The Shuttle SRB's, the only man-rated solid rocket ever made, is indeed a rocket that once fired must get fully used, and ejected if you need to quit using it.
Another benefit of using liquid fuels is that you can throttle (I.E. change the flow rate) of the rocket engine as it is fired.
Think about it this way: When you are firing a rocket you are also throwing away mass (Newton's F=ma equation). At the same time, when you are using a typical rocket engine, the actual amount of energy being send out the nozzle stays roughly constant throughout the burn, assuming that you can't throttle the rocket. This means, working the equation backward, force stays constant, but the accelleration rises as the mass drops.
Rockets like this are just fine for a nuclear warhead or for a solid well-built military satellite, but toward the end of the burn you can hit 20 G's or more. Even the Saturn V had this problem to some extent (the Apollo astronauts sometimes hit as high as 8 G's of accelation for brief moments). The Shuttle main engine has adjustable engines that fire at about 105% thrust rating on the launch pad and dropping to about 80% of the rating as it starts gaining altitude... in part to make the ride easier on the passengers.
While there are other issues to follow through, this is something else to consider, and why especially with manned rocket they are almost always liquid rockets.
In addition, the specific impulse (the amount of energy release by a pound of rocket fuel) is sometimes higher with liquid fuels. This is mainly a matter of chemestry, but several factors go into it. I'm sure, however, that some solid propellants have a higher specific impulse than LH2/LOX (the fuel typically used by NASA on the upper stages of most of the manned rockets... this is what caused the falling chunk of ice/foam that destroyed Columbia).
Keep in mind that the X-Prize requirements are that you only have to carry "ballast" equivalent of two extra passengers... not the passengers themselves. Still, it would be a nice "plus" if they could do a full commercial-capable flight of three people, two passengers + pilot.
I would have to agree that Rutan does follow a very methodical and incremental testing regime... indeed this is exactly the benefit of going the route that he has been taking. Carmack has been struggling with engine design, but it appears as though they are going to be ready to launch a test vehicle real soon as well. It is going to be an exciting year this year in terms of private space programs.
I'm expecting a stealth group to "suddenly" appear on the scene as well if these groups get real close to reaching the goal.
There are two issues to deal with in regards to e-mail headers:
1) Technical verification of headers: If somebody sends e-mail, an IP verification process can become part of the specification for the e-mail routing codes. This already happens to a small extent, and some changes to SMTP are already being proposed to deal with this. Anonymous transactions can still take place, but this would be a functionally equivalent to a Caller ID on your phone of "Unknown Caller" (which some phone companies give you the ability to block on your home telephone). The point is, when you use TCP services, you _*MUST*_ know the IP address of the machine who has contacted you (if for no other reason than to send a reply IP packet to verify that the message has been received). This is simply a definition of TCP/IP. Good mail servers will do this anyway.
Lousy mail servers that accept fradulant headers can be filtered out. Of course, this is what lead to the "blackout" lists that cause all kinds of legal headaches, but at least is a realistic technical solution. If a mail server wants to permit relays of e-mail that anonymizes the originator, it is still possible, but at least you know who is doing it. The anonymizer service then has to stay vigillant at keeping spamers off of its service if they don't want to get blocked. Possible, but not often easy to do.
2) Legal requirements to require truthful headers. This is often done with some state-level anti-spam laws. If you show up at somebody's house acting as a Kirby salesman (or worse yet, as a Police Officer), and you are not, certain laws apply to your actions you do after that.
E-mail that claims to have come from whitehouse.gov could in a similar fashion be subject to laws of impersonating official communications of the government, and potentially trying to represent in an official capacity a government official.
If you claim to be from some other company, and you are not, similar false representation should occur. A forged header claiming to be from ibm.com could result in a libel claim by IBM against the spammer.
Anonymizer services could still work, they would just have to be exactly who they claim they are, and clearly stamp their e-mail with some unique signature that makes it clear that the e-mail has been through an anonymization process. As long as that service hasn't kept any permanent copy of the e-mail from the originator, it would be impossible to tract back to the originator. The originator of the anonymous e-mail would then have to evaluate the trustworthiness of the anonymizer service as to if they keep copies of the e-mail or not.
The problem I see here is that many commercial ISP's don't really care who is using their service, and in some ways actively recruit spammers. The trick is to try and make strong disincentives for those sort of businesses from even getting associated with spammers.
Canada has the "feel" of a small town, at least as far as national politics are concerned.
The overall population of Canada is relatively small compared to the sheer size of the country, and in some ways, particluarly in the Yukon or Northwest Territories, it has a positively frontier feel. In many positive ways.
When you start having to govern a population that can be measured in billions (even if that is a large fraction of a billion, such as the USA or Russia) the government has to start doing things that often seems oppressive to people. As an American, it disturbs me to see my government do this too often.
My family has crossed back and forth across the U.S./Canadian border several times over the years. One part of my family is originally from Belfast, Ireland and helped settle London, Ontario. From there they moved to Missouri, and then latter helped settle Alberta, then even later moved to California. As a result, I have family on both sides of the border, and perhaps this gives me a better perspective on US/Canadian differences.
Smarter legal system? It is essentially the same (English Common Law), but the formation for the past two centuries has been quite a bit different due to a different set of issues both countries have had to deal with.
To sum it up: Canada has to deal with Quebec. The USA has to deal with Texas. I'm not so sure which is the tougher problem. L:)
I do have problems with approaches like what Canada is doing with music recording media, and what in the USA is also done (to a smaller extent) with videotapes.
Perhaps the #1 example of what an "industry tax" results in is with the DAT format: It was far superior to existing distribution media, and it would have allowed a "home audio studio" to be much more common than it is even today, for various reasons.
The RIAA got into the act and "forced" the U.S. Congress to "tax" the audio tapes to the point that the only people that ever bought anything in that format were full-time professional audio engineers and hard-core audiophillies. Eventually CR-R's replaced DAT, and it was the computer industry that fiercly resisted the U.S. government from taxing CR-R's.
On a philosophical basis, I don't think it should be a government's job to finance via taxation private for-profit businesses. The distribution of any money collected in that manner will always misappropriated and every time money changes hands there are opportunities for corruption and diverting that money to "more worthy" goals.
I am replying to a low-scoring poster here, but the point is valid.
A meme change to start calling the "music industry" instead as the "music cartel" might become very successful with/. readers and other like-minded individuals, and if it starts becoming very successful it could very likely start a political process simply because of the thought change from trying to support the group.
Some "cartels" or specifc organizations have been granted special permission by governments (including the US Government) in very narrow areas. A very specific example of this is Major League Baseball, which has a charter granted by the U.S. Federal Congress and very explicit laws spelling out the fact that they have been recognized as such and are excempt from anti-trust laws. I don't believe that the music industry is protected in the same manner, and it's clear they manipulate prices of CD's in a way that would never be tolerated in other industries, such as the petroleum industry.
Something that you've totally ignored is that in order for a new transportation system to be used, it needs to be done simultaneously with existing transportation modes...at least until it is fully implemented. Case in point: New York City. Much of the design of the city is layed out with the previous transportaion and communication system in mind. Some streets are so narrow that driving an automobile down them is clearly an afterthought.
Cost? Don't do a simple handwave and say the money will be there if we desire it. You need to prove that alternatives will not just simply solve some problems but must be significantly better.
Your solution would be an interesting thing to try to implement if you were starting from scratch and designing a whole community from the beginning. Unfortunately, that is not how real life deals with things.
Trying to decide just who owns a piece of real estate on the shore of the Great Salt Lake can be a really interesting problem. Other lakes in Utah also seem to have this problem, but it only really comes up when the lakes get too high or too low.
In the case of Salt Lake, because it is so shallow a drop of only a few feet can explose hundreds of acres of land. Admittedly it is rather smelly mud, and unless you are walking around in hip boots you would probabally not really want to get out into it except in a few spots. Still, some people have ranches that are on the lake shore and sometimes let their cattle wander out a little farther.
It is also debateable about wheither people using recreational vehicles can use the land. During times of high water levels you really can't drive around the Great Salt Lake, except on public highways that don't exactly follow the shoreline. When the water gets low however, there are no fences (usually) to get in the way of taking a 4-wheel ORV out into the mud. Also, by state law any land found below the statutory lake level is public property, which is what most people use as the excuse for why they can travel on the land. Of course, this even gets even more bizzare when older land claims, including stuff settled from the Homestead Act get into play that prempt the state law, so it isn't always so clear.
Hill Air Force Base does routine training over the Great Salt Lake as well, including flights into the Wendover Test Range. The western shore of the Great Salt Lake is pretty much uninhabited, and some of the bomb testing range does extend onto the shore. It is not unheard of for F-16's to go crashing into the lake, although the Air Force does try to recover all of the pieces when it does happen. The Test Range does have quite a bit of unexploded munitions that make it very hazardous to wander around the area without a guide. The area is about the size of a typical mid-western county.
Algorithms can be mathmatically proven, and have been.
The problem is wheither they can be proven completely in practical terms, not to mention proving an implementation of a particular algorithm.
In the time it would take for me to complete a proof of some piece of software I wrote, I could write a dozen (or even hundred) other programs. That and trying to develop the skills to perform a rigorous proof would have to be developed, which are (usually) never taught in a typical CS program at a university. Instead, mathamatical proofs of algorithms are usually a side curisoity that is done maybe once or twice (in a lifetime), and even then you give up trying unless it was a simple "Hello World" application.
I've also heard that good programmers are people who can visualize in multiple dimensions. This is not an easy skill, and in reality something quite rare. Most people can only visualize in two dimensions, with a great deal of struggling trying to get things to fit in a third. Even to grasp that there could be a fourth dimension and what that could be like is even harder to find still. I have some (simple) software I've written that has 10-15 dimensions of variables applying and relating to each other, and trying to convey that to somebody who doesn't get it can be quite difficult. If you've done some serious programming, I'm sure that you can relate to this, although you may not be thinking in the dimensional aspect unless it is pointed out to your directly.
Skiing on Mars would not be that difficult once you get the atmospheric pressure up enough to really make a difference. Once atmospheric moisture starts going around you would clearly start to see some glaciers start to form on Olympus Mons...now that would be a hill worth skiing on (even with oxygen tanks). The reduced gravity would also make it so you could jump even higher and perform stunts that would make a classic Warren Miller movie look like child's play.
Being decended from the folks that helped make Utah a place people could live in, I (sort of) take offense at the fact that Utah in uninhabitable. It is true that other colonizing attempts at the Western U.S. tended to overlook Utah as a place to settle, due to much more fertile areas elsewhere (including California and Oregon). The people who settled Utah almost completely died out due to lack of food and surving by sheer luck, and these were for the most part experienced people who were involved in other frontier settlements previously. That they survived and thrived is testament to the fact that people will do what they can to make a place for their families.
I can't even imagine what it would be like to bring a family to Mars, raise kids and grandkids, and try to make a place that you can grow cities and a society. When that starts to happen, it will be a truly historic occasion. I just hope to be able to witness the first extra-terrestial birth of a baby in my lifetime.
I am really surprised in some ways, and not at all in others that there are groups of people who want to leave the rest of the universe in pristine condition as it currently is.
Of course, I also believe that those same people would prefer a mass genocide of all of mankind (excepting themselves and a very small group of like-minded people). Some even plan for it and hope the rest of us kill each other.
I would have to agree that ownership of the territory is going to be a huge issue. There are folks that I consider to be on par with the name-a-star-after-your-loved-ones who are selling square mile parcels on planetary bodies throughout the solar system. That is at least the first wave of ownership that is currently happening.
Ownership of any rock that is outside of the earth is still up for debate. I think D. Delos Harriman (from Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon") probabally has the best approach if it really needs to come down to it, by trying to buy the property rights for celestial bodies from all nations that lie below the orbit of the planets (or the moon) but this is something that is going to get ugly before it gets better. Try to park a geosync satellite above Equador and find out just how valuable celestial real estate really is. Equador claims that spot directly above their country as soverign territory (really, look it up).
A pro-active approach from the UN might help in trying to distribute celestial territory, but their current efforts are more along the lines of the Moon Treaty and the Outer Space Treaty are, IMHO examples of those UN member nations who don't have spaceflight capability from legally keeping those who have it from doing anything with spaceflight. That and they are also diplomats and lobbiest who endorse mass genocide of most of mankind at heart. They really don't want anybody to go anywhere else beside staying on the earth. Oh, maybe send a few robots to check out some cool places, and keep the scientist in their ivory towers to keep writing cool proposals and professional research publications. Keep the teeming hoards of ordinary people from ever getting to the rest of those places.
If the UN get into the business of realistically dealing with outer space, it would have to be more along the lines of the Homestead Act and the Northwest Territories Ordinance passed by the United States congress, which specifically acknowledged that the new territories are going to be settled, provided a way for individuals to get involved in the process, and established governing principles for the creation of new governments for the people going into those territories. It would be cool to see the UN coming up with a plan that would allow sections of the Moon, for instance, be able to achieve the status as a UN member nation in the General Assembly.
(BTW, the Northwest of the Northwest Ordinance was the northwestern portion of the USA after the Revolution: Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and a part of Minnesota. This was one of the only comprehensive pieces of legislation passed under the U.S. Articles of Confederation before the current U.S. Constitution. This also established the pattern for making most of the western USA as well, in addition to current governing principles for American territory that is not currently in a state. I'm sure this would apply to soverign American territory in space as well.)
I seriously doubt that will ever happen.
Instead, I think what is probabally going to happen is a reenactment of the territory grab for the Americas (and most of the rest of the world as well) that happened between the 15th and 18th Centuries. That the players are going to be a little bit different (Europe will be a united voice, but India, China, and Japan w
I'd like to add that Columbus did approach the Portugues crown for sponsorship, but they already had their own exploration arm that was moving along rather well. They knew about the size of the globe, and there was some documentation that seems to indicate that they passed on Columbus's mission in part because they knew he was wrong.
There is also some strong indication that when Pedro Alvres de Cabral decided to "get lost" in the South Atlantic only to "discover" Brazil, that they knew about the America's all along... they just wanted to keep it a trade secret from the Spanish.
The neat thing about the voyage of Columbus was that it finally blew off the covers of America for all of Europe, and no longer a state secret. That the Portugues knew even more, they "leaked" the discovery of the Phillipines to convince the Pope to move the demarcation line, giving the Portuguese more of South America.
Yeah, the history of exploration is rather interesting, and this is one case where two major world powers were completing against one another. Later on it was a battle between the French and the English, which in part was played off of one another by the American Colonists during the American Revolution.
I've been doing contract work lately out of my home, and doing some substitute teaching on the side at the local high schools.
I think the original poster is dead on with the problems facing K-12 education. I live in a very conservative, Republican (and largely rural) area and even here the high school is all caught up with social issues. I once mentioned religious thought in the context of historical trends and what caused mass mirgrations of people (like the Pilgrims in Massachusetts, Mormons in Utah, Mennonites in Pennsylvania, etc.) and got a major ass chewing by some students and teachers for teaching religion. Science and math (what I try to teach if I get a chance) tend not to bring up these issues as much.
It shocks me in some ways how the High School experience has changed since I graduated (over 20 years ago). Some things like illegal drugs actually seem to be less common now than when I was in school. Seeing a police officer walk on campus in uniform (actually a T-Shirt with a police badge on it... to make them fit more with the high school kids, but everybody knows who he is) as a full-time faculty member does surprise me. I hate Channel One (a "manditory" TV commercial that pays for some A/V equipment that is usually half broken as well).
What you describe as a "sign of the times" is driven in part by faculty and what they percieve as the current issues. Social issues are issues in part because some activist wants to push them onto the front pages of newspapers and leading stories on the evening TV news. That traditionally liberals have also been more successful at identifying these issues tends to make them more liberal in nature.
The real issue that should be discussed in schools is if they can read, intelligently construct and defend and argument, and handle most ordinary consumer mathmatical problems (comparing price/oz/gram of differnt food items, and knowing when somebody is truly trying to rob you blind.) I also hope that most students learn enough science that they can intelligently seperate bad psuedo-science and con-artists from real scientists.
There are a number of very good reasons why programmers aren't members of a union.
Unions work best against a specific company. Most labor unions that have been successful were organized against a specific company (like United States Steel, Ford, GM, Amalgamated Mines, etc.). An old saying, but I happen to agree with, is that companies earn the unions they have to deal with. With a couple of prominent exceptions, software does not tend to be written by large software development companies (I.E. Microsoft, Oracle, etc.), but rather by small development teams that at best are a support department. Also, rather than a small handful of companies in a particular industry (like Ford, GM, & Chrysler for auto makers in the USA) there are thousands of companies you can write software for.
Going on with the idea of support departments: Programming is often not the primary focus of the company (at least from the view of the CEO). Programmers that are writing software for a bank, for example, might be writing mission critical software, but from the view of the CEO it is the teller and loan officiers who are bringing in most of the money. Firing a couple of programmers and then hiring a replacement doesn't seem that big of a deal, especially if the programmer went "on strike". It is even worse when you are only working on software that is an add-on product to something else the company is working on.
Many software development companies are very entrepreneural in nature. This means there are many that are starting up, and the typical age of a software company can at best be measured as just a few years. Employees hired early on in the company tend to have very personal relationships with the company founders/management, so anybody feeling alienated by the management is a new hiree that appears to be a troublemaker. Also, it simply takes time to organize workers, sometimes a decade or more. By that measure the company would often be bankrupt before that could happen.
Many programming shops are in anti-union states. Some states have union organizing laws that either encourage or discourage union participation. Most of the traditional rust-belt states (Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania) have closed shop rules that make it easier to form unions. Sun-belt states (Texas, Arizona, Florida, etc.) tend to have open shop rules and other laws making it tougher to get a union and keep it once it is formed. Where I live (Utah), even mentioning unions is actionable for getting fired from your job, and you have no legal recourse. It happened to me, so I know firsthand.
Computer programmers tend to have college degrees, and are better educated. Let's face it, white-collar jobs tend to have fewer union members than traditional manufacturing jobs. There are a number of factors with this, including some other points I've made with this so far, but the point here is that with a few exceptions the AFL-CIO has had little success with organizing employees among professional ranks. This isn't to say they haven't tried.
There appear to be few incentives for joining a union for programmers. Programmers already earn a fairly decent salary or wage (if they can find the work:)), often the equivalent of $20 or more for even entry-level work. A union organizer is going to have to promise (and deliver) much more than that if it really is going to be worth the union dues. When the Chicago stockyard workers got organized and got pay raises from $0.10 to $0.50/hour, it meant a whole lot more and those union organizers really did earn their pay.
Being advisarial does not develop good software. If you are a good software developer, you need to often obtain an elusive ability to feel what the customer (in most cases...the CEO of the company) really wants the software to do. If you are already fighting management and have additional barriers due to a labor union that interferes with the communication with the customer, there are many other companies
I know this thread is getting old and stale, but I would like to voice an opinion.
I am a US citizen and taxpayer, but the argument I am making really should be independent of what I am proposing.
Yes, I think that the US Government (through NASA and the U.S. Air Force... with the exception of some truly classified projects that are entirely defense related) should completely get out of the space transportation business for low-earth orbit travel. Kennedy Space Center (KSC) should be moved to the FAA for administration as a general-aviation space port/airport complex and moved completely out of the business.
Private businesses (and more than one of them) should be encouraged, even required (in term of congressional requirements to NASA) to provide all manned and unmanned launches to LEO activities, and NASA should be able to move on to the next frontier, if they are to be trusted at all. As a strong space enthusiaist, unfortunately, I wouldn't shed a tear if NASA was completely removed from the U.S. Federal Budget except as a pork spending program to hide all of the money going to black projects (like the NSA and CIA budgets). Even then I could think of other projects that would be easier to do to hide the same amount of money, and that is a lousy reason to keep an unproductive agency going.
Some of the NASA research centers should be kept with some sort of funding level, but perhaps moved to the National Science Foundation? Yeah, there are problems with other BIG SCIENCE government run agencies as well, but a serious discussion does need to take place regarding the role of NASA in the future of the American Republic and wheither the "glory days" of that space agency is in the past.
Should we give up on space transportation? Absolutely not!
Should NASA design and build a new generation of manned and unmanned rockets/spacecraft for LEO activities? My vote for this is no, and I suggest that we allow some other people to try and do what it appears as though NASA keeps screwing up on every attempt. The other projects (like the X-33, spaceplane, etc.) that NASA has tried to work on have ended up being even less fiscally responsible than even the current Shuttle program.
I would love a trim, slim NASA with a hardened astronaut corp that is more like the Star Trek TV series of people going boldly where noone has gone before. Show me an example of that from NASA in the last 20 years, and I might feel differently. (Basically, since the Skylab 3 mission.) It is cool that astronauts can service Hubble, but even that is being taken away from the astronaut corp at the moment. I see little that the ISS is providing that hasn't already been done by the USA with Skylab or the Russians with MIR. Just a little bit bigger and newer, but even that is relative and compares poorly.
A base on the moon is truly visionary attitude, as is a manned mission to Mars. I even like the idea of sending people to Mars in an orbital space station (not going there to land), simply to do real-time control of experiments going on and using robots to explore Mars directly. This is originality and extending frontiers. I hope that NASA is involved with projects of this nature in the future. In approximately 100 years, I hope that my grandchildren are viewing pictures from the first INTERSTELLAR space probes, and debating about propulsion methods trying to get to the planets that have been discovered with manned vehicles.
That is what it means to be human, to keep going and exploring where nobody has been before. NASA, from my viewpoint, it a roadblock to allowing me or my children from going anywhere off of this rock and as such should be removed.
You mean it took 20 years to design, from scratch the Apollo space capsule? The current space shuttle wasn't launched until the 1990's? (It was started in the 1970's)
The reason why the space shuttle is so derided is because it embodies almost everything that seems to be wrong with NASA today: Protected contractors, congressional pork, bloated management, worries about safety so extream that they can't move, design by comittee with so many compromises that nobody is happy and nothing useful is accomplished.
There is no reason why it should cost $0.5 Billion just to lanuch seven people into orbit (which after the current safety rounds may end up closer to $1 Billion... yes, that is a thousand million dollars). Most of that money is being used to help pay for the huge infrastructure that services and maintains the shuttles.
Could another orbiter be built to replace Columbia? Yes, we could do that like when the Challenger was destroyed, but at this point some very wise people are suggesting that it needs to be rethought and there are other more practical solutions that should also be considered.
That NASA has all of its options tied up to a single launch platform and launching system also shows some huge technical vunerabilities. Thank goodness that the Russians were at least available as a backup with the Soyuz capsules, otherwise there would be nothing in space and a bunch of stranded astronauts in the ISS.
I would have to totally disagree with this point. This does indeed get brought up as violations of the Geneva Convention, especially when the identity of the country who deployed the equipment is established.
The problem with most land mines is that many have been placed by countries/combatants that no longer exist, or the countries who did place them have sufficiently covered their tracks that it can't be traced. The question then becomes "Who is responsible?" There really aren't easy answers.
There are some mines left in Laos and Vietnam left by the USA, and again that raises the question: When such weapons are used, who has to deal with the items deployed by the defeated side of the conflict? My understanding is that the US military removed as much as they could before US forces left Vietnam anyway.
The place that is currently of major concern is the countries of the former Yugoslavia and the Balkan region in general. War has just decimated that region of the world, and those bombs you are describing were deployed by just about every faction in all of the wars in the last part of the 20th Century.
The other problem, also in violation of the Geneva Convention, is that often civilian facilities such as hospitals, schools, and shopping districts have been placed in close proximity to military facilities, such as the hospital in Bagdad that also served as the HQ for the Iraqi Defense Ministry during the Iraq war. The problem here is that legitimate military targets hide behind civilians as a "shield", so it should be little surprise then if ordinary civilians get killed when these targets are attacked.
This site seems to paint Ma Bell in glowing colors. I would have to agree that I considered the breakup of AT&T a huge tragedy, but quite a bit of good has come from it in many ways. My grandfather, father, and an uncle all worked for AT&T (pre-breakup... my dad quit and moved on doing other things with his life when he was in his early 20's), and all of them were of the opinion that AT&T planned on the breakup and deliberately tried to push their least profitable parts of the company onto the regional companies. That the RBOC (regional Bell operating companies) have done as well as they have post breakup still amazes me even thinking of it.
This is just speculations, but I believe that the current efforts with VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) would have been killed early on. Of course a paranoid AT&T (worried about another Justice Department lawsuit) may have "allowed" the technology to stay under the radar, but it would have been much more Free Software/personal hacks that only geeks and geek friends have access to. I just can't see commercial competition doing many of the things with VOIP that is happening today with a large Ma Bell controlling all aspects of the phone company throughout America.
I do believe that the days are numbered for normal local telephone service (POTS - this acronym varies for its meaning), and this change is as signficant as buggy whip manufactuers and buggy makers vs. automobile makers. A phone with numbers near the handset will still be in homes in 30 years, but the method that connects two phones in different places is going to be quite different. How regulators deal with this is going to be telling as well.
I seriously doubt that there will ever be one single universal communications company in America again controlling a key communications technology to the extent that AT&T has done. The only real current possibility would be with satellite communication, but there are alternatives to geosync satellites if these companies get too controlling.
You obviously never used the computer. If you use the brackets, you understand just what is going on.
Please, before you comment on something you don't know anything about, think.
Of course, what else is new on/.
Yes, it was called the Apple two, but in just about every reference and magazine (except more mainstream press like Time or the New York Times) used the ][ symbols because that is what Apple used, even in technical manuals as well as the boot text when the computer was first turned on. People use the symbols for fondness of the old system. BTW, the Apple/// did indeed use the "/" character in its name. An no, it is not just a varient font but the actual name of the computer.
Also, the command prompt for an Apple ][ was the right bracket "]". (Yes, I know about integer basic ">", and the monitor prompt "*", but floating point basic ("FP") was the default prompt.)
Sorry about getting way off topic here, but I can't let something like this go by. Now onto more about the Bell System.
I happen to live in an area that is growning very rapidly (due to a number of factors including people coming here from other parts of the country), and it is fairly common for areas where a voting precinct has been divided (due to population growth) to, for awhile at least, share the same voting precinct.
This is done because trying to find a reliable place for voting that is open to the public and politically neutral (such as a school, community center, etc.) can sometimes be difficult to do. Also, to help aid some of the senior citizens who just keep showing up to the same place when an election occurs, they show up and if they are in a new precinct they are simply directed to the other side of the room to the correct precinct. It really does solve quite a bit of hassles. Over time the new precincts do spread out into new buildings (like if a new school is built), but it does take time.
BTW, Orange County (CA) has even larger population growth than where I am living, so I would imagine that this has (at least historically) been an issue there. Florida also has similar problems in terms of growth, compounded with some very corrupt election officials (of both parties).
I'm going to have to agree with you on this point here. The LOTR trilogy was at least done by a diehard fan of the books (with much of the production staff as well).
Can you imagine what the film would have been like done by the usual Hollywood production crews, writers , producers, and directors?
Frankly I'm amazed at the compromises that Peter Jackson had to make turning it into movie, and what he was able to keep in the process. From the viewpoint of literature, it would be the equivalent of trying to condense the entire LOTR into three issues of Reader's Digest with each part being only 30 pages each. Really think about that. The typical script for a movie isn't really that much more, although visual descriptions can be shown.
Cinema is a totally different medium than the written word, and admittedly this is but one interpretation. When some other director decides to tackle this book again as a movie, they will always be compared to Peter Jackson. I dare say that such comparison will almost always be unfavorable, and the Oscar will seal the fate that such adaptation will only take place when the copyright to the books expire. In other words, not in my lifetime.
One problem with the Rivendell set: It was done in a NZ national park, and they had to take down all of the consruction within days filming (as a part of their permit). In other words, this set is no more and would have to be rebuilt from scratch. (See the Fellowship of the Ring DVD for details)
As for Hobbiton, it was built on a Sheep ranch and was built nearly a year before principle shooting. Peter Jackson wanted to give the feel of having been lived in for awhile, with gardens and trees in places where it would be logical for homes in a village. Most of the buildings are a simple facade, but were dug into actual hills. The NZ Corp of Engineering even built the main road through Hobbiton.
If this isn't already a tourist attraction, it probabally reverted back to the sheep operations. If there is any more info about this, it would be neat to find out the ultimate fate of Hobbiton.
While I would be the first to admit that the NSA has the competent computer scientists that have experience in dissecting algorithms and verifying secure communications, I for one would hate to politicize the NSA more than it already is by giving it responsibilities over election procedures.
Instead, as has been pointed out elsewhere, source code and full disclosure of machine schematics need to be published and available for citizens to inspect. The responsibility needs to rest with the political parties to verify that the elections are being run correctly, and procedures in place to lodge complaints if a security hole is found... with legal requirements to require the verified security hole is fixed.
In regards to the idea that any party can be organized and participate in the Primary elections, it varies from state to state, and sometimes there is a minimum voter threshold based on previous elections.
This is usually about 1%-3% of the total votes cast in the previous election must be for the party trying to get on the ballot. There are also procedures that are usually available to have people sign a petition and get their names/party on the ballot even for a primary. A primary is only really required if the seat is being contested by more than one person in that party for the same seat, but at these primaries there are usually multiple seats for different juristictions and levels of government that are open in the election.
So yes, anybody can set up a party (the Hackers Party anybody?) as long as you can get enough of your fellow citizens to set the party up.
My wife is an election judge where I live, and I can verify that the job is extreamly difficult. The election district that I have been voiting at typically uses the punchcard ballots made famous in Florida. Keep in mind that sometimes as many as 100 different ballot issues (referendium issues, seats for political office, bonding issues, constitiional changes) can be voted on, and even in this tiny election district there are approximately 3,000 potential voters, with general elections turning out about 1500 voters or more.
Counting accurately that many votes on so many issues is going to be much more error prone and expensive than if the process is automated through some sort of counting machine behavior. The argument is not the sexy machines but what is the most accurate and acceptable means to get all that information processed... and to have the results for all the issues being dealt with available in a resonable period of time.
The county where I live usually has all of the precints totally processed and reported before midnight of the day of the election. I can't even imagine hand counting paper ballots and how long that would take.
BTW, when special elections are called and there are comparitively few issues (sometimes only one issue on the ballot), these are indeed typically done with pencil and paper and then hand-counted.
Again in deference to my wife on this issue, in the last election where the paper ballots were used, they came up with four totally different tallies on two rounds of counting between four election judges. Since she was the head judge, she insisted that it be recounted again until they all agreed on the same totals. A couple of the other judges wanted to simply "split the difference" between their vote counts and go home. I'm sure that has been done in some other precints in the past. Paper ballots have many other issues and counting them (even with honest election judges) can have inaccuracies that other voting methods can try to avoid.
In regards to the dangling chad issue: There were only two ways my wife was able to intentionally create a dangling chad with the punch ballots: 1) Punch multiple cards simultaneously (this is not merely voting multiple times but also being lazy about voting and punching multiple cards at the same time). 2) Lazy election judges who don't clean out the bottom of the voting machines after a very large number of people (about 300+ voters) have used the machine and the waste paper from the previous voters messes up new votes cast. In my voting precinct there are usually 5-8 voting machines, so this means it has been a couple of hours minimum since the election judge has inspected the voting machine for tampering or other problems. There are other issue that would also be raising their head if this situation occured.
All told, I don't think there is a perfect solution to this issue, but the whole issue with the electronic voting machines is going to get ugly before it gets any better.
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The Shuttle SRB's, the only man-rated solid rocket ever made, is indeed a rocket that once fired must get fully used, and ejected if you need to quit using it.
Another benefit of using liquid fuels is that you can throttle (I.E. change the flow rate) of the rocket engine as it is fired.
Think about it this way: When you are firing a rocket you are also throwing away mass (Newton's F=ma equation). At the same time, when you are using a typical rocket engine, the actual amount of energy being send out the nozzle stays roughly constant throughout the burn, assuming that you can't throttle the rocket. This means, working the equation backward, force stays constant, but the accelleration rises as the mass drops.
Rockets like this are just fine for a nuclear warhead or for a solid well-built military satellite, but toward the end of the burn you can hit 20 G's or more. Even the Saturn V had this problem to some extent (the Apollo astronauts sometimes hit as high as 8 G's of accelation for brief moments). The Shuttle main engine has adjustable engines that fire at about 105% thrust rating on the launch pad and dropping to about 80% of the rating as it starts gaining altitude... in part to make the ride easier on the passengers.
While there are other issues to follow through, this is something else to consider, and why especially with manned rocket they are almost always liquid rockets.
In addition, the specific impulse (the amount of energy release by a pound of rocket fuel) is sometimes higher with liquid fuels. This is mainly a matter of chemestry, but several factors go into it. I'm sure, however, that some solid propellants have a higher specific impulse than LH2/LOX (the fuel typically used by NASA on the upper stages of most of the manned rockets... this is what caused the falling chunk of ice/foam that destroyed Columbia).
Keep in mind that the X-Prize requirements are that you only have to carry "ballast" equivalent of two extra passengers... not the passengers themselves. Still, it would be a nice "plus" if they could do a full commercial-capable flight of three people, two passengers + pilot.
I would have to agree that Rutan does follow a very methodical and incremental testing regime... indeed this is exactly the benefit of going the route that he has been taking. Carmack has been struggling with engine design, but it appears as though they are going to be ready to launch a test vehicle real soon as well. It is going to be an exciting year this year in terms of private space programs.
I'm expecting a stealth group to "suddenly" appear on the scene as well if these groups get real close to reaching the goal.
There are two issues to deal with in regards to e-mail headers:
1) Technical verification of headers: If somebody sends e-mail, an IP verification process can become part of the specification for the e-mail routing codes. This already happens to a small extent, and some changes to SMTP are already being proposed to deal with this. Anonymous transactions can still take place, but this would be a functionally equivalent to a Caller ID on your phone of "Unknown Caller" (which some phone companies give you the ability to block on your home telephone). The point is, when you use TCP services, you _*MUST*_ know the IP address of the machine who has contacted you (if for no other reason than to send a reply IP packet to verify that the message has been received). This is simply a definition of TCP/IP. Good mail servers will do this anyway.
Lousy mail servers that accept fradulant headers can be filtered out. Of course, this is what lead to the "blackout" lists that cause all kinds of legal headaches, but at least is a realistic technical solution. If a mail server wants to permit relays of e-mail that anonymizes the originator, it is still possible, but at least you know who is doing it. The anonymizer service then has to stay vigillant at keeping spamers off of its service if they don't want to get blocked. Possible, but not often easy to do.
2) Legal requirements to require truthful headers. This is often done with some state-level anti-spam laws. If you show up at somebody's house acting as a Kirby salesman (or worse yet, as a Police Officer), and you are not, certain laws apply to your actions you do after that.
E-mail that claims to have come from whitehouse.gov could in a similar fashion be subject to laws of impersonating official communications of the government, and potentially trying to represent in an official capacity a government official.
If you claim to be from some other company, and you are not, similar false representation should occur. A forged header claiming to be from ibm.com could result in a libel claim by IBM against the spammer.
Anonymizer services could still work, they would just have to be exactly who they claim they are, and clearly stamp their e-mail with some unique signature that makes it clear that the e-mail has been through an anonymization process. As long as that service hasn't kept any permanent copy of the e-mail from the originator, it would be impossible to tract back to the originator. The originator of the anonymous e-mail would then have to evaluate the trustworthiness of the anonymizer service as to if they keep copies of the e-mail or not.
The problem I see here is that many commercial ISP's don't really care who is using their service, and in some ways actively recruit spammers. The trick is to try and make strong disincentives for those sort of businesses from even getting associated with spammers.
I think Peter Jennings said it best about Canada:
Canada has the "feel" of a small town, at least as far as national politics are concerned.
The overall population of Canada is relatively small compared to the sheer size of the country, and in some ways, particluarly in the Yukon or Northwest Territories, it has a positively frontier feel. In many positive ways.
When you start having to govern a population that can be measured in billions (even if that is a large fraction of a billion, such as the USA or Russia) the government has to start doing things that often seems oppressive to people. As an American, it disturbs me to see my government do this too often.
My family has crossed back and forth across the U.S./Canadian border several times over the years. One part of my family is originally from Belfast, Ireland and helped settle London, Ontario. From there they moved to Missouri, and then latter helped settle Alberta, then even later moved to California. As a result, I have family on both sides of the border, and perhaps this gives me a better perspective on US/Canadian differences.
Smarter legal system? It is essentially the same (English Common Law), but the formation for the past two centuries has been quite a bit different due to a different set of issues both countries have had to deal with.
To sum it up: Canada has to deal with Quebec. The USA has to deal with Texas. I'm not so sure which is the tougher problem. L:)
I do have problems with approaches like what Canada is doing with music recording media, and what in the USA is also done (to a smaller extent) with videotapes.
Perhaps the #1 example of what an "industry tax" results in is with the DAT format: It was far superior to existing distribution media, and it would have allowed a "home audio studio" to be much more common than it is even today, for various reasons.
The RIAA got into the act and "forced" the U.S. Congress to "tax" the audio tapes to the point that the only people that ever bought anything in that format were full-time professional audio engineers and hard-core audiophillies. Eventually CR-R's replaced DAT, and it was the computer industry that fiercly resisted the U.S. government from taxing CR-R's.
On a philosophical basis, I don't think it should be a government's job to finance via taxation private for-profit businesses. The distribution of any money collected in that manner will always misappropriated and every time money changes hands there are opportunities for corruption and diverting that money to "more worthy" goals.
I am replying to a low-scoring poster here, but the point is valid.
/. readers and other like-minded individuals, and if it starts becoming very successful it could very likely start a political process simply because of the thought change from trying to support the group.
A meme change to start calling the "music industry" instead as the "music cartel" might become very successful with
Some "cartels" or specifc organizations have been granted special permission by governments (including the US Government) in very narrow areas. A very specific example of this is Major League Baseball, which has a charter granted by the U.S. Federal Congress and very explicit laws spelling out the fact that they have been recognized as such and are excempt from anti-trust laws. I don't believe that the music industry is protected in the same manner, and it's clear they manipulate prices of CD's in a way that would never be tolerated in other industries, such as the petroleum industry.
Something that you've totally ignored is that in order for a new transportation system to be used, it needs to be done simultaneously with existing transportation modes...at least until it is fully implemented. Case in point: New York City. Much of the design of the city is layed out with the previous transportaion and communication system in mind. Some streets are so narrow that driving an automobile down them is clearly an afterthought.
Cost? Don't do a simple handwave and say the money will be there if we desire it. You need to prove that alternatives will not just simply solve some problems but must be significantly better.
Your solution would be an interesting thing to try to implement if you were starting from scratch and designing a whole community from the beginning. Unfortunately, that is not how real life deals with things.
Trying to decide just who owns a piece of real estate on the shore of the Great Salt Lake can be a really interesting problem. Other lakes in Utah also seem to have this problem, but it only really comes up when the lakes get too high or too low.
In the case of Salt Lake, because it is so shallow a drop of only a few feet can explose hundreds of acres of land. Admittedly it is rather smelly mud, and unless you are walking around in hip boots you would probabally not really want to get out into it except in a few spots. Still, some people have ranches that are on the lake shore and sometimes let their cattle wander out a little farther.
It is also debateable about wheither people using recreational vehicles can use the land. During times of high water levels you really can't drive around the Great Salt Lake, except on public highways that don't exactly follow the shoreline. When the water gets low however, there are no fences (usually) to get in the way of taking a 4-wheel ORV out into the mud. Also, by state law any land found below the statutory lake level is public property, which is what most people use as the excuse for why they can travel on the land. Of course, this even gets even more bizzare when older land claims, including stuff settled from the Homestead Act get into play that prempt the state law, so it isn't always so clear.
Hill Air Force Base does routine training over the Great Salt Lake as well, including flights into the Wendover Test Range. The western shore of the Great Salt Lake is pretty much uninhabited, and some of the bomb testing range does extend onto the shore. It is not unheard of for F-16's to go crashing into the lake, although the Air Force does try to recover all of the pieces when it does happen. The Test Range does have quite a bit of unexploded munitions that make it very hazardous to wander around the area without a guide. The area is about the size of a typical mid-western county.
Algorithms can be mathmatically proven, and have been.
The problem is wheither they can be proven completely in practical terms, not to mention proving an implementation of a particular algorithm.
In the time it would take for me to complete a proof of some piece of software I wrote, I could write a dozen (or even hundred) other programs. That and trying to develop the skills to perform a rigorous proof would have to be developed, which are (usually) never taught in a typical CS program at a university. Instead, mathamatical proofs of algorithms are usually a side curisoity that is done maybe once or twice (in a lifetime), and even then you give up trying unless it was a simple "Hello World" application.
I've also heard that good programmers are people who can visualize in multiple dimensions. This is not an easy skill, and in reality something quite rare. Most people can only visualize in two dimensions, with a great deal of struggling trying to get things to fit in a third. Even to grasp that there could be a fourth dimension and what that could be like is even harder to find still. I have some (simple) software I've written that has 10-15 dimensions of variables applying and relating to each other, and trying to convey that to somebody who doesn't get it can be quite difficult. If you've done some serious programming, I'm sure that you can relate to this, although you may not be thinking in the dimensional aspect unless it is pointed out to your directly.
Skiing on Mars would not be that difficult once you get the atmospheric pressure up enough to really make a difference. Once atmospheric moisture starts going around you would clearly start to see some glaciers start to form on Olympus Mons...now that would be a hill worth skiing on (even with oxygen tanks). The reduced gravity would also make it so you could jump even higher and perform stunts that would make a classic Warren Miller movie look like child's play.
Being decended from the folks that helped make Utah a place people could live in, I (sort of) take offense at the fact that Utah in uninhabitable. It is true that other colonizing attempts at the Western U.S. tended to overlook Utah as a place to settle, due to much more fertile areas elsewhere (including California and Oregon). The people who settled Utah almost completely died out due to lack of food and surving by sheer luck, and these were for the most part experienced people who were involved in other frontier settlements previously. That they survived and thrived is testament to the fact that people will do what they can to make a place for their families.
I can't even imagine what it would be like to bring a family to Mars, raise kids and grandkids, and try to make a place that you can grow cities and a society. When that starts to happen, it will be a truly historic occasion. I just hope to be able to witness the first extra-terrestial birth of a baby in my lifetime.
I am really surprised in some ways, and not at all in others that there are groups of people who want to leave the rest of the universe in pristine condition as it currently is.
Of course, I also believe that those same people would prefer a mass genocide of all of mankind (excepting themselves and a very small group of like-minded people). Some even plan for it and hope the rest of us kill each other.
I would have to agree that ownership of the territory is going to be a huge issue. There are folks that I consider to be on par with the name-a-star-after-your-loved-ones who are selling square mile parcels on planetary bodies throughout the solar system. That is at least the first wave of ownership that is currently happening.
Ownership of any rock that is outside of the earth is still up for debate. I think D. Delos Harriman (from Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon") probabally has the best approach if it really needs to come down to it, by trying to buy the property rights for celestial bodies from all nations that lie below the orbit of the planets (or the moon) but this is something that is going to get ugly before it gets better. Try to park a geosync satellite above Equador and find out just how valuable celestial real estate really is. Equador claims that spot directly above their country as soverign territory (really, look it up).
A pro-active approach from the UN might help in trying to distribute celestial territory, but their current efforts are more along the lines of the Moon Treaty and the Outer Space Treaty are, IMHO examples of those UN member nations who don't have spaceflight capability from legally keeping those who have it from doing anything with spaceflight. That and they are also diplomats and lobbiest who endorse mass genocide of most of mankind at heart. They really don't want anybody to go anywhere else beside staying on the earth. Oh, maybe send a few robots to check out some cool places, and keep the scientist in their ivory towers to keep writing cool proposals and professional research publications. Keep the teeming hoards of ordinary people from ever getting to the rest of those places.
If the UN get into the business of realistically dealing with outer space, it would have to be more along the lines of the Homestead Act and the Northwest Territories Ordinance passed by the United States congress, which specifically acknowledged that the new territories are going to be settled, provided a way for individuals to get involved in the process, and established governing principles for the creation of new governments for the people going into those territories. It would be cool to see the UN coming up with a plan that would allow sections of the Moon, for instance, be able to achieve the status as a UN member nation in the General Assembly.
(BTW, the Northwest of the Northwest Ordinance was the northwestern portion of the USA after the Revolution: Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and a part of Minnesota. This was one of the only comprehensive pieces of legislation passed under the U.S. Articles of Confederation before the current U.S. Constitution. This also established the pattern for making most of the western USA as well, in addition to current governing principles for American territory that is not currently in a state. I'm sure this would apply to soverign American territory in space as well.)
I seriously doubt that will ever happen.
Instead, I think what is probabally going to happen is a reenactment of the territory grab for the Americas (and most of the rest of the world as well) that happened between the 15th and 18th Centuries. That the players are going to be a little bit different (Europe will be a united voice, but India, China, and Japan w
I'd like to add that Columbus did approach the Portugues crown for sponsorship, but they already had their own exploration arm that was moving along rather well. They knew about the size of the globe, and there was some documentation that seems to indicate that they passed on Columbus's mission in part because they knew he was wrong.
There is also some strong indication that when Pedro Alvres de Cabral decided to "get lost" in the South Atlantic only to "discover" Brazil, that they knew about the America's all along... they just wanted to keep it a trade secret from the Spanish.
The neat thing about the voyage of Columbus was that it finally blew off the covers of America for all of Europe, and no longer a state secret. That the Portugues knew even more, they "leaked" the discovery of the Phillipines to convince the Pope to move the demarcation line, giving the Portuguese more of South America.
Yeah, the history of exploration is rather interesting, and this is one case where two major world powers were completing against one another. Later on it was a battle between the French and the English, which in part was played off of one another by the American Colonists during the American Revolution.
I've been doing contract work lately out of my home, and doing some substitute teaching on the side at the local high schools.
I think the original poster is dead on with the problems facing K-12 education. I live in a very conservative, Republican (and largely rural) area and even here the high school is all caught up with social issues. I once mentioned religious thought in the context of historical trends and what caused mass mirgrations of people (like the Pilgrims in Massachusetts, Mormons in Utah, Mennonites in Pennsylvania, etc.) and got a major ass chewing by some students and teachers for teaching religion. Science and math (what I try to teach if I get a chance) tend not to bring up these issues as much.
It shocks me in some ways how the High School experience has changed since I graduated (over 20 years ago). Some things like illegal drugs actually seem to be less common now than when I was in school. Seeing a police officer walk on campus in uniform (actually a T-Shirt with a police badge on it... to make them fit more with the high school kids, but everybody knows who he is) as a full-time faculty member does surprise me. I hate Channel One (a "manditory" TV commercial that pays for some A/V equipment that is usually half broken as well).
What you describe as a "sign of the times" is driven in part by faculty and what they percieve as the current issues. Social issues are issues in part because some activist wants to push them onto the front pages of newspapers and leading stories on the evening TV news. That traditionally liberals have also been more successful at identifying these issues tends to make them more liberal in nature.
The real issue that should be discussed in schools is if they can read, intelligently construct and defend and argument, and handle most ordinary consumer mathmatical problems (comparing price/oz/gram of differnt food items, and knowing when somebody is truly trying to rob you blind.) I also hope that most students learn enough science that they can intelligently seperate bad psuedo-science and con-artists from real scientists.
I know this thread is getting old and stale, but I would like to voice an opinion.
I am a US citizen and taxpayer, but the argument I am making really should be independent of what I am proposing.
Yes, I think that the US Government (through NASA and the U.S. Air Force... with the exception of some truly classified projects that are entirely defense related) should completely get out of the space transportation business for low-earth orbit travel. Kennedy Space Center (KSC) should be moved to the FAA for administration as a general-aviation space port/airport complex and moved completely out of the business.
Private businesses (and more than one of them) should be encouraged, even required (in term of congressional requirements to NASA) to provide all manned and unmanned launches to LEO activities, and NASA should be able to move on to the next frontier, if they are to be trusted at all. As a strong space enthusiaist, unfortunately, I wouldn't shed a tear if NASA was completely removed from the U.S. Federal Budget except as a pork spending program to hide all of the money going to black projects (like the NSA and CIA budgets). Even then I could think of other projects that would be easier to do to hide the same amount of money, and that is a lousy reason to keep an unproductive agency going.
Some of the NASA research centers should be kept with some sort of funding level, but perhaps moved to the National Science Foundation? Yeah, there are problems with other BIG SCIENCE government run agencies as well, but a serious discussion does need to take place regarding the role of NASA in the future of the American Republic and wheither the "glory days" of that space agency is in the past.
Should we give up on space transportation? Absolutely not!
Should NASA design and build a new generation of manned and unmanned rockets/spacecraft for LEO activities? My vote for this is no, and I suggest that we allow some other people to try and do what it appears as though NASA keeps screwing up on every attempt. The other projects (like the X-33, spaceplane, etc.) that NASA has tried to work on have ended up being even less fiscally responsible than even the current Shuttle program.
I would love a trim, slim NASA with a hardened astronaut corp that is more like the Star Trek TV series of people going boldly where noone has gone before. Show me an example of that from NASA in the last 20 years, and I might feel differently. (Basically, since the Skylab 3 mission.) It is cool that astronauts can service Hubble, but even that is being taken away from the astronaut corp at the moment. I see little that the ISS is providing that hasn't already been done by the USA with Skylab or the Russians with MIR. Just a little bit bigger and newer, but even that is relative and compares poorly.
A base on the moon is truly visionary attitude, as is a manned mission to Mars. I even like the idea of sending people to Mars in an orbital space station (not going there to land), simply to do real-time control of experiments going on and using robots to explore Mars directly. This is originality and extending frontiers. I hope that NASA is involved with projects of this nature in the future. In approximately 100 years, I hope that my grandchildren are viewing pictures from the first INTERSTELLAR space probes, and debating about propulsion methods trying to get to the planets that have been discovered with manned vehicles.
That is what it means to be human, to keep going and exploring where nobody has been before. NASA, from my viewpoint, it a roadblock to allowing me or my children from going anywhere off of this rock and as such should be removed.
8 to 20 years?
You mean it took 20 years to design, from scratch the Apollo space capsule? The current space shuttle wasn't launched until the 1990's? (It was started in the 1970's)
The reason why the space shuttle is so derided is because it embodies almost everything that seems to be wrong with NASA today: Protected contractors, congressional pork, bloated management, worries about safety so extream that they can't move, design by comittee with so many compromises that nobody is happy and nothing useful is accomplished.
There is no reason why it should cost $0.5 Billion just to lanuch seven people into orbit (which after the current safety rounds may end up closer to $1 Billion... yes, that is a thousand million dollars). Most of that money is being used to help pay for the huge infrastructure that services and maintains the shuttles.
Could another orbiter be built to replace Columbia? Yes, we could do that like when the Challenger was destroyed, but at this point some very wise people are suggesting that it needs to be rethought and there are other more practical solutions that should also be considered.
That NASA has all of its options tied up to a single launch platform and launching system also shows some huge technical vunerabilities. Thank goodness that the Russians were at least available as a backup with the Soyuz capsules, otherwise there would be nothing in space and a bunch of stranded astronauts in the ISS.
I would have to totally disagree with this point. This does indeed get brought up as violations of the Geneva Convention, especially when the identity of the country who deployed the equipment is established.
The problem with most land mines is that many have been placed by countries/combatants that no longer exist, or the countries who did place them have sufficiently covered their tracks that it can't be traced. The question then becomes "Who is responsible?" There really aren't easy answers.
There are some mines left in Laos and Vietnam left by the USA, and again that raises the question: When such weapons are used, who has to deal with the items deployed by the defeated side of the conflict? My understanding is that the US military removed as much as they could before US forces left Vietnam anyway.
The place that is currently of major concern is the countries of the former Yugoslavia and the Balkan region in general. War has just decimated that region of the world, and those bombs you are describing were deployed by just about every faction in all of the wars in the last part of the 20th Century.
The other problem, also in violation of the Geneva Convention, is that often civilian facilities such as hospitals, schools, and shopping districts have been placed in close proximity to military facilities, such as the hospital in Bagdad that also served as the HQ for the Iraqi Defense Ministry during the Iraq war. The problem here is that legitimate military targets hide behind civilians as a "shield", so it should be little surprise then if ordinary civilians get killed when these targets are attacked.
This site seems to paint Ma Bell in glowing colors. I would have to agree that I considered the breakup of AT&T a huge tragedy, but quite a bit of good has come from it in many ways. My grandfather, father, and an uncle all worked for AT&T (pre-breakup... my dad quit and moved on doing other things with his life when he was in his early 20's), and all of them were of the opinion that AT&T planned on the breakup and deliberately tried to push their least profitable parts of the company onto the regional companies. That the RBOC (regional Bell operating companies) have done as well as they have post breakup still amazes me even thinking of it.
This is just speculations, but I believe that the current efforts with VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) would have been killed early on. Of course a paranoid AT&T (worried about another Justice Department lawsuit) may have "allowed" the technology to stay under the radar, but it would have been much more Free Software/personal hacks that only geeks and geek friends have access to. I just can't see commercial competition doing many of the things with VOIP that is happening today with a large Ma Bell controlling all aspects of the phone company throughout America.
I do believe that the days are numbered for normal local telephone service (POTS - this acronym varies for its meaning), and this change is as signficant as buggy whip manufactuers and buggy makers vs. automobile makers. A phone with numbers near the handset will still be in homes in 30 years, but the method that connects two phones in different places is going to be quite different. How regulators deal with this is going to be telling as well.
I seriously doubt that there will ever be one single universal communications company in America again controlling a key communications technology to the extent that AT&T has done. The only real current possibility would be with satellite communication, but there are alternatives to geosync satellites if these companies get too controlling.
You obviously never used the computer. If you use the brackets, you understand just what is going on.
/.
/// did indeed use the "/" character in its name. An no, it is not just a varient font but the actual name of the computer.
Please, before you comment on something you don't know anything about, think.
Of course, what else is new on
Yes, it was called the Apple two, but in just about every reference and magazine (except more mainstream press like Time or the New York Times) used the ][ symbols because that is what Apple used, even in technical manuals as well as the boot text when the computer was first turned on. People use the symbols for fondness of the old system. BTW, the Apple
Also, the command prompt for an Apple ][ was the right bracket "]". (Yes, I know about integer basic ">", and the monitor prompt "*", but floating point basic ("FP") was the default prompt.)
Sorry about getting way off topic here, but I can't let something like this go by. Now onto more about the Bell System.
I've got to respond to this problem here...
I happen to live in an area that is growning very rapidly (due to a number of factors including people coming here from other parts of the country), and it is fairly common for areas where a voting precinct has been divided (due to population growth) to, for awhile at least, share the same voting precinct.
This is done because trying to find a reliable place for voting that is open to the public and politically neutral (such as a school, community center, etc.) can sometimes be difficult to do. Also, to help aid some of the senior citizens who just keep showing up to the same place when an election occurs, they show up and if they are in a new precinct they are simply directed to the other side of the room to the correct precinct. It really does solve quite a bit of hassles. Over time the new precincts do spread out into new buildings (like if a new school is built), but it does take time.
BTW, Orange County (CA) has even larger population growth than where I am living, so I would imagine that this has (at least historically) been an issue there. Florida also has similar problems in terms of growth, compounded with some very corrupt election officials (of both parties).
I'm going to have to agree with you on this point here. The LOTR trilogy was at least done by a diehard fan of the books (with much of the production staff as well).
Can you imagine what the film would have been like done by the usual Hollywood production crews, writers , producers, and directors?
Frankly I'm amazed at the compromises that Peter Jackson had to make turning it into movie, and what he was able to keep in the process. From the viewpoint of literature, it would be the equivalent of trying to condense the entire LOTR into three issues of Reader's Digest with each part being only 30 pages each. Really think about that. The typical script for a movie isn't really that much more, although visual descriptions can be shown.
Cinema is a totally different medium than the written word, and admittedly this is but one interpretation. When some other director decides to tackle this book again as a movie, they will always be compared to Peter Jackson. I dare say that such comparison will almost always be unfavorable, and the Oscar will seal the fate that such adaptation will only take place when the copyright to the books expire. In other words, not in my lifetime.
Actually, Hitler only got to the rank of corporal in the German Army during WWI.
I get your point, however. Seeing this guy act like Cpl. Klinger on M.A.S.H. with the name Hitler could be distracting... or funny.
Of course Hitler was also from Jewish ancestry, in a bit of irony. (His grandmother was a Jew.)
One problem with the Rivendell set: It was done in a NZ national park, and they had to take down all of the consruction within days filming (as a part of their permit). In other words, this set is no more and would have to be rebuilt from scratch. (See the Fellowship of the Ring DVD for details)
As for Hobbiton, it was built on a Sheep ranch and was built nearly a year before principle shooting. Peter Jackson wanted to give the feel of having been lived in for awhile, with gardens and trees in places where it would be logical for homes in a village. Most of the buildings are a simple facade, but were dug into actual hills. The NZ Corp of Engineering even built the main road through Hobbiton.
If this isn't already a tourist attraction, it probabally reverted back to the sheep operations. If there is any more info about this, it would be neat to find out the ultimate fate of Hobbiton.
While I would be the first to admit that the NSA has the competent computer scientists that have experience in dissecting algorithms and verifying secure communications, I for one would hate to politicize the NSA more than it already is by giving it responsibilities over election procedures.
Instead, as has been pointed out elsewhere, source code and full disclosure of machine schematics need to be published and available for citizens to inspect. The responsibility needs to rest with the political parties to verify that the elections are being run correctly, and procedures in place to lodge complaints if a security hole is found... with legal requirements to require the verified security hole is fixed.
In regards to the idea that any party can be organized and participate in the Primary elections, it varies from state to state, and sometimes there is a minimum voter threshold based on previous elections.
This is usually about 1%-3% of the total votes cast in the previous election must be for the party trying to get on the ballot. There are also procedures that are usually available to have people sign a petition and get their names/party on the ballot even for a primary. A primary is only really required if the seat is being contested by more than one person in that party for the same seat, but at these primaries there are usually multiple seats for different juristictions and levels of government that are open in the election.
So yes, anybody can set up a party (the Hackers Party anybody?) as long as you can get enough of your fellow citizens to set the party up.
My wife is an election judge where I live, and I can verify that the job is extreamly difficult. The election district that I have been voiting at typically uses the punchcard ballots made famous in Florida. Keep in mind that sometimes as many as 100 different ballot issues (referendium issues, seats for political office, bonding issues, constitiional changes) can be voted on, and even in this tiny election district there are approximately 3,000 potential voters, with general elections turning out about 1500 voters or more.
Counting accurately that many votes on so many issues is going to be much more error prone and expensive than if the process is automated through some sort of counting machine behavior. The argument is not the sexy machines but what is the most accurate and acceptable means to get all that information processed... and to have the results for all the issues being dealt with available in a resonable period of time.
The county where I live usually has all of the precints totally processed and reported before midnight of the day of the election. I can't even imagine hand counting paper ballots and how long that would take.
BTW, when special elections are called and there are comparitively few issues (sometimes only one issue on the ballot), these are indeed typically done with pencil and paper and then hand-counted.
Again in deference to my wife on this issue, in the last election where the paper ballots were used, they came up with four totally different tallies on two rounds of counting between four election judges. Since she was the head judge, she insisted that it be recounted again until they all agreed on the same totals. A couple of the other judges wanted to simply "split the difference" between their vote counts and go home. I'm sure that has been done in some other precints in the past. Paper ballots have many other issues and counting them (even with honest election judges) can have inaccuracies that other voting methods can try to avoid.
In regards to the dangling chad issue: There were only two ways my wife was able to intentionally create a dangling chad with the punch ballots: 1) Punch multiple cards simultaneously (this is not merely voting multiple times but also being lazy about voting and punching multiple cards at the same time). 2) Lazy election judges who don't clean out the bottom of the voting machines after a very large number of people (about 300+ voters) have used the machine and the waste paper from the previous voters messes up new votes cast. In my voting precinct there are usually 5-8 voting machines, so this means it has been a couple of hours minimum since the election judge has inspected the voting machine for tampering or other problems. There are other issue that would also be raising their head if this situation occured.
All told, I don't think there is a perfect solution to this issue, but the whole issue with the electronic voting machines is going to get ugly before it gets any better.