>If you don't like the result, show the flaw in >the logic.
What logic? All you've offered so far are baseless assertions. Christians can't even agree on what Christian morality means. Their morality is as relative as any atheist's. Just look at the kiddie fucking - and the massive coverup of it - that took place in the Catholic Church. The jails in comparatively-religious America are packed full with religious inmates, many if not most of them brought up in the church. So much for Christian morality.
>Didn't I say earlier that atheism unchecked >leads inevitable to anarchy or totalitarianism?
Yes, you did say this. It just doesn't make any sense. You cite three fairly unique examples, and then try to extrapolate that out to a wider whole. Only you can't. Russia and China both had good reasons for going Communist - the feudal systems they were both locked in were certainly no paradise - and atheism held widespread appeal largely as a reaction to the barbaric excesses of the religious regimes they replaced.
The reality is that the overthrow of many of the church-supported monarchies in Europe lead to the formation of dictatorships that were formally or informally opposed to religion (it happened to one degree or another in France and England, for example). No surprise there - in times of chaos, dictators frequently seize control (Hitler being a prime example), and in cases where the church was propping up a corrupt monarchy, it's no surprise the dictators who replaced it would do everything in their power to break the church.
Organized religion has been on the decline in Europe now for decades. I certainly don't see them slipping into anarchy or totalitarianism. Unlike the far more religious United States, they still respect international law and elect their leaders . . .
>As for your assessment of religion, I see something quite different. >I see liberal giving, of time, self, and money to help the poor and >needy. I see people loving those who hate them. I see kindness and >compassion and a striving for freedom of the individual.
Well, you see what you want to see. I see that, in some religious people. I also see kiddie fucking priests and the massive coverup of their ongoing abuses, organized by the church's leadership and financed by donations from folks far less well-to-do than the church itself. I see that fine religious figure Osama bin Laden hijacking first Afghanistan, plunging it into utter chaos and then saddling it with one of the most truly barbaric regimes of modern times, the Taliban. Then I see him hijacking 4 jet planes and slamming two of them into the largest office buildings in the world, extinguishing the lives of over 2000 secular martyrs.
I certainly don't see any evidence - not one shred - to support the contention that religious people are any more moral than those who aren't religious.
>And when I see the abuses that do happen, I agree with you that they >are wrong. They are contrary to Christianity, not in accordance with it.
That's a hoot. How many Christian sects are there, thousands? Even "Christians" can't agree on what is and isn't "contrary" to Christianity. And you want people to base their morality on that? Fine. Get the 1000+ Christian sects to agree, and then get back to us on exactly what it is we should believe the sky god wants us to do.
>But the predator who lives by "survival of the fittest", or "might >makes right", or "pragmatic selfishness" is quite in accordance >with atheistic morality.
>I'll start w/ 20 million in the Soviet Union, >65 million under Mao and 2 million in Cambodia.
Again, meaningless statistics. You can no more blame every death on "atheism" than you can blame the deaths of those 15 million or so killed in the Pacific theater during WWII on Buddhism. Modern butchers have had a lot more raw material to work with than those in the past did, as this graph from the US Census Bureau demonstrates. Global population didn't hit 1 billion until around 1800. By the time of Stalin, Hitler, Mao and WWII, it was at over 2 billion. That, along with technological advances, made it possible for a truly stunning number of people to be slaughtered.
Your numbers for Mao and Pol Pot look a bit high according to this site, which provides pretty extensive analysis of 20th century bodycounts for various wars and atrocities.
Mao didn't set out to slaughter 65 million, by the way. 30 million were killed accidentally, during the ironically-named "Great Leap Forward," due to the famine caused by the idiotic economic "reforms" initiated by the Maoists. Although when dealing with human suffering on that scale, I don't think it matters much whether it's 30 million dead or 65 million dead. Either number is inconceivable.
Mao. Stalin. Pol Pot. Seems to me this is more an indictment of dictatorships than it is an indictment of any religious system (or lack thereof).
As for the proportion of population killed (which seems to me to be a more relevant measure, if you're attempting to compare religious, political or economic systems), check out the section on Proportionality from the same site mentioned above.
>The modern atheistic regimes have killed more >people than all of the "religious" wars in >history.
Since there were far more people on the earth during "modern" history than there were in the past, this is hardly a relevant point. As a percentage of population killed, they've certainly done no better (or worse) than their religious predecessors. And of course, many of the victims of religion were killed not in wars, but by the zealots in their own nations. From the Spanish Inquisition to the Salem witch trials, religion has been effective at persecuting or slaughtering the innocent within a society, quite apart from any wars between religions or sects.
One could also argue that Soviet-style Communism is as much a religion as Christianity, which sort of negates the argument that these "atheistic" regimes are free from "religion." Replacing one fucked-up, reality-denying philosophy (say, Christianity as it's been practiced traditionally) with another (say, Communism) isn't likely to lead to an improvement in anybody's quality of life.
I almost got a SliMP3 - like the way it serves files, it has great D/A converters, and I like the display - but it's limited to MP3 which is a real deal breaker. I want something that can stream uncompressed audio, so I can throw my CD's in a closet and forget about 'em, even for critical listening.
I believe it also lacks a digital output, which could be a bummer for some users (though with my H/K receiver and the flakey way it handles digital inputs, I'm more concerned about analog output quality).
Check out the cd3o. It utilizes Microsoft's speech synth doodad for Windows to provide a voice guide. Using the guide, it's easy to navigate through your library using your remote to punch in the first few letters of an artist's name or album or track title, or to flip through your pre-defined playlists. And you don't need to squint at some fluoroscopic display halfway across the room.
The Audiotron is also EXPENSIVE compared to the alternatives (particularly the cd3o), its D/A converters are said to be pretty poor (the cd3o and Slimp3 both have better specs), and it takes it forever to scan your drives initially.
While the display seems like a cool idea, in reality you can't see it well from across the room, and it's of little use for managing playlists. I think cd3o has the right idea with their client service / control panel on the server PC and voice guide on the client device. Doesn't require a television (with its inherent whine), doesn't require you to squint at a fluorescent display halfway across the room, and it knocks enough in the way of cost off the price of the unit to allow it to come with built-in WiFi reception.
I'd been toying with the idea of creating my own.WAV/.MP3 server for some time, to use as part of my audio system. In part it's because I'm lazy - I hate having to get up, drag CD's out of their storage cube, open the 5-disc changer, and plop 'em in.
I suppose I could have just bought one of those carousel changers - they can be had on eBay for a couple hundred bucks - and load all of my discs into that. But they're bulky and will be a dead-end if we move to non-CD based music distribution (which seems likely, at least at some point). And I don't want to be stuck burning CD's to load into my carousel down the road. Ick.
My original plan was to build a small Windows XP PC to function as an independent audio server. I'd get a mini-ITX motherboard with built in CPU (one of the VIA EPIA units), a big hard drive, a quiet or silent power supply, a remote and software to drive it, a CD ROM drive, and possibly an LCD display of some sort. It would require quite a bit of effort, but would be tres cool.
Problem is, it would also be tres expensive. A tiny case with a silent power supply would run at least $70 alone. Win XP and the motherboard would cost about the same or more each. Now we're talking $210, not including taxes, shipping, a hard drive, a remote or a display of any kind. Sure, I could use the television as a display, but what about that 15kHz whine? And maybe I could use a smaller drive - one just big enough for XP - and use my PC as a server. But then I'd need a bigger drive for my PC, and I'd need to network the two, and since they're in different rooms I'd be shelling out for wireless networking . . . and suddenly the cost explodes into the $700 range. More than I'm willing to spend.
I did look into a few devices designed to function as networked MP3 players, but they all have problems. The Slimp3 looks promising, with its large bright display, but it only plays MP3 compressed files (WAV's are transcoded into MP3 on your computer before being transmitted - so you get sucky mp3 quality and your PC slows down when WAVs are played) and would require an external wireless receiver. I want to play uncompressed or lossless compressed files, too. In fact, I want to have my entire CD collection available (or at the least, the tracks I'd be likely to listen to now and again). HP makes a device with similar restrictions (it adds on WMA lossy-compressed files) that's even more expensive ($300), but at least has a built-in wireless receiver. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a display. Turtle Beach's Audiotron looks the most promising, but it's expensive ($300 - $350), isn't wireless, and according to what I've read, has a shitty D/A converter. Of course, it also has digital out, but my H/K receiver is fidgety about digital sources, and tends to take a moment to "pickup the phone" when the line is dropped, cutting off the first few seconds of each track when fed a digital signal. So unfortunately, I probably need something that can feed my receiver a decent analog signal.
The Prismiq is probably the best alternative, but it requires the use of a television, which rules it out for use in my audio system. The video features strike me as being of little use - as an apartment dweller, I'll be relying on WiFi, and only the lowest-quality video can be streamed over WiFi (particularly in this high rise, steel framed, steel walled apartment building). The D/A converter is also said to be not the best. And of course, it doesn't support WiFi out of the box, so tack a good $40 onto the price of each unit.
Finally I found a device that's a respectable compromise & won't bust the old budget. It's called a cd3o, and it costs just $200. The website is here. It isn't perfect, but it scores on a lot of points. It's wireless (802.11b) or wired, with its own built-in receiver. It supports Winamp playlists. It doesn't have its own drive - it's just a player that uses your PC as its server. It doesn't just beam the ou
>Recovering only a small space capsule can get >very expensive, especially if you have to >involve a water landing.
You keep saying this, but haven't provided any evidence to support the assertion. How much do unplanned water rescues cost today? Certainly not even a fraction of what the launch of any manned rocket (even the small Soyuz) costs. I can't see the cost of plucking the capsule out of the ocean as a stumbling block, sorry. If it were, the fishing industry would go bankrupt overnight.
>Also, people forget the G-forces encountered >during an Apollo CSM flight can be quite strong
We're already sending astronauts back and forth to the ISS aboard the Soyuz, where they experience similar or even greater forces (9 G's on a recent trip, IIRC). Again, not a relevant issue.
Yes, the Shuttle did haul down a couple of satellites once. But the government had to subsidize that mission, to the tune of about $200 million, IIRC. In other words, it can be done, but there's absolutely no money in it unless you can get the taxpayers to foot the bill.
>First, he claims that the OSP is bad because it only >ships people, not cargo. That is a good thing, not a >bad thing.
You apparently read the article, but didn't understand what you were reading. Try reading it again. He thinks the OSP is a bad solution because it doesn't eliminate the need to continue flying the aging, dangerous, outrageously expensive Shuttle in order to supply the ISS with needed cargo, not because it "only ships people." If the OSP "only shipped people" and we had a cheap, unmanned cargo solution for the ISS, the OSP wouldn't be quite such an idiotic concept. As it stands, if we go ahead with the construction of the OSP, NASA will find itself having to support *two* outrageously expensive man-rated launch systems. Dumb.
>He complains about not understanding the plan for the >escape system. That is his inadequacy, not the OSP's. >Since the escape system/final stage should be a reliable, >evolutionary rocket design that gets a lot of attention, the >odds of it failing catastrophically should be much smaller >than the odds of one of the booster stages failing. Adding >this system will, therefore, slightly increase the odds of a >mission failure, while greatly reducing the odds of a crew >fatality. Whether that is an "extra" failure mode depends >on if you are looking at mission failure or crew loss.
I see lots of unfounded assumptions there. "Should be a reliable," "odds of it failing should be much smaller," "slightly increase," "depends upon," etc. What the author of the article doesn't understand is how the OSP is superior to the existing Soyuz solution, or other capsule based systems (for example, the Apollo-derived system he postulates), particularly when it comes to plans for an escape system. Any escape system for the OSP would have to be much, much larger than a comparable piece of equipment for a Soyuz or Apollo-derived solution, because the OSP weighs so damn much. The escape rockets would have to carry more fuel, necessitating a bigger main booster in the first place, further increasing the risk of booster failure. It's a vicious circle.
I agree with the author - the OSP doesn't make any sense no matter how you slice it, from a safety, performance or cost standpoint. Its functions could all be performed faster, better and cheaper with capsule-based solutions utilizing modifications of existing designs.
>The guys at Orbital who put the original design concept >together went with a winged system, and they definitely >put a lot of thought into the design.
They put a lot of thought into getting NASA to buy the design. Whether they produced the most efficient design - from a safety and cost standpoint - is another matter entirely. Supposedly smart designers gave us the Shuttle as well, which, as the author of the article points out, is a "flying Ming vase."
>The OSP is a near term, cheap solution with low technical risk.
With a first launch not coming before 2008 (and knowing NASA, not before 2012), you can hardly call the OSP "near term". And since we haven't built one of these things, we also don't have any clue what the cost is going to be to build, launch and support them. The Shuttles were, you recall, supposed to be cheap and reliable, capable of being flown dozens of times a year. At over $500 million a launch, supported by a small army of maintenance and repair workers, and flying one or two missions a year each, they've proven to be anything but. That's not factoring in the fact they explode 1 launch in 50, becoming a flying crematorium for 7 astronauts and about $2 billion in taxpayer cash.
>Lastly, he berates the idea of man rating the EELVs. >The EELVs were already designed to have the >reliability of a man rated system (>98%). They have >yet to have a failure, and it looks like they will meet >their reliability targets.
Again, you apparently read the article, but didn't
>Remember, the Apollo Command/Service Module >(CSM) was designed for WATER landing, not >landing on dry land. There will quite a lot >of expense involved in sending a recovery >team out into the middle of the ocean to get >the returning spacecraft
NASA already has to go out and retrieve the Shuttle's Solid Rocket Boosters after each launch, so they already have a ship capable of performing the task of retrieving a tiny capsule. I'd imagine it would cost less to retrieve a capsule than it would to delay the return of the proposed Orbital Space Plane by a day because of poor weather at the landing site.
And the capsules are likely to be a fraction the cost of any OSP, cheaper to launch because they'd weigh so much less, more robust, safer and cheaper to refurbish (assuming they aren't disposable to begin with).
>It would be a pretty difficult enterprise to >come up with a 'sensing' microphone that >assured good quality from a listening location.
One possibility might be to let people make a deposit on their credit card for a high-quality, $2,000+ studio microphone. They'd use it to balance their system, then FedEx it back to the manufacturer. If they failed to return the mic, the manufacturer would simply go ahead and charge the cost of the mic to their card.
>They also still need a bass module (i.e. >a "box") because planars don't have enough >excursion.
That's not always the case. *Small* planar speakers, like Magnepan's $700 entry-level pair, require a subwoofer if you want to reproduce loud low bass (think dance, rap, or the cannons in the 1812 Overature). But the giant-sized, 7' tall top-of-the-line Magnepan speakers certainly don't require a sub. True they're expensive (around $4,000 a pair, I believe), but they're still only a fraction the cost of the B&O system (and not much more expensive than paper-coned made in China junk like Bose).
Even though the smaller planar models don't produce lots of low bass, the bass they do produce is phenomenally accurate - far better than what you get from your typical cone driver. The increased accuracy makes the bass sound somewhat louder than it really is, helping to compensate somewhat for the reduced levels. But if you must listen to the latest Eminem record at full volume, you can always mate a planar speaker with an inexpensive (or expensive) sub.
Bose systems sound like shit. If you think it "sounds awesome," you were comparing it to $300 junk from JBL or Cerwin Vega at Circuit City, not other $3000 systems from manufacturers who spend their money on something other than marketing.
Just to name an example off the top of my head, check out Energy's $1,500 Encore 5.1 system. Blows the doors off of Bose junk selling for twice the price, without being any larger.
Or audition any of Linn's speaker systems in the $2,000 price range. When I first auditioned a pair of small Linn bookshelf speakers last year, I spent 15 minutes looking for the switch to turn off the subwoofer . . . only to finally realize there wasn't any subwoofer. Amazing what a manufacturer can do when they spend their money on quality instead of on marketing.
>All this gimmicky digital signal processing to >achieve better sound won't improve things if >you don't have the right kind of room, and >don't have the speakers in the right places.
That's not entirely true. In theory, you could use signal processing to not only overcome the limitations of the speakers themselves (say, a frequency response that's non-linear relative to the wattage driving the unit, or certain phase issues), but also the environment they've been placed in (room reflections or cancellation effects). In practice though, that would take lots of computing horsepower to do transparently, in real time, without introducing unwanted artifacts that sound worse than the problems you're attempting to address.
It looks like these B&O monsters are just using DSP to help with the bass equalization. They play back some bass tones, have the mic pick them up, analyze which frequencies are enhanced and which are suppressed relative to the input, then boost and cut the signal at the appropriate frequencies. Essentially, it's an automated graphic equalizer for the bass. Nice, but hardly worth $10,000, and not revolutionary by any means.
Revolutionary would be a system that ships with a quality microphone, preferably wireless, that you place at or near your desired listening position (or positions). The system would then analyze the listening environment with a variety of test tones, listening for response irregularities, phase issues, cancellations and other issues. It would then adjust the signal going to the drivers via a powerful DSP, in an attempt to make the signal at the listening position(s) as close an analog to the original signal sent to the speakers as possible.
The technology certainly exists at this point to produce such a device. In fact, I'm surprised nobody is selling one. It would certainly go a long way toward making cruddy speakers sound good, and could make most quality speakers sound fantastic.
>I've always gone for speakers, amps etc. that >will give the best sound quality, why I would >then want to use an source, such as MP3, that >would sound the same on a £50 stereo is beyond >me.
Eh? Maybe 128kbps MP3's played back over a Soundblaster card's cruddy D/A converters and amps would sound awful amplified through a good stereo system, but a 256kbps MP3, streamed out of my Soyo motherboard's optical TOSLINK port, and converted to analog by my Harman/Kardon receiver's 24-bit 96kHz-capable D/A converters sounds pretty durn good. Not quite as good as the original CD perhaps, but close enough for casual listening.
And of course, you aren't limited to 256kbps or MP3. The latest version of Windows Media Player for example includes support for Meridian Lossless Packing, the same *non*-lossy compression method being utilized for DVD-Audio. A CD compressed utilizing MLP will sound identical to the original, but consume between only 1/2 to 2/3'rds the storage space. With 80GB hard drives becoming commonplace, and the average CD containing only about 400MB worth of audio, that works out to at least 160 CD's worth of full-quality, no-artifacts audio (more if your collection includes a lot of old albums, most of which were only 35-40 minutes long due to the limitations of the LP).
If you're like me, there are only a couple of dozen albums you listen to in their entirety. For many of the rest, you'd only need to have your favorite tracks on hand at all times. Although I own more than 300 CD's, I could easily squeeze everything I listen to regularly onto a single 80GB drive using WMP and MLP, with room left over for 256kbps MP3's of the stuff I seldom listen to.
And of course, with hard drive prices continuing their long plunge in tandem with skyrocketing capacity, it won't be long (maybe a year or so) before 160GB drives are common and quite affordable. At that point, I could store my entire collection, MLP compressed, on a single $100 drive.
>Let's not forget that tapes are a magnetic >medium. All magnetic media have a temperature >(the Curie point) at which they will suddenly >demagnetize. Now I don't know what that >temperature is for tapes, but it's often not >that high.
For the magnetic material used for audio tapes it's got to be pretty high - I kept tapes in my car in Arizona for 6 years, and none of them were (much) worse for the wear, even after baking at 140 degrees (plus) 7 days a week, six months out of the year.
Baking tapes is just about the ONLY remedy available if you're experiencing problems with hydrophilic binders. The glue absorbs water over the years, becoming "sticky" and oozing up through the magnetic media itself. You have to bake the tapes (at a fairly low temperature - around 140 degrees, IIRC) in order to drive off that water and stabilize the binder. Of course, the binder won't stay stable, although you can probably slow the process by storing the baked tape in an airtight container along with a packet of silica gel.
>Myself, I'm not sure I'd take the word of a sportswriter.
Oh goodie, argument from authority. I suppose you don't put much weight in physics theories from patent clerks, either?
The "rebuttals" at hal-pc.org are pathetic nitpicks. They do nothing to undermine the basic thrust of Easterbrook's positions, which seem to be that the Shuttles are:
1) Outrageously expensive to build and operate compared to any other lift system. 2) More dangerous to their occupants than any other manned booster. 3) Incapable of living up to most of the promises that NASA made to Congress in order to get them built in the first place.
One of the "rebuttals" at hal-pc is so ignorant it defies description. Easterbrook asserts that, "a rational person might have laughed out loud at the thought that, although school buses are replaced every decade, a spaceship was expected to remain in service for 40 years." The author at hal-pc twitters on in his rebuttal about the B-52, and about how it may end up with a lifespan of over 90 years. Ignoring the fact that the first B-52 flew in 1954, which means the craft will need to remain in service for another 40 years (a completely baseless assertion), the type of energies and forces Shuttles are exposed to simply dwarf those experienced by a B-52. I'm guessing the Shuttles experience more forces acting on them in every launch / landing cycle than a B-52 can expect to experience in its entire operational lifetime. You might as well compare the Shuttle to a paper airplane. Even the SR-71, which the hal-pc author also cites, operates under conditions that are vastly less hostile to materials than those experienced by the Shuttles each and every launch.
As usual, Shuttle proponents can't come up with any positive arguments of their own for supporting the continuation of the Shuttle program, so instead resort to insane levels of nitpicking regarding any arguments against continuing the failed, costly, dangerous program.
>Myself, I think Easterbrook simply doesn't accept the fact >some things have high inherent risk.
Manned spaceflight is inherently risky. That doesn't mean you should take on unnecessary risks - particularly when you don't gain anything by undertaking those risks, and when you're spending substantially more in the process to boot. I haven't read the Easterbrook articles in some time, but I believe he might even make a similar point in one of his articles. There was no good reason to trade in the Saturn V for the Shuttle. NASA lied to Congress, and the result is the expensive, deadly boondoggle we're stuck with today. This mistake should be rectified. The Shuttle should be scrapped, existing alternatives (such as Soyuz) utilized in the interim, and new, truly superior replacement manned vehicles should be developed. Once which are truly cheaper to build and operate than the current generation of manned launch vehicles, and which are safer, too, regardless of whether these vehicles are radically different from existing disposable boosters or simply the natural evolution of their design.
A real comparison of the cost of the Titian IV-B vs. the Shuttles needs to take into account the entire build / support / fuel / launch equation. It looks as though Shuttles are good for around 20 missions each on average before they blow themselves to bits. Tack on another $100,000,000 or so a launch for the amortized cost of each Shuttle vehicle (and stuff like major Shuttle overhauls), and suddenly the Titan IV-B becomes much, much cheaper than the Shuttle to build / support / fuel / launch.
>No, the space station was placed in that orbit as a compromise >so that both the American (Shuttle) and the Russian (Soyuz) >vehicles could get to it. Baikonur [astronautix.com] and Cape >Canaveral [nasa.gov] are at quite different lattitudes. ISS is >half way in between.
Yes, true to a point - and it was a stupid compromise. Had we relied on the cheaper, more reliable Russian boosters and scrapped utilizing the Shuttles for ISS construction, crew delivery and resupply, the ISS could have been placed into a substantially higher orbit, requiring fewer reboost missions and therefore becoming inherently cheaper to operate.
Compare the cost of launching unmanned payloads (say, ISS components) on a Russian Proton rocket to the cost of launching them on the Shuttle. It costs around $4,729 a pound to put a payload into low earth orbit with the Shuttle, as opposed to $1,953 a pound with the Proton. Proton can't launch payloads that are quite as large as the Shuttle's (19,760 kg for the Proton vs. 28,803 kg for the Shuttle), but the cost per pound for the Russian vehicle is vastly lower. As opposed to the $300 million plus launch cost of a Shuttle, a Proton costs a comparatively paltry $85 million to build and launch.
And you don't need a rocket as big as a Proton to launch men into space - the Russians routinely send people to the ISS aboard the relatively tiny Soyuz rocket, which only has a capacity of 7,000 kg and costs just $37 million to build and launch (the per-pound cost is also cheaper than the shuttle - $2,432). Compare this to the Shuttles, which cost at least $2 billion to build each (probably more, if you factor in R&D), and well in excess of $300 million each launch (some accounting puts Shuttle launches at an incredible $500 million each).
There also hasn't been a fatal accident involving Soyuz since the 1970's, when an air seal failed during reentry and the crew suffocated. There was a serious accident during the '80s when the booster failed, but the cosmonauts were able to successfully escape the destruction of the vehicle and came away with only minor injuries. That's simply not possible with the Shuttle, since the astronauts are strapped right next to huge tanks of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen (an insanely stupid design - there's no way to be safely blown clear).
There have been something like 1,600 launches of Soyuz-family rockets, as opposed to a little more than 100 Shuttle launches, so clearly most of the bugs have been worked out of the Soyuz system by now. The fact it's a far smaller rocket means less energy is required to launch it into orbit, reducing the stress and strain on the system and making it inherently safer than the Shuttles, with all that fuel and weight they have to contend with. There's also no reason to couple human payloads with equipment and supplies bound for orbit. In fact, it's downright senseless.
Here are some reliability figures for boosters in common use. With the exception of Soyuz, these are all unmanned boosters. Note that many of these unmanned boosters are as reliable (or even more reliable) than the Shuttle, which becomes a 2 billion dollar supersonic crematorium for all 7 astronauts aboard roughly 1 mission in 50:
Quite frankly, the Shuttle is nothing but a jobs program. Everything that's being done with the ISS could be done - cheaper and safer - using Russian launchers. For some interesting stats regarding launchers and costs, see this PDF file (sorry for the format, but it's informative), this NASA FAQ on launchers (it's from the mid-'90s, but still mostly accurate), and
It's over - the goose is cooked. Silicon Valley is Silicon Detroit. It isn't coming back. Not when cheap engineering and coding labor can be had in India for about $3/hr, "benefits" included, and the US government won't institute tariffs to stop it. What happened to blue collar labor in the US in the '70s and '80s will now happen to those smart, hard working, well-educated white collar boys (and girls). No amount of education or hours on the job will make you competitive with a trained monkey who works for bananas and isn't allowed to talk back to his keepers.
It's purely a race to the bottom. Look for the United States to become the world's most powerful third world nation within a generation, displacing Russia. Kiss your Constitutional rights goodbye - they'll be auctioned off to the highest bidders (corporate America and the religious fanatics).
The good news is, you'll be able to buy a home in California for $50,000. The bad news is, you'll only earn $5,000 a year, half of that will be taken in taxes to support the military and the official state religion, and you'll run a substantial risk of being killed when a gang of religious fanatics lights your train on fire because opposing religious fanatics are allegedly aboard.
If you're lucky, you'll be able to marry a European and emigrate to a country where the utilities are on 24/7, citizens can vote without being shot at (frequently by soldiers), murderous religious fanatics are kept behind bars, healthcare is free, everybody has at least a halfway decent education, plutocrats don't control the media, there's still a substantial manufacturing sector, and workers earn more in a month than you're used to earning in a year.
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>If you don't like the result, show the flaw in
>the logic.
What logic? All you've offered so far are baseless assertions. Christians can't even agree on what Christian morality means. Their morality is as relative as any atheist's. Just look at the kiddie fucking - and the massive coverup of it - that took place in the Catholic Church. The jails in comparatively-religious America are packed full with religious inmates, many if not most of them brought up in the church. So much for Christian morality.
>Didn't I say earlier that atheism unchecked
>leads inevitable to anarchy or totalitarianism?
Yes, you did say this. It just doesn't make any sense. You cite three fairly unique examples, and then try to extrapolate that out to a wider whole. Only you can't. Russia and China both had good reasons for going Communist - the feudal systems they were both locked in were certainly no paradise - and atheism held widespread appeal largely as a reaction to the barbaric excesses of the religious regimes they replaced.
The reality is that the overthrow of many of the church-supported monarchies in Europe lead to the formation of dictatorships that were formally or informally opposed to religion (it happened to one degree or another in France and England, for example). No surprise there - in times of chaos, dictators frequently seize control (Hitler being a prime example), and in cases where the church was propping up a corrupt monarchy, it's no surprise the dictators who replaced it would do everything in their power to break the church.
Organized religion has been on the decline in Europe now for decades. I certainly don't see them slipping into anarchy or totalitarianism. Unlike the far more religious United States, they still respect international law and elect their leaders . . .
>As for your assessment of religion, I see something quite different.
>I see liberal giving, of time, self, and money to help the poor and
>needy. I see people loving those who hate them. I see kindness and
>compassion and a striving for freedom of the individual.
Well, you see what you want to see. I see that, in some religious people. I also see kiddie fucking priests and the massive coverup of their ongoing abuses, organized by the church's leadership and financed by donations from folks far less well-to-do than the church itself. I see that fine religious figure Osama bin Laden hijacking first Afghanistan, plunging it into utter chaos and then saddling it with one of the most truly barbaric regimes of modern times, the Taliban. Then I see him hijacking 4 jet planes and slamming two of them into the largest office buildings in the world, extinguishing the lives of over 2000 secular martyrs.
I certainly don't see any evidence - not one shred - to support the contention that religious people are any more moral than those who aren't religious.
>And when I see the abuses that do happen, I agree with you that they
>are wrong. They are contrary to Christianity, not in accordance with it.
That's a hoot. How many Christian sects are there, thousands? Even "Christians" can't agree on what is and isn't "contrary" to Christianity. And you want people to base their morality on that? Fine. Get the 1000+ Christian sects to agree, and then get back to us on exactly what it is we should believe the sky god wants us to do.
>But the predator who lives by "survival of the fittest", or "might
>makes right", or "pragmatic selfishness" is quite in accordance
>with atheistic morality.
That's a nice strawman you're blowdrying there.
>I'll start w/ 20 million in the Soviet Union,
>65 million under Mao and 2 million in Cambodia.
Again, meaningless statistics. You can no more blame every death on "atheism" than you can blame the deaths of those 15 million or so killed in the Pacific theater during WWII on Buddhism. Modern butchers have had a lot more raw material to work with than those in the past did, as this graph from the US Census Bureau demonstrates. Global population didn't hit 1 billion until around 1800. By the time of Stalin, Hitler, Mao and WWII, it was at over 2 billion. That, along with technological advances, made it possible for a truly stunning number of people to be slaughtered.
Your numbers for Mao and Pol Pot look a bit high according to this site, which provides pretty extensive analysis of 20th century bodycounts for various wars and atrocities.
Mao didn't set out to slaughter 65 million, by the way. 30 million were killed accidentally, during the ironically-named "Great Leap Forward," due to the famine caused by the idiotic economic "reforms" initiated by the Maoists. Although when dealing with human suffering on that scale, I don't think it matters much whether it's 30 million dead or 65 million dead. Either number is inconceivable.
Mao. Stalin. Pol Pot. Seems to me this is more an indictment of dictatorships than it is an indictment of any religious system (or lack thereof).
As for the proportion of population killed (which seems to me to be a more relevant measure, if you're attempting to compare religious, political or economic systems), check out the section on Proportionality from the same site mentioned above.
>The modern atheistic regimes have killed more
>people than all of the "religious" wars in
>history.
Since there were far more people on the earth during "modern" history than there were in the past, this is hardly a relevant point. As a percentage of population killed, they've certainly done no better (or worse) than their religious predecessors. And of course, many of the victims of religion were killed not in wars, but by the zealots in their own nations. From the Spanish Inquisition to the Salem witch trials, religion has been effective at persecuting or slaughtering the innocent within a society, quite apart from any wars between religions or sects.
One could also argue that Soviet-style Communism is as much a religion as Christianity, which sort of negates the argument that these "atheistic" regimes are free from "religion." Replacing one fucked-up, reality-denying philosophy (say, Christianity as it's been practiced traditionally) with another (say, Communism) isn't likely to lead to an improvement in anybody's quality of life.
I almost got a SliMP3 - like the way it serves files, it has great D/A converters, and I like the display - but it's limited to MP3 which is a real deal breaker. I want something that can stream uncompressed audio, so I can throw my CD's in a closet and forget about 'em, even for critical listening.
I believe it also lacks a digital output, which could be a bummer for some users (though with my H/K receiver and the flakey way it handles digital inputs, I'm more concerned about analog output quality).
Check out the cd3o. It utilizes Microsoft's speech synth doodad for Windows to provide a voice guide. Using the guide, it's easy to navigate through your library using your remote to punch in the first few letters of an artist's name or album or track title, or to flip through your pre-defined playlists. And you don't need to squint at some fluoroscopic display halfway across the room.
The Audiotron is also EXPENSIVE compared to the alternatives (particularly the cd3o), its D/A converters are said to be pretty poor (the cd3o and Slimp3 both have better specs), and it takes it forever to scan your drives initially.
While the display seems like a cool idea, in reality you can't see it well from across the room, and it's of little use for managing playlists. I think cd3o has the right idea with their client service / control panel on the server PC and voice guide on the client device. Doesn't require a television (with its inherent whine), doesn't require you to squint at a fluorescent display halfway across the room, and it knocks enough in the way of cost off the price of the unit to allow it to come with built-in WiFi reception.
I'd been toying with the idea of creating my own .WAV/.MP3 server for some time, to use as part of my audio system. In part it's because I'm lazy - I hate having to get up, drag CD's out of their storage cube, open the 5-disc changer, and plop 'em in.
I suppose I could have just bought one of those carousel changers - they can be had on eBay for a couple hundred bucks - and load all of my discs into that. But they're bulky and will be a dead-end if we move to non-CD based music distribution (which seems likely, at least at some point). And I don't want to be stuck burning CD's to load into my carousel down the road. Ick.
My original plan was to build a small Windows XP PC to function as an independent audio server. I'd get a mini-ITX motherboard with built in CPU (one of the VIA EPIA units), a big hard drive, a quiet or silent power supply, a remote and software to drive it, a CD ROM drive, and possibly an LCD display of some sort. It would require quite a bit of effort, but would be tres cool.
Problem is, it would also be tres expensive. A tiny case with a silent power supply would run at least $70 alone. Win XP and the motherboard would cost about the same or more each. Now we're talking $210, not including taxes, shipping, a hard drive, a remote or a display of any kind. Sure, I could use the television as a display, but what about that 15kHz whine? And maybe I could use a smaller drive - one just big enough for XP - and use my PC as a server. But then I'd need a bigger drive for my PC, and I'd need to network the two, and since they're in different rooms I'd be shelling out for wireless networking . . . and suddenly the cost explodes into the $700 range. More than I'm willing to spend.
I did look into a few devices designed to function as networked MP3 players, but they all have problems. The Slimp3 looks promising, with its large bright display, but it only plays MP3 compressed files (WAV's are transcoded into MP3 on your computer before being transmitted - so you get sucky mp3 quality and your PC slows down when WAVs are played) and would require an external wireless receiver. I want to play uncompressed or lossless compressed files, too. In fact, I want to have my entire CD collection available (or at the least, the tracks I'd be likely to listen to now and again). HP makes a device with similar restrictions (it adds on WMA lossy-compressed files) that's even more expensive ($300), but at least has a built-in wireless receiver. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a display. Turtle Beach's Audiotron looks the most promising, but it's expensive ($300 - $350), isn't wireless, and according to what I've read, has a shitty D/A converter. Of course, it also has digital out, but my H/K receiver is fidgety about digital sources, and tends to take a moment to "pickup the phone" when the line is dropped, cutting off the first few seconds of each track when fed a digital signal. So unfortunately, I probably need something that can feed my receiver a decent analog signal.
The Prismiq is probably the best alternative, but it requires the use of a television, which rules it out for use in my audio system. The video features strike me as being of little use - as an apartment dweller, I'll be relying on WiFi, and only the lowest-quality video can be streamed over WiFi (particularly in this high rise, steel framed, steel walled apartment building). The D/A converter is also said to be not the best. And of course, it doesn't support WiFi out of the box, so tack a good $40 onto the price of each unit.
Finally I found a device that's a respectable compromise & won't bust the old budget. It's called a cd3o, and it costs just $200. The website is here. It isn't perfect, but it scores on a lot of points. It's wireless (802.11b) or wired, with its own built-in receiver. It supports Winamp playlists. It doesn't have its own drive - it's just a player that uses your PC as its server. It doesn't just beam the ou
>Recovering only a small space capsule can get
>very expensive, especially if you have to
>involve a water landing.
You keep saying this, but haven't provided any evidence to support the assertion. How much do unplanned water rescues cost today? Certainly not even a fraction of what the launch of any manned rocket (even the small Soyuz) costs. I can't see the cost of plucking the capsule out of the ocean as a stumbling block, sorry. If it were, the fishing industry would go bankrupt overnight.
>Also, people forget the G-forces encountered
>during an Apollo CSM flight can be quite strong
We're already sending astronauts back and forth to the ISS aboard the Soyuz, where they experience similar or even greater forces (9 G's on a recent trip, IIRC). Again, not a relevant issue.
Yes, the Shuttle did haul down a couple of satellites once. But the government had to subsidize that mission, to the tune of about $200 million, IIRC. In other words, it can be done, but there's absolutely no money in it unless you can get the taxpayers to foot the bill.
>First, he claims that the OSP is bad because it only
>ships people, not cargo. That is a good thing, not a
>bad thing.
You apparently read the article, but didn't understand what you were reading. Try reading it again. He thinks the OSP is a bad solution because it doesn't eliminate the need to continue flying the aging, dangerous, outrageously expensive Shuttle in order to supply the ISS with needed cargo, not because it "only ships people." If the OSP "only shipped people" and we had a cheap, unmanned cargo solution for the ISS, the OSP wouldn't be quite such an idiotic concept. As it stands, if we go ahead with the construction of the OSP, NASA will find itself having to support *two* outrageously expensive man-rated launch systems. Dumb.
>He complains about not understanding the plan for the
>escape system. That is his inadequacy, not the OSP's.
>Since the escape system/final stage should be a reliable,
>evolutionary rocket design that gets a lot of attention, the
>odds of it failing catastrophically should be much smaller
>than the odds of one of the booster stages failing. Adding
>this system will, therefore, slightly increase the odds of a
>mission failure, while greatly reducing the odds of a crew
>fatality. Whether that is an "extra" failure mode depends
>on if you are looking at mission failure or crew loss.
I see lots of unfounded assumptions there. "Should be a reliable," "odds of it failing should be much smaller," "slightly increase," "depends upon," etc. What the author of the article doesn't understand is how the OSP is superior to the existing Soyuz solution, or other capsule based systems (for example, the Apollo-derived system he postulates), particularly when it comes to plans for an escape system. Any escape system for the OSP would have to be much, much larger than a comparable piece of equipment for a Soyuz or Apollo-derived solution, because the OSP weighs so damn much. The escape rockets would have to carry more fuel, necessitating a bigger main booster in the first place, further increasing the risk of booster failure. It's a vicious circle.
I agree with the author - the OSP doesn't make any sense no matter how you slice it, from a safety, performance or cost standpoint. Its functions could all be performed faster, better and cheaper with capsule-based solutions utilizing modifications of existing designs.
>The guys at Orbital who put the original design concept
>together went with a winged system, and they definitely
>put a lot of thought into the design.
They put a lot of thought into getting NASA to buy the design. Whether they produced the most efficient design - from a safety and cost standpoint - is another matter entirely. Supposedly smart designers gave us the Shuttle as well, which, as the author of the article points out, is a "flying Ming vase."
>The OSP is a near term, cheap solution with low technical risk.
With a first launch not coming before 2008 (and knowing NASA, not before 2012), you can hardly call the OSP "near term". And since we haven't built one of these things, we also don't have any clue what the cost is going to be to build, launch and support them. The Shuttles were, you recall, supposed to be cheap and reliable, capable of being flown dozens of times a year. At over $500 million a launch, supported by a small army of maintenance and repair workers, and flying one or two missions a year each, they've proven to be anything but. That's not factoring in the fact they explode 1 launch in 50, becoming a flying crematorium for 7 astronauts and about $2 billion in taxpayer cash.
>Lastly, he berates the idea of man rating the EELVs.
>The EELVs were already designed to have the
>reliability of a man rated system (>98%). They have
>yet to have a failure, and it looks like they will meet
>their reliability targets.
Again, you apparently read the article, but didn't
>Remember, the Apollo Command/Service Module
>(CSM) was designed for WATER landing, not
>landing on dry land. There will quite a lot
>of expense involved in sending a recovery
>team out into the middle of the ocean to get
>the returning spacecraft
NASA already has to go out and retrieve the Shuttle's Solid Rocket Boosters after each launch, so they already have a ship capable of performing the task of retrieving a tiny capsule. I'd imagine it would cost less to retrieve a capsule than it would to delay the return of the proposed Orbital Space Plane by a day because of poor weather at the landing site.
And the capsules are likely to be a fraction the cost of any OSP, cheaper to launch because they'd weigh so much less, more robust, safer and cheaper to refurbish (assuming they aren't disposable to begin with).
I've taken to videoing myself putting the DVDs back in the cases and sealing it in the envelope, with my digital camera.
You should patent that process, you know.
>It would be a pretty difficult enterprise to
>come up with a 'sensing' microphone that
>assured good quality from a listening location.
One possibility might be to let people make a deposit on their credit card for a high-quality, $2,000+ studio microphone. They'd use it to balance their system, then FedEx it back to the manufacturer. If they failed to return the mic, the manufacturer would simply go ahead and charge the cost of the mic to their card.
>They also still need a bass module (i.e.
>a "box") because planars don't have enough
>excursion.
That's not always the case. *Small* planar speakers, like Magnepan's $700 entry-level pair, require a subwoofer if you want to reproduce loud low bass (think dance, rap, or the cannons in the 1812 Overature). But the giant-sized, 7' tall top-of-the-line Magnepan speakers certainly don't require a sub. True they're expensive (around $4,000 a pair, I believe), but they're still only a fraction the cost of the B&O system (and not much more expensive than paper-coned made in China junk like Bose).
Even though the smaller planar models don't produce lots of low bass, the bass they do produce is phenomenally accurate - far better than what you get from your typical cone driver. The increased accuracy makes the bass sound somewhat louder than it really is, helping to compensate somewhat for the reduced levels. But if you must listen to the latest Eminem record at full volume, you can always mate a planar speaker with an inexpensive (or expensive) sub.
Bose systems sound like shit. If you think it "sounds awesome," you were comparing it to $300 junk from JBL or Cerwin Vega at Circuit City, not other $3000 systems from manufacturers who spend their money on something other than marketing.
Just to name an example off the top of my head, check out Energy's $1,500 Encore 5.1 system. Blows the doors off of Bose junk selling for twice the price, without being any larger.
Or audition any of Linn's speaker systems in the $2,000 price range. When I first auditioned a pair of small Linn bookshelf speakers last year, I spent 15 minutes looking for the switch to turn off the subwoofer . . . only to finally realize there wasn't any subwoofer. Amazing what a manufacturer can do when they spend their money on quality instead of on marketing.
>All this gimmicky digital signal processing to
>achieve better sound won't improve things if
>you don't have the right kind of room, and
>don't have the speakers in the right places.
That's not entirely true. In theory, you could use signal processing to not only overcome the limitations of the speakers themselves (say, a frequency response that's non-linear relative to the wattage driving the unit, or certain phase issues), but also the environment they've been placed in (room reflections or cancellation effects). In practice though, that would take lots of computing horsepower to do transparently, in real time, without introducing unwanted artifacts that sound worse than the problems you're attempting to address.
It looks like these B&O monsters are just using DSP to help with the bass equalization. They play back some bass tones, have the mic pick them up, analyze which frequencies are enhanced and which are suppressed relative to the input, then boost and cut the signal at the appropriate frequencies. Essentially, it's an automated graphic equalizer for the bass. Nice, but hardly worth $10,000, and not revolutionary by any means.
Revolutionary would be a system that ships with a quality microphone, preferably wireless, that you place at or near your desired listening position (or positions). The system would then analyze the listening environment with a variety of test tones, listening for response irregularities, phase issues, cancellations and other issues. It would then adjust the signal going to the drivers via a powerful DSP, in an attempt to make the signal at the listening position(s) as close an analog to the original signal sent to the speakers as possible.
The technology certainly exists at this point to produce such a device. In fact, I'm surprised nobody is selling one. It would certainly go a long way toward making cruddy speakers sound good, and could make most quality speakers sound fantastic.
>I've always gone for speakers, amps etc. that
>will give the best sound quality, why I would
>then want to use an source, such as MP3, that
>would sound the same on a £50 stereo is beyond
>me.
Eh? Maybe 128kbps MP3's played back over a Soundblaster card's cruddy D/A converters and amps would sound awful amplified through a good stereo system, but a 256kbps MP3, streamed out of my Soyo motherboard's optical TOSLINK port, and converted to analog by my Harman/Kardon receiver's 24-bit 96kHz-capable D/A converters sounds pretty durn good. Not quite as good as the original CD perhaps, but close enough for casual listening.
And of course, you aren't limited to 256kbps or MP3. The latest version of Windows Media Player for example includes support for Meridian Lossless Packing, the same *non*-lossy compression method being utilized for DVD-Audio. A CD compressed utilizing MLP will sound identical to the original, but consume between only 1/2 to 2/3'rds the storage space. With 80GB hard drives becoming commonplace, and the average CD containing only about 400MB worth of audio, that works out to at least 160 CD's worth of full-quality, no-artifacts audio (more if your collection includes a lot of old albums, most of which were only 35-40 minutes long due to the limitations of the LP).
If you're like me, there are only a couple of dozen albums you listen to in their entirety. For many of the rest, you'd only need to have your favorite tracks on hand at all times. Although I own more than 300 CD's, I could easily squeeze everything I listen to regularly onto a single 80GB drive using WMP and MLP, with room left over for 256kbps MP3's of the stuff I seldom listen to.
And of course, with hard drive prices continuing their long plunge in tandem with skyrocketing capacity, it won't be long (maybe a year or so) before 160GB drives are common and quite affordable. At that point, I could store my entire collection, MLP compressed, on a single $100 drive.
>Let's not forget that tapes are a magnetic
>medium. All magnetic media have a temperature
>(the Curie point) at which they will suddenly
>demagnetize. Now I don't know what that
>temperature is for tapes, but it's often not
>that high.
For the magnetic material used for audio tapes it's got to be pretty high - I kept tapes in my car in Arizona for 6 years, and none of them were (much) worse for the wear, even after baking at 140 degrees (plus) 7 days a week, six months out of the year.
Baking tapes is just about the ONLY remedy available if you're experiencing problems with hydrophilic binders. The glue absorbs water over the years, becoming "sticky" and oozing up through the magnetic media itself. You have to bake the tapes (at a fairly low temperature - around 140 degrees, IIRC) in order to drive off that water and stabilize the binder. Of course, the binder won't stay stable, although you can probably slow the process by storing the baked tape in an airtight container along with a packet of silica gel.
>Myself, I'm not sure I'd take the word of a sportswriter.
Oh goodie, argument from authority. I suppose you don't put much weight in physics theories from patent clerks, either?
The "rebuttals" at hal-pc.org are pathetic nitpicks. They do nothing to undermine the basic thrust of Easterbrook's positions, which seem to be that the Shuttles are:
1) Outrageously expensive to build and operate compared to any other lift system.
2) More dangerous to their occupants than any other manned booster.
3) Incapable of living up to most of the promises that NASA made to Congress in order to get them built in the first place.
One of the "rebuttals" at hal-pc is so ignorant it defies description. Easterbrook asserts that, "a rational person might have laughed out loud at the thought that, although school buses are replaced every decade, a spaceship was expected to remain in service for 40 years." The author at hal-pc twitters on in his rebuttal about the B-52, and about how it may end up with a lifespan of over 90 years. Ignoring the fact that the first B-52 flew in 1954, which means the craft will need to remain in service for another 40 years (a completely baseless assertion), the type of energies and forces Shuttles are exposed to simply dwarf those experienced by a B-52. I'm guessing the Shuttles experience more forces acting on them in every launch / landing cycle than a B-52 can expect to experience in its entire operational lifetime. You might as well compare the Shuttle to a paper airplane. Even the SR-71, which the hal-pc author also cites, operates under conditions that are vastly less hostile to materials than those experienced by the Shuttles each and every launch.
As usual, Shuttle proponents can't come up with any positive arguments of their own for supporting the continuation of the Shuttle program, so instead resort to insane levels of nitpicking regarding any arguments against continuing the failed, costly, dangerous program.
>Myself, I think Easterbrook simply doesn't accept the fact
>some things have high inherent risk.
Manned spaceflight is inherently risky. That doesn't mean you should take on unnecessary risks - particularly when you don't gain anything by undertaking those risks, and when you're spending substantially more in the process to boot. I haven't read the Easterbrook articles in some time, but I believe he might even make a similar point in one of his articles. There was no good reason to trade in the Saturn V for the Shuttle. NASA lied to Congress, and the result is the expensive, deadly boondoggle we're stuck with today. This mistake should be rectified. The Shuttle should be scrapped, existing alternatives (such as Soyuz) utilized in the interim, and new, truly superior replacement manned vehicles should be developed. Once which are truly cheaper to build and operate than the current generation of manned launch vehicles, and which are safer, too, regardless of whether these vehicles are radically different from existing disposable boosters or simply the natural evolution of their design.
A real comparison of the cost of the Titian IV-B vs. the Shuttles needs to take into account the entire build / support / fuel / launch equation. It looks as though Shuttles are good for around 20 missions each on average before they blow themselves to bits. Tack on another $100,000,000 or so a launch for the amortized cost of each Shuttle vehicle (and stuff like major Shuttle overhauls), and suddenly the Titan IV-B becomes much, much cheaper than the Shuttle to build / support / fuel / launch.
>No, the space station was placed in that orbit as a compromise
>so that both the American (Shuttle) and the Russian (Soyuz)
>vehicles could get to it. Baikonur [astronautix.com] and Cape
>Canaveral [nasa.gov] are at quite different lattitudes. ISS is
>half way in between.
Yes, true to a point - and it was a stupid compromise. Had we relied on the cheaper, more reliable Russian boosters and scrapped utilizing the Shuttles for ISS construction, crew delivery and resupply, the ISS could have been placed into a substantially higher orbit, requiring fewer reboost missions and therefore becoming inherently cheaper to operate.
Compare the cost of launching unmanned payloads (say, ISS components) on a Russian Proton rocket to the cost of launching them on the Shuttle. It costs around $4,729 a pound to put a payload into low earth orbit with the Shuttle, as opposed to $1,953 a pound with the Proton. Proton can't launch payloads that are quite as large as the Shuttle's (19,760 kg for the Proton vs. 28,803 kg for the Shuttle), but the cost per pound for the Russian vehicle is vastly lower. As opposed to the $300 million plus launch cost of a Shuttle, a Proton costs a comparatively paltry $85 million to build and launch.
And you don't need a rocket as big as a Proton to launch men into space - the Russians routinely send people to the ISS aboard the relatively tiny Soyuz rocket, which only has a capacity of 7,000 kg and costs just $37 million to build and launch (the per-pound cost is also cheaper than the shuttle - $2,432). Compare this to the Shuttles, which cost at least $2 billion to build each (probably more, if you factor in R&D), and well in excess of $300 million each launch (some accounting puts Shuttle launches at an incredible $500 million each).
There also hasn't been a fatal accident involving Soyuz since the 1970's, when an air seal failed during reentry and the crew suffocated. There was a serious accident during the '80s when the booster failed, but the cosmonauts were able to successfully escape the destruction of the vehicle and came away with only minor injuries. That's simply not possible with the Shuttle, since the astronauts are strapped right next to huge tanks of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen (an insanely stupid design - there's no way to be safely blown clear).
There have been something like 1,600 launches of Soyuz-family rockets, as opposed to a little more than 100 Shuttle launches, so clearly most of the bugs have been worked out of the Soyuz system by now. The fact it's a far smaller rocket means less energy is required to launch it into orbit, reducing the stress and strain on the system and making it inherently safer than the Shuttles, with all that fuel and weight they have to contend with. There's also no reason to couple human payloads with equipment and supplies bound for orbit. In fact, it's downright senseless.
Here are some reliability figures for boosters in common use. With the exception of Soyuz, these are all unmanned boosters. Note that many of these unmanned boosters are as reliable (or even more reliable) than the Shuttle, which becomes a 2 billion dollar supersonic crematorium for all 7 astronauts aboard roughly 1 mission in 50:
Atlas 1&2 - 49 launch attempts, 95.9% reliability
Delta 2 - 73, 98.6%
Ariane 4 - 81, 96.3%
Proton - 254, 89.4%
Soyuz - 958, 99.3%
Long March - 54, 90.7%
Quite frankly, the Shuttle is nothing but a jobs program. Everything that's being done with the ISS could be done - cheaper and safer - using Russian launchers. For some interesting stats regarding launchers and costs, see this PDF file (sorry for the format, but it's informative), this NASA FAQ on launchers (it's from the mid-'90s, but still mostly accurate), and
It's over - the goose is cooked. Silicon Valley is Silicon Detroit. It isn't coming back. Not when cheap engineering and coding labor can be had in India for about $3/hr, "benefits" included, and the US government won't institute tariffs to stop it. What happened to blue collar labor in the US in the '70s and '80s will now happen to those smart, hard working, well-educated white collar boys (and girls). No amount of education or hours on the job will make you competitive with a trained monkey who works for bananas and isn't allowed to talk back to his keepers.
It's purely a race to the bottom. Look for the United States to become the world's most powerful third world nation within a generation, displacing Russia. Kiss your Constitutional rights goodbye - they'll be auctioned off to the highest bidders (corporate America and the religious fanatics).
The good news is, you'll be able to buy a home in California for $50,000. The bad news is, you'll only earn $5,000 a year, half of that will be taken in taxes to support the military and the official state religion, and you'll run a substantial risk of being killed when a gang of religious fanatics lights your train on fire because opposing religious fanatics are allegedly aboard.
If you're lucky, you'll be able to marry a European and emigrate to a country where the utilities are on 24/7, citizens can vote without being shot at (frequently by soldiers), murderous religious fanatics are kept behind bars, healthcare is free, everybody has at least a halfway decent education, plutocrats don't control the media, there's still a substantial manufacturing sector, and workers earn more in a month than you're used to earning in a year.
Dungeon Master was originally *developed* for the Atari ST, and later ported to the other platforms (Amiga, //gs, PC).