I watched a show the other night which talked about how the US pulled 14 TITAN II missiles out of thier silos, relocated them to Vandenburg AirForce Base, removed the warhead and changed them over to carry a payload into space. 13 out of 14 were launched and 13 out of 13 were successful. The last TITAN II missile was kept as a static display at Vandenburg AFB.
That was done as a move to save money. In the end, the missiles required so much modification to transform them from ICBMs into launchers that it was *more* expensive than simply buying new ones.
The TITAN II missiles were good for it because they were man-rated. They were designed from the beginning to be reliable enough to carry a man into space (Gemini missions)
Despite sharing the same name, the ICBM and the Gemini booster were each different birds under the skin. In particular the variant used for Gemini was produced on a separate production line with specially trained workers and and a different (and Gemini specific) QA program from the ICBM version. (The ICBM versions was produced in Denver, while the Gemini version was built at a dedicated plant in Baltimore.)
I'm assuming you're just kidding, at least about the US arsenal. This is something that is taken very seriously. Confidence in the performance of weapons is managed through stockpile surveillance, assessment and certification, and refurbishment.
The Navy even more so than the USAF. The Navy will actually call in a SSBN from patrol occasionally. The warheads on one or more missiles will be removed and replaced with ballast. (No other modification is made to the missile, and the only operational interface that is even temporarily broken is the ordinance train for nose fairing jettison.) The submarine will transit to a simulated patrol area off of the Cape or Vandenburg and will await launch orders. When the launch order is sent (using actual strategic circuits) the (actual strategic) missile will be fired from its (actual strategic) tube and head downrange.
The USAF hauls the missile out of it's tube, ships it to Vandenburg, preps it, and launches it out of a special launch facility.
There are numerous layers of logic like this that are designed just for the issue you bring up. Clearly an ICBM should have enough smarts to know that it hasn't left reached it's target if it is only 20 yards from the launch site and the onboard altimiter never reached a height of over 200 feet.
There not only should be - there are. (US) [ICBM|SLBM]'s have a whole series of interlocks to prevent the physics package from being fired unless it has reached it's intended target. (Further details are, as you might guess, classified.)
There may be a better use of the money, but the bit about children's health is pretty lame. What do they think that kids will go blind? Reminds me of when my Mom used to tell me "Dont sit too close to the television set!". Even the eye doctors said crap like that. I started using computers as a child and my vision was also poor. My optometrist said that if I kept using computers constantly like I was then I would end up requiring glasses or corrective surgery or something. Even after an increased amount of usage (I now have multiple monitors in my face for 12+ hours a day) my vision has actually improved to 20/20. Am I genetically superior to most nerds, or was it all just a load of crap?
No, you are an unusual case sitting out under one end or the other of the bell curve.
It [the Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development] also finds it intriguing as to "why no developed country has been chosen" for MIT's OLPC experiment "given the fact that most of the developed world is far from universalising the possession and use of laptops among children of 6-12 age group".
That's because Negroponte, like the people who adopt from China or Korea, still believes in the White Man's Burden. It's racisim and elitism and imperialism, pure and simple. An undiluted form of bigotry straight from the nineteenth century. But it's been given a White Hat by virtue of seniority.
It's true you don't have to advertise. It doesn't cost anything really to have it available for download. Just sit back and rake in the.99 every few months or so.
[sigh] the same "doesn't cost anything really" fallacy.
Sure - it doesn't cost 'anything really' for a single piece of obscure music. The problem comes when you are handling a couple of million obscure bits of music - those little costs start to add up fast. Even if it only costs a (US) penny a month[1] to store an obscure song - then a million obscure songs cost you (US)$10,000/mo just to store them. (And the costs of the delivery end will have to be figured in eventually as well - so must 'overhead' costs like the HR department and the writers who create the text the web spinners will paste in...)
It's not cheap and it's not free when you look at the big picture.
[1] Hard drives cost money. So does the electricity to spin them and the air conditioning to keep the cool. The server they are mounted in, the rack the server is mounted in, and the datacenter the rack is housed in - all cost money. Hardware breaks and must be replaced - and the tech that does the replacing must be paid... etc... etc..
in this case the flight of the kite is a false positive in the context of 'something floating' - because a kite does not float. (In any scientific usage of the word 'float'.)
Arguing semantics aside, replace 'kite' with 'balloon' and his analogy is true, AND meets your pedantic requirement of the definition of "float".
It's not really being pedantic - the OP proposed a form of scientific thought experiment, I merely hold him to the standards applicable to that. (And a balloon is an interesting edge case - it will float, but can't really be 'thrown'.
You are still correct that the problem of reproducibility stems from a poor description of the experiment, but playing devil's advocate for a moment, who's to say this is not what's plaguing the bubble fusion experiements?
Actually - that's a criticism that been leveled (with some validity) at the alt.fusion community for over a decade. Poor experimental description, poor controls, poor methodology, etc... etc...
In one case I read about an experimenter calculated determined there was excess heat based on the input voltage to a test cell. The problem was, he used a power supply that supplied constant *voltage* but a floating *amperage* - and he didn't measure the amperage. When the proper calculations were used (accounting for amperage) the results showed no net energy gain. Oops.
It may well be that the scientists that are getting positive results are describing the conditions and steps of the experiment perfectly to their knowledge, but there is some other, unknown, condition that needs to be met for the experiement to be successful. Does this mean that every time someone fails to reproduce positive results it is a strike against the original theory? No, by your own admission, it could simply be a lack of complete information.
Certainly incomplete information is possible - but if this is a problem, then it can be cleanly laid at the feet of the alt.fusion community itself. It's practicioners are reluctant to share information and positively hostile to any form of outside review and oversight. (They've got caught many times in the early days not 'measuring the amperage'. Eventually they stopped inviting outsiders in.)
It's the responsibility of the original experimenter to document his theory and his experiments. If others consistently cannot replicate his experiment - the theory is dead in the water. Period. Either it's a bad theory, or a bad experiment - and it's the responsibility of the original experimenter to fix that. Until he does, yes - failing to reproduce positive results does mean the theory is problematical.
Although the kite analogy may not be perfect, it pretty much illustrates the GP poster's point - failing to reproduce the experiment does not disprove the theory, that may be as simple as incompetance.
The GP attempts however to level that as a failing of those attempting to reproduce the experiments - when the fault is in reality on the other end of the stick. (His last paragraph, invoking Big Business conspiracies tells you cleanly of his bias.) Again, that effect can be erased by having the experiments done - by the original experimenters - under independent monitoring or auditing. (Peer review is designed precisely to accomplish this independent auditing - and it's noticeably absent from the alt.fusion community.)
On must demonstrate that the original results were incorrect or impossible.
That's not how science works. If the experiment cannot be replicated - then the onus is on the original experimenter to explain, in detail, why he could get results, and his peers could not. The onus is *not*, as the GP implies, on the rest of the community to believe the original experimenter - that's the hallmark of a religion not of science.
Same problem with publishing research. Some journals try to suppress your right to share your paper freely on the web. So generally only people who's institution has a subscription can see the content.
The answer is competition - post your video on a website with better terms of service and publish in journals that don't have 'embargo' policies on sharing your own work.
My brother-in-law (a professor who must publish or perish) puts it succinctly - "I can publish in 'free' journals that few read and that grant commitees don't trust, that lack a track record and may disappear tommorow. Or I can publish where distribution is more limited - but it is available to my colleagues and grant committees and has a long and stable track record".
This seems a grand failure of basic logic. Getting negative results does not mean that something (in this case, cold fusion) can not actually happen.
For instance, I make an announcement that I have tied a piece of string to an object, threw the object in the air, and it stayed up floating for over an hour. Seems impossible, but heaps of people try to replicate it. Some try tying string to a wooden table, and throwing it in the air. It comes down after a couple of seconds. Other try other objects with similar failures. However, someone tried attaching string to a sheet of paper, and it floated for over 20 seconds before coming down. A partial success perhaps? But most people look at the equations of gravity and acceleration, and say that nothing will stay up for more than a few seconds, depending on how high you throw it. The original announcement is written off as a joke.
A few years later, it is well known that if you shape paper over a frame of rigid sticks in a diamond shape, add a tail, and have an air flow of at least so many metres per second, the object will fly so long as the wind keeps blowing. It is now called a kite. So do the initial negative results mean that the positive result is false, even though there was currently no known theory??
[Sorry for the long quote - it's needed to retain context.]
That people failed to replicate your initial 'experiment' stems from sloppy description of the initial 'experiment'. The actual failure of logic is yours - because you shift frames of reference in mid-tale. In this case the flight of the kite is a false positive in the context of 'something floating' - because a kite does not float. (In any scientific usage of the word 'float'.)
I respect several people who work in my field of science and they are not idiots. I assume the same applies to other scientific fields. So when several top-class individuals (eg. McKubre, director at SRI) say after a period of time they have achieved worthy cold fusion experimental results, I assume they are not incompentent or idiotic, and have actually achived something worthwhile. Perhaps one could be wrong, but the if all of them are wrong, then we are talking mass hallucinations of a lot of previously highly respected and compentent (in their field) people.
'Mass hallucination' (as you so charmingly put it) is hardly unknown in science. Nor are false positives.
Bloggers have the facts first before they write (indeed it's often why they write) and feedback fact-checking after, and the corrections get put right next to the errors.
It's a wonderful you live in - but it bears no relationship to the real world.
Think of Ben Franklin's work in The New England Courant (and others), or the Federalist Papers. Consider The Diary of Anne Frank. Wonder about the poems of Emily Dickinson.
If we're going to use the word "journalist" to refer to someone in the publishing industry whose primary focus is current events of arguably great impact, then there are a lot of very famous accounts of history, editorials, philosophies, works of literature, and yes, indeed, journals which were not penned by journalists.
Precisely. Niether Franklin, nor Frank, nor Dickinson were journalists. (Though Franklin is an edge case.) This should suprise no one as these are basic facts.
(I buy specials at the store, and do special things for my wife all the time - does that make me a 'specialist'. Not in the usual sense of the word, no.)
We as a society can allow this term to be hijacked for profit and for exclusionary purposes, but I would suggest we avoid such acceptance.
Huh? The definition hasn't been hijacked. The one trying to redefine the term into meaninglessness is you. The survey is using the term in the form it's been defined for over a century.
What is needed is a personal page-ranking system -- a central repository where people can rate websites based on factors that matter (ease of use, content, etc.), kind of like the Zagat guide to web sites.
The hash that is eBay rankings, Slashdot moderation, Digging, and Amazon reccomendations all mitigate against that being useful. In addition, the Zagat guide has come under considerable criticism for it's varied and sundry flaws. (Restaurants being ranked highly due to subjective factors, or because it's a 'favorite' (regardless of quality) or because of the nebelous 'this should be ranked highly' factor.)
Dr. Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun. Nazi rockets -> USAF rockets -> NASA. We were able to make ICBMs because we hired the guy who had learned the hard way how to make them (it's said more people died building the V2 rockets that were killed by them), and we were able to do early spacflight because we had ICBMs worked out.
Get your facts straight.
Actually it's Nazi rockets -> US *ARMY* rockets -> NASA. Dr. von Braun never worked for the USAF. Nor did his work noticeably influence the USAF ICBM program. (By the time the ICBM program got going - the US Army and USAF were seperate organizations. The USAF and their contractors had their own German teams.) Furthermore, in the quoted paragraph above - you claim the exact reverse of your original claim that the ICBM program was a spin off of the space program.
The technology to go to orbit and return safely (or, at least accurately) is the technology to put a payload down anywhere on Earth.
The basic technology was demonstrated even before there was a manned NASA flight. Discoverer XIII was a quite public demonstration.
Sure, the trip from LEO to the moon was just showing off, but Gemini was proof that our ICBMs really would work, and of course most of the rocketry components were built by the same companies that made the rocketry components for ICBMs. Gemini was certainly a spin-off from the nuclear arms race, as were the satellites of the era.
Gemini was a spin-off of Mercury - it got it's start as an unofficial program called Mercury MK II. (An attempt by McDonnel-Douglas to drum up business after they lost the Apollo contract to North American.) Gemini only got the nod as an official program after it became clear the Apollo's gestation would be prolonged as it was chnaged from it's original form (a general purpose LEO craft) to what we know it as today (the command ship of a Lunar expedition). Once again, the facts don't quite support your position.
Also, keep in mind the different evolutionary path that ICBM's and space launchers followed. By the time that NASA and manned space flight got going - the liquid fueled ICBM was a dinosaur. It was already being replaced by solid fuel - with only a relatively small number of Titan II's being kept in service because of their unique payload.
No one will debate that manned space benefited from the ICBM program - but the converse is decidely not true. Everything that people point to as being things that the NASA manned programs demonstrated as 'proof of our capabilities' was demonstrated before NASA flew a single man. If NASA was a demonstrator of anything - it was that Ike's Atoms for Peace could be extended to other fields.
Any spin offs are gravy, and historically have vastly exceeded the total budget by several orders of magnitude in untold commercial applications of even the most basic research by-products.
That's the propoganda NASA has been spinning for decades. The cold reality is that total number of spin-off is essentially zero.
Apollo 18 was killed by budget cuts shortly after 19 and 20 were.:(
Actually Apollo 15 was cancelled first, causing a renumbering of the subsequent flights. (This resulted in the Rovers flying early - they had been slated for the original Apollo 17. 15 & 16 would, under the original plan, have been handcart missions like 13 and 14.) This happened IIRC in 1969. Much later Apollo 20 was cut, the 19 was cancelled to free up a Saturn V for Skylab.
An assumption not borne out by even a brief visit to the Sims newsgroups or forums.
Sim City was interesting to non-gamers because they got to play god with a situation familiar to them: human cities.
Sim City players are playing a game - by definition, they are gamers. not the same niche as Halo, or FF, but gamers none-the-less.
Spore will neither attract young girls nor attract anywhere near the number of non-gamers Sim City did. Basically Will's come full circle back around to Populous. And hardly anyone played Populous.
This is so wrong it's laughable - Populous was (pardon the pun) enormously popular. (And had a handful of sequels - pretty surprising for a game 'nobody' played.) Without Sim City and Populous, Sid Meier probably doesn't get a shot at Railroad Tycoon and Civilization.
Yes a bunch of games tried to clone The Sim's success. None of them have succeeded. The Tycoon games took Sim City's basis and took off, but only in the tiny, non-gamer, $9.99 niche.
They are games - and people that are playing them are gamers. It may be a niche market - but it's a *BIG* niche market.
Wright's games exist in their own little world because while they're respected and appreciated by all the industry, they catch the imaginations of only very limited audiences.
It's fascinating how you simply handwave away all of Wright's games - but you can't handwave away one simple fact: Will Wright has sold more boxes than any other designer *ever*, and has done so consistently across a span of over a decade. That's hardly a 'limited' audience.
It just so happens that with The Sims he hit the ultimate niche audience, teenage girls. No one's going to revolutionize gaming by capturing their time, though, just as Britney Spears and N'Sync won't revolutionize music.
This conclusion only follows if one accepts the premises you state above - yet each and every premise is proveably false.
The reality is that Will Wright has revolutionized the industry at least twice - and is paused to do so again.
[sigh]I use a simple analogy to illustrate a complex scientific topic - and somebody always has to take it too far.
That's the real trick - we aren't comparing a handful of pebbles to one rock. We are comparing a.45 to the chest to a OO buckshot shotgun blast to the chest. The kinetic energy of the two is (roughly) on the same order - and despite the visual differences in damage, both are going to leave you in a deep world of hurt.
Hmm, if I have the choice, please shoot me in the chest with the shotgun. That way the impact is distributed over the surface of my bullet proof vest (atmosphere)
At cosmic scales, the atmosphere is about as bullet proof as your average sheet of toilet tissue.
and causes significantly less damage to me (earth's crust).
Nobody is worried about damage to the crust. What scientists are worried about is dumping large amounts of particulates and energy into the earth's atmosphere.
Ok, time to burst your little ego bubble. It looks to me like you are using a false analogy, mostly because you are a dumbass.
No, I used a simple analogy to illustrate complex scientific concepts. Mistakenly, you take that analogy too far.
Breaking up an impactor does not significantly reduce the damage. Search the literature, talk to actual scientists - and you'll find I'm correct and you are not. If you've been paying attention over the last few years, you'll note that discussion has moved from attacking impactors to diversion schemes. There's a reason for that.
While it is true that the kinetic energy of the components of a shattered object will be the same as the inital whole object there are several things you have neglected.
There are several *huge* things you have neglected. (or alternatively; you've posted what seems to be the 'common sense' version. However, as often happens in science, 'common sense' is wrong.)
1. Because the resulting pieces will be of varying size and shape, some will be below the size to successfully reach the surface before burning up.
They'll still dump large amounts of energy and dust into the Earth's atmosphere. That's the *real* cause of the damage from an asteroid impact - the crater and tsunami's are just eye candy.
2.Not all the resulting component pieces will have the same tragectory, thus
some pieces will miss the target
the kinetic energy will be spread out over a larger area.
I invite you to compare the damage done to a human body that is hit by a) a.45 and b) a shotgun blast. The difference between the two is spectacular visually - but the end result is the same.
3. Because the resulting pieces will be smaller and spread over a larger area, the resulting damage will be less pronounced. Think of the damage caused by getting a large tattoo. If those thousands of small pin pricks were converted into a single strike the damage would be much greater. Which would create more damage to you: three handfulls of pebbles dropped on your head, or a single rock of equivelent mass of those same three handfulls?
That's the real trick - we aren't comparing a handful of pebbles to one rock. We are comparing a.45 to the chest to a OO buckshot shotgun blast to the chest. The kinetic energy of the two is (roughly) on the same order - and despite the visual differences in damage, both are going to leave you in a deep world of hurt.
Even so, it is clearly going to take Maxis at least a year to stitch all the elements into a coherent whole.
It seems to me that this game has been a year away for about a year now. Not a good sign. (Especially since two major sections of the game, one of them quite important, were not available to the reviewers.) Lots of hype here - very little meat.
The publicity being generated around this game also reminds me of that which was generated in advance of [IT|Ginger|Segway].
Re:This is why I couldn't stomach web programming!
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Dvorak Rants on CSS
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· Score: 1
What were these people thinking?
They weren't.
Precisely. At the end of the day, the mess that is web development springs from a single cause; the developers and promoters insist on operating from an ivory tower. They don't think about the real world - because from the POV of the tower, it simply doesn't exist.
Philosophy uber alles, and functionality, etc... are at best side concerns.
Slashdot Mirror
That was done as a move to save money. In the end, the missiles required so much modification to transform them from ICBMs into launchers that it was *more* expensive than simply buying new ones.
Despite sharing the same name, the ICBM and the Gemini booster were each different birds under the skin. In particular the variant used for Gemini was produced on a separate production line with specially trained workers and and a different (and Gemini specific) QA program from the ICBM version. (The ICBM versions was produced in Denver, while the Gemini version was built at a dedicated plant in Baltimore.)
The Navy even more so than the USAF. The Navy will actually call in a SSBN from patrol occasionally. The warheads on one or more missiles will be removed and replaced with ballast. (No other modification is made to the missile, and the only operational interface that is even temporarily broken is the ordinance train for nose fairing jettison.) The submarine will transit to a simulated patrol area off of the Cape or Vandenburg and will await launch orders. When the launch order is sent (using actual strategic circuits) the (actual strategic) missile will be fired from its (actual strategic) tube and head downrange.
The USAF hauls the missile out of it's tube, ships it to Vandenburg, preps it, and launches it out of a special launch facility.
There not only should be - there are . (US) [ICBM|SLBM]'s have a whole series of interlocks to prevent the physics package from being fired unless it has reached it's intended target. (Further details are, as you might guess, classified.)
Overall the Russian failure rate is about the same percent the US (and the ESA for that matter) - roughly 2%.
No, you are an unusual case sitting out under one end or the other of the bell curve.
- It [the Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development] also finds it intriguing as to "why no developed country has been chosen" for MIT's OLPC experiment "given the fact that most of the developed world is far from universalising the possession and use of laptops among children of 6-12 age group".
That's because Negroponte, like the people who adopt from China or Korea, still believes in the White Man's Burden. It's racisim and elitism and imperialism, pure and simple. An undiluted form of bigotry straight from the nineteenth century. But it's been given a White Hat by virtue of seniority.[sigh] the same "doesn't cost anything really" fallacy.
Sure - it doesn't cost 'anything really' for a single piece of obscure music. The problem comes when you are handling a couple of million obscure bits of music - those little costs start to add up fast. Even if it only costs a (US) penny a month[1] to store an obscure song - then a million obscure songs cost you (US)$10,000/mo just to store them. (And the costs of the delivery end will have to be figured in eventually as well - so must 'overhead' costs like the HR department and the writers who create the text the web spinners will paste in...)
It's not cheap and it's not free when you look at the big picture.
[1] Hard drives cost money. So does the electricity to spin them and the air conditioning to keep the cool. The server they are mounted in, the rack the server is mounted in, and the datacenter the rack is housed in - all cost money. Hardware breaks and must be replaced - and the tech that does the replacing must be paid... etc... etc..
Actually - that's a criticism that been leveled (with some validity) at the alt.fusion community for over a decade. Poor experimental description, poor controls, poor methodology, etc... etc...
In one case I read about an experimenter calculated determined there was excess heat based on the input voltage to a test cell. The problem was, he used a power supply that supplied constant *voltage* but a floating *amperage* - and he didn't measure the amperage. When the proper calculations were used (accounting for amperage) the results showed no net energy gain. Oops.
Certainly incomplete information is possible - but if this is a problem, then it can be cleanly laid at the feet of the alt.fusion community itself. It's practicioners are reluctant to share information and positively hostile to any form of outside review and oversight. (They've got caught many times in the early days not 'measuring the amperage'. Eventually they stopped inviting outsiders in.)
It's the responsibility of the original experimenter to document his theory and his experiments. If others consistently cannot replicate his experiment - the theory is dead in the water. Period. Either it's a bad theory, or a bad experiment - and it's the responsibility of the original experimenter to fix that. Until he does, yes - failing to reproduce positive results does mean the theory is problematical.
The GP attempts however to level that as a failing of those attempting to reproduce the experiments - when the fault is in reality on the other end of the stick. (His last paragraph, invoking Big Business conspiracies tells you cleanly of his bias.) Again, that effect can be erased by having the experiments done - by the original experimenters - under independent monitoring or auditing. (Peer review is designed precisely to accomplish this independent auditing - and it's noticeably absent from the alt.fusion community.)
That's not how science works. If the experiment cannot be replicated - then the onus is on the original experimenter to explain, in detail, why he could get results, and his peers could not. The onus is *not*, as the GP implies, on the rest of the community to believe the original experimenter - that's the hallmark of a religion not of science.
That still doesn't prove the original postulate - which states the object was *thrown*. Close, but no cigar. :)
My brother-in-law (a professor who must publish or perish) puts it succinctly - "I can publish in 'free' journals that few read and that grant commitees don't trust, that lack a track record and may disappear tommorow. Or I can publish where distribution is more limited - but it is available to my colleagues and grant committees and has a long and stable track record".
That people failed to replicate your initial 'experiment' stems from sloppy description of the initial 'experiment'. The actual failure of logic is yours - because you shift frames of reference in mid-tale. In this case the flight of the kite is a false positive in the context of 'something floating' - because a kite does not float. (In any scientific usage of the word 'float'.)
'Mass hallucination' (as you so charmingly put it) is hardly unknown in science. Nor are false positives.
It's a wonderful you live in - but it bears no relationship to the real world.
(I buy specials at the store, and do special things for my wife all the time - does that make me a 'specialist'. Not in the usual sense of the word, no.)
Huh? The definition hasn't been hijacked. The one trying to redefine the term into meaninglessness is you. The survey is using the term in the form it's been defined for over a century.
The hash that is eBay rankings, Slashdot moderation, Digging, and Amazon reccomendations all mitigate against that being useful. In addition, the Zagat guide has come under considerable criticism for it's varied and sundry flaws. (Restaurants being ranked highly due to subjective factors, or because it's a 'favorite' (regardless of quality) or because of the nebelous 'this should be ranked highly' factor.)
Get your facts straight.
Actually it's Nazi rockets -> US *ARMY* rockets -> NASA. Dr. von Braun never worked for the USAF. Nor did his work noticeably influence the USAF ICBM program. (By the time the ICBM program got going - the US Army and USAF were seperate organizations. The USAF and their contractors had their own German teams.) Furthermore, in the quoted paragraph above - you claim the exact reverse of your original claim that the ICBM program was a spin off of the space program.
The basic technology was demonstrated even before there was a manned NASA flight. Discoverer XIII was a quite public demonstration.
Gemini was a spin-off of Mercury - it got it's start as an unofficial program called Mercury MK II. (An attempt by McDonnel-Douglas to drum up business after they lost the Apollo contract to North American.) Gemini only got the nod as an official program after it became clear the Apollo's gestation would be prolonged as it was chnaged from it's original form (a general purpose LEO craft) to what we know it as today (the command ship of a Lunar expedition). Once again, the facts don't quite support your position.
Also, keep in mind the different evolutionary path that ICBM's and space launchers followed. By the time that NASA and manned space flight got going - the liquid fueled ICBM was a dinosaur. It was already being replaced by solid fuel - with only a relatively small number of Titan II's being kept in service because of their unique payload.
No one will debate that manned space benefited from the ICBM program - but the converse is decidely not true. Everything that people point to as being things that the NASA manned programs demonstrated as 'proof of our capabilities' was demonstrated before NASA flew a single man. If NASA was a demonstrator of anything - it was that Ike's Atoms for Peace could be extended to other fields.
Right. That's why the ICBM predates the space program - and has followed an entirely different evolutionary path.
Right. I remember all those USAF orbital missions in the 50's and 60s'.
You haven't the foggiest clue what you are talking about.
Submarine propulsion plants used this idea back in the 30's.
That's the propoganda NASA has been spinning for decades. The cold reality is that total number of spin-off is essentially zero.
An assumption not borne out by even a brief visit to the Sims newsgroups or forums.
Sim City players are playing a game - by definition, they are gamers. not the same niche as Halo, or FF, but gamers none-the-less.
This is so wrong it's laughable - Populous was (pardon the pun) enormously popular. (And had a handful of sequels - pretty surprising for a game 'nobody' played.) Without Sim City and Populous, Sid Meier probably doesn't get a shot at Railroad Tycoon and Civilization.
They are games - and people that are playing them are gamers. It may be a niche market - but it's a *BIG* niche market.
It's fascinating how you simply handwave away all of Wright's games - but you can't handwave away one simple fact: Will Wright has sold more boxes than any other designer *ever*, and has done so consistently across a span of over a decade. That's hardly a 'limited' audience.
This conclusion only follows if one accepts the premises you state above - yet each and every premise is proveably false.
The reality is that Will Wright has revolutionized the industry at least twice - and is paused to do so again.
At cosmic scales, the atmosphere is about as bullet proof as your average sheet of toilet tissue.
Nobody is worried about damage to the crust. What scientists are worried about is dumping large amounts of particulates and energy into the earth's atmosphere.
No, I used a simple analogy to illustrate complex scientific concepts. Mistakenly, you take that analogy too far.
Breaking up an impactor does not significantly reduce the damage. Search the literature, talk to actual scientists - and you'll find I'm correct and you are not. If you've been paying attention over the last few years, you'll note that discussion has moved from attacking impactors to diversion schemes. There's a reason for that.
There are several *huge* things you have neglected. (or alternatively; you've posted what seems to be the 'common sense' version. However, as often happens in science, 'common sense' is wrong.)
They'll still dump large amounts of energy and dust into the Earth's atmosphere. That's the *real* cause of the damage from an asteroid impact - the crater and tsunami's are just eye candy.
I invite you to compare the damage done to a human body that is hit by a) a
That's the real trick - we aren't comparing a handful of pebbles to one rock. We are comparing a
It seems to me that this game has been a year away for about a year now. Not a good sign. (Especially since two major sections of the game, one of them quite important, were not available to the reviewers.) Lots of hype here - very little meat.
The publicity being generated around this game also reminds me of that which was generated in advance of [IT|Ginger|Segway].
Precisely. At the end of the day, the mess that is web development springs from a single cause; the developers and promoters insist on operating from an ivory tower. They don't think about the real world - because from the POV of the tower, it simply doesn't exist.
Philosophy uber alles, and functionality, etc... are at best side concerns.