You are correct. The Wikimedia (with an 'm') Foundation does not have any legal rights to the content of Wikipedia other than what the GDFL gives everyone. If anyone is to be sued over copyright violations of text in Wikipedia, it needs to be by at least one of the editors of the article in question (not including editors that have just corrected spellings, added cleanup tags, etc).
Yeah, I'm the same. I imagine a good forger would do a far better job of replicating my signature than me. Before I had an ATM card and had to sign a withdrawal slip whenever I needed cash, I often had to give my date of birth (as if that's a secret...) because my signature didn't match. I'm glad the UK has switched to chip and pin for credit/debit card transactions...
You don't usually need to go online to find Windows drivers - they come on a CD with the hardware. You may want to go online to update them, but it will work with the version on the disk to a reasonable degree. (Whether than quite counts as "out the box", I don't know, but at least you don't need to go online to get the driver for your wireless card in order to go online...)
Of course, that isn't entirely (if at all) Linux's fault, but that makes no differences for the end user.
You would need to establish a null hypothesis first, ie. what distribution you expect the figures to follow if there hasn't been a real decrease. Perhaps a normal distribution centred around the previous figures? Then you have to determine a standard deviation, and I have no idea what to pick there. Perhaps a statistics expert can help. I'm an undergrad maths student, but avoid stats where possible, so can't help much.
Nevertheless, I'd expect a 7% drop to be statistically significant given any reasonable assumptions. It's not, however, very surprising.
Sales of Linux is a meaningless number. If you look at total installs, it's much better. I expect it's still less than Vista, and will continue to be until it works properly out the box (which hopefully won't be long, it's getting much better, but it still requires quite complicated configuration with certain, not that uncommon, hardware).
As for an economic downturn... something tells me the free OS will do better than the expensive one when everyone suddenly runs out of money...
Re:This is HIGHLY illegal in the US
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eBay The Vote
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The difference is that he said "If you (collectively) elect me, I'll send you (individually) a check for up to $600", you got the money whether you voted for him or not, it just needed him to win the election. "Buying votes" means buying individual people's votes, not using money to persuade people to vote for you. There is a very big difference.
Given that you say 18 years, not (for example) 21, and are on an English language website gives a good chance that you are British (there are plenty of other options, but it's a pretty good guess). Given that your username is "smoker2", there is a good chance you smoke. Since smoking is banned in British pubs, I am going to guess that you are *not* in the pub right now - you may, however, be sitting outside it.
They are talking about it. Google "Tier 2". It's still just a long term goal, rather than being in active development at this point, but it is definitely being talked about.
How many countries have launched their own *manned* payloads to LEO? 3, I think, and one of those only recently. So really, 50% of those that have got to LEO have gone to the moon. That's a pretty good ratio.
Delta-V is not directly proportional to difficultly (although, it's pretty close to being proportional to marginal cost). Once you've got one engine capable of those kinds of delta-V's, building a second is much easier. So, your rocket needs 3 stages instead of 2, say? That's not 50% harder, since much of the work needed to build the 3rd stage has already been done for the first 2.
I don't know how well Bigelow will do - there isn't that big a market for space stations yet. Even if you can get the station cheaply, running it is still very expensive. Is that enough science to be worth all those publicly owned stations? I think private enterprise is going to be the market for Bigelow stations, and that will take slightly longer.
The $100 million figure is for the first flight, that will come down once development is absorbed. You only need a handful of people to go at those kinds of figures before you can start reducing the price. I expect it can be done for cheaper than that anyway, just not as soon.
I expect to send 10 a week by using reusable craft - if you have to build a new craft every time it's never going to be affordable. Once you have a permanent base on the moon, there is no reason not to send people there on a regular basis.
Are you really arguing that private enterprise is more bureaucratic than 1960's NASA? I know it was better in the 60's than it is now, but not *that* much better.
At the moment, private space flight is led by a few rich individuals who are 100% committed to it. Whether they can get the funding required to develop a moon base, I don't know, but I expect someone will try.
That's an interesting perspective. It's all just a matter of degree. There are elements of communism in every society, the aim of the Soviet Union was to take it to an extreme.
It was a *cold* war. The military didn't actually do much (supplied arms to a few proxy wars, that's about it). All the R&D, both for space and military, were purely for showing off.
Two things significantly reduce the cost: We're not starting from scratch this time. A lot of the development work has already been done and the costs absorbed in other space missions and non-space inventions. Secondly, the reduction in bureaucracy.
How many can afford it depends on how much it costs. Once you've absorbed development costs, a week on the Moon could be within the grasp of quite a lot of people. Very rich people, sure, but there are quite a lot of them. There are 9.5 million millionaires in the world - say 0.1% of those can afford to go and want to do so. That's about 10,000 people. Say you send up 10 a week, that's about 20 years worth of business.
Sub-orbital vehicles are not a particularly useful stepping stone towards orbital vehicles from an engineering standpoint, certainly, but from a business standpoint, it's very useful. Along with the sub-orbital vehicles being developed, there's a spaceport, various legislation, lots of research on what people want out of space travel, and, soon, a source of income. All of those will greatly help in the development of orbital vehicles.
Yes, but the standard definition of "terrorist" isn't "one who terrorises". What China does is called "human rights violations", not "terrorism". The key difference is that China is a sovereign state - doesn't make much difference to the people being abused, but it makes a difference to how you deal with it.
True, but the X-Prize isn't intended to *fund* anything, it's just a reward if you succeed. And about $16.7 billion of NASA's budget goes on moving paper around - that doesn't help.
It was a politician that told NASA to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. That's as much as any politician sticks their nose in. The difference is in actually giving the funds necessary to do the job.
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You are correct. The Wikimedia (with an 'm') Foundation does not have any legal rights to the content of Wikipedia other than what the GDFL gives everyone. If anyone is to be sued over copyright violations of text in Wikipedia, it needs to be by at least one of the editors of the article in question (not including editors that have just corrected spellings, added cleanup tags, etc).
Yeah, I'm the same. I imagine a good forger would do a far better job of replicating my signature than me. Before I had an ATM card and had to sign a withdrawal slip whenever I needed cash, I often had to give my date of birth (as if that's a secret...) because my signature didn't match. I'm glad the UK has switched to chip and pin for credit/debit card transactions...
You don't usually need to go online to find Windows drivers - they come on a CD with the hardware. You may want to go online to update them, but it will work with the version on the disk to a reasonable degree. (Whether than quite counts as "out the box", I don't know, but at least you don't need to go online to get the driver for your wireless card in order to go online...)
Of course, that isn't entirely (if at all) Linux's fault, but that makes no differences for the end user.
The drop *is* 7%, that's just basic arithmetic. The issue is that the drop may not, in itself, be a particularly useful number.
You would need to establish a null hypothesis first, ie. what distribution you expect the figures to follow if there hasn't been a real decrease. Perhaps a normal distribution centred around the previous figures? Then you have to determine a standard deviation, and I have no idea what to pick there. Perhaps a statistics expert can help. I'm an undergrad maths student, but avoid stats where possible, so can't help much.
Nevertheless, I'd expect a 7% drop to be statistically significant given any reasonable assumptions. It's not, however, very surprising.
Sales of Linux is a meaningless number. If you look at total installs, it's much better. I expect it's still less than Vista, and will continue to be until it works properly out the box (which hopefully won't be long, it's getting much better, but it still requires quite complicated configuration with certain, not that uncommon, hardware).
As for an economic downturn... something tells me the free OS will do better than the expensive one when everyone suddenly runs out of money...
The difference is that he said "If you (collectively) elect me, I'll send you (individually) a check for up to $600", you got the money whether you voted for him or not, it just needed him to win the election. "Buying votes" means buying individual people's votes, not using money to persuade people to vote for you. There is a very big difference.
Given that you say 18 years, not (for example) 21, and are on an English language website gives a good chance that you are British (there are plenty of other options, but it's a pretty good guess). Given that your username is "smoker2", there is a good chance you smoke. Since smoking is banned in British pubs, I am going to guess that you are *not* in the pub right now - you may, however, be sitting outside it.
They are talking about it. Google "Tier 2". It's still just a long term goal, rather than being in active development at this point, but it is definitely being talked about.
How many countries have launched their own *manned* payloads to LEO? 3, I think, and one of those only recently. So really, 50% of those that have got to LEO have gone to the moon. That's a pretty good ratio.
Delta-V is not directly proportional to difficultly (although, it's pretty close to being proportional to marginal cost). Once you've got one engine capable of those kinds of delta-V's, building a second is much easier. So, your rocket needs 3 stages instead of 2, say? That's not 50% harder, since much of the work needed to build the 3rd stage has already been done for the first 2.
I don't know how well Bigelow will do - there isn't that big a market for space stations yet. Even if you can get the station cheaply, running it is still very expensive. Is that enough science to be worth all those publicly owned stations? I think private enterprise is going to be the market for Bigelow stations, and that will take slightly longer.
The $100 million figure is for the first flight, that will come down once development is absorbed. You only need a handful of people to go at those kinds of figures before you can start reducing the price. I expect it can be done for cheaper than that anyway, just not as soon.
I expect to send 10 a week by using reusable craft - if you have to build a new craft every time it's never going to be affordable. Once you have a permanent base on the moon, there is no reason not to send people there on a regular basis.
Are you really arguing that private enterprise is more bureaucratic than 1960's NASA? I know it was better in the 60's than it is now, but not *that* much better.
At the moment, private space flight is led by a few rich individuals who are 100% committed to it. Whether they can get the funding required to develop a moon base, I don't know, but I expect someone will try.
That's an interesting perspective. It's all just a matter of degree. There are elements of communism in every society, the aim of the Soviet Union was to take it to an extreme.
It was a *cold* war. The military didn't actually do much (supplied arms to a few proxy wars, that's about it). All the R&D, both for space and military, were purely for showing off.
Two things significantly reduce the cost: We're not starting from scratch this time. A lot of the development work has already been done and the costs absorbed in other space missions and non-space inventions. Secondly, the reduction in bureaucracy.
How many can afford it depends on how much it costs. Once you've absorbed development costs, a week on the Moon could be within the grasp of quite a lot of people. Very rich people, sure, but there are quite a lot of them. There are 9.5 million millionaires in the world - say 0.1% of those can afford to go and want to do so. That's about 10,000 people. Say you send up 10 a week, that's about 20 years worth of business.
Sub-orbital vehicles are not a particularly useful stepping stone towards orbital vehicles from an engineering standpoint, certainly, but from a business standpoint, it's very useful. Along with the sub-orbital vehicles being developed, there's a spaceport, various legislation, lots of research on what people want out of space travel, and, soon, a source of income. All of those will greatly help in the development of orbital vehicles.
Plenty of market research about LEO, sure, but what about the Moon?
Depends on your definition of "better". Someone spending their own money will be more cautious, that's not necessarily better, though.
Yes, but the standard definition of "terrorist" isn't "one who terrorises". What China does is called "human rights violations", not "terrorism". The key difference is that China is a sovereign state - doesn't make much difference to the people being abused, but it makes a difference to how you deal with it.
True, but the X-Prize isn't intended to *fund* anything, it's just a reward if you succeed. And about $16.7 billion of NASA's budget goes on moving paper around - that doesn't help.
Has anyone done any real market research on how much people would be willing to spend on a holiday to the Moon?
It was a politician that told NASA to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. That's as much as any politician sticks their nose in. The difference is in actually giving the funds necessary to do the job.