Now I wish I hadn't already posted so that I could mod you down to oblivion;-)
You have no soul, and even less imagination. I'd accuse you of being an AI but I'm not sure the second word applies. No doubt you feel (not think) that Isabella should have fed the poor instead of funding Columbus -- and five hundred years later we'd be far worse off. Voyages of exploration and discovery both raise the technology level, and thus the overall standard of living, and lift the human spirit.
Besides, it's not an either/or. We spend far more money on "poverty relief" already than on space exploration -- just look at the federal budget.
The main problem is: chemical rockets suck. There's just no way to cheaply lift payload to orbit using our current rockets.
Your second sentence doesn't quite say the same thing as the first. Current chemical rockets suck. NASA seems enamored of solid fuels which are low-powered (low Isp), require ridiculously heavy structure (the whole thing is combustion chamber), and messy. They claim they're "reusable", when what they mean is they crash them in the ocean and then salvage them. The H2/O2 liquid fuel mix ain't bad -- except that LH2 has such low density (water contains 50% more hydrogen per unit volume, plus all that oxygen) that the tanks have to be huge, again wasting structure weight. The usual "rocket scientist" answer to that is "oh, we'll densify the hydrogen", ie hydrogen slush. An engineer's approach would be "okay, use liquid methane".
The problem is that both NASA's and Russia's rocket technology is still heavily mired in 1950s thinking. Chemical rockets could be a lot better.
All that said, though, there is a limit on just how much energy you can get out of chemical reactions. Personally I like gaseous fission -- Max Hunter shows a design for an integral, reusable spaceship where the propellant tank is only about half the volume of the ship. Now that's a spaceship. I hear DUMBO isn't bad either. (DUMBO is a similar idea to NERVA -- heat the propellant by passing it through a reactor -- but with more and finer fuel channels to get more thrust. NERVA has high Isp but couldn't generate enough thrust to lift its own weight, DUMBO could.) We really need to get over our irrational fear of a little radiation; there are plenty of things that will kill you just as dead either faster or even less pleasantly that we don't have the same phobia about.
For me, once I report my pda lost, the boys in corp will send a command to wipe the contents of the phone and remove all settings. I believe this option also exists for blackberry.
Won't do any good if whoever grabs the pda/blackberry immediately puts it in a shielded bag and thereafter any work on it is done in a shielded room (Faraday cage). If it's an organized intelligence operation doing this, you can bet that that's exactly what they'll do.
Better would be to add a deadman switch in the pda, which self-destructs if not periodically reset by a signal from home. The danger there is if the signal is lost for mundane reasons.
Any distro installed on a trusted network can easily be kept running for more than two years.
Yeah, if you're hanging out exposed on the internet or don't trust the folks on your LAN, you might want to patch or update once in a while. Even the system I'm typing this on has three firewalls and a proxy between me and the internet. I'm not saying it's impossible to get in (can't prove a negative), but it's going to be harder than targets that are worth more.
I've never had an issue with networking on either built-in or add-in cheapo NICs on Linux. Ditto with built-in or add-in cheapo video.
The fact is that you can't find Win98 drivers for newer hardware, you can't find XP (let alone Vista) drivers for old hardware, but for Linux odds are you can find both, and it may even be built in.
I have old Dells, old Gateways, old IBM's, old Compaqs and HPs. Never had a problem with built-in video. Only had one problem with built-in sound that was quickly solved by looking at the configuration (non-standard) in Windows 98. Never a problem with built in CD drives or CD or DVD drives I bought from a store. (The only exception was an Acer CD drive somebody gave me -- didn't work worth a damn, I never bothered trying it in Windows.) I've used all kinds of SCSI, Firewire, USB and serial gizmos, and parallel printers, without a problem. Perhaps I was just never stupid enough to buy old parallel non-printer peripherals. There have been a few odd-ball USB gizmos -- a cheapo (giveaway) digital camera, for example -- that didn't work on Linux, but those had a hard time working on Windows, even assuming you could find the driver disk that originally came with it or find somewhere on the net to download a driver.
Now, the old Dells, HPs, etc have been retired office machines, not consumer boxes. In my experience the manufacturers tend to cut more corners in the consumer stuff (the margins are thin as it is) and so may be more likely to use oddball parts or configurations that are less well supported. If the repurposed machines the OP was talking about were business machines (even desktops), they're more likely to "just work" with a Linux distro. In the OP's particular case, I'd say try both and go with what works best on those particular systems.
With Linux you won't have to look for drivers, they'll be built in. Linux has phenomenal support for hardware, that tends to get better as the hardware ages -- Linux developers have incentive to keep supporting it, unlike the hardware vendors. (Barring really crippled stuff like winmodems, but even those have some support).
Depending on the age/capability of the hardware you might need to go with an older version of a distro or just omit a bunch of default crap on the install. I've got some old Pentium boxen that run fine but modern distros gripe about not having enough RAM to run the graphic installer. Boots fast, though, unless it decides that two years since the last fsck is too long and forces it (override with tunefs).
Shuttle design payload was 65,000 pounds. Heaviest payload I can quickly find on the net was STS-93 carrying 49,789 pounds. (I think the nominal max is 55,000, that's what I based my 80% on). This is only 76% of original design goals. Launch profile has nothing to do with it. They have to fly upside-down so that the thrust vector of the SSMEs when pointed through the center of mass of the assembly is upward (and downrange).
Payloads to to the ISS are less (heaviest was about 36,000 pounds) because ISS is in a fairly high inclination orbit (which makes it easier to reach from Baikonur).
Wake turbulence is proportional to weight (actually, generated lift), not speed. These things are fairly light, and of comparable weight to each other. Wake turbulence won't be a serious issue (minor issue -- I've done formation flying in light planes and it can be a surprise if you're not expecting it, but no big deal -- and I'm talking distances of twenty feet or so.)
As for smoke, all the crap you seen on a Shuttle launch is from the solids, which are disgustingly dirty. There's also some condensed steam from the main engine exhaust. The rocket racers put out a little water vapor and CO2, no big deal. Note the absence of smoke in the video (above) of the flight test. If anything they might decide to add smoke (like in airshows) to make it more interesting. Here's a slightly longer video of an earlier version, with close ups, and another, different plane, some nice footage.
They're real rockets, they carry LOX as well as fuel. The idea spun off of XCOR's demo's using a rocket-propelled Rutan design (veri-eze or long-eze, I think).
It's not just a speed race -- the rockets could drive the planes way past redline. They're rocket-gliders, you kick in the rocket for a while, then glide to stretch out the time between refuelling stops. One of the features that XCOR has developed is a way to refuel (and reLOX) these things a lot faster than the older methods, and the rocket can be restarted multiple times in mid-flight.
There was never any way that Shuttle could have docked with Skylab. The last Apollo flight, the "Apollo-Soyuz Test Project" was originally planned to have the Apollo CSM dock with Skylab after the Soyuz rendezvous, and boost it to higher orbit. That was later cancelled for political reasons (they didn't want anything to distract from the "historic" Apollo-Soyuz hookup) as well as practical: by then it was obvious that Shuttle would never be ready in time to do anything with Skylab, it had no appropriate docking mechanism (Skylab used Apollo-style docking hardware), and there would be no more Apollo launches. As soon as the smoke cleared from the ASTP launch, they started converting the launch pad and VAB over to a Shuttle configuration.
The difference is that the Saturn V stats reflect real performance, the Ares V figures are still hypothetical. Shuttle never got much more than about 80% of its originally advertised payload capacity.
And of course, Saturn V is 45 year old technology. Just replacing the Instrument Unit (guidance system) with modern avionics would add about 2000 kg to the payload.
They can tell my sex, blood type, color of my eyes and hair, my favorite brand of cigarettes and my probability of being obese from a drop of my blood but they can't synthesize urine? Where there heck did things go so wrong?
Wrong comparison. We're talking about NASA here, so it's "if they can put a man on the moon, why can't they...". Oh, wait.
You'll get it when the buffer overflows. If you're running it on a system that processes a billion of those loops per second, that should be in a bit over 31 years. Scale accordingly for your processor and memory speed.
There are several moons in this solar system bigger than our own, although they all happen to orbit gas giants, so big moons per se aren't unusual.
The "large impactor on Mars" analysis lends support to models of planetary system formation that predict that some really big impacts -- such as formed our Moon -- are quite likely late in the initial aggregation phase. The severe axial tilt (98 degrees) of Uranus is probably the result of a similar catastrophic impact early in its history.
For a very readable book on this the theory of the Moon's origin and results of computer modelling of planetary system formation, see Dana Mackenzie's The Big Splat.
As for why Mars doesn't have a big moon now if it underwent a similar impact, well perhaps the impact wasn't quite as correspondingly large, or perhaps Jupiter's gravity sufficiently perturbed Mars's debris belt that it couldn't coalesce to a single moon. Perhaps Phobos and Deimos are remnants of this rather than later captures.
Not really. The Atlantis story is one told by a late-Classical-Period author (Plato), with explicit claims that it is derived from a millennia-old tradition preserved by Egyptian texts. If anything, the Atlantis story has more extrinsic plausibility than this one!
Is there any evidence beyond Plato's word that there is/was such a tradition in ancient Egyptian texts? Just curious, not trying to argue a position here.
The only way to get a monopoly is to provide better service than the competition.
Hah! If that were true, there'd be no need for antitrust legislation. However, the issue isn't really how they got the monopoly in the first place (it was pretty much handed to them by IBM). The laws that they broke, and are being supervised to make sure they don't break them again, are laws that are intended to prevent a monopoly from abusing its monopoly status to either maintain or expand into other areas its monopoly without providing better service than the competition. You know, things like product-tying, questionable vendor pre-load contracts, etc.
Fine. If, as a libertarian, you don't want government meddling in a company like Microsoft, then I sure that, as a libertarian, you would be happy to remove all the government regulations that prop up a company like Microsoft; limited liability corporate status, for starters.
In this case, though, there is already a judgement against MSFT for antitrust violations, so it's not exactly "preemptive", it's more like Microsoft is on parole, and this is just part of the parole supervision.
The Lionel Luthor character on Smallville, except for the hair length, always reminded me of Ellison. Especially the first few seasons before he mellowed out.
I know of $100M electronic devices orbiting 23,500 miles out in space which would indeed live 30 years if the tin whiskers don't kill them first.
Except that they'll die long before that because they've either run out of station-keeping fuel or their batteries die. (Even though they only need them for the few hours a year they're in the Earth's shadow, batteries have a limited shelf life.)
No, I didn't RTFA, I reacted to the original poster's remark about "looking for" the subs. I know the Navy knew where they were, and the whole thing about it being a "cover" story is a bit silly. Ballard asked for Navy money to help find the Titanic, they just attached strings to it. BFD.
Oh, the 100 had the rubbery headset couplers -- I still have mine, along with the 100 -- but you could also direct-connect if you were lucky enough to find somewhere with a phone jack or handy with a screwdriver.
I know quite a few of us 100 owners (that hung around on BIX at the time) rigged up cables with alligator clips so we could hook into hotel phone systems.
(My classic story of using headset couplers pre-dates the 100 by a bit -- I had to use a TI Silent 700 portable terminal (hardcopy, it used thermal paper!) to login to check a job, from a pay phone in the lobby of this little motel we were staying at in Maine (no room phones) for a weekend of diving. My boss hadn't wanted me to leave town but I convinced him I could handle any issues by phone. Got a few odd looks from people wondering why I had the phone handset stuck to a typewriter.)
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Now I wish I hadn't already posted so that I could mod you down to oblivion ;-)
You have no soul, and even less imagination. I'd accuse you of being an AI but I'm not sure the second word applies. No doubt you feel (not think) that Isabella should have fed the poor instead of funding Columbus -- and five hundred years later we'd be far worse off. Voyages of exploration and discovery both raise the technology level, and thus the overall standard of living, and lift the human spirit.
Besides, it's not an either/or. We spend far more money on "poverty relief" already than on space exploration -- just look at the federal budget.
The main problem is: chemical rockets suck.
There's just no way to cheaply lift payload to orbit using our current rockets.
Your second sentence doesn't quite say the same thing as the first. Current chemical rockets suck. NASA seems enamored of solid fuels which are low-powered (low Isp), require ridiculously heavy structure (the whole thing is combustion chamber), and messy. They claim they're "reusable", when what they mean is they crash them in the ocean and then salvage them. The H2/O2 liquid fuel mix ain't bad -- except that LH2 has such low density (water contains 50% more hydrogen per unit volume, plus all that oxygen) that the tanks have to be huge, again wasting structure weight. The usual "rocket scientist" answer to that is "oh, we'll densify the hydrogen", ie hydrogen slush. An engineer's approach would be "okay, use liquid methane".
The problem is that both NASA's and Russia's rocket technology is still heavily mired in 1950s thinking. Chemical rockets could be a lot better.
All that said, though, there is a limit on just how much energy you can get out of chemical reactions. Personally I like gaseous fission -- Max Hunter shows a design for an integral, reusable spaceship where the propellant tank is only about half the volume of the ship. Now that's a spaceship. I hear DUMBO isn't bad either. (DUMBO is a similar idea to NERVA -- heat the propellant by passing it through a reactor -- but with more and finer fuel channels to get more thrust. NERVA has high Isp but couldn't generate enough thrust to lift its own weight, DUMBO could.) We really need to get over our irrational fear of a little radiation; there are plenty of things that will kill you just as dead either faster or even less pleasantly that we don't have the same phobia about.
For me, once I report my pda lost, the boys in corp will send a command to wipe the contents of the phone and remove all settings. I believe this option also exists for blackberry.
Won't do any good if whoever grabs the pda/blackberry immediately puts it in a shielded bag and thereafter any work on it is done in a shielded room (Faraday cage). If it's an organized intelligence operation doing this, you can bet that that's exactly what they'll do.
Better would be to add a deadman switch in the pda, which self-destructs if not periodically reset by a signal from home. The danger there is if the signal is lost for mundane reasons.
Any distro installed on a trusted network can easily be kept running for more than two years.
Yeah, if you're hanging out exposed on the internet or don't trust the folks on your LAN, you might want to patch or update once in a while. Even the system I'm typing this on has three firewalls and a proxy between me and the internet. I'm not saying it's impossible to get in (can't prove a negative), but it's going to be harder than targets that are worth more.
I've never had an issue with networking on either built-in or add-in cheapo NICs on Linux. Ditto with built-in or add-in cheapo video.
The fact is that you can't find Win98 drivers for newer hardware, you can't find XP (let alone Vista) drivers for old hardware, but for Linux odds are you can find both, and it may even be built in.
I have old Dells, old Gateways, old IBM's, old Compaqs and HPs. Never had a problem with built-in video. Only had one problem with built-in sound that was quickly solved by looking at the configuration (non-standard) in Windows 98. Never a problem with built in CD drives or CD or DVD drives I bought from a store. (The only exception was an Acer CD drive somebody gave me -- didn't work worth a damn, I never bothered trying it in Windows.) I've used all kinds of SCSI, Firewire, USB and serial gizmos, and parallel printers, without a problem. Perhaps I was just never stupid enough to buy old parallel non-printer peripherals. There have been a few odd-ball USB gizmos -- a cheapo (giveaway) digital camera, for example -- that didn't work on Linux, but those had a hard time working on Windows, even assuming you could find the driver disk that originally came with it or find somewhere on the net to download a driver.
Now, the old Dells, HPs, etc have been retired office machines, not consumer boxes. In my experience the manufacturers tend to cut more corners in the consumer stuff (the margins are thin as it is) and so may be more likely to use oddball parts or configurations that are less well supported. If the repurposed machines the OP was talking about were business machines (even desktops), they're more likely to "just work" with a Linux distro. In the OP's particular case, I'd say try both and go with what works best on those particular systems.
With Linux you won't have to look for drivers, they'll be built in. Linux has phenomenal support for hardware, that tends to get better as the hardware ages -- Linux developers have incentive to keep supporting it, unlike the hardware vendors. (Barring really crippled stuff like winmodems, but even those have some support).
Depending on the age/capability of the hardware you might need to go with an older version of a distro or just omit a bunch of default crap on the install. I've got some old Pentium boxen that run fine but modern distros gripe about not having enough RAM to run the graphic installer. Boots fast, though, unless it decides that two years since the last fsck is too long and forces it (override with tunefs).
Shuttle design payload was 65,000 pounds. Heaviest payload I can quickly find on the net was STS-93 carrying 49,789 pounds. (I think the nominal max is 55,000, that's what I based my 80% on). This is only 76% of original design goals. Launch profile has nothing to do with it. They have to fly upside-down so that the thrust vector of the SSMEs when pointed through the center of mass of the assembly is upward (and downrange).
Payloads to to the ISS are less (heaviest was about 36,000 pounds) because ISS is in a fairly high inclination orbit (which makes it easier to reach from Baikonur).
Here's footage of an actual test flight.
Wake turbulence is proportional to weight (actually, generated lift), not speed. These things are fairly light, and of comparable weight to each other. Wake turbulence won't be a serious issue (minor issue -- I've done formation flying in light planes and it can be a surprise if you're not expecting it, but no big deal -- and I'm talking distances of twenty feet or so.)
As for smoke, all the crap you seen on a Shuttle launch is from the solids, which are disgustingly dirty. There's also some condensed steam from the main engine exhaust. The rocket racers put out a little water vapor and CO2, no big deal. Note the absence of smoke in the video (above) of the flight test. If anything they might decide to add smoke (like in airshows) to make it more interesting. Here's a slightly longer video of an earlier version, with close ups, and another, different plane, some nice footage.
And yes, you're a nay-sayer.
They're real rockets, they carry LOX as well as fuel. The idea spun off of XCOR's demo's using a rocket-propelled Rutan design (veri-eze or long-eze, I think).
It's not just a speed race -- the rockets could drive the planes way past redline. They're rocket-gliders, you kick in the rocket for a while, then glide to stretch out the time between refuelling stops. One of the features that XCOR has developed is a way to refuel (and reLOX) these things a lot faster than the older methods, and the rocket can be restarted multiple times in mid-flight.
There was never any way that Shuttle could have docked with Skylab. The last Apollo flight, the "Apollo-Soyuz Test Project" was originally planned to have the Apollo CSM dock with Skylab after the Soyuz rendezvous, and boost it to higher orbit. That was later cancelled for political reasons (they didn't want anything to distract from the "historic" Apollo-Soyuz hookup) as well as practical: by then it was obvious that Shuttle would never be ready in time to do anything with Skylab, it had no appropriate docking mechanism (Skylab used Apollo-style docking hardware), and there would be no more Apollo launches. As soon as the smoke cleared from the ASTP launch, they started converting the launch pad and VAB over to a Shuttle configuration.
The difference is that the Saturn V stats reflect real performance, the Ares V figures are still hypothetical. Shuttle never got much more than about 80% of its originally advertised payload capacity.
And of course, Saturn V is 45 year old technology. Just replacing the Instrument Unit (guidance system) with modern avionics would add about 2000 kg to the payload.
They can tell my sex, blood type, color of my eyes and hair, my favorite brand of cigarettes and my probability of being obese from a drop of my blood but they can't synthesize urine? Where there heck did things go so wrong?
Wrong comparison. We're talking about NASA here, so it's "if they can put a man on the moon, why can't they...". Oh, wait.
Carbon nanofibers ("buckytubes") != carbon fibers.
Most carbon fiber is pretty thick stuff, comparable to fiberglass. We're nowhere near being able to produce buckytubes in that kind of quantity.
Heh, go for it.
Well, not anywhere on the ground, anyway. No earthquakes in space, though.
You'll get it when the buffer overflows. If you're running it on a system that processes a billion of those loops per second, that should be in a bit over 31 years. Scale accordingly for your processor and memory speed.
There are several moons in this solar system bigger than our own, although they all happen to orbit gas giants, so big moons per se aren't unusual.
The "large impactor on Mars" analysis lends support to models of planetary system formation that predict that some really big impacts -- such as formed our Moon -- are quite likely late in the initial aggregation phase. The severe axial tilt (98 degrees) of Uranus is probably the result of a similar catastrophic impact early in its history.
For a very readable book on this the theory of the Moon's origin and results of computer modelling of planetary system formation, see Dana Mackenzie's The Big Splat .
As for why Mars doesn't have a big moon now if it underwent a similar impact, well perhaps the impact wasn't quite as correspondingly large, or perhaps Jupiter's gravity sufficiently perturbed Mars's debris belt that it couldn't coalesce to a single moon. Perhaps Phobos and Deimos are remnants of this rather than later captures.
Not really. The Atlantis story is one told by a late-Classical-Period author (Plato), with explicit claims that it is derived from a millennia-old tradition preserved by Egyptian texts. If anything, the Atlantis story has more extrinsic plausibility than this one!
Is there any evidence beyond Plato's word that there is/was such a tradition in ancient Egyptian texts? Just curious, not trying to argue a position here.
The only way to get a monopoly is to provide better service than the competition.
Hah! If that were true, there'd be no need for antitrust legislation. However, the issue isn't really how they got the monopoly in the first place (it was pretty much handed to them by IBM). The laws that they broke, and are being supervised to make sure they don't break them again, are laws that are intended to prevent a monopoly from abusing its monopoly status to either maintain or expand into other areas its monopoly without providing better service than the competition. You know, things like product-tying, questionable vendor pre-load contracts, etc.
Fine. If, as a libertarian, you don't want government meddling in a company like Microsoft, then I sure that, as a libertarian, you would be happy to remove all the government regulations that prop up a company like Microsoft; limited liability corporate status, for starters.
In this case, though, there is already a judgement against MSFT for antitrust violations, so it's not exactly "preemptive", it's more like Microsoft is on parole, and this is just part of the parole supervision.
The Lionel Luthor character on Smallville, except for the hair length, always reminded me of Ellison. Especially the first few seasons before he mellowed out.
I know of $100M electronic devices orbiting 23,500 miles out in space which would indeed live 30 years if the tin whiskers don't kill them first.
Except that they'll die long before that because they've either run out of station-keeping fuel or their batteries die. (Even though they only need them for the few hours a year they're in the Earth's shadow, batteries have a limited shelf life.)
you are not alone in not having read the article.
;-)
You must be new here.
No, I didn't RTFA, I reacted to the original poster's remark about "looking for" the subs. I know the Navy knew where they were, and the whole thing about it being a "cover" story is a bit silly. Ballard asked for Navy money to help find the Titanic, they just attached strings to it. BFD.
Oh, the 100 had the rubbery headset couplers -- I still have mine, along with the 100 -- but you could also direct-connect if you were lucky enough to find somewhere with a phone jack or handy with a screwdriver.
I know quite a few of us 100 owners (that hung around on BIX at the time) rigged up cables with alligator clips so we could hook into hotel phone systems.
(My classic story of using headset couplers pre-dates the 100 by a bit -- I had to use a TI Silent 700 portable terminal (hardcopy, it used thermal paper!) to login to check a job, from a pay phone in the lobby of this little motel we were staying at in Maine (no room phones) for a weekend of diving. My boss hadn't wanted me to leave town but I convinced him I could handle any issues by phone. Got a few odd looks from people wondering why I had the phone handset stuck to a typewriter.)