I find it funny that two AC's only choose to attack my use of a mispelled non-standard word attributed to dialect rather than the meat of the argument itself.
The irony is that they only proove my point. In a community of higher intelligence the distinctions of what places you on the 'stoopid' side of the scale become more and more minute. *sigh* to say that I have to include AC's in my deffinition of/. being a community of higher intelligence.... Anyway, obligatory deffense of my spelling.
" It takes a small mind indeed to conceive of spelling a word in only one way "
- Often atributed to Samuel Clemmens... and if he didn't say it he might as well have by now.
As for the usage of a non-standard word all I have to say is "The English language ain't dead yet". Never have figured out why people are so ready to declare it final and complete. To me, saying there is no such word when you know exactly what that word means is hysterical. By the way if you check Merriem Webster online you will find that irregardless is indeed a word albeit a nonstandared word generally relegated to spoken conversations in specific dialects.
Seriously though your argument would be that given genetic/cybog enhancement we would ultimately move closer and closer to a universal level of intelligence while I would claim that while according to our perception that society would essentially be of the same intelligence, future society would continually redefine the bell curve so that it always was a curve and we never reached the universal intelligence flat line.
Yes, as a matter of fact something does need nothing to be defined. At its most baisic deffinition, What is something ? If you do NOT have nothing you must have something if you do not have something ( generic ) then you have nothing. Semantic negation at its finest. Of course you can have something without nothing and nothing without something. In fact you have to. Having something MEANS you have more than nothing. Having nothing MEANS you don't have something... or anything for that matter.
Since we exist in a world with both then it is possible to define acts as good or bad. IE an act is good becasue we know it to be good, not because of what was not done but because we know what didn't happen is possible. I I would say your choice of stabbing is a bit of a straw man. A better example in the event of the little old lady would be ignoring her situation. Something far far far more common a choice than stabbing her. In some areas that may even be more common a choice than helping her.
I could disagree with you that helping the cliche old lady in an unfourtunate situation is good. Mostly by saying it should be a no brainer. It should simply be what you do. In a utopian society where there had never been a little old lady in distress that went unhelped there would be no moral standard by which to judge the act. In such a society it would be morally equivalent to breathing. Good and Bad are moral jdugements and they are very much indeed opposits placed on a scale where one does not exist without the other.
Since we most deffinatly do not live in a society where helping the little old lady in distress is universal we judge those that help the little old lady to be doing something good. Not in that they choose to help her as oppose to kill her, but in that they do choose to help. They choose to be the good samaritan.
Its not our choice of actions that judges us good but those of people before us in the same situation. IE it is thinkable that in the past people made the choice of not to helping the little old lady. Thus it is established there is a choice and those choices have different values ascociated with them. So opting to help is deemed 'good', opting to harm/ignore is 'bad'. In order to understand how I say good is defined by bad and bad is defined by good you must first envision a society without choice where one is the embodiment of good and one of Evil. In other words Heaven and Hell. Only think of them as unto themselves without ever knowing the choice. If all you ever knew was Heaven how would you know it was good ? If all you ever knew was Hell how would you ever know it was bad ? If there is only one action to take when encountering the little old lady how is it good or bad ? There is no choice. However, in the real world as we know it we have freedom of will. We have a choice. Thankfully, we live in a society where hurting the little old lady is morally repugnant and thus a choice rarely taken by any in society. Unfortunatly, many choose to ignore her and in that we find a moral grey area and begin arguing whether or not someone has the moral obligation to help. Finally, many people do indeed stop to help and in doing so we deem them to be kind and decent folk performing a good deed.
I find it funny that you decided to attack an example instead of the final point of Smart needs Stupid to be defined. Perhaps you have no argument wth me there but simply with my claim of defining good by bad ? By the way, that really isn't my argument. I wish I could lay claim to it but it is one for the ages. Probably the two greatest examples of that discussion are Plato's "Republic" and St. Augustines "City of God". There is also of course Utopia and the Author of that one escapes me but I believe it is another Saint.... Thomas Moore comes to mind.
Intresting concept but as many have pointed it out it has problems.
I can't say I would hire him to build my security system. I would however hire him to test it ala "Sneakers".
Computer security savvy is a catch twenty two. You can't know how to defend unless you know how they attack. The only way to be premptive is to figure out all the ways of attack. This means you have to attack your system at least theoretically. And the only way to determin if your deffense is effective is to test it.
People who are only testing a system will always be less creative in finding 'hacks' than those truly trying to penetrate the system. Its the problem of being inside the box.
The best crook is a cop and the best cop is a crook. Know your enemy. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
Ultimately I don't buy this rewarding crap. Mitnick at some level has paid for his transgressions with an all expense paid federal 'vacation'. If he so much as twitches his nose wrong with a computer system again and it is caught they will send him back and throw away the key. Paying the man to gain knowledge that can help you build a better and more secure system is not rewarding him. It is not encouraging kids to go get busted for a felony hacking offense and spend years in prison for the possibility of making big bucks as a security consultant.
To the letter of the law I doubt there are many people who post here who under 100% enforcement would not possess a computer misuse charge agianst them. How many here might have been that kid the RIAA just lit up? How many have never copied anything that was not supposed to be copied? How many have never tried a back door method of gaining access to a system ? Hell how many havn't successfully gone through a back door? Answer that with no justification, no weasle wording, and no claims but that was different. Technically the law dosn't give a damn.
Not that I think this is a wretched hive of scum and viallany. I just think this is a group of highly savvy computer users. There is deffinatly a line. A line I would wager the majority of/.'ers have not crossed and its a line Mitnick was well on the other side of. But to some extent I think the largest difference there is someone who acted on knowledge vrs people who possesed the knowledge. Ultimately who makes the better applicant for a job ? The one with the knowledge or the one with the knowledge and the experience ? In terms of social engineering Mitnick is one of the few KNOWN people that knows through experience the difference between reality and theory. However the fact of his experience makes him a risk.
I can see both sides of the issue.
On one hand HP could embrace Mitnick's firm and then emblazon on their systems that it was hack proofed by the most notorious hacker to date.
On the other they can say we won't encorage miscreat beheivior and hire people who it seems pretty certain have done questionable things in their past but have never been caught.
Overall.... hiring the people that have yet to be caught may be better. But it also carries with it its own risk. They may be employing Mitnick Jr. The overworn Cliche of having the fox gauarding the hen house is poorly thought out. After all don't we often have a Dog guarding the hen house.. or the sheep ? And what is a dog but a domesticated version of the Fox/Wolf that has been trained to provide a constructive service instead of a destructive one ?
The true question to me then is if Mitnick is still a fox or if he has been house broken. If the former stay away, if the latter I can think of few would would be better. You decide. Me personally I think he is the moral equivalent of a celebrity spy ( its an oxymoron ) IE he can't do what he did anymore because he is too well known. I say companies should take advantage of the fact he is out in the open. Odds are he will wind up being a nemissis to wanna be Mitnicks more than an inspiration.
Iregardless folks, stupidity is relative. If you actually manage to raise the bottom 10% it just means who makes up that bottom % will be smarter than the bottom 10% in the past. It will not change the fact that there will still be a bottom 10%. Though I wonder here if what is being discussed is mental retardation.. or simply the dense kid that studies hard but always gets D's because they just don't get it. Reducing genetic disorders would be a great and wonderfull thing. But societally there will need to be a replacement for the 'short bus kids'. A new rock bottom intelligence level will be created. Or those that used to be right above will simply be moved into the already existing bottom level. Either way as I said a bottom 10% will always be defined. Thus Stupidity is a fundamental societal existence. All that varies is what defines being stupid. Is it not being able to read/write ?? Or is it not being able to do diferential equations ?
In other words
Go to a Public Highschool and you will find it has a bottom 10%. Go to a Private Highschool and you find it too has a bottom 10%. As do Junior Colleges. Even Harvard has a bottom 10% not to mention Harvard Law.
In any human environment the lower 10% is defined somehow. Sometimes the differences are gross. Sometimes minute. But we by our nature class and measure ourselves against others. We by default define social pecking orders. We are social animals.
If as a society we raise the overall level of intelligence thats a good thing. But I always have to laugh when people say that by doing so we will wipe out stupidity. That simply isn't the case. All that will truly accomplish is to re-define stupidity.
Good needs Bad to be definable. Up needs Down. Left needs Right. Right needs Wrong. Smart needs Stupid.
If you truly eliminate people of lower intelligence you also eliminate people of higher intelligence by deffinition. Because Smart and Stupid are relative definitions defined by each other. If you don't belive me then look at in this light. Once upon a time in the US a highschool diploma was more than something you wiped your nose with. Today for your average 'good' job you had best come calling with some form of higher education, preferably a 4 year acredited institution and posses a relavent degree. Is this truly because a highschool education has degraded so far.... or because college educations are more common ? Check the percentage of higher education degrees in the work force in 2003 as opposed to say in 1903.
Its the crux of equality really. True equality can never exist so long as people make value judgements of each other because when as a society we judge each others value in any way we move away from equality. Equality is bland, it is ideal. It is Utopia.
"No aircraft built since, not even military, can sustain a mach 2 flight speed for over 3 hours."
Qualify that with "..and carry 50+ paying passengers" and I see your point. I was simply pointing out there are other planes than can sustain mach 2+. Not to mention due to the net loss operation of the concord fleet and usage dictaded by governemnt decree and support you can make the arguemnt it isn't really a commercial airliner. It certainly isn't in the strictest sense, no airline in their right mind would have backed the plane on their own when it was introduced and none have to date even after 30 years of government backed service.
On a seperate note, if concorde were capable of sustaining mach 3 it too would most likely leak like a sieve on the ground as well which is why they topped the design at 2.2. They never did fully solve the fuel tank thermal expansion problems at that speed on the XB-70 which is one of the many reasons that plane didn't go into production. Incidentaly that design was bounced around as a possible commercial design as a way of salveging it. Rejected for the same reasons the concorde almost never got out of development and is being canned now. Too expensive and no way to make the money back. It was worse with the 70 than the Concorde due to the fact it was initially designed to carry bombs not people.
Of course there is always the mythical Aurora plane that supposedly exists.
And the Mig 25/31 do take commercial passengers these days... not much more per flight than a concorde seat acutally ( about 10k ). Questionable if it could sustain its mach 2.5+ ability, I've heard the 25's engines had to be replaced after just minutes of full power usage. The Mig-31 is mid mach 2 capable but has more reliable and durable engines and could sustain its speed longer but obviously not for 3 hours.
I applaud your availability and use of e-mail. I wish my teacehrs had possesed e-mail and the internet as a tool.
However, I still don't agree with your claim that mid semester progress reports are poor diagnostic tools. Both of my parents are teachers and I of course have been through the mill. I know more about the vagaries of grading than I ever cared to know. Mid semester grades are not final grades. But they should be very indicative of the effort to date of a student. I have had many different kinds of teacehers that handled mid semester marks in many different ways. But I can't say that I had any that said they were meaningless as indicators of how you were doing to date.
I don't really think thats what your saying. At least I hope not. I think what your really saying is the issue is far more complex than a number. That a poor grade at mid semester does not mean a student is bereft of hope. A good grade is not a free pass to coast. It most certainly is not assured of being the same come time for final grades. Good test scores may mask a horrible class attitude. Bad scores may be exacerbated by numerous abscenses not the fault of the student. They may refelect a low test grade that later gets dropped, or assignments you decide not to count. Numbers and letter grades do a poor job of reflecting the story that goes into their creation and I understand having concern about placing them out there to be viewed without context.
However, if your really saying your grades don't indicate anything at mid semester I have to question your grading methods. Your saying they do not even indicate if the student is keeping up with the class ? Whether or not they are completeing assignments on time or to your satisfaction ? That they are at least there, physcially present ? When you say your midsemester grades are meaningless as a diagnostic tool I hear " I don't make the effort to make them usefull as diagnostic tools ". I don't necesarrily read that as a bad thing, it seems you preffer more hands on methods of providing parents with a diagnosis of their childs progress and for that I applaud you. On the other hand I still think your grades at mid semester should at least reflect the general gist of what you cover in more detail with a parent.
Hopefully your concern and reluctance to make use of this system is aimed at the fact this system does not allow you to express all the information you feel needs to be avialable to allow a full disclosure of the students current progress. That documented grading systems like this can remove a great deal of your flexibility when it comes to final grading time, or at least make it a real nuiscence to have to explain to everyone your grading methods. These are valid concerns. Off the top of my head I would add if its not used as a primary means of keeping up with grades its adding to an already full work load. Idealy this system would remove some of the redundancy of grading systems in use at most schools I am familiar with. IE. written ledger books audited at some level by the administration and klunky central systems updated at mid semester and semester end.
In direct response to your objections of displaying a work in progress without proper context I hear something contradictory in what you have said. Your availability seems to indicate parents can find out their childs current grades/scores and discuss there status etc anytime they want to by contacting you. If thats so then why does it seem to bother you for the parent to have online access to some of that information as well ?
Concorde still represents a pinnacle in civil aviation design in terms of speed.
Let me repeat... Still a Pinnacle. A top acheivement. There are no incredible leaps in technology since its inception with which to top it. Only some incremetal improovements that might be made.
More efficient engines could be produced but the cost of development versus the improovemnt would not be very economical.
Flight control systems could be updated to modern electronics. might Eliminate a few hundred, perhaps even a few thousand pounds. But its about like the difference between a 30 year old power steering system and a new one. Not much end user difference. Perhaps easier to maintain... more likely the biggest change there would be in reducing easing the pilots workload with modern display systems and computerized system monitoring.
The materials breakthroughs which made the design possible in the first place have only incrementally advanced. Mostly in the area of fabrication, not in terms of strength and thermal tollerences or most importantly in terms of cost which is the biggest issue.
All in all you could could perhaps make a more efficient Concorde. But in terms of pure performance you couldn't really make a better Concorde.
As I said, its design is still a Pinnacle of civil aviation design. Its also noteable in the military realm where supersonic designs have proliferated. Very few Military designs could keep up with a Concorde. The B-1 and Badger being the only two obvious designs currently in service that could keep up with it over the same range. There is also the XB-70 Valkarie mach 3 capable Bomber design that was never adopted which contributed a great deal of knowldege to Concordes Design, and of course the Retired A-12, and SR-71 Blackbird designs which still know no peer in the annals of aviation design.
We have reffined the knowledge pioneered in the late 50's and 60's which make planes like the Concorde, SR-71/A-12, XB-70 and B-1 possible but we have not made any new breathroughs that allow us to go beyond them as yet. We also have never acheived any kind of economy of scale with regards to their production either. I don't belive combining the total production numebrs of all the above listed long range multiple Mach capable designs would reach half the number of Boeing 747's produced.
As much economic sense retiring the Concorde makes... I still hate to see it go. Its one example of a big budget white elephant program I wouldn't mind having my tax dollars go towards. Of course living in the states I have never had my tax dollars go towards this particular white elephant. However, it is at least its something beautiful and tangible which theoretically anyone can get to have "hands on experience" with unlike so many other programs. Its hard to put a price tag on symbols and the Concorde has been a symbolic acheivment since its inception. Its retirment without a replacement is symbolic as well, one which represents something I don't much care to ponder.
Was about the ask about engines when I saw your reply.
If you took the supercruising capable design in the Pratt and Whitneys ( or GE's, whichever ones they decided on ) driving the F-22 raptor and incorporated them into a Concorde derrivative intended to super cruise around mach 1.5. Re-calculated the airframe stresses to take advatage of the lower speed requirement and less fuel needed for the higher efficiency but with the same avialable liftoff power ( or greater I would imagine ).
Do you think it would be possible to run an economically viable supersonic trans oceanic schedule ? If you can get it 1.5 you still travel roughly twice as fast meaning more trips... so if you can get close to half capacity of the big slow air bus designs you should be able to compete, esepcially as a luxury offering, if the airframe/maintnence isn't to much higher.
Well looks like everyone already jumped on the SR-71 though I would point out its oft mis-identified and even more impressive early sibling the A-12. The current transatlatic, and North America transcontenental tranist record holder is a lawn ornament at the Marhsall space flight center in Huntsville.... absolutely amazes me every time I drive by it.
Someone mentioned the B-1b and the Russian rip off Badger.
There is also the defunct XB-70 Valkerie that preeceded the B-1 but was never adopted. It was capable of lifting as much or more mass than the Concorde and it cruised at mach 3.
Security for this tool seems silly to the extreme, both from the password side and technical issues of what appears to be an open d-base for anyone that knows how to tie in to the back end. That aside...
I don't buy the argument that this is just a micromanaging parents wet dream. Parents that think B stands for Bad or not good enough don't need any excuse to do so. In other words this isn't going to make those parents any better or worse. However as the new generation of parents currently raising kids are more internet savy this kind of tool does present a very important advancement that has been very slow and comming. That is a Parent Teacher communication avenue that takes into account the simple fact both parents work in todays modern family.
This fact means parent teacher conferences are difficult things to arrange. They are often hasty and accomplish little. Sometimes they do not happen untill weeks after they become necesarry. Phone calls are also troublesome due to the fact it is difficult for teachers to contact parents during the day for any length of time and just like you and I they like to go home at the end of the day so contacting at night is an 'on their time' action many do but is not fair to expect, certainly not an any kind of consistent basis.
A method of keeping parents informed of day to day and week to week progress of their child in a time shifted format where teahcers can keep the information updated during their time at work and parents can check on their time would be an invaluable addition to the educational tool chest. With the new more technology savy parents with children at school becoming more common the internet provides a realistic tool for re-connecting parents and students. It also reduces the amount of effort necesarry for a parent to be more invovled in their childs education.
Yes children are important enough that arranging parent teacher conferences should not be subject to parents work. Yes its important enough that there should never be a problem with a parent being invovled in their childrens education without prodding. However, thats as it should be in an ideal world, unfortunatly we live in the real world and in the real world parents work schedules are a major obstacle to meaningful and timely parent teacher communication.
Yes Teachers should be totaly commited to the advancement of our youth. But we can't expect them to live and breathe our childrens lives 24/7. They exist and have lives of a sort outside of work and already demands are made on their time that most any one else in this world would scream bloody murder about if they were expected to do the same at their job... especially at the rates teachers are paid.
The new technology available in the world is making painfully slow in roads into our educational system. How many jobs exist anymore without a computer terminal of some sort as a part of if not your entire daily experience ? How many classrooms have even one computer in it much less 1 for each student ?
I don't think the question here is if this system is a good idea. I think the question is why has it taken so long and why is it such poorly implemented system ?
I couldn't disagree with your seintiments more. Seems to me you can place that as a disclaimer to your grade book and then leave an open invitation to discuss a childs progress with parents as well.
Just like with illness, early detection of a problem at school is the best and sometimes only way to solve the problem. By finding the time to keep grades reasonbaly up to date where parents can easily have access to them can give you a valuable ally in your efforts to reach struggling children.
Complain about the fact you probably have to many students in each class to realisticly keep an up to date grades book but please god don't say you would preffer not to post grades for parental review till the last week, what good does a poor mark do at that point ? The race is over, options are limited. You have to keep some running tally of grades anyway so why not take an hour at the end of each week and keep the online values consistent with your 'work in progress'?
Granted conference time is more valuable but is it a bad thing to give parents one more way to stay abreast of their childrens progress ?
He sold a chip with a modified copyrighted BIOS that was only usefull to people who had already bought a fully licensed chip.
Technically selling a modified copyrighted code is illegal however in this case he wasn't costing M$ any money. Eveyrone he is selling to already paid M$ for a box to use the chip in. Essentially to me he is selling the modifications and the work of installing those modifications. Work he did not M$. He is not cicumventing M$'s money for their material because people already posses it.
Further more M$'s work is mostly derivative in nature. BIOS systems only have so many ways in which to work and for a piece of equipemt like the X-box there are limited options for how it can be arranged and handled. To me patenting a BIOS is akin to pateting a gear, or cog. I mean ford dosn't hold the keys to combustion engine design. You are perfectly welcome to buy a ford block and modify it and re-sell it. this is the stock and trade kind of sale for most mod shops. THis is NO different than modifying the existing BIOS code in a system. SO long as the code manipulated is legaly obtained there is no issue. If this guy was selling pirate X-boxes I'd say string him up by his tonails. But morally he was selling the equivalent of moded EFI control chips for EFI cars.
software design has much more in common with engineering design than it does with intellectual works. controlling BIOS code to a specific piece of hardware is tantamount to contolling the use of IF/THEN code usuage. The hardware itself largely dictates the BIOS code. All M$ did was add conditional crap that limited what you could use the hardware for. Something akin to making a hammer that could only be used outside to hammer specific nails instead of using it to hit anything anywhere you want. Why ? Becasue the X-box is essentially and X86 computer with the ability to display quality graphics on a TV for a price point of $250. If they allowed it to be used as an X86 box is would reveal the insane overpriceing of computer hardware. We think of $800 computers as cheap yet you would be hard pressed putting a box together with the specs of the X-box for that price yet ultimately it is the same thing. Or perhaps thats not overpriced and console marketing looses money on the hardware to make it up in $50 a pop game sales and allowing a 250 general purpose computer on the market would kill the PC market which can't compete that way.
One thing.. heat problem isn't the cable.. not aware its a problem for the cable itself. The Shuttle itself has thermal issues were it to venture out into sunlight for to long ( ie more than a couple hours and even that takes a rotissirie roll ) That was just one of the nails in using the shuttle to do ths kind of heavy lifting.
one question... is it 7.5kg per Kilometer or 7.5 kg per meter. very different measures. And I understand its alot stronger than fishing line the point was 1000 yards ( approx 1 kilometer ) of 50 lbs test fishing lines weighs in at 15 pounds or almost 7.5kg.and it dosn't get much more insubstantial than that.Orders of magnitude stronger dosn't really enter into it at that scale. Taper dosn't enter into it either if thats the average over the whole length. My guess is it only gets heavier not lighter than 7.5kg per klick and it dosn't take much before current lift technology rapidly becomes unfeasible regardless of the benifits.... it just becomes trying to move a mountain one teaspoon at a time. thats a problem that has to be faced assuming the material becomes a reality. Whole other can or worms really.
Didn't really dig out the weight on the site... most stuff I have seen says lifting even the starter strand mass it is pretty silly, especially with checmical bi-prop rocketry. The smart thing to do is to capture a suitable asteroid and manufacture the ribbon in orbit. Course the delta V issues can be greater for either action depending on the scenarios used.But there are propulsion options in space you don't have at the bottom of a gravity well in an ecosystem we rely on for life support. Nuclear for one, Ion for another etc that could be used for steering an asteroid.
Less I am mistaken the 7.5 is for the single strand weight per klick.. I would expect it to be much higher for a full ribbon capable os supporting a sizeable crawler. Hell 50 pound test fishing line would be damn near 7.5kg per klick.
http://www.basspro-shops.com/servlet/catalog.Tex tI d?hvarTextId=7602&hvarDept=100&hvarEvent=&hvarClas sCode=10&hvarSubCode=1&hvarTarget=browse
Using the strand as a possible radiator is a nifty idea but I doubt its very viable. but I think that comparison to the fishing line gives you a sense of the scale of the line.. it would kind of like using a copper wire from a phone chord to serve as a radiator for your car.
A 7.5kg per klick cable that is capable of supporting 268,402.5kg is very impressive not to mention doing more work for lifting. Not to mention thats the weight at geosynch, the cable actually has to be a couple of times longer acording to that web sight.
Also acording to that web site they have yet to construct even small composite ribbons with a gpa greater than 3.3 and carbon tubes greater than 22. 3.3 is right there with steel and kevlar and thats the practical application problem they have to solve to use it. In otherwords they have a material theoretically capable at its maximum of providing the strength needed ( ~130 gpa ) but they have yet to get even 50% of the theoretical max from lab samples. They have yet to create a composite construction utilizing the 22gpa material they have created that is stronger than conventional materials.
Thats more than incremental improovement problems. There are serious questions about how close to theoretical maximums you can get with just the base nanotubes, not to mention questions of how efficiently you can harness that strength in a composite construction. And those questions remain in the lab environemnt. Its another step to go from small test samples to a production capability of creating thousands of kilometers of quality controled ribbon en masse. Those are revolutionary materials science steps akin to going from stone to carbon steel.
Don't get me wrong. I salivate over the idea of cheap easy access to space. However I just find that most of the elevator hype is nutz considering the the root material needed to make it a realistic consisderation has yet to exist even in a lab. Its a wonderfull idea but untill I can hold a 130gpa material in my hands I won't get overly excited about it.
shuttle payload is between 50 and 70k pounds depending on the orbiter/ET used. So ~23-~31,000 kg of which you now need enough extra fuel to boost to Geo stationary subtracting further the amount of ribbon you can take in one flight.
If you keep 20,000kg of payload capacity thats ~270,000kg/20,000 = 13.5 shuttle trips.
Doable. But you would need more fuel than that to boost to geostationary. A new larger capacity OMS or secondary boost system that does not exist now.
Shuttle is designed to take advantage of the earths shadow for thermal rejection. Once your orbit gets to high it begins having to spend too much time in the sun and it develops heat rejection problems. It causes problems even in LEO when the beta angles are high near the solstices and the common orbits used put it in more sun than shadow.
More thermal protection is more weight.
Its not that it can't work but shuttle isn't the answer. A heavy lift varient using shuttle components might be an answer.. Zurbin's Ares configuration comes to mind.
However before counting those chickens the elevator proponents had best focus on making the material and making it in quantity's needed to even consider launch issues. Hell they can't even make a strong enough varient in very controled lab conditions yet and without it this is beyound a pipe dream.
True that what we do is not necesarrily a good and natural thing to happen. However the relevence of warmer periods in earths history from which it recovered shows that our impact may or may not be as large or as irreversable as some claim them to be.
Most of the human impact global warming studies attempt to claim that it is human action and human actions alone responsible for the warming trend seen over the last couple of decades.
Now you take a study like this one and the solar variable studies and you find that a good chunk of what the human action studies claimed were due to human factors alone can in fact be contributed to completely natural earth weather pattern variation and they loose alot of steam out of their sails.
In fact when considering the results of largely agreed upon solar variation studies which human action studies did not account for, the resulting subtraction of those degrees of change from human action studies places their results back into the statistical margin of error region.. ie not a smoking gun, no statistical significant values of measureable change based on results of human action.
Fact: a single major volcanic erruption introduces more C02 into the atmosphere than mankind does in multiple years of production. I forget the exact number. I beilive there is a stat out there pointing out St. Helens dumped more C02 into the atmosphere than the US has produced in its entire industrial history. While your at it check the amounts released in the recent humongous forrest fires out west this past year as well. IN terms of industrial emmisions we are still puny in comparison to nature. In other words Earth has delt with larger problems than us.
However, I grant our long term effects can and perhaps are begining to add up to something dangerous but I firmly believe carrying capacity issues are going to cause a much larger concern for us before any emmision gases reach truly irrefutable significant levels. Regardless of what we do we will emit gasses that will play a role in earths weather. Thats one of the cornerstone deffinitions of life. We affect our surroundings. The larger and more powerful we get the more we will affect them. Replace all the C02 emmisions tommorrow with H20 from fuel cell emmisions and we will probbaly hear doom and gloom about that as well. Pontentially more storm systems, more cloud cover, leading to colder temps etc.... don't just consider enviromental concerns from the single angle that anything we are doing now is bad and any change made good. If we are emmitting gasses on a globaly significant level then ANY THING WE EMMIT IN REPLACEMENT WILL BE SIGNIFICANT AS WELL. Gasses at these levles are not produced for the hell of it and thinking you can simply x-nay these emissions without something replacing it are silly and in my book such thoughts are the first sign of an eco-wacky study. Good studies take more factors into account when considering possible actions to take and sometimes they include *gasp* compromises.
Finally if we can actively impact the eco system in a negative manner we can also actively impact it in a positive manner. Most eco concious groups talk about stopping or cleaning up when perhaps they could figure out ways to create industrial methods that work to counter act each other. There is more than one way to skin a cat. TO date in my book environmetalist and industrialists are both guilty of lack of long term thought. Industrialists in terms of impacts of waste emmissions and enviromentialists in terms of killing industry. Fact: environmental concerns to date are only considered in times of realtive ease. Toss us back into the depression and see how much people give a rats ass about 50 years from now. Not that its right. But it is reality and reality is what must be dealt with at some point.
Largely you make good points but I have a couple of nits.
The saturn F-1 has even less launch time on it than SSME's have. SSME's have a similar reliability record to those systems you mentioned, in fact a better one I believe. Challenger was due to a problem in the SRB's.... in my mind one of the silliest design choices ever, and columbia's failure was a far different beast than any of the payload suystems your comparing it to. The F-1's were used 18 times in 5 packs or 90 launches.. SSME's gone 100+ times in 3 packs or 300+. However I grant SSME' have never been able to reach the economies of scale that would make them more cost effective than F-1's would have prooven to be to date.
No arguments that shuttle is a walking talking bassackwards contradiction of requirments but don't compare apples and oranges. The SSME's are one of the few successes operationaly speaking to come out of the shuttle design. If they ever reached production levels sufficient to benifit from economy of scale they would probably realize much of the economic benefit of resuseable engines. Until such time however single use boosters are more economically feasible. Reuseables also have that nagging re-entry requirment.
Further more shuttle has a +90% launch success rate and +80% mission success rate ( in terms of returning the crew ). And there is no telling if those systems ( other than soyuz ) would have similar if they also had to meet the requirment of returning their payloads to earth.
Furthermore I will take those numbers far more readily if you put up their rates for their first 100 flights. Souyuz lost two crews in its first 11 manned flights that we know of ( what number flight was challenger ? ). We still do not know the number or results of the parallel military missions with the same booster. I'm not knocking soyuz, it has become one hell of a robust design but it has had so many more launches with which to work out that design than shuttle.
Don't get me wrong, I am not that huge of a fan of giving shuttle that kind of design life.. even if we were to truly commit to the economies of scale that justified its design in the first place. But to me, the white elephant nature of shuttle is largely tied to the re-entry requirmeents that were levied on it. A shuttle stack tosses some 220k-230k into LEO which is suitably appoloesque, but currently freaking 150-170k of that is tied up in the orbiter/heatshield/engines. However, the launch stack of SRB's and SSME's has prooved a capable heavy lift platform with a 90% success rate in its first 100 launches. There are other possible configurations for it than a shuttle stack. Zurbins ARES proposal in particular strikes me... espeically if we went for a one shot SSME design or could devlope a reasonable return shield for the engines, or utlized boeings new 600k lbs thrust one time use monster, but I want to say its a kerosene lox design like the F-1... but thats not altogether a bad thing.. It would allow for a more compact ET varient in the ARES design. SRB's may be a necesarry evil with the limitations of checmical bi-prop desingns... they were initially developed for a future saturn modification and adopted by the shuttle design team if memory serves ( but I may be mixed up with some alternate history fiction ).
Soyuz can only return 3. The artical states they could return 6 with two on station.
The station was envisioned with a 7 man crew ultimately but that is with the addiction of the US hab module whose future is very uncertain at this point in time. At this point 2 crew have designed sleeping quaters and one sleep in an empty rack location in the US Lab.
Repairing the shuttle on orbit is almost a hysterical proposition. Each tile is cutom ground for its location. Granted if you knew which tiles needed replacing perhaps you could launch them on a soyuz or shuttle and arrange a towers of hanoi shuffle using the one docking station but then attaching them in space is a major question. You know how painting, gluing etc all have constrainints on tempreture for proper curing ?? The tile setting is similar and you have a vacume of space environment to adhere these tiles on in. I doubt the current methods used are practicible in space. perhaps there is a work around.
This whole idea of of using sation as a life raft for 10 people is somewhat absurd as well unless it was explicitly planned for. The life support systems on station are currently designed for sustained occupation by 3 people. The US hab module would add an extended capacity. Shuttles systems are designed for short periods of use, not sustained suport. Those systems might be maxed to a month... perhaps more if you planned it from the outset.
The problem is people consume and the system is not a closed loop. consumption has to be accounted for in the upmass. If station is equiped to handle three people for 3 months without resuply that slips to 1.5 months with 6 people and to 1 month with 9 and under a month with 10. It can be stretched of course but only so much.
Lastly the shuttle mission has to be designed to go to station to get to station. Shuttles typical ( most efficient ) orbit does not allow for a station rendezvous. I kind of question why shuttle would go anywhere else but with columbia that is an easy answer... being the first orbiter its strcture was significantly heavier than its sister ships and the extra boost needed to get to ISS orbit shrunk its effective payload to that orbit to a very marginal point. They were in fact considering retiring columbia a year or so ago due to this shortcoming.
Well thats kinda mars climate seasons writ large. As different poles get exposed to sunlight it evaporates the ice be it CO2 or H2O and it drasticly changes the suface temps etc... and then as it gets cold it all settles back down.Whats this series anyway ? I am surprised I havn't heard/read it. I tend to purchase mars sci-fi based on no mare than cover art
With mars gravitational well its escape velocity is such that trying to keep atmospheric gases is a net loss activity for the natural cycle. If we could artificialy accelerate the atmosphere generation we might make it habitable for a limited amount of time but I don't know if that limited time is geologic or truly limited IE we would lose it rapidly in terms of our perception.
I'd suggest seeing if you can find the math ascociated with generating atmosphere, specifically to martian dirt/resources if its out there. You need to find the energy needed to generate enough to raise the atmosphere to the point we would need it and then calculate the retention rate. My guess is your talking pretty mind boggling numbers, ie something on the order of the earths total current energy production ( or more ) dedicated to nothing by generating atmospheric gas for a long time. If you go grab Zurbin's book ( mars direct ) he talks about terraforming and the pitfalls energy levels etc.. don't have my copy handy. Just keep in mind he is a very strong proponent of mars exploration and remeber to go find some naysayers and judge with both sides of the story. If I recall one of zurbin's ideas is centered around a huge orbital solar reflector to cook the water and co2 out of the soil but its pretty fantastic. Theortically withen the bounds of real science but its quite a bit further out than say something like a sustained fusion reaction.
I'd say pass on the terreforming ideas initially and leave it to the dim future and initially focus on finding caverns and mining etc to create truly large subteranean living environments where we could foster significant colinization. Once you get that to self sustaining levels I think terreforming is simply a matter of time be it generations, centuries or mellenia, if we get a toe hold it will happen sooner or later.
Recent info from the surveyor is indicating in the northern climes the dirt is ~75% water by volume. in other words its dirty ice not icey dirt. Question is how deep it goes. The surveyors limitation is the first couple of feet.
One thing to remember though is if there is that much on the surface there is likely more deeper.. and the deeper you go the higher the preasure gets and the surface of mars is not far out of waters range for existence so the possibility of underground aquifiers in liquid form is getting stronger and stronger.... IE you might just be able to drill a well on mars much as you would on earth with the added complication of keeping it from boiling off once exposed to surface preassure/temps.
Enough for oceans ? I dunno. imagine if the earths oceans evaporated. For there to be enough underground water to replace them either that water seeped into the ground or there is that much down there already. However the idea of the evaporation that takes place on mars is that it does it and the atoms/molecules reach escape velocity. Dosn't mean there can't be alot of water down there but 'oceans' in terristrial terms I doubt very much. Can still be a honking lot of water though.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it funny that two AC's only choose to attack my use of a mispelled non-standard word attributed to dialect rather than the meat of the argument itself.
/. being a community of higher intelligence.... Anyway, obligatory deffense of my spelling.
The irony is that they only proove my point. In a community of higher intelligence the distinctions of what places you on the 'stoopid' side of the scale become more and more minute. *sigh* to say that I have to include AC's in my deffinition of
" It takes a small mind indeed to conceive of spelling a word in only one way "
- Often atributed to Samuel Clemmens... and if he didn't say it he might as well have by now.
As for the usage of a non-standard word all I have to say is "The English language ain't dead yet". Never have figured out why people are so ready to declare it final and complete. To me, saying there is no such word when you know exactly what that word means is hysterical. By the way if you check Merriem Webster online you will find that irregardless is indeed a word albeit a nonstandared word generally relegated to spoken conversations in specific dialects.
About as well as you can proove that it will ;-)
Seriously though your argument would be that given genetic/cybog enhancement we would ultimately move closer and closer to a universal level of intelligence while I would claim that while according to our perception that society would essentially be of the same intelligence, future society would continually redefine the bell curve so that it always was a curve and we never reached the universal intelligence flat line.
Of course not. Its a great and wonderfull thing IMHO.
Yes, as a matter of fact something does need nothing to be defined. At its most baisic deffinition, What is something ? If you do NOT have nothing you must have something if you do not have something ( generic ) then you have nothing. Semantic negation at its finest. Of course you can have something without nothing and nothing without something. In fact you have to. Having something MEANS you have more than nothing. Having nothing MEANS you don't have something... or anything for that matter.
Since we exist in a world with both then it is possible to define acts as good or bad. IE an act is good becasue we know it to be good, not because of what was not done but because we know what didn't happen is possible. I I would say your choice of stabbing is a bit of a straw man. A better example in the event of the little old lady would be ignoring her situation. Something far far far more common a choice than stabbing her. In some areas that may even be more common a choice than helping her.
I could disagree with you that helping the cliche old lady in an unfourtunate situation is good. Mostly by saying it should be a no brainer. It should simply be what you do. In a utopian society where there had never been a little old lady in distress that went unhelped there would be no moral standard by which to judge the act. In such a society it would be morally equivalent to breathing. Good and Bad are moral jdugements and they are very much indeed opposits placed on a scale where one does not exist without the other.
Since we most deffinatly do not live in a society where helping the little old lady in distress is universal we judge those that help the little old lady to be doing something good. Not in that they choose to help her as oppose to kill her, but in that they do choose to help. They choose to be the good samaritan.
Its not our choice of actions that judges us good but those of people before us in the same situation. IE it is thinkable that in the past people made the choice of not to helping the little old lady. Thus it is established there is a choice and those choices have different values ascociated with them. So opting to help is deemed 'good', opting to harm/ignore is 'bad'. In order to understand how I say good is defined by bad and bad is defined by good you must first envision a society without choice where one is the embodiment of good and one of Evil. In other words Heaven and Hell. Only think of them as unto themselves without ever knowing the choice. If all you ever knew was Heaven how would you know it was good ? If all you ever knew was Hell how would you ever know it was bad ? If there is only one action to take when encountering the little old lady how is it good or bad ? There is no choice. However, in the real world as we know it we have freedom of will. We have a choice. Thankfully, we live in a society where hurting the little old lady is morally repugnant and thus a choice rarely taken by any in society. Unfortunatly, many choose to ignore her and in that we find a moral grey area and begin arguing whether or not someone has the moral obligation to help. Finally, many people do indeed stop to help and in doing so we deem them to be kind and decent folk performing a good deed.
I find it funny that you decided to attack an example instead of the final point of Smart needs Stupid to be defined. Perhaps you have no argument wth me there but simply with my claim of defining good by bad ? By the way, that really isn't my argument. I wish I could lay claim to it but it is one for the ages. Probably the two greatest examples of that discussion are Plato's "Republic" and St. Augustines "City of God". There is also of course Utopia and the Author of that one escapes me but I believe it is another Saint.... Thomas Moore comes to mind.
Intresting concept but as many have pointed it out it has problems.
/.'ers have not crossed and its a line Mitnick was well on the other side of. But to some extent I think the largest difference there is someone who acted on knowledge vrs people who possesed the knowledge. Ultimately who makes the better applicant for a job ? The one with the knowledge or the one with the knowledge and the experience ? In terms of social engineering Mitnick is one of the few KNOWN people that knows through experience the difference between reality and theory. However the fact of his experience makes him a risk.
I can't say I would hire him to build my security system. I would however hire him to test it ala "Sneakers".
Computer security savvy is a catch twenty two. You can't know how to defend unless you know how they attack. The only way to be premptive is to figure out all the ways of attack. This means you have to attack your system at least theoretically. And the only way to determin if your deffense is effective is to test it.
People who are only testing a system will always be less creative in finding 'hacks' than those truly trying to penetrate the system. Its the problem of being inside the box.
The best crook is a cop and the best cop is a crook. Know your enemy. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
Ultimately I don't buy this rewarding crap. Mitnick at some level has paid for his transgressions with an all expense paid federal 'vacation'. If he so much as twitches his nose wrong with a computer system again and it is caught they will send him back and throw away the key. Paying the man to gain knowledge that can help you build a better and more secure system is not rewarding him. It is not encouraging kids to go get busted for a felony hacking offense and spend years in prison for the possibility of making big bucks as a security consultant.
To the letter of the law I doubt there are many people who post here who under 100% enforcement would not possess a computer misuse charge agianst them. How many here might have been that kid the RIAA just lit up? How many have never copied anything that was not supposed to be copied? How many have never tried a back door method of gaining access to a system ? Hell how many havn't successfully gone through a back door? Answer that with no justification, no weasle wording, and no claims but that was different. Technically the law dosn't give a damn.
Not that I think this is a wretched hive of scum and viallany. I just think this is a group of highly savvy computer users. There is deffinatly a line. A line I would wager the majority of
I can see both sides of the issue.
On one hand HP could embrace Mitnick's firm and then emblazon on their systems that it was hack proofed by the most notorious hacker to date.
On the other they can say we won't encorage miscreat beheivior and hire people who it seems pretty certain have done questionable things in their past but have never been caught.
Overall.... hiring the people that have yet to be caught may be better. But it also carries with it its own risk. They may be employing Mitnick Jr. The overworn Cliche of having the fox gauarding the hen house is poorly thought out. After all don't we often have a Dog guarding the hen house.. or the sheep ? And what is a dog but a domesticated version of the Fox/Wolf that has been trained to provide a constructive service instead of a destructive one ?
The true question to me then is if Mitnick is still a fox or if he has been house broken. If the former stay away, if the latter I can think of few would would be better. You decide. Me personally I think he is the moral equivalent of a celebrity spy ( its an oxymoron ) IE he can't do what he did anymore because he is too well known. I say companies should take advantage of the fact he is out in the open. Odds are he will wind up being a nemissis to wanna be Mitnicks more than an inspiration.
Iregardless folks, stupidity is relative. If you actually manage to raise the bottom 10% it just means who makes up that bottom % will be smarter than the bottom 10% in the past. It will not change the fact that there will still be a bottom 10%. Though I wonder here if what is being discussed is mental retardation.. or simply the dense kid that studies hard but always gets D's because they just don't get it. Reducing genetic disorders would be a great and wonderfull thing. But societally there will need to be a replacement for the 'short bus kids'. A new rock bottom intelligence level will be created. Or those that used to be right above will simply be moved into the already existing bottom level. Either way as I said a bottom 10% will always be defined. Thus Stupidity is a fundamental societal existence. All that varies is what defines being stupid. Is it not being able to read/write ?? Or is it not being able to do diferential equations ?
In other words
Go to a Public Highschool and you will find it has a bottom 10%.
Go to a Private Highschool and you find it too has a bottom 10%.
As do Junior Colleges.
Even Harvard has a bottom 10% not to mention Harvard Law.
In any human environment the lower 10% is defined somehow. Sometimes the differences are gross. Sometimes minute. But we by our nature class and measure ourselves against others. We by default define social pecking orders. We are social animals.
If as a society we raise the overall level of intelligence thats a good thing. But I always have to laugh when people say that by doing so we will wipe out stupidity. That simply isn't the case. All that will truly accomplish is to re-define stupidity.
Good needs Bad to be definable.
Up needs Down.
Left needs Right.
Right needs Wrong.
Smart needs Stupid.
If you truly eliminate people of lower intelligence you also eliminate people of higher intelligence by deffinition. Because Smart and Stupid are relative definitions defined by each other. If you don't belive me then look at in this light. Once upon a time in the US a highschool diploma was more than something you wiped your nose with. Today for your average 'good' job you had best come calling with some form of higher education, preferably a 4 year acredited institution and posses a relavent degree. Is this truly because a highschool education has degraded so far.... or because college educations are more common ? Check the percentage of higher education degrees in the work force in 2003 as opposed to say in 1903.
Its the crux of equality really. True equality can never exist so long as people make value judgements of each other because when as a society we judge each others value in any way we move away from equality. Equality is bland, it is ideal. It is Utopia.
True.. but the Concorde passengers were not at ~100k feet able to see stars in the middle of the day like the SR-71 guys were :-)
"No aircraft built since, not even military, can sustain a mach 2 flight speed for over 3 hours."
Qualify that with "..and carry 50+ paying passengers" and I see your point. I was simply pointing out there are other planes than can sustain mach 2+. Not to mention due to the net loss operation of the concord fleet and usage dictaded by governemnt decree and support you can make the arguemnt it isn't really a commercial airliner. It certainly isn't in the strictest sense, no airline in their right mind would have backed the plane on their own when it was introduced and none have to date even after 30 years of government backed service.
On a seperate note, if concorde were capable of sustaining mach 3 it too would most likely leak like a sieve on the ground as well which is why they topped the design at 2.2. They never did fully solve the fuel tank thermal expansion problems at that speed on the XB-70 which is one of the many reasons that plane didn't go into production. Incidentaly that design was bounced around as a possible commercial design as a way of salveging it. Rejected for the same reasons the concorde almost never got out of development and is being canned now. Too expensive and no way to make the money back. It was worse with the 70 than the Concorde due to the fact it was initially designed to carry bombs not people.
Of course there is always the mythical Aurora plane that supposedly exists.
And the Mig 25/31 do take commercial passengers these days... not much more per flight than a concorde seat acutally ( about 10k ). Questionable if it could sustain its mach 2.5+ ability, I've heard the 25's engines had to be replaced after just minutes of full power usage. The Mig-31 is mid mach 2 capable but has more reliable and durable engines and could sustain its speed longer but obviously not for 3 hours.
Dought..... been a while since I brushed up my military plane trivia :-)
* sheepish grin *.... least I didn't get it mixed up with a Bear
I applaud your availability and use of e-mail. I wish my teacehrs had possesed e-mail and the internet as a tool.
However, I still don't agree with your claim that mid semester progress reports are poor diagnostic tools. Both of my parents are teachers and I of course have been through the mill. I know more about the vagaries of grading than I ever cared to know. Mid semester grades are not final grades. But they should be very indicative of the effort to date of a student. I have had many different kinds of teacehers that handled mid semester marks in many different ways. But I can't say that I had any that said they were meaningless as indicators of how you were doing to date.
I don't really think thats what your saying. At least I hope not. I think what your really saying is the issue is far more complex than a number. That a poor grade at mid semester does not mean a student is bereft of hope. A good grade is not a free pass to coast. It most certainly is not assured of being the same come time for final grades. Good test scores may mask a horrible class attitude. Bad scores may be exacerbated by numerous abscenses not the fault of the student. They may refelect a low test grade that later gets dropped, or assignments you decide not to count. Numbers and letter grades do a poor job of reflecting the story that goes into their creation and I understand having concern about placing them out there to be viewed without context.
However, if your really saying your grades don't indicate anything at mid semester I have to question your grading methods. Your saying they do not even indicate if the student is keeping up with the class ? Whether or not they are completeing assignments on time or to your satisfaction ? That they are at least there, physcially present ? When you say your midsemester grades are meaningless as a diagnostic tool I hear " I don't make the effort to make them usefull as diagnostic tools ". I don't necesarrily read that as a bad thing, it seems you preffer more hands on methods of providing parents with a diagnosis of their childs progress and for that I applaud you. On the other hand I still think your grades at mid semester should at least reflect the general gist of what you cover in more detail with a parent.
Hopefully your concern and reluctance to make use of this system is aimed at the fact this system does not allow you to express all the information you feel needs to be avialable to allow a full disclosure of the students current progress. That documented grading systems like this can remove a great deal of your flexibility when it comes to final grading time, or at least make it a real nuiscence to have to explain to everyone your grading methods. These are valid concerns. Off the top of my head I would add if its not used as a primary means of keeping up with grades its adding to an already full work load. Idealy this system would remove some of the redundancy of grading systems in use at most schools I am familiar with. IE. written ledger books audited at some level by the administration and klunky central systems updated at mid semester and semester end.
In direct response to your objections of displaying a work in progress without proper context I hear something contradictory in what you have said. Your availability seems to indicate parents can find out their childs current grades/scores and discuss there status etc anytime they want to by contacting you. If thats so then why does it seem to bother you for the parent to have online access to some of that information as well ?
Concorde still represents a pinnacle in civil aviation design in terms of speed.
Let me repeat... Still a Pinnacle. A top acheivement. There are no incredible leaps in technology since its inception with which to top it. Only some incremetal improovements that might be made.
More efficient engines could be produced but the cost of development versus the improovemnt would not be very economical.
Flight control systems could be updated to modern electronics. might Eliminate a few hundred, perhaps even a few thousand pounds. But its about like the difference between a 30 year old power steering system and a new one. Not much end user difference. Perhaps easier to maintain... more likely the biggest change there would be in reducing easing the pilots workload with modern display systems and computerized system monitoring.
The materials breakthroughs which made the design possible in the first place have only incrementally advanced. Mostly in the area of fabrication, not in terms of strength and thermal tollerences or most importantly in terms of cost which is the biggest issue.
All in all you could could perhaps make a more efficient Concorde. But in terms of pure performance you couldn't really make a better Concorde.
As I said, its design is still a Pinnacle of civil aviation design. Its also noteable in the military realm where supersonic designs have proliferated. Very few Military designs could keep up with a Concorde. The B-1 and Badger being the only two obvious designs currently in service that could keep up with it over the same range. There is also the XB-70 Valkarie mach 3 capable Bomber design that was never adopted which contributed a great deal of knowldege to Concordes Design, and of course the Retired A-12, and SR-71 Blackbird designs which still know no peer in the annals of aviation design.
We have reffined the knowledge pioneered in the late 50's and 60's which make planes like the Concorde, SR-71/A-12, XB-70 and B-1 possible but we have not made any new breathroughs that allow us to go beyond them as yet. We also have never acheived any kind of economy of scale with regards to their production either. I don't belive combining the total production numebrs of all the above listed long range multiple Mach capable designs would reach half the number of Boeing 747's produced.
As much economic sense retiring the Concorde makes... I still hate to see it go. Its one example of a big budget white elephant program I wouldn't mind having my tax dollars go towards. Of course living in the states I have never had my tax dollars go towards this particular white elephant. However, it is at least its something beautiful and tangible which theoretically anyone can get to have "hands on experience" with unlike so many other programs. Its hard to put a price tag on symbols and the Concorde has been a symbolic acheivment since its inception. Its retirment without a replacement is symbolic as well, one which represents something I don't much care to ponder.
Was about the ask about engines when I saw your reply.
If you took the supercruising capable design in the Pratt and Whitneys ( or GE's, whichever ones they decided on ) driving the F-22 raptor and incorporated them into a Concorde derrivative intended to super cruise around mach 1.5. Re-calculated the airframe stresses to take advatage of the lower speed requirement and less fuel needed for the higher efficiency but with the same avialable liftoff power ( or greater I would imagine ).
Do you think it would be possible to run an economically viable supersonic trans oceanic schedule ? If you can get it 1.5 you still travel roughly twice as fast meaning more trips... so if you can get close to half capacity of the big slow air bus designs you should be able to compete, esepcially as a luxury offering, if the airframe/maintnence isn't to much higher.
Well looks like everyone already jumped on the SR-71 though I would point out its oft mis-identified and even more impressive early sibling the A-12. The current transatlatic, and North America transcontenental tranist record holder is a lawn ornament at the Marhsall space flight center in Huntsville.... absolutely amazes me every time I drive by it.
Someone mentioned the B-1b and the Russian rip off Badger.
There is also the defunct XB-70 Valkerie that preeceded the B-1 but was never adopted. It was capable of lifting as much or more mass than the Concorde and it cruised at mach 3.
Security for this tool seems silly to the extreme, both from the password side and technical issues of what appears to be an open d-base for anyone that knows how to tie in to the back end. That aside...
I don't buy the argument that this is just a micromanaging parents wet dream. Parents that think B stands for Bad or not good enough don't need any excuse to do so. In other words this isn't going to make those parents any better or worse. However as the new generation of parents currently raising kids are more internet savy this kind of tool does present a very important advancement that has been very slow and comming. That is a Parent Teacher communication avenue that takes into account the simple fact both parents work in todays modern family.
This fact means parent teacher conferences are difficult things to arrange. They are often hasty and accomplish little. Sometimes they do not happen untill weeks after they become necesarry. Phone calls are also troublesome due to the fact it is difficult for teachers to contact parents during the day for any length of time and just like you and I they like to go home at the end of the day so contacting at night is an 'on their time' action many do but is not fair to expect, certainly not an any kind of consistent basis.
A method of keeping parents informed of day to day and week to week progress of their child in a time shifted format where teahcers can keep the information updated during their time at work and parents can check on their time would be an invaluable addition to the educational tool chest. With the new more technology savy parents with children at school becoming more common the internet provides a realistic tool for re-connecting parents and students. It also reduces the amount of effort necesarry for a parent to be more invovled in their childs education.
Yes children are important enough that arranging parent teacher conferences should not be subject to parents work. Yes its important enough that there should never be a problem with a parent being invovled in their childrens education without prodding. However, thats as it should be in an ideal world, unfortunatly we live in the real world and in the real world parents work schedules are a major obstacle to meaningful and timely parent teacher communication.
Yes Teachers should be totaly commited to the advancement of our youth. But we can't expect them to live and breathe our childrens lives 24/7. They exist and have lives of a sort outside of work and already demands are made on their time that most any one else in this world would scream bloody murder about if they were expected to do the same at their job... especially at the rates teachers are paid.
The new technology available in the world is making painfully slow in roads into our educational system. How many jobs exist anymore without a computer terminal of some sort as a part of if not your entire daily experience ? How many classrooms have even one computer in it much less 1 for each student ?
I don't think the question here is if this system is a good idea. I think the question is why has it taken so long and why is it such poorly implemented system ?
I couldn't disagree with your seintiments more. Seems to me you can place that as a disclaimer to your grade book and then leave an open invitation to discuss a childs progress with parents as well.
Just like with illness, early detection of a problem at school is the best and sometimes only way to solve the problem. By finding the time to keep grades reasonbaly up to date where parents can easily have access to them can give you a valuable ally in your efforts to reach struggling children.
Complain about the fact you probably have to many students in each class to realisticly keep an up to date grades book but please god don't say you would preffer not to post grades for parental review till the last week, what good does a poor mark do at that point ? The race is over, options are limited. You have to keep some running tally of grades anyway so why not take an hour at the end of each week and keep the online values consistent with your 'work in progress'?
Granted conference time is more valuable but is it a bad thing to give parents one more way to stay abreast of their childrens progress ?
He sold a chip with a modified copyrighted BIOS that was only usefull to people who had already bought a fully licensed chip.
Technically selling a modified copyrighted code is illegal however in this case he wasn't costing M$ any money. Eveyrone he is selling to already paid M$ for a box to use the chip in. Essentially to me he is selling the modifications and the work of installing those modifications. Work he did not M$. He is not cicumventing M$'s money for their material because people already posses it.
Further more M$'s work is mostly derivative in nature. BIOS systems only have so many ways in which to work and for a piece of equipemt like the X-box there are limited options for how it can be arranged and handled. To me patenting a BIOS is akin to pateting a gear, or cog. I mean ford dosn't hold the keys to combustion engine design. You are perfectly welcome to buy a ford block and modify it and re-sell it. this is the stock and trade kind of sale for most mod shops. THis is NO different than modifying the existing BIOS code in a system. SO long as the code manipulated is legaly obtained there is no issue. If this guy was selling pirate X-boxes I'd say string him up by his tonails. But morally he was selling the equivalent of moded EFI control chips for EFI cars.
software design has much more in common with engineering design than it does with intellectual works. controlling BIOS code to a specific piece of hardware is tantamount to contolling the use of IF/THEN code usuage. The hardware itself largely dictates the BIOS code. All M$ did was add conditional crap that limited what you could use the hardware for. Something akin to making a hammer that could only be used outside to hammer specific nails instead of using it to hit anything anywhere you want. Why ? Becasue the X-box is essentially and X86 computer with the ability to display quality graphics on a TV for a price point of $250. If they allowed it to be used as an X86 box is would reveal the insane overpriceing of computer hardware. We think of $800 computers as cheap yet you would be hard pressed putting a box together with the specs of the X-box for that price yet ultimately it is the same thing. Or perhaps thats not overpriced and console marketing looses money on the hardware to make it up in $50 a pop game sales and allowing a 250 general purpose computer on the market would kill the PC market which can't compete that way.
One thing.. heat problem isn't the cable.. not aware its a problem for the cable itself. The Shuttle itself has thermal issues were it to venture out into sunlight for to long ( ie more than a couple hours and even that takes a rotissirie roll ) That was just one of the nails in using the shuttle to do ths kind of heavy lifting.
one question... is it 7.5kg per Kilometer or 7.5 kg per meter. very different measures. And I understand its alot stronger than fishing line the point was 1000 yards ( approx 1 kilometer ) of 50 lbs test fishing lines weighs in at 15 pounds or almost 7.5kg.and it dosn't get much more insubstantial than that.Orders of magnitude stronger dosn't really enter into it at that scale. Taper dosn't enter into it either if thats the average over the whole length. My guess is it only gets heavier not lighter than 7.5kg per klick and it dosn't take much before current lift technology rapidly becomes unfeasible regardless of the benifits.... it just becomes trying to move a mountain one teaspoon at a time. thats a problem that has to be faced assuming the material becomes a reality. Whole other can or worms really.
Didn't really dig out the weight on the site... most stuff I have seen says lifting even the starter strand mass it is pretty silly, especially with checmical bi-prop rocketry. The smart thing to do is to capture a suitable asteroid and manufacture the ribbon in orbit. Course the delta V issues can be greater for either action depending on the scenarios used.But there are propulsion options in space you don't have at the bottom of a gravity well in an ecosystem we rely on for life support. Nuclear for one, Ion for another etc that could be used for steering an asteroid.
Less I am mistaken the 7.5 is for the single strand weight per klick.. I would expect it to be much higher for a full ribbon capable os supporting a sizeable crawler. Hell 50 pound test fishing line would be damn near 7.5kg per klick.
x tI d?hvarTextId=7602&hvarDept=100&hvarEvent=&hvarClas sCode=10&hvarSubCode=1&hvarTarget=browse
.
http://www.basspro-shops.com/servlet/catalog.Te
Using the strand as a possible radiator is a nifty idea but I doubt its very viable. but I think that comparison to the fishing line gives you a sense of the scale of the line.. it would kind of like using a copper wire from a phone chord to serve as a radiator for your car.
A 7.5kg per klick cable that is capable of supporting 268,402.5kg is very impressive not to mention doing more work for lifting. Not to mention thats the weight at geosynch, the cable actually has to be a couple of times longer acording to that web sight.
Also acording to that web site they have yet to construct even small composite ribbons with a gpa greater than 3.3 and carbon tubes greater than 22. 3.3 is right there with steel and kevlar and thats the practical application problem they have to solve to use it. In otherwords they have a material theoretically capable at its maximum of providing the strength needed ( ~130 gpa ) but they have yet to get even 50% of the theoretical max from lab samples. They have yet to create a composite construction utilizing the 22gpa material they have created that is stronger than conventional materials.
Thats more than incremental improovement problems. There are serious questions about how close to theoretical maximums you can get with just the base nanotubes, not to mention questions of how efficiently you can harness that strength in a composite construction. And those questions remain in the lab environemnt. Its another step to go from small test samples to a production capability of creating thousands of kilometers of quality controled ribbon en masse. Those are revolutionary materials science steps akin to going from stone to carbon steel
Don't get me wrong. I salivate over the idea of cheap easy access to space. However I just find that most of the elevator hype is nutz considering the the root material needed to make it a realistic consisderation has yet to exist even in a lab. Its a wonderfull idea but untill I can hold a 130gpa material in my hands I won't get overly excited about it.
I know the theory of nano tube material but 7.5 per klick seems too light even for that but lets go with it for S&G's.
/ _2 456.htm
35,787km * 7.5kg = 268,402.5kg worth of ribbon.
http://glossary.its.bldrdoc.gov/fs-1037/dir-017
shuttle payload is between 50 and 70k pounds depending on the orbiter/ET used. So ~23-~31,000 kg of which you now need enough extra fuel to boost to Geo stationary subtracting further the amount of ribbon you can take in one flight.
If you keep 20,000kg of payload capacity thats ~270,000kg/20,000 = 13.5 shuttle trips.
Doable. But you would need more fuel than that to boost to geostationary. A new larger capacity OMS or secondary boost system that does not exist now.
Shuttle is designed to take advantage of the earths shadow for thermal rejection. Once your orbit gets to high it begins having to spend too much time in the sun and it develops heat rejection problems. It causes problems even in LEO when the beta angles are high near the solstices and the common orbits used put it in more sun than shadow.
More thermal protection is more weight.
Its not that it can't work but shuttle isn't the answer. A heavy lift varient using shuttle components might be an answer.. Zurbin's Ares configuration comes to mind.
However before counting those chickens the elevator proponents had best focus on making the material and making it in quantity's needed to even consider launch issues. Hell they can't even make a strong enough varient in very controled lab conditions yet and without it this is beyound a pipe dream.
True that what we do is not necesarrily a good and natural thing to happen. However the relevence of warmer periods in earths history from which it recovered shows that our impact may or may not be as large or as irreversable as some claim them to be.
Most of the human impact global warming studies attempt to claim that it is human action and human actions alone responsible for the warming trend seen over the last couple of decades.
Now you take a study like this one and the solar variable studies and you find that a good chunk of what the human action studies claimed were due to human factors alone can in fact be contributed to completely natural earth weather pattern variation and they loose alot of steam out of their sails.
In fact when considering the results of largely agreed upon solar variation studies which human action studies did not account for, the resulting subtraction of those degrees of change from human action studies places their results back into the statistical margin of error region.. ie not a smoking gun, no statistical significant values of measureable change based on results of human action.
Fact: a single major volcanic erruption introduces more C02 into the atmosphere than mankind does in multiple years of production. I forget the exact number. I beilive there is a stat out there pointing out St. Helens dumped more C02 into the atmosphere than the US has produced in its entire industrial history. While your at it check the amounts released in the recent humongous forrest fires out west this past year as well. IN terms of industrial emmisions we are still puny in comparison to nature. In other words Earth has delt with larger problems than us.
However, I grant our long term effects can and perhaps are begining to add up to something dangerous but I firmly believe carrying capacity issues are going to cause a much larger concern for us before any emmision gases reach truly irrefutable significant levels. Regardless of what we do we will emit gasses that will play a role in earths weather. Thats one of the cornerstone deffinitions of life. We affect our surroundings. The larger and more powerful we get the more we will affect them. Replace all the C02 emmisions tommorrow with H20 from fuel cell emmisions and we will probbaly hear doom and gloom about that as well. Pontentially more storm systems, more cloud cover, leading to colder temps etc.... don't just consider enviromental concerns from the single angle that anything we are doing now is bad and any change made good. If we are emmitting gasses on a globaly significant level then ANY THING WE EMMIT IN REPLACEMENT WILL BE SIGNIFICANT AS WELL. Gasses at these levles are not produced for the hell of it and thinking you can simply x-nay these emissions without something replacing it are silly and in my book such thoughts are the first sign of an eco-wacky study. Good studies take more factors into account when considering possible actions to take and sometimes they include *gasp* compromises.
Finally if we can actively impact the eco system in a negative manner we can also actively impact it in a positive manner. Most eco concious groups talk about stopping or cleaning up when perhaps they could figure out ways to create industrial methods that work to counter act each other. There is more than one way to skin a cat. TO date in my book environmetalist and industrialists are both guilty of lack of long term thought. Industrialists in terms of impacts of waste emmissions and enviromentialists in terms of killing industry. Fact: environmental concerns to date are only considered in times of realtive ease. Toss us back into the depression and see how much people give a rats ass about 50 years from now. Not that its right. But it is reality and reality is what must be dealt with at some point.
Gracias
Largely you make good points but I have a couple of nits.
The saturn F-1 has even less launch time on it than SSME's have. SSME's have a similar reliability record to those systems you mentioned, in fact a better one I believe. Challenger was due to a problem in the SRB's.... in my mind one of the silliest design choices ever, and columbia's failure was a far different beast than any of the payload suystems your comparing it to. The F-1's were used 18 times in 5 packs or 90 launches.. SSME's gone 100+ times in 3 packs or 300+. However I grant SSME' have never been able to reach the economies of scale that would make them more cost effective than F-1's would have prooven to be to date.
No arguments that shuttle is a walking talking bassackwards contradiction of requirments but don't compare apples and oranges. The SSME's are one of the few successes operationaly speaking to come out of the shuttle design. If they ever reached production levels sufficient to benifit from economy of scale they would probably realize much of the economic benefit of resuseable engines. Until such time however single use boosters are more economically feasible. Reuseables also have that nagging re-entry requirment.
Further more shuttle has a +90% launch success rate and +80% mission success rate ( in terms of returning the crew ). And there is no telling if those systems ( other than soyuz ) would have similar if they also had to meet the requirment of returning their payloads to earth.
Furthermore I will take those numbers far more readily if you put up their rates for their first 100 flights. Souyuz lost two crews in its first 11 manned flights that we know of ( what number flight was challenger ? ). We still do not know the number or results of the parallel military missions with the same booster. I'm not knocking soyuz, it has become one hell of a robust design but it has had so many more launches with which to work out that design than shuttle.
Don't get me wrong, I am not that huge of a fan of giving shuttle that kind of design life.. even if we were to truly commit to the economies of scale that justified its design in the first place. But to me, the white elephant nature of shuttle is largely tied to the re-entry requirmeents that were levied on it. A shuttle stack tosses some 220k-230k into LEO which is suitably appoloesque, but currently freaking 150-170k of that is tied up in the orbiter/heatshield/engines. However, the launch stack of SRB's and SSME's has prooved a capable heavy lift platform with a 90% success rate in its first 100 launches. There are other possible configurations for it than a shuttle stack. Zurbins ARES proposal in particular strikes me... espeically if we went for a one shot SSME design or could devlope a reasonable return shield for the engines, or utlized boeings new 600k lbs thrust one time use monster, but I want to say its a kerosene lox design like the F-1... but thats not altogether a bad thing.. It would allow for a more compact ET varient in the ARES design. SRB's may be a necesarry evil with the limitations of checmical bi-prop desingns... they were initially developed for a future saturn modification and adopted by the shuttle design team if memory serves ( but I may be mixed up with some alternate history fiction ).
Soyuz can only return 3. The artical states they could return 6 with two on station.
The station was envisioned with a 7 man crew ultimately but that is with the addiction of the US hab module whose future is very uncertain at this point in time. At this point 2 crew have designed sleeping quaters and one sleep in an empty rack location in the US Lab.
Repairing the shuttle on orbit is almost a hysterical proposition. Each tile is cutom ground for its location. Granted if you knew which tiles needed replacing perhaps you could launch them on a soyuz or shuttle and arrange a towers of hanoi shuffle using the one docking station but then attaching them in space is a major question. You know how painting, gluing etc all have constrainints on tempreture for proper curing ?? The tile setting is similar and you have a vacume of space environment to adhere these tiles on in. I doubt the current methods used are practicible in space. perhaps there is a work around.
This whole idea of of using sation as a life raft for 10 people is somewhat absurd as well unless it was explicitly planned for. The life support systems on station are currently designed for sustained occupation by 3 people. The US hab module would add an extended capacity. Shuttles systems are designed for short periods of use, not sustained suport. Those systems might be maxed to a month... perhaps more if you planned it from the outset.
The problem is people consume and the system is not a closed loop. consumption has to be accounted for in the upmass. If station is equiped to handle three people for 3 months without resuply that slips to 1.5 months with 6 people and to 1 month with 9 and under a month with 10. It can be stretched of course but only so much.
Lastly the shuttle mission has to be designed to go to station to get to station. Shuttles typical ( most efficient ) orbit does not allow for a station rendezvous. I kind of question why shuttle would go anywhere else but with columbia that is an easy answer... being the first orbiter its strcture was significantly heavier than its sister ships and the extra boost needed to get to ISS orbit shrunk its effective payload to that orbit to a very marginal point. They were in fact considering retiring columbia a year or so ago due to this shortcoming.
Well thats kinda mars climate seasons writ large. As different poles get exposed to sunlight it evaporates the ice be it CO2 or H2O and it drasticly changes the suface temps etc... and then as it gets cold it all settles back down.Whats this series anyway ? I am surprised I havn't heard/read it. I tend to purchase mars sci-fi based on no mare than cover art
With mars gravitational well its escape velocity is such that trying to keep atmospheric gases is a net loss activity for the natural cycle. If we could artificialy accelerate the atmosphere generation we might make it habitable for a limited amount of time but I don't know if that limited time is geologic or truly limited IE we would lose it rapidly in terms of our perception.
I'd suggest seeing if you can find the math ascociated with generating atmosphere, specifically to martian dirt/resources if its out there. You need to find the energy needed to generate enough to raise the atmosphere to the point we would need it and then calculate the retention rate. My guess is your talking pretty mind boggling numbers, ie something on the order of the earths total current energy production ( or more ) dedicated to nothing by generating atmospheric gas for a long time. If you go grab Zurbin's book ( mars direct ) he talks about terraforming and the pitfalls energy levels etc.. don't have my copy handy. Just keep in mind he is a very strong proponent of mars exploration and remeber to go find some naysayers and judge with both sides of the story. If I recall one of zurbin's ideas is centered around a huge orbital solar reflector to cook the water and co2 out of the soil but its pretty fantastic. Theortically withen the bounds of real science but its quite a bit further out than say something like a sustained fusion reaction.
I'd say pass on the terreforming ideas initially and leave it to the dim future and initially focus on finding caverns and mining etc to create truly large subteranean living environments where we could foster significant colinization. Once you get that to self sustaining levels I think terreforming is simply a matter of time be it generations, centuries or mellenia, if we get a toe hold it will happen sooner or later.
Recent info from the surveyor is indicating in the northern climes the dirt is ~75% water by volume. in other words its dirty ice not icey dirt. Question is how deep it goes. The surveyors limitation is the first couple of feet.
One thing to remember though is if there is that much on the surface there is likely more deeper.. and the deeper you go the higher the preasure gets and the surface of mars is not far out of waters range for existence so the possibility of underground aquifiers in liquid form is getting stronger and stronger.... IE you might just be able to drill a well on mars much as you would on earth with the added complication of keeping it from boiling off once exposed to surface preassure/temps.
Enough for oceans ? I dunno. imagine if the earths oceans evaporated. For there to be enough underground water to replace them either that water seeped into the ground or there is that much down there already. However the idea of the evaporation that takes place on mars is that it does it and the atoms/molecules reach escape velocity. Dosn't mean there can't be alot of water down there but 'oceans' in terristrial terms I doubt very much. Can still be a honking lot of water though.