Don't forget the episode where the badguy of the hour obtained a street-cleaner truck full off a chemical compound that removed KITT's protective coating. After a good spraying the car was pretty much totaled by some industrial vehicle (if memory serves. but I was in elementary/middle school at the time, so who knows).
I think that after that episode they had a gang of inner city kids rebuild the car using all the latest technology (body-kit extenders and aero-brakes mostly).
Do not, learn not. Your loss. Ask yourself what's the worst thing that can happen. If you can live with that, go for it. If not take steps to mitigate the worst. If that's not enough, then you might not do it.
For the most part I agree, as long as the shuttle program continues, its going to be very difficult to develope a replacement. I say we sell the shuttles to private industry, buy some of that stuff the Russians use to move people to the ISS to use in the meantime, and focus on a space elevator and the technology that will be used with it to put stuff into orbit.
After all, the carbon fibers are nearly there now, and once we've got the space elevator, we won't need rockets anymore.
http://oea.larc.nasa.gov/news_rels/2000/GCTHUMBN AI LS.HTML
I'm not so sure on the reusability thing. Launch and re-entry is very rough on equipment, it may very well be that its cheaper and safer to make stuff that is rugged enough for one use and that can then be either thrown away or recycled.
As has been mentioned before, we probably need a combination of cheap disposable tech for heavy equipment lifting and light, reliable, reusable tech for moving people.
No doubt. It would be bad enough to have to pay to watch the game in the privacy of my own home. What in the world would make someone think I want to pay more to sit in an uncomfortable chair with 10,000 people I don't know and don't care to know, make trips to nasty public restrooms, overpay for snacks, miss out on pausing of live TV, any instant replay I want, professional commentary, and have to deal with nutty traffic. hell, for all that they better be _paying_ me to show up.
Speaking as a cat-lover, I'd say the cat appeared more distressed about the micro-g environment than the throwing part. It looked fairly unpreturbed after the first toss, it appeared to be that part after the second toss where it couldn't hang on to the 'floor' that really got it annoyed.
One of the reasons given was that the ability to preserve food for long periods was essential to modern food distribution methods, and if preservatives ended up having to be banned or heavily regulated as cancer causing agents it could mean mass starvation and worse health problems from food spoilage.
I dunno, it seems like they'd still want to know, even if not much could be done about it in the short term. Its not like people are going to immediately stop eating food with preservatives because it will give them a slightly higher risk of cancer decades from now. They'd just start preferentially buying food without preservatives when it was available. With that market pressure suppliers would have economic incentive to make more of those kinds of goods available.
That of course presumes that people will take the healthy choice rather than the cheap one, which, for most of the population is probably false. In which case it is the governments responsability to come up with a scheme to phase out those things that cause problems in such a way that minimal economic damage is done.
it occurs to me that there are alot of things like this that a purely capitalistic society would never change. I'll bet living in an anarchy would suck balls.
I use SoftPaws vinyl claw covers on my cats. They don't bother the cats, they come in fun colors, and they last for several weeks on each claw. I generally only have to put on one or two at a time (the claws don't all shed at the same time), so the cat doesn't object to the process much.
In the long term its more expensive than declawing, but it makes me happier than putting another cat through declawing, and it preserves the furnature and carpets.
Well, I dunno how drifting is scored (I presume there is an element of subjective judging in addition to timing), but I'd call it a kind of constrained racing. There are many types of racing where there are requirements other than getting from the start to the finish as fast as possible.
The money they give out is not enough to rent even the cheapest housing in the San Francisco area, but it is enough to fuel one hell of a drug binge, which regularly kills many homeless people every year.
so... its working?
Re:Whats wrong with Proprietary
on
Saving Huygens
·
· Score: 1
there was no way NASA could have known that this company built the black box out of off-the-shelf terrestrial design principles unfit for cosmic use
Well, for near-earth satts anyway.
And they would have known it wouldn't work if they had done the test in the first place, but they decided it was too expensive.
The guy from the article just had the insight and peristance to run a test that he knew should have been run before.
As a bonus he also figured out how to fix the problem.
The software was from a design used in earth sats, the ability to deal with doppler shift like that was not part of its design spec (I wonder if NASA got ripped of because they probably paid for a custom radio module and they got an off-the-shelf design).
There were lots of ways the receiver could have been done that would have been better, but it wasn't done that way, and they didnt' have the code, nor any way to fix it remotely anyway.
if 0.5mm wears off the sliding surfaces in a conventional turbine
I'm no mechanical engineer, but it seems like any normal turbine with 0.5mm of play in its bearings would be well on the way to destruction. I'd expect less than half that much./nitpick
You are proposing that the government fund its operations not from tax money, but by creating dollars (be they physical notes or numbers in a bank computer). Presuming (generously) that the government could exersize constraint and not over produce dollars, we're talking about adding on the order of 2 trillion dollars a year to the money supply.
Inflation is currently around 2% with the government income to spending deficit around $300b. It seems that if we increase that spending deficit by over 600% without getting dollars out of circulation somewhere else, we're going to see huge inflation levels.
So my question about your proposal is this: how would you avoid the inflation that would be caused by the approximately $1.7 trillion dollars that the government would add to the money supply every year?
You obviously have a firm grasp of how the system currently works (almost certainly better than my own), so I have no doubt that you've addressed it and I've just missed it.
It seems to me that it is necessary to fund the government through taxes (or other money-collecting activities) rather than simply 'printing' new money all the time. Elsewise we get the inflation problem.
With that stipulation, I think what you are proposing is essentially the same system that is in place now. The means by which dollars are added to and removed from the system would probably have to remain essentially unchanged, and there would need to be a system to account for the changes and costs, and to make recomendations, and etc.
In a nutshell, I think your proposal would mostly be a relabeling of the current system. There are many costs associated with the way the current system works, and calling it something else while doing essentially the same thing won't change those costs much.
You've saved the time that it takes to switch between working and goofing off. Before you could only do one or the other; now you can do both at the same time!
Working and goofing off at the same time? You obviously have no idea how to properly goof off.
Yes, I think that scientific progress should not be held back - at any cost
We here at the Mengele Research Center agree with this sentiment. We have a few research studies still looking for volunteer vic^H^H^Hsubjects, please feel free to stop by and sign up. You may want to bring along a driver to help you get home.
How exact of a discription is allowed? I can describe a high resolution bitmap very accurately by writing out the color values of each pixel, but I doubt that would be permissable.
Until we can figure out what to do with the nuclear waste we are just shifting the problem, and most likely aggevate it. If any of those spent fuel rods get "lost" they can contaminate entire landscapes,
We are already polluting the landscape with coal wastes. At least properly managed nuclear waste is small in volume compared to the output of a fossle fuel plant.
Yes, nuclear has its own problems, but it makes a huge impact in the problem of atmospheric pollution, which is becoming a more serious problem than what nuclear storage could be.
The GP's points about conservation only going so far are true, but I think he misses the point. With some care we can do the same things with less power, which has less of an impact on the enviroment for any given amount of work. Certainly there is a balance between the effort that it requires to conserve power and the resources consumed to produce power, but right now it looks very much like we'd be better off conserving more while we figure out how to reduce the environmental impact of power production.
the REAL problem now and always has been the near infinate storage of the spent fuel and any and all material that even gets near the fuel which over time become just as radioactive
You're overstating the problem considerably. Low-level waste is not a problem.
This is not to say that radioactive waste disposal is trivial, just that very few people have any idea what is really involved, and that it is less of a problem than dealing with the various toxins (including the radioactive variety) currently release by existing power stations.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget the episode where the badguy of the hour obtained a street-cleaner truck full off a chemical compound that removed KITT's protective coating. After a good spraying the car was pretty much totaled by some industrial vehicle (if memory serves. but I was in elementary/middle school at the time, so who knows).
I think that after that episode they had a gang of inner city kids rebuild the car using all the latest technology (body-kit extenders and aero-brakes mostly).
Do not, learn not. Your loss. Ask yourself what's the worst thing that can happen. If you can live with that, go for it. If not take steps to mitigate the worst. If that's not enough, then you might not do it.
Ah, a true hacker. Greetings brother!
What, are you kidding? It probably took him 20 minutes just to put all those props there in the first place.
The Shuttles we have now are pretty much ancient. They're not cutting-edge technology anymore, not by a long shot.
N AI LS.HTML
Well, not all of it is 70's era equipment:
Here is the original 1974 shuttle cockpit
Here it is again in 2000.
Here's a wide-angle shot.
For the most part I agree, as long as the shuttle program continues, its going to be very difficult to develope a replacement. I say we sell the shuttles to private industry, buy some of that stuff the Russians use to move people to the ISS to use in the meantime, and focus on a space elevator and the technology that will be used with it to put stuff into orbit.
After all, the carbon fibers are nearly there now, and once we've got the space elevator, we won't need rockets anymore.
http://oea.larc.nasa.gov/news_rels/2000/GCTHUMB
I'm not so sure on the reusability thing. Launch and re-entry is very rough on equipment, it may very well be that its cheaper and safer to make stuff that is rugged enough for one use and that can then be either thrown away or recycled.
As has been mentioned before, we probably need a combination of cheap disposable tech for heavy equipment lifting and light, reliable, reusable tech for moving people.
losing the capacity for manned flight for the foreseeable future.
Because we can't put men on disposable rockets??
No doubt. It would be bad enough to have to pay to watch the game in the privacy of my own home. What in the world would make someone think I want to pay more to sit in an uncomfortable chair with 10,000 people I don't know and don't care to know, make trips to nasty public restrooms, overpay for snacks, miss out on pausing of live TV, any instant replay I want, professional commentary, and have to deal with nutty traffic. hell, for all that they better be _paying_ me to show up.
even if you rent an apartment, your landlord still cannot just come into your place even though they "own" it.
In the U.S. they can, as long as they give a minimum 24 hour notice.
or a serial cable if you have a motrolla 2k dig cable box that hasn't been crippled by your cable company
Does MythTV support the 2k box serial port? Whats the communications spec? I've been looking for that info for quite some time.
Speaking as a cat-lover, I'd say the cat appeared more distressed about the micro-g environment than the throwing part. It looked fairly unpreturbed after the first toss, it appeared to be that part after the second toss where it couldn't hang on to the 'floor' that really got it annoyed.
One of the reasons given was that the ability to preserve food for long periods was essential to modern food distribution methods, and if preservatives ended up having to be banned or heavily regulated as cancer causing agents it could mean mass starvation and worse health problems from food spoilage.
I dunno, it seems like they'd still want to know, even if not much could be done about it in the short term. Its not like people are going to immediately stop eating food with preservatives because it will give them a slightly higher risk of cancer decades from now. They'd just start preferentially buying food without preservatives when it was available. With that market pressure suppliers would have economic incentive to make more of those kinds of goods available.
That of course presumes that people will take the healthy choice rather than the cheap one, which, for most of the population is probably false. In which case it is the governments responsability to come up with a scheme to phase out those things that cause problems in such a way that minimal economic damage is done.
it occurs to me that there are alot of things like this that a purely capitalistic society would never change. I'll bet living in an anarchy would suck balls.
I use SoftPaws vinyl claw covers on my cats. They don't bother the cats, they come in fun colors, and they last for several weeks on each claw. I generally only have to put on one or two at a time (the claws don't all shed at the same time), so the cat doesn't object to the process much.
In the long term its more expensive than declawing, but it makes me happier than putting another cat through declawing, and it preserves the furnature and carpets.
Well, I dunno how drifting is scored (I presume there is an element of subjective judging in addition to timing), but I'd call it a kind of constrained racing. There are many types of racing where there are requirements other than getting from the start to the finish as fast as possible.
More traction is ALWAYS beneficial.
Not if you're drift racing.
In theory an alien in a completely different universe could come up with the same formula.
True, but I think perhaps you underestimate how truely alien alternate realities with radically different physical laws could be.
The money they give out is not enough to rent even the cheapest housing in the San Francisco area, but it is enough to fuel one hell of a drug binge, which regularly kills many homeless people every year.
so... its working?
there was no way NASA could have known that this company built the black box out of off-the-shelf terrestrial design principles unfit for cosmic use
Well, for near-earth satts anyway.
And they would have known it wouldn't work if they had done the test in the first place, but they decided it was too expensive.
The guy from the article just had the insight and peristance to run a test that he knew should have been run before.
As a bonus he also figured out how to fix the problem.
The software was from a design used in earth sats, the ability to deal with doppler shift like that was not part of its design spec (I wonder if NASA got ripped of because they probably paid for a custom radio module and they got an off-the-shelf design).
There were lots of ways the receiver could have been done that would have been better, but it wasn't done that way, and they didnt' have the code, nor any way to fix it remotely anyway.
Faster, Better, Cheaper. Pick two.
if 0.5mm wears off the sliding surfaces in a conventional turbine
/nitpick
I'm no mechanical engineer, but it seems like any normal turbine with 0.5mm of play in its bearings would be well on the way to destruction. I'd expect less than half that much.
You are proposing that the government fund its operations not from tax money, but by creating dollars (be they physical notes or numbers in a bank computer). Presuming (generously) that the government could exersize constraint and not over produce dollars, we're talking about adding on the order of 2 trillion dollars a year to the money supply.
Inflation is currently around 2% with the government income to spending deficit around $300b. It seems that if we increase that spending deficit by over 600% without getting dollars out of circulation somewhere else, we're going to see huge inflation levels.
So my question about your proposal is this: how would you avoid the inflation that would be caused by the approximately $1.7 trillion dollars that the government would add to the money supply every year?
You obviously have a firm grasp of how the system currently works (almost certainly better than my own), so I have no doubt that you've addressed it and I've just missed it.
It seems to me that it is necessary to fund the government through taxes (or other money-collecting activities) rather than simply 'printing' new money all the time. Elsewise we get the inflation problem.
With that stipulation, I think what you are proposing is essentially the same system that is in place now. The means by which dollars are added to and removed from the system would probably have to remain essentially unchanged, and there would need to be a system to account for the changes and costs, and to make recomendations, and etc.
In a nutshell, I think your proposal would mostly be a relabeling of the current system. There are many costs associated with the way the current system works, and calling it something else while doing essentially the same thing won't change those costs much.
You've saved the time that it takes to switch between working and goofing off. Before you could only do one or the other; now you can do both at the same time!
Working and goofing off at the same time? You obviously have no idea how to properly goof off.
Yes, I think that scientific progress should not be held back - at any cost
We here at the Mengele Research Center agree with this sentiment. We have a few research studies still looking for volunteer vic^H^H^Hsubjects, please feel free to stop by and sign up. You may want to bring along a driver to help you get home.
How exact of a discription is allowed? I can describe a high resolution bitmap very accurately by writing out the color values of each pixel, but I doubt that would be permissable.
Until we can figure out what to do with the nuclear waste we are just shifting the problem, and most likely aggevate it. If any of those spent fuel rods get "lost" they can contaminate entire landscapes,
We are already polluting the landscape with coal wastes. At least properly managed nuclear waste is small in volume compared to the output of a fossle fuel plant.
Yes, nuclear has its own problems, but it makes a huge impact in the problem of atmospheric pollution, which is becoming a more serious problem than what nuclear storage could be.
The GP's points about conservation only going so far are true, but I think he misses the point. With some care we can do the same things with less power, which has less of an impact on the enviroment for any given amount of work. Certainly there is a balance between the effort that it requires to conserve power and the resources consumed to produce power, but right now it looks very much like we'd be better off conserving more while we figure out how to reduce the environmental impact of power production.
the REAL problem now and always has been the near infinate storage of the spent fuel and any and all material that even gets near the fuel which over time become just as radioactive
You're overstating the problem considerably. Low-level waste is not a problem.
This is not to say that radioactive waste disposal is trivial, just that very few people have any idea what is really involved, and that it is less of a problem than dealing with the various toxins (including the radioactive variety) currently release by existing power stations.