So you mean to say that it would be impossible to find a scientist who attempted to publish contrary theories about anthropogenic global warming would not be turned down in scientific journals merely because of the content of the theory instead of the quality of the science presented? Or perhaps that a graduate student trying to earn a PhD would get his dissertation rejected simply for the same reason... because it didn't present the prevailing view?
I certainly can produce "testimonials" of people who would prove that they have been rejected for very political reasons. Academia is sometimes a very harsh place for somebody who wants to "go against the grain" and challenges generally accepted concepts. You may think that "science" is generally open to new ideas, that often isn't the case. Climate scientists in particular seem to be increasingly close minded and seemingly weeding out of their midst anybody who would speak up against the studies currently going on. Explicit litmus tests are currently being done towards those who might want to obtain a degree in the field excluding those who might want to express a contrary viewpoint to this whole discussion, tenure is being denied, and publications are being rejected.
As evidenced by the original post alone, political advocacy has crept into the profession and is destroying its credibility in the process as well.
Who are 'they', exactly? Climate scientists just tell us about what the climate is doing, and what we are doing to it. I don't think it's quite within their remit to support anything.
If these climate scientists are so clueless to believe they aren't being used as tools for political goals including pure partisan politics, they really don't deserve the PhDs that they claim to have. The politics of the whole debate is something that is the issue, where even the original post pointed out that "it will be impossible to make the changes he and his colleagues believe need to occur to protect future generations from the effects of climate change." The "they" is the scientists quoted in the original post and others who have similar viewpoints.
In other words, it is all about the politics of how much money needs to be spent in what areas of society, if new taxes should or should not be imposed, and how some group of do-gooders think they need to control the behavior of others... either through convincing arguments or at the point of a gun. If anything, some of these "scientists" want that point of a gun to be used. Imposing a tax is using the point of a gun to get your point of view across.
If this was just pure science like trying to measure the melting point of Rubidium or debating over the global temperatures of extrasolar planets, where the only real political issue was if funding of the next related research project should even be done at all, I might agree that these "climate scientists" are being apolitical. It just isn't the case with climate studies at the moment where everything is politically charged and many in the scientific community are becoming advocates for particular political solutions and even political philosophies and factions.
It is this sort of thing that is destroying the credibility of the climate scientists, where they are no longer reporters but advocates.
While I'm not the original poster you are debating with here, I will concede that there may be some influence on the part of activities of mankind upon the global environment.
What I don't buy is the significance of that influence, or that the current situation is so dire that if we don't destroy all technology and go back to a hunter-gatherer society with a 99% reduction in world wide human population that we are doomed to extinction. It is the politics that are involved here and trying to decide where that line is between doing one thing that is insanely stupid like mass genocide and the other which is completely ignoring the impact of environmental pollution and thinking it should be our god given right to consume every resource to its utmost potential for greater profits and not giving a damn about how it impacts the planet.
There must be some point in between to make a balance. Attempts to try and control pollution of all forms have largely been successful in most 1st world countries, where environmental damage has been reversed and living more in harmony with this world has been demonstrated as a proven fact. The Hudson River in NYC is returning to a state where things can now live in that river again, you can breathe air in downtown Pittsburgh, and air quality in Los Angeles hasn't really become much worse than it was when I was just a little kid. Those are just a few examples I can point to where there have been some successes on something larger than just the efforts of one person and involve whole communities making a difference because they have made a difference.
Given that there have been some tremendous successes in raising environmental consciousness, where does the line get drawn in terms of what action need to take place? It is wrong to say that some measures suggested to "control carbon emissions" simply aren't going to work? Is there a serious discussion on some of those sequestration systems about what harmful effects they may cause for future generations? Is there a reason we must act and do something rash right now without holding a measured public debate over the real issues involved? Is the world really going to end in a decade if those rash actions are not done right now?
Arguing over the "science" of "global warming" or "global cooling" is mostly naval grazing compared to the very real policy issues about how to deal with environmental damage in general. Those trying to "prove global warming" in many ways really don't care if there is environmental damage and in some ways even helps their cause if that damage increases so they can have larger research budgets to "fight global warming".
In short, all of the easy stuff was done before you were born. Getting into orbit has gone from being something on the national news to something that happens so regularly that a vast amount of modern infrastructure depends on it. In fact, it's become so easy that we now worry about the amount of stuff in orbit.
Once you've got into orbit, you're most of the way to the moon, in terms of energy usage. Going to other planets is harder, although we've done that with probes.
I don't think you realize how hard it was to get anything into orbit, even after the mechanics of getting it to happen were well understood. The rocket equation is pretty unforgiving, particularly when you need to do atmospheric flight for part of that trip. The number of things that were unknown in the early 1960's was so huge there was even doubt that people could even get into space and do anything useful when they got up there, much less be able to accomplish things like orbital rendezvous and performing EVAs. I wouldn't call any of that particularly easy to accomplish. There have been only four organizations which have even been successful with an orbital rendezvous, and all four are organizations tied to their respective national governments... governments who are also permanent members of the United Nations Security Council thus have some clout in a political sense. The only permanent member of the Security Council that hasn't made the trip is the United Kingdom... and you can infer your own opinion on that factual point.
"I'm 46 and I grew up with Star Trek, the World Trade Center, the Concorde, and the space shuttle. How's that working out..."
One of these things is not like the others...
I don't know... they all crashed and burned real hard, which is why you don't see anything on that list in contemporary society. I'd even say that the destruction of the Star Trek franchise might have even been done by terrorists, but perhaps that is giving terrorists a bad name. The operative word for Star Trek is "corporate raiders milking the franchise for all it is worth". Only the Star Trek franchise ended without the loss of human lives, although you might even find a few suicidal fans for that one too. Care to try again?
This isn't BS, so far as it really was a very rare alignment of the planets.
Sadly, one of the members of congress in an appropriations hearing at the time expressed the attitude that we could afford to wait another 175 years as "the universe will still be out there when a couple centuries go by". The planetary science researchers literally pushed every political contact they had and recruited several "science fiction fan" groups like the L5 Society and various rocket societies to get the funding passed. It was just barely enough political support that the funding of the two Voyager probes were done. There were more ambitious ideas presented, but Congress shot them down.
There were also several members of congress at the time who thought it was surprisingly suspicious that just as funding was being cut for various NASA programs that this "once in a lifetime opportunity" presented itself. They said it was BS as well, and even accused these planetary scientists that somehow they were cooking the books to make this alignment show up in the way that it happened. In reality, it was just a lucky coincidence that the American spaceflight community had the equipment and the expertise necessary to pull off such a mission at the right moment in history allowing such a mission to happen in the first place.
The RTG used on the Voyager spacecraft is on the end of a very long boom separated from the main spacecraft by several feet... essentially as far away from the spacecraft as could be practically made given the constraints necessary for packaging the vehicle inside a faring for atmospheric flight into orbit and weight restrictions on the boom before it could be extended.
From a radiological point of view, the most hazardous part of the trip for Voyager was going through the Jupiter equivalent of the Van Allen belts and to a lesser degree doing the same thing near Saturn. Very likely the SD-RAM would have been scrambled on an iPad even with lead shielding and all of the other precautions. That is completely ignoring the need for "milspec" components capable of being able to operate in an environment that is just a few degrees above absolute zero. Most consumer grade electronics don't have a chance in that kind of environment. Voyager does have a heater core powered by the RTG to help keep the internal eletronics at something of a reasonable temperature, and that is the one thing that will ultimately kill the vehicle as once the heater goes out the electronics will simply die. Almost all of the other sub-systems have been shut down already just to keep this one "component" going along with the radio transmitter.
The problem is that a "Manhattan Project" style crash program getting a team of astronauts to Mars with a mantra "waste anything but time" is simply unaffordable for any country even trying. Mars is a tough nut to crack, and throwing money at trying to get there isn't enough. Even unmanned space probes is an incredibly tough challenge, and it is disheartening that even robotic exploration of Mars may be at an end with America losing even that capability... at least if NASA is the agency who will be providing that service to the country.
The idea that it may cost in the neighborhood of about a Trillion dollars (that is a big capital "T", not a "B") to conduct a proper manned exploration of Mars is enough to turn any congressman white and question if it is something which should even be done. If we used the Apollo project mentality and contracting system, that is what I would guess would be the final price tag. More "conservative" estimates put it more around the price of about $200 Billion, or about twice the cost of the International Space Station. I think that price is a low ball price which is why I suggest the higher amount.
While I admit that the U.S. Congress is tossing around Trillions of dollars like they are Zimbabwe currency, that still represents a huge commitment even for the American economy. Even if you spent that money over the course of a couple decades, it is a funding level that simply can't be sustained with the current political environment in DC. While I would be excited if NASA had its budget doubled and then doubled again to make that happen, and such a funding level would really only be returning to funding levels consistent with what happened during the Apollo project, it is money that can't really be justified here and now. There also aren't any politicians except for Newt Gingrich or John Glenn who would have the political strength needed to sustain such a huge expansion of NASA... and those two can't do such a program on their own and both are also on the fringe of their respective political parties in terms of any real political influence. There certainly is nobody like Lyndon Johnson who is backing the idea of a huge budget busting space program.
If anybody is going to make the trip to Mars, it will by necessity be done through private commercial efforts. At least I'm convinced of that.
The Voyager spacecraft computers are some of the last active computers in the Solar System still using hand-wrapped core memory. I think that says more about the space probe than almost anything else. There might be a couple museums which fire up a computer every now and again with such a memory module, but this is certainly the last one in a production environment. It shows how rugged that kind of design really can be.
Then again, saying it is the last one in the Solar System may not even be accurate, so it might just simply be said it is the last one currently running in the Milky Way Galaxy... unless we meet some alien races to dispute that fact.
Of any complaints that I've seen here, this is the most legitimate. Most of the other claims of stuff like World of Warcraft being the first to do stuff like this just make me want to puke in terms of the sheer ignorance of the people posting.
There were many sources of ideas that came from the virtual reality community, and I agree with the sentiments you are making here. The patents were filed though and not invalidated, and I certainly hate the software patent system including how difficult it is to prove prior art without showing a patent number which demonstrates that prior art. That is how patents on silly things like the ROT-13 algorithm got through the USPTO or in one case I even saw a bubble sort get approved because there was no "prior art" in the USPTO archive. Yes, I know that prior art can come in other forms, but prior patents seem to hold a whole lot more weight.
If Blizzard is being smart here, that would need to be their basis of defense where they would have to find groups like the ones you worked with or perhaps scan Slashdot for precisely comments like this and try to get you to testify on their behalf to demonstrate prior art. It would certainly help though if you had some of the source code or software from the era. I would have a hard time finding much of the software I wrote from back at that time period.
I have a very hard time believing that nobody knew this patent existed, and certainly the developers at Blizzard should have known about Alpha World and Worlds, Inc. well before they started the game. Worlds, Inc. really did create some amazing software that was ground breaking in a whole bunch of ways and was well known to developers who were familiar with the state of the art... because these guys actually did create some of the first kind of custom avatars that had player to player interaction. Not really so much gun fights but rather the social interaction stuff... which is what Alpha World and the previous Alpha Station software concentrated on.
At the time this stuff was being done, most people didn't even think it could be done. You would have to go back to some of the discussion groups of VRML, where the Alpha World guys were some of the first to put many of those VRML ideas into practice. That they may have been trolls to file patents on some of their work once they got it implemented may be true, but that is a criticism of the whole concept of a software patent in the first place rather than a criticism of these guys doing pioneering work and trying to "protect themselves".
Keep in mind that in 1995 there was the whole LZW algorithm patent issue that impacted the GIF image format, where software developers were suddenly impacted with having to deal with software patents... particularly anything dealing with graphic engines. If they decided to patent some new ideas they came up with at the time, I say more power to them. If you hate this, contact your congressman. Don't go saying how somebody using the system as intended is finally getting recognized.
If you've never heard of this software, I say you are missing something amazing, but also realize that the company who produced the software hasn't really had a commercial success because of several mistakes they made on the way. Many companies make mistakes like this too, so it isn't anything new. What amazes me is that the company is still around.
Doom originally sent all of the data out to all of the clients via UDP packets to a broadcast address. Network administrators absolutely hated the game because those packets would literally melt down routers and they had to be filtered out from the outgoing hubs or those packets would flood the whole internet. Later versions of Doom switched to TCP packets and kept track of the individual IP addresses for each player that significantly cut down on the packets being sent around the network. Doom worked just fine on a LAN though.
The customization that happened in Alpha Station was rather extensive and nothing like what happened with DOOM. I am scratching my head to remember if I played the Alpha version of DOOM first before I used Alpha Station, but they were pretty much contemporary with each other.
Alpha Station and later Alpha World really did have some unique elements compared to other software of the time including some extensive player to player interactions and what would be called today "emotes" on avatars. DOOM had none of that. I'm not knocking the coding skills of John Carmack, but the audience for DOOM was a very different crowd.
You certainly couldn't have literally hundreds of users gathering in virtual space each with different avatars like what happened in Alpha World. I remember an event with nearly a thousand different users, and at the time it was considered a mind blowing record for the most number of users in the same virtual space simultaneously for an avatar environment.
The claims here certainly seem very legitimate on the part of Worlds, Inc. As for why they waited until now to enforce their patent is something to be asked, but the claim that they really did come up with these ideas first is something that really can't be questioned if you know any of the history of this software at all. The original development team did some amazing things with avatars. The only prior art I could even consider would be Neal Stephenson with his book "Snow Crash", but these guys were the ones who figured out how to take the ideas in Snow Crash and convert them into actual software.
What happened was that the "modding" community around the original Alpha World ended up becoming more successful from a financial standpoint than the game/world itself. One of the companies that was producing content and providing stuff for players ended up buying out the company producing the main engine software, including all of the "intellectual property". Essentially the original development team really didn't know how to turn a profit out of the virtual world in spite of some pretty ambitious business goals.
That said, I think after the buy-out, the "new management team" has done a pretty good job of managing the resources of the game and the move to "Active Worlds" was a pretty good move given everything that happened earlier including putting the finances of the whole enterprise on a sound financial standing. While they have stayed a niche player and Active Worlds certainly never became something like World of Warcraft, they have had a very steady presence on the internet for a couple of decades now.
I spent perhaps far too much time in Alpha World myself and created not just a nice little McMansion, but I also ended up building a major subdivision in terms of laying out a huge grid network of roads and even started a "subway" system (actually an "elevated train" network) with several "stations". I loved the roller coasters but never got around to building one myself. Boy does this bring back memories.
I remember the original "Alpha Station" that even predated the Alpha World itself, and they've done some amazing things over the years. While there might be some prior art, these guys were some of the very early pioneers of avatars and were some of the very first people who tried to implement VRML in a meaningful way. Keep in mind this was back in the days that NCSA Mosiac was still the dominant web browser on the internet. In fact I think I downloaded the original Alpha Station with Mosaic, or perhaps that was a Gopher client based upon a post I saw on USENET (before spam became a problem there as well). This goes way back in what is now called the early history of the internet.
In terms of prior art, I would say that they are the prior art. The only question I have is if that prior art happened long enough ago for patent protection to even apply. At the time when the original software developers were making Alpha Station, they acknowledged the inspiration for their software from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. It was so much of an inspiration that the Black Sun lounge was even built by some of the developers once Alpha World came out. So does Neal Stephenson get a cut of the profits from the lawsuit if they win?
Slavery was undoubtedly a significant issue with the politics of 1860, and it was the election of Abraham Lincoln from a political party whose primary tenant and justification for existence was to promote the abolition of slaves throughout America that provided the spark which started the U.S. Civil War. It seems doubtful that South Carolina would have seceded had a Democrat been elected in 1860, but that is alternate time line stuff that we simply won't know what would have happened. Then again, Lincoln didn't even get the majority of the popular vote in 1860... just under 40% of the vote in fact.
I agree that there were people in the Confederate Army like Robert E. Lee who were loyal to the government of the state from which they were from, and that there certainly were many other factors too. But the point remains that slavery was the big issue, and in the Articles of Secession by South Carolina, slavery is perhaps the most prominent of the several reasons for justification the secession from the federal union. BTW, I love this document as it does address a number of issues in American constitutional law that hasn't really been resolved either legislatively or judicially and in particular points out some glaring weaknesses in the American federal constitution. While not named explicitly in the document, it also mentions that the election of Abraham Lincoln was another chief reason for secession because it was felt that they as citizens of South Carolina would no longer be capable of exercising their "rights" to hold slaves.
Armadillo Aerospace has been doing quite a few launches in New Mexico, which are all ground-launched vehicles. They are sub-orbital though and their flight path does not take them over cities like you are suggesting, but my point here is that "Spaceport America" isn't strictly for air launched vehicles... unlike Mojave which really doesn't have the facilities for ground launched rockets and is also being used for aviation purposes.
While Elon Musk is certainly one to stay in the limelight more than some of the other rocket builders, it seems like Jeff Bezos either was looking at or purchased land in the general region of Texas. Yes, I know Bezos has his test facility in west Texas, which is also licensed by the FAA-AST as a spaceport, so perhaps I'm mistaken.
If it wasn't Bezos, it seems like it was another group of commercial rocket developers. Benson Space Company perhaps?
Regardless, I would have to agree that some place other than KSC is going to be needed if SpaceX has anything close to the launch rates that Elon Musk is promising. While SpaceX doesn't need to compete against Shuttle launches any more, there still are all of the D.O.D. payloads that usually get higher priority over commercial flights. KSC can be a rather busy place from time to time.
There is a general presumption that planets which would be orbiting closely to small stars like a M-class main sequence star would be likely to tidally locked as well, presuming they were about Earth-sized and in the "habitable zone" where water would be liquid on the surface. Planets of that nature might be possible, but the environment would be very different.
Sadly, this one is schedule for decommissioning. The "Big E" may live on as another ship, but this one is going to be turned into scrap metal and sold to China (most likely).
Agree, I wish he had finished Minecraft before boredom set in. Makes me wonder if he'll do it again. Won't be buying during alpha or beta this time around...
Do you really think Mojang is going to have a shortage of developers who would be willing to continue maintenance on something like 0x10^c? As long as the money keeps coming in, it will be maintained. Just because Markus Persson moves on to another project should be irrelevant.
(and for the record, the pollution created by a coal plant generating the energy required to charge an electric car is less than the pollution created by burning gas in a non-electric car. And batteries last longer than five years, and are getting better every year. And tax incentives for new technologies help them get off the ground, and are a smart investment for the future).
Another point in favor of those who want to mention the "pollution" issues with gasoline vs. electric vehicles is that in the production of gasoline, almost as much energy is consumed to produce a gallon of gasoline as is made available from the refined gasoline itself. In the past, such energy was consumed from raw petroleum or by-products (like tars and heavy organic molecules also found in crude oil), but many of the current refineries simply use electricity to run their boilers and equipment as such energy sources are ideal for fixed physical facilities like a petroleum refinery. The refineries can usually find more profitable uses for those other organic molecules or even find "cracking" catalysts to break that down into Octane and other more valuable substances. Electricity at industrial rates usually is quite cheap from most power utilities too.
In other words, even if you are burning gasoline, a coal-powered electricity generating facility has likely been used to produce the energy you are using in your automobile anyway. Trying to compare the efficiency of using that electricity to make gasoline or charge up a battery can be very tricky, and I'm not entirely sure direct "apples to apples" comparisons can be applied even though it is tried. Most current "efficiency" measurements usually ignore completely this use of fossil fuels in terms of how it impacts pollution and energy efficiency calculations.
Until there's a budget passed, senior reviews mean nothing. And if Congress puts in enough mandates on NASA's plate without increasing the budget, something's gotta get cut.
If the budget's cut, are they going to give up on the JWST, or Kepler and dozens of other smaller projects that are returning results now?
There are just two significant programs NASA is working on: The SLS and JWST. Almost the entire rest of NASA is being cut to support both programs.... that in my own opinion neither one of these projects are ever going to actually work much less worry about getting much else accomplished.
If you had a system with multiple planets, you might get some rough estimates on masses if you knew the distance from the star and orbital periods. But the reason we can pin down solar system planet's masses so well is because we can observe their location at nearly all points in their orbit to great precision, and can see stuff like the precession of orbits. Just having transit times isn't going to give you anywhere near that kind of information to work with.
I would give astrophysicists a whole lot more credit for really understanding Newton's laws of motion or even General Relativity so far as how it applies to the motion of stars and planets. The information you can obtain from the stellar data coming from Kepler is a bit more involved than just transit times, and you can tell quite a bit in terms of the masses of other planets if you notice that some planet is "early" or "late" achieving a transit across the parent star. There is a suggestion that "moons (like the Earth's Moon) might even be detectable using the methods they are using right now.... which would make estimating planetary mass to be trivial by comparison.
So you could say the basic goals of Kepler have been accomplished and the rest is gravy.
It may be gravy, but it is very delicious gravy that is very difficult to get any other way. The ongoing science that Kepler is doing right now is amazing, and some of the stars they are monitoring right now need to have observations that last several years for some of the most revealing data to come forth. Some of that involves how Kepler is acquiring that data in the first place.
What is happening here is that this device is looking for transits of planets across the disc of the star being observed. For very close planets, that can be just a few days... but even here in our own Solar System we know of several planets including the one that I'm typing this message on which takes a fair bit longer for it to orbit around its "parent star". I think it would be at a minimum to in theory be able to detect our own Solar System and its planets presuming that the orientation would be appropriate for this kind of survey... which requires years of observations to detect such a transit.
Wouldn't it be amazing if we found a G-class star that had a planet with an orbital period of somewhat close to a year? That is the kind of thing we can expect to get from this expanded mission and is not something which can be said to come from the current data set.
Another issue is that because of bandwidth issues, a considerable portion of the data process needs to happen on the computer inside of Kepler... which is really where the professional astronomers come into question. They need to be able to establish the criteria for what data is sent for review and what data can simply be discarded as "lacking interest". This is an ongoing review of the data obtained, thus something which really needs continued funding. Perhaps private funding could extend the team of astronomers who could perform these kind of calculations, but ultimately it is government programs which need to sustained for a considerable period of time once a commitment is done to perform a task like this.
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So you mean to say that it would be impossible to find a scientist who attempted to publish contrary theories about anthropogenic global warming would not be turned down in scientific journals merely because of the content of the theory instead of the quality of the science presented? Or perhaps that a graduate student trying to earn a PhD would get his dissertation rejected simply for the same reason... because it didn't present the prevailing view?
I certainly can produce "testimonials" of people who would prove that they have been rejected for very political reasons. Academia is sometimes a very harsh place for somebody who wants to "go against the grain" and challenges generally accepted concepts. You may think that "science" is generally open to new ideas, that often isn't the case. Climate scientists in particular seem to be increasingly close minded and seemingly weeding out of their midst anybody who would speak up against the studies currently going on. Explicit litmus tests are currently being done towards those who might want to obtain a degree in the field excluding those who might want to express a contrary viewpoint to this whole discussion, tenure is being denied, and publications are being rejected.
As evidenced by the original post alone, political advocacy has crept into the profession and is destroying its credibility in the process as well.
Who are 'they', exactly? Climate scientists just tell us about what the climate is doing, and what we are doing to it. I don't think it's quite within their remit to support anything.
If these climate scientists are so clueless to believe they aren't being used as tools for political goals including pure partisan politics, they really don't deserve the PhDs that they claim to have. The politics of the whole debate is something that is the issue, where even the original post pointed out that "it will be impossible to make the changes he and his colleagues believe need to occur to protect future generations from the effects of climate change." The "they" is the scientists quoted in the original post and others who have similar viewpoints.
In other words, it is all about the politics of how much money needs to be spent in what areas of society, if new taxes should or should not be imposed, and how some group of do-gooders think they need to control the behavior of others... either through convincing arguments or at the point of a gun. If anything, some of these "scientists" want that point of a gun to be used. Imposing a tax is using the point of a gun to get your point of view across.
If this was just pure science like trying to measure the melting point of Rubidium or debating over the global temperatures of extrasolar planets, where the only real political issue was if funding of the next related research project should even be done at all, I might agree that these "climate scientists" are being apolitical. It just isn't the case with climate studies at the moment where everything is politically charged and many in the scientific community are becoming advocates for particular political solutions and even political philosophies and factions.
It is this sort of thing that is destroying the credibility of the climate scientists, where they are no longer reporters but advocates.
While I'm not the original poster you are debating with here, I will concede that there may be some influence on the part of activities of mankind upon the global environment.
What I don't buy is the significance of that influence, or that the current situation is so dire that if we don't destroy all technology and go back to a hunter-gatherer society with a 99% reduction in world wide human population that we are doomed to extinction. It is the politics that are involved here and trying to decide where that line is between doing one thing that is insanely stupid like mass genocide and the other which is completely ignoring the impact of environmental pollution and thinking it should be our god given right to consume every resource to its utmost potential for greater profits and not giving a damn about how it impacts the planet.
There must be some point in between to make a balance. Attempts to try and control pollution of all forms have largely been successful in most 1st world countries, where environmental damage has been reversed and living more in harmony with this world has been demonstrated as a proven fact. The Hudson River in NYC is returning to a state where things can now live in that river again, you can breathe air in downtown Pittsburgh, and air quality in Los Angeles hasn't really become much worse than it was when I was just a little kid. Those are just a few examples I can point to where there have been some successes on something larger than just the efforts of one person and involve whole communities making a difference because they have made a difference.
Given that there have been some tremendous successes in raising environmental consciousness, where does the line get drawn in terms of what action need to take place? It is wrong to say that some measures suggested to "control carbon emissions" simply aren't going to work? Is there a serious discussion on some of those sequestration systems about what harmful effects they may cause for future generations? Is there a reason we must act and do something rash right now without holding a measured public debate over the real issues involved? Is the world really going to end in a decade if those rash actions are not done right now?
Arguing over the "science" of "global warming" or "global cooling" is mostly naval grazing compared to the very real policy issues about how to deal with environmental damage in general. Those trying to "prove global warming" in many ways really don't care if there is environmental damage and in some ways even helps their cause if that damage increases so they can have larger research budgets to "fight global warming".
In short, all of the easy stuff was done before you were born. Getting into orbit has gone from being something on the national news to something that happens so regularly that a vast amount of modern infrastructure depends on it. In fact, it's become so easy that we now worry about the amount of stuff in orbit.
Once you've got into orbit, you're most of the way to the moon, in terms of energy usage. Going to other planets is harder, although we've done that with probes.
I don't think you realize how hard it was to get anything into orbit, even after the mechanics of getting it to happen were well understood. The rocket equation is pretty unforgiving, particularly when you need to do atmospheric flight for part of that trip. The number of things that were unknown in the early 1960's was so huge there was even doubt that people could even get into space and do anything useful when they got up there, much less be able to accomplish things like orbital rendezvous and performing EVAs. I wouldn't call any of that particularly easy to accomplish. There have been only four organizations which have even been successful with an orbital rendezvous, and all four are organizations tied to their respective national governments... governments who are also permanent members of the United Nations Security Council thus have some clout in a political sense. The only permanent member of the Security Council that hasn't made the trip is the United Kingdom... and you can infer your own opinion on that factual point.
"I'm 46 and I grew up with Star Trek, the World Trade Center, the Concorde, and the space shuttle. How's that working out..."
One of these things is not like the others...
I don't know... they all crashed and burned real hard, which is why you don't see anything on that list in contemporary society. I'd even say that the destruction of the Star Trek franchise might have even been done by terrorists, but perhaps that is giving terrorists a bad name. The operative word for Star Trek is "corporate raiders milking the franchise for all it is worth". Only the Star Trek franchise ended without the loss of human lives, although you might even find a few suicidal fans for that one too. Care to try again?
This isn't BS, so far as it really was a very rare alignment of the planets.
Sadly, one of the members of congress in an appropriations hearing at the time expressed the attitude that we could afford to wait another 175 years as "the universe will still be out there when a couple centuries go by". The planetary science researchers literally pushed every political contact they had and recruited several "science fiction fan" groups like the L5 Society and various rocket societies to get the funding passed. It was just barely enough political support that the funding of the two Voyager probes were done. There were more ambitious ideas presented, but Congress shot them down.
There were also several members of congress at the time who thought it was surprisingly suspicious that just as funding was being cut for various NASA programs that this "once in a lifetime opportunity" presented itself. They said it was BS as well, and even accused these planetary scientists that somehow they were cooking the books to make this alignment show up in the way that it happened. In reality, it was just a lucky coincidence that the American spaceflight community had the equipment and the expertise necessary to pull off such a mission at the right moment in history allowing such a mission to happen in the first place.
The RTG used on the Voyager spacecraft is on the end of a very long boom separated from the main spacecraft by several feet... essentially as far away from the spacecraft as could be practically made given the constraints necessary for packaging the vehicle inside a faring for atmospheric flight into orbit and weight restrictions on the boom before it could be extended.
From a radiological point of view, the most hazardous part of the trip for Voyager was going through the Jupiter equivalent of the Van Allen belts and to a lesser degree doing the same thing near Saturn. Very likely the SD-RAM would have been scrambled on an iPad even with lead shielding and all of the other precautions. That is completely ignoring the need for "milspec" components capable of being able to operate in an environment that is just a few degrees above absolute zero. Most consumer grade electronics don't have a chance in that kind of environment. Voyager does have a heater core powered by the RTG to help keep the internal eletronics at something of a reasonable temperature, and that is the one thing that will ultimately kill the vehicle as once the heater goes out the electronics will simply die. Almost all of the other sub-systems have been shut down already just to keep this one "component" going along with the radio transmitter.
The problem is that a "Manhattan Project" style crash program getting a team of astronauts to Mars with a mantra "waste anything but time" is simply unaffordable for any country even trying. Mars is a tough nut to crack, and throwing money at trying to get there isn't enough. Even unmanned space probes is an incredibly tough challenge, and it is disheartening that even robotic exploration of Mars may be at an end with America losing even that capability... at least if NASA is the agency who will be providing that service to the country.
The idea that it may cost in the neighborhood of about a Trillion dollars (that is a big capital "T", not a "B") to conduct a proper manned exploration of Mars is enough to turn any congressman white and question if it is something which should even be done. If we used the Apollo project mentality and contracting system, that is what I would guess would be the final price tag. More "conservative" estimates put it more around the price of about $200 Billion, or about twice the cost of the International Space Station. I think that price is a low ball price which is why I suggest the higher amount.
While I admit that the U.S. Congress is tossing around Trillions of dollars like they are Zimbabwe currency, that still represents a huge commitment even for the American economy. Even if you spent that money over the course of a couple decades, it is a funding level that simply can't be sustained with the current political environment in DC. While I would be excited if NASA had its budget doubled and then doubled again to make that happen, and such a funding level would really only be returning to funding levels consistent with what happened during the Apollo project, it is money that can't really be justified here and now. There also aren't any politicians except for Newt Gingrich or John Glenn who would have the political strength needed to sustain such a huge expansion of NASA... and those two can't do such a program on their own and both are also on the fringe of their respective political parties in terms of any real political influence. There certainly is nobody like Lyndon Johnson who is backing the idea of a huge budget busting space program.
If anybody is going to make the trip to Mars, it will by necessity be done through private commercial efforts. At least I'm convinced of that.
The Voyager spacecraft computers are some of the last active computers in the Solar System still using hand-wrapped core memory. I think that says more about the space probe than almost anything else. There might be a couple museums which fire up a computer every now and again with such a memory module, but this is certainly the last one in a production environment. It shows how rugged that kind of design really can be.
Then again, saying it is the last one in the Solar System may not even be accurate, so it might just simply be said it is the last one currently running in the Milky Way Galaxy... unless we meet some alien races to dispute that fact.
Of any complaints that I've seen here, this is the most legitimate. Most of the other claims of stuff like World of Warcraft being the first to do stuff like this just make me want to puke in terms of the sheer ignorance of the people posting.
There were many sources of ideas that came from the virtual reality community, and I agree with the sentiments you are making here. The patents were filed though and not invalidated, and I certainly hate the software patent system including how difficult it is to prove prior art without showing a patent number which demonstrates that prior art. That is how patents on silly things like the ROT-13 algorithm got through the USPTO or in one case I even saw a bubble sort get approved because there was no "prior art" in the USPTO archive. Yes, I know that prior art can come in other forms, but prior patents seem to hold a whole lot more weight.
If Blizzard is being smart here, that would need to be their basis of defense where they would have to find groups like the ones you worked with or perhaps scan Slashdot for precisely comments like this and try to get you to testify on their behalf to demonstrate prior art. It would certainly help though if you had some of the source code or software from the era. I would have a hard time finding much of the software I wrote from back at that time period.
I have a very hard time believing that nobody knew this patent existed, and certainly the developers at Blizzard should have known about Alpha World and Worlds, Inc. well before they started the game. Worlds, Inc. really did create some amazing software that was ground breaking in a whole bunch of ways and was well known to developers who were familiar with the state of the art... because these guys actually did create some of the first kind of custom avatars that had player to player interaction. Not really so much gun fights but rather the social interaction stuff... which is what Alpha World and the previous Alpha Station software concentrated on.
At the time this stuff was being done, most people didn't even think it could be done. You would have to go back to some of the discussion groups of VRML, where the Alpha World guys were some of the first to put many of those VRML ideas into practice. That they may have been trolls to file patents on some of their work once they got it implemented may be true, but that is a criticism of the whole concept of a software patent in the first place rather than a criticism of these guys doing pioneering work and trying to "protect themselves".
Keep in mind that in 1995 there was the whole LZW algorithm patent issue that impacted the GIF image format, where software developers were suddenly impacted with having to deal with software patents... particularly anything dealing with graphic engines. If they decided to patent some new ideas they came up with at the time, I say more power to them. If you hate this, contact your congressman. Don't go saying how somebody using the system as intended is finally getting recognized.
If you've never heard of this software, I say you are missing something amazing, but also realize that the company who produced the software hasn't really had a commercial success because of several mistakes they made on the way. Many companies make mistakes like this too, so it isn't anything new. What amazes me is that the company is still around.
Doom originally sent all of the data out to all of the clients via UDP packets to a broadcast address. Network administrators absolutely hated the game because those packets would literally melt down routers and they had to be filtered out from the outgoing hubs or those packets would flood the whole internet. Later versions of Doom switched to TCP packets and kept track of the individual IP addresses for each player that significantly cut down on the packets being sent around the network. Doom worked just fine on a LAN though.
The customization that happened in Alpha Station was rather extensive and nothing like what happened with DOOM. I am scratching my head to remember if I played the Alpha version of DOOM first before I used Alpha Station, but they were pretty much contemporary with each other.
Alpha Station and later Alpha World really did have some unique elements compared to other software of the time including some extensive player to player interactions and what would be called today "emotes" on avatars. DOOM had none of that. I'm not knocking the coding skills of John Carmack, but the audience for DOOM was a very different crowd.
You certainly couldn't have literally hundreds of users gathering in virtual space each with different avatars like what happened in Alpha World. I remember an event with nearly a thousand different users, and at the time it was considered a mind blowing record for the most number of users in the same virtual space simultaneously for an avatar environment.
The claims here certainly seem very legitimate on the part of Worlds, Inc. As for why they waited until now to enforce their patent is something to be asked, but the claim that they really did come up with these ideas first is something that really can't be questioned if you know any of the history of this software at all. The original development team did some amazing things with avatars. The only prior art I could even consider would be Neal Stephenson with his book "Snow Crash", but these guys were the ones who figured out how to take the ideas in Snow Crash and convert them into actual software.
What happened was that the "modding" community around the original Alpha World ended up becoming more successful from a financial standpoint than the game/world itself. One of the companies that was producing content and providing stuff for players ended up buying out the company producing the main engine software, including all of the "intellectual property". Essentially the original development team really didn't know how to turn a profit out of the virtual world in spite of some pretty ambitious business goals.
That said, I think after the buy-out, the "new management team" has done a pretty good job of managing the resources of the game and the move to "Active Worlds" was a pretty good move given everything that happened earlier including putting the finances of the whole enterprise on a sound financial standing. While they have stayed a niche player and Active Worlds certainly never became something like World of Warcraft, they have had a very steady presence on the internet for a couple of decades now.
I spent perhaps far too much time in Alpha World myself and created not just a nice little McMansion, but I also ended up building a major subdivision in terms of laying out a huge grid network of roads and even started a "subway" system (actually an "elevated train" network) with several "stations". I loved the roller coasters but never got around to building one myself. Boy does this bring back memories.
I remember the original "Alpha Station" that even predated the Alpha World itself, and they've done some amazing things over the years. While there might be some prior art, these guys were some of the very early pioneers of avatars and were some of the very first people who tried to implement VRML in a meaningful way. Keep in mind this was back in the days that NCSA Mosiac was still the dominant web browser on the internet. In fact I think I downloaded the original Alpha Station with Mosaic, or perhaps that was a Gopher client based upon a post I saw on USENET (before spam became a problem there as well). This goes way back in what is now called the early history of the internet.
In terms of prior art, I would say that they are the prior art. The only question I have is if that prior art happened long enough ago for patent protection to even apply. At the time when the original software developers were making Alpha Station, they acknowledged the inspiration for their software from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. It was so much of an inspiration that the Black Sun lounge was even built by some of the developers once Alpha World came out. So does Neal Stephenson get a cut of the profits from the lawsuit if they win?
Slavery was undoubtedly a significant issue with the politics of 1860, and it was the election of Abraham Lincoln from a political party whose primary tenant and justification for existence was to promote the abolition of slaves throughout America that provided the spark which started the U.S. Civil War. It seems doubtful that South Carolina would have seceded had a Democrat been elected in 1860, but that is alternate time line stuff that we simply won't know what would have happened. Then again, Lincoln didn't even get the majority of the popular vote in 1860... just under 40% of the vote in fact.
I agree that there were people in the Confederate Army like Robert E. Lee who were loyal to the government of the state from which they were from, and that there certainly were many other factors too. But the point remains that slavery was the big issue, and in the Articles of Secession by South Carolina, slavery is perhaps the most prominent of the several reasons for justification the secession from the federal union. BTW, I love this document as it does address a number of issues in American constitutional law that hasn't really been resolved either legislatively or judicially and in particular points out some glaring weaknesses in the American federal constitution. While not named explicitly in the document, it also mentions that the election of Abraham Lincoln was another chief reason for secession because it was felt that they as citizens of South Carolina would no longer be capable of exercising their "rights" to hold slaves.
Armadillo Aerospace has been doing quite a few launches in New Mexico, which are all ground-launched vehicles. They are sub-orbital though and their flight path does not take them over cities like you are suggesting, but my point here is that "Spaceport America" isn't strictly for air launched vehicles... unlike Mojave which really doesn't have the facilities for ground launched rockets and is also being used for aviation purposes.
While Elon Musk is certainly one to stay in the limelight more than some of the other rocket builders, it seems like Jeff Bezos either was looking at or purchased land in the general region of Texas. Yes, I know Bezos has his test facility in west Texas, which is also licensed by the FAA-AST as a spaceport, so perhaps I'm mistaken.
If it wasn't Bezos, it seems like it was another group of commercial rocket developers. Benson Space Company perhaps?
Regardless, I would have to agree that some place other than KSC is going to be needed if SpaceX has anything close to the launch rates that Elon Musk is promising. While SpaceX doesn't need to compete against Shuttle launches any more, there still are all of the D.O.D. payloads that usually get higher priority over commercial flights. KSC can be a rather busy place from time to time.
There is a general presumption that planets which would be orbiting closely to small stars like a M-class main sequence star would be likely to tidally locked as well, presuming they were about Earth-sized and in the "habitable zone" where water would be liquid on the surface. Planets of that nature might be possible, but the environment would be very different.
One person on television would serve to let aliens know we deserve to be wiped out:
David Hasslehoff
Sadly, this one is schedule for decommissioning. The "Big E" may live on as another ship, but this one is going to be turned into scrap metal and sold to China (most likely).
Agree, I wish he had finished Minecraft before boredom set in. Makes me wonder if he'll do it again. Won't be buying during alpha or beta this time around...
Do you really think Mojang is going to have a shortage of developers who would be willing to continue maintenance on something like 0x10^c? As long as the money keeps coming in, it will be maintained. Just because Markus Persson moves on to another project should be irrelevant.
(and for the record, the pollution created by a coal plant generating the energy required to charge an electric car is less than the pollution created by burning gas in a non-electric car. And batteries last longer than five years, and are getting better every year. And tax incentives for new technologies help them get off the ground, and are a smart investment for the future).
Another point in favor of those who want to mention the "pollution" issues with gasoline vs. electric vehicles is that in the production of gasoline, almost as much energy is consumed to produce a gallon of gasoline as is made available from the refined gasoline itself. In the past, such energy was consumed from raw petroleum or by-products (like tars and heavy organic molecules also found in crude oil), but many of the current refineries simply use electricity to run their boilers and equipment as such energy sources are ideal for fixed physical facilities like a petroleum refinery. The refineries can usually find more profitable uses for those other organic molecules or even find "cracking" catalysts to break that down into Octane and other more valuable substances. Electricity at industrial rates usually is quite cheap from most power utilities too.
In other words, even if you are burning gasoline, a coal-powered electricity generating facility has likely been used to produce the energy you are using in your automobile anyway. Trying to compare the efficiency of using that electricity to make gasoline or charge up a battery can be very tricky, and I'm not entirely sure direct "apples to apples" comparisons can be applied even though it is tried. Most current "efficiency" measurements usually ignore completely this use of fossil fuels in terms of how it impacts pollution and energy efficiency calculations.
Until there's a budget passed, senior reviews mean nothing. And if Congress puts in enough mandates on NASA's plate without increasing the budget, something's gotta get cut.
If the budget's cut, are they going to give up on the JWST, or Kepler and dozens of other smaller projects that are returning results now?
There are just two significant programs NASA is working on: The SLS and JWST. Almost the entire rest of NASA is being cut to support both programs.... that in my own opinion neither one of these projects are ever going to actually work much less worry about getting much else accomplished.
If you had a system with multiple planets, you might get some rough estimates on masses if you knew the distance from the star and orbital periods. But the reason we can pin down solar system planet's masses so well is because we can observe their location at nearly all points in their orbit to great precision, and can see stuff like the precession of orbits. Just having transit times isn't going to give you anywhere near that kind of information to work with.
I would give astrophysicists a whole lot more credit for really understanding Newton's laws of motion or even General Relativity so far as how it applies to the motion of stars and planets. The information you can obtain from the stellar data coming from Kepler is a bit more involved than just transit times, and you can tell quite a bit in terms of the masses of other planets if you notice that some planet is "early" or "late" achieving a transit across the parent star. There is a suggestion that "moons (like the Earth's Moon) might even be detectable using the methods they are using right now.... which would make estimating planetary mass to be trivial by comparison.
So you could say the basic goals of Kepler have been accomplished and the rest is gravy.
It may be gravy, but it is very delicious gravy that is very difficult to get any other way. The ongoing science that Kepler is doing right now is amazing, and some of the stars they are monitoring right now need to have observations that last several years for some of the most revealing data to come forth. Some of that involves how Kepler is acquiring that data in the first place.
What is happening here is that this device is looking for transits of planets across the disc of the star being observed. For very close planets, that can be just a few days... but even here in our own Solar System we know of several planets including the one that I'm typing this message on which takes a fair bit longer for it to orbit around its "parent star". I think it would be at a minimum to in theory be able to detect our own Solar System and its planets presuming that the orientation would be appropriate for this kind of survey... which requires years of observations to detect such a transit.
Wouldn't it be amazing if we found a G-class star that had a planet with an orbital period of somewhat close to a year? That is the kind of thing we can expect to get from this expanded mission and is not something which can be said to come from the current data set.
Another issue is that because of bandwidth issues, a considerable portion of the data process needs to happen on the computer inside of Kepler... which is really where the professional astronomers come into question. They need to be able to establish the criteria for what data is sent for review and what data can simply be discarded as "lacking interest". This is an ongoing review of the data obtained, thus something which really needs continued funding. Perhaps private funding could extend the team of astronomers who could perform these kind of calculations, but ultimately it is government programs which need to sustained for a considerable period of time once a commitment is done to perform a task like this.