Daft Punk are today what Wendy Carlos was in the 1980s.
I can respect the pioneers of electronic music (Kraftwerk and Wendy Carlos), but the genre has evolved considerably since then. Daft Punk played a significant role in that evolution.
For starters, sampling didn't become a respected/legitimate technique until nearly 10 years after Daft Punk started doing it. Their use of sampling differed quite a bit from how it was first used in hip-hop circles, given that the original tracks were often somewhat obscure, and difficult to identify in the final product. Discovery is arguably more musically relevant today than it was in 2001 (especially remarkable, given the album's 1960s funk influences)
Honestly, Daft Punk is a near-perfect fit for the film. From a marketing standpoint, it's great too, given the considerable level of respect that the group carries in the musical community. There will be people who go see the movie just for the soundtrack.
That all said, if you wanted to respect Carlos, while staying more modern, I'd have selected m83 to write the score. They're pretty heavily influenced by Daft Punk (they're also French, which seems to be a recurring theme with electronic musicians from the past 15 years), although they have more of an 'orchestral' sound that would lend itself quite well to a film score.
I mean.... Verizon's customers don't have very much choice in the matter either. We can get our phones/internets/TV from the cable company, or from Verizon.
The bizarre difference is that, even though Verizon aren't exactly the cuddliest company around, they certainly know a thing or two about running a network. I received one of the first FiOS installations on the east coast, and the service has been absolutely fantastic since day-one.
(On the other hand, I have nothing nice to say about Verizon Wireless, which remains the single nastiest entity I've ever had to deal with, beating out lawyers, airport security, and the DMV for the honor)
Think of it from another perspective: This facility will attract thousands of scientists and researchers to the (sparsely populated) area, most of whom will be registered voters.
I've posted this elsewhere on this story, but it's worth pointing out that we've been transporting nuclear material by road for quite some time, and without major incident.
Part of the reason behind this is that the containers used for shipping are deigned to withstand a collision from a fully-loaded high speed train.
That sort of accident is extremely unlikely, given that trains are not permitted to run at high speeds through grade crossings, while commercial/hazmat truck drivers are required to make a full stop at such crossings. I'm having trouble finding any record of an at-grade high speed collision (the Acela once hit a car while traveling at 70mph, while France's TGV has been operating for 25+ years without a single fatal accident).
Nevertheless, should extreme stupidity prevail, the container would still survive. It's hard to imagine an incident that would breach the container without also killing the pathogens stored inside.
The government has to choose between placing the lab in the geographic center (Kansas) or the population center (coasts) of the US. Both are bad for different reasons.
If remoteness is what you want, we could build it in Alaska, but that would generate all sorts of complaints about the region's geographical stability, cost, and political favoritism. You also have the issue of transportation.
Truth be told, modern construction techniques have made it perfectly safe to place buildings in tornado and earthquake-prone zones. Transport also isn't much of an issue, given that we've figured out how to transport nuclear waste in containers that are designed to withstand pretty much anything. (Hazardous materials could and should be stored on-site in similarly robust containers)
Honestly, this sounds like a story cooked up to increase ratings, and get people riled up.
I'm not really an expert on the subject (nor do I want to start a librarian flame war), but my understanding is that the LOC system produces a more logical arrangement of books in the context of a large university library, while the DD is better suited to small local libraries.
I'm not sure what people here are basing their opinions of MacOS on.
Up until the most recent release, MacOS X has run extremely well on old hardware, to the extent that newer releases were often, in fact faster than their predecessors. I'm basing this opinion based upon my experiences with a 450 Mhz G4 tower that I've had since the 90s, and is now running 10.4. For day-to-day tasks, the machine still runs great. I did some video editing on it a year or two back, and noticed that Final Cut Pro has astonishingly modest hardware requirements. How many 10-year-old computers can you say that about?
10.5 Leopard is a bit of a white elephant, given that it doesn't run particularly well on new hardware. I've run Linux (Ubuntu) on a Mac of the same vintage, and noted that GNOME, KDE, and many of their applications were far too slow to use, but had fantastic luck with XFCE.
There are a lot of things you could hate on Apple for. This isn't one of them.
While I'm at it, I'll also point out that XP runs fine on "low end" hardware, considering that "low end" hardware today is still quite a bit faster than the hardware that XP was targeted to run on when it was first released in 2001. I haven't seen any Vista-only apps in the wild yet (possibly some games, although I'm not qualified to comment on that)
The Win7 RC is more stable and bug-free than Vista, XP, and 2000 were at launch time, and includes a whole lot of very nice features. Unless some very severe security issues pop up (like happened with IE on XP), I'll go as far as to call it the best consumer OS Microsoft have put out since Win95.
I'm a mac guy, but the shell, file manager, and taskbar on Win7 are all far more functional than their equivalents in OS X.
Also, quite impressively, Microsoft seem to have finally figured out how to load drivers through the internet. Once I got the driver for my Thinkpad's weird ethernet controller working, everything else loaded automatically (ThinkPads are notorious for having tons of bizarre and obscure hardware that isn't supported by Windows' default set of drivers)
I've been using the beta on two machines for a few months, and have been extremely impressed. It's very pretty and fast on my newer (ie. 4 years old) Pentium M machine, while my 6-year-old 1.4 Ghz Celeron machine is also quite snappy, as the OS automatically disabled the fancy graphical features that the machine couldn't handle. How cool is that?
(Of course, for supporting old hardware, Apple is still king. I have a 10-year old G4 that runs OS X 10.4 without any noticeable sluggishness -- I actually use it to run a recent version of Final Cut Pro, which it does effortlessly. On the other hand, 10.5 Leopard is a mess, and doesn't run well on new hardware)
Colloquial evidence has suggested that the 2009 TDI Jetta's fuel mileage estimate by the EPA was botched badly -- mileage ranging from 35 to 50 MPG is commonly reported. I'm told that the old Golfs were still more efficient in real life, although the difference is nowhere as big as the EPA estimate would have you think.
There have been a few accusations that the EPA's testing methodology is flawed. Diesels tend to be underestimated, while hybrids tend to be overestimated. One glaring inadequacy of the current testing method is the fact that aerodynamic drag isn't accounted for at all (the test is done on a treadmill).
Can't we at least partially blame dell here for using the most obscure image format they could find?
It's not like it's particularly difficult to generate a.bmp, while it's fairly trivial to produce a.png, provided that you have a copy of libpng or zlib, both of which are licensed under the most permissive terms imaginable.
XBM is a relic from X11, and a seemingly bizarre one at that. Was there ever a reason for the image files to be syntactically-correct C code?
Although many here have already decried Negroponte's politics, alliances with Microsoft/Intel, the distribution model, or Sugar's technological structure as possible points of failure for the OLPC project, nobody has mentioned one of the project's biggest flaws:
What was the educational value of the OLPC? Where were these free textbooks and online teaching resources? Many educators in the first world would love to get their hands on these mythical free educational resources touted by the OLPC project and its supporters.
If we can compile a range of free educational resources (specifically engineered and targeted for children), we can solve more problems than any piece of hardware possibly can. Laptops are nice, but useless unless you have information worth accessing. The developed world hasn't found good uses for laptops in the classroom....why would someone think that they'd be more practical or applicable in countries that don't have access to running water?
Actually, I'll mildly disagree with you on this one: It *would* be nice for CSS to be able to do simple math, although JavaScript is perfectly adequate for the task.
Of course, JavaScript has more than a few of its own irritating deficiencies, although JQuery makes the language considerably more tolerable, and makes CSS manipulation a breeze. JQuery should have been part of JavaScript from the start!
Try using CSS for a while, and you'll see that its creators left out some frankly baffling features, such as the ability to center an element.
The 3 major implementations (Mozilla, WebKit, and IE) all had major differences in their first versions (with none of them implementing the spec properly!)
Other features that (dead tree) page designers would find extremely common were left out as well (hyphenation and columns being my biggest personal pet peeves)
Currently, there's a big push to do applications and graphics using CSS and Javascript, which have resulted in WebKit and Mozilla adopting a set of proprietary CSS attributes that aren't part of the standard.
Don't get me wrong -- style sheets were an absolute godsend to web development. However, both the standard (and the implementation of that standard) are crap. Metacity would be much better off taking NeXT/Apple route, and using a PDF/PostScript derivative.
True, although I think we can conclude that launching and landing is considerably more risky than any of the other space operations, given that we've never had a fatal spacewalk accident or hard landing that killed the cosmo/astronauts aboard (and the Russians have certainly seen their share of nasty landings). On the other hand, we've had quite a few launch/landing failures.
I'm not sure if an airlock failure would actually kill you if you were almost fully suited up. There's been quite a bit of speculation about this, and I believe that the consensus is that you'd have somewhere between 15 seconds and a minute before losing consciousness. A lot of this discussion revolved around the airlock scene in 2001, which was deemed to be vaguely plausible. (The probability of being picked up by a passing spacecraft, on the other hand, remains undetermined.)
There were also a few incidents aboard Mir that certainly endangered the crew on bboard.
I don't see why I should have to pay higher taxes to fund someone's else's Manhattan lifestyle.
You're not. Trust me.
The median household income in New York City in 2007 was $48,631, which is about $2,000 above the national median, and well below the median for New York State ($53,514), or any other statewide median in the Northeast US. There are a small number of fantastically wealthy individuals living on Manhattan, although this is a gross misrepresentation of the demographics of the city as a whole.
Most of the city's less affluent residents live in outlying areas such as Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Harlem. These areas have been hit the hardest by utility failures, and are usually the first to suffer whenever the public transportation budget gets cut. (Less than 20% of the city's residents live within Manhattan)
Manhattan's hasn't had any prolonged outages such as the one in Queens in 2006 -- Manhattan's electrical infrastructure seems to have held up decently.
Additionally, the New York Metro area receives an exceptionally poor return on its tax federal dollars -- $0.82 to the dollar. Across the river, New Jersey receives a paltry $0.65/$1. It is not without a touch of irony that "red" states generally receive an exceptionally high return on their tax dollars.
I should probably also mention that New York City is very poorly represented by its state government, due to a fairly wide demographic and cultural gap. Ideally, to provide the best representation, one would rearrange borders to create three new states: Upstate NY and PA; NYC, Long Island, and North Jersey; Philiadelphia and South Jersey. There is an active secessionist movement within NYC that has the support of many NYC politicians. According to mayor Michael Bloomberg, NYC pays $11 billion more to the state than it receives back.
However, in my opinion is isn't quite fair to compare liquid-fueled (RP-1 and LOX) Soyuz rocket to the solid-fueled Ares. You're dealing with much more energy in solid-fuel catastrophic scenario.
If we're talking about safety, I think it's extremely relevant. If solid-fueled rockets are inherently unsafe for manned flights, we probably shouldn't use them.
I thought NY's problems were the result of 40 years of complete neglect and increasing population.
The problem in Queens has been fixed, and improvements continue to be made elsewhere. Of course, this comes at a price -- 40 years of cutting taxes and letting infrastructure rot causes a whole lot of bills to stack up once things start to fail.
1) Generate your own power. If you really don't want the government "all up in your business," this is really the only way to go. Otherwise, you're going to learn to accept the rules of playing nicely in a shared society with limited resources.
2) Don't use "smart appliances" with your "smart meters." They'll operate whenever you want, and you'll pay the rate according to the time of day that you choose to use them. It's an extremely capitalist system.
3) Use smart appliances, and activate the override switch. Once again, you'll pay for your usage. The federal government does not have the legal authority to control what time of day you do the wash. If the government decides to go fascist and start implementing these sort of controls, we'll have more pressing concerns to worry about.
The amount of spin that this story has gotten is completely out of hand. The summarized gist is that electric companies are going to begin to bill for usage based upon the time of day that the usage was incurred. To help accomplish this, technologies are being developed to allow appliances to talk to the meter to help minimize unnecessary usage during peak hours. Nobody is seriously proposing for the government to micromanage your electricity usage.
AC delays are typically only instituted as a last-resort alternative to rolling blackouts. My former employer in New York City participated in such a program when I was working there in 2006.
If you don't remember, 2006 was a particularly hot summer, and New York had a series of nasty blackouts, particularly in Queens. At one point, 10 of the 22 feeder cables to Queens literally burned up due to the excessive heat and demand, leaving the residents without power for weeks. Although there indeed should have been safeguards in place to prevent this, I think that it's preferable to lose AC for a few hours than it is to suffer through a prolonged blackout.
NYC's rushing head over heel to fix its electricity infrastructure, although it's an uphill battle, considering many years of neglect, increasing demand, and an overall pressure to cut costs.
Yes, but we're talking about the viability of the launch abort system, not the overall safety of the program.
Also, for the sake of pedantry, the first "all hands lost" incident took place on a vehicle with only one crew member on board.
Every single fatal spaceflight incident thus far (excluding those on the ground, but including Apollo 1) has had no survivors. Failures tend to be catastrophic.
The rocket that exploded to cause the Nedelin disaster was an ICBM -- strictly speaking, not even part of the space program.
Additionally, the Russian space program had notable problems with re-entry, safety on the ground, automated docking, off-target landings, or the fact that they couldn't get the N-1 to work at all.
However, we're not talking about any of these things. Russia's launch abort system has proven itself to be successful, and has saved lives in two separate incidents. Although NASA has certainly done a better job of other aspects of its program, its launch abort system has never been used in practice and is conspicuously absent from the shuttle, which is the entire point of this conversation.
Odds are that both uses of the Russian launch abort system could have been avoided by correcting deficiencies present elsewhere in their space program. However, it's certainly nice to have redundancies present in the system. Shuttle missions have to be conducted with outright paranoia due to some of its design deficiencies.
The survival rate for exploding Soyuz rockets is 100%. It happened once in 1975, and again in 1983. Both times, the crew escaped without major injury. The Russian/Soviet space program has never had a launch failure that resulted in fatalities to crew aboard the ship.
The 1983 incident occurred as the rocket exploded while on the pad, and threw the capsule 6,500 feet into the air, subjecting the cosmonauts to approximately 17g of acceleration. According to popular legend, the cosmonauts destroyed the capsule's voice recorder due to the lengthy string of profanity that it captured during the incident.
What about the smart kid who likes working with his hands? The problem works both ways.
American society has shunned blue collar work to the extent that our mechanics can't "fix" cars, but rather run through checklists and replace parts. Our domestic industries have suffered tremendously as well -- GM builds shitty cars...poorly, and at far greater expense than their competitors.
Put smart people back into industry, and we might actually be able to build a ladder to climb out of the hole that we've dug ourselves into. Funneling our best and brightest into finance, medicine, and law have had dire consequences on our society.
Matthew Crawford wrote a fantastic editorial in the New York Times a few weeks ago that touches on this subject far more eloquently than I possibly can in a slashdot comment.
Slashdot Mirror
Daft Punk are today what Wendy Carlos was in the 1980s.
I can respect the pioneers of electronic music (Kraftwerk and Wendy Carlos), but the genre has evolved considerably since then. Daft Punk played a significant role in that evolution.
For starters, sampling didn't become a respected/legitimate technique until nearly 10 years after Daft Punk started doing it. Their use of sampling differed quite a bit from how it was first used in hip-hop circles, given that the original tracks were often somewhat obscure, and difficult to identify in the final product. Discovery is arguably more musically relevant today than it was in 2001 (especially remarkable, given the album's 1960s funk influences)
Honestly, Daft Punk is a near-perfect fit for the film. From a marketing standpoint, it's great too, given the considerable level of respect that the group carries in the musical community. There will be people who go see the movie just for the soundtrack.
That all said, if you wanted to respect Carlos, while staying more modern, I'd have selected m83 to write the score. They're pretty heavily influenced by Daft Punk (they're also French, which seems to be a recurring theme with electronic musicians from the past 15 years), although they have more of an 'orchestral' sound that would lend itself quite well to a film score.
I mean.... Verizon's customers don't have very much choice in the matter either. We can get our phones/internets/TV from the cable company, or from Verizon.
The bizarre difference is that, even though Verizon aren't exactly the cuddliest company around, they certainly know a thing or two about running a network. I received one of the first FiOS installations on the east coast, and the service has been absolutely fantastic since day-one.
(On the other hand, I have nothing nice to say about Verizon Wireless, which remains the single nastiest entity I've ever had to deal with, beating out lawyers, airport security, and the DMV for the honor)
Think of it from another perspective: This facility will attract thousands of scientists and researchers to the (sparsely populated) area, most of whom will be registered voters.
I've posted this elsewhere on this story, but it's worth pointing out that we've been transporting nuclear material by road for quite some time, and without major incident.
Part of the reason behind this is that the containers used for shipping are deigned to withstand a collision from a fully-loaded high speed train.
That sort of accident is extremely unlikely, given that trains are not permitted to run at high speeds through grade crossings, while commercial/hazmat truck drivers are required to make a full stop at such crossings. I'm having trouble finding any record of an at-grade high speed collision (the Acela once hit a car while traveling at 70mph, while France's TGV has been operating for 25+ years without a single fatal accident).
Nevertheless, should extreme stupidity prevail, the container would still survive. It's hard to imagine an incident that would breach the container without also killing the pathogens stored inside.
How is it assholery?
The government has to choose between placing the lab in the geographic center (Kansas) or the population center (coasts) of the US. Both are bad for different reasons.
If remoteness is what you want, we could build it in Alaska, but that would generate all sorts of complaints about the region's geographical stability, cost, and political favoritism. You also have the issue of transportation.
Truth be told, modern construction techniques have made it perfectly safe to place buildings in tornado and earthquake-prone zones. Transport also isn't much of an issue, given that we've figured out how to transport nuclear waste in containers that are designed to withstand pretty much anything. (Hazardous materials could and should be stored on-site in similarly robust containers)
Honestly, this sounds like a story cooked up to increase ratings, and get people riled up.
I'm not really an expert on the subject (nor do I want to start a librarian flame war), but my understanding is that the LOC system produces a more logical arrangement of books in the context of a large university library, while the DD is better suited to small local libraries.
You mention the Dewey Decimal System, while also linking to the Library of Congress, which uses its own numbering and classification system.
In fact, most academic libraries prefer the LOC's system over Dewey's.
I'm not sure what people here are basing their opinions of MacOS on.
Up until the most recent release, MacOS X has run extremely well on old hardware, to the extent that newer releases were often, in fact faster than their predecessors. I'm basing this opinion based upon my experiences with a 450 Mhz G4 tower that I've had since the 90s, and is now running 10.4. For day-to-day tasks, the machine still runs great. I did some video editing on it a year or two back, and noticed that Final Cut Pro has astonishingly modest hardware requirements. How many 10-year-old computers can you say that about?
10.5 Leopard is a bit of a white elephant, given that it doesn't run particularly well on new hardware. I've run Linux (Ubuntu) on a Mac of the same vintage, and noted that GNOME, KDE, and many of their applications were far too slow to use, but had fantastic luck with XFCE.
There are a lot of things you could hate on Apple for. This isn't one of them.
While I'm at it, I'll also point out that XP runs fine on "low end" hardware, considering that "low end" hardware today is still quite a bit faster than the hardware that XP was targeted to run on when it was first released in 2001. I haven't seen any Vista-only apps in the wild yet (possibly some games, although I'm not qualified to comment on that)
Hear Hear!
The Win7 RC is more stable and bug-free than Vista, XP, and 2000 were at launch time, and includes a whole lot of very nice features. Unless some very severe security issues pop up (like happened with IE on XP), I'll go as far as to call it the best consumer OS Microsoft have put out since Win95.
I'm a mac guy, but the shell, file manager, and taskbar on Win7 are all far more functional than their equivalents in OS X.
Also, quite impressively, Microsoft seem to have finally figured out how to load drivers through the internet. Once I got the driver for my Thinkpad's weird ethernet controller working, everything else loaded automatically (ThinkPads are notorious for having tons of bizarre and obscure hardware that isn't supported by Windows' default set of drivers)
I've been using the beta on two machines for a few months, and have been extremely impressed. It's very pretty and fast on my newer (ie. 4 years old) Pentium M machine, while my 6-year-old 1.4 Ghz Celeron machine is also quite snappy, as the OS automatically disabled the fancy graphical features that the machine couldn't handle. How cool is that?
(Of course, for supporting old hardware, Apple is still king. I have a 10-year old G4 that runs OS X 10.4 without any noticeable sluggishness -- I actually use it to run a recent version of Final Cut Pro, which it does effortlessly. On the other hand, 10.5 Leopard is a mess, and doesn't run well on new hardware)
Colloquial evidence has suggested that the 2009 TDI Jetta's fuel mileage estimate by the EPA was botched badly -- mileage ranging from 35 to 50 MPG is commonly reported. I'm told that the old Golfs were still more efficient in real life, although the difference is nowhere as big as the EPA estimate would have you think.
There have been a few accusations that the EPA's testing methodology is flawed. Diesels tend to be underestimated, while hybrids tend to be overestimated. One glaring inadequacy of the current testing method is the fact that aerodynamic drag isn't accounted for at all (the test is done on a treadmill).
Can't we at least partially blame dell here for using the most obscure image format they could find?
It's not like it's particularly difficult to generate a .bmp, while it's fairly trivial to produce a .png, provided that you have a copy of libpng or zlib, both of which are licensed under the most permissive terms imaginable.
XBM is a relic from X11, and a seemingly bizarre one at that. Was there ever a reason for the image files to be syntactically-correct C code?
Although many here have already decried Negroponte's politics, alliances with Microsoft/Intel, the distribution model, or Sugar's technological structure as possible points of failure for the OLPC project, nobody has mentioned one of the project's biggest flaws:
What was the educational value of the OLPC? Where were these free textbooks and online teaching resources? Many educators in the first world would love to get their hands on these mythical free educational resources touted by the OLPC project and its supporters.
If we can compile a range of free educational resources (specifically engineered and targeted for children), we can solve more problems than any piece of hardware possibly can. Laptops are nice, but useless unless you have information worth accessing. The developed world hasn't found good uses for laptops in the classroom....why would someone think that they'd be more practical or applicable in countries that don't have access to running water?
Actually, I'll mildly disagree with you on this one: It *would* be nice for CSS to be able to do simple math, although JavaScript is perfectly adequate for the task.
Of course, JavaScript has more than a few of its own irritating deficiencies, although JQuery makes the language considerably more tolerable, and makes CSS manipulation a breeze. JQuery should have been part of JavaScript from the start!
Try using CSS for a while, and you'll see that its creators left out some frankly baffling features, such as the ability to center an element.
The 3 major implementations (Mozilla, WebKit, and IE) all had major differences in their first versions (with none of them implementing the spec properly!)
Other features that (dead tree) page designers would find extremely common were left out as well (hyphenation and columns being my biggest personal pet peeves)
Currently, there's a big push to do applications and graphics using CSS and Javascript, which have resulted in WebKit and Mozilla adopting a set of proprietary CSS attributes that aren't part of the standard.
Don't get me wrong -- style sheets were an absolute godsend to web development. However, both the standard (and the implementation of that standard) are crap. Metacity would be much better off taking NeXT/Apple route, and using a PDF/PostScript derivative.
True, although I think we can conclude that launching and landing is considerably more risky than any of the other space operations, given that we've never had a fatal spacewalk accident or hard landing that killed the cosmo/astronauts aboard (and the Russians have certainly seen their share of nasty landings). On the other hand, we've had quite a few launch/landing failures.
I'm not sure if an airlock failure would actually kill you if you were almost fully suited up. There's been quite a bit of speculation about this, and I believe that the consensus is that you'd have somewhere between 15 seconds and a minute before losing consciousness. A lot of this discussion revolved around the airlock scene in 2001, which was deemed to be vaguely plausible. (The probability of being picked up by a passing spacecraft, on the other hand, remains undetermined.)
There were also a few incidents aboard Mir that certainly endangered the crew on bboard.
I don't see why I should have to pay higher taxes to fund someone's else's Manhattan lifestyle.
You're not. Trust me.
The median household income in New York City in 2007 was $48,631, which is about $2,000 above the national median, and well below the median for New York State ($53,514), or any other statewide median in the Northeast US. There are a small number of fantastically wealthy individuals living on Manhattan, although this is a gross misrepresentation of the demographics of the city as a whole.
Most of the city's less affluent residents live in outlying areas such as Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Harlem. These areas have been hit the hardest by utility failures, and are usually the first to suffer whenever the public transportation budget gets cut. (Less than 20% of the city's residents live within Manhattan)
Manhattan's hasn't had any prolonged outages such as the one in Queens in 2006 -- Manhattan's electrical infrastructure seems to have held up decently.
Additionally, the New York Metro area receives an exceptionally poor return on its tax federal dollars -- $0.82 to the dollar. Across the river, New Jersey receives a paltry $0.65/$1. It is not without a touch of irony that "red" states generally receive an exceptionally high return on their tax dollars.
I should probably also mention that New York City is very poorly represented by its state government, due to a fairly wide demographic and cultural gap. Ideally, to provide the best representation, one would rearrange borders to create three new states: Upstate NY and PA; NYC, Long Island, and North Jersey; Philiadelphia and South Jersey. There is an active secessionist movement within NYC that has the support of many NYC politicians. According to mayor Michael Bloomberg, NYC pays $11 billion more to the state than it receives back.
However, in my opinion is isn't quite fair to compare liquid-fueled (RP-1 and LOX) Soyuz rocket to the solid-fueled Ares. You're dealing with much more energy in solid-fuel catastrophic scenario.
If we're talking about safety, I think it's extremely relevant. If solid-fueled rockets are inherently unsafe for manned flights, we probably shouldn't use them.
Really?
I thought NY's problems were the result of 40 years of complete neglect and increasing population.
The problem in Queens has been fixed, and improvements continue to be made elsewhere. Of course, this comes at a price -- 40 years of cutting taxes and letting infrastructure rot causes a whole lot of bills to stack up once things start to fail.
Solar panels? Wind turbines? A small-ish generator? They're not illegal in most places.
Okay. You have a few options:
1) Generate your own power. If you really don't want the government "all up in your business," this is really the only way to go. Otherwise, you're going to learn to accept the rules of playing nicely in a shared society with limited resources.
2) Don't use "smart appliances" with your "smart meters." They'll operate whenever you want, and you'll pay the rate according to the time of day that you choose to use them. It's an extremely capitalist system.
3) Use smart appliances, and activate the override switch. Once again, you'll pay for your usage. The federal government does not have the legal authority to control what time of day you do the wash. If the government decides to go fascist and start implementing these sort of controls, we'll have more pressing concerns to worry about.
The amount of spin that this story has gotten is completely out of hand. The summarized gist is that electric companies are going to begin to bill for usage based upon the time of day that the usage was incurred. To help accomplish this, technologies are being developed to allow appliances to talk to the meter to help minimize unnecessary usage during peak hours. Nobody is seriously proposing for the government to micromanage your electricity usage.
AC delays are typically only instituted as a last-resort alternative to rolling blackouts. My former employer in New York City participated in such a program when I was working there in 2006.
If you don't remember, 2006 was a particularly hot summer, and New York had a series of nasty blackouts, particularly in Queens. At one point, 10 of the 22 feeder cables to Queens literally burned up due to the excessive heat and demand, leaving the residents without power for weeks. Although there indeed should have been safeguards in place to prevent this, I think that it's preferable to lose AC for a few hours than it is to suffer through a prolonged blackout.
NYC's rushing head over heel to fix its electricity infrastructure, although it's an uphill battle, considering many years of neglect, increasing demand, and an overall pressure to cut costs.
Yes, but we're talking about the viability of the launch abort system, not the overall safety of the program.
Also, for the sake of pedantry, the first "all hands lost" incident took place on a vehicle with only one crew member on board.
Every single fatal spaceflight incident thus far (excluding those on the ground, but including Apollo 1) has had no survivors. Failures tend to be catastrophic.
The rocket that exploded to cause the Nedelin disaster was an ICBM -- strictly speaking, not even part of the space program.
Additionally, the Russian space program had notable problems with re-entry, safety on the ground, automated docking, off-target landings, or the fact that they couldn't get the N-1 to work at all.
However, we're not talking about any of these things. Russia's launch abort system has proven itself to be successful, and has saved lives in two separate incidents. Although NASA has certainly done a better job of other aspects of its program, its launch abort system has never been used in practice and is conspicuously absent from the shuttle, which is the entire point of this conversation.
Odds are that both uses of the Russian launch abort system could have been avoided by correcting deficiencies present elsewhere in their space program. However, it's certainly nice to have redundancies present in the system. Shuttle missions have to be conducted with outright paranoia due to some of its design deficiencies.
The survival rate for exploding Soyuz rockets is 100%. It happened once in 1975, and again in 1983. Both times, the crew escaped without major injury. The Russian/Soviet space program has never had a launch failure that resulted in fatalities to crew aboard the ship.
The 1983 incident occurred as the rocket exploded while on the pad, and threw the capsule 6,500 feet into the air, subjecting the cosmonauts to approximately 17g of acceleration. According to popular legend, the cosmonauts destroyed the capsule's voice recorder due to the lengthy string of profanity that it captured during the incident.
What about the smart kid who likes working with his hands? The problem works both ways.
American society has shunned blue collar work to the extent that our mechanics can't "fix" cars, but rather run through checklists and replace parts. Our domestic industries have suffered tremendously as well -- GM builds shitty cars...poorly, and at far greater expense than their competitors.
Put smart people back into industry, and we might actually be able to build a ladder to climb out of the hole that we've dug ourselves into. Funneling our best and brightest into finance, medicine, and law have had dire consequences on our society.
Matthew Crawford wrote a fantastic editorial in the New York Times a few weeks ago that touches on this subject far more eloquently than I possibly can in a slashdot comment.