It's a bit more complicated than that... (it usually is). On top of a variety of internal problems, there was also the arrival of Google - which badly hurt hierarchical directory sites all over the web.
Not that DMOZ has gone away, it's still around... it's just irrelevant in the eyes of many. Not because of linkspam, but because it's harder to use.
If you knew anything about naval operations or carriers, you wouldn't have made the bullshit claim you did. Ergo, you don't. And, just like your first message you take on a bunch of irrelevancies in a pathetic and failed attempt to make yourself sound important and knowledgeable.
(And yes, the world has changed, but that doesn't make you right.)
(caveat - I was only a Sergeant with a SECRET clearance who ended up in a HQ unit after doing counter-terrorism and other ops)
Translation: I don't actually know anything about naval operations in general or carriers in specific - but I'll tack on my irrelevant rank to make myself sound important.
Your ignorance is astounding - even more so not only because it's voluntary... but because you go to such great lengths to preserve it.
Try reading up on the history of the ships I mentioned, and check out the history of HMS Argus as well. Whether you like it or not, the aircraft carrier was born in WWI.
Yes - and that someone is you. HMS Ark Royal was launching attack aircraft (though they had to recover on land) in early 1915. HMS Furious was launching and recovering wheeled attack aircraft (as opposed to scouts) by July 1918.
It wasn't until the 1920s that they had flat top experiments which is distinctly different from everything before it. You couldn't have dedicated fighters and sea planes were damn slow compared to some of the land based aircraft at the time.
It's not the flat top or dedicated fighters that mark the birth of the modern aircraft carrier - it's the shift from scouting and reconnaissance to offensive attacks.
But you'll see very worlds military building battleships with those suckers as soon as they think they can.
Only is they can solve the problem(s) that made battlewagons obsolete back in the 1940's - they're vastly outranged by and vulnerable to aircraft. This seems extremely unlikely.
To the fanboy and the non naval specialist, they [battlewagons] are endlessly fascinating. To the naval specialist, they're no more relevant today than a galleon. The only reason the US put the Iowa class back in commission in the 80's was they were seen as a [relatively] cheap and quick way to get Tomahawk and Harpoon launchers to sea, the big guns were a freebie. (The PR focused on the guns because they were the traditional weapons of the battlewagon - which has mislead those unfamiliar with naval topics into believing the guns were why they were reactivated.)
There will always be a market for premium hardware. This is just abjectly idiotic.
Always is a long time. Try visiting your local hardware store and aking about the "premium" brand of nails, or copper wire.
Unavailable in your local hardware store != unavailable globally. I'd no more expect my local hardware store to carry premium fasteners than I'd expect my corner stop-'n-rob to carry premium wines and cheeses.
Yeah, it means your corpse it less likely to be irradiated by said nuclear explosion. But whether it's directly in a nuclear explosion or weeks/months later when your supplies run out - you're just as dead.
A great area to look at it home audio. Time was, everything was pretty expensive. There wasn't really a cheap option. When cleaning out my grandfather's house my father found an old Allied Electronics catalogue from 1970. He and I had fun looking through it, and he found several items he used to have. They were around the lower end of what you could get from it, around $150 for a stereo receiver.
You really should take a look at this Radio Shack catalog from 1970: http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/catalogs/1970/. Stereo receivers for $99. "All-in-one" (receiver, turntable, speakers) systems for under a $100.
Since they've already decided they have "Aspergers or whatever", this is pretty much a useless admonition. They've already demonstrated an inability to "candidly asses their mental state".
In case you haven't noticed or anything, the Chinese are pretty talented at studying and manufacturing things.
Yet, you think they're doing it wrong for studying the Varyag... which presents something of a conundrum, because now you've claimed that 2+2=3, *and* that 2+2=5.
I'm having a hard time thinking this is something they couldn't handle.
As I said before, that's due to your baseless assumption that you know what you're talking about.
Those who have a clue about shipbuilding, or for that matter about any serious engineering whatsoever, know full well that when you've never built the object in question... studying an actual example is far more valuable than studying blueprints.
Those who have a clue about naval architecture and history, know full well the Chinese have never built a vessel of this size and complexity.
Those who have a clue about naval operations know full well that it takes decades to jumpstart an operating carrier from a blank sheet.
Ignorant jackasses pull stuff out of their ass and blow smoke when someone points out the errors in their assumption.
Four different categories - guess which one describes you?
So many advances in ship design have come and gone between the construction of that ship and now, that it makes little overt sense to try and retrofit it. China has thousands of unemployed engineers who could have done a much better job starting from scratch.
How can completely inexperienced engineers do a better job from scratch? From scratch, neither they nor their military customers have the knowledge to write even the most basic of the requisite specs. (Not to mention your faith in the progress of ship designs is... wildly misplaced.)
For a country largely governed by engineers, I would have expected better decisions.
That say more about your [utter lack of] knowledge and your [utterly unfounded in reality] assumptions than anything else.
That sound you heard was my point whoohsing ten feet over your head - as you retreat from reasoned discussion to invoking one of the standard mantra's of the space geek.
You can lead someone to facts, but you can't make them think... so we're done here.
Despite the fact that theoretically the Plymouth Colony shouldn't have required unique technologies or massive ongoing logistical support (as space based colonies will), it damn near didn't succeed. In fact, the history of colonization in the Americas, from the early 1500's onward, is largely a catalog of failures and near failures - and any success was due to massive support (in both bodies and equipment) from the mother countries and/or massive exploitation of the indigenous populations.
The mythology of the "plucky colonial" that has arisen over the last couple of centuries has lead the general populace to believe otherwise. The presence of so many "no visible means of support" colonies in science fiction, building on that "plucky colonial" myth, has lead the geek populace even further astray.
Any permanent move is going to have this dependent step... sooner we get started, the sooner we can viably cut the cord.
Nope, as the saying goes, "you can't railroad until it's time to railroad". Starting now or starting in a decade, it doesn't matter when the relevant technologies are a half century or more away.
Actually, thinking about cutting the cord, imagine the collapse we'd have if trans-oceanic transport were absolutely cut off.
But we could, with great pain, recover from such a collapse - even if it were to endure indefinitely. We have, on the North and South American continents, sufficient physical resources, population, and financial wherewithal to rebuild. It wouldn't entirely resemble today's society, among other things we'd be down about 30 odd percent of available oil, but it would be as close as we cared to make it. (Most people don't realize that despite all the hype about "Arab Oil", most of our oil imports come from Canada or Central or South America.)
Nothing we can do in space for next half century or so could even come close - any collapse of transportation of more than at most a few months duration is tantamount to a death sentence.
Integrated circuits benefited from the development of the Apollo guidance computer. Without integrated circuits we wouldn't have personal computers, cell phones, DVD players, video games, GPS and a lot of other things.
The AGC design was based on the design of the Polaris A-2 guidance system, and originally used discrete circuits. But the time MIT decided to redesign the AGC using integrated circuits - the Polaris A3, with it's IC based guidance computer, was only a few months from it's first flight.
Fuel cell development got a boost from Apollo funding, but it may be harder to convince the general public of their usefulness because there aren't any commercially-available fuel cell cars on the market, but they're apparently widely used in forklifts at Coca Cola, Whole Foods, FedEx and others where they are cutting down on emissions.
Actually, the PEM fuel cells used in those forklifts were used by NASA in the Gemini program.. They were replaced by alkaline fuel cells for Apollo and the Shuttle. In both cases, the technology pre-dates NASA involvement... As with so much else, NASA's primary effort during the Apollo wasn't research, it was specific development. (That is, taking an existing technology and adapting it for the specific needs of NASA and Apollo.)
You also forget the vast amount of money poured into fuel cells by the DoD and the DoE
What else owes its development to the Apollo program, and how does it benefit society?
Pretty much anything you can squint at from a certain angle and credit to the Apollo program will turn out to be the same as the examples above... Apollo had very little impact on the general development of technology because they didn't have time to develop anything new. Even with heaps of money (though not the fabled "blank check"), it was all they could do to take existing technologies and adapt them for Apollo's needs. What people fail to understand about Apollo was that, from a technology point of view, it's managers were extremely conservative. With the pressure of time, the high risks of the mission, and the political pressure to succeed, they were highly motivated to avoid pie-in-the-sky research and to concentrate on adapting existing technologies and hardware instead of starting from scratch - and much of it came from the DoD. (Whose budget, then and now, was vastly higher than NASA's.)
Please, add to this list so we can rebuff the people who say money spent on space is wasted.
Oh no, from NASA's point of view the money they've spent on decades of PR/propaganda is anything but wasted. They've perfected the art of claiming credit for financing and building the bakery when all they actually did was to open the bag of flour used for the pie crust. They've created generations of credulous acolytes who willingly repeat their party line while closing their eyes and minds to the truth.
The first practical integrated circuit was developed on the order of NASA for the use on the Apollo guidance computer. (And yes DoD pitched in too on that for their ICBM).
What you conveniently forget to mention is that the AGC's design was based on the guidance system for the Polaris A-2 SLBM. (Because MIT, the developer for both, could not design a new guidance system and still meet the time deadline for Apollo.) By the time NASA decided to convert that design from discrete components to solid state circuits - the solid state guidance computer for the A-3 was already in development and just a few months short of it's first flight. (The A-3 computer was *also* being developed at MIT - so, three guesses how the AGC team knew that a solid state design was even practical.)
NASA invested its money and brainpower into many things to push them to higher durability and power and lower size and weight.
NASA is a master at taking an infant or existing technology, developing it for a very specific application, and then taking credit for the whole pie when they were only responsible for a very small part of it if anything at all. Their PR/propaganda machine has decades of experience at this.
Apollo needed high-termperature ceramics and it needed computers.
And it got them largely because someone else (mostly the DoD) paid for them. Most of NASA's Apollo R&D budget went into the D - taking existing research and applying it NASA/Apollo specific applications. (The other dirty little secret is how much of that pre '67 budget spike went into building facilities and buying long lead time hardware.)
People often forget, if they even knew in the first place, how much precursor work was done long before NASA started the Apollo program and before President Kennedy re-directed the Apollo general purpose earth orbiter into a lunar landing mission.
A man on the surface of mars could do more in a single day than all the probes have done to date.
At a vastly higher cost.
True, but misleading when stated that way - because you get a couple of hundred working days out of that man. Each and everyone one of them potentially as productive as the one day that represents all the work done by the rovers to date.
The cost of sending a man on a one-way trip to Mars with a year of supplies would be well over a thousand times the cost of sending a rover.
More like a couple of hundred times the cost (at worst) for a full there-and-back mission, with the return of more than a couple of hundred times more work. As I've said before - comparing cost without comparing capability is stupid. Yes, an eighteen wheeler is more expensive than a motor scooter - but it's also vastly more capable.
The 'eggs in one basket' problem is the biggest reason I want us to get off the planet sooner rather than later.
The problem is, with current and foreseeable technology, going into space is like moving out of your parent's basement into a tent in their backyard. You're still reliant on the house for vital services (kitchen, bathroom, water, electricity) and the structure you've moved into is more vulnerable (structurally weaker) and less habitable (less insulation) than the one you've left. You can claim your independence because you're "no longer living in your parent's basement", but it's a hollow boast - because any disaster that engulfs the house is going to swallow your tent as well.
The response to 1) is well, sure, transaction confirmations are not instant. So what? Neither are credit-card transactions. They can take days, even weeks to confirm.
Um, no. Confirmation of credit card transactions is virtually instantaneous. It make take a while for the transfer to take place or the charges to be applied - but that's not the same thing.
Except NASA's budget goes right back into the pockets of the American people, plus we get space missions.
So does the DoD budget by that standard.
n 2002, the aerospace industry accounted for $95 billion of economic activity in the United States, including $23.5 billion in employee earnings dispersed among some 576,000 employees (source: Federal Aviation Administration, March 2004).
I hate to break it to you - but NASA is a very small slice of the aerospace pie. The DoD and commercial aviation make up the vast majority.
Nasa is the spearhead of innovation, if it wasn't for them, we'd not have a lot of the materials today that we make our innovations even more innovative with.
Wow, that sentence makes my head hurt.
But the reality is that no, NASA isn't really a "spearhead of innovation". It's a "spearhead of spin and taking credit for stuff they only had a modest hand in". They have one of the most effective PR/propaganda machines on the planet.
Slashdot Mirror
Translation: "My mind is made up, don't confuse me with facts".
It's a bit more complicated than that... (it usually is). On top of a variety of internal problems, there was also the arrival of Google - which badly hurt hierarchical directory sites all over the web.
Not that DMOZ has gone away, it's still around... it's just irrelevant in the eyes of many. Not because of linkspam, but because it's harder to use.
If you knew anything about naval operations or carriers, you wouldn't have made the bullshit claim you did. Ergo, you don't. And, just like your first message you take on a bunch of irrelevancies in a pathetic and failed attempt to make yourself sound important and knowledgeable.
(And yes, the world has changed, but that doesn't make you right.)
Translation: I don't actually know anything about naval operations in general or carriers in specific - but I'll tack on my irrelevant rank to make myself sound important.
Sadly, the weapon you describe is pretty much science fiction. Either that, or it's just a mix of buzzwords strung together to sound pretty.
Your ignorance is astounding - even more so not only because it's voluntary... but because you go to such great lengths to preserve it.
Try reading up on the history of the ships I mentioned, and check out the history of HMS Argus as well. Whether you like it or not, the aircraft carrier was born in WWI.
Yes - and that someone is you. HMS Ark Royal was launching attack aircraft (though they had to recover on land) in early 1915. HMS Furious was launching and recovering wheeled attack aircraft (as opposed to scouts) by July 1918.
It's not the flat top or dedicated fighters that mark the birth of the modern aircraft carrier - it's the shift from scouting and reconnaissance to offensive attacks.
Only is they can solve the problem(s) that made battlewagons obsolete back in the 1940's - they're vastly outranged by and vulnerable to aircraft. This seems extremely unlikely.
To the fanboy and the non naval specialist, they [battlewagons] are endlessly fascinating. To the naval specialist, they're no more relevant today than a galleon. The only reason the US put the Iowa class back in commission in the 80's was they were seen as a [relatively] cheap and quick way to get Tomahawk and Harpoon launchers to sea, the big guns were a freebie. (The PR focused on the guns because they were the traditional weapons of the battlewagon - which has mislead those unfamiliar with naval topics into believing the guns were why they were reactivated.)
Unavailable in your local hardware store != unavailable globally. I'd no more expect my local hardware store to carry premium fasteners than I'd expect my corner stop-'n-rob to carry premium wines and cheeses.
Yeah, it means your corpse it less likely to be irradiated by said nuclear explosion. But whether it's directly in a nuclear explosion or weeks/months later when your supplies run out - you're just as dead.
Depends on whose standards you use.
You really should take a look at this Radio Shack catalog from 1970: http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/catalogs/1970/. Stereo receivers for $99. "All-in-one" (receiver, turntable, speakers) systems for under a $100.
There's almost always been a "cheap" option.
Since they've already decided they have "Aspergers or whatever", this is pretty much a useless admonition. They've already demonstrated an inability to "candidly asses their mental state".
Yet, you think they're doing it wrong for studying the Varyag... which presents something of a conundrum, because now you've claimed that 2+2=3, *and* that 2+2=5.
As I said before, that's due to your baseless assumption that you know what you're talking about.
Those who have a clue about shipbuilding, or for that matter about any serious engineering whatsoever, know full well that when you've never built the object in question... studying an actual example is far more valuable than studying blueprints.
Those who have a clue about naval architecture and history, know full well the Chinese have never built a vessel of this size and complexity.
Those who have a clue about naval operations know full well that it takes decades to jumpstart an operating carrier from a blank sheet.
Ignorant jackasses pull stuff out of their ass and blow smoke when someone points out the errors in their assumption.
Four different categories - guess which one describes you?
How can completely inexperienced engineers do a better job from scratch? From scratch, neither they nor their military customers have the knowledge to write even the most basic of the requisite specs. (Not to mention your faith in the progress of ship designs is... wildly misplaced.)
That say more about your [utter lack of] knowledge and your [utterly unfounded in reality] assumptions than anything else.
That sound you heard was my point whoohsing ten feet over your head - as you retreat from reasoned discussion to invoking one of the standard mantra's of the space geek.
You can lead someone to facts, but you can't make them think... so we're done here.
Despite the fact that theoretically the Plymouth Colony shouldn't have required unique technologies or massive ongoing logistical support (as space based colonies will), it damn near didn't succeed. In fact, the history of colonization in the Americas, from the early 1500's onward, is largely a catalog of failures and near failures - and any success was due to massive support (in both bodies and equipment) from the mother countries and/or massive exploitation of the indigenous populations.
The mythology of the "plucky colonial" that has arisen over the last couple of centuries has lead the general populace to believe otherwise. The presence of so many "no visible means of support" colonies in science fiction, building on that "plucky colonial" myth, has lead the geek populace even further astray.
Nope, as the saying goes, "you can't railroad until it's time to railroad". Starting now or starting in a decade, it doesn't matter when the relevant technologies are a half century or more away.
But we could, with great pain, recover from such a collapse - even if it were to endure indefinitely. We have, on the North and South American continents, sufficient physical resources, population, and financial wherewithal to rebuild. It wouldn't entirely resemble today's society, among other things we'd be down about 30 odd percent of available oil, but it would be as close as we cared to make it. (Most people don't realize that despite all the hype about "Arab Oil", most of our oil imports come from Canada or Central or South America.)
Nothing we can do in space for next half century or so could even come close - any collapse of transportation of more than at most a few months duration is tantamount to a death sentence.
The AGC design was based on the design of the Polaris A-2 guidance system, and originally used discrete circuits. But the time MIT decided to redesign the AGC using integrated circuits - the Polaris A3, with it's IC based guidance computer, was only a few months from it's first flight.
Actually, the PEM fuel cells used in those forklifts were used by NASA in the Gemini program.. They were replaced by alkaline fuel cells for Apollo and the Shuttle. In both cases, the technology pre-dates NASA involvement... As with so much else, NASA's primary effort during the Apollo wasn't research, it was specific development. (That is, taking an existing technology and adapting it for the specific needs of NASA and Apollo.)
You also forget the vast amount of money poured into fuel cells by the DoD and the DoE
Pretty much anything you can squint at from a certain angle and credit to the Apollo program will turn out to be the same as the examples above... Apollo had very little impact on the general development of technology because they didn't have time to develop anything new. Even with heaps of money (though not the fabled "blank check"), it was all they could do to take existing technologies and adapt them for Apollo's needs. What people fail to understand about Apollo was that, from a technology point of view, it's managers were extremely conservative. With the pressure of time, the high risks of the mission, and the political pressure to succeed, they were highly motivated to avoid pie-in-the-sky research and to concentrate on adapting existing technologies and hardware instead of starting from scratch - and much of it came from the DoD. (Whose budget, then and now, was vastly higher than NASA's.)
Oh no, from NASA's point of view the money they've spent on decades of PR/propaganda is anything but wasted. They've perfected the art of claiming credit for financing and building the bakery when all they actually did was to open the bag of flour used for the pie crust. They've created generations of credulous acolytes who willingly repeat their party line while closing their eyes and minds to the truth.
Ah, the NASA party line - pity it's bullshit.
What you conveniently forget to mention is that the AGC's design was based on the guidance system for the Polaris A-2 SLBM. (Because MIT, the developer for both, could not design a new guidance system and still meet the time deadline for Apollo.) By the time NASA decided to convert that design from discrete components to solid state circuits - the solid state guidance computer for the A-3 was already in development and just a few months short of it's first flight. (The A-3 computer was *also* being developed at MIT - so, three guesses how the AGC team knew that a solid state design was even practical.)
NASA is a master at taking an infant or existing technology, developing it for a very specific application, and then taking credit for the whole pie when they were only responsible for a very small part of it if anything at all. Their PR/propaganda machine has decades of experience at this.
And it got them largely because someone else (mostly the DoD) paid for them. Most of NASA's Apollo R&D budget went into the D - taking existing research and applying it NASA/Apollo specific applications. (The other dirty little secret is how much of that pre '67 budget spike went into building facilities and buying long lead time hardware.)
People often forget, if they even knew in the first place, how much precursor work was done long before NASA started the Apollo program and before President Kennedy re-directed the Apollo general purpose earth orbiter into a lunar landing mission.
True, but misleading when stated that way - because you get a couple of hundred working days out of that man. Each and everyone one of them potentially as productive as the one day that represents all the work done by the rovers to date.
More like a couple of hundred times the cost (at worst) for a full there-and-back mission, with the return of more than a couple of hundred times more work. As I've said before - comparing cost without comparing capability is stupid. Yes, an eighteen wheeler is more expensive than a motor scooter - but it's also vastly more capable.
The problem is, with current and foreseeable technology, going into space is like moving out of your parent's basement into a tent in their backyard. You're still reliant on the house for vital services (kitchen, bathroom, water, electricity) and the structure you've moved into is more vulnerable (structurally weaker) and less habitable (less insulation) than the one you've left. You can claim your independence because you're "no longer living in your parent's basement", but it's a hollow boast - because any disaster that engulfs the house is going to swallow your tent as well.
Um, no. Confirmation of credit card transactions is virtually instantaneous. It make take a while for the transfer to take place or the charges to be applied - but that's not the same thing.
So does the DoD budget by that standard.
I hate to break it to you - but NASA is a very small slice of the aerospace pie. The DoD and commercial aviation make up the vast majority.
Wow, that sentence makes my head hurt.
But the reality is that no, NASA isn't really a "spearhead of innovation". It's a "spearhead of spin and taking credit for stuff they only had a modest hand in". They have one of the most effective PR/propaganda machines on the planet.