twostar (675002) sez: "But getting it to the moon does NOT require us to leave earth's well completely, we only have to travel part of the way and then let the moon pull us down. This is less then the energy required to leave the Earth's gravity well and transfer to the Sun's well."
Only if you don't mind your heavy equipment landing on the moon at high speed. A soft landing will require the same amount of energy as a fair take-off. And, no aerobraking.
"If the H3 doesn't outgas on the moon it is not going to magically outgas on the transport."
There's nothing disturbing it there. Stirring it up will release some, although most can be caught if the collection process is secure. Heating will release more. Anyway, there's no reason to ship regolith. Unless, of course, someone comes up with one. But the same minerals are available here, so it's not likely.
twostar (675002) sez: "Wait, you say it's to much to work to put equipment onto the moon, then go on to say we should put even more equipment into solar/mercury orbit?"
Yes. Consider initially getting it out of our gravity well a constant. Getting it back down into another safely (one without atmosphere for aerobraking) would be expensive in energy terms. Getting it out of the moon's gravity well would be less expensive, but not free by any stretch.
"Why do we need to process anything out there? Scoop up your regolith and ship the whole damn package back to earth. Moon based "catapults" or mag lev systems would probably work fine, and let the Earth's grav pull them in."
Why? To keep the pollution out there. To lighten the load that has to be lowered back down the well to Earth. To make use of whatever can be made use of on-site. To prevent He3 from outgassing from the regolith during handling and transport.
"Process it all on Earth, or even better, in LEO."
Just as long as the processing occurs in a minimal gravity well, it can be shipped around easily. Sure, gas stations in LEO, geosynch, any of the Lagrange points, and why not? And remember, just because orbit means microgravity, it does not mean it's outside a gravity well.
Mining the moon would require placing the equivalent of heavy "earth" moving equipment on the surface. Doing that is expensive. So is getting the results back off the surface. He3 is only in the first few feet of moon surface because it comes from the sun. Go to the source.
A better design would be a sol-centric orbital platform, say in Mercury's L-5 point, collecting solar wind via magnetic trap (the "ram-scoop" idea) and using an on board mass spectrometer to separate the components, which are then bottled for use, storage or shipping. In that orbit, there'd be sufficient solar power to run all that.
Set up a veritable merry-go-round of solar sail craft to go pick up and return the He3, and whatever else you want, and pay nothing in fuel costs. So what if they're slow. They're cheap. Build lots. Build *them* on the moon, or better, out of asteroids. You don't want these things slamming into Earth? Don't nuke 'em, smelt 'em.
Gerard O'Neill gave us lots of good ideas. We'd do well to remember that he didn't get them from professional scientists and engineers with reputations to make and maintain. He got them from undergraduates, whose class project it was to think these things up. Having a reputation to lose to your less foresightful colleagues sure puts a damper on innovation.
teeker (623861) sez: "what, am I supposed to apply at the bureau of activism before I can be a REAL activist??"
Zackly. I was wondering if the International Activism Army was holding a draft now. At least he didn't make the common media-dweeb gaff of using "vigilante".
The only thing this device can measure is physiological arousal level, and it can't tell one kind of arousal from another. This is precisely the same problem with polygraph.
Both require interpretation. That requires training. Both can be bamboozled by anyone who can control their physio responses. That requires training too; yoga is good, but biofeedback is very simple and nearly subconscious.
Anyone can learn to fool them. And I am not about to place my personal safety in the hands of some previously underemployed and undereducated, and presently overworked and undertrained glorified rent-a-cop. I mean, my respect and sympathy to the hardworking TSA people at the airports, but they are not EVER going to receive adequate training to be able to correctly interperate physiological response measures in context. I would rather trust a Scientologist with their "clearing" device (a simple electrodermal activity meter) because at least they have experience in interperating their results in the context of a structured interview. A polygraph is not a structured interview, and some security guard spouting random accusations in the form of questions definitely is not.
I sincerely hope this is just another bogus device that is being publicized as part of the general anti-terrorism psyops, to keep the bad guys guessing as to what can really be done. Let them spend a few million on more high tech Dunsels. But if they deploy these for regular use, everyone who had too much coffee that morning and just rushed in late from a traffic jam to the airport is going to be targeted.
BTW, the sign on my office (room 9-151, VA Hospital, West Haven CT) says "Electrophysiology Lab". I know whereof I rant.
Regardless of "could", they apparently haven't been written.
"So if we're not helping hold back the flood of spam..."
We who? I get zero. Not bad for 1,320 web hits on Google on my last name, and over 12 years of regular usenet use. And I do NOT filter. I'm just careful.
... in what my machine will be sending back to them as part of this process. After all, it does have to send something to tell them my browser is open and waiting for their wonderful content. There's got to be some kind of ACK packet or piece of cookie or something, right?
Oh my golly, I certainly hope that these little ACK packets don't get all munged up and get some big ole MP3 or something accidently cat'ed to them. Why, that'd shove a whole bunch of useless junk up their widget while it's waiting patiently to feed me my commercials.
The difference between TV and the net is, we always wanted to tell the TV off, but couldn't. We've been waiting for years for this, and now we can.
LMCBoy (185365) sez: "Uh, no. A parsec is the distance of a star at which its parallax angle (as seen from the Earth) is one arcsecond."
Yes, yes, 3.26 light years. This "mistake" is a geeks' favorite. Unfortunately there's applicable science available to explain not only the "mistake", but the correctness of its presentation in the film.
NASA's advanced propulsion research has already started looking at trans-relativistic mechanisms for space travel (http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast02fe b98_1.htm.) One concept being explored is the stretching of space-like dimensions, so that a craft can traverse a space without violating light speed. A very early paper on the subject was written by Frank Tipler in 1974 in Phys Rev D. It was titled "Rotating Cylinders and Global Causality Violation". (Larry Niven wrote a story based on this, with the same name; it's in his collection "Convergent Series".) Here's a link to a message (someone else's) which quotes a personal reply from Tipler, giving the reference to this and other papers (http://keithlynch.net/cryonet/9/21.html).
If space dimensions can be compressed, then a vehicle can traverse that space as though it were a shorter distance. The efficacy of the engines (and if they're "bending" space, then "warp" is apropos) would then be considered in terms of how much shorter they could make a given distance become. Hence, the Millenium Falcon's warp engines could have been powerful enough to shrink the Kessel Run to less than 12 parsecs, when it is "normally" much farther. Here's a Wikipedia entry that provides another explanation (http://www.4reference.net/encyclopedias/wikipedia/Hyperspace.html).
The evidence from the movie that this was in fact the nature of the M.F.'s engines? When they went to warp speed, the stars' images got stretched out into lines, as though the space in front of them was stretching. Had they accelerated to a significant fraction of light speed, the images of the stars from all around them, front and back, would have been compressed into a halo of stars with blue shift towards the center and red shift at the outside. Here's a site that shows better than I can tell (http://www.fourmilab.ch/cship/cship.html).
Other evidence that they did not approach lightspeed is the fact that they "disappeared" into warped/hyper-space in a finite time. Had they accelerated to c, it would have appeared to take forever from the viewpoint of an outside observer.
Feel free to disagree. After all, this is at the nexus of science, pre-science and science fiction. But I think I can support my assertions at least as well as those who simply appeal to standard relativistic physics. And, after all, I am a scientist. I consider it part of the job to come up with answers that are so good that, right or not, they might as well be.
Maybe I ought to just send this to George Lucas so he can work it into one of the last 4 episodes and get you guys off his back.
When the producer or director or editor decides to present some things and not others, and decides how those things are to be presented.
Plain old "editorial discretion" is deception, because it presents a bias, whether of omission or commission. When they pretend that a golf tournament deserves as much air time as, say, a suicide bombing, they're already playing a role that goes way, way beyond pretending they're in a certain location.
demonlapin (527802) sez: "Hate to break it to you, but the economists I've had the honor to meet consider "force of survival" a pretty potent economic factor. No matter which group of discoverers you're talking about, the motive was economic. Economic doesn't always mean strictly monetary, folks. Keep that in mind."
Oh, I do. I have no doubt economists would consider everything in their own terms. Scientific territoriality is a grand old tradition. We pee on each others' trees with impunity.
I also have no doubt, knowing my fair share of economics and (purposefully) experiencing well more than my share of survival activities, all the economic theory in the world doesn't mean squat when you're trying to kill something so you can stay alive. To paraphrase Heinlein, "theory is for the well fed."
Take out the fan. Get a *big* aquarium pump. Run hose from pump to machine. (Aimed right at the CPU). Start adding hose and moving the pump farther away, until it's in a place where you can't hear it. Closet, next room, basement, whatever.
jmichaelg (148257) sez: "The Americas were discovered and colonized due to economic factors."
It's said that history is written by the winners. That's just something the "winners" say so that you won't believe the "losers'" side of the story.
The "Americas" were discovered by force of survival by hunter/fisher/gatherers, tens of thousands of years ago. If the Hopi migration stories are correct (and many parts have been verified) they were here over 35,000 years ago, and did not arrive via the Bering Bridge.
The only thing that was "discovered" in 1492 was a lost and starving Italian guy with his crew in a big wooden boat.
We were here then. We're still here.
"The same piece of software that lets people around the world play video games on their cell phones is now letting scientists drive the ultimate remote-controlled car across the surface of Mars."
The specific Java program used to run the rover is called Maestro. It is available for Wintel, Mac, Linux and Solaris, from: http://mars.telascience.org/home/
Regular science and graphics updates come in here. You can get/view them just like the folks at JPL see them.
This is where CEBAF, the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator facility is. They built the place in large part with surplus stuff from other places, for a fraction of what it would have cost.
I'm betting CEBAF didn't go all Microsofty when it came to their IT. There's homegrown experts right in their back yard.
"How many people still use ancient monitors? And more importantly, what is the oldest monitor you still use regularly?"
My wife refuses to give up her 20" Sony which is now pushing 10 years.
My oldest regular monitor is an AppleColor 12" that came with my still regularly used Apple IIgs. Not regular, but used for testing restoration products: (1) an original Apple green monochrome, the one with the screen set on a swivel inside the case so it can tilt up and down and (2) an Apple//c 9 inch grey monochrome with combo monitor/computer stand.
Sorry, ain't gonna happen for most people. You'd have to be really messed up to earn the right to try to get this done to you.
What'll make this possible for widespread use is an external interface based on EEG/MEG (and most likely the former, because the magneto-EGs require extremely sensitive cryogenic quantum semi-conductors).
And even when this is possible, chances are what you'll be able to do with it will be no more than you could do more easily and a whole lot cheaper with your hands.
He can make grandiose claims for plans all he likes, and this being an election year he will, but his "plans" will never come to fruition. Congress has to first approve the budget, and then approve the appropriations before NASA would see a dime. With a trillion dollar deficit staring us in the face, there's no way any congresscritter is going to paint themselves with the dark side of the paintbrush Bush is handing them.
And even if they DID pass it, a future president with more sense (one who can actually count and doesn't believe in imaginary money) will be forced to cut back or cancel this, unless the deficit is fixed first.
Bush has no more intention of seeing this carried out than his father did in 1989. Remember what Bush Sr. did to the space program. He put Dan "Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe" Quayle in charge of it. I'm still shocked over that blatant slap in the face, and the audacity it took to claim to be pro-space afterwards.
This is apparently obvious to a lot of people already. Stock in space program contractors dropped today.
It's an election year. Wait until December before you start the count down.
ciphertext (633581) sez: "There is no such thing as zero chance."
I know. But that's what it'll take to satisfy those who will be exposed to the risk against their will.
And he sez: "Would you believe that nuclear powered space probes have already left the planet? There is Pioneer 10, Voyager 1 and 2, Viking, and I believe the Surveyors were nuclear powered as well."
And many of the KOCMOC (Cosmos) series. One of those landed in Canada and spilled its guts, some years back. Those were nuclear, or more correctly, radiothermal power generation systems. They were not high output fission reactors driving reaction mass. Even so there were many people protesting these launches all along.
Just the testing phase of these new designs is going to be tough to pull off, because if they fail, it is likely to be a CATO, in terms of both structure and environment. NASA lucked out with NERVA. It never suffered a major failure. But it was unplugged in 1972 when funding for manned Mars exploration was cut. In Russia, two hot reactor propulsion systems were designed, but never got off the paper, in large part because Korolev (their von Braun) figured out a nuclear-electric ion engine (such as on Deep Space 1 and Rosetta) would deliver 70% more payload than a chemical rocket, whereas a hot reactor + reaction mass rocket would deliver only 40% more than chemical.
Unless and until it can be proven that this thing will fly with zero chance of a CATO (catastrophic failure; "prang" for the more Britishy types), it'll never get off the ground, Orville.
It doesn't matter if the reaction mass is completely inert. As long as the fuel itself is a harmful substance, (in this design, uranium tetraflouride), it shouldn't be used where people who don't want to take the risk are not put at risk.
Says it works with 95, 98, NT and 2000. I have ver. 5, Standard. It came out before XP. I've got 2000, so I can't test for you. I tried the web site listed on the box (www.lhsl.com) but it redirected to Scansoft's page. They have Dragon and ViaVoice listed on the page but sell only Dragon from what I can see. Maybe check for used software places that might have it.
I got Dragon, but refuse to use it because it tells you it requires Internet Explorer to work (it doesn't; it just requires a DLL). If IE isn't your primary browser, it installs IE from its own installation CD, even if you have a later version.
Slashdot Mirror
twostar (675002) sez: "But getting it to the moon does NOT require us to leave earth's well completely, we only have to travel part of the way and then let the moon pull us down. This is less then the energy required to leave the Earth's gravity well and transfer to the Sun's well."
Only if you don't mind your heavy equipment landing on the moon at high speed. A soft landing will require the same amount of energy as a fair take-off. And, no aerobraking.
"If the H3 doesn't outgas on the moon it is not going to magically outgas on the transport."
There's nothing disturbing it there. Stirring it up will release some, although most can be caught if the collection process is secure. Heating will release more. Anyway, there's no reason to ship regolith. Unless, of course, someone comes up with one. But the same minerals are available here, so it's not likely.
twostar (675002) sez: "Wait, you say it's to much to work to put equipment onto the moon, then go on to say we should put even more equipment into solar/mercury orbit?"
Yes. Consider initially getting it out of our gravity well a constant. Getting it back down into another safely (one without atmosphere for aerobraking) would be expensive in energy terms. Getting it out of the moon's gravity well would be less expensive, but not free by any stretch.
"Why do we need to process anything out there? Scoop up your regolith and ship the whole damn package back to earth. Moon based "catapults" or mag lev systems would probably work fine, and let the Earth's grav pull them in."
Why? To keep the pollution out there. To lighten the load that has to be lowered back down the well to Earth. To make use of whatever can be made use of on-site. To prevent He3 from outgassing from the regolith during handling and transport.
"Process it all on Earth, or even better, in LEO."
Just as long as the processing occurs in a minimal gravity well, it can be shipped around easily. Sure, gas stations in LEO, geosynch, any of the Lagrange points, and why not? And remember, just because orbit means microgravity, it does not mean it's outside a gravity well.
Mining the moon would require placing the equivalent of heavy "earth" moving equipment on the surface. Doing that is expensive. So is getting the results back off the surface. He3 is only in the first few feet of moon surface because it comes from the sun. Go to the source.
A better design would be a sol-centric orbital platform, say in Mercury's L-5 point, collecting solar wind via magnetic trap (the "ram-scoop" idea) and using an on board mass spectrometer to separate the components, which are then bottled for use, storage or shipping. In that orbit, there'd be sufficient solar power to run all that.
Set up a veritable merry-go-round of solar sail craft to go pick up and return the He3, and whatever else you want, and pay nothing in fuel costs. So what if they're slow. They're cheap. Build lots. Build *them* on the moon, or better, out of asteroids. You don't want these things slamming into Earth? Don't nuke 'em, smelt 'em.
Gerard O'Neill gave us lots of good ideas. We'd do well to remember that he didn't get them from professional scientists and engineers with reputations to make and maintain. He got them from undergraduates, whose class project it was to think these things up. Having a reputation to lose to your less foresightful colleagues sure puts a damper on innovation.
teeker (623861) sez: "what, am I supposed to apply at the bureau of activism before I can be a REAL activist??"
Zackly. I was wondering if the International Activism Army was holding a draft now. At least he didn't make the common media-dweeb gaff of using "vigilante".
The only thing this device can measure is physiological arousal level, and it can't tell one kind of arousal from another. This is precisely the same problem with polygraph.
Both require interpretation. That requires training. Both can be bamboozled by anyone who can control their physio responses. That requires training too; yoga is good, but biofeedback is very simple and nearly subconscious.
Anyone can learn to fool them. And I am not about to place my personal safety in the hands of some previously underemployed and undereducated, and presently overworked and undertrained glorified rent-a-cop. I mean, my respect and sympathy to the hardworking TSA people at the airports, but they are not EVER going to receive adequate training to be able to correctly interperate physiological response measures in context. I would rather trust a Scientologist with their "clearing" device (a simple electrodermal activity meter) because at least they have experience in interperating their results in the context of a structured interview. A polygraph is not a structured interview, and some security guard spouting random accusations in the form of questions definitely is not.
I sincerely hope this is just another bogus device that is being publicized as part of the general anti-terrorism psyops, to keep the bad guys guessing as to what can really be done. Let them spend a few million on more high tech Dunsels. But if they deploy these for regular use, everyone who had too much coffee that morning and just rushed in late from a traffic jam to the airport is going to be targeted.
BTW, the sign on my office (room 9-151, VA Hospital, West Haven CT) says "Electrophysiology Lab". I know whereof I rant.
Regardless of "could", they apparently haven't been written.
"So if we're not helping hold back the flood of spam..."
We who? I get zero. Not bad for 1,320 web hits on Google on my last name, and over 12 years of regular usenet use. And I do NOT filter. I'm just careful.
... in what my machine will be sending back to them as part of this process. After all, it does have to send something to tell them my browser is open and waiting for their wonderful content. There's got to be some kind of ACK packet or piece of cookie or something, right?
Oh my golly, I certainly hope that these little ACK packets don't get all munged up and get some big ole MP3 or something accidently cat'ed to them. Why, that'd shove a whole bunch of useless junk up their widget while it's waiting patiently to feed me my commercials.
The difference between TV and the net is, we always wanted to tell the TV off, but couldn't. We've been waiting for years for this, and now we can.
McDonald's has tried the same stunt. They sued a Scottish cafe owner by the name of McDonald for trademark infringement.
They lost. They also garnered more bad PR than all the PETA types that have gone up against them could have ever hoped for.
Mike could win big if he hung in there.
LMCBoy (185365) sez: "Uh, no. A parsec is the distance of a star at which its parallax angle (as seen from the Earth) is one arcsecond."
e b98_1.htm.) One concept being explored is the stretching of space-like dimensions, so that a craft can traverse a space without violating light speed. A very early paper on the subject was written by Frank Tipler in 1974 in Phys Rev D. It was titled "Rotating Cylinders and Global Causality Violation". (Larry Niven wrote a story based on this, with the same name; it's in his collection "Convergent Series".) Here's a link to a message (someone else's) which quotes a personal reply from Tipler, giving the reference to this and other papers (http://keithlynch.net/cryonet/9/21.html).
a /Hyperspace.html).
Yes, yes, 3.26 light years. This "mistake" is a geeks' favorite. Unfortunately there's applicable science available to explain not only the "mistake", but the correctness of its presentation in the film.
NASA's advanced propulsion research has already started looking at trans-relativistic mechanisms for space travel (http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast02f
If space dimensions can be compressed, then a vehicle can traverse that space as though it were a shorter distance. The efficacy of the engines (and if they're "bending" space, then "warp" is apropos) would then be considered in terms of how much shorter they could make a given distance become. Hence, the Millenium Falcon's warp engines could have been powerful enough to shrink the Kessel Run to less than 12 parsecs, when it is "normally" much farther. Here's a Wikipedia entry that provides another explanation (http://www.4reference.net/encyclopedias/wikipedi
The evidence from the movie that this was in fact the nature of the M.F.'s engines? When they went to warp speed, the stars' images got stretched out into lines, as though the space in front of them was stretching. Had they accelerated to a significant fraction of light speed, the images of the stars from all around them, front and back, would have been compressed into a halo of stars with blue shift towards the center and red shift at the outside. Here's a site that shows better than I can tell (http://www.fourmilab.ch/cship/cship.html).
Other evidence that they did not approach lightspeed is the fact that they "disappeared" into warped/hyper-space in a finite time. Had they accelerated to c, it would have appeared to take forever from the viewpoint of an outside observer.
Feel free to disagree. After all, this is at the nexus of science, pre-science and science fiction. But I think I can support my assertions at least as well as those who simply appeal to standard relativistic physics. And, after all, I am a scientist. I consider it part of the job to come up with answers that are so good that, right or not, they might as well be.
Maybe I ought to just send this to George Lucas so he can work it into one of the last 4 episodes and get you guys off his back.
"...when does it cross the line into deception?"
When the producer or director or editor decides to present some things and not others, and decides how those things are to be presented.
Plain old "editorial discretion" is deception, because it presents a bias, whether of omission or commission. When they pretend that a golf tournament deserves as much air time as, say, a suicide bombing, they're already playing a role that goes way, way beyond pretending they're in a certain location.
demonlapin (527802) sez: "Hate to break it to you, but the economists I've had the honor to meet consider "force of survival" a pretty potent economic factor. No matter which group of discoverers you're talking about, the motive was economic. Economic doesn't always mean strictly monetary, folks. Keep that in mind."
Oh, I do. I have no doubt economists would consider everything in their own terms.
Scientific territoriality is a grand old tradition. We pee on each others' trees with impunity.
I also have no doubt, knowing my fair share of economics and (purposefully) experiencing well more than my share of survival activities, all the economic theory in the world doesn't mean squat when you're trying to kill something so you can stay alive. To paraphrase Heinlein, "theory is for the well fed."
Take out the fan.
Get a *big* aquarium pump.
Run hose from pump to machine.
(Aimed right at the CPU).
Start adding hose and moving the pump farther away, until it's in a place where you can't hear it. Closet, next room, basement, whatever.
Not enough? Get a second pump.
The Subgenius Hour of Slack weekly radio show.
http://www.subgenius.com/ts/hos.html
Why do you think it was called Slackware?
jmichaelg (148257) sez: "The Americas were discovered and colonized due to economic factors." It's said that history is written by the winners. That's just something the "winners" say so that you won't believe the "losers'" side of the story. The "Americas" were discovered by force of survival by hunter/fisher/gatherers, tens of thousands of years ago. If the Hopi migration stories are correct (and many parts have been verified) they were here over 35,000 years ago, and did not arrive via the Bering Bridge. The only thing that was "discovered" in 1492 was a lost and starving Italian guy with his crew in a big wooden boat. We were here then. We're still here.
"The same piece of software that lets people around the world play video games on their cell phones is now letting scientists drive the ultimate remote-controlled car across the surface of Mars." The specific Java program used to run the rover is called Maestro. It is available for Wintel, Mac, Linux and Solaris, from: http://mars.telascience.org/home/ Regular science and graphics updates come in here. You can get/view them just like the folks at JPL see them.
...when it comes to doing things on the cheap.
This is where CEBAF, the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator facility is. They built the place in large part with surplus stuff from other places, for a fraction of what it would have cost.
I'm betting CEBAF didn't go all Microsofty when it came to their IT. There's homegrown experts right in their back yard.
Bang paths. Still used in usenet headers. You could get royalties for every usenet post.
"How many people still use ancient monitors? And more importantly, what is the oldest monitor you still use regularly?"
//c 9 inch grey monochrome with combo monitor/computer stand.
My wife refuses to give up her 20" Sony which is now pushing 10 years.
My oldest regular monitor is an AppleColor 12" that came with my still regularly used Apple IIgs. Not regular, but used for testing restoration products: (1) an original Apple green monochrome, the one with the screen set on a swivel inside the case so it can tilt up and down and (2) an Apple
Sorry, ain't gonna happen for most people. You'd have to be really messed up to earn the right to try to get this done to you.
What'll make this possible for widespread use is an external interface based on EEG/MEG (and most likely the former, because the magneto-EGs require extremely sensitive cryogenic quantum semi-conductors).
And even when this is possible, chances are what you'll be able to do with it will be no more than you could do more easily and a whole lot cheaper with your hands.
He can make grandiose claims for plans all he likes, and this being an election year he will, but his "plans" will never come to fruition. Congress has to first approve the budget, and then approve the appropriations before NASA would see a dime. With a trillion dollar deficit staring us in the face, there's no way any congresscritter is going to paint themselves with the dark side of the paintbrush Bush is handing them.
And even if they DID pass it, a future president with more sense (one who can actually count and doesn't believe in imaginary money) will be forced to cut back or cancel this, unless the deficit is fixed first.
Bush has no more intention of seeing this carried out than his father did in 1989. Remember what Bush Sr. did to the space program. He put Dan "Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe" Quayle in charge of it. I'm still shocked over that blatant slap in the face, and the audacity it took to claim to be pro-space afterwards.
This is apparently obvious to a lot of people already. Stock in space program contractors dropped today.
It's an election year. Wait until December before you start the count down.
Jobs in IT from tech jobs. There were a large number of non-technical folks who became tech-morass victims. They can find other work far more easily.
ciphertext (633581) sez: "There is no such thing as zero chance." I know. But that's what it'll take to satisfy those who will be exposed to the risk against their will. And he sez: "Would you believe that nuclear powered space probes have already left the planet? There is Pioneer 10, Voyager 1 and 2, Viking, and I believe the Surveyors were nuclear powered as well." And many of the KOCMOC (Cosmos) series. One of those landed in Canada and spilled its guts, some years back. Those were nuclear, or more correctly, radiothermal power generation systems. They were not high output fission reactors driving reaction mass. Even so there were many people protesting these launches all along. Just the testing phase of these new designs is going to be tough to pull off, because if they fail, it is likely to be a CATO, in terms of both structure and environment. NASA lucked out with NERVA. It never suffered a major failure. But it was unplugged in 1972 when funding for manned Mars exploration was cut. In Russia, two hot reactor propulsion systems were designed, but never got off the paper, in large part because Korolev (their von Braun) figured out a nuclear-electric ion engine (such as on Deep Space 1 and Rosetta) would deliver 70% more payload than a chemical rocket, whereas a hot reactor + reaction mass rocket would deliver only 40% more than chemical.
Unless and until it can be proven that this thing will fly with zero chance of a CATO (catastrophic failure; "prang" for the more Britishy types), it'll never get off the ground, Orville.
It doesn't matter if the reaction mass is completely inert. As long as the fuel itself is a harmful substance, (in this design, uranium tetraflouride), it shouldn't be used where people who don't want to take the risk are not put at risk.
Says it works with 95, 98, NT and 2000. I have ver. 5, Standard. It came out before XP. I've got 2000, so I can't test for you. I tried the web site listed on the box (www.lhsl.com) but it redirected to Scansoft's page. They have Dragon and ViaVoice listed on the page but sell only Dragon from what I can see. Maybe check for used software places that might have it.
I got Dragon, but refuse to use it because it tells you it requires Internet Explorer to work (it doesn't; it just requires a DLL). If IE isn't your primary browser, it installs IE from its own installation CD, even if you have a later version.
Escher's "Relativity":
r el ativity.html
2 P1 26556727EFF0200P2205L4M1.JPG
http://www.lipsons.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/escher/
More topical, guess what's holding the CD containing 3.5 million peoples' names to Spirit's "dashboard"?
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/all/2/p/002/
Playing? HA! You better believe it's playing. And it's far more important than work, IMO.