Since industrial base wasn't a point discussed in either the original post, or my reply, or a big issue in the original site selection [for Cape Canaveral] - I'm not sure what your point is.
Industrial base was implied when I started discussing parts. And when you started discussing mining.
If you meant apples, why mention oranges? One doesn't even remotely imply the other. Not to mention, if you read the context, you'd note that I (barely) mentioned mining so that you'd understand that Florida was far better connected than you seemed to think - and why.
Honestly, what I was thinking about was pretty much around how so much of the shuttle was built from all over the place.
That would be because the manufacturers were all over the place. Despite what urban legend would have you believe, pork had very little to do with it. (The same is true (scattered manufacters, little pork) for Apollo as well.) The US is a very big place, and people and industry are scattered all across it.
Why do you need to pinpoint it on a map? It is simply not necessary for anything.
Because it's ratings are fading, or because it's mostly continuing on inertia, or because it hasn't been on the cutting edge of cultural relevance in twenty years... Or whatever other reason. They just needed the column inches.
The problem with competitions is that they tend to produce solutions optimized to win the competition - and that may or may not be a solution that's actually useful to solve the real-world problems the competition is notionally aimed at.
However, the important aspect is that the radiactive byproducts of nuclear fusion are NOT the long-lived radioactive waste that comes as the result of nuclear fission reactors. Therefore, there is no issue with waste disposal.
The issue with nuclear waste disposal in the US isn't about whether it's high or low level. (Though many like to frame it as such.) Rather, it's about the fact that it has to be sequestered for extended periods of time, something fusion reactors have to deal with as well.
Nor is it "relatively" close to Houston in any useful sense of the term - it's 300 miles away.
And? I'd call it close in an absolute sense not a relative sense. The closest similar industrial center to JFK Space Center is Atlanta at about 450 miles. Both locations are well connected to the industrial base of the US.
Since industrial base wasn't a point discussed in either the original post, or my reply, or a big issue in the original site selection [for Cape Canaveral] - I'm not sure what your point is.
There's the obvious low latitude (for the US) advantage to this location, but I see other advantages. Texas is relatively centrally located in the US, especially compared to Florida. This, and if they need any internationally sourced parts, their stated choice of location is relatively close to Houston, and Houston has plenty of infrastructure in place for getting stuff moved off of ships and onto rail. Houston already has a big shipping port.
While the *state* of Texas is (more-or-less) centrally located - the *city* of Brownsville is emphatically not. It's way the hell and gone down at the southern tip of Texas - about as not centrally located in the (continental) US as you can get. Nor is it "relatively" close to Houston in any useful sense of the term - it's 300 miles away. (I.E. you really need to look at a map.) Not to mention that since Brownsville has considerable construction and maintenance capacity for oil rigs... I doubt the (relatively speaking) tiny cargoes (both is size and volume of transport) that SpaceX will be an issue.
For latitude, Florida always seemed like a great option, but for shipping parts and materials, it seemed like a very inefficient choice.
You must not be very familiar with Florida then... Even back in the 50's (when site selection started) Florida was well connected with the rest of the US. Between mining (phosphate rocks lie essentially on the surface in many parts of the state), agriculture (citrus, vegetables, and ranching in the northern parts), and wood products (lumber, pulp, and paper goods)... there was a great deal of goods headed north out of Florida by both ship and rail. Jacksonville and Miami were both good sized ports, handling both exports (to other states and to others countries) and imports (from the Caribbean and South America). There was also Port Canaveral, lesser than Jacksonville or Miami, but still decently sized. It was also well connected for air travel, with both Imeson Field in Jacksonville and Miami International in Miami. (And Homestead AFB (Miami), and Cecil Field NAS (Jacksonville), and McCoy AFB (Orlando)...)
Florida was and is *very* well connected to the rest of the US. They didn't make the choice just based on latitude.
While you don't have a guarantee, at least one lawyer (registered with AZ state bar) believes you as a project backer do, in fact, have a contract with the project creator.
That lawyer is exploring filing a court case as a matter of principle.
What a lawyer thinks is more or less irrelevant until a judge gavels the issue.
Knowing how many died tells you a lot but when a society is so affected by war that you don't actually know how many died, that also tells you a lot.
It's not that society was so effected that we don't know how many actually died... It's that they didn't have the data to know how many actually died, and that situation is independent of the war. (Which is why Hacker had to resort to statistical analysis to guesstimate a more accurate count in the first place.)
Unless you're in your seventies or older or from a third world country, you've grown up in a social environment where records were kept and scrupulously preserved. Where every citizen (or at least out to two or three nines) could be tracked from birth, through school and work to death. This wasn't true in the 1860's.
CIP - my "cousin" Jerry. Who wasn't actually my cousin... You see, one of my aunts celebrated VJ day a bit... enthusiastically, and ended up with a souvenir from a soldier boy she never saw again. Well, back then and there in rural Georgia a girl didn't have a child out of wedlock - so she was sent to a relatives farm, and nine months later my Grandma showed up at the county courthouse to register her newborn son. The clerk just asked his birthday and produced a birth certificate for J____, son of J____ and R___... and thus my cousin became my uncle. (He was even given a name starting with "J"... just like his "father" and older "brothers".) You couldn't do that today...
Even in 1980, when my youngest brother was born at home due to a severe snowstorm, we had to wait a day until the paramedics filed their paperwork to get his birth certificate.
Footing part of the bill yourself offsets one of the key reasons to bid on the scope in the first place - having other people's money spent in your country. Nobody is going to be happy about getting half the package *and* an additional bill for 'privilege' of only getting half the package. (Which is why the politicians are not happy about the proposal, as mentioned in TFA.)
Anything done on a computer, likewise, is going to be a goddamned joke. I can see why they want to use every tool available to train the newest generation of docs, but it calls into question the people who make the procurement decisions, and how much they can possibly know about the training of medics
When I was in "C" school, and after I went to the fleet - I used to wonder the same thing. "WTF do those chair drivers know about training FTB's?" Then some time in the fleet, and actually going back to the schoolhouse as an instructor taught me the answer. "They know one well of a lot - a lot more than I do." You brag about all the things you did in training, well... who do you think made the decisions about how your course would be run?
As a former combat medic, I can assure you NO VIRTUAL TRAINING can match or prepare you for the real thing. NONE.
Since nobody is claiming that it can or will... your point would be what?
So what I'm saying is, enjoy your fucking computer games, just don't imagine they're going to help you when the shit hits the fan.
Nothing helps you when the shit hits the fan for the first time. Even you admit that (multiple times) after bragging about you ate rocks for breakfast and walked to training over six miles of broken glass - and liked it. So calling out CBI (computer based instruction) for especial venom is just more meaningless noise.
The fact is, CBI and other forms of simulation *are* valuable for training. (You even brag about taking part in a simulation!) I don't know about the specific details of the training of medics, but after seeing how it's useful and has had positive effects on the training pipelines I'm aware of, you'd have a very, very hard time convincing me that medics are somehow more "special" (not that there's anyone who doesn't believe their field is "special") than others and that there's no place for it in the pipeline.
Seriously? It's that difficult to understand the difference between a generic address that goes $DIETY knows where (and mail rent to it is probably vetted by an intern) and the actual address of the responsible individual(s)/team(s)?
I don't want to get all conspiratorial, but it seems to take 3 - 5 decades each time, for something involving radiation actually being linked to cancer.
Because cancers don't appear immediately after exposure - sometimes it takes decades for the cancers to appear. Then, once cancer does appear, you have to wait until enough of those cancers appear to have a valid statistical base. Then you have to work through all the potential causes to isolate the prime cause... And that's all made more difficult when the type of cancer is rare, as this type is. Worse yet, a large percentage of this type never result in gross symptoms - they're only discovered during autopsy.
Science takes time. Real life isn't a TV show where major medical breakthroughs occur by the 2nd commercial break.
They rejected the treaty on the ground that they're the United States, and nobody's forcing them to give up their nukes. They just couldn't say that.
The problem with your theory is that it pretty much has nothing to do with facts. The Comprehensive Test Ban wasn't a ban on nukes, it was a ban on nuclear testing.
Worse for your tinfoil hat view of the world, even though the US hasn't ratified the CTBT, it has acted as if it has and ceased nuclear testing.
So you're saying that we could once build an entire nuclear powerplant in 77 days and get it running within 9 hours...
No, it months to build the modules that made up the powerplant - the 77 days figure is for connecting the modules once they were built, assembled, tested, disassembled, and then shipped to Camp Century.
As far as getting it running in 9 hours... well, the exact times are classified but lets just say that submarine crews would have a pretty good shot at that record.
While it scores virtually infinite cartoon-supervillain points(seriously, a massive, ever-expanding labarynthine nuclear-powered ice fortress?), I have to imagine that the cost/benefit got a lot less exciting once the more prosaic 'lots of nuclear submarines sneaking around, also we can use them to attack ships, in a pinch,' strategy became viable.
SSBN's were half the solution, land based ICBM's with the range to reach the USSR from CONUS was the other.
It solves several problems with liquid spices (packaging/density) and dry (imagine salt/pepper dust floating around in 0 G).
The problem is, those problems are already solved. Liquid spices are in squeeze bottles designed to only let out small drops, and the astronauts trained to use them only close to the food so they don't float about. The quantity carried is small enough that density isn't a big issue. Dry spices are basically not used at all. Hot sauce (a liquid spice) is used in place of pepper, and a salt brine (a liquid spice) is used in place of salt.
Not to mention the strips are designed to "melt in the mouth", which means they aren't in the food... and thus are pretty much pointless.
This is about as interesting as posting every document related to every person who emigrated from w00tdorf, Germany to yayoubetcha, Minnesota in 1890.
Maybe it's not interesting to you... but the world doesn't revolve around you. This is going to be very interesting to genealogists and historians.
My niece (the family genealogist and historian) has been bouncing off of the walls since she first heard rumors of this... supposedly we have a distant relative who died onboard Titanic and now she has another shot at tracking them down. She hasn't been able to before, but she's very thorough and very persistent in making every effort to verify a story before moving it from the "legend" to the "fact" category. (My family tells lots of tall tales about it's history, some even having a grain of truth.)
And the people of Belfast patiently await mention of RMS Titanic's sister-ship and first of class, RMS Olympic, which made her maiden crossing to New York on 31st May 1911 and continued in service until the early 1930s.
And they hope there's little mention of HMHS Britannic, the third sister - who also had something of an inglorious career.
Her completion was delayed by months when WWI broke out and efforts were shifted to higher priority wartime Admiralty contracts. When she was completed she was laid up for months because the White Star line considered it too risky to place her into service.
Then, after being requisitioned by the Admiralty and just a years service as a hospital ship - she struck a mine off the Grecian coast. Despite post-Titanic modifications (which prevented too many compartments from flooding), a damaged watertight door and open portholes on the lower decks lead to rapid flooding - and her Captain ordered he abandoned only twenty minutes after the explosion. Fifty five minutes after the explosion, she rolled over on her starboard side and sank.
So you see, the Titanic was neither the largest ship in the World at the time, nor the most famous or glamorous. But that doesn't sell a film very well, does it?
Olympic 45,325 tons. Titanic 46,328 tons.
You should read the contemporary press - all of which lauded Titanic as the largest, most glamorous, most famous, etc... ship of the time. The hyperbole wasn't invented for the film and predates the sinking.
there is an entirely new generation of movie goers that have not seen one of most successful movies ever.
Have they been living in a cave someplace? Titanic has been out on DVD, and re-released multiple times in various editions - and it's been shown pretty regularly on cable.
And right there, is why this project is failing. The kids of the world need education, and you (like the project's leaders) are more interested in subjecting them to political indoctrination.
I own one of the first OLPCs. The problem isn't Linux. (I hate to think of Win XP running in 256MB system, 1GB storage.) The problem is the whole philosophy of "it's not a computer, it's an education tool." (Or however they put it.)
That's the surface layer - but the real problem lies deeper. The real problem is that it was designed to be a [computer|education tool|portal to information|flavor of the week] (I.E. somewhat confused goals) that adhered to the (idiosyncratic) design theories of people with little to no actual experience in developing such tools*, and to support the political agenda and social theories of Nicolas Negroponte. And it's last item that's the real killer, because everything else was subordinated to that agenda and those theories.
Not helping much was the decision to set the price to a politically attractive level long before they had sufficient experience with the software and hardware to know whether or not that price was a reasonable goal for their laundry list of features. When it turned out not to be, they slashed performance to target those political goals.
And that's not even touching on the myriad of other things they fouled up on...
* to be fair, nobody really has such experience - everything in the developed world to date has been somewhat ad hoc.
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If you meant apples, why mention oranges? One doesn't even remotely imply the other. Not to mention, if you read the context, you'd note that I (barely) mentioned mining so that you'd understand that Florida was far better connected than you seemed to think - and why.
That would be because the manufacturers were all over the place. Despite what urban legend would have you believe, pork had very little to do with it. (The same is true (scattered manufacters, little pork) for Apollo as well.) The US is a very big place, and people and industry are scattered all across it.
Nice woodworking job, can't help but wonder why he skimped and put such crappy legs on it though.
Because it's ratings are fading, or because it's mostly continuing on inertia, or because it hasn't been on the cutting edge of cultural relevance in twenty years... Or whatever other reason. They just needed the column inches.
The problem with competitions is that they tend to produce solutions optimized to win the competition - and that may or may not be a solution that's actually useful to solve the real-world problems the competition is notionally aimed at.
The issue with nuclear waste disposal in the US isn't about whether it's high or low level. (Though many like to frame it as such.) Rather, it's about the fact that it has to be sequestered for extended periods of time, something fusion reactors have to deal with as well.
Since industrial base wasn't a point discussed in either the original post, or my reply, or a big issue in the original site selection [for Cape Canaveral] - I'm not sure what your point is.
It's a supercomputer center... so, it's going to be quite a bit more than a million I suspect.
Oranges are cheap too... until you want to buy a few tens of tons of them. Then the bill gets pretty steep.
So it goes with computing - computers are cheap, but supercomputer centers are not.
While the *state* of Texas is (more-or-less) centrally located - the *city* of Brownsville is emphatically not. It's way the hell and gone down at the southern tip of Texas - about as not centrally located in the (continental) US as you can get. Nor is it "relatively" close to Houston in any useful sense of the term - it's 300 miles away. (I.E. you really need to look at a map.) Not to mention that since Brownsville has considerable construction and maintenance capacity for oil rigs... I doubt the (relatively speaking) tiny cargoes (both is size and volume of transport) that SpaceX will be an issue.
You must not be very familiar with Florida then... Even back in the 50's (when site selection started) Florida was well connected with the rest of the US. Between mining (phosphate rocks lie essentially on the surface in many parts of the state), agriculture (citrus, vegetables, and ranching in the northern parts), and wood products (lumber, pulp, and paper goods)... there was a great deal of goods headed north out of Florida by both ship and rail. Jacksonville and Miami were both good sized ports, handling both exports (to other states and to others countries) and imports (from the Caribbean and South America). There was also Port Canaveral, lesser than Jacksonville or Miami, but still decently sized. It was also well connected for air travel, with both Imeson Field in Jacksonville and Miami International in Miami. (And Homestead AFB (Miami), and Cecil Field NAS (Jacksonville), and McCoy AFB (Orlando)...)
Florida was and is *very* well connected to the rest of the US. They didn't make the choice just based on latitude.
What a lawyer thinks is more or less irrelevant until a judge gavels the issue.
It's not that society was so effected that we don't know how many actually died... It's that they didn't have the data to know how many actually died, and that situation is independent of the war. (Which is why Hacker had to resort to statistical analysis to guesstimate a more accurate count in the first place.)
Unless you're in your seventies or older or from a third world country, you've grown up in a social environment where records were kept and scrupulously preserved. Where every citizen (or at least out to two or three nines) could be tracked from birth, through school and work to death. This wasn't true in the 1860's.
CIP - my "cousin" Jerry. Who wasn't actually my cousin... You see, one of my aunts celebrated VJ day a bit... enthusiastically, and ended up with a souvenir from a soldier boy she never saw again. Well, back then and there in rural Georgia a girl didn't have a child out of wedlock - so she was sent to a relatives farm, and nine months later my Grandma showed up at the county courthouse to register her newborn son. The clerk just asked his birthday and produced a birth certificate for J____, son of J____ and R___... and thus my cousin became my uncle. (He was even given a name starting with "J"... just like his "father" and older "brothers".) You couldn't do that today...
Even in 1980, when my youngest brother was born at home due to a severe snowstorm, we had to wait a day until the paramedics filed their paperwork to get his birth certificate.
Footing part of the bill yourself offsets one of the key reasons to bid on the scope in the first place - having other people's money spent in your country. Nobody is going to be happy about getting half the package *and* an additional bill for 'privilege' of only getting half the package. (Which is why the politicians are not happy about the proposal, as mentioned in TFA.)
When I was in "C" school, and after I went to the fleet - I used to wonder the same thing. "WTF do those chair drivers know about training FTB's?" Then some time in the fleet, and actually going back to the schoolhouse as an instructor taught me the answer. "They know one well of a lot - a lot more than I do." You brag about all the things you did in training, well... who do you think made the decisions about how your course would be run?
Since nobody is claiming that it can or will... your point would be what?
Nothing helps you when the shit hits the fan for the first time. Even you admit that (multiple times) after bragging about you ate rocks for breakfast and walked to training over six miles of broken glass - and liked it. So calling out CBI (computer based instruction) for especial venom is just more meaningless noise.
The fact is, CBI and other forms of simulation *are* valuable for training. (You even brag about taking part in a simulation!) I don't know about the specific details of the training of medics, but after seeing how it's useful and has had positive effects on the training pipelines I'm aware of, you'd have a very, very hard time convincing me that medics are somehow more "special" (not that there's anyone who doesn't believe their field is "special") than others and that there's no place for it in the pipeline.
Seriously? It's that difficult to understand the difference between a generic address that goes $DIETY knows where (and mail rent to it is probably vetted by an intern) and the actual address of the responsible individual(s)/team(s)?
Because cancers don't appear immediately after exposure - sometimes it takes decades for the cancers to appear. Then, once cancer does appear, you have to wait until enough of those cancers appear to have a valid statistical base. Then you have to work through all the potential causes to isolate the prime cause... And that's all made more difficult when the type of cancer is rare, as this type is. Worse yet, a large percentage of this type never result in gross symptoms - they're only discovered during autopsy.
Science takes time. Real life isn't a TV show where major medical breakthroughs occur by the 2nd commercial break.
The problem with your theory is that it pretty much has nothing to do with facts. The Comprehensive Test Ban wasn't a ban on nukes, it was a ban on nuclear testing.
Worse for your tinfoil hat view of the world, even though the US hasn't ratified the CTBT, it has acted as if it has and ceased nuclear testing.
Yes, bombers are the third leg of the triad. But we weren't discussing the triad.
No, it months to build the modules that made up the powerplant - the 77 days figure is for connecting the modules once they were built, assembled, tested, disassembled, and then shipped to Camp Century.
As far as getting it running in 9 hours... well, the exact times are classified but lets just say that submarine crews would have a pretty good shot at that record.
SSBN's were half the solution, land based ICBM's with the range to reach the USSR from CONUS was the other.
The problem is, those problems are already solved. Liquid spices are in squeeze bottles designed to only let out small drops, and the astronauts trained to use them only close to the food so they don't float about. The quantity carried is small enough that density isn't a big issue. Dry spices are basically not used at all. Hot sauce (a liquid spice) is used in place of pepper, and a salt brine (a liquid spice) is used in place of salt.
Not to mention the strips are designed to "melt in the mouth", which means they aren't in the food... and thus are pretty much pointless.
Maybe it's not interesting to you... but the world doesn't revolve around you. This is going to be very interesting to genealogists and historians.
My niece (the family genealogist and historian) has been bouncing off of the walls since she first heard rumors of this... supposedly we have a distant relative who died onboard Titanic and now she has another shot at tracking them down. She hasn't been able to before, but she's very thorough and very persistent in making every effort to verify a story before moving it from the "legend" to the "fact" category. (My family tells lots of tall tales about it's history, some even having a grain of truth.)
And they hope there's little mention of HMHS Britannic, the third sister - who also had something of an inglorious career.
Her completion was delayed by months when WWI broke out and efforts were shifted to higher priority wartime Admiralty contracts. When she was completed she was laid up for months because the White Star line considered it too risky to place her into service.
Then, after being requisitioned by the Admiralty and just a years service as a hospital ship - she struck a mine off the Grecian coast. Despite post-Titanic modifications (which prevented too many compartments from flooding), a damaged watertight door and open portholes on the lower decks lead to rapid flooding - and her Captain ordered he abandoned only twenty minutes after the explosion. Fifty five minutes after the explosion, she rolled over on her starboard side and sank.
Olympic 45,325 tons. Titanic 46,328 tons.
You should read the contemporary press - all of which lauded Titanic as the largest, most glamorous, most famous, etc... ship of the time. The hyperbole wasn't invented for the film and predates the sinking.
Have they been living in a cave someplace? Titanic has been out on DVD, and re-released multiple times in various editions - and it's been shown pretty regularly on cable.
And right there, is why this project is failing. The kids of the world need education, and you (like the project's leaders) are more interested in subjecting them to political indoctrination.
That's the surface layer - but the real problem lies deeper. The real problem is that it was designed to be a [computer|education tool|portal to information|flavor of the week] (I.E. somewhat confused goals) that adhered to the (idiosyncratic) design theories of people with little to no actual experience in developing such tools*, and to support the political agenda and social theories of Nicolas Negroponte. And it's last item that's the real killer, because everything else was subordinated to that agenda and those theories.
Not helping much was the decision to set the price to a politically attractive level long before they had sufficient experience with the software and hardware to know whether or not that price was a reasonable goal for their laundry list of features. When it turned out not to be, they slashed performance to target those political goals.
And that's not even touching on the myriad of other things they fouled up on...
* to be fair, nobody really has such experience - everything in the developed world to date has been somewhat ad hoc.