I would have to agree that it is not really much of a breakthrough what they have done here. You are, however, quite mistaken on quite a bit here.
You claim that there is a difference between RGB and CMY colors, and you totally miss what is going on. the problem here is that you are interpreting pigments vs. phosphors as the same thing and totally miss that they are doing two totally different things, and that has nothing to do with each other.
The Hexachrome printing system has been in use for many years. If you want to see what the printing industry has been doing for many years that is similar to this, look up Hexachrome. Better yet, get ahold of something actually printed using this system. There are some promotional brochures around made by Pantone that show this off with the same image done by both methods, and it blows away the feeble attempt done on the web site listed above.
Where you make the mistake of RGB vs. CMY is that the two are just colors slightly offset in frequency from one another. Combinations of colors from either system can be used to "mimic" the primary colors of the other one, but in fact they are specific frequencies that fall on the EM frequency from near infared to near ultraviolet. Trying to get something that reproduces a specific color as perceived by your eye is a neat trick, and usually it can't be done although it can often come quite close using just a simple RGB color coordinate system.
Where pigmets break down is that they have to be made from some mineral, and tend to take on "earth tones" with even a very good pigment. The vibrancy and brilliance has nothing to do with the color coordinates, but with the quality of the pigment to re-radiate a given frequency of light. In fact most pigments (printer ink dyes, ect.) re-radiate almost all wavelengths in the visible light spectrum, just some better than others. Adding colors just adds extra pigments to blend the colors closer to the hue that you were trying for.
Radiative color systems (like a movie projector or computer monitor) can usually "tune" the color emitters much better to a much more narrow frequency of light in the EM band, although even the best of these still emit light along almost the entire EM band. This gets down into quantum physics and electron/photon interactions, but the fact is that a given phosphor can emit at a certain frequency, as long as you get a good phosphor. Usually however, even then a phosphor will have energy release frequencies that are beyond just one line in the visible light EM band, and there are impurities in any manufacturing process which will also modify the quality of the light produced by a phosphor. Yes, cinema uses pigments as well, and that gets back to this whole issue, where pigments have limitations just like phosphors.
I would dare you though, if you want to see something amazing, to open your mind just a little bit and try to see what adding extra colors might do to the over all quality of an image. Particularly if somebody gets a good true violet or deep red (I don't have a name for this color, but somewhere between fire-engine red and just beyond in infared), as well as something between red and green (probabaly a good yellow), that would be impressive. It is too bad that this group simply chose to use more traditional Cyan and Magenta as the colors, making people like you and many others here on/. confused regarding pigment vs. phosphor issues.
One big problem that you would encounter with an expanded color pallet (this is more than simply gamut) is simply getting content for that format. Almost everything to date is done with RGB or CMY(K), or for video YUV (totally different yet). Hexcolor systems like the one proposed with this article are going to need good encoding/scanning equipment to be able to identify and pull out the colors properly. As mentioned elsewhere, and I agree with some of the other posters here on this point
There is quite a bit of arguing going on regarding expanding the color space to see a higher quality image. This is very similar to arguments regarding Color vs. B&W Television from an era in the past (or the same said about Color vs. B&W movies).
Ideally, if you could, you would want to have a pixel that you could "tune" to a specific frequency and intensity, giving you a full range of colors from near infared to light just into ultraviolet.
To give an idea of what you could see from a system like this, go see a rainbow (a real one, not just a picture), and try to look at the blue/violet edge. This color, true violet, is something that you could never see on the best monitor, unless you have pixels or phosphors that will emit this color of light. No matter how hard you try to mix the RGB pallet, you will always end up with a washed out magenta trying to capture this color and will fail.
Indeed, I think this is exactly where this group is going to fail. Adding Yellow, Magenta, and Cyan will help fill the middle of spectrum, but will not improve the ends where current technologies don't cover the EM band of visible light at all.
Rather than trying to talk about the XYZ color coordinates, instead you need to think of the light you see as a two-dimensional graph with two axes, frequency on the horizontal and intensity along the vertical (just to "standardize" the format). Each "color" would have a different graph on this sort of diagram. When you are working with each color in a color space, you need to think of them being the same as the slider buttons on a sound equilzer, or a tone generator that has hundreds of sliders to "tune" to a given frequency. In this respect there is no difference between light frequencies and audio frequencies, other than you ear can "hear" a much larger range of frequencies than your eye can distinguish visible light frequencies.
The whole problem is that moving from that ideal pixel that could create a random "graph" of a color in the EM visible light spectrum, you instead have to deal with light emitters (or absorbers for print material) that have a very rough bandwidth limits to makes something close to that graph.
What is killing me in this reply is that I need to add graphs and diagrams to fully explain this, and I hope that you can understand what I'm discussing without them, unfortunately. This is just a limitation of/.
If you could get something close to that ideal pixel, with a more full spectrum view of a stored image and then compare it to an ordinary RGB image on a comparable device of the same brightness, the difference would be like listening to music on AM Radio vs. a audio CD. Until you see the difference you wouldn't know what you were missing. Also, some people perceive color differently than others, with the rods and cones (they do work together for color perception, even though the work they do is slightly different) of each person picking up slightly different frequencies better than others. People with tetra-chromatic eyes (there are some people with this ability to see 4 colors...usually women) would spot this even quicker than us mere mortals. "Color blind" people would be as impressed with this system as tone deaf people are with good music.
I would disagree here. While you could do some fancy mathmatics and push image compression, it would still require a full 8-bits per color, or more depth for even better resolution, if you were to actually use it in practice. At some point you would have to fully decompress the pixel to something that would take at least 48 bits or more.
The real trick is trying to decide what to do with the remaining 8-bits for a decent word space. Usually alpha channel is thrown in as the 4th byte for an RGB triplet giving 32 bits... usually something easy to manipulate with most system. With six colors and one alpha channel, you would end up with 56 bits, a very awkward number for computers. 64 bits is going to be a common "pixel" size even with this system, so what do you do with those remaining bits? Interesting question.
Your eyes are much more sensitive to green and red (as well as yellow and to a lesser extent magenta), which with some good coding schemes you might want to increase the bit depth on those colors to give better saturation. Mind you this is just the pixel color encoding scheme, not what actually gets displayed. I could digress some more here, but there are other tricks that can and are used to encode color information.
While it might be overdue, it is certainly something that can be planned for, and won't happen immediately.
The short-term predictive capabilities for volcanologists is getting pretty good. Events such as the eruption of Mt. St. Helens or Mt. Penetubo in the Phillipenes were extreamely accurate, and gave several days notice before they erupted. I would imagine that the same could be said about Yellowstone... even more so because so much is done to study the region on a geological basis.
The problem is that shutting down larger institutions, such as a military base or a city can take some time...witness the current efforts in Florida in anticipation of some Hurricanes that are approaching, and they have even dealt with Hurricanes there in the past. Some people have to, unfortunately, stand guard even if the environment is approaching something close to hell, just like the guards at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier choose to stay at their post. Some people may and will die simply for that reason in a disaster, but you don't have to lose everybody, or even a sizable minority.
The real question for a Yellowstone eruption would be, where would a safe place be?
While the damage to the USA would be huge, it could be dealt with, and in fact be quite benefitial in the long run as well. Volcanic ash, once treated and organic matter (aka manure) added, can be quite fertile for growing food. Damage to the cities downwind would be a little nastier, just like the damage that Tacoma had after Mt. St. Helens' eruption. Areas close to Yellowstone would be damaged quite a bit, but for the most part there aren't any major cities nearby. (Jackson Hole doesn't qualify as one of the top 100 cities in terms of population in the USA, nor does Cody, Wyoming).
Owing to the fact that I live within 600 miles of Yellowstone, this is more than passing interest. That would be a spetacular eruption if it really was that big. It also shows that ordinary human activity is insignificant compared to the destructive forces of nature, as I doubt the entire combined world-wide nuclear arsenals could cause an explosion of that magnitude.
While I'm not totally dismissing issues regarding space flight between stars, the fact is that you can travel between stars within human lifetimes. Right now, however, our technology is sufficient to travel between planets, and there is quite a bit of real estate out there we can get to that is essentially "virgin" territory where we don't need to go to another star system. This is going to be an issue in about 400-500 years when the solar system is starting to fill up with human settlements.
While I hope the first interstellar space probe happen in my lifetime, I'm not holding my breath.
Still, even assuming lightspeed travel, the entire Milky Way could be settled by humans in less than 1 million years, an eyeblink compared to the age of the Universe.
I don't want to belabor this point, but at least in theory patents are intended for inventions, not discoveries. The distinction between the two is very fuzzy at times, especially in regards to patenting chemicals.
The patent system is broke anyway, so detailing exceptions and fine points is just describing how bad it really is.
To have something like Star Trek where several spacefaring nations simultaneously arise and carve out competing empires is going to be even less likely. Imagine a race that had a 2 million year head start over us in settling the planets in our galaxy. Somehow I don't see us having the technological ability to even compete, much less even be an equal. The same goes for us if we explore even just the Milky Way. If we travel 10,000 light years to find a planet who is technologically at the Bronze Age (building pyramids and basically like Egypt when it was "THE" major political power on the Earth), do they have a chance against us after we have developed interstellar travel capabilities?
All of this has been pointed out by people like Sagan and Hawking. While there may be intelligent lifeforms other than mankind on another planet, the likelyhood of us actually finding a species that can deal with abstract symbols and advanced toolmaking is quite unlikely. If you had come to the Earth 5 million years ago (short time compared to the age of the universe), all you would have found are some very primitive humans, or even just chimpanzees that roamed open savannahs. Certainly not a technological civilization.
I would be very surprised if we found something like the Klingon empire, or even just the Kzinti. Alien races make wonderful science fiction, but I don't see how they can be found.
Where I am voting we are still using the punch card ballot, and to be honest they are working just fine. I even got to play with some sample test ballots and agree with the conclusion of the county recorder, that hanging chads and incomplete ballots are a sign of voting fraud, not incompetent voters.
I'm not sure where you get the $5000 per machine, however. I can get systems that are good enough for voting for about $500, including keyboard, monitor, and NIC for a LAN if you want to simplify printing costs. A printer good enough for ballot preparation would be about $150, and like I said it could be handled in a manner that only one would be required per voting precinct. Compared to mechanical voting machines (fairly common prior to 1970), the price is very similar. As far as the scanner, it could even be done at a central location, often only one or a few per county.
As far as incomplete marks, erasures, and overvotes, you are completely dismissing the issues. I have worked with optical scanner equipment in terms of having to write the software, and it is fraught with all kinds of issues that you are openly dismissing here. Admittedly this was to be used only for college class tests (like midterms and finals), but the technology is identical to what you are saying here. Routinely it gets about a 2% error even on stuff unimportant like a history final, and frequently an entire test sheet has to be rejected because the scanner can't read it. For elections, the standard much necessarily be considerably higher.
How do you know for certain that the ballot has been correctly scanned? Did you see a computer monitor to verify that the marks were correct? Are you sure that when it gets scanned it will give the same results if scanned next week during a recount? Some states don't allow votes to be scanned immediately by law, so the ballots, even optical scanned ballots must be kept in a locked box until after the election is over. While you might be totally sure about your own ballot, what about Mrs. Rose O'Grady, your 95 year old next door neighbor who shuffles down to the voting precinct at.5 mph and complains that the pencil isn't sharp enough and keeps missing the ballot altogether. Sure, you can have an assistant to help you put together your ballot (often allowed by law), but this individual is not the type to ask for help, so you need to let her use the ballot, just like she has done for the past 75 years and of course she thinks she knows how to vote. And when she votes for three different people to become President of the USA, do you want to tell her she has to vote again? Or that her vote doesn't count?
Re:Also between residency and production
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Lawyers In Space...
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· Score: 1
This discussion made me think about a restaurant I heard about that enforced a rather unusual dress code. In addition to the classic "no shirt/no shoes" policy, they also advertised a "no tie" policy. It was a rather classy restaurant that was popular for business lunches, due to the quality of the food and proximity to the downtown district (I think it was in Chicago, but I may be mistaken). The point was that if you entered into the restaurant, the owner reserved the right to take a pair of shears to your tie and cut it off from your neck and confiscate it if you wore it into the store. There was a wall of confiscated ties to prove the point, and the restaurant was crowded enough that almost every lunch collected at least one tie, sometimes several.
I'm curious about why you think the urban planners taking private areas into account as "public commons" areas is a good thing if you think issues regarding privitization of the public commons is bad? IMHO the problem is that services that should be a community utility such as street maintainence, regulation of throughfares, and community gathering places are owned by private individuals. The same thing applies when golf courses are counted the same as "public greenspace" when they are completely private entities with very exclusive membership requirements and access regulations.
I'm also curious about the limits to production on private land. While you are restricted from heavy industry, many communities allow for small offices/home offices to be run out of the home. This can be anything ranging from doing consulting to accounting services or even a small law office. There are necessarily restrictions on the number of visitors to the "place of business", but to say you can't produce anything there is not strictly true. As long as you don't have employees, you could also build kit cars, a boat, or a number of other items.
When you get employees it gets a little bit trickier, and generally speaking you can't do food preparation from your home...certainly not a typical home kitchen. It does vary from city to city, and sometimes you need to apply for a business license. The city I'm in now allows for a home office business license that is considerably cheaper than a normal business license, mainly to see who is doing that kind of activity. Taxes get weird, but no more than operating out of a more conventional business location.
Where I live you can even sell garden produce at a community market that is now running twice a week, and if you wanted you can turn your entire back yard into a garden...potentially several thousand dollars per year worth of food by itself even on a 1/4 acre lot.
I guess what I'm saying is that you can produce goods and services in surburban homes, but there are admittedly restrictions on the scope and extent of such industry. Even if it isn't strictly legal most neighbors won't complain as long as you don't rub their noses in the fact that you earn your money from home rather than a separate office.
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Regarding transportation infrastructure: I think space travel is going to be heavily regulated in terms of port access and screening, probabaly more so than even airports. Imagine the worst delays for going through international customs and it will be at least that or more. Transit between LEO and Earth ground will probabaly be the worst, and once in space regulations regarding travel and transit between points will be more than likely much easier. I.E. going from a Lunar colony to Mars may be easier than going from the Moon to Earth, in terms of red tape and getting approval to "import" or "export" stuff.
I don't know totally what you are talking about regarding airline regulation. Certainly it takes a bit of money to get a couple of airplanes together and start moving in on air routes. The biggest problem, at least in the USA, is trying to get gate access. Only established airlines are going to get the prime gates in the center of the airport, and new startups will ha
I think you missed my point. I agree that OCR scanners of paper ballots are the way to go. The whole point of an electronic voting machine is only for ballot preparation, not for vote counting.
Even a good OCR ballot with the traditional #2 pencils is bound to have errors, because some people will vote for more than one candidate, the eraser marks won't be enough, some people won't fill in the "oval" or other marking spot completely enough to count the vote, or other normal errors that you also find when scanning test for a college history class.
By having the ballots prepared by a computer, it can provide a service to those who have the hardest time dealing with the voting process. Blind people can vote on their own, it can have multi-lingual instruction, and even display additional information about candidates and/or issues (like the full text of a referendum or bonding issue) that simply could not be available on a normal "butterfly" ballot or in a voting book. The names can even be in big 2" high letters if people have a hard time seeing but won't admit it.
I think there are some good advantage for some computer terminal to be in the voting process, but I just don't think that "instantaneous" tabulation of the votes is necessarily the correct way to go.
So what is the motivation of SpaceX, Scaled Composites, and Armadillo Aerospace? They do indeed see relatively short-term profits from going into space.
Bigelow Aerospace is even going into space in a market that is outside of the launcher business, and they certainly plan on making money while doing it. That doesn't sound like Billions or Trillions of dollars, and certainly not a government run program either.
It will eventually take trillions of dollars, but that can and will happen over the course of many years, even hundreds of years. While there are some fairly obvious opportunities for commercialization of space, it will take some time for the infrastructure to mature to deal with getting the stuff up there and going. It will also take an "enlightened" government that is willing to let companies go into space before that will happen as well.
I think you miss the difference between tennantcy and those who have a freehold on real estate.
When you are a mere tennant, obviously you must bow to the whims of the lord of the land and do what they want. If that is set up in a feudal heirarchy, don't be surprised if you have to bow to the king.
By being in a freehold (a piece of land you own independently from any other landlord), you control your own destiny and answer only to the government you choose to associate with. Land law in most countries put supreme land ownership with a government, but that isn't too bad if you are in a participatory democracy where you can in part help write the laws. Even electing a representative to write those laws will still make sure your voice is heard.
The problem with your blog entry is that you presume that when you are a tenant in a feudal-type heirarchy that you can also have a say in what happens when you are on that land. You have to deal with that landlord if you are leasing the land because there is somebody between you and the government.
The problem with your discussion is that in "Suburbia" is largely made up of very small tracts of land that are usually independently owned...i.e. freeholders of 1/10th to 1/4th acre lots. That is why suburbs are so popular is because you can have the benefits of private property ownership even though you are a mere working-class citizen.
Malls and large office complexes are often mistaken for public commons areas, and it isn't surprising that conflicts between a landlord's privileges and presumed citizen rights occur. The problem is more due to the fact that city planners also consider malls and large foyers in office buildings to be public commons areas as well, at least for transportation and urban planning discussions.
How this applies to outer space is that the same principles need to hold up. Governments need to be created that are answerable to the people living under them. Private property needs to be made available to ordinary people so they have a vested interested in maintaining and improving that society. As I alluded to above, there is a need for public commons areas as well, for people to mingle and exchange ideas, and to provide space that can benefit the community as a whole, such as a park, auditorium, religious worship centers, etc. The people trying to do political protests need to have these public commons areas as well so they can share these ideas with other citizens.
Unfortunately, I think the pattern for first going into space is going to be more along the lines of the West Virginia "company" coal mining towns, where all of the residents were living in company owned housing and working for the company, even the police and school teachers.
The advantage that the USA had in "settling" the western frontier was that the principle occupation of most people going out to the frontier were farmers and didn't need to answer to anybody. Farms were individually owned freeholds and answered only to the government. How you can accomplish something like this in space is a good source of discussion. That farmers got exploited by the railroads is true, and the same would apply in space, particularly to those groups that set up interplantary shipping lines, where huge ammounts of capital are required to build a good bulk-freight hauler. A difference is that barriers to competition are going to be lower than railroads, and will be more like the Atlantic seacoast for shipping goods to Europe (like in space shipping goods from Mars to the Earth).
Just because a bunch of guys sitting around think that somethng is constitutional or legal doesn't make it so, although in this case it is people who supposedly understand patent laws and make "rulings" on these issues.
The patent system is broken, and IMHO political concerns and $$$ are getting tossed around pushing for gene patenting. At least there is a debate going on, but the following statement is somewhat disturbing:
Many arguments against patenting of any genetic material were heard, mainly based upon the premise that genes are part of nature and have not been invented by anyone, thus should not be owned by anyone. The PTO firmly rejected this notion based upon the fact that a gene may be removed from a person, then a clone of that gene may be made in a machine, which is then not a part of nature, but a product of the lab.
What I find incredible is the complete rejection of the arguments against gene patenting. And the idea that other avenues for encouraging gene research with patent laws aren't being explored. A patent should be encouraging novel concepts, and that is what the general public believes the patent system does. That there is a difference between the rose colored view of patents from Thomas Edison that you learned about in grade school and the actual patent system should explain why there is general popular support for the current system.
I would put my political support on those individuals who spoke up arguing against patenting of any genetic material. I think that most diagnostics and manufacturing methods involving genetic material could be covered under existing conventional patent laws and regulations if the patent examiner and the applicant were only a little more creative during the application process. Specifically patenting a DNA sequence, even if you can identify what it does and how to use it, should not by itself be patentable.
That the USPTO is granting patents on stuff like this is besides the point, and I don't like it when that happens.
In my original post in this thread, I was trying to suggest that it would make sense to permit a totally unique DNA sequence to be patented that does not exist normally in nature, just like if you wanted to patent a new chemical. The problem with this in regards to genetic material is that science isn't quite up to "growing you own" DNA in that way yet (for the most part).
Patents should not be about patenting a discovery, like discovering a new species of bacteria on the ocean floor that makes gold out of seawater (extracts, whatever). You can't patent the bacterium, but you can patent the process that uses the bacterial wastes to refine the gold from that point. This is basically what the gene researchers are trying to do is to patent the bacterium, or at least the gene(s) that do the gold extraction.
The LibPNG library is merely a standardized library for reading and writing PNG files. It has been ported to many platforms and is even LGPL'd.
This makes it a two-edged sword in some ways, because nothing is specifically keeping you from writing your own implementation of the PNG specification, but most people are generally lazy and grab whatever is at hand, particularly if it is well written.
The trick is to keep the formal specification seperated from the implementation so the implementation doesn't become the specification. Particularly with multimedia data formats, I've seen this happen far too often. PNG is particularly well designed in this regard, so you don't have to specifically condemn the format, just a particular library for problems like the CERT warning. Some formats are much worse in this regard.
That issues like this are coming up is more of a sign that the library is being widely used. One way to prevent issues like this from really taking over is to provide alternative implementations, so a "virus writer" couldn't depend on a specific implementation for an exploit like this.
I'm saying 4 million + years of using a certain gene sequence by myself and my ancestors. That is a big difference.
I'm also saying that you need to have something novel to do when you apply for a patent, and a simple DNA sequence that hasn't been registered with the USPTO before shouldn't count.
Yes, a new diagnostics technique should be patentable, but the scope of the patent would be incredibly narrow if the only difference is the change of a certain protein.
While you couldn't patent a Higgs particle, you could patent the process to produce the detector, and how the particle was "manufactured", or in other words how you access and use that particle. If it proves useful, that could make some very wealthy researchers, which is the whole point of the patent process anyway.
That can be done with genes as well, and certainly a novel approach to gene splicing or gene identification would be patentable. The problem is that researchers in this area aren't using creativity and some venture capitalists are seeing huge $$$ for comparitively little effort. Patents should be tough to obtain, precisely because it should be at the leading or bleeding edge of human activity.
Of course, you can start to see somebody trying to trademark a certain color, i.e. Coca-Cola "owns" the RGB triplet #FF0404. Maybe I shouldn't give anybody any ideas here.
Yeah, wouldn't 4 million + years of use be considered prior art?
If a biologist were able to form their own unique RNA/DNA pattern from scratch and truly "invent" a gene or sequence, I might buy the concept of a patented genes. Particularly if you could write out a gene sequence like writing computer software to a hard drive and "build your own monster"(tm).
Molecular Biology isn't quite there yet (close, and may get to that point), where you can stick in a CD-ROM or download an image over the internet and manufacture an oil-eating bacteria from nothing but raw amino acids. In theory that should be possible, but there is a long way to go for basic science to even understand biological processes to accomplish that task.
The trick here, and the argument that needs to be made, is how we as a society should reward individuals and companies doing basic research in this area. There are also existing gene sequences that can be "discovered" in nature that can prove to be useful, simply because genetic evolution has made many proteins that are quite useful for living things. This is also related to drug patents in the sense that herbal medicines tend to get overlooked because they are not patentable, but if you can demonstrate a novel chemical formula for a related compound that will be patented.
Of course, we are expecting lawyers and judges to understand science, and that is expectig quite a bit.
The trick is not to make the ballots merely an audit trail, but to have the paper ballots be the official ballots. All the computer equipment does is to dress up the ballots to make them easier to count, sort, and perhaps putting on some OCR-readable letters or something similar that helps to reduce the ambiguity.
Basically, this is a throw-back to the classic paper ballot, but with a twist that you won't have to read handwriting (usually) or be forced to have to "judge" which candidate is going to get the vote, aka the decision to determine if a vote was for Gore, Bush, Nadar, or Buchanan; as was the case in Florida with the "hanging chads" and other problems. That is the only real benefit I can see from electronic ballot preparation software.
Going this way, it would also remove the necessity of worrying about the voting validity, except for random checks. If you were to prove that the OCR/barcodes printed something different than what was printed in normal english, that company (or individual) who wrote the software would be in lawsuit heaven... for civil rights lawyers and all the registered voters in the effect precints.
As far as simple voting recepts are concerned, you are very much correct...a "throwaway" recept really doesn't have any more benefit than a "verification" screen on a pure electronic voting machine. In this situation open source licenses are not just a good idea, but manditory IMHO.
There were many other aspects of Skylab that were also rather impressive. It had more volume for usable workspace than the entire ISS has currently, and while it wasn't "permanently manned" it didn't need to be either.
The ISS has so many parts and pieces that if its manned component had to leave for several months or years, the ISS would have to be abandoned. When the Skylab 3 crew left, they deliberatly "left the lights on" so it could be used as a "lifeboat" for space missions that got into trouble, a.k.a. Columbia if it couldn't do reentry. One point of the Apollo-Soyuz missions were to allow emergency access to the Russians on Skylab if necessary.
When the Shuttle program had some serious delays in getting launched, and only then, was Skylab given an orientation for maximum drag. Almost all station keeping fuel that was left was also used do deliberatly degrade the orbit as well, further causing its destruction. The original intention was to have one of the first shuttle flights to boost Skylab to a higher orbit, and it is unfortunate that it never happened. That it was even a possibility for a shuttle rendevous should show just how solid of a design it was.
I'm not saying that it was the best that could be done, but a good review of Skylab should be done if there is any serious review of an orbital space platform of the Moon, Mars, & beyond program. Launches on a Saturn V-type engine would be much more economical and efficient use for station components than sending them up via shuttle cargo bay, except for finishing pieces and crew exchanges. Think bolts, antenna, batteries, and other bult spare parts, and even those could be sent in an automated cargo freighter. ISS would be a lousy vehicle to launch a Martian transit vehicle, but a Skylab-like vehicle would be considerably more attractive.
Re:The Space Race will be won by Russia and China.
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Soyuz To The Moon?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
If you consider other exploration groups that have been put forward by Americans, I think you are greatly mistaken. The opening up of the American West was filled with thousands of deaths, including little children that happened to be in the wrong place, like under a wagon axle or in the front of a stampeding herd of buffalo.
The problem with NASA is it isn't being done the American way. The future of the American space program/space industry will be with groups like Armadillo Aerospace and Scaled Composites, not with "government" run projects like NASA. Americans can stomache deaths and accidents (look at the deaths of people who do base jumping in the USA). The problem is that it is very difficult to convince American taxpayers to foot the bill to allow people to do that kind of silly stuff.
This is not to say that I think that India or China isn't welcome in space... far from it. Indeed, I see an Indian presence in space to be much more like the new American approach over time, if for nothing else than the fact that it will be the only way that India can afford a space program.
China will be more like the traditional government run programs, but China has a tendancy of being even more cautious than the USA for doing things of that nature. This is not because they value life more or less, but the Chinese government will not want to appear to be a failure and it will affect the Chinese political heirarchy harder when failures do occur.
BTW, the Americans used chimpanzees instead of dogs for the early spaceflights, precisely because they felt that the American people could stomache losing a chimp. Also, by using a chimp they could "test" response situations more accurately than could be done with a dog. If you want to see what Americans will support with tax dollars, just go to any animal shelter to see what is done when they get overcrowded. One method of euthenasia is death by suffication in a vacuum, no different than leaving a dog in space. Yes, I do know other methods are used like injection of lethal substances.
I will whole heartily agree that NASA has squandared their resources over the past 15 years, perhaps even the past 35. 15 years ago a major research paper came out suggesting why spaceflight wasn't that much cheaper with the Space Shuttle vs. the Apollo Program. It had to do with the customers, and who was willing to pay for the trips into space.
Basically, since the U.S. government was willing to pay the equivalent of $50-$100 million per astronaut to get into space, the cost was simply going to match that expectation.
Since Paul Allen wants to bring it down to about $2 million, thinking there is a commercial opportunity at that price, and even about $10,000 for a sub-orbital flight, he is going to bring the cost down to those price points.
The idea proposed of $250/ton (or passenger w/support structure) simply won't happen for awhile simply because these other opportunities are going to be done first. Still, the big obsticle for commercial spaceflight has been trying to bridge the gap from $50M to $10K per passenger. It looks like the X-Prize might finally bridge that gap turning it into reality. Going from $10K to $5K is trivial in comparison.
The reason we have been stuck using the same technology has much to do with Presidential leadership (or the lack thereof), and a highly bureaucratic NASA that can't make any substantial changes. The Shuttle program was developed by Von Braun before the Apollo 11 landing.
I hope that the next NASA spacecraft is intended to fly only in space. LEO spaceflight will soon be taking place by reservation through a travel agent, and NASA astronauts are certainly welcome to schedule, even with a "group" discount. To date, NASA has only designed one spacecraft that fits that definition, and that is the Apollo Lunar Lander. Instead of trying to talk about a shuttle replacement, perhaps we should be talking about a Lunar Lander replacement? At least that fits with the President's Moon, Mars, & Beyond outline. At the rate NASA is moving, somehow I think they will have to get to the moon to beat the tourists from looting the Apollo landing sites.
I think that Professor Van Allen is suffering from the concept that the only reason to go into space is to study what is out there. The Discovery of the Van Allen belts was an amazing accomplishment, and if anything this should show that by going out there and seeing what can be found, rather than sitting back and philosophizing about what should be there, is the only way to really discover this universe.
We as a species have only begun to explore this universe of ours, and it is much larger than anybody had ever imagined. While I would agree that the current space program as defined by NASA is a lousy way to do scientific research, that is not all that can be done for a scientific endeavor.
Imagine the following scientific research stations that can and should be built, and justified with current NSF/NASA budgets, provided we can make spaceflight more economical:
Far Side of Moon (Luna) - A telescope/radio astronomy observatory along the scale of the VLA would open up tremendous opportunites, even if just to study the parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that are normally found around 80 MHz to 110 MHz (broadcast FM radio for those not familiar with it). The moon would act as a great shield to block transmissions, and regardless of other future developments in space, would still represent a telescope that has its back to 99.9% of all humanity. Optical telescopes would also have some value, with little to no atmospheric interferance to cause problems with optics. (The little bit would come in the form of rocket exhaust, which would eventually cause some "problems" on the moon giving a very basic "atmosphere" there.)
Exogeology - There really isn't a good term for this, but exploration of minerals and rock formations on other worlds is an area that was barely scratched with the Apollo 17 mission, with the only real scientific observer, Harrison Schmidt, having had tremendous success and discovering minerals on the moon that only a trained mineral explorer would have found. While the Mars probes are interesting, I can't imagine the kind of scientific progress that would come from people studying minerals on Mars directly, where they can come up with their own scientific apparatus on the fly, test it immediately with out having to go through decontamination and a 5-10 year bureaucratic wait, not to mention the 1-2 year flight time to get it to Mars. Wouldn't it be nice to put a scientific instrument on Mars you just made on the surface of Mars tomorrow?
And I've just described just the Moon and Mars. There are litterally thousands of Celestial bodies we havn't visited yet, including many of the moons of other planets, the Asteroids, and comets. You can't tell me that you know what to expect on all of these bodies, and unfortunately it will ultimately take somebody with a pick axe pounding into rock to really uncover what is there. There are other ways to extract rocks, but that is ultimately what it will take, and is the best scientific instrument together with a pair of human eyes to actually see and reason about what it being held by a human hand. Robots are just an extension to this concept, but can't be replaced by somebody actually being there.
Exobiology - Here is an area of research that Prof. Van Allen should at least be aware of. Is there life on Mars? The current answer seems to be more maybe than no, or at least there once was life there. What about Europa? I'm sure that if you wanted to put together a 10-15 year mission to send biologist to Europa to study potential life forms that you would have a huge list of very qualified PhD scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, begging for the chance to go. No doubt that they would win a couple of Nobel Prizes along the way as well. A follow-up study to Apollo 12's retrieval of the pieces of Surveyor would also be an interesting study by itself. Again, only by actually going out to space are you really going to find out what is there.
There are two very distinct areas that NASA had a really huge hand in developing part of the current computer industry:
Integrated Chips (IC's)- Back when ICs were first developed, it was a solution in search of a problem. Computer equipment that was being produced at the time really didn't need them, and the engineers who were designing the computers felt much more comfortable using descrete transistors and tubes. (Yes, the old fashion vacuum flow-control tubes...quite common on computers from the 1960's). ICs only had a few hundred transistor equivalent on them anyway, and they were only the simple 7400-series chips of very basic logic gates. Imagine trying to build an entire CPU with only 7400 or 7202 chips.
When the Apollo Flight Guidance computer was being designed, the original intention was to use discrete transistors. They opted to go with ICs instead, which the estimated weight savings was only about 20%-30% from what discrete transistors would have done. Keep in mind this was a very new technology at the time, with production runs typically numbering about 100 to maybe a couple thousand. Because of the decision to jump in the IC bandwagon, NASA ended up purchasing something like 70% of the entire world-wide IC chip production for a couple of years, and gave chip fabs their first major customer. This also provided necessary cash for the chip fabs to reduce production costs that made them much more attractive for engineers to add them to their circuit designs. This would have happened anyway, but the push by NASA probabaly sped up the introduction of the IC into general computer markets by about ten years had NASA not been involved.
Real-time Operating SystemsMost computer operating systems from 1965 and earlier were strictly a batch processing system, where you would pile up a heap of punch cards in a reader and the computer would crunch the data, often creating a new pile of punch cards or reams of paper. Think payroll systems or printing out monthly invoices for billing purposes. Most computer labs, even at colleges, worked on this principle. Because NASA was developing complex guidance systems, they needed a computer system that would interact directly with the user while the application was running. That almost all computer software that you use does this now may make you think this is unremarkable, but back in the early 1960's and before this really was a novel concept. Timeshare systems were an outgrowth of this effort, but the computer systems that NASA developed for their simulators and mission control systems would still be largely recognized as a computer, where as the old Univac system and batch processing systems would be now treated as a really strange and alien beast. Would this have happened without NASA? Maybe, but you can't argue that they came up with a cool concept, by necessity, and made people think of other cool things you could do with computers.
Sure, some other non-NASA related activities could also be mentioned for the development of computers, but here is a final perhaps unintended consequence that had big reprocussions. When Steve Wozniack was designing the Apple I, he was looking for a good CPU to make the thing work. It just so happens that the 6502 chip had been over produced due to a boom and bust cycle (as mentioned above, started by NASA), so Motorola was almost giving the things away. Jobs and Woz grabed a bunch of the chips for fire sale prices, and the rest is history for what became of their little project. Indirect, sure, but still influential.
It is hard now to completely understand just how big of an economic impact that NASA had on the high-tech industry back in the 1960's, but is was quite substantial. As far as a current impact on chip designs, NASA is really small fish and its needs are all but completely ignored now, and that only because their needs are a little more extreame than a typical electronic component customer.
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I would have to agree that it is not really much of a breakthrough what they have done here. You are, however, quite mistaken on quite a bit here.
/. confused regarding pigment vs. phosphor issues.
You claim that there is a difference between RGB and CMY colors, and you totally miss what is going on. the problem here is that you are interpreting pigments vs. phosphors as the same thing and totally miss that they are doing two totally different things, and that has nothing to do with each other.
The Hexachrome printing system has been in use for many years. If you want to see what the printing industry has been doing for many years that is similar to this, look up Hexachrome. Better yet, get ahold of something actually printed using this system. There are some promotional brochures around made by Pantone that show this off with the same image done by both methods, and it blows away the feeble attempt done on the web site listed above.
Where you make the mistake of RGB vs. CMY is that the two are just colors slightly offset in frequency from one another. Combinations of colors from either system can be used to "mimic" the primary colors of the other one, but in fact they are specific frequencies that fall on the EM frequency from near infared to near ultraviolet. Trying to get something that reproduces a specific color as perceived by your eye is a neat trick, and usually it can't be done although it can often come quite close using just a simple RGB color coordinate system.
Where pigmets break down is that they have to be made from some mineral, and tend to take on "earth tones" with even a very good pigment. The vibrancy and brilliance has nothing to do with the color coordinates, but with the quality of the pigment to re-radiate a given frequency of light. In fact most pigments (printer ink dyes, ect.) re-radiate almost all wavelengths in the visible light spectrum, just some better than others. Adding colors just adds extra pigments to blend the colors closer to the hue that you were trying for.
Radiative color systems (like a movie projector or computer monitor) can usually "tune" the color emitters much better to a much more narrow frequency of light in the EM band, although even the best of these still emit light along almost the entire EM band. This gets down into quantum physics and electron/photon interactions, but the fact is that a given phosphor can emit at a certain frequency, as long as you get a good phosphor. Usually however, even then a phosphor will have energy release frequencies that are beyond just one line in the visible light EM band, and there are impurities in any manufacturing process which will also modify the quality of the light produced by a phosphor. Yes, cinema uses pigments as well, and that gets back to this whole issue, where pigments have limitations just like phosphors.
I would dare you though, if you want to see something amazing, to open your mind just a little bit and try to see what adding extra colors might do to the over all quality of an image. Particularly if somebody gets a good true violet or deep red (I don't have a name for this color, but somewhere between fire-engine red and just beyond in infared), as well as something between red and green (probabaly a good yellow), that would be impressive. It is too bad that this group simply chose to use more traditional Cyan and Magenta as the colors, making people like you and many others here on
One big problem that you would encounter with an expanded color pallet (this is more than simply gamut) is simply getting content for that format. Almost everything to date is done with RGB or CMY(K), or for video YUV (totally different yet). Hexcolor systems like the one proposed with this article are going to need good encoding/scanning equipment to be able to identify and pull out the colors properly. As mentioned elsewhere, and I agree with some of the other posters here on this point
There is quite a bit of arguing going on regarding expanding the color space to see a higher quality image. This is very similar to arguments regarding Color vs. B&W Television from an era in the past (or the same said about Color vs. B&W movies).
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Ideally, if you could, you would want to have a pixel that you could "tune" to a specific frequency and intensity, giving you a full range of colors from near infared to light just into ultraviolet.
To give an idea of what you could see from a system like this, go see a rainbow (a real one, not just a picture), and try to look at the blue/violet edge. This color, true violet, is something that you could never see on the best monitor, unless you have pixels or phosphors that will emit this color of light. No matter how hard you try to mix the RGB pallet, you will always end up with a washed out magenta trying to capture this color and will fail.
Indeed, I think this is exactly where this group is going to fail. Adding Yellow, Magenta, and Cyan will help fill the middle of spectrum, but will not improve the ends where current technologies don't cover the EM band of visible light at all.
Rather than trying to talk about the XYZ color coordinates, instead you need to think of the light you see as a two-dimensional graph with two axes, frequency on the horizontal and intensity along the vertical (just to "standardize" the format). Each "color" would have a different graph on this sort of diagram. When you are working with each color in a color space, you need to think of them being the same as the slider buttons on a sound equilzer, or a tone generator that has hundreds of sliders to "tune" to a given frequency. In this respect there is no difference between light frequencies and audio frequencies, other than you ear can "hear" a much larger range of frequencies than your eye can distinguish visible light frequencies.
The whole problem is that moving from that ideal pixel that could create a random "graph" of a color in the EM visible light spectrum, you instead have to deal with light emitters (or absorbers for print material) that have a very rough bandwidth limits to makes something close to that graph.
What is killing me in this reply is that I need to add graphs and diagrams to fully explain this, and I hope that you can understand what I'm discussing without them, unfortunately. This is just a limitation of
If you could get something close to that ideal pixel, with a more full spectrum view of a stored image and then compare it to an ordinary RGB image on a comparable device of the same brightness, the difference would be like listening to music on AM Radio vs. a audio CD. Until you see the difference you wouldn't know what you were missing. Also, some people perceive color differently than others, with the rods and cones (they do work together for color perception, even though the work they do is slightly different) of each person picking up slightly different frequencies better than others. People with tetra-chromatic eyes (there are some people with this ability to see 4 colors...usually women) would spot this even quicker than us mere mortals. "Color blind" people would be as impressed with this system as tone deaf people are with good music.
I would disagree here. While you could do some fancy mathmatics and push image compression, it would still require a full 8-bits per color, or more depth for even better resolution, if you were to actually use it in practice. At some point you would have to fully decompress the pixel to something that would take at least 48 bits or more.
The real trick is trying to decide what to do with the remaining 8-bits for a decent word space. Usually alpha channel is thrown in as the 4th byte for an RGB triplet giving 32 bits... usually something easy to manipulate with most system. With six colors and one alpha channel, you would end up with 56 bits, a very awkward number for computers. 64 bits is going to be a common "pixel" size even with this system, so what do you do with those remaining bits? Interesting question.
Your eyes are much more sensitive to green and red (as well as yellow and to a lesser extent magenta), which with some good coding schemes you might want to increase the bit depth on those colors to give better saturation. Mind you this is just the pixel color encoding scheme, not what actually gets displayed. I could digress some more here, but there are other tricks that can and are used to encode color information.
While it might be overdue, it is certainly something that can be planned for, and won't happen immediately.
The short-term predictive capabilities for volcanologists is getting pretty good. Events such as the eruption of Mt. St. Helens or Mt. Penetubo in the Phillipenes were extreamely accurate, and gave several days notice before they erupted. I would imagine that the same could be said about Yellowstone... even more so because so much is done to study the region on a geological basis.
The problem is that shutting down larger institutions, such as a military base or a city can take some time...witness the current efforts in Florida in anticipation of some Hurricanes that are approaching, and they have even dealt with Hurricanes there in the past. Some people have to, unfortunately, stand guard even if the environment is approaching something close to hell, just like the guards at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier choose to stay at their post. Some people may and will die simply for that reason in a disaster, but you don't have to lose everybody, or even a sizable minority.
The real question for a Yellowstone eruption would be, where would a safe place be?
While the damage to the USA would be huge, it could be dealt with, and in fact be quite benefitial in the long run as well. Volcanic ash, once treated and organic matter (aka manure) added, can be quite fertile for growing food. Damage to the cities downwind would be a little nastier, just like the damage that Tacoma had after Mt. St. Helens' eruption. Areas close to Yellowstone would be damaged quite a bit, but for the most part there aren't any major cities nearby. (Jackson Hole doesn't qualify as one of the top 100 cities in terms of population in the USA, nor does Cody, Wyoming).
Owing to the fact that I live within 600 miles of Yellowstone, this is more than passing interest. That would be a spetacular eruption if it really was that big. It also shows that ordinary human activity is insignificant compared to the destructive forces of nature, as I doubt the entire combined world-wide nuclear arsenals could cause an explosion of that magnitude.
While I'm not totally dismissing issues regarding space flight between stars, the fact is that you can travel between stars within human lifetimes. Right now, however, our technology is sufficient to travel between planets, and there is quite a bit of real estate out there we can get to that is essentially "virgin" territory where we don't need to go to another star system. This is going to be an issue in about 400-500 years when the solar system is starting to fill up with human settlements.
While I hope the first interstellar space probe happen in my lifetime, I'm not holding my breath.
Still, even assuming lightspeed travel, the entire Milky Way could be settled by humans in less than 1 million years, an eyeblink compared to the age of the Universe.
I don't want to belabor this point, but at least in theory patents are intended for inventions, not discoveries. The distinction between the two is very fuzzy at times, especially in regards to patenting chemicals.
The patent system is broke anyway, so detailing exceptions and fine points is just describing how bad it really is.
To have something like Star Trek where several spacefaring nations simultaneously arise and carve out competing empires is going to be even less likely. Imagine a race that had a 2 million year head start over us in settling the planets in our galaxy. Somehow I don't see us having the technological ability to even compete, much less even be an equal. The same goes for us if we explore even just the Milky Way. If we travel 10,000 light years to find a planet who is technologically at the Bronze Age (building pyramids and basically like Egypt when it was "THE" major political power on the Earth), do they have a chance against us after we have developed interstellar travel capabilities?
All of this has been pointed out by people like Sagan and Hawking. While there may be intelligent lifeforms other than mankind on another planet, the likelyhood of us actually finding a species that can deal with abstract symbols and advanced toolmaking is quite unlikely. If you had come to the Earth 5 million years ago (short time compared to the age of the universe), all you would have found are some very primitive humans, or even just chimpanzees that roamed open savannahs. Certainly not a technological civilization.
I would be very surprised if we found something like the Klingon empire, or even just the Kzinti. Alien races make wonderful science fiction, but I don't see how they can be found.
Where I am voting we are still using the punch card ballot, and to be honest they are working just fine. I even got to play with some sample test ballots and agree with the conclusion of the county recorder, that hanging chads and incomplete ballots are a sign of voting fraud, not incompetent voters.
.5 mph and complains that the pencil isn't sharp enough and keeps missing the ballot altogether. Sure, you can have an assistant to help you put together your ballot (often allowed by law), but this individual is not the type to ask for help, so you need to let her use the ballot, just like she has done for the past 75 years and of course she thinks she knows how to vote. And when she votes for three different people to become President of the USA, do you want to tell her she has to vote again? Or that her vote doesn't count?
I'm not sure where you get the $5000 per machine, however. I can get systems that are good enough for voting for about $500, including keyboard, monitor, and NIC for a LAN if you want to simplify printing costs. A printer good enough for ballot preparation would be about $150, and like I said it could be handled in a manner that only one would be required per voting precinct. Compared to mechanical voting machines (fairly common prior to 1970), the price is very similar. As far as the scanner, it could even be done at a central location, often only one or a few per county.
As far as incomplete marks, erasures, and overvotes, you are completely dismissing the issues. I have worked with optical scanner equipment in terms of having to write the software, and it is fraught with all kinds of issues that you are openly dismissing here. Admittedly this was to be used only for college class tests (like midterms and finals), but the technology is identical to what you are saying here. Routinely it gets about a 2% error even on stuff unimportant like a history final, and frequently an entire test sheet has to be rejected because the scanner can't read it. For elections, the standard much necessarily be considerably higher.
How do you know for certain that the ballot has been correctly scanned? Did you see a computer monitor to verify that the marks were correct? Are you sure that when it gets scanned it will give the same results if scanned next week during a recount? Some states don't allow votes to be scanned immediately by law, so the ballots, even optical scanned ballots must be kept in a locked box until after the election is over. While you might be totally sure about your own ballot, what about Mrs. Rose O'Grady, your 95 year old next door neighbor who shuffles down to the voting precinct at
This discussion made me think about a restaurant I heard about that enforced a rather unusual dress code. In addition to the classic "no shirt/no shoes" policy, they also advertised a "no tie" policy. It was a rather classy restaurant that was popular for business lunches, due to the quality of the food and proximity to the downtown district (I think it was in Chicago, but I may be mistaken). The point was that if you entered into the restaurant, the owner reserved the right to take a pair of shears to your tie and cut it off from your neck and confiscate it if you wore it into the store. There was a wall of confiscated ties to prove the point, and the restaurant was crowded enough that almost every lunch collected at least one tie, sometimes several.
I'm curious about why you think the urban planners taking private areas into account as "public commons" areas is a good thing if you think issues regarding privitization of the public commons is bad? IMHO the problem is that services that should be a community utility such as street maintainence, regulation of throughfares, and community gathering places are owned by private individuals. The same thing applies when golf courses are counted the same as "public greenspace" when they are completely private entities with very exclusive membership requirements and access regulations.
I'm also curious about the limits to production on private land. While you are restricted from heavy industry, many communities allow for small offices/home offices to be run out of the home. This can be anything ranging from doing consulting to accounting services or even a small law office. There are necessarily restrictions on the number of visitors to the "place of business", but to say you can't produce anything there is not strictly true. As long as you don't have employees, you could also build kit cars, a boat, or a number of other items.
When you get employees it gets a little bit trickier, and generally speaking you can't do food preparation from your home...certainly not a typical home kitchen. It does vary from city to city, and sometimes you need to apply for a business license. The city I'm in now allows for a home office business license that is considerably cheaper than a normal business license, mainly to see who is doing that kind of activity. Taxes get weird, but no more than operating out of a more conventional business location.
Where I live you can even sell garden produce at a community market that is now running twice a week, and if you wanted you can turn your entire back yard into a garden...potentially several thousand dollars per year worth of food by itself even on a 1/4 acre lot.
I guess what I'm saying is that you can produce goods and services in surburban homes, but there are admittedly restrictions on the scope and extent of such industry. Even if it isn't strictly legal most neighbors won't complain as long as you don't rub their noses in the fact that you earn your money from home rather than a separate office.
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Regarding transportation infrastructure: I think space travel is going to be heavily regulated in terms of port access and screening, probabaly more so than even airports. Imagine the worst delays for going through international customs and it will be at least that or more. Transit between LEO and Earth ground will probabaly be the worst, and once in space regulations regarding travel and transit between points will be more than likely much easier. I.E. going from a Lunar colony to Mars may be easier than going from the Moon to Earth, in terms of red tape and getting approval to "import" or "export" stuff.
I don't know totally what you are talking about regarding airline regulation. Certainly it takes a bit of money to get a couple of airplanes together and start moving in on air routes. The biggest problem, at least in the USA, is trying to get gate access. Only established airlines are going to get the prime gates in the center of the airport, and new startups will ha
I think you missed my point. I agree that OCR scanners of paper ballots are the way to go. The whole point of an electronic voting machine is only for ballot preparation, not for vote counting.
Even a good OCR ballot with the traditional #2 pencils is bound to have errors, because some people will vote for more than one candidate, the eraser marks won't be enough, some people won't fill in the "oval" or other marking spot completely enough to count the vote, or other normal errors that you also find when scanning test for a college history class.
By having the ballots prepared by a computer, it can provide a service to those who have the hardest time dealing with the voting process. Blind people can vote on their own, it can have multi-lingual instruction, and even display additional information about candidates and/or issues (like the full text of a referendum or bonding issue) that simply could not be available on a normal "butterfly" ballot or in a voting book. The names can even be in big 2" high letters if people have a hard time seeing but won't admit it.
I think there are some good advantage for some computer terminal to be in the voting process, but I just don't think that "instantaneous" tabulation of the votes is necessarily the correct way to go.
Eric,
Thank you for this discussion. And I will admit that I do need to learn a little bit more about this.
So what is the motivation of SpaceX, Scaled Composites, and Armadillo Aerospace? They do indeed see relatively short-term profits from going into space.
Bigelow Aerospace is even going into space in a market that is outside of the launcher business, and they certainly plan on making money while doing it. That doesn't sound like Billions or Trillions of dollars, and certainly not a government run program either.
It will eventually take trillions of dollars, but that can and will happen over the course of many years, even hundreds of years. While there are some fairly obvious opportunities for commercialization of space, it will take some time for the infrastructure to mature to deal with getting the stuff up there and going. It will also take an "enlightened" government that is willing to let companies go into space before that will happen as well.
I think you miss the difference between tennantcy and those who have a freehold on real estate.
When you are a mere tennant, obviously you must bow to the whims of the lord of the land and do what they want. If that is set up in a feudal heirarchy, don't be surprised if you have to bow to the king.
By being in a freehold (a piece of land you own independently from any other landlord), you control your own destiny and answer only to the government you choose to associate with. Land law in most countries put supreme land ownership with a government, but that isn't too bad if you are in a participatory democracy where you can in part help write the laws. Even electing a representative to write those laws will still make sure your voice is heard.
The problem with your blog entry is that you presume that when you are a tenant in a feudal-type heirarchy that you can also have a say in what happens when you are on that land. You have to deal with that landlord if you are leasing the land because there is somebody between you and the government.
The problem with your discussion is that in "Suburbia" is largely made up of very small tracts of land that are usually independently owned...i.e. freeholders of 1/10th to 1/4th acre lots. That is why suburbs are so popular is because you can have the benefits of private property ownership even though you are a mere working-class citizen.
Malls and large office complexes are often mistaken for public commons areas, and it isn't surprising that conflicts between a landlord's privileges and presumed citizen rights occur. The problem is more due to the fact that city planners also consider malls and large foyers in office buildings to be public commons areas as well, at least for transportation and urban planning discussions.
How this applies to outer space is that the same principles need to hold up. Governments need to be created that are answerable to the people living under them. Private property needs to be made available to ordinary people so they have a vested interested in maintaining and improving that society. As I alluded to above, there is a need for public commons areas as well, for people to mingle and exchange ideas, and to provide space that can benefit the community as a whole, such as a park, auditorium, religious worship centers, etc. The people trying to do political protests need to have these public commons areas as well so they can share these ideas with other citizens.
Unfortunately, I think the pattern for first going into space is going to be more along the lines of the West Virginia "company" coal mining towns, where all of the residents were living in company owned housing and working for the company, even the police and school teachers.
The advantage that the USA had in "settling" the western frontier was that the principle occupation of most people going out to the frontier were farmers and didn't need to answer to anybody. Farms were individually owned freeholds and answered only to the government. How you can accomplish something like this in space is a good source of discussion. That farmers got exploited by the railroads is true, and the same would apply in space, particularly to those groups that set up interplantary shipping lines, where huge ammounts of capital are required to build a good bulk-freight hauler. A difference is that barriers to competition are going to be lower than railroads, and will be more like the Atlantic seacoast for shipping goods to Europe (like in space shipping goods from Mars to the Earth).
The patent system is broken, and IMHO political concerns and $$$ are getting tossed around pushing for gene patenting. At least there is a debate going on, but the following statement is somewhat disturbing:
What I find incredible is the complete rejection of the arguments against gene patenting. And the idea that other avenues for encouraging gene research with patent laws aren't being explored. A patent should be encouraging novel concepts, and that is what the general public believes the patent system does. That there is a difference between the rose colored view of patents from Thomas Edison that you learned about in grade school and the actual patent system should explain why there is general popular support for the current system.
I would put my political support on those individuals who spoke up arguing against patenting of any genetic material. I think that most diagnostics and manufacturing methods involving genetic material could be covered under existing conventional patent laws and regulations if the patent examiner and the applicant were only a little more creative during the application process. Specifically patenting a DNA sequence, even if you can identify what it does and how to use it, should not by itself be patentable.
That the USPTO is granting patents on stuff like this is besides the point, and I don't like it when that happens.
In my original post in this thread, I was trying to suggest that it would make sense to permit a totally unique DNA sequence to be patented that does not exist normally in nature, just like if you wanted to patent a new chemical. The problem with this in regards to genetic material is that science isn't quite up to "growing you own" DNA in that way yet (for the most part).
Patents should not be about patenting a discovery, like discovering a new species of bacteria on the ocean floor that makes gold out of seawater (extracts, whatever). You can't patent the bacterium, but you can patent the process that uses the bacterial wastes to refine the gold from that point. This is basically what the gene researchers are trying to do is to patent the bacterium, or at least the gene(s) that do the gold extraction.
The LibPNG library is merely a standardized library for reading and writing PNG files. It has been ported to many platforms and is even LGPL'd.
This makes it a two-edged sword in some ways, because nothing is specifically keeping you from writing your own implementation of the PNG specification, but most people are generally lazy and grab whatever is at hand, particularly if it is well written.
The trick is to keep the formal specification seperated from the implementation so the implementation doesn't become the specification. Particularly with multimedia data formats, I've seen this happen far too often. PNG is particularly well designed in this regard, so you don't have to specifically condemn the format, just a particular library for problems like the CERT warning. Some formats are much worse in this regard.
That issues like this are coming up is more of a sign that the library is being widely used. One way to prevent issues like this from really taking over is to provide alternative implementations, so a "virus writer" couldn't depend on a specific implementation for an exploit like this.
No, that is not what I'm talking about.
I'm saying 4 million + years of using a certain gene sequence by myself and my ancestors. That is a big difference.
I'm also saying that you need to have something novel to do when you apply for a patent, and a simple DNA sequence that hasn't been registered with the USPTO before shouldn't count.
Yes, a new diagnostics technique should be patentable, but the scope of the patent would be incredibly narrow if the only difference is the change of a certain protein.
While you couldn't patent a Higgs particle, you could patent the process to produce the detector, and how the particle was "manufactured", or in other words how you access and use that particle. If it proves useful, that could make some very wealthy researchers, which is the whole point of the patent process anyway.
That can be done with genes as well, and certainly a novel approach to gene splicing or gene identification would be patentable. The problem is that researchers in this area aren't using creativity and some venture capitalists are seeing huge $$$ for comparitively little effort. Patents should be tough to obtain, precisely because it should be at the leading or bleeding edge of human activity.
Of course, you can start to see somebody trying to trademark a certain color, i.e. Coca-Cola "owns" the RGB triplet #FF0404. Maybe I shouldn't give anybody any ideas here.
Yeah, wouldn't 4 million + years of use be considered prior art?
If a biologist were able to form their own unique RNA/DNA pattern from scratch and truly "invent" a gene or sequence, I might buy the concept of a patented genes. Particularly if you could write out a gene sequence like writing computer software to a hard drive and "build your own monster"(tm).
Molecular Biology isn't quite there yet (close, and may get to that point), where you can stick in a CD-ROM or download an image over the internet and manufacture an oil-eating bacteria from nothing but raw amino acids. In theory that should be possible, but there is a long way to go for basic science to even understand biological processes to accomplish that task.
The trick here, and the argument that needs to be made, is how we as a society should reward individuals and companies doing basic research in this area. There are also existing gene sequences that can be "discovered" in nature that can prove to be useful, simply because genetic evolution has made many proteins that are quite useful for living things. This is also related to drug patents in the sense that herbal medicines tend to get overlooked because they are not patentable, but if you can demonstrate a novel chemical formula for a related compound that will be patented.
Of course, we are expecting lawyers and judges to understand science, and that is expectig quite a bit.
The trick is not to make the ballots merely an audit trail, but to have the paper ballots be the official ballots. All the computer equipment does is to dress up the ballots to make them easier to count, sort, and perhaps putting on some OCR-readable letters or something similar that helps to reduce the ambiguity.
Basically, this is a throw-back to the classic paper ballot, but with a twist that you won't have to read handwriting (usually) or be forced to have to "judge" which candidate is going to get the vote, aka the decision to determine if a vote was for Gore, Bush, Nadar, or Buchanan; as was the case in Florida with the "hanging chads" and other problems. That is the only real benefit I can see from electronic ballot preparation software.
Going this way, it would also remove the necessity of worrying about the voting validity, except for random checks. If you were to prove that the OCR/barcodes printed something different than what was printed in normal english, that company (or individual) who wrote the software would be in lawsuit heaven... for civil rights lawyers and all the registered voters in the effect precints.
As far as simple voting recepts are concerned, you are very much correct...a "throwaway" recept really doesn't have any more benefit than a "verification" screen on a pure electronic voting machine. In this situation open source licenses are not just a good idea, but manditory IMHO.
There were many other aspects of Skylab that were also rather impressive. It had more volume for usable workspace than the entire ISS has currently, and while it wasn't "permanently manned" it didn't need to be either.
The ISS has so many parts and pieces that if its manned component had to leave for several months or years, the ISS would have to be abandoned. When the Skylab 3 crew left, they deliberatly "left the lights on" so it could be used as a "lifeboat" for space missions that got into trouble, a.k.a. Columbia if it couldn't do reentry. One point of the Apollo-Soyuz missions were to allow emergency access to the Russians on Skylab if necessary.
When the Shuttle program had some serious delays in getting launched, and only then, was Skylab given an orientation for maximum drag. Almost all station keeping fuel that was left was also used do deliberatly degrade the orbit as well, further causing its destruction. The original intention was to have one of the first shuttle flights to boost Skylab to a higher orbit, and it is unfortunate that it never happened. That it was even a possibility for a shuttle rendevous should show just how solid of a design it was.
I'm not saying that it was the best that could be done, but a good review of Skylab should be done if there is any serious review of an orbital space platform of the Moon, Mars, & beyond program. Launches on a Saturn V-type engine would be much more economical and efficient use for station components than sending them up via shuttle cargo bay, except for finishing pieces and crew exchanges. Think bolts, antenna, batteries, and other bult spare parts, and even those could be sent in an automated cargo freighter. ISS would be a lousy vehicle to launch a Martian transit vehicle, but a Skylab-like vehicle would be considerably more attractive.
If you consider other exploration groups that have been put forward by Americans, I think you are greatly mistaken. The opening up of the American West was filled with thousands of deaths, including little children that happened to be in the wrong place, like under a wagon axle or in the front of a stampeding herd of buffalo.
The problem with NASA is it isn't being done the American way. The future of the American space program/space industry will be with groups like Armadillo Aerospace and Scaled Composites, not with "government" run projects like NASA. Americans can stomache deaths and accidents (look at the deaths of people who do base jumping in the USA). The problem is that it is very difficult to convince American taxpayers to foot the bill to allow people to do that kind of silly stuff.
This is not to say that I think that India or China isn't welcome in space... far from it. Indeed, I see an Indian presence in space to be much more like the new American approach over time, if for nothing else than the fact that it will be the only way that India can afford a space program.
China will be more like the traditional government run programs, but China has a tendancy of being even more cautious than the USA for doing things of that nature. This is not because they value life more or less, but the Chinese government will not want to appear to be a failure and it will affect the Chinese political heirarchy harder when failures do occur.
BTW, the Americans used chimpanzees instead of dogs for the early spaceflights, precisely because they felt that the American people could stomache losing a chimp. Also, by using a chimp they could "test" response situations more accurately than could be done with a dog. If you want to see what Americans will support with tax dollars, just go to any animal shelter to see what is done when they get overcrowded. One method of euthenasia is death by suffication in a vacuum, no different than leaving a dog in space. Yes, I do know other methods are used like injection of lethal substances.
I will whole heartily agree that NASA has squandared their resources over the past 15 years, perhaps even the past 35. 15 years ago a major research paper came out suggesting why spaceflight wasn't that much cheaper with the Space Shuttle vs. the Apollo Program. It had to do with the customers, and who was willing to pay for the trips into space.
Basically, since the U.S. government was willing to pay the equivalent of $50-$100 million per astronaut to get into space, the cost was simply going to match that expectation.
Since Paul Allen wants to bring it down to about $2 million, thinking there is a commercial opportunity at that price, and even about $10,000 for a sub-orbital flight, he is going to bring the cost down to those price points.
The idea proposed of $250/ton (or passenger w/support structure) simply won't happen for awhile simply because these other opportunities are going to be done first. Still, the big obsticle for commercial spaceflight has been trying to bridge the gap from $50M to $10K per passenger. It looks like the X-Prize might finally bridge that gap turning it into reality. Going from $10K to $5K is trivial in comparison.
The reason we have been stuck using the same technology has much to do with Presidential leadership (or the lack thereof), and a highly bureaucratic NASA that can't make any substantial changes. The Shuttle program was developed by Von Braun before the Apollo 11 landing.
I hope that the next NASA spacecraft is intended to fly only in space. LEO spaceflight will soon be taking place by reservation through a travel agent, and NASA astronauts are certainly welcome to schedule, even with a "group" discount. To date, NASA has only designed one spacecraft that fits that definition, and that is the Apollo Lunar Lander. Instead of trying to talk about a shuttle replacement, perhaps we should be talking about a Lunar Lander replacement? At least that fits with the President's Moon, Mars, & Beyond outline. At the rate NASA is moving, somehow I think they will have to get to the moon to beat the tourists from looting the Apollo landing sites.
We as a species have only begun to explore this universe of ours, and it is much larger than anybody had ever imagined. While I would agree that the current space program as defined by NASA is a lousy way to do scientific research, that is not all that can be done for a scientific endeavor.
Imagine the following scientific research stations that can and should be built, and justified with current NSF/NASA budgets, provided we can make spaceflight more economical:
And I've just described just the Moon and Mars. There are litterally thousands of Celestial bodies we havn't visited yet, including many of the moons of other planets, the Asteroids, and comets. You can't tell me that you know what to expect on all of these bodies, and unfortunately it will ultimately take somebody with a pick axe pounding into rock to really uncover what is there. There are other ways to extract rocks, but that is ultimately what it will take, and is the best scientific instrument together with a pair of human eyes to actually see and reason about what it being held by a human hand. Robots are just an extension to this concept, but can't be replaced by somebody actually being there.
To you and others here on /. with a similar mind, I have but one thing to add:
Amen!
P.S. I would add more, but it would detract from a well written rebuttal.
When the Apollo Flight Guidance computer was being designed, the original intention was to use discrete transistors. They opted to go with ICs instead, which the estimated weight savings was only about 20%-30% from what discrete transistors would have done. Keep in mind this was a very new technology at the time, with production runs typically numbering about 100 to maybe a couple thousand. Because of the decision to jump in the IC bandwagon, NASA ended up purchasing something like 70% of the entire world-wide IC chip production for a couple of years, and gave chip fabs their first major customer. This also provided necessary cash for the chip fabs to reduce production costs that made them much more attractive for engineers to add them to their circuit designs. This would have happened anyway, but the push by NASA probabaly sped up the introduction of the IC into general computer markets by about ten years had NASA not been involved.
Sure, some other non-NASA related activities could also be mentioned for the development of computers, but here is a final perhaps unintended consequence that had big reprocussions. When Steve Wozniack was designing the Apple I, he was looking for a good CPU to make the thing work. It just so happens that the 6502 chip had been over produced due to a boom and bust cycle (as mentioned above, started by NASA), so Motorola was almost giving the things away. Jobs and Woz grabed a bunch of the chips for fire sale prices, and the rest is history for what became of their little project. Indirect, sure, but still influential.
It is hard now to completely understand just how big of an economic impact that NASA had on the high-tech industry back in the 1960's, but is was quite substantial. As far as a current impact on chip designs, NASA is really small fish and its needs are all but completely ignored now, and that only because their needs are a little more extreame than a typical electronic component customer.