"The latest lunar prospecting first required aiming Hubble at Apollo landing sites and looking with special filters that showed only subtle UV signatures reflected by soils there. By then comparing the Hubble data to actual laboratory-studied samples that astronauts brought back from the same sites, they were able to get a clear idea just how these same minerals look through Hubble's eye. The Hubble Space Telescope can discriminate very subtle color differences on the surface," said planetary scientist Mark Robinson of Northwestern University. So subtle that Hubble can see mineralogical differences in rocks that look identical in color to the human eye, he said."
So the Hubble can in fact discern with a usable degree of precision....
"At Aristarchus, Hubble detected what appeared to be an abundance of the mineral ilmenite, which is good news, said NASA lunar scientist Michael Wargo. By heating or passing an electrical current through ilmenite, it's a simple matter to release oxygen, which can be used for breathing and for rocket fuel, he explained."
It will be easy to extract at least one useful element....
Ahhh...I'll just include the rest of the article.
"In some ways the Hubble prospecting is just the bare beginning of the next phase of lunar exploration, said Garvin. The next step will be taken by the robotic Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is being built to map out the moon's resources in details.
A second lunar probe is also being planned, all before the planned return of humans to the moon by about 2018, as directed by President George W. Bush's vision for humans in space.
In a sense, said Robinson, the Hubble prospecting experiment is giving scientists the first taste of how to interpret the deluge of lunar data that will be coming from those spacecraft.
"It will be a Niagara Falls of data," he said. "This is really going to jump start our ability to understand this data.""
So this Hubble use is part of what seems to me to be a sound plan for preparing to build a base on the moon.
A key quote from that story you linked to was this: "It could give the perception the space program wasted hundreds of billions of tax dollars."
In this case the perception is reality. Any technical spinoffs from the shuttle program came early on in its development. The program has just been about keeping people's government jobs for about the last twenty years.
I agree...they might be able to recoup some of the costs by producing a "ISS Re-Entry Show" with live coverage of this massive waste of tax dollars burning up in spectacular fashion. They could time the re-entry for the Fourth of July, and skip the ground launched fireworks.
Until we can come up with a propulsion system better and cheaper than the current ones, NASA launches are basically a form of entertainment for geeks. NASA should take the funds it spends on the shuttle and space research and focus on the propulsion problem. Congress would be OK, the funds would still be spent in the same states that they're being spent in now.
At a former employer I was responsible for initiating borrowings and wire transfers into the millions of dollars on a daily basis. The system our bank set up for doing this was they gave me a userid and a random password generating device(it looked strangely like one of those cheapo calculators). To connect to the bank's system you used a piece of software provided by the bank that dialed an 800 number. You got only three tries to get the random password typed in right or you were cut off and your userid was locked out until you contacted the bank to get it fixed, at which point you had to provide a bunch of additional information to verify that you were who you said you were. You would have to tap our phone line to get access to the data stream, and doing so wouldn't provide much more that information about the transactions taking place that day due to the one time nature of the password. In my mind this was a pretty bullet proof system. The only way it could be compromised would be by getting one's hands on the password generator, and of course we kept these locked up. The only risk was of corruption on the inside of the company, and any authentication system will be vulnerable to that.
It would be simple for banks to provide consumers with a small program to dial via phone line to an 800 number and avoid the problems associated with connecting via the internet. Even if a keylogger were installed on the consumer's computer it would be useless because each password is a one time password.
Please supply some references to academic literature that support the statement "transitional fossils happen to be more rare than other fossils". It sounds like you are describing "punctuated equilibrium" which has replaced Darwin's original theory of random mutation and natural selection occurring gradually through geologic time.
The Association of Space Explorers is holding their 19th Planetary Congress here in Salt Lake City this week. The theme of the conference is "Our Destiny in Space: Worlds without Borders". I took my son downtown and we got to meet Don Lind, one of the space shuttle astronauts. I thought it was pretty awesome. Thanks, Don. I'm curious to know how many folks have actually met an astronaut...
Some of the things they are talking about(from the official program):
The Genesis of Cooperation in Space: The Apollo-Soyuz Program Tom Stafford
Panel Discussion (ASE Founders) Loren Acton, Bertalan Farkas, Georgi Ivanov, Alexei Leonov, Vladimir Lyakhov, Dorin Prunariu, Rusty Schweickart, Vitaly Sevastyonov
Technical Session: International Space Programs Review Chairs: Chris Hadfield, Leroy Chiao
NASA Headquarters Update: The ISS Program and Future Issues
Bill Readdy, NASA
Life on Station
Leroy Chiao, NASA
Report on the Canadian Space Program
Chris Hadfield, CSA
Report on the Russian Space Program
Yuri Usachev, RSC Energia
Technical Session: Crew Safety & Technical Issues Chairs: Sergei Avdeev, Charlie Precourt
Shuttle Derived Vehicles
Mike Conn, ATK Thiokol
Maintaining On-Orbit Crew Proficiency
Chris Hadfield, CSA
Electromagnetic Radiation and Crew Health
Alexander Serebrov
Technical Session: Future Programs Chairs: Michel Tognini, Yuri Usachev
Beyond the Moon: The Asteroid Option
Tom Jones
Kliper
Yuri Usachev, RSC Energia
Russia's Future in Space
Georgi Grechko
The Aurora Program
Piero Messina, ESA
There's some pretty big names in there, also note that they are talking about astronaut safety with regard to electromagnetic radiation.
I submitted this to/. and got rejected, so take that, CmdrTaco!
Not to mention the fact that in the several billion year history of this planet, one hundred years of biased data is a statistically meaningless sample. When I say biased data, I mean things like weather reports from cities that have increased in size creating heat islands that raise the reported temperature in that city but have nothing to do with excess carbon dioxide. Parent post here is on to something; global warming is like a new religion that is suceeding because of all of the romanticist propaganda about how humans are bad for the planet.
I attribute the lack of financial success by Polar Express to the fact that it was just plain boring. I fell asleep in the middle...
I think that trying to make a feature film out of a book that had a total of maybe fifty complete sentences in it would always be an exercise in futility. My impression of the book was that it sold well due to the quality of the illustration rather than any greatness of the story.
Their hit counter shows a little over 31,000 just now; how many hits does it take to slashdot a server?
Prompts a joke(?): How many Microsoft employees does it take to screw in a lightbulb? An infinite number: they won't do it because it's a process that can't be patented:]....
I have to disagree..after a cursory trial of the calc product I think that this product is a solid basic spreadsheet package. If you were looking to build a low cost pc setup for someone this product would work well, IMO. I haven't looked at the functionality in MS Works spreadsheet in a while, but I'm pretty sure that ThinkFree Calc has quite a few more built in functions(such as engineering and financial) than MS Works..plus it saves into Excel 2003 format flawlessly(which I just tested). You can't say the same about MS Works.
Now if you need to do macro work ThinkFree isn't the tool for the job...
One potential downside to a web based Office product is the potential for DDOS attacks to shut down access; obviously you don't want to be in the middle of an important financial analysis and get cut off because Thinkfree gets attacked. I suppose Google would be immune to such attacks.
As a founding member of PETI-People for the Ethical Treatment of Insects-I am outraged by this immoral manipulation of an insect species. These scientists can expect a torch-bearing mob at their doorstep very soon......
Isn't the truly fundamental flaw in the system here the design of the Internet as it now stands? What has now become a global network was originally designed for use in a closed network where every machine attached was trusted. IE a fault tolerant communication system for the US military in case of massive attack.
When Internet standards change to the point where every machine attached has an un-spoofable address then DDOS attacks will disappear. Try setting up a radio jammer to block 802.11x transmissions in NYC; the source of the jamming would be identified and shut down in a real hurry because triangulation lets the authorities find the attacker quickly.
Agreed, agreed, agreed! Memory management is at the core of every useful program that ever has been or will be written. It absolutely should be automated and invisible to the programmer. Doing your own memory management while writing a program is like buying iron ore and coal and turning it into steel so you can build your own wheels for your car. It's a waste of effort.
I agree with most of your points; to me an undergraduate program in any discipline should be about helping as many students as possible succeed. There should be a certain basic amount of knowledge required so as not to fail out, but beyond that everyone who grasps those basics should pass.
Prodigies would be able to succeed in the field of engineering without going anywhere near a university. I would venture to say that a significant proportion of individuals who enter an engineering program already understand the general methods of "how to think"; they are seeking the detailed knowledge that an engineering curriculum should provide.
If you are really interested in designing things, its a lot easier these days to do it yourself. With the power of PC's and the vast amount of freeware/opensource engineering software out there, kids today can do things in their kitchens that us oldsters could only dream about. Let's just say a TI 99/4 isn't great for doing numerical modeling.
Whatever happened to the Lotus Office standalone suite? I still see ads for a Wordperfect Office suite that includes QuattroPro, but nothing about Lotus. Could IBM open-source Lotus? It would certainly be an attention grabber.
I think your comments are right on the money. On one hand, if MS chooses go focus on the Xbox, it builds a price for Windows OS into the system and the OS can't be copied because it is a console. But with the console business model of losing money on the console and making it up with cartridge sales negates that. Plus the console market is still a niche market compared to the general PC market and if MS tosses its PC sales it will have to shrink significantly. Plus there is the switch factor which you mentioned where with every console generation market share becomes a complete tossup since there is no backwards compatibility.
What Microsoft should really be doing is paying a quarterly dividend and admitting that they are a non-growth company. They are just milking the cash cow of Office and making poor investments with that cash.
The "some departments" you are referring to would be the hardware side of Sony. Obviously, the hardware engineers wanted to design products that would allow for routine copying of content, because no-one wants to buy a hardware design that you can't use to copy, say, movies. Of course, Sony's music and film people opposed that because they don't want consumers to be able to make copies of the content. This is why Sony is so far behind Apple on the I-pod thing; Apple knew that reducing the cost of music would be a big driver of sales for their hardware. Sony wasted years fighting this issue out internally. So it would be safe to say that for Sony their business strategy for the last ten years has been an absolute disaster.
Also, readers should note that ammunition sold for hunting purposes is not jacketed which (as you already know)means that the slug expands when it impacts the target increasing the killing power. International law mandates that military ammo is jacketed which means that you don't see the same kind of nasty wounds as was seen back in the Civil War when they were just firing balls of lead. So if you've got a citizen militia going up against some kind of military coup then there is an equalizing factor for the citizens.
Slashdot Mirror
Forget the tinfoil hats...go with armadillo hats!
"The latest lunar prospecting first required aiming Hubble at Apollo landing sites and looking with special filters that showed only subtle UV signatures reflected by soils there.
By then comparing the Hubble data to actual laboratory-studied samples that astronauts brought back from the same sites, they were able to get a clear idea just how these same minerals look through Hubble's eye. The Hubble Space Telescope can discriminate very subtle color differences on the surface," said planetary scientist Mark Robinson of Northwestern University. So subtle that Hubble can see mineralogical differences in rocks that look identical in color to the human eye, he said."
So the Hubble can in fact discern with a usable degree of precision....
"At Aristarchus, Hubble detected what appeared to be an abundance of the mineral ilmenite, which is good news, said NASA lunar scientist Michael Wargo. By heating or passing an electrical current through ilmenite, it's a simple matter to release oxygen, which can be used for breathing and for rocket fuel, he explained."
It will be easy to extract at least one useful element....
Ahhh...I'll just include the rest of the article.
"In some ways the Hubble prospecting is just the bare beginning of the next phase of lunar exploration, said Garvin. The next step will be taken by the robotic Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is being built to map out the moon's resources in details.
A second lunar probe is also being planned, all before the planned return of humans to the moon by about 2018, as directed by President George W. Bush's vision for humans in space.
In a sense, said Robinson, the Hubble prospecting experiment is giving scientists the first taste of how to interpret the deluge of lunar data that will be coming from those spacecraft.
"It will be a Niagara Falls of data," he said. "This is really going to jump start our ability to understand this data.""
So this Hubble use is part of what seems to me to be a sound plan for preparing to build a base on the moon.
A key quote from that story you linked to was this: "It could give the perception the space program wasted hundreds of billions of tax dollars."
In this case the perception is reality. Any technical spinoffs from the shuttle program came early on in its development. The program has just been about keeping people's government jobs for about the last twenty years.
I agree...they might be able to recoup some of the costs by producing a "ISS Re-Entry Show" with live coverage of this massive waste of tax dollars burning up in spectacular fashion. They could time the re-entry for the Fourth of July, and skip the ground launched fireworks.
Until we can come up with a propulsion system better and cheaper than the current ones, NASA launches are basically a form of entertainment for geeks. NASA should take the funds it spends on the shuttle and space research and focus on the propulsion problem. Congress would be OK, the funds would still be spent in the same states that they're being spent in now.
At a former employer I was responsible for initiating borrowings and wire transfers into the millions of dollars on a daily basis. The system our bank set up for doing this was they gave me a userid and a random password generating device(it looked strangely like one of those cheapo calculators). To connect to the bank's system you used a piece of software provided by the bank that dialed an 800 number. You got only three tries to get the random password typed in right or you were cut off and your userid was locked out until you contacted the bank to get it fixed, at which point you had to provide a bunch of additional information to verify that you were who you said you were. You would have to tap our phone line to get access to the data stream, and doing so wouldn't provide much more that information about the transactions taking place that day due to the one time nature of the password. In my mind this was a pretty bullet proof system. The only way it could be compromised would be by getting one's hands on the password generator, and of course we kept these locked up. The only risk was of corruption on the inside of the company, and any authentication system will be vulnerable to that.
It would be simple for banks to provide consumers with a small program to dial via phone line to an 800 number and avoid the problems associated with connecting via the internet. Even if a keylogger were installed on the consumer's computer it would be useless because each password is a one time password.
Boogers R' Us?
Please supply some references to academic literature that support the statement "transitional fossils happen to be more rare than other fossils". It sounds like you are describing "punctuated equilibrium" which has replaced Darwin's original theory of random mutation and natural selection occurring gradually through geologic time.
The Association of Space Explorers is holding their 19th Planetary Congress here in Salt Lake City this week. The theme of the conference is "Our Destiny in Space: Worlds without Borders". I took my son downtown and we got to meet Don Lind, one of the space shuttle astronauts. I thought it was pretty awesome. Thanks, Don. I'm curious to know how many folks have actually met an astronaut...
/. and got rejected, so take that, CmdrTaco!
Some of the things they are talking about(from the official program):
The Genesis of Cooperation in Space: The Apollo-Soyuz Program
Tom Stafford
Panel Discussion (ASE Founders)
Loren Acton, Bertalan Farkas, Georgi Ivanov, Alexei Leonov, Vladimir Lyakhov, Dorin Prunariu, Rusty Schweickart, Vitaly Sevastyonov
Technical Session: International Space Programs Review
Chairs: Chris Hadfield, Leroy Chiao
NASA Headquarters Update: The ISS Program and Future Issues
Bill Readdy, NASA
Life on Station
Leroy Chiao, NASA
Report on the Canadian Space Program
Chris Hadfield, CSA
Report on the Russian Space Program
Yuri Usachev, RSC Energia
Technical Session: Crew Safety & Technical Issues
Chairs: Sergei Avdeev, Charlie Precourt
Shuttle Derived Vehicles
Mike Conn, ATK Thiokol
Maintaining On-Orbit Crew Proficiency
Chris Hadfield, CSA
Electromagnetic Radiation and Crew Health
Alexander Serebrov
Technical Session: Future Programs
Chairs: Michel Tognini, Yuri Usachev
Beyond the Moon: The Asteroid Option
Tom Jones
Kliper
Yuri Usachev, RSC Energia
Russia's Future in Space
Georgi Grechko
The Aurora Program
Piero Messina, ESA
There's some pretty big names in there, also note that they are talking about astronaut safety with regard to electromagnetic radiation.
I submitted this to
Not to mention the fact that in the several billion year history of this planet, one hundred years of biased data is a statistically meaningless sample. When I say biased data, I mean things like weather reports from cities that have increased in size creating heat islands that raise the reported temperature in that city but have nothing to do with excess carbon dioxide. Parent post here is on to something; global warming is like a new religion that is suceeding because of all of the romanticist propaganda about how humans are bad for the planet.
I attribute the lack of financial success by Polar Express to the fact that it was just plain boring. I fell asleep in the middle...
I think that trying to make a feature film out of a book that had a total of maybe fifty complete sentences in it would always be an exercise in futility. My impression of the book was that it sold well due to the quality of the illustration rather than any greatness of the story.
I prefer to think that Slashdot editors believe in the educational principle of learning by repetition:).....
I found installing it to be very simple, and using the Synaptic package manager for adding programs is unbelievably simple.
Their hit counter shows a little over 31,000 just now; how many hits does it take to slashdot a server?
Prompts a joke(?): How many Microsoft employees does it take to screw in a lightbulb? An infinite number: they won't do it because it's a process that can't be patented:]....
I have to disagree..after a cursory trial of the calc product I think that this product is a solid basic spreadsheet package. If you were looking to build a low cost pc setup for someone this product would work well, IMO. I haven't looked at the functionality in MS Works spreadsheet in a while, but I'm pretty sure that ThinkFree Calc has quite a few more built in functions(such as engineering and financial) than MS Works..plus it saves into Excel 2003 format flawlessly(which I just tested). You can't say the same about MS Works.
Now if you need to do macro work ThinkFree isn't the tool for the job...
One potential downside to a web based Office product is the potential for DDOS attacks to shut down access; obviously you don't want to be in the middle of an important financial analysis and get cut off because Thinkfree gets attacked. I suppose Google would be immune to such attacks.
As a founding member of PETI-People for the Ethical Treatment of Insects-I am outraged by this immoral manipulation of an insect species. These scientists can expect a torch-bearing mob at their doorstep very soon......
Isn't the truly fundamental flaw in the system here the design of the Internet as it now stands? What has now become a global network was originally designed for use in a closed network where every machine attached was trusted. IE a fault tolerant communication system for the US military in case of massive attack.
When Internet standards change to the point where every machine attached has an un-spoofable address then DDOS attacks will disappear. Try setting up a radio jammer to block 802.11x transmissions in NYC; the source of the jamming would be identified and shut down in a real hurry because triangulation lets the authorities find the attacker quickly.
Agreed, agreed, agreed! Memory management is at the core of every useful program that ever has been or will be written. It absolutely should be automated and invisible to the programmer. Doing your own memory management while writing a program is like buying iron ore and coal and turning it into steel so you can build your own wheels for your car. It's a waste of effort.
Please give an example of how this is relevant to the typical programming task that a programmer would see...
Thanks
I agree with most of your points; to me an undergraduate program in any discipline should be about helping as many students as possible succeed. There should be a certain basic amount of knowledge required so as not to fail out, but beyond that everyone who grasps those basics should pass.
Prodigies would be able to succeed in the field of engineering without going anywhere near a university. I would venture to say that a significant proportion of individuals who enter an engineering program already understand the general methods of "how to think"; they are seeking the detailed knowledge that an engineering curriculum should provide.
If you are really interested in designing things, its a lot easier these days to do it yourself. With the power of PC's and the vast amount of freeware/opensource engineering software out there, kids today can do things in their kitchens that us oldsters could only dream about. Let's just say a TI 99/4 isn't great for doing numerical modeling.
Whatever happened to the Lotus Office standalone suite? I still see ads for a Wordperfect Office suite that includes QuattroPro, but nothing about Lotus. Could IBM open-source Lotus? It would certainly be an attention grabber.
Thanks for the info...I think your calculation make sense.
I think your comments are right on the money. On one hand, if MS chooses go focus on the Xbox, it builds a price for Windows OS into the system and the OS can't be copied because it is a console. But with the console business model of losing money on the console and making it up with cartridge sales negates that. Plus the console market is still a niche market compared to the general PC market
and if MS tosses its PC sales it will have to shrink significantly. Plus there is the switch factor which you mentioned where with every console generation market share becomes a complete tossup since there is no backwards compatibility.
What Microsoft should really be doing is paying a quarterly dividend and admitting that they are a non-growth company. They are just milking the cash cow of Office and making poor investments with that cash.
The "some departments" you are referring to would be the hardware side of Sony. Obviously, the hardware engineers wanted to design products that would allow for routine copying of content, because no-one wants to buy a hardware design that you can't use to copy, say, movies. Of course, Sony's music and film people opposed that because they don't want consumers to be able to make copies of the content. This is why Sony is so far behind Apple on the I-pod thing; Apple knew that reducing the cost of music would be a big driver of sales for their hardware. Sony wasted years fighting this issue out internally. So it would be safe to say that for Sony their business strategy for the last ten years has been an absolute disaster.
Also, readers should note that ammunition sold for hunting purposes is not jacketed which (as you already know)means that the slug expands when it impacts the target increasing the killing power. International law mandates that military ammo is jacketed which means that you don't see the same kind of nasty wounds as was seen back in the Civil War when they were just firing balls of lead. So if you've got a citizen militia going up against some kind of military coup then there is an equalizing factor for the citizens.