I definately fall into the "converted athiest" crowd: that is, I grew up athiest but was forced to give up that religion because I saw too many things that just didn't fit into that framework.
As a rationalist who is interested in mysticism, I would suggest yet another possible reason for the connection between geeks and magic: It seems to me that mysticism is (and always has been) a way to try to comprehend intuitively things that are too complex for rational analysis. A geek is (usually) up to his/her neck in some type of highly complex system, and makes his living by having a better understanding of it than the average person.
Now it is certainly true that modern technology was invented using, and operates according to, rational, predictable, stable laws. However, when a system becomes sufficiently complex, it will often exhibit emergent behaviors that cannot be well understood by looking at it from a reductionistic viewpoint, because to do so would require keeping track of too many interrelationships. Yet is it precisely these complex, odd behaviors that a geek must master.
Being a good geek requires the flexibility to use a mixture of intuition and rational analysis to solve problems. Mysticism can provide a framework in which one can intuitively approach complex systems. Thus it is no surprise to me that there is a strong mystical influence in geekdom.
while politicians and their parties compete furiously to see who can do less and spend less.
What planet are you living on, Katz? Politicians only rein in their spending programs when forced to on pain of being voted out of office. They're not spending less (of our money!), they're just doing less useful things with it.
Thank you very much. I wish I had some moderator points to give you.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to create a CAD drawing with inaccurate dimensions? It is twice as hard to produce a dimensionally-wrong CAD drawing as it is to just do it right.
This is SO true! I'm a mechanical engineer, and I've dealt with some drafters who just couldn't be bothered to draw things to scale and keep their dimensions associated to the lines they were measuring. GRRRR!
Your point is essentially correct for the technologies that have historically been available. However, don't discount the potential of distributed power generation: new technologies, most notably fuel cells, make it a very real and viable possibility. Even if you backyard fuelcell is 10% less efficient than the power plant, you still win because you save transmission losses (which run in the 20-30% range IIRC).
There are other benefits too, mostly economic: the power generation capacity of an area can scale directly with its power requirements, rather than as a step-function (i.e. every 10-20 years, you build another big generator).
The problem with liquid air is that the LOX and the LN2 would tend to separate: different densities and different liquification temperatures. So you could potentially wind up with a puddle of significantly concentrated liquid oxygen in your "gas" tank, and that is a fire hazard in a BIG way.
If you don't believe me, check out these images of people BBQing with LOX here and here.
Tune in, buddy. You're taking my arguement all wrong. I'm not saying that creators should not be rewarded for their work. What I'm saying is this: when technology makes it such that the cost of (re)production drops to zero AND production facilities are decentralized (both are important), the current model no longer makes sense. I am saying that this has happened to the music industry, will shortly happen to other "culture industries", and will eventually happen to all industries if we don't bury ourselves in grey goo in the process of getting there.
To me, this conclusion seems blatantly obvious, but apparently they are not to you. To wit:
The current model is based on the exchange of value: you give me food, I give you cash, etc. This exchange has always been moderated/controlled by the vehicle for the value (in the case of music, books, etc) or by the physical object itself (in the case of cars, CD players, etc). When the means of (re)production are such that the moderating element is no longer controllable (i.e. you don't need a CD to listen to music, or, with nanotech, you don't need a fab to make a chip), then the system falls apart. You can try to impose artificial (i.e. legal) controls to replace the former natural ones, but this is not a good idea. You will have to pass so many laws, and make them so restrictive, that personal freedom and liberty will be sacrificed in an attempt to preserve the old model. The artist/creator/etc still needs to be compensated, but the model for that compensation is going to have to change. I don't know what the new model should be, but I do know that the old one won't work anymore.
Taking my arguement into the future, to the nanotech world: now it costs nothing to produce anything, and the current model makes NO sense at all. A creator has to make a living, you say. In ghod's name, WHY??!? If all the necessities of life are free for the making, what use is money? Yes, the creator will be paid, but it won't be in cash or in real goods. It will be in the respect and admiration of his/her peers. Just like free software. Just think: no one would have to hold down a job that they hate, and every little bit of original work that was done would be a labor of love. Sounds like a pretty cool world to me.
Gods, I can't believe I just spent this much time replying to a troll. But maybe some of the things I say will be relevant to other folks out there. In that spirit, I will point out what I see as the two biggest issues that will remain after nanotech has obsoleted capitalism:
1) The allocation of space. The one thing that nanotech will not do for us is create more virgin wilderness. Land will remain scarce, which means some way of allocating its use will have to be found. And we will still have to control our population (on the planet, anyway): it might become possible to support 3 trillion people, but it would still suck because we'd all have to live in little boxes.
2) Personal motivation. A great many projects (software and otherwise) are undertaken just because they are fun, because some people enjoy stretching their minds and their abilities. However, I'm guessing that most people in our culture (including you, FallLine), given the option, would plant in front of the TV and never move again. That's a problem, because all the technology in the world is not going to save us from death by societal enuii. This is a tough one, and anyone who has any thoughts about it, please speak up!
As you point out, a capitalist system only makes sense in a resource-scarce environment. One can argue that capitalism is good because it is the most efficient method for production and distribution of value in an environment of scarcity (which still applies to real goods, at least). But consider the ramifications of nanotech: suddenly, all you need to make anything you want is some power (cheaply produced by 100% efficient photovoltaics) and a set of instructions for the assembler.
Nanotech will do for real goods what the internet has done for IP and content. Consider the RIAA/Napster/MPAA/2600/MP3.com/etc mess a warmup for what's to come...
where the beam strikes it and the outgassing will scoot it out of the way
Actually, I suspect that this is exactly what they have in mind. They're trying to protect a single target, not clean up orbit with this thing.
The power requirements to vaporize a sheet of aluminum 10 cm square through the atmosphere is quite beyond our present technology.
Portraying Bill Clinton as a chubby, child-molesting hill-billy red-neck is a parody; but it focuses and exaggerates...
Does it? Couldn't tell for sure...
So let's say the studios do exactly as you describe, and are even able to get the shrinkwrap contract upheld in court. So what?
DeCSS would still be legal; only the USE of it would be illegal, and that ammounts to an unenforcable law anyway (it'd be like if pot possession was legal, but smoking it was illegal).
If the EFF/2600 win this case, it will set precedents that software is speech, and reverse engineering is OK. Those precedents are the reason this case is so important.
Consider that the value of information changes temporally.
This is true, although your subsequent statements didn't really go down this path. But fresh information ("news") is more valuable than the same info after it has become stale. Of course, this is only true for some types of information: The value of stock market information is proportional to its freshness. But a knowledge of calculus doesn't get any less useful with time.
Most often, it is only valuable when only a few people have access to it. If it diffuses across a room, like in your steam analogy, it actually does "cool down."
But this begs the question: How much of that value is based soley on the fact that, by controlling the bottleneck of information flow, you can make money? Sure, the information is less valuable if everybody has it, because then nobody will pay for it. But that doesn't necessarily mean it is less useful.
Of course, the most important component of a CD is the artist's effort in developing that music. Artists spend a large portion of their creative energy on writing song lyrics and composing music or working with producers and A&R executives to find great songs from great writers. This task can take weeks, months, or even years.
So then why is it that the artist is often the only person in the transaction who winds up losing money?
It is funny that the USPS needs to bend over backwards to get customers these days. Now, they want to set you up with e-mail to justify their size. People are going through private carriers and other services these days, it's not just the internet. The USPS is a great service and all, but they are a federal business, why should they compete for customers?
This is not surprising. You can look at pretty much any bureaucracy as a single macro-entity made up of essentially interchangeable components (analogous to the earth, or your body, for that matter). When you do this, a clear pattern emerges. Any such macro-organism, once created will attempt to: 1) sustain its existence 2) grow
That's all they are trying to do: the USPS is nearly obsolete, so they are trying to expand their mission to keep themselves going. Businesses and other entities do the same thing.
Please don't accuse me of being a paranoid conspiracy theorist, or of anthropomorphizing a bureaucracy. This sort of behavior isn't due to a conspiracy, or to "conscious intent" on the part of the macro-organism. It is merely the result of many constituent entities acting to protect their own self-interest. It's a consequence of the incentive structure. But it is worth paying attention to, because it is a consistent behavior. Any organization that does not have an incentive structure like this won't survive long in the first place, because there are very few true altruists in the world.
I am bothering to point this out because this phenomena is primarily responsible for both the mega-merger craze in business and the ever-expanding involvement of our government in our daily lives.
The DC-X worked too well. It actually did what it was supposed to do, on time and on budget. They had a crack design team who were rearing to go on the next phase. Why did NASA ignore them and turn to Lockheed? This is Space Access Society's take on it: Lockheed (by this point, Lockheed-Martin) won the X-33 competition with their by-then renamed "Venturestar" lifting body rocketship. One of the reasons NASA gave for selecting this bid was that it *required* more new advanced technologies [and thus higher risk] than any of the other vehicles bid. So much for the KISS principle. quoted w/o permission from issue #91 of their newsletter; full text is available here. Scroll down about a page to "The Last Five Years: NASA Gets The Ball, And Drops It"
Rotary Rocket died over a year ago, but some of the guys on the propulsion team are still at work in Mojave. Check out the Xcor Aerospace website. They have accomplished something that as far as I know has never been done before: a non-hypergolic liquid-fueled rocket engine with 100% reliable ignition: No shit, I've seen this thing. You can turn it on and off like a lightbulb.
My last glimmer of hope is Beal Aerospace, not because they have any groundbreaking new ideas in their design Beal is actually breaking new ground in one way: they are designing a disposable rocket that is CHEAP, rather than one that is adapted from ICBM technology. Unfortunatley, they probably can't get launch below about $1000/lb this way, which isn't enough to break the threshold described in the SAS article. However, you might be right that they at least cause a resurgence of interest in the field.
And they hit the mark right on with that last article; it takes a billion dollar initial investment to develop a new launch system... Acutally, that's where I have to disagree with you (and SAS, though I don't think Henry really believes it has to cost that much; it just has historically). It costs several billion to design a new launch system when it's done by government agencies and large companies that have huge bureaucracries. It doesn't have to cost so damn much. Rotary Rocket budgeted $150 Million from start to first flight. We got as far as we did (working combustion chambers, and a demonstrator that flew as a helicopter) on a mere $30M, and alot of that went into infrastructure (they spent $5M on buildings, for example; really bad move, IMO). We probably could have done it for $150M. Double that, and we would have done it for sure. $150M is alot of bucks, but it's really not that much in the context of governemnt programs, or, for that matter, internet VC. And that's what really burns me: the money is out there. There are people who could underwrite the whole program for less than 10% of their net worth, and for that price they get to totally change the way the world works. But no...
Did Timothy not read the last SAS newsletter when it got posted to Slashdot? (Big thanks to whomever did that one, by the way; I'd advise interested readers to check out the archives too). You're welcome.
This poster really pointed to the heart of the matter for me: Being enthralled by the atmosphere in the game is what keeps people like me fascinated by the game. Trying to kill the humungous boss with an arsenal of weapons at the end of a level is rather boring in comparison to having to inch across a narrow beam 50 feet up in the wair above a pair of guards.
Good moviemakers and writers have known for years that suspense and tension are absolutely addictive. Having your awareness drawn out like a piano wire is at least as big a kick as the adreneline overdose you get from things like Unreal. Thief is an excellent example of this. You're creeping around, you don't know what's going to happen next, but you know that if you don't stay on your toes, you're fucked. The impact of this sort of situation can be increased by raising the stakes. Eg. in Soldier of Fortune, you only get a limitted number of saves per level. You can choose to turn this feature off, but I find it generally more fun to play with it on. It means that you can't afford to get sloppy because you can't just save before every major encounter. And so you're more involved with the moment, because if you screw up, you have something to lose (in this case, time and progress through the level). And if you pull off a clever stunt or a subtle strategy, the payoff feeling of success is huge. Of course, to make something like this work well, the user interface has to be nearly perfect. If you're creeping around and get killed because you goofed or were just unlucky, that's fine. But if you're always falling off that ceiling beam because the controls suck, that's just frustrating.
To hell with the record labels, RIAA or otherwise. Download what you want, or copy it from a friend, then go to FairTunes and send some money to the artist.
I too am perturbed by the goofy distinction that people like to draw between what is "natural" and what is "unnatural", as if humans are any less a part of nature than any other creature.
Having said that, however, I have to respond: we ARE different than the other animals, in that we have vastly more power to change our environment than most animals do. Populations of living beings simultaneously adapt to their environment, and attempt to adapt their environment to themselves. Ideally, the result of many different species doing this all at once is a balance, called homeostasis, that is a healthy environment for a wide variety of creatures. For more on this, read about Lovelock's Daisyworld.
Humans modify their environment, just like any other creature. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. But we have the ability to do it on a timescale that is orders of magnitude faster than that of any other creature. The reason that we have the potential to do so much damage to our environment is not that we are (individually or collectively) more powerful than the planet -- we've got nothing on the motion of geologic plates -- but we operate on a different timescale. Homeostasis is the product of many different species, all with different survival priorities and mechanisms, trying to change their environment to suit themselves. The result is a balance that is not ideal for any of them, but is generally good for all of them and more robust than an "ideal" solution would be. This balance can come to be because all the competing species are exerting approximately the same degree of influence over their environment, integrated over time. Humans have the ability to break that balance, because our actions can drive the environment one direction very hard for a few years, then reverse and drive it in some other direction. If we do this enough, we can really screw things up because there is never enough time for the system to come back to balance -- the system keeps looking for local minima, but is continuously driven out of them before it able to settle.
Anyway, this perspective on the human impact is relevant to environmental issues in general, and the impact of genetic engineering is no exception. I would also argue that you can look at cultural/social evolution through the same set of glasses (i.e. a complex and chaotically driven system that seeks a homeostatic local minima). In this case, the same arguements may pertain directly to the impact that, say, genetic screening and rational baby design will have on our culture.
Don't you have to wonder how many thousands of people would never have heard of or used Napster, but for the publicity generated by the RIAA lawsuit. Dumb move, Hillary.
I was thinking about the original intent of copyright and patent law: to allow the creator to enjoy for a limited time the fruits of their creative work, in order to encourage them to continue to do so. Contrast this to the current state of affairs: most IP is owned by corporations; inventors are required to sign over rights to their employer as a matter of course; musicians and authors have to give up all rights to their original work just to get them published, etc, etc.
One way out of this mess to to say that IP is evil and should be abolished. But I really do think that a creator should have some say in the fate of his/her creation. So I propose an alternate solution (not that this will ever be implemented, mind you). It's simple: change the law such that IP can only be owned by the inventor/creator/artist. The guy who registers the copyright/patent/whatever owns the IP. Period. He can license it, but he can't transfer, sell, or otherwise get rid of it. He retains final authority and control over its use. And unlike other forms of property, it cannot be bequeathed upon death: when the creator dies, his IP rights expire. Now it is true that the current power-players in the IP world (like the record companies) can still use their position to force a creator to sign a totally unreasonable IP licensing agreement. However, as everyone here is well aware, there is a big difference (at least in principle) between a license to use/reproduce/etc and outright ownership. If nothing else, it would make it much easier for the creator to sue to nullify an unreasonable agreement.
Go here for some information on the so-called hypercar. The hypercar concept is to wed a highly efficient gas/electric hybrid system (or, ultimately, a fuel cell) to a composite body and frame. By approaching the design as a systems-level problem, the efficiencies inherent in both the drive system and the lighter body can be made to work synergistically. (The Rocky Mountain Institute is really good at this kind of thinking.)
They are not building the vehicle themselves. Instead, they are doing design studies and sharing the results with all the existing automakers, and making it a point that they are doing so. In this way, they force the existing companies to re-evaluate "business as usual" because they know that if they don't, the competition will.
As far as fuel cells go, they are unfortunately not quite ready for primetime yet. But there is alot of work being done on them. Major automakers are talking about fuel cell powered cars by 2010 (which is about 10 years longer than I want to wait, but better late than never).
Slashdot Mirror
I definately fall into the "converted athiest" crowd: that is, I grew up athiest but was forced to give up that religion because I saw too many things that just didn't fit into that framework.
As a rationalist who is interested in mysticism, I would suggest yet another possible reason for the connection between geeks and magic: It seems to me that mysticism is (and always has been) a way to try to comprehend intuitively things that are too complex for rational analysis. A geek is (usually) up to his/her neck in some type of highly complex system, and makes his living by having a better understanding of it than the average person.
Now it is certainly true that modern technology was invented using, and operates according to, rational, predictable, stable laws. However, when a system becomes sufficiently complex, it will often exhibit emergent behaviors that cannot be well understood by looking at it from a reductionistic viewpoint, because to do so would require keeping track of too many interrelationships. Yet is it precisely these complex, odd behaviors that a geek must master.
Being a good geek requires the flexibility to use a mixture of intuition and rational analysis to solve problems. Mysticism can provide a framework in which one can intuitively approach complex systems. Thus it is no surprise to me that there is a strong mystical influence in geekdom.
while politicians and their parties compete furiously to see who can do less and spend less.
What planet are you living on, Katz? Politicians only rein in their spending programs when forced to on pain of being voted out of office. They're not spending less (of our money!), they're just doing less useful things with it.
Thank you very much. I wish I had some moderator points to give you.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to create a CAD drawing with inaccurate dimensions? It is twice as hard to produce a dimensionally-wrong CAD drawing as it is to just do it right.
This is SO true! I'm a mechanical engineer, and I've dealt with some drafters who just couldn't be bothered to draw things to scale and keep their dimensions associated to the lines they were measuring. GRRRR!
Your point is essentially correct for the technologies that have historically been available. However, don't discount the potential of distributed power generation: new technologies, most notably fuel cells, make it a very real and viable possibility. Even if you backyard fuelcell is 10% less efficient than the power plant, you still win because you save transmission losses (which run in the 20-30% range IIRC).
There are other benefits too, mostly economic: the power generation capacity of an area can scale directly with its power requirements, rather than as a step-function (i.e. every 10-20 years, you build another big generator).
The problem with liquid air is that the LOX and the LN2 would tend to separate: different densities and different liquification temperatures. So you could potentially wind up with a puddle of significantly concentrated liquid oxygen in your "gas" tank, and that is a fire hazard in a BIG way.
If you don't believe me, check out these images of people BBQing with LOX here and here.
Tune in, buddy. You're taking my arguement all wrong. I'm not saying that creators should not be rewarded for their work. What I'm saying is this: when technology makes it such that the cost of (re)production drops to zero AND production facilities are decentralized (both are important), the current model no longer makes sense. I am saying that this has happened to the music industry, will shortly happen to other "culture industries", and will eventually happen to all industries if we don't bury ourselves in grey goo in the process of getting there.
To me, this conclusion seems blatantly obvious, but apparently they are not to you. To wit:
The current model is based on the exchange of value: you give me food, I give you cash, etc. This exchange has always been moderated/controlled by the vehicle for the value (in the case of music, books, etc) or by the physical object itself (in the case of cars, CD players, etc). When the means of (re)production are such that the moderating element is no longer controllable (i.e. you don't need a CD to listen to music, or, with nanotech, you don't need a fab to make a chip), then the system falls apart. You can try to impose artificial (i.e. legal) controls to replace the former natural ones, but this is not a good idea. You will have to pass so many laws, and make them so restrictive, that personal freedom and liberty will be sacrificed in an attempt to preserve the old model. The artist/creator/etc still needs to be compensated, but the model for that compensation is going to have to change. I don't know what the new model should be, but I do know that the old one won't work anymore.
Taking my arguement into the future, to the nanotech world: now it costs nothing to produce anything, and the current model makes NO sense at all. A creator has to make a living, you say. In ghod's name, WHY ??!? If all the necessities of life are free for the making, what use is money? Yes, the creator will be paid, but it won't be in cash or in real goods. It will be in the respect and admiration of his/her peers. Just like free software. Just think: no one would have to hold down a job that they hate, and every little bit of original work that was done would be a labor of love. Sounds like a pretty cool world to me.
Gods, I can't believe I just spent this much time replying to a troll. But maybe some of the things I say will be relevant to other folks out there. In that spirit, I will point out what I see as the two biggest issues that will remain after nanotech has obsoleted capitalism:
1) The allocation of space. The one thing that nanotech will not do for us is create more virgin wilderness. Land will remain scarce, which means some way of allocating its use will have to be found. And we will still have to control our population (on the planet, anyway): it might become possible to support 3 trillion people, but it would still suck because we'd all have to live in little boxes.
2) Personal motivation. A great many projects (software and otherwise) are undertaken just because they are fun, because some people enjoy stretching their minds and their abilities. However, I'm guessing that most people in our culture (including you, FallLine), given the option, would plant in front of the TV and never move again. That's a problem, because all the technology in the world is not going to save us from death by societal enuii. This is a tough one, and anyone who has any thoughts about it, please speak up!
As you point out, a capitalist system only makes sense in a resource-scarce environment. One can argue that capitalism is good because it is the most efficient method for production and distribution of value in an environment of scarcity (which still applies to real goods, at least). But consider the ramifications of nanotech: suddenly, all you need to make anything you want is some power (cheaply produced by 100% efficient photovoltaics) and a set of instructions for the assembler.
Nanotech will do for real goods what the internet has done for IP and content. Consider the RIAA/Napster/MPAA/2600/MP3.com/etc mess a warmup for what's to come...
where the beam strikes it and the outgassing will scoot it out of the way
Actually, I suspect that this is exactly what they have in mind. They're trying to protect a single target, not clean up orbit with this thing.
The power requirements to vaporize a sheet of aluminum 10 cm square through the atmosphere is quite beyond our present technology.
...is a tennis shoe with a CCD mounted in the toe.
:)
Sorry.
Portraying Bill Clinton as a chubby, child-molesting hill-billy red-neck is a parody; but it focuses and exaggerates...
Does it? Couldn't tell for sure...
One word: Microsoft.
So let's say the studios do exactly as you describe, and are even able to get the shrinkwrap contract upheld in court. So what? DeCSS would still be legal; only the USE of it would be illegal, and that ammounts to an unenforcable law anyway (it'd be like if pot possession was legal, but smoking it was illegal).
If the EFF/2600 win this case, it will set precedents that software is speech, and reverse engineering is OK. Those precedents are the reason this case is so important.
Two Points:
Consider that the value of information changes temporally.
This is true, although your subsequent statements didn't really go down this path. But fresh information ("news") is more valuable than the same info after it has become stale. Of course, this is only true for some types of information: The value of stock market information is proportional to its freshness. But a knowledge of calculus doesn't get any less useful with time.
Most often, it is only valuable when only a few people have access to it. If it diffuses across a room, like in your steam analogy, it actually does "cool down."
But this begs the question: How much of that value is based soley on the fact that, by controlling the bottleneck of information flow, you can make money? Sure, the information is less valuable if everybody has it, because then nobody will pay for it. But that doesn't necessarily mean it is less useful.
Of course, the most important component of a CD is the artist's effort in developing that music. Artists spend a large portion of their creative energy on writing song lyrics and composing music or working with producers and A&R executives to find great songs from great writers. This task can take weeks, months, or even years.
So then why is it that the artist is often the only person in the transaction who winds up losing money?
It is funny that the USPS needs to bend over backwards to get customers these days. Now, they want to set you up with e-mail to justify their size. People are going through private carriers and other services these days, it's not just the internet. The USPS is a great service and all, but they are a federal business, why should they compete for customers?
This is not surprising. You can look at pretty much any bureaucracy as a single macro-entity made up of essentially interchangeable components (analogous to the earth, or your body, for that matter). When you do this, a clear pattern emerges. Any such macro-organism, once created will attempt to:
1) sustain its existence
2) grow
That's all they are trying to do: the USPS is nearly obsolete, so they are trying to expand their mission to keep themselves going. Businesses and other entities do the same thing.
Please don't accuse me of being a paranoid conspiracy theorist, or of anthropomorphizing a bureaucracy. This sort of behavior isn't due to a conspiracy, or to "conscious intent" on the part of the macro-organism. It is merely the result of many constituent entities acting to protect their own self-interest. It's a consequence of the incentive structure. But it is worth paying attention to, because it is a consistent behavior. Any organization that does not have an incentive structure like this won't survive long in the first place, because there are very few true altruists in the world.
I am bothering to point this out because this phenomena is primarily responsible for both the mega-merger craze in business and the ever-expanding involvement of our government in our daily lives.
For a more general discussion of this sort of thing, check out The Myth of the Borg and in particular, this thread about the link between structures and behaviors
The DC-X worked too well. It actually did what it was supposed to do, on time and on budget. They had a crack design team who were rearing to go on the next phase. Why did NASA ignore them and turn to Lockheed?
This is Space Access Society's take on it:
Lockheed (by this point, Lockheed-Martin) won the X-33 competition with their by-then renamed "Venturestar" lifting body rocketship. One of the reasons NASA gave for selecting this bid was that it *required* more new advanced technologies [and thus higher risk] than any of the other vehicles bid. So much for the KISS principle.
quoted w/o permission from issue #91 of their newsletter; full text is available here. Scroll down about a page to "The Last Five Years: NASA Gets The Ball, And Drops It"
Rotary Rocket died over a year ago, but some of the guys on the propulsion team are still at work in Mojave. Check out the Xcor Aerospace website. They have accomplished something that as far as I know has never been done before: a non-hypergolic liquid-fueled rocket engine with 100% reliable ignition: No shit, I've seen this thing. You can turn it on and off like a lightbulb.
My last glimmer of hope is Beal Aerospace, not because they have any groundbreaking new ideas in their design
Beal is actually breaking new ground in one way: they are designing a disposable rocket that is CHEAP, rather than one that is adapted from ICBM technology. Unfortunatley, they probably can't get launch below about $1000/lb this way, which isn't enough to break the threshold described in the SAS article. However, you might be right that they at least cause a resurgence of interest in the field.
And they hit the mark right on with that last article; it takes a billion dollar initial investment to develop a new launch system...
Acutally, that's where I have to disagree with you (and SAS, though I don't think Henry really believes it has to cost that much; it just has historically). It costs several billion to design a new launch system when it's done by government agencies and large companies that have huge bureaucracries. It doesn't have to cost so damn much. Rotary Rocket budgeted $150 Million from start to first flight. We got as far as we did (working combustion chambers, and a demonstrator that flew as a helicopter) on a mere $30M, and alot of that went into infrastructure (they spent $5M on buildings, for example; really bad move, IMO). We probably could have done it for $150M. Double that, and we would have done it for sure.
$150M is alot of bucks, but it's really not that much in the context of governemnt programs, or, for that matter, internet VC. And that's what really burns me: the money is out there. There are people who could underwrite the whole program for less than 10% of their net worth, and for that price they get to totally change the way the world works. But no...
Did Timothy not read the last SAS newsletter when it got posted to Slashdot? (Big thanks to whomever did that one, by the way; I'd advise interested readers to check out the archives too).
You're welcome.
This poster really pointed to the heart of the matter for me:
Being enthralled by the atmosphere in the game is what keeps people like me fascinated by the game. Trying to kill the humungous boss with an arsenal of weapons at the end of a level is rather boring in comparison to having to inch across a narrow beam 50 feet up in the wair above a pair of guards.
Good moviemakers and writers have known for years that suspense and tension are absolutely addictive. Having your awareness drawn out like a piano wire is at least as big a kick as the adreneline overdose you get from things like Unreal.
Thief is an excellent example of this. You're creeping around, you don't know what's going to happen next, but you know that if you don't stay on your toes, you're fucked.
The impact of this sort of situation can be increased by raising the stakes. Eg. in Soldier of Fortune, you only get a limitted number of saves per level. You can choose to turn this feature off, but I find it generally more fun to play with it on. It means that you can't afford to get sloppy because you can't just save before every major encounter. And so you're more involved with the moment, because if you screw up, you have something to lose (in this case, time and progress through the level). And if you pull off a clever stunt or a subtle strategy, the payoff feeling of success is huge.
Of course, to make something like this work well, the user interface has to be nearly perfect. If you're creeping around and get killed because you goofed or were just unlucky, that's fine. But if you're always falling off that ceiling beam because the controls suck, that's just frustrating.
To hell with the record labels, RIAA or otherwise. Download what you want, or copy it from a friend, then go to FairTunes and send some money to the artist.
I too am perturbed by the goofy distinction that people like to draw between what is "natural" and what is "unnatural", as if humans are any less a part of nature than any other creature.
Having said that, however, I have to respond: we ARE different than the other animals, in that we have vastly more power to change our environment than most animals do.
Populations of living beings simultaneously adapt to their environment, and attempt to adapt their environment to themselves. Ideally, the result of many different species doing this all at once is a balance, called homeostasis, that is a healthy environment for a wide variety of creatures. For more on this, read about Lovelock's Daisyworld.
Humans modify their environment, just like any other creature. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. But we have the ability to do it on a timescale that is orders of magnitude faster than that of any other creature. The reason that we have the potential to do so much damage to our environment is not that we are (individually or collectively) more powerful than the planet -- we've got nothing on the motion of geologic plates -- but we operate on a different timescale.
Homeostasis is the product of many different species, all with different survival priorities and mechanisms, trying to change their environment to suit themselves. The result is a balance that is not ideal for any of them, but is generally good for all of them and more robust than an "ideal" solution would be. This balance can come to be because all the competing species are exerting approximately the same degree of influence over their environment, integrated over time. Humans have the ability to break that balance, because our actions can drive the environment one direction very hard for a few years, then reverse and drive it in some other direction. If we do this enough, we can really screw things up because there is never enough time for the system to come back to balance -- the system keeps looking for local minima, but is continuously driven out of them before it able to settle.
Anyway, this perspective on the human impact is relevant to environmental issues in general, and the impact of genetic engineering is no exception. I would also argue that you can look at cultural/social evolution through the same set of glasses (i.e. a complex and chaotically driven system that seeks a homeostatic local minima). In this case, the same arguements may pertain directly to the impact that, say, genetic screening and rational baby design will have on our culture.
Don't you have to wonder how many thousands of people would never have heard of or used Napster, but for the publicity generated by the RIAA lawsuit.
Dumb move, Hillary.
Hehe. I personally know at least one guy who got laid entirely as a result of his association to sexy rocket hardware.
I was thinking about the original intent of copyright and patent law: to allow the creator to enjoy for a limited time the fruits of their creative work, in order to encourage them to continue to do so.
Contrast this to the current state of affairs: most IP is owned by corporations; inventors are required to sign over rights to their employer as a matter of course; musicians and authors have to give up all rights to their original work just to get them published, etc, etc.
One way out of this mess to to say that IP is evil and should be abolished. But I really do think that a creator should have some say in the fate of his/her creation.
So I propose an alternate solution (not that this will ever be implemented, mind you). It's simple: change the law such that IP can only be owned by the inventor/creator/artist. The guy who registers the copyright/patent/whatever owns the IP. Period. He can license it, but he can't transfer, sell, or otherwise get rid of it. He retains final authority and control over its use. And unlike other forms of property, it cannot be bequeathed upon death: when the creator dies, his IP rights expire.
Now it is true that the current power-players in the IP world (like the record companies) can still use their position to force a creator to sign a totally unreasonable IP licensing agreement. However, as everyone here is well aware, there is a big difference (at least in principle) between a license to use/reproduce/etc and outright ownership. If nothing else, it would make it much easier for the creator to sue to nullify an unreasonable agreement.
Go here for some information on the so-called hypercar. The hypercar concept is to wed a highly efficient gas/electric hybrid system (or, ultimately, a fuel cell) to a composite body and frame. By approaching the design as a systems-level problem, the efficiencies inherent in both the drive system and the lighter body can be made to work synergistically. (The Rocky Mountain Institute is really good at this kind of thinking.)
They are not building the vehicle themselves. Instead, they are doing design studies and sharing the results with all the existing automakers, and making it a point that they are doing so. In this way, they force the existing companies to re-evaluate "business as usual" because they know that if they don't, the competition will.
As far as fuel cells go, they are unfortunately not quite ready for primetime yet. But there is alot of work being done on them. Major automakers are talking about fuel cell powered cars by 2010 (which is about 10 years longer than I want to wait, but better late than never).