If I, as a software developer, was aware of a simple computer platform that was in widespread usage among a certain demographic group (aka school-aged children) throughout 1st world countries, I could frankly care less about what operating system it runs on or even if it is unique or original to this platform.
This seemed like a dream for software developers trying to target educational markets... if it had been done properly. And nobody in the educational software business really makes a killing like Oracle or Microsoft... let's be real here. They are usually barely able to cover their own overhead and break even in the end.
Negroponte never did get this, and when the governor of the state he was living in (Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at the time) tried to order 100,000 laptops for inner-city Boston youths.... Romney was turned down flat because "Massachusetts isn't a 3rd world country".
Again, I admire the thought about trying to get 3rd world countries become computer literate. I am also willing to admit to the presumption that a village without a consistent electricity conduit or even running water could perhaps use a mesh laptop computer network to help them learn the knowledge to improve their lives and get the other "luxuries" of 21st Century life.
The whole "buy one, give one free" was not Negroponte's idea anyway, and it required a major petition of a huge number of interested hackers and geeks to even bring this idea to his attention.
I could go on, but it appears I'm preaching to the choir here.
I do agree with your two organization approach, BTW, and that should have been done from the start. I might have become much more involved in the project if that had been the case.
In fairness to these scientists and engineers, often they have a need that isn't met by well trained software engineers and feel a desire to "get things right" by doing it themselves.
Even so, I think I would have to agree with your general assumption. IMHO some of the worst software I've ever seen (and I've seen quite a bit) wasn't scientists or even educators, but it was from electrical engineers who thought so highly of their own knowledge of computers that the two computer science courses they took were sufficient to have a through knowledge of software engineering practices.
Which is why a mission critical piece of firmware I saw had a global variable named "temp". Think real carefully about that one if you are a programmer and what the consequences of that is. And that is just scratching the surface of how bad that software was.
Call me cynical, but I don't really think learning, education, or even "electronic literacy" for 3rd world countries was ever a goal.
I have been a very harsh critic of the OLPC since its inception, and I still think that Negroponte is being incredibly paternalistic (read stuck up and thinking his PhD means he is better than anybody else) in his attitude toward these countries he has targeted for this project.
On the surface, without really looking at the meat of the organization, this sounds like a wonderful idea. The more that I dug into the details... even early on... the more I just couldn't believe what I was reading. More to the point, I felt that far too many compromises were being made for those companies "giving" components to the project when in fact better deals could be had elsewhere.
I also never understood the emphasis on 3rd world countries when the basic goal... a cheap laptop that could be very affordable and a consistent platform to be targeted by developers... was only treated as a secondary concern.
I still claim that if the emphasis here had been for affordable for kids in 1st world countries, that it would have ended up in 3rd world countries as well. Far too much engineering effort went into trying to disable this device when it wasn't used in the "approved" manner, nor have I ever seen what I would call honest concerns resolved about shipping these computers to 3rd world countries only to have the shipments diverted to the "black market" and used to add to the Swiss bank accounts of the leaders of these countries.
While I openly admit there are some very good and dedicated people who have been contributing to the project, I have questioned the leadership of the whole thing from the start and certainly question the model that they used to put everything together. The forking of the project alone shows it wasn't really a sound idea in the first place.
On the positive side, many of those contributions by the open source community can be redirected to other similar worthy projects, and the idea is out there to make computers affordable for kids in the $100-$300 price range. That idea won't die an easy death, even if the OLPC itself is shown to be the fad that it is right now.
The Associated Press was started by a bunch of small-town newspapers who individually simply couldn't even begin to compete against the major newspapers (mainly east-coast U.S. newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post). Some of those major papers did allow these small town newspapers to reproduce their stories, but charged extortionist prices for the content.
So instead, a bunch of these much smaller newspapers decided to get together and share their own news gathering resources with each other and try to substantially reduce royalty fees for reproducing content. In a few cases there were "bureaus" that were set up and financed by the collective organization, but for the most part they relied upon a dispersed distribution model where the "members" each contributed stories for the general geographic region where they lived.
There was also a voluntary "significance" rating applied to each story as well, ranging from general human-interest stories (somebody just raised a two-headed snake, biggest ball of twine in Smallville, Iowa) to significant news (war has just been declared or a major world leader has been assassinated). Mainly it was newspaper editors trying to help each other out and fill each other's newspapers with content without having to break the bank with a huge payroll of reporters.
Frankly the AP in my mind represents nearly the spirit of the open source movement in a great many ways, even though it is a commercial entity. You can debate about the current incarnation of the Associated Press and its current operations, but it certainly has an admirable and interesting heritage.
The issue here isn't big bad business vs. lonely bloggers... it is more how a 19th Century American institution based on a distributed content model can adapt to the 21st Century, and how content intended for one medium is being adapted for a much newer medium, where the business model will change.
There are several blogger and web-based distributed news gathering sources that create original content (aka not copy AP stories), but unfortunately most of these bloggers are taking the easy way out and simply doing a direct copy of what is clearly copyrighted work. If these same bloggers would support (and reference) these alternatives, this would have been a non-story at all. Indeed many of these alternatives even post content with a free content license like CC-by-SA or something similar.
I'm allowed to think whatever I want as a private citizen.
On the contrary... it is citizens like you that skewer the jury system and force prosecutors and juries to hand out guilty verdicts in cases that upon later review are clearly innocent of the charges that were brought against them.
A great many people have their verdicts overturn, or in the case of the Duke University Men's Lacrosse team, the prosecutor was even brought before the state bar to have his license revoked due to prosecutorial misconduct on a gross scale, even to have those charged be "officially" pronounced innocent... something quite rare in the judicial community.
In judicial systems of the past, notably the French during the 1st Republic (aka right after the French Revolution) there was a presumption of guilt and the burden of proof was upon the charged to demonstrate their innocence before the court. Under such a system it becomes nearly impossible for ordinary people to fight against a judicial system that has millions of dollars at its disposal and the authority of government to pry into every detail of your life.
I believe it is not only useful but incumbent upon all citizens to presume innocence on the part of those who have been charged with crimes and demand strong and convincing proof from our government if those charges are to prevail.
So help me, I hope you never get to sit on a jury with that sort of attitude. Journalists with your attitude are part of why court reporting is so awful at the moment as well.
The problem with what you are claiming here about signing the voter registration is a matter of enforcement:
Can you name any individual who has been prosecuted for "fraudulently signing" voter registration?
Or more to the point, other than perhaps catching the fraud at the voting booth when it happens during the act itself, how else are you going to catch or prosecute an individual attempting to vote for an in behalf of somebody else? Even if a voting judge catching somebody "in the act" trying to vote for somebody who they are not, it is very hard to actually arrest them if they take off and leave before police or somebody else can perform the arrest.
The question about ID vs. no ID at the voting booth is what sorts of voting fraud are you preventing?
Showing ID can prevent non-citizens from voting (don't tell me it doesn't happen... please!) or keep large groups of people from voting multiple times for and in behalf of individuals who should have been removed from the voting books long ago.
On the flip side, I will admit there are some individuals who can claim U.S. Citizenship (in American elections) and are otherwise completely "off the grid" in terms of having any form of ID. At the same time, in spite of studies to the contrary, I have a very hard time believing that any responsible adult who engages in today's economy in any significant fashion and has to work with government agencies on any level at all would never have a picture ID. For crying out loud, you need a picture ID just to board an airplane.
Why is the security of the voting booth not as critical as the security of the passenger cabin of an airplane?
I don't get it. I simply don't get what is groundbreaking about this project at all.
Open Source? 3D printing? Self-replication?
None of this is unique, or even original. If you want a high-quality 3D printer that can self-replicate a great many of its parts, and is open-source with some fantastic documentation currently available, see Fab@Home where some progress is being made and has been happening for a couple of years now.
I've seen suggestions of printable ICs and other sorts of digital circuits that might be used in such a device, and it should be noted that the ultimate goal of the Fab@Home project is a fully replicatable device with some sort of basic supply of "source materials" like resin and copper.
While the RepRap looks interesting, it doesn't look like they've done a "survey of available literature" to really prove they've done something new or original... and certainly not something worthy of a/. article. Fab@Home has been on/. more than once as well.
3D printers have been around for decades now in one form or another. If that is what is so ground breaking, these folks need to learn what is standard engineering practice among mechanical engineers. Prototyping machines like this are not only commonly used, but considered essential for any decent engineering shop. All the RepRap looks like to me is a cheap 3D printer.
I remember the contest... and somebody turned in a zero byte length source file. Really! Nothing at all as the source.
A standard C compiler (like GCC) will produce precisely an exact copy of the source code when the object code is executed at run-time.
The one thing that kept the contest from getting flooded with additional variations of this software was the requirement to be original and that nobody could use a previously published algorithm. This does make you think, however.
I have no idea why you are getting modded as a troll, and I hope that the meta-moderators will get this correct and mark this as bad moderation.
I happen to agree with you, and it seems as though even efforts by the "space enthusiasts" community to help with providing rationale and even funding for more "visible spectrum" filters is deliberately torpedoed by the NASA management.
The "public" is paying for these images, and certainly deserve to get something for their investment, even if it doesn't provide the maximum value for science at those frequencies. The scientists involved will claim that there is a limit to the number of filter you can put into the camera. I call that obfuscation of the issue.
Yes, I know it costs huge amounts of money to send something to Mars of Saturn, but please, don't feed me BS that you can't include some filters that ordinary people can get with a $50 digital camera.
In all fairness to your father, there was reasonable expectation in the early 1970's that manned missions to Mars would be not only happening but routine by the 1990's. Apollo not only showed it was possible, but even well within our technological realms to accomplish that task.
What happened was a group of politicians who looked at the huge cash cow that was NASA in the 1960's and deliberately sabotaged the agency to fund their own pork barrel projects of various kinds.
Unknown to ordinary taxpayers at the time, when Neil Armstrong was stepping on the Moon, NASA as it had been known previously was being dismantled... and that dismantling of NASA along with the layoffs from NASA research centers that basically threw away all of the talent that was accumulated at significant expense.
This resulted in a glut of electrical engineers at the beginning of the 1970's, which IMHO is one of the things that fueled the "digital revolution" by having teams of engineers who had experience with complex systems from Apollo and the earlier NASA projects that were re-directed into building personal computers and working with modern semi-conductors. It also forced engineers like Steve Wozniak to become entrepreneurial when older engineers were taking positions in private industry for far less than what would be considered typical wages due to this glut.
You can only guess at what NASA might have accomplished had they been able to maintain their 1966 funding levels in proportion to the overall federal budget to today. I think it could have been done if there had been leadership at the top of the U.S. government willing to spearhead the issue, but those who might have pushed for this sort of future were either killed (JFK and RFK) or involved in other politics such as the Vietnam War (LBJ) that proved to be unpopular and a turn-off to other voters. Ted Kennedy was never really able to pick up the mantle from his older brothers other than to make a significant career in the U.S. Senate.
When I'm talking to older people (older than myself... I'm more of a GenXer myself) who lived through the Apollo era, they are quite surprised that so little of the Federal budget is spent on NASA. They thought that the 1960's style of spending continued throughout the rest of the 20th Century and beyond, and that NASA has been accomplishing less due to sheer mis-management.
There is also an assumption that space travel is a difficult task, and along that line of thought that perhaps travel to Mars is simply impossible because with all of the hundreds of billions of dollars we have spent on NASA each year (yes, I know this is incorrect, but bear with me here) that NASA can't figure out how to build anything that can get past the moon unless it is robotic. With the "smartest guys on the planet" trying to figure this out, it must therefore be impossible.
I would argue that they are somewhat correct in that assessment, but in all fairness to what is NASA today has to do with incredibly unpredictable budgets from year to year and earmarks that had to be spent in certain ways that weren't exactly the most efficient method of spending that money in terms of an overall vision of space exploration.
We'll get to Mars eventually, but I'm not sure if it will be in the lifetime of my kids or my grandkids.
If you go back to basic Anglo-Saxon English, the proper term for the stuff you can run your fingers through that is found naturally on the ground is:
(Drumroll please)
Earth!
That is where the name of our planet comes from, together with similar names in other languages like "terra".
So, is there "earth" on Mars, or is it something different, like calling it "mars" (lower case deliberately)? As in "I am planting my corn in the mars tomorrow." Substitute the word "earth" in the above sentence if you think this sound funny.
For myself, I believe that falsification of information on domain registration (aka the "whois") ought to be criminalized instead of swept under the table as it is right now. There are legitimate reasons for being able to identify specific pieces of equipment and domains ranging from technical (I'm getting a whole bunch of packets from you... would you roll back that software update you just did and fix the bugs) to criminal activity... most of which is mentioned in the parent article.
Or more to the point, if a domain has false information listed, the domain ought to be invalid and can be revoked. I dare any bona fide business to apply for a business license from a government agency giving the kind of information I've seen on most whois databases... especially the dot com types. Business license information is public information and often even published in network accessible databases as well... many even on the web interestingly enough.
Unfortunately, the domain registrars themselves have been allowed to be lax in the kind of information they expect, and is IMHO an example of ICANN and its corruption and mis-management.
For those individuals who are worried about privacy, this isn't to say that you can't communicate and use the internet for private communications. But a domain name was never meant to be private. Insisting upon privacy for what should be public information is a mis-use of the resource.
This is also a situation where a free and just society is required so you can have the freedom to be able to publish your name in a public forum and not fear retribution from those who may want to do harm to you. The real reasons for the desire for privacy is protection from criminal behavior... and it is the criminals who mis-use this information (aka sending spam, threating letters, or abusive prosecution) that should be punished severely. In other words, the desire for privacy stems from a break-down of government in establishing order and consistently prosecuting genuine criminal behavior that most people would consider to be criminal.
Not after you factor in the post-orwellian guide-wires that will blanket our cities by 2020. These wires will make the layer between the flying car ways and the UV dome, which will be too large to minimize inevitable pressure differentials caused from the solar harvesting steam generators. The subway tunnels? They converted them to prison cells after the revolution.
What fantasy is this? 2020 is only 12 years away, and I certainly don't see any of this in any realistic urban planning concepts.
Go back to the 1960's with this sort of SciFi nonsense and get a grip with what the reality of the future will be.
Russia is certainly a worthy country to put into a comparison here, but Europe and China? India?
OK, Europe is considering a manned spaceflight option, and China has been able to duplicate the early Soyuz/Gemini type spaceflights, but I don't consider them to be realistic in terms of practical alternatives at the moment. Certainly not India who is developing technology comparable to SpaceX and some of the private space launching services.
If you relax the standards, you might as well add in Brazil and Dubai. Heck, Indonesia is even a major launcher of spacecraft... even though they contract out with other countries for most of their equipment.
The reason why private industry hasn't put people into orbit yet (discounting Space Advantures and their astro-tourists), has mainly been due to government bureaucrats getting in the way.
I know of at least two and perhaps more private industry groups that gathered the financing necessary to purchase a space shuttle for private flights. NASA didn't even want to consider the possibility and flatly refused to give the authority for the NASA contractors to continue the production line necessary to build additional shuttles and allow private citizens to obtain the parts for the equipment.
The other issue is the engineering principle regarding any sort of design.
You can design design anything either
*Cheaper *Reliably *Quickly
But you must select only two of the above options.
Apollo and the Cold War rush for ballistic missiles clearly pushed for reliable and quickly developed systems and threw cost out of the window entirely. The Space Shuttle tried to do all three simultaneously, and failed miserably at all of them.
What is different about SpaceX and the newer spacecraft development companies is that they are emphasizing a much cheaper cost to getting into orbit. This is something NASA (realistically) nor the military have every tried before... sometimes for political reasons and usually because any space development project simply must be completed within the 4-8 year terms of Senators and U.S. Presidents. Anything that takes longer is usually shot down unless it is so far along that the subsequent administration isn't going to kill the program.
Apollo (Kennedy/Johnson) and to a certain extent the Space Shuttle (Nixon/Ford) and certainly the ISS (Reagan/Bush I) were under this sort of time pressure to get things accomplished. Indeed the ISS is suffering from the fact that the original concept is nearly 20 years old in terms of its original political supporters who provided the initial funding.
I could give other opinion pieces and studies about why the cost of sending stuff into low-earth orbit is as high as it is... and there is some strong economic rationale for that on the part of the traditional aerospace manufacturers. Those costs are such that practical private citizen space travel is unprofitable until you can otherwise drive the cost of transit to orbit at a much cheaper rate. I'm glad that there are people with money to get the job done trying to make that happen.
The advantage of going with a company is that if a competitor comes up, you can hire the competitor... perhaps as a secondary supplier at first but if they work out you can make them the prime contractor and relegate the previous company as the secondary supplier/contractor.
In other words, you can cut out a company much easier than you can kill a bureau or department from the government.
Look at the regulations regarding the sales and importation of Irish Whiskey and tell me how you are going to kill the government agency that deals with that one product alone (and their fairy god-Senator(s) that protect them). Once an agency is created, it live nearly forever. That isn't necessarily true about a company who does contract work for the government.... which I know unfortunately from first-hand experience.
You tend to get better services from civilian contractors that are performing tasks that are admittedly something more of a civilian task anyway.
Do you think that some private soldier or ordinary seaman is going to have their heart into flipping burgers at the Burger King in the PX? What kind of accounting job do you think some 2nd Lieutenant fresh out of college is going to perform as opposed to a professional CPA with 30 years of experience that doesn't want to deal with the ordeals of a military officer? Neither of these jobs require somebody train in weaponry and combat tactics, yet these are examples of civilian contractors who do indeed work for the Department of Defense... sometimes on DoD payrolls even instead of contract situation.
During World War II, these would have been military jobs and indeed were given military ranks. Just like Ronald Reagan and his military commission in the Army doing what is admittedly a civilian job (he only made training films and was never considered for front-line service).
This is a bit different than the COTS program. COTS was originally intended to be a "safe bet" backup concept in case the Orion/Ares vehicle couldn't get off the ground (and increasingly it looks like that may happen). Or more to the point, there was a faction within NASA and Congress that wanted to see what private businesses could come up with, even though the leading administrators and committee chairs in Congress wanted to re-create the Saturn I rocket (for lack of a better comparison).
The "news" that makes this story current and relevant is that NASA is beginning to realize that they need to put commercial contracts on the front burner and make them the primary method of at least getting into low-earth orbit. Paying SpaceX or Blue Origin a contract for going into space would be like booking a flight on Delta or United... something that is cash and carry and no NASA engineer hanging over the launch team as the flight is going up.
That may still happen for the first several flights, but imagine if some NASA personnel had to sit in the cockpit of every flight that some NASA official had to take between Huntsville and Washington D.C.? Sounds silly to me too, although it wouldn't surprise me either.
If the dinosaurs had a space program (aka sentient dinosaurs with an industrial civilization to build them), I'm completely certain that we would have found the ruins of an ancient dinosaur civilization by now.
That we haven't even found evidence of even something like a cave-man level of technology from dinosaurs speaks volumes abut that concept.
Still, I would have to agree with you about news outlets.... who are very fickle with what they will and won't run as stories.
If you have airship pilots who have to sit around a hanger all day waiting for ideal conditions to fly their vehicle, that is a fixed facility cost of both the hanger, the labor costs that you would have to pay for the crews (both ground support and air crews), and the amortization cost of the airship as well.
In the time that you could get a single shipment of goods delivered from London to Sydney via airship, you could have a 747 crew do that dozens or even close to a hundred times. So about the only real "savings" that the airship would provide is for raw fuel costs. Same or smaller crews for the 747, and similar or slightly more expensive vehicle costs for the 747.... but used so often that in terms of a per-trip cost would actually be less than the airship by a huge margin.
Add on top of that the concept of being able to fly in substantially harsher conditions (aka "more reliable" in terms of getting to the destination when you want it to get there) and much more rapid delivery.... meaning the ability to ship high value goods (and therefore higher profits for the goods shipped), and it goes to show you why airships aren't being used.
BTW, thank you for your remark about airship launching conditions. There are practical applications of airship technology, and perhaps they may be used more extensively some day. But I believe it will be more of a novelty application in the future if it ever is used for passenger air travel. Research projects seem to be one of those niche applications that might make such a technology useful, although UAV's (unmanned flying vehicles) are taking over even some of those applications that once strongly suggested a lighter-than-air vehicle.
I'll beg to differ on this... only so far as based on verbal descriptions of the Hindenburg disaster and film of the event (the Hindenburg was oh so close to finishing its first trans-Atlantic crossing when the fire happened and was filmed by Fox Movietone News), the colors clearly indicated that substances other than hydrogen were involved in the fire.
Hydrogen gas tends to burn a faint bluish glow when oxidizing rapidly (aka "burning") You can even see this with the Space Shuttle engines as it is using hydrogen and oxygen as fuel. I'm talking the main shuttle engine, not the side boosters that are a solid propellant. In fact, this illustrates rather clearly the differences involved.
The causes and factors involved with the Hindenburg disaster were numerous, and the paint was but one of the factors. This is also something that even prominent chemists and material scientists have debated on over the years for both sides of the argument, so I hope you don't mind if I take the Mythbusters opinion on this with just a grain of salt.
My point was that the hydrogen shouldn't be the big boogyman in the corner to point the finger at, and that hydrogen-filled balloons shouldn't be something to be feared either. Yes, it is more hazardous than helium, but there are advantages to using hydrogen over helium that shouldn't be ignored... most important among them is the sheer cost of the raw gases involved.
Failure to build an airship strictly because you don't want to consider hydrogen as a lifting gas is IMHO not a valid excuse.
Weather forecasting certainly has improved dramatically since the 1940's when the era of major Zeppelin/airship manufacturing came to an end. So has composite manufacturing and avionics sensors that might actually make a difference from the 1930's technology base.
I should note here that the USS Los Angeles had one incident where the ship when nearly vertical (nose down) on a mooring stand due to some air density issues. It made for a spectacular photo too! The point here is that your "weather forecasts" must be accurate enough to understand that there are different air conditions from one end of the airship to the other, much less in the regions that the vehicle is flying.
I agree that the question of effectiveness for shipment of bulk goods would be a good one, and would have some decided military applications as well. One of the problems with U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is that the only realistic way to supply the soldiers there is to air lift the cargo to the country... and right now that means C-130 cargo planes. If you could even supplement that with some occasional bulk delivery of rations or other major bulk cargo that could be delivered much cheaper, you could extend combat operations in isolated areas for much longer periods of time.
It would be very hard to beat ocean vessels as bulk transporters, however, as a surface ship can be made to transport hundreds of thousands of tons of stuff with a comparatively small support crew (per ton of delivered goods). Add in rail transportation for destinations between two different locations on land, and the situation becomes even harder to justify air freight.
Where air freight gets its advantage is mainly the speed of delivery, when you are trying to cut down shipping times and the time cost of the supplies is either critical (such as pharmaceutical/medical applications) or you are involved with some sort of just-in-time manufacturing of smaller components where the shipping cost is only a minor factor to the overall cost of the product. In this situation, I don't see airships doing better than a 747 or A380 in terms of getting from the supply source to the destination quickly or reliably in less than ideal flying conditions. A 747 certainly can take off and land in flying conditions that would normally ground a typical airship... and do it routinely.
Re:More Annoying Money Wasters for Rich People
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· Score: 2, Interesting
A 747 does have a 1930's comparator: The DC-3
That was the "state of the art" at the time for heavier than air vehicle. And a pretty good design all things considered (I've even flown in one on a regular commercial passenger flight).
The point I was trying to make, however, was that bringing this into the 21st century that perhaps some refinements could be made to the handling system that wouldn't necessarily require so many people... especially if you could build some automated systems that would adjust based on wind currents on different portions of the airship and some advanced avionic sensors that simply weren't possible in the 1930's.
Still, I don't see how you can get rid of more than about half or so of the handlers there were for a comparably sized airship with modern technology. Perhaps a few more than that, but even now the Goodyear company has dozens of handlers even for their smaller blimps... and that is current technology that is compared to current 747s.
Furthermore, I'm trying to compare a major airship like the Hindenburg or USS Akron (google that one, if you would) to the 747.... which IMHO is a proper comparison if you want to compare carrying capacity for major kinds of air transport.
That is where the "apples to apples" comparison is at... as the 747 and its general class of airplanes is performing the task that the airships of the 1930's were originally designed to fill. It is also the supposed claim that airships are oh so much more efficient and should replace these monster airplanes for bulk air cargo shipments that I'm trying to refute and point out that the 747 exists precisely because the airships simply couldn't do the job in the first place.
I'm not talking cheap unskilled human labor here. This is hiring hundreds of highly skilled and professionally trained aircraft handling personnel, that you have to figure at the cost of about $50-$100 per hour (including overhead, supervisors, and benefits packages). This is also putting these highly skilled people into very dangerous situations when problems start to occur. Frankly, all things considered, I would consider this to be more dangerous profession than a fireman or even a combat infantry soldier during wartime.
Also.... how do you pay for all of these "people" to get the job done? My point here is that labor costs alone are something that makes the technology useless and uneconomical. Smaller airships can be more easily handled with a smaller crew, but then again they carry much less and don't get the job that is done by fixed winged aircraft either.
My hat is off to this venture company trying to make a go of this technology, but I'm suggesting that would-be investors hold onto their money and put it into businesses much more likely to return their investment... like buggy whip manufacturers.
Re:The Hindenburg crash set airships back 50yrs...
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I disagree that the Hindenburg crash was the only reason why airships aren't flying today. What that crash did was to remove the luster and glamor of airships from governments that were earlier subsidizing the airship industry and dumping huge amounts of money into an unproven technology.
More to the point, the economics of operating airships are such that it is far more expensive in terms of personnel costs, hanger sizes, and economies of scale compared to fixed wing aircraft that airships died out a slow death.
I would agree that there are niche applications that could use airships much better than fixed wing aircraft or even helicopters could be used... but aircraft technology has improved substantially where even many of these niche applications are being filled by fixed-wing aircraft.
If there was money to be made by flying airships, there would be a great many airship companies today. I think there would have been some other companies who certainly would have tried before the 21st century... and there have been other previous attempts to make a commercial model for airship travel.
Also, it wasn't the Hindenburg that shut down the USS Akron. It was the Navy doing a hard analysis of the technology and considering other technologies to be much more effective. Also, nearly every airship of the era had problems and lost lives... it wasn't just the single incident.
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If I, as a software developer, was aware of a simple computer platform that was in widespread usage among a certain demographic group (aka school-aged children) throughout 1st world countries, I could frankly care less about what operating system it runs on or even if it is unique or original to this platform.
This seemed like a dream for software developers trying to target educational markets... if it had been done properly. And nobody in the educational software business really makes a killing like Oracle or Microsoft... let's be real here. They are usually barely able to cover their own overhead and break even in the end.
Negroponte never did get this, and when the governor of the state he was living in (Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at the time) tried to order 100,000 laptops for inner-city Boston youths.... Romney was turned down flat because "Massachusetts isn't a 3rd world country".
Again, I admire the thought about trying to get 3rd world countries become computer literate. I am also willing to admit to the presumption that a village without a consistent electricity conduit or even running water could perhaps use a mesh laptop computer network to help them learn the knowledge to improve their lives and get the other "luxuries" of 21st Century life.
The whole "buy one, give one free" was not Negroponte's idea anyway, and it required a major petition of a huge number of interested hackers and geeks to even bring this idea to his attention.
I could go on, but it appears I'm preaching to the choir here.
I do agree with your two organization approach, BTW, and that should have been done from the start. I might have become much more involved in the project if that had been the case.
In fairness to these scientists and engineers, often they have a need that isn't met by well trained software engineers and feel a desire to "get things right" by doing it themselves.
Even so, I think I would have to agree with your general assumption. IMHO some of the worst software I've ever seen (and I've seen quite a bit) wasn't scientists or even educators, but it was from electrical engineers who thought so highly of their own knowledge of computers that the two computer science courses they took were sufficient to have a through knowledge of software engineering practices.
Which is why a mission critical piece of firmware I saw had a global variable named "temp". Think real carefully about that one if you are a programmer and what the consequences of that is. And that is just scratching the surface of how bad that software was.
Call me cynical, but I don't really think learning, education, or even "electronic literacy" for 3rd world countries was ever a goal.
I have been a very harsh critic of the OLPC since its inception, and I still think that Negroponte is being incredibly paternalistic (read stuck up and thinking his PhD means he is better than anybody else) in his attitude toward these countries he has targeted for this project.
On the surface, without really looking at the meat of the organization, this sounds like a wonderful idea. The more that I dug into the details... even early on... the more I just couldn't believe what I was reading. More to the point, I felt that far too many compromises were being made for those companies "giving" components to the project when in fact better deals could be had elsewhere.
I also never understood the emphasis on 3rd world countries when the basic goal... a cheap laptop that could be very affordable and a consistent platform to be targeted by developers... was only treated as a secondary concern.
I still claim that if the emphasis here had been for affordable for kids in 1st world countries, that it would have ended up in 3rd world countries as well. Far too much engineering effort went into trying to disable this device when it wasn't used in the "approved" manner, nor have I ever seen what I would call honest concerns resolved about shipping these computers to 3rd world countries only to have the shipments diverted to the "black market" and used to add to the Swiss bank accounts of the leaders of these countries.
While I openly admit there are some very good and dedicated people who have been contributing to the project, I have questioned the leadership of the whole thing from the start and certainly question the model that they used to put everything together. The forking of the project alone shows it wasn't really a sound idea in the first place.
On the positive side, many of those contributions by the open source community can be redirected to other similar worthy projects, and the idea is out there to make computers affordable for kids in the $100-$300 price range. That idea won't die an easy death, even if the OLPC itself is shown to be the fad that it is right now.
And I'll repeat that question:
Do you even know what the AP even is?
The Associated Press was started by a bunch of small-town newspapers who individually simply couldn't even begin to compete against the major newspapers (mainly east-coast U.S. newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post). Some of those major papers did allow these small town newspapers to reproduce their stories, but charged extortionist prices for the content.
So instead, a bunch of these much smaller newspapers decided to get together and share their own news gathering resources with each other and try to substantially reduce royalty fees for reproducing content. In a few cases there were "bureaus" that were set up and financed by the collective organization, but for the most part they relied upon a dispersed distribution model where the "members" each contributed stories for the general geographic region where they lived.
There was also a voluntary "significance" rating applied to each story as well, ranging from general human-interest stories (somebody just raised a two-headed snake, biggest ball of twine in Smallville, Iowa) to significant news (war has just been declared or a major world leader has been assassinated). Mainly it was newspaper editors trying to help each other out and fill each other's newspapers with content without having to break the bank with a huge payroll of reporters.
Frankly the AP in my mind represents nearly the spirit of the open source movement in a great many ways, even though it is a commercial entity. You can debate about the current incarnation of the Associated Press and its current operations, but it certainly has an admirable and interesting heritage.
The issue here isn't big bad business vs. lonely bloggers... it is more how a 19th Century American institution based on a distributed content model can adapt to the 21st Century, and how content intended for one medium is being adapted for a much newer medium, where the business model will change.
There are several blogger and web-based distributed news gathering sources that create original content (aka not copy AP stories), but unfortunately most of these bloggers are taking the easy way out and simply doing a direct copy of what is clearly copyrighted work. If these same bloggers would support (and reference) these alternatives, this would have been a non-story at all. Indeed many of these alternatives even post content with a free content license like CC-by-SA or something similar.
On the contrary... it is citizens like you that skewer the jury system and force prosecutors and juries to hand out guilty verdicts in cases that upon later review are clearly innocent of the charges that were brought against them.
A great many people have their verdicts overturn, or in the case of the Duke University Men's Lacrosse team, the prosecutor was even brought before the state bar to have his license revoked due to prosecutorial misconduct on a gross scale, even to have those charged be "officially" pronounced innocent... something quite rare in the judicial community.
In judicial systems of the past, notably the French during the 1st Republic (aka right after the French Revolution) there was a presumption of guilt and the burden of proof was upon the charged to demonstrate their innocence before the court. Under such a system it becomes nearly impossible for ordinary people to fight against a judicial system that has millions of dollars at its disposal and the authority of government to pry into every detail of your life.
I believe it is not only useful but incumbent upon all citizens to presume innocence on the part of those who have been charged with crimes and demand strong and convincing proof from our government if those charges are to prevail.
So help me, I hope you never get to sit on a jury with that sort of attitude. Journalists with your attitude are part of why court reporting is so awful at the moment as well.
The problem with what you are claiming here about signing the voter registration is a matter of enforcement:
Can you name any individual who has been prosecuted for "fraudulently signing" voter registration?
Or more to the point, other than perhaps catching the fraud at the voting booth when it happens during the act itself, how else are you going to catch or prosecute an individual attempting to vote for an in behalf of somebody else? Even if a voting judge catching somebody "in the act" trying to vote for somebody who they are not, it is very hard to actually arrest them if they take off and leave before police or somebody else can perform the arrest.
The question about ID vs. no ID at the voting booth is what sorts of voting fraud are you preventing?
Showing ID can prevent non-citizens from voting (don't tell me it doesn't happen... please!) or keep large groups of people from voting multiple times for and in behalf of individuals who should have been removed from the voting books long ago.
On the flip side, I will admit there are some individuals who can claim U.S. Citizenship (in American elections) and are otherwise completely "off the grid" in terms of having any form of ID. At the same time, in spite of studies to the contrary, I have a very hard time believing that any responsible adult who engages in today's economy in any significant fashion and has to work with government agencies on any level at all would never have a picture ID. For crying out loud, you need a picture ID just to board an airplane.
Why is the security of the voting booth not as critical as the security of the passenger cabin of an airplane?
I don't get it. I simply don't get what is groundbreaking about this project at all.
/. article. Fab@Home has been on /. more than once as well.
Open Source?
3D printing?
Self-replication?
None of this is unique, or even original. If you want a high-quality 3D printer that can self-replicate a great many of its parts, and is open-source with some fantastic documentation currently available, see Fab@Home where some progress is being made and has been happening for a couple of years now.
I've seen suggestions of printable ICs and other sorts of digital circuits that might be used in such a device, and it should be noted that the ultimate goal of the Fab@Home project is a fully replicatable device with some sort of basic supply of "source materials" like resin and copper.
While the RepRap looks interesting, it doesn't look like they've done a "survey of available literature" to really prove they've done something new or original... and certainly not something worthy of a
3D printers have been around for decades now in one form or another. If that is what is so ground breaking, these folks need to learn what is standard engineering practice among mechanical engineers. Prototyping machines like this are not only commonly used, but considered essential for any decent engineering shop. All the RepRap looks like to me is a cheap 3D printer.
I remember the contest... and somebody turned in a zero byte length source file. Really! Nothing at all as the source.
A standard C compiler (like GCC) will produce precisely an exact copy of the source code when the object code is executed at run-time.
The one thing that kept the contest from getting flooded with additional variations of this software was the requirement to be original and that nobody could use a previously published algorithm. This does make you think, however.
I have no idea why you are getting modded as a troll, and I hope that the meta-moderators will get this correct and mark this as bad moderation.
I happen to agree with you, and it seems as though even efforts by the "space enthusiasts" community to help with providing rationale and even funding for more "visible spectrum" filters is deliberately torpedoed by the NASA management.
The "public" is paying for these images, and certainly deserve to get something for their investment, even if it doesn't provide the maximum value for science at those frequencies. The scientists involved will claim that there is a limit to the number of filter you can put into the camera. I call that obfuscation of the issue.
Yes, I know it costs huge amounts of money to send something to Mars of Saturn, but please, don't feed me BS that you can't include some filters that ordinary people can get with a $50 digital camera.
In all fairness to your father, there was reasonable expectation in the early 1970's that manned missions to Mars would be not only happening but routine by the 1990's. Apollo not only showed it was possible, but even well within our technological realms to accomplish that task.
What happened was a group of politicians who looked at the huge cash cow that was NASA in the 1960's and deliberately sabotaged the agency to fund their own pork barrel projects of various kinds.
Unknown to ordinary taxpayers at the time, when Neil Armstrong was stepping on the Moon, NASA as it had been known previously was being dismantled... and that dismantling of NASA along with the layoffs from NASA research centers that basically threw away all of the talent that was accumulated at significant expense.
This resulted in a glut of electrical engineers at the beginning of the 1970's, which IMHO is one of the things that fueled the "digital revolution" by having teams of engineers who had experience with complex systems from Apollo and the earlier NASA projects that were re-directed into building personal computers and working with modern semi-conductors. It also forced engineers like Steve Wozniak to become entrepreneurial when older engineers were taking positions in private industry for far less than what would be considered typical wages due to this glut.
You can only guess at what NASA might have accomplished had they been able to maintain their 1966 funding levels in proportion to the overall federal budget to today. I think it could have been done if there had been leadership at the top of the U.S. government willing to spearhead the issue, but those who might have pushed for this sort of future were either killed (JFK and RFK) or involved in other politics such as the Vietnam War (LBJ) that proved to be unpopular and a turn-off to other voters. Ted Kennedy was never really able to pick up the mantle from his older brothers other than to make a significant career in the U.S. Senate.
When I'm talking to older people (older than myself... I'm more of a GenXer myself) who lived through the Apollo era, they are quite surprised that so little of the Federal budget is spent on NASA. They thought that the 1960's style of spending continued throughout the rest of the 20th Century and beyond, and that NASA has been accomplishing less due to sheer mis-management.
There is also an assumption that space travel is a difficult task, and along that line of thought that perhaps travel to Mars is simply impossible because with all of the hundreds of billions of dollars we have spent on NASA each year (yes, I know this is incorrect, but bear with me here) that NASA can't figure out how to build anything that can get past the moon unless it is robotic. With the "smartest guys on the planet" trying to figure this out, it must therefore be impossible.
I would argue that they are somewhat correct in that assessment, but in all fairness to what is NASA today has to do with incredibly unpredictable budgets from year to year and earmarks that had to be spent in certain ways that weren't exactly the most efficient method of spending that money in terms of an overall vision of space exploration.
We'll get to Mars eventually, but I'm not sure if it will be in the lifetime of my kids or my grandkids.
If you go back to basic Anglo-Saxon English, the proper term for the stuff you can run your fingers through that is found naturally on the ground is:
(Drumroll please)
Earth!
That is where the name of our planet comes from, together with similar names in other languages like "terra".
So, is there "earth" on Mars, or is it something different, like calling it "mars" (lower case deliberately)? As in "I am planting my corn in the mars tomorrow." Substitute the word "earth" in the above sentence if you think this sound funny.
For myself, I believe that falsification of information on domain registration (aka the "whois") ought to be criminalized instead of swept under the table as it is right now. There are legitimate reasons for being able to identify specific pieces of equipment and domains ranging from technical (I'm getting a whole bunch of packets from you... would you roll back that software update you just did and fix the bugs) to criminal activity... most of which is mentioned in the parent article.
Or more to the point, if a domain has false information listed, the domain ought to be invalid and can be revoked. I dare any bona fide business to apply for a business license from a government agency giving the kind of information I've seen on most whois databases... especially the dot com types. Business license information is public information and often even published in network accessible databases as well... many even on the web interestingly enough.
Unfortunately, the domain registrars themselves have been allowed to be lax in the kind of information they expect, and is IMHO an example of ICANN and its corruption and mis-management.
For those individuals who are worried about privacy, this isn't to say that you can't communicate and use the internet for private communications. But a domain name was never meant to be private. Insisting upon privacy for what should be public information is a mis-use of the resource.
This is also a situation where a free and just society is required so you can have the freedom to be able to publish your name in a public forum and not fear retribution from those who may want to do harm to you. The real reasons for the desire for privacy is protection from criminal behavior... and it is the criminals who mis-use this information (aka sending spam, threating letters, or abusive prosecution) that should be punished severely. In other words, the desire for privacy stems from a break-down of government in establishing order and consistently prosecuting genuine criminal behavior that most people would consider to be criminal.
Not after you factor in the post-orwellian guide-wires that will blanket our cities by 2020. These wires will make the layer between the flying car ways and the UV dome, which will be too large to minimize inevitable pressure differentials caused from the solar harvesting steam generators. The subway tunnels? They converted them to prison cells after the revolution.
What fantasy is this? 2020 is only 12 years away, and I certainly don't see any of this in any realistic urban planning concepts.Go back to the 1960's with this sort of SciFi nonsense and get a grip with what the reality of the future will be.
Russia is certainly a worthy country to put into a comparison here, but Europe and China? India?
OK, Europe is considering a manned spaceflight option, and China has been able to duplicate the early Soyuz/Gemini type spaceflights, but I don't consider them to be realistic in terms of practical alternatives at the moment. Certainly not India who is developing technology comparable to SpaceX and some of the private space launching services.
If you relax the standards, you might as well add in Brazil and Dubai. Heck, Indonesia is even a major launcher of spacecraft... even though they contract out with other countries for most of their equipment.
The reason why private industry hasn't put people into orbit yet (discounting Space Advantures and their astro-tourists), has mainly been due to government bureaucrats getting in the way.
I know of at least two and perhaps more private industry groups that gathered the financing necessary to purchase a space shuttle for private flights. NASA didn't even want to consider the possibility and flatly refused to give the authority for the NASA contractors to continue the production line necessary to build additional shuttles and allow private citizens to obtain the parts for the equipment.
The other issue is the engineering principle regarding any sort of design.
You can design design anything either
*Cheaper
*Reliably
*Quickly
But you must select only two of the above options.
Apollo and the Cold War rush for ballistic missiles clearly pushed for reliable and quickly developed systems and threw cost out of the window entirely. The Space Shuttle tried to do all three simultaneously, and failed miserably at all of them.
What is different about SpaceX and the newer spacecraft development companies is that they are emphasizing a much cheaper cost to getting into orbit. This is something NASA (realistically) nor the military have every tried before... sometimes for political reasons and usually because any space development project simply must be completed within the 4-8 year terms of Senators and U.S. Presidents. Anything that takes longer is usually shot down unless it is so far along that the subsequent administration isn't going to kill the program.
Apollo (Kennedy/Johnson) and to a certain extent the Space Shuttle (Nixon/Ford) and certainly the ISS (Reagan/Bush I) were under this sort of time pressure to get things accomplished. Indeed the ISS is suffering from the fact that the original concept is nearly 20 years old in terms of its original political supporters who provided the initial funding.
I could give other opinion pieces and studies about why the cost of sending stuff into low-earth orbit is as high as it is... and there is some strong economic rationale for that on the part of the traditional aerospace manufacturers. Those costs are such that practical private citizen space travel is unprofitable until you can otherwise drive the cost of transit to orbit at a much cheaper rate. I'm glad that there are people with money to get the job done trying to make that happen.
The advantage of going with a company is that if a competitor comes up, you can hire the competitor... perhaps as a secondary supplier at first but if they work out you can make them the prime contractor and relegate the previous company as the secondary supplier/contractor.
In other words, you can cut out a company much easier than you can kill a bureau or department from the government.
Look at the regulations regarding the sales and importation of Irish Whiskey and tell me how you are going to kill the government agency that deals with that one product alone (and their fairy god-Senator(s) that protect them). Once an agency is created, it live nearly forever. That isn't necessarily true about a company who does contract work for the government.... which I know unfortunately from first-hand experience.
You tend to get better services from civilian contractors that are performing tasks that are admittedly something more of a civilian task anyway.
Do you think that some private soldier or ordinary seaman is going to have their heart into flipping burgers at the Burger King in the PX? What kind of accounting job do you think some 2nd Lieutenant fresh out of college is going to perform as opposed to a professional CPA with 30 years of experience that doesn't want to deal with the ordeals of a military officer? Neither of these jobs require somebody train in weaponry and combat tactics, yet these are examples of civilian contractors who do indeed work for the Department of Defense... sometimes on DoD payrolls even instead of contract situation.
During World War II, these would have been military jobs and indeed were given military ranks. Just like Ronald Reagan and his military commission in the Army doing what is admittedly a civilian job (he only made training films and was never considered for front-line service).
This is a bit different than the COTS program. COTS was originally intended to be a "safe bet" backup concept in case the Orion/Ares vehicle couldn't get off the ground (and increasingly it looks like that may happen). Or more to the point, there was a faction within NASA and Congress that wanted to see what private businesses could come up with, even though the leading administrators and committee chairs in Congress wanted to re-create the Saturn I rocket (for lack of a better comparison).
The "news" that makes this story current and relevant is that NASA is beginning to realize that they need to put commercial contracts on the front burner and make them the primary method of at least getting into low-earth orbit. Paying SpaceX or Blue Origin a contract for going into space would be like booking a flight on Delta or United... something that is cash and carry and no NASA engineer hanging over the launch team as the flight is going up.
That may still happen for the first several flights, but imagine if some NASA personnel had to sit in the cockpit of every flight that some NASA official had to take between Huntsville and Washington D.C.? Sounds silly to me too, although it wouldn't surprise me either.
If the dinosaurs had a space program (aka sentient dinosaurs with an industrial civilization to build them), I'm completely certain that we would have found the ruins of an ancient dinosaur civilization by now.
That we haven't even found evidence of even something like a cave-man level of technology from dinosaurs speaks volumes abut that concept.
Still, I would have to agree with you about news outlets.... who are very fickle with what they will and won't run as stories.
That goes back to my economics argument again.
If you have airship pilots who have to sit around a hanger all day waiting for ideal conditions to fly their vehicle, that is a fixed facility cost of both the hanger, the labor costs that you would have to pay for the crews (both ground support and air crews), and the amortization cost of the airship as well.
In the time that you could get a single shipment of goods delivered from London to Sydney via airship, you could have a 747 crew do that dozens or even close to a hundred times. So about the only real "savings" that the airship would provide is for raw fuel costs. Same or smaller crews for the 747, and similar or slightly more expensive vehicle costs for the 747.... but used so often that in terms of a per-trip cost would actually be less than the airship by a huge margin.
Add on top of that the concept of being able to fly in substantially harsher conditions (aka "more reliable" in terms of getting to the destination when you want it to get there) and much more rapid delivery.... meaning the ability to ship high value goods (and therefore higher profits for the goods shipped), and it goes to show you why airships aren't being used.
BTW, thank you for your remark about airship launching conditions. There are practical applications of airship technology, and perhaps they may be used more extensively some day. But I believe it will be more of a novelty application in the future if it ever is used for passenger air travel. Research projects seem to be one of those niche applications that might make such a technology useful, although UAV's (unmanned flying vehicles) are taking over even some of those applications that once strongly suggested a lighter-than-air vehicle.
I'll beg to differ on this... only so far as based on verbal descriptions of the Hindenburg disaster and film of the event (the Hindenburg was oh so close to finishing its first trans-Atlantic crossing when the fire happened and was filmed by Fox Movietone News), the colors clearly indicated that substances other than hydrogen were involved in the fire.
Hydrogen gas tends to burn a faint bluish glow when oxidizing rapidly (aka "burning") You can even see this with the Space Shuttle engines as it is using hydrogen and oxygen as fuel. I'm talking the main shuttle engine, not the side boosters that are a solid propellant. In fact, this illustrates rather clearly the differences involved.
The causes and factors involved with the Hindenburg disaster were numerous, and the paint was but one of the factors. This is also something that even prominent chemists and material scientists have debated on over the years for both sides of the argument, so I hope you don't mind if I take the Mythbusters opinion on this with just a grain of salt.
My point was that the hydrogen shouldn't be the big boogyman in the corner to point the finger at, and that hydrogen-filled balloons shouldn't be something to be feared either. Yes, it is more hazardous than helium, but there are advantages to using hydrogen over helium that shouldn't be ignored... most important among them is the sheer cost of the raw gases involved.
Failure to build an airship strictly because you don't want to consider hydrogen as a lifting gas is IMHO not a valid excuse.
Weather forecasting certainly has improved dramatically since the 1940's when the era of major Zeppelin/airship manufacturing came to an end. So has composite manufacturing and avionics sensors that might actually make a difference from the 1930's technology base.
I should note here that the USS Los Angeles had one incident where the ship when nearly vertical (nose down) on a mooring stand due to some air density issues. It made for a spectacular photo too! The point here is that your "weather forecasts" must be accurate enough to understand that there are different air conditions from one end of the airship to the other, much less in the regions that the vehicle is flying.
I agree that the question of effectiveness for shipment of bulk goods would be a good one, and would have some decided military applications as well. One of the problems with U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is that the only realistic way to supply the soldiers there is to air lift the cargo to the country... and right now that means C-130 cargo planes. If you could even supplement that with some occasional bulk delivery of rations or other major bulk cargo that could be delivered much cheaper, you could extend combat operations in isolated areas for much longer periods of time.
It would be very hard to beat ocean vessels as bulk transporters, however, as a surface ship can be made to transport hundreds of thousands of tons of stuff with a comparatively small support crew (per ton of delivered goods). Add in rail transportation for destinations between two different locations on land, and the situation becomes even harder to justify air freight.
Where air freight gets its advantage is mainly the speed of delivery, when you are trying to cut down shipping times and the time cost of the supplies is either critical (such as pharmaceutical/medical applications) or you are involved with some sort of just-in-time manufacturing of smaller components where the shipping cost is only a minor factor to the overall cost of the product. In this situation, I don't see airships doing better than a 747 or A380 in terms of getting from the supply source to the destination quickly or reliably in less than ideal flying conditions. A 747 certainly can take off and land in flying conditions that would normally ground a typical airship... and do it routinely.
A 747 does have a 1930's comparator: The DC-3
That was the "state of the art" at the time for heavier than air vehicle. And a pretty good design all things considered (I've even flown in one on a regular commercial passenger flight).
The point I was trying to make, however, was that bringing this into the 21st century that perhaps some refinements could be made to the handling system that wouldn't necessarily require so many people... especially if you could build some automated systems that would adjust based on wind currents on different portions of the airship and some advanced avionic sensors that simply weren't possible in the 1930's.
Still, I don't see how you can get rid of more than about half or so of the handlers there were for a comparably sized airship with modern technology. Perhaps a few more than that, but even now the Goodyear company has dozens of handlers even for their smaller blimps... and that is current technology that is compared to current 747s.
Furthermore, I'm trying to compare a major airship like the Hindenburg or USS Akron (google that one, if you would) to the 747.... which IMHO is a proper comparison if you want to compare carrying capacity for major kinds of air transport.
That is where the "apples to apples" comparison is at... as the 747 and its general class of airplanes is performing the task that the airships of the 1930's were originally designed to fill. It is also the supposed claim that airships are oh so much more efficient and should replace these monster airplanes for bulk air cargo shipments that I'm trying to refute and point out that the 747 exists precisely because the airships simply couldn't do the job in the first place.
I'm not talking cheap unskilled human labor here. This is hiring hundreds of highly skilled and professionally trained aircraft handling personnel, that you have to figure at the cost of about $50-$100 per hour (including overhead, supervisors, and benefits packages). This is also putting these highly skilled people into very dangerous situations when problems start to occur. Frankly, all things considered, I would consider this to be more dangerous profession than a fireman or even a combat infantry soldier during wartime.
Also.... how do you pay for all of these "people" to get the job done? My point here is that labor costs alone are something that makes the technology useless and uneconomical. Smaller airships can be more easily handled with a smaller crew, but then again they carry much less and don't get the job that is done by fixed winged aircraft either.
My hat is off to this venture company trying to make a go of this technology, but I'm suggesting that would-be investors hold onto their money and put it into businesses much more likely to return their investment... like buggy whip manufacturers.
I disagree that the Hindenburg crash was the only reason why airships aren't flying today. What that crash did was to remove the luster and glamor of airships from governments that were earlier subsidizing the airship industry and dumping huge amounts of money into an unproven technology.
More to the point, the economics of operating airships are such that it is far more expensive in terms of personnel costs, hanger sizes, and economies of scale compared to fixed wing aircraft that airships died out a slow death.
I would agree that there are niche applications that could use airships much better than fixed wing aircraft or even helicopters could be used... but aircraft technology has improved substantially where even many of these niche applications are being filled by fixed-wing aircraft.
If there was money to be made by flying airships, there would be a great many airship companies today. I think there would have been some other companies who certainly would have tried before the 21st century... and there have been other previous attempts to make a commercial model for airship travel.
Also, it wasn't the Hindenburg that shut down the USS Akron. It was the Navy doing a hard analysis of the technology and considering other technologies to be much more effective. Also, nearly every airship of the era had problems and lost lives... it wasn't just the single incident.