The world already has a standardized launch system, courtesy of the Russians. It's called a vostok, and is actually an incremental improvement over the R-7 launch vehicle, which in turn was developed from ICBM technologies.
However, the world also long ago standardized on several designs for an internal combustion engine. That doesn't stop manufacturers from looking for better solutions.
Oh, and for those further up the thread (not the parent of this comment), I'm one of those Yanks you're talking about. Funny how until this paragraph I never even mentioned the US, isn't it? A criticism lacking in the ability to inform and instruct is just a flame.
I was involved with Wes Clark's campaign during the primaries, up until Dean's Iowa Implosion.
Because South Carolina, my home for the last year and a half, has an early primary, all of the major candidates stopped through multiple times. I got to be the driver of one of the cars for Clark's entourage, and spent a few minutes talking with him as well as getting to see him on stage numerous times, and his wife Gert once too. I also got to chat with her for around thirty minutes one day while the general was shaking hands, babies, and anything else within reach. She's a very charming woman incidentally, and a credit to the name Clark.
The format at one of the events where Gert was speaking-- I don't remember exactly where except that it was around Charleston somewhere-- was a short speech followed by a q&a session.
Knowing that the general was previously a high muckety-muck in a firm in Northern Virginia that specialized in engineering alternative-fuel and low-fuel-consumption engines for motor vehicles, I threw a softball question about his motivations for work such as that.
I was gladdened to see how much she warmed up to the subject in the few minutes she could spend to reply. Apparently he's been a sci-fi fan his entire life (actually she'd told me that privately during a previous visit, the one during which I'd cornered her for that 30-or-so minutes), and is still very much a science buff, too.
I still wish Iowa had worked out differently. For those who don't know or don't remember, General Clark didn't participate in the Iowa caucuses, figuring that Dean would carry Iowa in a walk anyway, but that Clark could face him in New Hampshire and South Carolina. When Kerry took Iowa & Dean made his (in)famous scream, Clark's position suddenly crumbled. To be honest, I doubt he would've won SC & NH anyway-- he was always the underdog candidate-- but I'm still glad to have worked on his campaign, and wish him well in everything he does in the future.
It's a shame, in my opinion: we could've had an actively pro-science president. Instead, we now have a choice between someone who apparently has no passion regarding science (Kerry) and one who gladly politicizes scientific reasoning to benefit himself & his corporate cronies (he who must not be named). Ok, for the fringe, I guess Nader's out there, along with whoever the Greens & the Libertarians are backing. Heck, I'm sure LaRouche is running again too, and that some people are stupid enough to vote for him. If you're one of them, sorry for offending you.
Wow, you mean the Toronto Blue Jays & Montreal Expos are US teams?
Ok, sure, the Expos actually most likely will be soon, if & when DC finally gets to root for a home team again (no thanks to Baltimore), but that still leaves Toronto!
One of the contracts I administer has at its heart a mysql/php application that, gzipped, fits entirely on a single floppy-- and it tracks financial information for an entire office the US Navy (and know, I don't mean office as in 'five people and their desks').
Granted, it's not a huge system-- but 5gbs is so far beyond what I'm currently using that the very idea of a system similar to this ever breaching that limit is just laughable.
Even for those systems where 5gbs is a limit, of course Sybase has a fully licensed pay-as-you-go version in the wings. What, did you think they weren't out to make a profit? Oh, that's right, large application developers aren't allowed to make profits around here, just the little contractors who wouldn't exist if not for the app providers. Sheesh.
You're kidding, right?
Sure, his tactics are cheap in the short-term. So is eating a Happy Meal for lunch. It's when I continue to eat Happy Meal day after day ad infinitum that it becomes expensive.
Imagine if his tactics spread nationwide (in as far as possible-- I doubt tents would do that well in colder climes). Now imagine the recidivism rate not budging an inch. Now imagine the cost to house all those prisoners.
We already have a higher proportion of our population incarcerated than any other industrialized country-- and more even than some of the totalitarian countries!
Let's start by accepting that the Libertarians are right on some points. Throwing pot smokers in jail is just ludicrous. Having to rotate a multiple murderer out in twenty-five years because the low-end drug dealers are taking all the space is even worse.
For the record: I have never been in jail. I haven't had weed in long enough that even were I to mention the exact length of time, the statute of limitations has expired. About the worst thing I do anymore is speed, and even at that I mostly stay at the same speed as the traffic around me. I'm not concerned about this for my own immediate benefit, but rather for the present and future of our society.
Great idea-- but since both the layer and the glass filter the color, you end up with subtractive colors, not additive. With your solution (assuming the tone and density of the vanadium & dye layers match), no light at all gets through.
Beyond the cost of developing the craft itself (not much new to develop on this one), most of the cost of any mission to orbit or beyond is just for fuel... and once you're in LEO, you're halfway to anywhere. The additional Delta V (change in angular momentum) to go from LEO to LoLO is negligible, and for a trajectory that never even enters LoLO, but just goes translunar on a free-return orbit, it's even less, given the correct launch window.
There was a communications satellite launched a few years ago-- I forget the name of the corporate owner-- which was launched incorrectly into a degrading elliptical orbit, but with some fuel left onboard. An enterprising firm realized that there was no reason to abandon it, as they could stabilize it by using the remaining fuel to propel it into a free-return orbit around the moon, spilling the excess Delta-V with what essentially added up to a negative gravity assist upon returning to Earth orbit.
The hard part is getting to LEO. Once you're there, as far as energy is concerned, it's cheap to go anywhere you want, if you have the time, the patience, and the life support.
At first I thought they're launching a Soyuz directly towards the moon and cleverly navigates its way around the moon (to see the dark side too), and back to earth.
This is entirely pedantic, but... (on/. you always know there's more coming when someone says "but...")
There is no dark side of the moon. There is a far side, caused by the tidal lock Earth has on the Moon's rotation, but both faces of the moon face the Sun for equal amounts of time.
There are theoretically some spots near the poles, hidden at the bottoms of craters, which may never see the sun, but that's because the angle of the sun over the horizon never gets steep enough to hit the bottoms of those craters.
Valid point, and thanks for the data points (I would never have guessed that Monaca had that high a population density!)... but my argument still stands. Some places are more crowded than others-- and likely to stay so-- and it's not the crowding that will cause our problems in the future, it's the scarcity of resources.
That population isn't evenly distributed. Places like India and China are intensely crowded already, while vast areas of Canada, the US, and Russia are sparesely settled if at all. Additionally, if not for immigration then the population of the US would actually be declining. China's population still has a while to go before theirs starts to decline-- gotta wait for the elderly to start dying in droves. India's, I have no idea what the growth rate (current or projected) looks like. Unless a better treatment for AIDS is found in the next couple of decades, Africa stands to lose a LOT of population.
The end result will be that some areas of the world, just like today, suffer from incredible population pressure; while others barely support anyone at all.
The problem isn't leibenschraum (apologies to German readers if I spelled that wrong). It's scarcity of resources.
Think about all the metals available in just one small asteroid, if only we had the technology to get there, bring it home, and mine it.
From a fixed vantage on the Moon's surface, Earth is always in the same angle in relation to the meridian (yeah yeah, no Prime Meridian on the Moon, but for the sake of argument, call it the longitude at which Apollo 11 landed). Due to the Moon's orbit not being completely on the ecliptic, the angle from the equator does change.
In addition, due to the rotation of the collective Earth/Moon system, the sun does be occulted (is that the right word?) by the Earth on a regular basis. I don't know what the frequency is, but considering Earth appears much larger from the moon than vice-versa, I'd have to assume that these events (call them Terran eclipses) happen more often than Solar eclipses.
So, to answer your question: wherever you stand on the Moon, Earth is always at the same position relative to the meridian, but moves relative to the equator. Therefore, if it's Earthrise now, it will be Earthrise at that same point for a damned long time:)
I believe I've heard heard your argument before (and actually written by lawyers, but w/ much more legalese, I'm sure)... but there's nothing that prevents me from spelling my name "Joe Schmoe" while pronouncing it "The Holy One, Praised Be He". As far as the law is concerned, I can pronounce my name any way I like.
What consumer demand for infotech was around back then? Yes, there were some major industries-- power generation, for example-- that were automating some processes, but the miniaturization of components was advanced on behalf of NASA purely to meet Kennedy's goal of getting us to the moon. Sure, the technologies invented in this period (not just the # of transistors on a chip, but all sorts of material science too-- think metallurgy, liquid flow, etc)-- might eventually have been discovered or invented anyway, but it would've taken a damn sight longer than it did.
Saying you "don't accept them" doesn't make them untrue. It just means you're prejudiced to believe (or not) what you want, without actually examining the data. That's not the scientific method, that's not even journalism. That's religion.
Dunno about that, but it did say Linux pros listen to electronica... which of course includes Kraftwerk!
Now we just need to figure out what software app Kraftwerk would be a good name for... perhaps an enchanced version of Qt?
Re:Semi-serious?
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I myself am areligious, but I disagree with your statement that science and religion don't mix. Except among the fundamentalists (on both sides), they attempt to answer different types of questions. Science asks 'how?' where religion asks 'why?'
I guess in one sense you are correct, they don't mix-- but then, it's not because of animosity toward one side from the other (again, excepting the fundamentalists)-- the methodologies of the two are incompatible enough that to subscribe to one of them does not forbid believing the other, too.
I have no memory of the soundtrack music. That in and of itself might say something. I'm a musician, but it just didn't register.
Not being aware of the soundtrack in a movie isn't always a bad thing. The best movie soundtracks/scores are that good because they don't take the foreground. Granted, there are many fine musicians out there who write excellent music for movies-- Danny Elfman being my personal favorite-- where the music is definitely noticeable, but the music should always enhance the movie, not dominate it.
Think of some classic movies and the role music played in them: Casablanca, Star Wars (the 1st trilogy-- the 2nd doesn't count as classic), The Shawshank Redemption, Jaws, etc. In every one of them, the music was used to set the scene, and where it was foreground, the music itself was part of the story.
Slashdot Mirror
The world already has a standardized launch system, courtesy of the Russians. It's called a vostok, and is actually an incremental improvement over the R-7 launch vehicle, which in turn was developed from ICBM technologies.
However, the world also long ago standardized on several designs for an internal combustion engine. That doesn't stop manufacturers from looking for better solutions.
Oh, and for those further up the thread (not the parent of this comment), I'm one of those Yanks you're talking about. Funny how until this paragraph I never even mentioned the US, isn't it? A criticism lacking in the ability to inform and instruct is just a flame.
Not to mention the ridiculous assumption that most of the world will be covered by water...I realize burning fossil fuels creates water, but WTF?
Wow, would it be just as ridiculous to look at any current-day globe & realize that most of the world is already covered by water?
I was involved with Wes Clark's campaign during the primaries, up until Dean's Iowa Implosion.
Because South Carolina, my home for the last year and a half, has an early primary, all of the major candidates stopped through multiple times. I got to be the driver of one of the cars for Clark's entourage, and spent a few minutes talking with him as well as getting to see him on stage numerous times, and his wife Gert once too. I also got to chat with her for around thirty minutes one day while the general was shaking hands, babies, and anything else within reach. She's a very charming woman incidentally, and a credit to the name Clark.
The format at one of the events where Gert was speaking-- I don't remember exactly where except that it was around Charleston somewhere-- was a short speech followed by a q&a session.
Knowing that the general was previously a high muckety-muck in a firm in Northern Virginia that specialized in engineering alternative-fuel and low-fuel-consumption engines for motor vehicles, I threw a softball question about his motivations for work such as that.
I was gladdened to see how much she warmed up to the subject in the few minutes she could spend to reply. Apparently he's been a sci-fi fan his entire life (actually she'd told me that privately during a previous visit, the one during which I'd cornered her for that 30-or-so minutes), and is still very much a science buff, too.
I still wish Iowa had worked out differently. For those who don't know or don't remember, General Clark didn't participate in the Iowa caucuses, figuring that Dean would carry Iowa in a walk anyway, but that Clark could face him in New Hampshire and South Carolina. When Kerry took Iowa & Dean made his (in)famous scream, Clark's position suddenly crumbled. To be honest, I doubt he would've won SC & NH anyway-- he was always the underdog candidate-- but I'm still glad to have worked on his campaign, and wish him well in everything he does in the future.
It's a shame, in my opinion: we could've had an actively pro-science president. Instead, we now have a choice between someone who apparently has no passion regarding science (Kerry) and one who gladly politicizes scientific reasoning to benefit himself & his corporate cronies (he who must not be named). Ok, for the fringe, I guess Nader's out there, along with whoever the Greens & the Libertarians are backing. Heck, I'm sure LaRouche is running again too, and that some people are stupid enough to vote for him. If you're one of them, sorry for offending you.
Not really. I enjoyed itWow, you mean the Toronto Blue Jays & Montreal Expos are US teams?
Ok, sure, the Expos actually most likely will be soon, if & when DC finally gets to root for a home team again (no thanks to Baltimore), but that still leaves Toronto!
You're kidding, right?
One of the contracts I administer has at its heart a mysql/php application that, gzipped, fits entirely on a single floppy-- and it tracks financial information for an entire office the US Navy (and know, I don't mean office as in 'five people and their desks').
Granted, it's not a huge system-- but 5gbs is so far beyond what I'm currently using that the very idea of a system similar to this ever breaching that limit is just laughable.
Even for those systems where 5gbs is a limit, of course Sybase has a fully licensed pay-as-you-go version in the wings. What, did you think they weren't out to make a profit? Oh, that's right, large application developers aren't allowed to make profits around here, just the little contractors who wouldn't exist if not for the app providers. Sheesh.
Sign me,
Slightly less cynical
I was wondering how far down the thread I'd have to read to get to the first person thinking this article belonged under "YRO".
Now I know the answer.
Oh, how I love typos.
he or she becomes some marty/icon
Wow, I have a hard enough time being some Mike, I'd hate to have to be some Marty, too!
You're kidding, right?
Sure, his tactics are cheap in the short-term. So is eating a Happy Meal for lunch. It's when I continue to eat Happy Meal day after day ad infinitum that it becomes expensive.
Imagine if his tactics spread nationwide (in as far as possible-- I doubt tents would do that well in colder climes). Now imagine the recidivism rate not budging an inch. Now imagine the cost to house all those prisoners.
We already have a higher proportion of our population incarcerated than any other industrialized country-- and more even than some of the totalitarian countries!
Let's start by accepting that the Libertarians are right on some points. Throwing pot smokers in jail is just ludicrous. Having to rotate a multiple murderer out in twenty-five years because the low-end drug dealers are taking all the space is even worse.
For the record: I have never been in jail. I haven't had weed in long enough that even were I to mention the exact length of time, the statute of limitations has expired. About the worst thing I do anymore is speed, and even at that I mostly stay at the same speed as the traffic around me. I'm not concerned about this for my own immediate benefit, but rather for the present and future of our society.
Great idea-- but since both the layer and the glass filter the color, you end up with subtractive colors, not additive. With your solution (assuming the tone and density of the vanadium & dye layers match), no light at all gets through.
The above comment was not insightful.
Beyond the cost of developing the craft itself (not much new to develop on this one), most of the cost of any mission to orbit or beyond is just for fuel... and once you're in LEO, you're halfway to anywhere. The additional Delta V (change in angular momentum) to go from LEO to LoLO is negligible, and for a trajectory that never even enters LoLO, but just goes translunar on a free-return orbit, it's even less, given the correct launch window.
There was a communications satellite launched a few years ago-- I forget the name of the corporate owner-- which was launched incorrectly into a degrading elliptical orbit, but with some fuel left onboard. An enterprising firm realized that there was no reason to abandon it, as they could stabilize it by using the remaining fuel to propel it into a free-return orbit around the moon, spilling the excess Delta-V with what essentially added up to a negative gravity assist upon returning to Earth orbit.
The hard part is getting to LEO. Once you're there, as far as energy is concerned, it's cheap to go anywhere you want, if you have the time, the patience, and the life support.
At first I thought they're launching a Soyuz directly towards the moon and cleverly navigates its way around the moon (to see the dark side too), and back to earth.
/. you always know there's more coming when someone says "but...")
This is entirely pedantic, but... (on
There is no dark side of the moon. There is a far side, caused by the tidal lock Earth has on the Moon's rotation, but both faces of the moon face the Sun for equal amounts of time.
There are theoretically some spots near the poles, hidden at the bottoms of craters, which may never see the sun, but that's because the angle of the sun over the horizon never gets steep enough to hit the bottoms of those craters.
Valid point, and thanks for the data points (I would never have guessed that Monaca had that high a population density!)... but my argument still stands. Some places are more crowded than others-- and likely to stay so-- and it's not the crowding that will cause our problems in the future, it's the scarcity of resources.
That population isn't evenly distributed. Places like India and China are intensely crowded already, while vast areas of Canada, the US, and Russia are sparesely settled if at all. Additionally, if not for immigration then the population of the US would actually be declining. China's population still has a while to go before theirs starts to decline-- gotta wait for the elderly to start dying in droves. India's, I have no idea what the growth rate (current or projected) looks like. Unless a better treatment for AIDS is found in the next couple of decades, Africa stands to lose a LOT of population.
The end result will be that some areas of the world, just like today, suffer from incredible population pressure; while others barely support anyone at all.
The problem isn't leibenschraum (apologies to German readers if I spelled that wrong). It's scarcity of resources.
Think about all the metals available in just one small asteroid, if only we had the technology to get there, bring it home, and mine it.
For goodness' sake, get the kids off the Pentium! How do they stand on such a small block of silicon anyway?
Or wait, is that a new pharmaceutical?
That's the word I meant :)
Yeah, I can just see a coven of witches doing their damnedest to hide the moon...
Actually it is... it's a Timex Ironman DataLink... which became completely redundant when I bought my Blackberry!
All with less computing power than your car.
Heh, not just less computing power than my car... less computing power than my wristwatch!
From a fixed vantage on the Moon's surface, Earth is always in the same angle in relation to the meridian (yeah yeah, no Prime Meridian on the Moon, but for the sake of argument, call it the longitude at which Apollo 11 landed). Due to the Moon's orbit not being completely on the ecliptic, the angle from the equator does change.
In addition, due to the rotation of the collective Earth/Moon system, the sun does be occulted (is that the right word?) by the Earth on a regular basis. I don't know what the frequency is, but considering Earth appears much larger from the moon than vice-versa, I'd have to assume that these events (call them Terran eclipses) happen more often than Solar eclipses.
So, to answer your question: wherever you stand on the Moon, Earth is always at the same position relative to the meridian, but moves relative to the equator. Therefore, if it's Earthrise now, it will be Earthrise at that same point for a damned long time :)
I believe I've heard heard your argument before (and actually written by lawyers, but w/ much more legalese, I'm sure)... but there's nothing that prevents me from spelling my name "Joe Schmoe" while pronouncing it "The Holy One, Praised Be He". As far as the law is concerned, I can pronounce my name any way I like.
What consumer demand for infotech was around back then? Yes, there were some major industries-- power generation, for example-- that were automating some processes, but the miniaturization of components was advanced on behalf of NASA purely to meet Kennedy's goal of getting us to the moon. Sure, the technologies invented in this period (not just the # of transistors on a chip, but all sorts of material science too-- think metallurgy, liquid flow, etc)-- might eventually have been discovered or invented anyway, but it would've taken a damn sight longer than it did.
Saying you "don't accept them" doesn't make them untrue. It just means you're prejudiced to believe (or not) what you want, without actually examining the data. That's not the scientific method, that's not even journalism. That's religion.
Oh c'mon, nothing beats Numbers.
That wondefully poetic line...
Uno, Dos, Treis, Quattro Cinco Cinco Seis
The Bard of Avon would cry for joy at such depth!
Dunno about that, but it did say Linux pros listen to electronica... which of course includes Kraftwerk!
Now we just need to figure out what software app Kraftwerk would be a good name for... perhaps an enchanced version of Qt?
I myself am areligious, but I disagree with your statement that science and religion don't mix. Except among the fundamentalists (on both sides), they attempt to answer different types of questions. Science asks 'how?' where religion asks 'why?'
I guess in one sense you are correct, they don't mix-- but then, it's not because of animosity toward one side from the other (again, excepting the fundamentalists)-- the methodologies of the two are incompatible enough that to subscribe to one of them does not forbid believing the other, too.
I have no memory of the soundtrack music. That in and of itself might say something. I'm a musician, but it just didn't register.
Not being aware of the soundtrack in a movie isn't always a bad thing. The best movie soundtracks/scores are that good because they don't take the foreground. Granted, there are many fine musicians out there who write excellent music for movies-- Danny Elfman being my personal favorite-- where the music is definitely noticeable, but the music should always enhance the movie, not dominate it.
Think of some classic movies and the role music played in them: Casablanca, Star Wars (the 1st trilogy-- the 2nd doesn't count as classic), The Shawshank Redemption, Jaws, etc. In every one of them, the music was used to set the scene, and where it was foreground, the music itself was part of the story.