We now have private companies nearly able to take people on joyrides into near earth orbit, which 6 or more governments can already do...
They are simply catching up with where we were in the 50's and 60's... but (a bit) cheaper
They have no plans to do any more than joyrides, because that is what people are willing and able to pay for...
The first 10-20 years of aviation were also limited nearly exclusively to joyrides. There's nothing wrong with that. But imagine what the world would look like today if the US government was the only organization that had airplanes.
The people paying for joyrides (at 1% or less of what the government was spending 60 years ago!) are funding the rapid development of technology, driving costs down by making profit actually matter, and that will lead to greater corporate use.
If you're a 2nd-tier school today, and you want to do some microgravity research, you're shit out of luck. In a couple years, you'll be able to use a hundred grand in grant money and do that research. Today, its not reasonable for, say, Samsung to ask itself "I wonder if I can improve efficiency on these OLED panels if I manufacture them in microgravity". In ten years (or less!), a few tens of millions (or less) will likely allow them to try that. For sixty years, politics has driven spaceflight. Now, profit, investment and corporations do. Profit, investment and corporations is why today we're all not living in farm houses with candlelight and no education. Its a powerful motivator to progress.
John Q Public has *absolutely* no business getting in on an IPO. That's just sheer insanity from an investment standpoint. IPOs are always offered to institutional investors, because institutional investors understand the risks involved.
The mess ten years ago was just proof that casual investors have no business being involved in IPOs. That's gambling, not investing.
But I still have an escape clause --I simply can't remember a passkey which was made up from 10 randomized password generator by 10 different online password generators
And you still go to jail for contempt of court. The reason for the contempt isn't a factor.
The grand endeavor to explore the universe that I knew as a kid
You mean that you imagined as a kid. Like a lot of things you knew as a kid, it was just the wide-eyed fantasies of youth. The space program has NEVER been about being a grand endeavor to explore the universe. It isn't now, and has never been in the entire global history of space programs. They've been about politics, they've been about national security, they've been about national pride. They've *never* been about exploration. Why do you think every single "pure" research project has such brutal trouble with funding? Why do you think the only substantially successful programs in the last 20 years have been the "cheaper, faster" programs?
It *is* depressing, but I vaguely remember it being depressing when I was five years old and figured out Santa, too.
In fact, for the first time in *history*, there's cause to NOT be depressed about the reality of space travel. We've got Branson getting ready to let anyone with a couple hundred grand be an astronaut. We've got a private company nearly ready to be lauching people into orbit. Those are BIG deals. Those are space exploration, even in its infancy, that *for once* is NOT coupled to national posturing.
Today, in 2012, has the greatest number of reasons to be *excited* about space travel, because for once its being done for real.
Unfortunately, US space exploration policy is driven more by buzzwards and hype than it is by real science. A human mission to mars would be very expensive and would, considering we can get a lot of data from unmanned probes, have very little additional value.
US space exporation policy has always been hampered by two fundamental, and diametrically-opposed priorities. The first (and MASSIVE majority) is projects of specific strategic value to national security. The space shuttle, the ISS, the technology behind the hubble, most of the launch systems, weather satellites, GPS -- these are all developments that were purely based on national security interests. They were about keeping particularly important contractors in business, about political back scratching, testing launch hardware needed for weapons systems, detecting NBC weapons testing around the world, etc.
A *tiny* amount of the budget has been focused on pure science. International partnerships are, generally speaking, never a priority for those projects. The overhead is too high, and costs too high. Its cheaper to do it ourselves if you don't have some other political justification for the partnership. You may have contributing scientists and engineers, but you won't see billions being spent on something internationally for pure science coming out of the US.
That's the reality of space flight in the US. That's why talk about expanding the manned space program always comes up during election years, when people are standing on podiums in Houston or along the east coast in Florida. There isn't even a fraction of the budget that is needed for the programs the politicians are talking about coming out of that "non-political" budget. They know that, but the hope and promise buys votes.
You're not going to see any major progress on BIG space technology in the US until we have a real enemy the politicians can rally the public behind, and can justify hundreds of billions of dollars for national security reasons. If you want to see the US get behind space exporation, what you really want to hope for is a permanently manned Chinese base on the moon, or a space station more sophisticated (in the public's eye) than a bunch of modules bolted together.
International collaboration, particularly with space-related activities has almost never been about saving money. Its either been about cold war competition and posturing with "enemies", or international political bribery with "allies". (This is particularly true of manned spaceflight, where projects amounted to corporate welfare for defense contractors, billion dollar bribes to partner nations, and other such shenanigans... do you really think the ISS would've taken 20 years and $100b to build if we just wanted a research space station!?)
The cheapest and best original thinking in the space race is currently at Space/X.
And the biggest schedule slippage.
Yeah, its amazing how NASA hit its goal of men on Mars in 1984, got the shuttle flying on time and under budget, AND had the ISS finished before the start of the 90's at cost! Why would anyone look anywhere else!?
There are two kinds of body scanners -- XRay and terahertz. EU banned the former, not the latter.
The picture in the article is a terahertz machine. That's what L-3 makes.
Re:The ocean frontier - not
on
Remembering Sealab
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
That's not really true, only some of these thing is open in the bottom, others have airlooks.
BTW, you have that exactly backwards. If you have an opening at the bottom of a submersible, you eliminate ANY issue with water pressure on the structure. (Because the water coming in the opening will pressurize the air to the same pressure -- the hull then has no pressure differential between inside and outside.) Of course, the oxygen in the air you breathe becomes toxic, and the nitrogen does bad things to you. (woo hoo! Narcosis!)
If you want to maintain 1atm inside, your structure now has to handle the differential between inside and outside, and be rigid enough to not compress. At 30 feet depth, you need to handle a 14psi differential (which is greater than the pressure differential you get from an atomic blast! That's why even at 30 ft, you need fairly thick steel to handle the pressure.
Its brutal trying to hire people with competence in anything high tech. (And competence, in a software world, means understanding how to write code, how to diagnose problems, how to *write* clearly, how to communicate well to an audience of varied skills and personalities, how to handle ones self in front of a customer, how to put a project plan together, how to properly estimate tasks, how to balance competing priorities, etc...)
How about trying to hire a software developer instead of a combined software developer/project manager/sales engineer? Anyone with all those skills is either 1) Working as an independent consultant (and not getting lowballed on the rates) 2) Commanding a very high salary in a senior position (and probably not writing much code) 3) Running their own company
If I have to hire someone else to do 2/3rds of an engineer's job, that engineer is only going to pull down $60k a year. Which is precisely the point of this entire article. The problem is, someone who can just write code walks into an interview thinking they deserve $120k a year, when someone else is going to have to micromanage them.
Someone pulling down six figures needs to be absolutely competent on every single one of those items. And at least 90% of the people who I've interviewed thought they deserved $120k a year and weren't. And I didn't hire them. Simple as that.
I wish I hadn't already posted in the thread so I could moderate you up -- you're absolutely right. There's a shocking inbalance between what people think they're worth and what they're worth, in the *vast* majority of cases. Its brutal trying to hire people with competence in anything high tech. (And competence, in a software world, means understanding how to write code, how to diagnose problems, how to *write* clearly, how to communicate well to an audience of varied skills and personalities, how to handle ones self in front of a customer, how to put a project plan together, how to properly estimate tasks, how to balance competing priorities, etc...)
People who are good and can prove it -- of any age -- , will be paid well for their skills. But 90% of the people who are applying for those positions are *not* good, but will go home and bitch to friends and family that they're not getting hired for (age|salary|stupid recruiter|ignorant MBA penny-pinchers|etc).
I was cocky in my 20's and 30's. I thought I owned the world and every big-name company I worked for 'stroked' me. but when I hit 40, things changed. and now that I'm 50, things VERY much changed.
And there's a lesson that every single person on/. should learn from and learn well -- put your effort into building up your investment and savings nest egg. Someone making upper-tier pay in a technical field, and putting a priority on savings, not living the baller lifestyle, can approach this juncture in a vastly different way. Decisions everyone makes when they're 25, 35, 40, etc all have direct bearing on this. The reality is, this problem happens in EVERY field to everyone as they get older. Your pay will not scale forever, and if you scale your cost of living with your pay, rather than scaling your savings, it will HURT when that trend reverses itself.
I'm not yet at 50, but I have plenty of friends and coworkers who are. Some of them, at equal pay, are looking at scaling back their work, focusing on consulting, even if their income ends up cut in half. Others are panicked at the slightest possibility of losing their job because they have a few months' expenses saved.
So, kids, learn a lesson here. When you're comfortable living on $60k a year, and find yourself making $150k a year, you can buy a $70k car and a $500k house, or you can keep right on living comfortably, and putting $50k a year away in investments. 20 years later you'll be facing this decision in a vastly different way.
Use centrifugal force at the space station level to implement actual gravity.
Centripital. And the problem with that is, the structure you're standing in has the same sense of acceleration as the astronaut. It has to be dramatically stronger, and thus heavier, and therefore unworkable in orbit.
Article's a bit light on any details... but that facility has to deal with all that heat somehow... and using it to provide heating for local residents would be a very good use of it.
There's a reason, outside of extremely dense cities, you don't see heat distribution happen -- its horrendously inefficient and expensive.
WP7 has been on the market for over a year. In that time they've atacted 1.1 million FB users. Further up the thread you see there 99 million IOS FB users and 88 million Android FB users. So WP7 is around 1% of market. Like Linux on the desktop. It has no traction. On the other hand MS has a truck load of money in the bank and will keep on trying.
I'm not sure you can really draw any reasonable figures from the Facebook numbers other than that the numbers in this article are just plain silly. Unlike Android and iOS, you don't need the Facebook app on WP7 to use Facebook. I've got a half dozen friends and family with WP7 devices. Two don't use FB at all, and I think I might be the only one who actually uses the FB app. (You can't "check in" friends with the native FB support, just yourself.)
Most sites I've seen estimate that between 1/6 and 1/8 of the WP7 users actually use the FB app, which puts the units in the hand of customers in the 7-10m range, which is consistent with the analyst estimates. I don't know what the source of those estimates are, but 1/6 is probably accurate in my experience.
Shhhh, don't let facts get in the way of a/. anti-MS orgy. You need to extrapolate the total number of phones sold across two dozen models in over a year by assuming the total number sold is equal to the number sold of one model in less than a month!
There's a reason we don't have chip+PIN in the US, and its the same reason the RFID cards are all the rage with banks -- the risk of fraudulent transactions is already calculated into the rates the banks charge merchants, and they know through direct studies that they make more money if they make it faster to charge.
Case in point -- a merchant can be fined by Visa if they make a customer sign a receipt for a sub-$25 purchase. Big retailers know it, which is why you don't get asked at them, but smaller retailers haven't always gotten the message.
This is exactly the same thing. The risk of theft is already known and managed, they just want you to tap your card as much as you can.
While they manned launches have gone well, the failed re-supply and the failed mars probe suggest there's some quality control issues creeping into the program.
You can only go so many months without giving your rocket scientists a paycheck...
For some bullshit I doubt anyone wants, seriously you can buy the best the world has to offer for 99 cents a track, what kind of horseshit DRM system to I have to infect windows with and dance around just to save what? 25 fucking cents in the end?
Or go to a used CD store and buy the CD. You might pay 25 cents a song.
One of the core concepts of "cellular" phones is that "cells" enable frequence reuse. Now this has to be carefully done to prevent interference, but in general, decreasing the size of cells will increase capacity. Of course this adds infrastructure cost.
But then you have to cut the power of each cell, and you start to have more problems with coverage in buildings.
There's a limit to what ATT can do without more spectrum. Expanding wifi coverage in denser urban areas would be a nice start, but at some level they are stuck unless entirely new technology making better use of the spectrum becomes available.
Slashdot Mirror
We now have private companies nearly able to take people on joyrides into near earth orbit, which 6 or more governments can already do ...
They are simply catching up with where we were in the 50's and 60's ... but (a bit) cheaper
They have no plans to do any more than joyrides, because that is what people are willing and able to pay for ...
The first 10-20 years of aviation were also limited nearly exclusively to joyrides. There's nothing wrong with that. But imagine what the world would look like today if the US government was the only organization that had airplanes.
The people paying for joyrides (at 1% or less of what the government was spending 60 years ago!) are funding the rapid development of technology, driving costs down by making profit actually matter, and that will lead to greater corporate use.
If you're a 2nd-tier school today, and you want to do some microgravity research, you're shit out of luck. In a couple years, you'll be able to use a hundred grand in grant money and do that research. Today, its not reasonable for, say, Samsung to ask itself "I wonder if I can improve efficiency on these OLED panels if I manufacture them in microgravity". In ten years (or less!), a few tens of millions (or less) will likely allow them to try that. For sixty years, politics has driven spaceflight. Now, profit, investment and corporations do. Profit, investment and corporations is why today we're all not living in farm houses with candlelight and no education. Its a powerful motivator to progress.
John Q Public has *absolutely* no business getting in on an IPO. That's just sheer insanity from an investment standpoint. IPOs are always offered to institutional investors, because institutional investors understand the risks involved.
The mess ten years ago was just proof that casual investors have no business being involved in IPOs. That's gambling, not investing.
But I still have an escape clause --I simply can't remember a passkey which was made up from 10 randomized password generator by 10 different online password generators
And you still go to jail for contempt of court. The reason for the contempt isn't a factor.
The grand endeavor to explore the universe that I knew as a kid
You mean that you imagined as a kid. Like a lot of things you knew as a kid, it was just the wide-eyed fantasies of youth. The space program has NEVER been about being a grand endeavor to explore the universe. It isn't now, and has never been in the entire global history of space programs. They've been about politics, they've been about national security, they've been about national pride. They've *never* been about exploration. Why do you think every single "pure" research project has such brutal trouble with funding? Why do you think the only substantially successful programs in the last 20 years have been the "cheaper, faster" programs?
It *is* depressing, but I vaguely remember it being depressing when I was five years old and figured out Santa, too.
In fact, for the first time in *history*, there's cause to NOT be depressed about the reality of space travel. We've got Branson getting ready to let anyone with a couple hundred grand be an astronaut. We've got a private company nearly ready to be lauching people into orbit. Those are BIG deals. Those are space exploration, even in its infancy, that *for once* is NOT coupled to national posturing.
Today, in 2012, has the greatest number of reasons to be *excited* about space travel, because for once its being done for real.
Unfortunately, US space exploration policy is driven more by buzzwards and hype than it is by real science. A human mission to mars would be very expensive and would, considering we can get a lot of data from unmanned probes, have very little additional value.
US space exporation policy has always been hampered by two fundamental, and diametrically-opposed priorities. The first (and MASSIVE majority) is projects of specific strategic value to national security. The space shuttle, the ISS, the technology behind the hubble, most of the launch systems, weather satellites, GPS -- these are all developments that were purely based on national security interests. They were about keeping particularly important contractors in business, about political back scratching, testing launch hardware needed for weapons systems, detecting NBC weapons testing around the world, etc.
A *tiny* amount of the budget has been focused on pure science. International partnerships are, generally speaking, never a priority for those projects. The overhead is too high, and costs too high. Its cheaper to do it ourselves if you don't have some other political justification for the partnership. You may have contributing scientists and engineers, but you won't see billions being spent on something internationally for pure science coming out of the US.
That's the reality of space flight in the US. That's why talk about expanding the manned space program always comes up during election years, when people are standing on podiums in Houston or along the east coast in Florida. There isn't even a fraction of the budget that is needed for the programs the politicians are talking about coming out of that "non-political" budget. They know that, but the hope and promise buys votes.
You're not going to see any major progress on BIG space technology in the US until we have a real enemy the politicians can rally the public behind, and can justify hundreds of billions of dollars for national security reasons. If you want to see the US get behind space exporation, what you really want to hope for is a permanently manned Chinese base on the moon, or a space station more sophisticated (in the public's eye) than a bunch of modules bolted together.
Until that happens, its all just fantasy.
International collaboration, particularly with space-related activities has almost never been about saving money. Its either been about cold war competition and posturing with "enemies", or international political bribery with "allies". (This is particularly true of manned spaceflight, where projects amounted to corporate welfare for defense contractors, billion dollar bribes to partner nations, and other such shenanigans... do you really think the ISS would've taken 20 years and $100b to build if we just wanted a research space station!?)
The cheapest and best original thinking in the space race is currently at Space/X.
And the biggest schedule slippage.
Yeah, its amazing how NASA hit its goal of men on Mars in 1984, got the shuttle flying on time and under budget, AND had the ISS finished before the start of the 90's at cost! Why would anyone look anywhere else!?
There are two kinds of body scanners -- XRay and terahertz. EU banned the former, not the latter.
The picture in the article is a terahertz machine. That's what L-3 makes.
That's not really true, only some of these thing is open in the bottom, others have airlooks.
BTW, you have that exactly backwards. If you have an opening at the bottom of a submersible, you eliminate ANY issue with water pressure on the structure. (Because the water coming in the opening will pressurize the air to the same pressure -- the hull then has no pressure differential between inside and outside.) Of course, the oxygen in the air you breathe becomes toxic, and the nitrogen does bad things to you. (woo hoo! Narcosis!)
If you want to maintain 1atm inside, your structure now has to handle the differential between inside and outside, and be rigid enough to not compress. At 30 feet depth, you need to handle a 14psi differential (which is greater than the pressure differential you get from an atomic blast! That's why even at 30 ft, you need fairly thick steel to handle the pressure.
How about trying to hire a software developer instead of a combined software developer/project manager/sales engineer? Anyone with all those skills is either
1) Working as an independent consultant (and not getting lowballed on the rates)
2) Commanding a very high salary in a senior position (and probably not writing much code)
3) Running their own company
If I have to hire someone else to do 2/3rds of an engineer's job, that engineer is only going to pull down $60k a year. Which is precisely the point of this entire article. The problem is, someone who can just write code walks into an interview thinking they deserve $120k a year, when someone else is going to have to micromanage them.
Someone pulling down six figures needs to be absolutely competent on every single one of those items. And at least 90% of the people who I've interviewed thought they deserved $120k a year and weren't. And I didn't hire them. Simple as that.
I wish I hadn't already posted in the thread so I could moderate you up -- you're absolutely right. There's a shocking inbalance between what people think they're worth and what they're worth, in the *vast* majority of cases. Its brutal trying to hire people with competence in anything high tech. (And competence, in a software world, means understanding how to write code, how to diagnose problems, how to *write* clearly, how to communicate well to an audience of varied skills and personalities, how to handle ones self in front of a customer, how to put a project plan together, how to properly estimate tasks, how to balance competing priorities, etc...)
People who are good and can prove it -- of any age -- , will be paid well for their skills. But 90% of the people who are applying for those positions are *not* good, but will go home and bitch to friends and family that they're not getting hired for (age|salary|stupid recruiter|ignorant MBA penny-pinchers|etc).
I was cocky in my 20's and 30's. I thought I owned the world and every big-name company I worked for 'stroked' me. but when I hit 40, things changed. and now that I'm 50, things VERY much changed.
And there's a lesson that every single person on /. should learn from and learn well -- put your effort into building up your investment and savings nest egg. Someone making upper-tier pay in a technical field, and putting a priority on savings, not living the baller lifestyle, can approach this juncture in a vastly different way. Decisions everyone makes when they're 25, 35, 40, etc all have direct bearing on this. The reality is, this problem happens in EVERY field to everyone as they get older. Your pay will not scale forever, and if you scale your cost of living with your pay, rather than scaling your savings, it will HURT when that trend reverses itself.
I'm not yet at 50, but I have plenty of friends and coworkers who are. Some of them, at equal pay, are looking at scaling back their work, focusing on consulting, even if their income ends up cut in half. Others are panicked at the slightest possibility of losing their job because they have a few months' expenses saved.
So, kids, learn a lesson here. When you're comfortable living on $60k a year, and find yourself making $150k a year, you can buy a $70k car and a $500k house, or you can keep right on living comfortably, and putting $50k a year away in investments. 20 years later you'll be facing this decision in a vastly different way.
Use centrifugal force at the space station level to implement actual gravity.
Centripital. And the problem with that is, the structure you're standing in has the same sense of acceleration as the astronaut. It has to be dramatically stronger, and thus heavier, and therefore unworkable in orbit.
(Yes, I know that my reply is missing the joke. I thought it was important to post anyway)
Nice recovery!
Hello. Target Acquired.
Are you still there?
Article's a bit light on any details... but that facility has to deal with all that heat somehow... and using it to provide heating for local residents would be a very good use of it.
There's a reason, outside of extremely dense cities, you don't see heat distribution happen -- its horrendously inefficient and expensive.
Crook County is farm-country.
WP7 has been on the market for over a year. In that time they've atacted 1.1 million FB users. Further up the thread you see there 99 million IOS FB users and 88 million Android FB users. So WP7 is around 1% of market. Like Linux on the desktop. It has no traction. On the other hand MS has a truck load of money in the bank and will keep on trying.
I'm not sure you can really draw any reasonable figures from the Facebook numbers other than that the numbers in this article are just plain silly. Unlike Android and iOS, you don't need the Facebook app on WP7 to use Facebook. I've got a half dozen friends and family with WP7 devices. Two don't use FB at all, and I think I might be the only one who actually uses the FB app. (You can't "check in" friends with the native FB support, just yourself.)
Most sites I've seen estimate that between 1/6 and 1/8 of the WP7 users actually use the FB app, which puts the units in the hand of customers in the 7-10m range, which is consistent with the analyst estimates. I don't know what the source of those estimates are, but 1/6 is probably accurate in my experience.
Windows Phone, according to Facebook -> https://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=135892916448833
Shhhh, don't let facts get in the way of a /. anti-MS orgy. You need to extrapolate the total number of phones sold across two dozen models in over a year by assuming the total number sold is equal to the number sold of one model in less than a month!
There's a reason we don't have chip+PIN in the US, and its the same reason the RFID cards are all the rage with banks -- the risk of fraudulent transactions is already calculated into the rates the banks charge merchants, and they know through direct studies that they make more money if they make it faster to charge.
Case in point -- a merchant can be fined by Visa if they make a customer sign a receipt for a sub-$25 purchase. Big retailers know it, which is why you don't get asked at them, but smaller retailers haven't always gotten the message.
This is exactly the same thing. The risk of theft is already known and managed, they just want you to tap your card as much as you can.
It's ironic to hear moon travel still being debated 40 years after the last Apollo landing in 1972.
I think that word doesn't mean what you think it means.
He's probably gen-X. That stupid Alanis song ruined that word for an entire generation.
While they manned launches have gone well, the failed re-supply and the failed mars probe suggest there's some quality control issues creeping into the program.
You can only go so many months without giving your rocket scientists a paycheck ...
For some bullshit I doubt anyone wants, seriously you can buy the best the world has to offer for 99 cents a track, what kind of horseshit DRM system to I have to infect windows with and dance around just to save what? 25 fucking cents in the end?
Or go to a used CD store and buy the CD. You might pay 25 cents a song.
what changed over the last 30 or so years?
30 years ago, people didn't want their phone service to work around the world.
You can't have 100 different wireless providers in the US and actually end up with the service that end user's actually want.
Not so with CDMA/UMTS/LTE. All cells operate on the same frequency.
Under these coding schemes, more cells allow more capacity, but they all use the same spectrum.
My cordless phone uses the same frequencies of, oh, probably a hundred million other devices in the US.
Thankfully I don't run it with a 50 megawatt transmitter, so we're all okay.
One of the core concepts of "cellular" phones is that "cells" enable frequence reuse. Now this has to be carefully done to prevent interference, but in general, decreasing the size of cells will increase capacity. Of course this adds infrastructure cost.
But then you have to cut the power of each cell, and you start to have more problems with coverage in buildings.
There's a limit to what ATT can do without more spectrum. Expanding wifi coverage in denser urban areas would be a nice start, but at some level they are stuck unless entirely new technology making better use of the spectrum becomes available.