... at least what the article sort of suggests. I have never seen that group being called a bunch of short-term thinkers before.
That and the concept of DNA storage of massive volumes of information sounds particularly epic. It would be incredible to think you could do something like store the contents of Wikipedia inside of the DNA of a redwood tree. The very thought that an organism could be used in such a way to preserve information is by itself something very interesting to consider... and something that is currently at the threshold of being done.
I'm really quite impressed with the level of thinking that this author has gone in terms of really getting into the grips of what it means for long term data storage systems. I'm sure other ideas will surface too, but this really is a pretty serious issue that has some tragic consequences in the past that need to be remembered too. The Aztecs and Mayans had huge libraries of writings in gold codices that the Spanish thought nothing more than to melt down into bullion bars... where even a fairly large percentage of those bars never even made the trip across the Atlantic Ocean (instead are on the bottom of that ocean) to get deposited into the royal treasury. Similar experiences happened with some things in Egyptian pyramids too. Making something durable yet making the information more valuable than the medium that is holding the data is a rather significant challenge.
Considering that archaeologists spend most of their time literally digging through garbage dumps, it is a funny choice of words to even say that "uninteresting garbage" is something that people in the future won't care about.
Even if you take something like the Bible, which has been filtered through the hands of hundreds of generations of religious folks trying to make a philosophical point and to promote a certain viewpoint of history, there are still stories of incest, drug abuse, love poems, marital court rulings, genealogical records, dry legal codes, military order of battle charts, minutes of committee meetings, and of course battle reports and some epic tales thrown into the middle of all of that other stuff. I'm just suggesting that in the course of 10k-20k of written history those things which still survive tends to include a whole bunch of that "uninteresting garbage" even when it is heavily edited.
As in what quantities of data are they talking about? Historically, there is the Bible with related similar tomes like the Torah (essentially the Old Testament with some minor differences), and the Koran. Perhaps something more recent would be the long-term archiving of something like Wikipedia or some other similar comprehensive encyclopedia. In terms of data sizes, think somewhere on the range of about a GiB to TiB.
I was merely stating that it was the best network service I found in the whole city in terms of network bandwidth. If you have the money where you don't give a damn, of course you can always hit one of the casinos.... or try to get "lucky" with a slot machine or something else there as well. Unfortunately most people who use computers are smart enough to know the odds are stacked against you when you visit a casino, so depending on winning the money needed to buy network coverage is usually not an option and is utterly stupid to even plan on.
Just how large was the expense account you used when you last made a trip to Vegas on business? Did it include a few thousand dollars for "entertainment"? No doubt some businesses similarly don't give a damn or expect that sending employees there for the various conventions are also going to "live it up". I wasn't so lucky.
I found that most of the casino hotels were willing to provide access to their internet connections (including wifi) in their hotels to non-guests.... for a fee. You might need to ask at the front desk or some "shop" area for "business travelers", but the option was there. It was expensive as hell and by the time you are done you might as well simply rent a room, but the option is usually there to still get on. Free wifi is almost non-existent in Vegas in particular.
I found the best place for WiFi in Las Vegas was the municipal public library. You need to go out of your way to find it, but the librarians were pretty decent about helping you get hooked up if you were courteous and reasonable. It sure as hell beat trying to jerk around with the hotel management and the bandwidth was a hell of a lot better too. If you wanted to even bother, all you need to do is sit in you (presumably rental) car with your laptop or go inside and they even had outlets... or you could get onto terminals in the library.
An added bonus by bringing your own equipment is that you essentially had no real time limit either.
By far and away the worst places were the resort hotels, but even the budget motels are a pain in the rear.
Don't even get me started with "roaming fees" for cell phones. Las Vegas is a death trap for most cell phone carriers. I purposely bought a throw-away cell phone at Wal-Mart with pre-paid minutes explicitly for calling from Vegas on the last time I was there. A buddy of mine brought in an AT&T cell phone, and ended up with a $500 cell phone bill before he left after just a few days in that city. His typical cell phone bill was usually about $40/month. Reno is almost as bad as Vegas too. By using the throw away cell phone, I only had to pay $50, including the brand-new cell phone and I even had minutes left over after the trip. It is just one of those "buyer beware" kind of things.
On the contrary, these lands are indeed "public property" as in commonly owned by all of the American people jointly. I can't say how that is done in other countries, but it is not a "public trust" as you are implying. Federal lands are those places to which were simply left over after everything else was claimed. In many cases it is land that is so utterly worthless (or was seen as worthless when stuff like the Homestead Act was in place) that nobody wanted that land. Yes, there are certain exceptions like military bases, federal court houses, office buildings for other federal employees, and of course monumental structures like the Lincoln Memorial or Washington Monument. Still, most of the federal land is in places like deserts, mountain ranges, or the middle of the Pacific Ocean and just tiny specs of land so utterly remote that other nations don't even bother trying to claim that land.
It has only been recently that laws have been established in these usually remote areas, and in almost every situation it has been to take away rights or deny people the ability to enter into these lands. In the past, there was usually a general absence of law enforcement in general as these were genuinely wilderness areas. In previous presidential administrations, a "shut down" or budget cuts in general would simply mean that park rangers or the captain of the local garrison (when these areas were territories instead of even being states) would simply be cashiered and dismissed and usually would go home to find a job in the private sector of some sort. In other words, as a practical matter there would be fewer people in these areas to enforce laws or provide services.
Throughout most of the 19th Century and even into the middle of the 20th Century, the goal of federal government was to get rid of these lands and to place them into private hands. It was to be done in an orderly fashion, and admittedly some land (starting with the Theodore Roosevelt administration) was to be held in reserve as a special trust more along the lines you are suggesting. Interestingly, this policy ended only in 1976, and the last actual transfer to private hands under homestead acts happened in 1988. It should be noted this has happened in the lifetimes of many Slashdot readers. Still, the land is presumed to be open for any needful purpose by the general public. This is one of the reasons why federal land has generally been open to hunting, fishing, and even resource extraction. For example, panning for gold is generally permitted on federal land (except in national parks... as I said, different rules). That is why these rules by the Obama administration are simply so jarring for ordinary citizens.
Crown lands, at least anciently, were pieces of real estate that the monarch personally owned instead of land belonging to vassals. While similarly some crown lands may have been remote wilderness areas, it generally wasn't really the case as such lands were more often given to vassals so the crown didn't need to deal directly with the general lawlessness of such remote areas. It really isn't what is seen as public land in America. As for England, that is a whole mess of ancient history, custom, and tradition that is a real mess, not to mention that the UK is still dealing with the remanents of a global empire. Far from being the most undesirable lands, most crown lands in most countries were often the most valuable and productive, especially farmland.
Terrorism is trying to get maximum results with as few people as possible (since you're a small movement, for example). That involves surprise attacks and attacks done to make a point. A marching army is not terrorism. Most of our military tactics here during the Revolutionary War would be considered terrorism today.
Your definition as used here could be applied to all military organizations. Very few armies actually "march into battle", and rarely did even at the beginning of the 20th century. Certainly tactics used by the U.S. Army in Afghanistan today (literally, as I type this up) are designed to use as few people as possible.
There is, however, a distinction between a national army out on the battle field and a covert army that isn't wearing uniforms and tries to hide among ordinary civilians to achieve their aims. That is a difference, where such groups really are a bunch of cowards in the end.
I would also disagree with you in terms of what the Continental Army did during the American Revolutionary War would be construed as terrorism. Certainly some of the actions of Nathaniel Greene might be considered properly terrorism (and rather effective I might add), but Washington was fielding soldiers in uniform and even lining them up for battle as most armies did in the 18th Century. Massed gunfire from a few hundred soldiers was absolutely brutal if you could maintain discipline. I certainly don't think the Battle of Yorktown in particular was what could be considered a terrorist action, nor most of the Saratoga campaign.
A disgruntled U.S. citizen shooting at the capitol is a terrorist.
That is a real stretch of the definition of a terrorist. A proper definition of a terrorist would more properly be a group of individuals organized in a para-military or military organization with the express purpose to cause a military revolution or achieve some other political objective through the use of military force. Also noting that in almost every case what you call a terrorist is usually acting with the support (especially financial support) of some sovereign government... usually (but not limited to) governments other than the government currently running the territory where the terrorist is operating.
America has sponsored many terrorist groups over the years, and still continues to do so.
A stupid thug committing an ordinary crime is most definitely not a terrorist, and neither is a disgruntled citizen.
What news? That Washington DC has a bunch of criminals (other than members of Congress, their staff, and lobbyists trying to influence all of the above) who shoot up people? It isn't exactly news that Washington DC is also the leading city in America for gun violence.
From all that can be seen, this is just another stupid street punk that just happened to choose a lousy place to have a high speed car chase in what might be a stolen vehicle. Again, besides the sheer location, is this something that even deserves to be called news?
Most of even the American rockets are using very old Russian engines (like the RD-180 [wikipedia.org]) instead of newer engine designs.
Except that RD-180 is *not* an old engine. It's from the 1990s.
Yeah, it isn't something from the 1960's. That still is a design that is over 20 years old, being designed at the same time most PC computers were running with 8088 chips as the primary CPU and the primary operating system was MS-DOS. Well, perhaps slightly better computers were around, but not much better.
On the other hand, SpaceX got some excellent telemetry that has helped the engine engineers figure out what the problem was that caused the 2nd stage engine to fail. Getting it to relight on this mission was more of an extra engineering test rather than anything needed to deliver payloads, so to call it a failure is sort of overstating the facts.
All that happened was this engineering test failed. Such tests do fail all of the time, even though in this case the failure happened when eyes were looking. It shouldn't be a wonder that SpaceX intentionally kept "secret" any telemetry from the 1st stage during the attempted recovery or even didn't broadcast any of the video footage in terms of what could be seen from the ground.
Are you saying that this private company isn't under "extreme time pressure to perform"?
Especially not a privately owned company. That usually implies somebody with a vision is running the company and furthermore is interested in actually making a profit rather than wasting huge piles of money for some minor political gain.
In the case of the Saturn V and the Apollo program, there literally was a saying that was printed on huge banners that hung in the manufacturing plants, posted on walls in engineering offices, and in the minds of everybody involved: "Waste anything but time". Cost was definitely not of any concern at all, but rather achieving the goal of "getting a man to the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth within the decade". That was one huge time pressure to perform where the politics was to do anything possible to achieve that goal.
Elon Musk's whole goal in terms of setting up SpaceX was to try and find a way where concepts of mass production and economies of scale could be used to drive down the cost of getting into space. This whole concern about cost and making spaceflight affordable for more people is the driving factor for the whole enterprise. If it takes a few more years to get that accomplished, he doesn't seem to mind. Certainly there have been a number of people on this story and elsewhere who complain about how SpaceX is letting their schedule slip, without realizing that sometimes it simply takes time to do things right.
So no, I don't think there is any "extreme time pressure to perform". Certainly nothing like what was being crammed down the throat of those who were building the Saturn V.
Next year is going to be the year for SpaceX to put up or shut up. Their manifest is absolutely huge, and Elon Musk made some rather bold predictions at the after-launch press conference today. He made the bold claim that he will actually launch a used Falcon 9 1st stage by the end of next year. I'd like to see him try.... seriously!
The video tour of the SpaceX plant in California (given just before the launch on the webcast) showed the plant being extremely busy and practically at capacity with a half dozen Dragon capsules already under construction, a whole row of completed Merline 1D engines, and a whole bunch of rockets all lined up at various stages of completion. Whatever problems SpaceX has with their rockets right now, it isn't a supply problem at the moment. All of that hardware certainly costs a whole bunch of money, so they've definitely dumped some serious cash on trying to meet that huge manifest.
It is also the difference between fixed price contracts where SpaceX says they will deliver a satellite to orbit for a given price and then SpaceX will eat any cost overruns themselves vs. stuff Lockheed Martin does with a cost-plus contract where their profit is guaranteed but the price that taxpayers will pay can vary if "problems" arise.
Just try, if you will, to find out how much money was spent on the last Atlas V rocket. Reportedly the Canadian government paid $10 million dollars for this particular launch. Yeah, that is a bit less than what even SpaceX will typically charge for a Falcon 9 flight, but they certainly didn't screw over the Canadian taxpayers or expect Canada to pay for any cost overruns.
Yeah, I'd say there are a bunch of people very ignorant of these NASA contracts you are talking about. Those Grumman contracts in the previous post certainly had no similarity to the government contracts that SpaceX has been using.
SpaceX counts a "launch" on the manifest for when the hardware gets delivered to the launch pad, not for when they actually go up. It seems very likely there will only be one more launch of the Falcon 9 this year, but I might be mistaken.
Still, I agree with you that SpaceX has gone into actual mass production with the Merlin engines with a permanent assembly line that continuously produces these engines... being made at the rate of about one every week or two at the moment and as you are pointing out ramping up production to about two per week. That indeed is a big deal and something that hasn't been done in America since the original ICBMs were built during the Cold War. When you have people who are making the same thing over and over again that quickly, they get very good at what they are doing.
The Falcon 1 rocket had two successful launches out of five attempts. Still, in the case of this particular version of the Falcon 9, so much had been changed that it was essentially a whole new rocket.
Typically most aerospace engineers try to do incremental changes rather than having so many like is being done here today. If anything, the historical trend is to use very old designs and just do very minor tweaks a little at a time. Examples including the Atlas rocket, which first flew in December 1957 and is still flying today (with admittedly a bunch of revisions over the years that make the current rocket bear almost no resemblance to the original rocket). The same could be said about the Soyuz spacecraft, which also has had numerous revisions over the years but rarely very many changes on any particular flight. Most of even the American rockets are using very old Russian engines (like the RD-180) instead of newer engine designs.
It is far more unusual for a new clean-sheet design, especially a brand new engine design like SpaceX did with the Merlin engine. Most of the time when new designs like this are made, it is mostly an academic exercise and the rocket almost never actually flies. Frequently companies who come up with new designs simply go bankrupt before the hardware leaves the ground, assuming that any sort of hardware testing was ever done in the first place. In other words, for actual flying hardware, it is mostly very well tested and very old designs with at best very minor tweaks.
This particular flight is especially unique not just because of the larger rocket, but most especially the new Merlin 1-D engine where this was the first time that particular engine design had ever been used. From a study done by the Aerospace Corporation around the year 2000, there were several critical areas where rockets would most likely fail, and the #1 cause was a failure with the engine design itself. As a matter of fact, even with this particular flight that was no exception as the Merlin 1-D engine on the 2nd stage apparently did fail. Luckily for SpaceX, if failed after all of the payloads had been deployed so it won't impact their bottom line.... but there was a spectacular test they were going to do (it was rumored they were going to try to fly the raw 2nd stage past the Moon with the remaining propellant). Instead, this stage is going to crash into the Earth eventually as just another piece of random space junk.
There were also new avionics that had never been used before, a new faring design (also a common failure point for many rockets), and a brand new launch site that had never been done along with an orbital profile that this particular rocket had never been proven with doing either. The only other rocket that I'm aware of that did this many firsts all at once was the Saturn V, and that was done simply because the NASA officials involved didn't want to waste several launches proving new technologies and decided to do everything at once. The "space race" was also a major factor with the Saturn V as NASA was under some extreme time pressure to perform and get people to the Moon.
Rocketry is something that is sitting on such a fine line between success and failure that just a tiny mistake that would be ignored in most other human endeavors is likely to destroy the vehicle when trying to put something into orbit. For example, the first Falcon 1 rocket simply disintegrated because a simple three cent nut was made out of the wrong kind of metal and fell off at a most inappropriate moment. The salty air + moisture from sitting just a few hundred feet from the Pacific Ocean at the time didn't help either.
Another problem is that to improve technology, you need to experiment and try new things. Far more often experiments tend to be failures rather than success as you try these new ideas... hence if you are using new technology, especially for the first time like SpaceX was doing today, the likelihood of failure would actually increase and not decrease. Only when it has been used many times and has been "proven" can you even remotely say that the likelihood of failure would drop.
And no, in spite of nearly a century of rocketry and nearly a trillion dollars spent by everybody involved, we still are just beginning to understand the technology and what it can do. There still are some amazing ideas that have yet to be tried.
Note that when the COTS contract proposals were submitted to NASA in the original RfP, the amounts per flight requested by each company was sealed and not disclosed to other participants. In other words, this was a closed bid process, where price was also not the major factor.
Being critical of Orbital because they submitted a higher price bid (still substantially less than the bid that both ATK and Boeing submitted for the same project) than SpaceX is just simply disingenuous and horribly distorting the facts involved.
After the contract runs out for both companies, there certainly is going to be a whole lot more price competition between these companies and it will be interesting to see what subsequent flight costs are going to be for taxpayers in terms of resupplying the ISS. Regardless of what you may think of this kind of money being dumped into these companies, it is much cheaper paying these prices than using a cost-plus contract like United Launch Alliance wanted to use to do the same thing.
The capture at the ISS was flawless, even though the software glitch previously prevented the rendezvous and capture.
Try and spend a few days on Wikinews or some other volunteer news outlet, much less a commercial news publishing source before you can realistically start to criticize the kind of pressures that journalists find themselves under.
Just because it has been done before doesn't make this routine. More importantly, that there are now two companies with proven track records of delivering bulk cargo to the ISS, it implies that a disaster or major engineering flaw on one spacecraft won't stop the other spacecraft type from continuing to fly.
History is filled with examples of how fatal flaws resulted in a great many missed opportunities in space. In fact, with regards to the ISS if there was until very recently a flaw in the Progress spaceship or the Soyuz rocket, the astronauts on board the ISS would need to come back to the Earth almost immediately and it might even be possible that the ISS would need to be de-orbited within a year or so. Now that there are several options available for resupplying the ISS, people up there can at least stick around without having to be so paranoid that they might starve to death or die if they stick around.
Commercial crew options being done by Boeing (with the CST-100) and SpaceX (with the Dragon) will make even the possibility that one of those spacecraft or even the Soyuz being grounded as only a minor inconvenience instead of a life-threatening catastrophe.
A similar kind of thing happened when the Apollo spacecraft were discontinued, as Skylab was left to crash into Australia (they were aiming for the Pacific Ocean and sort of missed). Waiting for the Space Shuttle to get built and fly to Skylab (one of the early missions that had some preliminary planning) meant that delays in getting that vehicle launched cost at least one long-term mission in space. When the Challenger and later the Columbia were destroyed, it also grounded the Space Shuttle fleet and effectively killed manned spaceflight operations for NASA until the problems were fixed.
Simply put, having a company like Orbital being available to take payloads up to the ISS really increases flexibility for everybody involved, not to mention that Orbital also has a spacecraft in the form of Antares which can do a whole lot of other things for other people if they need a commercial option for putting things into space. If SpaceX really screws up, they are no longer the only company capable of going into space.
Besides, this is interesting anyway and worthy of "news for nerds, stuff that matters". Who gives a damn if it is historic or not?
Steve Wozniak went back to school and got a teaching certificate, and spent several years as an elementary school teacher so he could inspire a new generation to innovate and create some really interesting stuff. He sure didn't need the money. He also finished his engineering degree.
To call Woz a money grubber is really being unfair to the guy. He also also started a bunch of Silicon Valley companies on his own and does pretty much his own thing how he wants and whatever he wants. That and he is still technically an employee of Apple Computer who can do special projects whenever he wants or feels the need.
Mostly Woz keeps to himself and doesn't flout all of his accomplishments, which are considerable.
Woz also invented the floppy disc drive for the Apple II. While floppy drives weren't exactly new at the time, the big innovation that Woz did was in reducing the chip count considerably and moving much of the timing circuitry and formatting systems into software, thus making the disc controllers much more affordable. The Apple II computers were one of the first mass produced computers with that technology and gave Apple Computer a very early lead over their competitors who were still using cassette tapes for data storage systems.
I still have awe at how Woz was not able to create the Integer BASIC interpreter used on the Apple I & Apple II computers, but that he hand assembled every op code into raw binary before putting it into the ROM chip. It was something that a lack of capital forced to happen... which is also why Woz developed the mini assembler that was found in the Apple II monitor ROM so he didn't need to do that again.
There certainly are some other gems in terms of just raw elegance in the design that Woz came up with that take somebody digging around the components to fully appreciate. It may seem quirky in terms of somebody developing an emulator with 21st Century technology, but it was utter brilliance at the time. Another chip reducing approach was to use the NTSC frame synch clock used for the display to also trigger the RAM data refresh cycle (thus refreshing the RAM at 60 Hz). Other computers of the era needed separate clock circuity. I could go on, but there were a whole bunch of similar genuine innovations.
Slashdot Mirror
... at least what the article sort of suggests. I have never seen that group being called a bunch of short-term thinkers before.
That and the concept of DNA storage of massive volumes of information sounds particularly epic. It would be incredible to think you could do something like store the contents of Wikipedia inside of the DNA of a redwood tree. The very thought that an organism could be used in such a way to preserve information is by itself something very interesting to consider... and something that is currently at the threshold of being done.
I'm really quite impressed with the level of thinking that this author has gone in terms of really getting into the grips of what it means for long term data storage systems. I'm sure other ideas will surface too, but this really is a pretty serious issue that has some tragic consequences in the past that need to be remembered too. The Aztecs and Mayans had huge libraries of writings in gold codices that the Spanish thought nothing more than to melt down into bullion bars... where even a fairly large percentage of those bars never even made the trip across the Atlantic Ocean (instead are on the bottom of that ocean) to get deposited into the royal treasury. Similar experiences happened with some things in Egyptian pyramids too. Making something durable yet making the information more valuable than the medium that is holding the data is a rather significant challenge.
Considering that archaeologists spend most of their time literally digging through garbage dumps, it is a funny choice of words to even say that "uninteresting garbage" is something that people in the future won't care about.
Even if you take something like the Bible, which has been filtered through the hands of hundreds of generations of religious folks trying to make a philosophical point and to promote a certain viewpoint of history, there are still stories of incest, drug abuse, love poems, marital court rulings, genealogical records, dry legal codes, military order of battle charts, minutes of committee meetings, and of course battle reports and some epic tales thrown into the middle of all of that other stuff. I'm just suggesting that in the course of 10k-20k of written history those things which still survive tends to include a whole bunch of that "uninteresting garbage" even when it is heavily edited.
What you are saying here is so true.
As in what quantities of data are they talking about? Historically, there is the Bible with related similar tomes like the Torah (essentially the Old Testament with some minor differences), and the Koran. Perhaps something more recent would be the long-term archiving of something like Wikipedia or some other similar comprehensive encyclopedia. In terms of data sizes, think somewhere on the range of about a GiB to TiB.
I was merely stating that it was the best network service I found in the whole city in terms of network bandwidth. If you have the money where you don't give a damn, of course you can always hit one of the casinos.... or try to get "lucky" with a slot machine or something else there as well. Unfortunately most people who use computers are smart enough to know the odds are stacked against you when you visit a casino, so depending on winning the money needed to buy network coverage is usually not an option and is utterly stupid to even plan on.
Just how large was the expense account you used when you last made a trip to Vegas on business? Did it include a few thousand dollars for "entertainment"? No doubt some businesses similarly don't give a damn or expect that sending employees there for the various conventions are also going to "live it up". I wasn't so lucky.
I found that most of the casino hotels were willing to provide access to their internet connections (including wifi) in their hotels to non-guests.... for a fee. You might need to ask at the front desk or some "shop" area for "business travelers", but the option was there. It was expensive as hell and by the time you are done you might as well simply rent a room, but the option is usually there to still get on. Free wifi is almost non-existent in Vegas in particular.
I found the best place for WiFi in Las Vegas was the municipal public library. You need to go out of your way to find it, but the librarians were pretty decent about helping you get hooked up if you were courteous and reasonable. It sure as hell beat trying to jerk around with the hotel management and the bandwidth was a hell of a lot better too. If you wanted to even bother, all you need to do is sit in you (presumably rental) car with your laptop or go inside and they even had outlets... or you could get onto terminals in the library.
An added bonus by bringing your own equipment is that you essentially had no real time limit either.
By far and away the worst places were the resort hotels, but even the budget motels are a pain in the rear.
Don't even get me started with "roaming fees" for cell phones. Las Vegas is a death trap for most cell phone carriers. I purposely bought a throw-away cell phone at Wal-Mart with pre-paid minutes explicitly for calling from Vegas on the last time I was there. A buddy of mine brought in an AT&T cell phone, and ended up with a $500 cell phone bill before he left after just a few days in that city. His typical cell phone bill was usually about $40/month. Reno is almost as bad as Vegas too. By using the throw away cell phone, I only had to pay $50, including the brand-new cell phone and I even had minutes left over after the trip. It is just one of those "buyer beware" kind of things.
Because he would be fired if he posted anything linking to his real name or a public pseudonym related to his real name or identity.
On the contrary, these lands are indeed "public property" as in commonly owned by all of the American people jointly. I can't say how that is done in other countries, but it is not a "public trust" as you are implying. Federal lands are those places to which were simply left over after everything else was claimed. In many cases it is land that is so utterly worthless (or was seen as worthless when stuff like the Homestead Act was in place) that nobody wanted that land. Yes, there are certain exceptions like military bases, federal court houses, office buildings for other federal employees, and of course monumental structures like the Lincoln Memorial or Washington Monument. Still, most of the federal land is in places like deserts, mountain ranges, or the middle of the Pacific Ocean and just tiny specs of land so utterly remote that other nations don't even bother trying to claim that land.
It has only been recently that laws have been established in these usually remote areas, and in almost every situation it has been to take away rights or deny people the ability to enter into these lands. In the past, there was usually a general absence of law enforcement in general as these were genuinely wilderness areas. In previous presidential administrations, a "shut down" or budget cuts in general would simply mean that park rangers or the captain of the local garrison (when these areas were territories instead of even being states) would simply be cashiered and dismissed and usually would go home to find a job in the private sector of some sort. In other words, as a practical matter there would be fewer people in these areas to enforce laws or provide services.
Throughout most of the 19th Century and even into the middle of the 20th Century, the goal of federal government was to get rid of these lands and to place them into private hands. It was to be done in an orderly fashion, and admittedly some land (starting with the Theodore Roosevelt administration) was to be held in reserve as a special trust more along the lines you are suggesting. Interestingly, this policy ended only in 1976, and the last actual transfer to private hands under homestead acts happened in 1988. It should be noted this has happened in the lifetimes of many Slashdot readers. Still, the land is presumed to be open for any needful purpose by the general public. This is one of the reasons why federal land has generally been open to hunting, fishing, and even resource extraction. For example, panning for gold is generally permitted on federal land (except in national parks... as I said, different rules). That is why these rules by the Obama administration are simply so jarring for ordinary citizens.
Crown lands, at least anciently, were pieces of real estate that the monarch personally owned instead of land belonging to vassals. While similarly some crown lands may have been remote wilderness areas, it generally wasn't really the case as such lands were more often given to vassals so the crown didn't need to deal directly with the general lawlessness of such remote areas. It really isn't what is seen as public land in America. As for England, that is a whole mess of ancient history, custom, and tradition that is a real mess, not to mention that the UK is still dealing with the remanents of a global empire. Far from being the most undesirable lands, most crown lands in most countries were often the most valuable and productive, especially farmland.
Terrorism is trying to get maximum results with as few people as possible (since you're a small movement, for example). That involves surprise attacks and attacks done to make a point. A marching army is not terrorism. Most of our military tactics here during the Revolutionary War would be considered terrorism today.
Your definition as used here could be applied to all military organizations. Very few armies actually "march into battle", and rarely did even at the beginning of the 20th century. Certainly tactics used by the U.S. Army in Afghanistan today (literally, as I type this up) are designed to use as few people as possible.
There is, however, a distinction between a national army out on the battle field and a covert army that isn't wearing uniforms and tries to hide among ordinary civilians to achieve their aims. That is a difference, where such groups really are a bunch of cowards in the end.
I would also disagree with you in terms of what the Continental Army did during the American Revolutionary War would be construed as terrorism. Certainly some of the actions of Nathaniel Greene might be considered properly terrorism (and rather effective I might add), but Washington was fielding soldiers in uniform and even lining them up for battle as most armies did in the 18th Century. Massed gunfire from a few hundred soldiers was absolutely brutal if you could maintain discipline. I certainly don't think the Battle of Yorktown in particular was what could be considered a terrorist action, nor most of the Saratoga campaign.
A disgruntled U.S. citizen shooting at the capitol is a terrorist.
That is a real stretch of the definition of a terrorist. A proper definition of a terrorist would more properly be a group of individuals organized in a para-military or military organization with the express purpose to cause a military revolution or achieve some other political objective through the use of military force. Also noting that in almost every case what you call a terrorist is usually acting with the support (especially financial support) of some sovereign government... usually (but not limited to) governments other than the government currently running the territory where the terrorist is operating.
America has sponsored many terrorist groups over the years, and still continues to do so.
A stupid thug committing an ordinary crime is most definitely not a terrorist, and neither is a disgruntled citizen.
What news? That Washington DC has a bunch of criminals (other than members of Congress, their staff, and lobbyists trying to influence all of the above) who shoot up people? It isn't exactly news that Washington DC is also the leading city in America for gun violence.
From all that can be seen, this is just another stupid street punk that just happened to choose a lousy place to have a high speed car chase in what might be a stolen vehicle. Again, besides the sheer location, is this something that even deserves to be called news?
Most of even the American rockets are using very old Russian engines (like the RD-180 [wikipedia.org]) instead of newer engine designs.
Except that RD-180 is *not* an old engine. It's from the 1990s.
Yeah, it isn't something from the 1960's. That still is a design that is over 20 years old, being designed at the same time most PC computers were running with 8088 chips as the primary CPU and the primary operating system was MS-DOS. Well, perhaps slightly better computers were around, but not much better.
On the other hand, SpaceX got some excellent telemetry that has helped the engine engineers figure out what the problem was that caused the 2nd stage engine to fail. Getting it to relight on this mission was more of an extra engineering test rather than anything needed to deliver payloads, so to call it a failure is sort of overstating the facts.
All that happened was this engineering test failed. Such tests do fail all of the time, even though in this case the failure happened when eyes were looking. It shouldn't be a wonder that SpaceX intentionally kept "secret" any telemetry from the 1st stage during the attempted recovery or even didn't broadcast any of the video footage in terms of what could be seen from the ground.
Are you saying that this private company isn't under "extreme time pressure to perform"?
Especially not a privately owned company. That usually implies somebody with a vision is running the company and furthermore is interested in actually making a profit rather than wasting huge piles of money for some minor political gain.
In the case of the Saturn V and the Apollo program, there literally was a saying that was printed on huge banners that hung in the manufacturing plants, posted on walls in engineering offices, and in the minds of everybody involved: "Waste anything but time". Cost was definitely not of any concern at all, but rather achieving the goal of "getting a man to the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth within the decade". That was one huge time pressure to perform where the politics was to do anything possible to achieve that goal.
Elon Musk's whole goal in terms of setting up SpaceX was to try and find a way where concepts of mass production and economies of scale could be used to drive down the cost of getting into space. This whole concern about cost and making spaceflight affordable for more people is the driving factor for the whole enterprise. If it takes a few more years to get that accomplished, he doesn't seem to mind. Certainly there have been a number of people on this story and elsewhere who complain about how SpaceX is letting their schedule slip, without realizing that sometimes it simply takes time to do things right.
So no, I don't think there is any "extreme time pressure to perform". Certainly nothing like what was being crammed down the throat of those who were building the Saturn V.
Next year is going to be the year for SpaceX to put up or shut up. Their manifest is absolutely huge, and Elon Musk made some rather bold predictions at the after-launch press conference today. He made the bold claim that he will actually launch a used Falcon 9 1st stage by the end of next year. I'd like to see him try.... seriously!
The video tour of the SpaceX plant in California (given just before the launch on the webcast) showed the plant being extremely busy and practically at capacity with a half dozen Dragon capsules already under construction, a whole row of completed Merline 1D engines, and a whole bunch of rockets all lined up at various stages of completion. Whatever problems SpaceX has with their rockets right now, it isn't a supply problem at the moment. All of that hardware certainly costs a whole bunch of money, so they've definitely dumped some serious cash on trying to meet that huge manifest.
It is also the difference between fixed price contracts where SpaceX says they will deliver a satellite to orbit for a given price and then SpaceX will eat any cost overruns themselves vs. stuff Lockheed Martin does with a cost-plus contract where their profit is guaranteed but the price that taxpayers will pay can vary if "problems" arise.
Just try, if you will, to find out how much money was spent on the last Atlas V rocket. Reportedly the Canadian government paid $10 million dollars for this particular launch. Yeah, that is a bit less than what even SpaceX will typically charge for a Falcon 9 flight, but they certainly didn't screw over the Canadian taxpayers or expect Canada to pay for any cost overruns.
Yeah, I'd say there are a bunch of people very ignorant of these NASA contracts you are talking about. Those Grumman contracts in the previous post certainly had no similarity to the government contracts that SpaceX has been using.
SpaceX counts a "launch" on the manifest for when the hardware gets delivered to the launch pad, not for when they actually go up. It seems very likely there will only be one more launch of the Falcon 9 this year, but I might be mistaken.
Still, I agree with you that SpaceX has gone into actual mass production with the Merlin engines with a permanent assembly line that continuously produces these engines... being made at the rate of about one every week or two at the moment and as you are pointing out ramping up production to about two per week. That indeed is a big deal and something that hasn't been done in America since the original ICBMs were built during the Cold War. When you have people who are making the same thing over and over again that quickly, they get very good at what they are doing.
Besides, Elon Musk also has some experience with mass production and what it takes to keep such a production line going.
The Falcon 1 rocket had two successful launches out of five attempts. Still, in the case of this particular version of the Falcon 9, so much had been changed that it was essentially a whole new rocket.
Typically most aerospace engineers try to do incremental changes rather than having so many like is being done here today. If anything, the historical trend is to use very old designs and just do very minor tweaks a little at a time. Examples including the Atlas rocket, which first flew in December 1957 and is still flying today (with admittedly a bunch of revisions over the years that make the current rocket bear almost no resemblance to the original rocket). The same could be said about the Soyuz spacecraft, which also has had numerous revisions over the years but rarely very many changes on any particular flight. Most of even the American rockets are using very old Russian engines (like the RD-180) instead of newer engine designs.
It is far more unusual for a new clean-sheet design, especially a brand new engine design like SpaceX did with the Merlin engine. Most of the time when new designs like this are made, it is mostly an academic exercise and the rocket almost never actually flies. Frequently companies who come up with new designs simply go bankrupt before the hardware leaves the ground, assuming that any sort of hardware testing was ever done in the first place. In other words, for actual flying hardware, it is mostly very well tested and very old designs with at best very minor tweaks.
This particular flight is especially unique not just because of the larger rocket, but most especially the new Merlin 1-D engine where this was the first time that particular engine design had ever been used. From a study done by the Aerospace Corporation around the year 2000, there were several critical areas where rockets would most likely fail, and the #1 cause was a failure with the engine design itself. As a matter of fact, even with this particular flight that was no exception as the Merlin 1-D engine on the 2nd stage apparently did fail. Luckily for SpaceX, if failed after all of the payloads had been deployed so it won't impact their bottom line.... but there was a spectacular test they were going to do (it was rumored they were going to try to fly the raw 2nd stage past the Moon with the remaining propellant). Instead, this stage is going to crash into the Earth eventually as just another piece of random space junk.
There were also new avionics that had never been used before, a new faring design (also a common failure point for many rockets), and a brand new launch site that had never been done along with an orbital profile that this particular rocket had never been proven with doing either. The only other rocket that I'm aware of that did this many firsts all at once was the Saturn V, and that was done simply because the NASA officials involved didn't want to waste several launches proving new technologies and decided to do everything at once. The "space race" was also a major factor with the Saturn V as NASA was under some extreme time pressure to perform and get people to the Moon.
Rocketry is something that is sitting on such a fine line between success and failure that just a tiny mistake that would be ignored in most other human endeavors is likely to destroy the vehicle when trying to put something into orbit. For example, the first Falcon 1 rocket simply disintegrated because a simple three cent nut was made out of the wrong kind of metal and fell off at a most inappropriate moment. The salty air + moisture from sitting just a few hundred feet from the Pacific Ocean at the time didn't help either.
Another problem is that to improve technology, you need to experiment and try new things. Far more often experiments tend to be failures rather than success as you try these new ideas... hence if you are using new technology, especially for the first time like SpaceX was doing today, the likelihood of failure would actually increase and not decrease. Only when it has been used many times and has been "proven" can you even remotely say that the likelihood of failure would drop.
And no, in spite of nearly a century of rocketry and nearly a trillion dollars spent by everybody involved, we still are just beginning to understand the technology and what it can do. There still are some amazing ideas that have yet to be tried.
US should learn how to be an ex-imperial society just like the other old empires.
Simple question: Why?
Note that when the COTS contract proposals were submitted to NASA in the original RfP, the amounts per flight requested by each company was sealed and not disclosed to other participants. In other words, this was a closed bid process, where price was also not the major factor.
Being critical of Orbital because they submitted a higher price bid (still substantially less than the bid that both ATK and Boeing submitted for the same project) than SpaceX is just simply disingenuous and horribly distorting the facts involved.
After the contract runs out for both companies, there certainly is going to be a whole lot more price competition between these companies and it will be interesting to see what subsequent flight costs are going to be for taxpayers in terms of resupplying the ISS. Regardless of what you may think of this kind of money being dumped into these companies, it is much cheaper paying these prices than using a cost-plus contract like United Launch Alliance wanted to use to do the same thing.
The capture at the ISS was flawless, even though the software glitch previously prevented the rendezvous and capture.
Try and spend a few days on Wikinews or some other volunteer news outlet, much less a commercial news publishing source before you can realistically start to criticize the kind of pressures that journalists find themselves under.
So again, nothing historic here.
Just because it has been done before doesn't make this routine. More importantly, that there are now two companies with proven track records of delivering bulk cargo to the ISS, it implies that a disaster or major engineering flaw on one spacecraft won't stop the other spacecraft type from continuing to fly.
History is filled with examples of how fatal flaws resulted in a great many missed opportunities in space. In fact, with regards to the ISS if there was until very recently a flaw in the Progress spaceship or the Soyuz rocket, the astronauts on board the ISS would need to come back to the Earth almost immediately and it might even be possible that the ISS would need to be de-orbited within a year or so. Now that there are several options available for resupplying the ISS, people up there can at least stick around without having to be so paranoid that they might starve to death or die if they stick around.
Commercial crew options being done by Boeing (with the CST-100) and SpaceX (with the Dragon) will make even the possibility that one of those spacecraft or even the Soyuz being grounded as only a minor inconvenience instead of a life-threatening catastrophe.
A similar kind of thing happened when the Apollo spacecraft were discontinued, as Skylab was left to crash into Australia (they were aiming for the Pacific Ocean and sort of missed). Waiting for the Space Shuttle to get built and fly to Skylab (one of the early missions that had some preliminary planning) meant that delays in getting that vehicle launched cost at least one long-term mission in space. When the Challenger and later the Columbia were destroyed, it also grounded the Space Shuttle fleet and effectively killed manned spaceflight operations for NASA until the problems were fixed.
Simply put, having a company like Orbital being available to take payloads up to the ISS really increases flexibility for everybody involved, not to mention that Orbital also has a spacecraft in the form of Antares which can do a whole lot of other things for other people if they need a commercial option for putting things into space. If SpaceX really screws up, they are no longer the only company capable of going into space.
Besides, this is interesting anyway and worthy of "news for nerds, stuff that matters". Who gives a damn if it is historic or not?
Steve Wozniak went back to school and got a teaching certificate, and spent several years as an elementary school teacher so he could inspire a new generation to innovate and create some really interesting stuff. He sure didn't need the money. He also finished his engineering degree.
To call Woz a money grubber is really being unfair to the guy. He also also started a bunch of Silicon Valley companies on his own and does pretty much his own thing how he wants and whatever he wants. That and he is still technically an employee of Apple Computer who can do special projects whenever he wants or feels the need.
Mostly Woz keeps to himself and doesn't flout all of his accomplishments, which are considerable.
Woz also invented the floppy disc drive for the Apple II. While floppy drives weren't exactly new at the time, the big innovation that Woz did was in reducing the chip count considerably and moving much of the timing circuitry and formatting systems into software, thus making the disc controllers much more affordable. The Apple II computers were one of the first mass produced computers with that technology and gave Apple Computer a very early lead over their competitors who were still using cassette tapes for data storage systems.
I still have awe at how Woz was not able to create the Integer BASIC interpreter used on the Apple I & Apple II computers, but that he hand assembled every op code into raw binary before putting it into the ROM chip. It was something that a lack of capital forced to happen... which is also why Woz developed the mini assembler that was found in the Apple II monitor ROM so he didn't need to do that again.
There certainly are some other gems in terms of just raw elegance in the design that Woz came up with that take somebody digging around the components to fully appreciate. It may seem quirky in terms of somebody developing an emulator with 21st Century technology, but it was utter brilliance at the time. Another chip reducing approach was to use the NTSC frame synch clock used for the display to also trigger the RAM data refresh cycle (thus refreshing the RAM at 60 Hz). Other computers of the era needed separate clock circuity. I could go on, but there were a whole bunch of similar genuine innovations.