But would you ask that question of Robert Lynn Asprin or other creators of shared universes (such as Thieve's World?) Or how about the authors who have decided to bring fanfic extensions "in-house" the way that Marion Zimmer Bradley has with Darkover? After all, aren't these some of the closest analogs of open source to turn up yet outside the world of programming?
That's it. The Shrub's defenders keep saying that he's not as dumb as he seems. This is his chance to prove it. Plant A Bush On Mars Now!
Hell, let's send an entire garden's worth.
First of all, as far as I could see, the usage cited was a legitimate example of suggesting a multiplier. Secondly, while undoubtedly some people misuse the term (don't get me started on "utilize") that doesn't cancel the usage I explained.
You want to dispute it? Cool. Give me an alternative to "leverage" that conveys the same sense that I explained.
Oh, btw, "weasely" conveys timid. As in "trying to weasel out". Which would also require that the original usage had been mine. What the ever-loving fuck have you ever seen in this post or any other post of mine here or anywhere else that could possibly be described as "timid"?
Yup. My bad. Actually, since IIRC, the DC-3 was pulled from gunship use by 1969, the improvised variants on the AC-130 may have come earlier. Frankly, I don't remember and am too lazy on a sunny Saturday morning to check.
That's what I get for writing entries late at night while doing two other things. Again, oops, my mistake.
But even so, thirty years versus sixteen. DC-3 still wins by a country mile.
Don't get me wrong, the Herc is an amazing plane, and has by now had an almost DC-3 scale legacy of morphs, not to mention the F-4 (which I believe is still in use somewhere out there) and, of course, the impossibly indispensible B-52.
But the DC-3 is still champ. Among other things, none of the other planes above could ever tolerate the abuse a DC-3 can or get by on anywhere near the level of maintenance. Christ, they've flown them with vegetable oil as lubricant.
The only way we would ever get another plane of that class of durability would be to change design philosophies. Not to mention breaking several dozen laws for aircraft design that didn't exist back in the days of yore.
If there is ever to be its equal it will not be built in America. We're too liability-happy and feature-drunk to allow it. Show me a car being manufactured with as few parts as an original VW bug and I'll believe that we can match the Gooney.
Oh, hell yeah! Contrary to popular belief the military has experienced quite a few amazing cases of longevity. Personally, on age I would say battleships win, on perfectness, the P-38 can opener, on saturation of our society, the Jeep.
There are plenty of others.
My question is, who knows of a viable candidate from the past twenty years? I don't.
How about the AC-130?
Lessee, DC-3, first deployed 1935, converted to "Spooky" system, 1965.
AC-130, first deployed 1972, first used as combat gun platform, 1972.
No comparison. The AC-130 was designed in part to replace the DC-3s.
Now, the truth is, improvised side-mounted guns in DC-3s were used in WWII by the Americans, the Japanese, and *maybe* the Russians (though, of course, the Russians IIRC, called theirs the LI-22 and claimed to have invented the plane themselves.) But even then it was an established variant of a civilian cargo plane design designed to an airline spec. (For example, the altitude test for take-off was determined by where US commercial airports where in the early Thirties.) Until the "Spooky" variant, which was not only gear but the idea of a pylon turn as a ballistics approach, it was all just improv done to last out the wait for "real" armed aircraft.
Of course the Herc has since built quite a field record of its own, but on this front it just can't compete. No, no comparison at all.
Ah, the famed DC 2 1/2. Kinda makes our kind of part-swapping seem mundane.
For those of you not familiar, the DC 2 1/2 was a DC-3 trashed by the Japanese during WWII. One wing wasn't repairable and no DC-3 wings could be found, so they strapped a DC-2 wing to the underside of, you guessed it, another DC-3, delivered the wing to the crippled plane, attached it, and flew the rebuilt plane out of the combat zone with one DC-3 wing and one DC-2 one.
This wasn't *quite* as insane as it sounds since the DC-2 and the DC-3 used the same root design. In other words, the point where the wing attached to the fuselage was the same on both planes so very little modification was needed. IIRC they pretty much just adjusted the trim *way* to one side and bopped on out.
I say again, three cheers for the unassuming, the unassailable, the unmatched DC-3. All-time champeeen.
No doubt, the SR-71 is/was purty, but nothing ever has beat the record of the good old Gooney Bird.
So durable that eventually the FAA gave up and declared it exempt from end-of-life regulations.
So durable that some have been flown under combat conditions with a third of the wing blown off.
The only thirty year old cargo plane ever to be reconfigured as a combat gun platform (the Dragon, a.k.a. Spooky, a.k.a. Puff the Magic Dragon)
Rebuilt as a turboprop and outperformed new aircraft.
Left abandoned in a field of snow up past the Arctic Circle for an entire winter and then, dug out from under the snow, started up, and flown home.
No longer manufactured after 1946, still in use to this day.
Bzzzzt! Wrong Answer! "Leverage" is about using a small investment to achieve a large result. Those of us who actually study a subject before being snitty about it call this the Multiplier Effect.
In this context, the goal is to use a relatively small investment in telecommunications and electronics to provide a tool, a "lever", that will then cause larger, desired change.
Go away, little boy and leave criticism to those of us who actually *do* know the proper meanings of words.
Okay, again, better communications are useful to ANYBODY. Even beyond what is in my post above, let's run down some obvious ones.
Farmers who are online can't be scammed anywhere near as much as to going prices of their crops. No more sleazy dealers buying from the farmers for three cents on the dollar.
DIY basic health care. Many people in places like this still don't even understand things like boiling water before using it to clean a wound. Access to simple online data like how to recognize Kaposi's Sarcoma will save many lives.
Information on farming and husbandry. My grandparents had a small farm in Kansas during the dustbowl years and I had it hammered into me many times that much of what kept my father and all of his siblings alive through it while others lost their land or worse was that my grandfather actually talked to the extension agent. Things like contour plowing or optimized crop rotation can mean the difference between life and death. As can, btw, the ability to recognize a plant blight *before* it hits the whole crop.
Far better opportunities for women, gay people, and other disempowered groups. People can't keep you down as well when you know that others are fighting elsewhere and how they're doing it.
Education, from schooling to information for parents on childcare.
Information on repair of things like pumps and stoves, and access to places to buy parts or replacements.
Access to music and entertainment. Here we just treat stuff like Kazaa as a cool way to route around Tower Records, but for somebody in rural Senegal access to music, movies, books, and so on, including the ability to upload their own is seriously important.
I could keep going but I hope that I've made my point. Of course, phone service provides *some* of this, but from the looks of it, many of these places don't have phones yet either.
Uh, let's see, weaving, carving, other handcrafts, or even services like human-enhanced OCR. If you can get a web site up then your customer base is the wired planet.
Also, a free press is a great tool to help develop a country. Get people used to exercising reason skills about the circumstances of their lives and they are a lot more likely to become entrepreneurial.
Don't get me wrong, I'ld rather see a balanced mix of solar ovens, microloans, and living machine-based water processing systems, But this is an excellent start.
Of course, since it's being sheparded by the Shrub White House we can assume that the whole project will be distorted by the sort of corporate malfeasance that made so much of the "Green Revolution" a multi-million death fiasco. But it is still worth it.
I've never quite gotten the level of frustration at/.ed sites some people show. Is it really such a big deal to wait a while and go back? Almost nobody stays/.ed for more then a few hours, let alone a day. The only reason I can see to get upset is that people want to be sure that their comments ARE RIGHT UP NEAR THE TOP WHERE THE COOL KIDS ARE. Blech.
Look, if it's such a big deal, then maybe you should all be agitating for a/. notice system, where Taco or whomever, at theri discretion, sends a formal, standardized notification to sites announcing that in X minutes their site will be in a/. story, perhaps also including a mirroring of the site before the notice is sent to bypass the cases where M$ or whomever then changes the site to cover up whatever the significant bit was.
Actually, the "Surely you must..." wasn't written by Feynmann, it was written _about_ him, and included anecdotes he himself had written.
Indeed. In fact, from what I've read and heard he "wrote" that stuff the same way that Malcom X "wrote" his autobiography. Which is to say he rambled into a tape recorder and went over notes while somebody else (sometimes my friend from soon after) did the work of transcribing, organizing, and cleaning up. Then a more polished writer put it all together. Nonetheless, Surely . .. and What do you . .. are very much weighted towards making him come across as more consistent, together, and attractive then he was.
All of which is fine unless and until some geekboy decides to treat a collection of fictionalized anecdotes as Holy Writ and dating manual in one.
I made the judgement call that for once I would sacrifice accuracy to brevity so that I could more swiftly move on to what folks *want* to read. I figured that the length of my disgusted tirade was already too long to prevent MEGO.
Ahhh, life is all about choices, isn't it?
Gotta love a bunch of techies who entirely dismiss reason when it's in the way of fantasy.
Okay, let's see if you can figure this out if I say it in small words.
Feynman _ wrote _ those _ books.
And what a surprise, he was biased towards making himself look good. I'ld recomend Gleick's Genius or any of a dozen other sources for a less biased account.
The short form? Feynman was massively insecure, never was as successful at dating as his own writing makes it appear, and spent much of his life paying off one or more women who blackmailed him after some ill-considered romp or other.
Oh, btw, I hung out with one of his former assistants back in '85 to '87 and she was mighty clear about the distance between the reality and his own claims. Let's just say that she was not impressed with his social skills or his appeal to women. (And since she thought *I* was cute, clearly she had no problem with geek guys per se.)
After way too many years of seeing nerds (derogotory term intentional) citing Feynman's misogynist, fictionalized, self-aggrandizing, b*lllsh*t as a training manual, I've really had enough.
Okay, moving on to happier things, you folk really should check/. before wandering off so quickly.
The ever thorough bellus quies put together this far better set of geek dating links. At least a dozen/.ers should by now have mentioned Eric S. Raymond's detailed dating guide, while for the halfway there, need-to-RTFM, folk, here are the man pages on woman parts.
Those, came from $$$exyGal's links.
Or you could try hanging out here or here to finding the geekishly inclined, though first you might want to download and read this painful but excellent overview.
If on the other hand (heh, heh) you've already given up on finding a human of your own, then you might want to drop by here, here, and here.
Oh, there's no question that the shuttle's design was shaped by a gruesome series of politically shaped compromises and the conservatism of what has become a fundamentally bureaucratric organization.
Hard though in may be to believe, my response was actually the short form relative to what I was thinking:-) I don't actually even consider the creation by NASA of a system like the one that I laid out (and again, is composed of pieces designed by people far more serious and well informed them me). It would only come about in an era that shifted more of the load to private carriers.
At this point, sadly, I look at NASA handling non-science missions the same way that I look at the Department of Homeland Security - a case of the federal government crippling a key national priority by leaving it in the newly more funded hands of the same screwups who got us into this situation in the first place.
Many of them mean well, but so did the middle-aged, timid IT executives I used to work with who would simultaneously stop looking into new options and also claim that Microsoft was the only way to go since it was an easier sell to senior management. I've had to not only live with that mindset, but also cleanup after their f*ckups when the multi-million dollar systems they implemented didn't actually work. All in the full knowledge that after our little handful of techies had patched the damage, Microsoft and firms like Andersen Consulting would then get the lucrative contract to fix the mess that had been their fault in the first place. "After all, they understand the system best".
Such a mindset is terminal and I see the shuttle as part of it. Among other things, part of why I like a diversified system (small Soyuz-type craft, heavy boosters for sats, ITVs, etc.) is precisely because it not only avoids the single point of failure situation we have now, but, with that flexibility, reduces the organizational penalties for innovation on the components of that system.
If Star City wants to opt out for while and redesign a pad, then the launch has a dozen places to go. If an experiment generates vibration, then it goes on a mini-station. And if something goes wrong in space, we have the means to do something about it.
As for the "profit motive", I'm actually probably more optimistic then you. Not only do I agree that companies like the X-Prize competitors and X-COR are more to "steer innovation", but I think that they are better at holding true to the dream that matters so much to us and, unlike NASA are unapologetic about making business decisions on that basis.
Well, that's all well and good but:
1.) The shuttle can't retrieve the vast majority of satellites either. Unless they're in LEO, not destabilized, are designed to be retrieved, and can be refolded to fit in the shuttle bay, NASA has to pass on the job.
A robot "space taxi" of the sort that was supposed to be a complement of the space station in the earlier designs (ion engines powered by micronuke or solar, multiple grasping arms, remote operation from ISS) would do the job better, cost far less, and provide dozens of other useful capabilities. Use the taxi to bring the troublesome unit to ISS, if possible, repair it there, if not, wrap it in a disposable shell and drop it to earth.
2.) Repairs? See above.
3.) Building things in orbit? Again, see above. In addition, small mobile robots would do the job better and faster, work all the time instead of just during the brief intervals that the shuttle is up, and bring the ISS closer to being self-supporting and self-repairing.
4.) Satellite launches? Rockets work just fine for less money. Cheaper per pound, can go direct to more orbits, and are far more flexible.
5.) A soyuz-type craft cannot carry as large a crew. But tell me, so what? Is there some reason that one can't just launch more small ships? Keep in mind, btw, that launch facilities are currently being built in Brazil and Tonga, while Guyana keeps being put in play. Add facilities at the European's sites and we could have launches every week or so, year round.
6.) No, the ISS is merely in orbit *all the time*! Personally, I am nervous at having all of our eggs in the ISS's one basket. But for far less then we're paying now, we could use a disposable launch system to put up two or three Skylab-scale stations in different orbits, connected by a "space tug". By boosting up a small SPS or a few outrigger microreactors, the fuel needs would be minimal and a few tugs could be available at all times, charged and ready to go. Also don't forget that with robot-based missions, time in space just doesn't matter that much. Combine that with the moon's much smaller gravity well, and getting a few tons of moon rock up to the ISS for use as shielding is nowhere near as big a deal as one would think. Just use super-efficient trajectories (who cares? a five month trip is perfectly acceptable to a robot) and the only seriously messy bit is getting down to the moon's surface and back up to space.
People with more time then me have worked out plenty of systems where the robot miner never goes back up again, but just shoots little bits of rock up with a mass driver, where they are intercepted and brought back to the station.
7.) It's true, a Soyuz is not reusable. So? Why does this matter? The shuttle uses an awful lot of disposable gear for a supposedly "reusable" launch system. Frankly, all that I care about is cost, safety, and how much usable mass is left in space when a mission is completed. The shuttle loses on all three.
8.) A Soyuz cannot boost something like spacelab and return it. Again, so? Skylab seems to have done just fine with 1970's technology. With the tens of billions we're spending on shuttle work we could come up with some mighty fine one-time-drop systems for large payloads. In fact, NASA started research years back and has had increasing success with what is basically a huge parafoil that can drop a payload to earth far more gently then the shuttle.
I've said it before and I'm saying it again. The shuttle is a white elephant. It's past time to move on.
Rustin
Not that I should be responding to such an obvious troll but here goes.
1.) Nobody personally has ALL the skills to build rockets. It's a safe bet that John C. has more of them then you. Or most managers at NASA for that matter.
2.) Location? I'ld say either rural Texas, where nobody much cares and land is cheap, or the nearest good spot near the Oklahoma Space Port, where they've already committed to this sort of thing.
3.)"Major undertaking"? Duh. Nobody is claiming otherwise. Right above this post are fifty or more going into how and why. But, ya know what? people set up chemical plants every day in America. Jewelers also routinely use mercury, figurine makers melt lead by the ton, and chip makers use solvents that would evaporate your eyeballs just from the fumes. Only a troll would think that anybody, let alone space activists needs to be informed by the likes of you that building rockets is risky business.
Sorry, twit. Try again. Somewhere far from here.
Not that it's pure or cheap, but the stuff sold by art supply houses as "bronzing powder" is, in some colors, basically powdered aluminum. I used that a few years back for some experiments of my own. (My, that stuff is exothermic!) When I was thinking of using the stuff on a larger scale my plan was to buy big hunks of aluminum and grind them down to powder myself, then use the same sorts of techniques gold prospectors use (settling tanks, long channels, curved sections to use centrifigal force, etc.) to separate the powder by composition and size. Primitive, but cheap and can be made more precise over time.
And, yes, I did consider using various light oils or other fluids as the transport medium.
Rustin
Depends on what you mean by "killed". American companies are very averse to killing white people within the developed world. Just not done, you see.
On the other hand, if you define "killed" as trashing their credit, causing their suppliers to walk away, stealing their staff, that kind of thing, well . . .
Back in the eighties I went to a conference in DC about invention development and ended up sitting in on an explanation by a corporate lawyer about patent selling policy. His basic statement was that inventors should always be sure that what they were planning to charge a large company was less then the cost of both a.) the company duplicating the process and b.) the cost of the company bankrupting the inventor and buying out their assets. He then proceeded to go over some cases where companies had done just that. Looks to me like Carmack may be experiencing the first moves of just such a plan.
Morton-Thiokol, et al don't need to do anything as primitive and proveable as violence. Microsoft-style tactics work just fine.
Oh, and let's not forget that your paranoid plan wouldn't work for the simple reason that Armadillo posts (and has since day one) detailed logs of their techniques and setbacks on their website. I've downloaded a few entries myself. Ain't no way anybody can effectively destroy AA's intellectual property short of the sort of police state takeover we're all fighting as it is. The data is spread all over the world and not even the people at Armadillo know who has it.
Rustin
I'm curious about this and may even be getting involved in a chemical processing project soon (much less scary- just removing particulates from used fry oil) but I don't even know what to think without more specifics such as:
How easy is it to ship?
How volatile is it in storage?
How long does a batch remain "usable"?
Is this a material subject to any new and expanding anti-terror reporting reqiurements?
How much would it cost to set up a plant? (space, money, staff, hours per staffer)
Are there other salable compounds that can be made with the same setup?
What are the production waste products?
What are various peroxide formulations and how easy is it to switch from making one to making another?
Are any other X-Prize teams using the same formulation?
Does making this stuff require the consumption of lots of electricity and/or water?
If water, then in what ways, if any, does it have to be pre-treated?
Could a plant be made mobile, or at least "luggable" by building it into a large truck and bringing it onsite?
Is this something that your average chem graduate student would be willing to make on a micro scale?
Are there any vendors who might be willing to sell off their more marginal (small capacity, finicky, etc.) production equipment?
Would this be doable by a department at a school like Carnegie-Mellon or Stevens
that likes to show off their process engineering chops?
If so, then could grant money be obtained?
And, most importantly, does the whole staff end up blond?:-)
The truth is, I think that I already know the answers to some of these, but years of project management has taught me never to assume.
Yeah, funny about that. I've wondered about the same thing. Frankly, while it seems odd to me that the makers of the various unmanned craft say they haven't figured out how to automate landing when Buran pulled it off, all that I can conclude is that a.) Buran did it in "demo mode", working vehicle don't get such controlled conditions, b.) Buran is bigger and more stable somehow, c.) an awful lot of different projects have agreed on the "robotics need work" conclusion, and d.) the Russians have lied before. So for now I'm going with "still needs work".
Okay, so we're going on the assumption that TNG is comatose and that the best work will have to come some time years from now when new decison-makers are able to "defibrillate it".
Let's say you get approached by a consortium that is looking to help this happen. They're worried about the (nothing personal) aging of the actors and losing any chance of building more good TNG-derived work. They want you and as many other cast members as possible to shoot a big ol' stack of fuzzy scenes without even knowing what they will eventually do with them. The theory being that if they've got enough footage that has never been seen before of you, Spiner, Stewart, and co., someday they'll be able to do a Forrest Gump/Natalie w/ Nat King Cole kind of fusion.
So they come to you and say that they want to shoot you against ST-ish backgrounds in uniform walking and talking with somebody, doing long shots with adaptable lines like "I've always wanted to do that", "It's good to finally meet you. I've read some of your work", or "Captain, I think that you'ld better come down here right now." They also want some unique but dialogueless reaction shots. In other words, semi-generic grist for the ST mill that will certainly be useful for something, someday but nobody knows what.
So, would you perhaps say yes? Would you be willing to have footage of you floating around with rights assigned without knowing what it will someday be used for?
I've been curious about this kind of thing since seeing Mark Hamill post-car crash. We're assuming, btw, that the money is reasonable and the terms otherwise (unlike a certain gaming show) amenable.
While obviously you're kidding, you've actually got a valid point.
Look at the numbers in that potato cannon story. The velocities show that these days things we're used to thinking of as heavy duty are actually doable for as little as a thousandth the cost our government tells us it will take.
For example, as Jerry Pournelle keeps pointing out, our space suit designs are absurd and vastly better options are available for far less.
Hooo boy! Vacuum! Think again; don't call it vacuum, call it one atmosphere of pressure. A good pair of bike shorts handles that sort of differential just fine, including the famously troublesome issue of what to do at joints. Oh, no! Radiation! Yeah, whatever. Any good lab supply catalog sells gear able to handle that too.
The same can be said for piles of the stuff we're doing in space.
I've loved space travel since I was a wee lad, used to belong to L5, all that stuff. And one of the worst moments of my life was going down to Cape Canaveral and seeing a mothballed Saturn sitting out in the tropical wet and sun, reduced to a paperweight. All I could think of was how far we had declined.
What do I think? F*ck NASA. They've blown the whole deal of manned space flight. I say increase the X-Prize series and match it to the various rewards tied to milestones mentioned here and elsewhere.
Pay the Russians to boost the ISS for a few more years, push as much useful mass up beyond LEO to stable orbits as we can, hope that somebody creates a new Beal Aerospace and this time actually gets funding, and allow the shuttle system to swiftly decline into irrelevancy.
The shuttle is our modern Pony Express. Huge amounts of money and support structure supporting a tiny number of brave, dedicated folks running a breathtakingly inefficient transport system that was outdated on the day they had their first trip.
NASA does great pure science. They deserve every kind of credit for Pathfinder, Hubble, and all the rest. But they're not competent to run a high-volume transport system. It's like putting geologists in charge of Greyhound.
Let's move on. Only then will we move up.
Slashdot Mirror
Where would you place Oath of Fealty?
But would you ask that question of Robert Lynn Asprin or other creators of shared universes (such as Thieve's World?) Or how about the authors who have decided to bring fanfic extensions "in-house" the way that Marion Zimmer Bradley has with Darkover?
After all, aren't these some of the closest analogs of open source to turn up yet outside the world of programming?
Rustin
Congrats. You win the award for post most likely to utterly perplex and upset Niven should he decide to red the thred.
Interesting point, though.
Rustin
That's it. The Shrub's defenders keep saying that he's not as dumb as he seems. This is his chance to prove it.
Plant A Bush On Mars Now!
Hell, let's send an entire garden's worth.
Rustin
First of all, as far as I could see, the usage cited was a legitimate example of suggesting a multiplier. Secondly, while undoubtedly some people misuse the term (don't get me started on "utilize") that doesn't cancel the usage I explained.
You want to dispute it? Cool. Give me an alternative to "leverage" that conveys the same sense that I explained.
Oh, btw, "weasely" conveys timid. As in "trying to weasel out". Which would also require that the original usage had been mine. What the ever-loving fuck have you ever seen in this post or any other post of mine here or anywhere else that could possibly be described as "timid"?
Rustin
Yup. My bad. Actually, since IIRC, the DC-3 was pulled from gunship use by 1969, the improvised variants on the AC-130 may have come earlier. Frankly, I don't remember and am too lazy on a sunny Saturday morning to check.
That's what I get for writing entries late at night while doing two other things. Again, oops, my mistake.
But even so, thirty years versus sixteen. DC-3 still wins by a country mile.
Don't get me wrong, the Herc is an amazing plane, and has by now had an almost DC-3 scale legacy of morphs, not to mention the F-4 (which I believe is still in use somewhere out there) and, of course, the impossibly indispensible B-52.
But the DC-3 is still champ. Among other things, none of the other planes above could ever tolerate the abuse a DC-3 can or get by on anywhere near the level of maintenance. Christ, they've flown them with vegetable oil as lubricant.
The only way we would ever get another plane of that class of durability would be to change design philosophies. Not to mention breaking several dozen laws for aircraft design that didn't exist back in the days of yore.
If there is ever to be its equal it will not be built in America. We're too liability-happy and feature-drunk to allow it. Show me a car being manufactured with as few parts as an original VW bug and I'll believe that we can match the Gooney.
Rustin
Oh, hell yeah! Contrary to popular belief the military has experienced quite a few amazing cases of longevity. Personally, on age I would say battleships win, on perfectness, the P-38 can opener, on saturation of our society, the Jeep.
There are plenty of others.
My question is, who knows of a viable candidate from the past twenty years? I don't.
Rustin
How about the AC-130?
Lessee, DC-3, first deployed 1935, converted to "Spooky" system, 1965.
AC-130, first deployed 1972, first used as combat gun platform, 1972.
No comparison.
The AC-130 was designed in part to replace the DC-3s.
Now, the truth is, improvised side-mounted guns in DC-3s were used in WWII by the Americans, the Japanese, and *maybe* the Russians (though, of course, the Russians IIRC, called theirs the LI-22 and claimed to have invented the plane themselves.) But even then it was an established variant of a civilian cargo plane design designed to an airline spec. (For example, the altitude test for take-off was determined by where US commercial airports where in the early Thirties.) Until the "Spooky" variant, which was not only gear but the idea of a pylon turn as a ballistics approach, it was all just improv done to last out the wait for "real" armed aircraft.
Of course the Herc has since built quite a field record of its own, but on this front it just can't compete. No, no comparison at all.
Rustin
Ah, the famed DC 2 1/2. Kinda makes our kind of part-swapping seem mundane.
For those of you not familiar, the DC 2 1/2 was a DC-3 trashed by the Japanese during WWII. One wing wasn't repairable and no DC-3 wings could be found, so they strapped a DC-2 wing to the underside of, you guessed it, another DC-3, delivered the wing to the crippled plane, attached it, and flew the rebuilt plane out of the combat zone with one DC-3 wing and one DC-2 one.
This wasn't *quite* as insane as it sounds since the DC-2 and the DC-3 used the same root design. In other words, the point where the wing attached to the fuselage was the same on both planes so very little modification was needed. IIRC they pretty much just adjusted the trim *way* to one side and bopped on out.
I say again, three cheers for the unassuming, the unassailable, the unmatched DC-3.
All-time champeeen.
Rustin
No doubt, the SR-71 is/was purty, but nothing ever has beat the record of the good old Gooney Bird.
So durable that eventually the FAA gave up and declared it exempt from end-of-life regulations.
So durable that some have been flown under combat conditions with a third of the wing blown off.
The only thirty year old cargo plane ever to be reconfigured as a combat gun platform (the Dragon, a.k.a. Spooky, a.k.a. Puff the Magic Dragon)
Rebuilt as a turboprop and outperformed new aircraft.
Left abandoned in a field of snow up past the Arctic Circle for an entire winter and then, dug out from under the snow, started up, and flown home.
No longer manufactured after 1946, still in use to this day.
The one, the only, The DC-3!
Yay!
Rustin
Bzzzzt! Wrong Answer!
"Leverage" is about using a small investment to achieve a large result. Those of us who actually study a subject before being snitty about it call this the Multiplier Effect.
In this context, the goal is to use a relatively small investment in telecommunications and electronics to provide a tool, a "lever", that will then cause larger, desired change.
Go away, little boy and leave criticism to those of us who actually *do* know the proper meanings of words.
Rustin
Farmers who are online can't be scammed anywhere near as much as to going prices of their crops. No more sleazy dealers buying from the farmers for three cents on the dollar.
DIY basic health care. Many people in places like this still don't even understand things like boiling water before using it to clean a wound. Access to simple online data like how to recognize Kaposi's Sarcoma will save many lives.
Information on farming and husbandry. My grandparents had a small farm in Kansas during the dustbowl years and I had it hammered into me many times that much of what kept my father and all of his siblings alive through it while others lost their land or worse was that my grandfather actually talked to the extension agent. Things like contour plowing or optimized crop rotation can mean the difference between life and death. As can, btw, the ability to recognize a plant blight *before* it hits the whole crop.
Far better opportunities for women, gay people, and other disempowered groups. People can't keep you down as well when you know that others are fighting elsewhere and how they're doing it.
Education, from schooling to information for parents on childcare.
Information on repair of things like pumps and stoves, and access to places to buy parts or replacements.
Access to music and entertainment. Here we just treat stuff like Kazaa as a cool way to route around Tower Records, but for somebody in rural Senegal access to music, movies, books, and so on, including the ability to upload their own is seriously important.
I could keep going but I hope that I've made my point. Of course, phone service provides *some* of this, but from the looks of it, many of these places don't have phones yet either.
Rustin
Uh, let's see, weaving, carving, other handcrafts, or even services like human-enhanced OCR. If you can get a web site up then your customer base is the wired planet.
Also, a free press is a great tool to help develop a country. Get people used to exercising reason skills about the circumstances of their lives and they are a lot more likely to become entrepreneurial.
Don't get me wrong, I'ld rather see a balanced mix of solar ovens, microloans, and living machine-based water processing systems, But this is an excellent start.
Of course, since it's being sheparded by the Shrub White House we can assume that the whole project will be distorted by the sort of corporate malfeasance that made so much of the "Green Revolution" a multi-million death fiasco. But it is still worth it.
Rustin
I've never quite gotten the level of frustration at /.ed sites some people show. Is it really such a big deal to wait a while and go back? Almost nobody stays /.ed for more then a few hours, let alone a day. The only reason I can see to get upset is that people want to be sure that their comments ARE RIGHT UP NEAR THE TOP WHERE THE COOL KIDS ARE. Blech.
/. notice system, where Taco or whomever, at theri discretion, sends a formal, standardized notification to sites announcing that in X minutes their site will be in a /. story, perhaps also including a mirroring of the site before the notice is sent to bypass the cases where M$ or whomever then changes the site to cover up whatever the significant bit was.
Look, if it's such a big deal, then maybe you should all be agitating for a
Nawwww, that would make far too much sense.
Rustin
Actually, the "Surely you must..." wasn't written by Feynmann, it was written _about_ him, and included anecdotes he himself had written. . and What do you . . . are very much weighted towards making him come across as more consistent, together, and attractive then he was.
Indeed. In fact, from what I've read and heard he "wrote" that stuff the same way that Malcom X "wrote" his autobiography. Which is to say he rambled into a tape recorder and went over notes while somebody else (sometimes my friend from soon after) did the work of transcribing, organizing, and cleaning up. Then a more polished writer put it all together.
Nonetheless, Surely . .
All of which is fine unless and until some geekboy decides to treat a collection of fictionalized anecdotes as Holy Writ and dating manual in one.
I made the judgement call that for once I would sacrifice accuracy to brevity so that I could more swiftly move on to what folks *want* to read. I figured that the length of my disgusted tirade was already too long to prevent MEGO.
Ahhh, life is all about choices, isn't it?
Rustin
Gotta love a bunch of techies who entirely dismiss reason when it's in the way of fantasy.
/. before wandering off so quickly. /.ers should by now have mentioned Eric S. Raymond's detailed dating guide, while for the halfway there, need-to-RTFM, folk, here are the man pages on woman parts.
Okay, let's see if you can figure this out if I say it in small words.
Feynman _ wrote _ those _ books.
And what a surprise, he was biased towards making himself look good. I'ld recomend Gleick's Genius or any of a dozen other sources for a less biased account.
The short form? Feynman was massively insecure, never was as successful at dating as his own writing makes it appear, and spent much of his life paying off one or more women who blackmailed him after some ill-considered romp or other.
Oh, btw, I hung out with one of his former assistants back in '85 to '87 and she was mighty clear about the distance between the reality and his own claims. Let's just say that she was not impressed with his social skills or his appeal to women. (And since she thought *I* was cute, clearly she had no problem with geek guys per se.)
After way too many years of seeing nerds (derogotory term intentional) citing Feynman's misogynist, fictionalized, self-aggrandizing, b*lllsh*t as a training manual, I've really had enough.
Okay, moving on to happier things, you folk really should check
The ever thorough bellus quies put together this far better set of geek dating links. At least a dozen
Those, came from $$$exyGal's links.
Or you could try hanging out here or here to finding the geekishly inclined, though first you might want to download and read this painful but excellent overview.
If on the other hand (heh, heh) you've already given up on finding a human of your own, then you might want to drop by here, here, and here.
Good luck to all of us.
Rustin
Oh, there's no question that the shuttle's design was shaped by a gruesome series of politically shaped compromises and the conservatism of what has become a fundamentally bureaucratric organization. :-) I don't actually even consider the creation by NASA of a system like the one that I laid out (and again, is composed of pieces designed by people far more serious and well informed them me). It would only come about in an era that shifted more of the load to private carriers.
Hard though in may be to believe, my response was actually the short form relative to what I was thinking
At this point, sadly, I look at NASA handling non-science missions the same way that I look at the Department of Homeland Security - a case of the federal government crippling a key national priority by leaving it in the newly more funded hands of the same screwups who got us into this situation in the first place.
Many of them mean well, but so did the middle-aged, timid IT executives I used to work with who would simultaneously stop looking into new options and also claim that Microsoft was the only way to go since it was an easier sell to senior management.
I've had to not only live with that mindset, but also cleanup after their f*ckups when the multi-million dollar systems they implemented didn't actually work. All in the full knowledge that after our little handful of techies had patched the damage, Microsoft and firms like Andersen Consulting would then get the lucrative contract to fix the mess that had been their fault in the first place. "After all, they understand the system best".
Such a mindset is terminal and I see the shuttle as part of it. Among other things, part of why I like a diversified system (small Soyuz-type craft, heavy boosters for sats, ITVs, etc.) is precisely because it not only avoids the single point of failure situation we have now, but, with that flexibility, reduces the organizational penalties for innovation on the components of that system.
If Star City wants to opt out for while and redesign a pad, then the launch has a dozen places to go. If an experiment generates vibration, then it goes on a mini-station. And if something goes wrong in space, we have the means to do something about it.
As for the "profit motive", I'm actually probably more optimistic then you. Not only do I agree that companies like the X-Prize competitors and X-COR are more to "steer innovation", but I think that they are better at holding true to the dream that matters so much to us and, unlike NASA are unapologetic about making business decisions on that basis.
Well, we can still dream,
Rustin
Well, that's all well and good but:
1.) The shuttle can't retrieve the vast majority of satellites either. Unless they're in LEO, not destabilized, are designed to be retrieved, and can be refolded to fit in the shuttle bay, NASA has to pass on the job.
A robot "space taxi" of the sort that was supposed to be a complement of the space station in the earlier designs (ion engines powered by micronuke or solar, multiple grasping arms, remote operation from ISS) would do the job better, cost far less, and provide dozens of other useful capabilities. Use the taxi to bring the troublesome unit to ISS, if possible, repair it there, if not, wrap it in a disposable shell and drop it to earth.
2.) Repairs? See above.
3.) Building things in orbit? Again, see above. In addition, small mobile robots would do the job better and faster, work all the time instead of just during the brief intervals that the shuttle is up, and bring the ISS closer to being self-supporting and self-repairing.
4.) Satellite launches? Rockets work just fine for less money. Cheaper per pound, can go direct to more orbits, and are far more flexible.
5.) A soyuz-type craft cannot carry as large a crew. But tell me, so what? Is there some reason that one can't just launch more small ships? Keep in mind, btw, that launch facilities are currently being built in Brazil and Tonga, while Guyana keeps being put in play. Add facilities at the European's sites and we could have launches every week or so, year round.
6.) No, the ISS is merely in orbit *all the time*! Personally, I am nervous at having all of our eggs in the ISS's one basket. But for far less then we're paying now, we could use a disposable launch system to put up two or three Skylab-scale stations in different orbits, connected by a "space tug". By boosting up a small SPS or a few outrigger microreactors, the fuel needs would be minimal and a few tugs could be available at all times, charged and ready to go. Also don't forget that with robot-based missions, time in space just doesn't matter that much. Combine that with the moon's much smaller gravity well, and getting a few tons of moon rock up to the ISS for use as shielding is nowhere near as big a deal as one would think. Just use super-efficient trajectories (who cares? a five month trip is perfectly acceptable to a robot) and the only seriously messy bit is getting down to the moon's surface and back up to space.
People with more time then me have worked out plenty of systems where the robot miner never goes back up again, but just shoots little bits of rock up with a mass driver, where they are intercepted and brought back to the station.
7.) It's true, a Soyuz is not reusable. So? Why does this matter? The shuttle uses an awful lot of disposable gear for a supposedly "reusable" launch system. Frankly, all that I care about is cost, safety, and how much usable mass is left in space when a mission is completed. The shuttle loses on all three.
8.) A Soyuz cannot boost something like spacelab and return it. Again, so? Skylab seems to have done just fine with 1970's technology. With the tens of billions we're spending on shuttle work we could come up with some mighty fine one-time-drop systems for large payloads. In fact, NASA started research years back and has had increasing success with what is basically a huge parafoil that can drop a payload to earth far more gently then the shuttle.
I've said it before and I'm saying it again. The shuttle is a white elephant. It's past time to move on.
Rustin
Not that I should be responding to such an obvious troll but here goes.
1.) Nobody personally has ALL the skills to build rockets. It's a safe bet that John C. has more of them then you. Or most managers at NASA for that matter.
2.) Location? I'ld say either rural Texas, where nobody much cares and land is cheap, or the nearest good spot near the Oklahoma Space Port, where they've already committed to this sort of thing.
3.)"Major undertaking"? Duh. Nobody is claiming otherwise. Right above this post are fifty or more going into how and why. But, ya know what? people set up chemical plants every day in America. Jewelers also routinely use mercury, figurine makers melt lead by the ton, and chip makers use solvents that would evaporate your eyeballs just from the fumes. Only a troll would think that anybody, let alone space activists needs to be informed by the likes of you that building rockets is risky business.
Sorry, twit. Try again. Somewhere far from here.
Rustin
Not that it's pure or cheap, but the stuff sold by art supply houses as "bronzing powder" is, in some colors, basically powdered aluminum. I used that a few years back for some experiments of my own. (My, that stuff is exothermic!)
When I was thinking of using the stuff on a larger scale my plan was to buy big hunks of aluminum and grind them down to powder myself, then use the same sorts of techniques gold prospectors use (settling tanks, long channels, curved sections to use centrifigal force, etc.) to separate the powder by composition and size. Primitive, but cheap and can be made more precise over time.
And, yes, I did consider using various light oils or other fluids as the transport medium.
Rustin
Depends on what you mean by "killed". American companies are very averse to killing white people within the developed world. Just not done, you see.
On the other hand, if you define "killed" as trashing their credit, causing their suppliers to walk away, stealing their staff, that kind of thing, well . . .
Back in the eighties I went to a conference in DC about invention development and ended up sitting in on an explanation by a corporate lawyer about patent selling policy. His basic statement was that inventors should always be sure that what they were planning to charge a large company was less then the cost of both a.) the company duplicating the process and b.) the cost of the company bankrupting the inventor and buying out their assets. He then proceeded to go over some cases where companies had done just that. Looks to me like Carmack may be experiencing the first moves of just such a plan.
Morton-Thiokol, et al don't need to do anything as primitive and proveable as violence. Microsoft-style tactics work just fine.
Oh, and let's not forget that your paranoid plan wouldn't work for the simple reason that Armadillo posts (and has since day one) detailed logs of their techniques and setbacks on their website. I've downloaded a few entries myself. Ain't no way anybody can effectively destroy AA's intellectual property short of the sort of police state takeover we're all fighting as it is. The data is spread all over the world and not even the people at Armadillo know who has it.
Rustin
How easy is it to ship?
How volatile is it in storage?
How long does a batch remain "usable"?
Is this a material subject to any new and expanding anti-terror reporting reqiurements?
How much would it cost to set up a plant? (space, money, staff, hours per staffer)
Are there other salable compounds that can be made with the same setup?
What are the production waste products?
What are various peroxide formulations and how easy is it to switch from making one to making another?
Are any other X-Prize teams using the same formulation?
Does making this stuff require the consumption of lots of electricity and/or water?
If water, then in what ways, if any, does it have to be pre-treated?
Could a plant be made mobile, or at least "luggable" by building it into a large truck and bringing it onsite?
Is this something that your average chem graduate student would be willing to make on a micro scale?
Are there any vendors who might be willing to sell off their more marginal (small capacity, finicky, etc.) production equipment?
Would this be doable by a department at a school like Carnegie-Mellon or Stevens that likes to show off their process engineering chops?
If so, then could grant money be obtained?
And, most importantly, does the whole staff end up blond? :-)
The truth is, I think that I already know the answers to some of these, but years of project management has taught me never to assume.
Rustin
Yeah, funny about that. I've wondered about the same thing. Frankly, while it seems odd to me that the makers of the various unmanned craft say they haven't figured out how to automate landing when Buran pulled it off, all that I can conclude is that a.) Buran did it in "demo mode", working vehicle don't get such controlled conditions, b.) Buran is bigger and more stable somehow, c.) an awful lot of different projects have agreed on the "robotics need work" conclusion, and d.) the Russians have lied before. So for now I'm going with "still needs work".
Rustin
Okay, so we're going on the assumption that TNG is comatose and that the best work will have to come some time years from now when new decison-makers are able to "defibrillate it".
Let's say you get approached by a consortium that is looking to help this happen. They're worried about the (nothing personal) aging of the actors and losing any chance of building more good TNG-derived work. They want you and as many other cast members as possible to shoot a big ol' stack of fuzzy scenes without even knowing what they will eventually do with them. The theory being that if they've got enough footage that has never been seen before of you, Spiner, Stewart, and co., someday they'll be able to do a Forrest Gump/Natalie w/ Nat King Cole kind of fusion.
So they come to you and say that they want to shoot you against ST-ish backgrounds in uniform walking and talking with somebody, doing long shots with adaptable lines like "I've always wanted to do that", "It's good to finally meet you. I've read some of your work", or "Captain, I think that you'ld better come down here right now." They also want some unique but dialogueless reaction shots. In other words, semi-generic grist for the ST mill that will certainly be useful for something, someday but nobody knows what.
So, would you perhaps say yes? Would you be willing to have footage of you floating around with rights assigned without knowing what it will someday be used for?
I've been curious about this kind of thing since seeing Mark Hamill post-car crash. We're assuming, btw, that the money is reasonable and the terms otherwise (unlike a certain gaming show) amenable.
Rustin
While obviously you're kidding, you've actually got a valid point.
Look at the numbers in that potato cannon story. The velocities show that these days things we're used to thinking of as heavy duty are actually doable for as little as a thousandth the cost our government tells us it will take.
For example, as Jerry Pournelle keeps pointing out, our space suit designs are absurd and vastly better options are available for far less.
Hooo boy! Vacuum! Think again; don't call it vacuum, call it one atmosphere of pressure. A good pair of bike shorts handles that sort of differential just fine, including the famously troublesome issue of what to do at joints. Oh, no! Radiation! Yeah, whatever. Any good lab supply catalog sells gear able to handle that too.
The same can be said for piles of the stuff we're doing in space.
I've loved space travel since I was a wee lad, used to belong to L5, all that stuff. And one of the worst moments of my life was going down to Cape Canaveral and seeing a mothballed Saturn sitting out in the tropical wet and sun, reduced to a paperweight. All I could think of was how far we had declined.
What do I think? F*ck NASA. They've blown the whole deal of manned space flight. I say increase the X-Prize series and match it to the various rewards tied to milestones mentioned here and elsewhere.
Pay the Russians to boost the ISS for a few more years, push as much useful mass up beyond LEO to stable orbits as we can, hope that somebody creates a new Beal Aerospace and this time actually gets funding, and allow the shuttle system to swiftly decline into irrelevancy.
The shuttle is our modern Pony Express. Huge amounts of money and support structure supporting a tiny number of brave, dedicated folks running a breathtakingly inefficient transport system that was outdated on the day they had their first trip.
NASA does great pure science. They deserve every kind of credit for Pathfinder, Hubble, and all the rest. But they're not competent to run a high-volume transport system. It's like putting geologists in charge of Greyhound.
Let's move on. Only then will we move up.
Rustin