The moon would be ok. In a Venus-trailing orbit would be much better. One of the problems we have is that we can only see asteroids when they're lit up by the Sun, and asteroids that have an orbit almost entirely inside of the Earth's orbit are hard to see--only the backside gets lit up, so we can't see them very well.
A vehicle placed at Venus's orbit, though, would be able to see those potentially dangerous asteroids quite well.
You misunderstand what GP was saying..."brute force" in this case means computationally being able to examine every possible path for the game to take, not the play strategy.
I strongly suspect that this isn't about getting Flash added to mobile safari. Adobe may not like that; but it is basically a lost cause for them, and they know it.
This is about the fact that Apple is forbidding the creation of applications using any intermediate language, even if they are programmatically crunched down into native apps by the time they show up on Apple's doorstep.
It's the difference between Microsoft saying "No, we have no interest in shipping our OS with Quicktime installed" and saying "Only software written in C# with Visual Studio may run on Windows". Not a small distinction.
I can't wait until we can buy a Toyota and install Mercedes software on it.
Oh, wait, your analogy was flawed. Microsoft doesn't make hardware. Ooops. Maybe we should let Toyota continue to be "closed" and we can choose to buy a Toyota or not...just like you can choose to buy a BB or iPhone or Android and those manufacturers can define what will and won't run on their hardware.
To call Tier One a "spaceship" is a gross misrepresentation. The Space Shuttle is a spaceship.
Tier One/Space Ship One traveled suborbitally. The Space Shuttle (STS) is an orbiter. The difference? SSO travels at Mach 3. STS hits Mach 25.
SSO flights take 3 people suborbitally. STS takes 7. Which is more important when you consider:
SSO flights take dozens of minutes. The STS can be up for 16+ days. It has to carry food, water, and process wastes for that length of time.
Space Ship One carries essentially no cargo. The Space Shuttle takes 25 metric tons to orbit.
Space Ship One is a suborbital craft. It is not a true space ship, despite its name. It would likely require multiple orders of magnitude more than $30M before it could orbit the planet.
Really? Re-formatting and installing all of your software has taken only an hour each time? That's pretty good. When I reformat, it takes about 4 hours just to reinstall WoW...that's well over $200 right there...of course, I can (sort of) do other things while it's installing.
And how much time and money have you spent, upgrading and maintaining?
My point was that my time is very valuable, especially my time off from work. I don't have to spend time to shop for new parts, installing them, maintaining, virus checking, etc., etc....and that's worth $500 to me. If you include your time, I'll bet that you spent more than $500 keeping that XP machine running.
Some people value money over time, some people value time over money. That's a place where Ballmer doesn't seem to look--why ARE people willing to spend $500 more for a machine? People don't really throw that sort of money away for a logo, no matter what he or you think. They believe that they are getting at least that much more value out of the system, or they wouldn't pay for it. It's probably true that some folks see value in the logo--I sure don't--but I do see value in both the reliability and longevity of the system, and the "turnkey" sort of nature to it.
nope, not gonna happen...it's my money, and I buy Apples because it's my experience that they last longer than cheap PCs and take less maintenance time than any PC. You don't have to believe me, and I don't really care if you do.
no, it's not. It's the combination of hardware reliability and software reliability that's worth it to me, anyway.
Vista and my iPhone convinced me to try out an iMac. I'm never going back. This thing is GREAT. Worst problem that I've had was solved in less than an hour. I just had to fight viruses on my PC, I gave up and did a full reinstall...probably took me a total of 14 hours, and it's not the first time I've had to do stuff like that.
I suppose the question of value depends on how much you value your time...I value mine quite a lot, that $500 is a real bargain to save 14 hours once or twice in the computer's lifetime.
Macs are way cheaper if you amortize the price of their useful life. My PC desktops generally last about 2.5 years, sometimes as much as 3. My Macs generally last about 4.5-6 years.
That $500 is a bargain, especially when you consider the time it takes to transfer all the programs over to a new system...
I'm a "switcher" to the Mac platform, but I still keep a PC around the house.
I spent about ten hours last weekend trying to repair a virus infestation. I finally gave up, so I then spent 4 more hours reinstalling the OS and all the programs I normally use.
I earn a bit more than $50 an hour, so I would have saved way more than $500 worth of my time had that PC been a Mac.
Even if the Mac had been infested, just stick the OS disk in, reformat the drive, open Time Machine, and drag my personal files onto the computer. Done in an hour or so.
Wow, you're right--I never looked that up. Shuttle masses just over 2,000,000 pounds and Saturn V was just over 3,000,000 pounds.
Thanks! Love the space trivia...
It's the solid rocket boosters that make the difference. Each SRB provides about 2.8 million pounds of thrust at sea level. 5.6 million pounds of thrust gives quite a kick!
Yes, it really is. There's a reason that almost all nonmedical doctorate degrees carry the same title: Doctor of Philosophy. In its highest form, all human knowledge is similar--it requires human thought, and as such is inherently philosophy.
expense, really--we can build another ground telescope for something like $300M, but a good space telescope would cost near $1B and have a limited lifetime.
Interestingly, the telescope would likely be near Venus...the sun lights up the asteroids, and you want to be on the same side of the asteroid as the sun. If you're on the outside, then the wrong half is lit up and you can't see it!
Actually, the uncertainty mostly isn't due to error in position; it's due to the fact that, when we observe a NEO, it's a point of light in the sky. We really don't know how far away it is. If it's near to the Earth and Sun, it moves more quickly; if it's farther away, it moves more slowly. If you remember that things move in circles or ellipses around the Sun, then you might get the idea that the uncertainty "ellipse" (due to a small error in position left-right, but a very large error in depth) due to the different orbital velocities, it "stretches out" over time, wrapping the ellipse's major axis around the Sun until it's basically a straight line.
There's a fantastic animation of this process at Spaceguard's site, just scroll down to the second animation.
Of course there are real life examples. Let me give you one:
Q: How many feet are in a mile?
A: Easy. 5,280
Q: Okay, then, how many feet are in 3/4 of a mile?
A:....
Q: 'Cause there's 750 meters in 3/4 of a kilometer.
A:...let me get my calculator...
Now I don't know about you, Derek, but I drive my car all the time. And I give directions all the time. And I say things like "Half a mile" and "a couple of miles" all the time. However, unless you pay attention to your odometer all the time, you really have no idea how far a half a mile is. I recently got a GPS, and a mile is a *lot* further than I had felt it to be before. With metric, it becomes innate pretty quickly. (My reason for saying this is that I build violins as a hobby, and all of the measurements in violin building are metric, and I built up a lot more of an understanding of how long something is in mm, rather than inches, very quickly. In a year of spending weekends in the shop, I was more comfortable saying something was ~500mm, rather than ~1' 9".)
How about if you're curious how tall that table in Ikea is. Well, you measured at home, and you wrote down that you need one at least 3' 3" tall. You grab a paper ruler, and measure that the table is 37" tall. A moment later, you do the math, and realize the table is 2" short. Hmm....Well, if you had done it in metric, that would have been a meter and a little less than a meter, and you could easily relate the sub-units to the macro-units. 976mm is very easy to relate to 1m, whereas 36" is not nearly as obvious of a comparison to 3'3". The rest of the world has adopted a standard other than ours because it's easier. Day-to-day easier. That's why our currency is decimal in nature, and why Britain gave up the old monetary system. I have no idea how many farthings were in a pound, and it doesn't matter--eventually few people will remember that there were 12" in a foot.
Lawsuits happen because *people* break laws, not corporations. It takes a person to make a choice that breaks a law. If you think that it's worse because a person in a big (and therefore evil?) company does it, rather than in a small (and therefore good?) company, then you are simplifying things too much.
If you do not punish wrongdoers, then the wrongdoing will continue. Let's say that the average adult in the US earns $15 per hour. Let's say that the average person in the US receives one phone call per week. Let's say that the average person spends one minute on the phone. Now, let's do the math:
200,000,000 (estimated number of adults) * 1/60 (one minute of his or her time) * $15 (average salary assumption) * 52 (number of calls in a year) = $2.6 Billion, no kidding, Billion dollars of time wasted per year.
I don't care if it's a non-profit or some "big evil company" that's wasting our time--I don't want them to do it. If we punish them enough times, then they'll stop. Otherwise, they will continue, despite it being against the law, because there's no reason for them not to do it--and it is in their own self interest to do so.
If you want an example of how people will continue to do things that are against the law when there's virtually no punishment, look at how many people drive the speed limit. There is an immediate self-interest (getting where you're going faster), and almost no punishment (people are generally not pulled over), so almost everyone does it almost every time they get on an open road.
So, you're right, don't bother going to court to protect your rights. I'm sure the politicians will punish these wrongdoers...oh, wait, the whole point of this was that it was the politicians doing it!
I am an engineer and I have a double monitor setup that uses a 14" laptop screen and a 17" external screen. Not quite the same as a 30" monitor, but it's similar.
I often find it quite useful to have the screen real estate that I do. For instance, I'll open a document that I'm writing on one screen, and the technical program (ProE, Excel, another document, whatever the paper is based on) on the other screen. I can have both programs displayed at readable and workable sizes.
I don't know how much "clicking and dragging" will save the average workplace, but I don't have to print out a copy of my reference material. I can also re-run a model if I need another example case or if I need to create a figure; I can continue writing other sections while the program runs.
This is a HUGE time saver for me. It lets me get back to Slashdot WAY faster.:)
The thing is, it would probably cost only about a billion dollars to reproduce the Hubble, sans launch costs. I have spoken with people in the telescoope building industry about this and they think that the telescope itself would only be $4-500M, due to new mirror polishing techniques that achieve convergence within days instead of months.
There are good reasons to do a new, cheap telescope. I think I would rather see a new duplicate telescope (with different instruments) launched every 5 years rather than do a servicing mission. First, it's cheaper; second, it gets cheaper and cheaper; third, we can use a rocket that is higher reliability than the Shuttle; finally, we could decide to change the system.
JPL proposed more than one telescope on the Discovery proposal cycle this year. I'm sure that Goddard and APL made proposals similar. the Discovery budget, including launch, is $425M.
Not true. Solar panels decay over time, too, producing less and less power and effectively limiting the rover's life. So do the batteries that hold the electricity that the solar panels generated.
Eventually, even if nothing else on the Mars Rovers failed, the solar panels would no longer produce enough energy to make the robots move...and that would be the end of the exploration part of the mission.
It's interesting to note, of course, that these robots were amazingly overdesigned. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that they're still going--but I wish JPL had a bit more money right now and a bit less money back then, ya know? Use slightly lower-quality solar panels, or something--they've gone 12 times as long as they were supposed to?!?!
When the acceleration due to gravity is equal to the deceleration of atmospheric friction, it will stop speeding up because the forces balance.
It will likely then slow down, as atmospheric friction will increase as the atmosphere becomes more dense.
Soooo, if you wanted a little "fun", you could calculate the altitude and maximum velocity, then figure out what it would be at sea level...but you'd need to know at least the maximum diameter of the object, and a few things I'm forgetting, I'm sure...what goes into the calculation of the ballistic coefficient again?
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A vehicle placed at Venus's orbit, though, would be able to see those potentially dangerous asteroids quite well.
You misunderstand what GP was saying..."brute force" in this case means computationally being able to examine every possible path for the game to take, not the play strategy.
I strongly suspect that this isn't about getting Flash added to mobile safari. Adobe may not like that; but it is basically a lost cause for them, and they know it.
This is about the fact that Apple is forbidding the creation of applications using any intermediate language, even if they are programmatically crunched down into native apps by the time they show up on Apple's doorstep.
It's the difference between Microsoft saying "No, we have no interest in shipping our OS with Quicktime installed" and saying "Only software written in C# with Visual Studio may run on Windows". Not a small distinction.
I can't wait until we can buy a Toyota and install Mercedes software on it.
Oh, wait, your analogy was flawed. Microsoft doesn't make hardware. Ooops. Maybe we should let Toyota continue to be "closed" and we can choose to buy a Toyota or not...just like you can choose to buy a BB or iPhone or Android and those manufacturers can define what will and won't run on their hardware.
Feb 2010 Smartphone Market share
Tier One/Space Ship One traveled suborbitally. The Space Shuttle (STS) is an orbiter. The difference? SSO travels at Mach 3. STS hits Mach 25.
SSO flights take 3 people suborbitally. STS takes 7. Which is more important when you consider:
SSO flights take dozens of minutes. The STS can be up for 16+ days. It has to carry food, water, and process wastes for that length of time.
Space Ship One carries essentially no cargo. The Space Shuttle takes 25 metric tons to orbit.
Space Ship One is a suborbital craft. It is not a true space ship, despite its name. It would likely require multiple orders of magnitude more than $30M before it could orbit the planet.
Really? Re-formatting and installing all of your software has taken only an hour each time? That's pretty good. When I reformat, it takes about 4 hours just to reinstall WoW...that's well over $200 right there...of course, I can (sort of) do other things while it's installing.
My point was that my time is very valuable, especially my time off from work. I don't have to spend time to shop for new parts, installing them, maintaining, virus checking, etc., etc....and that's worth $500 to me. If you include your time, I'll bet that you spent more than $500 keeping that XP machine running.
Some people value money over time, some people value time over money. That's a place where Ballmer doesn't seem to look--why ARE people willing to spend $500 more for a machine? People don't really throw that sort of money away for a logo, no matter what he or you think. They believe that they are getting at least that much more value out of the system, or they wouldn't pay for it. It's probably true that some folks see value in the logo--I sure don't--but I do see value in both the reliability and longevity of the system, and the "turnkey" sort of nature to it.
nope, not gonna happen...it's my money, and I buy Apples because it's my experience that they last longer than cheap PCs and take less maintenance time than any PC. You don't have to believe me, and I don't really care if you do.
Vista and my iPhone convinced me to try out an iMac. I'm never going back. This thing is GREAT. Worst problem that I've had was solved in less than an hour. I just had to fight viruses on my PC, I gave up and did a full reinstall...probably took me a total of 14 hours, and it's not the first time I've had to do stuff like that.
I suppose the question of value depends on how much you value your time...I value mine quite a lot, that $500 is a real bargain to save 14 hours once or twice in the computer's lifetime.
That $500 is a bargain, especially when you consider the time it takes to transfer all the programs over to a new system...
I spent about ten hours last weekend trying to repair a virus infestation. I finally gave up, so I then spent 4 more hours reinstalling the OS and all the programs I normally use.
I earn a bit more than $50 an hour, so I would have saved way more than $500 worth of my time had that PC been a Mac.
Even if the Mac had been infested, just stick the OS disk in, reformat the drive, open Time Machine, and drag my personal files onto the computer. Done in an hour or so.
Wow, you're right--I never looked that up. Shuttle masses just over 2,000,000 pounds and Saturn V was just over 3,000,000 pounds. Thanks! Love the space trivia...
It's the solid rocket boosters that make the difference. Each SRB provides about 2.8 million pounds of thrust at sea level. 5.6 million pounds of thrust gives quite a kick!
Physics is a subset of philosophy.
No, it's really not.
Yes, it really is. There's a reason that almost all nonmedical doctorate degrees carry the same title: Doctor of Philosophy. In its highest form, all human knowledge is similar--it requires human thought, and as such is inherently philosophy.
It doesn't matter if you think there's no valid gripe.
Apple upset its most loyal, most wealthy customers. Upset customers don't buy things. Loyal, wealthy customers not buying things is bad for business.
You can waste your time complaining about these upset customers all you want--it won't affect this obvious logic.
Interestingly, the telescope would likely be near Venus...the sun lights up the asteroids, and you want to be on the same side of the asteroid as the sun. If you're on the outside, then the wrong half is lit up and you can't see it!
There's a fantastic animation of this process at Spaceguard's site, just scroll down to the second animation.
Last I had heard, the upgrades delivered to the HST had rendered it too large to return to the Shuttle bays--any of them.
Q: How many feet are in a mile?
A: Easy. 5,280
Q: Okay, then, how many feet are in 3/4 of a mile?
A:....
Q: 'Cause there's 750 meters in 3/4 of a kilometer.
A:...let me get my calculator...
Now I don't know about you, Derek, but I drive my car all the time. And I give directions all the time. And I say things like "Half a mile" and "a couple of miles" all the time. However, unless you pay attention to your odometer all the time, you really have no idea how far a half a mile is. I recently got a GPS, and a mile is a *lot* further than I had felt it to be before. With metric, it becomes innate pretty quickly. (My reason for saying this is that I build violins as a hobby, and all of the measurements in violin building are metric, and I built up a lot more of an understanding of how long something is in mm, rather than inches, very quickly. In a year of spending weekends in the shop, I was more comfortable saying something was ~500mm, rather than ~1' 9".)
How about if you're curious how tall that table in Ikea is. Well, you measured at home, and you wrote down that you need one at least 3' 3" tall. You grab a paper ruler, and measure that the table is 37" tall. A moment later, you do the math, and realize the table is 2" short. Hmm....Well, if you had done it in metric, that would have been a meter and a little less than a meter, and you could easily relate the sub-units to the macro-units. 976mm is very easy to relate to 1m, whereas 36" is not nearly as obvious of a comparison to 3'3". The rest of the world has adopted a standard other than ours because it's easier. Day-to-day easier. That's why our currency is decimal in nature, and why Britain gave up the old monetary system. I have no idea how many farthings were in a pound, and it doesn't matter--eventually few people will remember that there were 12" in a foot.
Or we'll all get GPSs and it won't matter.
Lawsuits happen because *people* break laws, not corporations. It takes a person to make a choice that breaks a law. If you think that it's worse because a person in a big (and therefore evil?) company does it, rather than in a small (and therefore good?) company, then you are simplifying things too much.
If you do not punish wrongdoers, then the wrongdoing will continue. Let's say that the average adult in the US earns $15 per hour. Let's say that the average person in the US receives one phone call per week. Let's say that the average person spends one minute on the phone. Now, let's do the math:
200,000,000 (estimated number of adults) * 1/60 (one minute of his or her time) * $15 (average salary assumption) * 52 (number of calls in a year) = $2.6 Billion, no kidding, Billion dollars of time wasted per year.
I don't care if it's a non-profit or some "big evil company" that's wasting our time--I don't want them to do it. If we punish them enough times, then they'll stop. Otherwise, they will continue, despite it being against the law, because there's no reason for them not to do it--and it is in their own self interest to do so.
If you want an example of how people will continue to do things that are against the law when there's virtually no punishment, look at how many people drive the speed limit. There is an immediate self-interest (getting where you're going faster), and almost no punishment (people are generally not pulled over), so almost everyone does it almost every time they get on an open road.
So, you're right, don't bother going to court to protect your rights. I'm sure the politicians will punish these wrongdoers...oh, wait, the whole point of this was that it was the politicians doing it!
I am an engineer and I have a double monitor setup that uses a 14" laptop screen and a 17" external screen. Not quite the same as a 30" monitor, but it's similar. I often find it quite useful to have the screen real estate that I do. For instance, I'll open a document that I'm writing on one screen, and the technical program (ProE, Excel, another document, whatever the paper is based on) on the other screen. I can have both programs displayed at readable and workable sizes. I don't know how much "clicking and dragging" will save the average workplace, but I don't have to print out a copy of my reference material. I can also re-run a model if I need another example case or if I need to create a figure; I can continue writing other sections while the program runs. This is a HUGE time saver for me. It lets me get back to Slashdot WAY faster. :)
There are good reasons to do a new, cheap telescope. I think I would rather see a new duplicate telescope (with different instruments) launched every 5 years rather than do a servicing mission. First, it's cheaper; second, it gets cheaper and cheaper; third, we can use a rocket that is higher reliability than the Shuttle; finally, we could decide to change the system.
JPL proposed more than one telescope on the Discovery proposal cycle this year. I'm sure that Goddard and APL made proposals similar. the Discovery budget, including launch, is $425M.
Eventually, even if nothing else on the Mars Rovers failed, the solar panels would no longer produce enough energy to make the robots move...and that would be the end of the exploration part of the mission.
It's interesting to note, of course, that these robots were amazingly overdesigned. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that they're still going--but I wish JPL had a bit more money right now and a bit less money back then, ya know? Use slightly lower-quality solar panels, or something--they've gone 12 times as long as they were supposed to?!?!
It will likely then slow down, as atmospheric friction will increase as the atmosphere becomes more dense.
Soooo, if you wanted a little "fun", you could calculate the altitude and maximum velocity, then figure out what it would be at sea level...but you'd need to know at least the maximum diameter of the object, and a few things I'm forgetting, I'm sure...what goes into the calculation of the ballistic coefficient again?