Actually TOS did not appeal to "radical thinkers" it was more the flag waving herald for the Establishment. TOS folllowed, not lead the progressive movments as they became mainstream. While the radicals and the progressives protested the Vietnam war, Kirk was pitching for it when TOS wasn't making them out to be idiots. And "Let This Be Your Last Battlefield" was one of the most simplistically silly treatments of racism ever to have celluloid wasted on it. If Kirk had to be forced to kiss Uhura, that famous "kiss" is another thing that Trek gets way too much credit for. Kirk's Picards, and to some extent Sisko's are pretty much lousy examples for anyone who wants to hail Trek has some radical experiment in progressive social thought.
Why did Earth's Trek ban baseball and organised sports? The only similar Earth that did that was the corporate-controlled America of Howard Chaykins' American Flagg which offered sponsored gang violence as a substitute. What always boiled me about Trek was that major social moves like this were tossed out with no exploration as to why these changes were done, nor the implications of such changes. We're just supposed to accept this as part of the evolution of the the paradise that Picard's Earth was supposed to have become. A paradise full of people who readily became sheep when a renegade group of officers almost succeeded in turning Sisko's Starfleet into a 24th century Gestapo.
Trek's longevity is owed not to any boldness on it's part but a clever legerdermain of appearing to be progressive and bold while playing it safe on every issue it covered.
The common term is dirrigible, a lighter than air craft that moves under it's own power. And they do use common elements such as engines, cockpits. And i'm not sure that the new Zeppelin NT might not actually be a hybrid between the two classic types, that it might use more of a simplified frame as opposed to a complete skeletal structure as the description makes no mention of segmented gas cellas as used in rigid airships.
The tech didn't exactly die with the Hindenburg. The U.S. Navy used blimps as sub spotters during the Second World War and for some time beyond. And as we know Goodyear has kept a fleet of about a half-dozen blimps in operationa and several companies like Nike have a one of their own. There's also been hybrids like the Skycrane, half blimp and half heliocopter. Since the days of the Hindenburg and the Macon, we have learned a lot more in areas such as materials technolgy, our understanding of weather has improved. Dirigibles, both rigid and nonrigid have a place in the aerocology and it should be interesting to see what follows from here.
Skylab was larger and nothing came of it's re-entry over Austrailia, not even a dead kangaroo. Given that luck, the decision might be just to let it go and hope for the best.
Otherwise the most likely scenario is the unmanned rocket pack to deorbit. This of course would have to be done while Hubble is in decent shape, i.e. at least 3 operating gyroscopes. Otherwise not even a shuttle would be sent.
According to NASA watch Hubble should stay aloft until 2012 with a bit of luck although orbital decay would render it useless two years before entry. It's fairly inconceivable that 700 million dollars will be spent to just to recover it intact.
Actually the contribution was controlled powered flight . in a heavier than air craft. Santos Dumont had already made a name for himself in his daily routine of flying to Maxim's (high deal night club in Paris) each night, checking his vehicle, a homemade dirigible, with the doorman. (the invention of valet parking?) There had been several tests with powered flight as well. The contribution of the Wright brothers was "wing warping" a predecessor to modern ailerons which made stable turns possible.
The Wrights didn't think that much of their invention although they defended their patents fiercely enough to retard American progress for quite some time. They apparantly considered air flight impractical for any use save the one they actively marketed it for.... warfare.
The folks going for the X-Prize aren't going to making the kind of velocity neccessary for an extreme heat shield. As I understand it, they'll be making less velocity than even Alan Sheperd's Mercury-Redstone shot. Some heat protection is neccessary but far less than a typical orbital re-entry. And it's pratically a non-issue for a straight up straight down profile envisioned for the original project.
BTW, the Redstone was a single-stage rocket an reached a height of about 100 miles.
If you want to talk about "science fiction universes", then I'm free to refer to books like the one that's about the failure of technology in a futuristic high-rise. Or say Babylon 5 with it's community of "Lurkers" that live in the part of the station known as "Down Below."
But we can also go far by keeping it to present day. In today's world, such robots are kept within areas that are highly restricted from contact with the casual public for good reason as some fatal accidents with industrial type robots can attest.
Fact is however is that even most menial jobs require judgement beyond that of "pack rat" AI, they require people which is why we still have menial work even in the most advanced countries on the planet. For as far as we can forseee in the 21st century this will continue to be true.
The problem is that we don't have machines cheap enough to match the perceived value of menial tasks, nor are they sophisticated enough to do it right and safely. Just because a task is menial does not make it easy to automate. And I'm fairly sure that automating the garbage collection truck that stops by every Tuesday and Thursday in front of my house poses dangers I'd rather not contemplate. It's like the paperless office, the promise that a tech society would do away with menial work remains unfulfilled and perhaps unfulfillable.
Considering that Warp mechanics is nothing more than a phrase in the Star Trek writer's guide, it was rather disappointing to see the total lack of science relating their gas velocity and density to theorectical warp speeds. (a misnomer actually since there IS NO theory, but let it pass). So essentially while an entertaining exercise it's on the level of innumerable twinkie experiments. Amusing and clever use of lab equipment, but no real science at all.
There actually was a rather good sf novel by Forward I think some years back which illustrates what kind of damage one could do merely by slamming a small ship sized mass into a planet at fairly reasonable sublight speeds. The results aren't pretty.
In Voyager they answered your first question, ironically the way societies like Sparta did millennia ago. The Federation created a slave race of beings whose numbers were limited solely by the abundance of energy required to produce them, holographic copies of Voyager's Emergency Medical Hologram Mark One. They used them for hazardous mining, garbage collection, all of the truly scummy jobs deemed beneath that of men or even sentient androids. And perhaps that is the greatest unanswered question left by Voyager, a question so troubling in ethics, the next series was pushed centuries in the past.
We have trouble building something that's barely the size of a football field and you think we're ready to enginneer a construct three times the diameter of the Earth itself!!! Not to mention that we have no idea of what material will stand the stress or how to ground it.
GIMP is worthless to the commercial advertising and print field. It's fatal weaknesses are.
* Lack of color profile support * Lack of CMYK support * Lack of LAB color space support
Just one of the above is a deal breaker, not to mention the power editing features of Photoshop which have made it the Quark of image editing. If you're only doing web quality/RGB work then you can do okay work with GIMP. But to say that GIMP is a drop in replacement of Photoshop betrays an utter ignorance of the professional prepress requirements.
Nothing is 100 percent but given the fact that NASA launches over the open ocean, I consider the risk factor to be acceptable given the importance of deep space planetary science. Also remember it's not a true freefall impact air drag does slow down so once you hit terminal velocity it does not matter from how high a given object falls.
RTG cores are designed to survive even catastrophic failures which include the termination of the launch vehicle. If Galileo had been on board the worst that would have happened is that the RTG would have been lost at sea, far from any inhabited area.
I don't have the details on SNAP-9A and would appreciate a detailed URL that I could comment on further.
The nuclear heaters ARE RTGs. probe craft are a bit small to do the whole chamber pipeworks fission routine. And yes you are right about the RTGs, but that was a neccessity as the build up of lunar dust coats solar panels rather rapidly. (When the Apollo 12 astronauts checked out Surveyer 3, they found it coated with lunar dust.
And personally the dangers of RTG's such as the ones on Galileo were overblown by sensationalism. While I will be the first to point out the present impractibility of a manned mission to Mars, I do believe that that planetary science has enough merit to outweigh the risks involved. And no serious accidents have happened with RTG's at least, not on American craft.
If SMART 1's ion engine is of long duration, i.e. a sufficiently long power supply it may make something possible that's never been done before, an extended Lunar orbit.
What most people aren't aware of is that orbiting the Moon is an inherently unstable proposition. An orbit close enough so that the Moon can actually prevail over solar or Earth influence runs into the problem of mascons, mass concentrations that tend to accelerate and then drag any object in a lunar orbit. The end result is that without regular correction the object would lose orbital velocity and crash into the lunar surface within a month.
What's more interesting is the intense amount of ignorance.
SMART 1 is going to the Moon not Jupiter or Neptune. NASA does not load the extra weight of an RTG (Radioisotope Thermal Generator) unless a probe like Gailileo or Cassini is headed out beyond Mars orbit, where sunlight diminishes past the point in which solar panels are no longer practical for spacecraft power (due to that pesky inverse square law).
For inner planet missions i.e. Mercury through Mars, NASA uses solar panels as in the recent NEAR mission.
the above is a cute story and some of it is actually true.
Jay Miner, who was working at Atari developed the original three custom chips which were named Agnes, Denise, and Gary. Among the things he was aiming for was a really good flight simulator. When Atari expressed it's lack of interest in pursuing the design, he made a deal. He and others took out a loan with the chips and designs as collateral and formed the original Amiga Inc.
They sweated blood, worked long hours and built a prototype which had giant transitor versions of the three chips, spending virtually all their money getting something together for the big Western show, which I think at the time was ComDex. They had gotten it to the point where Miner could at leaast diagnose what transistors to replace and where depending on how the machine crashed. And at that point they were broke with the loan from Atari coming due.
The rest is mostly history. The ungangly prototype wowed the crowds at Comdex, including some folks from Commedore Buisness Machines which by that point was looking to move beyond it's 8-bit success with the C-64. Commedore bought Amiga, set it up as Commedore-Amiga and it would be this company that launched the Amiga 1000. It was actually during this honeymoon part of the Commedore purchase that most of the above actually happened, including the experimental Joyboard, a joystick which one sat on and used by manipulating their weight. The technique known as "Guru Meditation" would be the technical name for Amiga crashes until it was dropped in OS 2.something.
Unfortunately the way it's posted, Damage's position only harms one group of people, those who wish to leave SCO, not those who are actually setting the policies they wish to protest against.
By analogy it's as if the Allies had decided to proscute individual Axis soldiers instead of the Nazi leaders that were actually held accountable.
But lastly, this whole mess starting from SCO to Damage needs to be put on a real leagal examination. Sure SCO's actions are reprehensible, but is Damage's action discriminatory and at what point is the line crossed?
I used to see a bunch of these around Midtown Manhattan in the early-mid 90's. They've all been long gone one by one when time came up to resurface the streets. Only they weren't tiles as much as persistent scribing in asphalt.
In our case, we installed Virtual PC for the sole purpose of running FacetWin which was the only program that could interface with our antiquated SCO machine which uses a billing program that runs on SCOANSI (it couldn't just have been a standard ANSI but it had to be SCO* ansi grrr*)
Virtual PC serves a purpose in running a few "non-killer" Windows apps one might need but not want to invest in a second space-eating desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually TOS did not appeal to "radical thinkers" it was more the flag waving herald for the Establishment. TOS folllowed, not lead the progressive movments as they became mainstream. While the radicals and the progressives protested the Vietnam war, Kirk was pitching for it when TOS wasn't making them out to be idiots. And "Let This Be Your Last Battlefield" was one of the most simplistically silly treatments of racism ever to have celluloid wasted on it. If Kirk had to be forced to kiss Uhura, that famous "kiss" is another thing that Trek gets way too much credit for. Kirk's Picards, and to some extent Sisko's are pretty much lousy examples for anyone who wants to hail Trek has some radical experiment in progressive social thought.
Why did Earth's Trek ban baseball and organised sports? The only similar Earth that did that was the corporate-controlled America of Howard Chaykins' American Flagg which offered sponsored gang violence as a substitute. What always boiled me about Trek was that major social moves like this were tossed out with no exploration as to why these changes were done, nor the implications of such changes. We're just supposed to accept this as part of the evolution of the the paradise that Picard's Earth was supposed to have become. A paradise full of people who readily became sheep when a renegade group of officers almost succeeded in turning Sisko's Starfleet into a 24th century Gestapo.
Trek's longevity is owed not to any boldness on it's part but a clever legerdermain of appearing to be progressive and bold while playing it safe on every issue it covered.
The common term is dirrigible, a lighter than air craft that moves under it's own power. And they do use common elements such as engines, cockpits. And i'm not sure that the new Zeppelin NT might not actually be a hybrid between the two classic types, that it might use more of a simplified frame as opposed to a complete skeletal structure as the description makes no mention of segmented gas cellas as used in rigid airships.
The tech didn't exactly die with the Hindenburg. The U.S. Navy used blimps as sub spotters during the Second World War and for some time beyond. And as we know Goodyear has kept a fleet of about a half-dozen blimps in operationa and several companies like Nike have a one of their own. There's also been hybrids like the Skycrane, half blimp and half heliocopter. Since the days of the Hindenburg and the Macon, we have learned a lot more in areas such as materials technolgy, our understanding of weather has improved. Dirigibles, both rigid and nonrigid have a place in the aerocology and it should be interesting to see what follows from here.
The FTP program transmit by Panic Software uses the same doggie cursor that would pop up in Fetch.
Skylab was larger and nothing came of it's re-entry over Austrailia, not even a dead kangaroo. Given that luck, the decision might be just to let it go and hope for the best.
Otherwise the most likely scenario is the unmanned rocket pack to deorbit. This of course would have to be done while Hubble is in decent shape, i.e. at least 3 operating gyroscopes. Otherwise not even a shuttle would be sent.
According to NASA watch Hubble should stay aloft until 2012 with a bit of luck although orbital decay would render it useless two years before entry. It's fairly inconceivable that 700 million dollars will be spent to just to recover it intact.
Actually the contribution was controlled powered flight . in a heavier than air craft. Santos Dumont had already made a name for himself in his daily routine of flying to Maxim's (high deal night club in Paris) each night, checking his vehicle, a homemade dirigible, with the doorman. (the invention of valet parking?) There had been several tests with powered flight as well. The contribution of the Wright brothers was "wing warping" a predecessor to modern ailerons which made stable turns possible.
The Wrights didn't think that much of their invention although they defended their patents fiercely enough to retard American progress for quite some time. They apparantly considered air flight impractical for any use save the one they actively marketed it for.... warfare.
The folks going for the X-Prize aren't going to making the kind of velocity neccessary for an extreme heat shield. As I understand it, they'll be making less velocity than even Alan Sheperd's Mercury-Redstone shot. Some heat protection is neccessary but far less than a typical orbital re-entry. And it's pratically a non-issue for a straight up straight down profile envisioned for the original project.
BTW, the Redstone was a single-stage rocket an reached a height of about 100 miles.
If you want to talk about "science fiction universes", then I'm free to refer to books like the one that's about the failure of technology in a futuristic high-rise. Or say Babylon 5 with it's community of "Lurkers" that live in the part of the station known as "Down Below."
But we can also go far by keeping it to present day. In today's world, such robots are kept within areas that are highly restricted from contact with the casual public for good reason as some fatal accidents with industrial type robots can attest.
Fact is however is that even most menial jobs require judgement beyond that of "pack rat" AI, they require people which is why we still have menial work even in the most advanced countries on the planet. For as far as we can forseee in the 21st century this will continue to be true.
The problem is that we don't have machines cheap enough to match the perceived value of menial tasks, nor are they sophisticated enough to do it right and safely. Just because a task is menial does not make it easy to automate. And I'm fairly sure that automating the garbage collection truck that stops by every Tuesday and Thursday in front of my house poses dangers I'd rather not contemplate. It's like the paperless office, the promise that a tech society would do away with menial work remains unfulfilled and perhaps unfulfillable.
Considering that Warp mechanics is nothing more than a phrase in the Star Trek writer's guide, it was rather disappointing to see the total lack of science relating their gas velocity and density to theorectical warp speeds. (a misnomer actually since there IS NO theory, but let it pass). So essentially while an entertaining exercise it's on the level of innumerable twinkie experiments. Amusing and clever use of lab equipment, but no real science at all.
There actually was a rather good sf novel by Forward I think some years back which illustrates what kind of damage one could do merely by slamming a small ship sized mass into a planet at fairly reasonable sublight speeds. The results aren't pretty.
In Voyager they answered your first question, ironically the way societies like Sparta did millennia ago. The Federation created a slave race of beings whose numbers were limited solely by the abundance of energy required to produce them, holographic copies of Voyager's Emergency Medical Hologram Mark One. They used them for hazardous mining, garbage collection, all of the truly scummy jobs deemed beneath that of men or even sentient androids. And perhaps that is the greatest unanswered question left by Voyager, a question so troubling in ethics, the next series was pushed centuries in the past.
We have trouble building something that's barely the size of a football field and you think we're ready to enginneer a construct three times the diameter of the Earth itself!!! Not to mention that we have no idea of what material will stand the stress or how to ground it.
Get real.
GIMP is worthless to the commercial advertising and print field. It's fatal weaknesses are.
* Lack of color profile support
* Lack of CMYK support
* Lack of LAB color space support
Just one of the above is a deal breaker, not to mention the power editing features of Photoshop which have made it the Quark of image editing. If you're only doing web quality/RGB work then you can do okay work with GIMP. But to say that GIMP is a drop in replacement of Photoshop betrays an utter ignorance of the professional prepress requirements.
Free>Cheap?
What about Honest Purchase > Outright Theft?
What do they think that the Dells would come with? Thanks to Microsoft's "loss" in the judgement you get to chose from:
1. A flavor of Windows XP
2. A flavor of Windows XP
or
3. Another flavor of Windows XP?
The BeOS and Linux options were optioned out quite awhile ago thanks to the terms of MS licensing.
My personal vote would be for iBooks, Apple had better get on their toes and make sure they don't bungle this deal.
Nothing is 100 percent but given the fact that NASA launches over the open ocean, I consider the risk factor to be acceptable given the importance of deep space planetary science. Also remember it's not a true freefall impact air drag does slow down so once you hit terminal velocity it does not matter from how high a given object falls.
RTG cores are designed to survive even catastrophic failures which include the termination of the launch vehicle. If Galileo had been on board the worst that would have happened is that the RTG would have been lost at sea, far from any inhabited area.
I don't have the details on SNAP-9A and would appreciate a detailed URL that I could comment on further.
The nuclear heaters ARE RTGs. probe craft are a bit small to do the whole chamber pipeworks fission routine. And yes you are right about the RTGs, but that was a neccessity as the build up of lunar dust coats solar panels rather rapidly. (When the Apollo 12 astronauts checked out Surveyer 3, they found it coated with lunar dust.
And personally the dangers of RTG's such as the ones on Galileo were overblown by sensationalism. While I will be the first to point out the present impractibility of a manned mission to Mars, I do believe that that planetary science has enough merit to outweigh the risks involved. And no serious accidents have happened with RTG's at least, not on American craft.
If SMART 1's ion engine is of long duration, i.e. a sufficiently long power supply it may make something possible that's never been done before, an extended Lunar orbit.
What most people aren't aware of is that orbiting the Moon is an inherently unstable proposition. An orbit close enough so that the Moon can actually prevail over solar or Earth influence runs into the problem of mascons, mass concentrations that tend to accelerate and then drag any object in a lunar orbit. The end result is that without regular correction the object would lose orbital velocity and crash into the lunar surface within a month.
What's more interesting is the intense amount of ignorance.
SMART 1 is going to the Moon not Jupiter or Neptune. NASA does not load the extra weight of an RTG (Radioisotope Thermal Generator) unless a probe like Gailileo or Cassini is headed out beyond Mars orbit, where sunlight diminishes past the point in which solar panels are no longer practical for spacecraft power (due to that pesky inverse square law).
For inner planet missions i.e. Mercury through Mars, NASA uses solar panels as in the recent NEAR mission.
the above is a cute story and some of it is actually true.
Jay Miner, who was working at Atari developed the original three custom chips which were named Agnes, Denise, and Gary. Among the things he was aiming for was a really good flight simulator. When Atari expressed it's lack of interest in pursuing the design, he made a deal. He and others took out a loan with the chips and designs as collateral and formed the original Amiga Inc.
They sweated blood, worked long hours and built a prototype which had giant transitor versions of the three chips, spending virtually all their money getting something together for the big Western show, which I think at the time was ComDex. They had gotten it to the point where Miner could at leaast diagnose what transistors to replace and where depending on how the machine crashed. And at that point they were broke with the loan from Atari coming due.
The rest is mostly history. The ungangly prototype wowed the crowds at Comdex, including some folks from Commedore Buisness Machines which by that point was looking to move beyond it's 8-bit success with the C-64. Commedore bought Amiga, set it up as Commedore-Amiga and it would be this company that launched the Amiga 1000. It was actually during this honeymoon part of the Commedore purchase that most of the above actually happened, including the experimental Joyboard, a joystick which one sat on and used by manipulating their weight. The technique known as "Guru Meditation" would be the technical name for Amiga crashes until it was dropped in OS 2.something.
Unfortunately the way it's posted, Damage's position only harms one group of people, those who wish to leave SCO, not those who are actually setting the policies they wish to protest against.
By analogy it's as if the Allies had decided to proscute individual Axis soldiers instead of the Nazi leaders that were actually held accountable.
But lastly, this whole mess starting from SCO to Damage needs to be put on a real leagal examination. Sure SCO's actions are reprehensible, but is Damage's action discriminatory and at what point is the line crossed?
I used to see a bunch of these around Midtown Manhattan in the early-mid 90's. They've all been long gone one by one when time came up to resurface the streets. Only they weren't tiles as much as persistent scribing in asphalt.
For every Slashdotter who claimed to have "a friend at NASA", I'd be able to buy out Bill Gates.
In our case, we installed Virtual PC for the sole purpose of running FacetWin which was the only program that could interface with our antiquated SCO machine which uses a billing program that runs on SCOANSI (it couldn't just have been a standard ANSI but it had to be SCO* ansi grrr*)
Virtual PC serves a purpose in running a few "non-killer" Windows apps one might need but not want to invest in a second space-eating desktop.