I feel for the guy and his lost articles, but I am wondering why he did not keep backups of everything? The stories seem to be gone forever, or else his letter would be about to re-publishing. his stories on his own website....
That is a rather bad case of negligence on the publisher's side , but more so on the part of Mr. Crampton. For comparison: I work with a professional fotojournalist and this guy has been working for 50 years now and has archived everything (more than 1.5 million pictures) like a mad squirrel. If you ask him about an article he wrote in 1961, it takes him about five minutes to find a copy of the article and the raw materials. Everything analog but nonetheless... That makes you wonder if -while embracing digital media and the blogosphere - many journalists have not brought with them the necessary tools to manage and archive their digital assets.
First emotion: Wow! Far out: L2 is 1.5 million km from Earth beyond the orbit of the moon ( so no space shuttle service missions here... ). But before I looked it up I had completely forgotten that Mars is at best still another 53 million km and then imagining the billions of lightyears Herschel will be able to "see"... I have to buy another ticket for "Star Trek" to lose this image of an invisibly tiny blue spec in a black void in my head...
So in case of any real damage, Endeavor blasts off (piloted by a 2 Astronaut crew?), all the Astronauts on board Atlantis pack their bags and take a seat in the other shutlle and live happily ever after, which is most important of all. But what would happen to Atlantis in that case? You obviously can't tow it or land it by remote, but leaving such a large object in a (decaying) orbit could cause a lot of trouble. So what would they do? Send it to the moon à la "Space Cowboys" or give it a gentle but controlled kick, letting it crash and burn up in the atmosphere?
In an era where time is the devil and speed is God, it's interesting and heart warming to see that there is actually an engineering job where you can spend weeks looking at the dust under your feet, comtemplate your (modest) goals (another 100 feet, yeah!) and then very, very slowly take you next step. And if a dust storm comes along, just wait for the next breeze to gently brush the dust of your panels and let the sunshine in. Envious. Quite envious.
There have been a lot of posts demanding the release of the DN(F) code into the open source community, but I wonder if that is even feasilbe. Legal and commercial issues aside it I guess they will have amassed hundreds of thousands (or even millions of lines) of code that is in different states and versions and has been re-written for a a decade. Not to mention story board, skripts 3D-Models, Level Layouts etc. I guess it would take 20 dedicated and qualified people the better part of a year to make an assessment of what is usable and what still hast to be developed to finish the game. I do not think I have ever heard of a refactoring project like that undertaken by an open source community.
The question remains, if this just (a very large) bunch of isolated individualists on the hunt for fame and fortune, or if they could be united under a common belief and turned into a nationalistic, anti-foreign mass movement like the "Boxers" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_Rebellion, lashing out violently against anything or anyone that critizises or threatens mother China. A lot has been writtten about the downtrodden rural masses that could destroy the chinese "Wirtschaftswunder" in a bloody uprising with unforseeable consequencesfor the world, but I wonder if we also have to be wary about something like a boxer movement in cyberspace.
This law, if passed in its current form, establishes another first for Germany: The technical specification for (elcetronic) handover of the list and the weekly reporting of "incidents" is to be drafted by the Federal Police (BKA, Bundeskriminalamt) and not by the Bundesnetzagentur (German regulatory body) like all the other specs around Lawful Interception, Data retention and such. Which would also mean that not the Ministry for Economics is in charge, but the Ministry of the Interior
We are an Oracle Certified Partner for Fusion Middleware and since the acquisition of BEA (remember, remember) we have been in the middle of the "App Wars" which BEA Weblogic won over the OC4J and the Oracle JDeveloper (so far) over the BEA Workbench and Eclipse. Only recently - after months of annoucnements, trainings, roadshows etc. - we slowly started to come out of the trenches, shellshocked and still a bit confused but with a clearer picture of what Oracle's products are going to look like in the forseeable future and what do we see in the early morning light: General Larry, whistle in hand, already on the way up the next hill... You have to give it to them: keeping something like that under wraps is a masterpiece, but I wonder how many of Oracle's partners, customers and employees will follow the general up that hill.
"The deafness, though, was only temporary and the dolphin was not hurt in the experiment, said Mooney." So the experiment is still cruel but obviously no permanent damage. Deafness aside: Loud noise causes disorientation and nausea in humans, so why not in dolphins. BTW: A "singing" Whale produces a sound pressure level of up to 185 dB under water! (s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_pressure_level#Examples_of_sound_pressure_and_sound_pressure_levels) So 200 sounds extreme but remember its not air we are talking about, but water. For comparison the hearing threshhold of a diver is 67dB at 1khz. The auditory threshhold through the air at 1khz is 0 dB.
I do not want to cast a shadow on the glitzy Techfuture, but that looks like a lot of trouble on impact. I never read anything about extensive crash tests and the fate of the battery pack (or a disintegrating massive touchscreen...) at a velocity of say 35mph or 50mph. It took the gasoline eating kind of car decades to grow a gas tank that doesn't turn your car into blazing firework (Ford Mustang, anyone?). Toyota and all the others too promote every Five Star Rating in Crash Tests, but that topic is always kept very quite when it comes to hybrids and their battery packs. Not to compare apples and oranges here, but I still smell the scent of last year's burning laptops...
Not only is Tellurium extremely rare, Cadmium Telluride is toxic and I wouldn't want to work in a factory that handles the stuff. (although rendered harmless when build into solar cells). There is nothing to celebrate here. As long as we are not able to create energy (or most other high tech) without using up the rarest of earth's elements at an alarming pace, this is a dead end.
Could be an interesting social experiment. With all the "human factors" involved in both success and failure of a long term Mars mission,this could be an excellent playground to find the situations that provoke irrational behaviour and which are particularly hard to simulate.
The risk to Atlantis is of course serious enough, but what about the risk to Hubble itself or to other systems (communication satellites, GPS etc.)?
This can't be easily replaced and a "white spot" in GPS coverage e.g. in major shipping lane would be catastrophic.
Does anyone know about scenarios calculations for this?
Spend those years in space fruitfully and learn new arts and crafts, while you have your tasty snack. Make yourself some nice silk underwear, shirts and payamas for the really hot days on Venus. Or light up that dreary spaceship with home made furnishings: "Silk's elegant, soft luster and beautiful drape makes it perfect for many furnishing applications. It is used for upholstery, wall coverings, window treatments (if blended with another fiber), rugs, bedding and wall hangings". (Quoted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk)
If you read the article carefully, it becomes clear that they will be trying to reestablish the production in a new location, but are a bit worried, that some of the ancient machinery will survive relocation. They still sell 50.000 rolls a year and have a stockpile that will last them for 1-2 years.
That does not seem like a lot of time. The spacecraft are still in testing stage and at best a couple of years away from small scale tourist business and some decades (a century?) away from Weyland-Yutani style mining operations even within the limits of our solar system. So if you a serious about long-term commitment and you find a good spot for your own spaceport, a 99year lease would have made more sense...
Games today IMHO can be compared to blockbuster movies: Lots of special effects and mass market. If you have a brand (GTA) or a star (Lara Croft, Mario) you repeat the concept - with better special effects and a larger budget - as long as you have a ROI, sometimes (always?) sacrificing artistic ambitions for the bottom line.
But some Hollywood studios (and most publishers for that matter) use some of the blockbuster cash to subsidize experiments for smaller audiences and there also is a rather large independent scene with smaller budgets using festivals (e.g. Sundance in the US) that create visibility.
Maybe the game industry - and the blockbuster publishers - should invest some money in more experimental concepts - kind of a Bell Labs for gaming - and provide visibility for these beyond the large trade shows.
Highest regards for Buzz Aldrin, but that seems to me to be another classic case of pionieering gone wrong. Underestimate the terrain (Well, Houston, that surely LOOKED like ice from back home) Loose your crops get lost yourself and basta!
Robinson Crusoe comes to mind. Read the classic and consider for a moment the hardships Rob had to endure without having to care about water, air and heating. (Or if you need something more visual, watch Tom Hanks in "Cast Away"). That should give you a pretty good perspective on how many things we take for granted in our daily lives and that we depend on for our (better than 50 % chance of ) survival (with a life expctancy of more than 45). Things that are produced, manufactured and maintained by hundreds of people. Ok, maybe no man eating savages on Mars (maybe not right away "Lord of the Flies" anyone?) Even with a monthly supply train, a bad tooth would kill you faster than a bullet, never mind taking the appendix out of your fellow astronaut. How many waves would Buzz be willing to sacrifice before establishing a viable foothold? There is absolutely no escape, when the next starbucks is one year away. That could be my limited perspective at the beginning of the century. On the other hand: Maybe they'll call it: "The Aldrin Barbecue".
There seems to be a a lot of activity in this area (cf.: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/05/1157243) with not so much satellites as the basic technology but UAVs like the Predator, which - according to this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RQ-1) article is also operated by the CIA. With a service ceiling of app. 25,000 feet you should not be able to see or or hear then coming and it should be able to deliver much higer resolutions than four inches from an altitude of, say, 3000 feet. This could be useful for spying on people. BTW: The software does not care, if it is analysing videofeeds from a (relatively fast moving) UAV, a helicopter or your neighborhood CCTV camera.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel for the guy and his lost articles, but I am wondering why he did not keep backups of everything? The stories seem to be gone forever, or else his letter would be about to re-publishing. his stories on his own website.... That is a rather bad case of negligence on the publisher's side , but more so on the part of Mr. Crampton. For comparison: I work with a professional fotojournalist and this guy has been working for 50 years now and has archived everything (more than 1.5 million pictures) like a mad squirrel. If you ask him about an article he wrote in 1961, it takes him about five minutes to find a copy of the article and the raw materials. Everything analog but nonetheless... That makes you wonder if -while embracing digital media and the blogosphere - many journalists have not brought with them the necessary tools to manage and archive their digital assets.
when you will have to go underground to get a decent rat-burger (with fries) and a cold beer...
First emotion: Wow! Far out: L2 is 1.5 million km from Earth beyond the orbit of the moon ( so no space shuttle service missions here... ). But before I looked it up I had completely forgotten that Mars is at best still another 53 million km and then imagining the billions of lightyears Herschel will be able to "see"... I have to buy another ticket for "Star Trek" to lose this image of an invisibly tiny blue spec in a black void in my head...
I am sorry, I should read Slashdot more often. There obviously is a possiblity to remote pilot ths shuttle since STS-121: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/30/0458246.
So in case of any real damage, Endeavor blasts off (piloted by a 2 Astronaut crew?), all the Astronauts on board Atlantis pack their bags and take a seat in the other shutlle and live happily ever after, which is most important of all. But what would happen to Atlantis in that case? You obviously can't tow it or land it by remote, but leaving such a large object in a (decaying) orbit could cause a lot of trouble. So what would they do? Send it to the moon à la "Space Cowboys" or give it a gentle but controlled kick, letting it crash and burn up in the atmosphere?
In an era where time is the devil and speed is God, it's interesting and heart warming to see that there is actually an engineering job where you can spend weeks looking at the dust under your feet, comtemplate your (modest) goals (another 100 feet, yeah!) and then very, very slowly take you next step. And if a dust storm comes along, just wait for the next breeze to gently brush the dust of your panels and let the sunshine in. Envious. Quite envious.
There have been a lot of posts demanding the release of the DN(F) code into the open source community, but I wonder if that is even feasilbe. Legal and commercial issues aside it I guess they will have amassed hundreds of thousands (or even millions of lines) of code that is in different states and versions and has been re-written for a a decade. Not to mention story board, skripts 3D-Models, Level Layouts etc. I guess it would take 20 dedicated and qualified people the better part of a year to make an assessment of what is usable and what still hast to be developed to finish the game. I do not think I have ever heard of a refactoring project like that undertaken by an open source community.
The question remains, if this just (a very large) bunch of isolated individualists on the hunt for fame and fortune, or if they could be united under a common belief and turned into a nationalistic, anti-foreign mass movement like the "Boxers" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_Rebellion, lashing out violently against anything or anyone that critizises or threatens mother China. A lot has been writtten about the downtrodden rural masses that could destroy the chinese "Wirtschaftswunder" in a bloody uprising with unforseeable consequencesfor the world, but I wonder if we also have to be wary about something like a boxer movement in cyberspace.
This law, if passed in its current form, establishes another first for Germany: The technical specification for (elcetronic) handover of the list and the weekly reporting of "incidents" is to be drafted by the Federal Police (BKA, Bundeskriminalamt) and not by the Bundesnetzagentur (German regulatory body) like all the other specs around Lawful Interception, Data retention and such. Which would also mean that not the Ministry for Economics is in charge, but the Ministry of the Interior
...long live the Larry Borg.
We are an Oracle Certified Partner for Fusion Middleware and since the acquisition of BEA (remember, remember) we have been in the middle of the "App Wars" which BEA Weblogic won over the OC4J and the Oracle JDeveloper (so far) over the BEA Workbench and Eclipse. Only recently - after months of annoucnements, trainings, roadshows etc. - we slowly started to come out of the trenches, shellshocked and still a bit confused but with a clearer picture of what Oracle's products are going to look like in the forseeable future and what do we see in the early morning light: General Larry, whistle in hand, already on the way up the next hill... You have to give it to them: keeping something like that under wraps is a masterpiece, but I wonder how many of Oracle's partners, customers and employees will follow the general up that hill.
"The deafness, though, was only temporary and the dolphin was not hurt in the experiment, said Mooney." So the experiment is still cruel but obviously no permanent damage. Deafness aside: Loud noise causes disorientation and nausea in humans, so why not in dolphins. BTW: A "singing" Whale produces a sound pressure level of up to 185 dB under water! (s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_pressure_level#Examples_of_sound_pressure_and_sound_pressure_levels) So 200 sounds extreme but remember its not air we are talking about, but water. For comparison the hearing threshhold of a diver is 67dB at 1khz. The auditory threshhold through the air at 1khz is 0 dB.
I do not want to cast a shadow on the glitzy Techfuture, but that looks like a lot of trouble on impact. I never read anything about extensive crash tests and the fate of the battery pack (or a disintegrating massive touchscreen...) at a velocity of say 35mph or 50mph. It took the gasoline eating kind of car decades to grow a gas tank that doesn't turn your car into blazing firework (Ford Mustang, anyone?). Toyota and all the others too promote every Five Star Rating in Crash Tests, but that topic is always kept very quite when it comes to hybrids and their battery packs. Not to compare apples and oranges here, but I still smell the scent of last year's burning laptops...
Unlimited Opportunities :-):
http://www.freakingnews.com/Flying-Cars-Pictures--941.asp.
Please lets have a poll about everybody's favorite flying car! Myself, I always have been a fan of Fantomas' flying Citroen DS. Evil Genius travelling in style... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGDWIRI5j7o
Not only is Tellurium extremely rare, Cadmium Telluride is toxic and I wouldn't want to work in a factory that handles the stuff. (although rendered harmless when build into solar cells). There is nothing to celebrate here. As long as we are not able to create energy (or most other high tech) without using up the rarest of earth's elements at an alarming pace, this is a dead end.
Could be an interesting social experiment. With all the "human factors" involved in both success and failure of a long term Mars mission,this could be an excellent playground to find the situations that provoke irrational behaviour and which are particularly hard to simulate.
The risk to Atlantis is of course serious enough, but what about the risk to Hubble itself or to other systems (communication satellites, GPS etc.)? This can't be easily replaced and a "white spot" in GPS coverage e.g. in major shipping lane would be catastrophic. Does anyone know about scenarios calculations for this?
Spend those years in space fruitfully and learn new arts and crafts, while you have your tasty snack. Make yourself some nice silk underwear, shirts and payamas for the really hot days on Venus. Or light up that dreary spaceship with home made furnishings: "Silk's elegant, soft luster and beautiful drape makes it perfect for many furnishing applications. It is used for upholstery, wall coverings, window treatments (if blended with another fiber), rugs, bedding and wall hangings". (Quoted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk)
If you read the article carefully, it becomes clear that they will be trying to reestablish the production in a new location, but are a bit worried, that some of the ancient machinery will survive relocation. They still sell 50.000 rolls a year and have a stockpile that will last them for 1-2 years.
That does not seem like a lot of time. The spacecraft are still in testing stage and at best a couple of years away from small scale tourist business and some decades (a century?) away from Weyland-Yutani style mining operations even within the limits of our solar system. So if you a serious about long-term commitment and you find a good spot for your own spaceport, a 99year lease would have made more sense...
No, it's a lost toolbag! So many practical applications for things lost in space.
The grande finale of Farscape http://farscape.wikia.com/wiki/Image:PKW2.jpg
Games today IMHO can be compared to blockbuster movies: Lots of special effects and mass market. If you have a brand (GTA) or a star (Lara Croft, Mario) you repeat the concept - with better special effects and a larger budget - as long as you have a ROI, sometimes (always?) sacrificing artistic ambitions for the bottom line. But some Hollywood studios (and most publishers for that matter) use some of the blockbuster cash to subsidize experiments for smaller audiences and there also is a rather large independent scene with smaller budgets using festivals (e.g. Sundance in the US) that create visibility. Maybe the game industry - and the blockbuster publishers - should invest some money in more experimental concepts - kind of a Bell Labs for gaming - and provide visibility for these beyond the large trade shows.
Highest regards for Buzz Aldrin, but that seems to me to be another classic case of pionieering gone wrong. Underestimate the terrain (Well, Houston, that surely LOOKED like ice from back home) Loose your crops get lost yourself and basta! Robinson Crusoe comes to mind. Read the classic and consider for a moment the hardships Rob had to endure without having to care about water, air and heating. (Or if you need something more visual, watch Tom Hanks in "Cast Away"). That should give you a pretty good perspective on how many things we take for granted in our daily lives and that we depend on for our (better than 50 % chance of ) survival (with a life expctancy of more than 45). Things that are produced, manufactured and maintained by hundreds of people. Ok, maybe no man eating savages on Mars (maybe not right away "Lord of the Flies" anyone?) Even with a monthly supply train, a bad tooth would kill you faster than a bullet, never mind taking the appendix out of your fellow astronaut. How many waves would Buzz be willing to sacrifice before establishing a viable foothold? There is absolutely no escape, when the next starbucks is one year away. That could be my limited perspective at the beginning of the century. On the other hand: Maybe they'll call it: "The Aldrin Barbecue".
There seems to be a a lot of activity in this area (cf.: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/05/1157243) with not so much satellites as the basic technology but UAVs like the Predator, which - according to this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RQ-1) article is also operated by the CIA. With a service ceiling of app. 25,000 feet you should not be able to see or or hear then coming and it should be able to deliver much higer resolutions than four inches from an altitude of, say, 3000 feet. This could be useful for spying on people. BTW: The software does not care, if it is analysing videofeeds from a (relatively fast moving) UAV, a helicopter or your neighborhood CCTV camera.