I applaud what both these articles have, it really opened my eyes to what they can do these days. On that note was anyone slightly scared by how realistic and subtle these changes were? If not die-hard fanatics watching it repeatedly and comparing it to the original, they would never be noticed. Imagine what can be done these days with video feeds for press releases and publicity stunts. It certainly helped open my eyes to the fact that that the age where even video is completely untrustworthy is upon us, and has probably been here for longer than I thought.
They do this where I live (Vancouver, Canada). When you go to a bar, they swipe your driver's licence. If you get kicked out for being too drunk or fighting or something they file a notice on a DB. Any other bar you go to that checks your DL will crossreference the DB and refuse you entry. They claim they clear the database eviery day, and a friend of mine who got kicked out of a bar was indeed allowed back in a week later, but who really knows what they do with the data? Not all bars and clubs have this, but it's becoming more popular.
Uh what? Sounds good when you say it like that, but how exactly are you gonna build this "railway" at 100km up? For reference, 100km is the height that X-Prize competitors had to attain, and the world's tallest freestanding structure is only 553m tall. You want to build something 200x higher than anything we've built before, higher than most (all but 4) planes can fly, and expect people to take you seriously? The space elevator is pretty far-fetched, the only reason people are taking it seriously at all is that they've busted there ass to provide solid physical models of how it work and researched extensively the materials required, etc.
Yeah, maybe it did have some connection. Maybe the ozone hole recovering is also connected with the fact that I ate less at mcdonald's this year, and my farts had less vaporous preservatives in them. A correlation is interesting, but it doesn't mean shit if you can't formulate some kind of semi-probable causal connection between the two observations.
In the absence of an uber-amphibious truck or bridge, he may have opted to use a FERRY instead of driving thousands of kilometers the long way around the baltic sea through hostile territory...
Spot on. The grandparent post doesn't reall seem to grasp the politics of that area though. They were doing alright until they got to this:
A nuclear North Korea threatens the balance in the region. It is not in the interest of China for South Korea to develop it's own nukes. It is not in the interest of anyone for the Japanese to develop nukes to counter the threat of nuclear armed missiles from North Korea. China's real nightmare - is if the region starts a nuclear arms race and Taiwan goes nuclear.
The Japanese aren't allowed to have nukes - it's part of the deal they signed after WWII (same goes for germany). The South Koreans don't need nukes because the U.S. have them covered, and they're scared shitless about N. Korea and don't want to agravate the situation. Taiwan is in a similar situation. They're skating on thin ice as it is with China, and the U.S. has them covered too. So the when the grandparent starts talking about a nuclear arms race in the region he's off his rocker - the only country there that doesn't have nukes and wants them is N. Korea, and they're already doing all they can to get them. I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that a comprehensive understanding of the problem is neccesary before we can hope to deal with N. Korea.
I'd much rather NASA send up three cheaper/faster/riskier missions of which one crashes and two succeed, than send up one bullet-proof mission.
We all know that thats how NASAs relatively new faster-better-cheaper approach is supposed to work, but unfortunately its not. With the exception of the Mars Rovers (and some would argue the their PR value vastly outweighs their scientific value), NASA has seen nothing but catastrophic failure recently. Maybe it's time to take another look at the faster-better-cheaper methedology and realize that space is hard to do, and that even sending many missions that aren't "bullet-proof" is essentially dooming all of them to failure. Basically what I'm saying is that I agree 3 cheap missions with 2 successes and one failure would be better than one expensive mission guaranteed to succeed. But the way things have been going, we're sending up 3 cheap missions and all of them are failing. At that rate I'd rather have my one bulletproof mission.
This kind of stuff has been done for years by hams. Google for APRS (Automatic Position Reporting System). It's a very cool protocol whereby a GPS unit can interface with a ham radio which reports its position to internet-linked repeaters via packet every few minutes. Many hams have installed these on their cars or boats and provided a website so you can see where they are. It's a very cool technology - my friend had a unit for a long time. He finally took it out of his car and put it in his boat after his wife started calling him and telling him to slow down when she saw he was speeding on the website.:-)
Uh, paying with environmental impact yes, but if politicians are allowed to use tax dollars to campaign there's something very wrong. Politicians should have to use separate, fundraised monies for their campaigns - NOT public tax dollars.
Yes, they do have to be timed perfectly. However, in the nuclear explosion world, perfect timing is what it's all about. One of the primary difficulties in constructing a nuclear warhead is timing all the conventional explosives that compound the critical mass of plutonium (or uranium) to produce the nuclear explosion. The science is so precise that they have to account for the time delay it takes the electricity to travel down wires that are only meters long, let alone the rates at which the shockwave propagates through the conventional explosive - all of which must be correct to within thousandths of a second. Add another layer of complexity for hydrogen bombs.
So yes, they would have to time them perfectly, but that wouldn't be too difficult as it's a problem they've already figure out how to solve when constructing the devices in the first place.
A different kind of training is still a big distinction even if eventual careers are similar. I think it's very fair to make this comparison.
To the grandparent - you identified the wrong countries. The number 1 country generating engineering graduates these days is China, followed by - you guessed it - India. These are both countries that have an enourmous demand for engineers as they pull themselves out of the third/second world. Manufacturing engineers are particularly in demand and China especially has thousands of them employed. These engineers aren't neccesarily doing the same level of technical work as their counterparts in the west, but the massive supply of them allows china to drive down prices for manufactured goods to a point where it's almost impossible to compete. There was a really good article on this in the economist a couple months ago, do some googling for "the China Price" and you'll probably find more info.
cool site - very informative. I'd love to get my helicopter rating someday but at this point I can barely afford to be slowly upgrading my fixed-wing licence and keeping it current.
First of all, three meters isn't all that much, it's roughly 10 feet. Second, you're not surrounded by that much metal cogs and chains. As you pointed out they want to reduce weight, so almost the entire thing is built of composites. Further, if you read about the design, they are favouring larger, slower-moving rotors and associated equipment over faster smaller ones. Thirdly, any engineer worth his salt would take time to make sure that if the machine DID fall from 3 meters, the supports for the person/seat could be constructed to collapse and absorb the shock.
Finally, as with most under-powered helicopters, the most likely mode of failure is only being able to hop a couple feet off the ground, if they can lift off at all. Read up some helicopter flying books sometime, it's pretty inderesting how much more the ground effect affects them than fixed wing aircraft. This post is much longer than inteded, so I'll cut here with the conclusion that I if I could fly helicopters, I'd jump on this opportunity in seconds. That said, flying a helicopter is probably one of the hardest things I've ever tried to do (I'm a fixed-wing pilot).
I think these guys have a good chance of doing it because they are clearly focused on only one thing - winning the x-prize and walking away with cash and a launch vehicle that could have commercial applications. Scaled is very obviously more concerned about general space access, the scalability of their concept beyond the x-prize, and various other long term goals. While I commend them for their foresight, I really to wonder wtf they've being doing since that last flight? Why wasn't the x-prize won last month? do they really have that many issues? These guys are clearly a one-shot deal. They're not gonna bother dicking around with test flights to 80K ft, or anything else for that matter. They've designed a system on paper and they've decided that there's enough money on the line that it's worth the risk to do it now before someone else does.
No actually, the paper he cited is not the only research that has been done on this - I distincly remember reading an article about this 3 or 4 years ago, and a radio program mentioning it a while back too. I didn't read the paper he pointed to, but the reason it works is because not only do the cats orient themselves properly, they also splay out their legs and stretch the skin out, creating a parachute-like effect which drastically reduces their terminal velocity. Cats falling from 5 stories have plenty of time to orient themselves, but not enough to get this parachute thing going and slow themselves down (i.e. they're falling at the terminal velocity of a bunched up cat, not a spread out one). Also, you seem incredulous that cats falling from over 8 stories have a 100% survival rate. Remarkably, in reality it IS almost this high, certainly >90%.
All your points are valid, but they don't really add up. The only benefit of a GPS-style system is that it's easier and quicker to use than traditional navigation. In the case of space programs, we've already almost perfected celestial navigation, and we have the facilities to do it. The expense of sending all that GPS equipment to mars, calibrating it, and compensating for any failures, is simply not worth the minimal benefit in conveniance it has over tradional navigation.
This is one of my pet peeves about GPS - once people learn how to use it, they generally lose a lot of respect for traditional navigation. GPS is a great tool, but it's not the only way to achieve the job, and we've been doing very well for a very long time without it. Sometimes the old saying "if it aint broke, don't fix it" is true in other respects. If you already have a functioning system in place that does the job just fine, why spend millions replacing it?
This is a really interesting concept. I searched around google for a bit but only came up with this http://web.abnormal.com/~thogard/products/pulsar.h tml, which doesn't take into account the point of the other reply (how do you tell which pulse is which?). If anyone has more info, please post links. As the the other poster's conjecture that one could use directions to do the trig, It'd probably be pretty difficult given how far away these things are - I suspect the accuracy required for any reasonably precise calculation would require antennas far to large to be portable. However, unfolding antennas on a spacecraft might be large enough to provide the accuracy neccesary.
However, if you take the train, you go from downtown london to downtown paris. If you're on one of the French high-speed trains, the trip is only about an hour longer than it is by air. Factor in the fact that you can clear customs on the train rather than on the ground after you land, as well as the hour+ drives/cab rides to and from heathrow and charles de gaulle airports, and the train is actually faster for buisiness commuters by at least an hour. Now, there's not many people whose time is worth 149 - 64 = 80 GBP/hour, but they do exist.
There's other reasons, mostly regarding how train travel is generally more pleasant than air travel, and then theres the fact that you can bring your car across to calais from britain, but I found the revelation that the train can be faster door-to-door to be particularly insightful.
Agreed, I also think that completely devaluing wikis or not counting them in pagerank at all is a mistake. Unmolested wiki's are generally a very accurate source of links to pages that are reputable and useful and Google knows this. I think they would be more likely to implement a scheme where the longer a link has been in place on a wiki, the more it counts for thereby eliminating the usefulness of the small, short-lived links that the article discusses.
They don't actually have to carry three passengers, they just have to carry the bulk, the weight, and the life support for two simulation passengers and then actually carry one pilot. The X-prize rules are pretty clear about this. I think they did it so that if something does fuck up, at least only one guy bites the dust rather than three. It also allows for a few flights to be made with one passenger to thoroughly test the system before flying with three.
No, but activating WEP provides a good defense in the legal sense. If there's no WEP, wardrivers and the like can argue that since the AP was open, they thought that it was intentionally left that way in order to provide free wifi to the people (there are many people who do actually do this on purpose). If something happens (i.e. you get stuck with large bandwidth charges) you can't hold them accountable. OTOH, if they cracked WEP then they clearly broke into a system which they were not meant to be in.
That, combined with the points that other posters mentioned (it's more of a deterrant than anything else, and that it's actually fairly effective on low-traffic networks), make WEP very useful if only for home users who don't have sensitive data on their networks.
I think that for me, the defining aspect of a robot is that it MOVES. It doesn't have to have a moving base, but it does need to move in space (e.g. industrial welding bots). I think that for me, as well as many other people, actuated mechanical joints and limbs is what a robot is. If it's autonomous or semi-autonomous, that's even better, but not strictly neccesary.
I agree about this thing too - it's an appliance, not a robot.
WTF? are you telling me that if there's a wind blowing from the east and the plane wants to land on a North-South runway, that it aligns its wheels north-south and points its nose east, thereby landing sideways on the runway?!
Cuz that's sure what it sounds like you're saying...
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I applaud what both these articles have, it really opened my eyes to what they can do these days. On that note was anyone slightly scared by how realistic and subtle these changes were? If not die-hard fanatics watching it repeatedly and comparing it to the original, they would never be noticed. Imagine what can be done these days with video feeds for press releases and publicity stunts. It certainly helped open my eyes to the fact that that the age where even video is completely untrustworthy is upon us, and has probably been here for longer than I thought.
They do this where I live (Vancouver, Canada). When you go to a bar, they swipe your driver's licence. If you get kicked out for being too drunk or fighting or something they file a notice on a DB. Any other bar you go to that checks your DL will crossreference the DB and refuse you entry. They claim they clear the database eviery day, and a friend of mine who got kicked out of a bar was indeed allowed back in a week later, but who really knows what they do with the data? Not all bars and clubs have this, but it's becoming more popular.
Uh what? Sounds good when you say it like that, but how exactly are you gonna build this "railway" at 100km up? For reference, 100km is the height that X-Prize competitors had to attain, and the world's tallest freestanding structure is only 553m tall. You want to build something 200x higher than anything we've built before, higher than most (all but 4) planes can fly, and expect people to take you seriously? The space elevator is pretty far-fetched, the only reason people are taking it seriously at all is that they've busted there ass to provide solid physical models of how it work and researched extensively the materials required, etc.
The new priuses have a CVT (continuosly variable transmission). Look up how they work before you go spouting off and calling everyone wrong.
Yeah, maybe it did have some connection. Maybe the ozone hole recovering is also connected with the fact that I ate less at mcdonald's this year, and my farts had less vaporous preservatives in them. A correlation is interesting, but it doesn't mean shit if you can't formulate some kind of semi-probable causal connection between the two observations.
In the absence of an uber-amphibious truck or bridge, he may have opted to use a FERRY instead of driving thousands of kilometers the long way around the baltic sea through hostile territory...
Spot on. The grandparent post doesn't reall seem to grasp the politics of that area though. They were doing alright until they got to this:
A nuclear North Korea threatens the balance in the region. It is not in the interest of China for South Korea to develop it's own nukes. It is not in the interest of anyone for the Japanese to develop nukes to counter the threat of nuclear armed missiles from North Korea. China's real nightmare - is if the region starts a nuclear arms race and Taiwan goes nuclear.
The Japanese aren't allowed to have nukes - it's part of the deal they signed after WWII (same goes for germany). The South Koreans don't need nukes because the U.S. have them covered, and they're scared shitless about N. Korea and don't want to agravate the situation. Taiwan is in a similar situation. They're skating on thin ice as it is with China, and the U.S. has them covered too. So the when the grandparent starts talking about a nuclear arms race in the region he's off his rocker - the only country there that doesn't have nukes and wants them is N. Korea, and they're already doing all they can to get them. I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that a comprehensive understanding of the problem is neccesary before we can hope to deal with N. Korea.
I'd much rather NASA send up three cheaper/faster/riskier missions of which one crashes and two succeed, than send up one bullet-proof mission.
We all know that thats how NASAs relatively new faster-better-cheaper approach is supposed to work, but unfortunately its not. With the exception of the Mars Rovers (and some would argue the their PR value vastly outweighs their scientific value), NASA has seen nothing but catastrophic failure recently. Maybe it's time to take another look at the faster-better-cheaper methedology and realize that space is hard to do, and that even sending many missions that aren't "bullet-proof" is essentially dooming all of them to failure. Basically what I'm saying is that I agree 3 cheap missions with 2 successes and one failure would be better than one expensive mission guaranteed to succeed. But the way things have been going, we're sending up 3 cheap missions and all of them are failing. At that rate I'd rather have my one bulletproof mission.
This kind of stuff has been done for years by hams. Google for APRS (Automatic Position Reporting System). It's a very cool protocol whereby a GPS unit can interface with a ham radio which reports its position to internet-linked repeaters via packet every few minutes. Many hams have installed these on their cars or boats and provided a website so you can see where they are. It's a very cool technology - my friend had a unit for a long time. He finally took it out of his car and put it in his boat after his wife started calling him and telling him to slow down when she saw he was speeding on the website. :-)
Uh, paying with environmental impact yes, but if politicians are allowed to use tax dollars to campaign there's something very wrong. Politicians should have to use separate, fundraised monies for their campaigns - NOT public tax dollars.
Yes, they do have to be timed perfectly. However, in the nuclear explosion world, perfect timing is what it's all about. One of the primary difficulties in constructing a nuclear warhead is timing all the conventional explosives that compound the critical mass of plutonium (or uranium) to produce the nuclear explosion. The science is so precise that they have to account for the time delay it takes the electricity to travel down wires that are only meters long, let alone the rates at which the shockwave propagates through the conventional explosive - all of which must be correct to within thousandths of a second. Add another layer of complexity for hydrogen bombs.
So yes, they would have to time them perfectly, but that wouldn't be too difficult as it's a problem they've already figure out how to solve when constructing the devices in the first place.
A different kind of training is still a big distinction even if eventual careers are similar. I think it's very fair to make this comparison.
To the grandparent - you identified the wrong countries. The number 1 country generating engineering graduates these days is China, followed by - you guessed it - India. These are both countries that have an enourmous demand for engineers as they pull themselves out of the third/second world. Manufacturing engineers are particularly in demand and China especially has thousands of them employed. These engineers aren't neccesarily doing the same level of technical work as their counterparts in the west, but the massive supply of them allows china to drive down prices for manufactured goods to a point where it's almost impossible to compete. There was a really good article on this in the economist a couple months ago, do some googling for "the China Price" and you'll probably find more info.
cool site - very informative. I'd love to get my helicopter rating someday but at this point I can barely afford to be slowly upgrading my fixed-wing licence and keeping it current.
First of all, three meters isn't all that much, it's roughly 10 feet. Second, you're not surrounded by that much metal cogs and chains. As you pointed out they want to reduce weight, so almost the entire thing is built of composites. Further, if you read about the design, they are favouring larger, slower-moving rotors and associated equipment over faster smaller ones. Thirdly, any engineer worth his salt would take time to make sure that if the machine DID fall from 3 meters, the supports for the person/seat could be constructed to collapse and absorb the shock.
Finally, as with most under-powered helicopters, the most likely mode of failure is only being able to hop a couple feet off the ground, if they can lift off at all. Read up some helicopter flying books sometime, it's pretty inderesting how much more the ground effect affects them than fixed wing aircraft. This post is much longer than inteded, so I'll cut here with the conclusion that I if I could fly helicopters, I'd jump on this opportunity in seconds. That said, flying a helicopter is probably one of the hardest things I've ever tried to do (I'm a fixed-wing pilot).
I think these guys have a good chance of doing it because they are clearly focused on only one thing - winning the x-prize and walking away with cash and a launch vehicle that could have commercial applications. Scaled is very obviously more concerned about general space access, the scalability of their concept beyond the x-prize, and various other long term goals. While I commend them for their foresight, I really to wonder wtf they've being doing since that last flight? Why wasn't the x-prize won last month? do they really have that many issues? These guys are clearly a one-shot deal. They're not gonna bother dicking around with test flights to 80K ft, or anything else for that matter. They've designed a system on paper and they've decided that there's enough money on the line that it's worth the risk to do it now before someone else does.
No actually, the paper he cited is not the only research that has been done on this - I distincly remember reading an article about this 3 or 4 years ago, and a radio program mentioning it a while back too. I didn't read the paper he pointed to, but the reason it works is because not only do the cats orient themselves properly, they also splay out their legs and stretch the skin out, creating a parachute-like effect which drastically reduces their terminal velocity. Cats falling from 5 stories have plenty of time to orient themselves, but not enough to get this parachute thing going and slow themselves down (i.e. they're falling at the terminal velocity of a bunched up cat, not a spread out one). Also, you seem incredulous that cats falling from over 8 stories have a 100% survival rate. Remarkably, in reality it IS almost this high, certainly >90%.
All your points are valid, but they don't really add up. The only benefit of a GPS-style system is that it's easier and quicker to use than traditional navigation. In the case of space programs, we've already almost perfected celestial navigation, and we have the facilities to do it. The expense of sending all that GPS equipment to mars, calibrating it, and compensating for any failures, is simply not worth the minimal benefit in conveniance it has over tradional navigation.
This is one of my pet peeves about GPS - once people learn how to use it, they generally lose a lot of respect for traditional navigation. GPS is a great tool, but it's not the only way to achieve the job, and we've been doing very well for a very long time without it. Sometimes the old saying "if it aint broke, don't fix it" is true in other respects. If you already have a functioning system in place that does the job just fine, why spend millions replacing it?
This is a really interesting concept. I searched around google for a bit but only came up with this http://web.abnormal.com/~thogard/products/pulsar.h tml, which doesn't take into account the point of the other reply (how do you tell which pulse is which?). If anyone has more info, please post links. As the the other poster's conjecture that one could use directions to do the trig, It'd probably be pretty difficult given how far away these things are - I suspect the accuracy required for any reasonably precise calculation would require antennas far to large to be portable. However, unfolding antennas on a spacecraft might be large enough to provide the accuracy neccesary.
Man I wish I had mod points today.
However, if you take the train, you go from downtown london to downtown paris. If you're on one of the French high-speed trains, the trip is only about an hour longer than it is by air. Factor in the fact that you can clear customs on the train rather than on the ground after you land, as well as the hour+ drives/cab rides to and from heathrow and charles de gaulle airports, and the train is actually faster for buisiness commuters by at least an hour. Now, there's not many people whose time is worth 149 - 64 = 80 GBP/hour, but they do exist.
There's other reasons, mostly regarding how train travel is generally more pleasant than air travel, and then theres the fact that you can bring your car across to calais from britain, but I found the revelation that the train can be faster door-to-door to be particularly insightful.
Agreed, I also think that completely devaluing wikis or not counting them in pagerank at all is a mistake. Unmolested wiki's are generally a very accurate source of links to pages that are reputable and useful and Google knows this. I think they would be more likely to implement a scheme where the longer a link has been in place on a wiki, the more it counts for thereby eliminating the usefulness of the small, short-lived links that the article discusses.
They don't actually have to carry three passengers, they just have to carry the bulk, the weight, and the life support for two simulation passengers and then actually carry one pilot. The X-prize rules are pretty clear about this. I think they did it so that if something does fuck up, at least only one guy bites the dust rather than three. It also allows for a few flights to be made with one passenger to thoroughly test the system before flying with three.
No, but activating WEP provides a good defense in the legal sense. If there's no WEP, wardrivers and the like can argue that since the AP was open, they thought that it was intentionally left that way in order to provide free wifi to the people (there are many people who do actually do this on purpose). If something happens (i.e. you get stuck with large bandwidth charges) you can't hold them accountable. OTOH, if they cracked WEP then they clearly broke into a system which they were not meant to be in.
That, combined with the points that other posters mentioned (it's more of a deterrant than anything else, and that it's actually fairly effective on low-traffic networks), make WEP very useful if only for home users who don't have sensitive data on their networks.
I think that for me, the defining aspect of a robot is that it MOVES. It doesn't have to have a moving base, but it does need to move in space (e.g. industrial welding bots). I think that for me, as well as many other people, actuated mechanical joints and limbs is what a robot is. If it's autonomous or semi-autonomous, that's even better, but not strictly neccesary.
I agree about this thing too - it's an appliance, not a robot.
OK, I just did some googling and realized that I am an idiot. Please ignore this post.
WTF? are you telling me that if there's a wind blowing from the east and the plane wants to land on a North-South runway, that it aligns its wheels north-south and points its nose east, thereby landing sideways on the runway?!
Cuz that's sure what it sounds like you're saying...