Space is usually defined as 100km, which is what was used for the X-Prize. 200,000 feet gets you a couple minutes of free fall, black sky, and a curved horizon. For tourist purposes, that's functionally "space", but it doesn't meet the usual definition. It's high enough that you need rockets to get there, and it provides a good ride. My reading of the press releases is that this is a brief stopping point along the way to 110km, which will involve the same airframe shape, but with added lightness and other performance improvements. (Any details I know beyond that, I can't share.)
I have some non-back-of-the-envelope numbers for you. There are 4 engines, 3000 lbf thrust each (last I heard; that may have changed slightly, but not significantly). The propellants are pump-fed by derivatives of the pump used on the Rocket Racer. The chamber itself will be similar in construction to the Rocket Racer engine, but about double the thrust (RR engine is ~1500 lbf). So the engine is a larger LOX-kerosene engine than XCOR has built, but lower thrust than the 7500 lbf Lox-Methane engine they built for NASA.
You're right, I'm still not providing data on the market, because I don't know of good public data. But then, I'm not asking you to believe it, either. If you want some evidence (ont sufficient, I'm aware), note that EADS Astrium is entering the market or at least planning to -- and they're not exactly a small company. If they think there's a market, that's based on data.
When you look at the historical record for rocket engines, remember that very very few of those were designed with safety as the primary concern. Hence my earlier comment about repurposed missiles. You'd do better to look at the safety records of things like JATO bottles -- rockets that were primarily intended to be safe to operate. I said accidents aren't a given; I didn't say they weren't historically common. But there's no reason we have to repeat past mistakes, especially when the fundamental causes (ie, not making reliability a primary design goal) are so obvious and so easily fixed.
Lox/Methane vs Lox/Kerosene vs Nitrous/HTPB doens't make a huge difference -- they all have broadly similar energy contents. What does make a difference is that in a hybrid, the pressure vessel that can fail is much, much larger -- they're more like solids that way. Most rocket engine failures don't involve the propellants in the tanks mixing and detonating (that normally happens after the engine fails). They involve the pump or chamber failing as a pressure vessel -- a moderately large, high pressure pressure vessel. Blast shields can certainly contain that (where "contain" means "redirect aft where it won't hurt anything"). The blast shield is substantially lighter than the chamber itself; there's nothing hard about taking it with you, unless you're trying to shave your margins to old-fashioned aerospace standards in pursuit of some goal other than a safe, reliable, and cheap to operate vehicle.
XCOR isn't asking you to believe they can reach orbit; nor are they asking their investors to believe that. Long-term, they plan to do that, but they plan to build the experience and credibility first. This is a step on that path; it's obviously not sufficient. I find it odd that when you say it isn't orbit, and I answer that it's a step on the way, your complaint is that the journey isn't done yet. What exactly is the problem with starting the path to orbit by learning how to build and operate safe, reliable rocket engines and rocket powered vehicles? Note that no one knows how to operate a reliable, reusable rocket powered vehicle with sane amounts of maintenence. It simply hasn't been done -- with the possible exception of the EZ-Rocket, though even that is still too high maintenence for revenue service.
I won't comment much on propellant choice, except to say that by the time you account for density, Lox/Methane, Lox/Kerosene, and Lox/propane are all reasonable choices -- things like handling concerns, cooling properties, whether you can store them in wing tanks (it's a lot harder with cryos) are all at least as relevant as the minor performance differences. Lox is clearly the oxidizer of choice, and it should be paired with some liquid hydrocarbon, not LH2.
Certainly, the problems of orbit are far harder than suborbital. But you have to start somewhere. What's your alternative? All-up, aim for orbit on the first launch? How do you know it will work? I happen to think that if you want a reliable, reusable, commercially operable vehicle, you're much better off starting small and slowly expanding the envelope. There's no big quantum leap from suborbital to orbital -- you can slowly grow the performance and creep up on problems, solving them as they appear. The biggest thing to learn is how to operate the vehicle safely, reliable, and cheaply -- and the only way to learn that is to try operating such a vehicle. You learn a lot from that, and most of it transfers directly to the high performance version.
The ways in which Lynx is more like an airplane than a traditional rocket should be fairly obvio
Where do you arrive at that conclusion? Having interned at XCOR, that's not at all my understanding. They are building the Rocket Racer, they built and flew the EZ-Rocket, and they've been publicly discussing Xerus in vague terms for years. (Xerus is the former public name for Lynx.) I interpret this announcement as a good thing, both for XCOR and the industry as a whole.
It's abundantly clear if you have access to the market research. I don't right now, but I've (some of) it. No, I won't back it up more than that. If you were in a position where that research mattered to you directly (ie an investor / employee / business partner of a relevant company), you'd have access to it to.
Accidents are no more a given in this industry than any other transportation industry. At least in XCOR's case, the vehicle has more in common with a small private plane than historical rockets from a safety perspective. The rocket engines will be individually protected by blast shields in case something goes dramatically wrong -- just like jet engine turbines are. Aside from the engine and the flight plan, this is just a smallish airplane / glider, and most of the safety analysis is similar. Most importantly, it can draw on a long history of airplane safety analysis for the vast majority of failure modes.
Problems will certainly occur, but there is no reason that they need to cause injury or death. XCOR had a no-light on the EZ-Rocket during an air show once; most of the spectators never even realized anything went wrong. Most problems that occur on Lynx will be of similar magnitude: maybe a mission abort, but no catastrophic results.
Zenit and Pegasus are not private rockets in the same sense that the Lynx is; they're built largely for government markets and with substantial government funding. (Pegasus is slightly debateable, but even so it's not most rockets.) If you think most rockets were developed primarily for non-government customers, you're simply wrong. Falcon has flown twice, and failed both times -- I'll count it when it works (which I fully expect it to on its next launch -- I don't mean to disparage Elon and company, they just haven't succeeded yet, so I won't count them yet).
Be careful about saying the craft doesn't accomplish anything. Just because the market it's serving (a rollercoaster ride with a hell of a view at the top) isn't the one you want, doesn't mean it's not interesting. The technologies being developed for Lynx are carefully chosen to help build the XCOR technology base for future work. So what if the eventual orbital rocket isn't Lynx? The cheap way to get to orbit is to start small, learn as you go, and find ways to make it pay for itself before you get there. Unless you have Elon's money behind you, it's not possible to go directly to an orbital vehicle. Also, if you think Lynx isn't facing any of the same challenges, you're severly underestimating the amount of work that goes into it. It faces the challenges of control, reentry, high mass ratio, etc -- just smaller versions of all of them. You start by solving the easy version of the problem, then you make it a bit harder, then a bit harder still, and eventually you're in orbit without having to take any single giant leaps in engineering.
For most people, no. But for some people it certainly is. It's abundantly clear that there is at least a moderate size market for these flights -- enough to make the operation profitable.
If you want a better ride, wait a bit -- but the right way to get there, especially for a small company, is to start with a smaller, lower performance vehicle. Orbital tourism will come, but trying to do it now would be akin to trying to fly across the Atlantic in about 1905 -- the industry has barely come into existence, at least when you look at private rocketships, rather than government funded missiles and their derivatives.
Why? Climbing Mt. Everest isn't banned -- and I believe there has been 1 climbing season since it was first climbed that there *hasn't* been a death. Adventure tourism regularly claims lives, and hasn't been banned. Now, I doubt the company that had a fatal accident would survive, but there are a lot of dedicated engineers working very hard to make accidents both unlikely and survivable.
Disclaimer: I've interned at XCOR. Assuming I go back, I'll be getting a ride on this vehicle -- not as an option, but as a job requirement. It's part of the way they do safety. Anyone who works on the vehicle rides on it. That way everyone is directly motivated to work on making it safer.
Of course it doesn't. As a small inventor of an actually useful device, the simplest way to get rewarded for my invention may well be to sell the patent and prototype to a company with the resources to manufacture and market it. Never mind that I might want to move on to a new challenge rather than deal with the headaches of going into production and selling it myself.
The problem isn't the sale of the patent. The problem is the patent trolling -- producing a patent that *isn't* novel and useful, failing to produce a product (or sell it to someone who intends to), and then suing people who came up with the idea on their own.
The problem with patent trolls is that the risk / reward profile is all wrong. The corporation structure protects the investors, and no one is criminally liable if the lawsuit fails. So, the people setting it up can decide how much liability to expose themselves to by how much they invest, but the upper bound on the lawsuit payoff is virtually unlimited. So, when deciding whether to make the investment, there simply isn't an entry on the risk / reward table below "lawsuit fails." The incentive for them not file the lawsuit has to be on par with the potential earnings in the calculation, and someone getting "well and truly burnt" won't do that -- the probability of a big win has to change, since the size of the loss is bounded. (Well, either that or find ways to make the penalties bigger.)
You can get a port-a-potty delivered without ever providing positive identification. You don't even have to pay for it until it shows up, and they'll happily deliver while you're at work. They're quite used to people preparing to have renovations done by contractors.
Of course, I would never decide someone else needed a port-a-potty on their front lawn. But, much like the ants, it's something you can't help but notice if you have the right mindset.
Guilt is not sufficient to remove legal protections. In fact, many of our legal protections are there to prevent the rights of the guilty from being trampled on, not just the wrongly accused.
The fact that this particular crime is an emotionally sensitive one should not change that. Nor should it mean he deserves cruel and unjust punishment. I'm all in favor of sending him to jail if a court finds him guilty beyond reasonable doubt -- but people calling for him to be beaten or raped sicken me.
Silane explodes with considerable violence on exposure to air.
The best part? It's only *mostly* pyrophoric in air. *Sometimes* it waits a little while and accumulates a nice big cloud first, rather than flaring the instant it starts leaking.
As you say, better charts. Make the damn things editable!
A better solver. One that doesn't wander off and get stuck in places that aren't even locally optimal on smooth 3-input optimization problems.
Fourier transforms. Excel has it, and they're not that hard to code up, and if you need them there's really no substitute. I need them.
There are others, mostly interface and performance related, but really if you give me those I'll be happy...
There are plenty of uses that aren't transplants -- various medical research, and especially training of new doctors. Working with real cadavers is still important; you can't learn everything from books and you don't want to start on live patients for everything. How much those applications care about freezing is beyond me (I'm not a doctor), but I'm guessing it varies between "not at all" and "somewhat, but not nearly as much as transplants."
If this managed to affect both Linux and BSD despite no relevant common code, is Windows affected? I'm guessing OSX is, thanks to its BSD heritage. Has anyone tested either of them, though? How about other OSes?
Unless, of course, it turns out to be a security hole. The sysadmin installed GCC isn't the only way code gets on to systems. Besides, a lot of packages are shipped as binaries built with modern GCC, whatever that may be. This is going to be a pain to fix, even though the fix is simple.
I'll agree that it's obvious, but not in the way you think. There's plenty of evidence that insider trading occurrs to at least a moderate degree, and not much evidence (as distinct from appeals to intuition) that it does more than minor harm to the market.
The reasons why someone is selling stock are actually far less interesting than the fact that they're selling it. People regularly look to trade records for information, and don't ask why the trades occurred. Yes, the people with inside info profit from it -- but the information gets out when they do so, even if all the details don't.
The amount of harm caused by this process is very unclear and a subject of much debate. I'm willing to believe it's non-zero (what can I say, the appeals to intuition work), but there's no evidence it's gigantic. And there's certainly no evidence of outside investors getting scared off by insider trading -- though there's plenty of evidence that they get scared off by bad management, as they should, but that's for other reasons. Pump and dump is a symptom of bad management...
As I said before, I'll leave the ethics of insider trading to others. But I'm far from convinced there's more than minor harm resulting from it.
You're missing the point. The act of trading inherently gives away information -- the information enters the market through the trade records.
The fact that this is so is easy to determine from careful analysis of stock markets. Whether that makes insider trading any more or less ethical is left as an exercise for the reader...
Of course, given the usual (complete lack of) sensitivity to price that the satellite market has, it wouldn't have had a huge impact aside from making Clarke wealthier. It's only recently that we've seen any satellites launched that actually cared about cost, and only marginally for those. The patent would have expired long before that, though.
There are plenty of examples of patents stifling innovation, but this isn't one of them -- unless Clarke had tried to do something silly like prevent any satellites from flying, and I think it's obvious he wouldn't have done that. If you want to fight against patents, use reasonable examples of how they stifle innovation -- there are certainly plenty of them.
Obvious candidates would be navigational sensors and actuators. Good autonomous nav systems need to know where they are, and that's actually surprisingly difficult -- especially if you want it to perform the sorts of aerobatic manuevers that an ornithopter design makes possible. Gyroscopes and accelerometers are currently either very good, or very small, but most emphatically not both. That would be an obvious candidate -- there are no obvious inherent limitations, the options just don't exist commerically at present. If they're using image recognition to help with navigation (you can make do with really awful inertial sensors if you can continuously correct them from an external reference like your visual field -- witness the human inner ear), then that needs quantities of CPU power and image sensors that won't fit in your hearing aid -- but probably are present in your cell phone.
And remember, if you're packing the nav system into something that's "only" 2"x6", you won't come even close to a 12" wingspan -- the weight matters more than the volume, and a 2"x6" nav pack will be too heavy for the wing sizes they want. Remember, by the time you take an off the shelf GPS unit, an off the shelf CPU, off the shelf gyros and accelerometers, off the shelf cameras, an off the shelf radio... you have a large, bulky project by the standards of a bat. A typical 12" wingspan bat will weigh less than 1 oz, and if you want aerobatic performance you'll need to hit a similar weight target. And that includes any motors, actuators, batteries, solar cells, and structure. Suddenly a couple grams for a crude set of gyroscopes would look luxurious.
I don't see any inherent problem with reversing those numbers, or at least moving in that direction (with the obvious caveat that you couldn't make the change overnight). I wasn't attempting to argue the merits of any specific project, but rather to make a point about the style of argument.
My point was that the parent poster was presenting a false dichotomy: funding this specific project vs a cure for cancer. It's far more reasonable to argue about the appropriate size for major categories, and then to divide up within those categories. Or, you could argue whether individual projects are worth funding or not on their own merits. Ideally you'd do some mix of the two.
It's obviously unreasonable to compare this specific, small project against a nonexistant alternative that isn't even of comparable budget. It's a politicizing trick based on a false dichotomy, and as such has no place in intelligent discussion of the issues. Asking the broader questions "what would happen if we spent less on our military?" and "what would happen if we spent more on basic R&D?" and then combining those to get "should we shift the budget from one to the other, and should we raise or lower taxes to change the total?" is entirely reasonable.
So is the cure for cancer. And given the choice, I know where I'd want my taxes to be spent.
You present a false dichotomy.
I'm generally in favor of reduced defense spending, but research into new capabilities is something I think is worthwhile. I wholeheartedly agree that a cure for cancer would be better than this, but we don't have that choice available. Even if we did, it's likely that a few $M taken from a robotic bat project wouldn't even be close to enough.
We can spend money on both. Whether spending tax money on this is a good idea is mostly unrelated to whether spending tax money on medical research is a good idea. Obviously the two are connected through tax rates and thus the total government funding available, but as long as the projects are small relative to the total fund, they should each be evaluated against the alternative of reducing taxes (or increasing them, depending on your preferred viewpoint), rather than against each other.
We're all (well, mostly) smart people here, capable of evaluating complex choices. Let's at least look at the correct set of choices, rather than a rhetoric-filled politically motivated set of options that don't actually exist.
No, but it will be used to catch plenty of mundan criminals comitting more mundane crimes. They sell the system for catching terrorists, then proclaim its success at catching mundane criminals who they couldn't have gotten this sort of warrant to go after without the terrorist bogeyman. And they don't even bother pretending otherwise afterward. They must have noticed no one objects loudly enough to be relevant.
How do you tell if it has crashed or is just starving for HD access without looing at the HDD light?
I leave gkrellm open most of the time, with disk I/O as one of the tickers. If you don't do that routinely, and want something that won't take forever to load on a disk-starved system, or aren't logged in graphically, vmstat is handy. You'll likely care about the IO stats, and possibly the VM stats and context switches. If you want more details on the disk, vmstat -d will give you details including how many IOs got sent to the disk after grouping (likely the best indicator of a disk-starved system; moderate numbers of large reads won't hurt nearly as badly as lots of tiny ones). Adding -n 1 will give you an update every second, which can also be informative.
CPU time spent waiting for IO (the wa field in vmstat or top) is also a good indicator, though not as reliable.
I have no clue how to do the equivalent under Windows.
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Space is usually defined as 100km, which is what was used for the X-Prize. 200,000 feet gets you a couple minutes of free fall, black sky, and a curved horizon. For tourist purposes, that's functionally "space", but it doesn't meet the usual definition. It's high enough that you need rockets to get there, and it provides a good ride. My reading of the press releases is that this is a brief stopping point along the way to 110km, which will involve the same airframe shape, but with added lightness and other performance improvements. (Any details I know beyond that, I can't share.)
I have some non-back-of-the-envelope numbers for you. There are 4 engines, 3000 lbf thrust each (last I heard; that may have changed slightly, but not significantly). The propellants are pump-fed by derivatives of the pump used on the Rocket Racer. The chamber itself will be similar in construction to the Rocket Racer engine, but about double the thrust (RR engine is ~1500 lbf). So the engine is a larger LOX-kerosene engine than XCOR has built, but lower thrust than the 7500 lbf Lox-Methane engine they built for NASA.
You're right, I'm still not providing data on the market, because I don't know of good public data. But then, I'm not asking you to believe it, either. If you want some evidence (ont sufficient, I'm aware), note that EADS Astrium is entering the market or at least planning to -- and they're not exactly a small company. If they think there's a market, that's based on data.
When you look at the historical record for rocket engines, remember that very very few of those were designed with safety as the primary concern. Hence my earlier comment about repurposed missiles. You'd do better to look at the safety records of things like JATO bottles -- rockets that were primarily intended to be safe to operate. I said accidents aren't a given; I didn't say they weren't historically common. But there's no reason we have to repeat past mistakes, especially when the fundamental causes (ie, not making reliability a primary design goal) are so obvious and so easily fixed.
Lox/Methane vs Lox/Kerosene vs Nitrous/HTPB doens't make a huge difference -- they all have broadly similar energy contents. What does make a difference is that in a hybrid, the pressure vessel that can fail is much, much larger -- they're more like solids that way. Most rocket engine failures don't involve the propellants in the tanks mixing and detonating (that normally happens after the engine fails). They involve the pump or chamber failing as a pressure vessel -- a moderately large, high pressure pressure vessel. Blast shields can certainly contain that (where "contain" means "redirect aft where it won't hurt anything"). The blast shield is substantially lighter than the chamber itself; there's nothing hard about taking it with you, unless you're trying to shave your margins to old-fashioned aerospace standards in pursuit of some goal other than a safe, reliable, and cheap to operate vehicle.
XCOR isn't asking you to believe they can reach orbit; nor are they asking their investors to believe that. Long-term, they plan to do that, but they plan to build the experience and credibility first. This is a step on that path; it's obviously not sufficient. I find it odd that when you say it isn't orbit, and I answer that it's a step on the way, your complaint is that the journey isn't done yet. What exactly is the problem with starting the path to orbit by learning how to build and operate safe, reliable rocket engines and rocket powered vehicles? Note that no one knows how to operate a reliable, reusable rocket powered vehicle with sane amounts of maintenence. It simply hasn't been done -- with the possible exception of the EZ-Rocket, though even that is still too high maintenence for revenue service.
I won't comment much on propellant choice, except to say that by the time you account for density, Lox/Methane, Lox/Kerosene, and Lox/propane are all reasonable choices -- things like handling concerns, cooling properties, whether you can store them in wing tanks (it's a lot harder with cryos) are all at least as relevant as the minor performance differences. Lox is clearly the oxidizer of choice, and it should be paired with some liquid hydrocarbon, not LH2.
Certainly, the problems of orbit are far harder than suborbital. But you have to start somewhere. What's your alternative? All-up, aim for orbit on the first launch? How do you know it will work? I happen to think that if you want a reliable, reusable, commercially operable vehicle, you're much better off starting small and slowly expanding the envelope. There's no big quantum leap from suborbital to orbital -- you can slowly grow the performance and creep up on problems, solving them as they appear. The biggest thing to learn is how to operate the vehicle safely, reliable, and cheaply -- and the only way to learn that is to try operating such a vehicle. You learn a lot from that, and most of it transfers directly to the high performance version.
The ways in which Lynx is more like an airplane than a traditional rocket should be fairly obvio
Where do you arrive at that conclusion? Having interned at XCOR, that's not at all my understanding. They are building the Rocket Racer, they built and flew the EZ-Rocket, and they've been publicly discussing Xerus in vague terms for years. (Xerus is the former public name for Lynx.) I interpret this announcement as a good thing, both for XCOR and the industry as a whole.
It's abundantly clear if you have access to the market research. I don't right now, but I've (some of) it. No, I won't back it up more than that. If you were in a position where that research mattered to you directly (ie an investor / employee / business partner of a relevant company), you'd have access to it to.
Accidents are no more a given in this industry than any other transportation industry. At least in XCOR's case, the vehicle has more in common with a small private plane than historical rockets from a safety perspective. The rocket engines will be individually protected by blast shields in case something goes dramatically wrong -- just like jet engine turbines are. Aside from the engine and the flight plan, this is just a smallish airplane / glider, and most of the safety analysis is similar. Most importantly, it can draw on a long history of airplane safety analysis for the vast majority of failure modes.
Problems will certainly occur, but there is no reason that they need to cause injury or death. XCOR had a no-light on the EZ-Rocket during an air show once; most of the spectators never even realized anything went wrong. Most problems that occur on Lynx will be of similar magnitude: maybe a mission abort, but no catastrophic results.
Zenit and Pegasus are not private rockets in the same sense that the Lynx is; they're built largely for government markets and with substantial government funding. (Pegasus is slightly debateable, but even so it's not most rockets.) If you think most rockets were developed primarily for non-government customers, you're simply wrong. Falcon has flown twice, and failed both times -- I'll count it when it works (which I fully expect it to on its next launch -- I don't mean to disparage Elon and company, they just haven't succeeded yet, so I won't count them yet).
Be careful about saying the craft doesn't accomplish anything. Just because the market it's serving (a rollercoaster ride with a hell of a view at the top) isn't the one you want, doesn't mean it's not interesting. The technologies being developed for Lynx are carefully chosen to help build the XCOR technology base for future work. So what if the eventual orbital rocket isn't Lynx? The cheap way to get to orbit is to start small, learn as you go, and find ways to make it pay for itself before you get there. Unless you have Elon's money behind you, it's not possible to go directly to an orbital vehicle. Also, if you think Lynx isn't facing any of the same challenges, you're severly underestimating the amount of work that goes into it. It faces the challenges of control, reentry, high mass ratio, etc -- just smaller versions of all of them. You start by solving the easy version of the problem, then you make it a bit harder, then a bit harder still, and eventually you're in orbit without having to take any single giant leaps in engineering.
For most people, no. But for some people it certainly is. It's abundantly clear that there is at least a moderate size market for these flights -- enough to make the operation profitable.
If you want a better ride, wait a bit -- but the right way to get there, especially for a small company, is to start with a smaller, lower performance vehicle. Orbital tourism will come, but trying to do it now would be akin to trying to fly across the Atlantic in about 1905 -- the industry has barely come into existence, at least when you look at private rocketships, rather than government funded missiles and their derivatives.
Why? Climbing Mt. Everest isn't banned -- and I believe there has been 1 climbing season since it was first climbed that there *hasn't* been a death. Adventure tourism regularly claims lives, and hasn't been banned. Now, I doubt the company that had a fatal accident would survive, but there are a lot of dedicated engineers working very hard to make accidents both unlikely and survivable.
Disclaimer: I've interned at XCOR. Assuming I go back, I'll be getting a ride on this vehicle -- not as an option, but as a job requirement. It's part of the way they do safety. Anyone who works on the vehicle rides on it. That way everyone is directly motivated to work on making it safer.
Of course it doesn't. As a small inventor of an actually useful device, the simplest way to get rewarded for my invention may well be to sell the patent and prototype to a company with the resources to manufacture and market it. Never mind that I might want to move on to a new challenge rather than deal with the headaches of going into production and selling it myself.
The problem isn't the sale of the patent. The problem is the patent trolling -- producing a patent that *isn't* novel and useful, failing to produce a product (or sell it to someone who intends to), and then suing people who came up with the idea on their own.
The problem with patent trolls is that the risk / reward profile is all wrong. The corporation structure protects the investors, and no one is criminally liable if the lawsuit fails. So, the people setting it up can decide how much liability to expose themselves to by how much they invest, but the upper bound on the lawsuit payoff is virtually unlimited. So, when deciding whether to make the investment, there simply isn't an entry on the risk / reward table below "lawsuit fails." The incentive for them not file the lawsuit has to be on par with the potential earnings in the calculation, and someone getting "well and truly burnt" won't do that -- the probability of a big win has to change, since the size of the loss is bounded. (Well, either that or find ways to make the penalties bigger.)
We are sexy, sexy Von Neumann machines.
You can get a port-a-potty delivered without ever providing positive identification. You don't even have to pay for it until it shows up, and they'll happily deliver while you're at work. They're quite used to people preparing to have renovations done by contractors.
Of course, I would never decide someone else needed a port-a-potty on their front lawn. But, much like the ants, it's something you can't help but notice if you have the right mindset.
Guilt is not sufficient to remove legal protections. In fact, many of our legal protections are there to prevent the rights of the guilty from being trampled on, not just the wrongly accused.
The fact that this particular crime is an emotionally sensitive one should not change that. Nor should it mean he deserves cruel and unjust punishment. I'm all in favor of sending him to jail if a court finds him guilty beyond reasonable doubt -- but people calling for him to be beaten or raped sicken me.
Silane explodes with considerable violence on exposure to air.
The best part? It's only *mostly* pyrophoric in air. *Sometimes* it waits a little while and accumulates a nice big cloud first, rather than flaring the instant it starts leaking.
My short wishlist for Calc:
As you say, better charts. Make the damn things editable!
A better solver. One that doesn't wander off and get stuck in places that aren't even locally optimal on smooth 3-input optimization problems.
Fourier transforms. Excel has it, and they're not that hard to code up, and if you need them there's really no substitute. I need them.
There are others, mostly interface and performance related, but really if you give me those I'll be happy...
There are plenty of uses that aren't transplants -- various medical research, and especially training of new doctors. Working with real cadavers is still important; you can't learn everything from books and you don't want to start on live patients for everything. How much those applications care about freezing is beyond me (I'm not a doctor), but I'm guessing it varies between "not at all" and "somewhat, but not nearly as much as transplants."
Silly question time...
If this managed to affect both Linux and BSD despite no relevant common code, is Windows affected? I'm guessing OSX is, thanks to its BSD heritage. Has anyone tested either of them, though? How about other OSes?
Unless, of course, it turns out to be a security hole. The sysadmin installed GCC isn't the only way code gets on to systems. Besides, a lot of packages are shipped as binaries built with modern GCC, whatever that may be. This is going to be a pain to fix, even though the fix is simple.
I'll agree that it's obvious, but not in the way you think. There's plenty of evidence that insider trading occurrs to at least a moderate degree, and not much evidence (as distinct from appeals to intuition) that it does more than minor harm to the market.
The reasons why someone is selling stock are actually far less interesting than the fact that they're selling it. People regularly look to trade records for information, and don't ask why the trades occurred. Yes, the people with inside info profit from it -- but the information gets out when they do so, even if all the details don't.
The amount of harm caused by this process is very unclear and a subject of much debate. I'm willing to believe it's non-zero (what can I say, the appeals to intuition work), but there's no evidence it's gigantic. And there's certainly no evidence of outside investors getting scared off by insider trading -- though there's plenty of evidence that they get scared off by bad management, as they should, but that's for other reasons. Pump and dump is a symptom of bad management...
As I said before, I'll leave the ethics of insider trading to others. But I'm far from convinced there's more than minor harm resulting from it.
You're missing the point. The act of trading inherently gives away information -- the information enters the market through the trade records.
The fact that this is so is easy to determine from careful analysis of stock markets. Whether that makes insider trading any more or less ethical is left as an exercise for the reader...
Of course, given the usual (complete lack of) sensitivity to price that the satellite market has, it wouldn't have had a huge impact aside from making Clarke wealthier. It's only recently that we've seen any satellites launched that actually cared about cost, and only marginally for those. The patent would have expired long before that, though.
There are plenty of examples of patents stifling innovation, but this isn't one of them -- unless Clarke had tried to do something silly like prevent any satellites from flying, and I think it's obvious he wouldn't have done that. If you want to fight against patents, use reasonable examples of how they stifle innovation -- there are certainly plenty of them.
Obvious candidates would be navigational sensors and actuators. Good autonomous nav systems need to know where they are, and that's actually surprisingly difficult -- especially if you want it to perform the sorts of aerobatic manuevers that an ornithopter design makes possible. Gyroscopes and accelerometers are currently either very good, or very small, but most emphatically not both. That would be an obvious candidate -- there are no obvious inherent limitations, the options just don't exist commerically at present. If they're using image recognition to help with navigation (you can make do with really awful inertial sensors if you can continuously correct them from an external reference like your visual field -- witness the human inner ear), then that needs quantities of CPU power and image sensors that won't fit in your hearing aid -- but probably are present in your cell phone.
And remember, if you're packing the nav system into something that's "only" 2"x6", you won't come even close to a 12" wingspan -- the weight matters more than the volume, and a 2"x6" nav pack will be too heavy for the wing sizes they want. Remember, by the time you take an off the shelf GPS unit, an off the shelf CPU, off the shelf gyros and accelerometers, off the shelf cameras, an off the shelf radio... you have a large, bulky project by the standards of a bat. A typical 12" wingspan bat will weigh less than 1 oz, and if you want aerobatic performance you'll need to hit a similar weight target. And that includes any motors, actuators, batteries, solar cells, and structure. Suddenly a couple grams for a crude set of gyroscopes would look luxurious.
I don't see any inherent problem with reversing those numbers, or at least moving in that direction (with the obvious caveat that you couldn't make the change overnight). I wasn't attempting to argue the merits of any specific project, but rather to make a point about the style of argument.
My point was that the parent poster was presenting a false dichotomy: funding this specific project vs a cure for cancer. It's far more reasonable to argue about the appropriate size for major categories, and then to divide up within those categories. Or, you could argue whether individual projects are worth funding or not on their own merits. Ideally you'd do some mix of the two.
It's obviously unreasonable to compare this specific, small project against a nonexistant alternative that isn't even of comparable budget. It's a politicizing trick based on a false dichotomy, and as such has no place in intelligent discussion of the issues. Asking the broader questions "what would happen if we spent less on our military?" and "what would happen if we spent more on basic R&D?" and then combining those to get "should we shift the budget from one to the other, and should we raise or lower taxes to change the total?" is entirely reasonable.
So is the cure for cancer. And given the choice, I know where I'd want my taxes to be spent.
You present a false dichotomy.
I'm generally in favor of reduced defense spending, but research into new capabilities is something I think is worthwhile. I wholeheartedly agree that a cure for cancer would be better than this, but we don't have that choice available. Even if we did, it's likely that a few $M taken from a robotic bat project wouldn't even be close to enough.
We can spend money on both. Whether spending tax money on this is a good idea is mostly unrelated to whether spending tax money on medical research is a good idea. Obviously the two are connected through tax rates and thus the total government funding available, but as long as the projects are small relative to the total fund, they should each be evaluated against the alternative of reducing taxes (or increasing them, depending on your preferred viewpoint), rather than against each other.
We're all (well, mostly) smart people here, capable of evaluating complex choices. Let's at least look at the correct set of choices, rather than a rhetoric-filled politically motivated set of options that don't actually exist.
No, but it will be used to catch plenty of mundan criminals comitting more mundane crimes. They sell the system for catching terrorists, then proclaim its success at catching mundane criminals who they couldn't have gotten this sort of warrant to go after without the terrorist bogeyman. And they don't even bother pretending otherwise afterward. They must have noticed no one objects loudly enough to be relevant.
How do you tell if it has crashed or is just starving for HD access without looing at the HDD light?
I leave gkrellm open most of the time, with disk I/O as one of the tickers. If you don't do that routinely, and want something that won't take forever to load on a disk-starved system, or aren't logged in graphically, vmstat is handy. You'll likely care about the IO stats, and possibly the VM stats and context switches. If you want more details on the disk, vmstat -d will give you details including how many IOs got sent to the disk after grouping (likely the best indicator of a disk-starved system; moderate numbers of large reads won't hurt nearly as badly as lots of tiny ones). Adding -n 1 will give you an update every second, which can also be informative.
CPU time spent waiting for IO (the wa field in vmstat or top) is also a good indicator, though not as reliable.
I have no clue how to do the equivalent under Windows.