The goal is to provide stunt rides into the upper atmosphere for about the cost of a luxury ocean cruise.
Are you being deliberately obtuse for trolling purposes, or is your understanding of technological advancement really that lacking? Do you think the commercial air transportation system we have today sprang into being overnight? Here's how it happened. The Wright brothers developed powered flight. A few other intrepid entrepreneurs such as Glenn Curtis improved on the basic invention, but it was still not ready for prime time. The $25,000 Orteig prize was offered to the first person to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. The prize was offered by businessmen such as hotel owners, with the long term goal of making fast, long distance air travel a possibility. They understood that a technology must crawl before it can walk, and walk before it can run. Charles Lindbergh won that prize in 1927, just 24 years after the first short powered flight at Kitty Hawk. Soon, there were barnstormers selling "stunt rides" from county fairs and farmer's fields to those who were excited about the new technology and wanted to participate. The US Postal Service started using airplanes to deliver the mail. Then, and only then, was the technology mature enough to start an airline industry.
Just as the internet was used for pr0n before it was stable enough and pervasive enough for e-commerce, the first citizens into space will be tourists. But the technology developed for safe and low cost space tourism will be the stepping stone that will develop into a burgeoning industry with companies launching satellites that most medium sized companies can afford, manufacturing in microgravity, etc.
I don't have $20 million to spend for a few days in space, but I'd be willing to spend $10,000 for a few hours that I'll never forget. You still get a few minutes of microgravity and that wonderful view of the earth as a planet. Check out the images from the previous test flights at www.scaled.com.
Luddites such as yourself are free to stay at home and fire off sarcastic messages to Slashdot while the rest of us take our fledgling first steps to the stars.
showing up in a Long-EZE is probably a good way to get a good parking spot.
Maybe. But it'll probably be a lot harder to convince anyone that I'm just a transient pilot passing through, and am not there as a geek tourist for the big event.
I'm looking forward to the true commercialization of space, that is long overdue. I believe this is the event that starts it all. Kudos to Pete Diamandis for having the vision to dream up the Ansari X-Prize, and the fortitude to work hard to have it funded. These are indeed exciting times.
I had already read the warning of the airport closure. That just goes to show what a big event this is. Mojave is a public use airport. They don't just close those for a few days to hold a bake sale or something.
I was planning on arriving a few days early and maybe seeing if I could get involved, even in a tiny way. If not, I could always soak up the environment. If you're an airplane nut, there's a lot of neat stuff in Mojave. For a canard aircraft enthusiast, it's sort of like Mecca.
I'd probably find someplace to camp in a tiny bivy sack in the desert, because I like doing that sort of thing. And even if Mojave is closed, I could always fly into Tehachapi, about 20 miles away.
Not most folks cup of tea, but a pretty good geek vacation.
By my uninformed way of thinking, Paul Allen helped found Microsoft and was therefore analogous to the guy who opened the gates of Hell for the coming apocalypse. But my opinion of Allen has changed radically. Even if he has an ultimate profit motive for commercializing space, his investment in the Scaled Composites Ansari X-Prize hardware is a very good thing. He also gets a major boost in the ratings for handing SETI a big pile of cash for the Allen Telescope Array. Soon, SETI won't need to beg for time on the Arecibo dish, and they can look where they want with the new steerable dishes, instead of where ever Arecibo is pointed.
People are like tribbles. If you feed people, you get more people. Harsh, but I think true. That's not to say that feeding people isn't a noble venture, especially if there is an effort to control overpopulation in deserts that can't support human life. But the goal isn't to see how many people we can put on the earth.
On the other hand, taking the first real steps into space will pay long term benefits to all humanity. And by "real", I mean economically viable, commercial ventures. Not some "what's the most dangerous and expensive path to space" government pork project. I intend to offense to NASA engineers or their Russian counterparts, but governments just aren't very good at this sort of thing.
The test pilot will probably be Mike Melvill or Brian Binnie. There are not many test pilots in their 60s. Mike Melvill is a dude and a half. Both he and Brian Binnie are very capable test pilots.
The SpaceShipOne uses a safe design for the solid rocket engine. Burt Rutan has has designed more aircraft than probably anyone alive, and to date, nobody has ever been hurt in any of his many flight test programs. This isn't as safe as driving a car, but this is not some wacky stunt by someone with half an idea. If Burt is willing to risk the life of his very good long time friend Mike Melvill, you can be sure every i is dotted and every t is crossed.
I hope you were referring to the two small sonic books that SpaceShipOne makes on reentry. The SS1 rocket design is a very safe solid rocket system using rubber as the fuel and nitrous oxide as the oxidizer. It's been tested as well as it can be, both on the ground and in flight. So far, zero problems.
Yes, the Russian tourist flights were commercial flights, but they were done by a government. This is the first private venture into space. In a year or so, when the technology is more established, it will be possible to go into space for A LOT less than the $20 million that the Russians have been charging. The goal is to provide space tourism for about the cost of a luxury ocean cruise.
SpaceShipOne uses a custom developed avionics package and it is not based on Windows so it didn't "blue-screen" in that sense. The lift vehicle, White Knight uses an identical system. The design intent was to allow cross training, so time spent flying White Knight will train for SpaceShipOne flights.
The test pilot when the SS1 avionics required rebooting, Mike Melvill, is a VERY capable pilot. In short, he don't need no steenking avionics. All the Scaled team consists of interesting and capable people. They're the cream of the aviation crop.
I'm seriously thinking about flying my Long-EZ (another Rutan design) to Mojave to see the magic. This is going to be so cool.
And as for 'international law,' it doesn't apply if we don't sign it.
Excellent reasoning, Saddam. Time to crawl back in your spider hole.
All countries, including the US, need allies and positive regard from other countries. Given the infantile foreign policy of the US lately, perhaps a childhood analogy is in order. Unilaterally invading a country is like leaving a big doodie in the international sand box. People tend not to be your friends and they don't want to play with you anymore if you don't play nice.
It may do well in your culture, it may not do that well in others. The original story and question related to the UK, not to the USA.
Despite the reputation the US has for being a shoot-from-the-hip, violence obsessed society, US crime rates have actually been decreasing for many years. That's not to say that violent crime isn't a problem anywhere in the US. There are some bad neighborhoods. They're mostly urban areas. A lot of the violence here is drug related. Some of it is gang related. But I believe that even the larger cities in the US are mostly safe.
The geek worried about being mugged in the UK may have a serious problem, at least according to this article which indicates UK crime rates have risen sharply:
I intentionally avoided sensational sources of crime data. That obviously excluded all pro-gun and anti-gun sites. Relative comparisons within a country are not useful for this discussion. I tried to find data on per capita crimes for different countries. I couldn't find any, but I know the truth is out there. (TM) I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the US has a relatively high crime rate. The reverse wouldn't surprise me too much either.
I found an article claiming Canada's crime rate has been increasing. I've visited the Toronto area, and the Canadians I met were very nice. I know all societies have criminals, but I can't imagine Canadian criminals. We could learn a thing or two from our neighbors to the north. I wish our society was as polite. Their streets are cleaner too. That's a big plus for me, because I really hate litter. One of these days I'm going to see someone litter and it's going to make me so mad I kill them.
I already discussed the fact that the statistic about high crime rates correlating with gun control is misleading, like most statistics bandied about in emotional discussions. I spoke quite a bit about crime existing before gun laws, so gun laws didn't cause the high crime rates. But they do disarm those who have a right to protect themselves and the people they love. Laws that restrict gun ownership also encourage crime by ensuring that all of the law abiding citizens will be unarmed victims.
People in areas with less crime are not likely to be scared into passing gun restricting laws. They are also more accustomed to self reliance, so they are less likely to expect a police officer to protect them. Obviously the police can't protect people in sparse rural areas, but given the short time required to commit a crime, urban police are not much more effective at protecting citizens either, much less preventing crime.
The problem is crime. Crime is perpetrated by criminals. If you want to stop crime, stop criminals. Early social intervention is probably the best way to do that, but it isn't a simple fix. Guns are not the problem. A gun is a tool. Even if it was eventually possible to eliminate guns, there would still be violent criminals. Just as regions with fewer guns have the same suicide rates, just fewer suicides using guns. Baning guns doesn't solve any problems, and can make the situation worse in areas where there is already criminal activity.
I am not saying it is unimportant when seen in the light of US culture. The asker of the original question however lives in the UK, not the USA. There it would be better to apply the local culture also
Perhaps. But I think the ideas embodied in the 2nd Amendment of the United States Constitution would be well applied universally. I realize the right to keep and bear arms is not recognized in all countries. Far from it. But the United States Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the US Constitution) does not grant rights. It acknowledges rights. The difference is, no government should have the ability to withhold these rights because they are not granted by any government. These are inalienable rights that exist for all free people. The 2nd Amendment recognizes the right to bear arms. The purposes are many, including personal defense, defense of a state from foreign aggression, and protection of the citizens from an oppressive or tyrranical government. The latter two reasons are why the term militia specifically appears in the 2nd Amendment. Citizens need to be able to provide a credible and effective armed deterence if needed. The 2nd Amendment does not recognize the right to hunt or target practice. The right to bear arms is not restricted to "sporting use". It seems obvious that the intention was for American citizens to be able to protect themselves adequately, even if their adversary was their federal government. Banning miltary style weapons is clearly not consistent with the 2nd Amendment.
After more than two centuries, the United States Constitution is still a collection of radical and revolutionary ideas. It has withstood the test of time, because the ideas of liberty, freedom, and justice are timeless.
There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap box, ballot box, jury box and ammo box. Use in that order.
If other countries have a good method of providing for the protection of their citizens from criminals, foreign aggresors or the tyrrany of their own government, good for them. The 2nd Amendment has proven to be invaluable to US citizens in these matters, and we are reluctant to abandon the inalienable right that it recognizes.
For what I can see, you are making the point that cities with strict gun controlls have generally a higher crimerate in the USA. Lets just assume this is true (I do not know, but it sounds likely), the questions remain, are the two actually related directly, and if so, what is cause and what is effect here.
It's true. The areas of the US with the highest crime rates have the most restrictive gun laws. Crime (both violent and nonviolent) have been declining in the US for the last nine years, despite appearances in the news media.
As I said, I think the relationship is as follows:
Crime increases.
Citizens advocate gun control believing it will reduce criminals' access to guns.
Crime increases further because all victims are now unarmed.
I don't believe gun control causes crime by itself. I think crime is a social phenomenon with many interdependent causes. But in a high crime area, disarming the noncriminals only makes matters worse for society. Outlawing guns allows criminals to operate without concern for which of the potential victims might be armed. So even if you don't carry a gun in either case, you are still safer being unarmed in a society that allows handguns to be carried for defense.
Guns have prevented a lot of crime, but these situations are non-events because a crime didn't occur. They are therefore not reported. Nobody records non-crimes. There is no reliable statistical information for crimes prevented, so this important fact about gun ownership usually isn't considered when enacting anti-gun laws.
For Americans, the 2nd Amendment to the United States Constitution recognizes the right to bear arms. This is an integral portion of the document that is the basis for our government and legal system for a good reason. "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" is in no way ambiguous or open to alternative interpretations, again for a very good reason. I believe it applies as much today as it did when it was written 227 years ago.
I can't address the issue of Spain vs. the Netherlands, where you claim fewer guns results in increased safety. But I can tell you that in the United States, gun ownership has a strong corellation with reduced crime, including violent crime. The effect goes beyond the person who owns a gun and extends to the entire community, so you don't need to own a gun, just don't prohibit your neighbors from owning guns. This fact is often not understood by people who don't want to own a gun and therefore feel safer if nobody owned a gun. They're missing the rather obvious point that criminals don't obey gun laws and it isn't possible to make guns disappear by legislation. Even if it was possible, criminals would simply use other weapons.
However, even though I believe in the right to own guns, the statistics are probably misleading. US cities with high crime rates try to solve crime problems by outlawing or restricting guns. This only makes matters worse, because criminals don't obey gun laws. All it does is disarm the victims. But these were generally high crime areas before the gun restrictions. It seems likely that high crime areas ban guns, and less true that banning guns causes high crime rates. The high crime rates generally existed in those US cities before guns were banned. But it is true that crime rates increased in US cities where guns were banned. If you were considering a career as a mugger or burglar, wouldn't you appreciate knowing your victims would be unarmed?
The comment that a concealed weapon discovered by a mugger might cause the mugger to feel threatened and therefore more likely to act in a violent manner totally misses the point. If you think carrying a handgun will somehow bestow magical protective powers, please do not carry one. You will only supply guns to criminals. My personal solution to urban violence is to live in one of the areas that has a low crime rate. It's also an area with very reasonable gun laws. I don't carry a gun. But if I ever felt threatened enough to carry my 10 mm Glock, a mugger can feel as threatened as he likes, because he'll become aware of the fact that his victim is armed about a second before he receives two projectiles in the center of his mass, each 180 grains, with 700 foot pounds of energy.
I've been a vegan for over 20 years out of respect for all living things. But if you threaten my life or that of someone I love, you're dead as fried chicken.
I can't believe people accept the myth that the police will protect you. It flies in the face of all the facts. But it does fit nicely with our society's increasing need for specialization. We are increasingly hiring people to do everything we need done. There are fundamental aspects of our lives that we cannot and should not defer to others. Personal protection is one good example.
You forgot about bone meal, blood meal, hair meal (for your chickens)... plus head and guts to feed your pets.
Forcing grazing animals like cows and chickens to be carnivors is now illegal after the big agribusiness companies were finally forced to acknowledge science and admit that such unnatural practices cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, aka "mad cow disease"), which is passed to people who consume the cows as vCJD, which is fatal. There is no cure, for cows or people. Of course, there is little enforcement and the laws are still widely ignored.
insulin for the diabetic friends
For about a decade, insulin has been almost exclusively provided by hard working recombinant DNA bacteria. This is actual human insulin, free of transgenic viruses and foreign proteins that trigger a human immune response.
We evolved with cows.
Not even close. In the span of time appropriate for a reference to evolution, it's true to say we evolved with plants. Evidence indicates that humans evolved eating mostly plants, with a small amount of animal protein, much like the diets of chimps, lowland mountain gorillas and baboons. Proto-humans are believed to have supplemented their primarily plant based diet with almost as much insect protein as protein from mammals. It would be almost as correct to say "I've been using a computer my entire adult life, so humans evolved to use computers", or "I've been eating pizza since 1970, so humans evolved to eat pizza." The association with eating cows goes back a few more generations, but not nearly enough to justify a connection with evolution.
From a health perspective, people eat far too much meat and milk. There are much healthier plant sources of protein. PETA is probably exagerating the energy difference between raising plants for humans versus raising plants for cattle to feed humans, but it's still true that an acre of crops can feed more people than the same acre could feed if routed through a cow. Reasonable estimates I've seen indicate a 7:1 advantage.
I own a small engineering company. Windows got the boot almost two years ago in favor of Xandros Linux. So far, it's been very good. We use Xandros Deluxe, which ships with CrossOver. We have no need for IE, Excel, Word, etc. The killer ap is QuickBooks, at least until there's a good Linux accounting application that imports QuickBooks data. We switched to the only version that is supported under CrossOver, QuickBooks 2000 Pro. It works, but just barely. The buttons are all hidden and it's a user interface mess. But the data seems very secure. If CrossOver is being tweaked to support specific major applications, as it seems to be, any chance you'll have good support for QuickBooks?
Two other issues. I've generally been happy with the generic support of Windows applications, including IrfanView, Garmin GPS software, etc. But stuff written in Delphi seems to work fine except for disk I/O, essentially rendering disabled demo software without the ability to load or save files. It seems like a CrossOver fix for this one specific problem might open up a lot of Delphi applications.
Overall, I'd like to see CrossOver as a way for people to migrate to Linux by enabling them to run custom software where there isn't a good open source solution, not as a method to keep running proprietary Microsoft applications instead of OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc. Yes, I know I'm in the minority with this opinion.
I dropped out of college to stop my brain from exploding when I went from a physics class that was full metric to an aerospace engineering course that was all 'english' measurement. When a prof or whatever popped up and said something about a 'slug' being an measurement of atmospheric pressure I thought I was going to die.
A slug is not a measure of atmospheric pressure. Pressure is force/area. A slug is the English unit of mass. One slug equals 14.59 kg.
Are you sure you dropped out because of the stress of using English and metric units?
There have been "it's just around the corner!" reports exactly like this one about solar cell tech for more than two decades.
Correct, but misleading. This is a semiconductor technology. It has the potential to obey Moore's Law. Power has been relatively cheap because we're fuelishly burning hydrocarbon reserves, so there has not been the same market incentive for solar cells that we've had for memory and processors. But an exponential growth rate still applies.
Wake me up when the reports are finally true and solar cell powered houses and cars are sold at prices an average consumer can afford...
Well, it won't be/. news then, will it?
The market ensures that this technology will happen in large scale at the consumer level, barring some new centralized power source such as nuclear fusion. If we were smart, we'd be investing a lot of money in alternative power technologies, (solar, fusion and others), instead of the government being the lackeys of the oil industry and spending a lot of tax dollars to protect a continued supply of oil. Research into alternative energy sources benefits all taxpayers. Protecting foreign oil assets uses tax dollars to benefit only a few energy company executives and sheiks, and even that benefit only exists for the very near future. It's an unfair and unwise use of tax dollars. As a technogeek, the inefficiency and short sightedness of the US energy policy offends me. The previous success of the US economy was based on free market driven technological innovation, not special interest enforcement of the status quo. The US will either look to the future and lead, or cling to the past and follow as others step up to the technological challenges.
Burt already said that the X-Prize design from Scaled Composites would not be a good choice for an orbital vehicle. The design doesn't adapt well to high velocity reentry. The SpaceShipOne is optimized for the X-Prize suborbital mission with low velocity reentry.
However, I think it would be a GREAT idea to call Scaled Composites and ask Burt to design and build a reusable spacecraft with orbital capabilities. Scaled's reputation is unmatched in the aerospace industry. You want it, they build it. It's almost always a matter of faster, better, cheaper - pick any two. Scaled Composites has managed to consistently deliver all three at the same time.
From the zoomed out view, the US shuttle design is not a bad concept. However, in many areas, NASA's design-by-commitee approach engineered them into corners. They did a great job of surmounting the resulting nearly insurmountable technical problems. Of course, they spent enormous amounts of money and time overcoming problems that a simpler and more clever design would have avoided.
In aviation, simpler is usually lighter which allows more payload. More importantly, the reduced complexity results in less stuff to break and a design that's easier to fully test, so it's safer and more reliable.
I respect the hard working people at NASA, and they deserve credit for their accomplishments. But having a government bureaucracy running a space program is invariably the most expensive path to space. The shuttle cost about a billion dollars for each launch. That's WAY too much. And their "smaller-faster-cheaper" unmanned program in the 1990s resulted in a high failure rate that was regarded as a poor return on the investment. They're now back to fewer unmanned missions with more attention to detail on each. So far, the results seem very good, but it's not cheap.
It's past time for entrepreneurial access to space, both manned and unmanned. The X-Prize is an excellent first step. It'll be exciting to see the commercial space industry grow, just as our grandparents saw the aviation industry grow in the period from 1930 to 1970. If we projected the commercialization of space onto the commercial aviation timeline, we're around 1926.
Scaled will win the X-Prize this year, probably this summer. Stay tuned. This is going to be very cool.
standard home user edition $129. well, why dont people just use windows directly?
I paid $79 for Xandros 1.0 Deluxe (not the standard version which is half that price because it doesn't include CrossOver). A year later I paid $39 for the upgrade to Xandros 2.0 Deluxe.
The office applications are FREE (as in beer and speech), thanks to OpenOffice.org, so no gun-to-your-head mandatory upgrades there.
Xandros allows installation to one business machine as well as your home PCs. Windoze charges for each and every box.
And finally, Windows sucks, is an Outlook worm magnet, and Microsoft is a convicted and unrepentent anti-competitive monopolist. I buy Xandros gladly. I only wish I didn't have to pay the MS Tax on my last notebook PC because I couldn't get good hardware without being forced to buy Windoze.
Xandros 1.0 (late 2002) would interface to a Windows network easier than a Windows box would. They removed automatic primary domain controller authentication when they created Xandros 2.0, launched early 2004. You can still authenticate, but it's a brief manual operation. They retargeted the standard version of Xandros at home users and moved automatic authentication to their newly launched business version, essentially creating home and business versions of Xandros, much as Windows XP has Home and Pro versions.
A lot of Xandros users (myself included) weren't too happy about the bifurcated product line for what seemed to be marketing reasons, but even worse was the way they neglected to tell anybody they removed a touted feature. I guess marketing people don't go out of their way to tell you when you AREN'T getting a feature. To their credit, they saw the user's point of view, and allowed a trade when the business version appeared about a month later.
The business version did away with a simple configuration screen that allowed Xandros 1.0 to serve as the primary domain controller, because all the server functions have been moved to the upcoming server version of Xandros, but there is a how-to that apparently allows any version of Xandros to operate as the primary domain controller.
All versions of Xandros are still very good at networking, despite the slight distribution of some of the features across three different commercial versions. Xandros desktop users expect the soon to be announced server version to be a rock solid secure Linux server platform with the Xandros ease of use, so even a MCSE couldn't screw it up.
You don't need to buy it. Just compile Debian Sid and buy Codeweaver...
And you won't have:
The excellent four-click Xandros installer
An autoconfiguration routine that knows almost all PC hardware
The very good Xandros File Manager
Drag and drop CD burning (with Ogg or MP3 encoding if you like) for audio or data CDs
Super easy networking, including automatic primary domain authentication
Etc., etc., etc.
I've been using Xandros for almost two years. Their motto is "It just works" for a good reason. It's not perfect, but it's close, and getting better every day. I think it's one of the OSS and commercial software combination success stories.
Have you even tried Xandros? Or is your motto, "Where do I want to troll today?"
I've been using Xandros exclusively for almost two years, and I live at my PC.
I think the Xandros idea is to provide a user interface experience that seems comfortable to people who have been using modern graphical user interfaces. They want to ease the transition to Linux for the average users (not just/. geeks), and I think they've done a good job.
Xandros doesn't exactly mimic Windows, but there are a lot of similarities. I think they picked the best elements of Windows and the Mac, and added their own user interface improvements. I hadn't used Windows XP before switching, and I hear it's pretty good, but Xandros was A LOT easier to use than any Windows I had ever used. To me, every time I wanted to change something, Windows made me feel like I was playing a game called "where did they hide this feature?". In Xandros, the configuration info is all logically organized in the Control Center.
Xandros would not be a good choice for a hardcore Linux command line commando, but that's obviously not their target customer. There are already plenty of distros for those people. Xandros is aiming at the larger market of people who just want to use their PCs for web browsing, email, photo editing, word processing, spreadsheets, etc. But you'll be glad when they convert those people because your mailbox won't be filled with Outlook worms and spam from zombied Windoze machines. Smile. It's a Good Thing.
I wanna load Linux on my laptop, but I have heard nightmare stories of trying to get wifi cards configured properly under Linux.
WiFi is getting a lot better under Linux. I haven't tried it with my notebook PC yet, but I will soon. I use Xandros Linux and it's pretty good about autodetecting lots of hardware. I'd recommend it as a distro that would be good for anyone switching for the first time, and wanting to do real world stuff with their PC instead of twiddling around trying to get Linux to work. They have a very active online user support forum that is a big help with issues like WiFi.
With any Linux distro, I'd advise doing a bit of Google research before buying hardware. In almost every hardware category, you will find stuff that works well with Linux, stuff that can be made to work with Linux if you have a day, and stuff that absolutely refuses to work with Linux. Why make it hard on yourself? Get the stuff that works with Linux and support companies that support Linux.
The Register makes a few well deserved snide remarks about Microsoft, and I recently noticed prominent Microsoft ads at the bottom of their pages. Is this some sort of evil Microsoft marketing plan to extend and embrace their enemies?
Slashdot Mirror
Are you being deliberately obtuse for trolling purposes, or is your understanding of technological advancement really that lacking? Do you think the commercial air transportation system we have today sprang into being overnight? Here's how it happened. The Wright brothers developed powered flight. A few other intrepid entrepreneurs such as Glenn Curtis improved on the basic invention, but it was still not ready for prime time. The $25,000 Orteig prize was offered to the first person to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. The prize was offered by businessmen such as hotel owners, with the long term goal of making fast, long distance air travel a possibility. They understood that a technology must crawl before it can walk, and walk before it can run. Charles Lindbergh won that prize in 1927, just 24 years after the first short powered flight at Kitty Hawk. Soon, there were barnstormers selling "stunt rides" from county fairs and farmer's fields to those who were excited about the new technology and wanted to participate. The US Postal Service started using airplanes to deliver the mail. Then, and only then, was the technology mature enough to start an airline industry.
Just as the internet was used for pr0n before it was stable enough and pervasive enough for e-commerce, the first citizens into space will be tourists. But the technology developed for safe and low cost space tourism will be the stepping stone that will develop into a burgeoning industry with companies launching satellites that most medium sized companies can afford, manufacturing in microgravity, etc.
I don't have $20 million to spend for a few days in space, but I'd be willing to spend $10,000 for a few hours that I'll never forget. You still get a few minutes of microgravity and that wonderful view of the earth as a planet. Check out the images from the previous test flights at www.scaled.com.
Luddites such as yourself are free to stay at home and fire off sarcastic messages to Slashdot while the rest of us take our fledgling first steps to the stars.
Maybe. But it'll probably be a lot harder to convince anyone that I'm just a transient pilot passing through, and am not there as a geek tourist for the big event.
I'm looking forward to the true commercialization of space, that is long overdue. I believe this is the event that starts it all. Kudos to Pete Diamandis for having the vision to dream up the Ansari X-Prize, and the fortitude to work hard to have it funded. These are indeed exciting times.
I was planning on arriving a few days early and maybe seeing if I could get involved, even in a tiny way. If not, I could always soak up the environment. If you're an airplane nut, there's a lot of neat stuff in Mojave. For a canard aircraft enthusiast, it's sort of like Mecca.
I'd probably find someplace to camp in a tiny bivy sack in the desert, because I like doing that sort of thing. And even if Mojave is closed, I could always fly into Tehachapi, about 20 miles away.
Not most folks cup of tea, but a pretty good geek vacation.
By my uninformed way of thinking, Paul Allen helped found Microsoft and was therefore analogous to the guy who opened the gates of Hell for the coming apocalypse. But my opinion of Allen has changed radically. Even if he has an ultimate profit motive for commercializing space, his investment in the Scaled Composites Ansari X-Prize hardware is a very good thing. He also gets a major boost in the ratings for handing SETI a big pile of cash for the Allen Telescope Array. Soon, SETI won't need to beg for time on the Arecibo dish, and they can look where they want with the new steerable dishes, instead of where ever Arecibo is pointed.
On the other hand, taking the first real steps into space will pay long term benefits to all humanity. And by "real", I mean economically viable, commercial ventures. Not some "what's the most dangerous and expensive path to space" government pork project. I intend to offense to NASA engineers or their Russian counterparts, but governments just aren't very good at this sort of thing.
The SpaceShipOne uses a safe design for the solid rocket engine. Burt Rutan has has designed more aircraft than probably anyone alive, and to date, nobody has ever been hurt in any of his many flight test programs. This isn't as safe as driving a car, but this is not some wacky stunt by someone with half an idea. If Burt is willing to risk the life of his very good long time friend Mike Melvill, you can be sure every i is dotted and every t is crossed.
Yes, the Russian tourist flights were commercial flights, but they were done by a government. This is the first private venture into space. In a year or so, when the technology is more established, it will be possible to go into space for A LOT less than the $20 million that the Russians have been charging. The goal is to provide space tourism for about the cost of a luxury ocean cruise.
The test pilot when the SS1 avionics required rebooting, Mike Melvill, is a VERY capable pilot. In short, he don't need no steenking avionics. All the Scaled team consists of interesting and capable people. They're the cream of the aviation crop.
I'm seriously thinking about flying my Long-EZ (another Rutan design) to Mojave to see the magic. This is going to be so cool.
Excellent reasoning, Saddam. Time to crawl back in your spider hole.
All countries, including the US, need allies and positive regard from other countries. Given the infantile foreign policy of the US lately, perhaps a childhood analogy is in order. Unilaterally invading a country is like leaving a big doodie in the international sand box. People tend not to be your friends and they don't want to play with you anymore if you don't play nice.
Despite the reputation the US has for being a shoot-from-the-hip, violence obsessed society, US crime rates have actually been decreasing for many years. That's not to say that violent crime isn't a problem anywhere in the US. There are some bad neighborhoods. They're mostly urban areas. A lot of the violence here is drug related. Some of it is gang related. But I believe that even the larger cities in the US are mostly safe.
http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel03/ucr2002.htm
The geek worried about being mugged in the UK may have a serious problem, at least according to this article which indicates UK crime rates have risen sharply:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3669407.stm
I intentionally avoided sensational sources of crime data. That obviously excluded all pro-gun and anti-gun sites. Relative comparisons within a country are not useful for this discussion. I tried to find data on per capita crimes for different countries. I couldn't find any, but I know the truth is out there. (TM) I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the US has a relatively high crime rate. The reverse wouldn't surprise me too much either.
I found an article claiming Canada's crime rate has been increasing. I've visited the Toronto area, and the Canadians I met were very nice. I know all societies have criminals, but I can't imagine Canadian criminals. We could learn a thing or two from our neighbors to the north. I wish our society was as polite. Their streets are cleaner too. That's a big plus for me, because I really hate litter. One of these days I'm going to see someone litter and it's going to make me so mad I kill them.
It's a joke. Laugh.
People in areas with less crime are not likely to be scared into passing gun restricting laws. They are also more accustomed to self reliance, so they are less likely to expect a police officer to protect them. Obviously the police can't protect people in sparse rural areas, but given the short time required to commit a crime, urban police are not much more effective at protecting citizens either, much less preventing crime.
The problem is crime. Crime is perpetrated by criminals. If you want to stop crime, stop criminals. Early social intervention is probably the best way to do that, but it isn't a simple fix. Guns are not the problem. A gun is a tool. Even if it was eventually possible to eliminate guns, there would still be violent criminals. Just as regions with fewer guns have the same suicide rates, just fewer suicides using guns. Baning guns doesn't solve any problems, and can make the situation worse in areas where there is already criminal activity.
Perhaps. But I think the ideas embodied in the 2nd Amendment of the United States Constitution would be well applied universally. I realize the right to keep and bear arms is not recognized in all countries. Far from it. But the United States Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the US Constitution) does not grant rights. It acknowledges rights. The difference is, no government should have the ability to withhold these rights because they are not granted by any government. These are inalienable rights that exist for all free people. The 2nd Amendment recognizes the right to bear arms. The purposes are many, including personal defense, defense of a state from foreign aggression, and protection of the citizens from an oppressive or tyrranical government. The latter two reasons are why the term militia specifically appears in the 2nd Amendment. Citizens need to be able to provide a credible and effective armed deterence if needed. The 2nd Amendment does not recognize the right to hunt or target practice. The right to bear arms is not restricted to "sporting use". It seems obvious that the intention was for American citizens to be able to protect themselves adequately, even if their adversary was their federal government. Banning miltary style weapons is clearly not consistent with the 2nd Amendment.
After more than two centuries, the United States Constitution is still a collection of radical and revolutionary ideas. It has withstood the test of time, because the ideas of liberty, freedom, and justice are timeless.
There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap box, ballot box, jury box and ammo box. Use in that order.
If other countries have a good method of providing for the protection of their citizens from criminals, foreign aggresors or the tyrrany of their own government, good for them. The 2nd Amendment has proven to be invaluable to US citizens in these matters, and we are reluctant to abandon the inalienable right that it recognizes.
It's true. The areas of the US with the highest crime rates have the most restrictive gun laws. Crime (both violent and nonviolent) have been declining in the US for the last nine years, despite appearances in the news media.
As I said, I think the relationship is as follows:
Crime increases.
Citizens advocate gun control believing it will reduce criminals' access to guns.
Crime increases further because all victims are now unarmed.
I don't believe gun control causes crime by itself. I think crime is a social phenomenon with many interdependent causes. But in a high crime area, disarming the noncriminals only makes matters worse for society. Outlawing guns allows criminals to operate without concern for which of the potential victims might be armed. So even if you don't carry a gun in either case, you are still safer being unarmed in a society that allows handguns to be carried for defense.
Guns have prevented a lot of crime, but these situations are non-events because a crime didn't occur. They are therefore not reported. Nobody records non-crimes. There is no reliable statistical information for crimes prevented, so this important fact about gun ownership usually isn't considered when enacting anti-gun laws.
For Americans, the 2nd Amendment to the United States Constitution recognizes the right to bear arms. This is an integral portion of the document that is the basis for our government and legal system for a good reason. "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" is in no way ambiguous or open to alternative interpretations, again for a very good reason. I believe it applies as much today as it did when it was written 227 years ago.
However, even though I believe in the right to own guns, the statistics are probably misleading. US cities with high crime rates try to solve crime problems by outlawing or restricting guns. This only makes matters worse, because criminals don't obey gun laws. All it does is disarm the victims. But these were generally high crime areas before the gun restrictions. It seems likely that high crime areas ban guns, and less true that banning guns causes high crime rates. The high crime rates generally existed in those US cities before guns were banned. But it is true that crime rates increased in US cities where guns were banned. If you were considering a career as a mugger or burglar, wouldn't you appreciate knowing your victims would be unarmed?
The comment that a concealed weapon discovered by a mugger might cause the mugger to feel threatened and therefore more likely to act in a violent manner totally misses the point. If you think carrying a handgun will somehow bestow magical protective powers, please do not carry one. You will only supply guns to criminals. My personal solution to urban violence is to live in one of the areas that has a low crime rate. It's also an area with very reasonable gun laws. I don't carry a gun. But if I ever felt threatened enough to carry my 10 mm Glock, a mugger can feel as threatened as he likes, because he'll become aware of the fact that his victim is armed about a second before he receives two projectiles in the center of his mass, each 180 grains, with 700 foot pounds of energy.
I've been a vegan for over 20 years out of respect for all living things. But if you threaten my life or that of someone I love, you're dead as fried chicken.
I can't believe people accept the myth that the police will protect you. It flies in the face of all the facts. But it does fit nicely with our society's increasing need for specialization. We are increasingly hiring people to do everything we need done. There are fundamental aspects of our lives that we cannot and should not defer to others. Personal protection is one good example.
Forcing grazing animals like cows and chickens to be carnivors is now illegal after the big agribusiness companies were finally forced to acknowledge science and admit that such unnatural practices cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, aka "mad cow disease"), which is passed to people who consume the cows as vCJD, which is fatal. There is no cure, for cows or people. Of course, there is little enforcement and the laws are still widely ignored.
For about a decade, insulin has been almost exclusively provided by hard working recombinant DNA bacteria. This is actual human insulin, free of transgenic viruses and foreign proteins that trigger a human immune response.
Not even close. In the span of time appropriate for a reference to evolution, it's true to say we evolved with plants. Evidence indicates that humans evolved eating mostly plants, with a small amount of animal protein, much like the diets of chimps, lowland mountain gorillas and baboons. Proto-humans are believed to have supplemented their primarily plant based diet with almost as much insect protein as protein from mammals. It would be almost as correct to say "I've been using a computer my entire adult life, so humans evolved to use computers", or "I've been eating pizza since 1970, so humans evolved to eat pizza." The association with eating cows goes back a few more generations, but not nearly enough to justify a connection with evolution.
From a health perspective, people eat far too much meat and milk. There are much healthier plant sources of protein. PETA is probably exagerating the energy difference between raising plants for humans versus raising plants for cattle to feed humans, but it's still true that an acre of crops can feed more people than the same acre could feed if routed through a cow. Reasonable estimates I've seen indicate a 7:1 advantage.
Two other issues. I've generally been happy with the generic support of Windows applications, including IrfanView, Garmin GPS software, etc. But stuff written in Delphi seems to work fine except for disk I/O, essentially rendering disabled demo software without the ability to load or save files. It seems like a CrossOver fix for this one specific problem might open up a lot of Delphi applications.
Overall, I'd like to see CrossOver as a way for people to migrate to Linux by enabling them to run custom software where there isn't a good open source solution, not as a method to keep running proprietary Microsoft applications instead of OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc. Yes, I know I'm in the minority with this opinion.
A slug is not a measure of atmospheric pressure. Pressure is force/area. A slug is the English unit of mass. One slug equals 14.59 kg.
Are you sure you dropped out because of the stress of using English and metric units?
Correct, but misleading. This is a semiconductor technology. It has the potential to obey Moore's Law. Power has been relatively cheap because we're fuelishly burning hydrocarbon reserves, so there has not been the same market incentive for solar cells that we've had for memory and processors. But an exponential growth rate still applies.
Well, it won't be /. news then, will it?
The market ensures that this technology will happen in large scale at the consumer level, barring some new centralized power source such as nuclear fusion. If we were smart, we'd be investing a lot of money in alternative power technologies, (solar, fusion and others), instead of the government being the lackeys of the oil industry and spending a lot of tax dollars to protect a continued supply of oil. Research into alternative energy sources benefits all taxpayers. Protecting foreign oil assets uses tax dollars to benefit only a few energy company executives and sheiks, and even that benefit only exists for the very near future. It's an unfair and unwise use of tax dollars. As a technogeek, the inefficiency and short sightedness of the US energy policy offends me. The previous success of the US economy was based on free market driven technological innovation, not special interest enforcement of the status quo. The US will either look to the future and lead, or cling to the past and follow as others step up to the technological challenges.
Burt already said that the X-Prize design from Scaled Composites would not be a good choice for an orbital vehicle. The design doesn't adapt well to high velocity reentry. The SpaceShipOne is optimized for the X-Prize suborbital mission with low velocity reentry.
However, I think it would be a GREAT idea to call Scaled Composites and ask Burt to design and build a reusable spacecraft with orbital capabilities. Scaled's reputation is unmatched in the aerospace industry. You want it, they build it. It's almost always a matter of faster, better, cheaper - pick any two. Scaled Composites has managed to consistently deliver all three at the same time.
From the zoomed out view, the US shuttle design is not a bad concept. However, in many areas, NASA's design-by-commitee approach engineered them into corners. They did a great job of surmounting the resulting nearly insurmountable technical problems. Of course, they spent enormous amounts of money and time overcoming problems that a simpler and more clever design would have avoided.
In aviation, simpler is usually lighter which allows more payload. More importantly, the reduced complexity results in less stuff to break and a design that's easier to fully test, so it's safer and more reliable.
I respect the hard working people at NASA, and they deserve credit for their accomplishments. But having a government bureaucracy running a space program is invariably the most expensive path to space. The shuttle cost about a billion dollars for each launch. That's WAY too much. And their "smaller-faster-cheaper" unmanned program in the 1990s resulted in a high failure rate that was regarded as a poor return on the investment. They're now back to fewer unmanned missions with more attention to detail on each. So far, the results seem very good, but it's not cheap.
It's past time for entrepreneurial access to space, both manned and unmanned. The X-Prize is an excellent first step. It'll be exciting to see the commercial space industry grow, just as our grandparents saw the aviation industry grow in the period from 1930 to 1970. If we projected the commercialization of space onto the commercial aviation timeline, we're around 1926.
Scaled will win the X-Prize this year, probably this summer. Stay tuned. This is going to be very cool.
I paid $79 for Xandros 1.0 Deluxe (not the standard version which is half that price because it doesn't include CrossOver). A year later I paid $39 for the upgrade to Xandros 2.0 Deluxe.
The office applications are FREE (as in beer and speech), thanks to OpenOffice.org, so no gun-to-your-head mandatory upgrades there.
Xandros allows installation to one business machine as well as your home PCs. Windoze charges for each and every box.
And finally, Windows sucks, is an Outlook worm magnet, and Microsoft is a convicted and unrepentent anti-competitive monopolist. I buy Xandros gladly. I only wish I didn't have to pay the MS Tax on my last notebook PC because I couldn't get good hardware without being forced to buy Windoze.
That's why.
Thank's for asking, Anonymous Clueless.
Xandros 1.0 (late 2002) would interface to a Windows network easier than a Windows box would. They removed automatic primary domain controller authentication when they created Xandros 2.0, launched early 2004. You can still authenticate, but it's a brief manual operation. They retargeted the standard version of Xandros at home users and moved automatic authentication to their newly launched business version, essentially creating home and business versions of Xandros, much as Windows XP has Home and Pro versions.
A lot of Xandros users (myself included) weren't too happy about the bifurcated product line for what seemed to be marketing reasons, but even worse was the way they neglected to tell anybody they removed a touted feature. I guess marketing people don't go out of their way to tell you when you AREN'T getting a feature. To their credit, they saw the user's point of view, and allowed a trade when the business version appeared about a month later.
The business version did away with a simple configuration screen that allowed Xandros 1.0 to serve as the primary domain controller, because all the server functions have been moved to the upcoming server version of Xandros, but there is a how-to that apparently allows any version of Xandros to operate as the primary domain controller.
All versions of Xandros are still very good at networking, despite the slight distribution of some of the features across three different commercial versions. Xandros desktop users expect the soon to be announced server version to be a rock solid secure Linux server platform with the Xandros ease of use, so even a MCSE couldn't screw it up.
And you won't have:
The excellent four-click Xandros installer
An autoconfiguration routine that knows almost all PC hardware
The very good Xandros File Manager
Drag and drop CD burning (with Ogg or MP3 encoding if you like) for audio or data CDs
Super easy networking, including automatic primary domain authentication
Etc., etc., etc.
I've been using Xandros for almost two years. Their motto is "It just works" for a good reason. It's not perfect, but it's close, and getting better every day. I think it's one of the OSS and commercial software combination success stories.
Have you even tried Xandros? Or is your motto, "Where do I want to troll today?"
I've been using Xandros exclusively for almost two years, and I live at my PC.
I think the Xandros idea is to provide a user interface experience that seems comfortable to people who have been using modern graphical user interfaces. They want to ease the transition to Linux for the average users (not just /. geeks), and I think they've done a good job.
Xandros doesn't exactly mimic Windows, but there are a lot of similarities. I think they picked the best elements of Windows and the Mac, and added their own user interface improvements. I hadn't used Windows XP before switching, and I hear it's pretty good, but Xandros was A LOT easier to use than any Windows I had ever used. To me, every time I wanted to change something, Windows made me feel like I was playing a game called "where did they hide this feature?". In Xandros, the configuration info is all logically organized in the Control Center.
Xandros would not be a good choice for a hardcore Linux command line commando, but that's obviously not their target customer. There are already plenty of distros for those people. Xandros is aiming at the larger market of people who just want to use their PCs for web browsing, email, photo editing, word processing, spreadsheets, etc. But you'll be glad when they convert those people because your mailbox won't be filled with Outlook worms and spam from zombied Windoze machines. Smile. It's a Good Thing.
WiFi is getting a lot better under Linux. I haven't tried it with my notebook PC yet, but I will soon. I use Xandros Linux and it's pretty good about autodetecting lots of hardware. I'd recommend it as a distro that would be good for anyone switching for the first time, and wanting to do real world stuff with their PC instead of twiddling around trying to get Linux to work. They have a very active online user support forum that is a big help with issues like WiFi.
With any Linux distro, I'd advise doing a bit of Google research before buying hardware. In almost every hardware category, you will find stuff that works well with Linux, stuff that can be made to work with Linux if you have a day, and stuff that absolutely refuses to work with Linux. Why make it hard on yourself? Get the stuff that works with Linux and support companies that support Linux.
The Register makes a few well deserved snide remarks about Microsoft, and I recently noticed prominent Microsoft ads at the bottom of their pages. Is this some sort of evil Microsoft marketing plan to extend and embrace their enemies?