OH I don't know.... its not extensible enough to be a doom macro machine but it could easily be enough to macro a MMORPG skill convincingly enough. Course there are easier ways to do that... but this one could do it without a local program interface running in the background. You could probably also make it a travel ai which knew how to tell where it was and travel to where you want to go while you take a bath with programed responses to msg's recieved ( IE you are attacked by X **initiate combat escpae sequence Z** move to loc ) Text recognition would be a bizatch though.
CD's suck... 15-20 bucks for 1 or 2 highly promoted tracks you hear ad-neauseum on the radio. The other tracks are generally dreck and its hard to find the un-promoted gems becasue you cannot easily preview tracks not widely played. IE my idea of sampling music is not sitting at a store wearing indestructo crappy unadjustable sound headphones with a line behind me... or worse yet standing in line waiting. I much preffer kicked back at home or driving in my car with my sound system on my time.
The RIAA quite simply has got to find another buisness paradigm, one not predicated on a measure of physcial control over distributed media. Digital material simply does not work by the same rules as more physical based mediums and that is a good thing. Digital is the reality just the same as 8 track beat the Record, Cassette beat 8 track and CD beat cassete. Fluid digital will beat restricted CD digital. Remember capatilisim is a consumer driven marketplace thus one way or another the consumer will eventually win.
Yeah... but damn she looks good shakin her thang in hip huggers:-)
Just wish they would seperate music and image.. good image != good music and vice versa. Damn MTV and Damn the TV in general. Well I don't mean that... then again I do. Damnit damned if I do dmaned if I don't.
Ditto on a live 4 track.... I don't think there is anything inherrently evil is studio effect work, I just hate when it is substituted for talent.
Havn't used p2p much since college but now that I have DSL I had gone back to it but the crap to qulity ratio I found shocked me compared to a few years ago.
If your reading this you in all likely hood posses more potential recording capability than possesed by a Bang up top of the line recording studio in the 70's. If your sound card is shitty you need 2-500 bucks and the cost of whatever prgram you want to run. If you can capture quality sound ( EASY ) and you can mix multiple tracks ( can be done with free programs or progs that cost $XXXXXXXXX ) then you can produce a high quality recording.
The skill at mixing tracks is as much an art as ripping a killer solo which leads to studios with high end equipment and kick ass sound rooms that enable uber recording quality. However with minimal work you can get close to sound room quality ( which is not always desired in the first place, alot of that isolation is so that they can add effects of rooms with differant qualities ) you can easily forgo this if your band has the talent to play a song straight through. Play it a few times and get the input levels right then play it a few times and take the best one wrap it and sell it.
Of course the one take recording is the province of skilled musicians who can actually play their material. Imagine if record lables only signed people capable of doing a decent one take recordings.... imagine actual individual flavored music instead of studio homgenized junk with the latest 'sound'.
I am not sure MD5 is such a stumbling block here. If 100 people share a file pop_song.mp3 and 99 of them are overpeer files your chance of getting a crappy copy of pop_song.mp3 are 99%. The MD5 checksums aren't going to enter into it, all that does is assure you that you got the same file you requested. Thus, crappy file requested = you download a crappy file and comparing the MD5 checksum will simply say hey you got what you requested. You have to have central file management of some sort to quality control according to MD5 and central management structures.. AKA TARGETS FOR RIAA.. are something P2P clients avoid at all cost.
What we need is an artificial stupid ( AI ) routine smart enough to determine if a sound file is clean so it can be embedded in the P2P client and thus have a decentralized quality control.
I wonder if a Peer to Peer slashdot style mod system for marking good files ( and their checksum values ) would work as well. the trick would be to figure out a way to avoid awarding MOD points to an 'overpeer' type client. Creating a method of assigning and tracking MOD points acording to MD5 checksums without creating targets would be rather tricky though.
There is an inherent issue here in P2P that is a double edged sword... freely shared files among thousands of peers is impossible to stop but it also is impossible to stop people from sharing bad files. That issue is enough of a pain in the ass when it is just people sharing a crappy recording but something on a massive scale like this can create problems. On the flip side most mass spam systems generate a detectable and thus avoidable pattern so its simply and arms race that will have no end as long as P2P's are around.
Actually it kind of amazes me that Mars having water didn't make a bigger.. errah Splash. Thats huge. Water being present on the planet in significant qualities makes establishing permanet setelments a realistic proposition.
As for T-Rex I have one question. If the modle is accurate and the T-rex sized Chicken can't even walk then HTF did T-Rex walk ? Damn people, get with it, either the Model is wrong or T-Rex couldn't lift its own weight. Sheesh. This all gets back to the question of the Brontasaur and its neck. If T-Rex could barely move the Brontasaur must have been damn near imobile and yet it had to ingest craploads of food to sustain its incredible mass. But now they barely move and they lived in herds... how did they sustain themselves ?
I look for more on the issue of the dinosaurs size in the future. Right now it is more or less a given that we do not understand the phsyology of the Dinosaurs for the simple reason that if they worked by the rules we understand today they could not have existed. There is something we don't know. Either they possesed a more capable biomass system than any current known life form on earth or they lived in a weaker gravity field.
30 years ago this month the United States unveiled a 50 ghz computer.
30 years ago this month the United States annouced mobile phones smaller than a pack of cigarettes that could display color pictures taken by a camera which is a part of the phone.
30 years ago this month the United States landed men on the Moon.
Which really sounds more unlikely ? The truly odd thing about the moon landings is that today we can not readily duplicate them. Shuttle is not capable of dealing with the thermal loads that it would be subjected to on a trip to the moon and yet it is more advanced than apollo. This seeming contradiction is one the general knowledge of the public is not readily equiped to explain. Same for the incidental details like the rod stiffend flag and the lack of stars in the landing pictures.
NASA is paying the price of having such a monumental achivement in the past which dwarfs its current efforts in the imaginations of the general public. Sort of like a one hit wonder rock band that never duplicates or extends its one successful song/album.
I think their time and money would be better spent doing things which released the doubt of the public by re-capturing their imaginations with current deeds instead of tired archival footage and head to head rebuttles of people who doubt what they have done in the past. In short stop telling us about all the wonderful things done and start doing more wonderful things.
If you could tie things like Telnet and different port acess points to map locations and then have to fight to gain control of those areas and then have people doing the actual hacking while your team is fighting for control... I think this could have possibilities.
Imagine having areas where you could gain access to a root terminal, password files etc... Combine the high adreneline of FPS game with the slower meta game of hacking the other guys system. Make the ultimate goal cutting off the other teams access to the game server or something like that.
Well CRV is back in the budget but the size and return profile of a glider ala shuttle makes it a very interesting engineering problem. I look forward to it being rolled out.. though they are saying it will take till 2010 now. I look forward to it if they ever actually finish it, hopefully it will have a station to return a crew from once it is finished.
I really don't see why a capsule would take a couple of years, after all we have all the testing and design specs from our past capsules. I'd have to think we could fabricate an apollo module in fairly short order and that could at least serve as an interim Soyuz. We know the materials, loads and shape which is a large part of the testing. I could see it taking 2 or more years if we tried to make improovements, not if we simply made what we already know how to make. Only real question is can a maxed out Delta stack physcially toss the needed mass into the proper orbit and can an apollo command module be mated to a delta stack withen all current design parameters on both sides? If no major modifications where needed in either case ( to the stack or the capsule ) then I doubt it would take two years. We could probably do it in 6 months if someone had a sufficient enough bug up there ass to do it.
Cancel ISS and save 3 billion a year in shuttle costs.
A whole 3 billion you say. Wow, talk about savings. Personally speaking of course a billion dollars is a considerable sum of money. However where the US government is concerned its like saving 3 bucks on a two thousand dollar yearly purchase. %.0015 budget savings. ( currently the budget is 2 trillion dollars )
On the other hand, scrapping shuttle reduces our ability to send someone into orbit to nil, nothing, nada, zero. We loose that ability until such time as we design a more efficient system that would meet your requirments as a worth while launch system. In fact if the RSA does take a dive as its threatning, and US scraps the Shuttle then manned launch capability would be no more excepting posssibly China's budding space program.
Granted that is a symbolic ability and perhaps one not rooted in practicallity, but frankly it is one I am loath to relenquish and damn sure not one I am willing to relinquish for a grand total of.0015% savings in the yearly US budget. Doubly so since the path to advancement is not in giving up but in making progress where capable. We did not go from the wright flyer to a boeing 747.
Granted Shuttle's history is a boondoggle but hell with station it is finaly doing what it was designed to do in the first place. And when you get down to it its doing a very good job. Its doing a much better job than station itslef which is suffering from a confused and largely directionless design. However its hard to truly judge Station as yet as its not even freaking finished, its only a little over halfway there.
Personally I wish they would cut Shuttles non station related missions which are still going on. Station is not a viable commercial launch platform and if its going up there to do science experiments then what the hell is station for ? It is a passable low earth orbit hauler so lets commit it to that use. The costs of those launches could be used to complete the CRV devlopment and deployment of the extra Crew hab that was to go with it and leave some spare change to boot.
When launch costs are reduced by a factor of 100 ? And that will be when.. next week ? The truth of the matter is there is no readily apparent technology that will so much as reduce it by a factor of 10 in the next decade and in the meantime we will continue to launch. Seeing as that is the major budgetary issue regarding the station why not rotate crews while we are at it ? We have spent the billions to get the thing up there and we are just going to abandon it in the name of budget constraints when we will spend just as much after abandoning it ? Almost makes sense in an odd beuaracratic way.
What learn a lesson from a past experience ?? Thats far to logical for a govenment run operation.
I still want to see if we get past 2006 without an extended capacity CRV. I'm sorry but you just can't tell me we couldn't make a module that could be launched on a Delta that is at least as capable as a soyuz in less than a year much less 3?? The trick would be not trying to do too much. It seems NASA has no desire to go with a purely balistic landing craft, they want the sex appeal of something that lands like a plane.
Heck I have yet to figure out why they couldn't just build an mplm module with a life support system and heat shielding.. damn thing already fits in the shuttle bay and makes an airtight seal and passage to ISS, not to mention the first thing we figured out how to do was get a capsule back from orbit... we did that with mercury for crying out loud.
You know its easy to say the space station is a boondoggle and not worth throwing any more money at, after all its a big target that has very little success to shield it from criticisim. I hear many people not to much against bringing the crew home and letting it stay un manned for a while....
So how much money does that save ? The current cost expenditure of space station is not the station crew. The cost of the crew itself is negligible. The majority of the costs are tied up in LAUNCH costs, a small additional cost (realtively speaking) would be the manned operations centers for station ops and hardware production.
However, if station is to ever continue and or be used intermitently these centers and personel are not going anywhere as they will be needed or they will have to be re-trained if they are let go.
Shuttle cunstruction missions would still be going up so no money saved there on the launches OR the hardware. In addition shuttle missions become more complex and less productive because in addition to any construction needs a great deal of time is going to be soaked up in housekeeping chores. The ultimate ability of the shuttle crew to even perform its construction tasks would be placed in serious jepordy if even some very basic difficulites arise in bringing the station back online after being shut down. So not only are shuttle launch costs not decreased they are quite possibly increased and are deffiantly more at risk of being unable to be completed succesfully thus necessitating another launch. Don;t forget almost all of the construction missions are of a sequntial nature and CANNOT be done out of turn thus a construction mission failure would push back all subsequent shuttle launches. God forbid what if it happend twice ?
So about all you really cut are the progess and soyuz launch costs which are very small in comparison to shuttle launches. So the cost savings overall are small and the risk of completly trashing the station are greatly increased without a crew on board to deal with failiing equipment as it occurs. In particular the savings to NASA are NILL NOTHING NADDA ZIP ZERO... the savings only really effect the Russian space agency and its not really even savings since if you take them at their word this isn't a matter of not spending money they have but one of not spending money they do not have. Thats avoidence of debt not saving money.
This is a classic example to me of penny wise and pound foolish. Folks we are past halfway, past the point of no return where station is concerned. The service life of station is listed at 15 years and the clock started ticking in 2000. Extending the service life is HIGHLY linked to keeping up with any possible issues that arise WHEN they happen and that is mostly an ability only a 24/7/365 crew can provide. If you think station is useless and start talking about going to mars instead I point to you the fact that station has barely been in orbit long enough to have even made it to mars and back and it has certainly not survive on its own ( and could not ) without periodic resupply which YOU WILL NOT HAVE ON A MARS MISSION.
Station is a non sexy reality of living in space.. its like the farmers that came after columbus, they made the trip but they got no glory.. just a hard as hell life making it on a frontier. Station probably can't even function as a stand alone outpost. It is reliant on hundreds of ground controlers for its day to day operations, something that simply will not be practical with a mars mission due to comminication delays of 20-30 minutes or more. If station never presents a scientific discovery worth putting it up there for it will still be worthwhile in the aerospace technology of long term survival in space.
As for the science in particular... people are acting like its a surprise that to date ISS has largely been a bust as a science platform. People core complete is not scheduled untill 2006 which is the earliest a 6 man crew was EVER slated to be on station... and it was always stated that science would largely be secondary until such time as there was a sufficient crew on board and the construction phase was complete. Right now running science up there is like running it in a lab before its done being built where the scientists have to do the damn building. So at least don't judge it as compared to a fisnished and established lab here on earth. Perhaps it will never proove to be as important a place of reasearch as say MIT, or CALTECH or the SERBONNE but so far it is the only place where microgravity experiments can take place for durations exceeding a couple of weeks.
Take a long hard REALISTIC look at station. It has its faults, thats given. But bailing on it now would be far worse than biting the bullet and forging ahead. The costs incurred to date will have to be incurred again if we let it go to waste, perhaps it is a limited and unworthy construction but it beats nothing and thats what we have if we let it deteriorate into a useless hunk of junk.
Yeah but one small thing... the Russians where only tapped to provide a temporary crew return ability.. the idea was that in 2006 the US would add an extra Crew HAB module and the 7 person capable CRV. The us has since cancled both. While russia dropping out in 2003 on the CRV is premature its hard to cry foul since the US bailed on the CRV and crew hab the second Jr. was in office and the boeing budget overun came to light... the 7 person CRV has been re budgeted but it is now scheduled to come online in 2010. Ironically this leaves only 5 years on the initial lifetime expectancy of 15 years of Station which started with the dilevery of the service module in 2000.
I agree.. wish the bad boy could be tossed into geo stationary but like shuttle I would imagine there would be some serious thermal issues with regards to handling 12+ hours or so of sunlight a day. The thermal systems are designed with the understanding that they will be in shade several times a day... ISS already has some issues in this regard with its high inclination and the times of the year that generate high beta angles where it spends more time in sunlight than in the shade of the earths shadow.
Probably be more likely that we could operate it in orbit around the moon than in geosync... and the Delta V issues wouldn't be a heck of alot different, at least not in consideration of what it took to get the thing in LEO in the first place... getting to LEO is about 90% of the work of getting anywhere in the solar system.
It was a compromise like almost everything else to do with space station. It split the difference between Shuttles ability and Soyuz ability... probably more skewed towards Soyuz since Shuttle has a bit more freedom in its ability in achiving and recovering from various orbits.
Good points but
on
DSL Rising
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Lots of people are pointing out the issue of population densities which are in inhibition on the ability of DSL to penetrate the market.
However in the US there is also a real problem with the control the phone companies have over the telephone infrastructure. Not that they don't have a right to control of something they invested in but where the phone companies are not diving into DSL they are charging the DSL providers an arm and a leg to install and modify customer connections.. sometimes as much as 50-100 bucks simply to follow a customer through an address change.
Ultimately both cable companies and Phone companies have to integrate new technologies to add broadband net connection capabilities but for DSL providers there is the additional 'access' to the infrastructure charges that the cable providers are largely not having to deal with. To add insult to injury in most cases where the phone companies are attempting to provide DSL service themselves they are charging only a minimal amount less than non-phone company providers.. and generally tie those rates to using them for your phone service provider as well.
Population density is only part of the story... if you check census data you will find that the majority of the US population lives in fairly dense poplation areas.. DSL could easily have more users in the US if it were not for the issues presnted by the phone companies... as is cable companies have embraced broadband access much more readily and have thus secured a competitve edge.
In the long run I think both are doomed... the cost of a physically wired infrastructure is insane, creating, maintaining and updating. Countries on the scale of the US face and even larger problem in trying to maintain and update its many sparsely populated areas. On the other hand Wireless technologies are rapidly maturing to the point of being able to replace a wired infrastructure. In fact in many countries cellular services have all but replaced land line phone services. The same will happen in the US and in the rest of the world I imagine..... Now if only we could figure out a way to do away with those unsightly power lines to boot.
I doubt the hardware will be near as much an issue as the multi player aspect. The most popular FPS games are generally not reliant on current hardware as they develop a following over time. Establish a community intrested in playing each other without the limitation of internet gaming and these things ought to take off... I know I would rather pay for this than a movie ticket.
Ye gods only about 3 people rated above 3 even mention Heinlien ?
Asimovs Foundation ( seems the most common nomination )series was good but it just isn't nearly thought provoking enough for me, one response put it very well in that Foundation was a thinly veiled modern world exploded across a universe with some names changed.Great epic story but the world came across as very stale/sterile to me.
Heinlien posited truly new changes in culture brought on by changes in technology, ie
The concept of loonies and their culture.
The whole concept of the Howards.
The impact on sexual customs that would come with full genetic manipulation and eternal youth with no fear of unplanned pregnancy or disease. Some people take issue with his female characters, but I ask only that you posit why they would not be the way they are given his world. In recent history, freedom from pregnancy and equal rights have made women display far more open sexual agressiveness than in the past society of America.
As for Mamma Maureen in particular in " To Sail Beyond the Sunset " and 19th century Kansas, I think many peoples jaded view of old peoples sex and the hard to swallow odiepal relationship explorations get in the way of truly examining what Hienlien is saying about sexual custom. Sex and in particular Incest are 'untouchable' Sacred Cows in our society. Just ask Freud what its all about. Just like with other Sacred Cows Hienlien willy nilly sacrifices it and opens it up for discussion.
At anyrate, are there any more fundamental underpinnings of society than those which govern Sex and Procreation ?
In general he sacrifices sacred cows left and right to disect them and take a look at how they tick ( stranger in a strange land, job ). Many people have a knee jerk reaction to his casual discussion of taboo topics I think whithout truly exploring what he has to say.
He takes a historical point of view with regards to the advancement of science... IE that someone will stand current theory on its head but even so he deals with the implications of his science developed for plot devices ( multiverse, Time travel, libby drives ). But most of his tech is so mundane, so beliveable most people simply don't understand its far reaching implications, nor the true advancement most of his seeming simple ideas would present. Very little of his tech has been caught or rendered ridiculos by time.. boggle that for a while when recalling he worte the basis of most of it in the 50's and 60's. His take on genetics is on its way to becoming a reality.
True enough he is at turns dirty old man, heretic, comedian and satyre. but I think few people truly embraced the future as something that would be different and familiar all at once culturally as well as technologically the way he did.And I firmly belive no one intermixed or explored the possibilities as well to date.
Also of note for me are
Frank Herbert 'Dune' and the rest.
Clarke and Asimov.
Sagan
OSC 'enders game'
Turttledoves alternative history look at the civil war 'Guns of the south'.
The Illearth series by Donaldson.
Gordon Dixons 'Wolf and Iron'.
Verne
Kinda surprised no one mentioned Michale Flynn's recently completed series regarding the near term future of space travel and the threat of asteroids. Perhaps the main stream dreck in regards to that subject turned people sour on it? It wasn't the best written series but it was thought provoking. Especially his ideas regarding education.
For pure fun the Zahn starwars continuation trilogy. While Starwars is long on fiction and short of science I do consider it science fiction. But Star Wars is to science fiction what Treasure Island is to mainstream literature.
Just for the pure explosiveness of it, Imannuel Velikovsky. Of course his books are not stories in the genearl sense ( the earth and planets would be the characters, man is pretty secondary ) and He claims his speculations based on historical research are fact, not fiction. To date he hasn't become science either. If nothing else his books are incredible works of speculation which after all.. is a large part of what science fiction is about.
NEVER trust the client, and NEVER trust the server. The gall of SOE to try and police your knowledge of the information they send you is absolutly amazing to me. The problem of an unfair advantage aside I just don't see what grounds SOE has to stand on for attempting to legaly deny someone the right to know what information is comming or going into their machine from the outside world.
As for them actively scanning processes in the attempt to catch this activity I have to cry double foul. How would they respond if the same was done to their system ? That would obviously be a 'Hack' with serious legal ramifications yet they can do it without the same repercussions ? I don't think so!
If SOE dosn't want EQ to go up in flames Diablo style they better make peace with showeq or make double damn sure they can keep it broken in the event of a windows port.
Dought.. Whittle it was, didn't bother to google check my memory.
Idea was to find the next step. IE the SSME is to the Merlin as my 'Wimple' engine ( why not.. could be any name:-) ) would be to Whittle's turbine.
I think NERVA bosters would make acceptable orbital boosters ( ie used only in orbit ) But the public objection would still be huge... and not without merit. But Nuclear reactors will make it to space sooner or later, if they havn't already.
As I recall the idea was it would power the third stage of an apollo stack as originally envisioned.
Which is why I wonder why we spend time trying to make a better bi-propellent chemicle rocket. We are stuck in the 'piston engine' pardigim.. we need a wimple to get us to the next best thing, then another german mad scientist to make it practical. To heck with blue sky possibilities I would settle for a technology capable of developing 600 specific impulse or so.
NERVA style nuke engines could do it, they have an si of roughly 900 ( drool ), but nuclear is a dirty word. However its always nice to dream of a nuclear SSME that could launch that stack with half the gas and whole bunch more with all the gas.... would glowing in the dark be all that bad really ???
For this lifetime its possible your right. I also could not agree more that we won't move to the death of publication in physical form as we know it till the develop a useable media capable of replacing the versitility of the printed page. I would say the first feeble steps can be seen in the tablet PC and other technologies like it.
However I think the death of the record industry is potentially much closer as digital music is rapidly getting to the point it could displace the current conventional means of distribution just as the 8 track replaced LP's, casset replaced 8 track and CD replaced tape. With the loss of physical control of music distribution record companies loose alot of what drives them currently. They will be forced to adapt or they will become extinct. I imagine they will survive in some manner or other. Probbaly by focusing on promotion instead of record sales.
Ever done the math ? The most potent chemicle bipropellant mix is LOX and Hydrogen producing best case a specific impulse of around 450, SSME's I Believe harness somewhat over 400 of that which is pretty good. SSME's weigh in at 7500 pounds apiece and generate better than 400,000lbs of thrust. Lets say a dumb booster design is 75% as effective and costs only 25% of what an SSME does. Now this system would be incapable at lifting the shuttle without a corresponding 25% increase in fuel due to the 25% degredation in engine efficiency.
say what you want but the shuttle system tosses 220,000lbs or so into LEO, we will ignore for the moment the frustrating fact 150k of it is tied up in the orbiter itself ( and thats not including the engines ). Lets round it to an even 250,000lbs for S&G's ( you will see why shortly )
That 25% increase in fuel must come out of the 250,000 pounds that the system tosses into orbit otherwise its added weight which necesitate still a longer burn and more fuel ( you see the vicious cycle developing I am sure )
Now the ET holds roughly 1.5 million pounds of fuel. Lets say it only holds 1 million for the simplicity of the math and to illustrate my point even more clearly. a 25% increase for 1 million is 1/4 million... or 250,000 pounds. Now that you have your cheap booster ( and I didn't even suggest it weighs more than the current 7500 lbs weight for the SSME's ) you have a rocket that won't lift off the ground because your power to weight ratio is insufficient.
However it has a cheap engine.
You will also find that if you simply scale the system to use the cheaper booster you will either have to
A) use more of them... if it costs a 1/4 as much and you have to use 3 times as many and maintenence costs are doubled becasue you have more than twice as many less sophisticated engines to deal with how much have you saved in the end ?
B) Launch less acording to the power capabilities. You will find that at that point the price per pound that you tossed into orbit isn't greatly improoved though you will have a cheaper per launch cost.
As for your assesment of the Sat V... well how many engines are currently out there with the capability of the F-1 ? ( answer: none ). Even BDB's aren't BDB's. The performance margin of the Sat V and Shuttle and of all major rocket systems in the world currently capable of reaching LEO with ANY paylaod whatsoever are remarkably similar.
Slashdot Mirror
OH I don't know.... its not extensible enough to be a doom macro machine but it could easily be enough to macro a MMORPG skill convincingly enough. Course there are easier ways to do that... but this one could do it without a local program interface running in the background. You could probably also make it a travel ai which knew how to tell where it was and travel to where you want to go while you take a bath with programed responses to msg's recieved ( IE you are attacked by X **initiate combat escpae sequence Z** move to loc ) Text recognition would be a bizatch though.
CD's suck... 15-20 bucks for 1 or 2 highly promoted tracks you hear ad-neauseum on the radio. The other tracks are generally dreck and its hard to find the un-promoted gems becasue you cannot easily preview tracks not widely played. IE my idea of sampling music is not sitting at a store wearing indestructo crappy unadjustable sound headphones with a line behind me... or worse yet standing in line waiting. I much preffer kicked back at home or driving in my car with my sound system on my time.
The RIAA quite simply has got to find another buisness paradigm, one not predicated on a measure of physcial control over distributed media. Digital material simply does not work by the same rules as more physical based mediums and that is a good thing. Digital is the reality just the same as 8 track beat the Record, Cassette beat 8 track and CD beat cassete. Fluid digital will beat restricted CD digital. Remember capatilisim is a consumer driven marketplace thus one way or another the consumer will eventually win.
Yeah... but damn she looks good shakin her thang in hip huggers :-)
Just wish they would seperate music and image.. good image != good music and vice versa. Damn MTV and Damn the TV in general. Well I don't mean that... then again I do. Damnit damned if I do dmaned if I don't.
Ditto on a live 4 track.... I don't think there is anything inherrently evil is studio effect work, I just hate when it is substituted for talent.
Learn something new everyday. Gracias.
Havn't used p2p much since college but now that I have DSL I had gone back to it but the crap to qulity ratio I found shocked me compared to a few years ago.
If your reading this you in all likely hood posses more potential recording capability than possesed by a Bang up top of the line recording studio in the 70's. If your sound card is shitty you need 2-500 bucks and the cost of whatever prgram you want to run. If you can capture quality sound ( EASY ) and you can mix multiple tracks ( can be done with free programs or progs that cost $XXXXXXXXX ) then you can produce a high quality recording.
The skill at mixing tracks is as much an art as ripping a killer solo which leads to studios with high end equipment and kick ass sound rooms that enable uber recording quality. However with minimal work you can get close to sound room quality ( which is not always desired in the first place, alot of that isolation is so that they can add effects of rooms with differant qualities ) you can easily forgo this if your band has the talent to play a song straight through. Play it a few times and get the input levels right then play it a few times and take the best one wrap it and sell it.
Of course the one take recording is the province of skilled musicians who can actually play their material. Imagine if record lables only signed people capable of doing a decent one take recordings.... imagine actual individual flavored music instead of studio homgenized junk with the latest 'sound'.
I am not sure MD5 is such a stumbling block here. If 100 people share a file pop_song.mp3 and 99 of them are overpeer files your chance of getting a crappy copy of pop_song.mp3 are 99%. The MD5 checksums aren't going to enter into it, all that does is assure you that you got the same file you requested. Thus, crappy file requested = you download a crappy file and comparing the MD5 checksum will simply say hey you got what you requested. You have to have central file management of some sort to quality control according to MD5 and central management structures.. AKA TARGETS FOR RIAA.. are something P2P clients avoid at all cost.
What we need is an artificial stupid ( AI ) routine smart enough to determine if a sound file is clean so it can be embedded in the P2P client and thus have a decentralized quality control.
I wonder if a Peer to Peer slashdot style mod system for marking good files ( and their checksum values ) would work as well. the trick would be to figure out a way to avoid awarding MOD points to an 'overpeer' type client. Creating a method of assigning and tracking MOD points acording to MD5 checksums without creating targets would be rather tricky though.
There is an inherent issue here in P2P that is a double edged sword... freely shared files among thousands of peers is impossible to stop but it also is impossible to stop people from sharing bad files. That issue is enough of a pain in the ass when it is just people sharing a crappy recording but something on a massive scale like this can create problems. On the flip side most mass spam systems generate a detectable and thus avoidable pattern so its simply and arms race that will have no end as long as P2P's are around.
Actually it kind of amazes me that Mars having water didn't make a bigger.. errah Splash. Thats huge. Water being present on the planet in significant qualities makes establishing permanet setelments a realistic proposition.
As for T-Rex I have one question. If the modle is accurate and the T-rex sized Chicken can't even walk then HTF did T-Rex walk ? Damn people, get with it, either the Model is wrong or T-Rex couldn't lift its own weight. Sheesh. This all gets back to the question of the Brontasaur and its neck. If T-Rex could barely move the Brontasaur must have been damn near imobile and yet it had to ingest craploads of food to sustain its incredible mass. But now they barely move and they lived in herds... how did they sustain themselves ?
I look for more on the issue of the dinosaurs size in the future. Right now it is more or less a given that we do not understand the phsyology of the Dinosaurs for the simple reason that if they worked by the rules we understand today they could not have existed. There is something we don't know. Either they possesed a more capable biomass system than any current known life form on earth or they lived in a weaker gravity field.
30 years ago this month the United States unveiled a 50 ghz computer.
30 years ago this month the United States annouced mobile phones smaller than a pack of cigarettes that could display color pictures taken by a camera which is a part of the phone.
30 years ago this month the United States landed men on the Moon.
Which really sounds more unlikely ? The truly odd thing about the moon landings is that today we can not readily duplicate them. Shuttle is not capable of dealing with the thermal loads that it would be subjected to on a trip to the moon and yet it is more advanced than apollo. This seeming contradiction is one the general knowledge of the public is not readily equiped to explain. Same for the incidental details like the rod stiffend flag and the lack of stars in the landing pictures.
NASA is paying the price of having such a monumental achivement in the past which dwarfs its current efforts in the imaginations of the general public. Sort of like a one hit wonder rock band that never duplicates or extends its one successful song/album.
I think their time and money would be better spent doing things which released the doubt of the public by re-capturing their imaginations with current deeds instead of tired archival footage and head to head rebuttles of people who doubt what they have done in the past. In short stop telling us about all the wonderful things done and start doing more wonderful things.
If you could tie things like Telnet and different port acess points to map locations and then have to fight to gain control of those areas and then have people doing the actual hacking while your team is fighting for control... I think this could have possibilities.
Imagine having areas where you could gain access to a root terminal, password files etc... Combine the high adreneline of FPS game with the slower meta game of hacking the other guys system. Make the ultimate goal cutting off the other teams access to the game server or something like that.
Well CRV is back in the budget but the size and return profile of a glider ala shuttle makes it a very interesting engineering problem. I look forward to it being rolled out.. though they are saying it will take till 2010 now. I look forward to it if they ever actually finish it, hopefully it will have a station to return a crew from once it is finished.
I really don't see why a capsule would take a couple of years, after all we have all the testing and design specs from our past capsules. I'd have to think we could fabricate an apollo module in fairly short order and that could at least serve as an interim Soyuz. We know the materials, loads and shape which is a large part of the testing. I could see it taking 2 or more years if we tried to make improovements, not if we simply made what we already know how to make. Only real question is can a maxed out Delta stack physcially toss the needed mass into the proper orbit and can an apollo command module be mated to a delta stack withen all current design parameters on both sides? If no major modifications where needed in either case ( to the stack or the capsule ) then I doubt it would take two years. We could probably do it in 6 months if someone had a sufficient enough bug up there ass to do it.
Cancel ISS and save 3 billion a year in shuttle costs.
.0015% savings in the yearly US budget. Doubly so since the path to advancement is not in giving up but in making progress where capable. We did not go from the wright flyer to a boeing 747.
A whole 3 billion you say. Wow, talk about savings. Personally speaking of course a billion dollars is a considerable sum of money. However where the US government is concerned its like saving 3 bucks on a two thousand dollar yearly purchase. %.0015 budget savings. ( currently the budget is 2 trillion dollars )
On the other hand, scrapping shuttle reduces our ability to send someone into orbit to nil, nothing, nada, zero. We loose that ability until such time as we design a more efficient system that would meet your requirments as a worth while launch system. In fact if the RSA does take a dive as its threatning, and US scraps the Shuttle then manned launch capability would be no more excepting posssibly China's budding space program.
Granted that is a symbolic ability and perhaps one not rooted in practicallity, but frankly it is one I am loath to relenquish and damn sure not one I am willing to relinquish for a grand total of
Granted Shuttle's history is a boondoggle but hell with station it is finaly doing what it was designed to do in the first place. And when you get down to it its doing a very good job. Its doing a much better job than station itslef which is suffering from a confused and largely directionless design. However its hard to truly judge Station as yet as its not even freaking finished, its only a little over halfway there.
Personally I wish they would cut Shuttles non station related missions which are still going on. Station is not a viable commercial launch platform and if its going up there to do science experiments then what the hell is station for ? It is a passable low earth orbit hauler so lets commit it to that use. The costs of those launches could be used to complete the CRV devlopment and deployment of the extra Crew hab that was to go with it and leave some spare change to boot.
When launch costs are reduced by a factor of 100 ? And that will be when.. next week ? The truth of the matter is there is no readily apparent technology that will so much as reduce it by a factor of 10 in the next decade and in the meantime we will continue to launch. Seeing as that is the major budgetary issue regarding the station why not rotate crews while we are at it ? We have spent the billions to get the thing up there and we are just going to abandon it in the name of budget constraints when we will spend just as much after abandoning it ? Almost makes sense in an odd beuaracratic way.
What learn a lesson from a past experience ?? Thats far to logical for a govenment run operation.
I still want to see if we get past 2006 without an extended capacity CRV. I'm sorry but you just can't tell me we couldn't make a module that could be launched on a Delta that is at least as capable as a soyuz in less than a year much less 3?? The trick would be not trying to do too much. It seems NASA has no desire to go with a purely balistic landing craft, they want the sex appeal of something that lands like a plane.
Heck I have yet to figure out why they couldn't just build an mplm module with a life support system and heat shielding.. damn thing already fits in the shuttle bay and makes an airtight seal and passage to ISS, not to mention the first thing we figured out how to do was get a capsule back from orbit... we did that with mercury for crying out loud.
You know its easy to say the space station is a boondoggle and not worth throwing any more money at, after all its a big target that has very little success to shield it from criticisim. I hear many people not to much against bringing the crew home and letting it stay un manned for a while....
So how much money does that save ? The current cost expenditure of space station is not the station crew. The cost of the crew itself is negligible. The majority of the costs are tied up in LAUNCH costs, a small additional cost (realtively speaking) would be the manned operations centers for station ops and hardware production.
However, if station is to ever continue and or be used intermitently these centers and personel are not going anywhere as they will be needed or they will have to be re-trained if they are let go.
Shuttle cunstruction missions would still be going up so no money saved there on the launches OR the hardware. In addition shuttle missions become more complex and less productive because in addition to any construction needs a great deal of time is going to be soaked up in housekeeping chores. The ultimate ability of the shuttle crew to even perform its construction tasks would be placed in serious jepordy if even some very basic difficulites arise in bringing the station back online after being shut down. So not only are shuttle launch costs not decreased they are quite possibly increased and are deffiantly more at risk of being unable to be completed succesfully thus necessitating another launch. Don;t forget almost all of the construction missions are of a sequntial nature and CANNOT be done out of turn thus a construction mission failure would push back all subsequent shuttle launches. God forbid what if it happend twice ?
So about all you really cut are the progess and soyuz launch costs which are very small in comparison to shuttle launches. So the cost savings overall are small and the risk of completly trashing the station are greatly increased without a crew on board to deal with failiing equipment as it occurs. In particular the savings to NASA are NILL NOTHING NADDA ZIP ZERO... the savings only really effect the Russian space agency and its not really even savings since if you take them at their word this isn't a matter of not spending money they have but one of not spending money they do not have. Thats avoidence of debt not saving money.
This is a classic example to me of penny wise and pound foolish. Folks we are past halfway, past the point of no return where station is concerned. The service life of station is listed at 15 years and the clock started ticking in 2000. Extending the service life is HIGHLY linked to keeping up with any possible issues that arise WHEN they happen and that is mostly an ability only a 24/7/365 crew can provide. If you think station is useless and start talking about going to mars instead I point to you the fact that station has barely been in orbit long enough to have even made it to mars and back and it has certainly not survive on its own ( and could not ) without periodic resupply which YOU WILL NOT HAVE ON A MARS MISSION.
Station is a non sexy reality of living in space.. its like the farmers that came after columbus, they made the trip but they got no glory.. just a hard as hell life making it on a frontier. Station probably can't even function as a stand alone outpost. It is reliant on hundreds of ground controlers for its day to day operations, something that simply will not be practical with a mars mission due to comminication delays of 20-30 minutes or more. If station never presents a scientific discovery worth putting it up there for it will still be worthwhile in the aerospace technology of long term survival in space.
As for the science in particular... people are acting like its a surprise that to date ISS has largely been a bust as a science platform. People core complete is not scheduled untill 2006 which is the earliest a 6 man crew was EVER slated to be on station... and it was always stated that science would largely be secondary until such time as there was a sufficient crew on board and the construction phase was complete. Right now running science up there is like running it in a lab before its done being built where the scientists have to do the damn building. So at least don't judge it as compared to a fisnished and established lab here on earth. Perhaps it will never proove to be as important a place of reasearch as say MIT, or CALTECH or the SERBONNE but so far it is the only place where microgravity experiments can take place for durations exceeding a couple of weeks.
Take a long hard REALISTIC look at station. It has its faults, thats given. But bailing on it now would be far worse than biting the bullet and forging ahead. The costs incurred to date will have to be incurred again if we let it go to waste, perhaps it is a limited and unworthy construction but it beats nothing and thats what we have if we let it deteriorate into a useless hunk of junk.
Yeah but one small thing... the Russians where only tapped to provide a temporary crew return ability.. the idea was that in 2006 the US would add an extra Crew HAB module and the 7 person capable CRV. The us has since cancled both. While russia dropping out in 2003 on the CRV is premature its hard to cry foul since the US bailed on the CRV and crew hab the second Jr. was in office and the boeing budget overun came to light... the 7 person CRV has been re budgeted but it is now scheduled to come online in 2010. Ironically this leaves only 5 years on the initial lifetime expectancy of 15 years of Station which started with the dilevery of the service module in 2000.
I agree.. wish the bad boy could be tossed into geo stationary but like shuttle I would imagine there would be some serious thermal issues with regards to handling 12+ hours or so of sunlight a day. The thermal systems are designed with the understanding that they will be in shade several times a day... ISS already has some issues in this regard with its high inclination and the times of the year that generate high beta angles where it spends more time in sunlight than in the shade of the earths shadow.
Probably be more likely that we could operate it in orbit around the moon than in geosync... and the Delta V issues wouldn't be a heck of alot different, at least not in consideration of what it took to get the thing in LEO in the first place... getting to LEO is about 90% of the work of getting anywhere in the solar system.
It was a compromise like almost everything else to do with space station. It split the difference between Shuttles ability and Soyuz ability... probably more skewed towards Soyuz since Shuttle has a bit more freedom in its ability in achiving and recovering from various orbits.
Lots of people are pointing out the issue of population densities which are in inhibition on the ability of DSL to penetrate the market.
.... Now if only we could figure out a way to do away with those unsightly power lines to boot.
However in the US there is also a real problem with the control the phone companies have over the telephone infrastructure. Not that they don't have a right to control of something they invested in but where the phone companies are not diving into DSL they are charging the DSL providers an arm and a leg to install and modify customer connections.. sometimes as much as 50-100 bucks simply to follow a customer through an address change.
Ultimately both cable companies and Phone companies have to integrate new technologies to add broadband net connection capabilities but for DSL providers there is the additional 'access' to the infrastructure charges that the cable providers are largely not having to deal with. To add insult to injury in most cases where the phone companies are attempting to provide DSL service themselves they are charging only a minimal amount less than non-phone company providers.. and generally tie those rates to using them for your phone service provider as well.
Population density is only part of the story... if you check census data you will find that the majority of the US population lives in fairly dense poplation areas.. DSL could easily have more users in the US if it were not for the issues presnted by the phone companies... as is cable companies have embraced broadband access much more readily and have thus secured a competitve edge.
In the long run I think both are doomed... the cost of a physically wired infrastructure is insane, creating, maintaining and updating. Countries on the scale of the US face and even larger problem in trying to maintain and update its many sparsely populated areas. On the other hand Wireless technologies are rapidly maturing to the point of being able to replace a wired infrastructure. In fact in many countries cellular services have all but replaced land line phone services. The same will happen in the US and in the rest of the world I imagine.
I doubt the hardware will be near as much an issue as the multi player aspect. The most popular FPS games are generally not reliant on current hardware as they develop a following over time. Establish a community intrested in playing each other without the limitation of internet gaming and these things ought to take off... I know I would rather pay for this than a movie ticket.
Ye gods only about 3 people rated above 3 even mention Heinlien ?
.. is a large part of what science fiction is about.
Asimovs Foundation ( seems the most common nomination )series was good but it just isn't nearly thought provoking enough for me, one response put it very well in that Foundation was a thinly veiled modern world exploded across a universe with some names changed.Great epic story but the world came across as very stale/sterile to me.
Heinlien posited truly new changes in culture brought on by changes in technology, ie
The concept of loonies and their culture.
The whole concept of the Howards.
The impact on sexual customs that would come with full genetic manipulation and eternal youth with no fear of unplanned pregnancy or disease. Some people take issue with his female characters, but I ask only that you posit why they would not be the way they are given his world. In recent history, freedom from pregnancy and equal rights have made women display far more open sexual agressiveness than in the past society of America.
As for Mamma Maureen in particular in " To Sail Beyond the Sunset " and 19th century Kansas, I think many peoples jaded view of old peoples sex and the hard to swallow odiepal relationship explorations get in the way of truly examining what Hienlien is saying about sexual custom. Sex and in particular Incest are 'untouchable' Sacred Cows in our society. Just ask Freud what its all about. Just like with other Sacred Cows Hienlien willy nilly sacrifices it and opens it up for discussion.
At anyrate, are there any more fundamental underpinnings of society than those which govern Sex and Procreation ?
In general he sacrifices sacred cows left and right to disect them and take a look at how they tick ( stranger in a strange land, job ). Many people have a knee jerk reaction to his casual discussion of taboo topics I think whithout truly exploring what he has to say.
He takes a historical point of view with regards to the advancement of science... IE that someone will stand current theory on its head but even so he deals with the implications of his science developed for plot devices ( multiverse, Time travel, libby drives ). But most of his tech is so mundane, so beliveable most people simply don't understand its far reaching implications, nor the true advancement most of his seeming simple ideas would present. Very little of his tech has been caught or rendered ridiculos by time.. boggle that for a while when recalling he worte the basis of most of it in the 50's and 60's. His take on genetics is on its way to becoming a reality.
True enough he is at turns dirty old man, heretic, comedian and satyre. but I think few people truly embraced the future as something that would be different and familiar all at once culturally as well as technologically the way he did.And I firmly belive no one intermixed or explored the possibilities as well to date.
Also of note for me are
Frank Herbert 'Dune' and the rest.
Clarke and Asimov.
Sagan
OSC 'enders game'
Turttledoves alternative history look at the civil war 'Guns of the south'.
The Illearth series by Donaldson.
Gordon Dixons 'Wolf and Iron'.
Verne
Kinda surprised no one mentioned Michale Flynn's recently completed series regarding the near term future of space travel and the threat of asteroids. Perhaps the main stream dreck in regards to that subject turned people sour on it? It wasn't the best written series but it was thought provoking. Especially his ideas regarding education.
For pure fun the Zahn starwars continuation trilogy. While Starwars is long on fiction and short of science I do consider it science fiction. But Star Wars is to science fiction what Treasure Island is to mainstream literature.
Just for the pure explosiveness of it, Imannuel Velikovsky. Of course his books are not stories in the genearl sense ( the earth and planets would be the characters, man is pretty secondary ) and He claims his speculations based on historical research are fact, not fiction. To date he hasn't become science either. If nothing else his books are incredible works of speculation which after all
AMEN
NEVER trust the client, and NEVER trust the server. The gall of SOE to try and police your knowledge of the information they send you is absolutly amazing to me. The problem of an unfair advantage aside I just don't see what grounds SOE has to stand on for attempting to legaly deny someone the right to know what information is comming or going into their machine from the outside world.
As for them actively scanning processes in the attempt to catch this activity I have to cry double foul. How would they respond if the same was done to their system ? That would obviously be a 'Hack' with serious legal ramifications yet they can do it without the same repercussions ? I don't think so!
If SOE dosn't want EQ to go up in flames Diablo style they better make peace with showeq or make double damn sure they can keep it broken in the event of a windows port.
Dought.. Whittle it was, didn't bother to google check my memory.
:-) ) would be to Whittle's turbine.
Idea was to find the next step. IE the SSME is to the Merlin as my 'Wimple' engine ( why not.. could be any name
I think NERVA bosters would make acceptable orbital boosters ( ie used only in orbit ) But the public objection would still be huge... and not without merit. But Nuclear reactors will make it to space sooner or later, if they havn't already.
As I recall the idea was it would power the third stage of an apollo stack as originally envisioned.
Which is why I wonder why we spend time trying to make a better bi-propellent chemicle rocket. We are stuck in the 'piston engine' pardigim.. we need a wimple to get us to the next best thing, then another german mad scientist to make it practical. To heck with blue sky possibilities I would settle for a technology capable of developing 600 specific impulse or so.
NERVA style nuke engines could do it, they have an si of roughly 900 ( drool ), but nuclear is a dirty word. However its always nice to dream of a nuclear SSME that could launch that stack with half the gas and whole bunch more with all the gas.... would glowing in the dark be all that bad really ???
For this lifetime its possible your right. I also could not agree more that we won't move to the death of publication in physical form as we know it till the develop a useable media capable of replacing the versitility of the printed page. I would say the first feeble steps can be seen in the tablet PC and other technologies like it.
However I think the death of the record industry is potentially much closer as digital music is rapidly getting to the point it could displace the current conventional means of distribution just as the 8 track replaced LP's, casset replaced 8 track and CD replaced tape. With the loss of physical control of music distribution record companies loose alot of what drives them currently. They will be forced to adapt or they will become extinct. I imagine they will survive in some manner or other. Probbaly by focusing on promotion instead of record sales.
Ever done the math ? The most potent chemicle bipropellant mix is LOX and Hydrogen producing best case a specific impulse of around 450, SSME's I Believe harness somewhat over 400 of that which is pretty good. SSME's weigh in at 7500 pounds apiece and generate better than 400,000lbs of thrust. Lets say a dumb booster design is 75% as effective and costs only 25% of what an SSME does. Now this system would be incapable at lifting the shuttle without a corresponding 25% increase in fuel due to the 25% degredation in engine efficiency.
say what you want but the shuttle system tosses 220,000lbs or so into LEO, we will ignore for the moment the frustrating fact 150k of it is tied up in the orbiter itself ( and thats not including the engines ). Lets round it to an even 250,000lbs for S&G's ( you will see why shortly )
That 25% increase in fuel must come out of the 250,000 pounds that the system tosses into orbit otherwise its added weight which necesitate still a longer burn and more fuel ( you see the vicious cycle developing I am sure )
Now the ET holds roughly 1.5 million pounds of fuel. Lets say it only holds 1 million for the simplicity of the math and to illustrate my point even more clearly. a 25% increase for 1 million is 1/4 million... or 250,000 pounds. Now that you have your cheap booster ( and I didn't even suggest it weighs more than the current 7500 lbs weight for the SSME's ) you have a rocket that won't lift off the ground because your power to weight ratio is insufficient.
However it has a cheap engine.
You will also find that if you simply scale the system to use the cheaper booster you will either have to
A) use more of them... if it costs a 1/4 as much and you have to use 3 times as many and maintenence costs are doubled becasue you have more than twice as many less sophisticated engines to deal with how much have you saved in the end ?
B) Launch less acording to the power capabilities. You will find that at that point the price per pound that you tossed into orbit isn't greatly improoved though you will have a cheaper per launch cost.
As for your assesment of the Sat V... well how many engines are currently out there with the capability of the F-1 ? ( answer: none ). Even BDB's aren't BDB's. The performance margin of the Sat V and Shuttle and of all major rocket systems in the world currently capable of reaching LEO with ANY paylaod whatsoever are remarkably similar.