I don't think you would want to have me in a "clothing optional" environment. You might be good looking, but a middle-aged and overweight software developer is not something most people would want to see without clothing. Unfortunately that is also the kind of people who typically fly on airplanes too.
My fear with ladders isn't climbing up but rather how sturdy the ladder itself is. Standard 6 feet or 12 feet ladders aren't too bad, but a 30 foot ladder gets real shaky when you get to the top.
I once worked as a custodian where I had to climb to the top of the 30 foot ladder, let go of the thing to reach up and additional 3 feet above the ladder to reach for some florescent light bulbs in order to get them changed. They were in a stairwell, which is one of the reasons why they were so high up and you couldn't get a cherry picker into there. In hindsight, it violated several OSHA rules to even suggest that was the procedure for changing those bulbs, but I did it about once a month or so when I was doing that job.
I've had some ladders break out from under me... I a sort of big guy with a bit of heft on me. That gets real scary when that happens, at least when a rung or two go out from your weight. Some of the things I've had to climb up certainly didn't inspire me in terms of if I would last going up them.
It isn't the Library of Congress that determines what copyright laws are.... that is the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court. While the Library of Congress may have a few people who know a thing or two about copyright and that the Library of Congress is responsible for copyright registrations (where you send the checks and materials for that registration), it isn't the final word for what is legal or not.
The precedence is the DMCA... as awful as that law is. Or perhaps the 1st Amendment is the real final precedent, as a means to challenge some of the provisions of the DMCA together with suggesting that the DMCA violates the copyright clause as an unconstitutional grant of authority to the federal government that isn't permitted under the constitution. Good luck with that one as Eldred v. Ashcroft, the last major test of the copyright clause in the constitution, pretty much stated that Congress can interpret that clause to be whatever it is that they want it to mean.
When I read the headlines here, I thought this was old news, even something that should be in history books. ID Software released the source code more than a decade ago for Wolfenstein 3D, so for those who have wanted to dabble in the software it has certainly been available for what John Carmack said was some awful code that he was embarrassed about even releasing because of how shoddy the work is compared to what he is doing now. Still, it was worth looking at then.
Still, the news here isn't that the source code is being released, but that it has been licensed under the GPL. That is real news here, and something worth taking a look at again. I'm not entirely sure that the effort is worth going over except for nostalgia as there are several other first-person shooter games that likely have a more modern and up to date engines.. including stuff already available under the GPL. I'm sure there are a couple of real gems in the source code worth putting into other software.
There is plenty of money that can be made from extracting carbon, just not capturing it in spent forms that require an energy input.... well besides agriculture. But even most forms of agriculture merely use Carbon as a temporary holding element until the energy can be released again.
Why the restriction on 30 kWh of electricity per day? (you need to add the "hours" to the unit as kilowatts is a unit of capacity, not energy consumed). Seriously.... this seems like a forced kind of living when it isn't necessary for what you are addressing here. I agree that there are some wasteful applications of energy, but that restriction just seems out of place compared to the rest of what you are proposing.
Presuming that nuclear fusion reactors become common place in the next century, it seems like energy requirements are going to be the least of our concerns. Dispensing waste heat may be a big deal, and that may be the huge issue of the 21st Century. Hopefully we don't have to copy the idea from Isaac Asimov by erecting huge radiators that go into space on some tethers that throw the excess heat away from the atmosphere. That, to me, would be the ultimate upper limit in terms of how much per capita energy consumption there would be on the Earth. If you can figure out how to get rid of the excess heat, that number can go up dramatically.
$1000/barrel oil will never happen with the exception of hyperinflation that will make bread costing $1000 per loaf and minimum wage at $10k/hour.
There are many ways to produce a barrel of oil synthetically... the most obvious being simply with algae and perhaps a touch of genetic engineering. Such petroleum also tends to have fewer traditional contaminates such as sulfur (Sulfur Dioxide is something you commonly smell near petroleum refineries... along with other "nasty" stuff).
Population control like China's has some huge unintended consequences, most especially with the preferential selection for boys as opposed to girls within that culture. That will get fixed eventually, but in the meantime China has to decide what they are going to do with a couple hundred million excess men who will never be able to have a family with local women. It certainly makes it very tempting to send a group like that off to war, where losing a few million soldiers is no big deal. Are you sure you want to be on the blunt end of that army with the guns facing your direction?
Besides, most of the industrialized nations are facing a massive population decline, including America. The only thing that is keeping the population of America growing at all is due to immigration, which even that isn't going to be enough by the year 2020, according to U.S. Census Bureau projections. Not only that, but a substantial amount of food is now simply getting destroyed by burning it up in the tanks of automobiles in the form of ethanol. That is perhaps one of the most wasteful ways to utilize land that would be much more useful simply feeding people. Besides, the world could easily feed 10x the current global population using existing farm practices and using existing land already under cultivation. The concerns about over population are greatly exaggerated.
They want to be the Palestinians of the Pacific? That makes more sense than anything else in the article, I suppose.
They could only wish to be that fortunate. The Palestinians happen to be in a hunk of land that is already occupied by another country, and in a region that has foundational ties to three of the world's major religions. Instead, these guys are getting forced off their land by neglect and indifference, not war, in a land that nobody wants except for them.
I'm not saying that the Palestinians (originally the Philistines and still called that in Arabic) have had an easy lot in life either, but at least they know that they can at least pick up a gun to at least try to keep their homes. Kiribati is instead getting drowned so America and Europe can get cheap goods produced in Chinese factories. Sacrificing 100k people so 1 billion can live a "better" life is a good trade-off, isn't it?
The problem with tourism is that you need to have a link to the tourists.... something that Kiribati is definitely struggling with. Considering their population is right around 100k people and they are fairly distant from other parts of the world, and that their average annual income is quite low, there really isn't much to attract an airline to come to that part of the world in terms of delivering passengers. Yes, somebody can get there by boat, but that takes some extra effort.
The article talks about how the government is hoping to negotiate with some airlines to establish a regular route at least to the "capital" of the country. They have an airport which can take the planes, but the economics really isn't there to justify the cost of the flights without some subsidies... something that country can ill afford as well.
By traditional jetliner they are about two hours from Honolulu... the largest group of potential "tourists" that could get there. That also puts them within a reasonable distance by connecting flights from the USA and Japan, or make it a "day trip" for somebody who happens to be in Hawaii for some reason or another. The problem with that is trying to convince tourists that they should spend a few hundred extra bucks to go snorkeling in Kiribati instead of Maui. To the average tourist, there isn't really all that much difference other than you wouldn't have to worry about crowds in Kiribati. You also don't have the 5-star hotels of Honolulu.... not that I'm suggesting that a 5-star resort be built in Kiribati either.
Major tourism hot spots like the Bahamas have the convenience of being fairly close to major metro areas (like New York City) and that going there definitely offers something different that the people can't get from home.
The scale and cost of the Manhattan project is one that still amazes me, and the more that I study the project the more that I discover it was by far and away much larger than I ever could have imagined. I've heard stories that at least at one time or another the Manhattan project consumed as much as half of the GDP for the entire United States.... during the middle of World War II and including the Liberty ship production, all of the bombers, fighters, and other weapons and even consumer goods produced at the time. In other words, nearly half of all Americans were in some way or another involved with producing those first nuclear weapons in the 1940's. The USSR had an even larger portion of its population engaged in that research in the late 1940's while they didn't have to deal with pesky issues like being engaged in a desperate war as well.
While I will agree that those who steal the research from American and Russia are not likely to repeat the same mistakes of those two nuclear programs, it still is an insanely expensive process for anybody to make these weapons. It isn't something a small time terrorist is going to come up with on their own. Dollar for dollar, there are many other much more cost effective ways to bomb somebody that doesn't involve nuclear weapons.
The problem I have with some nations in the world isn't the bombs or weapons they are making, but what they are teaching their children. Those countries which raise their children in an environment where all those kids learn from the earliest age is hatred and bitterness toward a certain "enemy" is bound to eventually act upon that sort of training. It doesn't matter if the hatred is toward Americans, Blacks, Jews, Homosexuals, or whatever it might be, it is all bad and to me those schools are far and away more dangerous than any kind of bomb that could ever be made.
What disappoints me most is that many of those within the Muslim faith.... in countries where they are certainly free to speak their mind... are not condemning this kind of hatred but instead many are spreading it even further. I know there are at least some that do condemn this sort of visceral hatred toward certain ethnic groups, but those tend to be an exceptional minority. For radical Christian groups (such as the Irish Republican Army or the Ku Klux Klan), those extremist groups are the minority and are frequently condemned for their acts of violence. It is not something "mainstream" within Christian society. Wahhabism and other related philosophies are unfortunately mainstream in Muslim society.
You must know some real nut jobs, or perhaps you don't really understand what it is that they really think about the 2nd amendment. The complaint is how government agents and police officers are very selective on their application of the constitution. When those people in positions of authority are being selective in following their oath of office, I would have to say that they are following no oath at all.
Of course a police officer would love to be the only armed individual when they come into a house. That is precisely the "we can have something but you can't" argument. It isn't a surprise that there are also a whole bunch of bullies in the law enforcement community too. Not everybody, but it does attract that kind of element, just as education tends to attract perverts who like to molest children.
This misses completely the point of private arms advocates: If everybody has guns, then those who abuse those weapons can presume that all of their neighbors have those weapons and anything they do to seriously piss off their neighbors is likely to get those arms used against them.
Conversely, if nobody has weapons on a "legal basis", only criminals and oppressive government agents have guns. This was tried in Asia several millenia ago and the result was the development of "unarmed" martial arts... Karate, Kung Fu, Judo, and all of the other related forms explicitly to allow the peasants to be able to stand up against would-be aggressors. Europe, on the other hand until the last couple of centuries required everybody to be armed and made it a national obligation.
If they are in America and otherwise behaving as responsible law-abiding people, I don't mind seeing anybody including Mexicans, Somalians, Yemenites, or anybody else bearing arms of any kind. I also respect the decision of Quakers and Mennonites who insist that weapons should never be used... as long as it is a voluntary decision where you give up that right and don't force somebody else to disarm.
This is so true. Anybody with a general understanding of radioactive isotopes is likely going to be able to make something akin to the "Little Boy" or the "Fat Man" bombs that were used on Japan. In the realm of nuclear bombs, those were puny little things that were unbelievably heavy and inaccurate as well. It is sort of hard to miss a target the size of a city, so that wasn't a problem when they were used.
The trick, as you have pointed out, is to make the bombs small enough to be practical in terms of their delivery and to perhaps amplify the yield to give a genuinely powerful punch. Getting the size of a warhead to a manageable size is the key to much of the research, and to be able to know how to compress the fissionable metal sufficiently to initiate the chain reaction.
I've seen some magazines, notably an old issue of Analog, that even had a special supplement labeled "give this to your local terrorist" that went into depth about how to make nuclear weapons... at least some crude enough to get the job done. It also gave a rather detailed description of centrifuges necessary to get the material to a concentrated form from material found in a nuclear power plant... with a rather gruesome description of the medical problems nuclear materials workers need to be concerned about unless you have gobs of money necessary to build the proper facilities to get everything put together.
That is ultimately the largest problem with nuclear weapons: It needs the resources of a major nation-state in order to get one put together. You can trade real estate for cost.... which isn't too bad if you are a 3rd world dictator. Something like that sticks out like a sore thumb if it is done by a group trying to stay covert. Certainly no country is going to be unaware that nuclear bombs are being developed within that country, and it will never happen in a place like Somalia or Tuvalu.
Even once the bomb is built, unless that country is prepared to use the bomb immediately (with the massive consequences for doing that), the bombs become even more expensive in terms of basic security (making sure somebody other than the leaders of that country are not going to use those weapons) and maintaining the infrastructure necessary for simply hanging onto those weapons. Basically, there isn't a strong compelling reason to even have these weapons unless you are in a life or death struggle for national survival or are one of the top major economic and military powers in the world.
I think both Brazil and India would likely get into the international space transportation market themselves sooner or later. If they go up on these rockets, it will be to get some experience and training from American astronauts to build their own astronaut corps. Both countries have access to some pretty good spaceport access areas and in fact better latitudes than even KSC. They also both have the money and an indigenous rocket industry of their own that seems to be doing just fine.
Countries that may be more interested would be some place like Germany or South Korea that have money but lack the spaceport facilities for going into space from within their own country. Even France has to launch their rockets from South America (via the ESA).
The primary reason for this system of launchers being dragged behind the firing stage is to set up an assembly line of boosters that all have the same components. In other words, you improve reliability and decrease cost simply through economies of scale and turning out three or four of the same part (or more) for each flight. It also helps in terms of an emergency abort, where you may lose one stage but the subsequent stages can carry on as if nothing happened... other than you may not achieve orbit. Abort modes certainly don't need to be strictly launch or blow up the whole system.
The submarine was the group's previous project, and seems to run just fine. They are using the submarine merely because it is handy and are trying to make use of all of their available resources, not because they particularly need a submarine.
The last launch attempt was aborted due to a hair blower that they purchased at a local department store that got disconnected from its power supply and caused an LOX valve to seal shut. A similar kind of valve heater by one of the larger companies would have cost at least thousands of dollars. Considering they are going to be able to re-create Alan Sheppard's flight for around $100k (including development costs), I think these guys are certainly ones to watch. It is also nice to see Europeans getting into the race for private spaceflight, although this is hardly the only European company involved with building launchers as well.
To me, the most promising is ARCA, based out of Romania and launching into the Black Sea. Their staging system is perhaps the most unique system I've ever seen in my life, where the "top" stage of the rocket pulls up the rest of the spacecraft with a tether. This video is one that simply must be seen to be believed and certainly is out of the box thinking by doing something nobody else has ever even tried. ARCA has also made several launch attempts to get the concept down and are getting closer to putting something up. They plan on eventually (within the decade) get to the Moon and land something up there... hopefully to win the Google Lunar X-Prize. At least they are a major competitor.
Still, Copenhagen Sub-orbital seems like they might also have a profitable niche market. Their test flights are out of the Baltic Sea, which makes life pretty exciting in terms of a missile test range.
Once private spaceflight gets much more prevalent and self sufficient, expect lawmakers to stupidly say that NASA is useless and should be shut down.
Well said here. I agree that there will be people questioning what NASA is doing... and there already are some who "get it" in terms of seeing a group like Boeing fly up to a private space station that may cost less than a billion dollars for constructing a station 2x the size of the ISS and paying for the complete vehicle development cost & assembly. NASA doesn't seem to be able to clear their throat for less than a billion dollars.
I do know that NASA does much more than just fly people into space, and I hope they get back to that as their primary mission. Restoring NASA to a role similar to how the NACA used to work would be a much better use of government resources.
Boeing and Space Adventures are planning on docking with a space station built by Bigelow Aerospace. One of the planned space stations is going to have more volume than the International Space Station... at a fraction of the cost. There is a reason why Bigelow is expanding their manufacturing facilities too, as noted on the main web page for the company... people are starting to put money down on their products.
I think the view will be much nicer than the laptop screen sized window in the spacecraft, and you don't have to squeeze past the pilot in order to get that view as well.
On the other hand, if there are so many possible restrictions on the scope of the patent, it means that unless you follow all of the steps listed in the patent claim (multi-tiered seat prices that also have variable weights on voting for the path that the movie will follow) that any other sort of presentation will not be a patent violation. Essentially, this is a worthless patent that doesn't really cover much of anything and would be hard to enforce on much of anything... even a direct competitor who is trying to market a similar system but has non-weighted voting on the scenes instead.
Still, I wouldn't want to have the Nazgul sucking the life out of me in a courtroom, and there wouldn't be too many people wanting to risk even a threat from that three lettered company. In other words, they've done their job simply by showing up even if the patent is never enforced in the first place not to mention that those same three letters are also a huge marketing advantage if it is used in a real movie theater. Essentially, prior art be damned and they've captured this market segment until somebody gets brave enough to realistically challenge the patent.
There is quite a bit more in terms of real hardware that has been proven or is being proven than existed in 1969. Also... keep in mind who is making and marketing the CST-100 here: Boeing with Space Adventures as the marketing agent.
Boeing either owns or has a very close business relationship with every manufacturer that has flown people into space made by American spacecraft. Rockwell International, the company who built the Space Shuttle, is currently a subsidiary of Boeing. I think their cred in this case is pretty solid.
As for Space Adventures, they have flown several people into space already. Note this is history and past tense..... they have flown several people into space. This isn't just a pipe dream but people with real stories to tell about their experiences. All of those flights so far have been on of all things equipment designed by the Soviet Union, so it makes for even more irony that it has taken American companies more than a decade to discover capitalism after the Russians have been so proficient at it. In fact the one reason why it is becoming attractive to use American companies is because NASA has purchased all of the available slots on the Soyuz spacecraft over the next decade simply to give the NASA astronaut corps a chance to get some time in space... and RKK Energia is even expanding production to cope with that demand with the highest flight rate ever for the Soyuz spacecraft.
This is real stuff for a real product, and to compare this effort to a pure marketing promotion for a vehicle that might exist in the 21st Century (the flights on the TWA program weren't supposed to fly until after 2001 anyway) is disingenuous and hardly a fair comparison. If you read the fine print on the TWA promo, they never promised anything either.
The Democrats don't think free enterprise works below the sky, and the Republicans don't think it works above.
It amazes me to see a huge number of Republicans advocate for a central bureaucratic government authority with massive taxpayer subsidies and increased federal authority with the current Democratic presidential administration that is advocating for the elimination of federal bureaucracies, privatization of government services, and elimination of subsidies.
For myself, I think privatization of spaceflight is a very good thing, and it can only mean better things for America in the future. NASA isn't going anywhere, but they are no longer going to be a transportation service provider.... being Amtrack in space. Thank goodness too, as this is something that has been long overdue.
The deal that RCA offered was $100k and an employment contract that required Farnsworth to turn over this and all future inventions he may ever come up with to RCA. While not a terrible offer, it certainly could have been better and didn't give much wiggle room to Farnsworth.
What Farnsworth was more interested in was a more typical patent licensing and royalty contract where he could continue his own research into other areas but get a steady income from the invention royalties.
As to if some intelligent negotiation and perhaps a less abrasive approach in terms of dealing with David Smirnoff could have made a difference, I wasn't there at the time to see how the negotiations went down. Philo Farnsworth was a bit of an eccentric personality that would have fit in more with a Silicon Valley company much better than the hierarchical and rigid companies that were common in the 1930's and 40's. There was some animosity between David Smirnoff and Philo Farnsworth on a personal level as well that impacted this negotiation and future efforts as well.
Since it is a well known fact that all gate layouts can be done in software and all software can be done in hardware, I've argued that any sort of software patent must include a hardware layout that is an implementation of that patent. In other words, you need to provide a schematic for the algorithm implemented in gates.
Patents have become a joke, not a funny one, and far too long in the telling.
Software patents are works of fiction that, if they described the invention, would consist entirely of source code, as the source code is the only actual and accurate description of the program.
So lets say I invent something genuinely novel, like say a device that will transmit a motion picture over a distance electronically, with sound, and reproduce that motion picture faithfully in high resolution. And let's suppose that efforts to get this to work have happened for several decades previously with this approach being something genuinely novel as it hasn't been tried before. So with all of that effort to get it put together, you apply for the patent and the USPTO actually grants a patent on that invention (in this case it issued patent# 1,773,980). Then a very large company with a whole lot of political influence decides to copy your invention and do a smear campaign on your name for having never made the invention in the first place?
See Phlio T. Farnsworth and see how far that got him in terms of dealing with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). It took him decades to even get a court to listen to his arguments, much less be able to collect any money from his invention above and beyond the court costs involved. His whole career is one of getting burned because he wasn't nearly as well connected politically or had the money to engage in the fight effectively. His is really an example of a garage tinkering that resulted in a powerful idea that has only recently been abandoned in favor of much newer ideas to accomplish the same task.
This should have been a classic example of how the patent system would work, but instead it is to me a very good example of what is messed up over the patent system and why even for non-software applications it simply doesn't work.
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I don't think you would want to have me in a "clothing optional" environment. You might be good looking, but a middle-aged and overweight software developer is not something most people would want to see without clothing. Unfortunately that is also the kind of people who typically fly on airplanes too.
My fear with ladders isn't climbing up but rather how sturdy the ladder itself is. Standard 6 feet or 12 feet ladders aren't too bad, but a 30 foot ladder gets real shaky when you get to the top.
I once worked as a custodian where I had to climb to the top of the 30 foot ladder, let go of the thing to reach up and additional 3 feet above the ladder to reach for some florescent light bulbs in order to get them changed. They were in a stairwell, which is one of the reasons why they were so high up and you couldn't get a cherry picker into there. In hindsight, it violated several OSHA rules to even suggest that was the procedure for changing those bulbs, but I did it about once a month or so when I was doing that job.
I've had some ladders break out from under me... I a sort of big guy with a bit of heft on me. That gets real scary when that happens, at least when a rung or two go out from your weight. Some of the things I've had to climb up certainly didn't inspire me in terms of if I would last going up them.
It isn't the Library of Congress that determines what copyright laws are.... that is the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court. While the Library of Congress may have a few people who know a thing or two about copyright and that the Library of Congress is responsible for copyright registrations (where you send the checks and materials for that registration), it isn't the final word for what is legal or not.
The precedence is the DMCA... as awful as that law is. Or perhaps the 1st Amendment is the real final precedent, as a means to challenge some of the provisions of the DMCA together with suggesting that the DMCA violates the copyright clause as an unconstitutional grant of authority to the federal government that isn't permitted under the constitution. Good luck with that one as Eldred v. Ashcroft, the last major test of the copyright clause in the constitution, pretty much stated that Congress can interpret that clause to be whatever it is that they want it to mean.
When I read the headlines here, I thought this was old news, even something that should be in history books. ID Software released the source code more than a decade ago for Wolfenstein 3D, so for those who have wanted to dabble in the software it has certainly been available for what John Carmack said was some awful code that he was embarrassed about even releasing because of how shoddy the work is compared to what he is doing now. Still, it was worth looking at then.
Still, the news here isn't that the source code is being released, but that it has been licensed under the GPL. That is real news here, and something worth taking a look at again. I'm not entirely sure that the effort is worth going over except for nostalgia as there are several other first-person shooter games that likely have a more modern and up to date engines.. including stuff already available under the GPL. I'm sure there are a couple of real gems in the source code worth putting into other software.
There is plenty of money that can be made from extracting carbon, just not capturing it in spent forms that require an energy input.... well besides agriculture. But even most forms of agriculture merely use Carbon as a temporary holding element until the energy can be released again.
Why the restriction on 30 kWh of electricity per day? (you need to add the "hours" to the unit as kilowatts is a unit of capacity, not energy consumed). Seriously.... this seems like a forced kind of living when it isn't necessary for what you are addressing here. I agree that there are some wasteful applications of energy, but that restriction just seems out of place compared to the rest of what you are proposing.
Presuming that nuclear fusion reactors become common place in the next century, it seems like energy requirements are going to be the least of our concerns. Dispensing waste heat may be a big deal, and that may be the huge issue of the 21st Century. Hopefully we don't have to copy the idea from Isaac Asimov by erecting huge radiators that go into space on some tethers that throw the excess heat away from the atmosphere. That, to me, would be the ultimate upper limit in terms of how much per capita energy consumption there would be on the Earth. If you can figure out how to get rid of the excess heat, that number can go up dramatically.
$1000/barrel oil will never happen with the exception of hyperinflation that will make bread costing $1000 per loaf and minimum wage at $10k/hour.
There are many ways to produce a barrel of oil synthetically... the most obvious being simply with algae and perhaps a touch of genetic engineering. Such petroleum also tends to have fewer traditional contaminates such as sulfur (Sulfur Dioxide is something you commonly smell near petroleum refineries... along with other "nasty" stuff).
Population control like China's has some huge unintended consequences, most especially with the preferential selection for boys as opposed to girls within that culture. That will get fixed eventually, but in the meantime China has to decide what they are going to do with a couple hundred million excess men who will never be able to have a family with local women. It certainly makes it very tempting to send a group like that off to war, where losing a few million soldiers is no big deal. Are you sure you want to be on the blunt end of that army with the guns facing your direction?
Besides, most of the industrialized nations are facing a massive population decline, including America. The only thing that is keeping the population of America growing at all is due to immigration, which even that isn't going to be enough by the year 2020, according to U.S. Census Bureau projections. Not only that, but a substantial amount of food is now simply getting destroyed by burning it up in the tanks of automobiles in the form of ethanol. That is perhaps one of the most wasteful ways to utilize land that would be much more useful simply feeding people. Besides, the world could easily feed 10x the current global population using existing farm practices and using existing land already under cultivation. The concerns about over population are greatly exaggerated.
They want to be the Palestinians of the Pacific? That makes more sense than anything else in the article, I suppose.
They could only wish to be that fortunate. The Palestinians happen to be in a hunk of land that is already occupied by another country, and in a region that has foundational ties to three of the world's major religions. Instead, these guys are getting forced off their land by neglect and indifference, not war, in a land that nobody wants except for them.
I'm not saying that the Palestinians (originally the Philistines and still called that in Arabic) have had an easy lot in life either, but at least they know that they can at least pick up a gun to at least try to keep their homes. Kiribati is instead getting drowned so America and Europe can get cheap goods produced in Chinese factories. Sacrificing 100k people so 1 billion can live a "better" life is a good trade-off, isn't it?
The problem with tourism is that you need to have a link to the tourists.... something that Kiribati is definitely struggling with. Considering their population is right around 100k people and they are fairly distant from other parts of the world, and that their average annual income is quite low, there really isn't much to attract an airline to come to that part of the world in terms of delivering passengers. Yes, somebody can get there by boat, but that takes some extra effort.
The article talks about how the government is hoping to negotiate with some airlines to establish a regular route at least to the "capital" of the country. They have an airport which can take the planes, but the economics really isn't there to justify the cost of the flights without some subsidies... something that country can ill afford as well.
By traditional jetliner they are about two hours from Honolulu... the largest group of potential "tourists" that could get there. That also puts them within a reasonable distance by connecting flights from the USA and Japan, or make it a "day trip" for somebody who happens to be in Hawaii for some reason or another. The problem with that is trying to convince tourists that they should spend a few hundred extra bucks to go snorkeling in Kiribati instead of Maui. To the average tourist, there isn't really all that much difference other than you wouldn't have to worry about crowds in Kiribati. You also don't have the 5-star hotels of Honolulu.... not that I'm suggesting that a 5-star resort be built in Kiribati either.
Major tourism hot spots like the Bahamas have the convenience of being fairly close to major metro areas (like New York City) and that going there definitely offers something different that the people can't get from home.
The scale and cost of the Manhattan project is one that still amazes me, and the more that I study the project the more that I discover it was by far and away much larger than I ever could have imagined. I've heard stories that at least at one time or another the Manhattan project consumed as much as half of the GDP for the entire United States.... during the middle of World War II and including the Liberty ship production, all of the bombers, fighters, and other weapons and even consumer goods produced at the time. In other words, nearly half of all Americans were in some way or another involved with producing those first nuclear weapons in the 1940's. The USSR had an even larger portion of its population engaged in that research in the late 1940's while they didn't have to deal with pesky issues like being engaged in a desperate war as well.
While I will agree that those who steal the research from American and Russia are not likely to repeat the same mistakes of those two nuclear programs, it still is an insanely expensive process for anybody to make these weapons. It isn't something a small time terrorist is going to come up with on their own. Dollar for dollar, there are many other much more cost effective ways to bomb somebody that doesn't involve nuclear weapons.
The problem I have with some nations in the world isn't the bombs or weapons they are making, but what they are teaching their children. Those countries which raise their children in an environment where all those kids learn from the earliest age is hatred and bitterness toward a certain "enemy" is bound to eventually act upon that sort of training. It doesn't matter if the hatred is toward Americans, Blacks, Jews, Homosexuals, or whatever it might be, it is all bad and to me those schools are far and away more dangerous than any kind of bomb that could ever be made.
What disappoints me most is that many of those within the Muslim faith.... in countries where they are certainly free to speak their mind... are not condemning this kind of hatred but instead many are spreading it even further. I know there are at least some that do condemn this sort of visceral hatred toward certain ethnic groups, but those tend to be an exceptional minority. For radical Christian groups (such as the Irish Republican Army or the Ku Klux Klan), those extremist groups are the minority and are frequently condemned for their acts of violence. It is not something "mainstream" within Christian society. Wahhabism and other related philosophies are unfortunately mainstream in Muslim society.
You must know some real nut jobs, or perhaps you don't really understand what it is that they really think about the 2nd amendment. The complaint is how government agents and police officers are very selective on their application of the constitution. When those people in positions of authority are being selective in following their oath of office, I would have to say that they are following no oath at all.
Of course a police officer would love to be the only armed individual when they come into a house. That is precisely the "we can have something but you can't" argument. It isn't a surprise that there are also a whole bunch of bullies in the law enforcement community too. Not everybody, but it does attract that kind of element, just as education tends to attract perverts who like to molest children.
This misses completely the point of private arms advocates: If everybody has guns, then those who abuse those weapons can presume that all of their neighbors have those weapons and anything they do to seriously piss off their neighbors is likely to get those arms used against them.
Conversely, if nobody has weapons on a "legal basis", only criminals and oppressive government agents have guns. This was tried in Asia several millenia ago and the result was the development of "unarmed" martial arts... Karate, Kung Fu, Judo, and all of the other related forms explicitly to allow the peasants to be able to stand up against would-be aggressors. Europe, on the other hand until the last couple of centuries required everybody to be armed and made it a national obligation.
If they are in America and otherwise behaving as responsible law-abiding people, I don't mind seeing anybody including Mexicans, Somalians, Yemenites, or anybody else bearing arms of any kind. I also respect the decision of Quakers and Mennonites who insist that weapons should never be used... as long as it is a voluntary decision where you give up that right and don't force somebody else to disarm.
This is so true. Anybody with a general understanding of radioactive isotopes is likely going to be able to make something akin to the "Little Boy" or the "Fat Man" bombs that were used on Japan. In the realm of nuclear bombs, those were puny little things that were unbelievably heavy and inaccurate as well. It is sort of hard to miss a target the size of a city, so that wasn't a problem when they were used.
The trick, as you have pointed out, is to make the bombs small enough to be practical in terms of their delivery and to perhaps amplify the yield to give a genuinely powerful punch. Getting the size of a warhead to a manageable size is the key to much of the research, and to be able to know how to compress the fissionable metal sufficiently to initiate the chain reaction.
I've seen some magazines, notably an old issue of Analog, that even had a special supplement labeled "give this to your local terrorist" that went into depth about how to make nuclear weapons... at least some crude enough to get the job done. It also gave a rather detailed description of centrifuges necessary to get the material to a concentrated form from material found in a nuclear power plant... with a rather gruesome description of the medical problems nuclear materials workers need to be concerned about unless you have gobs of money necessary to build the proper facilities to get everything put together.
That is ultimately the largest problem with nuclear weapons: It needs the resources of a major nation-state in order to get one put together. You can trade real estate for cost.... which isn't too bad if you are a 3rd world dictator. Something like that sticks out like a sore thumb if it is done by a group trying to stay covert. Certainly no country is going to be unaware that nuclear bombs are being developed within that country, and it will never happen in a place like Somalia or Tuvalu.
Even once the bomb is built, unless that country is prepared to use the bomb immediately (with the massive consequences for doing that), the bombs become even more expensive in terms of basic security (making sure somebody other than the leaders of that country are not going to use those weapons) and maintaining the infrastructure necessary for simply hanging onto those weapons. Basically, there isn't a strong compelling reason to even have these weapons unless you are in a life or death struggle for national survival or are one of the top major economic and military powers in the world.
I think both Brazil and India would likely get into the international space transportation market themselves sooner or later. If they go up on these rockets, it will be to get some experience and training from American astronauts to build their own astronaut corps. Both countries have access to some pretty good spaceport access areas and in fact better latitudes than even KSC. They also both have the money and an indigenous rocket industry of their own that seems to be doing just fine.
Countries that may be more interested would be some place like Germany or South Korea that have money but lack the spaceport facilities for going into space from within their own country. Even France has to launch their rockets from South America (via the ESA).
The primary reason for this system of launchers being dragged behind the firing stage is to set up an assembly line of boosters that all have the same components. In other words, you improve reliability and decrease cost simply through economies of scale and turning out three or four of the same part (or more) for each flight. It also helps in terms of an emergency abort, where you may lose one stage but the subsequent stages can carry on as if nothing happened... other than you may not achieve orbit. Abort modes certainly don't need to be strictly launch or blow up the whole system.
The submarine was the group's previous project, and seems to run just fine. They are using the submarine merely because it is handy and are trying to make use of all of their available resources, not because they particularly need a submarine.
The last launch attempt was aborted due to a hair blower that they purchased at a local department store that got disconnected from its power supply and caused an LOX valve to seal shut. A similar kind of valve heater by one of the larger companies would have cost at least thousands of dollars. Considering they are going to be able to re-create Alan Sheppard's flight for around $100k (including development costs), I think these guys are certainly ones to watch. It is also nice to see Europeans getting into the race for private spaceflight, although this is hardly the only European company involved with building launchers as well.
To me, the most promising is ARCA, based out of Romania and launching into the Black Sea. Their staging system is perhaps the most unique system I've ever seen in my life, where the "top" stage of the rocket pulls up the rest of the spacecraft with a tether. This video is one that simply must be seen to be believed and certainly is out of the box thinking by doing something nobody else has ever even tried. ARCA has also made several launch attempts to get the concept down and are getting closer to putting something up. They plan on eventually (within the decade) get to the Moon and land something up there... hopefully to win the Google Lunar X-Prize. At least they are a major competitor.
Still, Copenhagen Sub-orbital seems like they might also have a profitable niche market. Their test flights are out of the Baltic Sea, which makes life pretty exciting in terms of a missile test range.
Once private spaceflight gets much more prevalent and self sufficient, expect lawmakers to stupidly say that NASA is useless and should be shut down.
Well said here. I agree that there will be people questioning what NASA is doing... and there already are some who "get it" in terms of seeing a group like Boeing fly up to a private space station that may cost less than a billion dollars for constructing a station 2x the size of the ISS and paying for the complete vehicle development cost & assembly. NASA doesn't seem to be able to clear their throat for less than a billion dollars.
I do know that NASA does much more than just fly people into space, and I hope they get back to that as their primary mission. Restoring NASA to a role similar to how the NACA used to work would be a much better use of government resources.
Boeing and Space Adventures are planning on docking with a space station built by Bigelow Aerospace. One of the planned space stations is going to have more volume than the International Space Station... at a fraction of the cost. There is a reason why Bigelow is expanding their manufacturing facilities too, as noted on the main web page for the company... people are starting to put money down on their products.
I think the view will be much nicer than the laptop screen sized window in the spacecraft, and you don't have to squeeze past the pilot in order to get that view as well.
On the other hand, if there are so many possible restrictions on the scope of the patent, it means that unless you follow all of the steps listed in the patent claim (multi-tiered seat prices that also have variable weights on voting for the path that the movie will follow) that any other sort of presentation will not be a patent violation. Essentially, this is a worthless patent that doesn't really cover much of anything and would be hard to enforce on much of anything... even a direct competitor who is trying to market a similar system but has non-weighted voting on the scenes instead.
Still, I wouldn't want to have the Nazgul sucking the life out of me in a courtroom, and there wouldn't be too many people wanting to risk even a threat from that three lettered company. In other words, they've done their job simply by showing up even if the patent is never enforced in the first place not to mention that those same three letters are also a huge marketing advantage if it is used in a real movie theater. Essentially, prior art be damned and they've captured this market segment until somebody gets brave enough to realistically challenge the patent.
There is quite a bit more in terms of real hardware that has been proven or is being proven than existed in 1969. Also... keep in mind who is making and marketing the CST-100 here: Boeing with Space Adventures as the marketing agent.
Boeing either owns or has a very close business relationship with every manufacturer that has flown people into space made by American spacecraft. Rockwell International, the company who built the Space Shuttle, is currently a subsidiary of Boeing. I think their cred in this case is pretty solid.
As for Space Adventures, they have flown several people into space already. Note this is history and past tense..... they have flown several people into space. This isn't just a pipe dream but people with real stories to tell about their experiences. All of those flights so far have been on of all things equipment designed by the Soviet Union, so it makes for even more irony that it has taken American companies more than a decade to discover capitalism after the Russians have been so proficient at it. In fact the one reason why it is becoming attractive to use American companies is because NASA has purchased all of the available slots on the Soyuz spacecraft over the next decade simply to give the NASA astronaut corps a chance to get some time in space... and RKK Energia is even expanding production to cope with that demand with the highest flight rate ever for the Soyuz spacecraft.
This is real stuff for a real product, and to compare this effort to a pure marketing promotion for a vehicle that might exist in the 21st Century (the flights on the TWA program weren't supposed to fly until after 2001 anyway) is disingenuous and hardly a fair comparison. If you read the fine print on the TWA promo, they never promised anything either.
I've seen this statement made in several places:
The Democrats don't think free enterprise works below the sky, and the Republicans don't think it works above.
It amazes me to see a huge number of Republicans advocate for a central bureaucratic government authority with massive taxpayer subsidies and increased federal authority with the current Democratic presidential administration that is advocating for the elimination of federal bureaucracies, privatization of government services, and elimination of subsidies.
For myself, I think privatization of spaceflight is a very good thing, and it can only mean better things for America in the future. NASA isn't going anywhere, but they are no longer going to be a transportation service provider.... being Amtrack in space. Thank goodness too, as this is something that has been long overdue.
The deal that RCA offered was $100k and an employment contract that required Farnsworth to turn over this and all future inventions he may ever come up with to RCA. While not a terrible offer, it certainly could have been better and didn't give much wiggle room to Farnsworth.
What Farnsworth was more interested in was a more typical patent licensing and royalty contract where he could continue his own research into other areas but get a steady income from the invention royalties.
As to if some intelligent negotiation and perhaps a less abrasive approach in terms of dealing with David Smirnoff could have made a difference, I wasn't there at the time to see how the negotiations went down. Philo Farnsworth was a bit of an eccentric personality that would have fit in more with a Silicon Valley company much better than the hierarchical and rigid companies that were common in the 1930's and 40's. There was some animosity between David Smirnoff and Philo Farnsworth on a personal level as well that impacted this negotiation and future efforts as well.
Since it is a well known fact that all gate layouts can be done in software and all software can be done in hardware, I've argued that any sort of software patent must include a hardware layout that is an implementation of that patent. In other words, you need to provide a schematic for the algorithm implemented in gates.
So lets say I invent something genuinely novel, like say a device that will transmit a motion picture over a distance electronically, with sound, and reproduce that motion picture faithfully in high resolution. And let's suppose that efforts to get this to work have happened for several decades previously with this approach being something genuinely novel as it hasn't been tried before. So with all of that effort to get it put together, you apply for the patent and the USPTO actually grants a patent on that invention (in this case it issued patent# 1,773,980). Then a very large company with a whole lot of political influence decides to copy your invention and do a smear campaign on your name for having never made the invention in the first place?
See Phlio T. Farnsworth and see how far that got him in terms of dealing with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). It took him decades to even get a court to listen to his arguments, much less be able to collect any money from his invention above and beyond the court costs involved. His whole career is one of getting burned because he wasn't nearly as well connected politically or had the money to engage in the fight effectively. His is really an example of a garage tinkering that resulted in a powerful idea that has only recently been abandoned in favor of much newer ideas to accomplish the same task.
This should have been a classic example of how the patent system would work, but instead it is to me a very good example of what is messed up over the patent system and why even for non-software applications it simply doesn't work.