No, they aren't opening a dollar store, but the numbers from TFA are enormous. SpaceX and Blue Origin may be standing on a mountain of previous research & tech from NASA, but NASA itself is also standing on that same mountain. Since it is their own mountain, it should be logical that they would be more effective in applying previously discovered knowledge to their new projects.
And, purely the fact that space is a hostile environment isn't a fact that can be used to explain away any level of bureaucracy and overhead. Arguably, the deep see is a more hostile environment because of the higher pressures. Combine that with using nuclear power in subs and you actually have an equally complex and risky environment, probably more. There are a lot more situations where quality control is an absolute requirement, such as nuclear power, (intensive) health care, chemical plants, etc. How big is overhead in those industries?
Probably the biggest problem in discussing overhead numbers for something that doesn't work yet is that you don't have the complete picture yet. If NASA overhead costs, say 10 billion for a total program cost of 15 billion then you could argue that the overhead would be 66%. But if we actually start transporting stuff into orbit and send a bill to whoever is sending the stuff (even if it is an internal NASA team), and you could bill them 10 billion in the course of the program for the time and materials required for the launces, then the overhead percentage would suddenly be "only" 40% (I know I'm taking a lot of shortcuts and most management would probably stick around after the SLS has been delivered).
But, no, simply ignoring these astronomical levels of overhead because of the complexity of space as an environment is in my opinion not valid.
You have to find a good mix in investing in the future and solving everyday problems *now*. And it’s very hard to make any argument about investing in the future to somebody who’s hurting today. You’re never going to win that debate, rationally or emotionally.
I read somewhere (http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/jfk-and-the-moon-180947824/) that Kennedy, before deciding on using project Apollo as a technological showcase for America, actually considered a large-scale desalination project to help Third World nations.
What if Kennedy had chosen the latter option? How would the world have evolved since then? An abundance of water and food in Africa but no internet and supercomputer in everybody’s pocket? Or would the desalination have contributed little and computers evolved just the same? Nobody's arguing about his choices back then because we're all happy his mission succeeded.
In the end, again, it’s about finding the right balance in investing in every day problem solving *and* investing in things that help us forward in the future.
You might be right. This might be a lucky find though in a larger project that does result in tangible benefits to society. And then I’m not against spending some more time to research it.
Your broader question might be about basic research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Basic research might not result in direct benefits, but a better understanding of natural phenoma can actually result in immense benefits.
In this case, for example, this might be the first object that we discovered that actually travels at speeds (in orders of magnitude) close to the speed of light. This could, for example, in the long run improve our understanding of relativity, properties of light and electromagnetism, etc.
If you realise how close some of our everyday technologies such as microprocessors, WiFi, etc. actually are operating close to the absolutes borders of physics, then you’ll understand that things we learn from basic research is the only way left to improve those technologies.
So, this finding *might* lead to some new understanding that *might* lead to new technologies that *might* lead to incredible new benefits to society. The only problem is, you don’t know in advance which research is the one with the big benefits. Spread your bets.
RIPLEY They're right under the primary heat exchangers....... GORMAN Shit! (into mike) Apone, collect magazines from everybody. We can't have any firing in there.
Plus, if we would ever be able to muster the amount of resources needed for solar system colonies or interstellar space travel, those resources would probably be better spent on surviving any major disaster here on earth.
Even after massive nuclear war or an astroid impact, the earth would still be considerably more hospitable to human life than say mars or venus.
If a major cataclism is really your concern then invest in a space station with a few hundred people in it, including the means to repopulate the earth. If you can build a generation ship that can colonize an outside world, the you can also *stay* and rebuild earth.
Another poster discussed that letting government provide vital services often results in those services being used / abused for political gain. Abusing regulations is a lot less effective for politicians and so they tend to be manipulated less in my opinion.
Let the free market do the producing.
But let the government keep them in check with regulations. You are right that regulations tend to be thinned out when politicians see no other way to promote growth anymore but I'm still not convinced that that is in any way worse than when the government would be responsible for production itself. Governments are perfectly able and willing to cut back on vital infrastucture below any responsible levels. The New Orleans levee's were not built nor maintained nor were policies and budgets set by commercial entities!
If the government is your only supplier you are left with no recourse should you be dissatisfied with their services. You can actually buy meat that has not been "improved" with all kinds of chemicals and pharmaceuticals. But you probably choose the convenience of buying the cheap meat at you local grocery store.
Ok, so you talk about "Services that people need in order to live - energy, water, medical".
There is a lot that people need to live. Would you argue nationalising all of them? Energy, water and medical aren't the only things that would make that list. What about food, transportation and clothing? You'll die very soon if they aren't in order. Houses - in a lot of climates you need them for shelter and defects in houses could cause them to collapse so they are crucial to survival - hygienic products, etc.
Now, why stop there? If you want energy, water, medical and maybe al those other things that I listed to be state supplied, why should their suppliers be excluded? Why nationalize the hospitals but not the farmaceuticals? They use up a large chunk of our health care budgets and the quality of their products is just as critical to our survival. So we add the farmaceuticals. And the producers of diagnostic equipment of course, can't have any defective MRI's. But MRI's have software. So those are in as well. We also need dependable medical oxygen suppliers. Suppliers for mainframes, PC's, lightbulbs, desktops (the ones you can tough), concrete, glass, sand, catering, bread, beef, cows, grass, fertilizer, oil.
My point is: we are very much used to putting our lives in the hands of commercial entities. From a car or an airliner to the contractor that built my house to the caterer that made that nice chicken filet that I just ate. They're all commercial entities, large multinationals or small mom-and-pops. They are regulated so I know what quality I can expect at minimum and if they don't deliver that quality either they get busted by the state or I sue them. This system actually works very well!
Now, why is water or a hospital that much different?
I ask this as someone who works at a healthcare provider in a "socialized healthcare" country.
For simple tables and forms that can have a lot of social interactions, i have found Podio to be great.
Podio is something of a crossbreed between yammer and Access. I use it a lot for to-do lists within projects, small incident lists, notes, agendas and minutes. It's great for tables / forms that contain 10's to 1000's of records... not for millions.
First 5 users within a domain are for free. It is a web application though, so your users need to be able to be on-line all the time.
Wait until the Russians tell him his Visa will expire and they're planning to send him off back to his old friends at the CIA. He'll give them his dropbox address in an instant.:-)
Interesting point... that begs the question... How does Fukushima compare to Bikini Atoll or the other nuclear bomb testing in terms of radioactive materials released?
When I was in high school (in the Netherlands, mind you) in physics class our lab has a small glass container with a little rod of uranium (or plutonium or something else radioactive). It must have been small and relatively riskless, but still radioactive. Very handy to show the classic experiments, such as showing a condensation-trail, or letting a geiger counter go wild.
Nowadays, highschool classes are filled with mobile phones, probably more phones than persons. It'd be interresting to see something like a NORAD-style "USDHS nuclear materials movement alerts screen" light up like a christmass tree once they activate this system.
This report is a must-read for anyone interrested in questions regarding open-source versus closed-source/proprietary.
For example, there is a complete chapter about user benefites, interoperability, productivity and cost savings. About cost savings a lot has been said on slashdot (and on the "get the facts" advertisments). When the report talks about TCO and the compatibility-problems that result from switching from (for example) MS-Office to Open-Office: (pag. 98)
The issue of compatibility losses could be taken furgher. Arguable, the losses of compatibility, and the losses caused bu migration in general, can be devided into two categories: those that would be incurred by migrating to a specific new system, and those that are incurred by migrating away from a currently used system. Compatibility losses are in the latter category - migrating away to any alternative system would result in the compatibility losses (assuming the use of proprietary standards, without which compatibility losses could nog occur). Such exit costs should be evaluated as part of the cost of the current system, not the future system.
Desh born, der ritt de gitt der gue, Orn desh, dee born desh, de umn børk! børk! børk!
We-a teke-a 50 cops. A geeve-a zem ell feereerms. Let zem etteck ze-a serverroom. Add e-a leetle-a hostage-a teckeeng. And spen zhree veeks copyeeng ell ze torrents zet conteeen pr0n.
"Everything is passed as strings, even integer arrays," he said.
Huh??? This is plainly incorrect and has been since I have been
working on stored procs in it (at least 7.0, maybe 6.5 or earlier).
All parameters are typed. They may, however, be presented as text
depending on the function and how it is called.
A few weeks ago I was trying to create a plperl procedure that reads a file from the filesystem and returns it in a bytea field. (I needed a way to fill a bytea table with testdata.) Big problems. If the input-file contains nulls the bytea is cut off right there. I tried hard, including switching to plpython, but did not actually get both loading and saving to/from bytea to work.
So, I do believe that "somewhere in there" all data-exchanges between stored procedures and the rest of the system are text-based.
ISS needed laptops because of problems with their own laptops. The shuttle-crew figured: "to hell with those thinkpads, glad to get rid of'em" and donated them.
why didn't they configure their domain name servers to simply refuse to resolve the domain name. I create "special" copies of my own domains so they point to my private IP-addresses at home in stead of the internet-address that the rest of the world can use.
They could have created a pointer to a site of their own saying: "we don't like this site and have blocked it".
Didn't this happen once? I read somewhere on wikipedia that one of the shuttlemissions did a succesfull abort-to-orbit when one of its main engines failed and the computer shut it down. They got to orbit fine with the other two and the mission was a success.
In reality, once the vehicle is launched, the last thing the astronaut crew would want to do is shut down the main engines.
IMHO this is a flawed assupmtion. The SSME's are shut down each and every time the shuttle is launched. They are shut down -when the launch is complete- in a controlled manner while they still have fuel to burn because letting them run dry would catastrophically damage them. Thus, if there is a routine way to shut them down in orbit I wouldn't think there would be to much problems shutting them down after a problem during launch.
I did read once that in most or all the normal abort-modes they keep the engines running on purpose as to empty the fuel-tank (a small bomb that you don't want to drop down to earth needlessly). But on the other hand; the ET has a range-safety device (ie: an explosive to blow it up if it gets loose).
In the end, what I'm saying is: the engines were specificly designed to be shut down.
2014 (or 2006 for that matter) Unix rights sold to Microsoft 2015 IBM now has a matched opponent 2016 Microsoft wins in court, Linux dies uttering as famous last words: "All our bases are belong to them...ahhhhh Kernel Panic!"
Slashdot Mirror
No, they aren't opening a dollar store, but the numbers from TFA are enormous. SpaceX and Blue Origin may be standing on a mountain of previous research & tech from NASA, but NASA itself is also standing on that same mountain. Since it is their own mountain, it should be logical that they would be more effective in applying previously discovered knowledge to their new projects.
And, purely the fact that space is a hostile environment isn't a fact that can be used to explain away any level of bureaucracy and overhead. Arguably, the deep see is a more hostile environment because of the higher pressures. Combine that with using nuclear power in subs and you actually have an equally complex and risky environment, probably more. There are a lot more situations where quality control is an absolute requirement, such as nuclear power, (intensive) health care, chemical plants, etc. How big is overhead in those industries?
Probably the biggest problem in discussing overhead numbers for something that doesn't work yet is that you don't have the complete picture yet. If NASA overhead costs, say 10 billion for a total program cost of 15 billion then you could argue that the overhead would be 66%. But if we actually start transporting stuff into orbit and send a bill to whoever is sending the stuff (even if it is an internal NASA team), and you could bill them 10 billion in the course of the program for the time and materials required for the launces, then the overhead percentage would suddenly be "only" 40% (I know I'm taking a lot of shortcuts and most management would probably stick around after the SLS has been delivered).
But, no, simply ignoring these astronomical levels of overhead because of the complexity of space as an environment is in my opinion not valid.
You have to find a good mix in investing in the future and solving everyday problems *now*. And it’s very hard to make any argument about investing in the future to somebody who’s hurting today. You’re never going to win that debate, rationally or emotionally.
I read somewhere (http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/jfk-and-the-moon-180947824/) that Kennedy, before deciding on using project Apollo as a technological showcase for America, actually considered a large-scale desalination project to help Third World nations.
What if Kennedy had chosen the latter option? How would the world have evolved since then? An abundance of water and food in Africa but no internet and supercomputer in everybody’s pocket? Or would the desalination have contributed little and computers evolved just the same? Nobody's arguing about his choices back then because we're all happy his mission succeeded.
In the end, again, it’s about finding the right balance in investing in every day problem solving *and* investing in things that help us forward in the future.
You might be right. This might be a lucky find though in a larger project that does result in tangible benefits to society. And then I’m not against spending some more time to research it.
Your broader question might be about basic research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Basic research might not result in direct benefits, but a better understanding of natural phenoma can actually result in immense benefits.
In this case, for example, this might be the first object that we discovered that actually travels at speeds (in orders of magnitude) close to the speed of light. This could, for example, in the long run improve our understanding of relativity, properties of light and electromagnetism, etc.
If you realise how close some of our everyday technologies such as microprocessors, WiFi, etc. actually are operating close to the absolutes borders of physics, then you’ll understand that things we learn from basic research is the only way left to improve those technologies.
So, this finding *might* lead to some new understanding that *might* lead to new technologies that *might* lead to incredible new benefits to society. The only problem is, you don’t know in advance which research is the one with the big benefits. Spread your bets.
RIPLEY ......
They're right under the primary heat exchangers.
GORMAN
Shit! (into mike)
Apone, collect magazines from everybody. We can't have any firing in there.
Plus, if we would ever be able to muster the amount of resources needed for solar system colonies or interstellar space travel, those resources would probably be better spent on surviving any major disaster here on earth.
Even after massive nuclear war or an astroid impact, the earth would still be considerably more hospitable to human life than say mars or venus.
If a major cataclism is really your concern then invest in a space station with a few hundred people in it, including the means to repopulate the earth. If you can build a generation ship that can colonize an outside world, the you can also *stay* and rebuild earth.
Another poster discussed that letting government provide vital services often results in those services being used / abused for political gain. Abusing regulations is a lot less effective for politicians and so they tend to be manipulated less in my opinion.
Let the free market do the producing.
But let the government keep them in check with regulations. You are right that regulations tend to be thinned out when politicians see no other way to promote growth anymore but I'm still not convinced that that is in any way worse than when the government would be responsible for production itself. Governments are perfectly able and willing to cut back on vital infrastucture below any responsible levels. The New Orleans levee's were not built nor maintained nor were policies and budgets set by commercial entities!
If the government is your only supplier you are left with no recourse should you be dissatisfied with their services. You can actually buy meat that has not been "improved" with all kinds of chemicals and pharmaceuticals. But you probably choose the convenience of buying the cheap meat at you local grocery store.
Ok, so you talk about "Services that people need in order to live - energy, water, medical".
There is a lot that people need to live. Would you argue nationalising all of them? Energy, water and medical aren't the only things that would make that list. What about food, transportation and clothing? You'll die very soon if they aren't in order. Houses - in a lot of climates you need them for shelter and defects in houses could cause them to collapse so they are crucial to survival - hygienic products, etc.
Now, why stop there? If you want energy, water, medical and maybe al those other things that I listed to be state supplied, why should their suppliers be excluded? Why nationalize the hospitals but not the farmaceuticals? They use up a large chunk of our health care budgets and the quality of their products is just as critical to our survival. So we add the farmaceuticals. And the producers of diagnostic equipment of course, can't have any defective MRI's. But MRI's have software. So those are in as well. We also need dependable medical oxygen suppliers. Suppliers for mainframes, PC's, lightbulbs, desktops (the ones you can tough), concrete, glass, sand, catering, bread, beef, cows, grass, fertilizer, oil.
My point is: we are very much used to putting our lives in the hands of commercial entities. From a car or an airliner to the contractor that built my house to the caterer that made that nice chicken filet that I just ate. They're all commercial entities, large multinationals or small mom-and-pops. They are regulated so I know what quality I can expect at minimum and if they don't deliver that quality either they get busted by the state or I sue them. This system actually works very well!
Now, why is water or a hospital that much different?
I ask this as someone who works at a healthcare provider in a "socialized healthcare" country.
For simple tables and forms that can have a lot of social interactions, i have found Podio to be great. Podio is something of a crossbreed between yammer and Access. I use it a lot for to-do lists within projects, small incident lists, notes, agendas and minutes. It's great for tables / forms that contain 10's to 1000's of records... not for millions. First 5 users within a domain are for free. It is a web application though, so your users need to be able to be on-line all the time.
It was actually pretty advanced for the era. Read a little here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link
Wait until the Russians tell him his Visa will expire and they're planning to send him off back to his old friends at the CIA. He'll give them his dropbox address in an instant. :-)
Interesting point... that begs the question... How does Fukushima compare to Bikini Atoll or the other nuclear bomb testing in terms of radioactive materials released?
...slashdot!
Take our leaders with you!
Bij deze is uw geek-card ingetrokken.
When I was in high school (in the Netherlands, mind you) in physics class our lab has a small glass container with a little rod of uranium (or plutonium or something else radioactive). It must have been small and relatively riskless, but still radioactive.
Very handy to show the classic experiments, such as showing a condensation-trail, or letting a geiger counter go wild.
Nowadays, highschool classes are filled with mobile phones, probably more phones than persons. It'd be interresting to see something like a NORAD-style "USDHS nuclear materials movement alerts screen" light up like a christmass tree once they activate this system.
This report is a must-read for anyone interrested in questions regarding open-source versus closed-source/proprietary.
For example, there is a complete chapter about user benefites, interoperability, productivity and cost savings. About cost savings a lot has been said on slashdot (and on the "get the facts" advertisments). When the report talks about TCO and the compatibility-problems that result from switching from (for example) MS-Office to Open-Office: (pag. 98)
Such insights are truly invaluable!
In the PDF document they tell that they were challenged by the builder of the original voting-machine to turn it into a chess-computer.
:)
Which they did.
Desh born, der ritt de gitt der gue, Orn desh, dee born desh, de umn børk! børk! børk!
We-a teke-a 50 cops. A geeve-a zem ell feereerms. Let zem etteck ze-a serverroom. Add e-a leetle-a hostage-a teckeeng. And spen zhree veeks copyeeng ell ze torrents zet conteeen pr0n.
And then ve putta Ze Pirates into ze stew.
A few weeks ago I was trying to create a plperl procedure that reads a file from the filesystem and returns it in a bytea field. (I needed a way to fill a bytea table with testdata.) Big problems. If the input-file contains nulls the bytea is cut off right there. I tried hard, including switching to plpython, but did not actually get both loading and saving to/from bytea to work.
So, I do believe that "somewhere in there" all data-exchanges between stored procedures and the rest of the system are text-based.
An "orkaan" would be equal to wind force 12 on the Beaufort scale. We get a 12 maybe once every 20 years or so. Last time was 1979.
ISS needed laptops because of problems with their own laptops. The shuttle-crew figured: "to hell with those thinkpads, glad to get rid of'em" and donated them.
why didn't they configure their domain name servers to simply refuse to resolve the domain name. I create "special" copies of my own domains so they point to my private IP-addresses at home in stead of the internet-address that the rest of the world can use.
They could have created a pointer to a site of their own saying: "we don't like this site and have blocked it".
Thanks for the info.
Didn't this happen once? I read somewhere on wikipedia that one of the shuttlemissions did a succesfull abort-to-orbit when one of its main engines failed and the computer shut it down. They got to orbit fine with the other two and the mission was a success.
In reality, once the vehicle is launched, the last thing the astronaut crew would want to do is shut down the main engines.
IMHO this is a flawed assupmtion. The SSME's are shut down each and every time the shuttle is launched. They are shut down -when the launch is complete- in a controlled manner while they still have fuel to burn because letting them run dry would catastrophically damage them. Thus, if there is a routine way to shut them down in orbit I wouldn't think there would be to much problems shutting them down after a problem during launch.
I did read once that in most or all the normal abort-modes they keep the engines running on purpose as to empty the fuel-tank (a small bomb that you don't want to drop down to earth needlessly). But on the other hand; the ET has a range-safety device (ie: an explosive to blow it up if it gets loose).
In the end, what I'm saying is: the engines were specificly designed to be shut down.
2014 (or 2006 for that matter) Unix rights sold to Microsoft .ahhhhh Kernel Panic!"
2015 IBM now has a matched opponent
2016 Microsoft wins in court, Linux dies uttering as famous last words: "All our bases are belong to them..