Because iTunes realized that people would see less value in a "digital" only copy of the music, and thus charged significantly less for the digital music than you would normally pay for a CD in the store. Valve charges (practically) the same price for a digital only game as it does for a game with a box, permanent CD, and a printed manual. Stupid.
You really are a "pathetic lefty liberal hippy" - instead of burdening everyone with your ignorance about the gaming business, you should probably stick to protesting something and extolling the virtues of granola.
Valve had an existing contract with Vivendi Universal for distribution. The way distribution works in the game world is the manufacturer signs away his right to sell the game directly for less than list. Since nobody pays list price that means, in effect, buying directly from the software company is gonna be more expensive than buying the same game at WallMart.
That's a pretty standard contract item, along with the one that makes you take back games that don't sell.
Valve tried to get around that by offering its back catalog to people who bought via Steam, but I suspect if it went overboard on extra incentives VU would have had some basis for a lawsuit (well, another lawsuit).
Steam may allow Valve to supplant VU and other distributers, but it will take some time to work through existing contractual agreements before they can undercut other companies on price. And by the way, the free market (minus the scare quotes) will decide whether or not this model will survive. That has nothing to do with "crazy Libertarian/Republican propaganda", but rather decisions made by consumers like you. Thanks for participating in the free market!
Helpful Hint #1: How long does it take to fly the 747 to Australia? What would happen if you took that long getting to orbit?
I don't know what you're trying to say here. The point was you could get to orbit with the same amout of fuel. I didn't say you'd do it in a 747.
Helpful Hint #2: What is the difference between energy and power? If two machines release the same total energy, but machine #2 must release it much more quickly with equal or greater precision, which is likely to be more complex and expensive?
Actually, jet engines are far more complicated than rocket engines. There's a reason rockets predated jets by, what, 40 years? I have no doubt Carmack and his folks at Armadillo will be successful building a rocket engine that will get them to orbit, but if you told me they were building a jet engine from scratch I'd roll on the floor laughing.
The reason flights to orbit are excessively expensive is either 1) You throw away most of the craft and have to build it again for the next flight and/or 2) You built the craft to be reusable but you designed it for maximum performance, which made everything complex (and thus expensive).
Unfortunately, no. Chemically fueled rockets are just barely capable of making it to orbit. They're mostly fuel tankage. Single stage to orbit craft must have at least a 90% fuel fraction. At least. Any serious inefficiency or weight growth kills the design, as happened for Rotary Rocket.
A more serious effort for SSTO was DC-X. The full size version probably wouldn't quite have made it to orbit, but it would have been close enough to know if it was possible to do it with a reasonable payload. Unfortunately, after two successful Air Force flights, NASA took over and the craft was destroyed because a technician didn't hook up a hydraulic line to one of the landing "legs". Then NASA cancelled it in favor of X-33, a project with no hope of success. X-33 allowed NASA to say, with a straight face, "SSTO doesn't work", when what they proved was X-33 doesn't work.
Staging helps. Two stages will get you to low earth orbit. Beyond low orbit usually requires three. This reduces the fuel fraction, but by less than one would hope. The Shuttle's fuel fraction is around 89%.
Yes, and staging also complicates the design, making it more expensive. You get those one-shot parts you throw away, which means doing lots of extra work (ie spending $$) to make sure they work the first and only time. I suppose you could have some kind of flyback reuseable stage, but that's complicated enough that it won't save you any money.
So space flight is all about weight reduction. Which is why everything is so fragile and unreliable. If you could build a launch system with a fuel fraction of 50%, which is roughly where most aircraft live, it would be a straightforward job.
Everything is fragile and unreliable because the design philosophy is wrong. It's a question of designing for perfomance when we should be designing for operational efficiency. In the end the mass fraction doesn't matter - what matters is reliability and $/lb. to orbit. There will always be a market for heavy lift launchers, but for manned flight you'd rather have frequency and reliability.
The benefit to VTVL SSTO is you can launch it more frequently, since all you have to do for the next flight is inspect it and fill up the tanks. The reentry is powered, so you don't have thermal problems, and since you don't need a runway you can land it on the same spot you launched it.
Look at it this way - the amount of fuel it takes to get to orbit will get you from the US to Australia in a 747. The reason it's cheaper to go to Australia is they don't throw away the plane when you get there (expendables) or take it apart and rebuild it (the shuttle) before the next flight.
This also has implications for safety. Would you rather fly a 747 for its maiden flight or its 100th? If you fly the same craft more than once you're much less likely to be bitten by manufacturing defects.
We've been using staged rockets for fifty years now, and the price is still a huge multiple of fuel costs. Time to try something different.
Yeah. After awhile it really will be like credit cards. Sure you have a legal right not to have a credit card, but unless you're driving and sleeping in your car, you can't travel without one anymore.
Once some critical mass is reached in terms of the people who are chipped, companies and the government can make policies expecting you to have one.
"Don't have a chip? Oh, sorry, you'll have to wait in that line to get a "non-chip-person" exception. It has to be signed by my boss, and he's on vacation. You'll have to pick up your heart medication next Tuesday."
A mere century ago, the usual age for marraige in most cultures was 12 to 16. Can you explain to me what has changed from that time, besides the views of society?
The funny thing is people are maturing earlier (at least sexually) than they did at that time. Something in the diet, apparently.
In other words, you think I'm wrong but you don't have any facts to back it up. You could have just said so.
I've heard it all before. We had a name for people with your ideas. They were called fascists.
You need to crack your history book. As Oliver Homes said "The Constitution isn't a suicide pact." If you really think what our government (or what I advocate) is doing amounts to fascism, you are woefully historically ignorant. Go back to school, or, if you're already there, please take a history class so you don't annoy people who know what they're talking about.
Wow you are uninformed. The Kurds have had their own government already. Sunni Muslims have been targeted since Saddam was toppled. Do you not think this is at least a possible precursor to a civil war? The Kurds and the Sunni Muslims had more autonomy under Saddam's regime, do you think they will settle for being governed by a the Shiite majority? It's obvious that the Sunni Muslims are already not happy, and it's not likely the Kurds will be satisfied when their laws are disregarded.
Well, it would be what you call a "democratic republic". Perhaps you've heard of another? The idea is Iraq would't have all decisions made at the federal level, but by province or locally. That's how you can get disparate populations like, say, New York and Utah to live in the same country without killing each other. Obviously you haven't bothered to learn anything about how the new constitution is shaping up. But then, you don't know anything about your own country, so I'm not surprised.
Like I said, you know nothing about Islam. I suppose I could just take quotes from the Bible that tell followers to stone someone to death and then we'd all beleive that Christianity is evil. Other than that I don't "blindly accept" Islam as a religion of peace. Islam is a religion of peace. You are blindly accepting right-wing propoganda about Islam.
So you say - I wonder who's really swallowing the propaganda here. If it really is a religion of peace maybe someone should point that out to the Muslims, as the don't seem to understand.
You are so naive. That is how we dealt with this before (FBI not regular cops) and we actually stopped a lot of potentially bad things from happening. How can you possibley ignore this fact. I don't see how you can support the present actions here and abroad when they have accomplished nothing.
Who's being naive? As far as I'm aware the FBI only stopped one group in New York after the first WTC bombing. There's no way the FBI can be everywhere at once - I'd rather the fight takes place in the Middle East than New York.
You are missing the point again. Not charging suspected terrorists is even worse. It's worse for our society. It's worse for our civil liberties. I guess our repsonse to fascism is more fascism.
No, you are missing the point. We're at war - these aren't ordinary crimes. In previous wars enemy spies and saboteurs were tried by the military. Civilian trials simply aren't set up to take national security into consideration.
Let me save you the time of waiting this out. It was a terrible mistake to go to Iraq.
You don't know that any more than supporters of the war think it's been a smashing success. Iraq will end up a stable democracy, the only question is what the cost is in terms of blood and money. The idea the country will descend into civil war is patently ridiculous, as there's no indication that's in the cards despite the hopes of the French media. As far as us bugging out... well, that would be a tragedy, but I'm optimistic that won't happen. Certainly it would be a grave mistake.
Where do you get that idea from? It is not and never was a Muslim's duty to convert or destroy all infidels everywhere. Do you even know anything about Islam?
Let's go right to the book, shall we? Sura 9:73:
"Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them. Hell shall be their home: an evil fate."
That's the shortest and most direct, but there are many more if you care to look instead of blindly accepting that "Religion of Peace" garbage.
This will never happen and you must be the one wearing a tin foil hat if you beleive it. Even if there was a significant amount of Muslims that wanted to do this (and there isn't) they still wouldn't have a chance.
I never said they would succeed. My point is he's got a list of goals that's completely incompatible with my existance as a non-Muslim. I know that's a hard thing for secular hedonists in the West to understand, but just because we mostly sleep in on Sunday doesn't mean others don't take religion seriously enough to kill for it. Personally, as far as I'm concerned he can have Southern Europe, but we might as well oppose him now since conflict is inevitable.
Now, I'm not trying to say that every Muslim takes every line in the Koran as seriously as Bin Laden, the same way not very many Christians believe touching shit is a sin just because it says so in the Bible. But Bin Laden, well, the world simply isn't big enough for fanatical Muslims and free non-Muslims.
I'm not defending bin Laden, he's a scumbag, but he's certainly not capable of more than a few organized attacks against strategic targets
At some point he'll be capable of a few organized nuclear attacks against heavily populated targets. It may be next year or five years hence, or maybe even twenty, but as far as I'm concerned our security apparatus better be up to snuff by then.
The simplest answer to all this is to apprehend the terrorists before they strike with good intelligence. Blowing up thousands of innocent people and taking away Americans civil liberties isn't going to get us anywhere. In fact we seemed to be doing a better job when that's where our heads were at. Several attempted attacks were thwarted with good intel and good police work
Oh, sure, we'd all love to go back to 9/10/2001 and just have the cops deal with this. But that's not how these kinds of wars are fought. To win a war against suicidal terrorists you have to be ready to do things you don't want to tell your grandkids about. You and I simply don't have any way of knowing how many attacks were prevented through PATRIOT, methods completely outside the law, or even methods that would get you a docket in the Hague. I'm all for using the court system whenever we can, but open trials and "charge 'em or set 'em loose" rules can be very damaging to successful intelligence gathering.
Honestly, I don't know where, as a society, we need to draw the lines. But there's nothing in PATRIOT I can't live with given the threat.
As far as the war is concerned, it's an attempt by the President to tilt the playing field in our favor. We won't know if it worked for another generation, but it seems like a more reasonable play than sending tomahawks here and there every time we have an attack.
Sigh. I always hesitate to answer a question like that, since it's obvious you aren't actually looking for an answer. And where do you get off calling me "you people"? Is "you people" everyone who isn't a member of International ANSWER, or is it just me? Or is it some other grouping you can only see through tinfoil?
What do you really think he means when he exhorts his followers to "establish the rule of God on Earth"? I realize he makes the comment in the context of "liberation", but this is reference to a Muslim's duty to convert or destroy all infidels everywhere.
Bin Laden never said that. Bin Laden's goal is to eliminate any Western Influence in the Arab world. He has not planned (at least exlpicitly) to take over the world and I think he is smart enough to realize that that is not possible.
That's only in the tape he made for western consumption. In the tapes and letters to his followers he doesn't make any mention of ending the jihad. I would dismiss out of hand any promises he makes non-Muslims, since by his reconing there's nothing wrong with lying to us if it provides a tactical advantage.
The idea we will ever be able to peacefully coexist with his ilk is patently ridiculous. The Muslim Brotherhood, which is the progenitor of modern Islamic terrorism, provided a theological basis for their struggle. It's a mismash of thousand-year-old grievances, literal interpretation of 7th century directives, and looney conspiracy theories. You can't make peace with that.
If we were to withdraw completely from the Middle East today it would simply focus their attack on regaining all the land of the original Caliphate, which would include Spain and Southern Europe up to Vienna. If we gave them Europe they'd be back for more in a couple of years. This is the nature of fascism, which is the true nature of militant Islam. It's a fascist movement masquerading as a religion.
The scary thing is that they're out there watching our government's reaction, gloating, and planning their next wave of attacks to see what sort of reactionary fascism they can goad our government into next.
You have a rather limited view of AQ's goals. They aren't trying to goad our government into reactionary facism. They're goal is to destroy our civilization and replace it with a Taliban-style Islamic theocracy. They're way less subtle than you think they are. Bin Laden himself has spelled this all out on tape.
So it's quite an exageration to imply "they're winning" when our legal guarentees are pared a bit. If they "win" PATRIOT will seem like heaven.
Is the purpose of higher education simply to show people tools and how they work so they can have a skill or to teach people why the tools are they way they are and (hopefully) help them to make the tools better?
There is a strong case to be made that the purpose of higher education is to sort people by intelligence. This is convenient for employers who aren't allowed, by law, to administer IQ tests. I think there's acutually some truth to the idea, but it's probably less true in the sciences.
In any event, I've hired quite a few programmers, and I don't see the degree as very usefull. If you want to be a programmer (as opposed to some kind of academic), you're better off getting a degree in math, physics, or EE.
People make decisions based a lot on perceived value, as opposed to outright cost. Many Americans live in a city with mass transit available to carry them wherever they need or want to go, yet they'll still choose cars. The cost of monthly transit passes is significantly lower then the cost of purchasing a car, buying insurance for it, filling it with expensive fuel and having routine maintenance performed on it.
I suppose if your time isn't worth anything these calculations work out better. The reason most people have a car is they would rather do a 40 minute commute by car as opposed to a 3 hour commute by bus-train-bus. Mass transit looks much better on paper than it does in reality. Here in the SF bay area we have a pretty servicable mass transit system, but by the time you add in the home-train and train-work legs of your journey you'll be shocked how much longer it all takes.
Mass transit is really only convenient where you have very high population densities, like NYC, London, and Tokyo. While it may serve the greater good in less dense cities, people who buy cars are making rational decisions.
I mean exactly that. I don't see any reason think the current antimatter production methods are the last word on the subject.
In 1945 they were using accelerometers to seperate U235 and U238, which was very inefficient. Today they use lasers to separate the isotopes at a tiny fraction of the former cost/pound (orders of magnitude). Why are you sure similar gains can't be made with antimatter?
I don't know how authoritative this link is, but if it can be believed the maximum theoretical efficiency of production would give you antiprotons at $5 million per gram using current energy prices. Clearly we won't ever get the maximum theoretical efficiency out of any process, but we may get close enough for non-state actors to produce a non-trivial amount.
Look at how much money goes into treating sexual dysfunction, social disorders, and allergies. Compare that to how much goes into treating Leishmaniasis, Chagas, etc. Is this social responsibility? There's no denying that drug companies take part in charity cases (to varying degrees), but the bulk of their efforts are, as one would expect, focused on profit. Drug stocks are very profitable.
But where would the money come from for those Leishmaniasis and Chagas treatments? You couldn't very well charge your customers the true cost - they can't even do that for AIDS drugs which have a much larger "customer" base. The way I see it, a new treatment for anything is progress, since it adds to the body of scientific knowledge. If the choice is between drug companies that turn out Viagra clones and no commercial drug development, I'll take the drug companies.
Of course you could have government funding of drug research. France, for example, does a lot of that (and with some success). But that model doesn't seem to be as productive as the capitalist one for research in general.
We've had some success here in the US with deals that go something like "if you're willing to do the research on this disease the taxpayers will pay for it and then allow you to keep the profit." That's not very popular with the voters, since they don't see why they should be charged twice, but at least you may end up with useful drugs.
The Orphan Drug Act was an attempt to address the problem, but it's been much abused. I know if it's still in effect or not.
Okay, let's put it this way: any degree of technological advancement that makes it possible to produce antimatter efficiently, and store and transport it safely*, would probably create such revolutionary change in our society that terrorism would be the least of our concerns.
I hope you are correct, although I don't see any reason why that must be so. I don't see why we couldn't have advances related specifically to antimatter.
Yes, the shuttle was designed to take weather into account. Only a cockfool such as yourself is suggesting that it wasn't. But it cannot be debated that there are still vast improvements that could be made. Mother Nature, through weather, provides the incentive necessary to force innovation. If it were not for the problems posed by weather, then innovation on that front would stall. Indeed, like I stated, improvements will always be possible.
Let me ask you this: If you were designing a rocket, which, let's face it, is always on the edge of just kinda blowing up, would you concentrate your efforts on dealing with hurricanes, or would you instead worry about things like added redundancy or crew safety? Every issue you address as an engineer puts constraints on the solutions you've devised for other problems. If waiting out hurricanes was such a big deal does it make more sense to change your craft (wich might cost billions) or launch it from somewhere without hurricanes?
The reason I'm not terribly worried about antimatter-toting terrorists is the same reason I'm a lot more worried about terrorists getting pre-made nukes than I am about them building one from scratch: it takes a tremendous knowledge base and industrial infrastructure that is beyond the capacity of even the biggest and best-funded terrorist group.
Well, antimatter is pretty new stuff. We don't really know how hard it would be to produce if someone (a government or brilliant scientist) actually made a concerted effort to reduce production to an industrial process. Nukes are pretty hard to make since you need to get ahold of enriched uranium somehow. Presumably antimatter could be made without exotic, traceable materials.
Oh, and I'm not too worried about lost Soviet nukes. You need the same infrastructure you used to make them if you want to keep them working for any length of time. After fifteen years "in the wild", I doubt a lost nuke would actually work.
Where would this world be without Dan Brown's Angels and Demons? Well, for one we wouldn't have people running around worried about terrorists blowing up Rome with an inconceivable amount of antimatter. Creating a gram of antimatter at this stage in its development would probably take close to 100 years. And 2 grams of antimatter would be enough to take out a good size chunk of the earth.
I've never read the book you're citing, but it should be obvious to any fool antimatter is dangerous stuff. And I wasn't talking about "this stage of its development". Right now it's pretty irrelevent except to researchers looking into basic physics, since you get such a trivial amount for lots of input energy. But there really isn't any reason technical hurdles in its production couldn't be overcome. OK, so a gram is an inconceivable amount of antimatter due to the amount of energy it contains. Personally, I think if we ever get fusion power working it wouldn't be inconceivable at all, but for the moment we'll stipulate our budding terroris is gonna make his antimatter from gas. It's pretty plentiful in the Middle East, which is where he's likely to be from anyway.
Let's say you developed a process that could convert gas to antimatter with a 10% efficency. I know that's a pretty high efficency, but I figure a really efficent engine can get 30%, so it's not out of the realm of possibility for a process that's purely imaginary at this point.
And further lets suppose you were rich or supported by a state and could process 10,000 gallons of gas a day. After a year you have a bomb with the equivalent energy of 365,000 gallons of gas.
By my calculation the energy contained in 365,000 gallons of gas is on the order of 10 megatons. Not an unheard of energy release in a weapon. But it does point out the problem - antimatter is the ultimate in energy storage. If you have an energy source which you can tap at non-trivial efficencies as well as a means to store the product, you have everything you need to make the ultimate weapon. And, unlike nuclear weapons antimatter bombs would be easy to set off. If you could make a containment vessel, you could certainly get it to fail.
Yeah, well, apparently unlike you science isn't a religion for me. It's a tool. I'm sure there are scientists out there of the idiot savant variety who would go ahead with that kind of research without thinking through the implications. I just hope cracking that nut is too hard for mere mortals. More efficient spaceflight isn't worth taking that kind of risk.
Yeah, and I hope it never gets easier to make and store. Antimatter would be the ultimate WMD - if it ever gets to the point where a small group of whackos could synthesize a gram or two and contain it in a refridgerator-size vessel civilization is pretty much over.
For an asset to be worth something it has to have some use. After the shuttle program is finally shut down, of what use is the VAB? I don't see why you would need it - as far as I know there's no project on the horizon that would require it. Lakehurst, NJ has three enormous buildings they used to use for airships, but they've been a financial millstone since the Navy stopped running blimps in the '60s.
These kinds of structures need to be maintained at enormous expense. You think painting your house is expensive? I say sell the VAB, if a buyer can be found. NASA isn't funded well enough that we can maintain monuments to old programs.
As far as it being "one-of-a-kind", it isn't the Mona Lisa or Ark of the Covenant. If we get rid of it and find we need it after all we can rebuild it.
But consider the Shuttle has been the only game in town for 30 years now, even though NASA's had seven or eight "replacements" suck up lots of money and then die a quiet death. The American people have lost interest in space (and who can blame them?), so NASA's budget is unlikely to stay as large as it is, let alone get larger. It will be generations (if ever) before we need a building like that again. Sure, we can use it for CEV, but we could use something else for less money. Horizontal assembly would probably be cheaper.
Personally, I'm convinced the future of manned spaceflight is in smaller SSTO craft. In that case you'll take off and land in the same place at a high frequency, so the craft will be out-of-doors when not undergoing maintennence. It will be much smaller than the Shuttle, so for maintennence a smaller building will suffice.
I'm ashamed to admit I got that one. The question I have is - did you have to look at the DVD case or did you actually remember the word "Navi" off the top of your head?
Personally, I'm looking forward to skull guns. I want to have a way to deal with all those geeks who are bumping into me while calculating the product of 356.31 and 2.4168 instead of looking where they're going.
If 20% of the Japanese population is over 65 I would say there's a pretty large labor pool for all the mall security jobs. I'm not sure the robot can compete.
Finally, for all the noise about the Democrats being a minority in the Senate, they represent a majority of people in the United States.
That's totally irrelevent. The Senate wasn't designed or ever intended to be a body elected by strict population representation. Whether people in the more populous states are upset is entirely beside the point. That's why we have the House of Representatives.
Also, your cite doesn't support your argument. The fact that Democratic Senators represent more people than Republican Senators doesn't give you any information about the relative numbers of Democrats and Republicans in the population.
So there would suddenly be a lot of constituents who might be slightly pissed that they no longer have representation in the Senate.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Do you mean to say people are only represented if they get their way? The Republicans are in the majority - they are simply exercising the powers of a majority party. My point was by overusing the filibuster the Democrats are starting to look petulant about losing the election - it gives the Republicans political cover to take it away.
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You really are a "pathetic lefty liberal hippy" - instead of burdening everyone with your ignorance about the gaming business, you should probably stick to protesting something and extolling the virtues of granola.
Valve had an existing contract with Vivendi Universal for distribution. The way distribution works in the game world is the manufacturer signs away his right to sell the game directly for less than list. Since nobody pays list price that means, in effect, buying directly from the software company is gonna be more expensive than buying the same game at WallMart. That's a pretty standard contract item, along with the one that makes you take back games that don't sell.
Valve tried to get around that by offering its back catalog to people who bought via Steam, but I suspect if it went overboard on extra incentives VU would have had some basis for a lawsuit (well, another lawsuit).
Steam may allow Valve to supplant VU and other distributers, but it will take some time to work through existing contractual agreements before they can undercut other companies on price. And by the way, the free market (minus the scare quotes) will decide whether or not this model will survive. That has nothing to do with "crazy Libertarian/Republican propaganda", but rather decisions made by consumers like you. Thanks for participating in the free market!
I don't know what you're trying to say here. The point was you could get to orbit with the same amout of fuel. I didn't say you'd do it in a 747.
Helpful Hint #2: What is the difference between energy and power? If two machines release the same total energy, but machine #2 must release it much more quickly with equal or greater precision, which is likely to be more complex and expensive?
Actually, jet engines are far more complicated than rocket engines. There's a reason rockets predated jets by, what, 40 years? I have no doubt Carmack and his folks at Armadillo will be successful building a rocket engine that will get them to orbit, but if you told me they were building a jet engine from scratch I'd roll on the floor laughing.
The reason flights to orbit are excessively expensive is either 1) You throw away most of the craft and have to build it again for the next flight and/or 2) You built the craft to be reusable but you designed it for maximum performance, which made everything complex (and thus expensive).
A more serious effort for SSTO was DC-X. The full size version probably wouldn't quite have made it to orbit, but it would have been close enough to know if it was possible to do it with a reasonable payload. Unfortunately, after two successful Air Force flights, NASA took over and the craft was destroyed because a technician didn't hook up a hydraulic line to one of the landing "legs". Then NASA cancelled it in favor of X-33, a project with no hope of success. X-33 allowed NASA to say, with a straight face, "SSTO doesn't work", when what they proved was X-33 doesn't work.
Staging helps. Two stages will get you to low earth orbit. Beyond low orbit usually requires three. This reduces the fuel fraction, but by less than one would hope. The Shuttle's fuel fraction is around 89%.
Yes, and staging also complicates the design, making it more expensive. You get those one-shot parts you throw away, which means doing lots of extra work (ie spending $$) to make sure they work the first and only time. I suppose you could have some kind of flyback reuseable stage, but that's complicated enough that it won't save you any money.
So space flight is all about weight reduction. Which is why everything is so fragile and unreliable. If you could build a launch system with a fuel fraction of 50%, which is roughly where most aircraft live, it would be a straightforward job.
Everything is fragile and unreliable because the design philosophy is wrong. It's a question of designing for perfomance when we should be designing for operational efficiency. In the end the mass fraction doesn't matter - what matters is reliability and $/lb. to orbit. There will always be a market for heavy lift launchers, but for manned flight you'd rather have frequency and reliability.
The benefit to VTVL SSTO is you can launch it more frequently, since all you have to do for the next flight is inspect it and fill up the tanks. The reentry is powered, so you don't have thermal problems, and since you don't need a runway you can land it on the same spot you launched it.
Look at it this way - the amount of fuel it takes to get to orbit will get you from the US to Australia in a 747. The reason it's cheaper to go to Australia is they don't throw away the plane when you get there (expendables) or take it apart and rebuild it (the shuttle) before the next flight.
This also has implications for safety. Would you rather fly a 747 for its maiden flight or its 100th? If you fly the same craft more than once you're much less likely to be bitten by manufacturing defects.
We've been using staged rockets for fifty years now, and the price is still a huge multiple of fuel costs. Time to try something different.
Once some critical mass is reached in terms of the people who are chipped, companies and the government can make policies expecting you to have one.
"Don't have a chip? Oh, sorry, you'll have to wait in that line to get a "non-chip-person" exception. It has to be signed by my boss, and he's on vacation. You'll have to pick up your heart medication next Tuesday."
The funny thing is people are maturing earlier (at least sexually) than they did at that time. Something in the diet, apparently.
In other words, you think I'm wrong but you don't have any facts to back it up. You could have just said so.
I've heard it all before. We had a name for people with your ideas. They were called fascists.
You need to crack your history book. As Oliver Homes said "The Constitution isn't a suicide pact." If you really think what our government (or what I advocate) is doing amounts to fascism, you are woefully historically ignorant. Go back to school, or, if you're already there, please take a history class so you don't annoy people who know what they're talking about.
Wow you are uninformed. The Kurds have had their own government already. Sunni Muslims have been targeted since Saddam was toppled. Do you not think this is at least a possible precursor to a civil war? The Kurds and the Sunni Muslims had more autonomy under Saddam's regime, do you think they will settle for being governed by a the Shiite majority? It's obvious that the Sunni Muslims are already not happy, and it's not likely the Kurds will be satisfied when their laws are disregarded.
Well, it would be what you call a "democratic republic". Perhaps you've heard of another? The idea is Iraq would't have all decisions made at the federal level, but by province or locally. That's how you can get disparate populations like, say, New York and Utah to live in the same country without killing each other. Obviously you haven't bothered to learn anything about how the new constitution is shaping up. But then, you don't know anything about your own country, so I'm not surprised.
So you say - I wonder who's really swallowing the propaganda here. If it really is a religion of peace maybe someone should point that out to the Muslims, as the don't seem to understand.
You are so naive. That is how we dealt with this before (FBI not regular cops) and we actually stopped a lot of potentially bad things from happening. How can you possibley ignore this fact. I don't see how you can support the present actions here and abroad when they have accomplished nothing.
Who's being naive? As far as I'm aware the FBI only stopped one group in New York after the first WTC bombing. There's no way the FBI can be everywhere at once - I'd rather the fight takes place in the Middle East than New York.
You are missing the point again. Not charging suspected terrorists is even worse. It's worse for our society. It's worse for our civil liberties. I guess our repsonse to fascism is more fascism.
No, you are missing the point. We're at war - these aren't ordinary crimes. In previous wars enemy spies and saboteurs were tried by the military. Civilian trials simply aren't set up to take national security into consideration.
Let me save you the time of waiting this out. It was a terrible mistake to go to Iraq.
You don't know that any more than supporters of the war think it's been a smashing success. Iraq will end up a stable democracy, the only question is what the cost is in terms of blood and money. The idea the country will descend into civil war is patently ridiculous, as there's no indication that's in the cards despite the hopes of the French media. As far as us bugging out... well, that would be a tragedy, but I'm optimistic that won't happen. Certainly it would be a grave mistake.
Let's go right to the book, shall we? Sura 9:73:
That's the shortest and most direct, but there are many more if you care to look instead of blindly accepting that "Religion of Peace" garbage.This will never happen and you must be the one wearing a tin foil hat if you beleive it. Even if there was a significant amount of Muslims that wanted to do this (and there isn't) they still wouldn't have a chance.
I never said they would succeed. My point is he's got a list of goals that's completely incompatible with my existance as a non-Muslim. I know that's a hard thing for secular hedonists in the West to understand, but just because we mostly sleep in on Sunday doesn't mean others don't take religion seriously enough to kill for it. Personally, as far as I'm concerned he can have Southern Europe, but we might as well oppose him now since conflict is inevitable.
Now, I'm not trying to say that every Muslim takes every line in the Koran as seriously as Bin Laden, the same way not very many Christians believe touching shit is a sin just because it says so in the Bible. But Bin Laden, well, the world simply isn't big enough for fanatical Muslims and free non-Muslims.
I'm not defending bin Laden, he's a scumbag, but he's certainly not capable of more than a few organized attacks against strategic targets
At some point he'll be capable of a few organized nuclear attacks against heavily populated targets. It may be next year or five years hence, or maybe even twenty, but as far as I'm concerned our security apparatus better be up to snuff by then.
The simplest answer to all this is to apprehend the terrorists before they strike with good intelligence. Blowing up thousands of innocent people and taking away Americans civil liberties isn't going to get us anywhere. In fact we seemed to be doing a better job when that's where our heads were at. Several attempted attacks were thwarted with good intel and good police work
Oh, sure, we'd all love to go back to 9/10/2001 and just have the cops deal with this. But that's not how these kinds of wars are fought. To win a war against suicidal terrorists you have to be ready to do things you don't want to tell your grandkids about. You and I simply don't have any way of knowing how many attacks were prevented through PATRIOT, methods completely outside the law, or even methods that would get you a docket in the Hague. I'm all for using the court system whenever we can, but open trials and "charge 'em or set 'em loose" rules can be very damaging to successful intelligence gathering.
Honestly, I don't know where, as a society, we need to draw the lines. But there's nothing in PATRIOT I can't live with given the threat.
As far as the war is concerned, it's an attempt by the President to tilt the playing field in our favor. We won't know if it worked for another generation, but it seems like a more reasonable play than sending tomahawks here and there every time we have an attack.
Sigh. I always hesitate to answer a question like that, since it's obvious you aren't actually looking for an answer. And where do you get off calling me "you people"? Is "you people" everyone who isn't a member of International ANSWER, or is it just me? Or is it some other grouping you can only see through tinfoil?
What do you really think he means when he exhorts his followers to "establish the rule of God on Earth"? I realize he makes the comment in the context of "liberation", but this is reference to a Muslim's duty to convert or destroy all infidels everywhere.
Bin Laden never said that. Bin Laden's goal is to eliminate any Western Influence in the Arab world. He has not planned (at least exlpicitly) to take over the world and I think he is smart enough to realize that that is not possible.
That's only in the tape he made for western consumption. In the tapes and letters to his followers he doesn't make any mention of ending the jihad. I would dismiss out of hand any promises he makes non-Muslims, since by his reconing there's nothing wrong with lying to us if it provides a tactical advantage.
The idea we will ever be able to peacefully coexist with his ilk is patently ridiculous. The Muslim Brotherhood, which is the progenitor of modern Islamic terrorism, provided a theological basis for their struggle. It's a mismash of thousand-year-old grievances, literal interpretation of 7th century directives, and looney conspiracy theories. You can't make peace with that.
If we were to withdraw completely from the Middle East today it would simply focus their attack on regaining all the land of the original Caliphate, which would include Spain and Southern Europe up to Vienna. If we gave them Europe they'd be back for more in a couple of years. This is the nature of fascism, which is the true nature of militant Islam. It's a fascist movement masquerading as a religion.
You have a rather limited view of AQ's goals. They aren't trying to goad our government into reactionary facism. They're goal is to destroy our civilization and replace it with a Taliban-style Islamic theocracy. They're way less subtle than you think they are. Bin Laden himself has spelled this all out on tape.
So it's quite an exageration to imply "they're winning" when our legal guarentees are pared a bit. If they "win" PATRIOT will seem like heaven.
There is a strong case to be made that the purpose of higher education is to sort people by intelligence. This is convenient for employers who aren't allowed, by law, to administer IQ tests. I think there's acutually some truth to the idea, but it's probably less true in the sciences.
In any event, I've hired quite a few programmers, and I don't see the degree as very usefull. If you want to be a programmer (as opposed to some kind of academic), you're better off getting a degree in math, physics, or EE.
I suppose if your time isn't worth anything these calculations work out better. The reason most people have a car is they would rather do a 40 minute commute by car as opposed to a 3 hour commute by bus-train-bus. Mass transit looks much better on paper than it does in reality. Here in the SF bay area we have a pretty servicable mass transit system, but by the time you add in the home-train and train-work legs of your journey you'll be shocked how much longer it all takes.
Mass transit is really only convenient where you have very high population densities, like NYC, London, and Tokyo. While it may serve the greater good in less dense cities, people who buy cars are making rational decisions.
I mean exactly that. I don't see any reason think the current antimatter production methods are the last word on the subject.
In 1945 they were using accelerometers to seperate U235 and U238, which was very inefficient. Today they use lasers to separate the isotopes at a tiny fraction of the former cost/pound (orders of magnitude). Why are you sure similar gains can't be made with antimatter?
I don't know how authoritative this link is, but if it can be believed the maximum theoretical efficiency of production would give you antiprotons at $5 million per gram using current energy prices. Clearly we won't ever get the maximum theoretical efficiency out of any process, but we may get close enough for non-state actors to produce a non-trivial amount.
But where would the money come from for those Leishmaniasis and Chagas treatments? You couldn't very well charge your customers the true cost - they can't even do that for AIDS drugs which have a much larger "customer" base. The way I see it, a new treatment for anything is progress, since it adds to the body of scientific knowledge. If the choice is between drug companies that turn out Viagra clones and no commercial drug development, I'll take the drug companies.
Of course you could have government funding of drug research. France, for example, does a lot of that (and with some success). But that model doesn't seem to be as productive as the capitalist one for research in general.
We've had some success here in the US with deals that go something like "if you're willing to do the research on this disease the taxpayers will pay for it and then allow you to keep the profit." That's not very popular with the voters, since they don't see why they should be charged twice, but at least you may end up with useful drugs.
The Orphan Drug Act was an attempt to address the problem, but it's been much abused. I know if it's still in effect or not.
I hope you are correct, although I don't see any reason why that must be so. I don't see why we couldn't have advances related specifically to antimatter.
Let me ask you this: If you were designing a rocket, which, let's face it, is always on the edge of just kinda blowing up, would you concentrate your efforts on dealing with hurricanes, or would you instead worry about things like added redundancy or crew safety? Every issue you address as an engineer puts constraints on the solutions you've devised for other problems. If waiting out hurricanes was such a big deal does it make more sense to change your craft (wich might cost billions) or launch it from somewhere without hurricanes?
Well, antimatter is pretty new stuff. We don't really know how hard it would be to produce if someone (a government or brilliant scientist) actually made a concerted effort to reduce production to an industrial process. Nukes are pretty hard to make since you need to get ahold of enriched uranium somehow. Presumably antimatter could be made without exotic, traceable materials.
Oh, and I'm not too worried about lost Soviet nukes. You need the same infrastructure you used to make them if you want to keep them working for any length of time. After fifteen years "in the wild", I doubt a lost nuke would actually work.
I've never read the book you're citing, but it should be obvious to any fool antimatter is dangerous stuff. And I wasn't talking about "this stage of its development". Right now it's pretty irrelevent except to researchers looking into basic physics, since you get such a trivial amount for lots of input energy. But there really isn't any reason technical hurdles in its production couldn't be overcome. OK, so a gram is an inconceivable amount of antimatter due to the amount of energy it contains. Personally, I think if we ever get fusion power working it wouldn't be inconceivable at all, but for the moment we'll stipulate our budding terroris is gonna make his antimatter from gas. It's pretty plentiful in the Middle East, which is where he's likely to be from anyway.
Let's say you developed a process that could convert gas to antimatter with a 10% efficency. I know that's a pretty high efficency, but I figure a really efficent engine can get 30%, so it's not out of the realm of possibility for a process that's purely imaginary at this point.
And further lets suppose you were rich or supported by a state and could process 10,000 gallons of gas a day. After a year you have a bomb with the equivalent energy of 365,000 gallons of gas.
By my calculation the energy contained in 365,000 gallons of gas is on the order of 10 megatons. Not an unheard of energy release in a weapon. But it does point out the problem - antimatter is the ultimate in energy storage. If you have an energy source which you can tap at non-trivial efficencies as well as a means to store the product, you have everything you need to make the ultimate weapon. And, unlike nuclear weapons antimatter bombs would be easy to set off. If you could make a containment vessel, you could certainly get it to fail.
Yeah, well, apparently unlike you science isn't a religion for me. It's a tool. I'm sure there are scientists out there of the idiot savant variety who would go ahead with that kind of research without thinking through the implications. I just hope cracking that nut is too hard for mere mortals. More efficient spaceflight isn't worth taking that kind of risk.
Yeah, and I hope it never gets easier to make and store. Antimatter would be the ultimate WMD - if it ever gets to the point where a small group of whackos could synthesize a gram or two and contain it in a refridgerator-size vessel civilization is pretty much over.
These kinds of structures need to be maintained at enormous expense. You think painting your house is expensive? I say sell the VAB, if a buyer can be found. NASA isn't funded well enough that we can maintain monuments to old programs.
As far as it being "one-of-a-kind", it isn't the Mona Lisa or Ark of the Covenant. If we get rid of it and find we need it after all we can rebuild it. But consider the Shuttle has been the only game in town for 30 years now, even though NASA's had seven or eight "replacements" suck up lots of money and then die a quiet death. The American people have lost interest in space (and who can blame them?), so NASA's budget is unlikely to stay as large as it is, let alone get larger. It will be generations (if ever) before we need a building like that again. Sure, we can use it for CEV, but we could use something else for less money. Horizontal assembly would probably be cheaper.
Personally, I'm convinced the future of manned spaceflight is in smaller SSTO craft. In that case you'll take off and land in the same place at a high frequency, so the craft will be out-of-doors when not undergoing maintennence. It will be much smaller than the Shuttle, so for maintennence a smaller building will suffice.
I'm ashamed to admit I got that one. The question I have is - did you have to look at the DVD case or did you actually remember the word "Navi" off the top of your head?
Personally, I'm looking forward to skull guns. I want to have a way to deal with all those geeks who are bumping into me while calculating the product of 356.31 and 2.4168 instead of looking where they're going.
If 20% of the Japanese population is over 65 I would say there's a pretty large labor pool for all the mall security jobs. I'm not sure the robot can compete.
That's totally irrelevent. The Senate wasn't designed or ever intended to be a body elected by strict population representation. Whether people in the more populous states are upset is entirely beside the point. That's why we have the House of Representatives.
Also, your cite doesn't support your argument. The fact that Democratic Senators represent more people than Republican Senators doesn't give you any information about the relative numbers of Democrats and Republicans in the population.
So there would suddenly be a lot of constituents who might be slightly pissed that they no longer have representation in the Senate.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Do you mean to say people are only represented if they get their way? The Republicans are in the majority - they are simply exercising the powers of a majority party. My point was by overusing the filibuster the Democrats are starting to look petulant about losing the election - it gives the Republicans political cover to take it away.