I think the 60 gallon figure comes from the speed of the supply line. Somebody just divided out the amount we could advance per day in Iraq by the rated mileage and got a sixty gallon tank. Even in Iraq, which is flat and has good roads, armored columns would start to outrun supply lines if they traveled more than about 60 miles per day.
In actual field experience, the M-1 gets about three gallons per mile, or about half its rated mileage.
The best papers I've ever read on this subject were Jerry Pournelle's Getting To Space and The SSX Concept. Basically he makes a simlar argument in the context of SSTO. The problem with the way we do space right now is it's just too expensive to do anything useful. Things we could do like space-based solar power and asteroid mining are now totally impractical because it costs, what, $20k to put a kilogram in orbit? As long as that's the case we're pretty much stuck with LEO vanity projects. We can't even afford to go back to the moon.
Getting the $/kg to LEO down should be the single-minded thrust of the US space program in the coming years.
Despite the mystique of piloted vehicles, there is nothing very difficult, algorithmically, about running a sub or plane autonomously. The only reason we haven't done more of it yet is because we've only had sufficiently compact, powerful, computers for a decade or so. But I expect in the next decade we'll see a whole lot more of it, making nonsense of traditional notions of borders.
This is wrong.. UAVs have a significantly higher accident rate than piloted aircraft because human pilots are better at takeoffs and landings, especially in a crosswind. And it's not a hardware problem, either. We simply don't know how to write software that's as good as a person is when it comes to the task of landing an aircraft. Are UAV autopilots good enough for what they do? Sure, because nobody dies when they crash. You won't see commercial airliners taking off or landing on autopilot.
Also, borders have nothing to do with technology. They're legal concepts. You are not going to get away with sending stealth aircraft over other countries' borders. For one thing "stealth" doesn't mean invisible, even to radar, and for another even if the country in question can't shoot your aircraft down you've just committed an act of war they will be compelled to respond to, one way or another.
Not enough young people are embracing computing, often because they are leery of being branded nerds.
Or, more likely, they don't want to move to India to get a job. I have a programming job right now, but a lot of developers I know are sitting at home in their underwear drinking beer and watching TV all day because they can't even get an interview, let alone a job. Of course some of that's the economy, but offshoring isn't going away. When the economy picks back up it seems likely that most of the new programming jobs will be in other countries.
Here in California we passed a law that requires any business or establishment to post signs if anything on the premises is a carcinogen. What happened was every single business in the state posted a sign. Legitimately, too, since lots of things we use on a daily basis are slightly carcinogenic, like gasoline and paint. Now everyone just ignores the signs because they're everywhere.
If you actually had something dangerous people would ignore your sign unless you put something like "On these premises there's something really, really carcinogenic. We're not kidding, either. Don't push your luck."
I realize that building a nationwide network will cost a small fortune and take time, but that's what it's going to take.
It's not a small fortune by any means. It's a very, very large fortune. In the first place, national spectrum, assuming you could get it at all, would cost something on the order of twenty billion dollars. Then you'd have to start installing hardware. The cell company for which I work spent something like four billion dollars last year upgrading our network just in California and Nevada. What is that, like 10% of the country? And we'll spend even more building out LTE.
The cellcos are never going to be turned into commodity bandwidth providers except, perhaps, by government fiat. It wouldn't save you much anyway - most of money we spend on infrastructure is going to handle increased call volume. As long as the call volume increases like it has in recent years the commodity will be in short supply, and the infrastructure costs are going to be paid by the customers one way or another.
Brilliant idea. Take people who don't measure up to everyone's expectations, and heap shame on them in the one place where they can take a break from it all. Microsoft should also file for a patent on a method to lose money.
The US has a "first to invent" system instead of "first to file". As long as Eolas can show they "invented" their system before Microsoft they're okay on the timing. Since Microsoft paid out a half billion dollars I'm assuming they were able to show that in court.
Not only that, but $31m is petty cash for Microsoft. Further up the thread people are claiming the cumulative losses on xbox are $8bn, which puts that in perspective.
But it does make you wonder whether if the xbox was some gigantic multi-year mistake or if Microsoft is reading from Hollywood's book. You know, realizing profits in a Cayman Islands subsidiary so they don't have to pay taxes.
From my perspective, one of the key advantages to open source software is it will make busting these kinds of patents a whole lot easier. There's almost certainly prior art somewhere for nearly every software patent on the books, but it's all in unsearchable proprietary code that may or may not have been deleted years ago. As more code gets added to sourceforge and other repositories it's going to get a lot easier to say "Hey, this thing you patented was done twenty years ago in an obscure open source project nobody uses anymore. And I can prove it."
I saw that. But the point doesn't change - a Pegasus system is only practical for launching small payloads into LEO because the carrier aircraft has a limited capacity. Scaled is using a similar system to launch a larger payload, but only because they're not going into orbit.
Pegasus needs a B-52 heavy bomber to carry it and puts less than half a ton in LEO. Orbital would build a bigger Pegasus if they could, but they can't because there's nothing that can carry it. Building a carrier aircraft that would be able to get a big enough booster to launch something like Space Ship II would be ridiculously expensive if it could be done at all.
But that's not the major hurdle anyway. Pegasus is normally used to launch satellites - things that aren't designed to return, and actually getting it into orbit is the easy problem to solve. Finding a way to dump energy when you want to come back is a big problem. They could go with some kind of ceramic like Rockwell did for the Space Shuttle, but that would increase the weight considerably, making an even bigger carrier necessary, and it would be complicated by the movable wing system. There are other potential solutions - big balloons to spread the heat over a wide area, active cooling, atmospheric skipping... but none of them have been demonstrated in practice, so who knows how much it would cost to develop a new reentry concept.
Of course, if you spend enough time and money eventually you can get everything to work out. But I don't think they have that kind of money, and they'll almost certainly be beaten to the punch buy other companies with a more conventional capsule design.
Three or Four will probably make the step of getting into a proper orbit.
I doubt it. I really hope they can do something like that, but I just don't see it happening as an extension of this project. You need, literally, ten times the energy to get something into orbit vs what they've accomplished to date, and all the thorny orbital issues remain, most notably a way to dump all that energy on reentry. If Virgin does end up selling orbital joyrides the hardware is likely to be radically different from the X-15 style ship they just unveiled.
I'm not sure what you mean by "stir up the industry a bit". GE is far from being just a finance company - they make everything from MRI machines to jet engines. As a result there is precious little NBC could report on that doesn't affect some part of the parent company. I'd much rather have a cable company running the network than a company that has a financial interest in selling fighters to despots, say, or getting favorable banking legislation through Congress.
The most Comcast can do is somehow favor their new pet network, which doesn't seem like that big of a deal now that everyone has 150 channels.
Heh heh. I hate to break this too you, but if you're running Ubuntu... you are a geek. But it is kind of weird the cable modem doesn't work - I used to run Fedora without any problem, and I have Comcast.
Oh, I'm willing to at least look at most things. It's not that I only look at sources I consider reliable, it's that the source you've cited is notably unreliable. As you say, you don't know me from Adam. But I wonder if you can follow the argument he's making well enough to spot flaws, or if you're trusting the analysis as written.
"Temporarily" is also a method for large organizations to fire someone without taking the PR hit when the scandal is hot news. I'd be willing to bet money he steps down permanently in a month or two.
I doubt that. Reputation is everything for scientists, and the revelation of his misdeeds has blackened his reputation forever. Far from having "pull", he's going to be radioactive - nobody will want to work with him.
That's the guy. At the time, Mann refused to release his data and refused to release the methodology behind the creation of the graph. Years later it turned out if you use Gaussian noise for your temperature input you get a graph with the same hockey stick shape.
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I think the 60 gallon figure comes from the speed of the supply line. Somebody just divided out the amount we could advance per day in Iraq by the rated mileage and got a sixty gallon tank. Even in Iraq, which is flat and has good roads, armored columns would start to outrun supply lines if they traveled more than about 60 miles per day.
In actual field experience, the M-1 gets about three gallons per mile, or about half its rated mileage.
The best papers I've ever read on this subject were Jerry Pournelle's Getting To Space and The SSX Concept. Basically he makes a simlar argument in the context of SSTO. The problem with the way we do space right now is it's just too expensive to do anything useful. Things we could do like space-based solar power and asteroid mining are now totally impractical because it costs, what, $20k to put a kilogram in orbit? As long as that's the case we're pretty much stuck with LEO vanity projects. We can't even afford to go back to the moon.
Getting the $/kg to LEO down should be the single-minded thrust of the US space program in the coming years.
Anybody who's ever worked a union job can tell you it doesn't happen because your coworkers will beat the shit out of you.
This is wrong.. UAVs have a significantly higher accident rate than piloted aircraft because human pilots are better at takeoffs and landings, especially in a crosswind. And it's not a hardware problem, either. We simply don't know how to write software that's as good as a person is when it comes to the task of landing an aircraft. Are UAV autopilots good enough for what they do? Sure, because nobody dies when they crash. You won't see commercial airliners taking off or landing on autopilot.
Also, borders have nothing to do with technology. They're legal concepts. You are not going to get away with sending stealth aircraft over other countries' borders. For one thing "stealth" doesn't mean invisible, even to radar, and for another even if the country in question can't shoot your aircraft down you've just committed an act of war they will be compelled to respond to, one way or another.
Or, more likely, they don't want to move to India to get a job. I have a programming job right now, but a lot of developers I know are sitting at home in their underwear drinking beer and watching TV all day because they can't even get an interview, let alone a job. Of course some of that's the economy, but offshoring isn't going away. When the economy picks back up it seems likely that most of the new programming jobs will be in other countries.
I really like this idea, especially the name.
Here in California we passed a law that requires any business or establishment to post signs if anything on the premises is a carcinogen. What happened was every single business in the state posted a sign. Legitimately, too, since lots of things we use on a daily basis are slightly carcinogenic, like gasoline and paint. Now everyone just ignores the signs because they're everywhere.
If you actually had something dangerous people would ignore your sign unless you put something like "On these premises there's something really, really carcinogenic. We're not kidding, either. Don't push your luck."
It's not a small fortune by any means. It's a very, very large fortune. In the first place, national spectrum, assuming you could get it at all, would cost something on the order of twenty billion dollars. Then you'd have to start installing hardware. The cell company for which I work spent something like four billion dollars last year upgrading our network just in California and Nevada. What is that, like 10% of the country? And we'll spend even more building out LTE.
The cellcos are never going to be turned into commodity bandwidth providers except, perhaps, by government fiat. It wouldn't save you much anyway - most of money we spend on infrastructure is going to handle increased call volume. As long as the call volume increases like it has in recent years the commodity will be in short supply, and the infrastructure costs are going to be paid by the customers one way or another.
I wasn't talking about kids as a group. I was talking about fat people.
Brilliant idea. Take people who don't measure up to everyone's expectations, and heap shame on them in the one place where they can take a break from it all. Microsoft should also file for a patent on a method to lose money.
The US has a "first to invent" system instead of "first to file". As long as Eolas can show they "invented" their system before Microsoft they're okay on the timing. Since Microsoft paid out a half billion dollars I'm assuming they were able to show that in court.
Not only that, but $31m is petty cash for Microsoft. Further up the thread people are claiming the cumulative losses on xbox are $8bn, which puts that in perspective.
But it does make you wonder whether if the xbox was some gigantic multi-year mistake or if Microsoft is reading from Hollywood's book. You know, realizing profits in a Cayman Islands subsidiary so they don't have to pay taxes.
From my perspective, one of the key advantages to open source software is it will make busting these kinds of patents a whole lot easier. There's almost certainly prior art somewhere for nearly every software patent on the books, but it's all in unsearchable proprietary code that may or may not have been deleted years ago. As more code gets added to sourceforge and other repositories it's going to get a lot easier to say "Hey, this thing you patented was done twenty years ago in an obscure open source project nobody uses anymore. And I can prove it."
I saw that. But the point doesn't change - a Pegasus system is only practical for launching small payloads into LEO because the carrier aircraft has a limited capacity. Scaled is using a similar system to launch a larger payload, but only because they're not going into orbit.
Pegasus needs a B-52 heavy bomber to carry it and puts less than half a ton in LEO. Orbital would build a bigger Pegasus if they could, but they can't because there's nothing that can carry it. Building a carrier aircraft that would be able to get a big enough booster to launch something like Space Ship II would be ridiculously expensive if it could be done at all.
But that's not the major hurdle anyway. Pegasus is normally used to launch satellites - things that aren't designed to return, and actually getting it into orbit is the easy problem to solve. Finding a way to dump energy when you want to come back is a big problem. They could go with some kind of ceramic like Rockwell did for the Space Shuttle, but that would increase the weight considerably, making an even bigger carrier necessary, and it would be complicated by the movable wing system. There are other potential solutions - big balloons to spread the heat over a wide area, active cooling, atmospheric skipping... but none of them have been demonstrated in practice, so who knows how much it would cost to develop a new reentry concept.
Of course, if you spend enough time and money eventually you can get everything to work out. But I don't think they have that kind of money, and they'll almost certainly be beaten to the punch buy other companies with a more conventional capsule design.
I doubt it. I really hope they can do something like that, but I just don't see it happening as an extension of this project. You need, literally, ten times the energy to get something into orbit vs what they've accomplished to date, and all the thorny orbital issues remain, most notably a way to dump all that energy on reentry. If Virgin does end up selling orbital joyrides the hardware is likely to be radically different from the X-15 style ship they just unveiled.
Why wouldn't you just print the scaffold at the same time you're printing everything else? Seems like you could make it as complicated as necessary.
I'm not sure what you mean by "stir up the industry a bit". GE is far from being just a finance company - they make everything from MRI machines to jet engines. As a result there is precious little NBC could report on that doesn't affect some part of the parent company. I'd much rather have a cable company running the network than a company that has a financial interest in selling fighters to despots, say, or getting favorable banking legislation through Congress.
The most Comcast can do is somehow favor their new pet network, which doesn't seem like that big of a deal now that everyone has 150 channels.
Heh heh. I hate to break this too you, but if you're running Ubuntu... you are a geek. But it is kind of weird the cable modem doesn't work - I used to run Fedora without any problem, and I have Comcast.
Comcast is too large? You realize the part they're buying was owned by Vivendi and GE, right, two of the biggest companies in the world?
Oh, I'm willing to at least look at most things. It's not that I only look at sources I consider reliable, it's that the source you've cited is notably unreliable. As you say, you don't know me from Adam. But I wonder if you can follow the argument he's making well enough to spot flaws, or if you're trusting the analysis as written.
realclimate.org is a completely discredited source, in my opinion. You'll have to do better than that.
"Temporarily" is also a method for large organizations to fire someone without taking the PR hit when the scandal is hot news. I'd be willing to bet money he steps down permanently in a month or two.
I doubt that. Reputation is everything for scientists, and the revelation of his misdeeds has blackened his reputation forever. Far from having "pull", he's going to be radioactive - nobody will want to work with him.
That's the guy. At the time, Mann refused to release his data and refused to release the methodology behind the creation of the graph. Years later it turned out if you use Gaussian noise for your temperature input you get a graph with the same hockey stick shape.