The cost of the parts for the first
amateur satellite (OSCAR-1) is widely quoted
at $26.00. This excludes labour costs. The launch was free - Uncle Sam (i.e. taxpayers) picked
up the tab.
Even today the going rate
is on the order of 5 figures per kilo to low Earth orbit.
That's in U.S. dollars, by the way...
The most expensive component of modern
satellites is usually the solar panels.
Because of this, many low-end projects
use batteries, run for a few weeks, and
then they die.
The Powers That Be look favourably on such satellites, since they
will automatically turn themselves off.
when the batteries run down.
No human intervention required.
Polar orbit launches don't get
much help from Earth's rotation, but they still
have range safety issues: if the rocket blows
up, will the wreckage land on anybody?
The U.S. launches almost all of its polar orbit
satellites from
Vandenberg AFB in California. By
launching to the south there
are no people for a very long way, should anything go wrong. The situation is
similar for Alaska.
But on the same time, science demands that we ask "what if this is true?". If he really has a free energy device, what amazing thing could he do to prove that it works?
I'm reminded of a quote from a science fiction
story I read years ago - "It works, eh? How?"
I'm not interested in demonstrations. Show
me the underlying theory and I'll believe you. The First Law of Thermodynamics is
well established, and there are no apparent
holes in it, so it would have to be one hell of a theory...
I figured the encryption algorithm out in
about 30 seconds by inspection. There is probably a very clever solution to the
problem the message poses, but I'd
just work
it out by brute force.
It's sometimes amazing what are considered "difficult" math problems. An example I
read in the newspaper that was supposedly
in a national mathematics contest:
Consider all the 9 digit numbers
composed of the digits 1 through 9 in all possible
orders. What proportion of them are divisible by 18?
I figured this one out in my head
while eating at McDonalds.
Have you linux guys even given Windows XP a fair shot?
A few weeks ago I was walking by a local
consumer high-tech place, and saw a sign out
front that proclaimed Windows XP: in-store demos today!
I
carefully hid my business cards, posed
as a home user with interest in multimedia
and digital photography (quasi-true), and asked what was so
cool about Windows XP.
Apparently you can have multiple users, with their
own environments. Cool! You can plug a digital camera
in and take pictures. Far out!
You can even put pictures on the login
screen. Wow!
All in all, just about the clunkiest demo I've seen of any system. Worse, the salesdroid
never did answer my question, because
all the digital camera stuff is not
actually new in XP.
I couldn't
help but notice the hefty hardware
(1.2 GHz Athlon) and the mediocre performance.
Sorry, not for me. I'll stick
to my Linux box. 550 MHz Pentium 3.
Could use a little more oomph when playing DVDs (bus speed, methinks), but works fine otherwise.
I would love to see the US Congress require all e-mail marketeers to be opt-in instead of opt-out (with the Death Penalty for violators). However, I don't know if this would be effective as most of the SPAM coming in is from foreign servers (mainly Asian nations).
Other than what possible jurisdiction the U.S. Congress
might have over Taiwan or Hong Kong-based spammers,
many spammers claim that I have opted
in. No, I don't believe a word of it.
The utter lack of market research is glaringly
obvious, like the myriad debt-consolidation
ads (I don't owe much of anything to anybody),
various gender-inappropriate offers,
solicitations for diploma-mill degrees
(I got my M.A.Sc. the hard way), and so on.
My usual observation: just how stupid do these people
think I am?
I mean, given the size of space and all, the amount of dust it has passed through is probably negligable, let alone what could have stuck to the camera...
Shuttles get hit by stuff all the time.
Cassini has gone a lot further, and is going
a lot faster. It has occupied a couple
of trillion cubic meters so far, and that's
a lot of space. Ample opportunity to hit
dust particles.
At interplanetary space speeds, a grain of sand is a
serious collision. 15 to 20 times
the speed of a rifle bullet. Ouch!
The other possibility is that Fermat's "proof"
was a proof by the standards of the day, where
it was acceptable to provide a few examples to
prove something. He may also have been wrong.
Proving FLT for any particular n is straightforward. Proving it for all n
is what took until the 1990s.
I haven't seen any mention of the fact that there was a play based on this book. I know it ran in London because I saw it there. I think it also ran on Broadway.
Something tells me that was the basis for the
made-for-tv film Breaking the Code. More about Turing as a person,
rather than a techie history.
Sorry, kiddies, but they're exactly right:
somebody who has any business doing this
wouldn't be asking here. Used scopes
are cheap, and a lot less hassle.
The mystery for me is why it's viewed as
such a deadly insult to point this out.
Some of my favourite titles are from a
weird and warped Aussie tv show a few
years back. The original
web site appears dead, but there is an archive
here - click on the
Home Page link.
Some of my faves:
It leads to tighter clearances, literally, on landing approach I imagine.
While Orbital's L-1011 carries Pegasus underneath for launch, I'd be surprised if they ferry
it to launch sites that way. Keep it inside,
protected (it will fit inside an L-1011,
but they may transport it other ways), until it has no choice but to
face the elements.
Yes, one of them blew up recently. But that's one launch
failure in over 30 launches.
By launch
vehicle standards, this
is a good record. According to my copy of
Space Mission Analysis and Design
(2nd ed., Table 18-3), the most reliable
launch vehicles at the time (1992) were Titan II, Titan IV and N1/H1 (R = 1.00), followed
by the Shuttle (R = 0.98). Pegasus would be 4th on the
list (R = 0.97).
If I had a satellite
to launch, I'd consider Pegasus without hesitation.
I know that this is the obvious thing to say, but hell, Isaac Asimov would be a great start in reading on things.
Agreed. If you want technology, you
need to read technological, i.e. hard
science fiction. Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein et al.
Others have mentioned Asimov's robot stories, and one point I always
liked was that the robots were machines,
created by engineers, invented for a purpose. They were designed to perform a function,
not to demonstrate that There Are Things Man
Was Not Meant To Know.
One of my favourite visual records remains
2001. Check out the navigation
displays in the spacecraft. Remember that this
was 1968, when they had to be animated by hand
and matted in to the film.
I remember a few years ago when a newly
launched amateur satellite proved to have
sufficiently sensitive receivers that it could ba accessed with a handheld radio.
One of the people who did the testing noted that
he remembered the first person he had seen talking
to a spacecraft with a handheld radio. His name was Captain Kirk.
I've often wondered if it was some
really deep hangup of the
(almost exclusively male) people who create them, or if it is just how
they must look to function.
I've always felt Ariane 4 looked the part even more so. The web page at
Arianespace shows this clearly.
All kidding aside, there are several orders
of magnitude between the results reported
in this thread, and actually getting
in to space. I hope they can
make it work. But the people at NASA, ESA
et al are not fools, and if they spent that
much time and money on the problem it
just might be because it's a harder problem
than it looks...
At the end of the day, I want no part of your lame ass "let's hang out" nonsense. Just an opportunity to relax and get my self on someone's "bad" list whenn my mouth starts moving too freely.
I agree, but for a different reason.
Fundamentally, I am a highly introverted person.
Over the years, I have learned that being
so introverted can be career-limiting.
So I have learned to pretend to be a
bit of an extrovert at work.
I do it well enough that only a few very perceptive people
see it for the act that it is.
But when work is over I need to recharge, and I can only do that by myself, because
of who I really am.
I know of at least one web page that has been
very carefully constructed so that search engines won't find it, but people who
know what they're looking for will find it easily.
With no subject-specific keywords, however, unless
you do know what the author
is talking about, you won't have any
idea what
she's so pissed off about.
No, don't ask: I am routinely pissed off
for the same reason, and will not post the URL here.
I wouldn't mind if searches for my
name brought up my current web page, rather
than the one I had in 1995. But that's
another matter.
My last move I said "fuck it" and shipped it all regular mail.
I'll second that. I sent a computer to my Mum,
from Ontario to B.C. Two boxes, fully insured, 25 bucks in postage. Arrived in less than a week,
not a scratch on it.
My landlord even gave me a lift to the post office. How could I lose?
I've tried UPS, and my experiences have all been
negative.
Cross-border shipments are particularly harrowing.
It is suspected that neutrinos can oscillate between several types, and the detectors are sensitive to certain types.
This was the leading theory presented
the other night. It also explains why the SuperK and SNO
numbers are different: SNO can only see electron
neutrinos, while SuperK can (in theory, at least)
see other kinds.
A detector for neutrinos. Have a look at their
web page.
I attended a talk last night by one of the
scientists from the
Sudbury neutrino detector.
One of their Big Issues at the moment is figuring
out why all the best neutrino detectors only pick up
a fraction of the neutrinos predicted
by all the best theories on the innards
of stars.
I've test-driven an Insight, and have
ridden in a Prius.
The Insight was very much the sporty two-seater. I noted that the electric
boost gauge on the dash acted much like a turbo boost gauge, except for no lag.
A colleague at work drives a Prius. I marvelled at
how quiet it was at idle, until I saw the
display on the dash.
A taxi company here in Vancouver run
Prius taxis. Haven't heard anything about them, though
I see them whirring by every now and then.
My car is a 1986 VW Jetta. It's smooth,
comfortable, and economical (about
6l/100km on the highway). I suspect it's also
the last purely gas-engined car I'll ever own.
There's an active
electric vehicle club in Vancouver. Lots of
conversions, ranging from grotty to
really nice.
I've played with a handful of other
distributions, including RedHat and SuSE, but
always come back to Slackware.
Slackware was my
very first Linux distribution, back when
my home system was a 486/66. I had just bought
a used computer, booted it, found that it
had Windows 3.1 on it, marvelled that people
actually paid money for Windows, bought a Linux book
that came with a Slackware CD, and the rest was history.
Slackware hasn't fallen into the all-too-common
trap of assuming that a GUI app is
a priori
good, or that a character-based application
is a priori bad. It assumes
that you know what hardware your
computer actually contains. This is bad?
Just because Windows uses a
thinking-optional GUI install program doesn't mean that Linux
has to.
...laura
Re:It's not "da Vinci"; it's "Leonardo".
on
Da Vinci Bridge Built
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Leonardo actually signed most of his
stuff as Io, Leonardo ("I, Leonardo").
Until relatively recently, most people were known
as So-and-So from Some-Place,
possibly with the addition of Son or Daughter
of Somebody.
There just wasn't enough travel or communication
to make any finer-granularity naming scheme
necessary.
To this day Russians use the So-and-so,
Son/Daughter of Somebody form, which is the
usual adult form of address. Icelanders
form names like this too. The Celtic
patronymics Mc/Mac are
well known.
Examples: Mikhail Sergeyevich ("son of Sergei") Gorbachev, Bjork Gudmundsdottir.
In France having la particule "de"
in one's name is positively fashionable.
People search family trees to find any
justification for using it. They may
even invent justification: one of
Napoleon's colleagues changed his name
from Demorny to de Morny.
Slashdot Mirror
The cost of the parts for the first amateur satellite (OSCAR-1) is widely quoted at $26.00. This excludes labour costs. The launch was free - Uncle Sam (i.e. taxpayers) picked up the tab. Even today the going rate is on the order of 5 figures per kilo to low Earth orbit. That's in U.S. dollars, by the way...
The most expensive component of modern satellites is usually the solar panels. Because of this, many low-end projects use batteries, run for a few weeks, and then they die.
The Powers That Be look favourably on such satellites, since they will automatically turn themselves off. when the batteries run down. No human intervention required.
...laura
Polar orbit launches don't get much help from Earth's rotation, but they still have range safety issues: if the rocket blows up, will the wreckage land on anybody?
The U.S. launches almost all of its polar orbit satellites from Vandenberg AFB in California. By launching to the south there are no people for a very long way, should anything go wrong. The situation is similar for Alaska.
...laura
I'm reminded of a quote from a science fiction story I read years ago - "It works, eh? How?"
I'm not interested in demonstrations. Show me the underlying theory and I'll believe you. The First Law of Thermodynamics is well established, and there are no apparent holes in it, so it would have to be one hell of a theory...
...laura
No, it's not quite that obvious...my solution was:
A number is divisible by 18 if it is divisible by 2 and by 9.
All these numbers are divisible by 9, since 1+2+3+...9=45, which is divisible by 9.
The numbers that end in 2, 4, 6 or 8 are divisible by 2. Since that's 4 out of the 9 possible endings, the answer is 4/9.
...laura
I figured the encryption algorithm out in about 30 seconds by inspection. There is probably a very clever solution to the problem the message poses, but I'd just work it out by brute force.
It's sometimes amazing what are considered "difficult" math problems. An example I read in the newspaper that was supposedly in a national mathematics contest:
I figured this one out in my head while eating at McDonalds.
...laura
A few weeks ago I was walking by a local consumer high-tech place, and saw a sign out front that proclaimed Windows XP: in-store demos today! I carefully hid my business cards, posed as a home user with interest in multimedia and digital photography (quasi-true), and asked what was so cool about Windows XP.
Apparently you can have multiple users, with their own environments. Cool! You can plug a digital camera in and take pictures. Far out! You can even put pictures on the login screen. Wow!
All in all, just about the clunkiest demo I've seen of any system. Worse, the salesdroid never did answer my question, because all the digital camera stuff is not actually new in XP. I couldn't help but notice the hefty hardware (1.2 GHz Athlon) and the mediocre performance.
Sorry, not for me. I'll stick to my Linux box. 550 MHz Pentium 3. Could use a little more oomph when playing DVDs (bus speed, methinks), but works fine otherwise.
It also talks to digital cameras.
...laura
Other than what possible jurisdiction the U.S. Congress might have over Taiwan or Hong Kong-based spammers, many spammers claim that I have opted in. No, I don't believe a word of it.
The utter lack of market research is glaringly obvious, like the myriad debt-consolidation ads (I don't owe much of anything to anybody), various gender-inappropriate offers, solicitations for diploma-mill degrees (I got my M.A.Sc. the hard way), and so on.
My usual observation: just how stupid do these people think I am?
...laura
Shuttles get hit by stuff all the time. Cassini has gone a lot further, and is going a lot faster. It has occupied a couple of trillion cubic meters so far, and that's a lot of space. Ample opportunity to hit dust particles.
At interplanetary space speeds, a grain of sand is a serious collision. 15 to 20 times the speed of a rifle bullet. Ouch!
...laura
The other possibility is that Fermat's "proof" was a proof by the standards of the day, where it was acceptable to provide a few examples to prove something. He may also have been wrong.
Proving FLT for any particular n is straightforward. Proving it for all n is what took until the 1990s.
...laura
Patent it and sue the ass off anybody who tries to use it. :-)
...laura
Something tells me that was the basis for the made-for-tv film Breaking the Code. More about Turing as a person, rather than a techie history.
Interesting film.
...laura
Sorry, kiddies, but they're exactly right: somebody who has any business doing this wouldn't be asking here. Used scopes are cheap, and a lot less hassle.
The mystery for me is why it's viewed as such a deadly insult to point this out.
...laura
Titles?
Some of my favourite titles are from a weird and warped Aussie tv show a few years back. The original web site appears dead, but there is an archive here - click on the Home Page link. Some of my faves:
The Sound of One Hand Killing
Don't Cry For Me Arch 'n' Tina
You Light Up My Wife
"K for Kleen!"
...laura
While Orbital's L-1011 carries Pegasus underneath for launch, I'd be surprised if they ferry it to launch sites that way. Keep it inside, protected (it will fit inside an L-1011, but they may transport it other ways), until it has no choice but to face the elements.
Yes, one of them blew up recently. But that's one launch failure in over 30 launches.
By launch vehicle standards, this is a good record. According to my copy of Space Mission Analysis and Design (2nd ed., Table 18-3), the most reliable launch vehicles at the time (1992) were Titan II, Titan IV and N1/H1 (R = 1.00), followed by the Shuttle (R = 0.98). Pegasus would be 4th on the list (R = 0.97).
If I had a satellite to launch, I'd consider Pegasus without hesitation.
...laura
Agreed. If you want technology, you need to read technological, i.e. hard science fiction. Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein et al.
Others have mentioned Asimov's robot stories, and one point I always liked was that the robots were machines, created by engineers, invented for a purpose. They were designed to perform a function, not to demonstrate that There Are Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.
One of my favourite visual records remains 2001. Check out the navigation displays in the spacecraft. Remember that this was 1968, when they had to be animated by hand and matted in to the film.
I remember a few years ago when a newly launched amateur satellite proved to have sufficiently sensitive receivers that it could ba accessed with a handheld radio. One of the people who did the testing noted that he remembered the first person he had seen talking to a spacecraft with a handheld radio. His name was Captain Kirk.
...laura
They all do.
I've often wondered if it was some really deep hangup of the (almost exclusively male) people who create them, or if it is just how they must look to function. I've always felt Ariane 4 looked the part even more so. The web page at Arianespace shows this clearly.
All kidding aside, there are several orders of magnitude between the results reported in this thread, and actually getting in to space. I hope they can make it work. But the people at NASA, ESA et al are not fools, and if they spent that much time and money on the problem it just might be because it's a harder problem than it looks...
...laura
I agree, but for a different reason.
Fundamentally, I am a highly introverted person.
Over the years, I have learned that being so introverted can be career-limiting.
So I have learned to pretend to be a bit of an extrovert at work. I do it well enough that only a few very perceptive people see it for the act that it is.
But when work is over I need to recharge, and I can only do that by myself, because of who I really am.
...laura
I know of at least one web page that has been very carefully constructed so that search engines won't find it, but people who know what they're looking for will find it easily.
With no subject-specific keywords, however, unless you do know what the author is talking about, you won't have any idea what she's so pissed off about.
No, don't ask: I am routinely pissed off for the same reason, and will not post the URL here.
I wouldn't mind if searches for my name brought up my current web page, rather than the one I had in 1995. But that's another matter.
...laura
I'll second that. I sent a computer to my Mum, from Ontario to B.C. Two boxes, fully insured, 25 bucks in postage. Arrived in less than a week, not a scratch on it. My landlord even gave me a lift to the post office. How could I lose?
I've tried UPS, and my experiences have all been negative. Cross-border shipments are particularly harrowing.
...laura
This was the leading theory presented the other night. It also explains why the SuperK and SNO numbers are different: SNO can only see electron neutrinos, while SuperK can (in theory, at least) see other kinds.
...laura
A detector for neutrinos. Have a look at their web page.
I attended a talk last night by one of the scientists from the Sudbury neutrino detector. One of their Big Issues at the moment is figuring out why all the best neutrino detectors only pick up a fraction of the neutrinos predicted by all the best theories on the innards of stars.
...laura
I've test-driven an Insight, and have ridden in a Prius.
The Insight was very much the sporty two-seater. I noted that the electric boost gauge on the dash acted much like a turbo boost gauge, except for no lag.
A colleague at work drives a Prius. I marvelled at how quiet it was at idle, until I saw the display on the dash. A taxi company here in Vancouver run Prius taxis. Haven't heard anything about them, though I see them whirring by every now and then.
My car is a 1986 VW Jetta. It's smooth, comfortable, and economical (about 6l/100km on the highway). I suspect it's also the last purely gas-engined car I'll ever own.
There's an active electric vehicle club in Vancouver. Lots of conversions, ranging from grotty to really nice.
...laura
Maybe it will run Windows XP at a decent speed? I saw a demo running on a 1.3 GHz Athlon last weekend and it was decidedly sluggish...
....laura who tried very hard not to laugh
I've played with a handful of other distributions, including RedHat and SuSE, but always come back to Slackware.
Slackware was my very first Linux distribution, back when my home system was a 486/66. I had just bought a used computer, booted it, found that it had Windows 3.1 on it, marvelled that people actually paid money for Windows, bought a Linux book that came with a Slackware CD, and the rest was history.
Slackware hasn't fallen into the all-too-common trap of assuming that a GUI app is a priori good, or that a character-based application is a priori bad. It assumes that you know what hardware your computer actually contains. This is bad?
Just because Windows uses a thinking-optional GUI install program doesn't mean that Linux has to.
...laura
Leonardo actually signed most of his stuff as Io, Leonardo ("I, Leonardo").
Until relatively recently, most people were known as So-and-So from Some-Place, possibly with the addition of Son or Daughter of Somebody. There just wasn't enough travel or communication to make any finer-granularity naming scheme necessary.
To this day Russians use the So-and-so, Son/Daughter of Somebody form, which is the usual adult form of address. Icelanders form names like this too. The Celtic patronymics Mc/Mac are well known.
Examples: Mikhail Sergeyevich ("son of Sergei") Gorbachev, Bjork Gudmundsdottir.
In France having la particule "de" in one's name is positively fashionable. People search family trees to find any justification for using it. They may even invent justification: one of Napoleon's colleagues changed his name from Demorny to de Morny.
All we have in Canada is a popular TV show called Da Vinci's Inquest.
...laura of Vancouver, daughter of Dennis