Ever driven along the highway listening to tuckers?
Yes, I quite a bit. I usually listen to the CB rather than the radio on long roadtrips. Much of the communications is short status updates. However, even the rambling conversations use a very stilted format that has evolved specifically for driving conditions. The half-duplex technology ensures that you don't have to listen while you're talking. Every party to the conversation understands that your transmission may have to be retried, and explicit handshakes (10-4, etc.) are used extensively. Significant silent gaps for delayed replies are expected. The CB protocol has adapted as an activity that has lower priority than the actual driving, and it takes significantly fewer brain cycles to operate than talking to an arbitrary party on the telephone.
Even so, it would probably be a good idea if a few of the more long winded truck drivers cut back on their yammering. It tends to be mostly redundant bitching about the same old sets of issues anyway.
Honey, on your way home, can you pick up some milk?
If cellphone conversations were really limited to that extent, there wouldn't be much of a problem. But they're not.
By this criteria all forms of non-driving activities should be banned. Which would include listening to the radio jocks as they try to tell a joke.
You are not expected to respond to the radio, so the attention you apply to it can vary as conditions warrant. The jock is also probably talking very clearly straight into a $1000 microphone. You are probably not straining to pick out what he's saying; nor are you trying to formulate an instant reply.
The drivers who CAN drive have no problem using com devices. Just look at any police car, taxi, ambulance, fire truck, transport truck, etc.
For the most part, they're exchanging occasional single-sentence messages that are on a predefined topic. Moreover, the volume on these radios is set to sound obnoxiusly loud and clear, so the driver doesn't have to strain to decode subtle meanings in a conversation. This does not consume a lot of high-level brain bandwidth. These radio communications also reduce overall risk by cutting down how much driving these vehicles need to do; without radios they'd have to return to base stations for instructions.
Even conversations with people in the car are safer because the passengers will usually shut up when a hazardous situation arises. In fact, passengers sometimes alert the driver to hazards that they see.
None of that applies to frivolous conversations over a cellphone. All you're trying to do is selfishly save some of your own personal time by paying less attention to your driving.
The moon does have 24 hour days, so long as you pick the light side to set up on.
You seem to be under the impression that the moon's spin is locked relative to the sun so that the sun never rises or sets. That's not true. The moon is locked relative to its orbit around the Earth. The moon's "day" is approximately one month long: two weeks of sunlight followed by two weeks of darkness.
This would cause big logistical problems and huge temperature swings for a moon base.
Re:version 10 for OS X?
on
Real Problems
·
· Score: 1
Quicktime hits me up for bucks every time I run it too. Fuck apple.
All significant software authored by corporations costs something. You don't get that stuff for free. You might have to pay cash, you might have to pay by watching advertisements, or getting nagged to cough up cash, or suffering through overloaded FTP servers, or by giving up your private information.
Microsoft receives its renumeration for WMP indirectly. Each installation of that software helps to expand Microsoft's sphere of vendor lock-in, which drives more sales in their highly profitable OS and other software. You pay them by staying loyal to their approved platforms, and by helping increase WMP market share so web content providers feel more lock-in, and so that broadcasters and film companies feel more pull towards Microsoft's sphere.
Maybe you paid in advance by choosing to run Windows before you thought about using WMP; therefore it seems totally free to you, but it's really not.
If all you had was a computer with a blank hard drive, you would definitely need to get out your credit card before you could start using the nag-free WMP.
I'm sure that if Apple, Real or anybody else could figure out a way to promote and protect a $10B/year, 80% profit margin cash cow with their media players, then their players would come without annoyances as well.
The 70% of the world's data phrase is just patently absurd. Is there anybody on this planet who really believes that there are more than two hard drives inside some IBM mainframe for each of the hundreds of millions of PC hard drives in the field? (With many of those > 100GB each.) At mainframe prices, that would probably cost more than the entire gross domestic product of most countries.
Undoubtedly, the claim is qualified somehow. Perhaps they meant "of all of the data encoded in EBCDIC format, 70% is in mainframes", or some other equally arbitrary distinction.
Re:Weapons ARE banned from orbit (some of them any
on
Weapons in Space
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
So, pretty much any military activity in space is banned by THAT treaty.
The wording of that paragraph indicates that WMDs are banned in space, and military activity is banned on the surface of planets and moons, but I don't see where applies to Weapons of Less Than Mass Destruction in free orbit. So we are free to put up a pinpoint weapon that can take out just The Terrorists (tm) from outer space, while leaving the surrounding area unharmed.
However, I think that this kind of "silver bullet" thinking is a waste of money until they figure out a better way to choose targets. It was clear from the latest Iraq war that when they used smart bombs and cruise missiles to precisely wipe out a target, they often had little clue as to what was actually inside the target, and they often had no idea where the people they really wanted to get were located.
I would prefer if they used the $Billions that they're sinking into these high-tech boondoggles to hire and train old-fashioned spies instead. If we had only had a few reliable high-level moles in Iraq, we could have avoided that whole war altogether. We would have known that WMDs weren't an issue, and the pissing match between Saddam and the Bush clan could have been handled by just killing Saddam & sons. (This could have been accomplished an off-the-shelf cruise missile if we had actual accurate information about where they were. There would have been some international protest about "illegal assasination", but that would have blown over much quicker than the current quagmire.) This would have saved thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.
Re:Of all the interesting moons in this solar syst
on
Titanic Saturn
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The problem with Europa is that the interesting part is buried under dozens of miles of solid ice. Titan is probably the moon that has the most interesting features that are directly accessible with 1997 technology.
Anyway, IIRC there are some future missions on the drawing board intended exclusively for Europa.
I take it you've never had to deal with PowerPoint and Excell happy marketing types?
Not to mention friends and family who just bought a 5 megapixel camera to take pictures of their new baby, but have no inkling of the concept of scaling images.
A single one of those pictures where you have to scroll to see more than the upper right corner of the baby's forehead in a 1024x768 window can max out a typical free e-mail account.
The reason the engineering firm I am employed at bought computers for everyone and does everything in Excel is because they needed a way to speed up lengthy, complicated, and interlinked/interrelated calculations.
Exactly my point. You use a computer because old-fashioned physical paper spreadsheets (they used to have those -- that's where the name came from) are inadequate. They were many orders of magnitude slower, massively error-prone, and required huge amounts of manual labor by humans ("computer" used to be a job title). So the physical spreadsheets have been replaced with the electronic computerized version.
I'm in the camp that says this kind of stuff is bad. IMO, the whole reason computers exist is because so many real objects suck. If physical folders and files had the properties we needed, then we wouldn't need to take so much effort to implement them in computers.
Invariably, my physical desk gets stacked deep with huge piles of papers and other miscellaneous stuff. This sucks because I can't find what I need amongst all of the clutter. My opinion is that this "spatial navigation", or popping up dozens of windows or whatever, is just emulating this undesirable clutter on the computer.
The computer is able to manage navigation very neatly with features such as the back-arrow dropdown list in file managers and browsers. If such a feature were available in the real world, my physical desktop would always be neat and I'd save gobs of time. (Hmm, maybe I should try installing a cafeteria dish stack holder in my desk...)
I don't agree that always trying to emulate the limitations of the real world is a good thing just because the limitations of the real world are more "intuitive".
Maybe the whole idea of charging by the channel is fundamentally flawed. To really match the costs to benefits of cable service, it might be better to charge by the minute. That way, the people who use the service more pay more, and the people who use it less pay less. It could be set up like most other utilities, with a base rate to cover overhead, and various per-minute rates depending on channel, time of day, etc. Everybody could always access any channel, but they would pay the corresonding per-minute charge to watch.
Of course, the problem with this is the cable companies' tendency to price gouge. However, maybe something as simple as mandating that the cable box always display an accurate real-time running count of the day's viewing charges might counteract this. Since most people are basically cheap, they'll shut off the service if they see the day's total go over a couple of bucks. This would put pressure on the cable providers to keep the charges reasonable.
Another approach might be to give billing control over the various channels directly to the upstream provider. The current cable company would only handle the physical infrastructure, with their costs covered by the base rate. The content providers would compete against each other on price for the individual channels that people watch. This could work kind of like the current arrangement for competition in long-distance phone service, where you choose among long-distance services that are brought to you via your local phone company.
Because the governmaent is interested in a bomb that requires 192 amplified lasers on a pellet of frozen hydrogen...and then proceeds to produce the energy equivalent of a light bulb?
No, it's because this is just about the only way to study actual fusion (not just computer simulations) under bomb-like conditions without using a bomb.
But you don't have to take my word for it. Here's what the LLNL itself says about their NIF:
NIF is crucial to the Stockpile Stewardship Program because it is the only facility that can create the conditions of extreme temperature and pressure - conditions that exist only in stars or in exploding nuclear weapons - that are relevant to understanding the operation of our modern nuclear weapons. In addition, NIF is the only facility that can create fusion ignition and thermonuclear burn in the laboratory. Nuclear fusion is the process that our modern nuclear weapons use to achieve their immense explosive power. The understanding of these conditions and the data provided by NIF will allow our nuclear stewards to assess and certify the aging stockpile without actual nuclear tests using supercomputer modeling tools.
If you use a 500 meter radius piece, that's a constant 740 megawatts focused on the pinhead-sized object of your choice.
The problem with this scheme is that no matter how big you make the mirror, thermodynamics says you can't heat the target up hotter than the image that you're focusing, which is the surface of the sun. Since that's only a few thousand K, it's nowhere near hot enough to initiate fusion.
My recollection is that the laser scheme doesn't heat the sample directly with the light either. The lasers blow away the surface of the target and the recoil compresses and heats the fuel. That's why they use trillions of watts for one nanosecond, something that simple focused sunlight wouldn't be able to do.
But it seems to me that if takes 10 years to just build an experiment, that should indicate that this probably isn't the way to build a practical reactor. It just screams "waste of money" to me.
Well, the US government probably funds this particular form of fusion research as much to improve their H-bomb designs under the test ban as to find a new energy source. Building a practical reactor isn't necessarily the main goal.
What sort of eclipse can we expect from this? To experience a solar eclipse from a temporary sattelite would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Given that it's only about 100 meters in diameter, seeing its eclipse would truly would a once-in-a-lifetime experience; in fact, your last experience. That's becuase to see a noticeable shadow you would have to be within a few kilometers of the asteroid. That would mean that it would be within a few milliseconds of impacting with multimegaton force in your general vicinity.
The "no classes" thing confused me and I would have loved to see some example Prothon code that accomplishes the kinds of things that I would have used a class for, in Python.
One of the inspirations for this kind of thing is the Self language. In a nutshell, instead of defining classes, you make up an example object instance by adding fields and methods to it, then you keep it around and clone it to make more. You can do "subclassing" by altering a prototype object then keeping it and cloning that one.
When I read up on Self, I thought it was kind of cool. However, IMO it suffers from the same issue as languages like Scheme: it's so stripped down, malleable and flexible that it ends up being too "slippery", and normal programmers can't really get a grip on it.
IIRC, the JavaScript language also essentially uses a prototype-based object system, so more people may be familiar with the concept than they realize.
The B-52 isn't the big deal. Instead, it's multimillion dollar conventional Pegasus rocket booster that gets the test vehicle up to speed. The Pegasus has been in use for a long time to launch small payloads into orbit; it's always dropped from an airplane.
What I don't quite understand is why they need a rocket capable of reaching orbit just to get the X-43 up to ~mach 5 so it can start it's engines. It seems like overkill to me. I would suppose they only use the Pegasus's first stage; maybe they had some cheap spares laying around.
I didn't say it can't be done. I said it will cost $1T, and that it would be worth the cost. In a couple of decades we can check back to see if I was right.
Anyway, I don't believe the high cost is as bad as many people think. The money doesn't just diappear into a black hole, it goes back into the economy. Similar "wasteful" spending like blowing things up in wars has proven to be good for the economy in the past. It just annoys me when people keep pushing obvious lowball estimates and don't have the courage to admit that some things are going to be expensive and will have to be paid for. That kind of self-delusion is how you end up with multitrillion dollar government debts.
Actually, I said 1.5 orders of magnitude. That's ~30 times.
You can find any number of ways to squander $1tr. Just because it's possible to fuck it up and do it wrong a-la ISS doesn't mean that you're destined to do it that way.
Unless you get lucky and have your president give a hard deadline and then promptly get shot, while at the same time racing against another country putting together the same mission, you're not likely to sustain the political will to maintain focus on the appropriate goals. Therefore, even if it's not 100% destined, the odds are that it will be done the ISS way.
Re:1 Trillion Dollars
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm well aware of all of these "cheap" schemes to go to Mars. They are probably the best approach. They will allow the mission to be $1 trillion instead of $5 trillion.
However, a book is still just handwaving. He asserts that it can be done for 1.5 orders of magnitude less then $1T, and I'm pointing out that mega-aerospace projects often exceed initial cost estimates by 1.5 orders of magnitude. (Or would exceed the cost if finished. The majority of large space projects started in the last 40 years were cancelled once it was realized how much they would really end up costing.) Just because he's using clever ideas doesn't make the proposed project immune to development problems.
It's hard to believe that a scaled up version of the MIR space station would cost almost $100 billion, but it does. And that's just a bunch of tin cans floating in low earth orbit.
The vast majority of the single manned mission will be one-time up-front development costs. Given all of the new technology that will have to be deployed (not just hand waving; actually designed developed, debugged tested and deployed), I believe that it will easily cost 10X more than the space station to send people to Mars and return them safely.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I quite a bit. I usually listen to the CB rather than the radio on long roadtrips. Much of the communications is short status updates. However, even the rambling conversations use a very stilted format that has evolved specifically for driving conditions. The half-duplex technology ensures that you don't have to listen while you're talking. Every party to the conversation understands that your transmission may have to be retried, and explicit handshakes (10-4, etc.) are used extensively. Significant silent gaps for delayed replies are expected. The CB protocol has adapted as an activity that has lower priority than the actual driving, and it takes significantly fewer brain cycles to operate than talking to an arbitrary party on the telephone.
Even so, it would probably be a good idea if a few of the more long winded truck drivers cut back on their yammering. It tends to be mostly redundant bitching about the same old sets of issues anyway.
Honey, on your way home, can you pick up some milk?
If cellphone conversations were really limited to that extent, there wouldn't be much of a problem. But they're not.
By this criteria all forms of non-driving activities should be banned. Which would include listening to the radio jocks as they try to tell a joke.
You are not expected to respond to the radio, so the attention you apply to it can vary as conditions warrant. The jock is also probably talking very clearly straight into a $1000 microphone. You are probably not straining to pick out what he's saying; nor are you trying to formulate an instant reply.
For the most part, they're exchanging occasional single-sentence messages that are on a predefined topic. Moreover, the volume on these radios is set to sound obnoxiusly loud and clear, so the driver doesn't have to strain to decode subtle meanings in a conversation. This does not consume a lot of high-level brain bandwidth. These radio communications also reduce overall risk by cutting down how much driving these vehicles need to do; without radios they'd have to return to base stations for instructions.
Even conversations with people in the car are safer because the passengers will usually shut up when a hazardous situation arises. In fact, passengers sometimes alert the driver to hazards that they see.
None of that applies to frivolous conversations over a cellphone. All you're trying to do is selfishly save some of your own personal time by paying less attention to your driving.
You seem to be under the impression that the moon's spin is locked relative to the sun so that the sun never rises or sets. That's not true. The moon is locked relative to its orbit around the Earth. The moon's "day" is approximately one month long: two weeks of sunlight followed by two weeks of darkness.
This would cause big logistical problems and huge temperature swings for a moon base.
All significant software authored by corporations costs something. You don't get that stuff for free. You might have to pay cash, you might have to pay by watching advertisements, or getting nagged to cough up cash, or suffering through overloaded FTP servers, or by giving up your private information.
Microsoft receives its renumeration for WMP indirectly. Each installation of that software helps to expand Microsoft's sphere of vendor lock-in, which drives more sales in their highly profitable OS and other software. You pay them by staying loyal to their approved platforms, and by helping increase WMP market share so web content providers feel more lock-in, and so that broadcasters and film companies feel more pull towards Microsoft's sphere.
Maybe you paid in advance by choosing to run Windows before you thought about using WMP; therefore it seems totally free to you, but it's really not. If all you had was a computer with a blank hard drive, you would definitely need to get out your credit card before you could start using the nag-free WMP.
I'm sure that if Apple, Real or anybody else could figure out a way to promote and protect a $10B/year, 80% profit margin cash cow with their media players, then their players would come without annoyances as well.
Undoubtedly, the claim is qualified somehow. Perhaps they meant "of all of the data encoded in EBCDIC format, 70% is in mainframes", or some other equally arbitrary distinction.
The wording of that paragraph indicates that WMDs are banned in space, and military activity is banned on the surface of planets and moons, but I don't see where applies to Weapons of Less Than Mass Destruction in free orbit. So we are free to put up a pinpoint weapon that can take out just The Terrorists (tm) from outer space, while leaving the surrounding area unharmed.
However, I think that this kind of "silver bullet" thinking is a waste of money until they figure out a better way to choose targets. It was clear from the latest Iraq war that when they used smart bombs and cruise missiles to precisely wipe out a target, they often had little clue as to what was actually inside the target, and they often had no idea where the people they really wanted to get were located.
I would prefer if they used the $Billions that they're sinking into these high-tech boondoggles to hire and train old-fashioned spies instead. If we had only had a few reliable high-level moles in Iraq, we could have avoided that whole war altogether. We would have known that WMDs weren't an issue, and the pissing match between Saddam and the Bush clan could have been handled by just killing Saddam & sons. (This could have been accomplished an off-the-shelf cruise missile if we had actual accurate information about where they were. There would have been some international protest about "illegal assasination", but that would have blown over much quicker than the current quagmire.) This would have saved thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.
Anyway, IIRC there are some future missions on the drawing board intended exclusively for Europa.
COSX
No, you don't get the extra money in this example, the U.S. government does. Get back to your cube.
Not to mention friends and family who just bought a 5 megapixel camera to take pictures of their new baby, but have no inkling of the concept of scaling images.
A single one of those pictures where you have to scroll to see more than the upper right corner of the baby's forehead in a 1024x768 window can max out a typical free e-mail account.
Exactly my point. You use a computer because old-fashioned physical paper spreadsheets (they used to have those -- that's where the name came from) are inadequate. They were many orders of magnitude slower, massively error-prone, and required huge amounts of manual labor by humans ("computer" used to be a job title). So the physical spreadsheets have been replaced with the electronic computerized version.
Invariably, my physical desk gets stacked deep with huge piles of papers and other miscellaneous stuff. This sucks because I can't find what I need amongst all of the clutter. My opinion is that this "spatial navigation", or popping up dozens of windows or whatever, is just emulating this undesirable clutter on the computer.
The computer is able to manage navigation very neatly with features such as the back-arrow dropdown list in file managers and browsers. If such a feature were available in the real world, my physical desktop would always be neat and I'd save gobs of time. (Hmm, maybe I should try installing a cafeteria dish stack holder in my desk...)
I don't agree that always trying to emulate the limitations of the real world is a good thing just because the limitations of the real world are more "intuitive".
Of course, the problem with this is the cable companies' tendency to price gouge. However, maybe something as simple as mandating that the cable box always display an accurate real-time running count of the day's viewing charges might counteract this. Since most people are basically cheap, they'll shut off the service if they see the day's total go over a couple of bucks. This would put pressure on the cable providers to keep the charges reasonable.
Another approach might be to give billing control over the various channels directly to the upstream provider. The current cable company would only handle the physical infrastructure, with their costs covered by the base rate. The content providers would compete against each other on price for the individual channels that people watch. This could work kind of like the current arrangement for competition in long-distance phone service, where you choose among long-distance services that are brought to you via your local phone company.
No, it's because this is just about the only way to study actual fusion (not just computer simulations) under bomb-like conditions without using a bomb.
But you don't have to take my word for it. Here's what the LLNL itself says about their NIF:
The problem with this scheme is that no matter how big you make the mirror, thermodynamics says you can't heat the target up hotter than the image that you're focusing, which is the surface of the sun. Since that's only a few thousand K, it's nowhere near hot enough to initiate fusion.
My recollection is that the laser scheme doesn't heat the sample directly with the light either. The lasers blow away the surface of the target and the recoil compresses and heats the fuel. That's why they use trillions of watts for one nanosecond, something that simple focused sunlight wouldn't be able to do.
Well, the US government probably funds this particular form of fusion research as much to improve their H-bomb designs under the test ban as to find a new energy source. Building a practical reactor isn't necessarily the main goal.
It was, however, the world's first vaporware.
Given that it's only about 100 meters in diameter, seeing its eclipse would truly would a once-in-a-lifetime experience; in fact, your last experience. That's becuase to see a noticeable shadow you would have to be within a few kilometers of the asteroid. That would mean that it would be within a few milliseconds of impacting with multimegaton force in your general vicinity.
Results: Hypothesis confirmed.
One of the inspirations for this kind of thing is the Self language. In a nutshell, instead of defining classes, you make up an example object instance by adding fields and methods to it, then you keep it around and clone it to make more. You can do "subclassing" by altering a prototype object then keeping it and cloning that one.
When I read up on Self, I thought it was kind of cool. However, IMO it suffers from the same issue as languages like Scheme: it's so stripped down, malleable and flexible that it ends up being too "slippery", and normal programmers can't really get a grip on it.
IIRC, the JavaScript language also essentially uses a prototype-based object system, so more people may be familiar with the concept than they realize.
What I don't quite understand is why they need a rocket capable of reaching orbit just to get the X-43 up to ~mach 5 so it can start it's engines. It seems like overkill to me. I would suppose they only use the Pegasus's first stage; maybe they had some cheap spares laying around.
Anyway, I don't believe the high cost is as bad as many people think. The money doesn't just diappear into a black hole, it goes back into the economy. Similar "wasteful" spending like blowing things up in wars has proven to be good for the economy in the past. It just annoys me when people keep pushing obvious lowball estimates and don't have the courage to admit that some things are going to be expensive and will have to be paid for. That kind of self-delusion is how you end up with multitrillion dollar government debts.
Actually, I said 1.5 orders of magnitude. That's ~30 times.
You can find any number of ways to squander $1tr. Just because it's possible to fuck it up and do it wrong a-la ISS doesn't mean that you're destined to do it that way.
Unless you get lucky and have your president give a hard deadline and then promptly get shot, while at the same time racing against another country putting together the same mission, you're not likely to sustain the political will to maintain focus on the appropriate goals. Therefore, even if it's not 100% destined, the odds are that it will be done the ISS way.
However, a book is still just handwaving. He asserts that it can be done for 1.5 orders of magnitude less then $1T, and I'm pointing out that mega-aerospace projects often exceed initial cost estimates by 1.5 orders of magnitude. (Or would exceed the cost if finished. The majority of large space projects started in the last 40 years were cancelled once it was realized how much they would really end up costing.) Just because he's using clever ideas doesn't make the proposed project immune to development problems.
It's hard to believe that a scaled up version of the MIR space station would cost almost $100 billion, but it does. And that's just a bunch of tin cans floating in low earth orbit.
The vast majority of the single manned mission will be one-time up-front development costs. Given all of the new technology that will have to be deployed (not just hand waving; actually designed developed, debugged tested and deployed), I believe that it will easily cost 10X more than the space station to send people to Mars and return them safely.