If this is creating a big psychological problem, why make the remote operators see any more than the live bomber pilots would? Is there a reason they must "watch it all the way to impact"?
I'd guess because they want to know ASAP if the attack was (likely) successful. For example, if the target is currently engaged with friendly troops, you want to know right away if a second bomb is needed.
If you are interested in the psychological aspects, I recommend reading a book called On Killing, by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman.
Is that by chance the same Dave Grossman that's convinced that regularly testifies on television that FPS games are "murder simulators" turning children into killing machines?
He repeatedly mentions his opponent by name in speeches and on his web site (why give the other guy free publicity?),
Actually, it's mostly by necessity -- they've found that the only way for them to get any media attention (besides McCain making a screw-up) is to say something about Obama. It sounds a little sad, but when you think about it, it's very much true.
The remains are placed in a specially designed, individual flight module or capsule which contains either seven grams or one gram of cremated remains, depending upon the service you selected. They are then integrated into the Celestis spacecraft, which is attached to the rocket and launched into space.
There's a huge misconception most people seem to have about this story, so I figured I'd repost my comment from the previous SpaceX story:
It's worth noting though that Celestis, the company which offers the service for placing a person's cremated remains on a space launch, only uses a tiny portion of the ashes on a particular launch. From their FAQ:
We offer the launch of a symbolic portion of the cremated remains as a memorial service, not final disposition of all the remains, because although dramatic progress is being made by entrepreneurs in reducing launch costs, spaceflight is still quite expensive. By launching a portion we can offer an affordable service, and also can provide performance assurance.
We will arrange for final disposition of the balance of the cremated remains through a sea scattering service, should you so desire.
Space launches are challenging. What if the orbit is not achieved?
In the event that the Celestis Earth Orbit Service spacecraft does not achieve orbit, we will -- at no additional cost -- place a second sample of the cremated remains aboard our next scheduled mission.
The New York Time reports that the rocket was also carrying the ashes of 208 people who had paid to have their remains shot into space, including the astronaut Gordon Cooper and the actor James Doohan, who played Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, the wily engineer on the original "Star Trek" television series.
It's worth noting though that Celestis, the company which offers the service for placing a person's cremated remains on a space launch, only uses a tiny portion of the ashes on a particular launch. From their FAQ:
We offer the launch of a symbolic portion of the cremated remains as a memorial service, not final disposition of all the remains, because although dramatic progress is being made by entrepreneurs in reducing launch costs, spaceflight is still quite expensive. By launching a portion we can offer an affordable service, and also can provide performance assurance.
We will arrange for final disposition of the balance of the cremated remains through a sea scattering service, should you so desire.
Space launches are challenging. What if the orbit is not achieved?
In the event that the Celestis Earth Orbit Service spacecraft does not achieve orbit, we will -- at no additional cost -- place a second sample of the cremated remains aboard our next scheduled mission.
Re:But what comes next?
on
NASA Turns 50
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· Score: 1
Even if a corporation was willing to spend that much money... there's no way it would happen. Almost everyone (politicians, executives, shareholders, and the general public) is pretty much incapable of long-term thinking. Hell, most companies don't even seem to think beyond this quarter, much less this year--just look at all the dumb decisions that boost quarterly profits at the expense of long-term ones.
A counter-example: Pharmaceutical companies in the US spend around $60 billion on R&D each year, and most of the drugs they test never make it to market. For those that do make it to market, the average time-to-market is 12 years. Despite the immense cost and huge amount of time before any profit is seen, the drug companies still invest in the long-term.
Re:But what comes next?
on
NASA Turns 50
·
· Score: 1
Sure, they can use the technology that national space programs develop, but no way a corporation is going to sink $100 billion into getting a man on the Mars.
Perhaps not, but the private space industry is most certainly needed in order to lower that $100 billion cost by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Re:Selling you yesterday's future today
on
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.
It isn't too great in terms of cost/kg, but it's quite low overall. The key point is that the techniques and technology SpaceX has developed will scale up quite nicely, such that their upcoming Falcon 9 will be around $3k per kg, and one of their main goals is to make their future launch vehicles even cheaper.
It's also worth noting that these "cost" figures aren't actually cost, but price to the end-user. The marginal cost to SpaceX per launch is presumably quite a bit lower than the stated price, although since their price is already so much lower than everyone else's they don't have as much of an incentive right now to drop it down so much.
Re:Selling you yesterday's future today
on
NASA Turns 50
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· Score: 3, Insightful
There's a fixed cost in terms of energy to pull a pound of matter out of the Earth's deep-ass gravity well.
Keep in mind that energy is a tiny fraction of current launch costs. Right now the vast majority of the costs for vehicles like the shuttle go into paying the standing army of personnel on the ground.
Re:Selling you yesterday's future today
on
NASA Turns 50
·
· Score: 3, Informative
50 years, and we are still stuck in low Earth orbit. 50 years, and still no cost-effective launch system.
It sounds kind of non-geeky at first, but for the past several years I (and many other geeks) have found swing dancing an excellent way to take care of both exercise and socialization with one stone. I actually started with DDR, and somehow ended up transitioning from that to actual dancing...
For whatever reason, there seems to be a surprisingly large amount of overlap between the populations of geeks and swing dancers -- maybe it's because swing dancing is a rather interesting finite state machine? In my experience the number of IT and programming folks in the swing dance community is quite high compared to the general populace.
Swing dancing involves a wide range of muscle groups, and can be quite athletic, especially when one is dancing the more fast-paced variants like Lindy Hop or Jive. Also, many of the best swing dancers are rather heavy-set, so having a large amount of weight isn't thought of negatively in the scene. An added bonus to swing dancing is that there's usually a drastic surplus of women and a shortage of men, so it's an excellent way to meet women.;)
Personally, I think it would be incredibly awesome if Google Docs (or one of its competitors) eventually got some sort of LaTeX support. Having a tool like that to allow multiple people to edit either the raw LaTeX source or a LyX-style graphical interpretation would be fantastic for scientific collaboration.
I'm guessing you don't live in Sweden? They just passed a law which is an even worse incursion on privacy than the the activity the US telecom immunity bill deals with.
My error, but the Eee 900 and 901 are almost the same price in the US: $550 vs $561, although technically speaking you can't actually buy the Eee 900 anymore and the Eee 901 hasn't been released yet.
That 1$ US = 1GBP in the electronics/computer world.
Yes, I know, but I'm wondering why price-wise it's MSI > Eee in the UK, while it's Eee > MSI in the US. It's not like they're manufactured in either country.
£350 doesn't make it "not cheap for a supposedly low-cost laptop", it makes a regularly priced laptop.
As I mentioned elsewhere in the discussion though, in the US it's $400 ($470 for the 3-cell version with XP), which definitely makes it a low-cost laptop. It's pretty much cheaper than anything you'd be able to find without having to go to eBay.
From what I can tell, in the US the MSI Wind has a starting price of $400 ($470 for the 3-cell Wind with XP instead of Linux), while the Eee 901 has an announced price of $600. In the UK however, the prices are flipped around, with the 3-cell Wind priced at £350 (~US$700) while the Eee 901 is £319 (~US$635). The overall increase in prices is of course due to things like the VAT, but does anybody know what the reason is for the reversal in relative prices?
Also, it's worth "only" 400$, so I'll happily bring it along to some bar or something while going out.
Where did you find an EEE 901 for $400? I thought it was $550, at least. From what I can tell the MSI Wind is slightly less expensive ($400 start price), slightly heavier (1.2kg instead of 1.0kg), slightly larger screen size (10" vs 9"), and the 80gb HDD vs 20gb SSD trade-off. It's almost directly comparable to the EEE 1000H which was announced, which is expected to be ~$630,
World wide, bees kill more people per year than terrorists do.
And more people have been killed by bees than have been directly killed by global warming. Does that mean we shouldn't take measures to prevent global warming?
I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same. I see this as the main problem with the electoral system in the states, only allowing two parties to have a real show of winning means that they both have to appeal to a range of swing voters, thus it's not particulary suprising that they are very similar in certain policy.
I've hypothesized that a two-party system tends to approximate the desires of the median of the voting populace, while a multi-party system tends to approximate the mean. Both have their pros and cons, but I think I prefer a government based on the median, because it tends to lessen the impact of what people on the fringe want, placing more emphasis on the center. Of course, many of us on slashdot disapprove of such a system, since we tend to be on the fringes ourselves.
Instead, NASA decided to compete against the private sector and create a new family of Ares boosters, basically from scratch.
You do realize that NASA, in the vast majority of items and processes in Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Shuttle and Constellation, contracted with defense and space contractors, right?
Sure, and the Ares I and Ares V are primarily contracted to ATK. However, the fact remains that NASA is funding the development of two new launchers which will compete (albeit poorly) against existing launchers in an already-crowded rocket marketplace.
The Ares V is certainly cool from a "bigger, shinier" perspective, but not so good from the perspective of wanting to reduce our immense launch costs to something even marginally more manageable. A big part of the (somewhat shoddy) reasoning for going with a shuttle-derived system was that it would be able to make use of currently-existing facilities and infrastructure. It's now looking like the Ares V is getting to be too large to use those facilities, so NASA will have to revamp its facilities, raising the cost even more.
In general, it was pretty peculiar of NASA to not devise a launch system which would take advantage of what we've learned (the hard way) from the ISS and use in-orbit assembly, which would've allowed NASA to use the already-existing launchers available from the private sector. Instead, NASA decided to compete against the private sector and create a new family of Ares boosters, basically from scratch.
Here's some interesting commentary from a couple of knowledgeable folks within the aerospace industry:
In a recent post, I discussed the weight issues associated with Ares V (probably to be renamed Ares VI if the extra RS-68 engine is slipped in.) The rocket is growing to address performance shortfalls, but it has become too heavy for the existing crawlers, too heavy for the existing launch pad, and too heavy for the hard stand on which the mobile launcher sits. I suggested that NASA should have initially determined weight and size limits on their rocket, based on the existing infrastructure, and limited the weight and size of Ares V to fit within those requirements. If that rocket were insufficient to meet the lift requirements for Project Constellation, use two heavy-lifters instead of one heavy-lifter and one crew launcher.
As noted, the vehicle has come a long way from the originally advertised "Shuttle-derived" system that was supposed to save us so much money and time, and utilize the existing Shuttle infrastructure (though the latter was always a politically-induced pork-driven bug, not a feature, if one wanted to actually lower launch costs). It (like Ares I) is now essentially a new vehicle, including components, though if Ares I ever comes to fruition, Ares V will probably be at least in part derived from it....
So, they're going to launch the Orion, with crew, on an Ares I, and hope that they can get a successful Ares V mission off within four days, because they can't afford the duration. They build this mondo grosso launch vehicle to avoid having to do multiple launches, and yet, they not only have dual launch, but it's one on a tight window. And if they can't get the launch off on time, the lunar mission is scrubbed, and the crew comes back home from LEO, having wasted the cost of an Ares I launch (and an Orion, if they end up not making it reusable).
This is an affordable, resilient, sustainable infrastructure?
The rationale for the heavy lifter has always been to avoid the complication of orbital assembly (apparently, the false lesson learned from our success with assembling ISS is that we should throw away all that experience, and take an entirely different approach for VSE). But it's already a "launch and half" mission, needing both Ares 1 and Ares 56, so they're not even avoiding it--they're only minimizing it. And even if the lunar mission doesn't outgrow the Ares 6, it won't be able to do a Mars mission in a single launch. So if we need to learn to do orbital assembly (and long-term
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If this is creating a big psychological problem, why make the remote operators see any more than the live bomber pilots would? Is there a reason they must "watch it all the way to impact"?
I'd guess because they want to know ASAP if the attack was (likely) successful. For example, if the target is currently engaged with friendly troops, you want to know right away if a second bomb is needed.
If you are interested in the psychological aspects, I recommend reading a book called On Killing, by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman.
Is that by chance the same Dave Grossman that's convinced that regularly testifies on television that FPS games are "murder simulators" turning children into killing machines?
He repeatedly mentions his opponent by name in speeches and on his web site (why give the other guy free publicity?),
Actually, it's mostly by necessity -- they've found that the only way for them to get any media attention (besides McCain making a screw-up) is to say something about Obama. It sounds a little sad, but when you think about it, it's very much true.
From the Celestis FAQ, it was either 1 gram or 7 grams of ashes, depending on which type of service was purchased.
http://www.memorialspaceflights.com/faq.asp
How are the cremated remains actually launched?
The remains are placed in a specially designed, individual flight module or capsule which contains either seven grams or one gram of cremated remains, depending upon the service you selected. They are then integrated into the Celestis spacecraft, which is attached to the rocket and launched into space.
There's a huge misconception most people seem to have about this story, so I figured I'd repost my comment from the previous SpaceX story:
It's worth noting though that Celestis, the company which offers the service for placing a person's cremated remains on a space launch, only uses a tiny portion of the ashes on a particular launch. From their FAQ:
http://www.memorialspaceflights.com/faq.asp
Why launch only a symbolic portion?
We offer the launch of a symbolic portion of the cremated remains as a memorial service, not final disposition of all the remains, because although dramatic progress is being made by entrepreneurs in reducing launch costs, spaceflight is still quite expensive. By launching a portion we can offer an affordable service, and also can provide performance assurance.
We will arrange for final disposition of the balance of the cremated remains through a sea scattering service, should you so desire.
Space launches are challenging. What if the orbit is not achieved?
In the event that the Celestis Earth Orbit Service spacecraft does not achieve orbit, we will -- at no additional cost -- place a second sample of the cremated remains aboard our next scheduled mission.
The New York Time reports that the rocket was also carrying the ashes of 208 people who had paid to have their remains shot into space, including the astronaut Gordon Cooper and the actor James Doohan, who played Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, the wily engineer on the original "Star Trek" television series.
It's worth noting though that Celestis, the company which offers the service for placing a person's cremated remains on a space launch, only uses a tiny portion of the ashes on a particular launch. From their FAQ:
http://www.memorialspaceflights.com/faq.asp
Why launch only a symbolic portion?
We offer the launch of a symbolic portion of the cremated remains as a memorial service, not final disposition of all the remains, because although dramatic progress is being made by entrepreneurs in reducing launch costs, spaceflight is still quite expensive. By launching a portion we can offer an affordable service, and also can provide performance assurance.
We will arrange for final disposition of the balance of the cremated remains through a sea scattering service, should you so desire.
Space launches are challenging. What if the orbit is not achieved?
In the event that the Celestis Earth Orbit Service spacecraft does not achieve orbit, we will -- at no additional cost -- place a second sample of the cremated remains aboard our next scheduled mission.
Even if a corporation was willing to spend that much money... there's no way it would happen. Almost everyone (politicians, executives, shareholders, and the general public) is pretty much incapable of long-term thinking. Hell, most companies don't even seem to think beyond this quarter, much less this year--just look at all the dumb decisions that boost quarterly profits at the expense of long-term ones.
A counter-example: Pharmaceutical companies in the US spend around $60 billion on R&D each year, and most of the drugs they test never make it to market. For those that do make it to market, the average time-to-market is 12 years. Despite the immense cost and huge amount of time before any profit is seen, the drug companies still invest in the long-term.
Sure, they can use the technology that national space programs develop, but no way a corporation is going to sink $100 billion into getting a man on the Mars.
Perhaps not, but the private space industry is most certainly needed in order to lower that $100 billion cost by a couple of orders of magnitude.
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.
It isn't too great in terms of cost/kg, but it's quite low overall. The key point is that the techniques and technology SpaceX has developed will scale up quite nicely, such that their upcoming Falcon 9 will be around $3k per kg, and one of their main goals is to make their future launch vehicles even cheaper.
It's also worth noting that these "cost" figures aren't actually cost, but price to the end-user. The marginal cost to SpaceX per launch is presumably quite a bit lower than the stated price, although since their price is already so much lower than everyone else's they don't have as much of an incentive right now to drop it down so much.
There's a fixed cost in terms of energy to pull a pound of matter out of the Earth's deep-ass gravity well.
Keep in mind that energy is a tiny fraction of current launch costs. Right now the vast majority of the costs for vehicles like the shuttle go into paying the standing army of personnel on the ground.
50 years, and we are still stuck in low Earth orbit. 50 years, and still no cost-effective launch system.
If all goes well, we'll have one this weekend:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Upcoming_launches
It sounds kind of non-geeky at first, but for the past several years I (and many other geeks) have found swing dancing an excellent way to take care of both exercise and socialization with one stone. I actually started with DDR, and somehow ended up transitioning from that to actual dancing...
For whatever reason, there seems to be a surprisingly large amount of overlap between the populations of geeks and swing dancers -- maybe it's because swing dancing is a rather interesting finite state machine? In my experience the number of IT and programming folks in the swing dance community is quite high compared to the general populace.
Swing dancing involves a wide range of muscle groups, and can be quite athletic, especially when one is dancing the more fast-paced variants like Lindy Hop or Jive. Also, many of the best swing dancers are rather heavy-set, so having a large amount of weight isn't thought of negatively in the scene. An added bonus to swing dancing is that there's usually a drastic surplus of women and a shortage of men, so it's an excellent way to meet women. ;)
Personally, I think it would be incredibly awesome if Google Docs (or one of its competitors) eventually got some sort of LaTeX support. Having a tool like that to allow multiple people to edit either the raw LaTeX source or a LyX-style graphical interpretation would be fantastic for scientific collaboration.
Sure glad i'm european
I'm guessing you don't live in Sweden? They just passed a law which is an even worse incursion on privacy than the the activity the US telecom immunity bill deals with.
Wait a second, are you the author of those electrical engineering romance paperbacks I've been reading?
Links please...
I haven't seen it in the past year+ I've been here...
I assure you it's been used quite a bit. The following query turns up 855 hits on google:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aslashdot.org+welcome+our+new+overlords
Notice that he said 900, not 901.
My error, but the Eee 900 and 901 are almost the same price in the US: $550 vs $561, although technically speaking you can't actually buy the Eee 900 anymore and the Eee 901 hasn't been released yet.
That 1$ US = 1GBP in the electronics/computer world.
Yes, I know, but I'm wondering why price-wise it's MSI > Eee in the UK, while it's Eee > MSI in the US. It's not like they're manufactured in either country.
£350 doesn't make it "not cheap for a supposedly low-cost laptop", it makes a regularly priced laptop.
As I mentioned elsewhere in the discussion though, in the US it's $400 ($470 for the 3-cell version with XP), which definitely makes it a low-cost laptop. It's pretty much cheaper than anything you'd be able to find without having to go to eBay.
From what I can tell, in the US the MSI Wind has a starting price of $400 ($470 for the 3-cell Wind with XP instead of Linux), while the Eee 901 has an announced price of $600. In the UK however, the prices are flipped around, with the 3-cell Wind priced at £350 (~US$700) while the Eee 901 is £319 (~US$635). The overall increase in prices is of course due to things like the VAT, but does anybody know what the reason is for the reversal in relative prices?
Also, it's worth "only" 400$, so I'll happily bring it along to some bar or something while going out.
Where did you find an EEE 901 for $400? I thought it was $550, at least. From what I can tell the MSI Wind is slightly less expensive ($400 start price), slightly heavier (1.2kg instead of 1.0kg), slightly larger screen size (10" vs 9"), and the 80gb HDD vs 20gb SSD trade-off. It's almost directly comparable to the EEE 1000H which was announced, which is expected to be ~$630,
Gee, izzatso? Where's the proof? Where are the successful attacks? Where are the thwarted attacks?
There's a fairly extensive listing of both terrorist incidents and prevented attacks within the US (years 2001-2005) in this FBI report:
http://www.fbi.gov/publications/terror/terrorism2002_2005.htm
World wide, bees kill more people per year than terrorists do.
And more people have been killed by bees than have been directly killed by global warming. Does that mean we shouldn't take measures to prevent global warming?
I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same. I see this as the main problem with the electoral system in the states, only allowing two parties to have a real show of winning means that they both have to appeal to a range of swing voters, thus it's not particulary suprising that they are very similar in certain policy.
I've hypothesized that a two-party system tends to approximate the desires of the median of the voting populace, while a multi-party system tends to approximate the mean. Both have their pros and cons, but I think I prefer a government based on the median, because it tends to lessen the impact of what people on the fringe want, placing more emphasis on the center. Of course, many of us on slashdot disapprove of such a system, since we tend to be on the fringes ourselves.
Instead, NASA decided to compete against the private sector and create a new family of Ares boosters, basically from scratch.
You do realize that NASA, in the vast majority of items and processes in Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Shuttle and Constellation, contracted with defense and space contractors, right?
Sure, and the Ares I and Ares V are primarily contracted to ATK. However, the fact remains that NASA is funding the development of two new launchers which will compete (albeit poorly) against existing launchers in an already-crowded rocket marketplace.
The Ares V is certainly cool from a "bigger, shinier" perspective, but not so good from the perspective of wanting to reduce our immense launch costs to something even marginally more manageable. A big part of the (somewhat shoddy) reasoning for going with a shuttle-derived system was that it would be able to make use of currently-existing facilities and infrastructure. It's now looking like the Ares V is getting to be too large to use those facilities, so NASA will have to revamp its facilities, raising the cost even more.
In general, it was pretty peculiar of NASA to not devise a launch system which would take advantage of what we've learned (the hard way) from the ISS and use in-orbit assembly, which would've allowed NASA to use the already-existing launchers available from the private sector. Instead, NASA decided to compete against the private sector and create a new family of Ares boosters, basically from scratch.
Here's some interesting commentary from a couple of knowledgeable folks within the aerospace industry:
http://chairforceengineer.blogspot.com/2008/06/directly-seeing-light.html
In a recent post, I discussed the weight issues associated with Ares V (probably to be renamed Ares VI if the extra RS-68 engine is slipped in.) The rocket is growing to address performance shortfalls, but it has become too heavy for the existing crawlers, too heavy for the existing launch pad, and too heavy for the hard stand on which the mobile launcher sits. I suggested that NASA should have initially determined weight and size limits on their rocket, based on the existing infrastructure, and limited the weight and size of Ares V to fit within those requirements. If that rocket were insufficient to meet the lift requirements for Project Constellation, use two heavy-lifters instead of one heavy-lifter and one crew launcher.
http://www.transterrestrial.com/archives/2008/03/out_takes.html
As noted, the vehicle has come a long way from the originally advertised "Shuttle-derived" system that was supposed to save us so much money and time, and utilize the existing Shuttle infrastructure (though the latter was always a politically-induced pork-driven bug, not a feature, if one wanted to actually lower launch costs). It (like Ares I) is now essentially a new vehicle, including components, though if Ares I ever comes to fruition, Ares V will probably be at least in part derived from it. ...
So, they're going to launch the Orion, with crew, on an Ares I, and hope that they can get a successful Ares V mission off within four days, because they can't afford the duration. They build this mondo grosso launch vehicle to avoid having to do multiple launches, and yet, they not only have dual launch, but it's one on a tight window. And if they can't get the launch off on time, the lunar mission is scrubbed, and the crew comes back home from LEO, having wasted the cost of an Ares I launch (and an Orion, if they end up not making it reusable).
This is an affordable, resilient, sustainable infrastructure?
http://www.transterrestrial.com/archives/2008/06/thoughts_on_the.html
The rationale for the heavy lifter has always been to avoid the complication of orbital assembly (apparently, the false lesson learned from our success with assembling ISS is that we should throw away all that experience, and take an entirely different approach for VSE). But it's already a "launch and half" mission, needing both Ares 1 and Ares 56, so they're not even avoiding it--they're only minimizing it. And even if the lunar mission doesn't outgrow the Ares 6, it won't be able to do a Mars mission in a single launch. So if we need to learn to do orbital assembly (and long-term