When people bet on a non-terrorist event, isn't there still a chance of something tragic happening?
If I sell company X short in the stock market, isn't there a good chance that, if I make money, it correlates with a bunch of company X's employees being out of a job?
If I invest in an insurance company, aren't I 'betting' that the actuarial tables will be right often enough for me to make money? Hey, that sounds like I'm making my money from human misery. If your wife dies, and she's insured with company Y, then (theoretically) I have incentive to hope it was suicide, so her policy doesn't pay off. Surely it adds to your suffering if a representitive from that company checks on the cause of death, and you may find even the hint of it offensive. Why does society allow such a thing? (Retorical question - In some cases, it catches the "bereved" who slipped arsenic in her tea and is crying crocodyle tears, and that alone is a powerful incentive to allow it, just like we allow police or DAs to do some things we normally find offensive, like shouting, asking leading questions, or deliberately misquoting testimony in an attempt to catch a witness off balance, in the hopes of catching more criminals.)
The point is, I'm not causing that misery. My actions correlate with that misery, but correlation does not imply causation. Why is it OK for me to trade in normal futures or insurance, but not in this? I understand that you are offended by A but apparently not B, what I'm not seeing here is what makes A and B unequal, by your description. Or are you equally offended by people selling stocks short, or betting that a drought will push up the price of corn this fall.
In your example, one problem is apparent. If I fould out my recently kidnapped child had been the subject of a betting pool, I would have a strong suspicion that among you and that "couple of guys". someone had possibly done more than bet, but had acted to influence the odds of winning. However disgusting or horrifying I might find the bet, I'm pretty certain I would find the existence of a causative link a lot more disgusting and horrifying.
If it happened to me, my emotions would probably equate the two, but if it happened to someone else and I had to do jury duty should I listen to those emotions or to reason? I could sentence a kidnapper to death for the death of the victim. I don't think I could give two mooks who were betting on whether the victim would be found alive, in the hearing of the parents, a death sentence, no matter how stupid and insensitive they were. Yes I think what they were doing was wrong, but if I thought phrases like "most horrifying" and "absolutely disgusting" applied, then I could support most severe or absolutely maximum penalties.
I honestly deplore the idea of a speculative market ala John Poindexter's plan. I think it would be a bad thing. But your arguement isn't making the issues any clearer.
Big wind turbines have their own risks. Simulated "Loss of Blade" accidents for a 10 MW plant sometimes involve an object the size of a 747's wing, tumbling end over end at 30 RPM and a net velocity of 300 MPH. That's as it slices diagonally though an elementary school built a mere 10 miles away. Oh, since turbines must face the wind to work, there's always a 'bad' direction for a loss of blade, and even always a direction where it can lead to a "chain reaction" if you have multiple towers. Sorry, but all forms of power generation have risks when they scale up to the MW range.
Military technology is often "things that can kill thousands of people - period". If you're going to restrict the subject with that additional clause, you might as well add this phrase as well, so it reads, "things that might kill _the wrong_ thousands of people while handled by a drunk. There's no way to compare risk of death for systems if some of those systems are _supposed_ to cause death.
A better example might be the civil space program, which is not intended to kill people. (Yes, someone told NASA that, but I'm not sure they were paying attention).
Even more relevant would be sticking to coal fired plants, hydroelectric plants and other power generation. After all, a drunken dam inspector could concevably kill thousands. Drunken coal truck drivers have definitely killed far more than that many over the history of the industry, although a handful at a time.
(By the way, the published risks from nuclear power deaths often include possible auto/truck or auto/train accidents for the small amount of shipping required, but invariably omit the death toal from shipping coal by truck or rail, even though that takes thousands of times the trucks or freight cars, and the inspection standards are far lower).
If SCO's deal is to pay 1 million cash and 7.95 million is shares to B,S & F, I'd expect B, S & F to do real work nominally worth about a million (or less), and stall on incurring expenses that might go above the cash part of the payment. The more they decided their client's case was a long shot, the more I'd expect them to stay under that cap. Does anyone know of a way to calculate the real expenses B, S, & F has incurred, from paper for all those briefs to non-partner salaries? Or is it just a pipe dream that this can be estimated?
This is a great example of how to read an analysis. Anyone who invests in the market needs to know this sort of thing before they get in over their heads. Good, professional people, knowing that their words can have an impact beyond their face value, will be careful to say only what they can back up. Your 'warning' that the stock's a turkey is never going to be a simple "Don't buy this Turkey!".
About the clearest I've seen was "While X claims to have resolved all major old contract disputes, the state wherein X is incorporated allows a full year for filing appeals." (Meaning they have been in court a lot in just the last fiscal year, and It looks like there's a good chance things aren't as resolved as they say. If you don't have the sense to check in detail to see just what the company considers a "minor" dispute, and whether any of the "major" ones ARE filing an appeal, you should not invest in stocks.) Most warning signs are subtler than that example.
DU is relatively hard (rigid) as well. Before we used DU, tungsten was used for penetrators, and with enough push, the tungsten would reach a temperature where it too would become a liquid jet on penetration, and burn in atmosphere. That's how all modern antitank rounds work, they take something at least as tough as steel, and slam it into armor so fast it keeps on going whether it retains structural integrity or not (usually not). You start with a tough, high melting point material, so it doesn't detabilize under tremendous initial acceleration, or melt in flight. Then you keep upping the amount of propellant to get the maximum effect at the sharp end. You can always add more "gunpowder" to the round. DU liquifies (some of it to vapor), flash burns in an instant, and spatters all around the inside of a tank crew compartment, leaving bits of glossy black metal oxide that shape themselves just like any spray of liquid and vapor that cools back to solid, i.e. it is concentrated in a cone spreading from the point of impact but finer particles (the part that actually makes it to a true vapor) drift about more and deposite themselves more evenly. Mixed in with this is melted armor and assorted stuff that burned inside the tank (including totally homogenized crew for a turret hit)
The whole issue of how to mark waste sites for long term storage contains a vastly silly assumption. It postulates a variety of worst case scenarios, where people of the future lack the technology to translate our languages, or the scientific knowledge to recognize what the hazard is.
For example, one scenario is that civilisation is reduced to an illiterate population of hunter-gatherers, then rebuilds itself to about the level of our 15th century (western reconing). Future equivalents of the Conquistadores stumble upon the site, avariciously seeking gold. How do you explain to them that it is not an ancient tomb?
I call this silly, for two reasons. 1. Any absolute worst case scenario is unbeatable as an arguement. You can always postulate people too deprived of protein in their formative years to figure out whatever symbolism you leave behind correctly, or a culture that has just rediscovered radiation but not yet had their equivalents of the Curies or that little accident in the WW2 era to teach them that it bites, so they just don't want to take the warning seriously even if they understand it. 2. If we think there's a real chance that civilization is going to fall so totally that no languages derived from our own will exist, then hadn't we better spend our money on preventing that instead of commissioning studies on long term radiological waste marking?
Whether such principles as "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" are good or bad is something that will be hotly debated by the Slashdot crowd. To my mind the one unargueable lesson in ALL the past implementations of Communism is that a powerful government doesn't just wither away. Instead, it opposes enemies, and if it can't get enough it manufactures new ones, both external and internal. That's why government isn't just an implementation detail. The big difference between charity, non-profit organization, and just plain sharing on one side and the various -isms on the other is that one set is voluntary and allows opting out if the prices approach martyrdom (or even discomfort), while the other set is manditory and assumes a government able to enforce that mandate.
Your link pointed to an ammonium nitrate driven chemical rocket that would work on a pulse design similar to the origial orion conception. However, the original design wasn't chemical propulsion, it was nuclear, along the lines of a rack of 100 or more genuine A-bombs or even H-bombs, a pusher plate of solid steel twenty or so feet thick, a 'gun' that spit one bomb a second or so out beneath that plate, and shock absorbers the size of railroad cars or better between that plate and the payload. One proposed design could have put a colony on the Moon in a single shot (1,000 people, machine shops, housing, greenhouses for food, racks of moon buggys to explore with, etc.). And you could put the colony down just about anywhere, cause wherever it lands is now flatlands. No, I am not making any of this up - it was the 60's, and some people thought the radiation exposure risks could be made managable.
A low acceleration thruster, such as an ion drive, or possibly a solar sail, could gradually move the HST to a higher orbit. For Ion power, your choice of places to clamp it to the HST would be broader, but you still have to be pretty close to aligned with the center of mass, and there's still some things to worry about, like metal bits that stick out being too near the path of the beam and deflecting it. In 5 years, the gadjet could probably be designed to be clipped on to HSTs solar panels for power, and if we could only wait 20 to 50 years the booster would probably be smart enough to think of that itself, and move from spot to spot until it found the optimum anchor point.
I really think there are political sides to the issue, as in NASA figures the best way to get the Webb telecope is not to keep the Hubble, and I just hope that trick works.
Wired made the same mistake. Can you believe they even dated the decision wrong? So did the register.
Re:Going after HP's customers...
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SCO News Roundup
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This is more like the Centauri (from Babylon 5) with their 17 front war. SCO is facing IBM, HP, and a bunch of 'small' guys, such as up and coming GNU/Linux connected firms. Bad enough, but then, there's the SEC, which dawdles just like the Vorlons, but once it finally moves has the real world equivalent of planet killers. There is only one player in this conflict that can escalate it to criminal charges, and if it does, they will all be pointed against SCO and allies.
For the last few years, most of Hubble's viewing time has been devoted to big sky questions, trying to look at the very early universe and help get data to confirm theories about the origin of the universe. There are a lot of PhD grade astronomers that had proposed projects for the Hubble put on the back burner repeatedly, and some have claimed that NASA was ignoring all other useful research in favor of the "Cosmo-genesis club".
Observations of the nearby stellar neighborhood (including planet searches), T-Tauri stars, determining the ages of our own galaxy's globular clusters, all these are programs that were proposed at some time and have had to find homes elsewhere or wait, and it's likely at least some of them were worthwhile science.
Some ground based scopes, such as the Kecks, have taken up a lot of the slack, but adaptive optics deal with atmospheric distortion. They don't help with the atmosphere's being opaque to many wavelengths, or weather, or just being in the wrong hemisphere to observe.
It isn't possible to push Hubble into the sun with a "cheap" rocket. 1. Given it's weight, direct routing to the sun would cost more than building a duplicate of the current space station, and involve a booster substantially bigger than the Saturn V 1st stage. We had a design once that _might_ have been capable of achieving a delta vee equal to earth's orbital velocity with a 24 ton object - it was called Orion. You might want to look that one up and find out why it was never built. While I won't swear that all possible indirect routes involving slingshot effects with Luna, Venus, etc are in the same ballpark, so far no one has come up with a good one. 2. No one has an actual design for such a booster, nor have they designed the couplings or automated grapples needed to get a grip on the Hubble with a booster that lines up through the center of mass of the object. 3. In fact, with all the add ons, retrofitting, and repairs, the location of Hubble's center of mass and the directions along which the scope is properly braced against thrust (if there still are any) are unknowns. What are the chances of a successful automated mission if you can't put an astronaut on scene to take some close measurements? Not real good at best.
Large ISPs will have a full time legal staff to keep other employees from answering interogatives without legal knowledge. Mom-n-Pop ISPs won't. The RIAA's actions will help the big fish gobble up all the small fish. Funny, that used to be something the government tried to stop, not assist.
Most states do, but remember, 1. this won't be an established industry, but a new market. 2. no-compete laws generally have limits set for when a commercial industry is not reachng standards - for Krispy Kreme, those might be if enough of the local stores failed multiple health inspections and failed to fix their problems for some time the state deemed sufficient. For broadband, it could possibly include price raises sufficiently above general inflation, failure to run services into certain ethnic neighborhoods as fast as others (does Utah have those?), or even failure to cooperate with state law enforcement. Probably, failure to comply with federal LE or spot failures rather than widespread ones wouldn't establish sufficient grounds, and definitely the for-profits would be entitled to a day in court, and interstate commerce would let them appeal a Utah based decision in federal district court and even to the supremes if they chose, but still non-compete law is not a complete bar. (I Am Not A Lawyer).
First, THE constitution doesn't set the responsibilitys of the individual states. The only way it can stop a state from assuming a responsibility is if that assumption conflicts with a right, either of a person, or of the federal government, or of the states taken severally. Second, any state that has a "promote the general welfare" clause in is own state constitution can use that as a basis for providing public utilities or delegating that right to townships or other incorporated entities unless that state has specific clauses limiting delegation. Oh, and I Am Not A Lawyer.
Announced today on Wired News - A lawsuit by a garage door manufacturer that tried to use the DMCA to stop another company from making replacement universal remote controls was dismissed, with the court noting that the entire area was well outside the boundaries of those issues the DMCA was intended to address. This law started off a shade rediculous, but is getting reined in. We can hope (and work) for more such decisions.
This is probably not going to go over well with many, but... I've come to the conclusion that the internet creates a different, and more serious type of problem for parents than previous systems. Here's why. Imagine a parent worried about their child viewing horror movies at the local theatre. He or she probably has a fairly clear idea what's in them, and why they might be a problem. Or the parent wants to keep the kid from looking at Playboy. Same situation in effect. Of course, there have always been those cases where the parent is somewhat caught by surprise - "This Cronenburg guy, he's worse than Friday the 13th!" - "Hey Hustler is a lot more misogynistic than good ole' Playboy!" - "I thought they were making too much fuss about Elvis wiggling, but this Bowie guy, maybe they were right!". Still, such surprises are limited in scale.
The problem I see is there's no shallow end of the pool with the internet. The very first porn the kid sees could be tubgirl, or something involving a Clydesdale, 12 pounds of latex, and a duct-taped ferret, before they ever see more normal images. The first political site they run across could be one of the most virulent hate sites around. They can find things they are actually curious about, or things they themselves didn't want to know the first thing about. (And the first time they ask if their development is normal for their age, your in-box gets 500 extra "Add 3 inches" spams)
The "It wasn't me... my computer was being hacked." defense is a completly independent issue. For example, people right now can sue for being barred from a game and use this defense in the process. Whatever precident Second Life has set, they haven't suddenly opended themselves to this risk - they and every company allowing public access is already running it.
1. Clear plastic and duct tape around an old air conditioner mounting bracket for a frame. 2. Army chem agent gloves and more duct tape for access. 3. Portable vehicle vacuum cleaner (cheap dust buster) fitted with spare hepa filter from M1 tank NBC system and powered at reduced voltage for slight overpressure on cage. 4. Insert broken drive and all needed tools. Seal. 5. Do technical stuff (including opening case and freeing read arm assembly manually, replacing servo if needed). 6. close case, open plastic seal. 7. Drive works, long enough to recover data at least. Tried 3 different times, with 3 successes.
Working environment for job - Moving shop truck on unpaved road in sandy desert environment. Had it easy that time - no one was shooting at truck.
Since then I've tried the same trick a few times at home with only about a 50% success rate. Conclusion - home isn't as clean as it should be.
Finland has a good idea there. Most US elections are scheduled for tuesdays or sometimes thursdays. Many areas do have pre-voting implemented to fix the problem I wrote of earlier. However, some areas have pre-voting, but the buildings are only open on weekdays, which partially defeats the purpose.
Rationally, it doesn't affect most voter's lives much to not know the results for a week or more, but I beg to differ with your last point. A lot of people want those results for emotional reasons, and the whipsaw of emotions in a close race with rapid but often inaccurate reporting fans thse emotions until they imprint so deeply that in many people they overide rational thought. A cooling off period seems likely to help (of course I offer that as an educated guess, not a certainty)
I appreciate several posters providing references to the original question so I didn't have to dig for page and paragraph numbers. Thanks to all. Let me add that Clarke and Asimov had a "mutual non-agression treaty" while Isaac was still alive. In part, when anyone asked who was the greatest living SF author or such questions, they always said the other one was, and if there was a fannish arguement about who had written first on a given idea or similar point, either of them would usually say something diplomatic rather than risk giving facts that might enflame the arguement.
Face-down praying? And we're occupying a Muslem country? Stranger and Stranger... By the way, what's a NEO-Troskyite? I thought the standard progression was from old style Trotskyite to Maoist. Or is this why so many/.'ers didn't care for Matrix Revolutions?
What amazes me most in reference to the monolithic left is Ralph Nader's candidacy. How some people on the right can accuse all the democrats of being autopilot equipped "L"iberals, and expect to be taken seriously is mindboggling. If the people they were argueing with were what the "conservatives" claim, the outcome of the last election would have been different by at least 3 million votes, and one sided enough that it wouldn't have been up to the supremes to settle it. (and I'm sure McCain supporters could make a similar arguement from the "other" perspective) For that matter, I'm amazed that anyone on either side thinks, (or publicly acts like they think) their own candidate got all those votes from commited idealists at the extremes of the political spectrum and none from people who just picked what they saw as the lesser of two evils. It ought to be political suicide to act like there is no great middle in politics. A person who talks like the moderate "middle" doesn't exist ought to sound just as crazy as one advocating declaring war on Atlantis or making all the blue eyed people move to Sheboygan.
Which is one more reason to doubt SCO wants to see this in court. In a more normal case, Mr. Torvalds, and even Mr. Stallman, might have actually been called on SCO's behalf. Alienating so many potential witnesses is either very stupid even for this case, or a reflection on how SCO's real plan doesn't involve either calling expert witnesses, or going up against IBM's own. Since they have no control over who IBM calls, SCO's real plan doesn't (or at least didn't originally) involve winning a court case at all. Ordinarily judges don't anticipate a request to have a witness treated as hostile before they even take the oath, but SCO might want to go ahead and file that brief too.
Slashdot Mirror
When people bet on a non-terrorist event, isn't there still a chance of something tragic happening?
If I sell company X short in the stock market, isn't there a good chance that, if I make money, it correlates with a bunch of company X's employees being out of a job?
If I invest in an insurance company, aren't I 'betting' that the actuarial tables will be right often enough for me to make money? Hey, that sounds like I'm making my money from human misery. If your wife dies, and she's insured with company Y, then (theoretically) I have incentive to hope it was suicide, so her policy doesn't pay off. Surely it adds to your suffering if a representitive from that company checks on the cause of death, and you may find even the hint of it offensive. Why does society allow such a thing? (Retorical question - In some cases, it catches the "bereved" who slipped arsenic in her tea and is crying crocodyle tears, and that alone is a powerful incentive to allow it, just like we allow police or DAs to do some things we normally find offensive, like shouting, asking leading questions, or deliberately misquoting testimony in an attempt to catch a witness off balance, in the hopes of catching more criminals.)
The point is, I'm not causing that misery. My actions correlate with that misery, but correlation does not imply causation. Why is it OK for me to trade in normal futures or insurance, but not in this? I understand that you are offended by A but apparently not B, what I'm not seeing here is what makes A and B unequal, by your description. Or are you equally offended by people selling stocks short, or betting that a drought will push up the price of corn this fall.
In your example, one problem is apparent. If I fould out my recently kidnapped child had been the subject of a betting pool, I would have a strong suspicion that among you and that "couple of guys". someone had possibly done more than bet, but had acted to influence the odds of winning. However disgusting or horrifying I might find the bet, I'm pretty certain I would find the existence of a causative link a lot more disgusting and horrifying.
If it happened to me, my emotions would probably equate the two, but if it happened to someone else and I had to do jury duty should I listen to those emotions or to reason? I could sentence a kidnapper to death for the death of the victim. I don't think I could give two mooks who were betting on whether the victim would be found alive, in the hearing of the parents, a death sentence, no matter how stupid and insensitive they were. Yes I think what they were doing was wrong, but if I thought phrases like "most horrifying" and "absolutely disgusting" applied, then I could support most severe or absolutely maximum penalties.
I honestly deplore the idea of a speculative market ala John Poindexter's plan. I think it would be a bad thing. But your arguement isn't making the issues any clearer.
Big wind turbines have their own risks. Simulated "Loss of Blade" accidents for a 10 MW plant sometimes involve an object the size of a 747's wing, tumbling end over end at 30 RPM and a net velocity of 300 MPH. That's as it slices diagonally though an elementary school built a mere 10 miles away. Oh, since turbines must face the wind to work, there's always a 'bad' direction for a loss of blade, and even always a direction where it can lead to a "chain reaction" if you have multiple towers. Sorry, but all forms of power generation have risks when they scale up to the MW range.
Military technology is often "things that can kill thousands of people - period". If you're going to restrict the subject with that additional clause, you might as well add this phrase as well, so it reads, "things that might kill _the wrong_ thousands of people while handled by a drunk. There's no way to compare risk of death for systems if some of those systems are _supposed_ to cause death. A better example might be the civil space program, which is not intended to kill people. (Yes, someone told NASA that, but I'm not sure they were paying attention). Even more relevant would be sticking to coal fired plants, hydroelectric plants and other power generation. After all, a drunken dam inspector could concevably kill thousands. Drunken coal truck drivers have definitely killed far more than that many over the history of the industry, although a handful at a time. (By the way, the published risks from nuclear power deaths often include possible auto/truck or auto/train accidents for the small amount of shipping required, but invariably omit the death toal from shipping coal by truck or rail, even though that takes thousands of times the trucks or freight cars, and the inspection standards are far lower).
If SCO's deal is to pay 1 million cash and 7.95 million is shares to B,S & F, I'd expect B, S & F to do real work nominally worth about a million (or less), and stall on incurring expenses that might go above the cash part of the payment. The more they decided their client's case was a long shot, the more I'd expect them to stay under that cap. Does anyone know of a way to calculate the real expenses B, S, & F has incurred, from paper for all those briefs to non-partner salaries? Or is it just a pipe dream that this can be estimated?
This is a great example of how to read an analysis. Anyone who invests in the market needs to know this sort of thing before they get in over their heads. Good, professional people, knowing that their words can have an impact beyond their face value, will be careful to say only what they can back up. Your 'warning' that the stock's a turkey is never going to be a simple "Don't buy this Turkey!".
About the clearest I've seen was "While X claims to have resolved all major old contract disputes, the state wherein X is incorporated allows a full year for filing appeals." (Meaning they have been in court a lot in just the last fiscal year, and It looks like there's a good chance things aren't as resolved as they say. If you don't have the sense to check in detail to see just what the company considers a "minor" dispute, and whether any of the "major" ones ARE filing an appeal, you should not invest in stocks.) Most warning signs are subtler than that example.
DU is relatively hard (rigid) as well. Before we used DU, tungsten was used for penetrators, and with enough push, the tungsten would reach a temperature where it too would become a liquid jet on penetration, and burn in atmosphere. That's how all modern antitank rounds work, they take something at least as tough as steel, and slam it into armor so fast it keeps on going whether it retains structural integrity or not (usually not). You start with a tough, high melting point material, so it doesn't detabilize under tremendous initial acceleration, or melt in flight. Then you keep upping the amount of propellant to get the maximum effect at the sharp end. You can always add more "gunpowder" to the round. DU liquifies (some of it to vapor), flash burns in an instant, and spatters all around the inside of a tank crew compartment, leaving bits of glossy black metal oxide that shape themselves just like any spray of liquid and vapor that cools back to solid, i.e. it is concentrated in a cone spreading from the point of impact but finer particles (the part that actually makes it to a true vapor) drift about more and deposite themselves more evenly. Mixed in with this is melted armor and assorted stuff that burned inside the tank (including totally homogenized crew for a turret hit)
The whole issue of how to mark waste sites for long term storage contains a vastly silly assumption. It postulates a variety of worst case scenarios, where people of the future lack the technology to translate our languages, or the scientific knowledge to recognize what the hazard is.
For example, one scenario is that civilisation is reduced to an illiterate population of hunter-gatherers, then rebuilds itself to about the level of our 15th century (western reconing). Future equivalents of the Conquistadores stumble upon the site, avariciously seeking gold. How do you explain to them that it is not an ancient tomb?
I call this silly, for two reasons.
1. Any absolute worst case scenario is unbeatable as an arguement. You can always postulate people too deprived of protein in their formative years to figure out whatever symbolism you leave behind correctly, or a culture that has just rediscovered radiation but not yet had their equivalents of the Curies or that little accident in the WW2 era to teach them that it bites, so they just don't want to take the warning seriously even if they understand it.
2. If we think there's a real chance that civilization is going to fall so totally that no languages derived from our own will exist, then hadn't we better spend our money on preventing that instead of commissioning studies on long term radiological waste marking?
Whether such principles as "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" are good or bad is something that will be hotly debated by the Slashdot crowd. To my mind the one unargueable lesson in ALL the past implementations of Communism is that a powerful government doesn't just wither away. Instead, it opposes enemies, and if it can't get enough it manufactures new ones, both external and internal. That's why government isn't just an implementation detail. The big difference between charity, non-profit organization, and just plain sharing on one side and the various -isms on the other is that one set is voluntary and allows opting out if the prices approach martyrdom (or even discomfort), while the other set is manditory and assumes a government able to enforce that mandate.
Your link pointed to an ammonium nitrate driven chemical rocket that would work on a pulse design similar to the origial orion conception. However, the original design wasn't chemical propulsion, it was nuclear, along the lines of a rack of 100 or more genuine A-bombs or even H-bombs, a pusher plate of solid steel twenty or so feet thick, a 'gun' that spit one bomb a second or so out beneath that plate, and shock absorbers the size of railroad cars or better between that plate and the payload. One proposed design could have put a colony on the Moon in a single shot (1,000 people, machine shops, housing, greenhouses for food, racks of moon buggys to explore with, etc.). And you could put the colony down just about anywhere, cause wherever it lands is now flatlands. No, I am not making any of this up - it was the 60's, and some people thought the radiation exposure risks could be made managable.
A low acceleration thruster, such as an ion drive, or possibly a solar sail, could gradually move the HST to a higher orbit. For Ion power, your choice of places to clamp it to the HST would be broader, but you still have to be pretty close to aligned with the center of mass, and there's still some things to worry about, like metal bits that stick out being too near the path of the beam and deflecting it. In 5 years, the gadjet could probably be designed to be clipped on to HSTs solar panels for power, and if we could only wait 20 to 50 years the booster would probably be smart enough to think of that itself, and move from spot to spot until it found the optimum anchor point.
I really think there are political sides to the issue, as in NASA figures the best way to get the Webb telecope is not to keep the Hubble, and I just hope that trick works.
Wired made the same mistake. Can you believe they even dated the decision wrong? So did the register.
This is more like the Centauri (from Babylon 5) with their 17 front war. SCO is facing IBM, HP, and a bunch of 'small' guys, such as up and coming GNU/Linux connected firms. Bad enough, but then, there's the SEC, which dawdles just like the Vorlons, but once it finally moves has the real world equivalent of planet killers. There is only one player in this conflict that can escalate it to criminal charges, and if it does, they will all be pointed against SCO and allies.
For the last few years, most of Hubble's viewing time has been devoted to big sky questions, trying to look at the very early universe and help get data to confirm theories about the origin of the universe. There are a lot of PhD grade astronomers that had proposed projects for the Hubble put on the back burner repeatedly, and some have claimed that NASA was ignoring all other useful research in favor of the "Cosmo-genesis club".
Observations of the nearby stellar neighborhood (including planet searches), T-Tauri stars, determining the ages of our own galaxy's globular clusters, all these are programs that were proposed at some time and have had to find homes elsewhere or wait, and it's likely at least some of them were worthwhile science.
Some ground based scopes, such as the Kecks, have taken up a lot of the slack, but adaptive optics deal with atmospheric distortion. They don't help with the atmosphere's being opaque to many wavelengths, or weather, or just being in the wrong hemisphere to observe.
It isn't possible to push Hubble into the sun with a "cheap" rocket. 1. Given it's weight, direct routing to the sun would cost more than building a duplicate of the current space station, and involve a booster substantially bigger than the Saturn V 1st stage. We had a design once that _might_ have been capable of achieving a delta vee equal to earth's orbital velocity with a 24 ton object - it was called Orion. You might want to look that one up and find out why it was never built. While I won't swear that all possible indirect routes involving slingshot effects with Luna, Venus, etc are in the same ballpark, so far no one has come up with a good one. 2. No one has an actual design for such a booster, nor have they designed the couplings or automated grapples needed to get a grip on the Hubble with a booster that lines up through the center of mass of the object. 3. In fact, with all the add ons, retrofitting, and repairs, the location of Hubble's center of mass and the directions along which the scope is properly braced against thrust (if there still are any) are unknowns. What are the chances of a successful automated mission if you can't put an astronaut on scene to take some close measurements? Not real good at best.
Large ISPs will have a full time legal staff to keep other employees from answering interogatives without legal knowledge. Mom-n-Pop ISPs won't. The RIAA's actions will help the big fish gobble up all the small fish. Funny, that used to be something the government tried to stop, not assist.
Most states do, but remember, 1. this won't be an established industry, but a new market. 2. no-compete laws generally have limits set for when a commercial industry is not reachng standards - for Krispy Kreme, those might be if enough of the local stores failed multiple health inspections and failed to fix their problems for some time the state deemed sufficient. For broadband, it could possibly include price raises sufficiently above general inflation, failure to run services into certain ethnic neighborhoods as fast as others (does Utah have those?), or even failure to cooperate with state law enforcement. Probably, failure to comply with federal LE or spot failures rather than widespread ones wouldn't establish sufficient grounds, and definitely the for-profits would be entitled to a day in court, and interstate commerce would let them appeal a Utah based decision in federal district court and even to the supremes if they chose, but still non-compete law is not a complete bar. (I Am Not A Lawyer).
First, THE constitution doesn't set the responsibilitys of the individual states. The only way it can stop a state from assuming a responsibility is if that assumption conflicts with a right, either of a person, or of the federal government, or of the states taken severally. Second, any state that has a "promote the general welfare" clause in is own state constitution can use that as a basis for providing public utilities or delegating that right to townships or other incorporated entities unless that state has specific clauses limiting delegation. Oh, and I Am Not A Lawyer.
Announced today on Wired News - A lawsuit by a garage door manufacturer that tried to use the DMCA to stop another company from making replacement universal remote controls was dismissed, with the court noting that the entire area was well outside the boundaries of those issues the DMCA was intended to address. This law started off a shade rediculous, but is getting reined in. We can hope (and work) for more such decisions.
This is probably not going to go over well with many, but... I've come to the conclusion that the internet creates a different, and more serious type of problem for parents than previous systems. Here's why. Imagine a parent worried about their child viewing horror movies at the local theatre. He or she probably has a fairly clear idea what's in them, and why they might be a problem. Or the parent wants to keep the kid from looking at Playboy. Same situation in effect. Of course, there have always been those cases where the parent is somewhat caught by surprise - "This Cronenburg guy, he's worse than Friday the 13th!" - "Hey Hustler is a lot more misogynistic than good ole' Playboy!" - "I thought they were making too much fuss about Elvis wiggling, but this Bowie guy, maybe they were right!". Still, such surprises are limited in scale. The problem I see is there's no shallow end of the pool with the internet. The very first porn the kid sees could be tubgirl, or something involving a Clydesdale, 12 pounds of latex, and a duct-taped ferret, before they ever see more normal images. The first political site they run across could be one of the most virulent hate sites around. They can find things they are actually curious about, or things they themselves didn't want to know the first thing about. (And the first time they ask if their development is normal for their age, your in-box gets 500 extra "Add 3 inches" spams)
The "It wasn't me... my computer was being hacked." defense is a completly independent issue. For example, people right now can sue for being barred from a game and use this defense in the process. Whatever precident Second Life has set, they haven't suddenly opended themselves to this risk - they and every company allowing public access is already running it.
1. Clear plastic and duct tape around an old air conditioner mounting bracket for a frame. 2. Army chem agent gloves and more duct tape for access. 3. Portable vehicle vacuum cleaner (cheap dust buster) fitted with spare hepa filter from M1 tank NBC system and powered at reduced voltage for slight overpressure on cage. 4. Insert broken drive and all needed tools. Seal. 5. Do technical stuff (including opening case and freeing read arm assembly manually, replacing servo if needed). 6. close case, open plastic seal. 7. Drive works, long enough to recover data at least. Tried 3 different times, with 3 successes. Working environment for job - Moving shop truck on unpaved road in sandy desert environment. Had it easy that time - no one was shooting at truck. Since then I've tried the same trick a few times at home with only about a 50% success rate. Conclusion - home isn't as clean as it should be.
Finland has a good idea there. Most US elections are scheduled for tuesdays or sometimes thursdays. Many areas do have pre-voting implemented to fix the problem I wrote of earlier. However, some areas have pre-voting, but the buildings are only open on weekdays, which partially defeats the purpose. Rationally, it doesn't affect most voter's lives much to not know the results for a week or more, but I beg to differ with your last point. A lot of people want those results for emotional reasons, and the whipsaw of emotions in a close race with rapid but often inaccurate reporting fans thse emotions until they imprint so deeply that in many people they overide rational thought. A cooling off period seems likely to help (of course I offer that as an educated guess, not a certainty)
I appreciate several posters providing references to the original question so I didn't have to dig for page and paragraph numbers. Thanks to all. Let me add that Clarke and Asimov had a "mutual non-agression treaty" while Isaac was still alive. In part, when anyone asked who was the greatest living SF author or such questions, they always said the other one was, and if there was a fannish arguement about who had written first on a given idea or similar point, either of them would usually say something diplomatic rather than risk giving facts that might enflame the arguement.
Face-down praying? And we're occupying a Muslem country? Stranger and Stranger... By the way, what's a NEO-Troskyite? I thought the standard progression was from old style Trotskyite to Maoist. Or is this why so many /.'ers didn't care for Matrix Revolutions?
What amazes me most in reference to the monolithic left is Ralph Nader's candidacy. How some people on the right can accuse all the democrats of being autopilot equipped "L"iberals, and expect to be taken seriously is mindboggling. If the people they were argueing with were what the "conservatives" claim, the outcome of the last election would have been different by at least 3 million votes, and one sided enough that it wouldn't have been up to the supremes to settle it. (and I'm sure McCain supporters could make a similar arguement from the "other" perspective) For that matter, I'm amazed that anyone on either side thinks, (or publicly acts like they think) their own candidate got all those votes from commited idealists at the extremes of the political spectrum and none from people who just picked what they saw as the lesser of two evils. It ought to be political suicide to act like there is no great middle in politics. A person who talks like the moderate "middle" doesn't exist ought to sound just as crazy as one advocating declaring war on Atlantis or making all the blue eyed people move to Sheboygan.
Which is one more reason to doubt SCO wants to see this in court. In a more normal case, Mr. Torvalds, and even Mr. Stallman, might have actually been called on SCO's behalf. Alienating so many potential witnesses is either very stupid even for this case, or a reflection on how SCO's real plan doesn't involve either calling expert witnesses, or going up against IBM's own. Since they have no control over who IBM calls, SCO's real plan doesn't (or at least didn't originally) involve winning a court case at all. Ordinarily judges don't anticipate a request to have a witness treated as hostile before they even take the oath, but SCO might want to go ahead and file that brief too.