The ultimate response of the space fanboi - having been challenged on real world technical issues, he moves the goalposts and turns it into a macho/testosterone contest. Thinking is hard, science is hard, engineering is hard - why bother with those when you can make cheap manhood challenges and invoke handwaving buzzwords?
I think the important point is, *once* the infrastructure for these new renewable energy forms is in place, the power itself comes at zero cost... wind, sun and water costs nothing
I just love this kind of ignorance... Because once you wipe out all the infrastructure and operating costs - fossil fuels are free too.
Once you have unlimited power at the head end, you don't really care very much about losses due to beamforming.
Once you get unlimited power at the head end, you've entered the real of science fiction. In the real world the amount of power is sharply limited by insolation (sunlight has a fixed strength), the acreage of solar cells you can lift and connect together in a stable fashion, the conversion efficiency of your cells, and the conversion efficiency of the electric power to microwaves.
This is very expensive and inconvenient on the top of a mountain in Afghanistan. A solar power receiving station doesn't.
A solar power receiving station is a circle a couple miles across - not very cheap or convenient itself. And it won't fit on a mountain top.
We should build something like the Iraqi Super-cannon. The thing was built out of 70's tech and was slated to deliver stuff to orbit for $600/Kg.
Only if the 'stuff' delivered was very small and destined for a very short lived low orbit. It's roughly as useful for delivering a SPS system as a CD mailer would be for shipping all the components of a nuclear aircraft carrier.
Folks like the US military are interested. It's expensive to ship fuel for generators to remote outposts. At those prices for power, SPS are competitive.
Only if you somehow imagine that the SPS bird is made of, and launched on a booster made of, magic fairy pixie dust. Otherwise, SPS power is fairly expensive. (Doubly so when you consider the cost of shipping in and assembling the massive antenna array, plus ongoing maintenance.)
You assume he has actually solved the problems - given that it is entirely untested, I find that highly unlikely. Further, our comments on the potential problems with the scheme don't affect your ability to analyze his thought 'processes' one bit.
So take your bullshit elsewhere and learn to think yourself before studying a process with which you are obviously unfamiliar.
There were indeed technical issues with Northrop's flying wing designs, but they were in no way considered insurmountable. Northrop's wings were killed by the USAF not on technical merits, but from political scheming.
So says Jack Northrup - but the evidence says that neither Northrup or anyone else tried flying wings for any purpose for many years and that the USAF (and the balance of the DoD) and NASA continued to buy Northrup products for many years. Convair itself continued unmerged for years afterwards.
Thus on the balance, one must regard Northrup's claim with suspicion.
So I don't see where I had to buy any hype in order to think that the Battle of the Atlantic could have been won by the Germans if they were just a little bit more careful with their encryption protocols.
When the sole source you cite is a first hand (and thus almost by definition biased and is also a worms eye view of something much larger) account of code breaking - you've bought into the hype. You then further provide proof by citing a single out of context sentence from a popular general article.
I think the first hand accounts of how the codes were broken are unassailable, maybe you disagree.
Oh certainly they are unassailable as accounts of the code breaking efforts. They are emphatically not however accounts of the Battle of the Atlantic.
The only other option than buying the hype, is that you are not only utterly and completely ignorant about the Battle of the Atlantic, you're too stupid to realize it. Citing Wikipedia lends the weight of evidence towards the latter conclusion.
Re:What Killed the Stealth fighter design?
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Hitler's Stealth Fighter
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The military couldn't drop what they didn't have... The F-117 was all angles because the computation required to design a smoother shape were essentially impossible to accomplish at that time. The cost of computation dropped greatly between the F-117 and the B-2, and thus the flat/angular stealth scheme vanished into history. Cell phones had fuck-all to do with it since they wouldn't become common until a decade after this happened.
In other words, you've bought the hype. But what those books and TV shows about Enigma don't tell you about is HUFF-DUFF, traffic analysis, radar, sonar (ASDIC), the ASW patrols in the Bay of Biscay, the large numbers of convoy escorts built, the CVE/CVL (light carriers) programs, hedgehog, leigh lights, etc... etc...
Enigma was very important, of that there is no doubt. But it was only one arrow in a large and well stocked quiver.
What the hell are they spending this money on? It's not like they're building anything new or buying raw materials; they just need someone to re-draw plans with new measurements in a different system.
And once the drawings are re-drawn, you have to verify the individual drawings. Then you have to verify the interfaces to make sure that vendor 'A' didn't round his tolerances in a direction that means his part will no longer properly mate with a part from vendor 'B'. Then you have to withdraw the old drawings from service and replace them with the new in an orderly fashion. Somewhere along the way you also have to not only update the references between drawings, but also the hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation, specifications, etc... that reference these drawings.
The individual steps are bone simple - but there are a lot of individual steps and they interact in various complicated ways.
An additional problem is that all this has to be done while those drawings, specifications, etc... etc... are in daily use at facilities scattered across the country, which means you have a fairly difficult problem not only in making these changes - but in ensuring everybody is 'on the same page'...
As Stalin said "quantity has a quality all its own". A stealth aircraft or two may have been pretty trick, but if you have thousands of targets to bomb, you better have hundreds if not thousands of aircraft (and pilots) to do the job.
And fuel for both the aircraft and the trainers used for the pilots. And a functioning logistics pipeline to get the fuel, bombs, spares, pilots, etc... etc... ready to go.
Which by 1944 the Germans were starting to have significant problems with.
Sometimes I think that the world got lucky - a few small changes in history, and things could easily have gone the other way.
Mostly because you've bought into the hype surrounding WWII German VunderVeapons. In reality, Germany never had an atom bomb (they weren't even close), let alone a plane capable of delivering it over strategic distances (they weren't even close), let alone a plan to use these non existent bombs and aircraft to attack New York. Sure, they had enough bits and pieces that with enough hype and lack of journalistic integrity one could create the illusion of such things for entertainment value... But such entertainment should not be confused with a documentary.
If this is your goal why not try to have it be "sugar on a disk" thats going to be infinitely easier than "sugar on a stick".
Because bootable CD's are so 1995. Which essentially sums up the problem with the entire project - both Sugar and the OLPC have concentrated much more on being 'hip, with it, and politically correct' at the expense of functionality and usability.
Opera has always been in a dominant position in mobile browser marketshare.
An interesting claim - got a citation?
The one you provide shows it roughly tied with the Iphone and Nokia not far behind. It certainly does not show Opera as anything resembling 'dominant'. The bar graph version makes that even more starkly clear.
" I'd like to remain in IT, but in less of a front-line role where I can actually get some work done without being interrupted every five minutes by a jamming printer or frozen instance of Outlook."
Um. If you are on the helpdesk - unjamming printers and unfreezing outlook is your job. Your work isn't being interrupted every five minutes, but rather you are being called on to do your job every five minutes.
IT is a support function, deal with it or find a different career field.
However what we had not counted on was the fact that the temperature would drop so low that the GPS would literally freeze and stop responding and completely shut off, until it got low enough, and warm enough again to turn on. We thought we had lost our package payload.
You didn't anticipate that equipment attached to a balloon flying at high altitude, where it's cold, would get cold?
So Mr. Negative does have some ground to stand on.
That's "Mr. Factual" to you mate.
On the other hand, 2 years slippage of the schedule does not a death of an industry make.
I've never claimed it does - merely pointed out that the optimism of many space 'fans' is unsupported by the record to date. Unlike them, I predict the future based on facts rather than wishful thinking. In the space fanboi community, willingness to address the facts is a rare quality and doesn't fit into their 'cheerleader or detractor' black and white mindset. (Hell, being fully cognizant of the facts is a rare commodity.)
I heard somewhere that the Merlin engine was the first of this size to be build and designed from scratch in, like, 40 years. Is that not true either?
I think that's the case.
On another note, and since you actually seem to know this stuff: why is it so damn hard to build big rockets that work reliably?
It really boils down to two things; a) engineering conservatism - what we've done so fat mostly works and nobody really raises a stink, and b) the extremely low total number of design generations and flight hours - making it hard to get valid statistics.
No, I'm someone who is actually conversant with the facts and comfortable with facing the truth. You are neither of those.
For example, you confuse 'full flight fidelity' with 'flight article'. They are not synonyms. In fact, attaching the word 'fidelity' (or 'qualification') is an explicit statement that it is *not* flight hardware.
Your word choices are overwhelmingly negative in connotation. I smell either a Lockheed/Boeing shill or a NASA Constellation partisan.
They are only negative in connotation to people who are unacquainted with the facts, or at least unwilling to face the unpleasant ones, and who mistakenly believe the world is a black and white place.
Wrong. One partially successful flight and one completely successful flight in three launches of a brand new vehicle is completely normal, historically.
This is an example of being unwilling to face the facts, or to handwave away the unpleasant ones - because you try to blow a smokescreen to make two flights cover four... Completely ignoring the complete failure and the other partial 'sucess' because they blow your comforting little fantasy world into dull lifeless shards. (You also fail to acknowledge the current launch campaign has been scrubbed, *twice*, for problems that should have been detected months ago.) Four flights - one payload delivered on orbit. That's a cold hard fact.
You play the same shell game as the OP by pointing towards the COTS program being on track and claiming that indicates that they are on schedule, and ignoring the uncomfortable facts that both the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 are years behind schedule.
One rocket, to orbit, development funded entirely from private money. They didn't have NASA contracts, starting out.
More ignorance of facts - because there are other people other than NASA who pay for booster development and who invest in launch contracts on unproven vehicles. (Hint: Look who paid for the first two payloads the Falcon I dropped into the ocean.)
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The ultimate response of the space fanboi - having been challenged on real world technical issues, he moves the goalposts and turns it into a macho/testosterone contest. Thinking is hard, science is hard, engineering is hard - why bother with those when you can make cheap manhood challenges and invoke handwaving buzzwords?
I just love this kind of ignorance... Because once you wipe out all the infrastructure and operating costs - fossil fuels are free too.
Once you get unlimited power at the head end, you've entered the real of science fiction. In the real world the amount of power is sharply limited by insolation (sunlight has a fixed strength), the acreage of solar cells you can lift and connect together in a stable fashion, the conversion efficiency of your cells, and the conversion efficiency of the electric power to microwaves.
A solar power receiving station is a circle a couple miles across - not very cheap or convenient itself. And it won't fit on a mountain top.
Only if the 'stuff' delivered was very small and destined for a very short lived low orbit. It's roughly as useful for delivering a SPS system as a CD mailer would be for shipping all the components of a nuclear aircraft carrier.
Only if you somehow imagine that the SPS bird is made of, and launched on a booster made of, magic fairy pixie dust. Otherwise, SPS power is fairly expensive. (Doubly so when you consider the cost of shipping in and assembling the massive antenna array, plus ongoing maintenance.)
You assume he has actually solved the problems - given that it is entirely untested, I find that highly unlikely. Further, our comments on the potential problems with the scheme don't affect your ability to analyze his thought 'processes' one bit.
So take your bullshit elsewhere and learn to think yourself before studying a process with which you are obviously unfamiliar.
Who gives a rip if it was thought up by a 15 year old boy? His age doesn't change the facts of the matter one bit.
So says Jack Northrup - but the evidence says that neither Northrup or anyone else tried flying wings for any purpose for many years and that the USAF (and the balance of the DoD) and NASA continued to buy Northrup products for many years. Convair itself continued unmerged for years afterwards.
Thus on the balance, one must regard Northrup's claim with suspicion.
When the sole source you cite is a first hand (and thus almost by definition biased and is also a worms eye view of something much larger) account of code breaking - you've bought into the hype. You then further provide proof by citing a single out of context sentence from a popular general article.
Oh certainly they are unassailable as accounts of the code breaking efforts. They are emphatically not however accounts of the Battle of the Atlantic.
The only other option than buying the hype, is that you are not only utterly and completely ignorant about the Battle of the Atlantic, you're too stupid to realize it. Citing Wikipedia lends the weight of evidence towards the latter conclusion.
The military couldn't drop what they didn't have... The F-117 was all angles because the computation required to design a smoother shape were essentially impossible to accomplish at that time. The cost of computation dropped greatly between the F-117 and the B-2, and thus the flat/angular stealth scheme vanished into history. Cell phones had fuck-all to do with it since they wouldn't become common until a decade after this happened.
Yep - pretty much no matter what they did, it's their lack of an industrial base, resources, and manpower that would have done them in.
In other words, you've bought the hype. But what those books and TV shows about Enigma don't tell you about is HUFF-DUFF, traffic analysis, radar, sonar (ASDIC), the ASW patrols in the Bay of Biscay, the large numbers of convoy escorts built, the CVE/CVL (light carriers) programs, hedgehog, leigh lights, etc... etc...
Enigma was very important, of that there is no doubt. But it was only one arrow in a large and well stocked quiver.
And once the drawings are re-drawn, you have to verify the individual drawings. Then you have to verify the interfaces to make sure that vendor 'A' didn't round his tolerances in a direction that means his part will no longer properly mate with a part from vendor 'B'. Then you have to withdraw the old drawings from service and replace them with the new in an orderly fashion. Somewhere along the way you also have to not only update the references between drawings, but also the hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation, specifications, etc... that reference these drawings.
The individual steps are bone simple - but there are a lot of individual steps and they interact in various complicated ways.
An additional problem is that all this has to be done while those drawings, specifications, etc... etc... are in daily use at facilities scattered across the country, which means you have a fairly difficult problem not only in making these changes - but in ensuring everybody is 'on the same page'...
And fuel for both the aircraft and the trainers used for the pilots. And a functioning logistics pipeline to get the fuel, bombs, spares, pilots, etc... etc... ready to go.
Which by 1944 the Germans were starting to have significant problems with.
Mostly because you've bought into the hype surrounding WWII German VunderVeapons. In reality, Germany never had an atom bomb (they weren't even close), let alone a plane capable of delivering it over strategic distances (they weren't even close), let alone a plan to use these non existent bombs and aircraft to attack New York. Sure, they had enough bits and pieces that with enough hype and lack of journalistic integrity one could create the illusion of such things for entertainment value... But such entertainment should not be confused with a documentary.
Because bootable CD's are so 1995. Which essentially sums up the problem with the entire project - both Sugar and the OLPC have concentrated much more on being 'hip, with it, and politically correct' at the expense of functionality and usability.
An interesting claim - got a citation?
The one you provide shows it roughly tied with the Iphone and Nokia not far behind. It certainly does not show Opera as anything resembling 'dominant'. The bar graph version makes that even more starkly clear.
Sounds like your version of Firefox is broken, as mine works just fine.
And here it is on Bing - with the circles just barely visible: http://www.bing.com/maps/default.aspx?v=2&FORM=LMLTCP&cp=50.937445~-1.874886&style=h&lvl=18&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&phx=0&phy=0&phscl=1&where1=50.937232%2C-1.873689&encType=1. (You'll have to zoom in.)
Which shows how hard these things are to discover - different light angles and ages and types of crops change the visibility greatly.
I know there are some UK [aerial photography] sites as well - any links from them?
" I'd like to remain in IT, but in less of a front-line role where I can actually get some work done without being interrupted every five minutes by a jamming printer or frozen instance of Outlook."
Um. If you are on the helpdesk - unjamming printers and unfreezing outlook is your job. Your work isn't being interrupted every five minutes, but rather you are being called on to do your job every five minutes.
IT is a support function, deal with it or find a different career field.
This isn't marketed to investors, but is aimed at suckers.
You didn't anticipate that equipment attached to a balloon flying at high altitude, where it's cold, would get cold?
That's "Mr. Factual" to you mate.
I've never claimed it does - merely pointed out that the optimism of many space 'fans' is unsupported by the record to date. Unlike them, I predict the future based on facts rather than wishful thinking. In the space fanboi community, willingness to address the facts is a rare quality and doesn't fit into their 'cheerleader or detractor' black and white mindset. (Hell, being fully cognizant of the facts is a rare commodity.)
I think that's the case.
It really boils down to two things; a) engineering conservatism - what we've done so fat mostly works and nobody really raises a stink, and b) the extremely low total number of design generations and flight hours - making it hard to get valid statistics.
No, I'm someone who is actually conversant with the facts and comfortable with facing the truth. You are neither of those.
For example, you confuse 'full flight fidelity' with 'flight article'. They are not synonyms. In fact, attaching the word 'fidelity' (or 'qualification') is an explicit statement that it is *not* flight hardware.
They are only negative in connotation to people who are unacquainted with the facts, or at least unwilling to face the unpleasant ones, and who mistakenly believe the world is a black and white place.
This is an example of being unwilling to face the facts, or to handwave away the unpleasant ones - because you try to blow a smokescreen to make two flights cover four... Completely ignoring the complete failure and the other partial 'sucess' because they blow your comforting little fantasy world into dull lifeless shards. (You also fail to acknowledge the current launch campaign has been scrubbed, *twice*, for problems that should have been detected months ago.) Four flights - one payload delivered on orbit. That's a cold hard fact.
You play the same shell game as the OP by pointing towards the COTS program being on track and claiming that indicates that they are on schedule, and ignoring the uncomfortable facts that both the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 are years behind schedule.
More ignorance of facts - because there are other people other than NASA who pay for booster development and who invest in launch contracts on unproven vehicles. (Hint: Look who paid for the first two payloads the Falcon I dropped into the ocean.)