You know if you take that absolutely literally its funny as most people take it but few understand that fundamentally the guy is right on.
Relatively speaking compared to other planets mars is in roughly the same orbit as earth.. I belive withen 1-2% difference actually.
The canals are more and more likely turning out to be the result of flowing water or possibly CO2... good chance of both.
With water or CO2 there is OXYGEN. cO2 O is for oxygen, the 2 stating there are 2 oxygen atoms per molecule. H2O has one atom of oxygen per molecule. With the energy to split them there is oxygen to breathe. Combine that fact with Mars 'temperate' climate compared to venus's lead melting surface temps and mercuries sun blasted nature mars is the closet planet with abundant life sustaining resources 'easily' available . Far more so than the moon. if you doubt that compare the energy requirements to to extracting them from moon regolith someday, you will get the point rather fast. Next on the list is probably Titan ( around Saturn I believe ).
The way Quayle said it was funny but damn people, cut the man some slack.
First, concentrating hydrocarbon fuel burning, GAS, OIL, Coal etc into huge plants for the production of electricity to create hydrogen is a friendlier option to the environment. There is this thing called the economy of scale. We can make those plants cleaner per amount of fuel used than we can when it is disbursed among cars etc.... Ie 200 parts ber billion is better than 2000 parts per billion. keep the scales in mind and don't compare apples to oranges as many do when comparing car pollution to plant polution. plants are easy targets with their concentration.. but there are far fewer plants than cars and regulating their emmisions is a hell of alot easier than regulating cars. so funnling all the hydrocarbon mess through more easily managed choke points is a viable alternative in the short run.
Problem.
You still have to collect the oil, make gas, mine coal. That price dosn't go away you have to ship it to the plants and all of that is overhead into creating hydrogen for clean cars. That means the price point of hydrogen will never drop below that of striaght hydrocarbon combustion if hydrocarbon combustion is the genisis of the hydrogen.
not to mention that sticky issue of limited resources. Perhaps its 10 yeard down the road.. hell mabye its 100 or a 1000. But it is limited. the question is do we do something now or later. My guess is later but I would certianly preffer earlier.
Next.
Alternative, either solar, hydro thermal, hydro or of course nuclear.
Solar - Current solar panel efficiency is at 15% for your average 'affordable' panel. roughly 1000 watts of solar power hits a square meter. Meaning a square meter of solar panel collect 150 watts PEAK. 1 watt worth of solar panel is a steal at $4 a watt. So a square meter of panel costs $600. There are higher efficiency panels but the price jumps like CPU's at the upper echeclon. 15% at $4 a watt is the sweet spot.
First to generate the power to run our homes during the day is huge. The power to generate enough hydrogen to replace gas for use in cars is huge. both are expensive. And you need extra size in the array to generate enough energy to store enough hydrogen to run our homes when the sun goes down, larger than the online array cause you have to allow for the loss of energy in translation ( thermodynamic laws ). at best that 80% efficiency turning the sunlight to energy and 80% converting the hydrogen back to electricity for a net of a little more than 60% efficiency. So the array for non sunlight powered days has to be some 40% larger than the online grid during peak time. The gas generating array also has to capture 40% more power.TEHN you need margin of error otherwise you generate a scarce IE EXPENSIVE resource. THis is before considering industry or military needs.
Until we get more capable solar panels that are reasonably priced.. I mean pennies on the watt they are not the answer. They will always be fringe becasue of the loosing efficiency game you play with them. Wind power faces the same problem.
Hydro and Thermal are more useable but they are limited and damning up rivers etc has its own issues. Geo thermal is probably a more viable larger source of power than hydro. Hydro is pretty well utilized at this point. There is more there and improvements and tidal capture ideas but I don' think its a primary possibility.
Nuclear- This is an answer. 6-7000 nuclear plants of the current most powerfull models would provide enough power. Its doable. but we don't know what to do with the waste of about 50 public plants and a couple hundred military plants. Until we solve that problem fission is risky. perhaps its more controlable and we can at least concentrate our damage in one area instead of the wide spread distribution system we have currently.
Just remember you have to have that efficiency overhead.. IE you have to generate more nuclear power than you are going to reap from the hydrogen when you turn it back into electricity.best thing to do is to drive hom
CD's cost to much and.99 is a lot closer to what CD's cost than its is a bargain, though it does offer the freedomg to get just the good tracks.. but then if you can't listen to the tracks before buying your in the same quandry.
When I buy something its mine, I'm borrowing it, I'm not buying it for a time. its mine to do with as I please in line with fair use. Loose the hope people will swallow proprietary players and formats. give people what they want at a price they will pay and you will make millions. Try to bilk them for all they are worth when there is such an easy alternative and you will slowly loose customers till you have none left and someone else figures out how to give people what they want at a price they will pay.
Hell I'd pay 50 cents a song for the old napster in a heart beat, especially if it has assured access to the musics industries FULL catalouge with quality assured files. Hell if someone could pull off that access I might spring for a buck a song. I'd have to say I wouldn't be willing to pay much more than that. And my willingness to pay goes to nill with the first artificial restriction on how I choose to listen to what I buy.
Everyone is stuck on the anti ballistic job being touted as the primary and seemingly only ability this platform would be capable of performing.
UMMM imagine an awacs and a couple of these things being used for air deffense. Picture an awacs circling in friendly airspace right behind the zone of conflict. Two airborn platforms circling some optimum distance away to cover maximum territory also in friendly skies with a reach of several hundred miles ( longest air to air missle range in US inventory is still the Phoenix at ~100 miles. ). In sight are all the primary airfields of the enemy. AWACS detects fighters being scrambled in response to an allied sortie. They slap their gear up and then get lit up like the fourth of july. No million dollar missle expended, no multimillion dollar interceptor and its priceless crew placed in harms way penetrating enemy airspace to engage the enemy. Just a single shot from an energy weapon system that can provide far more shots than can be physcially carried in the form of a missle. IE you spend 200 million building the plane but get thousands of shots from the system vrsus 200 million for 200 missiles with a million dollar price tag... which I belive is roughly the current cost of an AMRAM.
If they have line of sight to a ground target they can light it up as well with less potential for collateral damage from shrapnel and initial explosion that you have from current convetional munitions, less likely hood of a targeting malfunction. Granted thats only as good as your intelligence but unlike current munitions your percentage of hitting what you aim at would be essentially 100%. Secondary explosions, damage from fires started would still be an issue.
This is like putting a howitzer on a 500mph mobile platform that has speed of light ammunition 40,000 feet up in the air... its INSANE what the potential is for an aireal laser with sufficient power to be a weapon at line of sight distances from jet cruising altitudes.
And I hope no one says targeting is an issue... I garontee targeting subsonic and low supersonic munitions succesfully to their subsonic, low supersonic targets is FAR more difficult than hitting a subsonic, low supersonic target with a beam of light. Were pretty good at the former, the latter is a piece of cake by comparison. The trick is building a mobile laser with a directable enough beam to take advantage of our ability to target and the speed of light.
IN other words what everyone is trying to say is the only way to sucessfully reject the energy of the laser is to have as capable a reflection and energy rejection system as is utilized by the lasers mirrors which require incredible cooling systems... mirrors and cooling are a large part of the expense and complexity of lasers, the cooling systems in particular account for alot of that weight which requires the 747 for a usefull size to house a weaponized lazer in the first place... and extra weight is the last thing you will ever see added to chemicle rocket designs.. their margins of performance are already slim.
Is it 21k ? I was just going off the top of my head, but I did thinkI had heared that... perhaps I read miles instead of klicks on a rounded up figure for a news story.
At anyrate I was pretty fuzzy about my point. Granted speed isn't much of an issue ( though the longer it takes the longer life support needs to be sustained if you have bone bags along for the ride ) but if your talking 100 vrs 200 mph cruise you have a real difference if your trip is 8 days long at one and 4 days with the other.The question then would be if it were the engine size needed or the physcial limitations that prooved the limiting factor. Or in other words if it was relatively painless to reach the physcial limit with either size or if the limits where far enough out that the power/engine requirements to accelerate the larger vehicle to a higher cruise speed became prohibitive.
lets see accelerate for 1 minute at an increase of 4mps per second to attain a top speed would be 240mps
accelerate at 1mps for 1 minute and your speed is 60mps or 1/4 of the speed. I don't see how that works out to 1/2 the transit time instead of 1/4.
Also you have the same energy requirements for both but your still accomplishing more with the lighter vehicle through the multiple trips. This would also mean your primary power tranmission capability would have its max requirments at the end points with minamal tranmission needs during the main part of the trip.
Physcial limitations are very real for the mechanisims which would likely cancel out the advantage to the lighter system unless its capable of attaining and sustaining the higher speed. Imagine trying to build a 10 or 20 tonne car that goes ~400 mph for what is essentially a 100k mile round trip without a mechacnical failure. Don't forget its traction has to be sufficient to maintain control in the vertical for that entire distance as well. Imagine the breaking system you would need to control 20 tonnes of mass for a 50k mile descent trip. I think the only continual operational examples currently that clock that kind of mileage are nuclear powerd naval ships and I am not sure even they have realed off any 50k trips without some kind of break be it a dock side visit or actual mechanical failure.50k miles without a mechanical failure does not imply that had it run for 50k miles continuously it would not have failed. The physcial technology needed for the crawler has also often been a glossed over point in my opinion. Its not a level of engineering we have ever had need of. Can we do it... probably... have we ? Not yet. Are there unsurmountable/major problems with accomplishing it ? Won't know till we do it or at least try.
Rocket/Jet engines for non traction based primary acceleration/de-celeration............. UMMMMMMMMM, if you can propell it 50k miles from the surface of the earth without using the cable you don't NEED the cable. Perhaps as an augmentation that allows a running start and a later deceleration but the penalty in carrying the extra system and its fuel would likely not gain you a hell of alot in return for their use ( attianing your cruise velocity a few seconds/minutes sooner dosn't net you a lot of gain if your cruising for days ). Furthermore The benifit of the traction system is in carrying only the engine and traction system with a highly efficient energy transfer and means of leverage compared to mass ejection propellant solutions. Then instead of carrying fuel you beam the power via microwave or laser beams. Far more efficient than carrying the fuel, or stringing a 50k mile long power line along with the elevator cable.
Perhaps the book covers it...
on
The Space Elevator
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
But couple of issues.
50,000 miles is a long way for a mechanical crawler. Escpecially one that amounts to a 20 tonne capacity elevator and it could never exert more than the load limit in terms of force.. IE if 20 tonnes is the theoretical maximum for the 130 rated nano tubes then lifting 20 tonnes at say a 9.8 mps (1G) acceleration would be roughly 40 tonnes of force on the cable meaning a broken cable. Thus you would likely be lifting 18 tonnes and having low acceleration loads, you also could not exceed that load when decelerating. Hitting the gas or breaks to hard could lead to exceeding the cables strength. I am wondering if a lighter system with more leeway to zip up and down the cable would not allow for easier and more timely transfer of mass.
for example:
If you can accelerate/decelerate at 1g with a 20 tonne vehicle (40 tonnes of force ) then you can accelerate at 4g's with a 10 tonne vehicle ( also 40 tonnes of force ). This means you can go ~4 times as fast which is a very significant difference when dealing with long transit distances. So a 20 day round trip by the 20 tonne could be accopmlished in 5 days by the ten tonne and would allow for 4 trips in the same time. Even if the 10 tonne only had 30% of the cargo capactiy it lifts more in the same amount of time over the long haul. You get that benifit whatever the units of acceleation are be it G or more likely in fractional G acceleration loads. And the smaller the rates we are dealing with the larger the impact is of relatively small increases.
Don't get me wrong, the idea is great but the margin of error here sounds awfully thin esepcially considering the key material hasn't reached its theoretical proving point in a LAB much less in a mass production environment. Once they do that I say full steam ahead. But until then its a bit premature to start tossing out headlines reading "Space elevator for just 6 billion "
perhaps if it read "Space elevator for just 6 billion IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF"
"You have some decent ideas here, but the organization, spelling, and punctuation are reprehensible."
Phunny, same thing my english teachers have said to me through the years:-). I know I am horrible at puncuation/spelling and true enough I'm lazy; However, that laziness has very little to do with computers. My spelling in particular stems more from my laziness in utilizing a spellcheck function than my status as someone who is computer savy. In other words, my LACK of utilization of a computer as opposed to my use of a computer. Besides, my feelings regarding spelling are summed up by a quote I hear most often atributed to Samuel Clemmens.
" It takes a small mind to conceive of spelling a word in only one way "
I agree that Computer-savvy != educated != smart. However, Grammatic perfection != educated != smart.
God knows how many grammatically correct papers, ideas, etc... I have read through that were not worth the paper or pixels they were printed with. I'm sure you have as well unless you are trying to claim that grammatical perfection automaticaly imbues any post/book/paper with intelligence and fully educated thoughts/opinions ?
" If you're going to argue that spelling doesn't matter in a forum like this, then I have to ask: Why did you bother posting your thoughts here if you don't care how your ideas are taken by others."
Are you suggesting I should be overly concerned with the thoughts of those who would base their judgements more on appearance/presentation than on content ? I try my best not to "judge books by their covers" and hope others do as well. If they don't thats their loss not mine.
OTOH, my crappy organization was the result of a slap dash stream of conciousness rant with very little review or alteration dashed out in about 10 minutes or so of break time at work. I do appologise if as such it prooved difficult to puzzle out what I had to say.
Now, back to the point of the post. I find some irony in that you're point seems to be I am lazy because I am computer savy and that others become so as well. Despite the fact the mistakes you specifically pointed out are easily corrected by a 2 min run through a spell checker which any computer savy person would do right ?:-) Seriously, people are lazy with Pen and Paper as much or more than they are with computers. Computers simply have an amazing ability to maginify the effect of laziness. Yet, at the root of the problem it is the person who provides the laziness, not the tool. Computers are not to blame for my poor spelling. I AM !!!
I think the posts about PEN and PAPER being superior learning tools over a laptop and this techno phobia of calculators doing work and spell check replacing spelling bees is ridiculose.
The modern world is slowly becoming more and more computer driven. Why are we trying to keep our learning process stuck in past times ? When you tally figures at work your telling me you don't check it with a calculator ? When solving engineering problems you don't use a computer ? When you write a report you don't use spell check ? All a calculator/copmuter does is provide a different sort of scratch paper and error checking tool. One that is far less subject to human error. Computers are better at general computing and mundane detail checking than we are so why is there such a problem with relying on them to do perform these calculations ? For math the only place left where manual calculation is a matter of importance is in the class room ( and at some theoretical extremes ) and its time to stop it from being so idealized there as well. There is a point of over reliance and a point at which you need to understand how a computer does what it does but for everyday life these instances are few and far between and last time I checked thats what school was about... preparing you for the real world. Well folks the real world has computers and knowledge of them and use of them is fast becoming a dividing line between the haves and have nots in our society. The way we are going I say give it a decade or two and not knowing how to use a computer is going to be moraly equivalent to not being able to read/write today. This is already the case in tech industries. The sooner schools refelct this reality the better, primary schooling is lagging terribly behind.
This is a wonderful program IF they can sustain it and keep the technology relavent and continue to integrate it as a tool and not as a solution. So far most programs seeking to get computers into schools have used the computer as a solution in and of itself, not as a tool. And largely they couldn't be utilized as a tool becasue they were not universaly available. This is one of the few isntances where I have heard of computers being universally integrated and there for able to be depended upon as a tool available to students instead of as a luxury only partially available. Hopefully the success they have enjoyed will lead to sustained support of the program that will be needed to keep it susccesfull. Most other computing programs to date have not met with anywhere near the success enjoyed here and thus quickly become white whale programs that are rarely sustained ( nor should they have been ) thus creating the numerous antiquated ghost labs or sole classroom computer found in many schools from various feeble attempts to integrate computers and the educational progress.
For computers to work in the educational environment they are going to have to replace books as the primary interface for transfer of knowledge in classrooms. This is not to say replace entirely, but they have to become a fundamental method of transfering knowledge instead of an oddball method and they can't do that until you have universal access such as provided by giving ALL students a laptop or some similar form of versatile mobile technology for disiminating information in a digital medium. In this they are competing largely with books and there is the old saying " this town aint big enough for the both of em ". I think eventually it will come down to an either or decision and long term there is little doubt in my mind of the winner. In the short term there will be co-existence while the technology matures enough to take over more permanently. As the tech gets more mobile and can compete with books for legibility and versatility you will see books being abandoned but not until then and likley they will hang on regardless.. ie handwritting hasn't gone away since the inception of the printing press but its domain or use has continually shrunk ever since I forsee something similar happening with the printed page.
I think you missed the point. The automobile is more than an ecological nightmare, its a crowning symbol of personal wealth in the first world. What he is saying is its imposisble to elevate everyone to the current first world standard of living utilizing the earths resources. As you point out thats likely not a desireable thing to do anyway. However people want to live good thus this creates friction... everyone wants to live 'the life' but not everyone can and thats something people are willing to fight over. Whether 'the life' is owning a car and a house with a picket fence with 2.3 kids or whatever the fact remains there is a carrying capacity of the earth and eleveating everyone to that level requires insane amounts of energy and production that we don't have and dosn't look to be in the cards terrestially speaking.
Intresting link with a good all round look at the DRM vrs Fair Use issue. Peronally I don't think the companies get it. They need to get back in touch with the fact that the customer is always right. Right now the customers who have braod band access are thumbing their collective noses at the music industry because the industry is thumbing their noses at them. Get with the times folks, your hoarding bronze weapons when steel is on the market.
In regards to this joke of a music service being offered I have this to say. As long as they are going to practice highway robbery there will be pirates aplenty. Pave a 6 lane highway with no speed bumps and you might be amazed how many people are willing to pay to use it. You know this service reminds me of the end of Blazing saddles where they put up the Toll booth on the prarie only they expect it to work in real life.
That 40k only represents their end of the year bank account, most people I know would love to work/live for a year and have 40k more in the bank at the end of the year than they began with. Much less live a year as a 500,000 record selling major lable backed Rock Act copmlete with Groupies and red carpet events/treatment.
Not that I don't think they should get a little thicker slice of the pie, just that those numbers are very deceptive. Perhaps that sanitation worker gets 40k a year but he spends that 40k to live on. At the end of the year they might have a couple thousand in the bank left over. In the mean time He/she was living paycheck to paycheck making rent/bills and perhaps hitting the club scene most weekends as a beer swilling drone.
40k a year before living expenses and 40k a year after living expenses are two VERY different things.
Record cuts need to come after expenses not before same as artists or artists royaties need to be figured before expenses same as the Lables cut.
The Bands debt needs to be wiped out once the investment is paid back at reasonable return ( laws geverning loan sharking would be usefull here ).
Right now the lables up front investment/loan to the artist is only considered paid off when collected from the artists royalties despite the fact the lable reaps back the amount invested and a good bit besides in its own share of the proceeds long before the after expenses royalties amount is sufficient to cancle that debt alone, and indeed it is carefully balanced so that few ever do.
Less popular bands are not nearly the risk lables say they are. Take those numbers and set forth the initial money the record company plops down, now find the break even point on record sales for the lable acording to Albini's numbers. The number is alot lower than the 500,000 mark. Take those numbers... off the top of my head I belive it was $900k to the lable for 500k record sales or $1.80 and album. They invested 300,000 and got that back and a little more by the time 200k units were sold. Not to mention thats ONLY from their cut of the sales, they are also at this point collecting the artists royaties ostensibly to pay back their loan. So the record company has broken even from its cut and the artists royalties recieved to that point are whoely profit or return on the investment. If you called it square there then the artists recieves their royalties free and clear and the record lable continues to collect its share and that end figure for the artists changes a whole hell of alot.
Lets put that in a simple sentence
The lable collects its cut and the artists cut until the artists cut alone pays off the investment.
Another way
The lable makes money seperate of the artist on the sale of the album and yet only considers their invest paid off when the artists money pays off the loan.
This is completely and totally unfair. You change that so that the artist's debt is cleared once the lable makes its money back plus a reasonable return and the artist starts collecting full royalties a hell of alot sooner than they do now. This dosn't impact the lables bottom line much ( changes their debt and profit lines accordingly but they sum out pretty much the same ) But it does remove the debt anvil they generally get to hang over the artists head for sub 500k album sales. I mean oh tisk tisk we made a bundle but you didn't make enough to pay us back, here we will loan you some of this money you made us so you can make us some more money and owe us even more.
Fitness: Get in shape now... don't give me that smaht@$$ crap, do it or you will regret it you little snot nosed brat.
General: Crash and burn to live and learn, repeat as necesarry when dealing with Women.
Women: Find someone with a cluebat and ask them to apply it liberally as often as possible and pray for the day you actually develope a clue. In the meantime dtich the trumpet for the Guitar now instead of later. Learn to dance, sure you feel stupid but it pays off... truuuust me.
Job: Your right, the computer job market will go to shit when you graduate, don't worry you will be happy with where you wind up and you wouldn't belive me if I told you. Besides I wouldn't want to ruin the surprise.
Well that is indeed the literary definition but I was reffering more to the fact that most court prcedent ties piracy in IP disputes directly to profit/finacial transactions. In light of this one of the recent/. stories was about the RIAA attempting to establish a precedent where the mere aquisition of copyrighted material was declared profit.
As for the distribution issue I dunno. Its obviously a problem but the solution is worse than the disease in my opinion. At least if the solution is stringing up participants in communal digital distribution networks. If napster/kaza/gnutella etc... or anyone on their network were chargeing for access to a shared music database I'd have said string em up and keelhaul them. Personally I think the actions taken against Napster were akin to holding Honda Responsible for street racing that kids do with their cars.
The other thing is music has a real catch 22 that things like software and books do not. They broadcast music via TV/CABLE and Radio which are all subject to fair use.. IE I can legally record them and so can EVERYBODY else. Thus having a copy of anything I could have listend to in a broadcast is technically something I have a right too. The recording industry let fair use slide without a whole lot of challenge intially becasue there was no concievable way of everyone actually having a fair use copy of broadcast material for two reasons... one they wouldn't be willing to do the actual recording themselves for the most part and two they could not obtain a copy for free. IE their friends were unlikely to do it for them for free ( cost of tape if nothing else ) and certainly an organization wasn't going to do it for free. Communal digital sharing via the NET, on the otherhand, provides such an ability and it has scared them starkers which is why they are attacking P2P and attempting to subvert fair use like there is no tommorrow. Yesterdays impossibility is todays reality.
Of course there is the issue of a copy of a CD song versus a radio/mtv broadcast track but that isn't a very extensive area that has been challenged in courts. It's something I anticipate sooner or later... besides for the most part radios/mtv are broadcasting the album tracks you buy due to the fact they are in a sense advertisements. thats a whole other can of worms and when/if it gets opened it will be the end game of this whole mess.
All in all while I can see the music industries beef I firmly belive their are rights on both sides of the table and there is no garonteed right that makeing/producing music equates to people buying it. I feel if people are unwilling to buy music and are willing to freely share what they have thats fine, it will likely reduce the amount of music created but some how I doubt it. On the other hand it will be the death of the music industry as we know it and while people losing their job is a bad thing there is this thing called change and it does happen.
The key to my viewpoint is free. If no one is making money sharing the music then the artists and producers have no beef, after all 5% of nothing is nothing and they get all of that out of P2P and more. Copyright law is all about protecting the right to sell and profit from the reproduction of IP. It simply dosn't hold in the advent of transactionless communal sharing. Change happens, the RIAA needs to adapt to the new reality or go the way of the DoDo, muscicians are already begining to adapt.
Let me define exhaustive as beyond human capacity. True enough that Kasparov has a library in his head but more importantly he has conceptual knowledge. He might be able to fully regurgitate dozens, possibly even hundreds of games move for move and I'll give him the benifit of the doubt and say he has perfect recall of all of that while he is playing a game, but Deep Blue and Deep Junior have game archives in the thousands and permuation archives possibly out into the millions that they can search for a match to a current board configuration in seconds not to mention an ability to compare multiple game states at several moves deep that a human can only dream of. Yet it still has no concept, it can't concieve new lines.
Kasparov understands WHY you make a move which is very different from simply knowing what move(s) has been made before. I will be impressed when the computer can reason out a move as opposed to matching a stored response. Incidentally I have played a few people who try to play like a computer, they are tough only so long as you play to their knowledge. They tend to be very helpless if you can direct them into an unexplored line ( especially if you know what they have studied ) even if tactically its weaker.... the same weakness brute force computer algo's tend to have. Its realtively easy to get a person to an un-explored line as human memory is generaly limited in this respect, a solid copmuter algo with an Exhaustive library is far more difficult to de-rail.
In short I'll be impressed when the program thinks for itself. Don't get me wrong... both Jr, and Blue are impressive machines and their match successes are a testement to the advancing field of Machine AI but right now its the Puncher beating the Boxer and that has its appeal... but the true Advent of AI will be when we see a boxer and a boxer squared off.
First show em office space.... make sure they get the memo.
After the movie finishes tell them its got a large essence of truth.... turn the lights on, the ones that are left you can start teaching how to code.
Don't spend a whole freaking semseter on the tools, whiles, ifs etc... frankly if it takes them 3+ months to grasp the basics of a language they are FUBAR and should run screaming from the field before they get ensared in it. Don't be a syntax Nazi, computers no longer require punch cards and carefull scheduling to test a program.
Introduce them to real world application problems ASAP, open source is a perfect educational opportunity just waiting to be made use of. Whether they officially add to the source code of the project, develop in tandem or produce a fork makes no matter so long as they are dealing with something real. Granted wading into an open source project is not for the newbie forsh with no idea how to write a line of code but by the time they reach junior/senoir status they are theoretically supposed to be nearing the point in time where they can contribute meaningful code to a real world project. In reality that is something that in most CS programs is the exception, not the rule.
finally TIMTOWTDI !! god how I hated teachers that thought there was only one solution.
The RIAA's current efforts are like Horse Breeders at the turn of the last century complaining about the comming of the car. people are going to get form place to place the best way possible and they will obtain and listen to music the same way. Right now nobody is offering a way to pay for what P2P provides.
Treating people who copy and distribute IP freely the same as commercial pirating ventures out for profit via re-production of IP material is absolutely absurd. Restricting the flow of information soley to prevent this communal sharring which the digital age has made feasible is severely detrimental to society and taken to the extreme it makes the advantage of information sharing presented by copmuters and the internet largely moot.
The old models are broken people and the real problem with discussions regarding this issue is that people are fundamentally seperated into two groups, those who are attempting to adapt values to the realities of a digital society and those who have maintained the old values and attempted to transfer them. Simply put, Classic value systems regarding physical media are outmoded when applied to digital data.
I am not necesarrily saying copying and copying freely is fundamentaly right, just that they are not equivalent actions to the physicaly and capitalistic profit based concepts of stealing or piracy. The RIAA is persuing them as if they are equivalent and that is not right or just and the odds are they are going to seriously trample over some people before the system finally works to correct the situation.
The ability to freely share digital information that has come with a digital society is a very good thing but obviously it is going to present some serious challenges for the industries which have built up for centuries around physical distriubution of things which are now capable of being digitized and which people are now begining to desire in a digital format. Trying to restrict this new ability to a faithful reproduction of the system which governs the exchange of physicaly based information will also maintain the limitations of physcial media which defeats the whole damn purpose of having a widely acessible digital domain in the first place.
Values need to change. We need to decide if we even WANT the digital domain to be subject to the same costs and restrictions as physcial distribution systems. The reasons for doing so before was the protectors of the producers of the material ( ie printing is EXPENSIVE and necesarry ) however that is not the case with a digital infrastructure, the paradigm has changed. Right now we can choose to take digital information rights/distribution down a down a differant path than pysical which is by and by what most people using Napster/Kaza/Gnutella are doing. Right now RIAA's sole claim to rightousnous is in the prosecution of laws that were made in ignorance of what the future would bring. The Digital Mellinium Act has yet to go fully through the judicial review process and I think by and by it is going to sooner or later come to a landmark decision in the supreme court. Unfortunaltly the process is a hell of alot slower in real time than it is reading about it in a history book.
In short I think the RIAA would be much better off it it spent all the money it is wasting on P2P litigation instead on finding a way to harness P2P. Instead they are too stuck on the fact that their 'cheeze' supply is dwindling.
When a Computer can beat a GM without an exaustive move library. The problem with the move library and deep tree search is that in the event of strong matches and algorythmic solutions is the choice being made is the one either derived by the human player in the recorded match.. not by the chess program itself. In the event of mathmatical solutions such as the limited end game scenarios this is rearly any differant than a human/human game especailly between masters... though as computers get progressively more copmutational power they are able to mathmatically solve an end game with more and more pieces which is kind of like a computer being able to sort faster and more acurately.... not something indicative of intelligence.
When the chess program can take nothing but its knowledge of the rules and its own experience and re-creates or improoves on the same decisions when presented with classic game states then Tourings challenge will be trully acomplished.
To me the accopmlishments of Deep Blue and Deep Junior are somewhat akin to a computer being able to sort a list faster than a person. Its apples and oranges, a computer has yet to truly play a game of chess in my book. They have however very effectively indexed and to some extent abstracted massive game archive records to effectively choose from past sucesfull HUMAN decisions.
Again its impressive.... but when they can create those decisions in ignorance of what has been done/tried before and can consistently make the same level of decision without haveing that database it will be truly unreal.
ummmmm GIGO, the compiler knows where it halts or if it exits after all without it, it won't run anyway. No matter how you abstract the halting problem you still ahve to establish a syntax with set rules and syntax is what a computer follows better than a human.. in fact in this case the syntax and resultant compiler defines in and of itself where it halts or exits thus the compiler solves the halting problem in a manner of speaking which is why most people these days debug code by running it and letting the chine show them where it hangs then they waste their brain cells on figuring out why it hangs when they KNOW it shouldn't.
No I wouldn't say that they don't believe... in fact they know to the nth degree what shit can happen. Its simply not feasible to provide for every concievable scenario and adequately provide for it. Space explorations missions are a toss of the dice to begin with and most things that can go bad go bad very fast meaning very few scenarios where a rescue would have even a slim chance of success. Thus you can choose to spend a great deal of money on the ability to mount a rescue flight on the remote chance something happens to cripple a mision without killing the crew where there is enough time to launch and rendezvous ( 24+ hours minimum if you launch at the first sign of trouble at the first available launch window )... or you can take that money and do your best to ensure you never need a rescue mission. Logically the choice is obvious if its a choice you have to make.
In the short term I fully believe the answer to this tragedy is its dangerous and shit happens. In the long term the answer to increased safety is orbital infrastructure. Right now manned orbital infrastructure consists of sporadic visits by shuttles and soyuz with the only permanent presence being ISS. And for the events of this weekend ISS was like a gas station in prauge when you need one now in florida. And you can't have infrastructure before you have alot of flights without it or very little of it. thats having the chicken before the egg.
I don't think we can waste the time wondering what choices we might have made differeantly but instead should focus on what we can do from here. Retreating and re-grouping and deciding on another course of action is not an option. We have station and abandonning it now would waste all the painfully gathered momentum for a permanent outpost and the beginings of an infrastructure for orbital operations. Some times the correct choice is "Damn the Torpedoes and full speed ahead". Some things are worth dieing for and at least in my opinion this is one of those things.
Station - not an option. ISS is in a completely different orbit than was being used by columbia which was an orbit generally used by shuttle to date.. its a relatively low orbit even for shuttle ops designed for max payload ability.
Russian launch - not an option even if it had been a soyuz, the reason Stations orbit is so funky as compared to shuttles normal orbit is so that Soyuz AND shuttle can make it to ISS. ISS orbit isnot ideal for either and to add isult to injury to reduce reboost requirements they have it as high as is feasible while still retaining a modicum of payload abilities from Soyuz and Shuttle. Even if they could send them you need a crew of two to operate the Soyuz and it seats three. One saved is better than all lost but thats assuming you could get the one from columbia to the rescue vehicle without an ARM, docking ability, or EVA jetpack. My gut says it could be done but the odds in Vegas would be pretty long. However its moot since soyuz can't make the orbit anyway.
Shuttle Launch - Most possible rescue scenario. However Atlantis was not ready to launch and still had its remaining pre-launch saftey checks that would by and by have to be tossed out the window. Next, Atlantis is the shuttle with the most launches at 30. It was the most ready to launch by far as the others are well behind Atlantis in the pre-launch prep process. Was Columbias failure due to age/stress ? If so why would you then launch Atlantis which would be at even greater risk of failure ? Was the failure due to any shuttle design flaw that Atlantis would also be subject too ? How long to determine that ? Atlantis was equiped and loaded to go to ISS, you would likely want a differant payload ability and that takes time and removes what safety checks had already been completed on payload stowage. The airlock talk is bogus, the Mideck design includes an airlock which was in general a passthrough for the science lab however it could be used for EVA with loss of the Lab if memory serves. However were their EVA suits for all seven ? EVA suits are specially fitted and don't have much tolerance for error, they are also heavy and create a significant paylaod issue if not needed, just rushing 7 EVA suits to orbit might not work.
Could it have been laid on and done ?? again my gut says yes. An awful lot of the saftey process surrounding shuttle launch is double/triple quadrupal checking on top of being double damn sure already nothing is wrong. As a one time op with a minimal level of checks laid on with a crew understanding what was at stake, the crew probably comes out shinning. In that situation you simply havn't reduced the odds of a mistake being made and caught to usual levels and given its a one time risk you probably get away with it so you are left with a one time high level alert process risk of a mistake having been made.... not a good choice for consistent ops, however for an emergency op it could have been deemed a worthwhile risk IMHO. HOWEVER there is a catch. There are some checks on a launch that are not 5 extra layers of redundancy that can be shed in an emergency. Example: As we have become acustomed when a problem happens on an orbiter it grounds all the orbiters until the flaw is identified and fixed. Unless we could conclusively have stated that there was a problem and that is was not a congenital problem in the design with an as before unkown risk. This is not a redundant check. Skipping it is not optional and launching without clearing Atlantis from that standpoint would have been moraly equivalent to trying to save someone who fell through thin ice on a lake by tossing someone else in after them. Doing all of these things requires time. Columbia didn't have time, it had very limited ability to extend its stay. The foam evaluation was not complete till flight day 12 of 16. If that evaluation had sent NASA scurrying to launch a second shuttle for a rescue mission it would have had to have been done in 4-8 days mabye as many as 10 and who knows for whatever engineering ingenuity that came to the fore or difficult decisions ( loss of some crew to let others survive longer ? ) made. Thus the odds of being able to launch a rescue with any reasonable hope of success over simply adding to the tragedy rapidly approaches nil. Not all difficult situations surround actions taken... deciding not to take action can be just as difficult.
Thus when you boil it down once Columbia made orbit it had but one choice for survival, survive re-entry. Once you re-enter you get bail out options in addition to landing but odds are if you survive re-entry you will be able to land as the margin of error for re-entry survival is very thin. Meaning if you survive it you are most likely in reasonably good condition. There are no gentler flight profiles. No swapping of risk management, if there was a better way they would already be using it. Just like on launch the very ragged edge of the envelope is being tested. On launch its generating the needed power to reach escape velocity, on re-entry its the absorbtion of atmosphereic friction generated by orbital velocities.
To cap it all off the earliest it was known there was a problem was after they commited to re-entry. People can yap about the foam all they like but they miss the point about the foam having happend before. They had data points, they had a good idea of the damage levels foam was capable of however as they have repeatedly said, even if foam did insane amounts of damage and is the sole cause of the breakup there were no options other than to attempt re-entry and pray they made it through. If you still stick on a shuttle rescue launch think on it from the other side fo the tragedy. Before you KNOW columbia was going to meet its fate the best minds evaluated the risk and found it more or less not a risk. Worst case was limited localized structural damage and drawing from previous experience with foam problems they didn't even expect that. Now based on that information why would you lay on a risky launch just in case that estimate was wrong ? Perhaps an inspection of some kind would have altered the estimate. Perhaps but then you unwrap the question of one time problem versus congenital design/process problem.. all the while the clock is ticking. Even if its obviously a one time unique problem you now have to lay on a hasty launch risking a hell of alot of known possible risks with mistakes made. I'd say even had we known it was unique as quickly as possible it woudl have been a 50/50 call on trying to rush Atlantis up espcscially given even in that case the odds still saide they would survive. If an inspection prooved they were obviously a lame duck AND it was obviously a unique problem toss a coin on the rescue launch. I certainly know I wouldn't want to make the call.
Much as I hate to put it this way... Shit Happens and it happend last weekend despite the efforts of THOUSANDS of dedicated people whose job is to see that the SHIT that happend dosn't happen. Its a loosing battle because shit does indeed happen and there is nothing we can do about it but honor the ones lost and continue on and continue to do our best to see that shit dosn't happen again. Not to mention as it seems to become more and more likely the root problem was not the foam impact at launch the less and less likely there woudl have been any serious problem to be revealed on orbit thus making the whole notion of a rescue launch even thinkable short of having Mdame Cleo call to tell us what was going to happen.
Crew exchange needs are taking up the third seat unless they go to a two man crew in which event you still need only two as their are three people up there. Its like muscial chairs, taking a tourist when trying to do a crew rotation means somebody is without a seat. If they go to a two man maintnence crew the next rotation flight could carry a replacement crew of two and a paying customer and still bring back the tourist only that means you can't send an american or other IP astronaught which may happen but I doubt it... in that scenario its likey the third seat would be for a non-russian and the other two for the russian flight crew needed to operate a soyuz launch one of which would also be a russian station crew person. Its not really a danger issue... especially since soyuz is not shuttle and thus any danger increase now ascociated to shuttle does not apply to soyuz.
Slashdot Mirror
You know if you take that absolutely literally its funny as most people take it but few understand that fundamentally the guy is right on.
Relatively speaking compared to other planets mars is in roughly the same orbit as earth.. I belive withen 1-2% difference actually.
The canals are more and more likely turning out to be the result of flowing water or possibly CO2... good chance of both.
With water or CO2 there is OXYGEN. cO2 O is for oxygen, the 2 stating there are 2 oxygen atoms per molecule. H2O has one atom of oxygen per molecule. With the energy to split them there is oxygen to breathe. Combine that fact with Mars 'temperate' climate compared to venus's lead melting surface temps and mercuries sun blasted nature mars is the closet planet with abundant life sustaining resources 'easily' available . Far more so than the moon. if you doubt that compare the energy requirements to to extracting them from moon regolith someday, you will get the point rather fast. Next on the list is probably Titan ( around Saturn I believe ).
The way Quayle said it was funny but damn people, cut the man some slack.
Ok,
First, concentrating hydrocarbon fuel burning, GAS, OIL, Coal etc into huge plants for the production of electricity to create hydrogen is a friendlier option to the environment. There is this thing called the economy of scale. We can make those plants cleaner per amount of fuel used than we can when it is disbursed among cars etc.... Ie 200 parts ber billion is better than 2000 parts per billion. keep the scales in mind and don't compare apples to oranges as many do when comparing car pollution to plant polution. plants are easy targets with their concentration.. but there are far fewer plants than cars and regulating their emmisions is a hell of alot easier than regulating cars. so funnling all the hydrocarbon mess through more easily managed choke points is a viable alternative in the short run.
Problem.
You still have to collect the oil, make gas, mine coal. That price dosn't go away you have to ship it to the plants and all of that is overhead into creating hydrogen for clean cars. That means the price point of hydrogen will never drop below that of striaght hydrocarbon combustion if hydrocarbon combustion is the genisis of the hydrogen.
not to mention that sticky issue of limited resources. Perhaps its 10 yeard down the road.. hell mabye its 100 or a 1000. But it is limited. the question is do we do something now or later. My guess is later but I would certianly preffer earlier.
Next.
Alternative, either solar, hydro thermal, hydro or of course nuclear.
Solar - Current solar panel efficiency is at 15% for your average 'affordable' panel. roughly 1000 watts of solar power hits a square meter. Meaning a square meter of solar panel collect 150 watts PEAK. 1 watt worth of solar panel is a steal at $4 a watt. So a square meter of panel costs $600. There are higher efficiency panels but the price jumps like CPU's at the upper echeclon. 15% at $4 a watt is the sweet spot.
First to generate the power to run our homes during the day is huge. The power to generate enough hydrogen to replace gas for use in cars is huge. both are expensive. And you need extra size in the array to generate enough energy to store enough hydrogen to run our homes when the sun goes down, larger than the online array cause you have to allow for the loss of energy in translation ( thermodynamic laws ). at best that 80% efficiency turning the sunlight to energy and 80% converting the hydrogen back to electricity for a net of a little more than 60% efficiency. So the array for non sunlight powered days has to be some 40% larger than the online grid during peak time. The gas generating array also has to capture 40% more power.TEHN you need margin of error otherwise you generate a scarce IE EXPENSIVE resource. THis is before considering industry or military needs.
Until we get more capable solar panels that are reasonably priced.. I mean pennies on the watt they are not the answer. They will always be fringe becasue of the loosing efficiency game you play with them. Wind power faces the same problem.
Hydro and Thermal are more useable but they are limited and damning up rivers etc has its own issues. Geo thermal is probably a more viable larger source of power than hydro. Hydro is pretty well utilized at this point. There is more there and improvements and tidal capture ideas but I don' think its a primary possibility.
Nuclear- This is an answer. 6-7000 nuclear plants of the current most powerfull models would provide enough power. Its doable. but we don't know what to do with the waste of about 50 public plants and a couple hundred military plants. Until we solve that problem fission is risky. perhaps its more controlable and we can at least concentrate our damage in one area instead of the wide spread distribution system we have currently.
Just remember you have to have that efficiency overhead.. IE you have to generate more nuclear power than you are going to reap from the hydrogen when you turn it back into electricity.best thing to do is to drive hom
CD's cost to much and .99 is a lot closer to what CD's cost than its is a bargain, though it does offer the freedomg to get just the good tracks.. but then if you can't listen to the tracks before buying your in the same quandry.
When I buy something its mine, I'm borrowing it, I'm not buying it for a time. its mine to do with as I please in line with fair use. Loose the hope people will swallow proprietary players and formats. give people what they want at a price they will pay and you will make millions. Try to bilk them for all they are worth when there is such an easy alternative and you will slowly loose customers till you have none left and someone else figures out how to give people what they want at a price they will pay.
Hell I'd pay 50 cents a song for the old napster in a heart beat, especially if it has assured access to the musics industries FULL catalouge with quality assured files. Hell if someone could pull off that access I might spring for a buck a song. I'd have to say I wouldn't be willing to pay much more than that. And my willingness to pay goes to nill with the first artificial restriction on how I choose to listen to what I buy.
Everyone is stuck on the anti ballistic job being touted as the primary and seemingly only ability this platform would be capable of performing.
UMMM imagine an awacs and a couple of these things being used for air deffense. Picture an awacs circling in friendly airspace right behind the zone of conflict. Two airborn platforms circling some optimum distance away to cover maximum territory also in friendly skies with a reach of several hundred miles ( longest air to air missle range in US inventory is still the Phoenix at ~100 miles. ). In sight are all the primary airfields of the enemy. AWACS detects fighters being scrambled in response to an allied sortie. They slap their gear up and then get lit up like the fourth of july. No million dollar missle expended, no multimillion dollar interceptor and its priceless crew placed in harms way penetrating enemy airspace to engage the enemy. Just a single shot from an energy weapon system that can provide far more shots than can be physcially carried in the form of a missle. IE you spend 200 million building the plane but get thousands of shots from the system vrsus 200 million for 200 missiles with a million dollar price tag... which I belive is roughly the current cost of an AMRAM.
If they have line of sight to a ground target they can light it up as well with less potential for collateral damage from shrapnel and initial explosion that you have from current convetional munitions, less likely hood of a targeting malfunction. Granted thats only as good as your intelligence but unlike current munitions your percentage of hitting what you aim at would be essentially 100%. Secondary explosions, damage from fires started would still be an issue.
This is like putting a howitzer on a 500mph mobile platform that has speed of light ammunition 40,000 feet up in the air... its INSANE what the potential is for an aireal laser with sufficient power to be a weapon at line of sight distances from jet cruising altitudes.
And I hope no one says targeting is an issue... I garontee targeting subsonic and low supersonic munitions succesfully to their subsonic, low supersonic targets is FAR more difficult than hitting a subsonic, low supersonic target with a beam of light. Were pretty good at the former, the latter is a piece of cake by comparison. The trick is building a mobile laser with a directable enough beam to take advantage of our ability to target and the speed of light.
IN other words what everyone is trying to say is the only way to sucessfully reject the energy of the laser is to have as capable a reflection and energy rejection system as is utilized by the lasers mirrors which require incredible cooling systems... mirrors and cooling are a large part of the expense and complexity of lasers, the cooling systems in particular account for alot of that weight which requires the 747 for a usefull size to house a weaponized lazer in the first place... and extra weight is the last thing you will ever see added to chemicle rocket designs.. their margins of performance are already slim.
Is it 21k ? I was just going off the top of my head, but I did thinkI had heared that... perhaps I read miles instead of klicks on a rounded up figure for a news story.
At anyrate I was pretty fuzzy about my point. Granted speed isn't much of an issue ( though the longer it takes the longer life support needs to be sustained if you have bone bags along for the ride ) but if your talking 100 vrs 200 mph cruise you have a real difference if your trip is 8 days long at one and 4 days with the other.The question then would be if it were the engine size needed or the physcial limitations that prooved the limiting factor. Or in other words if it was relatively painless to reach the physcial limit with either size or if the limits where far enough out that the power/engine requirements to accelerate the larger vehicle to a higher cruise speed became prohibitive.
lets see accelerate for 1 minute at an increase of 4mps per second to attain a top speed would be 240mps
............. UMMMMMMMMM, if you can propell it 50k miles from the surface of the earth without using the cable you don't NEED the cable. Perhaps as an augmentation that allows a running start and a later deceleration but the penalty in carrying the extra system and its fuel would likely not gain you a hell of alot in return for their use ( attianing your cruise velocity a few seconds/minutes sooner dosn't net you a lot of gain if your cruising for days ). Furthermore The benifit of the traction system is in carrying only the engine and traction system with a highly efficient energy transfer and means of leverage compared to mass ejection propellant solutions. Then instead of carrying fuel you beam the power via microwave or laser beams. Far more efficient than carrying the fuel, or stringing a 50k mile long power line along with the elevator cable.
accelerate at 1mps for 1 minute and your speed is 60mps or 1/4 of the speed. I don't see how that works out to 1/2 the transit time instead of 1/4.
Also you have the same energy requirements for both but your still accomplishing more with the lighter vehicle through the multiple trips. This would also mean your primary power tranmission capability would have its max requirments at the end points with minamal tranmission needs during the main part of the trip.
Physcial limitations are very real for the mechanisims which would likely cancel out the advantage to the lighter system unless its capable of attaining and sustaining the higher speed. Imagine trying to build a 10 or 20 tonne car that goes ~400 mph for what is essentially a 100k mile round trip without a mechacnical failure. Don't forget its traction has to be sufficient to maintain control in the vertical for that entire distance as well. Imagine the breaking system you would need to control 20 tonnes of mass for a 50k mile descent trip. I think the only continual operational examples currently that clock that kind of mileage are nuclear powerd naval ships and I am not sure even they have realed off any 50k trips without some kind of break be it a dock side visit or actual mechanical failure.50k miles without a mechanical failure does not imply that had it run for 50k miles continuously it would not have failed. The physcial technology needed for the crawler has also often been a glossed over point in my opinion. Its not a level of engineering we have ever had need of. Can we do it... probably... have we ? Not yet. Are there unsurmountable/major problems with accomplishing it ? Won't know till we do it or at least try.
Rocket/Jet engines for non traction based primary acceleration/de-celeration
But couple of issues.
50,000 miles is a long way for a mechanical crawler. Escpecially one that amounts to a 20 tonne capacity elevator and it could never exert more than the load limit in terms of force.. IE if 20 tonnes is the theoretical maximum for the 130 rated nano tubes then lifting 20 tonnes at say a 9.8 mps (1G) acceleration would be roughly 40 tonnes of force on the cable meaning a broken cable. Thus you would likely be lifting 18 tonnes and having low acceleration loads, you also could not exceed that load when decelerating. Hitting the gas or breaks to hard could lead to exceeding the cables strength. I am wondering if a lighter system with more leeway to zip up and down the cable would not allow for easier and more timely transfer of mass.
for example:
If you can accelerate/decelerate at 1g with a 20 tonne vehicle (40 tonnes of force ) then you can accelerate at 4g's with a 10 tonne vehicle ( also 40 tonnes of force ). This means you can go ~4 times as fast which is a very significant difference when dealing with long transit distances. So a 20 day round trip by the 20 tonne could be accopmlished in 5 days by the ten tonne and would allow for 4 trips in the same time. Even if the 10 tonne only had 30% of the cargo capactiy it lifts more in the same amount of time over the long haul. You get that benifit whatever the units of acceleation are be it G or more likely in fractional G acceleration loads. And the smaller the rates we are dealing with the larger the impact is of relatively small increases.
Don't get me wrong, the idea is great but the margin of error here sounds awfully thin esepcially considering the key material hasn't reached its theoretical proving point in a LAB much less in a mass production environment. Once they do that I say full steam ahead. But until then its a bit premature to start tossing out headlines reading "Space elevator for just 6 billion "
perhaps if it read
"Space elevator for just 6 billion IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF"
"You have some decent ideas here, but the organization, spelling, and punctuation are reprehensible."
:-). I know I am horrible at puncuation/spelling and true enough I'm lazy; However, that laziness has very little to do with computers. My spelling in particular stems more from my laziness in utilizing a spellcheck function than my status as someone who is computer savy. In other words, my LACK of utilization of a computer as opposed to my use of a computer. Besides, my feelings regarding spelling are summed up by a quote I hear most often atributed to Samuel Clemmens.
:-) Seriously, people are lazy with Pen and Paper as much or more than they are with computers. Computers simply have an amazing ability to maginify the effect of laziness. Yet, at the root of the problem it is the person who provides the laziness, not the tool. Computers are not to blame for my poor spelling. I AM !!!
Phunny, same thing my english teachers have said to me through the years
" It takes a small mind to conceive of spelling a word in only one way "
I agree that Computer-savvy != educated != smart.
However, Grammatic perfection != educated != smart.
God knows how many grammatically correct papers, ideas, etc... I have read through that were not worth the paper or pixels they were printed with. I'm sure you have as well unless you are trying to claim that grammatical perfection automaticaly imbues any post/book/paper with intelligence and fully educated thoughts/opinions ?
" If you're going to argue that spelling doesn't matter in a forum like this, then I have to ask: Why did you bother posting your thoughts here if you don't care how your ideas are taken by others."
Are you suggesting I should be overly concerned with the thoughts of those who would base their judgements more on appearance/presentation than on content ? I try my best not to "judge books by their covers" and hope others do as well. If they don't thats their loss not mine.
OTOH, my crappy organization was the result of a slap dash stream of conciousness rant with very little review or alteration dashed out in about 10 minutes or so of break time at work. I do appologise if as such it prooved difficult to puzzle out what I had to say.
Now, back to the point of the post. I find some irony in that you're point seems to be I am lazy because I am computer savy and that others become so as well. Despite the fact the mistakes you specifically pointed out are easily corrected by a 2 min run through a spell checker which any computer savy person would do right ?
I think the posts about PEN and PAPER being superior learning tools over a laptop and this techno phobia of calculators doing work and spell check replacing spelling bees is ridiculose.
The modern world is slowly becoming more and more computer driven. Why are we trying to keep our learning process stuck in past times ? When you tally figures at work your telling me you don't check it with a calculator ? When solving engineering problems you don't use a computer ? When you write a report you don't use spell check ? All a calculator/copmuter does is provide a different sort of scratch paper and error checking tool. One that is far less subject to human error. Computers are better at general computing and mundane detail checking than we are so why is there such a problem with relying on them to do perform these calculations ? For math the only place left where manual calculation is a matter of importance is in the class room ( and at some theoretical extremes ) and its time to stop it from being so idealized there as well. There is a point of over reliance and a point at which you need to understand how a computer does what it does but for everyday life these instances are few and far between and last time I checked thats what school was about... preparing you for the real world. Well folks the real world has computers and knowledge of them and use of them is fast becoming a dividing line between the haves and have nots in our society. The way we are going I say give it a decade or two and not knowing how to use a computer is going to be moraly equivalent to not being able to read/write today. This is already the case in tech industries. The sooner schools refelct this reality the better, primary schooling is lagging terribly behind.
This is a wonderful program IF they can sustain it and keep the technology relavent and continue to integrate it as a tool and not as a solution. So far most programs seeking to get computers into schools have used the computer as a solution in and of itself, not as a tool. And largely they couldn't be utilized as a tool becasue they were not universaly available. This is one of the few isntances where I have heard of computers being universally integrated and there for able to be depended upon as a tool available to students instead of as a luxury only partially available. Hopefully the success they have enjoyed will lead to sustained support of the program that will be needed to keep it susccesfull. Most other computing programs to date have not met with anywhere near the success enjoyed here and thus quickly become white whale programs that are rarely sustained ( nor should they have been ) thus creating the numerous antiquated ghost labs or sole classroom computer found in many schools from various feeble attempts to integrate computers and the educational progress.
For computers to work in the educational environment they are going to have to replace books as the primary interface for transfer of knowledge in classrooms. This is not to say replace entirely, but they have to become a fundamental method of transfering knowledge instead of an oddball method and they can't do that until you have universal access such as provided by giving ALL students a laptop or some similar form of versatile mobile technology for disiminating information in a digital medium. In this they are competing largely with books and there is the old saying " this town aint big enough for the both of em ". I think eventually it will come down to an either or decision and long term there is little doubt in my mind of the winner. In the short term there will be co-existence while the technology matures enough to take over more permanently. As the tech gets more mobile and can compete with books for legibility and versatility you will see books being abandoned but not until then and likley they will hang on regardless.. ie handwritting hasn't gone away since the inception of the printing press but its domain or use has continually shrunk ever since I forsee something similar happening with the printed page.
I think you missed the point. The automobile is more than an ecological nightmare, its a crowning symbol of personal wealth in the first world. What he is saying is its imposisble to elevate everyone to the current first world standard of living utilizing the earths resources. As you point out thats likely not a desireable thing to do anyway. However people want to live good thus this creates friction... everyone wants to live 'the life' but not everyone can and thats something people are willing to fight over. Whether 'the life' is owning a car and a house with a picket fence with 2.3 kids or whatever the fact remains there is a carrying capacity of the earth and eleveating everyone to that level requires insane amounts of energy and production that we don't have and dosn't look to be in the cards terrestially speaking.
http://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/fair_use_and_drm.html
Intresting link with a good all round look at the DRM vrs Fair Use issue. Peronally I don't think the companies get it. They need to get back in touch with the fact that the customer is always right. Right now the customers who have braod band access are thumbing their collective noses at the music industry because the industry is thumbing their noses at them. Get with the times folks, your hoarding bronze weapons when steel is on the market.
In regards to this joke of a music service being offered I have this to say. As long as they are going to practice highway robbery there will be pirates aplenty. Pave a 6 lane highway with no speed bumps and you might be amazed how many people are willing to pay to use it. You know this service reminds me of the end of Blazing saddles where they put up the Toll booth on the prarie only they expect it to work in real life.
Then perhaps we are not as smart as we think we are.
That 40k only represents their end of the year bank account, most people I know would love to work/live for a year and have 40k more in the bank at the end of the year than they began with. Much less live a year as a 500,000 record selling major lable backed Rock Act copmlete with Groupies and red carpet events/treatment.
Not that I don't think they should get a little thicker slice of the pie, just that those numbers are very deceptive. Perhaps that sanitation worker gets 40k a year but he spends that 40k to live on. At the end of the year they might have a couple thousand in the bank left over. In the mean time He/she was living paycheck to paycheck making rent/bills and perhaps hitting the club scene most weekends as a beer swilling drone.
40k a year before living expenses and 40k a year after living expenses are two VERY different things.
Record cuts need to come after expenses not before same as artists or artists royaties need to be figured before expenses same as the Lables cut.
The Bands debt needs to be wiped out once the investment is paid back at reasonable return ( laws geverning loan sharking would be usefull here ).
Right now the lables up front investment/loan to the artist is only considered paid off when collected from the artists royalties despite the fact the lable reaps back the amount invested and a good bit besides in its own share of the proceeds long before the after expenses royalties amount is sufficient to cancle that debt alone, and indeed it is carefully balanced so that few ever do.
Less popular bands are not nearly the risk lables say they are. Take those numbers and set forth the initial money the record company plops down, now find the break even point on record sales for the lable acording to Albini's numbers. The number is alot lower than the 500,000 mark. Take those numbers... off the top of my head I belive it was $900k to the lable for 500k record sales or $1.80 and album. They invested 300,000 and got that back and a little more by the time 200k units were sold. Not to mention thats ONLY from their cut of the sales, they are also at this point collecting the artists royaties ostensibly to pay back their loan. So the record company has broken even from its cut and the artists royalties recieved to that point are whoely profit or return on the investment. If you called it square there then the artists recieves their royalties free and clear and the record lable continues to collect its share and that end figure for the artists changes a whole hell of alot.
Lets put that in a simple sentence
The lable collects its cut and the artists cut until the artists cut alone pays off the investment.
Another way
The lable makes money seperate of the artist on the sale of the album and yet only considers their invest paid off when the artists money pays off the loan.
This is completely and totally unfair. You change that so that the artist's debt is cleared once the lable makes its money back plus a reasonable return and the artist starts collecting full royalties a hell of alot sooner than they do now. This dosn't impact the lables bottom line much ( changes their debt and profit lines accordingly but they sum out pretty much the same ) But it does remove the debt anvil they generally get to hang over the artists head for sub 500k album sales. I mean oh tisk tisk we made a bundle but you didn't make enough to pay us back, here we will loan you some of this money you made us so you can make us some more money and owe us even more.
Fitness:
Get in shape now... don't give me that smaht@$$ crap, do it or you will regret it you little snot nosed brat.
General:
Crash and burn to live and learn, repeat as necesarry when dealing with Women.
Women:
Find someone with a cluebat and ask them to apply it liberally as often as possible and pray for the day you actually develope a clue.
In the meantime dtich the trumpet for the Guitar now instead of later.
Learn to dance, sure you feel stupid but it pays off... truuuust me.
Job:
Your right, the computer job market will go to shit when you graduate, don't worry you will be happy with where you wind up and you wouldn't belive me if I told you. Besides I wouldn't want to ruin the surprise.
Well that is indeed the literary definition but I was reffering more to the fact that most court prcedent ties piracy in IP disputes directly to profit/finacial transactions. In light of this one of the recent /. stories was about the RIAA attempting to establish a precedent where the mere aquisition of copyrighted material was declared profit.
As for the distribution issue I dunno. Its obviously a problem but the solution is worse than the disease in my opinion. At least if the solution is stringing up participants in communal digital distribution networks. If napster/kaza/gnutella etc... or anyone on their network were chargeing for access to a shared music database I'd have said string em up and keelhaul them. Personally I think the actions taken against Napster were akin to holding Honda Responsible for street racing that kids do with their cars.
The other thing is music has a real catch 22 that things like software and books do not. They broadcast music via TV/CABLE and Radio which are all subject to fair use.. IE I can legally record them and so can EVERYBODY else. Thus having a copy of anything I could have listend to in a broadcast is technically something I have a right too. The recording industry let fair use slide without a whole lot of challenge intially becasue there was no concievable way of everyone actually having a fair use copy of broadcast material for two reasons... one they wouldn't be willing to do the actual recording themselves for the most part and two they could not obtain a copy for free. IE their friends were unlikely to do it for them for free ( cost of tape if nothing else ) and certainly an organization wasn't going to do it for free. Communal digital sharing via the NET, on the otherhand, provides such an ability and it has scared them starkers which is why they are attacking P2P and attempting to subvert fair use like there is no tommorrow. Yesterdays impossibility is todays reality.
Of course there is the issue of a copy of a CD song versus a radio/mtv broadcast track but that isn't a very extensive area that has been challenged in courts. It's something I anticipate sooner or later... besides for the most part radios/mtv are broadcasting the album tracks you buy due to the fact they are in a sense advertisements. thats a whole other can of worms and when/if it gets opened it will be the end game of this whole mess.
All in all while I can see the music industries beef I firmly belive their are rights on both sides of the table and there is no garonteed right that makeing/producing music equates to people buying it. I feel if people are unwilling to buy music and are willing to freely share what they have thats fine, it will likely reduce the amount of music created but some how I doubt it. On the other hand it will be the death of the music industry as we know it and while people losing their job is a bad thing there is this thing called change and it does happen.
The key to my viewpoint is free. If no one is making money sharing the music then the artists and producers have no beef, after all 5% of nothing is nothing and they get all of that out of P2P and more. Copyright law is all about protecting the right to sell and profit from the reproduction of IP. It simply dosn't hold in the advent of transactionless communal sharing. Change happens, the RIAA needs to adapt to the new reality or go the way of the DoDo, muscicians are already begining to adapt.
Let me define exhaustive as beyond human capacity. True enough that Kasparov has a library in his head but more importantly he has conceptual knowledge. He might be able to fully regurgitate dozens, possibly even hundreds of games move for move and I'll give him the benifit of the doubt and say he has perfect recall of all of that while he is playing a game, but Deep Blue and Deep Junior have game archives in the thousands and permuation archives possibly out into the millions that they can search for a match to a current board configuration in seconds not to mention an ability to compare multiple game states at several moves deep that a human can only dream of. Yet it still has no concept, it can't concieve new lines.
Kasparov understands WHY you make a move which is very different from simply knowing what move(s) has been made before. I will be impressed when the computer can reason out a move as opposed to matching a stored response. Incidentally I have played a few people who try to play like a computer, they are tough only so long as you play to their knowledge. They tend to be very helpless if you can direct them into an unexplored line ( especially if you know what they have studied ) even if tactically its weaker.... the same weakness brute force computer algo's tend to have. Its realtively easy to get a person to an un-explored line as human memory is generaly limited in this respect, a solid copmuter algo with an Exhaustive library is far more difficult to de-rail.
In short I'll be impressed when the program thinks for itself. Don't get me wrong... both Jr, and Blue are impressive machines and their match successes are a testement to the advancing field of Machine AI but right now its the Puncher beating the Boxer and that has its appeal... but the true Advent of AI will be when we see a boxer and a boxer squared off.
First show em office space.... make sure they get the memo.
After the movie finishes tell them its got a large essence of truth.... turn the lights on, the ones that are left you can start teaching how to code.
Don't spend a whole freaking semseter on the tools, whiles, ifs etc... frankly if it takes them 3+ months to grasp the basics of a language they are FUBAR and should run screaming from the field before they get ensared in it. Don't be a syntax Nazi, computers no longer require punch cards and carefull scheduling to test a program.
Introduce them to real world application problems ASAP, open source is a perfect educational opportunity just waiting to be made use of. Whether they officially add to the source code of the project, develop in tandem or produce a fork makes no matter so long as they are dealing with something real. Granted wading into an open source project is not for the newbie forsh with no idea how to write a line of code but by the time they reach junior/senoir status they are theoretically supposed to be nearing the point in time where they can contribute meaningful code to a real world project. In reality that is something that in most CS programs is the exception, not the rule.
finally TIMTOWTDI !! god how I hated teachers that thought there was only one solution.
And I will say it again.
The RIAA's current efforts are like Horse Breeders at the turn of the last century complaining about the comming of the car. people are going to get form place to place the best way possible and they will obtain and listen to music the same way. Right now nobody is offering a way to pay for what P2P provides.
Treating people who copy and distribute IP freely the same as commercial pirating ventures out for profit via re-production of IP material is absolutely absurd. Restricting the flow of information soley to prevent this communal sharring which the digital age has made feasible is severely detrimental to society and taken to the extreme it makes the advantage of information sharing presented by copmuters and the internet largely moot.
The old models are broken people and the real problem with discussions regarding this issue is that people are fundamentally seperated into two groups, those who are attempting to adapt values to the realities of a digital society and those who have maintained the old values and attempted to transfer them. Simply put, Classic value systems regarding physical media are outmoded when applied to digital data.
Copying != Stealing
Copying Freely != Selling illicit copies for profit ( Piracy )
I am not necesarrily saying copying and copying freely is fundamentaly right, just that they are not equivalent actions to the physicaly and capitalistic profit based concepts of stealing or piracy. The RIAA is persuing them as if they are equivalent and that is not right or just and the odds are they are going to seriously trample over some people before the system finally works to correct the situation.
The ability to freely share digital information that has come with a digital society is a very good thing but obviously it is going to present some serious challenges for the industries which have built up for centuries around physical distriubution of things which are now capable of being digitized and which people are now begining to desire in a digital format. Trying to restrict this new ability to a faithful reproduction of the system which governs the exchange of physicaly based information will also maintain the limitations of physcial media which defeats the whole damn purpose of having a widely acessible digital domain in the first place.
Values need to change. We need to decide if we even WANT the digital domain to be subject to the same costs and restrictions as physcial distribution systems. The reasons for doing so before was the protectors of the producers of the material ( ie printing is EXPENSIVE and necesarry ) however that is not the case with a digital infrastructure, the paradigm has changed. Right now we can choose to take digital information rights/distribution down a down a differant path than pysical which is by and by what most people using Napster/Kaza/Gnutella are doing. Right now RIAA's sole claim to rightousnous is in the prosecution of laws that were made in ignorance of what the future would bring. The Digital Mellinium Act has yet to go fully through the judicial review process and I think by and by it is going to sooner or later come to a landmark decision in the supreme court. Unfortunaltly the process is a hell of alot slower in real time than it is reading about it in a history book.
In short I think the RIAA would be much better off it it spent all the money it is wasting on P2P litigation instead on finding a way to harness P2P. Instead they are too stuck on the fact that their 'cheeze' supply is dwindling.
When a Computer can beat a GM without an exaustive move library. The problem with the move library and deep tree search is that in the event of strong matches and algorythmic solutions is the choice being made is the one either derived by the human player in the recorded match.. not by the chess program itself. In the event of mathmatical solutions such as the limited end game scenarios this is rearly any differant than a human/human game especailly between masters... though as computers get progressively more copmutational power they are able to mathmatically solve an end game with more and more pieces which is kind of like a computer being able to sort faster and more acurately.... not something indicative of intelligence.
When the chess program can take nothing but its knowledge of the rules and its own experience and re-creates or improoves on the same decisions when presented with classic game states then Tourings challenge will be trully acomplished.
To me the accopmlishments of Deep Blue and Deep Junior are somewhat akin to a computer being able to sort a list faster than a person. Its apples and oranges, a computer has yet to truly play a game of chess in my book. They have however very effectively indexed and to some extent abstracted massive game archive records to effectively choose from past sucesfull HUMAN decisions.
Again its impressive.... but when they can create those decisions in ignorance of what has been done/tried before and can consistently make the same level of decision without haveing that database it will be truly unreal.
ummmmm GIGO, the compiler knows where it halts or if it exits after all without it, it won't run anyway. No matter how you abstract the halting problem you still ahve to establish a syntax with set rules and syntax is what a computer follows better than a human.. in fact in this case the syntax and resultant compiler defines in and of itself where it halts or exits thus the compiler solves the halting problem in a manner of speaking which is why most people these days debug code by running it and letting the chine show them where it hangs then they waste their brain cells on figuring out why it hangs when they KNOW it shouldn't.
What the Oracle at Delphi was to the ancients :-) ....
seek and ye shall find all knowledge that thy heart desires if ye but phrase the proper query to the almighty Google.
lol, you know cults have probably been started around sillier things.
No I wouldn't say that they don't believe... in fact they know to the nth degree what shit can happen. Its simply not feasible to provide for every concievable scenario and adequately provide for it. Space explorations missions are a toss of the dice to begin with and most things that can go bad go bad very fast meaning very few scenarios where a rescue would have even a slim chance of success. Thus you can choose to spend a great deal of money on the ability to mount a rescue flight on the remote chance something happens to cripple a mision without killing the crew where there is enough time to launch and rendezvous ( 24+ hours minimum if you launch at the first sign of trouble at the first available launch window )... or you can take that money and do your best to ensure you never need a rescue mission. Logically the choice is obvious if its a choice you have to make.
In the short term I fully believe the answer to this tragedy is its dangerous and shit happens. In the long term the answer to increased safety is orbital infrastructure. Right now manned orbital infrastructure consists of sporadic visits by shuttles and soyuz with the only permanent presence being ISS. And for the events of this weekend ISS was like a gas station in prauge when you need one now in florida. And you can't have infrastructure before you have alot of flights without it or very little of it. thats having the chicken before the egg.
I don't think we can waste the time wondering what choices we might have made differeantly but instead should focus on what we can do from here. Retreating and re-grouping and deciding on another course of action is not an option. We have station and abandonning it now would waste all the painfully gathered momentum for a permanent outpost and the beginings of an infrastructure for orbital operations. Some times the correct choice is "Damn the Torpedoes and full speed ahead". Some things are worth dieing for and at least in my opinion this is one of those things.
Yes they were really doomed.
Station - not an option. ISS is in a completely different orbit than was being used by columbia which was an orbit generally used by shuttle to date.. its a relatively low orbit even for shuttle ops designed for max payload ability.
Russian launch - not an option even if it had been a soyuz, the reason Stations orbit is so funky as compared to shuttles normal orbit is so that Soyuz AND shuttle can make it to ISS. ISS orbit isnot ideal for either and to add isult to injury to reduce reboost requirements they have it as high as is feasible while still retaining a modicum of payload abilities from Soyuz and Shuttle. Even if they could send them you need a crew of two to operate the Soyuz and it seats three. One saved is better than all lost but thats assuming you could get the one from columbia to the rescue vehicle without an ARM, docking ability, or EVA jetpack. My gut says it could be done but the odds in Vegas would be pretty long. However its moot since soyuz can't make the orbit anyway.
Shuttle Launch - Most possible rescue scenario. However Atlantis was not ready to launch and still had its remaining pre-launch saftey checks that would by and by have to be tossed out the window. Next, Atlantis is the shuttle with the most launches at 30. It was the most ready to launch by far as the others are well behind Atlantis in the pre-launch prep process. Was Columbias failure due to age/stress ? If so why would you then launch Atlantis which would be at even greater risk of failure ? Was the failure due to any shuttle design flaw that Atlantis would also be subject too ? How long to determine that ? Atlantis was equiped and loaded to go to ISS, you would likely want a differant payload ability and that takes time and removes what safety checks had already been completed on payload stowage. The airlock talk is bogus, the Mideck design includes an airlock which was in general a passthrough for the science lab however it could be used for EVA with loss of the Lab if memory serves. However were their EVA suits for all seven ? EVA suits are specially fitted and don't have much tolerance for error, they are also heavy and create a significant paylaod issue if not needed, just rushing 7 EVA suits to orbit might not work.
Could it have been laid on and done ?? again my gut says yes. An awful lot of the saftey process surrounding shuttle launch is double/triple quadrupal checking on top of being double damn sure already nothing is wrong. As a one time op with a minimal level of checks laid on with a crew understanding what was at stake, the crew probably comes out shinning. In that situation you simply havn't reduced the odds of a mistake being made and caught to usual levels and given its a one time risk you probably get away with it so you are left with a one time high level alert process risk of a mistake having been made.... not a good choice for consistent ops, however for an emergency op it could have been deemed a worthwhile risk IMHO. HOWEVER there is a catch. There are some checks on a launch that are not 5 extra layers of redundancy that can be shed in an emergency. Example: As we have become acustomed when a problem happens on an orbiter it grounds all the orbiters until the flaw is identified and fixed. Unless we could conclusively have stated that there was a problem and that is was not a congenital problem in the design with an as before unkown risk. This is not a redundant check. Skipping it is not optional and launching without clearing Atlantis from that standpoint would have been moraly equivalent to trying to save someone who fell through thin ice on a lake by tossing someone else in after them. Doing all of these things requires time. Columbia didn't have time, it had very limited ability to extend its stay. The foam evaluation was not complete till flight day 12 of 16. If that evaluation had sent NASA scurrying to launch a second shuttle for a rescue mission it would have had to have been done in 4-8 days mabye as many as 10 and who knows for whatever engineering ingenuity that came to the fore or difficult decisions ( loss of some crew to let others survive longer ? ) made. Thus the odds of being able to launch a rescue with any reasonable hope of success over simply adding to the tragedy rapidly approaches nil. Not all difficult situations surround actions taken... deciding not to take action can be just as difficult.
Thus when you boil it down once Columbia made orbit it had but one choice for survival, survive re-entry. Once you re-enter you get bail out options in addition to landing but odds are if you survive re-entry you will be able to land as the margin of error for re-entry survival is very thin. Meaning if you survive it you are most likely in reasonably good condition. There are no gentler flight profiles. No swapping of risk management, if there was a better way they would already be using it. Just like on launch the very ragged edge of the envelope is being tested. On launch its generating the needed power to reach escape velocity, on re-entry its the absorbtion of atmosphereic friction generated by orbital velocities.
To cap it all off the earliest it was known there was a problem was after they commited to re-entry. People can yap about the foam all they like but they miss the point about the foam having happend before. They had data points, they had a good idea of the damage levels foam was capable of however as they have repeatedly said, even if foam did insane amounts of damage and is the sole cause of the breakup there were no options other than to attempt re-entry and pray they made it through. If you still stick on a shuttle rescue launch think on it from the other side fo the tragedy. Before you KNOW columbia was going to meet its fate the best minds evaluated the risk and found it more or less not a risk. Worst case was limited localized structural damage and drawing from previous experience with foam problems they didn't even expect that. Now based on that information why would you lay on a risky launch just in case that estimate was wrong ? Perhaps an inspection of some kind would have altered the estimate. Perhaps but then you unwrap the question of one time problem versus congenital design/process problem.. all the while the clock is ticking. Even if its obviously a one time unique problem you now have to lay on a hasty launch risking a hell of alot of known possible risks with mistakes made. I'd say even had we known it was unique as quickly as possible it woudl have been a 50/50 call on trying to rush Atlantis up espcscially given even in that case the odds still saide they would survive. If an inspection prooved they were obviously a lame duck AND it was obviously a unique problem toss a coin on the rescue launch. I certainly know I wouldn't want to make the call.
Much as I hate to put it this way... Shit Happens and it happend last weekend despite the efforts of THOUSANDS of dedicated people whose job is to see that the SHIT that happend dosn't happen. Its a loosing battle because shit does indeed happen and there is nothing we can do about it but honor the ones lost and continue on and continue to do our best to see that shit dosn't happen again. Not to mention as it seems to become more and more likely the root problem was not the foam impact at launch the less and less likely there woudl have been any serious problem to be revealed on orbit thus making the whole notion of a rescue launch even thinkable short of having Mdame Cleo call to tell us what was going to happen.
Damn this got long.
Crew exchange needs are taking up the third seat unless they go to a two man crew in which event you still need only two as their are three people up there. Its like muscial chairs, taking a tourist when trying to do a crew rotation means somebody is without a seat. If they go to a two man maintnence crew the next rotation flight could carry a replacement crew of two and a paying customer and still bring back the tourist only that means you can't send an american or other IP astronaught which may happen but I doubt it... in that scenario its likey the third seat would be for a non-russian and the other two for the russian flight crew needed to operate a soyuz launch one of which would also be a russian station crew person. Its not really a danger issue... especially since soyuz is not shuttle and thus any danger increase now ascociated to shuttle does not apply to soyuz.