Bitcoins are stupid and Slashdot needs to stop posting articles about them.
I used to think that too. Soooo sick of Bitcoin articles. But now, every Bitcoin article is a new hilarious episode of idiocy, and it gives me my daily dose of schadenfreude, so I'm loving it.
While I don't disagree, if you watch the SpaceX docking coverage on NASA TV, whether they were showing the mission controls, or the view from orbit, there was only one flag and one country name prominently on display, and it wasn't the stars and stripes.
The US is pretty flag-happy, but pound for pound, I think Canada's got us beat. I think the only reason Canada doesn't have its own space launch program is that they can't figure out how to get a rocket shaped like a giant maple leaf to fly.
Look, Canada. You make a good robot arm, OK? Nice job, well done. We won't forget it it's your arm, hell, you put your flag all over it. We're impressed, it's a heck of a piece of hardware.
I swear, talking with Canadians about space exploration is like dealing with an insecure kid brother. "Happy mother's day, Mom, we all made you breakfast." "And I made the orange juice, Mom! Isn't it great orange juice? Make sure you try the orange juice, Mom! The orange juice is the most important part of breakfast!"
You'd have a great point if I had used my argument to justify downloading Game of Thrones torrents. I haven't. I've just sat, waiting, for a year, for Game of Thrones to come out on DVD, gradually hating HBO more and more.
Who cares? Zuckerberg and the big investment banks who launched the IPO have gotten paid. Only people who stand to lose now are the little guys who don't matter.
From your English I'm guessing you're Russian. This is off topic, but just to let you know, the Smithsonian exhibit for Mercury Friendship 7 is pretty honest about the fact that Gagarin came first. Here's a picture of the placard in the Smithsonian:
I want to pay for Game of Thrones. I'm proud to pay for great TV, music, books, and news.
HBO won't let me. I'm standing here with dollars in my fist yelling "TAKE MY MONEY", but they won't do it, because they insist on the ludicrous, outdated concept of "subscription" and "scheduled programming".
There's no comparison between a maglev launch system and what SpaceX is trying to do. Just for a start, the on-paper development cost for Startram rev 1 is 50 times greater than the development cost for everything SpaceX has done so far, and comparing the costs of an "on paper" system to a real flying system is... not a good idea. You're looking at a kid with a bicycle and saying "Y'know, you could get to the grocery store a lot faster if you bought a Boeing 777."
But my original point was that every launch system is indistinguishable from a bomb, and Startram is a perfect example. Startram launch vehicles are slowed down by friction as they fly through the atmosphere. Gen 1 design specs call for a loss of velocity of 800 m/s, which means about 6.5 gigajoules of kinetic energy is transferred to the atmosphere per ton of cargo. For comparison, blowing up a ton of TNT releases just 4 gigajoules. The TNT releases its energy a bit more quickly, but not by all that much. And God help you if you crash into the side wall of the tube at orbital velocity.
Always problematic to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, but you go to war with the army you have, not the army you'd like to have. You don't get to wish you had a new Apollo program so you could re-invent the rocket from scratch. Your goal, if you actually want to go to space instead of dreaming of the stars, is to make the best of the tools you have, improving them as you can.
they tend to fail about 2% of the time
I'm skeptical of this number. Got a source? The vast majority of kerosene-oxygen rockets have been on Soyuz-class boosters, which have a 2.8% failure rate. However, SpaceX is very different from Soyuz, because it can tolerate an engine failure. If you make a ton of conservative assumptions (All Soyuz failures are due to kerosene engine failure, SpaceX engines are no more reliable than Soyuz, each Soyuz has 5 "engines" even though it has 20 combustion chambers), you get a mission failure rate for Falcon 9 of 0.2%. Which would make me nervous if I were using it to commute to work, but we are dealing with rockets here.
Funny you mention jet airliners. Turbofan engines are more reliable than rocket engines, but still, they fail all the damned time. But they don't cause crashes, because the aircraft can keep flying with an engine failure, and if there's a problem on launch, the pilot can abort the takeoff. Which is exactly what SpaceX does.
Anyway, the point is that SpaceX has very different goals than your average space enthusiast. They're not trying to make space travel as easy and reliable as riding a bus. They're trying to get into space, right now, real cheap.
No matter how you do it, to get an object into low Earth orbit you have to give it as much energy as 10 times its weight in TNT. And all that energy can be released in seconds if something goes wrong.
Point being, whether you're talking rockets, spaceplanes or space elevators, there's no way to get into orbit without building something that looks an awful lot like a bomb.
Lot of comments here saying that the SpaceX rockets are pretty much the same old technology as the 1950s, and why aren't we focusing on carbon fiber scramjet single-stage spaceplanes or flying saucers powered by dark energy?
Because two-stage kerosene-and-oxygen rockets *work*. It's proven technology, you *know* it's going to work, and you don't have to spend billions on aerodynamics research to figure out if it's going to outfly its own skin. From there, you can add in high-tech electronics, advanced manufacturing, etc., as SpaceX has done.
This sort of practical solution to real-world problems using tried-and-true technology is something every engineer should appreciate. Including an engineer you all know and love..
If I had a penny for every dollar spent on single-stage-to-orbit research that went nowhere, I'd be Bill Gates.
You can argue that SpaceX's Falcon rocket is "a huge stunt", but that huge stunt actually flies to orbit at a reasonable price. Your "pioneering work in progress" is nothing but a few megabytes of CAD files.
It's a fundamental fact of rocketry: if you can design a single-stage rocket, you can use the same technology to build a much better multi-stage rocket. All of this has been known for half a century. The point SpaceX is making is that the oldschool fundamentals of rocket design haven't gone away, and they're proving the point by combining oldschool rocket science with modern electronics, materials, and manufacturing to make rockets that actually work.
By the way, if you're surprised to see an aerospace company providing mail sorting services to the USPS, you misunderstand what Northrup Grumman, Lockheed, General Dynamics, and Boeing are. They're not really aerospace companies, they're federal government contracting companies. Their primary expertise is in navigating the federal bureaucracy, attaching a money hose to it, and pumping it dry. That includes both admirable and unethical skills: they've got a ton of experience with the reams of required federal paperwork, but also cozy relationships with congress.
But they provide all kinds of non-defense services to the federal government. For instance, Lockheed operates the US Antarctic bases for the NSF.
I don't care about the details of the lawsuit, the courts can sort it out. What I like is that the USPS had the foresight to sign a fixed-price contract with a major federal contractor. Northrup Grumman, Lockheed, General Dynamics and friends are in the business of navigating federal bureaucracy and milking it for every last over-budget dollar.
Three cheers for USPS for drawing a line in the sand.
I agree that the US can make laws to forbid future entry to the US by any category of people, for any reason. Weirdly for a nation of immigrants, the constitution doesn't even *mention* immigration.
But there is a "redress of grievances" problem. If I leave the US and am not allowed back in, but I think that decision is unlawful, how can I demand a hearing or sue if I can't set foot in the US? It's a catch-22.
This is not just a problem faced by tax-evading billionaires!
If your provider actually made any specific and guaranteed speed claims, they are the stupidest ISP on the planet. Providers always use weasel words, just enough to lure you in, not enough to bind them to anything. This is an old, old game, and they're masters at playing it.
The only thing they listen to is market pressure, and if you've got no cable service to compete with them... good luck.
Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that a gram of natural uranium ore is easily detectable with a geiger counter a few feet away. The 235U in a bomb may not emit gamma directly, but uranium's daughter products absolutely do.
Smoke detectors do emit a very small amount of gamma radiation. I suspect the detectors in police vehicles are simple geiger counters: a gamma ray spectrometer (which is what's needed to distinguish between various isotopes) is a much more difficult beast to operate. I wouldn't expect a patrol cop to be able to use one without more training than is worthwhile.
I say yes. From a geiger counter's perspective, a legal, unshielded source could be indistinguishable from a very dangerous illegal source that's sitting behind a couple of inches of lead shielding. So long as the detectors only trigger false positives in highly unusual, easily documented circumstances like this guy's medical test, I see nothing wrong with his. If they went off every time somebody had a bag of potash fertilizer or a couple smoke detectors in their car, it'd be a problem.
I absolutely agree with your point, but my god, does that UK speed camera icon suck. Symbols can outlast objects, but the symbol should *start out* looking like a familiar object in use when the symbol is created. If you removed the text, the "speed camera" icon would be incomprehensible to me. A front-view 35mm camera would be a much better choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Mythbusters (accidentally) did it first.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4YeP7e0tPE&t=190
They should have hired Upton Sinclair to write their paper for them.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
I used to think that too. Soooo sick of Bitcoin articles. But now, every Bitcoin article is a new hilarious episode of idiocy, and it gives me my daily dose of schadenfreude, so I'm loving it.
If the attacker deleted your backup, you didn't actually have a backup.
While I don't disagree, if you watch the SpaceX docking coverage on NASA TV, whether they were showing the mission controls, or the view from orbit, there was only one flag and one country name prominently on display, and it wasn't the stars and stripes.
The US is pretty flag-happy, but pound for pound, I think Canada's got us beat. I think the only reason Canada doesn't have its own space launch program is that they can't figure out how to get a rocket shaped like a giant maple leaf to fly.
Look, Canada. You make a good robot arm, OK? Nice job, well done. We won't forget it it's your arm, hell, you put your flag all over it. We're impressed, it's a heck of a piece of hardware.
I swear, talking with Canadians about space exploration is like dealing with an insecure kid brother. "Happy mother's day, Mom, we all made you breakfast." "And I made the orange juice, Mom! Isn't it great orange juice? Make sure you try the orange juice, Mom! The orange juice is the most important part of breakfast!"
You'd have a great point if I had used my argument to justify downloading Game of Thrones torrents. I haven't. I've just sat, waiting, for a year, for Game of Thrones to come out on DVD, gradually hating HBO more and more.
Who cares? Zuckerberg and the big investment banks who launched the IPO have gotten paid. Only people who stand to lose now are the little guys who don't matter.
From your English I'm guessing you're Russian. This is off topic, but just to let you know, the Smithsonian exhibit for Mercury Friendship 7 is pretty honest about the fact that Gagarin came first. Here's a picture of the placard in the Smithsonian:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cdevers/5775250515/
I want to pay for Game of Thrones. I'm proud to pay for great TV, music, books, and news.
HBO won't let me. I'm standing here with dollars in my fist yelling "TAKE MY MONEY", but they won't do it, because they insist on the ludicrous, outdated concept of "subscription" and "scheduled programming".
There's no comparison between a maglev launch system and what SpaceX is trying to do. Just for a start, the on-paper development cost for Startram rev 1 is 50 times greater than the development cost for everything SpaceX has done so far, and comparing the costs of an "on paper" system to a real flying system is ... not a good idea. You're looking at a kid with a bicycle and saying "Y'know, you could get to the grocery store a lot faster if you bought a Boeing 777."
But my original point was that every launch system is indistinguishable from a bomb, and Startram is a perfect example. Startram launch vehicles are slowed down by friction as they fly through the atmosphere. Gen 1 design specs call for a loss of velocity of 800 m/s, which means about 6.5 gigajoules of kinetic energy is transferred to the atmosphere per ton of cargo. For comparison, blowing up a ton of TNT releases just 4 gigajoules. The TNT releases its energy a bit more quickly, but not by all that much. And God help you if you crash into the side wall of the tube at orbital velocity.
Always problematic to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, but you go to war with the army you have, not the army you'd like to have. You don't get to wish you had a new Apollo program so you could re-invent the rocket from scratch. Your goal, if you actually want to go to space instead of dreaming of the stars, is to make the best of the tools you have, improving them as you can.
I'm skeptical of this number. Got a source? The vast majority of kerosene-oxygen rockets have been on Soyuz-class boosters, which have a 2.8% failure rate. However, SpaceX is very different from Soyuz, because it can tolerate an engine failure. If you make a ton of conservative assumptions (All Soyuz failures are due to kerosene engine failure, SpaceX engines are no more reliable than Soyuz, each Soyuz has 5 "engines" even though it has 20 combustion chambers), you get a mission failure rate for Falcon 9 of 0.2%. Which would make me nervous if I were using it to commute to work, but we are dealing with rockets here.
Funny you mention jet airliners. Turbofan engines are more reliable than rocket engines, but still, they fail all the damned time. But they don't cause crashes, because the aircraft can keep flying with an engine failure, and if there's a problem on launch, the pilot can abort the takeoff. Which is exactly what SpaceX does.
Anyway, the point is that SpaceX has very different goals than your average space enthusiast. They're not trying to make space travel as easy and reliable as riding a bus. They're trying to get into space, right now, real cheap.
*shudder*
No matter how you do it, to get an object into low Earth orbit you have to give it as much energy as 10 times its weight in TNT. And all that energy can be released in seconds if something goes wrong.
Point being, whether you're talking rockets, spaceplanes or space elevators, there's no way to get into orbit without building something that looks an awful lot like a bomb.
Lot of comments here saying that the SpaceX rockets are pretty much the same old technology as the 1950s, and why aren't we focusing on carbon fiber scramjet single-stage spaceplanes or flying saucers powered by dark energy?
Because two-stage kerosene-and-oxygen rockets *work*. It's proven technology, you *know* it's going to work, and you don't have to spend billions on aerodynamics research to figure out if it's going to outfly its own skin. From there, you can add in high-tech electronics, advanced manufacturing, etc., as SpaceX has done.
This sort of practical solution to real-world problems using tried-and-true technology is something every engineer should appreciate. Including an engineer you all know and love..
If I had a penny for every dollar spent on single-stage-to-orbit research that went nowhere, I'd be Bill Gates.
You can argue that SpaceX's Falcon rocket is "a huge stunt", but that huge stunt actually flies to orbit at a reasonable price. Your "pioneering work in progress" is nothing but a few megabytes of CAD files.
It's a fundamental fact of rocketry: if you can design a single-stage rocket, you can use the same technology to build a much better multi-stage rocket. All of this has been known for half a century. The point SpaceX is making is that the oldschool fundamentals of rocket design haven't gone away, and they're proving the point by combining oldschool rocket science with modern electronics, materials, and manufacturing to make rockets that actually work.
By the way, if you're surprised to see an aerospace company providing mail sorting services to the USPS, you misunderstand what Northrup Grumman, Lockheed, General Dynamics, and Boeing are. They're not really aerospace companies, they're federal government contracting companies. Their primary expertise is in navigating the federal bureaucracy, attaching a money hose to it, and pumping it dry. That includes both admirable and unethical skills: they've got a ton of experience with the reams of required federal paperwork, but also cozy relationships with congress.
But they provide all kinds of non-defense services to the federal government. For instance, Lockheed operates the US Antarctic bases for the NSF.
I don't care about the details of the lawsuit, the courts can sort it out. What I like is that the USPS had the foresight to sign a fixed-price contract with a major federal contractor. Northrup Grumman, Lockheed, General Dynamics and friends are in the business of navigating federal bureaucracy and milking it for every last over-budget dollar.
Three cheers for USPS for drawing a line in the sand.
I agree that the US can make laws to forbid future entry to the US by any category of people, for any reason. Weirdly for a nation of immigrants, the constitution doesn't even *mention* immigration.
But there is a "redress of grievances" problem. If I leave the US and am not allowed back in, but I think that decision is unlawful, how can I demand a hearing or sue if I can't set foot in the US? It's a catch-22.
This is not just a problem faced by tax-evading billionaires!
If your provider actually made any specific and guaranteed speed claims, they are the stupidest ISP on the planet. Providers always use weasel words, just enough to lure you in, not enough to bind them to anything. This is an old, old game, and they're masters at playing it.
The only thing they listen to is market pressure, and if you've got no cable service to compete with them... good luck.
Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that a gram of natural uranium ore is easily detectable with a geiger counter a few feet away. The 235U in a bomb may not emit gamma directly, but uranium's daughter products absolutely do.
Smoke detectors do emit a very small amount of gamma radiation. I suspect the detectors in police vehicles are simple geiger counters: a gamma ray spectrometer (which is what's needed to distinguish between various isotopes) is a much more difficult beast to operate. I wouldn't expect a patrol cop to be able to use one without more training than is worthwhile.
Nah, he's right, I was implying I'd be around in 200 years. I hear that's going to be a new feature with the iPhone 8, Immortality Edition.
I say yes. From a geiger counter's perspective, a legal, unshielded source could be indistinguishable from a very dangerous illegal source that's sitting behind a couple of inches of lead shielding. So long as the detectors only trigger false positives in highly unusual, easily documented circumstances like this guy's medical test, I see nothing wrong with his. If they went off every time somebody had a bag of potash fertilizer or a couple smoke detectors in their car, it'd be a problem.
I absolutely agree with your point, but my god, does that UK speed camera icon suck. Symbols can outlast objects, but the symbol should *start out* looking like a familiar object in use when the symbol is created. If you removed the text, the "speed camera" icon would be incomprehensible to me. A front-view 35mm camera would be a much better choice.