It can carry three people (one pilot, two passengers), but will only carry one pilot for this flight. This is almost certianly for safety reasons. Better one dead pilot instead of three dead astronauts.
They'll repeat with three astronaughts, and then repeat again for the prize. Assuming none of the other teams manage to beat them first..:)
It's designed to win the prize and nothing else. Not that it's not an important milestone, mind you, but it's just a dead-end.
I agree with your first statement, but not your second. Just because a specific vehicle isn't designed to go into orbit, doesn't mean it's a dead end. Firstly, they're planning on sub-orbital flights, mostly for tourism. Secondly, the technologies used may be scalable to a larger, orbital model. Think of a smaller, design prototype. You have to demonstrate the smaller model works before you can scale up.
The designs and business practices of ALL the X-Prize contestants will be monitored closely. Which designs work, which don't? Which are more expensive? More reliable. That's the whole point about the X-Prize, to get people (engineers, businessmen, and the public in general) thinking about spaceflight for the common man.
So I would argue that SpaceShipOne is not a dead end in the sense that it is a requirement for a scaled up, orbital "SpaceShipTwo".
OK, maybe this theory is a bit out there, but has anyone truly worked out if the missing matter is truly evenly distributed? Is this even possible, even with very accurate measurements?
I was about to ask where you could get the Orbiter add-on for the asteroid. I've not heard of Celestia. I might have to check it out.
Does Celestia let you land on the asteroid? Does it let you compute your own interplanetary transfer orbits?
(A warning to the newbie... Orbiter's learning curve is *very* steep, but well worth it. Getting the trans-jovian transfer orbit burn just right was pretty cool. Landing on Io was even cooler.)
Seeing as how there are only about 10^80 particles in the entire universe...
Basically sounds like exponential growth isn't sustainable. Biologists have known this for years. It's interesting to see the projections to get a sense when things break down, just like the projections of human population growth to see when we'll hit 100 billion people are interesting.
Re:Waiting for this Slashdot headline...
on
HDTV TiVo Now Shipping
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I did a bit of research into this. As far as I can tell, the DirecTV/Canada issue has to do with the reception with sattelite signals, not with PVR's. I just want to hook this thing up to my local cable (preferably my digital cable, if at all possible, which many of us have up here)
On the contrary, Tivo seems quite hostile to the idea of selling Tivos in Canada. Once a national canadian radio station called up Tivo to ask about Tivo in canada, and their PR rep got angry about setting up an interview with Tivo under false pretences.
Does anyone know what Tivo's beef is with Canada?
Waiting for this Slashdot headline...
on
HDTV TiVo Now Shipping
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Does anyopne know when SpamAssassin will come out with a version that handles Bayesian Poisoning? (That's when you get about 20 random words added at the end of the spam to trick the filter into thinking it's a real message). I've gotten to the point where I've reduced my Spam-Level filter to 1 (!) just to keep the spam at bay. I've also tried to configure some temp rules to undo the affects of Bayesian poisoning, but it doesn't seem to work all the time.
I'm now up to almost 80 or 90 spam a day. Should I nuke my learned rules and get SpamAssassin to start again?
Suggestion: When the comet or asteriod does come, try to be a bit farther away than 1000 meters from the impact site. You'll be surprised how much the effects drop off with distance.
We should have a good amount of warning on any impact. Hell, 72 hours notice should be enough to evacuate the area for a 100 year or 1000 year asteriod. This program (with Realistic numbers, the impact above occurs once in 7 trillion years, about 500 times the age of the universe itself) has made me feel much more comfortable and not less. (quick calculation) 50km should be enough safe distance from a 1300 year frequency asteroid.. you could walk that if you had to in 3 days...
I wonder if it would make sense for a group of people (a bunch of techie friends, or maybe the whole internet) to get together and build a "shared tivo" that would reside at one house. People could log into that box, they communally tell it what to record, and then everyone just downloads (/streams) the shows they want to watch. Cost of cable/satellite goes down by a factor of N, but you still get to watch all your shows.
Brown shorts day for network execs is when someone decides to combine P2P file sharing with video capture cards. The internet communally decides what gets recorded/streamed, with the video capture nodes spread across the planet to record on every channel. Then you can either be a content provider and get perks for downloading other content, or be a distributor and have a heavier bandwith useage.
Blah blah blah, doesn't scale, blah blah blah, nobody has video capture cards... Just give it about 5 years. By 2010, I want to be able to watch Australian football matches a day after they've been aired.
I think this is more like the government blockading the door to your bathroom... of course, there's nothing stopping you from relieving yourself on the front lawn.;)
You've been playing way too much of "The Sims" haven't you?;)
I think there's a couple of things to take into account here...
1) These are exogeologists. Sometimes the most subtle things can reshape your whole model for how the planets were formed (go rent and watch Episode 10 of From the Earth to the Moon and you might get excited about geology too)
2) For a long time, people have talked about replacing humans with robots for extra-planetary field geology. This is the first time where the robots are actually doing more than sticking and arm into a random piece of soil. I mean, MER-A landed, saw a crater about 300m away, and is about 1/3rd of the way to driving towards it. This really is *amazing* stuff, even if the results just look like more pictures of rocks to the layman (or laygeek).
What, like the IBM Netfinity 5500 I have at home as my server? It's about 2.5 feet x 2.5 feet x 3 feet. It was a christmas present after the 3 year warranty expired.
123 pounds of Linuxy goodness...:) Hell to get upstairs though.
Simple answer: The ESA is only sending robots over the next 5 years.
Maybe they're still using Beagle style calculations for money.
Also, Canadian news media *sometimes* mix CDN$ and US$ in news reports, especially if the numbers are so huge and the money isn't actually being spent *in* Canada. I'm actually suprised they didn't quote a figure in Euros.
It's not just the space suits. Are you proposing we launch about 3 person years of human urine and excrement (after the water has been reclaimed..) back into space from the Martian surface?
Maybe you'd be able to irradiate it and kill everything, but how could you tell for *certain*?
The JPL answer to this is that the dust in the atmosphere is so fine and the solar panels so (relatively) warm that the dust ionizes and literally gets glued to the solar panel glass. If you went up to it with a big brush it would be a real bugger to get clean.
Maybe we should send Martha Stewart. That would be a good thing.
I think this has more to do with the fact that digital cable boxes work seperately from the MPEG encoder card... to change channels, you'd need to change channels on the digital cable box while requires some sort of IR device.
Your TV encoder card can't record digital channel 134, I assume?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Rich internet dot.commers who want to have sex in space.
If they're on SpaceShipOne, they better be fast. I believe it experiences only 3 minutes of weightlessness?
Just like the dot com bubble, they better come as fast as they go.
Does anyone know if this will be aired live? CNN? BBC News? Local Cable Access 4?
How about streamed on the net?
More susinctly: SpaceShipOne is as much of a dead end as Mercury-Redstone was.
It can carry three people (one pilot, two passengers), but will only carry one pilot for this flight. This is almost certianly for safety reasons. Better one dead pilot instead of three dead astronauts.
:)
They'll repeat with three astronaughts, and then repeat again for the prize. Assuming none of the other teams manage to beat them first..
It's designed to win the prize and nothing else. Not that it's not an important milestone, mind you, but it's just a dead-end.
I agree with your first statement, but not your second. Just because a specific vehicle isn't designed to go into orbit, doesn't mean it's a dead end. Firstly, they're planning on sub-orbital flights, mostly for tourism. Secondly, the technologies used may be scalable to a larger, orbital model. Think of a smaller, design prototype. You have to demonstrate the smaller model works before you can scale up.
The designs and business practices of ALL the X-Prize contestants will be monitored closely. Which designs work, which don't? Which are more expensive? More reliable. That's the whole point about the X-Prize, to get people (engineers, businessmen, and the public in general) thinking about spaceflight for the common man.
So I would argue that SpaceShipOne is not a dead end in the sense that it is a requirement for a scaled up, orbital "SpaceShipTwo".
$565 billion posted to its accounts?!?
With that kind of cash, screw Mars, let's go straight to Europa.
It's all Dyson Spheres, man....
OK, maybe this theory is a bit out there, but has anyone truly worked out if the missing matter is truly evenly distributed? Is this even possible, even with very accurate measurements?
I was about to ask where you could get the Orbiter add-on for the asteroid. I've not heard of Celestia. I might have to check it out.
Does Celestia let you land on the asteroid? Does it let you compute your own interplanetary transfer orbits?
(A warning to the newbie... Orbiter's learning curve is *very* steep, but well worth it. Getting the trans-jovian transfer orbit burn just right was pretty cool. Landing on Io was even cooler.)
Seeing as how there are only about 10^80 particles in the entire universe...
Basically sounds like exponential growth isn't sustainable. Biologists have known this for years. It's interesting to see the projections to get a sense when things break down, just like the projections of human population growth to see when we'll hit 100 billion people are interesting.
I did a bit of research into this. As far as I can tell, the DirecTV/Canada issue has to do with the reception with sattelite signals, not with PVR's. I just want to hook this thing up to my local cable (preferably my digital cable, if at all possible, which many of us have up here)
On the contrary, Tivo seems quite hostile to the idea of selling Tivos in Canada. Once a national canadian radio station called up Tivo to ask about Tivo in canada, and their PR rep got angry about setting up an interview with Tivo under false pretences.
Does anyone know what Tivo's beef is with Canada?
I'm waiting for this Slashdot headline:
TiVo available in Canada
It's about time we had this by now, dammit...
Does anyopne know when SpamAssassin will come out with a version that handles Bayesian Poisoning? (That's when you get about 20 random words added at the end of the spam to trick the filter into thinking it's a real message). I've gotten to the point where I've reduced my Spam-Level filter to 1 (!) just to keep the spam at bay. I've also tried to configure some temp rules to undo the affects of Bayesian poisoning, but it doesn't seem to work all the time.
I'm now up to almost 80 or 90 spam a day. Should I nuke my learned rules and get SpamAssassin to start again?
Do it the vonage way... 500 minutes of TV per month for $15. Start charging for individual programs instead of for individual channels.
I know I'd spend a lot more time actually planning on what I wanted to watch instead of flipping around the channels waiting to come on.
Suggestion: When the comet or asteriod does come, try to be a bit farther away than 1000 meters from the impact site. You'll be surprised how much the effects drop off with distance.
We should have a good amount of warning on any impact. Hell, 72 hours notice should be enough to evacuate the area for a 100 year or 1000 year asteriod. This program (with Realistic numbers, the impact above occurs once in 7 trillion years, about 500 times the age of the universe itself) has made me feel much more comfortable and not less. (quick calculation) 50km should be enough safe distance from a 1300 year frequency asteroid.. you could walk that if you had to in 3 days...
I wonder if it would make sense for a group of people (a bunch of techie friends, or maybe the whole internet) to get together and build a "shared tivo" that would reside at one house. People could log into that box, they communally tell it what to record, and then everyone just downloads (/streams) the shows they want to watch. Cost of cable/satellite goes down by a factor of N, but you still get to watch all your shows.
Brown shorts day for network execs is when someone decides to combine P2P file sharing with video capture cards. The internet communally decides what gets recorded/streamed, with the video capture nodes spread across the planet to record on every channel. Then you can either be a content provider and get perks for downloading other content, or be a distributor and have a heavier bandwith useage.
Blah blah blah, doesn't scale, blah blah blah, nobody has video capture cards... Just give it about 5 years. By 2010, I want to be able to watch Australian football matches a day after they've been aired.
I think this is more like the government blockading the door to your bathroom... of course, there's nothing stopping you from relieving yourself on the front lawn. ;)
;)
You've been playing way too much of "The Sims" haven't you?
I think there's a couple of things to take into account here...
1) These are exogeologists. Sometimes the most subtle things can reshape your whole model for how the planets were formed (go rent and watch Episode 10 of From the Earth to the Moon and you might get excited about geology too)
2) For a long time, people have talked about replacing humans with robots for extra-planetary field geology. This is the first time where the robots are actually doing more than sticking and arm into a random piece of soil. I mean, MER-A landed, saw a crater about 300m away, and is about 1/3rd of the way to driving towards it. This really is *amazing* stuff, even if the results just look like more pictures of rocks to the layman (or laygeek).
What, like the IBM Netfinity 5500 I have at home as my server? It's about 2.5 feet x 2.5 feet x 3 feet. It was a christmas present after the 3 year warranty expired.
:) Hell to get upstairs though.
123 pounds of Linuxy goodness...
I have Crohn's and dammit I wish it was this simple. ;)
Simple answer: The ESA is only sending robots over the next 5 years.
Maybe they're still using Beagle style calculations for money.
Also, Canadian news media *sometimes* mix CDN$ and US$ in news reports, especially if the numbers are so huge and the money isn't actually being spent *in* Canada. I'm actually suprised they didn't quote a figure in Euros.
It's not just the space suits. Are you proposing we launch about 3 person years of human urine and excrement (after the water has been reclaimed..) back into space from the Martian surface?
Maybe you'd be able to irradiate it and kill everything, but how could you tell for *certain*?
Proof this is already happening:
Janet Jackson most watched moment among TiVo users
The JPL answer to this is that the dust in the atmosphere is so fine and the solar panels so (relatively) warm that the dust ionizes and literally gets glued to the solar panel glass. If you went up to it with a big brush it would be a real bugger to get clean.
Maybe we should send Martha Stewart. That would be a good thing.
If I were Bill Gates, I would not accept invitations to kneel before someone with a sword.
OFF WITH HIS HEAD!
(Scanning the messages (at +3) I'm amazed someone hasn't said this yet)
I think this has more to do with the fact that digital cable boxes work seperately from the MPEG encoder card... to change channels, you'd need to change channels on the digital cable box while requires some sort of IR device.
:)
Your TV encoder card can't record digital channel 134, I assume?