They don't expect to take risks anymore, so they turn their money towards market hacking, and essentially producing shit products that are just shiny enough for the masses to buy.
The sad part is that you seem to actually believe this is a recent development rather than something true of all times and places.
No one in business understands it idea of Technical Debt and the value in future bugs prevented of paying that debt off.
That's because it's a buzzword rather than an idea. In the real world, it's also a fact of life - engineering (of the hard or soft sort) is invariably a series of compromises.
so its kind of easy for IBM to spend on R&D in the 1930s, considering that every government on the planet was pouring money into it's coffers.
Indeed. And the same is true of Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and practically every other major corporate R&D labs I can think of. They're almost universally features of a growing corporation that's flush with cash. (And while they're often celebrated for their basic and pie-in-the-sky research, that's usually the tip of the iceberg. Less well know is bulk of directed and applied research, along with product development, that took place out of the limelight.)
When your point and conclusion rests on rumors, legends, and "it seems" or "I believe" rather than actual facts.... it makes your conclusion valueless.
But you'll get +5 anyhow, because your conclusion coincides with one of Slashdot's most treasured bits of dogma.
That depends on which big artists you're talking about. Google has been very, very smart about who they've invited and who they're trying to hook - not just the A-list Entertainment Tonight celebrities, but a variety of big fish in little ponds too. You make not know who Marc Spagnoulo is, but virtually every woodworker on the net has. Ditto for Thomas Hawk. (One of the mostly widely followed photographers/photo writers on the 'net.) Etc... etc...
And their identities need to be verified every bit as much the latest starlet out of Hollywood - because those are the people that bring in the early adopters. It's that first ring of early adopters (like the already closely connected college classmates of early Facebook days) and their contacts that bring in folks like me. In turn, it's folks like me that bring in Mom, Grandma, and the rest of the kinfolk.
Until critical mass is reached - I suspect the whole of Google's strategy rests on those verified celebrities, large and small. That's one of the key reasons they keep coming back to some form of verified identity. That, and the one thing that Slashdot seems to miss - most users of social networks want to able to find and be found by high school classmates, lost cousins, old shipmates and army buddies, etc.. etc.. They could care less about the fig leaf of pseudo anonymity the tin foil hat crowd considers the gold standard.
Yet another Ask Slashdot that can be summarized as...
I want to do this thing, with all of it's conflicting requirements, without actually spending any money or time. Oh, and I haven't actually done any research beforehand or have any relevant experience either.
Since they don't have any experience with gravity assists and (no-one) has any real experience with solar sails, I figure they just picked the one that sounded more sexy.
Indeed. Every time one of these 'fear the yellow peril' stories is posted, folks seem to forget that China (like Russia over the last twenty odd years) has a very long list of Sexy And Ambitious Plans they're going to accomplish Real Soon Now - and a very short (read:practically non existent) of thing's they've actually accomplished.
let private enterprise do what has already been proven. Breaking the power of the aero-industrial complex with their legions of lobbyists and congressmen in their pockets took guts to do.
In other words, let private industry do what has already been proven - but only if it's the right private industry.
Use the Moon as a testbed for landers and ascent vehicles
That's somewhat like testing wetsuits in the middle of the Sahara desert. The hard part of landing is the aerodynamic part... and guess which part can't be tested on the Moon?
The really sad part? The quote above is the most clue-full part of your reply.
And as far as the actual trip itself, you've increased the chance of success for the final step because you've decoupled it from the hardest part, the trip out of LEO.
ROTFLMAO. Are you actually so ignorant as to believe that? The issue isn't the success of the final step - but the odds of success of the entire mission.
The balance of your reply is equally clue free. You simply have no idea what you're talking about, and consistently confuse handwaving and wishful thinking for reality.
The really good thing is that there is an existing range of small and medium-lift vehicles already in the catalogue off-the-shelf -- Delta, Ariane, Soyuz, H-2 and others all of which can do the job today without the eye-watering development costs and inevitable construction delays of building and qualifying a new heavy-lifter.
The problem is your solution to the eye watering cost of a big booster is to replace it with the eye watering cost of building a complete backup set of mission hardware *and* procuring a complete backup set of boosters *and* preparing them for launch in parallel with the primary set...
With an Apollo-style "everything in one package" giant launcher you risk both a catastrophic failure to deliver a complete bundle of equipment to orbit killing the program for years
What you don't seem to realize is launching with smaller boosters is no better - because if you lose a single payload, the entire program is shut down until you replace that payload. (You've also failed to consider that launch windows to Mars only occur every 19 months of so.) Worse yet, with multiple launches the odds of losing a payload go up considerably.
You've also added considerably to the cost, weight, risk, and complexity of the mission because you've increased the amount of on orbit assembly and introduced components that must withstand the Martian environment for years rather than a few months. (In the case of say, an ascent stage launched in advance.) The need to operate autonomously instead as of part of a stack piles on yet more cost, weight, risk, and complexity. (I.E. your ascent stage will need it's own cruise phase support, EDL system, power supply, etc... etc....)
Or, in short, it's not at all clear that increasing the number or launches and spreading them out over years makes the mission any cheaper or safer once you consider all the factors. In fact, it seems to have quite the opposite effect.
Grandiose missions require long time lines out of necessity. Not necessarily ridiculously long (Apollo got to the moon in less than a decade, though they continued with more missions for longer than that)
Apollo took much longer than most people think - there was a lot of tech in progress that NASA re-purposed. The F-1 engine for example, started development in 1956. The Saturn family of rockets started development in 1958, but was based on work that started as early as 1956. (The first hardware contracts for what would become the S-IVB were let in 1960.) Development of the Apollo CSM also started in 1960.
In fact, it was because all of this was in progress that Kennedy's science advisers recommended lunar landing to him as a goal, which he subsequently announced in his famous speech.
Once you're in LEO, you're nearly halfway to the surface of Mars in terms of delta-v. That's why monolithic missions are stupid -- everything you plan to send to Mars, including all the fuel for doing so, has to be lifted all at once from the surface meaning either the mission itself will be tiny or the rocket will have to be fucking huge -- probably both. With proper LEO capabilities, we could have a bigger Mars mission enabled by a smaller rocket, and with a shorter time-line from conception to conclusion.
Like so much else - it's just a wee bit more complicated by that. Smaller rockets probably won't shorten the time line because smaller rockets don't address the issue of doing all the engineering and development of the spacecraft, lander, etc... Smaller rockets will however make the mission more complicated and heavier because things that can be done simply on the ground now have to be done in orbit.
Smaller rockets also considerably increase mission risk - because the chance of loss increases with each launch added to the manifest. A three (huge rocket) launch mission, with a probability of success of.98 per launch (roughly currently the norm), has a total probability of success of.94 (.99*.99*.99). When you do the math for a ten or twelve (smaller rocket) with.98 probability... well, the chances of mission success start getting pretty slim indeed.
Go to your favorite store that sells knapsacks for hikers and students. REI is great if you don't mind the price premium.
I have to disagree - those stores are wonderful if you're hiker, student, or someone who needs a backpack for use on the trail or for daily use and who incidentally wants to carry a camera along. They're much less useful for the photographer who wants to carry a camera and incidentally some other stuff.
Visit REI or some other serious backpacker/hiker/student type store *first* in order to learn how to fit a backpack and how a properly fitted one feels... Then go to a pro camera shop to get advice, try on different bags, and to actually select and buy your bag.
Load all your gear into each and every pack they have, and put the pack on your back. Include the packs which you're sure wouldn't work.
I concur 100% - you'll never know if a bag is going to work unless you load it and try it out.
You should be able to find something that comfortably fits everything and which doesn't scream, "Mug me! I'm carrying around thousands of dollars of easily-fencable equipment!" Instead, you're going after the "I'm a poor student lugging around waaay too many textbooks" look.
I tried that route, and ended up with a backpack designed for poor students and too many textbooks - but which absolutely sucked for carrying a camera. The bad part is that I spent too long convincing myself the bag would work if I just kept trying and ended up keeping it too long to be able to return it. Even worse - said student bag ended up costing just as much than the camera bag I eventually bought. (Sturdy and comfortable bags aren't cheap.) I ended up going with a bag that wasn't quite so stealthy but which actually worked as a camera bag.
The goal here is just something that'll keep stuff from scratching as it rubs against each other plus a very little bit of shock protection. No backpack will provide more than that, so there's no point in pretending.
With a daily use camera bag, you're not so much worried about large shock loads on your gear as you are about the wear and tear caused by bouncing around and banging against each other as you go about your daily business - and a proper dedicated camera bag excels at that, while your solution provides little-to-no protection. (It takes a hell of a lot more than a bit of padded cloth or a winter sock to protect a lens as large as those described by the OP.) When you've spent a couple grand on a decent DSLR and lenses, you're stupid to not protect that investment by spending a couple of hundred on a proper bag. If you're a dedicated photographer (rather than someone who just carries a backpack and happens to carry a camera), a proper bag also offers something a half-ass solution doesn't - organization. Places for extra cards, for extra lenses, for filters, for your cleaning kit...
A proper bag pays for itself a hundred times over. Spend the time and money to do it right, and you'll never regret a penny.
Honestly, I can't see the argument for a single bag. I travel with similar equipment and the last thing I want to do is add the weight of a laptop when I'm out photographing. The laptop stays in the hotel or car.
But first you have to get the laptop *to* the hotel...
It also depends on shooting conditions - if you're headed out for a dedicated shooting expedition, leaving the laptop behind and/or having two bags sometimes makes sense. But a single bag does make sense if it's "daily use/daily carry" bag, where everything goes into one bag because you don't know what the day will bring. (That being said, I found that an iPhone replaces 90% of what I used to use a laptop for.) I wouldn't carry a laptop out in the wild, but I certainly would in the city.
For bag advice, I strongly recommend that you go to a dedicated site such as dpreview. I've received excellent advice for people there.
I find the best bag review site to be cambags.com because it features user reviews and pictures of the bag packed/in use, sorted both by bag type, and by camera model. The Flickr group for a given camera is generally also a valuable source.
Google+ is so direct copy of Facebook that it isn't even funny.
And in other news, Google Docs has cut-and-paste just like Microsoft Word.
Seriously, Facebook has set the bar with regards to what features a social networking site must have, and Google+ needs to meet or exceed that bar. Beyond the "hate everything that isn't Google" crowd, just being "not Facebook" isn't enough.
The single main reason that Ãoesocial networksà push the real names issue is quality of their database for the use of marketers that buy services from the social networks.
That's the tinfoil hat version - and it ignores that the service has to be paid for somehow...
But in reality, the main way the vast majority people find each other is by their real names, has been since the introduction of phone books.
I have a friend that has 3 PHD's in Archaeology and is a Viking Historian that heads up the local SCA Viking group. he had to change his name to a viking name to keep schools from googling him and labelling him as a "wierdo that dresses up" and losing teaching positions.
Given the number of people I know who are professors, or other high level professionals, or military members with TS clearances and arcane accesses (including both intel and nuclear weapons) who openly play in the SCA... Either he's embellishing, you're embellishing, or there's something else you or him aren't telling us.
No, technically they didn't steal it. But they did knowingly purchase property they knew did not belong to the seller - which by the way is also against the law.
They openly acknowledged how they got it.
In most places, this is known as "publicly admitting guilt".
Instead, we saw what happened. I would rather a judge have found for them and dismissed with prejudice, but at least it appears to be working out.
I'd have love to see the end up in front of a judge too - only I wanted them to be held accountable for their actions.
So it isn't completely clear why Jordan would want to promote green tech other than actual ideology (well and self-interest for when everyone else's oil runs out and they still want their stuff to not be insanely expensive. But that's surprisingly far-sighed in the circumstances).
It's not particularly far sighted at all, in fact Jordan is more a follower than a leader - the oil states have been starting to diversify for some time now. Consider this story from 2010, or this one from just a couple of weeks ago.
Those rovers are easily the most successful probes on a planetary surface ever. And this has been clear for years now. When you do something that turns out to be wildly successful, the most reasonable reaction that people have is to do it again.
The most reasonable reaction is to do it again, only if you want to do the same thing again. Otherwise, not so much.
But not NASA. NASA could have build, launched and operated at least ten or twenty duplicates of Spirit and Opportunity for the price of its current "Curiosity" rover (some $2,300,000,000) that may or may not work.
And what's the point of doing what you've done ten or twenty times more, when it won't accomplish what you want to do? If I want to climb Everest, I don't climb the hill at the end of my street ten or twenty times and then claim I've accomplished the equivalent. (If I did, everyone would, quite rightly, laugh at me.) Yet, that's what you propose to do by repeating the MER rovers.
Not to mention that nobody was sure the airbags would work beforehand either - the MER landers were much heavier than the Pathfinder lander, right at the bleeding edge of what the airbags were/are capable of in fact.
What happened to the good old scientific practice of repeating your measurements and assuring your hypothesis?
What happened to the good old scientific practice of building on your results?
The landing system of the MER rovers is extremely limited, and can only reach a very small portion of the Martian surface with a very small payload. The science suite is equally extremely limited in that it's designed to answer only a small number of questions. You could launch a whole fleet of them and get an avalanche of data, but after spending those billions you'd still come face to face with the same problem - they can neither accomplish the science nor reach the landing sites Curiosity can. (In fact, the most interesting scientific sites are in the high latitudes and at higher altitudes - neither of which the MER landing system can reach.)
I see, toss out due process and the protections of the law - they're inconvenient to vengeance and violence. How then are you different from those you seek to prosecute?
Slashdot Mirror
The sad part is that you seem to actually believe this is a recent development rather than something true of all times and places.
That's because it's a buzzword rather than an idea. In the real world, it's also a fact of life - engineering (of the hard or soft sort) is invariably a series of compromises.
Indeed. And the same is true of Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and practically every other major corporate R&D labs I can think of. They're almost universally features of a growing corporation that's flush with cash. (And while they're often celebrated for their basic and pie-in-the-sky research, that's usually the tip of the iceberg. Less well know is bulk of directed and applied research, along with product development, that took place out of the limelight.)
When your point and conclusion rests on rumors, legends, and "it seems" or "I believe" rather than actual facts.... it makes your conclusion valueless.
But you'll get +5 anyhow, because your conclusion coincides with one of Slashdot's most treasured bits of dogma.
That depends on which big artists you're talking about. Google has been very, very smart about who they've invited and who they're trying to hook - not just the A-list Entertainment Tonight celebrities, but a variety of big fish in little ponds too. You make not know who Marc Spagnoulo is, but virtually every woodworker on the net has. Ditto for Thomas Hawk. (One of the mostly widely followed photographers/photo writers on the 'net.) Etc... etc...
And their identities need to be verified every bit as much the latest starlet out of Hollywood - because those are the people that bring in the early adopters. It's that first ring of early adopters (like the already closely connected college classmates of early Facebook days) and their contacts that bring in folks like me. In turn, it's folks like me that bring in Mom, Grandma, and the rest of the kinfolk.
Until critical mass is reached - I suspect the whole of Google's strategy rests on those verified celebrities, large and small. That's one of the key reasons they keep coming back to some form of verified identity. That, and the one thing that Slashdot seems to miss - most users of social networks want to able to find and be found by high school classmates, lost cousins, old shipmates and army buddies, etc.. etc.. They could care less about the fig leaf of pseudo anonymity the tin foil hat crowd considers the gold standard.
Yet another Ask Slashdot that can be summarized as...
Indeed. Every time one of these 'fear the yellow peril' stories is posted, folks seem to forget that China (like Russia over the last twenty odd years) has a very long list of Sexy And Ambitious Plans they're going to accomplish Real Soon Now - and a very short (read:practically non existent) of thing's they've actually accomplished.
In other words, let private industry do what has already been proven - but only if it's the right private industry.
Why is this news? Proactive policing is hardly new. Doing the predictive work on a computer isn't new either. (NYC was doing it back in the 70's.)
That's somewhat like testing wetsuits in the middle of the Sahara desert. The hard part of landing is the aerodynamic part... and guess which part can't be tested on the Moon?
The really sad part? The quote above is the most clue-full part of your reply.
ROTFLMAO. Are you actually so ignorant as to believe that? The issue isn't the success of the final step - but the odds of success of the entire mission.
The balance of your reply is equally clue free. You simply have no idea what you're talking about, and consistently confuse handwaving and wishful thinking for reality.
The problem is your solution to the eye watering cost of a big booster is to replace it with the eye watering cost of building a complete backup set of mission hardware *and* procuring a complete backup set of boosters *and* preparing them for launch in parallel with the primary set...
What you don't seem to realize is launching with smaller boosters is no better - because if you lose a single payload, the entire program is shut down until you replace that payload. (You've also failed to consider that launch windows to Mars only occur every 19 months of so.) Worse yet, with multiple launches the odds of losing a payload go up considerably.
You've also added considerably to the cost, weight, risk, and complexity of the mission because you've increased the amount of on orbit assembly and introduced components that must withstand the Martian environment for years rather than a few months. (In the case of say, an ascent stage launched in advance.) The need to operate autonomously instead as of part of a stack piles on yet more cost, weight, risk, and complexity. (I.E. your ascent stage will need it's own cruise phase support, EDL system, power supply, etc... etc....)
Or, in short, it's not at all clear that increasing the number or launches and spreading them out over years makes the mission any cheaper or safer once you consider all the factors. In fact, it seems to have quite the opposite effect.
TANSTAAFL.
Apollo took much longer than most people think - there was a lot of tech in progress that NASA re-purposed. The F-1 engine for example, started development in 1956. The Saturn family of rockets started development in 1958, but was based on work that started as early as 1956. (The first hardware contracts for what would become the S-IVB were let in 1960.) Development of the Apollo CSM also started in 1960.
In fact, it was because all of this was in progress that Kennedy's science advisers recommended lunar landing to him as a goal, which he subsequently announced in his famous speech.
Like so much else - it's just a wee bit more complicated by that. Smaller rockets probably won't shorten the time line because smaller rockets don't address the issue of doing all the engineering and development of the spacecraft, lander, etc... Smaller rockets will however make the mission more complicated and heavier because things that can be done simply on the ground now have to be done in orbit.
.98 per launch (roughly currently the norm), has a total probability of success of .94 (.99*.99*.99). When you do the math for a ten or twelve (smaller rocket) with .98 probability... well, the chances of mission success start getting pretty slim indeed.
Smaller rockets also considerably increase mission risk - because the chance of loss increases with each launch added to the manifest. A three (huge rocket) launch mission, with a probability of success of
I have to disagree - those stores are wonderful if you're hiker, student, or someone who needs a backpack for use on the trail or for daily use and who incidentally wants to carry a camera along. They're much less useful for the photographer who wants to carry a camera and incidentally some other stuff.
Visit REI or some other serious backpacker/hiker/student type store *first* in order to learn how to fit a backpack and how a properly fitted one feels... Then go to a pro camera shop to get advice, try on different bags, and to actually select and buy your bag.
I concur 100% - you'll never know if a bag is going to work unless you load it and try it out.
I tried that route, and ended up with a backpack designed for poor students and too many textbooks - but which absolutely sucked for carrying a camera. The bad part is that I spent too long convincing myself the bag would work if I just kept trying and ended up keeping it too long to be able to return it. Even worse - said student bag ended up costing just as much than the camera bag I eventually bought. (Sturdy and comfortable bags aren't cheap.) I ended up going with a bag that wasn't quite so stealthy but which actually worked as a camera bag.
With a daily use camera bag, you're not so much worried about large shock loads on your gear as you are about the wear and tear caused by bouncing around and banging against each other as you go about your daily business - and a proper dedicated camera bag excels at that, while your solution provides little-to-no protection. (It takes a hell of a lot more than a bit of padded cloth or a winter sock to protect a lens as large as those described by the OP.) When you've spent a couple grand on a decent DSLR and lenses, you're stupid to not protect that investment by spending a couple of hundred on a proper bag. If you're a dedicated photographer (rather than someone who just carries a backpack and happens to carry a camera), a proper bag also offers something a half-ass solution doesn't - organization. Places for extra cards, for extra lenses, for filters, for your cleaning kit...
A proper bag pays for itself a hundred times over. Spend the time and money to do it right, and you'll never regret a penny.
But first you have to get the laptop *to* the hotel...
It also depends on shooting conditions - if you're headed out for a dedicated shooting expedition, leaving the laptop behind and/or having two bags sometimes makes sense. But a single bag does make sense if it's "daily use/daily carry" bag, where everything goes into one bag because you don't know what the day will bring. (That being said, I found that an iPhone replaces 90% of what I used to use a laptop for.) I wouldn't carry a laptop out in the wild, but I certainly would in the city.
I find the best bag review site to be cambags.com because it features user reviews and pictures of the bag packed/in use, sorted both by bag type, and by camera model. The Flickr group for a given camera is generally also a valuable source.
And in other news, Google Docs has cut-and-paste just like Microsoft Word.
Seriously, Facebook has set the bar with regards to what features a social networking site must have, and Google+ needs to meet or exceed that bar. Beyond the "hate everything that isn't Google" crowd, just being "not Facebook" isn't enough.
Well, there's that too... ;)
That's the tinfoil hat version - and it ignores that the service has to be paid for somehow...
But in reality, the main way the vast majority people find each other is by their real names, has been since the introduction of phone books.
Given the number of people I know who are professors, or other high level professionals, or military members with TS clearances and arcane accesses (including both intel and nuclear weapons) who openly play in the SCA... Either he's embellishing, you're embellishing, or there's something else you or him aren't telling us.
No, technically they didn't steal it. But they did knowingly purchase property they knew did not belong to the seller - which by the way is also against the law.
In most places, this is known as "publicly admitting guilt".
I'd have love to see the end up in front of a judge too - only I wanted them to be held accountable for their actions.
It's not particularly far sighted at all, in fact Jordan is more a follower than a leader - the oil states have been starting to diversify for some time now. Consider this story from 2010, or this one from just a couple of weeks ago.
The most reasonable reaction is to do it again, only if you want to do the same thing again. Otherwise, not so much.
And what's the point of doing what you've done ten or twenty times more, when it won't accomplish what you want to do? If I want to climb Everest, I don't climb the hill at the end of my street ten or twenty times and then claim I've accomplished the equivalent. (If I did, everyone would, quite rightly, laugh at me.) Yet, that's what you propose to do by repeating the MER rovers.
Not to mention that nobody was sure the airbags would work beforehand either - the MER landers were much heavier than the Pathfinder lander, right at the bleeding edge of what the airbags were/are capable of in fact.
What happened to the good old scientific practice of building on your results?
The landing system of the MER rovers is extremely limited, and can only reach a very small portion of the Martian surface with a very small payload. The science suite is equally extremely limited in that it's designed to answer only a small number of questions. You could launch a whole fleet of them and get an avalanche of data, but after spending those billions you'd still come face to face with the same problem - they can neither accomplish the science nor reach the landing sites Curiosity can. (In fact, the most interesting scientific sites are in the high latitudes and at higher altitudes - neither of which the MER landing system can reach.)
I see, toss out due process and the protections of the law - they're inconvenient to vengeance and violence. How then are you different from those you seek to prosecute?
No, it isn't. Because if you do, you're essentially tossing the very basis of a free society on the trash heap in the name of expedience.
Yes, let's put them in jail - after adhering to the law and following due process.