This sounds really great, but I don't see any real data on the steel. Does anyone have stuff like Yield Strength or Modulus of Elasticity for this stuff? It may look pretty I wonder how it would compare with modern advanced materials.
Screw the secrets of Damascas Metallurgy, I want the secrets of Soviet Metallurgy!
One of the reasons that the Iron Pillar in Delhi is believed to have survived uncorroded so long is that it has thin oxide based coating on it. As a member of the Powder Coating Institute, I can safely say that I don't mind at all if EVERYONE knew that the secret to such corrosion resistance was the selection of proper coatings ! ( http://www.powdercoating.org/home.htm )
Other factors in the corrosion resistance are supposedly the high quality of the iron used and the dry climate of the area (all of India does not have a wet climate).
You can find more info at:
www.the-week.com/21jun24/cover.htm (which also discusses damascus steel and its connection to Indian steel!)
This discussion seems to leave out a lot of interesting or important games and focus on just some popular 1st person shooters. There are many multiplayer 3d flying or space simulation games from the early Spasim ( http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery/spasim.html ) through to today's Air War and World War 2 Online efforts. Shouldn't many real time strategy games be considered 3d multiplayer games, Homeworld for example. None of the 3d multiplayer role-playing games are discussed, even though they have much of the "different modes of interaction than firing big guns at everything" that the article wishes for (hacking everything with a sword, for example).
Even in the 1st person shooter area, it fails to discuss my favorites Rainbow 6 and Rogue Spear. Playing these is not at all like playing Quake with a different colored shirt, as the article suggests. The feel is very different; it is more like a hunting game, where you are both the predator and the prey (I won my most tense and exciting game by firing one (1) well placed shot) with no health packs or body armour that you can pick up to fix yourself.
The article is an interesting discussion of how id software has sold a lot of hardware upgrades; but it seems short on discussing new or different directions for 3d multiplayer games.
I think some form violence will be the main mode of interaction in most 3d multiplayer games for some time to come. Otherwise, why do you need the graphics? I can play an economic game like Railroad Tychoon in 2d just as easily as 3d. As for creating some sense of community; why do you need to generate complex 3d graphics for that when you have something better: language. Imagine how confusing and bandwidth intensive Slashdot would be if it were a 3d multiplayer non-goal oriented environment.
False Authority Syndrome is hardly limited to computer technology and the Air Force. How many times have we seen some celebrity interviewed in the media or give testimony to congress on some topic that has nothing to do with their area of expertise. Why would anyone think that some actress knows anything about agribusiness because they played a farmer in a movie? Yet, the media eats such "celebrity experts" up. I know most of the sensible congressmen surely know that the celebrity "expert" congressional testimony is just a way to get free publicity for their committee, but why do so many people play along with that?
Scientists giving "expert opinions" outside their field of speciality is anouther common occurance (Carl Sagan comes to mind) in the media; perhaps because it is easier to know a handful of photogenic and cooperative scientists than to make a large number of contacts in different fields of research.
It seems to happen alot on slashdot, too.
Perhaps we should put useful biographical information in our sigs instead of cute sayings so that when someone with a degree in cognitive sciences is arguing with an aerospace engineer over spacecraft problems or adaptive behavior, we know which one to listen to at the time. I guess, perhaps that is what the User Info is for; but it doesn't seem to be used for that very often. Of course, if we get overly focused on "meatspace" identities, that might dampen otherwise productive discussions. Maybe different karma for different topics? Anyone have any ideas on how to minimize False Authority Syndrome on slashdot w/o introducing unneeded complexity or dampening useful dialog? Does it need worrying about?
No. Weather satellites and scientific Earth observing satellites DON'T generally use the same orbits as spy sats. In fact, almost all weather satellites are geostationary (set up to cover the nation or region that owns them). Non-miliatary earth observation sats do often use sunsynchronous orbits, but they are higher to give the spacecraft a longer life; SPOT, for example orbits at 830 km. JERS-1 orbits at 568km. IRS orbits at 905 km. The spy sats use very low orbits (around 200km), and only have lifetimes of a few years (two to five supposedly). Also, even if they did use the same exact orbit, they wouldn't necessarily collide any more than 2 cars going the same way at the same speed on the same road would collide. For a collision to happen, someone would have to put a spacecraft in an orbit that crossed the spy sat's orbit at exactly the same altitude at exactly the same time the spy sat would be there. Very unlikely (hence the 2 marble simplification). And, since NORAD monitors all spacecraft (and most space junk) they'd have to do it on the 1st orbit; otherwise the collision could be forseen and avoided. That would be a difficult (but not impossible) trick even if done deliberately. There aren't thousands of "marbles" that the spy sats have to worry about; there aren't even hundreds; and NORAD tracks them all anyway.
If you are really concerned about space collisions, you should encourage space debris mitigation efforts
( http://sn-callisto.jsc.nasa.gov/ ); not worry about a few well controlled spy sats in rarely used orbits. If you just want to complain about the U.S. military, find something that makes more sense.
Yes, but spy sats aren't in geostationary orbits. They occupy orbits that almost no other spacecraft would want. They tend to have very low orbits, which results in a lower spacecraft lifetime due to drag. They also tend to have sun synchronous orbits so that they can image the same spot under the same lighting conditions repeatedly. So, maybe it is more like tossing all the other marbles* around on the north side of the cricket field, then tossing one along the south side and expecting that odd one to hit the one of the rest. Oh, and before you toss your "spy" marble, you also get to look at your huge radar network that tracks every other marble and tells you where they will all be.
Besides, it isn't like we are the only country doing this; we are just the only country people are bitching about (big surprise). If you read the article, Petr Lala (of the UN office) is quoted as saying that they mostly are only given the initial orbit of spacecraft. If that is true, then the registry is a bunch of useless crap anyway. I checked the treaty ( http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/SORegister/regist.htm for those of you who like going to the original sources ) and sure enough it says in article IV section 2 that each State "may, from time to time, provide the...United Nations with additional information." "May provide" does not mean "Must provide." The U.S. is within the letter of the treaty (not that I would be upset if we weren't), and is not endangering anyone recklessly. Considering all the socialist, paternalist B.S. that finds its way into U.N. reports and the outright corruption of many U.N. relief and "peacekeeping" efforts, why is it that errors in the space objects registry are what is considered newsworthy?
* A little math will may be illustrative here (all sizes are approximate):
Vol. of a marble = 3.8E-5 cu. ft.
Vol. of a cricket field (up to 50 ft) = 5.5E6 cu. ft.
Vol. of a Kehole Spy Sat (size of a bus) = 6E3 cu. ft.
Vol. of available space in LEO (200 to 1000 km) = 1.5E20 cu. ft.
The marble is 1.4E11 times smaller than the cricket field. The Spy Sat is 2.5E16 times smaller than space in LEO. Therefore the Marble is more than 175,000 times more likely to be a navigation hazard to its fellows than the satellite is in space. Perhaps "you stand somewhere in the city and throw a marble and I'll stand somewhere in the city and throw another one" would be more like it. Oh, and don't forget I still get to call up NORAD ahead of time and see where your marble is going to be.
I think Pres. Bush* (and Reagan in his time) is smart in the way that Pres. Carter was not, and vice-versa.
Pres. Carter seemed like a genuinely nice guy; and he was very smart... in the same way so many/.ers are. Carter graduated in the top 10%of his class at the Naval Academy and went on to do graduate work in Nuclear Physics. Unfortunately he did not know how to manage people and organizations; he tended to micromanage everything (supposedly even the place settings and tennis schedule at the White House) and as a result he was a terrible president**. It is a shame he couldn't go right to being ex-president; because he has done a great job at that.
Bush (and other notable presidents) seems to be dumb in many of the ways Carter (and most/.ers) are smart. He doesn't seem to remember facts well, or have great language skills (very much UNLIKE Reagan), he certainly doesn't seem like the kind of guy you would want as a scientist or engineer or programmer. OTOH, he does seem to be very smart in the way Carter and many other technical people are dumb; he seems to know how to deal with people. He worked well with an opposition legislature as TX gov; he did manage to get elected as president; he seems to have done a great job picking advisors and getting cabinet members approved. Many of his speaches and descisions on very technical issues (Kyoto comes to mind) seem very well written, well informed and thought out (before you object, go read some of his speaches objectively). Obviously he didn't write them; and obviously he had considerable help from his advisors in making his decisions. I don't care how "dumb" the guy is as long as he is smart enough to pick good subordinates, empower them to do their job, and listen to what they say. I wish I had a boss that would do that. It will also be good if he can avoid throwing up on any other world leaders.
* The current Pres. Bush that is. Ironically, his father seems to be in the category of being technically smart (in the subject of International Affairs, he is ex-DCIA and his diplomacy and manipulation of the Gulf War are still paying dividens) but less savvy than his son as a manager or politician.
** Remember stagflation; Afganistan; the Olympic boycott; the grain embargo and its effects on the commodity market; military decline; poor international relations; etc.
>>The police SHOULD enforce even laws they think are stupid*; that is the only way the stupid laws
>>can be corrected
>How about this. Soldiers should follow orders,
>even if they think they are illegal, that is the
>only way the stupid officers can be removed.
>Isn't it the duty of a soldier do disobey an
>illegal order? Why couldn't it be the same
>for police forces?
Soldiers are only supposed to disobey illegal orders, not orders they think are stupid.
I'm just curious, what do you think a soldier should do if he is given an illegal order, BUT he happens to not like the law that makes the order illegal?
IANAL, but every month the NRA magazine publishes a page of excerpts from newspaper articles about citizens in the US who defended themselves or others with such "instruments of violence". In most of the cases there are no charges filed against the citizen. The exact details of what constitutes self defense varies from state to state. I'm sure you have to be a lot more careful in states like Mass. or CA than in TX or TN. In the state where I live there is a "no retreat" policy inside your residence; which means you do not have to try to run away from an assailant before using deadly force. Outside your home, you are obligated to retreat if possible. In either case you have to be in what a reasonable person (read, juror) would consider to be a situation that threatened you with death or grievous bodily harm before using deadly force (i.e. shooting, stabbing, or chainsawing your attacker). That means that if you are a healthy, athletic, young man then yes the assailant would probably have to be armed or else have friends with him; if you are a frail old man then even an unarmed attacker may be a reasonable threat.
The stories you hear about people being arrested for defending themselves are the vast minority of the cases. But, yes if you are going to wield power (whether it is a firearm or a computer or a car) you are expected to know the applicable laws and act responsibly. Failure to do Right (especially when someone dies) can result in facing criminal charges. I would rather live in a society that gives you the choice and makes you legally responsible for your actions than in one that treats you like a child and takes away your choices because you MIGHT not be responsible.
If the police never enforce laws they think are bad, then what is the point of having a legislature; we could just have the police make up the laws.
The police SHOULD enforce even laws they think are stupid*; that is the only way the stupid laws can be corrected. Otherwise the public and congress never get any feedback that the law isn't working right. So they just go on and make more bad laws; which the police would then edit as they see fit, etc., etc. and so forth. Eventually almost everything would be illegal and the police would just arrest people they didn't like.
I realize that the police and DAs are human, and they are going to learn from The Courts which cases have enough merit to likely get a conviction and which ones aren't worth their time. I understand that they will have to make those kind of decisions at some level. But I'd rather the police err on the side of being automatons than have them err on the side of being "street judges". Let the real judges and the jurors be the ones to decide which laws are unconstitutional. Let the Governors and the President decide who should get pardons. Let the public get enraged and call their congressmen when bad or stupid laws cause good people to be arrested. That is the way the process is designed to work; that is where the checks and balances are; those are the people who should be making those decisions. That way bad laws get refined into good ones.
Don't get mad at the FBI for doing their job when they do it right; they have been dropping the ball enough lately that you have plenty of incidents where agents did their job poorly that you can get mad about instead.
*In the town I grew up in, it was illegal for women to wear pants. Of course they did; and didn't get arrested. The law was part of some old "blue laws" that everyone (including the police) thought were archaic. Ideally I'd like to see some city councilwoman arrested for wearing pants; then the law would get changed and the case would almost certainly be thrown out or she'd get a pardon or some such. As long as the laws are ignored they will stay on the books. And every kid who reads about them in school and laughs has their respect for other laws diminished. Worse, every time a policeman knows about such laws and chooses to ignore them, he (and really the rest of society as well) get conditioned to the idea that the police get to choose what laws they want to enforce.
If you are going to wait for a perfect gov't (that is the only one which would have no immoral impositions on it's citizens) then you are going to be an anarchist for a long time. If you are going to be an anarchist, please do it in another country; the immoralities that would happen under anarchy dwarf the immorality of our imperfect constitutional republic.
I am a very libertarian person myself; but I also know how the world works (or at least I think I do...). Setting aside whether Dimitry having to go through a trial for DMCA is moral or not; it is still a good thing from a practicality standpoint.
If he were to run away, and the law was not challenged in Court, then there is no chance that it the law will be overturned. If the law is fought in the courts, and overturned as unconstitutional, then it is a victory for everyone because the immoral law* is recognized as such and no one else will have to suffer for it.
The Right thing to do, IMHO is to stand and fight within the legal system so that the bad law is undone, as long as that is possible.
I'll grant you the "when in the course of human events..." possibility that sometimes bad laws and bad gov't must be righted outside the system; but for God's sake be very careful about treading there, becuase that way lies war. Sometimes wars and rebellions are necessary, but they are horrible things. They generate tragedy and more injustice by the truckload; read a little history if you don't belive me. I'm not saying that just wars shouldn't be fought, but pick them very carefully. It is usually better to be clever and win without the war than brave and win with one. I think DMCA is something better fought within the system, instead of just brushing it off as immoral and therfore not valid. If you feel strongly about it, donate to Dimitry's legal defense fund and/or write your representatives in congress. If you work within the system to get the law changed then no one else has to suffer from it. If you run away from it, then others still suffer under the law even if you yourself get away. This is true regardless of whether the law is moral or immoral, "valid" or "invalid." Of course it is easy for me to say this, I am not Dimitry... but I pray that if I were the test case I would have the courage to stand up for my convictions.
BTW, I submit that not all laws need to be moral to be justly obeyed. I don't think there is anything inherently immoral about driving 90mph if you are a good enough driver to handle it... but that doesn't mean it is Wrong for you to get a ticket if you do.
Lastly, if you think that standing trial for a crime you are not guilty of is Wrong, then I suggest you figure out a way to have instantaneous and perfectly accurate trials so we can do away with the current system (which is, I freely admit an imperfect and evil, it is just the LEAST evil of all systems anyone has yet invented). I will avoid the obvious jokes about seeing if the guilty sink in water or can be burned alive that your earlier Catholic comments suggest; but only with great difficulty.
* I'll grant you that unconstitutional laws are not actually laws, but they may seem like it until The Court gets around to delaring them so.
"It was to do with a foreigner... who was detained wrongly in this nation."
What do you mean "wrongly detained"? He is accused of a crime, and now he is going to stand trial. I don't see anything wrong with that, unless you mean to suggest that it is wrong that we aren't omniscient and therefore able to hold trials instantaneously on the spot. If he is wrongly found guilty of a crime and imprisoned, now THAT would be "wrongly detained."
What Dimitry is going through is the judicial process; the same one you or I would go through if we were suspected of a crime. You can argue that the law that makes it a crime is a bad law; or even that it is unconstitutional and therefore not really a law. If it is unconstitutional (and I suspect it is), then this is exactly the process that will decide that; and therefore undo the bad law.
There are only two* ways I know of to really get rid of bad laws. One is for congress to enact new, better legislation; and we should be lobbying (or donating money to others to lobby on our behalf) congress to do that using this case as an example. The second is for The Court to declare the law unconstitutional; which may happen as a result of this case.
I think it would be unusual (but still worth trying) for congress to undo or improve DMCA right now. With that in mind, we should all have expected that this would happen as soon as DMCA became law. It is unfortunate for Dimitry that he has to be inconvenienced like this; but it had to be someone. As soon as DMCA was enacted, it was almost a sure thing that one of us would have to go through the court system as a test case. That is the reason that unconstitutional legislation is such a tragedy (and why lobbying your representatives are so important). As long as bad legislation exists (which means as long as legislators are flawed humans) some unlucky people will have to suffer through such things. And, as long as judges and jurors are not omniscient, such things will take time. In a better world, perhaps the authors of such bad legislation would wind up being the victims who become the "test case." Unfortunately we do not live in a perfect world, we do not have perfect legislators or an omniscient judiciary. But, we do have a damn good (and well refined) judicial process (pity the poor ancients who hadn't even figured out to write laws down in advance).
What we need to do now, is to make sure that any unconstitutionality in DMCA is brought to light and The Court declares it so (if you feel strongly about this, perhaps you should donate to his defense fund to speed this along). That way, Dimitry will be the only one of us so inconvenienced.
All things considered it is a pretty small price for someone to pay for righting a wrong. Some wrongs take wars to undo; and millions of lives. And some (if you look back at history, most) wrongs never are undone. Let the system work... Maybe try to help it along to the right conclusion.
* There is a third thing that sometimes happens; the law just gets ignored. It is illegal for women to wear pants in the town where I grew up. Of course they did, and were not arrested. Everyone knew the law was part of an old and obsolete set of "blue laws" that weren't applicable to our modern world (before you laugh, your hometown probably has similarly odd laws still on the books). Unfortunately they were still on the books. Every time laws "go away" by this process, it hurts our society. Children who read about such ridiculous things laugh, and lose some respect for all law. Every time police decide to ignore a law it reinforces the idea (with them, and with the rest of society) that the police should get to decide what laws to enforce and what to ignore. I say if it is illegal, then someone should be arrested for it (preferably a city councilwoman); the police shouldn't get to ignore a law just because they think it is stupid. Then everyone will be outraged, the city council will overturn the law, the "criminal" will probably get a pardon, and the bad law will go away permanently. Let's not let DMCA stay around; let's not encourage the police or the DAs to decide to ignore it; let's take this opportunity to make DMCA go away (or at least be amended into something better) permanently.
I'm not sure if you mean to say that guns are for women, or that guns are for weak people. Either way, I'd have to agree with you.
The average woman is not physically capable of beating the average man in a fight. (I'm not trying to be sexist here, I am talking about the combination of both genetics and societal expectations that tend to cause men to be stronger; everyone is not average, and I can certainly think of exceptions to this in both genders.) But most women don't like to go around feeling that they are at the mercy of any would-be assailant. As a result, I know plenty of women who own "purse guns" either out of foresight or because they have been attacked once and don't want to be defenseless if it should happen again. Despite the macho image of guns I believe that women are one of the fastest growing segments of firearms sales; they can spend a few hundred dollars, take a few hours of training and suddenly their ability to defend themselves has increased an order of magnitude.
There is a saying that "God made men; Sam Colt made them equal." I admit it; I am not a "tough guy." I have not spent years bulking up or taking martial arts; does that mean that I should be at the mercy those stronger than me? Certainly I don't think so. Being the technically oriented person I am, I purchased this wonderful labor saving device, spend a couple hours a month at the shooting range to keep my skills, and suddenly I am "equal" to any physically stronger would-be assailant.
What does this have to do with carrying other technical gadgets? Simple, it is driven by the same logic: I MIGHT need it sometime, so I'd better carry it. I "carry" when I go to visit my friend who lives in a city where the murder rate exceeds 20/100,000 (I don't know the attempted murder or assualt figures), and the "bad" neighborhoods are very interspersed with the rest of the city. But 20/100,000 is still a really small number (.00002); I could easily go my whole life without being assaulted. Similarly, how likely is it that I'll be going to a social event and suddenly need the computational power of my Handheld computer? My leatherman is really cool, but I have to admit I have NEVER been in a situation where I had to use it, but didn't have access to regular tools. I can count the number of times I've used the little flashlight on my keychain on one hand. Do those of us who like to walk around equiped with a high "batman factor" really carry much of the stuff because it is cool, or to justify buying a new toy, or because we have outfitted one-to-many role playing characters, or have secret _Sliders_ fantasies? Could we get by with just a pen, a Swiss Army knife and a cell phone? Or is there a logic to carrying rarely used items, IF the use is potentially important. I do, after all, carry a spare tire and jack in my trunk even though I may never use it; because if I ever do need to use it, I will need it very much. Certainly the same logic can be used for my firearm; even if I only really need to use it once in my whole life, it has paid for itself. And really, can't I say the same for the Leatherman... and that little flashlight... and now I'm back to having to carry all this stuff around.
Perhaps some mathematician among us could do some kind of cost/benefit analysis for personal encumbrance. Something like: (probability of need * importance of need) / bulk of object. And maybe I could somehow use this to justify buying those cell-phone and mp3 player attachement to my Visor!
The problem of how to carry wearable electronics without looking strange or "geeky" is a dificult one. I suspect it will not go away quickly because PDAs and such will probably become more powerful rather than smaller (or at least until we get better I/O methods for them).
People will spend thousands of dollars for clothes from the top fasion designers. If these designers are so good, one of them should tackle the problem of how to look stylish and still carry around such devices. There should be a lot of money in it, since they are getting more and more mainstream. I don't mean some public relations gimick of a fashion show with models having computer keyboards for bras or anything, I mean a real practical solution. Perhaps that would be a good career booster for some struggling designer somewhere. Unfortunately I cannot offer any useful suggestions; if I try to wear more than 3 colors in an outfit my fashion computer locks up. Thank God for monochrome Polo shirts and grey suits.
That is not a bad idea. A lot of work has been done in making holsters that allow you to carry large objects comfortably all day without being noticed. I have a rather nice shoulder holster that conceals a 3lb. large frame pistol and 2 high capacity magazines under a sport coat with no problem (before anyone complains, I have a permit for it). Surely some smart holster maker could make a lot of money by branching out into making similar rigs for techies. Or some techie could make money borrowing techniques from the holster makers.
Or if you want to show off your geek devices and don't mind looking strange you could just get a load bearing vest to put them all in; it would be more convienent than a back pack and probably cheaper than the "eVest." For example:
http://www.lightfighter.com/generic.html?pid=18
As an added bonus some of them have slip-in ballistic panels for when you have to make a tech service call to a very irate user.;)
Dumpster diving (or whatever you call it) is a subset of scrounging. Scrounging covers a wide range of activities for aquiring items from non-standard sources including getting it from the trash, cannibalizing old equipment, calling in favors from old friends, "horse trading", etc. Great scroungers seem to be able to get unique or rare items from nowhere; like locating a Chevy small-block engine in the middle of the Siberian tundra. For a great example of scrounging, check out James Garner's character in The Great Escape.
"Don't ask." -The best response when asked how you scrounged a particularly difficult to find part.
"Computers are the most useless--they are right up there with disposable diapers in landfill."
One of the scientists in the article claims (and a lot of commenters seem to agree) that old computers are as useless as disposable diapers. The researchers at Oak Ridge, TN would probably not agree. There was an article in the latest issue of Scientific American describing the Stone SouperComputer that was built at Oak Ridge National Labs because they needed a supercomputer to model environmental regions, but they couldn't afford one. They cobbled together a Beowulf cluster out of a bunch of obsolete surplus PCs that the lab had laying around.
The article can be found online at: www.sciam.com/2001/0801issue/0801hargrove.html
Back when I was in college I helped the physics dept. clean out their junk room. In exchange, they let me keep whatever I wanted out of the unneeded equipment. I got some really big lenses, some nice frount surface mirrors, and a tube powered oscilloscope that was originally purchased for NASA's Gemini program (and still had the appropriate labels on it). I had trouble explaining to the campus police why I was pushing a "late model oscilloscope" back to my dorm at 3am, but when they found out I was an mech. engineering major they smiled knowingly and left me alone. Among the uses I put it to was helping keep my underheated dorm room warm in the winter.
I agree with the statment about "the seemingly common misperception of an annoying number of Slashdotters that they're Really Smart, and that nobody else gives anything any real thought." I think that often times things are much more complicated once you get into the details of the work than they appear to outsiders. As the saying goes "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" and a lot of us have a little knowledge about other people's jobs. Especially politics.
As far as people from the U.S. making fun of people from Canada and not making fun of ourselves, I don't think it has to do with insecurity as much as the fact that we know the Canadians don't have guns. You can safely poke fun at the Canadians, but you have to think twice about making fun people from the U.S. because you don't know what they might be packing. Especially don't make fun of postal workers.:)
"An armed society is a polite society" - Robert Heinlein
The private space venture that the X-prize is supposed to lead to is low cost sub-orbital tourist flights. That may not seem as worthwhile as putting objects into orbit, but if people will pay to do it (and if it is cheap enough they will), then it is a great way to kick start private manned space flight. After companies get the hang of suborbital "extreme tourist" flights and they prove themselves profitable, then the next obvious step is orbit (and zero-g private hotel rooms).
You can find more information on the x-prize at: http://www.xprize.org/~Xprize/info/
Slashdot Mirror
MIDI MAZE! Thank you, I was trying to think of that game since I saw this topic.
This sounds really great, but I don't see any real data on the steel. Does anyone have stuff like Yield Strength or Modulus of Elasticity for this stuff? It may look pretty I wonder how it would compare with modern advanced materials.
Screw the secrets of Damascas Metallurgy, I want the secrets of Soviet Metallurgy!
One of the reasons that the Iron Pillar in Delhi is believed to have survived uncorroded so long is that it has thin oxide based coating on it. As a member of the Powder Coating Institute, I can safely say that I don't mind at all if EVERYONE knew that the secret to such corrosion resistance was the selection of proper coatings ! ( http://www.powdercoating.org/home.htm )
Other factors in the corrosion resistance are supposedly the high quality of the iron used and the dry climate of the area (all of India does not have a wet climate).
You can find more info at:
www.the-week.com/21jun24/cover.htm (which also discusses damascus steel and its connection to Indian steel!)
www.corrosion-doctors.org/Landmarks/Pillar.htm
This discussion seems to leave out a lot of interesting or important games and focus on just some popular 1st person shooters. There are many multiplayer 3d flying or space simulation games from the early Spasim ( http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery/spasim.html ) through to today's Air War and World War 2 Online efforts. Shouldn't many real time strategy games be considered 3d multiplayer games, Homeworld for example. None of the 3d multiplayer role-playing games are discussed, even though they have much of the "different modes of interaction than firing big guns at everything" that the article wishes for (hacking everything with a sword, for example).
Even in the 1st person shooter area, it fails to discuss my favorites Rainbow 6 and Rogue Spear. Playing these is not at all like playing Quake with a different colored shirt, as the article suggests. The feel is very different; it is more like a hunting game, where you are both the predator and the prey (I won my most tense and exciting game by firing one (1) well placed shot) with no health packs or body armour that you can pick up to fix yourself.
The article is an interesting discussion of how id software has sold a lot of hardware upgrades; but it seems short on discussing new or different directions for 3d multiplayer games.
I think some form violence will be the main mode of interaction in most 3d multiplayer games for some time to come. Otherwise, why do you need the graphics? I can play an economic game like Railroad Tychoon in 2d just as easily as 3d. As for creating some sense of community; why do you need to generate complex 3d graphics for that when you have something better: language. Imagine how confusing and bandwidth intensive Slashdot would be if it were a 3d multiplayer non-goal oriented environment.
False Authority Syndrome is hardly limited to computer technology and the Air Force. How many times have we seen some celebrity interviewed in the media or give testimony to congress on some topic that has nothing to do with their area of expertise. Why would anyone think that some actress knows anything about agribusiness because they played a farmer in a movie? Yet, the media eats such "celebrity experts" up. I know most of the sensible congressmen surely know that the celebrity "expert" congressional testimony is just a way to get free publicity for their committee, but why do so many people play along with that?
Scientists giving "expert opinions" outside their field of speciality is anouther common occurance (Carl Sagan comes to mind) in the media; perhaps because it is easier to know a handful of photogenic and cooperative scientists than to make a large number of contacts in different fields of research.
It seems to happen alot on slashdot, too.
Perhaps we should put useful biographical information in our sigs instead of cute sayings so that when someone with a degree in cognitive sciences is arguing with an aerospace engineer over spacecraft problems or adaptive behavior, we know which one to listen to at the time. I guess, perhaps that is what the User Info is for; but it doesn't seem to be used for that very often. Of course, if we get overly focused on "meatspace" identities, that might dampen otherwise productive discussions. Maybe different karma for different topics? Anyone have any ideas on how to minimize False Authority Syndrome on slashdot w/o introducing unneeded complexity or dampening useful dialog? Does it need worrying about?
*sigh*!
No. Weather satellites and scientific Earth observing satellites DON'T generally use the same orbits as spy sats. In fact, almost all weather satellites are geostationary (set up to cover the nation or region that owns them). Non-miliatary earth observation sats do often use sunsynchronous orbits, but they are higher to give the spacecraft a longer life; SPOT, for example orbits at 830 km. JERS-1 orbits at 568km. IRS orbits at 905 km. The spy sats use very low orbits (around 200km), and only have lifetimes of a few years (two to five supposedly). Also, even if they did use the same exact orbit, they wouldn't necessarily collide any more than 2 cars going the same way at the same speed on the same road would collide. For a collision to happen, someone would have to put a spacecraft in an orbit that crossed the spy sat's orbit at exactly the same altitude at exactly the same time the spy sat would be there. Very unlikely (hence the 2 marble simplification). And, since NORAD monitors all spacecraft (and most space junk) they'd have to do it on the 1st orbit; otherwise the collision could be forseen and avoided. That would be a difficult (but not impossible) trick even if done deliberately. There aren't thousands of "marbles" that the spy sats have to worry about; there aren't even hundreds; and NORAD tracks them all anyway.
If you are really concerned about space collisions, you should encourage space debris mitigation efforts
( http://sn-callisto.jsc.nasa.gov/ ); not worry about a few well controlled spy sats in rarely used orbits. If you just want to complain about the U.S. military, find something that makes more sense.
-UV Clearance Only-
"I am an american"
Yeh, nice try Ivan.
Yes, but spy sats aren't in geostationary orbits. They occupy orbits that almost no other spacecraft would want. They tend to have very low orbits, which results in a lower spacecraft lifetime due to drag. They also tend to have sun synchronous orbits so that they can image the same spot under the same lighting conditions repeatedly. So, maybe it is more like tossing all the other marbles* around on the north side of the cricket field, then tossing one along the south side and expecting that odd one to hit the one of the rest. Oh, and before you toss your "spy" marble, you also get to look at your huge radar network that tracks every other marble and tells you where they will all be.
m for those of you who like going to the original sources ) and sure enough it says in article IV section 2 that each State "may, from time to time, provide the ...United Nations with additional information." "May provide" does not mean "Must provide." The U.S. is within the letter of the treaty (not that I would be upset if we weren't), and is not endangering anyone recklessly. Considering all the socialist, paternalist B.S. that finds its way into U.N. reports and the outright corruption of many U.N. relief and "peacekeeping" efforts, why is it that errors in the space objects registry are what is considered newsworthy?
Besides, it isn't like we are the only country doing this; we are just the only country people are bitching about (big surprise). If you read the article, Petr Lala (of the UN office) is quoted as saying that they mostly are only given the initial orbit of spacecraft. If that is true, then the registry is a bunch of useless crap anyway. I checked the treaty ( http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/SORegister/regist.ht
* A little math will may be illustrative here (all sizes are approximate):
Vol. of a marble = 3.8E-5 cu. ft.
Vol. of a cricket field (up to 50 ft) = 5.5E6 cu. ft.
Vol. of a Kehole Spy Sat (size of a bus) = 6E3 cu. ft.
Vol. of available space in LEO (200 to 1000 km) = 1.5E20 cu. ft.
The marble is 1.4E11 times smaller than the cricket field. The Spy Sat is 2.5E16 times smaller than space in LEO. Therefore the Marble is more than 175,000 times more likely to be a navigation hazard to its fellows than the satellite is in space. Perhaps "you stand somewhere in the city and throw a marble and I'll stand somewhere in the city and throw another one" would be more like it. Oh, and don't forget I still get to call up NORAD ahead of time and see where your marble is going to be.
I think Pres. Bush* (and Reagan in his time) is smart in the way that Pres. Carter was not, and vice-versa.
/.ers are. Carter graduated in the top 10%of his class at the Naval Academy and went on to do graduate work in Nuclear Physics. Unfortunately he did not know how to manage people and organizations; he tended to micromanage everything (supposedly even the place settings and tennis schedule at the White House) and as a result he was a terrible president**. It is a shame he couldn't go right to being ex-president; because he has done a great job at that.
/.ers) are smart. He doesn't seem to remember facts well, or have great language skills (very much UNLIKE Reagan), he certainly doesn't seem like the kind of guy you would want as a scientist or engineer or programmer. OTOH, he does seem to be very smart in the way Carter and many other technical people are dumb; he seems to know how to deal with people. He worked well with an opposition legislature as TX gov; he did manage to get elected as president; he seems to have done a great job picking advisors and getting cabinet members approved. Many of his speaches and descisions on very technical issues (Kyoto comes to mind) seem very well written, well informed and thought out (before you object, go read some of his speaches objectively). Obviously he didn't write them; and obviously he had considerable help from his advisors in making his decisions. I don't care how "dumb" the guy is as long as he is smart enough to pick good subordinates, empower them to do their job, and listen to what they say. I wish I had a boss that would do that. It will also be good if he can avoid throwing up on any other world leaders.
Pres. Carter seemed like a genuinely nice guy; and he was very smart... in the same way so many
Bush (and other notable presidents) seems to be dumb in many of the ways Carter (and most
* The current Pres. Bush that is. Ironically, his father seems to be in the category of being technically smart (in the subject of International Affairs, he is ex-DCIA and his diplomacy and manipulation of the Gulf War are still paying dividens) but less savvy than his son as a manager or politician.
** Remember stagflation; Afganistan; the Olympic boycott; the grain embargo and its effects on the commodity market; military decline; poor international relations; etc.
>>The police SHOULD enforce even laws they think are stupid*; that is the only way the stupid laws
>>can be corrected
>How about this. Soldiers should follow orders,
>even if they think they are illegal, that is the
>only way the stupid officers can be removed.
>Isn't it the duty of a soldier do disobey an
>illegal order? Why couldn't it be the same
>for police forces?
Soldiers are only supposed to disobey illegal orders, not orders they think are stupid.
I'm just curious, what do you think a soldier should do if he is given an illegal order, BUT he happens to not like the law that makes the order illegal?
IANAL, but every month the NRA magazine publishes a page of excerpts from newspaper articles about citizens in the US who defended themselves or others with such "instruments of violence". In most of the cases there are no charges filed against the citizen. The exact details of what constitutes self defense varies from state to state. I'm sure you have to be a lot more careful in states like Mass. or CA than in TX or TN. In the state where I live there is a "no retreat" policy inside your residence; which means you do not have to try to run away from an assailant before using deadly force. Outside your home, you are obligated to retreat if possible. In either case you have to be in what a reasonable person (read, juror) would consider to be a situation that threatened you with death or grievous bodily harm before using deadly force (i.e. shooting, stabbing, or chainsawing your attacker). That means that if you are a healthy, athletic, young man then yes the assailant would probably have to be armed or else have friends with him; if you are a frail old man then even an unarmed attacker may be a reasonable threat.
The stories you hear about people being arrested for defending themselves are the vast minority of the cases. But, yes if you are going to wield power (whether it is a firearm or a computer or a car) you are expected to know the applicable laws and act responsibly. Failure to do Right (especially when someone dies) can result in facing criminal charges. I would rather live in a society that gives you the choice and makes you legally responsible for your actions than in one that treats you like a child and takes away your choices because you MIGHT not be responsible.
If the police never enforce laws they think are bad, then what is the point of having a legislature; we could just have the police make up the laws.
The police SHOULD enforce even laws they think are stupid*; that is the only way the stupid laws can be corrected. Otherwise the public and congress never get any feedback that the law isn't working right. So they just go on and make more bad laws; which the police would then edit as they see fit, etc., etc. and so forth. Eventually almost everything would be illegal and the police would just arrest people they didn't like.
I realize that the police and DAs are human, and they are going to learn from The Courts which cases have enough merit to likely get a conviction and which ones aren't worth their time. I understand that they will have to make those kind of decisions at some level. But I'd rather the police err on the side of being automatons than have them err on the side of being "street judges". Let the real judges and the jurors be the ones to decide which laws are unconstitutional. Let the Governors and the President decide who should get pardons. Let the public get enraged and call their congressmen when bad or stupid laws cause good people to be arrested. That is the way the process is designed to work; that is where the checks and balances are; those are the people who should be making those decisions. That way bad laws get refined into good ones.
Don't get mad at the FBI for doing their job when they do it right; they have been dropping the ball enough lately that you have plenty of incidents where agents did their job poorly that you can get mad about instead.
*In the town I grew up in, it was illegal for women to wear pants. Of course they did; and didn't get arrested. The law was part of some old "blue laws" that everyone (including the police) thought were archaic. Ideally I'd like to see some city councilwoman arrested for wearing pants; then the law would get changed and the case would almost certainly be thrown out or she'd get a pardon or some such. As long as the laws are ignored they will stay on the books. And every kid who reads about them in school and laughs has their respect for other laws diminished. Worse, every time a policeman knows about such laws and chooses to ignore them, he (and really the rest of society as well) get conditioned to the idea that the police get to choose what laws they want to enforce.
If you are going to wait for a perfect gov't (that is the only one which would have no immoral impositions on it's citizens) then you are going to be an anarchist for a long time. If you are going to be an anarchist, please do it in another country; the immoralities that would happen under anarchy dwarf the immorality of our imperfect constitutional republic.
I am a very libertarian person myself; but I also know how the world works (or at least I think I do...). Setting aside whether Dimitry having to go through a trial for DMCA is moral or not; it is still a good thing from a practicality standpoint.
If he were to run away, and the law was not challenged in Court, then there is no chance that it the law will be overturned. If the law is fought in the courts, and overturned as unconstitutional, then it is a victory for everyone because the immoral law* is recognized as such and no one else will have to suffer for it.
The Right thing to do, IMHO is to stand and fight within the legal system so that the bad law is undone, as long as that is possible.
I'll grant you the "when in the course of human events..." possibility that sometimes bad laws and bad gov't must be righted outside the system; but for God's sake be very careful about treading there, becuase that way lies war. Sometimes wars and rebellions are necessary, but they are horrible things. They generate tragedy and more injustice by the truckload; read a little history if you don't belive me. I'm not saying that just wars shouldn't be fought, but pick them very carefully. It is usually better to be clever and win without the war than brave and win with one. I think DMCA is something better fought within the system, instead of just brushing it off as immoral and therfore not valid. If you feel strongly about it, donate to Dimitry's legal defense fund and/or write your representatives in congress. If you work within the system to get the law changed then no one else has to suffer from it. If you run away from it, then others still suffer under the law even if you yourself get away. This is true regardless of whether the law is moral or immoral, "valid" or "invalid." Of course it is easy for me to say this, I am not Dimitry... but I pray that if I were the test case I would have the courage to stand up for my convictions.
BTW, I submit that not all laws need to be moral to be justly obeyed. I don't think there is anything inherently immoral about driving 90mph if you are a good enough driver to handle it... but that doesn't mean it is Wrong for you to get a ticket if you do.
Lastly, if you think that standing trial for a crime you are not guilty of is Wrong, then I suggest you figure out a way to have instantaneous and perfectly accurate trials so we can do away with the current system (which is, I freely admit an imperfect and evil, it is just the LEAST evil of all systems anyone has yet invented). I will avoid the obvious jokes about seeing if the guilty sink in water or can be burned alive that your earlier Catholic comments suggest; but only with great difficulty.
* I'll grant you that unconstitutional laws are not actually laws, but they may seem like it until The Court gets around to delaring them so.
"It was to do with a foreigner... who was detained wrongly in this nation."
What do you mean "wrongly detained"? He is accused of a crime, and now he is going to stand trial. I don't see anything wrong with that, unless you mean to suggest that it is wrong that we aren't omniscient and therefore able to hold trials instantaneously on the spot. If he is wrongly found guilty of a crime and imprisoned, now THAT would be "wrongly detained."
What Dimitry is going through is the judicial process; the same one you or I would go through if we were suspected of a crime. You can argue that the law that makes it a crime is a bad law; or even that it is unconstitutional and therefore not really a law. If it is unconstitutional (and I suspect it is), then this is exactly the process that will decide that; and therefore undo the bad law.
There are only two* ways I know of to really get rid of bad laws. One is for congress to enact new, better legislation; and we should be lobbying (or donating money to others to lobby on our behalf) congress to do that using this case as an example. The second is for The Court to declare the law unconstitutional; which may happen as a result of this case.
I think it would be unusual (but still worth trying) for congress to undo or improve DMCA right now. With that in mind, we should all have expected that this would happen as soon as DMCA became law. It is unfortunate for Dimitry that he has to be inconvenienced like this; but it had to be someone. As soon as DMCA was enacted, it was almost a sure thing that one of us would have to go through the court system as a test case. That is the reason that unconstitutional legislation is such a tragedy (and why lobbying your representatives are so important). As long as bad legislation exists (which means as long as legislators are flawed humans) some unlucky people will have to suffer through such things. And, as long as judges and jurors are not omniscient, such things will take time. In a better world, perhaps the authors of such bad legislation would wind up being the victims who become the "test case." Unfortunately we do not live in a perfect world, we do not have perfect legislators or an omniscient judiciary. But, we do have a damn good (and well refined) judicial process (pity the poor ancients who hadn't even figured out to write laws down in advance).
What we need to do now, is to make sure that any unconstitutionality in DMCA is brought to light and The Court declares it so (if you feel strongly about this, perhaps you should donate to his defense fund to speed this along). That way, Dimitry will be the only one of us so inconvenienced.
All things considered it is a pretty small price for someone to pay for righting a wrong. Some wrongs take wars to undo; and millions of lives. And some (if you look back at history, most) wrongs never are undone. Let the system work... Maybe try to help it along to the right conclusion.
* There is a third thing that sometimes happens; the law just gets ignored. It is illegal for women to wear pants in the town where I grew up. Of course they did, and were not arrested. Everyone knew the law was part of an old and obsolete set of "blue laws" that weren't applicable to our modern world (before you laugh, your hometown probably has similarly odd laws still on the books). Unfortunately they were still on the books. Every time laws "go away" by this process, it hurts our society. Children who read about such ridiculous things laugh, and lose some respect for all law. Every time police decide to ignore a law it reinforces the idea (with them, and with the rest of society) that the police should get to decide what laws to enforce and what to ignore. I say if it is illegal, then someone should be arrested for it (preferably a city councilwoman); the police shouldn't get to ignore a law just because they think it is stupid. Then everyone will be outraged, the city council will overturn the law, the "criminal" will probably get a pardon, and the bad law will go away permanently. Let's not let DMCA stay around; let's not encourage the police or the DAs to decide to ignore it; let's take this opportunity to make DMCA go away (or at least be amended into something better) permanently.
The 80s were a different universe.
I'm not sure if you mean to say that guns are for women, or that guns are for weak people. Either way, I'd have to agree with you.
The average woman is not physically capable of beating the average man in a fight. (I'm not trying to be sexist here, I am talking about the combination of both genetics and societal expectations that tend to cause men to be stronger; everyone is not average, and I can certainly think of exceptions to this in both genders.) But most women don't like to go around feeling that they are at the mercy of any would-be assailant. As a result, I know plenty of women who own "purse guns" either out of foresight or because they have been attacked once and don't want to be defenseless if it should happen again. Despite the macho image of guns I believe that women are one of the fastest growing segments of firearms sales; they can spend a few hundred dollars, take a few hours of training and suddenly their ability to defend themselves has increased an order of magnitude.
There is a saying that "God made men; Sam Colt made them equal." I admit it; I am not a "tough guy." I have not spent years bulking up or taking martial arts; does that mean that I should be at the mercy those stronger than me? Certainly I don't think so. Being the technically oriented person I am, I purchased this wonderful labor saving device, spend a couple hours a month at the shooting range to keep my skills, and suddenly I am "equal" to any physically stronger would-be assailant.
What does this have to do with carrying other technical gadgets? Simple, it is driven by the same logic: I MIGHT need it sometime, so I'd better carry it. I "carry" when I go to visit my friend who lives in a city where the murder rate exceeds 20/100,000 (I don't know the attempted murder or assualt figures), and the "bad" neighborhoods are very interspersed with the rest of the city. But 20/100,000 is still a really small number (.00002); I could easily go my whole life without being assaulted. Similarly, how likely is it that I'll be going to a social event and suddenly need the computational power of my Handheld computer? My leatherman is really cool, but I have to admit I have NEVER been in a situation where I had to use it, but didn't have access to regular tools. I can count the number of times I've used the little flashlight on my keychain on one hand. Do those of us who like to walk around equiped with a high "batman factor" really carry much of the stuff because it is cool, or to justify buying a new toy, or because we have outfitted one-to-many role playing characters, or have secret _Sliders_ fantasies? Could we get by with just a pen, a Swiss Army knife and a cell phone? Or is there a logic to carrying rarely used items, IF the use is potentially important. I do, after all, carry a spare tire and jack in my trunk even though I may never use it; because if I ever do need to use it, I will need it very much. Certainly the same logic can be used for my firearm; even if I only really need to use it once in my whole life, it has paid for itself. And really, can't I say the same for the Leatherman... and that little flashlight... and now I'm back to having to carry all this stuff around.
Perhaps some mathematician among us could do some kind of cost/benefit analysis for personal encumbrance. Something like: (probability of need * importance of need) / bulk of object. And maybe I could somehow use this to justify buying those cell-phone and mp3 player attachement to my Visor!
The problem of how to carry wearable electronics without looking strange or "geeky" is a dificult one. I suspect it will not go away quickly because PDAs and such will probably become more powerful rather than smaller (or at least until we get better I/O methods for them).
People will spend thousands of dollars for clothes from the top fasion designers. If these designers are so good, one of them should tackle the problem of how to look stylish and still carry around such devices. There should be a lot of money in it, since they are getting more and more mainstream. I don't mean some public relations gimick of a fashion show with models having computer keyboards for bras or anything, I mean a real practical solution. Perhaps that would be a good career booster for some struggling designer somewhere. Unfortunately I cannot offer any useful suggestions; if I try to wear more than 3 colors in an outfit my fashion computer locks up. Thank God for monochrome Polo shirts and grey suits.
That is not a bad idea. A lot of work has been done in making holsters that allow you to carry large objects comfortably all day without being noticed. I have a rather nice shoulder holster that conceals a 3lb. large frame pistol and 2 high capacity magazines under a sport coat with no problem (before anyone complains, I have a permit for it). Surely some smart holster maker could make a lot of money by branching out into making similar rigs for techies. Or some techie could make money borrowing techniques from the holster makers.
;)
Or if you want to show off your geek devices and don't mind looking strange you could just get a load bearing vest to put them all in; it would be more convienent than a back pack and probably cheaper than the "eVest." For example:
http://www.lightfighter.com/generic.html?pid=18
As an added bonus some of them have slip-in ballistic panels for when you have to make a tech service call to a very irate user.
Erin Gray was hot. ( http://www.buck-rogers.com/film_and_series/gallery _wilma.htm )
I guess my age is starting to show, isn't it.
Dumpster diving (or whatever you call it) is a subset of scrounging. Scrounging covers a wide range of activities for aquiring items from non-standard sources including getting it from the trash, cannibalizing old equipment, calling in favors from old friends, "horse trading", etc. Great scroungers seem to be able to get unique or rare items from nowhere; like locating a Chevy small-block engine in the middle of the Siberian tundra. For a great example of scrounging, check out James Garner's character in The Great Escape.
"Don't ask." -The best response when asked how you scrounged a particularly difficult to find part.
"Computers are the most useless--they are right up there with disposable diapers in landfill."
One of the scientists in the article claims (and a lot of commenters seem to agree) that old computers are as useless as disposable diapers. The researchers at Oak Ridge, TN would probably not agree. There was an article in the latest issue of Scientific American describing the Stone SouperComputer that was built at Oak Ridge National Labs because they needed a supercomputer to model environmental regions, but they couldn't afford one. They cobbled together a Beowulf cluster out of a bunch of obsolete surplus PCs that the lab had laying around.
The article can be found online at: www.sciam.com/2001/0801issue/0801hargrove.html
The photos that accompany the article are great.
Not bad for a bunch of "disposable diapers."
Back when I was in college I helped the physics dept. clean out their junk room. In exchange, they let me keep whatever I wanted out of the unneeded equipment. I got some really big lenses, some nice frount surface mirrors, and a tube powered oscilloscope that was originally purchased for NASA's Gemini program (and still had the appropriate labels on it). I had trouble explaining to the campus police why I was pushing a "late model oscilloscope" back to my dorm at 3am, but when they found out I was an mech. engineering major they smiled knowingly and left me alone. Among the uses I put it to was helping keep my underheated dorm room warm in the winter.
I agree with the statment about "the seemingly common misperception of an annoying number of Slashdotters that they're Really Smart, and that nobody else gives anything any real thought." I think that often times things are much more complicated once you get into the details of the work than they appear to outsiders. As the saying goes "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" and a lot of us have a little knowledge about other people's jobs. Especially politics.
:)
As far as people from the U.S. making fun of people from Canada and not making fun of ourselves, I don't think it has to do with insecurity as much as the fact that we know the Canadians don't have guns. You can safely poke fun at the Canadians, but you have to think twice about making fun people from the U.S. because you don't know what they might be packing. Especially don't make fun of postal workers.
"An armed society is a polite society" - Robert Heinlein
The private space venture that the X-prize is supposed to lead to is low cost sub-orbital tourist flights. That may not seem as worthwhile as putting objects into orbit, but if people will pay to do it (and if it is cheap enough they will), then it is a great way to kick start private manned space flight. After companies get the hang of suborbital "extreme tourist" flights and they prove themselves profitable, then the next obvious step is orbit (and zero-g private hotel rooms).
You can find more information on the x-prize at: http://www.xprize.org/~Xprize/info/