Something to think about from A Man For All Seasons:
Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast - man's laws, not God's - and if you cut them down - and you're just the man to do it - d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.
Which means that the entire SSx line is really a dead end, since they aren't going to do anything for getting bulk to orbit more efficiently. These craft are like Jet skis -- nice toys for the rich, but of little interest to the trucking or airline industry.
So now we are responding to childish irresponsibility by lying to the police? Real adult behavior there. Think about it -- you are saying it is OK to destroy the property of someone you disagree with and then lie about having done it.
This is rich. I get as annoyed about cell phone usage inside a theatre as anyone, but please people, these kind of reactions show you to be no better than the people you are condemning.
The main benefit for low-atmosphere launch, as has been pointed out, it safe abort, but that turns into a bad tradeoff if you use liquid hydrogen as fuel (which you currently need to do to get to orbit), as the cooling apparatus is quite heavy and energy intensive.
Current Russian orbital rockets do not use LH/LOX engines. They use Kerosene/LOX, just as the first stage of the Saturns did. LH is not required for orbit, particularly for small payloads like a short duration manned capsule. To put a large payload like the shuttle or a moonship into orbit, you are probably going to need the higher impulse of LH, however.
Unfortunately, given the state of the parenting these days, she probably went home and bawled to daddy and he bought his princess another cell phone.
Actually, I bet the theatre ended up paying for that phone, as it was cheaper than contesting a lawsuit for allowing destruction of property to occur on their premises. Both you and the brat should have been ejected and barred from the premises.
As the man said, your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose. Just because she was being rude gives you know right to commit robbery (you grabbed the phone from her hand), and destruction of her private property. Of course, I doubt that this actually happened, as any sane manager would have involved the police immediately to minimize his company's legal liability. At the very least the officer would have cited, if not arrested you.
This is pretty much the equivalent of keying a car illegally parked in the handicapped space. It feels good, but it still isn't right.
Solids do complicate the abort scenario though, as they are difficult to shut down. There was quite a bit of opposition in NASA to the SRBs until it became obvious that an all-liquid fueled scenario wasn't going to work inside the budget as I recall. Most abort scenarios occur near the pad, right in the regime where you are suggesting an all-solid stage.
This could mean a "fire in the hole" abort scenario, where you have to ignite the liquid stage to pull the vehicle to safety, which could lead to a loss of vehicle when an all-liquid rocket could shut down prior to liftoff. That could get expensive.
Your lack of perspective is showing. You know, it's OK to just admit you are wrong sometimes instead of reaching for examples that really, really don't apply. If you believe otherwise, I'm going to need more than one word answers to justify how either of your "examples" are in any way equivalent to Iraq or Gitmo.
And please, use facts. Not some tinfoil hat bullshit conspiracy web sites in your argument. I no longer have time to deal with on line wackos while we have the real thing in the White House.
The only difference between Democrats and Republicans is the name.
On this issue, perhaps, as the radical feminists who make up a significant part of the hard left base of the Democratic Party are as anti-porn as Jerry Falwell. On the other hand, you are willfully deceiving yourself if you believe that President Gore would have reacted to 9/11 by having a useless penis size contest with Saddam Hussein or by sanctioning what is currently happening at Gitmo.
There is a difference, albeit smaller than most of us would like and Bush counts on the fact that many people will discount that and either not vote or vote for hopeless third parties as some kind of "statement" that in the end means nothing. Something to consider the next time the Naderites or the Libertarians come knocking with their trendy anger and poorly photocopied 'zines.
I think the real problem was the decision for external insulation. The second and third stages of the Saturn V required insulation for their cryogenic tanks, and after much debate it was decided that it needed to be fitted inside the tanks. That made tank assembly a real bitch, and NASA wanted to get to something simpler for the shuttle, as one was supposed to be going up every three weeks or so. Spray on foam is easier to apply than the precision fitted insulation blocks required for internal insulation. The difference is that the internal insulation can't shed. If it did, then you could get insulation fragments in the turbopumps, which would be a Bad Thing.
I don't think that you are going to get a truly reusuable vehicle in the traditional rocket shape, I'm afraid. Saturn worked because it was designed to be thrown away, except for the reentry vehicle. If we had continued along that path, then this is a perfectly sensible approach to the problem. With a reusable vehicle, you are going to have exposed heat shields at launch, it is pretty much unavoidable.
No, they bloody weren't. The shotgun was developed as a hunting weapon, particularly for hunting birds because the dispersal of shot makes hitting a pheasant or a turkey actually possible. Later on, they were found to be useful in crowd control because with small shot loads they aren't automatically fatal, and the dispersal means that one shot can hit several rioters. Also, the shot does not penetrate walls or carry like rifle bullets do, thus avoiding Kent State situations.
Man, you've got to explain everything about firearms to city kids, don't you?
Cane sugar is theoretically of a higher quality, but is more expensive and harder to grow.
Add a "in the Continental United States' climate" to that sentence and I will agree with you. That's why the domestic sugar beet industry is so behind sugar tarrifs that keep the costs of cane sugar elevated in this country. If the sugar from South and Central America and the Carribean was admitted freely, the sugar beet farmers would be ruined. Of course, these same farmers like to rage about "welfare queens" and government "interfering in the Free Market" which is why I firmly believe that farm subsidies need to be moved out of Agriculture and into HHS and labeled as the welfare that they are.
How many charge cycles before the nasty insides of those batteries end up inside a landfill? A hydrogen tank can get a lot more re-use and is probably simpler to recycle than a battery. Sion says that their batteries can be recharged "hundreds of times" which, in addition to smelling of marketing speak (look ma, no numbers!), is still a pretty fast degradation cycle.
Lithium is considered a pollutant, as is sulfur. Perhaps you might wish to re-think the stupidity of fuel cells in that light?
None of my Dells require a floppy for a BIOS update, although they do require Windows for the floppyless update. I think they write the updater to the boot drive and reboot the machine with the flasher in control. At any rate, I haven't needed a floppy for a BIOS update for over a year.
Most recent Dells also support booting from USB Key Drives as well. You could put the updater on one of those and boot to flash the BIOS.
In the case of solar energy, my answer to your question is "does it matter if energy is lost?" A solar powered car is probably not going to very effective unless you live in Phoenix, but using sunlight that is otherwise thrown away to generate hydrogen to ship to New York is another matter. Hydrogen becomes a transport mechanism to get solar energy from areas where it is plentiful to areas with shitty weather. Considering the fact that we don't have zero resistance superconducting wires yet, that may be the most efficient way to do so.
This would also allow the Middle East to remain a player in the energy game. They have access to water along their coastlines and bountiful amounts of sunlight. A hydrogen pipeline across Turkey to Europe could be very profitable indeed, especially considering that many parts of Northern Europe are not know for an abundance of sunny days. Thus, solar powered hydrogen might not be as destabilizing as the alternative, which is to produce it using nuclear energy.
It is rather ironic however that it turns out that if we would have built more nuclear plants and used that energy to begin to move away from petroleum, we would have caused less damage to the global ecosystem than we did by sticking with fossil fuels to avoid the dreaded nucular raydeeashun.
I agree that this is a half-assed article. I'm just trying to shed some light on what makes it a half-assed article, from the economic consulting point of view.
I figured the fact that it was released by an economic consulting firm was the first clue it was half-assed, but thanks for the additional information.
Re:Yes, we were clustering when y'all were in napp
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DECnet Isn't Dead
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Was the 785 the dual-processor 780? My first sysadmin experience was on a cluster of 750s, 'cause my school was cheap. Still, the clustering stuff just worked, and this was in 1986 or 87. The VAXen were sturdy boxes.
We even had a testing MicroVAX/1 at the FDA that survived a momentary power outage that downed the cluster (your tax dollars were too meager to afford UPSes in those days!). The standing joke was that the uVAX was so damn slow it didn't notice that the power went out.
I also remember being called a clueless kid, because I'd never flipped the switches on the front of a PDP to bootstrap it. Good times indeed.
I suggest that you look for a copy of the sadly out of print The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: SOLVED. A librarian in Texas pulled things like the actual weather reports and did statistical analysis on the so-called Triangle and found a few key things:
The "ghost ship" stories like the Marie Celeste are drunken sailor's tales. There is no record of such a ship even being built.
Most of the "clear weather" disappearances, like the TBM Avengers, actually happened during foul weather. No reporters bothered to check the actual weather records.
Quite a few "Bermuda Triangle" disappearances occurred well outside of the triangle, such that it needs to be redefined as pretty much the entire South Atlantic.
And finally, when you factor out all of these circumstances, the unexplained loss rate is average for an area with that much shipping traffic.
I would furthermore add that since the advent of GPS and more reliable marine radio, we sure haven't heard much noise from the Graveyard of the Atlantic.
How much did Carly make ruining HP again? Hell, I would have gladly ruined the company for a measly six million bucks, in advance, but the executive search firm never did call me.
Of course it is sustainable, there will always be those that will buy the latest and greatest. $600 for a videocard is not a big deal, it's all relative to your income, lots of people will get one.
I can certainly afford such a video card, but none of the games that require that kind of processing power are worth the expenditure. $600 buys a lot of beermaking supplies, and I'll get far more enjoyment out of the money.
As far as your other statements go, the best CRPG I've played recently (KoTOR) came out on Xbox first, GTA: San Andreas hit PS2 first, and just about every sports game also ignores the PC at initial launch. Furthermore, the nature of console gaming allows services like Gamefly and Blockbuster to rent games, so gamers are not stuck spending huge bucks on games with lots of promise that turn out to be unbelievable piles of crap. I am so glad I rented Fable rather than buying it, whereas I am stuck with Black and White. Demos don't work, as both of these games were fun at the lower levels only to turn on the user after time was invested.
Console game sales have exceeded PC game sales for a while now, and they have lower development and support costs to boot. Once all of the major console platforms are non-Intel based, PC gamers may very well find themselves in the same boat as Mac and Linux gamers today -- unless a game is a runaway hit, it simply isn't economically viable to port the game to the PC architecture. Combine that with HDTV monitors and perhaps keyboard/mouse support from the console folks, and the economics start to look even bleaker.
I can buy a PS3 and an Xbox 360, both of which will have games that aren't technology demos masquerading as entertainment (hi id!). Six hundred bucks for a video card is outrageous given the sorry state of PC games today. The kind of games that excel on the PC (RTS, MMORG, and other RPGs) don't really need that kind of processing power, particularly at that price point.
Anybody else think that this sort of thing just isn't sustainable?
Worse yet, my experience with MS-Offixe/OS X has been terrible. Maybe it's because my mac is dreadfully under-spec, but MS Office's stability was lamentable, even for a M$ product.
And OpenOffice totally blows as well. Takes over two hours to load. Maybe it's because I'm trying to run it on my Coleco Adam, but hey.
The problem is indeed that you don't know if it will work until it is too late, so you might provoke a war with North Korea thinking you can neutralize their missiles and lose LA and Seattle. Your argument cuts both ways.
And their is a word for people who throw good money after bad: fools. Isn't that the argument for shutting down the Shuttle program now? When it became obvious that the battleship was truly a bad idea (and probably always had been) the Montanas were scrapped on the ways, despite all of that investment. We have prototypes of the Raptor, and it doesn't look necessary. I would much prefer to shut down the line and redirect the money toward producing a lightweight armored vehicle that offers at least some protection from IEDs. That's what our soldiers need right now. Only the defense contractors need the F-22. Perhaps it is time for them to make a little sacrifice for their country, otherwise I will ask them why they hate America so much.
Today's low success weapon is tomorrow's most useful weapon.
Not always. Sometimes today's low success weapon is tomorrow's low success weapon. An excellent example would be the all big gun battleship, which never proved decisive during its entire existence, and nearly bankrupted several of the nations who engaged in the arms races to build them. They sure looked pretty, though. The battlecruisers that were inspired by the limitations on speed of the dreadnoughts were even a greater failure, as the sailors who served on the HMS Hood could have attested to.
Another example would be the dirigible bomber. The Germans would have been better off building big conventional artillery pieces with the money they wasted on those.
The question is are there weapons systems under development today that have similar low probability of decisively influencing a battle, a short useful lifespan, and commesurately high cost. The F-22 seems to be a prime candidate, as it looks like remotely piloted vehicles are rapidly approaching viability and no conceivable enemy has an aircraft more capable than the current generation of fighters.
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Which means that the entire SSx line is really a dead end, since they aren't going to do anything for getting bulk to orbit more efficiently. These craft are like Jet skis -- nice toys for the rich, but of little interest to the trucking or airline industry.
This is rich. I get as annoyed about cell phone usage inside a theatre as anyone, but please people, these kind of reactions show you to be no better than the people you are condemning.
Current Russian orbital rockets do not use LH/LOX engines. They use Kerosene/LOX, just as the first stage of the Saturns did. LH is not required for orbit, particularly for small payloads like a short duration manned capsule. To put a large payload like the shuttle or a moonship into orbit, you are probably going to need the higher impulse of LH, however.
Actually, I bet the theatre ended up paying for that phone, as it was cheaper than contesting a lawsuit for allowing destruction of property to occur on their premises. Both you and the brat should have been ejected and barred from the premises.
As the man said, your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose. Just because she was being rude gives you know right to commit robbery (you grabbed the phone from her hand), and destruction of her private property. Of course, I doubt that this actually happened, as any sane manager would have involved the police immediately to minimize his company's legal liability. At the very least the officer would have cited, if not arrested you.
This is pretty much the equivalent of keying a car illegally parked in the handicapped space. It feels good, but it still isn't right.
This could mean a "fire in the hole" abort scenario, where you have to ignite the liquid stage to pull the vehicle to safety, which could lead to a loss of vehicle when an all-liquid rocket could shut down prior to liftoff. That could get expensive.
And please, use facts. Not some tinfoil hat bullshit conspiracy web sites in your argument. I no longer have time to deal with on line wackos while we have the real thing in the White House.
On this issue, perhaps, as the radical feminists who make up a significant part of the hard left base of the Democratic Party are as anti-porn as Jerry Falwell. On the other hand, you are willfully deceiving yourself if you believe that President Gore would have reacted to 9/11 by having a useless penis size contest with Saddam Hussein or by sanctioning what is currently happening at Gitmo.
There is a difference, albeit smaller than most of us would like and Bush counts on the fact that many people will discount that and either not vote or vote for hopeless third parties as some kind of "statement" that in the end means nothing. Something to consider the next time the Naderites or the Libertarians come knocking with their trendy anger and poorly photocopied 'zines.
I don't think that you are going to get a truly reusuable vehicle in the traditional rocket shape, I'm afraid. Saturn worked because it was designed to be thrown away, except for the reentry vehicle. If we had continued along that path, then this is a perfectly sensible approach to the problem. With a reusable vehicle, you are going to have exposed heat shields at launch, it is pretty much unavoidable.
Man, you've got to explain everything about firearms to city kids, don't you?
Add a "in the Continental United States' climate" to that sentence and I will agree with you. That's why the domestic sugar beet industry is so behind sugar tarrifs that keep the costs of cane sugar elevated in this country. If the sugar from South and Central America and the Carribean was admitted freely, the sugar beet farmers would be ruined. Of course, these same farmers like to rage about "welfare queens" and government "interfering in the Free Market" which is why I firmly believe that farm subsidies need to be moved out of Agriculture and into HHS and labeled as the welfare that they are.
Lithium is considered a pollutant, as is sulfur. Perhaps you might wish to re-think the stupidity of fuel cells in that light?
Most recent Dells also support booting from USB Key Drives as well. You could put the updater on one of those and boot to flash the BIOS.
Would you care to share the reading list? That topic sounds both interesting and useful in this day and age.
This would also allow the Middle East to remain a player in the energy game. They have access to water along their coastlines and bountiful amounts of sunlight. A hydrogen pipeline across Turkey to Europe could be very profitable indeed, especially considering that many parts of Northern Europe are not know for an abundance of sunny days. Thus, solar powered hydrogen might not be as destabilizing as the alternative, which is to produce it using nuclear energy.
It is rather ironic however that it turns out that if we would have built more nuclear plants and used that energy to begin to move away from petroleum, we would have caused less damage to the global ecosystem than we did by sticking with fossil fuels to avoid the dreaded nucular raydeeashun.
I figured the fact that it was released by an economic consulting firm was the first clue it was half-assed, but thanks for the additional information.
We even had a testing MicroVAX/1 at the FDA that survived a momentary power outage that downed the cluster (your tax dollars were too meager to afford UPSes in those days!). The standing joke was that the uVAX was so damn slow it didn't notice that the power went out.
I also remember being called a clueless kid, because I'd never flipped the switches on the front of a PDP to bootstrap it. Good times indeed.
I thought US talk radio was pretty much proof positive that Neanderthal man never left us. He just got dumber and wrapped himself in the flag.
I would furthermore add that since the advent of GPS and more reliable marine radio, we sure haven't heard much noise from the Graveyard of the Atlantic.
How much did Carly make ruining HP again? Hell, I would have gladly ruined the company for a measly six million bucks, in advance, but the executive search firm never did call me.
I can certainly afford such a video card, but none of the games that require that kind of processing power are worth the expenditure. $600 buys a lot of beermaking supplies, and I'll get far more enjoyment out of the money.
As far as your other statements go, the best CRPG I've played recently (KoTOR) came out on Xbox first, GTA: San Andreas hit PS2 first, and just about every sports game also ignores the PC at initial launch. Furthermore, the nature of console gaming allows services like Gamefly and Blockbuster to rent games, so gamers are not stuck spending huge bucks on games with lots of promise that turn out to be unbelievable piles of crap. I am so glad I rented Fable rather than buying it, whereas I am stuck with Black and White. Demos don't work, as both of these games were fun at the lower levels only to turn on the user after time was invested.
Console game sales have exceeded PC game sales for a while now, and they have lower development and support costs to boot. Once all of the major console platforms are non-Intel based, PC gamers may very well find themselves in the same boat as Mac and Linux gamers today -- unless a game is a runaway hit, it simply isn't economically viable to port the game to the PC architecture. Combine that with HDTV monitors and perhaps keyboard/mouse support from the console folks, and the economics start to look even bleaker.
Anybody else think that this sort of thing just isn't sustainable?
And OpenOffice totally blows as well. Takes over two hours to load. Maybe it's because I'm trying to run it on my Coleco Adam, but hey.
And their is a word for people who throw good money after bad: fools. Isn't that the argument for shutting down the Shuttle program now? When it became obvious that the battleship was truly a bad idea (and probably always had been) the Montanas were scrapped on the ways, despite all of that investment. We have prototypes of the Raptor, and it doesn't look necessary. I would much prefer to shut down the line and redirect the money toward producing a lightweight armored vehicle that offers at least some protection from IEDs. That's what our soldiers need right now. Only the defense contractors need the F-22. Perhaps it is time for them to make a little sacrifice for their country, otherwise I will ask them why they hate America so much.
Not always. Sometimes today's low success weapon is tomorrow's low success weapon. An excellent example would be the all big gun battleship, which never proved decisive during its entire existence, and nearly bankrupted several of the nations who engaged in the arms races to build them. They sure looked pretty, though. The battlecruisers that were inspired by the limitations on speed of the dreadnoughts were even a greater failure, as the sailors who served on the HMS Hood could have attested to.
Another example would be the dirigible bomber. The Germans would have been better off building big conventional artillery pieces with the money they wasted on those.
The question is are there weapons systems under development today that have similar low probability of decisively influencing a battle, a short useful lifespan, and commesurately high cost. The F-22 seems to be a prime candidate, as it looks like remotely piloted vehicles are rapidly approaching viability and no conceivable enemy has an aircraft more capable than the current generation of fighters.