Enough, already! I'm going to get myself a small whiteboard, and every week I'll accept one update on the name of this product so that I can write "Firebird = Phoenix" or "Firefox = Phoenix" or "Bruce = Phoenix" or whatever, and then I'm just going to call it Phoenix no matter how many twists and turns the project's name takes. Ugh.
(Wishing I had a link to that Dilbert strip about a preliminary preplanning meeting to think up a name for a project.)
I must agree with one point in the article, at least. The way to use the 'net in politics is to use it to the hilt, and assume that the traditional implements of power will act against you. Using it as just a nontraditional means of fundraising and then trying to spend the money with the people you just bypassed is not too bright.
Instead, go *completely* nontraditional. Don't buy into the claim that you have to spend big to win big. For very little money a candidate can now have what amounts to his own publishing empire, one that's very difficult for the entrenched interests to silence or drown out. Point out that the other guys are spending $100 million to win a job that pays $0.5 million a year, and ask if that seems fiscally responsible, or even sane. Publish *detailed analyses* instead of meaningless sound bites and vague strokes, for people who want to read 'em, and make a point of the fact that *your* thinking is always available for study while *they* seem to want to hide all their details. Dredge up the news that's important to you, and become known as a place where people can find the stuff that's kept out of the daily papers. Don't try to outspend 'em; try to out-write 'em.
Ya think they'd go that far? How much ya figure it costs to repair one of those signboards after an irate victim puts his fist through it or rips it off the wall and stamps on it?
Did Mr. Bradbury say how the billboards decide to whom they should advertise, when two people are there? I say this either won't work (because the board has no basis for decision) or it won't give you away (because it'll rotate among all the viewers and there's no way to know who triggered which ad.)
For that matter, how would anyone know that the current ad. was triggered by the presence of *any* of the bystanders? Do the boards go blank when the only people nearby are not known to have any interests that coincide with the agency's current customers? I expect that instead they would pick something from the master list, to keep those dollars flowing in.
I also think you're going to have a tough time selling advertising space when you have to admit that you don't know how much exposure your client's copy will get or how much he'll be paying you per week.
Targeted advertising is also only attractive to clients who only care about grabbing off their competitors' customers. A client who wants to expand the whole market (and take the lion's share of the new customers) will want to be exposed to people who *don't yet* buy anything like his product.
I think that micro-targeting is going to be a very hard sell.
Finally, users of these data have to contend with the fact that the person who bought the object from a store may not be the person who owns it now. People give away "gently used" clothing, sell stuff in the classifieds and at yard sales, and even pick each other's junk. People buy stuff as gifts for other people, or to outfit their dependents. There's no good way to know whether the person who bought the object is the person who is using it, even one hour after the sale. What's that you say? whiskey ad.s showing up in the first-grade cafeteria? blurbs for feminine-hygiene products following Hubby's new Christmas necktie around? And I'm expected to pay your agency for this kind of "service"?
"because the interrogating officer also happened to be a little short on cash. Not only does your future convenience hinge on his report, but other RFID traces show you going places your wife/employer/pick-another would be unhappy about if they knew. Now we could just keep this between the two of us, if..."
You're telling me I have an opportunity to help punish the crime of the century *and* an opportunity to help remove a corrupt policeman? Man, it just gets better and better. I must've landed on a Double Citizenship Points square.
"...pop up...." Where exactly are these ad.s going to pop up?
I get billions of ad.s for Viagra (or some ripoff) now. What's changed?
But then, I try not to do things that I believe to be wrong. And if I don't believe it's wrong, why would I be embarrassed? OTOH if I *have* done something that I believe to be wrong, thank you for rebuking my improper behavior.
"Well, Mr/Ms mwood, from data obtained from the RFID devices on your whitie tighties and those of Mohammed Atta, we see that on a regular basis you walked within talking range of him for a six month interval prior to the attacks. We'd like to talk to you about your potential conversations."
Me: "Where? [...] OMG, that *was* him! Yes, please. What would you like to know?"
Uhhuh. The loyalty-cards are a joke. People lend them all the time. I've even had store clerks *ask* if I would lend mine to the person behind me, who forgot his.
And if they make the tags hard to get out, people will form groups and shop for each other. What fun.
Yeah, I have a great deal of respect for some of those European privacy laws. The one thing I don't know, though, is what you can do to a person or organization which ignores them. Can you slap the offender hard enough to hurt?
'In the scary case, WalMart puts an RFID tag on my tighty-whities and then I go to Target and over the intercom comes a voice that says, "John Allman, Welcome to Target. We have tighty-whities for sale."'
And that's what you call *scary*? Don't go to any horror movies; your heart would never take the strain.
The only scary thing I see about it is if I were a Target stockholder and I found they were wasting my money on schemes to sell stuff to people who had just bought the same stuff elsewhere and thus do not need any more.
Now if you had said, "hilarious," or, "ludicrous," or, "stupid," I would grant you that. But, "scary?"
So set up an RFID swap club. Extract a few of the things and exchange them with comparative strangers. Have your club make up packets and mail them to other clubs. Poison the database.
So what will the scary evil gummint do with the knowledge that I'm standing on a street where lots of people know I often stand at this time of day in the city where I'm known to live? Or maybe they have some nefarious scheme that can only succeed if they know what brand of underwear I use?
Please tell me specifically what they can do with this. Enquiring minds want to know.
"We already *have* a lot of tonnage in the Shuttle design. It's got a hefty payload."
So, how many Shuttle flights would it take to haul the materials to build a habitat with one million cubic feet of habitable space. One? two?...a thousand? Because 1e6 cu. ft. is *dinky* compared to what you'd need for a serious, permanent orbital environment and way station. We'll have a dozen, all larger than that.
How many Shuttle flights has it taken to build the tiny portion of the ISS that's been assembled so far? How many more to complete it (assuming we don't get a better idea long before it is completed)?
On your other point: a city bus is rarely filled to capacity either, so is it a waste of money to run the buses? No, not compared to the amount of money you'd spend making fifty different sizes of public vehicle. Think about the cost of making fifty different sizes of *launch* vehicle. The only thing I can think of that addresses this problem w.r.t. transport to orbit is the orbital tower, and since that depends on the use of materials for which there is as yet not even a theoretical basis for their creation, there's no way of knowing how much *that*'s gonna cost.
Or you can look at it on a different scale and say that the cost of the STS scales very nicely with the size of the payload. It costs pretty much exactly a billion times as much to ship ten billion tons to orbit via shuttle as it does to ship ten tons, since you'll be making a billion trips. "Ten billion tons" is not wildly out of scale w.r.t. the amount of material needed to build a useful amount of permanent orbital habitat with its infrastructure. (Looking at the size of the project in this way will explain why people want to set up mines and mass-drivers on the moon: it doesn't scale so well but the operating cost should be much lower.)
Finally, it costs a lot to run a railroad train from coast to coast, so they put more than one item of freight on each train. Is there some way we can do a better job of filling each Shuttle flight to capacity, without making missions impossibly complex? (Unfortunately there is, as yet, very little worth bringing *back*, so every return leg is wasted except from the point of view of the passengers and crew.:-) Isn't there some sort of "small missions bus" that can carry four or five or twenty-five little jobs, eject them appropriately, and then either be thrown away or return to the mothership for reuse?
"The ISS project has not been useful for significant scientific research. Unmanned craft, on the other hand, have."
So, how much have we learned about how to build human habitats in space, and how humans adapt to life in such habitats, by using unmanned craft?
Robots have done a lot of really interesting geology and atmospheric science which would be rather pointless if attempted from a manned craft in earth orbit. Robots haven't really done anything I can think of to advance our understanding of ourselves. You don't use a particle accelerator to study economics or astronomy; there are other kinds of lab.s for those fields. Whether a given kind of lab. is useful to science depends on what you want to study.
How does the Challenger explosion connect with orbital refuelling? I suppose the ISS is a lousy place to store SRBs on cold days, but (a) the SRBs are thrown away before you reach orbit, and (b) one day in vacuum is as cold as another. Naturally fuel storage and transfer wouldn't take place inside the habitat, anymore than the corner gas station keeps its gasoline in jugs stacked in the office. Of course, the gas station is surrounded by oxidizer and the space station isn't, so fuel safety is a somewhat different proposition in orbit....
Why are people questioning the energy cost of hauling fuel and interplanetary spacecraft to the moon for launching? That's the dumb way to do it. You make the fuel and the spacecraft *on the moon*. The whole point of starting from orbit, or from the moon, is to avoid hauling hundreds of tons of stuff up from ground level in the first place. It's been the plan for 50 years or more.
Awww, come on. I dunno what was originally envisioned, but what we got is clearly a pilot project. It's way too small to be a serious refueling stop. I'm sure that all kinds of good science are being done as manpower and air leaks permit, but it's arguable that the most important thing we're learning from it is how to build space habitats.
(Well, we're also learning that some Russians/Yanks are not so bad after all and that even our governments can get along if they care to try. That's very useful.)
There are some things that we will have to scale up quite a bit in order to make a space station that's more than a floating lab. For one thing, we need a lot more transport capacity: more tonnage per trip and many more trips per year. It takes a *lot of stuff* to build a big space station, and at, what, 4000kg per trip? it's going to take forever.
Obviously the *budget* is going to have to increase quite a bit. Sure, the ISS is already expensive, but ask yourself what it would cost to build lower Manhattan from scratch, from the seabed up, and you'll get a feel for the amount of material, work, and money it takes to build something like what you see in _2001: a Space Odyssey_.
All this scaling suggests something else: *ownership* is going to have to scale up. The ISS is, technically, international since two nations are doing most of it, but what if there were a dozen nations as deeply involved, or a hundred? Of course each nation has its own limits as to what it could reasonably ask itself to contribute to such an effort. (Don't ask me how anyone is going to make the case to governments that are busy figuring out how they're going to pay for enough bullets to settle the score with the tribe next door.)-:
All of these are doable if enough people care, and there are reasons to care. But it's going to be hideously expensive, it's going to take a long time, and it's going to take a lot of steps and leave a lot of pilot projects and outright failures in its wake. The ISS is doing a lot for us, but it's never gonna be that big wheel in the sky -- it never could have been.
Yeah, a Newtonian already has a folded path. I was wondering what was going on. This is a slightly different use of the word "folded", I think. The text is not precisely clear and the photo, while rather neat, didn't help as much as I expected.
Instead of going straight out the side of the tube (normal to the tube's surface, that is), the path from the secondary mirror goes back in the general direction of the primary, but canted a bit so that you don't need a hole in the primary. The idea is to bring the path out somewhere near your natural eye height, so you don't have to stand on a ladder to view through such a monster as you would with the 90-degree bend.
Yeah, it's just cloning; it's not like you were talking about GM foods or something.:-)
(Interesting: in the U.S. it's wrong to make things that are identical to other things, but okay to make things that are new and different; in Europe it's just the opposite. Hmmm.)
I think you two have just described, with reasonable accuracy, the way that many people of East and West view one another's cultures.
It extends far beyond IT. I recall an article on culture clashes in some other business. The big boss (from Japan) felt disrespected when his American subordinates questioned his orders; the Americans felt disrespected that the boss wasn't listening to their concerns. It can be counterproductive and even dangerous to assume that "everybody who is decent does everything the same way I was taught." And the conflicts tend to come in areas which we are least likely to consider as questionable.
"The article specifically states that they were able to travel 3x further using this process of splitting out the hydrogen from standard diesel fuel."
So why has *no one* been able to explain where the magic free-as-in-beer energy comes from? Energy that wasn't put into the fuel during the cracking process, so it must have been in the feedstock? What is eating up 2/3 of the energy latent in the feedstock when it is burned rather than cracked?
I had not read the article, but I have now. It gets off to a poor start, confusing the fuel cell with the catalytic process that provides the hydrogen. I'm not sure how much to trust anything else they say after that. The writer seems confused as to whether the advantage is "three times more efficient" (which would be 4x as much energy) or 3x as much energy (which would be two times more efficient). The article says, "a truck with a given amount of diesel," but the truck is not burning diesel anymore; it's burning hydrogen and the amount it carries is not stated. I may have been away from the chem. lab. for a long time, but I remember how to report experiments precisely and this reporter doesn't even come close. It's impossible to determine what the article really means.
Slashdot Mirror
Not _Fireball XL-5_? :-)
Enough, already! I'm going to get myself a small whiteboard, and every week I'll accept one update on the name of this product so that I can write "Firebird = Phoenix" or "Firefox = Phoenix" or "Bruce = Phoenix" or whatever, and then I'm just going to call it Phoenix no matter how many twists and turns the project's name takes. Ugh.
(Wishing I had a link to that Dilbert strip about a preliminary preplanning meeting to think up a name for a project.)
I must agree with one point in the article, at least. The way to use the 'net in politics is to use it to the hilt, and assume that the traditional implements of power will act against you. Using it as just a nontraditional means of fundraising and then trying to spend the money with the people you just bypassed is not too bright.
Instead, go *completely* nontraditional. Don't buy into the claim that you have to spend big to win big. For very little money a candidate can now have what amounts to his own publishing empire, one that's very difficult for the entrenched interests to silence or drown out. Point out that the other guys are spending $100 million to win a job that pays $0.5 million a year, and ask if that seems fiscally responsible, or even sane. Publish *detailed analyses* instead of meaningless sound bites and vague strokes, for people who want to read 'em, and make a point of the fact that *your* thinking is always available for study while *they* seem to want to hide all their details. Dredge up the news that's important to you, and become known as a place where people can find the stuff that's kept out of the daily papers. Don't try to outspend 'em; try to out-write 'em.
Ya think they'd go that far? How much ya figure it costs to repair one of those signboards after an irate victim puts his fist through it or rips it off the wall and stamps on it?
Did Mr. Bradbury say how the billboards decide to whom they should advertise, when two people are there? I say this either won't work (because the board has no basis for decision) or it won't give you away (because it'll rotate among all the viewers and there's no way to know who triggered which ad.)
For that matter, how would anyone know that the current ad. was triggered by the presence of *any* of the bystanders? Do the boards go blank when the only people nearby are not known to have any interests that coincide with the agency's current customers? I expect that instead they would pick something from the master list, to keep those dollars flowing in.
I also think you're going to have a tough time selling advertising space when you have to admit that you don't know how much exposure your client's copy will get or how much he'll be paying you per week.
Targeted advertising is also only attractive to clients who only care about grabbing off their competitors' customers. A client who wants to expand the whole market (and take the lion's share of the new customers) will want to be exposed to people who *don't yet* buy anything like his product.
I think that micro-targeting is going to be a very hard sell.
Finally, users of these data have to contend with the fact that the person who bought the object from a store may not be the person who owns it now. People give away "gently used" clothing, sell stuff in the classifieds and at yard sales, and even pick each other's junk. People buy stuff as gifts for other people, or to outfit their dependents. There's no good way to know whether the person who bought the object is the person who is using it, even one hour after the sale. What's that you say? whiskey ad.s showing up in the first-grade cafeteria? blurbs for feminine-hygiene products following Hubby's new Christmas necktie around? And I'm expected to pay your agency for this kind of "service"?
"because the interrogating officer also happened to be a little short on cash. Not only does your future convenience hinge on his report, but other RFID traces show you going places your wife/employer/pick-another would be unhappy about if they knew. Now we could just keep this between the two of us, if..."
You're telling me I have an opportunity to help punish the crime of the century *and* an opportunity to help remove a corrupt policeman? Man, it just gets better and better. I must've landed on a Double Citizenship Points square.
"...pop up...." Where exactly are these ad.s going to pop up?
I get billions of ad.s for Viagra (or some ripoff) now. What's changed?
But then, I try not to do things that I believe to be wrong. And if I don't believe it's wrong, why would I be embarrassed? OTOH if I *have* done something that I believe to be wrong, thank you for rebuking my improper behavior.
"Well, Mr/Ms mwood, from data obtained from the RFID devices on your whitie tighties and those of Mohammed Atta, we see that on a regular basis you walked within talking range of him for a six month interval prior to the attacks. We'd like to talk to you about your potential conversations."
Me: "Where? [...] OMG, that *was* him! Yes, please. What would you like to know?"
What's the problem?
Let me know when I can have it for $29.95/mo with unlimited usage, and I'll stop yawning.
Uhhuh. The loyalty-cards are a joke. People lend them all the time. I've even had store clerks *ask* if I would lend mine to the person behind me, who forgot his.
And if they make the tags hard to get out, people will form groups and shop for each other. What fun.
Yeah, I have a great deal of respect for some of those European privacy laws. The one thing I don't know, though, is what you can do to a person or organization which ignores them. Can you slap the offender hard enough to hurt?
'In the scary case, WalMart puts an RFID tag on my tighty-whities and then I go to Target and over the intercom comes a voice that says, "John Allman, Welcome to Target. We have tighty-whities for sale."'
And that's what you call *scary*? Don't go to any horror movies; your heart would never take the strain.
The only scary thing I see about it is if I were a Target stockholder and I found they were wasting my money on schemes to sell stuff to people who had just bought the same stuff elsewhere and thus do not need any more.
Now if you had said, "hilarious," or, "ludicrous," or, "stupid," I would grant you that. But, "scary?"
So set up an RFID swap club. Extract a few of the things and exchange them with comparative strangers. Have your club make up packets and mail them to other clubs. Poison the database.
So what will the scary evil gummint do with the knowledge that I'm standing on a street where lots of people know I often stand at this time of day in the city where I'm known to live? Or maybe they have some nefarious scheme that can only succeed if they know what brand of underwear I use?
Please tell me specifically what they can do with this. Enquiring minds want to know.
"We already *have* a lot of tonnage in the Shuttle design. It's got a hefty payload."
:-) Isn't there some sort of "small missions bus" that can carry four or five or twenty-five little jobs, eject them appropriately, and then either be thrown away or return to the mothership for reuse?
So, how many Shuttle flights would it take to haul the materials to build a habitat with one million cubic feet of habitable space. One? two?...a thousand? Because 1e6 cu. ft. is *dinky* compared to what you'd need for a serious, permanent orbital environment and way station. We'll have a dozen, all larger than that.
How many Shuttle flights has it taken to build the tiny portion of the ISS that's been assembled so far? How many more to complete it (assuming we don't get a better idea long before it is completed)?
On your other point: a city bus is rarely filled to capacity either, so is it a waste of money to run the buses? No, not compared to the amount of money you'd spend making fifty different sizes of public vehicle. Think about the cost of making fifty different sizes of *launch* vehicle. The only thing I can think of that addresses this problem w.r.t. transport to orbit is the orbital tower, and since that depends on the use of materials for which there is as yet not even a theoretical basis for their creation, there's no way of knowing how much *that*'s gonna cost.
Or you can look at it on a different scale and say that the cost of the STS scales very nicely with the size of the payload. It costs pretty much exactly a billion times as much to ship ten billion tons to orbit via shuttle as it does to ship ten tons, since you'll be making a billion trips. "Ten billion tons" is not wildly out of scale w.r.t. the amount of material needed to build a useful amount of permanent orbital habitat with its infrastructure. (Looking at the size of the project in this way will explain why people want to set up mines and mass-drivers on the moon: it doesn't scale so well but the operating cost should be much lower.)
Finally, it costs a lot to run a railroad train from coast to coast, so they put more than one item of freight on each train. Is there some way we can do a better job of filling each Shuttle flight to capacity, without making missions impossibly complex? (Unfortunately there is, as yet, very little worth bringing *back*, so every return leg is wasted except from the point of view of the passengers and crew.
Let me know when you find a phone with a facing pair of 5"x8" 1200dpi displays for reading ebooks. That's about what a printed hardback is equal to.
"The ISS project has not been useful for significant scientific research. Unmanned craft, on the other hand, have."
So, how much have we learned about how to build human habitats in space, and how humans adapt to life in such habitats, by using unmanned craft?
Robots have done a lot of really interesting geology and atmospheric science which would be rather pointless if attempted from a manned craft in earth orbit. Robots haven't really done anything I can think of to advance our understanding of ourselves. You don't use a particle accelerator to study economics or astronomy; there are other kinds of lab.s for those fields. Whether a given kind of lab. is useful to science depends on what you want to study.
How does the Challenger explosion connect with orbital refuelling? I suppose the ISS is a lousy place to store SRBs on cold days, but (a) the SRBs are thrown away before you reach orbit, and (b) one day in vacuum is as cold as another. Naturally fuel storage and transfer wouldn't take place inside the habitat, anymore than the corner gas station keeps its gasoline in jugs stacked in the office. Of course, the gas station is surrounded by oxidizer and the space station isn't, so fuel safety is a somewhat different proposition in orbit....
Why are people questioning the energy cost of hauling fuel and interplanetary spacecraft to the moon for launching? That's the dumb way to do it. You make the fuel and the spacecraft *on the moon*. The whole point of starting from orbit, or from the moon, is to avoid hauling hundreds of tons of stuff up from ground level in the first place. It's been the plan for 50 years or more.
The Russians *do* have a shuttle, or at least they did, but they never scraped up enough money to fly it. What ever happened to Buran?
(I'll be mildly amused if it turns out to be Russians who create the materials needed for an orbital tower. Hmmm, it *was* their idea....)
Awww, come on. I dunno what was originally envisioned, but what we got is clearly a pilot project. It's way too small to be a serious refueling stop. I'm sure that all kinds of good science are being done as manpower and air leaks permit, but it's arguable that the most important thing we're learning from it is how to build space habitats.
(Well, we're also learning that some Russians/Yanks are not so bad after all and that even our governments can get along if they care to try. That's very useful.)
There are some things that we will have to scale up quite a bit in order to make a space station that's more than a floating lab. For one thing, we need a lot more transport capacity: more tonnage per trip and many more trips per year. It takes a *lot of stuff* to build a big space station, and at, what, 4000kg per trip? it's going to take forever.
Obviously the *budget* is going to have to increase quite a bit. Sure, the ISS is already expensive, but ask yourself what it would cost to build lower Manhattan from scratch, from the seabed up, and you'll get a feel for the amount of material, work, and money it takes to build something like what you see in _2001: a Space Odyssey_.
All this scaling suggests something else: *ownership* is going to have to scale up. The ISS is, technically, international since two nations are doing most of it, but what if there were a dozen nations as deeply involved, or a hundred? Of course each nation has its own limits as to what it could reasonably ask itself to contribute to such an effort. (Don't ask me how anyone is going to make the case to governments that are busy figuring out how they're going to pay for enough bullets to settle the score with the tribe next door.)-:
All of these are doable if enough people care, and there are reasons to care. But it's going to be hideously expensive, it's going to take a long time, and it's going to take a lot of steps and leave a lot of pilot projects and outright failures in its wake. The ISS is doing a lot for us, but it's never gonna be that big wheel in the sky -- it never could have been.
Yeah, a Newtonian already has a folded path. I was wondering what was going on. This is a slightly different use of the word "folded", I think. The text is not precisely clear and the photo, while rather neat, didn't help as much as I expected.
Instead of going straight out the side of the tube (normal to the tube's surface, that is), the path from the secondary mirror goes back in the general direction of the primary, but canted a bit so that you don't need a hole in the primary. The idea is to bring the path out somewhere near your natural eye height, so you don't have to stand on a ladder to view through such a monster as you would with the 90-degree bend.
Yeah, it's just cloning; it's not like you were talking about GM foods or something. :-)
(Interesting: in the U.S. it's wrong to make things that are identical to other things, but okay to make things that are new and different; in Europe it's just the opposite. Hmmm.)
I think you two have just described, with reasonable accuracy, the way that many people of East and West view one another's cultures.
It extends far beyond IT. I recall an article on culture clashes in some other business. The big boss (from Japan) felt disrespected when his American subordinates questioned his orders; the Americans felt disrespected that the boss wasn't listening to their concerns. It can be counterproductive and even dangerous to assume that "everybody who is decent does everything the same way I was taught." And the conflicts tend to come in areas which we are least likely to consider as questionable.
...you insensitive clod! :-)
"The article specifically states that they were able to travel 3x further using this process of splitting out the hydrogen from standard diesel fuel."
So why has *no one* been able to explain where the magic free-as-in-beer energy comes from? Energy that wasn't put into the fuel during the cracking process, so it must have been in the feedstock? What is eating up 2/3 of the energy latent in the feedstock when it is burned rather than cracked?
I had not read the article, but I have now. It gets off to a poor start, confusing the fuel cell with the catalytic process that provides the hydrogen. I'm not sure how much to trust anything else they say after that. The writer seems confused as to whether the advantage is "three times more efficient" (which would be 4x as much energy) or 3x as much energy (which would be two times more efficient). The article says, "a truck with a given amount of diesel," but the truck is not burning diesel anymore; it's burning hydrogen and the amount it carries is not stated. I may have been away from the chem. lab. for a long time, but I remember how to report experiments precisely and this reporter doesn't even come close. It's impossible to determine what the article really means.