I doubt that Scaled will need to build SpaceShipTwo to make their attempt. (Barring some loss-of-vehicle accident with SS1.)
If it was anybody else, I'd wonder about their ability to make their first prototype reach the target. Supersonic high-altitude flight is not exactly an easy environment to simulate on the ground.
But as it happens, Scaled has previous experience in this very environment. They were involved in the engineering and production of structural flight components for Orbital Sciences' Pegasus booster. No other X-Prize competitor that I'm aware of has flown components into orbit, let alone components that are so similar to their X-Prize effort.
This leads me to believe that they have the engineering experience to design the SS1 for the X-Prize and get it right the first time.
And even if they don't, the same problem applies to all the teams. If Scaled doesn't have the expertise to get it right the first time, there's no reason to think that Armadillo (or anyone else) will have better luck.
What do I mean by positive sum? Heck, I figured you knew... you used the term:
[...] folks don't even put sigificant effort into conceiving of truly positive sum approaches to humanity's future they are so stuck in a narrow way of looking at the world.
Positive sum, or more generally non-zero-sum, is a buzzword that describes the benefits of cooperation in a system. See nonzero.org.
First off, it isn't a matter of bringing materials back to earth. The fundamental question is the surface of a planet the right place for a technological civilization [...]
That may be so, but it isn't what you asserted in the previous post that I replied to. If you want to engage in a constructve conversation, you'll have to make up your mind about what you mean to assert.:)
There _may_ be some folks that can successfully create a population control policy that has no negative side effects [...] but I sure haven't seen it.
Who said it wouldn't have negative side effects? Most methods of population control will be highly unpleasant, even if they're preferable to the traditional War, Pestilence, Famine and Death. Global human population will eventually stabilize, or it will peak and crash. How long it takes to stabilize, at what population number that is, and how painfully the stability is accomplished is up to us to work out.
But don't lose hope. It appears that the single most effective population control measure is the education of young women. The effect may or may not be directly causal, but the association is clear enough to warrant action: Teach the children well, especially the girls.
My sense is that societies without frontiers have an inherent tendency to become authoritarian and insular--I really can't think of good exceptions.
This is a common American idea that has roots in Manifest Destiny. (Or maybe just Heinlein.) But it does not appear to be supported by facts. What about The Netherlands, Switzerland, and Japan? Sure, Japan was authoritarian and insular, but it wasn't the addition of frontiers that changed the society. There are plenty of other examples of frontierless societies that are neither authoritarian nor insular, or at least no more so than the good ol' US of A.
Colonizing in or above orbit would be nice, for a variety of reasons. But it is not necessary or sufficient to achieve a "a democratic, non-authoritarian, non-genocidal world order with population stability and preservation of human diversity."
Quite simply, existing growth of energy and raw material apprears unlikely to continue without utilization of non-terrestrial materials.
Well, sure. Population growth can't continue indefinitely without running short of raw materials. (And room.)
But what raw materials are we talking about here? If I'm not mistaken, the only materials available in abundance in near space are metals, and we're pretty well set for them. Our future resource shortages are more likely to be along the lines of fresh water than iron ingots.
Given the energy expenditure involved in extracting additional raw materials and bringing them safely to Earth, it seems to me that the same energy would be better spent recycling the contents of our landfills, cleaning up watersheds, and slowing population growth.
(Besides, who said indefinite growth is even desireable? If we end up in a position where population pressure is forcing migration up the gravity well, a few rockets ain't gonna cut the mustard anyway.)
It's not that I'm not a space enthusiast; I am. I hope humanity does colonize off-planet one day. But I don't see how space is a necessary or sufficient component for positive-sum approaches.
I've been paying more attention to Scaled than to Armadillo, so any comparison I make of their relative capabilities should be taken with some salt. That said, it looks to me that Scaled is currently closer than Armadillo. Their 20km is about 19.99km higher than Armadillo, so it's nothing to sneeze at.
Scaled has flown their vehicle under power, and to supersonic speeds. Apparently all non-propulsion systems are fully flight-qualified. They have ground-tested their rocket for the full duration necessary for an X-Prize flight, and fired it in flight for a short duration. The initial supersonic flight of SS1 appears to have been a complete success, except for the scrape they got on landing. That damage is now repaired, and they have flown again since, albeit unpowered. They're not nearly as open about what they're doing as Armadillo, though. They may well have taken another flight or two and not announced it yet. It wouldn't surprise me much if they actually accomplish a 100km flight before announcing that they're ready to fly for the prize.
Armadillo, on the other hand, does not yet have reliably relighting engines, which is kind of a big deal for them. (Or they didn't have 'em a couple weeks ago, anyway.) Given that their vehicle design makes this a life-safety issue, I expect they're gonna need many tests to validate their operation before they do a manned flight over 50 feet. Once they're ready to do that, they will still need to do enough test flights to ensure they understand the vehicle enough to try for the prize.
I think Armadillo's got an excellent shot at making a 100km flight, but I don't think they're going to beat Scaled. It's too bad about their previous fuel difficulties; that cost them a lot of time, and it looks to me that the delay may have cost them the prize.
The GMTBs that I'm familiar with would not be caught dead in a Starbucks, instrument of corporate dominance that it is. They much prefer locally-owned coffee shops. (Or better still, worker-owned cooperatives.)
I happened to be in charge of IT for two different small companies near the Software Assurance deadline, and made the recommendation to decline the move to SA.
In both cases, it just did not look worthwhile... I didn't think the Microsoft product cycle was likely to be fast enough to warrant the subscription. (Plus I was annoyed with the enforced change, as were many other folks in the industry... but that wasn't sufficient basis for the decision, alas.)
But it was a pretty high stakes game. Guessing wrong would cost thouands of dollars in the long run for each company. It's quite a relief to see that I guessed correctly... so far.
Amusingly, Microsoft has now managed to give pretty much all of its business customers cause to be annoyed with them. The first group was annoyed by the enforced choice between the loss of upgrade value and the expense of Software Assurance. The second group, that chose SA, should be getting pissed off right about... [checks watch]... now.
Fair enough. Stealthiness and ease of maintenance are both worthy goals. But as I see it, no one is talking about a specialized close air support aircraft for the replacement to the A-10. That's what puzzles me.
It seems to me that one of the reasons the A-10 has been so successful is that it was designed for the role it fills, and for nothing else. The designers did not have to trade off protection or payload for speed.
In the close air support environment, it seems to me that no amount of stealth or speed is going to let an aircraft get away without taking some serious lumps now and then. I don't see the single-engine JSF (or other potential CAS replacements) being designed to stand up to much punishment.
Stand-off precision-guided weapons make up for a lot, of course. But it seems likely to be an insufficient substitute in the long run. Eventually, some poor bastard is going to have to get in close with a thin-skinned JSF, and I'm afraid that a few weeks later his widow is gonna be wishing he had had an A-10.
People ask my why I have a beard. Up until now, I've just said, "Because I hate shaving." Now, I get to add scientific legitimacy to my disdain!
I can add this to my otherwise perfect day: * Cool, sunny day: check. * A long lunch away from work, including beer: check. * An upcoming evening of gaming: check. * Got laid this morning, and will again tonight: check. * New reason to avoid shaving: check.
Publishing warehouse management software with support for RFID is not exactly a big deal. The software presumably had a barcode module before, and now they've added an RFID module. So what? It's just another way to do the same thing. Warehousing is where RFID makes sense. The trouble with RFID has never been in the supply-chain side.
RFID only becomes a problem when active tags escape the market and remain with the end user. Escaped tags are a hardware problem, not a software problem, and trying to bash Microsoft for supporting RFID in warehousing software is just silly.
There are so many good reasons ro bash Microsoft that there exists no need to conjure up bad ones.
More science out of Hubble would be great. I hope someone will find a way to keep it operational and producing public data, and I don't much care who does it. But if we can't save it for science, we should at least save it for history.
With the shuttles out of the question, we don't currently have the ability to bring it down in one piece... or even safely. It appears that all agree we should send up a robot tug of some sort to gain control of Hubble's orbit and keep it from falling on Topeka.
If we're going to all the trouble of developing and launching a tug, let's push the darn thing up, not down. If I understand correctly, an ion thruster could give Hubble a gentle shove for months and move it very, very slowly to an orbit that would be stable for hundreds of years.
Eventually, if humanity progresses into space, we'll have the capability to bring it down intact as a priceless historical artifact.
Have these people forgotten what committee they sit on? The only thing worse would be an ethics committee doing this.
Man. I miss the good old days when partisan squabbles were settled by duels or a good brawl. This is just sad. The "greatest deliberative body in the world" has shamed itself.
(By the way: if you live in Oregon, there's an initiative being floated to make the state legislature nonpartisan, and thereby avoid this sort of shenannigan. For more info, see this article. If only we could do the same at the federal level!)
In 2090, on the 100th anneversary of the launching of Hubble, where will it be? Will history forgive us for dropping such a significant artifact in the ocean?
All seem to agree that the risk of letting Hubble fall out of orbit without some additional guidance is too high. (I have read figures stating that it'd be about a 1 in 700 chance of a fatality from the debris.) Apparently we're going to send a robot tug to move it.
but if we go to all the trouble of developing a robot tug to move Hubble, why are we moving it down?
It's going to be decommissioned eventually, but we can save it for future historians. We just need to put it in a high and stable enough orbit, and eventually someone will recover it. (Hopefully for history, possibly for salvage.) Don't know who, don't know when, but if humanity continues to climb into space it will happen eventually.
I realize it will take a more robust tug to do this, but it's not like we're in a hurry. We can put an ion thruster on the tug and let it boost for months if we need to. Heck, let's take it all the way to a Lagrange point.
It's a value judgement... and according to my values, I think this is not a great idea.
First, I think the benefits of having free and semi-anonymous e-mail outweigh the disadvantages of having to use and maintain spam filters. Obviously, many people disagree with me here, and more all the time.
(Here's a conspiracy for ya: what if some Big Brother is trying to kill the free exchange of ideas in e-mail by burying the whole system with spam? I don't believe it's true, but it's worth wondering about before jumping to non-free solutions!)
Second, even if I thought that killing spam was worth the cost of crippling some of e-mail's better and more distinctive features, I think going about it in a non-standards-based way is likely to be a road to chaos.
The best solution, I think, would be to supplant e-mail with something new that works in a more trusted and accountable way. If someone really hates spam, they can use only the new system; if they want anonymity and freedom at the cost of spam, they can use the current mail system. The systems could coexist much like Usenet and the Web; each is useful for different things.
This is a reasonable use of RFID. Just like for warehouse inventory control, it's a technical means to reduce "friction" in the system. In this case, it's without real harm to anyone. (Except card counters, I suppose.)
Harm is only likely when the tags get out the door of a monitored facility while intact and operational. Unlike razor blades in a market, chips are not intended to leave the premises of the casino. Cash 'em in, and you're clean.
As others have pointed out, it's not like a person has any privacy in a casino anyway.
Nitpicks: Reaching orbit does not mean escaping the gravity well, nor does it require escape velocity. Many useful orbits exist well below geosynchronous; note that the space shuttle never gets above a couple hundred kilometers. Now that's out of the way, to your point:
The X-prize is not about reaching space, so much as it is about spurring development. The prize for a solo nonstop flight over the Atlantic drove development of methods to reach the rather artificial goal, and those methods were useful in achieving other goals later. Some may have been useful directly, and some as examples of methods to be avoided. The same should hold true of developments for the X-prize... that's the point.
I am not a rocket scientist, and I have no idea if the Scaled, Armadillo, or other teams' efforts will really scale up to true orbital capability. Probably not, I think. But with each entry achieving its own innovations, it is likely that some combination of the lessons learned will contribute to the success of the next goal... whatever that is. It's all progress, and pretty darn cool besides. We can worry about scaling up later.
I wonder why Armadillo is listed as a Canadian effort in the X-Prize PDF. Maybe I just haven't been paying close enough attention lately... did we trade Texas for Quebec when I wasn't looking?
Hmm... come to think of it, maybe that's not such a bad idea.
It seems to me like gerrymandering could be cut to manageable proportions by mandating a few simple rules, enforced in order of priority:
1) Districts must be contiguous. 2) No party registration data may be used while assigning districts. 3) Districts must encompass areas equivalent in population within 0.X%. 4) Districts must have a ratio of perimeter to area of no more than Y. 5) Redistricting may not move the geographical center of any district by more than Z miles per census cycle.
We'd need to do a little study to find apprpriate values for X, Y, and Z, of course. But does it really need to be any harder than this? It is about fairness of representation... right?
The public radio show This American Life covered the issue (but not Gore Vidal) in last week's episode #250, "The Annoying Gap Between Theory and Practice". See thislife.org for an audio stream.
This may or may not count as mainstream media, of course, but the explanation of the problem was very accessible. It's excellent coverage to pass along to non-technical folk.
The best guess of Alyeska's seismic experts was that in a magnitude 8 earthquake -- the largest expected -- the ground could shift up to 30 feet, but the average would be 10 feet, along the fault. Alyeska engineers designed for a number in middle.
It sounds odd and insufficient to design for twice the "average" movement. However, the definition of "average" is notoriously loose in journalistic writing.
Perhaps they meant: "In places, the fault could move 30 feet, but the average movement over the entire length of the fault is 10 feet. And at this point here, where the pipeline is, we expect it to move no more than 20 feet."
On the other hand, maybe they just got lucky.:) either way, it's a nice piece of engineering, to come through without even a dent in the actual pipe.
Personally, I'm fed up. I'm going to get into the fray and fight for what's right. (Which, in my case, is center-left libertarian independent, or about -4, -4 on politicalcompass.org.)
I'm not sure I'm up to the task of getting elected, but I mean to try. I don't have a campaign fund set up, and I haven't even figured out what office I'm going to shoot for. (Congress is right out at this stage.) I might have a shot at the state legislature, but I doubt it. I mean to pick the most interesting office that affords me a decent chance at success.
Anyone in Oregon who wants to support a geek candidate can send me an e-mail, and I'll get back to you when I'm ready to raise money or volunteers.
...doctors are gouging the hell out of the patients...
I can't speak to the other parts of your post, but I know enough docs to rebut this.
This is no longer true, if it ever was. Docs are being squeezed both by malpractice insurance costs and by HMO reimbursements. Docs' net income is falling fast. There's very little gouging room left in the system for primary care providers. (Specialists may be another matter; I don't know any of them.)
It might appear that this is a good thing.
However, primary care docs used to have the margins to be able to provide significant free care to the indigent. (The good ones did so, the greedy ones did not.) These days, their ability to provide free care is much reduced. Many folks who used to get free care from a friendly doc are now forced to medicaid, and any docs who still can do charity work are forced to dance with the drug-rep devils to get enough sample drugs to keep their poor patients healthy. Private charity work is being forced into government and corporate circles.
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I doubt that Scaled will need to build SpaceShipTwo to make their attempt. (Barring some loss-of-vehicle accident with SS1.)
If it was anybody else, I'd wonder about their ability to make their first prototype reach the target. Supersonic high-altitude flight is not exactly an easy environment to simulate on the ground.
But as it happens, Scaled has previous experience in this very environment. They were involved in the engineering and production of structural flight components for Orbital Sciences' Pegasus booster. No other X-Prize competitor that I'm aware of has flown components into orbit, let alone components that are so similar to their X-Prize effort.
This leads me to believe that they have the engineering experience to design the SS1 for the X-Prize and get it right the first time.
And even if they don't, the same problem applies to all the teams. If Scaled doesn't have the expertise to get it right the first time, there's no reason to think that Armadillo (or anyone else) will have better luck.
What do I mean by positive sum? Heck, I figured you knew... you used the term:
:)
[...] folks don't even put sigificant effort into conceiving of truly positive sum approaches to humanity's future they are so stuck in a narrow way of looking at the world.
Positive sum, or more generally non-zero-sum, is a buzzword that describes the benefits of cooperation in a system. See nonzero.org.
First off, it isn't a matter of bringing materials back to earth. The fundamental question is the surface of a planet the right place for a technological civilization [...]
That may be so, but it isn't what you asserted in the previous post that I replied to. If you want to engage in a constructve conversation, you'll have to make up your mind about what you mean to assert.
There _may_ be some folks that can successfully create a population control policy that has no negative side effects [...] but I sure haven't seen it.
Who said it wouldn't have negative side effects? Most methods of population control will be highly unpleasant, even if they're preferable to the traditional War, Pestilence, Famine and Death. Global human population will eventually stabilize, or it will peak and crash. How long it takes to stabilize, at what population number that is, and how painfully the stability is accomplished is up to us to work out.
But don't lose hope. It appears that the single most effective population control measure is the education of young women. The effect may or may not be directly causal, but the association is clear enough to warrant action: Teach the children well, especially the girls.
My sense is that societies without frontiers have an inherent tendency to become authoritarian and insular--I really can't think of good exceptions.
This is a common American idea that has roots in Manifest Destiny. (Or maybe just Heinlein.) But it does not appear to be supported by facts. What about The Netherlands, Switzerland, and Japan? Sure, Japan was authoritarian and insular, but it wasn't the addition of frontiers that changed the society. There are plenty of other examples of frontierless societies that are neither authoritarian nor insular, or at least no more so than the good ol' US of A.
Colonizing in or above orbit would be nice, for a variety of reasons. But it is not necessary or sufficient to achieve a "a democratic, non-authoritarian, non-genocidal world order with population stability and preservation of human diversity."
Quite simply, existing growth of energy and raw material apprears unlikely to continue without utilization of non-terrestrial materials.
Well, sure. Population growth can't continue indefinitely without running short of raw materials. (And room.)
But what raw materials are we talking about here? If I'm not mistaken, the only materials available in abundance in near space are metals, and we're pretty well set for them. Our future resource shortages are more likely to be along the lines of fresh water than iron ingots.
Given the energy expenditure involved in extracting additional raw materials and bringing them safely to Earth, it seems to me that the same energy would be better spent recycling the contents of our landfills, cleaning up watersheds, and slowing population growth.
(Besides, who said indefinite growth is even desireable? If we end up in a position where population pressure is forcing migration up the gravity well, a few rockets ain't gonna cut the mustard anyway.)
It's not that I'm not a space enthusiast; I am. I hope humanity does colonize off-planet one day. But I don't see how space is a necessary or sufficient component for positive-sum approaches.
I've been paying more attention to Scaled than to Armadillo, so any comparison I make of their relative capabilities should be taken with some salt. That said, it looks to me that Scaled is currently closer than Armadillo. Their 20km is about 19.99km higher than Armadillo, so it's nothing to sneeze at.
Scaled has flown their vehicle under power, and to supersonic speeds. Apparently all non-propulsion systems are fully flight-qualified. They have ground-tested their rocket for the full duration necessary for an X-Prize flight, and fired it in flight for a short duration. The initial supersonic flight of SS1 appears to have been a complete success, except for the scrape they got on landing. That damage is now repaired, and they have flown again since, albeit unpowered. They're not nearly as open about what they're doing as Armadillo, though. They may well have taken another flight or two and not announced it yet. It wouldn't surprise me much if they actually accomplish a 100km flight before announcing that they're ready to fly for the prize.
Armadillo, on the other hand, does not yet have reliably relighting engines, which is kind of a big deal for them. (Or they didn't have 'em a couple weeks ago, anyway.) Given that their vehicle design makes this a life-safety issue, I expect they're gonna need many tests to validate their operation before they do a manned flight over 50 feet. Once they're ready to do that, they will still need to do enough test flights to ensure they understand the vehicle enough to try for the prize.
I think Armadillo's got an excellent shot at making a 100km flight, but I don't think they're going to beat Scaled. It's too bad about their previous fuel difficulties; that cost them a lot of time, and it looks to me that the delay may have cost them the prize.
One minor correction:
The GMTBs that I'm familiar with would not be caught dead in a Starbucks, instrument of corporate dominance that it is. They much prefer locally-owned coffee shops. (Or better still, worker-owned cooperatives.)
I do believe you meant SEDENTARY. Unless you're some form of mineral/rock, I don't believe you're living a sedimentary lifestyle.
Depends. How long has he been sitting there?
I happened to be in charge of IT for two different small companies near the Software Assurance deadline, and made the recommendation to decline the move to SA.
In both cases, it just did not look worthwhile... I didn't think the Microsoft product cycle was likely to be fast enough to warrant the subscription. (Plus I was annoyed with the enforced change, as were many other folks in the industry... but that wasn't sufficient basis for the decision, alas.)
But it was a pretty high stakes game. Guessing wrong would cost thouands of dollars in the long run for each company. It's quite a relief to see that I guessed correctly... so far.
Amusingly, Microsoft has now managed to give pretty much all of its business customers cause to be annoyed with them. The first group was annoyed by the enforced choice between the loss of upgrade value and the expense of Software Assurance. The second group, that chose SA, should be getting pissed off right about... [checks watch]... now.
Fair enough. Stealthiness and ease of maintenance are both worthy goals. But as I see it, no one is talking about a specialized close air support aircraft for the replacement to the A-10. That's what puzzles me.
It seems to me that one of the reasons the A-10 has been so successful is that it was designed for the role it fills, and for nothing else. The designers did not have to trade off protection or payload for speed.
In the close air support environment, it seems to me that no amount of stealth or speed is going to let an aircraft get away without taking some serious lumps now and then. I don't see the single-engine JSF (or other potential CAS replacements) being designed to stand up to much punishment.
Stand-off precision-guided weapons make up for a lot, of course. But it seems likely to be an insufficient substitute in the long run. Eventually, some poor bastard is going to have to get in close with a thin-skinned JSF, and I'm afraid that a few weeks later his widow is gonna be wishing he had had an A-10.
Replacing the A-10 has never made much sense to me. But then, I'm neither a military professional nor a defense contractor.
:)
On the other hand, if they do replace 'em I think a used one in civillian hands would make one hell of a crop duster.
People ask my why I have a beard. Up until now, I've just said, "Because I hate shaving." Now, I get to add scientific legitimacy to my disdain!
I can add this to my otherwise perfect day:
* Cool, sunny day: check.
* A long lunch away from work, including beer: check.
* An upcoming evening of gaming: check.
* Got laid this morning, and will again tonight: check.
* New reason to avoid shaving: check.
Life is sweet.
Publishing warehouse management software with support for RFID is not exactly a big deal. The software presumably had a barcode module before, and now they've added an RFID module. So what? It's just another way to do the same thing. Warehousing is where RFID makes sense. The trouble with RFID has never been in the supply-chain side.
RFID only becomes a problem when active tags escape the market and remain with the end user. Escaped tags are a hardware problem, not a software problem, and trying to bash Microsoft for supporting RFID in warehousing software is just silly.
There are so many good reasons ro bash Microsoft that there exists no need to conjure up bad ones.
More science out of Hubble would be great. I hope someone will find a way to keep it operational and producing public data, and I don't much care who does it. But if we can't save it for science, we should at least save it for history.
With the shuttles out of the question, we don't currently have the ability to bring it down in one piece... or even safely. It appears that all agree we should send up a robot tug of some sort to gain control of Hubble's orbit and keep it from falling on Topeka.
If we're going to all the trouble of developing and launching a tug, let's push the darn thing up, not down. If I understand correctly, an ion thruster could give Hubble a gentle shove for months and move it very, very slowly to an orbit that would be stable for hundreds of years.
Eventually, if humanity progresses into space, we'll have the capability to bring it down intact as a priceless historical artifact.
Have these people forgotten what committee they sit on? The only thing worse would be an ethics committee doing this.
Man. I miss the good old days when partisan squabbles were settled by duels or a good brawl. This is just sad. The "greatest deliberative body in the world" has shamed itself.
(By the way: if you live in Oregon, there's an initiative being floated to make the state legislature nonpartisan, and thereby avoid this sort of shenannigan. For more info, see this article. If only we could do the same at the federal level!)
In 2090, on the 100th anneversary of the launching of Hubble, where will it be? Will history forgive us for dropping such a significant artifact in the ocean?
All seem to agree that the risk of letting Hubble fall out of orbit without some additional guidance is too high. (I have read figures stating that it'd be about a 1 in 700 chance of a fatality from the debris.) Apparently we're going to send a robot tug to move it.
but if we go to all the trouble of developing a robot tug to move Hubble, why are we moving it down?
It's going to be decommissioned eventually, but we can save it for future historians. We just need to put it in a high and stable enough orbit, and eventually someone will recover it. (Hopefully for history, possibly for salvage.) Don't know who, don't know when, but if humanity continues to climb into space it will happen eventually.
I realize it will take a more robust tug to do this, but it's not like we're in a hurry. We can put an ion thruster on the tug and let it boost for months if we need to. Heck, let's take it all the way to a Lagrange point.
History will thank us if we do.
It's a value judgement... and according to my values, I think this is not a great idea.
First, I think the benefits of having free and semi-anonymous e-mail outweigh the disadvantages of having to use and maintain spam filters. Obviously, many people disagree with me here, and more all the time.
(Here's a conspiracy for ya: what if some Big Brother is trying to kill the free exchange of ideas in e-mail by burying the whole system with spam? I don't believe it's true, but it's worth wondering about before jumping to non-free solutions!)
Second, even if I thought that killing spam was worth the cost of crippling some of e-mail's better and more distinctive features, I think going about it in a non-standards-based way is likely to be a road to chaos.
The best solution, I think, would be to supplant e-mail with something new that works in a more trusted and accountable way. If someone really hates spam, they can use only the new system; if they want anonymity and freedom at the cost of spam, they can use the current mail system. The systems could coexist much like Usenet and the Web; each is useful for different things.
Warning! PMS overload in progress. You have four minutes to reach minimum safe distance.
This is a reasonable use of RFID. Just like for warehouse inventory control, it's a technical means to reduce "friction" in the system. In this case, it's without real harm to anyone. (Except card counters, I suppose.)
Harm is only likely when the tags get out the door of a monitored facility while intact and operational. Unlike razor blades in a market, chips are not intended to leave the premises of the casino. Cash 'em in, and you're clean.
As others have pointed out, it's not like a person has any privacy in a casino anyway.
Nitpicks: Reaching orbit does not mean escaping the gravity well, nor does it require escape velocity. Many useful orbits exist well below geosynchronous; note that the space shuttle never gets above a couple hundred kilometers. Now that's out of the way, to your point:
The X-prize is not about reaching space, so much as it is about spurring development. The prize for a solo nonstop flight over the Atlantic drove development of methods to reach the rather artificial goal, and those methods were useful in achieving other goals later. Some may have been useful directly, and some as examples of methods to be avoided. The same should hold true of developments for the X-prize... that's the point.
I am not a rocket scientist, and I have no idea if the Scaled, Armadillo, or other teams' efforts will really scale up to true orbital capability. Probably not, I think. But with each entry achieving its own innovations, it is likely that some combination of the lessons learned will contribute to the success of the next goal... whatever that is. It's all progress, and pretty darn cool besides. We can worry about scaling up later.
I wonder why Armadillo is listed as a Canadian effort in the X-Prize PDF. Maybe I just haven't been paying close enough attention lately... did we trade Texas for Quebec when I wasn't looking?
Hmm... come to think of it, maybe that's not such a bad idea.
It seems to me like gerrymandering could be cut to manageable proportions by mandating a few simple rules, enforced in order of priority:
1) Districts must be contiguous.
2) No party registration data may be used while assigning districts.
3) Districts must encompass areas equivalent in population within 0.X%.
4) Districts must have a ratio of perimeter to area of no more than Y.
5) Redistricting may not move the geographical center of any district by more than Z miles per census cycle.
We'd need to do a little study to find apprpriate values for X, Y, and Z, of course. But does it really need to be any harder than this? It is about fairness of representation... right?
If the system is secure, public trust is helpful.
If the system is not secure, public distrust is vital!
The public radio show This American Life covered the issue (but not Gore Vidal) in last week's episode #250, "The Annoying Gap Between Theory and Practice". See thislife.org for an audio stream.
This may or may not count as mainstream media, of course, but the explanation of the problem was very accessible. It's excellent coverage to pass along to non-technical folk.
Perhaps they meant: "In places, the fault could move 30 feet, but the average movement over the entire length of the fault is 10 feet. And at this point here, where the pipeline is, we expect it to move no more than 20 feet."
On the other hand, maybe they just got lucky.
Personally, I'm fed up. I'm going to get into the fray and fight for what's right. (Which, in my case, is center-left libertarian independent, or about -4, -4 on politicalcompass.org.)
I'm not sure I'm up to the task of getting elected, but I mean to try. I don't have a campaign fund set up, and I haven't even figured out what office I'm going to shoot for. (Congress is right out at this stage.) I might have a shot at the state legislature, but I doubt it. I mean to pick the most interesting office that affords me a decent chance at success.
Anyone in Oregon who wants to support a geek candidate can send me an e-mail, and I'll get back to you when I'm ready to raise money or volunteers.
...doctors are gouging the hell out of the patients...
I can't speak to the other parts of your post, but I know enough docs to rebut this.
This is no longer true, if it ever was. Docs are being squeezed both by malpractice insurance costs and by HMO reimbursements. Docs' net income is falling fast. There's very little gouging room left in the system for primary care providers. (Specialists may be another matter; I don't know any of them.)
It might appear that this is a good thing.
However, primary care docs used to have the margins to be able to provide significant free care to the indigent. (The good ones did so, the greedy ones did not.) These days, their ability to provide free care is much reduced. Many folks who used to get free care from a friendly doc are now forced to medicaid, and any docs who still can do charity work are forced to dance with the drug-rep devils to get enough sample drugs to keep their poor patients healthy. Private charity work is being forced into government and corporate circles.
This does not strike me as an improvement.