You do realize that it was Johnson, not Nixon who axed the Apollo program?
Yeah, Nixon wasn't a huge fan of dumping money on the space program either... certainly not somebody like JFK. Nixon was also a pragmatic leader where there was no public support for any sort of huge increase in Apollo funding.
But the point is that all of the Apollo hardware had already been built before Nixon had become president, and the contracts to make any more hardware canceled. There may have been a couple of vehicles "on the assembly line" when Nixon became president as well, but the engineers had already been laid-off (many of them) and even the assembly line workers who knew how to build the rockets had moved on to other things. In other words, even if Nixon had a burning desire to restart Apollo, it would have been an uphill climb to reverse the decisions of the previous administration.
The one credit I will give to cutting the Apollo program when they did was that it flooded the SF Bay Area and other regions of the USA with a glut of highly trained and experienced engineers of nearly every discipline. This, in turn, sparked the "computer revolution" where these engineers either found employment with or started new companies which created the explosion of computer technology that has existed since then. Articles from the mid 1970's in engineering journals openly lamented this glut and noted how it drove down salaries for engineers for nearly 10 years... with worries that such a glut might happen again.
I assert that had the space program continued on with the earlier levels of funding and soaking up engineers at the rate that it had been doing, Steve Wozniack and Steve Jobs would have likely ended up as cogs in the great race to Mars instead of starting a company like Apple Computer. This is one situation, and there would have been other engineers who were fortunately available to make things happen with computer technology and forced to enter the cut-throat world of nearly pure capitalism.
What is so interesting is how this has come full circle in many ways, where folks like Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, John Carmack, and Elon Musk have taken the money they earned from the private enterprises that they were involved with and invest that money into developing spacecraft. All of these gentlemen would likely have been NASA employees if the NASA budget remained at the 5% of the federal budget that NASA was at in 1967, and their contributions to the computer industry may not have happened. It is hard to imagine Microsoft with an even more anemic talent pool to draw from for engineers, but it very well might have happened.
As an addendum, I'd like to point out that the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) used to require an inventor to submit either a sample of their invention, or if the invention was larger, a reasonable physical model of their invention that would demonstrate the idea in tangible form. Many of these models still exist even though the USPTO no longer is accepting these models.
IMHO, this is a fantastic way to weed out patent trolls or asserting claims on really stupid things like a FTL drive. If you can't produce the thing, it really shouldn't be patented. Forcing a software patent submitter to produce, in physical hardware, their patent idea would certainly put up a barrier to most trolls but allow a determined and genuinely novel concept to be given protection. In a great many ways, it is unfortunate that the submission of models/devices is no longer a part of the process.
Submitting the algorithm on a stack of paper clearly demonstrates that the algorithm deserves copyright protection, but the issue of patent protection seems to be a bit over the top.
I don't understand why so many geeks on Slashdot have no concept how the patent system "works".
I think geeks on Slashdot know all too well how patents work... it is just a concept so alien to their way of thinking that they think the politicians and lawyers who came up with the concept of software patents are the clueless ones here.
Most geeks and in particular software developer geeks come up with novel ideas so quickly and so frequently that they find even taking the time to write up a patent to be something hardly worth the effort and slows their thinking down. How much uncommented/undocumented software do you think exists?
There is also a hacker (both black hat and white hat communities) philosophy of sharing information and techniques... where somebody who comes up with a novel algorithm gains respect within the community by virtue of the prestige for how often that algorithm is copied by everybody else. In other words, software developers are proud if their algorithm (particularly if their name is attacked to it like the LZW algorithm) and it is commonly used. This actually comes from the mathematics community, where mathematical theorems have a similar kind of reception between fellow mathematicians. Unfortunately for hackers and geeks, a good algorithm is seen as a cash cow.
The current patent laws explicitly prohibit patents on mathematical theorems... and in fact the language used is that mathematical formulas are exempt from patent protection. The argument used by software developers is that an algorithm is only a mathematical construct. Unfortunately, almost anything expressed as an algorithm can also be implemented as a representation of digital gates in hardware, so the algorithm can also be turned into a physical device that is tangible and made up of discrete components. That makes it patentable. BTW, the opposite is also true for most digital electronics, where hardware can be described in software... hence programmable logic.
As for the logic of allowing business methods as patentable concepts... I'll leave that to a whole other discussion. That is also something very recent, and IMHO just as harmful to the concept of a patent as software patents. Your description of selling baked goods via IRC is precisely one of these stupid business method patents that have perverted the concept of patents well beyond the initial intentions of the framers of the U.S. Constitution and why patent laws were originally developed.
A device that reproduces sound via recording the noise and allowing it to be played back... that is an invention worthy of a patent. Thomas Edison clearly deserved kudos and the protection for coming up with that idea initially. Patents were intended to protect physical devices from being copied due to the difficulty in doing the engineering and the infrastructure necessary to get those devices produced in the first place, so the government was willing to grant a temporary (read TEMPORARY!) monopoly over the concept to get the inventor of the idea established in the marketplace and recoup the R&D costs that the copy-cats wouldn't have to deal with. For most software patents, that is hardly the issue at all, and certainly isn't the case with business patents.
I remember several discussions among writers of the early MUDs (about 1990 or so... on USENET?) that involved aggregation of character data between multiple servers and allowing players to move from one "world" to the next. Some of this was simply copying character data, but it also involved direct links between servers... where players moving from one "room" to the next could switch to a different server and have it appear seamless to somebody playing within the MUD.
Obviously this was for MUD servers of the same "class" where data would be shared, but the data sharing concepts were discussed including IP (internet protocol) packet standards that would be used for sharing user data and even "world" data between servers.
I do think some prior art could be pulled up from these discussions, and there certainly is nothing that current MMORPGs provide other than graphics that hasn't already been done in abundance more than two decades ago with the old text-based MUDs, MOOs, and MUSHes. If anything, those experiments are still ahead of the game other than providing a snazzy client interface. Unless it is a patent on how to efficiently render 3D graphics on extremely low bandwidth, I don't see how there could be anything genuinely novel that isn't nearly 20 years old or much older anyway.
FYI, the DIKU MUD, while an early pioneer, wasn't the first. Multiplayer virtual combat games go back to at least 1980, and the real classic, ADVENT (Will Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure) came out in 1976... and was the real inspiration for most subsequent MUDs even if it wasn't necessarily "multi-player". The desire to make it multi-player, however, did become something to push people along. There were other multi-player combat games that are of a similar age that had to deal with these issues as well, some of which I did play in the 1970's.
What ends up happening when you separate the cargo from the astronauts is that the cargo ends up safer than the astronauts.
To explain this, consider that generally cargo is going up far more often than astronauts. The vehicles that are used to deliver the cargo are therefore going to be used, tested, and put into service far more often than the manned vehicles, so therefore there is going to be more history with those vehicles and more chance to work the bugs out.
Q.E.D.- the cargo vessels are going to be safer than the manned vehicles.
If you can build a common heritage with the manned and unmanned vehicles, that at least gives common components that you can test through experience that will help both programs and increase reliability and confidence. Increasing flight rate is always a useful thing in terms of reducing costs as well.
Consider that a pad worker at KSC only gets to launch three or four shuttles in a year. They really don't get to practice their skills except perhaps on mission scrubs, and even that isn't perfect. If you had a flight rate of dozens of flights a year (5-10 manned flights and a couple dozen cargo flights) those pad workers would gain proficiency in their jobs and even have a strong reason to want to streamline procedures in a manner that still preserves flight safety but also reduces costs.
I'm not sure we can reduce recycling times between landing and launch with spacecraft to the order we can for commercial airliners, but we certainly could try. I was incredibly impressed with the recycle times that SpaceX has done with the Falcon 1, where they could scrub a launch and restart the countdown within an hour... after engineers went to the vehicle and replaced a component and did maintenance on the vehicle. It will be interesting to see if SpaceX can pull off a similar kind of recycling of its launches with the Falcon 9... better yet if somebody was sitting on top of the Falcon.
Shuttle rules are that a scrub must have at least 24 hours and sometimes as long as 72 hours before restarting the countdown clock. That alone eats up costs that are unbelievable. Yes, the recycle times are necessary for the shuttle and I'm not asking to compromise safety, but the design stinks for that vehicle and is demonstrated by the time it takes to recycle a launch attempt. A better design could certainly help improve that issue.
As for hypersonic airliners, I think Virgin Galactic has that one covered. The economics of hypersonic aircraft that don't go sub-orbital is pretty rough, and there is a reason why the SST never was built, and the Concorde has been mothballed. Effectively, you need to leave the atmosphere if you really want to increase travel speeds for point to point destinations on the Earth, and do so efficiently where you can make some money. Point to point terrestrial space travel is something I do see happening in the not too distant future, however.... both for economic as well as military reasons. Landing a company of Marines any place on the globe within 6 hours sounds very appealing with the current U.S. Dept. of Defense thinking, and cost is not a major driver for that market.
All of this is true. The Shuttle program should have been a prototype for a whole series of continuously upgraded and improved vehicles. Not just things like the glass-cockpit idea that is a refurbishment of the shuttle, but a continuous assembly line that should have allowed vehicles like the Columbia to have been retired well before it disintegrated over Texas.
It was shutting down the vehicle construction assembly lines that was the main problem... and if something similar happened to the U.S. Navy where drydocks and shipbuilders were shut down, the USN would have similar kinds of problems in terms of getting talented engineers and scientists being able to build modern warships. It nearly is that way now anyway, but at least some are being built.
What we needed was something like the original X-program (aka X-15 and her sister vehicles) that continuously built upon the data of the previous vehicles for updated and improved vehicles. Improved based on several criteria, but all of them ones that could help the overall performance.
Unfortunately, data from the X-15 wasn't really used by anybody until Burt Rutan built Spaceship One... to cite a horrible example of what could have been but wasn't. At least Scaled Composites is taking that technology to the next generation. Where is the similar "next generation" shuttle program at right now? Orion is not a next generation shuttle.
It is hard to find something NASA has done that is good lately. NASA has mostly been turned into an engineering jobs program whose goal isn't to explore space, but rather to keep high paying jobs in key congressional districts so the respective congressional leaders can keep their jobs, or so votes can be "paid off" for supporting other legislation that helps somebody else.
NASA also seems to be stuck admiring their past far more than showing what they are working on for tomorrow. If you can show me even one manned spaceflight project that has gone past R&D testing and been seriously considered since the Space Shuttle (in the early 1980's) first launched... I'll eat my words. NASA has shown a singular ability to kill programs so fast that it is a wonder that the Ares I even got to where it is now. Most other projects didn't even make it that far, and there have been dozens of other proposals that have fallen flat on their face.
A replacement of the Shuttle is long, long over due, and the fact there isn't an alternative is pointing squarely why NASA is in so much trouble at the moment. Most of this is self-inflicted by NASA as well, I might add. Prominent scientists like Carl Sagan that openly demanded the dismantling of the manned spaceflight office didn't seem to help either, presuming (falsely) that it was a zero-sum game for unmanned spaceflight activities. That others have picked up Sagan's mantle and pushed the same concepts forward have only caused more problems than ever.
I would beg to differ on this point. An awful lot of private satellite launchers simply go belly up because the cost margins have been kept incredibly thin and they usually lack sufficient capital reserves to carry them forward beyond one or two launches. Yeah, the attrition rate for launchers is high, but it comes mainly from under capitalization... a chronic problem for all new start-up companies in almost every industry.
I'm curious... what companies are you referring to here that have seemed to be financially stable companies producing a launcher that seems to be performing quite well and then a mishap has shut them down? I can only think of a handful of companies that have even successfully put something into space at all, much less orbit.
Private enterprise certainly can weather the problems of things going boom and falling apart. Profit margins are even pretty good... unless you are trying to duplicate the NASA budgeting process and presuming that once a launcher is built that billions will be headed your way. On the other hand, a company that suffers a major set back but has cash reserves to build another vehicle is much more likely to send up the next rocket as opposed to a government operated program like NASA's shuttles that shut the whole program down for years with all sorts of political horsetrading going on in the meantime to fix the problem. That would never happen with a private company: either they go ahead and launch again in a couple of months or they simply close their doors completely.
Water does not "try" to drown you, in fact if you take your own air, it can be fun.
And when you run out of air you have to return back to where you came from... thats not quite good enough when you want to have a self sustaining outer space colony, as returning back to earth and refueling resources just isn't an option when its a 5 light year trip.
The earth ecosystem doesn't work so well for it by random chance, but because we are an evolved part of it. Chances of finding a compatible one are pretty slim.
Why? Are organic chemical unique to just the Earth? Are hydrogen and oxygen only found combined in the oceans of the Earth? Now that would be a remarkable scientific discovery if it were to be true.
Finding a place where organic chemistry can function like it does here on the Earth, however, might be a huge accomplishment. I would certainly say that such a place would be quite rare.
This puts the larger moons of the solar system, Ganymede, Titan, "The Moon" (Earth), and Triton somewhere on the border of detection... if we were trying to scan our own sun from that distance. Finding another terrestrial-sized double planet like the Earth-Moon planetary system would be a remarkable find in a situation like this.
Pluto, on the other hand, would not be detected based on mass alone.
I don't think that the Death Star was ever designed to operate in "stealth" mode. If anything, it was intended to be a shining beacon to the planets of the galaxy, letting them know that if they rebelled, that the Emperor certainly could dispatch them post-haste in a gruesome manner.
In other words, physical properties would be plainly obvious from even astronomical distances that you are dealing with the Death Star.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around how something that big can travel at superluminal velocities, but that is another question for another time.
The problem with defining a habitable zone is that currently we have a sample size of one. That makes statistical analysis of the topic difficult to do on an extreme level.
Assuming that the sample size can be increased, perhaps more statistical confidence can be gained to gain a proper conclusion. Discovery of life on Mars or Europa, to give some examples, might at least open up some potential and allow finer gradients of classification for "habitable" as well.
Even those two worlds being added as a "maybe" only puts the statistical sample size at 3. Not exactly a huge confidence interval for conclusions.
It was certainly a lot more hospitable than the "surface" of Jupiter, or even more realistically, the surface of Titan or Io. Neither of those two places are something I'd like to visit, even if the vistas are stunning.
Excuse the screwup I just had with the above section. Firefox just re-located a sentence I had intended for the last paragraph that ended up in the first one. Oops.
In fairness to biologists, their science has only recently (compared to other sciences) become a "hard" science with strong foundational theories and strongly determinant principles that could be applied to arrive at a conclusion. Largely, it still is in the fuzzy region between the hard sciences (like physics and astronomy) and the social sciences (like anthropology and psychology). I've even seen biologists use anthropological tools and study methods when investigating animal behavior, to give an example. He literally got into computers by reading a book and then buying a computer for his bio-research lab and didn't look back.
By hard science, with the discovery of DNA and a solid foundation of organic chemistry knowledge, biology has the potential to be as rigorous of a science as any other. In theory, you can even "design" a creature or plant to be created simply by organizing the organic molecules in the right order and combination... simply by pushing a button in a laboratory. That such potential exists scares the hell out of some people too.
Is biology there yet? No, but the "primitive" tools to get them there have already been built, and the rest is trying to make order out of the trillions of trillions of combinations that can be made with organic chemistry and how all of those chemicals interact with each other. It isn't an easy task, and certainly there is room for new scientific research in this area. IMHO this is one of many reasons why it dominates scientific journals, as the breadth of this field is quite huge.
More to the point, it is far and away much better shape than when Linnaeus first was trying to make sense in the first place about how to catalog what is a living thing. They are trying and if they are a little behind the other sciences, it has to do with the mountain of information they are dealing with and trying to get a handle upon.
As a footnote, I had a Computer Science professor who happened to have a PhD (his only one) in Biology. Frankly one of the best CS profs I ever had (he even specialized in computer graphics). He got into the position when a CS department was brand-new idea and you couldn't get a PhD in computer science, and so "switched" to a new field that seemed exciting to him at the time. Too bad that he is retired now, as he was a wealth of information and knowledge, not to mention his background in biology tended to keep the CS lectures from getting too dry.
I will admit to the fact that it was Al Gore that first proposed and actually set up the e-mail accounts for himself and Bill Clinton (president@whitehouse.gov), not to mention he was instrumental in getting the first White House web server up and going with official government documents. This was several years before even congress got their act together or the Pentagon (the top command, not necessarily elements of the D.O.D.)
As for his role in setting up NSF-net, I will also acknowledge his role in getting the legislation written to approve that network and getting the votes necessary for ratification of that bill. That doesn't imply that he "invented" the internet, but he was a contributing factor to its development in a significant manner. He at least was aware of computer technology and not afraid to use it.
Technically, yes. There's nothing in the constitution that denies Bill Gates the right to own a nuclear weapon is there? Nothing even close. I suppose you can interpret the private ownership of WMDs to be unconstitutional because of their definition of mass-destruction, thus by their existence in private hands violating other citizen's right to liberty.
Nothing in the constitution perhaps, but there is formal legislation now on the books that prevents ordinary citizens from owning WMDs, including biological and chemical weapons (aka Chlorine and Mustard Gas weapons). This law was passed shortly after 9/11/2001 when it was pointed out that a private citizens could (at the time) own a nuclear warhead and there were concerns about somebody sneaking in a former Soviet weapon and law enforcement personnel being powerless to stop it from coming in from a legal perspective. BTW, this is a law that has yet to be challenged, but I find it hard to believe that any judge would declare it unconstitutional... certainly not SCOTUS if it went up to appeal (which any such challenge which was successful would be appealed ultimately to the supremes).
World War II, particularly if the planned invasion of Japan had happened without the use of nuclear weapons, certainly would have passed the U.S. Civil War in terms of American military casualties. The Civil War only gets a higher body count when you combine both the Confederate and Union casualties together even with the use of nukes. The invasion of Japan was estimated to have between 1 to 2 million American casualties had it gone forth. God alone knows what Japan would have suffered in a convention military assault in that era. And people condemn the USA for its use of nukes on Hiroshima.
This said, many of the individual battles of the Civil War were as intense as any in recorded history, and certainly ranked up with significant battles like Normandy and Operation Market Garden.
The citizens of Baltimore also blockaded the railroad connections between New York and Washington D.C., thus preventing the reinforcement and supply of the capital during the opening days of the Civil War. Basically, for troops from New England and other northern states to even get to D.C, they had to go through Baltimore... including its citizens. Keeping the capital in the hands of the "loyalists" or "northern" states was seen as a critical military requirement in the early days of that war. More than a few Civil War battles took place within a modern day's car drive from D.C. as well.
This is likely to be simply a registration with the NSA so they can look over the plans for the potential weapon. Sometimes the government can be seriously screwed up in terms of what department is responsible for a particular function of the government such as this particular case.
IMHO this is about as logical as getting permission from NOAA to point a camera out of the window of a rocket in space (like Spaceship Two) if a part of the Earth is included in the shot.
For myself, I prefer high proof alcohol and tennis balls for cannons. When I used that ammo and explosive, I merely made a cannon out of a couple of Pringle cans taped to one another end to end with duct tape and some holes punched into the bottom of the "interior" cannon to set up the ignition chamber.
Don't fire the thing indoors... from personal experience. The tennis ball bounced back and forth between the walls about 15 times before it finally stopped. Talk about duck and cover.
High proof rubbing or cleaning alcohol sold in American drug stores won't work because there is a deliberate retardant added to spoil its value as an explosive. Perhaps a good thing, but if you need to make one of these weapons you should use some old fashioned moonshine or something home-made.
As for black powder, I used to make the stuff based on a recipe from the World Book Encyclopedia. The Salt Pieter I purchased from a local drug store (it is a heart medication that is now off the shelves due to ATF concerns) and for the carbon I used Kingsford briquettes. Sulfur came from the home chemistry set and I found other sources after my initial experiments.
Too bad that governments are far more paranoid today than when I was a kid.
...it is legal to own such a cannon because it does not use a firing pin and is muzzle loaded so the government does not consider the weapon a threat.
He then continued to say, "Also, I use it to hunt deer."
An interesting thought.... would this "gun" qualify for the muzzle-loading hunt? Due to the higher degree of difficulty in shooting with archaic guns and more limited range, several U.S. states offer special licenses for those hunters who hunt with a muzzle loading gun that often has extended dates and additional locations where you can hunt with those kind of guns.
Seems a tad bit overkill, but wouldn't it be a sight to see on the opening day of the hunt?
This is "up to 15 years", not a mandatory sentence of 15 years. There is judicial prerogative that can adjust the sentence to the circumstances, including if the person is a youth and prior convictions.
The point is that this isn't "involuntary manslaughter", which was mentioned in the original article. This is being prosecuted as somebody who has killed somebody else while intoxicated, or at least treated with the same degree of recklessness. The choice to text is yours as a driver, and it sure is easier to put away the cell phone than it is to put away the dozen beers you've been drinking.
If a fatality occurs, it is unfortunate but there is a victim there too that is screaming for justice... not to mention the family of the victim if a death occurs. It should be no small wonder that when somebody shows up at a state legislative session with a photo of the body of their son, daughter, father, or mother being pulled away from the accident scene (blood, gore, and all of the juicy details in the photo for proper effect) that a state legislature will react to at least increase the penalties if a death occurs. It is called real politics, and nothing will get money flowing to a political campaign faster than when blood is flowing from your own family.
BTW, in the case of Reggie Shaw, the kid whose photo appears in the article, he killed two engineers who worked at ATK rocket systems at Promentory Point. They were on their way to work (or from, I can't remember) when they were killed. While it may have been a hopeless cause, the two researchers may have been the ones to save the Ares I rocket from getting cut... saving the U.S. taxpayers several billion dollars, or perhaps coming up with a better alternative. We just won't know because they are dead. While I don't think that detail (where the victim works) should necessary be the cause of increased penalties, it did give the motivation to get this law written.
In Texas and several other western USA states, if you kill somebody entering your house (depending on circumstances and if the would-be thief is armed), that is in fact perfectly legal. The idiot shouldn't have been in the house in the first place trying to steal something.
This fails the argument other than that heroin is in the picture as well, but then the thief shouldn't have tried to hit the home of a heroin addict either. It is certainly the wrong analogy to be using to justify the action here and has nothing to do with texting while driving.
I"ve seen painted crosswalk on roads that are posted 50 mph. Does that count? That said, most pedestrians are smart enough to let cars pass or watch real carefully for vehicles willing to stop for them.
When it gets dangerous is when a car stops on a multi-laned road like this and in the next lane over a car "passes" the stopped vehicle even switching lanes and ignoring the pedestrian. Or when a car then rear-ends the stopped vehicle. I've seen both situations happen, both as a driver and in terms of a car passing somebody else... as the pedestrian. I wanted to drop something like a caltrop ahead of me when the idiot did that.
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You do realize that it was Johnson, not Nixon who axed the Apollo program?
Yeah, Nixon wasn't a huge fan of dumping money on the space program either... certainly not somebody like JFK. Nixon was also a pragmatic leader where there was no public support for any sort of huge increase in Apollo funding.
But the point is that all of the Apollo hardware had already been built before Nixon had become president, and the contracts to make any more hardware canceled. There may have been a couple of vehicles "on the assembly line" when Nixon became president as well, but the engineers had already been laid-off (many of them) and even the assembly line workers who knew how to build the rockets had moved on to other things. In other words, even if Nixon had a burning desire to restart Apollo, it would have been an uphill climb to reverse the decisions of the previous administration.
The one credit I will give to cutting the Apollo program when they did was that it flooded the SF Bay Area and other regions of the USA with a glut of highly trained and experienced engineers of nearly every discipline. This, in turn, sparked the "computer revolution" where these engineers either found employment with or started new companies which created the explosion of computer technology that has existed since then. Articles from the mid 1970's in engineering journals openly lamented this glut and noted how it drove down salaries for engineers for nearly 10 years... with worries that such a glut might happen again.
I assert that had the space program continued on with the earlier levels of funding and soaking up engineers at the rate that it had been doing, Steve Wozniack and Steve Jobs would have likely ended up as cogs in the great race to Mars instead of starting a company like Apple Computer. This is one situation, and there would have been other engineers who were fortunately available to make things happen with computer technology and forced to enter the cut-throat world of nearly pure capitalism.
What is so interesting is how this has come full circle in many ways, where folks like Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, John Carmack, and Elon Musk have taken the money they earned from the private enterprises that they were involved with and invest that money into developing spacecraft. All of these gentlemen would likely have been NASA employees if the NASA budget remained at the 5% of the federal budget that NASA was at in 1967, and their contributions to the computer industry may not have happened. It is hard to imagine Microsoft with an even more anemic talent pool to draw from for engineers, but it very well might have happened.
As an addendum, I'd like to point out that the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) used to require an inventor to submit either a sample of their invention, or if the invention was larger, a reasonable physical model of their invention that would demonstrate the idea in tangible form. Many of these models still exist even though the USPTO no longer is accepting these models.
IMHO, this is a fantastic way to weed out patent trolls or asserting claims on really stupid things like a FTL drive. If you can't produce the thing, it really shouldn't be patented. Forcing a software patent submitter to produce, in physical hardware, their patent idea would certainly put up a barrier to most trolls but allow a determined and genuinely novel concept to be given protection. In a great many ways, it is unfortunate that the submission of models/devices is no longer a part of the process.
Submitting the algorithm on a stack of paper clearly demonstrates that the algorithm deserves copyright protection, but the issue of patent protection seems to be a bit over the top.
I don't understand why so many geeks on Slashdot have no concept how the patent system "works".
I think geeks on Slashdot know all too well how patents work... it is just a concept so alien to their way of thinking that they think the politicians and lawyers who came up with the concept of software patents are the clueless ones here.
Most geeks and in particular software developer geeks come up with novel ideas so quickly and so frequently that they find even taking the time to write up a patent to be something hardly worth the effort and slows their thinking down. How much uncommented/undocumented software do you think exists?
There is also a hacker (both black hat and white hat communities) philosophy of sharing information and techniques... where somebody who comes up with a novel algorithm gains respect within the community by virtue of the prestige for how often that algorithm is copied by everybody else. In other words, software developers are proud if their algorithm (particularly if their name is attacked to it like the LZW algorithm) and it is commonly used. This actually comes from the mathematics community, where mathematical theorems have a similar kind of reception between fellow mathematicians. Unfortunately for hackers and geeks, a good algorithm is seen as a cash cow.
The current patent laws explicitly prohibit patents on mathematical theorems... and in fact the language used is that mathematical formulas are exempt from patent protection. The argument used by software developers is that an algorithm is only a mathematical construct. Unfortunately, almost anything expressed as an algorithm can also be implemented as a representation of digital gates in hardware, so the algorithm can also be turned into a physical device that is tangible and made up of discrete components. That makes it patentable. BTW, the opposite is also true for most digital electronics, where hardware can be described in software... hence programmable logic.
As for the logic of allowing business methods as patentable concepts... I'll leave that to a whole other discussion. That is also something very recent, and IMHO just as harmful to the concept of a patent as software patents. Your description of selling baked goods via IRC is precisely one of these stupid business method patents that have perverted the concept of patents well beyond the initial intentions of the framers of the U.S. Constitution and why patent laws were originally developed.
A device that reproduces sound via recording the noise and allowing it to be played back... that is an invention worthy of a patent. Thomas Edison clearly deserved kudos and the protection for coming up with that idea initially. Patents were intended to protect physical devices from being copied due to the difficulty in doing the engineering and the infrastructure necessary to get those devices produced in the first place, so the government was willing to grant a temporary (read TEMPORARY! ) monopoly over the concept to get the inventor of the idea established in the marketplace and recoup the R&D costs that the copy-cats wouldn't have to deal with. For most software patents, that is hardly the issue at all, and certainly isn't the case with business patents.
I remember several discussions among writers of the early MUDs (about 1990 or so... on USENET?) that involved aggregation of character data between multiple servers and allowing players to move from one "world" to the next. Some of this was simply copying character data, but it also involved direct links between servers... where players moving from one "room" to the next could switch to a different server and have it appear seamless to somebody playing within the MUD.
Obviously this was for MUD servers of the same "class" where data would be shared, but the data sharing concepts were discussed including IP (internet protocol) packet standards that would be used for sharing user data and even "world" data between servers.
I do think some prior art could be pulled up from these discussions, and there certainly is nothing that current MMORPGs provide other than graphics that hasn't already been done in abundance more than two decades ago with the old text-based MUDs, MOOs, and MUSHes. If anything, those experiments are still ahead of the game other than providing a snazzy client interface. Unless it is a patent on how to efficiently render 3D graphics on extremely low bandwidth, I don't see how there could be anything genuinely novel that isn't nearly 20 years old or much older anyway.
FYI, the DIKU MUD, while an early pioneer, wasn't the first. Multiplayer virtual combat games go back to at least 1980, and the real classic, ADVENT (Will Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure) came out in 1976... and was the real inspiration for most subsequent MUDs even if it wasn't necessarily "multi-player". The desire to make it multi-player, however, did become something to push people along. There were other multi-player combat games that are of a similar age that had to deal with these issues as well, some of which I did play in the 1970's.
What ends up happening when you separate the cargo from the astronauts is that the cargo ends up safer than the astronauts.
To explain this, consider that generally cargo is going up far more often than astronauts. The vehicles that are used to deliver the cargo are therefore going to be used, tested, and put into service far more often than the manned vehicles, so therefore there is going to be more history with those vehicles and more chance to work the bugs out.
Q.E.D.- the cargo vessels are going to be safer than the manned vehicles.
If you can build a common heritage with the manned and unmanned vehicles, that at least gives common components that you can test through experience that will help both programs and increase reliability and confidence. Increasing flight rate is always a useful thing in terms of reducing costs as well.
Consider that a pad worker at KSC only gets to launch three or four shuttles in a year. They really don't get to practice their skills except perhaps on mission scrubs, and even that isn't perfect. If you had a flight rate of dozens of flights a year (5-10 manned flights and a couple dozen cargo flights) those pad workers would gain proficiency in their jobs and even have a strong reason to want to streamline procedures in a manner that still preserves flight safety but also reduces costs.
I'm not sure we can reduce recycling times between landing and launch with spacecraft to the order we can for commercial airliners, but we certainly could try. I was incredibly impressed with the recycle times that SpaceX has done with the Falcon 1, where they could scrub a launch and restart the countdown within an hour... after engineers went to the vehicle and replaced a component and did maintenance on the vehicle. It will be interesting to see if SpaceX can pull off a similar kind of recycling of its launches with the Falcon 9... better yet if somebody was sitting on top of the Falcon.
Shuttle rules are that a scrub must have at least 24 hours and sometimes as long as 72 hours before restarting the countdown clock. That alone eats up costs that are unbelievable. Yes, the recycle times are necessary for the shuttle and I'm not asking to compromise safety, but the design stinks for that vehicle and is demonstrated by the time it takes to recycle a launch attempt. A better design could certainly help improve that issue.
As for hypersonic airliners, I think Virgin Galactic has that one covered. The economics of hypersonic aircraft that don't go sub-orbital is pretty rough, and there is a reason why the SST never was built, and the Concorde has been mothballed. Effectively, you need to leave the atmosphere if you really want to increase travel speeds for point to point destinations on the Earth, and do so efficiently where you can make some money. Point to point terrestrial space travel is something I do see happening in the not too distant future, however.... both for economic as well as military reasons. Landing a company of Marines any place on the globe within 6 hours sounds very appealing with the current U.S. Dept. of Defense thinking, and cost is not a major driver for that market.
All of this is true. The Shuttle program should have been a prototype for a whole series of continuously upgraded and improved vehicles. Not just things like the glass-cockpit idea that is a refurbishment of the shuttle, but a continuous assembly line that should have allowed vehicles like the Columbia to have been retired well before it disintegrated over Texas.
It was shutting down the vehicle construction assembly lines that was the main problem... and if something similar happened to the U.S. Navy where drydocks and shipbuilders were shut down, the USN would have similar kinds of problems in terms of getting talented engineers and scientists being able to build modern warships. It nearly is that way now anyway, but at least some are being built.
What we needed was something like the original X-program (aka X-15 and her sister vehicles) that continuously built upon the data of the previous vehicles for updated and improved vehicles. Improved based on several criteria, but all of them ones that could help the overall performance.
Unfortunately, data from the X-15 wasn't really used by anybody until Burt Rutan built Spaceship One... to cite a horrible example of what could have been but wasn't. At least Scaled Composites is taking that technology to the next generation. Where is the similar "next generation" shuttle program at right now? Orion is not a next generation shuttle.
It is hard to find something NASA has done that is good lately. NASA has mostly been turned into an engineering jobs program whose goal isn't to explore space, but rather to keep high paying jobs in key congressional districts so the respective congressional leaders can keep their jobs, or so votes can be "paid off" for supporting other legislation that helps somebody else.
NASA also seems to be stuck admiring their past far more than showing what they are working on for tomorrow. If you can show me even one manned spaceflight project that has gone past R&D testing and been seriously considered since the Space Shuttle (in the early 1980's) first launched... I'll eat my words. NASA has shown a singular ability to kill programs so fast that it is a wonder that the Ares I even got to where it is now. Most other projects didn't even make it that far, and there have been dozens of other proposals that have fallen flat on their face.
A replacement of the Shuttle is long, long over due, and the fact there isn't an alternative is pointing squarely why NASA is in so much trouble at the moment. Most of this is self-inflicted by NASA as well, I might add. Prominent scientists like Carl Sagan that openly demanded the dismantling of the manned spaceflight office didn't seem to help either, presuming (falsely) that it was a zero-sum game for unmanned spaceflight activities. That others have picked up Sagan's mantle and pushed the same concepts forward have only caused more problems than ever.
I would beg to differ on this point. An awful lot of private satellite launchers simply go belly up because the cost margins have been kept incredibly thin and they usually lack sufficient capital reserves to carry them forward beyond one or two launches. Yeah, the attrition rate for launchers is high, but it comes mainly from under capitalization... a chronic problem for all new start-up companies in almost every industry.
I'm curious... what companies are you referring to here that have seemed to be financially stable companies producing a launcher that seems to be performing quite well and then a mishap has shut them down? I can only think of a handful of companies that have even successfully put something into space at all, much less orbit.
Private enterprise certainly can weather the problems of things going boom and falling apart. Profit margins are even pretty good... unless you are trying to duplicate the NASA budgeting process and presuming that once a launcher is built that billions will be headed your way. On the other hand, a company that suffers a major set back but has cash reserves to build another vehicle is much more likely to send up the next rocket as opposed to a government operated program like NASA's shuttles that shut the whole program down for years with all sorts of political horsetrading going on in the meantime to fix the problem. That would never happen with a private company: either they go ahead and launch again in a couple of months or they simply close their doors completely.
Water does not "try" to drown you, in fact if you take your own air, it can be fun.
And when you run out of air you have to return back to where you came from... thats not quite good enough when you want to have a self sustaining outer space colony, as returning back to earth and refueling resources just isn't an option when its a 5 light year trip.
The earth ecosystem doesn't work so well for it by random chance, but because we are an evolved part of it. Chances of finding a compatible one are pretty slim.
Why? Are organic chemical unique to just the Earth? Are hydrogen and oxygen only found combined in the oceans of the Earth? Now that would be a remarkable scientific discovery if it were to be true.
Finding a place where organic chemistry can function like it does here on the Earth, however, might be a huge accomplishment. I would certainly say that such a place would be quite rare.
This puts the larger moons of the solar system, Ganymede, Titan, "The Moon" (Earth), and Triton somewhere on the border of detection... if we were trying to scan our own sun from that distance. Finding another terrestrial-sized double planet like the Earth-Moon planetary system would be a remarkable find in a situation like this.
Pluto, on the other hand, would not be detected based on mass alone.
I don't think that the Death Star was ever designed to operate in "stealth" mode. If anything, it was intended to be a shining beacon to the planets of the galaxy, letting them know that if they rebelled, that the Emperor certainly could dispatch them post-haste in a gruesome manner.
In other words, physical properties would be plainly obvious from even astronomical distances that you are dealing with the Death Star.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around how something that big can travel at superluminal velocities, but that is another question for another time.
The problem with defining a habitable zone is that currently we have a sample size of one. That makes statistical analysis of the topic difficult to do on an extreme level.
Assuming that the sample size can be increased, perhaps more statistical confidence can be gained to gain a proper conclusion. Discovery of life on Mars or Europa, to give some examples, might at least open up some potential and allow finer gradients of classification for "habitable" as well.
Even those two worlds being added as a "maybe" only puts the statistical sample size at 3. Not exactly a huge confidence interval for conclusions.
It was certainly a lot more hospitable than the "surface" of Jupiter, or even more realistically, the surface of Titan or Io. Neither of those two places are something I'd like to visit, even if the vistas are stunning.
How about raising 1 to the power of 80!. Yeah, that is going to be a really massive number.
Excuse the screwup I just had with the above section. Firefox just re-located a sentence I had intended for the last paragraph that ended up in the first one. Oops.
In fairness to biologists, their science has only recently (compared to other sciences) become a "hard" science with strong foundational theories and strongly determinant principles that could be applied to arrive at a conclusion. Largely, it still is in the fuzzy region between the hard sciences (like physics and astronomy) and the social sciences (like anthropology and psychology). I've even seen biologists use anthropological tools and study methods when investigating animal behavior, to give an example. He literally got into computers by reading a book and then buying a computer for his bio-research lab and didn't look back.
By hard science, with the discovery of DNA and a solid foundation of organic chemistry knowledge, biology has the potential to be as rigorous of a science as any other. In theory, you can even "design" a creature or plant to be created simply by organizing the organic molecules in the right order and combination... simply by pushing a button in a laboratory. That such potential exists scares the hell out of some people too.
Is biology there yet? No, but the "primitive" tools to get them there have already been built, and the rest is trying to make order out of the trillions of trillions of combinations that can be made with organic chemistry and how all of those chemicals interact with each other. It isn't an easy task, and certainly there is room for new scientific research in this area. IMHO this is one of many reasons why it dominates scientific journals, as the breadth of this field is quite huge.
More to the point, it is far and away much better shape than when Linnaeus first was trying to make sense in the first place about how to catalog what is a living thing. They are trying and if they are a little behind the other sciences, it has to do with the mountain of information they are dealing with and trying to get a handle upon.
As a footnote, I had a Computer Science professor who happened to have a PhD (his only one) in Biology. Frankly one of the best CS profs I ever had (he even specialized in computer graphics). He got into the position when a CS department was brand-new idea and you couldn't get a PhD in computer science, and so "switched" to a new field that seemed exciting to him at the time. Too bad that he is retired now, as he was a wealth of information and knowledge, not to mention his background in biology tended to keep the CS lectures from getting too dry.
I will admit to the fact that it was Al Gore that first proposed and actually set up the e-mail accounts for himself and Bill Clinton (president@whitehouse.gov), not to mention he was instrumental in getting the first White House web server up and going with official government documents. This was several years before even congress got their act together or the Pentagon (the top command, not necessarily elements of the D.O.D.)
As for his role in setting up NSF-net, I will also acknowledge his role in getting the legislation written to approve that network and getting the votes necessary for ratification of that bill. That doesn't imply that he "invented" the internet, but he was a contributing factor to its development in a significant manner. He at least was aware of computer technology and not afraid to use it.
Technically, yes. There's nothing in the constitution that denies Bill Gates the right to own a nuclear weapon is there? Nothing even close. I suppose you can interpret the private ownership of WMDs to be unconstitutional because of their definition of mass-destruction, thus by their existence in private hands violating other citizen's right to liberty.
Nothing in the constitution perhaps, but there is formal legislation now on the books that prevents ordinary citizens from owning WMDs, including biological and chemical weapons (aka Chlorine and Mustard Gas weapons). This law was passed shortly after 9/11/2001 when it was pointed out that a private citizens could (at the time) own a nuclear warhead and there were concerns about somebody sneaking in a former Soviet weapon and law enforcement personnel being powerless to stop it from coming in from a legal perspective. BTW, this is a law that has yet to be challenged, but I find it hard to believe that any judge would declare it unconstitutional ... certainly not SCOTUS if it went up to appeal (which any such challenge which was successful would be appealed ultimately to the supremes).
World War II, particularly if the planned invasion of Japan had happened without the use of nuclear weapons, certainly would have passed the U.S. Civil War in terms of American military casualties. The Civil War only gets a higher body count when you combine both the Confederate and Union casualties together even with the use of nukes. The invasion of Japan was estimated to have between 1 to 2 million American casualties had it gone forth. God alone knows what Japan would have suffered in a convention military assault in that era. And people condemn the USA for its use of nukes on Hiroshima.
This said, many of the individual battles of the Civil War were as intense as any in recorded history, and certainly ranked up with significant battles like Normandy and Operation Market Garden.
The citizens of Baltimore also blockaded the railroad connections between New York and Washington D.C., thus preventing the reinforcement and supply of the capital during the opening days of the Civil War. Basically, for troops from New England and other northern states to even get to D.C, they had to go through Baltimore... including its citizens. Keeping the capital in the hands of the "loyalists" or "northern" states was seen as a critical military requirement in the early days of that war. More than a few Civil War battles took place within a modern day's car drive from D.C. as well.
This is likely to be simply a registration with the NSA so they can look over the plans for the potential weapon. Sometimes the government can be seriously screwed up in terms of what department is responsible for a particular function of the government such as this particular case.
IMHO this is about as logical as getting permission from NOAA to point a camera out of the window of a rocket in space (like Spaceship Two) if a part of the Earth is included in the shot.
For myself, I prefer high proof alcohol and tennis balls for cannons. When I used that ammo and explosive, I merely made a cannon out of a couple of Pringle cans taped to one another end to end with duct tape and some holes punched into the bottom of the "interior" cannon to set up the ignition chamber.
Don't fire the thing indoors... from personal experience. The tennis ball bounced back and forth between the walls about 15 times before it finally stopped. Talk about duck and cover.
High proof rubbing or cleaning alcohol sold in American drug stores won't work because there is a deliberate retardant added to spoil its value as an explosive. Perhaps a good thing, but if you need to make one of these weapons you should use some old fashioned moonshine or something home-made.
As for black powder, I used to make the stuff based on a recipe from the World Book Encyclopedia. The Salt Pieter I purchased from a local drug store (it is a heart medication that is now off the shelves due to ATF concerns) and for the carbon I used Kingsford briquettes. Sulfur came from the home chemistry set and I found other sources after my initial experiments.
Too bad that governments are far more paranoid today than when I was a kid.
...it is legal to own such a cannon because it does not use a firing pin and is muzzle loaded so the government does not consider the weapon a threat.
He then continued to say, "Also, I use it to hunt deer."
An interesting thought.... would this "gun" qualify for the muzzle-loading hunt? Due to the higher degree of difficulty in shooting with archaic guns and more limited range, several U.S. states offer special licenses for those hunters who hunt with a muzzle loading gun that often has extended dates and additional locations where you can hunt with those kind of guns.
Seems a tad bit overkill, but wouldn't it be a sight to see on the opening day of the hunt?
This is "up to 15 years", not a mandatory sentence of 15 years. There is judicial prerogative that can adjust the sentence to the circumstances, including if the person is a youth and prior convictions.
The point is that this isn't "involuntary manslaughter", which was mentioned in the original article. This is being prosecuted as somebody who has killed somebody else while intoxicated, or at least treated with the same degree of recklessness. The choice to text is yours as a driver, and it sure is easier to put away the cell phone than it is to put away the dozen beers you've been drinking.
If a fatality occurs, it is unfortunate but there is a victim there too that is screaming for justice... not to mention the family of the victim if a death occurs. It should be no small wonder that when somebody shows up at a state legislative session with a photo of the body of their son, daughter, father, or mother being pulled away from the accident scene (blood, gore, and all of the juicy details in the photo for proper effect) that a state legislature will react to at least increase the penalties if a death occurs. It is called real politics, and nothing will get money flowing to a political campaign faster than when blood is flowing from your own family.
BTW, in the case of Reggie Shaw, the kid whose photo appears in the article, he killed two engineers who worked at ATK rocket systems at Promentory Point. They were on their way to work (or from, I can't remember) when they were killed. While it may have been a hopeless cause, the two researchers may have been the ones to save the Ares I rocket from getting cut... saving the U.S. taxpayers several billion dollars, or perhaps coming up with a better alternative. We just won't know because they are dead. While I don't think that detail (where the victim works) should necessary be the cause of increased penalties, it did give the motivation to get this law written.
In Texas and several other western USA states, if you kill somebody entering your house (depending on circumstances and if the would-be thief is armed), that is in fact perfectly legal. The idiot shouldn't have been in the house in the first place trying to steal something.
This fails the argument other than that heroin is in the picture as well, but then the thief shouldn't have tried to hit the home of a heroin addict either. It is certainly the wrong analogy to be using to justify the action here and has nothing to do with texting while driving.
I"ve seen painted crosswalk on roads that are posted 50 mph. Does that count? That said, most pedestrians are smart enough to let cars pass or watch real carefully for vehicles willing to stop for them.
When it gets dangerous is when a car stops on a multi-laned road like this and in the next lane over a car "passes" the stopped vehicle even switching lanes and ignoring the pedestrian. Or when a car then rear-ends the stopped vehicle. I've seen both situations happen, both as a driver and in terms of a car passing somebody else... as the pedestrian. I wanted to drop something like a caltrop ahead of me when the idiot did that.