Energy is not hard to come by. SpaceShipOne generated about a sixth of the delta-v it'd need to reach orbit. I consider that fairly close given the type of engine and relatively low mass fraction. SST is supposed to have slightly better performance in that regard. But neither is intended for this particular role.
But I think naysayers are overstating the difficulty of more delta v and a different thermal protection system. Sure, it might need a radical vehicle redesign. But guess who demonstrated that they can design such suborbital vehicles?
I'm curious what VG would charge for an orbital flight although I don't think they'll offer one in the foreseeable future.
Let's not get too hasty. I'd like to see the suborbital market work first. It is possible that many people will pay to fly to orbit, but we know for sure that there's a lot more people who will pay to go to other points on the Earth's surface in a timely manner.
Suborbital rocket flight won't truly be competitive with normal air flight on a cost basis (the latter is a multiple of propellant cost and rockets need to carry a lot more propellant than jet engines do). But if they can get the cost and travel time down enough, they can come up with something that is competitive and profitable, even without going into space directly.
I am not an expert in this field but some observations are apt: 'Two is a pilotable, larger craft whereas 'One was a smaller, shoot-up-parachue-down craft. The design differences are pretty big; they surely could have been working on the design for 'Two the whole time, but not much of the work on 'One carried over.
One would expect design differences given the larger size of SpaceShipTwo, the greater need for reliability as a passenger carrying vehicle instead of a prototype, and various performance and safety issues that were discovered with SpaceShipOne or with the 2007 accident (that killed three people and set back the attempts to develop a propulsion system for SpaceShipTwo).
So given that, I think a lot of the work on SpaceShipOne carries over. They have the same basic design of both the carrier aircraft and the rocket vehicle. They use the same sort of aerobraking system for the rocket vehicle. They know of a number of issues that need to be dealt with (such as instability of SpaceShipTwo once it separates from the carrier aircraft and boosts to its suborbital phase).
Most if not all the big companies are partly or wholly state owned.
Not in the US where fracking started.
This leads to an environment where the people become dependent on government hand outs (of cheap oil), diminishing incentive to seek alternative energy
Not true in the US or Europe. Oil products are taxed (very heavily in the case of Europe). And both spend large sums on alternative energy.
In my area, there are many several acre ponds that hold the returned fracking fluid. It goes down as whatever it's composition, and comes back up as a very saline and whatever other elements are in that rock, brew.
Having nasty stuff in a few ponds (and which at some point can be pumped back underground to the reservoir in question) is not the same thing as "destroy half the planet".
Because when you take the "Energy uber alles, and fuck the rest of ya" approach, the end result is not money gained, but money lost.
That's not what's happening here. We happen to need oil and fracking happens to be a way to deliver it efficiently.
Old cars have things break down more frequently. New cars have new perks to reduce maintenance (like auto-inflating tires).
Which is another thing that can break. I doubt it reduces maintenance at all (given how easy it is to check and adjust tire pressure and that it can't fix tire leaks and blowouts, which are the most expensive tire maintenance issues). Tires that never need inflation (like the "Tweel") might be a genuine bit of maintenance reduction.
I'm merely pointing out that reservoirs by their nature, hold things. When properly done, fracking (a procedure that is incidentally many decades old) isn't going to change that.
As I see it, the complaints about fracking chemicals leaking into water supplies are really complaints about drilling companies not following good procedure. In turn, that would mean regulatory agencies aren't enforcing existing regulation. I gather drillers who have taken short cuts have indeed caused some degree of damage over the decades. There's no reason to expect that those short cuts would be less damaging now than then.
They're just repeating rules that are already in place. Reasonable and what should be self-evident.
Libertarian types trying to sponge off the taxes of hard working tax payers via tax evasion need to stop being so greedy and stealing other peoples money.
That type of "libertarian" shows up throughout human society and has all sorts of professed ideologies.
Hint: what are the characteristics of a hydrocarbon reservoir?
Hints won't work here. One of the key characteristics of a hydrocarbon reservoir is that it keeps chemicals in one place. Else it wouldn't be a reservoir. These chemicals can be oil or they can be the less valuable fracking chemicals that drillers replace oil with.
The point is to make a system that can be dynamically reconfigured for increased performance on the fly.
They already have that. The game segregates everything into star systems and stations. That's easy to parallelize and under normal loads a server handles several star systems.
At great cost? Why would it have to be at great cost?
It's a huge change in the architecture. As I understand it from about a year ago, they cut out a lot of the player interactions in heavy battle conditions, introduced time dialation (which is a remarkable innovation, I might add), and pumped up the servers that are intended to handle battles.
But you still have a large number of interactions between players. If you hide some players from each other, then you can end up with situations like battlefield commanders unable to target critical ships because they can't see them (focus fire or everyone shooting the same target is a key tactic). Ships can have many drones apiece (5 for normal ships, 10-20 for "carriers" and "supercarriers"). And of course, someone will want to see the pretty explosions and pew pews.
That means your multiserver infrastructure will have considerably more interaction than the current Eve cluster experiences. And if you're going to bother with that, why not just have a really beefy server with multiple CPUs which has built-in the necessary communication network?
I happen to drive a 1992 Honda Civic. It looks pretty ugly (due to a faulty paint coating and a little old bling from the previous owner) so I understand where this guy is coming from. Especially, the plastic pieces that snap off.:-)
Even with a somewhat increased level of maintenance for a Civic, it's still cheaper and more convenient to maintain than most new cars. And I've had two unsolicited offers for it.
I wouldn't call this a "rut" primarily because cars never meant much to me. Having a car is life altering, changing cars not at all. If I ever get a job where shiny matters or the current one breaks too much, then I'll pick up something easier on the eyes. But even then, I'll buy a car that's not going to give me trouble.
Interactions square as the number of players. And a big limiting factor in the current size of the biggest fights is the lag. Lower it and more players will show. So "time dialation" will always have a role.
Further, what's the point of a fancy remake of the parallelism architecture? They already get substantial increases in capacity over time from better server equipment.
Sure, they can make a moderately better game at great cost, but that's not much of a case.
Given the alternatives are something like:
"Club was so cool that fire marshals closed it down due to overcrowding. We're waiting in the parking lot till it opens again."
Graceful failure is preferred to ungraceful failure.
It's not much if you're the whole organization of ACORN that lost all their support (wiki says they had a budget of $25 million)
So what? It's positive return on investment.
Ok, so no disappearing, but what about a lesser degree of shaming/discrediting/suing him like you said?
A slander lawsuit is a great way to do that. I imagine that didn't happen because either they didn't want to make a martyr or there was actual dirt hidden in ACORN records and that might have come out in a court case.
Um... because you just said government and private supporters pulled out? ACORN wasn't nor was it supposed to be some for profit company. No funding, no money. No money, no talk.
As I noted, ACORN could have scaled back on its spending and activities until a greater level of funding was restored.
Sure, the more wrong being government being incompetent making poor judgments and jumping to conclusions, and the private supporters who are pretty much no better than the rest of the rabble that follows along.
That's a great myth, but I don't actually see that in practice. I doubt any donors' or politicians' minds were changed by the O'Keefe video. They might have been changed by the somewhat inept response from ACORN leadership. But I think the real decision was to kill ACORN to keep it from becoming a 2010 election issue.
These exams are graded, all in time for university admissions.
That's a number of weeks. Reflecting on this thread, I think that this really is an issue of computer and network-based test taking. When you have such infrastructure required for the test, then that becomes another failure mode. It would be the same for any government-run testing service as well.
becasue the people who design this type of work, and mange it are really good.
Really good at siphoning public funds, that is. Who knows? They might be good at building roads too. But we'll never know from the I-405 construction project.
When you're after money, you don't worry about the semantics that you're using "slander" law to nail the guy. You pick what ever laws that has the best chance to succeed and/or reap the largest payout (and you don't need to win in court, getting a settlement can do just as well)
Well, from the casual way O'Keefe took this lawsuit, it appears he had more than $100,000 to his name. Adding slander to that might have picked up a big piece of whatever he actually has.
Your way of thinking actually applies for the opposite view: if O'Keefe was really on to something, and there's some really bad corruption going on, why hasn't the (obviously corrupt) government silenced him?
Why do you argue that? No offense, but allegedly engaging in minor crime by a minor organization just doesn't qualify as "really bad corruption" that someone would bother disappearing people for.
Further, it's worth noting that government and private supporters of ACORN were the very first to rush to judgment. For ACORN to lose its funding so quickly indicates to me that its political liabilities exceeded whatever value it had and they just cut it off.
And it probably would have been difficult, but ACORN could have cut back on its activities and scope until its finances were stable once again. So why declare bankruptcy only six months in? There's more wrong here than a supposedly fake video.
Slashdot Mirror
They're not even in the ballpark.
Energy is not hard to come by. SpaceShipOne generated about a sixth of the delta-v it'd need to reach orbit. I consider that fairly close given the type of engine and relatively low mass fraction. SST is supposed to have slightly better performance in that regard. But neither is intended for this particular role.
But I think naysayers are overstating the difficulty of more delta v and a different thermal protection system. Sure, it might need a radical vehicle redesign. But guess who demonstrated that they can design such suborbital vehicles?
I'm curious what VG would charge for an orbital flight although I don't think they'll offer one in the foreseeable future.
Let's not get too hasty. I'd like to see the suborbital market work first. It is possible that many people will pay to fly to orbit, but we know for sure that there's a lot more people who will pay to go to other points on the Earth's surface in a timely manner.
Suborbital rocket flight won't truly be competitive with normal air flight on a cost basis (the latter is a multiple of propellant cost and rockets need to carry a lot more propellant than jet engines do). But if they can get the cost and travel time down enough, they can come up with something that is competitive and profitable, even without going into space directly.
I am not an expert in this field but some observations are apt: 'Two is a pilotable, larger craft whereas 'One was a smaller, shoot-up-parachue-down craft. The design differences are pretty big; they surely could have been working on the design for 'Two the whole time, but not much of the work on 'One carried over.
One would expect design differences given the larger size of SpaceShipTwo, the greater need for reliability as a passenger carrying vehicle instead of a prototype, and various performance and safety issues that were discovered with SpaceShipOne or with the 2007 accident (that killed three people and set back the attempts to develop a propulsion system for SpaceShipTwo).
So given that, I think a lot of the work on SpaceShipOne carries over. They have the same basic design of both the carrier aircraft and the rocket vehicle. They use the same sort of aerobraking system for the rocket vehicle. They know of a number of issues that need to be dealt with (such as instability of SpaceShipTwo once it separates from the carrier aircraft and boosts to its suborbital phase).
Most if not all the big companies are partly or wholly state owned.
Not in the US where fracking started.
This leads to an environment where the people become dependent on government hand outs (of cheap oil), diminishing incentive to seek alternative energy
Not true in the US or Europe. Oil products are taxed (very heavily in the case of Europe). And both spend large sums on alternative energy.
In my area, there are many several acre ponds that hold the returned fracking fluid. It goes down as whatever it's composition, and comes back up as a very saline and whatever other elements are in that rock, brew.
Having nasty stuff in a few ponds (and which at some point can be pumped back underground to the reservoir in question) is not the same thing as "destroy half the planet".
Because when you take the "Energy uber alles, and fuck the rest of ya" approach, the end result is not money gained, but money lost.
That's not what's happening here. We happen to need oil and fracking happens to be a way to deliver it efficiently.
It's what that water come back out with that is a big problem. You think it comes back out as soap?
Of course, we don't want that nasty oil. Why else would we be pumping it out of the ground as fast as we can?
Old cars have things break down more frequently. New cars have new perks to reduce maintenance (like auto-inflating tires).
Which is another thing that can break. I doubt it reduces maintenance at all (given how easy it is to check and adjust tire pressure and that it can't fix tire leaks and blowouts, which are the most expensive tire maintenance issues). Tires that never need inflation (like the "Tweel") might be a genuine bit of maintenance reduction.
I'm merely pointing out that reservoirs by their nature, hold things. When properly done, fracking (a procedure that is incidentally many decades old) isn't going to change that.
As I see it, the complaints about fracking chemicals leaking into water supplies are really complaints about drilling companies not following good procedure. In turn, that would mean regulatory agencies aren't enforcing existing regulation. I gather drillers who have taken short cuts have indeed caused some degree of damage over the decades. There's no reason to expect that those short cuts would be less damaging now than then.
All seems reasonable to me.
They're just repeating rules that are already in place. Reasonable and what should be self-evident.
Libertarian types trying to sponge off the taxes of hard working tax payers via tax evasion need to stop being so greedy and stealing other peoples money.
That type of "libertarian" shows up throughout human society and has all sorts of professed ideologies.
Hint: what are the characteristics of a hydrocarbon reservoir?
Hints won't work here. One of the key characteristics of a hydrocarbon reservoir is that it keeps chemicals in one place. Else it wouldn't be a reservoir. These chemicals can be oil or they can be the less valuable fracking chemicals that drillers replace oil with.
The point is to make a system that can be dynamically reconfigured for increased performance on the fly.
They already have that. The game segregates everything into star systems and stations. That's easy to parallelize and under normal loads a server handles several star systems.
At great cost? Why would it have to be at great cost?
It's a huge change in the architecture. As I understand it from about a year ago, they cut out a lot of the player interactions in heavy battle conditions, introduced time dialation (which is a remarkable innovation, I might add), and pumped up the servers that are intended to handle battles.
But you still have a large number of interactions between players. If you hide some players from each other, then you can end up with situations like battlefield commanders unable to target critical ships because they can't see them (focus fire or everyone shooting the same target is a key tactic). Ships can have many drones apiece (5 for normal ships, 10-20 for "carriers" and "supercarriers"). And of course, someone will want to see the pretty explosions and pew pews.
That means your multiserver infrastructure will have considerably more interaction than the current Eve cluster experiences. And if you're going to bother with that, why not just have a really beefy server with multiple CPUs which has built-in the necessary communication network?
I happen to drive a 1992 Honda Civic. It looks pretty ugly (due to a faulty paint coating and a little old bling from the previous owner) so I understand where this guy is coming from. Especially, the plastic pieces that snap off. :-)
Even with a somewhat increased level of maintenance for a Civic, it's still cheaper and more convenient to maintain than most new cars. And I've had two unsolicited offers for it.
I wouldn't call this a "rut" primarily because cars never meant much to me. Having a car is life altering, changing cars not at all. If I ever get a job where shiny matters or the current one breaks too much, then I'll pick up something easier on the eyes. But even then, I'll buy a car that's not going to give me trouble.
Stuck in a very cheap rut. It has that going for it.
The record stands for itself.
Excuse me, it was the second reason I gave. So let's read the record again.
The other big problem with country-wide planning is that the private sector loses considerable incentive to plan. It's a variant of moral hazard.
I also didn't actually disagree with the idea of planning.
That's true, but it is not an argument against planning.
Sure. It's just an argument against having anyone, such as a government, in charge of the planning.
Interactions square as the number of players. And a big limiting factor in the current size of the biggest fights is the lag. Lower it and more players will show. So "time dialation" will always have a role.
Further, what's the point of a fancy remake of the parallelism architecture? They already get substantial increases in capacity over time from better server equipment.
Sure, they can make a moderately better game at great cost, but that's not much of a case.
Given the alternatives are something like: "Club was so cool that fire marshals closed it down due to overcrowding. We're waiting in the parking lot till it opens again." Graceful failure is preferred to ungraceful failure.
Why is it always up to Europe to clean up the rest of the world's mess?
When did Europe start doing this? It's welcome to do so, but I am a bit surprised.
Better yet, choose friends who are not douche bags to begin with, but obviously that concept has escaped you.
If my friends were that perfect, they would never hang out with me.
I think there was some rend damage in there too.
Or perhaps, if you're going to have mental issues, might as well have something that makes you happy.
It's not much if you're the whole organization of ACORN that lost all their support (wiki says they had a budget of $25 million)
So what? It's positive return on investment.
Ok, so no disappearing, but what about a lesser degree of shaming/discrediting/suing him like you said?
A slander lawsuit is a great way to do that. I imagine that didn't happen because either they didn't want to make a martyr or there was actual dirt hidden in ACORN records and that might have come out in a court case.
Um... because you just said government and private supporters pulled out? ACORN wasn't nor was it supposed to be some for profit company. No funding, no money. No money, no talk.
As I noted, ACORN could have scaled back on its spending and activities until a greater level of funding was restored.
Sure, the more wrong being government being incompetent making poor judgments and jumping to conclusions, and the private supporters who are pretty much no better than the rest of the rabble that follows along.
That's a great myth, but I don't actually see that in practice. I doubt any donors' or politicians' minds were changed by the O'Keefe video. They might have been changed by the somewhat inept response from ACORN leadership. But I think the real decision was to kill ACORN to keep it from becoming a 2010 election issue.
These exams are graded, all in time for university admissions.
That's a number of weeks. Reflecting on this thread, I think that this really is an issue of computer and network-based test taking. When you have such infrastructure required for the test, then that becomes another failure mode. It would be the same for any government-run testing service as well.
... and therein lies the issue with essential certification being tied in to a proprietary, privately owned-and-managed system.
The issue is? Seriously, who does this better?
becasue the people who design this type of work, and mange it are really good.
Really good at siphoning public funds, that is. Who knows? They might be good at building roads too. But we'll never know from the I-405 construction project.
When you're after money, you don't worry about the semantics that you're using "slander" law to nail the guy. You pick what ever laws that has the best chance to succeed and/or reap the largest payout (and you don't need to win in court, getting a settlement can do just as well)
Well, from the casual way O'Keefe took this lawsuit, it appears he had more than $100,000 to his name. Adding slander to that might have picked up a big piece of whatever he actually has.
Your way of thinking actually applies for the opposite view: if O'Keefe was really on to something, and there's some really bad corruption going on, why hasn't the (obviously corrupt) government silenced him?
Why do you argue that? No offense, but allegedly engaging in minor crime by a minor organization just doesn't qualify as "really bad corruption" that someone would bother disappearing people for.
Further, it's worth noting that government and private supporters of ACORN were the very first to rush to judgment. For ACORN to lose its funding so quickly indicates to me that its political liabilities exceeded whatever value it had and they just cut it off.
And it probably would have been difficult, but ACORN could have cut back on its activities and scope until its finances were stable once again. So why declare bankruptcy only six months in? There's more wrong here than a supposedly fake video.