As soon as I hit the "submit" button, I realized I screwed up here... but the point was the same.
I meant to mention the acceleration factor, which is most properly done as an integral using Newton's gravitational formula integrating over distance. Too bad slashdot doesn't have TeX markup to add the full formula.
To simplify matters, it is more
a=G(m-obj*m-moon)/(r^2*m-obj)
BTW, this comes from the a=f/m as the newtonian force (f) is divided by the object's mass (m).
With this the acceleration is the unit, not force. And you should note that m-obj listed twice cancels each other out of the equation so the only thing that really is affected here is just the acceleration.
While you might be correct that considered as independent systems the hammer might have a tiny, tiny bit more acceleration due to the combined mass, it is inconsequential when compared to the mass of the Moon or the Earth itself and would not even be measureable using current devices. To determine the exact different, let's solve the equation in two parts:
1) Calculate the Force 2) Calculate the actual acceleration due to that force
OK, here goes, even though the math is off in part.
G - Universal Gravity Constant (in mks system) - 6.6742 * 10^-11 m^3/(s^2*kg) Mass of the Moon - 7.347 673 * 10^22 kg Mass of Hammer - 100 kg (this is being very generous) Mass of Feather - 0.01 kg (to give a contrasting value) Radius of the Moon (assuming you are doing an experiment on the surface of the Moon itself) - 1.738 1 * 10^6 m
Before going on, note that the universal gravity constant is only good to 5 places. Some effort has gone to improve this calculation, but realistic calculations mean that you ought to note that is the limit of your calculations. I'm going to ignore this, and assume that G has infinite precision.
Yeah, you have some huge difference here, but lets divide these figures by the mass of the objects (you can take this to as many decimal places as you want, BTW. I'll leave that to you)
acc-hammer = 1.6233 m/s acc-feather = 1.6233 m/s
That is exactly the same, to the precision of the calculations that are possible. That is exactly my point, and that you can't tell the difference. Of course this is naval gazing and doesn't matter anyway.
Of course that happened too in the case of the K-T Event, but raw vacuum due to a huge pressure wave certainly is some significant hunk of energy, isn't it?
And that is nothing at all compared to if Sirus A decides to go Supernova on us.... of course in that case even a human settlement on the Moon would not offer true protection of the species, nor any other place in the Solar System for that matter, but that is only one other thing to worry about in the far distant future if it every becomes feasable to do interstellar travel.
And that is just a couple of nasty things that we know about in our Universe that could wipe out all life on the Earth in theory. Do you think we know everything really nasty out there like this yet?
I guess you are technically correct as the equation F = G(m-earth*m-object)/r^2 does give you a slightly higher gravitation force on the hammer due to increased mass.
But the difference is so inconsequential that it isn't worth bothering to figure out, and we don't know G to that many places anyway. Proper scientific calculations would ignore this as within the margin of error and report the force on both objects as identical.
Of course, I don't know why I'm responding to such a silly post.
How about the K-T event that killed off the dinosaurs?
And it doesn't matter how it happened, it was a major disruptive event for all life on the Earth and led to many new creatures coming up, notably Mammals in much larger quantities and forms.
The question is, do you want to be one of those creatures that go extinct in a similar kind of catistrophic global disaster?
If the K-T event were really an asteroid that directly exposed the mantle of the Earth to the vacuum of space (even briefly), do you really think you could survive such an impact from inside an Earth-based survival shelter? Think again. Industrialized society as we know it would certainly be eliminated completely, and all issues of global warming would be irrelvant completely. And the K-T event wasn't even the largest impact on the Earth either. It can get worse.
We have to thank Lee Harvey Oswald for putting people on the moon in the 1960s. Seriously.
JFK was a typical 20th Century U.S. President in many respect no different that George W. Bush or Jimmy Carter (to pick on both sides of the aisle here). The only significant act he did was die while in office, which meant that all of the programs that he initiated were pushed through and lionized as if it were ordained from God himself. I mean, who can beat a dead president in terms of getting votes?
This included Vietnam policy, Civil Rights legislation, and yes, NASA.
After JFK died, there was nobody willing to stand up and oppose most of these pet projects of his.
BTW, after the Apollo flights were successful, NASA was significantly scaled back and Presidents Johnson and Nixon both gutted most of what was built up for the moon landings.
Of course this did have an unintended side benefit: After NASA laid off most of its engineering team, there was a huge glut of Electrical Engineers who then went on to bigger and better things.... creating much of the infrastructure of what is now the computer industry in general. And creating much more demand for E.E.'s in the long term.
There was a time when NASA was at the leading edge of the computer industry, believe it or not, taking in something like 60% of all IC production in the world and building the first timeshare computer systems. NASA is no where near this level of technology bleeding edge any more.
I guess that this Wikipedia entry has to turn into a disambiguation page instead.
I think NASA made a mistake here with that name due to its relationship with nuclear propulsion technology, but then again perhaps that is going to be a part of the proposal once they get into space. Ground-launch nuclear propulsion systems still don't seem like the way to go, however.
And what is your point to this? That the USA is evil and all Americans should be killed in one mass genocidal orgy?
The fact is that burning coal for useful energy is a very dirty process that makes sense only for very large scale energy production needs, such as for ships, locomotives, or electric power plants. Even ships and locomotives have stopped using coal simply because of the transportation logistics needed to deliver the energy, and coal is comparatively low in terms of energy density per pound (or kg).
This means that in terms of energy/$$$ you are going to be doing pretty good going with coal.... if you have the logistics necessary to get the coal to a reasonable energy production facility.
One of the nice things about coal is that it is very abundant in the USA (I've heard estimates of over 500 years worth of coal production at current rates of consumption), and there is no real need to import this energy from politically volitile regions of the world like is done with oil.
I won't get into the politics of nuclear energy, but hard-core environmentalist have shut down the nuclear power industry completely in the USA, and the energy/$$$ simply is not justified for building nuclear plants if all you do is deal with demonstrators and environmental legislation compliance alone.
I won't even get into the environmental impact of hydro and wind powered projects, but it important to note that the environmental impact is rather significant and again is something that has been effectively shut down by hard-core environmentalists. Or do you think building a larger version of Lake Powell to be a good thing?
The current energy source that has been tapped for almost all new electric power plants in the USA is none of the sources you have mentioned. It is instead methane, usually in the form of natural gas. The reason for this is that methane can burn quite effeciently, has comparatively low pollutants beside CO2, and can be put into places that residental neighborhoods usually don't complain about, and is easily scalable to provide spot power needs. Of course that has also driven up my home heating costs because of this as well by over 100% in the past 3 years.
Perhaps I need to replace my furnace with a coal furnace instead?
I don't even remotely understand the numbers you have thrown up here, or who you are quoting. For a "typical" commercial rocket launch profile such as a Delta-4 rocket, you are perhaps corect with these figures. But that is one huge assumption.
The amount of delta-vee that must be compensated for through drag and overcoming gravity is really just a matter of the flight profile, and somewhat due to the aerodynamics of the spacecraft. Better engineering is really all that is needed to reduce that number, although there are some hard limits inheirant in the problem that you simply can't get past. That is why specific impulse numbers are so important, so you can simply pour more energy on the problem.
Once you get into space, there is no real additional atmospheric drag to compensate for, and instead it is more a straight-forward addition of delta-vee in order to achieve escape velocity. Spacecraft designers prefer to have a small but very effecient rocket motor to move stuff from LEO to GEO, which is why it takes 24 hours to get there or more (I've seen sometimes as much as a full week or even longer). If you had lots of energy resources (read a nuclear rocket or something like that with a very high ISP), you can get from LEO to GEO in less than an hour. I believe the 3rd stage of the Saturn V rocket (which pushed the astronauts to the moon) did something close to that on its final burn. The Apollo IX mission sent the 3rd stage into full escape velocity and solar orbit just to test the idea out (the LM and CSM remained in Earth Orbit during that mission for docking tests).
The other thing to consider is that for manned flights, you want to spend as little time as you can while passing through the Van Allen belts. This means you want to be in near constant acceleration while this is happening, giving you the equivalent of a chest x-ray for radiation absorbtion, instead of bathing in the equivalent of standing under a continuously running x-ray machine.
The idea of a "spaceport" is hardly new. In fact, it was proposed by none other than Werner Von Braun as his preferred method of getting to the Moon. Had it been built, there would have been real infrastructure for continued Lunar excursions rather than the glory missions we now know as Apollo, and many more than 12 men would have been able to walk on the Moon in the 20th Century, with only another dozen getting into circumlunar orbit. And it would have been much "cheaper" to send yet another mission to the Moon, with potentially vehicle reuse for return trips to the Moon. Fuel tenders could certainly be sent up unmanned at comparatively cheap prices in terms of cost/lb. Imagine, you wouldn't even have to supply a payload faring or any other gear other than just spacecraft navigation equipment and a few connectors to pull the fuel out after it gets to orbit. This is done, BTW, with the ISS already and was done successfully with MIR by the Russians.
One of the things to keep in mind, in addition to the significantly reduced atmospheric drag on spacecraft in LEO, you also have (usually) very high velocity that isn't that much more to simply reach escape velocity. The rockets used to push satellites to GEO aren't really all that big... but they do need to be on top of a huge stack that gets to LEO in the first place. Getting to the Moon from GEO is very trivial in comparison to what it took to get there in the first place.
You are correct, that the actual gravitational pull while standing on a huge tower or "sky scraper" that would be built to LEO altitudes would be almost identicle to standing at sea level on the Earth. The difference is that you are already moving at orbital velocities.
The problem is that it isn't an accumulated error of one second in four hundred-million years. It is a navigation error of being off by several meters (or feet) when you think something should be in one place but it is in fact someplace else. As air traffic control issues become more pronounced as more things are flying through the air, and the range of tolerance is getting smaller.
And as I was trying to point out with space travel, this precision is going to need to get even better as instead of being off by just a few feet, current technology is still going to have you off by a few hundred kilometers when doing interplanetary navigation. That is the difference between knowing you are in orbit around Mars or on the ground. Or even being able to get to Pluto at all.
I will guarentee that you will mind if that accumulated error puts another airplane into your seat and you have an air-to-air collision because the clocks were inaccurate. Or to put it more pleasantly, you can have more take-offs and landings at a given airport because the control tower has more precise navigation equipment, as do the airplanes at that airport. That means lower air fares and fewer "accidents" because everybody can keep track of where you are at to avoid a collision.
To add a more practical real world example to this line of thought....
Clock accuracy is one of the key components of GPS systems and other navigational equipment. By having a much more accurate clock, you would be able to build devices that can determine with higher precision exactly where you are on the Earth... or for that matter in space even.
If you aren't aware of the "data" that is streamed out of GPS satellites, all that is transmitted is a clock signal that simply says what time it is right now, and along with some identification information. When compared to other satellites and applying some fairly straight-forward mathmatics (that includes some relativity equations), you get your current position.
In fact, while you might be able to determine within about 20 feet where you are at with current GPS technology and think that is "good enough" for the purposes of using that technology, navigation in the Solar System is going to need even higher clock accuracy in order to plot accurate trajectories to Mars and not get the current 30% failure rate of spacecraft trying to get there and accidentally crashing into the surface or other navigational mistakes caused by inaccurate plotting of the motion of both Mars and the Earth.
In short, you life someday (perhaps even now) might litterally depend on the navigation equipment of the vehicle you are in (read airliner) knowing precisely where you are at, and a more accurate clock will give that vehicle better accuracy to keep you alive.
The main difference between PAL and NTSC is that the PAL standard has more scan lines at the sacrifice of a lower frame rate (50 fps vs. 60 fps). Both broadcast signals use approximately the same radio carrier frequency bandwidth, so it isn't really that much of a real difference in quality unless you are a nationalist biggot.
The real reason for the difference in broadcast standards is mainly due to the fact that in North America, the alternating current power stations operate at 60 Hz, where as many European countries have their power frequency at 50 Hz. It is not a coincidence that the respective television broadcast standards use those frequencies for their televisions.
There are other differences between the standards, of course, although it is also helpful to keep in mind that PAL was developed after NTSC, and they did fix some of the problems that were discovered after NTSC was implemented on a larger scale... something major engineering standards often don't have happen until after they are implemented.
Re:I am far more concerned with the traditional me
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When Wikipedia Fails
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· Score: 1
One thing to keep in mind is that while most newsrooms keep their editing process quiet and you only see the "polished" product, the process of creating Wikipedia articles is out in the open, misspelling, factual errors, rumors, and even incompetance. You see some of that now with 24-hour news channels, and there have been some famous mistakes by traditional media organizations on their web pages, but most of that is behind the scenes where you don't see the truly outrageous content before it is screened by an editor.
This is also hardly a new issue for Wikipedia, where suggestions have been made to have a "draft" and "published" version of featured articles. Certainly changes to Wikipedia could be done that would help out a bit, but Wikipedia simply is what it is, and people need to get used to it if they treat it as an authoritative source.
I will say that sometimes national and even international issues do come up, but again it is on a local level that they can be dealt with. For instance, a city counsel nearby where I live voted to recommend that the USA withdraw from the United Nations by sending an official proclamation to the state congressional delegation encouraging that sentiment. They also prohibited the city government from accepting any United Nations funding for any programs (not that it made much difference).
The thing is though that a local government in really incapable of dealing with national issues like immigration reform except through doing silly things like specifically prohibiting police officers from investigating or even informing the FBI/INS if they suspect an illegal alien. I find that silly, but it is at least a way to deal with the issue and express a political viewpoint.
I will say that democracy is entertaining, and does allow the potential of an "escape valve" when enough people really are pissed about an issue. I have frequently seen small-town city counsels that get in over their head and not listen to their constituants, only to get dumped out of office with a complete change-over in the city counsel because they did something very unpopular. An example was when the city I lived in sold the local power plant to a regional power consortium. Not only did the entire city government get canned (including the mayor), but the city charter was revised and the "energy board" was turned from an appointed to an elected governing body. Lawyers steped in and said it would be decades to reverse their decisions, but the people did speak and it surprisingly did get the attention of the regional power consortium which negotiated for much better power rates for the city than had the ordinary citizens stayed quiet about the whole thing.
The local school board where I live right now is currently on shaky ground due to a parent revolt and the resignation of a very popular school principal over policy issues that parents agreed with but the school board didn't want to deal with. Certainly this is going to be a major issue for the local school board elections that are coming up this November. The superintendent had to resign over this mess, and has created incredible headaches for the board members.
Again, like I said, it really does boil down to local issues and how individual lives are affected. I'm not saying that national issues aren't important, but it is the nature of the U.S. form of government that has local representation of geographic districts that push these local issues to the forefront of any political race. Other political systems that encourage more at-large seats that are proportionally divided between political parties tend to encourage more attention to national issues. I'm not really sure which is better (there are proponents of both systems), but it does seem to work for the USA.
I would like to point out the reason for concentrating on the preamble to the Declaration of Independence within the USA:
It really is a part of the U.S. Constitution. The authors of the Declaration of Independence were largely the same people who wrote the constitution, and their words are largely considered "sacred" by the "religion" of American constitutionalists.
In more recent times, it is the words to the preamble of the Declaration of Independence that have been justifications for legislation, particularly for civil rights laws that have been passed in the last 50 years. Indeed it is invoked so many times that some less-thinking and ignorant Americans think it really is a part of the U.S. Constitution.
As far as British students concentrating on taxation issues: no wonder they don't understand Americans. Taxation was merely a rallying point to show frustration over a corrupt political system that really did need some kind of overhaul, and the British government wasn't moving as fast as the American colonists wanted on changing that corruption, in part becasue many of the same problems existed in England at the same time as well. It was just easier for Boston to declare independence than Liverpool if they wanted to escape from the British monarchy.
If you believe this, you have missed quite a bit of what really happens in American elections.
While it may be perceived that issues don't matter, I think the problem is that you aren't paying attention to what issues don't matter.
Almost all elections in the USA concentrate on local issues, including those that are running for federal office, and frankly even Presidential candidate. This goes even more so for Congressional candidates, where things like base closures (not OUR base, please close somebody else's military base) and prominent pork barrel projects (you can read NASA here and other similar programs) often take a very strong place in debates for these offices. Especially if there has been a recent national policy to change something that has a strong effect on the local population. Pollution control standards are another thing that is seldom addressed on the national level but is a very hot issue on the local level in many different cities.
Often state politics enter the picture as well, especially when intelligent and informed debates over federal vs. state control of projects (i.e. welfare, national guard, public land, etc.) takes a grip.
On top of all this, there really are "political machines" that have control over many aspects of American elections. Again this is a problem of misdirected anger and misunderstanding rather than something that is happening on a national level. Instead, the political machines in America are almost all on the local level. I'm not going to get into specifics, but these political groups can control huge numbers of votes. They aren't really even being all that secretive about it either, and often you can find the names of these groups in the telephone book, but you do have to know what you are looking for. Sometimes there are multiple machines operating on a local level, which is where you see some real political fireworks fly. This, unfortunately, is one of the aspects of American apathy towards elections, because organized political groups like this are very difficult to overcome, and party affiliation is usually not enough to overcome any group like this.... these machines dominate the party selection process too.
A "machine" like this isn't really that big of a conspiracy. It is mainly a very well organized political group that offers "benefits" to its members in one form or another. It can be a "good ol' boys" club like a chamber of commerce or a fraternal organization, where campaign financing is very easy to be had.
Other forms include groups as bad as Boss Nast in NYC where he found jobs for incoming immigrants and cheap housing.... as long as you voted for his candidates. This still exists BTW, it just has changed flavor and they've been a bit more discrete about how it all happens.
And in some rare but increasingly common circumstances, you have people truly motivated by a political philosophy of some sort that have organized themselves into some sort of political group to make some sort of change to governmental policy. The Women's Sufferage Movement was an early example of this, as have been the "Pro Life" and "Pro Choice" movements regarding abortion. These groups are largely non-partisan and usually try to work in their philosophies to both major American political parties. Again, these groups are mainly local groups affecting local politics with local issues. If there are national affilations, generally the national "platform" is ignored unless it also seems to fit with the local group's goals or if the local group is desperate for money from the national organization (usually such local groups aren't that effective anyway).
So where does individual initive really come in with all this? If you sit on your hind end and think that election day itself is the only time you have to express your political opinion, then you are correct: The election is but a beauty contest and doesn't need your vote. Because the decisions are usually already made about the winner even before the election day. Only in a very tight contest does it really matter for individual votes, and even then you see the above groups really hammering hard trying to get "their" candidate to win.
My old software manager came up with an outstanding way of trying to estimate project completion for trying to tell upper management when something would be done.
He asked each of the software engineers how long it would take, based on their "gut" instincts.
Then he multiplied the figure by two and moved it to the next higher order of time. I.E. weeks become months, months become years. One time he asked us to estimate when we could get something accomplished and we told him two years. He cried for a little bit and went to upper management and said "Never, we can't get that done".
Surprisingly this turned out to be a very effective way for him to gague when things would actually get accomplished, and more often than not he was dead on correct. He also didn't let me in on his secret until just before he quit, but it has also helped me to make my own estimates for customers when I'm doing contract work now. I do the same thing where I make a preliminary estimate based on known issues and then apply the above rule to my own guess. I have (fortunately) been fairly accurate with my guesses at that point, even if it makes the customer angry with them insisting that it must be done in a shorter period of time.
One thing to point out is that the British Government royally (to use a pun) screwed up when dealing with their American colonies. Yes, England was governed largly by Parliment, and it was the English Crown that established the colonial legislatures as well that provided a sense of local governance. BTW, it was largely these colonial legislators that formed the key representatives which signed the Declaration of Independence and the early leadership of the USA after the end of the American Revolutionary War.
These are the things that, in hindsight, should have been done for the Americans:
1) Representation of British Subject in Parliment from America. This was the largest rallying cry throughout the colonies, and really what the early leaders of the USA really wanted from England, not full independence. Had sufferage been granted to the people in North America with parlimentary districts and some sort of North American delegation in the House of Commons, the whole experience of what would have happened in North America and for that matter even world history itself would have been substantially different. It would have been a British Shuttle going up instead of an American Shuttle yesterday, for instance.
2) Granting of Peerage to prominent Americans. Ben Franklin was perhaps the worst instigator, but imagine had he been granted peerage and been a member of the House of Lords. By more modern criteria that Elizabeth II has been using for peerage, Franklin would have been a no-brainer for it as well. There certainly would have been others as well to consider, but this is really more of getting American representation in the British government. Instead, these very wealthy, landed, and prominent Americans were treated as nobodies and practically forced to go their own way and establish a seperate government. Granting titles of nobility would have made these "rebels" instead loyal allies. BTW, this is something that George III clearly could have done without even dealing with Parliment, and an aspect of how he personally is at least partially responsible for the loss of the colonies.
3) Don't piss off the Press, and especially the Merchants. The British government did a major tax hike in America on just about every group that has a chance to influence public opinion, and did it simultaneously. From pubs to newspapers and coffee houses, every place that people gather to discuss politics was suddenly taxed, or taxes hiked 10x what they were previously. Sure, Americans at the time weren't even paying the same taxes that people in England were paying (or equivalent), but it was just a wrong headed policy to even tax the kinds of things that were taxed. Or to make so huge of a tax hike at once. Mind you, people don't pay attention to taxes too much and consider it to simply be like the weather. The only time people pay attention is if you raise the rates or impose a new tax. That got George H. W. Bush (#41) out of office precisely because he backed out of his campaign pledge and raised taxes when he said he wouldn't. Admittedly England was starting from zero taxes in this case, but it doesn't stop people from getting angry when it happens.
There are other issues that had more minor gripes, such as confiscation of property by the Army for quarting troops and the prohibition of British settlement in the Ohio valley. It seemed as though (from American eyes) that almost everything the British government was doing was something more to piss off the American colonies. One by one these could have been dealt with, but it seems as though it all happened at the same time and a war resulted instead.
BTW, in regards to having a state succeed and declare independence from the rest of the USA, I think that would be an interesting test. By treaty Texas still retains the right to succeed and become an independent country if they choose to do so, and other states have similar provisions in their state constitutions. What happened during the U.S. Civil War can be debated over this, but
If what you want to do is simply get to Mars, plant some flags for political points, gather a few rocks and take some pictures from Cydonia just to prove that Richard Hogland is an a**, fine, do the Mars Direct. It would be cheaper and get people to there faster and sooner.
Werner Von Braun had the same issue when he was setting up the Apollo program, which was given the primary mission of sending a man to the Moon and returning him safly to the Earth, although he was also up against a Presidential deadline of Jan 1st, 1970. He barely made it by less than six months BTW as it was.
One of the various alternatives proposed for Apollo was to build an elaborate manned space station in orbit that would do many things, but among them was a "dry dock" for building spacecraft that would then travel to the Moon and the rest of the Solar System. Admittedly at the time this was one of the most expensive alternatives than doing a "Moon direct" approach that was later actually done, but just imagine if this had been built instead. The ISS wouldn't have been built at all because it wouldn't have been needed. The astronaut corp would have been incredibly busy developing technologies and actually doing stuff in space, including basic scientific research. And this would have been a strong stepping stone to not only having people go to the Moon, but would have been building infrastructure to allow permanent settlements on the Moon as well as building spacecraft to get to Mars as well.
I would challenge that had the USA gone this route back in the 1960's, for the exact same money that the federal government has spent on NASA from 1958-2006, that we would already be on Mars with substantial manned exploration of other places in the Solar System as well. And there would have been considerably more to show from NASA for what they had achieved by building infrastructure in space rather than in New Orleans, Huntsville, and the Cape.
We are at a crossroads right now where we can do the same thing in terms of going to Mars, or follow the same mistakes that NASA has made over the past 40 years and build glory projects that have a lot of political overtones for all that they do. My vote is to build the infrastructure for people to live in space. And it can be done much cheaper than even how the ISS is being built. The Moon is a key component to reducing the cost of the infrastructure in space for all of this, and why we must go back to the moon and get a permanent human settlement there.
Re:Richard Feynman's Paper on the Challenger Disas
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Shuttle Launch Success
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I would have to strongly disagree almost completely here. The engineers are the people who are designing this stuff, and they put themselves in the pilot's chair when it comes to safety. When an entire engineering team (this is not just a rogue parnoid person saying this) is complaining about safty and their chief of that team is voicing grave concern over safty, it is time to stand up and take notice of what is going on.
The Shuttle was a good experimental design, and it did push some technologies further that otherwise wouldn't have been developed. It has also given a good baseline dataset for what it would mean for reusable spacecraft that otherwise wouldn't be known. The problem here is that additional launchs only give additional datapoints to this knowledge base, and the fact that two Shuttles have completely failed with full loss of the crew gives additional room to pause and wonder if it really is worth the added risk.
Much safer and even cheaper launch systems have been demonstrated. For crying out loud, NASA has even developed some better launch systems than the Shuttle but ended up killing those programs due to changes in political leadership and changing requirements for those projects that made them incredibly expensive.
Saving the Hubble and completing the treaty obligations for the ISS are noble things, and that is what the Shuttle is being kept around to do right now. I still question if there might not be a reasonable alternative, and strongly question the idea that during the years since the loss of the Columbia that the money spent toward trying to put band-aids on the Shuttle couldn't have been wiser spent on a whole new launch system. $15 billion and 4 years could certainly have built one hell of a good launch system, I think. Certainly this is not justification to send 14 people into LEO just to retrieve trash and rotate out the ISS crew. Think about it. Over $1 billion per astronaut. That is not wise spending of money by any criteria, nor are the astronauts billionaires either, which might have been wiser spending of the money and had more people servicing the ISS for the same money.
With the announcement today (July 5th) that NASA is still having foam issues on the external fuel tank, I think it is going to be yet another year before the next Shuttle mission goes up. There are some serious safty issues that are being overlooked, and I would tend to believe the engineers in this case. It is time to kill the Shuttle fleet and move on. Unfortunately, NASA has nothing to move on to.
Thanks for the reference, but unfortunately many Al Gore supporters still claim that he, in fact, did invent the Internet. I've even seen timelines of technology milestones that had a one-line "Al Gore Jr. invented the Internet" as one of the top 50 tech milestones for the 20th Century.
Of course anybody here on/. should have enough brains to understand that was not the case, although his support for early pork barrel projects that involved the internet is clear.
And I will give credit to Al Gore as well for getting whitehouse.gov established, and making sure that president@whitehouse.gov and vicepresident@whitehouse.gov were valid e-mail addresses right at the beginning of his term in the Executive Branch of the U.S. Government. That was significant because 1) it was 1992 when such things were still unusual. His predecessor Dan Quayle didn't have an e-mail address while in office, for instance and 2) this gave early validation to the internet when computer geeks were still trying to prove that it was worth even having an internet connection at all, even for just e-mail correspondance or USENET. I think the White House webserver was one of the first 10,000 or so web servers to come on-line as well, and clearly a very early adopter of such technology again thanks to Al Gore and his pushing for such on-line connections.
I will absolutely raise my voice and send a complaint, and mention your name and the efforts you made to work with ICANN.
I completely agree that ICANN doesn't really represent the ordinary internet user, or even the ordinary internet developer who really understands the protocols and can make more sense than the explanation by Sen. Ted Stevens (as just happened), or silly claims by politicians to have "invented" the internet.
As for the rest of what you said.... ditto or amen. You nailed this one.
The problem is that NASA claimed to have a much better success rate (or lower failure rate) than 1%. And the likelyhood of death as a result of failure to be even lower, with emergency safty procedures and other stuff. The sad fact of the matter is that death on the Shuttle is much more likely than it ever was during the Apollo days, and there also appears to be a very lax attitude in the part of NASA management that doesn't seem to care.
As for doing research in space, I would also point out that the Saturn V was an absolutely huge rocket. Skylab had almost the same interior space as the ISS, and was sent up in only one launch. And the Saturn V wasn't even the largest rocket that Werner Von Braun designed, nor was it the largest that the Cape was designed to fly either. There was supposed to be an even larger rocket that was nicknamed the Jupiter, which would have barely fit in the VAB. It was supposed to have 8-10 F-1 rocket engines (the main engine of the Saturn V) on the 1st stage. Talk about impressive amounts of cargo making it into orbit.
I would agree that the Virgin Galatic spacecraft are going to be puny little things too, but I guess most people look at that as a start. And I still firmly believe that rather than the sub-orbital market is going to be for inter-continental flight more than for tourism... aka London-Sydney in 2 hours. Or in another way: "when it absolutely, positively, has to get there yesterday" (by crossing the international dateline). The Concorde filled that niche until it was abaondoned, and a replacement could be created to fill that market niche.
Just speculating here, but SCO for the longest time has been one of the most shorted stocks on the market. Perhaps somebody is trying to cover their short, realizing that this is the beginning of the very end for this company?
Slashdot Mirror
As soon as I hit the "submit" button, I realized I screwed up here... but the point was the same.
I meant to mention the acceleration factor, which is most properly done as an integral using Newton's gravitational formula integrating over distance. Too bad slashdot doesn't have TeX markup to add the full formula.
To simplify matters, it is more
a=G(m-obj*m-moon)/(r^2*m-obj)
BTW, this comes from the a=f/m as the newtonian force (f) is divided by the object's mass (m).
With this the acceleration is the unit, not force. And you should note that m-obj listed twice cancels each other out of the equation so the only thing that really is affected here is just the acceleration.
While you might be correct that considered as independent systems the hammer might have a tiny, tiny bit more acceleration due to the combined mass, it is inconsequential when compared to the mass of the Moon or the Earth itself and would not even be measureable using current devices. To determine the exact different, let's solve the equation in two parts:
1) Calculate the Force
2) Calculate the actual acceleration due to that force
OK, here goes, even though the math is off in part.
G - Universal Gravity Constant (in mks system) - 6.6742 * 10^-11 m^3/(s^2*kg)
Mass of the Moon - 7.347 673 * 10^22 kg
Mass of Hammer - 100 kg (this is being very generous)
Mass of Feather - 0.01 kg (to give a contrasting value)
Radius of the Moon (assuming you are doing an experiment on the surface of the Moon itself) - 1.738 1 * 10^6 m
Before going on, note that the universal gravity constant is only good to 5 places. Some effort has gone to improve this calculation, but realistic calculations mean that you ought to note that is the limit of your calculations. I'm going to ignore this, and assume that G has infinite precision.
F-hammer = 162.33 Newtons
F-feather = 0.016233 Newtons
Yeah, you have some huge difference here, but lets divide these figures by the mass of the objects (you can take this to as many decimal places as you want, BTW. I'll leave that to you)
acc-hammer = 1.6233 m/s
acc-feather = 1.6233 m/s
That is exactly the same, to the precision of the calculations that are possible. That is exactly my point, and that you can't tell the difference. Of course this is naval gazing and doesn't matter anyway.
Of course that happened too in the case of the K-T Event, but raw vacuum due to a huge pressure wave certainly is some significant hunk of energy, isn't it?
And that is nothing at all compared to if Sirus A decides to go Supernova on us.... of course in that case even a human settlement on the Moon would not offer true protection of the species, nor any other place in the Solar System for that matter, but that is only one other thing to worry about in the far distant future if it every becomes feasable to do interstellar travel.
And that is just a couple of nasty things that we know about in our Universe that could wipe out all life on the Earth in theory. Do you think we know everything really nasty out there like this yet?
I guess you are technically correct as the equation F = G(m-earth*m-object)/r^2 does give you a slightly higher gravitation force on the hammer due to increased mass.
But the difference is so inconsequential that it isn't worth bothering to figure out, and we don't know G to that many places anyway. Proper scientific calculations would ignore this as within the margin of error and report the force on both objects as identical.
Of course, I don't know why I'm responding to such a silly post.
How about the K-T event that killed off the dinosaurs?
And it doesn't matter how it happened, it was a major disruptive event for all life on the Earth and led to many new creatures coming up, notably Mammals in much larger quantities and forms.
The question is, do you want to be one of those creatures that go extinct in a similar kind of catistrophic global disaster?
If the K-T event were really an asteroid that directly exposed the mantle of the Earth to the vacuum of space (even briefly), do you really think you could survive such an impact from inside an Earth-based survival shelter? Think again. Industrialized society as we know it would certainly be eliminated completely, and all issues of global warming would be irrelvant completely. And the K-T event wasn't even the largest impact on the Earth either. It can get worse.
We have to thank Lee Harvey Oswald for putting people on the moon in the 1960s. Seriously.
JFK was a typical 20th Century U.S. President in many respect no different that George W. Bush or Jimmy Carter (to pick on both sides of the aisle here). The only significant act he did was die while in office, which meant that all of the programs that he initiated were pushed through and lionized as if it were ordained from God himself. I mean, who can beat a dead president in terms of getting votes?
This included Vietnam policy, Civil Rights legislation, and yes, NASA.
After JFK died, there was nobody willing to stand up and oppose most of these pet projects of his.
BTW, after the Apollo flights were successful, NASA was significantly scaled back and Presidents Johnson and Nixon both gutted most of what was built up for the moon landings.
Of course this did have an unintended side benefit: After NASA laid off most of its engineering team, there was a huge glut of Electrical Engineers who then went on to bigger and better things.... creating much of the infrastructure of what is now the computer industry in general. And creating much more demand for E.E.'s in the long term.
There was a time when NASA was at the leading edge of the computer industry, believe it or not, taking in something like 60% of all IC production in the world and building the first timeshare computer systems. NASA is no where near this level of technology bleeding edge any more.
I guess that this Wikipedia entry has to turn into a disambiguation page instead.
I think NASA made a mistake here with that name due to its relationship with nuclear propulsion technology, but then again perhaps that is going to be a part of the proposal once they get into space. Ground-launch nuclear propulsion systems still don't seem like the way to go, however.
And what is your point to this? That the USA is evil and all Americans should be killed in one mass genocidal orgy?
The fact is that burning coal for useful energy is a very dirty process that makes sense only for very large scale energy production needs, such as for ships, locomotives, or electric power plants. Even ships and locomotives have stopped using coal simply because of the transportation logistics needed to deliver the energy, and coal is comparatively low in terms of energy density per pound (or kg).
This means that in terms of energy/$$$ you are going to be doing pretty good going with coal.... if you have the logistics necessary to get the coal to a reasonable energy production facility.
One of the nice things about coal is that it is very abundant in the USA (I've heard estimates of over 500 years worth of coal production at current rates of consumption), and there is no real need to import this energy from politically volitile regions of the world like is done with oil.
I won't get into the politics of nuclear energy, but hard-core environmentalist have shut down the nuclear power industry completely in the USA, and the energy/$$$ simply is not justified for building nuclear plants if all you do is deal with demonstrators and environmental legislation compliance alone.
I won't even get into the environmental impact of hydro and wind powered projects, but it important to note that the environmental impact is rather significant and again is something that has been effectively shut down by hard-core environmentalists. Or do you think building a larger version of Lake Powell to be a good thing?
The current energy source that has been tapped for almost all new electric power plants in the USA is none of the sources you have mentioned. It is instead methane, usually in the form of natural gas. The reason for this is that methane can burn quite effeciently, has comparatively low pollutants beside CO2, and can be put into places that residental neighborhoods usually don't complain about, and is easily scalable to provide spot power needs. Of course that has also driven up my home heating costs because of this as well by over 100% in the past 3 years.
Perhaps I need to replace my furnace with a coal furnace instead?
I don't even remotely understand the numbers you have thrown up here, or who you are quoting. For a "typical" commercial rocket launch profile such as a Delta-4 rocket, you are perhaps corect with these figures. But that is one huge assumption.
The amount of delta-vee that must be compensated for through drag and overcoming gravity is really just a matter of the flight profile, and somewhat due to the aerodynamics of the spacecraft. Better engineering is really all that is needed to reduce that number, although there are some hard limits inheirant in the problem that you simply can't get past. That is why specific impulse numbers are so important, so you can simply pour more energy on the problem.
Once you get into space, there is no real additional atmospheric drag to compensate for, and instead it is more a straight-forward addition of delta-vee in order to achieve escape velocity. Spacecraft designers prefer to have a small but very effecient rocket motor to move stuff from LEO to GEO, which is why it takes 24 hours to get there or more (I've seen sometimes as much as a full week or even longer). If you had lots of energy resources (read a nuclear rocket or something like that with a very high ISP), you can get from LEO to GEO in less than an hour. I believe the 3rd stage of the Saturn V rocket (which pushed the astronauts to the moon) did something close to that on its final burn. The Apollo IX mission sent the 3rd stage into full escape velocity and solar orbit just to test the idea out (the LM and CSM remained in Earth Orbit during that mission for docking tests).
The other thing to consider is that for manned flights, you want to spend as little time as you can while passing through the Van Allen belts. This means you want to be in near constant acceleration while this is happening, giving you the equivalent of a chest x-ray for radiation absorbtion, instead of bathing in the equivalent of standing under a continuously running x-ray machine.
A couple point to note:
The idea of a "spaceport" is hardly new. In fact, it was proposed by none other than Werner Von Braun as his preferred method of getting to the Moon. Had it been built, there would have been real infrastructure for continued Lunar excursions rather than the glory missions we now know as Apollo, and many more than 12 men would have been able to walk on the Moon in the 20th Century, with only another dozen getting into circumlunar orbit. And it would have been much "cheaper" to send yet another mission to the Moon, with potentially vehicle reuse for return trips to the Moon. Fuel tenders could certainly be sent up unmanned at comparatively cheap prices in terms of cost/lb. Imagine, you wouldn't even have to supply a payload faring or any other gear other than just spacecraft navigation equipment and a few connectors to pull the fuel out after it gets to orbit. This is done, BTW, with the ISS already and was done successfully with MIR by the Russians.
One of the things to keep in mind, in addition to the significantly reduced atmospheric drag on spacecraft in LEO, you also have (usually) very high velocity that isn't that much more to simply reach escape velocity. The rockets used to push satellites to GEO aren't really all that big... but they do need to be on top of a huge stack that gets to LEO in the first place. Getting to the Moon from GEO is very trivial in comparison to what it took to get there in the first place.
You are correct, that the actual gravitational pull while standing on a huge tower or "sky scraper" that would be built to LEO altitudes would be almost identicle to standing at sea level on the Earth. The difference is that you are already moving at orbital velocities.
The problem is that it isn't an accumulated error of one second in four hundred-million years. It is a navigation error of being off by several meters (or feet) when you think something should be in one place but it is in fact someplace else. As air traffic control issues become more pronounced as more things are flying through the air, and the range of tolerance is getting smaller.
And as I was trying to point out with space travel, this precision is going to need to get even better as instead of being off by just a few feet, current technology is still going to have you off by a few hundred kilometers when doing interplanetary navigation. That is the difference between knowing you are in orbit around Mars or on the ground. Or even being able to get to Pluto at all.
I will guarentee that you will mind if that accumulated error puts another airplane into your seat and you have an air-to-air collision because the clocks were inaccurate. Or to put it more pleasantly, you can have more take-offs and landings at a given airport because the control tower has more precise navigation equipment, as do the airplanes at that airport. That means lower air fares and fewer "accidents" because everybody can keep track of where you are at to avoid a collision.
To add a more practical real world example to this line of thought....
Clock accuracy is one of the key components of GPS systems and other navigational equipment. By having a much more accurate clock, you would be able to build devices that can determine with higher precision exactly where you are on the Earth... or for that matter in space even.
If you aren't aware of the "data" that is streamed out of GPS satellites, all that is transmitted is a clock signal that simply says what time it is right now, and along with some identification information. When compared to other satellites and applying some fairly straight-forward mathmatics (that includes some relativity equations), you get your current position.
In fact, while you might be able to determine within about 20 feet where you are at with current GPS technology and think that is "good enough" for the purposes of using that technology, navigation in the Solar System is going to need even higher clock accuracy in order to plot accurate trajectories to Mars and not get the current 30% failure rate of spacecraft trying to get there and accidentally crashing into the surface or other navigational mistakes caused by inaccurate plotting of the motion of both Mars and the Earth.
In short, you life someday (perhaps even now) might litterally depend on the navigation equipment of the vehicle you are in (read airliner) knowing precisely where you are at, and a more accurate clock will give that vehicle better accuracy to keep you alive.
The main difference between PAL and NTSC is that the PAL standard has more scan lines at the sacrifice of a lower frame rate (50 fps vs. 60 fps). Both broadcast signals use approximately the same radio carrier frequency bandwidth, so it isn't really that much of a real difference in quality unless you are a nationalist biggot.
The real reason for the difference in broadcast standards is mainly due to the fact that in North America, the alternating current power stations operate at 60 Hz, where as many European countries have their power frequency at 50 Hz. It is not a coincidence that the respective television broadcast standards use those frequencies for their televisions.
There are other differences between the standards, of course, although it is also helpful to keep in mind that PAL was developed after NTSC, and they did fix some of the problems that were discovered after NTSC was implemented on a larger scale... something major engineering standards often don't have happen until after they are implemented.
One thing to keep in mind is that while most newsrooms keep their editing process quiet and you only see the "polished" product, the process of creating Wikipedia articles is out in the open, misspelling, factual errors, rumors, and even incompetance. You see some of that now with 24-hour news channels, and there have been some famous mistakes by traditional media organizations on their web pages, but most of that is behind the scenes where you don't see the truly outrageous content before it is screened by an editor.
This is also hardly a new issue for Wikipedia, where suggestions have been made to have a "draft" and "published" version of featured articles. Certainly changes to Wikipedia could be done that would help out a bit, but Wikipedia simply is what it is, and people need to get used to it if they treat it as an authoritative source.
I will say that sometimes national and even international issues do come up, but again it is on a local level that they can be dealt with. For instance, a city counsel nearby where I live voted to recommend that the USA withdraw from the United Nations by sending an official proclamation to the state congressional delegation encouraging that sentiment. They also prohibited the city government from accepting any United Nations funding for any programs (not that it made much difference).
The thing is though that a local government in really incapable of dealing with national issues like immigration reform except through doing silly things like specifically prohibiting police officers from investigating or even informing the FBI/INS if they suspect an illegal alien. I find that silly, but it is at least a way to deal with the issue and express a political viewpoint.
I will say that democracy is entertaining, and does allow the potential of an "escape valve" when enough people really are pissed about an issue. I have frequently seen small-town city counsels that get in over their head and not listen to their constituants, only to get dumped out of office with a complete change-over in the city counsel because they did something very unpopular. An example was when the city I lived in sold the local power plant to a regional power consortium. Not only did the entire city government get canned (including the mayor), but the city charter was revised and the "energy board" was turned from an appointed to an elected governing body. Lawyers steped in and said it would be decades to reverse their decisions, but the people did speak and it surprisingly did get the attention of the regional power consortium which negotiated for much better power rates for the city than had the ordinary citizens stayed quiet about the whole thing.
The local school board where I live right now is currently on shaky ground due to a parent revolt and the resignation of a very popular school principal over policy issues that parents agreed with but the school board didn't want to deal with. Certainly this is going to be a major issue for the local school board elections that are coming up this November. The superintendent had to resign over this mess, and has created incredible headaches for the board members.
Again, like I said, it really does boil down to local issues and how individual lives are affected. I'm not saying that national issues aren't important, but it is the nature of the U.S. form of government that has local representation of geographic districts that push these local issues to the forefront of any political race. Other political systems that encourage more at-large seats that are proportionally divided between political parties tend to encourage more attention to national issues. I'm not really sure which is better (there are proponents of both systems), but it does seem to work for the USA.
I would like to point out the reason for concentrating on the preamble to the Declaration of Independence within the USA:
It really is a part of the U.S. Constitution. The authors of the Declaration of Independence were largely the same people who wrote the constitution, and their words are largely considered "sacred" by the "religion" of American constitutionalists.
In more recent times, it is the words to the preamble of the Declaration of Independence that have been justifications for legislation, particularly for civil rights laws that have been passed in the last 50 years. Indeed it is invoked so many times that some less-thinking and ignorant Americans think it really is a part of the U.S. Constitution.
As far as British students concentrating on taxation issues: no wonder they don't understand Americans. Taxation was merely a rallying point to show frustration over a corrupt political system that really did need some kind of overhaul, and the British government wasn't moving as fast as the American colonists wanted on changing that corruption, in part becasue many of the same problems existed in England at the same time as well. It was just easier for Boston to declare independence than Liverpool if they wanted to escape from the British monarchy.
If you believe this, you have missed quite a bit of what really happens in American elections.
While it may be perceived that issues don't matter, I think the problem is that you aren't paying attention to what issues don't matter.
Almost all elections in the USA concentrate on local issues, including those that are running for federal office, and frankly even Presidential candidate. This goes even more so for Congressional candidates, where things like base closures (not OUR base, please close somebody else's military base) and prominent pork barrel projects (you can read NASA here and other similar programs) often take a very strong place in debates for these offices. Especially if there has been a recent national policy to change something that has a strong effect on the local population. Pollution control standards are another thing that is seldom addressed on the national level but is a very hot issue on the local level in many different cities.
Often state politics enter the picture as well, especially when intelligent and informed debates over federal vs. state control of projects (i.e. welfare, national guard, public land, etc.) takes a grip.
On top of all this, there really are "political machines" that have control over many aspects of American elections. Again this is a problem of misdirected anger and misunderstanding rather than something that is happening on a national level. Instead, the political machines in America are almost all on the local level. I'm not going to get into specifics, but these political groups can control huge numbers of votes. They aren't really even being all that secretive about it either, and often you can find the names of these groups in the telephone book, but you do have to know what you are looking for. Sometimes there are multiple machines operating on a local level, which is where you see some real political fireworks fly. This, unfortunately, is one of the aspects of American apathy towards elections, because organized political groups like this are very difficult to overcome, and party affiliation is usually not enough to overcome any group like this.... these machines dominate the party selection process too.
A "machine" like this isn't really that big of a conspiracy. It is mainly a very well organized political group that offers "benefits" to its members in one form or another. It can be a "good ol' boys" club like a chamber of commerce or a fraternal organization, where campaign financing is very easy to be had.
Other forms include groups as bad as Boss Nast in NYC where he found jobs for incoming immigrants and cheap housing.... as long as you voted for his candidates. This still exists BTW, it just has changed flavor and they've been a bit more discrete about how it all happens.
And in some rare but increasingly common circumstances, you have people truly motivated by a political philosophy of some sort that have organized themselves into some sort of political group to make some sort of change to governmental policy. The Women's Sufferage Movement was an early example of this, as have been the "Pro Life" and "Pro Choice" movements regarding abortion. These groups are largely non-partisan and usually try to work in their philosophies to both major American political parties. Again, these groups are mainly local groups affecting local politics with local issues. If there are national affilations, generally the national "platform" is ignored unless it also seems to fit with the local group's goals or if the local group is desperate for money from the national organization (usually such local groups aren't that effective anyway).
So where does individual initive really come in with all this? If you sit on your hind end and think that election day itself is the only time you have to express your political opinion, then you are correct: The election is but a beauty contest and doesn't need your vote. Because the decisions are usually already made about the winner even before the election day. Only in a very tight contest does it really matter for individual votes, and even then you see the above groups really hammering hard trying to get "their" candidate to win.
Don't you just love democracy?
My old software manager came up with an outstanding way of trying to estimate project completion for trying to tell upper management when something would be done.
He asked each of the software engineers how long it would take, based on their "gut" instincts.
Then he multiplied the figure by two and moved it to the next higher order of time. I.E. weeks become months, months become years. One time he asked us to estimate when we could get something accomplished and we told him two years. He cried for a little bit and went to upper management and said "Never, we can't get that done".
Surprisingly this turned out to be a very effective way for him to gague when things would actually get accomplished, and more often than not he was dead on correct. He also didn't let me in on his secret until just before he quit, but it has also helped me to make my own estimates for customers when I'm doing contract work now. I do the same thing where I make a preliminary estimate based on known issues and then apply the above rule to my own guess. I have (fortunately) been fairly accurate with my guesses at that point, even if it makes the customer angry with them insisting that it must be done in a shorter period of time.
One thing to point out is that the British Government royally (to use a pun) screwed up when dealing with their American colonies. Yes, England was governed largly by Parliment, and it was the English Crown that established the colonial legislatures as well that provided a sense of local governance. BTW, it was largely these colonial legislators that formed the key representatives which signed the Declaration of Independence and the early leadership of the USA after the end of the American Revolutionary War.
These are the things that, in hindsight, should have been done for the Americans:
1) Representation of British Subject in Parliment from America. This was the largest rallying cry throughout the colonies, and really what the early leaders of the USA really wanted from England, not full independence. Had sufferage been granted to the people in North America with parlimentary districts and some sort of North American delegation in the House of Commons, the whole experience of what would have happened in North America and for that matter even world history itself would have been substantially different. It would have been a British Shuttle going up instead of an American Shuttle yesterday, for instance.
2) Granting of Peerage to prominent Americans. Ben Franklin was perhaps the worst instigator, but imagine had he been granted peerage and been a member of the House of Lords. By more modern criteria that Elizabeth II has been using for peerage, Franklin would have been a no-brainer for it as well. There certainly would have been others as well to consider, but this is really more of getting American representation in the British government. Instead, these very wealthy, landed, and prominent Americans were treated as nobodies and practically forced to go their own way and establish a seperate government. Granting titles of nobility would have made these "rebels" instead loyal allies. BTW, this is something that George III clearly could have done without even dealing with Parliment, and an aspect of how he personally is at least partially responsible for the loss of the colonies.
3) Don't piss off the Press, and especially the Merchants. The British government did a major tax hike in America on just about every group that has a chance to influence public opinion, and did it simultaneously. From pubs to newspapers and coffee houses, every place that people gather to discuss politics was suddenly taxed, or taxes hiked 10x what they were previously. Sure, Americans at the time weren't even paying the same taxes that people in England were paying (or equivalent), but it was just a wrong headed policy to even tax the kinds of things that were taxed. Or to make so huge of a tax hike at once. Mind you, people don't pay attention to taxes too much and consider it to simply be like the weather. The only time people pay attention is if you raise the rates or impose a new tax. That got George H. W. Bush (#41) out of office precisely because he backed out of his campaign pledge and raised taxes when he said he wouldn't. Admittedly England was starting from zero taxes in this case, but it doesn't stop people from getting angry when it happens.
There are other issues that had more minor gripes, such as confiscation of property by the Army for quarting troops and the prohibition of British settlement in the Ohio valley. It seemed as though (from American eyes) that almost everything the British government was doing was something more to piss off the American colonies. One by one these could have been dealt with, but it seems as though it all happened at the same time and a war resulted instead.
BTW, in regards to having a state succeed and declare independence from the rest of the USA, I think that would be an interesting test. By treaty Texas still retains the right to succeed and become an independent country if they choose to do so, and other states have similar provisions in their state constitutions. What happened during the U.S. Civil War can be debated over this, but
If what you want to do is simply get to Mars, plant some flags for political points, gather a few rocks and take some pictures from Cydonia just to prove that Richard Hogland is an a**, fine, do the Mars Direct. It would be cheaper and get people to there faster and sooner.
Werner Von Braun had the same issue when he was setting up the Apollo program, which was given the primary mission of sending a man to the Moon and returning him safly to the Earth, although he was also up against a Presidential deadline of Jan 1st, 1970. He barely made it by less than six months BTW as it was.
One of the various alternatives proposed for Apollo was to build an elaborate manned space station in orbit that would do many things, but among them was a "dry dock" for building spacecraft that would then travel to the Moon and the rest of the Solar System. Admittedly at the time this was one of the most expensive alternatives than doing a "Moon direct" approach that was later actually done, but just imagine if this had been built instead. The ISS wouldn't have been built at all because it wouldn't have been needed. The astronaut corp would have been incredibly busy developing technologies and actually doing stuff in space, including basic scientific research. And this would have been a strong stepping stone to not only having people go to the Moon, but would have been building infrastructure to allow permanent settlements on the Moon as well as building spacecraft to get to Mars as well.
I would challenge that had the USA gone this route back in the 1960's, for the exact same money that the federal government has spent on NASA from 1958-2006, that we would already be on Mars with substantial manned exploration of other places in the Solar System as well. And there would have been considerably more to show from NASA for what they had achieved by building infrastructure in space rather than in New Orleans, Huntsville, and the Cape.
We are at a crossroads right now where we can do the same thing in terms of going to Mars, or follow the same mistakes that NASA has made over the past 40 years and build glory projects that have a lot of political overtones for all that they do. My vote is to build the infrastructure for people to live in space. And it can be done much cheaper than even how the ISS is being built. The Moon is a key component to reducing the cost of the infrastructure in space for all of this, and why we must go back to the moon and get a permanent human settlement there.
I would have to strongly disagree almost completely here. The engineers are the people who are designing this stuff, and they put themselves in the pilot's chair when it comes to safety. When an entire engineering team (this is not just a rogue parnoid person saying this) is complaining about safty and their chief of that team is voicing grave concern over safty, it is time to stand up and take notice of what is going on.
The Shuttle was a good experimental design, and it did push some technologies further that otherwise wouldn't have been developed. It has also given a good baseline dataset for what it would mean for reusable spacecraft that otherwise wouldn't be known. The problem here is that additional launchs only give additional datapoints to this knowledge base, and the fact that two Shuttles have completely failed with full loss of the crew gives additional room to pause and wonder if it really is worth the added risk.
Much safer and even cheaper launch systems have been demonstrated. For crying out loud, NASA has even developed some better launch systems than the Shuttle but ended up killing those programs due to changes in political leadership and changing requirements for those projects that made them incredibly expensive.
Saving the Hubble and completing the treaty obligations for the ISS are noble things, and that is what the Shuttle is being kept around to do right now. I still question if there might not be a reasonable alternative, and strongly question the idea that during the years since the loss of the Columbia that the money spent toward trying to put band-aids on the Shuttle couldn't have been wiser spent on a whole new launch system. $15 billion and 4 years could certainly have built one hell of a good launch system, I think. Certainly this is not justification to send 14 people into LEO just to retrieve trash and rotate out the ISS crew. Think about it. Over $1 billion per astronaut. That is not wise spending of money by any criteria, nor are the astronauts billionaires either, which might have been wiser spending of the money and had more people servicing the ISS for the same money.
With the announcement today (July 5th) that NASA is still having foam issues on the external fuel tank, I think it is going to be yet another year before the next Shuttle mission goes up. There are some serious safty issues that are being overlooked, and I would tend to believe the engineers in this case. It is time to kill the Shuttle fleet and move on. Unfortunately, NASA has nothing to move on to.
Thanks for the reference, but unfortunately many Al Gore supporters still claim that he, in fact, did invent the Internet. I've even seen timelines of technology milestones that had a one-line "Al Gore Jr. invented the Internet" as one of the top 50 tech milestones for the 20th Century.
/. should have enough brains to understand that was not the case, although his support for early pork barrel projects that involved the internet is clear.
Of course anybody here on
And I will give credit to Al Gore as well for getting whitehouse.gov established, and making sure that president@whitehouse.gov and vicepresident@whitehouse.gov were valid e-mail addresses right at the beginning of his term in the Executive Branch of the U.S. Government. That was significant because 1) it was 1992 when such things were still unusual. His predecessor Dan Quayle didn't have an e-mail address while in office, for instance and 2) this gave early validation to the internet when computer geeks were still trying to prove that it was worth even having an internet connection at all, even for just e-mail correspondance or USENET. I think the White House webserver was one of the first 10,000 or so web servers to come on-line as well, and clearly a very early adopter of such technology again thanks to Al Gore and his pushing for such on-line connections.
I was thinking about it, and then I remembered that there was the *.int domain.
BTW, http://www.un.int/ does work as well, and is the "actual" URL for the UN as an international agency.
Nothing else to see here.... move along.
I will absolutely raise my voice and send a complaint, and mention your name and the efforts you made to work with ICANN.
I completely agree that ICANN doesn't really represent the ordinary internet user, or even the ordinary internet developer who really understands the protocols and can make more sense than the explanation by Sen. Ted Stevens (as just happened), or silly claims by politicians to have "invented" the internet.
As for the rest of what you said.... ditto or amen. You nailed this one.
The problem is that NASA claimed to have a much better success rate (or lower failure rate) than 1%. And the likelyhood of death as a result of failure to be even lower, with emergency safty procedures and other stuff. The sad fact of the matter is that death on the Shuttle is much more likely than it ever was during the Apollo days, and there also appears to be a very lax attitude in the part of NASA management that doesn't seem to care.
As for doing research in space, I would also point out that the Saturn V was an absolutely huge rocket. Skylab had almost the same interior space as the ISS, and was sent up in only one launch. And the Saturn V wasn't even the largest rocket that Werner Von Braun designed, nor was it the largest that the Cape was designed to fly either. There was supposed to be an even larger rocket that was nicknamed the Jupiter, which would have barely fit in the VAB. It was supposed to have 8-10 F-1 rocket engines (the main engine of the Saturn V) on the 1st stage. Talk about impressive amounts of cargo making it into orbit.
I would agree that the Virgin Galatic spacecraft are going to be puny little things too, but I guess most people look at that as a start. And I still firmly believe that rather than the sub-orbital market is going to be for inter-continental flight more than for tourism... aka London-Sydney in 2 hours. Or in another way: "when it absolutely, positively, has to get there yesterday" (by crossing the international dateline). The Concorde filled that niche until it was abaondoned, and a replacement could be created to fill that market niche.
Just speculating here, but SCO for the longest time has been one of the most shorted stocks on the market. Perhaps somebody is trying to cover their short, realizing that this is the beginning of the very end for this company?