'The improvements we're making to Ubunutu... are a better route for us to reach out to users and get a bigger user base.'
High five for being one organization in this world that recognizes the benefits of positive advertisement rather than negative attack campaigns. It's always better to stay positive. People will like you more.
Yep, you don't need many people if you don't intend to do the whole job.
Yep, because properly labeling and sealing hazardous waste containers is such a mission critical part of the job of launching rockets. Don't get me wrong, such a violation is probably unsafe to some extent and should be fined, but describing a labeling and disposal error on SpaceX's part as not intending "to do the whole job," falls into the category of needless opinionated spin and borderlines on hyperbole. Even IF SpaceX had handled their hazardous materials correctly, it probably would have cost them a few thousand more dollars and probably would not have needed one more employee whatsoever, so the OP's point that SpaceX developed three launch systems that have been demonstrated to work in a short time on a low budget with only 1,000 employees still stands exactly as true as it did when he said it. Your point, however, is nothing but scandalous hyperbole meant to generate negative publicity for SpaceX because, well...I don't know why. You have your own agenda but it certainly seems like a stupid one to me.
Woohoo! We Californians finally made it in the Top 3 of bad American stereotypes. I knew that once we shifted out focus from being the weird, outlandish, hippy nutbags to being the penniless, broke, spending addicted morons of the West we would start to make a real dent in national perception! Take that New Jersey! Your tough-talking, greasy haired Guido accents got nothing on us broke-as-hell West Coasters! I can die happy now.
I doubt that the dryer ban is that nefarious in nature. Here on the central coast of California, we have quite a few HOAs. Those homeowners associations express goal is to promote civil communities and increase property values. One of the ways to keep property values up is to not allow your HOA members to let their homes look trashy or unmaintained. Since drying clothes outside is considered trashy looking (for whatever stupid ass reason) by some folk, it gets banned by an HOA. HOAs also forbid other environmentally sensible stuff like replacing lawns with rock gardens or installing solar panels on your home/condo/whatever because it "looks bad." This is what happens when you let too many bored old cat ladies conspire to create rules to maintain the harmony of a community. I sometimes wonder if China is secretly run by a bunch of bored old cat ladies without anything better to do than poke into other folks' business.
Because none of the other countries want to risk losing trade status with the US. If you piss off the biggest kid on the block, he can make your life a bit unpleasant. Considering the the United States is still the leading dealer of armaments and defensive technologies in this world, losing trade status with it over music, movies, and art would appear to be a foolish move to a lot of rulers.
It's too bad the article is so scant on details and so full of fanboyism. I would very much like to see the circuit diagrams and control system diagrams for this supposed neural control network. Kevin Warwick, if I remember correctly, has a history of making very bold claims and announcing certain successes that don't quite live up to his descriptions when viewed critically...or for that matter when viewed at all. Supposedly, he is using a feedback control system involving these neural cells to force some kind of output. I'd like to see that control scheme. Are the neurons part of the plant or part of the state estimator? Is he controlling rates, position, accelerations, or some combination therein? Are the state variables (velocity, acceleration, whatever) fed back into the neural network and compared against a predicted or commanded state? He is claiming to have developed a neuron based control system but there are absolutely no details about the control system itself so I am very wary of this claim.
So far as I know, the only thing a neuron, or batch of neurons, can do is process an electrical signal from one end to another. If that's the case I fail to see how these neurons are controlling anything. I don't see how they could be used to calculate or predict any state at all. If all they are doing is transferring the analog signal from a batch of sensors, and then delivering those signals to a microcontroller or something, then they are not controlling the system at all, they are simply acting as biological wires. If they are rerouting sensory signals to various parts of the circuit based on level of input, that would be something worth noting, but I am not sure how a batch of neurons could do that. Furthermore, Rodney Brookes was able to do pretty much the same thing with transistor sets and analog sensors years ago when he developed his robotic bug brain...so it's not like such a control scheme hasn't been cooked up before. It would be great to see the details of the work to know what Warwick is actually up to this time, but I have a sneaking suspicion that his neural controller is nothing more than a classic analog or digital controller that uses a batch of neurons to transfer signals in the exact same manner that wires or a transistor bank could do. I want details.
So, I think this idea needs to be filed under, "theoretically interesting but not practical." Don't get me wrong, this is an intriguing, albeit complicated, design that may have potential in the future. But currently, there are a lot of engineering parameters that are going to shoot a satellite like this into the impractical/impossible area. First off, if you are pumping that many electrons (even for the small solar sail design discussed) repeatedly through copper wires, you have a good chance of melting your wires. This design has the satellite strung out in a long, awkward shape. Piping excess heat out of those cables and into an appropriately large radiator is going to be a pain in the ass, if not downright impossible.
Secondly, this satellite is a control engineer's worst nightmare. It looks like this satellite consists of multiple moment arms strung together that will continuously have a torque impressed upon them (solar wind, magentic forces, etc.). Trying to damp the sheer rotational momentum of this satellite, much less the perturbations induced by an inconsistent solar wind load, is going to saturate any reaction wheels or CMG's you put on the system. If you are going to use thrusters for momentum dumping, then you are going to need an epic crapton of fuel just to keep this satellite pointed and stable. It wouldn't be an easy problem, even for the smaller designs.
Thirdly, not only will maintaining the appropriate attitude for the collector be a difficult task, but the pointing requirements for that deathray, I mean laser, are going to be constrictive. Any controls engineer would be hard pressed to get that thing pointing within the 0.001 degrees (approximate guess) necessary to keep from melting someone on the ground. Add to that problem the consistent oscillations induced on the semi-rigid spacecraft body by a varying solar wind and you have a non-trivial pointing problem.
On top of that, communicating with such a satellite will be a colossal pain in the ass. Whatever communication dishes you have mounted to this thing are going to be subject to a lot of noise based on the magnetic field produced by the satellite as well as the high-radiation environment the satellite is living in. Communicating through all that noise is going to require quite a bit of power, and/or some very large dishes. Again, this isn't an impossible design challenge to overcome, but couple it with the cost of troubleshooting the other issues I listed above and you have a very nontrivial engineering task.
So sure, from a scientific theory point of view, this design is interesting (and I am still going over the details). From an engineering point of view, however, this satellite is a God-forsaken nightmare to design. It would be an extraordinarily expensive piece of equipment. There is a good chance that the first one or two would be lost early in the mission cycle. This is a project that would require an enormous amount of funding and political will to get pushed through. I'd be less surprised to see a PV based power generating satellite get produced in the next decade than seeing this design go anywhere past paper.
Oh sure, you have that right. The question is whether or not you have the ability to remain silent while that wrench is dangled ominously in front of your face.
I didn't say it was easy, and I didn't say those solutions were universal solutions. The point of all that was to demonstrate that sometimes you really just need to stand back, evaluate what it is you are trying to accomplish, and ask yourself if that is really what you need or what you want. I have no doubt in my mind that you are an intelligent individual and talented in many ways that I am not. What that means is that you need to find a way to make this world work for you. There are a million and one ways to make money out there, and at least 3 billion people stupid enough to want to give you their money. You just need to figure out how to take what you do and get in on that cash somehow. It's not easy, but it is possible.
Yes, in some instances both my roomate and I lucked out. In other instances, we burned our asses working hard to get nil for it. Hell, to this day I try to show off my technical chops with various hobby projects and no employer takes those seriously. But that never stopped me from talking to people, networking, asking around, calling up family, and so forth in order to find a place to go. College life can suck. I know. I was there. Any phase of your life can suck. Once if gets to a point where you don't like it anymore, or where you feel like you are living like a slave, then it's time to cut your losses, figure out what it is that makes you happy, and start getting creative on how to pursue those means. I don't really know what to tell you other than that. Keep your ears and eyes open for opportunities and don't be afraid to take them when they come along. And nobody ever said you'd be working your dream job designing filters or whatever, but if an opportunity comes along to make money in a completely different field...or hell, to pursue an education in a completely different manner (tech school, abroad, whatever) then maybe that's your chance to carpe diem.
Time. Nobody said you have to graduate by the time you are 21. Ease your school schedule back to half the units so that school itself costs you a bit less. Start swapping books on craigslist so that you don't have to buy them (or rent them from your school's library instead). That time you save by taking half the classes use to work a second and possibly third job to earn a bit more income. Have some patience, graduate later. Get on with your life. I didn't say it was easy. I did the exact same thing you are doing (although I preferred peanut butter sandwiches to ramen noodles). It worked out well enough for me, but I wasn't in a terrible rush either. I also went to a slightly cheaper school.
My roomate had an even better plan. He worked rather than going to college right out of HS. Saved some money, put a down payment on a condo. Now he has free housing (very low payments) and my share of the rent helps pay for his schooling. When he graduates, which will be a few years after I did. He will resell the condo and make his money back...essentially going to school for free. So yeah, there are ways to do it without being a debt slave. The point is, think outside the box and get creative. Also, you can make a lot of money from giving personal massages and charging $25 bucks per hour. But you didn't hear that from me.
Oh, one other thing, one kid I know got two years of free housing by finding a decent looking older woman that needed a younger man for "home maintenance" to be her flatmate. I can't guarantee that you can find such a deal, but it is worth looking into.
Sure, chucking a probe 20 lightyears away would be awesome, and if we could scrape together the international will and resources necessary to do that I would be all for such an effort. But what about exploring some of the more exciting areas in our own celestial backyard, if you will?
To date we have only had landers on a few of our planets. We only have functioning rovers on one. We had an impact probe on only one of the moons circling the gas giants. We have rendezvoused with one asteroid, and we have gotten two probes into the Kuiper belt. So, before we go dumping trillions of dollars (and it will cost at least that much) into a tiny (and it will be tiny) scientific payload to another solar system, can we start funding some serious exploration here first?
I want to see landers, rovers, and submersibles on Europa, Enceladus, Titan, Ganymede, Io, and Callisto. I want to see regular sample return missions to near Earth asteroids. I want to start a ferry program between LEO and the Earth's surface for more than a handful of elite astronauts. I want to see experimental habitats on the moon, rovers on Venus, probes on Mercury, orbiters around Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and even Pluto, and I want to have at least ten more robots actively exploring Mars. Don't get me wrong, Gliese 158g is one hell of an interesting planet and we should study it as best as we can with out long range sensors and, as one 'dotter even suggested, perhaps we should try communicating with it. I see no reason to evens start thinking about sending a matter-based payload to that planet, however, until we really take some time and effort to start exploring our own solar system. For as much as we have done here, we still really don't know all that much about our home system. I, for one, am not convinced that there are not colonies of methane-based life on Titan and a whole city of icy fish people swimming under the crust of Europa. Let's not even start talking about the possible cloud people of Venus or the cave-dwellers of Mars...
Huh, that's not an extremist view or anything. For what it's worth (anecdotal), I wasn't born into money. My parents kept us in the lower middle class by not spending an outrageous amount of money, but I haven't inherited much of anything. Nonetheless, I am a college graduate that is debt free at 24. How? Well I manage my finances and am pretty damn capable of not spending money on things I don't need. If you live as a debt slave in this society your whole life, it's because you can't keep your wallet closed. That's really all there is to it in my experience. And dying from a simple medical condition? Well, since I worked my way through college, I got a decent job where, yes, I do work my ass off, and that job provides me with health care that keeps simple medical conditions (even non-simple ones, like when I crashed my motorcycle) from killing me.
Do you want to know what my big secret to success is? I learned to shop at thrift shops. I learned to scavenge technology rather than buy the latest and greatest thing to hit the shelves. I learned to control my urges. I learned to provide a lot of stuff for myself, like growing some of my own fruits and vegetables and such. I do work my ass off every single day, but I also get a lot of cool stuff done (you can check out my website in my sig if you like). So....sure, you can sit there and rant about how you've been a consumer slave all your life or whatever, but frankly, that hasn't been the case for most folk I know. My roomate is also in a similar situation as myself but he was also raised with a similar mindset. Don't buy what you can't afford. Work hard to earn a living. No big secret about that.
Most of the folks that I know that advocate carbs over EFI do so because they want to be able to work on their vehicles on the side of the road. According to them, having an EFI system means that if things go to hell when they are stuck out in the boonies, then they can't break out the toolkit then and there and fix it. When I try to point out to them that proper maintenance should prevent the need to fix your shit out in the boonies, they get belligerent.
It's just too bad that the father son team didn't document the project themselves. The news articles are definitely interesting, but I would love to see their own website with information on it like pictures and video taken of them actually building the craft and such. I wish more nerds documented their hobby work so others could easily follow in their footsteps.
Check out the DIRECT Program. That might be what you are referring to. There are also a lot of other possible shuttle replacements that rely on various degrees of existing vs. nonexisting technology. A little Googling can reveal a lot of them, but I will leave that as an exercise to the reader.
Hey, former NASA employees, I have some thoughts for you. I just graduated with a degree in aero engineering myself a couple years back. I've been paying attention to the space industry since well before then so I have some advice if you are looking for new jobs.
1) Frankly, we don't know if there will be a government funded replacement for the shuttle ever. As such, start thinking about where your skills could apply elsewhere. Right now SpaceX, Bigelow, Boeing, the ESA, JAXA, Energia, IOS, and numerous other startup space companies are working on manned space programs. These include everything from space station building to capsule development. Most of your decades worth of skills and experience are directly transferable to these companies so start checking them out and applying.
2) There are other tech. industries where your skills could come in handy. If you worked on automation, data processing, signal filtering, or control dynamics, start looking into the robotics industry. All of those skills apply well there. If you worked in antennae theory, try checking out all of the new research going into wireless technology development (wi fi, 3g, 4g, etc.). If you worked in human-habitat development, I read about a few companies trying to design underwater habitats for humans. That's pretty analogous to habitat development in space. Also, most skills that go into designing spacecraft are directly transferable to designing boats and/or submarines. Those are also some industries you can look into.
3) Don't neglect to mention the qualities that made you a good employee for NASA in the first place on your resume. You worked on a project the likes of which had never been done before. You are obviously intelligent and a good general problem solver. You are not a pidgeon-holed employee. When the shuttle program started, you had to figure out how to design and build a space plane. There was almost no research in that area before. Likewise, those same problem-solving skills need to be emphasized on your resume now. Don't just talk about that one bracket that you designed. Talk about how that bracket solved a problem that was unique without any prior art. It will make you very appealing to start-up companies.
You guys worked hard on a great project. But you have to admit that an ~30 year long engineering project is a very long project lifecycle in this industry. Few, if any employees at other organizations can brag about working on a single project that long. That said, thanks for all the hard work, but you, as well as the rest of us, know that the shuttle was past its prime and needed to be put to bed. So please, don't become angry old fogies reminiscing about the good old days. Use those uniquely awesome and genius skills that you have to help lead my generation into a new era of space infrastructure development the likes of which has never been seen before. We have new technologies. We have new mission architectures. We have unprecedented levels of access to enormous amounts of information. We need your wisdom. We need mentors like you as we find our own way in this industry. Seize those resources along side the rest of us in this industry and let's show the solar system just what our silly little species is capable of!
That's not what I've read. From their respective wikipedia articles:
Embryonic stem cells: "Additionally, under defined conditions, embryonic stem cells are capable of propagating themselves indefinitely." Adult stem cells: "Self-renewal which is the ability to go through numerous cycles of cell division while still maintaining its undifferentiated state." (emphasis mine)
So, it seems that while embryonic stem cells can reproduce indefinitely, adult stems cells can reproduce numerous times, but not indefinitely. Sure, maybe that number that numerous implies is very high, but that is still distinctly different than indefinitely. That's why I asked the question in the first place... Even one of the doctors in the article talks about how embryonic stem cells are still necessary for research purposes due to their unique traits (I am wagering one of those traits is their reproducibility).
Meh, what's the point to life without freedom? Why bother getting out of the way if it will just lead to a world where those who lead (via lying, cheating, coercion, and so on) prey upon those who follow? See, the way I see it, there are three types of people in the world:
1) Those who recognize problems and run away from them.
2) Those who recognize problems and fix them.
3) Those who don't recognize problems.
They world's always been a rough place. That hasn't stopped our species from doing some absolutely amazing things. Keeping your head down and hiding in a hole while those around you are beaten down is just pathetic.
I thought one of the huge advantages of embryonic stem cells was that, once gathered, they could effectively be reproduced or cloned or something indefinitely without the need to gather more. Is that the case with these new cells? Or am I completely off base in the first place?
Effectively the article is saying that even if you use/b as your personal army, it doesn't matter, because you just promoted yourself a personal army of useless retards. =)
This was a very good article and I would recommend reading the whole thing to anyone interested in the topic. It was well thought out and I want to give props to the author first and foremost.
Now, that said, I think something that is missing from the article is a discussion of the 'action' factor that is used in protests and social movements today. Something I've noticed with a lot of online social movements is that they are very good at giving every member a means to voice their thoughts on a particular issue. This has granted a lot of people a large audience for their thoughts regarding any particular matter. As such, anyone can get up on their digital soap box (as I am doing now) and spout their claims to get a series of 'likes' or 'dislikes' from their large online audience. This has a very nice effect on the speaker, making them feel like they are taking part in something important and big. However, the reason many of these online causes do not effect as much change as someone might initially think is because that seems to be where all of the action stops. Social media has given folks a means to express their opinion without backing anything up with action (I do draw an arbitrary line here that distinguishes talk from action).
The author of this article makes a fine summary of the American Civil Rights movement back in the 60's. Something that he fails to address when summarizing these movements, however, is that they had long lasting consequences on society as a whole. The bus boycott actually damaged the economic stance of the bus company being boycotted. The Southern sit-ins prevented the businesses where they took place from earning much cash off of white customers. The action taken by those who participated in the Civil Rights movement went beyond mere words. They actually cost their opponents something valuable. This is something that online social media movements do not do. The folks pillaging Darfur and its inhabitants don't give a damn about the 1.2 million Facebook users that want to help Darfur. Those Facebook users aren't damaging their opponents in any way. They are passively sitting around, voicing their dissent through words or micro-donations, and patting themselves on the back for a job well done. Meanwhile, those that are committing atrocities in Darfur are being allowed to work, as normal, without any outside interference. Thus, nothing will change. There is no perturbation to the status quo.
The reason the Iranian case was somewhat different is because there really were protesters in Tehran marching and having rallies. That's great. However, those rallies did not cost the Iranian politicians anything of value. Standing around and complaining, even in large numbers, did not prevent the vote-smearing that was going on. Thus, nothing changed. the Iranian protesters came closer to afflicting change that the Darfur FB users because they actually organized and tried to do something. However, they did not damage anything of value to those in favor of the status quo.
So I would say that if anyone really wants a revolution over a particular issue, not only is hierarchical organization important (as discussed in the fine article), but also, those organizing the protest (be it through social media or any other medium) must, necessarily, find a way to deprive their opponents of something valuable over a long span of time. That said, for issues close to us 'dotters, I would say that simply commenting on related stories is not enough. If we really want the MAFIAA to fall for good, we need to deprive them of something they value. If we want politicians to stop acting like corrupt douchebags, we need to go beyond writing letters to them and complaining. We need to organize and cost them something of value. If we want net neutrality to be implemented, we need to find a way to deprive all throttling ISPs from getting something of value (customers, money, new technology, something).
Slashdot Mirror
'The improvements we're making to Ubunutu ... are a better route for us to reach out to users and get a bigger user base.'
High five for being one organization in this world that recognizes the benefits of positive advertisement rather than negative attack campaigns. It's always better to stay positive. People will like you more.
Yep, you don't need many people if you don't intend to do the whole job.
Yep, because properly labeling and sealing hazardous waste containers is such a mission critical part of the job of launching rockets. Don't get me wrong, such a violation is probably unsafe to some extent and should be fined, but describing a labeling and disposal error on SpaceX's part as not intending "to do the whole job," falls into the category of needless opinionated spin and borderlines on hyperbole. Even IF SpaceX had handled their hazardous materials correctly, it probably would have cost them a few thousand more dollars and probably would not have needed one more employee whatsoever, so the OP's point that SpaceX developed three launch systems that have been demonstrated to work in a short time on a low budget with only 1,000 employees still stands exactly as true as it did when he said it. Your point, however, is nothing but scandalous hyperbole meant to generate negative publicity for SpaceX because, well...I don't know why. You have your own agenda but it certainly seems like a stupid one to me.
budgetless west coast
Woohoo! We Californians finally made it in the Top 3 of bad American stereotypes. I knew that once we shifted out focus from being the weird, outlandish, hippy nutbags to being the penniless, broke, spending addicted morons of the West we would start to make a real dent in national perception! Take that New Jersey! Your tough-talking, greasy haired Guido accents got nothing on us broke-as-hell West Coasters! I can die happy now.
I doubt that the dryer ban is that nefarious in nature. Here on the central coast of California, we have quite a few HOAs. Those homeowners associations express goal is to promote civil communities and increase property values. One of the ways to keep property values up is to not allow your HOA members to let their homes look trashy or unmaintained. Since drying clothes outside is considered trashy looking (for whatever stupid ass reason) by some folk, it gets banned by an HOA. HOAs also forbid other environmentally sensible stuff like replacing lawns with rock gardens or installing solar panels on your home/condo/whatever because it "looks bad." This is what happens when you let too many bored old cat ladies conspire to create rules to maintain the harmony of a community. I sometimes wonder if China is secretly run by a bunch of bored old cat ladies without anything better to do than poke into other folks' business.
Because none of the other countries want to risk losing trade status with the US. If you piss off the biggest kid on the block, he can make your life a bit unpleasant. Considering the the United States is still the leading dealer of armaments and defensive technologies in this world, losing trade status with it over music, movies, and art would appear to be a foolish move to a lot of rulers.
I guess you hear enough of them that they just leave a ringing in your ears....
It's too bad the article is so scant on details and so full of fanboyism. I would very much like to see the circuit diagrams and control system diagrams for this supposed neural control network. Kevin Warwick, if I remember correctly, has a history of making very bold claims and announcing certain successes that don't quite live up to his descriptions when viewed critically...or for that matter when viewed at all. Supposedly, he is using a feedback control system involving these neural cells to force some kind of output. I'd like to see that control scheme. Are the neurons part of the plant or part of the state estimator? Is he controlling rates, position, accelerations, or some combination therein? Are the state variables (velocity, acceleration, whatever) fed back into the neural network and compared against a predicted or commanded state? He is claiming to have developed a neuron based control system but there are absolutely no details about the control system itself so I am very wary of this claim.
So far as I know, the only thing a neuron, or batch of neurons, can do is process an electrical signal from one end to another. If that's the case I fail to see how these neurons are controlling anything. I don't see how they could be used to calculate or predict any state at all. If all they are doing is transferring the analog signal from a batch of sensors, and then delivering those signals to a microcontroller or something, then they are not controlling the system at all, they are simply acting as biological wires. If they are rerouting sensory signals to various parts of the circuit based on level of input, that would be something worth noting, but I am not sure how a batch of neurons could do that. Furthermore, Rodney Brookes was able to do pretty much the same thing with transistor sets and analog sensors years ago when he developed his robotic bug brain...so it's not like such a control scheme hasn't been cooked up before. It would be great to see the details of the work to know what Warwick is actually up to this time, but I have a sneaking suspicion that his neural controller is nothing more than a classic analog or digital controller that uses a batch of neurons to transfer signals in the exact same manner that wires or a transistor bank could do. I want details.
So, I think this idea needs to be filed under, "theoretically interesting but not practical." Don't get me wrong, this is an intriguing, albeit complicated, design that may have potential in the future. But currently, there are a lot of engineering parameters that are going to shoot a satellite like this into the impractical/impossible area. First off, if you are pumping that many electrons (even for the small solar sail design discussed) repeatedly through copper wires, you have a good chance of melting your wires. This design has the satellite strung out in a long, awkward shape. Piping excess heat out of those cables and into an appropriately large radiator is going to be a pain in the ass, if not downright impossible.
Secondly, this satellite is a control engineer's worst nightmare. It looks like this satellite consists of multiple moment arms strung together that will continuously have a torque impressed upon them (solar wind, magentic forces, etc.). Trying to damp the sheer rotational momentum of this satellite, much less the perturbations induced by an inconsistent solar wind load, is going to saturate any reaction wheels or CMG's you put on the system. If you are going to use thrusters for momentum dumping, then you are going to need an epic crapton of fuel just to keep this satellite pointed and stable. It wouldn't be an easy problem, even for the smaller designs.
Thirdly, not only will maintaining the appropriate attitude for the collector be a difficult task, but the pointing requirements for that deathray, I mean laser, are going to be constrictive. Any controls engineer would be hard pressed to get that thing pointing within the 0.001 degrees (approximate guess) necessary to keep from melting someone on the ground. Add to that problem the consistent oscillations induced on the semi-rigid spacecraft body by a varying solar wind and you have a non-trivial pointing problem.
On top of that, communicating with such a satellite will be a colossal pain in the ass. Whatever communication dishes you have mounted to this thing are going to be subject to a lot of noise based on the magnetic field produced by the satellite as well as the high-radiation environment the satellite is living in. Communicating through all that noise is going to require quite a bit of power, and/or some very large dishes. Again, this isn't an impossible design challenge to overcome, but couple it with the cost of troubleshooting the other issues I listed above and you have a very nontrivial engineering task.
So sure, from a scientific theory point of view, this design is interesting (and I am still going over the details). From an engineering point of view, however, this satellite is a God-forsaken nightmare to design. It would be an extraordinarily expensive piece of equipment. There is a good chance that the first one or two would be lost early in the mission cycle. This is a project that would require an enormous amount of funding and political will to get pushed through. I'd be less surprised to see a PV based power generating satellite get produced in the next decade than seeing this design go anywhere past paper.
Oh sure, you have that right. The question is whether or not you have the ability to remain silent while that wrench is dangled ominously in front of your face.
His porn collection; like every other 19 year old male.
I didn't say it was easy, and I didn't say those solutions were universal solutions. The point of all that was to demonstrate that sometimes you really just need to stand back, evaluate what it is you are trying to accomplish, and ask yourself if that is really what you need or what you want. I have no doubt in my mind that you are an intelligent individual and talented in many ways that I am not. What that means is that you need to find a way to make this world work for you. There are a million and one ways to make money out there, and at least 3 billion people stupid enough to want to give you their money. You just need to figure out how to take what you do and get in on that cash somehow. It's not easy, but it is possible.
Yes, in some instances both my roomate and I lucked out. In other instances, we burned our asses working hard to get nil for it. Hell, to this day I try to show off my technical chops with various hobby projects and no employer takes those seriously. But that never stopped me from talking to people, networking, asking around, calling up family, and so forth in order to find a place to go. College life can suck. I know. I was there. Any phase of your life can suck. Once if gets to a point where you don't like it anymore, or where you feel like you are living like a slave, then it's time to cut your losses, figure out what it is that makes you happy, and start getting creative on how to pursue those means. I don't really know what to tell you other than that. Keep your ears and eyes open for opportunities and don't be afraid to take them when they come along. And nobody ever said you'd be working your dream job designing filters or whatever, but if an opportunity comes along to make money in a completely different field...or hell, to pursue an education in a completely different manner (tech school, abroad, whatever) then maybe that's your chance to carpe diem.
Time. Nobody said you have to graduate by the time you are 21. Ease your school schedule back to half the units so that school itself costs you a bit less. Start swapping books on craigslist so that you don't have to buy them (or rent them from your school's library instead). That time you save by taking half the classes use to work a second and possibly third job to earn a bit more income. Have some patience, graduate later. Get on with your life. I didn't say it was easy. I did the exact same thing you are doing (although I preferred peanut butter sandwiches to ramen noodles). It worked out well enough for me, but I wasn't in a terrible rush either. I also went to a slightly cheaper school.
My roomate had an even better plan. He worked rather than going to college right out of HS. Saved some money, put a down payment on a condo. Now he has free housing (very low payments) and my share of the rent helps pay for his schooling. When he graduates, which will be a few years after I did. He will resell the condo and make his money back...essentially going to school for free. So yeah, there are ways to do it without being a debt slave. The point is, think outside the box and get creative. Also, you can make a lot of money from giving personal massages and charging $25 bucks per hour. But you didn't hear that from me.
Oh, one other thing, one kid I know got two years of free housing by finding a decent looking older woman that needed a younger man for "home maintenance" to be her flatmate. I can't guarantee that you can find such a deal, but it is worth looking into.
Sure, chucking a probe 20 lightyears away would be awesome, and if we could scrape together the international will and resources necessary to do that I would be all for such an effort. But what about exploring some of the more exciting areas in our own celestial backyard, if you will?
To date we have only had landers on a few of our planets. We only have functioning rovers on one. We had an impact probe on only one of the moons circling the gas giants. We have rendezvoused with one asteroid, and we have gotten two probes into the Kuiper belt. So, before we go dumping trillions of dollars (and it will cost at least that much) into a tiny (and it will be tiny) scientific payload to another solar system, can we start funding some serious exploration here first?
I want to see landers, rovers, and submersibles on Europa, Enceladus, Titan, Ganymede, Io, and Callisto. I want to see regular sample return missions to near Earth asteroids. I want to start a ferry program between LEO and the Earth's surface for more than a handful of elite astronauts. I want to see experimental habitats on the moon, rovers on Venus, probes on Mercury, orbiters around Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and even Pluto, and I want to have at least ten more robots actively exploring Mars. Don't get me wrong, Gliese 158g is one hell of an interesting planet and we should study it as best as we can with out long range sensors and, as one 'dotter even suggested, perhaps we should try communicating with it. I see no reason to evens start thinking about sending a matter-based payload to that planet, however, until we really take some time and effort to start exploring our own solar system. For as much as we have done here, we still really don't know all that much about our home system. I, for one, am not convinced that there are not colonies of methane-based life on Titan and a whole city of icy fish people swimming under the crust of Europa. Let's not even start talking about the possible cloud people of Venus or the cave-dwellers of Mars...
Huh, that's not an extremist view or anything. For what it's worth (anecdotal), I wasn't born into money. My parents kept us in the lower middle class by not spending an outrageous amount of money, but I haven't inherited much of anything. Nonetheless, I am a college graduate that is debt free at 24. How? Well I manage my finances and am pretty damn capable of not spending money on things I don't need. If you live as a debt slave in this society your whole life, it's because you can't keep your wallet closed. That's really all there is to it in my experience. And dying from a simple medical condition? Well, since I worked my way through college, I got a decent job where, yes, I do work my ass off, and that job provides me with health care that keeps simple medical conditions (even non-simple ones, like when I crashed my motorcycle) from killing me.
Do you want to know what my big secret to success is? I learned to shop at thrift shops. I learned to scavenge technology rather than buy the latest and greatest thing to hit the shelves. I learned to control my urges. I learned to provide a lot of stuff for myself, like growing some of my own fruits and vegetables and such. I do work my ass off every single day, but I also get a lot of cool stuff done (you can check out my website in my sig if you like). So....sure, you can sit there and rant about how you've been a consumer slave all your life or whatever, but frankly, that hasn't been the case for most folk I know. My roomate is also in a similar situation as myself but he was also raised with a similar mindset. Don't buy what you can't afford. Work hard to earn a living. No big secret about that.
Seriously! To date my favorite battery tester is my tongue and a wet finger.
Most of the folks that I know that advocate carbs over EFI do so because they want to be able to work on their vehicles on the side of the road. According to them, having an EFI system means that if things go to hell when they are stuck out in the boonies, then they can't break out the toolkit then and there and fix it. When I try to point out to them that proper maintenance should prevent the need to fix your shit out in the boonies, they get belligerent.
It's just too bad that the father son team didn't document the project themselves. The news articles are definitely interesting, but I would love to see their own website with information on it like pictures and video taken of them actually building the craft and such. I wish more nerds documented their hobby work so others could easily follow in their footsteps.
Check out the DIRECT Program. That might be what you are referring to. There are also a lot of other possible shuttle replacements that rely on various degrees of existing vs. nonexisting technology. A little Googling can reveal a lot of them, but I will leave that as an exercise to the reader.
Hey, former NASA employees, I have some thoughts for you. I just graduated with a degree in aero engineering myself a couple years back. I've been paying attention to the space industry since well before then so I have some advice if you are looking for new jobs.
1) Frankly, we don't know if there will be a government funded replacement for the shuttle ever. As such, start thinking about where your skills could apply elsewhere. Right now SpaceX, Bigelow, Boeing, the ESA, JAXA, Energia, IOS, and numerous other startup space companies are working on manned space programs. These include everything from space station building to capsule development. Most of your decades worth of skills and experience are directly transferable to these companies so start checking them out and applying.
2) There are other tech. industries where your skills could come in handy. If you worked on automation, data processing, signal filtering, or control dynamics, start looking into the robotics industry. All of those skills apply well there. If you worked in antennae theory, try checking out all of the new research going into wireless technology development (wi fi, 3g, 4g, etc.). If you worked in human-habitat development, I read about a few companies trying to design underwater habitats for humans. That's pretty analogous to habitat development in space. Also, most skills that go into designing spacecraft are directly transferable to designing boats and/or submarines. Those are also some industries you can look into.
3) Don't neglect to mention the qualities that made you a good employee for NASA in the first place on your resume. You worked on a project the likes of which had never been done before. You are obviously intelligent and a good general problem solver. You are not a pidgeon-holed employee. When the shuttle program started, you had to figure out how to design and build a space plane. There was almost no research in that area before. Likewise, those same problem-solving skills need to be emphasized on your resume now. Don't just talk about that one bracket that you designed. Talk about how that bracket solved a problem that was unique without any prior art. It will make you very appealing to start-up companies.
You guys worked hard on a great project. But you have to admit that an ~30 year long engineering project is a very long project lifecycle in this industry. Few, if any employees at other organizations can brag about working on a single project that long. That said, thanks for all the hard work, but you, as well as the rest of us, know that the shuttle was past its prime and needed to be put to bed. So please, don't become angry old fogies reminiscing about the good old days. Use those uniquely awesome and genius skills that you have to help lead my generation into a new era of space infrastructure development the likes of which has never been seen before. We have new technologies. We have new mission architectures. We have unprecedented levels of access to enormous amounts of information. We need your wisdom. We need mentors like you as we find our own way in this industry. Seize those resources along side the rest of us in this industry and let's show the solar system just what our silly little species is capable of!
Ah, I get it now. That makes more sense. Thanks for the clarification.
That's not what I've read. From their respective wikipedia articles:
Embryonic stem cells:
"Additionally, under defined conditions, embryonic stem cells are capable of propagating themselves indefinitely."
Adult stem cells:
"Self-renewal which is the ability to go through numerous cycles of cell division while still maintaining its undifferentiated state." (emphasis mine)
So, it seems that while embryonic stem cells can reproduce indefinitely, adult stems cells can reproduce numerous times, but not indefinitely. Sure, maybe that number that numerous implies is very high, but that is still distinctly different than indefinitely. That's why I asked the question in the first place... Even one of the doctors in the article talks about how embryonic stem cells are still necessary for research purposes due to their unique traits (I am wagering one of those traits is their reproducibility).
Meh, what's the point to life without freedom? Why bother getting out of the way if it will just lead to a world where those who lead (via lying, cheating, coercion, and so on) prey upon those who follow? See, the way I see it, there are three types of people in the world:
1) Those who recognize problems and run away from them.
2) Those who recognize problems and fix them.
3) Those who don't recognize problems.
They world's always been a rough place. That hasn't stopped our species from doing some absolutely amazing things. Keeping your head down and hiding in a hole while those around you are beaten down is just pathetic.
I thought one of the huge advantages of embryonic stem cells was that, once gathered, they could effectively be reproduced or cloned or something indefinitely without the need to gather more. Is that the case with these new cells? Or am I completely off base in the first place?
Effectively the article is saying that even if you use /b as your personal army, it doesn't matter, because you just promoted yourself a personal army of useless retards. =)
This was a very good article and I would recommend reading the whole thing to anyone interested in the topic. It was well thought out and I want to give props to the author first and foremost.
Now, that said, I think something that is missing from the article is a discussion of the 'action' factor that is used in protests and social movements today. Something I've noticed with a lot of online social movements is that they are very good at giving every member a means to voice their thoughts on a particular issue. This has granted a lot of people a large audience for their thoughts regarding any particular matter. As such, anyone can get up on their digital soap box (as I am doing now) and spout their claims to get a series of 'likes' or 'dislikes' from their large online audience. This has a very nice effect on the speaker, making them feel like they are taking part in something important and big. However, the reason many of these online causes do not effect as much change as someone might initially think is because that seems to be where all of the action stops. Social media has given folks a means to express their opinion without backing anything up with action (I do draw an arbitrary line here that distinguishes talk from action).
The author of this article makes a fine summary of the American Civil Rights movement back in the 60's. Something that he fails to address when summarizing these movements, however, is that they had long lasting consequences on society as a whole. The bus boycott actually damaged the economic stance of the bus company being boycotted. The Southern sit-ins prevented the businesses where they took place from earning much cash off of white customers. The action taken by those who participated in the Civil Rights movement went beyond mere words. They actually cost their opponents something valuable. This is something that online social media movements do not do. The folks pillaging Darfur and its inhabitants don't give a damn about the 1.2 million Facebook users that want to help Darfur. Those Facebook users aren't damaging their opponents in any way. They are passively sitting around, voicing their dissent through words or micro-donations, and patting themselves on the back for a job well done. Meanwhile, those that are committing atrocities in Darfur are being allowed to work, as normal, without any outside interference. Thus, nothing will change. There is no perturbation to the status quo.
The reason the Iranian case was somewhat different is because there really were protesters in Tehran marching and having rallies. That's great. However, those rallies did not cost the Iranian politicians anything of value. Standing around and complaining, even in large numbers, did not prevent the vote-smearing that was going on. Thus, nothing changed. the Iranian protesters came closer to afflicting change that the Darfur FB users because they actually organized and tried to do something. However, they did not damage anything of value to those in favor of the status quo.
So I would say that if anyone really wants a revolution over a particular issue, not only is hierarchical organization important (as discussed in the fine article), but also, those organizing the protest (be it through social media or any other medium) must, necessarily, find a way to deprive their opponents of something valuable over a long span of time. That said, for issues close to us 'dotters, I would say that simply commenting on related stories is not enough. If we really want the MAFIAA to fall for good, we need to deprive them of something they value. If we want politicians to stop acting like corrupt douchebags, we need to go beyond writing letters to them and complaining. We need to organize and cost them something of value. If we want net neutrality to be implemented, we need to find a way to deprive all throttling ISPs from getting something of value (customers, money, new technology, something).
At least, that's my two cents.