Good point. An air-breathing launch vehicle is going to have a fairly high dry weight. It could be compensated for by not trying to get to orbit in one stage. The scramjet powered plane would just carry a rocket up to launch altitude and then fly home. The rocket alone would achieve orbit.
About your cheap fuel point, you're missing the problem of weight. Yes, the fuel is cheap. Getting the fuel to 100,000 feet with a rocket is not cheap. Rockets are not the most efficient propulsion system. They are needed in space because nothing else works.
I'm not an expert. If you are, I'll concede the point.
Most of the fuel burnt to get a space craft into space is burnt in the first 100,000 feet of altitude. If you could fly to this altitude (and get to Mach 5+) and then use a small rocket engine to take you the rest of the way you are going to save *a lot* of money.
Another way is to build the rocket engine into the Scramjet but that's much more difficult.
The IP's host name is host083130.metrored.net.ar if anyone cares. ar is Argentina isn't it? It looks like a dialup or other home connection. It certainly isn't www.whitehouse.gov or anything like that.
This is the same penny pinching economics that usually happens to a company after it IPOs. All those free refreshments that were given to the programmers are now taken away. The balance sheet shows a saving and the clueless manager is happy.
Now, did the company really save any money? Or has the unhappiness of the programmers dropped they're productivity to the point that it costs the company more than twice as much as a couple of cans of coke cost?
The main thing that keeps Apple afloat is its "Cool" factor and the loyalty of its users. This significantly drops the "Cool" factor of Apple and pisses off loyal users who were promised "An email address that follows you wherever you go". The whole benefit of @mac.com was supposed to be that Apple wouldn't go under, you wouldn't get sacked and they wouldn't charge. It was supposed to be a permanent email address. If they would just offer the email separately either free at a lower price (say $20), they would be a lot more popular.
Bought individually, comparable products would cost you an estimated $250:
Anti-virus: $50 Backup: $40 100MB of online storage: $60 15MB of email storage, forwarding and POP/IMAP access: $40+ Home page creation and hosting: $60
The only thing I want is the email, and I don't think I'm alone. I'm on dialup. Backing up to a web service is ludicrous and the iDisk is painfully slow. I've never used their shitty web hosting service and I certainly don't need Anti-virus software. Sell me the email, leave it with a 5MB cap (I am capable of storing my email locally) and I might pay $20-30 dollars for it. Might!
$100 is a joke. I'm an Australian and they better not be considering charging me nearly A$200 a year for 15MB of email space.
The problem is that we *aren't* making new discoveries. I think we may have discovered all the easy to discover stuff. I could be wrong, but I have a feeling that life on Mars will consist of either hard to reach, subsurface bacteria or hard to reach fossils. I don't think we'll be making a major discovery until we have sizable amounts of people on Mars.
Same with Europa. We are fairly sure that there is an ocean under the ice. Going from that to digging under the probably 10s of km thick ice to look for life is a *huge* jump.
Show me a way to do stuff like this with $150 million robot spacecraft and I'll give in.
I'm trying not to flame here but how many times are they going to announce the existance of water on Mars? Do we really need to hear about the latest dried up lake? New Scientist had a good editorial on this recently.
NASA seems to alternate between press releases of "Water/Life on Mars", "Yet Another Module of a Usless Space Station Launched", "Some 'Kids' Program" and "30 Years Since We Last Did Something (Orbit/Moon etc)".
I am a firm believer in space exploration but I'm really starting to loose faith in NASA. The search for life in the universe is important but should it really be the program's primary goal? IMHO, we should be trying to commercialize space (for humans not just satellites). NASA should help corporations build space hotels, start charging a $million a flight and fund their science that way. The Mars fossils aren't going anywhere! With a good space infrastructure looking for life becomes much easier.
AMROC was bought by SpaceDev and they are continuing the work.
Re:Anyone read it yet?
on
Wolframania
·
· Score: 2
Actually, by proving that complexity can come from simple rules he threw a spanner in the creationist idea that we had to have been designed because we are complex.
Zhenlei Cai, for his project, Discovery and Grouping of Semantic Concepts from Web Pages with Applications. This effort processed a corpus of documents and found words and phrases that tend to co-occur within the same document, producing a list of pairs of terms that seem to be closely related (such as "federal law" and "supreme court", or "Bay Area" and "San Francisco").
Am I the only one who thinks this would be useful for speech recognition? If you just detected a "federal" and you have two possibilities for the next word, "law" and "paw" say, the software would know it's more likely to be "law". Federal paw is probably fairly uncommon and yet this is exactly the mistake that current software makes.
KDE has been ported to *Darwin*. The fact that that means it can also run on Mac OS X is less important. Darwin, the bare Unix part, now has a decent window manager/desktop environment. Now (or soon anyway) people could use Darwin as an alternative to Linux. It may not be everyone's cup of tea but we now have a free Unix for the Mac that is binary compatible with Mac OS X. This will make it a lot easier for the community to work on Darwin as its own OS, with obvious benefits to Mac OS X.
Let's say Microsoft has 95% of the market. Assume Apple has the remaining 5% of the market. There are what, 25000 known viruses for Windows?
25000/95 = 263.158
263.158*5 = 1315.79.
Therefore we'd expect there to be over a thousand mac viruses. There are about 40 and most of those were HyperCard viruses. How do you account for the shortfall?
And by reacting the H2 with CO2 in the atmosphere you can make methane or CH4. This combined with some of the O2 can be used to power rovers and the like and maybe even the escape rocket. Why use methane instead of the H2 directly? Methane is a hell of a lot easier to store. It's basically just natural gas.
From the Australian Security Legislation Amendment
(Terrorism) Bill 2002 before parliment:
101.4 Possessing things connected with terrorist acts
(1) A person commits an offence if
(a) the person possesses a thing; and
(b) the thing is connected with preparation for, the engagement of a person in, or assistance in a terrorist act.
Penalty: Imprisonment for life.
(2) Absolute liability applies to paragraph (1)(b).
(3) A person commits an offence under subsection (1) even if the terrorist act does not occur.
(4) Subsection (1) does not apply if the person proves that he or she was not reckless with respect to the circumstance in paragraph (1)(b).
Note: A defendant bears a legal burden in relation to the matter in subsection (4) (see section 13.4).
(5) Section 15.4 (extended geographical jurisdiction--category D) applies to an offence against subsection (1).
That's just one subsection of a very draconian bill. I urge all Aussies to get a copy and read it. Looks like fun, doesn't it? Especially the bit about being guilty until you prove your innocence. Yes, it's not called the FBI in Australia. It's called ASIO and if the legislation gets passed it'll be just as dangerous.
Note: I don't think this guy has much to worry about though. It's the possibility that's frightening.
The only problem I have with 4.1 is that there is no way to use a proxy.
What? Oh, you must have missed a release note. OmniWeb now honours the system wide proxy settings. Go to System Preferences -> Network and select your interface, click on the Proxies tab and enter your settings.
And the plane will pretty much fly on its own. After a few commands are given to a Windows-based navigation program, the eye will pilot itself using a global positioning system.
Everyone keeps saying that its resolution is about 464*464*464. It's not. Check the specs. It's 768*768 by 198 sections. The section facing you will have a resolution of 768*768, which isn't that bad. The four bit colour is a bit crap though. I look forward to watching where this tech goes. Looks cool.
Why try to inhabit other planets, when we can't even make life decent for all the inhabitants on this planet
Give me one example from history where we stopped expanding our horizons and benefited. A chinese emperor (forget which one) decided to stop exploring, dismantled the fleet, and waited for others to come to him. They did, in battleships. Until recently, to which country did Hong Kong belong?
Europe OTOH, embarked on a huge era of exploration (1400s and up) and to this day they (and their colonies) are the most powerful and wealthiest countries on Earth.
Now, do we stay home or do we expand? Without a frontier human societies stagnate.
P.S. Yes, I know the Native Americans (North and South) got the raw end of the deal. In space (our system at least) there is no one to suffer from our expansion.
Can we please stop planting the American flag on the surface of something then proclaiming: "We came in peace for all mankind" (emphasis mine). The hypocrisy is unbearable.
Any Moon/Mars mission would probably involve ESA, Japan, etc. Wouldn't the UN flag be more appropriate? I would hate to see a flag post planted on Mars with six flags on it.
I don't do Carbon so I'm not much help there but for Cocoa get Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass. Stay away from Learning Cocoa, it sucks.
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About your cheap fuel point, you're missing the problem of weight. Yes, the fuel is cheap. Getting the fuel to 100,000 feet with a rocket is not cheap. Rockets are not the most efficient propulsion system. They are needed in space because nothing else works.
I'm not an expert. If you are, I'll concede the point.
Another way is to build the rocket engine into the Scramjet but that's much more difficult.
The IP's host name is host083130.metrored.net.ar if anyone cares. ar is Argentina isn't it? It looks like a dialup or other home connection. It certainly isn't www.whitehouse.gov or anything like that.
Now, did the company really save any money? Or has the unhappiness of the programmers dropped they're productivity to the point that it costs the company more than twice as much as a couple of cans of coke cost?
The main thing that keeps Apple afloat is its "Cool" factor and the loyalty of its users. This significantly drops the "Cool" factor of Apple and pisses off loyal users who were promised "An email address that follows you wherever you go". The whole benefit of @mac.com was supposed to be that Apple wouldn't go under, you wouldn't get sacked and they wouldn't charge. It was supposed to be a permanent email address. If they would just offer the email separately either free at a lower price (say $20), they would be a lot more popular.
The only thing I want is the email, and I don't think I'm alone. I'm on dialup. Backing up to a web service is ludicrous and the iDisk is painfully slow. I've never used their shitty web hosting service and I certainly don't need Anti-virus software. Sell me the email, leave it with a 5MB cap (I am capable of storing my email locally) and I might pay $20-30 dollars for it. Might!
$100 is a joke. I'm an Australian and they better not be considering charging me nearly A$200 a year for 15MB of email space.
Isn't landing usually harder on the undercarriage than take off ?
Same with Europa. We are fairly sure that there is an ocean under the ice. Going from that to digging under the probably 10s of km thick ice to look for life is a *huge* jump.
Show me a way to do stuff like this with $150 million robot spacecraft and I'll give in.
NASA seems to alternate between press releases of "Water/Life on Mars", "Yet Another Module of a Usless Space Station Launched", "Some 'Kids' Program" and "30 Years Since We Last Did Something (Orbit/Moon etc)".
I am a firm believer in space exploration but I'm really starting to loose faith in NASA. The search for life in the universe is important but should it really be the program's primary goal? IMHO, we should be trying to commercialize space (for humans not just satellites). NASA should help corporations build space hotels, start charging a $million a flight and fund their science that way. The Mars fossils aren't going anywhere! With a good space infrastructure looking for life becomes much easier.
Reply, don't mod.
AMROC was bought by SpaceDev and they are continuing the work.
Actually, by proving that complexity can come from simple rules he threw a spanner in the creationist idea that we had to have been designed because we are complex.
That'd have to be a pretty big room.
Am I the only one who thinks this would be useful for speech recognition? If you just detected a "federal" and you have two possibilities for the next word, "law" and "paw" say, the software would know it's more likely to be "law". Federal paw is probably fairly uncommon and yet this is exactly the mistake that current software makes.
KDE has been ported to *Darwin*. The fact that that means it can also run on Mac OS X is less important. Darwin, the bare Unix part, now has a decent window manager/desktop environment. Now (or soon anyway) people could use Darwin as an alternative to Linux. It may not be everyone's cup of tea but we now have a free Unix for the Mac that is binary compatible with Mac OS X. This will make it a lot easier for the community to work on Darwin as its own OS, with obvious benefits to Mac OS X.
25000/95 = 263.158
263.158*5 = 1315.79.
Therefore we'd expect there to be over a thousand mac viruses. There are about 40 and most of those were HyperCard viruses. How do you account for the shortfall?
Hmmm... maybe market share isn't the only factor?
Check out some of NASA's planned (well, studied anyway) missions.
That's just one subsection of a very draconian bill. I urge all Aussies to get a copy and read it. Looks like fun, doesn't it? Especially the bit about being guilty until you prove your innocence. Yes, it's not called the FBI in Australia. It's called ASIO and if the legislation gets passed it'll be just as dangerous.
Note: I don't think this guy has much to worry about though. It's the possibility that's frightening.
What? Oh, you must have missed a release note. OmniWeb now honours the system wide proxy settings. Go to System Preferences -> Network and select your interface, click on the Proxies tab and enter your settings.
Hope that helps.
Nooooooooo...
[Insert obligatory BSOD joke]
Everyone keeps saying that its resolution is about 464*464*464. It's not. Check the specs. It's 768*768 by 198 sections. The section facing you will have a resolution of 768*768, which isn't that bad. The four bit colour is a bit crap though. I look forward to watching where this tech goes. Looks cool.
Give me one example from history where we stopped expanding our horizons and benefited. A chinese emperor (forget which one) decided to stop exploring, dismantled the fleet, and waited for others to come to him. They did, in battleships. Until recently, to which country did Hong Kong belong?
Europe OTOH, embarked on a huge era of exploration (1400s and up) and to this day they (and their colonies) are the most powerful and wealthiest countries on Earth.
Now, do we stay home or do we expand? Without a frontier human societies stagnate.
P.S. Yes, I know the Native Americans (North and South) got the raw end of the deal. In space (our system at least) there is no one to suffer from our expansion.
Any Moon/Mars mission would probably involve ESA, Japan, etc. Wouldn't the UN flag be more appropriate? I would hate to see a flag post planted on Mars with six flags on it.
I don't know. Can you hit a golf ball at 2km/s? You would be able to do it on an asteroid however.
See this paper.
I don't do Carbon so I'm not much help there but for Cocoa get Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass. Stay away from Learning Cocoa, it sucks.
Done.