I was thinking quite the same thing. What gets most database engines so bulky is the drive to get them to do everything for everybody, even if you end up using only 1% of the functionality. Far too often a database engine is selected just because that is the only tool that the developer who spec'd the design requirments for a given package was even familiar with.
My own experience along similar lines involved a software package that made SQL queries for a read-only database (on a CD-ROM no less), and I ended up overhauling the entire software package to rip the guts out of the database routines with a custom db interface that did exactly what was needed and no more. Search times dropped to 1% or less in comparison to what it was with the SQL queries and reduced the memory footprint to something almost negligible, both RAM as well as hard drive space for the install.
There are legitimate uses for a full-featured database, and I won't knock those major applications that use them. But I would also have to agree that a "light" database does have some merit, as well as rolling your own db interface if the needs can be addressed by application specific optimization.
As pointed out, the quantities of money, while sounding impressive to people who are not well aquainted with this type of business, are actually rather low in terms of what it really would cost to get a team of software developers to get something like this put together.
My experience is that most people who don't directly understand the costs of software development underestimate the actual cost of development by only willing to pay about 5%-10% of the real world cost, especially if you are talking a full life-cycle in terms of development, maintainence, and archival for retrival in case something goes wrong and the ancient stuff needs to be hauled out of mothballs.
When spread out over a number of customers the cost can be lower per unit, but there are only so many software packages that can be sold simultaneously to millions of customers. Bill Gates didn't become a billionaire just because of one single software package.
A good, tight, and well discliplined software development team of between 5-10 programmers can easily burn through $5 million and still have rags on their kids and clunkers in their driveway, especially if spread over 3-4 years. And the investors would really wonder what happened to the money when all they have to show for it is a lousy CD-ROM filled with source code and an expired lease on some obscure office park with broken windows and police crime tape.
That is if you have somebody who is also willing to let the software development team do its job and not get in their way, and you let them get that fleabag office space or try to do it in a garage that you are renting for $50/month. If you want to impress other investors and do show and glitz, or try to blow money to puff up your prestige, fancy office space can even chew through more money than salaries. Then the management wonders why the programmers are buying computers from the local thrift store.
Heaven help you if the main investor decides to get involved with day to day affairs, even if they are a software developer themselves. Only if that investor is also acting as a lead designer and doing substantial amounts of software development can you really trust them to understand the situation.
Yeah, I've seen it all in this regard and worse, even from those who think they understand software development. Usually it isn't too extreme like I've described and most small software development shops are only semi-mediocre in terms of where they are located at, but the extremes do happen.
You are completely correct that once the day of reckoning comes (whatever that may be called or described) the number 1 thing that these investors are interested in is increasing value, the apparent value.
From my own experience in getting involved with a major software startup, unless you are the primary investor you are likely to get screwed over unless you also hire an attorney right at the beginning before you even start writing the first line of code. You might be lucky and have an "honest" senior investor, but don't count on it and more people are likely to lose their shirt... even from investors that are otherwise decent human beings.
This is certainly something that is up to debate by historians, about the effectiveness of the Gatling guns in the Civil War. Those guns were so incredibly crude that they often proved to be worthless in battle or even dangerous to the fire team that was supporting and running one of these guns from backfire and jammed ammunition.
This gun really wasn't perfected until well after the Civil War, which was my point. Apparently (and mentioned in the Wikipedia article) there was one particular campaign where the guns were used by front line troops, but it certainly wasn't a significant deciding factor in the outcome of that war, and it would be debatable that the soldiers using the weapon could not have been more effective simply using conventional artillery instead. But it did become a significant weapon and encouraged the development of true single-barrel machine guns, as well as foreshadowing what infantry units would be looking like less than 50 years later during WWI.
As far as the military and political need to use nukes in 1945, I agree that it is something that will be endlessly debated. President Truman only had the experience of Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, as well as previous battles in the Pacific to compare against. It was thought at the time that a battle on the main Japanese Islands would have been even more gruesome and hard won, with U.S. casualties estimated to be as high as several million U.S. soldiers to completely conquor Japan (a stated U.S. goal). Had that occured, the death toll for Japanese citizens would also have been incredibly high, even for the civilian population. This was a serious consideration, and U.S. Marines were trained and even sent to the coast of Japan to conduct that invasion. The attack didn't occur because the surrender took place first instead, but it would have been a naval invasion of a scale to dwarf even that of Okinawa, and certainly the invasion of Normandy in 1944.
It seems unlikely that the Japanese, without the use and threat of nuclear bombs, would have surrendered as quickly. That said, the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki was probably not strictly necessary and a peaceful end to the war against Japan was even implied by the Japanese Emperor before that bomb was dropped.
Because of the "fixed costs" associated with the space elevator idea and the fact that a "per launch" cost is comparatively trivial in comparison to conventional rocket launches, it certainly is something to take a look at. The "costs" are all however just a wild guess in the dark.
For me, I think the engineering requirements of a space elevator are still pretty much pie in the sky, as a realistic substrate that can withstand the tensile strength requirements of a space elevator has not been invented yet, carbon nanotubes not withstanding. This whole idea simply dwarfs even the most similar kinds of engineering projects to date, like trans-oceanic communications cables. And in the case of those massive cables, while there is a general requirement for some significant tensile strength, they do get some support from the ocean floor that simply doesn't exist with a space elevator concept. Nor are people in immediate and catestrophic danger if one of these cables fail.
For myself, I think that the necessary R&D to get one of these things going that is man-rated is a century or two in the future, assuming that advances in composite materials and extreme high tensile strength materials improves an order of magnitude or two beyond what is currently available. That is a hard assumption that is based on wishful thinking and not current scientific knowledge. At least in this situation, unlike FTL starship travel, there is a suggestion from theoretical chemistry that this is remotely possible.
The other aspect of this that is also completely ignored is the incredible concentration of wealth that comes from those who would be involved with the deployment of one of these elevators. Is this something that society really wants to have? This issue would make the rail barons of the 19th Century look like Sunday School teachers and monastic abbots compared to the political and economic control that the corporations or nations who control these elevators would have. And there are going to be a very limited number of places around the world that they can possibly be located at with the resulting land rush from nation states who try to take advantage of this economic condition. Countries like Equador, Brazil, and Columbia are going to make off like bandits with this, unless the USA and Europe decide that they want that real estate instead. As it is even today, Equador already has asserted national soverignty over all of their airspace to above Geo-sync orbits over their country, and reserve the right to remove satellites that orbit their country in a GEO orbit. Other equatorial countries are also going to be in some interesting positions on the subject, either the target for invasion or to be the next version of Kuwait and Quatar as obscure minor countries thrust into political limelight because of strategic and economic circumstances.
If you look at a globe or world map, notice where the Equator runs: Usually through some of the most econmically depressed regions of the world, even though there are some notable exceptions. Certainly if space elevators are built, these regions will become significant "ports" to space. Instead of looking at what is going to happen here both good and ill, the attitude is more like the building of Hoover Dam and Glenn Canyon Dam: Build it and see what happens.
No, the gatling gun was invented toward the end of the U.S. Civil War, not before it even started. While it did see some minor action in the Civil War, it was still considered an experimental weapon at the time and didn't see widespread usage by the U.S. Army until well after the war ended.
In fact, it wasn't until the Spanish-American War that it was regularly used in any large scale military action, by which time the Spanish also had similar weapons.
In addition, this gun required an entire squad of soldiers to maintain or even fire, was incredibly prone to break downs, and was incredibly bulky and heavy to transport. That does not make a good offensive weapon for any military organization. It was good to have as a defensive weapon, however, and it was used during the later part of the 19th Century in exactly that manner. Major fortification that had these weapons in the USA, however, never came under attack to see them used.
Where the squad automatic machine gun (the general class of weapons of which the Gatling Gun is a part) really showed its true horror was during World War I, where they were used extensivly due to refinements in their manufacturing process and improvements in metalurgy to make them light enough to be carried to the battle front. And millions of people died from guns like this because it was nearly impossible to overwhelm defenses with multiple machine guns supporting each other by ordinary infantry or calvary. New weapons like chemical artilery shells, tanks, airplanes, and shoulder launched missiles were developed to overcome the advantages of machine guns.
In the case of nukes, the firepower is so overwhelming that the strategy of increasing fire power or even building defenses against the weapons has become something of a joke. And the social taboo against using nuclear weapons has grown so much that it is in a way a sort of religion.
I will admit, however, that I hope they never get used in open warfare again. Unfortunately, as with the example presented here with the Gatling Gun, once it is developed and available for military generals to use, it seems likely that eventually they will be used, even if it isn't used by the country that first developed it to any major degree.
So you are a conspiracy nut who things the U.S. Govenment is out to kill its own citizens to initiate a failed attempt to start a war?
While the Anthrax may be a strain that originated at Fort Detrick, there is absolutely no proof to suggest that President Bush (or anybody else in the military heirarchy) was deliberately ordering the assassination of members of the U.S. Congress or trying to kill anybody else for that matter.
Had it been something officially ordered, it would have been played up considerably more, and been done much more effectively. At best, it was one lone nut job who merely had access somehow to the Anthrax and decided to take advantage of that access and do something terrible. Just like the Unibomber or Tim McVeigh. Nothing more.
In addition, neither was any real change done to day to day life except a bunch of very expensive machines build and sold to the U.S. Government to be used by the USPO. While it might give a couple of postal workers cancer 20 years from now, it otherwise has not affected day to day life in America. War was not declared on any country or even soldiers sent into a country due to the Anthrax attacks. It still isn't completely clear who even sent the letters in the first place. Had it been a deliberate conspiracy of the Bush administration, it is likely that there would have been considerable follow up to set up blame for some country, like North Korea or Iran. That never happened.
In addition, like all of the garbage that Al Queida does as well, there was no follow through to sustain the effort. 9/11 was in some ways quite effective, but to have the bombings on that scale and nothing else since just shows how utterly inept most of even the "smart ones" are at military matters. Had bombings and anthrax been occuring in the USA on a regular basis for the past five years there might be some justification for even some moderate fear. As it stands, they show themselves to be the true idiots they have demonstrated themselves to be.
There were dozens of similar stories of NORAD and SAC (Stratigic Air Command) personnel who have similar stories to these, where sometimes mis-communication led to a near miss of nukes being launched at the Soviet Union as well by the USA.
In terms of how the Russians saved our asses.... please elaborate. All I see is that they got buried under a pile of debt they couldn't recover from, and the USA is only dealing with by adding to that debt and exporting it to other countries. It will be more than a century before the Cold War debt will be paid off, if ever.
I will admit that the 1963 Cuban Missle situation was getting out of hand for the Kennedy administration, but please, don't imply that Reagan was responsible for putting nukes into Turkey which triggered a Soviet placement of nukes into Cuba. That was two totally different presidents of different political parties that governed the USA more than two decades apart.
As for how close in 1963 the world got to a full World War III: I personally know (the father of one of my friends I grew up with) a U.S. Marine who was on board a troop landing carrier (not on the transport ship, but the landing craft itself and actually holding the gun and ammunition, with orders to invade) that was less than 10 miles off the coast of Havana. I have no doubt that had that action taken place there would have been Soviet tanks running through Berlin within days if not hours. Almost everybody I know that was involved with the U.S. Military at the time all mentioned strange things like breaking out weapons and warshot that were meant only for wartime, not for practice training and how tense the situation was for everybody involved.
BTW, it takes two to make a war, and to claim that the Russians were completely innocent throughout the Cold War is also incredible revisionist history as well. The whole thing was a major political and economic struggle that really was an ideological struggle that eventually affected every nation on the Earth, often with nations being forced to choose sides in the conflict.
In defense of Tron, it was supposed to be a little fantastic. The AI in the movie was essential to the plot of the movie as well, where often it isn't really that important other than to have a techno character to be the "straight" guy for comic relief.
Being "scanned" into the computer was also a leap of faith for those watching the movie, but the question raised by Tron was essentially "what would the world of computers be like from the perspective of the programs themselves?" As far as forcing accounting software to "play" a computer game, yeah, that is a little more far-fetched. As is the brutal deletion of software just because they lost a game.
At least Tron tried to keep a consistant story together, and the use of computer graphics was simply amazing... at a time that nobody thought you could have a feature-length movie that could use them in any form at all. It took Toy Story to really push the envelope any further, which goes to show just how big of a leap that Pixar really made with their movies.
As far as a parent who sells a child's textbook, I would have to agree: It is illegal because the textbook is "property" of the school district. On the other hand, if the textbook (or any other book) is sold to the parent or child and it becomes their property. They are free to sell it, burn it, bury it, or do anything else to that book they would like to. Including selling it on eBay if they would want to.
The only reason that eBay would want to block the sale of these laptops is because they would be stolen property of a particular government agency. As long as the merchandise has legitimately transfered ownership, its sale in any forum can't be prevented.
BTW, the issue with Saddam and the PS/2s had more to do with export/import restrictions, where building a super-computer with PS/2s seemed to have been legal but doing so with a quarter-million x86 computers would have illegal under USA and EU export laws. It would have been impossible for Saddam to get computer components in any other way, and I would argue that the OLPC and similar programs can and will be perverted to circumvent technology trade laws and export restrictions. This has nothing to do with prohibiting computer manufacturers from making something but rather keeping some dangerous countries from getting certain technologies like nuclear weapons that may use them and not care about the consequences.
As far as what countries this program is going to target, all you have to do is look at a night-time satellite photo of the Korean penninsula: the nighttime lights stop at the DMZ, with hardly anything further north. Unfortunately the poorest of the poor countries of the world are ruled by idiots who are doing seemingly everything in their power to keep their fellow countrymen in the poverty status that they currently are in. Programs like OLPC will do nothing to help out these individuals.
I don't think there was voting fraud here, but this was an attempt to inject politics into what should be a purely scientific philosophy.
I also think, from my own view, that this is an attempt to make the rules for the classification of planets based on far too few observations, as the variety of planets found orbiting other stars is going to make the variety that we have found around the Sun to pale in comparison. And the "helio-centric" definition that is currently being offered is also going to cause some heartburn in the future that almost everybody is acknowledging will need to be changed. Indeed, the "official IAU" definition was noted as applying only for the Sun.
For myself, I prefer a size-based definition to deal with the range of objects from boulders to O-class stars. There are clear physical differences that happen as object achieve a certain size, and it should be recognized that some things are clearly "planet-sized" objects. If this means that Titan, Io, Europa, and other "moons" (including the Earth's Moon) are to be recognized as planets, then so be it. If not for the fact that you can suggest the Earth's Moon is clearly under gravitational influence of the Earth, it would be a strong candidate for dwarf planet status. I suggest perhaps it should be.
From a historical perspetive, this really is nothing new. When Ceres was discovered there was a huge debate over its planetary status as well, particularly when many other objects started to appear in the same general orbital region. Even more bizzare were the Galilean moons of Jupiter were discovered, breaking the idea that we (as humanity) always knew what made a planet. Perhaps Galileo is to blame for this whole mess, as he had to come up with terminology for those specks of light that stayed near Jupiter, and called them moons instead.
Of course Venus is locked into a 5:8 orbit with the Earth. Does that also demote Venus to dwarf planet status? Or the Earth?
Do this math:
25 x 117 (Earth days in a Venus solar day) = 2925 days 5 x 584 (Earth days between conjunction of Earth and Venus) = 2920 days 8 x 365 (Earth days in one solar year on Earth) = 2920 days
Of course this has not been fully explained by scientific theories, but it does suggest gravitational influence between these two "planets". The sidreal connection between the Earth and the rotation of Venus is even more peculiar as the Earth seems to have a tidal lock on the rotation speed of Venus, as viewed by an observer on the surface of Venus. The Earth seems to have the same spot in the sky throughout the whole Venusian day.
The Neptune/Pluto resonance is hardly the only one in the Solar System, and the current IAU definition won't work when still stranger situations appear with extra-solar planets. It is a flawed definition.
So I guess that Venus is no longer considered a planet, because it has a resonance with the Earth based on its orbital pattern and rotational rate.
Let's get real. This definition is so unstable that the IAU really should have simply said that the classical planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune will be the only celestial objects to be considered planets. No other object need apply.
This definition will change, and indeed must change. All this vote has done is to bring the issue up, and turn this into a firestorm for the next IAU convention. The final word from the IAU has not been said on this issue, by a longshot.
My contention is that the sale will be done by the governments of these 3rd world countries themselves anyway, perhaps laundered through some other surrogate like the nephew of the Education Minister, but it will be done.
IF these end up in the hands of individuals, there still won't be a way to legitimately stop the resale of these computers. Besides, unless eBay and other on-line auction houses specifically stop the sale of these laptops explicitly by name, there isn't a way to prohibit their sale there either.
In addition, how are you possibly going to prevent people like Saddam Hussein (when he bought a container ship full of PS/2s) from reusing these components for military systems or for purposes completely unrelated to the supposed educational mission?
Imagine a beowolf cluster of OLPC laptops that.....(fill in the blank)
These are clearly idiots who have no concept of economics outside of something they have learned by some strongly Marxist indoctrination class.
If a computer like this can be produced on any scale at a reasonable price, it will be. What they should instead be strongly pushing for is to push up economies of scale and sell huge volumes of this stuff to 1st world nations (if it is worth anything), allowing this to also be sold to 3rd world nations at huge discounts because all of the R&D costs have been paid for and mass production techniques have reduced the price to embarassingly low amounts.
If there is any industry that economies of scale work out better for than electronic component manufacturing, I don't know what it is. And this whole idea screams that you need to produce huge volumes of the stuff in order to be effective. Restricting sale to 3rd world nations only is just going to create an incredible economic imbalance.
I have no doubt that once these things are for sale in say Nigeria, that you will be seeing huge amount of spam from Nigeria (besides the 419 scams) that try to get you to buy these at nearly cost from those same countries.... perhaps even by the governments of those countires (perhaps the nephew of the education minister?)
In addition, especially since almost all of the software and materials here are going to be open source, creating a competing product for sale in 1st world nations is going to be trivial and will be done by competitors anyway if this proves to be successful. The only way to keep this corruption at bay is to sell them at Wal-mart for prices so cheap that there won't be an incentive for these 3rd world countries to make a profit off of them. This also won't kill the laptop market except at the most price sensitive ranges.
This whole idea of selling a version of it commercially at a major markup is just basic pipe dreaming and counter-productive to the actual goal: Getting computers into the hands of economically disadvantaged individuals. Defining exactly who those individuals are in terms of some United Nations statistical report and restricting sales is just academic BS.
As far as contacting the OLPC people.... I have long since given up in a since of futility as my lonesome opinion will hardly matter at all and they simply don't care about what I have to say. This is a BS program and an attempt to fleece a bunch of governments of 3rd world nations to buy a bunch of hazardous waste. I also don't see that much of this computer equipment will ever end up in the hands of very ordinary people living in modest living conditions, but rather go to the politically elite and political supporters of the government instead.
As far as trying to change the world for the better in a more productive task.... I'm doing that already. I won't go into details, but the point is that I have made my own private contributions to helping people in 3rd world countries, including direct offers (that have been taken) to both feed, clothe, and educate those who are interested. And doing what else I can do to generally make this a better world to live in.
This whole program is a scam and it will burn out with very negative reprocussions to any future legitimate effort to help spread knowledge around the world through technological means.
This is about academic tenure and people with PhDs who are thumping their chest to pretend that they are oh so much more important than the rest of humanity that they have a secret which they can barely keep from telling others about.
If this were something serious about trying to make a very inexpensive portable computer, it would have been developed, tested, and released with millions of them flooding Wal-mart and IKEA stores around the world, and/. geeks (or similar groups of individuals) being given the first crack to purchase them to help write the software.
While there are some legitimate efforts that are going into the OLPC of altruistic individuals, the main organizing people are trying oh so hard to keep from offending the major computer manufacturing companies and getting sweet deals on computer equipment that they simply miss basic economics. And why this is such a farce of a concept that I am offended that they call themselves to be citizens of the same country I live in.
I will also agree that the condescending attitude toward particularly African nations and others of the developing industrial world is particularly offensive to me... and I'm not even living in those countries. It should also speak volumes that the first major government to "sponsor" this project was.... Massachusetts. Clearly a significant 3rd world country.
Tons of money was an understatement. It was the #2 or #3 item on the Federal budget at the time, consuming as much as about 10% of the GDP of the USA. It is impossible to fathom exactly how pervasive NASA contracts were in the 1960s, but it seemed as though just about every major high tech company in America was involved in some way or another with the building of the Apollo spacecraft and other related components.
If this were to be done today, it would be like one in five/. readers would either be a NASA employee or a NASA sub-contractor. I'm not kidding here either. Comparisons between the Apollo program and the Manhattan project, or even the Pyrimids of Giza certainly are very well founded as these were undertakings of monumental proportions that could only be done by major world powers.
I don't know what it would take to get a major effort of similar proportions in order to send people to Mars, but somehow I think it is going to be a company traded on NASDAQ instead of a U.S. government agency that will get there first. I don't know if that is good or bad, but it will definitely be a very different history of the world if it happens. More of a D. Delos Harriman future instead of the legacy of JFK.
RAH, eat your heart out where you may rest in peace. Your vision of the future is coming true.
The original design was to be actual nuclear weapons. And that would be as polluting as a traditional above ground nuclear test.... both of my in-laws (my wife's parents) had to have their thyroid removed because of that kind of testing BTW. And there have been many other hazards as well.
As for the nuclear rocket opering only in interplanetary space.... compared to the background radiation from the solar wind, it isn't that bad. There are several designs that have been considered, including one that still simply spews out radioactive debris behind the rocket. You don't want to be standing behind one or even servicing the exhaust nozzle without a hard radiation suit, and even that more for than 15 minutes for your lifetime. Of course dealing with radioactive trash is fairly easy to do.... you can simply bury it in the Sun!
Of course the Wikipedia article mentioned by the parent post goes into much more detail.
What was very remarkable was that some of the hardware was even tested under actual "flight" conditions. When the Hydrogen bomb tests were conducted in the South Pacific by the USA, there was a section of the proposed "containment" nozzle that was set up right next to the bomb, just to see if it would survive and work. The surprising thing was that it did, including the very heavy duty springs that were acting as a shock absorber. I think there was proposed a follow-up test to build the full containment shield, but it was never built as that was about the same time that above-ground tests were eliminated.
Much smaller demonstration craft were also built that used more conventional explosives (I think they used C-4) to determine if the concept would work on a demonstration model, and those were also built by the Orion project of the 1960's. It was from these test that they came up with an actual ISP rating on the spacecraft. This is as close to actual flight hardware as was actually built.
Of course making a real version of this spacecraft that would launch from the ground would be something that could only be done in extreme despairation of a major nuclear power. What would make it so despairate to do this is left as an exercise for Science Fiction writers, as Jerry Pournelle and others have done.
There are some species of Parrots that seem to be able to symbolize items in a manner similar to chimps and dolphins. They also have a brain mass/body mass ratio that is very similar to dolphins and humans, and in one case a measured IQ that was in the mid 80s.
Still, your point is largely correct especially with domesticated animals. Or if this were an article trying to compare the brain of a cow to a goldfish, there may be something there. Neither is really all that bright. Cows will eat barbed wire as easily as they will eat grass, and not really tell the difference.
My kids have been raising frogs this summer in a fish tank. By the #1 criteria I can use for intelligence, survival and avoiding death from dangerous situations, these things are among the most stupid things I have ever dealt with. Goldfish certainly are smart enough to stay out of the tank filter system, but these frogs keep crawling into darn thing and getting squished by the motor. One even hoppped directly into the mouth of one of my cats, who wasn't even trying to get into the tank. I've kept them from other mortal danger, but it has been a genuine effort to do so. Hermit Crabs show more common sense than these frogs.
I don't know.... what was described in the parent post was precisely a good example of government boondogles as you are describing, and comparable proportions of government wealth being spent on apparent (for the day) crazy ideas.
There were several government pork projects that would certainly be comparable to the SCSC that existed during the middle ages. I could go into several of these, but one in particular below:
Perhaps one of the most notable was the astronomical observatory that Tycho Brahe built on the island of Hven (then in Denmark), which was being funded by the king of Denmark. This was certainly a scientific research lab that had all the markings of a pork barrel project as you have described and more. And we are talking 14th Century science here, when there certainly were other more pressing matters.
The #1 product of this observatory is that the measurements of planetary orbits were recorded to sufficient accuracy ( 1/2 degree). Johannes Kepler was an assistant of Brahe and used these observations specifically to demonstrate that Mars had an eliptical orbit. This raw data is also used to document historical positions of major stars and the planets, because it was accurate enough to still be scientifically useful even today.
BTW, in your remark about how the supercollider was canceled to avoid spending "good money after bad" seriously misses the mark. We will never know exactly what could have been had that project been completed, although I will admit it was a very good example of "big science". Unlike the ISS, it was very much built to do scientific research at a scale that would produce very basic scientific knowledge that could otherwise not possibly be obtained. I very much consider the cancellation of that project to be a textbook case of scientific illiteracy in American society.
I also strongly object to those who argue for manned vs. unmanned space missions as a zero-sum game. Even though I will admit the scientific value of the ISS is practically nil, the key product of the ISS is the transfer of knowledge and engineering skills from the Russians to the USA on how to effectively build large scale structures in orbit, such as MIR and other Russian space stations. This knowlege (if preserved) can and will be used in the future for building other space structures. The ISS is also so huge that it will have to be a permanent structure in space, and will become in effect the first extra-terrestrial musuem. It will never be de-orbited like Skylab or Mir unless the governments of the world completely collapse.
Now what to do with the ISS after 2010 is certainly something that can and should be debated.
Not necessarily here. The key word is if Boeing were to start a new government contract to build a new rocket system, it would require massives amounts of paperwork, just like any government welfare program. Or about one sheet of paper for every $100 that you recieve. Think about it. Think college Pell grants and anything else you have recieved from the government, including tax refund checks.
$1,000,000 of government money usually translates into a nice stack of about 10,000 sheets of paper by the time it is all said and done. $1 B is usually a semi-trailer worth of paper. I am not kidding. Electronic documents merely add to the mess, not reduce it. The Shuttle booster engines have a paperwork trail on each mission that is heavier than the actual boosters themselves, and that isn't even the original engineering paperwork that happened before they were designed in the first place.
If Boeing decided to go the route of SpaceX and decide "if we build it, customers will come", the paperwork would be decidedly less, as they would only have to report directly to the board of directors of the company. The problem there is that the culture of Boeing may not be used to designing and building in an extreme design fashion and not be able to untrain its engineers to not need so much paperwork or bureaucracy.
Of course, that allows windows of opportunity for companies like SpaceX to come in that somehow solve the problem. BTW, Mr. Musk did hire some former Boeing engineers who signed on specifically because they didn't have to answer to so much red tape and that decisions about how and when to proceed could happen on the factory floor by the company owner, not in some congressional hearing that takes a week to decide what flavor of pizza they should be ordering for their staff members while the hearings take place.
That is precisely why SpaceX can do it so much cheaper.
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I was thinking quite the same thing. What gets most database engines so bulky is the drive to get them to do everything for everybody, even if you end up using only 1% of the functionality. Far too often a database engine is selected just because that is the only tool that the developer who spec'd the design requirments for a given package was even familiar with.
My own experience along similar lines involved a software package that made SQL queries for a read-only database (on a CD-ROM no less), and I ended up overhauling the entire software package to rip the guts out of the database routines with a custom db interface that did exactly what was needed and no more. Search times dropped to 1% or less in comparison to what it was with the SQL queries and reduced the memory footprint to something almost negligible, both RAM as well as hard drive space for the install.
There are legitimate uses for a full-featured database, and I won't knock those major applications that use them. But I would also have to agree that a "light" database does have some merit, as well as rolling your own db interface if the needs can be addressed by application specific optimization.
As pointed out, the quantities of money, while sounding impressive to people who are not well aquainted with this type of business, are actually rather low in terms of what it really would cost to get a team of software developers to get something like this put together.
My experience is that most people who don't directly understand the costs of software development underestimate the actual cost of development by only willing to pay about 5%-10% of the real world cost, especially if you are talking a full life-cycle in terms of development, maintainence, and archival for retrival in case something goes wrong and the ancient stuff needs to be hauled out of mothballs.
When spread out over a number of customers the cost can be lower per unit, but there are only so many software packages that can be sold simultaneously to millions of customers. Bill Gates didn't become a billionaire just because of one single software package.
A good, tight, and well discliplined software development team of between 5-10 programmers can easily burn through $5 million and still have rags on their kids and clunkers in their driveway, especially if spread over 3-4 years. And the investors would really wonder what happened to the money when all they have to show for it is a lousy CD-ROM filled with source code and an expired lease on some obscure office park with broken windows and police crime tape.
That is if you have somebody who is also willing to let the software development team do its job and not get in their way, and you let them get that fleabag office space or try to do it in a garage that you are renting for $50/month. If you want to impress other investors and do show and glitz, or try to blow money to puff up your prestige, fancy office space can even chew through more money than salaries. Then the management wonders why the programmers are buying computers from the local thrift store.
Heaven help you if the main investor decides to get involved with day to day affairs, even if they are a software developer themselves. Only if that investor is also acting as a lead designer and doing substantial amounts of software development can you really trust them to understand the situation.
Yeah, I've seen it all in this regard and worse, even from those who think they understand software development. Usually it isn't too extreme like I've described and most small software development shops are only semi-mediocre in terms of where they are located at, but the extremes do happen.
You are completely correct that once the day of reckoning comes (whatever that may be called or described) the number 1 thing that these investors are interested in is increasing value, the apparent value.
From my own experience in getting involved with a major software startup, unless you are the primary investor you are likely to get screwed over unless you also hire an attorney right at the beginning before you even start writing the first line of code. You might be lucky and have an "honest" senior investor, but don't count on it and more people are likely to lose their shirt... even from investors that are otherwise decent human beings.
So.... what is your point? TNG covered all of that and more, and DS9 more yet.
Of course.... is a Klingon-Ferengi conjugal visit beastiality or not?
And being trapped in alternate universes is very standard fare for Star Trek...
Wouldn't it be the ultimate irony if Novell ended up actually owning the trademarks for DR-DOS, SCO, and Caldera as a result of the bankruptcy?
Just food for thought. Or perhaps even more silly would be that all of those (especially Digital Research!) ended up being owned by Microsoft instead?
This is certainly something that is up to debate by historians, about the effectiveness of the Gatling guns in the Civil War. Those guns were so incredibly crude that they often proved to be worthless in battle or even dangerous to the fire team that was supporting and running one of these guns from backfire and jammed ammunition.
This gun really wasn't perfected until well after the Civil War, which was my point. Apparently (and mentioned in the Wikipedia article) there was one particular campaign where the guns were used by front line troops, but it certainly wasn't a significant deciding factor in the outcome of that war, and it would be debatable that the soldiers using the weapon could not have been more effective simply using conventional artillery instead. But it did become a significant weapon and encouraged the development of true single-barrel machine guns, as well as foreshadowing what infantry units would be looking like less than 50 years later during WWI.
As far as the military and political need to use nukes in 1945, I agree that it is something that will be endlessly debated. President Truman only had the experience of Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, as well as previous battles in the Pacific to compare against. It was thought at the time that a battle on the main Japanese Islands would have been even more gruesome and hard won, with U.S. casualties estimated to be as high as several million U.S. soldiers to completely conquor Japan (a stated U.S. goal). Had that occured, the death toll for Japanese citizens would also have been incredibly high, even for the civilian population. This was a serious consideration, and U.S. Marines were trained and even sent to the coast of Japan to conduct that invasion. The attack didn't occur because the surrender took place first instead, but it would have been a naval invasion of a scale to dwarf even that of Okinawa, and certainly the invasion of Normandy in 1944.
It seems unlikely that the Japanese, without the use and threat of nuclear bombs, would have surrendered as quickly. That said, the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki was probably not strictly necessary and a peaceful end to the war against Japan was even implied by the Japanese Emperor before that bomb was dropped.
Because of the "fixed costs" associated with the space elevator idea and the fact that a "per launch" cost is comparatively trivial in comparison to conventional rocket launches, it certainly is something to take a look at. The "costs" are all however just a wild guess in the dark.
For me, I think the engineering requirements of a space elevator are still pretty much pie in the sky, as a realistic substrate that can withstand the tensile strength requirements of a space elevator has not been invented yet, carbon nanotubes not withstanding. This whole idea simply dwarfs even the most similar kinds of engineering projects to date, like trans-oceanic communications cables. And in the case of those massive cables, while there is a general requirement for some significant tensile strength, they do get some support from the ocean floor that simply doesn't exist with a space elevator concept. Nor are people in immediate and catestrophic danger if one of these cables fail.
For myself, I think that the necessary R&D to get one of these things going that is man-rated is a century or two in the future, assuming that advances in composite materials and extreme high tensile strength materials improves an order of magnitude or two beyond what is currently available. That is a hard assumption that is based on wishful thinking and not current scientific knowledge. At least in this situation, unlike FTL starship travel, there is a suggestion from theoretical chemistry that this is remotely possible.
The other aspect of this that is also completely ignored is the incredible concentration of wealth that comes from those who would be involved with the deployment of one of these elevators. Is this something that society really wants to have? This issue would make the rail barons of the 19th Century look like Sunday School teachers and monastic abbots compared to the political and economic control that the corporations or nations who control these elevators would have. And there are going to be a very limited number of places around the world that they can possibly be located at with the resulting land rush from nation states who try to take advantage of this economic condition. Countries like Equador, Brazil, and Columbia are going to make off like bandits with this, unless the USA and Europe decide that they want that real estate instead. As it is even today, Equador already has asserted national soverignty over all of their airspace to above Geo-sync orbits over their country, and reserve the right to remove satellites that orbit their country in a GEO orbit. Other equatorial countries are also going to be in some interesting positions on the subject, either the target for invasion or to be the next version of Kuwait and Quatar as obscure minor countries thrust into political limelight because of strategic and economic circumstances.
If you look at a globe or world map, notice where the Equator runs: Usually through some of the most econmically depressed regions of the world, even though there are some notable exceptions. Certainly if space elevators are built, these regions will become significant "ports" to space. Instead of looking at what is going to happen here both good and ill, the attitude is more like the building of Hoover Dam and Glenn Canyon Dam: Build it and see what happens.
No, the gatling gun was invented toward the end of the U.S. Civil War, not before it even started. While it did see some minor action in the Civil War, it was still considered an experimental weapon at the time and didn't see widespread usage by the U.S. Army until well after the war ended.
In fact, it wasn't until the Spanish-American War that it was regularly used in any large scale military action, by which time the Spanish also had similar weapons.
In addition, this gun required an entire squad of soldiers to maintain or even fire, was incredibly prone to break downs, and was incredibly bulky and heavy to transport. That does not make a good offensive weapon for any military organization. It was good to have as a defensive weapon, however, and it was used during the later part of the 19th Century in exactly that manner. Major fortification that had these weapons in the USA, however, never came under attack to see them used.
Where the squad automatic machine gun (the general class of weapons of which the Gatling Gun is a part) really showed its true horror was during World War I, where they were used extensivly due to refinements in their manufacturing process and improvements in metalurgy to make them light enough to be carried to the battle front. And millions of people died from guns like this because it was nearly impossible to overwhelm defenses with multiple machine guns supporting each other by ordinary infantry or calvary. New weapons like chemical artilery shells, tanks, airplanes, and shoulder launched missiles were developed to overcome the advantages of machine guns.
In the case of nukes, the firepower is so overwhelming that the strategy of increasing fire power or even building defenses against the weapons has become something of a joke. And the social taboo against using nuclear weapons has grown so much that it is in a way a sort of religion.
I will admit, however, that I hope they never get used in open warfare again. Unfortunately, as with the example presented here with the Gatling Gun, once it is developed and available for military generals to use, it seems likely that eventually they will be used, even if it isn't used by the country that first developed it to any major degree.
So you are a conspiracy nut who things the U.S. Govenment is out to kill its own citizens to initiate a failed attempt to start a war?
While the Anthrax may be a strain that originated at Fort Detrick, there is absolutely no proof to suggest that President Bush (or anybody else in the military heirarchy) was deliberately ordering the assassination of members of the U.S. Congress or trying to kill anybody else for that matter.
Had it been something officially ordered, it would have been played up considerably more, and been done much more effectively. At best, it was one lone nut job who merely had access somehow to the Anthrax and decided to take advantage of that access and do something terrible. Just like the Unibomber or Tim McVeigh. Nothing more.
In addition, neither was any real change done to day to day life except a bunch of very expensive machines build and sold to the U.S. Government to be used by the USPO. While it might give a couple of postal workers cancer 20 years from now, it otherwise has not affected day to day life in America. War was not declared on any country or even soldiers sent into a country due to the Anthrax attacks. It still isn't completely clear who even sent the letters in the first place. Had it been a deliberate conspiracy of the Bush administration, it is likely that there would have been considerable follow up to set up blame for some country, like North Korea or Iran. That never happened.
In addition, like all of the garbage that Al Queida does as well, there was no follow through to sustain the effort. 9/11 was in some ways quite effective, but to have the bombings on that scale and nothing else since just shows how utterly inept most of even the "smart ones" are at military matters. Had bombings and anthrax been occuring in the USA on a regular basis for the past five years there might be some justification for even some moderate fear. As it stands, they show themselves to be the true idiots they have demonstrated themselves to be.
There were dozens of similar stories of NORAD and SAC (Stratigic Air Command) personnel who have similar stories to these, where sometimes mis-communication led to a near miss of nukes being launched at the Soviet Union as well by the USA.
In terms of how the Russians saved our asses.... please elaborate. All I see is that they got buried under a pile of debt they couldn't recover from, and the USA is only dealing with by adding to that debt and exporting it to other countries. It will be more than a century before the Cold War debt will be paid off, if ever.
This is revisionist history of the worst degree.
I will admit that the 1963 Cuban Missle situation was getting out of hand for the Kennedy administration, but please, don't imply that Reagan was responsible for putting nukes into Turkey which triggered a Soviet placement of nukes into Cuba. That was two totally different presidents of different political parties that governed the USA more than two decades apart.
As for how close in 1963 the world got to a full World War III: I personally know (the father of one of my friends I grew up with) a U.S. Marine who was on board a troop landing carrier (not on the transport ship, but the landing craft itself and actually holding the gun and ammunition, with orders to invade) that was less than 10 miles off the coast of Havana. I have no doubt that had that action taken place there would have been Soviet tanks running through Berlin within days if not hours. Almost everybody I know that was involved with the U.S. Military at the time all mentioned strange things like breaking out weapons and warshot that were meant only for wartime, not for practice training and how tense the situation was for everybody involved.
BTW, it takes two to make a war, and to claim that the Russians were completely innocent throughout the Cold War is also incredible revisionist history as well. The whole thing was a major political and economic struggle that really was an ideological struggle that eventually affected every nation on the Earth, often with nations being forced to choose sides in the conflict.
In defense of Tron, it was supposed to be a little fantastic. The AI in the movie was essential to the plot of the movie as well, where often it isn't really that important other than to have a techno character to be the "straight" guy for comic relief.
Being "scanned" into the computer was also a leap of faith for those watching the movie, but the question raised by Tron was essentially "what would the world of computers be like from the perspective of the programs themselves?" As far as forcing accounting software to "play" a computer game, yeah, that is a little more far-fetched. As is the brutal deletion of software just because they lost a game.
At least Tron tried to keep a consistant story together, and the use of computer graphics was simply amazing... at a time that nobody thought you could have a feature-length movie that could use them in any form at all. It took Toy Story to really push the envelope any further, which goes to show just how big of a leap that Pixar really made with their movies.
I know this is a late reply, but so be it....
As far as a parent who sells a child's textbook, I would have to agree: It is illegal because the textbook is "property" of the school district. On the other hand, if the textbook (or any other book) is sold to the parent or child and it becomes their property. They are free to sell it, burn it, bury it, or do anything else to that book they would like to. Including selling it on eBay if they would want to.
The only reason that eBay would want to block the sale of these laptops is because they would be stolen property of a particular government agency. As long as the merchandise has legitimately transfered ownership, its sale in any forum can't be prevented.
BTW, the issue with Saddam and the PS/2s had more to do with export/import restrictions, where building a super-computer with PS/2s seemed to have been legal but doing so with a quarter-million x86 computers would have illegal under USA and EU export laws. It would have been impossible for Saddam to get computer components in any other way, and I would argue that the OLPC and similar programs can and will be perverted to circumvent technology trade laws and export restrictions. This has nothing to do with prohibiting computer manufacturers from making something but rather keeping some dangerous countries from getting certain technologies like nuclear weapons that may use them and not care about the consequences.
As far as what countries this program is going to target, all you have to do is look at a night-time satellite photo of the Korean penninsula: the nighttime lights stop at the DMZ, with hardly anything further north. Unfortunately the poorest of the poor countries of the world are ruled by idiots who are doing seemingly everything in their power to keep their fellow countrymen in the poverty status that they currently are in. Programs like OLPC will do nothing to help out these individuals.
I don't think there was voting fraud here, but this was an attempt to inject politics into what should be a purely scientific philosophy.
I also think, from my own view, that this is an attempt to make the rules for the classification of planets based on far too few observations, as the variety of planets found orbiting other stars is going to make the variety that we have found around the Sun to pale in comparison. And the "helio-centric" definition that is currently being offered is also going to cause some heartburn in the future that almost everybody is acknowledging will need to be changed. Indeed, the "official IAU" definition was noted as applying only for the Sun.
For myself, I prefer a size-based definition to deal with the range of objects from boulders to O-class stars. There are clear physical differences that happen as object achieve a certain size, and it should be recognized that some things are clearly "planet-sized" objects. If this means that Titan, Io, Europa, and other "moons" (including the Earth's Moon) are to be recognized as planets, then so be it. If not for the fact that you can suggest the Earth's Moon is clearly under gravitational influence of the Earth, it would be a strong candidate for dwarf planet status. I suggest perhaps it should be.
From a historical perspetive, this really is nothing new. When Ceres was discovered there was a huge debate over its planetary status as well, particularly when many other objects started to appear in the same general orbital region. Even more bizzare were the Galilean moons of Jupiter were discovered, breaking the idea that we (as humanity) always knew what made a planet. Perhaps Galileo is to blame for this whole mess, as he had to come up with terminology for those specks of light that stayed near Jupiter, and called them moons instead.
Of course Venus is locked into a 5:8 orbit with the Earth. Does that also demote Venus to dwarf planet status? Or the Earth?
Do this math:
25 x 117 (Earth days in a Venus solar day) = 2925 days
5 x 584 (Earth days between conjunction of Earth and Venus) = 2920 days
8 x 365 (Earth days in one solar year on Earth) = 2920 days
Of course this has not been fully explained by scientific theories, but it does suggest gravitational influence between these two "planets". The sidreal connection between the Earth and the rotation of Venus is even more peculiar as the Earth seems to have a tidal lock on the rotation speed of Venus, as viewed by an observer on the surface of Venus. The Earth seems to have the same spot in the sky throughout the whole Venusian day.
The Neptune/Pluto resonance is hardly the only one in the Solar System, and the current IAU definition won't work when still stranger situations appear with extra-solar planets. It is a flawed definition.
So I guess that Venus is no longer considered a planet, because it has a resonance with the Earth based on its orbital pattern and rotational rate.
Let's get real. This definition is so unstable that the IAU really should have simply said that the classical planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune will be the only celestial objects to be considered planets. No other object need apply.
This definition will change, and indeed must change. All this vote has done is to bring the issue up, and turn this into a firestorm for the next IAU convention. The final word from the IAU has not been said on this issue, by a longshot.
How will this possibly be made illegal?
My contention is that the sale will be done by the governments of these 3rd world countries themselves anyway, perhaps laundered through some other surrogate like the nephew of the Education Minister, but it will be done.
IF these end up in the hands of individuals, there still won't be a way to legitimately stop the resale of these computers. Besides, unless eBay and other on-line auction houses specifically stop the sale of these laptops explicitly by name, there isn't a way to prohibit their sale there either.
In addition, how are you possibly going to prevent people like Saddam Hussein (when he bought a container ship full of PS/2s) from reusing these components for military systems or for purposes completely unrelated to the supposed educational mission?
Imagine a beowolf cluster of OLPC laptops that.....(fill in the blank)
These are clearly idiots who have no concept of economics outside of something they have learned by some strongly Marxist indoctrination class.
If a computer like this can be produced on any scale at a reasonable price, it will be. What they should instead be strongly pushing for is to push up economies of scale and sell huge volumes of this stuff to 1st world nations (if it is worth anything), allowing this to also be sold to 3rd world nations at huge discounts because all of the R&D costs have been paid for and mass production techniques have reduced the price to embarassingly low amounts.
If there is any industry that economies of scale work out better for than electronic component manufacturing, I don't know what it is. And this whole idea screams that you need to produce huge volumes of the stuff in order to be effective. Restricting sale to 3rd world nations only is just going to create an incredible economic imbalance.
I have no doubt that once these things are for sale in say Nigeria, that you will be seeing huge amount of spam from Nigeria (besides the 419 scams) that try to get you to buy these at nearly cost from those same countries.... perhaps even by the governments of those countires (perhaps the nephew of the education minister?)
In addition, especially since almost all of the software and materials here are going to be open source, creating a competing product for sale in 1st world nations is going to be trivial and will be done by competitors anyway if this proves to be successful. The only way to keep this corruption at bay is to sell them at Wal-mart for prices so cheap that there won't be an incentive for these 3rd world countries to make a profit off of them. This also won't kill the laptop market except at the most price sensitive ranges.
This whole idea of selling a version of it commercially at a major markup is just basic pipe dreaming and counter-productive to the actual goal: Getting computers into the hands of economically disadvantaged individuals. Defining exactly who those individuals are in terms of some United Nations statistical report and restricting sales is just academic BS.
As far as contacting the OLPC people.... I have long since given up in a since of futility as my lonesome opinion will hardly matter at all and they simply don't care about what I have to say. This is a BS program and an attempt to fleece a bunch of governments of 3rd world nations to buy a bunch of hazardous waste. I also don't see that much of this computer equipment will ever end up in the hands of very ordinary people living in modest living conditions, but rather go to the politically elite and political supporters of the government instead.
As far as trying to change the world for the better in a more productive task.... I'm doing that already. I won't go into details, but the point is that I have made my own private contributions to helping people in 3rd world countries, including direct offers (that have been taken) to both feed, clothe, and educate those who are interested. And doing what else I can do to generally make this a better world to live in.
This whole program is a scam and it will burn out with very negative reprocussions to any future legitimate effort to help spread knowledge around the world through technological means.
... but it isn't at all.
/. geeks (or similar groups of individuals) being given the first crack to purchase them to help write the software.
This is about academic tenure and people with PhDs who are thumping their chest to pretend that they are oh so much more important than the rest of humanity that they have a secret which they can barely keep from telling others about.
If this were something serious about trying to make a very inexpensive portable computer, it would have been developed, tested, and released with millions of them flooding Wal-mart and IKEA stores around the world, and
While there are some legitimate efforts that are going into the OLPC of altruistic individuals, the main organizing people are trying oh so hard to keep from offending the major computer manufacturing companies and getting sweet deals on computer equipment that they simply miss basic economics. And why this is such a farce of a concept that I am offended that they call themselves to be citizens of the same country I live in.
I will also agree that the condescending attitude toward particularly African nations and others of the developing industrial world is particularly offensive to me... and I'm not even living in those countries. It should also speak volumes that the first major government to "sponsor" this project was.... Massachusetts. Clearly a significant 3rd world country.
Tons of money was an understatement. It was the #2 or #3 item on the Federal budget at the time, consuming as much as about 10% of the GDP of the USA. It is impossible to fathom exactly how pervasive NASA contracts were in the 1960s, but it seemed as though just about every major high tech company in America was involved in some way or another with the building of the Apollo spacecraft and other related components.
/. readers would either be a NASA employee or a NASA sub-contractor. I'm not kidding here either. Comparisons between the Apollo program and the Manhattan project, or even the Pyrimids of Giza certainly are very well founded as these were undertakings of monumental proportions that could only be done by major world powers.
If this were to be done today, it would be like one in five
I don't know what it would take to get a major effort of similar proportions in order to send people to Mars, but somehow I think it is going to be a company traded on NASDAQ instead of a U.S. government agency that will get there first. I don't know if that is good or bad, but it will definitely be a very different history of the world if it happens. More of a D. Delos Harriman future instead of the legacy of JFK.
RAH, eat your heart out where you may rest in peace. Your vision of the future is coming true.
The original design was to be actual nuclear weapons. And that would be as polluting as a traditional above ground nuclear test.... both of my in-laws (my wife's parents) had to have their thyroid removed because of that kind of testing BTW. And there have been many other hazards as well.
As for the nuclear rocket opering only in interplanetary space.... compared to the background radiation from the solar wind, it isn't that bad. There are several designs that have been considered, including one that still simply spews out radioactive debris behind the rocket. You don't want to be standing behind one or even servicing the exhaust nozzle without a hard radiation suit, and even that more for than 15 minutes for your lifetime. Of course dealing with radioactive trash is fairly easy to do.... you can simply bury it in the Sun!
Of course the Wikipedia article mentioned by the parent post goes into much more detail.
What was very remarkable was that some of the hardware was even tested under actual "flight" conditions. When the Hydrogen bomb tests were conducted in the South Pacific by the USA, there was a section of the proposed "containment" nozzle that was set up right next to the bomb, just to see if it would survive and work. The surprising thing was that it did, including the very heavy duty springs that were acting as a shock absorber. I think there was proposed a follow-up test to build the full containment shield, but it was never built as that was about the same time that above-ground tests were eliminated.
Much smaller demonstration craft were also built that used more conventional explosives (I think they used C-4) to determine if the concept would work on a demonstration model, and those were also built by the Orion project of the 1960's. It was from these test that they came up with an actual ISP rating on the spacecraft. This is as close to actual flight hardware as was actually built.
Of course making a real version of this spacecraft that would launch from the ground would be something that could only be done in extreme despairation of a major nuclear power. What would make it so despairate to do this is left as an exercise for Science Fiction writers, as Jerry Pournelle and others have done.
There are some species of Parrots that seem to be able to symbolize items in a manner similar to chimps and dolphins. They also have a brain mass/body mass ratio that is very similar to dolphins and humans, and in one case a measured IQ that was in the mid 80s.
Still, your point is largely correct especially with domesticated animals. Or if this were an article trying to compare the brain of a cow to a goldfish, there may be something there. Neither is really all that bright. Cows will eat barbed wire as easily as they will eat grass, and not really tell the difference.
My kids have been raising frogs this summer in a fish tank. By the #1 criteria I can use for intelligence, survival and avoiding death from dangerous situations, these things are among the most stupid things I have ever dealt with. Goldfish certainly are smart enough to stay out of the tank filter system, but these frogs keep crawling into darn thing and getting squished by the motor. One even hoppped directly into the mouth of one of my cats, who wasn't even trying to get into the tank. I've kept them from other mortal danger, but it has been a genuine effort to do so. Hermit Crabs show more common sense than these frogs.
I don't know.... what was described in the parent post was precisely a good example of government boondogles as you are describing, and comparable proportions of government wealth being spent on apparent (for the day) crazy ideas.
There were several government pork projects that would certainly be comparable to the SCSC that existed during the middle ages. I could go into several of these, but one in particular below:
Perhaps one of the most notable was the astronomical observatory that Tycho Brahe built on the island of Hven (then in Denmark), which was being funded by the king of Denmark. This was certainly a scientific research lab that had all the markings of a pork barrel project as you have described and more. And we are talking 14th Century science here, when there certainly were other more pressing matters.
The #1 product of this observatory is that the measurements of planetary orbits were recorded to sufficient accuracy ( 1/2 degree). Johannes Kepler was an assistant of Brahe and used these observations specifically to demonstrate that Mars had an eliptical orbit. This raw data is also used to document historical positions of major stars and the planets, because it was accurate enough to still be scientifically useful even today.
BTW, in your remark about how the supercollider was canceled to avoid spending "good money after bad" seriously misses the mark. We will never know exactly what could have been had that project been completed, although I will admit it was a very good example of "big science". Unlike the ISS, it was very much built to do scientific research at a scale that would produce very basic scientific knowledge that could otherwise not possibly be obtained. I very much consider the cancellation of that project to be a textbook case of scientific illiteracy in American society.
I also strongly object to those who argue for manned vs. unmanned space missions as a zero-sum game. Even though I will admit the scientific value of the ISS is practically nil, the key product of the ISS is the transfer of knowledge and engineering skills from the Russians to the USA on how to effectively build large scale structures in orbit, such as MIR and other Russian space stations. This knowlege (if preserved) can and will be used in the future for building other space structures. The ISS is also so huge that it will have to be a permanent structure in space, and will become in effect the first extra-terrestrial musuem. It will never be de-orbited like Skylab or Mir unless the governments of the world completely collapse.
Now what to do with the ISS after 2010 is certainly something that can and should be debated.
Not necessarily here. The key word is if Boeing were to start a new government contract to build a new rocket system, it would require massives amounts of paperwork, just like any government welfare program. Or about one sheet of paper for every $100 that you recieve. Think about it. Think college Pell grants and anything else you have recieved from the government, including tax refund checks.
$1,000,000 of government money usually translates into a nice stack of about 10,000 sheets of paper by the time it is all said and done. $1 B is usually a semi-trailer worth of paper. I am not kidding. Electronic documents merely add to the mess, not reduce it. The Shuttle booster engines have a paperwork trail on each mission that is heavier than the actual boosters themselves, and that isn't even the original engineering paperwork that happened before they were designed in the first place.
If Boeing decided to go the route of SpaceX and decide "if we build it, customers will come", the paperwork would be decidedly less, as they would only have to report directly to the board of directors of the company. The problem there is that the culture of Boeing may not be used to designing and building in an extreme design fashion and not be able to untrain its engineers to not need so much paperwork or bureaucracy.
Of course, that allows windows of opportunity for companies like SpaceX to come in that somehow solve the problem. BTW, Mr. Musk did hire some former Boeing engineers who signed on specifically because they didn't have to answer to so much red tape and that decisions about how and when to proceed could happen on the factory floor by the company owner, not in some congressional hearing that takes a week to decide what flavor of pizza they should be ordering for their staff members while the hearings take place.
That is precisely why SpaceX can do it so much cheaper.