Depends on if the carpenter is bringing the hammer, or a couple of the rooms that he previously built. The analogy of "code = tools" breaks down pretty quickly when you start applying it to function libraries that you first designed and implemented specifically to meet your previous employer's requirements.
The government? Excuse me, but since when can your country's government bureaucracy tell private citizens in other countries what to do? (okay, besides the obvious answer - that's not my point). There is lots of underpopulated real estate outside of the USA that is entirely suitable for use as a space launching site, and there are definitely people that are not US citizens, that are also pursuing the X-prize. They may not be anywhere near as far along in their programmes as Rutan and Armadillo, but as with cryptography, the only thing that will happen if the US "bans" private spacecraft development, is that private spacecraft development will happen outside of the US, and then a lot of sniveling and handwringing will be done by those who got left behind.
Armadillo's little rocket weighs a little over 300 pounds, and it's restricted in altitude by the FAA burn time limit, which they are observing to the letter because if they don't they'll never get permission to go higher. Like they posted on the Armadillo website, their little rocket is a testbed designed to de-risk anything they do to the big one. As has also been noted, they've abandoned concentrated H2O2 for H2O2/methanol mixed-monopropellant, and in the process developed all the required catalyst geometries and control systems that get them a reliable, startable, controllable engine, which they can build in their shop.
Does your supersonic rocket land itself back on the blunt end, within a couple of feet from where you launched?
Boosting three times as long will get you far more than three times the altitude, since the vehicle can be accelerated for the entire boost phase. However, they do have to keep enough fuel in the tank to manage the landing...
John Carmack is a long-time rocketry enthusiast and car (specifically, Ferrari) nut. Car and Driver did an article some years ago about the car that John was developing with one of the more well-known (not to me at this particular moment - damn gray hairs) car builders. They were getting something like 1000 hp from the Ferrari engine (i.e., double the factory output) and working on making it, and the rest of the drivetrain, last long enough. Those experiences would have been a good primer for the kind of design/try/redesign cycles that Armadillo has gone through in the last few years.
As I see it, Armadillo has singlehandedly pushed the state of the art in low-cost rocket engines ahead by a significant distance, especially in their initial quest to obtain high-purity peroxide, and when that failed, the development of mixed-monoprop engines and control systems. Props to John and the rest of the team at Armadillo!
It's pretty inevitable. There will always be extensions to today's technology, and likewise there will be visionaries (authors and screenwriters) who will try to imagine what that extended technology will look like and what it will feel like to use it. The visual scanning is pretty cool. What if you took a port-access logger output and assigned to each port a particular note, duration, or loudness? You'd hear white noise for the most part, but any nonrandom access would quickly be evident as a chirp, whistle or popping.
All alternators have field coils - the alternator output is regulated by controlling the field current. Usually there is a small amount of residual magnetization that allows an alternator to self-excite. However, trying to get this process going while simultaneously asking it to power an electric fuel pump, EFI computer, and high-power ignition is pretty daunting. Back in the days of carburetors, mechanical fuel pumps, and points style ignition, push-starting a car from a dead-flat battery condition was quite feasible.
But what about the nanotubes? Didn't something get published recently about the longevity and toxicity of nanotubes and buckyballs? Or am I way off my rocker here?
The fallacy with your argument is that it assumes that (a) the people currently pursuing the X-Prize have no regard for the safety of themselves or others, or that they're incapable of making sound decisions based on their knowledge (presumably because they're blinded by the need to be-there-first); and
(b) somehow, "properly funded and controlled organizations" (such as NASA?) DO have the ability to make these decision.
Recent events in the Space Shuttle program would suggest that the people doing the controlling are blinded by their career aspirations and the need to meet arbitrary schedule and performance targets, rather than making properly informed decisions based on sound risk assessment. "It's okay to launch in cold weather".... "We don't need to check the tiles because EVA is a little bit dangerous"...
Statistically, you're probably right. Sooner or later, a privately-funded spacecraft is going to have an accident. There have been many events that push the limits of human capability, such as the air races, the America's Cup (or the Vendee Monde (?) solo-around-the-world yacht race), motorsports, and pretty much any other sport involving state of the art technology and human know-how, and in each of them there have been fatalities, and usually not due to reckless abandon on the part of the participants. Everyone knows that some endeavours are inherently dangerous, but that doesn't stop them from making the attempt. If everyone was content to live in a neutral coloured soft padded cubby then the world would be a pretty boring place. Plus we'd all still be living in (padded) caves.
There are lots of people in the nuclear physics field that are plugging away at cold fusion, though, and they wouldn't be doing that if it was proven to be a crackpot science. Historically, a lot of ground-breaking discoveries have been made by people from outside the established group of experts in the field.
The facts are that a lot of people are seeing unexplained excess heat generation when they do these experiments. Whether it's fusion or not, unexplained results eventually lead to fundamental theoretical insights, and that's all to the good.
The 'reverse' just reflects the fact that "Polish notation", which was presumably developed or defined first, orders the elements for a multiply operation as, "* a b", and as it happens, it's a lot easier to implement and use it the other way around.
WHen you think about it, the so-called "algebraic" calculators do the same thing. You write " x = a * b ", but on the calculator you input "a * b =" to get the answer.
It sure does - in the last twenty years I've used superglue to pick up my fingerprints and leave them on model airplane parts, car parts, electronics assemblies,...
They could use a Polaroid type camera as a backup or primary imager, with a continuous video recording for proof of authenticity.
It's a cool idea. I'm sure there are tons of other backyard-science type of solutions, just waiting for someone to have the flash of insight and put the right parts together.
The heat of vaporization is only 88 kJ/kg, as compared to 2260 kJ/kg for water, and 165kJ/kg for Freon-12, so you'd have to design in about double the flow rate compared to Freon. You'd be better off running a partial-vacuum water based system (getting the local atmosphere low enough that the water will boil near the desired operating temp of your system)
That would be like what Microsoft does to Office app users... only recently has the onslaught of "Your document can't be read by version X of Word because it was generated by version Y" stopped.
Seems to me that for stuff like this, it would be simple to implement a translation utility to morph the data structures from version X to version Y (with the tacit assumption that features unique to version Y will be eliminated when translated into version X)
A lot of the time, excessive insistence on backward compatability can cripple the development of new architecture, both in software and hardware. Why is it that the default compile option for current versions of Borland C++ is "386 instruction set"?
Not true. It searches for a control channel by listening. You can't listen louder. You _can_ listen more often, but a cellphone receiver still consumes at most 10% of the power that its transmitter does.
A lot of the aviation 'firsts' had nothing to do with commercial interests on the part of the participants. They just wanted to DO it, because they thought they could. On that note, Carmack's efforts are closer in spirit to those of the Wrights, Lindbergh, et al, than Rutan (since Burt and Dick are well known in the experimental aircraft business) but it looks like that within a couple of years there will be a number of private organizations capable of doing Low-Earth-Orbit vehicle insertion. What that is going to do for society? I dunno. The suborbital capability alone basically gives Rutan etc. the ability to deliver people or cargo partway around the world in half an hour. That would be one hell of a courier service.
The problems seem to be that -the voting systems don't scale well. They can't handle a flood of votes or DB accesses without dropping the ball -the user interface is not designed with computer phobic people in mind. It's HARD to build something that absolutely can't be mis-used, and that will recover after being mis-used without intervention by a trained person -the machines are installed by inadequately trained people, and the installations were never (apparently) verified before the voting started.
All of the voting systems' demonstrated shortcomings should have been caught in beta trials - it's probably a case of 'if we report this then we'll cause the product to be even more late - better shut up'.
Let's face it - voting is a public activity. Half of the public is below average intelligence. Therefore, the voting machine must not be more difficult or confusing to operate than a pencil and paper.
The article says that the phones will display 'no service'. This is an indication that the phone has no connection to a cellsite, and without that connection, you can't make or take calls.
Actually, next-generation cellular service includes the ability for the basestations to more finely divide the type of service to allow for data-but-no-voice traffic, etc., but that would apply to a particular service area as defined by the cellphone service provider, not the operator of a movie theater (unless they contracted with the cellphone service provider to get a local microcell installed).
No. A cellphone establishes a connection with its network by scanning all the so-called "control channels" for a cellsite basestation signal. Once it's figured out which channel is the strongest out of all the channels it's scanned, it goes to that one and sends out a registration message. So a phone that can't receive anything (either because there is nothing to receive, or because it's being blasted by a jammer), will not register and won't send anything out.
The only ways that you can get 'No Service' on a cellphone, are: - if you are in an area where you can't lock onto any cellular control channel, either due to there being insufficient signal from any cellsite basestations, or - due to jamming from an interfering signal on the same frequencies, or - if someone installed a bogus cellsite emulator that would act as a honeypot for all the cellphones in a particular area, by broadcasting control-channel data at a high signal strength. The cellphones would then be blind to any traffic happening on the real network.
It is unlikely, though, that you could get an FCC license to do any of the above, and if you really want to kill all the cellular traffic, you need to do one of the above to both the 800 and 1900 MHz bands (in North America). It is probably easier to just ask people to be polite and shut the damn things off.
This works for going from a sedentary lifestyle to a moderately active one, but if you want to train for competitive events, you need to push quite a bit harder than that. As mentioned in the link provided by the other poster, regular high intensity training (into the anaerobic zone for sustained intervals) increases the lactose tolerance, which increases your ability to perform at maximum intensity. However, anaerobic threshold training is not recommended for people just starting on a training program.
Shameless plug: We are the technology behind the Nike SDM[Triax speed-distance monitor that fits on your shoe, and measures incremental distance from each individual stride you take.
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Depends on if the carpenter is bringing the hammer, or a couple of the rooms that he previously built. The analogy of "code = tools" breaks down pretty quickly when you start applying it to function libraries that you first designed and implemented specifically to meet your previous employer's requirements.
The government? Excuse me, but since when can your country's government bureaucracy tell private citizens in other countries what to do? (okay, besides the obvious answer - that's not my point). There is lots of underpopulated real estate outside of the USA that is entirely suitable for use as a space launching site, and there are definitely people that are not US citizens, that are also pursuing the X-prize. They may not be anywhere near as far along in their programmes as Rutan and Armadillo, but as with cryptography, the only thing that will happen if the US "bans" private spacecraft development, is that private spacecraft development will happen outside of the US, and then a lot of sniveling and handwringing will be done by those who got left behind.
Does your supersonic rocket land itself back on the blunt end, within a couple of feet from where you launched?
Boosting three times as long will get you far more than three times the altitude, since the vehicle can be accelerated for the entire boost phase. However, they do have to keep enough fuel in the tank to manage the landing...
Those experiences would have been a good primer for the kind of design/try/redesign cycles that Armadillo has gone through in the last few years.
As I see it, Armadillo has singlehandedly pushed the state of the art in low-cost rocket engines ahead by a significant distance, especially in their initial quest to obtain high-purity peroxide, and when that failed, the development of mixed-monoprop engines and control systems. Props to John and the rest of the team at Armadillo!
It's pretty inevitable. There will always be extensions to today's technology, and likewise there will be visionaries (authors and screenwriters) who will try to imagine what that extended technology will look like and what it will feel like to use it. The visual scanning is pretty cool. What if you took a port-access logger output and assigned to each port a particular note, duration, or loudness? You'd hear white noise for the most part, but any nonrandom access would quickly be evident as a chirp, whistle or popping.
All alternators have field coils - the alternator output is regulated by controlling the field current. Usually there is a small amount of residual magnetization that allows an alternator to self-excite. However, trying to get this process going while simultaneously asking it to power an electric fuel pump, EFI computer, and high-power ignition is pretty daunting. Back in the days of carburetors, mechanical fuel pumps, and points style ignition, push-starting a car from a dead-flat battery condition was quite feasible.
But what about the nanotubes? Didn't something get published recently about the longevity and toxicity of nanotubes and buckyballs? Or am I way off my rocker here?
(a) the people currently pursuing the X-Prize have no regard for the safety of themselves or others, or that they're incapable of making sound decisions based on their knowledge (presumably because they're blinded by the need to be-there-first); and
(b) somehow, "properly funded and controlled organizations" (such as NASA?) DO have the ability to make these decision.
Recent events in the Space Shuttle program would suggest that the people doing the controlling are blinded by their career aspirations and the need to meet arbitrary schedule and performance targets, rather than making properly informed decisions based on sound risk assessment. "It's okay to launch in cold weather".... "We don't need to check the tiles because EVA is a little bit dangerous"...
Statistically, you're probably right. Sooner or later, a privately-funded spacecraft is going to have an accident. There have been many events that push the limits of human capability, such as the air races, the America's Cup (or the Vendee Monde (?) solo-around-the-world yacht race), motorsports, and pretty much any other sport involving state of the art technology and human know-how, and in each of them there have been fatalities, and usually not due to reckless abandon on the part of the participants. Everyone knows that some endeavours are inherently dangerous, but that doesn't stop them from making the attempt. If everyone was content to live in a neutral coloured soft padded cubby then the world would be a pretty boring place. Plus we'd all still be living in (padded) caves.
The facts are that a lot of people are seeing unexplained excess heat generation when they do these experiments. Whether it's fusion or not, unexplained results eventually lead to fundamental theoretical insights, and that's all to the good.
WHen you think about it, the so-called "algebraic" calculators do the same thing. You write " x = a * b ", but on the calculator you input "a * b =" to get the answer.
It sure does - in the last twenty years I've used superglue to pick up my fingerprints and leave them on model airplane parts, car parts, electronics assemblies, ...
It's a cool idea. I'm sure there are tons of other backyard-science type of solutions, just waiting for someone to have the flash of insight and put the right parts together.
Using balloons, and filling the black (opaque) ones with confetti before you inflate them, is a close second.
The heat of vaporization is only 88 kJ/kg, as compared to 2260 kJ/kg for water, and 165kJ/kg for Freon-12, so you'd have to design in about double the flow rate compared to Freon. You'd be better off running a partial-vacuum water based system (getting the local atmosphere low enough that the water will boil near the desired operating temp of your system)
A lot of the time, excessive insistence on backward compatability can cripple the development of new architecture, both in software and hardware. Why is it that the default compile option for current versions of Borland C++ is "386 instruction set"?
Hate Penguin Computers.
Not true. It searches for a control channel by listening. You can't listen louder. You _can_ listen more often, but a cellphone receiver still consumes at most 10% of the power that its transmitter does.
A lot of the aviation 'firsts' had nothing to do with commercial interests on the part of the participants. They just wanted to DO it, because they thought they could. On that note, Carmack's efforts are closer in spirit to those of the Wrights, Lindbergh, et al, than Rutan (since Burt and Dick are well known in the experimental aircraft business) but it looks like that within a couple of years there will be a number of private organizations capable of doing Low-Earth-Orbit vehicle insertion. What that is going to do for society? I dunno. The suborbital capability alone basically gives Rutan etc. the ability to deliver people or cargo partway around the world in half an hour. That would be one hell of a courier service.
-the voting systems don't scale well. They can't handle a flood of votes or DB accesses without dropping the ball
-the user interface is not designed with computer phobic people in mind. It's HARD to build something that absolutely can't be mis-used, and that will recover after being mis-used without intervention by a trained person
-the machines are installed by inadequately trained people, and the installations were never (apparently) verified before the voting started.
All of the voting systems' demonstrated shortcomings should have been caught in beta trials - it's probably a case of 'if we report this then we'll cause the product to be even more late - better shut up'.
Let's face it - voting is a public activity. Half of the public is below average intelligence. Therefore, the voting machine must not be more difficult or confusing to operate than a pencil and paper.
Actually, next-generation cellular service includes the ability for the basestations to more finely divide the type of service to allow for data-but-no-voice traffic, etc., but that would apply to a particular service area as defined by the cellphone service provider, not the operator of a movie theater (unless they contracted with the cellphone service provider to get a local microcell installed).
No. A cellphone establishes a connection with its network by scanning all the so-called "control channels" for a cellsite basestation signal. Once it's figured out which channel is the strongest out of all the channels it's scanned, it goes to that one and sends out a registration message. So a phone that can't receive anything (either because there is nothing to receive, or because it's being blasted by a jammer), will not register and won't send anything out.
- if you are in an area where you can't lock onto any cellular control channel, either due to there being insufficient signal from any cellsite basestations, or
- due to jamming from an interfering signal on the same frequencies, or
- if someone installed a bogus cellsite emulator that would act as a honeypot for all the cellphones in a particular area, by broadcasting control-channel data at a high signal strength. The cellphones would then be blind to any traffic happening on the real network.
It is unlikely, though, that you could get an FCC license to do any of the above, and if you really want to kill all the cellular traffic, you need to do one of the above to both the 800 and 1900 MHz bands (in North America). It is probably easier to just ask people to be polite and shut the damn things off.
Shameless plug: We are the technology behind the Nike SDM[Triax speed-distance monitor that fits on your shoe, and measures incremental distance from each individual stride you take.