While it might be difficult to protect control surfaces, I can't think of anything else that would really be lost by expanding an ablative surface to cover the whole cockpit/rocket assembly, which is basically what a reusable orbiter is.
You'd have scrape off the rest of the ablative coating and apply another before the next launch, but I think that still makes your ship reusable.
Control surfaces might be pretty tough to pretect that way though. There are other ways besides traditional control surfaces to maneuver an aircraft though. The ones that immediately come to mind are plasma thrusters already installed for orbital flight and smooth, bendable control surfaces rather than hinged ones.
The important part about these inflatable structures is that they are light, right? So they can be lifted easily and still be large. But when I hear "light" the next thing that follows is usually "flimsy".
Space, even in earth orbit, isn't exactly a safe place. Maybe they could built it so that a water supply surrounded the living quarters to protect against the inevitable solar (and cosmic) radiation, but simple things like pieces of dust, or even the piece of chicken that hit the ISS a few months ago, could be devestating to a flexible plastic structure going thousands of miles an hour.
I've heard of water protection for the ultra-light space stations before, but how do these guys plan to make their spacecraft leak-proof? Isn't that pretty much the whole point to a space ship?
This is not such a big problem. People have been doing it successfully for 50 years. The early orbiters didn't even use fancy-schmancy ceramic tiles to keep them safe, they just used tough heat-resistant ablatives to protect the soft, delicious astronauts inside.
As for the deceleration, all that atmosphere tends to help, especially when you deploy parachutes;)
Seriously, you make it sound as if inventing a wheel would be impossible today, because small-time inventors don't have the massive government funding those 10,000 b.c. technicians did.
Hmmm, why don't we take AWAY options from our highly independent and knowledgeable support base? That will make them happier about using an open source operating system, and it will help out our arch-rival the masters of everything we stand against.
Well I don't watch TV, don't listen to the radio, and don't pay attention to the crap movies coming out every year... but I still liked Clerks!? What in buttery goodness?
Clearly they've developed some kind of diabolical mind control ray beam and are forcing me to do their evil blue bidding!
Re:A great Disturbance in the Force...
on
Star Wars TV Show
·
· Score: 1
I sense a great disturbance in the force, as if the voices of millions of Star Wars fans suddenly cried out in sanctimonious indignation... and they won't shut up!
I'm pretty sure that NASA scientists have documented bacterial cells churning out tons of DNA-repair enzymes under heavy radiation, which allows them to live on spaceship hulls that have been sterilized with UV light.
With so many stars moving past each other, the odds are that at least a few would be locked in death spirals with inevitable conclusions.
Please don't be a killjoy and ruin the image of the BEST demolition derby in the UNIVERSE.
Stars about to produce a gamma ray burst would actually be pretty easy to find. The problem is that the type of abnormally massive star that produces them isn't that unusual, and red giant stars, which are what a pre-gamma ray burst star would be, are downright common.
So if, say Betelgeuse (of Ford Prefect fame) was 100 times as massive as it really is and decided to collapse into a black hole one fine day 427 years ago, the only way we'd know about it would be looking at it a few hours before the burst hit, saying, "oh, Betelgeuse finally went bust" and then promptly be vaporised (along with the oceans!) half an hour later.
Stars don't really take that long to collapse, especially if they're the really big kind.
The point is that if Google tries to offer service to the PRC without this censorship, they get banned too. So would it be better to give the Chinese a free service that everyone knows is flawed (the Chinese know about censorship, they aren't stupid), or would you rather have Google not provide any of their free service to China? That's really the only two options Google has.
Evil or no, China's laws are the way they are, and Google isn't going to change them. If Google refuses to write in a little bit of code that snips out X,Y, and Z, they have no other choice than to deny 1.3 billion people a free, useful service.
As for the al-qaeda analogy, it's deeply flawed.
I'm pretty sure al-qaeda isn't a 50-odd year old sovereign nation with very firm and intractible laws about internet access. If Afghanis want to hook up to Google they can without any censorship, but they have to worry about al-qaeda coming and killing them.
A better analogy would be Saudi Arabia, but they, like the PRC, have firm control on all their internet lines, so Google is still stuck with the censored-search-or-no-search problem. I'm sure the red-blooded Americans over at Google aren't too thrilled about it either, but their only other option is to not provide any service at all. Which really doesn't help anybody.
This whole "giving comfort to the enemy" thing you're getting at is entirely beside the point. By refusing to obey the laws of the PRC, a sovereign nation, Google can only get themselves banned, hurting 20 million internet users without doing any damage to the tyrannical and corrupt government you rage against.
By "do no evil" Google didn't mean "flaunt the laws of a sovereign nation in such a way as to deny our service to its innocent people".
As for being paid by the PRC to alter its results, do you think Google would bail on one of the fastest-growing internet markets if the PRC didn't pay? It almost seems like the PRC is just being generous. They could probably force Google to change their results for free.
Oh, and your "profit at all cost" argument doesn't matter in the least to the Chinese guy in the internet cafe. When was the last time you paid to use Google? Or even noticed the understated ads on the sidebar?
The parliamentary system does distribute the power to its sort-of-atrophied executive branch in a much fairer way, yes.
If the United States had a pair of consuls (or praetors maybe?) like the old Roman Republic we wouldn't get neocon corporate-friendly policies as we do now, or extremely pricey social programs as we did under LBJ. If we had a PM working under a coalition government, we'd probably have decent moderate policy.
Most democracies and republics in the world have a unicameral legislature that works pretty much as you described. And most of them manage to muddle through, as all governments end up doing. (Name one really spectacular government with no/few problems and i'll give you my house when I move there.)
However, you don't have to look very far to see a parliamentary system that has been seriously screwed up by this very same power sharing structure.
The Knesset in Israel has been seriously skewed towards the right by these same power-sharing schemes. I don't off the top of my head know when this started or the specific Hebrew name of the movement, but I do know that there is an ultra-conservative party which holds only four or five seats in the 120-seat Knesset but has a major influence on policy. How can this be?
The power-sharing structure that would seem to be the answer to many problems in the Knesset's case has worked out to make these five guys, representing less than 5% of all Israelis (assuming 100% turnout), the tiebreakers in legislation and the necessary addition to any legitimate coalition government. Because this party continues to play its cards very well, any government in Israel, whether it is Liberal or Likkud, has to satisfy a certain number of these guys' demands to stay in power. Thus, the parliamentary power sharing under these circumstances produces a shift in policy that is profoundly against the principles of a representative government.
The moral of the story: governments usually find ways to suck, because the vast majority of people running them are human. It's a tragic problem that afflicts almost all governments in the world. Except the Swiss.
"An opposing viewpoint in Science has to be scientific"
Excellent point. Many religious scientists (that I know, ok several) wince whenever "get an opposing viewpoint" comes up on the creationist side, because they know something very important:
Science does not preclude religion.
This common misconception was originated by religious types without a clear understanding of science well before this century and is perpetuated by those same people.
Religious people get frustrated when (and if) they try (and fail) to disprove scientific claims because they're operating on the flawed assumption that their views are diametrically opposed to those held by scientists. Many scientists are religious people too, they simply reconcile their faith with their beliefs (they're different) and move on.
The general precepts of what we consider "modern" science, like evolution and the formation of planets (I think the jury's still out on the Big Bang) only conflict with very specific and limited parts of the Bible/Qu'ran/whatever, usually the parts that deal with the creation of the earth and mankind. I don't think many devout Christians/Muslims/whatever have a real problem with the Laws of Thermodynamics or General Relativity.
And for those of you literalists who won't bother to read past the first sentence... where is Cain's wife from anyway?
"Well, I do hope that he's better at constructing an argument for his position than you."
Well, just to be fair, the guys who writes these books probably does make a better argument than this random guy posting on/.
The Big Bang and Evolution are still theories, i.e. hypothesis. I don't think you'll be able to find a scientist who would say the Big Bang could be tested with a "repeatable" experiment so you got 'em there... but look into evolution studies and you might find some interesting patterns there. Like the repetition.
The Laws of Thermodynamics is the odd one out here. It definitely stands up unless you're going down to the level of Quanta and the Zero Point Field where all our understanding breaks down anyway.
It's just a theory guys, like the other ones. Sure I think holographic theory and some of the others are cool too, but you need to watch out for all the "the establishment doesn't believe in my work" lines those guys throw out. Seriously, holographic theory made the cover of Scientific American last year.
So don't go calling a popular theory with a lot of evidence behind it "misinformation". It may turn out to be wrong in the end, but the people putting it on aren't trying to mislead anyone.
First, everyone reading this must remember that China is not the United States. Yes, censorship is bad, but it's a fact of life in China. People everywhere hope that fact will change, but Google isn't going to be the one doing the changing. The PRC has the power to remove Google from their version of the internet. They've done it before. If Google does the "standing tall," i.e. ignoring foreigners' views, that seems so popular in America, it will just get banned again. Criticize the PRC all you want, but don't criticize Google for obeying a nation's laws when they're providing service to them.
I found Black & White had a crude good/evil setup myself. As an introspective window into the player's own morality, it was suck.
Being good basically amounted to spending hours micromanaging your villages, even feeding the little guys because they were too stupid to go get themselves food. You could finally start looking outside your own starting cluster of villages after about a good three hours of gameplay.
So, The Sims 2 will probably be less frustrating, er, because you signed on to do that micromanagement in the first place. I don't get you Sims people.
The only way to get the game to move along at any speed was to get on with the tasks of godliness and let the poor idiots back in your village starve to death. This naturally made you evil.
That said, I liked the creature AI and innovative control setup, especially using gestures for miracles. I hope BW2 will give players who want to be good some options other than painful hours of micromanagement.
Slashdot Mirror
While it might be difficult to protect control surfaces, I can't think of anything else that would really be lost by expanding an ablative surface to cover the whole cockpit/rocket assembly, which is basically what a reusable orbiter is.
You'd have scrape off the rest of the ablative coating and apply another before the next launch, but I think that still makes your ship reusable.
Control surfaces might be pretty tough to pretect that way though. There are other ways besides traditional control surfaces to maneuver an aircraft though. The ones that immediately come to mind are plasma thrusters already installed for orbital flight and smooth, bendable control surfaces rather than hinged ones.
The important part about these inflatable structures is that they are light, right? So they can be lifted easily and still be large. But when I hear "light" the next thing that follows is usually "flimsy".
Space, even in earth orbit, isn't exactly a safe place. Maybe they could built it so that a water supply surrounded the living quarters to protect against the inevitable solar (and cosmic) radiation, but simple things like pieces of dust, or even the piece of chicken that hit the ISS a few months ago, could be devestating to a flexible plastic structure going thousands of miles an hour.
I've heard of water protection for the ultra-light space stations before, but how do these guys plan to make their spacecraft leak-proof? Isn't that pretty much the whole point to a space ship?
This is not such a big problem. People have been doing it successfully for 50 years. The early orbiters didn't even use fancy-schmancy ceramic tiles to keep them safe, they just used tough heat-resistant ablatives to protect the soft, delicious astronauts inside.
;)
As for the deceleration, all that atmosphere tends to help, especially when you deploy parachutes
Seriously, you make it sound as if inventing a wheel would be impossible today, because small-time inventors don't have the massive government funding those 10,000 b.c. technicians did.
Wow, that's a really terrible idea.
Hmmm, why don't we take AWAY options from our highly independent and knowledgeable support base? That will make them happier about using an open source operating system, and it will help out our arch-rival the masters of everything we stand against.
You know guys, you could always not watch it.
That pretty much works for me when I don't want to see a TV show.
Well I don't watch TV, don't listen to the radio, and don't pay attention to the crap movies coming out every year... but I still liked Clerks!? What in buttery goodness? Clearly they've developed some kind of diabolical mind control ray beam and are forcing me to do their evil blue bidding!
I sense a great disturbance in the force, as if the voices of millions of Star Wars fans suddenly cried out in sanctimonious indignation... and they won't shut up!
I'm pretty sure that NASA scientists have documented bacterial cells churning out tons of DNA-repair enzymes under heavy radiation, which allows them to live on spaceship hulls that have been sterilized with UV light.
Thanks for that little bit of condescension. Care to enlighten anyone?
Or 13.7 billion if you follow the latest corrections to Big Bang theory.
With so many stars moving past each other, the odds are that at least a few would be locked in death spirals with inevitable conclusions. Please don't be a killjoy and ruin the image of the BEST demolition derby in the UNIVERSE.
Stars about to produce a gamma ray burst would actually be pretty easy to find. The problem is that the type of abnormally massive star that produces them isn't that unusual, and red giant stars, which are what a pre-gamma ray burst star would be, are downright common.
So if, say Betelgeuse (of Ford Prefect fame) was 100 times as massive as it really is and decided to collapse into a black hole one fine day 427 years ago, the only way we'd know about it would be looking at it a few hours before the burst hit, saying, "oh, Betelgeuse finally went bust" and then promptly be vaporised (along with the oceans!) half an hour later.
Stars don't really take that long to collapse, especially if they're the really big kind.
The point is that if Google tries to offer service to the PRC without this censorship, they get banned too. So would it be better to give the Chinese a free service that everyone knows is flawed (the Chinese know about censorship, they aren't stupid), or would you rather have Google not provide any of their free service to China? That's really the only two options Google has.
Evil or no, China's laws are the way they are, and Google isn't going to change them. If Google refuses to write in a little bit of code that snips out X,Y, and Z, they have no other choice than to deny 1.3 billion people a free, useful service.
As for the al-qaeda analogy, it's deeply flawed.
I'm pretty sure al-qaeda isn't a 50-odd year old sovereign nation with very firm and intractible laws about internet access. If Afghanis want to hook up to Google they can without any censorship, but they have to worry about al-qaeda coming and killing them.
A better analogy would be Saudi Arabia, but they, like the PRC, have firm control on all their internet lines, so Google is still stuck with the censored-search-or-no-search problem. I'm sure the red-blooded Americans over at Google aren't too thrilled about it either, but their only other option is to not provide any service at all. Which really doesn't help anybody.
This whole "giving comfort to the enemy" thing you're getting at is entirely beside the point. By refusing to obey the laws of the PRC, a sovereign nation, Google can only get themselves banned, hurting 20 million internet users without doing any damage to the tyrannical and corrupt government you rage against.
By "do no evil" Google didn't mean "flaunt the laws of a sovereign nation in such a way as to deny our service to its innocent people".
As for being paid by the PRC to alter its results, do you think Google would bail on one of the fastest-growing internet markets if the PRC didn't pay? It almost seems like the PRC is just being generous. They could probably force Google to change their results for free.
Oh, and your "profit at all cost" argument doesn't matter in the least to the Chinese guy in the internet cafe. When was the last time you paid to use Google? Or even noticed the understated ads on the sidebar?
The parliamentary system does distribute the power to its sort-of-atrophied executive branch in a much fairer way, yes.
If the United States had a pair of consuls (or praetors maybe?) like the old Roman Republic we wouldn't get neocon corporate-friendly policies as we do now, or extremely pricey social programs as we did under LBJ. If we had a PM working under a coalition government, we'd probably have decent moderate policy.
Most democracies and republics in the world have a unicameral legislature that works pretty much as you described. And most of them manage to muddle through, as all governments end up doing. (Name one really spectacular government with no/few problems and i'll give you my house when I move there.)
However, you don't have to look very far to see a parliamentary system that has been seriously screwed up by this very same power sharing structure.
The Knesset in Israel has been seriously skewed towards the right by these same power-sharing schemes. I don't off the top of my head know when this started or the specific Hebrew name of the movement, but I do know that there is an ultra-conservative party which holds only four or five seats in the 120-seat Knesset but has a major influence on policy. How can this be?
The power-sharing structure that would seem to be the answer to many problems in the Knesset's case has worked out to make these five guys, representing less than 5% of all Israelis (assuming 100% turnout), the tiebreakers in legislation and the necessary addition to any legitimate coalition government. Because this party continues to play its cards very well, any government in Israel, whether it is Liberal or Likkud, has to satisfy a certain number of these guys' demands to stay in power. Thus, the parliamentary power sharing under these circumstances produces a shift in policy that is profoundly against the principles of a representative government.
The moral of the story: governments usually find ways to suck, because the vast majority of people running them are human. It's a tragic problem that afflicts almost all governments in the world. Except the Swiss.
"An opposing viewpoint in Science has to be scientific"
Excellent point. Many religious scientists (that I know, ok several) wince whenever "get an opposing viewpoint" comes up on the creationist side, because they know something very important:
Science does not preclude religion.
This common misconception was originated by religious types without a clear understanding of science well before this century and is perpetuated by those same people.
Religious people get frustrated when (and if) they try (and fail) to disprove scientific claims because they're operating on the flawed assumption that their views are diametrically opposed to those held by scientists. Many scientists are religious people too, they simply reconcile their faith with their beliefs (they're different) and move on.
The general precepts of what we consider "modern" science, like evolution and the formation of planets (I think the jury's still out on the Big Bang) only conflict with very specific and limited parts of the Bible/Qu'ran/whatever, usually the parts that deal with the creation of the earth and mankind. I don't think many devout Christians/Muslims/whatever have a real problem with the Laws of Thermodynamics or General Relativity.
And for those of you literalists who won't bother to read past the first sentence... where is Cain's wife from anyway?
"Well, I do hope that he's better at constructing an argument for his position than you." Well, just to be fair, the guys who writes these books probably does make a better argument than this random guy posting on /.
Yeah...
You're ignoring what I said. "real science trying to find the light of day"? I never said these theories aren't real science.
As I said before, holographic theory was on the COVER of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. That's not exactly buried where no one can see it.
Books continue to be published on plasma theory. Where's the supression?
Try reading your parent post before griping about research.
The Big Bang and Evolution are still theories, i.e. hypothesis. I don't think you'll be able to find a scientist who would say the Big Bang could be tested with a "repeatable" experiment so you got 'em there... but look into evolution studies and you might find some interesting patterns there. Like the repetition. The Laws of Thermodynamics is the odd one out here. It definitely stands up unless you're going down to the level of Quanta and the Zero Point Field where all our understanding breaks down anyway.
Erm, or not, if we cease to exist as conscious entities. Who's side are you on again? :)
It's just a theory guys, like the other ones. Sure I think holographic theory and some of the others are cool too, but you need to watch out for all the "the establishment doesn't believe in my work" lines those guys throw out. Seriously, holographic theory made the cover of Scientific American last year. So don't go calling a popular theory with a lot of evidence behind it "misinformation". It may turn out to be wrong in the end, but the people putting it on aren't trying to mislead anyone.
First, everyone reading this must remember that China is not the United States. Yes, censorship is bad, but it's a fact of life in China. People everywhere hope that fact will change, but Google isn't going to be the one doing the changing. The PRC has the power to remove Google from their version of the internet. They've done it before. If Google does the "standing tall," i.e. ignoring foreigners' views, that seems so popular in America, it will just get banned again. Criticize the PRC all you want, but don't criticize Google for obeying a nation's laws when they're providing service to them.
I found Black & White had a crude good/evil setup myself. As an introspective window into the player's own morality, it was suck. Being good basically amounted to spending hours micromanaging your villages, even feeding the little guys because they were too stupid to go get themselves food. You could finally start looking outside your own starting cluster of villages after about a good three hours of gameplay. So, The Sims 2 will probably be less frustrating, er, because you signed on to do that micromanagement in the first place. I don't get you Sims people. The only way to get the game to move along at any speed was to get on with the tasks of godliness and let the poor idiots back in your village starve to death. This naturally made you evil. That said, I liked the creature AI and innovative control setup, especially using gestures for miracles. I hope BW2 will give players who want to be good some options other than painful hours of micromanagement.