Ahh, the EU... could not do anything to the company itself. They have no legal power over an Americian company.
There, you're wrong. The EU extracted designs and other things from Boeing as a condition of allowing it to continue to market in Europe after absorbing McDonnell-Douglas. The EU could just as easily demand that Microsoft publish API specs and release file formats for royalty-free use as a condition of selling in Europe. --
You mean "make money hand over fist." I believe the mental image is supposed to be somebody reaching into a pile of money like they're swimming the crawl, dragging back as much as a hand will hold while reaching out with the other.
...; they gave no numbers on the read/write speeds here, and I'm not convinced that this is going to be fast.
I doubt that speed is going to be an issue. What you're doing is changing the large-scale organization of magnetic domains in the material (at this scale, it is a single domain I'm sure). You're swapping the spins of a few millions of electrons; how much time can that take? Even the old-style magnetic cores weren't all that slow for their size, and these things should be about as much faster as they are smaller. --
Hit the books, then use them to hit the problem! That's the spirit!
The only way anything gets done is for people to push and poke at the problem, to see where it's vulnerable. Not everybody finds a soft spot, but you've just started toward being part of the process. Congratulations, and may you go far. --
Poets write haiku Trying to look deeper Fake erudition
Once spoke a fellow called Tucan, "I think that you need a clue, man! A lim'rick's not haiku!" I have one for you, too; I rhyme a lot better than you can! --
There once was a hacker named Mike who Tried to pick up a gal on his bike-u. But his bike (the poor guy!) Just did not catch her eye So he tried with some really bad haiku.
There once was a hacker named Mike who Tried to pick up a gal on his bike-u. But his bike (the poor guy!) Just did not catch her eye So he tried with some really bad haiku. --
I'd be interested to know how they came up with the figure of $2.5 billion per year in damages caused by "pirated" DVDs.
Simple. They take the estimates of the number of illegal copies being stamped out in Chinese piracy factories, times the US suggested retail price (or the UK price, whichever's higher) and call that their "damages". Never mind that most people who buy pirated DVD's probably live in third-world countries where they can't afford Hollywood's prices and wouldn't have bought a legit copy, it's "damages".
Of course, when they're busy trying to suppress DeCSS, they imply that DeCSS is responsible for the entire $2.5e9 figure. When it's videotape, they'll pretend it's illegal VHS copies. When it's people copying to hard drive to play repeatedly for their kids without risking damage to the original.... you get the idea. It's all a pack of artistically-packaged lies. That last is Hollywood's stock in trade; why would you expect anything different in their defensive (as opposed to promotional) PR? --
(2nd:I realized this after you mentioned the Van Allen Belts...you don't put people up there for long amounts of time. So i changed my idea:Mir could be mostly unmanned except for ocassional maintnence crews who would only stay for a week or so,and the station's critical electronics could be shielded...
Okay, you're talking about re-engineering all of the critical electronics for radiation resistance, and incurring all the costs of installing these new electronics on-orbit. On top of this, you want to have a station which already consumes most of the crew's time doing critical maintenance, and leave it almost entirely unmanned? Plus, you want to put it far, far beyond the range of the Progress freighters used to resupply it. Sooner or later you're going to have a "<SMACK> WHAT was I thinking!" moment. The sooner this happens, the quicker you can move on to something more useful.;-)
3rd:Ok,push it up to the Earth-Moon liberation point."
It's a "libration" point, no "e" in the word. Since you haven't mentioned which libration point you mean (there are 5 in the Earth-Moon system) I'll assume you mean L4 or L5. If I recall correctly, getting to either one of them requires more fuel than going directly to the Moon; on top of this, you'd have a trip of considerable distance (roughly equal to the Earth-Moon distance) from either L4 or L5 to Luna, and unless you were going to burn a lot of fuel it would be a lot slower than the trip from Earth. This isn't good for your radiation exposure.
As for fuel,this project would be delayed until a light,fairly effecient fuel to be created or discovered...again,as I stated before,this whole project would take time to come to fruitition...,then you could stick it on any boster and send it to Mir.)and one could plot an orbit that was arc like,similar to what Voyager 1&2 did.from there,take the most fuel efficient path to Luna.Future moon missions would need to be timed as accurately as Apollo missions.
The Voyagers used gravity-assist maneuvers at Jupiter, and they are on one-way trajectories out of the Solar System; the required heavy body is lacking in the Earth-Moon system, and you want to come back in any event. If you want some data for calculating Hohman ellipse trajectories, you can derive them from conservation of angular momentum r1*v1 = r2*v2 (for the apogee and perigee conditions) and conservation of energy (v^2 - 2GM/r = constant, G = gravitational constant, M = mass of the primary body, Earth in this case). A little bit of algebra applied to this lets you plug in r1 and v1 and get r2: r2 = v1^2 * r1 / ((2GM/r1) - v1^2) (plug r2 into the angular momentum equation and solve for v2)
From differences in velocities you can calculate the fuel-mass required at each burn from the rocket equation, Mfinal/Minitial = exp(-Vdelta/Vexhaust). Even for H2/O2, Vexhaust is only about 4500 m/sec; the mass required to push something around quickly becomes a frighteningly large (and expensive-looking) value.
You'd be much better off to crunch numbers for things that don't involve expending large amounts of reaction mass. For instance, if you're going to the Moon, there are possibilities for moving stuff with massive rotating tethers; as long as you move about the same amount of mass in both directions, they operate more or less for "free". This is a field that is far more worthy of study than keeping a creaky, leaky, flaky old space station in service for emotional reasons. Maybe slapping an ion engine on a Progress and boosting Mir up to a safe parking orbit, deactivated and emptied of atmosphere and fluids, would be attractive to somebody who wants to preserve it for some far-off museum display. Trying to bend other missions to fit Mir just so you can say it's being used doesn't make much sense. --
The source code to windows 2000 were to be leaked?
Could I then post it on my web page and call it freedom of speech?
Of course not, silly. It was never your own speech to begin with, and the author's right of copyright absolutely trumps your right to say what you want. On the other hand, if you independently re-create Windoze 2000 then you own the copyright to that work, and you can give it to the world, lock it in a vault, or sell all rights to it to M$ for a cool billion. --
Sometimes I forget how easy it is to mis-read the tone of a posting. I guess you forgot too.;-)
And the concept of a tranfer point for to change vehicles is valid - vehicles that are designed for takeoff, rentry and landing at 1G (with all the added equipment/mass) are simply not efficient for deep space and low-G landings. And fuel/consumables can be delivered to the transfer point with cheaper unmanned vehicles (like the Progress does for supplies for the Mir) this too is more efficient.
That's true to a point. However, to support a system like that takes a minimum level of traffic. Further, for separate delivery of vehicles and fuel, fuel must generally be storable for considerable periods of time, and the most mass-efficient fuel mixture (LH2/LOX) isn't considered storable by the people in the know. If your vehicle's LEO departure mass is mostly fuel anyway, it makes a heck of a lot of sense to fuel it on the ground and launch it full; it doesn't start making sense to launch the fuel separately until the cost of new vehicles outweighs the cost of running a fuel depot, plus losses, plus the opportunity costs of having to schedule your launches around orbital rendezvous requirements, etc. We're nowhere near that.
(Though I am not so clear about all the tradeoffs between LEO and a higher orbit. How much higher would be good?)
For the transfer vehicle and the ground-to-LEO vehicle, lower is generally better for a number of reasons:
The ground-to-LEO vehicle can carry considerably more mass to lower orbits than higher ones. This is especially true when the vehicle is burdened with wings and landing wheels.
Lower orbits move faster, so the transfer vehicle can burn its fuel from a higher starting speed. Energy is proportional to speed squared, so this actually gains you performance when you factor in the larger fuel deliveries.
If it were worthwhile to have such a fuel depot, Mir would be in a reasonably good spot... for traffic from Baikonur. For Canaveral launches, it's at far too high an inclination and limits the payload of the vehicles sent to it. However, Mir is a maintenance nightmare, leaky, and has no fuel-storage facilities worth talking about. It makes no sense to try using Mir for any purpose, and if the Russians were serious about this they'd have launched a new Mir core years ago. --
The neatest idea... give Mir a push out to about 20,000 miles up. Strap fuel tanks to it,and replace the damaged Spektr module or the ancient Mir Core Module with a new crew facility/dockink port. Tada! From here Mir can serve as a refuling/resuply station for travelers to the Moon.
Problems with that:
Mir is not designed to be boosted, period. It has things hanging off at all kinds of angles, and high thrust along any line would over-torque some of the junctions. This would rip the spacecraft apart at the joints. To boost it, you'd need to take it apart into modules, attach the modules to some kind of frame, boost the modules into the new orbit, and re-assemble the spacecraft. As long as you were doing that, you might as well junk the old Mir and use brand-new modules.
20,000 miles is inside the outer Van Allen belt, IIRC. This is not a healthy place for people to spend any length of time.
It doesn't make any sense to pause at 20,000 miles on the way to the moon. Circularizing your orbit to rendezvous would take almost as much, if not more, fuel than going direct to Luna. Once you've spent that fuel to get there, you do what... re-fuel? Where does this fuel come from, if not from the spacecraft going up there?
You would have known how silly these ideas are if you knew some orbital mechanics. It isn't that hard to teach yourself a heck of a lot about orbital mechanics from the twin principles of conservation of energy and conservation of momentum and a little bit of algebra. If you're unable to do algebra you're either not smart enough to be posting here, or you're wasting your time looking foolish when you could be spending the time needed to analyze concepts and actually have informed and worthwhile opinions. --
The inability to get the boosters up in time and the inability to properly allocate resources and poor scheduling on the part of NASA led to the early demise of the kludge. It failed to meet the goals of the project...
Reboosting it was never part of the goals of the project, it was just an idea that was considered but (obviously) never carried out. I'm not even sure if the third mission was part of the goals of the project, when it was launched. It wasn't designed to be re-provisioned or anything, so considering it a "failure" is silly.
But you're being silly, 'cause you're a troll. Oh, something I missed:
It may well be a "fixer upper" but that would be much more economically feasable than for a company to build one from scratch.
I had to quote that. It was the only sensible thing in the entire post.
I mis-read that and missed the word than, which reverses the entire meaning. I'm sorry I attributed one iota of sense to anything you've posted here. Mea culpa. --
It's only "ironic" if you consider the fact that capitalism out-produces command economies to be a surprise. A bankrupt economy will sell anything to stay afloat, and the Russians have spaceflights to sell. If the USA was in the same situation, you'd see a price schedule for Shuttle rides. --
In fact,
but, why describes most of this hypothetical undertaking. The things are next to useless on the ground, unless somebody wants one for a museum.
Iridium has already sent up a number of replacement satellites. This probably means that there are a number which have been built, but not yet launched. Think they'd make good collector's items? If I were eBay, I'd be trying to get those to auction on my site just for the publicity! --
There have been some near disasters, a crash and a fire
Plus the failure of the attitude-control computer which nearly left the whole station without power, plus chronic leaks in coolant lines, plus...
I know of no problems associated with either it's design or age.
This is a joke, right? (04:13 PM April 4th... definitely a bit late for that sort of thing.) Let me put it this way: your ignorance isn't shared by either the Russians or NASA.
Could it be the sour memories of Skylab? That was a failure due to defective design and technology.
Actually, Skylab was a phenomenal success and was only allowed to crash because the Shuttle program had so many delays (there were no Saturn boosters due to cancellation of the Saturn program to make way for Shuttle). Skylab's crash was due to the inability to send up a reboost mission, and had nothing to do with Skylab itself.
It may well be a "fixer upper" but that would be much more economically feasable than for a company to build one from scratch.
I had to quote that. It was the only sensible thing in the entire post. --
They have no idea whether it is still presurrised, whether the hull has been compromised or anything.
I distinctly remember reading about pressure losses on Mir, and how the cabin had been refilled from the on-board supplies. Do you think the Russians have no idea how to do telemetry? --
All these shootings are caused by media. If these items wouldn't be on the news everyday, they would just start to fade away
Preach on, brother! One of the things that I'm sure is bugging the news establishments is that the news hype over the 6-year-old in Mount Morris (MI) who shot and killed a classmate won't create any more news like it, because 6-year-olds don't read the newspaper and aren't going to become copycats.
Posting this close to the end this late, I wonder if anyone is going to read this... --
However, if there are people out there who want it (and from the attitudes expressed by NC leaders, there certainly are), there are people out there who will build it.
You have to take into account the credibility issue. If Pinkerton has already examined the "geek factor", if you want to call it that, and either tuned their criteria to discount reports of Quake playing (but kept ones of cruelty to animals) or discarded the entire project as unworkable, it would send a very public message to pols and the public. When someone asks "Pinkerton couldn't do this with all the experience they have on tap, why should we believe you when you say you can?" it's going to be a pretty tough question to answer convincingly.
Pinkerton may also be worrying about liability. Suicide is far more common than school shootings, and if a teen is coercively "counselled" as a result of a report passed through Pinkerton, and then commits suicide in despair, the company could wind up facing far more in liabilities than profits. This would be another disincentive for companies to get into the business; just look what liability judgements did to the makers of small airplanes, it pretty much shut them down for years. --
There is one answer which should never be accepted when a citizen goes to a government agency with a question, and that is "You don't need to know that." When the question is "What sites am I not allowed to see from the library workstations, and why?", the only answer that is acceptable in a free society is a list of site URL's and criteria. Call it a card anti-catalog, a list of things you can't find in the library, but it's all the same. When the library installs filters on the computers, they just made it your business.
When a library buys a filter from a company which keeps its filter list secret, this principle of public accountability is violated. This looks to me like it could be grounds for a citizen lawsuit against a library, demanding that the filter list be published or the filtering be removed. This could serve both ways; people who don't want legitimate information restricted could hammer on the filter companies for their abuses, and people who do want porn, violence, hate speech or whatnot blocked could make certain that there aren't any critical omissions in the lists either. But I think the most likely outcome is that the filter companies would stop selling to libraries, along with a small flurry of lawsuits by people and organizations like Peacefire against companies like Mattel, for libelling them in their filter classifications (Peacefire, pornographic and violent? HAH!). To keep their filter lists "secret" (as if they'll be safe from the amateur cryptographers and hackers!) they'll have to stop selling to public organizations. Voila, the problem is stamped out at the source. --
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you'll have to have something like this. ;-)
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We have the best legislature money can buy, donchaknow...
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(And yes, +1 is as low as I can post this.)
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For just the frame with the story in it, click here.
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Thanks, that was informative.
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The only way anything gets done is for people to push and poke at the problem, to see where it's vulnerable. Not everybody finds a soft spot, but you've just started toward being part of the process. Congratulations, and may you go far.
--
Trying to look deeper
Fake erudition
Once spoke a fellow called Tucan,
"I think that you need a clue, man!
A lim'rick's not haiku!"
I have one for you, too;
I rhyme a lot better than you can!
--
There once was a hacker named Mike who
Tried to pick up a gal on his bike-u.
But his bike (the poor guy!)
Just did not catch her eye
So he tried with some really bad haiku.
(I'd post this at 0, but I can't.)
--
There once was a hacker named Mike who
Tried to pick up a gal on his bike-u.
But his bike (the poor guy!) Just did not catch her eye So he tried with some really bad haiku.
--
Of course, when they're busy trying to suppress DeCSS, they imply that DeCSS is responsible for the entire $2.5e9 figure. When it's videotape, they'll pretend it's illegal VHS copies. When it's people copying to hard drive to play repeatedly for their kids without risking damage to the original.... you get the idea. It's all a pack of artistically-packaged lies. That last is Hollywood's stock in trade; why would you expect anything different in their defensive (as opposed to promotional) PR?
--
r2 = v1^2 * r1 / ((2GM/r1) - v1^2) (plug r2 into the angular momentum equation and solve for v2)
From differences in velocities you can calculate the fuel-mass required at each burn from the rocket equation, Mfinal/Minitial = exp(-Vdelta/Vexhaust). Even for H2/O2, Vexhaust is only about 4500 m/sec; the mass required to push something around quickly becomes a frighteningly large (and expensive-looking) value.
You'd be much better off to crunch numbers for things that don't involve expending large amounts of reaction mass. For instance, if you're going to the Moon, there are possibilities for moving stuff with massive rotating tethers; as long as you move about the same amount of mass in both directions, they operate more or less for "free". This is a field that is far more worthy of study than keeping a creaky, leaky, flaky old space station in service for emotional reasons. Maybe slapping an ion engine on a Progress and boosting Mir up to a safe parking orbit, deactivated and emptied of atmosphere and fluids, would be attractive to somebody who wants to preserve it for some far-off museum display. Trying to bend other missions to fit Mir just so you can say it's being used doesn't make much sense.
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- The ground-to-LEO vehicle can carry considerably more mass to lower orbits than higher ones. This is especially true when the vehicle is burdened with wings and landing wheels.
- Lower orbits move faster, so the transfer vehicle can burn its fuel from a higher starting speed. Energy is proportional to speed squared, so this actually gains you performance when you factor in the larger fuel deliveries.
If it were worthwhile to have such a fuel depot, Mir would be in a reasonably good spot... for traffic from Baikonur. For Canaveral launches, it's at far too high an inclination and limits the payload of the vehicles sent to it. However, Mir is a maintenance nightmare, leaky, and has no fuel-storage facilities worth talking about. It makes no sense to try using Mir for any purpose, and if the Russians were serious about this they'd have launched a new Mir core years ago.--
- Mir is not designed to be boosted, period. It has things hanging off at all kinds of angles, and high thrust along any line would over-torque some of the junctions. This would rip the spacecraft apart at the joints. To boost it, you'd need to take it apart into modules, attach the modules to some kind of frame, boost the modules into the new orbit, and re-assemble the spacecraft. As long as you were doing that, you might as well junk the old Mir and use brand-new modules.
- 20,000 miles is inside the outer Van Allen belt, IIRC. This is not a healthy place for people to spend any length of time.
- It doesn't make any sense to pause at 20,000 miles on the way to the moon. Circularizing your orbit to rendezvous would take almost as much, if not more, fuel than going direct to Luna. Once you've spent that fuel to get there, you do what... re-fuel? Where does this fuel come from, if not from the spacecraft going up there?
You would have known how silly these ideas are if you knew some orbital mechanics. It isn't that hard to teach yourself a heck of a lot about orbital mechanics from the twin principles of conservation of energy and conservation of momentum and a little bit of algebra. If you're unable to do algebra you're either not smart enough to be posting here, or you're wasting your time looking foolish when you could be spending the time needed to analyze concepts and actually have informed and worthwhile opinions.--
But you're being silly, 'cause you're a troll. Oh, something I missed:
I mis-read that and missed the word than, which reverses the entire meaning. I'm sorry I attributed one iota of sense to anything you've posted here. Mea culpa.--
It's only "ironic" if you consider the fact that capitalism out-produces command economies to be a surprise. A bankrupt economy will sell anything to stay afloat, and the Russians have spaceflights to sell. If the USA was in the same situation, you'd see a price schedule for Shuttle rides.
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Posting this close to the end this late, I wonder if anyone is going to read this...
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Pinkerton may also be worrying about liability. Suicide is far more common than school shootings, and if a teen is coercively "counselled" as a result of a report passed through Pinkerton, and then commits suicide in despair, the company could wind up facing far more in liabilities than profits. This would be another disincentive for companies to get into the business; just look what liability judgements did to the makers of small airplanes, it pretty much shut them down for years.
--
When a library buys a filter from a company which keeps its filter list secret, this principle of public accountability is violated. This looks to me like it could be grounds for a citizen lawsuit against a library, demanding that the filter list be published or the filtering be removed. This could serve both ways; people who don't want legitimate information restricted could hammer on the filter companies for their abuses, and people who do want porn, violence, hate speech or whatnot blocked could make certain that there aren't any critical omissions in the lists either. But I think the most likely outcome is that the filter companies would stop selling to libraries, along with a small flurry of lawsuits by people and organizations like Peacefire against companies like Mattel, for libelling them in their filter classifications (Peacefire, pornographic and violent? HAH!). To keep their filter lists "secret" (as if they'll be safe from the amateur cryptographers and hackers!) they'll have to stop selling to public organizations. Voila, the problem is stamped out at the source.
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