Maybe I'm showing my age, but to me a "troll" is someone who deliberately says stupid things or asks stupid questions in an effort to provoke a lot of long responses/arguments. It started on Usenet as people jokingly seeing who could ask the dumbest possible question or make the stupidest possible statement that still fooled someone into believing that it was sincere. If someone fell for it and gave a serious response, the joke was on them. This guy isn't really a troll, he's just a jerk.
I think that the cost of the screen is what really kills most of these "lets build a laptop for 17 cents" schemes. You can get 8-bit processors that run at a few tens of MHz and have a few tens of kb of RAM so cheaply that they're practically free. The problem is that any "reasonable" LCD screen, even a passive black-and-white one, is going to cost tens of dollars (unless you want people using the computer having to squint at a little 3 inch by 3 inch box of a screen). If you can hook the thing up to a TV, you eliminate that issue.
From the perspective of the guy who was trying to cheat, maybe - but I'm guessing that the wife who found out her husband is trying to hook up on the interenet is glad to know, even if she isn't happy with the knowledge.
Parent's point was that even switching to another company doesn't work if the companies all simultaneously institute the same change. Of course, in that case they aren't actually competing any more - they are colluding to maximize their collective profits. It's hard to make companies compete if they don't want to. There doesn't even have to be any explicit agreement between the companies; all it takes is for company A to find a way to screw their customers, and for company B, C, and D to all say to themselves "Hmmm, the door's open! Let's get on board with that!"
You can argue that, but the point was that 1)the feds didn't "seize" anything, they simply asked for it and were granted permission and 2)the guy who gave them permission had the authority to do so. You can complain about how his decision deprived the other library patrons of the computer, but now we're down to discussing a library director who makes a bad decision about how a computer should be used, rather than the FBI illegally seizing computers without warrants.
If the taxpayers who "own" the library computer want to create a law that forbids libraries from cooperating with the police unless there is a court order, they should exercise their collective will to make it happen. Until they do, the decision is obviously in the hands of the library employees who are directly responsible for the computer. He has not "failed at his job," unless there was something in his contract about how he was supposed to deal with federal agents.
If the people who own the computer (in this case, the library) are fine with handing it over, I don't see why court orders are necessary. Although I would hope that the library administrators would care enough about the privacy of library patrons to tell the feds to get lost and come back with a court order, obviously that's not the case. If you use someone else's computer, remember that the owner might or might not agree to cooperate with the police if they come knocking.
This is not a manned vehicle. It's a robotic drone/upper stage - basically an upper stage for a rocket that can be recovered.
Re:Space shuttle is a problem
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NASA Turns 50
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That was just based on operating costs, not initial research/design costs. If you included R&D both have a much higher per-launch price tag, but I believe the Saturn-V is still more expensive. Of course, the Saturn-V could launch something like 120 tons into orbit vs. 25 for the shuttle, so if you compare them on a cost/kg of payload the Saturn-V is competitive.
Re:Space shuttle is a problem
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NASA Turns 50
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· Score: 1
Although I agree with you in general, the shuttle is certainly not more expensive than a Saturn V launch. Adjusted for inflation, the cost of a Saturn V launch was something like $1.5-$2 billion, depending on how you want to calculate it. The shuttle is expensive, but still much less than that.
Re:Selling you yesterday's future today
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NASA Turns 50
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There's a fixed cost in terms of energy to pull a pound of matter out of the Earth's deep-ass gravity well. You're asking for a near-free source of energy that can effortlessly be converted into kinetic propulsion. NASA hasn't found it because it may very well NOT EXIST.
The "energy costs" are relatively trivial. The X1 is fueled by liquid oxygen and kerosene. Kerosene is about $500/ton, and liquid oxygen is only about $15/ton if you buy a lot of it, and is basically free if you have the equipment to liquify it yourself. The total cost of this rocket's propellant (and energy) is in the tens of thousands of dollars, not millions. Most of the $7 million price of launching one of these is the cost of the rocket itself, which is of course thrown away after one use.
Re:Selling you yesterday's future today
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NASA Turns 50
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· Score: 1
I guess it depends on whether or not you consider $7 million for launching 700 kg into orbit "cost effective"...personally, $10k per kg does not seem very cost effective to me. In fact, in terms of $/kg it's not much better than the Saturn V of 40 years ago.
I think the most interesting thing about this whole enterprise is that there are over 200 people who have already put down $20k deposits for tickets, with a final ticket price of $200k each - for a ride on in a vehicle of dubious safety (compared to a modern airline, anyway) that hasn't even been built yet! This seems to indicate that there is vast money to be made in the space tourism industry. Just imagine how many people will likely want to do it once it has an established safety record. And this is merely suborbital - presumably people would be willing to pay much much more for an orbital ride, if anyone ever gets around to building a low-cost, reusable orbital vehicle. I don't know how much all this cost to develop, but I wouldn't be surprised suspect that the pre-sold tickets have probably already more than paid for it.
Are there any rocket scientists here who could enlighten us about how much the balloon would really help with getting something into orbit? As I understand it, the problem with getting into orbit is that you have to get going really really fast - it's not just a matter of being up really high.
I'm not really sure what the point of this is...what is anyone going to do with 10-20 grams in orbit? Can you even make a transmitter + power supply that small that would still be powerful enough to communicate with the ground? Or are you just supposed to send up 20 grams of foil or something that can be tracked with ground radar?
The X-prize was about getting people into space, which I think most people can see uses for (even if it was sub-orbital). I'm not really sure about this. Although I guess it's a great way to get a lot of free publicity, especially since the odds of anyone actually claiming the prize money are very low.
But wait, you say, I shouldn't correct by height, the gender is the important difference. Fine... Let's find a 5' male runner and see if he can outrun Flo-Jo.
I hate to break this to you, but Ira Murchison was only 5'3", and for a while he held the world record in the 100m at 10.1 seconds.
Today for men a 100m time of 10.49 is not great; there are many, MANY male highschool track runners who do better than that. I am sure that at least a few of them are under 5'6".
Actually, almost all countries with a space program have a similar rule/law. They want to know who is taking images of potentially secrete spots like military bases or missile silos and what they will be used for.
I would think that the government would simply assume that other governments are ALWAYS trying to spy on them with satellites, and plan accordingly.
Most patents on genes that are found in nature are really patents on using a natural gene sequence for a particular purpose (medical therapy, growing a better crop, whatever), not patents on the gene sequence itself. It's more analogous to patenting T-shirts made from Klausonium, not patenting Klausonium in general.
Look, while I don't think that cell phones cause cancer either, I would hope that the slashdot crowd would be educated enough to realize that not all devices that emit electromagnetic energy are the same. Your cellphone puts out around 500 mW of radio waves. The speaker in your desk phone uses much less power than that, and most of the power that it consumes is turned into heat or sound - not 800 MHz radio waves.
Correct. The fact that he has an advanced degree simply means that we should take the time to listen to what he has to say. It doesn't mean we should uncritically accept whatever he says as true.
Perhaps more to the point, it's absurd to think that we could evaluate how likely an alien spaceship is to crash when we don't really have any idea what sort of technology it's based on. We don't have any idea how to build a ship that can go from orbit to the earth's surface and back without being very very obvious about its presence. If some alien technology exists that allows them to do that sort of thing, why do we assume that it's reliable or safe?
Don't get me wrong, I doubt very much that we have been visited by aliens, but the specific argument that alien spaceships should never crash seems very silly to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm showing my age, but to me a "troll" is someone who deliberately says stupid things or asks stupid questions in an effort to provoke a lot of long responses/arguments. It started on Usenet as people jokingly seeing who could ask the dumbest possible question or make the stupidest possible statement that still fooled someone into believing that it was sincere. If someone fell for it and gave a serious response, the joke was on them. This guy isn't really a troll, he's just a jerk.
I think that the cost of the screen is what really kills most of these "lets build a laptop for 17 cents" schemes. You can get 8-bit processors that run at a few tens of MHz and have a few tens of kb of RAM so cheaply that they're practically free. The problem is that any "reasonable" LCD screen, even a passive black-and-white one, is going to cost tens of dollars (unless you want people using the computer having to squint at a little 3 inch by 3 inch box of a screen). If you can hook the thing up to a TV, you eliminate that issue.
From the perspective of the guy who was trying to cheat, maybe - but I'm guessing that the wife who found out her husband is trying to hook up on the interenet is glad to know, even if she isn't happy with the knowledge.
Funny, but also a fairly apt analogy. They decided to call themselves "Templars" centuries after the Pope & co. bad-mouthed them.
Parent's point was that even switching to another company doesn't work if the companies all simultaneously institute the same change. Of course, in that case they aren't actually competing any more - they are colluding to maximize their collective profits. It's hard to make companies compete if they don't want to. There doesn't even have to be any explicit agreement between the companies; all it takes is for company A to find a way to screw their customers, and for company B, C, and D to all say to themselves "Hmmm, the door's open! Let's get on board with that!"
You can argue that, but the point was that 1)the feds didn't "seize" anything, they simply asked for it and were granted permission and 2)the guy who gave them permission had the authority to do so. You can complain about how his decision deprived the other library patrons of the computer, but now we're down to discussing a library director who makes a bad decision about how a computer should be used, rather than the FBI illegally seizing computers without warrants.
Yes, it is their job to control access. And clearly they have decided to give federal agents access.
If the taxpayers who "own" the library computer want to create a law that forbids libraries from cooperating with the police unless there is a court order, they should exercise their collective will to make it happen. Until they do, the decision is obviously in the hands of the library employees who are directly responsible for the computer. He has not "failed at his job," unless there was something in his contract about how he was supposed to deal with federal agents.
If the people who own the computer (in this case, the library) are fine with handing it over, I don't see why court orders are necessary. Although I would hope that the library administrators would care enough about the privacy of library patrons to tell the feds to get lost and come back with a court order, obviously that's not the case. If you use someone else's computer, remember that the owner might or might not agree to cooperate with the police if they come knocking.
This is not a manned vehicle. It's a robotic drone/upper stage - basically an upper stage for a rocket that can be recovered.
That was just based on operating costs, not initial research/design costs. If you included R&D both have a much higher per-launch price tag, but I believe the Saturn-V is still more expensive. Of course, the Saturn-V could launch something like 120 tons into orbit vs. 25 for the shuttle, so if you compare them on a cost/kg of payload the Saturn-V is competitive.
Although I agree with you in general, the shuttle is certainly not more expensive than a Saturn V launch. Adjusted for inflation, the cost of a Saturn V launch was something like $1.5-$2 billion, depending on how you want to calculate it. The shuttle is expensive, but still much less than that.
There's a fixed cost in terms of energy to pull a pound of matter out of the Earth's deep-ass gravity well. You're asking for a near-free source of energy that can effortlessly be converted into kinetic propulsion. NASA hasn't found it because it may very well NOT EXIST.
The "energy costs" are relatively trivial. The X1 is fueled by liquid oxygen and kerosene. Kerosene is about $500/ton, and liquid oxygen is only about $15/ton if you buy a lot of it, and is basically free if you have the equipment to liquify it yourself. The total cost of this rocket's propellant (and energy) is in the tens of thousands of dollars, not millions. Most of the $7 million price of launching one of these is the cost of the rocket itself, which is of course thrown away after one use.
I guess it depends on whether or not you consider $7 million for launching 700 kg into orbit "cost effective"...personally, $10k per kg does not seem very cost effective to me. In fact, in terms of $/kg it's not much better than the Saturn V of 40 years ago.
I think the most interesting thing about this whole enterprise is that there are over 200 people who have already put down $20k deposits for tickets, with a final ticket price of $200k each - for a ride on in a vehicle of dubious safety (compared to a modern airline, anyway) that hasn't even been built yet! This seems to indicate that there is vast money to be made in the space tourism industry. Just imagine how many people will likely want to do it once it has an established safety record. And this is merely suborbital - presumably people would be willing to pay much much more for an orbital ride, if anyone ever gets around to building a low-cost, reusable orbital vehicle. I don't know how much all this cost to develop, but I wouldn't be surprised suspect that the pre-sold tickets have probably already more than paid for it.
Are there any rocket scientists here who could enlighten us about how much the balloon would really help with getting something into orbit? As I understand it, the problem with getting into orbit is that you have to get going really really fast - it's not just a matter of being up really high.
I'm not really sure what the point of this is...what is anyone going to do with 10-20 grams in orbit? Can you even make a transmitter + power supply that small that would still be powerful enough to communicate with the ground? Or are you just supposed to send up 20 grams of foil or something that can be tracked with ground radar?
The X-prize was about getting people into space, which I think most people can see uses for (even if it was sub-orbital). I'm not really sure about this. Although I guess it's a great way to get a lot of free publicity, especially since the odds of anyone actually claiming the prize money are very low.
But wait, you say, I shouldn't correct by height, the gender is the important difference. Fine... Let's find a 5' male runner and see if he can outrun Flo-Jo.
I hate to break this to you, but Ira Murchison was only 5'3", and for a while he held the world record in the 100m at 10.1 seconds.
Today for men a 100m time of 10.49 is not great; there are many, MANY male highschool track runners who do better than that. I am sure that at least a few of them are under 5'6".
Actually, almost all countries with a space program have a similar rule/law. They want to know who is taking images of potentially secrete spots like military bases or missile silos and what they will be used for.
I would think that the government would simply assume that other governments are ALWAYS trying to spy on them with satellites, and plan accordingly.
Most patents on genes that are found in nature are really patents on using a natural gene sequence for a particular purpose (medical therapy, growing a better crop, whatever), not patents on the gene sequence itself. It's more analogous to patenting T-shirts made from Klausonium, not patenting Klausonium in general.
I wonder if guy got pissed off at his cell company and figured that his position as a cancer expert offered him a chance to get back at them BIGTIME?
Look, while I don't think that cell phones cause cancer either, I would hope that the slashdot crowd would be educated enough to realize that not all devices that emit electromagnetic energy are the same. Your cellphone puts out around 500 mW of radio waves. The speaker in your desk phone uses much less power than that, and most of the power that it consumes is turned into heat or sound - not 800 MHz radio waves.
Correct. The fact that he has an advanced degree simply means that we should take the time to listen to what he has to say. It doesn't mean we should uncritically accept whatever he says as true.
Only if you ground it.
Perhaps more to the point, it's absurd to think that we could evaluate how likely an alien spaceship is to crash when we don't really have any idea what sort of technology it's based on. We don't have any idea how to build a ship that can go from orbit to the earth's surface and back without being very very obvious about its presence. If some alien technology exists that allows them to do that sort of thing, why do we assume that it's reliable or safe? Don't get me wrong, I doubt very much that we have been visited by aliens, but the specific argument that alien spaceships should never crash seems very silly to me.