I'm not sure about this plan. Those immense gravity wells - especially ones with atmospheres - deal a lot better with high-velocity impacts from small rocks than space stations ever will.
I agree with you as a whole, but at SOME point, it's almost inevitable that humans will have to spread out from Earth.
Because...? Manifest destiny? Manifest fecundity? Population is leveling off or declining in most countries developed enough to get off the planet, isn't it?
The US is a huge economy, even when it's tanking. There really isn't any reason not to fund NASA on a reasonable, sustained budget. That would go a long way to being able to make rational choices as to how to apportion money to the various aspects of space exploration.
Definitely. But I think Bush's "let's put all our eggs in the man-on-Mars basket" approach to budgeting has done more harm than good.
This. I work in space science, think manned spaceflight is a wonderful thing, and look forward to it becoming increasingly a commercially available thing... but it's an extremely expensive way to accomplish most tasks, especially when it comes to accomplishing anything in the way of science.
I also work around environmental policy, and strongly feel we'd be better off working on surviving on this planet, instead of ruining it, then going off looking for others to ruin. Put a few of those "best and brightest" brains to work on finding ways to meet the Millennium Development Goals, wouldja?
I'm used to interferometry (in the astronomical context), but a particle physicist I'm not, and this abstract left me wishing there were an abstract of the abstract.
When the head of state travels, he represents the country. What would it say about the US aircraft industry if he travelled in a foreign airliner?
Meh, the heads of state of just about every other country (except maybe France and Russia) travel in foreign-built airliners all the time. We'd get over it.
That said, the A380 feels like overkill. I had one in factory grey taxiing behind the F70/F100 I was on in Lyon, and the difference in scale, yeeesh. It was like "OMG it's gonna EAT us."
The 747-200's that are still in service are almost exclusively commercial at this point, so it's nice to see that they're thinking of upgrading the fleet.
When you say "commercial" are you trying to say "cargo" or "charter" or some other C-word? US-registered 742s would tend to be in one of those categories (more cargo than charter).
If you have a laptop with a removable battery (which I do), you have the option of spending up to $100 on a second battery, which you then either rotate in and out now and then, or just keep laying around for a rainy day.
Many people won't make that particular choice. And if your removable battery shorts out and you don't have a spare, guess what - you're still running to your nearest store or service center, if you want to have things back in service pronto.
The way to advertise a good battery life is to turn the screen brightness right down to almost-unreadable, no WiFi (usually), hard disk spun down, sometimes even boot off a RAM disk, then open TextEdit and type some characters to simulate 'use'. If you're lucky the vendor's test might be to open Safari and load a webpage every 5 minutes from a local web server.
Apple's web site says it was based on 50% screen brightness, websurfing over wifi and using a word processor. If they really wanted to tweak the numbers, they could've turned off wifi and websurfed over ethernet, one would think.
I've been a road warrior for years, and frankly, the last thing I want in my laptop bag is another pound of weight in the form of a spare battery. Yet I keep seeing the tech media spewing forth this "people who travel really, really want to take two batteries with them everywhere" nonsense.
Why would they want this? It's not the 1990s anymore. Cars come with AC outlets. Airplanes have AC outlets. Trains have AC outlets. Heck, some planes and trains (and buses?!) even have wifi. Even in Least Developed Countries, the power doesn't usually go off for enough of the day to run down a battery.;)
Light weight plus long battery life makes me happy. Maybe the other road warriors are masochistic?
concerns about his health following his appearance at the World Wide Developers Conference two weeks ago
One of us is traveling near the speed of light, but I can't remember which one... for me (and everyone else traveling at the same relativistic velocity as me) WWDC was in June, not "two weeks ago."
The rumor sites were expecting practically everything including the kitchen sink, so by failing to introduce new iMacs, new Mac minis, the iPhone nano and... did I miss anything?, Apple didn't live up to their (completely delusional) expectations.
What really gets me is tech news sites - even MacWorld - calling the 17" MacBook Pro "disappointing" or "unattractive" because it's just a larger-form-factor MBP. Uh... hasn't it always been? Haven't the 15" and 17" always been pretty similar internally? And it's got this spiffy new battery made with Romulan technology, and anti-glare screens are back, and oh, yeah, there's a third USB port, woohoo.
It's funny, though - Apple is such a style cult, and has such a following, that the 17" MBP is being judged against... what, exactly? People's delusional expectations, apparently. Because it's not "disappointing" or "unattractive" when you compare it with every other 17" notebook in existence, is it? 1920x1280, check. 2.93GHz processor option, check. 256GB SSD option, check. Up to 8GB of RAM, check. 1066MHz FSB, check. 802.11n, check. ExpressWhatever, check. FW800, check. Dual video chipsets, check.
Yeah, I can probably get all those features somewhere else (though a fair bit of googling wasn't exactly productive)... but in a package under 25mm thick and under 3kg, with at least the potential for 8 hours of battery life? Fuhgeddaboudit. Doesn't sound so "disappointing" or "unattractive" to me.
And really, the MBPs won't be fully exploited until Snow Leopard and OpenCL drop, right?
The American Astronomical Society (AAS) is not the same thing as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). This conference is astronomy-specific.
I'm all for getting games away from Windows, because I remember DOS, I remember games running fine on DOS because the OS wasn't trying to do all kinds of crap under them, and I remember just about every version ever Windows breaking games that ran just fine either on DOS or older, lighter-weigh versions of Windows.
And really, this is a big reason PC gaming sucks compared to the consoles. Consoles don't have to worry about whether they need to be doing all kinds of other crap at the same time; PC's running Windows do (and this is more true with each version). Same goes for Mac, and frankly, same goes for any mainstream distro of Linux.
So one big thing that needs to be overcome is how to optimize Linux so it's actually better for gaming than Windows or Mac. Do you strip it down and get rid of stuff games don't need, come out with a gaming-specific distro? Or do you work on making the internals as fast as possible in ways that matter to games? Or something else entirely?
Get Linux to the point where things run better on it than on Windows or Mac, on equivalent hardware (since it is equivalent nowadays), and you might attract more game development.
The issue of artists someone pointed out is the other big issue. You need to motivate the artists. And - especially if you want them to work for free - you need to give them something really compelling. That means something OSS that's better than what they have now. Something that beats DirectX, beats OpenGL, or whatever. I don't know whether adding OpenCL support like Apple is doing will help - that seems more aimed at offloading processing tasks to the GPU, not offloading graphics tasks to spare CPU cores.
But in both cases, I think Linux is going to have to be a clear "best choice" before game developers will flock to it. Make it outperform other OSes in game execution as well as graphics and multimedia, and make compelling tools or toolkits for developing games and the graphics and multimedia they need, and they will come.
I just came down from the (sadly penguin-free) summit of Mauna Kea - where we too are having a White Christmas this year - and would like to wish my fellow scientists in Antarctica a Merry (White) Christmas in Hawaiian.:)
1920x1200 main screen, and 720x1280 side screen... did it not occur to them to have 1200 vertically on both? Also, I'm kinda thinking that for this kind of money, I should be able to buy 2 laptops providing a total resolution in excess of 2640x1280, and whatever software I need to share the screen of one as a second display on the other... and have 'em weigh less, together, than this monstrosity.;)
Slashdot Mirror
as someone who claims to work in space science
Sorry for not providing full disclosure up front.
you surely must be aware that there's some locations in space that simply cannot be ruined, for example, the Moon.
"cannot be ruined" in the sense that there's a treaty saying it can't be done? or in the sense that there's nothing there to really ruin? :)
I'm not sure about this plan. Those immense gravity wells - especially ones with atmospheres - deal a lot better with high-velocity impacts from small rocks than space stations ever will.
I agree with you as a whole, but at SOME point, it's almost inevitable that humans will have to spread out from Earth.
Because...? Manifest destiny? Manifest fecundity? Population is leveling off or declining in most countries developed enough to get off the planet, isn't it?
The US is a huge economy, even when it's tanking. There really isn't any reason not to fund NASA on a reasonable, sustained budget. That would go a long way to being able to make rational choices as to how to apportion money to the various aspects of space exploration.
Definitely. But I think Bush's "let's put all our eggs in the man-on-Mars basket" approach to budgeting has done more harm than good.
Astronauts do not become Astronauts because they want a safe job
True of a lot of jobs, though. Soldiers, athletes, diplomats, astronomers...
This. I work in space science, think manned spaceflight is a wonderful thing, and look forward to it becoming increasingly a commercially available thing... but it's an extremely expensive way to accomplish most tasks, especially when it comes to accomplishing anything in the way of science.
I also work around environmental policy, and strongly feel we'd be better off working on surviving on this planet, instead of ruining it, then going off looking for others to ruin. Put a few of those "best and brightest" brains to work on finding ways to meet the Millennium Development Goals, wouldja?
Encyclopedia Brown would have sorted this all out in a lot fewer pages.
(Am I the only one who has this namespace collision?)
I'm used to interferometry (in the astronomical context), but a particle physicist I'm not, and this abstract left me wishing there were an abstract of the abstract.
I mean, obviously, since we have already observed it (right?)
Yep; in fact there was a thread last month about a guy where I work doing this - but with a terrestrial telescope.
When the head of state travels, he represents the country. What would it say about the US aircraft industry if he travelled in a foreign airliner?
Meh, the heads of state of just about every other country (except maybe France and Russia) travel in foreign-built airliners all the time. We'd get over it.
That said, the A380 feels like overkill. I had one in factory grey taxiing behind the F70/F100 I was on in Lyon, and the difference in scale, yeeesh. It was like "OMG it's gonna EAT us."
The 747-200's that are still in service are almost exclusively commercial at this point, so it's nice to see that they're thinking of upgrading the fleet.
When you say "commercial" are you trying to say "cargo" or "charter" or some other C-word? US-registered 742s would tend to be in one of those categories (more cargo than charter).
If you have a laptop with a removable battery (which I do), you have the option of spending up to $100 on a second battery, which you then either rotate in and out now and then, or just keep laying around for a rainy day.
Many people won't make that particular choice. And if your removable battery shorts out and you don't have a spare, guess what - you're still running to your nearest store or service center, if you want to have things back in service pronto.
The way to advertise a good battery life is to turn the screen brightness right down to almost-unreadable, no WiFi (usually), hard disk spun down, sometimes even boot off a RAM disk, then open TextEdit and type some characters to simulate 'use'. If you're lucky the vendor's test might be to open Safari and load a webpage every 5 minutes from a local web server.
Apple's web site says it was based on 50% screen brightness, websurfing over wifi and using a word processor. If they really wanted to tweak the numbers, they could've turned off wifi and websurfed over ethernet, one would think.
I've been a road warrior for years, and frankly, the last thing I want in my laptop bag is another pound of weight in the form of a spare battery. Yet I keep seeing the tech media spewing forth this "people who travel really, really want to take two batteries with them everywhere" nonsense.
Why would they want this? It's not the 1990s anymore. Cars come with AC outlets. Airplanes have AC outlets. Trains have AC outlets. Heck, some planes and trains (and buses?!) even have wifi. Even in Least Developed Countries, the power doesn't usually go off for enough of the day to run down a battery. ;)
Light weight plus long battery life makes me happy. Maybe the other road warriors are masochistic?
concerns about his health following his appearance at the World Wide Developers Conference two weeks ago
One of us is traveling near the speed of light, but I can't remember which one... for me (and everyone else traveling at the same relativistic velocity as me) WWDC was in June, not "two weeks ago."
The rumor sites were expecting practically everything including the kitchen sink, so by failing to introduce new iMacs, new Mac minis, the iPhone nano and... did I miss anything?, Apple didn't live up to their (completely delusional) expectations.
What really gets me is tech news sites - even MacWorld - calling the 17" MacBook Pro "disappointing" or "unattractive" because it's just a larger-form-factor MBP. Uh... hasn't it always been? Haven't the 15" and 17" always been pretty similar internally? And it's got this spiffy new battery made with Romulan technology, and anti-glare screens are back, and oh, yeah, there's a third USB port, woohoo.
It's funny, though - Apple is such a style cult, and has such a following, that the 17" MBP is being judged against... what, exactly? People's delusional expectations, apparently. Because it's not "disappointing" or "unattractive" when you compare it with every other 17" notebook in existence, is it? 1920x1280, check. 2.93GHz processor option, check. 256GB SSD option, check. Up to 8GB of RAM, check. 1066MHz FSB, check. 802.11n, check. ExpressWhatever, check. FW800, check. Dual video chipsets, check.
Yeah, I can probably get all those features somewhere else (though a fair bit of googling wasn't exactly productive)... but in a package under 25mm thick and under 3kg, with at least the potential for 8 hours of battery life? Fuhgeddaboudit. Doesn't sound so "disappointing" or "unattractive" to me.
And really, the MBPs won't be fully exploited until Snow Leopard and OpenCL drop, right?
D'oh, I should have caught the location too - I've got enough colleagues and co-collaborators there, presenting posters, papers, booths, whatever.
I, of course, have been left behind to run things in their absence, thus protecting audiences from exposure to my idiocy. ;)
The American Astronomical Society (AAS) is not the same thing as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). This conference is astronomy-specific.
I'm all for getting games away from Windows, because I remember DOS, I remember games running fine on DOS because the OS wasn't trying to do all kinds of crap under them, and I remember just about every version ever Windows breaking games that ran just fine either on DOS or older, lighter-weigh versions of Windows.
And really, this is a big reason PC gaming sucks compared to the consoles. Consoles don't have to worry about whether they need to be doing all kinds of other crap at the same time; PC's running Windows do (and this is more true with each version). Same goes for Mac, and frankly, same goes for any mainstream distro of Linux.
So one big thing that needs to be overcome is how to optimize Linux so it's actually better for gaming than Windows or Mac. Do you strip it down and get rid of stuff games don't need, come out with a gaming-specific distro? Or do you work on making the internals as fast as possible in ways that matter to games? Or something else entirely?
Get Linux to the point where things run better on it than on Windows or Mac, on equivalent hardware (since it is equivalent nowadays), and you might attract more game development.
The issue of artists someone pointed out is the other big issue. You need to motivate the artists. And - especially if you want them to work for free - you need to give them something really compelling. That means something OSS that's better than what they have now. Something that beats DirectX, beats OpenGL, or whatever. I don't know whether adding OpenCL support like Apple is doing will help - that seems more aimed at offloading processing tasks to the GPU, not offloading graphics tasks to spare CPU cores.
But in both cases, I think Linux is going to have to be a clear "best choice" before game developers will flock to it. Make it outperform other OSes in game execution as well as graphics and multimedia, and make compelling tools or toolkits for developing games and the graphics and multimedia they need, and they will come.
I honestly don't see it happening, though. :(
Discovery, and 4-5 years, if it's the program I'm thinking of. They pre-screened it for the geology majors here, since our campus is on a volcano.
Because you were expecting.... what, exactly? Suggestions? Good ideas?
The standard operating procedure for dealing with a supervolcano is get the $#!+ outta there.
You can't exactly stop it.
I just came down from the (sadly penguin-free) summit of Mauna Kea - where we too are having a White Christmas this year - and would like to wish my fellow scientists in Antarctica a Merry (White) Christmas in Hawaiian. :)
Yeah! That's the one I was thinking of, but it's been so long since I read about it that I forgot the name.
1920x1200 main screen, and 720x1280 side screen... did it not occur to them to have 1200 vertically on both? Also, I'm kinda thinking that for this kind of money, I should be able to buy 2 laptops providing a total resolution in excess of 2640x1280, and whatever software I need to share the screen of one as a second display on the other... and have 'em weigh less, together, than this monstrosity. ;)
You can probably get the goggles working fine, the problem is finding content for them.
You mean the prospect of being able to do ls -lf in glorious 3-D color isn't sufficiently enticing?