New Orleans has been a disaster waiting to happen, as everyone now knows. And it is a city that lies in palpable danger during any hurricane season, now or in the future. Sure, we could learn from the Dutch and from others, but will we?
Our country has a history of trying to do things on the cheap, to pay as little as possible now and to postpone the inevitable for another generation. Now, New Orleans paid the price. We have bridges, highways, water systems and any number of infrastructure needs in the US that we quite effectively ignore on a daily basis.
Don't believe me? Think about how long it has taken California to replace the Bay Bridge after the '89 quake -- it was deemed unsafe then and it was decided to build a new one. This is comparable in scope to the levee system of New Orleans and the new Bay Bridge has taken over fifteen years to replace. Expect the same, Big Easy.
Blame is being passed around, something that politicians excel at. However, the Feds are not the only ones at fault. One must consider the city's priorities when they built a sports arena and did not work on their levees. One must also consider the refusal of the citizens to pay higher taxes to do both. The federal government cut funding, but if the city had REALLY wanted to fix their levees before Katrina, they could have made some hard choices. Instead, they chose to court the Charlotte Hornets and get them to move to the Big Easy. Just as a "for example."
Now, a massive rebuilding effort needs to take place, and one after the rescue and mitigation efforts are completed. The rebuilding will probably outpace the fortification of the levees, as people will want to rebuild their homes and that doing that on an indiovidual basis is smaller and easier than re-engineering levees.
However, before they do that they should consider that their new homes are in as much danger as the ones that they lost until they get their flood control issues resolved. This should be priority one for the city, the state of Louisiana and to a large degree the federal government. The cost will be in the billions, and I for one will be very surprised if the money is easily available.
Even if it is, it will take the better part of two decades -- or about twenty hurricane seasons -- for these new systems to be in place. In the meantime, NOLA better hope that another Katrina does not find their city.
I've read and heard the cargo capacity of the DC-3 was 9 tons or less.
Why do I blame Nixon?
Early in his presidency, Nixon appointed Spiro T. Agnew to head a Space Task Group which assessed the future of spaceflight in the nation.
The STG report recommended a vigorous post-Apollo exploration program culminating in a human expedition to Mars. At the time, mind you, we had the infrastructure in place to make such and effort. The engineers, scientists and support personnel were all working on Apollo.
At a funding level of $8 to $ 10 billion a year indefinitely, NASA could do it all - a manned expedition to Mars, permanent manned space bases in lunar orbit and the lunar surface, a 50-person space station in earth orbit, and a reusable space shuttle to support all of these projects on an economical basis. (astronautix.com)
Nixon did not approve this plan. Instead, he did decide in favour of building only one element of it, the Space Shuttle. It was approved on January 5, 1972.
Thus my feeling that whatever intertia in space exploration that the USA had was killed by Nixon -- who did not accept his own VP's recommendations but instead chose to de-emphasize space exploration at a key moment in NASA's history.
Then, again, we circle fully to the Shuttle itself, and how NASA basically had to make a deal with the Air Force to develop a hybrid vehicle that neither really wanted and has never worked anywhere near its promise.
Fifty launches a year was a selling point, however it took ten years for the STS to achieve that. It is also the only vehicle lost in-flight by NASA, and it has happened twice. Nor has the shuttle ever come close to the forecasts of the Mathematica Study.
After consulting with a family member who participated in the Shuttle design program at MSFC (Boeing) I concur, and stand corrected about the Faget design being side-mounted. I had misunderstood my uncle when I interviewed him for my book (still in writing.) So, thanks for the correction (seriously.)
However, there are some interesting quotes about that phase of the STS design era:
The result was that the simple DC-3 was clearly out of the picture because it had neither the cargo capacity nor the cross-range the Air Force demanded. In fact all existing designs were far too small, as a 40,000-pound (18 tonnes) delivery to polar orbit equates to a 65,000-pound (29 tonnes) delivery to a "normal" 28-degree equatorial orbit. In fact any design using simple straight or fold-out wings was not going to meet the cross range requirements, so any future design would require a more complex, heavier delta wing.
Worse, any increase in the weight of the upper portion of a launch vehicle, which had just occurred, requires an even bigger increase in the capability of the lower stage used to launch it. Suddenly the two-stage system grew in size to something larger than the Saturn V, and the complexity and costs to develop it skyrocketed. This I have also heard from many in the Huntsville area that worked in those halycon days, and for a time they even thought that the Nova might be drug out of the bottom drawer and actually happen, at least in a limited way (not so much for crew transfer.) That in no way was an official stance, but instead scuttlebutt around their offices in the 1960's. Interesting.
Also interesting are the stories of spirited debates regarding side-mounted designs, and how they would cause the problems that they eventually have: shedding. Further, there were also debates around MSFC and the design groups regarding using solids, something that was anathema to a number of folks. Given the Columbia and Challenger events, they have been proven right, much to their disappointment. Or, as my uncle says, sometimes you hope you are wrong.
Your assessments of the costing have been similarly echoed by folks actually in the space business, and you will not find too many major public corporations that will spend money in the eleven figure range based on "build it and they will come." That would be construed as fiduciary irresponsibility and the management replaced, at least that's my guess.
In other words, this is the provenance of a start-up like Virgin Intergalactic. And even they are starting small and working their way up...SpaceShip Two is still only electrons and imagination for the time being.
At the time, LBJ's "Great Society" was at it's height -- and the Congress, Democratically controlled at the time, was under great pressure to fund welfare programs.
No, the space program jump-started development of basic sciences and engineering practices that helped the US economically for decades.
For example, the structural analysis methodologies developed to design the Saturn series of spacecraft has become an everyday part of American design and R&D.
Another obvious example is the groundwork laid by the development of spaceraft telemetry and it's eventually incorporation not only into aerospace applications but also everyday telecomm.
Etc. etc. etc. This has literally filled shelf after shelf.
BTW, in case you ever watch television, the propoganda stunts and political gesturing that led to your having more than three over the air channels is remarkable in it's own right. Not exactly a development of Project Apollo directly, however, the capability of putting large communications satellites into orbit certainly is a derivation that even a first grader can understand.
Not exactly what happened. Close, but it was never the design of the shuttle that was so costly as it was the lack of political will on the part of the Niuxon administration, who had no real clue as to how to proceed once Apollo was winding down.
According to Wikipedia:
However, in reality, NASA found itself with a rapidly plunging budget. Rather than trying to adapt their long-term future to their dire financial situation, they attempted to save as many of the individual projects as possible. The mission to Mars was rapidly dismissed, but the Space Station and Shuttle conserved. Eventually only one of them could be saved, so it stood to reason that a low-cost Shuttle system would be the better option, because without it a large station would never be affordable.
A number of designs were proposed, but many of them were complex and varied widely in their systems. An attempt to re-simplify was made in the form of the "DC-3" by one of the few people left in NASA with the political importance to accomplish it, Maxime Faget, who had designed the Mercury capsule, among other vehicles. The DC-3 was a small craft with a 20,000-pound (9 tonne) (or less) payload, a four-man capacity, and limited maneuverability. At a minimum, the DC-3 provided a baseline "workable" (but not significantly advanced) system by which other systems could be compared for price/performance compromises.
The defining moment for NASA was when they, in desperation to see their only remaining project saved, went to the Air Force for its blessing. NASA asked that the USAF place all of their future launches on the Shuttle instead of their current expendable launchers (like the Titan II), in return for which they would no longer have to continue spending money upgrading those designs -- the Shuttle would provide more than enough capability.
The Air Force reluctantly agreed, but only after demanding a large increase in capability to allow for launching their projected spy satellites (mirrors are heavy).
The original space shuttle was just that -- a shuttlecraft not designed to carry heavy cargo into orbit.
At the end of the Apollo era, the politicians had collectively decided to give in to the "spend the money on earth" socialist types and were cutting the budget of a program that had succeeded both politically and technically. NASA had plans to build space stations, go to Mars and also to develop new vehicles to ferry cargo and another for crew. The "DC-3" space shuttle was that.
Instead, to preserve any of it's plans, NASA had to fold in the triumvirate of new spacecraft into one, and that to accomodate the Air Force.
This, in turn, led to the "compromise" design that has plagued the Shuttle since it's inception. fourteen people have died as a result of these compromises, which are namely:
1. Solid rocket boosters. The SS is the only man-rated vehicle of any nation to use SRB's as a primary boost source.
2. Side-carried "payload" -- namely the Shuttle itself. The original DC-3 design was a top-payload vehicle much like every other manned spaceraft. However, the size of the compromiwe vehicle would have required a booster larger than the Saturn V in order to achieve LEO. This, obviously was not enable, so the side-payload "piggyback" design was created using engines on the payload itself as a source of thrust for the vehicle.
Thus, we have what we have, and it is a flying compromise built by the lwest bidder by a company no longer in business for itself (Boeing acquired North American Rockwell.)
Time for a new shuttle, and one that goes back to the original vision.
The original poster posits: "However, is this coupling of old technology and designs really the best we can do?"
Apparently, s/he misunderstands how aerospace technology works: you stay with things that work and improve upon those things that have been problems in the past.
For example: When Wehrner Von Braun and his team set out to design the Saturn V, Boeig was tasked with building the most difficult part, the first stage, or S1-C.
Did they use new technology? In some cases, yes. For the rocket engines, no. The F-1 engines were actually initially designed by the Air Force in the mid 1950's. Boeing instead took the basic design of the F-1, improved it with better construction techniques, better materials and of course, new tubo-pumps, but nonetheless, the basic design of the F-1 stayed what it was.
Later, the S1-C flew flawlessly on every launch but one: on Apollo 6, there was a problem with "pogo-ing," which is a severe reverberation along the axis of the rocket. At that point, they re-studied the issue and re-engineered the ignitors of the engines, and the S1-C was the most impressive weight-lifter in human history from there on.
That's a for example. In the Shuttle design, there is a lot of work on rocket design and implementation that would be crazy to throw away, not to mention extremely expensive to engineer. These are man-rated vehicles, and there, NASA is exceptionally conservative -- they will stay with they know works and create replacements for that they know does not.
This in not building a new computer CPU, or engineering a new product that a failure is tolerable. I would be very surprised and actually disappointed in NASA and their contractors if they were to toss out the baby with the bathwater, and am personally relieved that they are not.
Several Microsoft acquisitions were heavy *nix users...most notably, Hotmail. At one point, legend has it that Microsoft switched away from the *nix operating systems to it's own products for the Hotmail servers, then switched back due to problems. Is this true?
Overall, where (if at all) does Microsoft use Linux or BSD (besides the labs) for it's enterprise?
SSTO with anti-matter propulsion or something might be perfectly fine.
I think that because of Star Trek, we are all beholden to the idea of anti-matter propulsion. That may come to pass in some distant future, but right now, it is a fairly unrealistic blue-sky idea.
I would put my chips on nuclear fusion as the long-term future, whenever we develop a replacement for chemical rockets. May years ago, Space.com cited some NASA experiments in the field:
NASA engineers are developing a radically new type or rocket engine that harnesses the power of stars to cut travel time to Mars, for example, from the current nine months down to three months. Called the gas-dynamic mirror engine, it traps and heats gas to temperatures as sizzling hot as those found at the core of the sun. That's hot enough to allow for nuclear fusion by combining lighter atomic nuclei into heavier nuclei.
Within a few months, a six-foot long model of the engine will be fired-up by injecting a superheated gas confined between powerful magnets at either end of the engine. Within a couple of years, the engineers hope to achieve a sustained nuclear fusion reaction in the hot plasma.
The article also mentions a fusion/anti-matter hybrid, but the former sounds like it holds more promise in the 30-50 year time frame...and who knows what future developments may hold?
In the near-term, solid rocket boosters put a lot of energy into the nozzle, so to speak. The current Shuttle gets roughly 80% of it's ascent propulsion from the solid rockets that are strapped aside the fuel tanks. That's a pretty powerful combination. The problems with solids are legendary, most notably the lack of any capability of trimming, reducing power or turning them off. The Shuttle is the only launch system that's man-rated that uses solids in a significant way, but this technology is tried and true, considering it is a veteran of many a shuttle launch. While the Challenger failure was a result of the SSRB's, it was a materials issue and not a flaw in the basic package.
Given that the shuttle fleet is nearing obsolescence and that it is a 30+ year old design, it's a good idea to move on. And why not use components that have been proven to work already? It simplifies the engineering needed to construct the new vehicle.
Then there is the private option, one that includes efforts from Burt Rutan, lately of SpaceShip One: Crew Transfer Vehicle (CXV). These guys say that they can fill in the gap during the time it takes for NASA to design/contract/construct a new vehicle.
You are correct. Challenger's SSRB failure was caused by a faulty O-ring, the failure of which was caused by cold weather and temperature cycling. Basically, it was a materials engineering issue.
Amazing to me how many people seem to have an incorrect grasp on history.
Not only that, there's nothing to say that the capsule could not return to a low-earth orbit prior to re-entry. At any rate, the Russians are certainly capable of updating their 1960's-era moon rocket technologies to get there and back again safely.
As hard as it is to believe that so much time has slipped us by, going to the moon was done in the late 1960's, and of course since then, dramatic advances in materials science, computer technologies etc., make it all the more do-able.
Matter of fact, we (the US) could be back there in short order if the political impetus and thus the funding was in place. Contrary to urban legend, blueprints of the Saturn V and associated components exist, and would serve as a good basis for any designs. Of course, it would take a while to design, create and test and man-capable booster system, but done it could be.
I see your point, but in this case "second round" meant this particular flight and it's second launch attempt.
Having family intimately involved with Apollo, I can attest to the pressures that the ground crews were under. After all, as a child, I saw my father and grandfather disappear at the Cape for weeks at a time as a launch was prepared and executed. Then, after the bird was in flight, they came home and watched on TV like everyone else.
Anyway, do not underestimate the effect of the Apollo 1 fire on the space program as a whole. It instilled a paranoia that has been institutionalized at NASA for decades now. Before that, there was a psychology called "Go fever" -- meaning that NASA - from top to bottom - thought that they were ten feet tall and bullet-proof. As a result, the CM for the original Saturn design was shoddy and a disaster waiting to happen. The only fortunate aspect of the whole incident was that it was on the ground and not in flight.
Finally, I agree 100% about Challennger. It was a watershed and exposed the shuttle for what it is -- a piece of space hardware that had too many politicians at the drawing board with their pencils.
There are four sensors total, three others worked within parameters and reported no problems. On this particular fuel tank there are two sensors, and the other one is not having any intermittent issues.
Also, it is incorrect to say that the sensor is reporting something "wrong" because obviously, on the ground with no fuel in the tank, it should not be reading as full. It was for a time, and that's indicative of a sensor issue.
Finally, NASA has been "planning" manned planetary expiditions since the 1960's. Old hands at NASA will tell you that they were almost ready after Apollo, and in fact, the NOVA was the booster (it was a Saturn series with a first stage that used 12(!) F-1 engines) that could have been used. Newer NASA folks could show you all sorts of ideas and plans that they have.
The one thing that is missing is the political will, which this country has very little of when it comes to Big Science light space exploration. Invariably it is decried as a waste, even though history has shown that taxes gained through space spinoffs have repaid the investment in the space program multiple times.
Bottom line: you want to go to Mars or beyond? Write your Congress-critter and tell them that. Write the President and tell him that too.
There are three possible outcomes to the launch attempt, only one of them is completely positive:
1. Discovery launches Tuesday during the launch window and has a routine and successful mission. After that, there will be plenty of time to determine the root cause of the sensor issue.
2. The weather does not co-operate or another tenchnical glitch surfaces, causing Tuesday's attempt to be scrubbed. NASA is hounded in the press for being unable to manage their spacecraft, when in fact they are doing exactly that according to their safety protocols, which have been generally tightened post-Columbia.
3. Disaster. Unthinkable and possibly the end of an American manned space presence until the Crew Exploration Vehicle is completed and launched in the next decade.
The Space Shuttle is an aging flying compromise that has been updated as much as possible, and it is what NASA has been given to work with. I almost expect Outcome #2, given their justifiable prudence in halting launches when they are not 100% satisfied that the system is as operationally ready as they can make it. NASA may be criticized for delays, but when seven lives and a multi-billion dollar spacecraft are on the line, not to mention all of their political capital, once can understand why they do what they do.
Bottom line is that all eyes will be back on the Cape come Tuesday morning. Godspeed Discovery.
The thing that amuses me the most about this whole episode is that senators and other publicity hounds never noticed the game when it was just violence, madness and mayhem, but shock of shocks, a character "gets a cup of coffee" and skin friction ensues, and the next thing you know, this is the worst thing that could ever possibly have happened to our kids!
Me, I would prefer my kid watch a porn flick any day rather than "Natural Born Killers" or play a video game with tawdry pixels as opposed to trying to see how many crimes can be committed in order to get a high score.
After all, who gets hurt by a good (consensual) boffing?
Well, yeah, I know about sex and responsiblity. So spare me the usual screed. But if you do, pleas explain at the same time a way to "responsibly" carjack or murder someone.
This is like saying that a group of midgets can pull a jet plane. Sure, they can, and it will be on some crappy network TV show (the midgets were on Fox) but at the same time, other than proving that midgets can move a plane, what else does it really accomplish?
In this case, we have someone who says you can run Windows on old hardware. Great! Maybe I can go and buy one of those $25 yard sale specials and quite dreaming of 64-bit Photoshop, whenever Adobe releases it. But, unlike a lot of Slashdotters, figure I better go a RTFA. Good thing I did:
Useability
This really about covers it:
> Only have 1 application open at a time if possible
It is true that the less you ask Windows to do, the better it does it. However, since the middle 1990's, this is not a real-world suggestion. For example: you have a spreadsheet that you want to get parts of to include in a report being composed in Microsoft Word. Are you to shut down Excel and start up Word, and paste part of it in, lather, rinse, repeat until done?
But wait! There's more...
> You can run with 16bit color on the desktop
Okay, forget the web and pictures.
> disable sound effects, and even disable the sound card
Not so bad, considering you won't be able to run any multimedia.
> Remove LPT/printer port
No ZIP drive, and printing over a network only
> Use hibernation feature
Over half of the computers I ever tried to use it with did a horrible job of it. Better to just leave the thing on and locked.
Security
>DONT install an extra service pack
>Don't apply O/S patches for security stability or other things.
Yes, a good idea. Security is somewhat inconsequential in this day and age. If you are going to do that, do not link up to the internet!
So: all in all, you have a computer that you can barely use and if you have any sense at all, you do not connect to the internet.
While it may be a good solution for some, in the real world, the only time you would ever use this is if you were on a desert island and simply couldn't get anything else.
Hollywood Still Missing The Obvious
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P2P and TV
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Those in charge of distribution of programs need to finally realize that either they distribute their shows and profit, or face the simple fact that they will be shared on P2P nets and distributed outside of their profit channels. The simple fact is that electronic distribution is not going to go away, no matter how many laws are erected to stop it.
That does not mean that I am saying that stealing is right, or that *is* a right, clearly, from a legal, moral and ethical standpoint it is not. However, common people are becoming common electronic thieves simply because that is the only way to satisfy demand. Given the illusory "anonymity" of the internet, it is all too easy to do, and right now, the odds are favoring them as opposed to Hollywood when it comes to facing the consequences of violating the copyright holders' rights.
That all said, it's also my take that people, given the choice, would pay a *reasonable* fee to legally download television shows and do more or less with them what they did or do with videotapes. However, for some reason, Hollywood cannot seem to grasp this, or at the very least, cannot grasp how to do loosen their grasp on their content in such a way to make a subscription based P2P net possible.
My suggestion: allow people to subscribe to virtual channels, as they do with satellite or cable now. Allow them to download the shows, to share them on legal networks and pay a fee that is comparable to what they pay for cable now. That would be a real on-demand system, one where the infrastructure of the network is paid for by the subscribers themselves. Other than a substantial investment in seed servers and a first uplink, Hollywood would have to do little else than pay credit card processors and accountants.
To enable protection, they could sell smartcards similar to what Dish and DirectTV use now. Yes, I know that they have been hacked in the past, but nowadays, they are relatively secure, in as much as the average guy will not bother even trying.
Home theatre systems are nearly impossible for the average person to set up properly now -- and we are "only" 9.1 systems. Today, we have more wires behind our receivers than the Pentagon network operations center, and balancing all of the speakers can be a frustrating experience to say the least.
The best part of all of that effort is this: we do it so we can let our wives watch Trading Spaces in high definition / surround! Or better, watch Lifetime Channel for three or four hours straight -- which has been proven to eradicate testosterone and cause a severe form of acute depression.
Seriously, audiophiles may pay for this, but most rooms are not big enough to support the sound effectively, and those with substantial investments will wait until the next upgrade cycle to even consider it.
It seems like every day I am hearing about some company losing hundreds of thousands of credit card data files, putting millions at risk for a major incovenience -- at the least, they have to chage the credit card number and if they have accounts set up with vendors based on those cards, then they have to go and update those too. Obviously, that's the least-case scenario.
My take is that credit card companies are going to have to change the way that credi cards work to slow this down. While no technology is unhackable, slowing it down is certainly possible. Ffor example, credit cards could use a biometric identification to verify identity before they are processed. Given the right amount of encryption and backend security, this would at least slow down the wholesale trading of account numbers that has become a plague.
Finally, regarding personal information, it would appear that Sun's Scott McNealy when he said a couple of years ago that there was no privacy anymore. Perhaps. Nevertheless, as long as governments sit idly by and do nothing about the collection and disclosure of personal data, this is only going to get worse. Citizens need to demand that government take a larger role in this, and ensure that private data is not collected unnecessarily and that disclosure of it is punitively prohibited. Given that a number of nations are involved, an international treaty should be enacted.
That alone would not stop this from happening. However, at the same time, data not collected is data not sold.
This problem has grown past the ridiculous and it is time that something be done to stop it. Surely there are solutions.
Hollywood Always Fights, Then Accepts and Profits
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Darknet: Hollywood's War
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· Score: 5, Insightful
It's really pretty simple from Hollywood's point of view: control the distribution mechanism, something they are used to, and control access, something else they are used to. Just because it is the internet does not mean that they will not try to apply the business model that has worked well for them for nearly a century. In fact, given their history, it would be surprising if they did not.
Keep in mind that Hollywood has largely tried to stifle technlogical innovation outside of their control: they complained about television, because it would keep people from the theatres. Then, they mastered that medium and made even more money because of it. Then, later, they complained about VCRs, because it would allow people to record films and not pay them for the privilege. Then, as with television, they mastered that medium and made even more money because of it. They resisted DVDs initially because it would be easy to make "perfect" copies from a DVD, and they put on an exceptionally weak encryption scheme to thwart that from happening. Of course, the 'DRM' was thwarted, people now copy DVDs, and guess what: Hollywood makes more money because of DVDs.
Now comes the internet. As usual, Hollywood is resisting this new technology and are saying what they usually say: it will cost them money. However, if history serves as a guide, they will eventually master this medium too and make money because of it.
There is piracy, there is little doubt about that. While it does prevent some sales of DVDs or movie tickets, in some cases it has gone the other way and has drawn interest into a film or a TV show. There is much speculation that the producers of Battlestar Galactica conducted a quiet stealtht marketing ploy by allowing their show to be distributed via BitTorrent and other P2P vectors -- and it worked. BG gained an audience, and surely some of it came from those who had downloaded earlier episodes. Now, the same is being said of the new Doctor Who. Surely, few Americans would see it if it were not for the illegal distributions. There is a lot of interest in this new show and it is surely because of P2P, because the show is not available in any form (legally) in the USA.
At the end of the day, all of Hollywood's fighting will turn to gradual acceptance. Whether or not it is on their terms is their and the market's choice. The internet is here to stay, and so is piracy. Instead of focussing on preventing piracy, perhaps Hollywood should add enough to the value propostition that piracy is an afterthought. Many would gladly pay to get electronic distributions of shows via the internet, and it is up to Hollywood to get out of their office chairs and to figure out how to profit from it. History says that they will, but it does not foretell WHEN they will.
As far as space launches go, this was an incredibly inexpensive one. However, that does not say that it was cheap for the Sagan folks. Hopefully, they will bounce back and get their bird up into space sooner rather than later.
To those who criticize NASA, which is hamstrung by its own bureaucracy and an overall lack of fncding, one would be remiss to fail to point out that they have indeed placed two probes on Mars recently, vehicles that have vastly exceeded their life-expectancies and remain useful and operational.
That also extends to the Space Shuttle. Those who constantly criticize it are either ignoring or are ignorant of its history: the Shuttle was a compromised design due to politics rather than technology, and NASA has been "stuck" with a vehicle it would rather not have initially had. On that point, the current design of the shuttle was certainly not what NASA wanted. As the mnost complex mechanical system on the planet, it is bound for failure, and it will not surprise me when all of them are lost in flight accidents.
That's why SpaceShipOne excited me so much on a personal level. It was a successful project, done relatively inexpensively and proved that private funding could succeed in putting a bird up in to technical space. By itself, SS1 is hardly a blip in space history, but it will serve as impetus to what comes next. Fresh eyes coming up with new solutions is a great idea.
The bottom line is this: Today, space flight is expensive, at least if you want a high probability of success. While it is tragic that the Solar Sail probe was lost, it does serve as yet another reminder that "on the cheap" programs prove that you get what you pay for. If you want to go to space, bring copious amounts of cash. It may seem wasteful in the midst of success, but in the midst of failures such as this, the costs suddenly become reasonable.
Digital is indeed good if it is a large volume of photographs that you are seeking to make. And its quality is [i]approaching[/i] that of many films, for example, 35mm B&W negative and 35mm color negative film. However, even a 16MP camera (the Canon EOS 1DS Mark II) is still short of 35mm transparency film -- and that is the provenance of the professional photographer and advanced amateurs.
Another place where digital fails miserably is in long exposure times. While film has reciprocity issues, those are accounted for mathematically, whereas digital noise is difficult to eradicate. Some may equate this to film graininess and that is true where ISO speeds are concerned. Instead, I am speaking of when exposures are many seconds. That is a simple "for-example" of a place where film remains superior...and there are others...consider infrared photography, which can be done in digital, save for the fact that most digital cameras filter out the IR light. A film camera only requires a different sort of film to become a very capable IR camera.
Another irritating thing to me is that non-pros assume that 35mm is the first camera of choice for a professional. Unless they are news or wildlife guys, this is not necessarily true. In fact, most studio-based pros use at least 120mm film cameras, and you can take the megapixels required to match film to the power of four. If they are using 5X7 view/field cameras, which is the minimum for a serious lanscapist, it is ^16 -- at minimum. And that is simple LPI acutance.
Further, the gigapixel digital photos are stitched for the most part, which comes with it's set of issues and challenges that far exceeds the capabilities of almost any point-and-shoot person. Fact is, most people have no clue about nodal point calibration, exposure matching and other gotchas that make the gigapixel photograph take literally days to execute and then assemble. Even a 100 MP cylindrical projection is a challenge to the casual amateur, and most of their works will not approach the level of so-called "fine-art" photographs.
Finally, you are 110% correct about color spaces. However, monitors that use the Adobe RGB color space are coming in to the market now, even if they are prohibitively expensive. Remaining in a single color space throughout the workflow will be a major boon to digital, and in 5-10 years I predict this to be the norm rather than the exception as it is today.
The bottom line is that it is wishful thinking to say that one technlogy will make the other "go away." Chemical photography will have it's uses far into the future and it will be quite some time before issues like noise, range and contrast are completely solved. Until then, guys like me will keep a plethora of cameras -- ranging from a Nikon D2X all the way to a fully manual Nikkormat -- in our camera bags. We are paid to capture images and I care not one whit which tool I use, but I do care passionately about whether or not I get on paper what it is that I set out to capture.
Perhaps one should keep in mind that Linux bigots are as entrenched with the OS of their choice as are Apple's OSX zealots. Ne'er shall the twain meet, it was once said, and I think that this will be another case of more of the same.
One should read Dvorak through the years, and I mean back to the 1980's when he was a columnist for Macworld and other magazines. He can be a blind squirrel that stumbles upon a nut, and he can be as infuriating as any writer who's ever analyzed computing. In other words, when his moth opens and shuts, gospel verses are not written.
First of all, one has to wonder if Apple is going to sell it's computers at the same commodity prices that Dell, HP and Lenovo/IBM do, or are they going to command a higher price than similarly powered Wintel or Linux machines.
The history of Apple suggests that they will try to leverage higher margins from their hardware than their competition, which was fine as long as they had a performance advantage over the rest of the pack. Now that they will be operating on the same CPU hardware, it is difficult to see them having a huge leg up. So where is the compelling reason to switch away from Linux to the BSD kernel and Apple?
It seems to have become fashionable to predict the death of Linux. Perhaps it will go by the wayside, but that won't be anytime soon. If anything, Apple itself should provide a writer lik eDvorak with that insight. Perhaps John is trying to join the Dynamic Duo that are Laura Didio and Rob Enderle?
Slashdot Mirror
New Orleans has been a disaster waiting to happen, as everyone now knows. And it is a city that lies in palpable danger during any hurricane season, now or in the future. Sure, we could learn from the Dutch and from others, but will we?
Our country has a history of trying to do things on the cheap, to pay as little as possible now and to postpone the inevitable for another generation. Now, New Orleans paid the price. We have bridges, highways, water systems and any number of infrastructure needs in the US that we quite effectively ignore on a daily basis.
Don't believe me? Think about how long it has taken California to replace the Bay Bridge after the '89 quake -- it was deemed unsafe then and it was decided to build a new one. This is comparable in scope to the levee system of New Orleans and the new Bay Bridge has taken over fifteen years to replace. Expect the same, Big Easy.
Blame is being passed around, something that politicians excel at. However, the Feds are not the only ones at fault. One must consider the city's priorities when they built a sports arena and did not work on their levees. One must also consider the refusal of the citizens to pay higher taxes to do both. The federal government cut funding, but if the city had REALLY wanted to fix their levees before Katrina, they could have made some hard choices. Instead, they chose to court the Charlotte Hornets and get them to move to the Big Easy. Just as a "for example."
Now, a massive rebuilding effort needs to take place, and one after the rescue and mitigation efforts are completed. The rebuilding will probably outpace the fortification of the levees, as people will want to rebuild their homes and that doing that on an indiovidual basis is smaller and easier than re-engineering levees.
However, before they do that they should consider that their new homes are in as much danger as the ones that they lost until they get their flood control issues resolved. This should be priority one for the city, the state of Louisiana and to a large degree the federal government. The cost will be in the billions, and I for one will be very surprised if the money is easily available.
Even if it is, it will take the better part of two decades -- or about twenty hurricane seasons -- for these new systems to be in place. In the meantime, NOLA better hope that another Katrina does not find their city.
I've read and heard the cargo capacity of the DC-3 was 9 tons or less.
Why do I blame Nixon?
Early in his presidency, Nixon appointed Spiro T. Agnew to head a Space Task Group which assessed the future of spaceflight in the nation.
The STG report recommended a vigorous post-Apollo exploration program culminating in a human expedition to Mars. At the time, mind you, we had the infrastructure in place to make such and effort. The engineers, scientists and support personnel were all working on Apollo.
At a funding level of $8 to $ 10 billion a year indefinitely, NASA could do it all - a manned expedition to Mars, permanent manned space bases in lunar orbit and the lunar surface, a 50-person space station in earth orbit, and a reusable space shuttle to support all of these projects on an economical basis. (astronautix.com)
Nixon did not approve this plan. Instead, he did decide in favour of building only one element of it, the Space Shuttle. It was approved on January 5, 1972.
Thus my feeling that whatever intertia in space exploration that the USA had was killed by Nixon -- who did not accept his own VP's recommendations but instead chose to de-emphasize space exploration at a key moment in NASA's history.
Then, again, we circle fully to the Shuttle itself, and how NASA basically had to make a deal with the Air Force to develop a hybrid vehicle that neither really wanted and has never worked anywhere near its promise.
Fifty launches a year was a selling point, however it took ten years for the STS to achieve that. It is also the only vehicle lost in-flight by NASA, and it has happened twice. Nor has the shuttle ever come close to the forecasts of the Mathematica Study.
However, there are some interesting quotes about that phase of the STS design era:
The result was that the simple DC-3 was clearly out of the picture because it had neither the cargo capacity nor the cross-range the Air Force demanded. In fact all existing designs were far too small, as a 40,000-pound (18 tonnes) delivery to polar orbit equates to a 65,000-pound (29 tonnes) delivery to a "normal" 28-degree equatorial orbit. In fact any design using simple straight or fold-out wings was not going to meet the cross range requirements, so any future design would require a more complex, heavier delta wing.
Worse, any increase in the weight of the upper portion of a launch vehicle, which had just occurred, requires an even bigger increase in the capability of the lower stage used to launch it. Suddenly the two-stage system grew in size to something larger than the Saturn V, and the complexity and costs to develop it skyrocketed.
This I have also heard from many in the Huntsville area that worked in those halycon days, and for a time they even thought that the Nova might be drug out of the bottom drawer and actually happen, at least in a limited way (not so much for crew transfer.) That in no way was an official stance, but instead scuttlebutt around their offices in the 1960's. Interesting.
Also interesting are the stories of spirited debates regarding side-mounted designs, and how they would cause the problems that they eventually have: shedding. Further, there were also debates around MSFC and the design groups regarding using solids, something that was anathema to a number of folks. Given the Columbia and Challenger events, they have been proven right, much to their disappointment. Or, as my uncle says, sometimes you hope you are wrong.
Your assessments of the costing have been similarly echoed by folks actually in the space business, and you will not find too many major public corporations that will spend money in the eleven figure range based on "build it and they will come." That would be construed as fiduciary irresponsibility and the management replaced, at least that's my guess.
In other words, this is the provenance of a start-up like Virgin Intergalactic. And even they are starting small and working their way up...SpaceShip Two is still only electrons and imagination for the time being.
At the time, LBJ's "Great Society" was at it's height -- and the Congress, Democratically controlled at the time, was under great pressure to fund welfare programs.
No, the space program jump-started development of basic sciences and engineering practices that helped the US economically for decades.
For example, the structural analysis methodologies developed to design the Saturn series of spacecraft has become an everyday part of American design and R&D.
Another obvious example is the groundwork laid by the development of spaceraft telemetry and it's eventually incorporation not only into aerospace applications but also everyday telecomm.
Etc. etc. etc. This has literally filled shelf after shelf.
BTW, in case you ever watch television, the propoganda stunts and political gesturing that led to your having more than three over the air channels is remarkable in it's own right. Not exactly a development of Project Apollo directly, however, the capability of putting large communications satellites into orbit certainly is a derivation that even a first grader can understand.
According to Wikipedia:
However, in reality, NASA found itself with a rapidly plunging budget. Rather than trying to adapt their long-term future to their dire financial situation, they attempted to save as many of the individual projects as possible. The mission to Mars was rapidly dismissed, but the Space Station and Shuttle conserved. Eventually only one of them could be saved, so it stood to reason that a low-cost Shuttle system would be the better option, because without it a large station would never be affordable.
A number of designs were proposed, but many of them were complex and varied widely in their systems. An attempt to re-simplify was made in the form of the "DC-3" by one of the few people left in NASA with the political importance to accomplish it, Maxime Faget, who had designed the Mercury capsule, among other vehicles. The DC-3 was a small craft with a 20,000-pound (9 tonne) (or less) payload, a four-man capacity, and limited maneuverability. At a minimum, the DC-3 provided a baseline "workable" (but not significantly advanced) system by which other systems could be compared for price/performance compromises.
The defining moment for NASA was when they, in desperation to see their only remaining project saved, went to the Air Force for its blessing. NASA asked that the USAF place all of their future launches on the Shuttle instead of their current expendable launchers (like the Titan II), in return for which they would no longer have to continue spending money upgrading those designs -- the Shuttle would provide more than enough capability.
The Air Force reluctantly agreed, but only after demanding a large increase in capability to allow for launching their projected spy satellites (mirrors are heavy).
The original space shuttle was just that -- a shuttlecraft not designed to carry heavy cargo into orbit.
At the end of the Apollo era, the politicians had collectively decided to give in to the "spend the money on earth" socialist types and were cutting the budget of a program that had succeeded both politically and technically. NASA had plans to build space stations, go to Mars and also to develop new vehicles to ferry cargo and another for crew. The "DC-3" space shuttle was that.
Instead, to preserve any of it's plans, NASA had to fold in the triumvirate of new spacecraft into one, and that to accomodate the Air Force.
This, in turn, led to the "compromise" design that has plagued the Shuttle since it's inception. fourteen people have died as a result of these compromises, which are namely:
1. Solid rocket boosters. The SS is the only man-rated vehicle of any nation to use SRB's as a primary boost source.
2. Side-carried "payload" -- namely the Shuttle itself. The original DC-3 design was a top-payload vehicle much like every other manned spaceraft. However, the size of the compromiwe vehicle would have required a booster larger than the Saturn V in order to achieve LEO. This, obviously was not enable, so the side-payload "piggyback" design was created using engines on the payload itself as a source of thrust for the vehicle.
Thus, we have what we have, and it is a flying compromise built by the lwest bidder by a company no longer in business for itself (Boeing acquired North American Rockwell.)
Time for a new shuttle, and one that goes back to the original vision.
> When was the last time we sent someone to the moon? The 60's.
Eugene Cernan was the last human on the moon, in December of 1972.
Apparently, s/he misunderstands how aerospace technology works: you stay with things that work and improve upon those things that have been problems in the past.
For example: When Wehrner Von Braun and his team set out to design the Saturn V, Boeig was tasked with building the most difficult part, the first stage, or S1-C.
Did they use new technology? In some cases, yes. For the rocket engines, no. The F-1 engines were actually initially designed by the Air Force in the mid 1950's. Boeing instead took the basic design of the F-1, improved it with better construction techniques, better materials and of course, new tubo-pumps, but nonetheless, the basic design of the F-1 stayed what it was.
Later, the S1-C flew flawlessly on every launch but one: on Apollo 6, there was a problem with "pogo-ing," which is a severe reverberation along the axis of the rocket. At that point, they re-studied the issue and re-engineered the ignitors of the engines, and the S1-C was the most impressive weight-lifter in human history from there on.
That's a for example. In the Shuttle design, there is a lot of work on rocket design and implementation that would be crazy to throw away, not to mention extremely expensive to engineer. These are man-rated vehicles, and there, NASA is exceptionally conservative -- they will stay with they know works and create replacements for that they know does not.
This in not building a new computer CPU, or engineering a new product that a failure is tolerable. I would be very surprised and actually disappointed in NASA and their contractors if they were to toss out the baby with the bathwater, and am personally relieved that they are not.
Several Microsoft acquisitions were heavy *nix users...most notably, Hotmail. At one point, legend has it that Microsoft switched away from the *nix operating systems to it's own products for the Hotmail servers, then switched back due to problems. Is this true?
Overall, where (if at all) does Microsoft use Linux or BSD (besides the labs) for it's enterprise?
I think that because of Star Trek, we are all beholden to the idea of anti-matter propulsion. That may come to pass in some distant future, but right now, it is a fairly unrealistic blue-sky idea.
I would put my chips on nuclear fusion as the long-term future, whenever we develop a replacement for chemical rockets. May years ago, Space.com cited some NASA experiments in the field:
NASA engineers are developing a radically new type or rocket engine that harnesses the power of stars to cut travel time to Mars, for example, from the current nine months down to three months. Called the gas-dynamic mirror engine, it traps and heats gas to temperatures as sizzling hot as those found at the core of the sun. That's hot enough to allow for nuclear fusion by combining lighter atomic nuclei into heavier nuclei.
Within a few months, a six-foot long model of the engine will be fired-up by injecting a superheated gas confined between powerful magnets at either end of the engine. Within a couple of years, the engineers hope to achieve a sustained nuclear fusion reaction in the hot plasma.
The article also mentions a fusion/anti-matter hybrid, but the former sounds like it holds more promise in the 30-50 year time frame...and who knows what future developments may hold?
In the near-term, solid rocket boosters put a lot of energy into the nozzle, so to speak. The current Shuttle gets roughly 80% of it's ascent propulsion from the solid rockets that are strapped aside the fuel tanks. That's a pretty powerful combination. The problems with solids are legendary, most notably the lack of any capability of trimming, reducing power or turning them off. The Shuttle is the only launch system that's man-rated that uses solids in a significant way, but this technology is tried and true, considering it is a veteran of many a shuttle launch. While the Challenger failure was a result of the SSRB's, it was a materials issue and not a flaw in the basic package.
Given that the shuttle fleet is nearing obsolescence and that it is a 30+ year old design, it's a good idea to move on. And why not use components that have been proven to work already? It simplifies the engineering needed to construct the new vehicle.
Then there is the private option, one that includes efforts from Burt Rutan, lately of SpaceShip One: Crew Transfer Vehicle (CXV). These guys say that they can fill in the gap during the time it takes for NASA to design/contract/construct a new vehicle.
Interesting choices lay ahead.
Amazing to me how many people seem to have an incorrect grasp on history.
Not only that, there's nothing to say that the capsule could not return to a low-earth orbit prior to re-entry. At any rate, the Russians are certainly capable of updating their 1960's-era moon rocket technologies to get there and back again safely.
As hard as it is to believe that so much time has slipped us by, going to the moon was done in the late 1960's, and of course since then, dramatic advances in materials science, computer technologies etc., make it all the more do-able.
Matter of fact, we (the US) could be back there in short order if the political impetus and thus the funding was in place. Contrary to urban legend, blueprints of the Saturn V and associated components exist, and would serve as a good basis for any designs. Of course, it would take a while to design, create and test and man-capable booster system, but done it could be.
I see your point, but in this case "second round" meant this particular flight and it's second launch attempt.
Having family intimately involved with Apollo, I can attest to the pressures that the ground crews were under. After all, as a child, I saw my father and grandfather disappear at the Cape for weeks at a time as a launch was prepared and executed. Then, after the bird was in flight, they came home and watched on TV like everyone else.
Anyway, do not underestimate the effect of the Apollo 1 fire on the space program as a whole. It instilled a paranoia that has been institutionalized at NASA for decades now. Before that, there was a psychology called "Go fever" -- meaning that NASA - from top to bottom - thought that they were ten feet tall and bullet-proof. As a result, the CM for the original Saturn design was shoddy and a disaster waiting to happen. The only fortunate aspect of the whole incident was that it was on the ground and not in flight.
Finally, I agree 100% about Challennger. It was a watershed and exposed the shuttle for what it is -- a piece of space hardware that had too many politicians at the drawing board with their pencils.
There are four sensors total, three others worked within parameters and reported no problems. On this particular fuel tank there are two sensors, and the other one is not having any intermittent issues.
Also, it is incorrect to say that the sensor is reporting something "wrong" because obviously, on the ground with no fuel in the tank, it should not be reading as full. It was for a time, and that's indicative of a sensor issue.
Finally, NASA has been "planning" manned planetary expiditions since the 1960's. Old hands at NASA will tell you that they were almost ready after Apollo, and in fact, the NOVA was the booster (it was a Saturn series with a first stage that used 12(!) F-1 engines) that could have been used. Newer NASA folks could show you all sorts of ideas and plans that they have.
The one thing that is missing is the political will, which this country has very little of when it comes to Big Science light space exploration. Invariably it is decried as a waste, even though history has shown that taxes gained through space spinoffs have repaid the investment in the space program multiple times.
Bottom line: you want to go to Mars or beyond? Write your Congress-critter and tell them that. Write the President and tell him that too.
There are three possible outcomes to the launch attempt, only one of them is completely positive:
1. Discovery launches Tuesday during the launch window and has a routine and successful mission. After that, there will be plenty of time to determine the root cause of the sensor issue.
2. The weather does not co-operate or another tenchnical glitch surfaces, causing Tuesday's attempt to be scrubbed. NASA is hounded in the press for being unable to manage their spacecraft, when in fact they are doing exactly that according to their safety protocols, which have been generally tightened post-Columbia.
3. Disaster. Unthinkable and possibly the end of an American manned space presence until the Crew Exploration Vehicle is completed and launched in the next decade.
The Space Shuttle is an aging flying compromise that has been updated as much as possible, and it is what NASA has been given to work with. I almost expect Outcome #2, given their justifiable prudence in halting launches when they are not 100% satisfied that the system is as operationally ready as they can make it. NASA may be criticized for delays, but when seven lives and a multi-billion dollar spacecraft are on the line, not to mention all of their political capital, once can understand why they do what they do.
Bottom line is that all eyes will be back on the Cape come Tuesday morning. Godspeed Discovery.
The thing that amuses me the most about this whole episode is that senators and other publicity hounds never noticed the game when it was just violence, madness and mayhem, but shock of shocks, a character "gets a cup of coffee" and skin friction ensues, and the next thing you know, this is the worst thing that could ever possibly have happened to our kids!
Me, I would prefer my kid watch a porn flick any day rather than "Natural Born Killers" or play a video game with tawdry pixels as opposed to trying to see how many crimes can be committed in order to get a high score.
After all, who gets hurt by a good (consensual) boffing?
Well, yeah, I know about sex and responsiblity. So spare me the usual screed. But if you do, pleas explain at the same time a way to "responsibly" carjack or murder someone.
In this case, we have someone who says you can run Windows on old hardware. Great! Maybe I can go and buy one of those $25 yard sale specials and quite dreaming of 64-bit Photoshop, whenever Adobe releases it. But, unlike a lot of Slashdotters, figure I better go a RTFA. Good thing I did:
Useability
This really about covers it:
> Only have 1 application open at a time if possible
It is true that the less you ask Windows to do, the better it does it. However, since the middle 1990's, this is not a real-world suggestion. For example: you have a spreadsheet that you want to get parts of to include in a report being composed in Microsoft Word. Are you to shut down Excel and start up Word, and paste part of it in, lather, rinse, repeat until done?
But wait! There's more...
> You can run with 16bit color on the desktop
Okay, forget the web and pictures.
> disable sound effects, and even disable the sound card
Not so bad, considering you won't be able to run any multimedia.
> Remove LPT/printer port
No ZIP drive, and printing over a network only
> Use hibernation feature
Over half of the computers I ever tried to use it with did a horrible job of it. Better to just leave the thing on and locked.
Security
>DONT install an extra service pack
>Don't apply O/S patches for security stability or other things.
Yes, a good idea. Security is somewhat inconsequential in this day and age. If you are going to do that, do not link up to the internet!
So: all in all, you have a computer that you can barely use and if you have any sense at all, you do not connect to the internet. While it may be a good solution for some, in the real world, the only time you would ever use this is if you were on a desert island and simply couldn't get anything else.
Those in charge of distribution of programs need to finally realize that either they distribute their shows and profit, or face the simple fact that they will be shared on P2P nets and distributed outside of their profit channels. The simple fact is that electronic distribution is not going to go away, no matter how many laws are erected to stop it.
That does not mean that I am saying that stealing is right, or that *is* a right, clearly, from a legal, moral and ethical standpoint it is not. However, common people are becoming common electronic thieves simply because that is the only way to satisfy demand. Given the illusory "anonymity" of the internet, it is all too easy to do, and right now, the odds are favoring them as opposed to Hollywood when it comes to facing the consequences of violating the copyright holders' rights.
That all said, it's also my take that people, given the choice, would pay a *reasonable* fee to legally download television shows and do more or less with them what they did or do with videotapes. However, for some reason, Hollywood cannot seem to grasp this, or at the very least, cannot grasp how to do loosen their grasp on their content in such a way to make a subscription based P2P net possible.
My suggestion: allow people to subscribe to virtual channels, as they do with satellite or cable now. Allow them to download the shows, to share them on legal networks and pay a fee that is comparable to what they pay for cable now. That would be a real on-demand system, one where the infrastructure of the network is paid for by the subscribers themselves. Other than a substantial investment in seed servers and a first uplink, Hollywood would have to do little else than pay credit card processors and accountants.
To enable protection, they could sell smartcards similar to what Dish and DirectTV use now. Yes, I know that they have been hacked in the past, but nowadays, they are relatively secure, in as much as the average guy will not bother even trying.
Then, collect cash.
Home theatre systems are nearly impossible for the average person to set up properly now -- and we are "only" 9.1 systems. Today, we have more wires behind our receivers than the Pentagon network operations center, and balancing all of the speakers can be a frustrating experience to say the least.
The best part of all of that effort is this: we do it so we can let our wives watch Trading Spaces in high definition / surround! Or better, watch Lifetime Channel for three or four hours straight -- which has been proven to eradicate testosterone and cause a severe form of acute depression.
Seriously, audiophiles may pay for this, but most rooms are not big enough to support the sound effectively, and those with substantial investments will wait until the next upgrade cycle to even consider it.
It seems like every day I am hearing about some company losing hundreds of thousands of credit card data files, putting millions at risk for a major incovenience -- at the least, they have to chage the credit card number and if they have accounts set up with vendors based on those cards, then they have to go and update those too. Obviously, that's the least-case scenario.
My take is that credit card companies are going to have to change the way that credi cards work to slow this down. While no technology is unhackable, slowing it down is certainly possible. Ffor example, credit cards could use a biometric identification to verify identity before they are processed. Given the right amount of encryption and backend security, this would at least slow down the wholesale trading of account numbers that has become a plague.
Finally, regarding personal information, it would appear that Sun's Scott McNealy when he said a couple of years ago that there was no privacy anymore. Perhaps. Nevertheless, as long as governments sit idly by and do nothing about the collection and disclosure of personal data, this is only going to get worse. Citizens need to demand that government take a larger role in this, and ensure that private data is not collected unnecessarily and that disclosure of it is punitively prohibited. Given that a number of nations are involved, an international treaty should be enacted.
That alone would not stop this from happening. However, at the same time, data not collected is data not sold.
This problem has grown past the ridiculous and it is time that something be done to stop it. Surely there are solutions.
It's really pretty simple from Hollywood's point of view: control the distribution mechanism, something they are used to, and control access, something else they are used to. Just because it is the internet does not mean that they will not try to apply the business model that has worked well for them for nearly a century. In fact, given their history, it would be surprising if they did not.
Keep in mind that Hollywood has largely tried to stifle technlogical innovation outside of their control: they complained about television, because it would keep people from the theatres. Then, they mastered that medium and made even more money because of it. Then, later, they complained about VCRs, because it would allow people to record films and not pay them for the privilege. Then, as with television, they mastered that medium and made even more money because of it. They resisted DVDs initially because it would be easy to make "perfect" copies from a DVD, and they put on an exceptionally weak encryption scheme to thwart that from happening. Of course, the 'DRM' was thwarted, people now copy DVDs, and guess what: Hollywood makes more money because of DVDs.
Now comes the internet. As usual, Hollywood is resisting this new technology and are saying what they usually say: it will cost them money. However, if history serves as a guide, they will eventually master this medium too and make money because of it.
There is piracy, there is little doubt about that. While it does prevent some sales of DVDs or movie tickets, in some cases it has gone the other way and has drawn interest into a film or a TV show. There is much speculation that the producers of Battlestar Galactica conducted a quiet stealtht marketing ploy by allowing their show to be distributed via BitTorrent and other P2P vectors -- and it worked. BG gained an audience, and surely some of it came from those who had downloaded earlier episodes. Now, the same is being said of the new Doctor Who. Surely, few Americans would see it if it were not for the illegal distributions. There is a lot of interest in this new show and it is surely because of P2P, because the show is not available in any form (legally) in the USA.
At the end of the day, all of Hollywood's fighting will turn to gradual acceptance. Whether or not it is on their terms is their and the market's choice. The internet is here to stay, and so is piracy. Instead of focussing on preventing piracy, perhaps Hollywood should add enough to the value propostition that piracy is an afterthought. Many would gladly pay to get electronic distributions of shows via the internet, and it is up to Hollywood to get out of their office chairs and to figure out how to profit from it. History says that they will, but it does not foretell WHEN they will.
As far as space launches go, this was an incredibly inexpensive one. However, that does not say that it was cheap for the Sagan folks. Hopefully, they will bounce back and get their bird up into space sooner rather than later.
To those who criticize NASA, which is hamstrung by its own bureaucracy and an overall lack of fncding, one would be remiss to fail to point out that they have indeed placed two probes on Mars recently, vehicles that have vastly exceeded their life-expectancies and remain useful and operational.
That also extends to the Space Shuttle. Those who constantly criticize it are either ignoring or are ignorant of its history: the Shuttle was a compromised design due to politics rather than technology, and NASA has been "stuck" with a vehicle it would rather not have initially had. On that point, the current design of the shuttle was certainly not what NASA wanted. As the mnost complex mechanical system on the planet, it is bound for failure, and it will not surprise me when all of them are lost in flight accidents.
That's why SpaceShipOne excited me so much on a personal level. It was a successful project, done relatively inexpensively and proved that private funding could succeed in putting a bird up in to technical space. By itself, SS1 is hardly a blip in space history, but it will serve as impetus to what comes next. Fresh eyes coming up with new solutions is a great idea.
The bottom line is this: Today, space flight is expensive, at least if you want a high probability of success. While it is tragic that the Solar Sail probe was lost, it does serve as yet another reminder that "on the cheap" programs prove that you get what you pay for. If you want to go to space, bring copious amounts of cash. It may seem wasteful in the midst of success, but in the midst of failures such as this, the costs suddenly become reasonable.
See: Clarkvision: Film vs. Digital
Another place where digital fails miserably is in long exposure times. While film has reciprocity issues, those are accounted for mathematically, whereas digital noise is difficult to eradicate. Some may equate this to film graininess and that is true where ISO speeds are concerned. Instead, I am speaking of when exposures are many seconds. That is a simple "for-example" of a place where film remains superior...and there are others...consider infrared photography, which can be done in digital, save for the fact that most digital cameras filter out the IR light. A film camera only requires a different sort of film to become a very capable IR camera.
Another irritating thing to me is that non-pros assume that 35mm is the first camera of choice for a professional. Unless they are news or wildlife guys, this is not necessarily true. In fact, most studio-based pros use at least 120mm film cameras, and you can take the megapixels required to match film to the power of four. If they are using 5X7 view/field cameras, which is the minimum for a serious lanscapist, it is ^16 -- at minimum. And that is simple LPI acutance.
Further, the gigapixel digital photos are stitched for the most part, which comes with it's set of issues and challenges that far exceeds the capabilities of almost any point-and-shoot person. Fact is, most people have no clue about nodal point calibration, exposure matching and other gotchas that make the gigapixel photograph take literally days to execute and then assemble. Even a 100 MP cylindrical projection is a challenge to the casual amateur, and most of their works will not approach the level of so-called "fine-art" photographs.
Finally, you are 110% correct about color spaces. However, monitors that use the Adobe RGB color space are coming in to the market now, even if they are prohibitively expensive. Remaining in a single color space throughout the workflow will be a major boon to digital, and in 5-10 years I predict this to be the norm rather than the exception as it is today.
The bottom line is that it is wishful thinking to say that one technlogy will make the other "go away." Chemical photography will have it's uses far into the future and it will be quite some time before issues like noise, range and contrast are completely solved. Until then, guys like me will keep a plethora of cameras -- ranging from a Nikon D2X all the way to a fully manual Nikkormat -- in our camera bags. We are paid to capture images and I care not one whit which tool I use, but I do care passionately about whether or not I get on paper what it is that I set out to capture.
Perhaps one should keep in mind that Linux bigots are as entrenched with the OS of their choice as are Apple's OSX zealots. Ne'er shall the twain meet, it was once said, and I think that this will be another case of more of the same.
One should read Dvorak through the years, and I mean back to the 1980's when he was a columnist for Macworld and other magazines. He can be a blind squirrel that stumbles upon a nut, and he can be as infuriating as any writer who's ever analyzed computing. In other words, when his moth opens and shuts, gospel verses are not written.
First of all, one has to wonder if Apple is going to sell it's computers at the same commodity prices that Dell, HP and Lenovo/IBM do, or are they going to command a higher price than similarly powered Wintel or Linux machines.
The history of Apple suggests that they will try to leverage higher margins from their hardware than their competition, which was fine as long as they had a performance advantage over the rest of the pack. Now that they will be operating on the same CPU hardware, it is difficult to see them having a huge leg up. So where is the compelling reason to switch away from Linux to the BSD kernel and Apple?
That said, Apple is only doing what Sun did with the Opteron-based machines (Sun: Extreme Performance) with an eye more towards the workstation market. Anyway, if Sun's example serves as a guide, it hardly killed Linux.
It seems to have become fashionable to predict the death of Linux. Perhaps it will go by the wayside, but that won't be anytime soon. If anything, Apple itself should provide a writer lik eDvorak with that insight. Perhaps John is trying to join the Dynamic Duo that are Laura Didio and Rob Enderle?