The so-called "magic bullet" did change its orientation (but not its trajectory) in mid flight before it hit Connally in the back. That's because it passed through Kennedy's neck before it got there. Careful analyses of the positions and orientations of Kennedy, Connally and Oswald at the time of that second shot found that they line up perfectly. Connally had an oval-shaped entrance wound on his back that can only be explained by a sideways-traveling bullet. Bullets don't travel sideways when they exit a rifle muzzle, but they quite often do that after they pass through materials like soft flesh -- in this case, Kennedy's neck. The bullet that hit Connally was also traveling at a relatively slow speed, again explainable only by it having first passed through something else.
The House Select Committee found a "probable conspiracy" on the basis of just one piece of evidence: a Dictabelt recording, supposedly capturing the sounds of gunfire, recorded by an open microphone on a police motorcycle. After the committee released its findings, it was conclusively discovered (by an amateur researcher) that the recording wasn't of the shots of the assassination at all. Their conclusion had no foundation at all.
Rather than answer your other points, all of which have been hashed out ad nauseum for many years, I'll simply refer you to "Case Closed" by Gerald Posner. His title says it all. If you want to apply your conspiracy-finding skills, I suggest you look for more fertile territory. Remember that whatever theory you propose has to match all the facts as closely as possible. You don't get to pick and choose. You'll never find a theory that exactly matches everything, but the theory that Oswald fired three shots from the sixth floor of the Book Depository (and there were no other shooters) matches all the known facts far more closely than any other theory.
It's true that we cannot absolutely, positively rule out the possibility of some undiscovered contact of Oswald's before the assassination. But when it comes to the basic aspects of what happened in Dealy Plaza at 12:30pm on November 22, 1963, the case has been closed for a very long time.
Um, why don't you try actually reading the MSNBC article quoted in the original Slashdot article. The same article has appeared in many other news sources.
Hmm, that link doesn't seem to be working anymore, so consider this random article, in particular this quote:
Traffic's managing director, Kirk Ewing, said that the game would "bring history to life" for a whole new generation of people.
"We genuinely believe that if we get enough people participating we'll be able to disprove once and for all any notion that someone else was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy," he said [...]
So... care to retract your "arrogant schmuck" remark?
Well, the Warren Commission's conclusions have been proven about as well as anything so heavily studied possibly can be. In a rational world, we would have accepted the lone gunman theory decades ago as the most reasonable explanation of all the observed facts and moved on with our lives.
But some people just can't accept such a simple, straightforward and logical explanation. There has to be more. They'll trash the Warren Commission without ever bothering to read the report, and they'll subscribe to any one of dozens of ridiculous, mutually contradictory conspiracy theories.
I do have a problem with the simulation's authors (I can't really bring myself to call it a "game") who want you to match the actual outcome as closely as possible. In many real-world situations with a random element there are a large number of similar outcomes, each one of which is relatively unlikely but in aggregate are virtually certain. For example, any given poker hand is just as likely as any other, and the chances of getting any given hand are extremely tiny, yet one of those extremely unlikely events is guaranteed to happen every time the cards are dealt.
Similarly, if Oswald could have repeated the assassination, the outcome would probably have been a little different each time. Perhaps the first shot wouldn't have missed as it did; perhaps he would have hit Kennedy's head with the second shot so he wouldn't have required a third; perhaps the third shot would have missed and he would have fired a fourth; and so on. The point is that all these outcomes flow from the same situation: Oswald sitting in the sixth floor corner window with a rifle, shooting at the motorcade. And that's what you're trying to determine.
So it's really kind of pointless to create a "game" in which you try to exactly match the actual outcome. If you're simply trying to understand what happened, it makes more sense to form a list of all possible explanations and then see which one most closely matches all the known facts. That's exactly what the Warren Commission did. And they did an excellent job in showing why they concluded that Oswald, acting alone, shot Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Book Depository.
It sounds like a project to try and show that the shot was impossible.
Quite the reverse. Quoting from the MSNBC article...
Ewing said the game was designed to undermine the theory there was some shadowy plot behind the assassination. "We believe passionately there was no conspiracy," he said.
What is the JFK assassination so difficult to understand? Anyone with a reasonable understanding of physics and some common sense can study the countless recreations and simulations of the assassination and come to the very same conclusions that the Warren Commission did. Unless, of course, you would rather live in a fantasy world of massive, shadowy conspiracies.
This game is clearly an attempt to show just how implausible the official explanation for the JFK assassination is.
Actually, the authors are trying to show exactly the opposite, that the Warren Commission made perfectly reasonable conclusions. Perhaps you should actually read what the game's authors said before you spout off your tired old conspiracy theories.
...they didn't want thousands of American tourists going up there each year, pointing out the window, and realizing "There's no fucking way!"
Funny, when I visited Dealey Plaza, it seemed so... small. Then I visited the Sixth Floor museum and stood next to that window. That shot was easy! The only mystery is how he actually managed to miss one shot out of three.
By the way, I've actually read the Warren Commission report. Have you?
Why would neutrinos be the ultimate communication system? They follow the inverse square law just like photons, so they propagate across empty space exactly the same. Neutrinos are a lot more difficult to detect than photons, and for exactly the same reason that they pass through the earth so easily.
It's a lot easier to get the earth out of the way so photons can pass (with multiple receiving stations so the spacecraft is always above the horizon of at least one) than it is to build an efficient neutrino detector. So what's the point of neutrinos?
To a first order, frequency/wavelength is irrelevant. All electromagnetic radiation follows an inverse square propagation law that's independent of frequency.
But it does matter in practice.
Background noise. The electromagnetic background noise level varies enormously with frequency. Here optical communications is actually at a big disadvantage compared with microwave, mainly because stars are brightest in the visible and near infrared. (Fortunately, it's fairly easy to exclude stars from interplanetary links with narrow-field telescopes.) The microwave range between 1 and 10 GHz is pretty quiet, which is why it's so heavily used for satellite and deep space communications. Below that range you start to run into sources of noise other than thermal radiation, such as lightning and radiation from charged particles trapped in magnetic fields.
Bandwidth. Optical frequencies have much more room for broadband signals, but in practice microwave bandwidth is plentiful for deep space communications. Those links tend to be signal-to-noise ratio limited, not bandwidth limited.
Antenna gain. Although the inverse square law applies equally at all wavelengths, antennas are not equally effective at all wavelengths. A receiving antenna's performance depends primarily on its aperture, the area with which it collects radiation, and that's independent of wavelength. But a transmitting antenna is different. The beamwidth of an antenna depends on its diameter in wavelengths, so a given antenna will transmit a narrower, tighter beam at shorter wavelengths, so more of it will land on the receiving antenna (assuming it's pointed accurately). So if you use a given pair of antennas on a given point-to-point link and vary just the wavength, the end-to-end power transfer efficiency will improve with shorter wavelengths at a rate of 6 dB per octave.
Atmospheric absorption. Space is an empty vacuum, but the attenuation of the earth's atmosphere is a complex function of frequency. Below about 30 MHz, the ionosphere acts like a mirror; that's how "shortwave" broadcasts get worldwide coverage. There's a broad window from about 30 MHz up to about 10 GHz. Above that frequency, water vapor becomes increasingly important. There's a sharp absorption line at 60 GHz due to oxygen absorption, and above there it becomes increasingly opaque up until the infrared. There's another broad opening in the infrared and visible range, followed by more absorption bands in the ultraviolet (due, among other things, to the ozone layer).
This leaves two places for interplanetary communication links: the microwave range between 1-10 GHz, and the optical range. The advantage in going optical lies entirely in the increased transmitter antenna gain that would allow much more of the limited spacecraft transmitter power to be directed to the receiving antenna on or near earth.
Ballmer's missive landed in my mailbox last night (somehow it escaped my spam filter), and I wrote this response. I know no one there will read it, but it was still fun to write.
I wish I had a nickle for every person who's said this.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with SMTP. It's not end-to-end, so it's the wrong place to implement authentication anyway.
The right place to authenticate an email message is in the message itself. We already have two very good mechanisms that do this: PGP and S/MIME. They're even widely deployed; all we have to do is to get people to use them.
No, progress is only progress when it's progress. Or, in other words, it's only progress when it involves doing something new, or is clearly a step to doing something new. Manned suborbital flights were already old hat by the early 1960s, so what's the point of doing them again now? Especially when the technology is such an obvious dead end?
I didn't say that you personally said the shuttle or the space station were good ideas. If you carefully read what I said, I said that you are advancing exactly the same arguments made in favor of the shuttle and the space station over 20 years ago. The sad fact is that a significant expansion in manned space flight, be it by NASA or anyone else, is pretty much pointless without a major leap in technology that does not even appear on the horizon. So emphasizing it now is just wasting money that could be much better spent in other ways, such as the further development of robotic space and planetary exploration.
Please don't tell me that the shuttle and the space station are disasters only because the government built them. The simple fact is that the laws of physics are exactly the same for both government and private space programs. A blind faith in "private enterprise" is just that, blind.
In fact, the complete absence of "private enterprise" in manned spaceflight, until now, is an excellent illustration of just how irrelevant it is with respect to the commercial development of space. Countless spacecraft have been launched on completely commercial missions that haven't had to carry a single astronaut to get the job done. Government space organizations like NASA, spending tax money, may be able to indulge in costly missions intended merely to boost "national prestige", but businesses don't have that luxury. Individuals who became incredibly rich through their businesses and are now indulging their egos are a special case; they're much more like their own small governments than businesses beholden to their stockholders.
I know it's a cliche, but you really do have to learn to crawl before you can walk. We are so far from the technology necessary for any kind of significant human colonization of space that the present emphasis on human space flight is a major mistake. As Exhibits A and B, I give you the space shuttle and space station. Sure, they're both a joke. But how could they have not been?
This is not a choice between robots and humans, it's really a choice between robots and nothing at all because the human option just isn't going to be feasible in our lifetime. But we can vicariously explore the planets right now, and perhaps lay the foundation for practical human visits long after you and I are gone.
If you disagree, show me a viable cost-effective plan for interplanetary human space exploration with a reasonable price tag and a good chance of success, not
some feel-good starry-eyed daydreaming that assumes we can print money.
I don't know if you were around in the 1970s and 1980s, but a lot of people banged the drum for the shuttle and space station with the very same arguments you're making now. They were essential stepping stones to space and the planets, launch costs would plummet dramatically, all sorts of great scientific and technological advances would result, only humans in space can do certain important things, etc, etc. The space and planetary scientists who argued against the shuttle and station lost, and now they have the bittersweet knowledge that everything since has proven them right. So why should your arguments deserve any credibility at all given that they haven't changed in 20+ years?
Planetary robots, both on the surface and in orbit, have proven themselves amazingly capable and cost-effective. And they're getting better all the time. What you see as inherent limitations of robotic exploration are usually not major problems at all. They may even represent major advantages of robots over humans. Spirit and Opportunity are on Mars to conduct geological research, not win an interplanetary road rally. Robots don't require food and oxygen and medical care, so they can remain active far beyond human limits. And they don't have to be returned to earth.
Besides, what good is a tire-squealing 100 mph rover when much of the detailed data you're collecting requires many multi-hour observations in each location? The gamma spectrometers, for example, integrate all night long on each spot to get their data. Would you want a human astronaut to have to stand in one spot, holding an instrument all night long?
Humans are able to act on their judgment in exploring distant planets; they've been doing it remotely ever since the first probe was launched. And the pool of talent isn't limited to those who can pass a rigorous astronaut selection and training program. Remember that only one of the Apollo astronauts was a trained geologist. The skills it takes to pilot a manned spacecraft are very different from those of a scientist.
Oh, I'm not a detractor. I believe very strongly in space science, exploration and development. That's why I'm compelled to speak out whenever I see human space flight being wildly oversold to a public that unfortunately doesn't know any better. It'll hurt the cause in the long run. The near-term realities and limitations of human space flight simply can't be wished away. We'll be much better off once we learn to live within our means, so to speak, and place the near-term emphasis back where it belongs, on sustainable science, exploration and commercialization instead of putting humans into space as PR stunts or as an end in itself.
Sure, someday it would be nice for humans to colonize space, but that's many generations off. Cliched comparisons to Columbus and the New World aren't just flawed, they're plainly absurd.
With both the space shuttle and the space station having become the ratholes and fiascos that the many scientists with calmer heads warned they'd become, one would think that the public would be learning their lesson by now.
Are you sure you didn't develop Verisign's Site Finder?:-)
DHCP is an official, open, widely used IETF standard. That puts people on notice
about how it works, and what to expect. Login redirection isn't. There's no comparison. Redirection is a hack, pure and simple, and like nearly all hacks, it may work most of the time but break horribly in all sorts of unexpected ways.
And there are much cleaner ways to do what you want.
Well, I do help design and build my "own" spacecraft. Ever heard of AMSAT?
The average guy with some technical
skills can
get involved in some really interesting space activities. You'll
learn a lot and have more than just 3.5 minutes of fun. Won't cost you a hundred grand, either.
Please explain how 3.5 minute joyrides in a dead-end vehicle that comes nowhere near orbit
are going to lead to more space exploration. Please don't repeat
the tired old cliche that we need humans in space to interest the public
in space science. That's what got us a useless space station that nobody cares about
and a grounded shuttle fleet that's not much more useful even when it flies.
A lack of astronauts on the Mars rovers or Cassini didn't seem
to stop a lot of folks from becoming intensely interested in those missions because,
unlike the manned program, they're actually doing some real space exploration!
What do you mean the dual plane idea "hasn't been done before?" It was done before, just as you said, with the X-15 and Pegasus!
Anyway, there's a very simple reason why airplanes aren't used much to reach space: they're just not that much help. An airplane, even one cruising as fast and high as White Knight, contributes only a tiny fraction of the energy you need to reach orbit. Even SpaceShipOne after its rocket firing has less than 4% of the energy it would need to reach orbit. It's not even close. Just reaching 100km is easy; the kinetic energy needed to stay there is a whole different story!
I don't know about SpaceShipOne, but the reason Pegasus is carried up on an airplane has to do with getting above the thick lower atmosphere and the aerodynamic heating it causes when you fly through it at high speed. This allows the Pegasus structure to be lighter and less heavily insulated than it would have to be to be launched from the ground.
Pegasus is a very small and physically rugged launcher that uses all solid propellants. That makes it practical to carry and launch from an airplane. Larger launchers are simply too big and fragile to carry up on an airplane, especially since they contain large amounts of nasty things like liquid oxygen.
You can solve ALL crime problems by the process of elimination and assuming everyone is guilty. That system is called a police state.
This is a popular rhetorical device among those defending civil liberties because it seems so obviously true. But it's not. Repressive police states are actually quite effective in promoting terrorism as a response. It's
both unnecessary and counterproductive in a truly free country.
Of course, whenever the US government fights some other
repressive government,
our leaders will call it "liberation" (if we do the fighting) or "freedom fighting" (if we sponsor the locals to do it). "Terrorism" doesn't have quite the desired connotation.
You misunderstand me. I wasn't objecting to having to register to use somebody else's hotspot. That's fair enough. I only object to the kludge "taught" (that's a patent term) by this particular set of patents. It's an ugly hack, a violation of the end-to-end principle, and a terrible abuse of the Internet protocols akin to Verisign's deservedly maligned Site Finder "service". It's bad for almost the exact same reasons that Site Finder is bad. Its only saving grace is that it only afflicts the users of a given wireless service and not the whole Internet.
What if my web browser is configured to use a proxy? What if my home page requires SSL? (Both are true for me). What if my browser doesn't properly implement caching, so the login pages come back up after I have already signed in? And suppose I don't even want to use the web, but just fetch mail or run an rsync command. I happen to be knowledgeable enough about this particular hack to manually disable my proxy and surf to a non-SSL webpage to get properly redirected, but what about your average non-technical user?
That's why I say it wouldn't be such a bad thing if these patents steered public IP wireless providers away from implementing this particular brain-dead hack and towards an authentication mechanism designed specifically for the job. 802.1x is the obvious alternative, but it's not the only one. IANA could reserve an IP anycast address and associated domain name specifically for authenticating yourself to a public wireless network with a standard web browser. Because you're not hijacking a request to some other web object, many of the architectural problems mentioned earlier disappear. If you know you'll use such a network, you just create a bookmark for that special domain name and put it in your browser's list of sites not to be reached through your proxy. Simple and clean, even if it still requires a web browser.
So what? No matter who developed the Atlas, Delta, Ariane, Zenit, etc, you can still go buy one and launch whatever you want on it. All you need is the cash. They'll take you wherever you want to go, within physical limits, because it's your nickle. Space has been commercialized for quite some time now.
Rutan claims he's "private enterprise", and he is in the sense that he doesn't
take money directly from the government. But he can't help but benefit from all that was done before him by various government and military space programs. Even Rutan's pilots got most of their training and experience in the military.
As was said about the atomic bomb shortly after it was used for the first time, the only real "secret" of the atomic bomb was the knowledge that it was possible. When Rutan does something that hasn't already been done for 40 years by a government, then he'll qualify as a true private-enterprise pioneer.
Besides, boosting satellites into orbit is hardly "exploration".
And 3.5 minute joyrides are? I guess it depends on your definition of the
term. By the one I like, this has been a banner year for space exploration. Nearly all of it has been done by JPL and related groups and none of it has involved any astronauts.
Okay, fine. So transoceanic cables have been around for 100 years, not 50. I said 50 because that was the number cited in the message I was answering. No matter, because only in the last twenty years has the average person begun to afford to use them. And only in the past ten years has the Internet -- and all its applications -- become a mass phenomenon. People are still figuring out how best to use it.
I doubt that meeting either Kerry or Bush in person is going to change who I'm going to vote for. (Nor is anything they're likely to say on the news, though.)
You sound like someone who's trying harder to convince himself than the other guy in a debate. Either that, or you work for an airline marketing department. An awful lot of companies talked investors into tossing a lot of cash at them in the late 1990s for business plans that made much more sense than space joyriding, and most of them still disappeared.
Even the communications satellite business -- by far the most commercially viable space application -- has fallen on hard times because of rapid technological developments in terrestrial communications. Not only have fiber, coax and DSL knocked satellites out of the running for most fixed point-to-point applications, but digital cellular has taken over mobile communications, including most of the part that people thought would go to satellites. That's why Iridium and Globalstar went bankrupt. Once again, communication satellites are used mainly for broadcasting, the one thing they do really well.
But talk is cheap. Time will tell what will really happen, and whether Branson et al are really tapping a big new market or just stroking their own egos.
Maybe this isn't so bad after all. One of the few pluses to patents is the way they sometimes keep people from using really bad ideas that they should be prevented from using. This is a good example.
I assume I don't have to explain to a Slashdotter how much telecommunications has improved in just the past few years, and how many more things you can do with all that undersea fiber being sold at fire-sale prices than with the first transoceanic coax cables of 50 years ago.
Sure, you can probably still contrive some situation where ultra-fast transportation would be worth it. But it's pretty damn rare. I never flew the Concorde even though I had enough in the bank to pay for a ticket. It was just never worth the premium.
We'll see just how willing you are to sign that $100,000 check when (or if) the time actually comes and you've had time to think about all the other things you could do with that money.
I'm reminded of the saying "Cocaine is God's way of telling you that you have too much money". I've never done the stuff and I never will, but I wouldn't be surprised if cocaine is both cheaper and safer than a ride on SpaceShipOne. On the other hand, I concede that a SpaceShipOne ride would give you the better bragging rights.
Sure, it would be great to see the earth from that altitude. But for that price, and only for a few minutes? If you took off during the day, it would be all over before your eyes even had time to adapt enough to see the stars.
Slashdot Mirror
The House Select Committee found a "probable conspiracy" on the basis of just one piece of evidence: a Dictabelt recording, supposedly capturing the sounds of gunfire, recorded by an open microphone on a police motorcycle. After the committee released its findings, it was conclusively discovered (by an amateur researcher) that the recording wasn't of the shots of the assassination at all. Their conclusion had no foundation at all.
Rather than answer your other points, all of which have been hashed out ad nauseum for many years, I'll simply refer you to "Case Closed" by Gerald Posner. His title says it all. If you want to apply your conspiracy-finding skills, I suggest you look for more fertile territory. Remember that whatever theory you propose has to match all the facts as closely as possible. You don't get to pick and choose. You'll never find a theory that exactly matches everything, but the theory that Oswald fired three shots from the sixth floor of the Book Depository (and there were no other shooters) matches all the known facts far more closely than any other theory. It's true that we cannot absolutely, positively rule out the possibility of some undiscovered contact of Oswald's before the assassination. But when it comes to the basic aspects of what happened in Dealy Plaza at 12:30pm on November 22, 1963, the case has been closed for a very long time.
Hmm, that link doesn't seem to be working anymore, so consider this random article, in particular this quote:
So... care to retract your "arrogant schmuck" remark?
But some people just can't accept such a simple, straightforward and logical explanation. There has to be more. They'll trash the Warren Commission without ever bothering to read the report, and they'll subscribe to any one of dozens of ridiculous, mutually contradictory conspiracy theories.
I do have a problem with the simulation's authors (I can't really bring myself to call it a "game") who want you to match the actual outcome as closely as possible. In many real-world situations with a random element there are a large number of similar outcomes, each one of which is relatively unlikely but in aggregate are virtually certain. For example, any given poker hand is just as likely as any other, and the chances of getting any given hand are extremely tiny, yet one of those extremely unlikely events is guaranteed to happen every time the cards are dealt.
Similarly, if Oswald could have repeated the assassination, the outcome would probably have been a little different each time. Perhaps the first shot wouldn't have missed as it did; perhaps he would have hit Kennedy's head with the second shot so he wouldn't have required a third; perhaps the third shot would have missed and he would have fired a fourth; and so on. The point is that all these outcomes flow from the same situation: Oswald sitting in the sixth floor corner window with a rifle, shooting at the motorcade. And that's what you're trying to determine.
So it's really kind of pointless to create a "game" in which you try to exactly match the actual outcome. If you're simply trying to understand what happened, it makes more sense to form a list of all possible explanations and then see which one most closely matches all the known facts. That's exactly what the Warren Commission did. And they did an excellent job in showing why they concluded that Oswald, acting alone, shot Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Book Depository.
But unless you actually read it, you don't have much on which to base an opinion, now do you?
Quite the reverse. Quoting from the MSNBC article...
What is the JFK assassination so difficult to understand? Anyone with a reasonable understanding of physics and some common sense can study the countless recreations and simulations of the assassination and come to the very same conclusions that the Warren Commission did. Unless, of course, you would rather live in a fantasy world of massive, shadowy conspiracies.
Actually, the authors are trying to show exactly the opposite, that the Warren Commission made perfectly reasonable conclusions. Perhaps you should actually read what the game's authors said before you spout off your tired old conspiracy theories.
Funny, when I visited Dealey Plaza, it seemed so... small. Then I visited the Sixth Floor museum and stood next to that window. That shot was easy! The only mystery is how he actually managed to miss one shot out of three.
By the way, I've actually read the Warren Commission report. Have you?
It's a lot easier to get the earth out of the way so photons can pass (with multiple receiving stations so the spacecraft is always above the horizon of at least one) than it is to build an efficient neutrino detector. So what's the point of neutrinos?
But it does matter in practice.
Background noise. The electromagnetic background noise level varies enormously with frequency. Here optical communications is actually at a big disadvantage compared with microwave, mainly because stars are brightest in the visible and near infrared. (Fortunately, it's fairly easy to exclude stars from interplanetary links with narrow-field telescopes.) The microwave range between 1 and 10 GHz is pretty quiet, which is why it's so heavily used for satellite and deep space communications. Below that range you start to run into sources of noise other than thermal radiation, such as lightning and radiation from charged particles trapped in magnetic fields.
Bandwidth. Optical frequencies have much more room for broadband signals, but in practice microwave bandwidth is plentiful for deep space communications. Those links tend to be signal-to-noise ratio limited, not bandwidth limited.
Antenna gain. Although the inverse square law applies equally at all wavelengths, antennas are not equally effective at all wavelengths. A receiving antenna's performance depends primarily on its aperture, the area with which it collects radiation, and that's independent of wavelength. But a transmitting antenna is different. The beamwidth of an antenna depends on its diameter in wavelengths, so a given antenna will transmit a narrower, tighter beam at shorter wavelengths, so more of it will land on the receiving antenna (assuming it's pointed accurately). So if you use a given pair of antennas on a given point-to-point link and vary just the wavength, the end-to-end power transfer efficiency will improve with shorter wavelengths at a rate of 6 dB per octave.
Atmospheric absorption. Space is an empty vacuum, but the attenuation of the earth's atmosphere is a complex function of frequency. Below about 30 MHz, the ionosphere acts like a mirror; that's how "shortwave" broadcasts get worldwide coverage. There's a broad window from about 30 MHz up to about 10 GHz. Above that frequency, water vapor becomes increasingly important. There's a sharp absorption line at 60 GHz due to oxygen absorption, and above there it becomes increasingly opaque up until the infrared. There's another broad opening in the infrared and visible range, followed by more absorption bands in the ultraviolet (due, among other things, to the ozone layer).
This leaves two places for interplanetary communication links: the microwave range between 1-10 GHz, and the optical range. The advantage in going optical lies entirely in the increased transmitter antenna gain that would allow much more of the limited spacecraft transmitter power to be directed to the receiving antenna on or near earth.
Ballmer's missive landed in my mailbox last night (somehow it escaped my spam filter), and I wrote this response. I know no one there will read it, but it was still fun to write.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with SMTP. It's not end-to-end, so it's the wrong place to implement authentication anyway.
The right place to authenticate an email message is in the message itself. We already have two very good mechanisms that do this: PGP and S/MIME. They're even widely deployed; all we have to do is to get people to use them.
I didn't say that you personally said the shuttle or the space station were good ideas. If you carefully read what I said, I said that you are advancing exactly the same arguments made in favor of the shuttle and the space station over 20 years ago. The sad fact is that a significant expansion in manned space flight, be it by NASA or anyone else, is pretty much pointless without a major leap in technology that does not even appear on the horizon. So emphasizing it now is just wasting money that could be much better spent in other ways, such as the further development of robotic space and planetary exploration.
Please don't tell me that the shuttle and the space station are disasters only because the government built them. The simple fact is that the laws of physics are exactly the same for both government and private space programs. A blind faith in "private enterprise" is just that, blind.
In fact, the complete absence of "private enterprise" in manned spaceflight, until now, is an excellent illustration of just how irrelevant it is with respect to the commercial development of space. Countless spacecraft have been launched on completely commercial missions that haven't had to carry a single astronaut to get the job done. Government space organizations like NASA, spending tax money, may be able to indulge in costly missions intended merely to boost "national prestige", but businesses don't have that luxury. Individuals who became incredibly rich through their businesses and are now indulging their egos are a special case; they're much more like their own small governments than businesses beholden to their stockholders.
This is not a choice between robots and humans, it's really a choice between robots and nothing at all because the human option just isn't going to be feasible in our lifetime. But we can vicariously explore the planets right now, and perhaps lay the foundation for practical human visits long after you and I are gone.
If you disagree, show me a viable cost-effective plan for interplanetary human space exploration with a reasonable price tag and a good chance of success, not some feel-good starry-eyed daydreaming that assumes we can print money.
I don't know if you were around in the 1970s and 1980s, but a lot of people banged the drum for the shuttle and space station with the very same arguments you're making now. They were essential stepping stones to space and the planets, launch costs would plummet dramatically, all sorts of great scientific and technological advances would result, only humans in space can do certain important things, etc, etc. The space and planetary scientists who argued against the shuttle and station lost, and now they have the bittersweet knowledge that everything since has proven them right. So why should your arguments deserve any credibility at all given that they haven't changed in 20+ years?
Planetary robots, both on the surface and in orbit, have proven themselves amazingly capable and cost-effective. And they're getting better all the time. What you see as inherent limitations of robotic exploration are usually not major problems at all. They may even represent major advantages of robots over humans. Spirit and Opportunity are on Mars to conduct geological research, not win an interplanetary road rally. Robots don't require food and oxygen and medical care, so they can remain active far beyond human limits. And they don't have to be returned to earth.
Besides, what good is a tire-squealing 100 mph rover when much of the detailed data you're collecting requires many multi-hour observations in each location? The gamma spectrometers, for example, integrate all night long on each spot to get their data. Would you want a human astronaut to have to stand in one spot, holding an instrument all night long?
Humans are able to act on their judgment in exploring distant planets; they've been doing it remotely ever since the first probe was launched. And the pool of talent isn't limited to those who can pass a rigorous astronaut selection and training program. Remember that only one of the Apollo astronauts was a trained geologist. The skills it takes to pilot a manned spacecraft are very different from those of a scientist.
Sure, someday it would be nice for humans to colonize space, but that's many generations off. Cliched comparisons to Columbus and the New World aren't just flawed, they're plainly absurd.
With both the space shuttle and the space station having become the ratholes and fiascos that the many scientists with calmer heads warned they'd become, one would think that the public would be learning their lesson by now.
DHCP is an official, open, widely used IETF standard. That puts people on notice about how it works, and what to expect. Login redirection isn't. There's no comparison. Redirection is a hack, pure and simple, and like nearly all hacks, it may work most of the time but break horribly in all sorts of unexpected ways. And there are much cleaner ways to do what you want.
Please explain how 3.5 minute joyrides in a dead-end vehicle that comes nowhere near orbit are going to lead to more space exploration. Please don't repeat the tired old cliche that we need humans in space to interest the public in space science. That's what got us a useless space station that nobody cares about and a grounded shuttle fleet that's not much more useful even when it flies. A lack of astronauts on the Mars rovers or Cassini didn't seem to stop a lot of folks from becoming intensely interested in those missions because, unlike the manned program, they're actually doing some real space exploration!
Anyway, there's a very simple reason why airplanes aren't used much to reach space: they're just not that much help. An airplane, even one cruising as fast and high as White Knight, contributes only a tiny fraction of the energy you need to reach orbit. Even SpaceShipOne after its rocket firing has less than 4% of the energy it would need to reach orbit. It's not even close. Just reaching 100km is easy; the kinetic energy needed to stay there is a whole different story!
I don't know about SpaceShipOne, but the reason Pegasus is carried up on an airplane has to do with getting above the thick lower atmosphere and the aerodynamic heating it causes when you fly through it at high speed. This allows the Pegasus structure to be lighter and less heavily insulated than it would have to be to be launched from the ground.
Pegasus is a very small and physically rugged launcher that uses all solid propellants. That makes it practical to carry and launch from an airplane. Larger launchers are simply too big and fragile to carry up on an airplane, especially since they contain large amounts of nasty things like liquid oxygen.
My fault, I should have been more explicit in what I meant!
Of course, whenever the US government fights some other repressive government, our leaders will call it "liberation" (if we do the fighting) or "freedom fighting" (if we sponsor the locals to do it). "Terrorism" doesn't have quite the desired connotation.
What if my web browser is configured to use a proxy? What if my home page requires SSL? (Both are true for me). What if my browser doesn't properly implement caching, so the login pages come back up after I have already signed in? And suppose I don't even want to use the web, but just fetch mail or run an rsync command. I happen to be knowledgeable enough about this particular hack to manually disable my proxy and surf to a non-SSL webpage to get properly redirected, but what about your average non-technical user?
That's why I say it wouldn't be such a bad thing if these patents steered public IP wireless providers away from implementing this particular brain-dead hack and towards an authentication mechanism designed specifically for the job. 802.1x is the obvious alternative, but it's not the only one. IANA could reserve an IP anycast address and associated domain name specifically for authenticating yourself to a public wireless network with a standard web browser. Because you're not hijacking a request to some other web object, many of the architectural problems mentioned earlier disappear. If you know you'll use such a network, you just create a bookmark for that special domain name and put it in your browser's list of sites not to be reached through your proxy. Simple and clean, even if it still requires a web browser.
Rutan claims he's "private enterprise", and he is in the sense that he doesn't take money directly from the government. But he can't help but benefit from all that was done before him by various government and military space programs. Even Rutan's pilots got most of their training and experience in the military.
As was said about the atomic bomb shortly after it was used for the first time, the only real "secret" of the atomic bomb was the knowledge that it was possible. When Rutan does something that hasn't already been done for 40 years by a government, then he'll qualify as a true private-enterprise pioneer.
And 3.5 minute joyrides are? I guess it depends on your definition of the term. By the one I like, this has been a banner year for space exploration. Nearly all of it has been done by JPL and related groups and none of it has involved any astronauts.I doubt that meeting either Kerry or Bush in person is going to change who I'm going to vote for. (Nor is anything they're likely to say on the news, though.)
You sound like someone who's trying harder to convince himself than the other guy in a debate. Either that, or you work for an airline marketing department. An awful lot of companies talked investors into tossing a lot of cash at them in the late 1990s for business plans that made much more sense than space joyriding, and most of them still disappeared.
Even the communications satellite business -- by far the most commercially viable space application -- has fallen on hard times because of rapid technological developments in terrestrial communications. Not only have fiber, coax and DSL knocked satellites out of the running for most fixed point-to-point applications, but digital cellular has taken over mobile communications, including most of the part that people thought would go to satellites. That's why Iridium and Globalstar went bankrupt. Once again, communication satellites are used mainly for broadcasting, the one thing they do really well.
But talk is cheap. Time will tell what will really happen, and whether Branson et al are really tapping a big new market or just stroking their own egos.
Maybe this isn't so bad after all. One of the few pluses to patents is the way they sometimes keep people from using really bad ideas that they should be prevented from using. This is a good example.
Sure, you can probably still contrive some situation where ultra-fast transportation would be worth it. But it's pretty damn rare. I never flew the Concorde even though I had enough in the bank to pay for a ticket. It was just never worth the premium.
We'll see just how willing you are to sign that $100,000 check when (or if) the time actually comes and you've had time to think about all the other things you could do with that money.
I'm reminded of the saying "Cocaine is God's way of telling you that you have too much money". I've never done the stuff and I never will, but I wouldn't be surprised if cocaine is both cheaper and safer than a ride on SpaceShipOne. On the other hand, I concede that a SpaceShipOne ride would give you the better bragging rights.
But time will tell.
Sure, it would be great to see the earth from that altitude. But for that price, and only for a few minutes? If you took off during the day, it would be all over before your eyes even had time to adapt enough to see the stars.