Dogbert: I plan to enslave the world. I will put everyone in small boxes and make them work there all day.
Dilbert: That's ridiculous. People would never stand for that. Now get out of my cubicle, I'm trying to get stuff done.
Dogbert: You mean your box.
Better yet, what I was envisioning is a system like Unix permissions.
"chmod 740 pictures"
Then your friends (logged in as members of the google "group") can go to username.google.com/pictures or something relatively simple like that and browse them like a folder. I doubt they would actually be so generous as to give us some sort of shell interface, but the concept still seems possible.
It isn't really news. It's just an interesting story that was published by a news vendor. This stuff comes up all the time, like the story about the pastor who's dedicated his life to helping drug addicts in the local paper: he's been doing it for 20 years, but it's still informative to most people.
Genetically modifying mice and other things has been happening for a while. This deals a little more specifically with the market that has emerged for them. Since it's about the market, which has developed continuously since the first mice were genetically altered (which was a single news event), it can't really be timed the same. For a more typical slashdot analogy, the difference is like talking about production of the first household wireless router, compared to talking about the prevalence of wireless routers in US households. We often see both types of articles here.
Grr...now you're taking me back to my PHL 220 - Ethics class. I hated that class.
I guess it's my attempt to place value on and prioritize suffering. I place human suffering above that of mice and value a small decrease in human suffering higher than the large increase in mouse suffering that may allow the former to take place. I don't hold human entertainment (or sick pleasure) as highly relative to the suffering of mice. Also, regarding a "curing disease fetish" and your own "sick pleasures," I generally view one as morally positive, and the other negative. I'm pretty darn sure most of the world agrees with me on that. Why I hold these priorities is part of a much bigger question.
Genetic engineering does raise some ethical questions, but it's not like they're raising these mice to laugh at them. "Hehe, these mice are blind. Let's put them in the carpenter's kitchen to see if his wife cuts off their tails!"
Is it playing God or using our natural faculties for the betterment of mankind? Where do you draw the line? Is it ok to make glow-in-the-dark mice, but not mice with 6 legs? What about glow-in-the-dark mice versus glow-in-the-dark E-choli (I did the latter back in high school)? Or glow-in-the-dark people?
I hate mulling over these questions because it's so hard to set a standard to judge them by, but they have to be asked or it gets out of control.
Funny, but also a good point. However, I do have a fair number of relatively low security risk files that it would be handy to access anywhere without carrying them on a flash drive. Flash drives are useable almost everywhere, but not quite, and they can get lost, which makes them as much or more of a security risk as files on a fileserver. I actually save a bunch of miscellaneous bits of information as drafts on my gmail account for convenience, but it would be nice to do so as something other than plain text. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone.
One would also expect that a google online drive would be roughly as secure as their mail account (same username and password, potentially different avenues for hacking, however). Email security is pretty important, so if a person is willing to trust their personal communications to Google, why not a few files? Besides, it's probably a lot more secure than the average user's personal computer.
I suppose cost is one of the big reasons a rocket sled hasn't been tried. A full scale ramp would be a major investment. If the sled is rocket driven, you still deal with burning lots of fuel, although reuse of components could be made simpler. If it's magnetic, you're dealing with developing new technology on a very large scale. I'm not sure if pneumatic or steam systems are even reasonably realistic at the velocities in question. Either way, you need a very long and straight ramp, which means a lot of real estate pointed roughly west-east, and you still have deal with high speeds in the densest portion of the atmosphere. As far as alternatives to vertical ground launches go, dropping from a carrier plane sounds like a better way to go to me...unless we can build a space elevator, that is.
Actually, another article said the capsule was originally referred to as "magic dragon," a reference to a certain Peter, Paul, and Mary song you might have heard. So the question is, are the engineers at SpaceX role-playing nerds or stoners?
Sorry, I beat you to it. Actually, I saw the SpaceRef article only a few minutes after I made my submission. It's a little bit better write up, if only for the fact that it has pictures and doesn't have space.com's ponderous wealth of ads and background images. Interestingly enough, I found the SpaceRef article when, out of curiosity, I checked wikipedia to see if there was any prior mention of the capsule, since I remembered Musk suggesting a year or two ago that he was interested in manned space flight. Instead, I found that someone had already added a section about the capsule this morning to the SpaceX entry. Crazy nerds!
Also, as you probably know but others may not, SpaceX already has a tentative contract to launch one of Bigelow Aerospace's prototype inflatable modules sometime next year (barring delays from either company, which is a longshot) aboard a Falcon 9.
Musk supposedly has never said how much of his own cash he's invested in SpaceX, but the article, as well as other estimates, place it at around $100 million so far. No mention of other contributions. The article also mentions that they don't expect to receive all of the $500 million NASA grant, but are hoping for at least half.
It's doubtful there is any stipulation that their technology become public domain. After all, don't Boeing and Lockheed get to keep all of theirs? I guess the grant could be considered sort of a private investment on the part of NASA. If SpaceX is successful, the investment pays off in the form of cheaper products in the future. Otherwise, it's lost money. Certainly no bigger a waste of money than any of the programs that have gotten as far as prototypes being built before getting cancelled.
This story also seems to have some seeds of truth. It's not surprise that the witnesses claim it looked sort of like an XB-70. The performance discussed also matches that of an XB-70, and according to the article, the Air Force had enough spare parts on hand to actually build a third XB-70 protoype.
I don't know if the craft would even necessarily have to be unmanned. The Pegasus is not a very large rocket, and it's launched at about 1/4 the speed (1/16 the KE, assuming the same mass) this supposed space plane would be launched at. If it really had a drop away booster (not a true two stage to orbit craft, in that case) I suspect a small manned craft would be possible.
I worked for the network and telecommunications department for a smaller university for a few years. Building the infrastructure in place like this is critical. We constantly found ourselves working out awkward solutions to providing access to older buildings. A couple of the buildings are running ethernet over phone wires and served by hubs that are 20 years old because they are the only thing with a strong enough signal for the quality of the wires. Two of the dorms are using Cisco's LRE DSL technology. Locating IDF's when we did major upgrades was a pain in the butt. Sometimes we would spend most of a day adding a couple drops to a single office that needed more space, but rewiring that wing wasn't in the budget. In the long run, the costs add up, as do the frustrations.
In contrast, our newest building is thoroughly wired (with the perplexing and random exception of two small labs that I spent several days running cable to last summer). Even the closets have multiple ports, just in case, and that has been important several times.
Documentation is equally important, and someplace where we currently lag. Currently, what goes where is stored in our heads, and gets lost every time someone leaves. The mix of old and new standards, as well non-standard crap has made the documenting process difficult. Also, it is impossible if there isn't a method in place for ensuring that changes made as documentation is being built up aren't recorded.
Another challenge is correctly anticipating what your future needs are and building in expandability. Our athletic center was built right before the networking became standard, and while it has plenty of phone lines, the distance is too far to run ethernet in some cases, and the routing makes spot-upgrades close to impossible.
It's not that Aviation Weekly is a bad source, but the Slashdot submission discussed the planes existance as fact. The AW article said there were unconfirmed reports of a possible plane and orbiter. It's also possible that over-zealous AW readers saw SR-71's launching drones, and thought they were something cooler (yes, cooler than an SR-71, if you can believe that).
This isn't uncommon. There have also been reports of a flying wing stealth reconnaisance plane referred to as the TR-3. More concretely, there was a lot of speculation during the 80's that the air force was developing a stealth fighter called the F-19 Ghostrider. The Air Force made a bit of fuss when drawings of it were leaked, the Wall Street Journal discussed it, Revell created a plastic model kit of it, and even Tom Clancy featured the plane in Red Storm Rising. It turned out the leak was a misleading cover up to help keep the true design of the F-117 secret, which flew for several years before being made public.
You are quite right in what you say. I find myself suckered into replying to global warming debates quite often by the people who authoratively declare that global warming is happening, and basically refuse to consider that it might not be. Many of them have no idea what the evidence for global warming is other than "the weatherman said 2005 was the warmest on record," or "the ice caps are melting." Yes we have some good indicators, but they are inconclusive.
I definitely don't hold that we shouldn't be taking some steps to improve, especially in light of the other benefits that would accompany improvements like reduced dependence on foreign oil and increased energy flexibility in the future. Personally, I'm pretty comfortable with the current rate of advance of green technology, but not with the disinformation and miseducation of quite a few people on both sides of the issue.
Yeah, but imagine a kid that age actually carrying around a real baritone sax, much less dancing down the hallway with it. And where the heck do you suppose they found that guy to play the band teacher? He was the best fit appearance-wise in the whole clip.
On the other hand, the Kepler telescope is moving forward, and there is some overlap in purpose. The Kepler looks for new planets by watching for them to transit their home stars. I believe it is supposed to be capable of locating planets as small as earth, but will conduct a survey of over 100,000 stars.
When the time came up to decide whether or not to give JIMO money to actually develop and build the mission beyond the concept phase, NASA shied away from it. They decided it relied too heavily on technology that is still under development like ion propulsion. Yes, both NASA and ESA have built and tested ion propelled spacecraft (like DS1), but the duration of those missions was something like 12 months each, as opposed to years, and the mass involved was fraction of JIMO's. A failure would mean the loss of a multi-billion dollar mission. I believe equally as important in the JIMO decision, was the projection that the amount of science return from it compared to mission cost would be significantly lower than other proposed missions. So JIMO isn't going to happen, but Griffin and JPL are still extremely interested in a mission to Europa in the next decade.
You may already know this, but work is moving ahead on the Mars Science Laboratory, the nuclear-powered follow on for the Mars Rovers to be launched in 2009. It looks like this one is really going to happen. And we all know about Stardust returning a bountiful harvest, as well as New Horizons currently well on its way to Pluto and beyond. NASA is also considering additional relatively low-cost missions based on the New Horizons hardware.
This project has experienced a problem with cost overruns, which was the real reason it was cancelled, not because of the CEV. Granted, had the budget not need to flex to push CEV development forward, the cost overruns might have been allowed, but there is more involved here than just human spaceflight goals affecting science.
1000 feet of Cat-5 is $60-70. 3 hubs to boost the signal at 100 meter intervals would be another $100. I'm assuming he already has the wireless bridge. Stick the bridge on top of the church tower and run cable to your house. If the signal is good, you might not even need three hubs. Run the cable along fences, laundry lines, etc so the neighbors don't notice.
...but, as most of us (but not all) know, the earth is not spontaneously bursting into flames with ice cream shooting out of the grand canyon or anything like that. Ice is melting. If I saw a man sweating, I would have the good sense to say, "hey, I don't know what's going on here. He could have a fever, or he could be overdressed for the weather, or he could have just been working out. I can't judge his actual health by a small fraction of his life."
Leszczynski's team hopes to show if radiation has any impact on the body's natural barrier that prevents toxins and other dangerous proteins that might be in the bloodstream from reaching brain cells.
They're looking to see if the radiation might have any indirect effects that can increase the body's susceptibility. They aren't looking directly for ill effects.
I didn't pay attention to this case for quite a while because there's so much patent BS going around right now, and I don't use Blackberry anyways. Can someone please summarize what this is over? The article is very, very basic on the details.
From a quick search, it sounds like the one company is based entirely off of patenting ideas and licensing them out (what some might call a "patent whore"). 5 of their patents happen to be related to some of RIM's technology, so they're suing. Can somebody (unbiased, preferred) fill in the details?
Also, haven't there been past patent infringement cases that were dropped because the patent holder had made no attempts to develop a product based on their patent, so there was really nothing to steal, unless it can be proven that RIM based the Blackberry on those patents rather than their own original work?
I suspect it was more a case of they don't feel confident of an overall favorable outcome of the case. 600 million dollars would have to be the difference between a long term loss in revenue or clearing their record. I don't think this settlement is going to be long remembered by potential customers. For the most part, the damage is already done.
Slashdot Mirror
Dogbert: I plan to enslave the world. I will put everyone in small boxes and make them work there all day.
Dilbert: That's ridiculous. People would never stand for that. Now get out of my cubicle, I'm trying to get stuff done.
Dogbert: You mean your box.
Better yet, what I was envisioning is a system like Unix permissions.
"chmod 740 pictures"
Then your friends (logged in as members of the google "group") can go to username.google.com/pictures or something relatively simple like that and browse them like a folder. I doubt they would actually be so generous as to give us some sort of shell interface, but the concept still seems possible.
It isn't really news. It's just an interesting story that was published by a news vendor. This stuff comes up all the time, like the story about the pastor who's dedicated his life to helping drug addicts in the local paper: he's been doing it for 20 years, but it's still informative to most people.
Genetically modifying mice and other things has been happening for a while. This deals a little more specifically with the market that has emerged for them. Since it's about the market, which has developed continuously since the first mice were genetically altered (which was a single news event), it can't really be timed the same. For a more typical slashdot analogy, the difference is like talking about production of the first household wireless router, compared to talking about the prevalence of wireless routers in US households. We often see both types of articles here.
Grr...now you're taking me back to my PHL 220 - Ethics class. I hated that class.
I guess it's my attempt to place value on and prioritize suffering. I place human suffering above that of mice and value a small decrease in human suffering higher than the large increase in mouse suffering that may allow the former to take place. I don't hold human entertainment (or sick pleasure) as highly relative to the suffering of mice. Also, regarding a "curing disease fetish" and your own "sick pleasures," I generally view one as morally positive, and the other negative. I'm pretty darn sure most of the world agrees with me on that. Why I hold these priorities is part of a much bigger question.
Genetic engineering does raise some ethical questions, but it's not like they're raising these mice to laugh at them. "Hehe, these mice are blind. Let's put them in the carpenter's kitchen to see if his wife cuts off their tails!"
Is it playing God or using our natural faculties for the betterment of mankind? Where do you draw the line? Is it ok to make glow-in-the-dark mice, but not mice with 6 legs? What about glow-in-the-dark mice versus glow-in-the-dark E-choli (I did the latter back in high school)? Or glow-in-the-dark people?
I hate mulling over these questions because it's so hard to set a standard to judge them by, but they have to be asked or it gets out of control.
Funny, but also a good point. However, I do have a fair number of relatively low security risk files that it would be handy to access anywhere without carrying them on a flash drive. Flash drives are useable almost everywhere, but not quite, and they can get lost, which makes them as much or more of a security risk as files on a fileserver. I actually save a bunch of miscellaneous bits of information as drafts on my gmail account for convenience, but it would be nice to do so as something other than plain text. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone.
One would also expect that a google online drive would be roughly as secure as their mail account (same username and password, potentially different avenues for hacking, however). Email security is pretty important, so if a person is willing to trust their personal communications to Google, why not a few files? Besides, it's probably a lot more secure than the average user's personal computer.
I suppose cost is one of the big reasons a rocket sled hasn't been tried. A full scale ramp would be a major investment. If the sled is rocket driven, you still deal with burning lots of fuel, although reuse of components could be made simpler. If it's magnetic, you're dealing with developing new technology on a very large scale. I'm not sure if pneumatic or steam systems are even reasonably realistic at the velocities in question. Either way, you need a very long and straight ramp, which means a lot of real estate pointed roughly west-east, and you still have deal with high speeds in the densest portion of the atmosphere. As far as alternatives to vertical ground launches go, dropping from a carrier plane sounds like a better way to go to me...unless we can build a space elevator, that is.
Actually, another article said the capsule was originally referred to as "magic dragon," a reference to a certain Peter, Paul, and Mary song you might have heard. So the question is, are the engineers at SpaceX role-playing nerds or stoners?
Sorry, I beat you to it. Actually, I saw the SpaceRef article only a few minutes after I made my submission. It's a little bit better write up, if only for the fact that it has pictures and doesn't have space.com's ponderous wealth of ads and background images. Interestingly enough, I found the SpaceRef article when, out of curiosity, I checked wikipedia to see if there was any prior mention of the capsule, since I remembered Musk suggesting a year or two ago that he was interested in manned space flight. Instead, I found that someone had already added a section about the capsule this morning to the SpaceX entry. Crazy nerds!
Also, as you probably know but others may not, SpaceX already has a tentative contract to launch one of Bigelow Aerospace's prototype inflatable modules sometime next year (barring delays from either company, which is a longshot) aboard a Falcon 9.
Musk supposedly has never said how much of his own cash he's invested in SpaceX, but the article, as well as other estimates, place it at around $100 million so far. No mention of other contributions. The article also mentions that they don't expect to receive all of the $500 million NASA grant, but are hoping for at least half.
It's doubtful there is any stipulation that their technology become public domain. After all, don't Boeing and Lockheed get to keep all of theirs? I guess the grant could be considered sort of a private investment on the part of NASA. If SpaceX is successful, the investment pays off in the form of cheaper products in the future. Otherwise, it's lost money. Certainly no bigger a waste of money than any of the programs that have gotten as far as prototypes being built before getting cancelled.
This story also seems to have some seeds of truth. It's not surprise that the witnesses claim it looked sort of like an XB-70. The performance discussed also matches that of an XB-70, and according to the article, the Air Force had enough spare parts on hand to actually build a third XB-70 protoype.
I don't know if the craft would even necessarily have to be unmanned. The Pegasus is not a very large rocket, and it's launched at about 1/4 the speed (1/16 the KE, assuming the same mass) this supposed space plane would be launched at. If it really had a drop away booster (not a true two stage to orbit craft, in that case) I suspect a small manned craft would be possible.
I worked for the network and telecommunications department for a smaller university for a few years. Building the infrastructure in place like this is critical. We constantly found ourselves working out awkward solutions to providing access to older buildings. A couple of the buildings are running ethernet over phone wires and served by hubs that are 20 years old because they are the only thing with a strong enough signal for the quality of the wires. Two of the dorms are using Cisco's LRE DSL technology. Locating IDF's when we did major upgrades was a pain in the butt. Sometimes we would spend most of a day adding a couple drops to a single office that needed more space, but rewiring that wing wasn't in the budget. In the long run, the costs add up, as do the frustrations.
In contrast, our newest building is thoroughly wired (with the perplexing and random exception of two small labs that I spent several days running cable to last summer). Even the closets have multiple ports, just in case, and that has been important several times.
Documentation is equally important, and someplace where we currently lag. Currently, what goes where is stored in our heads, and gets lost every time someone leaves. The mix of old and new standards, as well non-standard crap has made the documenting process difficult. Also, it is impossible if there isn't a method in place for ensuring that changes made as documentation is being built up aren't recorded.
Another challenge is correctly anticipating what your future needs are and building in expandability. Our athletic center was built right before the networking became standard, and while it has plenty of phone lines, the distance is too far to run ethernet in some cases, and the routing makes spot-upgrades close to impossible.
It's not that Aviation Weekly is a bad source, but the Slashdot submission discussed the planes existance as fact. The AW article said there were unconfirmed reports of a possible plane and orbiter. It's also possible that over-zealous AW readers saw SR-71's launching drones, and thought they were something cooler (yes, cooler than an SR-71, if you can believe that).
This isn't uncommon. There have also been reports of a flying wing stealth reconnaisance plane referred to as the TR-3. More concretely, there was a lot of speculation during the 80's that the air force was developing a stealth fighter called the F-19 Ghostrider. The Air Force made a bit of fuss when drawings of it were leaked, the Wall Street Journal discussed it, Revell created a plastic model kit of it, and even Tom Clancy featured the plane in Red Storm Rising. It turned out the leak was a misleading cover up to help keep the true design of the F-117 secret, which flew for several years before being made public.
You are quite right in what you say. I find myself suckered into replying to global warming debates quite often by the people who authoratively declare that global warming is happening, and basically refuse to consider that it might not be. Many of them have no idea what the evidence for global warming is other than "the weatherman said 2005 was the warmest on record," or "the ice caps are melting." Yes we have some good indicators, but they are inconclusive.
I definitely don't hold that we shouldn't be taking some steps to improve, especially in light of the other benefits that would accompany improvements like reduced dependence on foreign oil and increased energy flexibility in the future. Personally, I'm pretty comfortable with the current rate of advance of green technology, but not with the disinformation and miseducation of quite a few people on both sides of the issue.
Yeah, but imagine a kid that age actually carrying around a real baritone sax, much less dancing down the hallway with it. And where the heck do you suppose they found that guy to play the band teacher? He was the best fit appearance-wise in the whole clip.
The timing throughout was pretty well done, too.
On the other hand, the Kepler telescope is moving forward, and there is some overlap in purpose. The Kepler looks for new planets by watching for them to transit their home stars. I believe it is supposed to be capable of locating planets as small as earth, but will conduct a survey of over 100,000 stars.
Missile defense is a DoD project, not NASA.
When the time came up to decide whether or not to give JIMO money to actually develop and build the mission beyond the concept phase, NASA shied away from it. They decided it relied too heavily on technology that is still under development like ion propulsion. Yes, both NASA and ESA have built and tested ion propelled spacecraft (like DS1), but the duration of those missions was something like 12 months each, as opposed to years, and the mass involved was fraction of JIMO's. A failure would mean the loss of a multi-billion dollar mission. I believe equally as important in the JIMO decision, was the projection that the amount of science return from it compared to mission cost would be significantly lower than other proposed missions. So JIMO isn't going to happen, but Griffin and JPL are still extremely interested in a mission to Europa in the next decade.
You may already know this, but work is moving ahead on the Mars Science Laboratory, the nuclear-powered follow on for the Mars Rovers to be launched in 2009. It looks like this one is really going to happen. And we all know about Stardust returning a bountiful harvest, as well as New Horizons currently well on its way to Pluto and beyond. NASA is also considering additional relatively low-cost missions based on the New Horizons hardware.
This project has experienced a problem with cost overruns, which was the real reason it was cancelled, not because of the CEV. Granted, had the budget not need to flex to push CEV development forward, the cost overruns might have been allowed, but there is more involved here than just human spaceflight goals affecting science.
1000 feet of Cat-5 is $60-70. 3 hubs to boost the signal at 100 meter intervals would be another $100. I'm assuming he already has the wireless bridge. Stick the bridge on top of the church tower and run cable to your house. If the signal is good, you might not even need three hubs. Run the cable along fences, laundry lines, etc so the neighbors don't notice.
...but, as most of us (but not all) know, the earth is not spontaneously bursting into flames with ice cream shooting out of the grand canyon or anything like that. Ice is melting. If I saw a man sweating, I would have the good sense to say, "hey, I don't know what's going on here. He could have a fever, or he could be overdressed for the weather, or he could have just been working out. I can't judge his actual health by a small fraction of his life."
Interesting analogy, but not quite on target.
I didn't pay attention to this case for quite a while because there's so much patent BS going around right now, and I don't use Blackberry anyways. Can someone please summarize what this is over? The article is very, very basic on the details.
From a quick search, it sounds like the one company is based entirely off of patenting ideas and licensing them out (what some might call a "patent whore"). 5 of their patents happen to be related to some of RIM's technology, so they're suing. Can somebody (unbiased, preferred) fill in the details?
Also, haven't there been past patent infringement cases that were dropped because the patent holder had made no attempts to develop a product based on their patent, so there was really nothing to steal, unless it can be proven that RIM based the Blackberry on those patents rather than their own original work?
I suspect it was more a case of they don't feel confident of an overall favorable outcome of the case. 600 million dollars would have to be the difference between a long term loss in revenue or clearing their record. I don't think this settlement is going to be long remembered by potential customers. For the most part, the damage is already done.
Barnes and Noble not evil? Man! It's been a while since you bought a college textbook...