This is a dangerous idea that I often see expounded. I can agree with the idea in some emotional terms, but the economic terms are harsh:
Space is still expensive as all hell. The cost to fly is $1000/lbm or so. That's all well and good in the com-sat market, because the technology is reliable enough to get stuff into orbit safely and effectively. This is not the case with manned spaceflight, as we still have many things to learn. Only governments have enough cash to do this--and I'd rather see the government lay out specifications and tell Boeing or LockMart to build to spec rather than pass out money to contractors. I work in commercial spaceflight, and I can tell you that no corporation can think of it all. Our government has expertise in this area, and they should rightly take the lead.
If commercial spaceflight was going to work, don't you think that Boeing or LockMart would be part of the X-Prize? Most of those prototypes are so outrageously hideous in their ignorance of solid aerospace engineering principles as to be laughable. If Boeing or LockMart thought there was money in commercial spaceflight, they'd tell the government to kiss off and go on their own. Remember, Boeing is one of the largest civil aviation companies around.
NASA's budget has remained constant or been cut, with respect to inflation, for some time now. The Clinton Administration has starved NASA and encouraged Dan Goldin to promote his "faster, cheaper, better" ideal to the point that the last two Mars exploration missions failed miserably due to lack of oversight and understaffed engineering groups.
The Constitution states that the government should promote "useful arts and sciences". Few things are more useful in terms of science than space exploration. The project I work on promises to make unbelievable advances in fiber optics and human prosthetics--and yet we're underfunded and threatening to slip our schedule far out into the ISS service life. It's great to be commercial, but it would be nice to have government funding on this as well.
Let's just get rid of Dan Goldin.
--
Re:If so, then Trolls can sue the Moderators on /.
on
MAPS Sued Again
·
· Score: 2
You're forgetting a big thing here--you don't have to use MAPS, and you don't have to read at anything above -1. --
Working as I do at Teledyne Brown Engineering, I see some of the NASA software-development process second-hand. I know they outsource a lot of it--such as the Payload Data Library, which TBE runs for Marshall Space Flight Center. [I wonder if that link is visible by the bulk of/.ers...] NASA is progressing more to industry standards for things--maybe if open-source becomes industry standard, the Feds might follow suit.
There are, believe it or not, some things that won't benefit from being open source. Besides, the Feds will probably decide that some things will create more trouble than they're worth...
I find it interesting...the article I had from Business 2.0 open on my desk when reading the linked article by O'Reilly runs much along this vein. Alas, since it is published in the 10/24 print issue and not yet published on the Web, I can't link to it.
It's more interesting to me to watch the consortia-standards group fight than it is to worry about any single fight over any standard. If there's anything that watchers of IT should know, it's that if technology standards stink, we'll ignore them. You would think that businesses would eventually kowtow to standards groups, as consortia-derived standards tend to have a shorter shelf life--driving costs up as a new standard must be developed. Independently-developed standards tend to have greater market acceptance and therefore a longer shelf-life--eventually driving down marginal cost and increasing profits.
Why the companies that are out creating consortia can't realize this is beyond me...
The sad political truth is that access to the Net, the Web and broadband equals creativity, confidence and opportunity.
Say huh? Now, there are some of us who do fun things whilst in college--hell, I've been working on sports ezines since I was in high school--but when does access necessarily equal "creativity, confidence, and opportunity"? Perhaps you mean that such access can foster these things, but access can only foster creativity and opportunity--confidence comes from within. And all three of these things can be provided by that one unit that everyone wants to forget: the family.
Anyway, how is this a sad political truth? I understand some of the points in your piece, Katz, but are you reading this or having someone else do so?/P --
Bush's statements on global warming shows a serious misunderstanding of the issue... or else he's in the pocket of the oil industry. Hmmmm... I wonder which one it is... naaaa, he's too stupid to actually understand.
Is Bush the sharpest pencil in the box? Nope. However, he's right on this one. Go take a look at the science out there...our global temperature may be warming up, but nowhere near even the most conservative GW theoretical predictions. Has anyone ever bothered to think about the fact that we're coming out of the coolest period, geologically-speaking, since the last Ice Age?
This campaign speaks to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line, we have begun to disrespect the Constitution, where a "public servant" can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being in Washington, and walk in and decide to take over everybody else's life.
Perhaps the landmark for what you're looking for, Steve B, is Roe v. Wade. It's perhaps the most blatant usurping of the 10th Amendment right to the states' holding all powers not given to the Feds by the Constitution in American jurisprudence. Put me on the Supremes, and I'll overturn Roe in a second.
Please don't get me wrong here, though: one can easily make an argument for abortion rights. I think the right to abort is protected by the Constitution, while at the same time I am abhorrent of abortions. Roe doesn't do much for those seeking an abortion--states' laws at the time were working towards striking many of the provisos that brought Roe about--but it really tells Congress and the American judicial system one thing that scares the fool out of me:
Hey, guys! They don't care! Couch it in terms of improving their lives and protecting their rights, and they'll lap it up like a bunch of thirsty dogs!
Demos of the prototype work well, but there are obstacles to Whisper ever becoming a product. "In Japan or the U.S., people are not willing to wear wearable devices," Fukumoto says. "The only gadget that people allow themselves to wear today is a wristwatch."
The heck? What about all of us who have two pagers and a cell phone on our belts? (Well, I dropped pager #1, but I have to keep the other because of work--text messaging and all.) As if those aren't "wearable gadgets". I wouldn't want something clunky per se, but if you give me a watch that tells time, serves as a cell phone, and isn't the size of Montana, I'd probably wear it.
Why is it that people forget that innovating demands time? Why is it that people forget that those on the new frontier of anything tend to have an obsessive-compulsive attitude toward their work? Why is it that people forget that what seems mundane and everyday yet constantly evolving (i.e., the principles of management) is done exceedingly well by only a select few?
We are compensated for our time by our salary. Those who do difficult jobs--tech, management, etc.--get the highest pay. Those who do difficult jobs often spend hours upon end at the job or doing work--business dinners, entertaining clients, etc.
I think tech people whine because not enough of them have been to college and tried to keep a job at the same time. See what that does for you. The real world seems easy after that...
Well, the result is the same -- flow (and not circulation, btw) over the airfoil. The mechanism of achieving the flow, however, is rather different.
I don't argue the difference in the mechanism--I made that point myself. And, circulation is indeed present over the wing surface. I'm betting here that you haven't taken a course in aerodynamics. It's circulation that accelerates and decelerates the flow to create the pressure gradient across an airfoil.
"Crisp" does not mean "able to calculate everything to the n-the degree of accuracy". "Crisp" is a term from fuzzy logic and refers to old/normal/conventional logic, specifically to values '1' and '0'. These values are "crisp", while real numbers, like 0.5, are "fuzzy".
Last I checked, the laws of aerodynamics don't accurately model separated flow. You can make a stab at it, but you don't get anything near "conventional"--at least not yet. Separated and turbulent flows are a bitch to model. Laminar flow is easy--and crisp.
Flight was mastered by looking at how birds fly and experimenting.
Not really. Birds fly by flapping their wings and I don't know of a single successful aircraft that does this. Flight was mastered by understanding physical laws, specifically the laws of aerodynamics. These laws, by the way, are pretty crisp (=non-fuzzy).
In actuality, we generate lift with airfoils in the same way--by creating circulation. We just do it with thrust. =) And as for the laws of aerodynamics being "pretty crisp", Kaa, please tell me how to model turbulent behavior past the stall point of an airfoil.
Actually, I'm not really a karma whore. 65% or so of my karma comes from story points. =) Actually, the original post was the best I could come up with five minutes after awaking this morning. --
there is the small problem that you can't patent a word. you're looking for trademark... normally I wouldn't respond to something like this, but, hell, this is a contest for patents! stupid patents != redefining what a patent can cover.
Precisely! This was actually a semi-experiment on my behalf--could I fool moderators into taking something that isn't a patent and calling it one? Since my original comment got modded up to 4, I'd say I succeeded.
Now, you can view the results in two ways:
Moderators are easily fooled. (The Signal_11 approach.)
Patents are a hot-button, and anything that makes the patent system look stupid is great for the/. crowd. (The herd mentality approach.)
That people don't understand patents at all, or at least in full. This is my position.
It bothers me that the/. crowd is very anti-patent yet seems unwilling to examine the usefulness of patents.
...the term hacker, and all its variants--elite hacker, 31337 h4X0r, etc. If various news organizations don't stop using the term "hacker" correctly in a sentence, I will send them cease and desist orders--through federal court, if necessary--to have them stop using the term incorrectly! Anyone caught linking to a story about "hackers" without paying me a royalty is also in my debt.
Assuming, USPTO is amenable to this, I will then move to patent the term cracker, then maybe the DoS acronym. --
While doing something completely mindless at work (pecking a software-hardware interactions document to control spaceflight hardware for ISS), I got to thinking:
Why not change the moderation scales somewhat?
Here's the thoughts:
Is -1 to 5 enough? I'd say no, not at this scale of comments/users/page views. 5's are obviously "good" comments, and 4's are pretty good, too. But what's the line between 4 and 5? Fuzzy, depending upon the moderator. Is it a great 4? Maybe. Does it need a 5? Probably not. Would a 4.5 be nice? Sure. I'd think/. could go to 7-10 on the top side without killing things. This would make moderation a bit easier--each point counts less. Karma levels would have to be adjusted accordingly, but...
Allow more tags with points. Maybe there are enough. I don't know. But I'm thinking that maybe someone needs a laugh--let them select all the "Funny" comments, then select their threshhold. If I needed a laugh--most days I do--I'd seek that option out. If I was interested in something, I'd want to see "Informative" comments. If I was passionate, I'd want those "Insightful" comments culled for me. If I'm feeling deviant, I'd want those "Offtopic" comments gathered together and not necessarily modded down.
Now, to see this post get to (Score: 8, "Insightfully Funny")
Karma can be used, among other things, as a measure of your reputation on Slashdot (a very crude and rough measure, yes, but a measure nonetheless).
First, I'd rather have replies than karma, but YMMV. Also, couldn't you keep up with that by looking at your user info and seeing what comments of yours got modded up? It would be an informal way to keep track of your karma, as would the +1 bonus, etc.
CmdrTaco talks about this in the infamous #Kuro5hin IRC log. He (understandably) wants to read every single question asked about/. He wants to know what we think. That's admirable as hell. After all the shit people have given Rob, I'm happy he still gives a hoot.
I'd suggest, though, that one person can't do it all. There are many/.ers who've been around for a dog's age--let them answer some questions. If it were well-moderated--the Catch-22 in this--CmdrTaco, Hemos and the gang could read at 3, 4, or 5 and be fine. Me, I'd probably read that at 5, just because I don't know enough to code my way out of a wet sack of beans.
...if the nationalist model works. Right now, China is conspicuously absent from the International Space Station. That's due to reasons mostly of politics, but suffice it to say that they're doing all their own development work. One reason the IP's (International Partners) want to work with the USA and Russia is to learn.
China has the ability to show us if the one-country model works. I'm not totally thrilled with ISS, even though I'm helping build a payload for it for a foreign company. It's a mess, and that's primarily from the bureaucracy.
Perhaps China can shake up some of the market. The story states that Mars is their goal. It should be ours, too.
Hrm. I find myself in that position at the present. I have a high enough karma to have the +1 bonus, yet I still haven't moderated. I also probably run the same posting pattern. Heck, I think I have the majority of my karma points from providing/. with good stories on space (but that's only because I work inside the industry, heh). Which raises the question: how long ya gotta be around before you can moderate? --
I can't decide if the filing is the worst part or the fact that OpenTV has a Chief Intellectual Property Officer.
Okay, the filing is stupid. But why should IP not be guarded by a company? There are plenty of things that a company can do that need to be protected. Maybe you can find it funny that a company named "OpenTV" has a CIPO, but IP is a serious matter in the corporate world.
Sometimes I wonder if the line between honest desire to see free, open standards and anti-corporate hatred even exists in the minds of those who want to whack IP upside the head. I've had an idea or two that's patentable--but not in the software realm. I like my software open and my engineering design closed. =)
Since I'll be on the road to visit my family and haven't gotten the heads-up display/satellite Internet connection in my truck to work yet, let me just ask this:
Can Hemos and CmdrTaco please tell us why going private with karma won't work in the long run?
All the comments I've seen about this include "we'll get 1000's of emails" and "people want to know their karma". I posit that people knowing their karma is a bad thing. It's not like some deity lets us know how many good and bad points we've got in this world.
Actually, only a hundred launches seems about right. We sometimes forget in our post-spacerace society exactly how complex, difficult, and downright dangerous these missions are.
Yeah, this is #100. FYI, the originally-predicted failure rate for STS launches was around 2%. STS-51L (Challenger) was one. I get nervous with every launch these days, some because of that value, the other because I work on a payload to go to ISS and know that STS explosion==me out of a job.
That's why every single mission-that's right, every one- has its own mission patch (by the way, you can see STS-92's patch at this location. They call them "missions" for a reason: they are as intricate and dangerous as any military action. The slightest mistake can cost billions of dollars and even irreplaceable human lives, as has already been demonstrated in our history.
Stupidly, there's a movement afoot at NASA Public Affairs Office (PAO--I refer to it as the "Perfect Asshole Office") to even kill mission patches. Consider NASA Administrator Dan Goldin's desire to eradicate the NASA "worm" logo. Specifically, this link, which states in part:
"Astronaut mission logos are an important part of NASA activities. They should continue to be used as they have been, since they are an established form of visual identification for a particular mission. However, in terms of media awareness and overall visibility to the public, the use of the 'meatball' should take precedence over the use of mission logos."
Taco, I have a patent for snide observations and sarcasm on the Internet. Why do you think that a tag has never made its way into HTML? I won't let W3C use it! NAH! You owe me big. --
Slashdot Mirror
This is a dangerous idea that I often see expounded. I can agree with the idea in some emotional terms, but the economic terms are harsh:
The Constitution states that the government should promote "useful arts and sciences". Few things are more useful in terms of science than space exploration. The project I work on promises to make unbelievable advances in fiber optics and human prosthetics--and yet we're underfunded and threatening to slip our schedule far out into the ISS service life. It's great to be commercial, but it would be nice to have government funding on this as well.
Let's just get rid of Dan Goldin.
--
You're forgetting a big thing here--you don't have to use MAPS, and you don't have to read at anything above -1.
--
Working as I do at Teledyne Brown Engineering, I see some of the NASA software-development process second-hand. I know they outsource a lot of it--such as the Payload Data Library, which TBE runs for Marshall Space Flight Center. [I wonder if that link is visible by the bulk of /.ers...] NASA is progressing more to industry standards for things--maybe if open-source becomes industry standard, the Feds might follow suit.
There are, believe it or not, some things that won't benefit from being open source. Besides, the Feds will probably decide that some things will create more trouble than they're worth...
--
I find it interesting...the article I had from Business 2.0 open on my desk when reading the linked article by O'Reilly runs much along this vein. Alas, since it is published in the 10/24 print issue and not yet published on the Web, I can't link to it.
It's more interesting to me to watch the consortia-standards group fight than it is to worry about any single fight over any standard. If there's anything that watchers of IT should know, it's that if technology standards stink, we'll ignore them. You would think that businesses would eventually kowtow to standards groups, as consortia-derived standards tend to have a shorter shelf life--driving costs up as a new standard must be developed. Independently-developed standards tend to have greater market acceptance and therefore a longer shelf-life--eventually driving down marginal cost and increasing profits.
Why the companies that are out creating consortia can't realize this is beyond me...
--
Say huh? Now, there are some of us who do fun things whilst in college--hell, I've been working on sports ezines since I was in high school--but when does access necessarily equal "creativity, confidence, and opportunity"? Perhaps you mean that such access can foster these things, but access can only foster creativity and opportunity--confidence comes from within. And all three of these things can be provided by that one unit that everyone wants to forget: the family.
Anyway, how is this a sad political truth? I understand some of the points in your piece, Katz, but are you reading this or having someone else do so?/P
--
Is Bush the sharpest pencil in the box? Nope. However, he's right on this one. Go take a look at the science out there...our global temperature may be warming up, but nowhere near even the most conservative GW theoretical predictions. Has anyone ever bothered to think about the fact that we're coming out of the coolest period, geologically-speaking, since the last Ice Age?
--
Perhaps the landmark for what you're looking for, Steve B, is Roe v. Wade. It's perhaps the most blatant usurping of the 10th Amendment right to the states' holding all powers not given to the Feds by the Constitution in American jurisprudence. Put me on the Supremes, and I'll overturn Roe in a second.
Please don't get me wrong here, though: one can easily make an argument for abortion rights. I think the right to abort is protected by the Constitution, while at the same time I am abhorrent of abortions. Roe doesn't do much for those seeking an abortion--states' laws at the time were working towards striking many of the provisos that brought Roe about--but it really tells Congress and the American judicial system one thing that scares the fool out of me:
--
From the article:
The heck? What about all of us who have two pagers and a cell phone on our belts? (Well, I dropped pager #1, but I have to keep the other because of work--text messaging and all.) As if those aren't "wearable gadgets". I wouldn't want something clunky per se, but if you give me a watch that tells time, serves as a cell phone, and isn't the size of Montana, I'd probably wear it.
--
Why is it that people forget that innovating demands time? Why is it that people forget that those on the new frontier of anything tend to have an obsessive-compulsive attitude toward their work? Why is it that people forget that what seems mundane and everyday yet constantly evolving (i.e., the principles of management) is done exceedingly well by only a select few?
We are compensated for our time by our salary. Those who do difficult jobs--tech, management, etc.--get the highest pay. Those who do difficult jobs often spend hours upon end at the job or doing work--business dinners, entertaining clients, etc.
I think tech people whine because not enough of them have been to college and tried to keep a job at the same time. See what that does for you. The real world seems easy after that...
--
I don't argue the difference in the mechanism--I made that point myself. And, circulation is indeed present over the wing surface. I'm betting here that you haven't taken a course in aerodynamics. It's circulation that accelerates and decelerates the flow to create the pressure gradient across an airfoil.
Last I checked, the laws of aerodynamics don't accurately model separated flow. You can make a stab at it, but you don't get anything near "conventional"--at least not yet. Separated and turbulent flows are a bitch to model. Laminar flow is easy--and crisp.
--
In actuality, we generate lift with airfoils in the same way--by creating circulation. We just do it with thrust. =) And as for the laws of aerodynamics being "pretty crisp", Kaa, please tell me how to model turbulent behavior past the stall point of an airfoil.
--
Actually, I'm not really a karma whore. 65% or so of my karma comes from story points. =) Actually, the original post was the best I could come up with five minutes after awaking this morning.
--
Precisely! This was actually a semi-experiment on my behalf--could I fool moderators into taking something that isn't a patent and calling it one? Since my original comment got modded up to 4, I'd say I succeeded.
Now, you can view the results in two ways:
It bothers me that the /. crowd is very anti-patent yet seems unwilling to examine the usefulness of patents.
--
...the term hacker, and all its variants--elite hacker, 31337 h4X0r, etc. If various news organizations don't stop using the term "hacker" correctly in a sentence, I will send them cease and desist orders--through federal court, if necessary--to have them stop using the term incorrectly! Anyone caught linking to a story about "hackers" without paying me a royalty is also in my debt. Assuming, USPTO is amenable to this, I will then move to patent the term cracker, then maybe the DoS acronym.
--
While doing something completely mindless at work (pecking a software-hardware interactions document to control spaceflight hardware for ISS), I got to thinking:
Here's the thoughts:
Now, to see this post get to (Score: 8, "Insightfully Funny")
--
First, I'd rather have replies than karma, but YMMV. Also, couldn't you keep up with that by looking at your user info and seeing what comments of yours got modded up? It would be an informal way to keep track of your karma, as would the +1 bonus, etc.
--
Hell, I haven't meta-modded yet either. Keeps telling me I haven't been here long enough. =)
--
CmdrTaco talks about this in the infamous #Kuro5hin IRC log. He (understandably) wants to read every single question asked about /. He wants to know what we think. That's admirable as hell. After all the shit people have given Rob, I'm happy he still gives a hoot.
I'd suggest, though, that one person can't do it all. There are many /.ers who've been around for a dog's age--let them answer some questions. If it were well-moderated--the Catch-22 in this--CmdrTaco, Hemos and the gang could read at 3, 4, or 5 and be fine. Me, I'd probably read that at 5, just because I don't know enough to code my way out of a wet sack of beans.
--
...if the nationalist model works. Right now, China is conspicuously absent from the International Space Station. That's due to reasons mostly of politics, but suffice it to say that they're doing all their own development work. One reason the IP's (International Partners) want to work with the USA and Russia is to learn.
China has the ability to show us if the one-country model works. I'm not totally thrilled with ISS, even though I'm helping build a payload for it for a foreign company. It's a mess, and that's primarily from the bureaucracy.
Perhaps China can shake up some of the market. The story states that Mars is their goal. It should be ours, too.
--
Hrm. I find myself in that position at the present. I have a high enough karma to have the +1 bonus, yet I still haven't moderated. I also probably run the same posting pattern. Heck, I think I have the majority of my karma points from providing /. with good stories on space (but that's only because I work inside the industry, heh). Which raises the question: how long ya gotta be around before you can moderate?
--
Okay, the filing is stupid. But why should IP not be guarded by a company? There are plenty of things that a company can do that need to be protected. Maybe you can find it funny that a company named "OpenTV" has a CIPO, but IP is a serious matter in the corporate world.
Sometimes I wonder if the line between honest desire to see free, open standards and anti-corporate hatred even exists in the minds of those who want to whack IP upside the head. I've had an idea or two that's patentable--but not in the software realm. I like my software open and my engineering design closed. =)
--
Since I'll be on the road to visit my family and haven't gotten the heads-up display/satellite Internet connection in my truck to work yet, let me just ask this:
All the comments I've seen about this include "we'll get 1000's of emails" and "people want to know their karma". I posit that people knowing their karma is a bad thing. It's not like some deity lets us know how many good and bad points we've got in this world.
<><
--
But, IANAL. For that matter, IANAPL. Hell, IANAKW, even.
{PL==>Patent Lawyuh; KW==>Karma Whore}
--
Yeah, this is #100. FYI, the originally-predicted failure rate for STS launches was around 2%. STS-51L (Challenger) was one. I get nervous with every launch these days, some because of that value, the other because I work on a payload to go to ISS and know that STS explosion==me out of a job.
Stupidly, there's a movement afoot at NASA Public Affairs Office (PAO--I refer to it as the "Perfect Asshole Office") to even kill mission patches. Consider NASA Administrator Dan Goldin's desire to eradicate the NASA "worm" logo. Specifically, this link, which states in part:
I mean, this is really just a Mickey Mouse agency. -sigh- Yet I work as a contractor.
--
Taco, I have a patent for snide observations and sarcasm on the Internet. Why do you think that a tag has never made its way into HTML? I won't let W3C use it! NAH! You owe me big.
--