Project Constellation overall is a great idea, but building a moonbase is probably a bad idea.
He also argues that a Moon base is a poor use of resources, since "science can be done for far less money by robotic missions--which also don't put human lives at risk."[5] The Los Angeles Times seconded that in an editorial, saying "Manned moon flight may appeal to baby boomers, but it makes little scientific sense for most space missions these days. Robots can now perform, or be developed to perform, most of the tasks people would do at a moon station." [6]
Columnist Gregg Easterbrook has criticized the plans as a poor use of resources. He writes that
Although, of course, the base could yield a great discovery, its scientific value is likely to be small while its price is extremely high. Worse, moon-base nonsense may for decades divert NASA resources from the agency's legitimate missions, draining funding from real needs in order to construct human history's silliest white elephant. [7]
According to Easterbrook, the billions of dollars that a lunar colony might cost should instead be devoted to exploring the solar system with space probes; space observatories; and protecting the Earth from Near-Earth asteroids.
In the end it is, but it is far easier than the hardware. I agree the inteface/OS is probably the most important thing in any phone next to the connection stability, but any piece of software can be easily copied by even the smallest team. Copying the entire iPhone OS experience would be trivial when done on top of Windows Mobile, a single person has already copied much of the functionality. Creating a solid piece of hardware and in mass quantities is much harder IMO.
The Dell Axim series was one of the most popular Pocket PCs in history, I would bet they sold several times more Axims than Apple has sold iPhones.
The highest powered Axims released in the later years of the series was more powerful and feature rich than the iPhone. The x50 had VGA, touchscreen, wifi, BT, SD/CF, IR, 620mhz CPU, over 6000 software apps, and came out in 2004.
If Dell was serious about releasing an iPhone 'killer' all they would have to do is resurrect their x50 and add phone support and it would be better than the iPhone except for the interface. After releasing 6 PDA models they have the knowledge and experience to easily do this. Its probably only a matter of business contracts with the mobile carriers that is holding them back.
I'm sure it will be fun for a while, but it seems overhyped. Nothing in the game is ground breaking, every aspect of it has been done in other games already, its more about the combination of game play elements and scale that sets it apart I guess. Wright is a fantastic designer so I'm sure it will be great, but the best game ever made, no way.
As of November 2007, a daily updated report projected that the IANA pool of unallocated addresses would be exhausted in May 2010, with the various Regional Internet Registries using up their allocations from IANA in April 2011.[8] This report also argues that, if assigned but unused addresses were reclaimed and used to meet continuing demand, allocation of IPv4 addresses could continue until 2017.
I thought of that and yes I would feel the same way, why kill the tiger when you can tranquilize it, even if it may slightly increase the risk of a human being killed. I'm just very suprised my post got modded up, I now think more highly of the./ crowd.
The original post couldn't be more correct. "The only tragedy here was the tiger having to be killed."
Let the tiger kill 1 person, 100 people, 1000 people, it is a fucking TIGER people, not a bunny rabbit, it was born to do one thing only, KILL! DO NOT expect it to do anything else if its free, and sure as fuck don't kill it for doing so, tranquilize it for crying out loud. Any tiger left on the face of the planet is worth 1,000,000 times more than any human, they are endangered, WE ARE NOT.
PICTURES: Virgin Galactic unveils Dyna-Soar style SpaceShipTwo design and twin-fuselage White Knight II configuration By Rob Coppinger Virgin Galactic has unveiled a SpaceShipTwo (SS2) design, created by Scaled Composites, that harks back to the NASA/USAF Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar glider of the 1960s, while Scaled's carrier aircraft, White Knight II (WK2) has been given a twin-fuselage configuration.
To be launched on a Lockheed Martin Titan III rocket, Dyna-Soar was for hypersonic flight research but the programme was cancelled before the first vehicle was completed. Some of its subsystems were used in later X-15 flight research and Dyna-Soar became a testbed for advanced technologies that contributed to projects, including the Space Shuttle.
Above: SpaceShipTwo is carried between the two fuselages of White Knight II
Virgin Galactic's commercial operations will now start from New Mexico's Spaceport America in 2010 and not from Mojave air and space port in California, as originally planned, but the WK2, SS2 launch system will be test flown by Scaled at the Californian port.
At its 23 January press conference at the American Museum of Natural History in New York city Virgin Galactic described SS2 as using the same basic technology, construction and design as its predecessor SpaceShipOne (SS1), as 100% composite and twice as large as the $10 million X-Prize winning vehicle, SS1.
Above: SpaceShipTwo transitions into feathering mode for its reentry
The SS2 is 18.3m (60ft) long, has a wingspan of 12.8m, a tail height of 4.5m with a passenger cabin that is 3.66m long and 2.28m in diameter. Despite being so much larger than SS1, SS2 will still use a front nose skid, and not nose gear. Released at 50,000ft (15,200m) by WK2, the rocket glider's apogee is expected to be up to 110km (68 miles).
Above: SpaceShipTwo is under construction at Scaled Composites
The carrier aircraft, WK2, is now 23.7m-long, it still has a wingspan of 42.7m, with a tail height of 7.62m and its integration is now 80% complete - with the assembly of the wing underway in preparation for its mating with the twin fuselages.
The WK2 will have four Pratt and Whitney PW308 engines, as revealed by Flight in September last year. And as Flight has also reported WK2's crew and passenger cabin will be the same; for training purposes.
Above: White Knight II under construction with its twin fuselages being fitted with their tail fins at Scaled Composites
Virgin Galactic also announced that the SS2 simulator is now operational, ahead of the previous March 2008 date that had been given. It is already being used for pilot training.
Above: Brian Binnie, Scaled Composites pilot, sits in the SpaceShipTwo simulator
and no one will care and the world will go on as usual. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but advertisers could care less about you, and probably most people on this site. They care about people who spend money on trivial stupid things, 10 to 25 years old, with rich mommies and daddies. The reason advertising like this works is these morons spend their money before they even have it and must use credit cards and payment plans to get anything.
Get a plan together and send it to management telling them how these messages are pointless and wasting everyones time, then IT will adopt some new rules for all email clients.
- truncate all 'original messages' when replying to so many bytes - remove the Reply to All button and bury it in the menu - disable Include Original Message by default
How many subatomic particles are in the human body? Multiply that by maybe 10 or so and thats how much space you would need to 'record' your current state, so you could be put back together at the other end. So you would record the person on one end, send their info through to the other end, construct them from piles of subatomic particles, verify them, then deconstruct them at the original location.
You would need to record the orientation, position, temperature, and perhaps several other factors (probably unknown to us at this time) for all of the smallest particles.
This would seem to be the way to 'teleport' someone with ideas from current technology. Because the recording device would need MORE memory than the density of subatomic particles being recorded, this would seem to be quite a ways off, but you could do a rough calculation as to when we would reach this memory density and transmission rate.
It would seem easier in the near term to discover some kind of subspace worm hole than deal with the technological issues of teleportation.
Yeah you are right on. The most exciting thing for me would be the HD rentals, but the fact that you have to have an AppleTV is dumb, I have a MacMini hooked up to my HDTV and its awesome, why the hell can't I download HD movies using it? I have a 360 and their movie selection is pretty bad, Apple having all of the studios could be a big plus, but not if you need an AppleTV.
About the only thing that would have been impressive in your list is a tablet with multitouch, but seeing as every tablet that has ever been released has been a total failure, I don't think they are going to touch;) that anytime soon.
Sadly their streaming movies are crappy quality I've read, put up some HD movies, 720p even, and I'll gladly pay $20/month. http://www.vudu.com/ seems to be the only doing this, and its expensive as hell, then there is the 360 downloads, but their selection is crap and its still quite expensive at 3-4 bucks per movie.
It's just an article someone at PM wrote, it gives you no insights about public or political desires on how to spend money. Actually spending per person was down this year on black friday.
The reason articles like this are written is because it is more exciting to think about spending money on some gee-whiz new technology than any boring existing technology we know works.
Rule #1 in technology, anything portable is more expensive than if it were not portable. If its so cheap to use a crate, why not just put the stuff in the crate in a warehouse instead, bypassing the crate and all of the work and design involved with shoving and fitting the stuff in the crate?
Mags can't compete with websites for several reasons: 1) space, websites have unlimited space, size, and coverage possible 2) time, websites can publish immediately 3) media, websites can show pictures, video, sound, and link to demos seamlessly 4) cost, websites are a fraction of the cost of anything printed 5) promotion, websites can better integrate with relevant and targeted advertisements 6) user interaction, websites can offer real time discussion of any article or issue
In order for mags to compete they must evolve into something different than what websites can offer. Some ideas: 1) switch to full page color ads with little to no text (I find most ads are quite enjoyable if they are simply/mostly images) 2) focus on quality of reviews and previews rather than quantity, exclusivity, or breaking news, websites can easily beat you on these so you must focus on quality. 3) clean up the format so it is super clear and uncluttered
Ultimately I think all magazines and newspapers will shrink and be shoved in a corner to very specific uses for travel, bathrooms, waiting rooms, basically any public place where you are forced to wait.
If I owned a print only magazine, rather than trying to beat back the online media torrent that will dissolve your format, I would embrace it and move all resources to my online presense, then allow people to print free mini versions of the magazine for use in the public waiting places mentioned above.
There will be a PS4, they aren't just going to walk away that easily. They just have so many things against them with the PS3: brand new propreitary disc format, brand new cpu, no dual shock, the lamest game linup in history, the most expensive console of the bunch, a launch fiasco with limited supplies and massive ebaying, the rootkit issue, crappy multiplayer experience (compared to live), the list goes on...
With the PS4 they need to: use which ever disc format is most popular, use an intel cpu, nvidia gpu or amd/ati solution, have a price under $400, concentrate on game play rather than graphics.
God I hate articles formatted like this, please put them all on one html page so I don't have to click and wait 100 times. The 'print article' trick doesn't even work, at least provide an option for this format.
Welcome to what Smartphone and Pocket PC owners have been enjoying for over 5 years, plus quite a bit more since there are over 3000 games, 5000 applications, GPS, and 100's of devices which support the windows mobile platform.
Sure the WM platform has its problems, it just amazes me people are stunned when can use a web browser, read PDF, and view video on a phone when it has been around for so long, and oh yeah, you can get a better equiped Smartphone for about $200 less than an iPhone, and most of them are already unlocked.
That may be true with a homebrew SSD, but when you are controlling each chip directly without having to go through a RAID or USB interface, you can simply multiplex the reads and writes over 10s or 100s of memory chips, increasing throughput speeds to whatever you want, 1MB/s to 1GB/s, you name it.
This just blows my mind, so ebay spends millions attracting customers, building its site, gaining sellers, advertising everywhere, all for ONE goal, to get a buyer on their site to make them some money. Now why on earth would they send those buyers away to another sale site, when they could translate them into a sale? Instead of putting any external ad or link, they should be putting an internal one.
Slashdot Mirror
Project Constellation overall is a great idea, but building a moonbase is probably a bad idea.
He also argues that a Moon base is a poor use of resources, since "science can be done for far less money by robotic missions--which also don't put human lives at risk."[5] The Los Angeles Times seconded that in an editorial, saying "Manned moon flight may appeal to baby boomers, but it makes little scientific sense for most space missions these days. Robots can now perform, or be developed to perform, most of the tasks people would do at a moon station." [6]
Columnist Gregg Easterbrook has criticized the plans as a poor use of resources. He writes that
Although, of course, the base could yield a great discovery, its scientific value is likely to be small while its price is extremely high. Worse, moon-base nonsense may for decades divert NASA resources from the agency's legitimate missions, draining funding from real needs in order to construct human history's silliest white elephant. [7]
According to Easterbrook, the billions of dollars that a lunar colony might cost should instead be devoted to exploring the solar system with space probes; space observatories; and protecting the Earth from Near-Earth asteroids.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_outpost_(NASA)
"The interface is the device."
In the end it is, but it is far easier than the hardware. I agree the inteface/OS is probably the most important thing in any phone next to the connection stability, but any piece of software can be easily copied by even the smallest team. Copying the entire iPhone OS experience would be trivial when done on top of Windows Mobile, a single person has already copied much of the functionality. Creating a solid piece of hardware and in mass quantities is much harder IMO.
"Dell has a history of bombing with handhelds"
The Dell Axim series was one of the most popular Pocket PCs in history, I would bet they sold several times more Axims than Apple has sold iPhones.
The highest powered Axims released in the later years of the series was more powerful and feature rich than the iPhone. The x50 had VGA, touchscreen, wifi, BT, SD/CF, IR, 620mhz CPU, over 6000 software apps, and came out in 2004.
If Dell was serious about releasing an iPhone 'killer' all they would have to do is resurrect their x50 and add phone support and it would be better than the iPhone except for the interface. After releasing 6 PDA models they have the knowledge and experience to easily do this. Its probably only a matter of business contracts with the mobile carriers that is holding them back.
I'm sure it will be fun for a while, but it seems overhyped. Nothing in the game is ground breaking, every aspect of it has been done in other games already, its more about the combination of game play elements and scale that sets it apart I guess. Wright is a fantastic designer so I'm sure it will be great, but the best game ever made, no way.
As of November 2007, a daily updated report projected that the IANA pool of unallocated addresses would be exhausted in May 2010, with the various Regional Internet Registries using up their allocations from IANA in April 2011.[8] This report also argues that, if assigned but unused addresses were reclaimed and used to meet continuing demand, allocation of IPv4 addresses could continue until 2017.
-wikipedia
So when IPv6 finally does become the norm, will there be any need for NATs on home routers, or will ISPs simply give you many addresses?
I thought of that and yes I would feel the same way, why kill the tiger when you can tranquilize it, even if it may slightly increase the risk of a human being killed. I'm just very suprised my post got modded up, I now think more highly of the ./ crowd.
The original post couldn't be more correct. "The only tragedy here was the tiger having to be killed."
Let the tiger kill 1 person, 100 people, 1000 people, it is a fucking TIGER people, not a bunny rabbit, it was born to do one thing only, KILL! DO NOT expect it to do anything else if its free, and sure as fuck don't kill it for doing so, tranquilize it for crying out loud. Any tiger left on the face of the planet is worth 1,000,000 times more than any human, they are endangered, WE ARE NOT.
For those who can't connect...
PICTURES: Virgin Galactic unveils Dyna-Soar style SpaceShipTwo design and twin-fuselage White Knight II configuration
By Rob Coppinger
Virgin Galactic has unveiled a SpaceShipTwo (SS2) design, created by Scaled Composites, that harks back to the NASA/USAF Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar glider of the 1960s, while Scaled's carrier aircraft, White Knight II (WK2) has been given a twin-fuselage configuration.
To be launched on a Lockheed Martin Titan III rocket, Dyna-Soar was for hypersonic flight research but the programme was cancelled before the first vehicle was completed. Some of its subsystems were used in later X-15 flight research and Dyna-Soar became a testbed for advanced technologies that contributed to projects, including the Space Shuttle.
Above: SpaceShipTwo is carried between the two fuselages of White Knight II
Virgin Galactic's commercial operations will now start from New Mexico's Spaceport America in 2010 and not from Mojave air and space port in California, as originally planned, but the WK2, SS2 launch system will be test flown by Scaled at the Californian port.
At its 23 January press conference at the American Museum of Natural History in New York city Virgin Galactic described SS2 as using the same basic technology, construction and design as its predecessor SpaceShipOne (SS1), as 100% composite and twice as large as the $10 million X-Prize winning vehicle, SS1.
Above: SpaceShipTwo transitions into feathering mode for its reentry
The SS2 is 18.3m (60ft) long, has a wingspan of 12.8m, a tail height of 4.5m with a passenger cabin that is 3.66m long and 2.28m in diameter. Despite being so much larger than SS1, SS2 will still use a front nose skid, and not nose gear. Released at 50,000ft (15,200m) by WK2, the rocket glider's apogee is expected to be up to 110km (68 miles).
Above: SpaceShipTwo is under construction at Scaled Composites
The carrier aircraft, WK2, is now 23.7m-long, it still has a wingspan of 42.7m, with a tail height of 7.62m and its integration is now 80% complete - with the assembly of the wing underway in preparation for its mating with the twin fuselages.
The WK2 will have four Pratt and Whitney PW308 engines, as revealed by Flight in September last year. And as Flight has also reported WK2's crew and passenger cabin will be the same; for training purposes.
Above: White Knight II under construction with its twin fuselages being fitted with their tail fins at Scaled Composites
Virgin Galactic also announced that the SS2 simulator is now operational, ahead of the previous March 2008 date that had been given. It is already being used for pilot training.
Above: Brian Binnie, Scaled Composites pilot, sits in the SpaceShipTwo simulator
"That'll be the day I stop playing games"
and no one will care and the world will go on as usual. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but advertisers could care less about you, and probably most people on this site. They care about people who spend money on trivial stupid things, 10 to 25 years old, with rich mommies and daddies. The reason advertising like this works is these morons spend their money before they even have it and must use credit cards and payment plans to get anything.
Get a plan together and send it to management telling them how these messages are pointless and wasting everyones time, then IT will adopt some new rules for all email clients.
- truncate all 'original messages' when replying to so many bytes
- remove the Reply to All button and bury it in the menu
- disable Include Original Message by default
How many subatomic particles are in the human body? Multiply that by maybe 10 or so and thats how much space you would need to 'record' your current state, so you could be put back together at the other end. So you would record the person on one end, send their info through to the other end, construct them from piles of subatomic particles, verify them, then deconstruct them at the original location.
You would need to record the orientation, position, temperature, and perhaps several other factors (probably unknown to us at this time) for all of the smallest particles.
This would seem to be the way to 'teleport' someone with ideas from current technology. Because the recording device would need MORE memory than the density of subatomic particles being recorded, this would seem to be quite a ways off, but you could do a rough calculation as to when we would reach this memory density and transmission rate.
It would seem easier in the near term to discover some kind of subspace worm hole than deal with the technological issues of teleportation.
Yeah you are right on. The most exciting thing for me would be the HD rentals, but the fact that you have to have an AppleTV is dumb, I have a MacMini hooked up to my HDTV and its awesome, why the hell can't I download HD movies using it? I have a 360 and their movie selection is pretty bad, Apple having all of the studios could be a big plus, but not if you need an AppleTV.
;) that anytime soon.
About the only thing that would have been impressive in your list is a tablet with multitouch, but seeing as every tablet that has ever been released has been a total failure, I don't think they are going to touch
Sadly their streaming movies are crappy quality I've read, put up some HD movies, 720p even, and I'll gladly pay $20/month. http://www.vudu.com/ seems to be the only doing this, and its expensive as hell, then there is the 360 downloads, but their selection is crap and its still quite expensive at 3-4 bucks per movie.
a $50,000+ setup and he doesn't even have a 2.35 aspect screen with a panamorph lens?
It's just an article someone at PM wrote, it gives you no insights about public or political desires on how to spend money. Actually spending per person was down this year on black friday.
The reason articles like this are written is because it is more exciting to think about spending money on some gee-whiz new technology than any boring existing technology we know works.
Rule #1 in technology, anything portable is more expensive than if it were not portable. If its so cheap to use a crate, why not just put the stuff in the crate in a warehouse instead, bypassing the crate and all of the work and design involved with shoving and fitting the stuff in the crate?
Mags can't compete with websites for several reasons:
1) space, websites have unlimited space, size, and coverage possible
2) time, websites can publish immediately
3) media, websites can show pictures, video, sound, and link to demos seamlessly
4) cost, websites are a fraction of the cost of anything printed
5) promotion, websites can better integrate with relevant and targeted advertisements
6) user interaction, websites can offer real time discussion of any article or issue
In order for mags to compete they must evolve into something different than what websites can offer. Some ideas:
1) switch to full page color ads with little to no text (I find most ads are quite enjoyable if they are simply/mostly images)
2) focus on quality of reviews and previews rather than quantity, exclusivity, or breaking news, websites can easily beat you on these so you must focus on quality.
3) clean up the format so it is super clear and uncluttered
Ultimately I think all magazines and newspapers will shrink and be shoved in a corner to very specific uses for travel, bathrooms, waiting rooms, basically any public place where you are forced to wait.
If I owned a print only magazine, rather than trying to beat back the online media torrent that will dissolve your format, I would embrace it and move all resources to my online presense, then allow people to print free mini versions of the magazine for use in the public waiting places mentioned above.
There will be a PS4, they aren't just going to walk away that easily. They just have so many things against them with the PS3: brand new propreitary disc format, brand new cpu, no dual shock, the lamest game linup in history, the most expensive console of the bunch, a launch fiasco with limited supplies and massive ebaying, the rootkit issue, crappy multiplayer experience (compared to live), the list goes on...
With the PS4 they need to: use which ever disc format is most popular, use an intel cpu, nvidia gpu or amd/ati solution, have a price under $400, concentrate on game play rather than graphics.
God I hate articles formatted like this, please put them all on one html page so I don't have to click and wait 100 times. The 'print article' trick doesn't even work, at least provide an option for this format.
No, we will end up with 1, it will be called Skynet, Borg, or the Matrix, depending upon which type of nerd you are.
Welcome to what Smartphone and Pocket PC owners have been enjoying for over 5 years, plus quite a bit more since there are over 3000 games, 5000 applications, GPS, and 100's of devices which support the windows mobile platform.
Sure the WM platform has its problems, it just amazes me people are stunned when can use a web browser, read PDF, and view video on a phone when it has been around for so long, and oh yeah, you can get a better equiped Smartphone for about $200 less than an iPhone, and most of them are already unlocked.
That may be true with a homebrew SSD, but when you are controlling each chip directly without having to go through a RAID or USB interface, you can simply multiplex the reads and writes over 10s or 100s of memory chips, increasing throughput speeds to whatever you want, 1MB/s to 1GB/s, you name it.
just do this http://regmedia.co.uk/2005/02/28/tinfoil_car.jpg to your car
This just blows my mind, so ebay spends millions attracting customers, building its site, gaining sellers, advertising everywhere, all for ONE goal, to get a buyer on their site to make them some money. Now why on earth would they send those buyers away to another sale site, when they could translate them into a sale? Instead of putting any external ad or link, they should be putting an internal one.