While there is technically a difference between the two protocols, if you are careful when you are developing software for either you can do both simultaneously. Basically, tying yourself to just COM objects can in the long term kill you as a developer.
Still, trying to create well-behaving COM objects is always tricky, and sometimes they can give you massive fits. In addition, the DCOM procedures provide massive, and I mean massive security holes if you don't watch the default configurations carefully. I know because I got involved with some COM object that did things like manipulate the registry and did remote reading and writing of data files. You would be very surprised where some of these computers are that have this huge security hole, and when against strong recommendations from the manufacturer they put these computer on a public internet line. Stupid, but it hasn't caught them yet.
While I will agree with you that at some point trying to turn an asterix system into a full-fledged telecom company would take more than the $6000 mentioned in the article, it would be a good start.
Also, just like many medium to large business use a PBX for substantial savings, you could put a system like this into a block of downtown businesses and help to share the cost for connecting to commercial telecom providors... in effect becoming your own telecom.
The #1 problem would not be the technical side of things, which Asterix would certainly help with, but with the legal side of trying to start a telecom. Registering with the local public utility board and getting compliance with the whole host of regulations that come from trying to become a telephone company would probably be your undoing.
But if you are a high school aged kid that wants to do a little better than the old tin can between the treehouse and his bedroom, you can indeed run some CAT-5 cable from your house to a neighbor and "wire up" your neighborhood as your own private telephone company... and even use regular telephones. This is something that would have been impossible to do back when I was in high school under the old Ma Bell equipment providors. I think it would be a fun project, and even include some wireless access points to help cross streets in a private phone network. You might even pick up a girlfriend (by offering free telephone service for her and her friends).
That is part of my complaint about how the X-Prize foundation is treating this accomplishment by scaled composites: They have decided to turn the X-Prize into something like NASCAR... very artificial and only having very indirect relationships with the actual vehicles that they proportedly help to advance.
Like NASCAR, they will be advancing things like engine performance and safety, but the goals are for things that people will not be using in everyday life.
When the X-Prize was first announced, it was like "Hey, I might actually be able to be on that missile when it goes up". And to give Richard Branson at least some credit, the commercialization of sub-orbital flight (as opposed to supersonic flight) might turn out to be something positive in the long run. In this respect he is helping to blur the lines between ordinary airplanes and exotic spacecraft that otherwise have a very sharp distinction right now.
Rutan and the others are all shooting for LEO now as a long-term goal, but I hope they don't get too distracted by these short-term profits. As you and other dissenters of these efforts have pointed out, there are some huge obsticles to overcome in order to get into a stable controlled orbit.
On the other hand, I think incremental progress can be made with space vehicles now, rather than relying on whole new concepts like has driven the space industry so far. There is a world of difference between Apollo, Soyuz, and the Shuttle systems, and no real way to bring to cost of any of these systems in their present configuration to make commercial spaceflight a practical reality. That is the one very practical contribution that the X-Prize has made so far, even though I seem them dropping the ball now that they've made the first goal.
A land grab for the artic areas is all well enough, but as happened with the Vikings (during the last period of global warming) when they settled Greenland, when the weather started to get cold again all of this territory will become uninhabitable again.
The Vikings were able to build some fairly elaborate communities, with enough people that a dioscese for the Catholic church was established to govern the several congregations that existed there. All told close to about 20,000 people at the peak of the Greenland settlement. People were born there and a couple generations lived through some productive years, but eventually Greenland again turned cold and was not able to support a large population (at least with 10th & 11th Century levels of technology).
I think this is one area where having America as a neighbor to Canada could be beneficial: If somebody really tried (say Russia or even China) to assert soverignty on some of the northern Canadian islands, especially for mineral extraction (oil, gold, iron, etc.), I would be proud as an American to help Canada to defend its soverignty claims.
I think most other nations on this planet realize this as well, which is why it isn't even being remotely contested. The territory disputes between China and The Philipenes, however.....
The Arctic ocean basin is pretty much carved up between Norway, Russia, Canada, and America (mostly Alaska), with Iceland and Denmark getting other minor slices (especially with Greenland still technically under Danish control). Adding England to the mix still only makes a very few countries that have to be dealt with, compared to similar issues of soverignty in the Pacific. And most arctic boundaries are pretty much spelled out and agreed upon, with even Russia and America dealing with minor issues in the Bering Straight region.
Basically, I don't think this is that much of an issue as a practical matter.
Re:Unmanned mission to mars is OK
on
One Year on Mars
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· Score: 1
There are a couple points beyond the instability of the L2 point as covered by uberdave (L4 & L5 are much more stable and you need to read more about orbital mechanics to explain).
It also isn't 100% useful either for blocking out RF radiation from the Earth because most L2 orbits will be more a "halo" that "orbits" the L2 point rather than being at exactly L2. Again this is the same for all Lagrangian locations. True, such an orbit can be reduced, but there is also the apparent size of the moon relative to the L2 Point, and compared to the earth. The point here being that something on the surface of the Moon is inherantly easier to maintain, especially given the size requirements necessary for a radio telescope. Optical telescopes would not have this problem so much, and indeed an optical telescope at L5 would be a much better option anyway.
Dust and vibration kicked up by lunar mining operations would be no different than vibrations you experience in say Los Angeles from mining operations in Utah. Unless you are talking nuclear explosions that exceed the largest built nuclear warhead in human history, or a large metor impact, it is unlikely you would even be able to measure such activity at an astronomical observatory even with a sismonitor. The dust would fall to the ground due to gravity, and the only real effect that would have "global" impact on the moon is the increse in lunar atmosphere. Even that would still be negligable except for optical telescopes, which as I said would have better places to be at anyway. By way of measurement and note, human activity in the 20th Century doubled the lunar atmosphere, primaily from the Apollo landings. Even that is negligable when compared to the surface area of the moon as a whole.
As far as pre-existing logistical support, I would say that having an established lunar colony would be of tremendous benefit to such a project. Indeed, lunar smelting operations could provide the raw materials for such a project, and then the only logistical issues would be to be able to move the materials on site over ground terrain.
Look, all I'm suggesting is a practical reason to have a scientific base on the moon, that would yield a huge benefit to a major branch of science. I'm not suggesting that it would be the only possible solution either, and even with all of the supposed benefits such a base would offer, it would be obsolete in a few centuries as people move out in the solar system... so such an operation would have to be moved to yet deeper in the solar system.
The Concorde was a more reasonable machine to gripe about with the "ozone layer" and its environmental impact.... because that is precisely where it flew and it was in the direct path of the ozone region. In fact, the air intake valves that helped to pressurize the cabin had to decompose ozone so it wouldn't make the passengers sick. Other high-flying aircraft also have to worry about this same issue.
In the case of SS2 and spacecraft, they are merely punching through that altitude with only a brief period of time that they are actually going to be able to do any damage to the environment at that part of the atmosphere. I would dare say that cleaning agents and activities on the ground are going to be doing far more damage to the ozone layer than anything that occurs during the flight itself. Really. This issue is a moot point in regards to spacecraft, and there are many other environmental issues that need to be dealt with instead.
High level release of H2O (depending on fuel used) could be interesting, as it would create clouds that would be up considerably higher than normally exist from troposphere activity. Also, these clouds would take quite a bit longer to dissapate than even conventional contrails of high flying jets. By far and away this is a more serious and pressing issue to be dealt with than worrying about ozone depleation.
Once mass surface to LEO programs occur, the issue of space junk will be an even bigger issue, and have a more direct impact on LEO space activity. Even now there are thousands of pieces of fairly large junk that is being tracked, and the prospect of dozens or hundreds of rockets going up every day adding to this mess is a sobering thought to what happens when a bolt or screw comes loose. When that happens with commercial aircraft (yes, it does happen) there is usually enough open space that the loose part lands without incident. In space it either burns up eventually in the atmosphere or runs into something else. You just hope that you are not that something else it runs into.
Damn! I hope you tried to submit this as a story to the front page of/.
I wish they would have put some ages on the announcement, such as 18-25 or something along that line. Or can high school kids get involved?
Still, this would be a neat opportunity that I would have loved to be involved with, but my life has moved on. I have a son who would love to do this, but he is a little young (9 years old) and will have plenty of other opportunities as he gets older... especially if Scaled Composites actually goes anywhere with their projects or the X-Prize Cup turns out to be anything useful.
Re:Unmanned mission to mars is OK
on
One Year on Mars
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· Score: 1
Radio telescopes are not nearly so sensitive to motion problems, and there is eletronic steering that you can do to the detectors so that you can insure that the target astronomical object can be detected easily. The big advantage of the Moon here is that it is a physical barrier that stops RF interference, and the fact that it is turned away from the Earth 100% of the time. Not even Io or Ceres can offer that sort of guarentee.
As far as creating a reactor that uses Helium-3, it is a little more than a mere theoretical concept. There have been working research reactors using fusion that have been able to even produce more energy than was used to create the fusion environment. (Yes, they have passed the break even point). The problem is more trying to make a practical device that doesn't need another power generation facility just to get it to work. And hopefully be able to make it provide power for beyond the needs of the generation facility. This is all forms of fusion reactors, wheither it is a Tokamak, Fusor, or Cold-Fusion cell. The advantage of Helium-3 is such that it makes the practical fusion reactor much closer to reality. Current Helium-3 acquisition is from nuclear energy research and is quite expensive to manufacture.
Re:Unmanned mission to mars is OK
on
One Year on Mars
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· Score: 2, Informative
Helium-3 is considered the prime resource for the Moon, not Mars. Martian soil is unlikely to have much Helium due to the fact that it has a (compared to the Moon) thick atmosphere of other gasses. On the moon, much of the solar wind is able to directly impact the soil, which allows the Helium-3 to embed into the rocks on the lunar surface.
Similar conditions also exist on Phobos and Deimos, but in that case any Helium-3 extracted there will probabaly be used by Mars, and not the Earth, if any Martian colonies ever get established.
As far as a good location for a telescope, the Sea of Moscow (on the far side of the moon) or perhaps even closer to the lunar equator would be a fantastic location for a radio telescope.... you would be able to block out almost all human radio traffic, and all that is left would be from space missions in interplantary space. I hope that I can see it built in my lifetime.
Now it is my turn to be pessimistic on this. While I think all of these suggestions are very good (and concepts that are ripe to be explored, if not overdue for actual implementation), I don't think NASA is going to be the agency or group of people that will end up pulling off any of it.
There has been quite a bit of talk about the use of "waldos" in space (as well as underwater), and the technology to accomplish that effectively is quite close, but most often remote manipulation is done via joysticks, buttons, and a mouse... not exactly the most effective tools for that sort of manipulation. And it doesn't get the sense of feedback that say a skilled backhoe operator can have where just listening to the engine and feeling the bumps on truck they can sense stuff in the ground that is almost as good as doing the digging by hand. Remote systems are getting better, but even with the Titanic exploration crews, they still occasionally dive down to the bottom of the ocean in manned submersables, although robotic tele-operated devices have been used successfully for documentation and even manipulation of objects on the ocean floor.
There was lots of talk back in the 1980's of developing a shuttle-based unmanned cargo vehicle that even used many of the same components of the Shuttle, such as the SRB's, the Main Shuttle Engine, and even pads 39A & B for launch. This would have been a positive thing in terms of justifying the huge ground crew that is present at KSC to launch everything, but unfortunately it never got anywhere. Other concepts have been thrown around, and certainly different experimental configurations could be flown unmanned without nearly so much danger to life. Unfortunately doing that on a government budget (and accounting regimine) would require billions that NASA simply doesn't get from Congress. Not to mention the politics involved with the fact that each launch and spacecraft (we are talking production systems here... not experimental programs) requires a seperate appropriation clause when reviewed by Congress, and that opens each and every mission to political manuvering that Washington D.C. is so noted for.
The problem with this sort of thinking is that you are deliberately trying to gain market share on the presumption that once that market share is established, you can recover your money afterward with higher prices.
John D. Rockefeller did this very effectively with the Standard Oil Corporation, by eliminating all of his competition, and through reducing costs by scales of operation and improved manufacturing techniques, he was able keep the prices low afterward, and even make some money. Quite a bit of it.
Every entrepreneur since Rockefeller has tried to duplicate his success, and it was people who cited him that created the internet bubble. Note the similarities between the wildcat days of the oil industry and internet companies during the 1990's.
A problem with trying that strategy with the airline industry is that profit margins are paper thin, and it appears as though barriers to entry are not as tough as it would appear at first glance. Indeed, most of the reason why traditional major airlines are getting into trouble is because there are new airlines that are pushing prices down (JetBlue, Southwest, and more), and everybody has to buy the airplanes themsevles from the same suppliers (Boeing and Airbus), so there really isn't that much differentiation between each airline as there may have been in the past. That is why people like baggage handlers are getting attention right now, because it is with doing that sort of activity that can make the difference between one airline vs. another one.
I know this is a long time before replying, but I need to comment on this.
The whole process of trying to make retractable plates, designing the re-entry shield that would also not contaminate the samples, making the whole thing waterproof against seawater (not an easy thing in itself to do), and even the whole recovery operation would have added so many complexities to the project and mission that I don't think it would have been done.
Also, the number of samples that were returned would have been substantially reduced, presuming that the whole automated process of launch and reentry could have been done. Either that or the mission would have required a Delta 4 Heavy (just recently launched) or a Saturn V. This would have cost even more than a typical Shuttle mission, even accounting for training time for the manned mission segment, and potential could have risked proportionally just as many lives (accidents in space are not the only ways to die in the space program).
In short, this was a mission taylored to the Shuttle missions, and fit perfectly with the capabiities that the Space Shuttle has. As I said, this by itself certainly doesn't justify the cost of having the Shuttle, but it is a strong counter argument that the Shuttle is a worthless piece of hardware. It also goes on to prove that there is a need to have a space vehicle that can go up come back to the Earth in a reusable fashion with a general cargo bay that can haul up and down (with emphasis on down in this case) large quantities of bulk goods (measured in tons, not kilos or pounds). At the moment, only the U.S. Space Shuttle provides this capability.
Are there other ways to provide such a capability? Absolutely. It is also about time that NASA start to design and build reasonable alternatives, with congressional backing to see that they acutally get built. If NASA drags their heels, private companies may build this capability, but NASA shouldn't hold their breath waiting either. If such a vehicle is eventually built by NASA with U.S. Federal money, it should be made very plain that this is only for classified (i.e. Dept. of Defense) or government missions only.
The one mission that met this requirement that absolutely required a shuttle mission to bring a satellite out of orbit and land it on the Earth was with the long-term materials research satellite.
This was a special research satellite that was made up of about 40 different metal alloys and allowed to drift in LEO for about 6 years before it was finally retrieved by the Shuttle. It also had some other things it was testing to try and find what compounds worked best is a space environment, and what materials you should avoid. When it was brought back to the Earth, each "panel" was then sent through a bunch of chemical tests, put under a microscope, and otherwise examined to see what materials held out the best in LEO.
This mission simply could not have been done without the Shuttle. Period.
Now to suggest that this one mission justified the cost of the entire shuttle program, I would agree that is far fetched. But I did find a counter example to your argument and suggest there are legitimate uses for this sort of spacecraft capability. There are other legitimate uses as well that are similar to this sort of mission profile.
The #1 thing the Space Shuttle does that no other spacecraft in the world (besides Buran) can do is not only bring stuff up into orbit, but also bring substantial quantities (i.e. bulk goods and large containers) back to the earth safely without burning up.
The problem is that there are very few space missions where this is something that can be useful (at least so far), so NASA has to "invent" other missions for the shuttle to perform.
In the end when large scale passenger service from earth to orbit and back starts to occur, I'm certain it will have a configuration rather similar to the Shuttle. Hopefully those space vehicles will learn from the mistakes of the Shuttle and try to avoid them... especially some engineers who understand the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle and can get rid of much of the junk that requires a 6-month turn-around on each orbiter.
The purpose of a throttle is to control the amount of thrust that is expended during the flight. Keep in mind that when a rocket goes up, it is throwing out the bottom a considerable amount of mass.
The point here is that by the end of a stage, the acceleration of one of these rockets (solid or liquid fueled... it doesn't matter) can be quite high, and on ICBM's it can be as high as 20 G's or more. Sometimes a payload simply can't handle that sort of acceleration (like people, but some sattelites as well), so you need to drop the amount of thurst to lower the accleration rate.
This is a mission requirement, and when you design a space payload you also specify what the maximum acceleration will be (usually in m/s^2 but sometimes in different units). When the flight profile is calculated, the rocket will have pre-programmed intervals to scale back the thrust requirements. This makes life fun and interesting, and why rocket scientists get the big $$$.
The Space Shuttle's Main Engines have this feature, and it is even more important because of the human cargo, as well as bio research materials. I believe the flight profile of the shuttle is to maintain a maximum rate of about 4-5 G's. The Saturn V, by comparison, hit about 8-9 G's at the end of the 1st and 2nd stages.
One of the best examples of a P2P network that I havn't really seen done too well yet is a local distributed storage solution. The idea here is that you have some huge datastore (such as a file system or a database) where you want to put the data into the datastore and allow other individuals on the local network to be able to fish the data out.
The point here is that by going the P2P route rather than a fixed central server model, you both balance the network bandwith, particularly for "distant" nodes, and you allow the redundancy that the internet is so hyped over (you can nuke any node and the rest will compensate) but in practice is far from the truth. In theory you can still lose some data, but with a well built P2P network of this nature that could be minimized, and only seldom accessed data would be the most vunerable.
Another big plus of this is that not only does this type of storage system work well for limited bandwidth, you can also install more modest "almost thin terminals" into such a network that keeps only frequently accessed data locally, and other nodes can compensate with data storage elsewhere.
Unfortunately, I havn't seen any really good examples of this. Freenet comes close in theory, but even that has some ways to go to do this effectively.
The shuttle is relevant only because the author of these articles is also the pilot who flew the Columbia on her maden voyage with STS-1. That is correct, the very first shuttle flight.
This man is one serious pioneer, and rather than simply blathering about trying to get mankind out among the other planets in the solar system, he actually tried to so something about it. That NASA has been dinking around for the past 20 years since that flight and not done anything else is more about the raw incompentancy of NASA than the fact that this hombre has some serious balls to want to get on a shuttle when it was truly an untested spacecraft system.
BTW, I agree that we now know that the shuttle is not a good spacecraft to operate, but we didn't really know that back in 1980, and it is too bad that post Challenger something else wasn't followed up on. Columbia has sealed the fate of the rest of the shuttles, when by now even NASA acknowledges need to be eliminated from regular service. The question now is what should replace them?
If you are talking about Neanderthals and how they survived, you need to keep in mind that they went from mankind being isolated in a relatvely small geographic area to dispersing over practically the entire planet. By the time people got to North America, they were pretty adept at dealing with diverse environments. Some archeological evidence suggest a spread of permanent settlement by people throughout the Americas spread at the rate of about 1-4 km per year. When you think about it, that is quite remarkable, especially considering that as you move north & south you encounter substantially different climate zones. East & west migration is much easier to accomplish.
Even so, the point here is not just if you can have 0.01% of mankind survive a cataclysmic event, it is also to see just what other setbacks would happen if a major event occured.
The reason why mankind survived Mt. Visuvius or Krakatoa is not because people were not near those volcanoes when they erupted, but because people were elsewhere as well and could survive and re-colonize the area afterward. And we as a species have indeed done that in both areas since the respective eruptions.
They derive their authority and power from the United States Department of Commerce, who set them up after NSF-Net was dismantled. In short, they are a quasi-governmental agency like the Federal Reserve Board or the U.S. Postal Service, but with direct juristiction over the internet.
Of course, what can be granted can be taken away. At the same time, there is no ability to compete with them because of this grant of authority by the U.S. Federal Government.
Oh, and how this relates to other countries besides the USA... they are pretending that the USA knows what they are doing on how to govern the internet. Frankly I think the whole thing stinks, and when ICANN got rid of the at-large board members they finally acknowledged that the internet is run by greedy corporations who don't care about ordinary people.
No, I can be taxed and goverend by people who I don't elect, and often are even in a so-called democracy like the USA.
In this case, ICANN pretends to represent the ordinary internet users, and was chartered by the U.S. Department of Commerce to handle in a non-biased manner disputes over governance of the Internet. And this is governance, not just simply a company that you are buying a service from. Just who else is going to control the issuance of IP numbers and domain addresses? Is there an alternative that you know of?
And ICANN is trying to expand their power and authority over the internet in even more ways than simply this limited set of domains. In addition, they have at least over what they do control full legislative, executive, and even judicial control over internet governance. If you have a dispute over an internet domain, you go to ICANN, and they are the final authority over who gets the domain. You can't even appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
And yes, I am entitled to have fair access to community resources. And I should expect that these community resources, like frequency allocation for radio communications or port access for loading and unloading cargo, are in the realm of government authority. Allocation of IP addresses is no different. This is a scarace resource that needs regulation and ICANN is that body who does this.
In the case of ICANN, I even elected a reasonable representative, and frankly I think he did a damn good job representing my interests. His name was Karl Arbauch, and as far as I'm concerned he is still my representative at ICANN even if ICANN no longer recognizes his position as a member of their board. How ICANN removed elected representatives from their board speaks volumes over what they think of us poor schmucks who depend on using the internet on a day to day basis.
While I don't have the right to elect the people that run my ISP, I do have the right to set up my own ISP if I think my current ISP is full of BS. I can't set up an alternative to ICANN because it is a government-granted monopoly to internet governance. If I tried to set up my own "internetwork of computing devices", I could actually go to jail for even trying. I don't consider that to be something that is reasonable nor fair.
So in short, this is taxation without represntation, and ICANN needs to be eliminated. Hopefully I can convince elected government authorities that this is the case and be able to stop it.
Re:This is sort of cool, but...
on
Lego Logic Gates
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· Score: 1
Actually, the first electronic computer, the ENIAC, was a decimal (base-10) computer rather than a binary computer. It turns out that it creates many more hassles when you have to (in this case with a decimal computer) wire each number seperately. In other words, each number in the computing base has to have a seperate wire, or 10 wires for each digit.
With a binary circuit, you only need 1 wire, which is either on or off. And to make all of the numbers from 0 to 10, you only need five wires instead of ten. Really this is more than a mere convenience, but a real practical issue that would substantially affect the complexity of any computing machine that does not use binary calculations. Even with the Babbage machine, there is a substantial increase in complexity by using connections that were not binary. I'm certain that if mechanical computers were to continue from what Babbage had done instead of the development of electronic computers we have today, they still would have gone binary just due to the practical nature of how everything was interconnected.
Some "alternatives" to pure binary can include trits (trinary bits... made infamous with the programming language INTERCAL) where a single wire can have a positive, negative, or zero voltage. While this keeps the number of wires down, there are some practical engineering issues in trying to nail down detection circuits to keep the three states seperate, designing practical building blocks for trits can also be difficult. Also, maintaining a neutral zero voltage can be a royal pain in the behind when designing a circuit.
An alternative to the base-2 system is also the base-minus-2 number system. This really is just a reworked binary system and even there the computational logic is a little more complex, as there are two carries and two borrow bits to a simple adder circuit. Base-minus-2 is a good way to shake up the thinking of a digital logic design class, however.
No, it is a deliberate mangling of software and keeping users from even being able to run the software is not a good way to maintain customers. Copy protection that does not involve courts is just going to annoy legitimate users, not the people who are doing the cracking of the software. Going to court is going to deal with people who are the violators and abusing software developers.
I think you confuse legal copyright with artificial copy protection.
I agree that all copy protection schemes are really stuipd, with the end result screwing the customer more than it helps to keep a company profitable. Legitimate customers who have any ethics at all will buy software, even if it is GPL'd. People who don't care will pirate software no matter how much copy protection there is, with the more valuable pieces of software getting the most attention from software crackers. If you really need a piece of software, I'm sure you can buy it at a Beijing flea market for $5, regardless of how much the original company charged for the software or what copy protection schemes were on it.
You are also correct to complain about companies that go belly up and then you have no recourse to fix the computer that just caught fire because the sprinkler above the computer went off. Or a three-year-old stuck a butter knife into the CPU socket. While you may have a "license" for a single CPU (or equivalent), when the computer goes down and the company is no longer around, a critical piece of software goes down with the computer it was running on.
In terms of legal copyright protections, I do support law enforcement actions against blatant copyright violators, and in some ways I support in some weird perverted way the Business Software Alliance (mentioned in the article) putting the "Fear Of God(tm)" into business owners who feel they can ignore software copyright. I have yet to work for a business with multiple PCs that does not have some sort of pirated software, with sales and marketing people being some of the worst offenders of being able to understand copyright laws. Or at least trying to understand that it takes hard work to come up with computer software and the people that write it should somehow be compensated for their effort.
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While there is technically a difference between the two protocols, if you are careful when you are developing software for either you can do both simultaneously. Basically, tying yourself to just COM objects can in the long term kill you as a developer.
Still, trying to create well-behaving COM objects is always tricky, and sometimes they can give you massive fits. In addition, the DCOM procedures provide massive, and I mean massive security holes if you don't watch the default configurations carefully. I know because I got involved with some COM object that did things like manipulate the registry and did remote reading and writing of data files. You would be very surprised where some of these computers are that have this huge security hole, and when against strong recommendations from the manufacturer they put these computer on a public internet line. Stupid, but it hasn't caught them yet.
While I will agree with you that at some point trying to turn an asterix system into a full-fledged telecom company would take more than the $6000 mentioned in the article, it would be a good start.
Also, just like many medium to large business use a PBX for substantial savings, you could put a system like this into a block of downtown businesses and help to share the cost for connecting to commercial telecom providors... in effect becoming your own telecom.
The #1 problem would not be the technical side of things, which Asterix would certainly help with, but with the legal side of trying to start a telecom. Registering with the local public utility board and getting compliance with the whole host of regulations that come from trying to become a telephone company would probably be your undoing.
But if you are a high school aged kid that wants to do a little better than the old tin can between the treehouse and his bedroom, you can indeed run some CAT-5 cable from your house to a neighbor and "wire up" your neighborhood as your own private telephone company... and even use regular telephones. This is something that would have been impossible to do back when I was in high school under the old Ma Bell equipment providors. I think it would be a fun project, and even include some wireless access points to help cross streets in a private phone network. You might even pick up a girlfriend (by offering free telephone service for her and her friends).
That is part of my complaint about how the X-Prize foundation is treating this accomplishment by scaled composites: They have decided to turn the X-Prize into something like NASCAR... very artificial and only having very indirect relationships with the actual vehicles that they proportedly help to advance.
Like NASCAR, they will be advancing things like engine performance and safety, but the goals are for things that people will not be using in everyday life.
When the X-Prize was first announced, it was like "Hey, I might actually be able to be on that missile when it goes up". And to give Richard Branson at least some credit, the commercialization of sub-orbital flight (as opposed to supersonic flight) might turn out to be something positive in the long run. In this respect he is helping to blur the lines between ordinary airplanes and exotic spacecraft that otherwise have a very sharp distinction right now.
Rutan and the others are all shooting for LEO now as a long-term goal, but I hope they don't get too distracted by these short-term profits. As you and other dissenters of these efforts have pointed out, there are some huge obsticles to overcome in order to get into a stable controlled orbit.
On the other hand, I think incremental progress can be made with space vehicles now, rather than relying on whole new concepts like has driven the space industry so far. There is a world of difference between Apollo, Soyuz, and the Shuttle systems, and no real way to bring to cost of any of these systems in their present configuration to make commercial spaceflight a practical reality. That is the one very practical contribution that the X-Prize has made so far, even though I seem them dropping the ball now that they've made the first goal.
A land grab for the artic areas is all well enough, but as happened with the Vikings (during the last period of global warming) when they settled Greenland, when the weather started to get cold again all of this territory will become uninhabitable again.
The Vikings were able to build some fairly elaborate communities, with enough people that a dioscese for the Catholic church was established to govern the several congregations that existed there. All told close to about 20,000 people at the peak of the Greenland settlement. People were born there and a couple generations lived through some productive years, but eventually Greenland again turned cold and was not able to support a large population (at least with 10th & 11th Century levels of technology).
I think this is one area where having America as a neighbor to Canada could be beneficial: If somebody really tried (say Russia or even China) to assert soverignty on some of the northern Canadian islands, especially for mineral extraction (oil, gold, iron, etc.), I would be proud as an American to help Canada to defend its soverignty claims.
I think most other nations on this planet realize this as well, which is why it isn't even being remotely contested. The territory disputes between China and The Philipenes, however.....
The Arctic ocean basin is pretty much carved up between Norway, Russia, Canada, and America (mostly Alaska), with Iceland and Denmark getting other minor slices (especially with Greenland still technically under Danish control). Adding England to the mix still only makes a very few countries that have to be dealt with, compared to similar issues of soverignty in the Pacific. And most arctic boundaries are pretty much spelled out and agreed upon, with even Russia and America dealing with minor issues in the Bering Straight region.
Basically, I don't think this is that much of an issue as a practical matter.
There are a couple points beyond the instability of the L2 point as covered by uberdave (L4 & L5 are much more stable and you need to read more about orbital mechanics to explain).
It also isn't 100% useful either for blocking out RF radiation from the Earth because most L2 orbits will be more a "halo" that "orbits" the L2 point rather than being at exactly L2. Again this is the same for all Lagrangian locations. True, such an orbit can be reduced, but there is also the apparent size of the moon relative to the L2 Point, and compared to the earth. The point here being that something on the surface of the Moon is inherantly easier to maintain, especially given the size requirements necessary for a radio telescope. Optical telescopes would not have this problem so much, and indeed an optical telescope at L5 would be a much better option anyway.
Dust and vibration kicked up by lunar mining operations would be no different than vibrations you experience in say Los Angeles from mining operations in Utah. Unless you are talking nuclear explosions that exceed the largest built nuclear warhead in human history, or a large metor impact, it is unlikely you would even be able to measure such activity at an astronomical observatory even with a sismonitor. The dust would fall to the ground due to gravity, and the only real effect that would have "global" impact on the moon is the increse in lunar atmosphere. Even that would still be negligable except for optical telescopes, which as I said would have better places to be at anyway. By way of measurement and note, human activity in the 20th Century doubled the lunar atmosphere, primaily from the Apollo landings. Even that is negligable when compared to the surface area of the moon as a whole.
As far as pre-existing logistical support, I would say that having an established lunar colony would be of tremendous benefit to such a project. Indeed, lunar smelting operations could provide the raw materials for such a project, and then the only logistical issues would be to be able to move the materials on site over ground terrain.
Look, all I'm suggesting is a practical reason to have a scientific base on the moon, that would yield a huge benefit to a major branch of science. I'm not suggesting that it would be the only possible solution either, and even with all of the supposed benefits such a base would offer, it would be obsolete in a few centuries as people move out in the solar system... so such an operation would have to be moved to yet deeper in the solar system.
Of course, that means that Paris Hilton getting royally screwed has multiple meanings... espeicially if a Saudi Prince is involved.
The website says that individuals can book entire flights..... the implication certainly is there for such activities.
*Ahem* I just got to get my head out of the sewer now.
The Concorde was a more reasonable machine to gripe about with the "ozone layer" and its environmental impact.... because that is precisely where it flew and it was in the direct path of the ozone region. In fact, the air intake valves that helped to pressurize the cabin had to decompose ozone so it wouldn't make the passengers sick. Other high-flying aircraft also have to worry about this same issue.
In the case of SS2 and spacecraft, they are merely punching through that altitude with only a brief period of time that they are actually going to be able to do any damage to the environment at that part of the atmosphere. I would dare say that cleaning agents and activities on the ground are going to be doing far more damage to the ozone layer than anything that occurs during the flight itself. Really. This issue is a moot point in regards to spacecraft, and there are many other environmental issues that need to be dealt with instead.
High level release of H2O (depending on fuel used) could be interesting, as it would create clouds that would be up considerably higher than normally exist from troposphere activity. Also, these clouds would take quite a bit longer to dissapate than even conventional contrails of high flying jets. By far and away this is a more serious and pressing issue to be dealt with than worrying about ozone depleation.
Once mass surface to LEO programs occur, the issue of space junk will be an even bigger issue, and have a more direct impact on LEO space activity. Even now there are thousands of pieces of fairly large junk that is being tracked, and the prospect of dozens or hundreds of rockets going up every day adding to this mess is a sobering thought to what happens when a bolt or screw comes loose. When that happens with commercial aircraft (yes, it does happen) there is usually enough open space that the loose part lands without incident. In space it either burns up eventually in the atmosphere or runs into something else. You just hope that you are not that something else it runs into.
Damn! I hope you tried to submit this as a story to the front page of /.
I wish they would have put some ages on the announcement, such as 18-25 or something along that line. Or can high school kids get involved?
Still, this would be a neat opportunity that I would have loved to be involved with, but my life has moved on. I have a son who would love to do this, but he is a little young (9 years old) and will have plenty of other opportunities as he gets older... especially if Scaled Composites actually goes anywhere with their projects or the X-Prize Cup turns out to be anything useful.
Radio telescopes are not nearly so sensitive to motion problems, and there is eletronic steering that you can do to the detectors so that you can insure that the target astronomical object can be detected easily. The big advantage of the Moon here is that it is a physical barrier that stops RF interference, and the fact that it is turned away from the Earth 100% of the time. Not even Io or Ceres can offer that sort of guarentee.
As far as creating a reactor that uses Helium-3, it is a little more than a mere theoretical concept. There have been working research reactors using fusion that have been able to even produce more energy than was used to create the fusion environment. (Yes, they have passed the break even point). The problem is more trying to make a practical device that doesn't need another power generation facility just to get it to work. And hopefully be able to make it provide power for beyond the needs of the generation facility. This is all forms of fusion reactors, wheither it is a Tokamak, Fusor, or Cold-Fusion cell. The advantage of Helium-3 is such that it makes the practical fusion reactor much closer to reality. Current Helium-3 acquisition is from nuclear energy research and is quite expensive to manufacture.
Helium-3 is considered the prime resource for the Moon, not Mars. Martian soil is unlikely to have much Helium due to the fact that it has a (compared to the Moon) thick atmosphere of other gasses. On the moon, much of the solar wind is able to directly impact the soil, which allows the Helium-3 to embed into the rocks on the lunar surface.
Similar conditions also exist on Phobos and Deimos, but in that case any Helium-3 extracted there will probabaly be used by Mars, and not the Earth, if any Martian colonies ever get established.
As far as a good location for a telescope, the Sea of Moscow (on the far side of the moon) or perhaps even closer to the lunar equator would be a fantastic location for a radio telescope.... you would be able to block out almost all human radio traffic, and all that is left would be from space missions in interplantary space. I hope that I can see it built in my lifetime.
Now it is my turn to be pessimistic on this. While I think all of these suggestions are very good (and concepts that are ripe to be explored, if not overdue for actual implementation), I don't think NASA is going to be the agency or group of people that will end up pulling off any of it.
There has been quite a bit of talk about the use of "waldos" in space (as well as underwater), and the technology to accomplish that effectively is quite close, but most often remote manipulation is done via joysticks, buttons, and a mouse... not exactly the most effective tools for that sort of manipulation. And it doesn't get the sense of feedback that say a skilled backhoe operator can have where just listening to the engine and feeling the bumps on truck they can sense stuff in the ground that is almost as good as doing the digging by hand. Remote systems are getting better, but even with the Titanic exploration crews, they still occasionally dive down to the bottom of the ocean in manned submersables, although robotic tele-operated devices have been used successfully for documentation and even manipulation of objects on the ocean floor.
There was lots of talk back in the 1980's of developing a shuttle-based unmanned cargo vehicle that even used many of the same components of the Shuttle, such as the SRB's, the Main Shuttle Engine, and even pads 39A & B for launch. This would have been a positive thing in terms of justifying the huge ground crew that is present at KSC to launch everything, but unfortunately it never got anywhere. Other concepts have been thrown around, and certainly different experimental configurations could be flown unmanned without nearly so much danger to life. Unfortunately doing that on a government budget (and accounting regimine) would require billions that NASA simply doesn't get from Congress. Not to mention the politics involved with the fact that each launch and spacecraft (we are talking production systems here... not experimental programs) requires a seperate appropriation clause when reviewed by Congress, and that opens each and every mission to political manuvering that Washington D.C. is so noted for.
The problem with this sort of thinking is that you are deliberately trying to gain market share on the presumption that once that market share is established, you can recover your money afterward with higher prices.
John D. Rockefeller did this very effectively with the Standard Oil Corporation, by eliminating all of his competition, and through reducing costs by scales of operation and improved manufacturing techniques, he was able keep the prices low afterward, and even make some money. Quite a bit of it.
Every entrepreneur since Rockefeller has tried to duplicate his success, and it was people who cited him that created the internet bubble. Note the similarities between the wildcat days of the oil industry and internet companies during the 1990's.
A problem with trying that strategy with the airline industry is that profit margins are paper thin, and it appears as though barriers to entry are not as tough as it would appear at first glance. Indeed, most of the reason why traditional major airlines are getting into trouble is because there are new airlines that are pushing prices down (JetBlue, Southwest, and more), and everybody has to buy the airplanes themsevles from the same suppliers (Boeing and Airbus), so there really isn't that much differentiation between each airline as there may have been in the past. That is why people like baggage handlers are getting attention right now, because it is with doing that sort of activity that can make the difference between one airline vs. another one.
I know this is a long time before replying, but I need to comment on this.
The whole process of trying to make retractable plates, designing the re-entry shield that would also not contaminate the samples, making the whole thing waterproof against seawater (not an easy thing in itself to do), and even the whole recovery operation would have added so many complexities to the project and mission that I don't think it would have been done.
Also, the number of samples that were returned would have been substantially reduced, presuming that the whole automated process of launch and reentry could have been done. Either that or the mission would have required a Delta 4 Heavy (just recently launched) or a Saturn V. This would have cost even more than a typical Shuttle mission, even accounting for training time for the manned mission segment, and potential could have risked proportionally just as many lives (accidents in space are not the only ways to die in the space program).
In short, this was a mission taylored to the Shuttle missions, and fit perfectly with the capabiities that the Space Shuttle has. As I said, this by itself certainly doesn't justify the cost of having the Shuttle, but it is a strong counter argument that the Shuttle is a worthless piece of hardware. It also goes on to prove that there is a need to have a space vehicle that can go up come back to the Earth in a reusable fashion with a general cargo bay that can haul up and down (with emphasis on down in this case) large quantities of bulk goods (measured in tons, not kilos or pounds). At the moment, only the U.S. Space Shuttle provides this capability.
Are there other ways to provide such a capability? Absolutely. It is also about time that NASA start to design and build reasonable alternatives, with congressional backing to see that they acutally get built. If NASA drags their heels, private companies may build this capability, but NASA shouldn't hold their breath waiting either. If such a vehicle is eventually built by NASA with U.S. Federal money, it should be made very plain that this is only for classified (i.e. Dept. of Defense) or government missions only.
The one mission that met this requirement that absolutely required a shuttle mission to bring a satellite out of orbit and land it on the Earth was with the long-term materials research satellite.
This was a special research satellite that was made up of about 40 different metal alloys and allowed to drift in LEO for about 6 years before it was finally retrieved by the Shuttle. It also had some other things it was testing to try and find what compounds worked best is a space environment, and what materials you should avoid. When it was brought back to the Earth, each "panel" was then sent through a bunch of chemical tests, put under a microscope, and otherwise examined to see what materials held out the best in LEO.
This mission simply could not have been done without the Shuttle. Period.
Now to suggest that this one mission justified the cost of the entire shuttle program, I would agree that is far fetched. But I did find a counter example to your argument and suggest there are legitimate uses for this sort of spacecraft capability. There are other legitimate uses as well that are similar to this sort of mission profile.
The #1 thing the Space Shuttle does that no other spacecraft in the world (besides Buran) can do is not only bring stuff up into orbit, but also bring substantial quantities (i.e. bulk goods and large containers) back to the earth safely without burning up.
The problem is that there are very few space missions where this is something that can be useful (at least so far), so NASA has to "invent" other missions for the shuttle to perform.
In the end when large scale passenger service from earth to orbit and back starts to occur, I'm certain it will have a configuration rather similar to the Shuttle. Hopefully those space vehicles will learn from the mistakes of the Shuttle and try to avoid them... especially some engineers who understand the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle and can get rid of much of the junk that requires a 6-month turn-around on each orbiter.
The purpose of a throttle is to control the amount of thrust that is expended during the flight. Keep in mind that when a rocket goes up, it is throwing out the bottom a considerable amount of mass.
The point here is that by the end of a stage, the acceleration of one of these rockets (solid or liquid fueled... it doesn't matter) can be quite high, and on ICBM's it can be as high as 20 G's or more. Sometimes a payload simply can't handle that sort of acceleration (like people, but some sattelites as well), so you need to drop the amount of thurst to lower the accleration rate.
This is a mission requirement, and when you design a space payload you also specify what the maximum acceleration will be (usually in m/s^2 but sometimes in different units). When the flight profile is calculated, the rocket will have pre-programmed intervals to scale back the thrust requirements. This makes life fun and interesting, and why rocket scientists get the big $$$.
The Space Shuttle's Main Engines have this feature, and it is even more important because of the human cargo, as well as bio research materials. I believe the flight profile of the shuttle is to maintain a maximum rate of about 4-5 G's. The Saturn V, by comparison, hit about 8-9 G's at the end of the 1st and 2nd stages.
One of the best examples of a P2P network that I havn't really seen done too well yet is a local distributed storage solution. The idea here is that you have some huge datastore (such as a file system or a database) where you want to put the data into the datastore and allow other individuals on the local network to be able to fish the data out.
The point here is that by going the P2P route rather than a fixed central server model, you both balance the network bandwith, particularly for "distant" nodes, and you allow the redundancy that the internet is so hyped over (you can nuke any node and the rest will compensate) but in practice is far from the truth. In theory you can still lose some data, but with a well built P2P network of this nature that could be minimized, and only seldom accessed data would be the most vunerable.
Another big plus of this is that not only does this type of storage system work well for limited bandwidth, you can also install more modest "almost thin terminals" into such a network that keeps only frequently accessed data locally, and other nodes can compensate with data storage elsewhere.
Unfortunately, I havn't seen any really good examples of this. Freenet comes close in theory, but even that has some ways to go to do this effectively.
The shuttle is relevant only because the author of these articles is also the pilot who flew the Columbia on her maden voyage with STS-1. That is correct, the very first shuttle flight.
This man is one serious pioneer, and rather than simply blathering about trying to get mankind out among the other planets in the solar system, he actually tried to so something about it. That NASA has been dinking around for the past 20 years since that flight and not done anything else is more about the raw incompentancy of NASA than the fact that this hombre has some serious balls to want to get on a shuttle when it was truly an untested spacecraft system.
BTW, I agree that we now know that the shuttle is not a good spacecraft to operate, but we didn't really know that back in 1980, and it is too bad that post Challenger something else wasn't followed up on. Columbia has sealed the fate of the rest of the shuttles, when by now even NASA acknowledges need to be eliminated from regular service. The question now is what should replace them?
If you are talking about Neanderthals and how they survived, you need to keep in mind that they went from mankind being isolated in a relatvely small geographic area to dispersing over practically the entire planet. By the time people got to North America, they were pretty adept at dealing with diverse environments. Some archeological evidence suggest a spread of permanent settlement by people throughout the Americas spread at the rate of about 1-4 km per year. When you think about it, that is quite remarkable, especially considering that as you move north & south you encounter substantially different climate zones. East & west migration is much easier to accomplish.
Even so, the point here is not just if you can have 0.01% of mankind survive a cataclysmic event, it is also to see just what other setbacks would happen if a major event occured.
The reason why mankind survived Mt. Visuvius or Krakatoa is not because people were not near those volcanoes when they erupted, but because people were elsewhere as well and could survive and re-colonize the area afterward. And we as a species have indeed done that in both areas since the respective eruptions.
They derive their authority and power from the United States Department of Commerce, who set them up after NSF-Net was dismantled. In short, they are a quasi-governmental agency like the Federal Reserve Board or the U.S. Postal Service, but with direct juristiction over the internet.
Of course, what can be granted can be taken away. At the same time, there is no ability to compete with them because of this grant of authority by the U.S. Federal Government.
Oh, and how this relates to other countries besides the USA... they are pretending that the USA knows what they are doing on how to govern the internet. Frankly I think the whole thing stinks, and when ICANN got rid of the at-large board members they finally acknowledged that the internet is run by greedy corporations who don't care about ordinary people.
No, I can be taxed and goverend by people who I don't elect, and often are even in a so-called democracy like the USA.
In this case, ICANN pretends to represent the ordinary internet users, and was chartered by the U.S. Department of Commerce to handle in a non-biased manner disputes over governance of the Internet. And this is governance, not just simply a company that you are buying a service from. Just who else is going to control the issuance of IP numbers and domain addresses? Is there an alternative that you know of?
And ICANN is trying to expand their power and authority over the internet in even more ways than simply this limited set of domains. In addition, they have at least over what they do control full legislative, executive, and even judicial control over internet governance. If you have a dispute over an internet domain, you go to ICANN, and they are the final authority over who gets the domain. You can't even appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
And yes, I am entitled to have fair access to community resources. And I should expect that these community resources, like frequency allocation for radio communications or port access for loading and unloading cargo, are in the realm of government authority. Allocation of IP addresses is no different. This is a scarace resource that needs regulation and ICANN is that body who does this.
In the case of ICANN, I even elected a reasonable representative, and frankly I think he did a damn good job representing my interests. His name was Karl Arbauch, and as far as I'm concerned he is still my representative at ICANN even if ICANN no longer recognizes his position as a member of their board. How ICANN removed elected representatives from their board speaks volumes over what they think of us poor schmucks who depend on using the internet on a day to day basis.
While I don't have the right to elect the people that run my ISP, I do have the right to set up my own ISP if I think my current ISP is full of BS. I can't set up an alternative to ICANN because it is a government-granted monopoly to internet governance. If I tried to set up my own "internetwork of computing devices", I could actually go to jail for even trying. I don't consider that to be something that is reasonable nor fair.
So in short, this is taxation without represntation, and ICANN needs to be eliminated. Hopefully I can convince elected government authorities that this is the case and be able to stop it.
Actually, the first electronic computer, the ENIAC, was a decimal (base-10) computer rather than a binary computer. It turns out that it creates many more hassles when you have to (in this case with a decimal computer) wire each number seperately. In other words, each number in the computing base has to have a seperate wire, or 10 wires for each digit.
With a binary circuit, you only need 1 wire, which is either on or off. And to make all of the numbers from 0 to 10, you only need five wires instead of ten. Really this is more than a mere convenience, but a real practical issue that would substantially affect the complexity of any computing machine that does not use binary calculations. Even with the Babbage machine, there is a substantial increase in complexity by using connections that were not binary. I'm certain that if mechanical computers were to continue from what Babbage had done instead of the development of electronic computers we have today, they still would have gone binary just due to the practical nature of how everything was interconnected.
Some "alternatives" to pure binary can include trits (trinary bits... made infamous with the programming language INTERCAL) where a single wire can have a positive, negative, or zero voltage. While this keeps the number of wires down, there are some practical engineering issues in trying to nail down detection circuits to keep the three states seperate, designing practical building blocks for trits can also be difficult. Also, maintaining a neutral zero voltage can be a royal pain in the behind when designing a circuit.
An alternative to the base-2 system is also the base-minus-2 number system. This really is just a reworked binary system and even there the computational logic is a little more complex, as there are two carries and two borrow bits to a simple adder circuit. Base-minus-2 is a good way to shake up the thinking of a digital logic design class, however.
No, it is a deliberate mangling of software and keeping users from even being able to run the software is not a good way to maintain customers. Copy protection that does not involve courts is just going to annoy legitimate users, not the people who are doing the cracking of the software. Going to court is going to deal with people who are the violators and abusing software developers.
I think you confuse legal copyright with artificial copy protection.
I agree that all copy protection schemes are really stuipd, with the end result screwing the customer more than it helps to keep a company profitable. Legitimate customers who have any ethics at all will buy software, even if it is GPL'd. People who don't care will pirate software no matter how much copy protection there is, with the more valuable pieces of software getting the most attention from software crackers. If you really need a piece of software, I'm sure you can buy it at a Beijing flea market for $5, regardless of how much the original company charged for the software or what copy protection schemes were on it.
You are also correct to complain about companies that go belly up and then you have no recourse to fix the computer that just caught fire because the sprinkler above the computer went off. Or a three-year-old stuck a butter knife into the CPU socket. While you may have a "license" for a single CPU (or equivalent), when the computer goes down and the company is no longer around, a critical piece of software goes down with the computer it was running on.
In terms of legal copyright protections, I do support law enforcement actions against blatant copyright violators, and in some ways I support in some weird perverted way the Business Software Alliance (mentioned in the article) putting the "Fear Of God(tm)" into business owners who feel they can ignore software copyright. I have yet to work for a business with multiple PCs that does not have some sort of pirated software, with sales and marketing people being some of the worst offenders of being able to understand copyright laws. Or at least trying to understand that it takes hard work to come up with computer software and the people that write it should somehow be compensated for their effort.