You're probably trolling using a phrase like "will always be cheaper" but since the moderators seem to think your post is serious I'll bite.
Launch 100 rockets at 100 bucks per rocket and you've paid $10,000. Launch 100 elevators at at $1 per use and you've paid $100. Point is, which method is cheaper depends on the relative costs of the two methods.
Space Shuttles run $1 billion per launch. Since we don't know how much the elevator will cost to build or operate, $1 per launch is as good a number as any right now.
Larry Magid said on CBS something to the effect that the telcos still have to allow access to the copper wire but don't have to allow access to the telco equipment. For all I know about DSL equipment, DSLAM may as well be what Mark McGuire hits.
Does Magid's comment make any sense to those of you who know how DSL works?
Pierce the space suit and the astronaut is in a world of trouble. Space is a hostile enough envirionment that if the debris strike didn't kill the astronaut outright, the resultant loss of air pressure would. To get an idea of the liklihood, you can look at the shuttle windows as they record every hit they take on each flight. This article notes:
With all the cosmic debris orbiting the earth, it's little wonder the space shuttles routinely get dings in their windshields.
A tiny speck of space debris smashed into Space Shuttle Challenger's windshield on astronaut Rick Hauck's first mission in 1983, leaving a 4-mm crater, about 0.2 inches. Hauck spotted the small pit in the glass and alerted the crew. The debris was later identified as a chip of white paint, likely a remnant of a previous rocket launch. Though small, the debris was estimated to be hurtling through space at about 10,800 mph when it hit the window.
"We end up replacing one to two thermal windows after each shuttle mission," said Nick Johnson, NASA's Orbital Debris Program manager.
So the question NASA faces knowing they're replacing one or two windows each mission due to debris strikes is: is the hazard posed by the filler higher than the hazard posed by sace debris?
The best we can do, energy wise, is nuclear propulsion. Back in the late 50's, we designed a nuclear bomb propelled ship. Initial enthusiasm for using it to get off the Earth waned when Freeman Dyson realized each launch would kill 10 people. At the time, we were firing off atmospheric nuclear bombs all the time with no perceptible ill effects so Dyson's realization wasn't obvious. For some, those 10 lives were offset by the knowledge that any large scale activity kills people.
To alleviate the problem, the Orion team proposed a hybrid solution - use Saturn-class chemical rockets to launch an Orion booster. They figured they could build an Orion-class ship that weighed around 150 tons, well within Saturn's ability to loft 400 tons.
NASA's current proposal takes us back to being able to re-consider Orion. What killed the idea was NASA's aversion to risk. There wasn't any appetite for developing a rocket engine that could only be fully tested in space.
The idea of using nukes for Earth launch never completed died. Ted Taylor, one of the Orion team members, figured he could design a nuclear bomb that didn't emit any radiation at all. Ironically, the neutron bomb was an outgrowth of his work.
The comparison is not Ford to Ferrari it's SUV vs. Wagon.
Hmmm, I think you missed the parent's point. Without price data, the poll is meaningless. You wouldn't choose a SUV over a wagon if the SUV cost $100,000 and the wagon was $25,000.
Sony's comment about "work longer to pay for it..." makes me think the Ferrari analogy isn't that far off the mark.
I'm curious about the other side of the coin - what size pipe does Netflix have to have to make it work? If they have a 1000 customers downloading at the same time, that's 4 terabytes. Netflix has something like 3 million customers so if 10% of them log on at one time (say after dinner), that's 300,000 customers or 1.2 Petabytes in one night. And that's just for today's video. As more people move to HDTV, they'll want 1080p downloads. That 1.2 petabytes just quadrupled.
Several posts have suggested compression as a way out but I'm skeptical that'll get you very far. If a consumer can choose to watch a full quality HDTV directly from disc or a degraded image over cable, my hunch is that a good sized chunk of consumers will choose quality.
Seems to me for Netflix to be able to scale, they'll have to resort to a Bittorrent-like solution.
So their rationale du jour is to be taken at face value? Their rationales evolve to fit events. Have you forgotten Bin Laden's 1996 fatwah or his 1998 fatwah? Not a damned thing about Iraq in those calls to arms.
The claim you cite is an example of rationale morphing. Leave Iraq and the rationale for attacking us will change. You're dealing with people who hate us because we're not exactly the same kind of Muslim they are and will use any excuse they can conjur to attack us. Unfortunately, we fund some of them every time we fill our gas tank.
Yeah, he was killed right were the San Andreas Fault crosses the road near Cholame.
Years ago, a former girlfriend got a radar speeding ticket on it. As a result of that ticket, I found out that there's a California state law that forbids the use of radar on a road that has not had a "speed survey" conducted by Caltrans. If radar is used, the speed limit must be set at the 80% point I mentioned in my prior post. The idea is that the legislature didn't want small towns using radar to enforce an arbitrarily low speed limit as a revenue source.
I called Caltrans to find out if a speed survey had been conducted on the road and found out that it had but it had not been signed. It hadn't been signed because the man responsible for the survey was told by his boss not to sign it as it showed the speed limit was too low.
So the situation on Hwy 46 is that the survey was done which satisfies the law calling for a survey but it wasn't signed so the speed limit isn't too low. In the meantime, the county continues to steal money from passing motorists who can't be bothered to contest their ticket.
As to keeping you on your toes, that's not necessarily a bad thing. If you perceive it's a hazardous road, you'll drive more safely. Posting an arbitrarily low speed limit creates a tension between drivers who can see the road would safely support a higher speed and drivers who are trying to obey the speed limit. I believe that tension creates an additional hazard on the road as people jockey to pass the slower drivers.
They don't think it'll have any effect. They likened it to a gnat hitting a truck. In any event, if you look at tempel's orbit you'll see that itt doesn't ever come anywhere near the earth. Tempel has a better chance of hitting Mars than us.
During the press conference, they also said that the outgassing could go on for quite awhile, as in possibly months. The thinking is that the comet was in equilibrium and the impact has excavated sufficient material to allow the comet to sublimate over an area somewhere between that of a house and a stadium. How much mass leaves the comet as a result of the impact will affect what happens to the comet's orbit and rotation rate.
It wasn't a troll so I guess I was obnoxious to use my imagination. I don't think the suggestions were foolish but then again, if they were foolish, I would be the last to know since I made them.
I know we're talking about a huge delta v. I see three ways of achieving it - nuclear propulsion, ion engines or two separate shots.
At today's press conference, one of the investigators said he was surprised by how different this comet turned out to be from Comet Borelli. From earth, the spectroscopy was quite similar but up close, the two comets were quite different. There were some very strange features on this comet that would we would have benefitted from a prolonged observation. My point is that since the small sample of comets we've looked at so far have been so different from each other, we really ought to start gathering solid data on as many comets as we can afford so future generations can cope with the eventual earth collider.
It was a very impressive achievement. We need to do a lot more of these missions so we have an adequate sample of what comets look like because, scoff if you will, eventually earth will be endangered by one. If we have a sample of several comets we can make reasonable plans as to how to deflect them. Right now we have a sample of one.
Next time would be better if:
There's enough fuel on the mother ship to drop the impactor and then get out of harm's way to turn around to match speeds with the comet. The mother ship can linger over the crater for years watching the newly formed crater evolve.
The mother could land another drop ship in the newly excavated crater to give us a closeup of the comet's interior.
Deploy several microprobes that have little seismometers on them. As the comet outgasses, the seimic waves will give us information as to how the comet's interior is structured. Each seismometer could be powered with a small atomic battery which would enable it to operate for years and provide ample power to broadcast the seismometer's readings to the mother ship.
Make sure the equipment functions properly before it's launched. Blurry hi res photos because someone forgot to calibrate the equipment or parachutes that fail to open over Utah because they're installed backwards aren't ok.
It's a lovely drive that connects Paso Robles to the Central Valley and Hwy 5. A significant fraction of Central California uses the road to go to Los Angeles and points beyond.
The road is a dangerous two lane artery that is made more dangerous by arbitrarily lowering the speed limit on it. If you ever try driving that road at 55, you'll find yourself leading a parade of very impatient people who take each and every opportunity to pass you. And in the little dips in the road just beyond those opportunities you'll find Highway Patrol cars outfitted with Radar.
A few years back Caltrans did a speed survey on Hwy 46 and found that more than 80% of traffic was traveling faster than 60 MPH. Ordinarily, that information would cause Caltrans to raise the speed limit to accomodate the traffic. But the county, knowing that their traffic revenue would drop, objected. So the speed limit remains arbitrarily low.
The fact that Gardiner can even ask that question is remarkable.
400 years ago he would have been burned at the stake for posing the question since it was patently obvious that everything exists to demonstrate the glory of God. Anyone who would question that was a heretic. Today, he just has to watch out for F&Fs. (Fatwas and Falwells)
If someone's written work is devoid of some common rules of grammar and usage, does it matter if you completely and unambiguously understand what they are saying/writing?
If I recall correctly from an earlier release about Deep Impact's camera, it was incorrectly calibrated which lead to it being out of focus. This probably wasn't the result of a hardware defect but over a miscommunication; if it were a hardware defect, can you justify firing someone over something like this?
Yes you can. The people who designed the machine were paid to get it done right. Had the error been due to something unpredictable, that's one thing. But if it was due to a screwup like one team talking metric units and the other team is talking imperial units then management screwed up and shouldn't be trusted to get it right the next time. Yes, space is a dangerous place but it doesn't excuse poor management.
I can guarantee you there isn't nearly the level of accountability in privately held corporations.
That's simply not true. When a company fails to deliver the goods, it goes out of business. It happens all the time. The difference with NASA is it doesn't go out of business, no matter how faulty its operation. Praying to God won't alter poor management at NASA. Firing poor managers will.
If the telescope defect was detectable before launch, whomever was responsible for making that check should have lost their job due to the telescope being out of focus.
The press release is a masterpiece of indirection. It takes them 5 paragraphs to admit they have a problem and then this little gem:
"This in no way will affect our ability to impact the comet on July 4," said Rick Grammier, Deep Impact project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif. "Everyone on the science and engineering teams is getting very excited and looking forward to the encounter."
Although they may be "very excited and looking forward to the encounter", they won't be able to see the results very well.
In a Newsweek interview, Eisenhower again recalled the meeting with Stimson:
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
Eisenhower was fighting in Europe against Germans who thought pretty much the way he did. The German Army didn't have a mindset that produced Kamikazes. Eisenhower didn't have any Okinawas or Iwo Jimas to fight so he didn't have any first hand experience with soldiers who knew they were fighting to the death. Just before the Japanese cabinet voted to surrender or continue in mid August, a Japanese general presented his plan for ultimate victory - he wanted the entire nation to become Kamikazes.
Moreover, the Japanese government was divided into the civilian half which wanted to surrender and the military half which wouldn't consider it. The military had the guns and the procedural ability to checkmate any move on the civilian side. They had consistently wielded that ability to thwart the civilian's motions to surrender. Without a decision to surrender, the default was to continue fighting. The bomb convinced Hirohito that if he wanted his nation to survive, he had to go against his military and choose to give up.
After the vote was taken to surrender and Hirohito had recorded his agreement, there was an aborted military coup. A coup was what the civilians had anticipated would happen if they ever succeeded in getting the government to surrender.
When Hirohito announced his surrender, he said the bomb played a part in that decision:
Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalcuable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of this Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization. Such being the case, how are We to save the millions of Our subjects; or to atone Ourselves before the hallowed spirits of Our Imperial Ancestors? This is the reason why We have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the Joint Declaration of the Powers.
Eisenhower knew none of this when Stimson told him what was going to happen. Even still, if just for a moment you ignore the facts and you were right and the Japanese were indeed willing to surrender, did it matter? The perception was that they were not willing to surrender and we had to do whatever it took to get them to surrender.
Since the 1700s, not a single earthquake in California that was over 6.5 has caused a tsunami there.
There have been 8 California quakes that have generated tsunamis. Though the San Andreas Fault isn't liable to generate a tsunami because it slips to the right instead of up/down, some California quakes are able to generate undersea landslides. Click on the image on this Mbari page and you'll see a substantial scar left by a landslide off the Santa Barbara Coast.
Secondly, yesterday's quake was north of Cape Mendocino which is at the southern end of a series of subduction faults that head up to Alaska. Unlike transform faults, subduction faults can, and do, cause tsunamis.
If anything, I think the media is ignoring some of the risks. Portions of Monterey Bay have very steep submarine walls. A 7.0 quake centered in the bay could generate a landslide that would send a tsunami towards the low-lying regions in Monterey and Carmel. The best advice for anyone in California who feels a quake while they're near the shore is to climb right away. Don't wait for the media to tell you there's a risk because the warning will come too late. Most of the time climbing will be unnecessary, but sometimes it'll save someone's life.
I switched to Dvorak and continued to feel my carpal resurge. For me, it was a matter of wrist posture more than keyboard layout. When I was a kid, my piano teacher would admonish me to keep my wrists straight or (cue teacher's deep Hungarian accent) your wrists will torment you like the hounds of hell.(cut accent)
It wasn't til years later I found out what he was talking about. If you're hurting look at your wrist posture. If they bend backwards while you type, straightening them out may be sufficient. If your posture's wrong, Dvorak probably won't cure the pain.
To help keep my wrists straight when I'm just resting my hands, I stacked three gel wrist pads, stacked one on top of the other. That helped but not enough because I kept bending my wrists. I didn't want a brace because I had heard that they can cause other problems so I cobbled together a velcro strap and sharp pencil onto the back of each wrist. The idea of the pencils was if a wrist bent back at all, the pencil point would poke the back of my hand and remind me to straighten them. Within a couple of days, the carpal had completely disappeared. Once the posture became natural, I was able to discard the pencil straps.
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You're probably trolling using a phrase like "will always be cheaper" but since the moderators seem to think your post is serious I'll bite.
Launch 100 rockets at 100 bucks per rocket and you've paid $10,000. Launch 100 elevators at at $1 per use and you've paid $100. Point is, which method is cheaper depends on the relative costs of the two methods.
Space Shuttles run $1 billion per launch. Since we don't know how much the elevator will cost to build or operate, $1 per launch is as good a number as any right now.
Does Magid's comment make any sense to those of you who know how DSL works?
To alleviate the problem, the Orion team proposed a hybrid solution - use Saturn-class chemical rockets to launch an Orion booster. They figured they could build an Orion-class ship that weighed around 150 tons, well within Saturn's ability to loft 400 tons.
NASA's current proposal takes us back to being able to re-consider Orion. What killed the idea was NASA's aversion to risk. There wasn't any appetite for developing a rocket engine that could only be fully tested in space.
The idea of using nukes for Earth launch never completed died. Ted Taylor, one of the Orion team members, figured he could design a nuclear bomb that didn't emit any radiation at all. Ironically, the neutron bomb was an outgrowth of his work.
Then it dawned on me. The moon is made of Swiss cheese but since only Americans have landed on it, its color is American cheese.
Plastic can be made from lots of different oils, not just petroleum. George Washington Carver managed to convert peanut oil to plastic.
Hmmm, I think you missed the parent's point. Without price data, the poll is meaningless. You wouldn't choose a SUV over a wagon if the SUV cost $100,000 and the wagon was $25,000.
Sony's comment about "work longer to pay for it..." makes me think the Ferrari analogy isn't that far off the mark.
Several posts have suggested compression as a way out but I'm skeptical that'll get you very far. If a consumer can choose to watch a full quality HDTV directly from disc or a degraded image over cable, my hunch is that a good sized chunk of consumers will choose quality.
Seems to me for Netflix to be able to scale, they'll have to resort to a Bittorrent-like solution.
The claim you cite is an example of rationale morphing. Leave Iraq and the rationale for attacking us will change. You're dealing with people who hate us because we're not exactly the same kind of Muslim they are and will use any excuse they can conjur to attack us. Unfortunately, we fund some of them every time we fill our gas tank.
You've touched on a real problem with the idea of using it as a biometric id. Forget nail-pulling - just take the whole finger.
Years ago, a former girlfriend got a radar speeding ticket on it. As a result of that ticket, I found out that there's a California state law that forbids the use of radar on a road that has not had a "speed survey" conducted by Caltrans. If radar is used, the speed limit must be set at the 80% point I mentioned in my prior post. The idea is that the legislature didn't want small towns using radar to enforce an arbitrarily low speed limit as a revenue source.
I called Caltrans to find out if a speed survey had been conducted on the road and found out that it had but it had not been signed. It hadn't been signed because the man responsible for the survey was told by his boss not to sign it as it showed the speed limit was too low.
So the situation on Hwy 46 is that the survey was done which satisfies the law calling for a survey but it wasn't signed so the speed limit isn't too low. In the meantime, the county continues to steal money from passing motorists who can't be bothered to contest their ticket.
As to keeping you on your toes, that's not necessarily a bad thing. If you perceive it's a hazardous road, you'll drive more safely. Posting an arbitrarily low speed limit creates a tension between drivers who can see the road would safely support a higher speed and drivers who are trying to obey the speed limit. I believe that tension creates an additional hazard on the road as people jockey to pass the slower drivers.
During the press conference, they also said that the outgassing could go on for quite awhile, as in possibly months. The thinking is that the comet was in equilibrium and the impact has excavated sufficient material to allow the comet to sublimate over an area somewhere between that of a house and a stadium. How much mass leaves the comet as a result of the impact will affect what happens to the comet's orbit and rotation rate.
I know we're talking about a huge delta v. I see three ways of achieving it - nuclear propulsion, ion engines or two separate shots.
At today's press conference, one of the investigators said he was surprised by how different this comet turned out to be from Comet Borelli. From earth, the spectroscopy was quite similar but up close, the two comets were quite different. There were some very strange features on this comet that would we would have benefitted from a prolonged observation. My point is that since the small sample of comets we've looked at so far have been so different from each other, we really ought to start gathering solid data on as many comets as we can afford so future generations can cope with the eventual earth collider.
The video is incredible. The surface roiling shown in the Yahoo video makes me wonder how far below the surface the eruption is taking place.
Next time would be better if:
The road is a dangerous two lane artery that is made more dangerous by arbitrarily lowering the speed limit on it. If you ever try driving that road at 55, you'll find yourself leading a parade of very impatient people who take each and every opportunity to pass you. And in the little dips in the road just beyond those opportunities you'll find Highway Patrol cars outfitted with Radar.
A few years back Caltrans did a speed survey on Hwy 46 and found that more than 80% of traffic was traveling faster than 60 MPH. Ordinarily, that information would cause Caltrans to raise the speed limit to accomodate the traffic. But the county, knowing that their traffic revenue would drop, objected. So the speed limit remains arbitrarily low.
400 years ago he would have been burned at the stake for posing the question since it was patently obvious that everything exists to demonstrate the glory of God. Anyone who would question that was a heretic. Today, he just has to watch out for F&Fs. (Fatwas and Falwells)
Sometimes the answer is an unambiguous yes.
The fact that your business is 100 years old indicates it's not making those kind of errors - at least not on a regular basis.
Yes you can. The people who designed the machine were paid to get it done right. Had the error been due to something unpredictable, that's one thing. But if it was due to a screwup like one team talking metric units and the other team is talking imperial units then management screwed up and shouldn't be trusted to get it right the next time. Yes, space is a dangerous place but it doesn't excuse poor management.
I can guarantee you there isn't nearly the level of accountability in privately held corporations.
That's simply not true. When a company fails to deliver the goods, it goes out of business. It happens all the time. The difference with NASA is it doesn't go out of business, no matter how faulty its operation. Praying to God won't alter poor management at NASA. Firing poor managers will.
The press release is a masterpiece of indirection. It takes them 5 paragraphs to admit they have a problem and then this little gem:
Although they may be "very excited and looking forward to the encounter", they won't be able to see the results very well.Is that what one has after gay sex?
Eisenhower was fighting in Europe against Germans who thought pretty much the way he did. The German Army didn't have a mindset that produced Kamikazes. Eisenhower didn't have any Okinawas or Iwo Jimas to fight so he didn't have any first hand experience with soldiers who knew they were fighting to the death. Just before the Japanese cabinet voted to surrender or continue in mid August, a Japanese general presented his plan for ultimate victory - he wanted the entire nation to become Kamikazes.
Moreover, the Japanese government was divided into the civilian half which wanted to surrender and the military half which wouldn't consider it. The military had the guns and the procedural ability to checkmate any move on the civilian side. They had consistently wielded that ability to thwart the civilian's motions to surrender. Without a decision to surrender, the default was to continue fighting. The bomb convinced Hirohito that if he wanted his nation to survive, he had to go against his military and choose to give up.
After the vote was taken to surrender and Hirohito had recorded his agreement, there was an aborted military coup. A coup was what the civilians had anticipated would happen if they ever succeeded in getting the government to surrender.
When Hirohito announced his surrender, he said the bomb played a part in that decision:
Eisenhower knew none of this when Stimson told him what was going to happen. Even still, if just for a moment you ignore the facts and you were right and the Japanese were indeed willing to surrender, did it matter? The perception was that they were not willing to surrender and we had to do whatever it took to get them to surrender.Since the 1700s, not a single earthquake in California that was over 6.5 has caused a tsunami there.
There have been 8 California quakes that have generated tsunamis. Though the San Andreas Fault isn't liable to generate a tsunami because it slips to the right instead of up/down, some California quakes are able to generate undersea landslides. Click on the image on this Mbari page and you'll see a substantial scar left by a landslide off the Santa Barbara Coast.
Secondly, yesterday's quake was north of Cape Mendocino which is at the southern end of a series of subduction faults that head up to Alaska. Unlike transform faults, subduction faults can, and do, cause tsunamis.
If anything, I think the media is ignoring some of the risks. Portions of Monterey Bay have very steep submarine walls. A 7.0 quake centered in the bay could generate a landslide that would send a tsunami towards the low-lying regions in Monterey and Carmel. The best advice for anyone in California who feels a quake while they're near the shore is to climb right away. Don't wait for the media to tell you there's a risk because the warning will come too late. Most of the time climbing will be unnecessary, but sometimes it'll save someone's life.
It wasn't til years later I found out what he was talking about. If you're hurting look at your wrist posture. If they bend backwards while you type, straightening them out may be sufficient. If your posture's wrong, Dvorak probably won't cure the pain.
To help keep my wrists straight when I'm just resting my hands, I stacked three gel wrist pads, stacked one on top of the other. That helped but not enough because I kept bending my wrists. I didn't want a brace because I had heard that they can cause other problems so I cobbled together a velcro strap and sharp pencil onto the back of each wrist. The idea of the pencils was if a wrist bent back at all, the pencil point would poke the back of my hand and remind me to straighten them. Within a couple of days, the carpal had completely disappeared. Once the posture became natural, I was able to discard the pencil straps.