For what little it's worth, my simplistic idea is to use the orion drive only from earth orbit (or slightly beyond earth) to the heliopause. Not as a launch engine. I sense approbrium in your last question, and that might indicate you couldn't care less when the drive was used.
"The flying crowbar" is an amusing footnote of history. It's a good thing that someone started thinking about the radiation effects before it was finished. Although, if it was only used on those rare occasions when you needed to get payloads to the target AS FAST AS POSSIBLE, maybe the fallout tradeoff would be worth it...
Maybe we have a "flying crowbar" gap in our arsenal;-)
It'd be great if NASA (or someone higher up on the food chain) had the cojones to put an orion drive on a probe. "We're scrapping Voyager, but here's a probe *specifically designed* with instruments and radio for the heliopause and beyond. I know people might freak out about nukes in space, but the only way to get it out there in a reasonable amount of time is nuclear explosions against a pusher plate."
Come to think of it, maybe the idea could be sold to the DoD as a reseach project designed to keep the weapons scientists' bomb making skills up-to-date. It's a deal I'm willing to make.
Thanks for the correction and the link. RFPs are promising, and the timeline includes substantial progress by 2008. So, hopefully enough momentum will be established that the next President won't shred the plan and focus on entirely different goals.
Honestly, I'm not much of a person to judge NASA. Unless stuff like this is put in front of me, I am not going to be aware of progress until the CEV is being rolled to the launch pad.
Add to this that I've become a bit cynical about space programs, since so much manned flight has been promised and not delivered in the past two decades. I don't have any grounds to criticize the current administration on this issue, it's just that I've stopped trusting politicians in general when they promise the stars. Hopefully this time it will be different.
But again, thanks for the info., I'll try to stay better informed.
NASA's budget, overall, has increased every year since Bush started. In this article, NASA money is being moved from the "Earth-Sun" division to elsewhere within NASA (presumably the "Earth-Mars" division, whatever it's real name is).
So, Bush is somewhat responsible for this by saying to NASA, "Your new top priority is putting Man on Mars. Figure out how to do it." and "We're raising your budget, but not by enough to build the whole Mars-Lander program on top of everything else. You still have to cancel some things to make room in the budget." But NASA is responsible for what programs are actually getting cut.
As to the Mars program actually getting done? Bush has been talking about going to Mars every year. Still nothing to show for it, as far as I can tell.
That seems like a high estimate for active users, I'd divide by a higher factor. But, for the sake of argument, let's start with that...
If every active member contributed, it'd cost people $20/year to keep the Voyager. If only 10% contributed, you're up to $200/yr. Maybe it could be made more palatable by saying $16 month. Hey! That really IS "for the cost of a cup of coffee a day..." I think a 1% enrollment rate is more likely than 10%--people aren't that generous, but it's not worth doing every calculation...
You obviously have no Indian-computer-geek friends living in the US on visa;-)
It seems to take FOREVER to get citizenship in the US. I don't know for sure (not being personally invested in the process), but I think there's a mandatory 5-year residency requirement. So, even if these kids' applications were expidited, they wouldn't be eligible for scholarships until they were 23.
My wife has been aggitating for a TiVo for months. Two days ago, I agreed to get a Comcast DVR instead (which we got). One of the reasons was that I didn't trust TiVo to continue long enough in it's current state to justify buying the TiVo box.
In a way, I feel bad that we didn't get a TiVo, because I would now be able to return it to the store and explain that their changed pollicy has rendered it worthless to me as a consumer.
(For all my self-congratulations I should admit that come a year from now, when Comcast starts trying to do pop-up ads in it's DVR service, I expect that it will be very hard to convince my wife that we should stop the service.)
"Their buggies need blinking lights by law, so they have no choice but to give in on some technologies."
Imagine the day when each buggy is required by law to have a black-box recorder, in case of accidents. How weird it would be--lovingly hand-made buggies, with South Korean sensors stapled all over, and a Chinese laptop nailed to the back of the carriage.
I'm not saying it's going happen, but it would be a strange clash of cultures if it did.
I must say I'm surprised that this is their first full-length feature. I remember, now, that the first three were only short films. But considering how well-known the pair are it's sort of amazing that they've never had a full-blown US cinematic release (Is it possible that one of the W&G films was shown as a short before a typical summer blockbuster? I don't remember.)
I think most librarians consider themselves archivists. Part of archiving is filtering, but that is simply to boost the signal/noise ratio. Librarians today are given grants to, say, put online all of the collected historic documents from the local German immigrants. This is extremely valuable to the world. It might sound totally boring to you (and me), but they are trying daily to make as much information freely available as possible. Any decisions about how the information is presented involves filtering, but the librarians are doing a valuable service by that very filtering. Part historians, they are trying to impose a framework on a heap of undesigned coincidences. This is not because they have a god-given right to frame the data they recieve, but because the simple act of presentation has, inherent in the act, some sort of framing/filtering.
They have a truly Sisyphian task, by the way, since the amount of available information is growing far faster then the ranks of librarians.
This ALA President guy sounds like a dink, but I think librarians on the whole are good people. They are natural allies to the whole/. crowd. Librarians are the most vocal voice for fair use and against restrictive DRM laws. The idea of fair use is their whole reason for existence.
From one perspective, North Korea is a more likely nuclear target than anywhere else in the world. It's vast arsenal is aimed at Seoul, the rest of South Korea, and Japan. One of the primary reasons that the US can't simply invade NK like we did Iraq is that North Korea will respond by killing millions of South Korean's and Japanese. It is an impossible political problem. We can't start a war that results in the sacrificial death of millions of civilians of our allies. The only way to fight a war of on our initiative with North Korea is to take out all of their arsenal at once. It seems that the size of the task is so great that we would have to use nuclear weapons if only for the reason that we wouldn't possess enough conventional explosives to do the job. Of course, once you've developed the senario that far, you have to think about what China and Russia would have to say about a bunch of ICBMs being aimed right next door. Their objections/suspicions/possible nuclear reaction would seem to negate the idea that nukes could be used in the first place. And so the problem remains unsolvable.
Knowing that, don't you sometimes wish North Korea's sequence would go: 1. Makes ridiculous, aggressive statements in the media. 2. Pulls out of talks. 3. Demands concessions. 4. US takes North Korea at it's word--bombs every regime palace and military installation. 5. North Koreans stop eating pine needles and start a real life.
I know it's not going to happen. But what's the benefit of having an "irrational cowboy" in office if he doesn't throw down on the bad guys?
I know, I know, I'm being awfully glib with the "bomb back to the stone age" strategy. It's not a real answer.
I agree with you. According to the Bush Doctrine of pre-emption, this announcement, combined with what is known about NK's involvement in A. Q. Kahn's nuclear market, seems to be more of a causus belli than the intelligence against Saddam.
(I'm not interested in debating the justification of the war in Iraq. My assumption is that you aren't either.)
Thanks for doing the analysis that I was unprepared to do. You have a good point that the announcement may be news for the NK people moreso than for the US. It could be considered further substantiation of the rumors that are circulating about the imminent collapse of NK (I know, these rumors seem to arrise in cycles...). So the announcement may be more for the purpose of retaining power over the NK people, either through fear, adulation or reassurance of defensive capability against the evil US. Your theory about a possible attack on Taiwan is frightening; it makes me consider the China-NK relationship in a whole new light. I can see some similarity between the US-NK-China relationship and the US-Palestine-Saudi Arabia relationship. In both cases, the clear and present danger of the middle-man takes the focus off of the larger strategic danger in the region. The US has to enter into strategically disadvantageous relationships with the third country in order to solve the problem of the middle-man. And the third country, of course, has every incentive to see that the problem is never adequately resolved.
That's my question as well. What does this give NK that they didn't have before? They were already holding SK and Japan hostage with the threat of possible nuclear capability. Now the threat is confirmed nuclear capability. What do they get out of this? It seems that they just made themselves more of a target. No WMD questions here. They've got 'em and they're saying they've got 'em.
Not to reply to my own post, but don't be mad at the guys at Administration & Finance, be helpful. They are the ones standing between MS and the consumer by attempting to force MS to play nice. They're in danger of making a mistake, but at least they're trying. They could just as easily do nothing (c.f. the other 49 states) and no one would notice the opportunity passed by. If you call them frothing at the mouth at the fact that they are stupid and are being played by Microsoft, then they might decide, next time, to let business go on as usual.
Most people don't need this reminder, but since I almost did it myself, I thought I'd try to help out the other people like me.
I don't know who the "appropriate representative" is. This department (the source in the article) seems like a good place to start.
Eric Kriss, Massachusetts Secretary of Administration and Finance
Department home page: http://www.mass.gov/eoaf/
Contact info:
Executive Office for Administration & Finance
State House, Room 373
Boston MA, 02133
Phone (617) 727-2040
Fax (617) 727-2779
e-mail contactanf@state.ma.us
I suspect that a flood of email will be ignored.
The more clear, concise arguments to give to the good secretary that are posted on this thread, the easier it will be to reason with the department.
Doom : The Boardgame : The Computer Version!
on
DOOM: The Boardgame
·
· Score: 1
Coming soon, a skillful rendition of the award-winning Doom : The Boardgame, specifically designed for your PC!
- Stop worrying about losing plastic monster pieces or rolling dice under the sofa. Doom : The Boardgame : The Computer Version takes care of all that for you!
-Never worry about running out of table space for maps again; D:TB:TCV comes complete with many custom-designed maps specifically engineered for optimal entertainment.
-In addition, new "single player" feature allows you to play Doom : The Boardgame : The Computer Version against the computer, so you can still play even when your friends are unavailable or nonexistant!
As you can expect, a computer game is a bit more expensive than an old cardboard-and-plastic board game. However, by outsourcing to India, we've managed to keep the price as low as possible. Only twice the price of the board game: $120!
It's better than that. If you read the actual New Yorker article, you find out that the website interview is with the guy who almost, but didn't actually, interveiw Miyazaki. The cult of authorship pervading the New Yorker can be hard to take...
The actual New Yorker article is good, by the way. I didn't know much about Miyazaki before this; here's some things I learned from the article:
1) In addition to "Howl's Moving Castle" coming out (in movie theaters, presumably) this year, good versions of "Nausicaa" and "Porco Rosso" are being released on DVD.
2) "Porco Rosso" and "Kiki's Delivery Service" are probably going to be birthday presents for my nieces and nephews this year.
3) There's a new Studio Ghibli museum in Tokyo that might be well worth a visit, if you find yourself there.
Slashdot Mirror
For what little it's worth, my simplistic idea is to use the orion drive only from earth orbit (or slightly beyond earth) to the heliopause. Not as a launch engine. I sense approbrium in your last question, and that might indicate you couldn't care less when the drive was used.
;-)
"The flying crowbar" is an amusing footnote of history. It's a good thing that someone started thinking about the radiation effects before it was finished. Although, if it was only used on those rare occasions when you needed to get payloads to the target AS FAST AS POSSIBLE, maybe the fallout tradeoff would be worth it...
Maybe we have a "flying crowbar" gap in our arsenal
It'd be great if NASA (or someone higher up on the food chain) had the cojones to put an orion drive on a probe. "We're scrapping Voyager, but here's a probe *specifically designed* with instruments and radio for the heliopause and beyond. I know people might freak out about nukes in space, but the only way to get it out there in a reasonable amount of time is nuclear explosions against a pusher plate." Come to think of it, maybe the idea could be sold to the DoD as a reseach project designed to keep the weapons scientists' bomb making skills up-to-date. It's a deal I'm willing to make.
Thanks for the correction and the link. RFPs are promising, and the timeline includes substantial progress by 2008. So, hopefully enough momentum will be established that the next President won't shred the plan and focus on entirely different goals.
Honestly, I'm not much of a person to judge NASA. Unless stuff like this is put in front of me, I am not going to be aware of progress until the CEV is being rolled to the launch pad.
Add to this that I've become a bit cynical about space programs, since so much manned flight has been promised and not delivered in the past two decades. I don't have any grounds to criticize the current administration on this issue, it's just that I've stopped trusting politicians in general when they promise the stars. Hopefully this time it will be different.
But again, thanks for the info., I'll try to stay better informed.
NASA's budget, overall, has increased every year since Bush started. In this article, NASA money is being moved from the "Earth-Sun" division to elsewhere within NASA (presumably the "Earth-Mars" division, whatever it's real name is).
So, Bush is somewhat responsible for this by saying to NASA, "Your new top priority is putting Man on Mars. Figure out how to do it." and "We're raising your budget, but not by enough to build the whole Mars-Lander program on top of everything else. You still have to cancel some things to make room in the budget." But NASA is responsible for what programs are actually getting cut.
As to the Mars program actually getting done? Bush has been talking about going to Mars every year. Still nothing to show for it, as far as I can tell.
That seems like a high estimate for active users, I'd divide by a higher factor. But, for the sake of argument, let's start with that...
If every active member contributed, it'd cost people $20/year to keep the Voyager.
If only 10% contributed, you're up to $200/yr. Maybe it could be made more palatable by saying $16 month. Hey! That really IS "for the cost of a cup of coffee a day..."
I think a 1% enrollment rate is more likely than 10%--people aren't that generous, but it's not worth doing every calculation...
You obviously have no Indian-computer-geek friends living in the US on visa ;-)
It seems to take FOREVER to get citizenship in the US. I don't know for sure (not being personally invested in the process), but I think there's a mandatory 5-year residency requirement. So, even if these kids' applications were expidited, they wouldn't be eligible for scholarships until they were 23.
My wife has been aggitating for a TiVo for months. Two days ago, I agreed to get a Comcast DVR instead (which we got). One of the reasons was that I didn't trust TiVo to continue long enough in it's current state to justify buying the TiVo box.
In a way, I feel bad that we didn't get a TiVo, because I would now be able to return it to the store and explain that their changed pollicy has rendered it worthless to me as a consumer.
(For all my self-congratulations I should admit that come a year from now, when Comcast starts trying to do pop-up ads in it's DVR service, I expect that it will be very hard to convince my wife that we should stop the service.)
Really, it's not insightful--it's not orginal thought. You've seen this kind of simplistic liberal pouting on every /. post since the year 2000.
It's not funny. Even if a post is not original thought it can still be funny--unless it's a repeat of infinite previous gripes. Then it's just tired.
"Their buggies need blinking lights by law, so they have no choice but to give in on some technologies."
Imagine the day when each buggy is required by law to have a black-box recorder, in case of accidents. How weird it would be--lovingly hand-made buggies, with South Korean sensors stapled all over, and a Chinese laptop nailed to the back of the carriage.
I'm not saying it's going happen, but it would be a strange clash of cultures if it did.
I must say I'm surprised that this is their first full-length feature. I remember, now, that the first three were only short films. But considering how well-known the pair are it's sort of amazing that they've never had a full-blown US cinematic release (Is it possible that one of the W&G films was shown as a short before a typical summer blockbuster? I don't remember.)
I think most librarians consider themselves archivists. Part of archiving is filtering, but that is simply to boost the signal/noise ratio. Librarians today are given grants to, say, put online all of the collected historic documents from the local German immigrants. This is extremely valuable to the world. It might sound totally boring to you (and me), but they are trying daily to make as much information freely available as possible. Any decisions about how the information is presented involves filtering, but the librarians are doing a valuable service by that very filtering. Part historians, they are trying to impose a framework on a heap of undesigned coincidences. This is not because they have a god-given right to frame the data they recieve, but because the simple act of presentation has, inherent in the act, some sort of framing/filtering.
/. crowd. Librarians are the most vocal voice for fair use and against restrictive DRM laws. The idea of fair use is their whole reason for existence.
They have a truly Sisyphian task, by the way, since the amount of available information is growing far faster then the ranks of librarians.
This ALA President guy sounds like a dink, but I think librarians on the whole are good people. They are natural allies to the whole
[Bush is] not dropping 'the bomb' on anyone.
From one perspective, North Korea is a more likely nuclear target than anywhere else in the world. It's vast arsenal is aimed at Seoul, the rest of South Korea, and Japan. One of the primary reasons that the US can't simply invade NK like we did Iraq is that North Korea will respond by killing millions of South Korean's and Japanese. It is an impossible political problem. We can't start a war that results in the sacrificial death of millions of civilians of our allies.
The only way to fight a war of on our initiative with North Korea is to take out all of their arsenal at once. It seems that the size of the task is so great that we would have to use nuclear weapons if only for the reason that we wouldn't possess enough conventional explosives to do the job.
Of course, once you've developed the senario that far, you have to think about what China and Russia would have to say about a bunch of ICBMs being aimed right next door. Their objections/suspicions/possible nuclear reaction would seem to negate the idea that nukes could be used in the first place. And so the problem remains unsolvable.
Knowing that, don't you sometimes wish North Korea's sequence would go:
1. Makes ridiculous, aggressive statements in the media.
2. Pulls out of talks.
3. Demands concessions.
4. US takes North Korea at it's word--bombs every regime palace and military installation.
5. North Koreans stop eating pine needles and start a real life.
I know it's not going to happen. But what's the benefit of having an "irrational cowboy" in office if he doesn't throw down on the bad guys?
I know, I know, I'm being awfully glib with the "bomb back to the stone age" strategy. It's not a real answer.
I agree with you. According to the Bush Doctrine of pre-emption, this announcement, combined with what is known about NK's involvement in A. Q. Kahn's nuclear market, seems to be more of a causus belli than the intelligence against Saddam.
(I'm not interested in debating the justification of the war in Iraq. My assumption is that you aren't either.)
Thanks for doing the analysis that I was unprepared to do.
You have a good point that the announcement may be news for the NK people moreso than for the US. It could be considered further substantiation of the rumors that are circulating about the imminent collapse of NK (I know, these rumors seem to arrise in cycles...). So the announcement may be more for the purpose of retaining power over the NK people, either through fear, adulation or reassurance of defensive capability against the evil US.
Your theory about a possible attack on Taiwan is frightening; it makes me consider the China-NK relationship in a whole new light. I can see some similarity between the US-NK-China relationship and the US-Palestine-Saudi Arabia relationship. In both cases, the clear and present danger of the middle-man takes the focus off of the larger strategic danger in the region. The US has to enter into strategically disadvantageous relationships with the third country in order to solve the problem of the middle-man. And the third country, of course, has every incentive to see that the problem is never adequately resolved.
That's my question as well. What does this give NK that they didn't have before? They were already holding SK and Japan hostage with the threat of possible nuclear capability. Now the threat is confirmed nuclear capability. What do they get out of this? It seems that they just made themselves more of a target. No WMD questions here. They've got 'em and they're saying they've got 'em.
Not to reply to my own post, but don't be mad at the guys at Administration & Finance, be helpful. They are the ones standing between MS and the consumer by attempting to force MS to play nice. They're in danger of making a mistake, but at least they're trying. They could just as easily do nothing (c.f. the other 49 states) and no one would notice the opportunity passed by. If you call them frothing at the mouth at the fact that they are stupid and are being played by Microsoft, then they might decide, next time, to let business go on as usual.
Most people don't need this reminder, but since I almost did it myself, I thought I'd try to help out the other people like me.
I don't know who the "appropriate representative" is. This department (the source in the article) seems like a good place to start.
Eric Kriss, Massachusetts Secretary of Administration and Finance
Department home page: http://www.mass.gov/eoaf/
Contact info:
Executive Office for Administration & Finance
State House, Room 373
Boston MA, 02133
Phone (617) 727-2040
Fax (617) 727-2779
e-mail contactanf@state.ma.us
I suspect that a flood of email will be ignored.
The more clear, concise arguments to give to the good secretary that are posted on this thread, the easier it will be to reason with the department.
Coming soon, a skillful rendition of the award-winning Doom : The Boardgame, specifically designed for your PC!
- Stop worrying about losing plastic monster pieces or rolling dice under the sofa. Doom : The Boardgame : The Computer Version takes care of all that for you!
-Never worry about running out of table space for maps again; D:TB:TCV comes complete with many custom-designed maps specifically engineered for optimal entertainment.
-In addition, new "single player" feature allows you to play Doom : The Boardgame : The Computer Version against the computer, so you can still play even when your friends are unavailable or nonexistant!
As you can expect, a computer game is a bit more expensive than an old cardboard-and-plastic board game. However, by outsourcing to India, we've managed to keep the price as low as possible. Only twice the price of the board game: $120!
Download the game from here: Doom : The Boardgame : The Computer Version
We will be sending you a bill as soon as we clear up a few issues with our legal department.
This was the one thing that kept Microsoft dominant.
It's better than that. If you read the actual New Yorker article, you find out that the website interview is with the guy who almost, but didn't actually, interveiw Miyazaki. The cult of authorship pervading the New Yorker can be hard to take...
The actual New Yorker article is good, by the way. I didn't know much about Miyazaki before this; here's some things I learned from the article:
1) In addition to "Howl's Moving Castle" coming out (in movie theaters, presumably) this year, good versions of "Nausicaa" and "Porco Rosso" are being released on DVD.
2) "Porco Rosso" and "Kiki's Delivery Service" are probably going to be birthday presents for my nieces and nephews this year.
3) There's a new Studio Ghibli museum in Tokyo that might be well worth a visit, if you find yourself there.
His response to similar criticism is acceptable. Why call a typo "trolling"? The anonymity of the medium gives you undue license.
Long live Moore's Law
(Since I don't know any better, I'm going to keep betting on Moore's Law and the inexorable genius of the hardware engineers.)
Comments like this are the best reward for reading /.
Thanks
I can see it now, the robot spends all it's energy every day hunting flies to sustain itself and can't ever find time to surveil the battlefield.