The X-Prize isn't the only commercial space venture in town. Commercial injection of unmanned satellites into low or geosynchronous earth orbit is a thriving business. TransOrbital appears to be on track for a commercial lunar landing.
The so-called "scientific research" that is advertised as the reason for maintaining the space station is really a smokescreen for the true reason. "I want to go to Mars! Personally, not as a telepresence in a robot! Or at least send my children or grandchildren there." But no politician can justify this goal in a global environment with jihadists who intend to use our own technology to drive us back to the 11th century.
The X-prize is the next to the last step in getting NASA out of the routine LEO human transport business. The last steps will be the commercial human-to-orbit prize and the transformation of the FAA into the FASA, where it will regulate both atmospheric and space transportation. Then NASA will have no more excuses to hide the true reasons for maintaining the ISS, which are to solve the problem of long-duration human support for the two to four-year Mars journey. Everyone will be better off.
SHIP NAME/TYPE: Scranton, Pennsylvania/spindizzy drive
LENGTH: 5Km
BUILDER/COMMENTS: The first city to "go Okie", leaving an economically depressed Earth in search of paying jobs.
SOURCE: James Blish, "A Life for the Stars"
SHIP NAME/TYPE: Hern VI/spindizzy drive
LENGTH: 3000Km ("considerably smaller than Mercury")
BUILDER/COMMENTS: Flown across the galaxy by New Yorkers on a mission to destroy the Vegan Orbital Fort.
SOURCE: James Blish, "Earthman, Come Home"
SHIP NAME/TYPE: Mars/tweaked space-time elements of quantum descriptors
LENGTH: 6750Km
BUILDER/COMMENTS: The Federal Republic of Mars moved their planet to a new system 10,000 light years away in order to escape the oppressive politoco-economic expansionism of Earth's Greater East-West Alliance (GEWA). Mars's moon Phobos was used as a "scout ship".
SOURCE: Greg Bear, "Moving Mars". The novel won several awards, including the Nebula Award.
SHIP NAME/TYPE: none.
LENGTH: 90 million miles
BUILDER/COMMENTS: The ship was a gigantic dummy, the largest scarecrow ever conceived by the human mind. It was used at least twice, once to frighten away nonhuman agressors from a forgotten corner of the galaxies, once to serve as a diversionary action in the destruction of the dictator Lord Raumsog and seventeen million noncombatants with carcinogenic poisons.
SOURCE: Cordwainer Smith, "Golden the Ship Was -- Oh! Oh! Oh!"
if a company within the U.S. solicits sales through an overseas professional telemarketer, that U.S. company is liable for any TSR violations of the telemarketer.
This is the key to effective anti-spam legislation, too. If customers of spammers are penalized, then the spammers will have no content to distribute, and they'll go away. Except for those messages advertising CD's full of 200 million hotmail addresses.
A typical lighting flash carries a current of 12 million volts and 242,000 amperes (equivalent to 2.9 billion kilowatts of power), six times the entire electric generating capacity of the U.S.
We've known how to defend against EMP's of this magnitude since Benjamin Franklin flew his famous kite in 1752. Homebrew EM weapons are peashooters in comparison.
No your're not being paranoid by thinking MS wants to go to a subscription model. However, they've made the classic error of not checking out their competition. I already have a fully DRM'd device that has VCR-like functions. It's my Motorola set-top box given to me by AOL Time Warner Cable.
I paid $0 for the box, and $3 per month, with $4/day for any movie "rental", plus free loss leaders.
Why should I pay MS [division by zero] percent more for the same functionality? No reason and I won't, but P.T.Barnum was still right: there's a sucker born every minute who will, given enough slick marketing.
Subway installations could just turn off the voice and let people use internet and short message services. One of the reasons that SMS and i-mode are so popular in Europe and Japan is that people there actually believe politeness is a virtue.
Naw, that would never work. It would be discriminatory against the technologically-impaired who can't manage typing text using a numeric keypad.
As far back as 1961, the IBM Stretch supercomputer had 64-bit addressing.
In that type of architecture effective addresess were base+index, with the base value (typically 24 bits) embedded in the instruction and the index computed on separately. The Stretch's index registers were 64 bits wide. Addressing was to 64-bit words, not bytes, so the address space was actually 2^72 bytes!
But there was no virtual memory, so the reality was that the programmer had to work with the amount of real memory avaialable, typically 96Kwords (less than 1 megabyte).
It's of course amusing that people diss peer-review in Slashdot. Pay Attention! Commenting in slashdot is peer-review.
The key element is to identify the appropriate review community. (OK so maybe slashdot readers aren't peers of Wolfram. One characteristic of cranks is the claim that they have no peers at all.) I'd look for the opinions of professional researchers in cellular automata -- people whose work is so widely recognized that they get paid for their results.
Too bad Andrei Kolmogorov is dead; I guess we'll have to ask Gregory Chatin what he thinks of this work.
p.s. Memo to cybrpnk2: It was J.B.S. Haldane who said "the universe is not only queerer than you imagine, it is queerer than you can imagine."
Slashdot Mirror
The so-called "scientific research" that is advertised as the reason for maintaining the space station is really a smokescreen for the true reason. "I want to go to Mars! Personally, not as a telepresence in a robot! Or at least send my children or grandchildren there." But no politician can justify this goal in a global environment with jihadists who intend to use our own technology to drive us back to the 11th century.
The X-prize is the next to the last step in getting NASA out of the routine LEO human transport business. The last steps will be the commercial human-to-orbit prize and the transformation of the FAA into the FASA, where it will regulate both atmospheric and space transportation. Then NASA will have no more excuses to hide the true reasons for maintaining the ISS, which are to solve the problem of long-duration human support for the two to four-year Mars journey. Everyone will be better off.
SHIP NAME/TYPE: Scranton, Pennsylvania/spindizzy drive
LENGTH: 5Km
BUILDER/COMMENTS: The first city to "go Okie", leaving an economically depressed Earth in search of paying jobs.
SOURCE: James Blish, "A Life for the Stars"
SHIP NAME/TYPE: Hern VI/spindizzy drive
LENGTH: 3000Km ("considerably smaller than Mercury")
BUILDER/COMMENTS: Flown across the galaxy by New Yorkers on a mission to destroy the Vegan Orbital Fort.
SOURCE: James Blish, "Earthman, Come Home"
SHIP NAME/TYPE: Mars/tweaked space-time elements of quantum descriptors
LENGTH: 6750Km
BUILDER/COMMENTS: The Federal Republic of Mars moved their planet to a new system 10,000 light years away in order to escape the oppressive politoco-economic expansionism of Earth's Greater East-West Alliance (GEWA). Mars's moon Phobos was used as a "scout ship".
SOURCE: Greg Bear, "Moving Mars". The novel won several awards, including the Nebula Award.
SHIP NAME/TYPE: none.
LENGTH: 90 million miles
BUILDER/COMMENTS: The ship was a gigantic dummy, the largest scarecrow ever conceived by the human mind. It was used at least twice, once to frighten away nonhuman agressors from a forgotten corner of the galaxies, once to serve as a diversionary action in the destruction of the dictator Lord Raumsog and seventeen million noncombatants with carcinogenic poisons.
SOURCE: Cordwainer Smith, "Golden the Ship Was -- Oh! Oh! Oh!"
We've known how to defend against EMP's of this magnitude since Benjamin Franklin flew his famous kite in 1752. Homebrew EM weapons are peashooters in comparison.
No your're not being paranoid by thinking MS wants to go to a subscription model. However, they've made the classic error of not checking out their competition. I already have a fully DRM'd device that has VCR-like functions. It's my Motorola set-top box given to me by AOL Time Warner Cable.
I paid $0 for the box, and $3 per month, with $4/day for any movie "rental", plus free loss leaders.
Why should I pay MS [division by zero] percent more for the same functionality? No reason and I won't, but P.T.Barnum was still right: there's a sucker born every minute who will, given enough slick marketing.
Naw, that would never work. It would be discriminatory against the technologically-impaired who can't manage typing text using a numeric keypad.
In that type of architecture effective addresess were base+index, with the base value (typically 24 bits) embedded in the instruction and the index computed on separately. The Stretch's index registers were 64 bits wide. Addressing was to 64-bit words, not bytes, so the address space was actually 2^72 bytes!
But there was no virtual memory, so the reality was that the programmer had to work with the amount of real memory avaialable, typically 96Kwords (less than 1 megabyte).
It's of course amusing that people diss peer-review in Slashdot. Pay Attention! Commenting in slashdot is peer-review. The key element is to identify the appropriate review community. (OK so maybe slashdot readers aren't peers of Wolfram. One characteristic of cranks is the claim that they have no peers at all.) I'd look for the opinions of professional researchers in cellular automata -- people whose work is so widely recognized that they get paid for their results. Too bad Andrei Kolmogorov is dead; I guess we'll have to ask Gregory Chatin what he thinks of this work. p.s. Memo to cybrpnk2: It was J.B.S. Haldane who said "the universe is not only queerer than you imagine, it is queerer than you can imagine."