a well that could give insane bandwidths. In fact I think Verizon ran a DSL fiber to the curb trial in Arizona where you could get 50+ Mbs up and down.
The avionics is the hard part. You want your cruise missile to be ground hugging. So you need a radar with a frequency high enough to resolve ground details in time to avoid a collision.
Just don't listen to music! It sounds crazy, but, there's plenty of things to do besides to just listen to tunes.
The coffee cup logo on a PC has a really bad rap in some circles.
Any act not done for money is an act of voluntarily enslaving yourself to someone else's idea that you have little time to prove for yourself. Feel good about your acts, but be sure you understand what you are doing.
Programmers should know how computers work and today's breed often knows less about what goes on inside of object systems than they should. Send them to class to write one in assembly.
That whole generation Y has been ruined because of scrappy doo and edited bugs bunny cartoons.
Going off the grid is actually less efficient because a modern high end energy station will waste far less energy than your home generation will, even if you count transmission losses.
That's like saying, well, just trust us to stand in your house with a gas can and a lighter after we got out prison for arson. We'll be good, we promise.
Other countries use reformulated rods to cut down on waste. While the USA set a notable example for trying to cut down on proliferation, the rest of the world ignored it in favor of reducing the amount of nuclear waste it had in their nuclear programs.
a. true.
b. because it avoids the problems that occur with the present shuttle - stuff falling from the booster onto the thermal system.
c. true.
d & e. agreed, but NASA has had captured lessons learned about the shuttle for future avionics that can be used to kickstart requirements for a new bird.
I was all on board the idea of giving up on the OSP and getting a simple capsule, but then I saw something.
The inside of the shuttle is -big-. Capsules are small. We can stuff 7 people in a shuttle and they have more than enough room to hang out in. The cargo bay is big and roomy. There's plenty of stuff in there.
So, I'm going to come out and say that yes the shuttle is a hideously complicated system, aging technology, but we should keep in mind that we have a working orbital space plane.
Instead of building a cramped little capsule, why not design a newer shuttle that:
a) can be configured for lunar orbital missions
b) rides on top of a booster, rather than its side
c) has its own onboard jet engines (avoid the need for deadstick landings)
d) has a more reliable thermal protection system than the shuttle.
e) works to address designed in defects of the shuttle.
There's a huge amount of design knowledge around the shuttle, and just pitching it for a capsule seems like a waste.
Yeah, but they were all bad!
Sorry, but the assumption is warranted.
The United States is the largest single sovereign economic zone on the planet, and with the highest growth rate. I think in absolute terms, the USA will pass the EU by sometime around 2010 - we're already way ahead per capita.
I remember dialing into "chats" on different bulletin board systems. You could upload / download files, send messages to other people. It was pretty cool. All text stuff.
The reason China's economy is growing really fast is because they stopped centrally planning it. Yes they do have a lot of state sponsored works but the real dynamo of China's economy is that a lot of a generals in the Chinese army took their military contract funds and opened up factories to produce goods bound for America. Chinese banks now underwrite this production dramatically, so that, anyone in China can get a loan to start a factory if they can convince the bank they have a buyer in America for the goods that it produces.
The British Empire and the Soviet Union had no real used for the United Nations. Churchill signed on board because Roosevelt goaded him into it and Churchill needed to get the United States into the war.
The facts of the matter is:
We arrogant Americans created the League of Nations, then refused to join it.
We arrogant Americans created the United Nations, and now some of us think it has outlawed its usefulness.
Of course other nations got their two cents worth in, but, the United Nations and present structure of the world was driven by the United States primarily.
The United States did invent the United Nations.
The United Nations had in its genesis the League of Nations, advocated by the American President Woodrow Wilson. Impressed with the ideas of the League but also mindful of its failures was the young politician Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
When World War II was fought, it was through Roosevelt's insistence that the United Nations was founded. Roosevelt though, like Wilson, felt that the United Nations should ideally only apply to Democratic Nations. Unfortunately, he had to get Stalin on board the United Nations and in doing so ruined it.
For historical reference, please read the original Atlantic Charter, and also the text of Wilson's request for war against Germany in 1917.
If they had a genuine battery that could be charged in 60 seconds and drive 300 miles, someone would be selling it. But they don't have that battery.