Why would any investor choose to fund a company that planned to attempt to collect this money?
Because if you got NASA out of the way it would cost a lot less than $20,000,000,000; you could probably do it for a billion or two if you bought launches from the Commies and adapted Soyuz hardware for most of the mission.
That, I think, is actually the biggest problem with the idea; it would promote an Apollo-style rush to the Moon without developing any really new technology which would allow sustained flights.
Ultimately private companies will land on the Moon once the tourist market is rich enough to sustain flights there; which won't happen until after there's a big tourist market for suborbital flights and then a big tourist market for orbital flights as costs fall.
What I don't get is why we don't just buy some Soyuz spacecraft off the Russians and be done with it.
Because buying Soyuz wouldn't create many jobs in Florida and Texas. The manned spaceflight side of NASA is a jobs program which just happens to occasionally put some people into space.
AMD's mainstream line is about on par with Intel, and has a considerable cost advantage.
I'd say it's more than AMD's high-end is currently on par with Intel's mainstream line, forcing AMD to sell for a much lower price than Intel's high-end to compete.
I would say AMD and Intel are neck and neck performance-wise.
If by 'neck and neck' you mean 'often slaughtered by a CPU running 500MHz slower', yes. Which wouldn't be a problem for AMD per se if AMD's slower CPUs were significantly cheaper to build than Intel's; most of the revenue is in the mid-range even if much of the profit is at the high end.
They both alternate years of being in the lead.
AMD get ahead when Intel screw up. Currently Intel are not screwing up and don't seem likely to screw up for some time to come.
There are really only two manufacturers in the CPU market.
That'll be news to ARM (though I suppose that if you're pedantic enough you could claim that they don't actually _manufacture_ CPUs).
However, the 60W difference between Nehalem and Lynnfield seems odd since that would means that my system would drop to 35W idle with Lynnfield!
Isn't the claimed 60W difference under load? The idle figures I see in the Tom's Hardware article only show about 30W difference.
However, from what I've read of the article, the new CPUs will pretty much shut down cores which aren't being used and lose an entire north-bridge chip that currently takes about 20W by itself.
Legit users, of course, don't have to worry because Windows will never stop working for them (there are some exceptions, but those are typically solved quickly)
I bet you also believe that 'if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear', right?
I don't give a flying monkey crap about Microsoft's profits; I care about my software randomly not working because some crappy 'validation' software decides that I'm a criminal. More than that, I care about the whole concept of being treated as a criminal until proven innocent by a company that I've paid money to for the product I'm using.
You may be happy to bend over for big corporate profits, but I'm increasingly fed up with this crap -- not just from Microsoft but from other companies who decide to prevent software I've purchased from running until I beg them to fix their god-damn piece of crap 'validation'/'activation'/DRM bullshit -- to the extent that I'm now doing my best to completely eliminate Windows and commercial software which contains this kind of shit from my home.
Look in your pocket... I'm betting you have a cell phone.
Nope, I just checked all my pockets, no phone there. You lose.
Your phone connects to a tower to "talk" - they know which numbers are connected to what towers at any time of the day.
A connection to a cell tower is required for a cell-phone to work. Sending random data back to Microsoft is not required for Windows to work. See the difference?
So it's okay for a corporation to tread upon workers, pay them less than a living wage, force them to work long hours, and conspire to drive up prices for the goods they need, but heaven forbid the government get involved and regulate?
If employees aren't worth 'a living wage' -- whatever that might mean -- then if 'the government get involved and regulate', the company will just shift the jobs abroad to wherever the cheap workers are.
If you remove the SRBs then you will have to design a whole new engine, in the class of the Apollo era F-1s since each SRB puts out the equivalent thrust of almost TWO F-1 rocket engines each.
Some would argue that it's cheaper to engineer a man-rated rocket from scratch than go back and redesign an existing one, but it's a complex issue that I certainly am not qualified to weigh in on.
The whole 'man-rating' concept is really bogus: the shuttle couldn't be called 'man-rated' in any real sense when it kills its crew one flight in fifty.
The primary difference between manned and unmanned launchers is aborts and engine-out capability; if you're launching a bunch of humans and you lose a couple of engines but can still achieve a low orbit, that's preferable to having to make a risky abort. If you're launching a satellite and can only put it into a low orbit where it won't stay up for long, you're better off just dropping it into the ocean.
So yes, you'd want to ensure that aborts could be handled safely at any point in the flight, and add extra capability to handle engine-out failures which where the unmanned launch would be better off to just crash and burn. But those are relatively minor issues... you may lose some payload from flying a non-ideal trajectory, and you'll add some cost and perhaps some mass to improve engine-out capability; but those kind of changes hardly register when compared to NASA's record of spending billions of dollars and several years to achieve... nothing.
On the other hand, Ares V, as intended, will have significantly higher payload capacity than any other other rocket around. Bigger than Saturn V. So the debate about replacing Ares V with something COTS is moot... there IS nothing COTS that will fill its role.
Which leads to the obvious question: 'so what?'
What will Ares V achieve which will be worth its development and flight cost? Do we really need to build a huge launcher which will fly maybe once a year if we can launch the same payload on four or five flights of a smaller launcher which will see the cost-benefits of mass production?
I'm willing to be convinced that NASA really _need_ a huge, expensive launcher of their own, but I've seen no evidence so far that it will prove cheaper than buying launches elsewhere.
But nope, no money, because of some special interest in some congresscritter's district somewhere, that has a vested interest in NASA using an inferior piece of technology.
That, though, I could somewhat agree with... but I think you put too much blame on Congress and too little on NASA 'not invented here' syndrome (c.f. the Delta X).
NASA and teh space shuttle!!! It's like totally fail. Cuz it's like, teh goverment.
I think you got it.
The shuttle's problems were predicted before it flew, and even NASA appear to have understood that they couldn't possibly achieve the things they were claiming it would do (e.g. they didn't even have enough capacity to build the external tanks to support the two-week turnaround they were claiming they'd achieve).
No private company looking for a viable means of launching payloads cheaply would have built the shuttle; only a government could fail so spectacularly.
Sure, it's done a few useful things, but nothing even begin to justify the cost.
I always thought that the goal of Ares was to provide a method of finally killing the shuttle program: by promising a successor which would maintain the shuttle program jobs, they would have the political clout to close down the shuttle support manufacturing (external tanks, etc) to ensure that it couldn't fly past 2010 and then they would close down Ares once its job was done.
When people say 'NASA', they mostly mean the part that's spending billions delivering pizza to a few astronauts in a tin can who are too busy fixing it to do anything much useful. Not the unmanned part or the aeronautical part, both of which provide decent value for money.
And when it comes to rocketry, sure, the shuttle is getting a little long in the tooth, but is there any other vehicle capable of either servising Hubble, or bringing anything down?
At over a billion dollars per servicing mission, building multiple Hubbles on a production line and launching a new one every few years would have been cheaper. And there's essentially no market for bringing large payloads _down_ from space.
A hundred years ago, warfare was considered glorious, exciting, and desirable.
And it still is in much of the world; just because pampered Westerners no longer believe that war is glorious and exciting, that doesn't mean that poor kids in the third world feel the same way. Fighting a war is a step up for many such people.
The world is moving closer to peace every day. Step by step.
More people will die in in 21st century conflicts than did in the 20th.
What we really need is some basic R&D into why conservatives hold on to the mantra that the free market cures all ills when it's been shown time and again to fail completely in so many areas.
If only we had a free market; instead, most of the areas which could really make big profits in the next couple of decades are so heavily regulated that only a fool would try to build a business out of them in America. The next big thing is probably in biotech or nanotech, and imagine the outcry from the government if the next Steve Jobs wanted to set up a biotech lab in their garage to develop cures for cancer or whatever.
America became rich and powerful in the mid-20th century because it provided a far better environment for developing new technologies than the rest of the word; that meant that US companies got ahead and the 'best and brightest' of Europe moved to America because they had the best chance of doing something useful. Now America is at least as overregulated as Europe, so why would anyone want to do basic research there?
Where do you think IT would be today if Jobs and co had been lumbered with as many regulations as biotech companies?
Which is why the BBC has been at the forefront of reporting the MP expense scandal in Britain, which has certainly done far more damage to Labour than to the Conservatives.
a) it hasn't. It might have reported on the scandal, but it could hardly avoid doing so when everyone else was. If I remember correctly, it was the Telegraph which broke the story, the BBC was just a hanger-on after the fact.
b) since Labour are toast at the next election, the BBC lefties may have decided it's time to suck up to the Tories, since many Tories want the BBC privatised precisely because it's a haven of politically-correct leftism.
The BBC has two motivations:
1. To maintain its funding. 2. To push politically-correct left-wing viewpoints.
So long as its funding is stable, it will push further and further to the left of the vast majority of the British people. If the funding is at risk, it will actually start pretending it's not a haven of politically-correct leftism until the funding is stable again... hence, for example, the shift in its positions from the Thatcher era to the Blair era.
Well, first of all the sun isn't very good at melting snow because snow is reflective.
The albedo of freshly fallen snow is around 0.7-0.8 (and I believe it's significantly lower for IR), so more than 20% of the energy from the sun goes into warming the snow.
Second of all, 15% efficient solar panels are probably much closer to 100% efficient at heating themselves (or could be made to do that very easily).
And they still collect less energy than the raw sunlight which is unable to melt the snow.
The idea is to put the roads in dry, desert like areas.
How much snow do you get in 'dry, desert-like areas'? For that matter, how many roads do you find in such areas? For that matter, if this is restricted to 'dry, desert-like areas', why not, like, just build big piles of solar panels across the desert and forget the whole 'road' thing?
But much of that energy is just dissipated when there is no snow, this can pull energy off the grid if it needs to, and store energy it gets from the sun to use specifically when it detects snow.
If the heat of the sun isn't enough to melt the snow on the road, how is a 15% efficient solar panel going to produce enough heat to do so? Particularly at night?
OK, even the SUMMARY contains a sentence that says the roads wouldn't need plowing in the winter because they heat themselves to automatically melt any snow accumulation.
So we're installing these fancy new solar panels in order to generate less electricity than will be required to heat them in the winter?
The DHS has always held the belief (with the Supreme Court's backing) that people and their belongings at customs checkpoints at the airport (or at a border crossing) aren't within the country (yet), consequently, the constitution doesn't apply to "inspections" within those checkpoints. That gives the DHS and their goons all the leeway they want in "confiscating" or "inspecting" all the stuff they want for as long as they want.
By that argument, they're also free to take you into a back room and torture you until you admit to being an EVIL TERRORIST, even if you're a US citizen.
And since almost anyone will admit to almost anything under torture, just think of how successful they could be at catching terrorists that way.
Uh, no; there are so many different places where autorun is configured in Windows that the average clueless user has no hope of managing to completely disable it. The whole thing is a disaster.
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Why would any investor choose to fund a company that planned to attempt to collect this money?
Because if you got NASA out of the way it would cost a lot less than $20,000,000,000; you could probably do it for a billion or two if you bought launches from the Commies and adapted Soyuz hardware for most of the mission.
That, I think, is actually the biggest problem with the idea; it would promote an Apollo-style rush to the Moon without developing any really new technology which would allow sustained flights.
Ultimately private companies will land on the Moon once the tourist market is rich enough to sustain flights there; which won't happen until after there's a big tourist market for suborbital flights and then a big tourist market for orbital flights as costs fall.
What I don't get is why we don't just buy some Soyuz spacecraft off the Russians and be done with it.
Because buying Soyuz wouldn't create many jobs in Florida and Texas. The manned spaceflight side of NASA is a jobs program which just happens to occasionally put some people into space.
AMD's mainstream line is about on par with Intel, and has a considerable cost advantage.
I'd say it's more than AMD's high-end is currently on par with Intel's mainstream line, forcing AMD to sell for a much lower price than Intel's high-end to compete.
I would say AMD and Intel are neck and neck performance-wise.
If by 'neck and neck' you mean 'often slaughtered by a CPU running 500MHz slower', yes. Which wouldn't be a problem for AMD per se if AMD's slower CPUs were significantly cheaper to build than Intel's; most of the revenue is in the mid-range even if much of the profit is at the high end.
They both alternate years of being in the lead.
AMD get ahead when Intel screw up. Currently Intel are not screwing up and don't seem likely to screw up for some time to come.
There are really only two manufacturers in the CPU market.
That'll be news to ARM (though I suppose that if you're pedantic enough you could claim that they don't actually _manufacture_ CPUs).
However, the 60W difference between Nehalem and Lynnfield seems odd since that would means that my system would drop to 35W idle with Lynnfield!
Isn't the claimed 60W difference under load? The idle figures I see in the Tom's Hardware article only show about 30W difference.
However, from what I've read of the article, the new CPUs will pretty much shut down cores which aren't being used and lose an entire north-bridge chip that currently takes about 20W by itself.
Legit users, of course, don't have to worry because Windows will never stop working for them (there are some exceptions, but those are typically solved quickly)
I bet you also believe that 'if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear', right?
I don't give a flying monkey crap about Microsoft's profits; I care about my software randomly not working because some crappy 'validation' software decides that I'm a criminal. More than that, I care about the whole concept of being treated as a criminal until proven innocent by a company that I've paid money to for the product I'm using.
You may be happy to bend over for big corporate profits, but I'm increasingly fed up with this crap -- not just from Microsoft but from other companies who decide to prevent software I've purchased from running until I beg them to fix their god-damn piece of crap 'validation'/'activation'/DRM bullshit -- to the extent that I'm now doing my best to completely eliminate Windows and commercial software which contains this kind of shit from my home.
Look in your pocket... I'm betting you have a cell phone.
Nope, I just checked all my pockets, no phone there. You lose.
Your phone connects to a tower to "talk" - they know which numbers are connected to what towers at any time of the day.
A connection to a cell tower is required for a cell-phone to work. Sending random data back to Microsoft is not required for Windows to work. See the difference?
You can also avoid installing or validating using WGA ever, as long as you only use automatic updates to pull critical updates.
How can you avoid installing WGA by using automatic updated to pull critical updates... when Microsoft push WGA on you as a 'critical update'?
There's no reason to put yourself at risk by openly carrying around something that resembles a weapon unless you intend to use it.
How exactly do you plan to carry a six-foot long sniper rifle concealed in a shoulder holster?
So it's okay for a corporation to tread upon workers, pay them less than a living wage, force them to work long hours, and conspire to drive up prices for the goods they need, but heaven forbid the government get involved and regulate?
If employees aren't worth 'a living wage' -- whatever that might mean -- then if 'the government get involved and regulate', the company will just shift the jobs abroad to wherever the cheap workers are.
If you remove the SRBs then you will have to design a whole new engine, in the class of the Apollo era F-1s since each SRB puts out the equivalent thrust of almost TWO F-1 rocket engines each.
Or you could just buy RD-171s...
Assuming the I-X mission next month is succesful I think any doubts about the actual workability of flying an SRB solo will be dead.
Aside from the fact that 'Areas I-X' bears almost no resemblance to 'Ares I', anyway.
Some would argue that it's cheaper to engineer a man-rated rocket from scratch than go back and redesign an existing one, but it's a complex issue that I certainly am not qualified to weigh in on.
The whole 'man-rating' concept is really bogus: the shuttle couldn't be called 'man-rated' in any real sense when it kills its crew one flight in fifty.
The primary difference between manned and unmanned launchers is aborts and engine-out capability; if you're launching a bunch of humans and you lose a couple of engines but can still achieve a low orbit, that's preferable to having to make a risky abort. If you're launching a satellite and can only put it into a low orbit where it won't stay up for long, you're better off just dropping it into the ocean.
So yes, you'd want to ensure that aborts could be handled safely at any point in the flight, and add extra capability to handle engine-out failures which where the unmanned launch would be better off to just crash and burn. But those are relatively minor issues... you may lose some payload from flying a non-ideal trajectory, and you'll add some cost and perhaps some mass to improve engine-out capability; but those kind of changes hardly register when compared to NASA's record of spending billions of dollars and several years to achieve... nothing.
On the other hand, Ares V, as intended, will have significantly higher payload capacity than any other other rocket around. Bigger than Saturn V. So the debate about replacing Ares V with something COTS is moot... there IS nothing COTS that will fill its role.
Which leads to the obvious question: 'so what?'
What will Ares V achieve which will be worth its development and flight cost? Do we really need to build a huge launcher which will fly maybe once a year if we can launch the same payload on four or five flights of a smaller launcher which will see the cost-benefits of mass production?
I'm willing to be convinced that NASA really _need_ a huge, expensive launcher of their own, but I've seen no evidence so far that it will prove cheaper than buying launches elsewhere.
But nope, no money, because of some special interest in some congresscritter's district somewhere, that has a vested interest in NASA using an inferior piece of technology.
That, though, I could somewhat agree with... but I think you put too much blame on Congress and too little on NASA 'not invented here' syndrome (c.f. the Delta X).
NASA and teh space shuttle!!! It's like totally fail. Cuz it's like, teh goverment.
I think you got it.
The shuttle's problems were predicted before it flew, and even NASA appear to have understood that they couldn't possibly achieve the things they were claiming it would do (e.g. they didn't even have enough capacity to build the external tanks to support the two-week turnaround they were claiming they'd achieve).
No private company looking for a viable means of launching payloads cheaply would have built the shuttle; only a government could fail so spectacularly.
Sure, it's done a few useful things, but nothing even begin to justify the cost.
Oh wait, that wasn't the goal, was it?
I always thought that the goal of Ares was to provide a method of finally killing the shuttle program: by promising a successor which would maintain the shuttle program jobs, they would have the political clout to close down the shuttle support manufacturing (external tanks, etc) to ensure that it couldn't fly past 2010 and then they would close down Ares once its job was done.
What about spirit and opprtunity?
Don't they count?
When people say 'NASA', they mostly mean the part that's spending billions delivering pizza to a few astronauts in a tin can who are too busy fixing it to do anything much useful. Not the unmanned part or the aeronautical part, both of which provide decent value for money.
And when it comes to rocketry, sure, the shuttle is getting a little long in the tooth, but is there any other vehicle capable of either servising Hubble, or bringing anything down?
At over a billion dollars per servicing mission, building multiple Hubbles on a production line and launching a new one every few years would have been cheaper. And there's essentially no market for bringing large payloads _down_ from space.
A hundred years ago, warfare was considered glorious, exciting, and desirable.
And it still is in much of the world; just because pampered Westerners no longer believe that war is glorious and exciting, that doesn't mean that poor kids in the third world feel the same way. Fighting a war is a step up for many such people.
The world is moving closer to peace every day. Step by step.
More people will die in in 21st century conflicts than did in the 20th.
What we really need is some basic R&D into why conservatives hold on to the mantra that the free market cures all ills when it's been shown time and again to fail completely in so many areas.
If only we had a free market; instead, most of the areas which could really make big profits in the next couple of decades are so heavily regulated that only a fool would try to build a business out of them in America. The next big thing is probably in biotech or nanotech, and imagine the outcry from the government if the next Steve Jobs wanted to set up a biotech lab in their garage to develop cures for cancer or whatever.
America became rich and powerful in the mid-20th century because it provided a far better environment for developing new technologies than the rest of the word; that meant that US companies got ahead and the 'best and brightest' of Europe moved to America because they had the best chance of doing something useful. Now America is at least as overregulated as Europe, so why would anyone want to do basic research there?
Where do you think IT would be today if Jobs and co had been lumbered with as many regulations as biotech companies?
Which is why the BBC has been at the forefront of reporting the MP expense scandal in Britain, which has certainly done far more damage to Labour than to the Conservatives.
a) it hasn't. It might have reported on the scandal, but it could hardly avoid doing so when everyone else was. If I remember correctly, it was the Telegraph which broke the story, the BBC was just a hanger-on after the fact.
b) since Labour are toast at the next election, the BBC lefties may have decided it's time to suck up to the Tories, since many Tories want the BBC privatised precisely because it's a haven of politically-correct leftism.
The BBC has two motivations:
1. To maintain its funding.
2. To push politically-correct left-wing viewpoints.
So long as its funding is stable, it will push further and further to the left of the vast majority of the British people. If the funding is at risk, it will actually start pretending it's not a haven of politically-correct leftism until the funding is stable again... hence, for example, the shift in its positions from the Thatcher era to the Blair era.
Well, first of all the sun isn't very good at melting snow because snow is reflective.
The albedo of freshly fallen snow is around 0.7-0.8 (and I believe it's significantly lower for IR), so more than 20% of the energy from the sun goes into warming the snow.
Second of all, 15% efficient solar panels are probably much closer to 100% efficient at heating themselves (or could be made to do that very easily).
And they still collect less energy than the raw sunlight which is unable to melt the snow.
It's basic thermodynamics.
Indeed it is: perhaps you should learn some.
The idea is to put the roads in dry, desert like areas.
How much snow do you get in 'dry, desert-like areas'? For that matter, how many roads do you find in such areas? For that matter, if this is restricted to 'dry, desert-like areas', why not, like, just build big piles of solar panels across the desert and forget the whole 'road' thing?
But much of that energy is just dissipated when there is no snow, this can pull energy off the grid if it needs to, and store energy it gets from the sun to use specifically when it detects snow.
If the heat of the sun isn't enough to melt the snow on the road, how is a 15% efficient solar panel going to produce enough heat to do so? Particularly at night?
OK, even the SUMMARY contains a sentence that says the roads wouldn't need plowing in the winter because they heat themselves to automatically melt any snow accumulation.
So we're installing these fancy new solar panels in order to generate less electricity than will be required to heat them in the winter?
The DHS has always held the belief (with the Supreme Court's backing) that people and their belongings at customs checkpoints at the airport (or at a border crossing) aren't within the country (yet), consequently, the constitution doesn't apply to "inspections" within those checkpoints. That gives the DHS and their goons all the leeway they want in "confiscating" or "inspecting" all the stuff they want for as long as they want.
By that argument, they're also free to take you into a back room and torture you until you admit to being an EVIL TERRORIST, even if you're a US citizen.
And since almost anyone will admit to almost anything under torture, just think of how successful they could be at catching terrorists that way.
Easily disabled or dismissed.
Uh, no; there are so many different places where autorun is configured in Windows that the average clueless user has no hope of managing to completely disable it. The whole thing is a disaster.