Some environmental groups have warned these cables could be used instead to import non-renewable electricity from coal- and gas-fired power stations in north Africa.
OK, who wants to get up and defend this one?
I will, because it's a damm good question.
Here we are, trying to do something positive, and environmentalists come down hard on it.
The makers of Thalidomide thought they were trying to do something positive as well I bet. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It's not enough to try and do something positive, one must be sure one is actually doing something positive. This is the real world where real actions have real consequences, not your first grade classroom where everybody gets a trophy for trying - even if they don't actually accomplish anything.
It's easy (and childish) to simply dismiss the concerns as being from "those [obstructive] environmentalists, it's much harder to honestly answer the question.
It's almost as if environmentalists don't want any development whatsoever to happen from now until the end of humanity.
It's almost as if you didn't actually read their statement or bother to attempt to understand it. They didn't say "lets not build this", they said "lets make sure this accomplishes it's stated goal".
But criticism and oversight are no less important.
And to address the grandparents statement - I've always felt the notion that being critical of an idea somehow creates the responsibility to come up with a better one to be childish nonsense. It's just another way of saying "I don't like being criticized, so I'm not going to listen to you".
You time your separation to avoid the plume and recontact between the booster and the separating module.
If the rocket is already in the air and we can afford to jettison the booster, why would we care about equalizing thrust? If we can do a separation, we do it, and now the booster can do whatever the heck it wants to -- splash down into the ocean, explode into a million tiny pieces, etc. No?
Sometimes. But the question was again, was it possible, not was it desirable.
And really the plume is less than you might think, when the pressure in the booster drops, so does the combustion rate.
I imagine that would take a few seconds, though. Challenger's ET blew apart quickly enough from contact with a relatively tiny plume. I imagine half the total trust from an SRB would be pretty dangerous, even if it's nominally directed up and not sideways. And if the crew capsule is directly on top the solid rocket...
The Challenger's ET blew from the direct force of a full pressure plume for some six seconds (depending on what you choose as the starting and termination event) - while in a 'normal' (for lack of a better term) thrust venting situation the plume is being sent up and to the side, so your departing module catches only the very edges of that half the thrust. (It's a matter of sizing and pointing the vent stacks appropriately.) Since at the same time, it's slowing down and you're departing the vicinity... With as little as 1G of acceleration relative to the booster for a couple of seconds, after six seconds you're a couple of hundred feet away. The situation isn't even remotely the same.
It's the Internet in microcosm. Engineers first used the Internet to pass technical information. Noise was kept to a minimum so work could get done. Then the engineers were surprised to find that the general public had an intense interest in fluff and chatter.
Fluff, chatter, and noise were on the internet long before the general public got a hold of it.
When people start saying "you don't get it because you don't understand it, it's a dessert wax and a floor topping and you'd know that if you got it"... I get very suspicious.
You time your separation to avoid the plume and recontact between the booster and the separating module. The basic techniques were mastered back in the late 50's/early 60's for the SUBROC/ASROC and the Polaris A-1.
And really the plume is less than you might think, when the pressure in the booster drops, so does the combustion rate.
The bleeding hearts have realized that the sentence the man receives does not in any way undo or mitigate the deaths of the victims
Which is like 'realizing' that purple crayons aren't blue corn tortilla chips. Only someone utterly disconnected from reality would ever make the claim they were in the first place. Capital punishment is retribution, and always has been, claiming that it doesn't do something it was never intended to do marks you as insane, not insightful.
We need more examples that making a move does not mean being under the MPAA umbrella, does not mean using DRM, and does not mean "bittorrent is evil".
This is going to give "Copyrighted stuff can't be copied" people a hard time...
Since nobody has claimed that "Copyrighted stuff can't be copied", you're nothing but a karmawhoring strawman.
What people have claimed, and what the law states, is that "Copyrighted stuff can't be copied without permission except under a limited set of specific special circumstances".
Personally the one good thing about this format is that if people LIKE the damned show they won't just cancel it because some asshat made a political move on another producer.
They won't cancel it for that reason, no. But it won't do much for the tons of other reasons I've seen.
I cannot count the numbers of times I've LIKED a show but it's been killed off, scheduled stupidly, or who knows what.
I can't count the number of comics (independent dead tree and web) I've seen canceled because the writer got sick (or died), or the artist needed to get a real job, or the writer got bored and moved on, or any of half a dozen other reasons. Nor can I count the number I've stopped reading because they became stale formulaic shit because the writer got lazy or decided to cater to the raving fanboys.
The question wasn't "how much fuel they consume", it was "can they be stopped (rendered zero thrust)", which is the question I answered. From a safety POV, they amount to the same thing.
And in reality, the difference in track record between one flight and a dozen flights is to some extent meaningless - because every flight of an expendable is a first flight.
No, this isn't accurate.
Oh? Cite me a case where an expendable flew for a second time.
While each vehicle is different - there's always the potential for vehicle-specific manufacturing defects or incidents on launch (a lightning or bird strike, for example) - after a certain number of successful flights you can be pretty certain there aren't any obvious inherent design flaws with the vehicle that'll lead to serious safety issues.
The Shuttle flew for years, much more than the 'dozen or so' flights you cite for Falcon/Dragon to be ready to carry men, with at least two inherent design flaws that could have killed at any time. So, you're questionable on that count too, at least in the 'certain number of flights'.
Nobody's seriously alleging that they made a database of passwords, or website access by location, so they certainly aren't indexing that
Yes, they had all this location data - and they didn't index it by location. Oh, wait. They did didn't they - because that was exactly the reason they collected it in the first place.
They may have stored the packets incidental to building a location database, and they should've deleted them. But, as Kismet stores all packets by default, it's not like they went out of their way to hold onto them. In fact, it's pretty clear that they didn't know this was happening - hence the announcement.
Under the law, if you do it - you're responsible. "I didn't know the gun was loaded" doesn't fly.
Precedent and law overwhelmingly states that you can do whatever the hell you want with radio/light or sound waves that reach your eyes/ears/antennas.
Cite me the precedent and law that states that it's legal for a corporation to store and index that information. Doubly so since it isn't even remotely supported that you can do 'whatever the hell you want' with data that reaches you. Hint: try being a Peeping Tom and playing that card in your defense, you won't find a lawyer, judge, or jury in the Western world that will buy that.
Or, in other words, you're making shit up without a single clue what you're talking about.
Are you saying there is less free talent available in the AV arts than in programming?
The numbers are irrelevant to the fact that cooperation and dealing with events in the physical world is considerably different from cooperation in the virtual one.
There are a lot of talented, professional people working for free: Linux programmers, Debian developers, Gnome developers....
And I suspect that many have day jobs (many of them related to their volunteer 'jobs') which build their skills and pay the bills, if not time hobby hacking at their code.
Not to mention that you can hack around in code solo, or at least asynchronously, and distributed - something you can't really do for AV production. You can't have your props guy show up on Monday, your sound guy on Tuesday, your makeup guy on Wednesday, and your actors on Thursday, and then put everything on hold because your director's kid has the flu this week... Unlike coding, they pretty much have to be physically in the same place at the same time. The there's the issue that a given programmer may be digging into I/O code one week, and into process scheduling the next - while you're going to have a hard time finding a guy who can be a talented makeup guy one week and a talented video guy the next.
Someone has to eat that cost. If pilots end up being chosen by mass vote, the end result would probably not look that much different than what we had 50 years ago.
A bunch of really short lived low budget productions?
This is nothing but a way for a specific race, to get someone elected. Special rules designed to benefit a certain race? That sounds like racism to me.
That's what bothers me about many of these alternative voting schemes. While they're ostensibly meant to to give third parties a chance, what few realize is what that really means is giving special and minority interests representation out of proportion to their actual influence and numbers.
I guarantee that some other minorities and some whites would end up voting for an hispanic candidate if said candidate was an issue candidate and not a race candidate.
One of the key problem in America however is that many of the racial special interests don't want an issue candidate that just happens to be of their race. They want a racial candidate to represent their race, and they almost invariably make race a campaign issue. Or, as I've sometimes pointed out, some of the worst racists and bigots in American don't have white skin.
The best way to determine rocket reliability is through its track record. By the time humans are first launched on the Falcon 9, it will have had at least a dozen or so unmanned flights to prove itself. The Ares I, on the other hand, plans on carrying crew on its -second- flight ever.
And in reality, the difference in track record between one flight and a dozen flights is to some extent meaningless - because every flight of an expendable is a first flight. Also, your statistical error is proportional to your sample, in this case, 1/12 or 8%. So after a dozen test flights, your confidence is only 92% - hideously unsafe even by the abysmally low standards of safety in manned spaceflight. (I once calculated that if commercial jets failed at the same 2% rate as commercial space launchers - there would be over fifty crashes a day just at Sea-Tac alone.)
For comparison, Boeing is currently testing a new airliner - and the fifth aircraft in the test program just flew this week. The six and seventh, which complete the test fleet, will fly by the end of July. In just the two weeks of testing (in Dec 2009), with just one aircraft, they racked up more powered flight hours than the Falcon 9 will have by the time it first flies manned. By the time it enters revenue service (carrying paying passengers) it will have undergone a year of intense flight testing with thousands and thousands of hours in the air.
Solid rockets are cheaper, simpler, more robust, and have a higher thrust-to-weight ratio. But control options are limited. You can't vary thrust from plan, and once lit they will consume their entire fuel supply. No stop-and-restart.
Actually, while you can't restart 'em - you can shut them down.
Now, I believe the mechanics of launch to orbit dictate that you pretty much need at least one liquid fuel stage.
Actually, you can go all solid if you really want to, or all solid except for a small liquid OMS. You don't need a full stage, just the ability to control your final velocity fairly closely.
Basically Google probably could of swept this under the rug, and most companies would have. Google on the other hand came out as the only source. There was no accusations, or indication that this information would leak yet Google freely informed the public that this was an accident, and took responsibility
Basically, what Google has done is to attempt to sweep this under the rug. They claimed they hadn't been doing anything but sniffing addresses - and when challenged in court to provide the data they had stored, they 'discovered' that they had stored much more information 'accidentally'. They've been trying to spin it ever since, and legions of Google fanboys have been their willing zombies.
You cannot 'accidentally' capture and store data - it takes a deliberate act to do so. (It's either that or supreme incompetence to fail to notice that a database that should only have been 'x' size was 3'x' in size.)
I've got no paper, but I have been studying weather since I was a kid. So 22 years give or take.
To sum it up, a 4 year education doesn't mean you have enough experience to understand more then the guy on the ground who's been doing it for 40 years without the same.
Learning science at a college level is a hell of a lot more than just 'studying', it's also learning to think logically, to collect, record, and reduce data, to be able to express data and results in a format understandable by professionals, etc... etc...
To sum it up: No matter how many years you've been 'studying' and drawing your weather maps - you haven't a fraction of the training and discipline that someone with a 4 year education does, period. You're a fool if you think you do.
We built several thousands of dollars worth of test equipment using cheap junk and came out with stuff that was just as good.
And of course, you calibrated it against known standards so you know that for certain. (Calibration is what makes the difference between cheap junk and useful equipment.)
DIY folks have been doing this for decades, of course, but PhD students are now starting to publish these things. This is a big deal
Yes, it's a big deal. DIY grad students, PhD candidates, etc... have been cobbling together such equipment for decades as part of their research - but now our education system has sunk so low that what generations past considered part of their background work on the way to real research is now thought worthy of a PhD dissertation.
I am not sure enough effort will be saved by making the initial figure in this way vs. the traditional methods of preparing a surface for polishing to justify the spinning.
You have to heat and cool less glass, meaning easier heat management and lower strains.
The University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Mirror Lab has been spin casting big (6 meter) blanks for quite a while now for an impressive array of customers.
Slashdot Mirror
I will, because it's a damm good question.
The makers of Thalidomide thought they were trying to do something positive as well I bet. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It's not enough to try and do something positive, one must be sure one is actually doing something positive. This is the real world where real actions have real consequences, not your first grade classroom where everybody gets a trophy for trying - even if they don't actually accomplish anything.
It's easy (and childish) to simply dismiss the concerns as being from "those [obstructive] environmentalists, it's much harder to honestly answer the question.
It's almost as if you didn't actually read their statement or bother to attempt to understand it. They didn't say "lets not build this", they said "lets make sure this accomplishes it's stated goal".
But criticism and oversight are no less important.
And to address the grandparents statement - I've always felt the notion that being critical of an idea somehow creates the responsibility to come up with a better one to be childish nonsense. It's just another way of saying "I don't like being criticized, so I'm not going to listen to you".
Sometimes. But the question was again, was it possible, not was it desirable.
The Challenger's ET blew from the direct force of a full pressure plume for some six seconds (depending on what you choose as the starting and termination event) - while in a 'normal' (for lack of a better term) thrust venting situation the plume is being sent up and to the side, so your departing module catches only the very edges of that half the thrust. (It's a matter of sizing and pointing the vent stacks appropriately.) Since at the same time, it's slowing down and you're departing the vicinity... With as little as 1G of acceleration relative to the booster for a couple of seconds, after six seconds you're a couple of hundred feet away. The situation isn't even remotely the same.
Fluff, chatter, and noise were on the internet long before the general public got a hold of it.
When people start saying "you don't get it because you don't understand it, it's a dessert wax and a floor topping and you'd know that if you got it"... I get very suspicious.
You time your separation to avoid the plume and recontact between the booster and the separating module. The basic techniques were mastered back in the late 50's/early 60's for the SUBROC/ASROC and the Polaris A-1.
And really the plume is less than you might think, when the pressure in the booster drops, so does the combustion rate.
Which is like 'realizing' that purple crayons aren't blue corn tortilla chips. Only someone utterly disconnected from reality would ever make the claim they were in the first place. Capital punishment is retribution, and always has been, claiming that it doesn't do something it was never intended to do marks you as insane, not insightful.
Since nobody has claimed that "Copyrighted stuff can't be copied", you're nothing but a karmawhoring strawman.
What people have claimed, and what the law states, is that "Copyrighted stuff can't be copied without permission except under a limited set of specific special circumstances".
They won't cancel it for that reason, no. But it won't do much for the tons of other reasons I've seen.
I can't count the number of comics (independent dead tree and web) I've seen canceled because the writer got sick (or died), or the artist needed to get a real job, or the writer got bored and moved on, or any of half a dozen other reasons. Nor can I count the number I've stopped reading because they became stale formulaic shit because the writer got lazy or decided to cater to the raving fanboys.
The question wasn't "how much fuel they consume", it was "can they be stopped (rendered zero thrust)", which is the question I answered. From a safety POV, they amount to the same thing.
Oh? Cite me a case where an expendable flew for a second time.
The Shuttle flew for years, much more than the 'dozen or so' flights you cite for Falcon/Dragon to be ready to carry men, with at least two inherent design flaws that could have killed at any time. So, you're questionable on that count too, at least in the 'certain number of flights'.
Yes, they had all this location data - and they didn't index it by location. Oh, wait. They did didn't they - because that was exactly the reason they collected it in the first place.
Under the law, if you do it - you're responsible. "I didn't know the gun was loaded" doesn't fly.
Cite me the precedent and law that states that it's legal for a corporation to store and index that information. Doubly so since it isn't even remotely supported that you can do 'whatever the hell you want' with data that reaches you. Hint: try being a Peeping Tom and playing that card in your defense, you won't find a lawyer, judge, or jury in the Western world that will buy that.
Or, in other words, you're making shit up without a single clue what you're talking about.
Which is pretty much my point.
And what happens next Sunday with the next episode or with a different production? No buzz, no bucks.
The numbers are irrelevant to the fact that cooperation and dealing with events in the physical world is considerably different from cooperation in the virtual one.
And I suspect that many have day jobs (many of them related to their volunteer 'jobs') which build their skills and pay the bills, if not time hobby hacking at their code.
Not to mention that you can hack around in code solo, or at least asynchronously, and distributed - something you can't really do for AV production. You can't have your props guy show up on Monday, your sound guy on Tuesday, your makeup guy on Wednesday, and your actors on Thursday, and then put everything on hold because your director's kid has the flu this week... Unlike coding, they pretty much have to be physically in the same place at the same time. The there's the issue that a given programmer may be digging into I/O code one week, and into process scheduling the next - while you're going to have a hard time finding a guy who can be a talented makeup guy one week and a talented video guy the next.
A bunch of really short lived low budget productions?
"Is this the future of television?"
It looks pretty much like the past and present of television to me - he who gets the buzz gets the bucks.
That's what bothers me about many of these alternative voting schemes. While they're ostensibly meant to to give third parties a chance, what few realize is what that really means is giving special and minority interests representation out of proportion to their actual influence and numbers.
One of the key problem in America however is that many of the racial special interests don't want an issue candidate that just happens to be of their race. They want a racial candidate to represent their race, and they almost invariably make race a campaign issue. Or, as I've sometimes pointed out, some of the worst racists and bigots in American don't have white skin.
And in reality, the difference in track record between one flight and a dozen flights is to some extent meaningless - because every flight of an expendable is a first flight. Also, your statistical error is proportional to your sample, in this case, 1/12 or 8%. So after a dozen test flights, your confidence is only 92% - hideously unsafe even by the abysmally low standards of safety in manned spaceflight. (I once calculated that if commercial jets failed at the same 2% rate as commercial space launchers - there would be over fifty crashes a day just at Sea-Tac alone.)
For comparison, Boeing is currently testing a new airliner - and the fifth aircraft in the test program just flew this week. The six and seventh, which complete the test fleet, will fly by the end of July. In just the two weeks of testing (in Dec 2009), with just one aircraft, they racked up more powered flight hours than the Falcon 9 will have by the time it first flies manned. By the time it enters revenue service (carrying paying passengers) it will have undergone a year of intense flight testing with thousands and thousands of hours in the air.
Actually, while you can't restart 'em - you can shut them down.
Actually, you can go all solid if you really want to, or all solid except for a small liquid OMS. You don't need a full stage, just the ability to control your final velocity fairly closely.
Basically, what Google has done is to attempt to sweep this under the rug. They claimed they hadn't been doing anything but sniffing addresses - and when challenged in court to provide the data they had stored, they 'discovered' that they had stored much more information 'accidentally'. They've been trying to spin it ever since, and legions of Google fanboys have been their willing zombies.
You cannot 'accidentally' capture and store data - it takes a deliberate act to do so. (It's either that or supreme incompetence to fail to notice that a database that should only have been 'x' size was 3'x' in size.)
Google isn't being held responsible for hearing it - Google is being held responsible for storing and indexing it.
You don't even understand what the issue is - you shouldn't be lecturing other people.
Learning science at a college level is a hell of a lot more than just 'studying', it's also learning to think logically, to collect, record, and reduce data, to be able to express data and results in a format understandable by professionals, etc... etc...
To sum it up: No matter how many years you've been 'studying' and drawing your weather maps - you haven't a fraction of the training and discipline that someone with a 4 year education does, period. You're a fool if you think you do.
And of course, you calibrated it against known standards so you know that for certain. (Calibration is what makes the difference between cheap junk and useful equipment.)
Yes, it's a big deal. DIY grad students, PhD candidates, etc... have been cobbling together such equipment for decades as part of their research - but now our education system has sunk so low that what generations past considered part of their background work on the way to real research is now thought worthy of a PhD dissertation.
You have to heat and cool less glass, meaning easier heat management and lower strains.
The University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Mirror Lab has been spin casting big (6 meter) blanks for quite a while now for an impressive array of customers.