Re:Pardon me, but WTF is this
on
The Challenger
·
· Score: 2
If you actually check the statistics of all the space vehicles in the world, the best launchers seem to manage about a 1% catastrophic failure rate per journey into space.
A car that was that unreliable would be lethal.
Still, there may not be any fundamental reasons that rockets are so bad right now- it may well just be that mankind hasn't learnt how to do it reliably yet- nearly all the failures seem to be preventable.
Flying used to be very dangerous too, but now it is about as dangerous as driving (per journey; much safer per mile though.) Probably space flight will go the same way.
Weirdness? Uranus has an angle of dip more than 90 degrees! It spins the wrong way! You could go a long way to be weirder than that. Nobody has much clue how that could happen. Perturbing an orbit out of the ecliptic is trivial in comparison.
Ok, so Pluto's orbit is a bit skewed to the ecliptic. I can live with that. So it is tidally locked to its moon. Even the earths moon is tidally locked, and the earth will be locked to the moon as well eventually if nothing happens to stop it. These are not exactly hugely unusual.
>Sure, but there are a bunch of asteriods (the
>largest being Ceres which has a diameter of 933km)
>which also meet that criteria.
AFAIK Ceres has never been seen clearly enough to determine whether it is a spheroidal shape or not. In fact it transitted a star a while ago and the results indicated that it was surprisingly irregular. But I wouldn't exactly cry if Ceres counted as a planet anyway.
I'm not aware of any spheroidal asteroid that is smaller than Ceres either. If you have proof to the contrary, I would like to see it.
As for all your other points about pluto- so what. Every single body in the solar system appears to be completely different to every other.
Really? I don't think that the exact shape of Ceres is completely known. Still, a quick google at the web indicates that Ceres is irregularly shaped, which says it is an asteroid.
Re:We need a simple definition of planet...
on
Is Pluto A Planet?
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· Score: 2
I think that the fact that the center of mass of the earth-moon system is within the earth's surface disqualifies the moon from being a planet.
Hence it is the earth's moon, not the Sun's planet.
The moon is big enough and ugly enough to be a planet, but it needs to leave the coat tails of it mommy to count as a grownup around this solar system. Check out Space 1999 for tips on how to arrange for this.;-)
I'm sorry this isn't correct. The jump going from stem cells (which are already available anyway although there are ethical as well as technical considerations) to growing replacement organs is actually very large.
In order to do that it is necessary to get the chemical, physical and electrical environment correct for the particular organ that you are trying to grow. You need the recipes. We don't have the recipes yet.
That's the first problem. Then there's the time problem. How long is it going to take to grow an organ big enough that you can use it?
As for living forever, that isn't clear at all. For one thing the brain cells aren't designed to reproduce at all, and once enough of them are dead you are too. Adding reproducing brain cells to an adult may well have side effects. But there are signs that it might help in some cases e.g. parkinsons but even then it doesn't seem to be a cure.
Re:Not a "whacked out idea"
on
Space Diving
·
· Score: 4
One or more members of the crew were alive and conscious for atleast a few tens of seconds after the accident. The compressed air was switched on, and pretty much that can only have been done by human intervention. The astronauts weren't wearing pressure suits during the launch, so gas can only be supplied at ambient pressure, which at that altitude would have been insufficient to maintain consciousness for very long. Pure Oxygen would have allowed longer survival, but not radically so as the disaster involved impacting the sea at 200mph, so being unconscious is probably preferable.
However, there's no proof to what extent the vehicle leaked, as it was significantly damaged on impact, and all power was cut which stopped the audio recorder at the point when the spacecraft's tanks exploded.
Possibly if the crew had been in a pressure suit and/or were supplied with oxygen, and they had a bail out system then they might have survived, but it's probably unlikely even then. Bailing out at supersonic speeds is nearly impossible even with ejector seats.
Its a cryptography scheme that tries to use your hard-drive to store cryptography keys that protect the data. Basically it doesn't work. No hardware can be tamperproof enough. The scheme has more holes than swiss cheese.
This is similar, but more complex scheme than that that was used with the DVD. But as we've seen with DVD players, it doesn't work their either. You can copy DVD discs and play them.
The big problem with all these kinds of scheme is that they are only as good as the protection on the keys. You are trying to protect keys when the owner of the machine is able to take it to pieces and has the incentive to do so.
You can make it very difficult to do this, but given enough time it's usually possible to get at the keys.
And all it needs is ONE hard-drive anywhere in the world to be subverted (i.e. have a way to read the keys off of it) and then it is possible to mass produce copies of it. Then you can copy the software between these clones as much as you want.
The thing is the hard-drive manufacture that makes cloneable drives will produce them because they sell nicely;-). The users will buy it because it helps them 'back up their software'.
Finally, in order for the data to be used on the PC it must be the case that the data has had the cryptography removed. At that point the data is wide open.
Suppose you have a dimmer switch, temperature gauge for your house etc.
Wouldn't it be great if the neural network set the system to the right value BEFORE you asked it to?
So the way it works is that everytime you change a setting, it assumes that you've changed it for a reason, so it tries to correlate its sensory inputs (time, outside temperature, inside temperature, humidity, infrared sensing of people, time of year, how dark it is outside etc. etc.) with what changes you've made.
Then next time when its sensory state changes in that way it sets the outputs that way before you ask it to.
Anyway that's the theory. And its a way cool theory in my opinion.
There are lots of problems. Still, not having any hot water for a cool high tech reason is better than not having any hot water because you forgot to turn on the water heater;-)
>And - and optical-eletrical-optical switch is not really that slow.
>If you are talking about switching Sonet signals (aka TDM streams - not
>packet streams) then your latency through a node is measure in nano-seconds. Not really "slow"
Actually, more typically latency through a SONET node is 32 microseconds; which doesn't have much to do with switching time.
Switching time is more like 50ms in SONET land, although several times faster than that is a more typical value, and the standards allow for 100ms in some situations.
>IPv6, now how is that going to affect your average everyday user? Personal IP addresses, so? What good would that do? Everybody on this
>earth has a least 10 unique numbers already assigned to them (social security, bank accounts, phone numbers, email addresses).
IPv6 has quality of service support. That means that VOIP can go telephone quality or better. It also allows for videophones- and the bandwidth of ADSL is about right for that.
Videophones are probably another killer app.
Then there's video on demand, near video on demand. Another killer app.
You can sorta run these services ontop of IPv4 but they don't work very well.
I think they will do something similar to IBM. IBM is supporting their core business- hardware.
Microsoft's core business is, on the face of it, their operating system. But in actual fact, it isn't- its the applications like Office that run on it. They make more money from that than Windows in fact.
When/if Linux grows enough market share on the desktop, Microsoft will get less money back from their OS than they spend on it. At that point they might as well port Office to Linux and carry on making money from Linux.
It makes very little difference to Microsoft- they can still deliver OS and Office together, it's just that they won't charge for the OS. They'll still have a huge monopoly on Office to milk for atleast the next decade.
They will probably give up being an OS company- Linux is probably going to outcompete them- and its development is free for Microsoft whereas it would COST Microsoft money to do OS development...
Well, the firework, but its the same thing really.
(History: the Chinese invented it, the British first used it as a weapon, Goddard stuck a nozzle on the bottom that multiplied its range enormously, and then the Germans started lobbing Goddard-style rockets back at the British... perhaps there is some justice there after all;-)
Probably. However that may not be their only concern. They have quite a large population problem(!); and it seems that resources in general may become an issue. There are essentially unlimited amounts of resources in space, both energy (1.6kw per square meter from the sun), metals (titanium, aluminium etc on the moon) and platinum group metals on near earth asteroids.
Long term space resources are probably cheaper than earth resources. (Extraction on the earth requires an energy source, it's looking like solar furnaces are easy to build in space.)
Space based power satellites have been studied, appear perfectly practical and are cost effective if the scale is there. China has the scale to implement that, and probably the need to implement that.
Indirectly, that would be water. One plan is to place LARGE solar panels in orbit around the earth (kinda like the ISS panels, only production-line built in space from lunar materials.)
The water is used as a cheap rocket propellent (probably using nuclear power to turn it into steam first.)
Being in orbit and above the clouds, the satellites give 24x7 energy. The energy is beamed down using a low intensity km-wide microwave beam giving 80% efficiency. (Low intensity is ~1/50,000 of the power of a microwave oven, so you wouldn't get cooked if you walk into the beam!)
This is believed to be the most environmentally benign source of energy ever conceived. Zero green house gases. The only known concerns relate to the microwave beam, but birds and animals have been born and raised in the beam without any apparent ill-effects (and humans wouldn't be subjected to the beam in any case.)
Yes, and nuclear fusion is fantastically well developed today, so that will be a great source of energy!
#endif
Helium 3 is even more difficult to get to fuse than the normal reaction. But if you can manage to do so, then getting back more energy than you put in in the first place is much easier.
Trouble is we can't even get normal d-d or d-t reactions to work well enough to get significant fusion to happen, never mind helium.
Personally I am a controlled fusion skeptic. The tech isn't there. Its been 50 years away for over 50 years now, and will probably be so in another 50 years. The only people talking up fusion are the ones who's job depends on it.
Voice/Video maskerading as Data isn't the ultimate problem. They get worse service, but they pay less so who cares? If its ok with them, then who are you to complain?
Data maskerading as Voice/Video IS the problem... they get better service but everyone else suffers.
UDP packets can blithely ignore all the anticongestion techniques that TCP uses. Everyone else gets screwed but you get reasonably good service...
No problem. Lets say that comes out of your allowance per month. Above that- they're gonna bill you.
The thing they're trying to stop is you marking ALL your packets as gotta-get-there-right-now-or-the-world-ends. Unless there's a significant disincentive- right now there's little to stop it.
Sure, fat pipe helps a lot. Particularly when most people around you have thin pipes. But when everyone else has fat and the guy next door starts up a really huge 1 gig download, do you really want the hot and heavy VOIP to your girlfriend to stop? I know I don't.
I beg to differ. Only if there is a LOT more bandwidth than everyone needs will dropouts not be a problem. Basically if that's the case the telco will slow their deployment until there is JUST enough equipment for the demand. They have to do this to maximise the profit for their shareholders.
Don't forget there's a lot of pent up bandwidth demand out there- web is the least of it- video on demand...
As for 'no' tarrif. Wrong. You've just got a flat rate tarrif now; that's all.
Sure. Knock yourself out. But what makes you think that the telco is going to treat those packets as higher priority? Because that's what you want. You want higher priority packets for VOIP.
If all packets are high priority or if enough of them are high priority then the system screws up.
Yours and everyone elses VOIP experience then sucks. The telco then get out the packet police and subtly adjust your feed with bolt cutters.
Of course if you actually follow the rules your telco will probably give you 24*7 VOIP for free anyway if they've got any sense.
The thumb screws come out if you try to run gigabyte ftp downloads with high priority traffic or something.
Trivial. UDP packets are marked as such. All the telco have to do is count the UDP packets and bill you. If they segregate the packets and give them higher priority then they may even have a point.
What's that? You want to use TCP instead? Sure go ahead. But then your connection breaks up much more often. You get what you pay for. Your call.
Slashdot Mirror
If you actually check the statistics of all the space vehicles in the world, the best launchers seem to manage about a 1% catastrophic failure rate per journey into space.
A car that was that unreliable would be lethal.
Still, there may not be any fundamental reasons that rockets are so bad right now- it may well just be that mankind hasn't learnt how to do it reliably yet- nearly all the failures seem to be preventable.
Flying used to be very dangerous too, but now it is about as dangerous as driving (per journey; much safer per mile though.) Probably space flight will go the same way.
Who says they are mutually exclusive?
Weirdness? Uranus has an angle of dip more than 90 degrees! It spins the wrong way! You could go a long way to be weirder than that. Nobody has much clue how that could happen. Perturbing an orbit out of the ecliptic is trivial in comparison.
Ok, so Pluto's orbit is a bit skewed to the ecliptic. I can live with that. So it is tidally locked to its moon. Even the earths moon is tidally locked, and the earth will be locked to the moon as well eventually if nothing happens to stop it. These are not exactly hugely unusual.
>Sure, but there are a bunch of asteriods (the
>largest being Ceres which has a diameter of 933km)
>which also meet that criteria.
AFAIK Ceres has never been seen clearly enough to determine whether it is a spheroidal shape or not. In fact it transitted a star a while ago and the results indicated that it was surprisingly irregular. But I wouldn't exactly cry if Ceres counted as a planet anyway.
I'm not aware of any spheroidal asteroid that is smaller than Ceres either. If you have proof to the contrary, I would like to see it.
As for all your other points about pluto- so what. Every single body in the solar system appears to be completely different to every other.
Really? I don't think that the exact shape of Ceres is completely known. Still, a quick google at the web indicates that Ceres is irregularly shaped, which says it is an asteroid.
I think that the fact that the center of mass of the earth-moon system is within the earth's surface disqualifies the moon from being a planet.
;-)
Hence it is the earth's moon, not the Sun's planet.
The moon is big enough and ugly enough to be a planet, but it needs to leave the coat tails of it mommy to count as a grownup around this solar system. Check out Space 1999 for tips on how to arrange for this.
To my mind a planet is something that is made round by its own gravity, and is in orbit around a star.
Clearly under that definition Pluto counts as a planet. Pluto even has a moon called Charon.
The fact that Pluto is made of ice is irrelevant- Jupiter is made of gas. Does that mean Jupiter isn't a planet?
Anyway check out:
http://www.iau.org/PlutoPR.html for TNOs and other good stuff.
I'm sorry this isn't correct. The jump going from stem cells (which are already available anyway although there are ethical as well as technical considerations) to growing replacement organs is actually very large.
In order to do that it is necessary to get the chemical, physical and electrical environment correct for the particular organ that you are trying to grow. You need the recipes. We don't have the recipes yet.
That's the first problem. Then there's the time problem. How long is it going to take to grow an organ big enough that you can use it?
As for living forever, that isn't clear at all. For one thing the brain cells aren't designed to reproduce at all, and once enough of them are dead you are too. Adding reproducing brain cells to an adult may well have side effects. But there are signs that it might help in some cases e.g. parkinsons but even then it doesn't seem to be a cure.
One or more members of the crew were alive and conscious for atleast a few tens of seconds after the accident. The compressed air was switched on, and pretty much that can only have been done by human intervention. The astronauts weren't wearing pressure suits during the launch, so gas can only be supplied at ambient pressure, which at that altitude would have been insufficient to maintain consciousness for very long. Pure Oxygen would have allowed longer survival, but not radically so as the disaster involved impacting the sea at 200mph, so being unconscious is probably preferable.
However, there's no proof to what extent the vehicle leaked, as it was significantly damaged on impact, and all power was cut which stopped the audio recorder at the point when the spacecraft's tanks exploded.
Possibly if the crew had been in a pressure suit and/or were supplied with oxygen, and they had a bail out system then they might have survived, but it's probably unlikely even then. Bailing out at supersonic speeds is nearly impossible even with ejector seats.
Its a cryptography scheme that tries to use your hard-drive to store cryptography keys that protect the data. Basically it doesn't work. No hardware can be tamperproof enough. The scheme has more holes than swiss cheese.
;-). The users will buy it because it helps them 'back up their software'.
This is similar, but more complex scheme than that that was used with the DVD. But as we've seen with DVD players, it doesn't work their either. You can copy DVD discs and play them.
The big problem with all these kinds of scheme is that they are only as good as the protection on the keys. You are trying to protect keys when the owner of the machine is able to take it to pieces and has the incentive to do so.
You can make it very difficult to do this, but given enough time it's usually possible to get at the keys.
And all it needs is ONE hard-drive anywhere in the world to be subverted (i.e. have a way to read the keys off of it) and then it is possible to mass produce copies of it. Then you can copy the software between these clones as much as you want.
The thing is the hard-drive manufacture that makes cloneable drives will produce them because they sell nicely
Finally, in order for the data to be used on the PC it must be the case that the data has had the cryptography removed. At that point the data is wide open.
Suppose you have a dimmer switch, temperature gauge for your house etc.
;-)
Wouldn't it be great if the neural network set the system to the right value BEFORE you asked it to?
So the way it works is that everytime you change a setting, it assumes that you've changed it for a reason, so it tries to correlate its sensory inputs (time, outside temperature, inside temperature, humidity, infrared sensing of people, time of year, how dark it is outside etc. etc.) with what changes you've made.
Then next time when its sensory state changes in that way it sets the outputs that way before you ask it to.
Anyway that's the theory. And its a way cool theory in my opinion.
There are lots of problems. Still, not having any hot water for a cool high tech reason is better than not having any hot water because you forgot to turn on the water heater
>And - and optical-eletrical-optical switch is not really that slow.
>If you are talking about switching Sonet signals (aka TDM streams - not
>packet streams) then your latency through a node is measure in nano-seconds. Not really "slow"
Actually, more typically latency through a SONET node is 32 microseconds; which doesn't have much to do with switching time.
Switching time is more like 50ms in SONET land, although several times faster than that is a more typical value, and the standards allow for 100ms in some situations.
>IPv6, now how is that going to affect your average everyday user? Personal IP addresses, so? What good would that do? Everybody on this
>earth has a least 10 unique numbers already assigned to them (social security, bank accounts, phone numbers, email addresses).
IPv6 has quality of service support. That means that VOIP can go telephone quality or better. It also allows for videophones- and the bandwidth of ADSL is about right for that.
Videophones are probably another killer app.
Then there's video on demand, near video on demand. Another killer app.
You can sorta run these services ontop of IPv4 but they don't work very well.
I think they will do something similar to IBM. IBM is supporting their core business- hardware.
Microsoft's core business is, on the face of it, their operating system. But in actual fact, it isn't- its the applications like Office that run on it. They make more money from that than Windows in fact.
When/if Linux grows enough market share on the desktop, Microsoft will get less money back from their OS than they spend on it. At that point they might as well port Office to Linux and carry on making money from Linux.
It makes very little difference to Microsoft- they can still deliver OS and Office together, it's just that they won't charge for the OS. They'll still have a huge monopoly on Office to milk for atleast the next decade.
They will probably give up being an OS company- Linux is probably going to outcompete them- and its development is free for Microsoft whereas it would COST Microsoft money to do OS development...
Well, the firework, but its the same thing really.
;-)
(History: the Chinese invented it, the British first used it as a weapon, Goddard stuck a nozzle on the bottom that multiplied its range enormously, and then the Germans started lobbing Goddard-style rockets back at the British... perhaps there is some justice there after all
Probably. However that may not be their only concern. They have quite a large population problem(!); and it seems that resources in general may become an issue. There are essentially unlimited amounts of resources in space, both energy (1.6kw per square meter from the sun), metals (titanium, aluminium etc on the moon) and platinum group metals on near earth asteroids.
Long term space resources are probably cheaper than earth resources. (Extraction on the earth requires an energy source, it's looking like solar furnaces are easy to build in space.)
Space based power satellites have been studied, appear perfectly practical and are cost effective if the scale is there. China has the scale to implement that, and probably the need to implement that.
Indirectly, that would be water. One plan is to place LARGE solar panels in orbit around the earth (kinda like the ISS panels, only production-line built in space from lunar materials.)
The water is used as a cheap rocket propellent (probably using nuclear power to turn it into steam first.)
Being in orbit and above the clouds, the satellites give 24x7 energy. The energy is beamed down using a low intensity km-wide microwave beam giving 80% efficiency. (Low intensity is ~1/50,000 of the power of a microwave oven, so you wouldn't get cooked if you walk into the beam!)
This is believed to be the most environmentally benign source of energy ever conceived. Zero green house gases. The only known concerns relate to the microwave beam, but birds and animals have been born and raised in the beam without any apparent ill-effects (and humans wouldn't be subjected to the beam in any case.)
#define sarcasm
Yes, and nuclear fusion is fantastically well developed today, so that will be a great source of energy!
#endif
Helium 3 is even more difficult to get to fuse than the normal reaction. But if you can manage to do so, then getting back more energy than you put in in the first place is much easier.
Trouble is we can't even get normal d-d or d-t reactions to work well enough to get significant fusion to happen, never mind helium.
Personally I am a controlled fusion skeptic. The tech isn't there. Its been 50 years away for over 50 years now, and will probably be so in another 50 years. The only people talking up fusion are the ones who's job depends on it.
I respectively suggest that the client missed it.
Voice/Video maskerading as Data isn't the ultimate problem. They get worse service, but they pay less so who cares? If its ok with them, then who are you to complain?
Data maskerading as Voice/Video IS the problem... they get better service but everyone else suffers.
UDP packets can blithely ignore all the anticongestion techniques that TCP uses. Everyone else gets screwed but you get reasonably good service...
No problem. Lets say that comes out of your allowance per month. Above that- they're gonna bill you.
The thing they're trying to stop is you marking ALL your packets as gotta-get-there-right-now-or-the-world-ends. Unless there's a significant disincentive- right now there's little to stop it.
Quake 3 requires low latency to play well. So it plays much better with higher priority packets. You'd often want to pay more.
You don't HAVE to do that of course, but you'd probably want to, you'd get consistently better links than you do at the moment.
Sure, fat pipe helps a lot. Particularly when most people around you have thin pipes. But when everyone else has fat and the guy next door starts up a really huge 1 gig download, do you really want the hot and heavy VOIP to your girlfriend to stop? I know I don't.
I beg to differ. Only if there is a LOT more bandwidth than everyone needs will dropouts not be a problem. Basically if that's the case the telco will slow their deployment until there is JUST enough equipment for the demand. They have to do this to maximise the profit for their shareholders.
Don't forget there's a lot of pent up bandwidth demand out there- web is the least of it- video on demand...
As for 'no' tarrif. Wrong. You've just got a flat rate tarrif now; that's all.
Sure. Knock yourself out. But what makes you think that the telco is going to treat those packets as higher priority? Because that's what you want. You want higher priority packets for VOIP.
If all packets are high priority or if enough of them are high priority then the system screws up.
Yours and everyone elses VOIP experience then sucks. The telco then get out the packet police and subtly adjust your feed with bolt cutters.
Of course if you actually follow the rules your telco will probably give you 24*7 VOIP for free anyway if they've got any sense.
The thumb screws come out if you try to run gigabyte ftp downloads with high priority traffic or something.
Trivial. UDP packets are marked as such. All the telco have to do is count the UDP packets and bill you. If they segregate the packets and give them higher priority then they may even have a point.
What's that? You want to use TCP instead? Sure go ahead. But then your connection breaks up much more often. You get what you pay for. Your call.