Or put another way, what you are saying is that for the low cost of $46,000, these police cameras reduced crime in a certain area to only two offenses in a year? Sounds like a success to me.
So it really is a space craft that just does not have enough delta-v to make orbit.
...Has to be the understatement of the year. Yes, sub-orbital spaceflight addresses many of the technical challenges of orbital spaceflight, however it doesn't address the only hard one. Reaction control and the aerodynamics are really rather straight forward. This project does not address the thermal control issues of orbital flight, as the heat loads are no where near what would be encountered during re-entry from orbital velocity. Moreover, they are using a solid propellant rocket motor. They would have to switch to liquid engine to go suborbital, and that implies a heck of a lot more mass (tankage, cryo, pumps, much more complex engine, etc...) I don't mean to belittle the monumental achievements of Scaled Composites' with this project, however IMHO the real advances they have made are programatic... being able to accomplish this on a shoe-string budget, with few leaks, not to mention cutting through the beurocratic red tape necessary to DEFINE THE PROCESS of granting a civilian permit for space flight.
BTW, I just ran the calculations, and agree with you on the microsat point. Figuring a 10kg payload, and about 20kg for engine and tankage (pretty optimistic) requires about 160 kg of propellant to get to Vcirc at 100 km. I think a 200 kg 'payload stage' would be quite reasonable.
I think you highlight one of the reasons that BOTH sides of the political specturm are labeled as 'extremists'. The fact that you refer to Gore as having 'right-of-center positions on many issues' just demonstrates that the far left in this country has no idea where the 'center' is. Similarly, the extreme right seems to think that anything short of teaching evolution (exclusively) in schools is left of center'. Yes, Gore may have been to the right of the politcal center of, say, SF... but 'right of center' of the US populace? Was this really what you meant or did you mean his views were to the right of the median of his (liberal) voting base? (that statement could actually be feasible). Which positions specifically were right of center?
really not a trolling, just trying to better understand 'your perspective'.
Have you tried Snapstream's BeyondTV? I have been running the trial for about a month now and have been very impressed. Here is a list of supported capture cards, and the AIW is on there. (I am using a PVR-250). The interface is very, very nice looking and the system is very easy to use. Not having a TIVO, I don't know what a 'season pass' is, but I have BeyondTV setup to automatically record all episodes of my childs favorite show (the Wiggles). When reviewing the program guide, you can choose to record just this episode, all episodes or all new episodes. It supports live TV and as far as I know, does not have any kind of database to learn what you like. Although it is only a PVR, they just announced a new product called BeyondMedia which supports all the 'other' media center functions you would expect.
But this has nothing to do with installing alternate media players. Retailers have always been able to install alternate media players. I just bought a new Dell laptop and it came bundled with -count em- FOUR media players installed and WMP was NOT the default. My first order of buisness (well after turing on the firewall) was to uninstall all but WMP). The cruxt of the media player aspect of this ruling seems to be that windows includes a media player FOR FREE with every copy of windows, and that this is abusing its monopoly to hurt third-party media player companies.
Yes, the ruling attacks other things as well, I have limited this response to the media player issues.
Because our clocks and day-to-day lives are dictated by the solar day. A solar day is defined as the length of time for the sun to reappear at the same meridian. We define an hour as 1/24th of this length of time. Note that this requires that the earth rotate MORE than 360 degrees to cover the change in geometery due to the fact that the earth moves 1/365.24 around its orbit during each day, so the earth must rotate a little more for a solar day.
23.93 hours is the length of the sidereal day, which is how long it takes the earth to rotate 360 degrees on its axis.
It's refreshing to have an intelligent conversation about politics on/.... I don't have time to keep this up, but I wanted to point out just a couple things...
The politness was genuine. Any sarcasm or mockery is purely a communication channel effect.
Yes, one of my links refrenced the Miami Herald study, which I agree was probably biased. That is not why I included that link though,... further down in the CNN article, it talks about the National Opinion Research Center study which was supposed to be the definitve evaluation of the ballots in question. It was those results that I was trying to reference when I made the claim that Gore wouldn't have won anyway.
so by your reasoning, the baseball on my desk is a planet?
I wrote a cool program in Matlab for a graduate astrodynamics class I took that would plot the planets and their orbits at any time. One thing immediately jumps out at you.... Pluto is not a freakin planet! Any gooddiagram of the solar system shows to screwed up Pluto is.
For those who hate pictures, here are the orbit elements of the planets in tabular form
First off, note that Pluto has an eccentricity of almost 0.25, that is WAY oblate. Now, someone will probably point out that Mercury is nearly that oblate and we can argue whether Mercury is really a planet also. It probably is, however, it is soooo close to the Sun that it has comparatively zero angular momentum - and remember, that is the job of the planets, to store the bulk of the angular momentum of the solar system as it was formed (you do remember that right?) Anyway, Mercury is so close to the Sun, that its orbit is much more easily perturbed by higher J2 and J3 harmonics of the Sun and you would expect it to have be a little out of plane and eccentric due to multibody effects as well.
Moving on, how about that inclination... 17 degrees. Again, excluding Mercury, the next closest is 3.4 deg and the next closest outer planet is 2.5 deg.
And how bout these data. Check out the rotational period... 153 hrs.. the next closest outer planet is 17 hrs.
Sorry folks, it is a captured Kupiter belt object... move along.
I was always taught to start out with a positive comment so let me say that your response if very well organized and you communicate your points very well.
Unfortunately, I can not find a shred of evidence to support any of your claims. I honestly debated even responding, for one, because to do so effectively would require lots of references and I am feeling somewhat lazy, and two because I don't quite seem the point because IMHO the only way you could make the statements you have quite an emotional investment in the issue and I doubt any rational discussion would change this.
I am beginning to understand your confusion on the issue. Having followed and read the sole reference in your post, I myself am confused... is this really the source of your info or were you joking. For those to lazy to follow the link, here are some exerpts from this in-depth "analysis":
As AOL allows me to send out only 50 names or so at a time, I have
only responded to those of you who question my existence or have asked
for a clean, ungarbled copy of the "Layman's Guide" which I provide
below.
further down the 'analysis' begins:
Q: I'm not a lawyer and I don't understand the recent Supreme Court
decision in Bush v. Gore. Can you explain it to me?
A: Sure. I'm a lawyer. I read it. It says Bush wins, even if Gore
got the most votes.
Q: But wait a second. The US Supreme Court has to give a reason,
right?
A: Right.
To get you up to speed on what actually happened in 2000. I suggest the following, rather-unbiased law school FAQ. If you want to broaden your view and actually listen to an opposing viewpoint, you could try this obviously biased site. The main page of the site looks like they obviously have an agenda, but at least some the arguements are tracable, as opposed to your reference.
Of course, this is all moot as Bush would have won the election no matter how many times your recounted, even under the most Gore-favorable criteria. link (please read all of it) and link. (Is CNN part of the 'vast right wing conspiracy now too?')
Having spent the last couple hours looking reading up on this, I really am too tired now to respong to each of your assertions. However, I did want to highlight a few:
...the US Supreme Court then unconstitutionally intervened...
Pretty odd statement considering that the Supreme Court has the final say on constitutionality. By definition, the Supreme Court can not do anything "unconstitutional".
The Florida Supreme Court extended the deadline for performing recounts beyond the law, as passed by the legislature.
The problem was neither the butterfly ballot nor the 170,000 or 3% of Democratic-leaning voters (largely African-Americans) disenfranchised. The problem is that somewhat less than 0.01% of the ballots (less than 600 votes) may have been determined under ever-so-slightly different standards by judges and county officials recording votes under strict public scrutiny, as Americans have done for more than 200 years. The single judge overseeing the entire process might miss a vote or two.
I don't know what the heck you are trying to say here. If you are referring to the mass intimidations, and other irregularities, those have pretty much all been debunked IIRC.
They imposed a deadline of December 12 for the recount, whereas under normal federal election law Florida would have had until January 6 to complete the recount
Tin-foil hat alert! Either you don't know anything about the electoral process or you didn't actually follow the 2000 election.
The law of the land was followed to the "T". The Democrats tried to force an unconstitutional recount to ensure that Gore would win the election. By unconstitutional, I want to be clear that I do not think that recounts are by their nature 'bad'. In fact, there were two legal, certified recounts in Florida, and Bush won them both. The Democrats employed judicial activism at its worst to change the standards of for recounting ballots after the election in such a way that certain citizens votes would weigh more heavily than others.
The US Supreme Court ruled that this recount violated the equal protection rights of the citizens whose votes would not be recounted under the new, heavily-biased standards. They did not even "stop" the recount. They just said that the recount must be done using the same standards over the entire state. This was neither practical, nor beneficial to the Democrats as they only wanted to recount in their heavily stacked districts, so the effort was effectively dropped.
woops, the yahoo maps link I posted above did not accurately back-up my post. In the map, click on the word "Oso Pkwy" to recenter and zoom in to see what I am talking about.
Let me help frame this debate - alebit a little off-topic. I was born and raised in the adjacent suburb of Mission Viejo, which despite the obvious Spanish grammar error in its name (Mission is actually an irregular feminine noun in Spanish so it should be Mission Vieja), has tried to honor (perhaps insultingly so) the Spanish influence of the area by giving just about every landmark a Spanish name.
As an example, I went to Montivideo Elementary, Del Lago Elementary, and Los Alisos Intermediate School. The major roads are Margurite, Los Aliso, La Paz, Alicia, and Oso Parkway (which apparently means 'bear' in Spanish).
Anyway, apparently, "Oso Pkwy" was not entirely 'snooty' enough for the residents of Aliso Viejo, as they renamed the street "Pacific Park" where it crosses into their city.
I wonder what Shakespeare would think if he knew that his plays were learned by students the world over in TEXT format. These were -plays- after all. I think he would be happier with people viewing them as movies than just sitting and reading them.
Tell you what, I agree that Macs are above these problems... my point was that the Windows Viruses/Trojans tirade was an attack on lazy users, not the OS itself. Thankfully, SP2 will even fix this stuff for the lazy users as well.
Since OS X [apple.com] does not have the virus/worm issues that Windows has...
What virus/worm issue? I hate to sound like a MS fanboy, but have the people bashing Windows even tried XP? I know a lot of people still use Windows 98, but you realize that is a 7 year old OS, right?
I run Windows XP, with the built-in firewall enabled. I have Norton AV with the Real-time File Protection enabled. Live Update updates my Virus Definition files automatically. I have weekly full-systems scans scheduled. I have Windows Automatic Updates configured to automatically download patches.
Total time to complete the above steps: about 20 minutes. Once.
I have yet to have a virus infection or trojan intrusion (well, at least to my knowledge).
However, I have had a grand total of one system crash (in the last two years). I just recently installed a Hauppauge PVR-250, and XP flashed a warning that the drivers were 'not certified'. I installed them anyway, and sure enough, the system crashed on the next reboot. However, the system has worked fine for the last three weeks.
I also had one instance of Windows Update installing a bad driver. Note: This was NOT Automatic Update, but Windows Update which is selected under the Start menu. A new driver was recommened for my NIC, which subsequently interferred with audio in voice conferences. It took 10 whole clicks and about 30 seconds to roll-back the driver to the previous version. Problem solved.
Actually, I disagree a little here. I think their status more closely falls in with that of a prisoner of war, under the auspicies of the Geneva Convention. The point I was trying to make in the parent was some of the provisions of the Convention (particularly repatriation at the end of hostilities) are very difficult to apply in this situation. In either case, the human rights of the prisoners would be respected - while at the same time preventing them from receiving legal rights (as is the case with prisoners).
Perhaps because the Geneva Convention is an outdated document that doesn't address the complexities of terrorism. The provisions within the Geneva Convention protect soldiers of nations during conflicts with other nations. There is no mention of combatants who are not in the formal service of a soverign government. Because of this, there are certain expectations about how you treat prisoners, based on the assumption that at some point either (1) a treaty will be signed between the waring nations -or- (2) one nation will defeat the other. In either case, it is understood that the armed services of the the countries involved would cease hostilities. Moreover, prisoners can be released as the prisoners can be taken at their word that they will not engage in hostile action, as they were merely fighting on behalf of a country that has either brokered peace or been defeated.
Now consider the case of Al Qaeda. Exactly what 'nation' can we defeat that would assure that the members of Al Qaeda would lay down their arms and disengage, fascilitating the release of prisoners? I don't think I am assuming to much to point out that if captured Al Qaeda were released, they would immediately resume their hostilities. This is a stark contrast to the prisoners of WW2, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War, all of which were allowed to return to their respective countries and live their lives in peace.
Bottom line: The Geneva Convention doesn't apply because these people are not fighting on behalf of a government which could be reasonably expected to control their misguided actions. Why should they be afforded the same protections under the Geneva Conventions that I enjoy, when I am subject to military law, the law of the land, and the Geneva Convention and they are not?
Just out of curiosity.... why is it ok for this sci-fi show to have lyrics in its theme but thats one of the points that ires slashdotters about Enterprise?
Slashdot Mirror
Good luck finding the word privacy in the constitution. So exactly how would this be unconstitutional? Why can't you just drive the speed limit?
Or put another way, what you are saying is that for the low cost of $46,000, these police cameras reduced crime in a certain area to only two offenses in a year? Sounds like a success to me.
So it really is a space craft that just does not have enough delta-v to make orbit.
...Has to be the understatement of the year. Yes, sub-orbital spaceflight addresses many of the technical challenges of orbital spaceflight, however it doesn't address the only hard one. Reaction control and the aerodynamics are really rather straight forward. This project does not address the thermal control issues of orbital flight, as the heat loads are no where near what would be encountered during re-entry from orbital velocity. Moreover, they are using a solid propellant rocket motor. They would have to switch to liquid engine to go suborbital, and that implies a heck of a lot more mass (tankage, cryo, pumps, much more complex engine, etc...) I don't mean to belittle the monumental achievements of Scaled Composites' with this project, however IMHO the real advances they have made are programatic... being able to accomplish this on a shoe-string budget, with few leaks, not to mention cutting through the beurocratic red tape necessary to DEFINE THE PROCESS of granting a civilian permit for space flight.
BTW, I just ran the calculations, and agree with you on the microsat point. Figuring a 10kg payload, and about 20kg for engine and tankage (pretty optimistic) requires about 160 kg of propellant to get to Vcirc at 100 km. I think a 200 kg 'payload stage' would be quite reasonable.
Serbs weren't either... hey, weren't we actually coming to the defense of Muslims then... hmm... there goes that argument.
really not a trolling, just trying to better understand 'your perspective'.
Have you tried Snapstream's BeyondTV? I have been running the trial for about a month now and have been very impressed. Here is a list of supported capture cards, and the AIW is on there. (I am using a PVR-250). The interface is very, very nice looking and the system is very easy to use. Not having a TIVO, I don't know what a 'season pass' is, but I have BeyondTV setup to automatically record all episodes of my childs favorite show (the Wiggles). When reviewing the program guide, you can choose to record just this episode, all episodes or all new episodes. It supports live TV and as far as I know, does not have any kind of database to learn what you like. Although it is only a PVR, they just announced a new product called BeyondMedia which supports all the 'other' media center functions you would expect.
Yes, the ruling attacks other things as well, I have limited this response to the media player issues.
we have a word for your suggestions... its called blackmail.
23.93 hours is the length of the sidereal day, which is how long it takes the earth to rotate 360 degrees on its axis.
Thats not Bush. That is every politician. Clinton, Regan, Kennedy. Nothing has changed.
The politness was genuine. Any sarcasm or mockery is purely a communication channel effect.
Yes, one of my links refrenced the Miami Herald study, which I agree was probably biased. That is not why I included that link though,... further down in the CNN article, it talks about the National Opinion Research Center study which was supposed to be the definitve evaluation of the ballots in question. It was those results that I was trying to reference when I made the claim that Gore wouldn't have won anyway.
I wrote a cool program in Matlab for a graduate astrodynamics class I took that would plot the planets and their orbits at any time. One thing immediately jumps out at you.... Pluto is not a freakin planet! Any good diagram of the solar system shows to screwed up Pluto is.
For those who hate pictures, here are the orbit elements of the planets in tabular form
First off, note that Pluto has an eccentricity of almost 0.25, that is WAY oblate. Now, someone will probably point out that Mercury is nearly that oblate and we can argue whether Mercury is really a planet also. It probably is, however, it is soooo close to the Sun that it has comparatively zero angular momentum - and remember, that is the job of the planets, to store the bulk of the angular momentum of the solar system as it was formed (you do remember that right?) Anyway, Mercury is so close to the Sun, that its orbit is much more easily perturbed by higher J2 and J3 harmonics of the Sun and you would expect it to have be a little out of plane and eccentric due to multibody effects as well.
Moving on, how about that inclination... 17 degrees. Again, excluding Mercury, the next closest is 3.4 deg and the next closest outer planet is 2.5 deg.
And how bout these data. Check out the rotational period... 153 hrs.. the next closest outer planet is 17 hrs.
Sorry folks, it is a captured Kupiter belt object... move along.
Unfortunately, I can not find a shred of evidence to support any of your claims. I honestly debated even responding, for one, because to do so effectively would require lots of references and I am feeling somewhat lazy, and two because I don't quite seem the point because IMHO the only way you could make the statements you have quite an emotional investment in the issue and I doubt any rational discussion would change this.
I am beginning to understand your confusion on the issue. Having followed and read the sole reference in your post, I myself am confused... is this really the source of your info or were you joking. For those to lazy to follow the link, here are some exerpts from this in-depth "analysis":
As AOL allows me to send out only 50 names or so at a time, I have only responded to those of you who question my existence or have asked for a clean, ungarbled copy of the "Layman's Guide" which I provide below.
further down the 'analysis' begins:
Q: I'm not a lawyer and I don't understand the recent Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore. Can you explain it to me?
A: Sure. I'm a lawyer. I read it. It says Bush wins, even if Gore got the most votes.
Q: But wait a second. The US Supreme Court has to give a reason, right?
A: Right.
To get you up to speed on what actually happened in 2000. I suggest the following, rather-unbiased law school FAQ. If you want to broaden your view and actually listen to an opposing viewpoint, you could try this obviously biased site. The main page of the site looks like they obviously have an agenda, but at least some the arguements are tracable, as opposed to your reference.
Of course, this is all moot as Bush would have won the election no matter how many times your recounted, even under the most Gore-favorable criteria. link (please read all of it) and link. (Is CNN part of the 'vast right wing conspiracy now too?')
Having spent the last couple hours looking reading up on this, I really am too tired now to respong to each of your assertions. However, I did want to highlight a few:
Pretty odd statement considering that the Supreme Court has the final say on constitutionality. By definition, the Supreme Court can not do anything "unconstitutional".
The Florida Supreme Court extended the deadline for performing recounts beyond the law, as passed by the legislature.
The problem was neither the butterfly ballot nor the 170,000 or 3% of Democratic-leaning voters (largely African-Americans) disenfranchised. The problem is that somewhat less than 0.01% of the ballots (less than 600 votes) may have been determined under ever-so-slightly different standards by judges and county officials recording votes under strict public scrutiny, as Americans have done for more than 200 years. The single judge overseeing the entire process might miss a vote or two.
I don't know what the heck you are trying to say here. If you are referring to the mass intimidations, and other irregularities, those have pretty much all been debunked IIRC.
They imposed a deadline of December 12 for the recount, whereas under normal federal election law Florida would have had until January 6 to complete the recount
The law of the land was followed to the "T". The Democrats tried to force an unconstitutional recount to ensure that Gore would win the election. By unconstitutional, I want to be clear that I do not think that recounts are by their nature 'bad'. In fact, there were two legal, certified recounts in Florida, and Bush won them both. The Democrats employed judicial activism at its worst to change the standards of for recounting ballots after the election in such a way that certain citizens votes would weigh more heavily than others.
The US Supreme Court ruled that this recount violated the equal protection rights of the citizens whose votes would not be recounted under the new, heavily-biased standards. They did not even "stop" the recount. They just said that the recount must be done using the same standards over the entire state. This was neither practical, nor beneficial to the Democrats as they only wanted to recount in their heavily stacked districts, so the effort was effectively dropped.
Exactly how is this an "appointment"?
Wow...Mozilla will make a fortune off of this knock-off!
woops, the yahoo maps link I posted above did not accurately back-up my post. In the map, click on the word "Oso Pkwy" to recenter and zoom in to see what I am talking about.
As an example, I went to Montivideo Elementary, Del Lago Elementary, and Los Alisos Intermediate School. The major roads are Margurite, Los Aliso, La Paz, Alicia, and Oso Parkway (which apparently means 'bear' in Spanish).
Anyway, apparently, "Oso Pkwy" was not entirely 'snooty' enough for the residents of Aliso Viejo, as they renamed the street "Pacific Park" where it crosses into their city.
I wonder what Shakespeare would think if he knew that his plays were learned by students the world over in TEXT format. These were -plays- after all. I think he would be happier with people viewing them as movies than just sitting and reading them.
.....or you could try Mplayer
Tell you what, I agree that Macs are above these problems... my point was that the Windows Viruses/Trojans tirade was an attack on lazy users, not the OS itself. Thankfully, SP2 will even fix this stuff for the lazy users as well.
What virus/worm issue? I hate to sound like a MS fanboy, but have the people bashing Windows even tried XP? I know a lot of people still use Windows 98, but you realize that is a 7 year old OS, right?
I run Windows XP, with the built-in firewall enabled. I have Norton AV with the Real-time File Protection enabled. Live Update updates my Virus Definition files automatically. I have weekly full-systems scans scheduled. I have Windows Automatic Updates configured to automatically download patches.
Total time to complete the above steps: about 20 minutes. Once.
I have yet to have a virus infection or trojan intrusion (well, at least to my knowledge).
However, I have had a grand total of one system crash (in the last two years). I just recently installed a Hauppauge PVR-250, and XP flashed a warning that the drivers were 'not certified'. I installed them anyway, and sure enough, the system crashed on the next reboot. However, the system has worked fine for the last three weeks.
I also had one instance of Windows Update installing a bad driver. Note: This was NOT Automatic Update, but Windows Update which is selected under the Start menu. A new driver was recommened for my NIC, which subsequently interferred with audio in voice conferences. It took 10 whole clicks and about 30 seconds to roll-back the driver to the previous version. Problem solved.
Now,...what was the original question?
Dewey defeats Truman!
Actually, I disagree a little here. I think their status more closely falls in with that of a prisoner of war, under the auspicies of the Geneva Convention. The point I was trying to make in the parent was some of the provisions of the Convention (particularly repatriation at the end of hostilities) are very difficult to apply in this situation. In either case, the human rights of the prisoners would be respected - while at the same time preventing them from receiving legal rights (as is the case with prisoners).
Now consider the case of Al Qaeda. Exactly what 'nation' can we defeat that would assure that the members of Al Qaeda would lay down their arms and disengage, fascilitating the release of prisoners? I don't think I am assuming to much to point out that if captured Al Qaeda were released, they would immediately resume their hostilities. This is a stark contrast to the prisoners of WW2, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War, all of which were allowed to return to their respective countries and live their lives in peace.
Bottom line: The Geneva Convention doesn't apply because these people are not fighting on behalf of a government which could be reasonably expected to control their misguided actions. Why should they be afforded the same protections under the Geneva Conventions that I enjoy, when I am subject to military law, the law of the land, and the Geneva Convention and they are not?
Just out of curiosity.... why is it ok for this sci-fi show to have lyrics in its theme but thats one of the points that ires slashdotters about Enterprise?