On a Mars trip you'd be carrying hundreds of tons of fuel for the return journey, and quite a few tons of supplies of various kinds. That alone makes a half-decent radiation shield for the trip from Earth to Mars... shielding on the way back would be more complicated.
"How does the Challenger explosion connect with orbital refuelling?"
The shuttles were going to carry liquid-fuelled boosters to launch interplanetary probes like Galileo. After Challenger blew up they rethought that and cancelled any such future flights.
"You make the fuel and the spacecraft *on the moon*. The whole point of starting from orbit, or from the moon, is to avoid hauling hundreds of tons of stuff up from ground level in the first place"
And how exactly do you expect to "make spacecraft on the moon", without "hauling hundreds of tons of stuff up from ground level"? How easy exactly do you think it is to build a spacecraft from rocks with no tools or factories?
They went through the Van Allen belts in a couple of minutes rather than live in them for months, and there were no solar flares during the Apollo flights. Had there been a solar flare, their only chance was to turn the CSM so the fuel tanks of the SM were between them and the sun for some shielding, cross their fingers and kiss their butt goodbye.
"Why put the station in such a poor, low orbit? Because the shuttle can't fly that high."
It's not in a low orbit because of the shuttle, it's in a low orbit because it's manned and therefore cannot go higher without being either in or beyond the Van Allen belts: in the belts you'll kill the crew real fast, outside the belts you'll kill the crew the next time there's a solar eruption that emits a lot of radiation. No manned station is going to be much higher than ISS without a lot of radiation shielding.
Also, if it could be built, a Daedulus engine can do it easily and burn only a fairly small amount of fuel relative to the mass of the ship.
Further out gets more tricky, but constant 1g trips to Mars and back aren't that hard: lots of engineering work, but nothing that even comes close to breaking the laws of physics.
Of course the important question is, why would you want to go to Mars? Tourist trips, sure, but there's little real benefit to living in a big gravity well if you're advanced enough to build free-flying habitats.
Personally if I get spammed by stupid ads that expect to steal my entire screen, I'll be telling the companies whose products are being advertised precisely what I think of that crap, not the sites showing them. Well, assuming any of them are legitimate companies and not just the average crap-merchants that seem to buy most online advertising.
Uh, yes, 1337 H4x0r d00d, that's why I said 'checking file type is trivial'. Maybe I should have written it in 133t, so that 1337 h4x0rs like yourself would understand.
First, of course, your algorithm has to recognize that it's music. That leads to numerous obvious ways of avoiding such filters, in order of sophistication:
1) Rename the file from.mp3 to.txt, etc. 2) Put the file in an archive of some kind (.zip, etc) 3) Encrypt the file.
So the more sophisticated your scanner might be (e.g. checking file type is trivial, extracting files from an archive is easy, breaking encryption is hard), the more sophisticated the workaround becomes. Eventually the only way to break the filter-avoiding measures will be to have a human sitting there manually checking all the files they can find on the network.
"Getting the general public to understand the privacy implications of these systems so they stop voting for people that put them in place is probably a lot more effective."
But over 50% of the population have _already_ figured out that there's no difference between voting for the control-freak Democrat candidate or the control-freak Republican candidate, and don't vote for either.
"Bush: "I'd like to commit $1 billion over the next five years to try to fix NASA." Press: "One trillion dollars while we have a budget deficit!?! OMG!""
NASA wanted $10-15 billion dollars to build OSP, which is just a basic capsule. So do you really think they could get a human to Mars and back for less than a trillion?
"Astronauts know the risks of what they are doing, and I bet plenty would volunteer for a Hubble retrieval mission."
Indeed: the risk of an HST mission would be only slightly more than the risk of a mission to ISS. The shuttle is risky to fly, and the destination makes little difference... for all we know the next shuttle loss will be due to an exploding SSME or some other problem in an area that hasn't destroyed a shuttle before.
Frankly, astronauts would be much safer if we just flew one more mission to HST to fix it up and add a deorbit engine, then closed down the shuttle program and let ISS burn up. The fact that NASA aren't doing that shows that this decision has little to do with safety.
"If you compare them to the Star Trek 'effects' of the same vintage there is no comparison, the BBC effects were low budget but they were much more imaginative"
Well, I have to say I was amused to watch an old episode of the show that scared me to death when I was a kid, and discover that the 'monster' was just a guy wrapped up in bubble-wrap and painted green:).
"In this new digital age where lots of people collect every episode of their favorite TV shows we won't have to worry about this again."
Well, not for another few years, until all TVs and VCRs have to be DRM-crippled to receive new broadcasts, and collecting and sharing the recordings becomes impossible.
Well, most train trips I take I spend at least an hour total getting to the station and from the station to where I'm going, and unless the train is non-stop it wastes plenty of time slowing down and acceleration at each stop along the way, so the distance will be rather less than 3200km. But 3200km is still "short" compared to most airline flights I've made in the past (many of which obviously couldn't have been made by train due to the large lack of land along the way).
Every other major satellite launch took place after the first manned space flight. Are you now actually going to claim that current satellite technology isn't a result of the manned space program?"
Groucho Marx birth - 1890 Sputnik - 1957
Every satellite launch took place after Groucho Marx was born. Are you now actually going to claim that Groucho Marx isn't responsible for current satellite technology?
Maybe that $12,000,000,000 would be better spent teaching kids logic than sending bureaucrats to the moon (though they'll never get there for that price anyway: NASA want that much just to develop a new capsule for OSP).
Even if that were true, and I believe that many of the claims you're making are not, then it would have been vastly -- and I mean _VASTLY_ -- cheaper to have put the money into developing those things here on Earth and not blown tens of billions of dollars to send a few people to the Moon and back. This is the fundamental flaw of all 'spinoff' arguments: if you want new technologies you put the money into developing new technologies, not space boondoggles.
I mean, come on, exactly how hard would it have been to develop 'cordless tools'? Sticking a battery on a drill rather than a power cord? You really think we wouldn't have had them if Apollo hadn't gone to the moon? It's these kind of claims that make space nuts look so absurd to the rest of the world.
Not developed for Apollo. Neither was Teflon. Neither were ICs. Neither were lasers. Neither were most of the things that people keep claiming were developed for Apollo. In fact, I'm hard-pressed to think of a single significant invention that came out of Apollo, other than the Space Pen. Or was that Gemini?
Not to mention, of course, that if you wanted to develop those things, it would be a damn sight cheaper to just develop them here on Earth and forget about the whole 'going to the moon' thing.
Actually, I have a lot more respect for the pilots than I do the people on the ground who'd be telling them whether or not to shoot me down.
However, that said, given the rate at which US pilots were killing British troops during the Gulf Wars, I don't have that much respect for them either.
No, it was a serious comment, so I have no idea why it was marked as a 'Troll'. Given the choice between a woman on the plane with a weird jacket, and a guy I've never met flying alongside with heat-seeking missiles ready to shoot me down at the slightest twitch, I'd take the risk with the jacket, thanks.
I mean, even if they were a terrorist with a bomb in their jacket, what was the fighter escort supposed to do? Tell them 'don't you even think about blowing up that bomb, lady, or I'll shoot the plane down!'.
"$300 or $400 for a professional application of this type is quite reasonable."
If you're a prefessional user, perhaps, but I have a hard time believing that professional users would want to be treated this way by their software suppliers (they're more likely than most to have legitimate reasons for using banknotes in ads, posters and so forth).
For the rest of us it's extortionately priced and Gimp has always done everything that I needed to do with imagery for free. Plus it doesn't have stupid limitations like this.
"Now, if we imbed the RFID chip in their skull, then it might work"
Dunno about you, but the kids I went to school with would have it out of their skull in ten minutes. Or, at least, would have it out of other kids' skulls.
If I was a pilot, I'd be far more worried about some twenty-year-old in a fighter with a bunch of heat-seeking missiles than by a passenger with a jacket.
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On a Mars trip you'd be carrying hundreds of tons of fuel for the return journey, and quite a few tons of supplies of various kinds. That alone makes a half-decent radiation shield for the trip from Earth to Mars... shielding on the way back would be more complicated.
"How does the Challenger explosion connect with orbital refuelling?"
The shuttles were going to carry liquid-fuelled boosters to launch interplanetary probes like Galileo. After Challenger blew up they rethought that and cancelled any such future flights.
"You make the fuel and the spacecraft *on the moon*. The whole point of starting from orbit, or from the moon, is to avoid hauling hundreds of tons of stuff up from ground level in the first place"
And how exactly do you expect to "make spacecraft on the moon", without "hauling hundreds of tons of stuff up from ground level"? How easy exactly do you think it is to build a spacecraft from rocks with no tools or factories?
They went through the Van Allen belts in a couple of minutes rather than live in them for months, and there were no solar flares during the Apollo flights. Had there been a solar flare, their only chance was to turn the CSM so the fuel tanks of the SM were between them and the sun for some shielding, cross their fingers and kiss their butt goodbye.
"Why put the station in such a poor, low orbit? Because the shuttle can't fly that high."
It's not in a low orbit because of the shuttle, it's in a low orbit because it's manned and therefore cannot go higher without being either in or beyond the Van Allen belts: in the belts you'll kill the crew real fast, outside the belts you'll kill the crew the next time there's a solar eruption that emits a lot of radiation. No manned station is going to be much higher than ISS without a lot of radiation shielding.
Also, if it could be built, a Daedulus engine can do it easily and burn only a fairly small amount of fuel relative to the mass of the ship.
Further out gets more tricky, but constant 1g trips to Mars and back aren't that hard: lots of engineering work, but nothing that even comes close to breaking the laws of physics.
Of course the important question is, why would you want to go to Mars? Tourist trips, sure, but there's little real benefit to living in a big gravity well if you're advanced enough to build free-flying habitats.
Personally if I get spammed by stupid ads that expect to steal my entire screen, I'll be telling the companies whose products are being advertised precisely what I think of that crap, not the sites showing them. Well, assuming any of them are legitimate companies and not just the average crap-merchants that seem to buy most online advertising.
Uh, yes, 1337 H4x0r d00d, that's why I said 'checking file type is trivial'. Maybe I should have written it in 133t, so that 1337 h4x0rs like yourself would understand.
First, of course, your algorithm has to recognize that it's music. That leads to numerous obvious ways of avoiding such filters, in order of sophistication:
.mp3 to .txt, etc.
1) Rename the file from
2) Put the file in an archive of some kind (.zip, etc)
3) Encrypt the file.
So the more sophisticated your scanner might be (e.g. checking file type is trivial, extracting files from an archive is easy, breaking encryption is hard), the more sophisticated the workaround becomes. Eventually the only way to break the filter-avoiding measures will be to have a human sitting there manually checking all the files they can find on the network.
"Getting the general public to understand the privacy implications of these systems so they stop voting for people that put them in place is probably a lot more effective."
But over 50% of the population have _already_ figured out that there's no difference between voting for the control-freak Democrat candidate or the control-freak Republican candidate, and don't vote for either.
"Bush: "I'd like to commit $1 billion over the next five years to try to fix NASA." Press: "One trillion dollars while we have a budget deficit!?! OMG!"" NASA wanted $10-15 billion dollars to build OSP, which is just a basic capsule. So do you really think they could get a human to Mars and back for less than a trillion?
"Astronauts know the risks of what they are doing, and I bet plenty would volunteer for a Hubble retrieval mission."
Indeed: the risk of an HST mission would be only slightly more than the risk of a mission to ISS. The shuttle is risky to fly, and the destination makes little difference... for all we know the next shuttle loss will be due to an exploding SSME or some other problem in an area that hasn't destroyed a shuttle before.
Frankly, astronauts would be much safer if we just flew one more mission to HST to fix it up and add a deorbit engine, then closed down the shuttle program and let ISS burn up. The fact that NASA aren't doing that shows that this decision has little to do with safety.
"If you compare them to the Star Trek 'effects' of the same vintage there is no comparison, the BBC effects were low budget but they were much more imaginative"
:).
Well, I have to say I was amused to watch an old episode of the show that scared me to death when I was a kid, and discover that the 'monster' was just a guy wrapped up in bubble-wrap and painted green
"In this new digital age where lots of people collect every episode of their favorite TV shows we won't have to worry about this again."
Well, not for another few years, until all TVs and VCRs have to be DRM-crippled to receive new broadcasts, and collecting and sharing the recordings becomes impossible.
"3200km is not a "short" trip by any means."
Well, most train trips I take I spend at least an hour total getting to the station and from the station to where I'm going, and unless the train is non-stop it wastes plenty of time slowing down and acceleration at each stop along the way, so the distance will be rather less than 3200km. But 3200km is still "short" compared to most airline flights I've made in the past (many of which obviously couldn't have been made by train due to the large lack of land along the way).
Ask the people who live next to a coal-fired power plant that's running it whether they "generate CO2 and other nuisances".
Electricity doesn't magically make it "clean", it just moves the problems elsewhere.
"at speeds exceeding 400km/h, it is in the same ballpark as commercial passenger jets,"
True, if by "the same ballpark" you mean "half the speed".
Where it might win is on shorter trips where you avoid long checkin times and the minimum wage Nazis at the "security" checkpoints.
"Sputnik - 1957
Vostok 1 - 1961
Every other major satellite launch took place after the first manned space flight. Are you now actually going to claim that current satellite technology isn't a result of the manned space program?"
Groucho Marx birth - 1890
Sputnik - 1957
Every satellite launch took place after Groucho Marx was born. Are you now actually going to claim that Groucho Marx isn't responsible for current satellite technology?
Maybe that $12,000,000,000 would be better spent teaching kids logic than sending bureaucrats to the moon (though they'll never get there for that price anyway: NASA want that much just to develop a new capsule for OSP).
Even if that were true, and I believe that many of the claims you're making are not, then it would have been vastly -- and I mean _VASTLY_ -- cheaper to have put the money into developing those things here on Earth and not blown tens of billions of dollars to send a few people to the Moon and back. This is the fundamental flaw of all 'spinoff' arguments: if you want new technologies you put the money into developing new technologies, not space boondoggles.
I mean, come on, exactly how hard would it have been to develop 'cordless tools'? Sticking a battery on a drill rather than a power cord? You really think we wouldn't have had them if Apollo hadn't gone to the moon? It's these kind of claims that make space nuts look so absurd to the rest of the world.
Not developed for Apollo. Neither was Teflon. Neither were ICs. Neither were lasers. Neither were most of the things that people keep claiming were developed for Apollo. In fact, I'm hard-pressed to think of a single significant invention that came out of Apollo, other than the Space Pen. Or was that Gemini?
Not to mention, of course, that if you wanted to develop those things, it would be a damn sight cheaper to just develop them here on Earth and forget about the whole 'going to the moon' thing.
Actually, I have a lot more respect for the pilots than I do the people on the ground who'd be telling them whether or not to shoot me down.
However, that said, given the rate at which US pilots were killing British troops during the Gulf Wars, I don't have that much respect for them either.
No, it was a serious comment, so I have no idea why it was marked as a 'Troll'. Given the choice between a woman on the plane with a weird jacket, and a guy I've never met flying alongside with heat-seeking missiles ready to shoot me down at the slightest twitch, I'd take the risk with the jacket, thanks.
I mean, even if they were a terrorist with a bomb in their jacket, what was the fighter escort supposed to do? Tell them 'don't you even think about blowing up that bomb, lady, or I'll shoot the plane down!'.
Hey, I'd vote for that one :).
"$300 or $400 for a professional application of this type is quite reasonable."
If you're a prefessional user, perhaps, but I have a hard time believing that professional users would want to be treated this way by their software suppliers (they're more likely than most to have legitimate reasons for using banknotes in ads, posters and so forth).
For the rest of us it's extortionately priced and Gimp has always done everything that I needed to do with imagery for free. Plus it doesn't have stupid limitations like this.
"Now, if we imbed the RFID chip in their skull, then it might work"
Dunno about you, but the kids I went to school with would have it out of their skull in ten minutes. Or, at least, would have it out of other kids' skulls.
If I was a pilot, I'd be far more worried about some twenty-year-old in a fighter with a bunch of heat-seeking missiles than by a passenger with a jacket.