The budget for the film is the amount of money it took to make it. However, there are various people who get cuts of the revenue. The Theater owners keep something half of the take, for example, and if Stars or others get "points" (i.e., a percentage of the film's take in lieu of payment), that is not part of the budget either. Also, I think that there are some expenses that may be generally regarded as "off-budget" (I believe marketing may fall in that category), as they are not really finalized until after the film is released - the more popular the film, the more marketing that will be done.
Now, of course, film accounting is notoriously flakey, but that factor of 2.5 is just a rule of thumb to account for these various payments that have to be made before the film can recoup its cost of production, but are not really part of the cost of making the film.
Yes, and if you continue such acceleration, there would be really serious time dilation. With constant 1-g acceleration the subjective time to go 100 light years is just over 9 years.
Having said that, I don't think that is how people will do long distance travel - the dangers of collisions is very strong. (Anything you collide with is basically turned into energy, a 1 kg rock would have the energy of a multi-megaton bomb.) Going to the stars will take either multi-generational ships or manipulating space time.
To be politically incorrect, the problem with the robotic exploration of the solar system and beyond is just that it is much too slow. We have found less about Mars, for example, in 40 years than we did about the Moon in the first Apollo landings. The recent Mars Exploration Rovers are phenomenal achievements, but astronauts could have explored the same area in maybe a week. The search for life on Mars is now at 30 years and counting, and we may (at present rates) know something definitive by the middle of the next decade.
Recent NASA/ESA reviews have discussed Jupiter and Saturn mission planning through 2040, and these missions will not deal with the biological exploration of either Europa or Titan. FInding out if there is life on Europa will take (given current planning) well into the 2060 period at best, and probably into the next century.
My prediction is that this will continue until it is overtaken by events, such as an efficient manned space-flight program in China or India.
As far as Seth's essay is concerned, neither human or alien expansion into the galaxy is likely to be focused on stars, and so the travel time to stars is not really relevant.
No, it would not. Punched paper tape dries out and cracks along punches (especially higher order bytes with mostly ones, i.e., lots of holes). After a few years, the tape splits from the cracks and you get a lot of short sections of tape.
When I was at MIT in the late 1970's, already it was very hard to read Apollo data on punched paper tape, and an undergraduate was hired to feed in the punched paper tape and put it on disk, one 4 to 5 foot section at a time. He also had to determine the value of the byte where the tape split. I have always thought that that was one of the worst summer jobs of all time.
Yes, in Alaska there weren't many people to complain (it wasn't even a state until '59), and in Panama the feeling was you could ignore local complaints.
There was a project, Plowshare and a series of engineering bursts, including Sedan, which left a nice crater and "contaminated the most US residents of any nuclear test," and Gnome, which created a highly radioactive cavity in a salt dome. All in all, I don't think that any of this resulted on any engineering anyone might want to use.
Let's resurrect Project Orion, and use this stuff to put a few 100 people on Mars and prospect the main belt asteroids.
After all, this was one of the original rationales for Orion. In all of this time, I don't think that anyone has come up with any better ideas, and we sure aren't getting into the solar system very fast with chemical rockets.
The real story here is that all of this could have been done in the 1970's. We could have landed humans on Mars 30 years ago. We (for some set of "we") didn't want to. LBJ didn't want to. Nixon didn't want to. Is that all it takes to derail a Democracy - two leaders in a row that are opposed to something ?
It gives me a better appreciation for the travails of Admiral Zheng He and his treasure fleet.
I admire your passion, but I know of no one planning for winged / lifting body returns right now. There was the French Hermes and the Soviet Buran, but they are both long canceled. If you know of any active programs, please provide links.
People look back and find it unbelievable that just a few short years ago hundreds of bodily vital signs were not continuously anticipated and monitored by medical implants for the majority of the populace.... The huge amounts of data that are accumulated from millions of continuously monitored people are nothing short of a revolution for the control of the population and the detection of doubt and hostility to the thoughts of our beloved leader.
Both the Americas and the Soviets put a number of probes in or through the Venus atmosphere, including 2 French-Soviet balloons.
The Soviet Vega landers actually detected some interesting things in the upper atmosphere of Venus with a light backscatter experment :
Lots of submicron particles between 60 and 30 km - roughly 10,000 per cubic cm.
In the "F zone" (~ 30 - 45 km) a possible detection of "extremely large" particles in the mm size range.
It's not a current driver for space exploration, but based on this I would by no means rule out a possible biosphere in the upper levels of the Venusian atmosphere.
These bacteria were retrieved at "different heights ranging from 20 km to 41 k".
These altitudes bracket the surface pressures on Mars, and the conditions at 41 km are quite comparable to those on the Martian surface (full UV flux, lower atmospheric pressure).
Given that material is exchanged between the Earth and Mars, I have to wonder if these might not be Martian bacteria.
there would still be mischief (because the mischief is intentional...).
All too true. There is an eternal arms race here, and I have no illusions that any automated means would prevent all wrong doing. That is, I think, a test of articifical intelligence that is considerably more stringent than Turing's.
However, just as people still use markup validators to check html, and compilers to check code, even though these will by no means catch all errors, putting law into a systematic form would certainly detect some errors, and some attempts at mischief, that now go undetected. And, of course, when people sneak something by one tool, others will be written. (The eternal arms race mentioned above.)
I will grant that some obsfucation is deliberate, but a lot of it is an attempt to be precise. Plain language is all too often ambiguous. If you have ever tried to write a complicated contract, you will know what I mean. It's not that different from writing code - simple metacode may not be so simple once you have allowed for all possible exceptions and strange conditions.
I have long thought that there should be a logic-based language for laws, at least for laws like the Tax code. My original idea in this direction was prolog, but something built on top of XML is probably more appropriate today.
It should, for example, be possible to automatically check that some 400 page law doesn't contain 1 paragraph that totally changes some other law, or that, say, 20 pages of consumer protections are not negated by two lines 100 pages later. The legal language used is already close to meta-code, but right now this all has to be checked by hand, allowing untold mischief. It should also be possible to check for logical inconsistencies and missing if-then-else options.
Some I am sure will see the current... flexibility as a feature, not a bug, but I think it is high time to be able to do some automatic checking of what the Congress is doing and what proposed laws actually mean.
In 1980 a Gigabyte of memory was a large room full of Winchester drives. If you did computing on IBMs back then, you used (although maybe never saw) Winchester drives.
I liked drum drives too - not much space, but they looked cool.
But, watch out for fan-folded punched paper tape. As the paper aged, it would crack on the folds.
These changes were driven by corporations, not artists. There was no deep consideration of the longer terms, just a response to lobbying by corporate interests.
Whenever anything interesting is discovered, people go to old surveys, old plates (the Harvard Sky Patrol from the 1930's tend to be especially useful) and old catalogs to see if people have seen it before. This is routinely done for asteroids, for example.
This is how Galileo's observations of Neptune in 1612 and images of the quasar 3C273 from the 1890's were found, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
The budget for the film is the amount of money it took to make it. However, there are various people who get cuts of the revenue. The Theater owners keep something half of the take, for example, and if Stars or others get "points" (i.e., a percentage of the film's take in lieu of payment), that is not part of the budget either. Also, I think that there are some expenses that may be generally regarded as "off-budget" (I believe marketing may fall in that category), as they are not really finalized until after the film is released - the more popular the film, the more marketing that will be done.
Now, of course, film accounting is notoriously flakey, but that factor of 2.5 is just a rule of thumb to account for these various payments that have to be made before the film can recoup its cost of production, but are not really part of the cost of making the film.
Has it, bluntly, been worth the gamble, expense and hassle?
Bluntly, it's not my money, or my time, or my movie, so why are you asking me if it was worth it ?
It would be cool if the producers read slashdot, but I doubt it.
Yes, and if you continue such acceleration, there would be really serious time dilation. With constant 1-g acceleration the subjective time to go 100 light years is just over 9 years.
Having said that, I don't think that is how people will do long distance travel - the dangers of collisions is very strong. (Anything you collide with is basically turned into energy, a 1 kg rock would have the energy of a multi-megaton bomb.) Going to the stars will take either multi-generational ships or manipulating space time.
To be politically incorrect, the problem with the robotic exploration of the solar system and beyond is just that it is much too slow. We have found less about Mars, for example, in 40 years than we did about the Moon in the first Apollo landings. The recent Mars Exploration Rovers are phenomenal achievements, but astronauts could have explored the same area in maybe a week. The search for life on Mars is now at 30 years and counting, and we may (at present rates) know something definitive by the middle of the next decade.
Recent NASA/ESA reviews have discussed Jupiter and Saturn mission planning through 2040, and these missions will not deal with the biological exploration of either Europa or Titan. FInding out if there is life on Europa will take (given current planning) well into the 2060 period at best, and probably into the next century.
My prediction is that this will continue until it is overtaken by events, such as an efficient manned space-flight program in China or India.
As far as Seth's essay is concerned, neither human or alien expansion into the galaxy is likely to be focused on stars, and so the travel time to stars is not really relevant.
No, it would not. Punched paper tape dries out and cracks along punches (especially higher order bytes with mostly ones, i.e., lots of holes). After a few years, the tape splits from the cracks and you get a lot of short sections of tape.
When I was at MIT in the late 1970's, already it was very hard to read Apollo data on punched paper tape, and an undergraduate was hired to feed in the punched paper tape and put it on disk, one 4 to 5 foot section at a time. He also had to determine the value of the byte where the tape split. I have always thought that that was one of the worst summer jobs of all time.
Yes, in Alaska there weren't many people to complain (it wasn't even a state until '59), and in Panama the feeling was you could ignore local complaints.
There was a project, Plowshare and a series of engineering bursts, including Sedan, which left a nice crater and "contaminated the most US residents of any nuclear test," and Gnome, which created a highly radioactive cavity in a salt dome. All in all, I don't think that any of this resulted on any engineering anyone might want to use.
Let's resurrect Project Orion, and use this stuff to put a few 100 people on Mars and prospect the main belt asteroids.
After all, this was one of the original rationales for Orion. In all of this time, I don't think that anyone has come up with any better ideas, and we sure aren't getting into the solar system very fast with chemical rockets.
The real story here is that all of this could have been done in the 1970's. We could have landed humans on Mars 30 years ago. We (for some set of "we") didn't want to. LBJ didn't want to. Nixon didn't want to. Is that all it takes to derail a Democracy - two leaders in a row that are opposed to something ?
It gives me a better appreciation for the travails of Admiral Zheng He and his treasure fleet.
I admire your passion, but I know of no one planning for winged / lifting body returns right now. There was the French Hermes and the Soviet Buran, but they are both long canceled. If you know of any active programs, please provide links.
I would also hopes that it builds on some technology from this century, as well as the last.
The possibilities are enormous.
Indeed. Maybe in 2050 our descendants will read
People look back and find it unbelievable that just a few short years ago hundreds of bodily vital signs were not continuously anticipated and monitored by medical implants for the majority of the populace. ... The huge amounts of data that are accumulated from millions of continuously monitored people are nothing short of a revolution for the control of the population and the detection of doubt and hostility to the thoughts of our beloved leader.
Both the Americas and the Soviets put a number of probes in or through the Venus atmosphere, including 2 French-Soviet balloons.
The Soviet Vega landers actually detected some interesting things in the upper atmosphere of Venus with a light backscatter experment :
Lots of submicron particles between 60 and 30 km - roughly 10,000 per cubic cm.
In the "F zone" (~ 30 - 45 km) a possible detection of "extremely large" particles in the mm size range.
It's not a current driver for space exploration, but based on this I would by no means rule out a possible biosphere in the upper levels of the Venusian atmosphere.
These bacteria were retrieved at "different heights ranging from 20 km to 41 k".
These altitudes bracket the surface pressures on Mars, and the conditions at 41 km are quite comparable to those
on the Martian surface (full UV flux, lower atmospheric pressure).
Given that material is exchanged between the Earth and Mars, I have to wonder if these might not be Martian bacteria.
Microsoft is, of course, a partner on the California system, since you can't ignore Windows in the data center
Microsoft is supposed to have about 30% of the server market, so I am not sure I get that of course.
Google "Tempest." Some of this has been released, some not, but this is decades old.
there would still be mischief (because the mischief is intentional...).
All too true. There is an eternal arms race here, and I have no illusions that any automated means would prevent all wrong doing. That is, I think, a test of articifical intelligence that is considerably more stringent than Turing's.
However, just as people still use markup validators to check html, and compilers to check code, even though these will by no means catch all errors, putting law into a systematic form would certainly detect some errors, and some attempts at mischief, that now go undetected. And, of course, when people sneak something by one tool, others will be written. (The eternal arms race mentioned above.)
I will grant that some obsfucation is deliberate, but a lot of it is an attempt to be precise. Plain language is all too often ambiguous. If you have ever tried to write a complicated contract, you will know what I mean. It's not that different from writing code - simple metacode may not be so simple once you have allowed for all possible exceptions and strange conditions.
I have long thought that there should be a logic-based language for laws, at least for laws like the Tax code. My original idea in this direction was prolog, but something built on top of XML is probably more appropriate today.
It should, for example, be possible to automatically check that some 400 page law doesn't contain 1 paragraph that totally changes some other law, or that, say, 20 pages of consumer protections are not negated by two lines 100 pages later. The legal language used is already close to meta-code, but right now this all has to be checked by hand, allowing untold mischief. It should also be possible to check for logical inconsistencies and missing if-then-else options.
Some I am sure will see the current ... flexibility as a feature, not a bug, but I think it is high time to be able to do some automatic checking of what the Congress is doing and what proposed laws actually mean.
I thought it was funny that they said IBM, but the picture was Univac.
In 1980 a Gigabyte of memory was a large room full of Winchester drives. If you did computing on IBMs back then, you used (although maybe never saw) Winchester drives.
I liked drum drives too - not much space, but they looked cool.
But, watch out for fan-folded punched paper tape. As the paper aged, it would crack on the folds.
It's when you don't admit that you are wrong that your reputation suffers.
I don't like to speak ill of the dead, so I will leave it at that.
These changes were driven by corporations, not artists. There was no deep consideration of the longer terms, just a response to lobbying by corporate interests.
Of course, the really cool things about such prediscovery observations of a planet is that they will really help to nail down the orbit.
Whenever anything interesting is discovered, people go to old surveys, old plates (the Harvard Sky Patrol from the 1930's tend to be especially useful) and old catalogs to see if people have seen it before. This is routinely done for asteroids, for example.
This is how Galileo's observations of Neptune in 1612 and images of the quasar 3C273 from the 1890's were found, for example.