Look, it's not my fault you and the mods who failed to mark it 'funny' missed the point. So I'll follow yours.
After Apples I never learned to program. But I retained the ability to follow pretty much any code I was shown. I can't write, but I can read, with no proir experience.
Had I chosen to learn to program other machines, I have no doubt I could learn to do many different way well and easily.
I also can understand in a conceptual way what's going wrong with pretty much any machine, and can out guess first line tech support more often than not. I typically find myself talking as an equal to second tier support and solving the problem on that basis. I also tend to find my own work-arounds.
By training myself to bare metal I have become the most educated kind of user there is. I'm not a programmer, and don't intend to be. But more than almost everyone I know, I understand that *I* can control my machine. Very few programmers ever think it terms of helping me to be able to do that. The programmers they're ultimately programming for (by programming for their OS) follow the corporate mind set which is that I don't need this control or understanding.
Need, no. I can accomplish my job without it. But use, yes. I can avoid downtime because I can understand what's supposed to work and so what's not working right.
The usual end point for programmers is to make the program run. It ought to be making life easier for end users. They should make the program operate in such a way that it can be understood what it's doing. If that understanding requires an understanding of stacks and pushes and POPs, then users should come equiped.
Windows programmers work from the assumption that their job is to protect users from the machine.
Mainframe programmers work from the assumption that their job is to protect the machine from users.
Unix programmers work from the assumption that they're the users and the only protection they or anyone else needs is knowing enough about what they're doing. They also work from the assumption that "enough" means "as much as I know", no matter how much or little they know.
2/3 of Macintosh programmers think the same as Windows programmers. The other guy doesn't think about it.
I'm still an Apple II programmer. I still think it's a good idea, and necessary, for everyone to be able to program down to bare metal, because it's only for showing off what you can do since everyone is going to do their own programming anyway. At this point I believe that the only way I'll ever see any Apple II op code coming from anybody else would be if that's what they decode from the SETI signals.
"Although I hate spam as much as the next guy, is participating in a DDOS attack the way to bring spammers to their knees?"
The way? No. A way? Yes. The best way? Probably not. Will it work? Probably so. It is, after all, what they're doing. To work it just needs to be done better.
"If it's okay in this instance, it it okay to DDOS the next guy who does something we don't like?"
It's not OK. Lots of workable solutions that are adopted are not OK. OK or not, it's being done all the time. So the good guys get less good by adopting some of the bad guys' tactics to make the bad guys stop bothering the good guys. And thereby the definitions of good and bad get mixed muddied and found to be subjective, as if they weren't all along. Welcome to life on Earth.
"What we need are a few good old fashioned hangings." -- FTC Commissioner Orson Swindell at the 2003 FTC Spam Conference
1985 called. You're never, ever going to get your "good until proven otherwise", "all viewpoints tolerated", "we have to prove we're above all that" internet back.
Take that machine, run some software on it (a machine of its own, in the sense of an engine designed to produce a result) intended to mimic a small subset of human behaviors, then have the results interpreted by a bunch of people with a vested interest in having those results mimic the results of human societies.
Does anyone seriously think they could possibly see any other outcome than the one they intended to see, no matter how unrealistic that outcome is? More than anything else, this project would reiterate humans' tendency to see things within their own familiar context. But it wouldn't do it in a surprising way because it was designed to from the start.
Or perhaps it will be surprising. They will produce a supposed mimicry of a human culture out of 1000 individuals despite the fact that no collection of 1000 individuals not having, much less sharing, a set, stable language has ever occured. They will produce a completely familiar and supposedly "understandable" result from a patently ridiculous premise. They could very well set a new record for anthromorphization of the machine.
No matter how novel the emergent behaviors of the agents, they will be mapped to a predetermined explanation. If this models anything, it is the reification of predestiny. If the agents could have this insight, there's no doubt they'd invent ritual, out of frustration over a god that insists that everything they do is according to his design: they may as well engage in stereotypy, since that's how it'll be interpreted.
It takes a lot of balls to deny your leg is caught in a trap, at a time when most would be chewing their leg off. Or else his CEO pay is tied to the selling price of SCO.
The link (now?) goes to an article entitled "UPDATE 1-Sharp to share PC LCD patents with AU Optronics" which is all about lawsuits between LCD makers. It says nothing about dual-screen anything.
I remember when Zenith came out with the split/embedded screen TV. It sold as well as their TV with the built in color printer, ie. very poorly. Nobody bought them just for the capability. If they hadn't bundled them into their high end TVs, hardly anybody would have ever had it.
But maybe the market has changed in 20+ years. Maybe now people will just buy goofy crap for its own sake.
All that studies report is their results. They don't gaurantee other studies will find the same thing. If they did, there'd be no reason to have replications. This is a basic part of doing science.
And who's to say the replications aren't the ones that missed the mark?
1/3 right 1/3 wrong 1/3 we have no idea what the answer means. That's what I was told to expect from research in my first semester of grad school. Not from reading it -- from DOING it.
They really should teach science in school. Not the just areas of science, but the subject of science itself.
"If you don't, you're either a fool or a liar. Even if you "aren't interested in the money," think how much "legitimate" research could be done - how many people could be helped - with that million bucks."
I don't because I AM a scientist, and I do research, and it would be a waste of my time to work that hard to do something outside my field for that small of an amount when I can get more for doing more of what I know, and can therefore produce more.
Besides, I submit my work to peer review, not entertainers.
That is, non-compulsory. And make parents responsible for making them want to go, rather than making the people who are trying to do the educating also make them WANT to be educated. If the parents won't teach them to want to go, don't make them stay. We'll need a new generation of convenience store clerks etc. Many of the ones we have now are far more educated than you'd think, and they'd love the chance to compete for the better jobs.
As for the educating itself, Montessori has the right idea.
lazy genes (741633) sez: "If we lived in the Bose-Einstein condensate universe would there be other phases of matter? I would say yes to that question."
No. There'd be one. And all of it would be entangled. That's the definition of a BEC.
"The same would be true in a universe made of quark gluon plasma."
No again. It'd have one form of matter. Entanglement might be broken, but there'd be no way there could be anything to try to quantum compute with or anyone to want to.
"Another flaw in the fine article.They refuse to look at the wave form as a spiral that is compatable with space-time."
"Refusing" to look at any other peripheral thing in creation that any one else decides they feel the need to talk about is a flaw, but not in the article.
But I'm betting most of the whiners really don't care nearly as much about TFA as they do about getting the chance to whine.
And for the dinks that can't follow links and at least read the release from ORI, reflexology IS a science where they noticed the effect and developed the hypothesis from. Put "reflexology" in the search window in the PubMed link and you'll get 187 references. People doing scientific investigation of something is the verb definition of "science".
Remember, NIH has a center devoted to studying "alternative" therapy, and some of these "alternatives" have been around since before the ancestors of most Europeans (from whence comes "Western" medicine) were tribes yet to gain the smarts and strengths enough to challenge the Romans.
Yes, the Office of Alternative Medicine has been able to "validate" very little of what's been presented to them. The fact that they can't do in 10 years what's worked for a thousand only means "it doesn't work" if you ignore the vast majority of the evidence, which is most often done by insisting it appear in peer reviewed journals, and the hell with centuries of success.
And if you'll notice, this study wasn't funded by OAM. The NIH centers themselves are going around OAM, because they ARE run by scientists who realize there must be something there. This may be in part due to the fact that 50% of the people doing research at NIH are not from the US. Or maybe it's the other way around.
If it weren't for "quantum mechanical spontaneous symmetry breaking", the universe would be one big Bose-Einstein condensate, if not still stuck inside a singularity. Q.C. is a great idea, but God seems to insist on rolling dice anyway.
Animats (122034) sez: "That's been tried. "Salvage One", from 1979."
No it hasn't. Nothing in that went up that wasn't lifting by a crane or dangled from a thread in a studio. These guys pack real rocket fuel and really fly.
Also coming to SciFi, Junk Yard Wars meets Burt Rutan. "Master Blasters" punches holes in the sky with all kinds of cool junk. Reality TV with "Who broke Mach 1" instead of "Who got voted off".
Blame the title, and the editor that let it pass. I tried to tell them before release that it was wrong.
NASA will not research anti-matter rockets. NIAC (http://www.niac.usra.edu/ will fund an external investigation. This is the kind of thing that NIAC (NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts) does. They foster the dreamers.
It's very intersting stuff, but it's PRE-vaporware. It's not even a study yet. It's a brainstorm on paper to find out if the idea is worth making a study out of.
Folks like RocketPlane are lining up their own resources, such as a 12,000' surplus runway. NASA is afraid of getting passed by by the upcoming non-governmental space projects. They want to sell/rent resources so they can stay relevant. If Florida has any sense, they'll jump in make sure this happens. We are, after all, talking about tourism. "See Space! And then see Disney World!" How much money do you think the Orlando airport makes due to tourist traffic? KSC wants some of that.
1. Make something that is X better than everything else.
2. Count on the fact that people will pay Y times the common average going rate for "the best".
3. Charge X*Y+Z where Z is an arbitrary high number chosen by management who are paying more attention to the stock prices than the computer science.
4. Neglect the fact that while many people will makes googly noises about "the best", they will go for "good enough" in proportion to the constant Z, and that this effect will increase over time.
Let me clarify, then. NASA management and contractor management are so incestuous that together they create the "NASA cultural problem" you mention and run the whole show by its self-serving principles.
NASA management is to the space industry what the FDA is to the pharmaceutical industry, a merry-go-round of managers making sure the companies they come from and return to continue to get the contracts written the way that serves them best.
I completely agree that NASA's technical disasters are due to "professional managers". When engineers were in charge we got "Failure is not an option," and by god it wasn't. When the adminimonsters were in charge we got "My God, Thiokol, what do you want to me to do, wait until April to launch?"
But that's entirely different from corporate controls over NASA. When NASA says "Jump!", BoLockMart says "Show us the contract" and NASA says "How high?" and then BoLockMart demands and gets cost over-runs written in and NEVER fail to make complete use of them.
Just a quick case in point: How much money was wasted on the Shuttle C project (http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/shuttlec.htm) before it was found to be more expensive than Titans per pound-to-orbit, and cancelled? And having been cancelled, why does it appear as under serious consideration again (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8473961/) (the left of the 3 pictured)? Yet to be determined: how much money will get thrown at something already discarded, who will get that, how much of the intervening study will be replication of work done 15+ years ago, and which would be worse: throwing all that money away on something already proven as uneconimical, or actually building it this time?
Hey now, "The Stick" looks like an awesome ride. A 4 seat Apollo CSM on top an SRB. Now if only Thiokol would go into business for themselves and build a launch center and this beast, they could beat Rutan's Tier Two plans. Face it, Rutan sets the goal posts these days.
"Today we know that UFO's often hide in what we call Lenticular Clouds, which are cloud formations that seem to be produced to conceal the ships from the visible eye spectrum. Real lenticular clouds move with the rest of the clouds. Whereas the UFO clouds do not - often sitting 5 hours in one place."
Yep, people pulling crap out of their asses and hurling them at innocent slashdot readers!"
Some of what I referenced, and much else that appears on that site, is placed in a context that serves the site owner's agenda. However, the material they carry on the Hopi is not by them, and is accurate as far as I am familiar with the subject (which is more than casually).
It is a shame that people like this are the ones carrying the material, rather than anthropologists, despite the fact that the material has been available to them for many years.
So, (1) they are taking perfectly good material and cramming it up their asses along with their own crap, (2) the kind of crap being pulled out of the asses of anthropologists is apparently much more appetizing despite refusal to investigate not only word-of-mouth but also physical evidence because they are "scientific" and so not covering something is taken as evidence of absence, and (3) "innocent slashdot readers" is one of the most ironic combinations of words I've seen in a while.
>> and they've also announced plans to militarize their space program.
> What, like the USA did years ago?
The main failure of the US space program was that it was DE-militarized and turned into a white-collar corporate welfare program. The military was allowed to ride along more than drive.
If the US military space program was not cancelled and subsumed into NASA, Neil Armstrong would have soloed in a reuseable orbital space plane 40 years ago. The military's programs were cancelled supposedly to "save money". There has been far more money wasted just in the expected and allowed cost over-runs in the civilian programs that were started and then cancelled before completion than it would have taken to start and finish the military's DynaSoar and Manned Orbiting Laboratory programs.
When the US military got its own program half way back, it quickly surpassed NASA in time-to-accomplished-missions. Sadly it too is hampered by having to support corporate welfare.
The reasons for a militarized US space program would have indeed been different. The accomplishments would have been the same steps, but with different rationale, and much farther along than we are now.
G. Harry Stine was pretty much fired (range safety officer at White Sands, I believe) for saying in the 50s that if we didn't catch and pass the Soviet space race in a few years, we never would. If we don't make plans now to stay ahead of the Chinese, they will pass us, and we will never catch up. NASA cannot accomplish this in its present form, whether or not China militarizes their space program (and in China the difference between militarized and not is far less than in the US already). If the US space program was taken out of the hands of the contractors and returned to government control, we might could stay on top. The only organization we have capable of running such an operation without having to knuckle under to corporations is the military. And even THAT is starting to wane.
Let them ALL militarize. Who the hell cares how we get out of here?
"Please tell me Mr. Sagan, are we ever gonna get out of this planet alive?" -- PLANET EARTH ROCK & ROLL ORCHESTRA by Paul Kantner
"Bob" save us from a world where all the artists are replaced with engineers.
Where do the mixers get their material? Without the newly created, the constantly remixed would blur into grey noise like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.....
Any claim that a new application of a technology makes the previous irrelevant in its original form is entirely too full of itself. Fortunately for those making such claims, nobody seems to care enough to call them back later for an "I told you so". Futurologists are never held responsible.
Perhaps Mr. Gibson will prove us wrong by producing some remixes of his material. Or at least explain to us why his creations are immune to irrelevancy. My guess the reason would be that it's because it's based on a technology so irrelevant that it's pre-digital.
A good web site for summaries: http://www.crystalinks.com/hopi1.html Several pages, put together from various sources. Contains a well known talk about an elder from another nation that had traveled to other continents to verify some of the Hopi claims that specific peoples elsewhere started out with the Hopi and had similar cultural bases. That's the "stone tablets" talk. The site isn't the most cleanly arranged so you may have to poke around.
[You'll notice that some of the people who speak authoritatively about and/or for the Hopi are not Hopi. They know this. They often choose them. You'll also find people doing so who are not chosen or even reasonably educated by them. Much of the Wiki entries reflect this.]
The best book is: "Waters, Frank, 1963, Book of the Hopi : The First Revelation Of The Hopi's Historical And Religious Worldview Of Life, Penguin Books, NY, 346 P. THE definitive book concerning the Hopi. Long viewed as the standard work on the tribe, although warnings have been given that the book does contain some outright errors, and things have changed in Hopiland since the book was published. Includes discussion of the religion and myths of the tribe, along with a detailed history. Frank Waters received five nominations for the Nobel Prize for Literature."
[Waters is one of those chosen. As for 'outright errors', trust me, you talk to different elders from any tribe, and some of them are going to tell you that some of the things other say is 'wrong'. Not so different here. You'll also find some of the material in the "recent" prophecies was the same 100 years ago, prior to those things happening which were subsequently 'recognized' as having been what was prophesized.]
I can't find much on the web about the Nazca symbols beyond a single quote by one elder who recognized the symbols. What it claims he said is not what I heard, and it appears to me someone is taking advantage of the case to promote their own agenda. I do know that it was two anthropologists (one from Cornell, IIRC) that approached them. There are similar figures in the Four Corners region, made the same way, referenced in "Archeology of Arizona".
Slashdot Mirror
Look, it's not my fault you and the mods who failed to mark it 'funny' missed the point. So I'll follow yours.
After Apples I never learned to program. But I retained the ability to follow pretty much any code I was shown. I can't write, but I can read, with no proir experience.
Had I chosen to learn to program other machines, I have no doubt I could learn to do many different way well and easily.
I also can understand in a conceptual way what's going wrong with pretty much any machine, and can out guess first line tech support more often than not. I typically find myself talking as an equal to second tier support and solving the problem on that basis. I also tend to find my own work-arounds.
By training myself to bare metal I have become the most educated kind of user there is. I'm not a programmer, and don't intend to be. But more than almost everyone I know, I understand that *I* can control my machine. Very few programmers ever think it terms of helping me to be able to do that. The programmers they're ultimately programming for (by programming for their OS) follow the corporate mind set which is that I don't need this control or understanding.
Need, no. I can accomplish my job without it. But use, yes. I can avoid downtime because I can understand what's supposed to work and so what's not working right.
The usual end point for programmers is to make the program run. It ought to be making life easier for end users. They should make the program operate in such a way that it can be understood what it's doing. If that understanding requires an understanding of stacks and pushes and POPs, then users should come equiped.
Windows programmers work from the assumption that their job is to protect users from the machine.
Mainframe programmers work from the assumption that their job is to protect the machine from users.
Unix programmers work from the assumption that they're the users and the only protection they or anyone else needs is knowing enough about what they're doing. They also work from the assumption that "enough" means "as much as I know", no matter how much or little they know.
2/3 of Macintosh programmers think the same as Windows programmers. The other guy doesn't think about it.
I'm still an Apple II programmer. I still think it's a good idea, and necessary, for everyone to be able to program down to bare metal, because it's only for showing off what you can do since everyone is going to do their own programming anyway. At this point I believe that the only way I'll ever see any Apple II op code coming from anybody else would be if that's what they decode from the SETI signals.
"Although I hate spam as much as the next guy, is participating in a DDOS attack the way to bring spammers to their knees?"
The way? No. A way? Yes. The best way? Probably not. Will it work? Probably so. It is, after all, what they're doing. To work it just needs to be done better.
"If it's okay in this instance, it it okay to DDOS the next guy who does something we don't like?"
It's not OK. Lots of workable solutions that are adopted are not OK. OK or not, it's being done all the time. So the good guys get less good by adopting some of the bad guys' tactics to make the bad guys stop bothering the good guys. And thereby the definitions of good and bad get mixed muddied and found to be subjective, as if they weren't all along. Welcome to life on Earth.
"What we need are a few good old fashioned hangings." -- FTC Commissioner Orson Swindell at the 2003 FTC Spam Conference
1985 called. You're never, ever going to get your "good until proven otherwise", "all viewpoints tolerated", "we have to prove we're above all that" internet back.
"Don't anthromorphize the machine."
Take that machine, run some software on it (a machine of its own, in the sense of an engine designed to produce a result) intended to mimic a small subset of human behaviors, then have the results interpreted by a bunch of people with a vested interest in having those results mimic the results of human societies.
Does anyone seriously think they could possibly see any other outcome than the one they intended to see, no matter how unrealistic that outcome is? More than anything else, this project would reiterate humans' tendency to see things within their own familiar context. But it wouldn't do it in a surprising way because it was designed to from the start.
Or perhaps it will be surprising. They will produce a supposed mimicry of a human culture out of 1000 individuals despite the fact that no collection of 1000 individuals not having, much less sharing, a set, stable language has ever occured. They will produce a completely familiar and supposedly "understandable" result from a patently ridiculous premise. They could very well set a new record for anthromorphization of the machine.
No matter how novel the emergent behaviors of the agents, they will be mapped to a predetermined explanation. If this models anything, it is the reification of predestiny. If the agents could have this insight, there's no doubt they'd invent ritual, out of frustration over a god that insists that everything they do is according to his design: they may as well engage in stereotypy, since that's how it'll be interpreted.
You could spend a lot of time and effort avoiding working.
But that's work. A true slacker wouldn't. Nor would a true slacker write a book about it, or read one.
A REAL slacker wouldn't even bother to fini
It takes a lot of balls to deny your leg is caught in a trap, at a time when most would be chewing their leg off. Or else his CEO pay is tied to the selling price of SCO.
The link (now?) goes to an article entitled "UPDATE 1-Sharp to share PC LCD patents with AU Optronics" which is all about lawsuits between LCD makers. It says nothing about dual-screen anything.
I remember when Zenith came out with the split/embedded screen TV. It sold as well as their TV with the built in color printer, ie. very poorly. Nobody bought them just for the capability. If they hadn't bundled them into their high end TVs, hardly anybody would have ever had it.
But maybe the market has changed in 20+ years. Maybe now people will just buy goofy crap for its own sake.
All that studies report is their results. They don't gaurantee other studies will find the same thing. If they did, there'd be no reason to have replications. This is a basic part of doing science.
And who's to say the replications aren't the ones that missed the mark?
1/3 right
1/3 wrong
1/3 we have no idea what the answer means.
That's what I was told to expect from research in my first semester of grad school. Not from reading it -- from DOING it.
They really should teach science in school. Not the just areas of science, but the subject of science itself.
Google is not providing. They are not making it available. They are indexing its already existant availability and providing a link to it.
If someone makes it available, it would have been "provided" whether or not Goggle indexed it and provided a link to it.
Holding a search engine liable would leave them all open to sabotage by people posting copyrighted stuff and getting it indexed.
"If you don't, you're either a fool or a liar. Even if you "aren't interested in the money," think how much "legitimate" research could be done - how many people could be helped - with that million bucks."
I don't because I AM a scientist, and I do research, and it would be a waste of my time to work that hard to do something outside my field for that small of an amount when I can get more for doing more of what I know, and can therefore produce more.
Besides, I submit my work to peer review, not entertainers.
Read it. Read them all.
The earlier one about "weasel words" and stuff? Read that one before.
It pretty much negates the entire "High Frontier" issue.
There needs to be a word for this level of masturbatory bullshit.
A stable, predictable point far, far away with a clear line of sight is hardly a strategic or tactical high ground.
That is, non-compulsory. And make parents responsible for making them want to go, rather than making the people who are trying to do the educating also make them WANT to be educated.
If the parents won't teach them to want to go, don't make them stay. We'll need a new generation of convenience store clerks etc. Many of the ones we have now are far more educated than you'd think, and they'd love the chance to compete for the better jobs.
As for the educating itself, Montessori has the right idea.
lazy genes (741633) sez: "If we lived in the Bose-Einstein condensate universe would there be other phases of matter? I would say yes to that question."
."
No. There'd be one. And all of it would be entangled. That's the definition of a BEC.
"The same would be true in a universe made of quark gluon plasma."
No again. It'd have one form of matter. Entanglement might be broken, but there'd be no way there could be anything to try to quantum compute with or anyone to want to.
"Another flaw in the fine article.They refuse to look at the wave form as a spiral that is compatable with space-time
"Refusing" to look at any other peripheral thing in creation that any one else decides they feel the need to talk about is a flaw, but not in the article.
jericho4.0 (565125) sez: "Yeah. I'll take that as a hypothesis when I see any evidence of it, you know, actually working."
Then go to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi and put in "Journal of the American Geriatrics Society" and keep checking until the PubMed listing in entered, or go to http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/jgs/0/0 and keep checking until the EarlyOnline posts it. It was just accepted and hasn't appeared yet.
But I'm betting most of the whiners really don't care nearly as much about TFA as they do about getting the chance to whine.
And for the dinks that can't follow links and at least read the release from ORI, reflexology IS a science where they noticed the effect and developed the hypothesis from. Put "reflexology" in the search window in the PubMed link and you'll get 187 references. People doing scientific investigation of something is the verb definition of "science".
Remember, NIH has a center devoted to studying "alternative" therapy, and some of these "alternatives" have been around since before the ancestors of most Europeans (from whence comes "Western" medicine) were tribes yet to gain the smarts and strengths enough to challenge the Romans.
Yes, the Office of Alternative Medicine has been able to "validate" very little of what's been presented to them. The fact that they can't do in 10 years what's worked for a thousand only means "it doesn't work" if you ignore the vast majority of the evidence, which is most often done by insisting it appear in peer reviewed journals, and the hell with centuries of success.
And if you'll notice, this study wasn't funded by OAM. The NIH centers themselves are going around OAM, because they ARE run by scientists who realize there must be something there. This may be in part due to the fact that 50% of the people doing research at NIH are not from the US. Or maybe it's the other way around.
If it weren't for "quantum mechanical spontaneous symmetry breaking", the universe would be one big Bose-Einstein condensate, if not still stuck inside a singularity. Q.C. is a great idea, but God seems to insist on rolling dice anyway.
Animats (122034) sez: "That's been tried. "Salvage One", from 1979."
No it hasn't. Nothing in that went up that wasn't lifting by a crane or dangled from a thread in a studio. These guys pack real rocket fuel and really fly.
Here's a movie someone took of one project some of the people involved did previously: http://www.vahpr.com/videos/aurora.mpg
That's the Aurora Project that was on Discovery Channel's "Rocket Challenge".
Also coming to SciFi, Junk Yard Wars meets Burt Rutan. "Master Blasters" punches holes in the sky with all kinds of cool junk. Reality TV with "Who broke Mach 1" instead of "Who got voted off".
Blame the title, and the editor that let it pass. I tried to tell them before release that it was wrong.
NASA will not research anti-matter rockets. NIAC (http://www.niac.usra.edu/ will fund an external investigation. This is the kind of thing that NIAC (NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts) does. They foster the dreamers.
It's very intersting stuff, but it's PRE-vaporware. It's not even a study yet. It's a brainstorm on paper to find out if the idea is worth making a study out of.
Folks like RocketPlane are lining up their own resources, such as a 12,000' surplus runway. NASA is afraid of getting passed by by the upcoming non-governmental space projects. They want to sell/rent resources so they can stay relevant. If Florida has any sense, they'll jump in make sure this happens. We are, after all, talking about tourism. "See Space! And then see Disney World!" How much money do you think the Orlando airport makes due to tourist traffic? KSC wants some of that.
1. Make something that is X better than everything else.
2. Count on the fact that people will pay Y times the common average going rate for "the best".
3. Charge X*Y+Z where Z is an arbitrary high number chosen by management who are paying more attention to the stock prices than the computer science.
4. Neglect the fact that while many people will makes googly noises about "the best", they will go for "good enough" in proportion to the constant Z, and that this effect will increase over time.
Let me clarify, then. NASA management and contractor management are so incestuous that together they create the "NASA cultural problem" you mention and run the whole show by its self-serving principles.
NASA management is to the space industry what the FDA is to the pharmaceutical industry, a merry-go-round of managers making sure the companies they come from and return to continue to get the contracts written the way that serves them best.
I completely agree that NASA's technical disasters are due to "professional managers". When engineers were in charge we got "Failure is not an option," and by god it wasn't. When the adminimonsters were in charge we got "My God, Thiokol, what do you want to me to do, wait until April to launch?"
But that's entirely different from corporate controls over NASA. When NASA says "Jump!", BoLockMart says "Show us the contract" and NASA says "How high?" and then BoLockMart demands and gets cost over-runs written in and NEVER fail to make complete use of them.
Just a quick case in point: How much money was wasted on the Shuttle C project (http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/shuttlec.htm) before it was found to be more expensive than Titans per pound-to-orbit, and cancelled? And having been cancelled, why does it appear as under serious consideration again (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8473961/) (the left of the 3 pictured)? Yet to be determined: how much money will get thrown at something already discarded, who will get that, how much of the intervening study will be replication of work done 15+ years ago, and which would be worse: throwing all that money away on something already proven as uneconimical, or actually building it this time?
Hey now, "The Stick" looks like an awesome ride. A 4 seat Apollo CSM on top an SRB. Now if only Thiokol would go into business for themselves and build a launch center and this beast, they could beat Rutan's Tier Two plans. Face it, Rutan sets the goal posts these days.
Kafteinn (542563) sez: "Quote from http://www.crystalinks.com/hopi1.html
"Today we know that UFO's often hide in what we call Lenticular Clouds, which are cloud formations that seem to be produced to conceal the ships from the visible eye spectrum. Real lenticular clouds move with the rest of the clouds. Whereas the UFO clouds do not - often sitting 5 hours in one place."
Yep, people pulling crap out of their asses and hurling them at innocent slashdot readers!"
Some of what I referenced, and much else that appears on that site, is placed in a context that serves the site owner's agenda. However, the material they carry on the Hopi is not by them, and is accurate as far as I am familiar with the subject (which is more than casually).
It is a shame that people like this are the ones carrying the material, rather than anthropologists, despite the fact that the material has been available to them for many years.
So, (1) they are taking perfectly good material and cramming it up their asses along with their own crap, (2) the kind of crap being pulled out of the asses of anthropologists is apparently much more appetizing despite refusal to investigate not only word-of-mouth but also physical evidence because they are "scientific" and so not covering something is taken as evidence of absence, and (3) "innocent slashdot readers" is one of the most ironic combinations of words I've seen in a while.
Aardpig (622459) sez:
>> and they've also announced plans to militarize their space program.
> What, like the USA did years ago?
The main failure of the US space program was that it was DE-militarized and turned into a white-collar corporate welfare program. The military was allowed to ride along more than drive.
If the US military space program was not cancelled and subsumed into NASA, Neil Armstrong would have soloed in a reuseable orbital space plane 40 years ago. The military's programs were cancelled supposedly to "save money". There has been far more money wasted just in the expected and allowed cost over-runs in the civilian programs that were started and then cancelled before completion than it would have taken to start and finish the military's DynaSoar and Manned Orbiting Laboratory programs.
When the US military got its own program half way back, it quickly surpassed NASA in time-to-accomplished-missions. Sadly it too is hampered by having to support corporate welfare.
The reasons for a militarized US space program would have indeed been different. The accomplishments would have been the same steps, but with different rationale, and much farther along than we are now.
G. Harry Stine was pretty much fired (range safety officer at White Sands, I believe) for saying in the 50s that if we didn't catch and pass the Soviet space race in a few years, we never would. If we don't make plans now to stay ahead of the Chinese, they will pass us, and we will never catch up. NASA cannot accomplish this in its present form, whether or not China militarizes their space program (and in China the difference between militarized and not is far less than in the US already). If the US space program was taken out of the hands of the contractors and returned to government control, we might could stay on top. The only organization we have capable of running such an operation without having to knuckle under to corporations is the military. And even THAT is starting to wane.
Let them ALL militarize. Who the hell cares how we get out of here?
"Please tell me Mr. Sagan, are we ever gonna get out of this planet alive?" -- PLANET EARTH ROCK & ROLL ORCHESTRA by Paul Kantner
"Bob" save us from a world where all the artists are replaced with engineers.
Where do the mixers get their material? Without the newly created, the constantly remixed would blur into grey noise like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.....
Any claim that a new application of a technology makes the previous irrelevant in its original form is entirely too full of itself. Fortunately for those making such claims, nobody seems to care enough to call them back later for an "I told you so". Futurologists are never held responsible.
Perhaps Mr. Gibson will prove us wrong by producing some remixes of his material. Or at least explain to us why his creations are immune to irrelevancy. My guess the reason would be that it's because it's based on a technology so irrelevant that it's pre-digital.
A good web site for summaries: http://www.crystalinks.com/hopi1.html
Several pages, put together from various sources. Contains a well known talk about an elder from another nation that had traveled to other continents to verify some of the Hopi claims that specific peoples elsewhere started out with the Hopi and had similar cultural bases. That's the "stone tablets" talk. The site isn't the most cleanly arranged so you may have to poke around.
[You'll notice that some of the people who speak authoritatively about and/or for the Hopi are not Hopi. They know this. They often choose them. You'll also find people doing so who are not chosen or even reasonably educated by them. Much of the Wiki entries reflect this.]
The best book is: "Waters, Frank, 1963, Book of the Hopi : The First Revelation Of The Hopi's Historical And Religious Worldview Of Life, Penguin Books, NY, 346 P. THE definitive book concerning the Hopi. Long viewed as the standard work on the tribe, although warnings have been given that the book does contain some outright errors, and things have changed in Hopiland since the book was published. Includes discussion of the religion and myths of the tribe, along with a detailed history. Frank Waters received five nominations for the Nobel Prize for Literature."
[Waters is one of those chosen. As for 'outright errors', trust me, you talk to different elders from any tribe, and some of them are going to tell you that some of the things other say is 'wrong'. Not so different here. You'll also find some of the material in the "recent" prophecies was the same 100 years ago, prior to those things happening which were subsequently 'recognized' as having been what was prophesized.]
I can't find much on the web about the Nazca symbols beyond a single quote by one elder who recognized the symbols. What it claims he said is not what I heard, and it appears to me someone is taking advantage of the case to promote their own agenda. I do know that it was two anthropologists (one from Cornell, IIRC) that approached them. There are similar figures in the Four Corners region, made the same way, referenced in "Archeology of Arizona".