The guys who were in engine development at the Rotary Rocket Company went on to found XCor Aerospace. They have no money, but that hasn't stopped them from building and testing working (small) rocket engines with very high reliability.
mentions that Hudson recently left Rotary Rocket, which of course indicates that things have not been going well there. Since the company is still in business, one can assume that a large investor could still rescue it. But I don't know what to think about the chances of that happenning...
I used to work there. Emphasis on "used to". They dumped their entire engineering team almost a year ago, and have been doing nothing but trying to con money out of people since then. At this point, there is nothing left of the company but a couple of beancounters and a bunch of test hardware that was very expensive to build but totally useless to anybody else.
Well, really, you're right but you're also wrong. The first problem we have to solve, before we can do anything at all useful in space, is getting to orbit efficiently. Until we do that, the best we can do for interplanetary stuff is "photos and footprints", like we did with Apollo.
If you're talking about getting to orbit cheaply, your mass fraction needs to be good enough to lift a worthwhile payload. And obviously the more you can lift, the better off you are. However the primary cost driver of current launch systems is not the fuel: Liquid O2 (which is most of the propellant mass) is about $.05/lb. That's still $10Ks for a full propellant load, but that's not where the real expenses come into play. The real expense in current launch systems is in the operational nature of the vehicle. Most launchers are expendable, remember. And most of those vehicles are based on ICBM designs, which sacrificed economic efficiency for the sake of getting every last bit of performance out of the system. This does not make for a cheap vehicle. Beal is tackling the problem from this direction by building an expendable launcher that is designed to be CHEAP. And you know what, they're probably going to succeed (although they may not make much money, because it's not clear that they can break the $600/lb price barrier with this approach). As far as reusable vehicles go: The Space Shuttle requires practically a full refit between each flight. They have to -- no shit -- deweld parts of the engines in order to replace internal components EVERY TIME they fly. Then they have to put them back together, test them, etc, etc. Something like 30,000 people put their hands on the vehicles between each flight, and thousands more are needed at the actual launch. This is not the way to fly cheaply! Cheap reusable vehicles are possible with current technology, but they require a level of systems engineering that has not been present in most recent NASA designs (it's certainly not there on the X-33). For various reasons, single stage vehicles would be much cheaper to operate, but making a reusable SSTO launcher requires a very high degree of optimization, and some difficult engineering trades. Throw in the need to please 15 different bureaucrats and politicians, and the job becomes impossible.
Your point about advanced propulsion technologies is well taken: for interplantary work, mass fraction is all-important (because you have to lift not only the vehicle but also all the damn fuel). But most of those systems are not suitable for launch, and those that are, are very far out. We don't need fancy new technologies to make that first step, getting to orbit cheaply. We just need some money (not very much, maybe $100-200M) and a good engineering team.
I would like to know what Baptist Death Ray (and other professionals and semi-pros) think of Orange Alley and their bootlegal model. It seems like a great system to me -- though they need to get many more artists involved if they are going to succeed -- but I'm a geek, not a musician.
it is not a 'bomb'. liquid hydrogen peroxide will not detonate Under the right circumstances, it will quite happily undergo rapid decomposition, releasing large ammounts of superheated steam and bursting whatever vessel contains it. That may not qualify it as a "bomb" in your book, but I don't think it'll make much difference to the guy sitting on top of it.
and it will not decompose into water and oxygen unless it comes in contact with a catalyst (the silver in this case). or unless it is heated. Industrial H2O2 is normally supplied mixed 50-50 with water and stabilizers. Getting high concentration stuff is hard. There is a reason for this: At 90% concentration, it will oxidize organic materials on contact, and the heat from that reaction may be enough to sustain the decomposition process. Bottom line: he'd better make sure that tank is damn clean.
it's less dangerous than liquid propane actually.... If you say so. Personally, if I was going to do this (and I would, if I had the cash), I'd use a nitrous-oxide/propane propellant system. Of course, I know where I can get a N2O/Prop motor, which helps.
If they wait 10 years, there won't be a need for the technology any more. That's about the timescale on which you will start to see a major shift towards fuel cells.
Thank you for posting the email contact. This is what I sent them, for anyone who is interested.
I am writing to protest your organization's action against Michael Doughney's parody website. You may not like what he had to say, but his site was a parody which in any other medium would have been protected. It is unfortunate that the legal system has not seen fit to extend First Amendment rights into cyberspace. It is a sad statement about your organization that you would help to set a precdent AGAINST free speech simply to protect your own interests. It seems that PETA's concern with the rights of animals is such that the rights of humans must take a subordinate position.
Unfortunately, they are not a commerical interest (like Mattel) so it is harder to threaten them with anything that they care about (like taking your money elsewhere).
So Arthur may not seem like much of a hero to Americans he doesn't have any stock options, he doesn't have anything to exchange high fives about round the water-cooler. But to the English, he is a hero. Terrible things happen to him, he complains about it a bit quite articulately, so we can really feel it along with him - then calms down and has a cup of tea. My kind of guy!
He's right about English culture, you know. In the immortal words of Floyd:
Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time. Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say.
The Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado has done alot of good work on (among other things) the potential for a massive distributed energy generation system. You can read one of their reports in this issue of their newsletter. More stuff is available here.
As fuel cells become more common, the approach becomes realistic. Supplanting and replacing the old-fashioned power grid system makes alot of sense: You don't lose power in long distance transmission, and your demand and your production can track much more closely. It also has the potential to introduce a powerful market incentive towards conservation. Imagine: everyone has a fuel cell in their home and in their car. The grid is networked so that if you have surplus, you can sell it to the grid; if you need more power, you can buy it. On a hot summer day, you have the choice between paying (probably through the nose) for more power for your A/C, or just plugging in a fan and drinking icewater.
This is all true, and it highlights another point. We don't need more bloody legislation to deal with this problem! The comparison between abusive software liscensing and lemonade automobiles sounds like a strong argument for regulation: right or wrong, it's a fair statement that automotive transportation and computer software are both "necessities" of the modern American lifestyle. But there is a fundamental difference here: it takes thousands of people working in close coordination, plus millions of dollars in tooling, factory space, etc to build a decent automobile. If the automakers have you bent over, you have two choices: spread'em, or take the bus. Not so with software. The very existence of the open source movement is ample evidence of that. There are alternatives, and as commercial software becomes more heinous, there will be more alternatives.
It's true, there is likely to be a year or two (probably not more, given how fast the software world moves) of discomfort before the system's natural mechanisms correct the imbalance. Regulating the industry might address these issues more directly, but: 1) It will probably -- no, certainly! -- take longer to get the laws on the books than it will for the system to self-correct. 2) Regulation of a complex, feedback coupled system (like the software or most any other industry) usually has unintended consequences. For example, if the government gets invovled in regulating the nature of EULAs, this puts us on a slippery slope. If they can be paid/pressured into creating laws that restrict under what terms commerical software may be licensed, they can also makes laws controlling how free software may be licensed. And the entities that would benefit from such control (i.e. the commercial software companies) can bring more pressure to bear than can the average consumer.
I'm pretty sure that this black hole is not ejecting matter from its own core. It's simply accelerating ambient gasses and throwing them around. These quotes suggest that this is what is happening: "A lot of galaxies don't have that much gas lying around, but this one did so it made a pretty bubble," said Jeffrey Kenney, a Yale University professor who detected the black hole in the Hubble images. and The black hole feeds off material from its accretion disk, the white region underneath the bright bubble. Some of the matter streams out in opposite directions in fast-moving twin jets.
I'm not sure about the mechanism, but I'm guessing what happens is this: As the hole sucks in gas from the accretion disk, that material accelerates due to gravitational attraction and the spin of the hole. Some of that material isn't heading straight towards the hole and accumulates enough momentum that it goes shooting past the edge of the hole, missing it completely, and is travelling too fast to get sucked back in immediately. Since this gas is all travelling radially inward, it collides and fountains above and below the hole, creating the gas clouds you see.
First of all, the term "damascus steel" is often, but somewhat incorrectly, applied to folded-metal blades or cable blades (blades that are forge welded from a piece of elevator cable -- very pretty). The true technique for making Damascus steel (made in Spain, not Japan, BTW) has been lost and apparently not recovered. Kind of like Stradivarius. Regarding Japanese swordmaking: There is another technique they used, which I have not seen mentioned here, is as follows: When the blade is finished and ready for the final hardening (yaki-ire), the swordsmith would coat the spine of the blade with a layer of clay. He would then heat the entire blade red hot, and plunge the whole thing (clay still in place) into a quenching bath. The idea is that the metal on the edge would cool quickly, forming austenitic (?) steel, which is hard but brittle (holds an edge well); whereas the metal along the spine cooled more slowly because of the clay, producing martensitic (?) steel, which is softer but more flexible. (Note that I may have the two names for the different states of steel switched -- I have trouble keeping them straight. The chemical composition is the same in both cases; the difference is in the size and shape of the crystal structure.) Anyway, the boundary between the different steels is what forms the distinctive wavy line that runs down the side of the blade (the hamon). Many cheap swords have the hamon ground or etched in, to make the blade look more like the real thing.
Robert Zubrin has been pushing for the use of this and related technologies for YEARS. His plan for exploring Mars, called Mars Direct, consists of launching a series of unmanned, robotic lander stations. Each station would carry a powerplant, an earth-return vehicle with empty tanks, and a supply of hydrogen. Using a Sabatier reactor (which is presumably what they were talking about in the NASA article), the lander station uses the hydrogren to produce methane (propellant for the Marsrover and the earth-return vehicle) and water (and of course oxygen). The idea is, you let this unit run for a year or so, then you send people, and you have a fully fueled, supplied earth return vehicle and base station waiting for you when you arrive. The crew cruises around, explores, and gets to live in a nice, comfy habitat with all the water and air they can use. When they are ready, they launch the earth-return portion and go home, leaving the powerplant and a portion of the lifesystem behind for the next wave. If you send each crew to Mars in another lander station, then you can repeat this cycle endlessly. The ultimate goal would be to build up a network of these stations, each within Marsrover distance of the other, allowing for relatively safe exploration of large portions of the martian surface.
You can read more about this here. The discussion of in-situ resource production can be had here.
Jon, let me say that this is, IMO, the best peice you have written that I have read. You're point is, I think, well taken: it is not important that any of us go be any particular thing. But it is vitally important that each of us go be something of our own choosing. Preferably this would be done after putting some thought into what exactly we each want to be, but the main thing is to do something, anything other than just default to following the programming that society gives us. In the book Ishmael, Daniel Quinn talks about "Mother Culture": that little, subliminal voice that is constantly whispering in your ear, telling you what you "should" do and what you society expects of you. We are all subject to the influence of Mother Culture; you can't escape from it, really. The important thing is to be aware of the little voice, and know what it is telling you to do. Your point, in a nutshell, seems to be that the corporations have identified Mother Culture, and are actively manipulating her to their own ends. Spend a couple of hours watching television (or reading a popular magazine) and you will know that this is true, and it has been going on for a long time.
Then, the recording companies, and those few artists who are siding with them (hear us Metallica?) will be left out in the cold as the rest of us get on with our lives.
It's already started to happen. The people who brought you PayLar$.com created Orange Alley and their Bootlegal system. Basically, you pay a small amount to download MP3s from their website, and with it you buy the right to _legally_ distribute as many copies of that song as you want. If your friend goes and registers a copy of a song on their site, and cites you as the source, you get a kickback. And the artists get like 60% of the gross. Unfortunately, they can only distribute minor artists at this point, because all the big names have, by definition, already sold their souls to the labels. But these people have the right idea, and if this catches on, some of their clients will be big names some day. And then the RIAA can go take a flying leap...
The story with no registration required
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Go here for the story with no annoying registration.
I have a friend who works for Arsdigita Corp which is a related organization but not the same as the university, and I have been looking at both the company and the university with some interest.
Anyway, the University supplies a generalize undergraduate CS program, not a votech education in particular tools. In fact, they don't teach any programming languages specifically. You have to pick up that stuff on your own. Check out their cirriculum at the University homepage. As for ruling out "less bright" people: They are giving their students, for free, a 4-year high level CS program in one year. Their students better be bloody bright. At that pace, they don't have time to slow down for the less-than-brilliant. I agree that SAT tests aren't a real indicator of intelligence, but I think they're using them just to make the first cut. Getting a 1400 should be no problem for the mutant-geniuses that they are trying to recruit.
If you don't like this plan, go here and tell them. Be polite, be specific, and make sure that they understand that you will lobby your congresscritter if that's what it takes to defeat plans like theirs.
(It's hard to see in the image, but the thing on the back of the guy's neck in the rightmost frame is is a barcode.)
Re:Our changing perceptions of time...
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What is particularly ironic is that, at one time, humans cared very much about the season, phase of the moon, and time of year, because we had to, because we were farmers. Now we can know the time of day to arbitrary precision, any time we want to, but how many of you know what phase the moon is in right now, or what time the sun rises? Or, for the ones that really never get out, what season is it?:-)
If people didn't buy, the corporations wouldn't exist. If you think that corporations brain-wash people into buying stuff then blame the people for being dumb, not the corporations.
Oh, the people are the problem, no doubt about it. And if anything is going to change, that change has to start with people. But that includes the people who run the corporations: they have the power to shape society, and I think that saddles them with some level of responsibility. Ultimately, yes, I blame the sheeple for allowing themselves to be led around by the collective nose. But that doesn't mean I'm not disgusted by corporations' active efforts to make people as dumb and materialistic as possible.
And the reason that the scenario I describe disturbs me is this: with nanotech, we could see an end to the economics of scarcity; we could literally create the garden of Eden. Everyone could be rich. But that won't happen, because there are people for whom business success is a game, and money is the scoring system. For such people, being rich is only relevant if someone else is poor. For a perspective that is relevant to this issue, read "Voyage to Yesteryear" by Paul Hogan. He describes an (admitadely unrealistic) scenario in which the economics of scarcity no longer apply, and then writes a book about how people deal with it.
1. If the elite so badly want to crush the populace, they can probably do so right now. Of course it's one more way for them to wreak havoc on society if they so choose. Paranoia isn't such a huge deterrent to technology, though. Because it hasn't been since the Industrial revolution.
The elite does not want to crush the populace. They want to profit off of the populace. Now, I'm a good capitalist and a free-marketeer, and I don't have any problem at all with making a profit. But I have a problem with a group getting (an almost certainly government granted) monopoly on production, and then charging prices that have no relation to the costs of production or anything else.
2. Perhaps the elite SHOULD have control over everything, to prevent that lone deranged person from ever getting his hands on the controls. Open source nanotechnology sounds like an Open source nuclear warhead to me.
Well, first of all, I don't have a great deal of trust for any "ruling class". Granted, they are vested in the system, so the rational (not necessarily moral) ones are going to try to protect it. But they could still produce a crank who could do alot of damage with his privliged access to technology. And I find that scenario really scary, because there is absolutely nothing I can do about it under those circumstances. If I have an assembler of my own, at least I can fight back and protect myself (shades of a Mage War, here). Secondly, I don't believe any system is totally secure. Assemblers will get out. If we try to protect ourselves by controlling access, then it might take longer, but when it happens it will be covert (thus not subject to oversight) and there will be no safeguard in place to deal with whatever that loony and his assembler produce. I think we need to solve this problem in a fashion that allows for public access to assemblers. No other solution will be robust enough. I don't know what the solution is in this case. However, it does seem like most of the worst dangers of nanotech are associated to self-replicating critters. If we could control the production of those (how?), that might be enough.
Slashdot Mirror
I address this question in one of my other posts here.
The guys who were in engine development at the Rotary Rocket Company went on to found XCor Aerospace. They have no money, but that hasn't stopped them from building and testing working (small) rocket engines with very high reliability.
mentions that Hudson recently left Rotary Rocket, which of course indicates that things have not been going well there. Since the company is still in business, one can assume that a large investor could still rescue it. But I don't know what to think about the chances of that happenning...
I used to work there. Emphasis on "used to". They dumped their entire engineering team almost a year ago, and have been doing nothing but trying to con money out of people since then. At this point, there is nothing left of the company but a couple of beancounters and a bunch of test hardware that was very expensive to build but totally useless to anybody else.
Well, really, you're right but you're also wrong.
The first problem we have to solve, before we can do anything at all useful in space, is getting to orbit efficiently. Until we do that, the best we can do for interplanetary stuff is "photos and footprints", like we did with Apollo.
If you're talking about getting to orbit cheaply, your mass fraction needs to be good enough to lift a worthwhile payload. And obviously the more you can lift, the better off you are.
However the primary cost driver of current launch systems is not the fuel: Liquid O2 (which is most of the propellant mass) is about $.05/lb. That's still $10Ks for a full propellant load, but that's not where the real expenses come into play.
The real expense in current launch systems is in the operational nature of the vehicle. Most launchers are expendable, remember. And most of those vehicles are based on ICBM designs, which sacrificed economic efficiency for the sake of getting every last bit of performance out of the system. This does not make for a cheap vehicle. Beal is tackling the problem from this direction by building an expendable launcher that is designed to be CHEAP. And you know what, they're probably going to succeed (although they may not make much money, because it's not clear that they can break the $600/lb price barrier with this approach).
As far as reusable vehicles go: The Space Shuttle requires practically a full refit between each flight. They have to -- no shit -- deweld parts of the engines in order to replace internal components EVERY TIME they fly. Then they have to put them back together, test them, etc, etc. Something like 30,000 people put their hands on the vehicles between each flight, and thousands more are needed at the actual launch. This is not the way to fly cheaply!
Cheap reusable vehicles are possible with current technology, but they require a level of systems engineering that has not been present in most recent NASA designs (it's certainly not there on the X-33). For various reasons, single stage vehicles would be much cheaper to operate, but making a reusable SSTO launcher requires a very high degree of optimization, and some difficult engineering trades. Throw in the need to please 15 different bureaucrats and politicians, and the job becomes impossible.
Your point about advanced propulsion technologies is well taken: for interplantary work, mass fraction is all-important (because you have to lift not only the vehicle but also all the damn fuel). But most of those systems are not suitable for launch, and those that are, are very far out. We don't need fancy new technologies to make that first step, getting to orbit cheaply. We just need some money (not very much, maybe $100-200M) and a good engineering team.
I would like to know what Baptist Death Ray (and other professionals and semi-pros) think of Orange Alley and their bootlegal model. It seems like a great system to me -- though they need to get many more artists involved if they are going to succeed -- but I'm a geek, not a musician.
it is not a 'bomb'. liquid hydrogen peroxide will not detonate
Under the right circumstances, it will quite happily undergo rapid decomposition, releasing large ammounts of superheated steam and bursting whatever vessel contains it. That may not qualify it as a "bomb" in your book, but I don't think it'll make much difference to the guy sitting on top of it.
and it will not decompose into water and oxygen unless it comes in contact with a catalyst (the silver in this case). or unless it is heated.
Industrial H2O2 is normally supplied mixed 50-50 with water and stabilizers. Getting high concentration stuff is hard. There is a reason for this: At 90% concentration, it will oxidize organic materials on contact, and the heat from that reaction may be enough to sustain the decomposition process.
Bottom line: he'd better make sure that tank is damn clean.
it's less dangerous than liquid propane actually....
If you say so. Personally, if I was going to do this (and I would, if I had the cash), I'd use a nitrous-oxide/propane propellant system. Of course, I know where I can get a N2O/Prop motor, which helps.
*SHUDDER*
That's a bomb and make no mistake. Expensive, two. I wonder where he's getting it. High concentration H2O2 is hard to find.
If they wait 10 years, there won't be a need for the technology any more. That's about the timescale on which you will start to see a major shift towards fuel cells.
Thank you for posting the email contact. This is what I sent them, for anyone who is interested.
I am writing to protest your organization's action against Michael Doughney's parody website. You may not like what he had to say, but his site was a parody which in any other medium would have been protected. It is unfortunate that the legal system has not seen fit to extend First Amendment rights into cyberspace.
It is a sad statement about your organization that you would help to set a precdent AGAINST free speech simply to protect your own interests. It seems that PETA's concern with the rights of animals is such that the rights of humans must take a subordinate position.
Unfortunately, they are not a commerical interest (like Mattel) so it is harder to threaten them with anything that they care about (like taking your money elsewhere).
So Arthur may not seem like much of a hero to Americans he doesn't have any stock options, he doesn't have anything to exchange high fives about round the water-cooler. But to the English, he is a hero. Terrible things happen to him, he complains about it a bit quite articulately, so we can really feel it along with him - then calms down and has a cup of tea. My kind of guy!
He's right about English culture, you know. In the immortal words of Floyd:
Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time.
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say.
The Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado has done alot of good work on (among other things) the potential for a massive distributed energy generation system.
You can read one of their reports in this issue of their newsletter. More stuff is available here.
As fuel cells become more common, the approach becomes realistic.
Supplanting and replacing the old-fashioned power grid system makes alot of sense: You don't lose power in long distance transmission, and your demand and your production can track much more closely. It also has the potential to introduce a powerful market incentive towards conservation. Imagine: everyone has a fuel cell in their home and in their car. The grid is networked so that if you have surplus, you can sell it to the grid; if you need more power, you can buy it. On a hot summer day, you have the choice between paying (probably through the nose) for more power for your A/C, or just plugging in a fan and drinking icewater.
This is all true, and it highlights another point.
We don't need more bloody legislation to deal with this problem!
The comparison between abusive software liscensing and lemonade automobiles sounds like a strong argument for regulation: right or wrong, it's a fair statement that automotive transportation and computer software are both "necessities" of the modern American lifestyle.
But there is a fundamental difference here: it takes thousands of people working in close coordination, plus millions of dollars in tooling, factory space, etc to build a decent automobile. If the automakers have you bent over, you have two choices: spread'em, or take the bus. Not so with software. The very existence of the open source movement is ample evidence of that. There are alternatives, and as commercial software becomes more heinous, there will be more alternatives.
It's true, there is likely to be a year or two (probably not more, given how fast the software world moves) of discomfort before the system's natural mechanisms correct the imbalance. Regulating the industry might address these issues more directly, but:
1) It will probably -- no, certainly! -- take longer to get the laws on the books than it will for the system to self-correct.
2) Regulation of a complex, feedback coupled system (like the software or most any other industry) usually has unintended consequences. For example, if the government gets invovled in regulating the nature of EULAs, this puts us on a slippery slope. If they can be paid/pressured into creating laws that restrict under what terms commerical software may be licensed, they can also makes laws controlling how free software may be licensed. And the entities that would benefit from such control (i.e. the commercial software companies) can bring more pressure to bear than can the average consumer.
Is that what we want?
I'm pretty sure that this black hole is not ejecting matter from its own core. It's simply accelerating ambient gasses and throwing them around.
These quotes suggest that this is what is happening:
"A lot of galaxies don't have that much gas lying around, but this one did so it made a pretty bubble," said Jeffrey Kenney, a Yale University professor who detected the black hole in the Hubble images.
and
The black hole feeds off material from its accretion disk, the white region underneath the bright bubble. Some of the matter streams out in opposite directions in fast-moving twin jets.
I'm not sure about the mechanism, but I'm guessing what happens is this: As the hole sucks in gas from the accretion disk, that material accelerates due to gravitational attraction and the spin of the hole. Some of that material isn't heading straight towards the hole and accumulates enough momentum that it goes shooting past the edge of the hole, missing it completely, and is travelling too fast to get sucked back in immediately. Since this gas is all travelling radially inward, it collides and fountains above and below the hole, creating the gas clouds you see.
First of all, the term "damascus steel" is often, but somewhat incorrectly, applied to folded-metal blades or cable blades (blades that are forge welded from a piece of elevator cable -- very pretty). The true technique for making Damascus steel (made in Spain, not Japan, BTW) has been lost and apparently not recovered. Kind of like Stradivarius.
Regarding Japanese swordmaking: There is another technique they used, which I have not seen mentioned here, is as follows: When the blade is finished and ready for the final hardening (yaki-ire), the swordsmith would coat the spine of the blade with a layer of clay. He would then heat the entire blade red hot, and plunge the whole thing (clay still in place) into a quenching bath. The idea is that the metal on the edge would cool quickly, forming austenitic (?) steel, which is hard but brittle (holds an edge well); whereas the metal along the spine cooled more slowly because of the clay, producing martensitic (?) steel, which is softer but more flexible. (Note that I may have the two names for the different states of steel switched -- I have trouble keeping them straight. The chemical composition is the same in both cases; the difference is in the size and shape of the crystal structure.) Anyway, the boundary between the different steels is what forms the distinctive wavy line that runs down the side of the blade (the hamon). Many cheap swords have the hamon ground or etched in, to make the blade look more like the real thing.
Robert Zubrin has been pushing for the use of this and related technologies for YEARS. His plan for exploring Mars, called Mars Direct, consists of launching a series of unmanned, robotic lander stations. Each station would carry a powerplant, an earth-return vehicle with empty tanks, and a supply of hydrogen. Using a Sabatier reactor (which is presumably what they were talking about in the NASA article), the lander station uses the hydrogren to produce methane (propellant for the Marsrover and the earth-return vehicle) and water (and of course oxygen).
The idea is, you let this unit run for a year or so, then you send people, and you have a fully fueled, supplied earth return vehicle and base station waiting for you when you arrive. The crew cruises around, explores, and gets to live in a nice, comfy habitat with all the water and air they can use. When they are ready, they launch the earth-return portion and go home, leaving the powerplant and a portion of the lifesystem behind for the next wave.
If you send each crew to Mars in another lander station, then you can repeat this cycle endlessly. The ultimate goal would be to build up a network of these stations, each within Marsrover distance of the other, allowing for relatively safe exploration of large portions of the martian surface.
You can read more about this here. The discussion of in-situ resource production can be had here.
Jon, let me say that this is, IMO, the best peice you have written that I have read. You're point is, I think, well taken: it is not important that any of us go be any particular thing. But it is vitally important that each of us go be something of our own choosing. Preferably this would be done after putting some thought into what exactly we each want to be, but the main thing is to do something, anything other than just default to following the programming that society gives us.
In the book Ishmael, Daniel Quinn talks about "Mother Culture": that little, subliminal voice that is constantly whispering in your ear, telling you what you "should" do and what you society expects of you. We are all subject to the influence of Mother Culture; you can't escape from it, really. The important thing is to be aware of the little voice, and know what it is telling you to do.
Your point, in a nutshell, seems to be that the corporations have identified Mother Culture, and are actively manipulating her to their own ends. Spend a couple of hours watching television (or reading a popular magazine) and you will know that this is true, and it has been going on for a long time.
This bug has been known for at least a year and a half. Check this out.
Then, the recording companies, and those few artists who are siding with them (hear us Metallica?) will be left out in the cold as the rest of us get on with our lives.
It's already started to happen. The people who brought you PayLar$.com created Orange Alley and their Bootlegal system.
Basically, you pay a small amount to download MP3s from their website, and with it you buy the right to _legally_ distribute as many copies of that song as you want. If your friend goes and registers a copy of a song on their site, and cites you as the source, you get a kickback. And the artists get like 60% of the gross. Unfortunately, they can only distribute minor artists at this point, because all the big names have, by definition, already sold their souls to the labels. But these people have the right idea, and if this catches on, some of their clients will be big names some day. And then the RIAA can go take a flying leap...
Go here for the story with no annoying registration.
I have a friend who works for Arsdigita Corp which is a related organization but not the same as the university, and I have been looking at both the company and the university with some interest.
Anyway, the University supplies a generalize undergraduate CS program, not a votech education in particular tools. In fact, they don't teach any programming languages specifically. You have to pick up that stuff on your own.
Check out their cirriculum at the University homepage.
As for ruling out "less bright" people: They are giving their students, for free, a 4-year high level CS program in one year. Their students better be bloody bright. At that pace, they don't have time to slow down for the less-than-brilliant. I agree that SAT tests aren't a real indicator of intelligence, but I think they're using them just to make the first cut. Getting a 1400 should be no problem for the mutant-geniuses that they are trying to recruit.
If you don't like this plan, go here and tell them. Be polite, be specific, and make sure that they understand that you will lobby your congresscritter if that's what it takes to defeat plans like theirs.
This seemed apt.
(It's hard to see in the image, but the thing on the back of the guy's neck in the rightmost frame is is a barcode.)
What is particularly ironic is that, at one time, humans cared very much about the season, phase of the moon, and time of year, because we had to, because we were farmers. Now we can know the time of day to arbitrary precision, any time we want to, but how many of you know what phase the moon is in right now, or what time the sun rises? :-)
Or, for the ones that really never get out, what season is it?
If people didn't buy, the corporations wouldn't exist. If you think that corporations brain-wash people into buying stuff then blame the people for being dumb, not the corporations.
Oh, the people are the problem, no doubt about it. And if anything is going to change, that change has to start with people. But that includes the people who run the corporations: they have the power to shape society, and I think that saddles them with some level of responsibility. Ultimately, yes, I blame the sheeple for allowing themselves to be led around by the collective nose. But that doesn't mean I'm not disgusted by corporations' active efforts to make people as dumb and materialistic as possible.
And the reason that the scenario I describe disturbs me is this: with nanotech, we could see an end to the economics of scarcity; we could literally create the garden of Eden. Everyone could be rich. But that won't happen, because there are people for whom business success is a game, and money is the scoring system. For such people, being rich is only relevant if someone else is poor.
For a perspective that is relevant to this issue, read "Voyage to Yesteryear" by Paul Hogan. He describes an (admitadely unrealistic) scenario in which the economics of scarcity no longer apply, and then writes a book about how people deal with it.
1. If the elite so badly want to crush the populace, they can probably do so right now. Of course it's one more way for them to wreak havoc on society if they so choose. Paranoia isn't such a huge deterrent to technology, though. Because it hasn't been since the Industrial revolution.
The elite does not want to crush the populace. They want to profit off of the populace. Now, I'm a good capitalist and a free-marketeer, and I don't have any problem at all with making a profit. But I have a problem with a group getting (an almost certainly government granted) monopoly on production, and then charging prices that have no relation to the costs of production or anything else.
2. Perhaps the elite SHOULD have control over everything, to prevent that lone deranged person from ever getting his hands on the controls. Open source nanotechnology sounds like an Open source nuclear warhead to me.
Well, first of all, I don't have a great deal of trust for any "ruling class". Granted, they are vested in the system, so the rational (not necessarily moral) ones are going to try to protect it. But they could still produce a crank who could do alot of damage with his privliged access to technology. And I find that scenario really scary, because there is absolutely nothing I can do about it under those circumstances. If I have an assembler of my own, at least I can fight back and protect myself (shades of a Mage War, here).
Secondly, I don't believe any system is totally secure. Assemblers will get out. If we try to protect ourselves by controlling access, then it might take longer, but when it happens it will be covert (thus not subject to oversight) and there will be no safeguard in place to deal with whatever that loony and his assembler produce. I think we need to solve this problem in a fashion that allows for public access to assemblers. No other solution will be robust enough.
I don't know what the solution is in this case. However, it does seem like most of the worst dangers of nanotech are associated to self-replicating critters. If we could control the production of those (how?), that might be enough.