These days, since I tend to read ebooks on my phone, I would not be impressed if they took it away and made me sit and stare at a wall all day.
So you've lost the ability to read a paper book? Or are you just one of those self centered jerks who believes the universe revolves around them and their methods of doing things?
Back in the 1960's they had to start with a clean board and design the technology in less than a DECADE to fulfill the promise made by a dead president.
That's the urban legend. In reality, development of the F-1 engine (that ended up in the first stage of the Saturn V) got underway in 1956. Development of the Saturn family got underway in 1957. Development of the Apollo CSM got underway in early 1960. The first serious stabs at designing a LM got underway in early 1961.
That's why Kennedy chose the moon landing as a national goal - because an enormous amount of development that could be built on was already in progress.
Now we have the knowhow, we have the technology, what's the single insurmountable obstacle to returning to our nearest solar neighbour?
Budget. We just aren't willing to spend the significant fraction of the budget required to go back because we aren't racing the Reds anymore.
Was all that really done just to piss off the Russians? I have a difficult time putting it down to merely that.
Regardless of whether you have a difficulty with it or not, it's a fact.
The only difference between weapons grade plutonium and the left over crap when the reactor runs out of fuel is the length the fuel has been in place inside the reactor.
Incorrect. The longer the fuel is in the reactor the higher the proportion of Pu-240 - and Pu-240 is prone to predetonation and thus undesirable for use in a nuclear weapon. (And separating it out is hellishly expensive.)
Or to reverse the viewpoint - why do you think the reactor designers chose the harder task of making the fuel 'trivially removable' rather than the simpler task of leaving it in until it's burned up?
To use a dreaded Slashdot car analogy: Most people wouldn't feel comfortable having a car using 1960's safety technology as their daily driver. Why should people be more comfortable with something as complex as nuclear power generation using 1960's safety technology and design?
I should point out that the Navy used a 1950's design (the S5W) well into the 90's without accidents and with very few significant incidents. The A2W plants onboard USS Enterprise are of a similar design vintage and is equally free of accident and incident. The problem with civilian reactors isn't the age of the design, the problem is oversight and regulation of the operators as the grandparent poster stated.
Although it can be argued that the walls protecting Fukushima were not high enough (where does that arms race against nature stop?), that ignores the fundamental design flaws that allowed all the backup systems to fail. These are design flaws that could really only have been corrected by rebuilding the entire plant.
There's no guarantee that a newer design won't have it's own significant design flaws that won't be revealed until the system is place under stress.
Freedom of the Press and shield laws have never been absolute defenses against being an asshat. They're meant to protect the right to publish information and analysis, not personal attacks and character assassination.
When you read the article, and more importantly the judgment, you find the summary is (as usual) more inflammatory than factual and that Cringlely is spinning it quite heavily. The judge did not find that bloggers did not rate protection, but that Cox by conducting a deliberate campaign of defamation was not acting as a journalist and thus by extension was not protected as one.
The article is pretty much useless. While we know AT&T ranks lowest - we don't know what that means in absolute percentages. (I.E. they could be have a score of 99.98% percent customer satisfaction, and still be 'lowest'.)
But, that won't stop the cavalcade of anecdotal AT&T hate, after all Slashdot has to produce it's daily Two Minutes Hate against somebody corporate.
And that their choice was wrong is only obvious with 20/20 hindsight. Who in the 70's would have predicted the ubiquitous PC, let alone ubiquitous PC's with the power of a multi-core CPU chip? Without that ubiquitous PC, digital imaging makes no economic sense.
If you're under 40, and especially if you're under 30, there's almost no way to explain to you how different the world is today from the 1970's.
My house has two cars (with computers of their own and both with aftermarket satnav systems), two PC's with printers, two iPhones, a Tivo, an HDTV, a DVD player, a Wii, and Xbox, two GPSr's, three digital cameras (a consumer grade DSLR, a bridge camera, and a point-and-shoot), and computers in half a dozen appliances*... All of it off the shelf, and pretty much none of it available to the consumer at any price in the 1970's.
My hometown included the headquarters of a major multinational (RJR Industries) and a major bank (Wachovia). Yet, I wouldn't be surprised if my more-or-less ordinary suburban home has a significant fraction of the raw computing power that the entire city of Winston-Salem did in 1976.
Heck, when a grocery store out on the north side of town got a micro computer driven integrated POS system my junior year in high school (79-80), it made the local paper.
*And that's not counting things like the three digital thermometers in my kitchen, or the digital thermostat for the HVAC system, or the digital equipment out in the workshop, etc.. etc...
They're not distributing copies of books--they're doing searches and returning small snippets. The books are scanned, with the permission of their owners, only in order to allow those searches.
Except... They're not returning snippets, they're often returning as much as half or more of the book. And they're not doing it without the authors or right's holders permission. So, you're pretty much wrong on both counts - and so is Google. They've kept the suits alive with a variety of legal maneuvers such as the one described in TFA,
I would have thought first-sale rights would permit the owners of books to have their own copies scanned, and that fair use would permit Google to search them and return snippets.
First sale rights do not include providing copies to others. (What on earth would make you think it did?) And again, Google is returning *much* more than snippets.
I don't watch much TV because I just don't have the time
This neatly answers the question of what's wrong with TV: It doesn't fit into people's schedules. If you're not available when the TV company is broadcasting then you're out of luck.
Um, not only did the OP not mention a schedule conflict - you seem to miss the existence of time shifting via DVR's. (Though suspiciously you then discuss them a paragraph later.)
Then there's all the timewasting adverts. You might think a show starts at 10:30 but the broadcasters see the schedule time as a way to get you sitting down to watch a few adverts, nothing more. You might waste 20 minutes before it actually starts (at least, that's what they do around here).
I can't tell where 'around here' is for you, but every DVR I've ever seen has a mechanism to get around this - the fast forward button.
Yes there's TIVO to timeshift things but it's only a half measure. You still have to be sitting in the right room in front of the right screen and you have to remember to program it to record the shows you want.
Well, you exaggerate greatly here. The ability to (legally) share content within your home is fairly widespread and growing. And seriously, if you can't remember to take five minutes to program your DVR to grab the shows you want... well, you have bigger problems than not enough time to watch them. Tivo makes it even easier, as it takes only five minutes to set up to grab all the episodes of a given show.
Or, to put it another way - you're reply is nothing but a convoluted collection of exaggerations, half truths, and evasions to allow you to justify piracy and get in a karma whoring dig at the MPAA/RIAA.
NASA has lost ALL of it's Saturn V knowledge. The scientist have died, the documents have rotten and been lost. The parts were SOLD AS SCRAP.
While, as has been pointed out by other posters, you're utterly wrong - I'd like to ask, why do you think this matters? Even if we had all this stuff, it's all fifty years old. Processes, materials, engineering practices... it's all changed, radically, in half a century.
Just to take one example... The Instrument Unit - it weighed over two tones and occupied several hundred cubit feet (for the operating bits, not including the empty space in the middle). Today, it would fit in a few tens of cubic feet (probably well under) and weight only a few hundred pounds.
NASA is currently trying to buy up all the lost parts from scrap dealers. All this old knowledge is for the 'new' space program.
You're confusing two different stories from a decade apart. The first is NASA buying from scrap dealers in the 90's to keep some non critical 70's era shuttle support equipment running. The second is NASA examining some J2's that are in museums while learning how to rebuild the J2 for use on the Constellation booster. (Anyone who has worked with complex systems knows the documents don't tell the full story anyhow.)
Yes, we are indeed regressing.
Only if you're foolish enough to believe that fifty year old systems should be common knowledge among engineers who've never worked on those systems. Or that it's possible for documentation to contain 100% of all the relevant information in the first place. But such beliefs go hand-in-hand with believing in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
Good for you, you know your CONUS time zones. Do you expect someone in India to remember all of the CONUS TZs, or would you like the New Zeland time for the eclipse?
When India or New Zealand starts paying NASA's bills (since they authored the article), then you'll have a point. Until then, piss off.
The point is that UTC is global, just like this website.
Someone with the reading comprehension of a eight year old would note that article quoted is by a US government agency for US residents. Hence, the time is quoted in the relevant zones. So, until you graduate elementary school, piss off.
Predicting Facebook's imminent demise on Slashdot is like pundits predicting cheap, clean fusion energy - it's endlessly predicted, but somehow never actually happens. Facebook's imminent demise has been predicted regularly since it first appeared - yet five years after it first opened it's doors to all and sundry, it's still here.
I have never understood why Slashdot, supposedly so interested in technology, has been so quick and so relentless in it's dismissal of social media. Well, until Google got in the game anyway... Which hints at an ugly reason as to why Slashdot dismisses the media used by the masses, and eagerly drools at a broken systems (Orkut, Buzz, and now G+) introduced by Google.
Unanswered but interesting question - where did these extremophiles come from? Are we looking at evolution on a very short time frame (plausible for microorganisms)
There's two effects in play here for bacteria evolved locally... The first is that bacteria reproduce rapidly [1], so the bacteria around the pit have gone through an enormous number of generations. (254,000 from the closing of the pit to the present day assuming an average generation time of just one hour [2].) The second is the staggering number of potential ancestors - in the billions in soil surrounding the pit, fecal bacteria from birds and animals, etc... etc...
The result is a essentially a giant distributed memory MIMD parallel processor [3] attacking the problem of colonizing the waters of the pit.
are there actually very small numbers of these critters drifting around all the time, just looking for a toxic, acidic lake they can call home?
As I point out above, there are numerous potential ancestors. If I had to guess, I'd say they likely didn't colonize the pit directly - they likely colonized the margins and gradually drifted inwards toward the pit with successive generations each able to tolerate a higher level of acid and toxic materials.
[1] As little as half an hour under ideal circumstances - which is why food safety recommendations want things kept cool and cooled/or heated rapidly. A very small amount of bacterial contamination can become a big problem in a short time because bacterial population growth is exponential.
[2] Which is why fruit flies, with a generation time of ten days, are popular for genetics studies.
[3] Incidentally, the same is true of the early Earth. Creationists like to point out the unlikelihood of life arising because of the low odds of the right chemical conditions arising - but with thousands of lighting strikes (to take one proposed cause) occurring daily in a wide variety of locations, you have the same distributed memory MIMD effect. Though the chance of a given combination occurring is low, when you're trying multiple solutions in parallel, the odds of that combination appearing rise dramatically.
If the manual labor required for assembling your car makes it 10k more expensive than a comparable car of a big company, your best hope is to produce cars for a market segment where the uniqueness of your model is worth the additional cost to enough customers.
That's the OP's point - the Aptera is too expensive for the economy segment, and too underperforming/oddly styled for the (more well heeled) 'green fetish/stylish' market. Or, in other words, at it's price point the Aptera is a solution in search of a market. It's failure should have been predictable as it's problem isn't (as the submitter seems to think) that it's too late, but that it was wrongly conceived right out of the box.
Tesla was smart to start with the Roadster. Now they have the means to go after a bigger market with the Sedan.
With the small number produced, it's extraordinarily unlikely that Tesla accumulated sufficient capital to 'go after' the Sedan, they're probably relying on financing and the proceeds from their IPO. But, the Sedan is still going to be a very expensive car for it's performance level - like the Roadster (and the Volt, and the Leaf), aimed mostly at the (fairly small) 'green fetish/stylish' market. We're still a very long way off from a consumer level electric vehicle, one that can compete on price with the Honda Civic and similar cars in that (sub $20k) range.
This is a brilliant plan if they can actually pull it off at a high enough scale. This forces people to NOT spend for the holidays. Big banks (Visa gets a cut everytime you use your credit card!) and retailers like Walmart take a hit.
So will the independent optical lab my best friend works at. So will the independent hardware store another friend works at. So will the independent motor sports dealer my wife works at.
People don't just use their credit cards for holiday purchases or just at big box stores. If they pull this off at a 'high enough scale' to impact the big banks and retailers, a lot of little businesses and innocent people are going to get hurt too. Not to mention the workers at the charities who'll be spending hours dealing with irate people whose cards were falsely charged and in making chargebacks to give the money back.
Has anyone considered all the arcing and sparking that simple on / off / circuit breakers will have to deal with?
You just design the breaker appropriately. It's not exactly rocket surgery.
Telcos have used 48VDC for decades. Submarines have used circuit breakers on high voltage/high amperage DC for just about as long. (Even modern nuclear boats have a big ass 12VDC (in the US) battery for backup power.)
Slashdot Mirror
I can't think of a single industry where you'd gain useful 'street cred' by releasing your code as open source.
Having your phone taken away from you when summoned to jury duty is hardly unexpected... And buying a book you already have is stupid.
So yeah, I properly figured you out the first time - self centered jerk. Only after your reply, I'd have to add "and ignorant to boot".
So you've lost the ability to read a paper book? Or are you just one of those self centered jerks who believes the universe revolves around them and their methods of doing things?
That's the urban legend. In reality, development of the F-1 engine (that ended up in the first stage of the Saturn V) got underway in 1956. Development of the Saturn family got underway in 1957. Development of the Apollo CSM got underway in early 1960. The first serious stabs at designing a LM got underway in early 1961.
That's why Kennedy chose the moon landing as a national goal - because an enormous amount of development that could be built on was already in progress.
Budget. We just aren't willing to spend the significant fraction of the budget required to go back because we aren't racing the Reds anymore.
Regardless of whether you have a difficulty with it or not, it's a fact.
You act as though these are binary tests - either true or not true. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Incorrect. The longer the fuel is in the reactor the higher the proportion of Pu-240 - and Pu-240 is prone to predetonation and thus undesirable for use in a nuclear weapon. (And separating it out is hellishly expensive.)
Or to reverse the viewpoint - why do you think the reactor designers chose the harder task of making the fuel 'trivially removable' rather than the simpler task of leaving it in until it's burned up?
I should point out that the Navy used a 1950's design (the S5W) well into the 90's without accidents and with very few significant incidents. The A2W plants onboard USS Enterprise are of a similar design vintage and is equally free of accident and incident. The problem with civilian reactors isn't the age of the design, the problem is oversight and regulation of the operators as the grandparent poster stated.
There's no guarantee that a newer design won't have it's own significant design flaws that won't be revealed until the system is place under stress.
Freedom of the Press and shield laws have never been absolute defenses against being an asshat. They're meant to protect the right to publish information and analysis, not personal attacks and character assassination.
When you read the article, and more importantly the judgment, you find the summary is (as usual) more inflammatory than factual and that Cringlely is spinning it quite heavily. The judge did not find that bloggers did not rate protection, but that Cox by conducting a deliberate campaign of defamation was not acting as a journalist and thus by extension was not protected as one.
And... now we know why you're single and always will be.
The article is pretty much useless. While we know AT&T ranks lowest - we don't know what that means in absolute percentages. (I.E. they could be have a score of 99.98% percent customer satisfaction, and still be 'lowest'.)
But, that won't stop the cavalcade of anecdotal AT&T hate, after all Slashdot has to produce it's daily Two Minutes Hate against somebody corporate.
And that their choice was wrong is only obvious with 20/20 hindsight. Who in the 70's would have predicted the ubiquitous PC, let alone ubiquitous PC's with the power of a multi-core CPU chip? Without that ubiquitous PC, digital imaging makes no economic sense.
If you're under 40, and especially if you're under 30, there's almost no way to explain to you how different the world is today from the 1970's.
My house has two cars (with computers of their own and both with aftermarket satnav systems), two PC's with printers, two iPhones, a Tivo, an HDTV, a DVD player, a Wii, and Xbox, two GPSr's, three digital cameras (a consumer grade DSLR, a bridge camera, and a point-and-shoot), and computers in half a dozen appliances*... All of it off the shelf, and pretty much none of it available to the consumer at any price in the 1970's.
My hometown included the headquarters of a major multinational (RJR Industries) and a major bank (Wachovia). Yet, I wouldn't be surprised if my more-or-less ordinary suburban home has a significant fraction of the raw computing power that the entire city of Winston-Salem did in 1976.
Heck, when a grocery store out on the north side of town got a micro computer driven integrated POS system my junior year in high school (79-80), it made the local paper.
*And that's not counting things like the three digital thermometers in my kitchen, or the digital thermostat for the HVAC system, or the digital equipment out in the workshop, etc.. etc...
Except... They're not returning snippets, they're often returning as much as half or more of the book. And they're not doing it without the authors or right's holders permission. So, you're pretty much wrong on both counts - and so is Google. They've kept the suits alive with a variety of legal maneuvers such as the one described in TFA,
First sale rights do not include providing copies to others. (What on earth would make you think it did?) And again, Google is returning *much* more than snippets.
Um, not only did the OP not mention a schedule conflict - you seem to miss the existence of time shifting via DVR's. (Though suspiciously you then discuss them a paragraph later.)
I can't tell where 'around here' is for you, but every DVR I've ever seen has a mechanism to get around this - the fast forward button.
Well, you exaggerate greatly here. The ability to (legally) share content within your home is fairly widespread and growing. And seriously, if you can't remember to take five minutes to program your DVR to grab the shows you want... well, you have bigger problems than not enough time to watch them. Tivo makes it even easier, as it takes only five minutes to set up to grab all the episodes of a given show.
Or, to put it another way - you're reply is nothing but a convoluted collection of exaggerations, half truths, and evasions to allow you to justify piracy and get in a karma whoring dig at the MPAA/RIAA.
While, as has been pointed out by other posters, you're utterly wrong - I'd like to ask, why do you think this matters? Even if we had all this stuff, it's all fifty years old. Processes, materials, engineering practices... it's all changed, radically, in half a century.
Just to take one example... The Instrument Unit - it weighed over two tones and occupied several hundred cubit feet (for the operating bits, not including the empty space in the middle). Today, it would fit in a few tens of cubic feet (probably well under) and weight only a few hundred pounds.
You're confusing two different stories from a decade apart. The first is NASA buying from scrap dealers in the 90's to keep some non critical 70's era shuttle support equipment running. The second is NASA examining some J2's that are in museums while learning how to rebuild the J2 for use on the Constellation booster. (Anyone who has worked with complex systems knows the documents don't tell the full story anyhow.)
Only if you're foolish enough to believe that fifty year old systems should be common knowledge among engineers who've never worked on those systems. Or that it's possible for documentation to contain 100% of all the relevant information in the first place. But such beliefs go hand-in-hand with believing in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
When India or New Zealand starts paying NASA's bills (since they authored the article), then you'll have a point. Until then, piss off.
Someone with the reading comprehension of a eight year old would note that article quoted is by a US government agency for US residents. Hence, the time is quoted in the relevant zones. So, until you graduate elementary school, piss off.
What planet do you live on that every country doesn't do this to every other country it can do so to?
Predicting Facebook's imminent demise on Slashdot is like pundits predicting cheap, clean fusion energy - it's endlessly predicted, but somehow never actually happens. Facebook's imminent demise has been predicted regularly since it first appeared - yet five years after it first opened it's doors to all and sundry, it's still here.
I have never understood why Slashdot, supposedly so interested in technology, has been so quick and so relentless in it's dismissal of social media. Well, until Google got in the game anyway... Which hints at an ugly reason as to why Slashdot dismisses the media used by the masses, and eagerly drools at a broken systems (Orkut, Buzz, and now G+) introduced by Google.
That's your handicap, not a universal condition - there is a difference. (I'm in PST, and know the offsets for all (CONUS) timezones by heart.)
There's two effects in play here for bacteria evolved locally... The first is that bacteria reproduce rapidly [1], so the bacteria around the pit have gone through an enormous number of generations. (254,000 from the closing of the pit to the present day assuming an average generation time of just one hour [2].) The second is the staggering number of potential ancestors - in the billions in soil surrounding the pit, fecal bacteria from birds and animals, etc... etc...
The result is a essentially a giant distributed memory MIMD parallel processor [3] attacking the problem of colonizing the waters of the pit.
As I point out above, there are numerous potential ancestors. If I had to guess, I'd say they likely didn't colonize the pit directly - they likely colonized the margins and gradually drifted inwards toward the pit with successive generations each able to tolerate a higher level of acid and toxic materials.
[1] As little as half an hour under ideal circumstances - which is why food safety recommendations want things kept cool and cooled/or heated rapidly. A very small amount of bacterial contamination can become a big problem in a short time because bacterial population growth is exponential.
[2] Which is why fruit flies, with a generation time of ten days, are popular for genetics studies.
[3] Incidentally, the same is true of the early Earth. Creationists like to point out the unlikelihood of life arising because of the low odds of the right chemical conditions arising - but with thousands of lighting strikes (to take one proposed cause) occurring daily in a wide variety of locations, you have the same distributed memory MIMD effect. Though the chance of a given combination occurring is low, when you're trying multiple solutions in parallel, the odds of that combination appearing rise dramatically.
That's the OP's point - the Aptera is too expensive for the economy segment, and too underperforming/oddly styled for the (more well heeled) 'green fetish/stylish' market. Or, in other words, at it's price point the Aptera is a solution in search of a market. It's failure should have been predictable as it's problem isn't (as the submitter seems to think) that it's too late, but that it was wrongly conceived right out of the box.
With the small number produced, it's extraordinarily unlikely that Tesla accumulated sufficient capital to 'go after' the Sedan, they're probably relying on financing and the proceeds from their IPO. But, the Sedan is still going to be a very expensive car for it's performance level - like the Roadster (and the Volt, and the Leaf), aimed mostly at the (fairly small) 'green fetish/stylish' market. We're still a very long way off from a consumer level electric vehicle, one that can compete on price with the Honda Civic and similar cars in that (sub $20k) range.
And even bands whose albums I buy don't consistently produce albums I want to listen to all the tracks on.
When you've gone to such lengths to try and explain away the inconvenience, that kinda takes away any meaning from your half-assed 'apology'.
I'm not sure you're getting *my* point - so I'll repeat it.
High voltage/high amperage DC circuit breakers are old hat. The methods to deal with the arcs have been known for the better part of a century.
So will the independent optical lab my best friend works at. So will the independent hardware store another friend works at. So will the independent motor sports dealer my wife works at.
People don't just use their credit cards for holiday purchases or just at big box stores. If they pull this off at a 'high enough scale' to impact the big banks and retailers, a lot of little businesses and innocent people are going to get hurt too. Not to mention the workers at the charities who'll be spending hours dealing with irate people whose cards were falsely charged and in making chargebacks to give the money back.
It's saddening that you fail to realize this.
You just design the breaker appropriately. It's not exactly rocket surgery.
Telcos have used 48VDC for decades. Submarines have used circuit breakers on high voltage/high amperage DC for just about as long. (Even modern nuclear boats have a big ass 12VDC (in the US) battery for backup power.)