LL's caught in the same bind Las Vegas got itself into a few years ago. For years, Vegas was the glitzy-slease capital of the world; people went there to sin and have a good time doing it. Then some bright marketing person decided they should market to families, too. Trouble is, you can't have Sin City and Disneyland superimposed without annoying both audiences. Recently, Vegas bought a clue, as evidenced by the sudden shift to the "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" ad campaign.
SL desperately wants to be "mainstream", with wholesome people going to wholesome corporate outpost, all suitable for wooing bigger corporate investment. But the bulk of SL's users go there to have kinky, violent, socially unacceptable, scare-the-normals fun. LL wants the latter group's money, but would prefer they'd stay off-camera. As in the Vegas case, this is annoying both the weirdos and the normals.
Nope, for that we'll be relying on other nations. This would concern me much more if ISS had any identifiable purpose (beyond enriching contractors and cementing diplomatic relationships).
The retirement will leave the US without orbital capacity for at least four years
That's a very misleading statement. We'll have no human orbital capacity, but plenty of expendable rockets for lobbing satellites and probes into space.
If you've already had a given strain of the flu, you generally won't catch it again; your immune system is primed against that virus. So the laptop is little danger to you. Your immediate family probably got exposed through a thousand other shared items, so the laptop isn't making things noticeably worse for them, either. In short, I wouldn't worry about it.
Exactly. But the user has to understand the imperfections reasonably well to make an imperfect product truly useful. I've seen developers look at a reasonably clean source analysis report and take that as proof that the code is bug-free. That is worse, in my view, than not giving them the tool at all. Proper training has to be part of the picture.
The Third Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
I wonder if some hotshot lawyer could successfully argue that putting military bots on U.S. home computers violates the Third Amendment?
It would be pretty cool to see the forgotten Third Amendment get some time in the limelight.
Come on, people. This is a tech site. Can't we please use metric units? This case is especially annoying for two reasons:
1. When the satellites are deployed, their weight will be zero.
2. Those odd range limits -- 11 and 110 pounds -- are obviously Imperial conversions of the more reasonable range 5-50 kg.
We've already crashed one probe into Mars trying to juggle Imperial and metric units. Everyone reading/. knows metric units. Let's go metric-only here. Please.
Cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere routinely have higher energy than anything the LHC can achieve. So if high-energy particle collisions are going to produce strangelets and black holes, we've already been doomed for around four billion years.
I very much doubt we'll see any significant unfavorable coverage from the major corporate news media. All the big corporations are desperate to get or keep access to Chinese markets -- it's hard to ignore a billion potential customers. And they know very well that the Chinese government will remember who said bad things about them when it's time to negotiate licenses and deals.
If the GOP likes space so much, why are the rovers being starved for funding, the shuttles not being replaced, the manned lunar and martian mission timeline slipping ever further into the future, and so forth? We've had nearly two full terms with a Republican president, and most of that time Congress was also Republican.
Republicans don't have as big of a problem blowing lots of money on space stuff, whereas Democrats always have to get past this "we could use the money to feed the poor" mental stumbling block.
Yep, those Democratic bastards John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson nearly killed our space program by underfunding Gemini and Apollo, but the Republican Richard Nixon did a swell job of building on the success of Apollo with ambitious, well funded follow-on programs, which is why we have a thriving lunar colony and burgeoning orbital industries today.
Mercury isn't 1:1 locked (one face always toward the sun). Rather, it's 3:2 locked (three rotations for every two revolutions around the sun). Thus, all of the surface gets periods of sunlight and darkness.
The 3:2 resonance combined with Mercury's eccentric orbit does produce some interesting effects. As seen from certain points on the surface, you could start out in night, watch the sun rise, move a little way up the sky, turn around, set near where it rose, and then later rise again with a noticeably larger apparent diameter and travel all the way across the sky, then set, rise near where it set but now looking smaller again, turn around, and set again.
The thing is, the vendors you cite (and all the others in the digital-entertainment and software worlds) are free to adopt the business model you advocate, in which sharing of copies is permitted (or even encouraged) for the reasons you describe, or other ones. I have no doubt they are fully aware of these arguments, and they have chosen not to do business this way. End of story; under our current legal system, they get to decide that issue.
They way out of this morass is that pioneered by the open source / free software movement. You don't change the software business playing field by pirating Windows; you change it by developing Linux. The entertainment field will shift in the same way when enough artists and entrepreneurs begin releasing works with more open-source-like licenses.
Hm, yes...you'd need something that could land your at both your targeted time, and a relative dimension in space. I'm sure nobody has ever thought of such a device previously.
Getting good data is hard, but good course planning is also hard. It's easy to find an orbit that will work; push an object sideways around a mass at any of a wide range of velocities, and voila, it's in an orbit.
What's hard -- and really as much an art as a science -- is taking the laws of orbital mechanics, the very restricted maneuvering-fuel budget, and several thousand science goals (often mutually excusive), and turning them into an efficient mission plan.
Then add to that dealing with the unexpected. The Cassini team had a whole orbital tour worked out before launch, then discovered while the probe was already en route to Saturn that they needed to completely change the orbital geometry for the Huygens probe's Titan descent to compensate for a radio design snafu. They succeeded in not only rejiggering nearly all the planned science to fit into a new orbital tour, but also in grabbing a few resulting new opportunities for observations along the changed route.
The best analogy I can think of is to the difference between generating a set of legal chess moves, and a set of good chess moves.
Note to self...write script to disable slashdot posting from my account while under the influence of Dayquil. Sorry. Mean to type "base 7", but 'twas not to be.
Slashdot Mirror
The kind of thrust this would require is identical to the kind of thrust used for orbital maintenance, just applied over a longer period.
LL's caught in the same bind Las Vegas got itself into a few years ago. For years, Vegas was the glitzy-slease capital of the world; people went there to sin and have a good time doing it. Then some bright marketing person decided they should market to families, too. Trouble is, you can't have Sin City and Disneyland superimposed without annoying both audiences. Recently, Vegas bought a clue, as evidenced by the sudden shift to the "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" ad campaign.
SL desperately wants to be "mainstream", with wholesome people going to wholesome corporate outpost, all suitable for wooing bigger corporate investment. But the bulk of SL's users go there to have kinky, violent, socially unacceptable, scare-the-normals fun. LL wants the latter group's money, but would prefer they'd stay off-camera. As in the Vegas case, this is annoying both the weirdos and the normals.
Nope, for that we'll be relying on other nations. This would concern me much more if ISS had any identifiable purpose (beyond enriching contractors and cementing diplomatic relationships).
The retirement will leave the US without orbital capacity for at least four years
That's a very misleading statement. We'll have no human orbital capacity, but plenty of expendable rockets for lobbing satellites and probes into space.
If you've already had a given strain of the flu, you generally won't catch it again; your immune system is primed against that virus. So the laptop is little danger to you. Your immediate family probably got exposed through a thousand other shared items, so the laptop isn't making things noticeably worse for them, either. In short, I wouldn't worry about it.
Exactly. But the user has to understand the imperfections reasonably well to make an imperfect product truly useful. I've seen developers look at a reasonably clean source analysis report and take that as proof that the code is bug-free. That is worse, in my view, than not giving them the tool at all. Proper training has to be part of the picture.
It would be pretty cool to see the forgotten Third Amendment get some time in the limelight.
weighing between 11 and 110 pounds
/. knows metric units. Let's go metric-only here. Please.
Come on, people. This is a tech site. Can't we please use metric units? This case is especially annoying for two reasons:
1. When the satellites are deployed, their weight will be zero.
2. Those odd range limits -- 11 and 110 pounds -- are obviously Imperial conversions of the more reasonable range 5-50 kg.
We've already crashed one probe into Mars trying to juggle Imperial and metric units. Everyone reading
I hear the river is expected to crest at 5 + 3i feet over flood stage.
It really makes me wonder.
Cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere routinely have higher energy than anything the LHC can achieve. So if high-energy particle collisions are going to produce strangelets and black holes, we've already been doomed for around four billion years.
I hope you're right. We'll find out soon enough.
I very much doubt we'll see any significant unfavorable coverage from the major corporate news media. All the big corporations are desperate to get or keep access to Chinese markets -- it's hard to ignore a billion potential customers. And they know very well that the Chinese government will remember who said bad things about them when it's time to negotiate licenses and deals.
It wasn't a story; it was a technical article, I believe for the magazine Wireless World.
What, having the single most valuable orbit type named after him isn't enough? The orbit has the further advantage of actually being his idea.
If the GOP likes space so much, why are the rovers being starved for funding, the shuttles not being replaced, the manned lunar and martian mission timeline slipping ever further into the future, and so forth? We've had nearly two full terms with a Republican president, and most of that time Congress was also Republican.
Republicans don't have as big of a problem blowing lots of money on space stuff, whereas Democrats always have to get past this "we could use the money to feed the poor" mental stumbling block.
Yep, those Democratic bastards John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson nearly killed our space program by underfunding Gemini and Apollo, but the Republican Richard Nixon did a swell job of building on the success of Apollo with ambitious, well funded follow-on programs, which is why we have a thriving lunar colony and burgeoning orbital industries today.
Electrons in a superconductor (a material with zero resistance) do not travel at the speed of light.
Mercury isn't 1:1 locked (one face always toward the sun). Rather, it's 3:2 locked (three rotations for every two revolutions around the sun). Thus, all of the surface gets periods of sunlight and darkness.
The 3:2 resonance combined with Mercury's eccentric orbit does produce some interesting effects. As seen from certain points on the surface, you could start out in night, watch the sun rise, move a little way up the sky, turn around, set near where it rose, and then later rise again with a noticeably larger apparent diameter and travel all the way across the sky, then set, rise near where it set but now looking smaller again, turn around, and set again.
The thing is, the vendors you cite (and all the others in the digital-entertainment and software worlds) are free to adopt the business model you advocate, in which sharing of copies is permitted (or even encouraged) for the reasons you describe, or other ones. I have no doubt they are fully aware of these arguments, and they have chosen not to do business this way. End of story; under our current legal system, they get to decide that issue.
They way out of this morass is that pioneered by the open source / free software movement. You don't change the software business playing field by pirating Windows; you change it by developing Linux. The entertainment field will shift in the same way when enough artists and entrepreneurs begin releasing works with more open-source-like licenses.
Perfect!
Hm, yes...you'd need something that could land your at both your targeted time, and a relative dimension in space. I'm sure nobody has ever thought of such a device previously.
Getting good data is hard, but good course planning is also hard. It's easy to find an orbit that will work; push an object sideways around a mass at any of a wide range of velocities, and voila, it's in an orbit.
What's hard -- and really as much an art as a science -- is taking the laws of orbital mechanics, the very restricted maneuvering-fuel budget, and several thousand science goals (often mutually excusive), and turning them into an efficient mission plan.
Then add to that dealing with the unexpected. The Cassini team had a whole orbital tour worked out before launch, then discovered while the probe was already en route to Saturn that they needed to completely change the orbital geometry for the Huygens probe's Titan descent to compensate for a radio design snafu. They succeeded in not only rejiggering nearly all the planned science to fit into a new orbital tour, but also in grabbing a few resulting new opportunities for observations along the changed route.
The best analogy I can think of is to the difference between generating a set of legal chess moves, and a set of good chess moves.
Note to self...write script to disable slashdot posting from my account while under the influence of Dayquil. Sorry. Mean to type "base 7", but 'twas not to be.
"How old is HHttG, in base 14?"