The thing about the "sound barrier" is that while there were things that were known to go faster than sound (bullets, whips, etc.) It was thought that making an airframe capable of going faster than sound would be a difficult if not impossible task. And aeronautical designs for supersonic aircraft are indeed quite a bit different than subsonic aircraft. The difficulty is pronounced enough that supersonic travel is now almost exclusively for the military, especially with the demise of the Concorde. Burt Rutan is the only hope that perhaps I can do a supersonic flight at the moment as a civilian.
This is most compared to Moore's Law, where new breakthroughs in CPU and computer technology take place despite seemingly impossible barriers to cross in trying to get circuits to smaller and smaller sizes.
In the case of the speed of light, there is some very hard scientific theory that suggests that going to superluminal speeds is not only difficult, but litterally impossible. And the more that Relativity gets challenged, the more it seems to get confirmed rather than refuted, which is the hallmark of a successful scientific theory. The "Sound Barrier" only was based on some measurements of a single variable (Air resistance as you approach the speed of sound) and was rather easy to refute. Obviously it was challenged.
The problem with people talking about going at superluminal speeds is that they think if one major physical obsticle can be overcome that more can be as well. Trust me, if you can design a device that could even communicate information at speeds faster than the speed of light I could make both of us multi-billionaires tomorrow. It would also allow Moore's Law to continue for the next several centuries if you could find it.
There are a few astronomical measurements that take place over the course of just a few months or years. Supernova in particular happen in just a matter of a few days, which is where they get their name: They appear in the sky as a "new" (Latin form is "Novo" or "Nova") star that wasn't visible before.
In 1987 a supernova was extensively sutidied in one of the Magenellic clouds (galaxies very close to our own that are so close that their apparent size takes up a significant portion of the southern hemesphere's sky). Previous sky survey's demonstrated that it was in the Red Dwarf stage of its life, and after the explosion a pulsar was found in the same physical position. That was pretty convincing evidence that at least that portion of stellar evolution is quite accurate, and can still be verified with current measurements.
Another major scientific measurement took place with the "Eagle Nebula", which is the one that has the really cool columns of gases and has been done as poster you can buy in Wal-Mart and put on T-Shirts. In this case over the course of just a few years you can see stars litterally form right out of the gasses of the nebula. These new stars demonstrate that they are right on the "Main Sequence" after their formation. This certainly was a major plus to confirming these theories.
There are some suspected stars that are in transition from Main Sequence to Red Giant, but that takes considerably longer to happen.
With some very recent sky surveys, there have also been some significant confirmation of these theories, if simply from the huge amount of data that simply confirms this information. Keep in mind that many of these theories started out simply as a way to try and come up with a classification system of any kind, and have evloved from there.
The spectral classification originally started out when a bunch of researchers at Harvard University put star names and coordinates on a bunch of 3" x 5" cards and based on the spectrum lines and measured brightness, they litterally dropped these cards into boxes labeled "A", "B", "C", ect. After some more research the boxes were rearranged by temperature to become "O","B","A","F","G","K","M","R","N","S" ("Oh, Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me") As can be seen, the original classification was very arbitrary, but based on formal measurements. Our sun is of type "G", and blue stars as type "O".
We know about spectral lines because we can do that in laboratories here on the Earth. Really quite cool to do as well, and each element puts out its own specrum. I'm sure you've seen a Neon sign with its pink glow, which is exactly what is done with other elements to identify their spectra as well. BTW, this spectra is also critical to understanding the atomic structure of each element, but that is another story to itself.
The distance measurements are calculated from steallar parallax as the base measurement. We know from several other measurements how far the Earth is away from the Sun, and when the Earth travels around the Sun, stars appear to move relative to each other. This is like taking two photographs a few feet apart and seeing stuff in the background at different angles. Doing this you can directly measure how far away something is from where you are at. This measurement is accurate to about 1000 light years with the Hubble Telescope. Other techniques try to approximate distances based on similar looking stars to ones that are close to us and assuming that stars next to those are probably about the same distance. Obviously that means even further distances are less accurate as you go further away from us. These distance measurements are IMHO very accurate, and their accuracy can be expressed precisely to a certain range of accuracy as well.
Stellar color is pretty easy, as you just have to have filters at different wavelengths when you take pictures of the stars. That is what gives the color to the photo in this article, and you can
There are a number of ways to do this. Perhaps the #1 way is through what is called a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, named after the two astronomers who came up with this method of classification.
There are two primary aspects that allow you to plot an individual star on this diagram: Its spectral color (litterally, what color you see the star as) This can be assigned a number as a specific peak color frequency. This also can be interpreted as the temperature of the "surface" of the star. The other axis is the absolute brightness of the star. This is the number of photons you can count in a given period of time relative to how far away it is. For measuring stars in a galaxy, distance measurements can pretty much assume that all of the stars are roughly the same distance away, thus simplifying this task. Close stars will obviously be brighter, but stars like Alpha Centari, an ordinary yellow star, are apparently as bright as Betelguese, a star almost 100 times further away.
Keep in mind that only until the Hubble telescope was able to resolve the individual stars in this galaxy, this study wasn't able to happen for this particular galaxy... which is why this is now news. Really a neat project on the whole.
The point here is that young stars fall onto what is called "The Main Sequence". These are stars like our sun that are still mostly converting Hydrogen to Helium as the primary source of nuclear energy. This relationship is quite well defined, and has been observed in not only the Milky Way Galaxy, but in other galaxies where individual stars have been able to be identified.
Stars that run out of Hydrogen fall into a very different pattern. Like I mentioned with Betelguese (in the constellation Orion), it is much further away but yet just as bright. Also, its color is more Red (in a clear rural sky you can even see this reddish color), which puts it outside of the Main Sequence. That is because (according to current theory) it has run out of Hydrogen and is now in the process of turning Helium into Carbon. This group of stars, known as "Red Giants" play a huge role in determining the age of a galaxy or other group of stars.
When stars finally run out of Helium, the rest of the elemental transmutation takes place rather quickly, or the fusion simply stops. Without going through the subsequent steps, the star eventually turns into a Super Nova (if there is enough stuff in the star to produce it) and leaves behind a white dwarf or neutron star (for really big stars... black holes are yet more stuff). A white dwarf is quite dim even for its distance, but yet its surface temperature is quite hot. These give yet another very distinctive plot on the HR Diagram.
So the whole point here is that you can measure the age of a group of stars based on the relative brightness of the stars in that group. Very large stars tend to live very short lifespans because they do a very efficient job of doing the fusion. Small stars (like Wolf 359) will be still doing the hydrogen fusion 20 billion years from now. Over time (and based on considerable observation examples... not just this galaxy in the article but also concrete parallax measurements of close stars to our own as well) you will see fewer and fewer stars on the very blue end of the HR diagram and more and more Red Dwarfs, with white dwarves showing up in increasing numbers as well.
One other critical tool for measurement is also trying to determine what elements are in the spectra of the stars. Different elements show up in stars and can be measured based on if they are absorbing or emitting light from the surface of the star. Mind you, this doesn't indicate much in terms of what is happening in the center of the star, but rather what is on the surface of the star. The current assumption is that the Universe started out with mainly Hydrogen and Helium, and only very small amounts of other elements. If you find large quantities of other elements in a star (like significant quantities of Iron on the sur
I know this is an old discussion, but I differ with your statement:
Patriotism is the belief that your country is the best simply because you were born in it.
I disagree. Many countries have a significant cultural heritage, and the countries that have survived more than a few year, or even a few mellenia have achieved some very significant accomplishments, and have some good reasons to honor and respect those who have gone before them. Also, if it weren't for those people who were there before (like your parents) you wouldn't be here now able to argue with me on/.
Many countries are more than just a name and a hunk of territory. There are also ideals and concepts that underlie the foundation of that country, and try to bring about changes that help to meet those ideals. There are many countries around the world that I greatly respect because of these ideals, like Switzerland, Israel, Egypt, and China. Obviously I could name others, but the point is there are usually defensable reasons to be proud of where you were born, of if you think your country sucks, try and find a country that will take you that you also agree with its ideals. That may also take converting to another religion, but that should also be expected if you are making that sort of transition and change in your life.
It's quid pro quo. If a couple 17-year olds get married in Utah, is it okay for Massachusetts not to recognize their marriage, which wasn't legal under Massachusetts law? Or to ignore a Utah marriage because it was engaged without a blood test?
That is an excellent question. Should a marriage be recognized in one state where it is illegal that is performed in another? Common practice at the moment suggests that yes it should be. I would argue that perhaps not. BTW, until 3 years ago, it was legal in Utah to enter into a marriage when you were 14 years old. I'm pretty sure that is statutory rape in Massachusetts, so would a married couple be arrested in that situation for engaging in normal marital activities? (BTW, the law was changed because no state legislator could ever think of allowing their 14 year old daughter to get married... this was an old law from the 1870's when Utah was still just a U.S. territory.)
In terms of copyright laws, there are defensable reasons in the USA to say "go to hell" to European concepts of copyright. When the original copyright clause of the U.S. Constitution was put in, it was in reaction to European law at the time, with specific prohibitions on the government from even being able to copyright anything. It was intended to be for a very limited time, meaning something that would expire during the term of the congressmen involved in office, much less during somebody's lifetime.
Still, if something has been copyrighted in another country, I don't see any reasons why mutual copyright treaties couldn't at least give the same copyright protection in the USA as if the copyright had been filed within the USA.
Charles Dickens wrote some very popular books, in English (obviously), that were widely published in the USA. Unfortunately at the time, English copyright was not recognized in the USA and was considered to be "public domain" by US law at the time. Particularly ironic was when some of the book publishers who sold Mr. Dickens books in the USA paid for a voyage to bring him to the USA on a book tour. This was they only "royalty" payment he ever got from sales of US books. In this case there would have been some "public good" to give incentives to Mr. Dickens to write another novel. He would have been a multi-millionaire just from U.S. sales of books back then.
I just find it offensive that the U.S. Constitution is being largely violated just to be able to "conform" to norms of copyright legislation in other countries, and I don't think the copyright terms are even reasonable either. This is the same sort of thing as the marriage laws, and for most of the practical applications of copyright, simply saying that copyright from elsewhere ought to be recognized as if it were written locally. Global copyright would not really be much of an issue then.
Don't get bogged down in the number. The point is that the U.S. Navy is one of the largest brown water navies that has ever been fielded, even with cutbacks due to the end of the Cold War.
I'm giving an approximation based on the fact that the U.S. Navy has to patrol what could be considered a similar number of object (islands, shoreline, seamounts, etc.). I don't know exactly what the mission requirements for a space navy would be in real life, as every space navy to date has been in science fiction rather than in real life. That is only speculation.
The point is, however, in order for enforce a soverignty claim and to be able to control the flow of "traffic" you will at some point have to "get some butts on the ground" and physically be present to control any sort of astronomical body. That will clearly require more than a single ship, and a fleet of dozens or hundreds is at least likely... just to keep "space pirates" from being a major nusance. Space is big, even if all you are doing is restricting yourself to a sphere inside of the orbit of Pluto with emphasis on the eclipitic plane (where over 90% of the solar system is located besides planets and the sun).
Some things that would make it a bit easier to track in space as opposed to a coastline is that you can spot things off at truly astronomical distances. A single military spacecraft could "patrol" a significant volume of space. Obviously we are also talking about some significant improvements to propulsion methods in interplanetary space than what we currently have, but of no doubt there will be a militarization of space with live space cadets running around and doing their stuff. The difficulties of a space navy would be trying to overcome the incredible distances if you are on a pursuit to "catch" another spacecraft and having effective weapons to disable "rogue" spaceships.
Also, what I'm trying to emphasis is that trying to shut down a rogue mining operation on Ceres or Apollo (just a couple of asteroids to name a few) would be near impossible to stop unless you have the military firepower to actually stop it. And what would keep Helium-3 from being "smuggled" back to the Earth somehow? That is a major mission (the stoppage of smuggling contraband like cocaine) of the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard at the moment in addition to many of their other duties.
Once significant numbers of people get into space, it will be impossible to keep track of what each and every one of them is doing. On the Earth, the only reason "Big Brother" can keep track of you is that you travel through "checkpoints" all of the time that can be monitored. In space, those checkpoints just aren't there, as it really is a frontier area at the moment. Don't worry about monopolies on resources in space, as there will be for the next several centuries plenty of access to space resources just for the taking of anybody just willing to get there in the first place.
If you are worried about lunar mining operations becoming the next DeBeers of the Helium-3 extraction, there really is nothing unique about the Moon itself. Any relatively large body without a sustainable atmosphere (sorry neither Mars nor Venus is a candidate) will have similar concentrations of Helium-3 in its soil, regardless of where it is found in the Solar System, and there are a couple hundred decent candidates in the Asteroid Belt alone, not to mention both Phobos and Deimos. That will put an absolute cap on what Lunar Miners can charge for their product in the long term.
It will be more expensive to get Helium-3 from one of the asteroids than from the Moon, but not significantly more so. And no single country will be capable of claiming and controlling all of the asteroids... there are too many of them and it would take a space navy 3x (or more) the size of the U.S. Navy, in terms of capital warships and space "sailors". I don't see that happening any time soon.
The real control issue is going to be the entry/exit process to and from the Earth, and that will indeed be under control of terrestrial governments, although some enterprising South Pacific nations may take advantage of their status and make it easier for people to do space travel from their islands. In short, there is no reason to worry about a monopoly due to interests in space for at least fusion projects.
You can bet that Boeing, McDonell-Douglas, and every aerospace company out there would be building a cheap affordable private commercial spaceflight vehicle. If the science was feasible. They don't believe it is. The private sector has spoken.
Major corporations are the the realm that will create new and innovative ideas. It is against their corporate charter in some cases (they have to maximize profits... and dumping billions of $ into questionable projects simply can't be justified), or they are devoting their resources into something they know will give a more short-term payoff. In particular, BP is more likely to dump more money and resources into doing more oil exploration in the North Sea or even off-shore of the Bahamas. It is quite unlikely to get into solar energy satellites or even cold fusion simply because their research staff is more oriented toward oil production.
In the case of Cold Fusion, it has become so much herasy in the scientific community that even funding a single researcher with a very modest budget to even just read up on new ideas for Cold Fusion (much less run a lab) would discredit the entire research team. Simply put, you will never see any major energy companies doing significant research in Cold Fusion until some new startups begin to make some serious headway and can at least prove conclusively that Cold Fusion is easy, repeatable, verifiable, and scaleable to generate energy in sufficient quantities to do something like operate a lawn mower or automobile.
While there are many Cold Fusion researchers are trying to say that the phenomena is real and that some sort of fusion is taking place, only the real crackpots are the ones saying that Cold Fusion can be scalable to the point of running a car. Even the original Pons & Fleishman experiments were only suggesting that they could heat up water only a few degrees.... not bring it to a boiling point and sustain that for a period of hours or days with the resulting steam powering real energy consuming devices like a steam turbine or a sawmill. If a realistic proposal to do just that were ever made by a Cold Fusion researcher (and verified), you had better believe that the oil companies would be all over it.
At most the only real practical application for Cold Fusion is to have a device that can be turned on and off electronically that also is a source of neutrons and neutrinos. Even that can be done much more effectively with a Farnsworth Fusor, and is much more easily verified that way as well. (There are already a few commercial products being sold with Fusor technology for just that purpose.) Having a radiation source that doesn't have toxic waste disposal issues has many very useful applications.
I find it interesting that we complain the US is isolationist and then reject this attempt to conform to world policy.
I find this incredibly short-sighted, and a wrong policy to persue in general, to "conform" to world opinion on a subject, particularly for what is in the most part a very local issue. I even resent having laws to conform to conditions in New York City when I live in rural Utah. Or marriage laws in Massachusetts applying here as well.
Frankly, I don't mind an isolationist view for the USA, in the sense that we can go about our business, and the rest of the world can go nuke themselves for all we care. I don't mind wider cultural sharing (i.e. learning more about other peoples and places) or the legitimate exchange of scientific knowledge. I also admit that natural resources are unevenly distributed around the world, and that we need reasonable methods for sharing those resources through trading networks.
The problem comes from trying to get these trading networks to mesh together, which is why the WTO is proving to be almost as important for legislation as Parliment or the U.S. Congress. I'm not overly happy about the concept, and I wish that more thought went into just how these international treaty organizations (NATO, WTO, GATT, UN, etc.) related to ordinary citizens. At least the EU is acknowledging that ordinary citizens to have a stake in what they are up to and giving an avenue for how ordinary Europeans are feeling about a subject. I don't see that happening at the WTO talks or the Berne Convention (which is more directly responsible for copyright laws).
if the courts are not meant to be a check against Congress' passing of laws then why are there so many court cases dealing with laws going through the courts?
The U.S. Constitution never mentions any specific check and balance that the Judiciary is supposed to have against Congress. There is an implied check against the Presidency (remember, the founding fathers were used to an oppressive monarchy and other tyrants), where the courts can rule against the prosecution. They can even say that the executive branch has gone too far and has exceeded its authority... and often do so.
The ability to declare laws "unconstitutional" is more along the lines of the U.S. Supreme Court simply saying "we refuse to honor and enforce this law, and prohibit any lower court from doing so either... and here is why: the constitution says you can't make a law that does covers this subject". The law is still in effect, is is just that if a police department (law enforcement agency, whatever) wanted to enforce it, throwing up the unconstitutional card makes their case fall apart immediately.
The problem comes from judges that mistake this very limited authority to ignore laws and instead try to create new laws entirely. A good honest judge will go more along the lines of "take this issue up with Congress (or state legislature) in their next session" if the law doesn't cover what the case is about. No matter how much you may hate the act, or how immoral you think the person being prosecuted is, if the law doesn't cover what they did it, they should go free to do whatever they want to do.
I will say that judges also try to determine if a law is "just", and I concur that the Judiciary has gone too far when they do that. Several clauses in the U.S. Constitution declare "congress shall make no law", as well as in several state constititions. If a law is made on that subject, it should not be enforced. Very simple to interpret. If a law is not just ("All left-handed people are to be executed if they write with their left hand"), that is a matter of what the Legislative Branch should be dealing with, not the courts. The Executive Branch can even determine that a law is silly to enforce, and choose not to do so. That however does create some problems (like the Texas Sodomy laws --- SCOTUS screwed up there).
The other major function of courts is to act as referees in a dispute between two people. This is where courts really step into a lot of problems, because this is also where the judiciary meets politics. There are tort laws and ways to resolve contractural disputes. In the case of copyright and patent law, there are implied contracts that also have the force of formal legislation to back them up. In some cases, like copyright laws, it can turn from a simple contract dispute (you copied the software... no I didn't) to a more formal criminal proceeding. This is also where money piles on high and deep, because each judge has their own opinion on the matter, and the law is often not as clear cut as the Legislative Branch wanted it, or was even left deliberately ambiguous.
I find that a highly suspicious statement to make. While I would agree that re-creating the Saturn V would cost the same as developing any other new manned vehicle, and there certainly have been some substantial improvements in spaceflight since the 1960's when most Saturn V's were made, to simply rule out adoption of the design principles of the Saturn V is indeed being close minded.
The point about the Saturn V is that it was a man-rated space vehicle capable of lifting a tremendous amount of stuff into orbit.... a lunar expedition vehicle and support equipment for a manned landing at that, or even the launch of Skylab. If we could do it in the 1960's, we certainly should be capable of putting together a Saturn V using 21st Century technology. And from what I've seen you could put together a production line of Saturn V's for a price tag that competes very favorably with the Space Shuttle.... and even have the same crew capacity + extra mission payload. Even the Saturn I rockets were a worthy launch platform.
I admit, though, that the requisite assembly lines and technology infrastructure to make a Saturn V would have to be totally recreated if it or something like it were ever developed, and I think there are several other rocket companies (like SpaceX) that will eventually get to the lifting capacity of the Saturn V, if a rocket that size is ever needed. The Saturn V was killed because there were no other mission requirements that required that much mass into orbit.
Yes, I will admit that it is a simplification to call Delphi to be the same as Turbo Pascal, but the point I was trying to make is that the core compiler is largely the same, with even the same bugs and quirky language details... clearly Delphi was at some point bootstraped from Turbo Pascal at some point in its lineage and the Delphi development team was comfortable with the Turbo Pascal IDE environment. To the point that Delphi still allows you to use the same keystroke commands from the TP IDE (that don't break compatability with Windows in general... some old control things don't work the same due to "standard" Windows keystroke sequences).
ClearScreen and GotoXY do make sense for a "console" application, and in that regard it is too bad that Borland didn't provide 32-bit compatable units that would be source compatable with some of the earlier Turbo Pascal programs.
BTW, I have written a message loop in Delphi (a rather unusual circumstance that was unique to that particular project), but on the whole it is the TApplication object that deals with the actual message loop. It is there, and if you have a Professional version of Delphi (with the source code), you can recompile with debug information the message loop and see down and dirty how the messages get parsed by the VCL environment. Actually it is quite facinating to watch by stepping through the code at that low level.
I can imagine how to do Win apps without a form designer, as I've done it, and yes it is a royal pain in the rear end. On the other hand, even when Delphi 1 was released it wasn't that novel of a concept. There were some good features, and frankly I think Borland "got it" with what the API for GUI environments should be like.... doing some significant improvements over Microsoft. The fact that there are "non-windowed" controls that work at all are quite amazing (where Delphi handles the window messaging directly rather than dealing with the Microsoft Windows messages... including rendering).
It is also real interesting to see how much of the Delphi interface has been adopted into Visual Studio... more than Microsoft will openly admit.
For me, email is not instant. It is also (more?) susceptible to spam. I use AIM (grudgingly) and have never had a problem with spam.
You have been lucky. I find the spam from AIM to be even more annyoing than with the e-mail variety. If somehow your AIM handle gets known to spammers (many of the same ways apply here as the e-mail account name can get spammers) you get a near constant stream of messages like:
"Hey sexy dood: See me naked at this website: http://www.noclothes.com/"
"WANT A MILLION DOLLARS? I REPRESENT A CLIENT FROM AFRICA AND NEED A TRUSTWORTH PERSON TO HELP ME OUT."
"Stop getting spammed by AIM. Let me show you how."
or from the truly pathetic:
"I'm lonly. Do you want to talk?"
I am not kidding on any of the above either. They have all happened to me with AIM, and unless you kill your account, once you start to get one of those spam messages it gets worse and worse until you finally turn the bleeping thing off.
It is slightly easier to track down and kick off AIM spammers, but professional spammers can still get away without geting into any real trouble from ISPs or even the law, just like e-mail spam.
I would have to say I agree with this sentiment. I do often "turn the ringer off" with my telephone, and I deliberately don't have an instant messenger on because unless it is somebody I really want to talk to, I am not interested. I have been "spammed" by "instant messages" including IRC far more than I have had people I know that really needed to get ahold of me.
Also, if I am in the middle of trying to resolve a current task (I'm a software developer), sometimes it will take me about 1/2 hour to get back to the point I was at before I was interrupted. I also find as I'm getting older this is even more of a burden than when I was younger.
E-mail in all its flavors (not specifically SMTP) has a very valuable role in that you can send more complete ideas and get your point across... sometimes even better than if you were having a formal conversation because you don't get interrupted.
The one major complaint I have about some people reading e-mail, especially those who use "instant messenger" more often, is that they only read about one or two points in the e-mail and ignore the rest. I like to have one large communication and write practically an epistle on the subject, explaining the topic in depth and sometimes taking as long as a couple of hours to compose a single e-mail. Unfortunately if that person is your boss reading the e-mail, they miss the point buried in the seventh paragraph that may end up sinking the whole company.
I like snail mail as well (even more so in some ways), but the problem there is that by the time the physical piece of paper has gone through the collection and distribution system (i.e. Post Office) the information is more a historical document than something important to know about. On the positive side of snail mail, you can put far more emotion into the way you've composed the letter, even if you use a word processor. Some of that you can include in e-mail messages through HTML, but it doesn't seem to be as spontaneous, and even the way you sign your signature on a physical letter says volumes about what you think of the person you are sending the letter to... something that usually doesn't come across on e-mail either.
I love the promise of Lazarus, and I certainly hope that it actually works out eventually. The #1 problem of Lazarus is that they are contantly playing catchup to Borland, which isn't exactly a quick moving target, but Lazarus is still mostly hobbiests. #Develop has been in development for a much shorter period of time and has seem considerable more progress. If Borland does go under, Lazarus will be a good place to run to if you want to keep some sort of Object Pascal going.
Borland did make a half-hearted attempt at a "Trial Version" of Delphi a while back. Basically a stripped down version that had some size constraint and other annoying features, but it would compile full source code. I Believe it was a trial version of Delphi 3.
It certainly could have been thrown onto a book, but Borland had the restrictions on it so tight that you could only download it from their website, and even then you felt like you were signing away your firstborn to the devil after going through the survey questions to get it.
I agree: Borland messed up a very successful business model they had with even their earlier compilers and should have marketed their products better.
Keep in mind that Delphi 1 was pretty much Turbo Pascal 9 repackaged and a nice GUI development environment thrown on. The compiler was pretty much the same, and most program written for Turbo Pascal can compile just fine in Delphi. The only major problem I have with that now is that the specialty units in Turbo Pascal like DOS, CRT, Graph, ect. aren't available in Delphi, but a determined hacker could easily put something together for Delphi and make full source code compatability to work... including compiler directives and switches.
Also, there are an enormous number of libraries for Pascal as well. Just type your current need into Google and add Delphi or Pascal to the search (like PNG Source Delphi) and you will find many pre-written components for Delphi, many with source code and much that is even GPL'd. While admittedly not as much as C++, it isn't as obscure as say FORTH or Component COBOL.
I would say that SharpDevelop is one of the best Free-As-In-Beer environments for you to learn how to write software in C#. Download the ECMA docs for the specification and try to write a few programs, and it works out pretty well. Certainly much better than trying to write something with a text editor and trying to compile by command-line when everything else you may have is done through a GUI environment. Get the C# How-to books if you don't have access to them anyway.
I happen to be a Delphi developer as well, and my #1 complaint about Sharp Develop is that they use the Visual Studio environment as the model for how user interaction should take place. It isn't bad, but moving between Delphi and #Develop can be a bit of a paradyme shift that is uncomfortable. For those who are VS fans, it would be a much more familiar environment (like the windowing stuff and location of help files, etc.)
The GUI end is a little bit clunky, but it is getting better. The first time I tried #Develop the menu editor was so buggy that it crashed the package. It has been showing significant improvement over time, and is remarkably stable now for some fairly serious GUI development. They bootstrapped the development with Visual Studio, but I believe that #Develop is self-compiling now (the editor can be edited with itself).
The part of getting it to work with Mono is a big deal, and the only real reason that it doesn't self-compile in Mono is because Mono lacks the GUI support necessary to get it to work. This is being worked on, and with #Develop getting stable there is now a larger push to get it working in Mono on Windows (and yes, Linux too). It would be terrific if you could get true cross-platform development going for a GPL'ed GUI development environment.
I have no doubt that the people that actually settle Mars will be at least half intelligent if not more so than the people reading this article or even responding here on/. Because of the nature of the settlement of Mars, the people who will be living on Mars will be environmentally concious to a degree that people here on the Earth can hardly imagine, so I think this will be a non-issue anyway.
The time when this will become a major issue is when the population of Mars starts to get larger than 10 million people (more or less by a couple of orders of magnatude either way), in which case they will certainly be capable of making war against the Earth if they really cared to anyway...
I would imagine that places like the area of Utopia Planatia where the location of the Viking 1 lander is at will be of significant historical importance, and will be left alone for the most part, just like an area close by where I live is left pretty much as it was 150 years ago from when the original Trans-Continental Railroad was built across America... and is a National Monument run by the U.S. Department of Interior.
A typical kitchen...even a kitchen for a commercial service like a 4 star restaurant, has equipment and supplies from multiple vendors, and distribution channels at least as complex if not more so than what you would see from computer vendors. And the items in that kitchen have to be delivered in a very time-critical nature as well (like fresh lobster served in Kansas or Montana).
A typical chef doesn't have to deal with worrying about wheither the egg beater or frying pan is going to have an incompatable power source, or that the cooking oil for the fried egg rolls won't also work for onion rings. There is quite a bit of standardization in that industry, and most of the technical issues have been established for quite some time...even on "new technologies" for that part of the industry.
In this case you cite, you have a major datacenter with multiple databases and multiple purposes who are being sold often as stand-alone tools or worse yet have a sembalence of "cross-platform" compatability but takes a full-time software engineer to really make that happen...at the customer level. I can see a data center becoming as easy as connecting a consumer-level home entertainment system (also an example of standards from multiple vendors working together). It just takes time to figure out just what should be the "standards" between the various databases and how the various vendors are at an advantage to stick with the standardizing protocols and connections.
The problem is that you got companies like Microsoft that want to exploit standards for their own ends, but make everything incompatable for anybody else. I could mention other companies, but the point here is that for a short-term profit gain, some companies deliberately try to make their products totally incompatable with anything else.
The problem with trying to compare the software industry to other endeavors of human experience is that in the realm of the computer/electronics industry that most software developers are dealing with, you are near the pinacle of dealing with abstraction of complex systems. While there may be other very complex systems that on a large scale can compare to some computer networks or CPU designs, computer science is the practice of dealing with abstractions on many levels, sometimes simultaneously.
Indeed, electronic state machine digitial computing devices (also called computers) have proven so successful, with the software abstraction dealing with the various levels of abstraction, that they are used in the controlling of other complex systems, from air traffic management, urban water system management, freeway traffic monitoring, and law enforcement dispatching. You've seen them, and they are out there.
Some very talented engineers have done a surprisingly good job of simplifying the tasks and reducing the abstractions to the point that all you need to do for the most part is plug it in and watch the gizmo do its thing. What this article in the Economist seems to be doing is complaining that the job isn't finished, and that complexities in setting up a computer system for some project is more difficult than it should be. That is primarily due to the fact that the author is using products that don't comply with standards (a real problem if standards don't exist yet for a certain concept or technology) or they are using the wrong tool for the job, like using a hammer to put in a few screws. Sure, it will work, but it is aggrivating and sometimes takes quite a bit longer to get the job done, and can damage things around it as a side effect. How many software/electronic gizmos out there do you know get used like that?
While I'm willing to acknowledge that I don't know everything there is to know about the management and organization of complex systems, I would be more inclined to get the opinion on such a subject from a computer programmer than from a plumber.
More importantly, the law would have specified in more direct and clear language exactly what government agency has direct control and authority over spaceflight as launched from U.S. soil and through U.S. airspace.
Other agencies, like the FCC, FBI, and even NASA have all been wanting to get their hands into the cookie jar, and with the bill it is very obvious that only the FAA can run the show except for some very minor issues (like the FCC controlling telemetry frequencies for spacecraft). For that this is a very big deal.
Also, it forces the FAA to acknowledge that people will be requesting permits for private commercial spaceflight, and that the U.S. Congress is expecting these permits to be issued unless there is a very serious and grave reason for them not to be issued. At the moment it is more like you may be issued a permit for spaceflight, if and only if you have greased your local congressmen, prayed to the proper gods, and just plain dumb luck has come down on you like the fairy godmother from Cinderella. Basically, the permit is there only to suggest it is possible in theory, but in actual practice it may never get issued.
I've got to challenge that statement. I have told my wife and co-workers often that when I am pounding on a keyboard or even moving a mouse around that I am not programming then.
You are only "programming" when you are throwing the nerf basketball or thrashing a whiteboard out with the latest concepts of what you think the design ought to be like. In other words, when you are giving formal instructions to a computer you have (or should have) the design already worked out and at that point you are simply trying to transfer the model of what you think the software should be like into the computer.
GUI designs, and even just plain User Interface issues can sometimes bog a project down, but with a good form designer like most decent GUI compilers offer nowdays, this at most takes up 5% of all of my development time. 50% of my development time is pounding the wall with a baseball, bowling, playing golf, or even downing a few beers. It is trying to make the concepts fit, and far too often that is occuring for me when I'm at home with my wife and kids....time supposedly "off the clock" from the employer.
The problem is that most non-engineering types (accountants, salesmen, CEOs, and unfortunately too many engineering managers) think that if you aren't pounding on the keyboard and writing the next KLOC (thousand lines of code), then you havn't been productive. Sometimes I will spend an entire 10-hour work day writing just three lines of code, especially if it is to do a bug fix. The trick is to know what exact three lines of code you need to write, and where it will do the least damage to the rest of the software. Try to explain that to a CEO, and no wonder they think programmers are just wasting their money.
Still, I've got to admit that your statement about "Real programmers only type" (paraphrased and redone) does ring some truth. Of course, I could also get ugly and suggest that only real programmers know how to program a CPU using toggle switches loading instructions into CPU registers by hand...who needs such newfangled pieces of junk like a keyboard anyway?
Still, one reason to keep pushing along here is that you already know the opinions of several key congressmen and senators regarding a given bill, and there has already been considerable compromise regarding the wording etc. Generally if a bill was already debated in a previous session of congress, the reintroduced bill will fly through committee, unless it is a very hot topic like partial birth abortions or gay rights legislation. In the case of this space regulation bill it is merely considered a low priority to get on the docket, and frankly many members of congress are still trying to form their opinions on the subject.
In this regard, if you are an American, please write to your congressional representatives and let them know your opinions on this subject, even if they are newly elected and havn't been sworn into office yet. I would say in particular you need to let freshmen congressmen for the next session know that this could become a major political issue in the next few years, and they could be a part of it "from the beginning".
One of the problems that has happened with space law is that there are a whole lot of egos right now going along and trying to introduce bills trying to do the same thing. I counted at least 4 different bills in the House and 3 in the Senate (totally independent laws but covering the same thing) regarding space law. One of the problems currently is that all of these bills are getting hammered together into one piece of legislation, and that also takes time. By moving into the next session of congress, this commercial space regulation bill could be streamlined, all of the supporters unified into one single bill, and get it moving through committee. Also, it is less likely to get sabotaged like the last bill by staffers if it is only one piece of legislation.
I have no doubt that if the current bill under discussion, HR 5382, doesn't get passed in this current session of congress, that a reintroduced bill will come up for a vote by the full House and Senate in the next session of congress and more than likely end up on the President's desk for his signature.
In addition, while this is critical for future development of commercial activities in space, the AST has plenty of authority from previous legislation to take care of what commercial space endeavors are going to do in the next couple of years. The current uncertainty is more about what happens after that, which affect investment opportunities and some Wall Street types from dumping money into commercial spaceflight.
While the libraries themselves are GPL'd, it wouldn't take much to reverse-engineer them to make the libraries available under a BSD license.
I personnally think these server companies take the GPL a little too far, but I'm willing to at least try and give them a little goodwill by buying their server products for commercial purposes. Which is the whole point anyway.
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The thing about the "sound barrier" is that while there were things that were known to go faster than sound (bullets, whips, etc.) It was thought that making an airframe capable of going faster than sound would be a difficult if not impossible task. And aeronautical designs for supersonic aircraft are indeed quite a bit different than subsonic aircraft. The difficulty is pronounced enough that supersonic travel is now almost exclusively for the military, especially with the demise of the Concorde. Burt Rutan is the only hope that perhaps I can do a supersonic flight at the moment as a civilian.
This is most compared to Moore's Law, where new breakthroughs in CPU and computer technology take place despite seemingly impossible barriers to cross in trying to get circuits to smaller and smaller sizes.
In the case of the speed of light, there is some very hard scientific theory that suggests that going to superluminal speeds is not only difficult, but litterally impossible. And the more that Relativity gets challenged, the more it seems to get confirmed rather than refuted, which is the hallmark of a successful scientific theory. The "Sound Barrier" only was based on some measurements of a single variable (Air resistance as you approach the speed of sound) and was rather easy to refute. Obviously it was challenged.
The problem with people talking about going at superluminal speeds is that they think if one major physical obsticle can be overcome that more can be as well. Trust me, if you can design a device that could even communicate information at speeds faster than the speed of light I could make both of us multi-billionaires tomorrow. It would also allow Moore's Law to continue for the next several centuries if you could find it.
There are a few astronomical measurements that take place over the course of just a few months or years. Supernova in particular happen in just a matter of a few days, which is where they get their name: They appear in the sky as a "new" (Latin form is "Novo" or "Nova") star that wasn't visible before.
In 1987 a supernova was extensively sutidied in one of the Magenellic clouds (galaxies very close to our own that are so close that their apparent size takes up a significant portion of the southern hemesphere's sky). Previous sky survey's demonstrated that it was in the Red Dwarf stage of its life, and after the explosion a pulsar was found in the same physical position. That was pretty convincing evidence that at least that portion of stellar evolution is quite accurate, and can still be verified with current measurements.
Another major scientific measurement took place with the "Eagle Nebula", which is the one that has the really cool columns of gases and has been done as poster you can buy in Wal-Mart and put on T-Shirts. In this case over the course of just a few years you can see stars litterally form right out of the gasses of the nebula. These new stars demonstrate that they are right on the "Main Sequence" after their formation. This certainly was a major plus to confirming these theories.
There are some suspected stars that are in transition from Main Sequence to Red Giant, but that takes considerably longer to happen.
With some very recent sky surveys, there have also been some significant confirmation of these theories, if simply from the huge amount of data that simply confirms this information. Keep in mind that many of these theories started out simply as a way to try and come up with a classification system of any kind, and have evloved from there.
The spectral classification originally started out when a bunch of researchers at Harvard University put star names and coordinates on a bunch of 3" x 5" cards and based on the spectrum lines and measured brightness, they litterally dropped these cards into boxes labeled "A", "B", "C", ect. After some more research the boxes were rearranged by temperature to become "O","B","A","F","G","K","M","R","N","S" ("Oh, Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me") As can be seen, the original classification was very arbitrary, but based on formal measurements. Our sun is of type "G", and blue stars as type "O".
We know about spectral lines because we can do that in laboratories here on the Earth. Really quite cool to do as well, and each element puts out its own specrum. I'm sure you've seen a Neon sign with its pink glow, which is exactly what is done with other elements to identify their spectra as well. BTW, this spectra is also critical to understanding the atomic structure of each element, but that is another story to itself.
The distance measurements are calculated from steallar parallax as the base measurement. We know from several other measurements how far the Earth is away from the Sun, and when the Earth travels around the Sun, stars appear to move relative to each other. This is like taking two photographs a few feet apart and seeing stuff in the background at different angles. Doing this you can directly measure how far away something is from where you are at. This measurement is accurate to about 1000 light years with the Hubble Telescope. Other techniques try to approximate distances based on similar looking stars to ones that are close to us and assuming that stars next to those are probably about the same distance. Obviously that means even further distances are less accurate as you go further away from us. These distance measurements are IMHO very accurate, and their accuracy can be expressed precisely to a certain range of accuracy as well.
Stellar color is pretty easy, as you just have to have filters at different wavelengths when you take pictures of the stars. That is what gives the color to the photo in this article, and you can
There are a number of ways to do this. Perhaps the #1 way is through what is called a
Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, named after the two astronomers who came up with this method of classification.
There are two primary aspects that allow you to plot an individual star on this diagram: Its spectral color (litterally, what color you see the star as) This can be assigned a number as a specific peak color frequency. This also can be interpreted as the temperature of the "surface" of the star. The other axis is the absolute brightness of the star. This is the number of photons you can count in a given period of time relative to how far away it is. For measuring stars in a galaxy, distance measurements can pretty much assume that all of the stars are roughly the same distance away, thus simplifying this task. Close stars will obviously be brighter, but stars like Alpha Centari, an ordinary yellow star, are apparently as bright as Betelguese, a star almost 100 times further away.
Keep in mind that only until the Hubble telescope was able to resolve the individual stars in this galaxy, this study wasn't able to happen for this particular galaxy... which is why this is now news. Really a neat project on the whole.
The point here is that young stars fall onto what is called "The Main Sequence". These are stars like our sun that are still mostly converting Hydrogen to Helium as the primary source of nuclear energy. This relationship is quite well defined, and has been observed in not only the Milky Way Galaxy, but in other galaxies where individual stars have been able to be identified.
Stars that run out of Hydrogen fall into a very different pattern. Like I mentioned with Betelguese (in the constellation Orion), it is much further away but yet just as bright. Also, its color is more Red (in a clear rural sky you can even see this reddish color), which puts it outside of the Main Sequence. That is because (according to current theory) it has run out of Hydrogen and is now in the process of turning Helium into Carbon. This group of stars, known as "Red Giants" play a huge role in determining the age of a galaxy or other group of stars.
When stars finally run out of Helium, the rest of the elemental transmutation takes place rather quickly, or the fusion simply stops. Without going through the subsequent steps, the star eventually turns into a Super Nova (if there is enough stuff in the star to produce it) and leaves behind a white dwarf or neutron star (for really big stars... black holes are yet more stuff). A white dwarf is quite dim even for its distance, but yet its surface temperature is quite hot. These give yet another very distinctive plot on the HR Diagram.
So the whole point here is that you can measure the age of a group of stars based on the relative brightness of the stars in that group. Very large stars tend to live very short lifespans because they do a very efficient job of doing the fusion. Small stars (like Wolf 359) will be still doing the hydrogen fusion 20 billion years from now. Over time (and based on considerable observation examples... not just this galaxy in the article but also concrete parallax measurements of close stars to our own as well) you will see fewer and fewer stars on the very blue end of the HR diagram and more and more Red Dwarfs, with white dwarves showing up in increasing numbers as well.
One other critical tool for measurement is also trying to determine what elements are in the spectra of the stars. Different elements show up in stars and can be measured based on if they are absorbing or emitting light from the surface of the star. Mind you, this doesn't indicate much in terms of what is happening in the center of the star, but rather what is on the surface of the star. The current assumption is that the Universe started out with mainly Hydrogen and Helium, and only very small amounts of other elements. If you find large quantities of other elements in a star (like significant quantities of Iron on the sur
I know this is an old discussion, but I differ with your statement:
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Patriotism is the belief that your country is the best simply because you were born in it.
I disagree. Many countries have a significant cultural heritage, and the countries that have survived more than a few year, or even a few mellenia have achieved some very significant accomplishments, and have some good reasons to honor and respect those who have gone before them. Also, if it weren't for those people who were there before (like your parents) you wouldn't be here now able to argue with me on
Many countries are more than just a name and a hunk of territory. There are also ideals and concepts that underlie the foundation of that country, and try to bring about changes that help to meet those ideals. There are many countries around the world that I greatly respect because of these ideals, like Switzerland, Israel, Egypt, and China. Obviously I could name others, but the point is there are usually defensable reasons to be proud of where you were born, of if you think your country sucks, try and find a country that will take you that you also agree with its ideals. That may also take converting to another religion, but that should also be expected if you are making that sort of transition and change in your life.
That is an excellent question. Should a marriage be recognized in one state where it is illegal that is performed in another? Common practice at the moment suggests that yes it should be. I would argue that perhaps not. BTW, until 3 years ago, it was legal in Utah to enter into a marriage when you were 14 years old. I'm pretty sure that is statutory rape in Massachusetts, so would a married couple be arrested in that situation for engaging in normal marital activities? (BTW, the law was changed because no state legislator could ever think of allowing their 14 year old daughter to get married... this was an old law from the 1870's when Utah was still just a U.S. territory.)
In terms of copyright laws, there are defensable reasons in the USA to say "go to hell" to European concepts of copyright. When the original copyright clause of the U.S. Constitution was put in, it was in reaction to European law at the time, with specific prohibitions on the government from even being able to copyright anything. It was intended to be for a very limited time, meaning something that would expire during the term of the congressmen involved in office, much less during somebody's lifetime.
Still, if something has been copyrighted in another country, I don't see any reasons why mutual copyright treaties couldn't at least give the same copyright protection in the USA as if the copyright had been filed within the USA.
Charles Dickens wrote some very popular books, in English (obviously), that were widely published in the USA. Unfortunately at the time, English copyright was not recognized in the USA and was considered to be "public domain" by US law at the time. Particularly ironic was when some of the book publishers who sold Mr. Dickens books in the USA paid for a voyage to bring him to the USA on a book tour. This was they only "royalty" payment he ever got from sales of US books. In this case there would have been some "public good" to give incentives to Mr. Dickens to write another novel. He would have been a multi-millionaire just from U.S. sales of books back then.
I just find it offensive that the U.S. Constitution is being largely violated just to be able to "conform" to norms of copyright legislation in other countries, and I don't think the copyright terms are even reasonable either. This is the same sort of thing as the marriage laws, and for most of the practical applications of copyright, simply saying that copyright from elsewhere ought to be recognized as if it were written locally. Global copyright would not really be much of an issue then.
Don't get bogged down in the number. The point is that the U.S. Navy is one of the largest brown water navies that has ever been fielded, even with cutbacks due to the end of the Cold War.
I'm giving an approximation based on the fact that the U.S. Navy has to patrol what could be considered a similar number of object (islands, shoreline, seamounts, etc.). I don't know exactly what the mission requirements for a space navy would be in real life, as every space navy to date has been in science fiction rather than in real life. That is only speculation.
The point is, however, in order for enforce a soverignty claim and to be able to control the flow of "traffic" you will at some point have to "get some butts on the ground" and physically be present to control any sort of astronomical body. That will clearly require more than a single ship, and a fleet of dozens or hundreds is at least likely... just to keep "space pirates" from being a major nusance. Space is big, even if all you are doing is restricting yourself to a sphere inside of the orbit of Pluto with emphasis on the eclipitic plane (where over 90% of the solar system is located besides planets and the sun).
Some things that would make it a bit easier to track in space as opposed to a coastline is that you can spot things off at truly astronomical distances. A single military spacecraft could "patrol" a significant volume of space. Obviously we are also talking about some significant improvements to propulsion methods in interplanetary space than what we currently have, but of no doubt there will be a militarization of space with live space cadets running around and doing their stuff. The difficulties of a space navy would be trying to overcome the incredible distances if you are on a pursuit to "catch" another spacecraft and having effective weapons to disable "rogue" spaceships.
Also, what I'm trying to emphasis is that trying to shut down a rogue mining operation on Ceres or Apollo (just a couple of asteroids to name a few) would be near impossible to stop unless you have the military firepower to actually stop it. And what would keep Helium-3 from being "smuggled" back to the Earth somehow? That is a major mission (the stoppage of smuggling contraband like cocaine) of the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard at the moment in addition to many of their other duties.
Once significant numbers of people get into space, it will be impossible to keep track of what each and every one of them is doing. On the Earth, the only reason "Big Brother" can keep track of you is that you travel through "checkpoints" all of the time that can be monitored. In space, those checkpoints just aren't there, as it really is a frontier area at the moment. Don't worry about monopolies on resources in space, as there will be for the next several centuries plenty of access to space resources just for the taking of anybody just willing to get there in the first place.
If you are worried about lunar mining operations becoming the next DeBeers of the Helium-3 extraction, there really is nothing unique about the Moon itself. Any relatively large body without a sustainable atmosphere (sorry neither Mars nor Venus is a candidate) will have similar concentrations of Helium-3 in its soil, regardless of where it is found in the Solar System, and there are a couple hundred decent candidates in the Asteroid Belt alone, not to mention both Phobos and Deimos. That will put an absolute cap on what Lunar Miners can charge for their product in the long term.
It will be more expensive to get Helium-3 from one of the asteroids than from the Moon, but not significantly more so. And no single country will be capable of claiming and controlling all of the asteroids... there are too many of them and it would take a space navy 3x (or more) the size of the U.S. Navy, in terms of capital warships and space "sailors". I don't see that happening any time soon.
The real control issue is going to be the entry/exit process to and from the Earth, and that will indeed be under control of terrestrial governments, although some enterprising South Pacific nations may take advantage of their status and make it easier for people to do space travel from their islands. In short, there is no reason to worry about a monopoly due to interests in space for at least fusion projects.
You can bet that Boeing, McDonell-Douglas, and every aerospace company out there would be building a cheap affordable private commercial spaceflight vehicle. If the science was feasible. They don't believe it is. The private sector has spoken.
Major corporations are the the realm that will create new and innovative ideas. It is against their corporate charter in some cases (they have to maximize profits... and dumping billions of $ into questionable projects simply can't be justified), or they are devoting their resources into something they know will give a more short-term payoff. In particular, BP is more likely to dump more money and resources into doing more oil exploration in the North Sea or even off-shore of the Bahamas. It is quite unlikely to get into solar energy satellites or even cold fusion simply because their research staff is more oriented toward oil production.
In the case of Cold Fusion, it has become so much herasy in the scientific community that even funding a single researcher with a very modest budget to even just read up on new ideas for Cold Fusion (much less run a lab) would discredit the entire research team. Simply put, you will never see any major energy companies doing significant research in Cold Fusion until some new startups begin to make some serious headway and can at least prove conclusively that Cold Fusion is easy, repeatable, verifiable, and scaleable to generate energy in sufficient quantities to do something like operate a lawn mower or automobile.
While there are many Cold Fusion researchers are trying to say that the phenomena is real and that some sort of fusion is taking place, only the real crackpots are the ones saying that Cold Fusion can be scalable to the point of running a car. Even the original Pons & Fleishman experiments were only suggesting that they could heat up water only a few degrees.... not bring it to a boiling point and sustain that for a period of hours or days with the resulting steam powering real energy consuming devices like a steam turbine or a sawmill. If a realistic proposal to do just that were ever made by a Cold Fusion researcher (and verified), you had better believe that the oil companies would be all over it.
At most the only real practical application for Cold Fusion is to have a device that can be turned on and off electronically that also is a source of neutrons and neutrinos. Even that can be done much more effectively with a Farnsworth Fusor, and is much more easily verified that way as well. (There are already a few commercial products being sold with Fusor technology for just that purpose.) Having a radiation source that doesn't have toxic waste disposal issues has many very useful applications.
I find this incredibly short-sighted, and a wrong policy to persue in general, to "conform" to world opinion on a subject, particularly for what is in the most part a very local issue. I even resent having laws to conform to conditions in New York City when I live in rural Utah. Or marriage laws in Massachusetts applying here as well.
Frankly, I don't mind an isolationist view for the USA, in the sense that we can go about our business, and the rest of the world can go nuke themselves for all we care. I don't mind wider cultural sharing (i.e. learning more about other peoples and places) or the legitimate exchange of scientific knowledge. I also admit that natural resources are unevenly distributed around the world, and that we need reasonable methods for sharing those resources through trading networks.
The problem comes from trying to get these trading networks to mesh together, which is why the WTO is proving to be almost as important for legislation as Parliment or the U.S. Congress. I'm not overly happy about the concept, and I wish that more thought went into just how these international treaty organizations (NATO, WTO, GATT, UN, etc.) related to ordinary citizens. At least the EU is acknowledging that ordinary citizens to have a stake in what they are up to and giving an avenue for how ordinary Europeans are feeling about a subject. I don't see that happening at the WTO talks or the Berne Convention (which is more directly responsible for copyright laws).
The U.S. Constitution never mentions any specific check and balance that the Judiciary is supposed to have against Congress. There is an implied check against the Presidency (remember, the founding fathers were used to an oppressive monarchy and other tyrants), where the courts can rule against the prosecution. They can even say that the executive branch has gone too far and has exceeded its authority... and often do so.
The ability to declare laws "unconstitutional" is more along the lines of the U.S. Supreme Court simply saying "we refuse to honor and enforce this law, and prohibit any lower court from doing so either... and here is why: the constitution says you can't make a law that does covers this subject". The law is still in effect, is is just that if a police department (law enforcement agency, whatever) wanted to enforce it, throwing up the unconstitutional card makes their case fall apart immediately.
The problem comes from judges that mistake this very limited authority to ignore laws and instead try to create new laws entirely. A good honest judge will go more along the lines of "take this issue up with Congress (or state legislature) in their next session" if the law doesn't cover what the case is about. No matter how much you may hate the act, or how immoral you think the person being prosecuted is, if the law doesn't cover what they did it, they should go free to do whatever they want to do.
I will say that judges also try to determine if a law is "just", and I concur that the Judiciary has gone too far when they do that. Several clauses in the U.S. Constitution declare "congress shall make no law", as well as in several state constititions. If a law is made on that subject, it should not be enforced. Very simple to interpret. If a law is not just ("All left-handed people are to be executed if they write with their left hand"), that is a matter of what the Legislative Branch should be dealing with, not the courts. The Executive Branch can even determine that a law is silly to enforce, and choose not to do so. That however does create some problems (like the Texas Sodomy laws --- SCOTUS screwed up there).
The other major function of courts is to act as referees in a dispute between two people. This is where courts really step into a lot of problems, because this is also where the judiciary meets politics. There are tort laws and ways to resolve contractural disputes. In the case of copyright and patent law, there are implied contracts that also have the force of formal legislation to back them up. In some cases, like copyright laws, it can turn from a simple contract dispute (you copied the software... no I didn't) to a more formal criminal proceeding. This is also where money piles on high and deep, because each judge has their own opinion on the matter, and the law is often not as clear cut as the Legislative Branch wanted it, or was even left deliberately ambiguous.
I find that a highly suspicious statement to make. While I would agree that re-creating the Saturn V would cost the same as developing any other new manned vehicle, and there certainly have been some substantial improvements in spaceflight since the 1960's when most Saturn V's were made, to simply rule out adoption of the design principles of the Saturn V is indeed being close minded.
The point about the Saturn V is that it was a man-rated space vehicle capable of lifting a tremendous amount of stuff into orbit.... a lunar expedition vehicle and support equipment for a manned landing at that, or even the launch of Skylab. If we could do it in the 1960's, we certainly should be capable of putting together a Saturn V using 21st Century technology. And from what I've seen you could put together a production line of Saturn V's for a price tag that competes very favorably with the Space Shuttle.... and even have the same crew capacity + extra mission payload. Even the Saturn I rockets were a worthy launch platform.
I admit, though, that the requisite assembly lines and technology infrastructure to make a Saturn V would have to be totally recreated if it or something like it were ever developed, and I think there are several other rocket companies (like SpaceX) that will eventually get to the lifting capacity of the Saturn V, if a rocket that size is ever needed. The Saturn V was killed because there were no other mission requirements that required that much mass into orbit.
Yes, I will admit that it is a simplification to call Delphi to be the same as Turbo Pascal, but the point I was trying to make is that the core compiler is largely the same, with even the same bugs and quirky language details... clearly Delphi was at some point bootstraped from Turbo Pascal at some point in its lineage and the Delphi development team was comfortable with the Turbo Pascal IDE environment. To the point that Delphi still allows you to use the same keystroke commands from the TP IDE (that don't break compatability with Windows in general... some old control things don't work the same due to "standard" Windows keystroke sequences).
ClearScreen and GotoXY do make sense for a "console" application, and in that regard it is too bad that Borland didn't provide 32-bit compatable units that would be source compatable with some of the earlier Turbo Pascal programs.
BTW, I have written a message loop in Delphi (a rather unusual circumstance that was unique to that particular project), but on the whole it is the TApplication object that deals with the actual message loop. It is there, and if you have a Professional version of Delphi (with the source code), you can recompile with debug information the message loop and see down and dirty how the messages get parsed by the VCL environment. Actually it is quite facinating to watch by stepping through the code at that low level.
I can imagine how to do Win apps without a form designer, as I've done it, and yes it is a royal pain in the rear end. On the other hand, even when Delphi 1 was released it wasn't that novel of a concept. There were some good features, and frankly I think Borland "got it" with what the API for GUI environments should be like.... doing some significant improvements over Microsoft. The fact that there are "non-windowed" controls that work at all are quite amazing (where Delphi handles the window messaging directly rather than dealing with the Microsoft Windows messages... including rendering).
It is also real interesting to see how much of the Delphi interface has been adopted into Visual Studio... more than Microsoft will openly admit.
You have been lucky. I find the spam from AIM to be even more annyoing than with the e-mail variety. If somehow your AIM handle gets known to spammers (many of the same ways apply here as the e-mail account name can get spammers) you get a near constant stream of messages like:
"Hey sexy dood: See me naked at this website: http://www.noclothes.com/"
"WANT A MILLION DOLLARS? I REPRESENT A CLIENT FROM AFRICA AND NEED A TRUSTWORTH PERSON TO HELP ME OUT."
"Stop getting spammed by AIM. Let me show you how."
or from the truly pathetic:
"I'm lonly. Do you want to talk?"
I am not kidding on any of the above either. They have all happened to me with AIM, and unless you kill your account, once you start to get one of those spam messages it gets worse and worse until you finally turn the bleeping thing off.
It is slightly easier to track down and kick off AIM spammers, but professional spammers can still get away without geting into any real trouble from ISPs or even the law, just like e-mail spam.
I would have to say I agree with this sentiment. I do often "turn the ringer off" with my telephone, and I deliberately don't have an instant messenger on because unless it is somebody I really want to talk to, I am not interested. I have been "spammed" by "instant messages" including IRC far more than I have had people I know that really needed to get ahold of me.
Also, if I am in the middle of trying to resolve a current task (I'm a software developer), sometimes it will take me about 1/2 hour to get back to the point I was at before I was interrupted. I also find as I'm getting older this is even more of a burden than when I was younger.
E-mail in all its flavors (not specifically SMTP) has a very valuable role in that you can send more complete ideas and get your point across... sometimes even better than if you were having a formal conversation because you don't get interrupted.
The one major complaint I have about some people reading e-mail, especially those who use "instant messenger" more often, is that they only read about one or two points in the e-mail and ignore the rest. I like to have one large communication and write practically an epistle on the subject, explaining the topic in depth and sometimes taking as long as a couple of hours to compose a single e-mail. Unfortunately if that person is your boss reading the e-mail, they miss the point buried in the seventh paragraph that may end up sinking the whole company.
I like snail mail as well (even more so in some ways), but the problem there is that by the time the physical piece of paper has gone through the collection and distribution system (i.e. Post Office) the information is more a historical document than something important to know about. On the positive side of snail mail, you can put far more emotion into the way you've composed the letter, even if you use a word processor. Some of that you can include in e-mail messages through HTML, but it doesn't seem to be as spontaneous, and even the way you sign your signature on a physical letter says volumes about what you think of the person you are sending the letter to... something that usually doesn't come across on e-mail either.
I love the promise of Lazarus, and I certainly hope that it actually works out eventually. The #1 problem of Lazarus is that they are contantly playing catchup to Borland, which isn't exactly a quick moving target, but Lazarus is still mostly hobbiests. #Develop has been in development for a much shorter period of time and has seem considerable more progress. If Borland does go under, Lazarus will be a good place to run to if you want to keep some sort of Object Pascal going.
Borland did make a half-hearted attempt at a "Trial Version" of Delphi a while back. Basically a stripped down version that had some size constraint and other annoying features, but it would compile full source code. I Believe it was a trial version of Delphi 3.
It certainly could have been thrown onto a book, but Borland had the restrictions on it so tight that you could only download it from their website, and even then you felt like you were signing away your firstborn to the devil after going through the survey questions to get it.
I agree: Borland messed up a very successful business model they had with even their earlier compilers and should have marketed their products better.
Keep in mind that Delphi 1 was pretty much Turbo Pascal 9 repackaged and a nice GUI development environment thrown on. The compiler was pretty much the same, and most program written for Turbo Pascal can compile just fine in Delphi. The only major problem I have with that now is that the specialty units in Turbo Pascal like DOS, CRT, Graph, ect. aren't available in Delphi, but a determined hacker could easily put something together for Delphi and make full source code compatability to work... including compiler directives and switches.
Also, there are an enormous number of libraries for Pascal as well. Just type your current need into Google and add Delphi or Pascal to the search (like PNG Source Delphi) and you will find many pre-written components for Delphi, many with source code and much that is even GPL'd. While admittedly not as much as C++, it isn't as obscure as say FORTH or Component COBOL.
I would say that SharpDevelop is one of the best Free-As-In-Beer environments for you to learn how to write software in C#. Download the ECMA docs for the specification and try to write a few programs, and it works out pretty well. Certainly much better than trying to write something with a text editor and trying to compile by command-line when everything else you may have is done through a GUI environment. Get the C# How-to books if you don't have access to them anyway.
I happen to be a Delphi developer as well, and my #1 complaint about Sharp Develop is that they use the Visual Studio environment as the model for how user interaction should take place. It isn't bad, but moving between Delphi and #Develop can be a bit of a paradyme shift that is uncomfortable. For those who are VS fans, it would be a much more familiar environment (like the windowing stuff and location of help files, etc.)
The GUI end is a little bit clunky, but it is getting better. The first time I tried #Develop the menu editor was so buggy that it crashed the package. It has been showing significant improvement over time, and is remarkably stable now for some fairly serious GUI development. They bootstrapped the development with Visual Studio, but I believe that #Develop is self-compiling now (the editor can be edited with itself).
The part of getting it to work with Mono is a big deal, and the only real reason that it doesn't self-compile in Mono is because Mono lacks the GUI support necessary to get it to work. This is being worked on, and with #Develop getting stable there is now a larger push to get it working in Mono on Windows (and yes, Linux too). It would be terrific if you could get true cross-platform development going for a GPL'ed GUI development environment.
Amen Brother!
/. Because of the nature of the settlement of Mars, the people who will be living on Mars will be environmentally concious to a degree that people here on the Earth can hardly imagine, so I think this will be a non-issue anyway.
I have no doubt that the people that actually settle Mars will be at least half intelligent if not more so than the people reading this article or even responding here on
The time when this will become a major issue is when the population of Mars starts to get larger than 10 million people (more or less by a couple of orders of magnatude either way), in which case they will certainly be capable of making war against the Earth if they really cared to anyway...
I would imagine that places like the area of Utopia Planatia where the location of the Viking 1 lander is at will be of significant historical importance, and will be left alone for the most part, just like an area close by where I live is left pretty much as it was 150 years ago from when the original Trans-Continental Railroad was built across America... and is a National Monument run by the U.S. Department of Interior.
A typical kitchen...even a kitchen for a commercial service like a 4 star restaurant, has equipment and supplies from multiple vendors, and distribution channels at least as complex if not more so than what you would see from computer vendors. And the items in that kitchen have to be delivered in a very time-critical nature as well (like fresh lobster served in Kansas or Montana).
A typical chef doesn't have to deal with worrying about wheither the egg beater or frying pan is going to have an incompatable power source, or that the cooking oil for the fried egg rolls won't also work for onion rings. There is quite a bit of standardization in that industry, and most of the technical issues have been established for quite some time...even on "new technologies" for that part of the industry.
In this case you cite, you have a major datacenter with multiple databases and multiple purposes who are being sold often as stand-alone tools or worse yet have a sembalence of "cross-platform" compatability but takes a full-time software engineer to really make that happen...at the customer level. I can see a data center becoming as easy as connecting a consumer-level home entertainment system (also an example of standards from multiple vendors working together). It just takes time to figure out just what should be the "standards" between the various databases and how the various vendors are at an advantage to stick with the standardizing protocols and connections.
The problem is that you got companies like Microsoft that want to exploit standards for their own ends, but make everything incompatable for anybody else. I could mention other companies, but the point here is that for a short-term profit gain, some companies deliberately try to make their products totally incompatable with anything else.
The problem with trying to compare the software industry to other endeavors of human experience is that in the realm of the computer/electronics industry that most software developers are dealing with, you are near the pinacle of dealing with abstraction of complex systems. While there may be other very complex systems that on a large scale can compare to some computer networks or CPU designs, computer science is the practice of dealing with abstractions on many levels, sometimes simultaneously.
Indeed, electronic state machine digitial computing devices (also called computers) have proven so successful, with the software abstraction dealing with the various levels of abstraction, that they are used in the controlling of other complex systems, from air traffic management, urban water system management, freeway traffic monitoring, and law enforcement dispatching. You've seen them, and they are out there.
Some very talented engineers have done a surprisingly good job of simplifying the tasks and reducing the abstractions to the point that all you need to do for the most part is plug it in and watch the gizmo do its thing. What this article in the Economist seems to be doing is complaining that the job isn't finished, and that complexities in setting up a computer system for some project is more difficult than it should be. That is primarily due to the fact that the author is using products that don't comply with standards (a real problem if standards don't exist yet for a certain concept or technology) or they are using the wrong tool for the job, like using a hammer to put in a few screws. Sure, it will work, but it is aggrivating and sometimes takes quite a bit longer to get the job done, and can damage things around it as a side effect. How many software/electronic gizmos out there do you know get used like that?
While I'm willing to acknowledge that I don't know everything there is to know about the management and organization of complex systems, I would be more inclined to get the opinion on such a subject from a computer programmer than from a plumber.
More importantly, the law would have specified in more direct and clear language exactly what government agency has direct control and authority over spaceflight as launched from U.S. soil and through U.S. airspace.
Other agencies, like the FCC, FBI, and even NASA have all been wanting to get their hands into the cookie jar, and with the bill it is very obvious that only the FAA can run the show except for some very minor issues (like the FCC controlling telemetry frequencies for spacecraft). For that this is a very big deal.
Also, it forces the FAA to acknowledge that people will be requesting permits for private commercial spaceflight, and that the U.S. Congress is expecting these permits to be issued unless there is a very serious and grave reason for them not to be issued. At the moment it is more like you may be issued a permit for spaceflight, if and only if you have greased your local congressmen, prayed to the proper gods, and just plain dumb luck has come down on you like the fairy godmother from Cinderella. Basically, the permit is there only to suggest it is possible in theory, but in actual practice it may never get issued.
I've got to challenge that statement. I have told my wife and co-workers often that when I am pounding on a keyboard or even moving a mouse around that I am not programming then.
You are only "programming" when you are throwing the nerf basketball or thrashing a whiteboard out with the latest concepts of what you think the design ought to be like. In other words, when you are giving formal instructions to a computer you have (or should have) the design already worked out and at that point you are simply trying to transfer the model of what you think the software should be like into the computer.
GUI designs, and even just plain User Interface issues can sometimes bog a project down, but with a good form designer like most decent GUI compilers offer nowdays, this at most takes up 5% of all of my development time. 50% of my development time is pounding the wall with a baseball, bowling, playing golf, or even downing a few beers. It is trying to make the concepts fit, and far too often that is occuring for me when I'm at home with my wife and kids....time supposedly "off the clock" from the employer.
The problem is that most non-engineering types (accountants, salesmen, CEOs, and unfortunately too many engineering managers) think that if you aren't pounding on the keyboard and writing the next KLOC (thousand lines of code), then you havn't been productive. Sometimes I will spend an entire 10-hour work day writing just three lines of code, especially if it is to do a bug fix. The trick is to know what exact three lines of code you need to write, and where it will do the least damage to the rest of the software. Try to explain that to a CEO, and no wonder they think programmers are just wasting their money.
Still, I've got to admit that your statement about "Real programmers only type" (paraphrased and redone) does ring some truth. Of course, I could also get ugly and suggest that only real programmers know how to program a CPU using toggle switches loading instructions into CPU registers by hand...who needs such newfangled pieces of junk like a keyboard anyway?
Still, one reason to keep pushing along here is that you already know the opinions of several key congressmen and senators regarding a given bill, and there has already been considerable compromise regarding the wording etc. Generally if a bill was already debated in a previous session of congress, the reintroduced bill will fly through committee, unless it is a very hot topic like partial birth abortions or gay rights legislation. In the case of this space regulation bill it is merely considered a low priority to get on the docket, and frankly many members of congress are still trying to form their opinions on the subject.
In this regard, if you are an American, please write to your congressional representatives and let them know your opinions on this subject, even if they are newly elected and havn't been sworn into office yet. I would say in particular you need to let freshmen congressmen for the next session know that this could become a major political issue in the next few years, and they could be a part of it "from the beginning".
One of the problems that has happened with space law is that there are a whole lot of egos right now going along and trying to introduce bills trying to do the same thing. I counted at least 4 different bills in the House and 3 in the Senate (totally independent laws but covering the same thing) regarding space law. One of the problems currently is that all of these bills are getting hammered together into one piece of legislation, and that also takes time. By moving into the next session of congress, this commercial space regulation bill could be streamlined, all of the supporters unified into one single bill, and get it moving through committee. Also, it is less likely to get sabotaged like the last bill by staffers if it is only one piece of legislation.
I have no doubt that if the current bill under discussion, HR 5382, doesn't get passed in this current session of congress, that a reintroduced bill will come up for a vote by the full House and Senate in the next session of congress and more than likely end up on the President's desk for his signature.
In addition, while this is critical for future development of commercial activities in space, the AST has plenty of authority from previous legislation to take care of what commercial space endeavors are going to do in the next couple of years. The current uncertainty is more about what happens after that, which affect investment opportunities and some Wall Street types from dumping money into commercial spaceflight.
While the libraries themselves are GPL'd, it wouldn't take much to reverse-engineer them to make the libraries available under a BSD license.
I personnally think these server companies take the GPL a little too far, but I'm willing to at least try and give them a little goodwill by buying their server products for commercial purposes. Which is the whole point anyway.