For example, the author asserts that "stealth efficiency" of rockets (in an equation he uses) are "0.0". But you can do better than that (I'd say near 1.0 to be honest) merely by not pointing your rocket directly at a detector.
Unless you aren't firing your engines. Or the enemy can't detect the output of your engines (eg, certain light based, railgun-style propulsion, and "propellantless" drives) or maneuver tricks that don't involve thrust (such as slings and gravity assists).
And the linked article you refer to doesn't understand the idea of directed power. If an enemy starship that is trying to sneak up on you has their terawatt engines firing in your direction, it's because they're trying to cut your ship in half. When engines aren't pointed at you, they have a much lower energy signature and aren't detectable all the way out to Alpha Centauri (though obviously a torchship is going to be pretty easy to detect just the same). Similarly, the two Voyager spacecraft have easily detectable signals because those signals are directed by a high gain parabolic antenna at Earth, because the signal has a narrow bandwidth, and because there's a huge dish at Earth to pick up the signal.
On that last point, there's the matter of detecting signals. The problem here is that you need a lot of surface area and scanning to get the sort of sensitivity discussed in the article. You want to hear a 20 watt narrow bandwidth signal at 120 AU? You need a 70 meter dish and extremely low noise sensor or equivalent in alien technology. This stuff has mass and doesn't handle acceleration well. So now, your system is split into at least two parts, a delicate sensor side and the blow-them-up side.
Even if you had radar or some other kind of active sensors to detect incoming missiles before they engage their thrusters and give away their position, the attacker could simply fire their missiles inside a cloud of other flak to camouflage them.
And if it's coming in fast enough, even the flak can kill you.
Just drop it in federal court for the states violating the Federal Government's right to control interstate commerce, thus causing Tesla damages.
Except that the federal government doesn't have any such "right". At best, the federal government has the legal authority to regulate interstate commerce, but not necessarily intrastate commerce, like Iowa's regulation of car dealerships. You have to show violation first. And I don't buy that is actually happening here.
One can always make a sufficiently adventurous court decision, but that approach has a lot of blowback, more likely to cause trouble than to fix it especially once the adventurers start dealing with the inconvenient laws that help keep US citizens mostly free. The commerce clause in particular is a far too flexible means as it is of doing whatever the central government wants at the expense of everyone else. You don't really want a court to run with that just to break the power of Iowan car dealerships.
Odd turn of phrase. What made you think that people were trying to convince you?
Why are you posting then?
There are currently machines on the ground doing science. Aaaand where are the besuited experts currently? Are they on ground? Give us a breakdown on the actual current capability of besuited experts versus machines.
We can look at Apollo to see what human-level exploration and research looks like. I find it disingenuous to equate human-level exploration with no exploration at all.
Parachutes are emergency survival devices they are not supposed to be the way you normally fly - they are quite risky.
That's why sky divers use them only for emergencies. Pardon my sarcasm. And you're not "flying" with parachutes, but landing with them - a place where they have quite a bit of success and have turned out to be quite reliable.
Neither shuttle was lost in a situation where a capsule would have been superior; Had an Apollo capsule been ripped apart on ascent by an exploding booster as Challenger was the crew would have died just the same way (capsule crews generally have no personal escape gear like personal chutes because the capsule scheme cannot handle the extra mass, whereas post-Challenger shuttle crews DID get such equipment). Had an Apollo capsule suffered a basketball-sized hole in its heatshield its crew would have perished just as surely as Columbia's crew.
To the contrary, in the Challenger accident, two things would have been different. First, the capsule would have been on top of the vehicle. Second, it would have a launch abort system attached. That combination would have made the accident survivable.
The same goes for the Columbia accident. The capsule would not have been situated on the side of the launch vehicle where it could receive an impact and hence would not have had said basketball sized hole in the vehicle.
Finally, it's worth noting that NASA didn't have a need for a vehicle larger than a big capsule. They never had more than seven people in the crew. And payloads were no more massive and only a little bit bigger in width than the current Delta IV Heavy and the 80's Titan IV could handle.
Worth noting also that a machine with modern sensory equipment and software is going to be far far superior at spotting the "unusual" something as it makes it's way to point X.
A big part of the reason I'm not convinced is because of how much boosters of unmanned-only exaggerate the capabilities of such machines. There's no current machine that can beat a pressure-suited expert on the ground. And merely having better sensory equipment (when that actually is the case) doesn't mean a better ability at spotting the unusual.
In the meantime, the current desultory effort at studying Mars, means we'll lose at least a whole generation of researchers long before we get to human-level science acquisition on Mars.
Depends how important you think it is to do that. If you're willing to spend a billion dollars, then that's a strong indication to me that you should be interested in the advantages of having a human on site. If you don't think it's that valuable, then it isn't that valuable with humans either.
How about from the currently esoteric point of view of rebuilding human society from scratch?
The Z-80 is one of a few chips that has the unusual feature that it is both simple enough to be built out of vacuum tubes or crude handmade integrated circuits (for example, you would need somewhere in the neighborhood of 5k to 10k tubes, complex but not impossible for a small machine shop) yet barely complex enough that you can run a simple version of Linux on it (I gather Linux hasn't yet been ported, but there are apparently people working on it).
The Z-80 design creates a hardware-side pathway for bootstrapping computer technology from vacuum tubes and transistors to modern software tools and languages. Reverse engineering the design might at some future point put considerable computation power in the hands of a desperate society.
Sarcasm or serious? I can't tell (especially with yet another broken Slashdot UI feature keeping me from glancing at your posting history). All I can say though is that I'll take this sort of rant seriously when they come up with a better system rather than just rag on capitalism.
You have to build not only the rocket, but a tower to carry the crew to the top of the rocket along with an arm to get the astronauts into the vehicle (which is not compatible/spacecraft). Escape systems need to be installed. It's very expensive, and it would never be built without assurance that the demand is there.
Then guarantee the demand. It still doesn't require contracts. Notice here that Boeing isn't actually getting a long term contract or guarantee of business in the first place. They're building all that expensive stuff just because NASA gave them four billion dollars (well, will give them, over the course of the next few years).
The first mission or two is probably no return anyway so who cares if you can't abort?
Because it allows you a chance to save the crew and vehicle at little additional cost to the mission. As the article notes, if you have enough propellant to get to Mars, you have enough to abort at any point before you start using that propellant to go into Mars orbit and/or a landing.
We need to be WAY less cautious about manned space travel again, we aren't going to do much of import at this pace.
And yet, we could be more cautious than we currently are within the current budget and still get more done than we currently do. For example, the current dumping of US funding into a large rocket (with several single points of failure, low reliability, and spending in all the right congressional districts) is a huge inefficiency. It creates huge risks for both the long term viability of the US space program and to anyone involved (crew and ground personnel).
Also, I think Tesla should focus on breaking these absurd laws.
You have to break them too (or at least get blocked from acting due to the laws) in order to gain standing for any court actions. But it's also worth noting here that states have a great deal of latitude in creating rent seeking arrangements like what car dealers have all over the US. Lawsuits might overturn some of that, but I doubt it'll overturn all of it.
Events like the three days of test rides can be the seed for political and legal campaigns to overturn the present order. I wouldn't be surprised if the test drives and their subsequent cancellation were staged in order to start this process in Iowa.
You're off your rocker... You don't have a right to assault people, and you don't have a right to haul them into court on suspicion.
I honestly don't get what you're trying to say here. The self-defense thing remains an obvious problem. I don't have a right to assault you (everyone agrees on this), but assaults happen in the real world anyway. My concern has always been how your defensive actions are restrained by this rule so that you can't perform basic self-defense anymore - unless of course, you outright violate the rule and compel me to stop the assault, say by killing me.
As to contempt of court, it most often happens when someone suppresses or hides evidence relevant to a case. The existence of the evidence is known. It's not a vague suspicion.
Yes. Suppose I'm exercising quite vigorously my non-right to beat your head in with a brick. What should you be able to do about it? In the real world, we allow people to defend themselves.
Sure, your statement says that I don't have a right to assault you, but it also says that you have no right to compel me to stop my non-compliant behavior. And ultimately, what is the point of a fundamental rule that prohibits any sort of useful response to violations of the rule?
Nobody has any right to compel anybody to do anything at all, ever.
The obvious counterexample is self-defense. If I try to beat your head in with a brick, then you have the right to use lethal force to compel me to stop.
And if you still haven't turned over the encryption, then the judge can extend the penalty a few more months and repeat the process indefinitely. The reason contempt doesn't usually last very long is because people get that they'll stay in jail longer, if they continue to remain in contempt of court than if they turn over the evidence that the court demands of them.
If it was easy to make weapon grade uranium from ore we would control access to the ore. As it is, we control access to the enriching technology and final product.
No, "we" would try and fail hard to control access to the ore.
When an organization (the UN) that represents the interests of various world GOVERNMENTS is using up time/resources (funded by our tax dollars) to give her a nice title and time in the spotlight to push a cause that those governments approve of? That's capitalism?
Did that happen? All I saw was UN funds getting converted into PR firm revenue.
Now, you're starting to get into the entire "CEOs are psychopaths" pop psychology that appears here every once in a while. A successful leader has to be able to make unpopular choices. Some people just can't seem to get that.
Slashdot Mirror
More like 10 per day. Banker holidays.
For example, the author asserts that "stealth efficiency" of rockets (in an equation he uses) are "0.0". But you can do better than that (I'd say near 1.0 to be honest) merely by not pointing your rocket directly at a detector.
Unless you aren't firing your engines. Or the enemy can't detect the output of your engines (eg, certain light based, railgun-style propulsion, and "propellantless" drives) or maneuver tricks that don't involve thrust (such as slings and gravity assists).
And the linked article you refer to doesn't understand the idea of directed power. If an enemy starship that is trying to sneak up on you has their terawatt engines firing in your direction, it's because they're trying to cut your ship in half. When engines aren't pointed at you, they have a much lower energy signature and aren't detectable all the way out to Alpha Centauri (though obviously a torchship is going to be pretty easy to detect just the same). Similarly, the two Voyager spacecraft have easily detectable signals because those signals are directed by a high gain parabolic antenna at Earth, because the signal has a narrow bandwidth, and because there's a huge dish at Earth to pick up the signal.
On that last point, there's the matter of detecting signals. The problem here is that you need a lot of surface area and scanning to get the sort of sensitivity discussed in the article. You want to hear a 20 watt narrow bandwidth signal at 120 AU? You need a 70 meter dish and extremely low noise sensor or equivalent in alien technology. This stuff has mass and doesn't handle acceleration well. So now, your system is split into at least two parts, a delicate sensor side and the blow-them-up side.
Even if you had radar or some other kind of active sensors to detect incoming missiles before they engage their thrusters and give away their position, the attacker could simply fire their missiles inside a cloud of other flak to camouflage them.
And if it's coming in fast enough, even the flak can kill you.
Just drop it in federal court for the states violating the Federal Government's right to control interstate commerce, thus causing Tesla damages.
Except that the federal government doesn't have any such "right". At best, the federal government has the legal authority to regulate interstate commerce, but not necessarily intrastate commerce, like Iowa's regulation of car dealerships. You have to show violation first. And I don't buy that is actually happening here.
One can always make a sufficiently adventurous court decision, but that approach has a lot of blowback, more likely to cause trouble than to fix it especially once the adventurers start dealing with the inconvenient laws that help keep US citizens mostly free. The commerce clause in particular is a far too flexible means as it is of doing whatever the central government wants at the expense of everyone else. You don't really want a court to run with that just to break the power of Iowan car dealerships.
Odd turn of phrase. What made you think that people were trying to convince you?
Why are you posting then?
There are currently machines on the ground doing science. Aaaand where are the besuited experts currently? Are they on ground? Give us a breakdown on the actual current capability of besuited experts versus machines.
We can look at Apollo to see what human-level exploration and research looks like. I find it disingenuous to equate human-level exploration with no exploration at all.
Parachutes are emergency survival devices they are not supposed to be the way you normally fly - they are quite risky.
That's why sky divers use them only for emergencies. Pardon my sarcasm. And you're not "flying" with parachutes, but landing with them - a place where they have quite a bit of success and have turned out to be quite reliable.
Neither shuttle was lost in a situation where a capsule would have been superior; Had an Apollo capsule been ripped apart on ascent by an exploding booster as Challenger was the crew would have died just the same way (capsule crews generally have no personal escape gear like personal chutes because the capsule scheme cannot handle the extra mass, whereas post-Challenger shuttle crews DID get such equipment). Had an Apollo capsule suffered a basketball-sized hole in its heatshield its crew would have perished just as surely as Columbia's crew.
To the contrary, in the Challenger accident, two things would have been different. First, the capsule would have been on top of the vehicle. Second, it would have a launch abort system attached. That combination would have made the accident survivable.
The same goes for the Columbia accident. The capsule would not have been situated on the side of the launch vehicle where it could receive an impact and hence would not have had said basketball sized hole in the vehicle.
Finally, it's worth noting that NASA didn't have a need for a vehicle larger than a big capsule. They never had more than seven people in the crew. And payloads were no more massive and only a little bit bigger in width than the current Delta IV Heavy and the 80's Titan IV could handle.
Worth noting also that a machine with modern sensory equipment and software is going to be far far superior at spotting the "unusual" something as it makes it's way to point X.
A big part of the reason I'm not convinced is because of how much boosters of unmanned-only exaggerate the capabilities of such machines. There's no current machine that can beat a pressure-suited expert on the ground. And merely having better sensory equipment (when that actually is the case) doesn't mean a better ability at spotting the unusual.
In the meantime, the current desultory effort at studying Mars, means we'll lose at least a whole generation of researchers long before we get to human-level science acquisition on Mars.
Depends how important you think it is to do that. If you're willing to spend a billion dollars, then that's a strong indication to me that you should be interested in the advantages of having a human on site. If you don't think it's that valuable, then it isn't that valuable with humans either.
The problem is that the operators remain on Earth not Mars. There's a hard lag time which can be over an hour one way.
Move around on the surface of Mars and examine objects with lag time to a human operator of about a tenth of a second.
The US government doesn't have a contract that it'll accept tax payments in US dollars. It just says it will and that happens to be good enough.
How about from the currently esoteric point of view of rebuilding human society from scratch?
The Z-80 is one of a few chips that has the unusual feature that it is both simple enough to be built out of vacuum tubes or crude handmade integrated circuits (for example, you would need somewhere in the neighborhood of 5k to 10k tubes, complex but not impossible for a small machine shop) yet barely complex enough that you can run a simple version of Linux on it (I gather Linux hasn't yet been ported, but there are apparently people working on it).
The Z-80 design creates a hardware-side pathway for bootstrapping computer technology from vacuum tubes and transistors to modern software tools and languages. Reverse engineering the design might at some future point put considerable computation power in the hands of a desperate society.
Sarcasm or serious? I can't tell (especially with yet another broken Slashdot UI feature keeping me from glancing at your posting history). All I can say though is that I'll take this sort of rant seriously when they come up with a better system rather than just rag on capitalism.
You have to build not only the rocket, but a tower to carry the crew to the top of the rocket along with an arm to get the astronauts into the vehicle (which is not compatible/spacecraft). Escape systems need to be installed. It's very expensive, and it would never be built without assurance that the demand is there.
Then guarantee the demand. It still doesn't require contracts. Notice here that Boeing isn't actually getting a long term contract or guarantee of business in the first place. They're building all that expensive stuff just because NASA gave them four billion dollars (well, will give them, over the course of the next few years).
The first mission or two is probably no return anyway so who cares if you can't abort?
Because it allows you a chance to save the crew and vehicle at little additional cost to the mission. As the article notes, if you have enough propellant to get to Mars, you have enough to abort at any point before you start using that propellant to go into Mars orbit and/or a landing.
We need to be WAY less cautious about manned space travel again, we aren't going to do much of import at this pace.
And yet, we could be more cautious than we currently are within the current budget and still get more done than we currently do. For example, the current dumping of US funding into a large rocket (with several single points of failure, low reliability, and spending in all the right congressional districts) is a huge inefficiency. It creates huge risks for both the long term viability of the US space program and to anyone involved (crew and ground personnel).
Also, I think Tesla should focus on breaking these absurd laws.
You have to break them too (or at least get blocked from acting due to the laws) in order to gain standing for any court actions. But it's also worth noting here that states have a great deal of latitude in creating rent seeking arrangements like what car dealers have all over the US. Lawsuits might overturn some of that, but I doubt it'll overturn all of it.
Events like the three days of test rides can be the seed for political and legal campaigns to overturn the present order. I wouldn't be surprised if the test drives and their subsequent cancellation were staged in order to start this process in Iowa.
You're off your rocker... You don't have a right to assault people, and you don't have a right to haul them into court on suspicion.
I honestly don't get what you're trying to say here. The self-defense thing remains an obvious problem. I don't have a right to assault you (everyone agrees on this), but assaults happen in the real world anyway. My concern has always been how your defensive actions are restrained by this rule so that you can't perform basic self-defense anymore - unless of course, you outright violate the rule and compel me to stop the assault, say by killing me.
As to contempt of court, it most often happens when someone suppresses or hides evidence relevant to a case. The existence of the evidence is known. It's not a vague suspicion.
Yes. Suppose I'm exercising quite vigorously my non-right to beat your head in with a brick. What should you be able to do about it? In the real world, we allow people to defend themselves.
Sure, your statement says that I don't have a right to assault you, but it also says that you have no right to compel me to stop my non-compliant behavior. And ultimately, what is the point of a fundamental rule that prohibits any sort of useful response to violations of the rule?
Nobody has any right to compel anybody to do anything at all, ever.
The obvious counterexample is self-defense. If I try to beat your head in with a brick, then you have the right to use lethal force to compel me to stop.
Yea, right. They can't afford a cheap used car, but they can afford to go through a destructive subprime lease cycle with the used car dealer.
which might only be a few months at most
And if you still haven't turned over the encryption, then the judge can extend the penalty a few more months and repeat the process indefinitely. The reason contempt doesn't usually last very long is because people get that they'll stay in jail longer, if they continue to remain in contempt of court than if they turn over the evidence that the court demands of them.
If it was easy to make weapon grade uranium from ore we would control access to the ore. As it is, we control access to the enriching technology and final product.
No, "we" would try and fail hard to control access to the ore.
When an organization (the UN) that represents the interests of various world GOVERNMENTS is using up time/resources (funded by our tax dollars) to give her a nice title and time in the spotlight to push a cause that those governments approve of? That's capitalism?
Did that happen? All I saw was UN funds getting converted into PR firm revenue.
Now, you're starting to get into the entire "CEOs are psychopaths" pop psychology that appears here every once in a while. A successful leader has to be able to make unpopular choices. Some people just can't seem to get that.