This is hilariously coincidental, but I received a copy of the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog addressed to the previous occupant of my house (no seriously...I'm not a sucker!), and I took it with me to the computer lab on campus to show my friends some of the outrageous prices (like $695.00 for a plain red turtleneck). Their two page ad for the Skycar really caught my eye, since I thought Moller had died and the car with him, and I didn't believe it until I saw the Slashdot article. On one page it says "Wow! Give them something to talk about." The next is a rendition of a skycar flying 10 feet over a meadow, with the sales pitch:
Skycar Prototype. Born too late for the Wright Brothers' first plane? Missed out on Henry Ford's Model T? You can still have a piece of transportation history: the prototype for an unprecedented mode of transportation that melds sci-fi and state-of-the-art technology. The M400 Skycar is the world's first personal vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft, designed to elevate individual drivers above the headaches of commuting and the dangers of highway travel. In development since the 1960's, the Skycar has completed successful hovering flights, and its first manned, un-tethered flight is planned for Fall 2005. Developed by Moller International, the three-wheeled, folding-wing craft is designed to be as safe, affordable, and easy to use as an automobile, traveling at 350+ miles per hour and achieving an environmentally friendly 21 miles per gallon on alcohol, a cleaner fuel than gasoline. And because most auto emissions occur at idle or low speeds, the M400 will produce less pollution by burning fuel more completely. A limited number of M400s is expected to be available within the next three years, but you can purchase the actual prototype for yourself or your favorite commuter now. For more information and to order, please call 1.877.9NM.GIFT.
Skycar prototype - 3,500,000.00 (delivery not included)*
*Neiman Marcus is acting as the advertiser for this product. Certain regulatory requirements must be met for purchase of this prototype, including International Traffic in Arms Regulations and Federal Aviation Administration authorization. A purchase agreement will need ot be signed by the purchaser
I can't believe I just typed that out. A general comment about the Skycar, though: If the Beech Starcraft wasn't able to be successful, I have serious doubts that this ever will be, even though it takes a different business approach. Also, I'm guessing the ITAR restriction is only if you want to export it, or do domestice buyers need clearance, too?
Are you willing to take a rollercoaster ride into space in a damn kite with a rocket strapped to it?
Yes. No question. There are few things for which I'm willing to put my life at risk, and being one of the first 1000 people in human history to escape the atmosphere is absolutely one of them. I obviously don't want to die, but it's a chance I'm willing to take.
While that would be absolutely awesome, I just don't think I can justify $200,000 on it. This is the part where I complain about "the man" using his money and influence to keep the little guy out of the history books. Oh well, I guess I just have to keep trying to get NASA to hire me as a test monkey for the first CEV launch.
In 2007, a big set of new federal regulations will come into play for road diesel, cutting the sulfur content drastically and requiring catalytic converters in new cars. That will drop diesel emmisions per gallon burned to right around that of gas.
The problem that won't go away in 2007 is the winter demand for heating oil, which cuts into the diesel supply, since they're refined from similar weight crude content. Further natural gas development would help, but too many people are paranoid about it.
My dad got a TDI Jetta this spring (so no winter data), but he tells me he's getting around 50mpg, and it's still increasing as it breaks in. The only problem with the diesals is, as you noted, the sulphur, which will by law be reduced to almost gasoline levels around 2007. The price will probably go up a little bit, but it will also allow the use of a catalytic converter which cleans things up even more. The end result is that diesels will be producing less CO2/mile and about the same in other pollutants.
By the way, diesel prices vary significantly by region. It's about $0.10 more per gallon than gas here, and I've heard $0.25 other places.
Actually, a great number of cars, especially luxury cars, are moving away from heaters run off the coolant and towards electric. I drove my Mom's Honda Odyssey one cold day when visiting her, and to my shock, the vents started pouring out hot air immediately. I imagine quite a few other cars have made this same design mistake (coolant-based heaters require no extra power, and can be used to assist the radiator in the event of overheating).
The Civic or Corolla idea really makes sense. I've got a used Corolla, and I'm averaging just over 40 mpg on my commute. My only complaints are not having a pickup bed to toss stuff in, and the lack of similarity in performance to a Formula 1 car.
Don't forget about Joe Sixpack who bought the $400 Dell on sale for school, then realized that it only comes with Works suite, which has Word, Outlook Express, and Works. He gets to school and finds himself needing to make presentations and use real spreadsheets (not Works crap), but he was planning on spending the remaining $300 that tuition left to his name on books, not Office Small Business Edition. I see potential for Star or OpenOffice to appeal to him. Of course, it would have to be able to share with Microsoft programs effectively. If he can't deliver his presentations on whatever computer the professor sets up for the class or share his spreadsheets with his project partners, it won't really work for him. Does anybody know how the interoperability is going the opposite way the article discusses?
Buzzwords sure are great when you're trying to impress a big group of people. "Let's give all our kids laptops!" Laptop shouldn't even be a buzzword, but apparently it is. These things, while probably having reasonable potential for word processing, teaching general interface skills, and not much else, really don't sound like much more than Speak-n-Spells for this generation.
What? Wrong movie? Sorry, the first two sucked bad enough that there was no way I was going watch this one and let Regal Entertainment and Lucas Films to divy up my $8. Maybe I'll watch it when it comes out on DVD, but more likely, I'll wait until it comes out on Mystery Science Theatre 3000.
Last I heard, they are going forward with Galileo, because they don't want to have to rely on our system. The GPS was designed as a US military application and is still managed with military primarily in mind. It would be every bit as foolish for the French or Germans to depend wholly on navigation system run by another army during a war (even if we're not in any way opposed to whatever they might be doing) as it would be for us to rely on them.
Living long-term in a microgravity environment does give us lots of opportunity to observe long-term effects on the astronauts, which is important to understand if we ever send a mission to Mars (sorry, that cool pinwheel Mars mission idea from the 70's isn't going to happen anytime soon). Remember John Glenn went back into space as an old man to help understand the effects of gravity (or lack of it) on the human body.
In addition to Coriolis effect, a rotating station also has to be stopped to dock with another ship and is restricted to being symmetrical. Basically, expect a rotating space station to happen shortly after the space elevator.
Re:Its a matter of perspective
on
Pay vs. Happiness
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Engineering for the money definitely isn't worth it, for two reasons. First, because studying engineering means spending 4+ years absolutely convinced that everyone around you is enjoying life way more than you. Sure I enjoyed the stuff I studied and I'd make the same major decision again if I had to, but it was frustrating nonetheless to watch the girls wander through the dorm at 10 pm on Fridays while writing lab reports. Second, average salaries are a statistic, and statistics have a nasty habit of screwing you over just when probability says they shouldn't. Somehow I managed to finish in the top quarter of my ME class with a math minor and landed a job on contract making $10000 less than the average, no benefits. That's intended to be a case-in-point, not a rant.
To build on your story, my freshmen physics class started the first semester with around 85 students in it, almost all engineering majors. We pretty quickly started joking about how this class must be designed to weed out the students who shouldn't be engineers, but we didn't think the administration was actually that clever. At the end of the semester, only about 70 students showed up for the final. By the end of the second semester, there were less than 60 left. In retrospect, I still don't think the administration was consciously trying to cull those not oriented towards nerdiness (I did enough extracurricular stuff interacting with them to learn that they genuinely are not that clever), but the nature of the material either killed their intellectual idealism or their grades, probably both, and the rolls of the business, communications, and other "I don't know what I want to do with life" majors started swelling.
It's nothing to me, or the guy with the lawyer-turned-chef mom. The point is, if your job is bringing you down, it's not worth it. I'm sure there are some people out there who jobs they hate but that don't so absorb their life that they lose the opportunity for happiness.
The termination shock -- a shock wave in the solar wind, that marks the slowing of the supersonic solar wind to subsonic speed ~ quoted from a scientist in the article
Granted, he's probably trying to dumb this down for the Slashdot masses, or perhaps astrophysicists refer to their own forms of super/subsonic, but that caught my eye. Conventional super and subsonic concepts should be pretty close to meaningless out there. With as low as the density is out there, both the speed of sound and the efficiency of actually transmitting energy that way would be essentially zero.
If you're suggesting that we didn't have rockets blow up or have probes miss their marks back in the 70's when the Voyager's were launched, you should start reading again. I suggest you start by reviewing the last 35 missions to Mars
Well, some of these kids probably have (at $1/song) the equivalent value of an 4-year (public) university education on their computers. I know several people who do. Now one could argue that if all the music is deleted, the goods have been returned, but then again, you face the fact that after listening to the latest Green Day CD illegally 100 times in a row, little Johny might not be as anxious as he was to have his own copy, so the music might be consider "used" in that sense, but how the heck do you place a value on that. And of course, there's always the issue of court costs, and only the finest, most expensive lawyers will do for an important case like this....blah blah blah...you get the point: placing a value on this is no small task.
...that this is just a bunch of (Canadian?) kids (well, at least as much kids as I am) who like space and have an idea for a cool website, and they thought they'd see if the slashdot editors would help them promote it (which they did). If they're sharp and play their cards right, they might end up with the equivalent popularity of Slashdot or CNet among spacenuts. If not, well, a lot of us out here in Slashdot land have personal websites that never really go anywhere, so there's nothing to be ashamed of.
To their credit, the server hasn't been launched in orbit, spewing flames and smoke yet.
Please note the insightful mod. I wasn't actually sure which keywords to use to get the upgrade, but AJAX, ubuntu and evolved expanded launch vehicle seem to have worked. Now the question is do I get an "insightful" in this post for using those keywords, or do I first have to earn a "funny" or "interesting" rating with the first set of keywords.
I don't get it. My first instinct was to try to find a secret code in the capitalized letters, but that didn't work out. Are you attempting to appeal to the slashdot moderators that appear to be scripts by tossing in keywords? If so you're going about it all wrong. You should start with, "I'm gonna get modded down for this," and include the words space elevator, soviet russia, nucular, linux, and intelligent design. Adding in AJAX, ubuntu, and evolved expanded launch vehicle will bump you up from funny or interesting to insightful.
Dealing with the eccentricity of the moon's orbit is something of a pain in the butt. That gets easier to handle the less mass your counterweight has.
By the way, who the heck links to articles on msnbc? That's about the worst news site on the internet. Not to mention, the article is just a mirror from the orginal at space.com.
I've only bought 1 CD in the past year. There are a couple major bands I'm currently seriously considering buying CD's from, but one of the things holding me back is DRM and the other stupid crap pulled by the major labels. If others are willing to live without the latest big hits for a little while, I'm more than game for a boycott to teach the RIAA a lesson in the free market economy.
Hence why nobody reads them. I keep an online journal (blog if you must use the accursed word) mostly because I like shiny things (screwing around with PHP/MySQL), but I honestly don't expect anybody to read it except a few family members and friends. If I were some random guy wandering in off the larger internet, I know I'd think my site was almost as boring and unoriginal as reality TV. Unless you're someone interested in what's going on in iamlucky13's life, the only thing my site has going for it is the fact that it doesn't look like a blogger, livejournal, or myspace creation.
As for myself, I don't even find most non-personal blogs interesting, like you do. In general, the organization and delivery of content is much better from more established sources, like slashdot, NASA, ars technica, space.com, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha! That just gets funnier the more I think about it.
In 2007, a big set of new federal regulations will come into play for road diesel, cutting the sulfur content drastically and requiring catalytic converters in new cars. That will drop diesel emmisions per gallon burned to right around that of gas.
The problem that won't go away in 2007 is the winter demand for heating oil, which cuts into the diesel supply, since they're refined from similar weight crude content. Further natural gas development would help, but too many people are paranoid about it.
My dad got a TDI Jetta this spring (so no winter data), but he tells me he's getting around 50mpg, and it's still increasing as it breaks in. The only problem with the diesals is, as you noted, the sulphur, which will by law be reduced to almost gasoline levels around 2007. The price will probably go up a little bit, but it will also allow the use of a catalytic converter which cleans things up even more. The end result is that diesels will be producing less CO2/mile and about the same in other pollutants.
By the way, diesel prices vary significantly by region. It's about $0.10 more per gallon than gas here, and I've heard $0.25 other places.
Actually, a great number of cars, especially luxury cars, are moving away from heaters run off the coolant and towards electric. I drove my Mom's Honda Odyssey one cold day when visiting her, and to my shock, the vents started pouring out hot air immediately. I imagine quite a few other cars have made this same design mistake (coolant-based heaters require no extra power, and can be used to assist the radiator in the event of overheating).
The Civic or Corolla idea really makes sense. I've got a used Corolla, and I'm averaging just over 40 mpg on my commute. My only complaints are not having a pickup bed to toss stuff in, and the lack of similarity in performance to a Formula 1 car.
Don't forget about Joe Sixpack who bought the $400 Dell on sale for school, then realized that it only comes with Works suite, which has Word, Outlook Express, and Works. He gets to school and finds himself needing to make presentations and use real spreadsheets (not Works crap), but he was planning on spending the remaining $300 that tuition left to his name on books, not Office Small Business Edition. I see potential for Star or OpenOffice to appeal to him. Of course, it would have to be able to share with Microsoft programs effectively. If he can't deliver his presentations on whatever computer the professor sets up for the class or share his spreadsheets with his project partners, it won't really work for him. Does anybody know how the interoperability is going the opposite way the article discusses?
Wow, it's posts like that one that make dupes worthwhile. Thanks for the laugh.
Buzzwords sure are great when you're trying to impress a big group of people. "Let's give all our kids laptops!" Laptop shouldn't even be a buzzword, but apparently it is. These things, while probably having reasonable potential for word processing, teaching general interface skills, and not much else, really don't sound like much more than Speak-n-Spells for this generation.
"KHAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!"
What? Wrong movie? Sorry, the first two sucked bad enough that there was no way I was going watch this one and let Regal Entertainment and Lucas Films to divy up my $8. Maybe I'll watch it when it comes out on DVD, but more likely, I'll wait until it comes out on Mystery Science Theatre 3000.
Last I heard, they are going forward with Galileo, because they don't want to have to rely on our system. The GPS was designed as a US military application and is still managed with military primarily in mind. It would be every bit as foolish for the French or Germans to depend wholly on navigation system run by another army during a war (even if we're not in any way opposed to whatever they might be doing) as it would be for us to rely on them.
Living long-term in a microgravity environment does give us lots of opportunity to observe long-term effects on the astronauts, which is important to understand if we ever send a mission to Mars (sorry, that cool pinwheel Mars mission idea from the 70's isn't going to happen anytime soon). Remember John Glenn went back into space as an old man to help understand the effects of gravity (or lack of it) on the human body.
In addition to Coriolis effect, a rotating station also has to be stopped to dock with another ship and is restricted to being symmetrical. Basically, expect a rotating space station to happen shortly after the space elevator.
Engineering for the money definitely isn't worth it, for two reasons. First, because studying engineering means spending 4+ years absolutely convinced that everyone around you is enjoying life way more than you. Sure I enjoyed the stuff I studied and I'd make the same major decision again if I had to, but it was frustrating nonetheless to watch the girls wander through the dorm at 10 pm on Fridays while writing lab reports. Second, average salaries are a statistic, and statistics have a nasty habit of screwing you over just when probability says they shouldn't. Somehow I managed to finish in the top quarter of my ME class with a math minor and landed a job on contract making $10000 less than the average, no benefits. That's intended to be a case-in-point, not a rant.
To build on your story, my freshmen physics class started the first semester with around 85 students in it, almost all engineering majors. We pretty quickly started joking about how this class must be designed to weed out the students who shouldn't be engineers, but we didn't think the administration was actually that clever. At the end of the semester, only about 70 students showed up for the final. By the end of the second semester, there were less than 60 left. In retrospect, I still don't think the administration was consciously trying to cull those not oriented towards nerdiness (I did enough extracurricular stuff interacting with them to learn that they genuinely are not that clever), but the nature of the material either killed their intellectual idealism or their grades, probably both, and the rolls of the business, communications, and other "I don't know what I want to do with life" majors started swelling.
It's nothing to me, or the guy with the lawyer-turned-chef mom. The point is, if your job is bringing you down, it's not worth it. I'm sure there are some people out there who jobs they hate but that don't so absorb their life that they lose the opportunity for happiness.
If you're suggesting that we didn't have rockets blow up or have probes miss their marks back in the 70's when the Voyager's were launched, you should start reading again. I suggest you start by reviewing the last 35 missions to Mars
Well, some of these kids probably have (at $1/song) the equivalent value of an 4-year (public) university education on their computers. I know several people who do. Now one could argue that if all the music is deleted, the goods have been returned, but then again, you face the fact that after listening to the latest Green Day CD illegally 100 times in a row, little Johny might not be as anxious as he was to have his own copy, so the music might be consider "used" in that sense, but how the heck do you place a value on that. And of course, there's always the issue of court costs, and only the finest, most expensive lawyers will do for an important case like this....blah blah blah...you get the point: placing a value on this is no small task.
...that this is just a bunch of (Canadian?) kids (well, at least as much kids as I am) who like space and have an idea for a cool website, and they thought they'd see if the slashdot editors would help them promote it (which they did). If they're sharp and play their cards right, they might end up with the equivalent popularity of Slashdot or CNet among spacenuts. If not, well, a lot of us out here in Slashdot land have personal websites that never really go anywhere, so there's nothing to be ashamed of.
To their credit, the server hasn't been launched in orbit, spewing flames and smoke yet.
...and very low happiness with very high pay. I think most of us have seen it happen somewhere, or at least heard stories about it.
Please note the insightful mod. I wasn't actually sure which keywords to use to get the upgrade, but AJAX, ubuntu and evolved expanded launch vehicle seem to have worked. Now the question is do I get an "insightful" in this post for using those keywords, or do I first have to earn a "funny" or "interesting" rating with the first set of keywords.
I don't get it. My first instinct was to try to find a secret code in the capitalized letters, but that didn't work out. Are you attempting to appeal to the slashdot moderators that appear to be scripts by tossing in keywords? If so you're going about it all wrong. You should start with, "I'm gonna get modded down for this," and include the words space elevator, soviet russia, nucular, linux, and intelligent design. Adding in AJAX, ubuntu, and evolved expanded launch vehicle will bump you up from funny or interesting to insightful.
Dealing with the eccentricity of the moon's orbit is something of a pain in the butt. That gets easier to handle the less mass your counterweight has.
By the way, who the heck links to articles on msnbc? That's about the worst news site on the internet. Not to mention, the article is just a mirror from the orginal at space.com.
Times are indeed changing. How many family fortunes do you suppose have been lost because some nut stuck the directions of a Zip disk?
But it's the latest and greatest! Everyone will have one in a couple years.
I've only bought 1 CD in the past year. There are a couple major bands I'm currently seriously considering buying CD's from, but one of the things holding me back is DRM and the other stupid crap pulled by the major labels. If others are willing to live without the latest big hits for a little while, I'm more than game for a boycott to teach the RIAA a lesson in the free market economy.
Hence why nobody reads them. I keep an online journal (blog if you must use the accursed word) mostly because I like shiny things (screwing around with PHP/MySQL), but I honestly don't expect anybody to read it except a few family members and friends. If I were some random guy wandering in off the larger internet, I know I'd think my site was almost as boring and unoriginal as reality TV. Unless you're someone interested in what's going on in iamlucky13's life, the only thing my site has going for it is the fact that it doesn't look like a blogger, livejournal, or myspace creation.
As for myself, I don't even find most non-personal blogs interesting, like you do. In general, the organization and delivery of content is much better from more established sources, like slashdot, NASA, ars technica, space.com, etc.