On the Apple II Integer BASIC, typing in GOTO HELL would result in the software jumping to the line number contained in the variable "HE". It actually would work! It was an odd way to do a computed GOTO statement, but it was pretty effective I might add. Variables were only two letters long, and the subsequent letters in a variable name were permitted but ignored in terms of memory reference lookups.
It was fun when I typed that command in and it didn't come back as a syntax error... then I had to figure out why that was the case. I learned a whole lot about computer programming from that one statement.
If this does turn out to be the "list price" for a module like this, it will literally blow away the traditional aerospace companies like Boeing and Northrop-Grumman. I really don't know for certain, and as you have said... we will find out on Wednesday. I'm sure that some reporter will ask this very question.
If this turns into the price for a study, the amount seems to be much more typical. The thing is that Bigelow knows how to make this stuff so I fail to see what a study might actually accomplish.... unless this is the first payment of a much larger project. Even that seems to be a little strange.
The one thing that Scratch does by far and away better than Dartmouth BASIC (and subsequent variants) is the ability to implement multimedia design. It also introduces some "real time" programming concepts like event driven interrupts, multithreaded programming, and a whole bunch of other fun and interesting ideas that simply flow from the language design where you don't even need to teach the kids what they mean before they are using them extensively in their programming.
Mind you, I was one of those folks who learned how to program not in the 1990's but rather in the 1970's on 110 baud teletype terminals with crusty yellow paper and the ability to use punch tape for data storage. That was using the real Dartmouth BASIC and not the fancy stuff that later 8-bit microcomputers did to pervert the language. BASIC has its place and does some really fun things, but if you haven't tried Scratch, you don't know what you are missing.
Having a bunch of young kids myself, I've introduced Scratch programming to them and it is a perfect fit for introducing computer programming to middle school kids (nine to twelve year olds give or take a year or two on each end). It has a couple of artificial limitations simply because of some paranoia on the part of MIT that I strongly disagree with (it has no file I/O and the Scratch 2.0 variant has a really quirky network socket layer that is just odd) but you can do some really interesting things with the language.
If you want to whip up a program in an hour or two to do something really fun and interesting, Scratch is by far and away the best language to do a prototype multimedia programming interface. That would give you the added benefit that some employer or boss that says to use that interface for production code would have to be informed that you will be using a "real" compiler for the production stuff and that the interface is only a prototype.
It isn't even recycling the TransHab concept. Simply put, it **IS** the TransHab concept, just rebranded. Robert Bigelow saw the TransHab technology languishing and being neglected with no chance to actually fly into space in spite of a module actually built and crated up ready to fly on the Space Shuttle. After talking to a bunch of folks at NASA, hiring his own engineers to take a look at the technology and be able to understand the engineering drawings for a few minor tweaks and improvements, he spend his own money (not tax dollars) to launch not one but two of these spacecraft into orbit. Since American companies weren't up to the task at the time (SpaceX was still splashing the Falcon 1 into the Pacific Ocean when all of this was going on) he decided to hire the Russians instead.
Oh.... those space stations are still in orbit and still functioning with even some atmospheric reserves. The only thing missing from those space stations is really a good airlock, but otherwise people could have survived living in them for awhile. Bigelow Aerospace not only has the idea, they've built them and put them into orbit. Of the major "new space" players, Robert Bigelow is somebody who knows what the hell is going on and the credibility to pull this off.
Dissing this as simply recycling the concept is showing cluelessness about how Robert Bigelow even got this technology in the first place.
You have got to admit though that if this $18 million is for production space hardware, that is pretty damn cheap. You would be hard pressed to get an individual NASA spacesuit for that price. I would dare say that the cost of preparing meals for the astronauts is pretty close to that figure on an annual basis. Considering that the ISS cost well more than $100 billion to be put into the sky in the first place, this amount of money is merely a rounding error for most NASA projects. It would even be a reasonable sum of money for setting up the catering for VIPs and the press at a shuttle launch. Perhaps that is a bit lavish but it is on that order of expenses we are talking about and not some major new project that has senators complaining that the money isn't being spent in their state.
I've seen bicycle tires that have 90+ PSI with no problem and I have some automobile on my car (admittedly non-standard) that have a normal pressure rating of 70 PSI that were even able to maintain that pressure with "foreign objects" inside of the tire for a prolonged period of time (long enough to get it repaired without even changing the tire and just "filling up" the tire with air before driving a dozen miles to the tire store).
This announcement seems to be pretty clear that the $18 million (give or take with some change) is for the module and not merely a study. Yeah, this is causing my head to scratch too. I would think this amount is just throat clearing for a typical NASA project that would provide a stack of power point presentations suggesting a module in the future, but I don't see anywhere in the announcement that this is for a study but rather for actual flying hardware.
Owing to the fact that I don't know of any launcher that could put anything like an ISS module into space (not even a reusable Falcon 9) for that price, it does seem rather odd. I hope the details of what that money will be used for is discussed at the press conference. If you have another source suggesting this is just a paper study with no flying hardware, I would be interested in seeing that source.
In this case with Bigelow, yes it is a fixed price contract. Indeed I am wondering a bit about the contract authority because the amount NASA is paying for this module is so miniscule that I'm not even sure it is from appropriations funding. Hell, this amount of $17 million is usually enough to fund just the RFP (request for proposals) for a "paper study" for some future high end project of this scale.
If you want to see some projects to make you turn white, just look at the James Webb Telescope or the SLS (also called "Senate Launch System") where billions are being spent every year for things that will never even make the journey into space. In this case, NASA is getting a completed module for that paltry price of just a few million (not even billion) dollars. It is going to cost more to fly this into space even if they use a low cost provider like SpaceX.
yeah that would be 28 psi absolute, or 14 psi gauge. Unless you were testing it about 30 ft under water, which would probably be a great idea for leak detection.
Which is one of the reasons why Bigelow Aerospace has one of the largest swimming pools in Las Vegas (and that is saying a whole lot by itself). They intend to do not only underwater testing of these modules (or at least the design) before it goes up, but even provide an opportunity for astronauts to get up close and used to servicing the vehicle here on the Earth in a "neutral buoyancy simulator" (using scuba tanks to simulate EVAs).
Simple..... put the pressure gauge in a vacuum or use a pretty hard vacuum for comparison.
That is pretty much what would need to be done in a laboratory setting anyway.
For spacecraft, it really isn't that big of a deal compared to submarines, that need to be dealing with substantially larger pressure differences even if they go down just a couple hundred feet. Also, in a submarine they are worried about being crushed and need all sorts of structural support to keep that crushing from happening as opposed to a spacecraft that merely needs to hold together and not go flying off into a thousand pieces.
The analogy to flat-pack furniture is spot on with what is happening here. This isn't just something that you "add water and watch it grow", it will be taking some assembly once the whole things is put up into orbit and in fact a sort of "flat-pack" system simply to squeeze everything into the payload faring. The main advantage of this style of module is that it ultimately has a whole bunch more volume, so station design can be more compact rather than having everything much more spread out.... as is the case with the rest of the ISS modules. There will be many service flights to simply put things into this module.... and they will be able to add other stuff on the outside.
You sort of miss the point though that the shielding is already part of the design of this system. The only difference is that it uses a fabric shielding rather than something metalic..... so why would the astronauts need to add more? If it becomes a problem, it can be repaired.
And that same hyperinflation effectively confiscates everyone's 401k, pension and any other savings. It also eliminates mortgage debt.
Life sometimes sucks, doesn't it? I didn't say it was going to be pleasant nor that it was going to be something that those who voted for these politicians would necessarily benefit from. There isn't an easy solution to "fixing" the problem, but I do think that hyperinflation is likely to be the one way that it will be solved and is the current trajectory of the U.S. federal government. There are many economists who think differently, but then again many of those same economists didn't think the debt bubble was going to happen at the end of the last decade either.
There won't be economic growth if ordinary people are taxed to absurdity. Frankly I'm paying about half of my income now in taxes of some form or another (federal, state, and local combined). I simply can't afford to even live if that goes up substantially, and I'm hardly alone. Mind you, I'm not in that so-called 1% that everybody complains about either and in fact am on some forms of government assistance because my income is so low (which seems supremely absurd with the high tax rate I'm paying as well).
Most of the real growth of government has been at the local level, although quite a bit of that is due to federal mandates (many unfunded such as building storm sewers or other environmental compliance officers and projects) or cost-sharing programs where the federal government offers anywhere from 10% to 70% of the cost of a program and the local government is supposed to pick up the rest of the cost. While not directly "federal funds" it still is a huge and explosive growth of government. Some local governments have given the federal government the proverbial bird to take some of these projects, but many others see the dollars coming from the federal government and try to get every penny they can possibly obtain, even if it is one time funds and those local governments spend a pile of their own cash to get some of those funds. After the federal funds end, those local governments are stuck with these projects that often the local citizens don't want to give up either.
In the end, the government growth is in and of itself killing the economy as it is consuming so much of the economic activity or simply replacing it outright that the government is really the only game in town. You are correct that restoring economic growth would be useful, but I disagree that it may even be possible in the current situation. Government spending has to be cut or simply will be forced to be cut. By forced it will either be through violent revolution (not my favorite alternative) or austerity due to simply a lack of funds. That will also cause a recession/depression in and of itself simply because it will represent a significant shift of economic resources. Somebody is going to be unemployed, and a nation of government bureaucrats that do nothing isn't really going to be producing much in the way of economic activity.
I'll be the first to admit both major parties are guilty of spending far more than they should. The sad thing is that compromises really aren't something on the table any more nor even something to work for. With the current fiasco that is going on in DC, there will simply be a situation where nobody will get anything they want.
At the moment, I just don't see any way for anybody to keep their favorite project going, and it is just a matter of a couple years of this kind of reckless spending that there simply won't be anything that can be paid for without doing something much more drastic like simply printing money or cutting everything.
The point of the debt limit is that there was supposed to be this thing called a budget.... where expenses met income with most years running a surplus that could be used to pay off past debt or even build up a "rainy day fund". Most American states even have such requirements explicitly in their state constitutions.
It has been seen as standard practice now by the U.S. Congress to simply ignore the fact that a budget really should be "balanced" at the end of each year, and for the past several years they haven't even bothered with the fiction of even passing a budget in the first place (which by itself is a violation of the constitution). Frankly spending is so completely out of control now that it is laughably a joke that money needs to be spent for any program, where now trillions of dollars are being talked about as if it was petty cash. Just look at the trillion dollar coin debate if you think otherwise.
If the debt limit is hit, the government can still keep "paying the bills" as it were, but the debt limit law does do a "government shut down" as services deemed "non-essential" are cut. The problem comes when cutting the "non-essential services" aren't enough to even temporarily balance the budget so tax revenue can no longer pay the bills. That gets on to doing things like cutting Social Security monthly allotments or cutting the pay to active duty members of the military.
Ultimately the real problem is trying to balance the budget, which means that the spending spree has to end. What gets cut can be debated, but this debt is becoming so silly that eventually everything will need to be cut just to service the debt. Either that or the debt needs to be inflated away into meaninglessness... which seems to be more of what the Obama administration and congressional leaders seem to be pushing for (aka hyperinflation). Blaming the Republicats for the current problem is spot on... as long as you know who you are talking about.
BTW, the "credit rating" is meaningless as far as credit bureaus are concerned. That is why rating agencies haven't bothered being honest that T-bills really are "junk" value anyway or at least should be considered as such. Then again, I think putting money into any U.S. Dollar denominated bonds of any kind is a silly thing to do right now.
What is interesting is how Instant Run-Off voting is maligned... mostly by others who push for still different voting systems. I think it is reasonable to presume that "plurality voting" or "first past the post" is the worst of all possible systems, yet that is what we will continue to get until the bickering and in-fighting between alternate voting systems ends.
I also don't agree with the conclusions for why IRV is so awful as specified on the website you are linking to. Range voting may have some benefits, but I'd simply like to see *something* different.
I am beginning to think that a lottery election would likely work out better. Quite literally, your name is thrown into a giant lottery and through random chance your name may come up to become a member of Congress.
Frankly I don't think it could get any worse than the group currently in there and at least there would be some fresh faces in the place with some new ideas.
The second season of SG:U got much better, and one of the best episodes was unfortunately the last episode of season two. Still, I can understand why you thought the series sucked as there were some episodes in that first season that caused some serious brain loss.
At least one of the actors found a good gig by playing Rumpelstiltskin on Once Upon A Time. Mr. Gold still seems a bit like Dr. Rush though, and Robert Carlyle is able to portray somebody who makes your skin crawl and want to go out and kill the character.
Of course the asteroid was named by a bunch of SG1 fans, so the reference is quite fitting. That he was the Egyptian death god didn't hurt when it came time to convince the IAU that the name was appropriate. What surprises me is that this name wasn't previously taken by a Kuiper Belt object.
No, you don't need to give away software. You don't even need to give away GPL'd software (nothing stops you from charging money for software under that license).
The deal is that Angry Birds is pure entertainment, and if you upgrade your computer system in a way that will prevent you from using Angry Birds, it isn't that big of a loss.
On the other hand, if your HVAC system is working just fine other than the fact that the motherboard on your computer blew out and needs to be replaced, it would suck to have to basically buy a whole brand new HVAC system because you can't get the software to work with the new computer system you had to use to replace the one that has been chugging along for fifteen years. There is also the "freedom" of being able to tweak the controls so you can connect up a monitoring program for the building HVAC to your iPhone or Android device.... something that nobody even considered to put into that software fifteen years ago either. Perhaps the company who wrote that software is even out of business (very typical in a fifteen year period), so it isn't really skin off of their nose that you want to tweak that software.
Years ago you used to be able to get source code for just about everything you used with computer systems... including "proprietary software". It was just assumed. Then it was no longer assumed and then finally it became a part of the "planned obsolescence" that forced you to buy new products simply because the software no longer worked on newer system. At the very least, before you shut the doors on your computer shop, try to open source the software and let your customers who have paid for the stuff in the first place have the chance to continue maintenance on the software after you are no longer there to give support. This is free as in freedom and not free as in beer. It is knowing that milking every last possible dime from a piece of software ultimately screws over the end customers worse than had they simply not purchased your software.
I've known several companies who keep their latest version of their software with all of the latest enhancements and features as a closed up proprietary software, but the stuff they were working on two or three years ago is now open source as they've moved on. Sort of like what John Carmack and ID Software did with stuff like Castle Wolfenstein and Doom. If you want the latest and greatest software, pay the list price and buy the software. If you want the "free" stuff, you need to wait several years and live with yesterday's technology. On the other hand, there are many people who have taken the Doom software and updated it in a way that John Carmack simply doesn't have time to bother with.
My point of mentioning the DC-X and Ares I-X is that those were the highlights of projects that actually got something done and had real flight hardware... post Shuttle development. The rest of the projects never even got that far, other than perhaps the "Big G" Gemini II spacecraft (proposed and developed about the same time as the Space Shuttle). All that was built for that project was a capsule prototype that was supposed to sit on top of an Atlas rocket (I think Atlas IV, but I might be mistaken). Some bent metal, but not enough to really make a difference. If this was just one or two programs that flopped, I might say that those programs were poorly managed.
Unfortunately, I'd consider DC-X and the Constellation programs to be some of the better run programs in NASA that actually made real progress. There are dozens of other projects that didn't even get that far yet for which literally billions of dollars has been tossed in that direction to get stuff done. The amazing thing was that the Shuttle even got built with that kind of bureaucracy, much less had two "return to flight" programs after the two disasters with loss of crew.
As for genuinely reusable spacecraft, I do like the Grasshopper project. Other attempts at reusable rockets include the Stig rocket by Armadillo Aerospace and the New Shepard rocket by Blue Origin. I also like the Skylon rocket by Reaction Engines.... who looks like they are bending a whole lot of metal and may give Elon Musk a run for his money. Getting back to the main topic, Russia has a whole lot of competition and they need to come out with a "next gen" vehicle if only to stay relevant. I think RKK Energia knows this all too well and understands that they are competing in a global market with intense competition.... not in the old Cold War government-financed competition where the rule was "waste anything but time".
This is also the reason why the last manned spaceflight vehicle to actually fly in space was the Space Shuttle.... in spite of literally dozens of programs that were started after the Nixon administration including several with actual flight hardware (the DC-X comes to mind in particular not to mention the Ares I-X). SLS is just the latest of major NASA programs that are eventually going to be flushed down the toilet of failed programs.
Technically the Space Shuttle was even started under the Johnson administration (at least in terms of initial planning and coming up with a mission profile for the spacecraft). Lyndon Johnson was also the last President to even give a damn about the NASA budget as anything other than a jobs program for aeronautical engineers that never even needed to send stuff into space in order to be considered successful.
The problem is that the chalkboard itself was required, as the dry erase white board and the digital markup board are obviously unqualified options that need to be discarded in favor of the actual black slate chalkboard that was needed to meet the requirements. And don't you dare use anything other than the white chalk as well! None of that newfangled colored chalk allowed!
It should be noted that was precisely what Elon Musk set out to do.... look for ways to build a spacecraft cheaply but reliably. Other approaches for building spacecraft have been done in the past, but that was more like trying to build high performance racing automobiles as opposed to building a production consumer product. Something that races on the NASCAR circuit may cost millions of dollars, but something that sits in my garage may only cost about $10k. That is the kind of thing that SpaceX has been working on... and Lockheed Martin has been working instead on the next awesome NASCAR racer instead.
The sad thing is that the high performance vehicles that these traditional manufacturers were working on supposedly were going to be done to lower cost and not really be concerned about performance. That was the point of the Space Shuttle program, which is why no awe inspiring trips to Venus or Mars took pace in the 1990's. It was supposedly a workhorse vehicle, but instead it turned into a high performance vehicle that required an army of tens of thousands of workers to maintain and refurbish.... just like how a NASCAR vehicle must be rebuilt after each race. The car in my garage wouldn't ever be driven if I had to fully rebuild the engine after every 500 miles that I drove.
Hmm, I'm going with "people". I think the TSA proves some folks are more terrified of other people than sharks or fat.
Replace "people" with "members of the United States Congress" and I might agree with you. Those who legislate wanted to look like they were doing something in what was really a hopeless situation where nothing more could be done. Several billion dollars later and a significant loss of liberties on top of an ineffective system that really doesn't do what it claims to do is what we got with the TSA.
I'd rather they be wasting that money building bridges to the middle of Alaska than spending it molesting toddlers and grandmothers.
Slashdot Mirror
On the Apple II Integer BASIC, typing in GOTO HELL would result in the software jumping to the line number contained in the variable "HE". It actually would work! It was an odd way to do a computed GOTO statement, but it was pretty effective I might add. Variables were only two letters long, and the subsequent letters in a variable name were permitted but ignored in terms of memory reference lookups.
It was fun when I typed that command in and it didn't come back as a syntax error... then I had to figure out why that was the case. I learned a whole lot about computer programming from that one statement.
If this does turn out to be the "list price" for a module like this, it will literally blow away the traditional aerospace companies like Boeing and Northrop-Grumman. I really don't know for certain, and as you have said... we will find out on Wednesday. I'm sure that some reporter will ask this very question.
If this turns into the price for a study, the amount seems to be much more typical. The thing is that Bigelow knows how to make this stuff so I fail to see what a study might actually accomplish.... unless this is the first payment of a much larger project. Even that seems to be a little strange.
The one thing that Scratch does by far and away better than Dartmouth BASIC (and subsequent variants) is the ability to implement multimedia design. It also introduces some "real time" programming concepts like event driven interrupts, multithreaded programming, and a whole bunch of other fun and interesting ideas that simply flow from the language design where you don't even need to teach the kids what they mean before they are using them extensively in their programming.
Mind you, I was one of those folks who learned how to program not in the 1990's but rather in the 1970's on 110 baud teletype terminals with crusty yellow paper and the ability to use punch tape for data storage. That was using the real Dartmouth BASIC and not the fancy stuff that later 8-bit microcomputers did to pervert the language. BASIC has its place and does some really fun things, but if you haven't tried Scratch, you don't know what you are missing.
Having a bunch of young kids myself, I've introduced Scratch programming to them and it is a perfect fit for introducing computer programming to middle school kids (nine to twelve year olds give or take a year or two on each end). It has a couple of artificial limitations simply because of some paranoia on the part of MIT that I strongly disagree with (it has no file I/O and the Scratch 2.0 variant has a really quirky network socket layer that is just odd) but you can do some really interesting things with the language.
If you want to whip up a program in an hour or two to do something really fun and interesting, Scratch is by far and away the best language to do a prototype multimedia programming interface. That would give you the added benefit that some employer or boss that says to use that interface for production code would have to be informed that you will be using a "real" compiler for the production stuff and that the interface is only a prototype.
It isn't even recycling the TransHab concept. Simply put, it **IS** the TransHab concept, just rebranded. Robert Bigelow saw the TransHab technology languishing and being neglected with no chance to actually fly into space in spite of a module actually built and crated up ready to fly on the Space Shuttle. After talking to a bunch of folks at NASA, hiring his own engineers to take a look at the technology and be able to understand the engineering drawings for a few minor tweaks and improvements, he spend his own money (not tax dollars) to launch not one but two of these spacecraft into orbit. Since American companies weren't up to the task at the time (SpaceX was still splashing the Falcon 1 into the Pacific Ocean when all of this was going on) he decided to hire the Russians instead.
Oh.... those space stations are still in orbit and still functioning with even some atmospheric reserves. The only thing missing from those space stations is really a good airlock, but otherwise people could have survived living in them for awhile. Bigelow Aerospace not only has the idea, they've built them and put them into orbit. Of the major "new space" players, Robert Bigelow is somebody who knows what the hell is going on and the credibility to pull this off.
Dissing this as simply recycling the concept is showing cluelessness about how Robert Bigelow even got this technology in the first place.
You have got to admit though that if this $18 million is for production space hardware, that is pretty damn cheap. You would be hard pressed to get an individual NASA spacesuit for that price. I would dare say that the cost of preparing meals for the astronauts is pretty close to that figure on an annual basis. Considering that the ISS cost well more than $100 billion to be put into the sky in the first place, this amount of money is merely a rounding error for most NASA projects. It would even be a reasonable sum of money for setting up the catering for VIPs and the press at a shuttle launch. Perhaps that is a bit lavish but it is on that order of expenses we are talking about and not some major new project that has senators complaining that the money isn't being spent in their state.
I've seen bicycle tires that have 90+ PSI with no problem and I have some automobile on my car (admittedly non-standard) that have a normal pressure rating of 70 PSI that were even able to maintain that pressure with "foreign objects" inside of the tire for a prolonged period of time (long enough to get it repaired without even changing the tire and just "filling up" the tire with air before driving a dozen miles to the tire store).
This announcement seems to be pretty clear that the $18 million (give or take with some change) is for the module and not merely a study. Yeah, this is causing my head to scratch too. I would think this amount is just throat clearing for a typical NASA project that would provide a stack of power point presentations suggesting a module in the future, but I don't see anywhere in the announcement that this is for a study but rather for actual flying hardware.
Owing to the fact that I don't know of any launcher that could put anything like an ISS module into space (not even a reusable Falcon 9) for that price, it does seem rather odd. I hope the details of what that money will be used for is discussed at the press conference. If you have another source suggesting this is just a paper study with no flying hardware, I would be interested in seeing that source.
In this case with Bigelow, yes it is a fixed price contract. Indeed I am wondering a bit about the contract authority because the amount NASA is paying for this module is so miniscule that I'm not even sure it is from appropriations funding. Hell, this amount of $17 million is usually enough to fund just the RFP (request for proposals) for a "paper study" for some future high end project of this scale.
If you want to see some projects to make you turn white, just look at the James Webb Telescope or the SLS (also called "Senate Launch System") where billions are being spent every year for things that will never even make the journey into space. In this case, NASA is getting a completed module for that paltry price of just a few million (not even billion) dollars. It is going to cost more to fly this into space even if they use a low cost provider like SpaceX.
yeah that would be 28 psi absolute, or 14 psi gauge. Unless you were testing it about 30 ft under water, which would probably be a great idea for leak detection.
Which is one of the reasons why Bigelow Aerospace has one of the largest swimming pools in Las Vegas (and that is saying a whole lot by itself). They intend to do not only underwater testing of these modules (or at least the design) before it goes up, but even provide an opportunity for astronauts to get up close and used to servicing the vehicle here on the Earth in a "neutral buoyancy simulator" (using scuba tanks to simulate EVAs).
Simple..... put the pressure gauge in a vacuum or use a pretty hard vacuum for comparison.
That is pretty much what would need to be done in a laboratory setting anyway.
For spacecraft, it really isn't that big of a deal compared to submarines, that need to be dealing with substantially larger pressure differences even if they go down just a couple hundred feet. Also, in a submarine they are worried about being crushed and need all sorts of structural support to keep that crushing from happening as opposed to a spacecraft that merely needs to hold together and not go flying off into a thousand pieces.
The analogy to flat-pack furniture is spot on with what is happening here. This isn't just something that you "add water and watch it grow", it will be taking some assembly once the whole things is put up into orbit and in fact a sort of "flat-pack" system simply to squeeze everything into the payload faring. The main advantage of this style of module is that it ultimately has a whole bunch more volume, so station design can be more compact rather than having everything much more spread out.... as is the case with the rest of the ISS modules. There will be many service flights to simply put things into this module.... and they will be able to add other stuff on the outside.
You sort of miss the point though that the shielding is already part of the design of this system. The only difference is that it uses a fabric shielding rather than something metalic..... so why would the astronauts need to add more? If it becomes a problem, it can be repaired.
And that same hyperinflation effectively confiscates everyone's 401k, pension and any other savings. It also eliminates mortgage debt.
Life sometimes sucks, doesn't it? I didn't say it was going to be pleasant nor that it was going to be something that those who voted for these politicians would necessarily benefit from. There isn't an easy solution to "fixing" the problem, but I do think that hyperinflation is likely to be the one way that it will be solved and is the current trajectory of the U.S. federal government. There are many economists who think differently, but then again many of those same economists didn't think the debt bubble was going to happen at the end of the last decade either.
There won't be economic growth if ordinary people are taxed to absurdity. Frankly I'm paying about half of my income now in taxes of some form or another (federal, state, and local combined). I simply can't afford to even live if that goes up substantially, and I'm hardly alone. Mind you, I'm not in that so-called 1% that everybody complains about either and in fact am on some forms of government assistance because my income is so low (which seems supremely absurd with the high tax rate I'm paying as well).
Most of the real growth of government has been at the local level, although quite a bit of that is due to federal mandates (many unfunded such as building storm sewers or other environmental compliance officers and projects) or cost-sharing programs where the federal government offers anywhere from 10% to 70% of the cost of a program and the local government is supposed to pick up the rest of the cost. While not directly "federal funds" it still is a huge and explosive growth of government. Some local governments have given the federal government the proverbial bird to take some of these projects, but many others see the dollars coming from the federal government and try to get every penny they can possibly obtain, even if it is one time funds and those local governments spend a pile of their own cash to get some of those funds. After the federal funds end, those local governments are stuck with these projects that often the local citizens don't want to give up either.
In the end, the government growth is in and of itself killing the economy as it is consuming so much of the economic activity or simply replacing it outright that the government is really the only game in town. You are correct that restoring economic growth would be useful, but I disagree that it may even be possible in the current situation. Government spending has to be cut or simply will be forced to be cut. By forced it will either be through violent revolution (not my favorite alternative) or austerity due to simply a lack of funds. That will also cause a recession/depression in and of itself simply because it will represent a significant shift of economic resources. Somebody is going to be unemployed, and a nation of government bureaucrats that do nothing isn't really going to be producing much in the way of economic activity.
I'll be the first to admit both major parties are guilty of spending far more than they should. The sad thing is that compromises really aren't something on the table any more nor even something to work for. With the current fiasco that is going on in DC, there will simply be a situation where nobody will get anything they want.
At the moment, I just don't see any way for anybody to keep their favorite project going, and it is just a matter of a couple years of this kind of reckless spending that there simply won't be anything that can be paid for without doing something much more drastic like simply printing money or cutting everything.
The point of the debt limit is that there was supposed to be this thing called a budget.... where expenses met income with most years running a surplus that could be used to pay off past debt or even build up a "rainy day fund". Most American states even have such requirements explicitly in their state constitutions.
It has been seen as standard practice now by the U.S. Congress to simply ignore the fact that a budget really should be "balanced" at the end of each year, and for the past several years they haven't even bothered with the fiction of even passing a budget in the first place (which by itself is a violation of the constitution). Frankly spending is so completely out of control now that it is laughably a joke that money needs to be spent for any program, where now trillions of dollars are being talked about as if it was petty cash. Just look at the trillion dollar coin debate if you think otherwise.
If the debt limit is hit, the government can still keep "paying the bills" as it were, but the debt limit law does do a "government shut down" as services deemed "non-essential" are cut. The problem comes when cutting the "non-essential services" aren't enough to even temporarily balance the budget so tax revenue can no longer pay the bills. That gets on to doing things like cutting Social Security monthly allotments or cutting the pay to active duty members of the military.
Ultimately the real problem is trying to balance the budget, which means that the spending spree has to end. What gets cut can be debated, but this debt is becoming so silly that eventually everything will need to be cut just to service the debt. Either that or the debt needs to be inflated away into meaninglessness... which seems to be more of what the Obama administration and congressional leaders seem to be pushing for (aka hyperinflation). Blaming the Republicats for the current problem is spot on... as long as you know who you are talking about.
BTW, the "credit rating" is meaningless as far as credit bureaus are concerned. That is why rating agencies haven't bothered being honest that T-bills really are "junk" value anyway or at least should be considered as such. Then again, I think putting money into any U.S. Dollar denominated bonds of any kind is a silly thing to do right now.
What is interesting is how Instant Run-Off voting is maligned... mostly by others who push for still different voting systems. I think it is reasonable to presume that "plurality voting" or "first past the post" is the worst of all possible systems, yet that is what we will continue to get until the bickering and in-fighting between alternate voting systems ends.
I also don't agree with the conclusions for why IRV is so awful as specified on the website you are linking to. Range voting may have some benefits, but I'd simply like to see *something* different.
I am beginning to think that a lottery election would likely work out better. Quite literally, your name is thrown into a giant lottery and through random chance your name may come up to become a member of Congress.
Frankly I don't think it could get any worse than the group currently in there and at least there would be some fresh faces in the place with some new ideas.
The second season of SG:U got much better, and one of the best episodes was unfortunately the last episode of season two. Still, I can understand why you thought the series sucked as there were some episodes in that first season that caused some serious brain loss.
At least one of the actors found a good gig by playing Rumpelstiltskin on Once Upon A Time. Mr. Gold still seems a bit like Dr. Rush though, and Robert Carlyle is able to portray somebody who makes your skin crawl and want to go out and kill the character.
Of course the asteroid was named by a bunch of SG1 fans, so the reference is quite fitting. That he was the Egyptian death god didn't hurt when it came time to convince the IAU that the name was appropriate. What surprises me is that this name wasn't previously taken by a Kuiper Belt object.
No, you don't need to give away software. You don't even need to give away GPL'd software (nothing stops you from charging money for software under that license).
The deal is that Angry Birds is pure entertainment, and if you upgrade your computer system in a way that will prevent you from using Angry Birds, it isn't that big of a loss.
On the other hand, if your HVAC system is working just fine other than the fact that the motherboard on your computer blew out and needs to be replaced, it would suck to have to basically buy a whole brand new HVAC system because you can't get the software to work with the new computer system you had to use to replace the one that has been chugging along for fifteen years. There is also the "freedom" of being able to tweak the controls so you can connect up a monitoring program for the building HVAC to your iPhone or Android device.... something that nobody even considered to put into that software fifteen years ago either. Perhaps the company who wrote that software is even out of business (very typical in a fifteen year period), so it isn't really skin off of their nose that you want to tweak that software.
Years ago you used to be able to get source code for just about everything you used with computer systems... including "proprietary software". It was just assumed. Then it was no longer assumed and then finally it became a part of the "planned obsolescence" that forced you to buy new products simply because the software no longer worked on newer system. At the very least, before you shut the doors on your computer shop, try to open source the software and let your customers who have paid for the stuff in the first place have the chance to continue maintenance on the software after you are no longer there to give support. This is free as in freedom and not free as in beer. It is knowing that milking every last possible dime from a piece of software ultimately screws over the end customers worse than had they simply not purchased your software.
I've known several companies who keep their latest version of their software with all of the latest enhancements and features as a closed up proprietary software, but the stuff they were working on two or three years ago is now open source as they've moved on. Sort of like what John Carmack and ID Software did with stuff like Castle Wolfenstein and Doom. If you want the latest and greatest software, pay the list price and buy the software. If you want the "free" stuff, you need to wait several years and live with yesterday's technology. On the other hand, there are many people who have taken the Doom software and updated it in a way that John Carmack simply doesn't have time to bother with.
My point of mentioning the DC-X and Ares I-X is that those were the highlights of projects that actually got something done and had real flight hardware... post Shuttle development. The rest of the projects never even got that far, other than perhaps the "Big G" Gemini II spacecraft (proposed and developed about the same time as the Space Shuttle). All that was built for that project was a capsule prototype that was supposed to sit on top of an Atlas rocket (I think Atlas IV, but I might be mistaken). Some bent metal, but not enough to really make a difference. If this was just one or two programs that flopped, I might say that those programs were poorly managed.
Unfortunately, I'd consider DC-X and the Constellation programs to be some of the better run programs in NASA that actually made real progress. There are dozens of other projects that didn't even get that far yet for which literally billions of dollars has been tossed in that direction to get stuff done. The amazing thing was that the Shuttle even got built with that kind of bureaucracy, much less had two "return to flight" programs after the two disasters with loss of crew.
As for genuinely reusable spacecraft, I do like the Grasshopper project. Other attempts at reusable rockets include the Stig rocket by Armadillo Aerospace and the New Shepard rocket by Blue Origin. I also like the Skylon rocket by Reaction Engines.... who looks like they are bending a whole lot of metal and may give Elon Musk a run for his money. Getting back to the main topic, Russia has a whole lot of competition and they need to come out with a "next gen" vehicle if only to stay relevant. I think RKK Energia knows this all too well and understands that they are competing in a global market with intense competition.... not in the old Cold War government-financed competition where the rule was "waste anything but time".
This is also the reason why the last manned spaceflight vehicle to actually fly in space was the Space Shuttle.... in spite of literally dozens of programs that were started after the Nixon administration including several with actual flight hardware (the DC-X comes to mind in particular not to mention the Ares I-X). SLS is just the latest of major NASA programs that are eventually going to be flushed down the toilet of failed programs.
Technically the Space Shuttle was even started under the Johnson administration (at least in terms of initial planning and coming up with a mission profile for the spacecraft). Lyndon Johnson was also the last President to even give a damn about the NASA budget as anything other than a jobs program for aeronautical engineers that never even needed to send stuff into space in order to be considered successful.
The problem is that the chalkboard itself was required, as the dry erase white board and the digital markup board are obviously unqualified options that need to be discarded in favor of the actual black slate chalkboard that was needed to meet the requirements. And don't you dare use anything other than the white chalk as well! None of that newfangled colored chalk allowed!
It should be noted that was precisely what Elon Musk set out to do.... look for ways to build a spacecraft cheaply but reliably. Other approaches for building spacecraft have been done in the past, but that was more like trying to build high performance racing automobiles as opposed to building a production consumer product. Something that races on the NASCAR circuit may cost millions of dollars, but something that sits in my garage may only cost about $10k. That is the kind of thing that SpaceX has been working on... and Lockheed Martin has been working instead on the next awesome NASCAR racer instead.
The sad thing is that the high performance vehicles that these traditional manufacturers were working on supposedly were going to be done to lower cost and not really be concerned about performance. That was the point of the Space Shuttle program, which is why no awe inspiring trips to Venus or Mars took pace in the 1990's. It was supposedly a workhorse vehicle, but instead it turned into a high performance vehicle that required an army of tens of thousands of workers to maintain and refurbish.... just like how a NASCAR vehicle must be rebuilt after each race. The car in my garage wouldn't ever be driven if I had to fully rebuild the engine after every 500 miles that I drove.
Hmm, I'm going with "people". I think the TSA proves some folks are more terrified of other people than sharks or fat.
Replace "people" with "members of the United States Congress" and I might agree with you. Those who legislate wanted to look like they were doing something in what was really a hopeless situation where nothing more could be done. Several billion dollars later and a significant loss of liberties on top of an ineffective system that really doesn't do what it claims to do is what we got with the TSA.
I'd rather they be wasting that money building bridges to the middle of Alaska than spending it molesting toddlers and grandmothers.