Why not just code about 4k of javascript that continuously spits out digits of Pi or e... The page is infinite in size, but only takes up a little HD space!
You also have to realize that Canadian rebroadcast of American shows on Canadian channels have ALL CANADIAN Commercials. So there would be lost revenue dollars, and hundred of thousands of Americans craving real Canadian Beer that they couldn't get. ("Strange Brew" comes to mind... Global Conquest through Canadian Beer. Great movie.)
This is why we Canadians never get to see all those fancy Superbowl commercials the Yanks keep talking about...:)
The next version of DeCSS should include a "garbage" text file with just enough filler text (Perl poetry, perhaps? Anti-MPAA manifesto?) such that decss.tar.gz and decss.zip have EXACTLY THE SAME FILE SIZE AS THE REAL THING!
While flipping by the Superbowl today I realized something that may be of relevance to the iCraveTV shutdown.
Here in Canada, we of course get American stations along with Canadian ones. However, it's standard practice up here during events simulcast on both an American and a Canadian station to cut the signal from the American station and replace it with the Canadian one.
For instnace, we watch The Simpsons on Sunday nights on both FOX and Global, but it's Global's commercials we get to watch. I guess the clocks aren't quite in sync. Usually the change is quite abrupt. If I'm watching Simpsons on Fox, I get right up to Bart at the Blackboard when it cuts out and starts over again, this time "The Simpsons On Global"
Now we didn't get all those fancy smancy commercials up here in Canada, but rather a lot of Canadian ones, even though we still see the American coverage (ABC, right?). So if someone watched the Superbowl on iCraveTV, they'd not see these $2 million dollar spots of advertising glory, but rather the standard Canadian "boring" commercials we regularly see.
mmm Oh how I fancy a McCain's pizza right now, or want to buy Petro-Canada gas instead of those other foreign corporate gas stations from Texas or Holland... Warm Canadian fuzzy feelings.:) I wanna punch that sleazebag computer coming on to that poor lady in that Sprint Canada commercial.
The fact that all three probes are not responding may indicate that the cruise stage never seperated from the lander. This would mean that all three probes tried to land attached and crashed together. The lander couldn't survive with the cruis stage attached, but MAYBE the microprobes could. The cruise ring was supposed to detach after LOS.
I think we may see some sort of to-ground telemetry devised in the future, or more interesting protocols like:
catch (CruiseStageNotDetachedError e) {
propulsion.turnBackToEarth();
message.send("I can't get this DAMNED CRUISE RING OFF MY BACK! AAAAAAAGGGHHHHHH!!!!!"); System.exit(5);// Game Over
broadcast.com was supposed to offer a 300K Windows Media Player stream. They can't even keep their 28.8 streams running at full speed. They stopped working for me at 11AM PST...
Hmm, no contact at first attempt. 10 minutes past. Hopefully something just went into safemode.
It seems like all the best ideas from the BBS days have been ported over to the Internet at large... Take ICQ. I know not everyone uses it out there, but for those who do, it's very addictive. Forget logging on to a community and seeing who's there, just turn on your computer, and have instant presence of your friends online (cable modems rock!).
I know this isn't exactly community, but IRC takes up more of this role today.
Are there any other BBS functionality that haven't been ported to the net? I'd love to see more Tradewars like games out there...:)
I bought my zealot toy from McDonalds, but...
on
Review:Toy Story 2
·
· Score: 1
... I left it there with my crappy food. Arrgh!
I loved the zealots from the first movie, are they back in full alien force?:)
Commodore 64 with 300 baud VicModem, surfing the BBS scene in Nanaimo, BC, Canada.
I eventually got my hands on a Commodore 128 with 1200 baud modem and an 80 column monocrome monitor. Gotta love the C128, it had 2 monitor ports out the back, one for the 40 column monitor, one for the 80 column monitor... Ah yes, BBS was glorious in those days.
Now, 80% of the people in a local community are on the net socializing with the world instead of a local BBS. If it was the only option available to most, we'd all be back there... Reading News on FIDOnet...:)
If the mall we're truly only about the "Social Scene", they would be out of business by now.
A significant proportion of the Mall's business is made up in holiday shopping. I don't know about you, but I did a heck of a lot more Christmas shopping online this year. Sure I'll still go to the mall for regular things (clothes, food court, getting out of the house), but not for birthday or Christmas presents... I can really aviod the Xmas rush online, and that's when the mall's been traditionally making more money.
Remember the season which this was announced. I think the "Do your Christmas shopping online, avoid the mall" message would scare the crap out a multi-million dollar mall owner.
And the Americans didn't do this from the Germans?
on
China Enters Space
·
· Score: 1
Uh, wasn't the American rocket program pretty much completely taken from the German program, with German scientists or via espionage?
No doubt Chnese rocketry was influenced by the Amricans, the Russians, the Germans, and perhaps, gasp, the Chinese, who invented rocketry centuries ago...:)
IMHO, it would be great to get rid of hereditary diseases, as mentioned in the article, and other such things. Someone posted earlier that we are defined by our 'defects.' However, would someone with one such 'defect' be any less of a person if they did not have the problem? I don't think that would be the case. More likely that person had potential that they had extreme difficulty realizing because of a problem that hindered them.
I have Crohn's Disease. I agree with the statement above. I hope that genetic research eventually does come up with a "cure" that can prevent the disease being passed on to my children (or my daughter's children). At the very least, more effective treatment for active disease.
I once thought that an effective way of keeping parents from tinkering with the genes of their children is to not allow genetic engineering to be performed on people less than X years of age. That way, if you want to be genetically superhuman, you can make the choice yourself. Makes sense, unless you realize that you could alter your sperm or egg production to create your super-kid.
Me, I'd just be happy to rid myself of this damn disease. And get me some tolomerase extenders when they come out (just before all the Baby Boomers turn 70) so that I can live to 150+ and not get cancer...;)
I can see it now.. If you're in a loud noisy place (like a rock concert), you can make a cell phone call to someone and the new speech recognition software would be able to translate the call.
I can just image such a call now...
"Yes! No! Fire! Stop! No! Fire! Yes!"
Of course, you'll need to have only 11 neurons to understand the conversation.
I can see it now, the next US weapons project will be arming existing missles with anti-anti-missle missles, so that the missles can shoot down the anti-missles with their anti-anti-missle missles and arrive at their target, causing as much confusion as tactical damage.
For sake of scalability, the anti-anti-missle missles will have to be the size of a common pencil. They'll then be picked up by the NRA as the next great super-weapon for hunting deer.
-- TrevorB, who thinks there should be a "Silly" moderation attribute.
Thanks for the links. I'll keep them in my web surfing queue for the next little while, and see if I can unbias my postings a bit. I should have qualified my previous post by saying I was talking about NASA's unmanned program and not its manned one.
I agree with you on the ISS/shuttle bloat factor. The Shuttle has been going up and down into LEO for almost 20 years now (half way to anywhere, but in itself not a real destination, heck, even Gemini was more exciting). It costs a heck of a lot of your money. The ISS is a political dead horse that a lot (but not all!) of space enthusiasts are too afraid to call for it's cancellation. The best we've really gotten out of manned space exploration this decade are some complex telescope repair missions (would sending up a replacement have been cheaper?), and some ethereal political gains with Russia, about which the Americans are all glowy, and the Russians don't appear to care...:)
Would it be better if ISS or the Shuttle programs were cancelled? NASA's budget would probably get creamed. Yes, there might be about double the budget for unmanned missions, but I think there would be a lull in interest not seen since the post-Challenger era. (Well not quite true, at least Mir was being constructed in the late 80's, now we wouldn't even have that) It might take a long time (and perhaps the Chinese) to get the Americans interested into going back to space again. Or perhaps the dream of manned spaceflight is truly dead, and we're just wasting our time dreaming of a more exciting yesteryear.
Goldin is first and foremost a PR man, I'll grant you that. But I don't think anyone placed into his position could have called for the dismantling of ISS or the Shuttle (And all those jobs) without getting sacked pretty fast. Low cost alternatives (better, faster, cheaper, safer manned spaceflight) frankly are still on the drawing board. Yet Goldin has managed to get planetary exploration up and running again (as opposed to a decade ago). For that, I will praise him. Not that he's Claudius or anything, I just think the space program is a hell of a lot better now than before.
And I hope the person who replaces Mr. Goldin can make the existing space program look "as exciting as a trip to Pittsburg".
-- TrevorB, a Canadian who wishes the CSA was half as cool as NASA, but perhaps without the tacky bus tour. At least we got a cool robot arm!
I hope everyone realizes I'm talking about Voyager 1 and 2, launched by NASA in 1977, and not the USS Voyager, launched by Paramount sometime around 1996...
Voyager is undoubtedly humankind's greatest acheivement in unmanned space exploration. Two quickly prepared spacecraft to take advantage of a rare solar alignment tha only occured once every 175 years, the "Solar Tour" trajectory. Both Voyager 1 traveled to Jupiter and then to Saturn. Since these mission were never planned to last longer than these two planets, the mission planners decided to leave the Uranus/Neptune option to Voyager 2, and do a closeup flyby of Saturn's moon Titan to check up on that atmosphere of hydrocarbons and hope for a "break in the clouds" (thier words). Hopefully we'll learn more with the Huygens probe with Casinni in 2006. Unlike Galileo's Jupiter probe, Huygens may actually land on the surface and record data for up to 30 minutes! That may be really cool... Let's hope it lands on "land".
Voyager 2 went on to be the only probe to explore Uranus and Neptune. Quadruple planetary gravity assist! By the time Voyager 2 reached Neptune, it's arthritic camera (I'm not kidding, it's motors were pretty shot by that point), managed to keep the cameras on Neptune for the 30 seconds requried to gather enough light for a single photo...
And now Voyager is headed for the interstellar void. JPL *Still* has a 30 year plan. The nuclear RTGs on board will be powering Voyager equipment until 2017! The Voyager team still puts out Weekly Status Reports
I remember reading the sci.space.* newsgroups about 10 years ago. People were discussing mass-producing a thousand Voyager class spacecraft and sending about 5 of them to every object in the solar system. Sure, the failure rate would be atrocious, but think of the science! That sounds a bit like NASA's new "Discovery" program.:)
As for MCO, we're just learning how to produce spacecraft with all the bang for 1/10th the price. Give them a chance, they'll work out the bugs in the system.
Daniel Golden has done an incredible job for NASA in the past several years. He's taken a ho hum, shuttle after shuttle launching NASA without much focus, dealt with massive bugestary cuts, and trimmed NASA down (relatively) to a mean, lean space exploration machine. I know it's not quite what we expected when we were growing up, but who has done better? Not Private Business. The Russians stopped sending out interplanetary probes since their failed launch of a Mars probe in (I think) '96.
Can you remember this may active spacecraft ten years ago? (There are ten right now, alright, so I'm counting Voyager 1&2, the greatest missions ever, which are still alive and kicking 7 billion mies away). Half of these active missions are the new "better, faster, cheaper" created under Goldin's regime. Two missions to Mars every two years? The man has this incredible ability to convince the American public that science and space exploration are a good use of American tax dollars...
Goldin's ultimate goal it seems is to build a mega-telescope, most likely a huge interferometer, that could image the surfaces of planets in other solar systems, generating an Apollo 17 like image of an extra-solar Earth like planet to inspire the next generation. Deep Space 3 should be a good first test of space formation flying and interferometry.
Of course, NASA sounds like they're getting more cuts. One of those few instances where I guess you Americans would want Newt Gingrich, who was a big NASA fan himself, back where he was... OK, perhaps the only instance.;)
At any rate, I hope Goldin gets to keep hold of the helm for a while, or that private industry manages to gain some of the public's interest in space. I don't want to see a return to the late 80's...
Hey there. I posted this to the Building Virtual Universities discussion a few days ago, but too late for anyone to read it. I hope it's still relevant.
I've been a programmer at the Technical University of British Columbia for over two years now. I was reading with amusment Schank's article, thinking about our university and all that we've done and learned developing classes for our first year of students this September. TechBC may be closer to Schank's vision for a univsersity than a few others I know. We've tried to develop our course delivery models to embrace an online environment from the beginning. Too many online offerings are either just supplementary information for a lecture, or some glorified correspondance course. We've tried to change that by throwing out the old learning models (including a lecturer standing in front of a class droning on for 3 hours a week) and starting with something new.
A few features that set out TechBC from the rest (If I may get a plug in for my employer):
TechBC is Canada's newest university (1997). It's not a technical institute, but rather a university using technology to teach.
TechBC courses all have some kind of online component, but vary in "delivery model", ranging from "Presentational-Cooperative" (half way between a lecturer and team based learning), to "Computer-Mediated Classroom" (heavily based on online conferencing, ala Slashdot), to "Flexible Study" (the more traditional "online" course, but with a high level of interactivity and and attempt to build a community of learners.
TechBC "courses" are delivered as three 5 week, one credit modules. The theory is that modules can be interchanged as required, so you don't have to take three modules of Statistics if you're a business major. Modules are developed and re-used for other courses.
A common first year for students called TechOne. The material is divided between business/management, multimedia design, and information technology. This may have been for practical reasons as well, you have no idea how much work it is to get just 6 courses (ahem, 18 modules) out for September! (Including making sure all the servers are working, the Javascript debugged on 6000 pages...:) This also gives the students time to decide which program to go into (I know I could have used this, though I may not have been enthused about taking business courses in my first year)
Course material is developed from scratch from both textual and online resources. We don't quite have the same bias as other universities developing courses from existing "static lectures".
Geek Friendly! Well, at least our advertising slogan for this year of classes is "The geek shall inherit the earth". All of the professors, and even the presedent of the university are geeks at heart. (Especially us wacky ones in Educational Technology and Learning.... Hi guys!) Greater sense of online community. Well, at least we're working on it. Building a course management system to handle all these new concepts takes time. Nonetheless, the students seem to be posting as much in online conferences as hanging out after class.
Motiviated Professors. They're all really enthusiastic about teaching their students. Some of them come from the old school of lecturing in front of students, and are becoming excited as to how quickly the students are actually learning with the new course delivery models. As one professor commented just this last week, he was amazed how much and how quickly the students were learning brainstorming in teams (they were redesigning a user interface).
"Standardized" course material. Well, not really, but once course content is created online (a big overhead), it can be reused by faculty and not re-invented each semester. It probably ages after about 2 years or so and has to be re-done. Strong business relationship (with tech partners, not banks or cola manufacturers), with plans for a strong co-op program.
Some amusing points. I notices Schank was complaining about the use of Latin as an "ancient educational language". Latin is also often used as text filler, sort of an "insert your text here" when developing course material. We bucked ther trend and used Esparanto. (A quote translated from Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series, I believe).
I liked the bit about using "games" such as flight simulators to teach students. I think most of our professors who would like this idea and think it was cool.
Reading about people "drifting off" and losing interest in lectures. I've been asked to generate reports from the web logs to determine which students may be losing interest so we can give them some more attention, and make sure they're not dissatisfied with their learning experience.
Well, I've plugged enough. It's not all been roses... It's been hell to put off from the university's point of view, and we won't really know how well it works until the students have completed their first semester of courses.
Perhaps our university can shock the others into changing their ways...
Slashdot Mirror
Why not just code about 4k of javascript that continuously spits out digits of Pi or e... The page is infinite in size, but only takes up a little HD space!
You also have to realize that Canadian rebroadcast of American shows on Canadian channels have ALL CANADIAN Commercials. So there would be lost revenue dollars, and hundred of thousands of Americans craving real Canadian Beer that they couldn't get. ("Strange Brew" comes to mind... Global Conquest through Canadian Beer. Great movie.)
:)
This is why we Canadians never get to see all those fancy Superbowl commercials the Yanks keep talking about...
"What is preventing some other company creating the same thing in a different country that doesn't have US restrictions?"
:)
Like, Canada, perhaps?
I'm frightened by the implication that Canada is subject to US retrictions... Who exactly in the US were those stations after anyways?
Our Northern Telecom phone system is telling me today is March 1st... :) Anyone else see anything today?
The next version of DeCSS should include a "garbage" text file with just enough filler text (Perl poetry, perhaps? Anti-MPAA manifesto?) such that decss.tar.gz and decss.zip have EXACTLY THE SAME FILE SIZE AS THE REAL THING!
:)
That will really mess with their heads...
While flipping by the Superbowl today I realized something that may be of relevance to the iCraveTV shutdown.
:) I wanna punch that sleazebag computer coming on to that poor lady in that Sprint Canada commercial.
Here in Canada, we of course get American stations along with Canadian ones. However, it's standard practice up here during events simulcast on both an American and a Canadian station to cut the signal from the American station and replace it with the Canadian one.
For instnace, we watch The Simpsons on Sunday nights on both FOX and Global, but it's Global's commercials we get to watch. I guess the clocks aren't quite in sync. Usually the change is quite abrupt. If I'm watching Simpsons on Fox, I get right up to Bart at the Blackboard when it cuts out and starts over again, this time "The Simpsons On Global"
Now we didn't get all those fancy smancy commercials up here in Canada, but rather a lot of Canadian ones, even though we still see the American coverage (ABC, right?). So if someone watched the Superbowl on iCraveTV, they'd not see these $2 million dollar spots of advertising glory, but rather the standard Canadian "boring" commercials we regularly see.
mmm Oh how I fancy a McCain's pizza right now, or want to buy Petro-Canada gas instead of those other foreign corporate gas stations from Texas or Holland... Warm Canadian fuzzy feelings.
Any followup theories?
Hrrm.. I'm actually watching various graphics and links dissapear as I refresh the ICraveTV main page.
:(
Doesn't look good...
This article came out just yesterday. It details how the US has recently decided that "cyberwarfare" is an acceptable war tactic.
:)
So now you know what you're being hired for..
Subject only message....
;)
C'mon, moderate me up, you were thinking it too when you saw the photo...
I think Y2k has re-affirmed what *REAL* programmers have known all along...
Testing really isn't all that important...
</troll>
:)
Not looking forward to the scary barrage of 11:59PM "LAST POST!" messages.... Could that take down Slashdot?
I think we may see some sort of to-ground telemetry devised in the future, or more interesting protocols like:
catch (CruiseStageNotDetachedError e) {
}broadcast.com was supposed to offer a 300K Windows Media Player stream. They can't even keep their 28.8 streams running at full speed. They stopped working for me at 11AM PST...
Hmm, no contact at first attempt. 10 minutes past. Hopefully something just went into safemode.
It seems like all the best ideas from the BBS days have been ported over to the Internet at large... Take ICQ. I know not everyone uses it out there, but for those who do, it's very addictive. Forget logging on to a community and seeing who's there, just turn on your computer, and have instant presence of your friends online (cable modems rock!).
:)
I know this isn't exactly community, but IRC takes up more of this role today.
Are there any other BBS functionality that haven't been ported to the net? I'd love to see more Tradewars like games out there...
... I left it there with my crappy food. Arrgh!
:)
I loved the zealots from the first movie, are they back in full alien force?
Second post?
I can win this hands down.
:)
:)
Commodore 64 with 300 baud VicModem, surfing the BBS scene in Nanaimo, BC, Canada.
I eventually got my hands on a Commodore 128 with 1200 baud modem and an 80 column monocrome monitor. Gotta love the C128, it had 2 monitor ports out the back, one for the 40 column monitor, one for the 80 column monitor... Ah yes, BBS was glorious in those days.
Now, 80% of the people in a local community are on the net socializing with the world instead of a local BBS. If it was the only option available to most, we'd all be back there... Reading News on FIDOnet...
Why do I feel like such an old fogie at 25?
If the mall we're truly only about the "Social Scene", they would be out of business by now.
A significant proportion of the Mall's business is made up in holiday shopping. I don't know about you, but I did a heck of a lot more Christmas shopping online this year. Sure I'll still go to the mall for regular things (clothes, food court, getting out of the house), but not for birthday or Christmas presents... I can really aviod the Xmas rush online, and that's when the mall's been traditionally making more money.
Remember the season which this was announced. I think the "Do your Christmas shopping online, avoid the mall" message would scare the crap out a multi-million dollar mall owner.
Uh, wasn't the American rocket program pretty much completely taken from the German program, with German scientists or via espionage?
:)
No doubt Chnese rocketry was influenced by the Amricans, the Russians, the Germans, and perhaps, gasp, the Chinese, who invented rocketry centuries ago...
(Great, I'm fanning the flames... Sorry guys.)
IMHO, it would be great to get rid of hereditary diseases, as mentioned in the article, and other such things. Someone posted earlier that we are defined by our 'defects.' However, would someone with one such 'defect' be any less of a person if they did not have the problem? I don't think that would be the case. More likely that person had potential that they had extreme difficulty realizing because of a problem that hindered them.
;)
I have Crohn's Disease. I agree with the statement above. I hope that genetic research eventually does come up with a "cure" that can prevent the disease being passed on to my children (or my daughter's children). At the very least, more effective treatment for active disease.
I once thought that an effective way of keeping parents from tinkering with the genes of their children is to not allow genetic engineering to be performed on people less than X years of age. That way, if you want to be genetically superhuman, you can make the choice yourself. Makes sense, unless you realize that you could alter your sperm or egg production to create your super-kid.
Me, I'd just be happy to rid myself of this damn disease. And get me some tolomerase extenders when they come out (just before all the Baby Boomers turn 70) so that I can live to 150+ and not get cancer...
I can see it now.. If you're in a loud noisy place (like a rock concert), you can make a cell phone call to someone and the new speech recognition software would be able to translate the call.
I can just image such a call now...
"Yes! No! Fire! Stop! No! Fire! Yes!"
Of course, you'll need to have only 11 neurons to understand the conversation.
I remember a statistic quoted on Michael Moore's TV show...
"72% of Americans believe that if Jesus were to return today, we'd be in a lot of trouble"
I can see it now, the next US weapons project will be arming existing missles with anti-anti-missle missles, so that the missles can shoot down the anti-missles with their anti-anti-missle missles and arrive at their target, causing as much confusion as tactical damage.
For sake of scalability, the anti-anti-missle missles will have to be the size of a common pencil. They'll then be picked up by the NRA as the next great super-weapon for hunting deer.
-- TrevorB, who thinks there should be a "Silly" moderation attribute.
Thanks for the links. I'll keep them in my web surfing queue for the next little while, and see if I can unbias my postings a bit. I should have qualified my previous post by saying I was talking about NASA's unmanned program and not its manned one.
:)
I agree with you on the ISS/shuttle bloat factor. The Shuttle has been going up and down into LEO for almost 20 years now (half way to anywhere, but in itself not a real destination, heck, even Gemini was more exciting). It costs a heck of a lot of your money. The ISS is a political dead horse that a lot (but not all!) of space enthusiasts are too afraid to call for it's cancellation. The best we've really gotten out of manned space exploration this decade are some complex telescope repair missions (would sending up a replacement have been cheaper?), and some ethereal political gains with Russia, about which the Americans are all glowy, and the Russians don't appear to care...
Would it be better if ISS or the Shuttle programs were cancelled? NASA's budget would probably get creamed. Yes, there might be about double the budget for unmanned missions, but I think there would be a lull in interest not seen since the post-Challenger era. (Well not quite true, at least Mir was being constructed in the late 80's, now we wouldn't even have that) It might take a long time (and perhaps the Chinese) to get the Americans interested into going back to space again. Or perhaps the dream of manned spaceflight is truly dead, and we're just wasting our time dreaming of a more exciting yesteryear.
Goldin is first and foremost a PR man, I'll grant you that. But I don't think anyone placed into his position could have called for the dismantling of ISS or the Shuttle (And all those jobs) without getting sacked pretty fast. Low cost alternatives (better, faster, cheaper, safer manned spaceflight) frankly are still on the drawing board. Yet Goldin has managed to get planetary exploration up and running again (as opposed to a decade ago). For that, I will praise him. Not that he's Claudius or anything, I just think the space program is a hell of a lot better now than before.
And I hope the person who replaces Mr. Goldin can make the existing space program look "as exciting as a trip to Pittsburg".
-- TrevorB, a Canadian who wishes the CSA was half as cool as NASA, but perhaps without the tacky bus tour. At least we got a cool robot arm!
I hope everyone realizes I'm talking about Voyager 1 and 2, launched by NASA in 1977, and not the USS Voyager, launched by Paramount sometime around 1996...
:)
Voyager is undoubtedly humankind's greatest acheivement in unmanned space exploration. Two quickly prepared spacecraft to take advantage of a rare solar alignment tha only occured once every 175 years, the "Solar Tour" trajectory. Both Voyager 1 traveled to Jupiter and then to Saturn. Since these mission were never planned to last longer than these two planets, the mission planners decided to leave the Uranus/Neptune option to Voyager 2, and do a closeup flyby of Saturn's moon Titan to check up on that atmosphere of hydrocarbons and hope for a "break in the clouds" (thier words). Hopefully we'll learn more with the Huygens probe with Casinni in 2006. Unlike Galileo's Jupiter probe, Huygens may actually land on the surface and record data for up to 30 minutes! That may be really cool... Let's hope it lands on "land".
Voyager 2 went on to be the only probe to explore Uranus and Neptune. Quadruple planetary gravity assist! By the time Voyager 2 reached Neptune, it's arthritic camera (I'm not kidding, it's motors were pretty shot by that point), managed to keep the cameras on Neptune for the 30 seconds requried to gather enough light for a single photo...
And now Voyager is headed for the interstellar void. JPL *Still* has a 30 year plan. The nuclear RTGs on board will be powering Voyager equipment until 2017! The Voyager team still puts out Weekly Status Reports
I remember reading the sci.space.* newsgroups about 10 years ago. People were discussing mass-producing a thousand Voyager class spacecraft and sending about 5 of them to every object in the solar system. Sure, the failure rate would be atrocious, but think of the science! That sounds a bit like NASA's new "Discovery" program.
As for MCO, we're just learning how to produce spacecraft with all the bang for 1/10th the price. Give them a chance, they'll work out the bugs in the system.
Daniel Golden has done an incredible job for NASA in the past several years. He's taken a ho hum, shuttle after shuttle launching NASA without much focus, dealt with massive bugestary cuts, and trimmed NASA down (relatively) to a mean, lean space exploration machine. I know it's not quite what we expected when we were growing up, but who has done better? Not Private Business. The Russians stopped sending out interplanetary probes since their failed launch of a Mars probe in (I think) '96.
;)
Can you remember this may active spacecraft ten years ago? (There are ten right now, alright, so I'm counting Voyager 1&2, the greatest missions ever, which are still alive and kicking 7 billion mies away). Half of these active missions are the new "better, faster, cheaper" created under Goldin's regime. Two missions to Mars every two years? The man has this incredible ability to convince the American public that science and space exploration are a good use of American tax dollars...
Goldin's ultimate goal it seems is to build a mega-telescope, most likely a huge interferometer, that could image the surfaces of planets in other solar systems, generating an Apollo 17 like image of an extra-solar Earth like planet to inspire the next generation. Deep Space 3 should be a good first test of space formation flying and interferometry.
Of course, NASA sounds like they're getting more cuts. One of those few instances where I guess you Americans would want Newt Gingrich, who was a big NASA fan himself, back where he was... OK, perhaps the only instance.
At any rate, I hope Goldin gets to keep hold of the helm for a while, or that private industry manages to gain some of the public's interest in space. I don't want to see a return to the late 80's...
I've been a programmer at the Technical University of British Columbia for over two years now. I was reading with amusment Schank's article, thinking about our university and all that we've done and learned developing classes for our first year of students this September.
TechBC may be closer to Schank's vision for a univsersity than a few others I know. We've tried to develop our course delivery models to embrace an online environment from the beginning. Too many online offerings are either just supplementary information for a lecture, or some glorified correspondance course. We've tried to change that by throwing out the old learning models (including a lecturer standing in front of a class droning on for 3 hours a week) and starting with something new.
A few features that set out TechBC from the rest (If I may get a plug in for my employer):
Greater sense of online community. Well, at least we're working on it. Building a course management system to handle all these new concepts takes time. Nonetheless, the students seem to be posting as much in online conferences as hanging out after class.
Strong business relationship (with tech partners, not banks or cola manufacturers), with plans for a strong co-op program.
Some amusing points. I notices Schank was complaining about the use of Latin as an "ancient educational language". Latin is also often used as text filler, sort of an "insert your text here" when developing course material. We bucked ther trend and used Esparanto. (A quote translated from Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series, I believe).
I liked the bit about using "games" such as flight simulators to teach students. I think most of our professors who would like this idea and think it was cool.
Reading about people "drifting off" and losing interest in lectures. I've been asked to generate reports from the web logs to determine which students may be losing interest so we can give them some more attention, and make sure they're not dissatisfied with their learning experience.
Well, I've plugged enough. It's not all been roses... It's been hell to put off from the university's point of view, and we won't really know how well it works until the students have completed their first semester of courses.
Perhaps our university can shock the others into changing their ways...